The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at Duke University is undergoing extensive curriculum revisions incorporating both new content and organization and innovative teaching methods. The cornerstone of the new curriculum is a theme-based introductory course entitled Fundamentals of ECE . To introduce students to the major areas of ECE in their first year of study, this course has been organized around three concepts: 1) how to interface with the physical world, 2) how to transfer/transmit energy/information, and 3) how to extract/analyze/ interpret information. Other goals include illustrating how various areas of ECE contribute to the design and functioning of an entire system, emphasizing the relevance of course material to real-world applications, and capturing the students' imagination and creativity. To achieve these goals, the course adopts a unifying theme, tightly couples lecture and laboratory exercises, and includes a laboratory experience that emphasizes design, integration, and real applications. The course content and laboratory exercises were developed iteratively such that each component supported the other, rather than one being dominant and driving the other. A robotic platform was selected as the foundation of the laboratory experience. This platform enables the exploration of a broad range of ECE concepts, both independently and integrated into an entire system, is flexible, to encourage creative solutions, is capable of being applied to real-world challenges, and is easily connected to the curricular theme. This paper describes the curricular objectives and key course elements which guided the development of this course, the process by which the course was created, and the resulting content and structure.


The Constitution charges the President with the duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed..." Moreover, the President takes an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Although "[g]enerally, these duties are compatible..., when the Executive faces a law that he believes is unconstitutional, he must decide whether the law should be executed as written and defended if attacked, or whether the duty of faithfulness to the Constitution requires its repudiation." This decision belongs to the President alone as the head of a co-equal branch of the federal government. The doctrine of separation of powers dictates, inter alia, that the President enforces the laws that Congress passes. But, a constitutional problem arises "[w]hen the President's obligation to act in accord with the Constitution appears to be in tension with his duty to execute laws enacted by Congress..." When advising the President, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has maintained since at least 1860 that "the Constitution provides the President with the authority to refuse to enforce unconstitutional provisions." However, reasonable minds disagree as to the appropriate standard that should be used by the President and the DOJ when deciding whether or not to enforce a statute. Moreover, substantially less has come out of the DOJ regarding the President's decision not to defend legislation.The purposes of this paper are: (1) to summarize the case law, Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, and scholarship pertaining to the doctrines of non-enforcement and non-defense; (2) to propose workable standards for both non-enforcement and non-defense that can be used by future Presidents and the DOJ; and, (3) to apply these standards to President Obama's recent decision to continue to enforce, but to not defend, Section 3 of The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in order to show why the decision was proper.Part I explores the distinction between executive non-enforcement and executive non-defense. Part I.A discusses the case law (I.A.1), OLC opinions (I.A.2), and scholarship (I.A.3) addressing non-enforcement, while Part I.B explores the case law (I.B.1), OLC opinions (I.B.2), and scholarship (I.B.3) regarding non-defense. Part II briefly surveys the history of DOMA and the recent decision by the Obama administration not to defend Section 3 of DOMA. Finally, Part III proposes standards to be used by future administrations faced with whether to enforce and defend a statute, and the section ends by applying the standards to conclude that the Obama administration's decision to continue to enforce, but not to defend, Section 3 of DOMA was proper.


Background: Zuotai, a famous Tibetan medicinal mixture containing metacinnabar, is traditionally used for the purpose of tranquilizing minds and soothing nerves. However, it still lacks substantial experimental data for it to be approved for use. Aim: This study was designed to assess the effects of Zuotai on depressive-like symptoms in a chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) mouse model, and to explore its potential mechanism, particularly the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis pathway. Materials and methods: First, Kunming mice were exposed to the CUMS procedure and simultaneously administered Zuotai or imipramine (positive control) by gavage continuously for 6 weeks. Then, depressive-like behaviors of mice in each group were tested with the sucrose preference test, forced swimming test, tail suspension test, and open field test. Meanwhile, the three key neuroendocrine hormones (corticotropin releasing hormone, adrenocorticotropic hormone and corticosterone) in HPA axis pathway, and the level of the emotion-related monoamine neurotransmitters (5-hydroxytryptamine and norepinephrine) were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Furthermore, total mercury in the hypothalamus and hippocampus were determined using an automatic, direct mercury analyzer. Results: Zuotai or imipramine significantly increased the body weight and the sucrose preference ratio in sucrose preference test, and dramatically improved motor activity in forced swimming test, tail suspension test, and open field test in CUMS mice. Zuotai or imipramine remarkably decreased levels of corticotropin-releasing hormone, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and corticosterone in the HPA axis, and increased levels of 5-hydroxytryptamine and norepinephrine in the serum in CUMS mice. However, a small amount of mercury was deposited in the hypothalamus and hippocampus in Zuotai-treated mice, which may pose a potential risk to the central nervous system. Conclusion: Zuotai has a strong ability to ameliorate depressive-like behaviors in CUMS-treated mice through inhibition of the HPA axis and upregulation of monoamine neurotransmitters. These findings provide new insight into the pharmacological effect of Zuotai on depression.


Article 82 of the Treaty Establishing the European Community, which prohibits abuse of a dominant position, is the counterpart to the anti-monopolization provisions contained in Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Unfortunately, however, commentators have variously criticized recent applications of Article 82 as outdated, protectionist, inconsistent - and perhaps most damaging of all, based on faulty economics. This paper takes issue with these critiques to offer support for a robust Article 82. Narrow analyses focused on the provision's language or specific judicial decisions offer little insight. Rather, an appreciation for Article 82 can only emerge through a richer contextual analysis of its historical origins and its regulatory role within a broader policy of European economic integration. In developing its argument, the paper explores two common myths. The first is that Article 82 pits innovative American businesses against bureaucratic European regulators. The reality, however, is quite different: faced with lax antitrust enforcement at home, American competitors have found it necessary to turn to Europe for redress against monopolistic abuses. A second misperception is that antitrust should espouse a laissez-faire approach toward dominant firms - a mentality that has most prominently led to anemic interpretations of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. This so-called economic approach, however, is based on the faulty premises of Chicago School economics that, among other ills, misdefines consumer welfare, overplays contestability theory, and ignores core theory. It also slights path dependence, network effects, and the anticompetitive dangers of overbroad intellectual property rights. Sadly, in recent months Europe has begun to fall under the spell of laissez-faire rhetoric as it explores reinterpreting Article 82 to mimic Section 2. The paper concludes by arguing that these new developments, while troublesome, provide a window to debate three basic sets of questions. First, what interests desire a weakening of the law of abuse and dominant position? Second, can Section 2 learn from Article 82, rather than the other way around? Third, and most fundamentally, can Article 82 provide insight into a broader discussion about the goals and methods of antitrust?


Biological nitrogen (N) fixation is a key pathway in terrestrial ecosystems and is therefore critical for understanding the responses of ecosystems to global environmental changes. The free-living diazotrophic community is distributed along the canopy-to-soil profile, but the ecological significance of epiphyllic N2 fixers, despite their functional relevance, on plant foliar surfaces remains very poorly understood compared with the N2 -fixing community in forest litter and soils. We assessed the community structure of N2 fixers and overall bacteria by genetic fingerprinting (t-RFLP) to explore the seasonal successional patterns of the microbial community in the natural phyllosphere of a Holm oak (Quercus ilex) forest submitted to 12-year field experiment of rain exclusion mimicking the conditions of drought projected for the coming decades. Leaves of Holm oak were analysed in different seasons over a period of 1.5 years. The bacterial community of the phyllosphere did not correspond to the surrounding soil biome in the same area. These analyses provided field evidence for the presence of free-living diazotrophs associated with the tissues of leaves of Holm oak, the dominant tree species of many Mediterranean forests. The results also revealed that the community composition is affected seasonally and inter-annually by the environment, and that the composition shifts in response to climate change. Drought treatment increased the richness of the epiphyllic microbial community, especially during the summer. These changes were associated with higher C:N ratios of leaves observed in response to drought in semiarid areas. This epiphyllic microbiota that can potentially fix N2 extends the capacity of plants to adapt to the environment.


This book draws on a wide range of theoreti cal perspecti ves – from Chaney and Bourdieu to Berger, Sontag and Bakhti n – and from ideas about nostalgia to theories of consumpti on, nati on, and ethnicity. The ethnographic detail in each chapter is impressive, and in my view is the real core of the book. It is a resource which will be widely used by Russian, Soviet and postsocialist specialists, by anthropologists, sociologists and geographers, and by anyone interested in cultural studies, material culture and consumpti on, and place and ethnicity.


There is a wide consensus about the success brought to occidental societies by investments in research, development and innovation (R&D&I). This success is a product of the scientific system in which universities play a crucial role.

Moreover, there is also great criticism about failures of disbursements of Official Development Assistance, that have not succeeded in the past to induce a sustainable growth.

In the first case, the success has been achieved by uniting the individual curiosity and creativity of researchers with incentives designed to direct their activity towards global trends of development of societies and their markets. The trend is therefore driven by the incentives.

In the second case, in spite of important investments, the gap between developed and most underdeveloped countries is widening faster. In the last decades we have learned that development must be committed to the systems approach:
infrastructures are needed but are not enough, social engagement in democracy and civil freedoms is crucial, but not enough, women involvement and empowerment are important elements, and so on. The development does not come automatically.

