The objective of this paper is to analyse the navigation quality of the websites of Lithuanian banks. Information completeness for investors ensures the correct functioning of capital markets. In banking environments, this goal is reached by increasing the use of the corporate Website. For this reason, to ensure the quality of these online resources is one of the most important challenges for central banks and financial authorities. The content of the corporate Websites is being regulated by the Basel II initiatives, but navigation quality is not being observed by regulators. Since this variable has a significant impact on the quality of a website and can generate competitive advantages, it is necessary to analyse the current practices of financial entities. Financial institutions located in Lithuania find themselves in a rather special situation because the entry of this country into the EU means that they have to adapt to a new cultural environment and incorporate its symbols, rules, institutionalized beliefs and normative systems. One of these is the need to adopt transparent reporting practices in consonance with the rest of European countries. Therefore, the navigation quality in Lithuanian banks is analysed in this paper, the entity size is also considered as a possible variable of explanation, and a comparison with EU result is made, in order to detect competition disadvantages. To reach this goal, each website of the main Lithuanian financial entities is rated on the basis of a series of metrics that measure the quality of navigation, in accordance with the Web Quality Model developed by Calero et al. (2005). Our results show that Lithuanian financial entities are aware of the importance of online resources because the quality of navigation of their websites is high compared with the results reached by the European sample. As a consequence of this fact, it can be concluded that the Lithuanian financial sector is correctly prepared to confront the challenge of the EU framework.


A series of [Ru(bpy)(3)](2+)-type (bpy= 2,2'-bipyridine) photosensitisers have been coupled to a ligand for Mn, which is expected to give a dinuclear complex that is active as a water oxidation catalyst. Unexpectedly, photophysical studies showed that the assemblies had very short lived excited states and that the decay patterns were complex and strongly dependent on pH. One dyad was prepared that was capable of catalysing chemical water oxidation by using [Ru(bpy)(3)](3+) as an oxidant. However, photochemical water oxidation in the presence of an external electron acceptor failed, presumably because the short excited-state lifetime precluded initial electron transfer to the added acceptor. The photophysical behaviour could be explained by the presence of an intricate excited-state manifold, as also suggested by time-dependent DFT calculations.


Hedgehog (Hh) signaling plays an integral role in promoting proliferation in cerebellar granule cell precursors, which multiply in an external layer before differentiating and migrating deeper into the cerebellum. Overactivation of the Hh pathway is associated with medulloblastoma, a pediatric brain tumor that arises when granule cells continue to proliferate rather than differentiate. Genetic lesions commonly associated with human medulloblastoma include mutations in patched 1 (Ptch1), which encodes a Hh receptor, and loss of heterozygosity of hypermethylated in cancer 1 (Hic1), which encodes a transcriptional repressor. Briggs et al. propose that Hic1 attenuates the Hh proliferation signal by repressing expression of Atonal homolog 1 (Atoh1), a proneural transcription factor. Compound heterozygous mice carrying one deletion allele each of Ptch1 and Hic1 had an increased incidence of medulloblastoma as compared with animals carrying only one allele. Microarray analysis identified many potential targets of Hic1 regulation, one of which was Atoh1, a putative target of Hh signaling expressed in granule cell precursors and medulloblastomas. Chromatin immunoprecipitation experiments showed a direct interaction between Hic1 and the Atoh1 enhancer, and experiments in cell culture demonstrated that Hic1-mediated repression of Atoh1 expression overcomes its activation by Shh. Taken together, these data suggest a model in which Hh signaling induces proliferation of granule cells by activating Atoh1 expression, and differentiation is initiated when Hic1 represses Atoh1 expression. In the context of neural development, signaling through bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) pathways antagonizes Hh signaling to induce differentiation. In a related article, Zhao et al. (see commentary by Grimmer and Weiss) report that BMP signaling stimulated proteolytic degradation of Atoh1 in medulloblastoma and granule cells. Redundant mechanisms for reducing the abundance of Atoh1 may ensure that granule cells are insensitive to proliferation signals during terminal differentiation and identify Atoh1 as a potentially important target for medulloblastoma therapies. K. J. Briggs, I. M. Corcoran-Schwartz, W. Zhang, T. Harcke, W. L. Devereux, S. B. Baylin, C. G. Eberhart, D. N. Watkins, Cooperation between the Hic1 and Ptch1 tumor suppressors in medulloblastoma. Genes & Dev. 22, 770-785 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text] H. Zhao, O. Ayrault, F. Zindy, J.-H. Kim, M. F. Roussel, Post-transcriptional down-regulation of Atoh1/Math1 by bone morphogenic proteins suppresses medulloblastoma development. Genes & Dev. 22, 722-727 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text] M. R. Grimmer, W. A. Weiss, BMPs oppose Math1 in cerebellar development and in medulloblastoma. Genes & Dev. 22, 693-699 (2008). [Full Text]


My task in this paper was to take stock of the intersection between women's history and postcolonial studies through the rather partial perspective of journals on race and colonialism. Gender has emerged as one of the primary analytical categories in contemporary postcolonial studies, yet the role of feminists in advancing analysis of empire, race and power has often been overlooked in favour of a genealogy of male scholars such as Fanon, Said, and Bhabha, sometimes leading to the marginalization of a separate trajectory of feminist thought about race and empire. In 1993, Ann Curthoys argued that the Australian 'historiographical traditions concerned with gender and those concerned with colonialism, racism, and the imperial past have remained remarkably distinct', and suggested that the lack of engagement by feminist historians with the history of Indigenous-settler relations was a 'key dilemma' they faced; she suggested that the reasons for this divergence included social distance between white scholars and Aboriginal women, but also the difficulty white feminists had in seeing themselves as oppressors rather than oppressed, concluding that there was a 'need to revise an assumption that lies at the heart of much feminist scholarship--the historical innocence of women.' (19) Since that time things have changed, as research addressing the intersection of gender and colonialism has prompted new questions, methods and historiographical innovations. What does the pattern of articles published in non-women-dedicated journals tell us about current research on colonialism and gender? In conducting this review I drew upon on-line databases, journals, and websites, and surveyed key or often-cited articles in the field, focusing on publications since 2000. In terms of media, this survey revealed the continuing trend for publishers to make more content available online, reflected in the increasing prominence of big electronic houses such as Taylor and Francis, and Sage; 90% of journals for example, had been placed online in 2005, compared with 75% in 2003. (20) Nonetheless, the academy continues to regard books as the most prestigious and intellectually influential form of publication (indicated for example by research quantum assessment procedures, references provided in course outlines, select bibliographies and so on), and the relationship between journal articles and the larger picture of research and publishing on colonialism and gender is not always straightforward. As I discuss further, however, certain research themes appear more amenable to journal publication than others. Overall, however, it appears that the publication in journals of research that addresses the intersection of colonialism and gender does reflect the distinct historiographical traditions of these fields, appearing either in journals dedicated to gender and women's history or, more rarely, in those concerned with colonial history and postcolonial theory, as well as in those history journals concerned with local or regional history. There are no prominent journals dedicated specifically to gender and colonialism. Since the mid-1990s colonialism has been a topic of significant interest for feminist historians, seeking to bring gender as a category of historical analysis to bear on colonialism as a global process. A substantial and influential body of work has been produced that explores the mutually constitutive relationship between 'metropole' and 'periphery', especially in creating the European social order--what Dipesh Chakrabarty has termed 'the provineialisation of Europe'. (21) Here I am thinking, for example, of scholars such as Anne McClintock, Ann Stoler and Catherine Hall. (22) This work has placed race, class and gender at the centre of analysis, showing how colonial experience helped shape these axes of social difference, and was in turn shaped by them. These studies have also acted to globalise imperial history and unsettle the nation as the central way of organising history. …


