Hearing preservation has become a goal in modern surgery for acoustic neuroma. AIM: We have analyzed the post-operative hearing of patients who underwent surgery through the transmastoid retrolabyrinthine approach. STUDY DESIGN: Contenporany cohort transversal. PATIENTS AND METHOD: This study is a prospective analysis of 41 patients with small vestibular schwannoma and useful hearing operated through a transmastoid retrolabyrinthine approach between 1994 and 2004. All patients had unilateral tumors smaller than 1.5 cm. The following parameters were included in our protocol: 1-Total removal of the tumor, 2- intra-operative difficulties or complications, 3-immediate post-operative complications, 4- Audiologic evaluation 90 days after surgery. RESULTS: A good exposure of the internal auditory canal was possible in almost all cases. In six patients we had to change the approach to a translabyrinthine one, with total removal of the tumor in all patients. Hearing was preserved in 34.1% of the cases at the same preoperative levels. CONCLUSION: The retrolabyrinthine approach offered security to the facial nerve, no morbidity and good percentage of hearing preservation. It is also easier changeable to a translabyrinthine approach when a widely space is necessary.


As research and services in the Mediterranean region continue to increase, so do opportunities for global collaboration. To support such collaborations, the Alzheimer's Association was due to hold its seventh Alzheimer's Association International Conference Satellite Symposium in Athens, Greece in 2021. Due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, the meeting was held virtually, which enabled attendees from around the world to hear about research efforts in Greece and the surrounding Mediterranean countries. Research updates spanned understanding the biology of, treatments for, and care of people with Alzheimer's disease (AD_ and other dementias. Researchers in the Mediterranean region have outlined the local epidemiology of AD and dementia, and have identified regional populations that may expedite genetic studies. Development of biomarkers is expected to aid early and accurate diagnosis. Numerous efforts have been made to develop culturally specific interventions to both reduce risk of dementia, and to improve quality of life for people living with dementia.


In Hyphenating Moses Federico Alfredo Roth challenges reductive treatments of Exodus by mainstream postcolonial scholarship. Roth's discussion redeploys postcolonial theory to offer an alternative reading of its early narratives (1:1-3:15) that centers on the theme of identity formation.


Bluetooth, ultra-wideband (UWB), ZigBee, and Wi-Fi are four popular wireless standards for short-range communications. Specifically, ZigBee network is an emerging technology designed for low cost, low power consumption and low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPAN) with a focus on the device-level communication for enabling the wireless sensor networks. In this paper, after a brief overview of the four short-range wireless standards, the developed ZigBee platforms, ITRI ZBnode, have been presented for wireless sensor networking applications. Moreover, design issues for ZigBee industrial applications and the experimental implementation have been demonstrated via a multi-hop tree network.


Blind deconvolution is the recovery of a sharp version of a blurred image when the blur kernel is unknown. Recent algorithms have afforded dramatic progress, yet many aspects of the problem remain challenging and hard to understand. The goal of this paper is to analyze and evaluate recent blind deconvolution algorithms both theoretically and experimentally. We explain the previously reported failure of the naive MAP approach by demonstrating that it mostly favors no-blur explanations. On the other hand we show that since the kernel size is often smaller than the image size a MAP estimation of the kernel alone can be well constrained and accurately recover the true blur. The plethora of recent deconvolution techniques makes an experimental evaluation on ground-truth data important. We have collected blur data with ground truth and compared recent algorithms under equal settings. Additionally, our data demonstrates that the shift-invariant blur assumption made by most algorithms is often violated.


Although the concept of sustainable development has been widely addressed in territorial development and territorial intelligence, the results of the applications and practices may not be satisfactory. Most of the existing models in development are guided by "top-down" planning approach. The biggest disadvantage of this planning approach is that the opinions of key players may not be adopted in the planning process. For the principles of partnership and participation to be further realized, territorial intelligence and territorial development need an additional approach to base its decision and action on a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of community preferences. Nevertheless, what is different from the past is that, the way public governance adapts to the digital era is not only to deal with the technologies, but to develop new organizational structures and operational formats in order to disengage from traditional administrative culture, redefine its objectives and tasks, and form a format of e-governance that is more inclusive in decision-making, power-sharing, and coordination. With increasing diffusion of e-government, interaction and interdependence between plural stakeholders and politics has become more intensive, which in turn has impacted public service delivery and public policy making. In e-governance, such plural stakeholders include not only individual citizens but also enterprises, providers, various levels of governmental agencies, public interest groups, communities and information agents. To further territorial intelligence, in the digital era, it is imperative to manage stakeholder relationships between a government and its stakeholders in order to develop finer interactions and to adjust directions of governmental policies and service designs.


At the beginning of 2008, the amount of cluster industry batik in Solo start to grew, with so many innovations, big market (co1nsumers), low cost and high progit margin. The condition is so much different compare to the late 1980. Thus, with agent-based simulation for industrial cluster, the aims of the research are to understand what mechanism can describe the formation of cluster industry batik in Solo, and propose strategies to stimulate formation of cluster industry. There are three agents modeled in the simulation; consumer, produce, and supplier. Each agent has their own attributes and decision role. As result, the simulation can describe that industrial cluster is formed as bottom-up interaction between agents with interdependency decision-making. In the long term, only producer agent that agglomerate with other industry can survive and the average wealth of each agent will increase along with the density cluster of certain industrial cluster. Several policies can be implemented to stimulate the industrial cluster formation are creating join-showroom, build waste-water treatment for several industries, renovate the facilities (access) to the cluster industries.


We examine the extent to which declining manufacturing employment may have
contributed to increasing inequality in advanced economies. This contribution is typically
small, except in the United States. We explore two possible explanations: the high initial
manufacturing wage premium and the high level of income inequality. The manufacturing
wage premium declined between the 1980s and the 2000s in the United States, but it does
not explain the contemporaneous rise in inequality. Instead, high income inequality played
a large role. This is because manufacturing job loss typically implies a move to the service
sector, for which the worker is not skilled at first and accepts a low-skill wage. On
average, the associated wage cut increases with the overall level of income inequality in
the country, conditional on moving down in the wage distribution. Based on a stylized
scenario, we calculate that the movement of workers to low-skill service sector jobs can
account for about a quarter of the increase in inequality between the 1980s and the 2000s
in the United States. Had the U.S. income distribution been more equal, only about one
tenth of the actual increase in inequality could have been attributed to the loss of
manufacturing jobs, according to our simulations.


In these stories, Dianne Nelson illuminates that vast territory of pleasure and pain created within modern families. Whether it is a father trying to kidnap his young son from his estranged ex-wife or a woman celebrating her ability to produce babies without any help from men, Nelson's characters reveal the dark, haunting and sometimes comic dilemmas of kinship.In the title story, seventeen-year-old April is an involuntary witness to the seemingly endless parade of lovers who frequent her mother's bed. "I don't know why my mother finds no lasting peace" she muses. Opening a book and trying to find her peace in "facts, dates, the pure honesty of numbers," April is overwhelmed finally by the sounds of lovemaking from the adjoining room. "The walls of this house aren't thick enough to keep that kind of sadness contained." In "The Uses of Memory," Netta and Carlene are engaged in a different sort of mother-daughter drama. The issue at hand is the fate of Franklin, their husband and father, who lies in bed in a near comatose state, oblivious to the nurturings or pleadings of either woman.The past, with its countless repercussion on the present, tugs relentlessly at many of the characters. In "Chocolate," the lingering pain of an impoverished childhood plagues Janice; she recalls, in particular, the birthday and Christmas celebrations, the meager gifts wrapped in the same brown twine that was used to hold the door shut. Hillary, the narrator of "Dixon," is spurred into action by the memory of her dead brother. When a local barfly with "silt for brains" persists in telling outlandish lies about Dixon, Hillary takes up karate training with an eye to defending her brother's name the truth of what she knew him to be. Dee, in "Paperweight," can pinpoint the exact moment at which she came to think of the body as an earthbound trap, "a hopeless house with the doors all locked"; she traces it back to a grade-school theatrical performance and a classmate's luckless efforts to open the cumbersome stage curtains. "If it weren't for my body," she laments, "I could fly, I could go anywhere, I could be anything."Ranging in setting from a restaurant in St. Louis to the rain-soaked streets of San Francisco, from a boisterous family reunion beneath the broad Kansas sky to a ranch in Utah where a young father dreams of becoming a movie star, these fifteen stories show men and women pondering--and often struggling against--the mysteries of their own circumstances, especially the bonds of flesh and blood.


Oat straw was treated with different chemical reagents to remove specific components from the cell walls. The effects of these treatments were investigated using traditional wet-chemical analyses and pyrolysis mass spectrometry (Py-MS) in both electron impact and chemical ionization modes. Separate treatments with permanganate and chlorite dissolved the major portion of the lignin, while alkaline peroxide treatment dissolved a proportion of the non-cellulose polysaccharides (NCPs). Combined chlorite and sodium hydroxide treatments removed most of the lignin and NCPs whereas peracetic acid treatment showed a slight decrease in both NCPs and lignin contents. Py-MS thus confirmed the wet chemistry results by showing reductions in the ion markers for both lignin and NCPs, where appropriate. In addition, Py-MS showed other changes, such as the removal of phenolic acids, in a single analysis while differences between the residues from permanganate and chlorite treatment were also observed even though the chemical analyses gave virtually identical results.