We've learnt that one key component of development resides in human capacities. The capacity of a society to close the technical gap, to catch the knowledge that is needed to incorporate global technical and scientific advances
to its growth needs is mediated by human capacities of this society, so that an insufficient level in such capacities makes it impossible to reduce the gap.

Thus the creation of a critic mass of scientific and technical skills is one of the components of the mix that is needed for development in poor countries.
But actual problems of poor countries are mostly unknown, or forgotten, from the technology development frontier, and the incentives to researchers, (the search for "excellence" in developed, and also in underdeveloped countries)
are driven by advances in fields relevant for advanced countries, but not useful for poor countries: this pushes researchers from poor countries to involve in knowledge not well related to their countries main problems. The 10/90 gap
identified in health research by the Global Forum for Health Research is a well known indicator of this fact. In sixties, Duddley Seers demonstrated in his well
known paper "The limitations of the special case", that economical theories, built studying developed economies, were no suitable to underdeveloped countries,
as systems underlying both kinds of societies were not similar, and thus, systemic comportment of economical tools or recipes learnt in developed countries
could not be directly replicated in poor countries. But this conclusion must be generalized to all knowledge areas and thus, the need to put into the research targets the conditions and needs of poor gets clear. One economist claimed that the fact that at the end of the day all population of New York had eaten was a major demonstration of the good behaviour of capitalist formal economy. We can
reply that the fact that at the end of the day most of population of Nairobi's Kibera district have survived shows also that there is an important informal economy
behind that we don't know at all, so we aren't enough skilled to incentivate its improvement.

So if we wish to reach a fast extension to poor countries of the success that science and technology have got in developed countries, we have to put poverty and
informal social systems under the science focus and create incentives to shift part of the scientific attention -in all scientific areas- to relevant and unsolved problems
that actual poor societies face.

In this shift of attention, universities can play a major role.


The study was carried out to find out the differences in the chemical composition of wheat straw obtained from three different regions of India, to compare their susceptibility to fungal degradation, and subsequently to evaluate the correlation between lignin loss and improvement in in vitro digestibility. Four Phlebia species were used to degrade different wheat straw samples during 30 days of incubation. In wheat straw obtained from central zone of India, most of the fungi were more selective in ligninolysis, with a moderate loss in total organic matter. The best found fungus, P. brevispora,enhanced the in vitro digestibility from 172 to 287 g/kg in north western, 165 to 275 g/kg in north eastern, and 145 to 259 g/kg in central zone with a respective loss of 163, 129, and 105 g/kg in total organic matter. Other three fungi P. fascicularia, P. floridensis, and P. radiata were also able to enhance the in vitro digestibility of all the wheat straw samples up to a significant extent. The study demonstrated that selective ligninolytic behaviour of fungi is influenced by the overall composition of wheat straw as governed by geographic location.


Turmeric (Curcuma longa L.) plants that were grown in vitro for 17 or 22 weeks as a fed-batch culture in 2.5 L vessels yielded 39 to 43 g and 62 to 70 g of fresh rhizomes per vessel, respectively (95 % confidence interval). The MS liquid medium was maintained at 6 % sucrose through media addition twice during the experiment. Various methods were employed in attempts to increase secondary metabolism. Antioxidant and total phenolics assays were employed to characterize phytochemical activity. A first experiment exposed four clones to phenylalanine and/or methyl jasmonate (MeJa) from week 12 to 17 in culture. In a second experiment, a clone was given short-term exposure (1.5 weeks) to either proline, a natural proline-rich fish extract, MeJa, or chitosan beginning during the twentieth week of culture. This experiment also included a nitrogen stress treatment (weeks 16–22). The 5-week phenylalanine and MeJa treatments lowered biomass accumulation and antioxidant capacity of the tissue. The magnitude of antioxidant depression was dependent on genotype and, within each genotype, the degree of depression was similar for phenylalanine and MeJa, alone and in combination. In the second experiment, only the low-nitrogen treatment yielded an increase in phenolic content to 4.7 % of dry weight compared to untreated microrhizomes (4.1 % of dry weight). Nitrogen-stressed plants also had less leaf growth, but rhizome mass was unaffected and averaged 63 g FW per vessel. None of the short-term treatments had a significant effect on biomass, antioxidant capacity, or phenolic content. None of the treatments significantly affected radical scavenging, although the low-nitrogen treatment might have improved this activity (p = .1207). Results indicated that plants grown in a high-nitrogen MS media were not responsive to elicitation.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: It has been suggested that maternal depression during pregnancy is associated with asthma in the offspring, but the role of medical treatment of depression is not known. Our goal was to examine whether prenatal antidepressant use increases the risk of asthma in the offspring. METHODS: A cohort study was performed among all live singletons born in Denmark between 1996 and 2007. Mothers who had a diagnosis of depressive disorder and/or who used antidepressants 1 year before or during the index pregnancy were identified. Using a Cox proportional hazards regression model, we estimated the hazard ratio (HR) for asthma in the offspring after antidepressant use during pregnancy. RESULTS: Of the 733 685 children identified, 84 683 had a diagnosis of asthma. A total of 21 371 children were exposed to prenatal maternal depression (ie, a diagnosis of depressive disorder or use of antidepressants 1 year before or during pregnancy). Prenatal maternal depression was associated with childhood asthma (HR: 1.25 [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.20–1.30]). Overall, 8895 children were exposed to antidepressants in utero. Compared with children born to mothers with prenatal depression and no antidepressant use during pregnancy, the HR for asthma after any antidepressant use during pregnancy was 1.00 (95% CI: 0.93–1.08). HRs after use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors only, newer antidepressants only, and older antidepressants only were 0.95 (95% CI: 0.88–1.03), 1.11 (95% CI: 0.89–1.39), and 1.26 (95% CI: 1.02–1.55), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Antidepressant use during pregnancy generally did not increase the risk of asthma. Only use of older antidepressants was associated with an increased risk of asthma.


We hereby report a rare case of a woman who presented with symptoms of urogenital prolapse and menorrhagia. She was erroneously diagnosed to have cervical mass and underwent examination under anesthesia and was found to have only a vaginal leiomyoma. The fibroid was enucleated successfully through a vaginal incision. We discuss the rare case


The corneal epithelium forms the outer layer of the cornea. It provides mechanical protection, prevents fluid loss and forms a barrier to invasive pathogens. Though hemoglobin expression has been extensively studied in erythroid cells, recent work in multiple cell systems has documented hemoglobin expression in cells of non-erythroid origin. However, the function of hemoglobin in non-erythroid cells has yet to be established. The hypothesis that hemoglobin is expressed in corneal epithelium and that it functions to protect against oxidative stress will be examined in the present work. Hemoglobin expression and function was examined by immunocytochemistry and western blot analysis. Native human corneal explants and an immortalized human corneal epithelial cell line were examined. Expression of hemoglobin beta and delta chains was demonstrated at the protein level in both native and cell culture preparations. Hexamethylene bisacetamide is a known inducer of hemoglobin beta chain expression in murine erythroleukemia cells. HMBA did function to increase beta chain expression in cultured corneal epithelium as well. Beta chain immunolocalization was primarily cytoplasmic, while the delta chain localized to both cytoplasmic and membrane domains. Oxidative stress, from hydrogen peroxide exposure, was shown to upregulate delta chain expression. In conclusion, hemoglobin chains are expressed in corneal epithelium and could function to protect against oxidative stress. This is relevant given that exposure to light and high oxygen tensions render the cornea particularly susceptible to oxidative damage.


A. ZAIKOV, I. PISKOV and I. ILIEV. 2010. Investigation on shelter competition between Narrow-Clawed crayfish Astacus leptodactylus (Esch.) and Noble crayfish Astacus astacus L. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 16: 369-375 The aim of this study was to investigate the competitive relations in the occupation of shelters between Astacus leptodactylus (Esch.) and Astacus astacus L. in laboratory conditions. A total of 240 crayfish were used in the experiment, including 120 individuals of each species and 60 individuals of each gender. Three differ- ent groups of experiments were conducted in order to fully investigate the shelter competition. The study shows that the species belonging of the individuals has a predominant significance in shelter occupation. In all variants investigated, the noble crayfish have a dominant position compared to the narrow-clawed crayfish, and gender and body weight of the specimen investigated has no effect in this regard.


This paper presents an in-depth study of the semantics of the French discourse marker alors 'at that time, then, so'. Its evolution from temporal adverbial with local anaphoric meaning to polysemous marker including conversation management uses in spoken French is traced through a systematic diachronic corpus analysis. Of particular interest in this perspective is the relationship between the different meanings of alors and the position it occupies in the sentence. Our main hypothesis is that the semantic evolution of alors goes hand in hand with grammatical and functional changes leading to new discourse functions, viz. from sentence adverbial to discourse structuring marker. We show that semantic meaning is driven by syntactic position changes which gradually evolve over time.


textabstractPort greening is rapidly increasing globally. Adding to a limited type of research across port management disciplines interested in the context and the factors that have shaped green port organizational performance, this thesis research combines resource-based view (RBV) and organizational institutionalism, applying it to an organization type which is slightly different from 'normal' firms, namely the Port Authority (PA).
The study approaches the European green port concept in terms of EMS standards implementation -at both the field and the organizational level- from 1993 to 2010. Initially, it embraces the core neo-institutional perspective and assesses the occurrence of the European green port organizational field by observing the European ports' collective response to greening, but it also identifies the mechanisms involved. Its appraisal of port organizations as dynamic entities which can respond to external pressures in a variety of ways reflects its predilection to consider Oliver's (1991) suggestions that different variables represent environmental strategic response. The last part of the analysis advocates that the EMS standard diffusion impact is contingent to port organizational resources and offers a more synthetic perspective of what matters to the adoption of environmental practices. An inquiry based on RBV is employed for a supplementary analysis which explores how individual port internal resources and capabilities coalesce to external field dynamics in developing and shaping the organizations' strategic response.
The different ways in which ports perceived and chose to strategically implement their greening process by implementing EMS standards is comparatively explored by the four (4) selected port case studies, which make it possible to understand how and why European ports have been altered towards greening. The study contributes to the growing empirical literature on port sustainability and more particularly on the emerging field of port EMS standards implementation threefold, by explicitly introducing: the mechanisms that provoked EMS standards implementation; the institutional factors that shaped individual green port strategic response; and the role of distinct organizational capabilities in building up the individual 'green port'.


