Many years ago, before I crossed the desert for the first time to venture to the quintessential American City of neon and artifice, I asked an acquaintance about the buffets. He was a fan, I could immediately tell. "Mounds of shrimp as high as you can see," he exclaimed. He was speaking of the Mirage buffet, which at the time was considered by many to be among the best Las Vegas had to offer. The Las Vegas of the early 1990s was undergoing revitalization. Change has slowed in the 15 years since, but then the era of the mega resorts was just hitting its stride. The Mirage was among the first big projects to change the urban tourist landscape of Las Vegas since Caesars Palace had been built in the mid 1960s. Before Caesars, Las Vegas Boulevard, lying just outside city lines, had been dominated by low, sprawling casinos that resembled motels (huge motels, to be sure) more than the themed environments of today. The Mirage, like all the big resorts, has a massive buffet, aping an old Las Vegas tradition wherein "cheap food" lured in the marks. The El Rancho buffet cost $1.00 in the 1960s, competing with $2 steak and eggs and the ubiquitous $1 shrimp cocktail. The latter can still be found downtown, to sate those beckoned by a similar throwback, the $1 craps tables. Nothing stays the same in Las Vegas, at least not for long. The persistence of buffets as a cornerstone of the hotel/casino experience suggests that the lure of foodways persists-even thrives-among even the most rapid changes. Michael Owen Jones has long advocated for a new view of American folklore as situated within the behavioral history of the American experience. In arguing for this new conception of American history, he writes: It is an approach congenial with the writings of Dorson, who led his colleagues in folkloristics and history alike by calling attention to the existence of folklore in America and relating that folklore to experiences of people who encountered new social situations and geographical conditions. In this way, and to this extent, Dorson's work stands as model and inspiration for the writing of a history that reveals "another America," an America not of typical or atypical trends, of power relations, or of household economics but an America of common and recurrent forms of behavior by means of which people expressed their humanity, maintained their dignity, and managed to survive in the course of everyday events and ordinary encounters. (Jones 1982:50-51). Las Vegas, as I have argued elsewhere,1 is a quintessentially American place, and the behavior we find within it also defines it as the most American of cities. Though it doesn't aspire to the ideals that Jones and Dorson advocate, Las Vegas provides insight into American behavior as a model for the American history that Jones is calling for. Observing behavior at Las Vegas buffets provides deep insight into the nature of American attitudes toward food and, more broadly, toward the American experience. The classic Las Vegas buffet may have paled in comparison with the new, high-end version, but buffet behavior reportedly has not changed much in the last 50 years. The "old" allure of buffets was similar to that of cheap rooms or penny slots. The enticement of perceived "value" was enough to lure visitors across the desert. Once there, ideally, they would spend their "savings" on goods and services more profitable to the house. Of course, the real lure was and is Nevada's boom industry: gambling. The prospect that you may be the one who wins more than you lose is tantalizing. But in gambling, as in buffet culture, the house always has the edge. The allure of the "winner" idea is a profound one, despite all evidence within an individual's experience. You may be losing your money, but you can hear people winning around you. The gaming industry has to ratchet up the experience in a profound way to make the lure strong enough to keep the visitor coming back. …


'Drawn on by his eagerness for the open sky, he left his guide and soared upwards...' Ovid tells the tales of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, the Calydonian Boar-Hunt, and many other famous myths. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Ovid (c.43 BCE-17 CE). Ovid's other works available in Penguin Classics are The Erotic Poems, Fasti, Heroides and Metamorphoses.


Perceptual colour difference in simple colour patches has been extensively studied in the history of colour science. However, these methods are not assumed to be applicable for predicting the perceived colour difference in complex colour patches such as digital images of complex scene. In this work existing metrics that predict the perceived colour difference in digital images of complex scene are studied and compared. Performance evaluation was based on the correlations between values of the metrics and results of subjective tests that were done as a pair comparison, in which fifteen test participants evaluated the subjective colour differences in digital images. The test image set consisted of eight images each having four versions of distortion generated by applying different ICC profiles. According to results, none of the metrics were able to predict the perceived colour difference in every test image. The results of iCAM metric had the highest average correlation for all images. However, the scatter of the judgements was very high for two of the images, and if these were excluded from the comparison the Hue-angle was the best performing metric. It was also noteworthy that the performance of the CIELAB colour difference metric was relatively high.


Proteins that participate in biological regulatory mechanisms are often assembled into large complexes within which various signaling molecules interact to propagate a biochemical signal. Matsuzawa et al. characterize such a complex of proteins assembled at the activated receptor CD40 (a member of the tumor necrosis factor receptor family) on the cell surface. The complex formed at the cell surface within a few minutes after binding of ligand to the receptor but after 30 minutes had moved to the cytoplasm. Surprisingly, activation of mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) JNK and p38 and of the MAPK kinase MEKK1 was only detected once the complex left the receptor and moved into the cytosol. Degradation of the adaptor protein TRAF3 was required to initiate release of the complex from CD40. Other receptors may also use such a mechanism to specify the time and place at which signaling proteins are activated in response to receptor stimulation. A. Matsuzawa, P.-H. Tseng, S. Vallabhapurapu, J.-L. Luo, W. Zhang, H. Wang, D. A. A. Vignali, E. Gallagher, M. Karin, Essential cytoplasmic translocation of a cytokine receptor–assembled signaling complex. Science 321, 663-668 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text] A. G. Eliopoulos, "Make and brake" in signaling. Science 321, 648-649 (2008). [Summary] [Full Text]


Computational infrastructures for cooperative work should contain embedded agents for handling many routine tasks [3], but as the number of agents increases and the agents become geographically and/or conceptually dispersed, supervision of the agents will become increasingly problematic. We argue that agents should be provided with deep domain knowledge that allows them to make quantitatively justifiable decisions, rather than shallow models of users to mimic. In this paper, we use the application domain of distributed meeting scheduling to investigate how agents embodying deeper domain knowledge can choose among alternative strategies for searching their calendars in order to create flexible schedules within reasonable cost. In particular, we are interested in developing mechanisms by which agents can adapt their strategy choices to suit the demands imposed by a dynamically changing environment. In this paper, we first enumerate various strategies we have investigated to focus distributed negotiation between scheduling agents. Next, we demonstrate the necessity for such a scheduler to be adaptive in its choice of op£ions for the various strategy dimensions, so that it can perform effectively over time. In order to build an adaptive scheduler that can effectively choose from available strategy options, we develop quantitative performance estimates of these options using detailed probabilistic analysis. Results from these analyses are used to provide guidelines to choose the most appropriate strategy combination given current environmental conditions and local problem-solving states.


The most recent dialect dictionary covering all Swedish dialects appeared in 1862–67, published by Johan Ernst Rietz. In those days, dialect dic-tionaries only consisted of words which did not appear in standard Swe-dish. Rietz, though, does include some standard words and in the fore-word to the dictionary he specifies his criteria for entering them. In this article I examine what standard words Rietz has actually included (based on the words beginning with h-) and how well they correspond to his cri-teria.


In the colorful world of pigments and dyes, the chemical reduction of chromophores usually leads to bleaching because of π-conjugation interruption. Yet, the natural phenoxazinone-based ommochrome pigment called xanthommatin displays a bathochromic (i.e. red) shift upon two-electron reduction to its corresponding phenoxazine, whose electronic origins are not completely disclosed. In this study, we investigated, at quantum chemical level, a series of phenoxazinone/phenoxazine pairs that was previously explored by UV-Vis spectroscopy (Schäfer and Geyer, 1972), and which displays different hypsochromic and bathochromic shifts upon reduction. Density Functional Theory (DFT) and Time-Dependent DFT (TDDFT) have been applied to compute their optical properties in order to find a rational explanation of the observed photophysical behavior. Based on our results, we propose that the electro-accepting power of auxochromes and their conjugation facilitate intramolecular charge-transfers across the phenoxazine bridge by lowering unoccupied molecular orbitals via electronic and geometric couplings, leading ultimately to bathochromy. Our findings therefore suggest new potential ways to adjust the color-changing ability of phenoxazinones in technological contexts. Overall, this model extends our mechanistic understanding of the many biological functions of ommochromes in invertebrates, from tunable color changes to antiradical behaviors.


We provide a methodology for accurately predicting elastic backscattering radial distributions from random media with two simple empirical models. We apply these models to predict the backscattering based on two classes of scattering phase functions: the Henyey-Greenstein phase function and a generalized two parameter phase function that is derived from the Whittle-Matérn correlation function. We demonstrate that the model has excellent agreement over all length scales and has less than 1% error for backscattering at subdiffusion length scales for tissue-relevant optical properties. The presented model is the first available approach for accurately predicting backscattering at length scales significantly smaller than the transport mean free path.


Among the most important issues in international security today are the nature and the global implications of China's emergence as a world-class defense technology power. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Chinese defense industry has reinvented itself by emphasizing technological innovation and technology. This reinvention and its potential effects, both positive and negative, are attracting global scrutiny. Drawing insights from a range of disciplines, including history, social science, business, and strategic studies, Tai Ming Cheung and the contributors to Forging China's Military Might develop an analytical framework to evaluate the nature, dimensions, and spectrum of Chinese innovation in the military and broader defense spheres. Forging China's Military Might provides an overview of the current state of the Chinese defense industry and then focuses on subjects critical to understanding short- and long-term developments, including the relationship among defense contractors, regulators, and end-users; civil-military integration; China's defense innovation system; and China's place in the global defense economy. Case studies look in detail at the Chinese space and missile industry.


