Finger millet is an important cereal cultivated in Eastern Africa as well as Southern India. It is a staple crop that is characterized by ability to thrive on a variety of environmental conditions, excellent grain storage quality and ability to withstand significant levels of salinity. Scientific research aimed at improving this important cereal has been negligible and it is regarded as one of the orphaned crop species. The aim of this project was to isolate microsatellite markers from finger millet by analyzing data provided following 454 GS-FLX Titanium sequencing. This is a next generation sequencing platform that confers the potential of isolating a greater number of microsatellites at a much lower cost than the conventional Sanger sequencing platform. These markers are hyper variable, and exhibit wide genomic distribution, co-dominant inheritance, reproducibility, multi-allelic nature and chromosome specific location. The 2 genotypes of finger millet studied were obtained from ICRISAT, Nairobi. These were KNE 755 and KNE 796. In silico tools were used to mine for the microsatellites from sequence data obtained after enrichment and 454 GS-FLX sequencing of finger millet genomic DNA. These tools included NGSQC, for quality screening, MIRA for sequence assembly, SciRoKo for SSR mining and BatchPrimer3 for primer design. In vitro analysis was undertaken to evaluate the markers supplied by Ecogenics. This involved PCR analysis followed by allele calling using the Gene Mapper software package. The allelic data generated was subjected to statistical analysis using PowerMarker to reveal polymorphism. The in silico study resulted in the identification of 92 primers that were unique from the published as well as the Ecogenics supplied primers. From the in vitro study, 49 markers were polymorphic and the average polymorphic information content (PIC) was 0.4153. These markers are a significant addition to the existing 82 SSRs. They are also valuable tools that will be useful for conducting further genomic studies in finger millet, including MAS, fingerprinting studies as well as assaying genetic diversity. This study has demonstrated the use of NGS to rapidly and cost-effectively generate genomic sequences containing SSR motifs. It points to the possibility of using cutting edge technology to advance research in underutilized crops such as finger millet by researchers in Kenya. It also shows that it is possible to develop abundant genomic resources for hitherto understudied crops which have great significance to the development of third world countries in Africa and Asia.


Short-term, faculty-led study abroad programs are increasingly featured in higher education internationalization efforts. As noted in the literature, such programs can aid in the development of varied student outcomes, including developing global citizenship. This paper presents an examination of the Global Engagement Seminar (GES) program, a short-term, faculty-led program at a private women's liberal arts college that has expressed a firm commitment to internationalization. A quasi-experimental design was employed to examine whether participation in the GES program influenced participants' antecedents, identification, and pro-social values of global citizenship (Reysen & Katzarska-Miller 2013a), and how the relationships compare with those of a matched comparison sample. The results of the survey indicated that GES completion moderated some but not all of the paths in the global citizenship model. Completing a GES was associated with non-significant relations among the moderated paths, a finding that emphasizes the need for a nuanced discussion of the complex relationship between short-term study abroad and global citizenship. Implications for faculty-led global engagement programs that aim to promote global citizenship among undergraduates in liberal arts contexts are discussed.


As the number, complexity, and scope of large engineering projects (LEPs) increase worldwide, the huge stakes may endanger the survival of corporations and threaten the stability of countries that approach these projects unprepared. According to the authors, the "front-end" engineering of institutional arrangements and strategic systems is a far greater determinant of an LEP's success than are the more tangible aspects of project engineering and management.The book is based on an international research project that analyzed sixty LEPs, among them the Boston Harbor cleanup; the first phase of subway construction in Ankara, Turkey; a hydro dam on the Caroni River in Venezuela; and the construction of offshore oil platforms west of Flor, Norway. The authors use the research results to develop an experience-based theoretical framework that will allow managers to understand and respond to the complexity and uncertainty inherent in all LEPs. In addition to managers and scholars of large-scale projects, the book will be of interest to those studying the relationship between institutions and strategy, risk management, and corporate governance in general.Contributors Bjorn Andersen, Richard Brealey, Ian Cooper, Serghei Floricel, Michel Habib, Brian Hobbs, Donald R. Lessard, Pascale Michaud, Roger Miller, Xavier Olleros.


Recent trade negotiations such as TTIP include investor protection clauses. Against the background of an analysis of the case for trade, the paper asks whether such clauses can be justified from a normative perspective. More specifically, what is the impact of investor protection on the domestic distribution of the gains from trade between labour and capital, and how should we assess this impact from the perspective of justice? In order to answer this question, the paper develops a series of ideal-type scenarios that reflect the consequences of investor protection on employment on the one hand, and on the distributive conflict between labour and capital on the other. While no claim is made which of these scenarios corresponds to TTIP or other trade agreements, they provide a useful normative framework to analyse such agreements.


We measure the effective mass $({m}^{\ensuremath{\ast}})$ of interacting two-dimensional electrons confined to a 4.5-nm-wide AlAs quantum well. The electrons in this well occupy a single out-of-plane conduction-band valley with an isotropic in-plane Fermi contour. When the electrons are partially spin polarized, ${m}^{\ensuremath{\ast}}$ is larger than its band value and increases as the density is reduced. However, as the system is driven to full spin-polarization via the application of a strong parallel magnetic field, ${m}^{\ensuremath{\ast}}$ is suppressed down to values near or even below the band mass. Our results are consistent with the previously reported measurements on wide AlAs quantum wells where the electrons occupy an in-plane valley with an anisotropic Fermi contour and effective mass, and suggest that the effective mass suppression upon complete spin-polarization is a genuine property of interacting two-dimensional electrons.


Microtask platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) are increasingly used to create speech and language resources. AMT in particular allows researchers to quickly recruit a large number of fairly demographically diverse participants. In this study, we investigated whether AMT can be used for comparing the intelligibility of speech synthesis systems. We conducted two experiments in the lab and via AMT, one comparing US English diphone to US English speaker-adaptive HTS synthesis and one comparing UK English unit selection to UK English speaker-dependent HTS synthesis. While AMT word error rates were worse than lab error rates, AMT results were more sensitive to relative differences between systems. This is mainly due to the larger number of listeners. Boxplots and multilevel modelling allowed us to identify listeners who performed particularly badly, while thresholding was sufficient to eliminate rogue workers. We conclude that AMT is a viable platform for synthetic speech intelligibility comparisons.


Background Population aging is posing multiple social and economic challenges to society. One such challenge is the social and economic burden related to increased health care expenditure caused by early institutionalizations. The use of modern pervasive computing technology makes it possible to continuously monitor the health status of community-dwelling older adults at home. Early detection of health issues through these technologies may allow for reduced treatment costs and initiation of targeted preventive measures leading to better health outcomes. Sleep is a key factor when it comes to overall health and many health issues manifest themselves with associated sleep deteriorations. Sleep quality and sleep disorders such as sleep apnea syndrome have been extensively studied using various wearable devices at home or in the setting of sleep laboratories. However, little research has been conducted evaluating the potential of contactless and continuous sleep monitoring in detecting early signs of health problems in community-dwelling older adults. Objective In this work we aim to evaluate which contactlessly measurable sleep parameter is best suited to monitor perceived and actual health status changes in older adults. Methods We analyzed real-world longitudinal (up to 1 year) data from 37 community-dwelling older adults including more than 6000 nights of measured sleep. Sleep parameters were recorded by a pressure sensor placed beneath the mattress, and corresponding health status information was acquired through weekly questionnaires and reports by health care personnel. A total of 20 sleep parameters were analyzed, including common sleep metrics such as sleep efficiency, sleep onset delay, and sleep stages but also vital signs in the form of heart and breathing rate as well as movements in bed. Association with self-reported health, evaluated by EuroQol visual analog scale (EQ-VAS) ratings, were quantitatively evaluated using individual linear mixed-effects models. Translation to objective, real-world health incidents was investigated through manual retrospective case-by-case analysis. Results Using EQ-VAS rating based self-reported perceived health, we identified body movements in bed—measured by the number toss-and-turn events—as the most predictive sleep parameter (t score=–0.435, P value [adj]=<.001). Case-by-case analysis further substantiated this finding, showing that increases in number of body movements could often be explained by reported health incidents. Real world incidents included heart failure, hypertension, abdominal tumor, seasonal flu, gastrointestinal problems, and urinary tract infection. Conclusions Our results suggest that nightly body movements in bed could potentially be a highly relevant as well as easy to interpret and derive digital biomarker to monitor a wide range of health deteriorations in older adults. As such, it could help in detecting health deteriorations early on and provide timelier, more personalized, and precise treatment options.


A short, sharp, and provocative book, Blow Up the Humanities has esteemed scholar Toby Miller declaring that there are two humanities in the United States. One is the venerable, powerful humanities of private universities; the other is the humanities of state schools, which focus mainly on job prospects. There is a class division between the two—both in terms of faculty research and student background—and it must end.

Miller critically lays waste to the system. He examines scholarly publishing as well as media and cultural studies to show how to restructure the humanities by studying popular cultural phenomena, like video games. Miller ultimately insists that these two humanities must merge in order to survive and succeed in producing an aware and concerned citizenry.


The internet has become an important source of health related information and a number of studies have shown that the quality thereof is, at best, problematic. Nevertheless, there are very few studies investigating the Romanian medical cyberspace. The goal of this study was to assess the completeness and accuracy of information about the coeliac disease on the Romanian websites directed to the general population. We evaluated a sample of 100 websites selected from the Google's first search results pages. The coverage of the topic was extremely deficient (the mean completeness score was 3.8 on a scale of 10), especially on sensitive issues such as the causes, treatment, and complications of the coeliac disease. On the other hand, the accuracy of the information was relatively good (mean accuracy score 7.2 on a scale of 10). With one exception, we found no statistically significant differences between the quality scores of the websites by their general characteristics.


