Abstract Objectives: To compare the proportion of patients with documented diagnoses and management plans when they presented with musculoskeletal complaints at two community health centres (CHCs) using two models of care: one with a rheumatology outreach service and the other with none. Secondly, to describe the profile of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who attended the CHC with the outreach service. Design: Cross-sectional. Setting: Heidelberg Community Health Centre and Vanguard Community Health Centre, Cape Town. Subjects: A group of 59 patients at each CHC were compared regarding engagement of their musculoskeletal complaints by doctors and clinical nurse practitioners (CNPs). Secondly, 24 RA patients who attended Heideveld CHC were profiled. Results: A comparison of the "overall engagement" between the two CHCs [risk difference (RD) -0.06, 95% confidence interval (CI): -0.17–0.05, odds ratio (OR) 0.79, 95% CI: 0.51–1.24, chi-square 0.82, p-value 0.36] was not significantly different. Comparison between doctors (RD -0.05, 95% CI: -0.05–0.08, OR 0.80, 95% CI: 0.46–1.40, chi-square 0.41, p-value 0.52) was also not significantly different. The comparison between the CNPs at the two CHCs was statistically significant (RD 0.30, 95% CI: 0.14–0.45, OR 8.37, 95% CI: 1.05–66.60, Fisher's exact test 0.01), but the CI around OR was large. Patients with RA had a mean age of 60 years, an average of two co-morbidities and an average of three annual clinic visits. Eighty- three per cent resided in the drainage area of the clinic. Conclusion: There was no significant difference in engagement between the CHCs. The potential that CNPs seemed to show of being positively influenced by the outreach service should be further researched. Patients with RA had co- morbidities that required management at primary healthcare level.


Gaze is an important component of social interaction. While there is a large amount of research about perception of gaze direction, there has been comparatively little looking at gaze duration. As social interactions are inherently dynamic, understanding how long a person looks is at least as important as where they are looking. The current experiment was a normative study investigating individual differences in preference for mutual gaze duration. An international sample (n > 400) were shown a series of video clips of an actor (chosen at random) gazing directly at them for varying lengths of time. Participants then had to classify the amount of eye contact occurring during the clips as being either too long or too short to be "comfortable". Demographic information and personality data based on the Big Five Inventory were also gathered. It was found that the average length of preferred gaze duration was normally distributed with a mean of 3.2 seconds (± 1 second). The results showed a significant correlation between higher agreeableness self-ratings and preference for longer mutual gaze duration; this was particularly true for female participants viewing male actors. Further, higher extraversion and openness scores were found to positively correlate with higher variance in clip classification, indicating that participants who score more highly on these measures have a less strict categorisation of what constitutes a comfortable amount of mutual gaze duration. Differences between nationality and response variance were also found. The results suggest that while on average preference for length of mutual gaze is stable, individual preference in duration is influenced by multiple factors such as gender, age and nationality. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


There has been renewed interest in sociotechnical systems in the context of transitioning to a more sustainable society. While gains have been made in the qualitative understanding of sustainable transitions and sociotechnical systems, these approaches have not been well-operationalized. Given the importance of meeting future energy and environmental policy targets, there is need to develop predictive techniques and more robust methods to quantify and analyze sociotechnical systems undergoing rapid change and uncertainty due to sustainability pressures. Sustainability transitions depend on large-scale diffusion of technological and behavioral innovations on physical and virtual networked systems. Transitions can therefore be viewed as a subclass of diffusion phenomenon and subject to a range of mathematical and computational methods. We review, categorize, and critically assess methodological and theoretical approaches that integrate different aspects of sustainability, innovation, and complexity. We argue that these approaches should be adapted to improve our understanding of the behavior and dynamics of a broad range of sociotechnical systems to meet sustainability objectives. We therefore also make the conceptual link between complexity and sustainability as complimentary fields of research to inform policy and decision making to achieve more sustainable outcomes. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 19: 8-22, 2014


Fishing is the only source of livelihood in the coastal communities. This is the reason why poverty persists in these areas. The lack of other alternative livelihood activities results to overfishing and eventual degradation of fishery resources, thus, forming a vicious cycle of poverty and resource degradation. Recognizing the importance of promoting healthy and sustainable fisheries, SEAFDEC/AQD collaborated with the local government of Anini-y to develop a sustainable utilization of natural marine resources within the marine protected area at Nogas Island, Anini-y, Antique. This study determined the fishers' sociocultural characteristics and how these variables influence their participation in the community's coastal resources management activities. Primary data were collected from household survey using semi-structured questionnaire, focus group discussion and in-depth interview with key informants. Means and frequencies were used to describe the fishers' sociocultural and demographic characteristics while logistic regressions run by SPSS program was used to determine significance of relationships between sociocultural variables and extent of participation in coastal resources management. Results showed that age, gender, household size, distance from the shoreline, perceptions about coastal resources and fishers' willingness to leave fishing did not significantly influence fishers' participation in coastal resources management while fishers' economic well being, attitude towards coastal resources and awareness level to fishery regulations showed significant influence.


Central Asia faces serious environmental challenges, many as a legacy of Soviet times. Many of these environmental issues involve the use and abuse of scarce water resources. The huge investments in irrigation infrastructure by Soviet planners resulted in a vast diversion of water flows from the two main rivers of the region—the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya—into arid areas to feed the rapid expansion of region-wide cotton production, and to supply the rapidly growing urban centers in Central Asia. Since water was treated as a free good, it was used wastefully and unsustainably. In addition, Central Asia has to deal with many environmental hot spots caused by industrial and mining activities initiated in Soviet times. Add to this the lack of effective treatment of industrial and residential waste water and solid wastes in the growing cities of the region, and it is clear that Central Asia faces a tremendous environmental challenge, which needs to be addressed both at a national and a regional level to ensure that by 2050 the vision of a livable and sustainable future for the region is assured. These environmental challenges, which are generally well known and understood, will further be aggravated by the likely global and regional impacts of climate change, which until recently have not been as well understood and sufficiently considered, let alone addressed. This article focuses only on the climate change impacts and possible ways for Central Asian countries to address them in the coming decades.


This document describes a Fully-Specified Forward Error Correction
(FEC) Scheme for the one-dimensional (1-D) interleaved parity code and
its application to reliable delivery of media streams in the context
of FEC Framework. The 1-D interleaved parity code is a systematic
code, where a number of repair symbols are generated from a set of
source symbols and sent in one or more repair flows in addition to the
source symbols that are sent to the receiver(s) within a source flow.
The 1-D interleaved parity code offers a good protection against
bursty packet losses at a cost of decent complexity. This document
extends the FEC header defined in RFC 2733 and registers a new RTP
payload format for the FEC that is generated by the 1-D interleaved
parity code from a source media encapsulated in RTP. This new payload
format is compatible with and used as a part of the DVB Application-
layer FEC Specification.


This paper addresses the problem of finding appropriate method for analysis of non-stationary time series with complex trends and possibly with distinct periodic components in power spectrum. A well established Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MDFA) combined with Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) used on several artificial examples to demonstrate the capabilities of the method. In this combined method SSA is used for nonparametric periodic components extraction and for adaptive automatic nonparametric trend extraction. As usual, the local fractal characteristics of the signal are studied by utilizing the MFDFA algorithm. It is shown that combined method is capable of accurately extracting fractal features when signal is contaminated with broadband and narrowband noise. The main task that the author focused on when creating the method was the analysis of currents through ion channels in cell membrane.


The aim of this article is the comparison of input options of river boundary condition of MODFLOW - three-dimensional numerical simulation model of groundwater flow. The water level in stream flowing through territory of hydrogeological layer can be computed via three built-in modules: River, Stream and Streamflow-Routing. In this study the code MODFLOW is used to simulate idealized aquifer and stream. The differences between computed groundwater table showed to be minimal, thus in case of modules Stream and Streamflow- Routing they are equally usable as using module River with external one or two-dimensional simulation of surface water flow, which is more time-consuming process. However, this applies only to idealized, simplified conditions of the modeled environment. For more complex simulation of flow in streams with irregular structure of the streambed is necessary to use either an external simulation or use the Streamflow-Routing module, which includes the possibility to enter more complex hydraulic ...


IMPORTANCE
Rural homebound older adults are a vulnerable population at risk for depression, loneliness, and limited participation, but studies that examine these factors in this population are scarce.

OBJECTIVE
To describe the degree of depression, loneliness, and activity engagement among rural homebound older adults and determine differences in loneliness and activity engagement between those with and those without self-reported depression.

DESIGN
Cross-sectional survey.

SETTING
Two rural counties in south central Indiana.

PARTICIPANTS
Homebound adults ages 60 yr and older who received nutritional or companionship services from a local Area Agency on Aging. Outcomes and Measures: Depression was measured with an item on the self-report questionnaire and the Geriatric Depression Scale-15. Loneliness was measured with an item on the self-report questionnaire and the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Activity engagement was measured with the Engagement in Meaningful Activities Survey and the Meaningful Activity Participation Assessment.

RESULTS
Ninety-one participants returned surveys, of which 78 were analyzed. Regarding depression, 40% of participants reported having it, but results for the Geriatric Depression Scale-15 showed that 63% were in the indicative or suggestive range for depression. Participants in general reported moderate loneliness and low to moderate engagement in meaningful activities. Those with self-reported depression had significantly higher loneliness and lower activity engagement, particularly in self-care, leisure, and socializing activities.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE
A high proportion of this sample of rural homebound older adults had depression. Those who did tended to have a higher degree of loneliness and lower engagement in meaningful activities. What This Article Adds: Depression was associated with greater loneliness and lower activity engagement in rural homebound older adults. Occupational therapy practitioners serving rural homebound older adults with depression should consider providing interventions to address loneliness and facilitate activity engagement.


