Folic acid (FA) supplementation before and during pregnancy has been associated with decreased risk of neural tube defects although recent reports suggest it may also increase the risk of other chronic diseases. We evaluated exposure to maternal FA supplementation before and during pregnancy in relation to aberrant DNA methylation at two differentially methylated regions (DMRs) regulating Insulin-like Growth Factor 2 (IGF2) expression in infants. Aberrant methylation at these regions has been associated with IGF2 deregulation and increased susceptibility to several chronic diseases. Using a self-administered questionnaire, we assessed FA intake before and during pregnancy in 438 pregnant women. Pyrosequencing was used to measure methylation at two IGF2 DMRs in umbilical cord blood leukocytes. Mixed models were used to determine relationships between maternal FA supplementation before or during pregnancy and DNA methylation levels at birth. Average methylation at the H19 DMR was 61.2%. Compared to infants born to women reporting no FA intake before or during pregnancy, methylation levels at the H19 DMR decreased with increasing FA intake (2.8%, p=0.03, and 4.9%, p=0.04, for intake before and during pregnancy, respectively). This methylation decrease was most pronounced in male infants (p=0.01). Methylation alterations at the H19 DMR are likely an important mechanism by which FA risks and/or benefits are conferred in utero. Because stable methylation marks at DMRs regulating imprinted genes are acquired before gastrulation, they may serve as archives of early exposures with the potential to improve our understanding of developmental origins of adult disease.


Local tensor methods are a class of optimization algorithms that was introduced in [Hastings,arXiv:1905.07047v2][1] as a classical analogue of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). These algorithms treat the cost function as a Hamiltonian on spin degrees of freedom and simulate the relaxation of the system to a low energy configuration using local update rules on the spins. Whereas the emphasis in [1] was on theoretical worst-case analysis, we here investigate performance in practice through benchmarking experiments on instances of the MAXCUT problem.Through heuristic arguments we propose formulas for choosing the hyperparameters of the algorithm which are found to be in good agreement with the optimal choices determined from experiment. We observe that the local tensor method is closely related to gradient descent on a relaxation of maxcut to continuous variables, but consistently outperforms gradient descent in all instances tested. We find time to solution achieved by the local tensor method is highly uncorrelated with that achieved by a widely used commercial optimization package; on some MAXCUT instances the local tensor method beats the commercial solver in time to solution by up to two orders of magnitude and vice-versa. Finally, we argue that the local tensor method closely follows discretized, imaginary-time dynamics of the system under the problem Hamiltonian.


Computers have the capacity to transpose the pixels, shapes, and other features of visual material into sound. This act of data correlation between the visual and the audial produces a new artifact, a sonic composition created from the visual source. The new artifact, however, correlates precisely to data in the original, thus allowing for fresh ways of perceiving its form, content, and context. Seeming to distort the visual object into an aural one paradoxically allows an observer to observe the visual evidence anew, with more accuracy. A kind of generative, synesthetic criticism becomes possible by cutting across typical boundaries between the visual and the audio, the optic and the aural. Listening to as well as looking at visual artifacts by way of digital transpositions of data enables better close readings, more compelling interpretations, and deeper contextual understandings. Building on my earlier scholarship into image glitching, remixing, and sonification, this essay investigates a photograph of Joan Baez performing at the Greek Amphitheater in Berkeley, California, during the early 1960s. The image comes from my project on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and the history of the folk music revival on the West Coast of the United States. Here, the use of digital image sonification becomes particularly intriguing. While we cannot magically recover the music being made in the photograph, we can more closely attend to the ghosts of sound within the silent snapshot. Digital image sonification does not recover the music itself, but it does help to amplify issues of gender, power, embodiment, spectacle, performance, hierarchy, and performance in my perceptions of Baez making music in the photograph. Using the ear as well as the eye to scan the image for its multiple levels of meaning leads to unsuspected perceptions, which then support more revealing analysis. In digital image sonification, a cyborgian dance of data, signal, image, sound, history, and human perception emerges, activating visual materials for renewed scrutiny. In doing so, this mode of AudioVisual DH activates the scholarly imagination in promising new ways.


The resilience concept has provided a new insight and approach to the conventional perspective of agricultural management by emphasizing the need to maintain a diversity of future options to adapt to inevitable and often unpredictable changes. The concept has been taken up by various academic disciplines and development sectors, yet ways to define and operationalize resilience as a measurable concept are still being developed. We contributed to this ongoing effort by implementing a subjective resilience assessment method based on farmers' perceptions of three resilience components: (1) the sensitivity of their agricultural systems to increased salinity intrusion, (2) the capacity to recover from salinity damage, and (3) the capacity to change to other systems if salinity increases in the future. We conducted 27 in-depth interviews with local and national authorities, 11 focus group discussions, and 118 semistructured and 219 structured interviews with farmers in case study villages located along salinity transects in the Mekong Delta and at different distances to sea dikes in the Red River Delta in Vietnam in 2015-2016. Results from the subjective resilience assessment reveal that none of the agricultural systems studied systematically scored higher than the other systems on all three resilience components, implying that an increase in one resilience component by switching agricultural systems would negatively affect others. Agricultural responses to this salinity problem will influence current and long-term adaptability of the systems to future changes in salinity intrusion and other social-ecological developments in the deltas. Improving resilience components, e.g., through policies and interventions, resource allocation, and farming system changes, to sustain agricultural production or facilitate transformation to alternative systems when necessary is critically important for agricultural systems facing stress. Complementing subjective resilience assessments with qualitative data is thus crucial for understanding the drivers of resilience to improve components of resilience for agricultural systems in the respective deltas.


Objective: This study aimed to improve our understanding of how to best assist marginalized youth during their transition to adulthood, and how to provide them services that help them achieve independence within existing public systems of care. Method: Using purposive sampling methods, 17 direct service providers and supervisors of a large behavioral health organization participated in individual interviews and focus groups. Results: A team of analysts identified eight primary themes: (a) the primacy of consistent and caring relationships with adults; (b) working with youth and family concurrently; (c) the complicated dance of autonomy and independence; (d) engagement of alumni and peers in service delivery; (e) transition navigator: an active not passive approach to becoming an adult; (f) youth as the drivers of treatment and recovery; (g) provider training and resources to address the unique needs of transition-age youth; and (h) broadening the definition of treatment. Conclusions and Implications for Practice: Our findings have important implications for practice, including (a) adapting clinical practice to meet the unique needs of transition-age youth and young adults; (b) engaging and expanding positive support systems; and (c) shifting the mindset of transition-age youth and young adults, their caregivers, and providers from a perspective of "aging out" of the mental health system to a perspective of "continuing on" in the management of their mental health through treatment and rehabilitation as needed as young adults.


Intense precipitation associated with wintertime North Atlantic cyclones occurs not only in connection with frontal zones but also, and often mainly, embedded in strong cold air outbreaks to the west of mature cold fronts. Coherent structures of cloud clusters organized in mesoscale postfrontal low-pressure systems are frequently found in satellite data. Such postfrontal lows (PFL) can develop into severe weather events within few hours and can even reach Europe causing intense convective rainfall and gale force winds. Despite predicting the major storm systems numerical weather prediction (NWP) additionally needs to account for PFLs due to their frequent occurrence connected with high impact weather. But while the major cyclone systems are mostly well predicted, the forecast of PFLs remains poor. Using North Atlantic weather observations from the 1997 Fronts and Atlantic Storm Track Experiment (FASTEX) along with the standard voluntary observing ship (VOS) data led to a high quality validation data set for this usually data sparse region. For individual case studies of FASTEX cyclones with mesoscale PFLs investigations were carried out using the well calibrated precipitation estimates from HOAPS (Hamburg Ocean Atmosphere Parameters and fluxes from satellite data) compared to the NWP model output of the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). Preceding studies showed that the HOAPS precipitation structure and intensities are in good agreement with the VOS observations for all observed precipitation types within the cyclones, including PFLs. To assure that the results found in the 1997 data are still valid in the more recent ECMWF model system, a PFL rainfall comparison is carried out using HOAPS and ERA-40 (ECMWF Re-Analysis) data for the winter of 2001 and 2002. The results indicate that the ECMWF model is mostly well reproducing precipitation structures and intensities associated with frontal systems as observed in the VOS and HOAPS data, whereas PFL precipitation is mostly missing. Further investigations within the regions of PFL point out that the VOS observed surface pressure is systematically lower than reproduced in the models. This leads to the conclusion that the missing PFL precipitation in ECMWF may be primarily due to the absence of the corresponding mesoscale low-pressure system.


This case-study is inspired by a practical problem that was identified by Epiqo. Epiqo is an Austrian company that wants to expand to other countries within Europe and to other domains within Austria with their e-Recruiter system. For the e-Recruiter system to work, it needs domain specific ontologies. These ontologies need to be built from the ground up by domain experts, which is a time-consuming and thus expensive endeavor. This fueled the question from Epiqo whether this could be done (semi-)automatically.
The current research presents a solution for semi-automatically enriching domain specific ontologies. We adapt the general Ontology-Based Information Extraction (OBIE) architecture of Wimalasuriya and Dou (2010), to be more suitable for domain-specific applications by automatically generating a domain-specific semantic lexicon. We then apply this general solution to the case-study of Epiqo. Based on this architecture we develop a proof-of-concept tool and perform some explorative experiments with domain experts from Epiqo. We show that our solution has the potential to provide qualitative "good" enough ontologies to be comparable to standard ontologies.


