OBJECTIVE
The objectives of this study were to describe the prevalence and types of community reintegration problems among Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans who receive U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical care, identify interests in interventions or information to promote readjustment to community life, and explore associations between probable posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and reintegration problems and treatment interests.

METHODS
A national, stratified sample of Iraq-Afghanistan combat veterans receiving VA medical care responded to a mailed survey focused on community reintegration. Of 1,226 veterans surveyed, 754 (62%) responded. Prevalence and proportions were adjusted for potential nonresponse bias.

RESULTS
An estimated 25% to 56% of combat veterans who use VA services reported "some" to "extreme" difficulty in social functioning, productivity, community involvement, and self-care domains. At least one-third reported divorce, dangerous driving, increased substance use, and increased anger control problems since deployment. Almost all (96%) expressed interest in services to help readjust to civilian life (95% confidence interval [CI]=93%-99%). The most commonly preferred ways to receive reintegration services or information were at a VA facility, through the mail, and over the Internet. An estimated 41% (95% CI=36%-46%) screened positive for PTSD, and probable PTSD was associated with reporting more readjustment difficulties and expressing interest in more types of services, including traditional mental health services.

CONCLUSIONS
Iraq-Afghanistan combat veterans who already receive VA medical care reported multiple current reintegration problems and wanted services and information to help them readjust to community life. These concerns were particularly prevalent among those with probable PTSD. Research is needed to explore nontraditional modes of service delivery, including the Internet.


To what extent are transannular reactions of medium-ring compounds are dependent on their conformations and to what extent can reaction conditions and other factors such as ring size and substituents partially or completely control the transannular interaction? These questions have been investigated with experimental and theoretical studies in this work. A comprehensive study of hemiacetal formation and 1,x-hydride shift (x = 4 – 6) has been carried out for model compounds 1 – 5 in order to elucidate the influence of different factors such as ring size, presence of a C=C double bond and substituents on these transannular reactions.
...
The theoretical and NMR investigations on 1 – 3 indicate that the eight-membered disubstituted compounds present the optimal conditions for the 'contact' of substituents in the positions 1 and 5 for the transannular interactions resulting in transannular products. The X-ray crystal structures have clearly shown that compounds 1 and 3 exist as hemiacetals. The experiments clearly indicate highly dynamic behaviour of these molecules and the existence of equilibrium between tautomers especially in protic solvents, i.e., DMSO-d6 and D2O, which have not been reported before. The tautomeric equilibrium between 1 and its transannular product drives in the direction of hemiacetal in a range of polar and non-polar solvents. But remarkably, the combined effect of solvent polarity and temperature drives the equilibrium in the reverse direction to a significant extent. The equilibrium constant Keq for forward reaction is reduced to 16.5 in DMSO-d6 at 403 K and 31.3 in D2O at 323 K. In the case of 2, the transannular hemiacetal is only ≤1 % in D2O at higher temperature. In contrast, in compound 3 the hemiacetal is favoured exclusively in benzene-d6 at 298 and 343 K. The experimental findings for the tautomeric equilibrium of compounds 1 – 5 are substantiated by theoretical investigations. The present results represent the first comparison of transannular hemiacetal formation as a function of conformation in eight- and ten-membered hydroxy-ketones. Since these compounds possess very complex multidimensional potential energy hypersurfaces (PEHS), the choice of good starting geometries for these molecules was facilitated by applying molecular mechanics. The starting geometries referred as preferred starting conformer are selected on the basis of factors such as proximity of the reacting groups and energetics. Detailed conformational and energetic investigations carried out using DFT theory shows that the preferred starting conformer of 1, 4 and 5 are 8.5, 8.6 and 8.1 kcal mol-1, respectively, less stable than the corresponding hemiacetals in the gas phase. It implies thermodynamically preferred products in 1, 4 and are 1a, 4a and 5a. In case of 2 and 3 the preferred starting conformers are only 3.6 and 4.6 kcal mol-1 less stable that the corresponding hemiacetals. The calculated (B3LYP/6-31+G*) activation barriers for hemiacetal formation in 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are 38.2, 35.2, 36.5, 38.2 and 36.9 kcal mol-1, respectively, in the gas phase. The transannular hemiacetal formation occurs through a four-membered cyclic transition-state which is most tight in 2. The activation barriers calculated using continuum solvation models (PCM) were not significantly different from the gas phase calculations. It is obvious that the theoretical models used are not able to handle specific solvent effects, so we consider results obtained for hemiacetal formation in water and chloroform semiquantitatively. The experimental data show that the transannular 1,5-hydride shift is catalysed both by base and acid. A comparative theoretical study of the transannular 1,4-, 1,5- and 1,6-hydride shifts in compounds 1, 2, 4 and 5 shows consensus with the experimental findings that the presence of a metal counterion or acid lowers the activation barriers. In all cases, the reaction proceeds through a hexagonal transitionstate structure. The calculated (B3LYP/6-31+G*) activation barriers for 1,5-, 1,4- and 1,6-hydride shift in compounds 1, 2, 4 and 5 are 46.6, 52.2, 43.0 and 28.0 kcal mol-1, respectively, for the uncatalysed reaction. One of the key results is that the activation barriers for 1,6-hydride shift in 5 (28.0 kcal mol-1) and the corresponding intermolecular hydride shift (26.4 kcal mol-1) in the methanol and formaldehyde model system are very similar in the uncatalysed reactions. Moreover, the characteristics of the six-membered cycle formed in transition-state structure of 1,6-hydride shift is similar to the six-membered cycle formed in the intermolecular hydride shift between formaldehyde and methanol. The potential energy profiles for the degenerate 1,4-, 1,5- and 1,6-hydride shifts correspond to the two interchanging hydroxy-ketones and a high lying unsymmetrical transition structure for interconversion of 2 and 6, respectively and symmetrical transition structures for interconversion of 1 and 4, respectively. In the presence of a metal counterion, the transannular 1,6-hydride shift and the intermolecular hydride shift took place via low energy complexes. The low energy complexes are formed by the electrostatic attraction of metal counterion with carbonyl oxygen atom. It is highly
likely that similar intermediates are involved in 1,4- and 1,5-hydride shifts too, but attempts to locate similar low energy complexes in 1, 2 and 4 all failed. The transition-state formed in the acid catalysed reaction in 5 can best be described as a localised C-H-bridged cation with a facile 1,6-hydride shift. The transition-states for the transannular hemiacetal formation and 1,x-hydride shift are likely to closely resemble the preferred starting conformer. Thus, it might be anticipated that knowledge of the preferred starting conformations would be of great predictive value in determining the type of reaction systems 1 – 5 undergo. For the first time the synthetic potential of transannular 1,5-hydride shift in preparing keto-ethers by reaction of 1 with alcohols in presence of 0.04 M HCl is investigated. This method is attractive for the reasons that it is unexpensive and the hydroxy group can be easily deprotected. However, a major limitation of this method is that the yield of keto-ether of 1 with alcohols such as methanol and ethanol is low. On the other hand, reactions with alcohols such as 2-bromobenzyl alcohol give good yields of the keto-ether. The transannular reactions in hydroxy-ketones reported in the present study seem to serve as good models, in terms of electronic structure and geometry, for the transition-state of transannular hemiacetal formation and hydride shift reactions in medium-ring compounds. Our results suggest that such reactions, particularly hydride shift, can be exploited via easy protection and deprotection of hydroxy groups in the synthesis of important target molecule. Thus, the underlying chemistry of transannular reactions in certain medium-rings reasonably offers potential as a strategic element in the synthesis of polycyclic natural products. It is anticipated that the knowledge obtained in these experiments can be fruitfully applied to the goals for the synthesis of medium rings and the chemistry related to these experiments.


Introduction: One of the most common genes in Helicobacter pylori is glmM which is usually used for identification of infection with the bacterium within gastric biopsy specimens by PCR, as a target gene. The aim of this study was to examine the prevalence rate of glmM gene in DNA samples of stool and evaluate its relationship with the fluctuations of serum levels of TNF-α and IL- 1β. Materials & methods: In this study, blood and stool samples were collected from 82 subjects in two groups with positive and negative HPSA test referred to laboratories of Ilam, Iran. PCR was used to investigate the presence of glmM gene in DNA extracted from stool samples, and then serum levels of studied cytokines were measured using specific kits by ELISA, and the results were analyzed using statistical tests. Findings: Analysis of data obtained from the study showed that the frequency of glmM gene in the sample of cases with positive HPSA was 23.8%, and there was a significant relationship between the presence of this gene in stool and fluctuations in serum levels of TNF-α and IL- 1β (P less-than 0.05). Disussion & conclusion: According to data, it can be said that the presence of glmM gene was associated with fluctuations in any of the variables of HPSA, TNF-α and IL- 1β and the possible presence of the gene in the stool raises with increase in each unit of HPSA and IL- 1β, which in turn raises the prognosis of diseases with a virulence form of bacteria by both serology and stool methods.


