Over the past few years, rumors of "virtual reality" (VR) have begun to fire the public imagination. No longer the secret purview of military-industrial technologists, longhair computer hackers, and a small band of academic institutions, VR has been the subject of major articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal VR has also begun to penetrate the marketplace: it is a growth industry for the millennium The Next Big Thing The Wave of the Future The ultimate interactive entertainment experience. Sort of a cross between the home video game, an elaborate theme park fantasy ride and science fiction encounter therapy. You are there, sentient and mobile in an artificial place, the product of the best that digital technology has yet to offer. Such high-profile, mass-market coverage has provided a common, if superficial, account of the VR experience. The central image is that of a "patron" of an alternative, computer-generated world, who dons an elaborate, high-tech getup. This consists of a binocular (and binaural) headset whose two tiny TV screens emanate a synthetic 3D environment and whose sensitivity to all head movements induces "realistic" shifts in perspective, as well as electronic "data gloves" (or even a "data suit") that allow one to feel or move imaginary objects in virtual space and permit tactile interaction with other telepresences (human, or electronically rendered) that are simultaneously "jacked into" the system. While prototypes for elaborate VR gear have been developed, most notably through the work of the NASA Ames Research Center, Jaron Lanier's VPL (Virtual Programming Languages) Corporation, and the Cyberspace ProJect of Autodesk, Inc., such megabuck work toward experience simulation not only is still in its infancy but represents merely one manifestation (albeit the flashiest) of the burgeoning VR phenomenon. Some alternative definitions, as well as hard questions about the significance of VR, were among the topics touched upon at the First Annual Virtual Reality Conference convened in San Francisco last December by Meckler Corporation (which also publishes the quarterly Virtual Reality, edited by Sandra K. Helsel, and the book Virtual Reality: theory, practice and promise, edited by Helsel and Judith Paris Roth). Philosophers; information scientists; sociologists; architects; theoreticians of theater, education, and artificial intelligence; and designers representing young commercial firms and established academic institutions nationwide were invited to offer up their individual recipes for virtual representation. "Consensual" is a word that gets bandied about quite a bit in describing the multi-person creation of a virtual world, but an absence of clear consensus among the speakers in San Francisco, in their varied attempts to define the terminology, purposes, potentials, and tools of VR, was one of the conference's healthiest features. If you suddenly wanted to make the planet three times larger, put a crystal cave in the middle with a giant goat bladder pulsing inside of that and tiny cities populating the goat bladder's surface and running between each of the cities were solid gold railways carrying tiny gerbils playing accordions - you could build that world instead of talking about it! - Jaron Lanier(1) A key problem in discussing VR is that one finds oneself talking almost entirely about potential, rather than actual, applications. Moreover, the possibilities are so vast that each imagined application engenders others. Not only military and commercial uses but medical, educational, psychotherapeutic . . . the list goes on and on. And if we can conceive of activity in a VR funhouse as tactile and kinetic, can the notion of "teledildonics" be far behind?(2) Michael Spring, Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, made the most extensive and cogent attempt at a broad definition of VR in his talk "Models for Human-Computer Interaction. …


This paper presents a fifteen year history of the design performance of the Point Roberts Marina. The 1,000 berth small craft harbor is located on the Strait of Georgia, immediately north of the Puget Sound Basin. The marina was constructed utilizing several innovative design concepts: (1) narrow entrance channel coupled with curvilinear basin geometry to promote hydraulic circulation; (2) an annual sediment bypass operation to control downdrift shoreline erosion; and (3) the use of various coastal structures to protect the marina entrance channel from severe offshore wave activity. The performance of these design features, as well as other operational characteristics of the marina, are discussed in the paper.


Problem Statement : With the increasing importance of information and research, the importance of education and training has also increased. Especially in higher education institutions, educators have started to instruct students in accordance with the requirements of the modern era, and universities have influenced the international and national competitive powers in the educational domain. Nowadays, universities in developed countries are not only the organizations that execute education and training services, but they are also the institutions that produce more academic studies to enhance their environments, contribute to society through their projects, and integrate with business and industry organizations. In connection with these goals the higher education sector can improve the performances of many universities and reconstruct them by changing and improving conditions. These changes can only be possible with appropriate strategies. Purpose of the Study : This study reveals the present situation regarding education in public universities and aims to determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Within the framework of Turkey's higher-education strategy, the current state of the universities is discussed and certain suggestions were made. Method: Considering that the main field of activity in universities is "training and education", the public universities in Turkey have been evaluated in this study via a content analysis of the strategic plans of "training and education activities".  In total, the plans of 90 out of 103 state universities were analyzed according to a qualitative analysis. The dataset obtained was converted into numbers by means of the SPSS 15.0 program using frequency analysis. Results and Findings:  Assessing the dataset obtained, one third of the universities stated that "maintaining a diversity of programs, enhancing social activities, achieving a close interaction between the students and academicians, and increasing quality and accreditation" were among their strengths. As for their weaknesses, "inadequacy of interaction with graduates; inadequacy of social fields; inadequacy of health, culture, and sport facilities; inadequacy of foreign language education; inadequacy of library opportunities; scarcity of graduate programs; inadequacy of psychological counseling and guidance services; inadequacy of scholarship support; scarcity of application-oriented studies; and inadequacy of educational material" were listed. Nearly half of the universities regard "exchange programs" as opportunities, and they focus on the "Bologna Process and Exchange". On the other hand, "increasing the number of public and private universities" is seen as a threat. Conclusions and recommendations: As a result of the study, the categories for strengths in the higher education strategy include "education field, social activity, life culture, and communication". The weaknesses mentioned by the universities, as stated in the higher-education plan, can be strengthened with the strategies involving "physical opportunities, communication, social activities, life culture, scholarship and part-time work opportunities, student satisfaction, and educational implementations". For the eradication of the threats, one of which is the increasing number of public and private universities, educational strategies can be implemented at the correct times within the framework of the Bologna Process". Key Words: Instruction, Organization, Strategic Planning, University SWOT Analysis


Sheet metal technologies are challenged especially by the improvement in the automotive industry in the last decades to fulfill the customer expectations, safety requirements and market competitions, new production technologies have been implemented [1]. In this work the sheet metal used is 1060AA 1mm thick Aluminum alloy usually used for its light weight, high corrosion resistant, easy to recyclables and high strength to weight ratio. This sheet metal is to be formed by hydroforming process which used the hydraulic pressure as a punch to force the sheet metal to take the shape of the die cavity and study the formability of this alloy under different heat treatment procedures.


Without recognizing that it has done so, the Supreme Court has created a category of constitutional rules of criminal procedure that are all in a peculiar format, conditional rules. A conditional rule depends on some future event to determine whether one has failed to honor it. In a wide variety of contexts, if a police officer, prosecutor, judge or defense attorney does something that the Constitution regulates, one cannot determine if the constitutional rule has been violated or not until some point in the future. The Court has used three methods to create these rules. One looks to prejudice, and requires an evaluation at the end of the trial process to see if what happened had an adverse effect on the result. Another method creates rules that depend on the reaction of someone else, typically the defendant, to trigger the violation. The last way the Court has created conditional rules is to aggregate the time frame in which to make a judgment about the legitimacy of the actor's behavior, so that it must await further behavior by the same actor or someone exercising governmental power toward the same end. These rules superficially resemble applications of the harmless error doctrine or examples of waivers of rights, but they differ in fundamental ways. They are far less protective of the rights of defendants and they send a much different message about the limits of government power to those who control the criminal justice system. They create confusion, fail to guide the behavior of the government actors whose power the Constitution limits, stand as barriers to institutional efforts at ex ante prevention, mislead the public about the scope of their rights, and often do not take into account any of the symbolic values that lay behind the provisions of the Constitution governing the state's power to use a criminal sanction.


In this definitive biography of Ernest Tubb, Ronnie Pugh brings one of country music's greatest performers back to centre stage. Tracing a career that began in the 1930s and continued until just a few years before Tubb's death in 1984, Pugh presents not only the long and legendary life of the Texas Troubadour but also an unparalleled view of the world of country music in which Ernest Tubb played an essential part. Tubb began his career as an imitator of Jimmie Rodgers, but stormed the country music scene in the 1940s with a new honky tonk sound and a string of hits that included "Walking the Floor Over You." His innovations marked an important transition in country music to a style and lyric in tune with modern American working people, or at least that offered the real-life themes of hard drinking, divorce, tough times, and ruined lives - changes that helped define the music we recognise today as "country." A member of the Grand Ole Opry until 1982, Tubb hosted a live radio broadcast from the Ernest Tubb Record Shop in Nashville for years and became one of the first country music stars to host his own television show in the mid-1960s. Always popular and on the road much of the time even after his prime hit-making years had ended, he was well-known for promoting the careers of many new performers on the rise. Delving into fan club journals, songbooks, newspaper broadcast logs, record company files, and hundreds of interviews, Ronnie Pugh draws a picture of Tubb - exploring both his personal and professional life - that is unprecedented in its intimacy, detail, and vitality. We get a close-up view of Tubb riding the crest of his popularity, setting the pace for Nashville, facing the onslaught of Elvis Presley and rock 'n roll, and surviving as a country music legend. Richly illustrated with almost a hundred photographs, many of which are rare unpublished shots from private collections, Ernest Tubb also contains a detailed and complete sessionography, a resource that will be of continuing importance for serious record collectors. A biography that has been long awaited from Ronnie Pugh, unquestionably the leading authority on Ernest Tubb, this book will delight readers from among the fans of country music, those interested in the history of country music or American popular music and culture generally, and, of course, Ernest Tubb fans.