Pneumatic muscle actuators have the highest power/weight ratio of any actuator and therefore it has a broad application prospect in soft robotics. This paper presents a two degree of freedom (2-DOF) pneumatic muscle actuator that consists of four pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) and two rotation joins. However, this pneumatic muscle actuator has highly nonlinear and hysteretic properties (among muscle force, muscle displacement and pressure in the muscle), which lead to difficulty in accurate position control. Pneumatic muscle actuator usually necessitate the use various nonlinear techniques for control in order to improve their performance. The paper contains selection of computational intelligence methods designed for application in pneumatic muscle actuator. There are described and compared MLP neural network and RBF neural network.


In spite of the worldwide abundance of beachrocks and their acknowledged utility as an indicator of former sea level position, some studies have expressed doubt as to their position of cementation on paleo shorelines. These criticisms are not, however, coupled with nuanced sedimentological studies of beachrocks. Instead, few beachrock studies acknowledge any facies and therefore disregard important signatures of the depositional environment and, consequently, utility as paleo sea level indicators. This study presents detailed sedimentological descriptions and interpretations from two beachrock localities along the subtropical, microtidal, wave-dominated eastern coastline near Durban, South Africa. The outcrops record the migration of a paleo inlet and deposition in sub, inter, and supra tidal environments. Understanding the inferred depositional environment, and observed stratigraphic relationships between various beachrock facies is critical to teasing out the local evolution of shoreline and relative sea level. The outcrops studied here record multiple episodes of Holocene sea level rise and fall.


The concentrations of trace elements in apatite from granitoid rocks of the Mt Isa Inlier have been investigated using the laser‐ablation inductively coupled plasma‐mass spectrometry (ICP‐MS) microprobe. The results indicate that the distribution of trace elements (especially rare‐earth elements (REE), Sr, Y, Mn and Th) in apatite strongly reflects the chemical characteristics of the parental rock. The variations in the trace‐element concentrations of apatite are correlated with parameters such as the SiO2 content, oxidation state of iron, total alkalis and the aluminium saturation index (ASI). The relative enrichment of Y, HREE and Mn and the relative depletion of Sr in the apatites studied reflect the degree of fractionation of the host granite. Apatites from strongly oxidised plutons tend to have higher concentrations of LREE relative to MREE. Manganese concentrations are higher in apatite from reduced granitoids because Mn2+substitutes directly for Ca2+. The La/Ce ratio of apatite is well‐correlated with the whole‐rock K2O and Na2O contents, as well as with the oxidation state and ASI. Because apatite trace‐element composition reflects the chemistry of the whole rock, it can be a useful indicator mineral for the recognition of mineralised granite suites, where particular mineralisation styles are associated with granitoids that have specific geochemical fingerprints.


This article investigates into the domestication of communication technology through two cultural discourses, for one that of interior magazines and for two that of technology magazines. During domestication process technological items are objectified by ways in which they are brought to a physical environment and in ways in which they rearrange that environment (cf. Silverstone & al. 1992). The study is inspired by the domestication approach (Silverstone & Hirsch 1992, Silverstone 1994), while its methodological background is mainly based on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995). The data consist of 55 magazine articles including 687 images. The findings indicate that the discourses differ significantly. Thus, home technologies and homes as physical spaces live each on another planet in print media. The differentiation reveals an understanding of communication technologies as non- design. Both types of magazines ignore the issue of making communication technology home at home, an issue addressed to designerly thinking.


Objectives & Background Within emergency medicine there is a demand for non-invasive techniques to measure patient observations. Within resuscitation of unwell patients, measuring Cardiac Output (CO) and Systemic Vascular Resistance (SVR) is carried out in intensive care environment using invasive techniques. In this study we trialled the use of two non-invasive Cardiac Output monitors to assess their feasibility and agreement. The USCOM (USCOM) is a suprasternal Doppler device that uses ultrasound technology and has been extensively researched within clinical medicine. The Niccomo (Medis) device is a novel biothoracic impedance monitor. Methods Patients were recruited as part of the 'multi-modality monitoring in the emergency department' trial, University Hospital Leicester NHS trust (UHL). Adult patients with a wide range of clinical conditions presenting to the ED who were able to consent were recruited to the study. Devices were attached as per manufacturer instructions, with standard medical care ongoing throughout the study. Data was analysed using R statistical computation. Results 215 patients were included in the study with an age range 18–95 years. 93 patients had readings for both modalities. Figure 1 represents a Bland-Altman comparing average CO readings of USCOM vs Niccomo with the global average USCOM reading was considerably lower than the Niccomo device. Figure 2, shows SVR of USCOM vs Niccomo, this again highlighted a large difference between measurements. Conclusion This study revealed the Niccomo measured CO and SVR readings similar to the expected range of patients in this study. However, the USCOM revealed a significantly lower reading for CO and a higher SVR reading than the Niccomo. Further work needs to be undertaken to assess the clinical utility of the different methods to measure cardiac output. The study emphasises that different non-invasive methods of cardiac assessment are not interchangeable.


Motivation: RNA–RNA interactions via base pairing play a vital role in the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. Efficient identification of targets for such regulatory RNAs needs not only discriminative power for positive and negative RNA–RNA interacting sequence data but also accurate prediction of interaction sites from positive data. Recently, a few studies have incorporated interaction site accessibility into their prediction methods, indicating the enhancement of predictive performance on limited positive data. Results: Here we show the efficacy of our accessibility-based prediction model RactIPAce on newly compiled datasets. The first experiment in interaction site prediction shows that RactIPAce achieves the best predictive performance on the newly compiled dataset of experimentally verified interactions in the literature as compared with the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the second experiment in discrimination between positive and negative interacting pairs reveals that the combination of accessibility-based methods including our approach can be effective to discern real interacting RNAs. Taking these into account, our prediction model can be effective to predict interaction sites after screening for real interacting RNAs, which will boost the functional analysis of regulatory RNAs. Availability and Implementation: The program RactIPAce along with data used in this work is available at https://github.com/satoken/ractip/releases/tag/v1.0.1. Contact: firstname.lastname@example.com or email@example.com Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


Objectives: Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is one of the most aggressive forms of skin cancer. In 2008, CM was found to be the sixth most common cancer in the UK. The aim of this review was to systematically identify patients with advanced CM, limited to stage IIIc and stage IV disease.

Methods: Literature searches were undertaken in the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, CINAHL and EMBASE between December 2010 and March 2011. Webpages of the Office of National Statistics, Cancer Research UK and the Welsh Cancer Intelligence and Surveillance Unit were also scanned. A narrative synthesis was undertaken due to the heterogeneity of included studies.

Results: Three observational studies were identified. One study was in East Anglia, England while the remaining two were in Scotland. Both studies in Scotland estimated that 2% of all melanoma patients had advanced CM at the time of diagnosis. It was also noted that, in East Anglia, the incidence of stage IV CM decreased from 0.42 to 0.13 per 100,000 population per year between 1991 and 2004. The review highlighted the challenges in identifying patients with advanced CM from available data.

Conclusions: This review highlighted the lack of, and the need for primary studies to estimate the incidence of advanced CM in the UK. Defining this subgroup of patients is important for identifying patients for targeted treatment. We suggest that researchers must clearly define this population of patients in future studies.


The implementation of the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) mission was recommended by the National Research Council in 2007 to provide an on-orbit intercalibration standard with accuracy of 0.3% (k = 2) for relevant Earth observing sensors. The goal of reference intercalibration, as established in the Decadal Survey, is to enable rigorous high-accuracy observations of critical climate change parameters, including reflected broadband radiation [Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES)], cloud properties [Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS)], and changes in surface albedo, including snow and ice albedo feedback. In this paper, we describe the CLARREO approach for performing intercalibration on orbit in the reflected solar (RS) wavelength domain. It is based on providing highly accurate spectral reflectance and reflected radiance measurements from the CLARREO Reflected Solar Spectrometer (RSS) to establish an on-orbit reference for existing sensors, namely, CERES and VIIRS on Joint Polar Satellite System satellites, Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer and follow-on imagers on MetOp, Landsat imagers, and imagers on geostationary platforms. One of two fundamental CLARREO mission goals is to provide sufficient sampling of high-accuracy observations that are matched in time, space, and viewing angles with measurements made by existing instruments, to a degree that overcomes the random error sources from imperfect data matching and instrument noise. The data matching is achieved through CLARREO RSS pointing operations on orbit that align its line of sight with the intercalibrated sensor. These operations must be planned in advance; therefore, intercalibration events must be predicted by orbital modeling. If two competing opportunities are identified, one target sensor must be given priority over the other. The intercalibration method is to monitor changes in targeted sensor response function parameters: effective offset, gain, nonlinearity, optics spectral response, and sensitivity to polarization. In this paper, we use existing satellite data and orbital simulation methods to determine mission requirements for CLARREO, its instrument pointing ability, methodology, and needed intercalibration sampling and data matching for accurate intercalibration of RS radiation sensors on orbit. We conclude that with the CLARREO RSS in a polar 90° inclination orbit at a 609-km altitude, estimated intercalibration sampling will limit the uncertainty contribution from data matching noise to 0.3% (k = 2) over the climate autocorrelation time period. The developed orbital modeling and intercalibration event prediction will serve as a framework for future mission operations.