BACKGROUND
Extracts of the leaves of the maidenhair tree, Ginkgo biloba, have long been used in China as a traditional medicine for various disorders of health. A standardized extract is widely prescribed for the treatment of a range of conditions including memory and concentration problems, confusion, depression, anxiety, dizziness, tinnitus and headache. The mechanisms of action are thought to reflect the action of several components of the extract and include increasing blood supply by dilating blood vessels, reducing blood viscosity, modification of neurotransmitter systems, and reducing the density of oxygen free radicals.

OBJECTIVES
To assess the efficacy and safety of Ginkgo biloba for dementia or cognitive decline.

SEARCH STRATEGY
The Specialized Register of the Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group (CDCIG), The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL and LILACS were searched on 20 September 2007 using the terms: ginkgo*, tanakan, EGB-761, EGB761, "EGB 761" and gingko*. The CDCIG Specialized Register contains records from all major health care databases (The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, LILACS) as well as from many trials databases and grey literature sources.

SELECTION CRITERIA
Randomized, double-blind studies, in which extracts of Ginkgo biloba at any strength and over any period were compared with placebo for their effects on people with acquired cognitive impairment, including dementia, of any degree of severity.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Data were extracted from the published reports of the included studies, pooled where appropriate and the treatment effects or the risks and benefits estimated.

MAIN RESULTS
36 trials were included but most were small and of duration less than three months. Nine trials were of six months duration (2016 patients). These longer trials were the more recent trials and generally were of adequate size, and conducted to a reasonable standard. Most trials tested the same standardised preparation of Ginkgo biloba, EGb 761, at different doses, which are classified as high or low. The results from the more recent trials showed inconsistent results for cognition, activities of daily living, mood, depression and carer burden. Of the four most recent trials to report results three found no difference between Ginkgo biloba and placebo, and one found very large treatment effects in favour of Ginkgo biloba.There are no significant differences between Ginkgo biloba and placebo in the proportion of participants experiencing adverse events.A subgroup analysis including only patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (925 patients from nine trials) also showed no consistent pattern of any benefit associated with Ginkgo biloba.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
Ginkgo biloba appears to be safe in use with no excess side effects compared with placebo. Many of the early trials used unsatisfactory methods, were small, and publication bias cannot be excluded. The evidence that Ginkgo biloba has predictable and clinically significant benefit for people with dementia or cognitive impairment is inconsistent and unreliable.


This paper gives an overview of the Mandatory Representation of the Indigenous People of the Philippines. At present, the indigenous peoples and other minority groups are under-represented in the country's local legislature. This paper gives rise to the rights of indigenous peoples' mandatory representation in all local government sanggunians at all levels and that IPMR shall be selected in accordance with the guidelines adopted and promulgated by themselves. The Mandatory Representatives represent the general concerns and welfare of all the ICCs/IPs. The study used descriptive research method and seeks to determine the status of the IPMR to describe the status of social, economic, cultural and political development initiated by them, it also seeks to identify challenges related to IPMR's political isolation, economic marginalization and socio-cultural orientation hindering effectiveness of their performance and also to determine future trajectories of the Indigenous Peoples Mandatory Representation. The study was derived from the IPMR of a patriarchal tribe known as Dumagat from Gabaldon, Nueva Ecija and the IPMR OF Palayan City composed of the tribes: Aeta, Applay, Bago, Kankanaey, Kalanguya, Dumagat and Ibaloi. The study found out that IPMRs are facing several challenges that hamper their performance and the study showed the need to LGUs to strictly comply with the mandate of RA 8371 recognizing the rights of Indigenous Peoples Mandatory Representative.


Vortex-Induced Vibration (VIV) is one of the significant physics that encounter in the engineering practice. The good understanding of the structure response and technologies to suppress the significant vibration and undesirable forces induced by VIV is of vital importance for the entire design/planning procedure. However, for both the single-phase and multiphase flow, the main challenge is how to significantly improve the simulation efficiency and meanwhile maintain the accuracy.

This research aims to develop a hybrid model which can simulate VIV significantly more efficiently. A novel framework for a hybrid model which is based on the functional decomposition is proposed. The theoretical hypothesis of the hybrid model is that the viscous effect is only significant near the offshore structures or breaking waves, and may be ignored in other areas. In this model, all physical variables are split into two parts. One part is solved by a quasi-turbulent model in whole domain and the other part solved by using a residual turbulent model in a smaller domain. The two models are implemented simultaneously based on their respective meshes and time steps. Due to this feature, the techniques such as the sub-cycle strategy are employed for the improvement of the efficiency without the deterioration of the accuracy.

In this work, the equations and boundary conditions of the hybrid model for single phase and multiphase flow are derived. Corresponding algorithms and codes are developed using the open-source platform of OpenFOAM. The method is validated by simulating representative cases of flows past stationary and oscillating circular cylinder under various combinations of (Re, A/D, Fr) for single phase and of flows past stationary circular cylinder underneath an air-water interface for multiphase. It is demonstrated that the results of the hybrid model agree well with experimental data and with those obtained by using the original OpenFOAM. The investigation is also carried out on the efficiency of the hybrid model and indicate that the computational time of the hybrid model is significantly less than that of original OpenFOAM to obtain the similar results for the same cases. The investigation also indicates that the higher the Reynolds number, the larger the oscillation amplitude, the more computational time can be saved by using the new hybrid model. In some case, the hybrid model can save 80% of the computational time than using the original OpenFOAM solver.


