Background: Femoral head osteonecrosis (FHO) is a debilitating condition. Free vascularized fibular grafting (FVFG) has good survivorship, however patients are at risk for reoperation. AIM and Objectives: This study compares patient characteristics, hip pathology, and surgical intervention in patients with FHO. We hypothesized that patients with FHO who underwent FVFG would demonstrate less severe degeneration of hip chondral surfaces compared to patients who did not. Materials and Methods: A database of 1,481 hip arthroscopies performed by a single surgeon was queried. Inclusion criteria included history of FHO. Patients with a previous hip surgery were excluded. Non-FVFG patients served as a control. Demographics, presentation, physical examination, imaging, intraoperative pathology, and procedures performed were compared. Cartilage degeneration was quantified with chondromalacia severity index (CMI). The Hip Outcome Score- Activity of Daily Living (HOS-ADL), -Sports Subscale (HOS-SS), and modified Hip Harris Score (mHHS) were calculated. Results: Sixteen patients had a history of FHO. Six (37.5%) previously underwent FVFG. Both groups had similar demographics, clinical presentation, preoperative range of motion, and radiographic findings (P>0.05). Arthroscopy identified similar chondral lesion Outerbridge grade and size for the acetabulum and femoral head (P>0.05). Compared with controls, FVFG patients had greater CMI of the acetabulum (844.7±501.3 vs. 345.8±433.3; P=0.018) and similar CMI of the femoral head (408. ±187.7 vs. 1461.0±1493.6; P=0.289). Microfracture of the acetabulum and ligamentum teres debridement were performed preferentially in patients with a history of FVFG compared with controls. Of the six previous FVFG patients, two converted to total hip arthroplasty, two completed patient reported outcomes, and two were lost to follow-up. Conclusion: Patients with previous FVFG for FHO are at an increased risk of chondral damage to the acetabulum and demonstrated more advanced chondral degeneration compared with controls. Level of Evidence: III; Retrospective cohort study


This paper investigates the U.S. dollar's role as the international currency of choice as a key contributing factor in critical global developments that led to the crisis of 2007–09, and considers the future role of the dollar as the global economy emerges from that crisis. It is argued that the dollar is likely to retain its hegemonic status for a few more decades, but that U.S. spending powered by public rather than private debt would provide a more sustainable motor for global growth. In the process, the "Bretton Woods II" regime depicted by Dooley, Folkerts-Landau, and Garber (2003) as sustainable despite featuring persistent U.S. current account deficits may turn into a "Bretton Woods III" regime that sees U.S. fiscal policy and public debt as "minding the store" in maintaining U.S. and global growth.


A phenomenon-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm, harmony search, imitating music improvisation process, is introduced and applied to vehicle routing problem, then compared with one of the popular evolutionary algorithms, genetic algorithm. The harmony search algorithm conceptualized a group of musicians together trying to search for better state of harmony. This algorithm was applied to a test traffic network composed of one bus depot, one school and ten bus stops with demand by commuting students. This school bus routing example is a multi-objective problem to minimize both the number of operating buses and the total travel time of all buses while satisfying bus capacity and time window constraints. Harmony search could find good solution within the reasonable amount of time and computation.


Brownfield Ikebana is a series of works by artist Anna Francis which aim to reframe the neglected Brownfield sites in cities, as potential beauty spots, nature reserves and wildlife havens.

As with many post-industrial cities, Stoke-on-Trent has an abundance of gaps in its city centre, where buildings and factories have been taken down, but the money to rebuild and reimagine has not yet arrived. These spaces are often described by local people and the media as problem spaces or eyesores, but are in fact very important in the developing ecology of wildlife in city areas. One Example: In The North Staffordshire Field Club 's Annual address of 1875, declining numbers of Goldfinches in the county are attributed to industrial and housing development, which saw the decline in natural habitats. Recently, Goldfinch numbers in the city centre have grown, which can be attributed to the abundance of Brownfield Sites, providing new food sources.

Brownfield Ikebana aims to recognise the potential of these spaces, through creating artworks and events which invite a dialogue about the use of these sites, and value to local wildlife, and local people. 'Brownfield Ikebana' could be presented as a works instruction, performance and/or public workshop, which utilises the art of Japanese flower arranging, to explore Brownfield Sites, and use discarded rubbish in the place of vessels and vases, and weeds and vegetation growing on the site to create beautiful, formal floral displays.


This research is inspired and based on the religion unity between Islam and Hinduism in Senduro Village although in that district the Greatest Hinduism Shrine in South East Asia had been placed along this era. There, we never see the hostility and the disturbance between them. One of the factors that make them live in synchronization and harmony is the roles of religion leaders. It means the roles of Bedande (Hinduism Religion Leader) and Ustadz (Leader in Moslem Community) in their society to keep the peace between them. The religion leader in Senduro used various kinds of contexts to communicate with their religious members like physical aspects, psychological aspects and temporal (time) aspects. Communication context here is the situation and condition where the communication processes are happened. Physical aspects are climate, weather, the temperature, shape of environment, color of the wall, the chair position in the religion activity, the number of religious members, and the related tools that used to send the message. Secondly is the psychological aspects such as attitude, the potency of inclined, prejudices, and the emotion inside the communication participants. The third is social aspects like group norms, social value, and characteristics of culture. The fourth is time aspect or temporal aspects. It is the time when the communication is happened. (The day, the time, morning time, afternoon, evening, or other types of time) In this research, the researcher has used the qualitative method and field study to see the phenomenon in Senduro Village, Senduro Sub District, Lumajang Regency, and East Java, Indonesia. The researcher have searched communication context between religion leader and the religious members in order to keep the religion unity. Along the research process, the researcher had been using the observation methods to collect the data, documentation methods, and interview method. In the observation process, the researcher detected diverse activities of Senduro resident such as selametan desa, the PKK meeting for the women, and the tahlilan ceremony. Beside all activities, the researcher has found the data from documentation process. They are History Book of Mandhara Giri Shrine from Senduro Resident (written by senior Bedande from Senduro) along with several photos of Mandhara Giri Shrine activities. The next step, researcher has used the snowball sampling and succed to interview 15 informans in interviewing process. Based on the research result, we found that religion leader there were able to use many kinds of communication aspects in the daily communication with their religious member. For example the physical aspects, the religion leaders usually choose the wider place like the field and Public Hallor Building to hold communication activities. In psychological spects, the religion leaders always manage the prejudices, attitude, and emotion of their religious member in order to maintance the harmony situation and religion unity. In every communication activities, they always said that we were in one ancestors. The effect of that holy sentences (?one ancestors?) is building the concord attitude between them because they are one blood, one family and one ancestors even they has different religion. In the social aspects, all of the leaders always give the way to make the norm of social life is able to walk in harmony. For example the temporal aspects, the leaders always choose the selametan desa time to communicate with their religious members. The leaders always use the same time with important activity because it will be more efective to give the important message in the important time to all religious members. Based on the research, we can make conclusion that in the processes of keeping religion concord, the religion leader combined perfectly all of communication aspects. Although in the daily life communication with the religious member, the leaders never forget to watch and keep the norm inside the native Senduro. Just to reach one goal, the religion unity between them. Keyword : Konteks Komunikasi dan Pemimpin Agama Link terkait : http://skripsi.umm.ac.id/files/disk1/326/jiptummpp-gdl-s1-2009-filosagita-16266-PENDAHUL-N.pdf


The English National Opera Guides were originally conceived in partnership with the English National Opera and edited by Nicholas John, the ENO's dramaturg, who died tragically in an accident in the Alps. Most of the guides are devoted to a single opera, which is described in detail--with many articles that cover its history and information about the composer and his times. The complete libretto is included in both the original language and in a modern singing translation--except where the opera was written in English. Each has a thematic guide to the most important musical themes in musical notation and each guide is lavishly illustrated. They also contain a bibliography and a discography which is updated at each reprint. The ENO guides are widely regarded as the best series of their kind and excellent value.


The Text Encoding Initiative's typed segment-boundary delimiter method is only one of several proposed mechanisms for handling overlap in TEI documents. HORSE (aka CLIX) defines a method by which an XML element is used normally when possible and as an improved version of the typed segment-boundary delimiter method when an overlap problem is encountered. A significant portion of the rules necessary for validation of HORSE markup can be expressed using Schematron. This, combined with an utter hack that can "HORSEify" the declaration of elements in a TEI Relax NG grammar, can provide a potential significant step forward in handling overlap in TEI documents. TEI HORSEing Around Table of


Micronutrient deficiencies are particularly severe in Bangladesh. Understanding howhousehold income, food prices, parental education and nutritional knowledge, and culturally-based customs and food preferences interact to determine food consumption patterns (particularly for nonstaple foods), and so micronutrient intake, can provide crucial information for designing policies and intervention programs to improve human nutrition. Within the typical dietary patterns of the Bangladeshi survey population, the key food group with respect to micronutrient consumption is vegetables, providing nearly 95 percent of vitamin A intake, 75 percent of vitamin C intake, and 25 percent of iron intake. Vegetables are the least expensive sources of all of these nutrients. Vegetables are sufficiently inexpensive sources of vitamin A and vitamin C that they could provide the RDA within normal dietary patterns and the budgets of low-income groups. There is no corresponding inexpensive source of iron. Programs to educate consumers about the importance of meeting recommended daily allowances of vitamin A and vitamin C and about commonly eaten sources of these nutrients has the potential for improving intake. Because a high proportion of vitamin A and vitamin C intake apparently comes from own-production, extension programs to promote growing specific vitamin A and vitamin C rich foods not only would provide households with a ready supply of these nutrients, but increased production could bring the local price down.