Complexions of Race: The African Atlantic reveals the ways in which conceptions of race have informed - and sometimes over-determined - readings of American experience. The first section is concerned with the geography of racial identity, with race, place, and with mapping. The second explores the way racial identities are constructed, reconstructed, or enforced through performance. The final section explores the way literary forms, generic constructions, linguistic strategies, and critical practices construct, re-construct, or reposition identities assigned or claimed on the basis of race.


Global interest in fast reactors has been growing since their inception in 1960 because they can provide efficient, safe, and sustainable energy. Their closed fuel cycle can support long-term nuclear power development as part of the world's future energy mix and decrease the burden of nuclear waste. In addition to current fast reactors construction projects, several countries are engaged in intense R&D and innovation programs for the development of innovative, or Generation IV, fast reactor concepts. Within this framework, NINE is very actively participating in various Coordinated Research Projects (CRPs) organized by the IAEA, aimed at improving Member States' fast reactor analytical simulation capabilities and international qualification through code-to-code comparison, as well as experimental validation on mock-up experiment results of codes currently employed in the field of fast reactors. The first CRP was focused on the benchmark analysis of Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) Shutdown Heat Removal Test (SHRT-17), protected loss-of-flow transient, which ended in the 2017 with the publication of the IAEA-TECDOC-1819. In the framework of this project, the NINE Validation Process– developed in the framework of NEMM (NINE Evaluation Model Methodology) – has been proposed and adopted by most of the organizations to support the interpretation of the results calculated by the CRP participants and the understanding of the reasons for differences between the participants' simulation results and the experimental data. A second project regards the CRP focused on benchmark analysis of one of the unprotected passive safety demonstration tests performed at the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF), the Loss of Flow Without Scram (LOFWOS) Test #13, started in 2018. A detailed nodalization has been developed by NINE following its nodalization techniques and the NINE validation procedure has been adopted to validate the Simulation Model (SM) against the experimental data of the selected test. The third activity deals with the neutronics benchmark of China Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) Start-Up Tests, a CRP proposed by the China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE) launched in 2018 the main objective of which is to improve the understanding of the start-up of a SFR and to validate the fast reactor analysis computer codes against CEFR experimental data. A series of start-up tests have been analyzed in this benchmark and NINE also proposed and organized a further work package focused on the sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of the first criticality test. The present chapter intends to summarize the results achieved using the codes currently employed in the field of fast reactor in the framework of international projects and benchmarks in which NINE was involved and emphasize how the application of developed procedures allows to validate the SM results and validate the computer codes against experimental data.


The human gastrointestinal tract microbiota, despite its key roles in health and disease, remains a diverse, variable and poorly understood entity. Current surveys reveal a multitude of undefined bacterial taxa and a low diversity of methanogenic archaea. In an analysis of the microbiota in colonic mucosal biopsies from patients with inflammatory bowel disease we found 16S rDNA sequences representing a phylogenetically rich diversity of halophilic archaea from the Halobacteriaceae (haloarchaea), including novel phylotypes. As the human colon is not considered a salty environment and haloarchaea are described as extreme halophiles, we evaluated and further discarded the possibility that these sequences originated from pre-colonoscopy saline lavage solutions. Furthermore, aerobic enrichment cultures prepared from a patient biopsy at low salinity (2.5% NaCl) yielded haloarchaeal sequence types. Microscopic observation after fluorescence in situ hybridization provided evidence of the presence of viable archaeal cells in these cultures. These results prove the survival of haloarchaea in the digestive system and suggest that they may be members of the mucosal microbiota, even if present in low numbers in comparison with methanogenic archaea. Investigation of a potential physiological basis of this association may lead to new insights into gastrointestinal health and disease.


Body composition is a non-invasive method, which gives us information about the distribution of tissues in the body structure, it is also an indicator of the risk of mortality in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The heart rate variability is a technique that gives us information of autonomic physiological condition, being recognized as an indicator which is decreased in a number of diseases. The purpose of this study was to assess body composition and heart rate variability. The methodology used is that of Debora Kerr (1988) endorsed by the International Society for advances in Cineantropometría for body composition and heart rate variability of the guidelines described by the American Heart Association (1996). Roscraff equipment, caliper Slimguide and watch Polar RS 800CX was used. , BMI 26.7 ± 3.9 kg / m²; Muscle Mass 26.1 ± 6.3 kg ; Bone Mass 1.3 kg ± 8.1 76 ± 9.9 years Age : 14 candidates for pulmonary rehabilitation patients were evaluated , Adipose mass 16.4 ± 3.6 kg ; FEV1 54 ± 14%. Increased waist circumference and waist hip ratio was associated with a lower overall heart rate variability. The bone component was positively related to the variability of heart rate and patients with higher forced expiratory volume in one second had lower high frequency component in heart rate variability. In these patients, the heart rate variability is reduced globally and is associated with cardiovascular risk parameters.


Abstract Problem, research strategy, and findings Extreme heat is the deadliest climate hazard in the United States. Climate change and the urban heat island effect are increasing the number of dangerously hot days in cities worldwide and the need for communities to plan for extreme heat. Existing literature on heat planning focuses on heat island mapping and modeling, whereas few studies delve into heat planning and governance processes. We surveyed planning professionals from diverse cities across the United States to establish critical baseline information for a growing area of planning practice and scholarship that future research can build on. Survey results show that planners are concerned with extreme heat risks, particularly environmental and public health impacts from climate change. Planners already report impacts from extreme heat, particularly to energy and water use, vegetation and wildlife, public health, and quality of life. Especially in affected communities, planners claim they address heat in plans and implement heat mitigation and management strategies such as urban forestry, emergency response, and weatherization, but perceive many barriers related to human and financial resources and political will. Takeaway for practice Planners are concerned about extreme heat, especially in the face of climate change. They are beginning to address heat through different strategies and plan types, but we see opportunities to better connect planners to existing heat information sources and leverage existing planning tools, including vegetation, land use regulations, and building codes, to mitigate risks. Although barriers to heat planning persist, including human and capital resources, planners are uniquely qualified to coordinate communities' efforts to address the rising threat of extreme heat.


Let F be a field of characteristic not 2. We define certain properties D(n), n ∈ {2, 4, 8, 14}, of F as follows: F has property D(14) if each quadratic form φ ∈ I^3F of dimension 14 is similar to the difference of the pure parts of two 3-fold Pfister forms; F has property D(8) if each form φ ∈ I^2F of dimension 8 whose Clifford invariant can be represented by a biquaternion algebra is isometric to the orthogonal sum of two forms similar to 2-fold Pfister forms; F has property D(4) if any two 4-dimensional forms over F of the same determinant which become isometric over some quadratic extension always have (up to similarity) a common binary subform; F has property D(2) if for any two binary forms over F and for any quadratic extension E/F we have that if the two binary forms represent over E a common nonzero element, then they represent over E a common nonzero element in F. Property D(2) has been studied earlier by Leep, Shapiro, Wadsworth and the second author. In particular, fields where D(2) does not hold have been known to exist. In this article, we investigate how these properties D(n) relate to each other and we show how one can construct fields which fail to have property D(n), n > 2, by starting with a field which fails to have property D(2) and then passing to transcendental field extensions. Particular emphasis is devoted to the situation where K is a field with a discrete valuation with residue field k of characteristic not 2. Here, we study how the properties D(n) behave when one passes from K to k or vice versa. We conclude with some applications and an explicit and detailed example involving rational function fields of transcendence degree at most four over the rationals.


We analyse models in which additional "controls" or proxies are included in a regression. This might occur intentionally if there is significant measurement error in a key regressor or if a key variable is not measured at all. We develop a test of the hypothesis that a subset of the regressors are all proxying for the same latent variable and we show how an estimate of the structural coefficient might be obtained more efficiently than is available in the current literature. We apply the procedure to the determinants of sleep among young South Africans. We show that the income variable in the time use survey is badly measured. Nevertheless the measured impact of income on sleep is significant and amounts to 35 minutes per day between children with the median income and those in the topmost income bracket. Including a variety of asset proxies increases the estimated size of the coefficient enormously. The specification tests indicate that some of the asset proxies, however, have independent effects. Access to electricity, in particular, is not simply proxying for income. Instead it seems to be capturing access to various forms of entertainment, such as television. Even when this independent effect is properly accounted for, the size of the income coefficient is still 40% to 100% larger than in the specifications without the proxies.


MDCK (Madin-Darby canine kidney) cells represent a good model of polarized epithelium to investigate the signals involved in the apical targeting of proteins. As reported previously, GPI (glycosylphosphatidylinositol) anchors mediate the apical sorting of proteins in polarized epithelial cells through their interaction with lipid rafts. However, using a naturally N-glycosylated and GPI-anchored protein, we found that the GPI anchor does not influence the targeting of the protein. It is, in fact, the N-glycans that signal the protein to the apical surface. In the present review, the role of N-glycans and GPI anchors as apical signals is discussed along with the putative mechanisms involved.


