Paul Tablino. Christianity Among the Nomads: The Catholic Church in Northern Kenya. Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2004. 312 pp. Available from Paulines Publications Africa, P.O. Box 49026, Nairobi, GPO, Kenya. Illustrated. Maps. Biographical Notes. References. Index. 600KS. Paper. Paul Tablino, a missionary priest in northern Kenya since 1964, is also a highly respected ethnographer and historian whose previous works include The Gabra: Camel Nomads of Northern Kenya (1999). He brings to this current work not only the perspective of a missionary priest, but also the insights and analyses of an experienced ethnographer and historian well versed in the subdeties of social transformations in Africa. As the author notes in his introduction, the focus of this volume is on missionaries as agents of change. A chapter on the traditional religious beliefs and social organization of the diverse peoples of northern Kenya is followed by three chapters on the geographic and social origins and philosophical orientations of the various Catholic missionary groups that came to northern Kenya. Thus, early on in the book, the author sets the stage for a meaningful discussion of the outcomes of the encounter that ultimately occurred between Western missionaries and the people of northern Kenya. The focus of a second volume, now in preparation, will be on the responses of those who underwent change. Although Catholic missionaries traveled to northern Kenya in the early twentieth century, a meaningful presence there was not established until well into the 1950s and 1960s. This was rather late relative to Christian missionary activity in other areas of Kenya, and is accounted for by several variables, including manpower resource allocations to more densely populated areas such as the Kikuyu highlands, the presence of a largely nomadic population in northern Kenya, and an extremely poor transportation infrastructure which made many areas inaccessible. In addition, northern Kenya had been a closed district during much of the colonial era because of periodic and unpredictable civil unrest and the regular incursions of livestock raiders over the borders from Ethiopia and Somalia. Following Kenya's independence in 1963, the presence of Somali shifta in the region and Somali territorial claims to northern Kenya led to serious armed conflicts against a background of weak administrative control on the part of a new government. Not surprisingly, some missionaries were killed by bandits in northern Kenya, including the Reverend Michele Stallone in 1965 at Baragoi and the Reverend Luigi Graiff at South Horr in 1981. …


The papers examine and analyze the importance, problems and factors influencing public policy formulation and implementation. It dwelt further on the policy reforms and determinant of policy issues and features as a guide to effective public policy formulation and implementation in Nigeria. The study equally revealed that there is lack of full practice of federalism in Nigeria as enshrined in the 1999 constitution rather what is obtained now is synonymous to unitary system of government. Consequent upon that, in spite of the importance of public policy formulation and implementation as a critical factor in the management of government affairs in Nigeria, yet there are no standard formats or generally accepted guidelines towards such. It is against this background, that the bureaucrats has a way of constituting obstacles or frustration in the way of policies formulated by the political officials, especially those policies on which they hold divergent opinions or are not of direct benefit to them. A synonym for this sense is the bureaucratic decision making process. As a result of this since independent, the country has been facing challenges of managing her resources due to the different styles of governance in the implementing of various aspects of government public policies, programmes and actions. The study recommends among other things the need for government to be very proactive, sensitive in formulating and implementation of public policy decisions that has direct impact on its citizenry. Keywords : Public Policy, Policy reform, policy implementation


Faulty components in a network need to be localized and repaired to sustain the health of the network. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that carefully combines active and passive measurements to localize faults in wireless sensor networks. More specifically, we formulate a problem of optimal sequential testing guided by end-to-end data. This problem determines an optimal testing sequence of network components based on end-to-end data in sensor networks to minimize expected testing cost. We prove that this problem is NP-hard, and propose a recursive approach to solve it. This approach leads to a polynomial-time optimal algorithm for line topologies while requiring exponential running time for general topologies. We further develop two polynomial-time heuristic schemes that are applicable to general topologies. Extensive simulation shows that our heuristic schemes only require testing a very small set of network components to localize and repair all faults in the network. Our approach is superior to using active and passive measurements in isolation. It also outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches that localize and repair all faults in a network.


Hurricane Katrina, which landed just east of New Orleans, Louisiana on the morning of August 29, 2005, displaced hundreds of thousands of citizens, caused over 1,800 fatalities, and left much of the city in ruins. In its aftermath, the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Labor lifted certain labor and wage restrictions for a period of time in an attempt to accommodate survivors who had lost security documents as well as expedite the rebuilding process. As clean up efforts got underway, reports of abuse - coupled with the easing of labor regulations, virtually no monitoring of construction sites, and the city's lack of adequate housing and healthcare - suggested that unscrupulous contractors could easily be exploiting their workers.The International Human Rights Law Clinic and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley collaborated with the Payson Center for International Development and Technology Transfer at Tulane University to conduct a study of the situation of construction workers in New Orleans. The study took place in March 2006 and examined both documented and undocumented workers using three research methods: key informant interviews, targeted sampling, and random sampling. Researchers interviewed 25 key informants including legal advocates, social service providers, community activists, representatives of minority and immigrant groups, and representatives of federal, state, and local government agencies in Louisiana and Mississippi, among others. Researchers also used targeted sampling to interview 148 Latino workers in different sites in New Orleans and Kenner, with the goal to determine the needs of Latino workers as they represent the largest group of undocumented workers. In addition, a random sampling of 212 workers of all origins working in Orleans parish was conducted to provide quantitative information on workers' experiences.


Open-cut coal mining projects can have a range of environmental, cultural and social impacts that, in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, are required to be addressed as part of the environmental assessment (EA) process. While these impacts are often addressed within separate impact assessment frameworks, it is possible to undertake EA as an applied economic analysis with non-market valuation methods such as choice modelling (CM) used to incorporate environmental, cultural and social impacts. A CM study of the proposed extension of the Warkworth Mine in the Hunter Valley of NSW found that community well-being declined with increased clearing of endangered ecological communities (EECs), loss of highly significant Aboriginal sites and displacement of rural families from affected villages, but increased with the length of time that the mine provides employment and with the planting or protection of EECs as offsets. Community preferences for these offsets ranged from a ratio of 1.4:1 for protection of existing remnant EECs in the region to a ratio of 4.0:1 for planting of EECs.


The charcoal record contained in lake sedimentary sequences is often used to infer past fire events. Studies to calibrate such charcoal records have been carried out in a range of mid- to high-latitude regions and relationships have been determined between size and quantity of charcoal in the sediment and proximity and spatial extent of the fires. Very little is known, however, about the relationship between fire events in savanna ecosystems and how these are represented in the charcoal record in lake sedimentary sequences. This study presents the results of a project that aimed to calibrate the micro- and macroscopic charcoal record from Kruger National Park, South Africa, with known fire events. Surface sediment samples were analysed for charcoal of different size classes and compared with data on fire proximity, area and intensity (the rate of energy released along a fire front) from fire events over the last 10 years, and the relevant source areas for micro- and macroscopic charcoal were quantified. Results indicated that (i) the Relevant Source Area of Charcoal for lakes c. 200 m diameter is between 0 and 5 km for charcoal particles >50 ∝m in length and between 10 and 15 km for charcoal particles <50 ∝m; (ii) that charcoal deposits are most likely to represent combined fire events from the preceding five years; (iii) that fire proximity, area and intensity are each significantly represented in the charcoal record, but not equally, as the signal resulting from fire intensity is stronger than that for fire proximity or area. Mathematical equations linking charcoal with fire proximity, area and intensity are presented.


Twenty-six lanthanide coordination polymers (CPs), Ln2(fcd)2(phen)2(NO3)2 (Ln = Nd (1-Nd)), [Ln2(fcd)3(phen)2]·(CH3OH)2 (Ln = Sm (2-Sm), Eu (2-Eu), Gd (2-Gd), and Tb (2-Tb)), Ln2(fcd)2(Hfcd)2(phen)2 (Ln = La (3-La), Ce (3-Ce), Pr (3-Pr), Nd (3-Nd), Sm (3-Sm), and Gd (3-Gd)), [Ln2(fcd)3(CH3CH2OH)2(H2O)2]·H2O (Ln = La (4-La), Ce (4-Ce), Pr (4-Pr), Nd (4-Nd), Sm (4-Sm), Eu (4-Eu), Gd (4-Gd), Tb (4-Tb), Dy (4-Dy), Er (4-Er), Tm (4-Tm) and Yb (4-Yb)), and [Ln4(fcd)6(H2O)2]·nCH3CH2OH (Ln = Sm (5-Sm), Eu (5-Eu) and Tb (5-Tb)), were obtained from the reaction between 1,1′-ferrocenedicarboxylic acid (H2fcd), 1,10-phenanthroline (phen) and the corresponding lanthanide salts under hydrothermal conditions. Ln2(fcd)2(phen)2(NO3)2 (1-Nd) was constructed from discrete and neutral 0D dimeric units; [Ln2(fcd)3(phen)2]·(CH3OH)2 (2-Sm/Eu/Gd/Tb) and Ln2(fcd)2(Hfcd)2(phen)2 (3-La/Ce/Pr/Nd/Sm/Gd) were built up of 1D infinite chains, while [Ln2(fcd)3(CH3CH2OH)2(H2O)2]·H2O (4-La/Ce/Pr/Nd/Sm/Eu/Gd/Tb/Dy/Er/Tm/Yb) and [Ln4(fcd)6(H2O)2]·nCH3CH2OH (5-Sm, n = 0.33; 5-Eu, n = 0.31; 5-Tb, n = 0.30) were made up of 2D sheets. The different structures of these twenty-six CPs can be attributed to the variable conformations of fcd resulting from different reaction conditions like different counterions, ancillary ligands, temperatures, and solvents. Furthermore, the photoluminescence and magnetic properties of selected CPs have been characterized and discussed.


