Differential neurological outcomes due to prostaglandin E2 activating G-protein-coupled prostaglandin E (EP) receptors have been observed. Here, we investigated the action of the EP4/EP3 agonist 1-hydroxyPGE1 (1-OHPGE1) in modulating transient ischemic brain damage. C57BL/6 mice were pretreated 50 min before transient occlusion of the middle cerebral artery with an intraventricular injection of 1-OHPGE1 (0.1, 0.2, 2.0 nmol/0.2 microL). Brain damage 4 days after reperfusion, as estimated by infarct volume, was significantly reduced by more than 19% with 1-OHPGE1 in the two higher-dose groups (P < 0.05). To further address whether protection also was extended to neurons, primary mouse cultured neuronal cells were exposed to N-methyl-D-aspartate. Co-treatment with 1-OHPGE1 resulted in significant neuroprotection (P < 0.05). To better understand potential mechanisms of action and to test whether changes in cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) levels and downstream signaling would be neuroprotective, we measured cAMP levels in primary neuronal cells. Brief exposure to 1-OHPGE1 increased cAMP levels more than twofold and increased the phosphorylation of extracellular-regulated kinases at positions Thr-202/Tyr-204. In a separate cohort of animals, 1-OHPGE1 at all doses tested produced no significant effect on the physiological parameters of core body temperature, mean arterial pressure and relative cerebral blood flow observed following drug treatment. Together, these results suggest that modulation of PGE2 receptors that increase cAMP levels and activate extracellular-regulated kinases 1/2 caused by treatment with 1-OHPGE1 can be protective against neuronal injury induced by focal ischemia.


Enterprise Mashups have gained momentum in the last years. Business users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner existing mashable components. By combining and reusing Web-based resources within minutes, business users are able to create new value added applications to solve an individual and ad-hoc business problem. In this demo, we show the SAP Research RoofTop Marketplace prototype that transfers established marketplace concepts and principles to the Enterprise Mashup paradigm in order to handle business and organizational challenges of the Mashup paradigm in enterprise environments.


Scaling up of the numbers of people voluntarily undergoing HIV testing has become vital, especially in resource-constrained settings, where the need for knowledge of HIV status for both prevention and care is critical. The reality is that for most people
in Africa, access to HIV testing and to voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) has been very limited, and this has human rights implications – missing the opportunity to be diagnosed with a disease that is now well understood, manageable and treatable means certain death. The key challenge in our current context is how scaling up of HIV testing should be done. In responding to this challenge, we are guided by Gruskin and Loff,1 who state that 'A human rights approach mandates that any public strategy, whether or not
rights are to be restricted, be informed by evidence and widely debated. This approach protects against unproved and potentially counterproductive strategies, even those motivated by the genuine despair in the face of overwhelming public health challenges.\'
This article describes the arguments and discussion raised during a session on models for increasing access to HIV testing at the 2nd National Conference on HIV/AIDS held in Durban in June 2005. It describes the legal framework for HIV testing in South Africa, frames the issues at the heart of the debate, and describes and discusses the various models of HIV testing, routine HIV testing, VCT and mandatory or compulsory HIV testing, within the context of HIV prevention and care. It concludes with recommendations. Southern African Journal of HIV Medicine Vol. 6 (3) 2005: pp. 45-48


At least 30 small bodies of dolerite have been
found intruding sediments of the Pre-Cambrian
Rocky Cape Group along the coast between Sulphur
Creek and Crayfish Creek. The igneous bodies are
chiefly sills although dykes also occur. The
dolerites are characterized by strong deuteric alteration
which led to the formation of secondary
tremolite-actinolite, chlorite, zoisite, albite, calcite,
sericite, sphene, leucoxene, serpentine, and prehnite.
These rocks show petrological and chemical affinities
with dolerites of a similar age in Western
and South Australia. They have certain features
in common with the lavas of the Cambrian Dundas
Group, but the possibility that these bodies acted
as feeders to the flows is discounted on structural
and chemical grounds.


Why do locally bound reflexives (LBR) and obligatorily controlled PRO (OC-PRO) only have de se interpretations in the scope of verbs like 'expect' and 'believe', while other pronouns can but need not support such interpretations? We argue that occurrences of LBR and OC-PRO result from copying , which is distinct from co-indexing , and that copying is construed as a special case of co-indexing. Often, this distinction is truth-conditionally irrelevant. Even when a psychological verb lies between coindexed expressions, the resulting sentence can be "made true" in many ways, including de se ways. But if the matrix and embedded subjects are copies, this imposes a further constraint that only de se interpretations meet, given available distinctions in thought. On this view, which posits no special pronouns that conspire with an antecedent to create distinctively first-personal meanings, de se interpretations are accommodated with spare theoretical apparatus in syntax and semantics.


In The Self-Organizing Social Mind, John Bolender proposes a new explanation for the forms of social relations. He argues that the core of social-relational cognition exhibits beauty -- in the physicist's sense of the word, associated with symmetry. Bolender describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition, which account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of those symmetries. He further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry breaking organizes the neural activity generating the cognitive models that structure our social relationships. Bolender's primary claim is that there exists a social pattern generator analogous to the central pattern generators associated with locomotion in many animal species. Spontaneous symmetry breaking structures the activity of the social pattern generator just as it does in central pattern generators. Bolender's hypothesis that relational cognition results from self-organization is entirely novel, distinct from other theories that describe sociality in terms of evolution or environment. It presents a picture of social-relational cognition as resembling something inorganic. In doing so it reveals deep connections among cognition, biology, and the inorganic world. One can go too far, he acknowledges, in taking a solely dynamical view of the mind; the mind's innate functional complexity must be due to natural selection. But this does not mean that every simple mental feature is the result of natural selection. By noting a descending symmetry subgroup chain at the core of relational cognition, Bolender takes the first step in an important investigation.


Background and objectives: Perchloroethylene (PCE) is categorized as contaminant of concern because of its adverse health effects and persistence in drinking water resources. Permeable reactive barrier with zero valent iron (ZVI-PRB) is a passive zone in which chlorinated ethenes are degraded in situ through the chemical reduction mechanism. The objective of the present investigation was optimization and modelling of ZVI-PRB technology for the elimination of PCE from the aqueous environment using response surface methodology. Materials and methods: In order to simulate ZVI-PRB, a column filled with silica sand and ZVI was used. effects of three variables including pH, column height or barrier thickness and flow on reductive dechlorination efficiency were assessed. Design of experiment, modelling, and data analysis were carried out using response surface method. Results: The dechlorination efficiency was about 93% under optimum conditions (pH=5, 26 cm column height and 2 mL/min flow rate). The ascending trend of pH along the column revealed that the reductive condition was dominant within the column. The R2 value of 0.98 also indicated good fitness of the experimental results and model predictions. Conclusion: Based on the results, ZVI-PRB technology has high efficiency in dechlorination of PCE. Likewise, regarding to no need of energy consumption, abundance of iron, no production of harmful byproducts and cost-effectiveness, ZVI-PRB is propounded as a stable, green, and environmental friendly technology in groundwater remediation.


Factors shaping diversity patterns of pelagic rotifer assemblages were studied from data col- lected on 80 Pyrenean lakes during summer 2000. Different diversity aspects were investigated for the whole set of lakes (i.e. the metacommunity) and for a series of subsets (i.e. local communities): i) species incidences, rank abundance distribution and species richness per lake, ii) β-diversity spectra of species richness and Shannon index in relation to different environmental and ecological gradients, and iii) species abundance distributions (SADs). Our results show the basic patterns of rotifer diversity in the Pyrenees. We found that gradients of altitude, depth, macrozooplankton (MZP) abundance and especially the organic matter content (measured as the percentage of matter loss on ignition, LOI) were shaping rotifer β-diversity in the Pyrenees. In particular, the percentage of LOI has a relevant impact on plankton abundances in both rotifers and MZP. At the metacommunity level, the SAD showed a power law with an exponent β≈ -1. Exactly the same behaviour was observed for randomly grouped local communities. However, local communities including lakes located at the lowest altitudes (1620-2210 m a.s.l.) or with low organic matter content (i.e. <17% LOI) showed deviations from β≈ -1. Based on these analyses our main conclusions are: (i) three main factors were shaping rotifer diversity patterns: the presence of littoral species in pelagic rotifer assemblages in shallow lakes, the carbon flux through the lake, and the existence of increasing environmental restrictions in altitude; (ii) assuming neutral the- ory to be an appropriate model, our results suggest that rotifer species are not strongly limited by dis- persal in the Pyrenees; and (iii) differentiation between local communities and the metacommunity was only detectable on the basis of major environmental changes (e.g. altitude, LOI).


Landslides, movement of soil and rock under the influence of gravity, are common phenomena that cause significant human and economic losses every year. Experts use heterogeneous features such as slope, elevation, land cover, lithology, rock age, and rock family to predict landslides. To work with such features, we adapted convolutional neural networks to consider relative spatial information for the prediction task. Traditional filters in these networks either have a fixed orientation or are rotationally invariant. Intuitively, the filters should orient uphill, but there is not enough data to learn the concept of uphill; instead, it can be provided as prior knowledge. We propose a model called Locally Aligned Convolutional Neural Network, LACNN, that follows the ground surface at multiple scales to predict possible landslide occurrence for a single point. To validate our method, we created a standardized dataset of georeferenced images consisting of the heterogeneous features as inputs, and compared our method to several baselines, including linear regression, a neural network, and a convolutional network, using log-likelihood error and Receiver Operating Characteristic curves on the test set. We show that our model performs better than the other proposed baselines.