During the Cold War, an alliance between American scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and the US military pushed the medical establishment into ethically fraught territory. Doctors and scientists at prestigious institutions were pressured to produce medical advances to compete with the perceived threats coming from the Soviet Union. In Against Their Will, authors Allen Hornblum, Judith Newman, and Gregory Dober reveal the little-known history of unethical and dangerous medical experimentation on children in the United States. Through rare interviews and the personal correspondence of renowned medical investigators, they document how children - both normal and those termed "feebleminded" - from infants to teenagers, became human research subjects in terrifying experiments. They were drafted as "volunteers" to test vaccines, doused with ringworm, subjected to electric shock, and given lobotomies. They were also fed radioactive isotopes and exposed to chemical warfare agents.This groundbreaking book shows how institutional superintendents influenced by eugenics often turned these children over to scientific researchers without a second thought. Based on years of archival work and numerous interviews with both scientific researchers and former test subjects, this is a fascinating and disturbing look at the dark underbelly of American medical history.


This paper employs the epistemic community (EC) concept, borrowed from the international relations field, to examine the process of global innovation in multinational firms. An EC is a worldwide group of experts who develop and diffuse innovative policies by interacting with each other while advising the government decision-makers above them in their own countries. Multinational innovation resembles the process of international policy development, so lends itself to this view. The key implication for multinationals is that they can develop their intellectual capital by fostering and harnessing the specialised knowledge residing in all their functional and geographic areas, not just the R&D department at home.


The 11th International Circumpolar Remote Sensing Symposium (ICRSS) was held at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge from 20 to 24 September 2010. The ICRSS series began in Yellowknife in 1990 and has been held biennially since then. The 2010 meeting was the sixth time it had been held in Europe and the second time in the UK, but the first time in Cambridge. 35 people attended the meeting, from 11 countries, and over 20 oral presentations were made in addition to a well-attended poster session. The majority of the oral presentations have been developed into papers and appear in this issue of Polar Record, having been subjected to the normal peer review and editorial process, and they give a fair idea of the range of topics covered at this lively meeting. Sessions at the symposium were organised around the themes of cross-platform observations, ice and snow, topography, vegetation and observations of animals. The last theme produced three fascinating presentations on the monitoring of penguins, seals and fish from spaceborne and airborne platforms. The papers in this issue address two broad areas: terrestrial ice and snow, and high-latitude vegetation (sea ice, and polar zoology, were also represented at the meeting). All of them deal to a greater or lesser extent with technological innovation in assessing, mapping and monitoring these aspects of the polar regions, and several of them focus strongly on the development of new methods, or the assessment of newly available datasets. This issue of Polar Record thus provides a limited snapshot of the 'state of the art' in remote sensing of polar regions. It is the result of sustained effort by the authors of the papers, and the team of anonymous reviewers. I am glad here to record my gratitude to all of them, and to the helpers at the symposium, particularly Katya Shipigina, Allen Pope and Claire Lampitt.


Background Visual assessment rating scales for medial temporal lobe (MTL) atrophy have been used by neuroradiologists in clinical practice to aid the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Recently multivariate classification methods for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data have been suggested as alternative tools. If computerized methods are to be implemented in clinical practice they need to be as good as, or better than experienced neuroradiologists and carefully validated. The aims of this study were: (1) To compare the ability of MTL atrophy visual assessment rating scales, a multivariate MRI classification method and manually measured hippocampal volumes to distinguish between subjects with AD and healthy elderly controls (CTL). (2) To assess how well the three techniques perform when predicting future conversion from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD. Methods High resolution sagittal 3D T1w MP-RAGE datasets were acquired from 75 AD patients, 101 subjects with MCI and 81 CTL from the multi-centre AddNeuroMed study. An automated analysis method was used to generate regional volume and regional cortical thickness measures, providing 57 variables for multivariate analysis (orthogonal partial least squares to latent structures using seven-fold cross-validation). Manual hippocampal measurements were also determined for each subject. Visual rating assessment of MTL atrophy was performed by an experienced neuroradiologist according to the approach of Scheltens et al. Results We found prediction accuracies for distinguishing between AD and CTL of 83% for multivariate classification, 81% for the visual rating assessments and 89% for manual measurements of total hippocampal volume. The three different techniques showed similar accuracy in predicting conversion from MCI to AD at one year follow-up. Conclusion Visual rating assessment of the MTL gave similar prediction accuracy to multivariate classification and manual hippocampal volumes. This suggests a potential future role for computerized methods as a complement to clinical assessment of AD.


This thesis is a development of
an earlier piece of research by the author entitled 'Barriers to participation
in 3d print making' (MacLeod-Iredale, 2015).
The earlier paper identified 3d computer modelling as the most
significant barrier to participation in 3d printing for non-designers (other
than the socio-economic causes of disenfranchisement and disadvantage). This research will develop and test an
approach to introducing the layperson to generating 3d digital content. Until very recently, 3d content
has been the exclusive remit of professional designers and dedicated amateur
enthusiasts. The public are beginning to
have access to the much-vaunted technology (Kirkby 2015), with the nascent
democratisation of 3d printing via organisations including the FabLab movement, libraries and schools
(Compton and Walker 2014, Chung 2014, Griffey 2014, Moorefield-Lang 2014). Others can debate exactly how 3d printing may
affect the public (Chan and Smith 2013, Flanders 2011), it is clear however,
that it has the potential to provide a plethora of opportunities, especially
for those with needs poorly served by mass manufacturing (Manyika et al 2013;
NASA 2014; McCue 2015). If the public are to benefit from
these opportunities, then they must be able generate 3d content confidently;
this project introduces complete novices to 3d modelling. In a short period of time the project aims to
equip these neophyte designers with the basic skills and the confidence to
enable them to develop their own ideas independently.

The aim of this project was to
engagingly introduce lay-people (the '99%' who are not professional designers)
to 3d modelling for printing. The primary
objective to achieving this aim was to develop a short, introductory
workshop-based course. This was
delivered to small groups to train and inspire the attendees to develop these
skills so they can harness 3d printing technology for practical or expressive
purposes.


Bioethanol production was investigated in red algae Portieria hornemannii which belongs to the family Rhizophyllidaceae. Saccharomyces cerevisiae was cultured on Potato Dextrose Agar (PDA) media that had been sterilized at a temperature of 121°C and at a pressure of 1 atm for 15 min. It was incubated at 30°C for 3 days. Microbes on PDA media as culture stock was regenerated on the Yeast Extract Peptone Dextrose (YPD) media at 30°C for 24 h before mixing with hydrolysate. Reducing sugar was determined by 3,5-dinitrosalicylic acid (DNS) method. The seaweed hydrolysate from 60 g of seaweed gel (15 g of seaweed) yielded alcohol maximum in fermentate using S. cerevisiae as fermentation agent. Fermentation to produce alcohol was carried around 36-168 h. Bread yeast S. cerevisiae was found suitable for the bioethanol fermentation of seaweed hydrolysate, and gave an alcohol content of fermentate after 20-40 h of fermentation at room temperature.


JMA/MRI has developed MOVE-WNP-4DVAR, an ocean data assimilation system of the western North Pacific using a four-dimensional variational (4DVAR) method, for monitoring and forecasting of the coastal and open ocean state around Japan. This system has generated the 4DVAR Ocean Reanalysis for the western North Pacific over 30 years (FORA-WNP30), which is now freely provided from JAMSTEC basically for research activities. It is valuable to estimate the analysis errors for assessing the reliability of assimilation fields, or reanalysis data, generated by data assimilation systems. In this study, we tried to estimate analysis errors using the information of the Hessian matrix which are used in a quasi-Newton method for minimizing the cost function in the 4DVAR analysis. We also use an ensemble approach in order to improve the estimation. The results indicate that the data assimilation reduces errors of the ocean fields in the Kuroshio Extension region, the Kuroshio-Oyashio mixed water region, south of Japan where Kuroshio meanders are often developed, and the south-west Japan Sea around the exit of the Tsushima Strait. The errors seem to be reduced effectively in the area where unstable physical modes exist. In addition, we confirm that increasing ensemble members is essential for improving the accuracy of the error estimation.


On first blush the Jim Crow Era may seem an odd place to locate anything meaningful about democratic, equal citizenship and the promise of the fourteenth amendment. This article argues to the contrary. The period of Jim Crow, in its negation of democratic citizenship, in fact reveals import aspects about the nature of democratic citizenship. This occurred in two ways. First, whites who implemented white supremacy implicitly understood that freedom and citizenship manifest themselves in a multiplicity of spheres, which is why white supremacists sought to subordinate blacks not just politically but across all social spheres. Second, the resistance to comprehensive subordination revealed the multiplicity of the spirit of freedom and equality in actions and arguments African Americans. African Americans created spaces of democratic citizenship within the dominant culture of subordination. This article suggests that, in studying both the implementation of white supremacy and the resistance to it, we can learn more about how equal and democratic citizenship can be affirmed and implemented rather than negated, and also about the role of law as a tool for both subordination and resistance.


This paper looks into knowledge that is 'wasted' in organisations, that is existing relevant knowledge that is not (re)used in business operations. Against the backdrop of today's business environment, a lack of knowledge application is not only costly but also dangerous. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review research on knowledge reuse (waste) in organisations to identify our current body of knowledge and gaps in the field justifying further research activities. In order to do so, the study consists of a systematic review of 52 refereed empirical articles on knowledge reuse in organisations. The topic seems to be a promising field for intensive research and offers a variety of future research avenues. Some ideas for future research are proposed in this study.