OBJECTIVE
To compare cognitive function in postmenopausal women receiving continuous hormone replacement therapy and those receiving tibolone.

STUDY DESIGN
This was a 6-month, prospective, single-blind, single center, randomized study. A total of 50 healthy, postmenopausal women were enrolled. In the end, 40 women completed the 6-month follow-up. One group (23 subjects) received conjugated equine estrogens (CEE), 0.625 mg/d, and medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA), 5 mg/d. The other group (17 subjects) received tibolone, 2.5 mg/d. Their serum estradiol levels and Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument (CASI) and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores were obtained before starting and after 3 and 6 months of treatment.

RESULTS
There was a significant increase in the serum estradiol level in the CEE + MPA group, especially after 3 months of treatment, but there was no increase in the estradiol level in the tibolone group. The CASI and MMSE scores of the CEE + MPA group and the tibolone group after 3 and 6 months of treatment showed no significant difference between the two groups apart from the MMSE at the 3-month follow-up. We saw an increasing trend in CASI and MMSE scores after treatment in both groups; however, the increases were not statistically significant. The rate of increase of both CASI and MMSE scores in the CEE + MPA group was greater than in the tibolone group, though the difference was not significant.

CONCLUSION
This preliminary study demonstrated that both CEE + MPA and tibolone can preserve cognitive function and may be able to prevent cognitive decline in postmenopausal women during short-term treatment. Our results also show that continuous, combined CEE + MPA seems to be marginally more effective than tibolone in improving cognitive processes; however, long-term study is needed to follow-up such effect.


Under the prevailing model of copyright liability for user-generated content, right holders and intermediaries are both involved in the enforcement of exclusive rights on the Internet. While right holders are expected to identify and notify the infringing content that they wish to remove, the intermediaries have to react by assessing the received notices and taking appropriate action, including taking the information "down" from the service in case it is infringing. This "notice and takedown" system, championed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, became a model for many countries around the world. However, in the last few years, the right holders have begun to advocate for a fundamental re-design of the system. According to the number of initiatives, some of the right holders would prefer that intermediaries not only take down the notified content but also prevent its re-appearance in the future. This alternative model, often dubbed "notice and staydown," is currently proposed by the European Commission as part of its upcoming copyright reform. If successful, it will constitute a huge change for the existing global online environment.
This article scrutinizes the potential switch from notice and takedown policy ("NTD") to notice and staydown policy ("NSD") in order to answer two important questions: (1) What are the (economic) costs and benefits of two policy options and how do they compare? (2) Is NSD really superior in delivering better tools for automation? The overall goal of the paper is to offer general policy guidance for national or regional policymakers currently considering such policy change.
This article concludes that algorithmic enforcement is inevitable and, under some conditions, socially desirable. First, high-quality automation of copyright enforcement that produces negligible enforcement errors offers many opportunities for improvement of the status quo and therefore should be embraced and incentivized. Second, to make such automation a reality, we need to push innovation in the right direction by conditioning acceptance of algorithmically generated notices upon their quality. Third, an enhanced notice and takedown framework can promote such automation better than notice and staydown. It provides for stronger market incentives for the development of new filtering technologies and allows area-by-area deployment as the technologies improve. Last, as a consequence, enhanced NTD can become a superior policy option from a social perspective. However, in order to realize these benefits, some changes to the NTD framework are required, too. These could take the form of standardized submission formats or interfaces for robo-notices that come with quality conditions and effective sanctions to enforce them.


Prediction of water flow and transport processes in soils susceptible to structural alteration such as compaction of tilled agricultural lands or newly constructed landfills rely on accurate description of changes in soil unsaturated hydraulic conductivity. Recent studies have documented the critical impact of aggregate contact characteristics on water flow rates and pathways in unsaturated aggregated soils. We developed an analytical model for aggregate contact size evolution as a basis for quantifying effects of compression on saturated and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of aggregated soil. Relating confined one‐dimensional sample strain with aggregate deformation facilitates prediction of the increase in interaggregate contact area and concurrent decrease in macropore size with degree of sample compression. The hydrologic component of the model predicts unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of a pack of idealized aggregates (spheres) on the basis of contact size and saturation conditions under prescribed sample deformation. Calculated contact areas and hydraulic conductivity for pairs of aggregates agreed surprisingly well with measured values, determined from compaction experiments employing neutron and X‐ray‐radiography and image analysis. Model calculations for a unit cell of uniform spherical aggregates in cubic packing were able to mimic some of the differences in saturated and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity observed for aggregates and bulk soil.


For the analysis of climate impact on flood flows and flood frequency in macroscale river basins, hydrological models can be forced by several sets of hourly long-term climate time series. Considering the large number of model units, the small time step and the required recalibrations for different model forcing an efficient calibration strategy and optimisation algorithm are essential. This study investigates the impact of different calibration strategies and different optimisation algorithms on the performance and robustness of a semi-distributed model. The different calibration strategies were (a) Lumped, (b) 1-Factor, (c) Distributed and (d) Regionalisation. The latter uses catchment characteristics and estimates parameter values via transfer functions. These methods were applied in combination with three different optimisation algorithms: PEST, DDS, and SCE. In addition to the standard temporal evaluation of the calibration strategies, a spatial evaluation was applied. This was done by transferring the parameters from calibrated catchments to uncalibrated ones and validating the model performance of these uncalibrated catchments. The study was carried out for five sub-catchments of the Aller-Leine River Basin in Northern Germany. The best result for temporal evaluation was achieved by using the combination of the DDS optimisation with the Distributed strategy. The Regionalisation method obtained the weakest performance for temporal evaluation. However, for spatial evaluation the Regionalisation indicated more robust models, closely followed by the Lumped method. The 1-Factor and the Distributed strategy showed clear disadvantages regarding spatial parameter transferability. For the parameter estimation based on catchment descriptors as required for ungauged basins, the Regionalisation strategy seems to be a promising tool particularly in climate impact analysis and for hydrological modelling in general.


By making reference to the political context of "molecular invasion" (Critical Art Ensemble 2002), this article will compare two practices of production and administration of hormones to highlight the consequences at stake when business property extends over bodies and cells of humans, animals and plants. On the one hand, I will examine DIWO (Do It With Others) biohacking workshops that synthesise pharmaceutical hormones and share the know-how by using open-source protocols and participatory workshop methods. I will refer to these specific practices as exemplary of a growing approach to the topic which represents a new field combining biohacking, activism, art, and open science, by "commoning" (Linebaugh 2008) medical tools and knowledge. These workshops are hacking the business property in humans by commoning practices of co-creating and co-producing hormone molecules, refusing to be locked into the profit-driven mechanics of bio-capital and aiming at taking back scientific knowledge. Moreover, these interventions question what a normal or natural model of sex is – given that organic pollutants are already affecting every aspect of the sphere of reproduction of humans and animals, its related organs and hormonal balance (SCOPE-IUPAC 2001; Lind and Lind 2011; Hood 2005; Kier 2010; Langstone 2010). On the other hand, I draw on an open-ended conversation I conducted with a number of Italian trans activists, focusing on the power that pharmaceutical monopolies have, through the intellectual property rights on pharmaceuticals (including hormones), to introduce or withdraw from the market drugs on which many people rely. This article aims to show how selected DIWO biohacking workshops, which are taking place between Europe and North America, can be understood as decolonial interventions as they call us to critically reappraise the relationship between knowledge, power, and institutions by commoning science knowledge and resisting the push to commodify knowledge and place it behind paywalls, by commoning the molecules' production. Finally, they promote a more inclusive approach to healthcare that critically reappraises technology and raises collective awareness of our bodies as battlegrounds to be engineered and controlled.


The close coupling between media and science becomes predominant in the context of public controversies over science during disasters like earthquakes. The paper discusses some crucial aspects of this dynamic by investigating the role of regional press in Kerala, India, in initiating and maintaining a public controversy over a series of micro earthquakes in 2001 amidst growing public skepticism over the competence of Earth Science to convincingly explain the phenomenon. The press employed various strategies to challenge the official scientific explanation of the phenomenon and broke open the ground for a spectrum of alternative interpretations and critical interventions, affirming greater public participation in science. Most of the experts continued to downplay the concerns raised by the media, but closure was attained when a lesser-known team of experts convincingly interpreted the geological events while participating in the deliberations. The paper analyses how the media played a crucial role in revealing and enhancing the entanglement of science with diverse actors and institutions during the controversy.


Fisheries are coupled human and natural systems across space and time, involving movements of fish, money, and information in a globalized world. However, these social-ecological interactions over local to global scales are largely absent from the fisheries literature, as fisheries research to date has often been discipline- and location-specific. We analyzed this knowledge gap by using an emerging coupled human and natural systems research paradigm – the telecoupling framework – to investigate social-ecological interactions over distances (i.e. telecouplings) in the Great Lakes salmonine (i.e. Coho Salmon Oncorhynchus kisutch, Chinook Salmon O. tshawytscha) fishery. Since the 1960s, this fishery has involved telecoupled movements of fish, money, and information over relatively long distances facilitated by numerous individual and organizational agents. These telecouplings have been characterized by diverse social-ecological causes (e.g. decline of commercial fisheries, rising incomes and greater leisure time for recreational fishing) and effects (e.g. salmonine stocking, creation of angling- and tourism-based economies). Telecouplings are critical for fisheries professionals to consider because they promote holistic understanding of fisheries management while occasionally confounding conservation efforts (e.g. salmonine stocking spreads diseases and parasites and changes fish community structure and genetic integrity). Hence, fisheries professionals will benefit from using the telecoupling framework to optimize favorable and reduce unfavorable telecouplings and thereby enhance fisheries management programs. Overall, the telecoupling framework advances fisheries science by enabling fisheries professionals to systematically understand the causes and consequences of complex social-ecological fisheries interactions and develop informed strategies for sustainable fisheries management and governance throughout the Great Lakes and the world.