A new polarimetric interferometer has been developed on the basis of the phase difference between transverse electric (TE)/sub 0/ and transverse magnetic (TM)/sub 0/ modes in a composite optical waveguide (OWG). The composite OWG consists of a single-mode potassium ion-exchanged planar waveguide overlaid with a high-index thin film that has two tapered ends and supports only the TE/sub 0/ mode. Applying tapered velocity coupling theory, we found that the TE/sub 0/ and TM/sub 0/ modes coexisting in the potassium ion-exchanged layer were separated in the thin film region of the composite OWG: the TE/sub 0/ mode was coupled into the thin film while the TM/sub 0/ mode was confined in the potassium ion-exchanged layer. Interference occurs between TE- and TM-polarized output components when a single output beam is passed through a 45/spl deg/-polarized analyzer. The phase difference /spl phi/ between both orthogonal output components is very sensitive to the superstrate index n/sub c/ in the thin film region. Our experimental results indicate that a slight change of /spl Delta/n/sub c/=3.71/spl times/10/sup -6/ results in the phase-difference variation of /spl Delta//spl phi/=1/spl deg/ for a 5-mm-long TiO/sub 2//K/sup +/ composite OWG with a 34-nm-thick TiO/sub 2/ film. Such a simple polarimetric interferometer can be applied to chemical or biological sensors by modifying the upper film surface of the composite OWG with a chemically or biologically active substance.


The article analyzes the US policy in terms of rebuilding bipolarity in the world community, where the Communist Party of China is designated as the main enemy of progressive humanity, an attempt is made to reform alliances of supporters of confrontation with China and countries that are confidently striving to pursue sovereign foreign and domestic policies. For the United States, this positioning corresponds to the tradition of foreign policy activities in the world community. In addition, it is based on the success of the policy of counteracting the camp of socialism and the USSR, and it was proposed to implement the same course in relation to the CPC of the PRC. A study of the main conceptual provisions determining the content of the PRC's foreign policy strategy was carried out, it was proved that China does not seek to become a hegemon in the world community, but economic leadership and its economic interests will try to promote in all possible ways, excluding military actions. The economic expansion of the PRC can only be counteracted by the countries gaining genuine national economic sovereignty and building up national competitiveness, an interstate foreign policy strategy pursued by countries on the basis of realizing national interests and reaching an agreed consensus in sensitive sectors of economic interaction.


The first Sultan Complexes (kulliyes) of the Ottoman Empire, built in Bursa during the 14th and 15th centuries, played an important role in the formation of residential buildings around and in determining the main transportation axes in the development of the city. These five complexes, including social and religious buildings, left significant traces in cityscape until the 20th century, in addition to their spiritual values in urban history and became an integral part of urban identity. From the 20th century onwards, the developing dynamics of cities threatened the sustainability of monumental buildings and endangered their original identity. Bursa was included in UNESCO World Heritage Site list in 2014 with these complexes that preserved their authenticity and integrity in large despite these changes. However, high-rise buildings in the city began to dominate cityscape and the visibility of the complexes in the city skyline gradually disappeared. In this study, transformation of Sultan Complexes of Early Ottoman Period in Bursa has been analysed in terms of urban and architectural scales from the 19th century onwards. By comparing 1862 Suphi Bey map – the first city map including the most comprehensive information about the urban fabric of Bursaand the actual city map, changes in urban fabric around the complexes have been identified. In addition, comparison of the 19th century city photographs and engravings with actual photographs helped to reveal the changes in city skyline and the transformations in architectural scale. Keywords: Urban identity, Ottoman Sultan Complex (kulliye), Bursa


OBJECTIVES
This study determines the levels of selected contaminants in the muscle of three common fish species from the upper course of the Nitra River.

DESIGN
Were detected levels of Zn, Cu, Ni, Cr, Pb, Cd and Hg in the muscle and correlations among selected metals as well as standard length and total weight in brown trout (Salmo trutta morpha fario), Alpine bullhead (Cottus poecilopus) and grayling (Thymallus thymallus).

RESULTS
The content of analysed metals (mg.kg-1 wet weight) ranged as follows: brown trout - Zn 5.86-12.97, Cu 0.51-0.76, Ni 0.00-0.37, Cr 0.18-0.41, Pb 0.00-0.34, Cd 0.03-0.13, Hg 0.04-0.07; Alpine bullhead - Zn 7.02-13.68, Cu 0.34-0.62, Ni 0.00-1.13, Cr 0.19-0.24, Pb 0.00-0.37, Cd 0.03-0.09, Hg 0.06-0.18; grayling - Zn 3.38-6.36, Cu - 0.46-0.62, Ni 0.04-0.22, Cr 0.13-0.22, Pb 0.00-0.25, Cd 0.02-0.09, Hg 0.05-0.12, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS
The Slovak permissible limits for safe consumption, defined in the Commission Regulations No. 1881/2006 and 629/2008, in the case of Pb, Cd and Hg were exceeded in 10%, 63% and 0%, respectively.


Is Burgundy more than a region in France, or could it refer to a style of wine making? Food and wine are not only derived from a place. They make a place. Other industries are enabled through food and wine, particularly tourism. 'Region' has a distinctive role in framing the brand and prole of a wine bottle. 'Region' mitigates risk for a consumer. Region is a proxy for quality. This article investigates the impact of the legal protection and control of regionality on formerly colonized nations, with particular consequences on wine industries. By exploring Houghton's White Burgundy and its transformation into White Classic, the impact of protecting regionality on formerly colonized nations is revealed.


Metropolitan agriculture is not homogeneous. This paper delves beneath metropolitan county averages using data on individual farms in the Northeast classified into three statistically distinct types. A small group of adaptive farms profit from intensive production on smaller acreage to accommodate themselves to the urban environment. Traditional farms have increased costs and pressures on their more extensive operations without compensating increases in revenue from better-adapted enterprises. A large group of recreational farms subsidize small-farm activities from nonfarm income. Operating characteristics of each farm type are presented and their importance to metropolitan agriculture is assessed. Implications for preserving farming and farmland in the Northeast are drawn.


This paper is not fashionable. In fact, it's unfashionable. And being unfashionable in legal-philosophy terms is quite some feat, I should think. Indeed, if this paper even mustered up the popularity or social cachet to get invited to a party, it is likely that it would arrive early and confine itself to hovering around the punch-bowl for the duration, half-attempting to "bop" to whatever ill-advised late 90's song it took to liking (probably something by the Venga Boys). This paper attempts to answer, in part, the following question: What can jurisprudence learn from the empirical social sciences? I say it attempts to answer this "in part" because it does not answer this question in any complete or comprehensive fashion (nor in any unfashionable yet comprehensive way). It focuses on a proposal made by Professor Brian Leiter. One which forms part of his "philosophical reconstruction of American Legal Realism". Leiter seeks to adumbrate a "descriptive theory about the nature of judicial decision...according to which judicial decisions fall into (sociologically) determined patterns, in which...judges reach results based on a (generally shared) response to the underlying facts of the case, which...they then rationalise after-the-fact with appropriate legal rules and reasons." Leiter makes a practical suggestion as to how this theory which be put into practice. To do this he draws on the "Attitudinal Model" of judicial decision making. This Model was first posited by Spaeth and Segal who argued that the judicial decisions of the US Supreme Court are best explained in terms of the facts of the case coupled with the "ideological attitudes and values of the justices." Leiter, subject to some ambiguities, argues for this model through suggesting that we should adopt the account of law that would make "current social-scientific theory of adjudication (namely, the Attitudinal Model)...[both] true and explanatory." This paper sees problems with Leiter's approach. It also suggests that these problems extend to other similar accounts which are situated in the same theoretical frameworks.


The most frequently sustained severe injuries in motorcycle crashes are injuries to the head, and many of these are caused by rotational force. Rotational force is most commonly the result of oblique impacts to the head. Good testing methods for evaluating the effects of such impacts are currently lacking. There is also a need for improving our understanding of the effects of oblique impacts on the human head. Helmet standards currently in use today do not measure rotational effects in test dummy heads. However rotational force to the head results in large shear strains arising in the brain, which has been proposed as a cause of traumatic brain injuries like diffuse axonal injuries (DAI). This paper investigates a number of well-defined impacts, simulated using a detailed finite element (FE) model of the human head, an FE model of the Hybrid III dummy head and an FE model of a helmet. The same simulations were performed on both the FE human head model and the FE Hybrid III head model, both fitted with helmets. Simulations on both these heads were performed to describe the relationship between load levels in the FE Hybrid III head model and strains in the brain tissue in the FE human head model. In this study, the change in rotational velocity and the head injury criterion (HIC) value were chosen as appropriate measurements. It was concluded that both rotational and translational effects are important when predicting the strain levels in the human brain.


complex adaptive system where myriad "currencies" interact and respond to feedback systems that enable both flourishing and regulation. This collaborative model— rather than a model of exponential financial growth or the Singularity, which promises the transcendence of our current human condition through advances in technology— should provide the paradigm for our approach to artificial intelligence. More than sixty years ago, MIT mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener warned us that "when human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood."1 We should heed Wiener's warning.


