OBJECTIVES
To examine the diagnostic outcomes associated with clinical ankle synovitis in an early inflammatory arthritis cohort.

METHODS
Data from the Birmingham early inflammatory arthritis cohort (BEACON) were used to obtain information about baseline disease and demographic variables and diagnostic outcomes at 18 month follow-up. The prevalence of clinical ankle synovitis (defined as joint swelling on examination) was calculated. Relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) were used to estimate whether clinical ankle synovitis at baseline predicts diagnostic outcomes independent of age, sex, baseline 66-joint swollen joint count, and presence of either rheumatoid factor (RF) or anti-CCP antibody.

RESULTS
324 patients (52% women) were included. 103 had clinical ankle synovitis at the first clinic visit. Patients with bilateral ankle synovitis were more likely to be classified as having acute sarcoid arthritis (aRR (95%CI) 10.15 (1.13-90.89)). Among patients presenting with oligoarthritis and seronegative for RF and anti-CCP antibodies those with ankle synovitis were significantly more likely to be classified as having seronegative spondyloarthritis (RR (95%CI) 6.15 (1.58-23.88) and unclassified arthritis (RR (95%CI) 4.07 (1.05-15.81)) than RA.

CONCLUSIONS
Current predictive algorithms for patients with early arthritis focus on the prediction of RA or persistent arthritis. This alternative approach focused on a specific joint shows that baseline ankle synovitis predicts specific diagnostic outcomes besides RA. Future work should address the development of models to predict the totality of potential outcomes based on clinical phenotype and the results of routinely available investigations and clinical data.


The effect of a commercial beta-Mannanase enzyme (CTCZYME; CTC Bio Inc., Seoul, Korea) on broiler performance and dry matter output in corn-soybean meal diets was investigated. One hundred and twenty one-day-old male chicks of a commercial broiler strain were fed for 19 d on a nutritionally adequate diet based on corn and soybean meal. At that time birds were randomly allocated to four treatments, each of which had six replicates of five birds each. Aliquots of the basal diet were supplemented with four levels of the CTCZYME: 0%, 0.025%, 0.05% (recommended level) and 0.1%. Chromic oxide was used as an indigestible marker. After eight days of acclimation excreta was collected daily, weighed and dried at 130°C for 24 h to obtain the dry matter output. After seven days of excreta collection the birds were weighed and the experiment was terminated. There were no significant differences for body weight gain, feed conversion or feed intake. The addition of CTCZYME at the inclusion level of 0.05% and 0.1% significantly reduced (p<0.002) the daily dry matter excreta output per bird. Analysis of the excreta showed a reduction of the nitrogen level as the level of CTCZYME increased, indicating an improvement in nitrogen utilization by the bird. Gross energy of the excreta decreased as the inclusion level of the enzyme increased. When the inclusion levels of the enzyme increased, calcium and phosphorus levels increased, possibly due to a concentration effect. Higher levels of chromium in the excreta were observed with the increment of the enzyme, suggesting an improvement on the digestibility of the feed product of the effect of the betamannanase. These data indicate that nutrient digestibility is enhanced by the effect of CTCZYME. The reason for the increasing digestibility not affecting the broiler performance may be due to the short time the enzyme was included in the diet. Another possibility is that a change in carcass composition may have occurred; more protein could have been deposited on the carcass instead of fat when the enzyme was included but further studies are required to confirm this assumption. Also, it has to be taken into account that the dietary protein levels provided the needs for the bird and they probably did not need to assimilate the now more available amino acids due to the effect of CTZyme.


Academic librarian training for new faculty members is an essential yet tedious effort on the part of all stakeholders (trainer and trainee). An analysis of the large gaps in training experiences demonstrate that a variety of training programs exist for new academic librarian's during their orientation. This poster will serve as a visual representation on how new academic librarian training functions as "the elephant in the room" for experienced librarians and new hires as discussed in major library journals from 2011-2015. The poster will explore questions such as: (1) What constitutes formal vs. informal training programs? (2) To what frequency is library terminology used to describe the new academic librarian training process? (3) What does the literature reveal about a new hires' perspectives towards their training process? Through the use of graphs and charts, the authors will illustrate trends and gaps in librarian orientations. The goal of this poster is provide all visitors a blueprint to best practices and make recommendations for future new academic librarian orientations. The authors hope this poster initiates a dialogue amongst library science professionals regarding new hires' orientations; it functions as a progression towards eliminating the elephant in the room.


F ollowing thirty years of Washington Consensus policies, the new millennium saw Latin America adopt a wide range of new economic and social development policies that were leftist-oriented. A new role was seen for the state, including the state at local level. In Colombia, the city of Medellín has spearheaded this new movement for local activism, and the early results of this radical new trajectory have been positive. This Background Note argues that Medellín's progress in building a 'local developmental state' needs recognition for promoting enterprise and social inclusion. However, it also cautions against complacency, arguing that important adjustments are needed for more rapid and sustainable progress in combating poverty, underdevelopment and inequality in Medellín. The detrimental role of microenterprise development is highlighted as one important aspect of Medellín's policy package that needs rapid re-evaluation. This Background Note is based on field visits to Colombia in 2010 and early 2011, using data from roundtable discussions, case studies of microenterprises and key informant interviews carried out in Medellín.


Over 60 simple but incredibly effective recipes for taking control of OFBiz Optimize your OFBiz experience and save hours of frustration with this timesaving collection of practical recipes covering a wide range of OFBiz topics. Get answers to the most commonly asked OFBiz questions in an easy-to-digest reference style of presentation. Discover insights into OFBiz design, implementation and best practices by exploring real life solutions. Each recipe in this Cookbook is crafted to describe not only "how" to accomplish a specific task, but also "why" the technique works to ensure you get the most out of your OFBiz implementation. In Detail Apache Open For Business (Apache OFBiz) is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that provides a common data model and an extensive set of business processes. But without proper guidance on developing performance-critical applications, it is easy to make the wrong design and technology decisions. The power and promise of Apache OFBiz is comprehensively revealed in a collection of self-contained, quick practical recipes in this Cookbook. This book covers a range of topics from initial system setup to web application and HTML page creation, Java development, and data maintenance tasks. Focusing on a series of most commonly performed OFBiz tasks, this book provides clear, cogent, and easy-to-follow instructions designed to make the most of your OFBiz experience. Let this book be your guide to enhancing your OFBiz productivity by saving you valuable time. Written specifically to give clear and straight forward answers to the most commonly asked OFBiz questions, this compendium of OFBiz recipes will show you everything you need to know to get things done in OFBiz. Whether you are new to OFBiz or an old pro, you are sure to find many useful hits and handy tips here. Topics range from getting started to configuration and system setup, security and database management through the final stages of developing, and testing new OFBiz applications. Unlock the power and promise of Apache OFBiz with this comprehensive collection of concise, insightful and proven recipes, timesaving techniques and helpful hints. What you will learn from this book Learn OFBiz artifact organization and effective (OFBiz) project navigation skills. Configure OFBiz web applications and framework settings using various WebTools. Access and manage one or more database(s) using the OFBiz Entity engine. Create Java programs that call other OFBiz Services and utilities. Use Groovy to prepare data for web page presentation. Enhance existing OFBiz applications or create new ones, by implementing OFBiz Screen, Form, Tree and Menu Widgets. Create and deploy OFBiz Events and Services. Make easy administrative changes from the command line. Add web service client(s) and service provider features to your OFBiz instance. Minimize frustration and wasted time with straightforward recipes designed to get you up and running quickly. Approach The best way to experience OFBiz is to dive right in and start "kicking the tires". No matter if you are an end user exploring the out-of-the-box e-commerce web store or a software developer getting ready to build a new application, you will find, eventually, that you perform the same tasks over and over again. This book is designed as a reference to guide you through those oft encountered OFBiz tasks. It is a collection of recipes, not necessarily in any particular order of importance, that address and give answer to many of the very real world questions asked about how to do things with OFBiz. Who this book is written for If you are an OFBiz user who has some familiarity with enterprise software systems, and perhaps more importantly, Internet and Web exposure, you will be able to glean useful information from this book. For following some recipes you will need only basic knowledge of modern browser behavior (for example: how to click a mouse button) while others assume only a passing familiarity with a text-editor and XML documents. If you are a software developer looking for Java and/or Groovy examples, this book also includes a chapter on Java software development.


III-nitride quaternary InxAlyGa1-x-yN alloys have experienced considerable interest as potential materials for optoelectronic applications. Despite these interesting applications and the extensive efforts to understand their fundamental properties, research on its fundamental surface property, i.e., surface phonon polariton (SPP) has not yet been reported. In fact, the SPP properties have been shown to provide application for some photonic devices. Hence, there is an absolute need for thorough studies on the SPP properties of this material. In this work, theoretical study on the SPP modes in InAlGaN quaternary alloys are reported. Attention is focus on the wurtzite (α-) structure InxAlyGa1-x-yN semi-crystal with different In composition, x ranging from 0 to 0.10 and constant Al composition, y = 0.06. The SPP modes are obtained through the theoretical simulation by means of anisotropy model. The characteristics of SP dispersion curves are discussed. Accessible results in terms of the experimental point of view are also given. Finally, the results revealed that the SPP mode of α-InxAlyGa1-x-yN semiconductors exhibits two-mode behavior. Keywords—III-nitride semiconductor, attenuated total reflection, quaternary alloy, surface phonon polariton.