BACKGROUND
Previous studies have found an association between current smoking and lower rates of mammography and Pap testing. The objective of this study was to investigate the association of smoking status with breast and cervical cancer screening across the 1990-1994 National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS). The NHIS provides a consistent set of independent and dependent variables across several surveys, with data collected by a similar in-person interview methodology from year to year. This report employs more databases than have been used in other analyses that have examined associations between smoking and cancer screening.

METHODS
Data were from the health promotion and cancer control supplements to the 1990-1994 NHIS. The target population was women ages 42-75. Associations were examined between smoking status (never, former, <1 pack/day, >/=1 pack/day) and three screening indicators: ever had a mammogram, mammogram in the past 2 years, and Pap test in the past 3 years. Sample sizes ranged from about 3,000 to over 10,800 depending on the respective NHIS survey and dependent variable. Data analyses were conducted by bivariate and multiple logistic regression.

RESULTS
Women who smoked >/=1 pack of cigarettes per day were significantly less likely to have had mammography screening in all NHIS surveys, compared to women who never smoked. Adjusted odds ratios were 0.63 to 0.74 for ever had a mammogram, and 0.56 to 0.66 for mammography in the past 2 years. Women who smoked >/=1 pack per day also had lower Pap test rates than women who never smoked in 1992-1994 (adjusted odds ratios of 0.51-0.71). Results for lighter smokers were not as consistent. Former smokers often had significantly higher screening rates than never smokers.

CONCLUSIONS
Research still needs to identify reasons for lower screening among women who smoke. Factors to explore include the social networks of smokers and broader health behavior patterns. Clinicians should consider heavier smoking as a marker for risk of not obtaining screening and make assessment of screening status a priority at each visit.


Book synopsis: On 11 September 1973, President Salvador Allende of Chile, Latin America's first democratically elected Marxist president, was deposed in a violent coup d'etat. Early that morning the phone lines to Allende's office were cut, army officers loyal to the republic were arrested and shortly afterwards bombs from four British-made Hawker Hunter jets began slamming into the presidential palace. Allende refused to leave his post, making broadcasts to encourage the Chilean people until the last pro-government radio station was silenced. Later that morning he was found dead, with an AK-47 that had been a gift from Fidel Castro by his side.

The coup had been planned for months, even years before it actually happened. In fact, from the moment Allende's electoral victory in 1970 became a possibility, business leaders in Chile, extreme right-wing groups, high-ranking officers in the Chilean military and the US administration and the CIA worked together to secure a prompt and dramatic end to his progressive social programme.

Why Allende seemed such a threat in the political and economic context of the time and how the coup was engineered is the story Oscar Guardiola-Rivera tells, drawing on a wide range of sources, including phone transcripts and documents released as recently as 2008. It is a radical retelling of a moment in history that even at the height of Cold War paranoia – a time when Henry Kissinger described Chile as 'a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica' –shocked the world and which continues to resonate today. As the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the global protests at austerity measures introduced since the crash of 2008 show, the world is struggling to deal with the economic and political dilemmas Allende faced at the time.


Optical fibers have the potential to carry tens and even hundreds of Gbits/sec of information. The question of how to share these large capacities between many users through an efficient, flexible, and low cost network is a challenge. Standards are now being proposed that will decide the protocol for what might be called the third generation of local area and metropolitan area networks. This article explores the principal classes of protocols that permit efficient sharing of high-speed channels.


In 2013 the Discrete Logarithm Problem in finite fields of small characteristic enjoyed a rapid series of developments, starting with the heuristic polynomial-time relation generation method due to Gologlu, Granger, McGuire and Zumbragel, and culminating with the first heuristic quasi-polynomial algorithm (QPA) due to Barbulescu, Gaudry, Joux and Thome, which built upon an approach due to Joux. In 2014 Granger, Kleinjung and Zumbragel devised a way to extend the original GGMZ approach, resulting in a completely new QPA which has some interesting properties; in particular in some families of fields one can rigorously prove the complexity. In this talk we review these developments and compare the two QPAs.


MN1 encodes a transcriptional co-regulator without homology to other proteins, previously implicated in acute myeloid leukaemia and development of the palate. Large deletions encompassing MN1 have been reported in individuals with variable neurodevelopmental anomalies and non-specific facial features. We identified a cluster of de novo truncating mutations in MN1 in a cohort of 23 individuals with strikingly similar dysmorphic facial features, especially midface hypoplasia, and intellectual disability with severe expressive language delay. Imaging revealed an atypical form of rhombencephalosynapsis, a distinctive brain malformation characterized by partial or complete loss of the cerebellar vermis with fusion of the cerebellar hemispheres, in 8/10 individuals. Rhombencephalosynapsis has no previously known definitive genetic or environmental causes. Other frequent features included perisylvian polymicrogyria, abnormal posterior clinoid processes and persistent trigeminal artery. MN1 is encoded by only two exons. All mutations, including the recurrent variant p.Arg1295* observed in 8/21 probands, fall in the terminal exon or the extreme 3' region of exon 1, and are therefore predicted to result in escape from nonsense-mediated mRNA decay. This was confirmed in fibroblasts from three individuals. We propose that the condition described here, MN1 C-terminal truncation (MCTT) syndrome, is not due to MN1 haploinsufficiency but rather is the result of dominantly acting C-terminally truncated MN1 protein. Our data show that MN1 plays a critical role in human craniofacial and brain development, and opens the door to understanding the biological mechanisms underlying rhombencephalosynapsis.


The rationale of land use planning as a public function is to ensure economic efficiency in the use of space and to ensure that the health, safety and general security of the citizens of a country is promoted and secured.Land use planning regulations in Kenya have failed to influence land development patterns in the rapidly growing urban areas. Kenya's experience reveals lack of official government intervention and established procedures in formulating rules for allocation of land, control, approval and regulation of urban development. Evidence in Kenya shows the inability of land use planning regulations to hinder the occurrence of the problems associated with contemporary land use activities.This study focuses on land use regulations with reference to Umoja one estate. Umoja one estate was initially targeted for low income earners but currently it has been occupied mainly by middle income earners. The main objective of this study was to find out the reasons behind continuous increase of unplanned developments which have not been approved by the Nairobi City Council.It is evident that NCC has failed to implement land use planning regulations within its area of jurisdiction. As a result, informal settlements have continued to mushroom due to: inadequate man power, to implement land use planning regulations, inadequate finance, corruption and laxity among the NCC officials, lack of community participation and political interference in the council's activities.Effective reforms therefore need to be implemented and ways in which land use planning regulations could be made more efficient be examined so as to achieve planned and sustainable urban development.Field study included interviews and questionnaires which were administered to residents, developers and NCC Planning officials. Visual observations and photographs were also used to give visual aspects of the buildings and other visible activities taking place within the area of study.


Which investment choice is most important? Is it allocation among broad asset classes, country allocation, choice of sector, or selection of individual securities? Many investors have a false impression of the relative importance of these choices for two reasons. First, investors fail to distinguish between the activities they choose to emphasize and those with the greatest potential to influence investment results. Second, to the extent that investors do measure the potential influence of an investment activity, they often base their choices on contrived portfolios that are unobtainable. Simulations including thousands of realistic portfolios help us determine the natural dispersion of performance arising from different investment activities, which makes it possible to evaluate the hierarchy of investment choice from a normative perspective.


We demonstrate continuous-wave (cw) operation of a diamond Raman laser at 1240 nm in an external cavity configuration. The output power increased linearly with pump power with a 49.7% slope efficiency and reached 10.1 W at the maximum available pump power of 31 W. The combination of resonator design with diamond provides a novel approach to power-scalable cw wavelength and beam conversion.


Abstract Oberprieler, C., Himmelreich, S. & Vogt, R.: A new subtribal classification of the tribe Anthemideae (Compositae). — Willdenowia 37: 89–114. — ISSN 0511-9618; © 2007 BGBM Berlin-Dahlem. doi:10.3372/wi.37.37104 (available via http://dx.doi.org/) A new subtribal classification of the Compositae-Anthemideae is presented based on phylogenetic reconstructions for sequence information of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the nuclear ribosomal DNA (nrDNA) for 103 of the 111 accepted genera of the tribe. Results of the present analyses are compared with results from phylogenetic analyses based on cpDNA ndhF sequence variation and discussed in conjunction with morphological, anatomical, cytological, embryological and phytochemical evidence. As a result, 14 subtribes are circumscribed and described in detail, with information provided concerning the generic members and the geographical distribution of these entities. Four subtribes (i.e. Osmitopsidinae, Phymasperminae, Pentziinae and Leucanthemopsidinae) are described as new to science, for a further subtribe a new name (Glebionidinae, replacing the illegitimate Chrysantheminae) is validated.


In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to detect and avoid spurious correlation. It then applies it to a recent contribution by Lichtenberg (2004), which relates longevity in the United States to pharmaceutical innovation and public health care expenditure. The results of the bounds testing procedure show longevity to be linearly related to these two factors. Therefore, the estimates reported by Lichtenberg (2004) cannot be said to be result of spurious correlation, to the contrary, they very likely reflect an effective relationship, at least for the United States.