The extracellular ligand Wnt can activate multiple signaling pathways, the classical one being through the frizzled family of receptors, activating Dishevelled and glycogen synthase kinase 3, leading to the accumulation of β-catenin that enters the nucleus and regulates gene expression along with the transcription factors of Tcf/Lef family (see the Wnt/β-catenin pathway by Moon). However, the cellular responsiveness to Wnt changes during development: an example is the loss of dorsalizing activity of Wnt signaling after the midblastula transition (MBT) in Xenopus. Darken and Wilson explored how these different cellular outcomes can arise by manipulating Wnt signaling at different times during the development of Xenopus embryos. Their results indicate that Wnt signaling both before and after MBT is mediated by the classic Wnt pathway, despite the loss of induction of early genes, such as samois and Xnr3, at later stages of development. Expression of an activated Tcf-glucocorticoid fusion construct (which allowed controlled activation of the transcription factor) showed that the ability of TcF to increase the expression of the early genes is lost after the MBT, suggesting that the responsiveness of the late genes' promoters changes after the MBT. A more direct test of this was performed using the promoter of the samois gene fused to a luciferase reporter gene, which also demonstrated a loss of responsiveness to the Tcf-glucocorticoid fusion protein after MBT. Thus, in this instance, the cellular responsiveness is not altered by changing the signaling pathway, but by changes in the target promoters' ability to respond to the signal. R. Moon, Wnt/beta-catenin pathway, Science's STKE (Connections Map, as seen May 2001), http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi/cm/CMP_5533. [Online Journal] R. S. Darken, P. A. Wilson, Axis induction by Wnt signaling: Target promoter responsiveness regulates competence. Dev. Biol. 234, 42-54 (2001). [Online Journal]


Abstract. In this study, we have examined the ability of a regional climate model (RCM) to simulate the extended drought that occurred throughout the period of 2002 through 2007 in south-east Australia. In particular, the ability to reproduce the two drought peaks in 2002 and 2006 was investigated. Overall, the RCM was found to reproduce both the temporal and the spatial structure of the drought-related precipitation anomalies quite well, despite using climatological seasonal surface characteristics such as vegetation fraction and albedo. This result concurs with previous studies that found that about two-thirds of the precipitation decline can be attributed to the El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Simulation experiments that allowed the vegetation fraction and albedo to vary as observed illustrated that the intensity of the drought was underestimated by about 10 % when using climatological surface characteristics. These results suggest that in terms of drought development, capturing the feedbacks related to vegetation and albedo changes may be as important as capturing the soil moisture–precipitation feedback. In order to improve our modelling of multi-year droughts, the challenge is to capture all these related surface changes simultaneously, and provide a comprehensive description of land surface–precipitation feedback during the droughts development.


The New World family Heterothripidae (~90 spp., four genera) comprises flower-feeding and ectoparasitic thrips. The monophyly of the group has remained untested and species-level relationships were unknown. Morphological (123 characters) and molecular (28S rDNA D2 and D3-D5, H3, and partial COI) data were compiled to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships of this group. The ingroup was represented by 65 species of the four recognized Heterothripidae genera (Aulacothrips Hood, Heterothrips Hood, Lenkothrips De Santis & Sureda, and Scutothrips Stannard). The monophyly of Heterothripidae was recovered in the total evidence and molecular data only analyses with the ectoparasitic Aulacothrips placed as the sister group of the remaining Heterothripidae. The large genus Heterothrips (>80% of the species-level diversity), which was thoroughly sampled in our analyses (56 species), was recovered as paraphyletic with respect to Scutothrips and Lenkothrips. We conclude that additional morphological and molecular data would be desirable before revising the classification of Heterothripidae


The purpose of our experiments was to estimate basic sensitivity to motion gradients and to evaluate the evidence for second-order integration and differentiation of motion signals. We measured sensitivity to spatially sinusoidal contrast modulation between two oppositely moving bandpass-filtered noise images. The motion-contrast sensitivity function, defined as the inverse of threshold modulation amplitude as a function of modulation spatial frequency, was bandpass in shape with declines at both highest and lowest frequencies. The functions for three noise spatial frequencies had approximately the same shape when modulation frequency was expressed as a fraction of noise frequency. We compared the data with a model in which linear motion filters, whose outputs are squared or rectified, are followed by a second stage of excitatory or inhibitory pooling. The data are consistent with a model in which (1) all excitatory pooling occurs at the linear stage and (2) the second stage contains a large inhibitory pooling area, with a radius approximately eight times that of the linear receptive field.


In behavior-based individual-based models (IBMs), demographic functions are emergent properties of the model and are not built into the model structure itself, as is the case with the more widely used demography-based IBMs. Our behavior-based IBM represents the physiology and behavioral decision making of individual animals and, from that, predicts how many survive the winter nonbreeding season, an important component of fitness. This paper provides the first test of such a model by predicting the change in winter mortality of a charadriid shorebird following removal of intertidal feeding habitat, the main effect of which was to increase bird density. After adjusting one calibration parameter to the level required to replicate the observed mortality rate before habitat loss, the model predicted that mortality would increase by 3.65%, which compares well with the observed increase of 3.17%. The implication that mortality was density-dependent was confirmed by predicting mortality over a range of bird densities. Further simulations showed that the density dependence was due to an increase in both interference and depletion competition as bird density increased. Other simulations suggested that an additional area of mudflat, equivalent to only 10% of the area that had been lost, would be needed by way of mitigation to return mortality to its original level. Being situated at a high shore level with the flow of water in and out impeded by inlet pipes, the mitigating mudflat would be accessible to birds when all mudflats in the estuary were covered at high tide, thus providing the birds with extra feeding time and not just a small replacement mudflat. Apart from providing the first, and confidence-raising, test of a behavior-based IBM, the results suggest (1) that the chosen calibration procedure was effective; (2) that where no new fieldwork is required, and despite being parameter rich, a behavior-based IBM can be parameterized quickly (few weeks), and thus cheaply, because so many of the parameter values can be obtained from the literature and are embedded in the model; and (3) that behavior-based IBMs can be used to explore system behavior (e.g., the role of depletion competition and interference competition in density-dependent mortality).


The aim of this paper is to extend a hybrid protection plan for Power Transformer (PT) based on MRA-KSIR-SSVM. This paper offers a new scheme for protection of power transformers to distinguish internal faults from inrush currents. Some significant characteristics of differential currents in the real PT operating circumstances are extracted. In this paper, Multi Resolution Analysis (MRA) is used as Time–Frequency Analysis (TFA) for decomposition of Contingency Transient Signals (CTSs), and feature reduction is done by Kernel Sliced Inverse Regression (KSIR). Smooth Supported Vector Machine (SSVM) is utilized for classification. Integration KSIR and SSVM is tackled as most effective and fast technique for accurate differentiation of the faulted and unfaulted conditions. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to obtain optimal parameters of the classifier. The proposed structure for Power Transformer Protection (PTP) provides a high operating accuracy for internal faults and inrush currents even in noisy conditions. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is tested by means of numerous inrush and internal fault currents. The achieved results are utilized to verify the suitability and the ability of the proposed scheme to make a distinction inrush current from internal fault. The assessment results illustrate that proposed scheme presents an enhancement of distinguish inrush current from internal fault over the method to be compared without Dimension Reduction (DR).


At a glance briefing examines the implications of the personalisation agenda for nursing homes.Personalisation means thinking about care and support services in an entirely different way. This means starting with the person as an individual with strengths, preferences and aspirations and putting them at the centre of the process of identifying their needs and making choices about how and when they are supported to live their lives. It requires a significant transformation of adult social care services so that all systems, processes, staff and services are geared up to put people first.


Over the past year, there have been several reports of malicious code exploiting vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth protocol. While the research community has started to investigate a diverse set of Bluetooth security issues, little is known about the feasibility and the propagation dynamics of a worm in a Bluetooth environment. This paper is an initial attempt to remedy this situation.We start by showing that the Bluetooth protocol design and implementation is large and complex. We gather traces and we use controlled experiments to investigate whether a large-scale Bluetooth worm outbreak is viable today. Our data shows that starting a Bluetooth worm infection is easy, once a vulnerability is discovered. Finally, we use trace-drive simulations to examine the propagation dynamics of Bluetooth worms. We find that Bluetooth worms can infect a large population of vulnerable devices relatively quickly, in just a few days.


