The effect of photodynamic therapy (PDT) on neurons is an important consideration when treating cancers within or adjacent to the nervous system. The photosensitiser, meta-tetrahydroxyphenyl chlorin (mTHPC) is effective in destroying tumour cells but can spare neurons in culture. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of cellular antioxidant pathways in protecting neurons from damage during mTHPC-mediated PDT.

Exposing cells to 4 µg/ml mTHPC-mediated PDT in a 3D culture system resulted in substantial cell death among tumour cells and glia, but survival of neurons. To investigate this phenomenon, prior to PDT neurons were treated with drugs to block antioxidant pathways; L-buthionine sulfoximine (L-BSO) depleted glutathione, and diethyldithiocarbamate (DDC) and 2-methoxyoestradiol (2MeOE2) were used to inhibit superoxide dismutase SOD 1 and SOD 2 respectively. Neuronal cell death was assessed 24 h later.

Neuronal death following mTHPC-mediated PDT was significantly increased in the presence of either DDC or L-BSO compared to PDT-only controls. There was a slight increase in neuronal death following PDT in neurons treated with 2-MeOE2, but this was not statistically significant. Overall, inhibition of glutathione resulted in 63 ± 7 % of neurons dying and inhibition of SOD 1 resulted in 42 ± 7 % neuron death.

These results suggest that the mechanism by which neurons show reduced sensitivity to mTHPC-mediated PDT involves endogenous antioxidant pathways, the blocking of which results in neuronal cell death. Of the antioxidant pathways investigated here it is apparent that glutathione and SOD 1 play an important role, whereas inhibition of SOD 2 had little effect. Further studies are required to understand fully the cellular mechanisms involved in protecting neurons during this treatment, and the culture system described here is a useful tool for such research. Ultimately, understanding the conditions under which neurons may be able to survive PDT or other oxidative damage is important in developing strategies for treating tumours within or adjacent to the nervous system, where avoidance of neuronal damage has the potential to reduce side effects.


Treatment and Illness Updates p. 6 At the 2019 meeting of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, researcher Willem Nolen discussed optimal lithium levels to prevent episodes of bipolar disorder. Based on the limited number of controlled trials that have examined this issue and a survey of experts in the field, Nolen concluded that the standard dosing target to prevent bipolar episodes would be a blood concentration of 0.6 to 0.8 mEq/liter. This concentration could be dropped to 0.4 to 0.6 mEq/liter for patients who responded well to a higher dosage but needed to reduce side effects, and the concentration could be increased to 0.8 to 1.0 mEq/liter for patients who tolerated lithium treatment but showed an inadequate response. There was no consensus as to optimal blood concentrations of lithium to prevent bipolar episodes in children and adolescents, but some researchers endorsed the same standard recommended for adults. For elderly patients, the majority of researchers recommended a slightly lower concentration of 0.4 to 0.6 mEq/liter, with the option to increase to a maximum of 0.8 mEq/liter in those under age 80 and 0.7 mEq/liter in those over age 80. Lithium Reverses Some White Matter Abnormalities in Young People with Bipolar Disorder


Drop size distributions (DSD) associated with tropical rainfall at Cuddalore in the south-eastern part of India have been measured by a JossWaldvogel disdrometer (RD–80 model) during September to November 2002. The rainfall data corrected for instrumental error, matches very well with rainfall rates measured by a self recording raingauge, at the same site. For further analysis of the DSD, the rainfall events were separated into convective and stratiform rainfall by an algorithm based on variation of DSD parameters. One rain event in the form of a squall line of 15 September 2002, was analysed in greater detail to investigate the validity of the classification scheme as well as to study the variation of the DSD parameters during the course of a rain event. It was observed that, the algorithm was robust and had quite good correspondence with other independent rainfall separation algorithms. During the rain event, at low rainrates, the convective phase of the rainfall event was marked by DSD spectra that have greater population of small droplets as compared to stratiform DSDs at the same rainrates. At higher rainrates, the convective regime is characterised by narrow spectra centred at higher diameters. At the transition region between convective and stratiform spectra, mixed large and small drop spectra are observed. Similar variation was also observed in the averaged drop spectra. In addition, the averaged spectra also reveal an equilibrium distribution of the drop population in DSDs at higher rainrates (>39 /hr) for diameter range (>1.91 mm) corresponding to nearly constant values of the slope of the distribution, the intercept and the mean mass diameter. The value of the shape parameter, which for small rainrates varies the same as the slope parameter, starts to increase with increasing rainrate as the other two parameters of the gamma distribution approach a constant value corresponding to equilibrium shape. The value of the intercept parameter is highest for low to moderate convective rainfall and decreases as the rainrate increases.


What is the relationship between coding practice and contemporary forms of socially engaged art practice? Both can trace links to the conceptual art tradition. Both explore issues of system, instruction, communication and constraint. Both disturb the limits of autonomous art either by choosing to speak and to think in an alien, technologically inflected language, or by refusing to function in the gallery context and in the service of producing neatly solid and distinct aesthetic phenomena. Although at times the two can correspond closely – within currents, for example, of open source culture and political software art – they tend to preserve an uneasy relation. Despite their affinities, they cannot quite find adequate points of contact. This paper aims to examine this awkward relation, considering key dimensions of commonality and difference, as well as envisaging possibilities for greater collaborative intersection. Fostering exchange involves, at the outset, acknowledging diverse modes of addressing the social – from the literal to the indirect, from the immediate and ephemeral to the diagrammatic and abstract. Then, in a related manner, it involves conceiving new ways of setting these modes at play, of bringing into dialogue code and lived experience. More specifically, this paper examines how forms of code-drawing, which can easily be interpreted in terms of a naive and conservative return to the terrain of conventional art, can intersect with the diagrams and ephemeral 'walked' paths of socially engaged art.


This work involves the development and application of a database for the morphological, crystallographic, and chemical characterization of amphibole particles that occur as accessory minerals in the former vermiculite mine in Libby, Montana. The data in the database were collected using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) techniques for particle-by-particle characterization of mixed mineral dust samples. In the fall of 1999, public attention was focused on the small town of Libby due to health concerns over potential amphibole asbestos exposure that occurred in the now closed vermiculite mine. The vermiculite deposit, located in the Rainy Creek Igneous Complex, about seven miles northeast of Libby, was discovered in 1913 and commercial production of vermiculite began in 1923.


Multirate multicasting is a generalization of single-rate multicasting to prevent destinations with good connections from being limited by the capacity of bottleneck connections. While multirate multicasting has been traditionally performed over fixed trees, advances in network coding theory have enabled higher throughput and have helped us move beyond the restriction of tree structures for routing the multicast data. In this paper, we address the questions of optimal rate allocation and low-complexity network coding solutions to the problem of multirate multicasting in general multihop networks. Our work considers intralayer network coding capabilities, where the session is conceptually divided into layers optimally and coding is performed across packets belonging to the same layer. Our approach differs from earlier works in this domain in its separation of the problem into rate allocation and content distribution items, which allows a number of optimization and graphical techniques in their solution. Noting the complexities involved in the optimal rate allocation and content distribution solutions, we then propose and investigate two novel approaches for reducing the complexity of the original scheme for more practical implementation based on a layered multicasting mechanism and nested optimization approach. We demonstrate the implementation advantages of these low-complexity schemes via extensive numerical studies.


Answering to the formidable challenge of climate change requires a quick transition to a future economy with a drastic reduction in GHG emissions. And this in turn requires the development and massive deployment of new low-carbon energy technologies as soon as possible. Although many of these technologies have been identified, the critical issue is how to make them happen at the global level, possibly by integrating this effort into a global climate regime. This paper discusses the preferred approaches to foster low-carbon energy technologies from a regulatory point of view, within a global climate change regime, both from an academic and industrial point of view. It also provides practical recommendations for policy makers on the design of these policies. Specific promotion policies for energy efficiency and conservation, renewable energy, carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear are examined, as well as the interactions between technology policies and climate change policies.


While it is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture's history, there has been no general theory of that ethos. Now, in Architecture's Desire, K. Michael Hays writes an account of the "late avant-garde" as an architecture systematically twisting back on itself, pondering its own historical status, and deliberately exploring architecture's representational possibilities right up to their absolute limits. In close readings of the brooding, melancholy silence of Aldo Rossi, the radically reductive "decompositions" and archaeologies of Peter Eisenman, the carnivalesque excesses of John Hejduk, and the "cinegrammatic" delirium of Bernard Tschumi, Hays narrates the story of architecture confronting its own boundaries with objects of ever more reflexivity, difficulty, and intransigence. The late avant-garde is the last architecture with philosophical aspirations, an architecture that could think philosophical problems through architecture rather than merely illustrate them. It takes architecture as the object of its own reflection, which in turn produces an unrelenting desire. Using the tools of critical theory together with the structure of Lacan's triad imaginary-symbolic-real, Hays constructs a theory of architectural desire that is historically specific and yet sets the terms and the challenges of all subsequent architectural practice, including today's.


The United States and European Union have focused on improving the practices used to develop and implement legal requirements as a way to improve the quality of regulations themselves. Transparency in the regulatory process, from determining regulatory goals, to evaluating alternative means to achieve those goals, to enforcing regulatory requirements, features high on the agenda of cross-cutting government reform programs that address the issue of 'regulatory quality.' This article examines the transparency of procedures in the US and the EU related to impact analysis and public comment. It examines the importance of transparency for ensuring the effectiveness of these two regulatory practices, summarizes regulatory procedures in the US and the EU, compares the different approaches, and highlights the relative merits of each.


