Abstract. So far, the exploration of possible mechanisms for glacial atmospheric CO2 drawdown and marine carbon sequestration has tended to focus on dynamic or kinetic processes (i.e. variable mixing-, equilibration- or export rates). Here an attempt is made to underline instead the possible importance of changes in the standing volumes of intra-oceanic carbon reservoirs (i.e. different water-masses) in influencing the total marine carbon inventory. By way of illustration, a simple mechanism is proposed for enhancing the marine carbon inventory via an increase in the volume of relatively cold and carbon-enriched deep water, analogous to modern Lower Circumpolar Deep Water (LCDW), filling the ocean basins. A set of simple box-model experiments confirm the expectation that a deep sea dominated by an expanded LCDW-like watermass holds more CO2, without any pre-imposed changes in ocean overturning rate, biological export or ocean-atmosphere exchange. The magnitude of this "standing volume effect" (which operates by boosting the solubility- and biological pumps) might be as large as the contributions that have previously been attributed to carbonate compensation, terrestrial biosphere reduction or ocean fertilisation for example. By providing a means of not only enhancing but also driving changes in the efficiency of the biological- and solubility pumps, this standing volume mechanism may help to reduce the amount of glacial-interglacial CO2 change that remains to be explained by other mechanisms that are difficult to assess in the geological archive, such as reduced mass transport or mixing rates in particular. This in turn could help narrow the search for forcing conditions capable of pushing the global carbon cycle between glacial and interglacial modes.


Connected with various resurgent and decolonizing projects, Canada has seen a surge of renaming and Indigenous land acknowledgement, which draw attention to Indigenous territories that have been overwritten through colonial naming practices. While renaming practices and land acknowledgments are contested for having merely representational effects, they may also be linked with decolonizing efforts. Our paper explores subversive (re)naming practices afforded by the free-form location identifying function on Twitter's user profiles. It then draws a connection to issue-alignment in relation to the contested Trans Mountain pipeline as a means of considering to what extent toponymic selection is linked with actual issue alignment within the colonial context of resource extraction in Canada. We apply a mixed methods approach, based in digital methods that work with Twitter's user profile location category. We extend our analysis through a qualitative reading of key subsets of the Twitter data, using a grounded theory approach to identify prevalent themes. In keeping with the anti-colonial nature of the tweets, we resist colonial categorization of the data and instead share an "un-typology" of Twitter toponyms, which we then connect to various expressions of anti-pipeline positioning. These mixed methods help us explore the entanglement of representational toponymic significance, infrastructural, in relation to the platform and the colonial nature of geolocational regimes online, and grounded, in relation to issue expression regarding the Trans Mountain pipeline.


The present paper examines the challenges that Turkish foreign policy has faced in the Middle East following the outbreak of the uprisings that have been collectively called "the Arab Spring." It is argued that Turkish foreign policy has failed to play in the Middle East the pivotal role the "Davutoğlu Doctrine" had envisioned. Mounting problems in the Kurdish question and accusations of sectarianism in foreign policy have contributed to a decline of Turkey's soft power in the Middle East, which was painstakingly accumulated after years of political reform and stellar economic performance. Instead of becoming a crisis mediator, Turkey may end up entangled in the Middle East imbroglio.


Initiated by geoscientists, the growing debate about the Anthropocene, '€˜planetary boundaries'€™ and global '€˜tipping points'€™ is a significant opportunity for geographers to reconfigure two things: one is the internal relationships among their discipline's many and varied perspectives (topical, philosophical, and methodological) on the real; the other the discipline's actual and perceived contributions to important issues in the wider society. Yet, without concerted effort and struggle, the opportunity is likely to be used in a 'safe' and rather predictable way by only a sub-set of human-environment geographers. The socio-environmental challenges of a post-Holocene world invite old narratives about Geography's holistic intellectual contributions to be reprised in the present. These narratives speak well to many geoscientists, social scientists, and decision-makers outside Geography. However, they risk perpetuating an emaciated conception of reality wherein Earth systems and social systems are seen as knowable and manageable if the �€˜right�€™ ensemble of expertise is achieved. I argue that we need to get out from under the shadow of these long-standing narratives. Using suggestive examples, I make the case for forms of inquiry across the human-physical 'divide'€™ that eschew ontological monism and that serve to reveal the many legitimate cognitive, moral, and aesthetic framings of Earth present and future. Geography is unusual in that the potential for these forms of inquiry to become normalised is high compared with other subjects. This potential will only be taken advantage of if certain human-environment geographers unaccustomed to engaging the world of geoscience and environmental policy change their modus operandi.


Abstract. Collections of samples were conducted for the determination of the size distributions of EC and OC during the intensive sampling campaigns of the POVA program, in two Alpine valleys of the French Alps, in summer and in winter. The comparison of concentrations obtained for samples collected in parallel with impactor- and filter-based methods is rather positive with slopes of 0.95 and 0.76 for OC and EC, respectively and correlations close to 1 (0.92 and 0.90 for OC and EC, respectively, n=26). This is an indication that the correction of pyrolysis seems to work for the impactor samples despite non even deposits. The size distributions of the concentrations of EC and OC present large evolutions between winter and summer, and between a suburban and a rural site. In winter, an overwhelming proportion of the mass fraction of both species is found in the droplet and accumulation modes, often (but not always) in association with sulfate and other chemical species resulting from secondary formation processes. Some indications of gas/particles exchanges can be found for the other parts of the size spectrum (the Aitken and super micron modes) in the case of the rural site. In summer, the changes are more drastic with, according to the case, a dominant droplet or accumulation mode. Particularly at the rural site, the large extent of processing of the aerosol due to gas/particles exchanges is evident for the Aitken and super micron modes, with increasing of the OC mass fractions in these size ranges. All of these observations give indications on the degree of internal vs. external mixing of the species investigated in the different modes.


BACKGROUND
Allergy is a clinical disorder affecting humans worldwide. Allergenic extracts prepared from natural source materials remain heterogeneous in composition and content, but are regularly used for diagnosis and immunotherapy. Recombinant allergens are suitable candidates to use in place of natural allergens; however, the recombinant allergens should be assessed and compared with the natural ones. Cuc m 2 (profilin), one of the most important allergens of melon (Cucumis melo), has been cloned and was expressed in Escherichia coli (E. coli). We aimed to evaluate the validity of recombinant Cuc m 2 (rCuc m 2) in the diagnosis of melon allergy and investigate whether rCuc m 2 could be used as a replacement for natural Cuc m 2 (nCuc m 2).

METHODS
nCuc m 2 was purified by immuno-affinity chromatography and rCuc m 2 was purified by metal-affinity chromatography. SDS-PAGE and western blotting were carried out to evaluate the purification methods. Skin prick tests (SPT), and enzyme immunoassays to determine specific IgE, were performed with the natural and recombinant purified allergens on 53 patients with melon allergy.

RESULTS
rCuc m 2 elicited no significantly different responses in skin compared with nCuc m 2. All patients' sera showed similar ODs in ELISAs with natural and recombinant profilin.

CONCLUSION
rCuc m 2 evoked strong immuno-reactivity equivalent to nCuc m 2, and has potential for diagnosis of melon allergy.


The guidance below is a brief compilation of suggestions that might help you better manage your mood and anxiety over the lockdown period (or help prevent these from worsening), when so many of our normal coping mechanisms are necessarily curtailed. The list starts with some general suggestions that are applicable to all of us, including those who already struggle with psychological distress, and then goes on to describe some specific suggestions for those of us who struggle with specific anxiety disorders and depression. However, this is not a substitute for psychological or psychiatric treatment.


Ports are the vehicles par excellence for transactions. Since time immemorial, ports have been gateways for the exchange of goods, people and ideas. These exchanges have determined the relevance certain areas have attained in world history by framing global contacts beyond the narrow urban walls of a certain town. Even though Late Medieval and Renaissance ports were situated within the Mediterranean basin, the European expansion overseas and the local competition moved the preeminence of European ports to the Atlantic axis, where Northwestern European cities took over most of the central economic, social, political and cultural role of large metropolises, remaining important nodal points for global interactions until today.


BACKGROUND
Policy changes were needed to reshape the built environment for active transportation.

METHODS
Using the social ecological model as a framework, the Healthy Hawaii Initiative worked with a contractor to develop a series of meetings, planning sessions, and workshops. Activities spanned 22 months between 2007 and 2009, and involved multiple stakeholders, including educational outreach for legislators and collaborative planning sessions with advocates.

RESULTS
Ultimately, with the help of the contractor to initiate the process, Complete Streets and Safe Routes to School (SRTS) legislation were introduced January 2009. Advocacy groups monitored bill progress, testified at hearings, and assisted in rewording the bills. The SRTS statute required the Department of Transportation (DOT) to administer the federal SRTS funds and the complete streets law tasked the state and county DOTs to adopt complete streets policies and review existing highway design standards and guidelines. Both bills were signed into law June 2009.

CONCLUSIONS
Focusing efforts at multiple levels of the social ecological model involving champions and key stakeholders led to the successful passage of legislation supporting active transportation. Tracking policy implementation and evaluation over time will help determine actual impact on active transportation behaviors across Hawaii.


