Background: Chest trauma or chest injury is a kind of injury to chest that leads to life threatening impact. Radiation imaging is used for trauma assessment, treatment and monitoring. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to estimate of the radiation dose received in chest x-rays for traumatic patients in the Majmaah area and matched the results nationally and internationally. Furthermore, it aims to determine the reference radiation dose for chest x-rays. Methods: Sample of 160 patients were evaluated at radiology department of King Khaled Hospital- Majmaah, Saudi Arabia. The average patient age for adults was 34.5 ± 12.9 with the range of (18-80) (years) and for pediatric patients was 7.6 ± 2.5 with range of (1-16) years. The average and range of exposure parameters were 72.8 ± 8.3 (81.8-124.9) and 1.5 ± 0.9 (0.3-2.5) for X-ray tube potential (kVp) and current multiplied by the exposure time(s) (mAs), respectively. Results: The measured dose for adult patients were (0.20 ± 0.07 (0.13-0.37) and 0.24 ± 0.1 (0.06-0.74) for female and male respectively. The measured dose for pediatric patients were (0.20 ± 0.07 (0.13-0.37) and 0.18 ± 0.03 (0.06-0.23) for female and male respectively. Conclusion: The study was revealed that 90% of the chest x-rays exposures with normal dose levels. However, precise justification is required, especially for young patients.


In fashion, as in the rest of the economy, the globalisation of taste, power and production now plays a major role. The industry is dominated by fashion capitals like Paris, London or New York, populated by star designers like Tom Ford, Karl Lagerfeld or Jean-Paul Gaultier and controlled through MNC giants like Prada, Gucci, DKNY and Dior, who together influence consumer preferences on a global scale. However, there are numerous smaller actors that compete successfully in the fashion industry. Sweden is one such example, where fashion is a growing. In this thesis, there is a focus on group of small and medium sized Swedish fashion firms with a brand focused business strategy. Their products are design intensive, but their main competitive advantage rests on the brand and brand management. This group of firms are proficient at 'putting fashion into clothes' (Weller 2004). In other words, their main competitive advantage rests neither on price, nor on the most experimental design. More exactly, they produce clothes for a fashion conscious but not too adventurous consumer group. In the thesis it is argued that they are better described as trend forerunners than as trend setters. The subject of this thesis is this group of firms within the Swedish fashion industry and the aim is to improve understanding of their innovation processes, competitiveness, and the systemic character of the business they are a part of. As with most other fashion firms in high cost countries, Swedish companies has outsourced the garment production. They secure their competitive edge through high value added activities like design, marketing and retail. This points to the fact that fashion has both material and immaterial dimensions: it relates to clothing, design, textile and quality, but also to consumers' subjective feelings and attitudes towards the clothes and their brands. This is a study of the interface between these dimensions, with a focal point on the production of immaterial and symbolic value. The systemic nature of fashion can hardly be overestimated. This goes for both the practical part of clothes production, but also for the production of a belief system created not only by fashion producers but by a whole set of institutional actors. This thesis has an analysis of fashion firms' relations to business partners, competitors, media, and consumers. It is argued that the nature of these relations is critical for competition and success.The thesis is a collection of papers, which illuminates different parts of innovation, competition and business strategies in the fashion industry. The papers cover the central activity areas for fashion firms: how branding is affecting industrial structure and innovation, how symbolic is value created, and how 'cool' is used as a strategic resource.


Recent regulatory changes, known as Reg NMS in the United States or MiFID in Europe, together with the effects of the financial crisis (mainly its impact on liquidity), induced major changes on market microstructure in two main aspects: • the fragmentation of the liquidity around several trading venues, with the appearance of newcomers in Europe like Chi-X, BATS Europe, and Turquoise, some of them being not regulated or "dark"; • the rise of a new type of agent, high-frequency traders, responsible for 40% to 70% of the transactions. These two effects are linked, since high-frequency traders, being the main clients of the trading venues, have an implicit impact on the products offered by these venues. Combining a survey of recent academic findings and empirical evidence, this article presents what we consider to be the key elements to understanding the stakes of these changes, and also provides potential clues to mitigating some of them. The first section exposes the recent modifications in market microstructure. The second explains the role of the price formation process and how, interacting with liquidity supply and demand, high-frequency traders can reshape it. The next section discloses the various strategies used by these new market participants and their profitability. The final section discusses recent tools designed to assess and control high-frequency trading activity.


Microcephaly is often caused by an impairment of the generation of neurons in the brain, a process referred to as neurogenesis. While most neurogenesis in mammals occurs during brain development, it thought to continue to take place through adulthood in selected regions of the mammalian brain, notably the hippocampus. However, the generality of neurogenesis in the adult brain has been controversial. While studies in mice and rats have provided compelling evidence for neurogenesis occurring in the adult rodent hippocampus, the lack of applicability in humans of key methods to demonstrate neurogenesis has led to an intense debate about the existence and, in particular, the magnitude of neurogenesis in the adult human brain. Here, we demonstrate the applicability of a powerful method to address this debate, that is, the in vivo labeling of adult human patients with 15N-thymidine, a non-hazardous form of thymidine, an approach without any clinical harm or ethical concerns. 15N-thymidine incorporation into newly synthesized DNA of specific cells was quantified at the single-cell level with subcellular resolution by Multiple-isotype imaging mass spectrometry (MIMS) of brain tissue resected for medical reasons. Two adult human patients, a glioblastoma patient and a patient with drug-refractory right temporal lobe epilepsy, were infused for 24 h with 15N-thymidine. Detection of 15N-positive leukocyte nuclei in blood samples from these patients confirmed previous findings by others and demonstrated the appropriateness of this approach to search for the generation of new cells in the adult human brain. 15N-positive neural cells were easily identified in the glioblastoma tissue sample, and the range of the 15N signal suggested that cells that underwent S-phase fully or partially during the 24 h in vivo labeling period, as well as cells generated therefrom, were detected. In contrast, within the hippocampus tissue resected from the epilepsy patient, none of the 2,000 dentate gyrus neurons analyzed was positive for 15N-thymidine uptake, consistent with the notion that the rate of neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus is rather low. Of note, the likelihood of detecting neurogenesis was reduced because of (i) the low number of cells analyzed, (ii) the fact that hippocampal tissue was explored that may have had reduced neurogenesis due to epilepsy, and (iii) the labeling period of 24 h which may have been too short to capture quiescent neural stem cells. Yet, overall, our approach to enrich NeuN-labeled neuronal nuclei by FACS prior to MIMS analysis provides a promising strategy to quantify even low rates of neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus after in vivo15N-thymidine infusion. From a general point of view and regarding future perspectives, the in vivo labeling of humans with 15N-thymidine followed by MIMS analysis of brain tissue constitutes a novel approach to study mitotically active cells and their progeny in the brain, and thus allows a broad spectrum of studies of brain physiology and pathology, including microcephaly.


The aim of this research was first to identify the differences in the perceptions of stress among French and British managers. A second aim was to examine the levels of stress and the role of job demand, support, relationships at work and coping on well-being. Lastly, it was to evaluate the effects of coping resources on well-being.

Interviews indicated that differences exist in the understanding of stress. British managers attributed causes of stress more to workload and deadlines, decision latitude and lack of information. French managers viewed relationships at work as a primary cause of stress, followed by incidents and organisational culture. Unclear job role was a similar and important source of stress in both samples. There was no evidence that French managers were more stressed than the British or that they viewed stress as an 'individual issue' as found in previous research.

Regression analyses performed on a matching sample of managers (N=156), revealed that job demand had main effects on well-being and intention to quit the organisation in both national samples. However, as already suggested through the interviews, relationships at work turned out to be predictors of intention to quit the company only for the French managers. The UK managers in the repertory grid exercise more often mentioned the term coping in relation to stress than did the French managers. Only in the UK sample, were coping strategies correlated with well-being. While problem-oriented coping strategies correlated positively with well-being, emotion-focused strategies correlated negatively with well-being, confirming previous findings in studies on coping.

A longitudinal test of the relationship between job demand and well-being and the moderating effects of coping resources among a French sample (N=150) indicated that some coping resources improved after a training intervention but had no direct or interactive effects on well-being. Only job demand was a significant predictor of well-being. Limitations of the study and implications for further cross-cultural research are discussed.


The recently proposed Gaussian process dynamical models (GPDMs) have been successfully applied to time series modeling. There are four learning algorithms for GPDMs: maximizing a posterior (MAP), fixing the kernel hyperparameters α (Fix.α), balanced GPDM (B-GPDM) and two-stage MAP (T.MAP), which are designed for model training with complete data. When data are incomplete, GPDMs reconstruct the missing data using a function of the latent variables before parameter updates, which, however, may cause cumulative errors. In this paper, we present four new algorithms (MAP+, Fix.α+, B-GPDM+ and T.MAP+) for learning GPDMs with incomplete training data and a new conditional model (CM+) for recovering incomplete test data. Our methods adopt the Bayesian framework and can fully and properly use the partially observed data. We conduct experiments on incomplete motion capture data (walk, run, swing and multiple-walker) and make comparisons with the existing four algorithms as well as k- NN, spline interpolation and VGPDS. Our methods perform much better on both training with incomplete data and recovering incomplete test data.