A scientifically accepted theory about the teaching of new behaviors to horses is the learning by consequences (operant conditioning; e. g. Hendriksen / Elmgreen / Ladewig 2011; Innes / McBride 2008; Telatin et al. 2016). Negative reinforcement is widely used in practice but there seems to be a lack of concepts for the use of positive reinforcement in riding therapy. This study aims to relate education with mindfulness as well as understanding the effect of riding therapy with horses trained by positive reinforcement on people's emotional state. Results show an increase of calmness and activation as well as a decrease of helplessness and negative emotions. The idea presented in this study seems to be appropriate for its use in riding therapy. No comparison with negative reinforcement can be made. Limitations, ideas for future research and practical implications will be discussed.


In recent years, the local government sector in European countries has undergone important changes involving, among other things, the externalisation of local public service provision through various forms of corporatisation, public-public collaboration, public-private partnerships and contracting out. An important consequence of these institutional changes has been the recasting of local governance systems through the need for increased cooperation between public and private actors. This article addresses these matters with comparative reference to the experience in Italy and Sweden. In doing so, it considers local governments in their constitutional and legal contexts, leading to more detailed discussions of their externalisation initiatives and resultant organisational forms and governance arrangements. Issues of ownership have been important concerning the significance of 'community' and 'place' in the management of public affairs.


Morphological, vocal and molecular data have been used to reevaluate the taxonomy of some Asian Nisaetus taxa. This name is used instead of Spizaetus because the latter genus is polyphyletic with clades in Asia, South America and Africa. The Changeable Hawk-eagle complex (N. cirrhatus cirrhatus, N. c. limnaeetus, N. c. floris, N. lanceolatus and N. philippensis) has been studied. We propose that Nisaetus floris (Flores Hawk-eagle) should be treated as a distinct species, whereas the taxonomic status of Nisaetus c. cirrhatus and N. c. limnaeetus is still uncertain. We also propose that the Philippine Hawk-eagle should be split into two species Nisaetus philippensis and N. pinskeri. In the Mountain Hawk-eagle Nisaetus nipalensis complex, we propose that Nisaetus kelaarti (Legge's Hawk-eagle) should be treated as a distinct species. The conservation status of Nisaetus floris, Nisaetus kelaarti and Nisaetus bartelsi has been evaluated from population density estimates, which are based on territory size. N. floris and N. bartelsi qualify for the category "Endangered" on the IUCN Red List, whereas N. kelaarti qualifies as "Near Threatened". The changes in taxonomy of Nisaetus floris and N. kelaarti meet the qualification for being included in the Red List.


The ability of the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) framework to learn generative models mapping from simple latent distributions to arbitrarily complex data distributions has been demonstrated empirically, with compelling results showing that the latent space of such generators captures semantic variation in the data distribution. Intuitively, models trained to predict these semantic latent representations given data may serve as useful feature representations for auxiliary problems where semantics are relevant. However, in their existing form, GANs have no means of learning the inverse mapping -- projecting data back into the latent space. We propose Bidirectional Generative Adversarial Networks (BiGANs) as a means of learning this inverse mapping, and demonstrate that the resulting learned feature representation is useful for auxiliary supervised discrimination tasks, competitive with contemporary approaches to unsupervised and self-supervised feature learning.


This keynote provided a review of the developments of tourism in Northern Ireland over time. Three time periods were examined, the years prior to the Troubles, the years of the Troubles and period since the last ceasefire in 1996. The paper focused on the potential that a peaceful environment can offer tourism emerging from a turbulent past; the visitor numbers over the 1994-1998 period are examined to illustrate the rapid change that took place and that it is against a positive climate that opportunities now exist for tourism infrastructure products to be developed. The paper concludes with some observations regarding the signature projects that the National Tourism Organisation (NITB) has just recently launched where major tourism projects will be developed between 2004 and 2007. A cautionary note is stated regarding the relatively short time line for projects listed to be completed where there is not commitment for public money to be invested.


It has been a great year for the journal:  our most successful ever. This edition marks three years of publication of the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. In 2015 the journal was selected for inclusion into Scopus and Web of Science data bases. This is a terrific success story and testimony to the high quality of the articles, the editorship, the reviewing and the international readership of the journal. We are grateful as ever to our distinguished International Editorial Board and all our reviewers who are anonymous to readers and authors due to the norms of blind peer reviewing. We also thank the out-going foundational co-editor-in-chief Reece Walters for his efforts in making this journal the success it is. The journal has now surpassed 150,000 abstract views and 100,000 full PDF downloads. This journal is one of only a few in the world of criminology to support fully on-line free-to-download articles, and to promote creative commons copyright: that is, authors' rights to reproduce their own material. We support the democratisation of knowledge and are delighted to be leaders in high quality international journal publishing.Download the PDF file here for the Chief Editors' introduction to this issue and be motivated by the eclectic and impressive range of topics offered by our contributors to read further.


Abstract King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has given solar energy research and technology development great interest and attention as they represent prominent importance for the future economic and social development in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. KACST's activities in the area of solar energy research represent the core foundation of these activities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where they date back to 1980s. Building solar village research labs near Riyadh was a model and an important achievement at the level of applied science research locally, regionally, and internationally where specialists in these labs work on the development of new energy systems in general, and solar energy in particular, in addition to the area of energy conservation by utilizing the latest technologies available. Many of recent and proposed projects will be discussed in the presentation.


Warfare, epidemics, and famine left millions of Soviet children homeless during the 1920s. Many became beggars, prostitutes, and thieves, and were denizens of both secluded underworld haunts and bustling train stations. Alan Ball's study of these abandoned children examines their lives and the strategies the government used to remove them from the streets lest they threaten plans to mold a new socialist generation. The "rehabilitation" of these youths and the results years later are an important lesson in Soviet history.


In this article, I propose a novel way to distinguish between agreement and clitic doubling. The innovation lies in examining what happens when the relation between the relevant agreement morphology and the full noun phrase fails to obtain: whether the agreement morpheme still shows up, bearing default -features, or disappears altogether.The workings of the proposed diagnostic are demonstrated using a family of constructions in substandard Basque (Etxepare 2006). Besides supporting the proposed diagnostic, the analysis of Basque provides a new perspective on the typological status of the Basque agreement system, as well as evidence against the traditional analysis of unergatives in Basque as being underlyingly transitive.


Process Science and Engineering for Water and Wastewater Treatment is the first in a new series of distance learning course books from IWA Publishing. The new series intends to help readers become familiar with design, operation and management of water and wastewater treatment processes without having to refer to any other texts. Process engineering is considered fundamental to successful water and wastewater treatment and Process Science and Engineering for Water and Wastewater Treatment provides the fundamental chemistry, biology and engineering knowledge needed to learn and understand the underlying scientific principles directly relevant to water and wastewater treatment processes. Units in the text covering chemistry and biology include: fundamentals of water chemistry; chemical kinetics and equilibria; colloid and surface chemistry; fundamentals of microbiology; fundamentals biochemistry and microbial kinetics. The concept of Process Engineering is introduced through units on: mass and heat balances; mass and heat transfer; reactor design theory; engineering hydraulics and particle settlement. The text is designed for individual study at the learner?s own pace. Each section contains multiple features to aid learning, including: boxes highlighting key learning points exercises and problems with fully worked solutions to help the reader test their understanding as they progress through the text a comprehensive set of self-assessment questions (with answers) at the end of each unit Designed as a starting point for the other books in the Water and Wastewater Process Technologies Series, this book also provides a self-contained course of learning in the science and engineering for water and wastewater treatment processes. It forms part of the Masters degree programme taught in the School of Water Sciences at Cranfield University, UK.


Data from the US population-based Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, conducted from 1988 to 1994, were used to estimate the population prevalence, prevalence odds ratios, and attributable fractions for the association of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with employment by industry and occupation. The aim was to identify industries and occupations at increased risk of COPD. COPD was defined as forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV(1))/forced vital capacity <70% and FEV(1 )<80% predicted. The authors used SUDAAN software (Research Triangle Institute, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina) to estimate the weighted population prevalence and odds ratios using 9,823 subjects aged 30-75 years who underwent lung function tests. Odds ratios for COPD, adjusted for age, smoking status, pack-years of smoking, body mass index, education, and socioeconomic status, were increased for the following industries: rubber, plastics, and leather manufacturing; utilities; office building services; textile mill products manufacturing; the armed forces; food products manufacturing; repair services and gas stations; agriculture; sales; construction; transportation and trucking; personal services; and health care. Occupations associated with increased odds ratios for COPD were freight, stock, and material handlers; records processing and distribution clerks; sales; transportation-related occupations; machine operators; construction trades; and waitresses. The fraction of COPD attributable to work was estimated as 19.2% overall and 31.1% among never smokers.


An interview in three sessions with Don L. Anderson, Eleanor and John R. McMillan Professor of Geophysics. Integrating seismology, solid state physics and geochemistry, Anderson is recognized for his work on the origin, evolution, structure and composition of Earth and other planets. He is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and has won numerous awards including the National Medal of Science (1998), the Crafoord Prize (1998) and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1988).