In the present talk we discuss the development of the epitaxial technique Template-Assisted Selective Epitaxy (TASE)and its application for the monolithic integration of scaled III - V active photonic devices on silicon. A unique advantage of TASE for silicon photonics applications is that it enables a truly local integration of III-V material at precisely defined positions, it is therefore particularly suited for densely Integrated nanophotonic devices. Here we will discuss our work on InP-based microdisk lasers fabricated by either direct TASE growth or via the use of micro-substrates. Optical mode simulations using Lumerical are used to explore the design space. Notably, we are exploring the use of metal-clad cavities for further light confinement. The metal-clad cavities enable scaling of the laser diameter beyond what is achievable with a pure photonic cavity. Thermal simulations are used to explore the impact of the metal-cladding as a heat sink as opposed to plasmonic operation. We also evaluate the potential for electrical actuation and will show first results on monolithic photodetectors, using Sentaurus simulations to improve our understanding of device performance.


Introduction: The work presents the data of the literary sources review which suggests that nowadays, treatment of the urinary tract, including prostatitis and prostate adenoma, which are the most common and serious male disorders of and tend to increase their frequency, is the topical issue of the modern medicine. It is proved that the compounds of natural substances, standardized bee products in particular - honey powder (HP), propolis phenolic hydrophobic preparation (PPHP) and bee pollen (BP), are promising for the effective treatment of this disease. Materials and Methods: The results of studying the acute toxicity and safety of a new national medication of natural origin for treating the diseases of the genitourinary system, including prostatitis and prostate adenoma, which contains above named natural substances, are presented in the experimental part. Pharmacological, physiological, instrumental research methods and mathematical statistics methods have been used in the study. Results and Discussion: The analysis of morphological studies of testes and sperm functional state of rats demonstrates no change of morphological and functional indices in the experimental group compared with the control group. Basing on these studies, we can conclude that the mixture of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in the form of bee products standardized substances composition at a dose of 100 mg/kg demonstrates no toxic effects on spermatogenesis in male rats. The results of the study allergenic activity of the studied composition at the same dose indicate no hypersensitivity of immediate type reactions and no accumulation of homocytotrophic antibodies in the blood, and accordingly the no sensitizing activity, which was also confirmed by the "conjunctival test" on guinea pigs. The research of the local irritating effect of the mixture of the APIs on the mucous membrane demonstrates the lack of such effect after a single application to the eye of rabbits. Conclusions: The study of the specific toxicity of the APIs mix in the form of a bee products standardized substances composition - HP, PPHP, and BP at a dose of 100 mg/kg, demonstrated no capacity to gonadotoxic and allergenic effect. It has been found that the formula of APIs has no effect on the secretory function and the state of the gastric mucosa and no irritating action at contacting with mucous membranes of an eye. The results of the studies of pharmacological activity and specific toxicity of the bee products standard substances composition - HP, PPHP, and BP – allow to conclude that manufacturing such preparation is promising, and further preclinical researchers to obtain a permit to introduce a new preparation into clinical practice and industry are desirable.


The spray dried α-amylase-assisted supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) extract of small cardamom (rich in 1,8-cineole) was used for the fortification of custard to obtain a new designer nutraceutical custard. The encapsulate was employed at concentrations of 4%, 4.5% and 5% (w/w) to formulate the custards. Custard formulated with 4.5% of encapsulate was most preferred by the sensory panel. This custard sample showed a more stable texture, higher phytochemical properties and lower microbial load than the control sample (formulated without encapsulate). This is the first study on the formulation of a new designer nutraceutical custard by fortification with encapsulated SC-CO2 extract of small cardamom. The processes described here can safely be employed in the development of other nutraceutical or functional foods, which inevitably involves the loss of the phytochemicals of food constituents during manufacture.


False convictions are notoriously difficult to study because they can neither be observed when they occur nor identified after the fact by any plausible research strategy. Our best shot is to collect data on those that come to light in legal proceedings that result in the exoneration of the convicted defendants. In May 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations released its first report, covering 873 exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. By October 15, 2016, we had added 1,027 cases: 599 exonerations since March 1, 2012, and 428 that had already happened when we issued our initial report but were not known to us. In this paper I discuss what can and cannot be learned from the exonerations that we have collected. The cases we find and list are not a complete set of all exonerations that occur—not nearly—but it's clear from the patterns we see in known exonerations that false convictions outnumber exonerations by orders of magnitude. We cannot estimate the rate of false convictions or their distribution across crime categories. We can confidently say, however, that they are not rare events—and other research has estimated the rate of false convictions among death sentences at 4.1%, which provides an anchor for estimates of the rate for other violent crimes. We know that several types of false or misleading evidence contribute to many erroneous convictions (eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, bad forensic science, perjury and other lies), as does misbehavior by those who process criminal cases: misconduct by police and prosecutors; incompetence and laziness by defense attorneys. Beyond that, we cannot say how false convictions are produced. It's clear, however, from the relative prevalence of these factors that the process differs radically from one type of crime to another. Data from one local jurisdiction (Harris County, Texas) strongly suggest that across the country thousands if not tens of thousands of innocent defendants a year plead guilty to misdemeanors and low-level felonies in order to avoid prolonged pretrial detention. And our data clearly show that innocent African Americans are much more likely to be wrongfully convicted of crimes than innocent whites, in part because of higher criminal participation in the African American community and in part because of discrimination.


The capability to deliver high effective dosages to specific sites in the human body has become the holy grail of drug delivery research. Drugs with proven effectiveness under in vitro investigation often reach a major roadblock under in vivo testing due to a lack of an effective delivery strategy. In addition, many clinical scenarios require delivery of agents that are therapeutic at the desired delivery point, but otherwise systemically toxic. We propose a method for targeted drug delivery by applying uniform magnetic fields to an injected superparamagnetic colloidal fluid carrying a drug. The experimental and theoretical models presented give insight into the use of magnetic microspheres for site-specific delivery of therapeutic agents and blood flow occlusion for embolotherapy.


ABSTRACT With the rise of authoritarian populism and critical border studies, as well as the continued presence of the Minutemen and borderlands studies, it is safe to say that sovereign borders are receiving increasing attention from a diverse set of actors within and beyond academia. One strain of research, building on the work of Giorgio Agamben, has examined the border as a space of exception. However, Agamben's conceptual development of biopolitical sovereignty has come under fire, as critics assert his uneasy synthesis of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault is disproven by the agency of migrants proving themselves capable of resisting sovereign control at the border. This article responds to Agamben's critics by rebalancing the Schmittian and Foucauldian sources of Agamben's work. While much of the conceptual development of the border-as-exception has focused on the experience of the border-crosser as a capillary manifestation of control, I argue that the exception is as important for the sovereign as for the object of sovereign power. Every decision on the exception is also a process of defining who the sovereign is, and if we understand the border is a space of exception, then we also must recognize the vulnerability that this produces for the sovereign.


Extensive and indiscriminate exploitation of marine natural resources,
during the last three decades is leading to a situation where no more
commercial fish stocks may be left in the sea by year 2050 unless ecosystems
are protected and the biodiversity is revived, warns a new study cataloging
the global collapse of marine ecosystems (Worm et al., 2006). The task of
understanding the dynamics of large marine ecosystems to offer effective
and relevant scientific advice to develop management interventions is a
difficult, complex, expensive and lengthy process. This is especially true in
the Indian context where the country has an EEZ of 2.02 million km2, which
contributes nearly 40% of the total fish production from the Indian Ocean.
Fishes have been mentioned in the ancient literature of India including the
epics such as Ramayana and Mahabaratha. Excavations from Mohenjodaro
and Harappa indicate that fishing with hooks and nets was common as back
as 3000 B.C. and over the years fishing and fisheries in India have evolved at
a rapid pace (Ayyappan et al., 2004). Marine fisheries is basically harnessing
a natural resource and therefore its management must anchor on knowledge-
based interventions generated through close monitoring of their distribution,
abundance, exploitation, population dynamics and fluctuations of fish stocks
in relation to natural factors and anthropogenic interventions. Against a
scenario of an ever-increasing population and stagnant marine fish production
in recent years, per capita seafood availability is a serious concern. The country