The taxonomic position of Backhousia anisata is reassessed on morphological and anatomical grounds and its affinities found to lie with the Acmena alliance. Backhousia anisata is glabrous and has a suite of wood anatomical character-states that are more consistent with a phylogenetic position in or near the Acmena alliance than with other Backhousia species; molecular data also support this placement. Since this species lacks the fleshy fruit, thick cotyledons and hypogeal germination characteristic of other members of the Acmena alliance, a new genus Anetholea Peter G.Wilson is described to accommodate it, and the new combination Anetholea anisata (Vickery) Peter G.Wilson made.


The purpose of the thesis is to contextualise my art works in theoretical terms. As counterpart to my art practice and consistent with its subject matter, the thesis deals with the handbag as subject and investigates the formation of an idiomatic, metaphorical or symbolic visual language that emerges in my handbag Collections. The thesis traces how such language pertains to social, cultural and personal history as sources of its conception to also serve as foundation for the conception of my art works. Its central questions are formulated around 'how', thus investigating the formative, the developmental and the process. Its thinking is relativist, embracing the belief that no option is absolute, but rather as susceptible to change as it is open to interpretation. As events of change and change inducing events, developmental processes are posed in a framework of generative structuralism that comprises the internalisation of externalities and the externalisation of internalities. As such it structures an attempt to define the genesis of my aesthetic idiolect in and from a cultural context. The thesis therefore posits its secondary aims as investigative rather than determinist of how social and cultural context informs my art-making processes and how generation and development occur in my art-making processes in order to determine how these factors contribute to a personal voice becoming evident in my work. My art practice and art works serve as primary sources of information and the thesis partially serves as a process of textual re-articulation of my own art-making practices to reveal the relationships between habitus as generative structure, enaction of identity and aesthetic idiolect.


Despite the potential for high-speed communications, stringent regulatory mandates on Ultra-Wideband (UWB) emission have limited its commercial success. By combining resolvable UWB multipath from different directions, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems can drastically improve link robustness or range. In fact, a plethora of algorithms and coding schemes already exist for UWB-MIMO systems, however these papers use simplistic channel models in simulation and testing. While the temporal characteristics of the UWB channel have been well documented, surprisingly there currently exists but a handful of spatial-temporal models to our knowledge, and only two for bandwidths in excess of 500 MHz. This paper proposes a comprehensive spatial-temporal model for the frequency spectrum 2-8 GHz, featuring many novel parameters. In order to extract the parameters, we conduct an extensive measurement campaign using a vector network analyzer coupled to a virtual circular antenna array. The campaign includes 160 experiments up to a non line-of-sight range of 35 meters in four buildings with construction material varying from sheetrock to steel.


The purpose of this paper is to prove for all positive integers n and r that if a family of n + 1 + 2r, or more, strongly convex sets on the n dimensional sphere S n is such that each intersection of n + 1 + r of them is empty, then the intersection of some n + 1 of them must be empty. (S n is the set of points in n + 1 dimensional Euclidean space satisfying x\ + x\ + + xί+i = 1. A set on a sphere is called strongly convex if it does not contain any pair of diametrically opposite or antipodal points, and if together with any two of its points it contains the whole of the minor arc of the great circle joining them.)


MicroRNAs are present in diverse organisms, including humans, and control processes such as cell division and cell death. Boehm et al. now extend that repertoire of functions to include aging. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, lin-4, a microRNA that is a key regulator of the stage-specific timing of cell division patterns during the larval stage, also influences the life span and the pace of aging in the adult. The microRNA and its target, lin-14, act in the insulin/insulin growth factor-1 signaling pathway to influence life span and the pace of aging. Loss of lin-4 shortens worm life span. A common mechanism thus serves to control the timing of two processes--development and aging. M. Boehm, F. Slack, A developmental timing microRNA and its target regulate life span in C. elegans. Science 310, 1954-1957 (2005). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The main focus of this paper is to address issues related with the impact of the small and medium size hydro power plants connected to the distribution network in Albania, respectively, to 35, 20, 10 and 6 kV distribution network. Considering the significant positive impact in generation they have had also an impact on the distribution system as far as the technical and financial aspects of the distribution network are concerned. The results of the analysis performed indicates that the Middle and South-East areas have been impacted from the deployment of hydro power plants in these area due to the increased power injected from these hydro power plants. Referring to the topology of the network, load demand, constrains and amortization of the distribution network, difficulties faced with the maintenance of the feeders and substations in the subject, this situation has created some problems and issues in respect of very high levels of the voltage in the substations during the minimum load consumption, overloaded of the distribution network as well as frequent outages of lines and feeders in some areas. The analyse performed supports the necessity of reinforcement of the network and the need of clear and strict rules to be followed in respect of connection point of hydro power plants into the distribution network, in order to guarantee a reliable and secured operation of the network and to contribute to the improvement of the performance indicators of the distribution network.


In this paper we study the sources of wage growth. We identify the contribution to such growth of general, sector specific and firm specific human capital. Our results are interpretable within the context of a model where the returns to human capital may be heterogeneous and where firms may offer different combinations of entry level wages and firm specific human capital development. We allow for the possibility that wages are match specific and that workers move jobs as a result of identifying a better match. To estimate the average returns to experience, sector tenure and firm specific tenure within this context, we develop an identification strategy which relies on the use of firm closures. Our data source is a new and unique administrative data-set for Germany that includes complete work histories as well as individual characteristics. We find positive returns to experience and firm tenure for skilled workers. The returns to experience for unskilled workers are small and insignificant after 2 years of experience. Their returns to sector tenure are also zero. However, their returns to firm tenure are substantial.


This paper elucidates the relationship between approaches of community development, participation and empowerment. Participation and empowerment are two important concepts of community development. The final goal of community development is empowering the communities and improving the quality of their lives. But, it is impossible to achieve this goal without participation and involvement of the community in particular projects. On the other hand, there are many definitions, types and models of participation.
Thus, the questions are: what type of participation that leads to empowerment? Do every type and model of participation leads to empowerment? This paper emphasizes on
participation as a mean and participation as an end. It will try to demonstrate that which types of this participation that can lead to empowerment. Since in participation as an end people directly involve in the project and they can take the control of decision that affect on their lives, it is concluded that participation as an end would leads to empowerment. Furthermore, there are many approaches in community development, namely top-down, bottom-up and partnership. Finally, this paper concludes that empowerment and type of participation as an end in bottom-up approach of community development will be high, and consequently the particular community will access to a sustainable development.


As the studies of Krugman (1994), Young (1994), and Lau and Kim (1994) showed, the East Asian economic miracle may be characterized as 'input-led' growth. However, both the stagnation in investment and the decrease in average working hours combined with a decrease in the fertility rate require a productivity surge for renewed, sustainable growth in East Asia. The purpose of our study is to identify the sources of economic growth based on a KLEMS model for Japan and the Republic of Korea, which experienced a 'Lost Decade' and a financial crisis in 1997-1998, respectively. We report estimates of multifactor productivity in the market economy of Japan and Korea based on the dataset of a 72-industry classification following EU KLEMS project guidelines. We also identify the contributions of ICT assets and resource reallocations in two economies. Both economies have strong ICT-producing sectors but relatively weaker ICT-usage effects. Lower productivity in service industries due to excessive regulations and lack of competition in public service sectors seem to have worked against enhancing ICT-usage effects and finding renewed sustainable growth paths. The resource reallocation effects of capital input in both Japan and Korea were either negligible or insignificant, while those of labor input (the labor shift from lower wage industries to higher wage industries) were positive and significant. Therefore, a series of productivity-enhancing policies designed to promote reallocation of capital input seems crucial for both economies to resume sustainable growth paths.


In the works of K.A. Pericak-Spector and S. Spector [9, 10] a class of self-similar solutions are constructed for the equations of radial isotropic elastodynamics that describe cavitating solutions. Cavitating solutions decrease the total mechanical energy and provide a striking example of non-uniqueness of entropy weak solutions (for polyconvex energies) due to pointsingularities at the cavity. To resolve this paradox, we introduce the concept of singular limiting induced from continuum solution (or slic-solution), according to which a discontinuous motion is a slic-solution if its averages form a family of smooth approximate solutions to the problem. It turns out that there is an energetic cost for creating the cavity, which is captured by the notion of slic-solution but neglected by the usual entropic weak solutions. Once this cost is accounted for, the total mechanical energy of the cavitating solution is in fact larger than that of the homogeneously deformed state. We also apply the notion of slic-solutions to a one-dimensional example describing the onset of fracture, and to gas dynamics in Langrangean coordinates with Riemann data inducing vacuum in the wave fan.