Conducted by Shirley Cohen, the interview covers many aspects of Anderson's personal and professional life from his childhood onwards. Session 1 includes discussion of Anderson's education in Maryland and his early interest in geology. He reminisces about his time in the air force, including his research on the properties of polar ice, as well as his subsequent work for Chevron. Anderson also discusses the circumstances enabling him to come to Caltech and the difficult living conditions in California; he recalls his graduate work with Frank Press and reminisces about Caltech faculty, including Arden Albee, Robert Sharp, C. Hewitt Dix, Charles Richter, and Gerald Wasserburg. The second session continues with Anderson's various appointments at the institute and the culture of the Seismology Laboratory in the San Rafael hills. He discusses his work on floating anisotropic plates and other geophysical research, as well as the attempt to maintain the collegial atmosphere of the seismo lab with its move to campus. The final session includes further reminiscences of Charles Richter and Anderson's attempt to understand the Earth's mantle with respect to geochemistry and helium 3; and recent research in surface geology, bathymetry, and plate boundaries. The interview concludes with the events surrounding the Crafoord Prize and the President's medal, along with Anderson's research philosophy and the importance of Caltech seismology.


Abstract In the nuclear engineering community, the error propagation of the Monte Carlo fission source distribution through cycles is known to be a linear Markov process when the number of histories per cycle is sufficiently large. In the statistics community, linear Markov processes with linear observation functions are known to have an autoregressive moving average (ARMA) representation of orders p and p — 1. Therefore, one can perform ARMA fitting of the binned Monte Carlo fission source in order to compute physical and statistical quantities relevant to nuclear criticality analysis. In this work, the ARMA fitting of a binary Monte Carlo fission source has been successfully developed as a method to compute the dominance ratio, i.e., the ratio of the second-largest to the largest eigenvalues. The method is free of binning mesh refinement and does not require the alteration of the basic source iteration cycle algorithm. Numerical results are presented for problems with one-group isotropic, two-group linearly anisotropic, and continuous-energy cross sections. Also, a strategy for the analysis of eigenmodes higher than the second-largest eigenvalue is demonstrated numerically.


This paper demonstrates a tunable optical buffer with widely variable time delays using an array of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) filter and tunable wavelength converters (WCs). The flexibility of the proposed system gives an exact required delay and, consequently, better output port utilization. This system is designed to be compatible with 10 to 40 Gbps RZ communication systems.


Stars in open clusters are powerful probes of the intervening Galactic magnetic field via background starlight polarimetry because they provide constraints on the magnetic field distances. We use 2MASS photometric data for a sample of 31 clusters in the outer Galaxy for which near-IR polarimetric data were obtained to determine the cluster distances, ages, and reddenings via fitting theoretical isochrones to cluster color–magnitude diagrams. The fitting approach uses an objective χ2 minimization technique to derive the cluster properties and their uncertainties. We found the ages, distances, and reddenings for 24 of the clusters, and the distances and reddenings for 6 additional clusters that were either sparse or faint in the near-IR. The derived ranges of log(age), distance, and E(B−V) were 7.25–9.63, ∼670–6160 pc, and 0.02–1.46 mag, respectively. The distance uncertainties ranged from ∼8% to 20%. The derived parameters were compared to previous studies, and most cluster parameters agree within our uncertainties. To test the accuracy of the fitting technique, synthetic clusters with 50, 100, or 200 cluster members and a wide range of ages were fit. These tests recovered the input parameters within their uncertainties for more than 90% of the individual synthetic cluster parameters. These results indicate that the fitting technique likely provides reliable estimates of cluster properties. The distances derived will be used in an upcoming study of the Galactic magnetic field in the outer Galaxy.


Abstract Digitalization and the growth of big data promise greater customization as well as change in how manufacturing is distributed. Yet, challenges arise in applying these new approaches in consumer goods industries that often emphasize mass production and extended supply chains. We build a conceptual framework to explore whether big data combined with new manufacturing technologies can facilitate redistributed manufacturing (RDM). Through analysis of 24 consumer goods industry cases using primary and secondary data, we investigated evolving manufacturing configurations, their underlying drivers, the role of big data applications, and their impact on the redistribution of manufacturing. We find some applications of RDM concepts, although in other cases existing manufacturing configurations are leveraged for high volume consumer goods products through big data analytics and market segmentation. The analysis indicates that the framework put forward in the paper has broader value in organizing thinking about emerging interrelationships between big data and manufacturing.


Background
Pressure injuries (bedsores) are common and reduce quality of life. They are also costly and difficult to treat. This health technology assessment evaluates the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, budget impact, and lived experience of adding electrical stimulation to standard wound care for pressure injuries.

Methods
We conducted a systematic search for studies published to December 7, 2016, limited to randomized and non-randomized controlled trials examining the effectiveness of electrical stimulation plus standard wound care versus standard wound care alone for patients with pressure injuries. We assessed the quality of evidence through Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE). In addition, we conducted an economic literature review and a budget impact analysis to assess the cost-effectiveness and affordability of electrical stimulation for treatment of pressure ulcers in Ontario. Given uncertainties in clinical evidence and resource use, we did not conduct a primary economic evaluation. Finally, we conducted qualitative interviews with patients and caregivers about their experiences with pressure injuries, currently available treatments, and (if applicable) electrical stimulation.

Results
Nine randomized controlled trials and two non-randomized controlled trials were found from the systematic search. There was no significant difference in complete pressure injury healing between adjunct electrical stimulation and standard wound care. There was a significant difference in wound surface area reduction favouring electrical stimulation compared with standard wound care.The only study on cost-effectiveness of electrical stimulation was partially applicable to the patient population of interest. Therefore, the cost-effectiveness of electrical stimulation cannot be determined. We estimate that the cost of publicly funding electrical stimulation for pressure injuries would be $0.77 to $3.85 million yearly for the next 5 years.Patients and caregivers reported that pressure injuries were burdensome and reduced their quality of life. Patients and caregivers also noted that electrical stimulation seemed to reduce the time it took the wounds to heal.

Conclusions
While electrical stimulation is safe to use (GRADE quality of evidence: high) there is uncertainty about whether it improves wound healing (GRADE quality of evidence: low). In Ontario, publicly funding electrical stimulation for pressure injuries could result in extra costs of $0.77 to $3.85 million yearly for the next 5 years.


Abstract:  The palaeohistological study of the calcified internal organ of Axelrodichthys araripensis Maisey, 1986, a coelacanthiform from the Lower Cretaceous of Brazil (Crato (Aptian) and Santana (Albian) formations of the Araripe Basin), shows that the walls of this organ consist of osseous blades of variable thickness separated from each other by the matrix. This indicates that, in the living individuals, the walls were reinforced by ossified plates, probably separated by conjunctive tissue. This calcified sheath present in Axelrodichthys, as well as in other fossil coelacanths, lies in ventral position relative to the gut and its single anterior opening is located under the opercle, suggesting a direct connection with the pharynx or the oesophagus. The calcified organ of Axelrodichthys, like that of other fossil coelacanths, is here regarded as an 'ossified lung' and compared with the 'fatty lung' of the extant coelacanth Latimeria. The reinforcement of the pulmonary walls by the overlying osseous blades could be interpreted as a means of adapting volumetric changes in the manner of bellows, a necessary function for ventilation in pulmonary respiration. Other functional hypotheses such as hydrostatic and/or acoustic functions are also discussed.


Spatially resolved reflectance measurements are widely used for determination of the optical properties of biological media. However, the influence of the phase function on these measurements has not been quantified. We show that errors in the derived reduced scattering and absorption coefficients are as great as 100% for both absolute and relative spatially resolved reflectance measurements if a standard solution of the diffusion equation is used in the analysis. In addition, we investigated nonlinear regressions, using Monte Carlo simulations and an additional fitting parameter that characterizes the phase function, and found that the errors in the obtained optical coefficients were </=20% .


An influential literature has used the aftermath of terrorist attacks to estimate large effects of police street deployment on crime. However, the elasticities obtained in these settings may not easily extrapolate to more standard circumstances. This paper exploits a natural experiment that aimed to increase police presence in more than 6,000 well-defined areas, by economically-realistic amounts and under relatively normal circumstances. Using data transmitted by GPS devices worn by police officers, we first document exogenous and discontinuous changes in patrolling intensity. We do not find that these increases in patrolling were accompanied by corresponding decreases in crime. The standard errors are small enough to reject relatively small elasticities. We discuss and empirically evaluate explanations for our findings.


This paper presents an innovative database of domestic and bilateral online services trade between 39 countries, including the US, the EU and some emerging market economies. It combines monetized and "free" online services in a single measure based on the volume of page views on websites of online service providers. We find that the online services market is geographically very fragmented. Less than 1% of all online service providers export worldwide and account for almost half of worldwide online services trade; they are mostly US-based. In the EU and other regions the share of online services imported from the US is very substantial. Conversely, in the US 32% of its online services providers export and these exports account for nearly twice as much as domestic demand. Application of the well-known gravity model of trade shows that trade frictions from geographical distance are greatly reduced in online services. However, cultural and linguistic borders are reinforced and home bias is stronger online than offline. We explain this paradox in terms of online information cost reduction and consumers' quest to explore the longer tail of online supply, both at home and worldwide. Larger firms export to more markets than smaller firms. It is easier for larger online firms to reduce distance and language related trade costs; however large firms do not reduce strong online home bias. Trade costs and home bias vary considerably across services sectors though, in principle, all online services are fully tradable. The export performance of online firms is driven mostly by the comparative advantages of their home country, more so than by their own competitiveness. We conclude with some suggestions for further research.


