Recent research on nanowires (NWs) demonstrated the ability of III–V semiconductors to adopt a different crystallographic phase when they are grown as nanostructures, giving rise to a novel class of materials with unique properties. Controlling the crystal structure however remains difficult and the geometrical constraints of NWs cause integration challenges for advanced devices. Here, we report for the first time on the phase-controlled growth of micron-sized planar InP films by selecting confined growth planes during template-assisted selective epitaxy. We demonstrate this by varying the orientation of predefined templates, which results in concurrent formation of zinc-blende (ZB) and wurtzite (WZ) material exhibiting phase purities of 100% and 97%, respectively. Optical characterization revealed a 70 meV higher band gap and a 2.5× lower lifetime for WZ InP in comparison to its natural ZB phase. Further, a model for the transition of the crystal structure is presented based on the observed growth facets and the bonding configuration of InP surfaces.


Introduction: Most doctors at Tshwane District Hospital in Pretoria are women who experience difficulty combining a career with family responsibilities because of lack of flexitime or part-time posts. They are also frustrated by the hospital management's apparent indifference to their concerns. Consequently, female doctors tend to leave Tshwane District to pursue their careers elsewhere. This study explored factors that influence the career choices of female doctors at Tshwane District Hospital in Pretoria. Method: Of sixty-two doctors working at Tshwane District Hospital in Pretoria between January 2008 and July 2011, 47 were traced, and 28 completed a four-part, self-administered questionnaire constructed round eight themes that emerged from a focus group discussion involving six female doctors. Questions on levels of burnout and job satisfaction, based on existing validated questionnaires, were included. Of the 28 doctors who completed the questionnaire, 19 were female and nine male. The median age group was 30–39 years. Results: Forty-six per cent of doctors reported overall job satisfaction. Female doctors were less satisfied than male doctors. Sixty-four per cent reported symptoms of burnout, while a worrying 18% reported either persisting symptoms or complete burnout. The majority of female doctors would prefer to work flexitime and to have the option of part-time employment in an academically stimulating environment. Many of the doctors who participated in the study at Tshwane District Hospital plan to pursue their careers outside the public sector in order to balance their family responsibilities with their professional lives. Conclusion: Female doctors at Tshwane District Hospital reported having low job satisfaction, an inflexible work schedule, a heavy workload and being given little recognition for their contribution. Together, these factors probably account for the high turnover of doctors at Tshwane District Hospital. If doctor retention is to be improved in public sector facilities, such as Tshwane District Hospital, the particular needs of female doctors with family responsibilities must be addressed.


Analysis of large networks is a critical component of many of today's application environments, including online social networks, protein interactions in biological networks, and Internet traffic analysis. The arrival of massive network graphs with hundreds of millions of nodes, e.g. social graphs, presents a unique challenge to graph analysis applications. Most of these applications rely on computing distances between node pairs, which for large graphs can take minutes to compute using traditional algorithms such as breadth-first-search (BFS). In this paper, we study ways to enable scalable graph processing for today's massive networks. We explore the design space of graph coordinate systems, a new approach that accurately approximates node distances in constant time by embedding graphs into coordinate spaces. We show that a hyperbolic embedding produces relatively low distortion error, and propose Rigel, a hyperbolic graph coordinate system that lends itself to efficient parallelization across a compute cluster. Rigel produces significantly more accurate results than prior systems, and is naturally parallelizable across compute clusters, allowing it to provide accurate results for graphs up to 43 million nodes. Finally, we show that Rigel's functionality can be easily extended to locate (near-) shortest paths between node pairs. After a onetime preprocessing cost, Rigel answers node-distance queries in 10's of microseconds, and also produces shortest path results up to 18 times faster than prior shortest-path systems with similar levels of accuracy.


As we interact with our environment, our senses absorb large amounts of information that our brains interpret and catalogue. This sensory data then influences how we learn from our environment and interact with it in the future. Understanding the mechanisms by which we perceive, decipher, and retain information is key to understanding ourselves and answering the questions, "How do we learn?" and "How can we improve our learning experiences?" This book seeks to answer these questions by focusing on three topics within the field of cognitive psychology that directly influence human information processing: vision, memory, and attention. Inspired by the work of George Sperling, a renowned expert in cognitive science and an early pioneer in the study of human information processing, the contributors to this book examine new computational models and methodologies. They study concepts such as the effects of human eye movements on our interpretation of visual stimuli to demonstrate how vision, memory, and attention are interlinked, and how they influence how we learn. The contributors also describe real-world applications for research, including technological innovations that can augment our senses and help us derive more information from our environment.


Midway through reading U.S.A., Sartre declared John Dos Passos "the greatest living writer of our time." Other contemporaries, including Faulkner and Hemingway, similarly praised the novelist and admired the innovative style and sheer scope of the U.S.A. trilogy, (1) which for its detailed panorama of the early twentieth century remains among the most ambitious of American novels. But the long decline of the author's career is today equally famous. "After the 1940s," Michael Denning notes, "no one argued about Dos Passos" (166). Many critics point to the writer's later years of poorer work; some to the wide swing of his politics from the far left to the far right--although the latter is simplistic, for it neglects the fact, as George Monteiro explains, "neither conservatives nor leftists of any stripe, from the 1950s to our own day have been able or willing to restore to U.S.A. the esteem and widespread approval accorded Dos Passos's major achievement in the 1930s" (320). Critics certainly in recent decades have tried to put the writer's reputation back together again: a special edition of Twentieth Century Views (Dos Passos [1975]) republished the original reviews of the major work (including those by Sartre, Cowley, Wilson, McLuhan and Trilling), and there have since been numerous monographs and the major biographies by Virginia Spencer Carr and Townsend Ludington, the latter also editing the letters and diaries. Never out of print (attesting to a continuous readership), U.S.A. has actually been reissued (by the Library of America [1996]) and added to college reading lists. But the strange and fragmented modernist style of the trilogy itself has remained a puzzle--one the following discussion attempts to solve in terms of mimetic desire. Two particular problems lie at the center of U.S.A. criticism. The first of these Sartre has attributed to the technique of Dos Passos, which presents fictional characters as though in "still life," sealed beneath sheets of glass: the novelist's style is notoriously resistant to interpretation. Sartre points to the curious aim the author has in U.S.A.: [Dos Passos] wants to show us this world, our own, to show it only, without explanations or comment. There are no revelations. [...] We have already seen everything he wants to show us, and, so it seems at first glance, seen it exactly as he wants us to see it. (168) The effect of Dos Passos's aim is that the fictional lives and business in the novel seem petrified; they are stifled lives the reader also finds unbearable. Sartre contends Dos Passos presents such unrelieved stifling precisely so his reader then rebels against these characters' destinies (conditioned by capitalism) and that Dos Passos hereby achieves his purpose. While Sartre is clear about the politics of U.S.A.'s style, though, he fails to examine the novel's psychology, even as he at least suggests the general predicament concerning its characters at large can be explained in terms of mimesis. Sartre observes that Acts, emotions, and ideas suddenly settle within a character, make themselves at home and then disappear without his having to say much in the matter. You cannot say he submits to them. He experiences them. There seems to be no law governing them. (170) On the contrary, a form of meta-commentary on U.S.A. can be provided by a psychology of mimetic desire: Dos Passos's characters' acts, emotions, and ideas are indeed governed by a "law," whose current neglect by critical theory warrants a brief review. Rene Girard explores the psychology of mimesis extensively in several studies, beginning with Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1965), which explains how "triangular" desire operates in works by Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and Proust. Mimetic, triangular desire, Girard explains, is the desire for an object that a character copies or adopts from another model character's desire for the same object--the structure of the relationship between (1) the subject, (2) the model, and (3) the object forming a triangle. …


Previous research has demonstrated that middle childhood is a time in which friendships go through substantial changes and begin to occupy a central role in individuals' lives. The quality of children's friendships has implications for individuals' later psychosocial outcomes and yet relatively little is known about how children come to have high quality friendships. There is a large body of literature linking elements of parenting to children's social competence, suggesting that parenting is likely to predict friendship quality as well. Drawing on the Tripartite Model of parental influence, one aim of this study was to examine the ways that mothers' child-rearing beliefs may influence children's perceptions of friendship quality. Friendship research often ignores the fact that there are two children in every friendship, and thus there is the potential for influence from two mothers. Drawing from Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory, another aim of this study is to extend previous research by examining the ways that mothers' child-rearing beliefs may influence not only their own children's perceptions of friendship quality, but also their children's friends' perceptions of friendship quality. Utilizing a subsample of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development data - a longitudinal study of 1364 children and their families - the current study tested an Actor-Partner Interdependence Model whereby maternal child-rearing beliefs in fourth grade predicted children's perceived friendship quality via children's social competence. Results demonstrated mixed support for the hypothesized associations among maternal child-rearing beliefs, children's social competence, and children's perceptions of friendship quality. There was little evidence that maternal child-rearing beliefs were associated with perceived friendship quality, either directly or indirectly through children's social competence. However, there was support for the hypothesis that maternal beliefs would be associated with children's social competence, particularly for the pathways from maternal beliefs to children's aggression. There was also some support for the hypothesis that children's social competence would be linked to their own and their friends' perceived friendship quality. These results highlight the need for additional dyadic examinations of the precursors of children's friendship quality.