This paper investigates the discursive construction of co-ethnic migration in German society. Taking a biographical study on ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union as a starting point, the author traces co-ethnic immigrant pathways in German society and analyzes the legal frameworks, institutions, and organizations encountered by these migrants. The author employs a critical discourse analysis approach to texts relating to a camp where newly arriving immigrants live and undergo registration. The article proposes a new way of researching discursive construction, using biographical interviews as a starting point for identifying "localities of discourse" which are important to the group in question. Such an approach allows us to find relevant sources of discourse in a way that is grounded in empirical material, and subsequently to account for which discourses are appropriated by members of certain social groups, such as co-ethnic migrants. The article thus builds a bridge between biographical sociology and critical discourse analysis, using the former as a point of departure for framing the selection of materials for implementing the latter. The article makes a methodological contribution by introducing the concept "locality of discourse" as a bridge between biographical sociology and critical discourse analysis. The author also makes an empirical contribution by examining a border transit camp in Germany as a "locality of discourse" and showing how the camp informs our understanding of the place of co-ethnic migrants in German society


Prostate cancer remains the most common non-skin cancer and second leading cause of death among men in the United States. Although progress has been made in diagnosis and risk assessment, many clinical questions remain regarding early identification of prostate cancer and management. The early detection of aggressive disease continues to provide high curative rates if diagnosed in a localized state. Unfortunately, prostate cancer displays significant heterogeneity within the prostate organ and between individual patients making detection and treatment strategies complex. Although prostate cancer is common among men, the majority will not die from prostate cancer, introducing the issue of overtreatment as a major concern in clinical management of the disease. The focus of the future is to identify those at highest risk for aggressive prostate cancer and to develop prevention and screening strategies, as well as discerning the difference in malignant potential of diagnosed tumors. The Prostate Cancer Research Group of the National Cancer Institute's Early Detection Research Network has contributed to the progress in addressing these concerns. This summary is an overview of the activities of the group. See all articles in this CEBP Focus section, "NCI Early Detection Research Network: Making Cancer Detection Possible."


Deformable mirrors improve optical efficiency of a system by correcting the wave front aberration caused by imperfections in the system components or by turbulent atmosphere in case of telescope optics. Micromachined mirror technology has the potential to substantially reduce the cost of adaptive optics systems. First, a brief review of the work in this field is presented with the goal of informing the reader of the challenges in the micromachined adaptive optics and the implementation tradeoffs including stress-induced curvature of multilayer mirrors. Then, recent results on the silicon micromachined, hybrid integrated microelectromechanical deformable mirrors for adaptive optics developed at the University of Colorado are presented. Various microfabrication processes including surface micromachining, bulk micromachining, and flip-chip assembly are implemented to fabricate high optical fill factor and large-stroke piston-type micromirror arrays. The achieved micromirror deflection for some designs is in the range of 2 to 3.5 /spl mu/m, which results in the operating wavelength within infrared spectrum. Techniques to integrate microlenses on top of the micromirrors using self-aligned solder or transfer of ultrasmooth mirror plates on top of the micromirror actuators using flip-chip create high optical fill factor devices. Experimental results of aberration correction with such devices are presented.


The generating of explanation facilities have been amongst the most eulogised features of expert system applications. However, despite many years of research, many current systems still fail to meet explanation needs adequately, unless the explanations they naturally generate are augmented with additional knowledge. This is because the standard explanation feature in an expert system provides some problem solving knowledge, but little in the way of domain knowledge. Moreover, the augmented knowledge will often have to contain knowledge about the form of interaction during the explanation and user knowledge. This paper looks at explanation requirements for expert systems and traces the historical development of explanation by reviewing key research projects in first and second generation expert systems. The paper also briefly reviews explanation research supporting other knowledge representation paradigms such as frames and case based reasoning expert systems.


The natural abundance of nitrogen and oxygen isotopes in nitrate can be a powerful tool for identifying the source of nitrate in streamwater in forested watersheds, because the two main sources of nitrate, atmospheric deposition and microbial nitrification, have distinct δ18O values. Using a simple mixing model, we estimated the relative fractions in streamwater derived from these sources for two forested watersheds with markedly different streamwater nitrate outputs. In this study, we monitored δ15N and δ18O of nitrate biweekly in atmospheric deposition and in streamwater for 20 months at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, New Hampshire, USA (moderate nitrogen export), and monthly in streamwater at the Bowl Research Natural Area, New Hampshire, USA (high nitrogen export). For rain, δ18O values ranged from +47 to +77‰ (mean: +58‰) and δ15N from −5 to +1‰ (mean: −3‰); for snow, δ18O values ranged from +52 to +75‰ (mean: +67‰) and δ15N from −3 to +2‰ (mean: −1‰). Streamwater nitrate, in contrast to deposition, had δ18O values between +12 and +33‰ (mean: +18‰) and δ15N between −3 and +6‰ (mean: 0‰). Since nitrate produced by nitrification typically has δ18O values ranging from −5 to +15‰, our field data suggest that most of the nitrate lost from the watersheds in streamflow was nitrified within the catchment. Our results confirm the importance of microbial nitrogen transformations in regulating nitrogen losses from forested ecosystems and suggest that hydrologic storage may be a factor in controlling catchment nitrate losses. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Recent events - from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe - vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. "The Religious Question in Modern China" highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present. Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. "The Religious Question in Modern China" integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China's religious history that is certain to become an indispensable reference for specialists and students alike.


Vibration in internal turning is a problem in the manufacturing industry. A digital adaptive controller for the active control of boring bar vibration may not be a suficient solution to the problem. The inherent delay in a digital adaptive controller delays control authority and may result in tool failure when the load applied by the workpiece on the tool changes abruptly, e.g. in the engagement phase of the cutting edge. A robust analog controller, based on a lead-lag compensator, with simple adjustable gain and phase, suitable for the industry application, has been developed. Also, the basic principle of an active boring bar with embedded actuator is addressed. The performance and robustness of the developed controller has been investigated and compared with an adaptive digital controller based on the feedback filtered-x algorithm. In addition, this paper takes into account those variations in boring bar dynamics which are likely to occur in industry; for example, when the boring bars is clamped in a lathe. Both the analog and the digital controller manage to reduce the boring bar vibration level by up to approximately 50 dB.


Cells monitor how well synthesis of new proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is going, and when stressful conditions cause accumulation of unfolded proteins, the unfolded protein response (UPR) is initiated, which signals for appropriate changes in cellular systems. Ito et al. used a microarray screen to detect genes whose products were specifically expressed in response to agents that cause ER stress. They identified stanniocalcin2 (STC2), which is related to a hormone originally described in fish that functions to prevent hypercalcemia. Expression of STC2 was increased in cultured cells undergoing the UPR after exposure to thapsigargin, an inhibitor of the sarco(endo)plasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPase. Like other UPR genes, STC2 was also expressed in rat brain tissue after transient cerebral ischemia. Expression of STC2 appears to require signaling from the PERK serine-threonine kinase, a known mediator of the UPR, to the transcription factor ATF4, because mouse embryo fibroblasts lacking PERK or ATF4 failed to increase expression of STC2. Treatment of N2a neuroblastoma cells or HeLa cells with siRNA to inhibit STC2 expression increased apoptosis of those cells when treated with thapsigargin. Conversely, overexpression of STC2 in HeLa cells reduced the percentage of cells undergoing apoptosis after thapsigargin treatment. Increased synthesis of STC2, which was detected in the ER by immunofluoresence microscopy and was also secreted from cells undergoing ER stress, appears to contribute to signaling mechanisms that help protect cells under certain stressful conditions. D. Ito, J. R. Walker, C. S. Thompson, I. Moroz, W. Lin, M. L. Veselits, A. M. Hakim, A. A. Fienberg, G. Thinakaran, Characterization of stanniocalcin 2, a novel target of the mammalian unfolded protein response with cytoprotective properties. Mol. Cell. Biol. 24, 9456-9469 (2004). [Abstract] [Full Text]


OBJECTIVE
In this 3 year randomized clinical trial the cost effectiveness of a 6 week educational/cognitive intervention (ECO) is compared with an educational discussion intervention (EDI) and a waiting list condition (WLC).

METHODS
A total of 131 patients with fibromyalgia were randomly allocated to the ECO, EDI, or WLC intervention. The ECO and EDI groups were followed for 12 months, whereas the WLC group was followed for 6 weeks. Direct health care and nonhealth care costs, and the indirect costs associated with lost production due to illness, were calculated. The effects were measured in terms of utilities, using rating scale and standard gamble methods.

RESULTS
Treatment costs were estimated to be US $980 per patient for both ECO and EDI. The total direct health care costs of ECO treatment were US $1623 higher than those for EDI. This difference was significant. Indirect costs for the 2 groups were not significantly different. At 6 weeks there was a significant difference in rating scale utilities between the 3 groups, caused by a significantly greater improvement in the EDI group compared to the WLC group. However, no significant differences in either rating scale or standard gamble utilities were found between the ECO and EDI groups immediately after treatment, or at the 6 or 12 month followups.

CONCLUSION
The economic evaluation showed that the addition of a cognitive component to the educational intervention led to significantly higher health care costs and no additional improvement in quality of life compared to the educational intervention alone. This conclusion is robust through a range of plausible values used in a sensitivity analysis.


Various factors influence e-learners' feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with their e-learning experience, but from an extensive search with six major academic research databases we did not find any research that demonstrated comprehensive profiles of satisfying and dissatisfying factors in e-learning. We conducted a qualitative study to initiate the effort. We used Thorndike's law of effect and Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory as the conceptual frameworks for our study. Thorndike's law of effect applied to human psychology suggests that people would try to avoid annoying stimuli whereas they would try to preserve satisfying stimuli. Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory suggests that different factors influence extreme satisfaction and extreme dissatisfaction on the job. Using the two theories as the conceptual frameworks, we revealed profiles of satisfaction-dissatisfaction factors in e-learning by analyzing extant data of course evaluation obtained from 17 e-learning courses. In this article, we provide recommendations on how other e-learning institutions might utilize the research findings to optimize their e-learning programs and we discuss the potential impact of such interventions on overall institutional outcomes such as learner retention.


