Methane yield of ligno-cellulosic substrates (i.e. dedicated energy crops and agricultural residues) may be limited by their composition and structural features. Hence, biomass pre-treatments are envisaged to overcome this constraint. This thesis aimed at: i) assessing biomass and methane yield of dedicated energy crops; ii) evaluating the effects of hydrothermal pre-treatments on methane yield of Arundo; iii) investigating the effects of NaOH pre-treatments and iv) acid pre-treatments on chemical composition, physical structure and methane yield of two dedicated energy crops and one agricultural residue.
Three multi-annual species (Arundo, Switchgrass and Sorghum Silk), three sorghum hybrids (Trudan Headless, B133 and S506) and a maize, as reference for AD, were studied in the frame of point i). Results exhibit the remarkable variation in biomass yield, chemical characteristics and potential methane yield. The six species alternative to maize deserve attention in view of a low need of external inputs but necessitate improvements in biodegradability.
In the frame of point ii), Arundo was subjected to hydrothermal pre-treatments at different temperature, time and acid catalyst (with and without H2SO4). Pre-treatments determined a variable effect on methane yield: pre-treatments without acid catalyst achieved up to +23% CH4 output, while pre-treatments with H2SO4 catalyst incurred a methanogenic inhibition.
Two biomass crops (Arundo and B133) and an agricultural residue (Barley straw) were subject to NaOH and acid pre-treatments, in the frame of point iii) and iv), respectively. Different pre-treatments determined a change of chemical and physical structure and an increase of methane yield: up to +30% and up to +62% CH4 output in Arundo with NaOH and acid pre-treatments, respectively.
It is thereby demonstrated that pre-treatments can actually enhance biodegradability and subsequent CH4 output of ligno-cellulosic substrates, although pre-treatment viability needs to be evaluated at the level of full scale biogas plants in a perspective of profitable implementation.


A Colorado State University mechanical engineering professor is in the first year of a new study to determine whether nanotubes on titanium implants can deliver chemotherapy drugs and antibiotics directly to skeletal implants, limiting the spread of drugs throughout the body and reducing side effects on patients. Ketul Popat, who teaches in the university's School of Biomedical Engineering, received a three-year $300,000 grant in 2008 from the National Science Foundation to study nanomedicine - scaling down the size of drug delivery vehicles so that the drugs can be delivered directly to the target organs with appropriate delivery rates. One of the first papers on the study appeared in the January issue of Nanotechnology magazine. Colorado's Bioscience Discovery Evaluation Program, which aims to foster development of the bioscience industry in the state, also recently approved a grant of $57,000 for the research. Popat and his four students are investigating whether tiny tubes of titanium adhered to the implant can be used to deliver drugs and increase bone growth on the implant surface. Titanium, which is an exceptionally hard and scratch-resistant material, has been used in prosthetic devices since the 1970s. Popat's team is taking the research to the next level: Will increasing the surface area of the titanium with a pattern of tiny tubes allow drugs to be delivered in a controlled way that will help regenerate the bone and keep the tissue healthy? "We hope these nanotube arrays will mimic the complex geometries of natural tissue and will provide a porous mesh for the growth and maintenance of healthy cells," Popat said. Popat said his team has hypothesized that applying nanotubes to the implant surface will result in increased cell growth. This cell growth on the implant surface will enhance the bond between the titanium implant and the bone, helping implants last longer. Typically implants must be replaced every eight to 10 years. However, by applying these nanotubes to the implant, they can be made more permanent inside the body, thus preventing further complicated surgeries in patients. "Ultimately, if this kind of drug delivery system is found to be successful, it's going to improve the quality of life for people," Popat said. "Chemotherapy delivers up to 60 times more drugs than what is needed. We could release the drug for shorter or longer periods of time and keep the drug targeted to the tissue where is it needed so you won't realize you're taking a drug and there won't be any side effects." Popat joined the Colorado State University College of Engineering in January 2008 as an assistant professor. He is working with Craig Grimes at Pennsylvania State University on the research. Contact: Emily Narvaes Wilmsen (970) 491-2336 firstname.lastname@example.com --


Ed Lorenz was a pioneer of chaos theory; he provided the first realization of a strange attractor based on a mathematical model of just three coupled differential equations. In addition, Ed made many seminal contributions to theoretical meteorology, not only in studies of the predictability of weather and climate, but also in advancing our basic understanding of the dynamics and thermodynamics of climate.


The knowledge of variations of blood vessels of kidney is important during operative and diagnostic procedures. The present study contributes in making the clinicians aware of possible variations in renal vascular pedicle. 48 kidney specimens were studied for renal vessels in the Department of Anatomy, Pt. B. D. Sharma PGIMS, Rohtak. Out of 48 specimens, two kidneys were found to have anomalous vasculature. One kidney (Right Side) was observed to have triple renal veins along with an accessory renal artery. One other kidney (Left Side) exhibited triple renal artery. The study is being carried out till date and is planned for an extensive research for another few years to review and to collect more data in this perspective.


Nanoscale pores are a tool for single molecule analysis of DNA or RNA processing enzymes. Monitoring catalytic activity in real time using this technique requires that these enzymes retain function while held atop a nanopore in an applied electric field. Using an alpha-hemolysin nanopore, we measured the dwell time for complexes of DNA with the Klenow fragment of Escherichia coli DNA polymerase I (KF) as a function of the concentration of deoxynucleoside triphosphate (dNTP) substrate. We analyzed these dwell time measurements in the framework of a two-state model for captured complexes (DNA-KF binary and DNA-KF-dNTP ternary states). Average nanopore dwell time increased without saturating as a function of correct dNTP concentration across 4 orders of magnitude. This arises from two factors that are proportional to dNTP concentration: (1) The fraction of complexes that are in the ternary state when initially captured predominantly affects dwell time at low dNTP concentrations. (2) The rate of binding and rebinding of dNTP to captured complexes affects dwell time at higher dNTP concentrations. Thus there are two regimes that display a linear relationship between average dwell time and dNTP concentration. The transition from one linear regime to the other occurs near the equilibrium dissociation constant (K(d)) for dNTP binding to KF-DNA complexes in solution. We conclude from the combination of titration experiments and modeling that DNA-KF complexes captured atop the nanopore retain iterative, sequence-specific dNTP binding, as required for catalysis and fidelity in DNA synthesis.


We modify a standard SIR epidemiological model to allow for testing and asymptomatic agents. We explore cross country variation's ability to allow for identification of key parameters of the model: the fatality rate and the evolution over time of the normalized transmission rate. We first show that as long as tests are applied only to agents who exhibit symptoms, those parameters cannot be identified. We briefly discuss which additional information may allow for identification. Finally, we also describe conditions under which the normalized transmission rate can be computed with very high accuracy, and how cross country evidence can be used to evaluate the effect of lockdowns on evolution of the effective transmission rate over time.


The size, shape, and connectivity of water bodies (lakes, ponds, and wetlands) can have important effects on ecological communities and ecosystem processes, but how these characteristics are influenced by land use and land cover change over broad spatial scales is not known. Intensive alteration of water bodies during urban development, including construction, burial, drainage, and reshaping, may select for certain morphometric characteristics and influence the types of water bodies present in cities. We used a database of over one million water bodies in 100 cities across the conterminous United States to compare the size distributions, connectivity (as intersection with surface flow lines), and shape (as measured by shoreline development factor) of water bodies in different land cover classes. Water bodies in all urban land covers were dominated by lakes and ponds, while reservoirs and wetlands comprised only a small fraction of the sample. In urban land covers, as compared to surrounding undeveloped land, water body size distributions converged on moderate sizes, shapes toward less tortuous shorelines, and the number and area of water bodies that intersected surface flow lines (i.e., streams and rivers) decreased. Potential mechanisms responsible for changing the characteristics of urban water bodies include: preferential removal, physical reshaping or addition of water bodies, and selection of locations for development. The relative contributions of each mechanism likely change as cities grow. The larger size and reduced surface connectivity of urban water bodies may affect the role of internal dynamics and sensitivity to catchment processes. More broadly, these results illustrate the complex nature of urban watersheds and highlight the need to develop a conceptual framework for urban water bodies.


Not only do modeling and simulation help provide a better understanding of how real-world systems function, they also enable us to predict system behavior before a system is actually built and analyze systems accurately under varying operating conditions. Modeling and Simulation of Systems Using MATLAB and Simulink provides comprehensive, state-of-the-art coverage of all the important aspects of modeling and simulating both physical and conceptual systems. Various real-life examples show how simulation plays a key role in understanding real-world systems. The author also explains how to effectively use MATLAB and Simulink software to successfully apply the modeling and simulation techniques presented. After introducing the underlying philosophy of systems, the book offers step-by-step procedures for modeling different types of systems using modeling techniques, such as the graph-theoretic approach, interpretive structural modeling, and system dynamics modeling. It then explores how simulation evolved from pre-computer days into the current science of today. The text also presents modern soft computing techniques, including artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems, and genetic algorithms, for modeling and simulating complex and nonlinear systems. The final chapter addresses discrete systems modeling. Preparing both undergraduate and graduate students for advanced modeling and simulation courses, this text helps them carry out effective simulation studies. In addition, graduate students should be able to comprehend and conduct simulation research after completing this book. AncillariesAccompanying CD-ROM includes simulation code in MATLAB and Simulink, enabling quick and useful insight into real-world systems. A solutions manual is available for qualifying instructors.