Europe and its leaders, though they may not fully comprehend the significance of the events that are rapidly unfolding, and whether they like it or not, are key players in the historical process that will shape the geopolitics of the Middle East and Islam's response to the challenge of modernity. This is not say that Europe has it in its power to determine the choices that Iran and the Arab world will make, nor indeed should it attempt to do so. On the other hand, it does have a margin of manoeuvre which, depending on the way it is exercised, may tilt the balance in favour either of the politics of coexistence and cooperation or the politics of confrontation. European choices and capacities will revolve around four questions: How will European policies and attitudes position themselves vis-à-vis the Orientalist tendencies of the past? What steps might be taken to clear the backlog of unresolved geopolitical tensions and misunderstandings? Can Europe develop a programmatic approach to regional and international governance which accepts cultural plurality as its foundation stone, even if this should create tensions in the transatlantic relationship? Is Europe disposed to forge a new social compact that accepts Muslims in Europe as European citizens fully engaged in the task of European construction? The article argues that these are not four unrelated questions, each with its own separate logic and modus operandi, but four mutually constitutive policydilemmas that will in large measure reflect and in part shape European efforts to fashion a new identityand sense of place in the world.


Originally designed by Professor Frederic M. Wheelock as a sequel to Wheelock's Latin, his classic introductory Latin course, the second edition of Wheelock's Latin Reader has been revised by Professor Richard A. La Fleur for use as an intermediate text following any elementary Latin course. This new edition contains extensive readings, both prose and poetry, from a wide range of classical authors, including Cicero, Livy, Ovid and Pliny, as well as briefer selections from medieval and Late Latin. Useful features include a large, easy-to-read typeface for all Latin texts; introductions and extensive facing notes for each unit; a complete Latin-English vocabulary; maps of ancient Italy, Greece and the Roman Empire; and numerous new photographs illustrating aspects of classical culture presented in the book's readings.


This article examines the process of adaptation of Maghrebi women in migratory contexts by analysing their media diet, placing a focus on women of Moroccan origin who reside in Spain. On the one hand, the cultural setting is considered as a symbolic space in which the foreign-origin population should feel interested and to which access should be facilitated; on the other hand, cultural identity is considered as something that is both flexible and dynamic. Given that the lives of these women are basically limited to the home and that their roles in the family are heavily influenced by gender, the question addressed is: to what extent does the condition of being wives and mothers affect their media diet? Concepts such as 'cultural overburden' (feminist theories) and 'institutional mediation' (cultural studies) underpin the theoretical framework. The results suggest that the consumption of Arabic-language media reflects the need to maintain an emotional tie to the culture of origin. In the host country, access to media is restricted due to the low level of technological equipment in the home and to claims that this is 'good for the family'. However, the behaviour of teenagers approximates to that of a 'bridge' generation.


Significance Understanding the patterns and processes of human cooperation is of central scientific importance. Networks can promote cooperation when their existing or emergent topology allows conditional cooperators in the network to isolate themselves from exploitation by noncooperators. We do not know from prior work whether the emergent structures that promote cooperation are driven by reputation or can emerge purely via dynamics, i.e., the severing of ties to noncooperators and the formation of new ties irrespective of reputational information. Here we demonstrate, experimentally, that dynamic networks yield very high rates of cooperation even without reputational knowledge. Further, we identify realistic conditions under which static networks (where ties cannot be altered) yield cooperation rates as high as those in dynamic networks. Humans' propensity to cooperate is driven by our embeddedness in social networks. A key mechanism through which networks promote cooperation is clustering. Within clusters, conditional cooperators are insulated from exploitation by noncooperators, allowing them to reap the benefits of cooperation. Dynamic networks, where ties can be shed and new ties formed, allow for the endogenous emergence of clusters of cooperators. Although past work suggests that either reputation processes or network dynamics can increase clustering and cooperation, existing work on network dynamics conflates reputations and dynamics. Here we report results from a large-scale experiment (total n = 2,675) that embedded participants in clustered or random networks that were static or dynamic, with varying levels of reputational information. Results show that initial network clustering predicts cooperation in static networks, but not in dynamic ones. Further, our experiment shows that while reputations are important for partner choice, cooperation levels are driven purely by dynamics. Supplemental conditions confirmed this lack of a reputation effect. Importantly, we find that when participants make individual choices to cooperate or defect with each partner, as opposed to a single decision that applies to all partners (as is standard in the literature on cooperation in networks), cooperation rates in static networks are as high as cooperation rates in dynamic networks. This finding highlights the importance of structured relations for sustained cooperation, and shows how giving experimental participants more realistic choices has important consequences for whether dynamic networks promote higher levels of cooperation than static networks.


The objective of this project was to provide an overview of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and to demonstrate its application as a tool to provide a scientific comparison of alternative construction options for a commercial building in the Canadian context. The work entailed a quantitative assessment of the embodied environmental impacts of typical office buildings using a steel frame, and a concrete frame alternative (and associated components) in Toronto. Through the use of four assessment strategies, this study has indicated that the steel framed building performs better than the concrete building in most impact indicators, excepting primary energy and eutrophication potential. However, additional buildings should be assessed in order to confirm this finding. Furthermore, it was found that the manufacturing phase represents over 90% of the embodied impacts of the whole building. The study also advises caution when comparing different LCA studies and identifies its difficulties.


In the last decades of the 19th century education played a major role in Mexican society, when efforts were being made to restructure it based on the objective teaching of sciences, which was regarded as the driving force behind the change needed in various sectors such as industry and public health. In this context, the so-called science disseminators aimed to communicate their knowledge to the general public, mainly to the working classes and the children. Journalism grew and reached a wide range of themes and audiences. They believed in the idea of a science for all and that sciences were an instrument to know the new nations and educate the population. It is worth mentioning La ciencia recreativa, a publication dedicated to children and working classes. Between 1871 and 1879 it was edited by the topographical engineer and surveyor José Joaquín Arriaga (1831–1896), who aimed to generalise the scientific knowledge of cosmography, mineralogy, meteorology, physics, botany, zoology, descriptive geography and industrial agriculture. Abstract


This volume provides a practical treatment of how to formulate a macroeconomic adjustment program. The selection of macroeconomic policies oriented to reestablish or maintain internal and external equilibrium, and their incorporation in a quantitative framework that encompasses the diverse sectors of the economy, constitutes a financial program. Preparation of a country's financial program is a central element of courses offered by the IMF Institute. The focus here is on the case of Colombia during the period 1991-96, toward constructing an illustrative program for 1997. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM (supplied in a back-cover pocket) containing data tables needed to complete exercises given in the text. Contributors: Adolfo Barajas, Luis Carranza, Graciana del Castillo, Thomas Lehwing, and Alejandro Lopez-Mejia.


This article is based on the assumption that more spatially efficient  investment choices in both economic and basic infrastructure spending can make a significant impact on the equity, efficiency and sustainability of  human settlements. Emerging from work conducted as part of a Department of Science and Technology (DST)- funded Integrated Planning and   Development Modelling (IPDM) project, the article argues that decisions about infrastructure investment in South African metropolitan areas ought to be grounded in robust and rigorous analysis and scenario evaluation. More evidence, and better evidence, an understanding of spatial trends and the underlying forces that shape them, are needed to support planning and infrastructure investment. Urban simulation platforms offer valuable tools in this regard. Findings of simulation work in three metropolitan areas (eThekwini, Nelson Mandela Bay and Johannesburg) are presented to demonstrate this, and some implications for spatial policy, planning and infrastructure investment are highlighted.


BACKGROUND AND AIMS
Cyperus esculentus is widespread in tropical and temperate zones and is also present in cooler regions. It is used as a crop plant, but it also occurs in the wild and as a weed. As a consequence of its ecological plasticity, C. esculentus has remarkable variability, with several morphotypes. Four wild-type varieties are presently recognized, in addition to the cultivated form. This study investigates the phylogenetic position and biogeography of C. esculentus with the objective of contributing new data to increase the understanding of its evolutionary history.

METHODS
Genealogical relationships among genotypes were inferred by using plastid DNA haplotype and nuclear ribosomal (nr) DNA ribotype sequences for 70 specimens either collected in the field or obtained from herbaria. Statistical dispersal-vicariance (S-DIVA) and Bayesian binary method (BBM) analyses were used to reconstruct the possible ancestral ranges of C. esculentus. In order to determine the age of C. esculentus, a time-measured phylogenetic analysis was performed.

KEY RESULTS
Considerable variation between the chosen nuclear and plastid markers was detected (27 ribotypes vs. six haplotypes). No geographical structure was displayed among the haplotypes, but information on the dispersal pattern may be deduced. Two types of ribotypes were detected in nrDNA, with an evident geographical segregation into an Old World group and a polymorphic New World group. Both S-DIVA and BBM analyses suggested a biogeographical history in which dispersal from the African region has been crucial in shaping the current distribution pattern of C. esculentus. The most recent common ancestor between C. esculentus races has an age of 5.1 million years (95 % highest posterior density 2.5-10.2).

CONCLUSIONS
The molecular analysis provides novel insights into the evolutionary history of C. esculentus. The results have various taxonomic and phylogenetic implications, including a hypothesis on the origin and phylogeography of this species, which probably originated in the late Cenozoic in Africa, and reached the Americas repeatedly, independently of Columbian exchanges.


A Thesis Submitted to School of Graduate Studies of
Addis Ababa University in Partial Fulfillment of the
requirements for the Degree of Master in Business
Administration in Management


Early season infestations of sweet potato whiteflies, Bemisia [abaci ( Gennadius) were monitored in fields of cantaloupe, Cucumis melo L., near Yuma, Arizona. We used these data to describe the relationship between the proportion of infested leaves and mean adult population density for the entire field. This model was used to develop a binomial sampling plan based on a presenceabsence approach. We evaluated the model with three independent data sets, and the level of agreement between the model and data was reasonable for pest management purposes. A minimum sample size of 200 leaves is suggested for maximum accuracy. By turning over 50 leaves in the four quadrants of a field and determining what proportion have whiteflies (i.e., are there whitefly adults on the leaf or not), growers can estimate field populations. We recommend that if 60% of the sampled leaves have whiteflies then it is time to make a pesticide application because that tells you that population levels are approaching 3 adults per leaf.