As part of its research program to investigate ways of improving resource recovery and reducing subsidence, researchers from the U.S. Bureau of Mines placed instruments in the B-North ore body of the Cannon Mine, Wenatchee, WA, to monitor cemented backfill and rock deformation during mining. The vibrating-wire guages proved to be reliable and versatile, and approximately half of the instruments are providing data after 2 years of use. A two-dimensional, finite-element model was used to analyze the Cannon Mine's multilevel bench cut-and-fill mining method and predict rock and backfill displacements. The model accurately predicted rock displacements, but the predicted and measured displacements in cemented backfill had a correlation coefficient near zero, indicating that the model should only be used to predict rock displacements and not backfill displacements. A finite-difference model was also used to evaluate the stability of a cemented backfill pillar. Results can be used to conservatively predict backfill stresses, but on-site observations of pillar failures coupled with in situ measurements are needed to make more accurate predictions. An ongoing evaluation of the mining system has indicated that filling the primary stopes tight to the back with cemented backfill allowed these pillars to carry overburden loads soon after themore » cemented backfill was placed.« less


Q1: What is shown in fig 1 (see p 539), and what is its significance? Figure 1 shows a prolonged QT interval (corrected QT 520 milliseconds) and macroscopic T wave alternans. T wave alternans is defined as a beat to beat variation in the amplitude or polarity of the T wave. Macroscopic T wave alternans is a predictor of malignant ventricular arrhythmias. Microvolt T wave alternans is a validated predictor of mortality and morbidity in a variety of patient groups. This ECG anomaly is seen with both transient physiological stress (for example, exercise), and with pathological stress such as electrolyte abnormalities and myocardial ischaemia. Indeed, revascularisation in ischaemia has even been shown to reduce the incidence of T wave alternans. It has also been documented in association with the long QT and Brugada syndromes. T wave alternans on a millivolt scale visible to the naked eye (macroscopic T wave alternans) is predominantly a subject for individual case reports. It is often a precursor to the subsequent development of torsades de pointes (polymorphic ventricular tachycardia). Regardless of amplitude, T wave alternans should be regarded as a warning of malignant arrhythmias.


Howard Barker is a writer who has made several notable excursions into what he calls 'the charnel house…of European drama.' David Ian Rabey has observed that a compelling property of these classical works lies in what he calls 'the incompleteness of [their] prescriptions', and Barker's Women Beware Women (1986), Seven Lears (1990) and Gertrude: The Cry (2002), are in turn based around the gaps and interstices found in Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women (c1627), Shakespeare's King Lear (c1604) and Hamlet (c1601) respectively. This extends from representing the missing queen from King Lear, who Barker observes, 'is barely quoted even in the depths of rage or pity', to his new ending for Middleton's Jacobean tragedy and the erotic revivification of Hamlet's mother. This paper will argue that each modern reappropriation accentuates a hidden but powerful feature in these Elizabethan and Jacobean plays – namely their clash between obsessive desire, sexual transgression and death against the imposed restitution of a prescribed morality. This contradiction acts as the basis for Barker's own explorations of eroticism, death and tragedy. The paper will also discuss Barker's project for these 'antique texts', one that goes beyond what he derisively calls 'relevance', but attempts instead to recover 'smothered genius', whereby the transgressive is 'concealed within structures that lend an artificial elegance.' Together with Barker's own rediscovery of tragedy, the paper will assert that these rewritings of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama expose their hidden, yet unsettling and provocative ideologies concerning the relationship between political corruption / justice through the power of sexuality (notably through the allure and danger of the mature woman), and an erotics of death that produces tragedy for the contemporary age.


Healthcare professionals are involved in development work that is always present in healthcare organisations. They are required to participate when quality methods such as Lean and Six Sigma are introduced in hospitals' clinical practises. The purpose of this paper is to explore how development work in terms of providing reliable care are perceived by nurses and physicians when quality methods are implemented in clinical practises. The data consist from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with seventeen nurses and ten physicians at two hospitals in western Sweden. A qualitative research method was used. The interviews were analysed in the search for underlying themes that reflect their perception and evaluation of the quality methods and their possibility to increase the reliability in healthcare. The confidence between nurses and physicians was essential for creating and maintaining supportive relationships and reliable systems. Reliable care seemed to be more of the result of the dedication and professionalism than the result of the applied quality methods. Reliability in healthcare seemed to flow from work attitudes, commitment and continuous development work as much as from quality methods. In general, the professionals more emphasized the importance of teamwork and cooperation as ways to develop healthcare.


Satellite-star optical navigation, a new spacecraft navigation technique has been successfully demonstrated during Mariner 9's approach to Mars in mid-November of 1971. As Mariner 9 approached Mars, 21 TV pictures of its satellites, Phobos and Deimos, were taken and transmitted to earth. On earth, these pictures were carefully processed in order to locate the positions of the bright satellites against the relatively faint star background. These position fixes were used to obtain more accurate knowledge of Mariner 9's path with respect to Mars and its satellites. The accuracy of the new navigation technique has been confirmed by comparison with the standard radio navigation results on Mariner 9. This successful demonstration of satellite-star optical navigation is the culmination of over 2 years of development work at JPL sponsored by NASA's Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology (OAST). NASA now has developed and demonstrated a prototype of a more accurate navigation system, using onboard measurements, which is essential to meeting the challenging requirements of future missions such as the multi-planet gravity-assisted outer planet missions. This paper describes the objectives and performance of the pre-flight and real time activities leading to the successful demonstration of satellite-star navigation data.


The number of eHealth services for patients is rapidly increasing worldwide. This paper describes the status of a very important eHealth service for patients in Sweden, the Patient Accessible Electronic Health Record (PAEHR). As many countries are facing an introduction of national eHealth services providing health information to the patients, lessons learned from Sweden may improve the deployment and use of PAEHRs and similar eHealth services. Challenges that remain in Sweden relate to local differences in the implementation that lead to fragmentation and unequal access to information. Initiatives have been taken to reconcile some of the problems, e.g. an updated national regulatory framework for PAEHR. To date, evaluations are often performed from a healthcare provider perspective, focusing on aspects that are considered important by healthcare professionals and decision makers. Based on experiences of this nation-wide implementation we argue for the need to also base evaluations of eHealth on the perspective of the patients.


This study arose out of an awareness that contemporary performance theories
and production techniques were not appropriate to the plays of Howard
Barker. The first section, a comparison of Barker with Edward Bond,
attempts to 'situate' the former with reference to a major dramatist of the
seventies and early eighties. This reveals a number of significant
differences, including almost diametrically opposed conceptions of the
function of drama.
In the second section, I consider Barker against a wider background of
deconstructive and postmodernist thinking. As opposed to Bond's Brechtian
notion of a Rational theatre, I argue that Barker's theatre is irrational
and suggest that irrational interaction is Seduction. Barker's plays are
considered from the point of view of a theory of seduction - in particular
Jean Baudrillard's. There follows a review of a range of discourses on
performance by influential practitioners such as Stanislavsky. Although
seduction is identifiable in all their practices, it is almost universally
denied or shunned - except by Grotowski. Also the focus of acting technique
is invariably on the actor/character relation with little consideration of
interaction with others.
The third section considers in some detail two plays by Barker - JUDITH and
THE CASTLE, analysing them from a seductive perspective.


textabstractClimate change and global warming are significantly affected by carbon emissions that arise from the burning of fossil fuels, specifically coal, oil and gas. Accurate prices are essential for purposes of measuring, capturing, storing and trading in carbon emissions at the regional, national, and international levels, especially as carbon emissions can be taxed appropriately when the price is known and widely accepted. The paper uses a novel KLEM production function approach to calculate the latent carbon emission prices, where carbon emission is the output and capital (K), labour (L), energy (E) (or electricity), and materials (M), are the inputs into the production process. The variables K, L and M are essentially fixed on a daily or monthly basis, whereas E can be changed more frequently, such as daily or monthly, so that changes in carbon emissions depend on changes in E. If prices are assumed to depend on average cost pricing, the prices of carbon emissions and energy may be approximated by an energy production model with a constant factor of proportionality, so that carbon emission prices will be a function of energy prices. Using this novel modelling approach, the paper estimates carbon emission prices for Japan using seasonally adjusted and unadjusted monthly data on the volumes of carbon emissions and energy, as well as energy prices, from December 2008 to April 2018. The econometric models show that, as sources of electricity, the logarithms of coal and oil, though not LNG, are statistically significant in explaining the logarithm of carbon emissions, with oil being more significant than coal.


The directors of the Dutch West India Company have often been at the center of debates about religion and tolerance in Dutch colonies. Using the first comprehensive list of names from the most powerful company chambers, this essay examines the directors� religious affiliations and activity in the Netherlands and the impact of both on the company. Most were full members of the Reformed Church and many participated as elders and deacons on Reformed councils. They did not have as much control over their territories as some have assumed, but their religion matters for several reasons: It involved the company in the international Calvinist community, whose very existence may have fostered a cosmopolitan worldview that was amenable to empire. Their religion shaped their views of the company�s aims and achievements and facilitated a great deal of business with the church as the two worked together to meet religious needs abroad. Reformed beliefs about religious authority also allowed them to influence the clergy�s interpretation of imperial activity. The purported divide between church and company, minister and merchant, is inconsistent with Reformed doctrines and practices.