Making the Heartland Quilt: A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in Early-Nineteenth-Century Illinois. By Douglas K. Meyer. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Pp. Xvii, 332. Charts, maps, index, bibliography. Cloth, $49.95) Making the Heartland Quilt is destined to be a book that Illinois historians consult so often that the pages grow ragged from use. Douglas K. Meyer, a professor of geography at Southern Illinois University, has given us a prodigious amount of information about the evolution of the population of Illinois. Anyone who has lived in Illinois is aware of what Meyer calls the "midwestern dichotomies: northern versus southern; native-born versus foreign-born; rural versus urban; agriculture versus manufacturing." Many of us thought we had that all figured out. We thought southerners migrated to southern Illinois, people from Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc. populated the middle part of the state, and the northern counties, particularly Cook, were settled mostly by foreign immigrants. The real story is a lot more complicated. It's as complicated as the fact that despite those dichotomies Illinois was a true melting pot, the result of which was a distinctive midwestern character. In looking at the maps in this book the reason becomes clear. Although some people settled in clusters, very few (most notably religious communities) were actually isolated from other populations. For example, southerners, the first native-born immigrants to populate Illinois, did come to the southern part of the state and a large number of them stayed there, but not all. Many continued on in a northwest pattern in a sort of chain migration. And they didn't just come to Illinois in one jump from, say, North Carolina. They came in short steps to Tennessee, then on to Kentucky, and finally across the river and into Illinois. Some of them left North Carolina because they didn't agree with slave labor in the cotton industry or they thought distilling grain to make liquor was immoral. And some of them had come to North Carolina from Pennsylvania. They moved in small groups, then wrote home or visited and raved about the fertile soil and good prices for land in Illinois, so others followed. In the early 1800s many Europeans decided to emigrate to Illinois because of travel books, some of which pictured it as a sort of paradise. Fellow Europeans followed later, having been influenced by letters from America or to escape political upheavals or famine. That is one of the major values of this book. Meyer not only documents who came to Illinois, but why they left their previous homes and why they settled in one particular area. …


It is 1979. Esme Allen is a well-known West End actress at just the moment when the West End is ceasing to offer actors a regular way of life. The visit of her young daughter, Amy, with a new boyfriend sets in train a series of events which only find their shape eighteen years later. A generational play about the long term struggle between a strong mother and her loving daughter, "Amy's View" mixes love, death and the theatre in a way which is both heady and original.


Chain in both its forms - common (or stud-less) and stud-link - has many engineering applications. It is widely used as a component in the moorings of offshore floating systems, where its ruggedness and corrosion resistance make it an attractive choice. Chain exhibits some interesting behaviour in that when straight and subject to an axial load it does not twist or generate any torque, but if twisted or loaded when in a twisted condition it behaves in a highly non-linear manner, with the torque dependent upon the level of twist and axial load. Clearly an understanding of the way in which chains may behave and interact with other mooring components (such as wire rope, which also exhibits coupling between axial load and generated torque) when they are in service is essential. However, the sizes of chain that are in use in offshore moorings (typical bar diameters are 75 mm and greater) are too large to allow easy testing. This paper, which is in two parts, aims to address the issues and considerations relevant to torque in mooring chain. The first part introduces a frictionless theory that predicts the resultant torques and 'lift' in the links as non-dimensionalized functions of the angle of twist. Fortran code is presented in an Appendix, which allows the reader to make use of the analysis. The second part of the paper presents results from experimental work on both stud-less (41 mm) and stud-link (20.5 and 56mm) chains. Torsional data are presented in both 'constant twist' and 'constant load' forms, as well as considering the lift between the links.


The segmentation of cardiac structures in Cine Magnetic Resonance imaging (CMR) plays an important role in monitoring ventricular function, and many deep learning solutions have been introduced that successfully automate this task. Yet due to variabilities in the CMR acquisition process, images from different centers or acquisition protocols differ considerably. This causes deep learning models to fail silently. It is therefore crucial to identify out-of-distribution (OOD) samples for which the trained model is unsuitable. For models with a self-supervised proxy task, we propose a simple method to identify OOD samples that does not require adapting the model architecture or access to a separate OOD dataset during training. As the performance of self-supervised tasks can be assessed without ground truth information, it indicates during test time when a sample differs from the training distribution. The proposed method combines a voxel-wise uncertainty estimate with the self-supervision information. Our approach is validated across three CMR datasets and two different proxy tasks. We find that it is more effective at detecting OOD samples than state-of-the-art post-hoc OOD detection and uncertainty estimation approaches.


The practice of diabetes self-care plays an important role in achieving and maintaining good glycaemic control. However, not all patients with insulin-treated diabetes engage in their self-care activities. There is some evidence that self-care practices in patients with insulin-treated diabetes can be understood and predicted by their health beliefs, although studies are often hampered by methodological weaknesses, and the fact that less is known about adults with insulin-treated diabetes in Malaysia. This study was conducted to examine whether health beliefs (as specified in the Health Belief Model: HBM) can predict self-care practices and glycaemic control in patients with insulin-treated diabetes in Malaysia. Longitudinal design with self-reported questionnaire measures administered at baseline (Time 1:T1) and six months later (Time 2: T2). Participants were recruited from three endocrinology clinics in Malaysia. Measures included self-care practices (diet, insulin intake, exercise and self-blood glucose monitoring: SMBG), health beliefs and diabetes knowledge. Participants' glycaemic control was examined based on their glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) results. Data analysis was performed at different points of the study times; T1, T1-T2 and T2. Diabetes knowledge and demographic data were controlled for in predictive statistical analyses. A total of 159 patients with insulin-treated diabetes (aged 18-40 years) completed the measures at T1. Of these, only 108 (67.9%) completed follow-up measures at T2. However, demographic characteristics were not significantly different between those who completed and dropped out of the study (p>0.05). The HBM was significantly predictive of diet self-care at T2, insulin intake practice at T1 and HbA1c at T1-T2 and T2. Of the HBM constructs, perceived benefits significantly predicted good dietary habits at T1 (OR 1.92) and T2 (OR .23) and adherence to insulin injection at T1 (OR 3.17) and T1-T2 (OR 2.68). With the exception of perceived severity, all other HBM constructs significantly predicted HbA1c [perceived susceptibility (β .169) at T1, perceived barriers (β -.206) and perceived benefits (β -.397) at T2 and cues to action (β -.233) at T1-T2]. Health beliefs predict self-care practices and glycaemic control in young to middle-aged adults with insulin-treated diabetes in Malaysia. Diabetes educators could use this knowledge in their efforts to improve diabetes self-care in this patient group by modifying those beliefs through their diabetes education.


Our research efforts over the past decade have focused on three central issues in the economics of aging: retirement, Social Security, and pensions. We have examined how retirement is defined and have contributed explanations for the wide differences in retirement behavior among individuals. We have investigated the variety of incentives observed in pension plans and the sharp trends in these incentives over time. We also have considered related public policy questions pertaining to Social Security, pension regulation, and retirement income policies. In addressing these topics, other important behavioral and institutional questions arise. How do fixed working hours affect labor supply and retirement choice? What is the nature of the long-term employment relationship and what are the consequences for pensions, retirement, and other dimensions of labor market outcomes? How well informed are individuals about Social Security and their own pensions, and how does misinformation affect retirement behavior? Much of our work revolves around a structural retirement model. This model incorporates our findings on the proper specification of the opportunities governing the choice of retirement outcomes, and it has been used to analyze a variety of public policies. Consider first the question of how to define retirement. Our work suggests that it is not fully informative, and sometimes is misleading, to treat retirement as an either/or choice. Retirement behavior is most properly treated as involving labor market flow among at least three states, including partial retirement. Transition rates into and out of these states determine the stock of full-time workers, partially retired, and fully retired.[1] Theory suggests that if individuals could choose their hours in a job, most would gradually reduce work hours as they grow old. However, the majority of workers proceed directly from full-time work to retirement. The reason is: most jobs do not have flexible hours. In order to work part time, most workers must change jobs.[2] Our work shows that these hours constraints are pervasive. Most individuals are not free to retire on their main job by smoothly reducing their hours of work from full time to zero, while remaining with their employer. As a result, they face what is effectively an all-or-nothing derision about retirement from that job. In order to retire partially, they must take a new job and forgo the specific training accumulated over a long period on the main job. Consequently, partial retirement jobs offer much lower wages than can be earned on the main job.[3] Not only are constraints on hours common, but they are important in estimating retirement models. A retirement analysis that ignores hours constraints could suggest that workers are less subject to the influence of retirement incentives and retirement programs than is in fact the case. We also emphasize that the response of partial retirement to incentives may be substantially different from the response of full retirement to those same incentives. Studies that assume the two effects are identical may misinterpret the relationship of retirement to pension and Social Security incentives.[4] A central focus of our work has been to estimate a structural retirement model that allows for these features of the labor market, and to apply that model to related policy analysis.[5] The model includes different wage offers for full-time work and for partial retirement work, as well as incentives from both Social Security and pensions. In a recent paper, we also have included the analogous incentives created by retiree health insurance.[6] We also adjust the analysis to reflect the effects of the income tax. We have estimated the model using data from the Retirement History Study (RHS) and the National Longitudinal Study (NLS) of Mature Women. Our simulations indicate that the major peaks of retirement are a result of the incentives created by pension plans, and by discontinuities in the Social Security benefit formula. …


Abstract Novel magnesium(II) porphyrazine with peripheral methyl(3,5-dibromophenylmethyl)amine groups was synthesized in a multi-step procedure starting from commercially available diaminomaleonitrile. All intermediates and the final macrocycle were characterized using UV–Vis, FT-IR, MS and various NMR techniques. The absorption and emission properties of the macrocycle were evaluated in N,N-dimethylformamide, dimethyl sulfoxide, and dichloromethane. The potential photosensitizing activity was evaluated by assessing the ability of the macrocycle to generate singlet oxygen in dimethyl sulfoxide and N,N-dimethylformamide.


