In this work, we present a reconfigurable data glove design to capture different modes of human hand-object interactions, which are critical in training embodied artificial intelligence (AI) agents for fine manipulation tasks. To achieve various downstream tasks with distinct features, our reconfigurable data glove operates in three modes sharing a unified backbone design that reconstructs hand gestures in real time. In the tactile-sensing mode, the glove system aggregates manipulation force via customized force sensors made from a soft and thin piezoresistive material; this design minimizes interference during complex hand movements. The virtual reality (VR) mode enables real-time interaction in a physically plausible fashion: A caging-based approach is devised to determine stable grasps by detecting collision events. Leveraging a state-of-the-art finite element method (FEM), the simulation mode collects data on fine-grained 4D manipulation events comprising hand and object motions in 3D space and how the object's physical properties (e.g., stress and energy) change in accordance with manipulation over time. Notably, the glove system presented here is the first to use high-fidelity simulation to investigate the unobservable physical and causal factors behind manipulation actions. In a series of experiments, we characterize our data glove in terms of individual sensors and the overall system. More specifically, we evaluate the system's three modes by (i) recording hand gestures and associated forces, (ii) improving manipulation fluency in VR, and (iii) producing realistic simulation effects of various tool uses, respectively. Based on these three modes, our reconfigurable data glove collects and reconstructs fine-grained human grasp data in both physical and virtual environments, thereby opening up new avenues for the learning of manipulation skills for embodied AI agents.


Many phenomena taking place in the solar photosphere are controlled by plasma motions. Although the line-of-sight component of the velocity can be estimated using the Doppler effect, we do not have direct spectroscopic access to the components that are perpendicular to the line-of-sight. These components are typically estimated using methods based on local correlation tracking. We have designed DeepVel, an end-to-end deep neural network that produces an estimation of the velocity at every single pixel and at every time step and at three different heights in the atmosphere from just two consecutive continuum images. We confront DeepVel with local correlation tracking, pointing out that they give very similar results in the time- and spatially-averaged cases. We use the network to study the evolution in height of the horizontal velocity field in fragmenting granules, supporting the buoyancy-braking mechanism for the formation of integranular lanes in these granules. We also show that DeepVel can capture very small vortices, so that we can potentially expand the scaling cascade of vortices to very small sizes and durations.


This paper examines the behaviour of the demand for money in Greece during 1976:1-2000:4, a period that included many of the influences that cause money-demand instability. Two empirical methodologies, vector error correction (VEC) modelling and second-generation random coefficient (RC) modelling, are used to estimate the demand for money. The coefficients of both the VEC and RC procedures support the hypothesis that the demand for money becomes more responsive to both the own rate of return on money balances and the opportunity cost of holding money because of financial deregulation. In general, both procedures also support the hypothesis that the income elasticity of money demand declines over time as a result of technological improvements in the payments system and the development of money substitutes, which lead to economies of scale in holding money.


In the years immediately prior to the financial crisis, the doctrine of an independent Fed had achieved broad and unquestioned acceptance, especially within the economics profession. Under cover of this doctrine the Fed deployed unconventional monetary policies to vastly expand its balance sheet as well as the range of its activities in financial markets. Recently, this unilateral and arbitrary expansion of the Fed's powers combined with its failure to stimulate a robust recovery from the Great Recession has provoked increasing opposition even among some economists. In this changing intellectual climate, the time is ripe to implement a short-run program, under the existing regime of the fiat dollar, to terminate the Fed's anomalous status as a quasi-independent agency and make it directly accountable to Congress like any other department or agency of the Executive Branch.


Aged asphalt mixture is heavily involved in pavement maintenance and renewed construction because of the development of recycling techniques. The aged bitumen binder has partially lost its viscous behavior. Rejuvenators are therefore designed and used in this recycling procedure to enhance the behavior of such aged reclaimed bitumen. However, tests have not yet been clearly specified to understand the diffusion characteristics of rejuvenators in aged bitumen. In this research, molecular dynamic simulation is proposed and conducted with Materials Studio software to study the diffusion behavior of rejuvenators in aged bitumen at the molecular level. Two rejuvenators, named R-1 and R-2, were included. The difference between these two rejuvenators is their chemical composition of C=O. The diffusion coefficient is determined by studying the molecular movement. Results illustrate that the proposed models can be used to study the diffusion of rejuvenators in aged bitumen sufficiently. In the meantime, a dynamic shear rheometer (DSR) is used to evaluate the recovery influence on aged bitumen resulting from rejuvenators. The experimental results strengthen the model simulations and indicate that the aging index of bitumen has a significant influence on the rejuvenating effect. Research results indicate that rejuvenators have a sufficient rejuvenating effect on the long-term aged bitumen and a limited effect on short-term aged bitumen.


Streptomyces bacteria make numerous secondary metabolites, including half of all known antibiotics. Production of antibiotics is usually coordinated with the onset of sporulation but the cross regulation of these processes is not fully understood. This is important because most Streptomyces antibiotics are produced at low levels or not at all under laboratory conditions and this makes large scale production of these compounds very challenging. Here, we characterize the highly conserved actinobacterial two-component system MtrAB in the model organism Streptomyces venezuelae and provide evidence that it coordinates production of the antibiotic chloramphenicol with sporulation. MtrAB are known to coordinate DNA replication and cell division in Mycobacterium tuberculosis where TB-MtrA is essential for viability but MtrB is dispensable. We deleted mtrB in S. venezuelae and this resulted in a global shift in the metabolome, including constitutive, higher-level production of chloramphenicol. We found that chloramphenicol is detectable in the wild-type strain, but only at very low levels and only after it has sporulated. ChIP-seq showed that MtrA binds upstream of DNA replication and cell division genes and genes required for chloramphenicol production. dnaA, dnaN, oriC, and wblE (whiB1) are DNA binding targets for MtrA in both M. tuberculosis and S. venezuelae. Intriguingly, over-expression of TB-MtrA and gain of function TB- and Sv-MtrA proteins in S. venezuelae also switched on higher-level production of chloramphenicol. Given the conservation of MtrAB, these constructs might be useful tools for manipulating antibiotic production in other filamentous actinomycetes.


The tumor suppressor protein p53 plays a role in cellular responses to cancer-initiating events by regulating progress through the cell cycle. Several recent studies have shown that p53 transactivates expression of the members of the proapoptotic microRNA-34 family, which are underexpressed in several cancers. We demonstrate here that the latency-associated cluster of microRNAs (miRNA) encoded by an oncogenic herpesvirus, gallid herpesvirus 2 (GaHV-2), is a direct target of p53. Robust transcriptional activity was induced in three avian cell lines by a sequence mapping 600 base pairs (bp) upstream of the cluster of miRNAs. We found transcription start sites for the pri-miRNA transcript at the 3' end of this transcription-inducing sequence. The promoter has no consensus core promoter element, but is organized into a variable number of tandem repeats of 60-bp harboring p53-responsive elements (RE). The minimal functional construct consists of two tandem repeats. Mutagenesis to change the sequence of the p53 RE abolished transcriptional activity, whereas p53 induction enhanced mature miRNA expression. The identification of a viral miRNA promoter regulated by p53 is biologically significant, because all avirulent GaHV-2 strains described to date lack the corresponding regulatory sequence, whereas all virulent, very virulent, and hypervirulent strains possess at least two tandem repeats harboring the p53 RE.


A crucial area of Biomedical Natural Language Processing is relation extraction, the study of identifying relations between entities. One main challenge of relation extraction is text variations. They hinder pattern-based approaches to encode all patterns necessary for achieving a high recall, and limit the generalizability of machine-learning models especially when the size of training data is small. This thesis exams the representation of sentences for relation extraction. In particular, we are concerned with a suitable level of abstraction, which will improve the performance of the relation extraction systems, and in turn lead to advances in other text-mining fields. This thesis describes three steps along these lines. First, we propose an automatic approach for sentence simplification. It reduces the sentence complexity by detecting various syntactic constructs and generating simplified sentences. Second, we describe a framework to facilitate the development of pattern-based biomedical relation extraction systems. The framework leverages various linguistic theories to semi-automatically generate lexico-syntactic patterns. It also applies sentence simplification and semantic relations to increase the pattern coverage. Finally, we propose a structured representation, called Extended Dependency Graph (EDG). It provides an abstract representation accounting for textual variations, by not only considering syntactic dependencies between words in a sentence, but also utilizing information beyond syntax to capture dependencies. In each of these steps, we conduct experiments to evaluate the efficacy of the ideas. The results (1) show that various text-mining approaches can benefit from sentence simplification, (2) demonstrate that we can create state-of-the-art pattern-based systems using the framework to extract different types of relations, and (3) validate the utility of EDG in both pattern-based and machine-learning relation extraction systems.


We describe a project aimed at creating a deeply annotated corpus of Russian texts. The annotation consists of comprehensive morphological marking, syntactic tagging in the form of a complete dependency tree, and semantic tagging within a restricted semantic dictionary. Syntactic tagging is using about 80 dependency relations. The syntactically annotated corpus counts more than 28,000 sentences and makes an autonomous part of the Russian National Corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru). Semantic tagging is based on an inventory of semantic features (descriptors) and a dictionary comprising about 3,000 entries, with a set of tags assigned to each lexeme and its argument slots. The set of descriptors assigned to words has been designed in such a way as to construct a linguistically relevant classification for the whole Russian vocabulary. This classification serves for discovering laws according to which the elements of various lexical and semantic classes interact in the texts. The inventory of semantic descriptors consists of two parts, object descriptors (about 90 items in total) and predicate descriptors (about a hundred). A set of semantic roles is thoroughly elaborated and contains about 50 roles.