While open innovation has been increasingly adopted in developed countries, firms from emerging markets such as Brazil markedly fall behind this trend. Our understanding of the reasons behind this phenomenon remains nevertheless limited, since most research focuses on the industrialized world. In this paper, we aim to inspire the academic community to investigate the issue of why companies from emerging economies such as Brazil have limited open innovation strategies, when they need to draw on external partners as to overcome the institutional, resource and capability constraints they are subject to. We build on the argument that latecomer firms in emerging economies need to actively use open innovation more than ever, as to overcome internal rigidities and spur the innovative resources and capabilities required for the digital transformation and for addressing grand societal challenges. In reviewing current research on openness and especially in the Brazilian setting, we contend that it is a relevant empirical context to study, giving the potential to uncover unique mechanisms and theoretical relations by asking (and possibly answering) novel research questions. Building on a conceptual framework that links various implementation levels of open innovation, we identify themes that are either less well researched or contested and thereby suggest challenges and opportunities for future research.


For the development of biorefineries and the production of bio-based products, lignocellulosic biomass constitutes the largest source of renewable organic feedstock. The fractionation of its main components (hemicellulose, cellulose and lignin) is a promising approach for the production of platform chemicals. At the Institute of Thermal Separation Processes (TVT) at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), a second-generation biorefinery approach is being investigated and Liquid Hot Water (LHW) pretreatment is conducting in a batch screening reactor. LHW pretreatment can remove up to 80% of the hemicellulose and enhances the enzymatic digestibility of the material. Nevertheless, sugar degradations to furfural and others is unwanted and to be avoided. Application of citrate and acetate pH-buffers as reaction additives to suppress degradation reactions was studied. Different buffer concentrations were tested in a range of 0.005 M to 0.05 M. Highest buffer concentrations had an undesirable effect in hemicellulose yield and citrate buffers resulted to be noneffective to minimize furfural yield. As a consequence, they are not useful to reduce xylose degradation. Acetate pH-buffer was used with two different pH: 4 and 5. Unfortunately, the use of pH 4 buffer did not have a positive effect on the reduction of degradation reactions. However, it was found that pH 5 buffers can be used to reduce furfural yield (but not selectivity) and to keep the pH more basic after the LHW pretreatment in order to make suitable the consecutive enzymatic hydrolysis for the production of glucose and a highly pure solid lignin.


In this paper, shape memory alloys (SMAs) (NiTi-based) have been manufactured by casting with a different atomic percentage of a silver element (0, 1, 2 and 3 at. % Ag) using a Vacuum Arc Remelting (VAR) furnace. The silver element is added to the binary alloys due to its excellent properties such as (anti-corrosion, anti-bacterial and high electrical conductivity), which make these alloys using in wider applications. These alloys with different atomic percentages (Ni55Ti45Ag0, Ni55Ti44Ag1, Ni55Ti43Ag2 and Ni55Ti42Ag3) have been manufactured. The successful manufacturing process has been achieved and proved via examinations and tests. The FESEM microscopic examinations show that the silver element has been distributed uniformly and homogeneously in the NiTi matrix. Moreover, the emergence of austenite phase, martensite phase and little amount impurities. Regarding the XRD examination, showed that there is an increase in the number of peaks of Ag phase with an increase in the atomic percentage of the silver element, as well to emergence of phase (Ti2Ni) upon heating, phase (Ti 002) upon cooling, and phase (Ni4Ti3) is not desired. The starting and finishing of the phase transformations have been determined for all samples by the DSC test. The Shape Memory Effect (SME) for the alloy (Ni50Ti42Ag3) is measured to be about 89.99%.


This reflection identifies education as the primary domestic priority for both major political parties. Her commentary opens our conversation about education with an important question: How do you fundamentally change public education in a way that is not intrusive and over-reaching but, in the short-term, turns education around? Having learned his lesson from the senior President Bush, whose poll numbers plummeted when he vowed to abolish the U.S. Department of Education in the 1992 presidential race, Senator Bob Dole (R-KS) vowed instead to "overhaul" it when he ran for president against Bill Clinton. President Clinton, you may remember, actually ran as the "education president." He had been the "education governor" in Arkansas, after all, and championed policies that raised test scores and helped more disadvantaged kids get to college. In the 2000 presidential election year, both candidates ranked education among their highest priorities. George W. Bush called himself the "real" education presidential candidate, and now President Bush still calls education his top domestic priority. None of this is surprising. Previous presidential election cycles have seen education emerge as the number one issue on which most Americans believe more federal dollars should be spent. A 2000 survey by the University of Chicago revealed that over the preceding ten years, support for education had risen to the top of America's priority list, surpassing concerns about crime. September 11, 2001, has likely skewed those conclusions for the upcoming presidential election, but, unquestionably, a presidential candidate's view of and plan for education is one of the issues voters prioritize in evaluating and picking their national leader. President Bush has already begun to run on the issue. Unlike in other presidential cycles, however, Bush faces opposition to his own education policies from within his party and from Democrats. For the first time anyone I know in education can remember, state governors, legislators, and administrators are actually considering not taking Bush's federal education funds. Imagine it. The federal government offers hundreds of millions of education dollars to a budget-strapped state, and the state says, "Naaaaaaaaah--you keep it." It's extraordinary, particularly at a time when almost every state in the union has a budget deficit. Ms. Thornton, Patton Boggs partner, was chief of staff to the United States Secretary of Education, deputy advisor to President Clinton for the 1996 presidential debates, and associate counsel in the 1992 presidential transition. She has written numerous articles in publications including Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, American Lawyer, Boston Globe, and Legal Times. So, what's going on? In 2002, President Bush enacted No Child Left Behind, the signature piece of education legislation that he promised voters in his 2000 campaign and the bill he expected to propel him through a 2004 reelection. Indeed, the fact that he--by his own admission--has not actually read the bill aside, President Bush has been traveling the country talking about the bill's importance and its early success. The new law requires annual testing of students in grades three through eight and requires schools whose students do not meet the bill's standards for "adequate yearly progress" to take remedial action. The schools could be designated as failing, and they are exposed to penalties, including forced transfer of students and being taken over by the state. The complicated new law is more than one thousand pages long and attaches the availability of federal funding to successfully meeting the bill's stringent, high-consequence requirements. …


Summary

The exceptionally long (c. 11 months) growth period of king penguin chicks (Aptenodytes patagonicus) is interrupted by the Austral winter. As a consequence, penguin chicks born late in the breeding season have little time to build-up their energy reserves before the drastic energy bottleneck they experience during winter and face greater risks of mortality than early-born chicks.

Whereas it is well known that breeding adults alternate between early- and late-breeding attempts, little is known on the phenotype of early- and late-chicks, and on the potential existence of specific adaptive phenotypic responses in late-born individuals.

We investigated phenotypic differences between early- and late-chicks and tested their survival correlates both before the winter and at fledgling. Chicks were sampled 10 days after hatching to measure body mass, plasma corticosterone levels, oxidative stress parameters and telomere length.

Late-chicks were heavier than early-chicks at day 10. Late-chicks also had higher corticosterone and oxidative stress levels, shorter telomere lengths and suffered from higher mortality rates than early-chicks. For both early- and late-chicks, high body mass close to hatching was a strong predictor of survival up to, and over, the winter period.

In late but not early-chicks, high corticosterone levels and long telomeres were significant predictors of survival up to winter and fledging, respectively.

Our study provides evidence that late- and early-king penguin chicks showed marked phenotypic differences 10 days after hatching. We provide an integrative discussion on whether these differences may be adaptive or not, and to what extent they may be driven by active maternal effects, indirectly induced by environmental effects, or stem from individual differences in parental quality.


We study both theoretically and empirically the relationship between different types of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and a firm's product quality. On the one hand, observable external CSR (e.g., a firm's involvement in a social project) can be used as a signal to unobservable product quality. On the other hand, internal CSR (e.g., human resources practices such as training and labor stability) can improve a firm's labor productivity, specially in firms supplying high quality. We show that CSR may serve as a tool for a firm's product differentiation strategy, finding that both internal and external CSR enhance a firm's product quality. Moreover, this implies the existence of complementarity between internal and external CSR (they mutually reinforce each other) through product quality. We test our theoretical results with data from the hotel industry where we show that hotel establishments with a higher product quality are indeed more likely to be socially responsible, both internally and externally, indicative of the existence of complementarity.


Background Over the past decade, developed Western countries have supplied increasingly stringent measures to discourage those seeking asylum. Aims To investigate the longer-term mental health effects of mandatory detention and subsequent temporary protection on refugees. Method Lists of names provided by community leaders were supplemented by snowball sampling to recruit 241 Arabic-speaking Mandaean refugees in Sydney (60% of the total adult Mandaean population). Interviews assessed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depressive episodes, and indices of stress related to pasttrauma, detention and temporary protection. Results A multilevel model which included age, gender, family clustering, pre-migration trauma and length of residency revealed that past immigration detention and ongoing temporary protection each contributed independently to risk of ongoing PTSD, depression and mental health-related disability. Longer detention was associated with more severe mental disturbance, an effect that persisted for an average of 3 years after release. Conclusions Policies of detention and temporary protection appear to be detrimental to the longer-term mental health of refugees.