Objective: To assess neuropathology in individuals with restless legs syndrome (RLS). Methods: A standard neuropathologic evaluation was performed on seven brains from individuals who had been diagnosed with RLS. The substantia nigra was examined in greater detail for iron staining and with immunohistochemistry for tyrosine hydroxylase and proteins involved in iron management. Five age-matched individuals with no neurologic history served as controls. Results: There were no histopathologic abnormalities unique to the RLS brains. Tyrosine hydroxylase staining in the major dopaminergic regions appeared normal in the RLS brains. Iron staining and H-ferritin staining was markedly decreased in the RLS substantia nigra. Although H-ferritin was minimally detected in the RLS brain, L-ferritin staining was strong. However, the cells staining for L-ferritin in RLS brains were morphologically distinct from those in the control brains. Transferrin receptor staining on neuromelanin-containing cells was decreased in the RLS brains compared to normal, whereas transferrin staining in these cells was increased. Conclusions: RLS may not be rooted in pathologies associated with traditional neurodegenerative processes but may be a functional disorder resulting from impaired iron acquisition by the neuromelanin cells in RLS. The underlying mechanism may be a defect in regulation of the transferrin receptors.


I proposed that both Bruner's (1963) idea of the spiral curriculum and Yenawine's (1992) theories of teaching for visual literacy in the museum set the stage for significant learning for students when used together. If school teachers lay a foundation of knowledge about a museum object, especially through museum resources, then the student may transform and apply this 'prior knowledge' (explicit memories from the classroom) while on the museum visit tour. When docents utilize Yenawine's (1992) methods toward the goal of visual literacy, the semantic knowledge of the classroom is then fused with museum learning, building stronger memories and facilitating deeper understanding as students learn about museum objects. This research explored the correlation of these two theories in a qualitative manner based on observations of actual museum visit preparation in classrooms in Casper, Wyoming, and how it related to a museum tour at the Nicolaysen Art Museum and Discovery Center. The research revealed that conditions do exist within the community that would facilitate Bruner's (1963) idea of a learning spiral, yet not in the manner envisioned. The observed conditions toward a spiral was accomplished through the participant teachers relating the museum exhibit to their operational curriculum in a variety of curricular areas, such as language arts and science, when docents related the tour to classroom learning, and not through museum resources or Yenawine's (1992) methods toward increasing visual literacy, as was previously considered.


Abstract. Atmospheric sounding using the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is a well-established research field in Europe. At present, GNSS data from 1800 stations are available for model validation and assimilation in state-of-the-art models used for operational numerical weather prediction centres in Europe. Advances in GNSS data processing make it possible also to use the GNSS data for climatic trend analysis, an emerging new application. In Bulgaria and southeastern Europe, the use of GNSS for atmospheric sounding is currently under development. As a first step, the Sofia University Atmospheric Data Archive (SUADA) is developed. SUADA is a user-friendly database, and includes GNSS tropospheric products like zenith total delay (ZTD) and derivatives like vertically integrated water vapour (IWV), as well as observations from radiosonde (RS) and surface atmospheric data. Archived in SUADA are (1) GNSS tropospheric products (over 12 000 000 individual observations) and derivatives (over 55 000) from five GNSS processing strategies and 37 stations for the period 1997–2013, with temporal resolutions from 5 min to 6 h, and (2) radiosonde IWV data (over 6000 observations) for station Sofia (1999–2012). Presented are two applications of the SUADA data for the study of long- and short-term variations of IWV over Bulgaria during the 2007 heatwave and intense precipitation events in 2012.


The European crisis has provoked widespread critique of capitalist arrangements in most if not all countries in Europe. But to what extent do contemporary social protest and critique indicate a revival of critical capacity? The range of criticisms against the existing capitalist system raised by various social movements is seen as ineffectual and fragmented. Such observations are mirrored in sociological analyses of the critique of capitalism. A distinct type of critique of capitalism has, however, not been explicitly conceptualized. This political critique, denouncing the depoliticization and the erosion of autonomy resulting from capitalist arrangements, indicates the crucial role of the political in formulating common projects. The article will, first, briefly discuss Boltanski and Chiapello's historical identification of forms of critique of capitalism as well as the contemporary relevance of these. In a second step, it will conceptualize and in a way recuperate a political critique of capitalism. In a third step, it will show that the contours of a critique that explicitly refers to the political is available in the contemporary European context, not least in claims made by movements that pursue a 'Europe of the Commons' and an 'alternative Europe'.


In liquid-propellant chemical propulsion systems, the liquid fuel and oxidizer are atomized by impinging jet atomization, mixed and combustions will occur due to auto-ignition inside a chamber. It is important for a performance prediction to simulate the primary atomization phenomenon; especially, the local mixture ratio can be used as indicator of thrust performance, so it is useful to evaluate it from numerical simulations. In this research, to predict local mixture ratio distribution downstream from an impingement point, we propose a numerical method for considering bi-liquid and the mixture and install it to CIP-LSM which is a two-phase flow simulation solver with level-set and MARS method as an interfacial tracking method. A new parameter,β, which is defined as the volume fraction of one liquid in the mixed liquid within a cell is introduced and the solver calculates the advection of β, inflow and outflow flux ofβ to a cell. SMART method is used for the interpolating value in a cell. By validating this solver, we conducted a simple experiment and the same simulation. From the result, the solver can predict the penetrating length of a liquid jet correctly and it is confirmed that the solver can simulate the mixing of liquids. Then we apply this solver to the numerical simulation of impinging jet atomization. From the result, the inclination angle of fan after the impingement in the bi-liquid condition reasonably agrees with the theoretical value. Also, it is seen that the mixture of liquids can be simulated in this result. We validate the numerical method by comparing numerical results with the experimental results with local mass flux and mixture ratio distributions.


Women's empowerment is an important aim of the development activities of Non -Government Organizations (NGOs) in Bangladesh. In a patriarchal society, women experience discrimination and their participation in decision making processes often is not allowed in domestic, political and economic affairs. Most women's organizations mainly work to create a better, non-discriminatory, and equal society for women. To focus on this goal, these organizations often are not conscious of democracy at their own workplaces and equal participation of their members and employees in decision making. In addition, only a small amount of scholarship has been concerned with the structures and governance, organizational democracy, and women's participatory roles in organizational decision making. By using a multiple case study design, this research explores the ways four advocacy women's NGOs in Bangladesh promote women's empowerment and equality at the organizational level and how organizational structures and internal decision making processes help NGOs to achieve these goals. None of the organizations has pure democratic or bureaucratic structure and participatory decision making process. More democratic organizational structures or participatory decision making processes are more effective in promoting more cognitive and psychological empowerment of its members and employees.


Prostate cancer is the most occurring form of cancer in men in Sweden and new candidates for treatment towards advanced phases of prostate cancer needs to be investigated. One suggested treatment is vitamin D which will mediate effect via VDR and PDIA3 and cause cell cycle arrest. Another treatment is digitoxin which will cause accumulation of intracellular Ca leading to apoptosis. The aim of the project of was to investigate potential synergistic effects of 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 and digitoxin in prostate cancer cell lines and find out effects mediated by PDIA3. DU145 and LNCaP cells were seeded and treated with 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 (10, 10, 10 M), digitoxin (25 ng/ml and 50 ng/ml) and four combinations of 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 and digitoxin. Cell viability assay was performed for determining the number of viable cells. Treatment with 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 10M + digitoxin 50ng/ml (68%), 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 10M + digitoxin 25ng/ml (39%), 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 10M + digitoxin 50ng/ml (69%), digitoxin 25ng/ml (26%) and digitoxin 50 ng/ml (44%) was statistically significant with increased cell viability compared to untreated control in DU145 after 48h of treatment. Treatment with 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 10M (12%) and 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 10M (12%) was statistically significant with increased cell viability compared to untreated control in LNCaP after 24h of treatment. The conclusion based on results from this study is that a combination of digitoxin and 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 does not inhibit cell viability in DU145 or LNCaP cancer cell lines.


A new coding and queue management algorithm is proposed for communication networks that employ linear network coding. The algorithm has the feature that the encoding process is truly online, as opposed to a block-by-block approach. The setup assumes a packet erasure broadcast channel with stochastic arrivals and full feedback, but the proposed scheme is potentially applicable to more general lossy networks with link-by-link feedback. The algorithm guarantees that the physical queue size at the sender tracks the backlog in degrees of freedom (also called the virtual queue size). The new notion of a node ldquoseeingrdquo a packet is introduced. In terms of this idea, our algorithm may be viewed as a natural extension of ARQ schemes to coded networks. Our approach, known as the drop-when-seen algorithm, is compared with a baseline queuing approach called drop-when-decoded. It is shown that the expected queue size for our approach is O[(1)/(1-rho)] as opposed to Omega[(1)/(1-rho)2] for the baseline approach, where rho is the load factor.


To the Editor: The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) is withdrawing the abstract (A31) of Paper Presentation, ''Fondaparinux is superior to enoxaparin for venous thromboembolism prevention in major orthopedic surgery irrespective of patient characteristics,'' presented at its 2003 Annual Scientific Meeting by Turpie AG, Bauer KA, Eriksson BI et al. A synopsis of the same abstract was also published in J Am Geriatr Soc 2003; 51(suppl 4):S37. This abstract is being withdrawn after a review by the AGS Research and Executive Committees identified violations of AGS submission guidelines. The results reported in this presentation were not original, previously unpublished, research. In addition, the authors were not directly involved with the conduct of the research that was presented.