Wheat leaf rust, caused by the basidiomycete Puccinia triticina, can cause yield losses of up to 20% in wheat producing regions. During infection, the fungus forms haustoria that secrete proteins into the plant cell and effect changes in plant transcription, metabolism, and defense. It is hypothesized that new races emerge as a result of overcoming plant resistance via changes in the secreted effector proteins. To understand gene expression during infection and find genetic differences associated with races, RNA from wheat leaves infected with six different rust races, at 6 days post inoculation, was sequenced using Illumina. As P. triticina is an obligate biotroph, RNA from both the host and fungi were present and separated by alignment to the P. triticina genome and a wheat EST reference. A total of 222,571 rust contigs were assembled from 165 million reads. An examination of the resulting contigs revealed 532 predicted secreted proteins among the transcripts. Of these, 456 were found in all races. Fifteen genes were found with amino acid changes, corresponding to putative avirulence effectors potentially recognized by 11 different leaf rust resistance (Lr) genes. Twelve of the potential avirulence effectors have no homology to known genes. One gene had significant similarity to cerato-platanin, a known fungal elicitor, and another showed similarity to fungal tyrosinase, an enzyme involved in melanin synthesis. Temporal expression profiles were developed for these genes by qRT-PCR and show that the genes expression patterns were consistent between races from infection initiation to just prior to spore eruption.


Two families of software test data adequacy criteria, each based on data flow analysis, are defined for programs written in Pascal. Their formal properties are investigated and interactive software testing tools based on them are described.
The first of these families, the data flow testing criteria, was previously defined for programs written in a simple language. We extend the definitions to apply to programs written in Pascal. The data flow testing criteria are based purely on the syntax of the program being tested. They require that the test data execute certain paths from program points at which variables are defined to program points at which those definitions are used. We describe the design and implementation of a software testing tool, ASSET, based on the data flow testing criteria.
A serious weakness of the data flow testing criteria is that for some programs there exists no set of test data which is adequate for testing the program according to these criteria. This problem arises due to unexecutable paths in the program. The second family of criteria, the feasible data flow testing criteria, circumvent this problem by eliminating from consideration those definition-use associations which can never be exercised. We show that certain formal properties of the feasible data flow testing criteria differ significantly from those of the data flow testing criteria.
Since it is undecidable whether a given set of test data satisfies a given feasible data flow testing criterion, feasible data flow testing cannot be fully automated. However, it can be partially automated. We describe a heuristic method, the path expression method, which attempts to determine whether a given definition-use association can be exercised. The path expression method is based on a combination of data flow analysis and symbolic evaluation. We introduce a new symbolic evaluation technique which is more general, but essentially no more expensive, than symbolic execution. The path expression method, along with ASSET, constitute a tool which partially automates feasible data flow testing.


Single-layer antireflection (AR) coating films are used to transform semiconductor injection lasers into different kinds of active device. For example, a laser whose emitting facet reflectivities (one or both) are reduced to zero is transformed into a superluminescent diode or an optical amplifier, respectively. AR coated lasers are also very desirable in various configurations of a laser in an external cavity or as sources for optical fiber sensor applications. High quality antireflection coatings of laser facets have been achieved using sputtered silicon nitride. The emitting facets of InGaAsP lasers at 1.3 and 1.55 μm as well as of AlGaAs lasers at 0.85 μm were coated. The reflectivities achieved were consistently in the 0.01–0.03% range. Similar films were also used to AR coat InGaAs PIN detectors thereby significantly increasing their responsivity.


AIM
The aim of the present prospective study was to evaluate the impact of a computer-controlled anesthesia on patients' comfort and to investigate, through the willingness-to-pay (WTP) index, and patients' acceptance of this new technology.

METHODS
Fifty patients undergoing a class I or II restorative procedure were enrolled. A computer-controlled device for anesthetic delivery was utilized, and a questionnaire on the level of discomfort and WTP was given to all patients.

RESULTS
A total of 86% of participants declared less discomfort than that perceived during their last traditional procedure for pain control; 58% of patients were willing to pay an additional fee for a modern anesthesia technique, with a median WTP value of 20$.

CONCLUSIONS
Computer-controlled systems for local anesthesia represent a relevant tool for reducing patients' discomfort during dental treatment. The WTP index helps to quantify its relevance.


We examine economic inequality and social differences in infant and child mortality, and fertility responses to food price changes in North Orkney, 1855–1910, using linked vital records. This small population featured a diverse occupational structure, limited land resources, and geographic isolation from mainland Scotland. Segments of Orkney's non-agricultural working population were living so close to the margin of subsistence in normal years that an increase in food prices in bad years cost the lives of their children. Delayed childbearing, in addition to increased labour intensity, occupational diversification, and poor relief, failed to mitigate the negative effects of unfavourable prices in this group. While previous studies for Western Europe show a strong social gradient in mortality responses to food prices, and for Eastern Asia a strong household gradient, this study shows a strong sectoral gradient, indicating low standards of living for the non-agricultural working population well into the twentieth century.


It was found that the discovery of 5.8% (84/1437) of all drugs on the market involved serendipity. Of these drugs, 31 (2.2%) were discovered following an incident in the laboratory and 53 (3.7%) were discovered in a clinical setting. In addition, 263 (18.3%) of the pharmaceuticals in clinical use today are chemical derivatives of the drugs discovered with the aid of serendipity. Therefore, in total, 24.1% (347/1437) of marketed drugs can be directly traced to serendipitous events confirming the importance of this elusive phenomenon. In the case of anticancer drugs, 35.2% (31/88) can be attributed to a serendipitous event, which is somewhat larger than for all drugs. The therapeutic field that has benefited the most from serendipity are central nervous system active drugs reflecting the difficulty in designing compounds to pass the blood-brain-barrier and the lack of laboratory-based assays for many of the diseases of the mind.


This book describes the ever-escalating dangers to which Jewish refugees and recent immigrants were subjected in France and Italy as the Holocaust marched forward. Susan Zuccotti uncovers a grueling yet complex history of suffering and resilience through historical documents and personal testimonies from members of nine central and eastern European Jewish families, displaced to France in the opening years of the Second World War. The chronicle of their lives reveals clearly that these Jewish families experienced persecution of far greater intensity than citizen Jews or long-time resident immigrants. The odyssey of the nine families took them from hostile Vichy France to the Alpine village of Saint-Martin-Vesubie and on to Italy, where German soldiers rather than hoped-for Allied troops awaited. Those who crossed over to Italy were either deported to Auschwitz or forced to scatter in desperate flight. Zuccotti brings to light the agonies of the refugees' unstable lives, the evolution of French policies toward Jews, the reasons behind the flight from the relative idyll ofSaint-Martin-Vesubie, and the choices that confronted those who arrived in Italy. Powerful archival evidence frames this history, while firsthand reports underscore the human cost of the nightmarish years of persecution.


Laser vibrometry measurements on a bowed violin are performed. A rotating disc apparatus, acting as a violin bow, is developed. It produces a continuous, long, repeatable, multi-frequency sound from the instrument that imitates the real bow–string interaction for a 'very long bow'. What mainly differs is that the back and forward motion of the real bow is replaced by the rotating motion with constant velocity of the disc and constant bowing force (bowing pressure). This procedure is repeatable. It is long lasting and allows laser vibrometry techniques to be used, which measure forced vibrations by bowing at all excited frequencies simultaneously. A chain of interacting parts of the played violin is studied: the string, the bridge and the plates as well as the emitted sound field. A description of the mechanics and the sound production of the bowed violin is given, i.e. the production chain from the bowed string to the produced tone.


Donald Winnicott (1971) stated the necessity of separating the idea of creation from works of art, proposing that creativity belongs not to the manufacture of artefacts but to the engagement of the individual with external reality. In this paper, creativity is not considered as the prerogative of a particular type of personality but as resulting from an innate dialogic capacity manifested in every human endeavour – in science, natural sciences, education, industry and trade – towards improvement and transformation.
The paper considers how creativity is reified – made into a 'thing' – due to unconscious motivations, becoming a commodity to be consumed just like brands, cars, drinks, celebrities and governments. The imaginary (a register proposed by Jacques Lacan) aspect of creativity is explored with reference to desire. Creativity becomes a fetish as the focus of perverse and naive attraction, separated from the outcomes of production.
The aim of this paper is to reclaim the commonality of creativity, exposing it as 'ordinary' – like Raymond Williams (1989) proposed in respect of Culture. The myth of creativity at work is rooted in an impossibility of satisfaction that makes us value that which is imaginary (in Lacanian terms) at the expense of a depressive (in Kleinian terms), both (paradoxically) lacking and satisfying, truly playful (i.e., transformational) engagement with our working practices.