Exact information has become crucial part of the modern database applications and next generation information systems to make them more human friendly. In order to deal with information inexactness, fuzzy techniques have been extensively integrated with different database models and theories. But, object oriented database systems are extremely capable to represent and manipulate the complex objects as well as complicated and uncertain relationship existing among them. They are also much suitable for engineering and scientific applications, dealing with large data intensive applications. In this paper, a survey of different approaches regarding integration of fuzzy techniques in object oriented databases has been sketched, under numerous categories of conceptual data modeling, querying, indexing etc.


This Essay starts by tracing its humble origins to an earlier, related and unique law review article, namely, Tiger Cub Strikes Back: Memoirs of an Ex-Child Prodigy About Legal Education and Parenting. This Essay describes various professional responses to Tiger Cub Strikes Back, provides an update of some developments in research about parenting and legal education since Tiger Cub Strikes Back, and recounts a few personal stories about mindfulness and related to being an ex-child prodigy. This Essay then analyzes meta-mindfulness, defined as mindfulness about mindfulness. This Essay discusses how mindfulness about mindfulness can help facilitate the positive transformation of law students, personally and professionally. That discussion includes feedback by three students, one in each of these courses: torts, law and economics, and legal ethics and professionalism. This Essay concludes by considering meta-mindfulness as hope.


Sport is considered as a field for the development of social skills of competition, cooperation and collaboration. The assumption is made that latter social skills (and their consistency in form of coopetition) have a higher potential for the development in international context. The scientific problem solved during the research is framed by questions: what is the impact of social skills of competition, cooperation and collaboration on sportsmen coopetition?; and what is the impact of international context on the exertion of latter skills? A case of the International Dance-sport Competition "Ambercouple" is considered as the research environment. The aim of the research is to determine the sportsmen coopetition among dance-sport dancers. The research is provided in stages: 1) the context of international sporting event is presented from the point of its suitability for the research: countries are classified in terms of participating amount, winning amount, differences in competence; 2) interviews with coaches are provided to determine their judgments of coopetition possibilities from international point of view; 3) questionnaire research with participants of the competition is provided; and 4) the model of geographic boundaries of coopetition among dance-sport dancers is composed.


Introduction: In recent times, HIV Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VTC) have come to be widely regarded as an important method of HIV prevention and support service. Therefore, it is not surprising that VTC has become the current area of focus for the control and prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS in this part of Southern Africa. The uptake of HIV VCT in South Africa, as well as globally, is very low mainly because of society's low knowledge of the HIV/AIDS disease, negative societal attitudes towards those infected with HIV and significant social stigma associated with HIV/AIDS infection.

Aim: The aim of this study is to access the knowledge, attitude and perceptions towards HIV infection and VCT among young adults in Kempton Park community with a view of finding appropriate solutions to the identified problems.

Objectives: The objectives of this study are to identify the socio-demographic profile of the study population, access their influence on the knowledge and attitude towards HIV infection and VCT and to access the extent of HIV VCT uptake and the effect of VCT on change in risk behaviour, knowledge about HIV infection/AIDS and related stigma.

Materials and Methods: A quantitative study design by way of a descriptive cross-sectional survey was carried out in Kempton Park community which has an estimated population of about between 400,000 – 800,000 inhabitants. The study was conducted in three local clinics within the community which offered free primary health care services to all the community members. The study population was made up of young adults between the age brackets of 18-45 years who could be regarded as the most sexually active population group. A structured questionnaire was used as a data collecting tool from 4th January to 12th February, 2010. The questionnaire was administered to a total number of 321 participants comprising 217 (67.6%) females and 98 (30.5%) males. The participants were randomly selected without gender or racial discrimination.

Results: The findings showed that there was a high level of uptake of VCT in the community sampled with a test history of 63.9% (i.e. those who have previously taken HIV VCT) as well as a high level of HIV/AIDS knowledge, supportive community attitudes towards HIV infected persons and less HIV related stigma among the respondents. The results also showed a direct correlation between these good outcomes and previous exposure or participation in VCT. There was no significant variable shown to determine the uptake of VCT services. The risk of HIV transmission was found to be higher with males. They were more likely to have more sexual partners and to have previously contracted sexually transmitted infections than females.

Discussion and Conclusion: There is an obvious step in the right direction to improve society's attitude towards the uptake of HIV VCT as can be inferred from the results of the study. However, more work needs to be done by Government and NGOs with co-operation from community and youth leaders at the grass root level to ensure that the correct information and education on HIV/AIDS gets to every individual in every community in the country. Adoption of a more positive attitude towards HIV infected people and reduction in the associated stigma will encourage more young adults to know their HIV status by taking VCT. This will help to control the spread of the deadly HIV/AIDS disease in the long run.


We study the impact of heterogeneity of nodes, in terms of their energy, in wireless sensor networks that are hierarchically clustered. In these networks some of the nodes become cluster heads, aggregate the data of their cluster members and transmit it to the sink. We assume that a percentage of the population of sensor nodes is equipped with additional energy resources—this is a source of heterogeneity which may result from the initial setting or as the operation of the network evolves. We also assume that the sensors are randomly (uniformly) distributed and are not mobile, the coordinates of the sink and the dimensions of the sensor field are known. We show that the behavior of such sensor networks becomes very unstable once the first node dies, especially in the presence of node heterogeneity. Classical clustering protocols assume that all the nodes are equipped with the same amount of energy and as a result, they can not take full advantage of the presence of node heterogeneity. We propose SEP, a heterogeneous-aware protocol to prolong the time interval before the death of the first node (we refer to as stability period), which is crucial for many applications where the feedback from the sensor network must be reliable. SEP is based on weighted election probabilities of each node to become cluster head according to the remaining energy in each node. We show by simulation that SEP always prolongs the stability period compared to (and that the average throughput is greater than) the one obtained using current clustering protocols. We conclude by studying the sensitivity of our SEP protocol to heterogeneity parameters capturing energy imbalance in the network. We found that SEP yields longer stability region for higher values of extra energy brought by more powerful nodes.


We examine the psychometric and empirical properties of some commonly used survey-based measures of risk preferences in a population-based sample of 11,000 twins. Using a model that provides a general framework for making inferences about the component of measured risk attitudes that is not due to measurement error, we show that measurement-error adjustment leads to substantially larger estimates of the predictive power of risk attitudes, of the size of the gender gap, and of the magnitude of the sibling correlation. Risk attitudes are predictive of investment decisions, entrepreneurship, and drinking and smoking behaviors; are robustly associated with cognitive ability and personality; and our estimates are often larger than those in the literature. Our results highlight the importance of adjusting for measurement error across a wide range of empirical settings.


The analytical determination of lead in soil is discussed with particular reference to emission spectrographic and atomic absorption spectrophotometric methods. The problems associated with the two techniques are discussed, and accuracy and precision data are presented. Data indicating that the titanium-to-lead concentration ratio can be used to differentiate between lead-contaminated and noncontaminated soils are presented.


While documents librarians are generally familiar with document usage through their circulation statistics, they have no idea of how publications are being accessed online. The University of Denver has developed a system for tracking online document access. By redirecting every URL in their OPAC for federal documents first to a ColdFusion database, recording the URL, and then sending the user to the online document, they were able to track each access to online documents. Then, importing these statistics into an Access database, they were able to provide an analysis by agency, date of document, and other features. This article presents the results of one year of tracking access through the University of Denver library OPAC.


The yield stress characteristic is a property associated with numerous types of complex fluids – whereby the material does not flow unless the applied stress exceeds a certain value. This is evident in everyday tasks such as squeezing toothpaste from a tube or dispensing ketchup from a bottle, but is important across a whole range of industries and applications. The determination of a yield stress as a true material constant can be difficult as the measured value can be very much dependent on the measurement technique employed and the conditions of the test, of which there are many. Consequently, there is no universal method for determining yield stress and there exists a number of approaches, which find favor across different industries and establishments. This White Paper discusses the various approaches available to measure yield stress, and aspects of the practical measurement set-up and test parameters that need to be considered to obtain relevant, robust and reliable yield stress data using a rotational rheometer.


This paper addresses a gap in the literature concerning suitability of organizational learning approaches in facing social responsibility challenges, and proposes a developed framework that could proactively bridge this gap. A new framework is designed in order to gain insight on the relationships between the typical organizational learning approaches- which have been discussed extensively so far in the literature- and the brand-new concept of civil learning come out of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) studies in very recent years. Comparative analysis is employed to identify well-adjusted organizational learning approaches toward social evolution of organizations. Indeed we are looking to propose a specific learning framework for the firms that are tackling with CSR issues. Hence, we qualitatively bridge between organizational learning models and social learning approaches in order to foster a more advanced framework which recommends the employment of specific learning methods and styles to deal with CSR challenges based on the features of the firm and its business contextual considerations.