This issue of Evidence Matters delves into HUD's role and responsibilities in assisting communities with disaster recovery and mitigation and describes how communities are rebuilding after a disaster to ensure long-term resilience. The lead article, "Federal Disaster Policy: Toward a More Resilient Future," discusses the role of the federal government in supporting communities following natural disasters and in promoting resilience to reduce the financial and social toll of future disasters. The Research Spotlight piece, "The Research Basis for Disaster Resilience," presents information on the growing frequency and costs of disasters as well as the theory and practice underpinning the concept of resilience. Finally, the In Practice article, "Preparing for the Next Disaster: Three Models of Building Resilient Communities," examines how three communities have recovered from major disaster events with adaptations that have bolstered resilience and yielded economic benefits.


In scientific and technical degrees, the opinion of the final employers on the given subjects is really important. For this reason, the Quality Committee (CQ) of the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Barcelona prepared a survey for chemical, engineering and pharmaceutical companies asking about the academic training required by the companies. The survey consists of nine sections including items related to laboratory operations, chemical processes, calculation methods, management systems (quality, environment and safety) or general management information. In addition, at the end of each section, a question inquires the companies about the competences shown by students in the items of the section. The results were compared with that of a similar survey carried out in 2007. The scores obtained, between 2 and 3, for all the items (score: 1, not important; 2, unimportant; 3, important; 4, very important), show that companies accept the training given to our students and the competences achieved by them. However, according to their opinion, it is possible to improve this training, especially in the subjects related to management (time, information, environment, quality, safety, etc.). Therefore, surveys are a good tool for the evaluation of the training achieved in our degrees and, consequently, for improving degrees and the teaching task, according the Quality Management System implemented in the Faculty of Chemistry.


Abstract. A new treatment of cloud effects on aerosol and trace gases within parameterized shallow and deep convection, and aerosol effects on cloud droplet number, has been implemented in the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) version 3.2.1 that can be used to better understand the aerosol life cycle over regional to synoptic scales. The modifications to the model include treatment of the cloud droplet number mixing ratio; key cloud microphysical and macrophysical parameters (including the updraft fractional area, updraft and downdraft mass fluxes, and entrainment) averaged over the population of shallow clouds, or a single deep convective cloud; and vertical transport, activation/resuspension, aqueous chemistry, and wet removal of aerosol and trace gases in warm clouds. These changes have been implemented in both the WRF-Chem chemistry packages as well as the Kain–Fritsch (KF) cumulus parameterization that has been modified to better represent shallow convective clouds. Testing of the modified WRF-Chem has been completed using observations from the Cumulus Humilis Aerosol Processing Study (CHAPS). The simulation results are used to investigate the impact of cloud–aerosol interactions on regional-scale transport of black carbon (BC), organic aerosol (OA), and sulfate aerosol. Based on the simulations presented here, changes in the column-integrated BC can be as large as −50% when cloud–aerosol interactions are considered (due largely to wet removal), or as large as +40% for sulfate under non-precipitating conditions due to sulfate production in the parameterized clouds. The modifications to WRF-Chem are found to account for changes in the cloud droplet number concentration (CDNC) and changes in the chemical composition of cloud droplet residuals in a way that is consistent with observations collected during CHAPS. Efforts are currently underway to port the changes described here to the latest version of WRF-Chem, and it is anticipated that they will be included in a future public release of WRF-Chem.


This study makes a novel contribution to the ongoing fundamental tax reform debate with its investigation of how proposed reform will affect the international economic position of the United States and especially whether they could be adjusted at the border. It focuses on the business component of the three most popular proposals: the national retail sales tax, the Nunn- Domenici Unlimited Savings Allowance Tax (USA Tax), and the flat tax. If the taxes are adjusted, as the authors propose, they can be rebated on exports of goods and services and imposed on imports. To determine whether adjustment is permissible, the study examines the international rules of governing border tax adjustments. The existing rules distinguish between direct and indirect taxes, between goods and services, and between exports and imports. The authors conclude that there is no problem in adjusting a national retail sales tax on internationally traded goods and services. While the outcome is not cut-and-dried, the business component of the USA Tax is probably also adjustable, both on goods and services and on exports and imports. The biggest international questions will arise if border adjustments are applied to exports of goods under the flat tax. The authors suggest that changes in the international rules may be needed to permit border adjustments for the flat tax.


Disturbance shapes plant communities over a wide variety of spatial and temporal scales. How natural and anthropogenic disturbance interact to shape ecological communities is highly variable and begs a greater understanding. We used five censuses spanning the years 1990–2011 from the 16-ha Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot (LFDP) in northeast Puerto Rico to investigate the interplay of human land-use legacies dating to the early 20th century and two recent hurricanes (Hugo, 1989 and Georges, 1998). The LFDP is a landscape mosaic comprised of an area of mature subtropical wet forest and three areas of secondary forest with differing past land-use intensities. We examined the degree to which hurricane disturbance–effect and subsequent community recovery varied across past land-use classes. We expected areas with greater intensity of human land use to be more affected by hurricane disturbance therefore exhibiting greater initial damage and longer successional recovery times. Structurally, areas of secondary forest contained smaller trees than old-growth areas; hurricanes caused widespread recruitment of shrubs and saplings that thinned with time since the first hurricane. Species richness of the plot declined over time, mostly due to the loss of rare species, but also due to the loss of some heliophilic, pioneer species that became abundant after the first hurricane. Species composition differed strongly between areas of secondary and mature forest, and these differences were largely constant over time, except for an increase in compositional differences following the second hurricane. An indicator species analysis attributed this pattern to the longer persistence of pioneer species in areas of greater past land-use intensity, likely due to the more open canopy in secondary forest. When secondary forest areas of differing past land-use intensity were considered separately, few species of low community rank were found as indicators. When these areas were combined, more and higher-ranked species emerged as indicators, creating ecologically meaningful indicator species combinations that better captured the broad-scale plant community response to past land use. Our findings support the idea that effects of past land use can persist for decades to centuries following land-use abandonment, illustrating the importance of land-use legacies in shaping regenerating tropical secondary forests.


The main thrust of this study was to find out the conversational implicatures generated from flouting the Gricean maxims in two Jordanian satirical plays, namely "Muatin hasb alttalab" (1997) and "Al'an fahumtukum" (2012). Sixty-six talk exchanges from the two plays were analyzed to identify instances of flouting the Gricean maxims (quantity, quality, relation, and manner). The findings revealed that both plays flouted the Gricean maxims to poke fun and laughter. Furthermore, the maxims of quality and relation were flouted the most by the characters of both plays to ensure that their message is delivered effectively. Moreover, it was found that the characters of "al'an fahumtukum" had more space and freedom to express themselves than those in "muatin hasb alttalab" since the former was written in an era characterized by a democratic spirit.


Background: Radial nerve palsy (RNP) associated with humeral shaft fracture is a common injury pattern in trauma patients. The management of RNP associated with humeral fractures in high-energy trauma is controversial and poses a challenge to surgeons treating it. Purpose: Based on a review of our experience over the past 15 years, we determined the prognostic factors of radial nerve recovery after humeral fractures, evaluated the diagnostic role of nerve conduction studies and electromyography (EMG), and compared the outcomes of different treatment strategies. Materials and Methods: The data of 26 patients having RNP associated with humeral shaft fractures over a 15-year period were collected for a retrospective review. For statistical analysis, the patients were divided into groups on the basis of their recovery from RNP and the treatment strategies used. Results: The incidence of RNP associated with humeral fractures was 2.05%. In total, 91.3% of patients with primary RNP in this series experienced high-energy trauma. Spontaneous recovery was observed in 9 of 26 patients (34.6%). Radial nerve lesions were found in 7 of 8 patients with high-energy trauma. The severity of humeral shaft fractures was found to be a significant prognostic factor for spontaneous recovery from RNP. The rate of spontaneous recovery was significantly higher in the AO Foundation and Orthopaedic Trauma Association Type A humeral shaft fractures (P = 0.028) and lower in Type C fractures (P = 0.055). The median time to detect initial radial nerve recovery using EMG was 34 and 75 days after injury (P = 0.033). In high-energy trauma, tendon transfers were associated with more predictable outcomes than nerve reconstruction (favorable functional recovery: 100% for tendon transfers vs. 25% for nerve reconstruction, P = 0.007). Moreover, tendon transfers were associated with a shorter overall treatment duration (median treatment duration: 190 days for tendon transfers vs. 422 days for nerve reconstruction, P = 0.007). Conclusion: The prognosis of RNP associated with humeral shaft fractures in high-energy trauma is less favorable, with a low rate of spontaneous recovery. EMG is helpful for the early detection of initial nerve recovery. The outcomes of tendon transfers in high-energy trauma are predictable and the treatment duration is shorter. First-intention tendon transfer is a reasonable treatment strategy in patients with difficult nerve exploration, lower requirement for functional recovery, and lower compliance with treatment.


In The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick Carraway gazes upon the New York City skyline:
 Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty of the world....


Perceptually lossless foveated rendering methods exploit human perception by selectively rendering at different quality levels based on eye gaze (at a lower computational cost) while still maintaining the user's perception of a full quality render. We consider three foveated rendering methods and propose practical rules of thumb for each method to achieve significant performance gains in real-time rendering frameworks. Additionally, we contribute a new metric for perceptual foveated rendering quality building on HDR-VDP2 that, unlike traditional metrics, considers the loss of fidelity in peripheral vision by lowering the contrast sensitivity of the model with visual eccentricity based on the Cortical Magnification Factor (CMF). The new metric is parameterized on user-test data generated in this study. Finally, we run our metric on a novel foveated rendering method for real-time immersive 360° content with motion parallax.


