Aim

Climate refugia will become increasingly important for biota as climate change causes an increased frequency and intensity of extreme events, such as drought. Floodplains are potential drought refugia because they have cooler and more mesic microclimates than adjacent areas, and greater water availability through shallower groundwater and flooding. We explored the role of floodplains as drought refugia by estimating the resistance and resilience of terrestrial birds over a 13-year drought (the 'Big Dry') and for 4 years following the break in the drought in floodplain and non-floodplain zones.

Location

Murray–Darling Basin, Australia.

Methods

We used Atlas of Australian Birds survey data from more than 39,000 surveys at over 28,000 sites to estimate trends in reporting rates in floodplain and non-floodplain zones for 144 bird species during extended drought (1998–2009) and in the post-drought period (2010–13).

Results

There was greater resistance to drought in floodplain zones: fewer species declined in floodplain zones (19%) than in non-floodplain zones (29%) during the Big Dry, and more species had elevated reporting rates (13% vs. 8%). More species showed a recovery in reporting rates in non-floodplain zones (40.3%) than in floodplain zones (15.3%) during the post-drought period, which was expected because declines during the Big Dry were more common in non-floodplain zones. There was some evidence for limitations in the resilience of floodplain avifauna, with only 17.9% of species that declined in floodplain zones during the drought subsequently recovering.

Conclusions

Floodplains appear to enhance resistance to drought for many bird species, and are likely to be particularly important as refugia in areas with an arid climate. However, their role in resilience is less clear. Floodplain ecosystems require long-term management to relieve pressures and to restore their ecological condition so that their role as drought refugia is maintained or enhanced.


Major shifts in human lifestyle and dietary habits toward sedentary behavior and refined food intake triggered steep increase in the incidence of metabolic disorders including obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Patients with metabolic disease are at a high risk of cardiovascular complications ranging from microvascular dysfunction to cardiometabolic syndromes including heart failure. Despite significant advances in the standards of care for obese and diabetic patients, current therapeutic approaches are not always successful in averting the accompanying cardiovascular deterioration. There is a strong relationship between adipose inflammation seen in metabolic disorders and detrimental changes in cardiovascular structure and function. The particular importance of epicardial and perivascular adipose pools emerged as main modulators of the physiology or pathology of heart and blood vessels. Here, we review the peculiarities of these two fat depots in terms of their origin, function, and pathological changes during metabolic deterioration. We highlight the rationale for pharmacological targeting of the perivascular and epicardial adipose tissue or associated signaling pathways as potential disease modifying approaches in cardiometabolic syndromes.


The microtubule-based motor dynein generates pulling forces for centrosome centration and mitotic spindle positioning in animal cells. How the essential dynein activator dynactin regulates these functions of the motor is incompletely understood. Here, we dissect the role of dynactin's microtubule binding activity, located in p150's CAP-Gly domain and an adjacent basic patch, in the C. elegans zygote. Using precise mutants engineered by genome editing, we show that microtubule tip tracking of dynein-dynactin is dispensable for targeting the motor to the cell cortex and for generating cortical pulling forces. Instead, p150 CAP-Gly mutants inhibit cytoplasmic pulling forces responsible for centration of centrosomes and attached pronuclei. The centration defects are mimicked by mutations of the C-terminal tyrosine of α-tubulin, and both p150 CAP-Gly and tubulin tyrosination mutants decrease the frequency of organelle transport from the cell periphery towards centrosomes during centration. In light of recent work on dynein-dynactin motility in vitro, our results suggest that p150 GAP-Gly domain binding to tyrosinated microtubules promotes initiation of dynein-mediated organelle transport in the dividing embryo, and that this function of dynactin is important for generating robust cytoplasmic pulling forces for centrosome centration.


Workers' expressive culture (railroaders' dialect, cowboys' laments, seafarers' shanties, loggers' ballads, miners' customs, and trade unionists' rhetoric) has long attracted students of language and literature. During recent decades, labor advocates have joined peers in the humanities in extending study, initially, to objects (badges, banners, tools, trade signs) and, eventually, to public monuments and urban landscapes. To address this latter sphere, the late Stuart Kaufman of the George Meany Memorial Archives and Harry Rubinstein of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History convened a "Symposium on Labor and Material Culture" at the Meany Center on November 12, 1995. In the same year, Labor's Heritage devoted its Spring issue to "Labor Landmarks." Participating in the symposium and contributing to the journal, I addressed the roles of scholars and enthusiasts in viewing work and workers as integral to the treatment of narrative, artifact, or landmark. I have lumped sardonic tale, esoteric ritual, bronze plaque, and marble sculpture under the rubric laborlore, others have used occupational folklife, workers' culture, or revolutionary working class counterculture, as defining terms. In a personal sense, with four-decades of "progress" from ballad/ blues case studies (Only a Miner), to civic advocacy (preserving an obsolete copra crane on a San Francisco Bay inlet), I have been acutely conscious of antiquarian ghosts who have simultaneously haunted and illuminated my journey. To open, trade unionists are not immune from ghostly spirits. At the Knights of Labor national convention in 1893, Daniel De Leon and John Sovereign combined socialist and populist votes to terminate Terence Powderly's reign as the Grand Master Workman. Unable to sustain their victory, the new allies quarreled among themselves and across ideological fences. One skirmish touched matters of who should guard labor history, with what tools, and in which manner. De Leon's camp seemed especially keen to punish and banish deviants within the Socialist Labor Party. Among many targets, Charles Sotheran, an emigrant from Britain's Yorkshire, had published a book on Horace Greeley and other Utopian pioneers. The SLP's inner fight gravitated to New York's Knights of Labor District Assembly 49, where in July, 1894, Sotheran fought back by denouncing De Leon over his status as a lawyer. The latter then smote his foe, thundering that the Socialist Labor Party had no room for "this 250-pound perambulating scrap book and historic junk shop." (Quint 1953:155) In unceremoniously expelling Sotheran from the Socialist Labor Party, De Leon bore in upon a rival's role as a radical historian, omnivorous reader, and dedicated bibliophile. In turn, the book man tagged his former comrades as "socialist marplots, casuists, irreconcilables, disruptionists, falsifiers, and boodlers." (Quint 1953:68) I do not desire to fan ancient embers; rather, I call attention to De Leon's terms, scrap book and junk shop. Did he use them figuratively only to demean a rival, or did Sotheran surround his bookcases with buttons, banners, and brica-brac? Unable to rebuild Sotheran's collection, I ask: Did he literally treasure trade-union artifacts in a Dickensian curiosity shop: How did he extract meaning from scrapbook memorabilia. In short, if not Sotheran, when and where did any labor partisan first undertake to gather those items now placed under the rubric material culture? A related question follows: Was De Leon the initial hard-head to blast union pack rats for their obsessions, or had he in 1894 simply fallen back on a pejorative stance previously sanctified in labor discourse? Over the years, I have experienced some of the intense feeling projected both by pragmatists and visionaries against laborlore enthusiasts. In 1964, Joyce Kornbluh completed Rebel Voices, an exciting anthology of IWW writings and graphics; academic and popular journals alike praised her book. …


Purpose: The article reveals the authors' approach to forecast the socio-economic development of a region. Design/Methodology/Approach: The framework of this approach envisages the construction of three interrelated models: a matrix predictor, an autoregressive model, and a binary choice logit model. This approach ensures an adequate reproduction of the systemic dynamics of indicators of regional socio-economic development. Findings: Authors' models require their implementation in the state management function of the regional economy and testing with specific examples illustrating opportunities of multidimensional economic and mathematical modeling of difficult socio-economic phenomena and processes. Practical implications: Authors' development represents a conceptual foundation for the development of digital regional socio-economic monitoring systems providing an opportunity for a qualitative increase in the reliability and relevance of prognostic parameters. Originality/Value: The contribution of the article is assessment of an opportunity to model the dynamics of multidimensional processes with the perspective to build a combined forecast model of the socio-economic development of the region, providing for the implementation of multivariate forecast calculations.


'Housing affordability' has been widely used as the key criteria to examine the ability of households to afford the housing expenditures. However, much less attention has been paid to the housing affordability issues that faced by Chinese households. This paper examines factors which would impact housing affordability, by linking the theoretical understandings in the macroeconomic environment, housing market and liquidity constraints. Quarterly time series data at the national level are employed for empirical investigation. The instrumental variable approach is employed to resolve the endogeneity issues and obtain the consistent estimators. Suggestions of taking measures to mitigating housing affordability difficulties would be discussed according to the empirical findings.


Do Internet users "pay" for online products and services with personal data? The common analogy between online data collection for behaviorally targeted advertising and payment for purchases is seriously misleading. There is no functioning market based on exchanges of personal information for access to online products and services. In a functioning market, payment of a given price signals consumer demand for particular goods and services, transmitting consumer preferences to producers. Data collection serves as "payment" in that critical sense only if its transfer from users to collectors adequately signals user preferences for online goods and services. It does not. Indeed, for reasons explored in this article, the behavioral advertising business model leads to a failed online market and erects barriers to entry for no-data-collection alternatives. The market failure is due in part to the intertwined nature of personal information and involves collective action problems that cannot be solved by consent-based approaches to single transactions. Those collective action problems, in turn, erect barriers to entry for online businesses employing paid or contextual advertising business models. As a result of these factors, the online market is likely to be stuck in a failed state in which products and services are tailored to advertiser preferences for data extraction, rather than to consumer preferences.