At least two types of metabasites occur along the granulite amphibolite facies transition in the Okiep Copper District in western Namaqualand. Low-pressure mafic granulites are mainly found in metagranitoids (Nababeep Gneiss) and supracrustal sequences (Khurisberg Subgroup) in the southern granulite facies Okiep domain; they include low-MgO as well as Mg-rich ol-normative types. Prograde amphibolites and rare relics of mafic granulite occur in orthogneisses of the −1.8 Ga Gladkop Suite and associated volcano-sedimentary rocks of the Lammerhoek Subgroup in the northern Steinkopf domain. All metabasites were metamorphosed during the late Narnaqua (1.02 to 1.03 Ga) high-grade event and are of orthomagmatic origin: precursors of mafic granulites were of subalkaline tholeiitic, while those of amphibolites of transitional alkali olivine basaltic to tholeiitic composition. MORB-normalised spidergrams and REE patterns are vely similar for the two groups and indicate prominent large ion lithophile (LIL) element and LREE enrichment compared to MORB ((La/Lu)N mafic granulites, 1.2–16.0; amphibolites, 0.6–5.1). Geochemical differences were, however, confirmed for LIL elements; the lower and more erratic concentrations of K2O, Na2O, Rb, and Pb in the mafic granulites may be the result of mobile behaviour of LIL elements during high-grade metamorphism. However, observed increased LREE concentrations cannot be explained with post-magmatic mobilisation alone. REE modelling demonstrates that some REE patterns of mafic granulites may be explained with about 20 % of partial (batch) melting of a fertile mantle source with subsequent variable degrees of fractional crystallisation of clinopyroxene, olivine, plagioclase ± hornblende; higher melting rates up to 40 % need to be assumed for successful modelling of the Mg-rich granulite. 10–15 % partial melting of fertile mantle can reproduce the most primitive amphibolite REE patterns. However, partial melting of a primitive mantle source and subsequent fractionation could not reproduce LREE-rich patterns documented for most amphibolites; an enriched mantle source is indicated. Geochemical data exclude an intra-plate or a depleted MORB-type mantle source for the various types of mafic granulites as well as for amphibolites but do not allow discrimination between extensional (e.g. continental flood basalt) and subduction-related (e.g. arc type) geotectonic settings. Our data establish strong geochemical similarities to older 1.65 Ga amphibolites from central Bushmanland.


The article endeavors to trace the outset of governance concept, its dominant meanings and discourse, and its implication towards governability. The central role of government in the governing processes has predominantly been adopted. The concept of governance was emerged precisely in the context of the failure of government as key player in regulation, economic redistribution and political participation. Governance is therefore aimed to emphasize pattern of governing which are based both on democratic mechanism and sound development management. However, practices of such good governance concept –which are mainly adopted and promoted by donor states and agencies– tend to degrade state and/or government authority and legitimacy. Traditional function of the state as sole facilitator of equal societal, political and legal membership among citizens has been diminished. The logic of fair competition has been substituted almost completely by the logic of free competition in nearly all sectors of public life. The concept and practices of good governance have resulted in decayed state authority and failed state which in turn created a condition for "ungovernability". By promoting democratic and humane governance, the article accordingly encourages discourse to reinstall and bring the idea of accountable state back in.


This study deals with the Distributed Buying Problem, that is, the problem faced by geographically distributed businesses when it comes to optimising buyer time and global businesses resources. It adopts a software agent-based approach to the problem. A literature survey was carried out to review the relatively new field of software agents and mobile agents in particular. The role of agents in electronic commerce was also studied. A mobile agent system was then designed and implemented to serve as a proof-ofconcept system for an agent-based solution to the problem. The design and implementation are then discussed.


The goal of our research is to predict a relation (predicate) of two given RDF entities (subject and object). Link prediction between entities is important for developing large-scale ontologies and for knowledge graph completion. TransE and TransR have been proposed as the methods for such a prediction. However, TransE and TransR embed both entities and relations in the same (or different) semantic space(s). Since entity embedding is enough for predicting relations, we propose a method for predicting a predicate from a subject and an object by using a Deep Neural Network (DNN), and developed RDFDNN. RDFDNN embeds entities only; given subject and object are embedded and concatenated to predict probability distribution of predicates. Experimental results showed that predictions by RDFDNN are more accurate than those by TransE and TransR. Although RDFDNN learns from RDF triples only, its accuracy is comparable to that of DKRL which uses both RDF triples and entity descriptions for learning.


Graft copolymerization of methyl acrylate and acrylic acid monomers onto rubber
wood fiber (RWF) was carried out by simultaneous radiation-induced technique.
The parameters affecting the grafting reaction were investigated and the optimum
conditions for both monomers obtained are as follows: impregnation time, 16
hours; total dose, 30 kGy; methanol:water ratio, 3: 1 ; monomers concentration, 40
v/v% and sulphuric acid concentration, 0.1 mol/L.
Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR), Thermogravimetry Analysis (TGA), and
Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) analyses were performed to characterize
graft copolymers. The structural investigation by X-ray diffraction (XRD) shows
the degree of crystallinity of rubber wood fiber decreased with the incorporation of
poly(methyl acrylate) and poly(acrylic acid) grafts which causes partial destruction
of the inherent crystallinity in fiber. The sorption behavior of poly(acrylic acid)-
grafted RWF resin toward some metal ions was investigated using a batch
technique. The binding capacities ofeu, Fe, Zn, Cd and Pb ions were 0.379, 0.795, 0.189, 0.921 and 1.218 mmol/g, respectively. The sorption capacities of
poly(acrylic acid)-grafted RWF resin were selectivity toward these metal ions is in
the following order: Pb > Cd> Fe > Cu > Zn.
Irradiated PP/poly(methyl acrylate)-grafted RWF composite has higher mechanical
properties than PP/poly(methyl acrylate)-grafted RWF composite because of EB treatment
of PP is a highly efficient technique of creating chemically active sites
on PP matrix, which created a better coupling, and can be proved by SEM studies
and TGA analysis. Generally, the addition of poly(methyl acrylate)-grafted RWF
as coupling agent into the composites reduces the flexural and tensile properties,
which, causes poor and incompatible dispersion, which leads to poor filler-matrix
interfacial bonding. But, the addition of 1.0 wt % of P(MA)-g-RWF into the blend
give an optimum value of flexural and tensile properties.


Using a novel method to measure the isotopic signature (δd13C) of respiratory CO2 produced by bacterioplankton, we determined the proportion of terrigenous vs. algal‐derived organic carbon (OC) respired by bacteria in a series of eight lakes in southern Que'bec (Canada). The lakes are located within the same general basin but span a large range in trophic status, morphometry, and dissolved OC (DOC) concentrations. Isotopic δ13C values of respired CO2 ranged from ‐28.4‰ to ‐32.5‰ across a gradient of lakes and streams. These values were compared with those of potential OC sources within the lakes (terrigenous and algal) using a mass balance model. The proportion of terrigenous OC respired varied from 3% to >70% and was strongly negatively correlated to lake chlorophyll a (Chl a) concentrations and weakly positively correlated to DOC: Chl a concentrations. While both total plankton and bacterial respiration (BR) increase with lake Chl a concentration, the component of BR that is supported by terrigenous OC, which ranges from 0.7 to 1.7 mg C L‐1 h‐1, stays essentially constant along the trophic gradient, increasing only slightly with DOC concentration. There is a relatively constant baseline BR supported by terrigenous OC, which becomes diluted by the BR of algal OC as the lakes become more productive. The estimated production of CO2 through BR of terrigenous OC in the epilimnion explains on average 60% of the estimated air‐water CO2 flux calculated for these lakes, suggesting that the processing of allochthonous OC by bacteria is a major component of this flux.


This study proposes a social-environmental economic model, based on Regional Sequential Interindustry Model (SIM) integrated with geoprocessing data, in order to identify economic, pollution and public health impacts in state and municipality levels for energy planning analysis. Integrating I-O framework with electrical and dispersion models, dose-response functions and GIS data, this model aims to expand policy makers' scope of analysis and provide an auxiliary tool to assess energy planning scenarios in Brazil both dynamically and spatially. Moreover, a case study for wind power plants in Brazil is performed to illustrate its usage.


Purpose: To evaluate choroidal vascular structure and choroidal thickness in patients with chronic central serous chorioretinopathy. Materials and Methods: Thirty-four eyes of 34 patients with unilateral chronic central serous chorioretinopathy (Group 1; involved eyes, Group 2; fellow eyes) and 28 right eyes of 28 age and gender matched subjects (Group 3) were included to study. All participants underwent a detailed ophthalmic examination and an optical coherence tomography obtained by enhanced dept imaging mode (EDI-OCT). Choroidal thickness, total choroidal area, luminal area, stromal area and choroidal vascularity index were calculated with Image J program. Results: The mean choroidal thickness was 411.47±120.16 (228-674) in Group 1 376.64±73.345 (213-578) in Group 2 and 289.93±47.495 (220-372) in Group 3. Choroidal thickness was signifi cantly higher in Group 1 and 2 than Group 3, but it was statistically similar between Group1 and 2. The mean total choroidal area was 1.66±0.48 (0.58-2.51) in Group 1, 1.60±0.54 (0.63-2.68) in Group 2 and 1.39±0.26 (0.991.94) in Group 3. Total choroidal area, luminal area and choroidal vascularity index were signifi cantly higher in Group 1 and Group 2. Choroidal vascularity indexes were 0.55±0.26 (0.18-0.64), 0.34±0.06 (0.17-0.42), 0.28±0.04 (0.20-0.35) in Group 1, 2 and 3, respectively. It was signifi cantly higher in Group 1 and 2 than Group 3. Conclusion: Choroidal thickness was increased in patients with central serous chorioretinopathy and their fellow eyes. Also, choroidal vascular structural changes may occur in both eyes of patients.