The use of herbal therapy is a common practice in Africa. One of the commonly used herbs is Vernonia amygdalina . Processing of the plant for use leads to the loss of phytochemical principles like saponin which has been shown to possess bioactivity. This study was to evaluate and characterize the saponin principles, using chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques. Standard antipyretic study procedure using Saccharomyces cerevisiae induced pyrexia in rats was used for the evaluation of the herbal aqueous extract, as well as, the crude saponin and its chromatographic fraction. The separation and chromatogram development of resulting pure saponin components was carried out using a HPLC with UV-vis detection at 365 nm. Data for the antipyretic study agrees with previous bioactivity report for the saponin. Chromatographic and spectroscopic evaluation indicated the presence of three pure saponin components at retention times of 7.78 ± 0.19, 8.76 ± 0.16 and 13.54 ± 0.87 minutes, in the fractionate. Finding suggests that the pure components are individual or collective contributors to the bioactivity of the crude saponin and fractionate. Further bioactivity probe of the pure components will aid good understanding and use of the herbal medication. © 2017 International Formulae Group. All rights reserved. Keywords: Chromatographic, detection, pure components, bioactivity, rats


Our motivational survey highlighted that easily available support would be a motivator for depositors to contribute their teaching materials into a repository. Support with rights issues is particularly important because of the confusion over rights that exists within UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). We have identified possible support that depositors and end users could receive.
Some potential evaluation criteria have been identified to assess the licences that we have put in place. We aim to evaluate the experience of the depositor and the end user and assess each licence in terms of suitability and accuracy.


There has been much debate over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's lack of executive and congressional oversight: its single director removable only for cause and its operations are not subject to appropriations. This paper explains how this very leadership and accountability structure — intended to politically insulate the agency — had the perverse effect of politicizing it. Since Director Cordray's departure, there has been increased regulatory uncertainty, discouraging financial innovation and harming consumer welfare. This paper recommends that Congress restructure the Bureau into a multi-member, bipartisan commission to provide industry regulatory predictability and ensure that consumer protection retains its independent seat in the financial regulatory system.


The purpose of this study is to compare the efficiency of two methods for teaching polysemous vocabulary – the image-schema-based vocabulary instruction method (ISBM) and the translation-based vocabulary instruction method (TBM). While ISBM is inspired by cognitive linguistics, and represents a new trend in teaching polysemous vocabulary, TBM embodies a traditional and well established way of teaching polysemous vocabulary in EFL contexts. The subjects of this study, 40 pre-university Arab students studying in an intensive English program, were placed in two groups and were taught a range of metaphorical meanings of polysemous words, in accordance with the cognitive linguistics ISBM and the mainstream TBM. In order to assess the pedagogical value of both methods, a polysemous word knowledge test (PWKT) was used as a pre and post-test. The results of the immediate post PWKT suggest that the ISBM is more effective in teaching and learning polysemous vocabulary in this setting than the TBM. In light of these findings, I give a number of recommendations to teachers. As far as the contribution to field of vocabulary acquisition is concerned, this study attempts to shed light on the teaching of polysemous words in an Arab context (a so far an unmapped territory). In that, it tries to show how polysemous words have been treated in the English syllabi directed to UAE learners, to equip English teachers with feasible ways to teach polysemous words more efficiently, and thereby to improve the learners' ability to comprehend the polysemization mechanism more easily.


This chapter discusses the major features of the current healthcare environment. It describes the current regulations affecting laboratory practice. The chapter explains future regulations and political and economic events impacting pathology and laboratory practice. A high level of volatility and uncertainty, reflecting the political, economic, and social instability of our current environment, characterizes healthcare in the United States in the second decade of the 21st century. Funding and support for healthcare are diminishing, and the economic future of healthcare is hostage to some identifiable trends and concerns that include: a growing federal deficit and concerns about the future sustainability of Medicare and Medicaid; and a healthcare insurance and delivery system plagued by problems of access, quality, and safety. The "four horsemen" of federal laws and regulations that are particularly pertinent to pathology and laboratory medicine services are CLIA '88, HIPAA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards for occupational exposure to blood-borne pathogens, and the so-called Stark regulations that prohibit self-referral by healthcare providers. The increasing research and clinical demands for validated biospecimens can be expected to lead to significant growth in the number and size of biorepositories. Two other areas of concern to research and clinical laboratory practice are restrictive patents and excessive restraints on the use of human tissue and data for research and clinical purposes.


Rural population is vulnerable partly for its lack of self-sufficiency. This recognition considerably varies from the way rural territories functioned more than 200 years ago. The peasant societies were well known about sustaining themselves. A major trigger for the disappearance of this pattern was industrialization. This paper explicitly reviews a social perspective of industrialism and provides a novel point of view regarding its overall recognition. The present study states that there was an incremental effect of relying on machines. People have lost their sense of practical skills. Another hidden pattern of development was to utilize finite resources. The reason behind it might come from the fact that this way allows companies to distribute energy according to their own terms. As a conclusion, the paper argues that centralized (energy and industrial) production systems have increased the dependence of society – especially in case of rural population. Furthermore, it claims that the next stage of industrial revolution could enable people to return to self-sufficiency.


Valorization of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of commodity chemicals using various chemical methods continues to attract considerable attention. A wide and diverse range of different chemicals can be obtained from biomass and many different downstream pathways are currently under development. The conversion of various cellulosic derivatives such as glucose and fructose to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) has been identified as a key route. However, since HMF is intrinsically unstable, its transformation to other compounds is required. In this context, 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA) is a leading candidate, as it has the potential to replace terephthalic acid – the main component of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Based on the broad usage of FDCA as platform chemical, it was listed as one of the 12 key sugar-based platform chemicals for the production of bio-based chemicals and materials. Herein we present the catalytic oxidation of HMF into FDCA using Pt nanoparticles with molecular oxygen. A mechanistic investigation involving kinetic modeling and a correlation of the nanoparticle size with the different step was undertaken. Based on this analysis we hypothesized that a highly electron rich nanoparticle surface would enhance catalytic activity. Subsequent manipulation of the nanoparticle surface by the introduction of an ionic polymer stabilizer afforded surface electron-rich Pt nanoparticles that catalyze the transformation of HMF to FDCA under mild conditions in the absence of additives. The catalytic system is reasonably benign as molecular oxygen is employed as the oxidant and the process operates in water.


Abstract
The detection of prohibited performance-enhancing drugs in sports is often carried out using urine samples. The reason for this is that urine samples can be collected under non-sterile conditions and do not require the presence of a sanctioned medical officer. Improper storage of the urine samples from athletes can lead to microbial contamination, which can cause changes in the steroids profile, leading to false positive or false negative results for a particular athlete. To address this problem, a new analytical method was proposed that employs a fluorinated steroid as an internal standard and fluorine-19 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (19F-NMR) spectroscopy to identify both microbial and thermally-induced changes in the urine samples.
In Chapter 2, synthesis of fluorinated steroids was carried out using method that involve the reaction of Selectfluor® with enolates/enols of steroids. A range of fluorinated steroids was prepared (2 novel F-steroids) in moderate yields and varying diastereoselectivities. Several synthesised steroids were recrystallized and crystals suitable for X-ray were obtained.
In Chapter 3, selected fluorinated steroids were incubated with microorganisms such as Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus megaterium and Streptomyces griseus. Fluorinated steroids were transformed to various oxidised metabolites upon incubation with Streptomyces griseus. Escherichia coli did not produce any metabolites due to lack of cytochrome P450 enzymes. Incubation of Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus megaterium was not successful and therefore metabolites were not detected.
In Chapter 4, hydroxy steroids were reacted with pentafluoropyridine (PFP) to form perfluoropyridine ethers in good yield. Several novel steroids were synthesised and the structures of 4 perfluoropyridine ethers were confirmed for the first time by X-ray structure. It was found that the hydroxy steroid PFP adducts have very similar 19F NMR spectra however they can be distinguished using this technique. This novel derivatisation technique could be potentially used for identification of hydroxy steroids in biological material by 19F NMR.


Abstract Orhan Pamuk's 1998 novel, My Name is Red, features the field of art as torn with the ambiguities and the paradoxes of desire and the Ottoman miniaturist as torn with the dilemmas of East/West, reality/representation, tradition/innovation, and pleasure/pain. Except for the evident preoccupation with the differences of aesthetic concepts between the East and the West, My Name is Red further penetrates into the nature of representation and reality and explores the desire for perfection in art. Connected with the desire for immortality, the desire for perfection is projected onto the Western Other by the Ottoman artist and emerges as the unattainable object as well as the main drive for artistic creativity in the novel. In Pamuk's novel, art can be a pleasurable experience so far as it supports the fantasies of completeness and perfection and so far as it forecloses the realization of perfection which does not necessarily bring full satisfaction. The mysterious allure of art is rather consisted in its reproduction of desire as such.


