Competition law is generally focused on competition in a market. Yet, as recent economic studies have clearly indicated, one of the main sources of competition concerns of jurisdictions around the world is the impact of high levels of aggregate concentration in their markets, when a small group of economic entities controls a large part of the economic activity through holdings in many markets. High levels of aggregate concentration can significantly impact competition and welfare. On the one hand, conglomerates' substantial resources and varied experiences, as well as their economies of scale and scope, often enable them to enter markets more readily than other firms, especially when entry barriers are high. On the other hand, high levels of aggregate concentration raise significant competitive concerns. Most importantly, oligopolistic coordination in and across markets as well as entry barriers into markets might be increased. These effects, in turn, might lead to stagnation and poor utilization of resources, which adversely affect growth and welfare. Another major concern is a political economy one: given their size and economic heft, large conglomerates may attempt to translate their economic power into political power in order to create, protect and entrench their privileged positions. Given these effects, the paper attempts to explore the weight given- if at all- to aggregate concentration in the application of competition laws around the world. The analysis is based, inter alia, on the experiences of 35 different jurisdictions in dealing with aggregate concentration through competition law, based on a survey performed with the assistance of the UN Conference on Trade and Development.


This paper examines the economic impact of the 1979 labor strike against lettuce producer-shippers in the Imperial Valley of California. The theory presented suggests that formidable problems are encountered by agricultural labor unions in obtaining higher wages for farm workers. During the 1979 strike, ironically the returns to many of the lettuce producers in the Imperial Valley increased substantially.


The focus of this doctoral research is on developing an enhanced understanding of the nature and operational significance of fair values by studying the organisational systems and processes through which such values are produced. The external reporting of fair values in corporate financial statements has created significant controversy and debate, particularly during the global financial crisis with various accusations and competing defences as to whether or not such a form of accounting caused or exacerbated the crisis. Fair value accounting has been debated mainly from a relevance and reliability perspective, with much attention paid to the relative usefulness of fair value accounting to investors and claims and counter claims relating to the reliability and subjectivity of fair values compared to historical costing approaches. Investigation into implementation issues affecting reliability, however, has been little studied. While an emerging strand of the literature has pointed to the importance of recognising fair value accounting?s social constructed nature, relatively few research papers have examined the construction of fair values and the ways in which such values are shaped by social and organisational contextual influences. This research contributes to such an emerging literature through a detailed case study of the construction of fair values in an international financial services organisation. The primary focus of analysis is the work of the organisation?s central governing body in this area, namely its Fair Value Committee (FVC). The work of the FVC provides a rich empirical base from which to examine the key factors and perspectives influencing the organisation?s approach to fair values. In particular, through a detailed analysis of its formal minutes and supporting interviews with senior members of the FVC and other key organisational actors, the research documents and reflects on the nature and direction of change that the organisation experienced during the global financial crisis with respect to the operation of its fair value system. The main research findings in relation to the nature of the fair value system are: Firstly, the operation of an organisational fair value accounting system emerges not as a demonstrative example of objective, arm?s length pricing but as a social, relational process influenced by the organisational context. Secondly, in studying the way in which fair values are made sense of or constructed to be market consistent, patterns of sensemaking generally invoke a rational and prudent view of the market, which stimulates questioning as to whether fair value accounting is inherently pro-cyclical and exacerbates swings in the financial market. Thirdly, ?fair value? pricing should not be seen as being without a semblance of order and routine. Fourthly, the observed growing dependency of fair value accounting on valuation experts provides confirmation of the weakening jurisdictional authority of auditors and their monitoring role in overseeing fair value accounting. Finally, the research reveals clear evidence of the constitutive effects of fair value accounting on the organisation?s investment policy and permitted investments. As such, the acceptance of specialist models to construct fair values should not only be seen as being reflective of the particular organisational context but also serving in part to permit (and encourage) investments in esoteric financial instruments - a constitutive impact on the organisation's investment strategy and risk profile. The study encourages a greater empirical analysis of the operational construction, development and utilisation of fair values so as to advance knowledge and move the debate beyond polemical debates on the status of fair value accounting.


Abstract Some evidence suggests that experiencing a given scenario using virtual reality (VR) may engage greater attentional resources than experiencing the same scenario on a 2D computer monitor. However, the underlying neural processes associated with these VR-related effects, especially those pertaining to current consumer-friendly head-mounted displays of virtual reality (HMD-VR), remain unclear. Here, two experiments were conducted to compare task performance and EEG-based neural metrics captured during a perceptual discrimination task presented on two different viewing platforms. Forty participants (20–25 years old) completed this task using both an HMD-VR and traditional computer monitor in a within-group, randomized design. Although Experiment I (n = 20) was solely behavioral in design, Experiment II (n = 20) utilized combined EEG recordings to interrogate the neural correlates underlying potential performance differences across platforms. These experiments revealed that (1) there was no significant difference in the amount of arousal measured between platforms and (2) selective attention abilities in HMD-VR environment were enhanced from both a behavioral and neural perspective. These findings suggest that the allocation of attentional resources in HMD-VR may be superior to approaches more typically used to assess these abilities (e.g., desktop/laptop/tablet computers with 2D screens).


The Markham River is a small river draining a tropical mountain range with altitudes between 1000 to 3000 m. The river has an estimated sediment load of 12 Mtyr-1 and discharges directly into a submarine canyon. The estuary is located offshore, with a mixing zone outside the river channel. Profiles of salinity and suspended sediment concentrations (SSC) show that sediment is dispersed via a plume with components at both the surface, intermediate depth along isopycnal surfaces and along the steep seabed slopes in the Markham canyon. The dispersal pattern of the surface freshwater plume is largely determined by the buoyancy force. However strong northwesterly winds create upwelling along the fringes of the northern coast. During a high discharge event, the discharge was 1600 kgs-1 which amount to a daily load of 0.14 Mtons. Estimates of the horizontal sediment flux gradient of the surface plume along the estuary axis suggested that about 80% of the sediment discharge was lost to subsurface waters within a radial distance of 2 km from the river mouth. The layers of sediment within the water column contained about 0.03 Mtons which is about 30% of the daily discharge. The amount of suspended sediment accumulating in thick layers over the seabed is estimated to be about 0.4 Mtons which is about 4 times the daily discharge. Particle fall velocities estimated from the vertical flux indicate values less than those of highly flocculated material but particles will settle up to 100 m in a day. High SSCs observed near the seabed indicated sediment falling through the water column into a bottom boundary nepheloid layer. SSCs over the seabed did not exceed 1000 mgl-1 indicating continuous downslope flow of sediment. Sediment at this layer was either directly transported from the river mouth or from the seabed slopes where previously deposited fine material have been resuspended and transported along the seabed. Some of the sediment is transported by advection to form layers of high SSC at isopycnal surfaces. SSCs near the seabed of between 250 and 1000 mgl-1 suggest that layers of significantly elevated density existed near the seabed, moving under the influence of gravity down steep seabed slopes of the Markham canyon. The SSC data confirms that Markham River is a high yield river suitable for studying sediment transport mechanisms analogous to systems during low stand sea levels.
The application of the modified hydrodynamic Princeton Ocean Model (POM) has been successful for the Markham estuary. The model simulates surface plume distribution patterns under varying discharge and wind conditions which are comparable with measured data. The model clearly shows the behavior of the surface plume that tends to mix slowly along the fringes of the coast compared to the mixing of plume direct to open sea. The effect of the strong northwesterly wind that caused upwelling, have been well represented by the plume. The model proves to be suitable for predicting plume behavior for further studies on e.g. influence of changing river mouth features caused by weather patterns e.g. the El Nino cycle and the effects of the new tidal basin (700 m x 400 m x 14 m depth) development for the Lae Port Authority which will be dredged out from the swampy land adjacent to the Milford Haven Bay.
A new instrument called the Triple differential pressure sensor (TDPS) for measuring small (<100 mgl-1) amounts of depth averaged suspended sediment concentrations (SSC) has been designed and a prototype built. The new instrument measures SSC directly without the calibration problems that can be associated with optical instruments. Although the specification of the differential pressure sensor indicate that resolutions of up to 10 mgl-1 can be reached, the prototype TDPS had resolutions of 100 mgl-1. The low resolution can be attributed to the fabrication process where air pockets may have been trapped within the tubing channels of the device. Nevertheless, there is potential to improve the sensitivity of the instrument. The instrument can be used in coastal waters, rivers and lakes.


Carbon nanostructures, such as nanotubes and fullerenes, are of considerableinterest to a wide range of research communities. Owing to their unique properties, a numberof applications involving these structures have been proposed, one of which is the so-callednano-scaled oscillators, for which the resultant oscillatory frequencies are in the gigahertzrange. The phenomena of the gigahertz oscillations have also led to the possible creation offuture devices, such as ultra-fast optical filters and ultra-sensitive nano-antennae. In thispaper we present recent developments in this area and review the authors recent work,where we investigate the mechanics of a new type of gigahertz oscillator comprising afullerene C60 oscillating within the centre of a uniform concentric ring or bundle of carbonnanotubes. Using the Lennard-Jones potential and the continuum approach, for which carbonatoms are assumed to be uniformly distributed across the surface of a molecule, we providethe underlying mechanisms of these nano-scaled oscillators.