We study the problem of unlearning datapoints from a learnt model. The learner first receives a dataset $S$ drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution, and outputs a model $\widehat{w}$ that performs well on unseen samples from the same distribution. However, at some point in the future, any training datapoint $z \in S$ can request to be unlearned, thus prompting the learner to modify its output model while still ensuring the same accuracy guarantees. We initiate a rigorous study of generalization in machine unlearning, where the goal is to perform well on previously unseen datapoints. Our focus is on both computational and storage complexity. For the setting of convex losses, we provide an unlearning algorithm that can unlearn up to $O(n/d^{1/4})$ samples, where $d$ is the problem dimension. In comparison, in general, differentially private learning (which implies unlearning) only guarantees deletion of $O(n/d^{1/2})$ samples. This demonstrates a novel separation between differential privacy and machine unlearning.


This survey of wild oats and other weeds was conducted to obtain information needed in order to determine the benefits from diallate and triallate for wild oats control. Diallate is being reviewed by EPA as part of the Rebuttable Presumption Against Registration (RPAR) process and triallate is under consideration for RPAR. Pesticides are considered for RPAR review when there is information indicating possible health or environmental hazards. Reregistration of RPAR pesticides is dependent upon rebuttal of the hazards and/or a favorable benefit-risk analysis. Benefits can be actual or potential benefits so the benefits from herbicides for wild oats control is dependent upon the extent of the wild oats problem as well as present usage of herbicides for wild oats control.
This weed survey will not only provide information on infestations for present herbicide benefit analysis. but will also serve as a basis for determining weed population shifts in the future. Weed surveys give valuable information on the location and extent of infestation by various species which is important to development of weed prevention and control systems.


Th is study endeavors to clarify the taxonomy of Anthracoidea species occurring in East Asia. Being a cosmopolitan genus, more widely distributed in temperate and subarctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere, Anthracoidea is insuffi ciently studied in East Asia, particularly in Japan and Korea. A comprehensive account of the species composition and distribution of the Anthracoidea species in Japan is presented herein. Further, information about the Anthracoidea species in the Kuriles, Sakhalin, and Korean Peninsula is also provided. Th ree new smut fungi are described and illustrated as follows: Anthracoidea caricis-grallatoriae on Carex grallatoria from Japan, Anthracoidea lanceolatae on Carex lanceolata from South Korea, and Anthracoidea pseudomichelii on Carex michelii from Central Europe. For Cintractia japonica on 'Carex capillacea', a new combination, Anthracoidea japonica, is proposed. Anthracoidea grallatoriae Vánky is a superfl uous name and a synonym of A. japonica. Th e existence of the type specimen of Cintractia subglobosa S. Ito makes the lectotypifi cation of C. subglobosa redundant. Similarly, a lectotype of Cintractia variabilis S. Ito is also made redundant. Based on a comparative morphological investigation, 20 Anthracoidea species were established in Japan, all of them on host plants of Carex. In addition to Anthracoidea caricisgrallatoriae, six other species, A. capillaris, A. humilis, A. irregularis, A. karii, A. michelii, a Teodor T. Denchev and Cvetomir M. Denchev have main contribution for the conduction of this study. Both of them contributed equally. * Corresponding author: e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com 2 DENCHEV, T.T. et al. — The genus Anthracoidea (Anthracoideaceae) in Japan and A. sempervirentis, are reported for the fi rst time from Japan. Eight plant species are reported as new hosts of Anthracoidea species in Japan: Carex gmelinii with Anthracoidea buxbaumii; Carex foliosissima, C. mitrata, C. morrowii, C. nervata, and C. subebracteata with Anthracoidea caryophylleae; Carex fernaldiana and C. tenuinervis with Anthracoidea microsora. Ten fungus-host combinations, Anthracoidea capillaris on Carex tenuiformis, A. caryophylleae on Carex leucochlora, A. caryophylleae on Carex mitrata, A. caryophylleae on Carex foliosissima, A. caryophylleae on Carex morrowii, A. humilis on Carex lanceolata, A. karii on Carex omiana var. monticola, A. microsora on Carex fernaldiana, A. microsora on Carex tenuinervis, and A. sempervirentis on Carex makinoensis, are new for science. Additional distribution records are given for some Anthracoidea species hitherto known from Japan. Th e genus Anthracoidea is recorded for the fi rst time from the Korean Peninsula, with three species from South Korea: A. caryophylleae on Carex leucochlora, A. lanceolatae on Carex lanceolata, and A. siderostictae on Carex siderosticta. Two species, Anthracoidea caryophylleae and A. variabilis, are reported for the fi rst time from the Kuriles. Anthracoidea variabilis is a new species for Russia. Th ree species, Anthracoidea globularis, A. heterospora, and A. paniceae, are reported for the fi rst time from Sakhalin. Th e study further found that four fungus-host combinations had been wrongly recorded in the literature, specifi cally, Carex cespitosa is not a host of Anthracoidea variabilis; Carex foliosissima and C. conica are not hosts of Anthracoidea microsora; and Carex tarumensis is not a host of Anthracoidea buxbaumii.


A series of value/impact studies were performed for accident preventive and mitigative options intended to reduce the risks posed by the storage of spent fuel at nuclear power plants in spent fuel storage pools. Options studied included limited low-density reracking of spent fuel, installation of water sprays above the spent fuel pool, and the installation of redundant cooling and/or makeup system. The results of these studies indicated that the measures were in general not likely to be cost effective. The reason for this is due to both the low likelihood of a spent fuel pool accident that could result in a significant radiological release and the high cost of proposed modifications. These insights are largely contingent upon compliance with guidelines developed for licensees to assure the safe handling of heavy loads in the vicinity of spent fuel pools thus reducing the likelihood of the structural failure of the pool and rapid loss of water inventory due to a cask drop event.


Panoramic Camera (Pancam) images from Meridiani Planum reveal a low-albedo, generally flat, and relatively rock-free surface. Within and around impact craters and fractures, laminated outcrop rocks with higher albedo are observed. Fine-grained materials include dark sand, bright ferric iron–rich dust, angular rock clasts, and millimeter-size spheroidal granules that are eroding out of the laminated rocks. Spectra of sand, clasts, and one dark plains rock are consistent with mafic silicates such as pyroxene and olivine. Spectra of both the spherules and the laminated outcrop materials indicate the presence of crystalline ferric oxides or oxyhydroxides. Atmospheric observations show a steady decline in dust opacity during the mission. Astronomical observations captured solar transits by Phobos and Deimos and time-lapse observations of sunsets.


To improve the wear resistance of small machine parts such as microscale gears, we developed a novel surface treatment process, laser-induced local surface treatment. Disk-shaped austenitic stainless steel (SUS316L) specimens were soaked in Al(NO3)3 solution and subsequently irradiated by a nano-pulse fiber laser beam. The treated surfaces were then observed under a scanning electron microscope and analyzed using an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer. The effects of defocus amount, tribology behavior, and wear resistance on the characteristics of the treated surface were examined in detail. The surface roughness of the treated specimens with the defocus range of -1 to -2 mm was lower than that of the treated specimen without defocus. The thickness of the treated layer decreased when the defocus amount was increased within the abovementioned range of values. However, when treatment was performed with a defocus amount of -3 mm, no noticeable change was observed on the treated surface; this was attributed to the difference in laser-energy density. The friction coefficient of the laser-treated specimen with the defocus level of -1 mm was much lower than that of the untreated specimen. This implies that the wear resistance of austenitic stainless steel can be improved with the proposed surface treatment method.


Summary We studied the introduction of a telemedicine service for the prenatal diagnosis and management of pregnant patients at a remote site in Scotland. During a 10-month study period, 85 videoconferences were carried out between the remote hospital in Elgin and the fetal medicine unit in Aberdeen. ISDN transmission at 384 kbit/s was used. There were technical problems in five calls (6%). The mean call duration was 40 min (range 5-60 min). Most calls (62%) were for educational reasons and 26% were for clinical purposes. The degree of satisfaction recorded by the remote health-care staff was high: the mean score on a five-point scale (1, very unsatisfied; 5, very satisfied) for general satisfaction with the clinical support was 4.2. The system was found to be both clinically useful and educationally beneficial.


Abstract Primary objective: To examine deficits in emotion perception for adults who had experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) during childhood and investigate relationships between emotion perception skills, empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM). Design: Participants consisted of a random selection of individuals (n = 52) who had previously been recruited for a larger study. All participants had experienced an injury event as a child (0–17 years) (mild TBI, moderate/severe TBI or fractured limb) and were now aged between 18–30 years, with a minimum of 5 years post-injury. Methods and procedure: Each participant completed an emotion-sensitivity task, facial expression recognition task, the faux pas test (ToM) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Inventory (IRI: Empathy). Main outcomes: Individuals with moderate/severe TBI were less sensitivite to emotion and less accurate at facial expression recognition than those with mild TBI and orthopaedic controls. Difficulty with affective ToM but not empathy was also found. The emotion-sensitivity and the facial expression recognition tasks were unrelated, with only emotion sensitivity but not expression recognition related to ToM and IRI empathy. Conclusions: The current findings indicated that deficits in social skills are long lasting and raises the issue of whether intervention to improve sensitivity to genuine emotion can influence more complex social skills and improve quality of social interactions for individuals following TBI.