The current doctoral thesis takes particular interest in the city-centre night-time economy (NTE), against a background of literatures that link economic vitality of city-centres, consumption and safety to greater need for surveillance and policing. Increasingly, nightlife is being problematized in the media and public debate as a source of crime, disorder and excessive drinking which is believed to cause experienced lack of safety among visitors to nightlife areas. When it is widely accepted amongst policy makers that consumers are attracted more easily to city centres that are lively and safe, a common response has been increasing surveillance and policing in cities' NTE's. It is however not intrinsically clear how these interventions are perceived by nightlife consumers and to what extent they bolster their experiences of safety. From the perspective of the nightlife consumer, this doctoral thesis studies how CCTV surveillance, police officers and private security are perceived by nightlife consumers, and affect their experiences of safety while going out at night. To do so, a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods is employed. Results indicate that visitors to the main and central nightlife areas of Utrecht and Rotterdam (The Netherlands) tend to feel safe during their nights out. In those moments that a lack of safety emerges, CCTV cameras are considered largely unable to stimulate safety among nightlife consumers. Besides that nightlife consumers are not always aware about the presence of CCTV surveillance, they don't have accurate knowledge about how CCTV camera's work. CCTV surveillance is also not considered capable to act directly in those moments that danger emerges and incidents unfold. Nightlife consumers consider present police and private security much more capable to affect experienced lack of safety because they can soothe tension and aggression and, if needs be, put an end to dangerous situations through active interventions. At the same time, results indicate that their effects are rather complex.The effects of door staff are found to depend on participants' ethnic background. Present police can both, and at the same time, stimulate experienced safety and work into hand feelings of fear among nightlife consumers. More generally, these results then suggest that surveillance and policing are unlikely to reduce lack of safety in the night-time economy as much as past research, influential policy and media discourses have suggested. They also demonstrate that what is required is a surveillance and policing apparatus in nightlife areas that adapts and is proportional to the particularities of the social situations they are intended to act upon and affect experienced (lack of) safety in. In those situations when nightlife consumers are unconcerned about their safety, we conclude that surveillance and policing best remain in the background. This contrasts popular policing approaches that are more 'invasive' in nature and those that give support to zero-tolerance policing philosophy.


Fluctuations in the fundamental investment variable of interest rate over the life of an investment introduce uncertainty. The paper explores the relationship between interest rate uncertainty and investment value. In particular it looks at, and provides support for, the proposition that uncertainty in interest rates increases the value of an investment. The paper's contribution is that it does this in a readily understandable way, and demonstrates a clear relationship of value increase to underlying parameters, in contradistinction with existing treatments. A case study of a long-term infrastructure project is given in support of the theory.


The LHCb Collaboration is constructing a large scintillating fibre tracker for a major upgrade of the experiment during the LHC long shutdown LS2 scheduled for 2019–2020. The detector is based on blue emitting Kuraray SCSF-78MJ fibres of 0.25 mm diameter, read out by linear 128-channel Hamamatsu SiPM arrays. Over a period of about 2 years the full supply of 12,000 km of fibres underwent a systematic and rigorous quality assurance program, including geometrical refinement to deal with rare punctual imperfections. The measurements comprised attenuation length, ionisation light yield, diameter, cladding integrity and radiation tolerance to X-rays. The supply was found to be timely and of very high quality and stability, which led to negligible rejection rates. A small but systematic degradation of the attenuation length by about 1.4% per year is interpreted as natural aging due to oxidation of the polystyrene fibre core and is subject of further investigations.


Milk chocolates were prepared by replacing skim milk powder in the formulation with yoghurt powder at 50% and 100% levels. The effect of incorporating yoghurt powder on quality of chocolates was studied. No significant changes were observed in fatty acid profile and hardness of the chocolates. Sour taste of chocolate with yoghurt powder due to its acidity was neutralized by adding calculated amount of sodium bicarbonate. Sensory analysis showed that probiotic chocolates were highly acceptable and similar to control chocolate. Microbiological studies of chocolates showed the presence of Lactobacillus species to the extent of 3.37 log·cfu/g, which were not present in the control sample prepared only with skim milk powder. Rheological studies showed that milk chocolate prepared using yoghurt powder at 50% showed no significant changes in yield value compared to that of control, but at 100% addition a considerable decrease in yield value was observed. Microstructural properties of chocolate with 50% addition of yoghurt powder showed smaller particles adhering to the cocoa and sugar crystals but at 100% addition of yoghurt powder, the cocoa particles were completely covered by smaller yoghurt powder matrix.


Objective This study aimed to construct a job exposure matrix (JEM) for risk of becoming infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in an occupational setting. Methods Experts in occupational epidemiology from three European countries (Denmark, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom) defined the relevant exposure and workplace characteristics with regard to possible exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In an iterative process, experts rated the different dimensions of the COVID-19-JEM for each job title within the International Standard Classification of Occupations system 2008 (ISCO-08). Agreement scores, weighted kappas, and variances were estimated. Results The COVID-19-JEM contains four determinants of transmission risk [number of people, nature of contacts, contaminated workspaces and location (indoors or outdoors)], two mitigation measures (social distancing and face covering), and two factors for precarious work (income insecurity and proportion of migrants). Agreement scores ranged from 0.27 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.25–0.29] for 'migrants' to 0.76 (95% CI 0.74–0.78) for 'nature of contacts'. Weighted kappas indicated moderate-to-good agreement for all dimensions [ranging from 0.60 (95% CI 0.60–0.60) for 'face covering' to 0.80 (95% CI 0.80–0.80) for 'contaminated workspaces'], except for 'migrants' (0.14 (95% CI -0.07–0.36). As country differences remained after several consensus exercises, the COVID-19-JEM also has a country-axis. Conclusions The COVID-19-JEM assesses the risk at population level using eight dimensions related to SARS-COV-2 infections at work and will improve our ability to investigate work-related risk factors in epidemiological studies. The dimensions of the COVID-19-JEM could also be valuable for other future communicable diseases in the workplace.


Monitoring of the state of charge of the thermal energy storage component in solar thermal systems for space heating and/or cooling in residential buildings is a key element from the overall system control strategy point of view. According to the literature, there is not a unique method for determining the state of charge of a thermal energy storage system that could generally be applied in any system. This contribution firstly provides a classification of the state-of-the-art of available techniques for the determination of the state of charge, and secondly, it presents an experimental analysis of different methods based on established sensor technologies, namely temperature, mass flow rates, and pressure measurements, tested using a lab-scale heat exchanger filled with a commercial phase change material for cooling applications. The results indicate that, depending on the expected accuracy and available instrumentation, each of the methods studied here can be used in the present application, the deviations between the methods generally being below 20%. This study concludes that a proper combination of two or more of these methods would be the ideal strategy to obtain a more reliable and accurate estimation of the state of charge of the latent heat thermal energy storage.


The selective functionalization of the inner and outer surfaces of colloidal mesoporous silica (CMS) nanoparticles with different trialkoxysilanes, following a newly developed delayed co-condensation approach, results in bifunctional CMS. Complementary CMS nanoparticles were prepared with two different functional groups located either on the outer shell or in the inner core of the particle. The identification and localization of the functional groups was achieved by means of different techniques including zeta potential, nitrogen sorption measurements, and fluorescence spectroscopy. This last technique was applied to fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)-labeled CMS featuring aminopropyl functional groups on the periphery or the internal pore surface of the particles. Fluorescence quenching experiments were carried out with dodecanethiolate-stabilized gold nanoparticles having a diameter greater than the pore size of the CMS. It could be shown that fluorescence quenching occurs only when the FITC is positioned on the outer surface of the CMS nanoparticles, whereas no quenching was observed for FITC located in the inner core of the nanoparticle. These results clearly confirm the controlled localization of the aminopropyl groups in the nanometer space of the CMS particles. Our approach thus offers the opportunity to synthesize, in a novel multistep co-condensation strategy, various bifunctional mesoporous nanoparticles with controlled localization of different functional groups in the inner core or on the outer shell of the nanoparticle.


A Guide to Econometrics has established itself as a preferred text for teachers and students throughout the world. It provides an overview of the subject and an intuitive feel for its concepts and techniques without the notation and technical detail that characterize most econometrics textbooks. The fifth edition has two major additions, a chapter on panel data and an innovative chapter on applied econometrics. Existing chapters have been revised and updated extensively, particularly the specification chapter (to coordinate with the applied econometrics chapter), the qualitative dependent variables chapter (to better explain the difference between multinomial and conditional logit), the limited dependent variables chapter (to provide a better interpretation of Tobit estimation), and the time series chapter (to incorporate the vector autoregression discussion from the simultaneous equations chapter and to explain more fully estimation of vector error correction models). Several new exercises have been added, some of which form new sections on bootstrapping and on applied econometrics.


Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a range of major neurodevelopmental disabilities with a strong genetic basis. Yet, owing to extensive genetic heterogeneity, multiple modes of inheritance and limited study sizes, sequencing and quantitative genetics approaches have had limited success in characterizing the complex genetics of ASD. Currently, only a small fraction of potentially causal genes—about 65 genes out of an estimated severalhundred—are known based on strong genetic evidence. Hence, there isa critical need for complementary approaches to further characterize the genetic basis of ASD, enabling development of better screening and therapeutics. Here, we use a machine-learning approach based on a human brain-specific functional gene interaction network to present a genome-wide prediction of autism-associated genes, including hundreds of candidate genes for which there is minimal or no prior genetic evidence. Our approach is validated in an independent case-control sequencing study of approximately 2,500families. Leveraging these genome-wide predictions and the brain-specificnetwork, we demonstrate that the large set of ASD genes converges on a smaller number of key cellular pathways and specific developmental stages of the brain. Specifically, integration with spatiotemporal transcriptome expression data implicates early fetal and midfetal stages of the developing human brain in ASD etiology. Likewise, analysis of the connectivity of topautism genes in the brain-specific interaction network reveals the breadthof autism-associated functional modules, processes, and pathways in the brain. Finally, we identify likely pathogenic genes within the most frequent autism-associated copy-number-variants (CNVs) and propose genes and pathways that are likely mediators of autism across multiple CNVs. All the predictions, interactions, and functional insights from this work are available to biomedical researchers at asd.princeton.edu.