Research has shown how private homeownership features prominently in housing policy on a global basis. Little critique exists, however, on how property is framed in more contemporary privatisation policies unfolding in today's post-socialist cities. Taking the case study of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, this article examines the extent to which the government and international community remain focused on homeownership to the detriment of developing policies and legislation on other housing tenure, notably rental housing. The article examines two contemporary housing programmes: the introduction of homeowner associations and the government's approach towards informal settlements on the city's outskirts. These two programmes are examined as an entrenchment of earlier privatisation programmes introduced in the late 1980s and 1990s which resulted in the sale of state housing and the distribution of land on the city's outskirts. The results indicate that tenants often remain either invisible or their rights are subjuga...


The employment of graduates to raise an organization's intellectual capital is not a new phenomenon. But it is clear that there is a less demand for graduates all over the world. It is basically due to the miss-match between graduates' competencies and employers' expectations and also due to the weak relationship between university and the business sector. As a developing country under sever conflict situations in political, social and cultural Sri Lanka is not exceptional pertaining to this issue. This paper attempts to investigate into the assessment of private sector employers towards recruiting business graduates in Sri Lanka. The study investigated 65 of private sector business firms who are the possible employers of providing job opportunities for potential employees in Sri Lanka. Findings of the study showed that among the other state university graduates but except engineers and doctors, business graduates have more or less the necessary skills and qualities needed to work in private sector work places. But those skills and qualities are not up to the standard expected by the private sector employers. Among those skills Sri Lankan business graduates especially lack with ICT skills, English language proficiency and the applicability of practical knowledge. Hence the business graduates of Sri Lanka should improve the essential skills, attitudes and qualities in order to create a good demand for them in the available job market and to complete with other professionally qualified personnel.


To distinguish between hypertensive emergencies and urgencies and nonurgent narte blood pressure elevartion, evoluate the patient for evidence of targel organ damage. Perform a neurologic examination that indudes an assessment of mental status; any dranges suggest hypertensive encephalopathy. Funduscopy can detect papilledema, hemorrhages, and exudates; an ECG can reved evidence of cardiac ischemia. Order urinalysis and measure serum eatinine level to evaluate for kidney disease. The possible causes of a hypertensive emergency indude essential hypertension; renal porendrymal or renovascular disease; use of various illegal, prescription, or OTC drugs; CNS disorders; preeclampsia or edampsia; and endocrine disorders. A hypertensive emergency requires immediate blood pressure reduction (dthough not necessarily to the reference range) with parenteral antibiotics. An urgency is treated with combination oral antihypertensive therapy.


Aims:
We aim to investigate the onset of 2D time-dependent magnetic reconnection that is triggered using an external (non-local) velocity driver located away from, and perpendicular to, an equilibrium Harris current sheet. Previous studies have typically utilised an internal trigger to initiate reconnection, for example initial conditions centred on the current sheet. Here, an external driver allows for a more naturalistic trigger as well as the study of the earlier stages of the reconnection start-up process.

Methods:
Numerical simulations solving the compressible, resistive magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations were performed to investigate the reconnection onset within different atmospheric layers of the Sun, namely the corona, chromosphere and photosphere.

Results:
A reconnecting state is reached for all atmospheric heights considered, with the dominant physics being highly dependent on atmospheric conditions. The coronal case achieves a sharp rise in electric field (indicative of reconnection) for a range of velocity drivers. For the chromosphere, we find a larger velocity amplitude is required to trigger reconnection (compared to the corona). For the photospheric environment, the electric field is highly dependent on the inflow speed; a sharp increase in electric field is obtained only as the velocity entering the reconnection region approaches the Alfven speed. Additionally, the role of ambipolar diffusion is investigated for the chromospheric case and we find that the ambipolar diffusion alters the structure of the current density in the inflow region.

Conclusions:
The rate at which flux enters the reconnection region is controlled by the inflow velocity. This determines all aspects of the reconnection start-up process, that is, the early onset of reconnection is dominated by the advection term in Ohm's law in all atmospheric layers. A lower plasma-β enhances reconnection and creates a large change in the electric field. A high plasma-β hinders the reconnection, yielding a sharp rise in the electric field only when the velocity flowing into the reconnection region approaches the local Alfven speed.


This book scrutinises how political actors in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) have articulated the security-democracy nexus in their discourses. Security crises expose political leaders to an uncomfortable dilemma: guaranteeing the safety of citizens while at the same time preserving democratic principles, basic rights and liberties. In this respect, Israel represents an archetypical case. Defining itself as a democracy, the state of Israel has been in quasi-constant conflict with its neighbouring countries while facing terror attacks repeatedly. This situation has resulted in the upholding of the state of emergency since the establishment of the state in 1948 and in the enactment of security measures that are often in conflict with democratic values. The tension between security and democracy is not a new question: it has been at the centre of political thought from Rousseau and Locke to Lasswell and Dahl and stood at the core of political debates after 9/11 and the 2005 terror attacks in London. Many studies have questioned how political actors manage this tension or how they could - properly - balance security and democracy. Yet, in spite of the abundant literature on the issue, the manner in which political actors conceptualise and frame this tension has been rarely explored. Even less has been said on the effects of this conceptualisation on the democratic regime. Drawing on discourse theory and on an innovative narrative analysis, the book examines 40 debates held in the Knesset on security-oriented laws enacted in two different contexts: the period of relative calm preceding the first Palestinian intifada (1987) and the period following the eruption of the second intifada (2000). More specifically, three types of laws and discussions are examined: laws establishing a relation between freedom of expression and security; laws linking the category of 'the enemy' to democracy; and finally those connecting the right to family unification and residence of Palestinians with terrorism. Through a comparative analysis of the political actors' discourses in 1985 and between 2000 and 2011, the study demonstrates that two main narratives have constantly competed: on the one hand a marginal narrative anchored in basic rights and on the other a defensive democracy narrative, which has become dominant. The latter has legitimised the restriction of freedom of expression, freedom to participate in elections, freedom of movement or the right to citizenship. The book shows how the increasing dominance of the defensive democracy narrative has had a fundamental impact in reshaping the polity and the identity of Israel's democratic regime. The analysis ultimately opens the possibility to rethink the conventional approach of the security-democracy dilemma and to reflect on processes in other states, such as the United Kingdom or the United States during different security crises. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, Israeli politics, democracy studies, political theory and IR in general.


Metamorphic testing has been shown to be a simple yet effective technique in addressing the quality assurance of applications that do not have test oracles, i.e., for which it is difficult or impossible to know what the correct output should be for arbitrary input. In metamorphic testing, existing test case input is modified to produce new test cases in such a manner that, when given the new input, the application should produce an output that can easily be computed based on the original output. That is, if input x produces output f(x), then we create input x' such that we can predict f(x') based on f(x); if the application does not produce the expected output, then a defect must exist, and either f(x), or f(x') (or both) is wrong.
 In practice, however, metamorphic testing can be a manually intensive technique for all but the simplest cases. The transformation of input data can be laborious for large data sets, or practically impossible for input that is not in human-readable format. Similarly, comparing the outputs can be error-prone for large result sets, especially when slight variations in the results are not actually indicative of errors (i.e., are false positives), for instance when there is non-determinism in the application and multiple outputs can be considered correct.
 In this paper, we present an approach called Automated Metamorphic System Testing. This involves the automation of metamorphic testing at the system level by checking that the metamorphic properties of the entire application hold after its execution. The tester is able to easily set up and conduct metamorphic tests with little manual intervention, and testing can continue in the field with minimal impact on the user. Additionally, we present an approach called Heuristic Metamorphic Testing which seeks to reduce false positives and address some cases of non-determinism. We also describe an implementation framework called Amsterdam, and present the results of empirical studies in which we demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique on real-world programs without test oracles.


Low optical efficiency of light-emitting diode (LED) based headlamp is one of the most important issues to obstruct applications of LEDs in headlamp. An effective high-efficient LED headlamp freeform lens design method is introduced in this paper. A low-beam lens and a high-beam lens for LED headlamp are designed according to this method. Monte Carlo ray tracing simulation results demonstrate that the LED headlamp with these two lenses can fully comply with the ECE regulation without any other lens or reflector. Moreover, optical efficiencies of both these two lenses are more than 88% in theory.