We present results of optical measurements that yield clear evidence of localized-plasmon resonances of uniformly sized, submicroscopic structures on a continuous metal surface. Reflectance and inelastic-light-scattering spectra were measured for a silver surface that has randomly located projections, or "bumps," 60 nm high and 60 nm wide. The reflectance spectra exhibit two absorption bands corresponding to localized plasmons of the silver bumps, which oscillate in directions parallel and perpendicular to the surface. Addition of Rhodamine-dye molecules to the surface yields marked changes in the reflectance spectra. The intensities of the luminescence and the Raman scattering from the dye layer at the surface increase in approximate proportion to the number density of bumps, confirming the role of these bumps as signal amplifiers in the enhancements of the inelastically scattered light. The intensity and the shape of the luminescence spectra depend on the incident and emitted polarizations in a manner that can be qualitatively understood in terms of the polarization dependence of the localized plasmons.


Animation, defined as a process utilized to suggest motion to image or drawings, has evolved towards different techniques and styles offered by the industry. Its esthetic nature meets a progressive technologization of art and creativity, and therewith it responds to esthetics enrichment not only in animated object, but also in its creation process. The possibility to have an expanded form in techniques and formats has therefore prompted it to explore and to enrich various elements of its visual narrative. One of the most prominent elements has been the application of vertical format, while also acknowledging the consumption of digital content in smartphones. MOJITO LAB of ARPA/BUAP has focused on this technique as a line of research for 2D animation. This article herein presents some areas with considerable interest in the impact of vertical format in animation as follows: 1) The antecedents of vertical format in both still and moving image; 2) the relation between vertical format and digital media generated by smartphones; 3) observations based on the image analysis of 2D animation utilizing vertical format which provides esthetic qualities to visual narrative language of 2D animation.


Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies abandoned public executions in favor of private punishments, primarily confinement in penitentiaries and private executions. The transition, guided by a reconceptualization of the causes of crime, the nature of authority, and the purposes of punishment, embodied the triumph of new sensibilities and the reconstitution of cultural values throughout the Western world. This study examines the conflict over capital punishment in the United States and the way it transformed American culture between the Revolution and the Civil War. Relating the gradual shift in rituals of punishment and attitudes toward discipline to the emergence of a middle class culture that valued internal restraints and private punishments, Masur traces the changing configuration of American criminal justice. He examines the design of execution day in the Revolutionary era as a spectacle of civil and religious order, the origins of organized opposition to the death penalty and the invention of the penitentiary, the creation of private executions, reform organizations' commitment to social activism, and the competing visions of humanity and society lodged at the core of the debate over capital punishment. A fascinating and thoughtful look at a topic that remains of burning interest today, Rites of Execution will attract a wide range of scholarly and general readers.


While three deployed applications of game theory for security have recently been reported, we as a community of agents and AI researchers remain in the early stages of these deployments; there is a continuing need to understand the core principles for innovative security applications of game theory. Towards that end, this paper presents PROTECT, a game-theoretic system deployed by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) in the port of Boston for scheduling their patrols. USCG has termed the deployment of PROTECT in Boston a success, and efforts are underway to test it in the port of New York, with the potential for nationwide deployment. PROTECT is premised on an attacker-defender Stackelberg game model and offers five key innovations. First, this system is a departure from the assumption of perfect adversary rationality noted in previous work, relying instead on a quantal response (QR) model of the adversary's behavior --- to the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world deployment of the QR model. Second, to improve PROTECT's efficiency, we generate a compact representation of the defender's strategy space, exploiting equivalence and dominance. Third, we show how to practically model a real maritime patrolling problem as a Stackelberg game. Fourth, our experimental results illustrate that PROTECT's QR model more robustly handles real-world uncertainties than a perfect rationality model. Finally, in evaluating PROTECT, this paper for the first time provides real-world data: (i) comparison of human-generated vs PROTECT security schedules, and (ii) results from an Adversarial Perspective Team's (human mock attackers) analysis.


Knowledge of the structure of the Earth's atmospheric turbulence is critical for astronomical adaptive optics well as optical communications. Here we present the state of the art Stereo-SCIDAR technique for night time profiling. This high-sensitivity and high-resolution optical turbulence profiler has been in regular operation on La Palma and Paranal. Here we present the instrument, statistics and comparisons with other profiling instruments and numerical forecast models in the context of AO.


Citizenship lies at the heart of democracy and, at present, there are two main ways of thinking about this in Australia. One is based on the idea of cool attachment: citizens should adhere to the procedural rules of the state and should not harbour strong emotional attachments to the nation. The other holds that citizens should do more than simply abide by the procedures; they should think of themselves as belonging to a people. The first view focuses on justice and tolerance, the second on collective identity and a concern for the common good which is nurtured by feeling as well as reason. Proceduralism has more currency among intellectuals and members of the policy elite, while the idea of a national people is probably more popular with the electorate. The current move to legalise dual citizenship illustrates the political dominance of proceduralism.


With the focus on standardized tests, it appears that we are leaving classroom assessments and students at-risk of school failure behind. This quantitative study investigated the perceptions of junior high school teachers, and students at risk of school failure, on the effectiveness and level of use of various classroom assessments and assessment-related strategies. Results of the study showed that statistically significant differences existed between assessments and strategies teachers and students perceived to be effective and what is being used in classrooms. Perhaps we need to evaluate whether adolescents are really at risk or educators are making them at-risk because of their assessment strategies. ********** The middle school years are a pivotal period in adolescents' lives, and assessment plays a critical role in how adolescents perceive themselves and their peers during those middle school years. All children, including those at-risk, can and do learn; therefore, it is a charge of our teachers to be flexible in the methods of instructing and evaluating children to meet the needs of every individual within the schools. Various approaches are used to define at-risk students. Hixon and Tinzmann (1990) stated students who have certain demographic characteristics such as living in a single-parent home, being a member of a minority group, or having limited English proficiency are often considered at-risk, because statistically these students are more likely to be low achievers or drop out of school. Also, students who are performing badly or failing school are at-risk because they are not successful in the "regular" school program and require interventions. Other at-risk factors include frequent absenteeism, retention in one or more grades, severe behavior problems, low ability, low socioeconomic status, and drug and alcohol use. The students at-risk targeted in this study included those of low ability and/or low achievement who were at-risk of failing two or more subjects at the junior high school level, at-risk of failing two or more subjects and exhibited 10% or greater absenteeism, and/or were identified by their teachers as possible future dropouts. They may have been low achievers because they possessed one or more of the risk factors previously stated. School characteristics such as narrow curricula, a focus on lower-level skills, inappropriate instructional strategies, inappropriate materials and resources, over-reliance on standardized test results, tracking, pull-out programs, and beliefs and attitudes toward particular students and their parents have been blamed for students' failure (Hixon & Tinzmann, 1990). Anderman and Maehr (1994) found that students often exhibited a "disturbing downturn" in motivation during the middle grades and that competence and students' expectations for success were higher during the elementary years than during secondary school. They stated that students who experience school-related failure during adolescence might adopt self-schemata that define life goals and life tasks in terms of present failure instead of future possibilities. The same authors (Maehr & Anderman, 1993) suggested, "To an important degree, early adolescence is a make-or-break point for children who have experienced problems with school, other persons, and society" (p.594). Similarly, Eccles and her colleagues (1993) discovered that for some children the middle grade years "mark a downward spiral in school-related behaviors and motivation that often lead to academic failure and dropping out of school" (p. 554). They concluded that the decline in motivation assumed to be characteristic of the adolescent period was less a consequence of the children's developmental stage than of the "mismatch between students' needs and the opportunities afforded them in traditional middle schools" (p.567). Further studies in middle grades (MacIver & Epstein, 1993) showed that the content of the curriculum and the nature of instruction fostered or limited students' feelings of achievement and competence. …