By partitioning mass and energy fluxes, soil moisture exerts a fundamental control on basin hydrological response. Using the design characteristics of the Biosphere 2 hillslope experiment, this study investigates aspects of soil moisture spatial and temporal variability in a zero‐order catchment of a semiarid climate. The hydrological response of the domain exhibits a particular structure, which depends on whether topography‐induced subsurface stormflow is triggered. The occurrence of the latter is conditioned by topography, soil depth, and pre‐storm spatial distribution of moisture. As a result, a non‐unique behavior of soil moisture spatial heterogeneity emerges, manifested through a hysteretic dependence of variability metrics on mean water content. Further, it is argued that vegetation dynamics impose a "homogenizing" effect on pre‐storm moisture states, decreasing the likelihood that a rainfall event will result in topographic redistribution of soil water. Consequently, post‐rainfall soil moisture dynamics associated with the effect of topography that could lead to the enhancement of spatial heterogeneity are suppressed; a potential "attractor" of catchment states emerges. The study thus proposes several hypotheses that will be testable within the framework of long‐term hillslope experiments.


We examine a new data set of laws and practices governing public procurement, as well as procurement outcomes, in 187 countries. We measure regulation as restrictions on discretion of the procuring agents. We find that laws and practices are highly correlated with each other across countries, better practices are correlated with better outcomes, but laws themselves are not correlated with outcomes. To shed light on this puzzle, we present a model of procurement in which both regulation and public sector capacity determine the efficiency of procurement. In the model, regulation is effective in countries with low public sector capacity, and detrimental in countries with high public sector capacity because it inhibits the socially optimal exercise of discretion. We find evidence broadly consistent with this prediction: regulation of procurement improves outcomes, but only in countries with low public sector capacity.


The phenolic composition, aroma, and sensory profiles were evaluated for Pinot noir wines made using four different maceration techniques that modified the floating pomace cap during fermentation: 1) daily plunging; 2) reduced skin particle size (accentuated cut edges, ACE); 3) submerged cap; and 4) ACE plus submerged cap. Throughout vinification, wines were analyzed using rapid analytical techniques to assess the following phenolic attributes: anthocyanin, tannin, nonbleachable pigments, color density, and hue. At six months bottle age (230 days postinoculation), sensory and aroma analyses were conducted on the finished wines. ACE macerated wines were found to have the highest proportion of red color, tannin, nonbleachable pigments, fruit and floral aromas, bitterness, and astringency. Submerging the pomace cap resulted in a lower concentration of phenolic components when compared to ACE wines, but resulted in a significantly higher phenolic content and dark cherry aromas and flavor when compared to the control wine. These findings suggest that the employment of either maceration technique has the potential to make a considerable difference to the wine style produced from a given parcel of fruit and may provide an opportunity to press wines earlier in the fermentation. Linear regression analyses were conducted to compare descriptive wine parameters with instrumental phenolic measurements and demonstrated several strong correlations: red color appearance was correlated with both color density (r2 = 0.95) and nonbleachable pigment (r2 = 0.95); dark fruit flavor was correlated with both color density (r2 = 0.85) and nonbleachable pigment (r2 = 0.85); and astringency was correlated with both tannin (r2 = 0.97) and nonbleachable pigment (r2 = 0.87), demonstrating that techniques of rapid chemical analysis were able to provide valuable insights into the sensory properties of the wine and may become useful tools for monitoring the development of the wine during vinification. While submerged cap vinification also increased the tannin and nonbleachable pigment profiles of the wine, ACE maceration was found to be significantly more effective and is likely to be more readily adapted for application in commercial wineries.


Background: Recently, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Programme for the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans has been criticized for several of its evaluations, and also for the approach used to perform these evaluations. Some critics have claimed that failures of IARC Working Groups to recognize study weaknesses and biases of Working Group members have led to inappropriate classification of a number of agents as carcinogenic to humans. Objectives: The authors of this Commentary are scientists from various disciplines relevant to the identification and hazard evaluation of human carcinogens. We examined criticisms of the IARC classification process to determine the validity of these concerns. Here, we present the results of that examination, review the history of IARC evaluations, and describe how the IARC evaluations are performed. Discussion: We concluded that these recent criticisms are unconvincing. The procedures employed by IARC to assemble Working Groups of scientists from the various disciplines and the techniques followed to review the literature and perform hazard assessment of various agents provide a balanced evaluation and an appropriate indication of the weight of the evidence. Some disagreement by individual scientists to some evaluations is not evidence of process failure. The review process has been modified over time and will undoubtedly be altered in the future to improve the process. Any process can in theory be improved, and we would support continued review and improvement of the IARC processes. This does not mean, however, that the current procedures are flawed. Conclusions: The IARC Monographs have made, and continue to make, major contributions to the scientific underpinning for societal actions to improve the public's health. Citation: Pearce N, Blair A, Vineis P, Ahrens W, Andersen A, Anto JM, Armstrong BK, Baccarelli AA, Beland FA, Berrington A, Bertazzi PA, Birnbaum LS, Brownson RC, Bucher JR, Cantor KP, Cardis E, Cherrie JW, Christiani DC, Cocco P, Coggon D, Comba P, Demers PA, Dement JM, Douwes J, Eisen EA, Engel LS, Fenske RA, Fleming LE, Fletcher T, Fontham E, Forastiere F, Frentzel-Beyme R, Fritschi L, Gerin M, Goldberg M, Grandjean P, Grimsrud TK, Gustavsson P, Haines A, Hartge P, Hansen J, Hauptmann M, Heederik D, Hemminki K, Hemon D, Hertz-Picciotto I, Hoppin JA, Huff J, Jarvholm B, Kang D, Karagas MR, Kjaerheim K, Kjuus H, Kogevinas M, Kriebel D, Kristensen P, Kromhout H, Laden F, Lebailly P, LeMasters G, Lubin JH, Lynch CF, Lynge E, 't Mannetje A, McMichael AJ, McLaughlin JR, Marrett L, Martuzzi M, Merchant JA, Merler E, Merletti F, Miller A, Mirer FE, Monson R, Nordby KC, Olshan AF, Parent ME, Perera FP, Perry MJ, Pesatori AC, Pirastu R, Porta M, Pukkala E, Rice C, Richardson DB, Ritter L, Ritz B, Ronckers CM, Rushton L, Rusiecki JA, Rusyn I, Samet JM, Sandler DP, de Sanjose S, Schernhammer E, Seniori Costantini A, Seixas N, Shy C, Siemiatycki J, Silverman DT, Simonato L, Smith AH, Smith MT, Spinelli JJ, Spitz MR, Stallones L, Stayner LT, Steenland K, Stenzel M, Stewart BW, Stewart PA, Symanski E, Terracini B, Tolbert PE, Vainio H, Vena J, Vermeulen R, Victora CG, Ward EM, Weinberg CR, Weisenburger D, Wesseling C, Weiderpass E, Zahm SH. 2015. IARC Monographs: 40 years of evaluating carcinogenic hazards to humans. Environ Health Perspect 123:507–514; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1409149


The interplay between robotics and neuromechanics facilitates discoveries in both fields: nature provides roboticists with design ideas, while robotics research elucidates critical features that confer performance advantages to biological systems. Here, we explore a system particularly well suited to exploit the synergies between biology and robotics: high-speed antenna-based wall following of the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana). Our approach integrates mathematical and hardware modeling with behavioral and neurophysiological experiments. Specifically, we corroborate a prediction from a previously reported wall-following template - the simplest model that captures a behavior - that a cockroach antenna-based controller requires the rate of approach to a wall in addition to distance, e.g., in the form of a proportional-derivative (PD) controller. Neurophysiological experiments reveal that important features of the wall-following controller emerge at the earliest stages of sensory processing, namely in the antennal nerve. Furthermore, we embed the template in a robotic platform outfitted with a bio-inspired antenna. Using this system, we successfully test specific PD gains (up to a scale) fitted to the cockroach behavioral data in a "real-world" setting, lending further credence to the surprisingly simple notion that a cockroach might implement a PD controller for wall following. Finally, we embed the template in a simulated lateral-leg-spring (LLS) model using the center of pressure as the control input. Importantly, the same PD gains fitted to cockroach behavior also stabilize wall following for the LLS model.


In this paper we focus on Internet-based simulation, a form of distributed simulation in which a set of execution units that are physically located around the globe work together to run a simulation model. This setup is very challenging because of the latency/variability of communications. Thus, clever mechanisms must be adopted in the distributed simulation, such as the adaptive partitioning of the simulated model and load balancing strategies among execution units. We simulate a wireless model over a real Internet-based distributed simulation setup, and evaluate the scalability of the simulator with and without the use of adaptive strategies for both communication overhead reduction and load-balancing enhancement. The results confirm the viability of our approach to build Internet-based simulations.


This chapter introduces the field of Mixed Reality that merges the real and virtual worlds seamlessly. To develop a Mixed Reality system, two fundamental problems should be addressed: tracking and user interface. Tracking in Mixed Reality is defined as the task of estimating the user's viewing pose. The goal of tracking is to achieve an accurate registration between real and virtual objects. In order to allow the user to interact e±ciently with the Mixed Reality scene, interaction techniques should be designed. A wide range of Mixed Reality applications, such as medical and entertainment applications, have been identified. We will focus on the new trends and applications in the area of Mixed Reality.


Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore both the cognitive and affective images and examine the effects of destination image through both aspects on satisfaction levels and tourist loyalty.

Design/methodology/approach

Data collection was conducted using the convenience sampling method. The on-site survey was carried out with Chinese tourists at the popular tourist sites in Seoul City.

Findings

The results showed that the cognitive image had a direct influence on the affective image and confirmed the formation process of the destination image. Both cognitive and affective images had positive influences on satisfaction, and in turn, satisfaction predicted tourist loyalty. Moreover, the relationship between destination image and loyalty revealed that the affective image had a direct influence on tourist loyalty. Although the cognitive image showed no direct linkage to tourist loyalty, the authors found that it had an indirect influence on tourist loyalty through affective image and satisfaction.

Originality/value

The findings of this study provide a better understanding of the process that determines Chinese tourists' destination choices and loyalty. Moreover, it provides insightful implications for the Korean Government, the Korea Tourism Organization and tourism operators.


Europeans introduced brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) into Australia in the 1800's and they
are now widespread in the lentic and lotic systems of temperate south-eastern Australia.
The literature on salmonids in the streams of other continents provides examples ofboth
weak and strong impacts on the density of stream invertebrates. In Australia, we know
little of the impacts that brown trout have on the native invertebrate fauna of freshwater
habitats. This thesis aimed to determine the top-down effects oftrout predation in small
to medium sized headwater streams in Tasmania. My overall hypothesis was that the
effects of predatory trout should be spatially heterogeneous in headwater streams, where
physical and biological conditions are often variable over small spatial scales.
Initially, I used a survey of five upland forest streams containing brown trout and five
nearby highly similar streams that are naturally fishless to address how the top-down
impacts of trout are affected by: .1) the identity and behaviour of different invertebrate
taxa; 2) inter-reach variation in substrate and flow conditions; 3) and how variation in
shading affects the occurrence of trophic cascades. Finally; I conducted an experiment
using bank side stream channels that mimicked depositional habitats to test whether the
top-down effects of brown trout can induce a trophic cascade in depositional habitats,
and whether any trophic cascades are limited to high light environments.
For the surveys, trout had the strongest impacts on mayflies, particularly baetids, which
were up to five fold less numerous in the presence oftrout. Mayflies were probably
vulnerable to trout as they are numerous in the study streams, large bodied, feed on the
exposed surface of stones and frequently enter the drift. However, the effects of trout
were more marked on the behaviour of invertebrates with five taxa that showed no
density effects exhibiting reduced daytime drifting in the presence of trout.
The impacts of trout varied across the stream reach; for example, the density of baetid
mayflies were reduced in glide but not riffle or pool habitats in the presence of trout. In
contrast, leptophlebiid mayflies and gripopterygid stoneflies were reduced in trout streams in all habitats, although the effects were stronger on the epi-benthic density of
these invertebrates.
I argue that patch-to-patch variation in flow and substrate conditions affect the
vulnerability of invertebrates to trout with the strongest impacts under conditions of least
I
complexity. For example, baetid mayflies might be particularly vulnerable in glides
because trout are more numerous in glides and can more easily detect baetids in the drift
under smooth, low complex flow than they can in the rough, complex flow of riffles.
Moreover, within discrete habitats, the effects of trout may be strongest on invertebrates
that occupy the structurally simple epibenthic surfaces of cobbles and boulders.
The top-down effects of trout on invertebrates and algae were also affected by shading.
For example, algal biomass was higher in trout than fishless streams even under heavy
shade; however, the size ofthe trophic cascade under light shading was over two-fold
that observed under heavy shading. Differences between trout and fishless streams in the
epibenthic density ofbaetids were also affected by shading with similar densities under
heavy shading, but with 2.1 and 2.8 (respectively) fold higher density ofbaetids under
medium and light shading in fishless than trout streams. Thus, the effects of variation in. .
shading on the growth of algae and on the behaviour of mobile grazers may alter the
perceived effects of trout across small spatial scales.
The surveys and artificial stream experiment also indicated weak effects oftrout on the
fauna of depositional habitats, which may be attributed to a high density of small,
cryptic detritivorous invertebrates, such as Riethia chironomids, and a low density of
mayflies. In the artificial streams, trout did not produce a dramatic top-down cascade,
nor did shading influence the effects oftrout on algal biomass. I suggest that abundant
detritus dampened both the effects of trout and variation in shading by reducing the
direct importance of algae to browsers, promoting a fauna whose key members were less
vulnerable to predation, and by restricting light supply to benthic algae.


An efficient methodology was developed to synthesize novel organoselenium derivatives of formyl-substituted imidazo[1,2-a]pyridine by nucleophilic aromatic substitution with aryl selenolate anions generated in situ through the reduction of different diselenides. Herein, the crystal structure of 3-formyl-2-(phenylselanyl)-imidazo[1,2-a]pyridine (5a) has been reported; moreover, theoretical investigations of all the compounds were performed to obtain insight into their structural information. The synthesized compounds were tested for their antimicrobial potential and encouraging results were obtained. The toxicity profile was assessed against HEK-293 and HeLa cell lines and the results were found to be well within the acceptable range. The synergistic studies showed that these compounds can be effectively used in combination with antibiotics to significantly enhance the antimicrobial effect.


The Orchestra for the Youth of Sweepfire (OYS), an out-of-school time (OST) program, expressed desire for more data originating from their participants. Interviews were conducted with ten 4th-grade participants of OYS. Their responses will bolster OYS's effectiveness by providing insight into the program's experience as seen through the participants' personal reflections, narratives, and experiences. This research is important to the goals, objectives, and sustainability of the OYS program.


Woman's Life in Colonial Days By Carl Holliday This book is an attempt to portray by means of the writings of colonial days the life of the women of that period,—how they lived, what their work and their play, what and how they thought and felt, their strength and their weakness, the joys and the sorrows of their everyday existence. Through such an attempt perhaps we can more nearly understand how and why the American woman is what she is to-day. For a long time to come, one of the principal reasons for the study of the writings of America will lie, not in their intrinsic merit alone, but in their revelations of American life, ideals, aspirations, and social and intellectual endeavors. We Americans need what Professor Shorey has called "the controlling consciousness of tradition." We have not sufficiently regarded the bond that connects our present institutions with their origins in the days of our forefathers. That is one of the main purposes of this study, and the author believes that through contributions of such a character he can render the national intellectual spirit at least as valuable a service as he could through a study of some legend of ancient Britain or some epic of an extinct race. As Mr. Percy Boynton has said, "To foster in a whole generation some clear recognition of other qualities in America than its bigness, and of other distinctions between the past and the present than that they are far apart is to contribute towards the consciousness of a national individuality which is the first essential of national life.... We must put our minds upon ourselves, we must look to our past and to our present, and then intelligently to our future."


The majority of risk adjusted performance measures (RAPM) currently in use - e.g., Treynor ratio, (I±/I²)) ratio, Omega index, RoVaR, 'coherent' preference criteria, etc. - are incompat- ible with any sensible utility function and would be best avoided. We argue instead for the assessment of a maximum certainty equivalent excess return (CER*) criterion, or equivalent criteria, adapted to investment circumstances: alternative investments, return forecasts, and risk attitude. We explain the assessment of CER*s and give three applications: performance comparisons among traditional and alternative funds, optimal design of structured products, and explanation of the credit risk premium puzzle.


The United Nations Agenda 2030 has recognized that Social Economy (SE) entities play an important role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In order to maximize the impact of the SE, governments have recently deployed new policies regarding these entities. The objective is to understand the context of policy change that has allowed these policies to emerge, their main characteristics and the critical factors in their construction and implementation. Successful policy cases in Europe and Spain have been studied. Qualitative data have been collected through key policy documents, experts, and focus groups. As a main finding, the study shows that this new model of policies exhibits the following features: it focuses on transformative change, follows the public-community partnership governance approach and the mainstream approach in the sense of a broader policy context, and finally, it is innovative in terms of means and of complex systematization of strategies. Difficulties in the implementation of the partnership approach, in the deployment of the policy-mainstreaming approach, and in the acceptance of the SE framed by all policymakers, SE representatives, and government staff, and constraints in financial endowment are the main critical factors in the implementation of these policies.


Context: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the leading causes of mortality in the United States, accounting for about 1 in every 3 deaths annually. While studies have shown that arterial stiffness, a leading precursor to CVD, improves with passive heat stress not much is known about the independent effect of heat stress during exercise on arterial stiffness. Objective: The objective of this study was to examine the independent effect of heat stress during exercise on arterial stiffness. Design: Participants visited the lab three times; one familiarization and two experimental trials. Experimental trials were randomized and counter-balanced. Setting: All trials occurred in the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. The experimental trials consisted of subjects cycling at ~50% of their maximum aerobic capacity in an environment of 40°C / 40% relative humidity (Heat Cycle) or 15°C / 30% relative humidity (Cool Cycle). Participants: Participants included five male subjects and four female subjects. Subjects were older individuals (Age = 49 ± 12 y, Body Mass = 66.71 ± 12.64 kg) with stiffer arteries at baseline (> 6 m/s) identified in the familiarization trial. Interventions: The intervention was environmental condition; one trial occurred at 40°C / 40% relative humidity (Heat Cycle) and the other at 15°C / 30% relative humidity (Cool Cycle). Since the participants are exercising in both trials at the same aerobic capacity, we can elucidate the independent effect that mean body temperature (i.e., heat stress) had on arterial stiffness during exercise. Main Outcome Measures: Before and after cycling, pulse wave velocity (PWV measures occurred via ultrasound at the tibial, radial, femoral and carotid artery sites) were used to assess arterial stiffness. Specifically, central arterial stiffness was assessed by using measures between the carotid and femoral artery sites, while peripheral stiffness was assessed using the radial and tibial artery sites. At the same time, mean body temperature (Tbody) was measured via skin and rectal thermistors. Results: Tbody at the end of exercise showed significant differences between the heat cycle and cool cycle trials respectively (36.47 ± 0.23 vs. 34.84 ± 0.40°C). There were no interactions between time and condition for central PWV for Heat Cycle and Cool Cycle respectively (100.02 ± 138.64 vs. 24.19 ± 82.40 cm/s, p = 0.38), upper peripheral PWV (47.76 ± 131.35 vs. 64.41 ± 109.99 cm/s, p = 0.56) and lower peripheral PWV (40.77 ± 142.96 vs. 3.77 ± 167.67 cm/s, p = 0.47). Conclusions: The findings of this study suggest that differences in mean body temperature do not result in significant differences in arterial stiffness following exercise.