Standardization and harmonization of accounting practices is a fundamental element of a global business environment. Achieving this is a complex process that involves technical and political negotiation. The International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) was the organization that pioneered this process on a world-wide basis. The IASC prepared the way for the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and its International Financial Reporting Standards, which since 2005 have held the dominant influence over the financial reporting of thousands of listed companies in the European Union, as well as in many other countries. The forces and influences that shaped the formation of the IASB were intimately connected with the historical organization and operation of its predecessor, the IASC, and so to understand the standards enforced in financial reporting today, a historical understanding of the IASC is required. Financial Reporting and Global Capital Markets does just this. It examines the history of the IASC from 1973 to 2000, including its foundation, operation, changing membership and leadership, achievements and setbacks, the development of its standards, and its restructuring leading up to the creation of the IASB in 2001. The book also studies the impact of the IASC's standards on national standard setting and on accounting practice in developed and developing countries, as well as the impact on the IASC of the policies and positions of the UN, the OECD, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Organization of Securities Commissions, and the European Commission. It will be of vital interest to all concerned with accounting developments in a global environment, be they academics, policy-makers, or professionals.


Most people value the highly personalized service they receive from their barber, handyman, or financial advisor. These providers get to know individual customers, and they tailor their offerings to better match specific needs. This leads to loyalty, as customers return for the personal service. Interestingly, many national and international services (including retail stores, airlines, and hotels) buy their customers' loyalty by running loyalty programs that offer points and rewards. Loyalty programs collect information on individual customers; however, this information never gets passed on to a customer service representative, allowing them to personalize the service they provide to an individual customer. My thesis project investigates if loyalty program data can be collected and fed back to a customer-facing employee, allowing them to personalize their performance to an individual customer in a way that both provides value to customers as well as makes the employee feel they are better at performing their job. To arrive at my service design recommendations for customer-employee interactions in in-person settings, I conducted interviews as well as a large online survey to test my design concepts.


The Millennium Development Goals call for reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water. This goal was adopted in large part because clean water was seen as critical to fighting diarrheal disease, which kills 2 million children annually. There is compelling evidence that provision of piped water and sanitation can substantially reduce child mortality. However, in dispersed rural settlements, providing complete piped water and sanitation infrastructure to households is expensive. Many poor countries have therefore focused instead on providing community-level water infrastructure, such as wells. Various traditional child health interventions have been shown to be effective in fighting diarrhea. Among environmental interventions, handwashing and point-of-use water treatment both reduce diarrhea, although more needs to be learned about ways to encourage households to take up these behavior changes. In contrast, there is little evidence that providing community-level rural water infrastructure substantially reduces diarrheal disease or that this infrastructure can be effectively maintained. Investments in communal water infrastructure short of piped water may serve other needs and may reduce diarrhea in particular circumstances, but the case for prioritizing communal infrastructure provision needs to be made rather than assumed.


Our point of departure in the project reported in this paper is that learning activity is an activity producing or activity transforming activity (Engestrom 1987). Besides conducting research on artefact-mediated interaction, the aim of our Technology and Learning Lab (TELL) is to find out how to use existing technology to produce or transform activities, and thereby promoting expansive learning. In our work, we take for granted that in all learning activities, there is a need for three kinds of mediating artefacts - conceptual, technical-material, and organisational. The aim of the TELL lab is to support design of these kinds of artefacts. In the paper we will focus on the technical-material artefacts, at the same time as we attempt to pay due attention to their relations to appropriate conceptual and organisational artefacts. Technical-material artefacts that are being explored at TELL are: - Development of modules, so called "learning objects" that may be used in distance learning. (Learning objects are objects to learn from, but we prefer to see them used as tools for learning.) - "Research objects" which may be shared with students and thus be used in higher education. (In our case they always consists of video or audio recordings, primarily aimed for research.) - "Talks with researchers" (CHAT researchers or close to). This means that we form a kind of virtual community with our colleagues and our students. The latter get access to the voices and opinions of our research colleagues, and we are able to expand on their themes (at least partially) later on, because we are working within the same theoretical tradition as they are. (These "Talks" may be used as "learning objects" but preferably they are used more creatively.) - Artefacts to be used in "Blended" courses, i.e,, a mix of campus and distance courses that now are being offered at Blekinge Institute of Technology. It can be one of the artefacts mentioned above, but we explore if there are artefacts that for the distance students may compensate for the non-access to campus meetings and at the same time may be used of the campus students, e.g. to foster the written culture that sometimes is weak at campus. - Experiments with platforms for distance learning (open source, e.g. Moodle, The International Fifth Dimension Course Maze). TELL as a tool-producing tool aims at construction artefacts (conceptual, organisational, and physical-material) in order to promote the activity of learning.


A smartphone accessory can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers from fingerprick whole blood in 15 min, as operated by health care workers trained on a software app. Dongle + app = mobile test for sexually transmitted diseases There are thousands of health-related "apps" for smartphones, from tracking sleep patterns to recording heart rate to logging caloric intake. The power of such apps in connecting resource-limited communities to health care workers and, in turn, to proper and immediate care is now emerging. In this issue, Laksanasopin and colleagues describe a microfluidic-based diagnostic test for HIV and syphilis that attaches to (and is powered by) the iPod's headphone jack. The mobile test also comes complete with an easy-to-use app, flashing test results on-screen in under 15 min. The test is based on the standard immunoassay but uses gold-labeled antibodies to detect HIV and syphilis antigens in only 2 μl of whole blood, and then silver reagents to amplify the resulting signal. The authors deployed the dongle in Rwanda, testing its sensitivity and specificity on 96 patients. Evaluated side by side with the gold standard tests for HIV and syphilis, the dongle produced results with a sensitivity and specificity needed for making treatment decisions in the field. In a survey, a vast majority of patients reported satisfaction with dongle performance. After a few next-generation tweaks, including reducing the size of the dongle, the entire diagnostic package is ready for adoption in resource-poor clinics and communities, to improve detection of HIV and syphilis and empower health care workers to administer timely and appropriate treatments. This work demonstrates that a full laboratory-quality immunoassay can be run on a smartphone accessory. This low-cost dongle replicates all mechanical, optical, and electronic functions of a laboratory-based enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) without requiring any stored energy; all necessary power is drawn from a smartphone. Rwandan health care workers used the dongle to test whole blood obtained via fingerprick from 96 patients enrolling into care at prevention of mother-to-child transmission clinics or voluntary counseling and testing centers. The dongle performed a triplexed immunoassay not currently available in a single test format: HIV antibody, treponemal-specific antibody for syphilis, and nontreponemal antibody for active syphilis infection. In a blinded experiment, health care workers obtained diagnostic results in 15 min from our triplex test that rivaled the gold standard of laboratory-based HIV ELISA and rapid plasma reagin (a screening test for syphilis), with sensitivity of 92 to 100% and specificity of 79 to 100%, consistent with needs of current clinical algorithms. Patient preference for the dongle was 97% compared to laboratory-based tests, with most pointing to the convenience of obtaining quick results with a single fingerprick. This work suggests that coupling microfluidics with recent advances in consumer electronics can make certain laboratory-based diagnostics accessible to almost any population with access to smartphones.


Tightened regulatory requirements and a renewed appreciation for the benefits of preserving our diminishing natural resources have led to a recent profusion of stream restoration projects and the incorporation of environmental features into flood control projects. Accomplishing environmental objectives in such projects often necessitates the use of structural features such as flow deflectors, boulders, rock drop structures, and bank protection modified to provide environmental benefits. These features improve the quantity and quality of available habitat during low-flow periods, which are critical for many aquatic species in streams. Although several projects have successfully employed these techniques, the attainment of environmental objectives has been as much by chance as by design. The selection, layout and design of these project features has historically been accomplished by subjective analyses, usually without the benefit of engineering input. This is due in part to the fact that comprehensive design guidance based upon physical processes has not been developed for environmental features. This paper presents a summary of results from a research effort by the US Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station to develop selection, layout and design guidance for instream structural features and streambank protection techniques that provide environmental benefits.


