We investigate the bulk band structures and the surface states of Bi2Se3 and Bi2Te3 topological insulators using first-principles many-body perturbation theory based on the GW approximation. The quasiparticle self-energy corrections introduce significant changes to the bulk band structures, surprisingly leading to a decrease in the direct band gaps in the band-inversion regime as opposed to the usual situation without band inversion. Parametrized "scissors operators" derived from the bulk studies are then used to investigate the electronic structure of slab models which exhibit topologically protected surface states. The introduction of self-energy corrections results in significant shifts of the surface-state Dirac point energies relative to the bulk bands and in enlarged gap openings from the interactions between the surface states across the thin slab, both in agreement with experimental data.


The fifth modern Olympic Games were held in Stockholm in 1912 and therefore count among the first in Olympic history, and the first on Scandinavian soil. It was also the first time that representatives from all five continents took part, only later symbolically recognized at the Olympic Games in Antwerp in 1920 with the introduction of the five-ringed Olympic flag. From the start of the Olympic Games, until 1948 in London, the competition included painting, sculpture, music, literature and architecture as Olympic events. Sports competitions, which 'offered historically anchored and peaceful forms of contest between national states', according to the Olympic movement's leader, Pierre de Coubertin, would be complemented by international contests involving different arts representing sport. The idea was that artistic representation could reflect and inspire a certain perfection of the sporting idea itself. Examining the culture-historical context, this study provides an analytical-interpretative understanding of the literary element of the Olympic Arts Competitions, regarded as a thematic-typical literary phenomenon. In addition, literary documents about the experience of Olympic participation from the perspective of athletes are also analysed (diaries by Karl Lukk and David Wiman).


In the vacuum-ultraviolet region of the spectrum, the optical constants of vacuum-deposited absorbing films can be determined by measuring their specular reflectances at a number of angles of incidence. These reflectance values are then used to solve the generalized Fresnel reflection equations to obtain n and k. If the film is thin enough so that interference occurs between the wave fronts reflected from the film–vacuum and film–substrate interfaces, the errors in determining n and k may be large. Previously an opaque film, one that would transmit only 0.1% of the incident radiant flux at normal incidence if it were free-standing, was considered necessary if the n, k values of the film were to be determined with an accuracy of 1%. This paper presents the results of calculations demonstrating that the film thickness necessary to reduce the errors in n and k to 1% is dependent on n and k and is generally less than the opaque thickness.


Tuberculosis is considered to be one of the world's deadliest disease with 2 million deaths each year. The need for new antitubercular drugs is further exacerbated by the emergence of drug-resistance strains. Despite multiple recent efforts, the majority of the hits discovered by traditional target-based screening showed low efficiency in vivo. Therefore, there is heightened demand for whole-cell based approaches directly using host-pathogen systems. The phenotypic host-pathogen assay described here is based on the monitoring of GFP-expressing Mycobacterium marinum during infection of the amoeba Acanthamoeba castellanii. The assay showed straight-forward medium-throughput scalability, robustness and ease of manipulation, demonstrating its qualities as an efficient compound screening system. Validation with a series of known antitubercular compounds highlighted the advantages of the assay in comparison to previously published macrophage-Mycobacterium tuberculosis-based screening systems. Combination with secondary growth assays based on either GFP-expressing D. discoideum or M. marinum allowed us to further fine-tune compound characterization by distinguishing and quantifying growth inhibition, cytotoxic properties and antibiotic activities of the compounds. The simple and relatively low cost system described here is most suitable to detect anti-infective compounds, whether they present antibiotic activities or not, in which case they might exert anti-virulence or host defense boosting activities, both of which are largely overlooked by classical screening approaches.


Complexity of music audio signals creates an access problem to specific musical objects or structures within the sour ce samples. Instead of employing more commonly used audio analysis or production techniques to access features, we describe extraction of sub-mixtures from real-world audio using a Probabilistic Latent Component Analysis-based decomposition tool for music composition. This is highlighted with the presentation of a prior relevant compositional approach named Spectral Music along with a discussion of five compositions extending these principles using methods more commonly associated with source separation research.


The skeleton is the organ most frequently affected by metastases, whose complications impair dramatically patients quality of life, with a significant impact on health care costs. Although the understanding of the mechanisms underlying the tropism of some tumors to the bone and the development of "vicious circle" of metastases is not yet complete, it is now increasingly evident that the peculiar characteristics of bone microenvironment provide signals that confer a benefit in terms of growth to cancer cells and probably resistance to certain treatments. Aim of the project was to assess the influence that an impaired state of bone remodeling, as during osteoporosis, exerts on the establishment of metastases. To this end an advanced tridimensional in vitro model of bone metastases was developed co- culturing bone from healthy and osteoporotic rats with ret breast cancer cells, after evaluating the feasibility of different kinds of bone segment cultures and characterizing the cell line used. The results showed that the presence of osteoporotic bone influences cancer cells, which develop stronger characteristics of aggressiveness and invasiveness in comparison to cells cultured with healthy bone. The contemporary findings, via a co-culture in vitro model, that tumor microenvironment enhances osteoporotic osteoclasts activity, highlight the complex and mutual influence of tumor cells with bone cells, supporting the hypothesis that the presence of a condition of altered bone metabolism, such as osteoporosis, promotes the development of metastases, which in turn, stimulating OCs to enhance their osteolytic activity, further impoverish an already altered bone, fueling an endless loop.


Is the thought of teaching economics your worst nightmare? If it is, you are not alone. Many smart, capable teachers feel the same way. Even those who enjoy teaching government, history, and geography may find the prospect of teaching economics unwelcome. What might explain this attitude? Social studies teachers have a long list of grievances regarding the teaching of economics, including the following. * The content of economics seems dense and abstract. It is difficult to make economics relevant to teachers, never mind students. * Economics is sometimes thought to be politically conservative. Some social studies teachers do not wish to be associated with such thinking. * Economics is sometimes thought to be all about money, greed, and selfishness. Many teachers don't like to see social concerns get reduced to such issues. * Many social studies teachers have had little or no coursework in economics. Even those who have had one or two introductory courses may think they know too little to plan and teach courses of their own. We wish to introduce this special section on teaching economics by tackling some of the toughest contentions. First, is economics inherently dense, abstract, and dry as moon dust? Not at all. Not necessarily, at least. At key moments in history, economists have often focused on the analysis of problems that were anything but remote or dry. Adam Smith, the founder of economics, had much to say in 1776 about the most pressing issues of his day-explaining, for example, how trade and the division of labor can increase a nation's prosperity. Smith also argued that, for Great Britain, the costs of maintaining the American colonies would in the end outweigh the benefits. Economist John Maynard Keynes, seeking to understand and ameliorate the widespread unemployment Great Britain experienced after World War I, argued that government deficit spending during periods of recession can foster economic growth and help bring a nation back to full employment. In subsequent years, his theory has been highly influential among policymakers in Europe and the United States. During the Great Depression, economists in the United States played an important role in Washington, D.C., advising presidents and legislators on policy issues related to labor, agriculture, taxation, corporate monopolies, and welfare. Still more recently, and controversially, economists have been in the thick of things in the former Soviet Union, advising people about ongoing efforts to modernize the former Soviet-style economies. Still, notwithstanding its history, economics does strike many students and social studies teachers today as remote and difficult. In one sense, this is not surprising. Economics has been around for a while. It is a mature academic discipline, one about which economists can speak in detail and at great length. Not only that: as the discipline has matured, economists have sought to be ever more precise in their work, and their search for precision has led them increasingly to the use of rigorous, abstract language, including the language of mathematical operations and models. Macroeconomics, the branch of economics that focuses on whole economic systems, and the branch about which economists tend most to disagree, has become particularly abstract. As a result, even students in Econ 101 now are apt to encounter technical analyses, expressed in compressed, quantitative terms, where they may have expected to find advice about personal finance or general discussions about wealth and poverty. Finding a Place to Begin You might wonder where this sketch leaves you. The answer, fortunately, is that social studies teachers trying to find their bearings in economics need not choose between the richly contextualized work of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, on the one hand, or the austere work of technical specialists, on the other. Between the history of economics and its presence in cutting-edge research today, educators can find an impressive set of concepts and principles representing the best insights of the discipline that is at the same time suitable for curricular planning and day-to-day classroom teaching. …


American government officials are starting to experiment with a novel government-funding and privatization structure known as a social impact bond ("SIB"). An SIB is a contract between a government agency and a private entity in which the government agrees to pay the private entity an agreed-upon sum only if it can meet certain goals or outcomes. Currently, SIBs exist both globally and domestically, and are targeted to solve perpetual social ills such as the high homelessness and recidivism rates plaguing certain communities. By analogizing the problems facing private prisons to the potential problems facing the use of SIBs, this Note details the privatization challenges that government officials will likely face as they implement SIBs. Most importantly, this Note is the first to propose how government officials implementing SIBs can overcome the traditional obstacles facing privatization schemes—both through the structure of SIBs and through additional contractual solutions. Finally, the Note concludes with a discussion about how elements of SIBs can be incorporated to improve existing privatization models such as private prisons, and how SIBs alter the existing debate about privatization in this country.