Fluid-inclusion and stable isotope evidence are presented for the transition from magmatic-related mesothermal to meteoric water-dominated epithermal activity at the giant Porgera gold deposit, Papua New Guinea. Reflecting this transition, Au-Ag mineralization occurs in two main stages: disseminated auriferous pyrite in phyllic alteration zones (stage I); and fault-related, quartz-roscoelite-cemented hydrothermal breccias and veins carrying locally abundant free gold and Au-Ag-tellurides (stage II). The deposit is spatially and temporally associated with a late Miocene (6 Ma) epizonal intrusive complex emplaced in continental crust immediately prior to an early Pliocene continent- island-arc collision. Stage I ore formation was associated in part with fluids of magmatic origin (∼200 to >500 °C, 7 to 12 wt% and 31 to 58 wt% NaCl equivalent [eq.], δ 18 O = 8.1‰ to 9.4‰, δD = -50‰ to -32‰) and appears to represent a new type of Au-rich, Cu-poor, porphyritic, intrusion- related mineralization associated with volatile-rich, mafic, alkalic magmatism in a continent island-arc collision environment. Stage II vein-type mineralization crosscuts this earlier disseminated orebody; it formed at depths of 2 to 3 km from lower temperature, lower salinity, isotopically exchanged ground waters (∼180 °C, 3 to 10 eq. wt% NaCl, δ 18 O = 3.1‰ to 6.4‰, δD = -62‰ to -34‰), similar to fluids from other Au-Ag-Te epithermal deposits. Gold in these late veins was probably remobilized from deeper stage I-type mineralization, and stable isotope and textural evidence suggest that Au was deposited following tectonically induced fluid phase separation.


When evaluating equity, researchers often look at the "achievement gap." Privileging knowledge and skills as primary outcomes of science education misses other, more subtle, but critical, outcomes indexing inequitable science education. In this comparative ethnography, we examined what it meant to "be scientific" in two fourth-grade classes taught by teachers similarly committed to reform-based science (RBS) practices in the service of equity. In both classrooms, students developed similar levels of scientific understanding and expressed positive attitudes about learning science. However, in one classroom, a group of African American and Latina girls expressed outright disaffiliation with promoted meanings of "smart science person" ("They are the science people. We aren't like them"), despite the fact that most of them knew the science equally well or, in one case, better than, their classmates. To make sense of these findings, we examine the normative practice of "sharing scientific ideas" in each classroom, a comparison that provided a robust account of the differently accessible meanings of scientific knowledge, scientific investigation, and scientific person in each setting. The findings illustrate that research with equity aims demands attention to culture (everyday classroom practices that promote particular meanings of "science") and normative identities (culturally produced meanings of "science person" and the accessibility of those meanings). The study: (1) encourages researchers to question taken-for-granted assumptions and complexities of RBS and (2) demonstrates to practitioners that enacting what might look like RBS and producing students who know and can do science are but pieces of what it takes to achieve equitable science education.


Cereals form the primary foundation for most of the local weaning foods in Nigeria and they are inadequate in some essential amino acids needed for weaning infants. Baobab seed, an under-utilized crop is rich in protein but the knowledge of the utilization potential of the protein extract is yet to be readily available. Baobab seeds were sourced from Ahmadu Bello University Teaching and Research Farm, Zaria and its protein was extracted by deffating the baobab seed flour and precipitating the protein using a centrifuge. The maize meal was blended with extracted protein at 90:10, 80:20, 70:30 and 100:0 w/w, respectively and fed to 20 male albino rats for 28 days. The baobab seed flour was subjected to proximate analysis and the blood of the rats fed with the crude protein extract was evaluated for some hematological parameters [Serum Glutamate Oxaloacetate Transaminase (SGOT), Alkaline Phosphatase (ALP) and Total Protein (TP)]. The histopathology of the liver and kidney was carried out to determine the effect of the residual concentration of anti-nutrients in the protein extract and the Protein Efficiency Ratio (PER) was calculated. Data obtained were subjected to Analysis of Variance and the means were separated using Duncan multiple range test at 95% probability level. The proximate values for the baobab seed flour were 8.42, 27.58, 11.87, 16.88, 9.53 and 25.72% for moisture, protein, ash, fat, crude fibre and carbohydrate contents, respectively. The range of values obtained for the SGOT, ALP and TP for test groups of 90:10, 80:20, 70:30 and 100:0 were 338 467.2, 130.8 146.6 U/L and 20 49 g/L, respectively. Mild inflammatory cell infiltrations were recorded in the histopathology of the kidney and liver of the experimental animals. The average PER of the test groups were 1.13, 1.60 and 1.84, compared with a value of 2.2 which is the standard value of casein protein for 90:10, 80:20 and 70:30, respectively. Baobab seed protein extract was well tolerated by the experimental rats. It was concluded that baobab seed protein extract could be a potential supplement for weaning foods.


RNAi is widely used as a genetic tool in a range of model organisms, however still relatively little is known about the endogenous functions of RNAi. In this thesis we have studied several aspects of the endogenous role of RNAi in order to enhance our understanding of the capabilities of this mechanism. We investigated an RNAi-related silencing mechanism (cosuppression) which is triggered by repetitive sequences resulting in silencing of endogenous genes in trans. We found both chromatin remodeling factors and RNAi factors to be involved in cosuppression, indicating a transcriptional branch to the RNAi mechanism. We also identified three members of a relatively new family of RNA-metabolising enzymes in C. elegans: the TRF-like nucleotidyltransferases. Analysing the family of TRF-like nucleotidyltransferases we found that all members are expressed in the germline of C. elegans and that three of them (cde-1, cde-2 and rde-3) are required in different combinations of RNAi-related silencing processes. Nucleotidyltransferase mutants cde-1 and rde-3 showed defects in germline stability and were unable to maintain germline function over time, suggesting that the RNAi silencing pathway and developmental pathways of the germline intersect at the level of the TRF-like nucleotidyltransferases. Next we created tagged constructs of RDE-3 to further analyse its function, and found that RDE-3 is localized to the germline cytoplasm, and to a subset of neurons. The protein was detected in two complexes: a large complex of 600-700kD, and a smaller less abundant 400kD complex. We used mass spectrometry to identify potential binding partners of RDE-3. We also studied the function of CDE-1 in RNAi and chromosome segregation. CDE-1 localises specifically to mitotic chromosomes in embryos, and requires the RdRP EGO-1, and the Argonaute protein CSR-1 for this localisation. We found that CDE-1 is required for the uridylation of CSR-1 bound siRNAs, and that in the absence of CDE-1 these siRNAs accumulate to inappropriate levels, accompanied by defects in both meiotic and mitotic chromosome segregation. Elevated siRNA levels are associated with erroneous gene silencing, most likely through the inappropriate loading of CSR-1 siRNAs into other Argonaute proteins. We propose a model in which CDE-1 restricts specific EGO-1-generated siRNAs to the CSR-1 mediated, chromosome associated RNAi pathway, thus separating it from other endogenous RNAi pathways. The conserved nature of CDE-1 suggests that similar sorting mechanisms may operate in other animals, including mammals. Finally, we identified a homologue of the small RNA methylating enzyme HEN-1, named REM-1. We showed that rem-1 mRNA is present in the germline, and that REM-1 is responsible for the methylation of the class of 21U RNAs confirming the notion that 21U RNAs are the worm counterpart of piRNAs. Methylation of 21U RNAs, however seems to be not essential for overall 21U RNA function. Taken together we identified two different chromatin-related branches to the RNAi mechanism, which changes our view of RNAi from a posttranscriptional silencing mechanism to a mechanism with a wider range of effects. In addition we reveal a regulatory mechanism involving nucleotidyltransferases and methylases, determining the stability and Argonaute loading preferences of small RNAs.


Moorings are required to hold cages against the forces
generated by wind, currents and waves and to allow the
fish stocks and the cages and let the best chance of
survival. In sheltered waters, requirements to moor a cage
safely were minimal. This has changed dramatically with
moves into coastal waters, and a potentially much higher
wave climate. Mooring failures were common place in the
early days of coastal farming, but a better understanding
of the problems, and more sophisticated analysis has
largely reduced these risks. Perhaps the most important
point is to view the cage group, its nets and moorings, as
a single system, whose components are mechanically
linked. Their dynamic responses cannot be considered in
isolation, each component affecting the other. Cage and
mooring design is "site specific", and careful and combined
choice of cage type, nets and most specifically moorings,
has a considerable bearing on the ability of fish stocks to
survive in major storms, on exposed sites.


Abstract As a significant part of the college course Human Relations in a Multicultural Society, pre-service teachers are engaged in service learning and reflection as two of the primary methods to develop cultural awareness and appreciation, human relations skills, and positive dispositions about diverse groups in society. Eleven oppressed groups in U.S. society are the focus of students' study, experience in the community, and reflection. Education students "do" diversity through eighteen contact hours of service learning with a group that is outside their comfort zone. Specific planned objectives are addressed throughout the service learning experience. At the conclusion of the service learning, students reflect on the experience. Introduction It is well recognized and documented that the United States is a pluralistic society made up of diverse racial/ethnic groups and microcultures (Gollnick and Chinn, 2004). Because of this diversity, there is a need for understanding, tolerance, and acceptance of cultural differences related to language, customs, culture, religion, and values. Teachers of the twenty-first century are challenged by the heterogeneity of present classroom populations. Since teachers must promote harmony in the classroom and meet the individual needs of students to succeed in school, they must have an understanding of pluralism as well as possess good human relations skills to work with diverse groups of children, parents, and colleagues. Meaningful, research-based pre-service courses that actively engage students through constructive education assist in building this cultural competence. Review of the Literature Research related to the reduction of prejudice is the foundation of human relations training. Dent (1976) found that more active student participation was more effective in teaching tolerance. Ijaz (1981) noted that cultural immersion positively altered attitudes toward acceptance of differences. Stephan (1985) completed a comprehensive review of the literature related to reduction of racial prejudice through changing group attitudes and behaviors. He concluded that voluntary contact between people of differing groups could lead to prejudice reduction. Allgood (1998) reported that when multicultural content is addressed in cognitive, reflective, emotive and active domains, it is more likely to reduce prejudice. Additionally, Rice (1994) advised that in order to develop more consciousness about diversity, one must leave his/her comfort zone. "Interaction among diverse individuals can (a) decrease stereotyping and prejudice and (b) increase positive relationships. It is only through direct contact and interaction with diverse individuals that stereotypes can be reduced" (Johnson and Johnson, 2002, p. 9). Boyte (1991), Conrad and Hedin (1991), and Pate (1992), reported that service learning is one of the methods that is more effective in reducing prejudice. Allam and Zerkin (1994) expound on the benefits of service learning when it is infused in teacher education programs. When infused in a teacher education program, the service learning experience helps to "create a learning environment which is empowering and multicultural in approach" (p. 3). A recent study by Garmon (2004) testified that intercultural experiences and self-reflectiveness were two of six factors identified as playing a critical role in positive multicultural development. Designing a Program A course in human relations that focuses on skills related to diverse populations has been developed. A service learning component is integral to this class because it is an avenue for placing students with people different from them. Through service learning, students experience diversity i.e. "do diversity", instead of just learning about it. Early in the semester, students self-determine their needs related to developing knowledge, skills, and positive attitudes about people who are different from them. …


PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES
To describe the experiences of cancer survivors and caregivers with healthcare providers in the context of the Internet as a source of health information.