Since the process of becoming dead genes or pseudogenes (pseudogenization) is irreversible and can occur rather rapidly under certain environmental circumstances, it is one plausible determinant for characterizing species specificity. To test this evolutionary hypothesis, we analyzed the tempo and mode of duplication and pseudogenization of bitter taste receptor (T2R) genes in humans as well as in 12 nonhuman primates. The results show that primates have accumulated more pseudogenes than mice after their separation from the common ancestor and that lineage-specific pseudogenization becomes more conspicuous in humans than in nonhuman primates. Although positive selection has operated on some amino acids in extracellular domains, functional constraints against T2R genes are more relaxed in primates than in mice and this trend has culminated in the rapid deterioration of the bitter-tasting capability in humans. Since T2R molecules play an important role in avoiding generally bitter toxic and harmful substances, substantial modification of the T2R gene repertoire is likely to reflect different responses to changes in the environment and to result from species-specific food preference during primate evolution.


In reinforcement learning (RL) , one of the key components is policy evaluation, which aims to estimate the value function (i.e., expected long-term accumulated reward) of a policy. With a good policy evaluation method, the RL algorithms will estimate the value function more accurately and find a better policy. When the state space is large or continuous \emph{Gradient-based Temporal Difference(GTD)} policy evaluation algorithms with linear function approximation are widely used. Considering that the collection of the evaluation data is both time and reward consuming, a clear understanding of the finite sample performance of the policy evaluation algorithms is very important to reinforcement learning. Under the assumption that data are i.i.d. generated, previous work provided the finite sample analysis of the GTD algorithms with constant step size by converting them into convex-concave saddle point problems. However, it is well-known that, the data are generated from Markov processes rather than i.i.d. in RL problems.. In this paper, in the realistic Markov setting, we derive the finite sample bounds for the general convex-concave saddle point problems, and hence for the GTD algorithms. We have the following discussions based on our bounds. (1) With variants of step size, GTD algorithms converge. (2) The convergence rate is determined by the step size, with the mixing time of the Markov process as the coefficient. The faster the Markov processes mix, the faster the convergence. (3) We explain that the experience replay trick is effective by improving the mixing property of the Markov process. To the best of our knowledge, our analysis is the first to provide finite sample bounds for the GTD algorithms in Markov setting.


This paper presents the stance towards modal choice behavior between public transport and private car. To find out the probable solutions, this paper investigated the latent attitudes of the trip makers concerning modal choice between private car and public transport and the advantages and disadvantages of these two modes as a choice. It was also discussed in this paper that the public transport usage can be increased if the service of public transport is designed in a way that accommodates the level of services required by the customers. Even though, several factors, such as individual characteristics and lifestyle, the type of journey, length of trip, the apparent service performance etc. of each transport mode play the significant role for the modal choice in the transport sector. It was also focused in this paper that the influence of car usage should be targeted to reduce car usage.


OBJECTIVE
In this study, we aimed to investigate the incidence, dynamics and profiles of human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-directed antibodies developed after transplantation and their impact on graft rejection and outcome in kidney recipients.

STUDY DESIGN
Prospective follow-up study.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
A total of 56 kidney recipients were monitored at 1(st), 6(th) and 12(th) months for the development of anti-HLA antibodies using bead based flow-cytometry assays (Flow PRA tests).

RESULTS
In 21 (37.5%) patients, panel reactive antibodies (PRA) was positive after transplantation, however, in 35 (62.5%) patients PRA was found negative. Twelve (57.1%) patients with post-transplantation HLA-reactive antibodies [PRA (+)] and 8 (22.9%) patients with no detectable alloantibodies [PRA (-)] were developed allograft rejection (p=0.010). In the PRA positive patient group the rates of early period infection and delayed graft function (DGF) were higher than the PRA negative patient group. Serum creatinine levels of PRA positive group at 6. and 12. months after transplantation were significantly higher than the PRA negative group (p=0.015 and p=0.048, respectively). The rejection rates of patients who had class I and II HLA antibodies were significantly higher than the patients who had either class I or II HLA antibodies (p=0.011). Acute rejection rates were significantly higher in patients who had class I and II HLA antibodies at the first month (p=0.007).

CONCLUSION
Higher occurrence of rejection episodes in PRA positive group may show the importance of anti-HLA antibody monitoring using Flow-PRA after renal transplantation as a prognostic marker in terms of graft survival.


Financial literacy and behavioral biases are critical factors affecting the financial decisions and behaviors of investors. We survey 596 individual stock investors to measure their financial literacy, to examine their behavioral biases and to investigate the relationship between financial literacy and behavioral biases. Results suggest that around half of the investors have a low financial literacy level, their main source of financial information is advice from parents or friends, and they have a high level of behavioral biases. While some of these behavioral biases are independent of the level of financial literacy, there is a significant relationship between a number of other biases and the level of financial literacy.


The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) — the crown corporation responsible for the long-term storage of nuclear fuel waste in Canada — seeks to bury our nuclear fuel waste deep in the Canadian Shield, with the provisions that the waste is monitored and remains retrievable for possible future use. To ensure that its solution is ethically acceptable, the NWMO established a set of requirements which, if satisfied, would successfully discharge its ethical obligations to both present and future generations. Those requirements include the obligation to justify its practice, minimize risk, clearly identify all of the relevant costs and risks of harm, abide by the precautionary principle, obtain fully informed consent from potentially affected individuals, and distribute the risk fairly across multiple generations. In this document I show that the ethical principles, as formulated by the NWMO, are either (a) seriously vague and unhelpful; or (b), where substantial and helpful, the nature of the practice show that many of the principles cannot be satisfied. As a final result, it is deeply questionable whether nuclear power in general, and especially the current solution to nuclear waste in particular, can ever be deemed ethical in Canada.


Author(s): Hoynes, Hilary | Abstract: The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has been supporting the incomes of low-income working families since 1975. It is now a major anti-poverty program for both adults and children. This brief provides an overview of how the Earned Income Tax Credit supports families in a context of wage stagnation and encourages work. Together with the Child Tax Credit, the EITC lifted 9.2 million people, including 4.8 million children, out of poverty in 2015. It has long-lasting benefits on maternal and children's health and on children's development. The EITC has therefore positive effects beyond its direct cash value to recipients.


The infusion of new genetic diversity fr om related species into domesticated types of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) will greatly increase opportunities for genetic improvement. We report here the development of the aneuploid F1 chromosome substitution stocks in G. hirsutum for whole chromosomes and chromosome arms of G. mustelinum Miers ex Watt. These hypoaneuploid interspecific chromosome substitution stocks are an additional genetic resource for localization of genomic sequences, marker development, definition of linkage groups, and validation of genome maps. Hypoaneuploid plants that lack specific chromosomes or arms were detected by analysis of phenotypic syndromes and conventional meiotic metaphaseI configuration analysis of acetocarmine-stained microsporocytes ("pollen mother cells"), as well as by deletion analysis with chromosome specific SSR markers. Here, we report the development of 25 such hypoaneuploid hybrids, including 13 monosomic hybrids, each missing a different G. hirsutum chromosome (chromosome 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20, and 25, respectively), and 12 monotelodisomic (acrocentric) hybrids (Te05Lo, Te08Lo, Te11Lo, Te11sh, Te12Lo, Te14Lo, Te15Lo, Te20Lo, Te20sh, Te22Lo, Te22sh, and Te26sh) that are deficient for the respective distal segment of opposing G. hirsutum arms 5sh, 8sh, 11sh, 11Lo, 12sh, 14sh, 15sh, 20sh, 20Lo, 22sh, 22Lo, and 26Lo. Each of the interspecific F 1s reported here is a major step toward a development of the respective backcross disomic substitution line. Such lines are individually and collectively powerful resources for targeted germplasm introgression, genetic dissection, and genetic improvement of complex traits.