This paper proposes a closed-loop sparse channel estimation (CE) scheme for wideband millimeter-wave hybrid full-dimensional multiple-input multiple-output and time division duplexing based systems, which exploits the channel sparsity in both angle and delay domains. At the downlink CE stage, random transmit precoder is designed at base station (BS) for channel sounding, and receive combiners at user devices (UDs) are designed to visualize hybrid array as a low-dimensional digital array for facilitating the multi-dimensional unitary ESPRIT (MDU-ESPRIT) algorithm to estimate respective angle-of-arrivals (AoAs). At the uplink CE stage, the estimated downlink AoAs, namely, uplink angle-of-departures (AoDs), are exploited to design multi-beam transmit precoder at UDs to enable BS to estimate the uplink AoAs, i.e., the downlink AoDs, and delays of different UDs using the MDU-ESPRIT algorithm based on the designed receive combiners at BS. Furthermore, a maximum likelihood approach is proposed to pair the channel parameters acquired at the two stages, and the path gains are then obtained using least squares estimator. According to spectrum estimation theory, our solution can acquire the super-resolution estimations of the AoAs/AoDs and delays of sparse multipath components with low training overhead. Simulation results verify the better CE performance and lower computational complexity of our solution over existing state-of-the-art approaches.


The use of personal computers (PCs) has mushroomed in the United States during the last decade. The arts have followed this trend cautiously. The box offices of many theatres, large and small, still use hard, or paper, tickets for both single ticket events and for season or series subscriptions.
This dissertation is the first in-depth study of current computerized box office systems and their use in specific theatres. The methodology of the project is a case study comparison of two large academic theatres, two small academic theatres, and two professional theatres and the systems they use. The theatres involved in the study are Brigham Young University, Imperial Theatre, Papermill Playhouse, Pennsylvania State University, Southwest Missouri State University, and University of Arizona. Emphasis is on the opportunities or problems that led the organizations to automation, and the selection criteria and process each theatre used to choose a system. A discussion or information collection, funding sources, training issues, and practical applications is included. Each theatre administrator/box office manager outlines the advantages of the system chosen and its ability to meet the needs of the theatre, and discusses their "wish list" for the perfect automated box office system.
This study includes an overview of the computerized box office systems, highlighting their technical requirements and features. Samples of box office reports and tickets produced by the systems are presented.


The physical and chemical properties of decorated graphene and graphene ribbons, single-layer III-V systems, three-dimensional carbon and BN foam, and transition-metal-molecular sandwich nanowires have been investigated by first-principle calculations and their potential applications have been predicted. First, it is shown that zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs) can be converted into half metal when their edges are decorated by some chemical functional groups, and the half-metalicity is induced by chemical potential difference between two edges when one edge is decorated by electron-donating group like –OH and the other edge is decorated by electron-accepting group like –F,-NH 2 ,-N(CH 3) 2 ,-SO 2 ,-NO 2 and –CN, or by spin-polarized impurity state induced by isolated SO 2 group. In addition, no matter how trivial the potential difference between two edges is, the decorated ZGNR can be half metal as long as the width of ZGNR is sufficiently large. As ZGNRs are decorated by copper atoms, they are shown to be a unique host system for the realization of an extended planar tetracoordinate carbon (ptC) strips due to its highly delocalized in-plane π-electrons and intrinsic rigid structure. When they are decorated by scandium atoms, they are shown to be good candidates for hydrogen storage and the adsorption energy can be controlled by electric field. Second, graphene is also revealed to become half metal through selective chemical decorations, and by selective hydrogenation, it can become magnetic quantum dot arrays and its magnetic coupling or band gap can be tuned, which can be applied for magnetic data storage and light-emitting devices. Third, single-layer BN and some other hexagonal systems like AlN, GaN, BP, SiC, ZnO are studied. It is demonstrated that upon charge-injection some of them like BN and AlN can become magnetic or even half-metallic, which is clarified by using Stoner Criterion. As they are cut into zigzag nanoribbons with one or two edges unpassivated, some of them may become half metals, and the edge-reconstructions of the unpassivated edges are studied. Fourth, two kinds of 3D carbon and BN foam, one with hexagonal holes and the other with triangular holes and only pure sp2 carbon bonds, are designed, and they are shown to be stable and porous low-density carbon and BN allotrope with large internal surface area and strong bulk modulus. Finally, some transition-metal-molecular sandwich nanowires can become magnetic or even half-metallic from nonmagnetic through charge-injection, which is also clarified by using Stoner Criterion. For …


Antibiotic resistance is a major threat to human welfare. Inhibitors of multidrug efflux pumps (EPIs) are promising alternative therapeutics that could revive activities of antibiotics and reduce bacterial virulence. Identification of new druggable sites for inhibition is critical for the development of effective EPIs, especially in light of constantly emerging resistance. Here, we describe EPIs that interact with periplasmic membrane fusion proteins, critical components of efflux pumps that are responsible for the activation of the transporter and the recruitment of the outer-membrane channel. The discovered EPIs bind to AcrA, a component of the prototypical AcrAB-TolC pump, change its structure in vivo, inhibit efflux of fluorescent probes, and potentiate the activities of antibiotics in Escherichia coli and other Gram-negative bacteria. Our findings expand the chemical and mechanistic diversity of EPIs, suggest the mechanism for regulation of the efflux pump assembly and activity, and provide a promising path for reviving the activities of antibiotics in resistant bacteria.


The academic conference is an important feature of our professional lives. It constitutes a meeting ground, a forum, in which key topics in a field can begin to emerge; where cognate ideas and approaches get debated, affirmed or contested; where, in short, ideas can move (on) through academics being in contact with each other's ideas. Any journal editor is drawn inevitably to the conference 'season' as fertile, 'hunting' ground; trawls for papers that will yield article publications (if others do not get there first!). And so it is that my second issue of TRI since becoming editor is sourced from the 2008 Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas conference, hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles and co-sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. As this event is expertly introduced and the issue framed by co-organizers Sue-Ellen Case and Diana Taylor, this editorial note needs only to be brief. Indeed, I hesitated long at the computer keyboard thinking that perhaps no note at all was necessary. Except that two observations or headlines felt editorially important to me to express: the significance of Actions of Transfer for thinking generally about the nature of the conference event in relation to TRI's international, theatre research remit, and the mix of articles and the performance dossier brought together in the issue.


We propose and demonstrate a new scheme for suppression of output distortion in an open-loop gyroscope employing an erbium-doped fiber amplifier/source (FAS). In addition to the main modulation for the rotation rate measurement, a small auxiliary modulation at a different frequency is used to extract an error signal, which is necessary for keeping the quasi-dc component of the feedback signal power at a constant level for varying rotation rate. By active tracking of the optimum modulation condition using this two-frequency modulation scheme, we obtain stable gyro output with suppressed distortion as well as stable FAS characteristics. We also calculate the distortion in the gyro response due to the feedback effect, from which we estimate the FAS gyro output distortion due to the residual ac feedback effect when the dc feedback effect is removed by the proposed scheme. The measured residual deviation agrees reasonably with the estimation.


Plant-growth-promoting rhizobacteria are known as potential biofertilizers and plant-resistance inducers. The current work aims to study the durability of the resistance induced as a response to the inoculation of wheat grains with Paenibacillus sp. strain B2 (PB2) and its influence by plant genotype, growth stage, and Mycosphaerella graminicola strain (the causal agent of Septoria tritici blotch or STB). The results of the plate-counting method showed that PB2 has high potential for wheat-root external colonization [>106 colony-forming unit (CFU)/g of root], and the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) analysis demonstrated its internal root-colonization capacity on all tested cultivars. However, the colonization seems to be dependent on wheat-growth stage. The durability of PB2-induced resistance (PB2-IR) was tested at the 3-leaf, tillering, and flag-leaf-growth stages. Additionally, the results showed that the PB2-IR is durable and able to protect the flag leaf, the most important leaf layer during grain fill. It conferred a high protection efficiency (55–94%) against four virulent strains of M. graminicola and over 11 wheat cultivars with different resistance levels to STB. Although, PB2-IR is dependent on M. graminicola strains, wheat genotypes and growth stages, its efficiency, under field conditions, at protecting the last wheat-leaf layers was not an influence. However, it showed 71–79% of protection and reached 81–94% in association with half of the recommended dose of Cherokee® fungicide. This may be explained using laboratory results by its direct impact on M. graminicola strains in these leaf layers and by the indirect reduction of the inoculum coming from leaves infected during the earlier growth stages. Gene expression results showed that PB2-IR is correlated to upregulation of genes involved in defense and cell rescue and a priming effect in the basal defense, jasmonic acid signaling, phenylpropanoids and phytoalexins, and reactive oxygen species gene markers. To conclude, PB2 induces a high and durable resistance against M. graminicola under controlled and field conditions. The PB2-IR is a pathogen strain and is plant-growth-stage and genotype dependent. These results highlight the importance of taking into consideration these factors so as to avoid losing the effectiveness of induced resistance under field conditions.


"The Sourcebook of Contemporary Graphic Design" is a cutting-edge design anthology featuring material from established and emerging designers around the world, as well as hundreds of full-colour examples of work forging new graphic ground across a complete range of visual media. For ease of reference, graphic design illustrations and explanations are categorized according to design type such as: websites, brochures, posters, company reports, stationery, and promotional materials. Also included is a visual index for quick reference and designers' contact information.