Information encoded by the autoassociation network of CA3 situates landmarks and objects within an allocentric frame of space and time. Guiding locomotion across the spatial environment, and generally organizing behaviour that transcends space and time, the hippocampus creates phenomenal space and time themselves, thus laying the foundations for conscious awareness. It is argued that conscious experience describes the informational content of self-organizing activity patterns in CA3. Excessive pyramidal cell activity in CA3, due to deficient inhibition by GABAergic basket interneurons, leading to event memory formation unrestrained by entorhinal input may be a mechanism for the generation of hallucinations in schizophrenia.


This paper presents a collocation method for the solution of two-point boundary value problems associated with the solution of constrained trajectory optimization of robotic systems. Here, the trajectory optimization is formulated as an optimal control problem with state and control variable inequality constraints. The indirect approach to solving this problem leads to a two-point boundary value problem involving index-1 differential-algebraic equations and inequality constraints due to the complementarity conditions. In the numerical algorithm presented here, the differential and algebraic variables of the BVP-DAEs are approximated using piecewise polynomials on a mesh that may be nonuniform. The collocation method is realized by approximating the BVP-DAE at Lobatto points within each interval of the mesh. An interior point Newton's method is used to solve the collocation equations, and maintain feasibility of the inequality constraints. Two examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the numerical algorithm. In the first example the algorithm is used to determine the time optimal point to point trajectory for a 3 degree of freedom floating robot. The second example determines the optimal trajectory of a two-link R-R robot that is subject to end effector constraints.


Background and Aim: Contamination of food with enterotoxins of Staphylococcus aureus i s a risk factor for public health. Because of lack of inf ormation on the contamination of the processed meat products including sausage and hams with the enterotoxin s of Staphylococcus aureus, the present study was conducted to assess the pres ence of these toxins in the aforementioned products in Iran. Material and Methods: In this cross sectional study, 72 samples of sausage and h am were obtained from product storages of four active meat processing plan ts with different qualitative grades; including A, B, C and D in summer of 2015 in Isfahan Province, Iran. Th e qualitative grading of the meat processing plants was performed on the basis of the "pre requisite programs: PRPs" form approved by Food and Drug Administration of Ministry of Health in Iran. The scores of hygien ic factors including "hygiene of workers", "production and processing", "washing, disinfection, cleaning" and "hazard identif ication and verification" of the aforementioned meat processing plants were determined accor ding t the PRPs form. The meat processing plant with qualitative grades of A, B, C and D had the scores of 924, 825, 754 and 614, respectively. The hygienic grades of meat processing plants were "desirable", based on the PRPs form. The ELISA kite was used to detect the enterotoxins of staphylococcus aureus. Results: The results showed lack of contamination of the processed m at products with enterotoxins of staphylococcus aureus in all sampls obtained from all of the factories with different qualitative grades. Conclusion: The result of the current study show ed that the implementation of suitable designs in relation to the hygienic principles and the continuo us surveillance of food inspectors of the Department of Food and Drug of Isfahan Univer sity of medical sciences could have a positive ro le in prevention of contamination of sausage and hams wit h enterotoxins of Staphylococcus aureus.


The annual image competition, Reflections of Research, provides a glimpse into the cutting-edge heart and circulatory research funded by the British Heart Foundation.


This article examines the use of interim assessments in elementary schools in the School District of Philadelphia. The article reports on the qualitative component of a multimethod study about the use of interim assessments in Philadelphia. The study used an organizational learning framework to explore how schools can best develop the capacity to utilize the potential benefits of interim assessments. The qualitative analysis draws on data from intensive fieldwork in 10 elementary schools and interviews with district staff and others who worked with the schools, as well as further in-depth case study analysis of 5 schools. This article examines how school leaders and grade groups made sense of data provided through interim assessments and how they were able to use these data to rethink instructional practice. We found substantial evidence that interim assessments have the potential to contribute to instructional coherence and instructional improvement if they are embedded in a robust feedback system. Such feedback systems were not the norm in the schools in our study, and their development requires skill, knowledge, and concerted attention on the part of school leaders.


Why is it difficult to save for a pension or maintain a healthy diet? Choosing between options that have future or delayed consequences presents a challenge for a decision maker. When faced with such intertemporal choices the tendency to favour choices with immediate or short term outcomes, otherwise known as delay discounting, can lead to suboptimal consequences in the long-term. However, the mechanisms underlying the devaluation of future outcomes are poorly understood. This is due to the lack of a consistent framework for the representation of delays and delayed outcomes. One perspective is to represent delays as uncertainty. However, current conceptions of uncertainty are limited, by and large, to the dimension of probability, and are therefore inadequate. This thesis adopts a delay discounting model and emphasises different types of uncertainties within choice. Unifying these components, a framework that considers intertemporal choice as decision making under uncertainty is proposed.A series of behavioural and electrophysiological studies is presented to demonstrate that: it is the perceived uncertainty about ?if? and ?when? outcomes occur that contributes to behavioural discounting (chapters 2 and 3); the perception and evaluation of ?what? is delayed is underlined by emotional processes (chapter 4); and that generally, uncertainties about ?if? and ?what? outcomes differentially characterise risky and impulsive choices (chapter 5), and can be distinguished in terms of their informational qualities (chapter 6). Collectively, these findings present a deconstruction of uncertainty into components of ?if?, ?what? and ?when?, that could be mapped to delayed outcomes. I discuss them within the context of judgement and decision making, individual differences, and neural aspects of reward processing. These results allow me to argue that 1) all decision making is a process of information availability; 2) behaviour is motivated to reduce uncertainty; 3) choice is the manifestation of acquired information gathered from a decision-maker?s internal and/or external environment. In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates that decision making under uncertainty can be qualified beyond a single dimension of probability; and that uncertainty can be characterised as a state of incomplete information about ?if? what? and ?when? outcomes will occur. Accordingly, intertemporal and risky choices can be accommodated within a single framework, subject to the same cognitive and neural processes. Consequently, this framework allows for the design of behavioural interventions that specifically target reducing uncertainties of ?if?, ?what? or ?when?.


Understanding the neurophysiology underlying pain perception in infants is central to improving early life pain management. In this multimodal MRI study, we use resting-state functional and white matter diffusion MRI to investigate individual variability in infants' noxious-evoked brain activity. In an 18-infant nociception-paradigm dataset, we show it is possible to predict infants' cerebral haemodynamic responses to experimental noxious stimulation using their resting-state activity across nine networks from a separate stimulus-free scan. In an independent 215-infant Developing Human Connectome Project dataset, we use this resting-state-based prediction model to generate noxious responses. We identify a significant correlation between these predicted noxious responses and infants' white matter mean diffusivity, and this relationship is subsequently confirmed within our nociception-paradigm dataset. These findings reveal that a newborn infant's pain-related brain activity is tightly coupled to both their spontaneous resting-state activity and underlying white matter microstructure. This work provides proof-of-concept that knowledge of an infant's functional and structural brain architecture could be used to predict pain responses, informing infant pain management strategies and facilitating evidence-based personalisation of care.


The possibility of hybrid system construction is considered in this paper. The coherent optical system is the constituent part of this system. The first part of the system is constructed in passband (optical cable is transmission medium), and the second part of the system is constructed in baseband. The heterodyne optical receiver is used as optical receiver. Estimation is not done just after demodulation, but it is done at the end of the section in baseband. Taking into account shot noise of photodetectors, laser phase noise (transmitter laser and local laser) and noise which is generated during transmission by means of the section in baseband, we determine the performances of the proposed system.


Research in speaker recognition has recently seen significant progress due to the application of neural network models and the availability of new large-scale datasets. There has been a plethora of work in search for more powerful architectures or loss functions suitable for the task, but these works do not consider what information is learnt by the models, apart from being able to predict the given labels.
In this work, we introduce an environment adversarial training framework in which the network can effectively learn speaker-discriminative and environment-invariant embeddings without explicit domain shift during training. We achieve this by utilising the previously unused `video' information in the VoxCeleb dataset. The environment adversarial training allows the network to generalise better to unseen conditions. The method is evaluated on both speaker identification and verification tasks using the VoxCeleb dataset, on which we demonstrate significant performance improvements over baselines.


Gradient-based adversarial attacks on neural networks threaten extremely critical applications such as medical diagnosis and biometric authentication. These attacks use the gradient of the neural network to craft imperceptible perturbations to be added to the test data, in an attempt to decrease the accuracy of the network. We propose a defense to combat such attacks, which can be modified to reduce the training time of the network by as much as 71%, and can be further modified to reduce the training time of the defense by as much as 19%. Further, we address the threat of uncertain behavior on the part of the attacker, a threat previously overlooked in the literature that considers mostly white box scenarios. To combat uncertainty on the attacker's part, we train our defense with an ensemble of attacks, each generated with a different attack algorithm, and using gradients of distinct architecture types. Finally, we discuss how we can prevent the attacker from breaking the defense by estimating the gradient of the defense transformation.


When Hong Kong was returned to the sovereignty of China by the British in July 1997, the new Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) Government announced the 'Biliterate and Trilingual' policy for all schools. Hong Kong students of this generation are expected to be proficient in both written English and Chinese, and speak fluent English (the international language), Cantonese (the vernacular language) as well as Putonghua (the national language of the PRC). To find out the attitudes of secondary school students towards these three languages, a questionnaire study was conducted with 134 senior secondary students. Given also the important relationship between social class, achievement and language attitudes (Schumann, 1976; Gibbons, 1984; Gardner, 1985; Siu, 1988; Lee, 1998), this paper compares the language attitudes of two main groups of Hong Kong students, namely the middle-class elite and the working-class low-achievers. The findings showed that the former group was more inclined to use English while the latter group the vernacular Cantonese. Despite this difference, both groups of students held generally positive attitudes towards the three languages.