The increasing abundance of data creates new opportunities for communities of interest and communities of practice. We believe that interactive tabletops will allow users to explore data in familiar places such as living rooms, cafes, and public spaces. We propose informal, mobile possibilities for future generations of flexible and portable tabletops. In this paper, we build upon current advances in sensing and in organic user interfaces to propose how tabletops in the future could encourage collaboration and engage users in socially relevant data-oriented activities. Our work focuses on the socio-technical challenges of future democratic deliberation. As part of our vision, we suggest switching from fixed to mobile tabletops and provide two examples of hypothetical interface types: TableTiles and Moldable Displays. We consider how tabletops could foster future civic communities, expanding modes of participation originating in the Greek Agora and in European notions of cafes as locales of political deliberation.


Recent breakthroughs in creating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) provide alternative means to obtain embryonic stem (ES) cell-like cells without destroying embryos by introducing four reprogramming factors (Oct3/4, Sox2, and Klf4/c-Myc or Nanog/Lin28) into somatic cells. However, the molecular basis of reprogramming is largely unknown. To address this question, we employed microRNAs, small molecules, and conducted genome-wide RNAi screen, to investigate the regulatory mechanisms of reprogramming. First we showed that depleting miR-21 and miR-29a enhances reprogramming in mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs). We also showed that p53 and ERK1/2 pathways are regulated by miR-21 and miR-29a and function in reprogramming. Second, we showed that computational chemical biology combined with genomic analysis can be used to identify small molecules regulating reprogramming. We discovered that the NSAID Nabumetone and the anti-cancer drug OHTM could replace Sox2 during reprogramming. Nabumetone could also replace c-Myc or Sox2 without compromising self-renewal and pluripotency of derived iPS cells. To identify the cell-fate determinants during reprogramming, we integrated a genome-wide RNAi screen with transcriptome analysis to dissect the molecular requirements in reprogramming. We found that extensive interactions of embryonic stem cell core circuitry regulators are established in mature iPS cells, including Utf1, Nr6a1, Tdgf1, Gsc, Fgf10, T, Chrd, Dppa3, Fgf17, Eomes, Foxa2. Remarkably, genes with non-differential change play the most critical roles in the transitions of reprogramming. Functional validation showed that some genes act as essential or barrier roles to reprogramming. We also identified several genes required for maintaining ES cell properties. Altogether, our results demonstrate the significance of miRNA function in regulating multiple signaling networks involved in reprogramming. And our work further advanced the reprogramming field by identifying several new key modulators.


Evidence supporting the idea that serial-order verbal working memory is underpinned by long-term knowledge has accumulated over more than half a century. Recent studies using natural-language statistics, artificial statistical-learning techniques, and the Hebb repetition paradigm have revealed multiple types of long-term knowledge underlying serial-order verbal working memory performance. These include (a) element-to-element association knowledge, which slowly accumulates through extensive exposure to an exemplar; (b) position–element knowledge, which is acquired through several encounters with an exemplar; and (c) whole-sequence knowledge, which is captured by the Hebb repetition paradigm and acquired rapidly with a few repetitions. Arguably, the first two are a basis for fluent and efficient language usage, and the third is a basis for vocabulary learning. Thus, statistical-learning mechanisms (and possibly episodic-learning mechanisms) may form the foundation of language acquisition and language processing, which characterize linguistic long-term knowledge for verbal working memory.


Background and purpose: Diabetes mellitus is a common metabolic disease, currently affecting more than 280 million people worldwide. Centaurea cyanus known as cornflower has antioxidant properties and is used in traditional medicine in lowering blood sugar. This study aimed at determining the biochemical and histopathological changes in serum and the kidneys of diabetic rats treated with hydroalcoholic extract of Centaurea cyanus. Materials and methods: In this study, 60 male Wistar rats were divided into five groups (n= 12 per group). Diabetes was induced by alloxan. The diabetic rats were treated for 8 weeks with hydro alcoholic extract of C. cyanus at two concentrations (400 and 800 mg/kg). Finally, the animals were anesthetized and the serum levels of glucose, creatinine and urea and kidney tissue catalase level were measured. The kidney tissue slides were histopathologically examined. Results: Histopathological examination showed that similar to the control group, there were no significant changes in histolological features of the group receiving 800 mg/kg extract of the C. cyanus. In the group treated with 400 mg/kg of the extract there were mild tubular changes. Biochemical examination showed higher levels of creatinine in the group receiving the extract at 800 mg/kg. The level of urea in the group receiving the extract at 400 mg/kg, was significantly higher compared to that of the control group. (P<0.05). Conclusion: Consumption of Centaurea cyanus extract at 800 mg/kg could prevent kidney tissue injuries in diabetic rats, but further investigations are required before its use in treatment of patients with diabetes.


Andreas Schiffler (2011), 'New Game Physics: Added Value for Transdisciplinary Teams', Ph.D. University of Plymouth, UK. This study focused on game physics, an area of computer game design where physics is applied in interactive computer software. The purpose of the research was a fresh analysis of game physics in order to prove that its current usage is limited and requires advancement. The investigations presented in this dissertation establish constructive principles to advance game physics design. The main premise was that transdisciplinary approaches provide significant value. The resulting designs reflected combined goals of game developers, artists and physicists and provide novel ways to incorporate physics into games. The applicability and user impact of such new game physics across several target audiences was thoroughly examined. In order to explore the transdisciplinary nature of the premise, valid evidence was gathered using a broad range of theoretical and practical methodologies. The research established a clear definition of game physics within the context of historical, technological, practical, scientific, and artistic considerations. Game analysis, literature reviews and seminal surveys of game players, game developers and scientists were conducted. A heuristic categorization of game types was defined to create an extensive database of computer games and carry out a statistical analysis of game physics usage. Results were then combined to define core principles for the design of unconventional new game physics elements. Software implementations of several elements were developed to examine the practical feasibility of the proposed principles. This research prototype was exposed to practitioners (artists, game developers and scientists) in field studies, documented on video and subsequently analyzed to evaluate the effectiveness of the elements on the audiences. The findings from this research demonstrated that standard game physics is a common but limited design element in computer games. It was discovered that the entertainment driven design goals of game developers interfere with the needs of educators and scientists. Game reviews exemplified the exaggerated and incorrect physics present in many commercial computer games. This "pseudo physics" was shown to have potentially undesired effects on game players. Art reviews also indicated that game physics technology remains largely inaccessible to artists. The principal conclusion drawn from this study was that the proposed new game physics advances game design and creates value by expanding the choices available to game developers and designers, enabling artists to create more scientifically robust artworks, and encouraging scientists to consider games as a viable tool for education and research. The practical portion generated tangible evidence that the isolated "silos" of engineering, art and science can be bridged when game physics is designed in a transdisciplinary way. This dissertation recommends that scientific and artistic perspectives should always be considered when game physics is used in computer-based media, because significant value for a broad range of practitioners in succinctly different fields can be achieved. The study has thereby established a state of the art research into game physics, which not only offers other researchers constructive principles for future investigations, but also provides much-needed new material to address the observed discrepancies in game theory and digital media design.


This paper anatomises a pioneering international research project on the global relocation of telemediated employment. It outlines the intellectual origins of the project in the literature on globalisation, the knowledge society, teleworking and other related bodies of work and discusses the limits of the empirical information available up to 2000, when the project was launched. It then summarises the conceptual and methodological framework developed for the project, before discussing some of its limitations, drawing lessons for future international collaborative research on the changing international division of labour.


Cross-Sector humanitarian–business partnerships in managing humanitarian logistics comprise a key discussion topic in literature, yet empirical validations of these partnerships are lacking to date. This paper aims to develop a typological framework for humanitarian–business partnerships in managing humanitarian logistics and to empirically verify this typology with a data-set using content analysis. The results show that the amounts of partnerships developed between the business sector and the humanitarian sector in managing humanitarian logistics is still limited and these partnerships are not widely publicised. The research furthermore shows that financial contributions comprise the most common type of resource delivered by the business sector when it comes to partnerships with the humanitarian sector focused on managing humanitarian logistics. It is also interesting to note that the majority of partnerships in our sample are dyadic in nature, managed by a single humanitarian organisation and a single business corporation. Furthermore, we find that most of the partnerships target support for natural disaster emergency relief operations and mainly focus on disaster response.


Dysfunctional voiding is a functional voiding disorder characterized by an intermittent uroflow rate due to involuntary intermittent contractions of the striated muscle of the external urethral sphincter or pelvic floor muscles (PFMs) during voiding in neurologically normal children. Symptoms include voiding difficulties as well as urgency, voiding frequency and, in some instances, urinary incontinence and/or nocturnal enuresis. Recurrent urinary tract infections, chronic constipation and/or fecal incontinence and vesicoureteral reflux (VUR) contribute to this condition. Urotherapy is the mainstay of the treatment. It starts with education and demystification and simple behavioral modifications. Specific measures include PFM exercises with various forms of biofeedback concentrating at the recognition of PFM function and their relaxation. However, the PFMs are part of the abdominal capsule and they act in coordination with lower abdominal muscles. These muscles need to be relaxed during voiding. Diaphragmatic breathing exercises were introduced to teach children abdominal muscle relaxation. Easy to learn exercises do not require any specific equipment and can be performed at all health care levels. Children from five years of age could benefit from these exercises. In children resistant to standard treatment, botulinum toxin type A application, intermittent catheterization and surgery in children with VUR are recommended.