This is the fourth and final volume presenting the results of excavations carried out at the Nubian complex of Meinarti in 1963 and 1964, and concludes and important and impressive body of work on an equally important and impressive archaeological site. Previous volumes dealt with the pre-Christian remains (Meinarti I; Adams 2000), the Early and Classic Christian remains (Meinarti II, Adams 2001), and the Late and Terminal Christian remains (Meinarti III, Adams 2002). This concluding publication considers the church and the cemetery - two features of the site whose use continued through most of the Christian period. Both were described briefly in the earlier volumes in relation to specific occupation levels, but they are comprehensively dealt with here. The work includes colour plates, separate fold-out maps, and a 6-page summary in Arabic.


SYNOPSIS. TO test the hypothesis that developmental integration coordinates evolutionary change through history, we dissect the spatial and temporal integration of ontogenetic allometries of piranha body form and examine the evolutionary coordination among ontogenetic features by a phylogenetic analysis. Few of our characters provide evidence in support of the hypothesis. In general, we find that developmental integration is historically labile, being modified at virtually every speciation event. Most of the ontogenetic features are dissociated in their phylogenetic changes and evolve in a mosaic fashion. Indeed, developmental integration is so labile that primitively integrated features of ontogeny usually evolve subsequently as independent characters. Evolutionary changes in developmental integration can result in increased or decreased integration on the ontogenetic time scale. When localized features are deleted from ontogeny, or when spatially integrated features are gained, the derived ontogenies may be more integrated in a spatial sense. The end result of phylogenetic dissociations may be a more highly developmentally integrated ontogeny. Thus, in the piranhas we studied, we find a historically coupled increase in developmental integration caudally and a decrease in developmental integration cranially.


It is well known that in motorsport the wake from an upstream vehicle can be detrimental to the handling characteristics of a following vehicle, in particular in formulae with high levels of downforce. Previous investigations have been performed to characterize the wake from an open wheel race car and its effect on a following car, either through the use of multiple vehicles or purpose-built wake generators. This study investigates how the wake of an upstream race car impacts the aerodynamic performance of a following car in a close-following scenario. Wakes are imposed on the inlet of a CFD simulation and wake parameters (eg: velocity deficit, trailing vorticity) are directly manipulated to investigate their individual impacts on the following vehicle. The approach provides a useful alternative to the simulation of multi-vehicle cases but a better simulation could be achieved by including wake unsteadiness from the upstream vehicle. Arguably the most significant impact of a wake on the following vehicle was found to be the rearward movement of the vehicle center of pressure. Secondary flow (eg: upwash, vorticity) on a bulk scale had the beneficial impact of moving the wake up and over the following vehicle but more localized impacts could be positive or negative according to the detailed interaction with downstream vehicle features.


Clastic sediments deposited in the syn-orogenic Tertiary Piedmont Basin in northwest Italy represent the depositional counterpart of the cooling/exhumation and erosion of Western Alpine rocks over the last 30- 35 Myr. 40 Ar/ 39 Ar analyses of detrital white micas from Oligocene-Miocene sediments and present-day river sands show, in addition to younger Tertiary age groups, a wide range of Cretaceous ages. Pronounced well defined Late Cretaceous (~70-90 Ma) and Early Cretaceous (~105-120 Ma) age clusters are recorded in Lower to Upper Miocene sediments, forming discrete age groups with a contribution to the total detrital population of as high as 58%. This age pattern of discrete age peaks is remarkably constant and can be followed up-sequence through different formations spanning a time interval for sedimentation of >20 Myr. Our new detrital mica ages may be the result of either excess Ar in the source rock, as commonly assumed for HP mica Ar ages from the internal western Alps, or of inherited Ar, and consequently be representative of real geological events. The first scenario would imply that incorporation of excess Ar in minerals can lead to non-random detrital age populations which could then mistakenly be interpreted as representative of real geological events. The second scenario would imply that during the last Eocene thermal event, pre-existing micas were only partially overprinted and the presence of older ages are the result of real Cretaceous metamorphic events of the Western Alpine orogen. We argue that our new data derived from the sedimentary record, in particular from the time interval from Serravallian to Present, cannot easily be explained as simply being due to incorporation of excess argon. We therefore interpret these ages to be representative of cooling following major metamorphic events in the Alpine orogen. The new argon data from the sediments in combination with the data from the rocks exposed in the orogen today point to a complex Mesozoic history of the internal Alpine orogen.


A 44-year-old woman was referred for evaluation of peripheral corneal rings. At the time of presentation, her best-corrected visual acuity was OD 20/30 and OS 20/25. Intraocular pressure was normal OU, and pupils were round and reactive bilaterally. On exam, the anterior segment was normal except for bilateral, golden yellow-orange-coloured rings in the cornea at the limbus (figure 1A). The material was deposited in the deep stroma and Descemet membrane (figure 1B). No pigmentation of the conjunctiva or lens capsule was noted. The dilated fundus exam was normal. General physical examination revealed an orange skin tone. When asked about her current medications, the patient admitted to taking more than 40 different vitamin supplement pills daily but was unable to recall the names or the amounts of supplements ingested. Regarding her skin, she stated that she was using a daily tanning colour lotion. A laboratory evaluation was performed in order to determine the aetiology of the deposited material. Her blood count, metabolic panel, serum liver function tests, heavy metals (gold, silver, arsenic, lead, mercury), ceruloplasmin, vitamins A and D, and inflammatory markers were normal. The serum carotene was found to be elevated at 255 μg/dl (range 6–77 μg/dl), α-carotene was 69 μg/dl (range 9–101 μg/l), β-carotene was 995 μg/l (range 42–373 μg/l), lutein was 1690 μg/dl (range 50–250 μg/l), zeaxanthin was 100 μg/dl (range 8–80 μg/l), vitamin A was 39 μg/dl (range 38–98 μg/l), and a diagnosis of hypercarotenaemia was made.

Figure 1
Slit-lamp photograph of the left eye demonstrating a dark yellow-orange-coloured ring in the corneal limbus (A), at the level of the deep stroma and Descemet membrane (B).

The patient provided a list of her vitamin supplements. In total, she ingested 38 different supplement pills daily. Her total daily β-carotene intake was 12 879 retinol activity equivalent (RAE) (equals 42 500 IU), …


Social Enterprises (SEs) are normally micro and small businesses that trade to tackle social problems, and to improve communities, people's life chances, and the environment. Thus, their importance to society and economies is increasing. However, there is still a need for more understanding of how these organisations operate, perform, innovate and scale-up. Obtaining this understanding is the main driver of this paper, which explores the SE activities to manage their knowledge. Interviews from 21 owners and senior members of SEs in UK confirmed that SEs possessed valuable tacit and explicit knowledge about their organisation, practices, experiences and work with communities and costumers. This knowledge is managed informally and, when acquired, is not always converted into usable knowledge, applied to create value, and protected from inappropriate or illegal use. Thus, SEs need to know what they know and manage effectively that knowledge. This can help them to acquire, convert, apply and protect all their knowledge that would result in added value to their organisation and stakeholders, legitimised their practice, adjusted and defined their operational and strategic direction, and informed the measurement of their social impact. This paper contributes to SE and Knowledge Management researchers, SE practitioners and organisations supporting SEs.


Segmenting anatomical structures in medical images has been successfully addressed with deep learning methods for a range of applications. However, this success is heavily dependent on the quality of the image that is being segmented. A commonly neglected point in the medical image analysis community is the vast amount of clinical images that have severe image artefacts due to organ motion, movement of the patient and/or image acquisition related issues. In this paper, we discuss the implications of image motion artefacts on cardiac MR segmentation and compare a variety of approaches for jointly correcting for artefacts and segmenting the cardiac cavity. The method is based on our recently developed joint artefact detection and reconstruction method, which reconstructs high quality MR images from k-space using a joint loss function and essentially converts the artefact correction task to an under-sampled image reconstruction task by enforcing a data consistency term. In this paper, we propose to use a segmentation network coupled with this in an end-to-end framework. Our training optimises three different tasks: 1) image artefact detection, 2) artefact correction and 3) image segmentation. We train the reconstruction network to automatically correct for motion-related artefacts using synthetically corrupted cardiac MR k-space data and uncorrected reconstructed images. Using a test set of 500 2D+time cine MR acquisitions from the UK Biobank data set, we achieve demonstrably good image quality and high segmentation accuracy in the presence of synthetic motion artefacts. We showcase better performance compared to various image correction architectures.


Despite improvements in girls' relative academic success at the school leaving level, and despite suggestions in the press that boys are now the underachievers, girls remain second-class citizens in education and beyond. This book aims to show how and why girls' education remains subordinated to that of the boys', and to demonstrate how this analysis can be used as a basis for investigating the position of other subordinated groups - such as children from lower socio-economic groups, ethnic minorities, or those with special educational needs. By focusing on what distinguishes the 'normal' from the 'other' says the author, we can begin to call the normal into question and challenge the ideas and assumptions of our educational system.


Today's main challenges for Electrical Utilities are either the aging of existing equipment and tight operating and maintenance costs. The availability of rapid, reliable and low-cost diagnostic tools are thus very important to provide an early warning on failures of electrical equipment both to promptly manage these situations and in view of more targeted and efficient Asset management strategies. At this aim this paper concerns the development of an optical sensor for an early detection of accelerated degradation of the insulating oil system in transformers. A Molecularly Imprinted Polymer (MIP) has been used as an artificial receptor in connection with Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) transduction in Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) for the high selective detection of small molecules in oil-filled power transformer. In particular, the proposed sensor has been experimentally tested for the detection of furfural (furan-2-carbaldehyde), so that a MIP specific for this substance has been developed and implemented. Main results of tests with this SPR sensor confirm the good performance of this particular kind of synthetic receptor, in view of the fact that the sample matrix here considered is the transformer oil.