The production of heavy flavour quarks in association with a vector boson represents an important process to study QCD. High precision is achieved in measurements of differential cross sections and comparisons are made to state-of-the-art NLO QCD calculations and different parton distribution function parameterizations. Measurement of the production of a W boson in association with a charm quark using 4.6 fb-1 of pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector is reported. The measurement is performed using W boson plus tagged c-jet and W boson plus D/D* meson. Cross sections integrated over a fiducial kinematic range and differential as a function of the pseudorapidity of the lepton from the W-boson decay are reported.


The effective volume occupied by the genomes of all forms of life far exceeds that of the cells in which they are contained.
Therefore, all organisms have developed mechanisms for compactly folding and functionally organizing their genetic material. H-NS, a bacterial DNA compaction protein, is a prime example of a protein that is functionally modulated in response to environmental cues. These cues are translated into adapted gene expression patterns. We delve into the mechanisms underlying DNA compaction and its adaptation to environmental stimuli and explore the complex and subtle modulation of these diverse, yet difficult-to-study, structures.


Law in the United Methodist Church (UMC) is a product of democracy, written by elected delegates to a legislative body, recorded in a book entitled The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church. As "a Book of Law," the Book of Discipline is "the only official and authoritative Book of Law of The Methodist Church," according to the Methodist Church's Judicial Council in a landmark 1953 ruling. Despite this declaration, the Judicial Council had no idea in 1953 that it had addressed a question that in 20 years would divide not just the Methodists, but Americans and American Christians generally. In the last 30 years of the twentieth century, controversies over homosexuality led American Christians into debates over the role law should play in their churches, while Americans as a whole debated the role churches should play in their law. United Methodist conservatives discovered that by rallying populist majorities to rewrite church law, they could then use church trials to roll back what they saw as excesses from the 1960s still plaguing American society. Writing any law is necessarily a political process, but in the UMC, church trials became political battlegrounds as well, contests to determine if rank-and-file clergy approved church rules against anything resembling a same-sex marriage.


The purpose of this research was to analyze the adsorption behavior of Fe(II) and Fe(III) ions in aqueous solution onto beads of naturally derived chitosan cross-linked with tripolyphosphate in a batch system. Effects of solution pH, contact time and amount of adsorbent were regarded in the kinetic and equilibrium studies. The optimum conditions of adsorption for Fe(II) and Fe(III) were obtained as pH 5 and 3, amount of adsorbent 2 and 1.9 g and contact time 70 and 60 min, respectively. The kinetic and equilibrium experimental data were integrated into different models using the non-linear regression method. As a result, the pseudo-second-order and the Redlich–Peterson isotherm were the best evaluated models. The adsorption capacity, based on Langmuir, was 11.65 mg g −1 for Fe(II) and 13.72 mg g −1 for Fe(III). The beads of chitosan cross-linked with tripolyphosphate may be used as an effective bioadsorbent for the removal of Fe(II) and Fe(III) from an aqueous solution. This study confirms that the chitosan isolated from shrimp waste can be used to remove certain heavy metals in wastewater, without adversely affecting the ecosystem.


A speech processing algorithm was developed to create more salient versions of the rapidly changing elements in the acoustic waveform of speech that have been shown to be deficiently processed by language-learning impaired (LLI) children. LLI children received extensive daily training, over a 4-week period, with listening exercises in which all speech was translated into this synthetic form. They also received daily training with computer "games" designed to adaptively drive improvements in temporal processing thresholds. Significant improvements in speech discrimination and language comprehension abilities were demonstrated in two independent groups of LLI children.


Octavia Butler mentioned her "ongoing fascination with biology [and] medicine," when commenting on one of her own short stories (first published in 1987) in which she has combined elements from three genetic disorders to create the premises for the story. This fascination locates much of her oeuvre at the intersection of miscegenation and the medical. In many of her novels, she addresses the racist notion of miscegenation both literally and figuratively, and in biological as well as cultural contexts. Many of her main characters are what other characters often regard as miscegenated offspring; most are placed in situations where they have to embrace, or at least accept, interracial or inter-species biological and/or cultural relations – hybrid lives – in order to survive and possibly develop. For instance, the quotation "What will she give us all? Fur? Tails?" comes from Butler's last novel, Fledgling (2005). The protagonist of this novel is a genetic experiment, a hybrid, whose African American ancestry is the solution to a problem but, at the same time, means that her family members are murdered due to enduring racist ideas originating in American slavery, which in this speculative novel has spread to another humanoid species. In this paper, I will focus on how Butler portrays and comments on miscegenation in Clay's Ark (1984), a science fiction novel that features a physician as one of the main characters and depicts an alien infection that changes not only people's lives but also their offspring.


We Are Stardust Most of the universe's chemical elements were produced in stars, with the heaviest elements being produced when stars explode. Barlow et al. (p. 1343) used the Herschel Space Observatory to obtain submillimeter spectra of the Crab Nebula, the remains of a stellar explosion that was witnessed on Earth in 1054 AD, and detected the first evidence of a noble gas-containing molecular ion in space—36ArH+. Koo et al. (p. 1346) obtained near-infrared spectroscopic observations of the remains of another stellar explosion, Cassiopeia A, with the Palomar 5-m Hale telescope, and found evidence that a substantial amount of phosphorus was formed in the explosion. Among the six elements essential for life (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), only the origin of phosphorus remained to be confirmed by observation. Spectroscopic observations of the remains of stellar explosions confirm that argon-36 and phosphorus are produced in such energetic events. Phosphorus (31P), which is essential for life, is thought to be synthesized in massive stars and dispersed into interstellar space when these stars explode as supernovae (SNe). Here, we report on near-infrared spectroscopic observations of the young SN remnant Cassiopeia A, which show that the abundance ratio of phosphorus to the major nucleosynthetic product iron (56Fe) in SN material is up to 100 times the average ratio of the Milky Way, confirming that phosphorus is produced in SNe. The observed range is compatible with predictions from SN nucleosynthetic models but not with the scenario in which the chemical elements in the inner SN layers are completely mixed by hydrodynamic instabilities during the explosion.


Many studies have shown that the perception of 'difficult' non-native phonetic contrasts can be improved through auditory training. More recently, studies comparing the effectiveness of auditory and audiovisual training have shown an advantage for audiovisual training at least for contrasts that are sufficiently visually-salient. Audiovisual training also led to improvements in the pronunciation of the trained consonants. The current study, which trained the /l/-/r/ contrast with Japanese learners of English, investigated training effectiveness using visual stimuli alone, i.e. with trainees seeing but not hearing the speakers. Fifteen Japanese students participated in the seven-session training programme and there were eleven controls. Pre/post tests were carried out in auditory (A), visual (V) and audiovisual (AV) test conditions and participants were also recorded before and after the training reading a list of words which included the sounds /l/ and /r/. Visual training was successful in significantly increasing the discriminability of the /l/-/r/ contrast in trainees in V and AV test conditions but there was no carry-over to the A condition. There was generalisation to nonsense words by unknown speakers. Visual influence was also tested by comparing performance in A and AV test conditions, and in a simple McGurk task. AV benefit increased to a greater extent for trainees. In the McGurk test, visual influence in the identification of discrepant (A /ba/- V /ga/) stimuli increased significantly in the post-test but this also occurred for controls, so might be due to a 'foreignlanguage' effect as most participants were attending a phonetics summer school in a foreign country. Results of an identification and rating test evaluating the participants' pronunciation of /l/ and /r/ pre- and post- training showed no evidence of any improvements in pronunciation following visual training. Index Terms: Audiovisual perception, L2 speech perception, training, McGurk effect


This paper describes a biologically inspired approach to vision-only simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) on ground-based platforms. The core SLAM system, dubbed RatSLAM, is based on computational models of the rodent hippocampus, and is coupled with a lightweight vision system that provides odometry and appearance information. RatSLAM builds a map in an online manner, driving loop closure and relocalization through sequences of familiar visual scenes. Visual ambiguity is managed by maintaining multiple competing vehicle pose estimates, while cumulative errors in odometry are corrected after loop closure by a map correction algorithm. We demonstrate the mapping performance of the system on a 66 km car journey through a complex suburban road network. Using only a web camera operating at 10 Hz, RatSLAM generates a coherent map of the entire environment at real-time speed, correctly closing more than 51 loops of up to 5 km in length.


In the subacute phase of myocardial infarction following coronary ligation in dogs, a relationship was noted between the extent of infarction and the degree of elevation of left ventricular end-diastolic pressure. Left ventricular filling pressure was consistently increased when 25% or more of the left ventricle was infarcted. Isoproterenol infusion resulted in enhanced left ventricular function in both control and infarcted dogs, but the response was clearly weakened in those animals in which more than 20% of the left ventricle was infarcted. Acetylstrophanthidin caused no improvement in left ventricular function in infarcted dogs as judged by the relationship between filling pressure and cardiac output. The peak rate of rise of left ventricular pressure did increase in animals with infarcts, but was less than that in controls. Animals with infarcts had a lowered threshold for production of ventricular tachycardia by acetylstrophanthidin. These results in dogs suggest the need for further assessment of the role of digitalis in the treatment of heart failure following acute myocardial infarction.