This research aims to provide an overview of the seawater encroachment threat on agriculture in lowland areas and potential solutions for better practices. It was found that the Mekong river delta experiences severe impacts from climate change with more than 75% of provinces affected by seawater intrusion, of which Kien Giang, Ca Mau and Ben Tre provinces are the most influenced with 70% affected areas. The salinity of river water was observed in the range of 15–30 g/L in 2015; meanwhile, the strongest tolerated rice species reached ceiling values of 3–4 g/L. Emerging challenges were identified due to the uncertain upstream hydrological regime coupled with high levels of tide, field evaporation and water withdrawal. The development strategies of affected provinces are given on the modification of rice tolerant capacity, and modification to aquaculture in areas with high salinity, in which water purification is in urgent demand. Desalination technologies have been proposed with various innovations which are still not practical on a large scale. The desalination of seawater and brackish water by reverse osmosis, nano-filtration, electro-dialysis, ion-exchange resins, electrochemical processes and thermal distillation has been applied to agriculture. The advance reverse osmosis shows most potential because of its advances in treating performance, cost effectiveness and effective rejection of brine.


With the increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance, the need to develop antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) technologies is urgent. The current challenge has been to perform the antibiotic susceptibility testing in short time, directly with clinical samples, and with antibiotics over a broad dynamic range of clinically relevant concentrations. Here, a technology for point-of-care diagnosis of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in urinary tract infections, by imaging the clinical urine samples directly with an innovative large volume solution scattering imaging (LVSi) system and analyzing the image sequences with a single-cell division tracking method is developed. The high sensitivity of single-cell division tracking associated with large volume imaging enables rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing directly on the clinical urine samples. The results demonstrate direct detection of bacterial infections in 60 clinical urine samples with a 60 min LVSi video, and digital AST of 30 positive clinical samples with 100% categorical agreement with both the clinical culture results and the on-site agar plating validation results. This technology provides opportunities for precise antibiotic prescription and proper treatment of the patient within a single clinic visit.


Executive SummaryThe evaluation of this project has been overwhelmingly positive; in particular ithas shown the following outcomes;1. The Project team has developed a highly valuable educational version of theDigital Film Archive for use in the teaching of Key Stage 3 history.2. The team has developed an effective training programme for teachers whichcould be disseminated to a wider audience in both initial teacher education andcontinuing professional development3. There has been a very effective collaborative approach to the delivery of theproject involving the Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission, theNerve Centre and Classroom 2000.4. The project has had a positive impact on pupil learning in terms of motivation,understanding history, the development of thinking skills, the expansion ofICT and multi-media skills and in the growth of team work, pupil autonomyand collaborative learning.5. The Project has had a positive effect on teacher development through reenergisingtheir work in history, developing a stronger understanding of thevalue of links with other subjects, extending their confidence and competencein ICT and multi-media skills and in creating a relationship with pupils basedon 'co-learning'.6. Further work still needs to be done to ensure that the benefits of this creativeapproach to learning are provided on a whole class basis and embedded indaily practice


In a quest of novel antispasmodic agents with antimicrobial properties, the present study describes design and synthesis of novel analogs for veratric acid ester 4-[ethyl-{2-(4- methoxyphenyl)-1-methylethyl} amino] butan-1-ol, an antispasmodic drug which is expected to be a potent antimicrobial agent may be due to the presence of two benzene rings and a secondary or tertiary nitrogen in the basic structural framework of the molecule. The reaction between substituted 2-ethylamino-1-(4'-methoxyphenyl) propane and various haloaryl benzoates derivatives obtained from reaction between different homologs of benzoic acid and dibromoalkanes in a two step process to give corresponding structurally diverse analogs of lead compound has been achieved. The structures of these novel analogs were confirmed by different structure elucidation techniques. All the compounds have been screened for their anti-spasmodic activity and the study extended further to evaluate their sedative, antibacterial and antifungal potency. The novel analogs of lead compound exhibited pronounced antispasmodic activities and also gave encouraging results of antimicrobial and sedative activity as anticipated.


In November 1946, US Government financial experts inside former Nazi Germany concluded that Germany's most powerful banks must be liquidated if lasting peace was to be achieved. The giant Deutsche and Dredener Banks had completely intertwined themselves with the Nazi regime and were directly responsible for the systematic theft of Jewish property, slave labour, and financing the construction of SS concentration camps. As the Americans in the Finance Division of the Office of Military Government (US) -- OMGUS -- saw things at the time, the bank leaders should be tried as war criminals and barred from ever holding any positions of importance in German political or economic life. However, these recommendations were never implemented. In fact, many of the officials of the Deutsche Bank went on to be some of the most important figures in German economic development in the postwar period. The Deutsche Bank secretly retained almost a ton of gold taken from the dead at concentration camps; the Dresdener Bank re-emerged as a multinational financial giant. Meanwhile, the US Government buried the 500+ page report of its financial experts in classified files, where they gathered dust for decades. Today, the Deutsche Bank is the largest financial institution in the world and the Dresdener Bank is not far behind.


A Dead Hand is a dark tale of crime in Calcutta, by Paul Theroux. Jerry Delfont is a travel writer with writer's block. Lounging in Calcutta one day, he receives a mysterious letter. It comes from an American philanthropist, Mrs Merrill Unger. An Indian friend of her son is in trouble: he woke up in a hotel room with a dead body next to him; he panicked and fled. Mrs Unger would like someone to discreetly look into this matter, to find out the truth. Will Delfont do her the honour? But Jerry is at first more intrigued by the beautiful, beguiling Mrs Unger and her Tantric massages. Yet as he begins investigating the circumstances surrounding the body he wonders what exactly is the nature of her philanthropy...A Dead Hand is a dark and twisted narrative of obsession and need from one of our finest writers. "Richly enjoyable, entertaining ...a satisfyingly tense, almost thrillerish conclusion". (Financial Times). "Genuinely intriguing". (The Times). "Original and enlightening". (Daily Telegraph). "Theroux's prose is always a pleasure". (Tatler). Paul Theroux's books include Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel and The Lower River. The Mosquito Coast and Dr Slaughter have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.


High optical quality LiREF(4) (RE = Tb(3+), Dy(3+), Ho(3+), Er(3+) and Yb(3+)), PrF(3) and CeF(3) single crystals have been grown by the Czochralski technique. Their magneto-optical properties have been measured and analyzed in detail in the ultraviolet-visible wavelength region, and their figures of merit as Faraday rotators have been determined. CeF(3) presents superior properties above 300 nm, showing a figure of merit higher than that of the reference material, terbium-gallium-garnet, which is nowadays used in the visible-near infrared. PrF(3) is the best rotator for the 220-300 nm range. Towards shorter wavelength and in the vacuum ultraviolet, it is shown that the LiREF(4) crystals are unique rotators. Overall, the rare-earth fluoride single crystals studied here exhibit better properties than other materials considered so far, and therefore they have potential to cover the increasing demand for new and improved Faraday rotators in the ultraviolet-visible wavelength region.


Despite significant premium associated with cross-listing on U.S. exchanges many firms remain in their local markets or list on exchanges with weaker legal commitments. This paper develops a signaling model that helps in explaining controlling shareholders unique reluctance to bond. If constraints on private benefits vary across firms, by cross-listing and bonding controlling shareholders signal that they can extract only a limited amount of private benefits, a signal that adversely affects their control premium. As a result controlling shareholders propensity to cross-list is lower than it would have been if only bonding were at play; the control premium and the value of the control block of controlling shareholders that do not cross-list increases upon cross-listing by peers. In contrast to controlling shareholders this signal encourages managers to cross-list. This result explains why inclination to cross-list is inversely related to control block size. The model helps in explaining other evidence - why the price reaction to cross-listing is strong though bonding is limited; cross-listing premia disappear over time; controlling-shareholders that cross-list have lower control premia; and cross-listing adversely affects non-cross-listed firms.The model suggests that firms with controlling shareholders have a unique dislike for regulation. Thus the implications of their behavior for the desirability of US regulation are limited. The result that controlling shareholders' incentives sharply differ from managers' could have implications to other decisions that corporations make such as distributing dividends, and raising capital.