The performance and energy-efficiency advantages of customized architectures are well-known and widely-pursued. To date there has been no systematic basis to balance benefit from specialization with general-purpose coverage, much less to assemble accelerators to collectively support a generalpurpose workload. Our study is a first step to create a systematic basis for heterogeneous architectures, balancing specialization and general-purpose coverage. We analyze a collection of 34 programs drawn from five major benchmark suites and a few independent sources, producing clusters of critical loops based on operation and datatype as well as three dimensions of memory behavior. Computational characteristics of each cluster are an opportunity for customized architecture. The operation and datatype analysis produces 25 multi-loop clusters, corresponding to over 90% of the computations. Memory behavior studies produce a similar number of clusters. The clusters can be exploited individually, or in groups, enabling specialization to be traded systematically against generality as proposed in Borkar and Chien's "10x10" [9], influencing choices of accelerators, accelerator breadth, and ensembles of accelerators (in an SoC). For several clusters, we discuss examples of how they might be exploited architecturally for improved performance or energy efficiency. The fact that there are a reasonable number of clusters and that these clusters span multiple application domains, demonstrates that architecture design need not cater to each domain individually, and bodes well for 10x10 research. We also show that the clusters are coherent, distinct, stable and that the applications are a good representation of general-purpose workloads.


SUMMARY

Relationships between seed moisture content (fresh weight basis) and germination were examined for nine Araucaria species by desiccation under mild environmental conditions. The lowest safe moisture content, below which germination percentage begins to decline, was estimated in each case. Seeds can be grouped into three moisture content categories: the first group (including A. araucana, A. angustifolia, A. hunsteinii and A. bidwillii) cannot be safely dried to below 25–40%; the second group (including A. columnaris, A. rulei, A. nemorosa and A. scopulorum) cannot be dried to below about 12% without damage; the third category contains A. cunninghamii, which can be dried to 2% without damage.

Seeds in the first group should be stored at 0–5 °C with moisture contents above the lowest-safe value. Provided freezing damage does not exceed 10%, seeds in the second group should be kept at - 18°C or lower with about 7% moisture content for long-term storage and at 0–5 °C with about 12% moisture content in the short term. Seed of A. cunninghamii is best retained at near 5% moisture content and in -18°C or lower.

The lowest-safe moisture content was found to be associated with seed size and weight, higher moisture content values coinciding with greater size and weight of seed. Food reserve materials also differed among the groups; seeds of the first group were mainly starchy, whilst those in the other categories possessed a high lipid content.


A varifocal micromirror is designed and fabricated using silicon micromachining technology. A spherical convex surface of mirror is generated by applying a bending moment to the circumference of micromirror. This method is different from the conventional technique in which a distributed force is exerted on the central area of mirror. On the basis of the theory of materials strength, the deformation of a plate is purely spherical if only a bending moment is applied to the circumference. Spherical surface is well approximated to be a parabola if deflection is small. In order to generate only a bending moment, a force is applied to the plate in the region outside the fulcrum, by which the plate is supported freely in rotation. The proposed mirror was fabricated from a silicon on insulator wafer and a glass plate, which were connected by anodic bonding. The deviation in surface profile of mirror from a parabola was measured with an optical interferometer to be less than 4.7 nm rms in the mirror region inside the 400-mum-diameter fulcrum at the voltage lower than 215 V. The focal length of the fabricated mirror was varied from approximate infinity to 24 mm.


The use of CPPs (cell-penetrating peptides) as delivery vectors for bioactive molecules has been an emerging field since 1994 when the first CPP, penetratin, was discovered. Since then, several CPPs, including the widely used Tat (transactivator of transcription) peptide, have been developed and utilized to translocate a wide range of compounds across the plasma membrane of cells both in vivo and in vitro. Although the field has emerged as a possible future candidate for drug delivery, little attention has been given to the potential toxic side effects that these peptides might exhibit in cargo delivery. Also, no comprehensive study has been performed to evaluate the relative efficacy of single CPPs to convey different cargos. Therefore we selected three of the major CPPs, penetratin, Tat and transportan 10, and evaluated their ability to deliver commonly used cargos, including fluoresceinyl moiety, double-stranded DNA and proteins (i.e. avidin and streptavidin), and studied their effect on membrane integrity and cell viability. Our results demonstrate the unfeasibility to use the translocation efficacy of fluorescein moiety as a gauge for CPP efficiency, since the delivery properties are dependent on the cargo used. Furthermore, and no less importantly, the toxicity of CPPs depends heavily on peptide concentration, cargo molecule and coupling strategy.


Neoclassical economic theory seems to aptly characterize contract law's essence. Contracts enable two parties to reach a mutually beneficial agreement, thereby facilitating economically efficient transactions. It would seem to follow that the achievement of economic efficiency serves as contract law's major goal.This article, however, examines an alternative hypothesis, that contract law is about enforcing inefficient bargains in order to provide enough security to facilitate cooperation among economic actors over long periods of time. On this account, contract law manages change over time, rather than achieves static efficiency. While recognizing that parties execute contracts in order to realize an efficient exchange, this article argues that contract law exists largely to enforce bargains that have become inefficient over time. It argues that inefficient contract law performs important macroeconomic functions in stimulating economic growth. The analysis developing this tension between efficient contracting and inefficient contract law casts some doubt on a major rationale for making efficiency the dominant goal for contract law. It also adds an important dimension to the existing explanation of the scholarly literature's many inconsistencies in conclusions about the efficiency of contract rules. Finally, it helps explains the major exceptions to the rule that courts enforce inefficient contracts found in doctrines of impossibility and impracticability. This article endorses an economic dynamic approach to contact law in light of the tension between efficient contracting and inefficient contract law and describes the components of an economic dynamic analysis rooted in institutional economics. It shows that some of our leading scholars have already tacitly employed this approach effectively to shed new light on contract law.