Background The leucine-rich repeats and immunoglobulin-like domains (LRIG) proteins constitute an integral membrane protein family that has three members: LRIG1, LRIG2, and LRIG3. LRIG1 negatively regulates growth factor signaling, but little is known regarding the functions of LRIG2 and LRIG3. In oligodendroglial brain tumors, high expression of LRIG2 correlates with poor patient survival. Lrig1 and Lrig3 knockout mice are viable, but there have been no reports on Lrig2-deficient mice to date. Methodology/Principal Findings Lrig2-deficient mice were generated by the ablation of Lrig2 exon 12 (Lrig2E12). The Lrig2E12-/- mice showed a transiently reduced growth rate and an increased spontaneous mortality rate; 20-25% of these mice died before 130 days of age, with the majority of the deaths occurring before 50 days. Ntv-a transgenic mice with different Lrig2 genotypes were transduced by intracranial injection with platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) B-encoding replication-competent avian retrovirus (RCAS)-producing DF-1 cells. All injected Lrig2E12+/+ mice developed Lrig2 expressing oligodendroglial brain tumors of lower grade (82%) or glioblastoma-like tumors of higher grade (18%). Lrig2E12-/- mice, in contrast, only developed lower grade tumors (77%) or had no detectable tumors (23%). Lrig2E12-/- mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEF) showed altered induction-kinetics of immediate-early genes Fos and Egr2 in response to PDGF-BB stimulation. However, Lrig2E12-/- MEFs showed no changes in Pdgfrα or Pdgfrβ levels or in levels of PDGF-BB-induced phosphorylation of Pdgfrα, Pdgfrβ, Akt, or extracellular signal-regulated protein kinases 1 and 2 (ERK1/2). Overexpression of LRIG1, but not of LRIG2, downregulated PDGFRα levels in HEK-293T cells. Conclusions The phenotype of Lrig2E12-/- mice showed that Lrig2 was a promoter of PDGFB-induced glioma, and Lrig2 appeared to have important molecular and developmental functions that were distinct from those of Lrig1 and Lrig3.


Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women that can causes many psychological problems in patients. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of spiritual cognitive-emotional group therapy in the reduction of psychological problems in female patients suffering breast cancer. In this quasi-experimental study, the pretest-posttest design was used. From the hospitals, 18 female participants diagnosed with breast cancer were selected according to their availability and then, randomly distributed into two groups of experiment and control. The therapy program included the participation of the experimental group in 10 sessions of spiritual cognitive emotional group therapy. Each session lasted 90 minutes. Beck depression inventory, beck anxiety inventory, and identity crisis questionnaire were used for collecting data. The ANCOVA results demonstrated that the spiritual cognitive emotional group therapy was effective in reducing anxiety, depression, absurdity, despair, life dissatisfaction, sadness, and increasing self-esteem in women with breast cancer. Therefore, according to these findings we can conclude that spiritual cognitive emotional group therapy was effective in reducing the psychological problems of patients suffering cancer.


This review will focus on recent progress regarding the mechanisms of light-induced discoloration of mechanical and chemimechanical pulps and on the proposed preventive treatments. It is evident that the mechanisms behind photoyellowing of lignin-rich pulps are complex and that several types of reaction pathways may coexist. Photoyellowing proceeds via one initial fast phase and a slower following phase. The fast phase has been ascribed to oxidation of free phenolic groups and/or hydroquinones and catechols to photoproducts of mainly quinonoid character. A multitude of reactions involving several lignin subunits are possible. Important intermediates are phenoxyl radicals, and to some extent ketyl radicals. The importance of the phenacyl aryl ether pathway might be more important than previously thought, even though the original content of such groups is low in lignin. Even though many preventive methods against photoyellowing have been suggested, no cost-efficient treatment is available to hinder photoreversion of lignin-containing paper permanently. Suggested methods for stabilization include chemical modification (etherification and esterification), coating the paper product, addition of radical scavengers, excited state quenchers, or ultraviolet absorbing compounds.


A series of 7-chloro-2,3-disubstituted-4(3H)-quinazolinones (4a-j) were synthesized by the reaction of 3-amino-7-chloro-2-phenylquinazolin-4(3H)-one (3) with various amines in presence of formaldehyde. The starting material for the compounds was 2-amino-4-chloro benzoic acid. The structures of the compounds were characterized by IR, 1 H NMR, elemental analyses. Docking analysis of quinazolinone derivatives was done with DNA gyrase protein which was carried out by means of the AutoDockTools (ADT) v 1.5.4 and AutoDock v 4.2 programs. All compounds interacted with DNA gyrase protein. Preclinical evaluation of the compounds was ascertained by in silico toxicity, blood-brain barrier and drug like properties. All compounds were investigated for their antibacterial activity. Overall, compound (4b) showed better properties as a drug like candidate.


We propose an integrated scheme for tracking the mobility of a user based on autoregressive models that accurately capture the characteristics of realistic user movements in wireless networks. The mobility parameters are obtained from training data by computing Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) estimates. Estimation of the mobility state, which incorporates the position, velocity, and acceleration of the mobile station, is accomplished via an extended Kalman filter using signal measurements from the wireless network. By combining mobility parameter and state estimation in an integrated framework, we obtain an efficient and accurate real-time mobility tracking scheme that can be applied in a variety of wireless networking applications. We consider two variants of an autoregressive mobility model in our study and validate the proposed mobility tracking scheme using mobile trajectories collected from drive test data. Our simulation results validate the accuracy of the proposed tracking scheme even when only a small number of data samples is available for initial training.


Insights into the etiology of Parkinson's disease (PD) disorders have resulted from the identification of Mendelian genes, including parkin. Most patients with parkin mutations do not have Lewy body pathology, yet have a clinical syndrome recognized as PD. Here, we describe a man with exceptionally early onset Parkinsonism due to parkin. His symptoms began at the age of 8, with dragging of the left leg, involving the right leg within 6 months, and clawing of the left and then right hand. At the age of 10, he had an asymmetric spastic tetraplegia with lordotic gait, hyperreflexia, and extensor plantar responses. He was suspected to have either a congenital anomaly such as cerebellar ectopia or a high-cervical medullary tumor. He was then noted to have hypomimic facies, generalized cogwheel rigidity, and hyperreflexia. His gait was described as a mixture of steppage and waddle with a tendency to fall backward, walking with extended arms and clawed hands. The diagnosis was revised to a degenerative striatal disorder. Trihexyphenidyl gave considerable benefit. At the age of 13, his diagnosis was juvenile Parkinsonism without known cause. At the age of 17, he had developed a fine postural tremor. At the age of 32, he was noted to have asymmetric rest tremor. He responded very well to an apomorphine challenge. At the age of 33, when referred to Prof. David Marsden, he had slurred speech, dysphagia, daily falls, and complained of poor memory. He had diminished right arm swing, poor balance on turning with loss of postural reflexes, dystonic posturing of hands and feet, and marked asymmetric bradykinesia (Video, Segment 1). A diagnosis of pallidal atrophy was made, later revised to possible familial pallidal degeneration. Dopamine agonists had some benefit but were poorly tolerated due to confusion and hallucinations. At the age of 36, dysphagia, bladder symptoms, and constipation were attributed to chronic anticholinergic use. He remained cognitively intact but developed depression and anxiety. Thirty-six years after the disease onset, aged 44, he remained independent with intermittent dystonia, mild dysarthria, moderate neck rigidity and asymmetric postural tremor, bradykinesia, and rigidity. His gait showed marked start hesitation with dystonic plantar flexion of the feet, good stride length, and gait freezing. During practically defined off his motor, UPDRS was 68 of 108 (Video, Segment 2). Following 250-mg levodopa, UPDRS improved to 22 of 108 (Video, Segment 3). He underwent bilateral caudal zona incerta deep brain stimulation at the age of 46 with substantial benefit. Six months postoperatively on stimulator plus oral therapy, the motor UPDRS was 24 of 108 (Video, Segment 4). L-dopa was tried three times during his disease but not tolerated because of dyskinesia. Shortly after his neurosurgery, compound heterozygous parkin mutations were identified. His parents were not consanguineous and neither had neurological symptoms. A maternal aunt was said to have developed stiffness and shuffling gait at the age of 15 but has not been examined. A paternal half-sister was seen at the age of 5 with abnormal gait and left-sided increased tone, but did not develop a progressive movement disorder. Copy number metrics derived from Illumina Infinium HumanHap550 arrays revealed changes consistent with either homozygous deletion or compound heterozygous deletion at the same locus, within PRKN. Further analysis of the region using multiplex ligation-dependent probe assay (MLPA, MRC-Holland) confirmed the abnormality and demonstrated a compound heterozygous exon 2/exon 2 1 3 deletion in the parkin gene. Although our patient had an asymmetric L-dopa responsive akinetic-rigid syndrome, meeting the Queen Square Brain Bank criteria for PD, this was considered to be an atypical parkinsonian disorder. The early dysarthria, prominent distal dystonia, and erect posture with flexion of the arms when walking are suggestive of pallidostriatal Parkinsonism-dystonia diseases. Experienced movement disorders experts, before the identification of the parkin gene, diagnosed this patient as having pallidal or striatal degeneration. Other notable features of this case include long disease duration, extreme sensitivity to the dyskinesigenic effects of L-dopa, marked problems with gait freezing, and a beneficial response to DBS. The patient sample was included in a screen of young onset PD samples looking for novel gene changes, and we show that the Illumina SNP assay can also be used to identify deletions in genomic DNA. There are relatively few reports of neuropathology in parkin patients. Severe involvement of the substantia nigra and locus coeruleus is common, but other areas of the basal ganglia, including the striatum and pallidum, are usually unaffected. The average onset age in patients with parkin disease is 31 years. Onset before age 10 is rare, and we have only identified six reported cases (Table 1). Of those with two identified parkin mutations, all had parkin exon 3 deletions. Although relatively common (13% of all mutations), we suggest that exon 3 mutations may be particularly likely to be associated with very early onset disease.


Abstract This study gives valuable insights into the microstructure and pore space characteristics of 17 compositionally variable Visean shale samples from the Ukrainian Dniepr-Donets Basin (the 'Rudov Beds'). The representative imaging area varies considerably (from 10 000 to >300 000 µm2) as a function of the mineralogy and diagenetic overprinting. The pores hosted in organic matter (OM) are restricted to secondary solid bitumen. Based on high-resolution maps from broad ion beam scanning electron microscopy combined with organic geochemical and bulk mineralogical data, we propose that the amount of OM-hosted porosity responds to the availability of pore space, enabling the accumulation of an early oil phase, which is then progressively transformed to a porous solid bitumen residue. The type of OM porosity (pendular/interface v. spongy) is reflected in the individual pore size distributions: the spongy pores are usually smaller (<50 nm) than the pendular or OM–mineral interface pores. The OM-hosted porosity coincides with differences in the composition of the extract, with high amounts of extractable OM and saturated/aromatic compound ratios indicative of abundant porous solid bitumen. The average circularity and aspect ratio of the mineral matrix pores correlate with the corresponding values for the OM-hosted pores, which show a preferred bedding-parallel orientation, suggesting that compaction influenced both types of pore.