Introduction Endometrial ablation is a common gynaecological treatment for heavy menstrual bleeding.1 The NICE guideline recommends that women undergoing ablation must be advised to avoid subsequent pregnancy2 because of the risks of abnormal placentation.3 We present a case of placenta percreta with uterine rupture at 21 weeks gestation requiring hysterectomy in a pregnancy following ablation. Case A 33 year old woman presented in her third pregnancy having had 2 spontaneous vaginal deliveries. She had a Novasure® endometrial ablation one year previously for menorrhagia. She did not use contraception post procedure and was amenorrhoeic. Pregnancy was uncomplicated until 21 weeks when she presented with abdominal pain of unknown cause. On day 5 of admission she collapsed with hypovolaemic shock. In theatre, at laparotomy, there was a haemoperitoneum of 2000 mls. A bleeding uterine rupture was found in the posterior fundus. A hysterotomy was performed to deliver the alive but non-viable fetus. The placenta was densely adherent and a subtotal hysterectomy was performed. Total blood loss was 2500 mls. She made a good recovery. Pathology confirmed uterine rupture with placenta percreta. Conclusion Pregnancy following endometrial ablation can have disastrous complications. Many centres recommend sterilisation at the time of ablation. References Hare A, Olah K. Pregnancy following endometrial ablation: a review article. J Obs Gyn 2005;25:108–114 NICE clinical guideline. Heavy Menstrual Bleeding. 2007 Herath R, Singh N, Oligbo N. Antenatal uterine rupture in a pregnancy following microwave endometrial ablation. J Obs Gyn 2010


Simultaneously recovered absorption and scattering images that separate these optical property features within the female breast are demonstrated from frequency-domain measurements. A study of known absorbing and scattering objects is presented as a foundation for interpreting these in vivo images once the contrast space has been fully characterized. No measurable influence of absorbing-object contrast appears in the scattering images, whereas localized scattering contrast enhances the corresponding region within the absorption image by approximately 30% (e.g., a 2:1 scatterer also reconstructs as an approximately 1.3:1 absorber). Scattering and absorption images of a female volunteer with a 3.4-cm fibroadenoma show a clear 2:1 localized increase in absorption coefficient with little or no evidence of scattering enhancement in the lesion.


A theoretical model for the remodeling of collagen gels is proposed. The collagen fabric is modeled as a network of collagen fibers, which in turn are composed of collagen fibrils. In the model, the strengthening of collagen fabric is accomplished by fibroblasts, which continuously recruit and attach more collagen fibrils to existing collagen fibers. The fibroblasts also accomplish a reorientation of collagen fibers. Fibroblasts are assumed to reorient collagen fibers toward the direction of maximum material stiffness. The proposed model is applied to experiments in which fibroblasts were inserted into a collagen gel. The model is able to predict the force-strain curves for the experimental collagen gels, and the final distribution of collagen fibers also agrees qualitatively with the experiments.


Since the 1990s the Japanese pet industry has grown to a trillion-yen business and estimates place the number of pets above the number of children under the age of fifteen. There are between 6,000 to 8,000 businesses in the Japanese pet funeral industry, including more than 900 pet cemeteries. Of these about 120 are operated by Buddhist temples, and Buddhist mortuary rites for pets have become an institutionalised practice. In Bones of Contention , Barbara Ambros investigates what religious and intellectual traditions constructed animals as subjects of religious rituals and how pets have been included or excluded in the necral landscapes of contemporary Japan. Pet mortuary rites are emblems of the ongoing changes in contemporary Japanese religions. The increase in single and nuclear-family households, marriage delays for both males and females, the falling birthrate and graying of society, the occult boom of the 1980s, the pet boom of the 1990s, the anti-religious backlash in the wake of the 1995 Aum Shinriky incident--all of these and more have contributed to Japan's contested history of pet mortuary rites. Ambros uses this history to shed light on important questions such as: Who (or what) counts as a family member? What kinds of practices should the state recognise as religious and thus protect financially and legally? Is it frivolous or selfish to keep, pamper, or love an animal? Should humans and pets be buried together? How do people reconcile the deeply personal grief that follows the loss of a pet and how do they imagine the afterlife of pets? And ultimately, what is the status of animals in Japan? Bones of Contention is a book about how Japanese people feel and think about pets and other kinds of animals and, in turn, what pets and their people have to tell us about life and death in Japan today.


Thiopurines azathioprine and 6-mercaptopurine are effective immune-modulators and cytotoxic agents widely used in the treatment of autoimmune diseases, graft rejection, and cancer. Of concern is the growing epidemiologic evidence that chronic exposure to these agents increases the risk of mesenchymal and solid tumors. Although in vitro and in vivo animal studies suggest that these agents are mutagenic and have the potential to select for mismatch repair deficient mutants, their in vivo mechanism(s) of carcinogenicity in humans remain(s) unclear. We investigated the in vivo mutagenicity of thiopurines in a cross-sectional study of 119 children and adults with inflammatory bowel disease by determining the frequency and spectra of somatic mutations at the HPRT locus using the T-cell cloning assay. We observed a significant increase in the frequency of somatic mutations that was related to total dose (p<0.001) and duration of treatment (p<0.001) among 56 thiopurine treated subjects compared to 63 untreated subjects. By mutation spectra comparison of 1020 mutant isolates, we also observed a significant dose-dependent increase in the proportion of G:C to A:T transitions (p<0.001) that is consistent with the in vitro mutagenic signature of these drugs. Although in vivo selection for HPRT mutants may have confounded the absolute mutation frequency since this is a ratio value, the significant thiopurine dose-dependent correlations with frequency and mutation spectra shift strongly suggest that thiopurine treatment is mutagenic in vivo. We also investigated the prevalence of in vivo clonal proliferation by the combined analyses of HPRT mutations and TCRβ CDR3 regions from mutant isolates and observed a higher prevalence of cell proliferation in association with chronic thiopurine therapy. Thiopurine treated subjects displayed expansions of precursor or committed progenitor cells and post-β rearrangement thymocytes or mature T-cells while untreated adult subjects showed only post-β rearrangement expansions of thymocytes or mature T-cells. Thiopurine treated subjects also uniquely displayed clonal expansions of "hyper-mutable" thymocytes or mature T-cells that gave rise to progenies with independent mutations either through extensive proliferation or from genetic instability. This pattern predominated in children and exhibited the highest occurrences of G:C to A:T mutations. G:C to A:T transitions were also observed in both early precursors or committed progenitors and post-β rearrangement thymocytes or mature T-cells from thiopurine treated subjects compared to untreated subjects who displayed a low frequency of G:C to A:T mutations unrelated to thiopurine therapy in post-β rearrangement thymocytes or mature T-cells. These data provide direct evidence that thiopurine treatment is mutagenic in vivo by mutation induction that may be enhanced through its effects on cell proliferation, and provide the first mechanistic evidence for the carcinogenicity of these therapeutic agents in humans. Our observations also suggest the potential risks to proliferating precursor and mature cells. In children, we may be capturing a subpopulation of "hypermutable" T-cells with a higher propensity to progress to lymphoma, which occur at highest frequency following transplantation.


Proofs by induction are central to many computer science areas such as data structures, theory of computation, programming languages, program efficiency-time complexity, and program correctness. Proofs by induction can also improve students' understanding and performance of computer science concepts such as programming languages, algorithm design, and recursion, as well as serve as a medium for teaching them.
Even though students are exposed to proofs by induction in many courses of their curricula, they still have difficulties understanding and performing them. This impacts the whole course of their studies, since proofs by induction are omnipresent in computer science. Specifically, students do not gain conceptual understanding of induction early in the curriculum and as a result, they have difficulties applying it to more advanced areas later on in their studies.
The goal of my dissertation is twofold: (1) identifying sources of computer science students' difficulties with proofs by induction, and (2) developing a new approach to teaching proofs by induction by way of an interactive and multimodal electronic book (e-book). For the first goal, I undertook a study to identify possible sources of computer science students' difficulties with proofs by induction. Its results suggest that there is a close correlation between students' understanding of inductive definitions and their understanding and performance of proofs by induction. For designing and developing my e-book, I took into consideration the results of my study, as well as the drawbacks of the current methodologies of teaching proofs by induction for computer science. I designed my e-book to be used as a standalone and complete educational environment. I also conducted a study on the effectiveness of my e-book in the classroom. The results of my study suggest that, unlike the current methodologies of teaching proofs by induction for computer science, my e-book helped students overcome many of their difficulties and gain conceptual understanding of proofs induction.


Sexual misconduct on university campuses is rampant and underreported,
particularly among graduate and professional students. To combat this, the entire university community,
especially campus clinicians, must be trauma-informed, allowing for reduction of stigma, an increase
in reporting rates, and an acceptance that trauma will be treated within the academic theater.
Yet, this environment is rare. Despite the laws passed, procedures enacted, and resources allocated,
many victims are still met with a university response that creates further trauma, ultimately discouraging
disclosures. The probability that a student will report is dependent on diverse factors at the institutional
level. Compounding this further is the complexity of graduate and professional students
themselves. These individuals regularly navigate numerous, sometimes simultaneous roles within the
university structure (e.g., student, staff, faculty, and employee), engaging in relationships with clear
power imbalances. Moreover, factors like age, cultural and ethnic background, need for recommendations,
desire for future employment, developmental experiences, and personal distal/proximal relationships
also contribute to their inherent vulnerability.

The authors of this paper have gathered and reviewed published information on graduate
and professional students who are victims of sexual misconduct while in the academic environment
and discuss systemic and individual strategies to ameliorate the impact.

Gaps in the literature include current, large-scale studies on the prevalence of sexual
misconduct among graduate and professional students, universal protocols for preventive and treatment
strategies, the framing of education as a climate-shifting opportunity for empowerment, and a
holistic model that addresses the needs of the entire academic universe.


Objective A 5% change in weight is a significant predictor for frailty and obesity. We ascertained how self-reported weight change over the lifespan impacts rates of frailty in older adults. Methods We identified 4,984 subjects ≥60 years with body composition measures from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. An adapted version of Fried's frailty criteria was used as the primary outcome. Self-reported weight was assessed at time current,1 and 10 years earlier and at age 25. Weight changes between each time point were categorized as ≥ 5%, ≤5% or neutral. Logistic regression assessed the impact of weight change on the outcome of frailty. Results Among 4,984 participants, 56.5% were female, mean age was 71.1 years, and mean BMI was 28.2kg/m2. A weight loss of ≥ 5% had a higher association with frailty compared to current weight, age 25 (OR 2.94 [1.72,5.02]), 10 years ago (OR 1.68 [1.05,2.69]), and 1 year ago (OR 1.55 [1.02,2.36]). Weight gain in the last year was associated with increased rate of frailty (1.59 [1.09,2.32]). Conclusion There is an association between frailty and reported weight loss over time while only weight gain in the last year has an association with frailty.