In this paper, I will defend two methodological theses, one negative and one positive, about how to develop a holistic theory of content for mental representations that avoids a problem peculiar to holistic theories, viz., the problem of content instability. The relevant debate between holists and anti-holists has focused on whether this problem provides an in principle barrier to developing a plausible holistic theory. On this front, the holists have won; defenders of holistic theories have convincingly argued that the anti-holists do not have a cogent argument from the problem of content instability to the impossibility of developing a plausible holistic theory. However, beyond this, little has been said about how to develop a holistic theory that avoids the problematic consequences of content instability; all that has been established is that it appears to be, in principle, possible to do so. This paper should contribute to making progress in this area. The two theses I will defend are about how to generate useful constraints on holistic theories so that they avoid content instability. The negative thesis of this paper is that the strategy of generating constraints suggested by the holists' response to anti-holist arguments, viz., appealing to properties of theories' determination functions, is a non-starter. The positive thesis of this paper is that the best way to develop useful stability constraints is to appeal to the explanatory role(s) that representations play in cognitive science theories.


This study was initiated to determine under field conditions the feasibility of using soil as a medium for the renovation of acid mine drainage water. Acid water from a stream was applied weekly at three levels (0, 12.5, and 25 cm/week) to an unlimed and a limed (20 metric tons/ha) floodplain soil. Soil water samples were collected weekly at soil depths of 25, 75, and 130 cm. The soil water samples and the acid water were analyzed for pH, total acidity, Al, Fe, Mn, K, Ca, Mg, Na, and SO/sub 4/. The effect of liming, levels of acid water irrigation, and depth in the soil profile on the soil water quality were determined. Initially both the unlimed and limed areas had considerable capacity for renovating the applied acid water. However, with time, lower pH values and higher levels of acidity, Al, Fe, and Mn were found at the 25- and 75-cm soil depths in the unlimed areas. When the soil was limed, the soil water at the 25-cm depth was nearly neutral or alkaline throughout the study and practically devoid of Al, Fe, and Mn. At the 130-cm depth on both unlimed and limed areas the pH, total acidity, Al,more » Fe, and Mn of the soil water remained relatively unchanged even after 525 cm of acid water had been applied. Growth of ryegrass and tall fescue was not adversely affected by irrigation with the acid water, but was significantly increased by liming. Only the tall fescue yielded significantly more with increased levels of acid water irrigation.« less


Objective Participants in the Atherosclerosis Prevention in Paediatric Lupus Erythematosus (APPLE) trial were randomised to placebo or atorvastatin for 36 months. The primary endpoint, reduced carotid intima medial thickness (CIMT) progression, was not met but atorvastatin-treated participants showed a trend of slower CIMT progression. Post-hoc analyses were performed to assess subgroup benefit from atorvastatin therapy. Methods Subgroups were prespecified and defined by age (> or ≤15.5 years), systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) duration (> or ≤24 months), pubertal status (Tanner score ≥4 as post-pubertal or <4 as pre-pubertal), low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL) (≥ or <110 mg/dl) and high-sensitivity C reactive protein (hsCRP) (≥ or <1.5 mg/l). A combined subgroup (post-pubertal and hsCRP≥1.5 mg/l) was compared to all others. Longitudinal linear mixed-effects models were developed using 12 CIMT and other secondary APPLE outcomes (lipids, hsCRP, disease activity and damage, and quality of life). Three way interaction effects were assessed for models. Results Significant interaction effects with trends of less CIMT progression in atorvastatin-treated participants were observed in pubertal (3 CIMT segments), high hsCRP (2 CIMT segments), and the combined high hsCRP and pubertal group (5 CIMT segments). No significant treatment effect trends were observed across subgroups defined by age, SLE duration, LDL for CIMT or other outcome measures. Conclusions Pubertal status and higher hsCRP were linked to lower CIMT progression in atorvastatin-treated subjects, with most consistent decreases in CIMT progression in the combined pubertal and high hsCRP group. While secondary analyses must be interpreted cautiously, results suggest further research is needed to determine whether pubertal lupus patients with high CRP benefit from statin therapy. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00065806.


With the exponential growth of DNA sequences in the past twenty years, it has became ineffective to analyze DNA sequences only through the traditional biological experiments. Various mathematical methods and computer algorithms are applied to sequence analyses and related research areas, which help the biological study to be upgraded into automatic programming from manual operation. Especially, there are two important research areas to study DNA sequences in bioinformatics. One is to predict the coding regions on DNA sequences, another is to determine the evolutionary relationship based on DNA sequences. In this thesis, two mathematical methods are introduced to show our achievements in these two research areas respectively.

In chapter two, we introduce a simple parameter called TICOR (Threshold to Identify Coding Region) to distinguish the coding regions from non-coding regions. The method only takes the linear computation time which is much better than those of Fourier Transform and other methods. Moreover, we are able to estimate the proportion of coding regions to the length of the whole DNA sequence simply basing on the parameter TICOR. Finally, we develop a novel method to predict the coding regions from DNA sequences, which we call TICORSCAN. We do the test on the ROSETTA dataset with our TICORSCAN method and other popular method, such as GENSCAN and TWINSCAN. The prediction accuracy shows that our TICORSCAN method is able to predict the coding regions more efficiently.
Secondly, we report a novel mathematical method to transform the DNA sequences into the distribution vectors in chapter three. The distribution vectors correspond to points in the sixty dimensional Euclidean space. Each component of the distribution vectors represents the distribution of one kind of nucleotide in k segments of the DNA sequence. The statistical properties of the distribution vectors are demonstrated and examined with huge datasets of human DNA sequences and random sequences. The determined expectation and standard deviation can make the mapping stable and practicable. Moreover, we apply the distribution vectors to the clustering of the mitochondrial complete genomes from 80 placental mammals and the gene Haemagglutinin (HA) of 60 H1N1 viruses from Human, Swine and Avian. The 80 mammals and 60 H1N1 viruses are classified accurately and rapidly compared to the multiple sequence alignment methods. The results indicate that the distribution vectors can reveal the similarity and evolutionary relationship among homologous DNA sequences based on the distances between any two of these distribution vectors. The advantage of fast computation offers the distribution vectors the opportunity to deal with the huge amount of DNA sequences efficiently.