Variation between and within individuals in life history traits is ubiquitous in natural populations. When affecting fitness-related traits such as survival or reproduction, individual heterogeneity plays a key role in population dynamics and life history evolution. However, it is only recently that properly accounting for individual heterogeneity when studying population dynamics of free-ranging populations has been made possible through the development of appropriate statistical models. We aim here to review case studies of individual heterogeneity in the context of capture-recapture models for the estimation of population size and demographic parameters with imperfect detection. First, we define what individual heterogeneity means and clarify the terminology used in the literature. Second, we review the literature and illustrate why individual heterogeneity is used in capture-recapture studies by focusing on the detection of life-history trade-offs, including senescence. Third, we explain how to model individual heterogeneity in capture-recapture models and provide the code to fit these models (https://github.com/oliviergimenez/indhet_in_CRmodels). The distinction is made between situations in which heterogeneity is actually measured and situations in which part of the heterogeneity remains unobserved. Regarding the latter, we outline recent developments of random-effect models and finite-mixture models. Finally, we discuss several avenues for future research.


Rho is a ring-shaped, ATP-fueled motor essential for remodeling transcriptional complexes and R-loops in bacteria. Despite years of research on this fundamental model helicase, key aspects of its mechanism of translocation remain largely unknown. Here, we used single-molecule manipulation and fluorescence methods to directly monitor the dynamics of RNA translocation by Rho. We show that the efficiency of Rho activation is strongly dependent on the force applied on the RNA but that, once active, Rho is able to translocate against a large opposing force (at least 7 pN) by a mechanism involving 'tethered tracking'. Importantly, the ability to directly measure dynamics at the single-molecule level allowed us to determine essential motor properties of Rho. Hence, Rho translocates at a rate of ∼56 nt per second under our experimental conditions, which is 2–5 times faster than velocities measured for RNA polymerase under similar conditions. Moreover, the processivity of Rho (∼62 nt at a 7 pN opposing force) is large enough for Rho to reach termination sites without dissociating from its RNA loading site, potentially increasing the efficiency of transcription termination. Our findings unambiguously establish 'tethered tracking' as the main pathway for Rho translocation, support 'kinetic coupling' between Rho and RNA polymerase during Rho-dependent termination, and suggest that forces applied on the nascent RNA transcript by cellular substructures could have important implications for the regulation of transcription and its coupling to translation in vivo.


BACKGROUND
Suburban development patterns may impede physical activity (PA) and mobility and affect healthy aging. This paper investigates the relationships between neighborhood design and walking, driving, PA, and obesity in adults over age 65 years.

METHODS
Data from the SMARTRAQ (Atlanta region) survey provided measures of PA, BMI, SES, and travel patterns. Neighborhood design was measured using a walkability index (residential density, street connectivity, retail density, and land use mix). Chi square and regression was used to evaluate relationships.

RESULTS
Increased walkability was related with more walking (OR 2.02), less time spent traveling in a car (OR .53), and lower odds of being overweight (OR .68). Those with 1 or no cars were more likely to walk (OR 2.9) and spend less time in cars (OR .53); but also less likely to get recommended levels of PA (OR .55). Visiting a fast food outlet was associated with increased odds of obesity (OR 1.81).

CONCLUSIONS
Policies are needed to bring older Americans closer to shops and services and healthy food outlets as a means of encouraging regular walking and healthy body weight. Incentives to encourage neighborhood grocery stores and affordable housing in central areas along with regulatory reform through zoning can encourage PA and healthy body weight in the elderly.


BACKGROUND
Chronic pelvic pain is a common and debilitating condition; its aetiology is multifactorial, involving social, psychological and biological factors. The management of chronic pelvic pain is challenging, as despite interventions involving surgery, many women remain in pain without a firm gynaecological diagnosis.

OBJECTIVES
To assess the effectiveness and safety of non-surgical interventions for women with chronic pelvic pain.

SEARCH METHODS
We searched the Menstrual Disorders and Subfertility Group Specialised Register. We also searched (from inception to 5 February 2014) AMED, CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL and LILACS. We handsearched sources such as citation lists, trial registers and conference proceedings.

SELECTION CRITERIA
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on non-surgical management of chronic pelvic pain were eligible for inclusion. We included studies of women with a diagnosis of pelvic congestion syndrome or adhesions but excluded those with pain known to be caused by endometriosis, primary dysmenorrhoea (period pain), active chronic pelvic inflammatory disease or irritable bowel syndrome. We considered studies of any non-surgical intervention, including lifestyle, physical, medical and psychological treatments.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Study selection, quality assessment and data extraction were performed independently by two review authors. Meta-analysis was performed using the Peto odds ratio (Peto OR) for dichotomous outcomes and the mean difference (MD) for continuous outcomes, with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). The primary outcome measure was pain relief, and secondary outcome measures were psychological outcomes, quality of life, requirement for analgesia and adverse effects. The quality of the evidence was assessed by using GRADE methods.

MAIN RESULTS
Twenty-one RCTs were identified that involved non-surgical management of chronic pelvic pain: 13 trials were included in the review, and eight were excluded. The studies included a total of 750 women-406 women in the intervention groups and 344 in the control groups. Included studies had high attrition rates, and investigators often did not blind adequately or did not clearly describe randomisation procedures. Medical treatment versus placebo Progestogen (medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA)) was more effective than placebo at the end of treatment in terms of the number of women achieving a greater than 50% reduction in visual analogue scale (VAS) pain score immediately after treatment (Peto OR 3.00, 95% CI 1.70 to 5.31, two studies, n = 204, I(2) = 22%, moderate-quality evidence). Evidence of benefit was maintained up to nine months after treatment (Peto OR 2.09, 95% CI 1.18 to 3.71, two studies, n = 204, I(2) = 0%, moderate-quality evidence). Women treated with progestogen reported more adverse effects (e.g. weight gain, bloatedness) than those given placebo (high-quality evidence). The estimated effect of lofexidine on pain outcomes when compared with placebo was compatible with benefit and harm (Peto OR 0.42, 95% CI 0.11 to 1.61, one study, 39 women, low-quality evidence). Women in the lofexidine group reported more adverse effects (including drowsiness and dry mouth) than women given placebo (moderate-quality evidence). Head-to-head comparisons of medical treatments Head-to-head comparisons showed that women taking goserelin had greater improvement in pelvic pain score (MD 3, 95% CI 2.08 to 3.92, one study, n = 47, moderate-quality evidence) at one year than those taking progestogen. Women taking gabapentin had a lower VAS pain score than those taking amytriptyline (MD -1.50, 95% CI -2.06 to -0.94, n = 40, low-quality evidence). Study authors reported that no statistically significant difference was observed in the rate of adverse effects among women taking gabapentin compared with women given amytriptyline. The study comparing goserelin versus progestogen did not report on adverse effects. Psychological treatment Women who underwent reassurance ultrasound scans and received counselling were more likely to report improved pain than those treated with a standard 'wait and see' policy (Peto OR 6.77, 95% CI 2.83 to 16.19, n = 90, low-quality evidence). Significantly more women who had writing therapy as a disclosure reported improvement in pain than those in the non-disclosure group (Peto OR 4.47, 95% CI 1.41 to 14.13, n = 48, very low-quality evidence). No difference between groups in pain outcomes was noted when other psychological therapies were compared with standard care or placebo (quality of evidence ranged from very low to low). Studies did not report on adverse effects. Complementary therapy Distension of painful pelvic structures was more effective for pain when compared with counselling (MD 35.8, 95% CI 23.08 to 48.52 on a zero to 100 scale, one study, n = 48, moderate-quality evidence). No difference in pain levels was observed when magnetic therapy was compared with use of a control magnet (very low-quality evidence). Studies did not report on adverse effects.The results of studies examining psychological and complementary therapies could not be combined to yield meaningful results.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
Evidence of moderate quality supports progestogen as an option for chronic pelvic pain, with efficacy reported during treatment. In practice, this option may be most acceptable among women unconcerned about progestogenic adverse effects (e.g. weight gain, bloatedness-the most common adverse effects). Although some evidence suggests possible benefit of goserelin when compared with progestogen, gabapentin as compared with amytriptyline, ultrasound versus 'wait and see' and writing therapy versus non-disclosure, the quality of evidence is generally low, and evidence is drawn from single studies.Given the prevalence and healthcare costs associated with chronic pelvic pain in women, RCTs of other medical, lifestyle and psychological interventions are urgently required.


The physical characteristics of Sn-117m combined with the biodistribution of the compound tin-117m (Stannic, 4+) diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (Sn-117m DTPA) suggest that it should be an excellent agent for the palliation of pain from bony metastases. Prior work has established the dosimetry and the safety for the material in human beings. The presence of low-energy conversion electrons should result in the relative sparing of the bone marrow while delivering a high radiation dose to sites of bony metastatic disease. Forty-seven patients with painful bone metastases from various malignancies were treated with Sn-117m DTPA. The patients were assigned to five different dose levels ranging from 2.64 to 10.58 MBq (71-286 microCi) per kg of body weight. Follow-up included review of pain diaries, performance scores, analgesic requirements, blood chemistries, and hematological assessment. Three patients received a second treatment. There was an overall response rate for relief of pain of 75% (range, 60-83%) in the 40 treatments that could be evaluated. No correlation was apparent in this limited series between response rate and the five dose levels used. The relief was complete in 12 patients (30%). The time to onset of pain relief was 19 +/- 15 days with doses < or = 5.29 MBq/kg and 5 +/- 3 days with doses > or = 6.61 MBq/kg. Myelotoxicity was minimal, with only one patient having a marginal grade 3 WBC toxicity. On the basis of our data, Sn-117m DTPA should be an effective and safe radiopharmaceutical for palliation of painful bony metastases. A large-scale trial is warranted to evaluate it in comparison to other similar agents.