The topic of insider threat detection is getting an increased concern from academia, industry, and governments due to the growing number of malicious insider incidents. A malicious insider threat is devised of a set of anomalous behaviours attributed to an insider who exploit their privileges with the intention to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the system or data. The existing approaches for detecting insider threats still have a common shortcoming, which is the high number of false alarms (false positives), which deceives the system administrator(s) about suspicious behaviour of many users. To address the shortcoming of false alarms, in this thesis, we formulate an opportunistic approach to detect insider threats with the aim of any-behaviour-all-threat detection. As a preliminary step, we apply feature engineering on the data logs of users' behaviour. This work is conducted on synthetic CMU-CERT data sets which implement a variety of malicious insider threat scenarios. The maturity of data in an organisation is defined into three cases based on the availability of labelled data. We address the different cases of data maturity by proposing, developing, and evaluating machine learning approaches that incorporate techniques to reduce false alarms. The first presents a class imbalance approach, namely CD-AMOTRE, which combines the concept of Class Decomposition (CD) and a novel Artificial Minority Oversampling and Trapper REmoval (AMOTRE) technique. The second builds an adaptive one-class ensemble-based anomaly detection framework which introduces a progressive update method with an outlier aware artificial oversampling procedure. The third proposes a real-time anomaly detection approach, namely Ensemble of Random subspace Anomaly detectors In Data Streams (E-RAIDS). The proposed approaches detect most/all of the malicious insider threats, and achieve the minimum FP over the data sets compared to the existing machine learning approaches.


Background Corticosteroid insensitivity is a major barrier of treatment for some chronic inflammatory diseases, such as severe asthma, but the molecular mechanism of the insensitivity has not been fully elucidated. The object of this study is to investigate the role of protein phosphate 2A (PP2A), a serine/threonine phosphatase, on corticosteroid sensitivity in severe asthma. Methodology/Principal Findings Corticosteroid sensitivity was determined by the dexamethasone ability to inhibit TNFα-induced IL-8 or LPS-induced TNFα production. PP2A expression, glucocorticoid receptor (GR) nuclear translocation defined as the nuclear/cytoplasmic GR ratio and phosphorylation of GR-Ser226, c-Jun N-terminal kinase 1 (JNK1) and PP2A were analysed by Western-blotting. Phosphatase activity was measured by fluorescence-based assay. Okadaic acid (OA), a PP2A inhibitor, reduced corticosteroid sensitivity with reduced GR nuclear translocation and increased GR phosphorylation in U937 monocytic cells. PP2A knockdown by RNA interference showed similar effects. IL-2/IL-4 treatment to U937 reduced corticosteroid sensitivity, and PP2A expression/activity. In peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from severe asthma, the PP2A expression and activity were significantly reduced with concomitant enhancement of PP2AC-Tyr307 phosphorylation compared with those in healthy volunteers. As the results, GR-Ser226 and JNK1 phosphorylation were increased. The expression and activity of PP2A were negatively correlated with phosphorylation levels of GR-Ser226. Furthermore, co-immunoprecipitation assay in U937 cells revealed that PP2A associated with GR and JNK1 and IL-2/IL-4 exposure caused dissociation of each molecule. Lastly, PP2A overexpression increased corticosteroid sensitivity in U937 cells. Conclusions/Significance PP2A regulates GR nuclear translocation and corticosteroid sensitivity possibly by dephosphorylation of GR-Ser226 via dephosphorylation of upstream JNK1. This novel mechanism will provide new insight for the development of new therapy for severe asthma.


A survey is reported of the courses of 84 patients who presented the syndrome of malignant hypertension and who have been under treatment with potent antihypertensive drugs. Among these, 70 per cent survived 1 year of observation, 50 per cent 3 years, 33 per cent 5 years, and 26 per cent 6 years. These survival rates represent substantial therapeutic gains over survival rates in the untreated series of Keith, Wagener, and Barker. The reported first-year survival rate is weighted by the untoward complication of hexamethonium pneumonitis, and current survival is greater than in the estimate presented. Other causes of death are (1) rapidly or (2) delayed or slowly progressive renal failure and (3) complications of atherosclerosis. The first is usually associated with poor control of blood pressure. It seems merely an attenuation of the usual course of malignant hypertension. The syndrome of delayed or slowly progressive renal failure is associated with diffuse occlusive fibrous intimal hyperplasia of major renal arteries. Among the complications of atherosclerosis, cerebral hemorrhage was the most common and was associated with poor control of blood pressure level, while myocardial infarction, the next most common, was not. It may be that the coronary arteries, like the renal, are subject to progressive occlusive disease in some patients with treated malignant hypertension. It is not clear whether this process represents a continuation in vessels larger than arterioles, of a basic vascular disease or a delayed response on the part of the arteries to preexisting severe hypertension. Survival is improved in patients who undertake treatment before malignant hypertension has caused extensive vascular damage. Patients who present themselves for treatment with evidences of severe renal damage generally do not survive for long periods. However, several such have maintained active lives for many months and years. Hence treatment should be withheld only in the most desperate circumstances.


The lack of paediatric medicines, including innovative and advanced ones, is a long-lasting and well-known problem at European and international levels. Despite the existing legal frameworks and incentives, children remain deprived of many kinds of therapy because of challenges faced in appropriately study and tailoring medicinal and other products for them. In this context, the necessity to foster paediatric research addressing unsolved and uncovered issues within a 'translational approach' has appeared. This article, after having clarified the concept of translational research in the perspective of the establishment of a European paediatric research infrastructure (RI), will identify and point out ethical, legal and regulatory issues particularly relevant in a children's rights perspective. It concludes asking for the setting up of an adequate model of governance within a future RI, including adequate and independent ethical oversight and a pluridisciplinary common service dealing with ethical, legal and societal issues relevant for children.


Until recently, AI research that used games as an experimental testbed has concentrated on perfect information games. Many of these games have been amenable to so-called brute-force search techniques. In contrast, games of imperfect information, such as bridge and poker, contain hidden knowledge making similar search techniques impractical. This paper describes work being done on developing a world-class poker-playing program. Part of the program's playing strength comes from real-time simulations. The program generates an instance of the missing data, subject to any constraints that have been learned, and then searches the game tree to determine a numerical result. By repeating this a sufficient number of times, a statistically meaningful sample can be obtained to be used in the program's decision-making process. For constructing programs to play two-player deterministic perfect information games, there is a well-defined framework based on the alpha-beta search algorithm. For imperfect information games, no comparable framework exists. In this paper we propose selective sampling simulations as a general-purpose framework for building programs to achieve high performance in imperfect information games.


High levels of turbulence have been proven to substantially increase the blade loadings on tidal turbines, outlining the need of properly characterizing turbulence parameters in tidal energy sites. The presence of long surface gravity waves may cause a significant bias on the estimation of these parameters, which requires wave-turbulence decomposition methods that are currently missing from guidelines. Here, three techniques of decomposing wave and turbulence are tested: the stopband filter (SB), moving average filter (MA), and synchrosqueezing wavelet transform (SWT). The study site, Banks Strait, Tasmania, is a 16 km wide channel that presents high potential for tidal energy generation. Wave peak periods at the study site were found to vary mostly between 7 and 12 s, with maximum exceeding 15 s. Turbulence intensities (TI), turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), and integral scales are quantified. Our results indicate differences between the estimates obtained from each method. The MA highly underestimates turbulence, resulting in TI values which were nearly 50% lower than those obtained from other decomposition methods. While TI and TKE estimated from the SB and the SWT techniques are quite similar, integral length scales are considerably underestimated by the SB. These findings reveal that the SWT is a more reliable method because of the more accurate estimates of turbulence parameters and indicate the need of establishing guidelines which address wave-turbulence decomposition in tidal stream energy site assessments. Despite having shown to be quite a versatile technique, further investigation of its applicability in data from other prospective tidal energy sites is necessary to fully assess the generality of the SWT technique.


The increasingly threat of suppression of Atlantic Forest vegetation makes urgent studies that support government decisions in favor of its preservation. Therefore, researchers from the Santa Cecilia University carried out a floristic survey in an stretch of the Environmental Preservation Area (APA) "Serra do Guararu", in the city of Guaruja, SP, which is listed by the Historical Heritage and has the largest group of preserved Atlantic forest ecosystems of the Santo Amaro island. Aiming to expand the availability of information other than scientific journals, usually restricted to the scientific community, this study aimed to the development of an interactive identification key of the species found in the survey, using the Xper2 program and transferring to the Xper3, an online version of the software. For the 44 crafted species, we obtained 37 descriptors and 252 character states and 24 species were illustrated. The interactive key is available on: http://xper3.com/xper3GeneratedFiles/publish/ identification/-3926428857737329072/mkey.html. Keywords : Biodiversity. Flora survey. Species Identification.