Mutations in the insulin receptor gene can cause genetic syndromes such as lep-rechaunism that are associated with extreme insulin resistance. We have investigated a patient with leprechaunism born of a consanguineous marriage. All 22 exons of the insulin receptor gene were screened for mutations using denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis. Thereafter, the nucleotide sequences ofselected exons were determined directly. The patient was homozygous for a point mutation in exon 2 of the insulin receptor gene which results in the substitution of methionine for iso-leucine at codon 119. Thus, the mutant allele encodes a receptor that has a mutation in the putative insulin binding domain. Accordingly, the mutant receptor would be predicted not to transduce the insulin signal effectively. In spite of a homozygous abnormality of the insulin receptor gene and many of the clinical features of severe insulin resistance, the proband's clinical syndrome was no-ticeably different from previously described patients with leprechaunism who usually die within the first six months of life. There are a total of nine children in the family, five of whom are homozygous for the Ile"9-+Met mutation in the insulin receptor gene, and are clinically affected with varying degrees of severity. Four unaffected sibs are clinically normal; two are heterozygous carriers ofthe mutant allele, one is homozygous for the normal allele, and one unaffected sib was not available for molecular studies.


What are the implications of the current socio-economic changes (i.e. population ageing or the financial crises) for social welfare? How do individuals react to increased reform pressure? How are well-established determinants of welfare attitudes such as self-interest and values affected by societal changes? The main contribution of the dissertation is twofold. On an analytical level I provide a thorough theoretical micro-foundation of existing welfare attitude research by paying explicit attention to the individual mechanisms that link the macro level (i.e. increasing reform pressure and retrenchment reforms) to the micro level (individual welfare attitudes). On a methodological level I contribute to welfare attitudes research by complementing the standard approach in the field – i.e. the estimation of multilevel models – with three innovative research designs: a difference-in-differences-estimation, a natural experiment and a survey experiment. These research designs help to overcome the methodological challenges linked to multilevel models (such as small N and endogeneity) and get closer to establish. The dissertation consists of four empirical studies, two are concerned with health care attitudes and two with pension reform preferences. I show that, even in times of austerity, support for public health care remains high and stable and that people are not merely self-interested in their attitudes towards public health care. Instead, there is a wide consensus in that, no matter their ideological views, all citizens generally tend to support public health care in times of austerity. As for pension attitudes, I show that population ageing leads to an increased acceptance of retrenchment efforts such as of a reform raising the retirement age. Moreover, detailed information on and increased awareness of population ageing weakens the opposition against raising the retirement age. Still, once enacted a reform increasing the retirement age reduces reform acceptance in the following year. This is strong evidence of a saturation effect and that people react against the reform direction.


The aim of this paper is to present PhD research that aims to enhance the User Experience by proposing a framework that combines the three core components of: dynamic interfaces; adaptive interfaces; and intelligent interfaces. Initial research into the field has identified a gap at the intersection of these types of interaction. A dynamic interaction understands the user, their device and their physical environment to provide a basic User Experience. An adaptive interaction understands the user's capabilities further to implement an enhanced experience via usability and accessibility whilst recognising the flow of the user and their pipeline. The intelligent interaction builds further upon this through the incorporation of Machine Learning algorithms that assist in making the interface intelligent and provide a personalised experience for each user based upon their end goal. This in turn will reduce a user's cognitive load and enhance their interactive experience with an interface.


Laccases catalyse the oxidation of a range of organic substrates coupled to the
reduction of molecular oxygen to water. They are members of the ubiquitous blue multi-copper oxidase family. These enzymes are implicated in a wide variety of biological activities. Most of the laccases studied thus far are of fungal origin. Large variety of potential substrates has raised interest in the use of laccases in several industrial applications, such as pulp delignification, textile dye bleaching, effluent detoxification, biopolymer modification and bioremediation. Cloning of the laccase genes followed by heterologous expression may provide higher enzyme yields and may permit to produce laccases with desired properties (different substrate specificities and improved stabilities) for industrial applications.
Heterologous expression of Pleurotus ostreatus laccases POXC and POXA1b in two yeasts and a first approach of directed evolution experiments are reported. The yeasts of choice were Saccharomyces cerevisiae, proven to be success-full in recombinant laccase expression and directed-evolution experiments, and Kluyveromyces lactis, a non-conventional yeast offering significant advantages, such as high-level secretion of non-hyperglycosylated recombinant proteins. Expression vectors were set up cloning the cDNAs under the control of different promoters. Furthermore, the laccase leader peptides (poxc and poxa1b), as well as the yeast derived signal peptides (S. cerevisiae invertase and K. lactis killer toxin), were alternatively used to direct the secretion of active laccase into the culture medium. The laccase signals proved to be more effective to drive the secretion of recombinant proteins in both hosts.
Levels of laccase secreted activity were markedly different: rPOXA1b transformants always gave much higher activity than rPOXC transformants, and production of both laccases in S. cerevisiae was significantly lower than that in K. lactis.
Recombinant laccases from K. lactis were purified to electrophoretic homogeneity and characterized. rPOXA1b specific activity was similar to that of the native protein, whilst rPOXC specific activity was much lower than that of the native POXC. Mass spectrometry analyses of the recombinant proteins allowed to verify their primary structures and to identify post-translational modifications. Our data confirm that K. lactis has a lower tendency, respect to S. cerevisiae, to hyperglycosylate recombinant proteins. The S. cerevisiae laccase expression systems were further used to set off directed evolution experiments. Mutated cDNAs libraries with different mutation rate were created, and homologous recombination experiments were performed, giving rise to libraries of mutated laccase secreting yeasts. Moreover a screening procedure to isolate clones exhibiting desired property was realized.
As a result, this work allowed obtaining the heterologous expression of two P. ostreatus laccases in yeasts, and their purification and characterisation. Moreover, this research work broadened the potentiality of the developed expression system addressing enzymes to such large markets and different industrial application such as pulp and textile bleaching, and enzymatic remediation of waste streams. A new laccase host (K. lactis) has been built on, and its promising performances will lead to further investigate its utilization for further structure-activities studies, as well as for directed evolution. Results obtained demonstrate the potential of the recombinant expression for the study of potential industrial interest.


In Chapter 1, a theory of optimal fund size in venture capital is developed. Fund managers - the VCs - add value to the projects they finance, but their human capital is scarce. A matching model is proposed where VCs span their nurturing activity over more projects, and entrepreneurs, who own the projects, direct their search to VCs based on their projects' quality. The work provides necessary and sufficient conditions for positive and negative assortative matching over VC attention and project quality to emerge and shows when VCs fundraising decision is distorted by selection considerations. The chapter ends with an investigation of the effects of entry of less skilled intermediaries. By attracting the worse entrepreneurs, these new agents alleviate the adverse selection problem associated to managing a larger fund. This offers a new angle to think about policies encouraging entry in the venture capital industry.
In Chapter 2, the model developed in Chapter 1 is extended to a dynamic setting, where projects need time to develop and produce returns. VCs can choose to enter in a short-term contract with investors, giving them access to investors liquidity for a given period of time, and an open credit relationship that allows them to raise investors money at any point in time. The model illustrates a novel advantage of closed, finite-horizon funds, which emerge in equilibrium even when they are socially undesirable: they attract the best entrepreneurs, who value the most the exclusive relationship that only a closed-end fund can guarantee. The interpretation is that VCs benefit from committing to a size in the first place.
In Chapter 3, the focus moves to the study of the distortions in fund managers' behavior that may occur within a fund's life. A setting is introduced where information about a manager's ability is imperfect and managers are interested in their reputation. Given the application to investments in young firms, managers in the model are agents that create value because they can experiment and learn about a projects potential. Their incentive to take on risk is distorted by career concerns, and can result in under or over risk-taking. The result contrasts with Holmstrom (1999) where managers directly affect the project's success rate, and career concerns can only produce inefficiently low risk-taking. It is shown that the inefficiency is reduced when the market can also observe the outcome of projects with the same fundamental.


Most normative economics assumes that individuals have coherent preferences. This paper responds to growing evidence of failures of this assumption, particularly in the context of stated-preference methods widely used in environmental policy analysis. I propose a criterion of consumer sovereignty which does not presuppose preference coherence, and which is satisfied by competitive markets. I then propose an approach to cost-benefit analysis that attempts to simulate consumer sovereignty in situations of market failure. The key idea is to use valuations revealed 'at the moment of consumption'. I argue that this principle is better implemented by hedonic pricing than by contingent valuation.


Differential privacy is a notion of confidentiality that protects the privacy of individuals while allowing useful computations on their private data. Deriving differential privacy guarantees for real programs is a difficult and error-prone task that calls for principled approaches and tool support. Approaches based on linear types and static analysis have recently emerged; however, an increasing number of programs achieve privacy using techniques that cannot be analyzed by these approaches. Examples include programs that aim for weaker, approximate differential privacy guarantees, programs that use the Exponential mechanism, and randomized programs that achieve differential privacy without using any standard mechanism. Providing support for reasoning about the privacy of such programs has been an open problem.
 We report on CertiPriv, a machine-checked framework for reasoning about differential privacy built on top of the Coq proof assistant. The central component of CertiPriv is a quantitative extension of a probabilistic relational Hoare logic that enables one to derive differential privacy guarantees for programs from first principles. We demonstrate the expressiveness of CertiPriv using a number of examples whose formal analysis is out of the reach of previous techniques. In particular, we provide the first machine-checked proofs of correctness of the Laplacian and Exponential mechanisms and of the privacy of randomized and streaming algorithms from the recent literature.