It is increasingly recognized in the management literature that the initial public off ering
(IPO) is an important stage in the life cycle of privately held and entrepreneurial fi rms.
At this critical juncture, a fi rm has overcome the fi rst challenges of its entrepreneurial
phase and entered a growth stage. As Fama and French ( 2004 : 229) emphasize, an IPO
"is the point of entry that gives fi rms expanded access to equity capital, allowing them to
emerge and grow." An IPO can provide an entrepreneurial fi rm with critical resources
for its future expansion. It can also provide the entrepreneur with the fi rst substantive
access to cash from their investment of time and resources in the entrepreneurial eff ort.
Despite the growing awareness of the importance of IPOs among both academics and
the investor community, the process by which a privately held fi rm transforms itself into
a publicly traded company is still not well understood. While numerous studies have
investigated the determinants of the going public decision (e.g. Booth and Smith, 1986 ;
Jain and Kini, 1999 ) and post-issue performance (e.g. Beatty and Ritter, 1986 ; Brav,
Geczy, and Gompers, 2000 ; Espenlaub and Tonks, 1998 ; Michaely and Shaw, 1994 ), there
is relatively little research on the related but equally important issue of what factors
infl uence the corporate governance mechanism of a fi rm at IPO stage, and how the specifi
c characteristics of this mechanism such as board composition, executive incentives,
and ownership interests of private equity investors may aff ect the IPO's performance.


This chapter provides an overview of available noble gas data for solar system bodies apart from the Earth, Mars, and asteroids. Besides the Sun, the Moon, and the giant planets, we will also discuss data for the tenuous atmospheres of Mercury and the Moon, comets, interplanetary dust particles and elementary particles in the interplanetary medium and beyond. In addition, we summarize the scarce data base for the Venusian atmosphere. The extensive meteorite data from Mars and asteroidal sources are discussed in chapters in this volume by Ott (2002), Swindle (2002a,b) and Wieler (2002). Data from the Venusian and Martian atmospheres are discussed in more detail in chapters by Pepin and Porcelli (2002) and Swindle (2002b). Where appropriate, we will also present some data for other highly volatile elements such as H or N.

The solar system formed from a molecular cloud fragment—traditionally called the solar nebula—that was rather well mixed. Therefore, isotopic abundances in almost all available solar system materials are very similar to each other, and elemental abundances in primitive meteorites are also similar to the values in the Sun. The major exceptions to this rule are the noble gases. Because they are chemically inert and volatile, they are very strongly depleted in solid matter. As a consequence, numerous noble gas "components" can be recognized throughout the solar system which are not necessarily related to the composition of the bulk nebula. Still, one major question in cosmochemistry is to what extent planetary bodies contain reservoirs that reflect the noble gas composition in the nebula or the presolar cloud.

To discuss this, we first need a proxy for the nebula composition. The obvious choice is the bulk Sun, except for He, which has been produced in the Sun throughout its history. We will discuss the …


In recent years, political discussion and social life are increasingly concentrating in face-to-face and online echo chambers composed of individuals with similar world views. This segmentation of civil society has stymied in-depth and respectful communication across ideological difference and in the process contributed to the divisiveness that characterizes political discourse across the globe. In this article, I examine how anthropological learning and teaching can help open up these echo chambers and promote cultural empathy and cross-ideological communication. My discussion focuses on three methodologies I use in my undergraduate-level Culture, Health and Healing course – weekly critical analyses on contemporary health issues, an in-class illness narrative exercise, and a term-long public service announcement project. For each, I describe the pedagogy, present examples of how the assignment or activity plays out in the classroom, and consider how these pedagogies work toward increasing cross-cultural/ideological understanding and communication. I argue that through unsettling students' default frameworks for thinking, reflexive and emotionally engaged anthropological teaching and learning can play important roles in laying the epistemological, affective, and ethical foundations for future professionals and engaged community members in today's contentious times.


One aspect of sustainability that often baffles design students is the need to balance concepts such as the triple bottom line (environment, economy and social issue) with the product's life cycle in their design process. In some cases, this is a result of a lack of understanding of interactions between these aspects since the theoretical part of them is often removed from the student's daily life experience. One proposal to solve this barrier and allow for a better understanding and integration is the use of board games. Board games have shown to be a useful tool to teach conflict resolution, strategy development, forward and lateral thinking, either through cooperation or competition. Therefore they can be used to teach basic sustainability concepts (i.e. the tragedy of the commons, population bomb) and their participation in the triple bottom line. Games such as Settlers of Catan, Civilization, Carcassonne and CO2 (an example of a board game with environmental aspect as the core concept), are games where winning conditions can be achieved through balancing several aspects. Therefore this can be extrapolated into the development of educative board games that can be used as a tool to explain design students the need for balance the triple bottom line and other sustainability concepts and allow for a better understanding. The aim of this paper is to reflect upon the initial findings of a research project whose objective is to develop board games for use as learning tool in sustainable design courses at undergrad level.


Peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming has generated a significant amount of interest in both the research community and the industry, which find it a cost-effective solution to the user scalability problem. However, despite the success of Internet-based applications, the adoption has been limited for commercial services, such as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). With the advent of the next-generation-networks (NGN) based on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), advocating for an open and inter-operable architecture, P2P emerges as a possible alternative in situations where the traditional mechanisms are not possible or economically feasible. This work proposes a P2P IPTV architecture for an IMS-based NGN, called P2PTV, which allows one or more service providers to use a common P2P infrastructure for streaming the TV channels to their subscribers. Instead of using servers, we rely on the uploading capabilities of the user equipments, like set-top boxes, located at the customers' premise. We comply with the existing IMS and IPTV standards from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the Telecommunications and Internet converged Services and Protocols for Advanced Networking (TISPAN) bodies, where a centralized P2PTV application server (AS) manages the customer access to the service and the peer participation. Because watching TV is a complex and demanding user activity, we face two significant challenges. The first is to accommodate the mandatory IMS signaling, which reserves in the network the necessary QoS resources during every channel change, establishing a multimedia session between communicating peers. The second is represented by the streaming interruptions, or churn, when the uploading peer turns off or changes its current TV channel. To tackle these problems, we propose two enhancements. A fast signaling method, which uses inactive uploading sessions with reserved but unused QoS, to improve the tuning delay for new channel users. At every moment, the AS uses a feedback based algorithm to compute the number of necessary sessions that accommodates well the demand, while preventing the over-reservation of resources. We approach with special care mobility situations, where a proactive transfer of the multimedia session context using the IEEE 802.21 standard offers the best alternative to current methods. The second enhancement addresses the peer churn during channel changes. With every TV channel divided into a number of streams, we enable peers to download and upload streams different from their current channel, increasing the stability of their participation. Unlike similar work, we benefit from our estimation of the user demand and propose a decentralized method for a balanced assignment of peer bandwidth. We evaluate the performance of the P2PTV through modeling and large-scale computer simulations. A simpler experimental setting, with pure P2P streaming, indicates the improvements over the delay and peer churn. In more complex scenarios, especially with resource-poor peers having a limited upload capacity, we envision P2P as a complementary solution to traditional approaches like IP multicast. Reserving P2P for unpopular TV channels exploits the peer capacity and prevents the necessity of a large number of sparsely used multicast trees. Future work may refine the AS algorithms, address different experimental scenarios, and extend the lessons learned to non-IMS networks. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Retinal imaging provides an opportunity to detect pathological and natural age-related
physiological changes in the interior of the eye. Diagnosis of retinal abnormality requires an image that is sharp, clear and free of noise and artifacts. However, to prevent tissue damage, retinal imaging instruments use low illumination radiation, hence, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is reduced which means the total noise power is increased. Furthermore, noise is inherent in some imaging techniques. For example, in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) speckle noise is produced due to the coherence between the unwanted backscattered light. Improving OCT image quality by reducing speckle noise increases the accuracy of analyses and hence the diagnostic sensitivity. However, the challenge is to preserve image features while reducing speckle noise. There is a clear trade-off between image feature preservation and speckle noise reduction in OCT.

Averaging multiple OCT images taken from a unique position provides a high SNR
image, but it drastically increases the scanning time. In this thesis, we develop a multi-frame image denoising method for Spectral Domain OCT (SD-OCT) images extracted from a very close locations of a SD-OCT volume. The proposed denoising method was tested using two dictionaries: nonlinear (NL) and KSVD-based adaptive dictionary. The NL dictionary was constructed by adding phases, polynomial, exponential and boxcar functions to the conventional Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) dictionary. The proposed denoising method denoises nearby frames of SD-OCT volume using a sparse representation method and combines them by selecting median intensity pixels from the denoised nearby frames. The result showed that both dictionaries reduced the speckle noise from the OCT images; however, the adaptive dictionary showed slightly better results at the cost of a higher computational complexity. The NL dictionary was also used for fundus and OCT image reconstruction. The performance of the NL dictionary was always better than that of other analytical-based dictionaries, such as DCT and Haar.

The adaptive dictionary involves a lengthy dictionary learning process, and therefore
cannot be used in real situations. We dealt this problem by utilizing a low-rank approximation. In this approach SD-OCT frames were divided into a group of noisy matrices that consist of non-local similar patches. A noise-free patch matrix was obtained from a noisy patch matrix utilizing a low-rank approximation. The noise-free patches from nearby frames were averaged to enhance the denoising. The denoised image obtained from the proposed approach was better than those obtained by several state-of-the-art methods. The proposed approach was extended to jointly denoise and interpolate SD-OCT image. The results show that joint denoising and interpolation method outperforms several existing state-of-the-art denoising methods plus bicubic interpolation.