16 AUGUST 1928 * 9 MAY 2008JAMES C. THOMPSON, one of surgery's leading scientists, edu, cators, and statesmen of the past half century, died at age seventy-nine in his home in Galveston, Texas, on 9 May 2008 of prostate cancer. From 1970 to 1995, he was professor and chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, where he also served as professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics.His record of extended service to his institution and leadership in American surgery has rarely been matched. However, most would agree that it was Jim Thompson's personality, style, and sheer panache that made him a legendary figure. In a recent memoir written for the American College of Surgeons, Marshall Orloff characterized him as "colorful, outrageous, funny, bombastic, eloquent, sometimes inoffensively vulgar, charming, engaging and never dull." He was all that and more. Mark Ravitch, surgery's historian of the twentieth century, added that he was iconoclastic. Thompson's persona was so strong that it seemed perfectly natural when he occasionally shifted momentarily into a good-natured parody of the geheimrat with appropriate Sid Caesar-style German dialect. Being with him was always fun. He was like no other professor of surgery.Although he was a proud Texan by birth and childhood and later, for twenty-five years as chairman at Galveston, a surgical leader of that state, Jim Thompson quite often said that his most important memories and loyalties were generated by the nine years he spent at the University of Pennsylvania. How this Texan came to consider himself a Philadelphian is best told in his own distinctive style as transcribed verbatim from a talk he gave at Jonathan Rhoads's eightieth birthday party. Jim said,I came here [to Penn] entirely by accident. I am a great believer in planning, but the results of my life give it no substantiation. Everything that is worth a nickel to me was an accident. I had always wanted to be a surgeon, and when I was a senior medical student, I applied to the Mayo Clinic like everybody did in that part of the world, because that's where all the great surgeons came from. I was accepted the first week of December of my intern year. I later got a wire from the Mayo Clinic saying that they were having a terrible time replacing people going off to the Korean War so they'd decided not to take anybody who had not already fulfilled his military requirement and would I please do that and then they would be happy to have me. Well, I knew how to take orders so I sent away to the Air Force and got a great big application and filled it all out. On New Year's Day, it was sitting on my desk all filled out ready to go in and my daughter spilled a bottle of ink on it. I reflected on that . . . and thought that it was probably a message from God. So I quickly changed my plans and wrote everybody listed in the AMS directory asking for a residency. But, of course, everybody was filled by then. Dr. Ravdin [Penn's chairman], however, wrote back, wired back, and said, "We're filled! However, any descendant of the great James Thompson of Galveston is welcome in my program." That faced me with a moral dilemma. I was not related to James Thompson [unbeknownst to Jim, James E. Thompson was the founder many years earlier of the Department of Surgery at Jim's medical school, UTMB]. I reflected on that for some time, accepted the residency, waited six months, and told Dr. Ravdin. Nothing was ever said about this until the residency graduation banquet when Dr. Ravdin got up and announced that I had gotten into the program by subterfuge.I'll have to say that everything that's ever been of any good to me intellectually or clinically or investigatively has come as a result of being here at Penn. I came from Hebbronville, Texas, and I went to [college at] Texas A&M and then to [medical school at] Galveston. I did not have any money at all, and I had to get into a medical school before I got drafted. …


We report an experimental study of the doping and drawing effects on the Raman activities of phosphorus (P)-doped silica-based optical fiber and its related preform. Our data reveal a high sensitivity level in the full width at half maximum value of the 1330 cm−1 (O = P) Raman band to the P-doping level. Its increase with the P doping level does not clash with an increase in the disorder of the O = P surrendering matrix. In addition, we observe that in the central core region of the sample (higher doping level), the drawing process decreases the relative band amplitude. We tentatively suggest that this phenomenon is due to the change in the first derivate of the bond polarizability as a function of the normal vibration coordinates.


Obtaining superoleophobicity is a difficult challenge due to the low surface tension of oils. Here, a highly fluorinated 3,4-ethylenedioxypyrrole monomer was synthesized by a multi-step reaction and employed for the elaboration of superoleophobic films by electrochemical polymerization (one-pot method, mild conditions). The study of the wettability and the morphology of the films as a function of electrochemical parameters (deposition charge, monomer concentration, nature of the doping anion, nature of the substrate) were performed by surface analysis using static and dynamic contact angle measurements, scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy and optical profilometry. The unconventional nanoporous morphology obtained is favorable to the Cassie–Baxter state and may be a key factor for the elaboration of superoleophobic surfaces.


Shiller (2003) and others have argued for the creation of financial instruments that allow individuals to insure risks associated with their lifetime labor income. In this paper, we argue that while the purpose of such assets is to smooth consumption across states of nature, one must also consider the assets' effects on households' ability to smooth consumption over time. We show that consumers in a realistically calibrated life-cycle model would generally prefer income-linked loans (with a rate positively correlated with income shocks) to an income-hedging instrument (a limited liability asset whose returns correlate negatively with income shocks) even though the assets offer identical opportunities to smooth consumption across states. While for some parameterizations of our model the welfare gains from the presence of income-linked assets can be substantial (above 1% of certainty-equivalent consumption), the assets we consider can only mitigate a relatively small part of the welfare costs of labor income risk over the life cycle.


In this paper, we analyze the performance of polarization-diversity receivers employing maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) to combat the effects of polarization mode dispersion (PMD) for both the intensity-modulation direct detection (IMDD) and duobinary modulation formats at 43 Gb/s. We propose and study several parametric branch metrics, showing that the use of MLSE receivers based on polarization diversity with appropriate branch metrics allows to cancel out the high penalty incurred by standard MLSE receivers in the presence of PMD.


This research project addressed a practice gap in the identification of patients experiencing depression in primary care. Depression is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, including one million suicide deaths annually. One rural Western state has a depression rate more than three times the national rate, and the highest rate of suicide in the U.S., nearly double the national rate. The setting of interest was a primary care clinic in this state, and the following research question was asked: among adult patients, does the routine administration of the Patient Health Questionnaire2 (PHQ-2) during wellness visits improve depression identification as compared to routine care? The project sample was gathered between May 2 and July 25, 2016, and consisted of 33 patients meeting the inclusion criteria gathered from a total patient panel of 1,479. Patients were screened for depression with the PHQ-2 during their wellness visits. Two new cases of depression were identified in the study group, compared to none in the control group. A randomization test, based on 5,000 trials, was done to assess statistical significance. The rate of new diagnosis with the depression screening tool was observed to be 0.062 with an associated 95% confidence interval of between 0 and 15.6%. Associated p-value was 0.243. Although 6.2% was not a statistically meaningful difference, this project holds clinical relevance. By implementing routine depression screenings, discussion of depression was found to be initiated more often, and patients' perceived barriers to seeking help for depression were addressed.


Aims. Our aim is to study deuterium burning in objects forming according to the core accretion scenario in the hot and cold start assumption and what minimum deuterium burning mass limit is found for these objects. We also study how the burning process influences the structure and luminosity of the objects. Furthermore we want to test and verify our results by comparing them to already existing hot start simulations which did not consider, however, the formation process.
Methods. We present a new method to calculate deuterium burning of objects in a self-consistently coupled model of planet formation and evolution. We discuss which theory is used to describe the process of deuterium burning and how it was implemented.
Results. We find that the objects forming according to a hot start scenario behave approximately in the same way as found in previous works of evolutionary calculations, which did not consider the formation. However, for cold start objects one finds that the objects expand during deuterium burning instead of being partially stabilized against contraction. In both cases, hot and cold start, the mass of the solid core has an influence on the minimum mass limit of deuterium burning. The general position of the mass limit, 13 MJ, stays however approximately the same. None of the investigated parameters was able to change this mass limit by more than 0.8 MJ. Due to deuterium burning, the luminosity of hot and cold start objects becomes comparable after ~ 200 Myrs.


Background: This study aimed to investigate the effect of eight weeks of interval training on gene expression of liver X receptors (LXR) in Wistar male rats.
Materials and Methods: In this study, 24 male wistar rats (200-250 g) were randomly used to three groups for this purpose, 24 male Wistar rats were prepared and divided into three groups: control (8 = n), high intensity intermittent exercise (8 = n) and continuous submaximal exercise (8 = n), respectively. The treadmill exercise program was performed for eight weeks, three days a week for 40 minutes. High intense exercise protocol, 30 minutes running periodic (every period of four minutes and two minutes running with 90-85% of VO2 max intensity active recovery with 60-50% of VO2 max) three days a week for eight weeks. Also, the continuous training group under maximum was an exercise intensity equivalent to 50 to 55 percent of maximum oxygen consumption of the mice.
Results: The results showed that there was a significant difference between the four groups in the gene expression level, after data analysis and test research hypotheses, findings of this study show that the expression of LXR alpha gene, apolipoprotein 1, ABCG1 a significant increase in intensity interval exercise than the control group (p = 0.004). The results also showed a significant difference between the three groups in the expression of LXR beta and apolipoprotein 2, SR-BI does not exist. Although the results showed a slight increase in groups of periodic training and continuing slight increase, but this has not led to a significant difference.
Conclusion: Overall results indicated the superiority of intense interval training than submaximal exercise in reverse cholesterol transport is continuous. Intense interval training by increasing hepatic expression of the receptor gene as well as the main cause of the liver and eventually out HDL receptors can play an important role in reducing cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis.
Keywords: Endurance Training, High Intensity Interval training, liver X receptors.