The Adirondacks have been an Indigenous homeland for millennia, and the presence of Native people in the region was obvious but not well documented by Europeans, who did not venture into the interior between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, by the late nineteenth century, historians had scarcely any record of their long-lasting and vibrant existence in the area. With Rural Indigenousness, Otis shines a light on the rich history of Algonquian and Iroquoian people, offering the first comprehensive study of the relationship between Native Americans and the Adirondacks. While Otis focuses on the nineteenth century, she extends her analysis to periods before and after this era, revealing both the continuity and change that characterize the relationship over time. Otis argues that the landscape was much more than a mere hunting ground for Native residents; rather, it a "location of exchange," a space of interaction where the land was woven into the fabric of their lives as an essential source of refuge and survival. Drawing upon archival research, material culture, and oral histories, Otis examines the nature of Indigenous populations living in predominantly Euroamerican communities to identify the ways in which some maintained their distinct identity while also making selective adaptations exemplifying the concept of "survivance." In doing so, Rural Indigenousness develops a new conversation in the field of Native American studies that expands our understanding of urban and rural indigeneity. Melissa Otis holds a PhD in history of education from the University of Toronto. ® Rural Indigenousness: A History of Iroquian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks


Abstract Background:  Understanding personality types have been an unwavering desire for professionals making career choices. Online education of Family Nurse Practitioners is expanding rapidly.  Studies have been conducted concerning learning styles of students and performance in online and on-campus education.  Few studies have been conducted that examined the personality types of Family Nurse Practitioners.  Objective:  To examine the personality types of students entering online and on-campus Family Nurse Practitioner programs Methodology:  Exploratory descriptive cross-sectional design.  Sample 109 entering FNP students (50 online and 59 on-campus).  Instrument Form M of Myers Briggs Personality Inventory administered anonymously online. Results: Significant differences in Sensing versus Intuition and Judging versus Perceiving types were found across cohorts. No significant difference were found between online and on-campus cohorts.  Highest composite indexes were Introvert, Sensing, Feeling, Judging and Extrovert, Sensing, Feeling, Judging. Conclusions:  Further research on personality types of FNP students and practicing FNPs is needed to determine which students would be best fitted for the FNP curriculum.


We examined whether basketball throwing performance in general and motor skill specificity from the free throw distance in particular are influenced by visual contextual information. Experienced basketball players (N = 36) performed basketball set shots at five distances from the basket. Of particular interest was the performance from the free throw distance (4.23 m), at which experienced basketball players are expected to show superior performance compared with nearby locations as a result of massive amounts of practice. Whereas a control group performed the shots on a regular basketball court, the distance between the rim and the free throw line was either increased or decreased by 30 cm in two experimental groups. Findings showed that only the control group had a superior performance from the free throw distance, and the experimental groups did not. Moreover, all groups performed more accurately from the perceived free throw line (independent of its location) compared with nearby locations. The findings suggest that visual context information influences the presence of specificity effects in experienced performers. The findings have theoretical implications for explaining the memory representation underlying the especial skill effect in basketball.


Abstract The PROFIL and PROFIL-2 experiments performed in the Phénix demonstration fast reactor irradiated 130 small separate samples containing almost pure isotopes. These highly accurate experiments are a very specific and powerful source of information on the nuclear data of major and minor actinides and several fission products. Their analysis was carried out using the ERANOS-2.0 code system associated to JEFF-3.0 cross-section data, UKFY3.5 fission yield data, and JEF-2.2 decay data. The consistency of the results demonstrates the overall good quality of the actinide nuclear data and experimental techniques used and points out where specific improvement is necessary: fission yields of 235U on neodymium isotopes; integral capture cross sections of 232Th, 233U, 241Pu, 242Pu, and 241Am (and to a lesser extent, 240Pu and 237Np); and branching ratios for 241Am capture. A similar analysis characterizes the degree of accuracy of the integral capture cross sections of 19 fission products. Future plans include the analysis of two new experiments of the same kind, included in the current Phénix experimental program, and the use of a consistent set (cross sections, fission yields, and decay data) of the latest JEFF-3.1 nuclear data files.


Context. Whenever stars rotate very rapidly, such that Ω/Ωcrit > 0.7 where Ω crit is the Keplerian angular velocity of the star accounting for its deformation, radiative stellar winds are enhanced in polar regions. This theoretical prediction has now been confirmed by interferometric observations of rapidly rotating stars. Aims. Polar winds remove less angular momentum than spherical winds, thus allow the star to retain more angular momentum. We quantitatively assess the importance of this effect. Methods. We first use a semi-analytical approach to estimate the variation in the angular momentum loss when the rotation parameter increases. We then compute complete 9 M ⊙ stellar models at very high angular velocities (starting on the ZAMS with Ω/Ω crit = 0.8 and reaching the critical velocity during the main sequence) with and without radiative wind anisotropies. Results. When wind anisotropies are accounted for, the angular-momentum loss rate is reduced by less than 4% for Ω/Ω crit < 0.9 relative to the case for spherical winds. The reduction amounts to at most 30% when the star is rotating near the critical velocity. These values result from two counteracting effects: on the one hand, polar winds reduce the loss of angular momentum, and on the other hand, surface deformations imply that the mass that is lost at high co-latitude is lost at a larger distance from the rotational axis and thus removes more angular momentum. Conclusions. In contrast to previous studies that neglected surface deformations, we show that the radiative wind anisotropies have a relatively modest effect on the evolution of the angular momentum content of rapidly rotating stars.


Objectives: This study aims to investigate whether there is a role of ROBO-1, ROBO-2 and TGM-3 gene expression levels in the development of laryngeal cancer. Patients and Methods: The study was completed with 29 patients who underwent total or partial laryngectomy due to squamouscell laryngeal cancer. Gene expression analysis was performed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Expression ratios were transformed into fold changes and reported as relative expression. Obtained fold changes were compared between different tumor grades in addition to normal tissue samples. Results: The ROBO-1, ROBO-2 and TGM-3 genes were expressed at a lower level than the control group. Conclusion: Our study results showed that there was no correlation between ROBO-1, ROBO-2 and TGM-3 gene expression and development of laryngeal cancer.


Economic progress seems to consistently come with a steep price tag. The Industrial Revolution was birthed in the 1800's, and as a result manufacturing, mining, transport, as well as other industries within our system systematically tainted viable water sources, contaminated soil, and increased greenhouse gases that include, but are not limited to, carbon dioxide and methane. By 1889 the first sewage treatment plant was installed at Washington D.C., but there were still a very small number of laws that were enacted in order to regulate the mounting amount of industrial waste. Not until 1970, almost 20 years after the fiery vision of the Cuyahoga River, did President Richard Nixon issue forth a mandate for change. In July of the same year, with Congress and the White House working collectively, the Environmental Protection Agency was formed in response to the public demand for an increase in quality standards that included the life sustaining elements; water, air, and land. On December 2nd of the same year, the Environmental Protection Agency opened its doors to fulfill its contract with America (EPA). This paper fulfilled C. Turner's Honor Contract for Honors Botany. Her faculty supervisor was Professor Steven Giambrone.


Alcohol use is an important part of the health profile of older adults, and little is known about the prevalence and correlates of drinking among this population in Ghana and South Africa. This study aimed to describe and compare the prevalence and correlates of drinking patterns among adults aged 50 and above in Ghana and South Africa, and to determine which correlates explain differences in drinking patterns between the two countries. We used data from the WHO Study on global AGEing and adult health (SAGE) conducted in Ghana and South Africa. The sample of participants aged 50+ was 4289 in Ghana and 3666 in South Africa. Alcohol measures included a self-report of the number of standard drinks consumed over the previous 7 days, from which we constructed the mutually exclusive drinking categories of lifetime abstainers, low risk and at risk drinkers by gender. We used multivariate analysis to identify independent correlates for the different drinking patterns and those contributing to drinking differences between countries. Lifetime abstainers comprised 41.9% and 74.6% of the Ghana and South Africa samples, respectively. Among current drinkers, there were significantly more at risk drinkers among both genders in South Africa compared to Ghana. Factors independently associated drinking patterns differed between countries and by gender, although similarities included religion and smoking. Smoking status contributed to the difference in drinking patterns between Ghana and South Africa more than socio-demographics. Different patterns of drinking and associated correlates exist among older adults between Ghana and South Africa, and differences in drinking patterns were more strongly associated with smoking than socio-demographics. Drinking may increase in Ghana as economic development continues, although other health behaviors such as smoking may also play an important role and should be monitored in future surveys.


Unbound granular materials are generally used in road pavements as base and subbase layers. The granular materials provide load distribution through aggregate contacts to a level that can help the subgrade to withstand the applied loads. Several research studies have shown that unbound pavement layers exhibit anisotropic properties. Anisotropy is caused by the preferred orientation of aggregates and compaction forces. The result is unbound pavement layers that have higher stiffness in the vertical direction than in the horizontal direction. This behavior is not accounted for in the design and analysis procedures included in the proposed AASHTO 2002 design guide. One of the objectives of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis of flexible pavement response using different models for unbound pavement layers: linear isotropic, nonlinear isotropic, linear anisotropic and nonlinear anisotropic. Pavement response is computed using a finite element program. The computations from nonlinear isotropic and anisotropic models of unbound layers are compared to the AASHO field experimental measurements. The second objective is to analyze the influence of using isotropic and anisotropic properties for the pavement layers on the performance of flexible pavements calculated using the AASHTO 2002 Models. Finally, a comprehensive sensitivity analysis of the proposed AASHTO 2002 performance models to the properties of the unbound pavement layers is conducted. The sensitivity analysis includes different types of base materials, base layer thicknesses, hot-mix asphalt type and thickness, environmental conditions, and subgrade materials.