Question: Following the framework of Suding et al. (2003), we examined whether morphological traits (organismal response), tolerance and competitive effect (specific process response) were associated with grass dominance (abundance response) on burning, mowing, fertilization and soil depth gradients in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa.

Location: University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

Methods: Using several pot experiments involving 29 grass species in total, we determined the vegetative traits, competitive effect and response, and tolerance to shading for grasses common in closed, tufted mesic grassland in KZN.

Results: The primary axis of grass–trait variation was most strongly related to a negative correlation (trade-off) between growth rate and specific leaf area (SLA), with broad-leaved, rapidly-growing grasses (high SLA) occupying one extreme and narrow-leaved, slow-growing grasses (low SLA) the other extreme of the first principal component. The low SLA, slow-growth strategy was found to be a relatively general strategy among grasses dominant in undisturbed, high litter grassland, as well as those adapted to moisture-stressed habitats. In contrast, grasses dominant in highly productive habitats with some form of disturbance, e.g. mowing, had a broad-leaved, rapid-growth strategy. Intermediate combinations of the SLA–growth rate trade-off were common among grasses dominant under other combinations of disturbance and soil resource availability.

Conclusions: Distinct patterns of organismal (SLA, growth rate) and specific process (competitive effect and response, as well as tolerance of shading) responses appeared to be associated with grasses dominant on gradients of burning, mowing, fertilization and soil depth. These organismal and specific process responses were similar to those for North American and European grasses dominant under the same environmental influences, suggesting that some general trait–environment patterns exist at an inter-continental scale. This general trait–environment relationship appears to be driven by functional adaptive selection along the SLA–environment continuum and its unavoidable trade-off with growth rate.


Legal aid to indigent persons is increasingly being recognised as fundamental to the realisation of access to justice for the most vulnerable in society. The Constitution of Botswana, whilst guaranteeing fundamental human rights and making provision for their enforcement, does not put an obligation on the state to provide the necessary financial help, if need be, to enforce them. Consequently, these rights are rendered nugatory to most Batswana who lack the financial strength to access legal services in order to uphold and vindicate these rights. Despite a clear need for the establishment of a legal aid scheme in Botswana, no concerted attempt has so far been made towards its establishment. This article puts the case for the establishment and proposes a possible a legal framework.


Title of dissertation: BENCHMARKING CHARGE EXCHANGE THEORY IN THE DAWNING ERA OF SPACE-BORNE HIGH-RESOLUTION X-RAY SPECTROMETERS Gabriele Latif Betancourt-Martinez, Doctor of Philosophy, 2017 Dissertation directed by: Professor Christopher Reynolds Department of Astronomy Dr. F. Scott Porter NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Charge Exchange (CX) is a process in which a highly charged ion captures one or more electrons from a neutral atom or molecule into an excited state during a close interaction. The electron's subsequent radiative cascade to the ground state produces diagnostic line emission in the X-ray band. CX with solar wind ions occurs frequently in the solar system, and CX may also occur astrophysically. In order to properly identify CX in astrophysical spectra and make use of its diagnostic properties, we must be able to model the emission. Theoretical treatments of CX are often computationally expensive, experimental benchmarks at high resolution are fairly scarce, and there is often poor agreement between the two. This dissertation seeks to build a better understanding of the mechanics and spectral signatures of CX through high-resolution experimental data paired with theoretical calculations of CX. Chapter 1 outlines the necessary ingredients for modeling and identifying CX spectra, describes several astrophysical environments in which CX has been observed or postulated to occur, and presents some of the challenges we are facing in identifying and understanding this emission. Chapter 2 describes the theoretical and computational tools used in this work. Chapter 3 discusses the experimental tools and facilities we use, namely an Electron Beam Ion Trap (EBIT) and an X-ray microcalorimeter. Chapter 4 presents experimental K-shell data that highlights both the subtle nature of the CX interaction and the difficulty in including those nuances in spectral synthesis codes. Chapter 5 presents the first high-resolution L-shell CX spectra of Ne-like Ni and describes what we can learn from these results. In Chapter 6, we take these data a step further and present a pipeline to calculate relative state-selective capture cross sections, previously only available from theoretical modeling. We then compare some of our results to theory. In Chapter 7, we discuss several future steps for our work. BENCHMARKING CHARGE EXCHANGE THEORY IN THE DAWNING ERA OF SPACE-BORNE HIGH-RESOLUTION X-RAY SPECTROMETERS


Exceptional points associated with non-Hermitian operators, i.e. operators being non-Hermitian for real parameter values, are investigated. The specific characteristics of the eigenfunctions at the exceptional point are worked out. Within the domain of real parameters the exceptional points are the points where eigenvalues switch from real to complex values. These and other results are exemplified by a classical problem leading to exceptional points of a non-Hermitian matrix.


Background: Acne vulgaris is the most common disorder of pilosebaceous unit. Systemic antibiotics are known to be effective in its treatment. We performed this investigation to compare the efficacy of azithromycin with doxycycline in the treatment of acne vulgaris. Method: A twelve-week study was performed on 69 patients with moderate facial acne to compare the efficacy of oral azithromycin with oral doxycycline. Sixty patients completed the study. Patients in the treatment arm one were scheduled to receive 500 mg azithromycin once daily three times a week, and patients in the treatment arm two were instructed to use 100 mg doxycycline daily. All patients administered topical tretinoin cream every other night. Clinical assessment was made at baseline and then every 4 weeks. Result: There were statistically significant improvements in comedones and inflammatory lesion counts in both groups. Neither drug was shown to be more effective than the other. Conclusion: This study indicated that azithromycin had similar efficacy to doxycycline in reducing acne lesions.


The uncertain origin of the recently discovered "changing-look" quasar phenomenon—in which a luminous quasar dims significantly to a quiescent state in repeat spectroscopy over ∼10-year timescales—may present unexpected challenges to our understanding of quasar accretion. To better understand this phenomenon, we take a first step toward building a sample of changing-look quasars with a systematic but simple archival search for these objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12. By leveraging the >10-year baselines for objects with repeat spectroscopy, we uncover two new changing-look quasars and a third discovered previously. Decomposition of the multiepoch spectra and analysis of the broad emission lines suggest that the quasar accretion disk emission dims because of rapidly decreasing accretion rates (by factors of ≳2.5), while disfavoring changes in intrinsic dust extinction for the two objects where these analyses are possible. Broad emission line energetics also support intrinsic dimming of quasar emission as the origin for this phenomenon rather than transient tidal disruption events or supernovae. Although our search criteria included quasars at all redshifts and transitions from either quasar-like to galaxy-like states or the reverse, all of the clear cases of changing-look quasars discovered were at relatively low redshift ( ) and only exhibit quasar-like to galaxy-like transitions.


Prior to the enactment of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) of 2005, United States bankruptcy law provided a number of different mechanisms designed to both facilitate credit markets and provide some measure of consumption insurance. The interplay between chapter 7 and chapter 13 discharge procedures in particular influenced debtor behavior such that debtors sought to maximize financial gain from bankruptcy by transferring wealth from nonexempt forms to exempt forms. BAPCPA dramatically altered the procedures affecting debtor behavior. In an effort to stop opportunistic behavior, BAPCPA eliminated a number of wealth manipulation strategies. However, BAPCPA provided new strategies and incentives to transfer wealth to new exempt forms, manipulate the means test, and ultimately succeed in avoiding debt repayment. This article examines incentives to act opportunistically before and after BAPCPA. As demonstrated in the article, BAPCPA creates a ten-fold incentive to curtail work six months before filing to reduce median income for purposes of manipulating the means test. However, because of increased costs to file, BAPCPA significantly deters nonopportunistic debtors. After examining BAPCPA's deleterious effect on bankruptcy law as a source of consumption insurance, the article suggests an alternate approach. Under the approach, a single filing procedure is created where debtors must repay debts from both income and wealth in an effort to track obligation to repay with ability to repay. The article suggests this approach creates greater economic efficiency, significantly deters opportunistic behavior, and maintains bankruptcy as a source of consumption insurance. Ultimately, the article suggests that BAPCPA benefits credit markets,


The helmeted hornbill faces a conservation crisis that requires an urgent response. A conservation planning workshop bringing together a multistakeholder group consisting of government agencies, non-government organisations, academia, field experts, donors and a zoological institution was held in Sarawak, Malaysia in May 2017 to construct such a response.


by Leddy G Glenn This study sought to decipher the difference in women's images between Hip Hop music videos of 2007 and 2011. Four songs were chosen, two by Beyonce Knowles and two by Gym Class Heroes. These artists were popular in 2007 and are popular today. All four of the performances will be described, a critical analysis will be performed and the findings will be provided. This analysis will answer the questions: Has Hip Hop changed its tune? Are adolescent African American girls today hearing and seeing the same stereotypes in the vast sea of music and videos, or are they being exposed to a more mature, socially conscious set of lyrics? The findings of this study showed that the backdrop to the videos changed from 2007 to 2011, but the representation of women did not. Unfortunately, African American women are visible only in roles that neither fulfill them nor encourage loving relationships. HAS HIP HOP CHANGED ITS TUNE? ANALYZING THE STEREOTYPES ADOLESCENT AFRICAN AMERICAN GIRLS ARE HEARING AND SEEING IN HIP HOP MUSIC AND VIDEOS.