Introduction: Most neurodegenerative diseases are associated with the disruption of axonal transport and this might also be related to diabetes-associated disorders affecting the nervous system. Cytoplasmic dynein is a very important motor driving the movement of a wide range of cargoes toward the minus ends of microtubules. The effects of endurance training on dynein motor protein expression in Wistar male rats sciatic nerves with diabetic neuropathy were investigated. Methods: Twenty one male Wistar rats were divided into three groups: diabetic control (DC: n=7), diabetic trained (DT: n=7) and Healthy control (HC: n=7). Two weeks post STZ injection (45 mg/kg, i.p.), rats were subjected to treadmill exercise for 5 days a week for over 6 weeks. Levels of mRNA and protein content were determined by Real time-PCR and ELISA. Results: The blood glucose levels and dynein mRNA in both sensory and motor parts and dynein content in sciatic nerves were increased by diabetes (P≤0.05). Furthermore, exercise training modulated the dynein mRNA and dynein content to normal levels in diabetic trained rats (P≤0.05). Moreover, exercise training reduced blood glucose levels in the DT rats (P≤0.05). Conclusion: The results of the present study confirm that dynein expresses up-regulation in STZ-induced diabetic rats. Increase in the amount of dynein expression can be a compensatory response in the lower trophic support and burden imposed on autophagy system. These alterations suggest that retrograde axonal transport may be impaired in diabetic rats. In addition, endurance training as a non-pharmacotherapy strategy can modulate these alterations.


Automatic disease inference is of importance to bridge the gap between what online health seekers with unusual symptoms need and what busy human doctors with biased expertise can offer. However, accurately and efficiently inferring diseases is non-trivial, especially for community-based health services due to the vocabulary gap, incomplete information, correlated medical concepts, and limited high quality training samples. In this paper, we first report a user study on the information needs of health seekers in terms of questions and then select those that ask for possible diseases of their manifested symptoms for further analytic. We next propose a novel deep learning scheme to infer the possible diseases given the questions of health seekers. The proposed scheme is comprised of two key components. The first globally mines the discriminant medical signatures from raw features. The second deems the raw features and their signatures as input nodes in one layer and hidden nodes in the subsequent layer, respectively. Meanwhile, it learns the inter-relations between these two layers via pre-training with pseudo-labeled data. Following that, the hidden nodes serve as raw features for the more abstract signature mining. With incremental and alternative repeating of these two components, our scheme builds a sparsely connected deep architecture with three hidden layers. Overall, it well fits specific tasks with fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset labeled by online doctors show the significant performance gains of our scheme.


The Supreme Court's recent Eighth Amendment death penalty case law is in disarray, and the confusion is symptomatic of a larger problem in constitutional doctrine. In Baze v. Rees and Kennedy v. Louisiana, the Court approached the challenged state policies with vastly different levels of deference. Though the Court purported to apply longstanding Eighth Amendment tests in both cases, Baze was highly deferential to state policy, and Kennedy was not deferential at all. Remarkably, neither the Court nor legal scholars have acknowledged, let alone justified, these contrasting approaches.This Article proposes a theory of deference to address this discrepancy. Courts often premise deference in constitutional cases on political authority and epistemic authority. While these rationales make sense in theory, courts sometimes mechanically repeat them without asking whether the responsible institution enjoys either kind of authority in reality. Courts should engage in such inquiries before summarily granting or denying deference.In light of these principles, the Court approached the problems of deference in Baze and Kennedy carelessly. Whereas Baze assumed (without explanation) that the state possessed political and epistemic authority worthy of deference, Kennedy assumed (also without explanation) the exact opposite. Attention to these issues in the Eighth Amendment and other constitutional contexts would encourage more transparent, deliberative policymaking and more careful, candid judicial constitutional decision making.


Abstract Objective To characterize meal patterns across ten European countries participating in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) calibration study. Design Cross-sectional study utilizing dietary data collected through a standardized 24 h diet recall during 1995–2000. Eleven predefined intake occasions across a 24 h period were assessed during the interview. In the present descriptive report, meal patterns were analysed in terms of daily number of intake occasions, the proportion reporting each intake occasion and the energy contributions from each intake occasion. Setting Twenty-seven centres across ten European countries. Subjects Women (64 %) and men (36 %) aged 35–74 years (n 36 020). Results Pronounced differences in meal patterns emerged both across centres within the same country and across different countries, with a trend for fewer intake occasions per day in Mediterranean countries compared with central and northern Europe. Differences were also found for daily energy intake provided by lunch, with 38–43 % for women and 41–45 % for men within Mediterranean countries compared with 16–27 % for women and 20–26 % for men in central and northern European countries. Likewise, a south–north gradient was found for daily energy intake from snacks, with 13–20 % (women) and 10–17 % (men) in Mediterranean countries compared with 24–34 % (women) and 23–35 % (men) in central/northern Europe. Conclusions We found distinct differences in meal patterns with marked diversity for intake frequency and lunch and snack consumption between Mediterranean and central/northern European countries. Monitoring of meal patterns across various cultures and populations could provide critical context to the research efforts to characterize relationships between dietary intake and health.


Race Women Internationalists explores how a group of Caribbean and African American women in the early and mid-twentieth century traveled the world to fight colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism. Based on newspaper articles, speeches, and creative fiction and adopting a comparative perspective, the book brings together the entangled lives of three notable but overlooked women: American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson. It explores how, between the 1920s and the 1960s, the trio participated in global freedom struggles by traveling; building networks in feminist, student, black-led, anticolonial, and antifascist organizations; and forging alliances with key leaders. This made them race women internationalists—figures who engaged with a variety of interconnected internationalisms to challenge various forms of inequality facing people of African descent across the diaspora and the continent.


A direct-write "dip-pen" nanolithography (DPN) has been developed to deliver collections of molecules in a positive printing mode. An atomic force microscope (AFM) tip is used to write alkanethiols with 30-nanometer linewidth resolution on a gold thin film in a manner analogous to that of a dip pen. Molecules are delivered from the AFM tip to a solid substrate of interest via capillary transport, making DPN a potentially useful tool for creating and functionalizing nanoscale devices.


The minimum oxygen fugacity ( f O2) of Earth's upper mantle probably is controlled by metal saturation, as defined by the iron-wustite (IW) buffer reaction (FeO → Fe + O). However, the widespread occurrence of moissanite (SiC) in kimberlites, and a suite of super-reduced minerals (SiC, alloys, native elements) in peridotites in Tibet and the Polar Urals (Russia), suggest that more reducing conditions ( f O2 = 6–8 log units below IW) must occur locally in the mantle. We describe pockets of melt trapped in aggregates of corundum crystals ejected from Cretaceous volcanoes in northern Israel which contain high-temperature mineral assemblages requiring extremely low f O2 (IW < −10). One abundant phase is tistarite (Ti2O3), previously known as a single grain in the Allende carbonaceous chondrite (Mexico) and believed to have formed during the early evolution of the solar nebula. It is associated with other reduced phases usually found in meteorites. The development of super-reducing conditions in Earth's upper mantle may reflect the introduction of CH4 + H2 fluids from the deep mantle, specifically related to deep-seated volcanic plumbing systems at plate boundaries.


This landmark book represents the first attempt in two decades to survey the science of the ancient world, the first attempt in four decades to write a comprehensive history of medieval science, and the first attempt ever to present a full, unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. In "The Beginnings of Western Science," David C. Lindberg provides a rich chronicle of the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to the late-medieval scholastics. Lindberg surveys all the most important themes in the history of ancient and medieval science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. He synthesizes a wealth of information in superbly organized, clearly written chapters designed to serve students, scholars, and nonspecialists alike. In addition, Lindberg offers an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe. And throughout the book he pays close attention to the cultural and institutional contexts within which scientific knowledge was created and disseminated and to the ways in which the content and practice of science were influenced by interaction with philosophy and religion. Carefully selected maps, drawings, and photographs complement the text. Lindberg's story rests on a large body of important scholarship produced by historians of science, philosophy, and religion over the past few decades. However, Lindberg does not hesitate to offer new interpretations and to hazard fresh judgments aimed at resolving long-standing historical disputes. Addressed to the generaleducated reader as well as to students, his book will also appeal to any scholar whose interests touch on the history of the scientific enterprise.


We present a novel method to improve the robustness of real-time 3D surface reconstruction by incorporating inertial sensor data when determining inter-frame alignment. With commodity inertial sensors, we can significantly reduce the number of iterative closest point (ICP) iterations required per frame. Our system is also able to determine when ICP tracking becomes unreliable and use inertial navigation to correctly recover tracking, even after significant time has elapsed. This enables less experienced users to more quickly acquire 3D scans. We apply our framework to several different surface reconstruction tasks and demonstrate that enabling inertial navigation allows us to reconstruct scenes more quickly and recover from situations where reconstructing without IMU data produces very poor results.