Infinite--Layer Networks (ILN) have recently been proposed as an architecture that mimics neural networks while enjoying some of the advantages of kernel methods. ILN are networks that integrate over infinitely many nodes within a single hidden layer. It has been demonstrated by several authors that the problem of learning ILN can be reduced to the kernel trick, implying that whenever a certain integral can be computed analytically they are efficiently learnable.
In this work we give an online algorithm for ILN, which avoids the kernel trick assumption. More generally and of independent interest, we show that kernel methods in general can be exploited even when the kernel cannot be efficiently computed but can only be estimated via sampling.
We provide a regret analysis for our algorithm, showing that it matches the sample complexity of methods which have access to kernel values. Thus, our method is the first to demonstrate that the kernel trick is not necessary as such, and random features suffice to obtain comparable performance.


The relative cost of carbon emissions reductions across regions depends on whether we measure cost by marginal or total cost, private or economy-wide cost, and using market or purchasing power parity exchange rates. If all countries are on the same marginal carbon abatement cost curve then lower marginal costs of abatement are associated with higher energy intensities and higher total costs of abatement in achieving proportional cuts in emissions, equal emissions per capita, or common global carbon price targets. We test this conjecture using the results of the GTEM computable general equilibrium model as presented in the climate change economics review conducted by the Australian Treasury Department. Rankings of countries by costs do differ depending on whether marginal or total cost is used. But some regions, including OPEC and the former USSR, have high marginal costs and high emissions intensities and, therefore, high total costs and others like the EU relatively low marginal and total costs. Under a global emissions trading regime real economy-wide costs of abatement are higher in developing economies with currencies valued below purchasing power parity and large differences between private and economy-wide costs such as India contributing to the high GDP losses experienced in those countries.


The success of generative modeling in continuous domains has led to a surge of interest in generating discrete data such as molecules, source code, and graphs. However, construction histories for these discrete objects are typically not unique and so generative models must reason about intractably large spaces in order to learn. Additionally, structured discrete domains are often characterized by strict constraints on what constitutes a valid object and generative models must respect these requirements in order to produce useful novel samples. Here, we present a generative model for discrete objects employing a Markov chain where transitions are restricted to a set of local operations that preserve validity. Building off of generative interpretations of denoising autoencoders, the Markov chain alternates between producing 1) a sequence of corrupted objects that are valid but not from the data distribution, and 2) a learned reconstruction distribution that attempts to fix the corruptions while also preserving validity. This approach constrains the generative model to only produce valid objects, requires the learner to only discover local modifications to the objects, and avoids marginalization over an unknown and potentially large space of construction histories. We evaluate the proposed approach on two highly structured discrete domains, molecules and Laman graphs, and find that it compares favorably to alternative methods at capturing distributional statistics for a host of semantically relevant metrics.


Although the basal and uppermost lateral branches of Lupinus angustifolius L. frequently grow and contribute to yield, buds formed in the axils of leaves 6–12 (referred to as middle buds) rarely grow. This may be due to an inherent limitation of these buds, or some form of apical dominance or competition imposed by the plant. The hypothesis that middle buds have the full capacity to grow, but remain suppressed on intact plants was tested. The main stem apex and buds from the axils of leaves 1 and 8 (bud 1 and bud 8) were excised and cultured on sterile agar. The buds were removed from culture and weighed every 2–3 d for 21 d. The growth rate of apices from the main stem was approximately 5.8 mg d−1, compared to 2.4 mg d−1 for bud 1 and 0.9 mg d−1 for bud 8. Buds in the axils of leaves 6–10 on intact plants were painted six times with a synthetic cytokinin, benzylaminopurine, from 40 d after sowing. This promoted rapid elongation and thickening of these buds, visible as early as 5 d after painting began. The rapid growth of these branches was associated with a reduction in the length of the remaining branches on the plant. However, excision of lower branches did not increase the growth of the middle buds. It is concluded that buds 6–12 of Lupinus angustifolius L. have a partial potential to grow. This potential appears to be limited by innate factors in the bud, and may be structural and/or hormonal. The limitation appears to develop very early in the plant, and potential growth is not modified by subsequent nutrition of the plant.


In this timely book Theodore Koutsobinas explores the system of status markets and their social effects including inequality. He explains how media fascination with superstars and luxury consumption goods amplify positional concerns for all, distort the aspirations of the middle class and cause relative deprivation. Building on themes first identified by Veblen and Galbraith, Koutsobinas analyses extensively the behavioural evidence from modern interdisciplinary research and contributes constructively to a new genre of economic analysis. The Political Economy of Status compels us to consider seriously redistributive culture change policies targeted to assist the underprivileged. This book will be a valuable and lively reading resource for academics in various fields including economic theory, political economy, sociology, social psychology and cultural studies.


Textile dyes have always been considered in the context of recalcitrant xenobiotics compounds in water and soil ecology. Present research work is focused on the bioremediation abilities of different indigenous biological resources like fungi, bacteria and microbially rich sludge for the treatment of Textile dyes.

Physiochemical characterization of effluent of a local textile industry at three different sites showed a considerably high values of temperature (40°C), pH (9.50), EC (3.57µs/m), BOD (548 mg-l), COD (1632 mg-l), TSS (5496 mg-l), TDS (2512 mg-l), heavy metal ions (0.28-6 mg-l) and color compared to the desired values of National Environmental Quality Standards. However, a gradual decline in almost all pollution indicators down the stream (sink) suggested that natural remediation was at work.

Fungal (9 No) and bacterial strains (10 No) were isolated from the textile wastewater pond. Based upon initial screening on the basis of their growth on dye containing media, five fungal isolates were selected and further adapted to higher concentration (10-1000 mg-l) of four structurally different dyes [Acid red (AR) 151 (Diazo), Orange (Or) II (Monoazo), Drimarene blue (Db) K2RL (Reactive anthraquinone based) and Sulfur black (Sb) (Anthraquinone based)] on solid culture medium. Different levels of resistance (550-850 mg-l) for growth on dye containing media were observed by fungal isolates on the four dyes. However, maximum resistance level was shown by Aspergillus niger SAl against AR 151.

When dye decolorization in liquid media was tested for all the four dyes under static condition, maximum result was observed in case of AR 151 (68 %) and Or 11 (44 %) by A. niger SAL While, Penicillium spp. SA5 for Sb , Alternaria spp. SA4 and A. tereus SA3 for Db K2RL showed maximum decolorization of 59, 43 and 42 % respectively. Decolorization efficiency of the fungal isolates was significantly improved (45-100 %) under shaking condition (100 rpm). Further, the residual amount of the products (sulfanilic acid, a. naphthol and aniline) in the treatment of AR 151 and Or II by selected fungal isolates kept quite low suggested their further mineralization.

Physicochemical conditions also showed their effects on the dye decolorization abilities of the fungal strains. Maximum decolorization of dyes was noted in a pH range of 5-7, in mesophilic temperature (25-35oC) conditions. It kept ≥50-≤ 100 % at 100-400 mg-1 of dyes, 6-10 mg-1 of glucose and 0.1-0.5 mg-1 of urea concentration in the mineral salt medium (STE). Enhanced decolorization/degradation of dyes (70-100 %) with significant removal of CODs was observed by applying pregrown fungal biomass (dry/live wet) in repeated batch and continuous mode.

Out of ten bacterial isolates, Lactobacillus spp. N3A, Bacillus subtilis N4A, Micrococcus spp. N5A, Bacillus spp. N6A and Bacillus megaterium N7 A showed comparatively higher resistance levels against four dyes (337-537 mg-1). Highest growth resistance against AR 151 (750 mg-1), Db K2RL (600 mg-1) and Sb (450 mg-1) was observed by Bacillus subtilis N4A and against Or II (650 mg-1) by Bacillus megaterium N7A. The average decolorization abilities of the bacterial isolates for four dyes was 25-46 % under static condition (anoxic) in 8 days and it considerably improved in most of the bacterial isolates after addition of yeast extract(1 %) in STE. Based upon initial screening, selected bacterial isolates Bacillus subtilis N4A, E. coli NIOA and consortium (of ten bacterial isolates) were further trailed in decolorization of AR 151 and Or II under aerobic condition. A comprehensive mineralization of AR 151 and Or II was observed by bacterial consortium.

Actual and Simulated textile effluents were treated aerobically with sludge in a rotatory bioreactor (30°C) for 10 days. COD, BOD and color removal were 52, 84, 83 % and 74, 48,43 % in actual effluent and simulated effluent respectively. However, the results were further improved to permissible limits of National Environmental Quality Standards with sludge inocula enriched and pretreated with glucose for 24 hrs before use.