Liverpool's designation as European Capital of Culture for 2008, together with the 800th anniversary of the founding of the borough in 2007, has (unsurprisingly) generated a number of books dealing with different aspects of the city's history. The five volumes reviewed here represent just a small selection of those available, ranging from the deliberately academic to much more popular publications. Together they provide much of interest for urban historians. If these books have a common theme it is the argument (or assumption) that for much of its history, and in many different respects, Liverpool was (and remains) in various ways different from other British cities. The celebration of difference lies very much at the heart of Liverpool's Capital of Culture activities, and these books provide additional perspectives on Liverpool's demographic, social, cultural, sporting and architectural distinctiveness.


fast food or full-service restaurant? Recent survey results show that consumers with less diet and health knowledge tend to choose a full-service restaurant, while those with more knowledge are just as likely to choose a fast food restaurant. When making choices about where and how often to eat out, U.S. consumers balance a number of sometimes competing desires. Consumers search not only for low prices, but also for taste, convenience, entertainment, and nutrition when deciding where to eat. An ERS analysis of a 2002 consumer survey conducted by Rutgers University finds that respondents who were more willing to forgo other food attributes for convenience were about 8 percent more likely to dine out at least every few days. Respondents citing convenience as the main factor influencing their away-from-home food choices were 17 percent more likely to purchase fast food than were respondents who did not place a premium on convenience. Survey respondents looking for healthful foods were 19 percent more likely to patronize full-service restaurants (eating places with wait staff) than fast food outlets. This type of rule-of-thumb decisionmaking—in this case, methodical avoidance of fast food— can be a result of limited information. Market research shows that consumers often develop decision rules to compensate for an inability to gather or understand more nuanced information. In fact, meals and snacks consumed at full-service restaurants are not necessarily nutritionally superior to meals purchased at fast food restaurants. Compared with fast food meals, full-service meals tend to be higher in fat, cholesterol, and sodium, though lower in saturated fats. Both types of eating places offer healthful food choices. Survey analysis suggests that respondents with better diet-health knowledge recognize this. When looking for healthful food, they are equally likely to eat at fast food or full-service restaurants. This suggests that informed consumers are better able to navigate the awayfrom-home market, while less knowledgeable ones live by rules of thumb that can be inaccurate.


BrrF is a Fur-regulated small RNA highly upregulated in Burkholderia cenocepacia under conditions of iron depletion. Its computationally predicted targets include iron-containing enzymes of the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle such as aconitase and succinate dehydrogenase, as well as iron-containing enzymes responsible for the oxidative stress response, such as superoxide dismutase and catalase. Phenotypic and gene expression analysis of BrrF deletion and overexpression mutants show that the regulation of these genes is BrrF-dependent. Expression of acnA, fumA, sdhA and sdhC was downregulated during iron depletion in the wild type strain, but not in a BrrF deletion mutant. TCA cycle genes not predicted as target for BrrF were not affected in the same manner by iron depletion. Likewise, expression of sodB and katB was dowregulated during iron depletion in the wild type strain, but not in a BrrF deletion mutant. BrrF overexpression reduced aconitase and superoxide dismutase activities and increased sensitivity to hydrogen peroxide. All phenotypes and gene expression changes of the BrrF deletion mutant could be complemented by overexpressing BrrF in trans. Overall, BrrF acts as a regulator of central metabolism and oxidative stress response, possibly as an iron-sparing measure to maintain iron homeostasis under conditions of iron starvation. Importance Regulatory small RNAs play an essential role in maintaining cell homeostasis in bacteria in response to environmental stresses such as iron starvation. Prokaryotes generally encode a large number of RNA regulators, yet their identification and characterisation is still in its infancy for most bacterial species. Burkholderia cenocepacia is an opportunistic pathogen with high innate antimicrobial resistance, which can cause the often fatal cepacia syndrome in individuals with cystic fibrosis. In this study we characterise a small RNA which is involved in the response to iron starvation, a condition that pathogenic bacteria are likely to encounter in the host.


Background and Hypothesis: In the US alone, more than 160,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year. Prostate cancer grows slowly in many patients such that most die due to unrelated causes, yet 29,000 prostate cancer-related deaths occur annually in the US. The gravity of this mortality rate promotes over-treatment of low- and intermediate-risk cancer patients as well as monitoring of cancer via invasive biopsies to determine cancer grade. We hypothesize that molecular imaging methods can differentiate low- and intermediate- risk prostate cancer, guide optimal treatment, and eliminate morbidity associated with biopsy procedures.
Experimental Design or Project Methods: In this work, we used PET [68Ga] Ga-PSMA-11 imaging to estimate cancer grade through direct comparison with whole mount pathology, which is the gold standard for cancer grading. A tool was developed using Interactive Data Language (IDL) to automate 3D spatial registration of whole mount pathology slices with [68Ga] Ga-PSMA-11 PET images. Upon accurate spatial registration, quantitative analysis was performed to establish the relationship between regional [68Ga] Ga-PSMA-11 uptake and prostate cancer grade.
Results: Thus far, we have shown qualitatively that the whole mount pathology accurately maps to the correct 3D spatial location on the PET images. Upon spatial registration, using a ROC curve, we have found that [68Ga] Ga-PSMA-11 uptake could be used to detect both low- and high- risk tumor location (AUC = 0.82 and 0.84 respectively). Further, we demonstrated increasing uptake with greater risk.
Conclusion and Potential Impact: This study begins to establish the feasibility of noninvasive, imaging-based monitoring alternatives which can mitigate the need for invasive biopsies for prostate cancer. Ultimately, improved imaging methods have the potential for not only bettering prostate cancer monitoring but also for improving cancer outcomes and quality of life for prostate cancer patients.


The dentate gyrus of the hippocampus contains neural progenitor cells (NPCs) that generate neurons throughout life. Developing neurons of the adult hippocampus have been described in depth. However, little is known about their functional properties as they become fully mature dentate granule cells (DGCs). To compare mature DGCs generated during development and adulthood, NPCs were labeled at both time points using retroviruses expressing different fluorescent proteins. Sequential electrophysiological recordings from neighboring neurons of different ages were carried out to quantitatively study their major synaptic inputs: excitatory projections from the entorhinal cortex and inhibitory afferents from local interneurons. Our results show that DGCs generated in the developing and adult hippocampus display a remarkably similar afferent connectivity with regard to both glutamate and GABA, the major neurotransmitters. We also demonstrate that adult-born neurons can fire action potentials in response to an excitatory drive, exhibiting a firing behavior comparable to that of neurons generated during development. We propose that neurons born in the developing and adult hippocampus constitute a functionally homogeneous neuronal population. These observations are critical to understanding the role of adult neurogenesis in hippocampal function.


Objective To investigate the role of radiotherapy (RT) in patients who underwent hysterectomy for uterine carcinosarcoma (UCS). Methods Patients with the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics stage I–IVa UCS who were treated between 1990 and 2012 were identified retrospectively in a multi-institutional database. Of 235 identified patients, 97 (41.3%) received adjuvant RT. Twenty-two patients with a history of previous pelvic RT were analyzed separately. Survival outcomes were assessed using the Kaplan-Meier method and Cox proportional hazards model. Results Patients with a previous history of pelvic RT had poor survival outcomes, and 72.6% of these patients experienced locoregional recurrence; however, none received RT after a diagnosis of UCS. Univariate analyses revealed that pelvic lymphadenectomy (PLND) and para-aortic lymph node sampling were significant factors for locoregional recurrence-free survival (LRRFS) and disease-free survival (DFS). Among patients without previous pelvic RT, the percentage of locoregional failure was lower for those who received adjuvant RT than for those who did not (28.5% vs. 17.5%, p=0.107). Multivariate analysis revealed significant correlations between PLND and LRRFS, distant metastasis-free survival, and DFS. In subgroup analyses, RT significantly improved the 5-year LRRFS rate of patients who did not undergo PLND (52.7% vs. 18.7% for non-RT, p<0.001). Conclusion Adjuvant RT decreased the risk of locoregional recurrence after hysterectomy for UCS, particularly in patients without surgical nodal staging. Given the poorer locoregional outcomes of patients previously subjected to pelvic RT, meticulous re-administration of RT might improve locoregional control while leading to less toxicity in these patients.


Background and purpose — Previously, implant survival of total shoulder prostheses was reported to be inferior to that of hemiprostheses. However, the use of total prostheses has increased in Norway due to reported good functional results. On this background, we wanted to study implant survival of 4 major shoulder prosthesis types in Norway between 1994 and 2012. Patients and methods — The study population comprised 4,173 patients with shoulder replacements reported to the Norwegian Arthroplasty Register, including 2,447 hemiprostheses (HPs), 444 anatomic total prostheses (ATPs), 454 resurfacing prostheses (RPs), and 828 reversed total prostheses (RTPs). Three time periods were compared: 1994–1999, 2000–2005, and 2006–2012. Kaplan-Meier failure curves were used to compare implant failure rates for subgroups of patients, and adjusted risks of revision were calculated using Cox regression analysis. Results — For prostheses inserted from 2006 through 2012, the 5-year survival rates were 95% for HPs (as opposed to 94% in 1994–1999), 95% for ATPs (75% in 1994–1999), 87% for RPs (96% in 1994–1999), and 93% for RTPs (91% in 1994–1999). During the study period, the implant survival improved significantly for ATPs (p < 0.001). A tendency of better results with acute fracture and worse results in sequelae after previous fractures was seen in all time periods. Interpretation — The 5-year implant survival rates were good with all prosthesis types, and markedly improved for anatomic total prostheses in the last 2 study periods. The better functional results with total shoulder prostheses than with hemiprostheses support the trend towards increased use of total shoulder prostheses.