Gunnel Karlsson, »Gender clashes, clangers and faux pax. Notes on the construction of cabinet minister Ulla Lindstrom's political persona« The political diaries of Ulla Lindstrom caused a great sensa- tion when published in 1966, three years after her resignation as minister without portfolio. She was the only female minister in the Swedish government from 1954 to 1966 and, according to the press, her career had been characterized by faux pas or, as one reviewer of her diaries wrote: »(t)he silly Ulla […] of the botches, bodges, and gaffes«. He added that he himself had helped to put her down »with both malice and recklessness«. Surprised, he found her recently published political diaries impressing, written by an intelligent and humorous politician. He was, however, not the only journalist putting Ulla Lindstrom down. A particular discourse or way of describing her political persona was developed in the Swedish press during her ministerial career. She started as the good-looking »pin-up girl« of the Parliament and ended up as the »shrew« of the party, the faux pas queen who was too talkative and thus in need of a muzzle. She was constructed as deviant, both as a woman and as a politician. In her political diaries Ulla Lindstrom herself compared the way in which she and her male colleagues were portrayed in the press. She created her own political persona and tried to show that the political persona created by the press was a false persona , built on prejudices against women and misogyny. In my paper I will compare Lindstrom's own political persona with the one created in the press.


The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry & Social Class. Gary Lenhart. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. xviii + 152 pp. $19.95 (paper). Poet and critic Gary Lenhart offers an accessible and engaging critical look at poetry and social class in his new book, The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry & Social Class, building upon his earlier pedagogical work in the 1998 The Teachers & Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams. As Lenhart clearly and honestly shows, class in poetry is complicated by education, connection, employment, income, language, form, publication, location, subject, and a myriad of other daily choices such as whether one drinks beer from the bottle or a can. Lenhart socially examines representative poems from what one might call the State of Poetry-what Jed Rasula defines as "the world of poetry" (Lenhart 3) in the American Poetry Wax Museum in 1996 and what Lenhart redefines here as "the poetry scene in the United States" in 2006 (3). Lenhart essentially asks whether or not this poetic State or scene is an equal opportunity reader. Chapters such as "The 'Uneducated Poets,'" "Caviar and Cabbage," "A Song for Occupations," and "Literary Men in Blue Jeans" expose a cultural tension between class relationships, education, and/or occupation. Lenhart identifies himself as "an experienced reader of poetry who has learned to appreciate the classics of our culture despite the xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and class bias that infect them" (114). His book more than sufficiently backs up this large occupational claim, but Lenhart also stresses, through multifarious examples, just how difficult a claim this is for him, or anyone from a lower-class background, to make, because of cultural issues related to class. As New York City poet Ron Padgett told Lenhart in an interview, "large claims imply a presumption of authority. Lower-class people think that they don't have any authority. Maybe subconsiously they feel that they shouldn't have any authority. . . . If they did, why are they near the bottom of the social ladder?" (106-7). Citing class culture as a prohibiting factor, Lenhart offers a counteractive measure to break this cycle: education. At first glance, Lenhart's solution seems to veer dangerously close to a maxim toted by politicians across the United States: knowledge is power; education leads to success; no child left behind. Thankfully a scholar and not a politician, Lenhart refuses to accept or offer such easy answers. Education may be freely available to the American and poetic publics, but, as Lenhart's examples attest, acceptance of this offer can carry a high cost. Poets such as Stephen Duck, Mary Leapor, Mary Collier, and Ann Yearsley were initially prized for the novelty of their origins (i.e., milkwoman), their colloquial language usages (i.e., "not worth a straw"), and choices of subject (i.e., manual labor); however, these poets were ultimately discouraged from leaping class categories through education, station, or occupation. They could be successful only as long as their verse retained the markers of a lower economic status. Over the course of his lifetime, Melvin Tolson, an African American poet, too, was criticized: both for being too pedantic and "rural" as well as too "white" in his elitist, high modernist verse. Lenhart uses examples such as these to expose the often contradictory and even hypocritical attitudes of readers within the State of Poetry toward both poetic occupation and education. Lenhart makes less obvious, and equally valid, connections, however, between distorted versus necessary autobiographical and sociopolitical content in chapters like "Poor Doc, Nobody Wants His Life or His Verses" and "Special Handling," both chapters that hold special interest for readers of William Carlos Williams, particularly for those readers of Paterson. Lenhart's argument here is against New Critical approaches. Lenhart points out the class bias in a reader's refusal to allow a poet's autobiography, particularly when it affects perceptions of his/her social and economic class, to color readings of a work. …


This paper studies the nonparametric identification of the first-price auction model with risk averse bidders within the private value paradigm. First, we show that the benchmark model is nonindentified from observed bids. We also derive the restrictions imposed by the model on observables and show that these restrictions are weak. Second, we establish the nonparametric identification of the bidders' utility function under exclusion restrictions. Our primary exclusion restriction takes the form of an exogenous bidders' participation, leading to a latent distribution of private values that is independent of the number of bidders. The key idea is to exploit the property that the bid distribution varies with the number of bidders while the private value distribution does not. We then extend these results to endogenous bidders' participation when the exclusion restriction takes the form of instruments that do not affect the bidders' private value distribution. Though derived for a benchmark model, our results extend to more general cases such as a binding reserve price, affiliated private values, and asymmetric bidders. Last, possible estimation methods are proposed. Copyright 2009 The Econometric Society.


Chitosan obtained by alkaline deacetylation of chitin is a non-toxic, biocompatible, and biodegradable natural polymer. Chitosan-based hydrogel polymeric beads have been extensively studied as microor nano-particulate carriers in the pharmaceutical and medical fields, where they have shown promise for drug delivery as a result of their controlled and sustained release properties, as well as biocompatibility with tissue and cells. To introduce desired properties and enlarge the scope of the potential applications of chitosan, graft copolymerization with natural or synthetic polymers on it has been carried out, and also, various chitosan derivatives have been utilized to form beads. The desired kinetics, duration, and rate of drug release up to therapeutical level from polymeric beads are limited by specific conditions such as beads material and their composition, bead preparation method, amount of drug loading, drug solubility, and drug polymer interaction. The present review summarizes most of the available reports about compositional and structural effects of chitosan-based hydrogel polymeric beads on swelling, drug loading, and releasing properties. From the studies reviewed it is concluded that chitosan-based hydrogel polymeric beads are promising drug delivery systems.


Analyses the Court of Appeal judgment in R. v T in which the court in remarking on shoeprint comparison evidence considered how expert witnesses, in particular forensic scientists, should present their evidence in court and the types and quality of the data they can draw on when formulating their conclusions. Identifies what the court had to say about the methodology employed by the expert witness, in particular the use of likelihood ratios. Emphasises positive features of the judgment, rejecting interpretations which threaten to diminish the integrity and distort the probative value of scientific evidence.


Natural populations of many organisms exhibit excess of rare alleles in comparison with the predictions of the neutral mutation hypothesis. It has been shown before that either a population bottleneck or the presence of slightly deleterious mutations can explain this phenomenon. A third explanation is presented in this work, showing that hidden subdivision within a population can also lead to an excess of rare alleles in the total population when the expectations of the neutral model are based on the allele frequency profile of the entire population data. With two examples (mitochondrial DNA-morph distribution and isozyme allele frequency distributions), it is shown that most cosmopolitan human populations exhibit excess of rare as well as total allele counts, when these are compared with the expectations of the neutral mutation hypothesis. The mitochondrial data demonstrate that such excesses can be detected from genetic variation at a single locus as well, and this is not due to stochastic error of allele frequency distributions. Contrast of the present observations with the allele frequency profiles in agglomerated tribal populations from South and Central America shows that even when the neutral expectations hold for individual subpopulations, if all subpopulations are grouped into a single population, the pooled data exhibit an excess of total number of alleles that is mainly due to the excess of rare alleles. Therefore, a primary cause of the excess number of rare alleles could be the hidden subdivision, and the magnitude of the excess indicates the extent of substructuring. The two components of hidden subdivision are: 1) Number of subpopulations, and 2) the average genetic distance among them. The implications of this observation in estimating mutation rate are discussed indicating the difficulties of comparing mutation rates from different population surveys.


In this paper we present characteristics of the statistical correlation between the Hirsch (h-) index and several standard bibliometric indicators, as well as with the results of peer review judgment. We use the results of a large evaluation study of 147 university chemistry research groups in the Netherlands covering the work of about 700 senior researchers during the period 1991–2000. Thus, we deal with research groups rather than individual scientists, as we consider the research group as the most important work floor unit in research, particularly in the natural sciences. Furthermore, we restrict the citation period to a three-year window instead of 'life time counts' in order to focus on the impact of recent work and thus on current research performance. Results show that the h-index and our bibliometric 'crown indicator' both relate in a quite comparable way with peer judgments. But for smaller groups in fields with 'less heavy citation traffic' the crown indicator appears to be a more appropriate measure of research performance.


Different kinds of meta-heuristi c algorithms have been recently utilized to overcome the complex nature of optimum design of structures. In this paper, an integrated optimization procedure with the objective of minimizing the self-weight of real size structures is simply performed interfacing SAP2000 and MATLAB ® softwares in the form of parallel computing. The meta-heuristic algorithm chosen here is Cuckoo Search (CS) recently developed as a type of population based algorithm inspired by the behavior of some Cuckoo species in combination with the Levy flight behavior. The CS algorithm performs suitable selection of sections from the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) wide-flange (W) shapes list. Strength constraints of the AISC load and resistance factor design specification, geometric limitations and displacement constraints are imposed on frames. Effective time-saving procedure using simple parallel computing, as well as utilizing reliable analysis and design tool are also some new features of the present study. The results show that the proposed method is effective in optimizing practical structures.