Translation costs restrict the preparation of medical survey questionnaires in migrant and Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. This is further compounded by a lack of affordable and accurate machine translation (MT) mechanisms. This research investigates combined strategies intended to provide an efficacious and affordable machine translator to meet these needs by: (a) using an interlingua or hub-language which requires less resources for its construction than contemporary systems and has the additional benefit of significant error reduction; (b) creating word group structures to reduce the complexity of translation rules and enhance correct transfer of meaning between natural languages; and (c) defining smaller operating environments to restrict data input and further enhance translation by reducing error occurrence significantly. This research aims to produce a prototype MT mechanism that will accept questionnaire texts as discrete questions and suggested answers from which a respondent may select. The prototype will be designed to accept as input, non-ambiguous English as the source language (SL), translate it to a 'hub-language' or interlingua based on Esperanto and thence to a selected target language (TL). Additionally, an inverse path of translation from French back to English will enable validation of minimal or zero change in both syntax and semantics of the original input.


Academic and professional attention towards ethics in business in general and audit ethics in particular has grown significantly following well-documented audit failures and corporate scandals. Several empirical studies have been carried out to investigate the factors underlying such auditors' ethics. The majority has been done in the USA and other developed countries, often using undergraduate student convenience samples. They have provided clearly mixed results and have tended to focus on only one or two stages of the ethical decision making (EDM) model devised by Rest (1986). This study sought to build and improve on the previous research by investigating the impact of a broad set of personal, organisational, and issue-specific variables on three stages of external auditors' EDM process. Moreover, it did so in a developing country, namely Egypt, which is the largest country by population in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. This study hypothesised that personal variables (gender, age, educational level, position level, work experience, certification status, professional commitment, and personal moral philosophy), organisational variables (code of ethics, firms size, ethical climate types), and moral intensity dimensions are significantly related to the different stages of external auditors' EDM process. Using a relatively large sample, data was collected via a questionnaire which include four context-based external audit ethics scenarios. An adapted Arabic version of the questionnaire translated using translation-back translation technique was administered to Egyptian participants and usable responses were received from 393 external auditors working for 19 international audit firms in Egypt. For each scenario, the EDM process was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest's model. While moral intensity was originally conceptualised as a six-dimensional construct, factor analysis revealed only two dimensions, which were named 'perceived social pressure' and 'actual harm'. Results show that these two dimensions, particularly social pressure, are the strongest predictors of auditors' three stages of EDM. Ethical climate types and personal moral philosophy also showed some significant results. Significant and positive results were also found regarding firm size, work experience, position level, and certification status. However, findings revealed that age, educational level, code of ethics, and professional commitment have very limited impact on auditors' EDM stages. Interestingly, when gender differences were found, male auditors exhibited more ethical choices than females. Findings reinforces the need to give more attention to auditors' socialisation and training, as well as the importance of continuing professional education to enhance auditors' EDM abilities. Egyptian audit firms should also pay more attention to their organisational ethical infrastructure and maintain an organisational consensus regarding unethical acts. Using alternative methodologies and inclusion of the ethical behaviour stage in future studies, may aid future research in complementing these results, thus provide an enhanced understanding of auditors' ethical decisions. At the very least, future studies should study all the first three stages, as in this research, rather than focusing on only one or two stages. Additionally, cross-cultural audit ethics studies represent a fruitful avenue for future research. The questionnaire used in this study could be used, with minimal adaptations, in other countries.


In the present paper we report experimental and theoretical evidence for lithium biphenyl disproportionation in solution. The presence of an absorption band (at 250 nm), which corresponds to neutral biphenyl in the spectra of dissolved crystalline [Li+(THP)4][Bph˙−] (1), clearly suggests the disproportionation of the biphenyl radical anion into neutral biphenyl plus the corresponding dianion, 2Bph˙− ⇄ Bph2− + Bph0. The experimental spectrum of 1 displays four main groups of bands at 834, 644, 408 and 250 nm. Upon addition of an excess of lithium, the biphenyl band becomes diminished revealing a hidden lower intensity band at 262 nm, this one truly belonging to the dianion. Highly accurate time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) calculations of the electronic spectra of a series of contact as well as solvent separated ionic associate models, performed at the wB97XD/6-311++G(3df,3pd) level of theory in dimethoxyethane (DME) solution, revealed that the contact lithium biphenyl dianion [(Li+DME)2Bph2−] predicts all the main absorption bands fairly well, while the corresponding radical anion does not reproduce the experimental spectral pattern. Analysis of the electron density distribution performed by means of Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules (QTAIM) confirms that the studied ionic associates represent the correct resonance structures since the charges of the lithium cations are close to +1 in all the cases. Solvation usually plays a key role in these types of equilibria; however the underlying cause of this disproportionation seems to lie on the inherent electronic stabilities of the anionic species involved, as could be inferred from the reported free energy calculations of the nude ion associates, neglecting any solvent effects.


Prediction of Active and Inactive Chemical Compounds from High-Throughput Assays Elaf Jameel Islam This study considers chemical compounds that can exert their activity by interacting with a target protein or other molecular receptors. Our aim is to develop machine learning models that can predict if a chemical compound will be active in a particular test/assay. We will use data from assays that are present in the PubChem knowledgebase, specifically in its segment called BioAssays which reports the results of many high-throughput screening experiments. PubChem BioAssays is a valuable resource that contains information from a large number of experiments. In one assay, sometimes many hundreds or even many thousands of chemicals are tested. Data from these experimental assays contain information about chemicals that are active as well as chemicals that are not active in the assay. These represent an interesting resource of experimental data that are well suited for classification purposes. We will approach the problem by evaluating different ways that chemical compounds can be numerically described by means of so-called fingerprints, and then apply different machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to classify active and inactive chemicals for a number of assays. In this study, we will make comprehensive comparisons of the types of ML/DL models and types of fingerprint features that describe chemicals, and evaluate combinations of models and fingerprints that work best for the problem in question. Our focus is on finding those combinations which are useful for distinguishing active from inactive compounds in single PubChem assays. We will evaluate the methods across 10 assays and will examine the effects of 11 types 5 of fingerprints. For example, PubChem fingerprints and MACCS keys fingerprints. For the evaluation, up to now we performed 88 experiments for each dataset and 968 in total for all 10 PubChem assays. These experiments involved approximately 6,000 interactions between chemicals and their targets. The implementation of this project has been done using MATLAB. Based on these and additional experiments, we will be in a position to propose which combination of fingerprints and ML/DL models works best in the above mentioned task. Such modeling will be useful to predict activity for chemicals that are not yet tested.


Objective The aim of this study was to detect the arginase Ι (ARG I) enzyme in asthma patients, clarify its role, in addition to examining the relationship of this enzyme with bronchial asthma.
Methods:
Blood samples were collected from 100 patients from the Department of Medicine in Rizgary Hospital in Erbil City, in addition to intact 100 volunteers; the introduced questionnaire was filled out on the basis of type-induced asthma, duration of the disease, age of the patients, gender, family history, and allergy condition, Serum was separated to perform Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in Medical Research Center to examine the association of ARGΙ with bronchial asthma. By ARG activity we can measure the conversion of arginine to ornithine and urea. By using a quantitative colorimetric assay at 490 nm, employing a QuantiChrom arginase assay kit (Bioassay Systems).
Results: Our results depicted the association between ARGΙ and bronchial asthma: based on their age, significant elevation of serum arginase level was observed in the patients with ≥81 years old, which mean value (100.16±19.77c), p-value (0.000); also the duration of asthma ≥20 years (82.48±38.81c) , p-value (0.01) were remarkably affected; this sign was found in those with types of induced asthma and with allergy condition.  But the non- significant difference in the frequency of abnormal serum arginase level was observed in those patients that have a family history of asthma disease and gender of the patients. This finding demonstrated a remarkable association of ARG Ι in the development of asthma at p ˂ 0.05.


The Greek Aegean islands of Crete and Lesvos are widely known as prime destinations where tourists come to enjoy the sea, sand, and sun. Yet as geopolitical borderlands of not just Greece but the European Union (EU), they are also crucial points of destination and arrival for both economic and asylum-related migrations. Just as Greece has commanded the spotlight in anxieties and debates regarding the European market (as of 2012), these islands at Europe's periphery are at the center of contestations over European sovereignty, territory, and belonging. Demarcating not just countries but continents and vastly asymmetrical zones of economic development (Lauth Bacas, 2005), the Aegean island borders disrupt also the migratory activities of persons who seek to cross these boundaries.


Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all of them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of "virtue" (and only he) is entitled also to the further descriptions "honest" and "well-controlled" and "just" and "friendly" and "courageous" and "fostering" and "supportive," and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary "virtue"?


This report by the APSA Presidential Task Force on Women's Advancement in the Profession is based on personal and confidential semi-structured interviews with individuals from three graduate programs who entered graduate school around the same time (the early 1990s) about their educational and career experiences from the decision to pursue the PhD to the present—regardless of whether or not the individuals completed the degree or work in the profession today. How do people experience the profession of political science? What explains differences in individual trajectories—both within and outside the academy? How do climate, efforts to diversify the academy, and policies such as family leave impact individual careers? What policies and practices help graduate students on the job market, and faculty on the tenure-track? What are the tradeoffs in academic and non-academic pursuits? And what is the value of the Ph.D.—inside and outside the academy?