Surficial sediments and sea-floor features of the northern Gulf of Mexico continental slope record dramatic episodic venting and slower seepage of formation fluids, brines, crude oil, gases, and fine-grained sediments. Faults, activated by massive sediment input during periods of Plio-Pleistocene falling to low sea levels accompanied by compensating salt movement, provide avenues of vertical transport to the continental slope surface. Many of these faults cut thick sedimentary sequences that frequently contain geopressured zones which provide the driving force for fluid and gas expulsion. Flux rate and fluid characteristics are interpreted as important determinants of modern sea-floor geology and biology. Qualitatively, under conditions of rapid flux of sediment-rich fluids, mud volcanoes (up to 1 km wide and 50 m high) and extensive sheets of extruded mud result. These sediments contain old and displaced microfaunas. Muds are frequently extruded with large volumes of crude oil and gas (both biogenic and thermogenic). In water depths greater than approximately 500-m rapid to moderate vertical flux of hydrocarbon gases and fluids results in the construction of relief features composed of gas hydrates, ejected mud, and authigenic carbonates. Areas with near-surface hydrates frequently support complex chemosynthetic communities with associated hardgrounds containing calcareous remains of mussels, clams, and associated gastropods. Slow flux (seeps) promotes the formation of 13 C-depleted carbonate hardgrounds, stacked carbonate slabs, and moundlike carbonate buildups (frequently >20-m relief). Barite along with carbonate has been found in areas where rapid flux of sediment-carrying fluids has waned in the recent past and mineral-rich brines are now being ejected. Crests, chimneys, and cones of these minerals are found in such settings. Both recent numerical simulations of fluid release from geopressured zones and direct observations at the sea floor support a pattern of episodic venting. Short-term episodes of venting are probably regulated by fault movement, perhaps controlled by local salt adjustment. Destabilization of gas hydrates by oceanographic processes also causes short-term episodic gas expulsion. These events occur with interannual to intra-annual frequencies. Longer gas hydrate stabilization-destabilization cycles in continental margin settings are forced by hydrostatic loading and unloading at the frequency of sea-level change. Radiometric dating suggests that other long-term episodes of venting and major venting expulsion events are also probably modulated by sea- level change, time scales of thousands of years in response to low-stand sedimentary loading. Results of this summary of vent-seep-related phenomena suggest that sediment input from the shelf margin associated with cyclic Plio-Pleistocene falling to low sea-level periods, followed by major listic fault and salt adjustments to a new sediment load have activated venting-seepage throughout this period and perhaps longer.


With the proliferation of e-commerce, e-wallet, and e-health smartphone applications, the need for trusted mobile applications is greater than ever. Unlike their desktop counterparts, many mobile applications rely heavily on sensor inputs. As a result, trust often requires authenticity and integrity of sensor readings. For example, applications may need trusted readings from sensors such as a GPS, camera, or microphone. Recent research has started to recognize the need for "trusted sensors", yet providing the right programming abstractions and system support for building mobile trusted applications is an open problem.
 This paper proposes two software abstractions for offering trusted sensors to mobile applications. We present the design and implementation of these abstractions on both x86 and ARM platforms. We implement a trusted GPS sensor on both platforms, and we provide a privacy control for trusted location using differential privacy. Our evaluation shows that implementing these abstractions comes with moderate overhead on both x86 and ARM platforms. We find these software abstractions to be versatile and practical - using them we implement one novel enterprise mobile application.


Drawing on Weber, this study tests whether the normative principles of merit orientation and impartiality are more prevalent in shaping public hiring preferences among civil servants—both junior and senior—than among private sector employees. In a conjoint experiment, respondents are asked to compare two hypothetical applicants for an office job in a municipal administration and to decide which they would hire. The application profiles vary with respect to a set of meritocratic and nonmeritocratic attributes. The empirical findings suggest that first, in all three samples, hiring decisions are primarily based on meritocratic attributes. Second, there is evidence of ethnic discrimination in the private employee sample, while there is no such effect in either of the two civil servant samples. Third, private employees' hiring preferences are influenced by personal political beliefs, while civil servants are less likely to let political attitudes affect their hiring choices. Thus, while civil servants hiring preferences are largely consistent with passive representation and nondiscrimination, support for a representative bureaucracy among citizens should be improved.


This research aims to evaluate the variables in Malaysia's e-wallet services that may contribute to customer satisfaction. A financial institution has recently launched an ewallet as an alternative payment system for customers. To increase their market share, service providers need to consider consumer expectations and find ways to improve customer loyalty. The research used a quantitative approach where questionnaires were used to gather information. Five hundred questionnaires were distributed among students in Kuala Lumpur through Google to different social groups. Within 14 days of the specified grace period, two hundred and twelve usable answers were obtained. In order to get further participation, three updates are typically sent to all the social classes. The findings indicate that three key factors are crucial: quality of service, confidence, and


This paper presents the Poisson-randomized gamma dynamical system (PRGDS), a model for sequentially observed count tensors that encodes a strong inductive bias toward sparsity and burstiness. The PRGDS is based on a new motif in Bayesian latent variable modeling, an alternating chain of discrete Poisson and continuous gamma latent states that is analytically convenient and computationally tractable. This motif yields closed-form complete conditionals for all variables by way of the Bessel distribution and a novel discrete distribution that we call the shifted confluent hypergeometric distribution. We draw connections to closely related models and compare the PRGDS to these models in studies of real-world count data sets of text, international events, and neural spike trains. We find that a sparse variant of the PRGDS, which allows the continuous gamma latent states to take values of exactly zero, often obtains better predictive performance than other models and is uniquely capable of inferring latent structures that are highly localized in time.


Abstract The paper investigates how firms operating in capital market-oriented economies (the U.K. and the U.S.) and bank-oriented economies (France, Germany, and Japan) determine their capital structure. Using panel data and a two-step system-GMM procedure, the paper finds that the leverage ratio is positively affected by the tangibility of assets and the size of the firm, but declines with an increase in firm profitability, growth opportunities, and share price performance in both types of economies. The leverage ratio is also affected by the market conditions in which the firm operates. The degree and effectiveness of these determinants are dependent on the country's legal and financial traditions. The results also confirm that firms have target leverage ratioswith French firms being the fastest in adjusting their capital structure toward their target level and Japanese firms the slowest. Overall, the capital structure of a firm is heavily influenced by the economic environment and its institutions, corporate governance practices, tax systems, the borrower-lender relation, exposure to capital markets, and the level of investor protection in the country in which the firm operates.


OBJECTIVES
We evaluated the risk of work disability (sick leave and disability pension) before and after diabetes diagnosis relative to individuals without diabetes during the same time period, as well as the trajectory of work disability around the diagnosis.

METHODS
This Swedish population-based cohort study with register data included 14 428 individuals with incident diabetes in 2006 and 39 702 individuals without diabetes during 2003 to 2009.

RESULTS
Work disability was substantially higher among people with diabetes (overall mean = 95 days per year over the 7 years, SD = 143) than among those without diabetes (mean = 35 days, SD = 95). The risk of work disability was slightly higher after diabetes diagnosis than before and compared with the risk of those without diabetes. The trajectory of work disability was already increasing before diagnosis, increased even more at the time of diagnosis, and leveled off after diagnosis. Individual sociodemographic characteristics and comorbid conditions contributed both to the risk and to the trajectory of work disability.

CONCLUSIONS
Although diabetes has an independent effect on work disability, sex, age, education, and comorbid conditions play a significant role.


This study aimed to analyze the epidemiological indicators of TB/HIV co-infection in São José do Rio Preto, São Paulo, Brazil from 1998 to 2006. Data of new TB cases that initiated treatment between January 1998 and December 2006 were obtained from the TB Notification System (EPI-TB) and 306 cases were reported. The incidence rate was 5.1/100,000 inhabitants in 2006. Most cases were men (72.5%) with ages ranging between 20 and 59 years (96.4 %). The majority (51%) had incomplete primary education. Pulmonary TB was the most common type (52.9%) and 46.1% of the patients received supervised treatment. In 2006, the cure rate was 33.3%, 14.3% death rate and no patient abandoned the treatment. Diagnosis occurred at the hospital in 60% of the cases. Results show the need of improved coordination between the city's Tuberculosis Control Program and the Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV Program.


This annotated translation is the first systematic rendering into any Western language of the nine major treatises on the art of the Japanese No theater by Zeami Motokivo (1363-1443). Zeami, who transformed the No from a country entertainment into a vehicle for profound theatrical and philosophical experience, was a brilliant actor himself, and his treatises touch on every aspect of the theater of his time. His theories, mixing philosophical and practical insights, often seem strikingly contemporary. Since their discovery early in this century. these secret treatises have been considered among the most valuable and representative documents in the history of Japanese aesthetics. They discuss subjects from the art of the playwright to the reciprocal nature of the relationship between performer and audience.


Aim To determine the extent of drug toxicity experienced by children and methods to detect it in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) published over a 10-year period. Methods EMBASE, MedLine and the Cochrane Library were searched for RCTs of AEDs which recruited children (age <16 years) and were published between 1998 and 2007. Methodological, efficacy and toxicity data were extracted. Results 54 trials were identified (26 monotherapy and 28 adjunctive therapy designs). 29 trials recruited adults and children but only 10 of these reported the number of children recruited. Only three of the 29 trials analysed the paediatric patients separately. Adverse event rates were the primary toxicity measure, but the method of assessing incidence of side effects was frequently omitted and only six trials documented the use of a standardised method. Only three trials had an independent safety monitoring committee. Conclusions RCTs of AEDs potentially provide the best source of information on relative efficacy, but rarely provide reliable information on side effects. Children are frequently exposed to the risks of RCTs but clinical information regarding efficacy and safety in paediatric patients is often not given. Trials involving paediatric patients alongside adult patients should always include information regarding the number of children recruited and details of efficacy and safety separately. All trials involving children should have an independent safety monitoring committee.