DeepQB is a proposed application of deep neural networks to player tracking data from over two full seasons of American professional football. This novel approach demonstrates the ability to successfully understand complex aspects of the passing game, most notably quarterback decision-making. It can assess and compare individual quarterback pass target selection based on a snapshot presented to the passer by the receivers and defenders. Assessments of quarterback decision-making are made by comparing actual target selection to that predicted by our model. The model performs well, correctly identifying the targeted receiver in 60% of cross-validated cases. When passers target the predicted receiver, passes are completed 74% of the time, compared to 55% when the QB targets any other receiver. This performance is surprisingly strong, given that the offense often conceals its intent by design, while defenses try not to allow any single receiver to be open. Further, quarterback passing skills separate and apart from his receivers and defense are isolated and assessed by comparing metrics of actual play success to the metrics of success predicted by the situation presented to the passer. This approach represents a new way for teams, media, and fans to understand and quantitatively assess quarterback decision-making, an aspect of the sport which has previously been opaque and inaccessible.


Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS) forms part of a spectrum of severe adverse cutaneous reactions that can eventually culminate into toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), a potentially fatal condition. Drugs, most commonly allopurinol, antivirals, antiepileptics, sulfonamides and other antibiotics are implicated in this disease, even though, many case reports and series describe a variety of associations with many other classes of drugs. Infectious and inflammatory conditions also predispose to this severe cutaneous disease. Here, we present a patient who was initially diagnosed as a case of acute on chronic liver failure in hepatic encephalopathy grade I, in whom the introduction of rifaximin therapy led to aggressive cutaneous reactions, leading to SJS, which was managed with intensive supportive treatment because of which the patient improved substantially and was discharged after 14 days of onset of a potentially fatal condition. Rifaximin therapy leading to SJS-TEN has been reported only once before.


Two important tectonostratigraphic units of the Karakaya Complex in northwest Turkey are: a lower metamorphic sequence of metabasite, phyllite and marble, called the Nilufer Unit; and an upper clastic sequence with Permian and Carboniferous limestone olistoliths called the Hodul Unit. In northwestern Turkey, the Hodul Unit consists of arkosic sandstones, which pass upward into greywacke and siltstone with Permian and Carboniferous limestone blocks. A scarce macrofauna in the sandstones indicates a Norian age for the Hodul Unit. We report for the first time Norian—Rhaetian limestones, here named the Kaflal Limestone Member, from the Hodul Unit to the southwest of Bal›kesir. The Kaflal Limestone Member forms ~80-m-thick, several-hundred- metres large blocks in a sheared siltstone, sandstone, and shale matrix of Norian age. The clastic matrix also includes neritic Permian limestone blocks. The Kaflal Limestone Member is a variegated, medium-bedded, nodular limestone with abundant coral, brachiopod, lamellibranch, crinoid, gastropod, algae, bryzoa, sponge spicules and foraminifera. A varied microfauna in the limestone indicates a Norian—Rhaetian age. The age similarity between the matrix and the Kaflal Limestone, and transition to a muddy facies observed in one of the blocks indicate that, unlike the exotic Permian limestones, the Kaflal Limestone Member represents in situ carbonate deposition in the Hodul basin. The subsequent shearing of the limestone contacts occurred during the deformation associated with the arrival of the olistostromes. The deformation leading to the closure of the Hodul basin is constrained to Rhaetian—Hettangian; that is, between 210 to 202 Ma, from the age of the Hodul Unit and that of the overlying Bay›rkoy Formation. This age is similar to the isotopic age of regional metamorphism in the Nilufer Unit (215 to 205 Ma), and suggests that Cimmeride deformation in northwestern Turkey occurred over a short interval in the latest Triassic—earliest Jurassic.


Photosynthetic characteristics and induction of crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) by drought stress were investigated in Sedum album, Sedum stoloniferum and Rosularia elymaitica from Crassulaceae. Titratable acidity, malate content, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (PEPC) activity and gas exchange parameters were determined in plants at the end and beginning of the photoperiod. Results showed that, significant changes in dusk/dawn titratable acidity (?Acidity) and malate (?Malate) could be detected in all three studied species after 20 days drought stress. However, ?acidity and ?malate in leaves of Sedum stoloniferum and R. elymaitica were less than values obtained for S. album. Although drought stress caused a significant increase in the activity of PEPC in all three studied species, difference between daytime and nighttime PEPC activity was significant only in S. album. In S. stoloniferum and R. elymaitica, despite of an increase by drought stress, net nighttime CO2 assimilation was still negative resembling a C3-like pattern of gas exchange. Comparison of responses of S. album with other two tested species showed that, drought stressed S. stoloniferum and R. elymaitica develop a low degree of CAM activity e.g. CAM-cycling metabolism, while S. album is capable to exhibit a typical CAM pathway under drought stress e.g. C3-CAM intermediate. Activity of superoxide dismutase and catalase were decreased under drought stress, but that of peroxidase and ascorbate peroxidase did not change. The exception was an increase in peroxidase activity in drought stressed R. elymaitica, suggesting an important role for this enzyme in the protection against ROS in this species.


Hydrological models are one of the key challenges in hydrology. Their goal is to understand, predict and manage water resources. Most of the hydrological models so far were either physical or conceptual models. But in the past two decades, fully data-driven (empirical) models started to emerge with the breakthroughs of novel deep learning methods in runoff prediction. These breakthroughs were mostly favored by the large volume, variety and velocity of water-related data. Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Unit neural networks, particularly achieved the outstanding milestone of outperforming classic hydrological models in less than a decade. Moreover, they have the potential to change the way hydrological modeling is performed. In this study, precipitation, minimal and maximum temperature at the Ansongo-Niamey basin combined with the discharge at Ansongo and Kandadji were used to predict the discharge at Niamey using artificial neural networks. After data preprocessing and hyperparameter optimization, the deep learning models performed well with the LSTM and GRU respectively scoring a Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency of 0.933 and 0.935. This performance matches those of well-known physically-based models used to simulate Niamey's discharge and therefore demonstrates the efficiency of deep learning methods in a West African context, especially in Niamey which has been facing severe floods due to climate change.


Campbell and Shiller's cyclically adjusted P/E (CAPE) has proven to be a powerful descriptor, and useful predictor, of long-term equity returns in the United States and some global markets. In recent years, though, it has been criticized for being overly pessimistic about the prospects for equity returns, lacking robustness to distortions in corporate earnings and overstating the predictability of returns at long horizons because of overlapping observations and endogeneity, particularly when estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS). This article explores various definitions of CAPE and presents new construction techniques that make it robust to a wide range of accounting and index construction biases, as well as to changing equity market fundamentals. The authors evaluate CAPE's forecasts over various time periods using econometric methods that account for endogeneity, overlapping observations, and the presence of outliers. Many of these enhancements have minimal impact on CAPE and its U.S. equity market forecasts, but they prove to be useful in smaller markets and in markets that experienced significant dislocations. The authors also show that using accounting-flow variables such as cash flow and revenues in place of earnings and cyclically adjusted earnings can effectively supplement, and even enhance, CAPE's market return forecasts. Finally, they show that CAPE and its variants forecast nominal returns more effectively than real returns and that the current 10-year forecast for the S&P 500 Index return is about 5.8% per annum.


The first Exchange-Traded Note (ETN) was introduced in 2006. Since then, at least 64 other ETNs have been issued, with more announced. This financial security, which is growing in number and popularity, is often confused with Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and seems to be largely misunderstood by the general investing public and even by institutional investors and academicians. Since no academic work has been published on the subject, this article offers a seminal introduction to ETNs. It provides five basic categories of information: 1) descriptive information about ETNs, 2) fine print related to ETNs that we believe investors should understand before purchasing shares, 3) a few simple examples of ETNs that are available, 4) a simple analysis of how closely ETN market prices track their indicative values (something akin to NAV), and 5) a discussion of why ETNs may appeal to various investor classes. The authors believe this article will provide the catalyst for much future empirical work on these financial securities.


Clinical managers play a crucial role in securing the implementation and sustainability of IT innovation in healthcare. Yet, not all clinical managers are willing and able to support IT innovation, particularly when the institutional logics of an IT innovation challenge their professional practice. We investigate how clinical managers use their hybrid identities to reconcile differences among competing institutional logics that affect IT innovation. Based on three examples of IT innovation (telehealth for Obstructive Sleep Apnoea, telehealth for Heart Failure, and Electrocardiograms) in a healthcare organisation in England, we identify three roles in IT innovation (innovation advocate, innovation broker, innovation laggard) that clinical managers enacted in response to three degrees of conflict between institutional logics (no conflict, moderate conflict, and high conflict), respectively. We make the following contributions. First, we demonstrate how clinical managers' perception of their hybrid role in relation to their professional identity influences their response to the conflicting institutional demands of IT innovation. We conclude that clinical managers' fragmented identities can compromise their ability to effectively manage IT innovation in healthcare. Second, our findings raise implications for understanding the role of professionals' hybrid identities in the implementation of digital transformation at the intersection of multiple institutional logics.