This paper examines the impact of the behavioral changes and governments' responses to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic using a unique dataset of daily private forecasters' expectations on a sample of 32 emerging and advanced economies from January 1 till April 13, 2020. We document three important lessons from the data: First, there is evidence of a relation between the stringency of the policy interventions and the health outcomes consistent with slowing down the spread of the pandemic. Second, we find robust evidence that private forecasters have come to anticipate a sizeable contraction in economic activity followed by a check mark recovery as a result of the governments' increasingly stringent response. The evidence suggests also that workplace restrictions have further contributed to the downturn and to the subsequent sluggish recovery—opening up the question about the costs of tighter work restrictions. Finally, we argue inflation expectations have not changed significantly so far. Through the lens of the neoclassical growth model, these changes in macro expectations can result from the resulting work disruptions and the potential productivity slowdown from the gradual de-escalation of the confinement.


Nowadays, variants of Spatial Modulation (SM) are studied by a lot of researchers in order to increase Spectral Efficiency (SE) more. One of the important variants of SM is known as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Index Modulation (OFDM-IM). In OFDM-IM, selection of active subcarriers is based on the idea of the selection of active antennas in the SM. Then, to take OFDM-IM a step further in terms of SE, Dual Mode OFDM-IM (DM-OFDM-IM) has been proposed that activates entire subcarriers unlike that of OFDM-IM. However, in all these studies same assumption is made, i.e., channel is perfectly known at the receiver. However, this assumption is not accurate for practical applications. For this reason, the presented simulation results and theoretical analysis without channel estimation cannot represent the real system performance. In this study, a pilot symbol aided channel estimation for DM-OFDM-IM scheme is considered. We investigate the effect on Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of five different interpolation techniques. The simulation results illustrate that, interpolation techniques perform similiar BER performance for low and moderate Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) range. However, at the high SNR values (SNR> 30 dB), Low-Pass and SPLINE interpolation techniques give the highest performance among all considered techniques.


Ground vehicle localization is a problem of significance in an urban setting given the recent global conflicts, security interests, and rapid growth of sensor networks. This task is often difficult due to the lack of information regarding a target vehicle's position, velocity, and destination. Field operatives can provide binary measurements of a target's presence in an area, and these measurements can be processed to obtain estimates of the target's location. A particle filter is more suitable for this application than a Kalman filter due to its ability to handle non-Gaussian distributions and non-differentiable measurement models, however it is computationally expensive. Suppose there is a mobile ground vehicle of known description but unknown position, velocity, or destination that is to be found, tracked, and intercepted by an unmanned aerial vehicle. The vehicle is known to be in an urban environment, and full knowledge of that environment (roads, obstacles, intersection constraints, and speed limits) is available. There are numerous issues of interest within this problem. A particle filter in an urban environment was developed to locate, track, and intercept a ground vehicle given soft binary measurements (measurements from human sources). Two particular issues are studied in this work: the effect of a sophisticated particle dynamic model on target localization and tracking, and the development of a real time path planning routine in the particle filter framework to enable target interception. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, the importance and impact of an accurate particle time update on target localization and tracking is validated. Secondly, a thorough investigation into the effect of particle spatial resolution in the presence of imperfect measurements is made that will prove valuable for future particle filter applications. Finally, the path planning routine offers reduced computational expense when compared to existing


The recent paper "Sigma: Issues, Insights, and Challenges" by Strasser et al. (2009) provided an excellent review of the complexity and dependency of the standard deviation σ of ground motion, as well as the difficulty in reducing it. Strasser et al. (2009) concluded that "the value of σ has remained fairly stable over the past 40 years," although there have been systematic efforts to reduce it (Atkinson and Boore 2003; Abrahamson and Silva 2008; Strasser et al. 2008). In other words, Strasser et al. (2009) showed that the prospects of reducing σ are hopeless, even though the authors may still believe that "there is some hope to achieve reductions in σ , although the process may be labor-intensive." As stated by Strasser et al. (2009), their "attempt is made to identify the more promising approaches for reduction of σ ." Their paper is not worth a single comment if σ is simply a statistical issue or personal belief. As stated by Strasser et al. (2009), however, "the effort involved [reducing σ ] is likely to be worthwhile in the context of seismic hazard analysis." Their paper surely deserves a comment in the context of seismic hazard analysis, modern probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) in particular, because the implications for society are far reaching, from seismic design of nuclear power plants, buildings, and bridges to earthquake insurance premiums.

Statistics is a common tool used by all disciplines for collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data, and in particular for prediction and forecasting …


The abundance and size distribution of plankton in the surface ocean are key metrics to understanding primary and export production, food web dynamics, and the optical properties of the water column. Here we quantified cell size and abundance of phytoplankton species from mono-specific laboratory cultures, using optical, electrical, and image-based benchtop instrumentation. Moreover, we combined particle size distribution and size fractionated chlorophyll a (Chl a) analysis with image analysis to estimate phytoplankton community composition and abundance comparing a high and low biomass station in the North Atlantic during springtime. In laboratory cultures, we found generally good agreement in estimates of both particle concentration and particle size among instruments. Image-based approaches (e.g., microscopy, FlowCam) delivered somewhat lower cell abundance estimates, because image-based instruments distinguish cells from non-target particles. Image-based approaches also measured 10–20% greater cell sizes, because measurements were based only on in-focus images of the target species. Compared to image-based instruments, particle counters delivered indistinguishable estimates of size and abundance with much lower effort and technical expertise required; maximum coefficient of variation for cell abundance and size did not exceed 10 and 15%, respectively. Measurement precision was consistent across instrument type and across a cell size spectrum from 3 to >40 μm equivalent spherical diameter (ESD). For whole plankton community analyses from the North Atlantic, combined estimation of Chl a concentration and image-based diversity assessments resolved the dominant phytoplankton species and spatial differences in the size structure of the plankton community. These results provide strong support for using particle counters, that can rapidly process large volumes of samples, to quantify particle size and abundance, including rarer, larger particles. Species identities and community composition can be revealed by supplemental, image-based approaches. Application of this coupled approach can help identify fundamental ecosystem characteristics such as particle size spectra that affect primary production, trophic transfer, and export. Ultimately, the tremendous species diversity of plankton can be leveraged as particle tracking and identification keys, such as near-real time identification of coherent water masses.


INTRODUCTION Most electronic documents are available in the free-text format. Analyzability of the free-text information can play a crucial role in decision making through pattern discovery (Lo & Hsieh, 2003). The enormous volume of available documents can be processed semi-automatically by a closed or an open system (Banko & Etzioni, 2008). Important applications such as electronic governance (Zhang, Lin, Lin, & Hsieh, 2008) may entail the use of extracted information from these documents to gain competitiveness and public trust by enforcing transparency. An effectively designed Information Extraction (IE) system can be useful in this regard. An IE system is designed to extract the user-specified items or pre-defined events (Srihari, Li, Niu, & Cornell, 2008) from the text documents of a specific domain. The items to be extracted are specific word(s) of sentences of the input documents. An IE system can be used to fill the fields of a table of a relational database from text documents. Examples of the fields may include the name of a company or type of business. In order to interpret the extracted information, these items can be saved into a relational database. The extracted items can also be used to fill-out forms specified by a user. The information saved in the database can be further processed to identify the relevant correlations. Compared to the extraction of structured data performed by, for example, an ERP system (Wu, Hsieh, Shin, & Wu, 2005), extracting information from a free-text domain is a challenging problem. The reason is that only the contextually relevant target words or phrases have to be extracted. Because statistics does not consider the contexts of the words, the methods such as Naive Bayes Classifier or Average Mutual Information (Carven et al., 2000) are not effective in extracting information. Most of the state of the art IE systems use a combination of statistical and machine learning methods (Freitag, 2000). Jose Iria and Fabio Ciravegna (2006) developed an ontology learning (Suchanek, Sozio, & Weikum, 2009) and document classification method that represents language resources, such as syntactic and semantic parsers, in a way that is independent of the extraction process. Yildiz and Miksch (2007) proposed an unsupervised rule learning method (Downey, Schoenmackers, & Etzioni, 2007; Sekine & Oda, 2007) based on ontological structures. Syntactic and semantic analyses have been found to improve precision (Feldman, Aumann, Finkelstein-Landau, Hurvitz, Regev, & Yaroshevich, 2002). Xu, Uszkoreit, Li, and Felger (2008) designed a system that extracts linguistic grammar rules from a semantic seed. An alignment based pattern matching technique was developed by (Kim, Jeong, Lee, Ko, & Lee, 2008) that can extract relationships between two arguments. Jain, Ipeirotis, and Gravano (2008) developed a technique to process structured queries from the relations extracted from unstructured texts. Stevenson and Greenwood (2009) found that the IE models that use the relevant portions of a dependency tree (Wu & Weld, 2008) perform better. A rule-based decision tree was found effective in extracting information from online resumes (Bhargavi, Jyothi, Jyothi, & Sekar, 2008). The use of deep level ontology structure (Welty & Murdock, 2006) and the use of multiple ontologies from the same domain (Wimalasuriya & Dou, 2009) have been found effective in performance enhancement. Assigning weights to the syntactic features according to their co-occurrences in the related class has been found effective in determining ontologies about person-names and their geographic locations (Tanev & Magnini, 2008). Enterprise applications of IE systems require higher accuracy and scalability (Chiticariu, Li, Raghavan, & Reiss, 2010). Similar to many other systems, Pennacchiotti and Pantel (2009) used a combination of a pattern match method with a distributional method. …


Previous studies suggest that producers tend to store crops longer than makes economic sense. Since decisions to sell are irreversible, there can be a real option value from waiting to sell grain. This real option value may explain why producers appear to store too long. A seasonal mean reversion model is estimated that allows prices to be a random walk within a season, but mean reverting across crop years. Unless prices are extremely low, it is optimal for producers to sell before the mean reversion begins. Thus, the real option value of waiting cannot explain why producers seem to store at a loss in the latter part of crop years.