The study developed from realisation that there is no information available about strategies or processes in the iBT speaking scoring rubrics, although ETS (Educational Testing Service) claims that the iBT speaking test is designed to measure strategic processes, which is one constructs of academic proficiency. Therefore, the study investigates which strategic processes are used to complete given speaking tasks. This would provide evidence to help in the evaluation of the validity claims proposed by the test designers. Six Korean participants, studying at English-medium universities, completed 2 independent tasks and 2 integrated tasks both in a test and in their class. Participants' speech samples were collected during the performances and stimulated recall verbalisation was conducted after they had completed the tasks. Speech samples were coded into five categories: approach, compensation, cognitive, metacognitive strategies and feelings. Consequently, the study examined how strategies reported through stimulated recalls were present in actual speech. The findings showed that metacognitive strategies were used most frequently under both conditions. Fair-level speakers employed more strategies in the test, while goodlevel speakers used more strategies in the class. Moreover, integrated task types elicited more strategy use for both conditions. Speakers reported that they felt significantly more negative under test conditions than in the class. More importantly, two conditions shared 67.74% of the strategy types, and 84% of the strategy types used in the test were also used in the classroom, which may strengthen the validity of the iBT speaking test in terms of strategy use. Finally, evidences of strategy use were identified in actual speech, which can open the way to operationalised strategy use assessment in speaking test. However, the figure of evidenced strategy use was very low: 5.28% and 2.66% respectively in the test and in the class. It is recommended that future research be carried out with a large number of participants in order to generalise strategy use in speaking performance. Moreover, further studies might be conducted to examine the significance of observable strategic evidence in speech, to inform decisions to include strategies in the scoring rubrics.


The construction of low-dimensional models explaining high-dimensional signal observations provides concise and efficient data representations. In this paper, we focus on pattern transformation manifold models generated by in-plane geometric transformations of 2D visual patterns. We propose a method for computing a manifold by building a representative pattern such that its transformation manifold accurately fits a set of given observations. We present a solution for the progressive construction of the representative pattern with the aid of a parametric dictionary, which in turn provides an analytical representation of the data and the manifold. Experimental results show that the patterns learned with the proposed algorithm can efficiently capture the main characteristics of the input data with high approximation accuracy, where the invariance to the geometric transformations of the data is accomplished due to the transformation manifold model.


PML-RARα oncoprotein is a fusion protein of promyelocytic leukemia (PML) and the retinoic acid receptor-α (RARα) and causes acute promyelocytic leukemias (APL). A hallmark of all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) responses in APL is PML-RARα degradation which promotes cell differentiation. Here, we demonstrated that autophagy is a crucial regulator of PML-RARα degradation. Inhibition of autophagy by short hairpin (sh) RNA that target essential autophagy genes such as Atg1, Atg5 and PI3KC3 and by autophagy inhibitors (e.g. 3-methyladenine), blocked PML-RARα degradation and subsequently granulocytic differentiation of human myeloid leukemic cells. In contrast, rapamycin, the mTOR kinase inhibitor, enhanced autophagy and promoted ATRA-induced PML-RARα degradation and myeloid cell differentiation. Moreover, PML-RARα co-immunoprecipitated with ubiquitin-binding adaptor protein p62/SQSTM1, which is degraded through autophagy. Furthermore, knockdown of p62/SQSTM1 inhibited ATRA-induced PML-RARα degradation and myeloid cell differentiation. The identification of PML-RARα as a target of autophagy provides new insight into the mechanism of action of ATRA and its specificity for APL.


A simple linear regression is commonly used as a practical predictive pricing model of used cars. The concept of maximum predictive pricing or efficient frontier model is a popular notion in capital asset pricing model. A non-linear model has been observed to provide a better estimate of price appreciation while describing real-life phenomena. The objective of this paper is to develop a new S-curve model on the maximum predictive pricing of used cars. A dynamic S-shaped Membership Function (SMF) was used as a base function to formulate a new S-curve maximum equation model. A comparison between linear regression, cubic regression, and S-curve model has been made prior to formulating a new S-curve maximum predictive pricing model. Validation of the new S-curve maximum predictive pricing model was done by curve-fitting the new equation into the required data set. This new S-curve model is expected to represent a better and practical model related to the price prediction of used cars and specifically, can offer a more realistic forecast of used car pricing in Malaysia.


This paper focuses on innovation development in small enterprises. It explores what kinds of innovations have been developed in small enterprises and what is the diversity of innovation types. In addition, this paper examines the features characterising the journey of a small enterprise from a non-innovator to a diversified innovator. The empirical evidence is based on quantitative data gathered through an e-mail questionnaire, which yielded 733 qualified responses from the representatives of Finnish small enterprises with fewer than 50 employees. The results suggest that the degree of innovation capabilities, R&D investments and profitability are associated with the diversity of developed innovation types. The findings display four alternative routes when a small enterprise moves from a non-innovator to a diversified innovator. Applying these results will provide more specific questions for studying innovation development in the smallest enterprises.


The Herefordshire Beacon, situated a little south of the middle of the Malvern range, sends out towards the east and south-east several buttresses or spurs; they occupy an area of about one mile from north to south and half a mile from east to west. In the summer of 1878 I visited the Malvern Hills to compare the rocks with those of Shropshire, and I was sanguine, from Dr. Holl's description of this district, that I should find in it some equivalents of the younger Precambrian group of that county. In his valuable and thoroughly scientific memoir on the Malvern Hills, published in the Journal of this Society in 1865, Dr. Holl describes the area in question as "occupied by baked rocks* of the probable age of the Hollybush Sandstone and Black Shales," the alteration of the rocks being supposed to be due to immense trap-dykes—a very natural interpretation of the facts when we consider the vague ideas of petrology and of metamorphism which prevailed 15 years ago. On my first visit I had the advantage of Dr. Holl's guidance. I found that he had advanced beyond his original position, and was quite prepared to consider a new reading of the district. I saw at a glance that the rocks were quite of a type with which I had been familiar in Lilleshall Hill, the extreme north-easterly summit of the Salop Precambrian chain. The prevailing variety is a very compact, flinty, hornstone † (note 1, p. 538) of a grey


The kinetic description of linear waves in plasmas is succinctly presented, with emphasis on applications to high-frequency (hf) wave heating and current drive. The Maxwell-Vlasov system of equations is introduced. Its two-timescale analysis yields the linearized Vlasov and the quasilinear Fokker-Planck equations. The standard guiding centre and Hamiltonian formalisms are presented. Two formulations of the hf plasma wave equation are given: as a partial differential equation to hold at each position, and as a global Galerkin ('variational') form.


In alpine-type collision belts, deformation of the foreland may occur as a result of forward propagation of thrusting and is generally associated with thin-skinned deformation mobilizing the sedimentary cover in fold-and-thrust belts. Locally, foreland deformation can involve crustal-scale thrusting and produce large-scale exhumation of crystalline basement resulting in significant relief generation. In this study, we investigate the burial and exhumation history of Tertiary flexural basins located in the Western Alpine foreland, at the front of the Digne thrust sheet (southeast France), using low-temperature apatite fission-track and (U-Th)/He thermochronology. Based on the occurrence of partially to totally reset ages, we document 3.3–4.0 km of burial of these basin remnants between ca. 12 Ma and 6 Ma, related to thin-skinned thrust-sheet emplacement without major relief generation. The onset of exhumation is dated at ca. 6 Ma and is linked to erosion associated with significant relief development. This evolution does not appear to have been controlled by major climate changes (Messinian crisis) or by European slab breakoff. Rather, we propose that the erosional history of the Digne thrust sheet corresponds to basement involvement in foreland deformation, leading to crustal thickening. Our study highlights the control of deep-crustal tectonic processes on foreland relief development and its erosional response at mountain fronts.


Necdetina (type species N. taurica n. sp.) is described here as a new fusulinoidean genus with a replaced or recrystallized wall from the Middle Permian (Capitanian) of Turkey. In addition to its distinctive wall structure, which was probably originally keriothecal and composed of aragonite or high-Mg calcite, the genus is characterized by an ovate shell with rounded to acute poles and axially elongated, biserially enrolled chambers. Chomata are absent, but inconsistently developed parachomata-like structures are present in the test where biserially enrolled chambers overlap. Circular foramina alternate in two rows at the bases of the apertural face and septa. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that Necdetina belongs in the clade of staffellid fusulinoideans, a group whose walls are invariably altered. Among the staffellids, Necdetina is allied with other genera in which the coiling axis is elongated to produce a spherical, oval or fusiform test. In this subclade, Necdetina is further united with Thailandina and Neothailandina in possessing parachomata and having well-organized foramina along the antetheca and septa. Necdetina is the only known staffellid, indeed the only known fusulinoidean, with biserial chambers.


We present a study regarding basic level of concepts in conceptual categorization. The basic level of concepts is an important phenomenon studied in the psychology of concepts. We propose to utilize this phenomenon in formal concept analysis to select important formal concepts. Such selection is critical because, as is well known, the number of all concepts extracted from data is usually large. We review and formalize the main existing psychological approaches to basic level which are presented only informally and are not related to any particular formal model of concepts in the psychological literature. We argue and demonstrate by examples that basic level concepts may be regarded as interesting, informative formal concepts from a user viewpoint. Interestingly, our formalization and experiments reveal previously unknown relationships between the existing approaches to basic level. Thus, we argue that a formalization of basic level in the framework of formal concept analysis is beneficial for the psychological investigations themselves because it helps put them on a solid, formal ground.