The advent of extreme-scale computing systems, e.g., Petaflop supercomputers, High Performance Computing (HPC) cyber-infrastructure, Enterprise databases, and experimental facilities such as large-scale particle colliders, are pushing the envelope on dataset sizes. Supercomputing centers routinely generate and consume ever increasing amounts of data while executing high-throughput computing jobs. These are often result-datasets or checkpoint snapshots from long-running simulations, but can also be input data from experimental facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). These growing datasets are often processed by a geographically dispersed user base across multiple different HPC installations. Moreover, end-user workflows are also increasingly distributed in nature with massive input, output, and even intermediate data often being transported to and from several HPC resources or end-users for further processing or visualization.
The growing data demands of applications coupled with the distributed nature of HPC workflows, have the potential to place significant strain on both the storage and network resources at HPC centers. Despite this potential impact, rather than stringently managing HPC center resources, a common practice is to leave application-associated data management to the end-user, as the user is intimately aware of the application's workflow and data needs. This means end-users must frequently interact with the local storage in HPC centers, the scratch space, which is used for job input, output, and intermediate data. Scratch is built using a parallel file system that supports very high aggregate I/O throughput, e.g., Lustre, PVFS, and GPFS. To ensure efficient I/O and faster job turnaround, use of scratch by applications is encouraged. Consequently, job input and output data are required to be moved in and out of the scratch space by end-users before and after the job runs, respectively. In practice, end-users arbitrarily stage and offload data as and when they deem fit, without any consideration to the center's performance, often leaving data on the scratch long after it is needed. HPC centers resort to "purge" mechanisms that sweep the scratch space to remove files found to be no longer in use, based on not having been accessed in a preselected time threshold called the purge window that commonly ranges from a few days to a week. This ad-hoc data management ignores the interactions between different users' data storage and transmission demands, and their impact on center serviceability leading to suboptimal use of precious center resources.
To address the issues of exponentially increasing data sizes and ad-hoc data management, we present a fresh perspective to scratch storage management by fundamentally rethinking the manner in which scratch space is employed. Our approach is twofold. First, we re-design the scratch system as a "cache" and build "retention", "population", and "eviction" policies that are tightly integrated from the start, rather than being add-on tools. Second, we aim to provide and integrate the necessary end-user data delivery services, i.e. timely offloading (eviction) and just-in-time staging (population), so that the center's scratch space usage can be optimized through coordinated data movement. Together, these two combined approaches create our Integrated End-User Data Service, wherein data transfer and placement on the scratch space are scheduled with job execution. This strategy allows us to couple job scheduling with cache management, thereby bridging the gap between system software tools and scratch storage management. It enables the retention of only the relevant data for the duration it is needed. Redesigning the scratch as a cache captures the current HPC usage pattern more accurately, and better equips the scratch storage system to serve the growing datasets of workloads. This is a fundamental paradigm shift in the way scratch space has been managed in HPC centers, and outweighs providing simple purge tools to serve a caching workload.


(57) ABSTRACT A coated Substrate including a Substrate having a surface, a bond coat proximate to the substrate surface, a yttrium stabilized zirconia (YSZ) thermal barrier layer opposite the Substrate Surface, and at least one interlayer disposed between the bond coat and the thermal barrier layer, wherein the interlayer contains an alloy having a nanocrystalline grain structure. A method for coating a substrate to be exposed to high in service temperatures and/or temperature cycles including depositing a bond coating on Substrate Surface, depositing at least one nanocrystalline interlayer on the bond coat opposite the Substrate surface, and depositing a yttrium stabilized zirconia (YSZ) thermal barrier coating on the nanocrystalline interlayer opposite the bond coat, wherein the service life of the YSZ thermal barrier coating is extended relative to a substrate coated with the bond coating and the thermal barrier without the interlayer dis posed therebetween.


Let $G$ be a simple algebraic group over an algebraically closed field $\k$ of characteristic $0$, and $\g=\text{Lie}\,G$. Let $(e,h,f)$ be an $\sl_2$-triple in $\g$ with $e$ being a long root vector in $\g$. Let $(\,\cdot\,,\,\cdot\,)$ be the $G$-invariant bilinear form on $\g$ with $(e,f)=1$ and let $\chi\in\g^*$ be such that $\chi(x)=(e,x)$ for all $x\in\g$. Let ${\mathcal S}$ be the Slodowy slice at $e$ through the adjoint orbit of $e$ and let $H$ be the enveloping algebra of ${\mathcal S}$; see [\cite{P02}]. In this note we give an explicit presentation of $H$ by generators and relations. As a consequence we deduce that $H$ contains an ideal of codimension $1$ which is unique if $\g$ is not of type $\mathrm A$. Applying Skryabin's equivalence of categories we then construct an explicit Whittaker model for the Joseph ideal of $U(\g)$. Inspired by Joseph's Preparation Theorem we prove that there exists a homeomorphism between the primitive spectrum of $H$ and the spectrum of all primitive ideals of infinite codimension in $U(\g)$ which respects Goldie rank and Gelfand--Kirillov dimension. We study highest weight modules for the algebra $H$ and apply earlier results of Mili{\v c}i{\'c}--Soergel and Backelin to express the composition multiplicities of the Verma modules for $H$ in terms of some inverse parabolic Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomials. Our results confirm in the minimal nilpotent case the de Vos--van Driel conjecture on composition multiplicities of Verma modules for finite ${\mathcal W}$-algebras. We also obtain some general results on the enveloping algebras of Slodowy slices and determine the associated varieties of related primitive ideals of $U(\g)$. A sequel to this paper will treat modular aspects of this theory.


S R Ranji

Dr S R Ranji, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; email@example.com

Do quality improvement interventions reduce unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics for outpatients with acute illnesses?

Studies selected evaluated 1 of 6 strategies (clinician education, patient education, delayed prescriptions, audit and feedback, clinician reminders and decision support systems, and financial and regulatory incentives and disincentives) intended to reduce unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics for outpatients with acute non-bacterial illnesses, and reported data on antibiotic prescribing or use before and after the intervention. Outcomes included proportion of patient visits with a prescription for antibiotics and clinical outcomes (eg, symptom resolution).

Cochrane Collaboration Effective Practice and Organisation of Care database (1966 to Aug 2005), Medline (Jun 2005 to Mar 2007), and reference lists were …


There are several types of crime fiction. This thesis is concerned
with one type only, the detective story. As this term has been used
rather loosely by publishers, reviewers, critics and librarians, the
first part of this chapter has been devoted to a discussion of its
meaning and its relationship with the novel. This is followed by a brief
history of the genre, within the limits defined. Librarians have made several efforts to devise a
classification scheme for fiction. Even the most general scheme will
break down in practice, because a novel may have more than one facet.
An historical romance may include a mystery: 'The talisman ring' by Georgette
Heyer; an adventure story may have an element of detection: 'The day
of the jackal' by Frederick Forsyth; a detective story may also belong
to science fiction: 'The naked sun' by I. Asimov; and a crime novel may
have a strong love interest: 'Gaudy night' by Dorothy L. Sayers.
In the realm of crime fiction there are similar problems. For
example, 'The moonstone', 'Gaudy night' and the historical stories of John
Dickson Carr have all been called detective stories, but they could
equally well be considered as romances.
For the purpose of this thesis, therefore, it is necessary to provide
a working definition of "detective story" and, as far as possible, to
disentangle it from the other forms of fiction with which it is often
confused, and with which it sometimes blends; these include the mystery
story, the thriller and the crime novel.


Stratified two-phase flow regimes can occur in chemical plants, nuclear reactors and oil pipelines. A relevant problem is the development of wavy stratified flows which can lead to slug generation. The slug flow regime is characterized by an acceleration of the gaseous phase and by the transition of fast liquid slugs, which carry a significant amount of liquid with high kinetic energy. It is potentially hazardous to the structure of the system due to the strong oscillating pressure levels formed behind the liquid slugs as well as the mechanical momentum of the slugs. Because these flow conditions cannot be predicted with the required accuracy and spatial resolution by the one-dimensional system codes, the stratified flows are increasingly modelled with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. In CFD, closure models are required that must be validated. The recent improvements of the multiphase flow modelling in the ANSYS CFX code make it now possible to simulate these mechanisms in detail. In order to validate existing multiphase flow models and to further develop these, measurement data with a high-resolution in time and also in space are needed. For the experimental investigation of co-current air/water flows, the HAWAC (Horizontal Air/Water Channel) was built. The channel allows in particular the study of air/water slug flow under atmospheric pressure. Parallel to the experiments, CFD calculations were carried out. The two-fluid model was applied with a special turbulence damping procedure at the free surface. An Algebraic Interfacial Area Density (AIAD) model on the basis of the implemented mixture model was introduced, which allows the detection of the morphological form of the two phase flow and the corresponding switching via a blending function of each correlation from one object pair to another. As a result this model can distinguish between bubbles, droplets and the free surface. The behaviour of slug generation and propagation at the experimental setup was qualitatively reproduced by the simulation, while local deviations require a continuation of the work. The creation of small instabilities due to pressure surge or an increase of interfacial momentum should be analysed in the future. Furthermore, experiments with pressure and velocity measurements are planned and will allow quantitative comparisons, also at other superficial velocities.


Fungal infections of nose and paranasal sinuses are getting common these days. Nose and paranasal sinuses being constantly exposed to environmental insults causing them to be infected. With increasing incidence of diseases like HIV and life style disorders like Diabetes Mellitus compromises host immunity, that it is no wonder that the incidence of fungal infections involving the nose and sinuses are on the rise. In addition the incidence of fungal infections in immunocompetent persons are also on the rise. This article attempts to review the published literature available on this topic concurrently along with our experience on this subject. In Indian scenario the incidence of fungal infections involving the nasal cavity has shown an increase. There is also a significant increase in the incidence of fungal infections involving the nose and sinuses even in immunocompetent individuals. Increased use of advanced imaging techniques like CT scan, MRI, and Nasal endoscopes have increased the awareness of Rhinologist to this disease spectrum.


Bosch has been at the forefront of vehicle safety technology ever since the introduction of the headlight, and until now the implementation of safety improvements within vehicles has largely concentrated on stand-alone safety systems for the vehicle driver and passengers. Now, with the introduction of sensor fusion, networking and inter-connectivity, Bosch is increasingly looking at how they can influence the complete vehicle / traffic / road infrastructure safety scenario through technology implementation and bring about the long term target of zero accidents. Locally in Australia we have introduced a project called "Reducing Vehicle Accident Rate and Severity". The objective is to examine how we can reduce the accident rate and mitigate the severity through implementation and networking of current and future technologies, how we can most effectively interface with other organisations that are trying to achieve the same outcome, and finally how we can best educate all road users of the use cases and benefits of the new technology. This presentation aims to outline the technologies that we are introducing, how they can be networked and the other activities aimed at achieving the overall target of zero accidents.