This paper describes a method to improve converter fed grid structures with Modular Multilevel Converters (MMC). In grids with decentralized energy production and bidirectional power flow, an increasing number of power electronic loads and sources make power quality an important issue to ensure grid stability. The MMC topology is highly suitable to meet the requirements of a low Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) and voltage stability due to its high quality output voltages. In combination with power line communication based on harmonic injection, MMCs compensate low frequency grid current harmonics and imbalances to improve the power quality. A standalone laboratoryscale converter-fed microgrid including low voltage MMCs shows the capability of the developed control algorithms.


Abstract. Nowadays we can explore many examples of different types of maps, made during centuries on all kind of solid material: bones, tusks, stone plates, wood, clay, metal, glass, plastics, paper etc. Some of them were preserved for more than thousand years is condition, which still allow us reading their content. But, archiving all kind of maps in digital form is a great problem both for map and archive community. Early digital storage media, like floppy diskettes, magnetic tapes or compact discs aren't readable anymore; storage formats of archived maps are usually unsupported by new software after only a decade and storage data couldn't be retrieved.Large cartographic companies, state mapping agencies and other larger map producers and providers usually organise their own long term storage system, adapted to their needs and used equipment. Non state-institutional maps, published by some interest groups or organizations, such as orienteering maps are often excluded from such solutions and need special focus. The orienteering maps particularly usually cover some specific smaller areas of interest. On the same territory maps with slightly different content may exist (e.g. versions of map for different orienteering sports' disciplines), each of those map usually has its specific updating period, also only part of old map can be updated, different maps can overlap. Most of those maps should be safely long term preserved; they are part of mapping heritage, source for different analyses, like analysing former O-events or championships, repeating the same courses at anniversaries or other special occasions. Archived maps are important funds for the owners and have to be safety stored, on the other hand they can be of interest for many users and therefore should be easy accessible for them.There are some options for long term document archiving using different file, server or repository systems, where each has advantages and weaknesses. Slovenian orienteering federation together with Archives of the Republic of Slovenia started the test project with possible solutions of long term archiving orienteering maps. Initially we are defining, what should we preserve from orienteering maps: map originals – colour layers, final maps (printed, in raster or in vector form), maps with some most attractive courses (printed or digital), source material (photogrammetric plots, field work scratches, data bases, photos…) and map documentation (standards, procedures, etc). Slovenian orienteering clubs and some others created so far all together about 500 orienteering maps, all of them are registered by Slovenian Orienteering Federation. Our final goal is to archive all of them, including first 22 maps, which have been produced on plastics using analogue procedures. For each map we are intending to store original version (if available) and image for overview. Proposed storage formats are geo tiff for rasters and gml for vector forms, supplied with all relevant metadata (map type, SW type and version used for production, ISOM or other standard that was followed, used source data, owner, accessibility). Documentation should be also INSPIRE compliant. Success of the project might lead to common solution for various other smaller map corpuses, like maps at students' work and similar.


Notch signalling is implicated in the pathogenesis of a variety of cancers, but its role in prostate cancer is poorly understood. However, selected Notch pathway members are overrepresented in high‐grade prostate cancers. We comprehensively profiled Notch pathway components in prostate cells and found prostate cancer‐specific up‐regulation of NOTCH3 and HES6. Their expression was particularly high in androgen responsive lines. Up‐ and down‐regulating Notch in these cells modulated expression of canonical Notch targets, HES1 and HEY1, which could also be induced by androgen. Surprisingly, androgen treatment also suppressed Notch receptor expression, suggesting that androgens can activate Notch target genes in a receptor‐independent manner. Using a Notch‐sensitive Recombination signal binding protein for immunoglobulin kappa J region (RBPJ) reporter assay, we found that basal levels of Notch signalling were significantly lower in prostate cancer cells compared to benign cells. Accordingly pharmacological Notch pathway blockade did not inhibit cancer cell growth or viability. In contrast to canonical Notch targets, HES6, a HES family member known to antagonize Notch signalling, was not regulated by Notch signalling, but relied instead on androgen levels, both in cultured cells and in human cancer tissues. When engineered into prostate cancer cells, reduced levels of HES6 resulted in reduced cancer cell invasion and clonogenic growth. By molecular profiling, we identified potential roles for HES6 in regulating hedgehog signalling, apoptosis and cell migration. Our results did not reveal any cell‐autonomous roles for canonical Notch signalling in prostate cancer. However, the results do implicate HES6 as a promoter of prostate cancer progression.


IZA DP No. 14286 APRIL 2021 Aversion to Breaking Rules and Migration* Migration movements may increase the geographic dispersion of the Aversion to Breaking Rules (ABR) in a population, with possible long-term economic consequences. We show this result with Italian Census data, using indicators of false birth date registrations for families of South-North migrants and remainers in the two macro-regions. Within locality×biennium cells, deterrence and cheating benefits are similar in the two groups and thus cheating differences are informative about the underlying ABR, as our theory suggests. We also exploit the Fascist reforms of 1926 as shocks to deterrence, offering additional information on the underlying ABR of migrant and remainer families. JEL Classification: J61, C93, R23


We study the effects of mergers and acquisitions on industry dynamics. We develop an infinite horizon model of a competitive industry, which features mergers, entry, exit, and investment by heterogeneous firms. Merger synergies arise from improvements in productivity and cost efficiencies. We characterize the time-series and cross-sectional evolution of firm productivities and merger opportunities in a rational expectations equilibrium. Consistent with the empirical evidence, our model generates procyclical entry and merger activity, as well as counter-cyclical exit. The presence of a merger market induces higher entry rates and lower exit rates, reduces the counter-cyclicality of exit, and increases the mean and variance of the cross-sectional distribution of firm-level productivities. While entry and exit induce the mean productivity to be counter-cyclical, this pattern is reversed when the possibility of mergers is taken into account. JEL Classifications: D21, D92, E22, E32, G34, L11


Postmenopausal osteoporosis is a systemic metabolic skeletal disease generally ascribable to a dearth of estrogen. Whether traditional Chinese medicine is effective in management of postmenopausal osteoporosis remains unclear. This article reviews the experimental evidence of both in vitro and in vivo preclinical studies with the theme of the application of Chinese single herbs and active ingredients in postmenopausal osteoporosis. It includes three single herbs (Herba Epimedium, Rhizoma Drynariae, and Salvia miltiorrhiza) and eight active ingredients (saikosaponins, linarin, echinacoside, sweroside, psoralen, poncirin, vanillic acid, and osthole). The experimental studies indicated their potential use as treatment for postmenopausal osteoporosis and investigated the underlying mechanisms including osteoprotegerin/receptor activator of nuclear factor κB ligand (OPG/RANKL), extracellular-signal-regulated kinase/c-Jun N terminal kinase/mitogen-activated protein kinase (ERK/JNK/MAPK), estrogen receptor (ER), bone morphogenetic protein (BMP), transforming growth factor (TGF)-β, Wnt/β-catenin, and Notch signaling pathways. This review contributes to a better understanding of traditional Chinese medicine and provides useful information for the development of more effective anti-osteoporosis drugs.


Complexity of illicit drug markets mirrors the complexity of illicit drug use itself. The intricacy of multiple interactions between individuals, the various time lines linked to different aspects of harm reduction, and contrasted social rationalities observed among field practitioners (prevention, law enforcement, harm reduction) contribute to the creation of complex and unpredictable systems. In order to explore this complexity, an Agent-Based Model (ABM) called SimDrug was designed. The prototype model includes users, dealers, wholesalers, outreach workers and police forces. The model is focused upon local drug market and the hot spots in Melbourne. The time span for the model is 4 years, and the team endeavoured to replicate the period of the Australian heroin drought. One interesting question to answer was whether the drought was an emergent phenomenon or caused by externalities. Preliminary results tend to provide comprehensive answers to the question and meaningful insights for further developments of the model.


Are people less likely to attend large churches? Using nationally representative data, I find a negative relationship between size and the probability of attendance for Conservative, Mainline, and black Protestants and for Catholics in parishes larger than 500 attenders. The addition of control variables does not change these patterns. These results support the theory that group cohesion lies at the heart of the size-participation relationship in churches. With the rapid growth of megachurches in the United States, a negative relationship between size and frequency of attendance could serve to accelerate aggregate declines in attendance. Methodologically, this article demonstrates how Bayesian hierarchical models can handle complex data structures and imputation procedures in a unified model.


Purpose There are no commercially available devices to measure visual fields in infants. We developed a device, "Pediatric Perimeter," that quantifies visual field extent (VFE) for infants. We describe the construction, validation, and use of this device. Methods A hemispherical dome with light emitting diodes (LEDs) was constructed. The LEDs were controlled using a computer program to measure reaction time (RT) to gross visual fields (GVF) and the VFE. Participants were tested in supine position in a dark room. Eye or head movement towards the stimuli was monitored with an infrared (IR) camera. Validation was done on 10 adults (mean age: 24.4 ± 5 years) with tunnel vision simulator. Results Perimetry was performed on 19 infants (age: 2.3–12 months), five infants with normal milestones. GVF and VFE were estimated in 17 and 7 infants, respectively. Median RT of infants with developmental delay was 663 ms and 380 ms for healthy infants. Also, 14 children (age: 14 months–6 years) with developmental delay and five patients with cognitive impairment were tested. Conclusion Visual field isopter and RT can be examined with the Pediatric Perimeter device on infants and patients with special needs. Further testing on infants will need to assess the repeatability. A large-scale study will be needed to compare typically developing infants and infants with delayed milestones with this device. Translational Relevance Quantifiable parameters obtained with this device can be used as outcome measures in clinical examination of infants and patients with special needs. This device can be used in pediatric, neurology, and ophthalmology clinics.