Abstract. A satellite-based approach to derive the aerosol direct shortwave (SW) radiative effect (ADRE) was studied in an environment with highly variable aerosol conditions over eastern China from March to October 2009. The method is based on using coincident SW top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) fluxes from the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) and aerosol optical depths (AODs) from the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to derive SW clear-sky ADRE. The estimate for the aerosol-free TOA flux (F0,TOA) is obtained by establishing linear regression between CERES SW TOA fluxes and MODIS AODs. A normalization procedure to a fixed solar zenith angle, Earth–Sun distance and atmospheric water vapor content was applied to the CERES fluxes prior to the linear fit against AOD to reduce the flux variation not related to aerosols. In the majority of the cases, the normalization increased positive correlation between observed SW TOA fluxes and AODs, and it decreased RMSE. The key question in the satellite-based approach is the accuracy of the estimated F0,TOA. Comparison with simulated F0,TOA showed that both the satellite method and the model produced qualitatively similar spatial patterns, but absolute values differed. In 58 % of the cases the satellite-based F0,TOA was within ±10 W m−2 of the modeled value (about 7–8 % difference in flux values). Over bright surfaces, the satellite-based method tend to produce lower F0,TOA than the model. The satellite-based clear-sky estimates for median instantaneous and diurnally averaged ADRE over the study area were −8.8 W m−2 and −5.1 W m−2, respectively. Over heavily industrialized areas, the cooling at TOA was 2 to more than 3 times the median value, and associated with high AODs (> 0.5). Especially during the summer months, positive ADREs were observed locally over dark surfaces. This was most probably a method artifact related to systematic change of aerosol type, sub-visual cloud contamination or both.


Horace Rumpole - cigar-smoking, claret-drinking, Wordsworth-spouting defender of some unlikely clients - often speaks of the great murder trial which revealed his talents as an advocate and made his reputation down at the Bailey when he was still a young man. Now, for the first time, the sensational story of the Penge Bungalow Murders case is told in full: how, shortly after the war, Rumpole took on the seemingly impossible task of defending young Simon Jerold, accused of murdering his father and his father's friend with a German officer's gun. And how the inexperienced young brief was left alone to pursue the path of justice, in a case that was to echo through the Bailey for years to come.


We know a lot about competitive or approximation ratios of scheduling algorithms. This, though, cannot be translated into direct bounds on the schedule produced by a scheduling algorithm, because often the optimal solution is intractable. We derive a methodology to find absolute bounds on the scheduling of jobs with precedence constraints on parallel identical machines. Our bounds hold for a large class of online and offline scheduling algorithms: the "work conserving" scheduling algorithms. We apply this methodology to prove that an important class of synchronous dataflow graphs $the parallelized pipelines -has very good performance characteristics when scheduled by a work conserving scheduler. Real time guarantees and granularity design for these dataflow graphs are discussed. We argue that parallelized pipelines should be dynamically scheduled on multiprocessor architectures.


This article which will appear as the introductory essay in Volume 9 of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science begins, at the editor's request, with a professional autobiography which traces the aspirations and training that led to Lempert's commitment to the field of law and social science and allows him to comment on the emergence of Empirical Legal Studies and other development sin the field. Some of what is written may be of interest to those who seek to understand the history of the field's revival, and those who were among the first generation of Law & Society Association members may see some of their own experience in Lempert's account. But much of the article's first portion may be of interest largely to the author's friends and family. The second and larger portion of the article discusses uses of law and social science research in the policy arena and cautions against the possibility that a study's policy appeal may exceed the weight that can fairly be put on it. Five studies are used as examples: James Q. Wilson and Kelling's essay on "Broken Windows," Lawrence Sherman and Richard Berk's work on arrest for spouse abuse, Isaac Ehrlich's article on the deterrent effects of the death penalty, John Lott and David Mustard's work on "right to carry" laws and Richard Sander's mismatch critique of affirmative action. The portion discussing Sander's work presents previously unpublished data that not only refutes published claims by Professor Sander that Michigan Law School's minority graduates fare poorly on the bar, but also indicates in 3 recent years affirmative action eligibility appears to have had little if any relationship to bar passage success. The article also emphasizes the importance to policy of understanding mechanism, and the need for sophistication in the soft methods of study design along with a good understanding of formal statistics.


Models of parallel processing systems typically assume that one has l servers and jobs are split into an equal number of k = l tasks. This seemingly simple approximation has surprisingly large consequences for the resulting stability and performance bounds. In reality, best practices for modern mapreduce systems indicate that a job's partitioning factor should be much larger than the number of servers available, with some researchers going to far as to advocate for a "tiny tasks" regime, where jobs are split into over 10,000 tasks. In this paper we use recent advances in stochastic network calculus to fundamentally understand the effects of task granularity on parallel systems' scaling, stability, and performance. For the split-merge model, we show that when one allows for tiny tasks, the stability region is actually much better than had previously been concluded. For the single-queue fork-join model, we show that sojourn times quickly approach the optimal case when l "big tasks" are subdivided into k≫ l "tiny tasks". Our results are validated using extensive simulations, and the applicability of the models used is validated by experiments on an Apache Spark cluster.


Cooperative compliance programmes have been introduced in various tax jurisdictions, with its pioneers including Australia, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Such programmes are part of a wider trend in regulatory systems that emerged in the 1980s, and attempt to better balance interests between the tax authority and corporate taxpayers, and seek to reflect a more collaborative working method, as promoted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This paper examines the US cooperative compliance arrangement, known as the Compliance Assurance Process (CAP), and probes the nature of the relationship that ensues between the regulator and regulatee under CAP, the motivations of each party to the arrangement, and the manner in which the relationship is (or is not) sustained. This paper sheds light on such matters pertaining to CAP by examining its evolution and operation through the lens of regulation theory, drawing in particular on the work of Etienne (2013), who develops a typology of ideal type interactions and relational signals in regulatory settings. It is also informed by interview data from two separate studies involving interviews with senior in-house tax executives/advisors. Drawing on Etienne's typology facilitates a better understanding of the limits of cooperative compliance in the context of large businesses, particularly in the US environment. This paper shows the importance of adequately capturing the motivations of regulator and regulatee, demonstrating they do not carry equal weight nor have they remained stable over time, and addresses the implications of these differences for the success of an initiative such as CAP. It also demonstrates that interactions between regulator and regulatee follow multiple logics, and highlights and critiques the high level of interaction required, especially during the initial stage of responsive regulation-based relationships. The paper concludes with some broader considerations around regulator-regulatee relationships, including the potential role for recent technological innovations in this context. Keywords: cooperative compliance, Compliance Assurance Process, responsive regulation, Etienne


An in vitro system that recapitulates the in vivo effect of AU-rich elements (AREs) on mRNA deadenylation has been developed from Xenopus activated egg extracts. ARE-mediated deadenylation is uncoupled from mRNA body decay, and the rate of deadenylation increases with the number of tandem AUUUAs. A novel ARE-binding protein called ePAB (for embryonic poly(A)-binding protein) has been purified from this extract by ARE affinity selection. ePAB exhibits 72% identity to mammalian and Xenopus PABP1 and is the predominant poly(A)-binding protein expressed in the stage VI oocyte and during Xenopus early development. Immunodepletion of ePAB increases the rate of both ARE-mediated and default deadenylation in vitro. In contrast, addition of even a small excess of ePAB inhibits deadenylation, demonstrating that the ePAB concentration is critical for determining the rate of ARE-mediated deadenylation. These data argue that ePAB is the poly(A)-binding protein responsible for stabilization of poly(A) tails and is thus a potential regulator of mRNA deadenylation and translation during early development.


ABSTRACT How can European democratic states respond to Russian information warfare? This article aims to enable and spur systematic research of how democracies can respond to the spread of distorted information as part of information warfare. The article proposes four ideal-type models representing different strategies that democratic governments can employ; blocking, confronting, naturalising and ignoring. Each strategy is illustrated by ways of empirical examples of strategies applied by European states in view of what is regarded as an unwelcome Russian strategic narrative that is spread as part of information warfare. We problematise each strategy and explore reasons for why states choose one strategy over another. We then explore how different strategies might contribute to destabilise or stabilise the security environment and how they resonate with democratic values. Finally, we contribute to theorising on strategic narratives by highlighting that the choice of strategy will influence states in their formation of strategic narratives. We thus further theorising on strategic narratives by highlighting the link between strategies and narratives, thus identifying one central dynamic in how narratives are formed.


This paper sets up a choice theoretic, dynamic optimization model in a life cycle setting, within which a temporary international migrant attempts to maximize a lifetime utility function. The choice variables are consumption at each point in time and the period of stay abroad. Determinants of the latter choice are the time stream of benefits and costs associated with migration. Benefits consist primarily of the jump in income levels. Costs comprise, first, of initial job-search and travel costs, second, of higher living costs abroad and, third, of 'psychic' costs due to family separation and cultural alienation. The model is applied to a data set of 417 Pakistani workers in Saudi Arabia. The impact of income 'shocks' of varying magnitude on planned lengths of stay abroad is simulated. It appears that the decline in wages has to be substantial, over 50 per cent, before, more or less, immediate large-scale return migration can commence to Pakistan.