Accurate and fast estimation of state of charge (SOC) and water loss during battery operations plays an important role in the prevention of over-charge and over-discharge and optimal control strategy of charging, which requires a model that has great performance in accuracy, algorithm robustness, computational efficiency, numerical stability, and cost. For SOC estimation, most researchers focus on electric equivalent circuit model (ECM) and electrochemical model. The latter is based on electrochemical and thermal principles which are capable of representing the details of cell behavior, it is more accurate. However, it cannot be applied to real time applications, due to high computational time. The ECM is relatively simple, but limited to represent a narrow range of operating behaviors not considering the effects of temperature and aging. Therefore, there is a need for the development of a method that considers the effects of temperature and aging and also has real time capability. In water loss estimation, the qualitative analysis is proposed. A Second order ECM with an extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used to estimate the SOC of an AGM lead acid battery. Considering the model parameter dependence on temperature and aging, the EKF is designed to identify model parameters online. Because the ECM shows poor performance when the battery is under constant voltage (C.V.) charging, the new EKF and Coulomb counting are combined. Then, given the relationship between capacity and temperature, the capacity-temperature model is added to the new method. With this proposed method, SOC estimation error can be reduced to 3% at various temperatures and aging processes. In water loss estimation, this thesis is the first to propose and test a method to measure the mass of the decomposed water of an AGM lead acid battery. Through calibration of the reaction rate of decomposed water, a water loss estimation algorithm is presented. The comparison between ii simulation and experimental results proves the accuracy of this water loss estimation method. The algorithm shows that water loss can be minimized by limiting the maximum voltage and temperature during charging.


Ocean warming can modify the ecophysiology and distribution of marine organisms, and relationships between species, with nonlinear interactions between ecosystem components potentially resulting in trophic amplification. Trophic amplification (or attenuation) describe the propagation of a hydroclimatic signal up the food web, causing magnification (or depression) of biomass values along one or more trophic pathways. We have employed 3‐D coupled physical‐biogeochemical models to explore ecosystem responses to climate change with a focus on trophic amplification. The response of phytoplankton and zooplankton to global climate‐change projections, carried out with the IPSL Earth System Model by the end of the century, is analysed at global and regional basis, including European seas (NE Atlantic, Barents Sea, Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Bay of Biscay, Adriatic Sea, Aegean Sea) and the Eastern Boundary Upwelling System (Benguela). Results indicate that globally and in Atlantic Margin and North Sea, increased ocean stratification causes primary production and zooplankton biomass to decrease in response to a warming climate, whilst in the Barents, Baltic and Black Seas, primary production and zooplankton biomass increase. Projected warming characterized by an increase in sea surface temperature of 2.29 ± 0.05 °C leads to a reduction in zooplankton and phytoplankton biomasses of 11% and 6%, respectively. This suggests negative amplification of climate driven modifications of trophic level biomass through bottom‐up control, leading to a reduced capacity of oceans to regulate climate through the biological carbon pump. Simulations suggest negative amplification is the dominant response across 47% of the ocean surface and prevails in the tropical oceans; whilst positive trophic amplification prevails in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. Trophic attenuation is projected in temperate seas. Uncertainties in ocean plankton projections, associated to the use of single global and regional models, imply the need for caution when extending these considerations into higher trophic levels.


The deepening penetration of renewable power generation is challenging how the minute balancing of supply and demand is carried out by power system operators. Several proposals to shortterm operational planning rely on robust optimization to offer guarantees on the ability of the operator to meet a wide array of possible scenarios. The main downside of these approaches is their conservative results whose operating costs and/or carbon tally may be sub-economical. Such results come by because these approaches put emphasis often on very low-probability portions of the uncertainty set they consider. Moreover, these approaches also often ignore the inherent time and spatial couplings of wind and solar generation variability. In this paper, we seek to reduce the conservativeness of these uncertainty sets by proposing the concept of spatio-temporal flexibility requirement envelopes. We show how it is able to efficiently capture and model the temporal trends and spatial correlation of multisite renewable generation and load. A mathematical program for energy scheduling is also developed using the projections of this envelope. We showcase the use and advantages of spatiotemporal flexibility requirement envelopes and their associated scheduling approach in a microgrid and on a modified IEEE Reliability Test System.


In the modern era, robots have become an integral part of human life. In a world where humans and robots need to coexist, it is important to evolve more natural and easy communication mechanisms for human-machine interaction. The communication mechanism needs to be `easy' more for humans, than machines. One such mechanism can be developed by using natural gestures of the humans. In this paper, a prototype silent spybot is developed that operates by processing the gesture commands signal. The prototype uses video processing with object tracking algorithm to understand the gesture commands. The spybot is programmed to interpret the gesture command signal and navigate according to hand gestures, sensed by a video camera operating within a short range. The gesture commands can be used for controlling the spybot's functions such as movement of the robot, or other operations of the robot, silently. Performance evaluation is carried out through various environments, with encouraging results. As a possible application, a spy robot that captures images from target places silently and sends the spied data to a host computer, is also demonstrated.


This master's thesis describes a development of a portable and adjustable power supply. The first part of the thesis introduces us to the working principle of power supplies in general. Next, we present a functional design of a portable and adjustable power supply and a list of its required functionalities. Chapter "switched-mode power supplies" introduces us to the theoretical basics of the said power supplies, while chapter "linear regulators" introduces us to different types of linear regulators and tells us more about how they work. Everything regarding which microcontroller was used and why it was used is described in the "ARM microcontroller" chapter. Besides microcontrollers, it also talks about which integrated development environment is used and how the microcontroller is programmed. A full and detailed description of each part of the analog circuitry can be found in the chapter "describing the development of the portable and adjustable power supply". Lastly, the user interface is described in detail.


Labour has been acquiring a decreasing share of aggregate income since the eighties, despite the fact that its productivity has been increasing continuously. The 52.7 per cent average wage share of the Visegrad countries in 2016 is considerably lower than the 63.3 per cent EU average. As for Hungary, a 6.8 percentage point drop was recorded between 1995 and 2016, projected for the whole of the economy, which is considerable compared to the Central European average. Current literature suggests that the bargaining power of labour was undermined by technological innovations, economic globalisation and the weakening of trade unions. Hungarian economic policy took the former two factors as given and intended to break the downward trend by active labour market policies, pro-labour tax policies and the increase of the minimum wage, in other words through redistribution from capital incomes to labour incomes. The specific surtaxes levied on oligopolistic markets and on the beneficiaries of previous decades, as well as savings on public debt interest payments contributed to the creation of public employment programmes, the increase of family tax allowance and the reduction of personal income tax to a 15 per cent flat rate. These policies have influenced wage shares, which has been reflected in the almost 2 percentage point increase of wage shares from 2015 to 2016 according to Eurostat and Ameco data. If we consider the ratio of net real wage and real GDP, then the increase was larger, 5.05 percentage points between 2010 and 2016 or 6.15 percentage points when the family tax allowances are also considered. Hungarian crisis management is part of a new, post-Keynesian, long-term growth strategy, which is based on wage convergence instead of the previous debt-led growth. In line with scientific results, this strategy considers real wages as the primary factor catalysing long-term, sustainable economic growth through the increase of demand.


The leadership of the school principal has long been associated with teacher effectiveness and student achievement. Research on the topic of principal leadership supports this association (Hallinger, Bickman, & Davis, 1996; Hallinger & Heck, 1996, 1997; Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004; Walters, Marzano, & McNulty, 2003). Research indicates that this association is indirect and occurs through mediating factors (Hallinger et al., 1996; Hallinger & Heck, 1996, 1997; Leithwood, Louis et al., 2004; Robinson, 2007). These factors include intervening variables such as a school's vision and mission, teacher's pedagogical and content knowledge, teacher instructional practices, and school culture. A review of the literature on mediating variables reveals school culture as a mediating variable that may have a significant relationship with improved teacher effectiveness.   Schoen and Teddlie's (2008) model of school culture was selected as the operational definition of school culture for the present study. The review of literature leads to multiple models of teacher effectiveness and provides justification for using student achievement as a proxy measure of teacher   effectiveness. Using Schoen and Teddlie's model of school culture and student achievement as a proxy measure for teacher effectiveness, the study uses   meta-analysis techniques to examine the effect size of school culture on student achievement in K-12 schools in the United States.  The study synthesizes correlational study findings between school culture and student achievement since the signing of Goals 2000 in 1994. Studies included in the meta-analysis were conducted in U.S. public schools and included correlations in the form of a Pearson r between one or more of the dimensions of school culture and student achievement. The review of literature produced 30 studies meeting all established criteria for inclusion, provided a total of 152 correlations, and included 3,378 schools. The results of the study indicate that a strong moderate effect exists between school culture and student achievement in K-12 schools in the United States. The results indicate that school culture is a significant mediating variable of principal leadership and student achievement.