GAVAC (Heber Biotec S.A, Havana, Cuba) is a commercially available vaccine developed with the Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus Bm86 recombinant antigen. Bm86 is a "concealed" antigen that is present in the plasmatic membrane of tick gut epithelial cells with unknown function so far. It is well known that after vaccination in the last fifteen years in Cuba, there was a significant decrease of babesiosis (Babesia bovis and Babesia bigemina) and anaplasmosis (Anaplasma marginale) in cattle. A reduced transmission capacity of ticks fed on tick-immune animals and humans has been reported for several tick-borne pathogens. Recent experiments have demonstrated that an anti-tick vaccine may contribute to the control of tick-borne pathogens not only by decreasing the exposure of susceptible hosts to ticks, but also by reducing the vector capacity of ticks. In this study, the potential of Bm86 vaccination to interfere with pathogen transmission among ticks was evaluated by using as experimental model the brown dog tick Rhipicephalus sanguineus and the tickborne Babesia canis and Ehrlichia canis pathogens. Dogs, vaccinated and not vaccinated, were infested with pathogen-infected ticks and noninfected nymphs of R. sanguineus. After feeding, the pathogen transmission to newly molted adults from co-feeding uninfected nymphs was studied by conventional PCR and qPCR. Results suggest that the anti-Bm86 antibodies could be able to block the transmission of B. canis and/or E. canis from infected to non-infected ticks.


Remote sensing technology has seen a massive rise in popularity over the last two decades, becoming an integral part of our lives. Space-based satellite technologies facilitated access to the inaccessible terrains, helped humanitarian teams, support complex emergencies, and contributed to monitoring and verifying conflict zones. The scoping phase of this review investigated the utility of the role of remote sensing application to complement international peace and security activities owing to their ability to provide objective near real-time insights at the ground level. The first part of this review looks into the major research concepts and implementation of remote sensing-based techniques for international peace and security applications and presented a meta-analysis on how advanced sensor capabilities can support various aspects of peace and security. With key examples, we demonstrated how this technology assemblage enacts multiple versions of peace and security: for refugee relief operations, in armed conflicts monitoring, tracking acts of genocide, providing evidence in courts of law, and assessing contravention in human rights. The second part of this review anticipates future challenges that can hinder the applicative capabilities of remote sensing in peace and security. Varying types of sensors pose discrepancies in image classifications and issues like cost, resolution, and difficulty of ground-truth in conflict areas. With emerging technologies and sufficient secondary resources available, remote sensing plays a vital operational tool in conflict-affected areas by supporting an extensive diversity in public policy actions for peacekeeping processes.


The Green–Ampt model describes infiltration of water into soil. A sharp front separates the saturated from the unsaturated zones, and capillary pressure is assumed to remain constant during infiltration. We generalized this model to account for a capillary pressure that depends on the flow velocity. Based on dimensional analysis and physical considerations, we posited a functional form for dynamic capillary pressure and assumed the nonequilibrium capillary pressure to depend on the capillary number in the form of a power law. Our model for dynamic capillary pressure describes measurements of capillary pressure versus Darcy velocity by D.A. Weitz et al. and S.L. Geiger and D.S. Durnford. Moreover, the dimensional analysis allows us to collapse three dynamic capillary pressure curves that Geiger and Durnford measured for sands of different grain size onto one curve. Furthermore our model describes capillary rise experiments performed by T. Tabuchi well. We also derived an implicit analytical solution for the front velocity.


The relationship between methane concentration and second-harmonic output of a particular optical methane-detection system is derived. The system uses a broadband source and a comb filter with its transmission peaks matched to the R-branch absorption lines of methane. An optimal modulation index is obtained, and a noise-limited detection resolution of 0.02% lower explosive level (3-s time constant) is estimated.


In 1986 Andy Warhol silkscreened a series of cowboys and Indians.  In 1978 Roy Henry Vickers, a Tsimshian artist, silkscreened Jesus as well as a lacrosse player.  Since the time of the Campbell's Soup Can (1962), Northwest Coast Indigenous artists have been silkscreening fine art in their own vernacular.  They have used the medium to reclaim heritage, to share histories, to educate, and to demand Western recognition through visuality.  Today, as Western serigraphy has receded back to the commercial medium it was before Pop art, Indigenous artists continue to envision the possibilities serigraphy provides to challenge the art world and popular perceptions of Indigenous cultures.  In this paper I reveal the modes of discourse opened through Indigenous people's use of serigraphy.  Since its inception into Northwest Coast culture, the serigraph has been used to tell the story of Northwest Coast tradition and progress: politically, economically, artistically and culturally.


This paper contends that Aldo Leopold's pursuit of unpeopled wilderness had a disturbing corollary—a disdain for human population growth that culminated in a critique of providing food and medical aid to developing nations. Although Leopold never fully shared these ideas with the public, he explored them in multiple unpublished manuscripts, and he submitted a first draft of one of these essays to a press. Leopold also exchanged these views with the most popular environmental Malthusian of his day, William Vogt, whose exposition of nearly identical arguments won him national fame. By revealing connections between wilderness thought and callous proposed social policy, this paper identifies a new dimension of what environmental historian William Cronon called the "Trouble with Wilderness." This manuscript further calls into question whether the concept of wilderness is inherently exclusionary and misanthropic.


Learning the distribution of a continuous or categorical response variable $\boldsymbol y$ given its covariates $\boldsymbol x$ is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. Deep neural network-based supervised learning algorithms have made great progress in predicting the mean of $\boldsymbol y$ given $\boldsymbol x$, but they are often criticized for their ability to accurately capture the uncertainty of their predictions. In this paper, we introduce classification and regression diffusion (CARD) models, which combine a denoising diffusion-based conditional generative model and a pre-trained conditional mean estimator, to accurately predict the distribution of $\boldsymbol y$ given $\boldsymbol x$. We demonstrate the outstanding ability of CARD in conditional distribution prediction with both toy examples and real-world datasets, the experimental results on which show that CARD in general outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including Bayesian neural network-based ones that are designed for uncertainty estimation, especially when the conditional distribution of $\boldsymbol y$ given $\boldsymbol x$ is multi-modal. In addition, we utilize the stochastic nature of the generative model outputs to obtain a finer granularity in model confidence assessment at the instance level for classification tasks.


This study focuses on the usage of alternative materials consisting of physical, mechanical and durability properties of cement mortars containing natural zeolite and plastic bottle waste, as a substitute for the aggregate. Three different volume fractions of sand, 5 %, 10 % and 20 %, were replaced by the same weight of PET aggregate granules. Natural zeolite replaced the cement at 0 %, 10 % and 20 %. Despite its drawbacks, such as a decrease in the compressive strength and fire resistance, the use of waste PET aggregates presented advantages, such as a reduction in the density and water absorption and high frost resistance of the cement mortar. The result of this study indicated that a cement paste utilising 5 % of waste PET and 10 % natural zeolite showed a satisfactory compressive strength. In conclusion, the result of the study suggested that a cement paste with PET aggregates and natural zeolite could be used in civil engineering constructions for the purpose of saving the environment.


HYPOTHESIS
The triple test score (TTS) is useful and accurate for evaluating palpable breast masses.

DESIGN
Diagnostic test study.

SETTING
University hospital multidisciplinary breast clinic.

PATIENTS
Four hundred seventy-nine women with 484 palpable breast lesions evaluated by TTS from 1991 through July 2000.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Physical examination, mammography, and fine-needle aspiration were each assigned a score of 1, 2, or 3 for benign, suspicious, or malignant results; the TTS is the sum of these scores. The TTS has a minimum score of 3 (concordant benign) and a maximum score of 9 (concordant malignant). The TTS was correlated with subsequent histopathologic analysis or follow-up.

INTERVENTIONS
The TTS was prospectively calculated for each mass. Lesions with a TTS greater than or equal to 5 were excised for histologic confirmation, whereas lesions with scores less than or equal to 4 were either excised (n = 60) or followed clinically (n = 255).

RESULTS
All lesions with TTS less than or equal to 4 were benign on clinical follow-up, including 8 for which the fine-needle aspiration was the suspicious component. Of the 60 biopsied lesions, 51 were normal breast tissue, 4 showed fibrocystic change, 1 was a papilloma, and 4 were atypical hyperplasia. All lesions with a TTS greater than or equal to 6 (n = 130) were confirmed to be malignant on biopsy. Thus, a TTS less than or equal to 4 has a specificity of 100% and a TTS greater than or equal to 6 has a sensitivity of 100%. Of the 39 lesions (8%) with scores of 5, 19 (49%) were malignant, and 20 (51%) were benign.

CONCLUSIONS
The TTS reliably guides evaluation and treatment of palpable breast masses. Masses scoring 3 or 4 are always benign. Masses with scores greater than or equal to 6 are malignant and should be treated accordingly. Confirmatory biopsy is required only for the 8% of the masses that receive a TTS of 5.


Novel mixed-matrix membranes prepared by blending sodium alginate (NaAlg) with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and certain heteropolyacids (HPAs), such as phosphomolybdic acid (PMoA), phosphotungstic acid (PWA) and silicotungstic acid (SWA), followed by ex-situ cross-linking with glutaraldehyde (GA) to achieve the desired mechanical and chemical stability, are reported for use as electrolytes in direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs). NaAlg-PVA-HPA mixed matrices possess a polymeric network with micro-domains that restrict methanol cross-over. The mixed-matrix membranes are characterised for their mechanical and thermal properties. Methanol cross-over rates across NaAlg-PVA and NaAlg-PVA-HPA mixed-matrix membranes are studied by measuring the mass balance of methanol using a density meter. The DMFC using NaAlg-PVA-SWA exhibits a peak power-density of 68 mW cm(-2) at a load current-density of 225 mA cm(-2), while operating at 343 K. The rheological properties of NaAlg and NaAlg-PVA-SWA viscous solutions are studied and their behaviour validated by a non-Newtonian power-law.