The explosive growth in the number of law school clinics over the last 50 years began with an individual client focus as a core component. This contributed to reducing unmet legal needs in substantive areas such as landlord-tenant, family, consumer and other areas. These service clinics accomplished the dual purpose of training students in the day-to-day challenges of practice while reducing the number of unrepresented poor. In recent years, however, the trend has been to broaden the law school clinical experience beyond individual representation and preparation for law firm practice. So-called "impact" clinics typically address systemic change without significant individual client representation. In this chapter from the forthcoming volume, "Beyond Elite Law: Access To Civil Justice For Americans Of Average Means" (Samuel Estreicher & Joy Radice eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2014), the authors argue that the shift from service clinics to impact clinics is partly driven by clinicians' search for status within the academy. Specifically, status plays an important role in a clinic design that permits clinicians to more easily engage in theoretical and doctrinal scholarship on subject matters that are more respected within the academy. The authors predict that this trend toward development of impact clinics will continue, particularly at higher ranked law schools, with the unfortunate side effect of reducing clinics' contribution to addressing access to justice issues.


A new and previously misidentified, small-flowered Cyrtochilum (Orchidaceae: Oncidiinae) from central Ecuador is described, illustrated with a line drawing and photographs, and compared with the species that it has previously been taxonomically mixed-up with by the author. The new species is readily distinguished by the dark yellow, gibbous and carnose lip callus, versus more elongate, longitudinally furrowed and bilobed calli for similar species.


Demand for aluminum in final products has increased 30-fold since 1950 to 45 million tonnes per year, with forecasts predicting this exceptional growth to continue so that demand will reach 2-3 times today's levels by 2050. Aluminum production uses 3.5% of global electricity and causes 1% of global CO2 emissions, while meeting a 50% cut in emissions by 2050 against growing demand would require at least a 75% reduction in CO2 emissions per tonne of aluminum produced--a challenging prospect. In this paper we trace the global flows of aluminum from liquid metal to final products, revealing for the first time a complete map of the aluminum system and providing a basis for future study of the emissions abatement potential of material efficiency. The resulting Sankey diagram also draws attention to two key issues. First, around half of all liquid aluminum (~39 Mt) produced each year never reaches a final product, and a detailed discussion of these high yield losses shows significant opportunities for improvement. Second, aluminum recycling, which avoids the high energy costs and emissions of electrolysis, requires signification "dilution" (~ 8 Mt) and "cascade" (~ 6 Mt) flows of higher aluminum grades to make up for the shortfall in scrap supply and to obtain the desired alloy mix, increasing the energy required for recycling.


Some translation scholars hold that Jin Di's theory of equivalent effect and Nida's theory of dynamic equivalence are essentially same because Jin has basically adopted the definition of Nida's dynamic equivalence in formulating his own translation theory. However, this paper reveals that there are some fundamental differences between the two theories in three aspects:(1) Nida's theory is reader-oriented while Jin's is text-oriented; (2) Nida's theory is flexible while Jin's tends to be inflexible; and (3) Jin's theory is an ideal one in the sense that it cannot be realized in translation practice whereas Nida's theory is a realistic one. Examples from Jin's Chinese version of James Joyce's Ulysses and Bible translations are given to illustrate these differences between Nida's theory and Jin's theory.This paper further explores the two major reasons that lead to such discrepancies: (1) the deficiency of Nida's theory in dealing with transference of aesthetic elements for literary translation; (2) the influence of traditional Chinese translation theories upon Jin's translation principle. Although Nida's theory is not restricted to Bible translation, it has some limitations in guiding literary translation because it fails to address the transference of aesthetic elements for literary translation. When Jin translated Joyce's Ulysses, he had to face the problem of aesthetic transference of literary works. This is the reason why Jin eventually turns to traditional Chinese translation theory and classic literary criticism to seek for support for his translation theory of equivalent effect.


Using coping methods can help to dominate on physical, mental, and social relationships, individual contradiction problems, and can be considered as one of effective factors in general and mental health of nurses. The objective of the present research is predicting job stress based on elements of coping styles in nurses. By correlative methodology for this research, 120 female20-45 years old nurses in Tehran city were selected by simple random sampling method based on Cochran formula. The research instrument includes job stress questionnaire and coping style questionnaire of Lazzarus & Folkman; the Pearson correlation coefficient test, and linear regression were used to test hypotheses and generalize the obtained information from tests. Findings showed that participants' scores were near normal range and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.58 which indicated scores internal consistency. The obtained results showed that coping elements in 0.05 significant level with f-value of 12.403 significantly predicted job stress. In addition, regression coefficient among support, responsibility, and managerial solution elements was negative and positive with two other relationships including job stress and escape-avoidance. Therefore, it can be concluded that elements of support, responsibility, escape-avoidance, and managerial solution significantly predict nurses' job stress among coping elements.


This paper deals with the issue of genetic relationships between English-based Atlantic creoles. A method borrowed from biology will be applied to a set of lexical and structural features found in the sample presented in Hancock (1987) in order to assess the degrees of affinity between these languages and their evolutionary histories. We will argue that the phylogenetic networks approach proposed here is the most suitable for the classification of creole languages. At the same time, we will show that this tool can also be used to assess the degree of radicalness of a creole, another issue which has been at the heart of creole studies.


The Olympic Games are increasingly viewed as a potential catalyst for urban transformation, increased investment, and social, economic, and political change. They are expected to bring tourists, foreign investment, and attention to the host city and nation. However, are these expectations justified? Although there have been numerous attempts to assess the impacts and effects of the Olympic Games on the host city and nation (for example, Preuss 2004 and Kasimati 2003), few have focused on the institutional reforms in the host country that are needed for political, social, and economic integration into global markets. This study tests the hypothesis that the Olympics Games accelerate this integration and induce the political, regulatory, legal, and economic reforms to support increased foreign investment in real estate. If the Olympics bring about institutional change and global market integration, it can be expected that aggregate levels of foreign investment in real estate in the host country will increase, as perceived opportunities and reduced levels of (institutional) risk attract new investors (Geurts and Jaffe 1996). Indeed, the positive effect of hosting an Olympic Game may lead to a reduction of the often observed ihome-asseti bias. On the other hand, if foreign investment remains below pre-Olympic levels or those of comparable countries, the Games may provide only short-term and/or superficial impacts on institutions and markets. Using a study group of five Olympic Games spanning the past 20 years, this paper applies a modified difference-in-difference model to evaluate the impact of the Olympic Games on the level and growth rate of foreign real estate investment in the host country (Slaughter 2001). For each host, comparable countries are selected using a composite of regulatory indices from the World Bank, the Heritage Foundation, and the Fraser Institute, as well as macroeconomic, demographic, and geographic variables to create a control group for the analysis. This matching technique allows for a more precise estimation of Olympic-related impacts by reducing the potential error of the coefficients due to selection bias and unobserved differences between groups.


Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope's digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of hand-drawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers.


Sustaining the rural and urban populations of the developing world has been identified as a key global challenge for the twenty-first century. Rural-Urban Interaction in the Developing World is an introduction to the relationships between rural and urban places in the developing world and shows that not all their aspects are as obvious as migration from country to city. There is now a growing realization that rural-urban relations are far more complex.

Using a wealth of student-friendly features including boxed case studies, discussion questions and annotated guides to further reading, this innovative book places rural-urban interactions within a broader context, thus promoting a clearer understanding of the opportunities, as well as the challenges, that rural-urban interactions represent.


In the course of an informal mediation, the accused, Mr Silk, sought to hand up to the presiding mediator a photocopy of a judgement from the Law Reports. His opponent Mr Stickler (no doubt because the inexorable logic of the judgement - one of mine - destroyed his own submissions) objected that the reproduction and handing up of a copy was an infringement of the Copyright Act and that it was unlawful to do so. The mediator said he was there to mediate and not make a decision (which serves the parties right for circumventing courts) and referred the matter for prosecution. The prosecuting authorities have decided to make this a test case.


: Plants survive adverse conditions by modulating their growth in response to changing environmental signals. Gibberellins (GA) play a key role in these adaptive responses by stimulating the degradation of growth repressing DELLA proteins. GA binding to its receptor GID1 enables association of GID1 with DELLAs. This leads to the ubiquitin-mediated proteasomal degradation of DELLAs and consequently growth promotion. We report that DELLA-dependent growth control can also be regulated independently of GA. We demonstrate that a proportion of DELLAs are conjugated to the Small Ubiquitin-like Modifier (SUMO) protein which increases during stress. We identify a SUMO interacting motif (SIM) in GID1 and demonstrate that SUMO-conjugated DELLA binds to this motif in a GA-independent manner. The consequent sequestration of GID1 by SUMO-conjugated DELLAs leads to an accumulation of non-SUMOylated DELLAs and subsequent beneficial growth restraint during stress. We conclude that plants have developed a non-GA mechanism to control growth during stress.


Nd: YAG laser welding of duplex stainless steels as 2205, LDX 2101, 2304, LDX 2404 grades were performed with and without addition materials. As additional material were used Metco 41C high nickel contain powder and 22 9 3 NL filler wire, conventional used for standard duplex stainless steels. The mechanical and corrosion properties of duplex stainless steels welds are dependent on microstructure and chemical composition. The additional materials favourable effects on mechanical properties were observed. The best pitting corrosion resistance were observed at specimens welded with wire addition.