In a variety of animal models, baroreceptor resetting during chronic hypertension has been correlated to vessel wall hypertrophy and decreased distensibility. In one possible mechanism of chronic resetting, termed the splinting hypothesis here, it has been suggested that a stiffer vessel wall might increase the minimum pressure required for activation of these mecha-noreceptors (pressure threshold) and decrease suprathreshold pressure sensitivity. Lower vessel distensibility would alter baroreceptor function by preventing equivalent pressures from producing equivalent vessel distensions and, thus, receptor distortions. Recent studies have also suggested that the pressure threshold is strongly influenced by the most recent (minutes) history of blood pressure exposure during a process termed rapid resetting. Hypertension and advanced aging are associated with distensibility changes. The present study examines pressure and equivalent mechanical response characteristics of aortic baroreceptors from aged normotensive Wistar-Kyoto and spontaneously hypertensive rats. An in vitro aortic arch-aortic nerve preparation was used to assess the discharge properties from a number of baroreceptors and the pressure-diameter relationship of each aorta. Both control and rapid resetting protocols were used to study the baroreceptor characteristics. Aged Wistar-Kyoto rats were normotensive and averaged 115 weeks of age. Aged spontaneously hypertensive rats had systolic tail pressures of 187 mm Hg and averaged 76 weeks of age. Although aortic distensibility of aged WKYs was much lower than previously found in younger animals, the pressure threshold was unchanged. Aged spontaneously hypertensive rat receptors were chronically reset in proportion to their blood pressure. Decreased distensibility did not alter the rapid resetting process. It is concluded that baroreceptor pressure sensitivity is more closely related to aortic distensibility under several conditions altering vessel stiffness, whereas, the pressure threshold may be regulated additionally by mechanisms inde pendent of distensibility. The results are inconsistent with the splinting hypothesis.


Subsampling of sediment cores is the important first step of almost every study. Sampling procedures were developed within IODP/ODP/DSDP to ensure the reproducibility of core treatment as well as its documentation. In contrast, procedures for lacustrine sediment cores are as manifold as the corresponding scientific questions and communities. A sampling assembly and a flexible sampling protocol are described in their version adapted to the PASADO project. This protocol introduces a core splitter and a sampling assembly consisting of a divider and a D-scoop for fast and efficient subsampling. Detailed information can be found in our recently published paper (Ohlendorf et al., 2011).
The core splitter cuts plastic core liners without contamination of the sediment by liner material. The core sampling assembly is used to sample one core half completely in contiguously steps. The core half is split into slices of similar thickness by inserting thin discs through a comb-like divider (Fig. 1). The D-scoop (Fig. 1) is used to sample these sediment discs. The utilisation of the sediment is optimised because all sediment is sampled in one step. Subsamples with known volume can then be taken from the exact same stratigraphic level in the core. Quality flags are defined to document the condition of every (sub)sample, and to allow a first classification of the sediment character.


Overexpression, activation, and mutations of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) are commonly found in solid tumors. The aim of this study was to develop a PET-based method for detecting the constitutively active mutant de2-7 EGFR, which is associated with disease progression and resistance to chemotherapy and radiotherapy in glioma. Methods: The chimeric antibody ch806, which selectively binds an epitope of the EGFR that is exposed only on overexpressed, mutant, or ligand-activated forms of the receptor, was conjugated to the radiohalogen 124I via the residualizing ligand IMP-R4, and in vitro properties were characterized. In vivo biodistribution and small-animal PET studies were performed in BALB/c nude mice bearing U87MG.de2-7 glioma xenografts. Imaging results were correlated with measured tumor uptake of the radioconjugate. Results: 124I-IMP-R4-ch806 had an immunoreactivity of 78.3% and was stable for 7 d when incubated in serum in vitro. The biodistribution analysis of 124I-IMP-R4-ch806 demonstrated a maximal uptake of 30.95 ± 6.01 percentage injected dose per gram (%ID/g) in U87MG.de2-7 xenografts at 48 h after injection, with prolonged tumor retention (6.07 ± 0.80 %ID/g at 216 h after injection). The tumor-to-blood ratio increased from 0.44 at 4 h after injection to a maximum of 4.70 at 168 h after injection. PET of 124I-IMP-R4-ch806 biodistribution was able to clearly detect the U87MG.de2-7 tumors at 24 h after injection and for at least 168 h after injection. Correlation between tumor PET image quantitation of 124I-IMP-R4-ch806 and %ID/g determined from resected tissues (r = 0.9350) was excellent. Conclusion: These results show that immuno-PET with 124I-IMP-R4-ch806 is feasible and allows noninvasive quantitation of de2-7 EGFR expression in vivo.


Natural fibers are widely used as "reinforcing agents" in polymer composites. The aim of the current study is to evaluate the effect of span length on the tensile properties of several natural fibers (Vietnamese coir and bamboo and Bangladeshi jute). Tensile testing of jute, bamboo and coir fibers was carried out by varying span length (5, 10, 15, 25 and 35 mm). The Young's modulus and strain to failure were corrected by using newly developed analytical equations in order to correlate the Young's modulus and strain to failure of natural fibers. Scanning electron microscopy of the fibers was also carried out. It is clearly observed that the Young's modulus increased with an increase in span length. Whereas tensile strength and strain to failure decreased with an increase in the span length of single fibers. The correction method resulted in a high Young's modulus for larger span, while strain to failure found was lower compared to smaller span. This is because larger span length helps to minimize the machine displacement compared to smaller ones. Among all fibers, the Young's modulus of bamboo fiber was highest, followed by jute and coir respectively. Jute fiber had smoother surface and compact structure compared to other two fibers.


Periodontitis, also known as pyorrhea, is a set of inflammatory diseases affecting the periodontium, i.e., the tissues that surround and support the teeth. Periodontitis involves progressive loss of the alveolar bone around the teeth, and if left untreated, can lead to the loosening and subsequent loss of teeth. Periodontitis is caused by microorganisms that adhere to and grow on the tooth's surfaces, along with an over-aggressive immune response against these microorganisms. A diagnosis of periodontitis is established by inspecting the soft gum tissues around the teeth with a probe (i.e., a clinical examination) and by evaluating the patient's X-ray films (i.e., a radiographic examination), to determine the amount of bone loss around the teeth. Specialists in the treatment of periodontitis are periodontists; their field is known as "periodontology" or "periodontics".


Wooden horns wrapped in coiled birch bark (Norwegian: lur) have a long history in Norway, dating back at least to the 7th century AD. By the Vikings, they were used for various signalling purposes, e.g. during battles. More recent uses are generally peaceful—to celebrate the opening of fairs, announce bishop visitations etc. In the 19th century, playing such instruments was as a popular past-time when herding cattle, and, if needed, to scare off predators (bears, wolves, etc.) or signal for help. Common throughout the southern part of Norway, such instruments gained symbolic importance during the 19th century national revival.


Low-productivity forests are often the last remaining pristine forests in managed forest landscapes and typically overrepresented among protected forests. However, the provisioning of individual and multiple ecosystem services (ES-multifunctionality) by these forests remains poorly assessed, making it difficult to evaluate their importance in forest conservation and management.Here, using nationwide data on ES from over 2,000 forest plots, we test whether levels of ES-multifunctionality and individual ES differ between low-productivity forested mires and rocky outcrops in relation to the levels of productive forests, and as a function of forest age, tree species richness and climate. We defined ES-multifunctionality using different threshold values of the maximum levels (low, medium and high) and weighted these according to land-use objectives (equal weight of all services, greater weight to cultural and supporting ES or greater weight to production).We show that the ES-multifunctionality of forested mires is consistently lower than those of productive forests. However, the ES-multifunctionality increased with forest age in forested mires but not in productive forests. The ES-multifunctionality of forested rocky outcrops, on the other hand, was higher or equivalent to that of productive forests under equal weight and supporting land-use objectives, respectively. Our findings highlight that forested rocky outcrops can supply multiple ES, especially older forested stands with mixtures of coniferous and deciduous trees. Generally, we found no evidence for strong trade-offs between the ES studied and our results highlight the importance of forest age for increasing the ES-multifunctionality of low-productivity forests.Synthesis and applications. Low-productivity forests should not be exempt of forestry or protected purely based on low productivity or low land-use conflict if the goal is to conserve multiple ecosystem services (ES). Inclusion grounds for protecting low-productivity forests should instead carefully consider the site type (dry vs. wet), forest age and tree species richness. To maintain higher ES-multifunctionality in low-productivity forests, older or deciduous trees should also not be harvested. This will require changes in current conservation or management policies of low-productivity forests of some countries.


However, burrows provide very important facilities for scorpions, a little knowledge has been established so far regarding burrow habitat. The aim of current study was to describe the burrowing biology of S. maurus towensendi in some parts of Khouzestan a south west province of Iran, which is a habitat of this species. This research study was carried out through a particular nest sampling procedure in 12 nesting sites of scorpions of Ahvaz and Shoushtar, sw of Iran. No significant difference was recorded in ratios of dimensions of scorpion borrows in the present study. Findings of the current study indicated that S. maurus used same engineering method in excavating their tunnels. The comparison among the ratios of width/height using lower and upper limits of nest dimensions showed no significant different in the way of tunnels during making the nests. This fact explained that similar techniques, using the pedipalps, were applied in nest making by this species.


The overall purpose of the article is to describe a joint learning process where both practicable and theoretically anchored knowledge are in the foreground. The empirical data derives from an EU project. In focus is a group of course leaders and their experiences of carrying out a training programme targeted for a group of individuals with a weak position on the labour market. The author brings out what happens when individuals try to understand perspectives from one another. The results demonstrate the knowledge that is developed when members of a project team are included in the entire research process, from the definition of problems to the analysis, presentation of results and suggestions of change. Further the outcome illustrates how an interactive research approach can be conducted in close co-operation with those concerned. Active participation, a structured learning process, critical reflections and common understanding then became essential prerequisites. Taken together the study reveals that it is possible to learn how to approach complex problems and situations. By communicating experiences and thoughts that could be attributed to interaction patterns in social relations, communication structures, emotions, influence and power, the course leaders and the researcher jointly created a learning environment where reflection, understanding and development-oriented learning were of vital importance.