RESEARCH APPROACH
Qualitative description.

SETTING
Online cancer communities hosted by the Association of Cancer Online Resources.

PARTICIPANTS
Purposive sample of 488 cancer survivors, with varying cancer types and survivorship stages, and caregivers.

METHODOLOGIC APPROACH
Secondary data analysis using Krippendorff's thematic clustering technique of qualitative content analysis.

MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES
Survivorship, healthcare relationships, and the Internet.

FINDINGS
Disenchantment with healthcare relationships was associated with failed expectations related to evidence-based practice, clinical expertise, informational support, and therapeutic interpersonal communication. Survivors and caregivers exercised power in healthcare relationships through collaboration, direct confrontation, becoming expert, and endorsement to influence and control care decisions.

CONCLUSIONS
Disenchantment propelled cancer survivors and caregivers to search the Internet for health information and resources. Conversely, Internet information-seeking precipitated the experience of disenchantment. Through online health information and resources, concealed failures in healthcare relationships were revealed and cancer survivors and caregivers were empowered to influence and control care decisions.

INTERPRETATION
The findings highlight failures in cancer survivorship care and underscore the importance of novel interdisciplinary programs and models of care that support evidence-informed decision making, self-management, and improved quality of life. Healthcare professionals need to receive education on survivors' use of the Internet as a source of health information and its impact on healthcare relationships. Future research should include studies examining the relationship between disenchantment and survivorship outcomes.


Abstract. Soil is a complex system where biotic (e.g., plant roots, micro-organisms) and abiotic (e.g., mineral surfaces) consumers compete for resources necessary for life (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus). This competition is ecologically significant, since it regulates the dynamics of soil nutrients and controls aboveground plant productivity. Here we develop, calibrate and test a nutrient competition model that accounts for multiple soil nutrients interacting with multiple biotic and abiotic consumers. As applied here for tropical forests, the Nutrient COMpetition model (N-COM) includes three primary soil nutrients (NH4+, NO3− and POx; representing the sum of PO43−, HPO42− and H2PO4−) and five potential competitors (plant roots, decomposing microbes, nitrifiers, denitrifiers and mineral surfaces). The competition is formulated with a quasi-steady-state chemical equilibrium approximation to account for substrate (multiple substrates share one consumer) and consumer (multiple consumers compete for one substrate) effects. N-COM successfully reproduced observed soil heterotrophic respiration, N2O emissions, free phosphorus, sorbed phosphorus and NH4+ pools at a tropical forest site (Tapajos). The overall model uncertainty was moderately well constrained. Our sensitivity analysis revealed that soil nutrient competition was primarily regulated by consumer–substrate affinity rather than environmental factors such as soil temperature or soil moisture. Our results also imply that under strong nutrient limitation, relative competitiveness depends strongly on the competitor functional traits (affinity and nutrient carrier enzyme abundance). We then applied the N-COM model to analyze field nitrogen and phosphorus perturbation experiments in two tropical forest sites (in Hawaii and Puerto Rico) not used in model development or calibration. Under soil inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus elevated conditions, the model accurately replicated the experimentally observed competition among nutrient consumers. Although we used as many observations as we could obtain, more nutrient addition experiments in tropical systems would greatly benefit model testing and calibration. In summary, the N-COM model provides an ecologically consistent representation of nutrient competition appropriate for land BGC models integrated in Earth System Models.


A numerical model of optical parametric amplification (OPA) is introduced to investigate the impact of wavefront phase distortion of pump on the beam quality of signal. Numerical results show that the unidentical walk-off directions of the pump and the idler waves are the main factors leading to the transfer of wavefront phase distortions of the pump to the signal, and by reducing the angle between the two directions, the beam quality factor (M2) can be greatly decreased and hence the good beam quality of the signal can be maintained.


On September 11, 2001, I was lecturing on "bomb culture" to a class of students who–I suggested–could have no idea of the climate of fear created during the Cold War by the possibility that a single rogue intercontinental ballistic missile might unleash nuclear holocaust. I had recently returned from a trip to Germany, where I had joined other dedicated Pynchon readers and scholars traveling to sites which appear in Gravity's Rainbow. We had been to Berlin, Slothrop's "City Sacramental" (372), visited the V-2 rocket research facilities at Peenemunde and seen what remains of the underground Mittelwerke, near Nordhausen, where slave laborers from Dora and other camps had died assembling the missiles used for Hitler's vengeance strikes in 1944–1945. Pynchon's 1973 novel and the terror weapons of the Second World War were fresh in my mind as I walked out of class to find myself watching the map of another City Sacramental, New York, inverted and transformed by debris, dust and shreds of office documents. The fragments of papers which drifted over lower Manhattan as a poignant testimony to lives lost in the World Trade Center towers were soon to be followed by other records of the missing. Personal profiles of victims appeared as fliers and posters in the streets of Manhattan and as "Portraits of Grief" in the New York Times. These echoed strangely another paper trail of loss: the "[a]dvertisements for shelter, clothing, the lost, the taken, […] out in the wind, when the wind comes, stuck to trees, door-frames, planking, pieces of wall–white and fading scraps, writing spidery, trembling, smudged, thousands unseen, thousands unread or blown away" (373) that Slothrop finds in war-devastated Berlin in 1945; and the "scrap of newspaper headline" which elliptically informs him of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima (693).


Controller area network (CAN) is a fieldbus network suitable for small-scale distributed computer controlled systems (DCCS), being appropriate for sending and receiving short real-time messages at speeds up to 1 Mbit/sec. Several studies are available on how to guarantee the real-time requirements of CAN messages, providing preruntime schedulability conditions to guarantee the real-time communication requirements of DCCS traffic. Usually, it is considered that CAN guarantees atomic multicast properties by means of its extensive error detection/signaling mechanisms. However, there are some error situations where messages can be delivered in duplicate or delivered only by a subset of the receivers, leading to inconsistencies in the supported applications. In order to prevent such inconsistencies, a middleware for reliable communication in CAN is proposed, taking advantage of CAN synchronous properties to minimize the runtime overhead. Such middleware comprises a set of atomic multicast and consolidation protocols, upon which the reliable communication properties are guaranteed. The related timing analysis demonstrates that, in spite of the extra stack of protocols, the real-time properties of CAN are preserved since the predictability of message transfer is guaranteed.


The article analyses cross-national variation in violent victimization of youth using data from the second sweep of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study. A multi-level approach is applied which takes into account individual factors as well as the characteristics of the immediate neighbourhood and the context of the given country. The routine activity theory suggested by Cohen and Felson is utilized to derive hypotheses about macro-level factors with the potential to explain differences in violent victimization rates. Specifically, the effects of homicide rates, the Gini coefficient, and the Human Development Index are analysed. The results reveal that the variation in violent victimization rates across countries is only partly attributable to the countries' heterogeneity with respect to individual characteristics and lifestyle choices of youth, together with neighbourhood features. Furthermore, a significant effect is observed for a country's Human Development Index, which relates higher levels of development to lower victimization risk, even when individual and neighbourhood characteristics are controlled for.


Dr. Brent K. Jesiek is Associate Professor in the Schools of Engineering Education and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. He is also an Associate Director of Purdue's Global Engineering Program, leads the Global Engineering Education Collaboratory (GEEC) research group, and is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award to study boundary-spanning roles and competencies among early career engineers. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Tech and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech. Dr. Jesiek draws on expertise from engineering, computing, and the social sciences to advance understanding of geographic, disciplinary, and historical variations in engineering education and practice.


This article raises questions about who becomes the proper subject for (non)academic attention in a time when 'city publics' might be positioned as democratising and open or, conversely, as curtailed and shaped through specific and pre-determined economies of value and use. The use of the city and its residents are echoed in regeneration politics and objectives, attached to and brought forward by specific 'regenerative' subjects, now deemed 'resilient' and capacitated. Such rhetorics of inclusion and measurable impact are echoed within ideas of a 'public sociology', which the engaged researcher should practice as she re-engages differently located spaces and subjects. Here, questions are raised about the place of a 'public sociology' as part of a 'city publics', where understanding local disseminations and disparities is important in considering where different users, interviewees and indeed researchers are coming from. Having situated the fieldwork site, we initially focus on the expert advisory group and their constructions of the project's 'use-value'. We then consider the background 'shadows' in and out of 'expert' space, as a trailing presence of research intentions and trajectories. Ideas of public sociology – as with an open 'city publics' - often assumes that all users are interested, willing to hear and appear as equal members of a 'community'. In contrast, the experience of engaging a user group may involve dis-engaging the research-researcher-researched and here we provide disruptions to a straightforward 'travelling through' research space as we walk through our research methodologies. This article presents professional and personal reflections on research experience as well as interpretative accounts of navigating fieldwork and city space.