The analysis of the internal structure of concepts reveals the presence of a substantial amount of contextual information. Even though this interaction is easily recognizable, it is not clear how contextual information is processed and included into concept representations. The aim of this paper is to shed light on this question by analyzing the effect that an increasing amount of context exerts on conceptual processing. We report a self-paced reading experiment and a visual world experiment to test two hypotheses about the integration of context information: the incremental activation hypothesis suggests that the degree of facilitation in concept processing increases with the amount of context available; and the immediate activation hypothesis states that once a sufficient amount of contextual support is reached, no more facilitation occurs. Our data are compatible with the latter account.


The two- and three-dimensional stability properties of the family of coherent shear-layer vortices discovered by Stuart are investigated. The stability problem is formulated as a non-separable eigenvalue problem in two independent variables, and solved numerically using spectral methods. It is found that there are two main classes of instabilities. The first class is subharmonic, and corresponds to pairing or localized pairing of vortex tubes; the pairing instability is most unstable in the two-dimensional limit, in which the perturbation has no spanwise variations. The second class repeats in the streamwise direction with the same periodicity as the basic flow. This mode is most unstable for spanwise wavelengths approximately 2/3 of the space between vortex centres, and can lead to the generation of streamwise vorticity and coherent ridges of upwelling. Comparison is made between the calculated instabilities and the observed pairing, helical pairing, and streak transitions. The theoretical and experimental results are found to be in reasonable agreement.


Terms used to describe city centers, such as Downtown, are key concepts in everyday or vernacular language. Here, we explore such language by harvesting georeferenced and tagged metadata associated with 8 million Flickr images and thus consider how large numbers of people name city core areas. The nature of errors and imprecision in tagging and georeferencing are quantified, and automatically generated precision measures appear to mirror errors in the positioning of images. Users seek to ascribe appropriate semantics to images, though bulk-uploading and bulk-tagging may introduce bias. Between 0.5–2% of tags associated with georeferenced images analyzed describe city core areas generically, while 70% of all georeferenced images analyzed include specific place name tags, with place names at the granularity of city names being by far the most common. Using Flickr metadata, it is possible not only to describe the use of the term Downtown across the USA, but also to explore the borders of city center neighborhoods at the level of individual cities, whilst accounting for bias by the use of tag profiles.


Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Evidence shows that a conventional western diet may contribute to the proliferation of cancer cells, affecting their prognosis. The aim of this review is to examine the efficacy and safety of using the ketogenic diet as an adjuvant to traditional cancer therapy. The systematic literature search was performed in October 2018 on two search engines: EBSCOhost (Medline, CINHAL, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials) and Web of Science using the following key terms: ketogenic diet, high fat & low-carbohydrate diet, Atkins diet, cancer or neoplasms+. The search limitations included clinical studies among adult cancer patients. A total of 544 publications were initially identified. After the first title/abstract screening, 22 articles were eligible for full-text screening; finally, 3 were eligible for data extraction. We synthesized the effects of the ketogenic diet on cancer progression and safety by extracting and summarizing data on 4 items: 1) study characteristics, 2) characteristics of study participants, 3) diet composition and duration, and 4) key findings for efficacy and safety. Although only 3 studies were included, it was observed that more patients who adhered to the ketogenic diet than patients who did not experienced stability of disease and response to treatment. Patients who received the ketogenic diet also experienced a decrease in tumor size, cholesterol, fasting glucose, and triglyceride levels at 90 days. No statistically significant anthropometric changes were experienced; patients weight was maintained. However, more clinical evidence is necessary before applying the ketogenic diet in an oncological setting.


This guidebook provides a template for corridor planning that will assist states to better understand the implications of transportation decisions on mobility, communities, economic development, and environmental stewardship. The template can be a useful tool to help states program funds to meet identified needs and priorities. It should be of immediate use to transportation decision makers, managers, and planning practitioners involved in the preparation of statewide transportation plans and priority programs.


The Bruneau-Grand View area is part of an artesian basin in northern Owyhee County, Idaho. The area described in this report comprises about 600 square miles, largely of undeveloped public domain, much of which is open, or may be opened, for desert-entry filing. Many irrigation-entry applications to the Federal Government are pending, and information about ground-water geology is needed by local citizens and well drillers, by Federal agencies that have custody of the land, and by local and State agencies that administer water rights. The areal geology and ground-water conditions in the Bruneau-Grand View area seemingly typify several basins in southwestern Idaho, and this study is a step toward definition and analysis of regional problems in ground-water geology and the occurrence and availability of ground water for irrigation or other large-scale uses. Owyhee County is subdivided physiographically into a plateau area, the Owyhee uplift, and the Snake River valley. The Bruneau-Grand View area is largely within the Snake River valley. The climate is arid and irrigation is essential for stable agricultural development. Nearly all usable indigenous surface water in the area is appropriated, including freshet flow in the Bruneau River, which is used for power generation at the C. J. Strike Dam. However, with storage facilities additional land could be irrigated, and some land may be irrigated with Snake River water if suitable reclamation projects are constructed. Sedimentary and igneous rocks exposed in the area range in age from Miocene to Recent. The igneous rocks include silicic and basic intrusive and extrusive bodies, and the sedimentary rocks are compacted stream and lake sediments. The rocks contain economically important artesian aquifers; the principal ones are volcanic rocks in which ground water is imperfectly confined beneath sediments of the Idaho formation, thus forming a leaky artesian system. The altitude of the piezometric surface of the artesian water does not exceed about 2,700 feet above mean sea level. In some areas, where the land surface is below that altitude, the artesian system discharges water through springs and seeps and locally causes waterlogging and development of alkali soil. In chemical quality much of the water is unsuitable for irrigation and domestic use. The water contains a relatively moderate amount of dissolved solids, but the percent sodium and the concentration of fluoride are excessive for some uses. The quality of the water for irrigation ranges from excellent in the southern part of the artesian system to unsuitable in the northern part. All the artesian ground water that was sampled contained excessive amounts of fluoride. There is a substantial supply of undeveloped artesian water in the area, but 147 148 CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HYDROLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES sustained use of the water for irrigation may not be feasible unless provisions can be made for adequate soil drainage and soil amendment, because of the high percentage of sodium in the water. Detailed hydrologic and geologic study of the area should precede development.


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The Microbial World: A Coloring Book of Microbe-Inspired Postcards features the work of top illustrators' take on unique microbes and microscopic animals, ranging from Prochloroccus to the tardigrade. Each postcard showcases the favorite microbe or microscopic animal of thirteen renowned microbial science experts, complete with a short quote about why they love them! Get coloring, be creative, and mail one to your favorite microbiologist!
Paperback, 28 pages, images.


The evaporation of a drop from a liquid subphase is investigated. The two liquids are immiscible, and the contact angles between them are given by the Neumann construction. The evaporation of the drop gives rise to flows in both liquids, which are coupled by the continuity of velocity and shear-stress conditions. We derive self-similar solutions to the velocity fields in both liquids close to the three-phase contact line, where the drop geometry can be approximated by a wedge. We focus on the case where Marangoni stresses are negligible, for which the flow field consists of three contributions: flow driven by the evaporative flux from the drop surface, flow induced by the receding motion of the contact line, and an eigenmode flow that is due to the stirring of the fluid in the corner by the large-scale flow in the drop. The eigenmode flow is asymptotically subdominant for all contact angles. The moving contact-line flow dominates when the angle between the liquid drop and the horizontal surface of the liquid subphase is smaller than 90°, while the evaporative-flux driven flow dominates for larger angles. A parametric study is performed to show how the velocity fields in the two liquids depend on the contact angles between the liquids and their viscosity ratio


This paper surveys the state of the economic literature examining the aggregate impacts of natural disasters. The paper reviews the main disaster data sources available, discusses the determinants of the direct effects of disasters, and distinguishes between short- and long-run indirect effects. The paper then examines some of the relevant policy questions and follows up with a survey of current projections about the likelihood of future disasters. The paper ends by identifying several significant gaps in the literature.


The emplacement of the end-Cretaceous to Palaeocene magmatic arc in the Precordilleria of Vallenar occurred during a fundamental switch in deformation style of the upper plate of the Andean margin from extension/transtension to contractional deformation. This switch in regional tectonics is shown by combining precise [sup]40 Ar/[sup]39 Ar geochronology with microstructural and structural field observations that demonstrate a direct link between the ages for emplacement, cooling and subsequent deformation of end-Cretaceous to Palaeocene magmatic arc.
The emplacement of the Las Campanas pluton during upper plate extension, 70.6 ± 1.3 Ma, was accommodated by a floor-subsidence mechanism that normally reactivated the east-dipping Agua de los Burros extensional growth fault. This generated a steep upper amphibolites-facies, syn-plutonic, brittle-ductile, dip-slip shear zone that is located on the pluton's western side and exhibits a consistent east-down sense of shear. [sup]40 Ar/[sup]39 Ar hornblende and biotite ages from the pluton interior and shear zone are the same, within error, which demonstrates rapid cooling of the pluton.
The emplacement of the Chehueque pluton, 69.1 ± 0.62 Ma to 66.75 ± 0.62 Ma was also accommodated by floor-subsidence mechanisms during upper plate extension, but a switch from regional extension/transtension to contraction can be occurred prior to cooling. The Chehueque pluton has an upper-amphibolite facies brittle-ductile shear zone along its western margin, similar to that of Las Campanas. However, this shear-zone is much wider and shows both east-down and east-up sense of shear indicators. This duality in shear sense is attributed to two phases of deformation during the emplacement and subsequent cooling in this part of the Palaeocene magmatic arc. The initial extensional phase is directly linked to floor-subsidence emplacement mechanisms that generated passive down-bending in the host rocks, towards the pluton. This was closely followed by deformation linked to the initial stages of regional contraction that superimposed an east-up sense of shear; these kinematic indicators can be matched between the host rocks and pluton. This difference in syn-plutonic deformation style and the ages of the Las Campanas and Chehueque plutons therefore constrains the time of the switch from regional extension/transtensional deformation to contractional deformation to a period of c. 4 Myr in latest Cretaceous to early Palaeocene time in the Precordillera of Vallenar.