The Supreme Court's decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius regarding the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act produced three main holdings concerning two critical provisions of the Act. The first two holdings concerned the "individual mandate" that requires most Americans to maintain "minimum essential" health insurance. The third holding concerned "the Medicaid expansion," which expanded the class of persons to whom the states must provide Medicaid coverage as a condition for receiving federal funds under the Medicaid program. By a vote of 7-2, the Court struck down this provision as an impermissible condition on the provision of federal funds to the states. Many commentators have opined that, of these three holdings, the third — concerning what is often called Congress's "conditional spending power" — is apt to have the most far-reaching consequences beyond health care. Unfortunately, this third holding is not only the most potentially significant, but also the one supported by the least clear rationale. At first blush, the majority appeared to hold straightforwardly that the conditional offer that the Medicaid expansion embodied was unconstitutional because coercive, and coercive because it gave states "no choice" but to accept. For several reasons, however, that initial reading appears cloudier on a second or third read. Given the vast potential significance of the Court's holding on conditional spending and the manifest lack of clarity regarding its rationale, this essay offers a comprehensive and critical assessment. Very generally, the essay does five things: (1) disambiguates the concepts of coercion and compulsion; (2) shows that, under the label "coercion," the Supreme Court majority in National Federation of Independent Business actually deployed the concept of compulsion; (3) argues, against the majority, that compulsion is not a normatively meaningful concept and that coercion is; (4) explains how a threat to withhold benefits that the government is not obligated to provide can be unconstitutional by amounting to a penalty; and (5) argues (tentatively) that the Medicaid expansion probably did threaten a penalty and thus probably did constitute the wrong of coercion. Points (3) and (4) in particular bear profound implications for understanding "unconstitutional conditions" cases even outside the context of federal conditional spending.


This paper discusses a personalized heart monitoring system using smart phones and wireless (bio) sensors. We combine ubiquitous computing with mobile health technology to monitor the wellbeing of high risk cardiac patients. The smart phone analyses in real-time the ECG data and determines whether the person needs external help. We focus on two life threatening arrhythmias: ventricular fibrillation (VF) and ventricular tachycardia (VT). The smart phone can automatically alert the ambulance and pre assigned caregivers when a VF/VT arrhythmia is detected. The system can be personalized to the needs and requirements of the patient. It can be used to give advice (e.g. exercise more) or to reassure the patient when the bio-sensors and environmental data are within predefined ranges


There are many examples of defects in strongly-correlated metal oxides for which density functional theory predicts electronic structures that qualitatively disagree with experimental data. This behaviour arises from the self-interaction error inherent to standard density functionals, and is demonstrated by both p- and n-type systems where the defect state is a small polaron associated with host lattice atoms. An approximate correction is to describe the electron—electron interactions in the orbitals of interest within the DFT+U formalism. This gives improved descriptions for systems where the states of interest are well represented by atomic-like orbitals. The qualitative failure of standard DFT and corresponding improvement achieved with DFT+U is illustrated for cases where the defect state is primarily associated with localised cation f and d states (O vacancies in CeO2 and TiO2) and anion p states (Li-doped MgO).


An important tool for scientific study in any field is a formal language in which the phenomena can be described and hypotheses formulated. In this book a formal notation is developed for the description of the cognitive structure of arguments. The analyses based on this notation are more fine-grained than the analyses in previous attempts, and they are applicable not only to arguments but to all types of moves in a discourse. Further, the notational system provides a basis for the description of relations between arguments and the structure of the discourse as a whole. In the final chapter, some empirical studies of retention of arguments in memory and of precis writing are reported, based on hypotheses formulated in terms of the notational system.


Tear film recognizes as a significant problem in and around the world. The children at the age of 7 to the people around the age of 65 suffering from dry eye syndrome. The tear film must be detected at an early stage to protect the person from death.The tear film should be a monitor at the initial stage and diagnose by the unique technique, whether it may be the invasive or non-invasive method of dry detection. The invasive approach is the time-consuming process, and many disadvantages in this method arise in tear film detection. The non- invasive technique is not said to be a slow process. So the author proposed the novel approach of tear film detection by fuzzy c means clustering algorithm. The sample of eye images are taken and processed with fuzzy c means clustering algorithm and finds the intensity in both the eye. The accuracy analysis carried by fuzzy c indicates a clustering algorithm of 82% in its efficiency.


This paper presents the design and fabrication of a robotic ostraciiform. The robot's design is inspired by the highly stable and fairly maneuverable boxfish. Boxfish with its multiple fins can maneuver in confined spaces with a near zero turning radius and it has been found that its unusual boxy shape is responsible for a self correcting mechanism that makes its trajectories immune to water disturbances. The Micro Autonomous Robotic Ostraciiform (MARCO) project aims to apply these features in a novel underwater vehicle design. Miniature underwater vehicles with these characteristics have a variety of applications, such as environmental monitoring, ship wreck exploration, inline pipe inspection, forming sensor networks, etc. Tail fin hydrodynamics have been investigated experimentally using robotic flapper mechanisms to arrive at a caudal fin shape with optimal shape induced flexibility. Fluid simulation studies were utilized to arrive at the body shape that can result in self correcting vorticity generation. The robotic ostraciiform prototype was designed based on the above results. Ostraciiform locomotion is implemented with a pair of 2-DOF pectoral fins and a single DOF tail fin. The finalized body shape of the robot is produced by 3D prototyping two separate halves.


This study examines the volatility transmissions across the Gulf Arab states (GCC) stock markets and the linkages between these markets and the United States stock and oil markets, using the Multi-chain Markov Switching model. This approach enables the distinction between different transmission types including volatility spillover, interdependence, comovements and independence. The results demonstrate the presence of different transmissions between the markets and that the type of transmission is highly sensitive to the state of the economy characterized by turbulence or tranquility. They support strong interdependence between the oil price, the U.S. S&P 500 index, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. There is also a strong spillover from the U.S. S&P 500 index to Oman and Kuwait, but interdependence with Dubai. There are also different diversification opportunities between the GCC markets. Policy implications on portfolio strategies under different states are also discussed.


In 1960 it was decided to grow tea in Bunyoro primarily as part of the Uganda Government's plans to diversify the country's agriculture and to shift some of its economic dependence on cotton and coffee to other crops, and secondarily to initiate some sort of major agricultural / industrial project which would provide employment in an area of Uganda which had previously received little in the way of development stimulation. The project has taken the form of a plantation controlled by Agricultural Enterprises Ltd., a subsidary of the Uganda Development Corporation, together with production on small farms in the neighbourhood.


This paper presents a revised conceptual model of the long-term evolution of back-barrier marshes on the macro-tidal north Norfolk coast and their adjustment to tidal levels. The present suite of salt marsh deposits has apparently evolved since 2-3000 B.P. under effectively stable eustatic sea level and quasi-linear subsidence at approximately 1mm yr 1 . With the aid of a numerical simulation model, calibrated against age/elevation data for 9 marshes, two 'characteristic' sedimentation scenarios are envisaged: 1) Neotectonic control, with marsh surfaces attaining a static absolute elevation determined by subsidence and sediment supply, and 2) Eustatic control, with marsh surfaces attaining equilibrium with both subsidence and changing tide levels such that (assuming linear eustatic rise) absolute marsh surface elevation continues to increase at a constant rate. Simulations using published eustatic sea level projections derived from global warming models suggest that even with no corresponding increase in sediment supply, sedimentation on these macrotidal marshes is capable of maintaining their ecological function - albeit at slightly lower surface elevations relative to tidal levels. It is suggested that under the more probable scenarios of future eustatic sea level rise, on-shore migration of associated barrier structures may be a more important mechanism for salt marsh loss than 'drowning' in a vertical dimension.


This new textbook provides students with the basic principles and practice standards of forensic victimology--the scientific study of victims for the purposes of addressing investigative and forensic issues. It provides case-based coverage with original insights into the role that victimology plays in the justice system, moving beyond the traditional theoretical approaches already available. The purpose of this textbook is to distinguish the investigative and forensic aspects of victim study as a necessary adjunct to the field of victimology. It identifies forensic victimologists in the investigative and forensic communities and provides them with methods and standards of practice needed to be of service. This book is intended to educate students on the means and rationale for performing victimological assessments with a scientific mindset. Forensic Victimology is designed specifically for teaching the practical aspects of this topic, with "hands on" real-life case examples and an extensive online Instructor's Manual featuring summaries, key terms, and test questions for every chapter. * Applied victimology for students and caseworkers performing objective examinations as opposed to theoretical victimology that studies victim groups and crime statistics. * First ever textbook detailing a mandate, scope and methods for forensic victimologist practitioners. * Provides a critical / scientific counterbalance to existing mainstream texts approaching general victimology with a pro-victim bias. * Written by practitioners of forensic victimology in the investigative, forensic, mental health, and academic communities.


Decomposition processes of litter in peat swamp forest in the upper catchment of the Sebangau River in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia were studied. Litterbags were sampled every six months from November 2000 to May 2002 and analyzed for total content of N, P, K, dan Ca. Litterbags was collected in three permanent study plots, 50 x 50 m, which were established in mixed swamp forest (MSF) and low pole forest (LPF). In each plot, 25 litterbags (25 sub-plot) were placed in forest floor. Every six months 12 litterbag samples were harvested from the study plots (MSF and LPF) and these were air dried, oven dried and weighed. Six litterbag samples were taken from hollows and other six samples from hummocks. Weight loss in both sub-tipe of forest, mixed swamp forest and low pole forest was fast in the first six months. Potassium was the fastest nutrient loss in the mixed swamp forest and low pole forest. Decomposition rate (k) in the mixed swamp forest and low pole forest are 0.396 yr -1 and 0.285 yr -1 respectively.