Disaster relief logistics is considered to be one of the major activities in disaster management. This research studies response phase of the disaster management cycle. To do so, a multi-purpose integrated model for a three-level relief cycle logistics is provided under an uncertainty condition and on a periodic basis. In this model, inventory transfer, vehicle routing, distribution and sending relief goods are modeled on a periodic basis. In addition, in order to solve the proposed mathematical model, ultra-initiative particles swarm algorithm in combination with variable neighborhood search based on Pareto archive is proposed. To prove the efficiency of the proposed particles swarm algorithm, several sample problems are randomly selected considering the solved problems in the literature and are solved by particles swarm algorithm. These problems are also solved by genetic algorithm and the results obtained from these two algorithms are compared in terms of quality, dispersion and integrity indices. The results show that compared to genetic algorithm, particles swarm algorithm is more capable of producing more integrated, qualified and dispersed responses. Moreover, the results show that the solution time of genetic algorithm is less than that of the proposed algorithm.


Dean Acheson was one of the most influential Secretaries of State in U.S. history, presiding over American foreign policy during a pivotal era-the decade after World War II when the American Century slipped into high gear. During his vastly influential career, Acheson spearheaded the greatest foreign policy achievements in modern times, ranging from the Marshall Plan to the establishment of NATO. In this acclaimed biography, Robert L. Beisner paints an indelible portrait of one of the key figures of the last half-century. In a book filled with insight based on research in government archives, memoirs, letters, and diaries, Beisner illuminates Acheson's major triumphs, including the highly underrated achievement of converting West Germany and Japan from mortal enemies to prized allies, and does not shy away from examining his missteps. But underlying all his actions, Beisner shows, was a tough-minded determination to outmatch the strength of the Soviet bloc-indeed, to defeat the Soviet Union at every turn. The book also sheds light on Acheson's friendship with Truman-one, a bourbon-drinking mid-Westerner with a homespun disposition, the other, a mustachioed Connecticut dandy who preferred perfect martinis. Over six foot tall, with steel blue, "merry, searching eyes" and a "wolfish" grin, Dean Acheson was an unforgettable character-intellectually brilliant, always debonair, and tough as tempered steel. This lustrous portrait of an immensely accomplished and colorful life is the epitome of the biographer's art.


The psychological factors that influence performance in the practice environment, where competitive athletes engage in deliberate practice, have recently been given specific research attention. The current study employed an action research approach to implement the practice environment model as an education strategy to increase the practice performance of players in a U.K. basketball academy team over a 20-week period. The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of the education strategy on practice performance. The team competed nationally and consisted of the head coach, the assistant coach, and 18 male players aged 16–19 years. Data were collected through focus groups, joint semistructured interviews, field observations, and a practice environment model web-based questionnaire. Qualitative data were analysed using thematic narrative analysis and the Friedman test analysed quantitative data. Quantitative results suggested that the education strategy decreased perceptions of stress and increased effort, preparation activities, and teammate support. Qualitative results provided an in-depth narrative of the environmental changes undertaken to improve practice performance. Discussion focuses on the key strategies of effort and control, performance expectations, team drive, positive communication, and preparation. This study is the first to apply the practice environment model to a real-world sporting domain.


BACKGROUND
 Facial expressions require the complex coordination of 43 different facial muscles. Parkinson disease (PD) affects facial musculature leading to "hypomimia" or "masked facies."

 OBJECTIVE
 We aimed to determine whether modern computer vision techniques can be applied to detect masked facies and quantify drug states in PD.

 METHODS
 We trained a convolutional neural network on images extracted from videos of 107 self-identified people with PD, along with 1595 videos of controls, in order to detect PD hypomimia cues. This trained model was applied to clinical interviews of 35 PD patients in their on and off drug motor states, and seven journalist interviews of the actor Alan Alda obtained before and after he was diagnosed with PD.

 RESULTS
 The algorithm achieved a test set area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.71 on 54 subjects to detect PD hypomimia, compared to a value of 0.75 for trained neurologists using the United Parkinson Disease Rating Scale-III Facial Expression score. Additionally, the model accuracy to classify the on and off drug states in the clinical samples was 63% (22/35), in contrast to an accuracy of 46% (16/35) when using clinical rater scores. Finally, each of Alan Alda's seven interviews were successfully classified as occurring before (versus after) his diagnosis, with 100% accuracy (7/7).

 CONCLUSIONS
 This proof-of-principle pilot study demonstrated that computer vision holds promise as a valuable tool for PD hypomimia and for monitoring a patient's motor state in an objective and noninvasive way, particularly given the increasing importance of telemedicine.


Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of Cerebrolysin in muscle healing in vivo. Materials and methods Twenty adult albino rats were used in this study. Both right and left gastrocnemius muscles of the albino rats were cut at 60% of their length from their distal insertion through 75% of their width and 50% of their thickness and then sutured with simple sutures using absorbable catgut sutures. The gastrocnemius muscles of all albino rats were injected directly in the lesion with 100 ng/ml/kg of cerebrolysin at 1, 3, and 5 days after laceration. The sham control muscles were subjected to the same treatment but were injected with the same volume of physiological normal saline. One week after the injury the animals were killed and the gastrocnemius muscles were removed and processed for paraffin sectioning and stained with hematoxylin and eosin, Bcl-2 (B-cell lymphoma 2), and P53 (tumor suppressor gene) immune peroxidase stains. Results There was a significant increase in the mean myonuclei/myofiber diameter ratio and the size of the regenerating myofibers as an index of muscle regeneration in the cerebrolysin-injected group compared with the control. It is anticipated that cerebrolysin is a potent stimulator of muscle regeneration in vivo. It has also been found that regenerating myofibers were located both in the deep and the superficial areas of the injured site of muscles only when treated with cerebrolysin, thereby demonstrating greater initial healing when the injured muscle is treated with cerebrolysin. Cerebrolysin retarded apoptosis in neutrophils, macrophages, and other inflammatory cells by activating the anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 (B-cell lymphoma 2) protein leading to accumulation of these inflammatory cells. Conclusion This study has shown that injections of cerebrolysin into an injured muscle improved muscle healing in vivo. Also, documents the occurrence of a protective Bcl-2 in inflammatory neutrophils and macrophages, which were expressed in cerebrolysin-treated muscles, leading to enhancement of the effect of these inflammatory cells. We have also found that Inflammatory cells play a role in satellite cell activation and proliferation but, the tumor suppressor gene p53, which is recognized as a central regulator of cell cycle and apoptosis, had no role in muscle regeneration in this in-vivo study.


Abstract A series of ocean-bottom cable (OBC) surveys has been conducted in the Bohai Sea in China in recent years to overcome difficulties experienced with streamer surveys in shallow water, such as strong currents, missing near offsets, and obstacles. The main challenges in OBC data imaging include steeply dipping structures, serious multiples in the shallow-water environment, large lateral velocity variations, fault shadow effects, and low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). To obtain optimal images, advanced processing technologies have been developed and applied to OBC data which involve effective PZ summation and shallow-water demultiple, a high-fidelity beam migration in the wide-azimuth domain, and accurate velocity-model building in 3D tilted-transverse-isotropy (TTI) media. The PZ summation and shallow-water demultiple methods aim to effectively eliminate shallow-water ghosts to achieve broadband seismic data. Furthermore, high-fidelity controlled-beam migration (CBM) and TTI velocity-model updates gre...


Long-distance migratory bird species might face larger problems to adapt to local climate change in their breeding area than short-distance migrants. This study investigated the effect of climatic change on the timing of the breeding season of two wader species with contrasting migration strategies, the long-distance migratory Black-tailed Godwit Limosa limosa and the short-distance migrant Northern Lapwing Vanellus vanellus. We tested the hypothesis that a change in breeding schedule will be stronger in the Lapwing than in the Godwit. Our analyses are based on the ringing dates of around 35,000 Black-tailed Godwit chicks and 112,000 Lapwing chicks from 1960 to 2004 in The Netherlands. The results demonstrate that the Lapwing is breeding earlier than in the 1960s, independent of the species' direct response to warm early springs. In contrast, the Godwit does not exhibit earlier breeding dates other than a direct response to warmer springs. Our observations suggest that the Godwit is not able to advance breeding dates to cope with changes in its breeding habitat. This could mean the species is suffering lower breeding success than would have been the case if it had adapted, and this could be one of the reasons for the stronger decline in The Netherlands of the Godwit population than that of the Lapwing.


Abstract Manipulation of wetlands for agricultural purposes by the ancient Maya of southern Mexico and Central America has been a subject of much research and debate since the 1970s. Evidence for wetland cultivation systems, in the form of drained or channelized fields, and raised planting platforms, has been restricted primarily to the southern Maya Lowlands. New research in the Yalahau region of Quintana Roo, Mexico, has recorded evidence for wetland manipulation in the far northern lowlands, in the form of rock alignments that apparently functioned to control water movement and soil accumulation in seasonally inundated areas. Nearby ancient settlements date primarily to the Late Preclassic period (ca. 100 B.C. to A.C. 350), and this age is tentatively attributed to wetland management in the area.