Hydrolytic oxidation of various hydrosilanes in acetonitrile and in the absence of organic solvents catalyzed by an N-heterocyclic carbene organocatalysis is described. The NHC organocatalyst exhibited a very high activity with only 0.1 mol% loading of the catalyst in acetonitrile for aryl-substituted dihydrosilanes to produce hydrogen gas and cyclosiloxanes almost quantitatively in several minutes. The calculated TOF (15 000 h-1) of this organocatalyst is comparable to those of precious metal-based heterogeneous catalysts and much superior to those of the existing homogeneous metal catalysts. The catalytic reaction selectively yielded cyclosiloxanes in high yield without the contamination of silanols. Furthermore, the catalytic reaction can also be furnished under solvent-free conditions at elevated temperatures with 2.5 mol% loading of the NHC in 5-12 hours.


Information Extraction (IE) aims at mapping texts into fixed structure representing the key information.
A typical IE system will try to answer the questions like who are present in the text, what events happen and when these events happen. The task is making possible significant advances in applications that require deep understanding capabilities such as question-answering engines, dialogue systems, or the semantic web. Due to the huge effort and time consumation of developping extraction systems by domain experts, our approach focuses on machine learning methods that can accurately infer an extraction model by training on a dataset. The goal of this research is to design and implement models with improved performance by learning the combination of different algorithms or by inventing novel structures that are able to exploit kinds of evidence that have not been explored in the literature.
A basic component of an IE system is named entity recognition (NER) whose purpose is to locate objects that can be referred by names, belonging to a predefined set of categories. We approach this task by proposing a novel reranking framework that employs two learning phases to pick the
best candidate. The task is considered as sequence labelling with Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) is selected as the baseline algorithm. Our research employs novel kernels based on structured and unstructured features for reranking the N-best hypotheses from the CRFs baseline. The former features are generated by a polynomial kernel encoding entity features whereas tree kernels are used to model dependencies amongst tagged candidate examples.
Relation Extraction (RE) is concerned with finding relationships between pairs of entities in texts. State-of-the-art relation extraction model is based on convolution kernel over the constituent parse tree. In our research, we employ dependency parses from dependency parsing in addition to phrase-structure parses from constituent parsing. We define several variations of dependency parses to inject additional information into the trees.
Additionally, we provide an extensive ablation over various types of kernels by combining the tree, sequence, and polynomial kernels. These novel kernels are able to exploit learned correlations between phrase-structure parses and grammatical relations.
A large amounts of wide-coverage semantic knowledge today exists in large repositories of unstructured or semi-structured text documents. The increased availability of online collaborative resources has attracted the attention of much work in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community. Nevertheless, the ability to extract it using statistical machine learning techniques is hindered by well-known problems such as heavy supervision and scalability. These drawbacks can be alleviated by applying a form of weakly supervision, specifically named distant supervision (DS), to automatically derive explicit facts from the semi-structured part of Wikipedia.
To learn relational facts from Wikipedia without any labeled example or hand-crafted pattern, we employ DS where the relation providers are external repositories, e.g., YAGO (a huge semantic knowledge base), and the training instances are gathered from Freebase (a huge semantic database).
These allow for potentially obtaining larger training data and many more relations, defined in different sources. We apply state-of-the-art models for ACE RE, that are sentence level RE (SRLE), to Wikipedia. Based on a mapping table of relations from YAGO to ACE (according to their semantic
definitions), we design a joint RE model of DS/ACE and tested it on ACE annotations (thus according to expert linguistic annotators). Moreover, we experiment with end-to-end systems for real-world RE applications. Consequently, our RE system is applicable to any document/sentence, i.e. another major improvement on previous work, which, to our knowledge, does not show experiments on end-to-end SLRE.


Capt. John Franklin's account of his journey along the western Arctic coast of North America presents two spellings of the toponym he gave to the point at the eastern end of Workboat Passage, the strait between Herschel Island and the mainland. "Pt. Catton" is printed in the text, and "Pt. Calton" on the accompanying map compiled by Lt. E.N. Kendall. One of these must be a misprint. Catton Point and Calton Point have been used by the National Topographic System and on Canadian hydrographic charts. Calton Point was adopted by the Government of Canada for use in November 1962. However, Catton Point is almost certainly the intended toponym after the Rev. Thomas Catton, FRS (c. 1758 – 1838), President of St. John's College, Cambridge (1819 – 22), and tutor when John F.W. Herschel arrived at the college in 1809. Catton was one of 13 fellows of the Royal Society honoured by Franklin in northern Yukon. No Calton has ever been elected to the Royal Society or included in the Dictionary of National Biography .


Lind, Anna Karin. 2006. HUMAN OVULATION – Studies on collagens, gelatinases and tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, The Sahlgrenska Academy at Göteborg University, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, S-413 45 Göteborg, Sweden. Ovulation is a highly regulated process, which involves the degradation and rupture of healthy tissue of the ovarian follicle and the extrusion of a fertilizable oocyte. This unique biological process is initiated by the LH-surge, which induces major vascular changes and remodelling of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in and around the follicle. The collagens of the ECM make up the tensile strength of the follicle wall and breakdown of these proteins seems to be a prerequisite for follicular rupture to occur. There is now robust evidence that matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and their endogenous tissue inhibitors (TIMPs) are crucial in this process. Earlier studies in this field have been mostly animal studies. The general aims of this thesis were to investigate the distribution of three types of collagens in the human ovary and to explore the expression patterns of the gelatinases, MMP-2 and MMP-9, together with their endogenous inhibitors, TIMP-2 and TIMP-1, during ovulation. The study was approved by the human Ethics Committee of Sahlgrenska Academy, Göteborg University. Informed written consent was obtained from all women participating in the study. Women, planned for laparoscopic sterilization participated in the study. They were closely monitored by transvaginal ultrasound. Surgery was performed during either of four distinct ovulatory phases and the dominant follicle and its adjacent stroma was excised. Granulosa and theca cells were harvested. Whole ovarian sections from premenopausal women undergoing oophorectomy at surgery for cervical cancer or due to familial predisposition to ovarian cancer were also obtained. The distribution of collagen types I, III and IV in biopsies of the perifollicular stroma from four distinct ovulatory phases as well as in whole ovarian sections was investigated by immunohistochemistry (paper I). Collagen types I and III were abundant in the perifollicular stroma around the periovulatory human follicle. These types of collagen were also present in a typical concentric layered pattern in the stromal capsule of the ovary making up a scaffold for the ovarian tissue. Collagen type IV was present in the basal lamina that separates the granulosa from the theca cells. The staining intensity of collagens type I and III in the perifollicular stroma decreased from preovulatory stage throughout ovulation indicating a degradation of the follicle wall. In paper II-IV, MMP-2, MMP-9 and TIMP-2 and TIMP-1 were found to be present in the stroma-, theca and granulosa cells compartment of the periovulatory follicle. The protein levels of these enzymes and inhibitors were examined by Western Blot in paper II. In paper II-IV mRNA expression was demonstrated by real time PCR and the protein distribution by immunohistochemistry. An increase of TIMP-1 was seen in the perifollicular stroma both on the proteinand mRNAlevel. In the granulosaand theca cells compartments a large increase in TIMP-1 and MMP-9 mRNA was demonstrated. Immunostaining for MMP-2, MMP-9, TIMP-2 and TIMP-1 was visualized in the different compartments of the periovulatory folllcle. In summary, the abundance of collagens in the human follicular wall and their specific localization suggest that major site-directed degradation of collagens is necessary for follicular rupture to occur. This is the first study that has demonstrated an ovulation-associated expression of the ECM remodelling enzyme, MMP-9, together with its endogenous inhibitor, TIMP-1, in and around the human follicle at ovulation. Increasing knowledge concerning these aspects of human ovulation could contribute to the development of clinical treatments of anovulation and also to the discovery of new contraceptive strategies that could inhibit ovulation on the ovarian level without the side effects of the oral contraceptives used today.


The emergence and proliferation of the service economy greatly amplifies the need to thoroughly manage service productivity. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the expressiveness of conceptual modeling grammars for service productivity management as well as to provide directions for future research. Based on authoritative theories on service productivity, we identify a set of evaluation criteria with which we benchmark a selection of conceptual modeling grammars. Our analysis yields two major insights: First, literature on service productivity provides only limited theoretical support for designing conceptual modeling grammars. Second, the concepts contained in service productivity theories have found little recognition in the grammars' meta models. We derive two core implications: First, extended theory support is needed to inform the design of conceptual modeling grammars. Second, additional constructs need to be included in conceptual modeling grammars to facilitate productivity-oriented analysis and design in the service sector.