An in situ attenuated total reflection study of the chiral solid-liquid interface created by cinchonidine adsorption on a Pt/Al(2)O(3) model catalyst is presented. Experiments were performed in the presence of dissolved hydrogen, that is under conditions used for the heterogeneous enantioselective hydrogenation of alpha-functionalized ketones. Cinchonidine adsorbs via the quinoline moiety. The adsorption mode is coverage dependent and several species coexist on the surface. At low concentration (10(-6)M) a predominantly flat adsorption mode prevails. At increasing coverage two different tilted species, alpha-H abstracted and N lone pair bonded cinchonidine, are observed. The latter is only weakly bound and in a fast dynamic equilibrium with dissolved cinchonidine. At high concentration (10(-4)-10(-3) M) all three species coexist on the Pt surface. A slow transition from an adsorbate layer with a high fraction of alpha-H abstracted cinchonidine to one with a high fraction of N lone pair bonded cinchonidine is observed with the cinchonidine concentration being the driving force for the process. The reverse transition in the absence of dissolved cinchonidine is fast. Cinchonidine competes with solvent decomposition products for adsorption sites on the Pt, which may contribute to the observed solvent dependence of the heterogeneous enantioselective hydrogenation of ketones by cinchonidine-modified Pt.


Piezoelectric fans are very low power, small, very low noise, solid-state devices that have recently emerged as viable thermal management solutions for a variety of portable electronics applications including laptop computers, cellular phones and wearable computers. Piezoelectric fans utilize piezoceramic patches bonded onto thin, low frequency flexible blades to drive the fan at its resonance frequency. The resonating, low frequency blade creates a streaming airflow directed at key electronics components. The optimization of a piezoelectric fan with two symmetrically placed piezoelectric patches is investigated through an analytical Bernoulli-Euler model as well as a finite element (FE) model of the composite piezo-beam. The closed form analytical solution is used to demonstrate that different optimal piezoceramic-to-blade length ratios and piezoceramic-to-blade thickness ratios exist for maximizing the electromechanical coupling factor (EMCF), tip deflection and rotation. Such optimization procedures provide simple design guidelines for the development of very-low power, high flow rate piezoelectric fans.


Recently, ontology stream reasoning has been introduced as a multidisciplinary approach, merging synergies from Artificial Intelligence, Database, World-Wide-Web to reason on semantic augmented data streams. Although knowledge evolution and real-time reasoning have been largely addressed in ontology streams, the challenge of predicting its future (or missing) knowledge remains open and yet unexplored. We tackle predictive reasoning as a correlation and interpretation of past semantics-augmented data over exogenous ontology streams. Consistent predictions are constructed as Description Logics entailments by selecting and applying relevant cross-streams association rules. The experiments have shown accurate prediction with real and live stream data from Dublin City in Ireland.


Abstract Despite public sentiment to the contrary, recreational marijuana use is deleterious to adolescent health and development. Prospective studies of marijuana use trajectories and their predictors are needed to differentiate risk profiles and inform intervention strategies. Using data on 15,960 participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, variable-centered approaches were used to examine the impact of childhood polyvictimization on marijuana onset, marijuana use from age 15 to 24 years, and marijuana dependence symptoms. Zero-Inflated Poisson latent class growth analysis (ZIP-LCGA) was used to identify marijuana use subgroups, and their associations with childhood polyvictimization were tested via multinomial logit regression within ZIP-LCGA. Results showed that the overall probability and frequency of marijuana use increased throughout adolescence, peaked in early adulthood, and diminished gradually thereafter. Polyvictimization was associated with earlier onset and greater overall use, frequency of use, and dependence symptoms. ZIP-LCGA uncovered four subgroups, including non-users and three classes of users: adolescence-limited users, escalators, and chronic users. Polyvictimization distinguished non-users from all classes of marijuana users. The findings underscore the lasting developmental implications of significant childhood trauma. Children who experience polyvictimization represent a group that may benefit from selective interventions aimed at preventing early, frequent, chronic, and dependent marijuana use.


How can the positive power of a marketing ethos and techniques solve social problems? We propose a deepened understanding of social marketing in response to the sustainability imperative, applying systems theory to elaborate the impact of social marketing campaigns and to advance our understanding of viable practices. A meta-framework reveals the complexities of human behaviour that influences the aims and outcomes of social marketing. We clarify the ontological status of the social marketing field and recognise the world view within which marketing has expanded into the public realm of social problems. We identify the problem of ontological misconception stemming from the denial of nonrational forms of human behaviour. While complicated mechanism is assumed in the problem of long-term health and prosperity for citizens and society, organic complexity is the condition faced. Conventional social marketing has provided a 'partial' gesture towards a solution. We outline an alternative understanding grounded in a human-centred world view of socio-economic advancement.


Australia's information privacy framework fails to protect personal information contained within data generated by automated vehicles. Automated vehicles will increasingly store, share and broadcast data about the vehicle (and by implication the occupants) with rising levels of automation. Using data mining techniques, personal information contained within disparate data streams can be compiled to allow profiling of individuals to a high degree. Following the recent decision in Privacy Commissioner v Telstra Corporation Ltd ('Telstra'), Australian law does not recognise personal information unless contained within a single data stream and remains silent on how to identify personal information within data having multiple subject matters. This article argues that, post-Telstra, the privacy framework will not safeguard personal information contained within data produced by automated land vehicles.


Memory system congestion due to serialization of hot spot accesses can adversely affect the performance of interprocess coordination algorithms. Hardware and software techniques have been proposed to reduce this congestion and thereby provide superior system performance. The combining networks of Gottlieb et al. automatically parallelize concurrent hot spot memory accesses, improving the performance of algorithms that poll a small number of shared variables. The widely used "MCS" distributed-spin algorithms take a software approach: they reduce hot spot congestion by polling only variables stored locally. Our investigations detected performance problems in existing designs for combining networks and we propose mechanisms that alleviate them. Simulation studies described herein indicate that a centralized readers writers algorithms executed on the improved combining networks have performance at least competitive to the MCS algorithms.


The potential of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) as a method to reveal the consequences of climate change on the biodiversity that make up natural soundscapes can be undermined by the discrepancy between the low barrier of entry to acquire large field audio datasets and the higher barrier of acquiring reliable species level training, validation, and test subsets from the field audio. These subsets from a deployment are often required to verify any machine learning models used to assist researchers in understanding the local biodiversity. Especially as many models convey promising results from various sources that may not translate to the collected field audio. Labeling such datasets is a resource intensive process due to the lack of experts capable of identifying bioacoustics at a species level as well as the overwhelming size of many PAM audiosets. To address this challenge, we Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning workshop at NeurIPS 2021 have tested different sampling techniques on an audio dataset collected over a twoweek long August audio array deployment on the Scripps Coastal Reserve (SCR) Biodiversity located adjacent to sandstone cliffs and the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California. These sampling techniques involve creating four subsets using stratified random sampling, limiting samples to the daily bird vocalization peaks, and using a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) trained for bird presence/absence audio classification. We found that a stratified random sample baseline only achieved a bird presence rate of 44% in contrast with a sample that randomly selected clips with high hybrid CNN-RNN predictions that were collected during bird activity peaks at dawn and dusk yielding a bird presence rate of 95%. The significantly higher bird presence rate demonstrates how intelligent, machine learning-assisted selection of audio data can significantly reduce the amount of time that domain experts listen to audio without vocalizations of interest while building a ground truth for machine learning models.


Objective The purpose of the current study was to discuss the interrelation among alexithymia and negative psychology of nursing personnel and their coping style, so as to provide a theoretical basis for better mental health education and psychological intervention for nursing personnel. Methods A questionnaire survey was administered to 503 nursing personnel sampled from a hospital in Henan Province between May and June 2010 by means of survey instruments of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 Items (TAS-20), the Trait Coping Style Questionnaire (TCSQ), and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-20). Results (1) Alexithymia and a negative coping style had a positive correlation with negative psychology (P<0.01), while a positive coping style had a negative correlation with negative psychology (P<0.01). (2) The model fitting indices of coping style as intermediate variables between alexithymia and+ negative psychology were χ2/df=1.459, RMSEA=0.030, CFI=0.995, IFI=0.995, RFI=0.966, TCI=0.989, and NEI=0.985, indicating a good model fitting. Ninety-nine percent of the total variation of negative psychology could be explained by alexithymia and coping style, of which the indirect effect affecting negative psychology by coping style accounted for 94.59% of the total. Conclusion Alexithymia and coping style were very important factors for improvement of current mental status of the nursing personnel, especially for a change in negative coping style and selection of good coping style.