New information and communication technologies (ICTs), such
as cell phones, email, and social media, have been transforming how social
movements recruit, organize, participate in collective action, and experience
repression. Yet, limited scholarship has addressed the uses of these
technologies by social movements organizing within American prisons. Using a
dialectical interpretive approach, I examine how a coalition of prisoners'
rights organizations uses ICTs to plan and participate in collective resistance
across prison walls. The coalition, referred to here as the New Prisoners'
Rights Coalition (NPRC), organizes against low and no-wage prison labor,
unhealthy and unsafe prison conditions, and inhumane prisoner treatment. The NPRC
has a multi-platform public digital presence and mobilizes prisoner activists
and free activists. Through narrative description, I summarize the ways NPRC
activists use ICTs from December 2013 through September 2016, noting changes in
ICT use over time and in response to movement repression. I find that new ICTs
offer innovative ways for NPRC activists to record and document their
environments, communicate privately, and communicate publicly. ICTs, however,
do not remove all barriers to activism or ensure that activists' concerns are
resolved or even taken seriously. NPRC activists struggle to overcome stigma
and mischaracterization online. They face physical repression, interpersonal
hostilities, institutional sanctions, economic repression, legal sanctions,
interpretive repression, surveillance, and monitoring. In different
circumstances, the NPRC responds to repression by increasing ICT use,
decreasing ICT use, going dark, migrating from one online platform to another,
and shifting digital responsibilities from prisoner activists to free
activists. I explain how, most of the time, the digital unreachability of the
prison environment makes it difficult for NPRC activists to substantiate their
claims of mistreatment, abuse, and injustice. Moreover, I consider how current
prison technology policies may be inadvertently pushing NPRC activists into difficult-to-monitor
online spaces and exacerbating safety concerns of corrections workers.


Despite economic theory and empirical literature that have shown that wide availability of business services contributes significantly to productivity gains and growth, economic modelers have been slow to meaningfully incorporate services into their models. This paper employs a 52-sector, small, open-economy computable general equilibrium model of the Tanzanian economy to assess the impact of the liberalization of regulatory barriers against foreign and domestic business service providers in Tanzania. The model incorporates foreign direct investment in services, and productivity effects in both goods and services markets endogenously through a Dixit-Stiglitz framework. The paper summarizes and builds on the surveys and policy notes of the regulatory regimes in business services in Tanzania, and estimates the ad valorem equivalent of barriers to foreign direct investment. The paper estimates significant gains to Tanzania from services reforms, especially in banking, maritime and road transportation Decomposition exercises reveal that the largest gains will derive from liberalization of non-discriminatory regulatory barriers.


Recently, the Meyer wavelet packets transform (MWPT), the harmonic wavelet transform (HWT), and the S-transform have been used to process recorded earthquake induced strong ground motions (GMs) in various earthquake engineering and engineering seismology applications. In this paper, the potential of these three wavelet-based time-frequency representation (TFR) techniques to identify and to characterize low-frequency pulse-like content in GMs is assessed. This is achieved by processing ensembles of simulated non-stationary time-histories with known energy content upon appropriately fine-tuning the considered TFRs. Next, the ensemble average wavelet transform is used to characterize the energy distribution of the time-histories on the time-frequency plane, within a Monte-Carlo analysis framework. Specifically, the considered time-histories are realizations of sums of uncorrelated uniformly modulated stochastic processes characterized by analytically known evolutionary power spectra (EPSDs). These EPSDs are judicially defined to model the frequency content of pulse-like GMs. Pertinent numerical results considering EPSDs compatible with the elastic design spectrum of the current European (EC8) aseismic code provisions are included, in which pre-specified pulse-type frequency content is introduced by adding low-frequency "patches of energy". The reported numerical data indicate that the HWT provides for smoother estimates of the considered EPSDs than the MWPT. Further, the S-transform is more accurate than both the HWT and the MWPT in identifying the time location and central frequency of the low frequency components contained in the considered artificial pulse-like accelerograms. Overall, this study sheds light into the challenges of detecting low frequency content "corrupted" by higher frequency components in artificial signals modelling pulse-like accelerograms in an effort to inform best practices in the application of TFR techniques to characterize low frequency pulses in recorded GMs.


Neurons form elaborate subcellular structures such as dendrites, axons, cilia, and synapses to receive signals from their environment and to transmit them to the respective target cells. In the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, lack of the RFX transcription factor DAF-19 leads to the absence of cilia normally found on 60 sensory neurons. We now describe and functionally characterize three different isoforms of DAF-19. The short isoform DAF-19C is specifically expressed in ciliated sensory neurons and sufficient to rescue all cilia-related phenotypes of daf-19 mutants. In contrast, the long isoforms DAF-19A/B function in basically all nonciliated neurons. We discovered behavioral and cellular phenotypes in daf-19 mutants that depend on the isoforms daf-19a/b. These novel synaptic maintenance phenotypes are reminiscent of synaptic decline seen in many human neurodegenerative disorders. The C. elegans daf-19 mutant worms can thus serve as a molecular model for the mechanisms of functional neuronal decline.


Objective: The aim of the research was to characterize the diversity of current pharmacy faculty members in the US and UK. Methods: An online self-completion survey was designed and sent to the faculty members from the top 40 accredited pharmacy institutions in USA and top 20 in the UK. Data were analyzed to identify differences between pharmacy faculty members in both regions. Results: The response rate was 9.4% (411/4355). In both UK and US, more female faculty members stand at junior academic positions (e.g. assistant professor/associate professor in US or lecturer/senior lecturer in UK), while male professors were significant more in senior academic level (e.g. professor in US or reader/professor in UK). The results indicated the obstacles for female faculty members to pursue the further professional progression in pharmacy academics. Caucasians accounted for high proposition of faculty members at UK (95.4%) and US (89.6%), while there were very few Hispanic or African/Caribbean-descent faculty members in both countries. Thus, there was significant underrepresentation of minority in pharmacy faculty in both countries. Among the pharmacy discipline, pharmacy practice comprised over half of respondents (53% in UK and 58% in US), while science-related subjects (e.g. medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutics and pharmacology) took the rest positions. The results showed that the training models of pharmacy education in UK and US emphasized on clinical pharmacy and practice. Conclusion: Our research provided a comparative view of the professional development to current pharmacy faculty members in the US and UK. It is also an effective reference to the administrators in pharmacy school.


This study synthesized intervention studies focusing on instruction to improve fraction skills. Seventeen studies met the inclusion criteria: being published in English-language peer-reviewed journals or dissertations between 1975 and 2014, and targeting 3rd- through 12th-grade students struggling to learn mathematics. From the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, addition and subtraction of fractions were most frequently representing the Standards for Mathematical Content, and modeling for mathematics instruction was most frequently observed to represent the Standards for Mathematical Practice. Results indicated that interventions consisting of evidence-based instructional components (e.g., concrete and visual representations; explicit, systematic instruction; range and sequence of examples; heuristic strategies; and use of real-world problems) led to improved performance on measures with fraction concepts and skills. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.


Many cellular signaling pathways contain proteins whose interactions change in response to upstream inputs, allowing for conditional activation or repression of the interaction based on the presence of the input molecule. The ability to engineer similar regulation into protein interaction elements would provide us with powerful tools for controlling cell signaling. Here we describe an approach for engineering diverse synthetic protein interaction switches. Specifically, by overlapping the sequences of pairs of protein interaction domains and peptides, we have been able to generate mutually exclusive regulation over their interactions. Thus, the hybrid protein (which is composed of the two overlapped interaction modules) can bind to either of the two respective ligands for those modules, but not to both simultaneously. We show that these synthetic switch proteins can be used to regulate specific protein-protein interactions in vivo. These switches allow us to disrupt an interaction with the addition or activation of a protein input that has no natural connection to the interaction in question. Therefore, they give us the ability to make novel connections between normally unrelated signaling pathways and to rewire the input/output relationships of cellular behaviors. Our experiments also suggest a possible mechanism by which complex regulatory proteins might have evolved from simpler components.


The downward-sloping yield curves of recent years have been called perverse, but an examination of the history of American interest rates reveals that, at least since the Civil War, falling yield curves have been nearly as common as those with upward slopes. This article summarizes yield curve patterns since 1862 and suggests that (1) the traditional expectations theory remains a viable explanation of observed yield curves and (2) yield curves since the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 have much in common with those of the greenback era of 1862-78 but are distinct from those of the gold standard years of 1879-1970. The slopes of yield curves appear to depend upon expectations of future yields as determined by expectations of inflation, which, in turn, depend upon the prevailing monetary standard.