This article offers a sociological understanding of the role of catalogue shopping in women's everyday lives. The article draws on qualitative data generated from interviews with women working at the returns department of the Kays catalogue warehouse in Worcester. During the time of writing, Shop Direct, owners of Kays closed down the historic warehouse in Worcester, effectively bringing over 200 years of Worcester's association with Kays and the catalogue industry to an end, and leading to 500 job losses, including those of the women taking part in the research. Once the largest private employer in Worcester, Kays occupies an important role in local cultural and social identities, and in this article, I will argue that a sociological account of catalogue shopping is apt and timely given such significant social changes, the recent economic downturn and social problems that have long been associated with this form of consumption. In addition, the article will show that to date, much research into catalogue shopping has tended to rest on economic historical accounts of the 'mail order' industry. In contrast, this article argues that catalogue shopping occupies not only a significant place in the popular cultural imagination surrounding the shopping habits of the working classes (and especially working-class women) but has also played a crucial role in women's management of the home, caring for the family and safeguarding an often limited financial budget. The article will consider the important role that catalogues have played in offering credit to working-class women who may have previously struggled to get this. Finally, it adds to recent attempts to put women's domestic consumption patterns firmly on the academic agenda.


Microfluidic-based tissue-on-a-chip devices have generated significant research interest for biomedical applications, such as pharmaceutical development, as they can be used for small volume, high throughput studies on the effects of therapeutics on tissue-mimics. Tissue-on-a-chip devices are evolving from basic 2D cell cultures incorporated into microfluidic devices to complex 3D approaches, with modern designs aimed at recapitulating the dynamic and mechanical environment of the native tissue. Thus far, most tissue-on-a-chip research has concentrated on organs involved with drug uptake, metabolism and removal (e.g., lung, skin, liver, and kidney); however, models of the drug metabolite target organs will be essential to provide information on therapeutic efficacy. Here, we develop an osteogenesis-on-a-chip device that comprises a 3D environment and fluid shear stresses, both important features of bone. This inexpensive, easy-to-fabricate system based on a polymerized High Internal Phase Emulsion (polyHIPE) supports proliferation, differentiation and extracellular matrix production of human embryonic stem cell-derived mesenchymal progenitor cells (hES-MPs) over extended time periods (up to 21 days). Cells respond positively to both chemical and mechanical stimulation of osteogenesis, with an intermittent flow profile containing rest periods strongly promoting differentiation and matrix formation in comparison to static and continuous flow. Flow and shear stresses were modeled using computational fluid dynamics. Primary cilia were detectable on cells within the device channels demonstrating that this mechanosensory organelle is present in the complex 3D culture environment. In summary, this device aids the development of 'next-generation' tools for investigating novel therapeutics for bone in comparison with standard laboratory and animal testing.


There are several studies that find a positive effect of productivity on firm-level export, but little is known about the role of import. This paper fills this gap by looking at the interaction between import and productivity in influencing exports. The main hypothesis is that imports stimulate learning, which in turn means that the productivity effect on export is greater for firms with previous import experience. To test this, I examine whether productivity increases the probability to engage in exports and for existing exporters total value of exports when firms have imported from a period before. Using data of Swedish manufacturing firms from 1997-2006,I find that imports enhance productivity in promoting firm's exports.


Fluctuations in biodiversity, both large and small, are pervasive through the fossil record, yet we do not understand the processes generating them. Here we use a novel extension of theory from non-equilibrium statistical physics to show that three universal properties of macroevolution---punctuated adaptive radiation, niche conservatism and resultant heterogeneity of diversification rates between taxa---are sufficient to explain the previously unaccounted for fat-tailed form of fluctuations in diversity through the Phanerozoic. Using this theory, known as super-statistics, we identify taxonomic orders as largely autonomous evolutionary units, each likely experiencing its own unique and conserved region of an adaptive landscape. The separation of timescales between background origination and extinction compared to the origin of major ecological and evolutionary innovations between orders allow within-order dynamics to reach equilibrium, while between-order diversification is non-equilibrial, driven by major evolutionary innovations. Compared to other approaches that have used simple birth-death processes, equilibrial dynamics or non-linear theories from complexity science, super-statistics is superior in its ability to account for both small and extreme fluctuations in fossil diversity. Its success opens up new research directions to better understand the universal nature of non-equilibrium dynamics across disparate systems of interest---from societal to physical to biological. Specifically in the biological case, research is motivated to understand the evolutionary processes leading to the stasis of order-level occupancy in an adaptive landscape punctuated by innovations between orders.


Abstract Control of plant bacterial diseases remains difficult due to the limited availability of efficient plant protection products with reduced negative effects either in the environment or with human and animal health. In order to reduce the usage of chemical pesticides alternative strategies for controlling plant pathogens and improve plant disease resistance are promoted. The aim of the study was to investigate the antibacterial activity of some natural compounds (plant extracts of Tamarix ramosissima, Rosmarinus officinalis, Chelidonium majus, Silybum marianum, Satureja hortensis essential oil and propolis) against bacterial ring rot pathogen, Clavibacter michiganensis ssp. sepedonicus (Cms). An agar diffusion method was used for the screening of the inhibitory effect of natural compounds on bacterial strains' growth. Minimum inhibition concentrations (MICs) were determined by a twofold serial dilution method. The anti-pathogenic activity was investigated by the study of anti-biofilm activity of natural substances. The analyzed natural substances showed a good microbicidal activity and anti-biofilm activity. The results obtained from this study may contribute to the development of new bio-control agents as alternative strategies for prevention and control of ring rot pathogen.


Influenza A virus (IAV) subtypes are globally responsible for seasonal pandemics. Subtypes of IAV virus can beclassified because of differences surface antigenic protein. The non structural protein1 (NS1) of IAV is the only protein that encoded by IAV and contributing role in the pathogensis. NS1 is a virulence factors duringviral replication in the host. NS1 of IAV is known to be multifunctional protein which enhances the pathogenicity of the virus duringt he viral life cycle. The current study is aimed to investigate NS1 of IAV subtype H1N1, H7N7, H4N6 and H5N1, which were successfully cloned in to the pcDNA 3.1 vector. Restriction analysis with enzymes BamH1,Xba1 and Kpn1 and sequencing showed that NS1 gene was successfully cloned. My recombinant proteins have been used by Dr. Broniaczyk to successfully express in cell culture.


The use of statistical AI techniques in authorship recognition (or stylometry) has contributed to literary and historical breakthroughs. These successes have led to the use of these techniques in criminal investigations and prosecutions.  However, few have studied adversarial attacks and their devastating effect on the robustness of existing classification methods. This paper presents a framework for adversarial attacks including obfuscation attacks, where a subject attempts to hide their identity imitation attacks, where a subject attempts to frame another subject by imitating their writing style.  The major contribution of this research is that it demonstrates that both attacks work very well.  The obfuscation attack reduces the effectiveness of the techniques to the level of random guessing and the imitation attack succeeds with 68-91% probability depending on the stylometric technique used.  These results are made more significant by the fact that the experimental subjects were unfamiliar with stylometric techniques, without specialized knowledge in linguistics, and spent little time on the attacks. This paper also provides another significant contribution to the field in using human subjects to empirically validate the claim of high accuracy for current techniques (without attacks) by reproducing results for three representative stylometric methods.


The Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change (STIC) is a multisystemic and multidimensional feedback system that provides therapists feedback about systemic domains of client change in individual, couple, and family therapy over time. The goal of the present study is to investigate the sensitivity to change of the scores of the STIC Initial Scales. In total, 583 clients who voluntarily sought individual, couple, or family therapy services and participated in a randomized controlled trial study were included in the study. Their pre- and posttherapy responses to the STIC Initial measures and corresponding validation measures for individual functioning, couple relationship, child adjustment, and family functioning were compared. The results support the sensitivity to change of the scores of the four STIC Initial Scales investigated: Individual Problems and Strengths (IPS), Relationship with Partner (RWP), Family/Household (FH), and Child Problems and Strengths (CPS). Of particular note, the IPS demonstrated even greater change over time than the BDI-II, BAI, and OQ-45. The discriminant validity of measuring change with the CPS was not supported. Thus, the STIC Initial IPS, RWP, and FH can be usefully employed to measure multisystemic changes in both research and clinical work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).


We explore the multidimensional, multiwavelength selection of quasars from mid-infrared (MIR) plus optical data, specifically from Spitzer-Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Traditionally, quasar selection relies on cuts in two-dimensional color space despite the fact that most modern surveys (optical and IR) are done in more than three bandpasses. In this paper, we apply modern statistical techniques to combined Spitzer MIR and SDSS optical data, allowing up to eight-dimensional (8-D) color selection of quasars. Using a Bayesian selection method, we catalog 5546 quasar candidates to an 8.0 μm depth of 56 μJy over an area of ∼24 deg2. Roughly 70% of these candidates are not identified by applying the same Bayesian algorithm to 4-color SDSS optical data alone. The 8-D optical+MIR selection on this data set recovers 97.7% of known type 1 quasars in this area and greatly improves the effectiveness of identifying 3.5 < z < 5 quasars which are challenging to identify (without considerable contamination) using MIR data alone. We demonstrate that, even using only the two shortest wavelength IRAC bandpasses (3.6 and 4.5 μm), it is possible to use our Bayesian techniques to select quasars with 97% completeness and as little as 10% contamination (as compared to ∼60% contamination using color cuts alone). We compute photometric redshifts for our sample; comparison with known objects suggests a photometric redshift accuracy of 93.6% (Δz ± 0.3), remaining roughly constant when the two reddest MIR bands are excluded. Despite the fact that our methods are designed to find type 1 (unobscured) quasars, as many as 1200 of the objects are type 2 (obscured) quasar candidates. Coupling deep optical imaging data, with deep MIR data, could enable selection of quasars in significant numbers past the peak of the quasar luminosity function (QLF) to at least z ∼ 4. Such a sample would constrain the shape of the QLF both above and below the break luminosity (L*Q) and enable quasar clustering studies over the largest range of redshift and luminosity to date, yielding significant gains in our understanding of the physics of quasars and their contribution to galaxy evolution.