This paper introduces a novel intention-aware routing system (IARS) for electric vehicles. This system enables vehicles to compute a routing policy that minimizes their expected journey time while considering the policies, or intentions, of other vehicles. Considering such intentions is critical for electric vehicles, which may need to recharge en route and face potentially significant queueing times if other vehicles choose the same charging stations. To address this, the computed routing policy takes into consideration predicted queueing times at the stations, which are derived from the current intentions of other electric vehicles. The efficacy of IARS is demonstrated through simulations using realistic settings based on real data from The Netherlands, including charging station locations, road networks, historical travel times, and journey origin-destination pairs. In these settings, IARS is compared with a number of state-of-the-art benchmark routing algorithms and achieves significantly lower average journey times. In some cases, IARS leads to an over 80% improvement in waiting times at charging stations and a more than 50% reduction in overall journey times.


The concept of Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) has been adopted by many countries as
proposed in the 2001 Reykjavik Declaration concerning marine ecosystem utilization and management.
Under a project funded by the ICAR AP Cess Fund, the construction of a trophic model of the Arabian
Sea ecosystem off Karnataka using the ECOPATH with ECOSIM (EwE) software was carried out.
ECOPATH is a trophic accounting model that is a practical way of studying the trophic interactions of all
species in an ecosystem by incorporating the energy flows between trophic levels and interactions among
trophic components. ECOSIM calculates corresponding changes in biomass of each component when the
fishing mortality of any particular group is altered. Using equilibrium simulations, where equilibrium biomass
is plotted over a range of fishing effort (F values), ECOSIM provides the facility to predict the potential
equilibrium yield for the fished group.
The project was also able to generate growth, mortality, biological, population and ECOPATH input
parameters for 55 commercially important species which are presented as 'Species Life History Sheets'. Besides
by extensive stomach sampling (9786 fishes and shellfishes) of 56 species a comprehensive database on
diets was made and presented as diet tables.
The Karnataka model encompassed an area of 27,000 km2 and had 24 functional ecological groups. Estimates
were made of the biomass, production/biomass ratios, consumption/biomass rates, and diet compositions
for each functional group. The total system throughout represents the size of the entire system in terms of
flow and was estimated as 11,522 t/km2/year, which is comparatively high, but is consistent with tropical
marine ecosystems with high turnover. The Karnataka model had a mean trophic level of 3.04. Gross
efficiency of the fishery was estimated as 0.0016 (higher than the global average) indicating a fishery harvesting
fishes low in the food chain. Based on the gross efficiency value of the ecosystem it can be classified as an
ecosystem, which is in the process of achieving full maturity. Fully mature ecosystems have web like
connections and are less susceptible to perturbations.
The Arabian Sea ecosystem of Karnataka had a system omnivory index of 0.299 indicating the diverse
nature of feeding interactions between trophic levels. The estimates of net system production and total
primary production by total biomass ratio also substantiated the fact that the ecosystem is immature. Trophic
pyramids representing the distribution of biomass and energy flow indicate that the transfer efficiency
from primary producers was estimated as 14.3% and from detritus 9.1%.
A simulation exercise using ECOSIM with a 17% increase in effort every year for 10 years indicated the
changes in the biomass and yield of different components of the ecosystem for different fleets such as
multi-day trawl, single-day trawl, purse-seine, hook and line, gillnet and artisanal fleets. The results show
that increase in effort does not show proportional increase in total catch and value of the fishery indicating
that effort increase is not recommended for these fleets along Karnataka coast. The present ecological
model constructed and the simulations made are a preliminary exercise and with the availability of better
information and more vigorous data, the model can be improved so as to reflect the reality in a better
fashion.


The volume of fluid (VoF) method is widely used in multi-phase flow simulations to track and locate the interface between two immiscible fluids. A major bottleneck of the VoF method is the interface reconstruction step due to its high computational cost and low accuracy on unstructured grids. We propose a machine learning enhanced VoF method based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to accelerate the interface reconstruction on general unstructured meshes. We first develop a methodology to generate a synthetic dataset based on paraboloid surfaces discretized on unstructured meshes. We then train a GNN based model and perform generalization tests. Our results demonstrate the efficiency of a GNN based approach for interface reconstruction in multi-phase flow simulations in the industrial context.


On the Development of Novel Multi-Layer Passive Components and the Implementation of Compact Wideband Two-Layer 44 Butler Matrix in SIW Technology Multibeam antennas have become a key element in nowadays wireless communication systems where increased channel capacity, improved transmission quality with minimum interference and multipath phenomena are severe design constraints. These antennas are classified in two main categories namely adaptive smart antennas and switched-beam antennas. Switched-beam antennas consist of an elementary antenna array connected to a Multiple Beam Forming Network (M-BFN). Among the different M-BFNs, the Butler matrix has received particular attention as it is theoretically lossless and employs the minimum number of components to generate a given set of orthogonal beams (provided that the number of beams is a power of 2). However, the Butler matrix has a main design problem which is the presence of path crossings that has been previously addressed in different research works. Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) features interesting characteristics for the design of microwave and millimetre-wave integrated circuits. SIW based components combine the advantages of the rectangular waveguide, such as the high Q factor, low insertion loss and high power capability while being compatible with low-cost PCB and LTCC technologies. Owing to its attractive features, the use of SIW technology appears as a good candidate for the implementation of BFNs. The resulting structure is therefore suitable for both waveguide-like and planar structures. In this thesis, different novel passive components (couplers and phase shifters) have been developed exploring the multi-layer SIW technology towards the implementation of a two-layer compact 44 Butler matrix offering wideband performances for both transmission magnitudes and phases with good isolation and input reflection characteristics. Different techniques for the implementation of wideband fixed phase shifters in SIW technology are presented. First, a novel waveguide-based CRLH structure is proposed. The structure is based on a single-layer waveguide with shunt inductive windows (irises) and series transverse capacitive slots, suitable for SIW implementations for compact phase shifters. The structure suffers relatively large insertion loss which remains however within the typical range of non-lumped elements based CRLH implementations. Second, the well-known equal length, unequal width SIW phase shifters is discussed. These phase shifters are very adapted for SIW implementations as they fully exploit the flexibility of the SIW technology in different path shapes while offering wideband phase characteristics. To satisfy good return loss characteristics with this type of phase shifters, the length has to be compromised with respect to the progressive width variations associated with the required phase shift values. A two-layer, wideband low-loss SIW transition is then proposed. The transition is analyzed using its equivalent circuit model bringing a deeper understanding of its transmission characteristics for both amplitude and phase providing therefore the basic guidelines for electromagnetic optimization. Based on its equivalent circuit model, the transition can be optimized within the well equal-length SIW phase shifters in order to compensate its additional phase shift within the frequency band of interest. This two-layer wideband phase shifter scheme has been adopted in the final developed matrix architecture.This transition is then exploited to develop a three-layer, multiply-folded waveguide structure as a good candidate for compensated-length, variable width, low-loss, compact wideband phase shifters in SIW technology. Novel two-layer SIW couplers are also addressed. For BFNs applications, an original structure for a two-layer 90° broadband coupler is developed. The proposed coupler consists of two parallel waveguides coupled together by means of two parallel inclined-offset resonant slots in their common broad wall. A complete parametric study of the coupler is carried out including the effect of the slot length, inclination angle and offset on both the coupling level and the transmission phase. The first advantage of the proposed coupler is providing a wide coupling dynamic range by varying the slot parameters allowing the design of wideband SIW Butler matrix in two-layer topology. In addition, previously published SIW couplers suffer from direct correlation between the transmission phase and the coupling level, while the coupler, hereby proposed, allows controlling the transmission phase without significantly affecting the coupling level, making it a good candidate for BFNs employing different couplers, such as, the Nolen matrix. A novel dual-band hybrid ring coupler is also developed in multi-layer Ridged SIW (RSIW) technology. The coupler has an original structure based on two concentric rings in RSIW topology with the outer ring periodically loaded with radial, stub-loaded transverse slots. A design procedure is presented based on the Transverse Resonance Method (TRM) of the ridged waveguide together with the simple design rules of the hybrid ring coupler. A C/K dual band coupler with bandwidths of 8.5% and 14.6% centered at 7.2 GHz and 20.5 GHz, respectively, is presented. The coupler provides independent dual band operation with low-dispersive wideband operation. Finally, for the Butler matrix design, the two-layer SIW implementation is explored through a two-fold enhancement approach for both the matrix electrical and physical characteristics. On the one hand, the two-layer topology allows an inherent solution for the crossing problem allowing therefore more flexibility for phase compensation over a wide frequency band. This is achieved by proper geometrical optimization of the surface on each layer and exploiting the SIW technology in the realization of variable width waveguides sections with the corresponding SIW bends. On the other hand, the two-layer SIW technology is exploited for an optimized space saving design by implementing common SIW lateral walls for the matrix adjacent components seeking maximum size reduction. The two corresponding 44 Butler matrix prototypes are optimized, fabricated and measured. Measured results are in good agreement with the simulated ones. Isolation characteristics better than -15 dB with input reflection levels lower than -12 dB are experimentally validated over 24% frequency bandwidth centered at 12.5 GHz. Measured transmission magnitudes and phases exhibit good dispersive characteristics of 1dB, around an average value of -6.8 dB, and 10° with respect to the theoretical phase values, respectively, over the entire frequency band.


The available technologies for publishing journals electronically are surveyed. They range from abstract representations, such as SGML, concerned largely with the structure of the document, to formats such as PostScript which faithfully model the layout and the appearance. The issues are discussed in the context of choosing a format for electronically publishing the journal: Electronic Publishing -- Origination, Dissemination and Design. PostScript is neither widely enough available nor standardised enough to be suitable; a bitmapped pages approach suffers from being resolution-dependent in terms of the visual quality achievable. Reasons are put forward for the final choice of Adobe s new PDF document standard for creating electronic versions of the journal.