Results of present study have significantly proved the role of indigenous microbial strains (bacteria/fungi) in the bioremediation of Textile dyes. Decolorization of dyes by the fungal isolates showed a three stage phenomenon. Initial biosorption/bioadsorption of dyes (1st step) into/onto the fungal mycelia, followed with reduction (2nd step) and then mineralization of reduction products of dyes (3rd step). Further studies on metabolic understanding and application of these microbial isolates as bioremediation agents could be of much interest in future.


Purpose
This paper aims to investigate how supply chain risks can be identified in both collaborative and adversarial buyer–supplier relationships (BSRs).

Design/methodology/approach
This research includes a multiple-case study involving ten Chinese manufacturers with two informants per organisation. Data have been interpreted from a multi-level social capital perspective (i.e. from both an individual and organisational level), supplemented by signalling theory.

Findings
Buyers use different risk identification strategies or apply the same strategy in different ways according to the BSR type. The impact of organisational social capital on risk identification is contingent upon the degree to which individual social capital is deployed in a way that benefits an individual's own agenda versus that of the organisation. Signalling theory generally complements social capital theory and helps further understand how buyers can identify risks, especially in adversarial BSRs, e.g. by using indirect signals from suppliers or other supply chain actors to "read between the lines" and anticipate risks.

Research limitations/implications
Data collection is focussed on China and is from the buyer side only. Future research could explore other contexts and include the supplier perspective.

Practical implications
The types of relationships that are developed by buyers with their supply chain partners at an organisational and an individual level have implications for risk exposure and how risks can be identified. The multi-level analysis highlights how strategies such as employee rotation and retention can be deployed to support risk identification.

Originality/value
Much of the extant literature on supply chain risk management is focussed on risk mitigation, whereas risk identification is under-represented. A unique case-based insight is provided into risk identification in different types of BSRs by using a multi-level social capital approach complemented by signalling theory.


Paleoecology
The causes of the Pleistocene extinctions of large numbers of megafaunal species in the Northern Hemisphere remain unclear. A range of evidence points to human hunting, climate change, or a combination of both. Using ancient DNA and detailed paleoclimate data, Cooper et al. report a close relationship between Pleistocene megafaunal extinction events and rapid warming events at the start of interstadial periods. Their analysis strengthens the case for climate change as the key driver of megafaunal extinctions, with human impacts playing a secondary role.

Science , this issue p. [602][1]

 [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aac4315


This article explores the relationality between women's bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women's experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom.


In the companion paper, Watson et al. (1997), we demonstrated the effectiveness of using perceptual criteria to select the amount of detail that is displayed in an immersive virtual reality (VR) system. Based upon this determination, we will now attempt to develop a principled, perceptually oriented framework to automatically select the appropriate level of detail (LOD) for each object in a scene, taking into consideration the limitations of the human visual system. We apply knowledge and theories from the domain of visual perception to the field of VR, thus optimizing the visual information presented to the user based upon solid metrics of human vision. Through a series of contrast grating experiments a user's visual acuity may be assessed in terms of spatial frequency (c/deg) and contrast. The results of these tests can be modeled mathematically using a contrast sensitivity function (CSF). Therefore, we can use the CSF results to estimate how much visual detail the user can perceive in an object at any instant. Then, if we could describe this object in terms of its spatial frequencies, this would enable us to select the lowest LOD available without the user being able to perceive any visual change.


Emerging cloud markets like spot markets and batch computing services scale up services at the granularity of whole VMs. In this paper, we observe that GPU workloads underutilize GPU device memory, leading us to explore the benefits of reallocating heterogeneous GPUs within existing VMs. We outline approaches for upgrading and downgrading GPUs for OpenCL GPGPU workloads, and show how to minimize the chance of cloud operator VM termination by maximizing the heterogeneous environments in which applications can run.


Aimed at researchers, graduate students and undergraduates alike, this book presents a unified exposition of all the main areas and methods of the theory of Kleinian groups and the theory of uniformization of manifolds. The past 20 years have seen a rejuvenation of the field, due to the development of powerful new methods in topology, the theory of functions of several complex variables, and the theory of quasiconformal mappings. Thus this new book should provide a valuable resource, listing the basic facts regarding Kleinian groups and serving as a general guide to the primary literature, particularly the Russian literature in the field. In addition, the book includes a large number of examples, problems, and unsolved problems, many of them presented for the first time.


The extant literature linking slack time to innovation focuses on how slack time facilitates creative activities such as ideation, experimentation, and prototype development. We turn attention to how slack time may enable activities that are less creative but still important for innovation, namely mundane, execution-oriented tasks. First, we document the main effect: a sharp rise in innovative projects posted on a major crowdfunding platform when colleges are on break. Next, we report timing and project type evidence consistent with the causal interpretation that slack time drives innovation. Finally, we present a series of results consistent with the mundane task mechanism but not with the traditional creativity-related explanations. We do not rule out the possibility that creativity benefits from slack time. Instead, we introduce the idea that mundane, execution-oriented tasks, such as those associated with launching a crowdfunding campaign (e.g., administration, planning, promotion), are an important input to innovation that may benefit significantly from slack time.


The paper describes a bioluminescence detection lab-on-chip consisting of a fiber-optic faceplate with immobilized luminescent reporters/probes that is directly coupled to an optical detection and processing CMOS system-on-chip (SoC) fabricated in a 0.18-/spl mu/m process. The lab-on-chip is customized for such applications as determining gene expression using reporter gene assays, determining intracellular ATP, and sequencing DNA. The CMOS detection SoC integrates an 8 /spl times/ 16 pixel array having the same pitch as the assay site array, a 128-channel 13-bit ADC, and column-level DSP, and is fabricated in a 0.18-/spl mu/m image sensor process. The chip is capable of detecting emission rates below 10/sup -6/ lux over 30 s of integration time at room temperature. In addition to directly coupling and matching the assay site array to the photodetector array, this low light detection is achieved by a number of techniques, including the use of very low dark current photodetectors, low-noise differential circuits, high-resolution analog-to-digital conversion, background subtraction, correlated multiple sampling, and multiple digitizations and averaging to reduce read noise. Electrical and optical characterization results as well as preliminary biological testing results are reported.


How can we as educators address complex and controversial topics in the social sciences without encouraging simplistic responses and self-reproducing binary oppositions? Drawing upon an ethnographic analysis of a fi rst-year writing seminar on the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this article proposes novel approaches to overcome instinctive reactions to contentious topics. Arguing that the experience of controversy produces self-reinforcing binary oppositions that become autopoetically abstracted from the actual topic of discussion, I build upon specifi c seminar experiences to propose two novel and practical concepts for the pedagogy of controversy: (1) deidentifi cation, which refers to a process of disengagement from the binaries and thus identities that structure and reproduce controversy, and (2) humanisation, which refers to a process of moving beyond abstractions to reidentify with the fundamentally human experience of contentious historical moments. The pedagogy of controversy, I argue, must teach against our conventional identifi catory responses to controversy to promote a more nuanced understanding of inherently complex issues.


In last ten years or so the traditional chalkboard teaching has been supplemented by audio visual aids like overhead/ slide projectors and videos. The phenomenal growth of Internet has brought in a new teaching media - elearning. The declining cost of Personal Computers, easy and cheaper access to Internet, and improved quality of multimedia software has made it attractive option for both teachers and students. Multimedia courses over the Internet will have the potential to serve a dual purpose by enhancing the learning experience for resident students, while opening the educational experience up to distance students. The content development for web-based courses has to be treated differently than the traditional classroom teaching. Just posting of lecture notes, assignments and the solutions does not help the student in elearning. The content needs to be interactive acting like a virtual teacher. The content development for online engineering education for undergraduate and graduate courses would also need different treatment. A course on Engineering Mechanics for the first year engineering students based on Interactive Virtual Tutor (IVT) system and a course on Bridge Engineering based on Internet Knowledge Base (IKB) format for graduate students has been developed. The methodology adapted in Interactive Virtual Tutor and Internet Knowledge Base is explained in this paper.


The purpose of this paper is to put forward an alternative solution to the problem of reconstitution of existing ports, generally too shallow for the large tankers and ore carriers. Usually, the existing moles are extended to deep water fairways and approaches to berths, docks and basins, dredged and adapted to the draught of the new giants. This is connected with enormous expenses. Sometimes completely new port units, as for instance Europort, are built. The Island Harbours, with their seaward position, will reduce the length of the shipway to the berths and thus provide a speedier turn-out of vessels. The cost of erection and maintenance of such a harbour is in most cases lower than in that of a conventional solution, due to short breakwaters and limited quantities of primary and maintenance dredging operations. Different alternatives of island ports can be adapted in most sandy coasts over the world. The changes in coastal regime which may result from erecting an island harbour connected with the mainland by a bridge or a causeway can turn out profitable for general cargo ships, and even fisherboats, especially on the coasts where till now cutting the sea approaches through the shallows and bars was often unacceptable, due to the enormous expenses involved.