This thesis analyses the way The West Australian presents natural death to its readers. Previous research involving death notices and obituaries has focused on gender and numerical analysis. There are hundreds of books dealing with death, covering legal, biological, physical, sociological and spiritual aspects of death, but books on death in the media tend to skirt around natural death. The diverse areas of death research fail to postulate a common defmition of natural death. A similar diversity of views exists on the good death and the concepts surrounding life after death. This encourages the analysis of material from daily life, such as death notices, obituaries and editorial content, to add a contemporary interpretation of the way death is presented in The West Australian. As a research basis, 24 consecutive issues of The West Australian in February 2005 have been used. This yielded 33 obituaries, 57 articles dealing with natural death, 4046 death notices and led to the categorising of 11216 text elements under fourteen headings. During the collection of the data four major themes emerged: the "good death", the loss suffered by the family, the social context and the hope for a life after death. Confirming previous studies, males receive more attention after death. Death notices, which are placed by friends and relatives of the deceased, focus on the person. Obituaries focus on the life and achievements of the deceased, whilst editorial content dealing with natural death focuses on the manner of dying, the disease that has caused death. Society's preoccupation with longevity is not reflected in death notices -the older a person dies, the less they are missed, and the less death notices they receive. The difficulty of accepting death is manifested in the high proportion of death notices that address the deceased as if he or she were still alive, or notices containing reference to religion, suggesting widespread hope for a life after death. Neither death notices nor obituaries or articles dealing with natural death give clear indications if the people die a good death. Where obituaries mention death at home, it is invariably in a positive tone. The material reveals death notices as describing who a person is; they describe, in varying degrees, position in the family, friends, personality and enumerate the ways in which a person is missed. Obituaries and editorial material dealing with natural death describe people in terms of their achievements, their jobs, and their position in society. They describe what a person ts.


PCBs and PAHs were quantified in air samples taken every 6 h over a 7 day period in August 1995 at a rural site in northwest England. For the first 5 days, a stable high-pressure system moved slowly across northern England from the east. During this time, PCB air concentrations responded very closely to the changes in ambient temperature, following a clear diurnal cycle. All PCB congeners correlated well with temperature, but the correlation was strongest for lower chlorinated species. Daily PCB concentration maxima exceeded minima by a factor of 2.1−3.7 for different congeners; in contrast, daily maxima:minima ratios for different PAHs were in the range 0.47−1.44. These data are interpreted as providing evidence that rapid, tem perature-controlled air-terrestrial surface exchange of PCBs influencing air concentrations and, hence, regional/global scale cycling of these compounds occurs. Toward the end of the study period, the stable air conditions were replaced by a turbulent (windy), unstable low-pressure system, when day/night temperature differences were small and the diurnal PCB congener pattern was not discernible. Diurnal PAH concentration changes were not correlated with temperature, but groups of compounds were strongly correlated with each other (e.g., phenanthrene, fluoranthene, and pyrene; benzo(k)fluoranthene, benzo(a)pyrene, benzo(ghi)perylene). It is therefore hypothesized that short-term PAH air concentrations are controlled by ongoing recent local/regional source inputs (rather than air-surface recycling), atmospheric reactions, and deposition processes. The air−surface exchange of PCBs is satisfactorily modeled by a sine curve describing ambient temperatures and controlled by a temperature-dependent air−terrestrial surface (KTA) partition coefficient.


Midday depressions in stomatal conductance (g(s) ) and photosynthesis are common in plants. The aim of this study was to understand the hydraulic determinants of midday g(s) , the coordination between leaf and stem hydraulics and whether regulation of midday g(s) differed between deciduous and evergreen broadleaf tree species in a subtropical cloud forest of Southwest (SW) China. We investigated leaf and stem hydraulics, midday leaf and stem water potentials, as well as midday g(s) of co-occurring deciduous and evergreen tree species. Midday g(s) was correlated positively with midday stem water potential across both groups of species, but not with midday leaf water potential. Species with higher stem hydraulic conductivity and greater daily reliance on stem hydraulic capacitance were able to maintain higher stem water potential and higher g(s) at midday. Deciduous species exhibited significantly higher stem hydraulic conductivity, greater reliance on stem capacitance, higher stem water potential and g(s) at midday than evergreen species. Our results suggest that midday g(s) is more associated with midday stem than with leaf water status, and that the functional significance of stomatal regulation in these broadleaf tree species is probably for preventing stem xylem dysfunction.


Discharging large scale of Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries when power demand is high, and charging them back when the peak is over, is relatively a new area in smart grid energy management. An Independent System Operator (ISO) will coordinate, control and monitor such operation. Since the battery lifespan is a function of number of cycles the battery is charged or discharged, the EV driver, who agrees to sign up for such a program, will need to learn about the number of cycles his EV battery is charged and discharged by the ISO to discover if incentive offered by the ISO is a fair value in contrast to the depreciation of the EV battery so caused. This paper presents a smart solution for FAIR VALUE COMPENSATION (FVC) in EV-batteries based mobile micro grid. The proposed architecture consists of three key functional elements: i.e.: a Cycle Counter, that will count the number of cycles the battery is charged and discharged. A Computation Logic, that will compile and present real time battery depreciation and compute fair value the EV owner deserves, decision parameters intended to help EV driver make educated decision.


Demise of the Lizards Despite pessimistic forecasts from recent studies examining the effects of global climate change on species, and observed extinctions in local geographic areas, there is little evidence so far of global-scale extinctions. Sinervo et al. (p. 894; see the Perspective by Huey et al.) find that extinctions resulting from climate change are currently reducing global lizard diversity. Climate records during the past century were synthesized with detailed surveys of Mexican species at 200 sites over the past 30 years. Temperature change has been so rapid in this region that rates of adaptation have not kept pace with climate change. The models were then extended to all families of lizards at >1000 sites across the globe, and suggest that climate change-induced extinctions are currently affecting worldwide lizard assemblages. A historical record of lizard populations in Mexico is used to parameterize models that predict global effects of climate change. It is predicted that climate change will cause species extinctions and distributional shifts in coming decades, but data to validate these predictions are relatively scarce. Here, we compare recent and historical surveys for 48 Mexican lizard species at 200 sites. Since 1975, 12% of local populations have gone extinct. We verified physiological models of extinction risk with observed local extinctions and extended projections worldwide. Since 1975, we estimate that 4% of local populations have gone extinct worldwide, but by 2080 local extinctions are projected to reach 39% worldwide, and species extinctions may reach 20%. Global extinction projections were validated with local extinctions observed from 1975 to 2009 for regional biotas on four other continents, suggesting that lizards have already crossed a threshold for extinctions caused by climate change.


We develop a macroeconomic framework to estimate the importance of fluctuations in relative ability in accounting for trends in the college premium in the United States since 1965. The theoretical scaffolding is a heterogeneous agent model with two dimensions of ability and endogenous schooling choice, with exogenous skill-biased technological change (SBTC), college tuition, and noneconomic social forces. We solve for conditions under which SBTC reduces the relative ability of college educated workers, and show that these conditions are met in the data. We attribute the drop in the college premium over the 1970s to a 25.5% drop in the mean relative quality of college-educated workers from 1968 to 1977. We find that SBTC explains about two thirds of the increase in college attendance since 1965, and that absent both supply shifts and a supply response to SBTC, the relative wage of highly educated workers would have been 77.1% larger in 2013.


Abstract The Coolant Purification System (CPS) together with the Tritium Extraction System (TES) and Helium Cooling System (HCS) are the principal auxiliary circuits of HCLL and HCPB TBMs to be tested in ITER. Among them, CPS is used to extract tritium from the cooling primary circuit as well as to guarantee the removal of gas impurities which could interact with structural material. Based on considerations in terms of safety, tritium accountancy and process control, instrumentation philosophy requires real-time tritium monitoring (which might be not very accurate) to control the processes in both TBM helium loops and special tritium accountancy procedure with regard to the interface with other sub-systems of the Tritium Plant. Furthermore, in addition to chemical speciation of the flow, the control of the process requires the measurement of other parameters such as flow rates, pressures and temperatures. For each monitored parameter, this paper describes the most suitable technologies, including a review of advantages, drawbacks and possible ways of improvement.


A network application communicates with other applications according to a set of rules known as a protocol. This communication is managed by the part of the application known as the protocol-handling layer, which enables the manipulation of protocol messages. The protocol-handling layer is a critical component of a network application since it represents the interface between the application and the outside world. It must thus satisfy two constraints: It must be efficient to be able to treat a large number of messages and it must be robust to face various attacks targeting the application itself or the underlying platform. Despite these constraints, the development process of this layer still remains rudimentary and requires a high level of expertise. It includes translating the protocol specification written in a high-level formalism such as ABNF toward low-level code such as C. The gap between these abstraction levels can entail many errors. This paper proposes a new language-based approach to developing protocol-handling layers, to improve their robustness without compromising their performance. Our approach is based on the use of a domain-specific language, Zebu, to specify the protocol-handling layer of network applications that use textual HTTP-like application protocols. The Zebu syntax is very close to that of ABNF, facilitating the adoption of Zebu by domain experts. By annotating the original ABNF specification of a protocol, the Zebu user can dedicate the protocol-handling layer to the needs of a given application. The Zebu compiler first checks the annotated specification for inconsistencies, and then generates a protocol-handling layer according to the annotations. This protocol-handling layer is made up of a set of data structures that represent a message, a parser that fills in these data structures, and various stub functions to access these data structures or drive the parsing of a message.