Users of complex automation sometimes make mistakes. Vendors and supervisors often place accountability for these mistakes on the users themselves and their limited understanding of how these systems are "supposed" to be used (a perspective that influences how operators are trained and fosters efforts to design systems that explain their actions). Seeking to give users a better understanding of their systems, however, sidesteps the critical issue of how we ought to get computers to shoulder the responsibility of understanding humans. The machine is the piece of this equation that is "supposed" to conform. Our approach has the potential to make what people do naturally be the right thing. This work derives somewhat from related research in Intent Inference, which has focused on representing the tasks and actions of a user so that a system can maintain a representation of the user's intent and can tailor its decision support accordingly. There is a growing need to extend the notion of intent inference to multi-operator venues, as systems are targeted increasingly at collaborative environments and operators are called upon to perform in multiple roles. In this paper we describe an approach to Crew Intent Inference that relies on models representing the goals and actions of individual operators and the overall team. We focus on the potential for intent inference to enhance coordination and present example scenarios highlighting the utility of intent inference in a multi-operator domain.


A sample of 152 accidents and incidents involving Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems, more commonly referred to as "drones", have been analysed. The data was collected from a 10-year period, 2006 to 2015, conveniently sourced from a limited population owing to the scarcity of reports. Results indicate that safety occurrences involving Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) have a significantly different distribution of contributing factors when sorted into distinct categories. This provides a thorough and up-to-date characterization of the safety deficiencies specific to RPAS. In turn, this contributes to the development of adequate safety management systems applicable to the RPAS sector. The majority of RPAS occurrences involved system component failures which were the result of equipment problems. Therefore, airworthiness instead of pilot licensing needs to be considered first when regulating the Remotely Piloted Aircraft System industry. "Human factors" and "loss of control in-flight" were found to be the second most common "contributing factor" and "occurrence category", respectively; Remotely Piloted Aircraft pilot licensing will help reduce the probability of these secondary occurrences. The most significant conclusion is that reporting systems must be implemented to address RPAS accidents and incidents specifically, such that more useful data is available, and further analysis is possible facilitating an improved understanding and greater awareness.


Whitesands (ISO: TNP) is an Oceanic language of the southern Vanuatu sub-group. Like the related languages of southern Vanuatu, Whitesands has developed a clause-linkage system that is a kind of switch-reference system. This device monitors referent continuity on new clauses – typically contrasting with the previous clause. In this paper I investigate the use of this system in natural discourse, focusing on regularity and form of the system. I conclude that discourse or genre type does not correlate with specific switch reference features in a narrow sense, yet at the same time suggest that studies investigating switch reference should be aware of the discourse context when making generalisation about prominence and usage patterns.


A central question in civil war research is how state sponsorship, overseas funding, involvement in illicit economics, and access to lootable resources affect the behavior and organization of insurgent groups. Existing research has not arrived at any consensus, as resource wealth is portrayed as a cause of both undisciplined predation and military resilience. A social-institutional theory explains why similar resource wealth can be associated with such different outcomes. The theory argues that the social networks on which insurgent groups are built create different types of organizations with differing abilities to control resource flows. There is no single effect of resource wealth: instead, social and organizational context determines how these groups use available resources. A detailed comparative study of armed groups in the insurgency in Kashmir supports this argument. A number of indigenous Kashmiri insurgent organizations received substantial funding, training, and support from Pakistan from 1988 to 2003, but they varied in their discipline and internal control. Preexisting networks determined how armed organizations were built and how material resources were used. Evidence from other South Asian wars shows that this is a broader pattern. Scholars of civil conflict should therefore explore the social and organizational processes of war in their research.


The historical record provides evidence of an apparent semantic shift in the denotational range of the Portuguese colour term roxo, whereby its referent, initially designating the colour red, came to designate the colour purple. Drawing on colour term research from the World Colour Survey, prototype theory and cognitive semantics, I argue that such a process was set in motion by an adjacent semantic shift in the colour term vermelho from non-basic to the basic colour term for red in Portuguese. Supported by empirical evidence from historical texts as well as comparative linguistics, I document an overall timeline for this change and argue that extra-linguistic factors involving the dyeing industry in Iberia serve as the motivation for these shifts, a view supported by colour term cognates in other Ibero-Romance varieties such as Catalan and Galician. The evolution of Portuguese roxo and vermelho provides an example of one possible evolutionary path that basic colour terms can take in the history of a language, demonstrating the cognitive mechanics involved in the division and shift of colour category boundaries and the relocation of prototypes.


There have been powerful incentives for Tasmanian Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to adopt information technology to enable them to remain competitive and to comply with legislative regulations. This research study was undertaken to establish whether SMEs implementing computerised accounting systems have a subsequent change in their external accountancy fees. The research study employed a quantitative methodology using survey questionnaires. The study found that in less than 3% of cases SMEs reported a decrease in accountancy fees, in almost 45% of cases the organisation actually experienced a slight to substantial fee increase while 52% reported no change in accountancy fees.


Abstract The end-Permian (c. 252 Ma) and end-Triassic (c. 201 Ma) mass-extinction events are commonly linked to the emplacement of the large igneous provinces of the Siberia Traps and Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, respectively. Accordingly, scenarios for both extinctions are increasingly convergent and cross-fertilization of ideas has become important. Here, we present a synthesis of extinction scenarios based on a critical assessment of the available palaeontological, sedimentological, geochemical and geophysical evidence. How similar were the extinction events, what gaps exist in our understanding and how can a comparison of the events enhance our understanding of each event individually? Our focus is on the most important proximate kill mechanisms including: climate change and atmospheric pollution; increased soil erosion, weathering and runoff; forest dieback and the spread of pathogens; and ocean temperature changes, anoxia and acidification. There is substantial evidence to suggest that very similar kill mechanisms acted upon late Permian as well as Late Triassic ecosystems, strengthening the hypothesis that the ultimate causes of the mass-extinction events were similar.


Tropical vegetation is a major source of global land surface evapotranspiration, and can thus play a major role in global hydrological cycles and global atmospheric circulation. Accurate prediction of tropical evapotranspiration is critical to our understanding of these processes under changing climate. We examined the controls on evapotranspiration in tropical vegetation at 21 pan-tropical eddy covariance sites, conducted a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of 13 evapotranspiration models at these sites, and assessed the ability to scale up model estimates of evapotranspiration for the test region of Amazonia. Net radiation was the strongest determinant of evapotranspiration (mean evaporative fraction was 0.72) and explained 87% of the variance in monthly evapotranspiration across the sites. Vapor pressure deficit was the strongest residual predictor (14%), followed by normalized difference vegetation index (9%), precipitation (6%) and wind speed (4%). The radiation-based evapotranspiration models performed best overall for three reasons: (1) the vegetation was largely decoupled from atmospheric turbulent transfer (calculated from X decoupling factor), especially at the wetter sites; (2) the resistance-based models were hindered by difficulty in consistently characterizing canopy (and stomatal) resistance in the highly diverse vegetation; (3) the temperature-based models inadequately captured the variability in tropical evapotranspiration. We evaluated the potential to predict regional evapotranspiration for one test region: Amazonia. We estimated an Amazonia-wide evapotranspiration of 1370mmyr (cid:2) 1 , but this value is dependent on assumptions about energy balance closure for the tropical eddy covariance sites; a lower value (1096mmyr (cid:2) 1 ) is considered in discussion on the use of flux data to validate and interpolate models.


21 December 2017 A SAFER HIGHWAY AT GUNNEDAH IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS The completion of road resurfacing work on the Oxley Highway at Gunnedah has delivered an early Christmas present to local residents. Member for Tamworth Kevin Anderson said Roads and Maritime Services engaged Gunnedah Council to resurface a 700 metre section of the Oxley Highway between the Kamilaroi Highway intersection and Boundary Road in October, which also involved drainage work and vegetation removal. "The essential work was delivered on time and on budget under the NSW Government's $1.5 billion program to maintain and improve the 18,028 kilometre state road network," Mr Anderson said. "The completed section of road aims to improve safety for motorists and reduce ongoing future maintenance requirements. "The community must be thanked for its patience while this important work was carried out. "Investigation work for the roundabout planned for the intersection of Boundary Road and the Oxley Highway is also progressing. "Planning is continuing, with early work being carried out this year including utility relocations. "Roads and Maritime has been working with Gunnedah Shire Council to develop plans for the intersection upgrade, including consultation with nearby residents. "The upgrade to the intersection was identified in the Oxley Highway Corridor Strategy to improve traffic flow and safety for all road users." Work to build the roundabout is expected to start next year.


Tip60, originally isolated as an HIV-1-Tat interactive protein, contains an evolutionarily conserved domain with yeast silencing factors. We demonstrate here direct biochemical evidence that this domain of Tip60 has histone acetyltransferase activity. The purified recombinant effectively acetylates H2A, H3, and H4 but not H2B of core histone mixtures. This substrate specificity has not been observed among histone acetyltransferases analyzed to date. These results indicate that Tip60 is a histone acetyltransferase with a novel property, suggesting that Tip60 and its related factors may introduce a distinct alteration on chromatin.