According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf people there are nearly 7.5 million hearing-impaired people in Great Britain. Human-operated machine transcription systems, such as Palantype, achieve low word error rates in real-time. The disadvantage is that they are very expensive to use because of the difficulty in training operators, making them impractical for everyday use in higher education. Existing automatic speech recognition systems also achieve low word error rates, the disadvantages being that they work for read speech in a restricted domain. Moving a system to a new domain requires a large amount of relevant data, for training acoustic and language models. The adopted solution makes use of an existing continuous speech phoneme recognition system as a front-end to a word recognition sub-system. The subsystem generates a lattice of word hypotheses using dynamic programming with robust parameter estimation obtained using evolutionary programming. Sentence hypotheses are obtained by parsing the word lattice using a beam search and contributing knowledge consisting of anti-grammar rules, that check the syntactic incorrectness' of word sequences, and word frequency information. On an unseen spontaneous lecture taken from the Lund Corpus and using a dictionary containing "2637 words, the system achieved 815% words correct with 15% simulated phoneme error, and 73.1% words correct with 25% simulated phoneme error. The system was also evaluated on 113 Wall Street Journal sentences. The achievements of the work are a domain independent method, using the anti- grammar, to reduce the word lattice search space whilst allowing normal spontaneous English to be spoken; a system designed to allow integration with new sources of knowledge, such as semantics or prosody, providing a test-bench for determining the impact of different knowledge upon word lattice parsing without the need for the underlying speech recognition hardware; the robustness of the word lattice generation using parameters that withstand changes in vocabulary and domain.


Social Networking Sites (SNS) differ from other online media in a number of aspects including the quality of content published, reach and audience, interaction frequency, accessibility, usability and immediacy. In our analysis of social commerce, we have taken into account these unique attributes of SNS and argue that social commerce differ from classical e-business models. We further maintain that the said distinctions of SNS have led to the misuse of user-generated content and abuse of users trust resulting in information security and privacy violations. Recent unfortunate incidents of security and privacy breaches have shown the negative repercussions on online businesses. In this thesis, we argue that security and privacy issues on SNS are a major barrier hindering the success of the emerging social commerce applications and preventing businesses from gaining the full economic benefit of SNS. Hence, following a deductive strategy and taking a positivist stance, the current research explores the issues of information security, privacy, and related constructs in the context of social commerce (B2C interactions) with emphasis on how they affect purchase intention.

Using a systematic review of prior literature, we have identified the key concepts and related constructs of information security and privacy and the relationships between the constructs. Based on this understanding, the current study proposes to test a number of hypotheses. Data was collected using a Web-based survey administered to a sample of SNS users. The hypotheses were tested using PLS-SEM for a dataset of 514 respondents.

Based on the findings of the current research, we can come to the following conclusions: (1) 'Perceived security', 'Trustworthiness', and 'Perception towards usage of information' have a direct impact on SNS users 'Purchase intention', (2) SNS users 'Perception towards privacy notices' positively affects 'Perceived privacy' and 'Perceived security', (3) 'Trustworthiness' negatively affects SNS users 'Risk perception' and 'Perceived privacy', and (4) 'Trustworthiness' of a SNS site is positively influenced by the 'perceived ability to control submitted information' and by 'Perceived privacy'.

This research contributes to the body of knowledge on information security, privacy, and related constructs in a number of ways. For instance, the proposed research model which was empirically tested in the current research is the most valuable contribution. To test the proposed model, we have validated new and existing factors measuring information security constructs and purchase intention, thereby contributing to theory building. This provides a better understanding of privacy, security and related issues on SNS and explains some of the possible reasons for the slow adaptation of social commerce compared to 'classical' e-business models. From a practical and managerial point of view, this research help social media vendors to comprehend the fundamental features necessary to attract customers to their business such as building trust by enhancing security and privacy practices. Further, we suggest the use of ethical data gathering and transparent, easily accessible and readable security/privacy notices on social commerce shopping portals to help customers overcome their psychological barriers to purchase from SNS.


Turkey has confronted numerous severe and destructive earthquakes for centuries because of being located on the Mediterranean Seismic Belt. Proven to be safe due to their lightness and ductile nature, wooden buildings have gained importance in the course of time in this land. In this paper, earthquake−resistant timber constructions and the use of wooden material as an absorbing element for seismic forces in Anatolia and Thrace are investigated based on the historical development process with the help of the archaeological data. The seismic structure, forests and timber residential placements of Turkey are studied in relation with each other at first. Accordingly the sustainable development process of architectural plan types and structural systems that are able to withstand earthquakes were mentioned under the light of archaeological findings. The structural characteristics that render a traditional timber building earthquake−resistant were researched according to the regional distribution, material and structural features and the most advanced structural systems used in both timber and timber−masonry composite systems were demonstrated as living examples today.


This paper in honour of my friend and colleague, Andrew Domanski, traces the origin and basic features of the South African and Scottish legal systems, which are perhaps the two most important mixed legal systems in the world. These two systems are identified as truly mixed systems on the basis of criteria developed by Vernon Palmer in his book Mixed Jurisdictions Worldwide in order to distinguish them from other pluralistic or hybrid jurisdictions.
The genesis and development of the South African legal system is explored from the time of the Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652, through British colonial rule from 1806-1900, the subsequent development of South African law after the Anglo-Boer War from 1902 till 1990 and the ushering in of the new constitutional era in South Africa after 1990. An important feature of this development was the gradual adjustment and piecemeal reform of the Cape system of administration of justice. This soon acquired a typically British flavour through, amongst other things, the adoption of the British court system and law of procedure and evidence, the recruitment of legally qualified judges from England and Scotland, the delivery and reporting of well-argued judgments by individual judges and the doctrine of precedent. In addition British rule drew South Africa into a rapidly expanding network of international trade, which significantly boosted commercial and political activity and led to a large-sale importation of English commercial law into the Cape and the eclipse of the unsophisticated Dutch constitutional and administrative law by its English counterpart. At present, the principles enshrined in the post-apartheid South African Constitution are whittling away the superstructure of apartheid laws and are gradually freeing the mixed Roman-Dutch law infrastructure of any form of racial discrimination, leaving a mixed legal system of predominantly English commercial and public law and Roman-Dutch private law, pervaded by the constitutional principles of personal freedom and the rule of law.
The genesis of Scottish law and its development into a truly mixed legal system started with the infiltration of Roman law into Scots law through the close connection between Roman law and canon law in the early Scottish ecclesiastical courts, which gradually also influenced the secular Scottish courts; the acceptance of Roman institutions in notarial practice and Scottish legislation, and the emergence of a body of professional lawyers who had studied in Italy, France and - after the reformation - in the Netherlands, rather than at the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A wholesale reception of Roman law, especially Roman private law, took place only after the creation in 1532 of a supreme court in Edinburgh, namely the Court of Session; and the creation of a Scottish legal literature by the "institutional writers" who had studied in Europe and who introduced the ius commune into their native Scots law. However, after Scotland voluntarily joined England through the Treaty of Union in 1707, the influence of civilian law steadily declined and Scots law became increasingly anglicised. Besides the administration of justice system being modelled on the English prototype and the English House of Lords being accepted as the highest court of appeal, the Scottish acknowledgment of the superiority of English commercial law after the unprecedented growth in trade and industry following on the Industrial Revolution of 1850, led to a full-scale adoption of English law into Scots law. Thus Scots law, like South African law, ended up with a strong civilian private law and an English-law based constitutional, procedural and commercial law.
In conclusion, the mixed legal systems of South African and Scots law have demonstrated that the two main legal systems of the world, namely common law and civil law, can exist peacefully in one united legal system. Some of the concepts and institutions developed in mixed legal systems, like the South African and Scottish law of trust and the Scottish standard land security replacing the obscure and antiquated English law of mortgage, are of a truly hybrid character. This renders them fit for adoption in harmonisation projects like that of European private law. On a global scale the ease with which English commercial practices have been incorporated into the civilian law of contract of mixed legal systems leaving the civilian principle of consensus virtually intact, can relieve the fears of Continental, Asian and South American civilian lawyers that harmonisation will inundate the law of obligations with unprincipled common-law provisions and institutions. Finally, mixed legal systems, in having adopted the fundamental liberal Anglo-American principles of the rule of law and due process, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights and the South African Bill of Rights in Chapter 2 of its Constitution, have ensured that they will be counted amongst the most developed legal systems in the world.