The term III-N nanowire (NW) will refer throughout this work to the free-standing nanowires made of group-III-nitrides semiconductors, namely InN, GaN and AlN. These nanostructures have a large length/diameter ratio, of the order of 100 (sev- eral micrometers versus tenths of nanometers). The term free-standing highlights the fact that the NWs are not embedded in another material. The improvement of the epitaxial techniques, and in particular, those based on III-N semiconductors, has lead an important part of the Solid State Physics community to concentrate the attention in the last years towards a better understanding of the physical properties of those NWs. Nanowires present several di erences with respect to the still widely investi- gated two-dimensional layers and the zero-dimensional nanostructures (quantum dots). We would like to highlight the following: (i) Nanowires grow strain-free (except maybe at their base), and thus with a minimal presence of dislocations or defects along the main structure. This fact opens the possibility of growing high- quality materials with an important lattice mismatch with the substrate, contrary to the situation found in quantum dots or superlattices. (ii) Depending on the NW lateral dimensions, two types of NWs can be distinguished. When the diameter is larger than 20 nm, the electronic properties of the NWs can be considered as that of a bulk material, thus making them a suitable platform to study the bulk optical and transport properties, which can be hardly investigated in bulk samples (thin lms), that grow with a high density of defects, when there is a high lattice mismatch with the substrate. (iii) For NWs of smaller diameters (. 20 nm), on the other hand, the e ects of quantum con nement can lead to important changes in the optical and transport properties, which can open the possibility of tuning the NW properties by controlling their size. One can roughly classify the investigations on nanowires into three main re- search lines. The rst one concerns the fabrication, being the molecular beam epitaxy or/and the metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) the two techniques that allow the growth of higher quality NWs. This research area is in 2 constant development, and is not limited only to the growth of pure compound NWs, but also alloy-based NWs, which extend the possibilities of allowing beyond those possible in standard bulk growth, or axially and radially structured NWs. New physical phenomena arise which must be tacked by the physical community, in particular the e ect of the surface in the optical and transport properties of the NWs. Another focus of research is based on applications to optoelectronics devices and photovoltaic cells. In particular, III-N NWs, as InN, GaN and AlN, have attracted a special interest of the scienti c community, due to the band gap engineering. InN has a band gap of 0.67 eV (1852 nm), in the infrared, whereas GaN and AlN have a band gap of 3.5 eV (355 nm) and 6.2 eV (200 nm), respec- tively, in the ultraviolet. This opens the possibility of covering the whole solar spectrum by an appropriate alloying. In this context, the theory and numerical simulations play a crucial role in the explanation of NWs properties and a better understanding of the observed phenomena. The predictions o ered by the theory can also drive the fabrication of new heterostructures and the design of devices. In this work, we have studied theoretically by using several models, the fundamental aspects of the electronic structure and optical properties of the III-N bulk semiconductors in the rst place, and have applied afterwards such models to the investigation of the III-N nanowires physical properties.


City Literacies explores the lives and literacies of different generations of people living in two contrasting areas of London at the end of the 20th century: Spitalfields and the City. This contrast outwardly symbolizes the huge difference between poverty and wealth existing in Britain at this time. The book presents a study of living, learning and reading as it has taken place in public settings, including the school classroom, clubs, places of worship, theatres, and in the home. Over fifty people recount their memories of learning to read in different contexts and circumstances.


This qualitative study examined the use of Wikis and blogs among graduate students in an online class that was part of a teacher preparation program in English as a Second Language. Participants included practicing teachers and graduate assistants who represented a variety of learning environments and experiences. The study was framed by a set of overarching questions and utilized a variety of data sets, which were collected throughout the study. These included survey data on use of Web 2.0 tools, participant-designed classroom Wikis, instructional materials for language learning, regular education teachers, ESL teachers, and resources for administrators and community stakeholders. Analysis employed the Constant Comparative process and Grounded Theory. Findings indicate several hindrances as well as benefits to using Wikis in the PreK-higher education environment. Participants emerged as content creators and modeled the process for their ESL students.


This paper presents an asymptotically stable scheme for the spectral approximation of linear conservation laws deened on a triangle. Lagrange interpolation on a general two-dimensional nodal set is employed and, by imposing the boundary conditions weakly through a penalty term, the scheme is proven stable in L 2. This result is established for a general unstructured grid in the triangle. A special case, for which the nodes along the edges of the triangle are chosen as the Legendre Gauss-Lobatto quadrature points, is discussed in detail. The eigenvalue spectrum of the approximation to the advective operator is computed and is shown to result in an O(n ?2) restriction on the time-step when considering explicit time-stepping.


Objectives: Aberrant activity of the trapezius muscle and associated postural abnormalities have been identified as potential factors for neck pain in computer users, thus postural correction is often advocated. The purpose of this trial was to examine the effect of specific scapular postural correction exercises on middle and lower trapezius activity. Methods: Sixty participants matched for the duration of daily computer use were included in the study. Twenty had no neck pain and exhibited "good" scapular posture (constituting Control group C), while forty reported pain (Neck Disability Index ≥ 15/100) for ≥ 3 months over 12 month period. The latter were randomly allocated to one of the two groups (A and B). Electromyographic recordings were taken from the middle and lower trapezius at rest and during typing. After 20-minutes of typing participants in group A (n=20) practiced scapular postural correction exercises while participants in group B (n=20) relaxed. Electromyographic recordings were repeated in a second typing task. Results: Following correction of the scapular posture in group A, middle trapezius activity became similar to the control group (P = 0.229) with no effect on lower trapezius activity (P < 0.001). Significant normalization did not occur after relaxation exercises (P = 0.004). Conclusion: Intermittent scapular postural correction exercises were effective in altering the middle and lower trapezius activity during computer use and may be advised for prevention of neck pain.


Development Reporting (DR) has long been considered the cornerstone of journalistic practice in Africa. The high prevalence of Brown Envelope Journalism (BEJ) - defined as a practice that involves news sources granting monetary incentives to journalists – is, however, posing a challenge to DR. BEJ has signaled a shift from a traditional model of DR, where journalists strived to report any legitimate development news to a public relations model where news is heavily influenced by source payments. Using Zambia and Ghana as case studies, this study provides insight into journalists' perspectives on DR and BEJ. Additionally, the study delves into the extenuating factors that perpetuate BEJ.


In order to describe the different events occurring during the anionic polymerization of polyamide 12 (PA12), a general concept of a time, temperature, and transformation (TTT) diagram was established and related to reactive processing conditions. Polymerization kinetics were established, and it was found that the reaction was best described by an autocatalytic expression. Polymerization temperatures above and below the final polymer melting temperature were considered. Furthermore, the variation of the melting temperature and viscosity were followed as a function of the polymerization time and degree of conversion. It was shown that monomer-polymer phase separation and crystallization may occur during PA12 polymerization. The results could be adapted for use during liquid molding of PA12 polymers and their composites.


Plug-and-play (PnP) is a non-convex framework that combines ADMM or other proximal algorithms with advanced denoiser priors. Recently, PnP has achieved great empirical success, especially with the integration of deep learning-based denoisers. However, a key problem of PnP based approaches is that they require manual parameter tweaking. It is necessary to obtain high-quality results across the high discrepancy in terms of imaging conditions and varying scene content. In this work, we present a tuning-free PnP proximal algorithm, which can automatically determine the internal parameters including the penalty parameter, the denoising strength and the terminal time. A key part of our approach is to develop a policy network for automatic search of parameters, which can be effectively learned via mixed model-free and model-based deep reinforcement learning. We demonstrate, through numerical and visual experiments, that the learned policy can customize different parameters for different states, and often more efficient and effective than existing handcrafted criteria. Moreover, we discuss the practical considerations of the plugged denoisers, which together with our learned policy yield state-of-the-art results. This is prevalent on both linear and nonlinear exemplary inverse imaging problems, and in particular, we show promising results on Compressed Sensing MRI and phase retrieval.


At the height of his career, around the time he was working on Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens wrote a series of sketches, mostly set in London, which he collected as The Uncommercial Traveller. In the persona of 'the Uncommercial', Dickens wanders the city streets and brings London, its inhabitants, commerce and entertainment vividly to life. Sometimes autobiographical, as childhood experiences are interwoven with adult memories, the sketches include visits to the Paris Morgue, the Liverpool docks, a workhouse, a school for poor children, and the theatre. They also describe the perils of travel, including seasickness, shipwreck, the coming of the railways, and the wretchedness of dining in English hotels and restaurants. The work is quintessential Dickens, with each piece showcasing his imaginative writing style, his keen observational powers, and his characteristic wit. In this edition Daniel Tyler explores Dickens's fascination with the city and the book's connections with concerns evident in his fiction: social injustice, human mortality, a fascination with death and the passing of time. Often funny, sometimes indignant, always exuberant, The Uncommercial Traveller is a revelatory encounter with Dickens, and the Victorian city he knew so well.