Five heterotic groups were etermined among 29 maize inbred lines using RFLP and SSR markers. A total of 56 polymorphic probe enzyme combinations and 66 polymorphic SSR primers were identified among the inbred lines, which produced 187 and 232 alleles respectively. Mean polymorphism information content (PIC) for RFLPs (0.42) was lower than that for SSRs (0.54), but mean genetic similarity (GS) were similar (0.62&0.64). The five heterotic groups based on both RFLPs and SSRs were Sipingtou, Luda Red cob, LSC, BSSS, and PA groups. They were consistent with the grouping based on the available pedigree data. Moreover, inbreds with unknown pedigree were assigned to the established heterotic groups. The identification of PA group provided a valuable guidance for maize hybrid breeding.


Synopsis Mining and plant practices can benefit from preconcentration of UG2 platinum ores in a dense medium separation (DMS) plant. The main benefit of DMS is the selective discard of waste from the feed stream, thus improving project economics while reducing the power and water requirements for processing. On the mining side, with the correct combination of variables, implementing DMS as a pre-concentration step can reduce cut-off grades and, as a result, increase ore reserves. In addition, the use of DMS technology gives the mine team the opportunity to consider alternative mining methods for an operation. The challenges of balancing the mining tonnage, methods, and resulting grades with the process plant size, recoveries, and DMS discard volumes have resulted in the development of a model to optimize value on new projects or existing operations. This paper will focus on these benefits from a mining and plant perspective, quantifying the water and power savings, and look at the economic benefits of preconcentration and the effect of metal prices, plant feed grade, and DMS efficiency in different mining environments.


Agent-based modelling (ABM) is fast becoming the dominant paradigm in social simulation due primarily to a worldview that suggests that complex systems emerge from the bottom-up, are highly decentralised, and are composed of a multitude of heterogeneous objects called agents. These agents act with some purpose and their interaction, usually through time and space, generates emergent order, often at higher levels than those at which such agents operate. ABM however raises as many challenges as it seeks to resolve. It is the purpose of this paper to catalogue these challenges and to illustrate them using three somewhat different agent-based models applied to city systems. The seven challenges we pose involve: the purpose for which the model is built, the extent to which the model is rooted in independent theory, the extent to which the model can be replicated, the ways the model might be verified, calibrated and validated, the way model dynamics are represented in terms of agent interactions, the extent to which the model is operational, and the way the model can be communicated and shared with others. Once catalogued, we then illustrate these challenges with a pedestrian model for emergency evacuation in central London, a hypothetical model of residential segregation tuned to London data which elaborates the standard Schelling (1971) model, and an agent-based residential location built according to spatial interactions principles, calibrated to trip data for Greater London. The ambiguities posed by this new style of modelling are drawn out as conclusions.


Shelf-life prediction for fruits based on the visual inspection and with RGB imaging through external features becomes more pervasive in agriculture and food business. In the proposed architecture, to enhance the accuracy with low computational costs we focus on two challenging tasks of shelf life (remaining useful life) prediction: 1) detecting the intrinsic features like internal defects, bruises, texture, and color of the fruits; and 2) classification of fruits according to their remaining useful life. To accomplish these tasks, we use the thermal imaging technique as a baseline which is used as non-destructive approach to find the intrinsic values of fruits in terms of temperature parameter. Further to improve the classification tasks, we combine it with a transfer learning approach to forecast the shelf life of fruits. For this study, we have chosen "Kesar? (Mangifera Indica Linn cv. Kesar) mangoes and for the purpose of classification, our designed dataset images are categorized into 19 classes viz. RUL-1 (Remaining Useful Life-1) to RUL-18 (Remaining Useful Life-18) and No-Life as after harvesting, the storage span of "Kesar? is near about 19 days. A comparative analysis using SqueezeNet, ShuffleNet, and MobileNetv2 (which are prominent CNN based lightweight models) has been performed in this study. The empirical results show a highest achievable accuracy of 98.15±0.44% with an almost a double speedup in training the entire process by using thermal images.


Hypoxia activates the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF), promoting glycolysis and suppressing mitochondrial respiration. In the type 2 diabetic heart, glycolysis is suppressed whereas fatty acid metabolism is promoted. The diabetic heart experiences chronic hypoxia as a consequence of increased obstructive sleep apnoea and cardiovascular disease. Given the opposing metabolic effects of hypoxia and diabetes, we questioned whether diabetes affects cardiac metabolic adaptation to hypoxia. Control and type 2 diabetic rats were housed for three weeks in normoxia or 11% oxygen. Metabolism and function were measured in the isolated perfused heart using radiolabelled substrates. Following chronic hypoxia, both control and diabetic hearts upregulated glycolysis, lactate efflux and glycogen content and decreased fatty acid oxidation rates, with similar activation of HIF signalling pathways. However, hypoxia-induced changes were superimposed on diabetic hearts that were metabolically abnormal in normoxia, resulting in glycolytic rates 30% lower, and fatty acid oxidation 36% higher in hypoxic diabetic hearts than hypoxic controls. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α target proteins were suppressed by hypoxia but activated by diabetes. Mitochondrial respiration in diabetic hearts was divergently activated following hypoxia compared with controls. These differences in metabolism were associated with decreased contractile recovery of the hypoxic diabetic heart following an acute hypoxic insult. In conclusion, type 2 diabetic hearts retain metabolic flexibility to adapt to hypoxia, with normal HIF signalling pathways. However, they are more dependent on oxidative metabolism following hypoxia due to abnormal normoxic metabolism, which was associated with a functional deficit in response to stress.


Social media is now ubiquitously used by political campaigns, but less attention has been given to public discussions that take place on candidates' free public accounts on social media. Also unclear is whether there is a relationship between campaign messaging and the tone of public comments. To address this gap, this article analyzes public comments on Facebook accounts of candidates Trump and Clinton during the US election presidential debates in 2016. We hypothesize that attack messages posted by the candidates predict uncivil reactions by the public and that the public is more likely to be uncivil when attacking candidates. We use content analysis, supervised machine learning, and text mining to analyze candidates' posts and public comments. Our results suggest that Clinton was the target of substantially more uncivil comments. Negative messages by the candidates are not associated with incivility by the public, but comments are significantly more likely to be uncivil when the public is attacking candidates. These results suggest that the public discourse around political campaigns might be less affected by what campaigns post on social media than by the public's own perceptions and feelings toward the candidates.


When watching a movie, the viewer perceives camera motion as an integral movement of a viewport in a scene. Behind the scenes, however, there is a complex and error-prone choreography of multiple people controlling separate motion axes and camera attributes. This strict separation of tasks has mostly historical reasons, which we believe could be overcome with today's technology. We revisit interface design for camera motion starting with ethnographic observations and interviews with nine camera operators. We identified seven influencing factors for camera work and found that automation needs to be combined with human interaction: Operators want to be able to spontaneously take over in unforeseen situations. We characterize a class of user interfaces supporting (semi-)automated camera motion that take both human and machine capabilities into account by offering seamless transitions between automation and control.


Decentralized and peer-to-peer computing, as a subset of distributed computing, are seen as enabling technologies for future Internet applications. However, many of them require some sort of data management. Apart from currently popular P2P file-sharing, there are already application scenarios that need data management similar to existing distributed data management, but being deployable in highly dynamic environments. Due to frequent changes of the peer availability, an essential issue in peer-to-peer data management is to keep data highly available and consistent with a very high probability. Usually, data are replicated at creation, hoping that at least one replica is available when needed. However, due to unpredictable behavior of peers, their availability varies and the number of configured replicas might not guarantee the intended data availability. Instead of fixing the number of replicas, the requested guarantees should be achieved by adapting the number of replicas at run-time in an autonomous way. This thesis presents a decentralized and self-adaptable replication protocol that is able to guarantee high data availability and consistency fully transparently in a dynamic Distributed Hash Table. The proposed solution is generic and can be applied on the top of any DHT implementation that supports common DHT API. The protocol can detect a change in the peer availability and the replication factor will be adjusted according to the new settings, keeping or recovering the requested guarantees. The protocol is based on two important assumptions: (1) ability to build and manage a decentralized replica directory and (2) ability to measure precisely the actual peer availability in the system. The replica directory is built on top of the DHT by using a key generation schema and wrapping replicas with additional system information such as version and replica ordinal number. The way in which replicas are managed in the DHT helps us to define a measurement technique for estimating peer availability. Peers cannot be checked directly, due to the fact that the common DHT API does not reveal any details about the underlying DHT topology. The peer availability is computed based on the measured the availability of replicas. With the help of confidence interval theory, it is possible to determine the sufficient number of probes that produces results with an acceptable error. Finally, two variants of the protocol are defined: one that assumes that data are immutable, and another one without such a limitation. A theoretical model is developed to determine the sufficient number of replicas needed to deliver the pre-configured guarantees. If a peer detects that the current availability of peers and the replication factor are not sufficient for maintaining the guarantees, the sufficient replication factor will be determined according to the measured availability of peers. Knowing the previous and new replication factor, the peer is able to insert into the DHT additional replicas of data managed in its local storage. On the other hand, if the number of replicas is higher than needed, the peer will remove unnecessary replicas from its storage, reducing the storage overhead. Replication makes the consistency of data harder to maintain. Every logical update is translated into a set of replica updates. Due to the dynamic nature of the DHT, many replicas can be unavailable at the time when an application issues an update request. Such conditions force the usage of some weak-consistency models that updates all available replicas and synchronizes all the others eventually when they become online again. Until this is achieved, none of guarantees about the consistency of the accessed data cannot be given. The proposed protocol implements a weak-consistency mechanism that, unlike the others, is able to provide an arbitrary high probabilistic guarantees about the consistency of available data before all replicas are synchronized. This is done by updating the available and inserting the new version of all offline replicas. As soon as a replica becomes available again, it is informed about missing updates, and is merged with the new version. Such approach ensures that at least one consistent replica is available with a high probability when data are requested. The approach presented was evaluated by using a custom-made simulator. The requested availability and consistency levels are fully guaranteed in the DHT with a stable or increasing peer availability. During churns (periods when the peer availability decreases), the guarantees are maintained only in cases when the dynamic of churns is low (the peer availability decreases slowly). Faster changes cannot be compensated fully, but eventually, after the system stabilizes enough replicas will be generated, and the guarantees will be recovered.