Author(s): Urbani, Jacquelyn Marion | Advisor(s): Pearson, P. David; Prinz, Philip M. | Abstract: Deaf and hard of hearing children (hereafter DHH) frequently have delayed language and little experience with books because they do not share a common language with their hearing parents. However, there is little research concerning language and literacy development in the DHH classroom and equally little discussion of teacher responsibilities to address these issues. This study investigated the implementation of dialogic reading, which aims to engage students in active discussion and retellings of stories, using American Sign Language, called story signings. Because dialogic reading research with language delayed, hearing preschool students resulted in significant improvement of language skill (Whitehurst, Arnold, et al., 1994; Whitehurst, et al., 1999), it was a logical candidate for implementation with DHH students. A hybrid of case study and design-based research methods was used to investigate the implementation of dialogic reading with four elementary teachers of DHH students. This study was undertaken collaboratively with teachers in order to overcome obstacles that might interfere with implementation and sustainability, to make adjustments to alleviate such problems as they arose during implementation, and to identify necessary adaptations for their student population. The teachers taught grades one through five. Two taught in a school for DHH children, and the other two taught in special day classes for DHH students located within elementary schools. Data sources included videotapes of story signings and reading instruction and audiotapes of meetings with teachers. Findings indicate that the teachers were hindered first by a lack of knowledge and then subsequently by the difficulties of implementation. These difficulties included those identified in previous research: teacher time for small groups, a difference in philosophy of teaching and learning, and teacher effort (Lonigan a Whitehurst, 1998). Specifically, teachers were not regularly engaged in reading to students, admitted they did not know how to address language delays within the classroom, and felt additional adaptations for their students competed with their professional commitment to other curricular areas. Future research needs to investigate implementation issues for the purposes of sustainability, and teacher education programs — for pre-and in-service teachers — need to prepare teachers for the multifaceted, complex nature of instruction.


This microethnographic case study focuses on patterns of interpretation and decision making of undergraduate preservice teachers as they participated in observations, co-teaching, and teaching in elementary schools in northern Mexico. At the core, this study explores the deeply embedded assumptions preservice teachers may bring to new cross-cultural interactions. Drawing from participant documents, surveys, and interviews, the study seeks to investigate the meaning perspectives and schemes (Mezirow, 1991) that study abroad participants used to make sense of their experiences. Also explored are ways the study abroad experience may have helped to alter or solidify meaning perspectives. Finally, recommendations based on lessons learned are provided for designing study abroad experiences that prompt preservice teachers to view and use cultural differences as assets in classroom practice.


This chapter critically examines contemporary meanings and uses of dialect in local economic and cultural development projects in rural Valdres, Norway. A variety of pro-dialect practices offer overt support for local linguistic and cultural revitalization and have contributed to the revalorization of Valdresmal. Attesting to its popularity and sociocultural value, the local dialect is increasingly featured in public marketing campaigns and other advertising contexts, which use and circulate a relatively small number of dialect forms. As the dialect becomes increasingly commodified, new definitions and forms of Valdresmal appear to be emerging that are distinct from, and may ultimately threaten, the "traditional" Valdres dialect.


These works come from a fascination I have had for many years with the complexity of organic natural forms and their relationship to simple mathematical rules. Influenced by the work of D'Arcy Thompson, Alan Turing, and Ernst Haeckel, they study how the forms of plant and coral-like structures can be created by digital simulation using rules for flow and deposition. These sculptural shapes are created by a process of accretion over time. They are gradually grown by simulating the paths of millions of particles randomly flowing in a field of forces. Over time, they build on top of an initial simple seed surface to produce structures of immense complexity. Contact Andy Lomas 2035 Talmadge Street Los Angeles, California 90027 USA +1.323.668.1486 email@example.com www.andylomas.com


Background Flow diversion with the Pipeline embolization device is a well-established method of intracranial aneurysm treatment. However, deployment of the first-generation device (Pipeline Classic) can be technically challenging. The Pipeline Flex contains the same flow-diverting stent with a modified delivery system. Objective To compare procedural outcomes between the first-generation device (Pipeline Classic) and the Pipeline Flex. Methods Thirty-eight of the first 40 consecutive patients who underwent intracranial aneurysm treatment with the Pipeline Flex and 58 of the most recent 60 consecutive patients who underwent treatment with the Pipeline Classic at our institution were evaluated. Patient demographics, aneurysm characteristics, technical procedural details, and early outcomes were analyzed. Results The two groups were comparable for age, gender, and location of target aneurysms. Use of Pipeline Flex decreased procedure time by 44.2 min (p≤0.001) and fluoroscopy time by 22.0 min (p=0.001) compared with the Pipeline Classic. Similarly, radiation exposure was less in the Flex group with a mean difference of 3473.5 Gy cm2 (p=0.002), while contrast usage was decreased with a mean difference of 22.3 mL (p=0.007). These differences remained significant in multivariate regression analysis. Finally, the rate of device deployment failure was lower in the Flex group (7.1%) than in the Classic group (23.9%) (p=0.034). Conclusions Use of Pipeline Flex significantly reduces the total procedure and fluoroscopy time, contrast usage, patient radiation exposure, and proportion of recaptured devices in comparison with the Pipeline Classic, probably owing to an enhanced delivery system that allows for more reliable and controlled deployment.


Spark plug erosion is critical in determining the overall efficiency of a spark ignition engine. Over its lifetime, a spark plug is subject to millions of firings. Each spark event results in material erosion due to several mechanisms such as melting, vaporization, sputtering and oxidation. With electrode wear, the inter-electrode spacing increases and a larger voltage difference is required to initiate the spark. The probability of engine misfires also increases with electrode erosion. Once a critical gap is reached, the energy in the ignition coil is not enough to cause a spark breakdown, and the spark plug must be replaced. Due to the long relevant time scales over which erosion occurs, and the difficulty of analyzing the spark plug environment during operation, determining spark plug lifetime typically requires extensive field testing. A high fidelity commercial thermal plasma solver, VizSpark is used simulate electrode erosion due to spark events. The model preserves key arc physics such as current conservation, conjugate heat transfer, fluid flow and electrode ablation. The solution framework includes the capability of coupling high fidelity arc physics with a dynamically deforming spark-plug electrode. A phenomenological model for electrode erosion based on energy is derived from prior experimental work on single-pulse electrode erosion. The energy based electrode erodion model is validated against experimental results, and 3-D electrode erosion simulations in stationary and cross-flow were performed.


Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of earnings forecast revisions by equity analysts in predicting Canadian stock returns. Design/methodology/approach - the sample covers 420 Canadian firms over the period 1998-2009. It analyses investors' reactions to 27,271 upward revisions and 32,005 downward revisions of analysts' forecast for Canadian quoted companies. To test whether analysts' earnings forecast revisions have impacts on stock return continuation, forecast revision portfolios similar to Jegadeesh and Titman (2001) are constructed. The paper analyses the returns gained from a trading strategy based on buying the strong upward revisions portfolio and short selling the strong downward revisions portfolio. It also separates the sample into upward and downward revisions Findings - a) new information in the form of analyst forecast revisions is not impounded efficiently into stock prices. Significant returns persist for a trading strategy that buys stocks with recent upward revisions and short sells stocks with recent downward revisions; b) good news is impounded into stock prices more slowly than bad news; c) post-earnings forecast revisions drift is negatively related to analyst coverage. The effect is particularly strong for stocks with greatest number of upward revisions; d) the introduction of the better disclosure standards has made the Canadian stock market more efficient. Originality/value - This paper adds to the limited evidence on the effect of analyst forecast revisions on the returns of Canadian stocks. It sheds light on the importance of analysts' earnings forecast information and offers support for the investor conservatism and information diffusion hypotheses. It also shows how policy can improve market efficiency.


Background Tigecycline, a glycylcycline antibiotic, is indicated in adults for the treatment of complicated skin and soft tissue infections and complicated intra-abdominal infections. FDA and EMA have reviewed their indications. Purpose The aim of this study is to describe the use of tigecycline in our hospital. Materials and methods The patient's clinical histories were reviewed to verify the correct use of tigecycline. A descriptive observational study was performed to evaluate the use of tigecycline over a 3 months period. Several variables were studied, including patient information, diagnosis, evaluation of empirical treatment, duration of treatment or change of antibiotic and clinical resolution. Results 39 patients, 22 men and 17 women, with mean age 61 years old (range 49-72) were investigated. 29 (74,4%) were sent to the Urgency Service. Co-morbilities were: diabetes mellitus (25,6%), renal failure (23,1%), cancer (18%), congestive cardiac failure (15,8%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (10%) and peripheral arteriopathy (10%). The majority of the treatments were prescribed in medical intensive care units. Of the 39 patients: 15 were assessed in Anaesthesia and Reanimation Unit and 13 in the Intensive Care. An internal medicine physician specialising in infectious diseases prescribed tigecycline to 5 patients (12,8%). And the rest were from surgical units. The most common infections were: intra-abdominal infection (35,8%), skin and soft tissue (17,9%), bacteraemia (15,4%), pneumonia (10,3%), fever syndrome (7,7%), central catheter infections (5,1%), central nervous system infection (2,6%), respiratory infections (2,6%), and not identified (12,8%). In 18 patients (46,2%) treatment was suspended due to clinical resolution, 2 of them were de-escalated. 15 patients (38%) died during the study period. In 6 patients were not collected. Conclusions Tigecycline was prescribed to many infections, most of them were not indicated. It was necessary to insist on dissemination of the protocols of empirical treatment to ensure the proper use of antibiotics.