The Arctic Council Between Science, Managment and Policy What has often been lacking in the scholarly literature on environmental and climatic changes in the Arctic are analyses addressing what determines the influence of scientific knowledge on regulations of relevance to the Arctic. The purpose of this article is to analyse the relationship between the production and systematisation of knowledge (including policy recommendations arising from this work) on Arctic issues and the Norwegian management system (overseen by, among other bodies, the Norwegian Environment Agency and Ministry of Climate and Environment). The article focuses on three of the Arctic Council's working groups: 1) Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP); 2) Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF); and 3) Protection of Arctic Marine Environment (PAME). The focus is on state of knowledge, degree of political and economic controversy in the issue area, the importance of the mat-ter in public opinion and among policy makers, and management design.


Recombinant ricin A chain was chemically linked to monoclonal antibodies directed toward human breast cancer cells, a human T-cell differentiation antigen, and mouse transferrin receptor. Three types of immunotoxins were prepared; in two of them the antibody was linked to recombinant ricin A chain by a disulfide bond and in the third, a nonreducible thioether bond was used. Immunotoxins containing a nonreducible linkage may have some advantage over conjugates containing a reducible linkage because of improved stability in vivo. Conjugation of recombinant ricin A chain through either the endogenous thiol group or through a derivatized amino group produced immunotoxins with comparable cytotoxicity. The thioether conjugate was 1000-fold less cytotoxic to target tumor cells than the respective disulfide-linked immunotoxin. However, addition of monensin, a monocarboxylic ionophore, greatly enhanced the cytotoxicity of the thioether-linked immunotoxin. Monensin increased the immunotoxin activity better than other lysosomotropic reagents that were tested. The increase in activity of recombinant ricin A chain-containing immunotoxins mediated by monensin argues against a role for contaminating ricin B chain in potentiation.


In this paper, I present a pair of new measures of economic inequality with the application of Snell's law. The idea originates when I envisage, with fantasy, that a society without economic inequality is nothing but a state or condition where light touches everyone without refraction. The egalitarian line of the Lorenz curve framework, for measuring economic inequality, represents such an ideal condition. In reality, however, it deviates or refracts from the ideal condition, as we live in a stratified society with varying living conditions. Refractive index has origin in geometrical optics, where it measures bending of a ray of light passing from one homogeneous transparent medium into another. As light refracts according to characteristics of different media, so also Lorenz curve does according to concentration of wealth or income in different strata. Thanks to this analogy, first, I compute refractive (inequality) index for each income group in a distribution to study inequality condition in each, and then simply add all and standardise to propose an overall measure for the whole framework. I utilise data on quintile group shares of income or consumption from the UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality Database WIID 3.4, 2017 with 180 countries and 5604 cases. Results are noteworthy. While a refractive index value of less than 1.00, in case of light, refers an 'anomalous refraction', such a condition of economic inequality is found to be too common for many of us in reality. In contrast to that, in more than 31% of the cases, the index value of the richest group lies above 2.00, where the same of 1.00 depicts an ideal condition that is enviable. With many attractive properties, the summative overall measure appears to be pro transfer-sensitive and ornamental going far beyond the most popular Gini coefficient, which is simply transfer-neutral.


The aim of this study was to characterise vasodilator responses in the perfused ciliary vascular bed of the bovine eye. When bovine eyes were perfused at a constant rate of 2.5 ml min-1, infusion of the powerful vasodilator, papaverine (150 muM), produced a very small reduction in perfusion pressure. Under the same conditions, the nitric oxide synthase inhibitor, L- NAME (100 muM), had no effect but the inhibitor of soluble guanylate cyclase, ODQ (10 muM), produced a small vasoconstrictor response. These results indicate that there is a small component of intrinsic (myogenic) tone that may be suppressed by a basal release of nitric oxide. In the bovine eye, vasodilatation to acetylcholine or bradykinin was unaffected by L- NAME (100 muM), or the cyclo-oxygenase inhibitor, flurbiprofen (30 muM), but was significantly attenuated following treatment with a high concentration of KC1 (30 muM), or by damaging the endothelium with the detergent, CHAPS (0.3%, 2 min). Thus agonist-induced vasodilatation is not mediated by nitric oxide or prostacyclin but involves a K+ conductance and is endothelium-dependent. Acetylcholine-induced vasodilatation in the bovine eye was unaffected by glibenclamide (10 muM), an inhibitor of ATP-sensitive K+ channels (KATP), but was significantly attenuated by TEA (10 mM), a non-selective inhibitor of K+ channels. The blockade of vasodilatation by TEA but not glibenclamide could indicate that a calcium- sensitive K+ channel is involved in the response. The small conductance calcium-sensitive K+ channel (SKCa) inhibitor, apamin (100 nM), and the large conductance calcium-sensitive K+ channel (BKCa) inhibitor, iberiotoxin (50 nM), had no significant effect on acetylcholine-induced vasodilatation. In contrast, the intermediate (IKCa)/large conductance calcium-sensitive K+ channel inhibitor, charybdotoxin (50 nM), powerfully blocked these vasodilator responses, and uncovered a vasoconstrictor response. Thus, vasodilator responses appear to involve the opening of IKCa channels. The combination of apamin (100 nM) with a sub-threshold concentration of charybdotoxin (10 nM) significantly attenuated acetylcholine-induced vasodilatation, but the combination of apamin (100 nM) with iberiotoxin (50 nM) had no effect. This profile of blockade is consistent with the vasodilator responses being mediated by endothelium-derived hyperpolarizing factor (EDHF). Ascorbate is known to protect nitric oxide dependent vasodilatation under conditions of oxidant stress, however, EDHF-mediated vasodilator responses induced by acetylcholine or bradykinin were powerfully blocked when ascorbate (50 muM, 120 min) was included in the perfusion medium; with acetylcholine a normally masked muscarinic vasoconstrictor response was also uncovered. These results indicate that, ascorbate at a physiologically relevant concentration, can inhibit EDHF-mediated vasodilatations. The blockade of EDHF-mediated vasodilatation by ascorbate was time-dependent (maximum blockade at 120 min) and concentration-dependent (10-150 muM). Thus, the blocking action of ascorbate has a slow onset and occurs concentrations across the normal plasma concentration range (10 -150 muM). The ability of ascorbate to block EDHF-mediated vasodilatation in the bovine eye is likely to result from its reducing properties, since this action was mimicked by two other reducing agents, namely, N-acetyl-L-cysteine (1 mM) and dithiothreitol (100 muM), but not by the redox-inactive analogue, dehydroascorbate (50 muM). In the bovine eye, vasodilatations induced by the KATP opener, levcromakalim (100 pmol-30 nmol), or the nitric oxide donor, glyceryl trinitrate (10 nmol), were completely unaffected by the infusion of ascorbate (50 muM). Furthermore, the L-NAME induced vasoconstrictor response in the presence of U46619 (~200 nM) was unaffected by infusion of ascorbate (50 muM). Thus, the blockade of EDHF-mediated vasodilatation by ascorbate is highly selective and does not result from non-selective damage of the endothelium as basal release of nitric oxide is unaffected. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).


Purpose: The purpose was to investigate whether 20 min cool-down exercise performed on an ergometer cycle immediately after eccentric exercise of knee extensors would reduce delayed onset of muscle soreness and maximal isometric force loss. Methods: Twenty-four volunteers, (14 woman and 10 men) were randomly assigned into two groups: a "cool- down" group and a "control" group, i.e., each group consisted of 12 volunteers (7 woman and 5 men). Maximal voluntary isometric contraction force (MVC) in knee extensors, pressure pain threshold (PPT) along the rectus femoris muscle and subjective rating of pain intensity in thigh muscles were obtained before eccentric exercise (baseline), and 24 and 48 hours after eccentric exercise. Subjects in the cool-down group completed 20 min exercise on an ergometer cycle (60-70% of HRmax) immediately after the eccentric exercise. Subjects in the control group did not receive any interventions. Results: A significant group by time interaction from baseline to 48 hours after the eccentric exercise were found for PPT in the distal portion of rectus femoris (P = .047). For both groups, PPT at the distal part of the muscle decreased from day 1 to day 3; however, the reduction was substantially higher for the control group (23.3 %) compared to the cool-down group (9.6 %). A tendency for a group by time interaction from baseline to both 24 and 48 hours after eccentric exercise was found for MVC (P = .06). For both groups the mean force was lower on day 2 and 3 compared to baseline; however, the reduction in force for both comparisons was higher for the control group (22.5 %, 20.4 %) compared to the cool-down group (9.7 %, 8.2 %). The pattern of change in PPT at the central part of the muscle belly over the time period was not different between the groups. No significant difference in pain intensity rating (VAS) was found between the control and cool-down group at 24 and 48 hours after eccentric exercise. Conclusions: The result suggest that 20 min of cycling at moderate intensity performed immediately after eccentric exercise may have a preventive effect on the development of delayed onset of muscle soreness and strength loss after eccentric exercise.


We consider the problem of classification using high dimensional features' space. In a paper by Bickel and Levina (2004), it is recommended to use naive-Bayes classifiers, that is, to treat the features as if they are statistically independent.

Consider now a sparse setup, where only a few of the features are informative for classification. Fan and Fan (2008), suggested a variable selection and classification method, called FAIR. The FAIR method improves the design of naive-Bayes classifiers in sparse setups. The improvement is due to reducing the noise in estimating the features' means. This reduction is since that only the means of a few selected variables should be estimated.