Alexander McCall Smith, best-selling author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, has turned his hand to humour. The delightful result is a creation of comic genius. For in the unnaturally tall form of Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, we are invited to meet a memorable character whose sublime insouciance is a blend of the cultivated pomposity of Frasier Crane and of Inspecteur Clouseau's hapless gaucherie. Von Igelfeld inhabits the rarefied world of the Institute of Romance Philology at Regensburg, a world he shares with his equally tall and equally ridiculous colleagues, Professors Florianus Prinzel and Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. Their unlikely adventures are described in three deliciously funny instalments: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances.


Two feature extraction and compensation algorithms, feature-space minimum phone error (fMPE), which contributed to the recent significant progress in conversational speech recognition, and stereo-based piecewise linear compensation for environments (SPLICE), which has been used successfully in noise-robust speech recognition, are analyzed and compared. These two algorithms have been developed by very different motivations and been applied to very different speech-recognition tasks as well. While the mathematical construction of the two algorithms is ostensibly different, in this report, we establish a direct link between them. We show that both algorithms in the run-time operation accomplish feature extraction/compensation by adding a posterior-based weighted sum of "correction vectors," or equivalently the column vectors in the fMPE projection matrix, to the original, uncompensated features. Although the published fMPE algorithm empirically motivates such a feature extraction, operation as "a reasonable starting point for training" our analysis proves that it is a natural consequence of the rigorous minimum mean square error (MMSE) optimization rule as developed in SPLICE. Further, we review and compare related speech-recognition results with the use of fMPE and SPLICE algorithms. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of discriminative training on the feature extraction parameters (i.e., projection matrix in fMPE and equivalently correction vectors in SPLICE). The analysis and comparison of the two algorithms provide useful insight into the strong success of fMPE and point to further algorithm improvement and extension.


Chloroplasts of the plant Arabidopsis convert light to metabolic energy--up to a point. When the incident light is simply too intense, the chloroplasts shuffle off to the sides of the cell to find some shade near the adjacent cells' walls. Under more moderate light conditions, the chloroplasts spread out over the face of the cell to capture as many photons as possible. Kagawa et al. have now identified a protein that helps regulate this process, NPL1, that resembles a known blue-light photoreceptor. Thus, the plant appears to fine-tune and protect its light-harvesting capabilities by using photoreceptors to direct subcellular compartmentalization. T. Kagawa, T. Sakai, N. Suetsugu, K. Oikawa, S. Ishiguro, T. Kato, S. Tabata, K. Okada, M. Wada, Arabidopsis NPL1: A phototropin homolog controlling the chloroplast high-light avoidance response. Science 291, 2138-2141 (2001). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Taking into consideration all the work that has been done in the field of regulating the learning processes that happen in one's own mind, there arises a thirst to review all the existing models of self- regulated learning that have been discovered and implemented until now. A considerable number of researchers and their research have long recognized the potential and benefits of the instructional tools available in digital learning environments (DLEs) which are particularly helpful for learners to develop self-regulated learning (SRL) behaviors. This has led to the discussion of a comprehensive analysis and zooming in to novel features in sheer volume of available literature, which is covered in this paper. A comprehensive analysis over models in chronological order is conducted under following aspects: model evaluation, measuring instruments for learning strategy and supported empirical results. Accumulating all this knowledge into this paper will rather be beneficial to researchers as they will obtain the required theoretical insights gained from the provided meta-analytic evidence. This will enable those people who work with digital learning environments to think about and explicitly take note of the degree to which learners have gained this novel capacity of self-learning.


The impetus for Inter-Professional Education (IPE) amongst the health and social care professions within higher education has been gaining pace over the past fifteen year. The exploratory research adds to the understanding of podiatry as a health profession involved with IPE. It comprises two studies which identify IPE stakeholders and policies, its delivery to undergraduate health and social care students, and its application to and perception by final year podiatry students. It uses mixed methods and a critical realist perspective to inform understanding of the different societal levels involved with IPE. A literature search of IPE stakeholders and policies directed semi-structured interviews with course developers, subsequently contrasted with IPE attitudes and concerns of podiatry students. A convenience sampple of seven lead developers of IPE was recruited from the thirteen UK universities that teach podiatry. Semi-structured telephone interviews were performed, with the transcripts undergoing a detailed content analysis. Q Methodology was utilised to reveal the views of forty-one podiatry students about IPE: their attitudes towards the subject and their concerns over its implementation. Findings indicate that IPE implementation is pragmatic and atheoretical with regards to best practice, though uses of educational theory and two frameworks are identified. Principles of Adult Education and experiential learning are common, facilitated within small groups of mixed health and social care students. Whilst some podiatry students are appreciative of IPE, others have more critical viewpoints, in particular of its professional relevance and facilitation. The research suggests further research into staff and student preparation for IPE, and exploration of the contrasting medical and social models of care implicit within IPE endeavours.


Personal construct theory and repertory grid technique provides a suitable framework for exploring Registered Nursing students' perceptions of their psychiatric practicum. This descriptive research was designed to understand students' own ways of constructing knowledge during their mental health clinical experience. A constructivist conceptual perspective and George Kelly's personal construct psychology were the theoretical bases of the research. A qualitative case study methodology allowed creation of and reflection on personal construct changes as provided in participants' review of repertory grid ideas about psychiatric nursing. The participants were six Canadian second-year nursing students in a Baccalaureate programme that integrated psychiatric and medical surgical nursing curricula. The following three overarching themes were identified and are used to explain and describe significant features of the psychiatric clinical experience: 1) students' anxiety related more to feeling unable to help than to interactions with mentally ill patients; 2) students' feelings of a lack of inclusion in staff nurse groups; 3) student emphasis on the importance of nonevaluated student-instructor discussion time.


I was led to philosophy by politics. There can be no foundation for political action except in ethics; and there can be no foundation for ethics except in some form of metaphysics, whether religious or other. And one cannot travel very far along the philosophic road— particularly if one has in mind the need of arriving at some definite destination—without finding as an obstacle the perennial problem of Free Will. It is an obstacle which has somehow to be crossed. It cannot be evaded or ignored. The man who is dealing with public affairs—with the principles of Criminal Law, for example, or with the factors that make for peace or war, and indeed with any of the major questions that confront our society—if he tries to think things out, is faced constantly by the problem of individual human responsibility; just as the man of religion is faced by it constantly.


Handling data needed by Building Energy Simulation (BES) tools can be a tedious task, especially at the urban scale. Besides BES, users often have different needs (building energy use, human comfort, integration of renewables, urban planning…) in mind when using simulation tools, but often have access to the same dataset. To simplify and harmonize the process of obtaining a homogeneous dataset, we make use of a PostgreSQL database in the CityGML file format using the Energy Application Domain Extension (ADE), which can be accessed remotely to retrieve data. CityGML with Energy ADE is an open data model with the objective of having a common platform to store and exchange 3D information and energy data between municipalities, professionals and researchers. The structure of the CityGML covers the following modules: geometry, construction, occupancy and energy systems. However, in the CityGML structure an important parameter to describe the city livability is missing: the outdoor human comfort. Considering this, we propose to further develop the database, by adding outdoor human comfort parameters and results. A case study of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) campus will be set-up, stored in the database and simulated with the software CitySim. The resulting human comfort indices will further be sent back to the improved database for an offline analysis with GIS tools. With this new development, the CityGML with Energy ADE can benefit from information on the urban microclimate and its impact on people activities and wellbeing.


Curiously, the thawing of frozen soils containing ice lenses has only been the subject of rare fundamental studies even though it is the cause of the greatest damage to constructions. The reduction of bearing capacity caused by the thawing of the ice lenses is a destructive phenomenon, and thus costly, which concerns roadway and railway infrastructures, as well as the melting of mountain permafrost by global warming. The present research, especially experimental, has tried to explain how ice lenses melt and how the water produced by the melting acts on soil properties, in particular on their deformability. Numerous freezing and thawing tests have been carried out in a testing apparatus including : A mould containing a specimen 150 mm in diameter and 300 mm in height. It is slightly conical in order to reduce the friction against its walls due to swelling. Numerous gauges placed on the sides and in the specimen in order to measure temperature, unfrozen water content and suction. Three cryostats, which control temperature at the head of the specimen (positive and negative), at its base (always positive) and outside of the thermal insulation placed against the mould. A micro-camera (endoscope), which moves in a translucent tube placed along the axis of the specimen, which enables animations of the growth and melting of ice lenses to be made. A press to enable loading and unloading cycles to be applied to the specimen. An X ray device using lead shot placed in the specimen, which enables the measurement of deformation in the entire specimen during the freezing and thawing cycles. All of the tests were carried out on one very frost–susceptible silt. Their duration of approximately two months excluded the possibility of carrying out tests on several types of frost–susceptible soils. Some numerical simulations permitted the verification of the thermal behaviour of the test apparatus. Then, previous freezing and thawing tests carried out at full scale on road pavements, carried out in a large test pit, were reinterpreted in order to obtain improved information on the deformability (resilient moduli) of the frost–susceptible infrastructure which was made up of a silt similar to that tested in the laboratory tests described above. The results of the laboratory tests and the reinterpretation of the full–scale measurements on road pavements were used for two very different practical applications : the design of roadway and railway pavements by quantitative methods using, in particular, resilient moduli and the formation of mountain permafrost and its thawing due to global warming. In the general field of the physical phenomenon of freezing and thawing of frost–susceptible soils, the very elaborate experiments permitted the measurement, with precision and reliability, of numerous parameters which are involved in the phenomena of freezing and thawing of fine-grained soils. However, most of these phenomena were already known and their parameters have been determined rather well by numerous experiments. This research has, nevertheless, permitted the quantification of certain parameters a bit better. The greatest contribution to the understanding of these phenomena has been the visualisation of the growth and the thawing of ice lenses inside the specimen using an endoscope, which has never been carried out previously. The resulting animations show extremely well how the ice lenses form and melt in a virtually natural soil. In the field of freezing and thawing design for roads and railways, the research has shown that the use of a thawing resilient modulus combined with modern numerical design methods is completely possible. This research has provided several values for this modulus : for the silt used in the full–scale test pit, for various frost–susceptible soils, and, by a more elaborate method, for the silt used in this research. Also concerning this field, it has shown how the resilient modulus may be used in modern numerical methods and how to determine it in the laboratory. The results of this research will thus be very useful for the work of the Swiss committee which will very soon address the revision of Swiss standards for the design of pavements for roads and railways. In the field of the construction of roads and railways, this research has confirmed that the water, which comes from the melting of ice lenses, flows toward the soil zone from where it has been extracted then transported toward the freezing front. Any drainage of the formation level is thus of no practical use. Finally, in the field of melting of permafrost due to global warming and the initiation of debris flows in mountain permafrost, this research has shown, first of all, the importance of the capillary suction regime in the formation of mountain permafrost, which has never been well explained until now. It has also shown how the use of sophisticated numerical models in the prediction of the melting of mountain permafrost and of the initiation of debris flows is possible. Such use, however, is difficult and should not be considered as a practical tool for common use in the prevention of these dangerous phenomena. This research has also provided a practical method for evaluating the degree of supersaturation of permafrost.