The trend toward assortative mating is the rule in Western societies for a large series of factors. The case for personality variables is however not clear, since weak and even negative relationships have been found in correlation analyses between spouses. The present study compared the profiles of members from 145 stable couples living together for more than 5 years, and representative of the Belgian population. Personality measurements were performed using Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), in order to: 1) determine whether the subject's TCI predicts the partner's profile; 2) determine whether modeling has an important influence between the partners; 3) describe the behavior of personalities with extreme traits; 4) measure whether personalities with extreme traits would favor complementarity over homogamy. In all dimensions but Harm Avoidance and its sub-dimensions, positive associations were found between the partners, indicating a trend toward assortative mating. These differences were significant for Novelty Seeking, Reward Dependence, Persistence and Cooperativeness. Trends were observed in Self-Directedness and Self-Transcendence. Subjects with extreme personality traits were not shown to favor complementarity over assortative mating. Homogamy was thus confirmed here for a series of personality traits, independently of the TCI Temperament or Character classification and on the subjects position in the distribution.


In little more than two centuries Prussia rose from medieval obscurity and the devastation of the Thirty Years War to become the dominant power of continental Europe. Her rulers rose from Electors to Kings, and from Kings to Emperors. It is a dramatic story, and H. W. Koch fills a major gap in English-language literature with this comprehensive account. It traces the origins and rise of the Prussian state from the thirteenth century to the causes and consequences of its incorporation into the German Empire.


This thesis explores the Australian State response to the voyage facilitators of maritime asylum seekers, commonly known as 'people smugglers'. It does so by examining a number of Parliamentary debates and previously confidential Cabinet papers. Negative depictions of asylum seekers and their voyage facilitators as well as the prevailing political discourse is critically explored while Parliamentary debates are analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis. The research questions the ways Australian legislators justified the criminalisation of these voyage facilitators and investigates whether political elites were sufficiently informed about the circumstances of maritime asylum seeker journeys and the unique nature of their travel arrangements. The analysis is conducted within the container of established asylum seeker rights as formulated by the United Nations is its 1951 Refugee Convention. Within the Australian context these are framed as the "rights of unauthorised arrivals". By examining de-classified Fraser government documents, the thesis presents evidence of the State's intent to criminalise 'people smugglers' as part of a two-fold strategy, aiming to also punish maritime asylum seekers for arriving uninvited. This strategy was first proposed under the Fraser government soon after the first asylum seeker vessels arrived in Australia during the late 1970s. The research findings indicate that the increasingly harsh measures imposed by successive Australian governments targeting smugglers and passengers represents an increasingly punitive and continuous series of policy proposals and parliamentary discourse, where the voyage facilitators became the recipients of criminal labels such as "traffickers" and "smugglers" while 1980 legislative measures determined them to be serious criminals. The research also analyses legislative measures aiming to impose criminal sanctions implemented by the Howard government in 1999, and legislation that established a wide range of extended powers to Australian border officials in dealing with 'unauthorised' vessels entering Australian waters. Both legislative measures were responses to a number of undetected entries by vessels with Chinese migrants in the lead-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. This section of the research explores the dominant "national security" narrative constructed by Australia's conservative political elites in order to justify the legislation criminalising 'people smugglers'. The research presents documented evidence that the Howard government withheld details of the Chinese Evil Smugglers or Extreme Rhetoric? page xi arrivals from Parliament for 'operational reasons' and that the Immigration Department attempted to influence political debates by means of distributing a manipulative briefing document in the Parliament. Post-research participant interviews present evidence that Prime Minister John Howard's Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock held the view that nobody has the right, neither by air nor by boat, to enter Australia to seek asylum. The research concludes that the legislative measures criminalising 'people smugglers' were not presented in order to fight transnational people trafficking but that they were instead presented and passed by the Parliament to 'stop the boats' and to further deter assisted asylum voyages into Australia by regarding such ventures as illegal without due regard for the UN Refugee Convention.


Internet technologies are having a significant impact on the learning industry. For-profit organizations and traditional institutions of higher education have developed and are using web-based courses, but little is known about their effectiveness compared to traditional classroom education. Our work focuses on the effectiveness of a web-based virtual learning environment (VLE) in the context of basic information technology skills training.

This article provides three main contributions. First, it introduces and defines the concept of VLE, discussing how a VLE differs from the traditional classroom and differentiating it from the related, but narrower, concept of computer aided instruction (CAI). Second, it presents a framework of VLE effectiveness, grounded in the technology-mediated learning literature, which frames the VLE research domain, and addresses the relationship between the main constructs. Finally, it focuses on one essential VLE design variable, learner control, and compares a web-based VLE to a traditional classroom through a longitudinal experimental design.

Our results indicate that, in the context of IT basic skills training in undergraduate education, there are no significant differences in performance between students enrolled in the two environments. However, the VLE leads to higher reported computer self-efficacy, while participants report being less satisfied with the learning process.


The cultivation of wheat (Triticum spp. L.) has been on for thousands of years and is commonly used in animal feed and human food in many regions of Turkey. Therefore, wheat is considered to be one of the most important grain cereals in Turkey. Wheat germ is another important by-product of the wheat milling industry constituting relatively small amount of the whole wheat grain by volume. However, the wheat germ is an important nutritional natural resource, which contains important fatty acids and minerals. Both the wheat germ and wheat germ oil are usually utilized in food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries increasingly, today. In this study, both the distribution of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids and the mineral contents of wheat germ of the Turkish samples were reported. The fatty acids were analyzed after Soxhlet extraction and derivatization by gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS), whereas the mineral contents were analyzed by various techniques, such as N being determined by the dry combustion method using elemental analyses, P measured by a colorimetric method, whereas K and Na was measured by flame photometry. Finally, the elements Ca, Mg, Fe, Cu, Zn and Mn were detected and quantified by atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS), respectively. The compositions were 19.9% saturated fatty acid and 80.1% of unsaturated fatty acids. The major components of the germ oil were identified as linoleic acid (56.1%), palmitic acid (17.4%) and oleic acid (17.4%).

 Key words: Triticum spp, wheat germ oil, fatty acids, elements and minerals, gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS), atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS).


FPGAs offer high performance coupled with energy efficiency, making them extremely attractive computational resources within a cloud ecosystem. However, to achieve this integration and make them easy to program, we first need to enable users with varying expertise to easily develop cloud applications that leverage FPGAs. With the growing size of FPGAs, allocating them monolithically to users can be wasteful due to potentially low device utilization. Hence, we also need to be able to dynamically share FPGAs among multiple users. To address these concerns, we propose a methodology and a runtime system that together simplify the FPGA application development process by providing: 1) a clean abstraction with high-level APIs for easy application development; 2) a simple execution model that supports both hardware and software execution; and 3) a shared memory-model which is convenient to use for the programmers. Akin to an operating system on a computer, our lightweight runtime system enables the simultaneous execution of multiple applications by virtualizing computational resources, i.e., FPGA resources and on-board memory, and offers protection facilities to isolate applications from each other. In this paper, we illustrate how these features can be developed in a lightweight manner and quantitatively evaluate the performance overhead they introduce on a small set of applications running on our proof of concept prototype. Our results demonstrate that these features only introduce marginal performance overheads. More importantly, by sharing resources for simultaneous execution of multiple user applications, our platform improves FPGA utilization and delivers higher aggregate throughput compared to accessing the device in a time-shared manner.


This paper presents a network security laboratory project for teaching network traffic anomaly detection methods to electrical engineering students. The project design follows a research-oriented teaching principle, enabling students to make their own discoveries in real network traffic, using data captured from a large IP darkspace monitor operated at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Although darkspace traffic does not include bidirectional conversations (only attempts to initiate them), it contains traffic related to or actually perpetrating a variety of network attacks originating from millions of Internet addresses around the world. This breadth of coverage makes this darkspace data an excellent choice for a hands-on study of Internet attack detection techniques. In addition, darkspace data is less privacy-critical than other network traces, because it contains only unwanted network traffic and no legitimate communication. In the lab exercises presented, students learn about network security challenges, search for suspicious anomalies in network traffic, and gain experience in presenting and interpreting their own findings. They acquire not only security-specific technical skills but also general knowledge in statistical data analysis and data mining techniques. They are also encouraged to discover new phenomena in the data, which helps to ignite their general interest in science and engineering research. The Vienna University of Technology, Austria, first implemented this laboratory during the summer semester 2014, with a class of 41 students. With the help of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at UCSD, all exercises and IP darkspace data are publicly available.


Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made significant changes to the way it conducts economic analyses of regulatory actions. Changes in the assumptions and methods used in regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) have produced fundamentally different conclusions about the economic benefits and costs of significant regulations. At the same time, the EPA has eliminated its Environmental Economics Advisory Committee (EEAC), which had provided external review of key inputs to the agency's benefit–cost analyses, such as the value of a statistical life. This article describes the history and activities of the EEAC to increase understanding of the role it served and what has been lost by eliminating it. In addition, we discuss our own experience as recent EEAC members. We also present examples of the very different results produced by the Obama and Trump administrations' economic analyses of the same EPA rules to illustrate why external review is so important for ensuring that economic analyses are credible, robust, and not influenced by political agendas.