Abstract Background. Little information is available about survival outcomes of patients with HER2-positive early breast cancer treated with adjuvant capecitabine-containing chemotherapy with or without trastuzumab. Patients and methods. One thousand and five hundred patients with early breast cancer were entered to the Finland Capecitabine trial (FinXX) between January 2004 and May 2007, and were randomly assigned to receive either three cycles of adjuvant TX (docetaxel, capecitabine) followed by three cycles of CEX (cyclophosphamide, epirubicin, capecitabine; TX-CEX) or three cycles of docetaxel followed by three cycles of CEF (cyclophosphamide, epirubicin, fluorouracil; T-CEF). The primary endpoint was recurrence-free survival (RFS). The study protocol was amended in May 2005 while study accrual was ongoing to allow adjuvant trastuzumab for patients with HER2-positive cancer. Of the 284 patients with HER2-positive cancer accrued to FinXX, 176 (62.0%) received trastuzumab after amending the study protocol, 131 for 12 months and 45 for nine weeks. The median follow-up time was 6.7 years. Results. Patients with HER2-positive cancer who received trastuzumab had better RFS than those who did not (five-year RFS 89.2% vs. 75.9%; HR 0.41, 95% CI 0.23–0.72; p = 0.001). Patients treated with trastuzumab for 12 months or nine weeks had similar RFS. There was no significant interaction between trastuzumab administration and the type of chemotherapy. Four (2.3%) patients treated with trastuzumab had heart failure or left ventricular dysfunction, three of these received capecitabine. Conclusion. Adjuvant trastuzumab improves RFS of patients treated with TX-CEX or T-CEF. Few patients had cardiac failure.


It is my intention in this thesis to explore the concept of School Self-Evaluation to improve infant literacy in a DEIS Band 2 primary school of diverse pupil population. The desired outcome of this research is to design an individualized reading methodology, a direct instructional paradigm for teaching reading in a rural multi-cultural school with 15 nationalities. This school-based action research approach is consistent with international trends and has become a very significant focus in improving quality in our schools (McNamara, O'Hara, 2008, Matthews, 2010). The research question that guided the study is simply: How can we improve our daily practice to raise literacy levels in infant classes?

The literature review focuses on literacy, school self-evaluation, action research and motivational leadership. An action research methodology is used for systematic inquiry and the continual need for critique (Mc Niff, Whitehead, 2010), in order to identify school needs and develop action plans to support the change process.

A large volume of qualitative and quantitative data was generated and while I engaged in a mixed methods approach, quantitative findings are secondary to qualitative findings. The analysis is based on the literature, research data and my experience as Principal. Further timely validation of the research came during a pilot Whole School Evaluation/Management Leadership and Learning Inspection. This is a process of external evaluation of the work of a school carried out by the Department of Education and Skills Inspectorate Division. 'It affirms positive aspects of the school's work and suggests areas for development' (Department of Education and Skills, 2010). The findings of the Inspectorate further added to our evidence base, authenticating our data and highlighting the importance of the leadership style of the Principal.

It is a principle argument of this cases-study that, internal evaluation should be supported by external evaluation, with constant reference to context and pupil population. Schools need to be taught how to self-evaluate, not investigated nor expected to comply with our present trends towards over-regulation. This study engages with a framework that represents the very meaningful empowerment of classteachers who crucially depend on the action and interactions of their leader, developing a shared collective responsibility, a bottom-up approach with top-down support. This is done by balancing what is best for individual pupils and what is best for our school community. 'This is particularly important in educational communities of cultural diversity, where living together with difference calls for living together with understanding and tolerance' (Taysum, A. 2010).

Findings also reveal that the necessity for early intervention if all pupils are to succeed to the best of their ability cannot be ignored as it is central to social inclusion and future life chances. If improving quality means ensuring sustainability of best practice, then leadership in this study involves empowering teachers to drive sustainable change to suit individual pupil needs through the provision of appropriate support and resources. The emergent leaders that became manifest in the school, were encouraged through critical reflection, open collaborative inquiry, participative decision making, clearly defined objectives, and creative autonomy. Leadership in this study has to do with change. A significant feature of change is the teacher as change agent. In operational terms, without change no leadership has occurred.

Conclusions will then be drawn and recommendations made proposing the most appropriate strategies for dealing with the complex issues of school improvement and school self-evaluation.


This dissertation provides a philosophical analysis about the influence colonialism had over capitalism's current configuration and how their intricate interplay impacts both the social and the ecological spheres, in both central and peripheral countries. Such analysis draws from the work of Jose Lutzenberger, a Brazilian environmentalist. The current capitalist economic system tends to disregard the environment, since it would be greatly affected by negative externalities. A negative externality is an economic activity that imposes a negative effect on an unrelated third party. Many negative externalities are related to the environmental consequences of production and consumption. In addition, this dissertation explores the fact that an ecological crisis is also a social crisis. A genealogical and existential thread going from Brazil's early days as one of Portugal's colonies to the present is drawn, showing how colonialism helped to create the foundations and the conditions for the current exploitative capitalist system, in Brazil and elsewhere. To change this situation, the environment should not be entrusted to private interests but to an institution responsible for the good of society as a whole. Genuinely green economies are more prone to appear on the periphery, but only if global economic justice is achieved first.


The ubiquitin E3 ligase Smurf controls the reciprocal trafficking of the Hedgehog signaling mediators Smoothened and Patched. Smurf controls reciprocal trafficking of Smo and Ptc Hedgehog (Hh) stimulates intracellular signaling by binding to Patched (Ptc) at the cell surface, relieving Ptc-mediated repression of the transmembrane protein Smoothened (Smo). Hh also stimulates the ubiquitylation and internalization of Ptc. In the absence of Hh, Smo is inactivated and targeted for ubiquitylation and removal from the membrane. Li et al. identified Smurf family ubiquitin E3 ligases as required for this reciprocal regulation of Ptc and Smo in Drosophila melanogaster. The ability of Smurf to bind to and ubiquitylate Smo depended on phosphorylation of Smurf by G protein–coupled receptor kinase 2 (Gprk2) and was inhibited by Hh-induced phosphorylation of Smo. Hh-induced dissociation of Smurf from Smo freed Smurf to interact with Ptc, thus promoting the ubiquitylation of Ptc. These findings identify Smurf family E3 ligases as key players in the reciprocal accumulation of Smo and Ptc at the cell surface (see Focus by Sharpe and de Sauvage). Hedgehog (Hh) induces signaling by promoting the reciprocal trafficking of its receptor Patched (Ptc) and the signal transducer Smoothened (Smo), which is inhibited by Ptc, at the cell surface. We identified Smurf family E3 ubiquitin ligases as essential for Smo ubiquitylation and cell surface clearance and demonstrated that Smurf family members mediate the reciprocal trafficking of Ptc and Smo in Drosophila melanogaster. G protein–coupled receptor kinase 2 (Gprk2)–mediated phosphorylation of Smurf promoted Smo ubiquitylation by increasing the recruitment of Smurf to Smo, whereas protein kinase A (PKA)–mediated phosphorylation of Smo caused Smurf to dissociate from Smo, thereby inhibiting Smo ubiquitylation. Smo and Ptc competed for the same pool of Smurf family E3 ubiquitin ligases, and Hh promoted Ptc ubiquitylation and degradation by disrupting the association of Smurf family E3 ubiquitin ligases with Smo and stimulating their binding to Ptc. Our study identifies the E3 ubiquitin ligases that target Smo and provides insight into how Hh regulates the reciprocal trafficking of its receptor and signal transducer.


Over the past two decades, there has been a notable similarity across Hungarian counties in the changes in the unemployment rate. During the transformational recession and – more recently – after the financial crisis of 2008, all of the counties experienced the same rise in the unemployment rate, while regional disparities narrowed. However, during the economic recovery after the first recession, the disparities widened. These patterns suggest the existence of an equilibrium relationship between economic performance and spatial disparities of unemployment, which has been described for several countries with fully developed market economies, but so far has not been analysed in the situation of an economic transformation following a change of the political system.This study attempts to detect the same correspondence between economic performance and spatial disparities of unemployment, examining the experiences of the first 21 years after the change of the political system. To do this, econometrics-based empirical investigation, including tests for correlation and cointegration were used. After testing for non-stationarity in the trends of the indicators of spatial disparities and the national unemployment rate, taken as a proxy of economic performance, the vector error correction approach was applied to test for cointegration between the variables. Although the results exhibit no unambiguous evidence of the relationship for the time series as a whole, governmental adjustments could suggest breaks in the trends of the variables. To take this into consideration, the periods before and after the trend break of 2001 were analysed separately, as several governmental adjustments happened around that year which could have modified the relationship. However, repeated tests on the distinctive components of the whole period showed no evidence of the hypothesised correspondence in Hungary, either.It seems that the processes of slow economic transformation and governmental adjustments did not allow this phenomenon to develop. Considering the shortness of the time series within post-1989 Hungary and the unexpected long-term effects of the recent crises, further investigation will be needed to trace the potential manifestation of such a relation.


The creation of a single European railway area is the overall policy objective of the European Union for the railway industry. Rail infrastructure management is seen as a natural monopoly to be operated at a national scale. Competition is possible downstream in the provision of rail transport services. A European-wide market of rail transport services would benefit from larger economies of scale, and competition would ensure such efficiencies are passed down to European citizens and businesses. However, the reform process has been set back by Member States that disagree with the full vertical separation of infrastructure management and transport service provision, as well as by Member States that want to delay the full liberalization of the industry. As a consequence, inconsistent national models are emerging and non-sustainable asymmetries between Member States are creating tensions. The Fourth Railway Package is the opportunity to conclude the European railway reform process, both for commercial services and for public contract services. Imaginative solutions are necessary to reach a workable consensus.


NOTICE This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Transportation in the interest of information exchange. The United States Government assumes no liability for the contents or use thereof. The United States Government does not endorse products or manufacturers. Trade or manufacturer's names appear herein solely because they are considered essential to the objective of this report.