Occurring in the Early Palaeozoic palaeomargin of the East Antarctica Craton, the Tonalite Belt of North Victoria Land is a narrow linear magmatic belt up to 200 km long, made up of strongly foliated tonalitic and granodioritic intrusions. They were synkinematically emplaced into the Lanterman-Murchison Shear Zone, a major tectonic structure across which different tectono-metamorphic terranes were accreted during the Late Cambrian Ross Orogeny. The deformational and kinematic features of the intrusions indicate that strain and displacement during terrane accretion were partitioned into oblique thrust, high-angle thrust and strike-slip shear zones. From this it is deduced that a transpressional regime prevailed during Early Palaeozoic deformation and terrane accretion. This and other magmatic belts which exploited major tectonic structures in collisional margins, such as the Coast Plutonic Complex of NW America, are basic keys for understanding deformational processes and kinematic regimes during terrane accretion. Moreover, the occurrence of such types of magmatic belts might be regarded as a reliable indication of large scale strike-slip motion between accreting terranes in an oblique convergent setting.


Academic libraries are going through what may be the most difficult period in their history. With more and more scholarly content available online and accessible almost anywhere, where does the traditional 'brick and mortar' library fit in?In this book, Jeannette Woodward attacks these and other pressing issues facing today's academic librarians. Her trailblazing strategies center on keeping the customer's point of view in focus at all times to help you: integrate technology to meet today's student and faculty needs; revaluate the role and function of library service desks; implement staffing strategies to match customer expectations; and, create new and effective promotional materials. Librarians are now faced with marketing to a generation of students who log on rather than walk in and this cutting edge book supplies the tools needed to keep customers coming through the door.


Objectives: To establish the information-seeking behaviours of paediatricians in answering every-day clinical queries. Design: A questionnaire was distributed to every hospital-based paediatrician (paediatric registrar and consultant) working in Ireland. Results: The study received 156 completed questionnaires, a 66.1% response. 67% of paediatricians utilised the internet as their first "port of call" when looking to answer a medical question. 85% believe that web-based resources have improved medical practice, with 88% reporting web-based resources are essential for medical practice today. 93.5% of paediatricians believe attempting to answer clinical questions as they arise is an important component in practising evidence-based medicine. 54% of all paediatricians have recommended websites to parents or patients. 75.5% of paediatricians report finding it difficult to keep up-to-date with new information relevant to their practice. Conclusions: Web-based paediatric resources are of increasing significance in day-to-day clinical practice. Many paediatricians now believe that the quality of patient care depends on it. Information technology resources play a key role in helping physicians to deliver, in a time-efficient manner, solutions to clinical queries at the point of care.


The share of income held by the top 1 percent in many countries around the world has been rising persistently over the last 30 years. But we continue to know little about how the rising top income shares affect human well-being. This study combines the latest data to examine the relationship between top income share and different dimensions of subjective well-being. We find top income shares to be significantly correlated with lower life evaluation and higher levels of negative emotional well-being, but not positive emotional well-being. The results are robust to household income, individual's socio-economic status, and macroeconomic environment controls.


Detecting DeepFake videos are one of the challenges in digital media forensics. This paper proposes a method to detect deepfake videos using Support Vector Machine (SVM) regression. The SVM classifier can be trained with feature points extracted using one of the different feature-point detectors such as HOG, ORB, BRISK, KAZE, SURF, and FAST algorithms. A comprehensive test of the proposed method is conducted using a dataset of original and fake videos from the literature. Different feature point detectors are tested. The result shows that the proposed method of using feature-detector-descriptors for training the SVM can be effectively used to detect false videos.


Inequities in learning motivation among school students have been attributed to many factors, among which school environment and family support are important and well documented. Most of these studies have been in culturally different societies, which do not share much commonality with schools and societies of Arab world. Diversity within Arab world countries, with respect to their socioeconomic status, further thins down the possibility of establishing any grounded theories on these aspects, based on relevant literature available from studies conducted in Arab world countries. Schools with sufficient resources and infrastructures, and families without any economic constraints do influence the learners' motivation differently in some Arab countries, and lead to inequity, contrary to other findings elsewhere. A qualitative study was conducted in a boys' boarding school over a period of six years, with an initial pilot study with 12 selectively sampled students to establish the issues to be used for further interviews. The final interviews were conducted with the same 12 students and 54 other selectively sampled students of age ranging between 13 to 18 years. Information was gathered through records of students' academic performance, observation of students' classroom and out of class academic attitudes and interviews with open ended questions about their perception of school and family support. Common themes of perception of lack of belonging and support, from school and family, were prominent reasons for decreasing motivation for learning among these students. Negative perception of school environment induced by isolation emerged as a factor for reduced motivation. A new role of private tutors emerged to be influencing the motivation to learn. Private tutors, parents with less contact time, and disturbed family structure, did negatively affect the students' motivation to learn. Learners who were able to merge themselves with the school system were able to get self motivated. Such merger was influenced by the students' cultural adaptability, involvement of students' family member in the day to day affairs of the student in school and involvement of parents in school affairs and activities. The findings warrant, revision of curriculum and school policies, and social awareness, for affecting student learning motivation.


Digital image manipulation software is now readily available on personal computers. It is therefore very simple to tamper with any image and make it available to others. Insuring digital image integrity has therefore become a major issue. Watermarking has become a popular technique for copyright enforcement and image authentication. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of emerging techniques for detecting whether image tampering has taken place. Compared to the techniques and protocols for security usually employed to perform this task, the majority of the proposed methods based on watermarking, place a particular emphasis on the notion of content authentication rather than strict integrity. In this paper, we introduce the notion of image content authentication and the features required to design an effective authentication scheme. We present some algorithms, and introduce frequently used key techniques.


Traditional work on grammaticalization has often focussed on the creation of new atomic linguistic forms; recent research has suggested that grammaticalization may be considered as constructional emergence at an increasingly schematic level. Such a claim relies on an understanding of a construction as both (a) a form-meaning pairing in which the meaning of the whole is not derivable from the parts and (b) a string whose meaning is predictable from its parts, but which occurs with sufficient frequency for it to be stored as a pattern. The article summarises relevant issues in Construction Grammar, outlines aspects of existing research on constructions and grammaticalization in English and discusses some aspects of case loss and grammaticalization in the history of English including the loss of genitive objects. It also examines the place of analogy in grammaticalization. The article therefore presents new approaches to grammaticalization from the perspective of Construction Grammar.


This article considers California as an island, as a place apart. In five fragments, it looks at the state as a place where ideas are exchanged, imported and exported; as a place whose economy, geography and politics keep it apart from the rest of the country; as islands within islands; as a place that early cartographers and explorers believed to literally be an island; and as a place of ecological richness rivaling mythical islands.


Hippocampal atrophy is a clinical biomarker of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and is implicated in many other neurological and psychiatric diseases. For this reason, there is much interest in the accurate, reproducible delineation of this region of interest (ROI) in structural MR images. Here, both current and novel MR hippocampal segmentation methods are presented and evaluated: Two versions of FMRIB's Integrated Registration and Segmentation Tool (FIRST and FIRSTv2), Freesurfer's Aseg (FS), Classifier Fusion (CF) and a Fast Marching approach (FMClose). Segmentation performance on two clinical datasets is assessed according to three common measures: Dice coefficient, false positive rate (FPR) and false negative rate (FNR). The first clinical dataset contains 9 normal controls (NC) and 8 highly-atrophied AD patients, whilst the second is a collection of 16 NC and 16 bipolar (BP) patients. Results show that CF outperforms all other methods on the BPSA data, whilst FIRST and FIRSTv2 perform best on the CMA data, with average Dice coefficients of 0.81+-0.01, 0.85+-0.00 and 0.85+-0.01, respectively. This work brings to light several strengths and weaknesses of the evaluated hippocampal segmentation methods, of utmost importance for robust and accurate segmentation in the presence of specific and substantial pathology.


In the United States, unlike in all other advanced industrial states, health care is financed principally through employment-based health insurance. In 2009, more than 156 million individuals under the age of sixty-five, or 59% of that population, were covered by employment-based health insurance. On March 21, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Described as seminal as the enactment of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), PPACA fundamentally reforms the American health care system. PPACA, however, does not eliminate the system's reliance on employment-based health insurance. Instead, it builds on, and arguably strengthens, the employment-based system. This Article discusses how PPACA is likely to affect employers' willingness to sponsor employment-based health insurance. The Article begins by providing a brief history of employment-based health insurance in the United States. It then discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this system. In doing so, it focuses on four separate aspects of employment-based health insurance: (1) its favorable tax treatment, (2) its cost, (3) the fact that the employer acts as an agent for its employees when it purchases health insurance, and (4) the labor incentives it creates. The Article then turns to the three incentives PPACA creates with respect to the provision of employment-based health insurance: (1) the large employer "pay-or-play" mandate, (2) the small employer tax credit, and (3) the excise tax on so-called "Cadillac" plans. It describes and discusses how each of these incentives is likely to affect employers' willingness to offer employment-based health insurance. It concludes that, at least in the short run, PPACA is unlikely to change the American health care system's reliance on employment-based health insurance.