In May 2019, the Minister for Lands convened a National Land Summit in Port Moresby to review the implementation of the National Land Development Program over the course of the past decade. Much of the discussion at this meeting was concerned with the incorporation of customary land groups and the voluntary registration of their collective land titles under legislation that was passed by the National Parliament in 2009 but did not take effect until 2012. Participants in the summit thought that the implementation of this legislation had not proven to be an effective way of 'mobilising customary land for development'. This paper seeks to explain why the new legal and institutional regime has failed to live up to the expectations of the policymakers who were instrumental in its establishment. An initial examination of the rationale behind the legislation is followed by an examination of published evidence relating to its implementation in different parts of the country, including case studies of areas where the evidence serves to illuminate the motivations of the actors involved in the process of incorporation and registration. The paper concludes with some reflections on the lessons to be learnt from this experiment in policy reform.


Abstract Iterative evolutionary changes are of special interest because they imply that the recurring morphological changes had a cause that also repeated itself and might therefore be possible to uncover. We describe a set of iterative morphological changes in melanopsid gastropods from the ancient, long-lived Lake Pannon. First in the Pannonian Age, and again in the Pontian Age approximately three million years later, a smooth-shelled ancestor gave rise to a shouldered descendant. In both cases, the morphological change was probably coincident with a shift from habitats just outside the lake (e.g., rivers and streams) to habitats within the lake itself. Many other convergent examples exist in which a smooth-shelled river dweller is closely related to a shouldered and/or ribbed lacustrine snail. The frequency of this type of morphological change suggests that it has an adaptive basis; response to differing predators or hydrodynamic conditions seem the most plausible explanations, but the functional nature of these morphological changes remains unknown.


The one-hundredth anniversary of the estate tax provides an ideal moment to reflect on the role of wealth transfer taxation in the larger scheme of the U.S. tax system. Wealth and income inequality are at historically high levels, and the responses to these issues are often reduced to a simplistic political dichotomy of "right" versus "left." The multitude of views of the American people cannot be reduced to such simple generalities without losing important nuances. This Article identifies three general categories of political philosophical viewpoints that are commonly endorsed by both politicians and everyday Americans, and then examines the current estate tax from within the perspective of those positions. The Article concludes that maintaining a wealth transfer tax system, perhaps organized as a tax assessed on the heirs, best matches the political views of twenty-first century Americans.


This paper is part of a Symposium entitled ?American Regulatory Policy: Have We Found A Third Way?? In the decades following World War II, until the oil shocks of the 1970s, Western European countries developed generous, inclusive, exemplary welfare states. Despite the differences between the countries, the defining principle was inclusion ? all citizens within the nation were deserving of support. Unions, under corporatist bargaining arrangements, exercised wage restraint in return for benefits. The welfare states rested on full employment prosperity. In other words, most people contributing to the welfare state rather than drawing benefits. In the past two decades, these countries have been suffering from sluggish economies and, most seriously, high rates of long-term unemployment. Many policymakers are looking to emulate the United States and, more recently, the United Kingdom. They argue that the welfare state is too generous and that labor has to be made more flexible. The paper then examines the U.S. welfare system, where the emphasis is on work and exclusion. It argues that rather than being the so-called ?Third Way,? this has been the historic mission of the liberal welfare state. The paper concludes with proposals for reform.


Lean construction research has shown that managing work flow effectively and maintaining labor flow on site can improve construction labor performance. Related research also shows that congestion on construction sites often leads to lowered efficiency. Using these findings as a point of departure, we use the agent-based modeling method to represent the construction site as a system of complex interactions and explore whether labor efficiency can be treated as an emergent property resulting from individual and crew interactions in space. This allows us to use a "bottom-up" approach to analyzing labor efficiency, which supplements existing "top-down" approaches to modeling the impacts of space congestion on labor efficiency. A pilot implementation of the agent-based model, and preliminary results illustrating the relationships between congestion and labor efficiency are presented. The empirical studies exhibit system behavior that support published principles of work-force management. The primary contribution of this paper is that it provides a method that can be used to efficiently utilize construction space, and develop plans and schedules that account for congestion arising from crew interactions in space.


Abstract Environmental risks associated with Co, Cr, Cu, Mn, Ni, Pb, V and Zn in street dust collected from Baotou, a medium-sized industrial city in a semi-arid area of northwest China, were assessed by using enrichment factor and the potential ecological index. Their spatial distributions and sources in the dust were analyzed on the basis of geostatistical methods and multivariate statistical analysis, respectively. The results indicate that street dust in Baotou has elevated heavy metal concentrations, especially of Co, Cr, Cu, Pb and Zn. Co in the dust was significantly enriched. Cr and Pb were from moderate to significant enrichment. Cu and Zn were from minimal to moderate enrichment, whereas Mn, Ni and V in the dust were from deficient to minimal enrichment. The ecological risk levels of Co and Pb in the dust were moderate to considerable and low to moderate, respectively, whereas those of other heavy metals studied in the dust presented low ecological risk. Different distribution patterns were found among the analyzed heavy metals. Three main sources of these heavy metals were identified. Cr, Mn, Ni and V originated from nature and industrial activities. Cu, Pb and Zn derived mainly from traffic sources, and Co was mainly from construction sources.


Graph theory-based regression techniques, such as group additivity, have widely been implemented for fast estimation of thermochemistry of large molecules. The essence of these techniques lies in graphs that molecules are decomposed to. These graphs are selected based on heuristics and as a result, they may not give optimal accuracy and are hard to choose for non-nearest-neighbor electronic effects such as ring strain, steric hindrance, and resonance structures. Here, we explore LASSO, a feature selection algorithm, to select the optimal set of graph descriptors for predicting the standard enthalpy of formation, ΔfH°. We gather hydrocarbon gas-phase data from the NIST Webbook and the Burcat's databases. We find that models using LASSO-based graph descriptors from the exhaustively enumerated graph descriptor space predict ΔfH° more accurately than the traditional group additivity. We compare our framework with state-of-the-art machine-learning models for the QM9 data set. The mean absolute error of 1.39 kcal mol−1 is comparable to published machine learning models. To cope with the computational cost of complete enumeration, we present: (1) a semi-supervised LASSO learning method and (2) an adsorbate subgraph mining algorithm. The former prunes the graph descriptor space on-the-fly during the LASSO regression and is applied to a gas-phase hydrocarbon data set. The latter enumerates a truncated graph descriptor space from adsorbate graphs of surface science data. For lignin monomer adsorbates on Pt(111), considered here as an illustrative example, descriptors selected from the adsorbate subgraph space result in a mean absolute error and a root mean square error of 2.08 and 3.03 kcal mol−1, respectively. We discuss a simple method that identifies outliers in descriptor space that result in large model errors so the accuracy can be improved with the addition of suitable data.


The tommotiid Paterimitra pyramidalis Laurie, 1986, is redescribed based on well‐preserved material from the lower Cambrian Wilkawillina, Wirrapowie and Ajax limestones of the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. The material shows that the scleritome of Paterimitra pyramidalis includes three sclerite morphotypes (S1, S2 and L). Detailed shell microstructure studies show striking similarities with both the paterinid brachiopod Askepasma toddense and the tommotiid Eccentrotheca helenia, which strengthens the suggested evolutionary link between tommotiids and brachiopods. Based on the partly articulated specimens and similarities in shell microstructure and sclerite morphology with Eccentrotheca, Paterimitra pyramidalis is reconstructed as a tube‐dwelling, epifaunal, sessile, filter‐feeder with an organic pedicle‐like attachment structure. The proposed reconstruction of the scleritome comprises a basal unit composed of one S1 and one S2 sclerite, as well as an unresolved number of L sclerites lining a coniform tubular structure.


We present a classification-based policy iteration algorithm, called Direct Policy Iteration, and provide its finite-sample analysis. Our results state a performance bound in terms of the number of policy improvement steps, the number of rollouts used in each iteration, the capacity of the considered policy space, and a new capacity measure which indicates how well the policy space can approximate policies that are greedy w.r.t. any of its members. The analysis reveals a tradeoff between the estimation and approximation errors in this classification-based policy iteration setting. We also study the consistency of the method when there exists a sequence of policy spaces with increasing capacity.


A field experiment was conducted at the School of Sustainable Agriculture Field Laboratory in University Malaysia Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah to study the effect of
different photoperiod on Chrysanthemum sp. as cut flower under lowland area with mean daily temperature at 31°C and 75 % of relative humidity. Effectiveness of each photoperiod given was measured through the rate of Chrysanthemum growth and the flower size obtained. The experiment was conducted by using Complete Random Design (CRD) by supplementing different photoperiod, which were 12 h, 14 h, 16 h,
and 18 h of light. Each photoperiod was evaluated using 10 pseudoreplicates. Generally, the plant height was recorded from the first week after transplanting (WAT) whereas the bud opening was recorded only after the seventh week. The result clearly shown that there is significant different on different photoperiod on the plant heigh growth (One-way ANOVA). The 14 h photoperiod resulted to highest plant height (85.4 cm) and also had the shortest photoperiod response (3.5 weeks). Besides, 50% of flowers obtained were categorized as 'Fancy', 10% of 'Standard' and 40% of 'Short'
grade. In conclusion, the 14 h of photoperiod is best suggested to obtained Chrysanthemum cut flower under lowland area. In conclusion, 14 h was suggested the best photoperiod treatment under lowland area which yields taller plant height, and had the shortest photoperiodic response. However, a further study in temperature effect to plant growth and flowering response of Chrysanthemum cultivated under lowland area should be conducted. Hence, through this that we may obtained a more promising protocol of Chrysanthemum cut flower production that is more flexible, easy and cheaper and subsequently to create an alternative way upon the competition on land use of highland area, especially in Sabah.