Across immigrant-receiving democracies, "multiculturalism" has come under assault by political decision-makers and pundits. The academic debate, while less fiery, is also heated. We start by outlining the multiple meanings of "multiculturalism:" a term for demographic diversity; a political philosophy of equality or justice; a set of policies to recognize and accommodate ethno-racial and religious diversity; or a public discourse recognizing and valorizing pluralism. We then review the existing empirical literature and offer some new statistical analyses to assess what we know about the harm or benefits of multicultural policies, focusing in particular on socio-political outcomes. We conclude that multicultural policies appear to have some modest positive effects on socio-political integration for first generation immigrants, and likely little direct effect, positive or negative, on those in the second generation. On the question of majority backlash, the limited scholarship is mixed; we speculate that multiculturalism work best in places where both minorities and majority residents see it as part of a common national project. We end by considering the conditions under which this happens and whether there are distinctions between "Anglo-settler" and other countries.


Accidents caused by the bite of spiders of the genus Latrodectus have been known since olden times (22), being rather frequent in the United States, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Uruguay and Argentina (Latrodectus mactans); Australia and New Zealand (Latrodectus hasseltii); Italy, Spain and Russia (Latrodectus tredecimguttatus); South Africa (Latrodectus indistinctus) and Madagascar (Latrodectus menavodi). In Argentina we have recorded hundreds of cases (Latrodectus mactans).
Eight species of this genus have been described: Latrodectus pallidus (Cambridge, 1872); L. hystrix (Simon, 1889); L. tredecimguttatus (Rossi, 1770); L. geometricus (Koch, 1841); L. foliatus (Mello Leitao, 1940); L. concinnus (Cambridge, 1905); L. indistinctus (Cambridge, 1905) and L. mactans (Fabricius, 1775). L. pallidus, L. hystrix, L. geometricus and L. mactans ought to be considered as fundamental species (11). The 12,000 spiders used in our investigations belonged to the species L. mactans (Gerschman and Schiapelli). We also experimented with L. geometricus.


The type system in the Dart programming language is deliberately designed to be unsound: for a number of reasons, it may happen that a program encounters type errors at runtime although the static type checker reports no warnings. According to the language designers, this ensures a pragmatic balance between the ability to catch bugs statically and allowing a flexible programming style without burdening the programmer with a lot of spurious type warnings. In this work, we attempt to experimentally validate these design choices. Through an empirical evaluation based on open source programs written in Dart totaling 2.4 M LOC, we explore how alternative, more sound choices affect the type warnings being produced. Our results show that some, but not all, sources of unsoundness can be justified. In particular, we find that unsoundness caused by bivariant function subtyping and method overriding does not seem to help programmers. Such information may be useful when designing future versions of the language or entirely new languages.


People tend to make self-aggrandizing social comparisons on traits that are important to the self. However, existing research on the better-than-average effect (BTAE) and trait importance does not distinguish between personal trait importance (participants' ratings of the importance of certain traits to themselves) and cultural trait importance (participants' perceptions of the importance of the traits to the cultural group to which they belong). We demonstrated the utility of this distinction by examining the joint effects of personal importance and cultural importance on the BTAE among Hong Kong Chinese and American participants. Results showed that the BTAE was more pronounced for personally important traits among both Chinese and American participants. More important, the magnitude of the BTAE was smaller on culturally important traits among Chinese participants only. Chinese participants displayed the strongest BTAE on personally important and culturally unimportant traits, and the smallest BTAE on personally unimportant and culturally important ones. American participants showed the smallest BTAE on personally and culturally unimportant traits. These findings underscore the importance of distinguishing personal trait importance and cultural trait importance in understanding the cultural effects on self-aggrandizing social comparisons. They further suggest that in cultures where people are expected to be modest in self-expression (e.g., Chinese culture), people would avoid claiming superiority on highly culturally important traits even when these traits are important to the self.


Antipredatory behavioral responses tend to be energetically expensive, and prey species thus need to resolve trade-offs between these behaviors and other activities such as foraging and mating. While these trade-offs have been well-studied across taxa, less is known about how costs and benefits vary in different life-history contexts, and associated consequences. To address this question, we compared responses of the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti [Diptera: Culicidae]) to predation threat from guppy (Poecilia reticulata [Cyprinodontiformes: Poeciliidae]) across two life-history stages-larvae (data from previous study) and pupae (from this study). Pupae are motile but do not feed and are comparable to larvae in terms of behavior. To understand how physiological costs affect the threat sensitivity of pupae, we used sex (with size as a covariate) as a proxy for stored energy reserves, and quantified movement and space use patterns of male (small-sized) and female (large-sized) pupae when exposed to predation threat. We found that pupae did not alter movement when exposed to predator cues but instead altered spatial use by spending more time at the bottom of the water column. We found no effect of pupa sex (or size) on the behavioral responses we measured. We conclude that pupa behavior, both antipredatory and otherwise, is primarily targeted at minimizing energy expenditure, as compared with larval behavior, which appears to balance energy expenditure between the opposing pressures of foraging and of avoiding predation. We suggest that antipredatory defenses in metamorphosing prey are modulated by varying energetic trade-offs associated with different life-history stages.


The current drought in California and the western U.S. are set in the framework of drought persistence, drought forecasting and reducing the consequences of droughts. During the fifteen year period from 1975-1990, six years have been significantly below average in precipitation and runoff in California and the western U.S. Reducing drought consequences can be achieved through an expanded use of ground water recharge during wet years and expanded ground water pumpage during dry years. Legal and institutional barriers are currently delaying an increased usage of this water management scheme.


This article argues that the traditional debates between the expressive and compensatory views of tort law ignore the way in which an injury may itself have an expressive component, one that in turn increases the extent of physical harm suffered by a victim. I take up the example of informed consent in the medical malpractice context to show how an excessively narrow idea of physical harm has negative consequences for tort law in general. In these situations, when a physician performs a procedure without providing the patient with sufficient information, we can better understand the harm that occurs through a combination of civil recourse theory and new insights from the field of narrative medicine. Under the current regime, the effort to cabin potential liability for physicians' well-intended conduct has resulted in a disconnect between a negligence standard — with its requirement of strictly physical injury — and the actual harm in question, which has historically been recognized as at least partially dignitary. I argue that this disconnect can be resolved through a broader view of the nature of the injury suffered when a physician performs an inadequately authorized procedure. A more appropriate view would take into account the newly understood, long-term physical harms that arise when a physician coopts a patient's subjective knowledge about and narrative control over his body. I then argue that by focusing on remedies that consider the relational quality of the injury imposed on patients in these cases tort scholars can be more responsive to actual harms, not only in the case of informed consent but throughout the tort regime generally.


The objective of this research was to estimate the effect of using bur extractors in cotton stripping on foreign material in harvested cotton, on both quality attributes and lint turnout, and to determine the minimum harvested acres a producer must have for a bur extractor to be cost effective. Results indicate that the bur extractor has significant effect in reducing bur percent, stick percent, and in increasing seed cotton percent and lint turnout, while is showed no statistically significant effect on any of the quality attributes. Results also suggest that investment in bur extractors is profitable for both irrigated and dryland cotton production situations with an operation of at least 750 acres. This study provides a simple method that can be employed by producers of stripper-harvested cotton to determine the cost effectiveness of a bur extractor given individualized production scenarios.


ABSTRACT The Hippo signalling pathway and its transcriptional co-activator targets Yorkie/YAP/TAZ first came to attention because of their role in tissue growth control. Over the past 15 years, it has become clear that, like other developmental pathways (e.g. the Wnt, Hedgehog and TGFβ pathways), Hippo signalling is a 'jack of all trades' that is reiteratively used to mediate a range of cellular decision-making processes from proliferation, death and morphogenesis to cell fate determination. Here, and in the accompanying poster, we briefly outline the core pathway and its regulation, and describe the breadth of its roles in animal development. Summary: This Development at a Glance article describes the core Hippo pathway, its regulation and the roles it plays in animal development.


With the increasing consumer demand for smart objects, LED-to-Camera communication appears as a low-cost alternative to radio to make any conventional device smart. Since LEDs are already on most electronics devices, that is achieved at the cost of negligible hardware modifications. However, as these LEDs are very different from the widely studied ceiling ones, several challenges need to be addressed to make this happen. Among these issues, we note the constrained physical layer data unit (PHY-SDU) length that complicates the use of coding strategies to cope with bits or packets erasure. To break this limitation, this paper presents SeedLight, a coding scheme designed to face the inherent packet losses and enhance line-of-sight LED-to-Camera communication goodput. SeedLight leverages random linear coding to provide an efficient redundancy mechanism that works even on PHY-SDU of tens of bits. The key idea of SeedLight is to reduce the code overhead by replacing the usual coding coefficients by a seed. Since this work addresses IoT devices with low computational resources, SeedLight encoding algorithm complexity remains low. We develop an implementation of SeedLight on a low-cost MCU and a smartphone to evaluate both the communication and algorithmic performances. Experimental results show that SeedLight introduces a negligible overhead and can be implemented even on the cheapest MCU, such as the ones used in many IoT devices. The achievable goodput can be up to 2.5kbps, while the gain compared to a trivial retransmissions scheme is up to 100%.


We have constructed a novel ring cavity for a double-clad thulium-doped fiber laser, by placing the fiber's 45 degrees angle-polished output end before the input end and relaunching the pump and the laser power into the fiber. This design can reduce reabsorption by using short fibers without loss of pump efficiency. The dependence of the laser's performance on the fiber's length and the output coupler's reflectivity is investigated experimentally and theoretically. With an 80-cm-long fiber, 2.7-W single-mode continuous-wave output is generated for 11.5 W of launched pump power.