We propose a novel distributed leader election algorithm to deal with the controller and control service availability issues in programmable networks, such as Software Defined Networks (SDN) or programmable Radio Access Network (RAN). Our approach can deal with a wide range of network failures, especially intermittent network partitions, where splitting and merging of a network repeatedly occur. In contrast to traditional leader election algorithms that mainly focus on the (eventual) consensus on one leader, the proposed algorithm aims at optimizing control service availability, stability and reducing the controller state synchronization effort during intermittent network partitioning situations. To this end, we design a new framework that enables dynamic leader election based on real-time estimates acquired from statistical monitoring. With this framework, the proposed leader election algorithm has the capability of being flexibly configured to achieve different optimization objectives, while adapting to various failure patterns. Compared with two existing algorithms, our approach can significantly reduce the synchronization overhead (up to 12x) due to controller state updates, and maintain up to twice more nodes under a controller.


We report a simple approach for generating nondiffracting random intensity patterns that do not change with propagation. Experimental results are shown where the generating patterns are encoded onto a phase-only liquid-crystal display. We expect that these results will be useful for encryption or surveillance applications.


Though many companies are still just beginning to grasp the potential uses and impacts of the Web and e-commerce, advances in technologies and their application continue. These advances often present various managerial and technological issues for individuals, companies, governments, and other entities. One significant area of technological advancement is the development of mobile e-commerce, which encompasses interactive business activities and processes related to a (potential) commercial transaction conducted through communications networks that interface with wireless devices. These systems provide the potential for organizations and users to perform various commerce-related tasks without regard to time and location (anytime from anywhere). This emerging mobile e-commerce environment presents a new set of issues. This paper identifies and categorizes some of these issues so that researchers, developers, and managers have a starting point for focusing their activities within the emerging m-commerce domain. Our examination finds categories that include technological (both client and infrastructure) issues, application issues, and areas for future research.


Fibre reinforced materials are increasingly employed in aerospace, naval and civil structures because of their low weight and high specific strength and stiffness. A major concern is the inherent susceptibility of composite laminates to barely visible damage induced by low velocity impacts. Non-destructive, in-situ inspection techniques are required to continuously control the integrity of such structures. Traditional non-destructive testing methods, like ultrasonic scanning, are time-consuming and require the withdraw from service of the tested part. Vibration-based structural health monitoring methods are reported to be a promising tool to check the structural integrity. In fact, damage leads to a local decrease of the structural stiffness and alters the wave propagation in a laminate. The stiffness modification results in a change of the modal characteristics of the structure. Numerous studies have shown that eigenfrequencies, damping ratios and curvature mode shapes of a laminated composite structure are sensitive to impact induced damage. Inverse numerical-experimental techniques based on modal characteristics have already demonstrated their applicability for the identification of mechanical properties of intact composite laminates. By using an adequate damage model, a similar method may be used for the identification of damage parameters. In this work, a damage identification method based on signals obtained by an integrated sensing system is proposed. Fibre Bragg gratings (FBG), a recent sensor technology, are optical sensors allowing to measure internal strains in composite laminates. This type of sensor can be perfectly integrated in a structure, is maintenance-free and may last for the entire lifetime of a structure. A high rate FBG interrogation system based on intensity modulation is enhanced so that calibrated low-noise strain measurements can be performed with acquisition rates of up to 250 kHz. In this study, the FBG sensors are embedded in carbon fibre reinforced cross-ply plates made of 28 unidirectional plies. The sensors are used to capture the dynamic response of the plate to an impact event and to carry out experimental modal analysis. Moreover, acoustic waves originating from impacts are sensed with a high sensitivity and an acquisition rate of 1 GHz. The experimental results using several instrumented plates demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the interrogation system. Monitoring of the structural integrity of the composite plate consists of two stages, first impact localisation and second damage identification. The appearance of an eventual impact is detected by surveying the dynamic response of the FBG sensors and its location is predicted based on waves propagating from the impact to the sensors. The prediction is made via interpolation of a previously determined reference data set produced by non-destructive hammer impacts. The interpolation-based localisation method does neither require the knowledge of the wave propagation velocity nor the exact position of the sensors within the laminate. The prediction accuracy of the localisation method is evaluated with several numerical and experimental validation tests and is shown to be in the order of a few millimetres. The different potential error sources are identified and they are found to be mainly independent on the plate size. Upon the detection and localisation of an impact, an eventual damage is identified using an inverse numerical-experimental optimisation method. A finite element model of the damaged plate is built based on three-dimensional characterisation of the damage pattern using high resolution X-ray computed tomography. The identification method utilises a homogenised damage model with an approximated damage shape and reduced transverse shear moduli. The damage surface and position are identified by minimising the discrepancy between the numerically calculated and experimentally determined eigenfrequency changes using a hybrid iterative and global search algorithm. The initial guess of the damage position required for the optimisation procedure needs to be sufficiently precise. Within this work, it consists of the predicted impact location obtained from the localisation method. The robustness of the algorithm to different initial guesses of the parameters is tested by numerical and experimental examples. The impact localisation and damage identification method is summarised and demonstrated by a comprehensive experiment. Four FBG sensors are employed to detect and localise the impact and to determine the plate's eigenfrequencies. The damage surface is in general underestimated by approximately 20% by the numerical-experimental optimisation algorithm and the distance between the identified and exact damage position corresponds to less than 10% of the damage size.


This article examines the changing relationships between museums and indigenous peoples over the past two centuries, with a specific focus upon the relationship of American museums to Native peoples within the United States. In the 19th century, the role of the American Museum was to acquire objects that could offer knowledge about natural history or world cultures to facilitate certain public values. With respect to Native peoples, the 19th century practices of American museum often institutionalized a hierarchical relationship consistent with the exploitative tenets of European colonialism and Imperialism. In comparison, modern museums must engage the multiple experiences of the diverse groups that are present within the nation-state, as well as disparate populations across the globe. Groups often disagree about the meaning of the past, as well as the articulation of their contemporary identity. In this respect, modern museums often participate in reshaping public values through the combined processes of repatriation and reconciliation. Through the process of repatriation, museums honor the human rights of Native peoples by transferring possession of ancestral human remains and cultural objects that were wrongfully appropriated in the past. Through the process of reconciliation, museums foster new relationships between Native peoples and the nation-state that more accurately reflect their distinctive historical experience and contemporary identity as separate sovereigns. This article argues that museums have an important role to play in the contemporary effort of Native Nations to assert their cultural sovereignty and reclaim their own histories. Specifically, the article examines the role of the National Museum of the American Indian and the role of tribal museums in fostering tribal cultural sovereignty.


Under conditions of carbon starvation or thermal, osmotic, or oxidative shock, mutants affected in the synthesis or mobilization of poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) are known to survive less well. It is still unclear if the synthesis and accumulation of PHB are sufficient to protect bacteria against stress conditions or if the stored PHB has to be mobilized. Here, we demonstrated that mobilization of PHB in Herbaspirillum seropedicae SmR1 was heat-shock activated at 45°C. In situ proton (1H) nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (i.e., 1H-nuclear magnetic resonance) showed that heat shock increased amounts of 3-hydroxybutyrate (3HB) only in H. seropedicae strains able to synthesize and mobilize PHB. H. seropedicae SmR1 mutants unable to synthesize or mobilize PHB were more susceptible to heat shock and survived less well than the parental strain. When 100 mM 3-hydroxybutyrate was added to the medium, the ΔphaC1 strain (an H. seropedicae mutant unable to synthesize PHB) and the double mutant with deletion of both phaZ1 and phaZ2 (i.e., ΔphaZ1.2) (unable to mobilize PHB) showed partial rescue of heat adaptability (from 0% survival without 3HB to 40% of the initial viable population). Addition of 200 mM 3HB before the imposition of heat shock reduced protein aggregation to 15% in the ΔphaC1 mutant and 12% in the ΔphaZ1.2 mutant. We conclude that H. seropedicae SmR1 is naturally protected by 3HB released by PHB mobilization, while mutants unable to generate large amounts of 3HB under heat shock conditions are less able to cope with heat damage. IMPORTANCE Bacteria are subject to abrupt changes in environmental conditions affecting their growth, requiring rapid adaptation. Increasing the concentration of some metabolites can protect bacteria from hostile conditions that lead to protein denaturation and precipitation, as well as damage to plasma membranes. In this work, we demonstrated that under thermal shock, the bacterium Herbaspirillum seropedicae depolymerized its intracellular stock polymer known as poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB), rapidly increasing the concentration of 3-hydroxybutyrate (3HB) and decreasing protein precipitation by thermal denaturation. Mutant H. seropedicae strains unable to produce or depolymerize PHB suffered irreparable damage during thermal shock, resulting in fast death when incubated at 45°C. Our results will contribute to the development of bacteria better adapted to high temperatures found either in natural conditions or in industrial processes. In the case of H. seropedicae and other bacteria that interact beneficially with plants, the understanding of PHB metabolism can be decisive for the development of more-competitive strains and their application as biofertilizers in agriculture.