We also consider the design of naive Bayes classifiers. We show that a good alternative to variable selection is estimation of the means through a certain non parametric empirical Bayes procedure. In sparse setups the empirical Bayes implicitly performs an efficient variable selection. It also adapts very well to non sparse setups, and has the advantage of making use of the information from many "weakly informative" variables, which variable selection type of classification procedures give up on using.

We compare our method with FAIR and other classification methods in simulation for sparse and non sparse setups, and in real data examples involving classification of normal versus malignant tissues based on microarray data.


Context. Observations suggest that most long duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are connected with broad-line supernovae Ib/c, (SNe-Ibc). The presence of GRB-SNe is revealed by rebrightenings emerging from the optical GRB afterglow 10-15 days, in the rest-frame of the source, after the prompt GRB emission. Aims. Fermi/GBM has a field of view (FoV) about 6.5 times larger than the FoV of Swift, therefore we expect that a number of GRB-SN connections have been missed because of lack of optical and X-ray instruments on board of Fermi, which are essential for revealing SNe associated with GRBs. This has motivated our search in the Fermi catalog for possible GRB-SN events. Methods. The search for possible GRB-SN associations follows two requirements: (1) SNe should fall inside the Fermi/GBM error box of the considered long GRB, and (2) this GRB should occur within 20 days before the SN event. Results. We have found five cases within z < 0.2 fulfilling the above reported requirements. One of them, GRB130702A-SN 2013dx, was already known to have a GRB-SN association. We have analyzed the remaining four cases and we have concluded that three of them are, very likely, just random coincidences due to the Fermi/GBM large error box associated with each GRB detection. We found one GRB possibly associated with a SN 1998bw-like source, GRB 120121B/SN 2012ba. Conclusions. The very low redshift of GRB 120121B/SN 2012ba (z = 0 : 017) implies a low isotropic energy of this burst (E-iso = 1 : 39 x 10(48)) erg. We then compute the rate of Fermi low-luminosity GRBs connected with SNe to be rho(0,b) <= 770 Gpc(-3) yr(-1). We estimate that Fermi/GBM could detect 1-4 GRBs-SNe within z <= 0.2 in the next 4 years.


The typological distinction between pilgrims and tourists has often been drawn in tourism studies. This article aims at complementing this debate by applying computational techniques to analyse discourses in a corpus of blogs from the Dutch travel blog repository of waarbenjij.nu. The hypothesis is that pilgrims and tourists share notable similarities in their identity narratives. Several unsupervised computational methods are leveraged to analyse the corpora; they provide a cue for further interpretation, which relies on a directed close reading of indicated keywords. The analysis shows that pilgrims, instead of writing about sacred topics, focus on the same practical topics that tourists are invested in. Conversely, tourists show a notable sensibility to a range of highly valued, set apart experiences. The paper ends with the proposal for a new continuum to understand the distinction between pilgrims andtourists, based on the difference between condensed diversity and extended engagement.


Abstract: Social movements have an important new campaigning and organizing competence in new information communication technologies. These technologies also enable the members of social movements to readily research the accuracy of information: knowledge becomes globalized and readily accessible. In relation to Big Pharma, women's social movements and social movements of the medicated intersect, and there is now a substantial challenge to Big Pharma both within developed and developing countries from the terrain of gender and health. This paper documents those challenges and looks towards their consequences in the future both in respect of Big Pharma but also in terms of 'academic' research. 1. Introduction: Health, gender and the globalizing of knowledge Not one of the chief scientists or heads of research at any of the major pharmaceutical companies is a woman. Why that's the case is much less clear. (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/309/5735/724) Let's start by visiting the International People's Health University, an on-line facility operated from Nicaragua (http://www.phmovement.org/iphu/) and one of its courses (http://www.phmovement.org/iphu/en/short). We can see that not only is health knowledge being globalised but there are social movements which are strategizing the globalization of health knowledge. The International People's Health University provides resources and training for health activists on a global platform and within its concerns are issues of gender and health. It provides courses and knowledge on the range of global health action and in doing so counteracts and compensates for inequitable health practices by other organizations, institutions and agencies. The new information communication technologies provide a new space for discourse and organization by activists and new parameters for action and challenge. On-line activist health personnel linked to universities provide one form of new social action in health, global social movements and meeting the challenge of AIDS/HIV provides another (http://www.globalaidsalliance.org/). Health organizing through and around web sites generates open and searchable knowledge: it creates paths to knowledge for those affected by health conditions and prevents such knowledge from being confined to the professional portfolios of experts. In this context, Big Pharma has come under challenge and within this challenge it is recognized that there has been a persisting gender bias of drug development consistent with the decade-old medicalizing of women's bodies (http://www.thenhf.com/articles_169.htm ; http://orlando.women.it/quarta/workshops/epistemological4/pizzini.htm). But even as Big Pharma comes under challenge, and there are indeed signs of the success of activist challenge to the industry1, Big Pharma pushes into new domains and engulfs traditional areas of women's power and health knowledge. The regulation of food supplements, and its removal of many traditional food supplements from the marketplace altogether, can be viewed as an undermining of the last bastion of the alternative modality of the health knowledge of women - the unregulated traditional health space of 'wise women'2 has finally disappeared (http://www.naturalnews.com/027297_corn_food_the_FDA.html ; http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james24.htm ; http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2005/07/12/european_court_decides_foo d_supplements_directive_may_go_ahead.htm). The loss of women's power over health practice through the masculinization, medicalization and regulation of health over centuries is now, however, under challenge by women's increasing power as consumers and by their knowledge of health matters as trained professional practitioners and through new information communication technologies. Social movements around gender and health are now a feature of the modern political scene (http://www.womens.studies.uconn.edu/ManishaDesai1100028a. …


Language, Society and Power is the essential introductory text for students studying language in a variety of social contexts.

This book examines the ways in which language functions, how it influences thought and how it varies according to age, ethnicity, class and gender. It seeks to answer such questions as: How can a language reflect the status of children and older people? Do men and women talk differently? How can our use of language mark our ethnic identity? It also looks at language use in politics and the media and investigates how language affects and constructs our identities, exploring notions of correctness and attitudes towards language use.

This third edition of this bestselling book has been completely revised to include recent developments in theory and research and offers the following features:

•a range of new and engaging international examples drawn from everyday life: beauty advertisements, conversation transcripts, newspaper headlines reporting on asylum seekers, language themed cartoons, and excerpts from the television programme South Park and satirical news website The Onion
•new activities designed to give students a real understanding of the topic
•a new chapter covering 'Student Projects' – giving readers suggestions on how to further explore the topics covered in the book
•updated and expanded further reading sections for each chapter and a glossary.

While it can be used as a stand-alone text, this edition of Language, Society and Power has also been fully cross-referenced with the new companion title: The Language, Society and Power Reader. Together these books provide the complete resource for students of English language and linguistics, media, communication, cultural studies, sociology and psychology.


This paper deals with the relationship between intelligent behaviour, on the one hand, and the mental qualities needed to produce it, on the other. We consider two well-known opposing positions on this issue: one due to Alan Turing and one due to John Searle (via the Chinese Room). In particular, we argue against Searle, showing that his answer to the so-called System Reply does not work. The argument takes a novel form: we shift the debate to a different and more plausible room where the required conversational behaviour is much easier to characterize and to analyze. Despite being much simpler than the Chinese Room, we show that the behaviour there is still complex enough that it cannot be produced without appropriate mental qualities.


Master Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Reports and Dashboards Deliver meaningful business information to users anytime, anywhere, on any device, using Oracle Business Intelligence 11g. Written by Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman, Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Developers Guide fully covers the latest BI report design and distribution techniques. Find out how to execute effective queries, build accurate models, use scorecards and KPIs, create dynamic reports, set up dashboards, and publish to smartphones and wireless devices. This Oracle Press guide contains comprehensive details on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, the best-in-class, preintegrated BI platform. Install or upgrade to Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Develop and manage custom Oracle Business Intelligence repositories Access relational, file, and multidimensional data sources Design print-quality reports with Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Create web-enabled analyses, dashboards, and visualizations Integrate with other applications using Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Action Framework Employ authentication, authorization, and row-level security Configure and deploy Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine


In the 1980s in France, the term precarite [an objective situation of socio-economic insecurity, precariousness], which was being used in both political and policy discourse and social
science research, became highly polysemic. At first it was a category of political discourse. In
sociology, it is marked by its earliest use in sociology of the family; its later, specific use in
describing employment-related situations; and its most recent use to characterize French society
as a whole. Comparative research on the five most populous countries of the European Union
shows that the term cannot be used directly in international comparisons; precarite throughout
Europe cannot be measured comparatively. Other, more specific categories must be constructed
which, though imperfect, allow for grasping the dimensions of what in France is customarily designated by this semantically proliferating term.