The final breakup of Gondwana occurred during Late Cretaceous time as rifted continental crust of New Zealand separated from West Antarctica. Geophysical data acquired using R/V Polarstern constrain the structure and age of Antarctica's rifted oceanic margin. The Marie Byrd Land sector resembles a typical magma-poor margin with a narrow steep slope and a 145 km wide continent-ocean transition zone (COTZ). Our transect modeled from gravity and seismic reflection data indicates initial continental crust of thickness 24 km that was stretched 90 km. The Bellingshausen sector, east of the Antipodes Fault, is broad and complex with abundant evidence for later volcanism. The COTZ is c. 670 km wide and substantial uncertainty remains as to the nature of crust within the COTZ. Extension estimates fall in the range of 106-304 km for this sector. Seafloor magnetic anomalies adjacent to the Marie Byrd Land sector at the longitude of the Pahemo Fracture Zone indicate a full-spreading rate during c33-c31 (80-68 Myr) of 60 mm/yr, increasing to 74 mm/yr at c27 (62 Myr), and then dropping to 22 mm/yr by c22 (50 Myr). Spreading rates were lower to the west. Extrapolation towards the continental margin indicates that initial oceanic crust formation was at c. c34y (84 Myr). The high extension rate of 30-60 mm/yr during initial margin formation is consistent with the relatively sharp and symmetrical margin morphology, but subsequent motion of the Bellingshausen plate relative to Antarctica was slow and complex, and modified the rift morphology through migrating deformation and volcanic centres to create a broad and complex COTZ.


This thesis examines the role of university museums in the United States and their relationship to academic and local communities as well as their influence on a national and international level. The purpose of this study is to identify how changes in educational, social, and cultural issues have affected the role of university museums in the United States during their almost two hundred and fifty years of evolution. The goal is to identify which audiences (academic or public) they chose to focus on. Taking a multifaceted approach, this thesis studies three museums from Ivy League institutions: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Three major research questions are explored: (1) What function or role do university museums play? And how have these changed over time? (2) What were the reasons for the development and growth in university museums? (3) How and why do university museums include or exclude certain audiences? Ultimately, this study provides an in-depth examination of the role and function of university museums in the United States since the 18 century.


The Criminalization series arose from an interdisciplinary investigation into criminalization, focussing on the principles that might guide decisions about what kinds of conduct should be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. Developing a normative theory of criminalization, the series tackles the key questions at the heart of the issue: what principles and goals should guide legislators in deciding what to criminalize? How should criminal wrongs be classified and differentiated? How should law enforcement officials apply the law's specifications of offences? The fourth book in the series examines the political morality of the criminal law, exploring general principles and theories of criminalization. Chapters provide accounts of the criminal law in the light of ambitious theories about moral and political philosophy - republicanism and contractarianism, or reflect upon on the success of important theories of criminalization by viewing them in a novel light. Ideas that are fundamental to any complete theory of the criminal law - liberty, harm, and the effect on victims - are investigated in depth. Sociological investigation of the criminal law grounds a critical investigation into the principles of criminalization, both as a legislative matter, and with respect to criminalization practices, in contemporary and historical contexts. The volume broadens our conceptions of the theory of criminalization, and clarifies the role of the series in the development of this theory. It is essential reading for all interested in legal, political, and social theories of criminalization.


The idea of using a separately trained target model (or teacher) to improve the performance of the student model has been increasingly popular in various machine learning domains, and meta-learning is no exception; a recent discovery shows that utilizing task-wise target models can significantly boost the generalization performance. However, obtaining a target model for each task can be highly expensive, especially when the number of tasks for meta-learning is large. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method, coined Self-improving Momentum Target (SiMT). SiMT generates the target model by adapting from the temporal ensemble of the meta-learner, i.e., the momentum network. This momentum network and its task-specific adaptations enjoy a favorable generalization performance, enabling self-improving of the meta-learner through knowledge distillation. Moreover, we found that perturbing parameters of the meta-learner, e.g., dropout, further stabilize this self-improving process by preventing fast convergence of the distillation loss during meta-training. Our experimental results demonstrate that SiMT brings a significant performance gain when combined with a wide range of meta-learning methods under various applications, including few-shot regression, few-shot classification, and meta-reinforcement learning. Code is available at https://github.com/jihoontack/SiMT.


Controlling wildfire suppression expenditures has become a major public policy concern in the United States. However, most policy remedies have focused on the biophysical determinants of suppression costs: fuel loads and weather, for example. We show that two non-biophysical variables—newspaper coverage and political pressure—have a significant effect on wildfire suppression costs. Hausman tests showed that newspaper coverage and fire size were endogenous, so regression models were estimated using two-stage least squares. We suggest a number of non-biophysical policy remedies that may be able to reduce wildfire suppression expenditures more cost-effectively than traditional biophysical remedies such as fuel management.


Warming of the Antarctic Peninsula in the latter half of the 20th century was greater than any other terrestrial environment in the Southern Hemisphere, and obvious cryospheric and biological consequences have been observed. Under a global 1.5°C scenario, warming in the Antarctic Peninsula is likely increase the number of days above 0°C, with up to 130 of such days each year in the northern Peninsula. Ocean turbulence will increase, making the circumpolar deep water (CDW) both warmer and shallower, delivering heat to the sea surface and to coastal margins. Thinning and recession of marine margins of glaciers and ice caps is expected to accelerate to terrestrial limits, increasing iceberg production, after which glacier retreat may slow on land. Ice shelves will experience continued increase in meltwater production and consequent structural change, but not imminent regional collapses. Marine biota can respond in multiple ways to climatic changes, with effects complicated by past resource extraction activities. Southward distribution shifts have been observed in multiple taxa during the last century and these are likely to continue. Exposed (ice free) terrestrial areas will expand, providing new habitats for native and non-native organisms, but with a potential loss of genetic diversity. While native terrestrial biota are likely to benefit from modest warming, the greatest threat to native biodiversity is from non-native terrestrial species.


The strategies of translating Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain, a martial arts novel by Jin Yong, into English are determined mainly by the skopos of bringing Jin Yong's work to life for a Western audience, shaped also by the translator's ideology and the poetics dominant in the receiving culture. It follows that the functions associated with translating this literary text, a major genre in contemporary Chinese literature, would include introducing martial arts fiction as a literary genre; introducing Jin Yong as a master storyteller; and presenting genre-specific devices employed in penning a classic work. An overriding strategy adopted by the translator proved to be extensive rewriting into the target language as the translated work only materialized after serious efforts at recreative translating. The fluent translation strategy, when aptly used, is the one that effects transparency, thereby evoking authorial presence in a literary translation.


The so-called unique items hypothesis claims that translations tend to contain fewer "unique items" than comparable non-translated texts. This is proposed as a potential translation universal, or at least a general tendency. A unique item is one that is in some sense specific to the target language and is presumably not so easily triggered by a source-language item that is formally different; it thus tends to be under-represented in translations. The concept of a unique item is not well-defined, however. Drawing on some earlier work on transfer, contrastive and error analysis, this article offers a critical analysis of the concept, and raises a number of methodological issues concerning research on the topic.


Quantile regression is an effective technique to quantify uncertainty, fit challenging underlying distributions, and often provide full probabilistic predictions through joint learnings over multiple quantile levels. A common drawback of these joint quantile regressions, however, is \textit{quantile crossing}, which violates the desirable monotone property of the conditional quantile function. In this work, we propose the Incremental (Spline) Quantile Functions I(S)QF, a flexible and efficient distribution-free quantile estimation framework that resolves quantile crossing with a simple neural network layer. Moreover, I(S)QF inter/extrapolate to predict arbitrary quantile levels that differ from the underlying training ones. Equipped with the analytical evaluation of the continuous ranked probability score of I(S)QF representations, we apply our methods to NN-based times series forecasting cases, where the savings of the expensive re-training costs for non-trained quantile levels is particularly significant. We also provide a generalization error analysis of our proposed approaches under the sequence-to-sequence setting. Lastly, extensive experiments demonstrate the improvement of consistency and accuracy errors over other baselines.


These recommendations provide a data-supported approach. They are based on the following: 1) Formal review and analysis of recently-published world literature on the topic [Medline search]; 2) American College of Physicians Manual for Assessing Health Practices and Designing Practice Guidelines; 3) guideline policies, including the AASLD Policy on the Development and Use of Practice Guidelines and the AGA Policy Statement on Guidelines;; and 4) the experience of the authors in the specified topic. Intended for use by physicians, the recommendations in this document suggest preferred approaches to the diagnostic, therapeutic and preventive aspects of care. They are intended to be flexible, in contrast to standards of care, which are inflexible policies to be followed in every case. Specific recommendations are based on relevant published information. This document has been designated as a Position Paper, since the topic contains more data based on expert opinion than on randomized controlled trials and is thus not considered to have the emphasis and certainty of a Practice Guideline. Nevertheless, it serves an important purpose of facilitating proper and high level patient care and we have characterized the quality of evidence supporting each recommendation, in accordance with the Practice Guidelines Committee of the AASLD recommendations used for full Practice Guidelines (Table 1) These recommendations are fully endorsed by the AASLD.