This paper presents a new approach in the field of condition monitoring of power semiconductors in power converters. The new approach avoids additional sensors and uses only the data that is already available in a power electronic system. This results in advantages such as saving extra costs and eliminating potential sources of failure. In this paper, the aging mechanism of bond wire lift-off is investigated. First, it is shown by simulations that output voltage harmonics of the current controller contain information about the bond wire lift-off aging mechanism. For testing the new approach in practice, real data are recorded in a test bench for a power module with unharmed bond-wires in order to train an algorithm for normal behavior. Then the aging mechanism bond wire lift-off is induced by cutting off bond wires of a power module with the aim of testing the functionality of the algorithm. The results of this investigation show that the proposed approach is able to detect the anomaly in the data set.


We recently presented an estimate of the number of mutually discriminable olfactory stimuli at one trillion (1). Subjects were asked to sniff mixtures of molecules with increasing component overlap selected from a panel of 128 isointense structurally and perceptually diverse monomolecular odorants (2). We considered stimulus pairs discriminable when the majority of subjects could significantly discriminate them at p=0.05, a conventional statistical threshold given our sample size. From these empirical data, we estimated that human discriminative capacity exceeds one trillion olfactory stimuli. Several readers have pointed out that such extrapolations are sensitive to underlying assumptions about the chosen significance threshold (3) and the dimensionality of olfaction (4). It is important to note that any exponential function will be sensitive in this way, and the goal of our model was not to identify the exact number of discriminable olfactory stimuli, or even the exact mathematical bounds, but an estimate of the order of magnitude of human discriminatory power across a population of human subjects. This was not clearly stated in our paper, and we agree that contradictory references to a "lower limit" and an "upper bound" were confusing. The central argument in (4) is that our estimation method assumes that the dimensionality of olfactory space is large. We agree that the high-dimensional nature of olfaction is indeed an assumption, and we should have stated this explicitly in our paper (1). Even if we follow this logic of the models presented in (4), purely geometrical calculations show that our results hold if the dimensionality of olfactory representations is D≥25. The dimensionality of olfaction is a question of interest to everyone, and while we do not know for sure, all available evidence suggests that olfaction is a high-dimensional sense. The olfactory system is wired to keep information from the ~400 odorant receptors strictly separated, so it is plausible that olfaction operates at least in 400-dimensional space. This is an important topic of discussion in olfaction, and we welcome continued debate of the dimensionality of smell and how this impacts human olfactory perception.


As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due to climate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representational figures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss and habitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices that mobilize various images of the 'play of the world', including the making of star species to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species into archives implicitly organized around the category of their destruction. The first section of this article looks at Jacques Rancière's concept of political aesthetics in order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispecies living beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessive engagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form of ethics or an 'aesthetics of existence', as Foucault put it. The conclusion considers how a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, and asks what aesthetic shifts would make the 'play of the world' more present in its absences.


The hierarchical stratification of Greco-Roman culture emphasized corporeal features as integral to maintaining social status. The elite body was protected from physical and sexual assault; the servile or low-status body was liable to such dishonoring treatment. The body and its presentation – its gestures, postures and clothing – formed a canvas which communicated to others a person's social location. Low status, then, was a somatic phenomemon: the scars of floggings, for example, signaled one's degraded status and left one vulnerable to further abuse. On the other hand, the primary literature characterizes the bodies of high-ranking males (the politician, the general, the paterfamilias) or of elite females (the priestess, wife or daughter) in sacral terminology. This thesis investigates the meaning of Paul's sacralization of the body in the Epistle to the Romans. Romans 12:1 states "parakalw/ ou=n u`ma/j ... parasth/sai ta. sw,mata u`mw/n qusi,an zw/san a`gi,an euva,reston tw/| qew/|", that is: "I exhort you ... to offer your bodies [to God] as a sacrifice which is living, holy and pleasing to God" (my translation). Given the predominantly low social status of his hearers, Paul's construction of their bodies as holy helps establish an identity of high worth which conflicts with their social locations. Paul's construal of these degraded bodies is at odds with the cultural norm to characterize only elite bodies in sacral and honorable terms. For many of Paul's hearers, their bodily identity was the antithesis of the sacral. I will argue that, by construing the Christ-followers' bodies as sacral, Paul subverts the cultural construal of many of his hearers' bodies. Those whose bodily experiences and appearances would have been construed by the social code as demeaning have this interpretation contested by Paul. For him, the suffering of the body is no longer an indication of degraded status; rather, it is to be considered sacrificial, viz., an aspect of worshiping identity. In contrast with the tendency of biblical scholars to neglect the lived experiences of Paul and his hearers as bodily beings, it is suggested that Paul is deliberate in claiming that it is the bodies of his hearers which are to be offered to God. Rather than demanding that the Christ-followers offer "themselves" to God in some abstract sense, Paul constructs their bodies as sacred phenomena which stand under God's claim. By construing their low-status bodies in such terms, Paul subverts the dominant social narrative which read the bodies of the elite in terms of sacrality and honor and degraded those whose bodies were vulnerable to physical and sexual assault, thereby offering a potent counter-reading of the low-status body.


Performing controlled experiments on noisy data is essential in understanding deep learning across noise levels. Due to the lack of suitable datasets, previous research has only examined deep learning on controlled synthetic label noise, and real-world label noise has never been studied in a controlled setting. This paper makes three contributions. First, we establish the first benchmark of controlled real-world label noise from the web. This new benchmark enables us to study the web label noise in a controlled setting for the first time. The second contribution is a simple but effective method to overcome both synthetic and real noisy labels. We show that our method achieves the best result on our dataset as well as on two public benchmarks (CIFAR and WebVision). Third, we conduct the largest study by far into understanding deep neural networks trained on noisy labels across different noise levels, noise types, network architectures, and training settings. The data and code are released at the following link: this http URL


Practices of witnessing powerfully modulate perceptions of historical temporality in contemporary liberal-democratic societies. This essay not only acknowledges that acts of witnessing suffuse the rhetoric of historical narration in our time but also examines a more fundamental temporal phenomenon: the sense of historical time peculiar to witnessing as such. Witnessing organizes a discursive window on the past through which audiences are given to understand historical chronology and potentially steer its trajectory toward the ends of symbolic, if not procedural, justice. Such collective perceptions of historical chronology are fundamentally untimely: specters of radically other historical experiences are among the most commonly invoked and uncannily felt historical touchstones of contemporary historical pedagogy, transnational justice, and moral reasoning. The essay delineates essential characteristics of the untimely time that comes to pass in the rhetorical act of witnessing and those customary historical truths and judgments that it organizes and distributes as resources of social, political, and moral influence.


Abstract We describe the diet of fossas (Cryptoprocta ferox) in a dry deciduous forest of western Madagascar from 376 scats collected between June 1994 and September 1996, from which 554 prey items were identified. More than 90% of these were vertebrates, and more than 50% were lemurs. No other nonprimate mammal includes such a high proportion of primate items in its diet. The principal prey comprised approximately 6 lemur species and 2 or 3 spiny tenrec species, along with snakes and small mammals. Significant differences were apparent in the composition of the scats in wet and dry seasons, with a higher proportion of Tenrec in the former, and fewer lemurs. Within the confines of a diet of vertebrates, fossas appeared to be opportunistic predators. For those prey types for which data were available, a significant relationship was found between the estimated relative number of individuals taken of any one type of prey and its abundance. Fossas were estimated to remove up to 19% of their prey populations per year. This high impact suggests that they were living close to the maximum population density possible on the available prey. Species of a wide range of body masses were included in the diet. Verreaux's sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi), weighing more than one-half of the body mass of the fossa, constituted approximately 11% of the prey biomass.


Pareatidae are a group of mollusc‐eating snakes widely distributed in South‐eastern Asia. Due to their dietary specialization, the asymmetric dentition of pareatids has recently become an interesting issue in evolutionary biology. However, phylogenetic relationships and species diversity of pareatids are still poorly studied. A total of three Pareas species, P. formosanus (Van Denburgh 1909), P. compressus (Oshima 1910) and P. komaii (Maki 1931), have been reported for Taiwan. However, only P. formosanus is currently regarded as a valid species. Using mitochondrial sequence phylogeny, nuclear c‐mos haplotype network, as well as multivariate morphometrics, we re‐evaluated the taxonomic status of Pareas from Taiwan, the Ryukyus and adjacent regions. These lines of evidence showed congruent results for the coexistence of three Pareas species in Taiwan, with prominent genetic and morphological differentiation and differing level of dentition asymmetry. The currently used name P. formosanus should be applied only to the snakes with red iris, comparatively short lower jaw and totally smooth dorsal scales. An examination of the type material indicated that the name P. compressus should be regarded as a junior synonym of P. formosensis sensu stricto. Pareas komaii (Oshima 1910) is confirmed as a valid taxon with yellow iris, elongated lower jaw and strongly keeled dorsals. The third clade is characterized by a yellow iris, elongated lower jaw and weakly keeled dorsals. Despite their sympatric occurrence, every examined individual showed consistent grouping from mitochondrial, nuclear and morphological markers, indicating there is no gene flow among these three clades. Here, we describe the third clade as a new specie, Pareas atayal sp. nov.