This paper proposes an effective voice activity detection (VAD) algorithms in low SNR noise environment. Traditional short-term energy and zero-crossing rate can only get high performance at high SNR environment. The spectral entropy algorithm is used to detect stationary noise signal, which is based on the inherent steady characteristics of noise signal. The whole spectrum is divided into some sub-bands, and then, the entropy value of sub-bands are computed separately. Since the voice change is stronger in some frequency bands, the sub-frequency band is extracted for detecting endpoint. The experimental results show that proposed method greatly improves performance of VAD at low SNR environment.


This master thesis is performed on behalf of Volvo Group Trucks Operations Logistics Services in Eskilstuna, which is also the final part of the Master in Engineering program – Innovation, production and logistics at Malardalen University.Logistics Services central warehouse in Eskilstuna ensures that parts are available all over the world, material is transported to the production facilities, packaging is available and vehicles are distributed to the dealers. The current need is to reduce costs and improve the production process at the Inbound department. The aim of this project has been to analyze the current flow of materials and tied-up capital in the inbound flow and give improvement suggestions on reducing lead times and the tied-up capital, as well as give suggestions on common performance metrics for all the sub departments at Inbound.The report is based on theoretical and empirical study, where the theory concerns the topics; logistics, lean philosophy and supply chain management. The empirical study was carried out by data collection through time measurements in the plant and by BEAT-report, observations and discussions with the operators, and interviews with production managers and process developers. The collected data was analyzed and the products in the flow were divided into groups, where the inbound material flow was mapped by the VSM tool. Product groups were analyzed by amount of received material reports, quantity, value and lead time, and the product groups that tied the highest value were defined as well as where in the flow the value was located. For each sub department calculations on production capacity and utilization were performed to analyze the current state and be able to compare the departments with each other. The interviews contributed with knowledge to create a reliable and valid SWOT analysis for each sub department at Inbound, where common factors could be defined concerning deviations, performance metrics and other hidden problems, but also opportunities.Finally, in this report the current state in the Inbound department has been analyzed. Products have been categorized into groups and the materials flow mapped. It has been defined where in the flow and how much value that is tied up, and by which product groups. Hidden problems and deviations have been brought up to surface. Improvement suggestions have been given concerning decreasing of lead times and the tied up value, and also suggestions on common performance metrics for all the sub departments have been given.


This project report is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering, 2018.


City of Arlington was not a tax case, but is still relevant for the tax world because the Supreme Court clarified when the Chevron two-step test for evaluating the validity of some agency interpretations of statutory provisions applies. This issue is generally referred to as ''Chevron step zero.'' The main holding of City of Arlington was that issues of statutory interpretation related to the scope of the agency's jurisdiction or authority to act are subject to the Chevron two-step test. However, the decision also suggests that the most unsatisfactory aspect of the Mead test for answering Chevron step zero may have been eliminated.


A method of replicating randomly rough surfaces fabricated in photoresist has been developed, enabling comparisons of the scattered light to be made between identical diffusers made from different materials. Experimental measurements on one-dimensional metal (gold) and dielectric surfaces are presented, and some initial comparisons with numerical calculations are made.


FIERCE DEBATE OVER civic education in America's public schools has erupted in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Broadly speaking, liberal approaches to civic education have emphasized the need to resist jingoism and to explore why America induces such hatred in certain parts of the world. By contrast, conservative responses to 9/11 have emphasized our national virtues and the need to defend them in times of danger. Conservatives tend to caricature liberal civics lessons as the toleration of the intolerable, while liberals often criticize conservative civics lessons as a knee-jerk brand of patriotism. Yet despite this stark contrast in content, both liberal and conservative advocates continue to insist that civic education in our schools not only impart civic knowledge and civic skills but also shape our deepest values, attitudes, and motivations. My view, briefly stated, is that the attempt to inculcate civic values in our schools is at best ineffective and often undermines the intrinsic moral purpose of schooling. What is civic virtue, and how does it relate to civic knowledge and civic skills? I define civic knowledge as an understanding of true facts and concepts about public affairs, such as the history, structure, and functions of government, the nature of democratic politics, and the ideals of citizenship. Civic skill is the ability to deploy knowledge in the pursuit of political goals--actions such as voting, protesting, petitioning, and debating. Civic virtues integrate such knowledge and skill with proper civic motivations or attitudes, such as respect for the democratic process, love for the nation, and concern for the common good. Ideally, it would seem that civic education ought to promote appropriate virtues, not merely knowledge and skills, because without a virtuous motivation, knowledge and skills lack moral worth. After all, civic knowledge and skills routinely support all manner of immoral political conduct--including the use of deception, manipulation, and coercion--all the way to a traitorous betrayal of the nation to its enemies. Yet if civic schooling attempts to inculcate civic virtue, it can lead to the subordination of knowledge to civic uplift. So it is best for public schools to focus on what they do best: the inculcation of knowledge and skills. Civic Education or Civic Schooling? For the past half-century, political scientists have been seeking to answer some basic questions about the nature of civic education. For instance, where do citizens acquire their knowledge, skills, and virtues? What role do schools--in particular, high-school civics courses--play in that acquisition? Studies focusing on the learning of civic competence or skills find, not surprisingly, that these skills are mainly acquired not by children in schools, but by adults in churches, labor unions, civic organizations, and workplaces. According to these researchers, schools foster skills not by directly teaching civics, but by encouraging students to volunteer in extracurricular organizations and to participate in student government. Even if civic skills are not acquired in schools, surely civic knowledge and civic attitudes might be. After all, there is a long-standing consensus among researchers that an individual's knowledge and attitudes are best predicted by his or her years of schooling. After surveying a huge body of literature about the role of education in political socialization, political scientists M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi reported a broad consensus that interest in politics, the possession of political skills, political participation, and support for the liberal democratic creed all increase with years of schooling. However, there is no agreement on how to explain the simple correlation between civic virtue and educational attainment. It certainly does not appear that more education by itself automatically produces more political activity. …


Dynamic business environments call for companies' organizational agility as being able to sense the changes in competitive environments and respond accordingly. A flexible IT environment facilitates this aim but contrasts with the structuration of IT organization through IT governance. We analyze how scaling agile frameworks as blueprints for agile IT organizations solve the contrast between structuration embedded in IT governance and agility. We see converging business and IT in structure and strategy as facilitator for resolving this conflict. In detail, we compare eight scaling agile frameworks on how IT governance is covered, how IT governance decisions are made and whether business IT convergence is achieved. We conclude that IT governance is still predominantly top down decision-making and focuses on traditional business IT alignment instead of business IT convergence. With our analysis, we provide a comprehensive base for organizations to choose from when approaching their specific agility challenges.


Context: Altered orofacial morphology and poor dental status affects the dietary intake of cleft patient, making susceptible to nutritional imbalance. Oral health care planning for this population is impossible without the evaluation of stomatognathic functional status as well as prosthetic and nutritional status and need. Aims: The aim of this study was to evaluate prosthetic status and prosthetic treatment need, bite force and nutritional status, in adult cleft patients and to compare them with the adult noncleft population of similar definition. Settings and Design: Cleft (n = 250) and noncleft (n = 250) individuals of either sex, aged 18 years or above, excluding severe medically compromised and differently abled, were examined and individual biteforce was measured after obtaining written consent and ethical clearance from the two institutions in Kolkata. Subjects and Methods: A "raw data sheet" was prepared according to the parameters of the "Oral Health Surveys: Basic methods," World Health Organization (1997) for evaluation of prosthetic status and need, dentition status and Mini-Nutritional Assessment, Nestlé (1994) for the evaluation nutritional status. A Gnathodynamometer was used to record bite force. Statistical Analysis Used: Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS 20.0.1, Graph Pad Prism version 5, Student's t-test, and Chi-square test. Results: The mean bite force of frontal area in cleft group (3.4356 ± 0.9457 kgf) was found to be significantly lower (P < 0.0001) than in noncleft (22.8749 ± 5.3644 kgf) group. The difference of mean bite force in the right side (2.4576 ± 0.6131 kgf) and left side (1.2708 ± 0.1036 kgf) in cleft group was found to be statistically significant (P < 0.0001). Prosthetic need in maxillary arch was found to be significantly (χ2: 490.0000; P < 0.0001) higher in cleft than in noncleft group. Nutritional status was observed to be significantly (χ2: 179.4049; P < 0.0001) higher "at risk" in cleft than in noncleft group. Conclusions: Lack of adequate Government concern leading to significantly higher prosthetic need and lower prosthetic status, hence lower bite force resulting lower nutritional status in adult cleft patients in Kolkata.


In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.