Formation of electron bunches in the interelectrode space in vacuum detectors of optical radiation is discussed. Such bunches give rise to pulses of the electric current, usually interpreted as photocounts, in the external circuit. It is shown that the traditional theory of photocounts, in inconsistent and, in particular, it violates causality. Calculations based on the variational method are used to show that a distributed low-density electron cloud is unstable in the presence of the Coulomb forces and that it splits into bunches. The electron bunches moving in the interelectrode space experience peaking, which is easiest to understand on the basis of the catastrophe theory. Spatial (caustics) and temporal (overtaking) catastrophes may occur in an electron flux. Numerical simulation is used to consider spherical and linear expansion of electron bunches under the action of the Coulomb forces. It is shown that sharp electron density maxima are formed and that their properties resemble those of point-like particles capable of inducing electric current peaks (photocounts) in the external circuit of a detector when they travel across the interelectrode space. Circumstances leading to a higher probability of formation of one-electron bunches are pointed out. The analysis as a whole is intended to help the understanding of the discrete nature of photocounts when a photocathode is excited by a continuous high-energy laser radiation train.


1. The organic anion transporting polypeptides (humans OATP; other species Oatp) belong to the SLCO gene superfamily of transporters and are twelve transmembrane domain glycoproteins expressed in various epithelial cells. Some OATPs/Oatps are expressed in a single organ, while others are expressed ubiquitously. 2. The functionally characterized members mediate sodium-independent transport of a variety of structurally independent, mainly amphipathic organic compounds, including bile salts, hormones and their conjugates, toxins, and various drugs. 3. This review summarizes the general features and the substrates of the eleven human OATPs. Furthermore, it reviews what is known about the mechanism of their multispecificity, their predicted structure, their role in drug–food interactions, and their role in cancer. 4. Finally, some open questions are raised that need to be addressed to advance OATP research in the near future.


Significantly, the school has already forged strong partnerships with communities in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven districts, as was clear from the many community leaders present at the ceremony. The GSM's primary goal is to graduate doctors committed to serving in regional, rural and remote Australia. In the words of the university's Vice-Chancellor, the school's model is designed "to address the shortage of [country] medical practitioners". And this commitment explains why many of the inaugural students hail from regional and rural communities.


Lucy has her school things ready. She has a new grey skirt, a pair of brown shoes, a pencil case and a satchel. Tom wishes that he had a satchel too. Full of warmth and good humour, the happy simplicity of childhood is captured in this richly illustrated, classic picture book about two young children's first experience of school.


OBJECTIVE
Ketamine has demonstrated rapid antidepressant effects in patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD); however, the safety and tolerability of ketamine in this population have not been fully described. Herein we report the largest study to date of the safety, tolerability, and acceptability of ketamine in TRD.

METHOD
Data from 205 intravenous (IV) ketamine infusions (0.5 mg/kg over 40 minutes) in 97 participants with DSM-IV-defined major depressive disorder (MDD) were pooled from 3 clinical trials conducted between 2006 and 2012 at 2 academic medical centers. Safety and tolerability measures included attrition, adverse events (AEs), hemodynamic changes, and assessments of psychosis and dissociation.

RESULTS
The overall antidepressant response rate, defined as a ≥ 50% improvement in Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale score, was 67% (65 of 97 participants). Four of 205 infusions (1.95%) were discontinued due to AEs. The overall attrition rate was 3.1% (3 of 97). In the first 4 hours after the infusion, the most common general AEs were drowsiness, dizziness, poor coordination, blurred vision, and feeling strange or unreal. Approximately one third of individuals experienced protocol-defined hemodynamic changes. Ketamine resulted in small but significant increases in psychotomimetic and dissociative symptoms (all P < .05). There were no cases of persistent psychotomimetic effects, adverse medical effects, or increased substance use in a subgroup of patients with available long-term follow-up information.

CONCLUSIONS
In this relatively large group of patients with TRD, ketamine was safe and well tolerated. Further research investigating the safety of ketamine in severe and refractory depression is warranted.

TRIAL REGISTRATION
ClinicalTrials.gov identifiers: NCT00419003, NCT00548964, and NCT00768430.


On Saturday, October 12, 1991, faced with Professor Anita Hill's testimony from the previous day alleging that Judge Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming transformed sensational political melodrama into Shakespearean tragedy in an attempt to save the judge's nomination. During the final round of the committee's questioning of Thomas, Simpson declared, chorus-like:I tell you I do [think] Shakespeare would love this. This is all Shakespeare. This is about love and hate and cheating and distrust and kindness and disgust and avarice and jealousy and envy--all those things that make that remarkable bard read today. But, boy, I tell you one came to my head and I just went and got it out of the back of the book, Othello. Read Othello and don't ever forget this line. "Good name in man and woman dear, my Lord"--remember this scene--"is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; T'is [sic] something, nothing; T'was [sic] mine, t'is [sic] his and has been slave to thousands. But he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed." What a tragedy! What a disgusting tragedy! (Phelps and Winternitz 355)(1)Those unfamiliar with the Othello text undoubtedly accepted the quotation at face value because of Thomas's lengthy lamentations on the loss of his reputation. Familiarity with Othello, on the other hand, led some to view Simpson's allusion with amused contempt because the lines he quoted belong not to Othello but to Iago, who elsewhere says, "Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving" (II.iii. 268-70). If Simpson blundered, what was his initial purpose? Had he sent a staffer to look up entries under "reputation" in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and picked this one because Othello was black?(2) Whom did he consider his audience? Surely, Simpson did not mean to draw an analogy between Thomas and the enraged Othello who kills his white wife out of jealousy, especially since behind the enraged Thomas sat his white wife.At the time, Simpson's Othello allusion received scant notice in the New York Times, where Maureen Dowd reported it without analyzing its purpose (29). In retrospective accounts, the Othello appropriation was overlooked by contributors to Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992) and by David Brock in The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story (1993), the latest attempt to delve into Hill's motivation. In two 1991 articles in The New Republic, however, Simpson's declaration became subject to derision along with other examples of the misuse of literary allusion by committee members.(3) Barry Edelstein termed Simpson's "recourse to Othello...incongruous" since Iago, who speaks the lines, is "a white man who, although supposedly on Othello's side, plots to bring him down and eventually destroys him." Edelstein found it "no wonder [that] Judge Thomas, along with every other literate American, sat there silent" (13).(4) Robert Brustein also complained that the words quoted are "uttered by the dissimulating villain Iago, who is stonewalling." He added that Thomas, "vigorously nodding in agreement...offered no protest or correction" (34). Additionally, in Capitol Games (1992), authors Phelps and Winternitz reported:Thomas seemed to wince as Simpson spoke. The parallels to Thomas were perfect, and completely misunderstood by Simpson. The lines that the senator quoted were not those of Othello, the black tragic hero of the play, but of Iago, the scheming villain, who was falsely trying to convince Othello that he was telling the truth. (355)(5)Although they do not reveal their reasons, Phelps and Winternitz seem correct in saying that "the parallels to Thomas were perfect." Despite his seeming misappropriation of Shakespeare in a feeble bid to lend sympathy and tragic stature for Thomas, Simpson is not the literary simpleton he appeared. …


This Article reviews the literature on the debate regarding the causal relationship between filing for bankruptcy and the use of payday loans but does not weigh in on the subject. Rather, it uses these studies, as well as a general discussion of bankruptcy filing and payday loans, as a backdrop for analyzing new data regarding the correlation between bankruptcy filing and the use of payday loans. This Article reports on an empirical study conducted in the state of New Mexico that measures rates of payday loan use among bankruptcy debtors from a large sample of publicly available bankruptcy data.Part I of this Article discusses the payday loan industry, its business model, how the loans work, and who the likely payday lending customer is. Part II reviews the current literature regarding the connection between payday loans and bankruptcy, and suggests some ways in which the existing literature falls short of fully answering the question of whether payday lending causes bankruptcy filing. Part III describes the new empirical study from New Mexico. This Article describes the method used to conduct this study as well as its results. In summary, our data show that from 2007 to 2009, 18.9 percent of bankruptcy debtors in New Mexico reported using payday loans. Compared to the use of payday loans reported in other studies among the general population, as well as past studies on payday loan use among bankruptcy debtors, this rate of usage is extremely high. Moreover, the correlation between bankruptcy and payday loans seems to be getting stronger, as the use of these loan products appears to be growing. We find that almost double the percentage of bankruptcy debtors reported using payday loans from 2007 to 2009, than from 2000 to 2002.Part IV of this Article concludes that while one cannot be certain that there is a causal connection between filing for bankruptcy and using payday or other short-term loans, there is a strong correlation between bankruptcy filing and payday loan use. If the increasing use of payday loans is seen as a problem, we conclude that the problem appears to be growing, despite efforts by states to cut down on the use of these loans and to curb the use of multiple loans at one time. In fact, the usage of multiple payday loans at one time also has increased drastically, as recent bankruptcy debtors, whether individuals or families, report using far more of these types of loans simultaneously than in the past. All of this indicates that the use of multiple loans at one time is increasing, a problem states are grappling with but apparently are not solving.