Despite the prevalence and importance of transparency in organisms, particularly pelagic species, it is a poorly understood characteristic. This article reviews the current state of knowledge on the distribution, ecology, and physical basis of biological transparency. Particular attention is paid to the distribution of transparent species relative to their optical environment, the relationship between transparency and visual predation, the physics of transparency, and what is known about the anatomical and ultrastructural modifications required to achieve this condition. Transparency is shown to be primarily a pelagic trait, uncommon in other aquatic habitats and extremely rare on land. Experimental and theoretical studies in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems have shown that transparency is a successful form of camouflage, and that several visual adaptations seem to counter it. The physical basis of transparency is still poorly understood, but anatomical observations and mathematical models show that there are various routes to transparency. Future avenues for research include examination of the ultrastructure and optical properties of transparent tissue, exploring the link between transparent species and special visual modifications in the species they interact with, and analysis of the evolution of transparency using comparative methods.


The past year has seen increasing scrutiny of Smart Cities efforts with regard to privacy. Privacy advocates have criticized Smart City data collection on the whole and critiqued specific city efforts that they feel have crossed a line. Cities are struggling with a number of privacy issues, including how to address third parties' collection of Smart City data, how cities consume personally identifying information from third-parties, and how public records laws intersect with privacy concerns. The majority of data that cities collect are subject to disclosure under public record laws, with an attendant obligation to anonymize sensitive private information. However, as the amount and availability of data increases, the ability to cross-reference, correlate, and de-anonymize or re-sensitize datasets also increases. This leads to re-identification attacks that infringe the privacy of individuals in those datasets, and fosters mistrust in city governments and technology vendors. A fundamental challenge is that open data and privacy interact in complex and unpredictable ways. Some cities may choose to allow third parties to collect and manage that data in an effort to encourage innovation in the delivery of city services, while simultaneously wrestling with the legal and policy implications, such as privacy and public records law compliance. Unfortunately, this also may have undesirable privacy outcomes depending on a third-party's use of that data and the city's role in encouraging its collection. In this paper, we will discuss concrete approaches to smart cities data privacy governance including collection and management, and specifically, an innovative pilot project supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science & Technology Directorate aimed at demonstrating how privacy technology can help harmonize data sensitivity risks with intended benefits.


Approximately half of all pharmaceutical drugs are marketed as salts. This thesis
pioneers the application of computational crystal structure prediction to organic salts
containing the commonly used chloride or carboxylate counterions, and assesses the
extent to which the theoretical calculations can be used to aid experimental efforts
targeting organic salts.
A screen for multi-component solid forms of pyridine and 4-
dimethylaminopyridine (DMAP) using a range of dicarboxylic acids led to one novel
cocrystal of pyridine and six novel salts of DMAP. All novel crystal structures were
solved using single crystal X-ray diffraction. At a simplistic level, salts differ from
cocrystals in the position of the acidic proton within the crystal. For a selected set of
structures, periodic ab initio calculations were shown to be useful in suggesting the
observed N+-H (salt) or O-H (cocrystal) covalent bond as the preferred atomic
connectivity. Modelling the same crystal structures by lattice energy minimisation
using a distributed multipole based electrostatic model proved successful if the correct
proton connectivity was used. The observed structures of a model salt, cocrystal and
disordered salt-cocrystal system were found to be the most stable or almost equienergetic
with the most stable structure in the predicted crystal energy landscapes.
When the predictions were repeated using molecular structures with the wrong proton
connectivity, the energetic ranking of the structure got worse.
The computational model of crystal structure prediction was successfully used to
rationalise the different polymorphic and hydration behaviour of the pharmacologically
active amantadine hydrochloride and memantine hydrochloride salts. Finally, a similar
methodology was applied to 1,8-naphthyridinium fumarate and the calculations
performed as part of the fifth international blind test of crystal structure prediction.
Overall, the success in modelling the crystal structures of carboxylate and chloride salts
illustrates the promise of crystal structure prediction in aiding experimental efforts of
organic salt selection.


When people see a group of faces, they tend to code the average property, such as the mean identity. In some experiments, participants extracted this ensemble representation rather than the individual identities. This has led to the suggestion that coding an ensemble is the "default mode" when processing identity for groups of faces (de Fockert & Wolfenstein, 2009). These studies used groups of very similar identities, which participants may have found difficult to distinguish as individuals, and which may have facilitated the coding of an ensemble. If ensembles are the default way to represent groups, then they should have a coding advantage over those of individual identities also for groups that consist of easily distinguishable faces. Here, we tested whether an advantage of the ensemble identity varies with the similarity of the group identities. The identities in each group were experimentally manipulated to range from extremely similar to very dissimilar. In Experiment 1, participants viewed groups of four faces, followed by a set average (blends between group identities) or an individual exemplar, and indicated whether this was a member of the group or not. Our results showed that for sets of dissimilar faces, participants more frequently endorsed individual exemplars than set averages as members. For similar faces, which participants tended to see as the same person, participants endorsed set averages more frequently than exemplars. However, this set average advantage was attenuated when the design was modified, such that participants had to select between the set average and the exemplar, to directly test participants' preferences for ensemble or exemplar representations. In sum, there was no ensemble advantage for easily distinguishable faces, and even for very similar faces, the ensemble advantage was not as robust as expected, suggesting that ensemble representations may not be the default mode to code identity of face groups. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Although very little has been published specifically on the study of gaze in interpreter-mediated dialogues, there has been some evidence that gaze direction is an important device for showing attention and for the distribution of turns. In this chapter, analysis of gaze shifts based on video recordings of immigration interviews reinforces previous findings in the field. It also shows that gaze not only has a function in signalling attention and co-ordinating turns to talk, it also regulates patterns of participation. In particular by their patterns of gaze and other non-verbal signals, all participants position themselves and others within the exchange. In this way, the interplay of patterns of gaze is closely bound up with role and status – and, therefore, with issues of identity and power.


We introduce Hermes, a lightweight smart shoe and its supporting infrastructure aimed at extending gait and instability analysis and human instability/balance monitoring outside of a laboratory environment. We aimed to create a scientific tool capable of high-level measures, by combining embedded sensing, signal processing and modeling techniques. Hermes monitors walking behavior and uses an instability assessment model to generate quantitative value with episodes of activity identified by physician, researchers or investigators as important. The underlying instability assessment model incorporates variability and correlation of features extracted during ambulation that have been identified by geriatric motion study experts as precursor to instability, balance abnormality and possible fall risk. Hermes provides a mobile, affordable and long-term instability analysis and detection system that is customizable to individual users, and is context-aware, with the capability of being guided by experts. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our model and the complimentary role our system can play by providing long-term monitoring of patients outside a hospital or clinical setting at a reduced cost, with greater user convenience, compliance and inference capabilities that meet the physician's or investigator's needs.


The universal education is today a reality. Trough the e-learning system we can access to diverse educational system for all the educational level. In this case the technical revolutions have suppose that the higher centre changes their point of view and think how arrived at all the student or possibly pupils. In this case the social networks have became in the best too to get the principal objective of the universities, the communicate with all the student and teachers. In this chapter we presented different social nets for all the world and how the universities made themselves known to the world.


Background: Hypericum perforatum is used as a medicinal plant, mostly in antidepressant treatment. With endogenous and exogenous dormancy, more studies about the germination of the seeds are necessary. Aim: To evaluate the effect of temperature and of preparations of high dilutions on the germination of seeds of Hypericum perforatum. Methodology: Three bioassays were carried out in chambers of germination, using a completely randomized experimental design and in duplicate. In the first bioassay, of temperatures of 20, 25 and 30 oC was evaluated, with 20 replicates and 50 seeds in each replicate. In the second, the effect of high dilutions (Kali carbonicum, Natrum muriaticum, Phosphorus and Silicea terra in 12cH) using 4 replicates with 50 seeds each. In the third, Kali carbonicum was tested at 6, 12, 20, 30cH with 50 seeds and 4 replicates. The percentage of germination, germination rate index (GRI), average germination time (AGT) and seedlings with cotyledons. The data were analyzed through the R software at a 5% significance. Results: At the temperature of 25 °C, 63% of the seeds germinated while at the temperatures of 20 and 30 °C the percentage was 26% and 18%, respectively. In seeds treated with Kali carbonicum 12cH the germination rate increased significantly in relation to the control group. Kali carbonicum 6cH increased the GRI of the seeds, while at 20cH, it increased the AGT, showing delay in germination. Conclusion: The use of the Kali carbonicum assists in the breakage of dormancy and average time of germination in Hypericum perforatum seeds.


A new multiscale method combined with model order reduction is proposed for flow problems in three-scale porous media. We derive an effective three-scale model that couples a macroscopic Darcy equation, a mesoscopic Stokes-Brinkman equation, and a microscopic Stokes equation. A corresponding three-scale numerical method is then derived using the finite element discretization with numerical quadrature, where the macroscopic and mesoscopic permeability is upscaled at quadrature points from mesoscopic and microscopic problems, respectively. The computational cost of solving numerous mesoscopic and microscopic flow problems is further reduced by applying a Petrov– Galerkin reduced basis method at the mesocopic and microscopic scales. As there is no natural way to obtain an affine decomposition of the mesoscopic problems, which is instrumental for the efficiency of the model order reduction, we derive a mesoscopic solver that makes use of empirical interpolation techniques. A priori and a posteriori error estimates are derived for the new method that is also tested numerically to corroborate the theoretical convergence rates and illustrate its efficiency.