As opposed to the approach that makes a dichotomous distinction between 'rigid religiosity' and 'soft religiosity', I would like to point to a reality in which these boundaries are blurred. I shall do so by examining the case of the religious revival movement in Israel (the 'teshuvah movement'), which offers a broad range of teshuvah styles, out of which hozrim beteshuvah (penitents) select 'teshuvah baskets', which they fill and pack themselves, according to their own personal preferences. These 'teshuvah baskets' are dynamic, in that their owners can fill, empty and modify their contents, while they conduct an ongoing critical 'market survey'. This dynamism creates a reality, accompanied by a discourse, which continuously blurs the symbolic boundaries separating the various types of religious 'supply' sources. It demonstrates how practices and beliefs related to 'soft religiosity' are expressed also by those participating in what is generally referred to as 'rigid religiosity'.


Introduction Nursing documentation is one of the main parts of clinical documentation. Poor knowledge of nurses in documentation methods could bring about problems for patients and nurses. It is very important to promote nurses' knowledge and skills in this regard through effective teaching methods. The aim of this study was to use Team-Based Learning (TBL) to teach nursing documentation for nurses. Methods TBL was implemented for 20 nurses participating in a nursing documentation workshop in Qazvin, Iran, in 2015. TBL consists of three main stages. The first stage is the learners' reading about the subject matter. The second stage is measuring the learners' knowledge about the subject matter they have studied using the Individual Readiness Assurance Test (IRAT). In the third stage, more profound learning is achieved by forming small groups and performing teamwork. Finally, participants' views and experiences about TBL were investigated using observations and interviews. Results The results showed that TBL method increases transfer of information and improves intrapersonal relationships and collaboration. All nurses were satisfied with the educational content and the TBL method. The strong points of this workshop included obtaining the viewpoints of the nurses, step-by-step integration of the contents of teamwork, consultation and active participation of all participants, high learning motivation, and creating a sense of competition. The nurses viewed TBL as a useful method to improve their reporting skills. Conclusion Using new teaching methods based on teamwork could bring about achievements, including improvement of intrapersonal relationships and teamwork, which are requisites of nursing in addition to facilitating the learning of educational content. It is suggested that the TBL method be used to improve teaching and to increase nurses' skills and knowledge.


The islands of Southeast Asia comprise one of the most geologically and biogeographically complex areas in the world and are a centre of exceptional floristic diversity, harbouring 45,000 species of flowering plants. Cyrtandra, with over 800 species of herbs and shrubs, is the largest genus in the family Gesneriaceae and is one of the most emblematic and species-rich genera of the Malesian rainforest understorey. The high number of species and tendency to narrow endemism make Cyrtandra an ideal genus for examining biogeographic patterns. We sampled 128 Cyrtandra taxa from key localities across Southeast Asia to evaluate the geo-temporal patterns and evolutionary dynamics of this clade. One nuclear and four chloroplast regions were used for phylogenetic reconstruction, molecular dating, and ancestral range estimation. Results from the dating analysis suggest that the great diversity of Cyrtandra seen in the Malesian region results from a recent radiation, with most speciation taking place in the last five million years. Borneo was recovered as the most likely ancestral range of the genus, with the current distribution of species resulting from a west to east migration across Malesia that corresponds with island emergence and mountain building. Lastly, our investigation into the biogeographic history of the genus indicates high levels of floristic exchange between the islands on the Sunda shelf and the important role of the Philippines as a stepping stone to Wallacea and New Guinea. These patterns underlie much of the plant diversity in the region and form an emerging paradigm in Southeast Asian plant biogeography.


Signaling networks control and regulate outcomes in cells and organisms in both normal physiology and pathophysiological states. Signaling is traditionally represented and studied as a series of stepwise enzymatic events constituting a cascade. However, it is increasingly apparent that such representations limit understanding of signal transduction since these linear cascades function in an interconnected network that includes extensive cross talk among receptors and pathways. Mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics is a useful tool that allows a system-wide investigation of signaling events at the levels of post-translational modifications (PTMs), protein-protein interactions and changes in protein expression on a large scale. This technology now allows accurate quantification of thousands of proteins and their modifications in response to any perturbation.
This thesis work is dedicated to the optimization and employment of quantitative mass spectrometry to cellular signaling and an application to segregate two lymphoma subtypes at the levels of protein expression and phosphorylation, employing state of the art liquid chromatography (LC)-MS/MS technologies coupled with improved sample preparation techniques and data analysis algorithms.
In the first project I investigated the feasibility of a new, high accuracy fragmentation method called higher energy collisional dissociation (HCD) for the analysis of phospho-peptides. Using this method we were able to measure the phospho-proteome of a single cell line in 24h of measurement time which was a great improvement to previous capabilities. This fragmentation method that was originally thought to be slower and less sensitive than the standard method of low resolution collision induced dissociation (CID) fragmentation. However, our work proves this not to be the case and we showed that HCD outperformed the existing low resolution strategy [1].
In the second project I employed this HCD fragmentation technique on the LTQ-Orbitrap Velos for addressing the clinical question of segregating two subtypes of diffuse B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). These subtypes are histologically indistinguishable but had been segregated on the basis of a gene expression signature. I employed the recently developed 'super-SILAC' approach with a 'super-SILAC mix' of multiple labeled cell lines. This heavy reference mix was spiked into several cell lines derived from the two DLBCL subtypes and analyzed LC-MS, resulting in successful segregation based on a distinct proteomic signature [2].
The third project deals with the in-depth analysis of the phospho-proteome of a human cancer cell line on a quadrupole-Orbitrap mass spectrometer using a label-free quantification approach. Our analysis uncovered about 50,000 distinct phosphorylated peptides in a single cell type across a number of cellular conditions allowing assessment of global properties of this large dataset. Strikingly, we found that at least three-quarters of the proteome can be phosphorylated which is much higher than current estimates. We also analyzed phosphotyrosine events using enrichment with anti-phospho-tyrosine antibodies to identify more than 1,500 site specific phosphorylation events. Unexpectedly tyrosine phosphorylated proteins were enriched among higher abundance proteins. The observed difference in phospho-protein abundance correlated with the substrate Km values of tyrosine kinases. For the first time we calculated site specific occupancies using label- free quantification and observed widespread full phosphorylation site occupancy during mitosis.
In the final and main project, I applied proteomics and phospho-proteomics to the study of signal transduction in response to transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β), a multifunctional cytokine. TGF-β signaling regulates many biological outcomes including cell growth, differentiation, morphogenesis, tissue homeostasis and regeneration. The cellular responses to this multifunctional ligand are diverse and can even be opposed to each other, depending on the cell type and the conditions. To shed light on the reasons for the different outcomes, we analyzed the early phospho-proteome and ensuing proteome alterations in response to TGF-β treatment in a keratinocyte cell line. The early SILAC based phospho-proteome analysis uncovered over 20,000 phosphorylation events across five time points (0 to 20 min) of TGF-β treatment. Building on our recent advances in instrumentation, sample preparation, and data analysis algorithms we measured a deep TGF-β responsive proteome at six late time points (6h to 48h) with corresponding controls in only eight days of measurement time. Our label-free approach identified about 8,000 proteins and quantified more than 6,000 of them. This deep proteome covered well established pathways involved in TGF-β signaling, allowing global evaluation at the level of individual pathway members. Combining the TGF-β responsive proteome with an in-silico upstream regulator analysis, we correctly retrieved several known and predicted novel transcription factors driving TGF-β induced cytostasis, de-differentiation and epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT). The combined analysis of transcription factor regulation with early phosphorylation changes and proteome changes enabled visualization of the intricate interplay of key transcription factors, kinases and various pathways driving cytostatis, EMT and other processes induced by TGF-β.
In summary, my thesis developed a highly efficient phospho-proteomic workflow, which was applied to the measurement of a very deep phospho-proteome of a single cancer cell line allowing analysis of its global features. The main achievement was the first in-depth and combined study of the phospho-proteome and resulting proteome changes following a defined signaling event, in this case leading to a time-resolved view of TGF- β signaling events relevant in cancer.


One of the most puzzling properties of the solar system is the high abundance at its birth of 26Al, a short-lived radionuclide with a
mean life of 1 Myr. Now decayed, it has left its imprint in primitive meteoritic solids. The origin of 26Al in the early solar system
has been debated for decades and strongly constrains the astrophysical context of the Sun and planets formation. We show that,
according to the present understanding of star-formation mechanisms, it is very unlikely that a nearby supernova has delivered 26Al
into the nascent solar system. A more promising model is the one whereby the Sun formed in a wind-enriched, 26Al-rich dense shell
surrounding a massive star (M > 32 M). We calculate that the probability of any given star in the Galaxy being born in such a
setting, corresponding to a well-known mode of star formation, is of the order of 1%. It means that our solar system, though not the
rule, is relatively common and that many exo-planetary systems in the Galaxy might exhibit comparable enrichments in 26Al. Such
enrichments played an important role in the early evolution of planets because 26Al is the main heat source for planetary embryos.