Abstract The Innovative Retail Laboratory (IRL) is an application-oriented research laboratory of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) run in collaboration with the German retailer GLOBUS SB-Warenhaus Holding in St. Wendel. In this living lab, we conduct research in a wide range of different domains all connected to intelligent shopping consultants, which range from a virtual assistant responsible for matters of dieting and allergies, over a digital sommelier, to personalized cross and up selling, smart items with digital product memories as a further development of the RFID technology, indoor positioning and navigation as well as new logistics concepts, to see if they are suitable for everyday life and useful for customers. New ways of customer interaction are developed and tested for implementation. The range varies from personalized shopping assistants to "talking" products and intelligent shopping carts, which plan and show the way through the store according to your shopping list. Furthermore they can give advice on what to buy for the recipes you have in mind, they compare products, point out special offers in a personalized way and give additional information about the products. However, the concepts and technologies that regard the self-service store of the future as a place for shopping are not IRL´s only focus. The relation between the store and its customers begins way before the shopping trip itself takes place. It starts with an individual shopping preparation and a personalized presentation of offers at home and will be continued afterwards through advice that is given about purchased goods and information about their use.


Machine learning systems based on minimizing average error have been shown to perform inconsistently across notable subsets of the data, which is not exposed by a low average error for the entire dataset. Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) seemingly addresses this problem by minimizing the worst expected risk across subpopulations. We establish theoretical results that clarify the relation between DRO and the optimization of the same loss averaged on an adequately weighted training dataset. The results cover finite and infinite number of training distributions, as well as convex and non-convex loss functions. An implication of our results is that for each DRO problem there exists a data distribution such that learning this distribution is equivalent to solving the DRO problem. Yet, important problems that DRO seeks to address (for instance, adversarial robustness and fighting bias) cannot be reduced to finding the one 'unbiased' dataset. Our discussion section addresses this important discrepancy.


Abstract Brazil and China have been successful in the use of microbial control methods to manage several agricultural and forest insects. In both countries, entomopathogenic fungi (EF) have been used for pest management since the 1970s. However, EF production and commercialization have not been constant in either country. Several companies and cooperatives suspended their activities or shut down from the 1970s to the 1990s. This was due to loss of confidence in available mycoinsecticides by Brazilian farmers or due to reduced involvement and government subsidies for biological control in China; and, consequently, mycoinsecticides were largely replaced by inexpensive chemical insecticides. Starting in the 1990s and continuing until today, however, new Brazilian and Chinese private companies have arisen. In Brazil, the area treated with M. anisopliae for spittlebug control alone is estimated to be approximately one million hectares in 2008, 75% of which was for control of spittlebugs in sugarcane plantations and the remainder for spittlebugs in pasture grass (primarily Brachiaria spp.) and other smaller programs. In China, the fungus Beauveria bassiana was used annually in 0.8–1.3 million ha until the 1980s. Several factors were important for the success of these programs, such as: governmental support (at least during the initial steps of biocontrol programs); availability of indigenous virulent fungal isolates; low-cost substrates for mass production; retail prices of mycoinsecticides lower than their chemical counterparts; and sale by contract which allows the products to be immediately available for use, rather than stored. In this report, we discuss the current biocontrol programs using insect fungi in these two developing countries, as well as the future and main challenges they must face to further encourage the adoption of mycoinsecticides.


Results from the study 'nature's significance for human well-being', shows that "The Rug of Life" gives additional value to the narratives. The method is qualitative with in-depth interviews combined with visual methodology of sixteen respondents between ages 25–76, who are living close to nature. In the interview it was asked what kind of nature has a meaning for them and how they estimate their well-being and nature's impact on it and how quality of life are experienced, as well as nature's and the local rural environment's significance as a health promoting factor. The study has a salutogenic approach.


Katrina demonstrated the growing vulnerability of the United States to major hurricanes. This paper analyzes the sources of growing hurricane vulnerability, or increasing numbers of persons and real property in coastal counties in U.S. Atlantic and Gulf counties since 1950. The analysis specifically focuses on policy interventions in insurance markets, or states with "hurricane pool" residual market mechanisms. Regressions show that coastal county growth increased after establishment of a pool by 16,000 to 22,000 persons and 4,000 to 6,000 housing units per decade. But hurricane pools do not affect the percentage growth rates of population or housing units. Direct election of insurance commissioners may have contributed to growth as well, but this increase fails to attain statistical significance. Together these results indicate a possible significant role for insurance subsidies as driving coastal population growth. A landfalling hurricane did not slow growth during a decade, but counties with greater hurricane risk also grew significantly faster, which may be evidence that people ignore hurricane risk in making location decisions. 1


Common stereotypes portray black fathers as being largely absent from their families. Yet while black fathers are less likely than white and Hispanic fathers to marry their child's mother, many continue to parent through cohabitation and visitation, providing caretaking, financial, and other in-kind support. This volume captures the meaning and practice of black fatherhood in its many manifestations, exploring two-parent families, cohabitation, single custodial fathering, stepfathering, noncustodial visitation, and parenting by extended family members and friends. Contributors examine ways that black men perceive and decipher their parenting responsibilities, paying careful attention to psychosocial, economic, and political factors that affect the ability to parent. Chapters compare the diversity of African American fatherhood with negative portrayals in politics, academia, and literature and, through qualitative analysis and original profiles, illustrate the struggle and intent of many black fathers to be responsible caregivers. This collection also includes interviews with daughters of absent fathers and concludes with the effects of certain policy decisions on responsible parenting.


Cooperation between customers and companies has existed for a long time. However, the role of a customer was rather passive and organizations were the ones who dictated their rules and took a leading role in the process of product creation. With a course of time the situation has been changed and customers are becoming more and more involved into the process of cooperation. As a customer driven innovation is relatively new phenomenon, the aim of our study is to examine its status in the modern business world. It can be observed that organizations all around the globe claim about their readiness and willingness to listen to customers and cooperate with them. Companies create customer support sections where they offer to leave complaints, comments and suggestions. Airline companies tend to have such experience. ―We want to hear from you. Your feedback is important and helps us become a better airline‖ claims Delta Airlines. Tiger Airways states ―Yes! We want to hear from you! Submit your feedback via our Customer Support Portal‖. And there is multitude of such examples. With the help of the investigation of theoretical material, survey conduction and examining practical examples we aim to examine the issue of customer involvement into cooperation with organizations as well as to found out how ready customers are for such collaboration.


Resistance to infection with an influenza A virus conferred by previous infection with an influenza A virus belonging to another subtype is called heterosubtypic immunity. Heterosubtypic immunity is demonstrable in laboratory animals but is believed to be weak in humans. The present study examined whether heterosubtypic immunity from previous influenza virus infection induced resistance to infection with an attenuated influenza A vaccine virus. Two groups of vaccinees consisting of young infants and children who received either influenza A H1N1 or H3N2 attenuated virus were studied. Influenza A H3N2 virus vaccine recipients were classified by their preexisting H1N1 heterosubtypic antibody level induced by prior infection with wild-type virus, and the H1N1 vaccinees were classified by their history of infection with H3N2 vaccine virus. For both groups of vaccinees, the rates of seroconversion and virus shedding and the level of vaccine virus replication were compared in subjects with and without heterosubtypic immunity. In 48 influenza A H3N2 virus and 39 H1N1 virus vaccinees, heterosubtypic immunity had no demonstrable effect on infectivity, immunogenicity, or replication of attenuated vaccine virus. These observations confirm the weak nature of heterosubtypic immunity in humans and suggest that it will not limit the utility of live attenuated influenza A viruses in young infants and children.


The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Japanese Atomic Energy Research Institute torso phantoms were developed to calibrate lung counting systems that are used to estimate plutonium and other radionuclides deposited in the lung. Originally, low energy photon counting systems consisted of phoswich detectors. The average chest wall thicknesses and individual measurement points of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory phantom and its overlay plates in the regions covered by these detectors were provided by the manufacturer. Germanium detectors are of a different size and are placed in different locations on the phantom so that the manufacturer's data are no longer applicable for the locations of the germanium detectors on the phantom. The Human Monitoring Laboratory has re-evaluated the chest wall thickness of both the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Japanese Atomic Energy Research Institute phantoms and their overlay plates for its germanium lung counting system. The measurements were made in the upper right, lower right, upper left, and lower left positions on the phantom's torso plate above the lungs. The effective chest wall thicknesses (17 keV) for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory torso plate are 1.46 cm, 1.43 cm, 1.66 cm, 1.48 cm, respectively. The manufacturer's quoted average effective chest wall thickness for a pair of phoswich detectors is 1.63 cm. The measured effective chest wall thicknesses (17 keV) for the JAERI's torso plate are 1.76 cm, 2.15 cm, 1.79 cm, 2.15 cm, respectively. The manufacturer's quoted average chest wall thickness for an unspecified region of the chest is 1.50 cm. This paper presents effective chest wall thickness data for the phantoms with and without their overlay plates at 17 keV, 60 keV, 200 keV and 1,500 keV. The uncertainties involved in determining the effective chest wall thickness have shown that there is no significant difference between the effective chest wall thickness and the physical chest wall thickness.