Recent journalism research often argues that it is high time that we moved beyond the newsroom and begin asking who it is that is stimulating transformation and not what it is, as individual journalists, entrepreneurs, technology firms, and startups assume an increasingly critical role in the development of the field. This article introduces the concept of 'pioneer journalism' to provide just such an analysis across different organizational contexts. Pioneer journalism is understood as a particular group of journalists that incorporates new organizational forms and experimental practice in pursuit of redefining the field and its structural foundations. To introduce this concept, the article argues along three stages. First, it develops a theoretical basis on which to pin our understanding of pioneering practice by reviewing previous research into journalism's transformation beyond the newsroom. Second, it extends the theoretical discussion into the empirical realm by looking at five extreme cases of pioneer journalists through an explorative interview analysis. Third, and to conclude, an integrated concept of pioneer journalism is outlined as a point of departure from which to further consider journalism's re-figuration more generally.


We study the properties of ISM substructure and turbulence in hydrodynamic (AMR) galaxy simulations with resolutions up to 0.8 pc and 5 � 10 3 M� . We analyse the power spectrum of the density distribution, and various components of the velocity field. We show that the disk thickness is about the average Jeans scale length, and is mainly regulated by gravitational instabilities. From this scale of energy injection, a turbulence cascade towards small-scale is observed, with almost isotropic small-scale motions. On scales larger than the disk thickness, density waves are observed, but there is also a full range of substructures with chaotic and strongly non-isotropic gas velocity dispersions. The power spectrum of vorticity in an LMC-sized model suggests that an inverse cascade of turbulence might be present, although energy input over a wide range of scales in the coupled gaseous+stellar fluid could also explain this quasi-2D regime on scales larger than the disk scale height. Similar regimes of gas turbulence are also found in massive high-redshift disks with high gas fractions. Disk properties and ISM turbulence appear to be mainly regulated by gravitational processes, both on large scales and inside dense clouds. Star formation feedback is however essential to maintain the ISM in a steady state by balancing a systematic gas dissipation into dense and small clumps. Our galaxy simulations employ a thermal model based on a barotropic Equation of State (EoS) aimed at modelling the equilibrium of gas between various heating and cooling processes. Denser gas is typically colder in this approach, which is shown to correctly reproduce the density structures of a star-forming, turbulent, unstable and cloudy ISM down to scales of a few parsecs.


Pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) are one of the most often used methods to coor- dinate entry into the electoral market. Party elites, however, do not know how voters will respond to the coalition formation at the polls. In this article, the authors report on an experimental study among 1,255 Belgian students. In order to study voter responses to the formation of PECs,respondents were presented with two ballots:one with individual parties (party vote condition) and one with coalitions (coalition vote condition). The aim of this experiment is to predict under what conditions party supporters will follow their initially preferred party into the coalition and vote for the PEC, and under what conditions they would desert the PEC at the polls.The decision whether to follow the coalition or not can be traced back to four considerations: dislike of the coalition partner; ideological congruence between coalition partners; size of the initially preferred party; and being attracted to a specific high-profile candidate. (Dis)liking the coalition partner is independent from the ideological congruence between the two coalition partners. The study's results also show support for an adjustment effect, as respondents became more loyal toward cartels over the course of the 2003-2005 observation period.


Prion diseases are rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorders that can be sporadic, inherited or acquired by infection. Based on a national surveillance program in the Netherlands we describe here the clinical, neuropathological, genetic and molecular characteristics of 162 patients with neuropathologically confirmed prion disease over a 12-year period (1998–2009). Since 1998, there has been a relatively stable mortality of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in the Netherlands, ranging from 0.63 to 1.53 per million inhabitants per annum. Genetic analysis of the codon 129 methionine/valine (M/V) polymorphism in all patients with sporadic CJD (sCJD) showed a trend for under-representation of VV cases (7.0%), compared with sCJD cohorts in other Western countries, whereas the MV genotype was relatively over-represented (22,4%). Combined PrPSc and histopathological typing identified all sCJD subtypes known to date, except for the VV1 subtype. In particular, a "pure" phenotype was demonstrated in 60.1% of patients, whereas a mixed phenotype was detected in 39.9% of all sCJD cases. The relative excess of MV cases was largely accounted for by a relatively high incidence of the MV 2K subtype. Genetic analysis of the prion protein gene (PRNP) was performed in 161 patients and showed a mutation in 9 of them (5.6%), including one FFI and four GSS cases. Iatrogenic CJD was a rare phenomenon (3.1%), mainly associated with dura mater grafts. Three patients were diagnosed with new variant CJD (1.9%) and one with variably protease-sensitive prionopathy (VPSPr). Post-mortem examination revealed an alternative diagnosis in 156 patients, most commonly Alzheimer's disease (21.2%) or vascular causes of dementia (19.9%). The mortality rates of sCJD in the Netherlands are similar to those in other European countries, whereas iatrogenic and genetic cases are relatively rare. The unusual incidence of the VV2 sCJD subtype compared to that reported to date in other Western countries deserves further investigation.


We consider optimal resolution of air traffic (AT) conflicts. Aircraft are assumed to cruise within a given altitude layer and are modeled as a kinematic system with constant velocity and curvature bounds. Aircraft cannot get closer to each other than a predefined safety distance. For such a system of multiple aircraft, we consider the problem of planning optimal paths among given waypoints. Necessary conditions for optimality of solutions are derived and used to devise a parametrization of possible trajectories that turns into efficient numerical solutions to the problem. Simulation results for a realistic aircraft conflict scenario are provided. A decentralized implementation of the optimal conflict resolution scheme is introduced that may allow free-flight coordination in a cooperative airspace management scheme. Impact of decentralization on performance and safety is finally discussed with the help of extensive simulations.


The central ring of a 1,4-bis(arylethynyl)arene (ditolan) can be viewed as a molecular rotor with an extremely low barrier to rotation in the gas phase or solution. The torsional energy profile of that ring is shown to be dependent on the relative conformation of the end capping arenes. When the capping arenes are sterically bulky m-terphenyl units, it is possible to rationalize the conformational dynamics of the central ring by a factorization analysis, involving perturbation of the basic torsional energy profile by polar-π, and dispersion interactions between the flanking rings of the cap and the central ring of the ditolan. The symmetry of the construct can modulate the effect of these interactions. These principles apply to the design of materials in which a steric shroud excludes packing distortions.


Context: Man lives in close harmony with animals and so the chances of injuries and diseases contracted from them. Effective preventive measure such as vaccination is to be ensured following harmful bites resulting in Rabies. Aim: The aim is to assess the proportion of rabid animal bite cases and non-compliance of post exposure prophylaxis vaccination following bites, reporting to a rural primary health care centre. Setting and Design: This is a retrospective cross sectional study from records of animal bite cases attending a rural primary health centre from January 2017 to December 2017. Materials and Methods: A pre-designed case record form was used to estimate the proportion of animal bite cases leading to Rabies and Non-compliance of post exposure prophylaxis attending the health centre. Statistical Analysis: Data analysis was done in SPSS 2016. Chi square was used to find the significance. Results: Around 448 animal bites were found over a span of one year, out of which 222 (49.5%) were found to be rabid animal bites. 46.65% (209) were dog bites and 2.9% (13) were cat bites. Statistical significance (P < 0.05) was seen between age and compliance of vaccination following dog bites. 1.14% of the study subjects who had completed the 5 dose post prophylaxis vaccination belonged to the elderly age group. Among the cat bite cases, 2 of the study subjects had received 1 dose of PEP with anti-rabies vaccine. Conclusion: Only 1.14% of the study subjects had taken the complete dose of PEP. This suggests the lack of awareness among public and lack of services and supervision for rabid animal bites in rural areas. It is the duty of every physician to counsel people, co-ordinate with veterinary physician and maintain proper records so as to ensure completion of PEP to prevent rabies related deaths in humans.


The ability of amino acids to form nucleophilic enamines with aldehydes and ketones has been used in the development of asymmetric α-oxidation reactions with electrophilic oxidizing agents. Singlet molecular oxygen has for the first time been asymmetrically incorporated into aldehydes and ketones, and the products were isolated as their corresponding diols in good yields and ee's. Organocatalytic α-oxidations of cyclic ketones with iodosobenzene and N-sulfonyloxaziridine were also possible and furnished after reduction the product diols in generally low yields and in low to good ee's. Amino acids have also been shown to catalyze the formation of carbohydrates by sequential aldol reactions. For example, proline and hydroxy proline mediate a highly selective trimerisation of α-benzyloxyacetaldehyde into allose, which was obtained in >99 % ee. Non linear effect studies of this reaction revealed the largest permanent nonlinear effect observed in a proline-catalyzed reaction to date. Moreover, polyketides were also assembled in a similar fashion by an amino acid-catalyzed one-pot reaction, and was successful for the trimerisation of propionaldehyde, however the sequential cross aldol reactions suffered from lower selectivities. This problem was overcome by the development of a two-step synthesis that enabled the formation of a range of polyketides with excellent selectivities from a variety of aldehydes. The method furnishes the polyketides via the shortest route reported and in comparable product yields to most multi-step synthesis. All polyketides were isolated as single diastereomers with >99 % ee. Based on the observed amino acid-catalysis, amino acids are thought to have taken part in the prebiotic formation of tetroses and hexoses.