Title of dissertation: STRUCTURED APPROACHES FOR EXPLORING INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE TEXT Snigdha Chaturvedi, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Hal Daumé III Department of Computer Science Human relationships have long been studied by scientists from domains like sociology, psychology, literature, etc. for understanding people's desires, goals, actions and expected behaviors. In this dissertation we study inter-personal relationships as expressed in natural language text. Modeling inter-personal relationships from text finds application in general natural language understanding, as well as real-world domains such as social networks, discussion forums, intelligent virtual agents, etc. We propose that the study of relationships should incorporate not only linguistic cues in text, but also the contexts in which these cues appear. Our investigations, backed by empirical evaluation, support this thesis, and demonstrate that the task benefits from using structured models that incorporate both types of information. We present such structured models to address the task of modeling the nature of relationships between any two given characters from a narrative. To begin with, we assume that relationships are of two types: cooperative and non-cooperative. We first describe an approach to jointly infer relationships between all characters in the narrative, and demonstrate how the task of characterizing the relationship between two characters can benefit from including information about their relationships with other characters in the narrative. We next formulate the relationshipmodeling problem as a sequence prediction task to acknowledge the evolving nature of human relationships, and demonstrate the need to model the history of a relationship in predicting its evolution. Thereafter, we present a data-driven method to automatically discover various types of relationships such as familial, romantic, hostile, etc. Like before, we address the task of modeling evolving relationships but don't restrict ourselves to two types of relationships. We also demonstrate the need to incorporate not only local historical but also global context while solving this problem. Lastly, we demonstrate a practical application of modeling inter-personal relationships in the domain of online educational discussion forums. Such forums offer opportunities for its users to interact and form deeper relationships. With this view, we address the task of identifying initiation of such deeper relationships between a student and the instructor. Specifically, we analyze contents of the forums to automatically suggest threads to the instructors that require their intervention. By highlighting scenarios that need direct instructor-student interactions, we alleviate the need for the instructor to manually peruse all threads of the forum and also assist students who have limited avenues for communicating with instructors. We do this by incorporating the discourse structure of the thread through latent variables that abstractly represent contents of individual posts and model the flow of information in the thread. Such latent structured models that incorporate the linguistic cues without losing their context can be helpful in other related natural language understanding tasks as well. We demonstrate this by using the model for a very different task: identifying if a stated desire has been fulfilled by the end of a story.


In the last five years, Artificial Intelligence has made striking progress, and now defeating humans at subtle strategy games, such as Go, and even Poker. However, these algorithms are running on traditional processors which have a radically different architecture than the biological neural networks they are inspired from. This considerably slows them down and requires massive amounts of electrical power, more than ten thousand times what the brain typically need to function. This energy dissipation is not only becoming an environmental issue, but it also sets a limit to the size of neural networks that can be simulated. We are at a point where we need to rethink the way we compute, and build hardware chips directly inspired from the architecture of the brain. This is a challenge. Indeed, contrarily to current electronic systems, the brain is a huge parallel network closely entangling memory and processing.

In this talk, I will show that, for building the neuromorphic chips of the future, we will need to emulate functionalities of synapses and neurons at the nanoscale. I will review the recent developments of memristive nano-synapses and oscillating nano-neurons, the physical mechanisms at stake, and the challenges in terms of materials. Finally, I will present the first achievements of neuromorphic computing with novel nanodevices and the fascinating perspectives of this emerging field.


"Peak-locking" causes deterministic mean measurement bias in most of the existing cross-correlation based algorithms for PIV data analysis. This phenomenon is inherent to the typical smooth curve-fitting through discrete correlation values which are used to obtain the sub-pixel accuracy in velocity. In this paper we introduce a new algorithm/method for obtaining the sub-pixel accuracy, which eliminates the peak-locking effect. We refer to this procedure as "correlation mapping method". In an ideal case, the second exposure (image 2) in a PIV measurement can be regarded as a mapping of the first exposure (image 1) where the mapping rules are affected by displacement, deformation, out of plane motion, etc. The correlation mapping method is based on shifting of image 1 by certain sub-pixel value, thus generating a virtual image (2′), whose gray level can be expressed in terms of the original image and the sub-pixel displacement. Thus, the correlation map of images 1 and 2′ is also a function of the intensity distribution in image 1 and the displacement. This correlation map is matched with the measured correlation map of images 1 and 2, providing a system of equations, one for discrete point in the correlation map with the sub-pixel values as unknowns. Solving these equations for each point in the vicinity of the correlation peak generates a series of sub-pixel displacements. Least square fitting is then used to determine the sub-pixel displacement with minimal difference between the real and virtual correlation values. This method is applied to several experimental and synthetic flow image pairs. In most cases the results show substantial improvements in sub-pixel accuracy in comparison to other algorithms and it eliminates the peak locking bias.Copyright © 2004 by ASME


Abstract In this paper we explore the historical inscriptions at the North Head Quarantine Station, Manly through the lens of biography to examine what the archaeological record can tell us about some of the people who found themselves in quarantine and who chose to mark their presence in the landscape. In particular we focus on two inscriptions located in the Wharf area of the Quarantine Station to illustrate how the archaeological record in this instance provides a mechanism for investigating and exploring the personal and social histories of migration and quarantine. Half of all the inscriptions at the Quarantine Station contain some biographical information about people, place and passage. They provide a material portal through which we can access something of the stories of the ordinary men, women and children who migrated to Australia. The archaeological record of names and lists of passengers and crew does not simply map onto the shipping registers in the archives, as the Samuel Plimsoll and John Howie examples illustrate. The material characteristics of the inscriptions set up a discursive interaction between the archaeological and historical records that allows us to interrogate them as objects with a biography and as objects as biography. Keywords: North Head Quarantine Station, historical inscriptions, object biography ********** Rebecca Will You Marry Me? Tim is carved in large letters across the face of a boulder at Old Man's Hat, North Head, Manly. It appears to have been made relatively recently as the inscription is fresh and unpatinated. Although we do not know who Rebecca is, or indeed whether she agreed to marry Tim, her declarative suitor, this intimate glimpse into a private and personal moment is just one example, amongst many, of an individual instance of mark making and identity assertion at the North Head Quarantine Station. Even if Tim thought his handwritten marriage proposal might remain hidden from view to be seen by Rebecca alone, it nevertheless remains as a mark of presence long past the immediacy and impulse of that one romantic moment. Tim's proposal which sits on the sandstone outcrop amongst a suite of other inscriptions, many dating to the late nineteenth century, has now become part of the larger material record of marks. We are left to wonder not only about Rebecca and Tim and their potential life together but also about what North Head meant to them as a place. The effect of both this individual inscription and those surrounding it is to pull us, the viewer, into an engagement with person and place, both historically and in the present (Frederick and Clarke in press). Inscription and biography When Appadurai (1986) and others raised the 'biographical possibilities' of things (Kopytoff 1986: 66), they mobilised a turning point in the study of object-human relations that resonated with archaeology. Janet Spector's (1993) groundbreaking study of a Lakota awl is a notable example of what is now referred to as the study of artefact life histories (Holtorf 2002; Joy 2009). At the heart of such archaeological investigations is the notion that, 'as people and objects gather time, movement and change, they are constantly transformed, and these transformations of person and object are tied up with each other' (Gosden and Marshall 1999:169). By taking this approach, an individual inscription may be regarded as an artefact with a biography. In one sense the life of the inscription begins when it is carved into the sandstone. In another sense its biography as an archaeological signature only begins when we make note of its presence as a site or artefact. From that point on 'Rebecca and Tim' are no longer simply tied to each other, they acquire a new history in which they are assigned a number, a description, a GPS coordinate, a technique, an aspect and so on. The biography of the inscription inevitably becomes entwined in a larger network of biographies that make up the archaeological assemblage as a whole. …


Consistency is a practical metric that evaluates an instrument's reliability based on its ability to yield the same output when repeatedly given a particular input. Despite its broad usage, little is understood about the feasibility of using consistency as a measure of worker reliability in crowdwork. In this paper, we explore the viability of measuring a worker's reliability by their ability to conform to themselves. We introduce and describe Deja Vu, a mechanism for dynamically generating task queues with consistency probes to measure the consistency of workers who repeat the same task twice. We present a study that utilizes Deja Vu to examine how generic characteristics of the duplicate task - such as placement, difficulty, and transformation - affect a worker's task consistency in the context of two unique object detection tasks. Our findings provide insight into the design and use of consistency-based reliability metrics.


power aware routing schemes for mobile ad hoc networks have been developed for increasing network life time by isolating low power nodes from the routing process. This paper presents a survey of some recently proposed power aware routing schemes based on certain characteristics such as multipath support, quality of service support, mobility support and reliability support. It has been learnt that the majority of the proposed power aware routing schemes are not suitable for real-time applications, as they don't support the establishment of multiple simultaneous paths, provision of guaranteed quality of service, and random node mobility. Reliability has also been an important concern in those schemes, which needs to be incorporated in order to find trust aware energy efficient paths.