Emerging personal lifelog (PL) collections contain permanent digital records of information associated with individuals' daily lives. This can include materials such as emails received and sent, web content and other documents with which they have interacted, photographs, videos and music experienced passively or created, logs of phone calls and text messages, and also personal and contextual data such as location (e.g. via GPS sensors), persons and objects present (e.g. via Bluetooth) and physiological state (e.g. via biometric sensors). PLs can be collected by individuals over very extended periods, potentially running to many years. Such archives have many potential applications including helping individuals recover partial forgotten information, sharing experiences with friends or family, telling the story of one's life, clinical applications for the memory impaired, and fundamental psychological investigations of memory. The Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is currently engaged in the collection and exploration of applications of large PLs. We are collecting rich archives of daily life including textual and visual materials, and contextual context data. An important part of this work is to consider how the effectiveness of our ideas can be measured in terms of metrics and experimental design. While these studies have considerable similarity with traditional evaluation activities in areas such as information retrieval and summarization, the characteristics of PLs mean that new challenges and questions emerge. We are currently exploring the issues through a series of pilot studies and questionnaires. Our initial results indicate that there are many research questions to be explored and that the relationships between personal memory, context and content for these tasks is complex and fascinating.


This study reports on research carried out within the Learning Disability Division of a major Mental Health NHS Trust in the North of England, and relates to the discrepancy between the actual number of incidents of violence and aggression and those reported. The literature review demonstrated that violence is a particular issue for nurses, particularly those working in the areas of mental health and learning disability where studies have indicated that as many as one in five may be affected. A questionnaire was distributed to all learning disability nurses currently employed in the Trust, a total of 411, with a response rate in excess of 40%.
The study revealed that a discrepancy does exist between actual and reported incidents of violence within the Trust. It confirmed previous claims that the predominant difficulty is cultural, violence being regarded as part of the job and
non-reporting primarily revolving around perceptions of incidents being considered 'minor', not worth the time to complete the paperwork. The paper concludes that more work is needed to achieve a united, consistent approach across the NHS, in order that a high quality, accessible service for people with learning disabilities and complex needs can be delivered without violence being considered an acceptable part of the job.


In this paper, we consider a two-way communication system in which two users communicate with each other through an intermediate relay over block-fading channels. We investigate the optimal opportunistic scheduling scheme in order to maximize the long-term average transmission rate in the system assuming symmetric information flow between the two users. Based on the channel state information, the scheduler decides that either one of the users transmits to the relay, or the relay transmits to a single user or broadcasts to both users a combined version of the two users' transmitted information by using linear network coding. We obtain the optimal scheduling scheme by using the Lagrangian dual problem. Furthermore, in order to characterize the gains of network coding and opportunistic scheduling, we compare the achievable rate of the system versus suboptimal schemes in which the gains of network coding and opportunistic scheduling are partially exploited.


Abstract On March 26, 2020, 3 months after Chinese authorities admitted to a novel coronavirus outbreak and 10 weeks after the first infection was documented on American soil, the U.S. led the world in COVID-19 cases. While the State Department touted the U.S. as "leading the world's humanitarian and health assistance response to the COVID-19 pandemic," media accounts more often applied terms like "muddled" and "confused." In this essay, we step back to consider what it takes to bring about swift and coordinated action in pandemic response, and what has impeded such a response thus far in U.S. efforts to address COVID-19. Informed by a policy regime perspective, we argue that the response has been handicapped by deficient political commitment and unclear goals, dysfunctional institutional dynamics—from bureaucratic silos to mismatched institutions, and inertia from partisan and economic interests. We conclude that the incoherence of the U.S. response to date has further eroded its already undermined legitimacy, and more importantly, has helped engender negative feedback that threatens the near-term durability of response measures, with grave consequences.


This paper explores the recent series of financial scandals in the Australian financial advice industry. It examines the causes, consequences and responses to these scandals by financial institutions, investors and regulators through the lens of relevant finance theory and extant literature. Although the paper focuses on the recent Australian experience the discussion and findings presented are of relevance to financial market regulation worldwide. It is proposed that a combination of compensation, education, training and structural reforms are required to reduce the undesirable effects of information asymmetry, adverse selection and moral hazard in the finance sector.


Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is rare neoplasm and rarely extends to IVC. Perinephric and venous system invasion is an important prognostic sign for RCC. The tumor may grow intraluminally into the renal vein and Inferior Vena Cava (IVC) as an extension of primary tumor. In this report, we present two unusual case of venous system involvement, invasion of RCC into SVC. RCC with tumor thrombus extension into the IVC remains a difficult operative challenge. However surgical intervention should be performed. Our cases were successfully operated and their post operative recovery was uneventful.


Engagement in creative occupations has been shown to promote well-being for older adults with dementia. Providing access to such occupations is often difficult, as successful participation requires face-time with a person who is knowledgeable in facilitating engagement as well as access to any required resources, such as an arts studio. In response, a computer-based device, the Engaging Platform for Art Development (ePAD), was created to with the aim of enabling more independent access to art creation. ePAD is a an artificially intelligent touch-screen device that estimates a client's level of engagement and provides prompts to encourage engagement if the client becomes disengaged. ePAD is customizable such that an art therapist can choose themes and tools that they feel reflect their client's needs and preferences. This article presents a mixed-methods study that evaluated ePAD's usability by six older adult (with mild-to-moderate dementia) and art therapist dyads. Usability measures suggest that all participants found ePAD engaging but did not find prompts effective. Future development of ePAD includes improving the prompts, implementing the recommendations made by participants in this research, and long-term testing in more naturalistic art therapy contexts.


This study, the second in the series of IDMU Regular Users surveys, examined anonymous questionnaires completed by 1136 cannabis users to assess changes in patterns of use and prices of illicit drugs since previous surveys. Prices of drugs other than cannabis, including bulk prices, are included for the first time, in national and regional tables. Most drug prices had fallen compared to previous data from 1994 or 1995. Purchasing patterns: Most users purchase drugs when they have money available, i.e. weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Daily purchase is only common among heroin users. Cannabis was purchased in amounts between 1/8oz (3.5g) and 1oz (28g) in 92% of cases. Estimates of the market shares of different cannabis varieties reveal a substantial increase in consumption of domestically-produced cannabis, 80% of this being flowering tops, at the expense of imported herbal cannabis. Cannabis resin remains the most common form of the drug. Incidence of use of other drugs was similar to, or lower than, in previous years, but with a significant increase in the lifetime prevalence of ecstasy and to a lesser extent amphetamine representing increased saturation of the ecstasy market. Very few respondents reported daily use of illicit drugs other than cannabis, confirming findings of previous surveys. However around 20% of respondents would use stimulants (amphetamine, ecstasy) and 10% use hallucinogens (LSD, mushrooms) on a monthly or weekly basis. The value of the UK cannabis market is estimated between £1.7 billion and £9 billion per annum, by reference to reported arrest rates, drug purchasing behaviour, and cultivation and Home Office seizure and arrest statistics, suggesting approximately 2 1/4 million regular cannabis users using weekly or more often.


Lygodium palmatum (Bernh.) Sw. leaves are deliberated as worthy traditional medicine. To give a scientific basis for traditional usage of this medicinal plant, the leaf extract were appreciated for its antioxidant activity. In this study, in vitro antioxidant activities of the leaf extract of L. palmatum were determined by total antioxidant, DPPH, Reducing power capacity, total phenolic content, total flavonoid content. The extract showed a dose dependent radical scavenging effect in DPPH assay. IC 50 for free radicals achieved by the extract is 46.94 μg/ml. The extract showed significant reducing power activity as compared to ascorbic acid and proportionally increased with the increasing concentration of the extract. Increase in absorbance of the reaction mixture indicates the increase in the reducing power of the extract. Phenol content was 96.67± 0.82 mg gallic acid/g and flavonoid content was 27.30 ± 0.30 mg quercetin/g. Our current results emerged that L. palmatum act as an antioxidant agent due to its free radical scavenging and cytoprotective activity. So, the plant may be further pursued to find out for its pharmacological active natural products.


For the interested observer of real estate markets, China is the most fascinating place in the world today, and the coming years promise to be no less intriguing than the recent past has been. This Article offers an overview of how a specific segment of the Chinese real estate market - the acquisition of land use rights - operates in practice, from both a legal and business perspective. I recently interviewed dozens of Chinese and Western experts who are taking part in one of the greatest real estate booms in world history. My conversations with these real estate developers, bankers, government officials, judges, practicing lawyers, consultants, economists, real estate agents, and law and business professors provide acute insights into how China is transforming itself from an economic backwater into a self-styled "socialist market economy." The fact that Chinese real estate and business laws are still in an early stage of development, the speed with which the Chinese legal and economic systems are evolving, and the strong cultural tradition of reliance on personal relationships rather than rule-of-law principles all demonstrate why a straightforward doctrinal approach would be incomplete and misleading. My goal here is to establish how this particular aspect of Chinese real estate practice is maturing with what appears to be tremendous success against the backdrop of a young legal system.