The impact of renewable energy installations connected to the utility grid is an important
issue concerning the technical and economic viability of harnessing these emerging
energy sources. Distribution networks must be carefully controlled in order to
maintain an acceptable power supply quality. The major sources of non-conventional
energy are small scale generation and storage from mini hydro, photovoltaic, wind
power, fuel cells, battery, flywheel, pump storage and biomass.
The aim of this thesis is to analyse the variation in voltage of the distribution network
when renewable energy sources are interconnected to the distribution network, in
terms of it's stability. In particular this study analyses the impact of interconnection of
small synchronous generators to the utility power grid. Dynamic stability analysis is
mainly concerned with analysing the response of electrical power system to small perturbation
about a given operating point. These studies are particularly important due
to the growing interest in interconnecting small renewable energy sources to large and
complex power systems. Simulation studies were carried out in order to find out the
transient stability and voltage stability of the non-conventional energy sources under
different operating conditions. A 5-second simulation was conducted using explicit
numerical integration (Euler method) and an integration time step of 0.002 second.
Power System Toolbox was used for analysis.The multimachine power system models
used in this thesis are generated in MATLAB code. The load flow is performed on the
multimachine power system correponding to the loading condition to be investigated.
The machines are represented by the two-axis models, the exciters by IEEE Type-1
models and the loads are modelled as constant impedances. To save programming
time, it has become common to limit the machine and exciter representations to some
specified models. The network admittance matrix is reduced by retaining only the internal buses of the generators. The reduced network, machine and exciter data are then
combined to form a linearised state-space model representing the entire system.
The simulation studies are applied to a four machine ten bus system. It is clear from
the analysis that much care should be taken based on the stability point of view while
interconnecting the small renewable energy sources to the utility. The renewable
energy sources should be interconnected at a point which provides higher stability
margin.The renewable energy sources is a viable option if it is connected to the
distribution network with necessary methods of improving transient stability and
voltage stability.


Delmore Schwartz was the golden boy of the American literary scene until his untimeley death in 1966, alone and destitute. James Laughlin was the founder of New Directions, publisher and editor of the Modernists. This collection chronicles a correspondence that began with Schwartz's first unsolicited submission to Laughlin in 1937 and continued throughout the friendship that lasted until the poet's death. The relationship that developed between them was both literary, steeped in their own work and the work of their contemporaries, and personal: gifted storytellers, they delighted each other with factual and fictional observations. The two remained friends and colleagues until the mental illness that eventually claimed him, began to destroy Schwartz's ability to trust even those closest to him.


Some analysts have argued that if a major political party adopts a restrictive immigration policy it will lose votes among immigrants. In the November 2001 federal election the Coalition emphasised its border control policy which, since late August, has prevented boats carrying unvisaed asylum-seekers from entering the Australian migration zone. The Unity Party, a pro-immigration, pro-multiculturalism party, opposed this policy (as did the Greens and the Democrats). Did the Government's policy alienate migrant voters and did the Unity Party attract them? Western Sydney offers a test case. Many electorates in Western Sydney have high immigrant populations, especially Fowler. In every case, the Liberal Party vote rose. In the electorates where the Unity Party stood candidates in 2001, its vote fell. This was true even of booths within Fowler which have very high concentrations of recent immigrants.


The purpose of this research is to design an intelligent diagnostic system for detecting a sense of wonder in English speech signal using Fuzzy-Nervous Inference-Adaptive system (ANFIS). For English, the recognition of some surprise feelings such as anger, grief, joy and hatred has been made, but due to the difficulty of creating a speech database in a state of wonder and a shortage of resources in this case, even in other languages, so far, no sense of wonder has been detected in the English speech. In the absence of a suitable database in English for the identification of emotions, at first, a wonder-neutral database (without feeling) was created in Persian, containing 30 sentences with a sense of surprise and neutrality. Then, LPC coefficients and frequency characteristics of speech signals such as maximum, minimum, middle and mean (obtained by FFT) were extracted. Finally, the neuro-fuzzy adaptive network (ANFIS) was used to create a sense of wonder with an average accuracy of about 94.93%.


ABSTRACT As part of an outreach initiative by the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria, an interdisciplinary educational module was developed to teach students about sustainability through the lens of mineral resources used to produce mobile phones. The overall goal of the module is to provide teachers of different subjects with a multifaceted tool to include sustainability in their classrooms and create greater awareness of our resource-rich lifestyle. The evaluation of efficacy and impact of the module in formal classroom environments is facilitated through two case studies: an assessment of teacher experiences across Austria with our teaching kit, and an assessment of student learning in Austria and the U.S. During the development of the teaching module in Austria, workshops with 97 teachers were conducted to identify educators' needs and offer an interdisciplinary usable teaching kit. The study showed that teachers greatly appreciated the hands-on workshops and implemented the module in their curriculum. For the student study, 416 students from Vienna, Austria, (209 students) and the Greater Boston area in the U.S. (207 students) were taught the same module by the same instructor. Student performance and learning impact were assessed using pre and post questionnaires. For the Austrian students, an additional long-term post questionnaire was completed six months after the intervention. Students' short-term performances increased significantly immediately after the module. This paper describes the outreach project and our teaching module, and proposes the development of curriculum extensions and teacher professional development for implementing interdisciplinary science concepts.


Anyone working in constructive theology surely knows the age of epistemological positivism is over, such that something more than qualifying our proofs positive of a historical Jesus is at stake in the teaching of Christology. As Christians we live within the public humiliation of Christianity-within the decades consequent to its imbrication with racism, sexism, colonialism, and (especially poignant for us in Western Canada) cultural genocide, while currently the public face of Christianity has been assumed as a front for North America's "war against terrorism." Given the ways in which each of these structures of exclusion pivoted upon a Christological conviction, critical theories, like the practice of confession, prevent us from simply burying our sins under the insecurities of our present time. Critical theories help us remediate the ways in which our Christologies, our sacred imaginais, have been imbricated with structural oppression and the ways in which, without remediation of our symbolic imaginai, we will, among other things, metabolize these Christologies of imperial-colonial power and oedipalized disconnection from sentience. For these reasons as well as for reasons of a theologian's own intellectual integrity and ethical responsibility, the Christological curriculum needs to be brought into conversation with critical theories. But that said, the practice of critical theory can, in the theological classroom, be felt as yet one more, even the final and most vulnerable, challenge to any hope of religious entrustment to life. Theology students, if not Christians in the world at large, can-given the ingress of modernity and their own desire for ontological security-reach for a foundationalist approach to religion, for biblical positivism or literalism-as is verified by the turn to religious fundamentalisms, scripturally-based evangelicalism, and the insularity of narrative communities. So how can progressive Christianities attend to the psychic need of humans, given modernity's dis-embedding technologies so stressing our capacities of life entrustment, without giving up the credible intellectual critiques so important to disrupting the more destructive vectors, that is, those occasioning economic division and ecological decimation, of the globalizing of modernity? The temptation for the academic trained up in modernism may be to present students with various Jesus portraits and Christological propositions and then demonstrate how critical theories invalidate such proposals, or at least produce intellectual skepticism. Applied in this way, critical theories contribute to a modernist epistemological rationalism which elides the lived body in its social milieu and thereby undercut the confidence of the learner. But could there be a way to apply critical theories to what we teach and how we teach, such that these tools of reflection can help us not only ameliorate this age of insecurities, but resurrect Christianities? In pursuit of that possibility, I here consider where biblical and theological colleagues, working in the dimensions of poststructuralism and other critical theories, suggest we plant or root postcolonial, post-modern conversations on Christology. When we relent our struggles for mastery over Jesus, so much a part of both liberalizing and conserving modern theologies, where does Christological discourse end up? What does the application of critical theories suggest about the shape and content of Christologies for a feminist, postmodern, post-colonial context? This is not to say that critical theories can do everything for us. The practice of theology makes claims on us-to posit value, to promote livable imaginais-which are not necessarily the responsibility of other critical theories. Critical theories can help us undertake ethical, analytic reflection on our practice and help us, through something like theological archaeology,1 to recuperate theological wisdom from various historical strata of Christian experience. …


Forecasting the flow of crowds is of great importance to traffic management and public safety, and very challenging as it is affected by many complex factors, such as inter-region traffic, events, and weather. We propose a deep-learning-based approach, called ST-ResNet, to collectively forecast the inflow and outflow of crowds in each and every region of a city. We design an end-to-end structure of ST-ResNet based on unique properties of spatio-temporal data. More specifically, we employ the residual neural network framework to model the temporal closeness, period, and trend properties of crowd traffic. For each property, we design a branch of residual convolutional units, each of which models the spatial properties of crowd traffic. ST-ResNet learns to dynamically aggregate the output of the three residual neural networks based on data, assigning different weights to different branches and regions. The aggregation is further combined with external factors, such as weather and day of the week, to predict the final traffic of crowds in each and every region. Experiments on two types of crowd flows in Beijing and New York City (NYC) demonstrate that the proposed ST-ResNet outperforms six well-known methods.