In this paper six authors propose guidelines for German labor market policy, to overcome current discouragement and lead to a new balance of social security and individual competitiveness. Crucial aspects in this regard should be a reformed tax system based on excise instead of income taxes, and a system of incentives (vouchers) to encourage further education and individual initiative in the event of unemployment. In addition the declaration pleads for economic regulation of immigration and demands more marketability of honorary work. The welfare state should not be shattered but has to stimulate the individual to take economic risks and chances. This paper has been forwarded to a broader German public in order to influence discussion on the future course of labor market policy.


Speaking as an American and a New Yorker, not everyone around here agrees on the U.S. government's military response to the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. With few exceptions, none of these disagreements are apparent from listening to U.S. Congressional debates or watching CNN - the key makers and disseminators of U.S. foreign policy, respectively. With only handfuls of people at scattered rallies, speak-outs, and demonstrations gathering on campuses and city squares in protest of the U.S. bombings in Afghanistan, one is left to wonder how widespread anti-war sentiment actually is in America.


BACKGROUND
Heading professional soccer balls can generate mild traumatic brain injury in children. The long-term consequences could include difficulty in solving problems and deficits in memory and language.

AIM
To assess the impact of a professional adult soccer ball on a child's head, using the finite element method and dynamic effects to predict brain damage.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
The minimum conditions of an adult game were considered: the ball speed was 6 m/s and the diffuse blow was 345 and 369 Newtons (N), on the forehead and top of the head, respectively. A head was modeled in order to know the stresses, strains and displacements generated by the impacts. The extent of the alteration was determined by comparing the strength of brain tissue, with predictions of computed stresses. The geometric characteristics of the head were transferred from medical images. The input data of the materials of a child's head was obtained from the literature.

RESULTS
In the case of heading with the forehead, mathematical simulation showed frontal lobe alterations, with brain stresses between 0.064 and 0.059 N/mm(2). When the heading was with the upper head zone, the brain alterations were in the parietal lobe, with stresses between 0.089 and 0.067 N/mm(2). In the cerebral spinal fluid the pressure was 3.61 to 3.24 N/mm(2).

CONCLUSIONS
The mathematical simulations reveal evidence of brain alterations caused by a child heading adult soccer balls. The model presented is an economical and quick tool that can help predict brain damage. It demonstrates the ability of the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) to absorb shock loads.


This paper describes a fluid and responsive design process identified among certain practitioners involved in solving social problems or inspiring social change. Their practice is both user-centred and participative in its approach and addresses the shortcomings of many top-down initiatives. These people work tactically to weave together policy knowledge, funding opportunities, local initiative and ideas for improving social and environmental conditions, acting as connectors, activists and facilitators in different contexts at different times. Although their activities are recognisably related to more conventional designing practices, the materials they use in finding solutions are unusual in that they may include the beneficiaries themselves and other features of the social structure in which they are effecting change. We present an ethnographic study of practices in designing that focuses on social initiatives rather than the tangible products or systems that might support them. We explore the how design practices map to the process of winning local people's commitment to projects with a social flavour. To situate the discussion in a political context we draw on de Certeau's distinction between strategic and tactical behaviour and look at how our informants occupy a space as mediators between groups with power and a sense of agency and those without.
 Keywords:
Social Change; Ethnographic Action Research; Discourse Analysis; Designing In The Wild


Linda Nyati explores the duty to facilitate public participation in legislative processes in terms of sections 59(1) (a), 72(1) (a) and 118(1) (a) of the Constitution. This issue, the article demonstrates, is highly pertinent to citizens in grappling with the inner working of a democratic dispensation.

The author delves into it by way of a critical analysis of the Constitutional Court judgment in Merafong Demarcation Forum & Others v The President of the Republic of South Africa 2008 (10) BCLR 968 (2008 (5) SA 171) CC.) After considering the representative and participatory aspects of our constitutional democracy, the article considers whether the standards set by the courts are effective in ensuring that legislative bodies fully discharge their duty to facilitate meaningful participation by all citizens. The "minimalist approach to public participation" adopted by the court in this matter, it concludes, "has created a gap wide enough to let an important piece of legislation which has significant implications on the public to be passed as reasonable. Setting such low standards means that judicial review of the other branches of government is ineffective."


Genetic alterations conferring resistance to the effects of chemical inhibitors are valuable tools for validating on-target effects in cells. Unfortunately, for many therapeutic targets such alleles are not available. To address this issue, we evaluated whether CRISPR-Cas9-mediated insertion/deletion (indel) mutagenesis can produce drug-resistance alleles at endogenous loci. This method takes advantage of the heterogeneous in-frame alleles produced following Cas9-mediated DNA cleavage, which we show can generate rare alleles that confer resistance to the growth-arrest caused by chemical inhibitors. We used this approach to identify novel resistance alleles of two lysine methyltransferases, DOT1L and EZH2, which are each essential for the growth of MLL-fusion leukemia cells. We biochemically characterized the DOT1L mutation, showing that it is significantly more active than the wild-type enzyme. These findings validate the on-target anti-leukemia activities of existing DOT1L and EZH2 inhibitors and reveal a simple method for deriving drug-resistance alleles for novel targets, which may have utility during early stages of drug development.


Though contemporary research has testified to the importance of social presence in influencing the format and structure of group processes, its unidimensional nature and inability to accommodate asynchronous communication has eroded its relevance in the face of more sophisticated IT-based collaborative networks such as virtual project teams. Kumar and Benbasat [25, 26] thus advanced the notion of Para Social Presence (PSP) as a broader, encompassing concept that overcomes the aforementioned weaknesses inherent in the existing social presence construct. Yet to-date, there has not been a theoretical and empirical validation of the pertinent of the PSP construct when applied to more dynamic group configurations as claimed. To this end, this study reviews extant literature to first establish whether the PSP construct is meaningful conceptually and then empirically validates its measurement properties over time through a temporal field experimentation setting.


Soybean mosaic virus (SMV) occurs in most soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) growing areas around the world. The use of soybean cultivars with resistance to SMV is the most effective way of controlling this disease. Three independent genetic loci (Rsv1, Rsv3, and Rsv4) with multiple alleles for SMV resistance have been identifi ed. The objective of this study was to evaluate the genetic composition of a Chinese soybean line 8101 for SMV resistance. In this study, 8101 was crossed with susceptible cultivars Lee 68, Essex, and Hefeng No. 25. The genotype 8101 was also crossed with resistant lines PI 96983, L29, and V94-5152 carrying Rsv1, Rsv3, and Rsv4, respec- tively, to examine the allelic relationship between the genes in 8101 and the previously reported genes at these three loci. The results indicated that 8101 carries three independent dominant genes for resistance to SMV. One of them is at the Rsv1 locus but carries a different allele than the Rsv1 in PI 96983. This new allele confers resistance to SMV G1 but a susceptible reaction to SMV G7. The second gene is at the Rsv3 locus conferring resistance to SMV G7 but a suscep- tible reaction to SMV G1. The third gene is at the Rsv4 locus and confers resistance to both SMV G1 and G7. The presence of these three genes in 8101 confers resistance to SMV strains G1 through G3 and G5 through G7. The line 8101 is the fi rst genotype identifi ed as carrying all three SMV resistance genes, Rsv1, Rsv3, and Rsv4. Research is underway to further characterize the three resistance genes in 8101.


ABSTRACT A shortage of suitable franchisees has long plagued the Australian franchise industry impacting franchisors' capacity to grow their chains. This exploratory research identifies, defines and examines an unresearched category of franchisees that of internally recruited franchisees, who prior to their franchise recruitment were employees of the franchisor. This category has previously been ignored by the literature even though estimates of some chains place the proportion of internally recruited franchisees at over 40 per cent. Employing qualitative interviews with key franchisor decision makers this research begins to address this gap. This study investigates what factors drive franchisors to recruit franchisees from the ranks of their employees and how they perceive this impacts on the achievement of franchising's four strategic imperatives of unit growth, system uniformity, local responsiveness and system-wide adaption. Seven drivers for the internal recruiting of franchisees were identified: company owned units, significant system hierarchy, larger unit scale, unit viability, system maturity, capital freedom and strong growth in unit numbers. A preliminary model of factors influencing the propensity of franchise systems to recruit franchisees internally is presented. This research provides the first contribution to the franchise literature on the internally recruited franchisee phenomenon. In a practical sense this study should influence the recruitment practices of franchisors.


In multibody dynamics holonomic constraint equations exist because of mechanical joints, or specified motion trajectories. In order to solve the dynamic equations of motion of the constrained multibody system, one can use a coordinate partitioning approach to eliminate dependent coordinates. An alternative approach is to use the Lagrange multiplier technique. A generalized constraint force vector associated with the system generalized coordinates has to be added in the equations of motion, which is computed by a multiplication of the transposed constraint Jacobian times a Lagrange multiplier. At this point, it should be noted that the constraint force vector is in general not the vector of actual reaction forces in the joints. For example, in robotics it is of particular interest to prescribe the motion of the tool center point and determine the drive torques in the joints. This leads to an optimal control problem, which is in general very expensive to solve. However, an alternative method is to apply a motion as a rheonomic constraint equation on the tool center point of the robot. We show that the resulting generalized constraint force vector, which is acting on the body of the tool center point, can be converted into equivalent drive torques in the joints by the use of the principle of virtual work. The advantage of the proposed method is that the solution can be obtained after one single forward simulation of the multibody system, since the conversion into the drive torques is just a post-processing step.