There is a spectacular growth in Web based information sources and services. It is estimated that, there is approximately doubling of Web pages every year. The rapid expansion of Web is enjoyable because of the growth of information but it is also leading to problems of increased difficulty in extracting relevant information from the Web. Most existing Web mining algorithms are not efficient enough to possess attractive Time and Space complexities. In this paper, a mathematical approach to deal with various problems related to time complexity is developed and this intelligent Web mining optimizes the use of Web dictionary and previously spend time statistic to improve the ranking process of Web pages. The proposed system can be merged as a module in search engine to improve the Web page ranking process.


Microsystem technologies (MST) have become the basis of a large industry. The advantages of MST compared to other technologies provide opportunities for application in implantable biomedical devices. This paper presents a general and broad literature review of MST for implantable applications focused on the technical domain. A classification scheme is introduced to order the examples, basic technological building blocks relevant for implantable applications are described and finally a case study on the role of microsystems for one clinical condition is presented. We observe that the microfabricated parts span a wide range for implantable applications in various clinical areas. There are 94 active and 67 commercial 'end items' out of a total of 142. End item refers to the total concept, of which the microsystem may only be a part. From the 105 active end items 18 (13% of total number of end items) are classified as products. From these 18 products, there are only two for chronic use. The number of active end items in clinical, animal and proto phase for chronic use is 17, 13 and 20, respectively. The average year of first publication of chronic end items that are still in the animal or clinical phase is 1994 (n = 7) and 1993 (n = 11), respectively. The major technology–market combinations are sensors for cardiovascular, drug delivery for drug delivery and electrodes for neurology and ophthalmology. Together these form 51% of all end items. Pressure sensors form the majority of sensors and there is just one product (considered to be an implantable microsystem) in the neurological area. Micro-machined ceramic packages, glass sealed packages and polymer encapsulations are used. Glass to metal seals are used for feedthroughs. Interconnection techniques such as flip chip, wirebonding or conductive epoxy as used in the semiconductor packaging and assembly industry are also used for manufacturing of implantable devices. Coatings are polymers or metal. As an alternative to implantable primary batteries, rechargeable batteries were introduced or concepts in which energy is provided from the outside based on inductive coupling. Long-term developments aiming at autonomous power are, for example, based on electrostatic conversion of mechanical vibrations. Communication with the implantable device is usually done using an inductive link. A large range of materials commonly used in microfabrication are also used for implantable microsystems.


Background: Polymorphisms in genes encoding glutathione S-transferase (GST) may affect susceptibility to develop urothelial carcinomas (UCs). One of the extensively studied genes in this group is GST P1 (GSTP1), but studies of the relationship of polymorphisms of GSTP1 and UC of the bladder have been equivocal. Hence, we assessed the association between genetic polymorphism of GSTP1 gene and the development of UC of the urinary bladder. Materials and Methods: This prospective, case–control study was conducted in the departments of urology and clinical genetics at a tertiary care teaching hospital in South India, which included 52 patients with histopathologically confirmed UC bladder and matched with 46 controls from August 2012 to July 2013. The study participants provided a single venous blood sample for extraction of genomic DNA. Laboratory personnel was blinded to sample groups. The primary outcome of the study was to detect association of genetic polymorphism of GSTP1 gene with UC of the bladder. The secondary outcome was to assess if the risk of urothelial bladder cancer is increased in smokers with polymorphism of GSTP1 gene. Statistical Analysis Used: We used the Chi-square or Fisher's (F) exact test to compare discrete variables. Unconditional logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals. Results: Although the heterozygous polymorphic genotype ile/val (AG) was seen more frequently in cancer group (34.6% vs. 23.9%), the difference was not statistically significant (P = 0.202). None of the smokers had homozygous polymorphic valine allele and GSTP1 did not add to the susceptibility of UC bladder even among smokers. Conclusions: A lack of association between GSTP1 313 G/G polymorphism and urothelial cancer of bladder was observed.


Burning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God's love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God's love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. Through this analysis, Barbezat demonstrates how presentations of heresy, and to some extent actual responses to perceived heretics, were shaped by long-standing images of biblical commentary and exegesis. He finds that this imagery is more than a literary curiosity; it is, in fact, a formative historical agent.


This article outlines a theoretical and conceptual account for the analysis of contemporary ethical or "bioethical" expertise. The substantive focus is on the academic discipline of bioethics—understood as a "practical" or "applied" ethics—and its relationship to medicine and medical ethics. I draw intellectual inspiration from the sociology of science and make use of research into the idea of "expertise" per se. In so doing, I am attempting to move the debate beyond the limitations placed upon it by philosophical or meta-ethical analysis and develop a perspective than can be used to address the sociological reality of (bio)ethical expertise. To do so, I offer the terms ethos and eidos to provide a basic conceptual framework for the sociological analysis of "morality" and "ethics." I then turn to an exegesis of Collins and Evans's account of ubiquitous, contributory, and interactional expertise and situate these topics in relation to academic bioethics and medical practice. My account suggests a particular understanding of the kinds of relationships that "bioethics" should seek to foster with the social fields it endeavors to not only comment on but also influence.


Introduction: Dental anxiety is common and causes symptomatic use of oral health services. Objectives: The aim was to study if a short-term virtual reality intervention reduced preoperative dental anxiety. Methods: A randomized controlled single-center trial was conducted with 2 parallel arms in a public oral health care unit: virtual reality relaxation (VRR) and treatment as usual (TAU). The VRR group received a 1- to 3.5-min 360° immersion video of a peaceful virtual landscape with audio features and sound supporting the experience. TAU groups remained seated for 3 min. Of the powered sample of 280 participants, 255 consented and had complete data. Total and secondary sex-specific mixed effects linear regression models were completed for posttest dental anxiety (Modified Dental Anxiety Scale [MDAS] total score) and its 2 factors (anticipatory and treatment-related dental anxiety) adjusted for baseline (pretest) MDAS total and factor scores and age, taking into account the effect of blocking. Results: Total and anticipatory dental anxiety decreased more in the VRR group than the TAU group (β = −0.75, P < .001, for MDAS total score; β = −0.43, P < .001, for anticipatory anxiety score) in patients of a primary dental care clinic. In women, dental anxiety decreased more in VRR than TAU for total MDAS score (β = −1.08, P < .001) and treatment-related dental anxiety (β = −0.597, P = .011). Anticipatory dental anxiety decreased more in VRR than TAU in both men (β = −0.217, P < .026) and women (β = −0.498, P < .001). Conclusion: Short application of VRR is both feasible and effective to reduce preoperative dental anxiety in public dental care settings (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03993080). Knowledge Transfer Statement: Dental anxiety, which is a common problem, can be reduced with short application of virtual reality relaxation applied preoperatively in the waiting room. Findings of this study indicate that it is a feasible and effective procedure to help patients with dental anxiety in normal public dental care settings.


This article develops a rhetorical analysis of how older adults in Canada and the UK engage with civic-moral imperatives of healthy living. The analysis draws on Burke's concepts of 'symbolic hierarchies' and the 'rhetoric of rebirth' to explore how participants discursively negotiate the moralizing framework of self-regulation and self-improvement central to healthy eating discourse, in particular. Working from the premise that healthy eating is a 'principle of perfection' that citizens are encouraged to strive to achieve, the article traces the vocabularies and logical distinctions of 'guilt', 'purification' and 'redemption' in participants' accounts of what healthy eating means to them. This analysis reveals some of the complex, situated and often strategic ways in which they rearticulate and reconfigure the normative imperatives of healthy eating in ways suited to their lived experience and their priorities for health and well-being in older age.


A 3D numerical model named NEWTANK is employed to investigate the flow motion and sediment transport in grouped spur dikes system. This model is based on the Navier-Stokes equations, adopting the Volume of Fluid (VOF) method to track the free surface motion, while the solid is described by using the Porous Media Method (PMM). The Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is applied to capture turbulence. In sediment calculation parts, the suspended load and bedload are treated separately but combined together to update bed variation eventually. The finite difference form and Two-step Projection Method are employed in the process of discretizing the governing equation. Several carefully selected flume experiments are introduced to verify this model's reliability before its application on the simulation of grouped spur dike case, and detailed flow characteristics and sediment properties are analyzed afterwards.


As a deadjectival verb, English clean should be a clear-cut result verb, yet it often shows hallmarks of a manner verb. This paper investigates this dual behavior in light of manner/result complementarity: the proposal that verbs lexicalize either manner or result meaning components, but not both. We demonstrate that once lexicalized and contextually determined meaning components are distinguished, clean conforms to manner/result complementarity. It can be a result verb, not entailing a particular manner. However, given its strong association with cleaning routines, some uses simply lexicalize manner. Crucially, in manner uses the result drops out, consistent with manner/result complementarity. The manner-only and result-only uses of clean , then, instantiate related senses, each conforming to manner/result complementarity.