The objective of this study is to investigate automatic recognition of speech-evoked auditory brainstem responses (speech ABR) to the five English vowels (/a/, /ae/, /ɔ/, /i/ and /u/). We used different automatic speech recognition methods to discriminate between the responses to the vowels. The best recognition result was obtained by applying principal component analysis (PCA) on the amplitudes of the first ten harmonic components of the envelope following response (based on spectral components at fundamental frequency and its harmonics) and of the frequency following response (based on spectral components in first formant region) and combining these two feature sets. With this combined feature set used as input to an artificial neural network, a recognition accuracy of 86.3% was achieved. This study could be extended to more complex stimuli to improve assessment of the auditory system for speech communication in hearing impaired individuals, and potentially help in the objective fitting of hearing aids.


The cybersecurity risks to the nation's critical infrastructure and key resources are significant and increasing every day. While a sound legal basis exists for the government to use computer intrusion detection technology to protect its own networks, critical infrastructure and key resources which are primarily owned by the private sector are governed by a different set of constitutional principles and laws. This Article explores the potential for a new cybersecurity exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant and individualized suspicion requirements. By viewing cybersecurity through a protective Fourth Amendment lens, as opposed to a criminal, intelligence, or military lens, fairly well established legal frameworks from the physical world can be applied to cyberspace to enable the government to use technology to identify malicious digital codes that may be attacking the nation's critical infrastructure and key resources without running afoul of the Fourth Amendment. The Article argues that reasonable and limited digital scans at virtual checkpoints in cyberspace, which are binary and do not initially expose the contents of the communications to human review, are a constitutional and effective way to minimize the cybersecurity risks to the nation. The Article proposes that the Congress consider and enact sensible new legislation that will specifically enable the government to take remedial and other protective actions in cyberspace within the constitutional framework that has enabled this nation to prosper.


Mind body therapies appear to reduce morbidity and mortality in patients with cardiovascular diseases, but there is limited understanding of the mechanisms that mediate this effect. Vascular endothelial dysfunction is a central feature of atherogenesis that is adversely impacted by mental stress. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of mind body therapies on peripheral endothelial function in patients with and without established cardiovascular disease. The search included Medline, Cochrane Library, Scopus and Embase to identify studies up to November 2009. Eligible studies were randomized controlled trials that compared the effects of mind body therapies and placebo on endothelial function. Two reviewers extracted data on study characteristics, methods, and outcomes. Disagreement was resolved by consensus. Three eligible trials enrolled a total of 258 patients. Sixty one (24 percent) were women and 53 percent had established cardiovascular disease. The trials had good methodological quality. Meta-analysis using random-effects model showed a non significant improvement of endothelial function by mind body therapies (standardized mean difference 0.15; 95% CI, -0.36 to 0.67, P=0.56). The analysis was underpowered due to small sample size. Circumstantial evidence indicates that mind body therapies may have a therapeutic benefit on endothelial dysfunction, however, the aggregate data from the three small randomized trials to date do not support this hypothesis. This biologically plausible effect requires additional investigation in adequately powered studies.


The number of youth on the autism spectrum approaching young adulthood and attending college is growing. Very little is known about the subjective experience of these college students. Disability identification and self-efficacy are two subjective factors that are critical for the developmental and logistical tasks associated with emerging adulthood. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2 to examine the prevalence and correlates of disability identification and self-efficacy among college students on the autism spectrum. Results indicate nearly one-third of these students do not report seeing themselves as disabled or having a special need. Black race was associated with lower likelihood of both disability identification and self-efficacy.


To show global leadership and to foster the international negotiations for a long term international climate regime the EU has decided to reduce its GHG emissions by 20% relative to 1990 until the year 2020. These reductions will even rise to 30% if there is an international agreement committing other developed countries to comparable emission reductions and economically more advanced developing countries to contributing adequately according to their responsibilities and respective capabilities. At the same time, the European council started in 2000 the so-called Lisbon process which established the issue of competitiveness as a priority area for EU policy and there is some concern about the competitiveness effects of EU climate policy. We use the multi-sector, multi-region computable general equilibrium model DART to assess the impacts of the recent EU climate policy proposals for the competitiveness of the European economies and specific sectors. There are three general insights. First, the effects of EU climate policies on competitiveness are relatively small if one leaves out the fossil fuels themselves the consumption of which is supposed to be reduced anyway. The losses of the energy intensive industries are compensated by gains in other manufacturing sectors. Secondly, there is no uniform effect across the member states of the EU. It is the special circumstances in side the different sectors within the member states that determine whether a sector wins or looses competitiveness. And finally, the changes in competitiveness are strongly influenced by the choice of the particular policy design. A more efficient instrument choice not only reduces the competitiveness effects it also distributes the burden more equally.


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It is next to impossible to let a day go by without coming into contact with a computer system in some way, either by direct usage, or making a telephone call that is directed by computer systems. Due to the importance of computer systems we are all concerned with their quality, directly or indirectly, a malfunctioning system will disturb our lives in more or less drastic ways. Each stakeholder promotes his qualities and priorities for the system, and this will eventually lead to conflict, depending on relations between qualities. There is no simple solution to the problem of relating and conflicting quality attributes. But by making an informed decision it is possible to soften the effects of the trade-offs and gain a higher level of total software quality. The way to make an informed decision is to have knowledge about the relations between quality attributes along with insights of the consequences of the decision. This report gives a short introduction to the problem, and surveys both the relations stated within academia, and industry. The intention is to explore the knowledge present within academia and collect and present the established relations found by researchers. Further this report presents a survey carried out at companies working in different areas with software engineering, to show which relations that are visible to industry and how they are handling the relations between quality attributes. This gathered knowledge intends to support the ambition towards higher quality in software engineering.


The dynamical activity of the human brain describes an extremely complex energy landscape changing over time and its characterisation is central unsolved problem in neuroscience. We propose a novel mathematical formalism for characterizing how the landscape of attractors sustained by a dynamical system evolves in time. This mathematical formalism is used to distinguish quantitatively and rigorously between the different human brain states of wakefulness and deep sleep. In particular, by using a whole-brain dynamical ansatz integrating the underlying anatomical structure with the local node dynamics based on a Lotka-Volterra description, we compute analytically the global attractors of this cooperative system and their associated directed graphs, here called the informational structures. The informational structure of the global attractor of a dynamical system describes precisely the past and future behaviour in terms of a directed graph composed of invariant sets (nodes) and their corresponding connections (links). We characterize a brain state by the time variability of these informational structures. This theoretical framework is potentially highly relevant for developing reliable biomarkers of patients with e.g. neuropsychiatric disorders or different levels of coma.


OBJECTIVE
The anti-GnRH immunotherapeutic product Improvest was administered to intact male large flying foxes (Pteropus vampyrus) under managed care for androgen mitigation, leading to a decrease in agonistic behaviors, falls, and injuries from conspecific attention.

ANIMALS
12 males were included in this study.

PROCEDURES
Eleven bats received subcutaneous (SC) Improvest interscapular, and 1 animal received Improvest SC in its leg. Assessments included clinical presentation, treatment, behavior, and urine and fecal glucocorticoid metabolites and testosterone (T5) concentrations.

RESULTS
Eleven of the 12 bats developed reactions, which included facial edema, localized irritation, swelling of the head and neck, and pruritus with varying degrees of skin ulceration and subsequent necrosis. Three of the animals required extensive treatments, and the 1 animal who received the injection in its leg was unaffected. Posttreatment, fecal glucocorticoid metabolite and/or T5 values were at or below the nonbreeding season baseline for 3 successive breeding seasons, and there was a reduction in agonistic interactions, falls, and injuries.