Water stress reduces the yield of agricultural crops severely. The objectives of this study were to investigate genotypic differences between 20 popcorn lines in environments under wellirrigated (WW) and water stressed (WS) conditions to determine phenotypic, genetic and environmental relations among agronomic and root traits. The experiment was arranged in a randomized complete block design with three replications per environment. The following traits were evaluated: volume of expanded popcorn per hectare (PV), grain yield (GY), popping expansion (PE), number of rings of adventitious roots (NRAR), number of adventitious roots (NAR), number of tap roots (NTR), number of crown roots (NCR), adventitious root density (ARD), tap root density (TRD), crown root density (CRD), tap root angle (TRA), and crown root angle (CRA). Under WS, the values of the agronomic traits PV, GY and PE were reduced by 74.03, 67.15 and 28.76%, respectively. Water stress had little influence on NRAR, NAR, DR, NTR, and NCR. Due to an adaptive response to WS, increases were observed in TRA and CRA. In general, the estimates of genetic parameters evaluated under WS were higher. Negative genetic associations between agronomic traits and TRD, and CRD were observed in cultivation under WS; selection for trait PV will produce simultaneous gains in GY and PE under this regime. Under well-watered conditions, the development of genotypes with satisfactory GY and PE is difficult. This reinforces the hypothesis that root phenotypes adapted to particular environments should be identified.


THE CENTRAL theme of this paper is expressed with enviable clarity and simplicity in the above short poem. Written by Herman Talingapua, a young Papua New Guinea man on his return home after acquiring Western knowledge abroad, it describes, in a manner strikingly in accord with those anthropological interpretations of male initiations which stress the male gender ambiguity theme, his perception of himself as, lacking access to the secret power within manhood, 'condemned to sleep with women, unfit to carry shield and spear'. But what is perhaps even more striking is the depiction of male power, and hence the key to the attainment of a satisfactory manhood, as located in the female-manufactured and pregnant baskets. In other words, Talingapua, the 'modern' young man, has produced yet another and most poignant version of the type of 'matriarchal' myth with which I am concerned in this chapter.


Arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) phase errors are normally assessed from the Fourier transform of the interference intensity data in the frequency domain method. However it is possible to identify the phases directly from the intensity data if one adopts a trial-and-error method. Since the functional form of the intensity profile is known, the intensities can be calculated theoretically by assuming arbitrary phase errors. Then we decide the phases that give the best fit to the experimental data. We verified this method by a simulation. We calculated the intensities for an artificial AWG which is given arbitrary phases and amplitudes. Then we extracted the phases and amplitudes from the intensity data by using our trial-and-error method. The extracted values are in good agreement with the originally given values. This approach yields better results than the analysis using Fourier transforms.


Purpose: 3D Image based treatment planning for intraluminal brachytherapy in bile duct carcinoma. Methods: Five patients with bile duct carcinoma were treated with definitive radiation therapy. Radiation therapy was delivered by means of external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) combined with HDR brachytherapy.Eclipse v8.6 TPS (Varian Medical Systems, USA) was used for treatment planning.In the diagnostic radiology suite, a flexible guide wire was passed through the biliary stent to a point past the stenosis. Subsequently catheter localisation, dummy wire was inserted and orthogonal films were used to confirm the position. All the patients were scanned on CT scanner (Siemens, Germany) with a slice thickness of 3 mm without any radio opaque dummy. The GTV, CTV OAR were contoured according to ICRU 62.Since the catheter is inserted in biliary stent, the applicator reconstruction is not possible. The first source point was reconstructed from the tip of the stent. From the orthogonal topograph the offset was calculated by measuring the tip of the stent to first dummy source distance. This offset was set in the planning. With the optimum source length the dose was calculated and CTV, OAR doses were quantified. The External and brachytherapy plans were summed to produce resultant DVH. Results: The applicator reconstruction accuracy was found to be within ±2mm. The mean, median dose of GTV, CTV was 32Gy, 23Gy and 18Gy, 13Gy respectively. The mean, median dose for duodenum was 7.6Gy and 2.8Gy. Conclusion: In radiography assisted planning, dose distribution is usually calculated according to the applicator geometry and in addition to fixed reference points. But with 3D brachytherapy planning the doses can be optimised to GTV and can be summed with external plan for clinical evaluation.


Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate how previous experience and location of entrepreneurs influence the survival of new tourism firms. The paper departs from recent evolutionary economic geography advancements, highlighting the importance of routines and skills as well as location-specific knowledge for firm success. While having been well-researched for manufacturing industries characterized by high entry barriers, little knowledge is currently available on the factors influencing survival rates in service sectors with low entry barriers. A quantitative approach applies hazard models to investigate the survival rates over a seven-year period of a total of 133 new micro-tourism firms started between 1999 and 2001 in the four northernmost counties of Sweden. The geo-referenced micro-database ASTRID links information on firm features (e.g. firm births and deaths, spatial coordinates and industry codes) to characteristics of entrepreneurs (e.g. age, education, previous experience). The main finding is that entrepreneurs with previous work experience in related sectors are more likely to survive and, in this case, entrepreneurs without local experience tend to be less successful. We find no evidence that new firms operating in regions specialized in tourism have a survival advantage. Our analysis also indicates that surviving firms improve performance over time. The paper thus contributes new knowledge on the determinants of micro-firm survival in tourism.


Few recent cases in finance have attracted as much interest — and vitriol — as last year's decision in U.S. Bank National Association v. Windstream Services, LLC v. Aurelius Capital Master, Ltd. (S.D.N.Y. 2019). This brief summary explores some of the larger debates in corporate finance and contracts raised by the case. The Windstream opinion made waves not because it was (arguably) incorrectly decided, but because it hastened creditors' recognition that no amount of contractual armor can fully protect them from opportunistic behavior in today's markets. Although the specific objectionable behavior in Windstream is already being addressed by new contract provisions, the reality is that sophisticated hedge funds, other creditors, and borrowers will always find ways to exploit contract language to their advantage. And that task may ironically be made easier by today's style of contract drafting. The more detailed and complex contracts become, the more easily they can be exploited ex post, when the state of the world and the parties' incentives have changed.


The work of artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954) embraces performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His recent work offers dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome, and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. The subjects on which Kelley has written are as varied as his artistic media. They include the work of fellow artists, sound, caricature, the uncanny, UFOlogy, and gender-bending. This book offers a diverse collection of Kelley's writings from the last twenty-five years. It contains major critical texts on art, film, and the wider culture, including his piece on the aesthetic he calls "urban Gothic." It also contains essays, mostly commissioned for exhibition catalogs and journals, on the artists and groups David Askevold, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Douglas Huebler, John Miller, Survival Research Laboratories, and Paul Thek, among others. Kelley's voices are passionate, analytic, and ironic, and his critical intelligence is leavened with touches of whimsy.


Interference is fundamental to wireless networks. It is hard to achieve good performance when design routing metrics or algorithms without taking it into account. We study interference in wireless networks through empirical experiments and simulations. We find out that current routing protocols face difficulties in effectively managing it, which can lead to severe problems. For instance, a simple network of two links with one flow is vulnerable to severe performance degradation if interference is not properly accounted for. Motivated by these observations, we develop a simple and effective model to capture effects of interference in a wireless network. Different from the existing interference models, our model captures IEEE 802.11 DCF under both homogeneous and heterogeneous traffic and link characteristics, and is simple enough to be directly used as a basic building block for wireless performance optimization. Based on this model, we develop optimization algorithms for several objectives, such as network throughput and fairness. Given traffic demands as input, these algorithms compute rates at which individual flows must send to achieve these objectives. We implement these algorithms in Qualnet simulations and 19-node testbed. Our experiment and simulation results show that our methods can systematically account for and control interference to achieve good performance. More specifically, when optimizing fairness, our methods can achieve almost perfect fairness; when optimizing network throughput, they can lead to 100-200% improvement for UDP traffic and 10-50% for TCP traffic.


I. INTRODUCTION The 1990s were characterized by substantial financial sector consolidation across a large number of industrialized countries. This consolidation included within-industry and within-country consolidation as well as cross-industry (for example, banking and insurance) and cross-border consolidation. In addition to mergers and acquisitions, there was a substantial increase in joint ventures and strategic partnerships between financial sector firms. The number of these looser affiliations increased especially rapidly in recent years. In response to this ongoing transformation of the financial landscape, the Group of Ten (G-10) undertook a study of financial sector consolidation. (1) The resulting report, produced by the G-10's Task Force on the Impact of Financial Consolidation on Monetary Policy (Group of Ten 2001) includes an analysis of the patterns and causes of consolidation in different sectors and countries. The report also evaluates the possible effects of consolidation, both in the past and going forward, in a number of important policy areas, including supervision, efficiency and competition, payments systems, and monetary policy. At the outset, those organizing the study thought that consolidation could have significant implications for the conduct and effectiveness of monetary policy (Ferguson 2001, p. 6). Consolidation could affect monetary policy by influencing the implementation of policy, the monetary transmission mechanism, or the environment for policy (including, for example, the liquidity and volatility of financial markets or the effects of difficulties at large institutions). However, the report concludes that the effects of consolidation on monetary policymaking have generally been very modest thus far, and that consolidation is unlikely to pose significant problems going forward (Group of Ten 2001, Chapter 4). The next section provides some background on financial sector--and especially banking industry--consolidation in recent years. Section III summarizes the G-10 report on consolidation and monetary policy, laying out the reasons why one might expect consolidation to have effects on monetary policymaking, the evidence gathered by the task force, and the conclusions reached. Section IV offers some possible implications of the report for U.S. policymakers; Section V concludes. II. CONSOLIDATION AND BANKING INDUSTRY CONCENTRATION The financial sector consolidation of recent years has been driven by a number of factors, including technological advances, deregulation, globalization of financial markets, and increased pressure from shareholders. (2) This consolidation has been accomplished through mergers and acquisitions as well as by joint ventures and strategic alliances. Such ventures and alliances are arrangements between firms allowing each to remain autonomous while also engaging in a "new business arrangement to achieve predetermined objectives" (Group of Ten 2001, p. 41). These looser links may be particularly useful when differences in language, regulation, corporate culture, or expectations make a formal merger either too expensive or prohibitively risky. They may also allow firms to move more gradually toward a merger (Group of Ten 2001, p. 32). As shown in Table 1, the pace of financial sector consolidation picked up considerably over the past decade. The number and dollar volume of financial sector mergers and acquisitions increased rapidly over the 1990s. The bulk of these transactions--84 percent by dollar volume--reflected mergers within a single industry, and an even larger percentage reflected mergers of firms in the same country. The number of joint ventures and strategic alliances, while considerably smaller than the number of mergers and acquisitions, also expanded greatly over the course of the decade, with particularly fast growth recently. As one might expect, the fraction of joint ventures and strategic alliances accounted for by cross-border deals has been considerably higher than the comparable share of mergers and acquisitions. …