The MAC16 tumour produces a factor which exhibits lipid-mobilizing activity in vitro in addition to causing extensive depletion of host lipid stores. The mechanism of the anti-lipolytic effect of two anti-cachectic agents, eicosapentaenoic acid, an ω-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA), and N-(3-phenoxycinnamyl)acetohydroxamic acid (BW A4C), a 5-lipoxygenase inhibitor, has been investigated. These two agents reduce tumour growth and reverse the weight loss which accompanies transplantation of the MAC16 murine colon adenocarcinoma into NMRI mice. Mice transplanted with the MAC16 tumour exhibited weight loss which was directly proportional to the serum lipolytic activity measured in vitro up to a weight loss corresponding to 16% of the original body weight. After this time, an inverse relationship between weight loss and lipolytic activity was observed. Body composition analysis revealed a large decrease in body fat relative to other body compartments. The anti-tumour/anti-cachectic effect of EPA did not appear to be due to its ability to inhibit the production of prostaglandin E2. The MAC16 lipolytic factor increased adenylate cyclase activity in adipocyte plasma membranes in a concentration-dependent manner. EPA inhibited the production of cAMP attributed to this lipid-mobilizing factor. EPA produced alterations in Gi , the guanine nucleotide binding protein which mediates hormonal inhibition of adenylate cyclase, in addition to altering cAMP production in adipocyte plasma membranes in response to hormonal stimulation. The alterations in adenylate cyclase activity were complex and not specific to EPA. EPA stimulated adenylate cyclase activity when in a relatively high fatty acid : membrane ratio and inhibited activity when this ratio was lowered. The inhibitory effect of EPA on adenylate cyclase activity may be the underlying mechanism which explains its anti-lipolytic and anti-cachectic effect. The inability of the related ω-3 PUFA, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), to inhibit cachexia may be due to a difference in the metabolic fates of these two fatty acids. BW A4C inhibited lipolysis in isolated adipocytes which suggests that this compound may possess the potential for an anti-cachectic effect which is independent of its inhibitory effect on tumour growth.


This work presents the temporal analysis for a distributed differential control system for a mobile robot deployed on a wireless network using the SunSPOT platform. The system is programmed in Java and each of its part is executed in a distinct processor which cooperates via a wireless network. The communication between the network nodes is made by remote procedure calls, which are implemented by a minimum version of the Java RMI (mRMI), presented in this work. Simulation results are compared to experimental data acquired by the deployment of the system on real devices, the SunSPOTs. The comparisons reveal that the distributed solution presents fairly good results besides the inserted errors due to the wireless communication.


Abelisauroid predators have been recorded almost exclusively from South America, India and Madagascar, a distribution thought to document persistent land connections exclusive of Africa. Here, we report fossils from three stratigraphic levels in the Cretaceous of Niger that provide definitive evidence that abelisauroid dinosaurs and their immediate antecedents were also present on Africa. The fossils include an immediate abelisauroid antecedent of Early Cretaceous age (ca. 130–110 Myr ago), early members of the two abelisauroid subgroups (Noasauridae, Abelisauridae) of Mid–Cretaceous age (ca. 110 Myr ago) and a hornless abelisaurid skull of early Late Cretaceous age (ca. 95 Myr ago). Together, these fossils fill in the early history of the abelisauroid radiation and provide key evidence for continued faunal exchange among Gondwanan landmasses until the end of the Early Cretaceous (ca. 100 Myr ago).


Many protagonists of today's architecture seem to possess the aim of transcending Modernist tradition. We have had reformers of the Modern Movement, who enriched it and gave it a noteworthy degree of pluralism, allowing for rationalism and organicism to live side by side. Today we live in a formalist world, without rules or criteria that cultivates surprise and spectacle. Innovation is just as necessary as it is inevitable, but taking innovation as an end in itself is, in our field of work, a stupid adherence to the supposed spirit of the age, that no one identifies. Innovation is possible only if it occurs based on modern tradition. In our times it is necessary for architecture to continue being an ecological activity, as it occured in the modern tradition. Speaking of "sustainable architecture" should simply be considered a redundancy. Conducting modern discovers towards satisfying the identity of architecture and ecology should be a universal goal. The current economic crisis should introduce within the mentality of contemporary architecture the intention of service to mass society with which the modernist revolution started and prospered. The modest and enriching management of the modernist legacy, the Innovacion y recovery of the traditional identity between architecture and ecology, and the recuperation of social service are all qualities that should be implicit within the exercise of our profession. I also find these criteria an adequate program for the expression of our contemporary age


Compomers and resin-modified glass ionomers have been developed to improve the physical properties of traditional glass ionomer cements. This project compared the toothbrush wear-resistance of three compomers (Compoglass, Dyract, Hytac) and three resin-modified glass ionomer restorative materials (Fuji II LC, Photac-Fil, Vitremer) to that of two resin-based composites (Herculite XRV, Silux Plus). Specimens (n = 7) were prepared according to manufacturers' instructions and stored in a humidor for 48 hours prior to testing. The specimens were subjected to 120,000 strokes at 1.5 Hz, using a brush-head force of 200 g on a Manly V-8 cross-brushing machine. The slurry contained a 50:50 (w/w) mixture of toothpaste and deionized water. Abrasion-resistance was calculated by measuring specimen mass-loss prior to and subsequent to brushing. The data were analyzed using a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the Tukey-Kramer post-hoc test. Significant differences (p < .0001) in mass-loss were found, and loss ranged from 0.013 +/- 0.003 g (Hytac) to 0.061 +/- 0.009 g (Compoglass). No correlation (p = .959) between wear-resistance and experimentally determined filler content existed. This study showed that all but one hybrid resin-ionomer type material exhibited a resistance to toothbrush wear that was as good as or better than that of the two traditional resin-based composite materials.


G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) constitute the largest, most ubiquitous and most versatile family of membrane proteins encoded by the human genome. Due to diverse ligands and multiple physiological activities, this set of receptors has frequently been explored as potential drug targets. Deorphanisation of GPCRs successfully identified FFA1 and FFA4 (previously named GPR40 and GPR120) as long chain free fatty acid receptors. With diverse expression patterns and close association to pathophysiology of metabolic diseases, both receptors are being studied to understand both receptor pharmacology and their potential for drug development. Due to the overlap in the activation of FFA1 and FFA4 by endogenous fatty acid ligands, selective synthetic ligands have been developed for these receptors. Using a number of biochemical and biophysical assays, I have characterised TUG-770, TUG-905 and GW-1100 as FFA1 ligands and TUG-891, TUG-1197 and TUG-1275 as FFA4 ligands. TUG-905 was found to be most potent and selective FFA1 agonist and GW-1100 showed insurmountable antagonism at FFA1. At FFA4, TUG-1197 was found to be a highly potent and selective agonist. TUG-1275 showed insurmountable antagonism at FFA4 in β-arrestin2 recruitment, receptor internalisation and inositol monophosphate accumulation studies and showed complete selectivity for hFFA4. Agonist exposure rapidly phosphorylated FFA4 in an agonist-concentration-dependent fashion which was totally blocked by TUG-1275. The protein kinase C activator PMA was also noted to phosphorylate FFAA in a concentration-dependent manner. Thus both homologous and heterologous phosphorylation is involved in FFA4 regulation. The FFA4-agonist TUG-891 produced robust internalisation of FFA4 as detected by each of confocal microscopy, and both cell surface ELISA and biotinylation. PMA was able to internalise FFA4 although it was unable to recruit β-arrestin2 to FFA4 suggesting that this internalisation might not be β-arrestin2-dependent. Constitutive internalisation was seen for FFA1, where the selective FFA1 antagonist GW-1100 had no effect. Repeated agonist-exposure desensitised both FFA1 and FF4 as revealed in single-cell calcium imaging studies. Although there was a small reduction of FFA4-internalisation and a slight elevation of total calcium levels from a single-chronic exposure of agonist, elimination of β-arrestin1/2 from HEK293 cells by genome editing did not significantly change the desensitisation of FFA4 to repeated exposure of agonist and did not prevent agonist-promoted internalisation. These studies indicate that β-arrestins are not the sole factors in desensitisation of human FFA4. Gαq/11 elimination by genome editing completely blocked intracellular calcium mobilisation and accumulation of inositol monophosphates mediated by both FFA1 and FFA4 indicating that Gαq/11 coupling to agonist-activated receptors is essential for this functional signalling outcome via both receptors. FFA4 expressed in Gαq/11-null cells was found to be phosphorylated by agonist, indicating that phosphorylation-mediated desensitisation of this receptor is not dependent on Gαq/11 proteins. FRET and BRET experiments revealed for the first time homo and hetero-oligomerisation of both FFA1 and FFA4. Although ligand regulation of oligomerisation was not investigated these preliminary observations of oligomerisation may help in the future to answer many questions of regulation and desensitisation of these receptors. The selective FFA1 and FFA4 ligands characterised here in this project might be used as tool compounds to further explore the physiology and pharmacology of these therapeutically important receptors.