The difficult connection between Nietzsche's philosophy and economics has only been very recently examined. This essay examines (a) the introduction of Nietzsche's particular meaning of "creative destruction" in economics and (b) the philosophical justification of this notion. In so doing, the paper evaluates the conflicting evolutionist and Nietzschean interpretations of "creative destruction." It is difficult to reconcile these two metaphors in order to demonstrate that the will for power offers a better interpretation of the "creative destruction" mechanism than does the fight for life.


The low cost of sperm sexing methods combined with in vitro embryo production in genetic improvement programs can increase the profitability of cattle production, in particular when it does not decrease reproductive efficiency. The aim of this work was to evaluate the sex ratio deviation of thawed bovine semen processed by density gradient centrifugation and swim-up. Semen doses were collected from ten bulls of different breeds, and each experimental group was replicated ten times.A Percoll™ gradient was prepared by mixing Dulbecco's Modified Eagle Medium (DMEM; Sigma Aldrich, St. Louis, MO, USA) isotonic solutions with Percoll™ (GE Healthcare Bio-Science AB, Uppsala, Sweden) stock solution with 0.3% BSA, resulting in densities ranging from 1.110 to 1.123 g mL-1. The layers of discontinuous density gradient were disposed from the larger density (bottom of the tube) to the smaller into 15-mL conical centrifuge tubes. About 40 million sperm were overlaid on Percoll™ gradient and were centrifuged at 500 g for 15 min, at 22°C.The thawed semen samples were deposited in 15-mL conical centrifuge tubes containing 5 mLof DMEM and centrifuged twice at 300 g for 5 min for extender removal. After the second centrifugation, the supernatant was discarded and the sediment diluted in 1.0 mL of DMEM supplemented with 0.3% BSA. The tube was maintained in an incubator at 38.5°C and 5% CO2 for 1 h. One milliliter of supernatant was recovered and evaluated for the sperm motility and vigor. Eighty million sperm were submitted to the swim-up method. For the association of density gradient and swim-up, the swim-up supernatant was recovered and overlaid on Percoll™ gradient. The gradients were centrifuged and the sperm pellet recovered. The recovered sperm were submitted to DNA extraction with phenol-chloroform. Quantitative Real Time PCR (Parati et al. 2006 Theriogenology 66, 2202-2209) was used for the determination of the proportion of X-chromosome-bearing sperm, after centrifugation through density gradient and after swim-up. The results of amplification were analyzed in 7500 Sequence Detection System Software (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA), using Relative Quantification (Ct) Study assay. The results of X-sorted sperm samples analyzed by multiple pairwise comparisons (Tukey) were not different (P > 0.05). The percentage of X-chromosome-bearing sperm after the density gradient comprised 50.3% of the sample, after the swim-up was 49.9% and after swim-up combined with Percoll™ gradient centrifugation was 56.6%. Therefore, sperm sex selection using Percoll™ gradient centrifugation and swim-up was not effective.


Abstract This article highlights that organisations mask a 'gendered substructure' and a 'positional substructure', and reinforces the importance of (re)incorporating the effects of positional processes as an analytical concern in current analysis of occupational segregation. Drawing on the concept of 'inequality regimes', we use the case of 'non-academic' workers in Scottish higher education institutions as the context in which to explore how gendered and positional processes may be perpetuating occupational gender segregation—focusing on finance, registry, security and cleaning staff. Our findings show how embedded gendered and positional processes are reinforcing occupational gender segregation in many areas of non-academic work. We reveal that some gendered processes are position-sensitive and that stereotyped language use and related biases impact the progression and treatment of workers at the 'bottom'—and the compounding effects on women. We show that positions within organisational opportunity structures cannot merely be read off grading hierarchies and argue that any analysis of positional substructures necessitates uncovering the potential existence of multiple organisational hierarchies and other forms of positional advantage/disadvantage, whilst recognising that positional substructures are not static.


This study examines if internal information quality facilitates state tax planning. Due to the considerable number of tax jurisdictions, variety of tax rules, and enforcement mechanisms, state taxes are one of the most complex areas for tax planning. Prior literature finds that internal information quality is positively associated with summary measures of tax planning. However, we know little about what specific forms of tax planning drive this association. We conjecture that the complex area of state tax planning is one of the forms of tax planning that benefits from strong internal information quality. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that higher internal information quality is positively associated with state tax planning. We also find that domestic firms drive this relation, consistent with multinational firms focusing more on international tax planning. Finally, using a structural equation model that allows different forms of tax planning to covary with each other, we find a positive association between higher levels of internal information quality and both state and foreign tax planning. We fail to find a significant association between internal information quality and federal tax planning. Taken together, our results imply that internal information quality is most important for complex, multi-jurisdictional areas of tax planning.


Zooplankton and juvenile fish were sampled among different macrophyte beds in a large lowland river, during a very low discharge period when current velocity was not the structuring factor. Patterns exhibited by zooplankton taxa and fish were investigated at different spatial scales of habitat heterogeneity. One habitat type excepted, macrophyte types did not differ in zooplankton composition, but they differed in their total zooplankton abundance. Zooplankton abundance was higher in vegetated areas and showed clear differences among macrophyte types, whereas no difference was apparent among channel and side-arm habitats. No distinct fish assemblages appeared to be associated with the different macrophyte types. However, these macrophyte types differed in their total juvenile fish abundance, which was higher in vegetated areas and in side-arm habitats. Zooplankton and juvenile fish abundance were positively correlated, and morphological characteristics of the different macrophytes studied were hypothesized to result in different habitat quality (protection against predators, food availability). Our results emphasize the influence of physical and chemical conditions (water temperature, dissolved oxygen and structural complexity) for zooplankton abundance, whereas trophic resources appeared to be the main determinant of juvenile fish abundance. The importance of submerged macrophytes and trophic resources for habitat use in large rivers is discussed.


Lichen woodlands (LW) located in the closed-crown boreal forest are not a successional stage moving towards a closed black spruce feathermoss stand (FM), but an alternative stable state, due to their previous forest history, and the occurrence of LWs located nearby closed-crown FM stands. Therefore, afforestation in those LWs through site preparation and plantation could shift back LW into FM stands. We implemented an experimental design with different combinations of silvicultural treatments in both site types (LW, FM). We monitored the evolution of plant diversity and the physiology of three bio-indicators (Picea mariana, Kalmia angustifolia, Rhododendron groenlandicum) in different microsites created by the silvicultural treatments. The return to the initial composition was noticed only two years after treatments, especially in the LW stands, thus indicating a higher level of early ecosystem resilience in LWs compared to FM stands. Mean species cover, especially in the FM stands, decreased the most in the skid trails created by logging, probably due to a lack of acclimation of bryophytes to open stand conditions. Conversely, ericaceous shrubs and lichens found in the LWs were already acclimated to open stand conditions, which give to LWs a restructuring advantage compared to FM plant communities after silvicultural treatments. Overall, FM and LW short-term resilience was similar, indicating equally efficient ecosystem reorganization in both stands. The comparable early resilience in managed LW and FM stands, in terms of plant biodiversity, contradicts the presumed fragility of LW stands, especially in this case where LWs are assumed to be an alternative stable state created by compound disturbances. Silvicultural treatments maintained the functional group diversity in LWs, a key element for ecosystem resilience. Therefore, this study support the idea that plantation following site preparation in LWs could be a valuable management strategy to reach several objectives, such as increasing forest carbon sinks.


As school systems internationally seek to improve the models of professional development they are providing for their teachers to support them in integrating information and communication technology (ICT) in their teaching practice, growing opportunities emerge to compare and contrast approaches employed in different cultural contexts and to learn from each other. This paper arose from dialogue between the two authors about ICT professional development approaches being implemented in Norway and one regional area in Australia. Three programs of professional development which the authors had been involved with are described and these are compared and contrasted to reveal significant similarities and poignant differences between the approaches. The paper proposes some key success factors in ICT professional development, in particular mentoring and reflection, and goes on to illustrate how the comparative analysis of the approaches being used in different contexts was beneficial in informing further developments in both countries. In particular the paper argues that the processes and substance of reflection are critical to overall success, and that a focus on metacognitive reflection can support continuing professional learning outcomes for teachers.


The estimation of return periods for floods likely to have significant societal impact is challenging unless suitably long records exist. Relatively few sites across the UK provide a continuous record of river level or discharge over 50 years, whilst records extending back to the nineteenth century are rare. This represents a significant problem in providing robust and reliable estimates of flood risk, as relatively short records often fail to include an adequate sample of large floods. The inclusion of historical flood levels/magnitudes prior to instrumental river flow recording presents a valuable opportunity to extend this dataset. This paper examines the value of using historical data (both documentary and epigraphic) to augment existing gauged records for the River Trent in Central England, as part of a multi-method approach to assessing flood risk. Single station and pooled methods are compared with flood risk estimates based on an augmented historical series (1795–2008) using the generalised logistic and generalised Pareto distributions. The value of using an even longer, but less reliable, extended historical series (1320–2008) is also examined. It is recommended that modelling flood risk for return periods >100 years should incorporate historical data, where available, and that a multi-method approach increases confidence in flood risk estimates.


Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform. By Paul Starr. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2011. 309 pp. $28.50. Many readers familiar with Paul Starr's highly acclaimed book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, published nearly three decades ago and recognized today as the definitive history of the medical profession's rise to prominence in the United States, have long wished for a sequel that would carry the story forward to the present day. Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform is not that sequel, but it unquestionably is a worthy companion to Starr's earlier work. This aptly titled book recounts the century-long struggle over health reform in the U.S., beginning with the Progressive era of 1915-1919 and concluding with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010. Curiously, the inspiration for the book's title is not revealed until the final chapter when Starr credits Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., with having noted "that politics in a democracy (transcends) the struggle for power or the manipulation of image" and "is above all about the search for remedy." Starr hastens to add that the search for remedy to a social problem inevitably triggers reaction, especially in a deeply divided political environment. He calls the American struggle over health care "peculiar" because of the unusual lines on which it has been fought and because the problems are not restricted to the least powerful members of society. For example, he points out that special interests have not always been aligned only on one side of the debate, and that much of the bias against change often comes from "members of the protected public," such as Medicare beneficiaries. He also argues that many middle-class Americans, not just the poor, suffer the misfortune of becoming sick while being uninsured. Such peculiarities are unique to our system, and they continue to shape both our political debate and our current reform efforts. The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, Starr traces health care reform from its origins as a search for universal health insurance in the Progressive era, followed by the failure to enact national health insurance (along with Social Security) during the Great Depression and New Deal years, to its evolution as a quest for comprehensive system reform in the 1970s and 1980s. He describes the "policy trap" that ensnared the U.S. following World War II, when American Medical Association opposition to national health insurance defeated President Truman's proposal even as Congress enacted legislation that led to unprecedented hospital construction and service expansion (exactly the reverse of Western democracies' establishment of universal insurance programs before embarking on campaigns of system infrastructure development). Once private employer-based insurance had become the dominant form of coverage for many Americans, Starr argues that the U.S. found itself with a "deeply dysfunctional system that the country could not readily bring itself to change." Although the creation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs in 1965 was a limited victory for social insurance, it also added to the complexity and fragmentation of the health care system, further hampering reform efforts. Starr highlights the dramatic shift in reform efforts from a focus on coverage to a focus on costs as health care spending grew at historic rates following the lifting of wage and price controls in 1974. …


We report the size-dependent reactivity of phenylethanethiolated gold nanoparticles with acetic acid. Employing this reactivity, we synthesize a novel nanocluster Au38(PET)26 (PET: phenylethanethiolate), which is otherwise difficult to obtain and exhibits remarkably different photoluminescence and electrochemical properties compared with the well-known Au38(PET)24 nanoclusters. And the reaction process between Au38(PET)26 and acetic acid was probed by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry.


[Abstract]: Debate has persisted over the raison d'etre of the Information Systems (IS) discipline. There are many facets to this complex issue, including two closely linked ones, namely rigour versus relevance, and the relationship between academics and professionals. While there has been much introspection from IS researchers as to the apparent state of play, there has been no empirical research conducted to illicit the practitioner perspective. Based on a framework of the current literature, this paper explores the situation from the practitioner perspective through in-depth interviews. The findings provide new insights into the academic-practitioner relationship, highlighting aspects of the existing understanding and extending it in ways that will prove critical in assisting the resolution of this long-term problem.


In the first decade of the 21st century Indonesian television underwent drastic transformations as part of the broader socio-political changes following the fall of the New Order regime of President Suharto in 1998. As part of the reforms, Indonesia implemented regional autonomy, devolving powers from the central to sub-provincial governments. The process has turned the country from one of the most centralised states in the world into one of the highly decentralised. In contrast to the authoritarian New Order era when the central state government implemented a uniform top down policy at all levels of government administration, post-New Order Indonesia has seen the rise of the local, characterised by greater regional control over political and economic affairs. This has led to new social, political and cultural dynamics at the sub-national level. As the nation searches for a new post-authoritarian identity by transforming its political systems into a democracy, television is inextricably embedded in the process. The dissertation investigates one important aspect of such transformations, namely the rise of TV lokal (local television). Since the turn of the millennium the Indonesian television landscape has transformed rapidly from a centralised system, consisting of predominately national broadcasters into a more decentralised television structure with hundreds of new stations operating at a local level, broadcasting for a limited service area. The study set out to explore the rise of TV lokal by investigating its first decade of development (2002-2012). It aims to identify local television's specific role in the construction of locality in post-New Order Indonesia. What are the underlying factors that shape such a role, and in what forms and through which mechanisms does local television contribute to the process? The analysis focuses on institutional developments, emphasising the industrial dimension of television. It is based on fieldwork that was carried out in several locations, including Yogyakarta and Solo in Central Java, Denpasar in Bali and Manado in North Sulawesi. Four sample stations were used as case studies namely Bali TV, Jogja TV, TATV and Pacific TV. By combining both macro and micro analyses the dissertation identifies factors that underpinned local television development (Chapter 1 and 2), scrutinises its characteristics and modes of operations (Chapter 3-5) and investigates its specific roles in the socio-cultural transformations at the local level (Chapter 6 and 7). It employs a critical media industry approach to examine different aspects of local television industry, including both its extrinsic (public discourse in Chapter 1, regulations in Chapter 2) and intrinsic elements (ownership in chapter 3, economic practices in Chapter 4, programming and production practices in Chapter 5-7). The interplay between these elements is examined from a historical perspective, situating the analysis within specific historical contexts that have shaped the development of local television at both local as well as national levels.


Water treatment residues (WTR), the by-products of the production of potable water, are chemically benign, inorganic materials which are suitable for disposal by land application, though they are frequently reported to have high phosphorus (P) sorption capacities. An understanding of the distribution of inherent P in WTR is, however, required, if sorption-desorption processes are to be correctly interpreted. The aim of this investigation was to characterise the chemical properties relevant to P-sorption/desorption processes of 15 South African WTR and to determine the inherent distribution of P within the WTR using a chemical fractionation procedure. The pH, exchangeable Ca and organic carbon content ranged from 4.77 to 8.37, 238 to 8 980 mg·kg-1 and 0.50 to 11.6 g·100 g-1, respectively. Dithionate, oxalate and pyrophosphate extractable Al fractions ranged from 741 to 96 375, 1 980 to 82 947 and 130 to 37 200 mg·kg-1, respectively, and dithionate, oxalate and pyrophosphate extractable Fe ranged from 441 to 15 288, 3 865 to 140 569 and 230 to 90 000 mg·kg-1, respectively. Mechanisms of P-retention are residue specific, being dependent on the chemical properties of the WTR. Elevated Ca and amorphous Al and Fe concentrations did, nevertheless, suggest that all residues had the capacity to adsorb high amounts of P and to retain this P in forms unavailable for plant uptake.


Is the relationship between energy and agricultural commodities an important factor in the increasing price variability of food commodities? Findings from the literature appear to be mixed and highly influenced by the data frequency used in those analysis. A recurrent task in time series applied work is to match up data at different frequencies, while macroeconomic variables are often found at monthly or quarterly observations, financial variables are sampled daily or even at higher frequencies. In order to match up time series at different frequencies a common procedure is to aggregate the higher frequency to fit in the low frequency, this has the potential of losing valuable information, and generating misspecification. We study whether the use of mixed frequency estimations with data for the 2006-2011 period helps to improve the out of sample performance of a model that explains grain prices as a function of energy prices, macroeconomic variables such as exchange rate, interest rate, and inflation. Preliminary results suggest that an improvement is feasible, however it is tenuous beyond two months horizons.


As Australia's population ages, increasing numbers of seniors move to a growing number of retirement villages. Unlike time shares, which are 'managed investment schemes' and therefore regulated as 'financial products' under corporate law administered nationally by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Commonwealth withdrew from the regulation of retirement villages in the 1980s on the basis that at that time they were local, usually run by religious bodies and charities and were not of national concern. The regulation of retirement villages was taken over by the states and territories under their non-uniform Retirement Villages Acts and the common law. Until then retirement villages, often indistinguishable from Commonwealth regulated timeshares, were regulated in the original State and Territory Uniform Companies Acts in 1961 as 'interests', and then in later Commonwealth legislation as 'prescribed interests' by the forebear of ASIC, the then National Companies and Securities Commission (NCSC) with the State and Territory Corporate Affairs Commissions as its 'delegates'. Today retirement villages, which are largely owned and managed by the corporate sector, raise many issues of national concern such as accountability, fees and the rights of residents. Some aspects of retirement villages such as directors' duties, fundraising, prospectuses and unregistered schemes are regulated as corporations by ASIC under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), but retirement villages are not regulated as 'financial products' under corporate law. This article challenges the effectiveness of state and territory regulation of retirement villages and calls for federal regulation of retirement villages by bringing retirement villages into the definition of 'financial product' in the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) and in the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001 (Cth). As financial products, retirement villages would then be regulated by Commonwealth legislation which deals with financial services and financial markets, as regulated by ASIC. These laws include consumer protection provisions such as the prohibition of misleading or deceptive conduct, unfair contract terms, unconscionable conduct, licensing and high standards for those in the retirement village industry. This would result in a return to Commonwealth leadership of the regulation of retirement villages to harmonise and to consolidate the current mix of state and territory regulation with federal legislation including an enforceable Retirement Villages Code of Conduct.