Novel imaging of active transcription sites in interphase nuclei of intestinal epithelial cells in situ showed that key genes associated with Wnt and Notch signaling were dynamically regulated as the cells underwent normal maturation during their migration along the mouse crypt-villus axis (CVA). However, oscillating patterns of activation of these genes were displaced along this axis in the histologically normal intestinal mucosa of Apc mice before tumor development. Gene expression profiling then showed that the normal reprogramming of cells along the CVA was dampened in the Apc mice, with an overrepresentation of c-myc target genes among those loci affected in the mutant mice. Moreover, in the Apc mice, there was a perturbed pattern of expression of lineage-specific markers along the CVA consistent with transcription site repression of the Math1 gene, and genes encoding enzymes of every step of the tricarboxylic acid cycle were downregulated in the crypt of Apc mice compared with WT, but not in the villus. These changes may alter energy metabolism and generate a pseudohypoxic state, suggested by elevated expression of Hif1α and its target genes. Thus, although intestinal tumors develop in Apc mice on focal loss or inactivation of the WT allele, our results show that in the Apc mouse, inheritance of only a single WT Apc allele perturbs the dynamic and complex reprogramming underlying normal cell maturation, which links epithelial function and homeostasis with architectural organization of the intestine. Cancer Res; 70(13); 5348–57. ©2010 AACR.


Motivated by the need to audit complex and black box models, there has been extensive research on quantifying how data features influence model predictions. Feature influence can be direct (a direct influence on model outcomes) and indirect (model outcomes are influenced via proxy features). Feature influence can also be expressed in aggregate over the training or test data or locally with respect to a single point. Current research has typically focused on one of each of these dimensions. In this paper, we develop disentangled influence audits, a procedure to audit the indirect influence of features. Specifically, we show that disentangled representations provide a mechanism to identify proxy features in the dataset, while allowing an explicit computation of feature influence on either individual outcomes or aggregate-level outcomes. We show through both theory and experiments that disentangled influence audits can both detect proxy features and show, for each individual or in aggregate, which of these proxy features affects the classifier being audited the most. In this respect, our method is more powerful than existing methods for ascertaining feature influence.


Commissions of inquiry into police have a long and chequered history - both internationally and locally. In this special edition, our focus falls on the two most recent commissions of inquiry into police in South Africa - parochially known as the Marikana and Khayelitsha commissions. The deliberations of the two commissions have attracted much attention. Media coverage has at times opted for the sensational. However, a steady stream of more thoughtful commentaries, crafted by investigative journalists and policing experts, has also seen the light. The archival footprints of both commissions have been enormous. Thousands of pages of information on a wide range of administrative, operational and policy matters of relevance to police and policing have been produced. The online storage of expert testimonies, witness statements, and transcriptions of cross-examinations has further enhanced access to both primary and secondary material. Amid this abundance of data it would seem that those interested in the trials and tribulations of policing the post-colony can do no better than to capitalise on the opportunity for critical reflection and substantive analysis. In this special edition of the South African Crime Quarterly we take up the challenge for reflection.


European Bioinformatics Institute, New York University Langone Medical Center, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Oregon Health and Science University. The contents of this document may be freely copied and distributed in any media, provided the authors, plus the institutions, are credited, as stated under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. For more information see our license. 17/12/2022


This thesis is focused on a study on modeling and measurement of the indoor radio and infrared channels. Both channels have been studied, compared and their vital differences identified. Initially, an infrared channel model was developed that was not similar to any existing models for the infrared domain. The wireless diffuse infrared channel is solely used indoors and is usually confined within a room. Conventional channel models are described, but their disadvantage is heavy time and processor requirements. A new model is introduced, in which the approach is different from the traditional methods in the way that it discretises the delay range instead of the physical characteristics of the environment. The new model offers accurate results without the increased time and processor requirements compared with traditional techniques. Following the characterisation of the infrared channel, a wideband radio propagation campaign took place in two different buildings that allowed valuable insight into the mobile radio channel. Time domain analysis of the measurement results allowed the careful study of the radio channel and produced interesting results as far as RMS delay spread and Power Delay Statistics are concerned. It has been shown that the RMS delay spread is not always dependent on antenna separation, while it was found to be highly dependent on the clutter present on the measurement environment. The infrared model was finally converted to account for radio propagation. Traditional channel models for indoor propagation prediction are described, while the major differences of the infrared and radio channel are mentioned. The radio channel prediction benefits from the accuracy of the infrared model, where a very high accuracy is necessary in order to predict the effect of scattering. A simple measurement campaign has been introduced in order to validate the results of the simulation tool and a comparison with the most important wideband channel models has been performed, along with higher frequency measurements where scattering is more important. The results present a good fit to the measurements and models in the literature, and empirical conclusions relative to the scattering characteristics of the radio channel are drawn from these comparisons.


Estimates of flood discharge with various risks of exceedance are needed for a wide range of engineering problems: examples are culvert and bridge design and construction floods in major projects. At a site with a long record of measured floods, these estimates may be derived by statistical analysis of the flow series. Alternatively the storm magnitude of an appropriate duration, aerial coverage and return period may be estimated and converted into the flood of a given return period using a rainfall/runoff model such as the unit hydrograph. However, in cases where adequate rainfall or river flow records are not available at or near the site of interest, it is difficult for hydrologists and engineers to derive reliable flood estimates directly and regional studies can be useful. This is particularly true in the case of semi-arid areas, where, in general, flow records are scarce. The problem of assigning a flood risk to a particular flow value is one which has received considerable attention in the literature. The estimation of flood risk through the evaluation of a flood frequency distribution is complicated, however, by the lack of a sufficient temporal characterization of the underlying distribution of flood events. The inadequacies in the data availability necessitate the estimation of the flood risk associated with events which have a return period beyond the length of the historical record. Regional flood frequency analysis can be effective in substituting an increased spatial characterization of the data for an insufficient temporal characterization, although problems exist with the implementation of regional flood frequency analysis techniques.


Eating difficulties after stroke are common and can, in addition to being a risk for serious medical complications, impair functional capability, social life and self-image. Stroke unit care entails systematic multidisciplinary teamwork and continuity of care. The purpose of this study was to describe (i) multidisciplinary stroke care as represented in patient records for patients with eating difficulties, and (ii) the written information that was transferred from hospital to elderly care. Data from 59 patient records were analysed with descriptive statistics and by categorization of phrases. Signs of multidisciplinary collaboration to manage eating problems were scarce in the records. While two notes from physiotherapists were found, nurses contributed with 78% of all notes (n = 358). Screening of swallowing and body weight was documented for most patients, whereas data on nutritional status and eating were largely lacking. The majority of notes represented patients' handling of food in the mouth, swallowing and lack of energy. Care plans were unstructured and few contained steps for managing eating. Discharge summaries held poor information on care related to eating difficulties. The language of all professionals was mostly unspecific. However, notes from speech-language therapists were comprehensive and entailed information on follow-up and patient participation.


The Global Youth Wellbeing index includes 35 indicators across seven domains that is gender equality, economic opportunity, education, health, safety and security, citizen participation and information and communication technology. Youth signifies the developmental phase where critical decisions are taken on the key life transitions including; continuing education, entering work, adopting healthy lifestyles, starting a family and participating in society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that contribute to holistic wellbeing among Malaysian youth. The Nominal Group Technique was used to address the question 'What influence the well-being of youth? The group participants were nine youth ages 19 -29 years. Item generation was followed by discussion for clarification and operationalisation. The results indicated that selfrecognition, love, quality time, entertainment, health, vacation, education, ICT, spirituality, wealth, peace, interpersonal relationship and infrastructure, influence the well-being of youth. This study highlighted some important findings that could be used as guidelines in conducting further research on the well-being of youth in Malaysia. Interventions implemented on improving youth well-being should cover on individual, family, learning institutions as well as community level.


Liberia is facing large infrastructure gaps and developmental needs that constrain the country's growth potential. The government has set an ambitious agenda to transform the economy and to reach middle-income country status by 2030 by scaling up investment in infrastructure and human capital. Fiscal space remains constrained by rigidities in current spending and the government will need to resort to borrowing to close some of the gaps. This paper presents an estimate of the nexus between public investment, financing, and growth in Liberia using an inter-temporal macroeconomic model. The model has been calibrated as much as possible to Liberian economic data and assumes that public investment has a high economic and social rate of return and is highly complementary toward private sector investment. The objective of the paper is to contribute to the debate on how fast public investment should be scaled up to address the country's developmental needs. The paper also highlights the trade-offs and potential risks associated with different financing options and the required changes in fiscal policy to ensure macroeconomic stability.