The aim of this thesis is to explore the ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful in Gothic literature. Using ideas proposed by Edmund Burke, I will argue that authors of the Gothic genre developed these ideas into a maturing relationship between the Sublime and the Beautiful, and then demonstrate how this relationship has close ties with death and resurrection. I will also explain how this relationship assists towards understanding death as something that has already occurred in the past, which 1 call the Beautiful Death. 1 will further argue how the development of the Beautiful helped to popularise the character of the vampire in fiction as it is recognised today.

Using Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto as a starting point, I will discuss how authors came to realise the necessity of the Beautiful in Gothic literature along with its charge of empowering the Sublime. 1 will trace what I understand to be the evolution of the Beautiful from Walpole's novel onwards until it becomes a force that first challenges the presence of the Sublime, and then arguably becomes more powerful than the Sublime. With this in mind I will demonstrate how the Beautiful Death is developed by authors into an independent force that is identifiable in strong, overpowering characters from Matthew Lewis' The Monk onwards. I will argue that the physical guise of the Beautiful is an important step towards the popularisation of the vampire in fiction.

As I will be focusing more on the Beautiful rather than the Sublime, my thesis will therefore primarily address the idea of whether or not the Gothic genre can be considered as a literature of the Beautiful as well as the Sublime and how, in using it, authors effected not only the idea of accepting death, but also established a relationship between their characters and death. I will discuss the latter in my conclusion using Carolyn Lamb's Glenarvon, by which point I will have demonstrated how death and the Beautiful are vital components of Gothic fiction, and how their presence was a vital influence upon the emergence of the vampire as a recurring character of proceeding fiction.


Allaire, S. E., Baril, B., Vanasse, A., Lange, S. F., MacKay, J. and Smith, D. L. 2015. Carbon dynamics in a biochar-amended loamy soil under switchgrass. Can. J. Soil Sci. 95: 1–13. The environmental impacts of switchgrass production for bioenergy could be reduced through the use of biofertilizers rather than mineral fertilizers and through soil amendment with biochar. The objectives of this study were: (1) to assess the impact of biochar and biofertilizer on switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) yield and parameters related to carbon dynamics, (2) to correlate carbon parameters with soil physico-chemical properties over the first two growing seasons, and (3) to develop a C budget. A complete randomized block design was installed in a sandy loam with split plot treatment design, the main plots receiving 0 or 10 t ha-1 of biochar and the sub - plots receiving no fertilization, mineral N fertilization, or biofertilizers. Biofertilizers had no significant impact on plant and soil. Biochar increased yield relative to the control treatment by about 10% during the first year and root biomass by up to 50% after 2 yr (P>0.1). Mineral N fertilization also increased yield resulting in higher plant C sequestration after 2 yr. Biochar increased CO2 soil concentration (CO2-soil) by up to 50% but its impact on CO2 emission flux (CO2-flux) changed over time. The impact of mineral fertilization on CO2-flux also varied with time. Soil CO2 dynamics was mostly influenced by temperature, N and water content. Biochar and fertilization treatments showed interactions on some plant and soil parameters. The highest C sequestration budget was obtained with a combination of biochar and mineral N fertilization. The equivalent of about one-third of the increase in soil C content associated with biochar treatments was respired away by soil microorganisms. Nearly one-fourth of C sequestered by plants remained in or at the soil surface (root and crop residues).


We derive a new intrinsic social motivation for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), in which agents are rewarded for having causal influence over another agent's actions. Causal influence is assessed using counterfactual reasoning. The reward does not depend on observing another agent's reward function, and is thus a more realistic approach to MARL than taken in previous work. We show that the causal influence reward is related to maximizing the mutual information between agents' actions. We test the approach in challenging social dilemma environments, where it consistently leads to enhanced cooperation between agents and higher collective reward. Moreover, we find that rewarding influence can lead agents to develop emergent communication protocols. We therefore employ influence to train agents to use an explicit communication channel, and find that it leads to more effective communication and higher collective reward. Finally, we show that influence can be computed by equipping each agent with an internal model that predicts the actions of other agents. This allows the social influence reward to be computed without the use of a centralised controller, and as such represents a significantly more general and scalable inductive bias for MARL with independent agents.


This paper presents a method for prediction of the unequal admission performance of a double entry turbine based on the full admission turbine maps and a minimal number of unequal admission points. The double entry turbine has two separate inlet ports which feed a single turbine wheel: this arrangement can be beneficial in a turbocharger application; however the additional entry does add complexity in producing a complete turbine map which includes unequal admission behavior. When a double entry turbine is operated under full admission conditions, with both entries feeding the turbine equally, this will act effectively as a single entry device and the turbine performance can be represented by a standard turbine map. In reality a multiple entry turbine will spend the majority of time operating under varying degrees of unequal admission, with each entry feeding the turbine different amounts; the extent of this inequality can have a considerable impact on turbine performance. In order to produce a full map which extends from full admission through to the partial admission case (where one inlet has no flow) a large number of unequal admission data points are required. The paper starts by discussing previous attempts to describe the partial and unequal admission performance of a double entry turbine. The full unequal admission performance is then presented for a nozzled, double entry turbine. The impact of unequal admission on turbine performance is demonstrated. Under some conditions of operation, the turbine efficiency may be less than half that of the equivalent full admission case based on the average turbine velocity ratio. A method of using the steady, equal admission maps, with a limited number of unequal admission data points, to predict the full unequal admission behavior is presented. A good agreement is found when the map extension method is validated against the full unequal admission turbine performance measured on a test stand. In the prediction of efficiency a mean error of approximately 0.39% is found between the test stand data and the proposed extrapolation method, with a standard deviation of 2.79%. A better agreement is generally found at conditions of higher power. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4025763]


Auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) using clicks enable global objective estimation of hearing threshold. Recently, it has been suggested that a chirp stimulus may produce a synchronous response from a larger portion of the basilar membrane than a click, and that a chirp will produce a greater amplitude response than a click at the same sensation level. Various workers have modified the stimulus to achieve frequency specificity (e.g. using tone-bursts). The present investigation used band-limited chirp stimuli having the same frequency-delay characteristics as the chirp mentioned above that compensate for frequency-dependent cochlear delays. The intention was to generate highly synchronized neural responses across parts of the nerve fibre array. Stimuli were presented at sensation levels between 10 and 50 dB to 10 adult subjects. Wave V was consistently identifiable even for low-frequency stimuli. Wave V amplitude increased and latency decreased as stimulus frequency increased. The latency decrease is consistent with high-frequency responses arising from basal regions of the cochlea. ABR thresholds were defined by objective estimation and visual inspection. Average ABR thresholds were 16 dB higher than behavioural thresholds for high-frequency chirps (3000-6000 Hz), increasing to 25 dB for low-frequency chirps (375-750 Hz). These ABR thresholds are closer to behavioural thresholds and have a smaller variance than reported for tone-burst stimuli without masking. However, they are not as close as those reported for tone-bursts in notched noise. The disadvantage of the band-limited chirps is that they have a wider spectral spread than tone-bursts and hence may elicit a response from unwanted frequency regions of the basilar membrane.


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BACKGROUND
A recent survey reported that U.S. general internists are performing fewer procedures, although practice environment heavily influences this experience.

OBJECTIVE
To determine the procedures performed by U.S. Army general internists.

DESIGN
Cross-sectional cohort study.

METHODS
A modified questionnaire was distributed to all active duty U.S. Army internists. Respondents were asked to indicate their practice setting and the procedures they had performed in the previous year. Analysis of variance, t-tests, and Fisher's exact test were used for statistical comparisons, and Bonferroni's correction was used for multiple comparisons.

RESULTS
Eighty-two internists responded to the survey (55% response rate). Army internists performed a greater variety of procedures than the civilian benchmark (10.8 vs. 6.5, p < 0.001, t-test). Internists at Army community hospitals performed more types of procedures than individuals practicing in a tertiary care facility or troop clinic (13.8, 10.0, 9.0, respectively, p < 0.05, analysis of variance). Deployed internists performed more chest tube placements and endotracheal intubations, and internists at home were more likely to perform thoracentesis, paracentesis, graded exercise tests, and spirometry (p < 0.0012).

CONCLUSIONS
U.S. Army internists perform a greater variety of procedures than their civilian colleagues. Our findings underline the importance of procedure training in military graduate and continuing medical education.


We consider the problem of optimizing an unknown (typically non-convex) function with a bounded norm in some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), based on noisy bandit feedback. We consider a novel variant of this problem in which the point evaluations are not only corrupted by random noise, but also adversarial corruptions. We introduce an algorithm Fast-Slow GP-UCB based on Gaussian process methods, randomized selection between two instances labeled "fast" (but non-robust) and "slow" (but robust), enlarged confidence bounds, and the principle of optimism under uncertainty. We present a novel theoretical analysis upper bounding the cumulative regret in terms of the corruption level, the time horizon, and the underlying kernel, and we argue that certain dependencies cannot be improved. We observe that distinct algorithmic ideas are required depending on whether one is required to perform well in both the corrupted and non-corrupted settings, and whether the corruption level is known or not.