Summary This case is the first to describe a patient who experienced concomitant agranulocytosis and anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis as an adverse effect of propylthiouracil treatment for Graves' disease. A 42-year-old female with Graves' disease presented to the emergency department (ED) with a 2-week history of fevers, night sweats, transient lower limb rash, arthralgia, myalgia and fatigue. She had been taking propylthiouracil for 18 months prior to presentation. On admission, agranulocytosis was evident with a neutrophil count of 0.36 × 109/L and immediately propylthiouracil was stopped. There was no evidence of active infection and the patient was treated with broad-spectrum antibodies and one dose of granulocyte colony-stimulation factor, resulting in a satisfactory response. On further investigation, ANCAs were positive with dual positivity for proteinase 3 and myeloperoxidase. There was no evidence of end-organ damage secondary to vasculitis, and the patient's constitutional symptoms resolved completely on discontinuation of the drug precluding the need for immunosuppressive therapy. Learning points: Continued vigilance and patient education regarding the risk of antithyroid drug-induced agranulocytosis is vital throughout the course of treatment. ANCA-associated vasculitis is a rare adverse effect of antithyroid drug use. Timely discontinuation of the offending drug is vital in reducing end-organ damage and the need for immunosuppressive therapy in drug-induced ANCA-associated vasculitis. Similarities in the pathogenesis of agranulocytosis and drug-induced ANCA-associated vasculitis may offer insight into an improved understanding of vasculitis and agranulocytosis.


OBJECTIVE
A multicenter trial was conducted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of paclitaxel every 2 weeks in patients with advanced or recurrent gastric cancer who had previously received fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy.

METHODS
The subjects were patients with gastric cancer who had disease progression or recurrence while receiving fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy. All patients had adequate major organ functions with an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status (PS) of 0-2. Paclitaxel 140 mg/m(2) was administered intravenously on days 1 and 15 of a 4-week cycle. The primary endpoint was the response rate. Secondary endpoints were progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival and safety.

RESULTS
Response was assessable in 40 of 41 enrolled patients. Their median age was 63 (range: 48-77) years, and PS was 0 in 22 patients, 1 in 13 and 2 in 5. Previous treatment included S-1 (1 M tegafur-0.4 M gimestat-1 M otastat potassium) monotherapy in 32 patients and S-1-based combination therapy in 5. The median number of administered courses of paclitaxel was 3.5 (1-14). The response rate was 17.5% (95% confidence interval: 7.3-32.8%, partial response: 7, stable disease: 21, progressive disease: 10 and not evaluable: 2). The disease control rate was 70.0%, the median PFS was 111 days and the median overall survival was 254 days. Major adverse events of Grade 3 or 4 were neutropenia (27.5%), anemia (12.5%), diarrhea (2.5%) and sensory neuropathy (2.5%).

CONCLUSIONS
Biweekly paclitaxel seemed to be one of the useful chemotherapies after failure of fluoropyrimidine-based treatment in patients with advanced or recurrent gastric cancer.


Multichannel automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems commonly separate speech enhancement, including localization, beamforming, and postfiltering, from acoustic modeling. In this paper, we perform multichannel enhancement jointly with acoustic modeling in a deep neural network framework. Inspired by beamforming, which leverages differences in the fine time structure of the signal at different microphones to filter energy arriving from different directions, we explore modeling the raw time-domain waveform directly. We introduce a neural network architecture, which performs multichannel filtering in the first layer of the network, and show that this network learns to be robust to varying target speaker direction of arrival, performing as well as a model that is given oracle knowledge of the true target speaker direction. Next, we show how performance can be improved by factoring  the first layer to separate the multichannel spatial filtering operation from a single channel filterbank which computes a frequency decomposition. We also introduce an adaptive variant, which updates the spatial filter coefficients at each time frame based on the previous inputs. Finally, we demonstrate that these approaches can be implemented more efficiently in the frequency domain. Overall, we find that such multichannel neural networks give a relative word error rate improvement of more than 5% compared to a traditional beamforming-based multichannel ASR system and more than 10% compared to a single channel waveform model.


This book is an exploration of how to undertake research. It brings together a wide range of different approaches and invites learners to consider innovative approaches to the way they work. Through reflection and evaluation it looks at how all aspects of research can contribute to the realization of a dynamic body of work that brings a whole new dimension to an image. Informed research lies at the heart of engaging photography. Without understanding how to do research and why it is valuable, a budding photographer is unlikely to grasp the full potential for the medium. This title presents students of photography with a range of tools and ideas to assist them in engaging with the research process and how to start to work as a reflective practitioner. At a time when the world is saturated with photographs, it is vital that an up-and-coming photographer understands what lies behind the surface of the making of a photographic project or body of work.


The mesoscopic effects in the quantum trapped gases of the Bose atoms constitute
the main subject of the present thesis. These effects are the most difficult for
the theoretical analysis in the quantum statistical physics since they can?t be seen by
neither a standard quantum mechanics of the simple microscopic systems of one or
very few atoms nor a standard statistical physics of the macroscopic systems that are
infinite in the bulk (thermodynamic) limit.
Most of the experiments on the cold quantum gases performed in the last decade,
starting from the first demonstration of BEC in 1995, involve the mesoscopic systems
of a finite number of atoms. The mesoscopic effects should manifest themselves most
clearly and easily near a critical temperature of BEC; however, they could be observed
also above and below the critical temperature.
Here I study the quantum and thermal fluctuations of the Bose-Einstein condensate
(BEC) in a box with the periodic boundary conditions under a particle-number
constraint. The above constraint is the only reason for the BEC and is crucial for the
mesoscopic effects in the BEC fluctuations, especially in the vicinity of the critical
temperature in the Bose gas.
I employ the particle-number conserving operator formalism of Girardeau and
Arnowitt introduced in 1959 to analyze the canonical ensemble fluctuations. I present
analytical formulas and numerical calculations for the central moments of the ground
state occupation fluctuations in an ideal Bose gas in a box with a mesoscopic number of particles.
I present the analysis of the BEC statistics both on a temperature at a fixed
number of particles and on a number of particles at a fixed temperature. Both analyses
are valid for the purpose of understanding the important mesoscopic effects near the
critical temperature. I emphasize the non-Gaussian nature of the fluctuations.
The presented formalism can be generalized to the case of a weakly interacting
Bose gas in a box in the framework of the Bogoliubov approximation. The work in
this direction is in progress but is not included in the present thesis.


Abstract. Toxoplasma gondii is a cosmopolitan protozoan parasite of felids that also has significant implications for the health of wildlife, livestock and humans worldwide. In Australia, feral, stray and domestic cats (Felis catus) are the most important definitive host of T. gondii as they are the only species that can excrete the environmentally resistant oocysts that provide a major source of infection for mammals and birds. In Tasmania, the rapid decline of the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) may allow an increase in feral cat abundance, thereby increasing the risk of T. gondii infection to a range of susceptible wildlife species. At present, there is scant information on the prevalence of T. gondii infection in feral cat populations across Tasmania. We tested feral cats from 13 regions across Tasmania for the presence of T. gondii–specific IgG antibodies using a modified agglutination test. Results were combined with serosurveys from three previous studies to enable a comparison of seroprevalence among 14 regions across Tasmania. We found that 84.2% (224 of 266) of cats tested positive for T. gondii IgG antibodies. This is among the highest rates of prevalence recorded from Australia, and significantly higher than for most other countries. Adult cats had higher seroprevalence than kittens but there was no difference between sexes. In Tasmania, seroprevalence was high in 12 of 14 regions (range: 79.3–100.0%), with only two regions (Tasman Island and Southern Tasmania) recording significantly lower seroprevalence (≤50%). This suggests a high risk of infection across Tasmania, and has significant implications for wildlife conservation should feral cat abundance increase with the ongoing declines in Tasmanian devils.


How do you communicate a protest movement? And how do communication practices shape its character and power relations?  Based on a view of communication as constitutive of protest movements, this talk considers these questions as two sides of the same coin. The focus lies on the Occupy movement and particularly on its use of digital media. Characterised by a belief in direct participation and a rejection of central leadership, Occupy emerged through a bottom-up process of organizing that spanned different platforms and physical places, from Facebook pages to public squares. The process of constructing the collective involved the creation of communication sites and foundational texts, and their interlinking. This process was influenced by the rules, affordances and proprietary character of media platforms and physical spaces, as well as the diverse cultures and strategies of the activists using them. A closer look at this process sheds light on the power relations within the movement and particularly on five sources of communication power. These range from the power to create communication sites and texts to the power to access or link them together. The picture that emerges is complex, revealing a movement with both centralizing and decentralizing dynamics. Ultimately, it was the balance between these opposing dynamics that determined both the emergence of the movement and its decline. Acknowledgement: This contribution is the podcast of a talk Anastasia Kavada gave in the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI)'s Research Seminar Series on February 25, 2015, at the University of Westminster.


The second biomedical revolution puts into question human society as a whole inasmuch as it gives to human being the dominion over three fundamental systems, namely: reproduction, genetics, and the nervous system. Current experiment assays go beyond either health protection or health recovery, thus allowing new techniques to be challenged in the sense that they may modify the evolution of species; furthermore they may modify humans as a species. On no account, however, are we suggesting simply that some control program on science be implemented, nor are we willing to sow mutual suspicions likely to generate an endless quarrel on scientific advance. To progress towards an actual problem solving process coupled to a cooperation between scientific culture and human values, it is necessary that research on people must be transformed into researching with people. To which extent, however, medical research is in a position to envision new alliances between scientific tasks and human demands? Setting up an expanded scientific community able and willing to present new social actors with a collective appropriation of knowledge is an urgent commitment to be considered thoroughly.