BACKGROUND: Physician burnout in the United States has reached epidemic proportions and is rising rapidly, although burnout in other occupations is stable. Its negative impact is far reaching and includes harm to the burned-out physician, as well as patients, coworkers, family members, close friends, and healthcare organizations. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this review is to provide an accurate, current summary of what is known about physician burnout and to develop a framework to reverse its current negative impact, decrease its prevalence, and implement effective organizational and personal interventions. DATA SOURCES: I completed a comprehensive MEDLINE search of the medical literature from January 1, 2000, through December 28, 2016, related to medical student and physician burnout, stress, depression, suicide ideation, suicide, resiliency, wellness, and well-being. In addition, I selectively reviewed secondary articles, books addressing the relevant issues, and oral presentations at national professional meetings since 2013. STUDY SELECTION: Healthcare organizations within the United States were studied. RESULTS: The literature review is presented in 5 sections covering the basics of defining and measuring burnout; its impact, incidence, and causes; and interventions and remediation strategies. CONCLUSIONS: All US medical students, physicians in training, and practicing physicians are at significant risk of burnout. Its prevalence now exceeds 50%. Burnout is the unintended net result of multiple, highly disruptive changes in society at large, the medical profession, and the healthcare system. Both individual and organizational strategies have been only partially successful in mitigating burnout and in developing resiliency and well-being among physicians. Two highly effective strategies are aligning personal and organizational values and enabling physicians to devote 20% of their work activities to the part of their medical practice that is especially meaningful to them. More research is needed.


1. Introduction Every teacher must have faced the dilemma at one point or another: what should be my role in the classroom? Should I primarily focus on efficient organization of lessons with a careful selection of the language facts to be transmitted to students? Or should I be more flexible and let the lesson flow spontaneously? Should I take full responsibility for the choice of activities, topics, and areas of language (after all, I am familiar with examination requirements, so I do know what my students should cover in class), or perhaps should I always make the effort of giving the learners as much choice as possible? Finally, should I become friends with my students (if it is possible at all), or maybe it's enough to concentrate on the material and evaluation and not expect too much openness and trust from teenagers? These and many other questions have haunted the teaching profession for years. They have been bothering the author of the present paper since the very beginning of her teaching career and have led her to take a deeper and more systematic interest in the issue of teacher role. In a attempt to gain insights into foreign language teachers' and students' understanding of teacher role in the classroom, two research projects were carried out and then their results were compared. 2. Research on teachers 2.1. Objectives of the research project and techniques of data collection The purpose of the first research project was to find out how foreign language teachers of English view their role in the classroom. The teachers expressed their opinions in a questionnaire consisting of three open-ended questions: 1. What is the role of the foreign language teacher in the classroom? List and describe at least five functions. 2. Which of the above roles is most important and why? 3. Which of the above roles is most common and why? The other set of objectives included assessing whether the teachers' answers to the questionnaire were congruent with their role behavior, i.e. the performance of roles. To obtain the information, the lessons of several high school teachers who taught different student levels were observed. During the observations a checklist consisting of the roles that the teachers had enumerated in the questionnaire was used. 2.2. The respondents The questionnaire was distributed among 76 Polish high school teachers of English, the majority of whom were women (82.2%). Among them, the most numerous group comprised the youngest (under 30) informants (92.2%). There were 9 (11.8%) respondents aged between 30-40, and 8 (10.5%) over 40. Most of them worked in high schools in Poznan, the rest in other big cities or towns in Poland. Quite a few (about 60%) were teacher training college graduates currently doing their MA degree at Adam Mickiewicz University (fifth year students), whereas the remaining ones had completed their studies at the School of English some time before. The classroom observations were carried out in five different high schools in Poznan. Altogether 8 teachers were observed: 7 women and 1 man. The group consisted of: 3 experienced teachers (i.e. that had been teaching for over 5 years) aged 35-45; 1 teacher with several years of professional practice aged 31; and 4 inexperienced teachers (i.e. that had been teaching for 1-2 years), among them 3 under 30 and 1 aged 40. Three of the four inexperienced teachers were teacher training college graduates and two of them were doing their MA degree. The subjects' students ranged from beginners to pre-intermediate, and through intermediate to upper-intermediate. In the case of 3 teachers two different student levels were observed; in all the other cases only one class was examined. In order to receive a fairly comprehensive picture of a given teacher's role behavior 3-4 lessons with the same group of learners were observed, which makes 34 lessons altogether. …


Since the early days of the world wide web (WWW), the information infrastructure provided over the Internet has improved considerably. The simplicity of offering and accessing data on the WWW and the increase of commercial uses of the Internet are major reasons for this development. During this development, it was discovered that shifts in popularity of content and services offered over the web lead to unbalanced load. A sudden increase in popularity can occur (slashdot effect) and is very hard to predict. Therefore it is also very hard to scale these servers and their connection to the Internet at the right time. To overcome these problems, hierarchies of cache servers such as harvest and squid have been set up to alleviated general load, but the large amount of content has limited their effectiveness in many situations. For that reason, controlled pre-distribution of content on behalf of the content providers has been offered as commercial service. To offer the service, servers are installed in the networks of different Internet service providers around the world. The servers can cooperate but they are only connected through the Internet. An infrastructure for this kind of service is known as content distribution network (CDN). Offering content through such a CDN has two advantages. First, several providers' content is offered from the same CDN and only the content of very few providers will experience a sudden increase in popularity at the same time. By offering the content through a CDN, not every content provider must maintain servers that can cope with the load that he experiences at times of very high popularity. Instead, the CDN hosting the content will experienced a multiplexed load, and it can be scaled to cope with high load for some but not all content providers. Second, content in the CDN may be replicated over several hosting centers and accesses to content can be redirected to the closest one, thus reducing network load and access latency. By now, these commercial content hosting CDNs that offer access to discrete media constitute the classical form kind of CDNs. There are, however, other forms of content distribution that are covered by the term CDN as well. One form is used to distribute a different kind of content, namely live data streams that are transmitted from a single source to a large audience. Another form distributes discrete media as well, but uses the peer-to-peer (P2P) model in which equal nodes collaborate for the distribution, and in which nodes are often owned by individuals. Even though commercial CDNs for live and stored content and P2P systems have been investigated separately so far, they share characteristics, for example that they consist of nodes that are connected through the Internet but typically not directly to each other. The integration of these approaches is therefore a challenge to researchers. Another is the increased importance of multimedia content and interactive applications, which will impose new problems on CDNs. This seminar has brought together researchers who address the challenges that lie in the improvement of CDNs. Among the challenges faced are those related to scaling of the CDN infrastructure, the use of appropriate techniques and tools, and the management of the growing CDNs. Several attendees of the seminar presented ideas and results concernings this topic. Topics covered in presentations of participants' current research include system and network support for scalability of content and CDN nodes, the communication between nodes and from the nodes to end-systems. The topics included dimensioning, scaling, configuration and reconfiguration of distribution networks for both, hierarchical CDNs and those that follow the P2P model, and reports on the needs of variations applications that rely on CDNs now or in the future.


Objective: Biohydrogel has gathered great interest in the pharmaceuticals field. This natural polymers were biodegradable, non-toxic, biocompatible, and its specific ability to response environment change can be considered for the controlled released matric of bioactive compound. In this study, the biohydrogel was synthesized by graft-copolymerization of acrylic acid onto carboxymethyl starch (CMS) and chitosan. The objective of this research was to determine the effect of CMS-chitosan ratio on the biohydrogel characteristic. Methods: The acrylic acid was grafted on to the backbone (3:1) by using cerric ammonium nitrate as the inisiator. A standarded curcumin was applied to test the binding potency of matrix. Results: A higher CMS ratio in the polymer mixture (4:1) revealed the highest swelling power (16.9 w/w) and percentage of curcumin absorption (17.34%). All the samples have the pH-responsive swelling properties, with the swelling trend was observed in the order of distilled water > HCl solution > phospathe buffer solution. FTIR spectra and SEM micrographs has confirmed the graft-copolymerization of PAA/CMSCs biohydrogel by describing the appearance of peak around 1600 cm -1 and the morphology of granula structure, respectively.  Conclusion: The graft-copolymerization of acrylic acid onto the two anionic natural polymer by cerric ammonium nitrate as the initiator has resulted a pH-dependent swelling biohydrogel, and it has the ability to deliver curcumin in stomach-targeted system.


Featuring ordinary people, celebrities, game shows, hidden cameras, everyday situations, and humorous or dramatic situations, reality TV is one of the fastest growing and important popular culture trends of the past decade, with roots reaching back to the days of radio. ""The Tube Has Spoken"" provides an analysis of the growing phenomenon of reality TV, its evolution as a genre, and how it has been shaped by cultural history. This collection of essays looks at a wide spectrum of shows airing from the 1950s to the present, addressing some of the most popular programs including Alan Funt's Candid Camera, Big Brother, Wife Swap, Kid Nation, and The Biggest Loser. It offers both a multidisciplinary approach and a cross-cultural perspective, considering Australian, Canadian, British, and American programs. In addition, the book explores how popular culture shapes modern western values; for example, both ""An American Family"" and its British counterpart, ""The Family"", showcase the decline of the nuclear family in response to materialistic pressures and the modern ethos of individualism. This collection highlights how reality TV has altered the tastes and values of audiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It analyzes how reality TV programs reflect the tensions between the individual and the community, the transformative power of technology, the creation of the celebrity, and the breakdown of public and private spheres.


Material Supplemental http://genome.cshlp.org/content/suppl/2014/03/03/gr.162230.113.DC1.html P<P Published online March 24, 2014 in advance of the print journal. License Commons Creative . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ described at a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International), as ). After six months, it is available under http://genome.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml first six months after the full-issue publication date (see This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the