Cad. Saúde Pública, Rio de Janeiro, 25(5):950-951, mai, 2009 In recent years, Brazil has experienced one of the most impressive declines in child malnutrition anywhere in the developing world. According to a comparison of estimates from the Demographic Health Surveys program in probabilistic samples of Brazilian children under five years of age in 1996 and 2006-2007, severe forms of malnutrition, as indicated by a sharp disproportion between weight and height, were virtually eliminated throughout the country, including the Northeast Region, where previously there was still a relevant prevalence of such types of malnutrition. During the same period, the national prevalence of height-for-age deficit, a sensitive indicator of the persistent presence of poor nutritional and health conditions, was reduced from 13.5% to 6.8%. In the Northeast, stunting decreased from 22.2% to 5,9%, totally erasing this region's disadvantage in relation to the Central and Southern Regions of the country. The sharp drop in stunting among the lowest-income quintile of children and a slight reduction among the highest-income quintile eliminate three-fourths of the absolute disparity between extreme poverty and extreme wealth (from 24.6 to 6.2 percentage points). Based on statistical modeling applied to the data sets from the two surveys, the favorable evolution in four determinants of child nutrition explains two-thirds of the drop in malnutrition [Monteiro et al. Rev Saúde Pública 2009; 43(1):35-43]. The improvement in maternal schooling, especially doubling the proportion of mothers that finished primary school, explains 25.7% of the decline in the prevalence of childhood stunting. Another 21.7% can be attributed to increased purchasing power among the poorest Brazilian families, as reflected in the substantial shift from socioeconomic class E to classes D and C. Another 11.6% of the decline can be attributed to the expansion of primary health care for mothers and children, and another 4.3% to the growth in coverage of sanitation services. In short, the causes of the impressive decline in child malnutrition in Brazil appear to lie in the improvements in coverage of essential public services and increases in family income, both particularly favoring the poor. Improvements in maternal schooling reflect expanded access by young people to primary education in the last 10 to 20 years. Meanwhile, improved maternal and child health care and sanitation represent continuous expansions in access to these services from 1996 to 2007. More recently there has been an important increase in purchasing power among the poorest Brazilians, resulting from an upturn in the national economy, a reduction in unemployment, and policies focused on increasing the income of the lowest income segments, particularly the increase in the minimum wage and expansion and intensification of income transfer programs [Neri MC, coord. Miséria, Desigualdade e Políticas de Renda: O Real do Lula. Rio de Janeiro: FGV/IBRE/CPS; 2007]. The most important issue is that overcoming the blight of child malnutrition once and for all, as glimpsed in the last decade, will depend on maintaining economic growth and income redistribution policies, as well as investments to universalize such policies (still incomplete), with access by all Brazilian families to education, health, and sanitation. The Brazilian experience in the last decade demonstrates the enormous impact on child malnutrition resulting from policies for income redistribution and universal access to education, health, and sanitation. Such policies should top the agenda of priorities for any government committed to improving quality of life for future generations. The decline in child malnutrition in Brazil EDITORIAL


A systematic study was done on the synthesis and superconducting properties of metal rich transition metal borides. Five different binary systems were investigated including the boride systems of niobium, tantalum, molybdenum, tungsten and rhenium. High temperature solid state methods were used in order to synthesize samples of different transition metal borides of the composition M2B, MB, M3B2, MB2, and M2B4. The reactions were carried out in three different furnaces with different sample containers: the electric arc (copper crucible), the high frequency induction furnace (boron nitride, tantalum or glassy carbon crucibles), and the conventional tube furnace (sealed evacuated quartz ampoules).
The products obtained were characterized with X-ray powder diffractometry, scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. Phase analyses and crystal structure refinements using the Rietveld method and based on structure models known from literature were performed. A neutron diffraction measurement was done for W2B4 to allow for a complete crystal structure determination, because of the presence of a heavy element like tungsten and a light element like boron that made it difficult to determine the accurate determination of the boron atom positions and occupancies from X-ray data. A new structure model for W2B4 was proposed.
Magnetic measurements in a SQUID magnetometer down to temperatures as low as 1.8 K were performed to several of the products in order to see if the transition metal borides become superconducting at low temperatures, and the results were compared with data from literature. Superconducting properties were found for the following compounds: NbB2 (TC = 3.5 K), β-MoB (TC = 2.4 K), β-WB (TC = 2.0 K), α-WB (TC = 4.3 K), W2B4 (TC = 5.4 K), Re7B3 (TC = 2.4 K).
A relationship between the superconducting properties and the compositional and structural features was discussed for metal diborides. Also it was found that there is an influence of particle sizes on the superconductivity of WB and W2B4.


The AAAI President's address (the pervious article by Nils Nilsson) presents an eloquent argument for a particular AI paradigm that may be summarized by what Nils calls the "propositional doctrine:" AI is the study of how to acquire and represent knowledge within a logic-like propositional formalism, and the study of how to manipulate this knowledge by use of logical operations and the rule of inference. Although we concur with many of Nil's other assertions, this propositional doctrine seems far to extreme: a lot of interesting and important AI research is done outside of the logic-and theorem- proving paradigm. Indeed, the view that other lines of inquiry serve only to produce tools that may be procedurally attached to an AI (logic-and-theorem-proving ) architecture seems a kind of Logic Imperialism to those of us they wish to relegate to working in the procedure factories. this dismissal of other avenues of research as "not really AI" would normally be cause only for knowing shake of the head and a small chuckle, but when such views are promulgated by the President of the AAAI it is time to take up arms against the logic-and-theorem-proving set -- there is a danger that someone might actually take them seriously! This paper, therefore, constitutes an initial salvo over(into?) their bow. We will focus on two central questions in this rebuttal: What is an appropriate research paradigm for AI? What role should logic-like formal languages and deduction play in the study of AI?


This thesis is written in cooperation with Herrenknecht. The main objectives of this thesis were to: •Compare recorded TBM performance in soft ground with results from laboratory tests designed to estimate performance. •Evaluate the influence and usefulness of soil conditioning additives, which are designed to reduce wear and torque and thus improve performance. The research was conducted by first doing a field study, which included recording essential TBM performance data, collecting soil samples and obtaining valuable knowledge from experienced people working on site. The samples have later been tested in the laboratory, and the recorded data has been processed. Literature studies have been used to discuss and better understand the results. It must be emphasized that this research is based on performance data from less than 90 meters of TBM tunneling. On the other hand, the documentation from this segment is very high, and all performances are based on a big amount of data. The two main laboratory tests are the Soil Abrasion Test (SATTM) and the Soft Ground Abrasion Test (SGAT). Other tests performed are grain size distribution analysis and XRD mineralogy analysis. Tests have shown that moisture content of soil samples collected for this thesis, and thus its compactibility can influence the soil abrasivity by as much as 500 %. A result of this high moisture influence is that the SGAT seems to have a better ability to predict TBM performance than SATTM. There is a clear correlation between recorded weight loss, torque and thrust from the SGAT tests, which increases the reliability of the test. Results from this work do indicate that results from the SGAT can be used to predict in-situ TBM performance. Adding foam to the sample reduces weight loss, torque and thrust. A reduction in abrasion of 60 % has been achieved, but this influence is very dependent on the soil and its moisture content and compactibility.


We determine the anisotropic electron effective mass and mobility parameters in wurtzite InN thin films with free electron concentration Nfrom 1.8 × 1017 cm–3 to 9.5 × 1018 cm–3 using Infrared Magneto-optic Generalized Ellipsometry. The room-temperature measurements were carried out with magnetic fields up to 4.5 T. For the Γ-point we estimate m*⊥ = 0.047m0 and m*‖ = 0.039m0 for polarization perpendicular and parallel to the c -axis, respectively. Scattering by impurities or ionized donors may explain the decrease of mobility for polarization parallel to the c -axis from 1600 cm2/(Vs) to 800 cm2/(Vs) with increase in N , where the perpendicular mobility is further decreased, likely caused by additional grain boundary scattering.


A document discusses the creation of a viewport suitable for use on the surface of Venus. These viewports are rated for 500 C and 100 atm pressure with appropriate safety factors and reliability required for incorporation into a Venus Lander. Sapphire windows should easily withstand the chemical, pressure, and temperatures of the Venus surface. Novel fixture designs and seals appropriate to the environment are incorporated, as are materials compatible with exploration vessels. A test cell was fabricated, tested, and leak rate measured. The window features polish specification of the sides and corners, soft metal padding of the sapphire, and a metal C-ring seal. The system safety factor is greater than 2, and standard mechanical design theory was used to size the window, flange, and attachment bolts using available material property data. Maintenance involves simple cleaning of the window aperture surfaces. The only weakness of the system is its moderate rather than low leak rate for vacuum applications.