Chitosan binds to negatively charged soy lecithin liposomes by an electrostatic interaction driven by its positively charged amino group. This interaction allows stable covered vesicles (chitosomes) to be developed as a suitable targeted carrier and controlled release system. This study investigated the effect of chitosomes on the activation of cranberry proanthocyanidins (PAC) in Raw 264.7 macrophages. Chitosomes were characterized according to size, zeta potential, PAC-loading, and release properties. Results showed an increase in the net positive charge and size of the liposomes as the concentration of chitosan was increased, suggesting an effective covering of the vesicles by means of electrostatic interactions, as shown by transmission electron microscopy and fluorescence microscopy. About 85% of the PAC that was loaded remained in the chitosomes after release studies for 4 hours in phosphate-buffered saline. Cyclo-oxygenase-2 (COX-2) and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) are associated with inflammation. Activated RAW 264.7 macrophages increase the expression of COX-2 and iNOS in response to bacterial infection and inflammation; we, therefore, tested the ability of the PAC-loaded chitosomes to attenuate COX-2 and iNOS expression in LPS (lipopolysaccharide)-stimulated macrophages. Increasing the amount of PAC loaded into the chitosomes caused a dose-dependent attenuation of iNOS and COX-2 expression in LPS-stimulated macrophages. A 2% v/v PAC-loaded chitosomes formulation almost completely attenuated the LPS-induced expression of iNOS and COX-2. PAC-loaded chitosomes were more active than PAC alone, suggesting that the macrophage response to LPS occurs after endocytosis of the PAC-loaded chitosomes.


This paper discusses the problem of the swelling of a fused quartz tube when it is heated locally. An equation is obtained that describes the viscous-flow kinetics of the melted section of the tube. Studies were carried out of how the maximum swelling diameter of the tube and the time it takes to swell depend on the relative length of the heated section of the tube and on its temperature. The results are experimentally checked when single quartz capillaries swell, as well as when a capillary assembly consisting of blanks for drawing microstructured optical fiber with two layers of air holes is sintered.


Little girl's dress of check woven, pink transparent fabric with pink silk ribbon trim and pink silk flowers. Rounded square neckline, short sleeves, and falls at the knees. Dress has a simple yet unique construction. Fabric of sleeve is gathered into a flower of silk ribbon at each outer sleeve with pleated shoulders. Eight pink silk flowers circle the lower portion of the dress, and there are two bands of ribbon trims at double, scalloped hem.

With accompanying slip of pink sateen cotton bordered in pink silk ribbon. Sleeveless with scalloped double hemline.


Exposure to axial unloading induces adaptations in paraspinal muscles, as shown after spaceflights. This study investigated whether daily exposure to artificial gravity (AG) mitigated lumbar spine flattening and muscle atrophy associated with 60-day head-down tilt (HDT) bed rest (Earth-based space analogue). Twenty-four healthy individuals participated in the study: Eight received 30 minutes continuous AG; eight received 6x5 minutes AG, interspersed with rest periods; eight received no AG exposure (control group). Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the lumbopelvic region was conducted at baseline (BDC) and at day 59 of HDT (HDT59). T1-weighted images were used to assess morphology of the lumbar spine (spinal length, intervertebral disc angles, disc area) and volumes of the lumbar multifidus (LM), lumbar erector spinae (LES), quadratus lumborum (QL), and psoas major (PM) muscles from L1/L2 to L5/S1 vertebral levels. A chemical shift-based 2-point lipid/water Dixon sequence was used to evaluate muscle composition. Results showed that: spinal length and disc area increased (P<0.05); intervertebral disc angles (P<0.05) and muscle volumes of LM, LES, and QL reduced (P<0.01); and fat/water ratio for the LM and LES muscles increased (P<0.01) after HDT59 in all groups. Neither of the AG protocols mitigated the lumbar spinal deconditioning induced by HDT bed rest. The increase in lipid/water ratio in LM and LES muscles indicates an increased relative intramuscular lipid concentration. Altered muscle composition in atrophied muscles may impair lumbar spine function after body unloading, which could increase injury risk to vulnerable soft tissues. This relationship needs further investigation.


A memory-based heuristic is a heuristic function that is stored in a lookup table. Very accurate heuristics have been created by building very large lookup tables, sometimes called pattern databases. Most previous work assumes that a memory-based heuristic is computed for the entire state space, and the cost of computing it is amortized over many problem instances. But in some cases, it may be useful to compute a memory-based heuristic for a single problem instance. If the start and goal states of the problem instance are used to restrict the region of the state space for which the heuristic is needed, the time and space used to compute the heuristic may be substantially reduced. In this paper, we review recent work that uses this idea to compute space-efficient heuristics for the multiple sequence alignment problem. We then describe a novel development of this idea that is simpler and more general. Our approach leads to improved performance in solving the multiple sequence alignment problem, and is general enough to apply to other domains.


BACKGROUND
Advancing knowledge of biobehavioral effects of interventions can result in improved treatments. Thus, a standardized laboratory cue reactivity assessment has been developed and validated to assess the cognitive and psychophysiological responses to a simulated high-risk situation: alcohol cues. The present study investigates the effects of a pharmacotherapy (naltrexone) on a laboratory-based, cue-elicited urge to drink among abstinent alcoholics in treatment.

METHODS
Alcohol-dependent subjects were randomized to 12 weeks of naltrexone or placebo after completing a partial hospital program. After approximately 1 week on medication, all received cue reactivity assessment.

RESULTS
Significantly fewer patients taking naltrexone reported any urge to drink during alcohol exposure than did those on placebo. Those with any urges reported no decrement in level of the urges. Mean arterial pressure decreased significantly for those on placebo, but not for those on naltrexone, whereas cue-elicited decreases in heart rate were not affected by the medication.

CONCLUSIONS
The results have implications for models of relapse and naltrexone's effects. Cue reactivity methodology has utility for investigating hypothesized mediators of therapeutic effects of pharmacotherapies as well as behavioral treatments.


Four different computer-based media combinations - Text-only, Text + Diagrams,
Spoken Text + Diagrams, and Text + Video material - have been created to instruct
participants how to carry out the practical task of removing and installing both a video
card and a CPU chip in a computer system. The four presentations are based upon identical teaching material. Tests were constructed to measure the amount of knowledge gained both in the theoretical and in the practical parts of the experiment. An interactive facility was provided which allowed participants to move forwards and backwards in the material so that the effects of interactivity (or lack of it) could be investigated in relation to the media combinations used. In addition, student learning style was measured and the effects of the four presentations on students with different learning styles were investigated. A practical domain was chosen because most previous work has mainly
been on theoretical domains (such as statistics) or on animated examples of simple systems (such as braking systems). Two experiments have been designed and carried out. The first experiment was a pilot study which used 24 participants. Its results were used to improve the design of the second experiment by improving the material presented and the knowledge tests and adjusting the complexity of the questions used in the test. The second experiment was a more extensive one in which 80 participants took part. These results showed that text-only material was not as effective in delivering the teaching material to the participants compared with the other presentations. However, when interactivity was introduced, the text-only participants were able to improve their performance considerably by moving extensively between scenes. The addition of video material did not improve the learning performance in the completion of the practical tasks, in comparison with the other media combinations and this may have been due to a redundancy effect. Finally, learning style (regarding the sensing/intuitive learners) did
result in significant learning performance differences, but these were not due to the media combinations used. An examination of performance of sensing and intuitive learners over the theoretical and practical aspects of the test suggested that the difference may be due to intuitors' preference for theoretical material and sensors' preference for practical
material.
Further research work is proposed to investigate further the effects observed.


We consider the Secure Broadcast problem in incomplete networks. We study the resilience of the Certified Propagation Algorithm (CPA), which is particularly suitable for ad hoc networks. We address the issue of determining the maximum number of corrupted players t max that CPA can tolerate under the t-locally bounded adversary model, in which the adversary may corrupt at most t players in each player's neighborhood. For any graph G and dealer-node D we provide upper and lower bounds on t max that can be efficiently computed in terms of a graph theoretic parameter that we introduce in this work. Along the way we obtain an efficient 2-approximation algorithm for t max . We further introduce two more graph parameters, one of which matches t max exactly. Our approach allows to provide an affirmative answer to the open problem of CPA Uniqueness[10].


Microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) is widely employed to extract active compounds from plants. However, optimum operating conditions for MAE reported in literature are applicable only for specific scale of extraction and microwave system. This operational limitation was focused by taking into consideration the intrinsic power and energy required for optimizing the MAE in this study. Thus, the effects of absorbed microwave power density (APD) and absorbed microwave energy density (AED) on MAE of anti-diabetic compounds from cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) leaves were investigated. This study suggests that APD addresses the real heating power of MAE and characterizes the extraction kinetics of MAE. Meanwhile AED can replace the extraction time to indicate the progress of MAE towards equilibrium extraction regardless of the heating conditions, i.e. solvent loading (100-300 ml) and microwave irradiation power (100-600 W). The optimum power and energy required for the MAE was 0.3 W/ml and 300 J/ml. respectively. They are independent of the extraction scales of 2-6 g sample and their extraction performances are comparable with that of Soxhlet extraction. In addition, structural analysis on plant sample illustrated the impact exerted by the microwave heating. This study highlights the implications and the significances of the energy-related parameters for MAE process.