Beginning Fedora Desktop: Fedora 18 Edition is a complete guide to using the Fedora 18 Desktop Linux release as your daily driver for mail, productivity, social networking, and more. Author and Linux expert Richard Petersen delves into the operating system as a whole and offers you a complete treatment of Fedora 18 Desktop installation, configuration, and use. You'll discover how to install Fedora 18 Desktop on any hardware, learn which applications perform which functions, how to managesoftware updates, tips and tricks for the GNOME 3 and KDE desktops, useful shell commands, and both the Fedora administration and network tools. Get the most out of Fedora 18 Desktop -- includingfree Office suites, editors, e-book readers, music and video applications and codecs, email clients, Web and FTP browsers, microblogging and IM applications -- with a copy of Beginning Fedora Desktop: Fedora 18 Edition at your side. What you'll learn how to install Fedora 18 Desktop on any hardware the available GUI choices, including KDE, GNOME, and alternative desktop environments how to use word processors, spreadsheets, presentation, and e-mail software how to maintain your system and back it up how to participate in social networks using open source clients and much moreWho this book is for Beginning Fedora Desktop: Fedora 18 Edition is for novice to intermediate users who are looking to install Fedora 18 as their primary computing environment.


This research establishes an approach to modelling a congested road network for air quality management, which enables the assessment of traffic management solutions that may create only subtle changes in the traffic flow regimes. Road network emissions have been calculated using standard factors taking into account details of vehicle fleet composition, average speeds and road type. Additionally, the use of microsimulation traffic modelling in conjunction with an instantaneous emissions model (IEM) has been adopted to allow comparison between methodologies and enable congestion sensitive analysis of the impact of air quality management measures on the network. Findings from microscale modelling have revealed that the use of an IEM to calculate emissions as an input for air quality dispersion modelling significantly improved the performance of the dispersion modelling when measured against monitored data. Moreover, this methodology has been successfully applied to assess the performance of a traffic scheme in Durham, UK.


The historical transition from the 20th Century to the 21st has sparked a boom in identifying names and classifying characteristics of the young American adults and teens coming of age at that time. Though there is much discrepancy about the starting birth year and the life span parameters of "Generation Y", generalizing descriptions abound in an effort to capture their influential "historical location context, opportunities, and experiences" that members of this group share, particularly in their formative years. Defining qualities that are largely agreed upon among researchers include an inclination for "digital media, their confidence and optimism, and their orientation towards collaboration" (Donnison).


Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a heterogeneous disease with poor prognosis that lacks targeted therapies, especially in patients with chemotherapy-resistant disease. Since DNA methylation-induced silencing of tumor suppressors is common in cancer, reversal of promoter DNA hypermethylation by 5-aza-2′-deoxycytidine (decitabine), an FDA-approved DNA methyltransferase (DNMT) inhibitor, has proven effective in treating hematological neoplasms. However, its antitumor effect varies in solid tumors, stressing the importance of identifying biomarkers predictive of therapeutic response. Here, we focused on the identification of biomarkers to select decitabine-sensitive TNBC through increasing our understanding of the mechanism of decitabine action. We showed that protein levels of DNMTs correlated with response to decitabine in patient-derived xenograft (PDX) organoids originating from chemotherapy-sensitive and -resistant TNBCs, suggesting DNMT levels as potential biomarkers of response. Furthermore, all 3 methytransferases, DNMT1, DNMT3A, and DNMT3B, were degraded following low-concentration, long-term decitabine treatment both in vitro and in vivo. The DNMT proteins could be ubiquitinated by the E3 ligase, TNF receptor–associated factor 6 (TRAF6), leading to lysosome-dependent protein degradation. Depletion of TRAF6 blocked decitabine-induced DNMT degradation, conferring resistance to decitabine. Our study suggests a potential mechanism of regulating DNMT protein degradation and DNMT levels as response biomarkers for DNMT inhibitors in TNBCs.


This report reviews the main activities in the British Geological Survey (and previously as the Institute of Geological Sciences) that have generated geochemical data. Included are; the mineral reconnaissance programme; regional geochemical mapping; groundwater geochemistry; marine and estuarine surveys; environmental geochemistry and health; radiometric surveys; isotopic geochemistry; lithogeochemical investigations; organic geochemistry laboratories; and many international activities involving geochemical sampling. An indication is given as to where the data resides and who is currently responsible for managing it. An objective of this report is to give better access to the geochemical results and information both for the internal and external users of geochemical data. A list of recommendations are proposed to help give a more corporate and joined up approach to BGS provision of geochemical data and information. The presentation of the geochemical data to the public should be done in a less project-orientated manner. The corporate Geochemistry Database is rather a misnomer as it only contains geochemical data generated by a small number (although very sizable) projects. Other geochemical databases exist but they are not particularly accessible. There is still a lot of geochemical data that is not captured to any corporately supported database. Internal and external reports are one of the major sources of geochemical data and information and this report contains a comprehensive reference list to key BGS geochemical publications.


It has been suggested that coffee drinking may confer a beneficial effect on health by reducing the risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) and indeed there is much epidemiological evidence for a reduced incidence of T2DM in habitual coffee drinkers. However, many acute studies have reported a temporary worsening in postprandial glycaemia following caffeinated coffee (CC) consumption. Varied methodologies have been employed by these studies with many giving their participants large doses of coffee.
In the acute studies conducted for this thesis, a single serving of CC increased the postprandial glycaemic response more than control (p=0.008), with no apparent dose-response effect. Furthermore, a single serving of decaffeinated coffee (DC) consumed in the morning, produced no effect on postprandial glycaemia, although a trend was observed for a reduction in the postprandial glucose peak (p=0.060) when DC was consumed at lunchtime.
The majority of longer-term investigations have recruited habitual coffee drinkers who are likely to have already obtained any potential benefits of coffee consumption. The longer-term intervention reported in this thesis found no overall effects of twelve weeks of CC drinking on glucose and lipid metabolism in coffee-naive individuals. However, differences were observed between fast and slow caffeine metabolisers when the analysis was split by phenotype. The fast caffeine metabolisers displayed a lower postprandial glucose response (p=0.019) and greater NEFA suppression (p=0.001) at baseline. Furthermore, significant interaction effects were observed between visit and phenotype for postprandial glucose (p=0.048) and NEFA (p=0.019), with the intervention producing an apparent increase in postprandial glycaemia in fast metabolisers and reduced NEFA suppression in slow metabolisers.
In conclusion, no evidence was found for a beneficial effect of coffee drinking on glucose and lipid metabolism in the general population, however, individual differences in response to longer-term coffee drinking were observed which warrant further investigation.


Three psychiatrists were found not guilty of serious professional misconduct by the General Medical Council, the body that regulates British doctors, last week in a case that centred on the issue of patient consent and confidentiality (see editorial, p 1240). The complainant had been the subject of a case report submitted by the doctors to a specialist medical journal, and she claimed that the report contained so much detail that she could be identified from it.

The report, which concerned people with bulimia nervosa who bleed themselves, was entitled "Blood-letting in bulimia nervosa" and was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (1993;162:246-8). The authors were consultant psychiatrist Dr John Eagles and psychiatric registrar Dr Jon Richard Parkin, who were both working at the time at the Royal Cornhill Hospital in Aberdeen. The article also acknowledged thanks to Dr Alistair Palin for "allowing us to report on one of his patients." Consultant psychiatrist Dr Palin also worked at the Royal Cornhill, and he was the third doctor involved in the hearing.

The complainant, known throughout the three day hearing as "Miss C," claimed that Dr Parkin had asked to interview her …


The voluntary sector, or the 'third sector', as it is frequently known in social policy circles has been at the centre of social action in the UK for many years. When the New Labour Government came into power back in 1997 the third sector had become more visible and the government of the day had great expectations of the positive impact that the third sector promised. Since this time there has been a belief in central government that the third sector plays a vital role in enhancing civil society and of strengthening the functionality of local communities. In May 2010, the coalition government implemented the concept of the big society. Overall the big society is recognised as a pivotal player in the relationship between citizens and the state. The third sector is perceived as a principle mechanism for implementing the big society vision. This paper aims to critically explore the big society's impact on the third sector, within the context of the current global economic recession.


Purpose: The purpose of this study was to review previous literature with an aim to explore the sleep disturbance level after a patient undergoes cataract surgery using an integrative review. Methods: We used the key words, 'cataract surgery', 'sleep', and 'intraocular lens' to find peer-reviewed publications in seven databases. Among 450 searched articles, eight articles were selected after exclusion of articles that did not meet the criteria. Results: Five of the articles submitted that subjective sleep quality of the patients with bluefiltering intraocular lens (BF-IOL) implant improved as compared to that before surgery. The change of saliva melatonin concentration after BF-IOL implant did not coincide in two of the articles. Two of the articles reported an increased level of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells response after BF-IOL implantation. Conclusion: The published studies stated that BF-IOL implant did not have any negative impact on quality of sleep among cataract patients suffering with poor sleep. Rregardless of intraocular lens type, cataract surgery may increase photoreception of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells one year after surgery although the mechanism was not clear. It is necessary to identify various factors influencing the quality of sleep such as gender and activities among cataract patients with BF-IOL implant in the future.