In order to facilitate the conservation of biological diversity, a comprehensive knowledge of the microbial ecology of an ecosystem is required. As the vast majority of microbes are not readily culturable, it is necessary to use molecular tools to investigate their diversity and function in the marine ecosystem. Although it provides a vast quantity of data, the information obtained by molecular tools alone is not sufficient to understand the drivers behind the changes in bacterial communities.
This study aims to characterize changes in the diversity and activity of the heterotrophic bacterial community in relation to a changing environment, in time and space. Two different sampling strategies were used in order to achieve this goal; an annual time series study at a coastal station (station L4, Western English Channel Observatory (WECO)) and a Lagrangian study following an upwelling plume on its track to off shore (2nd filament, Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS) - Impact of coastal upwelling on the air-sea exchange of climatically important gases (ICON) cruise).
Surface water samples were collected from the time series station L4 of the Western Channel Observatory (50o15'N, 04o13'W; www.westernchannelobservatory.org) every week between 6th April 2009 and 26th April 2010. The respiration rate of the heterotrophic community was determined using Winkler titration to measure the dissolved oxygen content of the < 0.8 μm size-fraction of the seawater. This dataset sits within the larger framework of the Western English Channel bacterial diversity
ABSTRACT
2
time series (2003-2009) and the seasonal metagenomic and metatranscriptomic studies associated with this site.
The second approach was to investigate the bacterial diversity and activity in a dynamic environment, such as an upwelling region. The upwelling region off the coast of Mauritania is one of the most productive areas of the world ocean, yet little is known of the temporal and spatial variability in prokaryotic community structure and metabolic activity there, and crucially how this contributes to global elemental cycles.
During a Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) SOLAS-funded Lagrangian study, we determined bacterial community structure and production together with total community respiration and production. This part of the study describes the temporal changes in bacterial community structure and its activity, in relation to the complex upwelling environmental conditions (mixing, chlorophyll, dissolved organic and inorganic nutrients). Turbulence and dissolved organic carbon appear to play an important role.


OBJECTIVE
The 2-ethoxycarbonyl-8-methoxy-2,3,4,4a,5,9b-hexahydro-1H-pyrido-[4,3b] indolinium chloride (SMe1EC2) is a prospective antioxidant and neuroprotectant drug. The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of SMe1EC2 on embryofetal development of rats.

METHODS
The substance tested was administered orally to Wistar/DV rats from day 6 to day 15 of gestation at the doses 5, 50 and 250 mg/kg/day. The animals were killed on day 20 of gestation and uterine content was inspected. Live fetuses were examined for gross, skeletal and visceral anomalies.

RESULTS
Administration of SMe1EC2 did not induce any signs of maternal toxicity. No adverse effect of the substance tested was found on reproductive variables. Morphological examination of fetuses revealed no evidence of teratogenesis.

CONCLUSION
The prenatal toxicity study showed that the substance SMe1EC2 tested did not have embryotoxic and teratogenic effects on developing rats. Neither were any signs of maternal toxicity found.


This research motivated by the problems faced by teachers of art and culture subjects of Senior High School in the Province of West Sumatra namely the low results of Teacher Competency Test with an average score of 60 in particular the field art of music. The purpose of this model design is to develop a model of music art training that is valid, practical, and effective. Research method used is Research and Development with ADDIE procedures. The sample is determined by area probability sampling technique with the number of respondents 34 teachers of arts and culture subjects. The results concluded that the average of the ability of teachers 58.75. The developed model design consists of: (1) preparation stage (training contract, ability analysis, and group division); (2) learning stages (finding concepts/theories, discussions, group demonstrations, peer feedback, training with instructor's guidance, joint demonstrations); (3) evaluation stage through observation test.


The neurotransmitter GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid) generally exerts inhibitory effects on neuronal activity during adulthood, but during early development when circuits are being built, GABA has excitatory effects. Studying chick neurons, Liu et al. show that the change involves a switch in the direction of the chloride gradient across the cell membrane, which is in turn triggered by changes in nicotinic signaling activity. The change in signaling modality may reflect how neuronal activity and cellular development interact to fine-tune the structure of the brain. Z. Liu, R. A. Neff, D. K. Berg, Sequential interplay of nicotinic and GABAergic signaling guides neuronal development. Science 314, 1610-1613 (2006). [Abstract] [Full Text]


We investigate the timing, magnitude, and direction of the relation between changes in product market competition across vertically related industries over the period 1978-2008. We document that changes in customer industry concentration are positively related to subsequent changes in supplier industry concentration consistent with changes in customer industry concentration prompting changes in supplier industry concentration. We find evidence that increased concentration in customer and supplier industries, perhaps reflecting countervailing power motives for horizontal mergers and acquisitions, explain in part the observed positive relation; however, we also find robust evidence that decreases in concentration perhaps reflecting entry waves in vertically related industries are also important determinants of the observed relation. Our results have implications for those papers that examine the association between the level of product market competition and important corporate finance policy choices and asset pricing.


This short piece analyzes the background and content of the Copenhagen Accord on climate change, which was agreed to last December by leaders of roughly 25 countries, including all of the world's major economies. Although the Copenhagen Accord is a political rather than a legal instrument and has been criticized by some as inadequate or worse, it represents a potentially significant breakthrough. On one side, developed countries agreed to put significant new funds on the table for climate change mitigation and adaptation, both for the short and medium terms, and committed to implement national economy-wide emissions targets for the post -2012 period, which will be internationally listed. On the other side, developing countries agreed for the first time to reflect their national mitigation actions in an international instrument and to subject their actions to some form of international review. The failure of the conference as a whole to adopt the Accord leaves its future uncertain. But if the participating states actually carry through on what they negotiated in Copenhagen, the "bottom up" architecture of the Accord could help encourage and reinforce national actions. In any event, as the most that world leaders could accept through direct negotiations under an intense international spotlight, the Copenhagen Accord may well represent the high-water mark of the climate change regime for some time to come.


People desire to be happy but do not always know how to do so. As a relatively new field of psychology, positive psychology offers a host of research and positive interventions aimed at increasing positive emotions to improve well-being. But these interventions must be applied with care. Valuing, pursuing, and expressing happiness have each been associated with negative outcomes, creating the need for a greater understanding of how to optimize positive interventions. This paper assists in this goal by characterizing positive interventions as a form of emotion regulation that actively seeks to upregulate positive emotions. Upon reviewing research on effective emotion regulation, this paper offers four considerations for optimizing positive interventions: authenticity, autonomy, dialectics, and context. Positive interventions should allow for authentic emotional expression. They should support the autonomy to select and modify interventions. The dialectics of well-being illustrate the need to mitigate positive emotions and include negative emotions in positive interventions. Finally, examining personal and cultural context highlights the need for context-sensitive interventions. Considering each of these aspects while implementing positive psychology will help the field further its mission of enabling others to flourish. GENUINE, INDEPENDENT, HOLISTIC, AND APPROPRIATE 3


Purpose of review There is currently limited ability to identify which infants and young children with recurrent wheezing will ultimately develop persistent asthma. In addition, it is not clear how risk factors influence the development of asthma in later childhood and adulthood. This review will discuss efforts to categorize these children with recurrent wheezing and develop asthma-predictive tools. Recent findings Transient and persistent wheezing phenotypes have been identified with atopy, reduced lung function, and viral and bacterial respiratory infection as major risk factors for persistence of asthma. Children with severe asthma tend to have greater magnitude of atopy and lower lung function than those with mild–moderate asthma. These phenotypes and risk factors have been described in previous studies and are supported by the recent literature. Summary Heterogeneity of wheezing phenotypes may account for different responses to treatment and varied outcomes. Overlap in phenotypes and instability over time also add additional challenges to defining discrete groups of children with specific outcomes. Further studies are needed to determine combinations of variables that may improve phenotype designation with the goal of improving asthma prevention and treatment as well as predicting outcomes and understanding the pathogenesis of asthma.


Multicomputers built around a general network are an attractive architecture for a wide class of applications. The architecture provides many benefits compared with special-purpose approaches, including heterogeneity, reuse of application and system code, and sharing of resources. The architecture also poses new challenges to both computer system implementers and users. First, traditional local-area networks do not have enough bandwidth and create a communication bottleneck, thus seriously limiting the set of applications that can be run effectively. Second, programmers have to deal with large bodies of code distributed over a variety of architectures, and work in an environment where both the network and nodes are shared with other users. Our experience in the Nectar project shows that it is possible to overcome these problems. We show how networks based on high-speed crossbar switches and efficient protocol implementations can support high bandwidth and low latency communication while still enjoying the flexibility of general networks, and we use three applications to demonstrate that network-based multicomputers are a practical architecture. We also show how the network traffic generated by this new class of applications poses severe requirements for networks.


The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consideration. First, it should embrace an integrated social-ecological system perspective and acknowledge the key dynamics that such systems entail, including the role of ecosystems in sustaining human wellbeing, multiple cross-scale interactions, and uncertain thresholds. Second, the process needs to address trade-offs between the ambition of goals and the feasibility in reaching them, recognizing biophysical, social, and political constraints. Third, the goal-setting exercise and the management of goal implementation need to be guided by existing knowledge about the principles, dynamics, and constraints of social change processes at all scales, from the individual to the global. Combining these three aspects will increase the chances of establishing and achieving effective Sustainable Development Goals.