Shared control is a key technology for various robotic applications in which a robotic system and a human operator are meant to collaborate efficiently. In order to achieve efficient task execution in shared control, it is essential to predict the desired behavior for a given situation or context in order to simplify the control task for the human operator. This prediction is obtained by exploiting Learning from Demonstration (LfD), which is a popular approach for transferring human skills to robots. We encode the demonstrated behavior as trajectory distributions and generalize the learned distributions to new situations. The goal of this paper is to present a shared control framework that uses learned expert distributions to gain more autonomy. Our approach controls the balance between the controller's autonomy and the human preference based on the distributions of the demonstrated trajectories. Moreover, the learned distributions are autonomously refined from collaborative task executions, resulting in a master-slave system with increasing autonomy that requires less user input with an increasing number of task executions. We experimentally validated that our shared control approach enables efficient task executions. Moreover, the conducted experiments demonstrated that the developed system improves its performances through interactive task executions with our shared control.


The LHCb detector is one of the four experimental setups built to detect high-energy proton collisions to be produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Located at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), the LHC machine and the LHCb experiment are expected to start in 2008, and will then operate for several years. Being the largest collider of its kind, the LHC will open the way to new investigations, in the very-high energies, but also in terms of statistics for the study of rare-phenomena and flavor physics. In this framework LHCb is dedicated to precise measurements of CP-violating and rare decays of beauty hadrons, in order to test (or over-constrain) the Standard Model of particle physics. From the hardware point of view, the construction of such detectors represents several challenges; one of them is the routing at a very high frequency of many signals in a harsh radiation environment. We designed to this purpose a hardware setup and a software filter which together reduce the cross-talk present in the readout of the LHCb vertex detector to a level of (1 ± 2)%, leading to an improved signal quality in the acquisition chain. From the physics point of view, many of the CP-violation measurements performed at LHCb using Bs decays, for example using Bs → Ds∓ K± decays, will require as input the Bs–Bs oscillation frequency Δms. Thus the measurement of Bs–Bs oscillations, which are best observed using the flavor-specific Bs → Ds- π+ decays, will play an important role. We have developed a complete selection of Bs → Ds- π+ and Bs → Ds∓ K± events, based on Monte Carlo simulations. Assuming 2 fb-1 of data, we expect a Bs → Ds- π+ signal yield, after the first level of trigger, of 155 k events over a background between 0.6 k and 7.8 k events at 90% confidence level. Moreover, we assess with fast Monte Carlo studies the corresponding statistical sensitivity on the Bs oscillation frequency, σ(Δms) = 0.008 ps-1, on the wrong tag fraction, σ(ω) = 0.003, as well as on other parameters related to the Bs-meson system. We also addressed an important aspect of the systematics associated with the Δms measurement, and developed a method to calibrate and assess the length scale. This calibration is performed through the reconstruction of secondary interactions occurring in the material of the vertex detector. We show that the statistical relative precision of this approach quickly matches 6 × 10-5, obtained from the survey measurements of the detector.


The use of various search engines could influence the number of search results in the World Wide Web. Therefore, this study attempted to discover any association between the word types or the information types used to search through the World Wide Web using the available search engines. By doing so, it could assist the process of data mining for information in the World Wide Web. This study used a prototype program based on genetic algorithm to manipulate the initial set of data. Three sets of inputs were used to generate new populations based on the individual fitness. New strains of individuals from a new population were used to test the results obtained from the World Wide Web. Eight search engines used for this study were tested with two groups of words. All the eight words were used as keyword search in all the eight search engines, and the numbers of web pages returned by each search engines were collected. The total web pages based on the selected new individuals were calculated and tabulated. In order to find any association between the search word and the search engines combinations, the individuals were ranked based on the most web pages to the least according to each of the eight words. Results obtained through the creation of new populations by the prototype program showed that the average fitness of each population improves as new populations were created and new strains of individuals were created through this evolution process. The test on results obtained from the Internet showed that certain class of words could be associated by certain combination of search engines.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Entrepreneurship has become mandatory for different societies because not only does entrepreneurship make it possible for individuals to access the financial resources generated by the idea but it also facilitates the development of a country by solving problems in a new way. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to explore and determine the relationship between entrepreneurial skills on job performance of managers and deputies working in the municipalities of Hormozgan province located in the south of Iran. METHODS: The present study is a descriptive-practical correlation in terms of how data was collected. The collected data were based on the quantitative research method used to measure job performance by means of the Standard 15 Questionnaire. For evaluating the entrepreneurship skills, the 20 researcher-made questionnaire with 20 statements was used based on the research literature. The statistical population of the study consisted of 350 managers and deputy mayors of Hormozgan province. By applying the Cochran's formula, 182 people were selected as the statistical sample. Data analysis was performed by means of SmartPLS3 software. FINDINGS:The results of the research indicate positive relationships among entrepreneurial (3.695), managerial (5.680) and technical (7.369) skills concerning job performance. Therefore, these hypotheses were confirmed and, on the contrary, the hypothesis related to the relationship between personal skills and job performance (1.774) was rejected. CONCLUSION: According to the findings, the development of the relationship between entrepreneurial skills on job performance of managers and deputy mayors of Hormozgan province improves the competitive performance of organizations.


The debate on China's piracy and counterfeiting problems has been ongoing for more than two decades. However, in the past few years, this debate has taken on a new sense of urgency and significance. In August 2008, the City of Beijing will host the Summer Olympic Games. Two years later, the 2010 World Expo will be held in Shanghai. In addition, two World Trade Organization dispute settlement panels were recently established to resolve disputes between China and the United States over inadequate enforcement of intellectual property rights and inadequate market access to U.S. media products. All of these developments, of course, take place against a background of China's rise to emerging world power status. Although the Olympics, the World Expo, and the two WTO dispute settlement panels all constitute new developments in the U.S.-China intellectual property debate, the existing debate is not that different from the debate in the late 1990s when I began studying intellectual property protection in China. While some commentators have attributed China's piracy and counterfeiting problems to the lack of political will on the part of Chinese authorities, others have cited the many political, social, economic, cultural, judicial, and technological problems that have arisen as a result of the country's rapid economic transformation and accession to the WTO. This Essay, however, advances a different explanation, which I briefly touched upon in previous writings. It argues that the failure to resolve piracy and counterfeiting problems in China can be partly attributed to the lack of political will on the part of U.S. policymakers and the American public to put intellectual property protection at the very top of the U.S.-China agenda. In other words, it is not only the Chinese who lack political will, as many critics have claimed, but the Americans as well. To illustrate this argument, this Essay examines three questions I always ask when I engage in debate with U.S. scholars and policymakers over intellectual property protection in China. It is the hope that the ensuing discussion will underscore the policy complexities involved in the U.S.-China intellectual property debate.


The goal of this study was to test a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis dealing with one of the biggest unsolved questions in linguistics: Does language affect the way we think? Grammatical systems in the world's languages differ in many aspects. Unlike English or German many languages group nouns on the basis of noun classifiers. Recently research has adressed the question if these linguistic categories built up by classifier systems influence non-linguistic thought. In this paper we studied Mandarin Chinese and Thai—two languages with classifier systems. Although both are classifier languages they categorize objects in different ways. We tested if these system differences lead to different similarity judgements of objects in a non-linguistic rating task (participants had to rate the similarity of picture pairs). In contrast to previous studies we suprisingly observed no difference in categorization. It seems that the so-called Whorf effect, i. e. that language affects the way we perceive and categorize the world, diminishes rapidly over the time speakers are exposed to a different language system such as, in this case, German.


This study examins the intra- and inter-individual changes in the foraging route-choice behaviour of 45 female Antarctic fur seals Arctocephalus gazella breeding at the Cap Noir colony in the Kerguelen Archipelago, southern Indian Ocean. Satellite transmitters were used to track seals during one or more consecutive foraging trips in 3 consecutive austral summers (1998 to 2000). In all years of study the seals showed a 'colony-preferred direction', concentrating their trips at sea in a 140° arc east of Kerguelen, indicating a preferred area for foraging. Within this area, lactating females travelled in 1 of 2 main directions: north east toward the edge of the Kerguelen plateau; and less commonly, east/south east. Each direction led seals to sub-areas characterised by different bathymetric features where animals appeared to use different tactics to search for food patches. Moreover, a fidelity index incorporating the mean direction of successive trips and the colony pre- ferred direction indicated the existence of an individual directional fidelity. The organisation of foraging trips suggests 2 levels of learning by seals: a colony memory of the main foraging zone and an individual memory of profitable patches that are exploited by the same individual during succes- sive trips.


Cultural psychology and experimental existential psychology are two of the fastest-growingmovements in social psychology. In this bookDaniel Sullivan combines both perspectives to present a groundbreaking analysis of culture's role in shaping the psychology of threat experience. The first part of the book presents a new theoretical framework guided by three central principles: that humans are in a unique existential situation because we possess symbolic consciousness and culture; that culture provides psychological protection against threatening experiences, but also helps to create them; and that interdisciplinary methods are vital to understanding the link between culture and threat. In the second part of the book, Sullivan presents a novel program of research guided by these principles. Focusing on a case study of a traditionalist group of Mennonites in the Midwestern United States, Sullivan examines the relationships between religion, community, guilt, anxiety, and the experience of natural disaster.


Until recently, economists studying economic development have tended to consider it a universal process, or focussed their attention on common aspects. This book originates from the growing recognition of significant sectoral differences in economic development and examines the catching-up process in five different economic sectors: pharmaceuticals, telecommunications equipment, semiconductors, software, and agro-food industries. Each of these sector studies explore the learning and catch-up processes in various developing countries, in order to identify both the common features, and those which differ significantly across sectors and nations. The authors pay particular attention to China, India, Brazil, Korea and Taiwan.