CLINICAL RELEVANCE
A behavioral characteristic of this species is to focus on areas of irritation that exacerbated the extent of the skin wounds. Some cases required medical, surgical, and behavioral intervention. Large flying foxes may be particularly sensitive to this immunotherapeutic when given subcutaneously in the interscapular region. Despite this reaction, the positive long-term effects on behavior and multiyear reduction of hormones suggest that the use of this immunotherapeutic warrants further investigation, although the results should be taken into consideration with other factors such as handling, treatments, chronicity of lesions.


summary: the present study attempts to go beyond the traditional detection of simple correlations between sociological variables on the one side and indicators of health and illness on the other side. its aim is to show at the instance of a specificpopulation how social structural conditions become "translated" into personal well-being or illness. it concentrates, thereby, not only on social aspects of health and illness but tries to take the concept of personal well-being seriously and to elaborate its determination through a person's everyday experience in work and family life. well-being is measured by a question on general happiness and a scale of positive feeling states, health disturbances are measured by a scale of negative feelingstates and a scale of psychological distress derived from a list of illness symptoms. the concentration on aspects of 'social vulnerability', as it is manifested clearly in the investigated group of 1.370 young married and employed women in austria,makes it also possible to utilize the findings for health and social policy measures.;


We outline some components of a mentalist theory of human communicative competence. Communication in our species is an intentional and overt type of social interaction, based on each agent's capability of entertaining shared mental states and of acting so as to make certain mental states shared with the other. Communicative meaning is a matter of ascription: it is not an intrinsic property of a communicative act, but is instead created here and now as the shared construction of the interlocutors. We then discuss how communicative actions are superficially realized by our species, focusing in particular on the difference between linguistic and extralinguistic (that is, gestural) means of expression. Linguistic communication is the communicative use of a symbol system, whereas extralinguistic communication is the communicative use of a set of symbols. The difference turns out to be a matter of processing rather than of intrinsic structure.


This paper considers the attitudes and behaviours of university language lecturers and their students regarding the use of the L1 in the higher education L2 classroom. A case study of one Irish higher education institution was carried out and qualitative interviews conducted with six lecturers in Japanese and six in German. The results indicated widespread support among the participants for the judicious use of the L1 in limited instances, particularly where it can facilitate a reduction in cognitive overload and learner anxiety by, for example, the explanation of complex terminology, concepts and grammatical structures, as well as aiding in the creation of a relaxed classroom environment. Implications for the language classroom and for this field of research are considered.


Releasing all pairwise shortest path (APSP) distances between vertices on general graphs under weight Differential Privacy (DP) is known as a challenging task. In the previous attempt of (Sealfon 2016}, by adding Laplace noise to each edge weight or to each output distance, to achieve DP with some fixed budget, with high probability the maximal absolute error among all published pairwise distances is roughly $O(n)$ where $n$ is the number of nodes. It was shown that this error could be reduced for some special graphs, which, however, is hard for general graphs. Therefore, whether the approximation error can be reduced to sublinear in $n$ is posted as an interesting open problem. We break the linear barrier on the distance approximation error of previous result, by proposing an algorithm that releases a constructed synthetic graph privately. Computing all pairwise distances on the constructed graph only introduces $\tilde O(n^{1/2})$ error in answering all pairwise shortest path distances for fixed privacy parameter. Our method is based on a novel graph diameter (link length) augmentation via constructing"shortcuts"for the paths. By adding a set of shortcut edges to the original graph, we show that any node pair has a shortest path with link length $\tilde O(n^{1/2})$. Then by adding noises with some positive mean to the edge weights, we show that the new graph is differentially private and can be published to answer all pairwise shortest path distances with $\tilde O(n^{1/2})$ approximation error using standard APSP computation. Additionally, we consider the graph with small feedback vertex set number. A feedback vertex set (FVS) of a graph is a set of vertices whose removal leaves a graph without cycles, and the feedback vertex set number of a graph, $k$, is the size of a smallest feedback vertex set. We propose a DP algorithm with error rate $\tilde O(k)$.


[1] As the most destructive seismic episode ever known in eastern Taiwan, the 1951 M L 7.3 Hualien - Taitung earthquake series consisted of sequential ruptures along four distinct fault segments. It provides a good opportunity to study earthquake triggering processes along an active fault at an oblique arc-continent collision boundary. This sequence initiated on 21 October 1951 with the M L 7.3 Hualien main shock and a group of M6+ aftershocks nearby. The M L 6.0 Chihshang earthquake occurred 34 days later and 100 km away from the main shock. The M L 7.3 Yuli earthquake followed 3 m later and 5 km away from the Chihshang event. Two days later, the M L 6.0 Taitung earthquake shocked a region 40 km away from the preceding M6 event and completed the sequence. The first triggered rupture outside the main shock area did not occur on the nearby Yuli fault segment but occurred 100 km away at the Chihshang fault. Calculations of static Coulomb stress change show that most of the major aftershocks were located in areas of enhanced static stress change. However, the stress transfer alone cannot explain triggering across 100 km. With the rate/state stress transfer model, we computed the temporal order of encouraged ruptures on different segments along the collision boundary. The results show that 34 days following the major shocks in Hualien, the Chihshang segment had a higher M6+ (M ≥ 6) earthquake probability due to its significantly higher (at least an order of magnitude) background seismicity rate than the other two segments. After the Chihshang event, the rate/state model predicted a higher M6+ earthquake probability in the Yuli segment, also matching the observation. In this case, the Yuli segment was triggered ahead of the Taitung segment because of its larger increase in Coulomb stress change.


In the last years, the need for enhancing health and preventing problems with remote monitoring is increasing. A non-invasive low-cost technique for processing bio-signals and monitoring vital parameters, at rest and during physical activity, is the use of wearable PhotoPlethysmoGraphic (PPG) systems. However, in order to detect a relevant vital parameter, such as the heart rate during demanding exercises, motion artifacts must be removed from the signals retrieved. In this paper, we present a fast and easy to implement algorithm to estimate the heart rate value which does not need to reconstruct the noise-free signal nor does it apply adaptive filtering as existing algorithms, thus gaining computational time and stored memory space. The method consists of applying the Fast Fourier Transform on short windows of data and removing motion artifacts relying on single-sided amplitude spectrum analysis of PPG and 3-axis accelerometer signals. The results show that our algorithm manages to remove a wide range of motion artifacts achieving an average absolute error of only 1.27 BPM between the heart rate estimated by the algorithm every second and the ground-truth value. The method was successfully implemented on a wearable PPG device achieving an execution time of 226 ms per second, hence obtaining a battery lifetime of 9.37 days.


Deflection is the main criteria to evaluate the performance of the pipes and corrugations are added to pipes to increase the stiffness. In the relevant standards, ring stiffness is taken into account together with deformation. In this study, the state of strain–stress of the circular cylindrical shell under the uniform loads in the direction of the vertical diameter, distributed along a certain length of the generatrixes of the shell is investigated by the analytical and experimental methods. The obtained analytical results are applied to the investigation of the state of strain of the corrugated plastic pipes which are widely used in the construction of infrastructure facilities. Comparison of the obtained analytical and experimental data reveals their satisfactory agreement. The results enable to overcome the difficulties in assessing the data received during testing stiffness of corrugated pipes which are subjected to the vertical loads.


Recent environmental issues have become serious due to mass-production and disposal of oil-based plastic products. Thus reduction of the usage of plastics have been required. One of the methods is to utilize natural fiber reinforced plastics (FRP). The usage of FRP could reduce the amount of plastics as matrix and the weight of a structure. The usage of plant-based fiber also reduces environmental impact more than the usage of conventional FRP.


Abstract A six-compartment metabolic model for tritium accumulation by bivalves was developed and validated using two observed data sets supplied in an international IAEA program for validation of environmental models, EMRAS (Environmental Modeling for Radiation Safety, 2003-2007). The data observed were presented in scenarios for model prediction of temporal change of HTO and OBT concentrations in Barnes mussels (Elliptio complanata). In the Uptake Scenario, mussels were transplanted from a site with background tritium concentrations into a lake, which has historically received tritium inputs over time from upgradient waste management areas. Another data set was presented in the Depuration Scenario for model prediction of the temporal decrease in HTO and OBT concentrations in the mussels following transplantation from the lake into another lake with significantly lower tritium levels. The model simulation was able to reproduce the observation that the amount of hydrogen taken from sediment was very small compared with that taken from lake water.


The purpose of this article is to acknowledge the gap between research and practice in vocational rehabilitation (VR) and provide strategies for VR counselors to help bridge that gap. Evidence-based practice (EBP) and knowledge translation (KT) are two concepts that help the implementation of research into practice and have been adopted in health care and other related fields for many years. Although most research supports the implementation of these theories in health care settings, it is a fairly new concept in vocational rehabilitation. Many barriers, such as inadequate time, limited access to technology and research, and caseload size can inhibit the implementation of EBP and KT for VR counselors. The Knowledge-to-Action (KTA) framework helps to overcome some of these barriers and facilitate counselors' abilities to acquire, apply, and share knowledge and evidence-based approaches. More strategies for facilitating KT and EBP implementation for VR counselors are reviewed.