Studies in African countries have shown an association between irrigation projects and the spread of schistosomiasis mansoni and haematobium. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential association between irrigation levels and the occurrence and spread of Schistosoma mansoni infection in the State of Bahia. Two forms of irrigation were developed in the State of Bahia: the first is capital-intensive and mechanized, requiring little manual labor. The second is labor-intensive and characterized by limited mechanization. According to the study, the municipalities with the largest irrigated areas are not the ones with the highest S. mansoni infection rates. In most of these counties, irrigation is capital- and technology intensive. According to the findings, unlike Africa, in the State of Bahia irrigation has had little impact on the spatial profile of the schistosomiasis endemic.


This paper presents a multicell converter topology composed of N single-phase power cells per phase and a multipulse power transformer. The topology achieves high-power-quality waveforms in three-phase applications under the presence of severe unbalanced ac mains. Moreover, the power cells are properly arranged in order to achieve high-performance ac supply current waveforms under asymmetrical loads. The configuration is based on single-phase power cells that feature a pulsewidth-modulation rectifier in order to achieve an overall unitary displacement power factor and a controlled dc-link voltage at the power-cell level. The configuration is implemented, and different experimental tests are performed where unbalance and distortion indexes are computed.


This article discusses the moral principles underlying the idea of humanitarian intervention. The analysis is in two parts, one historical and the other philosophical. First, the article examines arguments made in late medieval and early modern Europe for using armed force to punish the violation of natural law and to defend communities from tyranny and oppression, regardless of where they occur. It seeks to understand how moralists writing before the emergence of modern international law conceived what we now call humanitarian intervention. In the context of international law, humanitarian intervention is usually understood to be an exception to the nonintervention principle. However, the natural law tradition regards international law as less important than the moral imperative to punish wrongs and protect the innocent. Second, the article considers how humanitarian intervention is justified within the reformulation of the natural law tradition displayed in recent efforts to theorize morality along Kantian lines. In this reformulation, humanitarian intervention is a product of the duty of beneficence and, more specifically, of the right to use force to protect the innocent. The article draws upon the biblical injunction "Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor," which has become a centerpiece of the modern reformulation, and briefly explores its application to humanitarian intervention in the context of international relations today. This reformulation of natural law explains why, despite modern efforts to make it illegal, humanitarian intervention remains, in principle, morally defensible.


Guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) permits candidates to receive a cochlear implant provided they only hear sounds louder than 90 dB HL at 2 and 4 kHz. In some patients, their level of residual hearing may be sufficient to warrant the use of a hearing aid in their non-implanted ear. A survey of unilaterally implanted adults indicated that those implanted since the publication of NICE guidance were almost seven times more likely to use a hearing aid than those implanted prior to this. If contralateral hearing aid use provides additional benefits over implant use alone, it may be appropriate to consider the capacity to use residual hearing following implantation when determining candidacy.


Aims: To evaluate the effect of topical application of ketamine gel )0.5%( and gel alone)without ketamine( on salivary and serum level of human interlukin-6)IL-6 (in patient with recurrent aphthous ulceration )RAU( and compare the results with control group having no RAU. Materials and methods: The investigation was carried out on)36( subjects with mean ± SD ages )25.11±6.31(years and different sex )20 males,16 females(. These subjects were divided into three groups. Group1: The study group consisted of )12(patients having minor RAU received topical ketamine gel )0.5%( applied on the lesion. Group2: The placebo group consisted of )12(patients having minor RAU received topical gel alone. Group3: The control group consisted of )12( healthy subjects having no RAU.Peripheral venous blood and saliva samples were collected from all subjects before treatment, and four days after treatment from group1and group2 only, to assess the levels of serum and salivary )IL-6( by Enzyme Linked Immuno Sorbent Assays )ELISA( method. Patients were subjectively assessed for the intensity of pain which was recorded pre and four days post treatment in group1 and 2 by using Verbal Pain Scale )VPS(. Data were analyzed using paired t-test, One way ANOVA and Willcoxon Signed Ranks test. Results: The results showed that the mean of serum IL-6 concentrations were high in the study and placebo groups )18.49±5.4pg/ml( and )18.97± 7,47 pg/ml( respectively before treatment comparing with mean of serum IL-6 concentration of control group )9.63±2.77pg/ml(, and the mean of salivary IL-6 concentrations were high in the study and placebo groups )63.03±47.28pg/ml( and )62.25±45.14pg/ml( respectively before treatment comparing with mean of saliva IL-6 concentration of control group )13.1±5.08pg/ml(.


How order can emerge spontaneously from a disordered system has always fascinated scientists from numerous disciplines. Especially in active systems like flocks animals, self-propelled microorganisms or the cytoskeleton, a unifying understanding of the pattern formation remains elusive. This is attributed to the inherent complexity of most model systems that prevents a thorough identification of the fundamental mechanisms that are responsible for the intriguing self-organizing phenomena in active systems. Here we show that long ranged hydrodynamic interactions play a crucial role in the pattern forming mechanisms in the high density motility assay, a precisely controllable minimal model system consisting of highly concentrated filaments that are driven on the nanoscale. Stability and size of the patterns depend on long ranged hydrodynamic interactions that are self-induced by the coherently moving filaments. The hydrodynamic interactions not only influence the spatial and temporal scale of the patterns but also affect the dynamics of a particular cluster in close proximity to confining boundaries or other surrounding clusters.


The sustainable development discourse has significantly shaped the way planners talk about planning problems and their potential solutions. Drawing upon an analysis of Western Australian planning between 1990 and 2004, this paper argues that the mainstreaming of sustainability ideas has had more impact on policy-making processes than on the substantive content of planning strategies. In Western Australia sustainability has become a discursive device for advocating compact city policies and collaborative approaches to policymaking. This discourse was adopted for strategic reasons to frame preferred policy options that represented what policymakers viewed as 'good' planning decisions and also to share responsibility with communities for addressing planning problems.


About the book:
A Practical Guide to Teaching Music in the Secondary School provides valuable support, guidance and creative ideas for student teachers, mentors and practising teachers who want to develop their music teaching. Written to accompany the successful textbook Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School , it will help you understand important current developments and explore new possibilities for teaching and learning. Focusing on teaching music musically, the book explores musical learning through placing pupils at the centre of a musical experience. Considering the revised KS3 curriculum and the 14-19 agenda in music, it also seeks to broaden the perspectives of music teachers through engaging with collaborative practice, transitions and cross-curricular work. Key issues explored include: personalising musical learning; teaching creatively and promoting creativity; approaches to using ICT in the classroom; musical collaboration with other adults; assessment for learning in music; making connections with other subjects.
Using practical examples and tasks, this book will help you critically examine the way in which children learn music. It is an invaluable resource for those involved in teaching music who are seeking to develop their practical and theoretical understanding.