Creek banks within Mecklenburg County, NC, are eroding, producing excessive quantities of sediment in the creek and causing bank instability. Seeking innovative approaches to these problems, Mecklenburg County Storm Water Services (SWS) teamed with HDR Engineering's Charlotte and Anchorage, AK, offices to develop prototype projects for improving channel stability and reducing bank erosion throughout the county. Three sites along Toby Creek with representative channel problems were selected to demonstrate channel restoration techniques. The three sites selected were: (1) an eroding side channel to Toby Creek that has an exposed 21-inch sanitary sewer line, (2) a straight channel reach with undercut vertical channel banks and bank slumping, and (3) an eroding bend where the scouring threatens a major sewer line. Restoration techniques were developed specifically for these types of problems and will include native vegetation, reshaping of channel banks, and construction of bank toe protection. Based on findings from these channel restoration projects, a series of standard details will be developed for use throughout the County on areas with similar problems. The sites will be monitored for two years to evaluate performance of channel restoration techniques.


Objectives: To determine the effectiveness of intravenous versus oral paracetamol (acetaminophen) in the management of acute pain in the out-of-hospital setting. Methods: We extracted ambulance electronic patient care records for all patients who received 1 g intravenous paracetamol throughout January 2019, and case matched these by sex and age with consecutive patients who received 1 g oral paracetamol over the same time period. Eligible for inclusion were all patients aged ≥ 18 who received 1 g paracetamol for acute pain and who were transported to the emergency department (ED). The primary outcome was the mean reduction in pain score using the numeric rating scale (NRS), with a reduction of 2 or more accepted as clinically significant. Results: 80 care records were eligible for analysis; 40 patients received intravenous and 40 patients received oral paracetamol. The mean age of both groups was 54 years (± 3 years) and 67.5% (n = 54) were female. Patients receiving intravenous paracetamol had a clinically significant mean (SD) improved pain score compared to those receiving oral paracetamol, 2.02 (1.64) versus 0.75 (1.76), respectively [p = 0.0013]. 13/40 (32.5%) patients who received intravenous paracetamol saw an improved pain score of ≥ 2 compared to 8/40 (20%) who received oral paracetamol. No patients received additional analgesia or reported any adverse symptoms. Abdominal pain, infection and trauma were the most common causes of pain in both groups. Conclusion: Our study suggests that intravenous paracetamol is more effective than oral paracetamol when managing acute pain in the out-of-hospital setting. Our findings support further investigation of the role of paracetamol in paramedic practice using more robust methods.


Research into figurative language in foreign language acquisition has primarily focused on the receptive skills, where there is strong evidence to suggest that encouraging students to reflect on the metaphorical origins of figurative expressions makes learning and recall of vocabulary demonstrably more effective. However, very little has been said about the effects of this strategy on students' productive output. With some advanced learners' dictionaries now also including information about conceptual metaphor, it is important that the utility of this feature be examined in more detail. This paper examines different types of figurative language produced by advanced learners of English at an Italian university. It highlights the extent to which conceptual meaning is dependent on collocation and phraseology, and suggests how this can be treated more effectively in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.


Greater than ever pressure is being brought to bear on the South African Criminal Justice System to function more efficiently than is currently the situation. Hence the Department of Correctional Services published a new White Paper during 2005. In terms of the White Paper the core business of the Department is "correcting offender behaviour, rehabilitation, and correction as a societal responsibility" (Department of Correctional Services 2005:7). Case management was identified as the vehicle to bring about a shift in emphasis in the core business. Applied to South African corrections, case management first made an appearance in the Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998. However, the Department of Correctional Services has been trying to implement case management within the correctional system since the promulgation of the new legislation, sadly with mixed results and very little real advancement in the area of offender rehabilitation. A case study has been completed in one of the two existing private prisons in South Africa to investigate the successful implementation of a case management system. The Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998 makes provision for the institution of private prisons through joint ventures. These private prisons are bound by the same Act as is the case for prisons under government control. In private prisons case management legally and contractually forms part of the performance requirements that have been applicable since their inception. The selection of the particular private prison was based on the fact that the prison was erected in accordance with the philosophical and architectural dictates applicable to unit management, and caters for full implementation of case management within the system. Full implementation of case management in the private prison environment would ensure that the results from the case study could be viable for and applicable to other prisons in South Africa. The purpose of this article is to investigate, at the hand of the case study, the implementation of case management in a selected private prison in South Africa.


We present a new type of "snake" in which the dimensionality of the shapes is scaled appropriately for the resolution of the images in which the shapes are embedded. We define shapes as an ordered list of control points and compute the principal components of the shapes in a prior training set. Our energy function is based upon the Mahalanobis distance of a given shape from the mean shape and on the Mahalanobis distance of the image attributes from image attribute values extracted from the training set. We show that the derivative of this energy function with respect to the modal weights is reduced as the image resolution is reduced, and that the derivative of the energy scales with the variance associated with each mode. We exploit this property to determine the subset of the modes which are relevant at a particular level of image resolution thereby reducing the dimensionality of the shapes. We implement a coarse-to-fine search procedure in the image and shape domains simultaneously, and demonstrate this procedure on the identification of anatomic structures in Computed Tomography images.


I. INTRODUCTION II. THE RULES OF THE GAME A. Immigration Laws Affecting Foreign Athletes 1. The Current 0 Visa 2. The Current P Visa 3. Effect of the Current Legislation 4. Practical Application to Foreign Athletes B. Collective Bargaining 1. MLB Draft and Current CBA 2. NBA Draft and Current CBA C. Antitrust Jurisprudence in Professional Sports 1. Major League Baseball's Antitrust Exemption 2. Effects of Antitrust Law on the NBA III. A GLOBAL PLAYING FIELD A. Emergence of Baseball as an International Sport 1. International Awareness in MLB 2. Other International Issues B. The NBA and Global Basketball 1. Introduction of International Players 2. FIBA--Global Basketball Governing Body IV. INSTANT REPLAY--RECENT BIG PLAYS A. MLB Players and Owners Avoid Strike B. Houston Rockets Draft China's Yao Ming as the Number One Pick V. POST-GAME WRAP-UP: COMPARING MLB AND THE NBA A. Global Draft is Necessary B. Baseball Should Learn From Basketball VI. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION Our world is getting smaller with each passing year. Advances in science, technology, and industry have bridged geographical gaps between nations. Music, art, and education foster common understanding between vastly different societies. Working toward ideals of equality and freedom will continue to unite politically disparate communities. More and more, citizens of the world are opening their eyes to see that people who seem to live a lifetime away are really not that different after all. That which binds a community together also connects those around the world. This global connection is becoming more apparent in the world of professional sports. Over the past few decades, American sports fans have seen a dramatic increase in the number of international players in arenas, stadiums, and ballparks throughout the United States. (1) Some fans undoubtedly disapprove of such a "foreign invasion" of "American" pastimes, while others welcome the new challenges, perspectives, and competition that the international community can bring to American games. The changing faces of American sports heroes have not gone unnoticed by those in the sports business. Perhaps players, in particular, feel that their job security and positions in the limelight are threatened by the presence of foreign talent. If so, what can players do about it? Should they do anything about it? Is it right or wrong for sports management to seek talent from outside the United States? Does bringing in outside talent have a detrimental or beneficial effect on American sports? Can players and owners reach amicable solutions to the inherent tensions that these questions raise? This comment does not attempt to answer all of these questions. Instead, it will focus on the impact of bringing foreign players into the United States via professional sports drafting systems within the professional sports of baseball and basketball. Part II provides a legal backdrop from which to view the drafting of foreign players. First, it explains the immigration laws that allow international athletes to play in the United States. It then explains the mechanisms through which players can negotiate with and challenge management on issues inherent in drafting systems: collective bargaining and antitrust law. Part III of this comment closely examines the ways in which American baseball and basketball have grown into global, rather than American, pastimes. Part IV focuses on two recent events that have brought the issue of foreign players and the draft to the forefront of the sports world. First, America's baseball players agreed during the summer of 2002 to implement a worldwide draft system in Major League Baseball (MLB). Second, Chinese player Yao Ming was the number one draft pick in the National Basketball Association (NBA) starting in the 2002-03 basketball season. …


There are currently no effective treatments to prevent spontaneous preterm labor. The precise upstream biochemical pathways that regulate the transition between uterine quiescence during pregnancy and contractility during labor remain unclear. It is well known however that intrauterine inflammation, including infection, is commonly associated with preterm labor. In this study, we identified the immunoproteasome subunit low‐molecular‐mass protein (LMP)7 mRNA expression to be significantly upregulated in laboring human myometrium. Silencing LMP7 using siRNA‐targeted knockdown of LMP7 and its inhibitor ONX‐0914 in human myometrial cells and tissues decreased proinflammatory cytokines (IL‐6), cell chemotaxis (CXCL8, CCL2 expression, and THP‐1 migration), cell to cell adhesion (ICAM1 expression and myometrial adhesion), contraction‐associated proteins (PTGS2, FP, PGE2, and PGF2α), as well as suppressing contractions in myometrial cells and in myometrial tissues obtained from laboring women. In addition, LMP7 silencing reduced NF‐κB RelA activity. ONX‐0914 alleviated inflammation (CCL3, CXCL1, PTGS2, and IL‐6) in myometrium, placenta, fetal brain, amniotic fluid, and maternal serum induced by LPS in pregnant mice. Collectively, our data suggest a novel role for ONX‐014 to suppress uterine activation and contractility associated with preterm labor.