As part of the greater focus on the role of firms and entrepreneurship in development, spotlight has recently fallen upon so-called 'social enterprises'. Social enterprises are organizations that operate in the borderland between the for-profit and non-for-profit spheres. The inherent purpose of social enterprises is generation of social change through commercial means which is effectuated through innovative business model hybrids. At the bottom of pyramid (BOP) in developing Sub-Saharan Africa, the need for sustainable solutions is greater than ever and social enterprises are increasingly in focus as key players in sustainable development. Kenya constitutes a suitable location for the collection of empirical evidence on social enterprises at the BOP, partly because Kenya is a regional forerunner in the promotion of an entrepreneurial business culture, partly because Kenya displays many of the poverty related development challenges endemic to Sub-Saharan Africa. Hence, this paper presents six tales of social enterprises from the Kenyan BOP, who all have managed to pursue a social agenda while at the same time achieving commercial viability. While the cases contribute to the BOP literature as each constitutes solid evidence of social routes to success at the BOP, they also reveal important dilemmas facing managers who each day are forced to make difficult decisions in order to strike the right balance between achieving both commercial and social goals. Thereby the paper also adds significant value to the ongoing discussions in the social enterprise literature. Besides constituting important empirical evidence from the inadequately investigated area of social enterprises at the BOP, the cases provide basis for raising important conceptual issues related to the boundaries of social and traditional commercial enterprises. CBDS Working Paper Successful Social Enterprises in Africa iii


This work assesses the changes resulting from durum wheat (Triticum turgidum L. var. durum) breeding in Italy and Spain during the 20th century on grain filling, biomass production, and allocation at anthesis, and the remobilization of preanthesis photosynthates to the grain of main stems. Field experiments, involving 12 Italian and 12 Spanish cultivars released at different periods, were conducted at two Spanish sites during three growing seasons. Breeding activities did not modify final grain weight (W G ), the maximum rate of grain filling (R), nor grain filling duration (D) of central grains of main spikes. Genetic variability existed for W C and R within countries and periods. Cycle length (expressed as days from sowing to anthesis [DSA]) was reduced by 2 and 8 d in Italian and Spanish cultivars, respectively. Crop dry weight (CDW) decreased by 21% (0.51% yr -1 ) and green area index (GAI) by 28% (-0.33% yr -1 ) in Spanish cultivars. Green area index at anthesis did not differ between old and modern Italian cultivars, while CDW decreased by 9%. Leaf area index (LAI) remained unchanged in cultivars from both countries, while the spike:stem ratio increased by 8 and 10% in Italian and Spanish cultivars, respectively. Changes over time in DSA were positively associated with changes in CDW and GAI. Dry matter translocation (DMT) efficiency switched from 9% in old cultivars to 20% in modern ones. The contribution ofpreanthesis assimilates to grain yield (CPA) increased to values of 31 and 27% in Italian and Spanish modern cultivars, respectively. Opportunities for further increases in genetic yield potential in Mediterranean-type environments are discussed.


Condensation heat transfer and pressure drop of R245fa were investigated experimentally in a plate-shell heat exchanger which consisted of thirty seven counter flow channels formed by thirty-eight plates with a chevron angle of 50°. The upflow of the water in one channel receives heat from the downflow of R245fa in the other. The effects of refrigerant mass flux, imposed heat flux, refrigerant saturation pressure, and mean vapor quality on the heat transfer characteristics were explored in detail. Experimental correlations were proposed to predict the condensation heat transfer coefficient and friction factor in terms of the Boiling number, Reynolds number, and Prandtl number. In the experiments, the mean vapor quality in the refrigerant channel was varied from .22 to .82, mass flux from 3 to 5 kg/m 2 , imposed heat flux from 1 to 3 kW/m 2 , and system pressure from .61 to .81 MPa.


Concern over greenhouse gases and the onset of global warming has become
international in scale. Business opportunities arising from greenhouse gas abatement have
been correspondingly recognised, and the potential advantages of less greenhouse
intensive processes are being explored for any available market advantage. With this
recognition comes a need to ensure that abatement is occurring, and that environmental
benefit is a real outcome.
Ecological modernisation theory posits that capitalist business behaviour can benefit by
building into its activities environmental stewardship, thereby contributing to long term
conservation of global ecosystems. The theory is explored, defining terms and discussing
insights and limitations. The nature of greenhouse policy and definitions of what might
comprise a greenhouse abatement industry are then established. This background
provides a basis from which to investigate the business opportunities and constraints of
genuine ecologically driven greenhouse reform.
The thesis employs two case studies from the small Australian state of Tasmania. They
depict how the theory of ecological modernisation is translated into practice. The
Tasmanian government owns two businesses that significantly influence the state's
greenhouse profile - one managing forests, the other renewable energy resources — and
these have been chosen. Each case is tested against a history of environmental conflict
and in the context of current marketing of a 'clean and green' image for the state. On this
basis an assessment of what ecological modernisation can achieve is made.
It is concluded that the environmental discourse characteristic of greenhouse policies
cannot be translated into significant business opportunities due to difficulties involved
with investment risks and with breaking from traditional development paradigms.
Outcomes tend to constitute technological add-ons (evidence of weak ecological
modernisation), or, in the worst case, a continuation of existing unsustainable practices
within an environmental guise. This confines policy goals and production outcomes, and
directly results in overstating environmental gains, a constriction of socio-political
discourse, and undermined marketing potential in terms of environmental care. The
promotion of greenhouse potential is therefore likely to be little more than rhetoric. The
study concludes that, while ecological modernisation provides a theoretical framework
through which trends can be ascertained, it fails in a prescriptive sense, for it does not
explicitly cater for the uptake of environmental stewardship in the confines of strained
economic circumstances similar to those of Tasmania and, perhaps, other types of
economies.


The trend towards globalisation and increased competitiveness across markets has meant that many businesses are looking at solutions to increase efficiency. Businesses have previously focussed on workforce levels and streamlined internal operations to achieve efficiencies. Increasingly businesses are now looking at the supply chain and more specifically procurement to provide additional efficiencies. Many companies are looking at eProcurement to increase efficiencies and decrease the bottom line. E-Procurement is evolving as one of the shining lights in the evolving e-Business story and this paper will look at a research survey of Australian organisations to determine what is driving and hindering e-Procurement. A model of e-Procurement drivers and barriers is presented with an analysis of the views of 38 organisations. The main outcomes of the survey show that cost based factors are driving e-Procurement whilst technology issues are the main barriers to eProcurement.


Implicit functions are dependently typed functions, such that arguments are provided (by default) by inference machinery instead of programmers of the surface language. Implicit functions in Agda are an archetypal example. In the Haskell language as implemented by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), polymorphic types are another example. Implicit function types are first-class if they are treated as any other type in the surface language. This holds in Agda and partially holds in GHC. Inference and elaboration in the presence of first-class implicit functions poses a challenge; in the context of Haskell and ML-like languages, this has been dubbed "impredicative instantiation" or "impredicative inference". We propose a new solution for elaborating first-class implicit functions, which is applicable to full dependent type theories and compares favorably to prior solutions in terms of power, generality and simplicity. We build atop Norell's bidirectional elaboration algorithm for Agda, and we note that the key issue is incomplete information about insertions of implicit abstractions and applications. We make it possible to track and refine information related to such insertions, by adding a function type to a core Martin-L'of type theory, which supports strict (definitional) currying. This allows us to represent undetermined domain arities of implicit function types, and we can decide at any point during elaboration whether implicit abstractions should be inserted.


A library for rare books and a reading garden, the following project emerged from an attempt to better understand the idea of an autonomous architecture. Framing architectural questions as a choice between opposing alternatives of perceived relevance (e.g., geometric construction versus geometric composition, self referential versus self governing, singular versus universal) the project, which at its beginning was a simple exercise in geometric constructive technique, evolved as it was viewed through the lenses of those dualities.


Materials of built heritage are at risk of bio-deterioration caused by diverse populations of microorganisms living in biofilms. The microbial metabolites of these biofilms are responsible for the deterioration of the underlying substratum and may lead to physical weakening and discoloration of stone. Fungal ability in production of pigments and organic acids have crucial role in discoloration and degradation of different types of stone in cultural heritage objects. Additionally, stone objects may support novel communities of microorganism that are active in bio-deterioration process this investigation focused on mycological analyses of microbial biofilm from Mahadev temple, Bastar of Chhattisgarh state which is made of sand stone and which were heavily colonized by fungi. The eight fungal species on sand stone were isolated. Aspergillus sp. was common in stone structure. The identified micro fungi cause discoloration as well as mechanical exfoliation of building stone material that was analyzed through mechanical hyphae penetration and production of dark pigments and organic acids.