This article addresses sustainable institutional arrangements to support economy-wide improvements in the investment climate in the context of a middle-income economy. The recent experience of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI) in Russia provides a valuable example of establishing a new government agency to advance economic deregulation in an environment where the political appetite for reform is limited. In our view, ASI has been the most successful institutional innovation to emerge in Russia since the 2008–09 financial crisis. Rather than engage in the traditional tussle over budget funds and benefits, ASI's mandate has been to organise a strategic dialogue with the private sector and build consensus within the government. We consider ASI's institutional set-up in light of the good practice principles adopted under Russia's 'new industrial policy'. Our findings suggest other middle-income economies may find ASI's experience applicable when designing institutions to support a deregulation reform agenda. While the crisis in Ukraine has triggered a fundamental shift in Russia's development path that is likely to make ASI's deregulation efforts largely irrelevant, the agency's practical experience remains pertinent to the broader discussion of institutional arrangements to promote deregulation.


Introduction: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) is one of the main causes of disability. The diagnosis of CTS confirm by electrodiagnostic tests. Sonography is an alternative method for diagnosis of CTS that can investigate anatomy and probable pathology. The aim of this study is to investigate the multiple sonographic diagnostic criteria and compare its diagnostic value with electrodiagnosis. Materials and Methods:In this descriptive-cross sectional study, 84 wrists (42 patients with CTS and 42 individuals without any clinical signs in upper limb) were investigated. Symptomatic patients underwent clinical examination, standard electrodiagnostic evaluation of upper limb and sonographic investigation of median nerve in forearm and wrist. The control group underwent sonographic investigation. Results: Cross Sectional Area (CSA) of Median nerve at distal wrist crease, at the level of Hamate hook and Trapezium, the amount of flexor retinaculum bowing, ratio of CSA at the forearm to distal wrist crease and ratio of CSA at the Pisiform level to distal wrist crease had significant difference in the case group compared to the control group (P-value<0.05). Among these criterion, the most sensitivity, NPV and accuracy was for CSA at distal wrist crease (73.8%, 72.5%, 71.4% respectively), the most specificity, PPV was at the level of Hamate hook and Trapezium (85.3%, 80% respectively). Conclusion: Our study reveals that sonography is a somehow sensitive and specific method in diagnosis of CTS and can be used as an adjuvant method in diagnosis of CTS but cannot substitute electrodiagnosis.


In Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment, the United States Supreme Court, sua sponte, denounced the doctrine of "hypothetical jurisdiction," a doctrine that, in some circumstances, allowed courts to assume, arguendo, the existence of jurisdiction and to address the merit questions presented by cases. Several of the Justices distanced themselves from the denunciation, however, and despite the vociferousness of the position taken by the majority, even it found that there were exceptional circumstances in which the Court had acted properly (and presumably in which other courts would act appropriately) in assuming jurisdiction arguendo and addressing merits questions. The opinion left open a number of questions with which the federal courts and commentators have begun to grapple. In this Article, I focus on matters left unclear by Steel Co. and, in particular, on the effects of the Court's denunciation on the work of the federal appellate courts.The first Part describes the Steel Co. opinion and highlights several of the questions it raised. Part II considers how the Court's denunciation of hypothetical jurisdiction has changed the appellate courts' approach to cases in which they find issues concerning the district courts' jurisdiction. It does not attempt to answer all of the interpretive issues left open by Steel Co., as that case applies to district court jurisdiction, nor does it tackle the myriad issues that courts will face in determining whether particular matters go to the district courts' "jurisdiction," for Steel Co.'s purposes. Part II does, however, focus, by way of example, on the primary area of controversy that arose in the wake of Steel Co. as it applies to district court jurisdiction: whether the Eleventh Amendment defense is jurisdictional in the sense that courts may no longer assume it to be inapplicable or unavailable, and may decide cases on their merits.Part III initially provides a transition from appellate handling of issues of district court jurisdiction to issues of appellate jurisdiction. It begins by addressing the apparent tension between the Court's denunciation of hypothetical jurisdiction and its restriction of the scope of appellate jurisdiction when hearing interlocutory appeals, and stakes out a position on which matters of district court jurisdiction appellate courts may entertain upon interlocutory appeals. Part III then examines how appellate courts had employed hypothetical appellate jurisdiction and how the Court's seeming prohibition on hypothetical jurisdiction applies to matters of appellate jurisdiction. This undertaking requires consideration of the constitutional provisions, statutes, rules and doctrines that govern appellate jurisdiction and an evaluation of which requirements no longer may be assumed to be satisfied, to allow an appellate court to reach merits issues.Finally, Part IV looks at the effect of Steel Co. on the kinds of issues that the courts of appeals are deciding. It then comments on the value of this effect.


The present paper tries to investigate the relevant determinants of rural to urban migration in large agglomerations/cities in India. OLS regression analysis is used in this paper to analyse data pertaining to 51 large cities in India by using data from Census of India and unit level data of National Sample Survey (NSS) on employment and unemployment and consumption expenditure data. The OLS regression results show that city-wise employment and unemployment situation (measured by male self employed, not in labour force male, male casual labourer) have a negative impact on city level rural to urban migration. The level of poverty (measured by poverty head count ratio) and inequality conditions (measured by Gini coefficients) of a city also has a negative impact. However, infrastructure condition (availability of total number of electricity connection) of a city has a positive impact on city-wise rural to urban migration. Economic conditions also matters higher level of rural to urban migration. Finally, it suggests that cities need to equip themselves with better infrastructural facilities along with higher job opportunities to encourage urbanization through rural-urban migration for higher and sustainable economic growth in India.


ABSTRACT Foraging is one of the main evolutionary driving forces shaping the phenotype of organisms. In predators, a significant, though understudied, cost of foraging is the risk of being injured by struggling prey. Hunting spiders that feed on dangerous prey like ants or other spiders are an extreme example of dangerous feeding, risking their own life over a meal. Here, we describe an intriguing example of the use of attachment silk (piriform silk) for prey immobilization that comes with the costs of reduced silk anchorage function, increased piriform silk production and additional modifications of the extrusion structures (spigots) to prevent their clogging. We show that the piriform silk of gnaphosids is very stretchy and tough, which is an outstanding feat for a functional glue. This is gained by the combination of an elastic central fibre and a bi-layered glue coat consisting of aligned nanofibrils. This represents the first tensile test data on the ubiquitous piriform gland silk, adding an important puzzle piece to the mechanical catalogue of silken products in spiders. Editors' Choice: Gnaphosid spiders utilize sticky, extensible piriform silk to subdue hazardous prey. This derived use of attachment silk comes with strong modifications of the spinning apparatus and reduces the ability to attach structural silk threads.


Groundwater is an important natural resource used for drinking by many people globally, especially in rural and peri-urban areas, but this resource cannot be sustainably used unless its quality is ascertained. Urbanization and the increasing population growth in the Thiririka Sub Catchment has put increasing pressure on natural resources and social services such as housing, water supply and sanitation, education and health facilities in the Sub Catchment. This increased in demand, coupled with the inadequate or lack of supply of potable water and sanitary services has consequently made the inhabitants to increasingly rely on groundwater as their sole or supplementary source of water, however, groundwater in the Sub Catchment is under threat of contamination due to the utilization of on-site sanitation systems, dominated by pit latrines and agricultural pollution originating mainly from run off water after rains, carrying fertilizers, pesticides, herbicide and faecal matter, hence this study was conducted in the Thiririka Sub Catchment, Kiambu County, Kenya, to determine the safety of groundwater sources and to examine the factors influencing groundwater quality. The study sought to assess the groundwater quality and to map its spatial distribution in terms of suitability for domestic purposes. Groundwater samples from 19 boreholes and 17 shallow wells were sampled from during the months of April to June 2013 and analysed for selected physico - chemical and microbial parameters. Standard methods were used for the analysis of groundwater samples in the laboratory. The results obtained were compared to guideline values of the NEMA, USEPA and WHO to establish the potability of groundwater. The the concentration of nitrates and turbidity in some of the samples exceeded the prescribed NEMA, USEPA and WHO standards of 10 mg/L and 5 NTU respectively. The concentration of iron and maganese also exceeded the established standards of 0.3 mg/L and 0.4 mg/L while 15 of the sampled boreholes and all of the 17 sampled shallow wells had faecal coliform contamination and did not conform to the NEMA, USEPA and WHO guideline value of 0 cfu/100 ml. The student"s t-test performed at 95% confidence interval showed a significant difference between the means for the sampled boreholes and shallow wells for the following parameters; nitrates, faecal coliform count and turbidity. The Inverse distance weighting methodology in the 3D Analyst module of ArcGIS 9.3 was used to generate a thematic map for each of the tested parameters. It was observed from the calculated Water Quality Index (WQI) that, 21 of the samples were in the 100 - 200 range indicating poor quality, 11 in the 200 - 300 range, indicating very poor quality and 4 samples in the above 300 range indicating unsuitable for drinking purposes. This was due to the high concentration iron, zinc and manganese present in groundwater samples in the Sub Catchment. The close proximity of cattle kraals, pit latrines and domestic sewage effluents were found to be the factors that influence and degrade the quality of groundwater. The sanitary survey also revealed that the risk to pollution for the boreholes ranged from low to medium but all the shallow wells were in the high risk category due to the proximity of cattle kraals, pit latrines and domestic waste dumps to these wells. Groundwater in the Thirirka Sub Catchment should therefore be treated before used. The construction of wells with cement blocks with an apron and a well drainage system around these wells should be encouraged. Inhabitants of the Sub Catchment should be informed by officials of NEMA and WRMA about the status of groundwater in the Sub Catchment.