Recent work on deriving $O(\log T)$ anytime regret bounds for stochastic dueling bandit problems has considered mostly Condorcet winners, which do not always exist, and more recently, winners defined by the Copeland set, which do always exist. In this work, we consider a broad notion of winners defined by tournament solutions in social choice theory, which include the Copeland set as a special case but also include several other notions of winners such as the top cycle, uncovered set, and Banks set, and which, like the Copeland set, always exist. We develop a family of UCB-style dueling bandit algorithms for such general tournament solutions, and show $O(\log T)$ anytime regret bounds for them. Experiments confirm the ability of our algorithms to achieve low regret relative to the target winning set of interest.


A study of the dissolution rate of paracetamol tablets using polysorbate 80 as wetting agent had been investigated. The aim of this investigation  is to determine  concentration of polysorbate 80 should be added to the formula to produced the tablet with the fastest dissolution rate. The paracetamol tablets were prepared by wet granulation methods using polysorbate 80 with various concentration,   1%, 3%, 5%, 7% and 9% respectively. The tablet without polysorbate 80 was also prepared for comparison. The tablets had been evaluated with uniform size, uniform weight, hardness, disintegration time and the dissolution test.  The dissolution test of  tablet in phosphate buffer pH 5.8  using the stirring paddle  with rotation speed at 50 rpm at the temperature 37 ± 0.5°C. The release of paracetamol every time appointed well measured by UV spectrophotometer at wave length 242 nm and the concetration determinated with standard curve. The evaluation of tablets showed that no one formula  suitable with requires, the hardness test only  formula I suitable with requires and the disintegration time all of the tablet suitable with requires. The result of statistical with complete random form method show the added of polysorbate 80 in the parasetamol tablets formula increase dissolution of paracetamol. The analysis efficiency dissolution using Duncan's method on data's showed that the concentration 3% of polysorbate 80 (formula III) give significant effect in increasing the dissolution rate of tablets ( a = 0.05 ). Key word : Polisorbat 80, Dissolition, Paracetamol


We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of functional gradient descent that minimizes the KL divergence. Empirical studies are performed on various real world models and datasets, on which our method is competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods. The derivation of our method is based on a new theoretical result that connects the derivative of KL divergence under smooth transforms with Stein's identity and a recently proposed kernelized Stein discrepancy, which is of independent interest.


The cluster account, one of the best attempts at art classification, is guilty of ahistoricism. While cluster theorists may be happy to limit themselves to accounting for what art is now rather than how the term was understood in the past, they cannot ignore the fact that people seem to apply different clusters when judging art from different times. This paper shows that while allowing for this kind of historical relativity may be necessary to save the account, doing so could result in incorporating an essentially institutional component or making the theory extremely complex and virtually impossible to use.


A Review of:
Becker, D. A., & Chiware, E. R. T. (2015). Citation analysis of masters' theses and doctoral dissertations: Balancing library collections with students' research information needs. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 41(5), 613-620. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.06.022

Objective – To determine the citation pattern of graduate students' theses and dissertations.

Design – Citation analysis.

Setting – An institutional repository at a South African university of technology.

Subjects – 201 Engineering Master's theses and Doctoral dissertations.

Methods – A random sample of Master's theses and Doctoral dissertations from the Faculty of Engineering were analyzed. The theses and dissertations were drawn from the institutional repository covering the period 2005-2014. References were checked for format of the cited items including journal, book, conference proceeding, online item (resource with a URL other than a journal, book or proceeding), and other (anything not in the first four categories). The date of all journal articles was recorded. Journal titles were analyzed in terms of country of origin, language, availability in the library, and online access. Data were categorized by department to determine if there were any differences in the use of materials by department. Data were also analyzed by degree level.

Main Results – 101 theses and dissertations were analyzed out of a total of 201 available in the institutional repository. Journals were the most used resource (42%), followed by books (30%), other (12%), online (10%), and proceedings (6%). Doctoral students used a higher percentage of journals than Master's students. Departmental usage differed. Mechanical (54%) and Chemical (48%) Engineering students mainly used journals. Civil Engineering students mostly used resources from the "other" category (31%). Students in Industrial (41%) and Construction (40%) Engineering mostly cited books. Analysis of the "other" category showed a wide variety of resources used (emails, personal interviews, course notes, conference papers, government publications, national and international standards, manuals and guides, technical reports, and technical notes).

The technology university provides access to 79% of the journal titles used by engineering students in their theses and dissertations. 84% of titles are available online. Students mainly used current articles (i.e., from 2000-present). Students heavily favoured journals from the United States of America and Europe, although South African journals were the fifth most cited by country. English language titles dominated, however Portuguese and French titles were the next most commonly cited. Seventy-four titles were referenced more than 10 times.

Conclusion – The authors state that more electronic resources are being used by graduate students, including "online" information. Journals are the most cited information resource held by the library and the majority of journal titles that were cited can be found in the library. The authors conclude that librarians should work with graduate students to encourage the continued use of library resources. They also state that this information can be useful for identifying journals that could be canceled in times of budgetary cutbacks. The authors note that this study provides the university libraries with insight into the use of library holdings, but being limited to engineering, a more comprehensive study of subjects would provide a broader picture of the collection's use and provide valuable information for collection development.


Throughout English poetry one finds examples of poems that are metaphorized as architectural structures, as houses or churches built of solid enough materials to reliably contain ephemeral spirits and ideas. From Chaucer to Heaney, the writing of a poetic line has been linked with the construction of a sure foundation, the use of a carpenter's level, the solidity of physical enclosure. As a one-time architect's assistant, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was extraordinarily well positioned to make an informed entrance into this genre of architectural poems, and indeed, he embraced architectural theory as an aspect of his poetics. Famously, in The Life of Thomas Hardy, Florence Hardy-or Hardy himself-describes his poetry in terms of gothic building principles: He had fortified himself in his opinion by thinking of the analogy of architecture, between which art and that of poetry he had discovered, to use his own words, that there existed a close and curious parallel, each art, unlike some others, having to carry a rational content inside its artistic form.... [H]e carried on into his verse, perhaps unconsciously, the Gothic art-principle in which he had been trained. (1) In his poetry, Hardy works to link the two art forms in many ways, from publishing (in Wessex Poems) elaborate sketches of buildings alongside his words to writing poems about architects and architecture. However, in his Poems of 1912-1913, the elegiac sequence he wrote after the death of his first wife Emma, Hardy resists the impulse to place his poetry within an architectural frame, not only in subject (nearly all of the poems take place out of doors, and those that do not express a certain yearning for escape to unbounded places), but also, as I will argue, in the formal components of the sequence's poetics. In comparing these poems to Hardy's architectural drawings-particularly his sketches of St. Juliot, the church in whose shadow he first met Emma-it becomes clear that, as he goes about elegizing his estranged wife, he takes certain poetic steps to reverse the process of architectural construction. Instead, he builds a kind of poetics that take place outside, whose visual components break open, and whose careful symmetries crumble: they are poems that evoke elaborate ruins more than they evoke grand gothic monuments. Astonished by rekindled desire for a woman he once loved and from whom he had grown distant, the poet attempts to recapture the Emma of his youth, a woman who sought the freedom of nature and who had not been changed by the confinement of a long, unhappy marriage. If, at first, his poems concentrate on the ghost of the later Emma, who is the ghost of closed quarters and habitation, his poems begin to reach out more toward the earlier Emma, a ghost who haunts water, air, and cliffs. In so doing, his poems move away from confined spaces such as houses, rooms, and even graves, rejecting the idea of the elegy as providing a house for the dead. Instead, Poems of 1912-1913 represents a dismantling of poetic structure in order to revive a ghost who insists on the freedom of windy spaces in which she, as much as her elegist, can define the proportions of her existence. Hardy's elegiac move out of doors is remarkable when one considers the history of the elegy. In this monumentalizing genre, the desire to preserve a passing spirit within a physical, understandable space has often found urgency. In The Life of the Poet, Lawrence Lipking describes the tombeau tradition, in which poets seek to provide poetic tombs for great writers of the past in order to rectify the obscurity of unrecognized graves: "the tomb of the poet is built by other poets; their verses take him in." (2) Not only elegies for great poets, however, seek to conflate the poem itself to a physical space in which passing spirits might reside; the desire to build a poetic tomb or house for the dead appears in elegies for all classes of subject, and the space created by the poem is often more physically defined than it is in many of Lipking's tombeaux. …


Charismatic leadership has often been associated with positive organizational change. Although some of the literature acknowledges the less positive aspects there is a lack of critical approaches to leadership. Empirical case studies demonstrating the more negative aspects of charismatic leadership and theoretical concepts that can be used to understand transformational and/or charismatic leadership as potentially destructive phenomena. This article therefore presents, from a critical perspective, an empirical study of leadership within a British international organization, drawing out the conditions that allowed an episode of charismatic leadership to be established. It also presents a theoretical study in which, by introducing Bourdieu's concept `symbolic violence', we are able to explore the legitimation of power in relation to this episode of leadership. We conclude that the use of symbolic violence, by foregrounding power, is helpful in unmasking the potential human cost and possible long-term damage of extreme leadership episodes within organizations.