We study the trading of individual investors using transaction data and identifying buyer- or seller-initiated trades. We document four results: (1) Small trade order imbalance correlates well with order imbalance based on trades from retail brokers. (2) Individual investors herd. (3) When measured annually, small trade order imbalance forecasts future returns; stocks heavily bought underperform stocks heavily sold by 4.4 percentage points the following year. (4) Over a weekly horizon, small trade order imbalance reliably predicts returns, but in the opposite direction; stocks heavily bought one week earn strong returns the subsequent week, while stocks heavily sold earn poor returns.


Title of Document: CONSTITUTIVE PROPERTY TESTING AND RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT OF LEADFREE SOLDER JOINT Yuri Lee, Master, 2010 Directed By: Professor Bongtae Han, Department of Mechanical Engineering A modified single lap shear test configuration, based on the Iosipescu geometry, is proposed to characterize mechanical properties of solder alloys. In the method, an auxiliary device (extension unit) is employed to improve the accuracy of measurement. The extension unit is attached directly to the test area. The unit converts shear displacements to axial displacements, which are subsequently captured by a high-resolution extensometer. The extension unit allowed measurement of shear deformations without compensating machine and grip compliance. The proposed test configuration is utilized to characterize the constitutive properties of lead-free solder. Experimental parameters are obtained for (1) a partitioned model, where the elastic, rate-independent plastic and rate-dependent creep behaviors are all separated and (2) a unified creep-plastic model. Reliability assessment of lead-free solder joint is performed by calibration of virtual qualification model for leaded packages with lead-free solder. CONSTITUTIVE PROPERTY TESTING AND RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT OF LEAD-FREE SOLDER JOINT


The article raises the question of how a person argues for social change by compromise. The study is about the leading theorist of the reformist Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), Ernst Wigforss, and how he argues for a compromise in the relations between capital and labour. My hypothesis is that social change is argued as necessary, possible, and desirable. The guiding idea for the analysis is to use Quentin Skinner's understanding of political thought and its expression as a political manoeuvre bounded by a historically given context. However, the latter needs to be specified as an analytical concept, as well as audience and interest. Despite his efforts Wigforss failed to create an agreement about new relations between capital and labour. His problem situation and his efforts to work through the problem mirror a general political problem, the possibilities of reformism to convert the existing society on crucial issues. More specifically, however, in his effort to redefine what the interest of each party should be, Wigforss had to consider the character of the object of conflict he was addressing, as this determined what the interest of each party was, and the sort of compromise that might be reached.


This paper discusses optimization of decisions diagrams (DDs) by total autocorrelation functions. We present an efficient algorithm for construction of linearly transformed binary decision diagrams (LT-BDDs) and Linearly transformed multiterminal BDDs (LT-MTBDDs) for systems of Boolean functions, based on linearization of these functions by the corresponding autocorrelation functions. Then, we present a method for reduction of sizes of DDs by a level-by-level reduction of the width of DDs using the total autocorrelation functions. The approach provides for a simple procedure for minimization of LT-BDDs and LT-MTBDDs and upper bounds on their sizes. Experimental results for benchmarks illustrate that the proposed method on average is very efficient.


Abstract Evolutionary trees are powerful tools used in modern biological research, and commonly used in textbooks and classroom instruction. Studies have shown that K-14 students have difficulties interpreting evolutionary trees. To improve student learning about this topic, it is essential to teach them how to understand and use trees like professional biologists. Unfortunately, few currently used teaching frameworks for evolution instruction are designed for this purpose. In this study we developed the Model of the Use of Evolutionary Trees (MUET), a conceptual model that characterizes how evolutionary trees were used by professional biologists as represented in their research publications. The development of the MUET was guided by the Concept-Reasoning Mode of representation (CRM) model as well as a "model of modeling" framework. The MUET was then used to review instructional and assessment material for K-14 classrooms. Future studies with the MUET may inform the development of teaching materials for K-14 classrooms aimed at improving students' understanding of and learning about evolutionary trees.


The motive to hold inventories purely in the hope of profiting from a price increase is called the speculative motive. This motive has received considerable attention in the literature. However, existing studies do not have a clear implication for how large it is quantitatively. This paper incorporates the speculative motive for holding inventories into an otherwise standard real business cycle model and finds that empirically plausible parameterizations of the model result in an average inventory stock to output ratio that is virtually zero. For this reason, we conclude that the quantitative magnitude of the speculative role for holding inventories in this model is quite small. This suggests the possibility that the study of aggregate economic phenomena can safely abstract from inventory speculation.


Speaking into the Air is, quite simply, the most original and thought provoking book on communication that I have read. It is dazzlingly and sometimes obscurely erudite yet with a clear and coherent argument that challenges our current commonsense views about communication. I am persuaded by this argument, though less so by the point at which John Durham Peters himself takes leave of it. That point seems to me to be oddly, uncomfortably, strange; something which, in itself, needs some explanation. It's partly to do, I think, with the Americanness of the book and partly its religiousness. Neither of these two points, I hasten to add, are implied criticisms. But they might begin to account for its strangeness, for this is a weird and eccentric book, voyaging in strange seas of thought alone, far from the busy, crowded lanes down which the usual academic shipping travels.


This work refers to the study of the batch and fed batch cultures of an industrially applicable microbial strain termed Gluconobacter suboxydans S-22, capable of converting D-sorbitol into L-sorbose and D-glucose into D-gluconic acid at extremely high substrate mass concentrations. Media based on CSL-filtrate and containing different D-sorbitol concentrations were applied to perform experiments. Studied were the effects of D-sorbitol and L-sorbose concentrations on the kinetics of microbial growth and D-sorbitol conversion into L-sorbose, and of microbial cell metabolism on the oxygen solubility and water activity, on the oxygen transfer and uptake rates and on the bioprocess final L -sorbose yield. In order to define the process relationships and describe the kinetics of all relevant process events in a large range of reaction conditions, a mathematical model based on corresponding differential equations was developed. The applicability of the mathematical model was tested by computer simulation. Data of computer simulations fitted well to experimental data. Changes of biomass, D-sorbitol, L-sorbose and dissolved oxygen concentrations during the batch and fed batch cultures can be well explained by applied mathematical model regardless of whether they refer to the reaction system of commonly dissolved substance mass concentration (close to 200 g L ―1 ) or to the reaction system of extremely highly dissolved and total substance concentrations (above 700 g L ―1 ). Excellent correlation coefficients (0.99693 ― 0.99995) expressing the agreement of the theoretical with experimental data were found for compared biomass, D -sorbitol, L -sorbose and dissolved oxygen concentrations. Results confirmed the hypothesis that the water activity can be expressed as a function of oxygen solubility in the investigated reaction system.


Peroxide oxidizes and activates the kinase Lyn to recruit neutrophils to the site of injury. Tissue injury causes the production of reactive oxygen species, specifically hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) produced by NADPH oxidase, which is activated at the site of injury. This H2O2 signal triggers the migration of neutrophils to the site of injury. Yoo et al. provide evidence, using the model organism zebrafish, that H2O2 causes the oxidation of a specific cysteine in the intracellular Src family kinase (SFK) Lyn, which activates the kinase resulting in chemotaxis. Neutrophil recruitment to sites of tail injury in zebrafish larvae was compromised if SFK activity was inhibited or if dual oxidase, which produces H2O2 at the site of injury, was knocked down. Furthermore, neutrophils were recruited in response to H2O2 exogenously applied to the embryos and human neutrophils chemotaxed toward H2O2 in vitro, and these responses were blocked in the presence of SFK inhibitors. Knockdown of Lyn in the zebrafish embryos impaired neutrophil migration to sites of injury and inhibited wound-induced SFK autophosphorylation, which is required for catalytic activity. Mutational analysis of Lyn expressed in human embryonic kidney (HEK) 293 cells and in vitro kinase assays with the mutants showed that Cys466 was necessary for H2O2 to activate Lyn activity. The importance of Cys466 for neutrophil wound responses was confirmed by rescue experiments in zebrafish in which endogenous Lyn was knocked down. Thus, the authors concluded that oxidation of Cys466 activated Lyn, enabling Lyn to serve as the H2O2 sensor for promoting neutrophil migration to sites of injury. S. K. Yoo, T. W. Starnes, Q. Deng, A. Huttenlocher, Lyn is a redox sensor that mediates leukocyte wound attraction in vivo. Nature 480, 109–112 (2011). [PubMed]


Accurate map matching has been a fundamental but challenging problem that has drawn great research attention in recent years. It aims to reduce the uncertainty in a trajectory by matching the GPS points to the road network on a digital map. Most existing work has focused on estimating the likelihood of a candidate path based on the GPS observations, while neglecting to model the probability of a route choice from the perspective of drivers. Here we propose a novel feature-based map matching algorithm that estimates the cost of a candidate path based on both GPS observations and human factors. To take human factors into consideration is very important especially when dealing with low sampling rate data where most of the movement details are lost. Additionally, we simultaneously analyze a subsequence of coherent GPS points by utilizing a new segment-based probabilistic map matching strategy, which is less susceptible to the noisiness of the positioning data. We have evaluated the proposed approach on a public large-scale GPS dataset, which consists of 100 trajectories distributed all over the world. The experimental results show that our method is robust to sparse data with large sampling intervals (e.g., 60 s ∼ 300 s) and challenging track features (e.g., u-turns and loops). Compared with two state-of-the-art map matching algorithms, our method substantially reduces the route mismatch error by 6.4% ∼ 32.3% and obtains the best map matching results in all the different combinations of sampling rates and challenging features.