G iuseppe Attardi was neither a neurologist nor a practicing physician, though he obtained his medical degree from the University of Padua in 1947. However, his pioneering work in mitochondrial biology had a tremendous effect on our understanding of humanmitochondrialdiseases.Therefore,hisdeath,which abruptly interrupted a long but still vibrant research career, is as much a loss for biology in general as it is for neurology. Dr Attardi's monumental contributions to our knowledge of the "other genome," mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), include the discovery of mitochondrial RNA (which accounts for only 0.5% of the total cellular RNA [a very important needle in a very big haystack]), the characterization of mitochondrial ribosomes, the definition of mtDNA transcription, the punctuation role of mitochondrial transfer RNA in the processing of the polycistronic precursor RNA, and the identification of all 13 proteins encoded by mtDNA. More directly, when the first pathogenic mutations in human mtDNA were described in 1988, Dr Attardi understood that obtaining an animal model of mtDNA-related diseases was going to be a formidable if not insurmountable task, and he, together with a then graduate student Michael P. King, perfected an ingenious in vitro model that allowed one to repopulate permanent human cell lines emptied of their mtDNA (rho cells) with mitochondria from patients harboring mtDNA mutations. This system has been widely used and has provided important information on the pathogenic nature, threshold, and (to a lesser extent) mechanism of different mtDNA mutations. Although Dr Attardi was best known for his seminal contributions to the mitochondrial field, this interest occupied only the latter part of his 60-year academic career. In 1955, when still an assistant professor in Padua, he followed the example of an earlier alumnus of the same university, William Harvey, when he described in an article in Nature the "portal heart . . . that marvel of physiological hydrodynamics that is . . . the portal vein of rodents." In 1952, his interest in the emerging role of RNA in cell function took him to the laboratory of Torbjörn Caspersson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where he spent 3 years. After 2 years at his alma mater, the University of Padua, Giuseppe went through a period of intense traveling, first as a Fulbright Fellow with Melvin Cohn at the Department of Microbiology at Washington University in St Louis and then with Renato Dulbecco at the Department of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, which was to become his permanent home. Before he settled at Caltech in 1963, however, he did postdoctoral work with François Gros and François Jacob at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and with Boris Ephrussi in Gif-surYvette. These were years of intense productivity for him in different fields, including immunology, virology, and the characterization of bacterial messenger RNA. At Caltech, Dr Attardi was the Grace C. Steele Professor of Molecular Biology in the Division of Biology, where his laboratory attracted a large number of outstanding researchers, both basic and clinical, including some neurologists. The respect and love that Dr Attardi inspired as a caring mentor was manifest at a Symposium on Mitochondrial DNA in Health, Disease, and Aging organized in his honor in 2003 by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr Attardi was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1998. His many honors include the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Medicine from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, the Gairdner Foundation International Prize, the Passano Foundation Award, and the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Zaragoza in Spain. He is survived by Anne Chomyn, his companion in life and science, his daughter Laura, a cancer biologist at Stanford University, and his son Luigi, a writer in Rome. To them we offer our deepest condolences.


ABSTRACT This article explores how British social problem films in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented social anxieties around the sexuality of girls in their mid to late teens. Its analytic focus is upon the risks posed by modern social life to the teenage girl's sexual innocence and it argues that attending to this hitherto often-neglected sexual state brings new insights to cultural histories of young female sexualities. Discussion draws upon Beat Girl (1959), Rag Doll (1960), Girl on Approval (1961) and Don't Talk to Strange Men (1962), highlighting how these films situated the figure of the teenage girl in the liminal space of child-adult and girl-woman and how this informed concerns about her sexual vulnerability. By unpicking the films' different approaches to viewing and representing this liminal space—through the lenses of adolescence and young womanhood—the authors demonstrate how at this historical juncture the intersections of gender and age are differently emphasised and given meaning in cinematic portrayals of sexual innocence.


InThe Peshitta and Syro-Hexapla Translations of Amos 1:3-2:16, Petra Verwijs presents the result of a detailed study about the translation techniques used by two Syriac translations of the Biblical passage indicated.


This dissertation focuses on the eddic poetry in the Codex Upsaliensis DG 11 4to, the Uppsala Edda. The manuscript has long been considered too far removed from the assumed original of the text to be of much use to editors, with the result that it was largely neglected by philologists during the last century. The eddic poetry in DG 11 differs in many instances from the other main manuscripts, and this study aims to examine these variants from the point of view of the 14th century scribe and reader of the manuscript. The dissertation's framework comes close to what is known as New or Material Philology, but since the focus is more on the abstract than the material sides of the manuscript, the study's theoretical framework is tentatively called descriptive reception philology.In all, 57 stanzas of eddic poetry are examined. The study does not include variation in names or metrics other than alliteration, which means that 10 stanzas consisting almost entirely of names have been excluded. The remaining 57 stanzas contain 137 variants that DG 11 shares with half or fewer of the other manuscripts. These variants are analysed with the aim of deciding whether they were consciously written by the scribe and to what extent the reader could have understood them. Consciously produced variants are said to belong to the sender witness, and if they were probably understood, they are also placed in the receiver witness. Variants not immediately understood by the readers are called incongruities and need to be reinterpreted in order to become part of the receiver witness. If they cannot be interpreted, they are categorised as actual errors.The analysis shows that the vast majority of deviating variants belong to both the sender and receiver witnesses. There are also indications that the eddic poetry was in part quoted from a different exemplar than the prose, an exemplar containing versions of the poems not otherwise known today. Rather than being regarded as confused and incomprehensible, DG 11's eddic poetry was accepted as the version known by the manuscript's contemporary users.


We present a method for deducing paleoaltitudes that incorporates basic physical principles of atmospheric science and inferences of paleoclimates from plant leaf physiognomy. We exploit the average west-to-east flow of the atmosphere at mid-latitudes and a thermodynamically conserved variable in the atmosphere—moist static energy (the combined internal, latent heat, and gravitational potential energy of moist air)—to develop a method that relies on a parameter that varies with height in the atmosphere in a predictable fashion. Because the surface distribution of moist static energy is constrained by atmospheric dynamics and thermodynamics, the combined internal and latent heat energies, also known as the moist enthalpy, should only vary with altitude provided we know the distribution of moist static energy. Thus, we avoid having to make assumptions about the mean annual temperature lapse rate, which varies spatially and temporally owing to unpredictable variations in atmospheric water vapor. To estimate a paleoaltitude, therefore, we require (1) a priori knowledge of the spatial distribution of moist static energy for the paleoclimate and (2) the ability to estimate paleoenthalpy for two isochronous locations: one at sea level, the other at some unknown elevation. To achieve this, we investigated the spatial distribution of moist static energy for the present-day climate of North America to estimate the deviations in moist static energy from zonal invariance. In parallel, we quantified the relation between moist enthalpy and plant leaf physiognomy of modern forests. Assuming that such deviations from zonal invariance and such relationships between physiognomy and enthalpy apply to ancient climates and fossil leaves, these investigations yield an uncertainty estimate of ±910 m in the paleoaltitude difference between two isochronous fossil assemblage locations.


Errors are inherent in medicine due to the imperfectness of human nature. Health care providers may have a difficult time accepting their fallibility, acknowledging mistakes, and disclosing errors. Fear of litigation, shame, blame, and concern about reputation are just some of the barriers preventing physicians from being more candid with their patients, despite the supporting body of evidence that patients cite poor communication and lack of transparency as primary drivers to file a lawsuit in the wake of a medical complication. Proper error disclosure includes a timely explanation of what happened, who was involved, why the error occurred, and how it will be prevented in the future. Medical mistakes afford the opportunity for individuals and institutions to be candid about their weaknesses while improving patient care processes. When a physician takes the Hippocratic Oath they take on a tremendous sense of responsibility for the care of their patients, and often bear the burden of their mistakes in isolation. Physicians may struggle with guilt, shame, and a crisis of confidence, which may thwart efforts to identify areas for improvement that can lead to meaningful change. Coping strategies for providers include discussing the event with others, seeking professional counseling, and implementing quality improvement projects. Physicians and health care organizations need to find adaptive ways to deal with complications that will benefit patients, providers, and their institutions.


African Voices, African Lives explores the world of 'Mohammed', a swahili peasant living on Mafia Island, Tanzania. Through his own words - some written, some spoken - and those of his relatives, including his ex-wife and one of his daughters, he enables us to see the world through his eyes, including the invisisble world of spirits which plays a significant role in his life. This information is gathered by Pat Caplan, the anthropologist, over almost three decades of talking and writing to each other. She acts not only as translator and editor, but also as interpreter, bringing in her own knowledge gathered from field data as well as comparative material from other anthropological work.
 By utilising a mixture of styles - narrative and life history, ethnographic observation, and the diary kept by Mohammed at the anthropologist's bequest, African Voices African Lives will make an important contribution to current debates in anthropology by grappling with issues raised by 'personal narratives', authorial authority, and with reflexivity.


Ta and Ti are the most widely used additions for technical Nb3Sn multifilamentary superconductors. These elements are known to influence grain growth, grain morphology and chemical composition in the A15 layer, hence the current carrying properties of the wires over a wide magnetic field range. So far only few studies tried to compare systematically Ta and Ti doped and undoped Nb3Sn wires in the frame of the same work, down to a nanometric scale. We present an investigation on several multifilamentary (Nb, Ta, Ti)3Sn bronze route wires, fabricated at a laboratory scale, with various amounts of additives. The wires consist of fine filaments embedded in a Cu-Sn or Cu-Sn-Ti Osprey bronze with > 15 wt.% Sn and an external Cu stabilization. Microstructural observations are compared with the results of Jc and n values measured up to 21 T at 4.2 and 2.2 K, and for longitudinal strains up to 0.5%. Non-Cu Jc values up to 300 Amm−2 and n values up to 50 at 17 T and 4.2 K show clearly that wires with Ti addition to the bronze have a better performance with respect to wires with Ti additions to the filaments.