The study aims to determine the radioactivity levels of thermal waters which have been used seasonally or permanently in spas for therapeutic intentions. Samples were collected from spas in different regions of Turkey. Some radionuclides (40K, 232Th, 226Ra, 137Cs), gross alpha (GA) and gross beta (GB) activities, and physical and some chemical parameters were measured. Gamma radiation measurements for 226Ra, 232Th and 40K radionuclides were performed by using a high purity germanium (HPGe) detector. The results of the gamma spectrometry ranged from 1.385 to 11.025 Bql-1 for 226Ra, <minimum detectable activity to 3.477 Bql-1 for 232Th and 9.679 to 36.989 Bql-1 for 40K. GA and GB activity concentrations were detected by using ultra-low level α/β counter. The GA and GB activity ranged from 43 to 3,182 mBql-1 and 54 to 1,950 mBql-1, respectively. Based on calculated annual effective dose equivalent, the total dose originated mostly from 226Ra and slightly from 40K. Furthermore, waters with high Cl content were enriched with 40K, 226Ra isotopes, and the source of GA and GB activity in these waters was mostly 226Ra. Strong high positive correlation between Cl, 226Ra and total dissolved solids in Cl-enriched samples indicated that the nuclides formed from dissolved minerals in these waters.


In this study, SEBS (styrene-b-ethylene-b-butylene-styrene) clay nanocomposites were synthesized with easy-to-find, cheap ingredients and using convenient, efficient and commercially viable methods. In particular, a combined melt intercalation method and insitu intercalative polymerization method was implemented to produce nanocomposites. The underlying strategy of this approach was to treat clays with appropriately chosen surfactants, namely, those that posessed the ability to intercaltate the basal spacings of the clay. An added subtlety of this study was the incorporation of an engineered polymerization initiator in the nanocomposite preparation, which behaved as an effective surfactant and permitted the uniform initiation of polymerization from even within basal spacings as opposed to being restricted to the clay surface. In the first part of this study, the optimum surfactant for a given reaction condition was determined to be Tequart DSM (N-N dialkyl dimethyl ammonium chloride). Basal spacings noted via WAXD analysis showed that Na-MMT treated with Tequart DSM had reached values of up to 1.9 nm, which exceeded the value of 1.2 nm that is typical of pristine clay. Notably, Tequart DSM delaminated more effectively than Cloisite 15 A, a commercial organoclay (1.38 nm). BTC 1218-50 (Alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride ) was also succesful in view that the value noted was about 1.4 nm. Subsequently, an appropriate surfactant-initiator was envisaged and afforded by methylating the watersoluble radical initiator, V-50 (2,2-Azobis-2-methyl propionamide). Methylation was confirmed by the appearance of additional resonances on the 1H-NMR spectrum and by the shift of the melting curve from 173.9 oC to 119.5 oC on the DSC thermogram. While NMR analysis indicated that an average of four methyl groups had been attached to the native structure, DSC thermograms implied high product purity in view that the new melting endotherm was sharp. By applying this in-situ intercalative polymerization strategy to the best surfactant and initiator pair, a Styrene-clay nanocomposite masterbatch was realized. Clay, modified using an equimolar ratio of Tequart DSM and methylated V-50, displayed the greatest interlayer distance of 2.35 nm when characterized using WAXD. While this sample (MC1) gave the best results, the interlayer spacings of other preparations were also notable: Tequart DSM-native V-50 (MC6) gave 2.02 nm, BTC 1218-50-treated V-50 (MC4) gave 1.07 nm, and BTC 1218-50-untreated V-50 (MC2) gave 1.07 nm. In the final part of the thesis, several approaches for the preparation of nanocomposites were tested on a standard unfilled SEBS grade material. Each attempt was melt- mixed with SEBS and compression molded plaques were tested. Thermogravimetric analyses were carried out primarily to verify the anticipated clay content in each of the blends. SEM images in agreement with WAXD data proved that the nanocomposite produced was in fact intercalative. Tensile testing of polymer blends containing 5wt% intercalated clays displayed greater elongation values in all of the nanocomposites when compared with unfilled SEBS. For example, the maleic anhydride grafted SEBS (SEBSMA) sample had the highest elongation value (642,87%). The sample representing our strategy, namely, a MC1 masterbatch (MC1-MB) containing nanocomposite, was more easily elongated than MC1 5% clay sa mples, even though it contained more styrene. Another interesting finding was the decreased tensile strength of the nanocomposities when compared to unfilled SEBS. Lastly, as the clay content was increased, the maximum elongation values were found to decrease. To summarize, the combined melt intercalation method and in-situ intercalative polymerization method did indeed afford nanocomposites with altered properties. Compatibilization through masterbatch preparation or SEBS-MA incorporation consistently improved maximum elongation values. The masterbatch technique also improved the tensile strength of nanocomposites, the reason being apparently related to the extra styrene content in matrix. It follows to reason that the continued development of such an intercalative strategy can greatly improve the compatibility and properties of a wide range of composite materials.


The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed a human well-being index (HWBI) that assesses the over-all well-being of its population at the county level. The HWBI contains eight domains representing social, economic and environmental well-being. These domains include 25 indicators comprised of 80 metrics and 22 social, economic and environmental services. The application of the HWBI has been made for the nation as a whole at the county level and two alternative applications have been made to represent key populations within the overall US population — Native Ameri- cans and children. A number of advances have been made to estimate the values of metrics for counties where no data is available and one such estimator — MERLIN — is discussed. Finally, efforts to make the index into an interactive web site are described.


When a planning agent works in a complex, real-world domain, it is unable to plan for and store all possible contingencies and problem situations ahead of time. The agent needs to be able to fall back on an ability to construct plans at run time under time constraints. This thesis presents a method for planning at run time that incrementally builds up plans at multiple levels of abstraction. The plans are continually updated by information from the world, allowing the planner to adjust its plan to a changing world during the planning process. All the information is represented over intervals of time, allowing the planner to reason about durations, deadlines, and delays within its plan. In addition to the method, the thesis presents a formal model of the planning process and uses the model to investigate planning strategies. The method has been implemented, and experiments have been run to validate the overall approach and the theoretical model.


The mediaeval Islamicate world was dominated by a language-obsessed culture that placed great value on words and their meanings. These words and meanings could, for those who used them, make the difference between both earthly success or failure, and salvation or damnation in the hereafter. Scholars were also conscious of the contingency of the links between words and their meanings, and the potential this created for ambiguity. This dissertation is about the mechanisms, models, and assumptions those scholars used to manage linguistic ambiguity. My investigation focuses on ar-Rāġib al-Iṣfahānī (fl. ≤ 409/1018), one such language-obsessed scholar. I provide a comprehensive review of his life, works, and times. He put together a portfolio of intellectual positions in exegesis, theology, ethics, and poetics that was guided by a philosophy of language which accepted and negotiated linguistic ambiguity. Underpinning that philosophy was a theory of meaning that used the pairing of expression and idea (lafẓ and maʿnā) to deal with polysemy, the intent of the speaker, and the function of the lexicon. Ar-Rāġib's philosophy was emblematic of what I call the Arabic Language Tradition, the shared assumptions of which constituted an indigenous philosophy of language that was able to supply its own answers to the central questions of linguistics and then use those answers across all of the genres encompassed by its scholarship, from grammar to poetics, law, and theology. It was an Arabic Language Tradition that is best understood through comparison to an alternative Classical Language Tradition that had its roots in the Organon and a theory of meaning with little space for ambiguity. Re-telling Islamic intellectual history
through the lens of language in this way shows us that in addition to the well-known and oft-studied Islamic engagement with Hellenistic philosophy there was another, indigenous, tradition with its own answers to the problems of mediaeval scholarship. This Arabic Language Tradition saw in language a solution to these problems, rather than seeing language as just another hurdle to be overcome.%%%%Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations


The success and mainstreaming of e-books is transforming not only the traditional/Gutenbergian idea of the book but also the previous idea of an e-book as mainly an enriched print book. In the new e-book concept, the nature of a book as an artifact is diminishing and disposition as a networked interface to the knowledge is rising. One of the most important emerging concept is social reading, which means reading acts while connected to the other people. Social reading is a new and not very well defined area of reading practices. In addition to the traditional reading together and discussing books person to person, social reading includes a large number of networked functions like sharing and receiving shared information. Research of this new phenomena is almost non existent, yet it is expected to be the next big thing in reading and in e-books. This study provides an overview of the history of social reading of printed books and then defines parallel features in new digital reading activities. Research material consists of popular e-book software and services. The proposed categorization of social reading is based on content analysis of properties that were found in those services. This report claims that social reading functionalities are manifestations of the social needs that have existed during and even before the paper book. Digital time enables re-emerging of some of those features, but in a differen t manner.


Operating since the late 1980s, in an environment of shifting wars, the Humanitarian Mine Action ( HMA ) programme in Afghanistan has nonetheless been highly successful in reducing the impact of landmines. This article discusses three factors that have contributed to its success: the building of national capacity; the systematic application of surveys; and the ability to act flexibly and innovatively. Having operated under the auspices of the UN, but in the absence of a functioning government, the programme faces new challenges with the potential transition to peace in Afghanistan. Ultimately, however, the programme is a world leader in its field, and as one of the best functioning sectors in economic and humanitarian assistance to the country, it represents a key resource for a new internationally recognised Afghan government.