It is generally accepted that an abstract system for the transfer of property is applied in South Africa. Characteristic of an abstract system is that the different legal acts which form part of the process, namely the obligatory agreement, delivery of the thing concerned or registration and the real agreement are separated from each other. The real agreement is an agreement between the transferor and the transferee based on a meeting of the minds; it is directed at the transfer of ownership by delivery and should be distinguished from the underlying causa (for example an obligatory agreement). The real agreement merely consists of the transferor's intention to transfer property and the transferee's intention to receive property. A second characteristic of the real agreement is that it should meet its own requirements. It is therefore not dependent on the validity of the preceding obligation or any other legal act. This means that ownership will pass from the transferor to the transferee even though the underlying obligatory agreement is invalid. The real agreement is an invention of the German jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny. The purpose with this article is to ascertain whether or not Roman law at the time of Justinian reflects any of the characteristics of an abstract system and the real agreement (which is generally associated with an abstract system). Can it be said that Savigny based his theory on Roman law? It appears from this paper that a clear distinction was drawn in Roman law between the causa (obligatory agreement) and delivery (traditio). Ownership in movable and immovable property did not pass directly by virtue of the conclusion of the contract of sale or donation (causa) - the thing concerned had to be delivered to the transferee in a legally accepted way as well. Although there is no clarity regarding the question of whether or not a valid causa was a requirement for the transfer of ownership, it can be stated with a fair amount of certainty that the causa had to be valid in those cases where delivery was effected by virtue of sale and donation. If the causa was invalid, ownership did not pass, even though the parties had the intention to pass ownership. In this regard Roman law at the time of Justinian reflects the characteristics of a causal system. However, if the thing was delivered on account of a dos or solutio by virtue of a stipulatio (and maybe also mutuum), there was no prior obligatory agreement and traditio was not affected by the causa at all. Ownership had passed merely by virtue of the intention to transfer and to receive ownership. In other words, Roman law portrays characteristics of an abstract system in these situations. Regarding the question whether or not the reciprocal intention to transfer and to receive ownership had been construed as an independent agreement which should be distinguished from the obligatory agreement, it appears that that was not the case. Because of the dual nature of the contract of sale in Roman law (it created an obligation but it was also iusta causa traditionis), it was accepted that the intention to transfer and to receive ownership was actually contained in the obligatory agreement. It did not exist on its own as a separate agreement (except in cases of a dos, solutio and mutuum). However, it emerges that the intention was emphasised more and more and that it was gradually loosened from the causa. The loosening, however, existed merely in the vision that the intention to pass ownership (as contained in the causa) can continue to exist on its own even though the causa appears to be invalid. The bond between causa and traditio was not yet finally broken, because it was still the intention at the time of the obligatory agreement that effected the passing of ownership. The conclusion is that there was no sign of a real agreement which merely consisted of the reciprocal intention to transfer and receive ownership and which existed independently from the underlying obligatory agreement. Keywords Transfer of property; abstract system of transfer of property; causal system of transfer of property; real agreement; intention to transfer property; animus possidendi; possessio; iusta causa traditio; mancipatio; solutio; stipulatio; mutuum; Savigny; Roman law; formalities – writing. Sleutelwoorde Oordrag van eiendomsreg; abstrakte stelsel van oordrag van eiendomsreg; kousale stelsel van oordrag van eiendomsreg; saaklike ooreenkoms; bedoeling om eiendomsreg oor te dra; animus dominus; diminium; iusta causa traditio; mancipatio; solutio; stipulatio; mutuum; Savigny; Romeinse reg; skrif as vormvereiste.


Background: Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are common. A goal of rehabilitation is to restore functional capacity. Currently, there are contrary opinions regarding the effectiveness of using either closed or open kinetic chain exercises (CKC, OKC) only, or a combination of both, following ACL injury, to obtain the most effective outcome. The debate also reflects the approach which places the least force on the ACL itself. Objective: To identify the evidence of effectiveness of closed versus open kinetic chain exercises, or a combination of both, in anterior cruciate ligament rehabilitation. Methods: A systematic review was undertaken of experimental studies published since 1990. Included studies were on humans with ACL injury. The ACL ligament could be healthy, ruptured, deficient or reconstructed. Studies on animals and cadavers were excluded. The methodological quality of included studies was appraised with the PEDro tool. Studies were graded according to hierarchy level, methodological quality, statistical significance, effect size, and clinical relevance. Recommendations were made on the strength of the body of evidence. The outcome measure of interest was force on the ACL during exercise. Results: 23 eligible studies were included. The majority of studies reflected lower level experimental designs with moderate methodological quality. Three studies showed a significant difference in ACL force comparing CKC and OKC exercises, 11 demonstrated trends towards significant differences in outcome and nine showed no significant differences. Conclusion: There is moderate evidence to recommend CKC exercises or a combination of CKC and OKC exercises, rather than OKC exercises alone, for ACL rehabilitation when considering forces on the ACL.


Abstract Diet of the Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) was studied using regurgitated pellets, individual fish bones and fish remains collected from below roosting trees at Želivka and Slapy Reservoirs, Czech Republic, during summer, a warm winter and a cold winter. Both reservoirs have the same trophic status and similar fish assemblages. Using diagnostic bones (os pharyngeum, dentale, praeoperculare) and our own linear regression equations relating dimensions of the diagnostic bone and fish total length (LT), a total of 2,055 fish of 18 species and four families were identified in the diet of Great Cormorants and their size was reconstructed. Both fish total length and weight differed significantly between seasons being, on average, 12.0 cm and 30 g during summer, 18.3 cm and 109 g during a warm winter and 22.8 cm and 157 g during the cold winter. The average weight of fish taken by Great Cormorants significantly increased with decreasing air and water temperature. The contribution of the dominant "large growing", torpedo-shaped fish species in the diet of Great Cormorants dramatically increased from summer to the cold winter. In contrast, the contribution of dominant "small growing", torpedo-shaped species, or humped body-shaped species, showed completely the opposite tendency. Great Cormorants seem to consume all fish of appropriate size that they are able to catch in summer and select for larger fish in winter. Thus, the winter elevation of foraging efficiency described for Great Cormorants in the literature is due to capturing larger fish not to capturing more fish.


The last decades of globalization have shown profound changes in production of goods and services and a shift towards financial capitalism. These developments have contributed to growing output and wealth, at the same time posing significant challenges to the achievement of social justice and a fair globalization for all – decent work. The fruits of the globalization process are not equitably distributed and too many are left behind. This report aims to stimulate international discussion on possible approaches, means and avenues to promote the goal of decent work for all. It gives a brief review of the consequences of globalization for working conditions, explains the Decent Work Agenda and the strategies of main actors, and winds up with some reflections on the options and pathways for advancement of the Agenda.


Making daylight more available in buildings is highly desirable for reasons of energy efficiency, visual comfort, occupant well-being and health. The Anidolic Integrated Ceiling (AIC) is a highly efficient daylighting system, designed to gather and redirect daylight from the outside of a building into its interior with minimal losses. The reflective coating materials used within AICs have a major impact on the optical efficiency of such systems. The first part of our article presents a new computer model of an AIC consisting of more than 30 distinct components. We discuss on which of them the use of expensive, highly reflective coatings makes the most sense. We conclude that coating the component "Anidolic element 1" is always a good choice and that considerable financial savings can be obtained by following an appropriate optimization sequence.The second part of our article discusses chronobiological properties of Anidolic Daylighting Systems (ADS). We recorded daytime irradiance values for several weeks from March to May 2009 in an experimental office setup in our laboratory using a portable digital spectroradiometer. Our results showed to which extent different sky conditions influenced daylight exposure of office workers in an ADS-equipped office room. We conclude that for the tested ADS-equipped office room, daylight supply can be considered largely sufficient during long periods on most working days. However, complementary artificial lighting with blue-enriched polychromatic fluorescent tubes might be useful on days with predominantly overcast skies as well as before 09:00 and after 16:30 on all days.


The built environment is moving towards sustainable development and the number of green buildings increased worldwide in recent years. Green buildings are environmentally, socially and economically desirable; however the certification of green buildings is often expensive and labor-intensive. The document preparation and review process for green building certification is iterative in nature and requires the collaboration of many project participants, certification organizations and third party engineering consultants. This paper aims at developing a system framework that can assist the green building certification process. Different certification standards have been studied and their scope and credit calculation were compared to understand the requirements of the system framework. Based on the study, the required features were designed as follows, (1) role-based access control, (2) document manager and related document discovery, (3) workflow manager, (4) credit manager, and (5) knowledge manager. The features of the system provide a collaborative environment and reduce repetitive works commonly occurring in manual processes. The features of the system framework are discussed and illustrated considering the Hong Kong BEAM Plus standard. This paper also describes how the system framework enhances collaboration in the certification process


Because of the increasing need of sand for use on land and coastal protection, offshore sand extraction has become commonplace. On the other hand, the practice of beach nourishment has become a common method to combat beach erosion. Here, economic and other interests may be served by dumping the sand not directly onto the beaches, but nearshore. Within the framework of the Coastal Defence Study for the Dutch coast and the preparation of a Marine Aggregate Extraction Plan model studies were performed in order to obtain indications and quantitative estimates of the morphological effects of offshore sand extraction and nearshore profile nourishment. The major results of the model computations are: - offshore sand extraction landward of the 16 m isobath may affect the coastline within a century. - nearshore nourishments landward of the 7 m isobath have positive effects on the coastline. The model computations could not be validated in the field. Due to the relatively large margins of inaccuracy the political implication of this study is that sand extraction landward of the 20 m. isobath is not licensed.


The behavioral effects of human nerve growth factor (NGF) were assessed in Fischer-344 rats of two ages: 4 months old (4MO) and 23 months old (23MO). Recent memory was tested in delayed alteration (T maze), reference memory in a place discrimination (water maze), and sensorimotor skills in a battery of sensorimotor tasks. Each rat was preoperatively trained in each task, given either a control procedure (CON), or continuous infusion of human NGF via an osmotic minipump, and retested again 3 weeks later. Two doses of NGF were delivered: 40 micrograms and 160 micrograms (total amount infused over a period of 4 weeks). In 23MO-NGF rats, both doses improved performance in the recent memory task, and in some measures of the place learning task, but had no effect on sensorimotor skills. In 4MO-NGF rats, the low dose impaired performance in the recent memory task, but not in the place discrimination or in the sensorimotor tasks. These data indicate that human NGF can reverse age-related cognitive impairments in old rats. However, the present study also raises the issue of potential detrimental effects that NGF may exert in young normal subjects.