Data mining can be said to have the aim to analyze the observational datasets to find relationships and to present the data in ways that are both understandable and useful. In this thesis, some existing intelligent systems techniques such as Self-Organizing Map, Fuzzy C-means and decision tree are used to analyze several datasets. The techniques are used to provide flexible information processing capability for handling real-life situations. This thesis is concerned with the design, implementation, testing and application of these techniques to those datasets. The thesis also introduces a hybrid intelligent systems technique: Optimized Weighted Fuzzy Decision Tree (OWFDT) with the aim of improving Fuzzy Decision Trees (FDT) and solving practical problems.

This thesis first proposes an optimized weighted fuzzy decision tree, incorporating the introduction of Fuzzy C-Means to fuzzify the input instances but keeping the expected labels crisp. This leads to a different output layer activation function and weight connection in the neural network (NN) structure obtained by mapping the FDT to the NN. A momentum term was also introduced into the learning process to train the weight connections to avoid oscillation or divergence. A new reasoning mechanism has been also proposed to combine the constructed tree with those weights which had been optimized in the learning process. This thesis also makes a comparison between the OWFDT and two benchmark algorithms, Fuzzy ID3 and weighted FDT.

SIx datasets ranging from material science to medical and civil engineering were introduced as case study applications. These datasets involve classification of composite material failure mechanism, classification of electrocorticography (ECoG)/Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, eye bacteria prediction and wave overtopping prediction. Different intelligent systems techniques were used to cluster the patterns and predict the classes although OWFDT was used to design classifiers for all the datasets. In the material dataset, Self-Organizing Map and Fuzzy C-Means were used to cluster the acoustic event signals and classify those events to different failure mechanism, after the classification, OWFDT was introduced to design a classifier in an attempt to classify acoustic event signals. For the eye bacteria dataset, we use the bagging technique to improve the classification accuracy of Multilayer Perceptrons and Decision Trees. Bootstrap aggregating (bagging) to Decision Tree also helped to select those most important sensors (features) so that the dimension of the data could be reduced. Those features which were most important were used to grow the OWFDT and the curse of dimensionality problem could be solved using this approach. The last dataset, which is concerned with wave overtopping, was used to benchmark OWFDT with some other Intelligent Systems techniques, such as Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Evolving Fuzzy Neural Network (EFuNN), Genetic Neural Mathematical Method (GNMM) and Fuzzy ARTMAP.

Through analyzing these datasets using these Intelligent Systems Techniques, it has been shown that patterns and classes can be found or can be classified through combining those techniques together. OWFDT has also demonstrated its efficiency and effectiveness as compared with a conventional fuzzy Decision Tree and weighted fuzzy Decision Tree.


[1] Previous studies have suggested that the presence of silicate ash may cause the 8.6-μm sulfur dioxide (SO2) retrieval to overestimate total column abundances and contribute to variations between ultraviolet and 8.6-μm SO2 estimates. Tested here is a volcanic aerosol forward model which allows the determination of transmission spectra. The forward model is embedded into a three-layer atmospheric radiative transfer model, based upon the moderate spectral resolution atmospheric transmittance algorithm (MODTRAN) radiative transfer code. This model is used to investigate the effects of silicate ash on the 8.6-μm SO2 retrieval from satellite data. Forward modeling of transmission through volcanic clouds enables us to evaluate the assumptions and errors of current retrievals. Four free variables, (1) effective radius, (2) variance, (3) number of particles, and (4) spectral refractive index, are used to determine the transmission and single scattering albedo at 7–13 μm. Here we present simplistic characterizations of three eruptions, containing sulfates, ice, or andesitic ash using this forward model. The ash correction model based on the aerosol forward model is tested on the ash-rich lobe of the 19 February 2001 eruption plume of Mount Cleveland volcano using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. Uncorrected MODIS radiance values estimate 22 kt of SO2, while ash-corrected radiances estimate 17 kt. The minimal reduction in total SO2 indicates that previous variations in ultraviolet and 8.6-μm SO2 retrievals are unlikely to be due solely to the presence of ash.


This paper presents a multicommodity price-endogenous spatial equilibrium model of the (European Community) EC feed grain sector. The model incorporates nonintegrable feed grain demand functions which were estimated using a pseudodata approach based on a set of representative least-cost LP models of compound feed production in the EC. The price and quantity impacts of three "rebalancing" EC policies are investigated within a comparative statics framework: the abolition of the green rates or Monetary Compensatory Amounts (MCA) system, a 10% cut in support prices for EC grains, and a 10% tax on the use of imported cereal substitutes. Both "short-run" (constant livestock output) and "long-run" (variable livestock output) results are reported at the EC level.


This paper examines bidding in over 1,700 knockout auctions used by a bidding cartel (or ring) of stamp dealers in the 1990s. The knockout was conducted using a variant of the model studied by Daniel Graham, Robert Marshall, and Jean-Francois Richard (1990). Following a reduced form examination of these data, damages, induced inefficiency, and the ring's benefit from colluding are estimated using a structural model in the spirit of Emmanuel Guerre, Isabelle Perrigne, and Quang Vuong (2000). A notable finding is that nonring bidders suffered damages that were of the same order of magnitude as those of the sellers. (JEL D43, D44, L12)


A major challenge of invasion biology is the development of a predictive framework that prevents new invasions. This is inherently difficult because different biological characteristics are important at the different stages of invasion: opportunity/transport, establishment and spread. Here, we draw from recent research on a variety of taxa to examine the evolutionary causes and consequences of biological invasions. The process of introduction may favour species with characteristics that promote success in highly disturbed, human‐dominated landscapes, thus exerting novel forms of selection on introduced populations. Moreover, evidence is accumulating that multiple introductions can often be critical to the successful establishment and spread of introduced species, as they may be important sources of genetic variation necessary for adaptation in new environments or may permit the introduction of novel traits. Thus, not only should the introduction of new species be prevented, but substantial effort should also be directed to preventing the secondary introduction of previously established species (and even movement of individuals among introduced populations). Modern molecular techniques can take advantage of genetic changes postintroduction to determine the source of introduced populations and their vectors of spread, and to elucidate the mechanisms of success of some invasive species. Moreover, the growing availability of genomic tools will permit the identification of underlying genetic causes of invasive success.


In his influential paper ''Essence and Modality'', Kit Fine argues that no account of essence framed in terms of metaphysical necessity is possible, and that it is rather metaphysical necessity which is to be understood in terms of essence. On his account, the concept of essence is primitive, and for a proposition to be metaphysically necessary is for it to be true in virtue of the nature of all things. Fine also proposes a reduction of conceptual and logical necessity in the same vein: a conceptual necessity is a proposition true in virtue of the nature of all concepts, and a logical necessity a proposition true in virtue of the nature of all logical concepts. I argue that the plausibility of Fine's view crucially requires that certain apparent explanatory links between essentialist facts be admitted and accounted for, and I make a suggestion about how this can be done. I then argue against the reductions of conceptual and logical necessity proposed by Fine and suggest alternative reductions, which remain nevertheless Finean in spirit.


A calix[4]arene derivative 2-[Cu(II)]2 functionalized with two cis-diaqua Cu(II) centers at the distal positions of the upper rim was synthesized and investigated as a model for dinuclear metalloenzymes that catalyze chemical transformations of phosphate esters. The flexible dinuclear calix[4]arene efficiently catalyzes the transesterification of the RNA model 2-hydroxypropyl-p-nitrophenyl phosphate (HPNP) and the hydrolysis of the DNA model ethyl-p-nitrophenyl phosphate (EPNP) with turnover conversion, thereby exhibiting rate enhancement factors of 1.0 × 104 and 2.7 × 104, respectively. The mononuclear reference complex, 3-Cu(II), lacking the macrocyclic backbone, has a much lower activity, showing that the high catalytic activity of the dinuclear calix[4]arene complex is due to synergetic action of the two Cu(II) centers. Saturation kinetics and pH variation studies point to the formation of a Michaelis-Menten complex in which the phosphate group is doubly Lewis acid activated by coordination to the two Cu(II) centers. In this complex, a Cu(II) bound hydroxide ion, which is present already at pH 6.5, can act as a base in the intramolecular transesterification of HPNP or as a nucleophile in the hydrolysis of EPNP. The remarkably low pKa of the Cu(II) bound water molecules in the hydrophobic calix[4]arene 2-[Cu(II)]2 mimics the low pKa of metal bound water molecules in hydrophobic enzyme active sites, which makes the enzyme (model) active under slightly acidic to neutral conditions. The high catalytic efficiency of this enzyme model is attributed to a dynamic binding of the substrate and (pre)transition state, possible by rapid low energy conformational changes of the flexible calix[4]arene backbone.