This paper provides a Markov chain model for the term structure and credit risk spreads of bond prices. It allows dependency between the stochastic process modeling the interest rate and the Markov chain process describing changes in the credit rating of the bonds by their mutual dependency on a hidden Markov chain, which can be thought of as describing the underlying economic conditions. The model also allows a new interpretation of risk premia used in previous approaches and also uses a linear programming approach to strip the bonds of their coupons in such a way as to guarantee there is no mispricing.


Objective To provide global estimates of blood pressure by age and sex for adults aged ≥ 30 years, by WHO subregion. Design and methods Data were obtained from studies identified in a literature review of population-based surveys. These were complemented by data from MONICA and INTERSALT studies. Estimates of the shape of the age–systolic blood pressure (SBP) association were made from survey data utilizing parametric and non-parametric analyses. A linear sex-specific association of SBP with age was demonstrated from 30 to 70 years in females and 20 to 70 years for males in each subregion. Mean age- and sex-specific estimates of SBP were estimated for each WHO subregion separately, based on study and country-weighted SBP data. Results Analyses were based on data from about 230 surveys and over 660 000 participants. Age-specific mean SBP values ranged from 114 to 164 mmHg for females, and 117–153 mmHg for males. Females typically had lower SBP levels than males in the 30–44-year age groups, but in all subregions, SBP levels rose more steeply with age for females than males. Therefore, SBP levels in those aged ≥ 60 years tended to be higher in females. Subregions with consistently high mean SBP levels included parts of eastern Europe and Africa. Mean SBP levels were lowest in south-east Asia and parts of the western Pacific. Conclusions These global estimates of blood pressure by age, sex and subregion show considerable variation in estimated levels. The lack of data in developing countries is substantial, and this is an important limitation given the role of blood pressure in increasing cardiovascular disease levels.


Volcanic eruptions fundamentally alter landscapes, paving over channels, decimating biota, and emplacing fresh, unweathered material. The fluvial incision of blocky lava flows is a geomorphic puzzle. First, high surface permeability and lack of sediment should preclude geomorphically effective surface runoff and dissection. Furthermore, past work has demonstrated the importance of extreme floods in driving incision via column toppling and plucking in columnar basalt, but it is unclear how incision occurs in systems where surface blocks are readily mobile. We examine rapid fluvial incision of the Collier lava flow, an andesitic Holocene lava flow in the High Cascades of Oregon. Since lava flow emplacement ∼1600 yr ago, White Branch Creek has incised bedrock gorges up to 8 m deep into the coherent core of the lava flow and deposited >0.2 km3 of sediment on the lava flow surface. Field observation points to a bimodal discharge regime in the channel, with evidence for both annual snowmelt runoff and outburst floods from Collier glacier, as well as historical evidence of vigorous glacial meltwater. To determine the range of discharge events capable of incision in White Branch Creek, we used a mechanistic model of fluvial abrasion. We show that the observed incision implies that moderate flows are capable of both initiating channel formation and sustaining incision. Our results have implications for the evolution of volcanic systems worldwide, where glaciation and/or mass wasting may accelerate fluvial processes by providing large amounts of sediment to otherwise porous, sediment-starved landscapes.


Recent research in the field of computational social science have shown how data resulting from the widespread adoption and use of social media channels such as twitter can be used to predict outcomes such as movie revenues, election winners, localized moods, and epidemic outbreaks. Underlying assumptions for this research stream on predictive analytics are that social media actions such as tweeting, liking, commenting and rating are proxies for user/consumer's attention to a particular object/product and that the shared digital artefact that is persistent can create social influence. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media data from twitter can be used to predict the sales of iPhones. Based on a conceptual model of social data consisting of social graph (actors, actions, activities, and artefacts) and social text (topics, keywords, pronouns, and sentiments), we develop and evaluate a linear regression model that transforms iPhone tweets into a prediction of the quarterly iPhone sales with an average error close to the established prediction models from investment banks. This strong correlation between iPhone tweets and iPhone sales becomes marginally stronger after incorporating sentiments of tweets. We discuss the findings and conclude with implications for predictive analytics with big social data.


Title of Document: CHARACTERIZATION OF EXFOLIATED GRAPHITE AND LATEX COMPOSITE AS TEMPERATURE SENSORS TO PRODUCE THERMAL IMAGES Elizabeth Ann Sauerbrunn, Master of Science, 2014 Directed By: Professor Hugh A. Bruck Department of Mechanical Engineering Temperature sensing is crucial in spacecraft to ensure all systems remain within operating temperatures. Sensing over an area would allow thermal management systems to effectively see the temperature profile in real time, which is not being done with thermocouple and RTD systems used today. The resistance response as a function of temperature for exfoliated graphite and latex composite sensors was investigated. The effect of the substrate CTE and the EG loading level were observed and 30 wt% EG sensors were calibrated on a carbon fiber substrate. Above room temperature, the percent resistance change and temperature relationship is linear, while below room temperature the relationship is exponential. The resistance response from twelve sensor grids was converted into a temperature field to produce thermal images over a surface. These temperature profiles were compared to thermal simulation data, proving that the sensor grids successfully mapped the proper temperature patterns. CHARACTERIZATION OF EXFOLIATED GRAPHITE AND LATEX COMPOSITE AS TEMPERATURE SENSORS TO PRODUCE THERMAL IMAGES


This paper presents a method for characterising spatial responsivity of hyperspectral cameras. Knowing the responsivity of the camera as a function of pixel coordinates allows applying a flat-field correction on image data. The method is based on scanning the field of view of the camera with a broadband radiance source, based on an integrating sphere, and combining the captured frames to synthesise a uniform radiance source filling the whole field of view of the camera at the focus distance. The method was compared with a traditional approach where the aperture of an integrating sphere is imaged from a close distance, filling the entire field of view of the camera. The measurement setup was tested with a hyperspectral camera, based on a tunable Fabry–Pérot interferometer. Without the flat-field correction, the average standard deviation of the pixel responsivities across all the spectral channels of the camera was 3.78%. After the correction, the average standard deviation was reduced to 0.40% and 3.25% for the aperture-scanning method and the close-distance method, respectively. The expanded uncertainty (k  =  2) for the flat-field correction obtained using the scanning method was 0.68%–0.78%, depending on the spectral channel of the camera.


We report an optically addressed liquid crystal light valve, a home-made device that has solved the problem of low transmittance caused by opaque electrodes in present transmissive spatial light modulators. The operating characteristic of the light valve is analyzed. The optimum driving voltage of this device is 27 V at 300 Hz, as deduced from the equivalent electric model. Its transmittance reaches 80% and its contrast is approximately 40:1. Its dynamic performance, especially its ability to obscure laser light at programmed locations, is demonstrated. The results are in good agreement with the desired shape, which indicates that our light valve performs very well.


In the pursuit of a first-rate education for all students, America's public schools have struggled to achieve fuller racial integration and higher academic standards. Yet sharp inequities between prosperous school districts and poorer districts remain, reinforced by traditional ways of funding and administering public education. This book brings together cutting-edge ideas and strategies of prominent advocates of school equity reform. Discussing their first-hand experiences in forming coalitions, framing court cases, and dealing with state politics in New Jersey, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Alabama, Kentucky, and Washington, the contributors consider what succeeded, and what failed, in the search for financial and legal remedies to educational inequity.The varied case studies of this book underscore the importance of a comprehensive approach -- combining finance, restructuring, and governance reforms -- for the success of a city, or state school reform effort. The authors investigate how state constitutions have been used to challenge a state's financial distribution of school aid, how business and community organizations have engaged in reform efforts, and how others have negotiated legislation to achieve change. This discussion of reform strategies will interest not only those who are concerned with excellence and equity. in education but also those who wish to form successful coalitions and challenge existing state policies."This group of authors shares an important common vision of education reform. Their concrete, down-to-earth orientation and up-to-date information on key reform efforts give this book broad appeal". -- Jeffrey R. Henig, author of Rethinking School Choice


Financial inclusion is considered an emerging priority for many economies across the globe today because of its potential to speed up economic growth. Banking the unbanked in Ghana is a research endeavour seeking to provide wider access to financial products and services to the estimated 70 percent unbanked population in the country. For the purpose of this study, the research combined both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The mixed-methods approach was used in order to present a descriptive account and an in-depth investigation of the factors accounting for people's decision to bank. Data was collected by the use of questionnaires administered to unbanked participants as well as face-to-face interviews with selected individuals. The findings of the study revealed that social factors and firm factors both had significant and positive effects in predicting an individual's intention to bank. On the contrary, however, personal factors were not found to be significant in predicting banking propensity. The study proposed three key strategic recommendations.