The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" — the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of association, cultural producers and consumers challenged dominant ideas about just who could be a public person, greatly expanded the resources of public life for ordinary people in their own time, and developed ideas and practices that have helped create the political culture of modernity. Coming from a number of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, art history, history of religion, history of science, and musicology, the contributors develop analyses of a range of cases of early modern public-making that together demonstrate the rich inventiveness and formative social power of artistic and intellectual publication in this period.


Two terms ago, in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment precludes ministers from bringing employment-related claims against their churches. In some ways, Hosanna-Tabor changed little. The lower courts had all reached that conclusion already, though the Supreme Court slightly expanded the breadth of the so-called ministerial exception. More important is how Hosanna-Tabor reconceptualized things, especially in how it pushed back somewhat against the Supreme Court's imperial decision in Employment Division v. Smith, where the Court had broadly held that the Free Exercise Clause did not entitle religious believers to exemptions from generally applicable laws.Hosanna-Tabor could end up an isolated anomaly, a peculiar concession to the importance of ministers and the intrusiveness of employment discrimination laws, a railroad ticket good for one day and train only. But the Court's opinion speaks of a broader principle, a principle whose boundaries it consciously puts off defining. And it is striking how so many decisions in the lower courts fall within Hosanna-Tabor's principle. From employment discrimination law to labor law, from contract to tort, lower courts regularly dismiss all manner of cases in ways incompatible with Smith and for reasons akin to those given in Hosanna-Tabor. This Article looks at that universe of cases, reflects on some patterns that emerge, and works toward an explanation for what is happening and how courts should handle these issues across the board.


The arctic mirage is an atmospheric refraction phenomenon caused by a temperature inversion in the lower atmosphere. It is classified into three basic types, two of which (hillingar and hafgerdingar effects) occur fairly frequently. The third is the Novaya Zemlya effect, reported by polar explorers on several occasions as an anomalous sunrise during the polar winter, when the position of the sun was below the horizon. The Novaya Zemlya effect consists of the trapping of light rays beneath a thermocline of large horizontal extent. Within the thermocline layers, the coefficient of refraction must exceed 1, while above and below it the coefficient must be less than 1. Then certain upward rays repeatedly bounce back from the thermocline and are transmitted for long distances around the earth's curvature. The anomalous sunrise is a special case of this generalized definition. The properties of the Novaya Zemlya effect, analyzed using a laterally uniform stratified-atmosphere model, agree with those reported by polar expeditions. A narrow strip or window appears near the horizon, with or without an image of the sun in the window. An observation sketched by Liljequist in Antarctica is reconstructed to demonstrate the model's accuracy.


Futures offer a convenient abstraction for encapsulating delayed computation. It is a mechanism to introduce concurrency through a rewrite of the sequential program. However, managing futures is tedious and requires knowledge of concurrency and its concerns. The notion of transparent futures is used to hide the complexity of futures from developers. A number of techniques based on transparency have been proposed to create and manage futures. Previous techniques make use of reflection. In this paper, we propose duck futures that use a generative approach. We show that duck futures are much more efficient compared to previous notions of transparent futures. We also present the first large scale study of the applicability and utility of duck futures in practice using the Boa infrastructure for mining large scale open source repositories. Our study finds that transparent futures, despite their limitations, can be very useful in practice.


Intellectual property (IP) has become one of the most influential and controversial issues in today's knowledge-based society. This challenging book exposes the reader to key issues at the heart of the public debate now taking place in the field of IP. It considers IP at the macro level where it affects many issues. These include: international trade policy, ownership of breakthrough technologies, foreign direct investment, innovation climates, public–private partnerships, competition rules and public health where it is strongly embedded in contemporary business decision making.


And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning, by Joel M. Hoffman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2010. 256 pp. $25.99. A little learning, they say, is a dangerous thing. Joel Hoffman's background would seem to have lefthim with more than just a little learning, but a reading of his book And God Said demonstrates that he still falls well within the danger area. It's too bad, because his topic is one that deserves a good book for a general readership; and Hoffman himself has a few worthwhile things to say. The book is divided into two sections, each comprising about half the book. The first, "Getting Started," consists of three chapters explaining why all previous translations of the Bible are "wrong," and demonstrating the "correct" approach to Bible translation. The second, "Moving Forward," applies Hoffman's method to five biblical phrases or passages: b'chol levavcha u-v'chol nafshecha (Deut 6:5); YHWH ro'i (Ps 23:1); ahoti kallah (Song of Songs, passim); lo tirtzach and lo tahmod (in the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5); and almah (Isa 7:14). Part I of the book, "Getting Started," is intended to prove the inadequacy of all translation methods other than Hoffman's (which he does by demonstrating that pushed to extremes they all lead to absurdity) and to demonstrate his own approach. This is the method of "functional equivalence" (p. 238)- though the reader will not learn this phrase without reading the "Guide to Translations and Further Reading" that appears in a significantly smaller type size as an appendix at the back of the book. In the main text, explanation is more or less limited to one sentence saying that "the goal is to understand not just the vocabulary but also the grammar of the source language ... and then try to do the same thing in the target language" (p. 69) and a diagram, labeled "Table I" (it is the only graphic feature in the book), showing translation as a process of "decoding" the "function" of the phrase in the source language and encoding the same "function" in the target language (p. 69). This technique, too, could be shown to lead to absurd results if carried to extremes. The amazing thing about the book is that Hoffman himself provides the absurdities of his own method. Take, for example, "the Lord is my shepherd" from Psalm 23. Hoffman explains what is wrong with this translation: "The problem is that shepherds, once common, are now rare" (p. 126). Nowadays, a shepherd is "meek, humble, powerless, and . . . not a part of mainstream society" (p. 133), whereas in biblical times shepherds provided sustenance and were powerful, romantic, and common-none of which apply to shepherds today. So Hoffman tries out various other options: marine, fireman, lawyer, lumberjack, cowboy, pilot, doctor, nurse, veterinarian, zookeeper, farmer. …


This article sheds new light on the credibility of sovereign ratings, and raises some doubts about their accuracy and impartiality. Although credit rating agencies (CRAs) are tasked with issuing accurate sovereign ratings, the stability of ratings suffers when CRAs inflate them owing to anticipated yet uncertain lender-of-last-resort intervention. The impartiality of sovereign ratings can be compromised also by regulators' expectations and by the demands of investors and debt issuers. These problems were not addressed by Regulation (EU) No 462/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May 2013 amending Regulation (EC) No 1060/2009 on credit rating agencies. This article explains how to improve sovereign rating methodologies by revamping the standard through-the-cycle approach. Ratings criteria should place greater emphasis on the sustainability of both total debt and the exchange rate; they should account also for spillover effects and the central government's cost of bank bailouts.


Much research has been conducted relating to uses-and-gratification theory and how audiences select their news medium and message. Research has examined how newspapers, television stations, and social media outlets such at Twitter present news. However, no research has examined from which medium the audience retains the most information. Through the lens of uses-and-gratification theory, this exploratory study used a 4 × 1 experimental design to fill this gap. A convenience sample of 285 students at a large Midwestern university was invited to participate. A total of 122 responded to the invitation (N = 122). While most reported getting the majority of their sports news via television, participants who were presented news in print scored significantly higher on a retention test than did their counterparts who consumed news via television or Twitter. Avid sports fans retained more information, and the presence of links and images in Twitter did have an impact on how much news was retained. Implications for further research are also discussed.


Vegetative plant remains and microsporangiate cones, related to the fossil genera Frenelopsis and Classostrobus respectively, were studied in three localities from the Lower Cretaceous of the Pyrenees and Iberian Ranges (Spain). Sterile remains belong to three different species: F. Rubiesensis Barale, F. Ugnaensis sp. nov. and F. Turolensis sp. nov. The male cones Classostrobus ugnaensis sp. nov. and C. Turolensis sp. nov. are associated with the two latter species respectively, and C. Turolensis is found in connection with F. Turolensis. Internodes of F. Ugnaensis display small hemispherical papillae and long conical hairs covering the entire cuticle surface, while F. Turolensis has a strip of hairs near the leaf margin, in addition to more massive outer stomatal papillae and higher stomatal density. The tiny cones of C. Ugnaensis bear microsporophyll cuticles capped with vermiculate flattened papillae and a fringe of marginal hairs, while C. Turolensis has a central area of microsporophylls covered by long conical hairs. Sedimentological and taphonomic analyses show that the assemblages studied belong to a wide spectrum of habitats. These indicate that Spanish Lower Cretaceous frenelopsids were xeromorphic plants, able to adapt to helophytic and riparian habitats, and grew in brackish coastal marshes and fluvio–lacustrine freshwater environments.