We present the results of a multiwavelength observational campaign on the TeV binary system LS I +61° 303 with the VERITAS telescope array (>200 GeV), Fermi-LAT (0.3–300 GeV), and Swift/XRT (2–10 keV). The data were taken from 2011 December through 2012 January and show a strong detection in all three wavebands. During this period VERITAS obtained 24.9 hr of quality selected livetime data in which LS I +61° 303 was detected at a statistical significance of 11.9σ. These TeV observations show evidence for nightly variability in the TeV regime at a post-trial significance of 3.6σ. The combination of the simultaneously obtained TeV and X-ray fluxes do not demonstrate any evidence for a correlation between emission in the two bands. For the first time since the launch of the Fermi satellite in 2008, this TeV detection allows the construction of a detailed MeV–TeV spectral energy distribution from LS I +61° 303. This spectrum shows a distinct cutoff in emission near 4 GeV, with emission seen by the VERITAS observations following a simple power-law above 200 GeV. This feature in the spectrum of LS I +61° 303, obtained from overlapping observations with Fermi-LAT and VERITAS, may indicate that there are two distinct populations of accelerated particles producing the GeV and TeV emission.


We use the gradients of first order channels and the ratio between drainage basin planimetric area and volume (RVA) as primary topographic measures capable of distinguishing the relative tectonic activity of mountain fronts in both extensional and compressional tectonic settings. Here we report results from test cases on five mountain fronts with variable rates of rock uplift and deformational style in the western United States and Italy. Our study is guided by initial results obtained from two ranges in the southern Rocky Mountains, USA, Sierra Nacimiento and the Taos Range, that have departed on unique landscape developmental pathways related to the degree of tectonic activity on the range front fault. A frequency distribution of Taos Range and Sierra Nacimiento first order channel gradients is distinctly bimodal and the RVA positively co-vary with tectonic activity for the Taos Range. We are able to generally reproduce these results for the tectonically active range front faults of the Wasatch Range in Utah and the Black Range in Death Valley, California. We also examined the relationship between RVA and channel gradients for the foreland flank of the northern Apennines, Italy. A similar, positive relationship between RVA and channel gradient exists in this fold and thrust belt, however these data exhibit higher variance than those collected from the uplifted footwall blocks in the western United States. We attribute the higher variance to the effects of overall larger drainage basin size investigated and the considerable variability in rock-type. In general, RVA among the studied mountain fronts can be interpreted primarily in terms of the tectonic setting, and secondarily in terms of specific variations in drainage basin shape controlled by local rock-type and climatic setting. The RVA is an effective metric in determining the relative tectonic activity of fault-bounded mountain fronts and escarpments. When combined the gradients of first-order streams, the RVA can help determine the relative position of a catchment along a time-dependent drainage basin development curve.


The Gulf of Suez and Red Sea rifts are currently bordered by large asymmetric uplifts that are undergoing erosion. We find that the amount and timing of erosion vary systematically along the strike of the margin and have been controlled by variations in the prerift stratigraphy. The prerift strata are composed of cliff-forming Eocene-Cretaceous carbonates overlying the easily eroded Cretacous-Cambrian "Nubian" sandstone. This lithologic succession promotes scarp retreat of the sedimentary section, followed by dissection of the underlying basement. The prerift section thins from over 2000 rn at the northern end of the rift to less than 400 rn at its junction with the Red Sea. Thus, at the northern part of the Gulf of Suez, the Nubian sandstone is minimallyexposed, and the carbonates form a scarp at the rift border fault. Farther south, undercutting of the carbonates by erosion of the sandstone has resulted in scarp retreat. The escarpment cuts diagonally away from the border fault and is over 100 km inland from the border fault at the southernmost Gulf of Suez. The amount of retreat varies inversely with the sediment thickness. Exposure and erosion of basement are initiated by the retreat of the escarp- ment, and the depth of erosion, as indicated by fission track ages, increases with distance from the escarpment. These observations are explained by a model in which erosion along the Gulf of Suez is initiated as rift flank uplift becomes sufficiently large to expose the friable sandstones. Undercutting of the escarpment and exhumation of basement has been propagating northward and westward for at least 20 m.y. The average rate of scarp retreat has been 6 km/m.y. and the along-strike propagation of the erosion has been 12 km/m.y. The diachronous erosion of the the rift flanks at the Gulf of Suez highlights the importance of distinguishing between the timing of uplift and of erosion. Both thermochronometric and stratigraphic data primarily indicate the timing of erosion, which may differ significantly from the timing of the uplift that initiates it. They must be interpreted carefully to avoid erroneous conclusions about rift tectonics.


Faecal incontinence is a potentially complex patient issue that poses a real challenge to healthcare professionals and requires careful and effective assessment and prevention strategies to protect the viability of the skin. This paper explores preliminary results of an observational study undertaken by the authors in an intensive therapy unit. Data highlighted that faecal incontinence can damage the skin's integrity, leading to skin breakdown and possible wound contamination, giving rise to major healthcare costs. To prevent this, faecal collection systems can be used as an effective early intervention. The study mentioned in this article, identified that clinical staff associated a high skin risk assessment score with the need to use a faecal collection device.


Lucia Saks uses South African cinema as a lens through which to view cultural changes resulting from the end of apartheid in 1994. She examines how media transformed the meaning of race and nation during this period and argues that, as apartheid was disbanded and new racial constructs allowed, South Africa quickly sought a new mode of representation as a way to distance itself from the violence and racism of the half-century prior as well as to demonstrate stability amid social disruption. This rapid search for a new way to identify and reflect itself is what Saks refers to as the race for representation. She contextualizes this race in terms of South African history, the media, apartheid, sexuality, the economy, community, early South African cinema, and finally speculates about the future of 'counter-cinema' in present-day South Africa.


On a nearly zero protein diet, 11 patients with Parkinson's disease with the "on-off" effect demonstrated great sensitivity to levodopa (L-dopa)-carbidopa and reduced fluctuations. Eight patients required a 41% reduction in total L-dopa dosage and discontinuation of all adjuvant therapy to reduce the preponderance of chorea. On a high-protein diet, all patients were immobilized by bradykinesia for most of the day. A low-protein dietary regimen during the daytime offers an important technique for the control of fluctuations in patients with Parkinson's disease who are receiving L-dopa-carbidopa.


Many cetacean vocalisations are tonal and most are frequency-modulated. The detection algorithm presented here breaks the frequency contour into a sequence of elements. Each element is sufficiently short that a linear approximation to the frequency contour can be made. In this way the problem is simplified from that of detection of an unknown signal, to the detection of a known signal (a linear chirp) with unknown parameters. The method of estimation is based on maximum likelihood, and the start frequency, chirp rate and amplitude of each element are estimated. Further analysis is then carried out on groups of concatenated chirps (i.e. calls) to classify them. Results are given on performance for the supplied test recording and for synthetic signals in white noise. The pros of the algorithm are: good detection performance, at least in white noise; high resolution; ease of interpretation; flexibility; data compression. The cons are: computational cost; deterioration, of performance in non-white noise or with amplitude-modulated signals. Further development is needed to reduce errors with overlapping tonal or non-tonal signals. The algorithm is currently being applied to the problem of detecting right whale vocalisations and distinguishing them from those of humpback whales.


The microbial fuel cell (MFC) is an attractive green energy source since it can use wastewater and/or organic wastes as fuels to generate electricity. A cost-effective anode material with superior bioelectrocatalysis activity is critical to MFC. In this study, a honeycomb-like hierarchical porous carbon–silica (PC/Si) composite with macropores (2–15 μm) and mesopores (3–4 nm) was derived from distiller's grains via a simple carbonization procedure and used as an anode in a Shewanella putrefaciens CN32 (S. putrefaciens CN32) fuel cell for the first time. The obtained three dimensional scaffold structure with meso pores on the wall provides not only a large surface for bacteria adhesion, but also more active sites for flavin mediated interfacial electron transfer. It is interesting that the siliceous crusts of this PC/Si composite greatly promote the bacteria adhesion as well as a uniform biofilm formation. Accordingly, the PC/Si anode delivers a maximum power density of 580.7 mW m−2 in S. putrefaciens CN32 MFC, which is 4.5-fold higher than that of the conventional carbon cloth anode. Considering the synthesis process of this biomass based carbon material is facile, this PC/Si anode could be very promising when applied for high performance, large scale MFC.


Fats, oil and grease (FOG) deposits in sewer systems are responsible for approximately 25% of all annual line blockages in the United States and lead to the release of 3–10 million gallons of untreated wastewater to the surrounding environment. Considerable effort has been made to maintain the conveyance of wastewater by cleaning pipes that have a significant FOG deposit accumulation. Changes in the urban landscape from the addition or deletion of food service establishments (FSEs), however, may pose challenges in determining the location of these high accumulation zones. This research focuses on the development of a sewer collection system model that predicts high FOG deposit accumulation zones. Two collection systems were simulated to test the prediction capabilities of the tool and to assess how changes in the urban landscape affect the location of these accumulation zones. The numerical tool incorporates a mechanistic-based FOG deposit formation kinetic model. Results showed that the model predicts about 65% of the reported high FOG deposit accumulating zones. Simulations also showed significant changes in the location of these high FOG deposit accumulating zones from changes in the number and locations of FSEs and from FSE discharge and background wastewater flow variations.


textabstractThe process of modernisation brought about new contexts, such as ageing, individualism, and migration – to just name a few – posing questions about the organisation of support and the role of different providers in individuals' support networks. A key premise across Europe has been the idea that kin and non-kin ties should take more responsibility in the future, but little is known about the circumstances under which they are willing and able to do so. This holds particularly true for non-kin ties – ties which are not related by blood or legal arrangements, e.g. friends, neighbours and colleagues. Non-kin ties have been largely neglected in European research on support. A link between generous social spending and non-kin support has been established, but questions such as how do non-relatives situate in individuals' support networks remain open. Our knowledge remains equally scarce when it comes to the mechanics underlying non-kin help. This dissertation addresses this knowledge lacuna and poses two key questions: (1) To what extent do non-kin ties form part of individuals' support networks across Europe? and (2) How are contemporary cultural, social, and demographic contexts, at both the individual and the country level, linked with potential and actual non-kin support in Europe?