This paper investigates different methods for quantifying thaw subsidence using terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds. Thaw subsidence is a slow (millimetre to centimetre per year) vertical displacement of the ground surface common in ice‐rich permafrost‐underlain landscapes. It is difficult to quantify thaw subsidence in tundra areas as they often lack stable reference frames. Also, there is no solid ground surface to serve as a basis for elevation measurements, due to a continuous moss–lichen cover. We investigate how an expert‐driven method improves the accuracy of benchmark measurements at discrete locations within two sites using multitemporal TLS data of a 1‐year period. Our method aggregates multiple experts' determination of the ground surface in 3D point clouds, collected in a web‐based tool. We then compare this to the performance of a fully automated ground surface determination method. Lastly, we quantify ground surface displacement by directly computing multitemporal point cloud distances, thereby extending thaw subsidence observation to an area‐based assessment. Using the expert‐driven quantification as reference, we validate the other methods, including in‐situ benchmark measurements from a conventional field survey. This study demonstrates that quantifying the ground surface using 3D point clouds is more accurate than the field survey method. The expert‐driven method achieves an accuracy of 0.1 ± 0.1 cm. Compared to this, in‐situ benchmark measurements by single surveyors yield an accuracy of 0.4 ± 1.5 cm. This difference between the two methods is important, considering an observed displacement of 1.4 cm at the sites. Thaw subsidence quantification with the fully automatic benchmark‐based method achieves an accuracy of 0.2 ± 0.5 cm and direct point cloud distance computation an accuracy of 0.2 ± 0.9 cm. The range in accuracy is largely influenced by properties of vegetation structure at locations within the sites. The developed methods enable a link of automated quantification and expert judgement for transparent long‐term monitoring of permafrost subsidence. © 2020 The Authors. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd


The law that defines and regulates fiduciary relationships appears in many legal areas, such as family law, surrogate decision-making, international law, agency law, employment law, pension law, remedies rules, banking law, financial institutions' regulation, corporate law, charities law not for profit organizations law, and the law concerning medical services.
Fiduciary relationships, and the concepts on which they are grounded, appear not only in the law. They appear in other areas of knowledge: economics, psychology; moral norms and pluralism. Fiduciary law has a very long history. It was recognized in Roman law and the British common law and appeared decades ago in religious laws, such as Jewish law, Christian law, and Islamic law. Internationally, fiduciary law has a place in European legal system in Chinese law, Japanese law and Indian law.
This article offers an explanation to the evolution and expansion of fiduciary principles and a prediction of their future. Part One opens with a short description of fiduciary relationships, and the conditions under which they arise. Part Two describes the evolution of specialization of living being–from genetic to chosen cooperative specialization. Part Three notes the positive and negative social impact of fiduciary relations and the response of the law designed to encourage the relationships while discouraging the abuse they might lead to. Part four of the article highlights the criticism of fiduciary law and alternative solutions to the issues raised by fiduciary relationships. Part Five offers a prediction about the future of fiduciary law.


We examined the temporal changes of isokinetic strength performance of knee flexor (KF) and extensor (KE) strength after a football match. Players were randomly assigned to a control (N = 14, participated only in measurements and practices) or an experimental group (N = 20, participated also in a football match). Participants trained daily during the two days after the match. Match and training overload was monitored with GPS devices. Venous blood was sampled and muscle damage was assessed pre-match, post-match and at 12h, 36h and 60h post-match. Isometric strength as well as eccentric and concentric peak torque of knee flexors and extensors in both limbs (dominant and non-dominant) were measured on an isokinetic dynamometer at baseline and at 12h, 36h and 60h after the match. Functional (KFecc/KEcon) and conventional (KFcon/KEcon) ratios were then calculated. Only eccentric peak torque of knee flexors declined at 60h after the match in the control group. In the experimental group: a) isometric strength of knee extensors and knee flexors declined (P<0.05) at 12h (both limbs) and 36h (dominant limb only), b) eccentric and concentric peak torque of knee extensors and flexors declined (P<0.05) in both limbs for 36h at 60°/s and for 60h at 180°/s with eccentric peak torque of knee flexors demonstrating a greater (P<0.05) reduction than concentric peak torque, c) strength deterioration was greater (P<0.05) at 180°/s and in dominant limb, d) the functional ratio was more sensitive to match-induced fatigue demonstrating a more prolonged decline. Discriminant and regression analysis revealed that strength deterioration and recovery may be related to the amount of eccentric actions performed during the match and athletes' football-specific conditioning. Our data suggest that recovery kinetics of knee flexor and extensor strength after a football match demonstrate strength, limb and velocity specificity and may depend onmatch physical overload and players' physical conditioning level. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0128072 June 4, 2015 1 / 22 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Draganidis D, Chatzinikolaou A, Avloniti A, Barbero-Álvarez JC, Mohr M, Malliou P, et al. (2015) Recovery Kinetics of Knee Flexor and Extensor Strength after a Football Match. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0128072. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0128072 Academic Editor: Miklos S. Kellermayer, Semmelweis University, HUNGARY Received: November 5, 2014 Accepted: April 22, 2015 Published: June 4, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Draganidis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: Donation received by Bodosakis Foundation, Athens, Greece Departmental funding to IGF. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.


Significance This article describes a molecular realization of the classical three-body problem, where the motion of three or more bodies is directed by a set of pairwise forces. Surprisingly, motion of the components of the three-body molecular systems is found to be highly choreographed by differences in strength of intercomponent interactions, promoting a rare inchworm-like loading of molecular rings onto a molecular thread. Our work demonstrates the utility of an integrative approach to design and develop functional molecular machines. The coordinated motion of many individual components underpins the operation of all machines. However, despite generations of experience in engineering, understanding the motion of three or more coupled components remains a challenge, known since the time of Newton as the "three-body problem." Here, we describe, quantify, and simulate a molecular three-body problem of threading two molecular rings onto a linear molecular thread. Specifically, we use voltage-triggered reduction of a tetrazine-based thread to capture two cyanostar macrocycles and form a [3]pseudorotaxane product. As a consequence of the noncovalent coupling between the cyanostar rings, we find the threading occurs by an unexpected and rare inchworm-like motion where one ring follows the other. The mechanism was derived from controls, analysis of cyclic voltammetry (CV) traces, and Brownian dynamics simulations. CVs from two noncovalently interacting rings match that of two covalently linked rings designed to thread via the inchworm pathway, and they deviate considerably from the CV of a macrocycle designed to thread via a stepwise pathway. Time-dependent electrochemistry provides estimates of rate constants for threading. Experimentally derived parameters (energy wells, barriers, diffusion coefficients) helped determine likely pathways of motion with rate-kinetics and Brownian dynamics simulations. Simulations verified intercomponent coupling could be separated into ring–thread interactions for kinetics, and ring–ring interactions for thermodynamics to reduce the three-body problem to a two-body one. Our findings provide a basis for high-throughput design of molecular machinery with multiple components undergoing coupled motion.


Tropical dry forests are already undergoing changes in the quantity and timing of rainfall, but there is great uncertainty over how these shifts will affect belowground carbon (C) cycling. While it has long been known that dry soils quickly release carbon dioxide (CO2) upon rewetting, the mechanisms underlying the so-called 'Birch effect' are still debated. Here, we quantified soil respiration pulses and their biotic predictors in response to simulated precipitation events in a regenerating tropical dry forest in Costa Rica. We also simulated the observed rewetting CO2 pulses with two soil carbon models: a conventional model assuming first-order decay rates of soil organic matter, and an enzyme-catalyzed model with Michaelis–Menten kinetics. We found that rewetting of dry soils produced an immediate and dramatic pulse of CO2, accompanied by rapid immobilization of nitrogen into the microbial biomass. However, the magnitude of the rewetting CO2 pulse was highly variable at fine spatial scales, and was well correlated with the size of the dissolved organic C pool prior to rewetting. Both the enzyme-catalyzed and conventional models were able to reproduce the Birch effect when respiration was coupled directly to microbial C uptake, although models differed in their ability to yield realistic estimates of SOC and microbial biomass pool sizes and dynamics. Our results suggest that changes in the timing and intensity of rainfall events in tropical dry forests will exert strong influence on ecosystem C balance by affecting the dynamics of microbial biomass growth.


Obesity is a global health concern, it is cause of many co–morbidities (such as osteoarthritis OA, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolaemia, etc.) that pose serious health problems, decrease quality of the life, and increase healthcare system costs. In particular, obesity is a modifiable risk factor for knee osteoarthritis (OA), because the excess body mass modifies lower extremity joint loads during locomotion [1]. So, the additional weight is responsible for potentially unhealthy joint loads in obese individuals. This condition can bring serious disability to perform activities of daily living and the risk of knee OA increase with increasing of BMI. Weight loss is critical to reducing incidence of OA and decrease the risk and/or severity of such diseases [1, 2]. The purpose of this proposal is to conduct a motion analysis experiments to study effects of BMI on knee biomechanics in rowing exercise at different resistance levels and find the correlation between changing in biomechanical parameters and BMI. Ten participant were recruited, 5 normal weight (NW, BMI = 18.5 – 24.9 kg/m2) and 5 obese (OB, BMI ?? 30 kg/m2), and the data were collected by an optoelectronic system. No differences were found due to BMI in knee adduction moment, and knee flexion angle. The results obtained for the knee flexion angle contradict conclusions in Roemer study [3]. It could be due to the absence of a very big abdominal mass in OB participants, that consented them to conduct the exercise with the same NW participants' dynamic. Significant differences were found in maximum normalized knee extension moment and maximum normalized compressive force, between NW and OB with a resistance level equal to 3 and in both resistance levels and other two combinations (p < 0.05), respectively. Maximum knee adduction moments (KAMs) were higher in Gait than Cycling (p < 0.001), Elliptical (p < 0.001) and Rowing (p < 0.001) for NW and OB participants. Confirming the hypothesis that KAMs would depend on exercise type [4], and the rowing made no exception. The results suggest that except Gait, the other exercises may be preferred weight loss exercises aimed at limiting OA risk in OB individuals. A limitation of this study was the small sample size of participants. In order to improve evidence-based guidelines for weight loss exercises that minimize OA risk, future studies will include more participants and OW participants, and consider other biomechanical parameters and exercises.