Research, so far, has shown that many personal attributes, including religious and political affiliations, sexual orientation, relationship status, age, and gender, are predictable providing users' interaction data. To address these privacy concerns, users on a social networking site like Faceboook are usually left with profile settings to mark some of their data invisible. However, users sometimes interact with others using unprotected posts (e.g., posts from a ``Faceboook page''). Although the aim of such interactions is to help users to become more social, visibilities of these interactions are beyond their profile settings and publicly accessible to everyone. The focus of this paper is to explore such unprotected interactions so that users' are well aware of these new vulnerabilities and adopt measures to mitigate them further. In particular, we ask - are users' personal attributes predictable using only the unprotected interactions? To answer this question, we design a novel problem of predictability of users' personal attributes with unprotected interactions. The extreme sparsity patterns in users' unprotected interactions pose a serious challenge for the proposed problem. Therefore, we first provide a way to mitigate the data sparsity challenge and propose a novel attribute prediction framework using only the unprotected interactions. Experimental results on Faceboook dataset demonstrates that the proposed framework can predict users' personal attributes.


Dr. Gary Heba, Advisor Students are motivated to use technology to write. Using this idea, teachers can assimilate what the students are already doing through personal websites/blogs and classroom content with a meaningful audience. Students, no matter gender or ability level, need to see that writing is a vehicle to show individual thought on subjects, and that this is powerful. Technology, such as web logs, can provide one part of the answer, but educators should recognize that the key to conscientious writing among students is that the students need to be a more active part of the educational community. The aim of this study is to shed light on a range of student needs, and show that the differing or ranges in levels of motivation to write with consideration for an audience can be addressed through web logs. A very real audience is out "there," the Internet, for students to use.


The development of effective content-based multimedia search systems is an important research issue due to the growing amount of digital audio-visual information. In the case of images and video, the growth of digital data has been observed since the introduction of 2D capture devices. A similar development is expected for 3D data as acquisition and dissemination technology of 3D models is constantly improving. 3D objects are becoming an important type of multimedia data with many promising application possibilities. Defining the aspects that constitute the similarity among 3D objects and designing algorithms that implement such similarity definitions is a difficult problem. Over the last few years, a strong interest in methods for 3D similarity search has arisen, and a growing number of competing algorithms for content-based retrieval of 3D objects have been proposed. We survey feature-based methods for 3D retrieval, and we propose a taxonomy for these methods. We also present experimental results, comparing the effectiveness of some of the surveyed methods.


In order to extract beneficial information and recognize a particular pattern from huge data stored in different databases with different formats, data integration is essential. However the problem that arises here is that data integration may lead to duplication. In other words, due to the availability of data in different formats, there might be some records which refer to the same entity. Duplicate detection or record linkage is a technique which is used to detect and match duplicate records which are generated in data integration process. Most approaches concentrated on string similarity measures for comparing records. However, they fail to identify records which share the semantic information. So, in this study, a threshold-based method which takes into account both string and semantic similarity measures for comparing record pairs. This method is experimented on a real world dataset, namely Restaurant and its effectiveness is measured based on several standard evaluation metrics. As experimental results indicate, the proposed similarity method which is based on the combination of string and semantic similarity measures outperforms the individual similarity measures with the F-measure of 99.1% in Restaurant dataset. Therefore, based on experimental results, besides string similarity, semantic similarity should be considered in order to detect duplicate records more effectively.


For companies with multiple orbital assets, managing the risk of collision with other low-Earth orbit (LEO) Resident Space Objects (RSOs) can amount to a significant operational burden. LeoLabs and Planet investigate the impact of a workflow that integrates commercial Space Situational Awareness (SSA) data into conjunction assessments for large satellite constellations. Radar measurements from LeoLabs are validated against truth orbits provided by the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) and to measurements from Planet's on-board GPS instrumentation. The radar data is then used as input for orbit fits in order to form the basis of a conjunction assessment. To confirm the reliability of the orbit determination (OD), the generated ephemerides are validated against ILRS and GPS-derived orbits. In addition, a covariance realism assessment is performed in order to check for self-consistency by comparing the propagated orbit and the associated covariance against later measurements. Several cases are investigated to assess the benefits of integrating radar-derived products with Conjunction Data Messages (CDMs) received on Planet spacecraft. Conjunction assessment is refined using onboard GPS measurements from Planet satellites along with tracking measurements of the secondary RSO by LeoLabs. This study demonstrates that commercial data provided by LeoLabs is reliable, accurate, and timely, and that ephemeris generated from LeoLabs data provides solutions and insights which are consistent with those provided in CDMs. For the cases analyzed, the addition of commercial SSA data from LeoLabs has a positive impact on operations due to the additional information on the state of the secondary RSO which can lead to increased confidence in any maneuver-related decisions. Measurements from LeoLabs can also be used to improve conjunction assessment for commercial satellites that do not have any operator OD.


A regulatory circuit controlling plant flowering genes leads the way to reconstruction of a time-delay control system. Plants flower only when their developmental programs give the go-ahead; otherwise, floral genes remain repressed. Sun et al. (see the Perspective by Zhang) analyzed the regulatory program that controls expression of the transcription factor KNUCKLES (KNU), which is required in the control of floral genes. KNU expression was silenced by the presence of Polycomb group (PcG) proteins. The floral homeotic protein AGAMOUS competed for control of KNU and activated its expression, but with a 2-day lag time. Thus, eviction of PcG by activating DNA-binding proteins can insert a lag time before a switch in gene expression takes place. B. Sun, L.-S. Looi, S. Guo, Z. He, E.-S. Gan, J. Huang, Y. Xu, W.-Y. Wee, T. Ito, Timing mechanism dependent on cell division is invoked by Polycomb eviction in plant stem cells. Science 343, 1248559 (2014). [Abstract] [Full Text] X. Zhang, Delayed gratification—Waiting to terminate stem cell identity. Science 343, 498-499 (2014). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The Wauja of the Upper Xingu say that their musical ritual is simultaneously of and for the spirits. I will address some factors of their cosmology and shamanism, and then investigate men's kawoká rituals and women's songs performed in iamurikumã rituals. I consider these two rituals to be integral parts of a single set, the kawoká–iamurikumã symbolic–ritual complex, in which there is a deep correlation between men, women and spirits: the latter transmit their musical creations to humans through dreams. Only the male master of the kawoká flutes and the female mistress of the iamurikumã songs are capable of memorising and reproducing this musical material. During ritual performance, the women transform the music of the flutes into iamurikumã songs and vice versa. Through ritual performance, the musical creation of the spirits is returned to them in a humanised and transformed form.


The potential transformation of labour markets by the emergence of online labour platforms has triggered an intense academic, media and policy debate, but its true scale remains speculation. Nevertheless, adequate policy responses hinge on a good understanding of dynamics – something that will only grow in importance with the labour market crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic. With technologically enabled remote work, growing demand for services such as food delivery or care, as well as rising unemployment and the financial strain on many workers, platform work may resume its rapid growth. Therefore, there is a need for good quality data on the prevalence of platform and other forms of precarious work in society.

This working paper provides a critical assessment of different approaches to counting gigs; that is, estimating the scale of engagement in platform work in the general population. The aim is to examine the main obstacles encountered in previous studies, the reasons for surprising or contradictory results and possible sources of error, but also the lessons that can be learned for future research. This is illustrated with key research in this area, ranging from large projects conducted by national statistical offices to smaller scale independent research, from national to (nearly) global scale.


The problem of vessel collisions or near-collision situations on sea, often caused by human error due to incomplete or overwhelming information, is becoming more and more important with rising maritime traffic. Approaches to supply navigators and Vessel Traffic Services with expert knowledge and suggest trajectories for all vessels to avoid collisions, are often aimed at situations where a single planner guides all vessels with perfect information. In contrast, the authors suggest a two-part procedure which plans trajectories using a specialised A* and negotiates trajectories until a solution is found, which is acceptable for all vessels. The solution obeys collision avoidance rules, includes a dynamic model of all vessels and negotiates trajectories to optimise globally without a global planner and extensive information disclosure. The procedure combines all components necessary to solve a multi-vessel encounter and is tested currently in simulation and on several test beds. The first results show a fast converging optimisation process which after a few negotiation rounds already produce feasible, collision free trajectories.


Cloud radio access network systems, consisting of remote radio heads densely distributed in a coverage area and connected by optical fibers to a cloud infrastructure with large computational capabilities, have the potential to meet the ambitious objectives of next generation mobile networks. Actual implementations of C-RANs tackle fundamental technical and economic challenges. In this article, we present an end-to-end solution for practically implementable C-RANs by providing innovative solutions to key issues such as the design of cost-effective hardware and power-effective signals for RRHs, efficient design and distribution of data and control traffic for coordinated communications, and conception of a flexible and elastic architecture supporting dynamic allocation of both the densely distributed RRHs and the centralized processing resources in the cloud to create virtual base stations. More specifically, we propose a novel antenna array architecture called load-controlled parasitic antenna array (LCPAA) where multiple antennas are fed by a single RF chain. Energy- and spectral-efficient modulation as well as signaling schemes that are easy to implement are also provided. Additionally, the design presented for the fronthaul enables flexibility and elasticity in resource allocation to support BS virtualization. A layered design of information control for the proposed end-to-end solution is presented. The feasibility and effectiveness of such an LCPAA-enabled C-RAN system setup has been validated through an over-the-air demonstration.