This paper examines the utilization of participants' nightmares in art therapy to benefit treatment. The researcher utilized a self-study by means of making art about three of her own nightmares, followed by a comparative analysis in case studies. The researcher asked the participants to make art about a nightmare they reported they had while in a treatment session, and then provided them with the opportunity to alter the image for possible means of catharsis. The researcher then discussed the process with the participants in order to answer the research questions. The participants' ages ranged from 6-15; with two males and a female included. Their diagnoses vary yet all participants had one thing in common: that they all suffer from nightmares. The research revealed the significance of utilizing nightmare processing in art therapy. The practice provides a client with means of sharing nightmares with another person, which may lead to topics never discussed in treatment, a deepened examination of symptoms, diagnoses and fears, and catharsis in the artistic process. The literature reveals that the existence of nightmares is symptomatic, but that the use of processing nightmares in therapy is found to be successful. There is little literature about research with use of nightmares in art therapy practice; therefore this paper is a contribution to the research drought pertaining to this area of the field. ART IN THE TERROR iv


Background Ferric carboxymaltose (FCM) (Ferinject) is a new parenteral iron used to treat iron deficiency anaemia. Infusion modalities are different from ferric hydroxide sucrose complex (FHSC), formerly used in our hospital until July 2012. In particular, for FCM, the infusion takes 15 min (or less at doses below 500 mg), instead of 90 min for FHSC (for which shorter infusion times may be dangerous). Despite the higher cost of FCM and the lack of recommendations from our National Health Agency, we have decided, to avoid medicines errors, to keep Ferinject only on the hospital formulary. Purpose To discover the approach followed by other Parisian Public Assistance Hospitals (AP-HP) (n = 40) to avoid the risk of confusion between the different forms of parenteral iron. Materials and Methods In October 2012, a questionnaire was developed to assess 3 items: the type of parenteral iron on the hospital formulary, methods of dispensing and occurrence of medicines errors. Hospital pharmacists were phoned to answer the survey. Results Of the 30 pharmacists who responded, 14 referenced FCM and 16 did not; 11/14 stocked both FCM and FHSC. Three pharmacists had opted to keep FCM only. In 50% of hospitals in which FCM was available, it had to be prescribed by the brand name and checked by a pharmacist. Two hospitals of the 14 had reserved FCM for specific wards. To the best of their knowledge of pharmacists who answered the survey, no iron administration error had occurred in their hospitals. Conclusions This study shows that choice of parenteral iron is not homogeneous in the different hospitals of AP-HP. We suggest that the risk of medication errors, when FCM and FHSC are both present in the same hospital, could be underestimated. No conflict of interest.


Something is different in this retelling of the classic story of the girl with the golden locks. Goldilocks, as usual, discovers the three bears' house in the woods. She ventures inside and makes herself at home, sitting in the chairs, sampling the meal laid on the table, and taking a nap. But the bears - they're an entirely new breed! Steven Guarnaccia's comical, stylized artwork delivers bears who are hip; they have a sense of style and a love of design. Their 1950s split-level home is filled with cool furniture created by an international crowd of celebrated designers, from Alvar Aalto to Charles and Ray Eames to Isamu Noguchi! This is not a typical cottage in the woods! Children and parents alike will delight in this new edition of the beloved story. And when they look at the endsheets, which provide the name of each decorative object and its creator, they may even pick up a design tip or two.


One of the most common syndromes in product development is firefighting, the unplanned allocation of resources to fix problems discovered late in a product's development cycle. While it has been widely criticized in both the popular and scholarly literature, firefighting is a common occurrence in most product development organizations. Product development systems have a tipping point. In models of infectious diseases, the tipping point represents the threshold of infectivity and susceptibility beyond which a disease becomes an epidemic. Similarly, in product development systems there exists a threshold for problem-solving activity that, when crossed, causes firefighting to spread rapidly from a few isolated projects to the entire development system. The location of the tipping point, and therefore the susceptibility of the system to the firefighting phenomenon, is determined by resource utilization in steady state. Many of the current methods for aggregate resource planning are insufficient and managers wishing to avoid the firefighting dynamic must rethink their approach to managing multi-project development environments.


Leishmaniases are a group of sand fly-borne diseases caused by protozoan parasites from species of Leishmania genus. These diseases are reported in about 100 countries with a prevalence of 12 million people infected and incidence of 2 million people per year, putting approximately 350 million people at risk of the infections. Leishmaniases are endemic and are considered as important public health problems in many provinces of Iran. The infection is transmitted through the bite of phlebotomine sand flies. The sand fly salivates while biting the vertebrate host. The saliva of phlebotomines consists of different molecules that are necessary for a sand fly to successfully take a blood meal. Additionally, previous exposures to sand fly saliva indirectly affect the establishment of Leishmania in the vertebrate host. Moreover, mice previously exposed to the saliva by injection or by uninfected sand fly bites have shown both humoral and cellular immune responses against the salivary antigens that protects them against Leishmania infection. Importantly, the immunization of mice with defined molecules from the saliva of the vector species has also conferred a strong protection against Leishmania infection. This suggests that such salivary components may be considered as candidates for a cocktail vaccine against leishmaniases. The current article briefly explains the potential of salivary components of sand fly vectors as immunological items to prevent leishmaniasis. So far, there is no efficient vaccine against these infections and efforts are required to be focused on developing effective and applicable vaccines against leishmaniases.


A two-dimensional (2D) simplified model of the very large floating structure (VLFS) is formulated based on Huston's interpretation of the Kane methodology. In this proposed model, the VLFS is considered as a serial of discrete floating bodies connected by elastic hinges. The rotation stiffness of elastic hinges has a great influence on the dynamic responses of VLFS and its value is determined based on the vertical displacements equivalent between the simply supported beam model and the elastically hinged multiple bodies model with the same boundary conditions on a concentrated load. Reduced Kane equations are used in the actual dynamic analysis, once initial conditions and mechanical analysis of system have been formulated. Validation of the Kane-based method and the reliability of corresponding program developed are established by several comparative study on a continuous structure and a hinged structure with three parts. The predictions based on the proposed method are essentially identical to the model test data and calculation results provided by related literatures.


We document cycles in corporate investment corresponding with the timing of national elections around the world. During election years, firms reduce investment expenditures by an average of 4.8% relative to nonelection years, controlling for growth opportunities and economic conditions. The magnitude of the investment cycles varies with different country and election characteristics. We investigate several potential explanations and find evidence supporting the hypothesis that political uncertainty leads firms to reduce investment expenditures until the electoral uncertainty is resolved. These findings suggest that political uncertainty is an important channel through which the political process affects real economic outcomes.


Based on the importance of herbal plants in medicine, this study was conducted to evaluate the antibacterial efficacy of aqueous, ethanol and methanol extracts of Thymbra spicata, Nepeta curviflora, and Verbascum fruticulosum against two clinical isolates (I and II) of the gram positive methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Agar well diffusion method was performed to examine the antibacterial activity of all studied plant extracts. Micro-broth dilution method was used to measure the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) then the minimum bacteriocidal concentration (MBC) for all active extracts. The examined isolates were susceptible to the prepared plant extracts. Ethanol and methanol extracts of T. spicata were the most efficient extracts. Ethanol and methanol extracts for all plants in this study showed higher antibacterial activity compared to aqueous extracts. Among the studied plant extracts, T. spicata extracts showed the best antibacterial effect for MRSA as they act as bacteriocidal agents at concentration range (0.781-6.25) mg/ml. Fractionation and characterization of T. spicata active components may enhance the pharmaceutical industry of new drugs against MRSA.


Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a multisystem disease with a range of abdominal manifestations including those involving the liver, pancreas, and kidneys. Recent advances in management of the respiratory complications of the disease has led to a greater life expectancy in patients with CF. Subsequently, there is increasing focus on the impact of abdominal disease on quality of life and survival. Liver cirrhosis is the most important extrapulmonary cause of death in CF, yet significant challenges remain in the diagnosis of CF related liver disease. The capacity to predict those patients at risk of developing cirrhosis remains a significant challenge. We review representative abdominal imaging findings in patients with CF selected from the records of two academic health centres, with a view to increasing familiarity with the abdominal manifestations of the disease. We review their presentation and expected imaging findings, with a focus on the challenges facing diagnosis of the hepatic manifestations of the disease. An increased familiarity with these abdominal manifestations will facilitate timely diagnosis and management, which is paramount to further improving outcomes for patients with cystic fibrosis.


Technical change is a major driving force for economic growth and development, thus, technological change and innovations could be a powerful process that opens-up opportunities to increase social welfare and social benefits for societies. Whether in reality opportunities from the process of technical change turn into real and inclusive benefits for a society depends on a number of facts. Hence, in this contribution we focus on the question of inclusiveness for the global process of innovation and technical change. We discuss a number of questions such as: Does technical change in DCs show specific characteristics that affect different groups of labour asymmetrically? Further, for the transfer of technologies to LDCs we ask: What are the channels of technological transfer from DCs to LDCs that allow developing economies to participate in benefits of technical change? How can a transfer of technologies affect economic and social development? After identifying such elements that link technical change to the question of inclusiveness we describe the effects of technical change on inclusiveness in DCs and LDCs. We try to answer questions like: Which groups benefit more or less from gains of technical change? Were benefits inclusive for a major share of the population or could basically small groups take advantage? Which are the reasons that led to non-inclusive growth for a larger share of the population.


v Abstract The method of the deposition of films of small molecules for use in electronic applications is just as important as the molecule design itself as the film's morphology and continuity influence the performance of the devices that they are incorporated in. The purpose of the work in this thesis was to develop a method of electrochemically depositing films of small molecules for potential use in electronic applications. A method of electrochemically depositing films of chemically reduced low solubility dye molecules was successfully pioneered. The process was developed using N,N dibutyl-3,4,9,10-perylene-bis(dicarboxime), a simplified version of 3,4,9,10-perylene-tetracarboxylic bisbenzimidalzole. Both of these dyes have been used in electronic applications, but low solubility makes them difficult to deposit by traditional solution techniques. A series of films was electrochemically deposited onto FTO coated glass and field effect transistors using coulometry. These films were characterised by absorption spectroscopy, photoluminescence, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and photo-electrochemistry. The same deposition method was applied to copper phthalocyanine. These films were characterised by absorption spectroscopy, photoluminescence, scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. The developed method was used to deposit films of bilayers of dyes and to investigate the dye penetration during the deposition of copper phthalocyanine onto porous titanium dioxide. Films of neutral copper and nickel dithiolenes were electrodeposited from air-stable TMA salts to investigate the absorbance of the near infrared species formed, as well as to investigate the conductivity of both complexes and the magnetoresponse of the neutral copper dithiolene which is air unstable when formed chemically.