This paper focuses on the efficient allocation of TAS resources from a machine manufacturer perspective, in order to give service to a large number of customers geographically dispersed using Discrete Event Simulation (DES). The developed model suggests the most efficient solution in terms of number of technicians and TAS location in order to maximize the availability of the machinery network and minimize the cost. Due to the high number of machines to be served by the TAS unit (over 500 machines), clustering has been used as an initial simplification method in order to model an affordable and manageable number of group of machines.


From simple molar mass disperse homopolymers over copolymers to functionalized, 3-dimensional structures containing various distributions, the complexity of polymeric materials has become more and more sophisticated in recent years. With applications in medicine, pharmacy, smart materials or for the semiconductor industry the requirements for the characterization have risen with the complexity of the used polymers. For each additional distribution, an additional dimension in analysis is needed. Small, often isobaric heterogeneities in topology or microstructure can usually not be simply separated chromatographically or distinguished by any common detector. Instead of a complicated, time consuming and/or expensive 2d-chromatography or ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) method, that also has its limitations, here a simple approach using size exclusion chromatography (SEC) coupled with electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI) is proposed. We used SEC for the separation because unlike other separation modes the separation in this mode solely should occur due to the hydrodynamic volume with no interference of other interactions. This simplifies the interpretation and the above mentioned heterogeneities should show a slight difference in hydrodynamic volume. ESI mass spectrometry can offer more than an access to mass dependent information like MMD, end group masses or CCD in polymer analysis. The online coupling to SEC allows the analysis of reconstructed ion chromatograms (RIC) of each degree of polymerization. While a complete separation often cannot be achieved, the derived retention times and peak widths lead to information on the existence and dispersity of heterogeneities in microstructure or topology, that are otherwise inaccessible or accessible only by time consuming or expensive methods. Because these heterogeneities might vary with the molar mass, analysis of the whole MMD-Peak (here the total ion current (TIC)) would not lead to the desired information. The broadening of the chromatographic peaks in this case does not origin from the already well known band broadening factors in chromatography from diffusion. This band broadening is attributed to the nature and composition of the analyte itself. Surprisingly there is very little investigation into the peak width or peak shape due to analyte structure itself found in literature. It is also shown, that with proper calibration even quantitative information could be obtained. This method is suitable to detect small differences in e. g. branching, topology, monomer sequence or tacticity and could potentially be used in production control of oligomeric products or other routinely done analyses to quickly indicate deviations from set parameters. Based on a variety of examples we demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of this approach.


Abstract Objectives: The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy and tolerability of 20% trichloroacetic acid (TCA) peel with 15% azelaic acid gel, a standard antiacne topical treatment. Materials and methods: 51 patients aged between 16-40 years, with mild and moderate acne, were randomized into two groups. Before the treatment were investigated the patients clinical features and hygienic habits, the previous antiacne treatments and feed-back to them. No cases under treatment with contraceptive pills or antiacne medication that could interfere with the results, were included. For a period of eight weeks, 27 patients (group A) were treated with 15% azelaic acid gel, twice daily, and 24 patients (group B) underwent four sessions of 20% TCA peels, at 14 days interval. The efficacy was evaluated by acne lesions counting, at baseline and at 8 weeks. Adverse effects incidence (erythema, local skin irritation), as well as the satisfaction degree of patients, were investigated. Results: Was observed a mean reduction in the number of acne lesions of 32,36% for the group A and 69,36% for the group B. There was no statistically significant difference between the average number of acne lesions before treatment between the two groups. The mean number of acne lesions after the treatment was significantly different (p<0,0001), 20% TCA peels showed superior results than 15% azelaic acid gel. Additionally, 96% of patients who underwent TCA peels were very satisfied with the results obtained. Conclusions: TCA peel is an efficient and well tolerated method for the treatment of acne vulgaris.


This paper briefly summarizes the implementation of a university-wide electronic portfolio requirement. We begin with a systemic view of the ePortfolio Program and narrow our focus to a view of ePortfolio integration into two different classes. The rationale behind the Clemson University ePortfolio Program is to build a mechanism through which core competencies are demonstrated and evaluated. The target classes are a general education English class focusing on 20th and 21st century literature and a professional development seminar in computer science. Both classes allow students to select their topics and present their work to the class using a variety of media types, and both include a form of peer evaluation. These classes confirm that when students' choice is built into the assignments we are pleasantly surprised by the outcomes. In addition, an extensive variety of artifacts are generated from each course that can be used to demonstrate the general education competencies, provide authentic evidence of learning, and generate a career portfolio. In our examples, we will describe the planning, implementation, and dissemination processes necessary to integrate the ePortfolio Program into university courses.


This paper surveys the main features of Portuguese economic growth in the last half century, with a particular emphasis on the period after the return to democracy in 1974. It shows that significant structural change and capital deepening were the chief sources of growth in the Portuguese economy until the mid 1970s. From then onwards, human capital accumulation and productivity growth were the main reasons behind Portugal's economic fortunes. Growth declined between these two phases, as in the rest of Europe. In Portugal, it slowed further after 1990. After surveying the main causes of the slowdown of the Portuguese economy in the last decade, Portugal's main human capital indicators are compared to other European and OECD economies. While Portugal has made a remarkable transition from an agrarian society to an industry- and service-based economy, the country still has not been able to successfully move on to a knowledge-based economy. Such a transition, however, is instrumental to spur economic growth on and to improve productivity.


The concept of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) being adopted by Government is a positive move towards economic development. SEZs are areas granted special privileges in a country specifically for economic development through foreign business persons to invest into that country. The privileges include special investment policies such as tax easing, financial support and issuance of work permits and special support in infrastructure. Major businesses which usually fall under SEZs are manufacturing, agriculture, commerce, tourism. If implemented accordingly, they assist in employment creation and economic development. There is need to ensure that laws and regulations which address issues of gender, working conditions, human rights and security are well expounded and put into place to avoid their failure. It should be noted that creation of SEZs should not be viewed as a substitute for the country's large trade and investments reforms as these may lead to total failure of trade policy.<br>


Modern distribution system operators are facing a changing scenery due to the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, introducing new challenges to system operation. In order to ensure secure system operation at a low cost, centralized and decentralized operational schemes are used to optimally dispatch these units. This paper proposes a decentralized, real-time, operation scheme for the optimal dispatch of distributed energy resources in the absence of extensive monitoring and communication infrastructure. This scheme uses an offline, centralized, optimal operation algorithm, with historical information, to generate a training dataset consisting of various operating conditions and corresponding distributed energy resources optimal decisions. Then, this dataset is used to design the individual local controllers for each unit with the use of machine learning techniques. The performance of the proposed method is tested on a low-voltage distribution network and is compared against centralized and existing decentralized methods.