There are five chapters presented in this thesis. The first chapter deals with the development and validation of an analytical method, incorporating HPLC, for the analysis of MDMA in illicitly produced ecstasy tablets. In all 100 tablets were analysed and the MDMA content on average was found to be 79.01mg. The second chapter involved the analysis of route specific compounds (two pyrimidines and N-formyl BDB) generated by the synthesis of MBDB that had been synthesised via the Leuckart route. HPLC and GC-MS methods were developed and validated of for the analysis of the three target compounds. Solid phase extraction and liquid-liquid extraction were assessed as potentially suitable methods for the extraction of the three target compounds from MBDB synthesised via the Leuckart route. Street samples of MBDB were analysed and it was discovered that three of the tablets were likely to have been synthesised via Leuckart route. The most likely routes of synthesis of MDA, MDMA, MDEA, MBDB and 4-MTA were investigated in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. The third chapter involved subjecting impurities, intermediates and products generated by the routes investigated, to GC-MS analysis. Mass spectral data recorded was incorporated into a software based library which could be used as a forensic tool for the attempted identification of routes of synthesis. Samples licitly prepared Ecstasy and samples of illicitly prepared Ecstasy were subjected to GC-MS analysis. Where possible, routes of synthesis were identified with the aid of the library. Chapter IV involved the analysis of the 100 urine samples, taken from clients of the methadone programme in the Drug Treatment Centre in Dublin, which had tested positive for amphetamines on EMIT screening. A GC-MS method was used to determine whether the type of amphetamines being abused were non-ring substituted (amphetamine, methamphetamine), ring-substituted propanamines (MDA, MDMA, 4-MTA) or ring-substituted butanamines (MBDB, BDB). Amphetamine and methylenedioxy propanamines were found however, there was no abuse of 4-MTA or ring-substituted butanamines noted. The final chapter used GC-FID to determine the cannabinoid content of products of the plant Cannabis sativa seized and./or grown in the Republic of Ireland. THC, CBD and CBN levels were determined for 62 samples of cannabis resin, 5 samples of herbal cannabis and 21 samples hemp. The average levels of THC, CBD and CBN in resin were 2.11%, 2.19% and 2.13% respectively. The average levels of THC, CBD and CBN in hemp were 0.06%, 1.61% and 0.06% respectively. The average levels of THC, CBD and CBN in herb were 0.20%, 0.13% and 0.65% respectively.


BACKGROUND
Little is known what advice or support patients are given about return to work (RTW) after hip or knee replacement surgery.

AIMS
This study aims to understand the delivery, timing and content of 'RTW' advice currently delivered by surgical teams offering hip and knee replacements across the UK.

METHODS
National online survey exploring five specific areas relating to 'RTW' advice: (i) timings of interactions between hospital orthopaedic teams and patients prior to surgery, (ii) routine delivery of 'RTW' advice, (iii) methods used to deliver 'RTW' advice, (iv) confidence delivering advice and (v) need for an occupational 'RTW' advice intervention.

RESULTS
A total of 152 participants including surgeons, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and nurses from 59 different public and private health providers responded. Only 20% (n = 30) of respondents reported that working patients were identified as a specific subgroup in need of additional support. Overall, 62% (n = 92) stated that they did not routinely offer 'RTW' advice. When given, 'RTW' advice was almost always verbal, generic advice using blanket timescales and based on the respondent's anecdotal experience rather than the patients individualized needs. Overall, 116 (78%) felt an occupational advice intervention was needed.

CONCLUSIONS
This national survey demonstrated wide variation in the timing, content and delivery of information and advice for patients in work and intending to RTW after hip and knee replacement surgery. Current RTW advice provided to hip and knee replacement patients is inadequate.


This paper investigates the influence of late Roman military law on the Lex Baiuvariorum – a text, which served as the basis for the Merovingian kings' organization of the Frankish kingdom's eastern border-region as a ducatus or duchy. Particular considerations concerning the historical background of the Bavarian duchy's formation will be addressed, after which provisions for the protection of the Bavarian dux or duke, largely as relates to treason and military discipline, will be investigated. By comparing sources for the Roman crimen laesae maiestatis and other legal texts of Roman military writers, it will be demonstrated that the provisions of the Bavarian law-code clearly bear the influence of Roman military law.


Background: Although it is well recognized that anesthetics modulate the central control of cardiorespiratory homeostasis, the cellular mechanisms by which anesthetics alter cardiac parasympathetic activity are poorly understood. One common site of action of anesthetics is inhibitory neurotransmission. This study investigates the effect of propofol on γ-aminobutyric acid–mediated (GABAergic) and glycinergic neurotransmission to cardiac parasympathetic neurons. Methods: Cardiac parasympathetic neurons were identified in vitro by the presence of a retrograde fluorescent tracer, and spontaneous GABAergic and glycinergic synaptic currents were examined using whole cell patch clamp techniques. Results: Propofol at concentrations of 1.0 μm and greater significantly (P < 0.05) increased the duration and decay time of spontaneous GABAergic inhibitory postsynaptic currents. To determine whether the action of propofol was at presynaptic or postsynaptic sites, tetrodotoxin was applied to isolate miniature inhibitory postsynaptic currents. Propofol at concentrations of 1.0 μm and greater significantly (P < 0.05) prolonged the decay time and duration of miniature inhibitory postsynaptic currents, indicating that propofol directly alters GABAergic neurotransmission at a postsynaptic site. Propofol at high concentrations (≥50 μm) also inhibited the frequency of both GABAergic inhibitory postsynaptic currents and miniature inhibitory postsynaptic currents. Propofol at concentrations up to 50 μm had no effect on glycinergic neurotransmission. Conclusions: Propofol may vary heart rate by modulating GABAergic neurotransmission to cardiac parasympathetic neurons. At clinically relevant concentrations (≥1.0 μm), propofol facilitated GABAergic responses in cardiac vagal neurons by increasing decay time, which would increase inhibition of cardioinhibitory cardiac vagal neurons and evoke an increase in heart rate. At higher supraclinical concentrations (≥50 μm), propofol inhibits GABAergic neurotransmission to cardiac vagal neurons, which would evoke a decrease in heart rate.


s should be provided for all Original Articles, Reviews and Short Reports. Figures: Digital illustrations should be sharp with good contrast and color rendition. Resolution for all graphics should be at least 300 dpi. We request that all illustrations be in a common format such as .jpg (.jpeg .jpe), .tif (.tiff), .eps or .ppt. Tables must be in Word format. Please use MS WORD Table > Insert > Table command from the menu bar to make tables. Literature Cited References should be quoted in the text as follows: single author: Jones (1999); two authors: Jones and Smith (2000); more than two authors: Jones et al. (2001). The reference list should be arranged alphabetically according to the first author's surname. Titles should be given in full. Papers published in electronic format exclusively should list authors, title and journal as above followed by the journal's URL, e.g.: Chinnappan D, Zhang Y, Ravid K: AIM-1 Transgenic mice with a curly tail phenotype and its chromosome location. Cytogenet Genome Res 98:231A (2002) at: http:// karger.com/doi/ 10.1159/000069799. Book references must include the book title, editor(s), publisher, and city of publication. Recent issues of the Journal should be carefully consulted for reference list style. Agreement between text citations and the reference list should be checked carefully, and the latter checked for accuracy. If many errors are found, the manuscript will be returned for corrections which may cause considerable publication delay. Gene Symbols Human gene symbols: Only official gene symbols assigned by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) are accepted. Authors must obtain or verify the official gene symbol of the gene(s) mapped and indicate that they have done so in the manuscript submitted. This can be accomplished for human genes by contacting HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) Wellcome Trust Genome Campus Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, CB10 1SA, UK E-Mail: email@example.com Website: www.genenames.org Guidelines set forth by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee are available at www.genenames.org/guidelines.html Guidelines for Authors


Hybrid Rice Optimization Algorithm(HRO) is a novel swarm intelligence optimization algorithm based on heuristic evolutionary computation, which is inspired by the cultivation process of three line hybrid rice. In this paper, we design and implement distributed hybrid rice algorithm based on Hadoop, proposing two distributed schemes. Through experiment, we select the better one for further research. By tuning the size of swarm size, we implement comparison experiment on our scheme and traditional HRO. Experiment demonstrate that our scheme shows better performance. What's more, with the increase of nodes in Hadoop scheme, our scheme shows obvious advantage.


To achieve the goal of scientific literacy, besides conveying science and technology concepts, cultivating students' modeling ability has become important. However, in-service teachers face the difficulty that their teaching load increases while they are still bound by limited teaching hours. Teachers may know of modeling ability, life related content and hands-on activities which are all important and beneficial for science learning; however, they very often find it is hard to engage all these methods into their limited teaching hours. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop an efficient method of instruction based upon the frameworks of cognitive apprenticeship and modeling ability to promote students' modeling ability and scientific concept regarding battery. A topic oriented instructional design has been adopted to develop a four-lesson instruction (200 minutes in total). There were 149 non-science majors from three classes invited to participate in this study. They were randomly assigned different instructions, and students' performances were evaluated by three kinds of tests: the general modeling ability test, concept tests and context-based modeling tests. The results indicate cognitive apprenticeship and modeling ability instruction could significantly improve students' modeling ability and also enhance their learning regarding the concept of the battery. However, it is remarkable to point out that, "modeling ability instruction" and the "video lab" provided in this study play the crucial roles. The implication of this study is also discussed.