Background: Diabetes mellitus could be result from disorders in insulin secretion or receptors, characterized by hyperglycemia. Natural antioxidants including pomegranate have hypoglycemic effect. Aim of the Work: The present research was designed to evaluate the possible protective role of pomegranate peel extract (PPE) against diabetic-induced hepatic complication. Materials and Methods: Forty-eight male Wistar rats, weighed 200–250 g and aged 3 months, were sorted into four groups: Group 1: Used as control, Group 2: Normal rats received PPE (200 mg/kg bw/day) given orally for 11 consecutive weeks. Group 3: Streptozotocin (STZ)-diabetic rats, injected with 55 mg/kg bw of STZ, and Group 4: Normal rats received PPE for 11 weeks and then rats were injected with STZ (55 mg/kg/bw). Effectiveness of the PPE was assessed by measuring serum glucose and histopathology of liver tissue. Liver enzymes were also assayed. PPE was found to control diabetic hyperglycemia and decrease in body weight. Histological examination showed that pretreatment with PPE provided preservation against diabetes-induced hepatic histological changes (necrotic and apoptosis). Result: Alanine aminotransferase, alanine phosphatase, and aspartate aminotransferase levels were significantly elevated in Group 3 diabetics and decreased in Group 4 which confirmed histological finding. Conclusion: This study confirmed the hypothesized possible protective effect of PPE against diabetic-induced histological and functional alteration of rat liver and advised its use by diabetic patients.


In the 1980s some developing countries adopted orthodox market-oriented policies in response to international economic crises, others experimented with alternative programmes, and still others failed to develop coherent adjustment strategies of any sort. Building on the case studies in Economic Crisis and Policy Choice, these essays offer comparative analysis of these divergent experiences with macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment. Barbara Stallings and Miles Kahler explore the external pressures on governments. Peter Evans and John Waterbury examine the role of the state in the adjustment process, Evans through the lens of earlier historical experience with economic restructuring, Waterbury by focusing on the politics of privatization. Joan Nelson analyzes the politics of income distribtuion in the adjustment process, andd Haggard and Kaufman investigate the political correlates of inflation and stabilization. A final essay assesses the prospects for combining market-oriented reforms with political democratization.


OBJECTIVE We developed and validated a self-assessment score for diabetes risk in Korean adults and compared it with other established screening models. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) 2001 and 2005 data were used to develop a diabetes screening score. After excluding patients with known diabetes, 9,602 participants aged ≥20 years were selected. Undiagnosed diabetes was defined as a fasting plasma glucose ≥126 mg/dL and/or nonfasting plasma glucose ≥200 mg/dL. The SAS Survey Logistic Regression analysis was used to determine predictors of undiagnosed diabetes (n = 341). We validated our model and compared it with other existing methods using the KNHANES 2007–2008 data (n = 8,391). RESULTS Age, family history of diabetes, hypertension, waist circumference, smoking, and alcohol intake were independently associated with undiagnosed diabetes. We calculated a diabetes screening score (range 0–11), and a cut point of ≥5 defined 47% of adults as being at high risk for diabetes and yielded a sensitivity of 81%, specificity of 54%, positive predictive value of 6%, and positive likelihood ratio of 1.8 (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.73). Comparable results were obtained in validation datasets (sensitivity 80%, specificity 53%, and AUC = 0.73), showing better performance than other non-Asian models from the U.S. or European population. CONCLUSIONS This self-assessment score may be useful for identifying Korean adults at high risk for diabetes. Additional studies are needed to evaluate the utility and feasibility of this score in various settings.


Understanding how to limit the stickiness of vascular endothelial cells reveals new targets for treating vascular diseases. Vascular inflammation contributes to vascular diseases, such as atherosclerosis and arteritis. This week's issue of Science Signaling has a pair of papers that investigate how the vascular endothelial cells themselves contribute to this process by promoting either the adhesion of leukocytes to their surface where they contribute to the formation of atherosclerotic plaques or their migration through the vessel promoting inflammation, such as that seen in giant cell arteritis. Reelin is a glycoprotein produced by the liver and released into the circulation where it regulates blood clotting. Endothelial cells lining the blood vessels have receptors for Reelin. Ding et al. found that mice globally deficient in Reelin or lacking Reelin produced by the liver were protected from diet-induced atherosclerosis. This protective effect was associated with decreased abundance of the adhesion proteins VCAM1, ICAM1, and E-selectin on the endothelial cell surface, which reduced the binding of monocytes to the endothelial cells, a critical first step in the inflammatory response that promotes atherosclerosis. Blocking the proadhesion activity of Reelin on endothelial cells may prevent atherosclerosis or complement existing strategies. In research published in 2015, Galvani et al. examined the role of a different endothelial cell receptor in atherosclerosis, the sphingosine 1-phosphate receptor (S1P1). In this case, studies with mice with an endothelial cell–specific knockout in S1P1 demonstrated a protective role, rather than a proinflammatory role, for this receptor. S1P, a lipid mediator that is carried in the blood bound to various chaperone protein complexes, elicited chaperone-specific signaling in the endothelial cells. Of particular relevance to atherosclerosis, S1P bound to lipoprotein ApoM in the context of the high-density lipoprotein (HDL) complex to reduce the abundance of ICAM-1. Thus, this pathway may explain the cardiovascular benefits of HDL, the so-called good cholesterol. Espígol-Frigolé et al. reported that a single subunit p19 of a normally dimeric secreted cytokine IL-23 acted from inside the endothelial cells of capillaries from patients with giant cell arteritis to increase the abundance of ICAM-1 and VCAM-1. This process involved binding of p19 to one of the cytokine receptor subunits gp130 and promoted leukocyte attachment to endothelial cells and their transendothelial cell migration. These studies show that understanding how the "stickiness" of endothelial cells is regulated can aid in the development of therapies to treat vascular disease. Y. Ding, L. Huang, X. Xian, I. S. Yuhanna, C. R. Wasser, M. Frotscher, C. Mineo, P. W. Shaul, J. Herz, Loss of Reelin protects against atherosclerosis by reducing leukocyte–endothelial cell adhesion and lesion macrophage accumulation. Sci. Signal. 9, ra29 (2016). [Abstract] G. Espígol-Frigolé, E. Planas-Rigol, H. Ohnuki, O. Salvucci, H. Kwak, S. Ravichandran, B. Luke, M. C. Cid, G. Tosato, Identification of IL-23p19 as an endothelial proinflammatory peptide that promotes gp130-STAT3 signaling. Sci. Signal. 9, ra28 (2016). [Abstract] S. Galvani, M. Sanson, V. A. Blaho, S. L. Swendeman, H. Obinata, H. Conger, B. Dahlbäck, M. Kono, R. L. Proia, J. D. Smith, T. Hla, HDL-bound sphingosine 1-phosphate acts as a biased agonist for the endothelial cell receptor S1P1 to limit vascular inflammation. Sci. Signal. 8, ra79 (2015). [Abstract]


African farm systems remain the least mechanized of all continents. There were substantial state-led efforts to promote agricultural mechanization during the 1960s and 1970s, but these efforts failed, which led to a subsequent neglect of mechanization, both in practice and in academia. In practice, this situation has changed more recently as governments, development practitioners and private companies have re-discovered agricultural mechanization as a top priority. In academia, scholars are also gradually devoting more effort to study mechanization. However, there is still a large gap in the literature from several decades of neglecting mechanization. In this empirical vacuum, several claims around mechanization have emerged in the public debate. While some of them are accurate, many are too simplistic and some are plainly wrong or "myths". Such popular myths can mislead policies and programs to promote mechanization and lead to adverse effects on farmers. This paper presents a fact check on nine propositions regarding mechanization. Which ones are true? Which ones are false? To answer these questions, the study uses most of the recent literature on mechanization, thereby also providing a review of the current literature on agricultural mechanization in Africa. The paper draws up implications for future research and action.


Cover crops are a key component of conservation cropping systems. They can also be a key component of integrated crop-livestock systems by offering high-quality forage during short periods between cash crops. The impact of cattle grazing on biologically active soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) fractions has not received much attention. We investigated the impacts of tillage (conventional disk and no tillage) and cover crop management (ungrazed and grazed) on biologically active soil C and N fractions from biennial sampling during seven years of continuous management. Soil microbial biomass C was unaffected by cover crop management under conventional tillage, but was enhanced with grazing compared with no grazing under no tillage at a depth of 0 to 6 cm (0 to 2.4 in), as well as at 0 to 30 cm (0 to 12 in). The same effect occurred for the flush of carbon dioxide (CO2) following rewetting of dried soil during 3 days of incubation at a depth of 0 to 6 cm only, while it occurred for cumulative C mineralization during 24 days of incubation at a depth of 0 to 30 cm only. Grazing effects on net N mineralization during 24 days of incubation and residual soil inorganic N were nonexistent. All biologically active fractions of soil C and N were highly stratified with depth under no tillage and less so under conventional tillage. Cumulative stocks of soil C and N fractions to a depth of 0 to 30 cm were generally not significantly different between cover crop management systems, nor between tillage systems, except for (1) lower soil microbial biomass C with than without grazing under conventional tillage, (2) greater soil microbial biomass C with than without grazing under no tillage, and (3) lower cumulative C mineralization during 24 days under no tillage than under conventional tillage. Grazing of cover crops can be recommended as a strategy to promote greater adoption of cover cropping throughout the southeastern United States.