Modern medicine offers us a variety of fertility treatments. One of the results is that in the United States alone there are a more than 400,000 frozen embryos and another 10,000 frozen embryos are frozen each year. Since the rate of divorce in the United States increases exponentially, one can easily imagine how many frozen embryos may become the subject of litigation. Indeed a lot of attention is devoted to this sort of dispute by the media, the law and by people considering the ethical aspects. This is because this kind of dispute forces us to reassess many complex matters starting with the appropriate balance between the legal right to become a parent and the legal right not to be forced to become a parent. In this research we will try to present for reassessment the legal dispute as dichotomy and binary as if we have to choose between two options, either full legal parentage or no legal parentage. We will prove that the establishment of legal parentage is primarily by agreement due to the intention, wish and agreement which led to the birth of a child. In our opinion, the extent of parental status to be given to the legal parent depends upon the extent of the responsibility, which he is willing to undertake. If he accepts all the parental duties, his status will be that of a full parenthood, but if he does not want to undertake all the parental duties, he will not receive any parental right, but simply the status of non-parenthood. This approach used in the case of adoption was also applied in legal practice in many states of the United States and in the world, whereby the donor of gamete, semen and ova, or even frozen embryo receives the status of non-parenthood. In this research we will endeavor to examine the value and efficiency of offering an additional legal option which may be a possible compromise in the case of the bitter quarrels with regard to frozen embryos - granting the non-parenthood status to the spouse who objects to the continued fertility treatments and to becoming a parent against his will.


An approach to describing the R(H) magnetoresistance hysteresis in granular high-temperature superconductors and behavior of the R(T) resistive transition in these objects in an external magnetic field is proposed. The dissipation is attributed to the subsystem of intergrain boundaries, which form a Josephson junction network. The approach is based on accounting for the effect of magnetic moments of superconducting grains on the resulting (effective) field in the intergrain medium. The described procedure includes (i) establishing of the degree of magnetic flux crowding in the intergrain medium by comparing the experimental data on the R(H) magnetoresistance hysteresis and magnetization M(H), (ii) determining the effective field Beff in the intergrain medium as a function of external field H and temperature T with regard to the thermomagnetic prehistory, and (iii) fitting the experimental R(H) and R(T) dependences using the Arrhenius expression R ∼ exp(–EJ/ kB T), where EJ is the parameter corresponding to the Josephson coupling energy. The fundamental novelty of the proposed approach is the extraction of the functional dependences of EJ on the effective field Beff in the intergrain medium rather than on the external field H, as was made in many previous works. It is shown that the proposed approach makes it possible to adequately describe both the R(H) hysteretic dependences and R(T) dependences of the Y-Ba-Cu-O high-temperature superconductor samples with different morphologies and critical current densities.An approach to describing the R(H) magnetoresistance hysteresis in granular high-temperature superconductors and behavior of the R(T) resistive transition in these objects in an external magnetic field is proposed. The dissipation is attributed to the subsystem of intergrain boundaries, which form a Josephson junction network. The approach is based on accounting for the effect of magnetic moments of superconducting grains on the resulting (effective) field in the intergrain medium. The described procedure includes (i) establishing of the degree of magnetic flux crowding in the intergrain medium by comparing the experimental data on the R(H) magnetoresistance hysteresis and magnetization M(H), (ii) determining the effective field Beff in the intergrain medium as a function of external field H and temperature T with regard to the thermomagnetic prehistory, and (iii) fitting the experimental R(H) and R(T) dependences using the Arrhenius expression R ∼ exp(–EJ/ kB T), where EJ is the parameter corresponding t...


In its role as a scriptural charter, vinaya has justified widely dissimilar approaches to religious life as Buddhist orders in different times and places have interpreted it in contradictory ways. In the resulting tension between scripture and practice, certain kinds of ceremonial issues (such as those involving lineage, seniority, initiation, purification, repentance, visualization, vows, ordination) acquire profound social, psychological, doctrinal, and soteriological significance in Buddhism. Going Forth focuses on these issues over a wide sweep of history - from early fifth-century China to modern Japan - to provide readers with a rich overview of the intersection of doctrinal, ritual, and institutional concerns in the development of East Asian Buddhist practices. Despite the crucial importance of vinaya, especially for understanding Buddhism in East Asia, very little scholarship in Western languages exists on this fascinating topic. The essays presented here, written by senior scholars in the field, go beyond the timeworn method of relying on prescriptive accounts in the scriptures to describe what imaginary Buddhists must have done (or do). Rather, they address how actual people responded to local social and cultural imperatives by reading scripture in innovative ways to give new life to cradition. They place real people, practices, and institutions at the center of each account, revealing both diversity and unity, continuity and transformation, in Buddhist customs. The result is a well-integrated, accessible work - relevant for Buddhist studies, but with wider implications for anyone interested in East Asian cultural heritage.


ABSTRACT Both Plasmodium and Babesia species are intraerythrocytic protozoans that infect a wide range of hosts, including humans, and they elicit similar inflammatory responses and clinical manifestations that differ markedly in severity. We recently reported that a rhesus macaque that was chronically infected with Babesia microti was able to control infection with Plasmodium cynomolgi (a parasite of macaques with characteristics very similar to those of Plasmodium vivax) better than naïve monkeys. To confirm this and to investigate the underlying immunopathology, six naïve rhesus monkeys were infected with B. microti. After 24 days, four of these monkeys and four naïve rhesus monkeys were challenged with P. cynomolgi blood-stage parasites. B. microti persisted at low levels in all monkeys, and the clinical parameters were comparable to those of noninfected controls. There was a significant decrease in P. cynomolgi parasitemia in animals coinfected with B. microti compared to the parasitemia in animals infected with P. cynomolgi alone. This decrease in P. cynomolgi parasitemia correlated with increases in the levels of proinflammatory monocytes at the time of P. cynomolgi infection and with higher C-reactive protein (CRP) serum levels 1 week after malaria infection. Therefore, we conclude that ongoing infection with B. microti parasites leads to suppression of malaria infection.


UNLABELLED
The International Consortium of Psychiatric Epidemiology has confirmed the high comorbidity in community-drawn samples between substance use disorders and anxiety or depression. In the same way, associations between substance use and specific personality traits (such as novelty seeking, harm avoidance or antisocial personality) have also been extensively documented. Self-medication and social deviance are among the most commonly evoked explanatory models for these forms of comorbidity, and are based on findings that affective disorders and specific personality traits often precede the onset of substance use disorders. The self-medication model postulates that an individual chooses a specific substance according to its psychopharmacologic action on the given psychological state of the person. By contrast, the social deviance model posits that this form of comorbidity is due to the fact that persons consuming certain substances may have affective or personality characteristics that are more severe or more deviant than non-consumers (or than consumers of socially well-accepted substances). In this way, the individual does not use a particular substance to assuage pre-existing disorders but, due to a more deviant personality, is less influenced by social norms and may more easily turn to using illicit substances or to polyconsumption. However, a major limitation of the current scientific literature concerning tests of these models is that previous investigations have been based in overwhelming majority on clinical populations. The examination only of clinical samples renders difficult the identification of causal (or primary) risk factors for the emergence of substance use disorders from the potential consequences of substance use itself. The goal of the current study was therefore to simultaneously compare both models of association using a non clinical population of substance users. In addition to selecting subjects based on use (rather than abuse or dependence), multiple comparisons were corrected with a Bonferroni adjustment.

METHOD
A two-phase sampling plan was used with post-stratification on substances use. In the first stage, an initial sample of 685 students was pre-selected based on responses to a battery of self-questionnaires, including information concerning recent consumption of substances (alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, heroin, acid, solvents, and so on), anxiety levels measured by the State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI, Spielberger, 1983) and depression levels evaluated by the Center of Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D, Radloff, 1977). Based on responses to these questionnaires, 98 subjects were selected in the second phase to compose four groups of substance users: non consumers (those who did not use any substance during the last month); consumers of alcohol only, consumers of cannabis (with or without alcohol) and consumers of other illicit substances (with or without cannabis or alcohol). These subjects were then invited to participate in a brief laboratory-based meeting where they completed the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI, Cloninger, 1992), which assessed different personality characteristics such as novelty seeking (NS), harm avoidance (HA) or antisocial personality disorder (APD).

ANALYSES
The hypotheses concerning self-medication were tested by multiple logistic regression by comparing each group of substance consumption to the non-consumer group relative to levels of anxiety, depression and scores of novelty seeking and harm avoidance. The social deviance model was tested by ANOVAs using contrasts which allowed for a test of a linear tendency across the four groups of consumption relative to each of the personality traits (novelty seeking, harm avoidance and antisocial personality).

RESULTS
Results of multiple logistic regressions showed no difference between non-consumers and any group of consumers with regard to anxiety, depression and harm avoidance. However, consumers of other illicit substances significantly differed from non-consumers for novelty seeking trait (qOR=8.4; p<0.05). Results of the ANOVA also showed no differences between the four groups with regard to scores of harm avoidance and level of antisocial personality but again a comparison of novelty seeking scores was significant, F(94)=6.46, p<0.05. Moreover, the contrast method demonstrated that novelty seeking scores increased linearly and significantly (p<0.001) from the group of non-consumers to the group of the consumers of the most deviant substances.

CONCLUSION
The results obtained in this non-clinical sample are in favor of social deviance model which posits that the personality trait of novelty seeking is associated to the consumption of the most illicit and deviant substances (such as heroin or cocaine). On the other hand, no support was found for the hypothesis of self-medication which assumes that specific substances should be particularly associated with specific psychological characteristics or vulnerabilities.