We consider the problem of optimally allocating a limited budget to acquire relevance judgments when constructing an information retrieval test collection. We assume that there is a large set of test queries, for each of which a large number of documents need to be judged. However, the available budget only permits to judge a subset of them. We begin by developing a mathematical framework for query selection as a mechanism for reducing the cost of constructing information retrieval test collections. The mathematical framework provides valuable insights into properties of the optimal subset of queries. These are that the optimal subset of queries should be least correlated with one another, but have a strong correlation with the rest of queries. In contrast to previous work, which is mostly retrospective, our mathematical framework does not assume that relevance judgments are available a priori, and hence is designed to work in practice. The mathematical framework is then extended to accommodate both the query selection and document selection approaches to arrive at a unified budget allocation method that prioritizes query-document pairs and selects a subset of them with the highest priority scores to be judged. The unified budget allocation is formulated as a convex optimization, thereby permitting efficient solution and providing a flexible framework to incorporate various optimization constraints. Once a subset of query-document pairs are selected, crowdsourcing can be used to collect associated relevance judgments. While the labels provided by crowdsourcing are relatively inexpensive, they vary in quality, introducing noise into the relevance judgments. To deal with noisy relevance judgments, multiple labels for a document are collected from different assessors. It is common practice in information retrieval to use majority voting to aggregate multiple labels. In contrast, we develop a probabilistic model that provides accurate relevance judgments with a smaller number of labels collected per document. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our cost optimization approach on three experimental data, namely: (i) various TREC tracks, (ii) a web test collection of an online search engine, and (iii) crowdsourced data collected for the INEX 2010 Book Search track. Our approach should assist research institutes, e.g. National Institute and Standard Technology (NIST), and commercial search engines, e.g. Google and Bing, to construct test collections where there are large document collections and large query logs, but where economic constraints prohibit gathering comprehensive relevance judgments.


Taking its name from the antebellum woman who "stole herself" and led blacks to freedom through the underground railroad, the Harriet Tubman Literary Circle (HTLC) is an educational clearing house and advocacy project that creates and promotes online archives of information, art, narratives and maps that support the expansion of sustainable communities and anti-violence initiatives.

This gathering site for research, information, dialogue and engagement promoting social, political and personal transformations seeks to confront violence with an online multi-lingual dialogue that crosses borders as well as cultural, ethnic/racial, economic and gendered boundaries to further social justice organizing.


Administering oxytocin to neonatal rats has positive long-term effects on growth and development (Uvnas-Moberg and Petersson, 2005). These effects include a reduction in the stress response to weaning, increased post-weaning feed intake and alterations in the expression of gastrointestinal (GI) hormones regulating feed intake (Uvnas-Moberg et al., 1998; Sohlstrom et al., 1999). Two GI hormones of importance in regulating feed intake are ghrelin and leptin, which have antagonistic actions. Ghrelin expression is increased in response to fasting and leptin expression increases rapidly in response to feed intake. Since weaning the piglet is associated with stress and growth restriction, this study examined whether oxytocin given to young pigs could reduce the extent of the post-weaning growth check, along with any associated changes in ghrelin and leptin expression.


Background: Indonesia has the fourth largest number of diabetes patients after India, China and the USA. Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common cause of death in diabetic patients. Early detection and risk stratification is important for optimal management. Abnormal myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) is an early manifestation in the ischemic cascade. Previous studies have demonstrated the use of MPI to accurately diagnose obstructive CAD and predict adverse cardiac events. This study evaluated whether MPI predicts adverse cardiac event in an Indonesian diabetic population. Method: The study was undertaken in a consecutive cohort of patients with suspected or known CAD fulfilling entry criteria. All had adenosine stress MPI. The end point was a major adverse cardiac event (MACE) defined as cardiac death or nonfatal myocardial infarction (MI). Results: Inclusion and exclusion criteria were satisfied by 300 patients with a mean follow-up of 26.7 ± 8.8 months. The incidence of MACEs was 18.3% among diabetic patients, versus 9% in the non-diabetic population (p < 0.001). A multivariable Cox proportional hazard model demonstratedin dependent predictors for a MACE as abnormal MPI [HR: 9.30 (3.01 – 28.72), p < 0.001], post stress left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) ≤30% [HR:2.72 (1.21 – 6.15), p = 0.016] and the patients diabetic status [HR:2.28 (1.04 – 5.01), p = 0.04]. The Kaplan Meier event free survival curve constructed for the different subgroups based on the patients' diabetic status and MPI findings demonstrated that diabetic patients with an abnormal MPI had the worst event free survival (log rank p value < 0.001). Conclusions: In an Indonesian population with suspected or known CAD abnormal adenosine stress MPI is an independent and potent predictor for adverse cardiovascular events and provides incremental prognostic value in cardiovascular risk stratification of patients with diabetes.


This paper considers the development of Canadian manufacturing interests and manufacturers' protectionist movement in the late nineteenth century. As a case, it analyses manufacturers' views and activities in connection with the implementations of the Cayley Tariff of 1858, the Galt Tariff of 1859, and the National Policy tariff of 1879. Not until the late 1850s did the protectionist movement start in Canada. This movement was led by Isaac Buchanan, who maintained that Canada should avoid importing industrial goods and instead develop its own manufacturing industry through protective tariffs. In advancing this argument, he proposed that Canada strive to become a 'manufacturing colony' within the British Empire; he also established the Association for the Promotion of Canadian Industry (APCI). In April 1858, APCI held a meeting and submitted a petition for its protective tariff plan to William Cayley, Inspector General of the United Provinces of Canada. The proposed Cayley Tariff and Galt Tariff had two-tier structures, comprising lower tariffs for raw materials and higher tariffs for finished products. These proposed tariffs included protectionist factors that were also supported by APCI. It was after the Great Depression of 1873 that protectionism was raised again. Under the Depression, manufacturers' opinions became clearly divided between protectionism and reciprocity with the United States. In order to overcome the disagreement, members of the Executive Committee of the Manufacturers' Association of Ontario (MAO), the successor organisation to APCI, linked protectionism with nationalism and regarded the reciprocity as unpatriotic. This contributed to the unification of Canadian producers against the United States. MAO started to support the Conservative party after it added the implementation of protective tariffs to its platform in the late 1870s. W. H. Frazer, the secretary of MAO, established the Dominion National League (DNL), a support organisation for the Conservative that was funded by MAO. The Conservative won in the 1878 general election through the supports of MAO and DNL, and implemented protective tariffs that were known as the 'National Policy'. In conclusion, Canadian manufacturers emphasised protecting the national economy against the United States through higher tariffs in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, they did not intend to separate from the British Empire but rather fortify its economic development within it.


Institutions of higher learning have not escaped the transformation of South African society. However, voices of concern are often heard that the knowledge produced does not reflect the ethos of the new political dispensation. This article addresses one specific challenge for theology at a public university, namely the question as to how the discourse on the divine should reflect the imperative of epistemological transformation and serve the common good. Formally, it is suggested that the nature of the theological activity, the function of the God-symbol and the impact of God-images be considered carefully. Materially, there is an argument that favours a discourse which is sensitive to religious inclusivity, a genealogical approach to notions of the divine, multidisciplinary conversation and the challenge of alterity. Finally, the article emphasises that these formal and material guidelines for a Christian theological discourse be explored along trinitarian avenues.


Stochastic Filtering Theory uses probability tools to estimate unobservable stochastic processes that arise in many applied fields including communication, target-tracking, and mathematical finance. As a topic, Stochastic Filtering Theory has progressed rapidly in recent years. For example, the (branching) particle system representation of the optimal filter has been extensively studied to seek more effective numerical approximations of the optimal filter; the stability of the filter with "incorrect" initial state, as well as the long-term behavior of the optimal filter, has attracted the attention of many researchers; and although still in its infancy, the study of singular filtering models has yielded exciting results. In this text, Jie Xiong introduces the reader to the basics of Stochastic Filtering Theory before covering these key recent advances. The text is written in a style suitable for graduates in mathematics and engineering with a background in basic probability.


ABSTRACT In the growing scholarship on marginalia, relatively little attention has been given to their function in military memoirs. This article proposes that modern military marginalia have a quality of their own, if we accept Yuval Noah Harari's diagnosis of a 'modern war culture' emerging from the concurrent developments of an expanding book market and a post-Enlightenment epistemology that attributes special significance to the experience and remembrance of war. In the light of this ambivalent quality of modernity, the military annotator can be seen as a 'guerrilla memoirist', re-appropriating the intimate conversation among combatants in tacit challenge to the commodification and marketization of their shared experience. The article draws on historical examples of military marginalia and on Lewis Hyde's account of the gift relationship to contextualize a case study: the annotations (including a pasted-in trench map) made by an American First World War veteran in a copy of Storm of Steel, the 1929 American edition of Ernst Jünger's best-selling war memoir In Stahlgewittern.


Despite rare entities, postoperative sternal osteomyelitis and mediastinitis are pathologies with high mortality that require certain surgical treatment. Even though many techniques are performed for the reconstruction of the sternal resection and anterior thorax wall, there is no accepted gold standard method yet. We present the reconstruction method we performed through the combination of free fibula autograft and metal plate.