In the past, United States "for-benefit" entities were generally organized as non-profit corporations. The same choice is available in the United Kingdom, but the entity's purpose is traditionally limited to charities. However, a true non-profit entity does not allow an investor to receive any return on her investment, i.e., all "profits" are redistributed to the entity and not to its members/investors. In the present economy, entrepreneurs increasingly wish to invest capital in socially responsible businesses and to receive an internal return - a true admixture of "profit" and "social benefit." In addition, these "social entrepreneurs" increasingly seek capital from private investors or foundations with "program related investments" or, "PRIs," that include low-interest loans or loan guarantees to non-profit charities or organizations engaged in socially beneficial efforts. Examples of hybrid organizations blending "profit" with "benefit" in the United States include the "B," or "benefit," corporation, and the L3C. Each of these hybrid entities carries significant pre-packaged disadvantages.The thesis of this Article is that presently the Delaware LLC provides global investors maximum internal efficiency as well as asset protection at a decreased agency cost for businesses operating solely within or outside the United States for socially driven enterprises. The Delaware LLC offers contractual freedom to investors, managers, owners, funds and foundations to structure a for-benefit, for profit socially responsible business internal plan with limited liability for owners and investors, including maximum tax efficiencies within the United States or the United Kingdom due to its completely mobile, contractual character.


We present an intrinsic AGN spectral energy distribution (SED) extending from the optical to the submm, derived with a sample of unobscured, optically luminous (νLν,5100 >1043.5 erg s−1) QSOs at z < 0.18 from the Palomar Green survey. The intrinsic AGN SED was computed by removing the contribution from stars using the 11.3 μm polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) feature in the QSOs' mid-IR spectra; the 1σ uncertainty on the SED ranges between 12 and 45 per cent as a function of wavelength and is a combination of PAH flux measurement errors and the uncertainties related to the conversion between PAH luminosity and star-forming luminosity. Longwards of 20 μm, the shape of the intrinsic AGN SED is independent of the AGN power indicating that our template should be applicable to all systems hosting luminous AGN (νLν, 5100 or LX(2–10 keV) _ 1043.5 erg s−1). We note that for our sample of luminous QSOs, the average AGN emission is at least as high as, and mostly higher than, the total stellar powered emission at all wavelengths from the optical to the submm. This implies that in many galaxies hosting powerful AGN, there is no 'safe' broad-band photometric observation (at λ < 1000 μm) which can be used in calculating star formation rates without subtracting the AGN contribution. Roughly, the AGN contribution may be ignored only if the intrinsic AGN luminosity at 5100 AA is at least a factor of 4 smaller than the total infrared luminosity (LIR, 8–1000 μm) of the galaxy. Finally, we examine the implication of our work in statistical studies of star formation in AGN host galaxies.


This thesis consists of eight chapters investigating the relationship between bank competition and capital allocation. Following the introduction (chapter 1), the second chapter provides a review of the literature. The third chapter extends a seminal contribution in the bank competition literature, the model developed by Broecker (1990). In chapter 4 I show that an auction framework may be an inappropriate way of modeling bank competition and I explore the implications of modeling bank competition in a more robust fashion for the allocation of capital. The fifth chapter aims to resolve a long-standing discrepancy between the empirical and theoretical literatures on bank competition and capital allocation. While theoretical work tends to see few benefits from more intense competition, the evidence suggests that the allocation of capital improves as bank competition becomes more intense. The theoretical model developed in chapter 5 reconciles these results by modeling banks' objective function in a way consistent with empirical evidence on X-inefficiency in banks. Chapters 6 and 7 investigate the transmission mechanism through which a greater intensity of competition is transmitted within banks and study lending-related incentive structures through interview-based fieldwork. Chapter 6 provides motivation and outlines the scope of the study whereas the actual findings are presented in chapter 7. That chapter also analyzes the implications for the lending and monitoring decisions that co-determine the allocation of capital. Chapter 8 concludes.


Research has demonstrated that governance of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) have evolved largely in isolation from each other – through different conceptual and institutional frameworks, response strategies and plans, at both international, national and subnational levels. As a result, the management of disaster risk through DRR and CCA is highly fragmented. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the set of actors and their location in government that create and shape governance in DRR and CCA integration within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states.,The study draws upon a range of data collection techniques including a comprehensive literature review relating to DRR and CCA in general and in the SADC member states, face-to-face interviews and an online survey. A mixed method research design was applied to the study with a total of 35 respondents from Botswana, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe participating in the face-to-face interviews and an online survey.,The analysis shows that DRR and CCA are carried out by different departments, agencies and/or ministries in all but three SADC member states, namely, Mozambique, Mauritius and the Seychelles. Participants were able to highlight the different ways in which integration should unfold. In light of this, the paper proposes a normative model to integrate government organisations for DRR and CCA within SADC member states.,The implementation of the model has the potential to accelerate the integration of organisations for DRR and CCA, with the resultant improvement in the implementation of risk reduction strategies and efficient use of resources.


Examines how the media progressively turned the racist murder of an 18-year-old black student into a major mediatized public crisis and prompted British society to re-examine questions of (in)justice, cultural identity, and racism.

There have been many racially motivated murders in Britain in recent years that have received little media attention or public expressions of concern. The 1993 murder of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence, a black student, proved to be very different. Through time and growing media interest, the name of Stephen Lawrence became a potent symbol and catalyst for change. This particular killing prompted widespread re-examination of questions of (in)justice, cultural identity, and continuing racism in British society, and it eventually initiated processes of institutional reflexivity, including government policies targeting institutional racism within Britain's most powerful organizations of state and civil society. This book examines the media's role in performing the Stephen Lawrence case over the ten-year period since Lawrence's murder.

Developing the framework of mediatized public crisis, this book carefully examines how and why the British and international media turned the Stephen Lawrence case into a watershed moment with potentially transformative effects. To understand this, we need to attend to the expressive possibilities of symbols and journalism forms, the dynamics and contingencies that inhere within both politics and narrative, as well as the strategic interventions of involved interests and identities. This important book provides new insights into how and why the media report and, occasionally, perform issues of race in ways that can unleash moral forces for social change. Includes many newspaper images from the British press; a list of racially motivated murders from 1970 to 2003; a detailed chronology of the Stephen Lawrence case; and the Macpherson recommendations and social reforms.


Obesity is a multi-factorial metabolic disease, resulting in increased adipose tissue acquisition by the host. This disease increases the risk for developing co-morbidities, including Metabolic Syndrome and other disorders such as breast cancer. Obesity, and particularly abdominal obesity, is characterised by metabolic changes, including chronically elevated insulin concentrations and aberrant secretion of cytokines released from fat tissue, called adipokines. Epidemiologically, the risk of developing postmenopausal breast cancer is increased in obese individuals. The molecular link between obesity and breast cancer however is not well understood. The study presented here aimed at identifying the molecular mechanisms involved in this link, by testing the hypothesis that high insulin concentration and certain adipokines may promote breast cancer progression and/or breast cancer aetiology. A cell culture system of breast cancer cells and breast epithelial cells was employed to investigate changes in cell proliferation, activation of cell signalling pathways, cell cycle progression and apoptosis after treatment with insulin, leptin, TNF-I±, adiponectin and IL-6. In MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells, insulin treatment did not affect cell proliferation, cell cycle or apoptosis. Conversely, IR-phosphorylation, AKT-phosphorylation and ERK1/2-phosphorylation were all significantly increased. Microarray analysis indicated several important changes in gene expression with insulin treatment. Leptin treatment increased proliferation by 21%. Additional analyses of the effect of leptin indicated that neither the PI3-kinase pathway nor the MAP-kinase pathway was involved in mediating this effect. Treatment with TNF-I± increased apoptosis, but did not affect cell proliferation or activation of cell signalling pathways. In MCF-10A breast epithelial cells, cell proliferation increased after insulin treatment by 180%. IR-phosphorylation, AKT-phosphorylation and ERK1/2 phosphorylation were all significantly increased while early apoptosis decreased after insulin treatment. Analysis of cell cycle however did not indicate a change in progression. Microarray analysis indicated that insulin treatment may increase expression of genes related to cancer growth. Leptin treatment increased cell proliferation and also increased ERK1/2-phosphorylation, while AKT-phosphorylation was not affected. Leptin did not change cell cycle progression. TNF-I± treatment increased cell proliferation and also increased ERK1/2 phosphorylation, while AKT-phosphorylation was not changed. TNF-I± treatment tended to increase apoptosis, the change however was not statistically significant. In SK-BR-3 breast cancer cells, cell proliferation did not change after insulin treatment. IR-phosphorylation and AKT-phosphorylation increased after insulin treatment, while ERK1/2-phosphorylation decreased. Gene expression of cyclin D and cyclin E increased with insulin treatment, while apoptotic rate and cell cycle profile were also not affected. Cell proliferation increased by 115% after treatment with 100 ng/ml leptin. ERK1/2-phosphorylation however decreased, while AKT-phosphorylation tended to increase, but the change was not statistically significant. Cell cycle profile was not affected by leptin treatment, G1-phase however tended to increase, but the change was again not statistically significant. Cell proliferation increased by 59% after 48 h treatment with 10 ng/ml TNF-I±. AKT-phosphorylation and ERK1/2-phosphorylation increased with TNF-I± treatment. Cell cycle analysis showed a decrease in S-phase and G2-phase, indicative of a decrease in cell cycle progression. These results indicate that none of the examined obesity-related factors is convincingly identified as the main molecular link between obesity and postmenopausal breast cancer. Conversely, all treatments affected each of the cell lines in, at least, one of the examined aspects. This indicates that many of the obesity-related factors may affect breast cancer and that a single breast tumour may utilise a unique combination of those factors to promote growth. All treatments increased proliferation in MCF-10A breast epithelial cells, with additional analysis generally supporting growth promotion. Insulin treatment particularly increased cell proliferation, while leptin and TNF-I± increased MAP-kinase signalling. This may indicate that insulin and adipokines may have a higher impact on breast cancer aetiology than on breast cancer progression.