The past 15 years have seen dramatic improvements in the performance of computer algorithms which attempt to recognise human speech. The falling error rates achieved by the best speech recognition systems on limited tasks have recently enabled the development of a diverse range of applications which promise to have a signiicant impact on many aspects of society. Examples of these range from dictation systems for personal computers to automated over-the-telephone enquiry services and interactive voice-controlled computing and mobility aids for disabled users. Engineering research into the recognition of acoustic signals has focused on the development of eecient, trainable models which are adapted to speciic recognition tasks. While the acoustic signal parameterisations employed are usually chosen to crudely model the behaviour of the human auditory system, little or no use is typically made of knowledge regarding the mechanisms of speech production. Physical and inertial constraints on the movement of articulators in the vocal tract cause variations in the acoustic realisations of sounds according to their phonetic contexts. The diiculty of accurately modelling these contextual variations in the frequency domain represents a fundamental limitation on the performance of existing recognition systems. This dissertation describes the design and implementation of a self-organising articula-tory speech production model which attempts to incorporate production-based knowledge into the recognition framework. By using an explicit time-domain articulatory model of the mechanisms of co-articulation, it is hoped to obtain a more accurate model of contextual eeects in the acoustic signal, while using fewer parameters than traditional acoustically-driven approaches. Separate articulatory and acoustic models are provided, and in each case the parameters of the models are automatically optimised over a training data set. A predictive statistically-based model of co-articulation is described, and found to yield improved ar-ticulatory modelling accuracy compared with X-ray articulatory traces. Parameterised acoustic vectors are synthesised by a set of artiicial neural networks, and the resulting acoustic representations are used to re-score N-best recognition hypothesis lists produced by an HMM-based recogniser. The system is evaluated on two test databases, one including speaker-speciic X-ray training data and the other acoustic data alone, and improvements in word recognition accuracy are obtained in each case.


Since traffic diversity and volume increase with growing popularity of mobile applications, there is the strong need to manage the traffic carried by networks. Software defined networks can simplify network management while enabling new services by employing traffic management including routing whose goal is to maximize the given utility while satisfying capacity requirements. In this paper, we propose an efficient routing algorithm to minimize the cost based on power consumption determined by the number of active OpenFlow switches in a software defined network while satisfying throughput requirements of all flows according to constraints on link capacities in the network. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm based on the number of active switches for different network topologies with various scenarios.


Dr. Zheng and I are delighted to introduce the second part of a two-part series on pancreas cancer in the Chinese Clinical Oncology Journal , which updates us on a diverse series of topics in this disease. Pancreas cancer is gaining increasing prominence due to the rising incidence and relatively intransigent mortality rates. Nonetheless, there are major improvements in our understanding of the pathophysiology, genomic underpinnings and other critical aspects of this disease.


Psoriasis is an erythematous, scaly chronic inflammatory dermatosis and occurs due to altered epidermal differentiation and hyperproliferation due to faulty signals that speed up the growth cycle of skin cells. Psoriasis reduces quality of life, and psoriatic patients generally have higher risk for metabolic disease. Psoriasis is associated with many bur dening comorbidities, which often share similar pathogenic features and follow a pro - gressive pattern. Genetic variation in human genome causes specific kind of disease, and nowadays, research is focused on metabolic pathways that trigger psoriasis and related comorbidities. In addition, genetic variations are also important for psoriasis treatment regime and response. The purpose of this section is to shown to genetic epidemiology, pharmacogenetics, immune genetics of psoriasis and related comorbidities.


We propose and demonstrate a tunable optical filter based on a tapered silica microcylinder, whose diameter is gradually varied along its longitudinal axis. The tapered microcylinder comprises a slowly varying transition zone fabricated through the fiber drawing technique. Given the tapered diameter of the microcylinder, the resonant wavelengths can be tuned by displacing the tapered microcylinder. This tunable filter exhibits a high Q-factor (~106) and a large tuning range (>1 free spectral range (FSR)).


Abstract. A stochastic Duffing-type oscillator model, i.e noise-driven motion with inertia in a potential landscape, is considered for glacial millennial-scale climate transitions. The potential and noise parameters are estimated from a Greenland ice-core record using a nonlinear Kalman filter. For the period from 60 to 20 ky before present, a bistable potential with a deep well corresponding to a cold stadial state and a shallow well corresponding to a warm interstadial state is found. The system is in the strongly dissipative regime and can be very well approximated by an effective one-dimensional Langevin equation.


This paper considers two sets of theories attempting to explain wage rigidities and unemployment: implicit contract theory and the efficiency wage theory. The basic thesis of the paper is that the former set of theories do not provide a convincing explanation of the kind of wage rigidity which is associated with cyclical unemployment,while the latter theories do. Several of the more recent versions of implicit contract theory are considered: implicit contracts with asymmetric information may give rise to over employment rather than underemployment, and the forms of contracts to be expected, were asymmetric information considerations paramount, are not observed.Other versions of the asymmetric information implicit contract model, explicitly long term in nature, may give rise to full employment. One version of implicit contract theory which does give rise to lay-offs arises when search is costly and cannot be monitored. But even this extension does not explain certain important features of observed patterns of unemployment. In contrast, the efficiency wage models not only provide an explanation of the existence of unemployment equilibrium in competitive economies, but they also provide part of the explanation of the observed patterns of unemployment. They also explain why different firms may pay similar workers different wages, why wages may be sticky, why firms maynot loose much if they fail to adjust their wages, and why, when they adjust their wages optimally, they adjust them slowly.The policy implications of the efficiency wage model are markedly different from those of models in which wages are absolutely rigid aswell as from those in which unemployment arises from asymmetric information.


In the low density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor system, blocks in intracellular movement of a cell surface receptor result from naturally occurring mutations. These mutations occur in patients with familial hypercholesterolemia. One class of mutant LDL receptor genes (class 2 mutations) produces a receptor that is synthesized and glycosylated in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) but does not reach the cell surface. These receptors contain serine/threonine-linked (O-linked) carbohydrate chains with core N-acetylgalactosamine residues and asparagine-linked (N-linked) carbohydrate chains of the high mannose type that are only partially trimmed. To determine the site of blockage in transport, we used electron microscope immunohistochemistry to compare the intracellular location of LDL receptors in normal human fibroblasts with their location in class 2 mutant fibroblasts. In normal cells, LDL receptors were located in coated pits, coated vesicles, endosomes, multivesicular bodies, and portions of the Golgi complex. In contrast, the mutant receptors in class 2 cells were almost entirely confined to rough ER and irregular extensions of the rough ER. Metabolic labeling studies with [3H]glucosamine confirmed that these mutant receptors contain core O-linked sugars, suggesting that the enzymes that attach these residues are located in the rough ER or the transitional zone of the ER. These studies establish that naturally occurring mutations in cell surface receptors can cause the receptors to remain trapped in the ER, thereby preventing their normal function and producing a genetic disease.


Abstract Objective To evaluate whether the circulating level of tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-4 (TIMP-4) in the period between 20 and 25 weeks of gestation is a predictor of preeclampsia. Methods We have performed a case-control study, nested in a prospective study cohort in Ribeirão Preto, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Of the 1,400 pregnant women evaluated between 20 and 25 weeks of gestation, 460 delivered in hospitals outside of our institution. Of the 940 pregnant women who completed the protocol, 30 developed preeclampsia. Healthy pregnant women (controls, n = 90) were randomly selected from the remaining 910 participants. From blood samples collected between 20 and 25 weeks of gestation, we performed a screening of 55 angiogenesis-related proteins in 4 cases and 4 controls. The protein TIMP-4 was the most differentially expressed between cases and controls. Therefore, we measured this protein in all cases (n = 30) and controls selected (n = 90). Results There were no differences in the plasma TIMP-4 levels of cases compared with controls (1,144 ± 263 versus 1,160 ± 362 pg/mL, respectively; p > 0.05). Conclusion Plasma TIMP-4 levels were not altered at 20 to 25 weeks of gestation, before the manifestation of clinical symptoms; therefore, they are not good predictors of the development of preeclampsia.


Whether the poor pay more for food than other income groups is an important question in food price policy research. Stores serving low-income shoppers differ in important ways from stores that receive less of their revenues from Food Stamp redemptions. Stores with more revenues from Food Stamps are generally smaller and older, and offer relatively fewer convenience services for shoppers. They also offer a different mix of products, with a relatively high portion of sales coming from meat and private-label products. Metro stores with high Food Stamp redemption rates lag behind other stores in the adoption of progressive supply chain and human resource practices. Finally, stores with the highest Food Stamp redemption rates have lower sales margins relative to other stores, but have significantly lower payroll costs as a percentage of sales. Overall, operating costs for stores with high Food Stamp redemption rates are not significantly different from those for stores with moderate Food Stamp redemption rates. If the poor do pay more, factors other than operating costs are likely to be the reason.


University facilities often have extensive technical equipment for complex high-accuracy engineering calculations. These facilities strive to verify their results in practice. Such an opportunity arose in collaboration between the Centre for Forming Machine Design Research (CFMDR, Centrum výzkumu konstrukce tvařecich strojů) and the company TS Plzen, which focused on a new design concept for a hydraulic press for open-die forging. This press was the CKV 120/140 type; built for and supplied to the company SUNAN.


We present a new algorithm that performs demosaicing and super-resolution jointly from a set of raw images sampled with a color filter array. Such a combined approach allows us to compute the alignment parameters between the images on the raw camera data before interpolation artifacts are introduced. After image registration, a high resolution color image is reconstructed at once using the full set of images. For this, we use normalized convolution, an image interpolation method from a nonuniform set of samples. Our algorithm is tested and compared to other approaches in simulations and practical experiments.