The ability to reliably and consistently develop systems that utilise Internet and Web technologies has become increasingly important. These systems are typically both functionally complex and information-rich, and have a number of unique characteristics that should imply specific changes to the development processes, methods and models that are adopted. One aspect that has received increasing attention is information modelling for these applications, particularly with respect to aspects such as navigation models and their relationships to the underlying content. These models have typically focussed on modelling at a relatively low-level, however, and have failed to address higher-level aspects, such as architectural and even business process modelling. The paper introduces a formal information modelling set which can be considered as a companion to to an existing modelling language - WebML - that facilitates information modelling at this higher level of abstraction. We argue that this modelling approach will provide a clearer connection between an understanding of business models and processes, and the lower-level designs typically represented in existing models.


This paper presents an improved version and a modification of Robust Evolving Cloud-based Controller (RECCo). The first modification is normalization of data space in RECCo. As a consequence, some of the evolving and adaptation parameters become independent of the range of the process output signal. Thus the controller tuning is simplified which makes the approach more appealing for the use in practical applications. The data space normalization is general and is used with Euclidean norm, but other distance metrics could also be used. Beside the normalization new adaptation scheme of the controller gain is proposed which improves the control performance in the case of a negative initial error in starting phase of the evolving process. At the end, different simulation scenarios are tested and analyzed for further practical implementation of the Cloud-based controller into real environments. For that reason a detail simulation study of a plate heat exchanger is performed and different scenarios were analyzed.


Link analysis is a technique frequently used in the ranking of web sites. On the web, we often encounter content that is organized by entries, sorted from recent to old, and generally follows the structure of a blog. In this paper we explore and evaluate the usage of a bibliometrics measure, called h-index, for the task of blog ranking, in an information retrieval context. We base our experiments on the TREC Blogs08 collection, which comprises over 28 million posts. The results obtained indicate that the h-index is a robust metric that allows for an improved relevance discrimination between blogs, when compared to the in-degree. Additionally, tests performed using distinct versions of the post graph, indicate that this metric might tolerate a certain level of link clutter.


We introduce Merlion, an open-source machine learning library for time series. It features a unified interface for many commonly used models and datasets for anomaly detection and forecasting on both univariate and multivariate time series, along with standard pre/post-processing layers. It has several modules to improve ease-of-use, including visualization, anomaly score calibration to improve interpetability, AutoML for hyperparameter tuning and model selection, and model ensembling. Merlion also provides a unique evaluation framework that simulates the live deployment and re-training of a model in production. This library aims to provide engineers and researchers a one-stop solution to rapidly develop models for their specific time series needs and benchmark them across multiple time series datasets. In this technical report, we highlight Merlion's architecture and major functionalities, and we report benchmark numbers across different baseline models and ensembles.


Background The anti–IL6 receptor-α antibody tocilizumab (TCZ) demonstrated numerical improvement in modified Rodnan skin score (mRSS) and clinically relevant preservation of lung function (LF) (assessed by forced vital capacity [FVC]) in systemic sclerosis (SSc) patients (pts) in a ph 2 trial.1 Objectives Report the efficacy and safety (sft) of TCZ vs placebo (PBO) in SSc pts from the double-blind period of ph 3 trial (NCT02453256). Methods SSc pts were randomly assigned 1:1 to weekly subcutaneous TCZ 162 mg or PBO for 48 wks. Primary endpoint was mean difference (diff) in change (Δ) from baseline (BL) to wk 48 in mRSS for TCZ vs PBO. Key secondary endpoints were ΔBL%-predicted FVC (ppFVC) and time to Tx failure (time from first study treatment (Tx) to first occurrence of death, decline in FVC >10%, increase in mRSS >20% and mRSS ≥5, or occurrence of predefined SSc-related Cx). Chest high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) and ACR Combined Response in SSc (CRISS) were exploratory endpoints. Results Of 106 PBO- and 104 TCZ-treated pts, 81% were women and 31% had previous or concurrent interstitial lung disease based on history. BL mean values were age 48 yrs, SSc duration 23 mts, mRSS 20.4, ppFVC 82.1%, and ppDLCO 75.6%. Mean BL computer-assisted quantitative lung fibrosis of the most affected lobe (QLF-LM) was 4.7% for the PBO group and 5.5% for the TCZ group. At wk 48, the primary endpoint was not significant (ΔBL mRSS: PBO, −4.4; TCZ, −6.1; adjusted least squares mean diff, −1.7 [95% CI: −3.8, 0.3]; p=0.098) (Fig 1A). All p values for other endpoints were nominal. The cumulative distribution of wk 48 ΔBL ppFVC favored TCZ over PBO (median [IQR]: PBO, −3.9 [−7.2, 0.6] vs TCZ, −0.6 [−5.3, 3.9]; van Elteren nominal p=0.0015). The diff in mean ΔBL FVC at wk 48 between Tx groups was 167 mL (95% CI: 83, 250), favoring TCZ (Fig 1B). At wk 48, 5 (5.4%) TCZ-treated pts experienced ≥10% absolute decline in ppFVC compared with 15 (16.5%) for PBO. The HR (95% CI) for time to Tx failure was 0.6 (0.4, 1.1), numerically favoring TCZ (Cox proportional hazards model; p=0.082). ACR CRISS scores favored TCZ over PBO at wk 48: median (IQR), 0.89 (0.09-1.00) vs 0.25 (0.00-0.99) (p=0.023). HRCT showed less progression of lung fibrosis for TCZ than for PBO, which supports the FVC results. Sft results were consistent with Cx of SSc and the established TCZ sft profile; SAEs were reported by 17% of PBO pts and 13% of TCZ pts; serious infections were reported by 7% and 2% of pts, respectively. Conclusion The primary mRSS endpoint was not met; however, TCZ Tx resulted in clinically relevant differences in FVC with preservation of LFS and improvement in fibrosis, measured by HRCT, in SSc pts. Disclosure of Interests:  Dinesh Khanna Shareholder of: Eicos Sciences, Inc, Grant/research support from: Bayer, BMS, Pfizer, Horizon, Consultant for: Actelion Acceleron, Arena, Bayer, BI, BMS, CSL Behring, Corbus, Cytori, GSK, Genentech/Roche, Galapagos, Employee of: Elcos Sciences, Inc, Celia J. F. Lin Shareholder of: Genentech, Employee of: Genentech, Jonathan Goldin: None declared, Grace Kim Grant/research support from: GenenTech, NHLBI, Consultant for: MedQIA LLC, Masataka Kuwana Grant/research support from: Actelion, Consultant for: Chugai, Reata, GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Corpus, CSL-Berling, Mochida, Speakers bureau: Actelion, Pfizer, Bayer, Nippon Shinyaku, Chugai, Yannick Allanore Grant/research support from: Inventiva, F Hoffman La-Roche, Sanofi, BMS, Pfizer, Consultant for: Actelion, Bayer, BMS, Boehringer, Roche, Sanofi, Anastas Batalov: None declared, Irena Butrimiene: None declared, Patricia Carreira: None declared, Marco Matucci-Cerinic Grant/research support from: Actelion, MSD, Pfizer, BMS, Chemomab, Sanipedia, Speakers bureau: Actelion, BMS; MSD, Janssen, Oliver Distler Grant/research support from: Prof. Distler received research funding from Actelion, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim and Mitsubishi Tanabe to investigate potential treatments of scleroderma and its complications, Consultant for: Prof. Distler has/had consultancy relationship within the last 3 years with Actelion, AnaMar, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, ChemomAb, espeRare foundation, Genentech/Roche, GSK, Inventiva, Italfarmaco, iQvia, Lilly, medac, MedImmune, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, Pharmacyclics, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi, Serodapharm and UCB in the area of potential treatments of scleroderma and its complications. In addition, he had/has consultancy relationship within the last 3 years with A. Menarini, Amgen, Abbvie, GSK, Mepha, MSD, Pfizer and UCB in the field of arthritides and related disorders, Dušanka Martinović Kaliterna: None declared, Carina Mihai Consultant for: Received consulting fees or other remuneration from Actelion, Geneva, Roche, and Rofarm, Consultant for: F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Actelion, Geneva Romfarm, Mette Mogensen: None declared, Marzena Olesińska Consultant for: F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Janet Pope Consultant for: Eli Lilly and Company, Gabriela Riemekasten Consultant for: Chugai, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Speakers bureau: Chugai, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Tatiana Sofía Rodriguez-Reyne Grant/research support from: F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Maria Jose Santos: None declared, Jacob M. van Laar Grant/research support from: Genentech, Consultant for: F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Helen Spotswood Shareholder of: Roche Products Ltd., Employee of: Roche Products Ltd., Jeffrey Siegel Shareholder of: Genentech, Consultant for: Genentech, Angelika Jahreis Shareholder of: F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Employee of: Genentech, Daniel Furst Grant/research support from: F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Genentech, Christopher Denton Grant/research support from: GlaxoSmithKline, Inventiva, CSF Behring, Consultant for: Roche-Genentech, Actelion, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Aventis, Inventiva, CSL Behring, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bayer


The recent global financial crisis has underlined the need to go beyond the microprudential perspective to financial instability and move in a macroprudential direction. There is a growing consensus among policymakers and academics that macroprudential policy should be adopted. Through these changes, policymakers appear to be moving in a direction broadly consistent with Minsky's view. The theoretical framework of macroprudential policy can be found in Minsky's financial instability theory. Emerging economies, including Turkey, have adopted macroprudential tools to prevent and mitigate system wide risks. This paper offers a Minsky perspective on macroprudential policy and evaluates macroprudential tools through an examination of the Turkish experience as a case study.