This survey was carried out to provide the Kainji Lake Fisheries Promotion Project (KLFPP), whose overall goal is the improvement of the standard of living of fishing communities around Kainji Lake, Nigeria, and an increase in the availability of fish to consumers, with nutritional status baseline data for long-term monitoring and evaluation of the overall project goal. In a cross-sectional survey, baseline anthropometric data was collected from 768 children, aged 3-60 months in 389 fisherfolk households around the southern sector of Kainji Lake, Nigeria. In addition, data was collected on the nutritional status and fertility of the mothers, vaccination coverage of children and child survival indicators. For control purposes, 576 children and 292 mothers from non-fishing households around Kainji Lake were likewise covered by the survey. A standardised questionnaire was used to collect relevant information, while anthropometric measurements were made using appropriate equipment. Data compilation and analysis was carried out with DATAEASE registered and EPI-INFO registered software, using NCHS reference data for the analysis of anthropometric measurements. The prevalence of stunted children in fishing households was high at 40%, while the prevalence of wasted and underweight children was likewise high at 10% and 29% respectively. Children from non-fishing households had a marginally lower prevalence of stunting, wasting and underweight with 37%, 7% and 25 % respectively, although these differences were not statistically significant. Considering the fact that the survey was carried out during a period of relative food abundance, the prevalence of wasting and underweight children is likely to be much higher during periods of food shortage. The prevalence of stunting, wasting and underweight was relatively high for children aged 3 to 23 months, suggesting an increased risk of malnutrition during this period, most likely associated with inadequate weaning practices. The prevalence of malnourishment amongst women of child-bearing age was relatively high, irrespective of occupation of the household, with an average of 11% undernourished and 6% wasted. Vaccination coverage was very low while infant and child mortality were extremely high with about 1 in 5 children dying before their fifth birthday. Based on the ethical obligation to maximise the potential benefits of the survey, recommendations for activities to improve community nutrition and health were made for communication to relevant authorities. (PDF contains 52 pages)


With the trend of high integration and high power of insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) components, strict requirements have been placed on the heat dissipation capabilities of the IGBT devices. On the basis of traditional rectangular fins, this paper developed two new types of heat-dissipating fins to meet the high requirements of heat dissipation for the IGBT devices. One is the rectangular radiator with a groove length of 2.5 mm and a width of 0.85 mm, the other is the arc radiator with the angle of 125 arc angle, 0.8 mm arc height, and 1.4 mm circle radius. After theoretically calculating the IGBT junction temperature, numerical simulations have been implemented to verify the theoretical result. The commercial CFD software, STAR-CCM+, was employed to simulate the heat dissipation characteristics of the IGBT module under different wind speeds, power, and fin structures. By analyzing the temperature field and vector field of the IGBT module, the analysis results demonstrate that the error between the simulation result and the theoretical calculation is within 5%, which proves the feasibility of the newly designed heat-dissipating fins. When the wind speed is 12.5 m/s, the power is 110 W, the fin height is 31.2 mm, and the fin thickness is 2.3 mm, the rectangular radiator can achieve the best heat dissipation performance.


Systems used to extract renewable energy often are subject to suboptimal working conditions due to the intermittent nature of most renewable energy sources. The flywheel energy storage system suggested in this paper utilises an electronic clutch that engages and disengages the generator from the flywheel of the renewable energy system in an attempt to prevent the generator rotor from coming to a rest and encounter undesirable startup torque. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the threshold controls – average power output by the system can be seen to increase by 5% for a system with a small generator and by over 7,300% for a system with a very large generator, when compared to results for when no threshold controls are applied. The increased effectiveness for the larger generators confirms that the proposed threshold control scheme improves power output by decreasing the effect of counter-torques on the operation of the system.


In this article, we demonstrate the size of family background eff ects in various regions of Russia and Estonia, concentrating on urban and rural diff erences, addressing the idea that the family background effect is moderated by school level admission policies. Having common path-dependent educational institutions from the communist period, the countries diff er in both the extensiveness of the welfare state and system level school choice policies. However, we see many commonalities in both systems, especially at the urban school level. The family background eff ect is defi ned as the dependence of student achievement on family background characteristics, such as parental education, income and social status. In operationalising family background, the number of books at home and parental education are used as proxies, and its eff ect is measured as a percentage of the individual level PISA 2012 score. We contribute to the literature by studying school choice, its key characteristics and moderating eff ects by school level admission policy in an urban environment.


This paper, using panel data on Finnish metalworkers for the years 1990–2000, explores gender differences in the allocation of workers across jobs of different complexity. The data provide measures for the complexity of the workers' tasks and for the individual productivity of each worker. The results indicate that women were less likely to be promoted than men who started their careers in similar tasks. A productivity comparison shows that there was no gender-related productivity differential at the time of the initial assignment, but that women became, on average, more productive than men afterward, in the subsets both of promoted workers and of non-promoted workers. The most plausible interpretation of these results, the authors argue, is that women faced a higher promotion threshold than men. Consistent with this interpretation, they find that the quit rate for young female workers was higher than that for young men.


Patients diagnosed with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) are at increased risk of monomorphic ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation. The presence of myocardial fibrosis provides both anatomical and functional barriers that promote arrhythmias in these patients. Propagation of VT in a reentrant circuit depends on the presence of excitable myocardium and the refractoriness of the circuit. We hypothesize that myocardial refractoriness can be modulated surgically in a model of HFrEF, leading to decreased susceptibility to VT. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were infarcted via permanent left coronary artery ligation. At 3 weeks post-infarction, engineered grafts composed of human dermal fibroblasts cultured into a polyglactin-910 biomaterial were implanted onto the epicardium to cover the area of infarction. Three weeks post-graft treatment, all rats underwent a terminal electrophysiologic study to compare monophasic action potential electroanatomic maps and susceptibility to inducible monomorphic VT. HFrEF rats (n=29) demonstrated a longer (p=0.0191) ventricular effective refractory period (ERP) and a greater (p=0.0394) VT inducibility compared with sham (n=7). HFrEF rats treated with the graft (n=12) exhibited no change in capture threshold (p=0.3220), but had a longer ventricular ERP (p=0.0029) compared with HFrEF. No statistically significant change in VT incidence was found between HFrEF rats treated with the graft and untreated HFrEF rats (p=0.0834). Surgical deployment of a fibroblast-containing biomaterial in a rodent ischemic cardiomyopathy model prolonged ventricular ERP as measured by programmed electrical stimulation. This hypothesis-generating study warrants additional studies to further characterize the antiarrhythmic or proarrhythmic effects of this novel surgical therapy.


Spatial planning documents contain information about the principles and rights of land use in different zones of a local authority. They are the basis for administrative decision making in support of sustainable development. In Poland these documents are published on the Web according to a prescribed non-extendable XML schema, designed for optimum presentation to humans in HTML web pages. There is no document standard, and limited functionality exists for adding references to external resources. The text in these documents is discoverable and searchable by general-purpose web search engines, but the semantics of the content cannot be discovered or queried. The spatial information in these documents is geographically referenced but not machine-readable. Major manual efforts are required to integrate such heterogeneous spatial planning documents from various local authorities for analysis, scenario planning and decision support. This article presents results of an implementation using machine-readable semantic metadata to identify relationships among regulations in the text, spatial objects in the drawings and links to external resources. A spatial planning ontology was used to annotate different sections of spatial planning documents with semantic metadata in the Resource Description Framework in Attributes (RDFa). The semantic interpretation of the content, links between document elements and links to external resources were embedded in XHTML pages. An example and use case from the spatial planning domain in Poland is presented to evaluate its efficiency and applicability. The solution enables the automated integration of spatial planning documents from multiple local authorities to assist decision makers with understanding and interpreting spatial planning information. The approach is equally applicable to legal documents from other countries and domains, such as cultural heritage and environmental management.


More than any other investment area, real estate will be radically affected by the Tax Reform Act of 1986. This dramatic new bill will effect property values, rents, cash flows, and rates of return on most real estate investments. In straightforward English, this book reviews the general effects of tax reform on real estate syndications, REITS, home mortgages, home office deductions, leasehold improvements, rehabilitation credit, low-income housing, and more. Chapters show how to evaluate present and future investments with respect to capital gains and losses, passive loss limitations, depreciation write-offs, alternative minimum tax, and other tax traps and opportunities. Complete with easy-to-understand, worked-out examples under both the old laws and the new ones.


The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adopting on earning management by considering the role of board size and board independence. Univariate tests and multivariate regression analysis were employed to test whether the level of earnings management is significantly lower after the adoption of IFRS and whether the role of board size and board independence on constraining the earnings managements is higher after IFRS adoption for a sample of Chinese listed companies during the period 2003 to 2013 except 2007 over a four-year period before and a six-year period after the adoption of IFRS. The empirical results show that earning management increased after the adoption of IFRS. However, there is no relationship between board size and earnings management before and after the adoption of IFRS but board independence has significantly decreased the earning management after the adoption of IFRS in China. The findings of this study have important implications for policymakers, auditors, multinational firms, and users of financial reports. As the rapid growth of China's economy gains global recognition, the Chinese stock market is capturing the attention of international investor.

 Key words: Earning management, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), board size, board independence.


Metastasis is the major cause of death in cancer patients; with no therapeutic cure, treatments remain largely palliative. As such, new targets and therapeutic strategies are urgently required. Here we show that bone morphogenetic protein-4 (BMP4) blocks metastasis in animal models of breast cancer and predicts improved survival in patients. In preclinical models of spontaneous metastasis, BMP4 acted as an autocrine mediator to modulate a range of known metastasis-regulating genes, including SMAD7, via activation of canonical BMP-SMAD signaling. Restored BMP4 expression, or therapeutically administered BMP4 protein, blocked metastasis and increased survival by sensitising cancer cells to anoikis, thereby reducing the number of circulating tumour cells. Gene silencing of BMP4, or its downstream mediator SMAD7, reversed this phenotype. Administration of recombinant BMP4 markedly reduced spontaneous metastasis to lung and bone. Elevated levels of BMP4 and SMAD7 were prognostic for improved recurrence-free survival and overall survival in breast cancer patients, indicating the importance of canonical BMP4 signaling in the suppression of metastasis and highlighting new avenues for therapy against metastatic disease.