In this chapter the interplay between tense, aspect and modality in the interpretation of modal auxiliaries in three different past tenses in Dutch is studied. After discussing the semantic effects of these factors separately, it is shown that each factor exerts a different, conflicting force on the meaning of a proposition. It is argued that a bidirectional optimality theoretic model explains how Dutch speakers use the various past tense modal constructions in the Dutch language in order to convey different interpretations.


The accumulation process of the blooming plankton Peridinium bipes was studied in this paper using a mathematical model based on a horizontal one-dimensional multi-layered flow model coupled with a vertical migration model of the Peridinium bipes community. The estimated accumulation process consisted of three processes: upward swimming and dispersion of Peridinium bipes cells, advection of the cells with the countercurrent of surface water, and entrainment and effluent of the cells with the plunging flow of inflow river water. The numerical analysis has revealed that the accumulation process helps Peridinium bipes to avoid hydraulic washout and it contributes to a contributes to a concentration of Peridinium bipes cells on the upper side of the reservoir.


We according to the proportion of data from 1952 to 2008 of the cultural industry output value accounted for the GDP time series, ARIMA model is established through the concrete data by using comprehensive analysis. Through model analysis, the conclusion is: since 1952, the cultural industry output value of the proportion of fluctuations in GDP is larger. In a period around 1978, culture industry proportion reached trough; but after 1984 the situation improved and the proportion is increasing year by year, the implementation and the policy after the reform and opening up of China's cultural industry rapid economic development coincide; and in recent years the proportion of the cultural industry in the national total production value in the stable. And according to the change trend of cultural industry production value proportion and proportion on the cultural industry output value analysis, understand the industry structure to our country's culture industry should be optimized, to vigorously develop the cultural industry at the same time, should pay attention to the adjustment of industrial structure, promote cultural industry better and faster development.


As a result of globalization and advances in information and communication technologies, the increased use of virtual teams in business has become prominent. In the competitive environment companies are obliged to produce more rapidly, more effectively and more efficiently. It is necessary for them to put together different capabilities and services with the goal, through cooperation between suppliers and customers, service providers and scientific institutions to achieve firm's objective with high quality. Nowadays shift from serial to simultaneous and parallel working in entity has become more commonplace. Literatures have shown that collaboration is as a meta-capability for companies. This article after define a virtual teams and its characteristics, addressing virtual environments and relationship with different challenges which organization should deal them such as management and employee challenges. Finally conclude that managers of company should invest less in tangible assets, but more in virtual team to generate knowledge, and in their employees' creativity to stimulate incremental innovations in already existing technologies that will directly generate their future competitive advantage. Companies must educate everyone, not just virtual employees, on the virtual team culture but both employees and managers need to understand the dealing aspects with virtual team.


The first scientific geophysical research achievements in South Africa are easy to identify: the first magnetic observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, and the Beattie and Morrison magnetic survey. In contrast, the early mining- and mineral-related geophysical surveys are not so easy to pinpoint. The best compilation of early work was provided by Krahmann (1936a). He pointed out that prior to 1931, only a few geophysical investigations were performed in southern Africa. He had records of 45 of these investigations, 30 of which comprise electrical methods. The results of many geophysical surveys were never made public, and consequently we know little or nothing about them. The surveys discussed in this section are the ones carried out and reported during the first 30 years of mining and mineral exploration geophysics in southern Africa. This then is the period commencing in the early 1900s, and this discussion ends at the start of World War II.


Although the Basle Committee has identified recovery risk as an important source of risk in addition to default, the impact of recovery rates on bond prices is not yet fully understood in the literature. This paper proposes a reduced form discrete-time approach for pricing defaultable securities incorporating stochastic recovery rates. We provide pricing formulas for risky bonds and CDS contracts in the case of an economy with an affine state vector. We show that our methodology provides a tractability that is usually typical of continuous time models. The model stays tractable even in the case of rich and realistic econometric representations of the state variables and can therefore be estimated using standard techniques. As an illustration, several specifications for the state variables are discussed and a numerical example is provided.


This book presents comprehensive coverage of project finance in Europe and North America.  The Second Edition features two new case studies, all new pedagogical supplements including end-of-chapter questions and answers, and insights into the recent market downturn.  The author provides a complete description of the ways a project finance deal can be organized-from industrial, legal, and financial standpoints-and the alternatives available for funding it.  After reviewing recent advances in project finance theory, he provides illustrations and case studies. At key points Gatti brings in other project finance experts who share their specialized knowledge on the legal issues and the role of advisors in project finance deals.

 *Foreword by William Megginson, Professor and Rainbolt Chair in Finance, Price College of Business, The University of Oklahoma

 *Comprehensive coverage of theory and practice of project finance as it is practiced today in Europe and North America

 *Website contains interactive spreadsheets so that readers can input data and run and compare various scenarios, including up to the minute treatment of the cutting-edge areas of PPPs and the new problems raised by Basel II related to credit risk measurement


This thesis covers a fundamental problem of local phase based signal processing: the isotropic generalization of the classical one dimensional analytic signal (D. Gabor) to higher dimensional signal domains. The classical analytic signal extends a real valued one dimensional signal to a complex valued signal by means of the classical 1D Hilbert transform. This signal extension enables the complete analysis of local phase and local amplitude information for each frequency component in the sense of Fourier analysis. In case of two dimensional signal domains, e.g. for images, additional geometric information is required to characterize higher dimensional signals locally. The local geometric information is called orientation, which consists of the main orientation and apex angle for two superimposed one dimensional signals. The problem of two dimensional signal analysis is the fact that in general those signals could consist of an unlimited number of superimposed one dimensional signals with individual orientations. Local phase, amplitude and additional orientation information can be extracted by the monogenic signal (M. Felsberg and G. Sommer) which is always restricted to the subclass of intrinsically one dimensional signals, i.e. the class of signals which only make use of one degree of freedom within the embedding signal domain. In case of 2D images the monogenic signal enables the rotationally invariant analysis of lines and edges. In contrast to the 1D analytic signal the monogenic signal extends all real valued signals of dimension n to a (n+1) - dimensional vector valued monogenic signal by means of the generalized first order Hilbert transform, which is also known as the Riesz transform. The analytic signal and the monogenic signal show that a direct relation between analytical signals and their algebraic representation exists. This fact has motivated the work and the results of this thesis, namely the extension of the 2D monogenic signal to more general 2D analytic signals, their algebraic representation, and their most geometric embedding. In case of more general 2D signals the geometric algebra will be shown to be a natural representation, and the conformal space as the geometric embedding for the signal interpretation. In this thesis we present 2D analytic signals as generalizations of the 2D monogenic signal which now extend the original 2D signal to a multi-vector valued signal in homogeneous conformal space by means of higher order Hilbert transforms, and by means of a so called hybrid matrix geometric algebra representation. The 2D analytic signal and the more general multi-vector signal will be interpreted in conformal space which delivers a descriptive geometric interpretation and algebraic embedding of signals. In case of 2D image signals the 2D analytic signal and the multi-vector signal enable the rotationally invariant analysis of lines, edges, corners and junctions in one unified framework. Furthermore, additional local curvature can be determined by first order generalized Hilbert transforms without the need of derivatives. This so called conformal monogenic signal can be defined for any signal domain.


Startup ecosystems started to emerge in different parts of the world since the 2000s. They normally focus on specific areas and present different characteristics and dynamics. Also, each ecosystem has its own path of evolution over time. In this paper, we analyze the dynamics of these ecosystems by taking the New York case study as an example. We show what stages ecosystems pass through, the requirements for each of these phases and why it is possible for many ecosystems to evolve until reaching a self-sustainable level of maturity. This research can bring a better understanding of the evolution of software startup ecosystems and what role their actors play in this development. The results can be used as a basis for ecosystem stakeholders to reflect and act concretely on improving the maturity of their local environments.