The classification of finite semigroups is difficult even for small
orders because of their large number. Most finite semigroups are
nilpotent of nilpotency rank 3. Formulae for their number up to
isomorphism, and up to isomorphism and anti-isomorphism of any order
are the main results in the theoretical part of this thesis. Further
studies concern the classification of nilpotent semigroups by rank,
leading to a full classification for large ranks.

In the computational part, a method to find and
enumerate multiplication tables of semigroups and subclasses is
presented. The approach combines the advantages of computer algebra
and constraint satisfaction, to allow for an efficient and fast
search. The problem of avoiding isomorphic and anti-isomorphic
semigroups is dealt with by supporting standard methods from
constraint satisfaction with structural knowledge about the semigroups
under consideration. The approach is adapted to various
problems, and realised using the computer algebra system GAP and the
constraint solver Minion. New results include the numbers of
semigroups of order 9, and of monoids and bands of order 10. Up to
isomorphism and anti-isomorphism there are 52,989,400,714,478 semigroups
with 9 elements, 52,991,253,973,742 monoids with 10 elements, and
7,033,090 bands with 10 elements. That constraint satisfaction can also
be utilised for the analysis of algebraic objects is demonstrated by
determining the automorphism groups of all semigroups with 9 elements.

A classification of the semigroups of orders 1 to 8 is made available
as a data library in form of the GAP package Smallsemi. Beyond the
semigroups themselves a large amount of precomputed properties is
contained in the library. The package as well as the code used to
obtain the enumeration results are available on the attached DVD.


This paper examines the implications for the traditional "legal bonding" hypothesis arising from future "reverse" cross-listings, meaning the cross-listing by issuers from jurisdictions with stronger investor protections into capital markets and on exchanges where investor protections are deemed less robust. We use as examples the first "Indian Depositary Receipt" or IDR IPO in May 2010, and IPOs we believe will complete on a future Shanghai Stock Exchange "international board". This analysis serves to dilute one of the long-standing negative implications of the traditional legal bonding account -- that reverse cross-listings by issuers from jurisdictions with stronger investor protections into weaker investor protection markets exhibit abnormal negative price effects, allegedly because of market expectations that the foreign listing will facilitate conduct impermissible in the home market. More importantly, this analysis allows for a more nuanced understanding of the bonding hypothesis along either vector, and why firms cross-list into foreign jurisdictions, regardless of the receiving legal and regulatory environment. Those other factors include: the simple quest for capital, the possibility of higher initial valuations in capital controls-segmented markets and eventually higher secondary market values with the easing of such controls and thus enhanced global liquidity, the reduced cost ensured by listing in a less burdensome regulatory and enforcement environment, and a cluster of reasons which we describe as "consumer-commercial markets bonding", distinct from the legal and regulatory system bonding that has featured so long in the traditional legal bonding hypothesis. This "consumer-commercial markets bonding" includes the advertising of goods, services and corporate identity into a given consumer market, identification of the issuer as a global firm but with local identity and ownership, demonstrated commitment to key markets and the customers and regulators connected with those markets, a tipping of the hat to the sovereign legal-regulatory establishment of the receiving jurisdiction, and appeals to the receiving market's regulators for the provision of franchise or licensing benefits.


In the years 2003-2008 the Russian economy experienced a period of strong and sustained growth, which was accompanied by large worker turnover and rising informality. We investigate whether the burden of informality falls disproportionately on job separators (displaced workers and quitters) in the Russian labor market in the form of informal employment and undeclared wages in formal jobs. We also pursue the issues whether displaced workers experience more involuntary informal employment than workers who quit and whether informal employment persists. We find a strong positive link between separations and informal employment as well as shares of undeclared wages in formal jobs. Our results also show that displacement entraps some of the workers in involuntary informal employment. Those who quit, in turn, experience voluntary informality for the most part, but there seems a minority of quitting workers who end up in involuntary informal jobs. This scenario does not fall on all separators but predominantly on those with low human capital. Finally, informal employment is indeed persistent since separating from an informal job considerably raises the probability to be informal in the subsequent job.


Prior to the vertebrate invasion of land, aquatic vision provided short range sensing with low contrast scenes. Once on land, aerial vision provided a 100-fold increase in range with high contrast scenes. This change in sensory ecology due to emergence onto land may have provided a selective advantage to those animals that were able to imagine alternative action sequences toward distant goals. To explore the relationship between sensory ecology and the utility of planning, we developed a simulation of predator-prey dynamics where we controlled visual range, planning depth, and environmental complexity. Simulations show that for prey with short visual range, increased planning results in a negligible change in survival rate with increased environmental complexity. However, at longer visual ranges, survival rate is strongly correlated with planning depth and environmental complexity, with peak survival rate occurring at high complexity and planning depth. These data suggest that planning is an adaptation to long range sensing enabled by terrestrial habitats 385 million years ago. Our results point to future research into the limitations on our temporal and spatial range of prospective cognition, a possible result of environments in which we have evolved, to raise awareness and create circumventions for looming existential threats.


AbstractRecent philosophical and theological writing on Augustine in France, England and North America is sharply divided between readings which serve either a historicist, anti-metaphysical, postmodern retrieval or an ahistorical, metaphysical, modern reassertion. The postmodern retrieval begins from a Heideggerian «end of metaphysics» and goes at least some distance with Jacques Derrida's development of its consequences. This essay starts from engagements with Augustine by Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, moving then to Rowan Williams on the De trinitate, read to prevent comparison with Descartes' Meditations, and considers how Williams relates Augustine to Plotinus. The opposed modernist interpretation appears in Stephen Menn's Descartes and Augustine, which sees a continuity between Plotinus, Augustine and Descartes. Finally, the essay treats Plotinus and Augustine on God and self-knowledge, maintaining that Augustine's De trinitate is better understood from within a modern ahistorical stance which, within metaphysics, places Augustine together with Plotinus and Descartes. This view better captures his difference from Plotinus than the alternative postmodern perspective tending to assimilate Augustine to Plotinus.


The fitness of consumers varies widely in aquatic and terrestrial habitats depending on resource quantity and quality. In aquatic food webs, herbivores are most affected by a variable resource quality, which is caused by considerable spatial and seasonal variations of nutrient availability in an ecosystem. Herbivores underlie a particularly high pressure in terms of their ability to acquire a sufficient nutrient supply in order to maintain high rates of growth and reproduction in heterogeneous environments. Particularly for organisms with limited motility such as gastropods, food searching is a very cost-intensive process. The effectiveness of food searching could be increased through the perception of diet-derived infochemicals that convey information about a food resource's quality over a certain distance. Chemical information transfer is a major agent in the regulation of interspecific and intraspecific interactions in natural ecosystems. The information transmission via chemical cues, like volatile organic compounds (VOCs) would clearly help to optimize foraging processes of herbivores and it would be adaptive for them to have efficient chemoreceptive mechanisms to locate food resources over distances. Despite the importance of the interaction of primary producers and grazers for the structure of a benthic natural system there is little knowledge about factors and mechanisms that allow the communication of these organisms.
This study aimed to elucidate important aspects and mechanisms of a snail-periphyton interaction, mediated by the transmission of volatile infochemicals from algae and this study highlights the natural relevance. As model organisms, the common pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis and the benthic green alga Uronema/ Ulothrix fimbriata were used for investigations like growth and behavioural assays but also for GC-MS analyses. I was able to show that the availability of essential macro-elements Nitrogen and Phosphorous in benthic algae lead to reduced fitness of juvenile L. stagnalis and additionally to qualitative and quantitative changes in the algal VOCs bouquet. The results of the behavioural assays revealed that VOCs extracted from U. fimbriata serve as foraging cues for L. stagnalis. Further, I was able to demonstrate for the first time that snails are able to differentiate between high and low quality food sources just by the perception of food odours released from benthic green algae after cell wounding. In field experiments I tested whether this foraging strategy is relevant on a larger spatial scale. The data of the field experiments showed that L. stagnalis is able to recognise algal odour bouquets as foraging infochemicals under natural conditions. Further findings gave also strong evidence that the feeding style of snails (radular cell damage) leads to VOC release under natural conditions because the grazing of L. stagnalis caused an aggregation of conspecifics under natural conditions. Furthermore, L. stagnalis appear to be able to distinguish between high and low quality food resources based on resource-quality specific odour bouquets under natural conditions. My results suggest that the perception of volatile cues is a process relevant on environmental scales and thus a possible mechanism to explain the frequently observed patchy distribution of grazers in ecosystems. The results of a VOCs liberation experiment demonstrated that gastropod grazing indeed leads to VOCs release. Further, I was able to show that a certain threshold of VOCs level is necessary for L. stagnalis which induces a directed foraging behaviour towards the odour. Finally, a mass balance model demonstrated that the grazer mediated VOC release is able to yield signal concentrations sufficient for the recognition by other lymnaeids which then utilize these cues as foraging infochemicals. The emission of ecologically relevant volatiles through snail grazing with subsequent attraction of other gastropod grazers to algal biofilms indicates an important but so far understudied chemical signalling mechanism of ecological importance.