Malware and other sources of malicious activity are becoming more prevalent on home networks. In addition to traditional PC-based malware, new classes of threats (e.g., botnets of Internet of Things, or IoT, devices engaging in denial of service attacks) have emerged. Many of these threats are opaque for an end user. Unless a user is appropriately notified about a threat (e.g., via consumer anti-virus or commercial intrusion detection mechanisms) or the user notices degradations in service quality, threats may go undetected. Put another way, these threats may cause their harms without causing noticeable performance problems for the infected end-user. Since network security threats generate negative externalities on a local scale (e.g., malware entering a corporate network), as well as for the greater Internet ecosystem (e.g., botnets in a DoS), a number of stakeholders have championed a range of network security notification and remediation schemes as useful strategies to combat these new types of emergent threats.
This paper reviews the efficacy and potential of both past and proposed end-user notification schemes. It begins by tracing the origin of notification schemes from other Internet security governance initiatives (such as the anti-spam push) and those that emerged following large, defining security events such as the Conficker worm. Next, it catalogs 13 prior and current notification and remediation schemes enacted across various jurisdictions and contexts in the U.S. and abroad. These schemes are evaluated in terms of their scope, similarity, efficacy, and applicability.
We conclude that, while some prior schemes may have been effective in the past, existing initiatives and standards work on notification is often rooted in an older threat landscape that does not scale well beyond the older "one modem-one PC" home network paradigm, and hence does not address the challenges confronted in an IoT world.
A common theme in notification and remediation schemes is their dependence on timely notification to end-users of threats, along with actionable remediation advice appropriate to the threat. Implementing this paradigm in today's novel threat landscape will require cooperation across the multiple stakeholders that need to be involved in sharing information and in implementing the actions required by any proposed scheme. The chain of stakeholders is diverse and includes network operators, ISPs, standards bodies, governments, equipment providers, consumers, and various alliances of these groups.
We discuss key technical and policy issues that must be resolved in order to ensure a trusted notification and incentive-compatible remediation scheme is in place to address these threats effectively. By highlighting existing schemes that effectively act at the intersection of stakeholder interests, we show that meeting the two notification and remediation goals is possible if future designs are rooted in the lessons of existing schemes.


The amount of new knowledge accumulated in the past 15 years about the aetiology, epidemiology, and public significance of diarrhoeal disease is quite remarkable, particularly because such knowledge has challenged orthodox concepts strongly rooted in misconceptions. Until recently, most diarrhoeas in the general population were regarded as 'food indigestion' and accordingly were given a variety of lay names. Remarkably, even today some medical professionals may refer to certain diarrhoeas as caused by unwholesome food with characteristics incompatible with health. Even though shigellosis, salmonellosis, cholera, giardiasis, amoebiasis, and other specific clinical entities had been characterized satisfactorily, as recently as 10 years ago it was difficult to prove that most outbreaks of diarrhoea in communities were of an infectious origin. In fact, some spoke of 'nutritional diarrhoea' in analogy with nutritional anaemias. It is now accepted, however, that most diarrhoeas in the community and in outpatient and emergency hospital services are related to viral, microbial, and parasitic agents, a concept supported by the following considerations: (a) diarrhoeas are prevalent in ecosystems with inadequate environmental sanitation, education, income, and personal hygiene; (b) secondary cases develop in contacts of index cases within intervals compatible with incubation periods, pointing to spread by direct or indirect contact; (c) incidence and severity of diarrhoea decrease with age, and older persons are relatively free of diarrhoea, suggesting the d!..relopment of immunity; (d) comprehensive laboratory investigations demonstrate a potential infectious pathogen in about 70 per cent of acute diarrhoea cases (Mats 1983a). Thus, improvement of personal hygiene and environmental sanitation results in a significant reduction in morbidity and mortality due to diarrhoeal diseases. It is easy to understand the epidemic proportions of diarrhoea in New York City at the turn of the century, comparable to that of many less developed countries today, when environmental conditions, education, personal hygiene, and income were low, especially among immigrants. Part of the gap regarding the aetiology of diarrhoea was resolved in the


Vaccines against dengue virus (DV) are commercially nonexistent. A subunit vaccination strategy may be of value, especially if a safe viral vector acts as biologically active adjuvant. In this paper, we focus on an immunoglobulin-like, independently folded domain III (DIII) from DV 2 envelope protein (E), which contains epitopes that elicits highly specific neutralizing antibodies. We modified the hepatitis B small surface antigen (HBsAg, S) in order to display DV 2 DIII on a virus-like particle (VLP), thus generating the hybrid antigen DIII-S. Two varieties of measles virus (MV) vectors were developed to express DIII-S. The first expresses the hybrid antigen from an additional transcription unit (ATU) and the second additionally expresses HBsAg from a separate ATU. We found that this second MV vectoring the hybrid VLPs displaying DIII-S on an unmodified HBsAg scaffold were immunogenic in MV-susceptible mice (HuCD46Ge-IFNarko), eliciting robust neutralizing responses (averages) against MV (1:1280 NT90), hepatitis B virus (787 mIU/mL), and DV2 (1:160 NT50) in all of the tested animals. Conversely, the MV vector expressing only DIII-S induced immunity against MV alone. In summary, DV2 neutralizing responses can be generated by displaying E DIII on a scaffold of HBsAg-based VLPs, vectored by MV.


With a view to bridging the gap between deep learning and symbolic AI, we present a novel end-to-end neural network architecture that learns to form propositional representations with an explicitly relational structure from raw pixel data. In order to evaluate and analyse the architecture, we introduce a family of simple visual relational reasoning tasks of varying complexity. We show that the proposed architecture, when pre-trained on a curriculum of such tasks, learns to generate reusable representations that better facilitate subsequent learning on previously unseen tasks when compared to a number of baseline architectures. The workings of a successfully trained model are visualised to shed some light on how the architecture functions.


In the present study, an attempt has been made to synthesize some novel phenyl azochalcone derivatives for biological activity chaclone were prepared from 4-aminoacetophenone, diazotization of the amino ketone followed by Claisen Schimdt condensation and finally coupling of diazo group with various reagents gave phenylazochalcone. The structure of the compounds has been confirmed by IR, NMR (1H & 13C), mass spectral data and elemental analysis. All the derivatives were screened for antitubercular activity by MABA method, in-vitro antiinflammatory activity by BSA method and antioxidant activity by DPPH method.


Feature discovery aims at finding the best representation of data. This is a very important topic in machine learning, and in reinforcement learning in particular. Based on our recent work on feature discovery in the context of reinforcement learning to discover a good, if not the best, representation of states, we report here on the use of the same kind of approach in the context of approximate dynamic programming. The striking difference with the usual approach is that we use a non parametric function approximator to represent the value function, instead of a parametric one. We also argue that the problem of discovering the best state representation and the problem of the value function approximation are just the two faces of the same coin, and that using a non parametric approach provides an elegant solution to both problems at once.


Detailed characterization of the shallow subsurface is important not only in environmental, groundwater, and geotechnical engineering applications, but in neotectonics, mining geology, and the analysis of petroleum reservoirs (and analogs) as well. Extensive drilling or trenching to assist in characterization or monitoring, however, is at times imprudent or prohibitively expensive. In such cases, characterizing the upper layers of the Earth cost-effectively and noninvasively becomes important. Seismology in its various forms has been used to gather subsurface information for almost a century. There are numerous examples of using seismic reflection techniques to examine the upper 100 m of the Earth's subsurface. However, ultrashallow (less than 3 m) reflection seismology has only become possible over the last 20 years due to improvements in equipment, survey design, and processing procedures. This has allowed coincident seismic and GPR surveys (Figure 1) with vertical resolution ∼20 cm and detection of ref...


Phosphorylation at C-terminal sites contributes to the increases in Akt activity associated with the cell cycle, growth factor signaling, and DNA damage. Cells need to carefully control the activity of kinases, especially those that are involved in regulating cell proliferation and survival, such as Akt (also known as protein kinase B). Liu et al. found that phosphorylation of Akt (an indication of activity) fluctuated with the cell cycle, peaking at the same time as cyclin A, which starts to accumulate in S phase and peaks in G2. Akt1 had four putative cyclin A–binding motifs, and mutation of two of these motifs substantially reduced coimmunoprecipitation of Akt1 with cyclin A and also reduced its phosphorylation. In vitro kinase assays and mass spectrometry analysis revealed that cyclin A associated with cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (Cdk2) phosphorylated Ser477 and Thr479 in the C-terminal tail of Akt1, which are near the activating phosphorylation site Ser473. Surprisingly, these two sites did not conform to the consensus motif for cyclin A/Cdk2 phosphorylation, and their location near the C terminus may provide the structural flexibility that is typically supplied by the proline residue in the consensus motif. Analysis of phosphorylation of Akt1 in cells by immunoblotting or immunofluorescence confirmed that these sites were phosphorylated in a manner that fluctuated with the cell cycle and was dependent on cyclin A/Cdk2 activity. Two other kinases, mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 2 (mTORC2) and DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNAPK) also stimulated phosphorylation of Ser477 and Thr479, suggesting that these residues also contribute to the activity of Akt in response to growth factor stimulation and DNA damage, respectively. Phosphorylation of Ser473 and Thr308 was undetectable in cells in which Akt1 was reconstituted with a mutant that could not be phosphorylated at the C-terminal residues (Akt1-S477A/T479A) and was enhanced in cells reconstituted with the phosphorylation-mimetic mutant Akt1-S477D/T479E, suggesting that phosphorylation of the C-terminal residues was necessary for phosphorylation of the two other sites. Cells expressing the phosphomimetic Akt1-S477D/T479E exhibited increased tumor growth in mouse xenografts. Brain-specific knockout of cyclin A reduced Ser477 and Thr479 phosphorylation in the olfactory bulb and increased markers of apoptosis, suggesting that these cell cycle–regulated phosphorylation events may be critical for cell survival. P. Liu, M. Begley, W. Michowski, H. Inuzuka, M. Ginzberg, D. Gao, P. Tsou, W. Gan, A. Papa, B. M. Kim, L. Wan, A. Singh, B. Zhai, M. Yuan, Z. Wang, S. P. Gygi, T. H. Lee, K.-P. Lu, A. Toker, P. P. Pandolfi, J. M. Asara, M. W. Kirschner, P. Sicinski, L. Cantley, W. Wei, Cell-cycle-regulated activation of Akt kinase by phosphorylation at its carboxyl terminus. Nature 508, 541–545 (2014). [PubMed]