From the very Early Neolithic in the Balkans two categories of objects are recognized as having been involved in prehistoric drilling activities. The first is beads and other decorative and prestigious items made of bone, shell, pottery and various minerals. The second comprises toolkits of micro-perforators/borers found among the flint assemblages of several sites.This paper presents experiments in drilling different materials with the aim of testing several practical issues. A series of micro-borers were produced and used for manual and mechanical drilling (with a pump drill). Various samples (mainly prepared thin plates) of minerals and rocks were used, ranging in hardness (on Mohs scale) from 3 (marble, limestone, calcite) to 6.5 (amazonite, nephrite). Biominerals were also used: aragonite (shells) and apatite (bones). Actual bead production was approached by manufacturing 16 delicate beads of 5 different materials using fine sand and water abrasion. Though not conclusive, the experimental work was instructive in many of the parameters, procedures and technical details of prehistoric drilling.


Background The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant changes in daily routines and lifestyle worldwide and mental health issues have emerged as a consequence. We aimed to assess the presence of sleep disturbances during the lockdown in the general population. Methods Cross-sectional, online survey-based study on adults living through the COVID-19 pandemic. The questionnaire included demographics and specific questions assessing the impact of the pandemic/lockdown on sleep, daytime functioning and mental health in the general population. Identification of sleep pattern changes and specific sleep-related symptoms was the primary outcome, and secondary outcomes involved identifying sleep disturbances for predefined cohorts (participants reporting impact on mental health, self-isolation, keyworker status, suspected COVID-19 or ongoing COVID-19 symptoms). Results In total, 843 participants were included in the analysis. The majority were female (67.4%), middle aged [52 years (40–63 years)], white (92.2%) and overweight to obese [BMI 29.4 kg/m2 (24.1–35.5 kg/m2)]; 69.4% reported a change in their sleep pattern, less than half (44.7%) had refreshing sleep, and 45.6% were sleepier than before the lockdown; 33.9% had to self-isolate, 65.2% reported an impact on their mental health and 25.9% were drinking more alcohol during the lockdown. More frequently reported observations specific to sleep were 'disrupted sleep' (42.3%), 'falling asleep unintentionally' (35.2%), 'difficulties falling'/'staying asleep' (30.9% and 30.8%, respectively) and 'later bedtimes' (30.0%). Respondents with suspected COVID-19 had more nightmares and abnormal sleep rhythms. An impact on mental health was strongly associated with sleep-related alterations. Conclusions Sleep disturbances have affected a substantial proportion of the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. These are significantly associated with a self-assessed impact on mental health, but may also be related to suspected COVID-19 status, changes in habits and self-isolation.


The Russian annexation of the Crimea in March 2014 focused the world's attention on the Peninsula in ways not seen since the Crimean War. Thousands of Crimean Tatars clashed with pro-Russian militiamen in Simferopol, while Moscow has in turn stoked fears of jihadi terrorism among the overwhelmingly Muslim Tatars as retrospective justification for its invasion. The key thread in this book is the Crimean Tatars' changing relationship with their Vatan (homeland) and how this interaction with their natal territory changed under the Ottoman Sultans, Russian Tsars, Soviet Commissars, post-Soviet Ukrainian authorities and now Putin's Russia. Taking as its starting point the 1783 Russian conquest of the independent Tatar state known as the Crimean Khanate, Williams explains how the peninsula's native population, with ethnic roots among the Goths, Kipchak Turks and Mongols, was scattered across the Ottoman Empire. He also traces their later emigration and the radical transformation of this conservative tribal-religious group into a modern, politically mobilized, secular nation under Soviet rule.Stalin's genocidal deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944 to Uzbekistan and their almost messianic return to their cherished "Green Isle" in the 1990s are examined in detail, while the author's archival investigations are bolstered by his field research among the Crimean Tatar exiles in Uzbekistan and in their samozakhvat (self-seized) squatter camps and settlements in the Crimea.


A system to interrogate photonic sensors based on long weak fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) is presented and experimentally demonstrated, dedicated to measure the precise location of several spot events. The principle of operation is based on a technique used to analyze microwave photonics (MWP) filters. The long weak FBGs are used as quasi-distributed sensors. Several events can be detected along the FBG device with a spatial accuracy under 1 mm using a modulator and a photo-detector (PD) with a modest bandwidth of less than 500 MHz. The simple proposed scheme is intrinsically robust against environmental changes and easy to reconfigure.


In this work a method to estimate grain growth parameters during equiaxed eutectic solidification is presented. The method assumes free grain growth before impingement and an exponential dependence of the grain growth rate on undercooling. In order to validate the method, a heat transfer / solidification kinetics (HT/ SK) model was implemented. Once validated, the method was used to estimate experimentally the kinetic parameters of equiaxed growth of a near eutecticAl-Si alloy notmodified anmodified with Sr. Results shows that eutectic grain growth parameters of eutectic Al-Si change as a consequence of eutectic modification with Sr.


This paper seeks to analyse the causes of sectarian violence against women which are rooted in the history of the partition of the country during independence and patriarchal attitudes which continue to dominate society. That this violence was gendered is a fact largely ignored by recorded history although it appears as a recurrent theme in the fictional narratives of the partition. Recent woman-centric works by scholars like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin and others have now provided a factual base for the fictional narratives which reveal the nexus behind patriarchal values and communal violence in which women become the nameless victims. Hence, the paper emphasizes the importance of these works in any assessment of sectarian violence against women. It also shows how the violence becomes gendered as a result of dominant patriarchal attitudes which have not changed significantly since independence.


This research explores the topic about consumers' perception and experience in purchasing local fresh fruit from the retail shop in Jasin, Melaka. The main objective of this study was to investigate consumers' perception and experience specifically describe the trend of purchasing, explore the key determinants choosing the favourable retail formats, and the definition of quality in purchasing fresh local fruits. The primary data was used in this study where the structured questionnaires were distributed to the target sample. This study included a target sample of 150 respondents, who were responsible for purchasing household produce. Stratified sampling and simple random sampling technique were used to get the sample of respondents during the study. The data was analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS). The descriptive analysis was used and presented with frequency, correlation, cross tabulation while exploratory factor analysis used to measure pattern matrix, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin, and Bartlett's test of sphericity. The findings show that facilities, product presentation, condusive environment, structure, location, promotion, and services were the key determinant for the consumers in choosing their retail format in Jasin, Melaka. In addition, availability of various goods, price, and good services were the reason why consumers were choose modern retail format and quality attribute was the reason while choosing traditional retail format. In term of quality definition, credence attribute, variety, physical appearance, and extrinsic attribute were indicated the quality of local fresh fruits. Lastly, this study might found be as useful to people who were involved directly or indirectly in supply chain activities and soon will realize that these data very important in to guide them to achieve better acceleration in their marketing activities.


Background: Attending school may have a strong preventative association with sexually transmitted infections among young women, but the mechanism for this relationship is unknown. One hypothesis is that students who attend school practice safer sex with fewer partners, establishing safer sexual networks that make them less exposed to infection. Setting: We used longitudinal data from a randomized controlled trial of young women aged 13–20 years in the Bushbuckridge district, South Africa, to determine whether the percentage of school days attended, school dropout, and grade repetition are associated with having a partner 5 or more years older (age–disparate) and with the number of sexual partners in the previous 12 months. Methods: Risks of having an age-disparate relationship and number of sexual partners were compared using inverse probability of exposure weighted Poisson regression models. Generalized estimating equations were used to account for repeated measures. Results: Young women who attended fewer school days (<80%) and who dropped out of school were more likely to have an age–disparate relationship (risk difference 9.9%, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 3.9% to 16.0%; risk difference (%) dropout 17.2%, 95% CI: 5.4% to 29.0%) and those who dropped out reported having fewer partners (count difference dropout 0.343, 95% CI: 0.192 to 0.495). Grade repetition was not associated with either behavior. Conclusion: Young women who less frequently attend school or who drop out are more likely to have an age-disparate relationship. Young women who drop out have overall more partners. These behaviors may increase the risk of exposure to HIV infection in young women out of school.


This review is to know the magnitude of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease ( NAFLD) among general population and risk group populations of the South Asian countries. A thorough search of evidence-based literature was conducted using the PubMed database with key words. Databases searched from inception to February 2017. Systematic search of the literature was conducted for studies pertaining. Prevalence of NAFLD in South Asia var- ies from 13 to 34%. The Highest rate is in Bangladesh (34.34%) and lowest in Pakistan (13.5%). Prevalence of NAFLD is 15–80% among obese people, 25–60% with dyslipid - emia and 33–55% in pre diabetics and diabetics. Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is present in about 50% of the NAFLD cases that can lead to fibrosis, cirrhosis or even hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). NAFLD is not the disease for only obese people, but it is also common in nonobese in this region. About 11.11% hepatocellular carcinoma developed from NASH. Incidence rate of diabetes and coronary artery disease is high among NAFLD patients. NAFLD is becoming a future challenge for South Asia region. Prevalence and severity has been remarkably increasing for last few years. The health system should get ready to confront burden of NAFLD in future for South Asia.


A growing body of literature tests the effects of different tax structures on long-run economic growth. We argue that these tests do not properly account for endogeneity between supposedly independent variables. We run several cross-country ordinary least squares tests with special attention to human capital, and show how education choice behaviors are affected by different tax mixes. The results obtained by microeconomic theory are validated, and they imply that accumulation rates of human capital cannot be deemed independent from savings taxation. Our results also show that more progressive labor taxation does not appear to be correlated with lower investments in education, contrary to what one would expect from microeconomic theory. We discuss possible implications, and suggest that a likely explanation lies in the outcome of redistribution policies reducing credit constraints of poorer households, thus allowing them easier access to education and, consequently, higher aggregate human capital accumulation.