Abstract This paper examines the relief of travellers in Warwickshire, England. By using an unusually rich set of Constables' Accounts for the parish of Grandborough, it interrogates the relationship between charity, local justice, and both official and popular perceptions of migration. It argues that the large number of migrants who passed through rural parishes were categorised by the local constable according to cultural and discretionary criteria. This 'typology' of travellers determined the nature and extent of the relief they might receive and the actions that might be taken against them. Socially threatening migrants, such as poor pregnant women, the sick, and vagrants, also found themselves affected by this same 'proscriptive calculation', often to their detriment.


Nowadays, we input text not only on stationary devices, but also on handheld devices while walking, driving, or commuting. Text entry on the move, which we term as nomadic text entry, is generally slower. This is partially due to the need for users to move their visual focus from the device to their surroundings for navigational purposes and back. To investigate if better feedback about users' surroundings on the device can improve performance, we present a number of new and existing feedback systems: textual, visual, textual & visual, and textual & visual via translucent keyboard. Experimental comparisons between the conventional and these techniques established that increased ambient awareness for mobile users enhances nomadic text entry performance. Results showed that the textual and the textual & visual via translucent keyboard conditions increased text entry speed by 14% and 11%, respectively, and reduced the error rate by 13% compared to the regular technique. The two methods also significantly reduced the number of collisions with obstacles.


PURPOSE
The purpose of this report is to highlight the dilemma and the associated clinical implications in treating a patient with superior vena cava syndrome (SVCS) with a coexisting coagulophathy.

CLINICAL FEATURES
This case report describes a post-bone marrow transplant patient who was admitted to our ICU because of bronchiectasis complicated with nosocomial pneumonia. Following the recovery from pneumonia and long ventilatory support, he developed superior vena cava syndrome (SVCS) due to mediastinal lymphadenopathy. The diagnosis was delayed due to associated confounding clinical factors. Due to the rapid deterioration in patient's condition, the immediate tissue diagnosis of mediastinal lymph nodes and re-canalization of superior vena cava by stenting was not done though it was, our priority. He had many other medical problems as well such as thrombocytopenia, deranged coagulation profile, old cerebral infarction with hemiplegia, seizure disorder and cardiac arrhythmias that complicated the treatment plan. Ultrasonography (USG) guided biopsy followed by stenting of the SVC was done after discussing the risks and benefits with patient's relatives. But, he had bleeding from biopsy site due to deranged coagulation profile. He was not given any anticoagulants. Within 24 hours, the stent was blocked by clot that was diagnosed by the deteriorating clinical features and a repeat CT scan. Then he was given Enoxaparin in therapeutic dose and the clot cleared within a day, possibly partly due to Enoxaparin and partly coagulopathy.

CONCLUSION
Meticulous care should be practiced in deciding the appropriate treatment of SVCS especially when it is associated with other complicating medical problems particularly coagulopathy.


This article seeks to advance our understanding of the adoption barriers faced by the 250 million people age 15 and older in Latin America who are not regular Internet users. The data are sourced from large-scale household surveys in four countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. The empirical strategy is based on modeling the probability that nonadopters cite different reasons for nonsubscription and nonuse, conditional on demographic characteristics. In contrast to developed countries, the findings indicate that high costs and limited service availability continue to be key barriers to residential subscription and, to a lesser extent, individual use. However, the findings also suggest that human capital barriers related to lack of ICT skills and content relevance are important determinants of digital exclusion for specific groups, such as older adults and indigenous language speakers. In broader terms, the article corroborates the need to study barriers to Internet adoption in different country contexts and, perhaps more importantly, across socioeconomic groups.


Abstract. This study describes three-dimensional numerical simulations of the evolution of an aircraft contrail during the first 30 min following the emission of exhausts. The wake is modeled as a vortex pair descending in a stratified atmosphere where turbulent fluctuations are sustained in the late dissipation regime. The focus of the study is laid on the interactions between vortex dynamics, atmospheric turbulence and contrail microphysics, and their role in determining the growth and the distribution of ice crystals. The atmospheric turbulence is synthesized using a methodology developed to force anisotropic turbulent fluctuations. The results show the feasibility of three-dimensional simulations of the early development of a contrail in supersaturated conditions before its transition into a contrail-cirrus. %(when radiative heating and sedimentation are no more negligible). It is shown that in case of strongly supersaturated and shear-free atmosphere the optical depth is maintained as the contrail spreads by turbulent diffusion in the late dissipation regime.


We wage a perpetual battle about what not to read. There are so many factors which stop us from reading as much as we feel we ought to, but I would put highest amongst these the sheer volume that we could actually read. I was recently in a talk by Professor Neal Maskrey who quoted some work looking at the reading requirements generated by a ward round. The researchers reckoned that the time needed to read simply to keep up to date with the guidelines on the conditions encountered on the round was easily an order of magnitude greater than the time needed to see the patients. There are some flaws in this of course—we don't factor the time spent at medical school into the time it takes us to understand the average patient's condition on a round, in the same way that we also learn the guidelines through use and, unless we're in a remarkably disparate speciality, we are able to re-use knowledge. But the challenge remains; there is a huge amount of information out there. Further barriers to our reading— other than the need to eat, drink, sleep, and interact with friends and family from time to time—are the way things are written. I can entirely understand why a Cochrane review needs to be 50 pages long, or a NICE guideline 150 pages long. I wouldn't criticise that they need to explain their robust methodology for each reader. I'd just observe that I rarely read more than a few pages of either. Paul Glazsiou describes a vivid experience of discovering a cellar full of unread, shrink-wrapped guidelines at the WHO headquarters; he dubbed this "mummified evidence"—and his blog post offers some helpful tips about how to avoid the phenomenon. Philippa Prentice has taken the role of section editor for Guidelines at E&P very seriously, and I was struck, looking through this edition, what an excellent job she is doing of it. We're quite hard task-masters when commissioning these reviews. We try to avoid authors who hate the guideline, or who love it unconditionally. We try to get them to present why it is that you, the reader, should be interested in the guideline—or part of it—and to think about what you should start doing, stop doing, or reflect on why you are doing it. We have two guideline reviews. Nkem Onyeador, Siba Prosad Paul and Bhupinder Kaur Sandhu look at the PGHAN bodies' joint guideline on diagnosis and management of gastroeosophageal reflux and gastroesophageal reflux disease (see page 190). Emily Stenke and Séamus Hussey look at the NICE guidance on management of ulcerative colitis (see page 194). One of these conditions is more specialist than the other—and I'd guess that one is more poorly managed than the other, with a proliferation of non evidence-based treatment in the last decade. They each provide an extremely helpful summary of what we need to know from the guideline; for its day to day practicality for many child health professionals I've made the reflux paper my editor's choice this month. I'd argue that "What won't I read" is a more pertinent question —and the one that we practically answer on a day to day basis—than its converse. The midwife who recently told the parents of a baby I saw with constipation to give the baby some brown sugar must have, at some level, taken a decision not to read the NICE guidance on constipation. We can usually spot this "brown sugar" scenario, but we're so good at spotting things outside of our comfort zone—or which we feel very comfortable about but are in fact probably wrong (prokinetic agents in reflux anyone?) We do need to try to keep up with this stuff, and at E&P we hope to bring you articles that you will read, and will enjoy—because they're relevant to you and your patients and are well written. If you know of a guideline you think we might not be reading, but which we ought to cover, then why not let us know? I'm always happy to have your suggestions for improvement; look out for some further developments in the next year or so which we hope will make the journal even more interesting, so watch this space...


Towing capacity affects a vehicle's towing ability and it is usually costly to buy or even rent a vehicle that can tow certain amount of weight. A widely swaying towing trailer is one of the main causes for accidents that involves towing trailers. This study propose an affordable automated disconnected towing system (ADTS) that does not require physical connection between leading vehicle and the trailer vehicle by only using a computer vision system. The ADTS contains two main parts: a leading vehicle which can perform lane detection and a trailer vehicle which can automatically follow the leading vehicle by detecting the license plate of the leading vehicle. The trailer vehicle can adjust its speed according to the distance from the leading vehicle.


From the early eighteenth century into the 1830s, Great Britain was the only major country in the world to adopt gold as the sole basis of its currency, in the process absorbing much of the world's supply of that metal into its pockets, cupboards, and coffers. During the same period, Britons forged a nation by distilling a heady brew of Protestantism, commerce, and military might, while preserving important features of its older social hierarchy. All That Glittered argues for a close connection between these occurrences, by linking justifications for gold's role in British society—starting in the 1750s and running through the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes in California and Australia—to contemporary descriptions of that metal's varied values at home and abroad. Most of these accounts attributed British commercial and military success to a credit economy pinned on gold, stigmatized southern European and subaltern peoples for their nonmonetary uses of gold, or tried to marginalize people at home for similar forms of alleged misconduct. This book tells a primarily cultural origin story about the gold standard's emergence after 1850 as an international monetary system, while providing a new window on British exceptionalism during the previous century.