Three closely related 4-hydroxy-3(2H)-furanones have been found in a range of highly cooked foodstuffs where they are important flavour compounds with aroma threshold values as low as 20 micrograms kg-1 water (approximately 0.14 mumol l-1). The compounds are formed mainly as a result of the operation of the Maillard reactions between sugars and amino acids during heating but one compound, 5-(or 2)-ethyl-2-(or 5)-methyl-4-hydroxy-3(2H)-furanone, appears in practice to be produced by yeast, probably from a Maillard intermediate, during the fermentation stages in the production of soy sauce and beer. The compounds are also important in the flavour of strawberry, raspberry, pineapple and tomato but the route of biosynthesis is unknown. Two 3-hydroxy-2(5H)-furanones, emoxyfuranone and sotolon, which are produced spontaneously from amino acids such as threonine and 4-hydroxy-L-leucine are major contributors to meaty and spicy/nutty flavours in foods. The biosynthesis of 5-(1,2-dihydroxyethyl)-3,4-dihydroxy-2(5H)-furanone (ascorbic acid, vitamin C) and 5-hydroxymethyl-3,4-dihydroxy-2(5H)-furanone (erythroascorbic acid) from sugars in plants and yeast, respectively, has been characterized to the enzymic level. After treatment with chlorine, humic waters contain a range of chloro-furanones, some of which, particularly 3-chloro-4-(dichloromethyl)-5-hydroxy-2(5H)-furanone (MX), are powerful mutagens. The furanones which occur in foods are also mutagenic to bacteria and cause DNA damage in laboratory tests. However, these compounds are, in practice, very effective anti-carcinogenic agents in the diets of animals which are being treated with known cancer-inducing compounds such as benzo[alpha]pyrene or azoxymethane. Two of the food-derived furanones have antioxidant activity comparable to that of ascorbic acid. A biological function has been discovered for some of the furanones besides vitamin C. 5-Methyl-4-hydroxy-3(2H)-furanone is a male pheromone in the cockroach Eurycolis florionda (Walker) and the 2,5-dimethyl derivative deters fungal growth on strawberries and is an important component of the attractive aroma of the fruit. The red seaweed Delisea pulchra (Greville) Montagne produces a range of brominated furanones which prevent colonisation of the plant by bacteria by interfering with the acylated homoserine lactone (AHL) signalling system used by the bacteria for quorum sensing. In addition, these compounds can deter grazing by marine herbivores. It is proposed here that the evolved biological function of a number of furanones is to act as inter-organism signal molecules in several different systems. This has resulted in two coincidental effects which are important for humans. Firstly, the easily oxidized nature of the furanones in general, which is likely to be an important property in their functioning as signal molecules, results in both mutagenic and anti-carcinogenic activity. The balance of these two effects from compounds in the diet has yet to be fully established. Secondly, and more specifically, the 4-hydroxy-3(2H)-furanones associated with fruit aromas act to attract animals to the fruit, which ensures seed dispersal. In the case of humans, the coincidental synthesis of some of these compounds in foods during preparation results in these foods appearing particularly attractive through the transferred operation of the original signalling mechanisms.


Previous research on how students' acceptance of emotionally charged theories relates to their understanding is based on the measurement of acceptance and understanding as two separate variables. As an alternative, the present study takes a qualitative approach with the aim of exploring what 24 upper-secondary school students accept when they come to understand the concept of gender and how to justify gender-related statements. The results show how the students accept ideas about social structures, power, and emancipation, as well as ideas about essences, individual independence, and a natural order. As for their justifications, they accept ideals of equality and objectivity. By assuming that the ideas have positive connotations for the students, it becomes possible to understand them as engaged in negotiating norms that are brought to the fore in the interviews.


This chapter deals with our experience with inquiry-based,
student-focused teaching and research approach to genetics-nutrition interactions in ruminant livestock at the University of Tasmania. An in-depth literature review on the manipulation of muscle and adipose tissue fatty acid composition and molecular marker associations with meat quality is also presented. Examples of our laboratory practicals on intramuscular fat extraction,fat melting point, meat quality and molecular genetics techniques
in gene sequencing homology are also included.

Since the 1960s, it was already known that nutrition was among the most significant environmental factors regulating the action of genes and the subsequent exhibition of phenotypes in animals (Jacob and Monod, 1961). Ordovas (2008) concluded that "it is of paramount importance that genes are considered in the context of nutrition and that nutrition is considered within the context of genes." This notion is the foundational building block of the concept of genetics-nutrition interactions in molecular genomics. In other words, genetics-nutrition interaction describes the modulatory effect of a dietary component on a specific phenotype by a genetic variant. Alternatively, this notion refers to the dietary modification of the effect of a genetic variant on a phenotypic trait. However, the mechanisms responsible for individual and breed-specific differences in dietary responses are very complex and poorly understood. This lack of understanding necessitates a comprehensive examination of genetics-nutrition interactions in livestock at the molecular level, to unravel the role of genetic factors contributing to differences in response to supplementary nutrients for the metabolic alterations of fatty acids that affect meat quality.

A major dilemma that undergraduate students face in animal
science is understanding the complex scientific concepts of genetics by nutrition interaction relationships in pasture-based systems obtainable in the sheep, dairy, and beef cattle industries (Malau-Aduli et al., 2012a). It has been suggested that in order to challenge old assumptions and break new ground in teaching and learning in the animal sciences, a paradigm shift from the traditional teacher-focus to a modern student-centered learning approach is necessary for establishing synergy (systematic working together in concert) between research-led teaching
and inquiry-based learning to enhance students'understanding
of both science content and scientific practices (Malau-Aduli and Lane, 2012).

Australian data conclusively demonstrated that the implementation of an innovative, inquiry-based learning, and research-led teaching approach made a significant contribution to the student learning experience in animal science through the development of students' critical thinking and scholarly values of genetics-nutrition interactions in livestock (Malau-Aduli et al., 2012a). This strategy in addition to the theoretical concepts taught in class, included student exposure to hands-on genetics-nutrition experimental growth trials with sheep (Holman and Malau-Aduli, 2012a,b, Holman et al., 2012, Malau-Aduli and Akuoch,2012, Malau-Aduli and Holman, 2010, Malau-Aduli et al.,2012b), laboratory experiments on intramuscular fat extraction,fat melting point, sensory evaluation of meat eating qualities,statistical data analysis, livestock industry field visits, scientific journal article critiques, and seminar presentations.


The event-related evoked potential (ERP) responses to sentence endings that either confirm or violate syntactic/semantic constraints have been extensively studied. Very little is known, however, about the corresponding situation with respect to music. The current study investigates the brain- wave (ERP) responses to perceived phrase closure. ERPs are a potentially valid measure of how language-like or uniquely musical the perception of phrase closure is. In our study, highly trained musicians (N= 16) judged whether or not novel musical phrases were closed (melodically or harmonically). Three stimulus series consisted of seven- note tunes with four possible endings: closed (tonic note or tonic chord), open/ diatonic (dominant chord or a member thereof), open/ chromatic (a chromatic note or chord outside the key of the melody), or open/white noise (a nonmusical control). One series included melodies alone, a second series included melodies harmonized, and a third series included melodies in which the melodic contexts were disrupted rather than the endings. In the recorded ERPs, a statistically significant negative drift in the waveforms occurred over the course of the context series, indicating anticipation of closure. The drift-corrected poststimulus waveforms for all series were subjected to a principal components analysis/analysis of variance. Two subject variables were also considered: sex and absolute pitch. All four stimulus types elicited identifiable responses. The waveform peaks for the four stimulus types are clearly differentiated by principal component analysis scores to two components: one with a maximum value at 273 ms and one with a maximum value at 471 ms. Taking the closed endings as the expected "standard," the waveforms for the two types of musical deviant endings were significantly below the standard at 273 ms and above the standard at 471 ms. The amount of negativity was proportional to the amount of deviance of the ending. The positive peak in the closed condition and the reduced peak in the open/diatonic condition are contrary to the normal inverse relationship between peak size and stimulus probability; the former agrees with peaks found in response to syntactic closure in language. Significant, though isolated, interactions involving both sex and absolute pitch also emerged.


This work provides a molecular dynamics simulation of the thermal conductivity and viscosity of thin water film. The results show that the average normal thermal conductivity and viscosity of thin water film is about an order of magnitude lower than those of bulk water, and they increase nonlinearly with the increase of thin film thickness. However, the viscosities at different sub-layers of a thin water film are apparently different. The density profiles at different positions of the thin water films are given to indicate their influence on the normal thermal conductivity and viscosity. The large increase of the viscosity and substantial decrease of the normal thermal conductivity in the near wall region of the substrate is influenced by the structural transition of thin water film because of its high density, which has prominent impact on the mean free path at the nanoscale. It provides a viable guidance for the mechanism study on the heat and mass transfer of an evaporating thin liquid film near the triple line.


Bio-micro-array fabrication and biological molecules patterning has been the focus of much research in recent years, as they are envisaged to play an important part in genomic studies, drug discovery and screening, protein identification and scaffolding development for tissue engineering. A number of different approaches have been examined for fabricating patterned biological surfaces. Almost in all cases, patterning of biomolecules has been two-dimensional. We demonstrate both 2D and 3D biotin patterning using techniques which enable the construction of arbitrary two and three dimensional shapes, not restricted to array-based shapes. For the 2D printing, Laser Induced Forward Transfer (LIFT) is employed to deposit controlled and viable micro-patterns of biotin. The activity and the functionality of the transferred materials are shown. For the 3D printing, firstly micro-structures are made employing multi-photon polymerisation. Biotin is subsequently immobilised on the structures surface by excimer laser photo-activation of photobiotin and further incubated with fluorescent labelled streptavidin. The specificity of the binding is demonstrated. The methods allow not only prototyping but also direct device construction.