The goal of this PhD thesis is to design efficient resource allocation policies in cooperative networks composed of a cellular network and an opportunistic network of users. The latter can exploit several fullduplex operating relay nodes to communicate while ensuring a low impact, in terms of Shannon rates, on the cellular network performance; as well as energy harvesting in order to boost the opportunistic achievable rate. To the best of our knowledge, opportunistic rate maximization for a cognitive full-duplex relay aided multi-tier network, under a rate-based Quality of Service constraint has not been addressed in the literature. Furthermore, the simultaneous blend of full-duplexing, multi-tier networks, cooperative communications, enables us to optimize the global network while assessing the impact of each technique on the wireless network. This optimization problem will be tackled for several relaying schemes which will require various tools from multi-user information theory, to game theory, artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques.


We mapped 63 conduits, ∼2000 dike segments, and 12 sills in the San Rafael subvolcanic field, Utah (United States), where this Pliocene magmatic system is eroded to a depth of ∼0.8 km and is exceptionally well exposed. Although the number of mapped conduits, dikes, and sills might represent minimums, depending on the level of erosion and exposure, mapped dikes are more numerous around the areally extensive sills and interact with sills and conduits in complex ways. We analyze conduit distribution using kernel density methods and compare results with dike and sill distribution. We find that the distribution of conduits matches the major features of dike distribution, including development of clusters and distribution of outliers. These statistical models are then applied to the distributions of volcanoes in several recently active volcanic fields, where intrusion distributions must be inferred from very sparse data, and compared with San Rafael conduit distribution. This comparison supports the use of statistical models in probabilistic hazard assessment for distributed volcanism. Specifically, renewed dike intrusion and potential eruptions in active basaltic systems can be assessed probabilistically from the distribution of older volcanoes in distributed volcanic systems.


The Foulden Maar is part of the latest Oligocene early Miocene Waipiata Volcanic Field and is located about 10 km to the southeast of Middlemarch, Central Otago, New Zealand. Its sediment-filled crater is approximately 1 km in diameter and includes laminites, debris flows and volcaniclastics. Three geophysical surveys of the Foulden Maar have been undertaken and these include seismic reflection, gravity and a magnetic investigation. Two boreholes have also been drilled at the site (FH1 and FH2) and the location of these was selected with the aid of the geophysical surveys. The seismic reflection study entailed the collection of four profiles across the diameter of the Foulden Maar. Explosive sources (150 g Pentex boosters) were used as the source, and 48×40 Hz geophones at a 5 m spacing were used to record the reflections. Signal within the data was optimised using a commercial seismic processing package by removing noisy traces, attenuating the airwave, applying refraction static corrections, deconvolving the waveforms, and applying automatic gain. Six facies were characterised in the stacked reflections based on dip direction, velocity, and depth (time). The sedimentary facies were the most well defined, with debris flows at the edges (marginal facies) and laminites filling the remaining accommodation space in the crater. The diatreme facies had a low reflectivity because it probably has a density which is similar to the Otago Schist (∼2.67 g/cm). Reflections from a deep antiformal structure (∼2 km) were identified and are likely to be from an old magma chamber or sill. A normal fault structure was also identified toward the west of the Maar, and this has an offset between 10 and 30 m. The FH2 borehole was drilled at 5516263N, 2292728E (NZGD1949) and 183.88 m of core was recovered with a diamond drill rig between the 23rd of June and the 3rd of July, 2009. FH2 contained four significant facies related to maar sedimentation. These were laminated diatomite, non-laminated diatomite, sandstone debris and a schist breccia. The facies were grouped into four stages of sedimentation (A-D) based on their succession. Whole core densities and P-wave velocities were measured for FH2 with a Multi Sensor Core Logger. These data sets were analysed in a geophysical interpretation package to generate a synthetic seismogram for the well location. The synthetic seismogram allowed for a detailed re-interpretation of seismic profiles based on the four stages of sedimentation. A gravity survey over the Foulden Maar involved the observation of 356 stations over eight profiles. Observations were made at 20 m intervals and accurate height information was gathered by differential GPS. Raw gravity data were corrected for drift and reduced to the Bouguer Anomaly (BA). The residual gravity field was exposed by occupation of 22 stations around Foulden Hills. This was extracted from the BA to give an oblate residual anomaly of -6.2 mGal centred toward the middle of the mapped diatomite deposit. The crater sediments were modelled in 2D for each of the eight profiles. Two bodies were used in the modelling; a diatomaceous body (1.27 g/cm); and a sandstone body (2.22 g/cm). A 3D model was created using an original method. The basal 3D surface of the modelled diatomaceous body has a maximum depth of 118 m while the sandstone body has a maximum depth of 194 m. The total field strength of 2011 magnetic stations were measured with a proton magnetometer during November, 2008. Data was processed to extract the effects of diurnal variation, account for magnetic infrastructure, and transform data to the pole, where the inducing iii field is vertical. Two high intensity, short wavelength trends were identified in the southwest, while longer wavelengths were also identified there (242 nT) and toward the centre of the mapped diatomite deposit (84 nT). Computer models were developed with basalt bodies, assigned a magnetic susceptibility of 0.0043 c.g.s. The models reveal that short wavelength trends are related to outcrops of basalt at the surface which penetrate to a depth of 600 m. The long wavelength trend in the southwest may be caused by an eroded basalt body while a feeder vent is probably the cause of the 84 nT intensity toward the centre of the Maar. Overall, the Foulden Maar conforms with the general maar model which was postulated by Lorenz (2003). The crater sediments have a bowl like shape, whereas the diatreme facies probably have a funnel shape. The Maar walls are steep sided within the diatreme breccia because the Foulden Maar is situated in a hard rock environment, and a diatreme depth of 1500 m is proposed, giving a ratio of about 4:7, for crater width to diatreme depth. There is a possibility that two maar craters exist at Foulden Hills, and evidence for this is found in the gravity and magnetic data. However, further investigations are needed to prove the theory. Therefore, the Foulden Maar is likely to have a similar structure to the Baruth and Messel maars in Germany, which have been defined by Schulz et al. (2005).


5-Amino-4-imidazolecarboxamide (AICA) riboside, the nucleoside corresponding to AICA ribotide (AICAR or ZMP), an intermediate of the de novo pathway of purine biosynthesis, was found to exert a dose-dependent inhibition on gluconeogenesis in isolated rat hepatocytes. Production of glucose from lactate-pyruvate mixtures was half-maximally inhibited by ∼100 μM and completely suppressed by 500 μM AICA riboside. AICA riboside also inhibited the production of glucose from all other gluconeogenic precursors investigated, i.e., fructose, dihydroxyacetone, and L-proline. Measurements of intermediates of the glycolytic-gluconeogenic pathway showed that AICA riboside provoked elevations of triose phosphates and fructose-1,6-bisphosphate and decreases in fructose-6-phosphate and glucose-6-phosphate. The effects of AICA riboside persisted when the cells were washed 10 min after its addition but were suppressed by 5-iodotubercidin, an inhibitor of adenosine kinase. AICA riboside provoked a dose-dependent buildup of normally undetectable Z nucleotides. After 20 min of incubation with 500 μM AICA riboside, ZMP, ZTP, and ZDP reached 3, 0.3, and 0.1 μmol/g cells, respectively. Concentrations of ATP were not significantly modified by addition of up to 500 μM AICA riboside when the cells were incubated with lactate-pyruvate but decreased with fructose or dihydroxyacetone. The activity of rat liver fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase was inhibited by ZMP with an apparent Ki of 370 μM. It is concluded that AICA riboside exerts a suppressive effect on gluconeogenesis because it provokes an accumulation of ZMP, which inhibits fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase. Because gluconeogenesis is increased in diabetes, our observations warrant a search for related inhibitors of f ructose-1,6-bisphosphatase, which may have therapeutic potential in this disorder.


This study investigates the social relationships in captive groups of Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) concerning their social system and sociality. Wild orangutans are supposed to live in fission-fusion societies with a high flexibility in spatial and social structures. Zoo-living orangutans however are usually housed in stable groups. It is unclear whether a permanent group-living under the spatial restrictions of captivity over longer periods of time corresponds to the orangutans` social potential. The orangutans' social system is still not well understood. Proximate data referring to mechanisms regulating the social relationships, including a sufficient sample size of individuals, are largely missing so far.
This study examines the structure of social relationships, the persistence and form of fission-fusion tendencies, and how the individuals deal with the group-living conditions. Three sets of orangutans were comparatively studied. Two groups were housed under constant group-keeping conditions; one group was kept under more flexible conditions. The analyses focused on the patterns of the interactive and spatial behaviour. Additionally, long-term observations were carried out on one of the groups, and a second sampling method was implemented allowing a sequence analysis of behaviours.
The results of this study support the assumption that orangutans have the potential to engage in a higher amount of social activities compared to the wild without many conflicts. To evaluate this social potential under natural conditions is hardly possible. The structure of social relationships between the studied animals was largely compatible to what is described for free-ranging orangutans, though the relationships tended to be generally friendlier. The different keeping conditions seem to have little influence on the social patterns. The socio-spatial patterns were characterized by frequent encounters and leavings; interactions were mainly sociopositive but brief. On the structural level, this pattern is in accordance with the fission-fusion sociality described for wild orangutans. Orangutans may possibly have an intrinsic motivation to merge and split regularly and to establish only weak social bonds. Future work should refer to this, both under the conditions in the wild and under human care. The findings of this study can contribute to the further development of new concepts on fission-fusion dynamics in primates. This work points out that a detailed analysis of the interactive and spatial-temporal patterns under the conditions in captivity provides important and supplemental clues about the sociality of orangutans. This may account also for the management of this endangered species in zoos and fragmented areas in the wild.