This paper is an extension of a previous paper [Phil. Mag. 87 (2007) p.569] devoted to lost work and entropy production. Here, we also introduce extra work (i.e. W Extra=W in–W Rev) in an irreversible process and apply both concepts to the analysis of a system with complexity: the stepwise ideal-gas Carnot cycle. A stepwise Carnot cycle is performed by means of N small weights (here called dws), which are first added and then removed from the piston of the vessel containing the gas. The work performed by the gas can be found as an increase in the potential energy of the dws. We identify each single dw and evaluate the rise; i.e. its increase in potential energy. Thus, we find how the energy output of the cycle is distributed among the dws. The size of the dws affects entropy production and, therefore, the lost and extra work. The raising distribution depends on the removal process chosen. Since these processes are N!, there are N! distributions for the raisings of the dws


The Arab Spring uprisings have released a flood of land and property conflicts, brought about by decades of autocratic rule. Expropriations, corruption, poor performance of the rule of law, patronage and sectarian discrimination built up a wide variety of land and property transgressions over approximately 30 years. The result has been the creation of longstanding, acute grievances among large components of national populations who now seek to act on them. If new, transitional or reforming governments and their international partners fail to effectively attend to such grievances, the populations concerned may act on them in ways that detract from stability. This article critiques the case of Yemen, whose transitional government, with international support, initiated a land and property mass claims process in the South in order to address a primary grievance of the southern population as part of the National Dialogue transition. A series of techniques are described that would greatly improve the mass claims process once it inevitably recommences after the Houthi conflict comes to an end. These improvements would attach more importance to socio-political realities and how to quickly attend to them, as opposed to an over-reliance on specific legalities. Such an approach could have wider utility among Arab Spring states seeking to address similar land and property grievances.


This research into the applicability of ―Promise Based Management‖ in the UK construction sector examines the business side of construction as to where and how client and customer interact. A research opportunity to attend meetings and conduct interviews with clients and contractors on a major construction project in the North West of England gave first hand access to the various issues involved and enabled the researchers to draw some conclusions as to how promises are both a key to success in a construction project and indeed an enabling factor in how things get done in construction. Our focus is ―speech act theory‖ or the ―language action perspective‖ and its analysis of the way social cohesion is produced. Meetings were attended which were concerned with the planning and implementation of a contract and interviews were conducted with members of the client, main contractor and subcontractor teams. The initial findings point towards the necessary resilience of the sector and how successful project managers deal with the contingencies that arise and even on occasion work them to the advantage of the project and, of course, the company.


Few-shot class incremental learning -- the problem of updating a trained classifier to discriminate among an expanded set of classes with limited labeled data -- is a key challenge for machine learning systems deployed in non-stationary environments. Existing approaches to the problem rely on complex model architectures and training procedures that are difficult to tune and re-use. In this paper, we present an extremely simple approach that enables the use of ordinary logistic regression classifiers for few-shot incremental learning. The key to this approach is a new family of subspace regularization schemes that encourage weight vectors for new classes to lie close to the subspace spanned by the weights of existing classes. When combined with pretrained convolutional feature extractors, logistic regression models trained with subspace regularization outperform specialized, state-of-the-art approaches to few-shot incremental image classification by up to 22% on the miniImageNet dataset. Because of its simplicity, subspace regularization can be straightforwardly extended to incorporate additional background information about the new classes (including class names and descriptions specified in natural language); these further improve accuracy by up to 2%. Our results show that simple geometric regularization of class representations offers an effective tool for continual learning.


Speech recognition is an emerging research area having its focus on human computer interactions (HCI) and expert systems. Analyzing speech signals are often tricky for processing, due to the non-stationary nature of audio signals. The work in this paper presents a system for speaker independent speech recognition, which is tested on isolated words from three oriental languages, i.e., Urdu,Persian, and Pashto. The proposed approach combines discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and feed-forward artificial neural network (FFANN) for the purpose of speech recognition. DWT is used for feature extraction and the FFANN is utilized for the classification purpose. The task of isolated word recognition is accomplished with speech signal capturing, creating a code bank of speech samples, and then by applying pre-processing techniques.For classifying a wave sample, four layered FFANN model is used with resilient back-propagation (Rprop). The proposed system yields high accuracy for two and five classes.For db-8 level-5 DWT filter 98.40%, 95.73%, and 95.20% accuracy rate is achieved with 10, 15, and 20 classes, respectively. Haar level-5 DWT filter shows 97.20%, 94.40%, and 91% accuracy ratefor 10, 15, and 20 classes, respectively. The proposed system is also compared with a baseline method where it shows better performance. The proposed system can be utilized as a communication interface to computing and mobile devices for low literacy regions.


Objective To investigate the long term effects of continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (insulin pump therapy) on cardiovascular diseases and mortality in people with type 1 diabetes. Design Observational study. Setting Swedish National Diabetes Register, Sweden 2005-12. Participants 18 168 people with type 1 diabetes, 2441 using insulin pump therapy and 15 727 using multiple daily insulin injections. Main outcome measures Cox regression analysis was used to estimate hazard ratios for the outcomes, with stratification of propensity scores including clinical characteristics, risk factors for cardiovascular disease, treatments, and previous diseases. Results Follow-up was for a mean of 6.8 years until December 2012, with 114 135 person years. With multiple daily injections as reference, the adjusted hazard ratios for insulin pump treatment were significantly lower: 0.55 (95% confidence interval 0.36 to 0.83) for fatal coronary heart disease, 0.58 (0.40 to 0.85) for fatal cardiovascular disease (coronary heart disease or stroke), and 0.73 (0.58 to 0.92) for all cause mortality. Hazard ratios were lower, but not significantly so, for fatal or non-fatal coronary heart disease and fatal or non-fatal cardiovascular disease. Unadjusted absolute differences were 3.0 events of fatal coronary heart disease per 1000 person years; corresponding figures were 3.3 for fatal cardiovascular disease and 5.7 for all cause mortality. When lower body mass index and previous cardiovascular diseases were excluded, results of subgroup analyses were similar to the results from complete data. A sensitivity analysis of unmeasured confounders in all individuals showed that an unmeasured confounders with hazard ratio of 1.3 would have to be present in >80% of the individuals treated with multiple daily injections versus not presence in those treated with pump therapy to invalidate the significantly lower hazard ratios for fatal cardiovascular disease. Data on patient education and frequency of blood glucose monitoring were missing, which might have influenced the observed association. Conclusion Among people with type 1 diabetes use of insulin pump therapy is associated with lower cardiovascular mortality than treatment with multiple daily insulin injections.


Recent advances in the application of first-principles calculations of NMR parameters to periodic systems have resulted in widespread interest in their use to support experimental measurement. Such calculations often play an important role in the emerging field of "NMR crystallography", where NMR spectroscopy is combined with techniques such as diffraction, to aid structure determination. Here, we discuss the current state-of-the-art for combining experiment and calculation in NMR spectroscopy, considering the basic theory behind the computational approaches and their practical application. We consider the issues associated with geometry optimisation and how the effects of temperature may be included in the calculation. The automated prediction of structural candidates and the treatment of disordered and dynamic solids are discussed. Finally, we consider the areas where further development is needed in this field and its potential future impact.


Despite containing one of the largest stone and timber circles in Britain, the Late Neolithic monument complex at Stanton Drew, Somerset, has seen surprisingly little archaeological work. This paper presents the results of new fieldwork, which included excavation around a recently discovered recumbent stone, test-pitting on the floodplain of the River Chew and fieldwalking close to the monuments. The excavations revealed that the recumbent stone had been deliberately buried in the medieval period and also uncovered other archaeology of this date. The test-pitting exposed thick deposits of alluvium and from this it is argued that the landscape has changed dramatically since the monuments were constructed. The fieldwalking revealed a relatively low density of lithics which may indicate that activities around the monuments were carefully controlled. Also considered is the siting of the Stanton Drew monuments and their intimate relationship with the River Chew.


Open vascular reconstructions frequently fail due to the development of recurrent disease or intimal hyperplasia (IH). This paper reports a novel drug delivery method using a rapamycin-loaded poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) nanoparticles (NPs)/pluronic gel system that can be applied periadventitially around the carotid artery immediately following the open surgery. In vitro studies revealed that rapamycin dispersed in pluronic gel was rapidly released over 3 days whereas release of rapamycin from rapamycin-loaded PLGA NPs embedded in pluronic gel was more gradual over 4 weeks. In cultured rat vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs), rapamycin-loaded NPs produced durable (14 days versus 3 days for free rapamycin) inhibition of phosphorylation of S6 kinase (S6K1), a downstream target in the mTOR pathway. In a rat balloon injury model, periadventitial delivery of rapamycin-loaded NPs produced inhibition of phospho-S6K1 14 days after balloon injury. Immunostaining revealed that rapamycin-loaded NPs reduced SMC proliferation at both 14 and 28 days whereas rapamycin alone suppressed proliferation at day 14 only. Moreover, rapamycin-loaded NPs sustainably suppressed IH for at least 28 days following treatment, whereas rapamycin alone produced suppression on day 14 with rebound of IH by day 28. Since rapamycin, PLGA, and pluronic gel have all been approved by the FDA for other human therapies, this drug delivery method could potentially be translated into human use quickly to prevent failure of open vascular reconstructions.


Conceptualizing adolescent development within a life course framework that links the perspectives on social inequality and early life course transitions has largely been absent from previous research. Such a conceptual model is needed, however, in order to understand how the individual development of agentic capacities and the opportunities and constraints inherent in the social contexts of growing up interact and jointly affect young people's trajectories across the adolescent life stage. We present the corner stones of the conceptual "trident" of social inequality, life course transitions, and adolescent development and identify three major themes the eleven contributions to this special issue address within this conceptual framework: social and individual prerequisites and consequences of coping with life course transitions; intergenerational transmission belts of social inequality; socialization of agency in and outside the family home. These three themes exemplify the great analytical potential inherent in this framework.