High performance, energy efficient logic style has always been a popular research topic in the field of very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits because of the continuous demands of ever increasing circuit operating frequency. The invention of the dynamic logic in the 80s is one of the answers to this request as it allows designers to implement high performance circuit block, i.e., arithmetic logic unit (ALU), at an operating frequency that traditional static and pass transistor CMOS logic styles are difficult to achieve. However, the performance enhancement comes with several costs, including reduced noise margin, charge-sharing noise, and higher power dissipation due to higher data activity. Furthermore, dynamic logic has gradually lost its performance advantage over static logic due to the increased self-loading ratio in deep-submicron technology (65nm and below) because of the additional NMOS CLK footer transistor. Because of dynamic logic's limitations and diminished speed reward, a slowly rising need has emerged in the past decade to explore new logic style that goes beyond dynamic logic. In this thesis a constant delay (CD) logic style is proposed. The constant delay characteristic of this logic style regardless of the logic expression makes it suitable in implementing complicated logic expression such as addition. Moreover, CD logic exhibits a unique characteristic where the output is pre-evaluated before the inputs from the preceding stage is ready. This feature enables performance advantage over static and dynamic logic styles in a single cycle, multi-stage circuit block. Several design considerations including appropriate timing window width adjustment to reduce power consumption and maintain sufficient noise margin to ensure robust operations are discussed and analyzed. Using 65nm general purpose CMOS technology, the proposed logic demonstrates an average speed up of 94% and 56% over static and dynamic logic respectively in five different logic expressions. Post layout simulation results of 8-bit ripple carry adders conclude that CD-based design is 39% and 23% faster than the static and dynamic-based adders respectively. For ultra-high speed applications, CD-based design exhibits improved energy, power-delay product, and energy-delay product efficiency compared to static and dynamic counterparts.


A middle-aged gentleman with history of left penetrating keratoplatsy presented with left eye perforated corneal graft secondary to infective keratitis. The affected eye was blind from absolute steroid-induced glaucoma. In view of expected poor graft survival in a blind eye, globe removal was offered. However, the patient refused the treatment and request for another corneal graft. This case highlights both the possibility of good outcome of cornea graft in such a case, and also illustrates that patient's autonomy to refuse treatment option outweighs beneficence.


In this paper, we provide a descriptive statistical analysis of subjective experiments in mobile imaging. Most of the statistical analyses of such experiments use condensed statistics such as mean opinion scores along with standard deviations. These statistics give only limited insights on the underlaying distribution of a data set. On the other hand, higher order statistics such as skewness and kurtosis provide additional information about a distribution but their qualitative interpretation is complicated. In order to alleviate these shortcomings, we advocate the use of box plots to efficiently visualize and compare distributions between different sets of image quality scores. Specifically, box plots serve the purposes of accounting for the diversity in image quality scores as well as supporting an intuitive qualitative interpretation of the results. It is shown by analysing two subjective experiments of the wireless imaging quality database that notched box plots are beneficial in quickly assessing the statistical significance among differences in such experiments. Further, box plots are used to identify those test material that received a wide diversity in image quality scores including outliers.


In studies on gender differences with respect to Holland's (1997) vocational interests, men often score higher on Realistic (and sometimes also on Investigative and Enterprising) interests, and women score higher on Social and Artistic interests. In research and practice, vocational interests are almost exclusively assessed by means of questionnaires. The aim of this study was to examine whether these results are also stable across assessment methods. Thus, a questionnaire and a nonverbal interest inventory were administered to a sample of N = 448 participants. Results were in the expected direction for both inventories, men scoring higher on Realistic interests and women scoring higher on Artistic and Social interests. However, the structure of interests varied between men and women: The structural assumptions of Holland's theory fit the data for men better than the data for women. Thus, mean-level gender differences should be interpreted conservatively.


This is a redacted transcript of a course given by the author at Harvard in spring semester 2016. It contains a pedagogical overview of recent developments connecting the subjects of soft theorems, the memory effect and asymptotic symmetries in four-dimensional QED, nonabelian gauge theory and gravity with applications to black holes. The lectures may be viewed online at this https URL. Please send typos or corrections to firstname.lastname@example.com http URL.


Abstract Corporate concentration is currently being discussed as a core reason for the crisis of democratic capitalism. It is seen as a prime mover for wage stagnation and alienation, economic inequalities and discontent with democracy. A tacit coalition of progressive anti-monopoly critiques and small business promoters considers more deconcentrated corporate structures to be a panacea for the crisis of democratic capitalism, arguing that small firms in competition are better for employment, equality and democracy. This paper offers a brief outline of ideas of the anti-monopoly and small business ideal and critically evaluates whether a more deconcentrated economy may live up to these promises. While we agree that the plea for strengthened antitrust enforcement contains relevant and promising prospects for reform, our analysis concludes on a decidedly critical note. In particular, we caution against romanticized notions of the small capitalist firm.


Humoral immunity is characterized by an early primary response of short lived plasma cells (SLPCs) secreting low affinity antibody followed by the formation of germinal center (GC) reactions and subsequent production of high affinity, class switched antibodies by long lived plasma cells (LLPCs). The lineage relationship between these two processes is not well established. We report that the SLPC element of the humoral response is Pim-dependent. Pim-deficient animals have decreased numbers of PreB cells in the bone marrow, but other subsets remain comparable to control animals. In the periphery, only peritoneal B1a B cell numbers are deficient, contributing to low serum Immunoglobulin (Ig) and a lack of natural antibody. Other aspects of the primary B cell pool and splenic architecture reflect normal development. Following immunization, Pim1-/-Pim2-/animals mount humoral immune responses deficient in the production of SLPCs. T-independent type II responses, comprised entirely of SLPCs, are virtually absent. T-dependent responses are similarly compromised in their production of SLPCs, but do generate germinal center reactions leading to LLPC production. These deficiencies evince two distinct humoral immune responses: the Pim1/ 2-dependent early production of SLPCs, and the later, Pim1/2-independent, GC / LLPC response. The upstream mediators of these pathways correlate with the expression of TACI on SLPCs and BR3 on GCs / LLPCs, two receptors for the BLyS family of survival factors, known to be vital to B cell survival. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Immunology First Advisor Michael Cancro


This paper argues for a physicalistic interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein's general conception of world and language analysis is interpreted and exemplified in relation to the historical background of the psychophysical analysis of sense data and, in particular, color analysis. Three of his main principles of analysisthe principle of independence, the context principle and the principle of atomismare interpreted and justified on the background of physicalism. From his proof of color exclusion in the Tractatus, it is shown that Wittgenstein had a detailed conception of how philosophy should fulfil the task of distinguishing between sense and nonsense using physicalistic presuppositions.


Habitat, emotion and an eco-theological understanding of humanity: In conversation with Johan Buitendag. The question on what his viewpoint of an eco-theological understanding of life entails is firstly posed in conversation with the South African systematic theologian Johan Buitendag. His standpoint, in which he argues for the constitutive significance of habitat against the background of the philosophical, biological and theological contours of descriptions of what life is, is set forth. He suggests that human life should be described with regard to habitat in its constitutive significance and subsequently in regard to a value system, and concludes that human life as homo religiosus must be understood from an eco-theological viewpoint as ontologically extended (' ontologies uitgebreid '). His eco-theological viewpoint is secondly taken up in an explication of the sense making of human life by humans, determined and shaped by their biological roots in their habitat. Lastly the affective-cognitive dimension of being human with specific emphasis on affectivity is expounded as representing the embodiment of the logic of survival of personhood in their habitat.


We introduce a selective and cell-permeable calcium sensor for photoacoustics (CaSPA), a versatile imaging technique that allows for fast volumetric mapping of photoabsorbing molecules with deep tissue penetration. To optimize for Ca2+-dependent photoacoustic signal changes, we synthesized a selective metallochromic sensor with high extinction coefficient, low quantum yield, and high photobleaching resistance. Micromolar concentrations of Ca2+ lead to a robust blueshift of the absorbance of CaSPA, which translated into an accompanying decrease of the peak photoacoustic signal. The acetoxymethyl esterified sensor variant was readily taken up by cells without toxic effects and thus allowed us for the first time to perform live imaging of Ca2+ fluxes in genetically unmodified cells and heart organoids as well as in zebrafish larval brain via combined fluorescence and photoacoustic imaging.