Cloud computing aims to give users virtually unlimited pay-per-use computing resources without the burden of managing the underlying infrastructure. We present a new job execution environment Flextic that exploits scalable static scheduling techniques to provide the user with a flexible pricing model, such as a tradeoff between different degrees of execution speed and execution price, and at the same time, reduce scheduling overhead for the cloud provider. We have evaluated a prototype of Flextic on Amazon EC2 and compared it against Hadoop. For various data parallel jobs from machine learning, image processing, and gene sequencing that we considered, Flextic has low scheduling overhead and reduces job duration by up to 15% compared to Hadoop, a dynamic cloud scheduler.


The analysis of Baltic regional trade patterns reveals that during the nineties the Baltic states made significant progress to integrate into the Western European division of labour although a significant share of (transit) trade with Russia remained. In view of this development, history seems to matter with respect to the interwar period and the period of Soviet occupation. In addition, a trade entropy analysis and gravity model estimates show that European integration of the Baltic states has a regional centre of gravity located in the Baltic Sea region. The Baltic trade flows increasingly follow the gravitational forces that generally shape trade relations, while regional integration is still much more important than it is normally the case.


The Iranian Jews, one of Iran's oldest religious minorities, have been either neglected, or generally portrayed as outcasts and misfits, in both classical and modern Persian literature. They have been otherwise depicted as the "other" in the process of defining the Iranian "self" image. The stereotyping of members of religious minorities, characteristic of the religious prejudices of the Iranian society informed works of a numbers of Iranian classical poets. In fact the image of the Jew in the traditional Persian literature was as a whole consistent with the social status of the Jewish minority in Islamic Iran. With the establishment of the Safavid dynasty, when Shi'ism became the official religion of the state, the non-muslim members of the society were regarded with greater contempt than ever before.
By the end of the 19th century, an new ideological tendency, that of nationalism tinged with an ethnic awareness of the pre-Islamic history of Iran, heightened the anti-Arab and indeed anti-semitic sentiments in Iran. Mirza Agha Khan Kirmani was the first secular and modernist Iranian writer to echo such sentiments. A generation later, Sadeq Hedayat expressed similar anti-semitic views in a number of his works where the Jews are stereotyped as the miser, the ugly, the non-Iranians forever engaged in conspiring against the Aryans. Similar portrayals are found in the works of Sadeq Chubak where the Jew, although no longer viewed in religious or racial terms, is nonetheless entitled no more than a negative image.
Thus, while the "self" and the "other" have been continuously reconstructed, redefined and re-examined, in Iranian society, the Iranian Jew has remained the subject of popular and literary contempt, and has been denied recognition as a fellow Iranian. Even in modern Persian literature, where the ideas of tolerance and human diversity seem to have taken root, the portrayal of the Jew has not gone beyond old stereotypes.


The Singapore Story is the first volume of the memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, the man who planted the island state of Singapore firmly on the map of the world. It was first published in 1999. In intimate detail, Lee recounts the battles against colonialists, communists and communalists that led to Singapore's independence. With consummate political skill, he countered adversaries, sometimes enlisting their help, at others opposing them, in the single-minded pursuit of Singapore's interests. We read how he led striking unionists against the colonial government, how over tea and golf he fostered ties with key players in Britain and Malaya, of secret midnight meetings in badly lit rooms, drinking warm Anchor beer with a communist underground leader, of his purposeful forging of an alliance with communists to gain the support of the Chinese-educated masses. Readers will find inspiration in his tenacity as he fought for the people's hearts and minds against first the communists and later the communalists – in parliament, on the streets and through the media.

 Drawing on unpublished Cabinet papers, archives in Singapore, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, as well as personal correspondence, he gives us a vivid picture of how others viewed him: determined ("Lee will bluff, bully and blackmail up to the eleventh hour"), motivated ("Choo knew I sweated blood to master Hokkien"), ambitious ("He would think himself as legitimate as I was to be the leader of Malaya"), dangerous ("Crush Lee! Put him inside"). It is a sometimes controversial yet strangely consistent portrait of this Asian statesman. These experiences and his dealings with the political leaders were to shape his views and policies, which have had a major impact on Singapore and the region.


ABSTRACT
Elementary concept of accountability relied on classification of responsibilitas manajerial at every level in organization with aim to for the execution of activity at every shares. Each individual at every overall accountable aparatur to the each;every executed activity at its shares. By going into effect Law Number 32 Year 2004 about Governance of Area, hence there are some strategic
consideration at the opposite of autonomous concept of area in makeup of participation, feel and accountable of society, acceleration of development, democratization etcetera. In its management of Government of Town of Blitar
have obligation in responsibility of governance of area according to section 27 sentence (2) Law Number 32 Year 2004.
This Formula research internal issue is how constraints and procedure faced in execution of governmental institution performance accountability, and also what supporter factors in execution of governmental institution performance
accountability in Part Of Governmental Law of Town of Blitar.
Source of data in this research is the following primary data of obtained data is direct the than first source that is from Part Of Governmental Law of Town of Blitar, and data of secunder as development of primary data for example
including documents / regulation archives at Government of Town of Blitar etcetera, with technique analyse data in descriptive research qualitative.
Pursuant to result of research which have is to be obtained by result and concluded as follows : Process compilation of plan activity of budget, at executive storey; level conducted by gradual or in phases and do not make a change drastic, as for its its by modification need. Medium process solution at legislative storey; level of society feel not yet got adequate sosialiasai in course of evaluation and solution result of activity which have been executed by part of Governmental law of Town of Blitar. Factors Supporter in execution of planning of performance
until reporting of performance result and also evaluation result of performance report which have been executed for example in environmental and internal environment of eksternal. Suggestion in research is as follows : device and
planning of APBD require to be conducted by aspiration network and socialization to society.


Radio‐frequency electromagnetic tomography (or radio imaging method) employs radio‐frequency (typically 0.1–10 MHz) electromagnetic wave propagation to delineate the distribution of electric properties between two boreholes. Currently, the straight‐ray imaging method is the primary imaging method for the radio imaging method data acquired for mineral exploration. We carried out synthetic studies using three‐dimensional finite‐element modelling implemented in COMSOL Multiphysics to study the electromagnetic field characteristics and to assess the capability of the straight‐ray imaging method using amplitude and phase data separately. We studied four sets of experiments with models of interest in the mining setting. In the first two experiments, we studied models with perfect conductors in homogeneous backgrounds, which show that the characteristics of the electromagnetic fields depend mainly on the wavelength. When the borehole separations are less than one wavelength, induction effects occur; conductors with simple geometries can be recovered acceptably with amplitude data but are incorrectly imaged on the phase tomogram. When the borehole separations are longer than two wavelengths, radiation effects play a major role. In this case, phase tomography provides images with acceptable quality, whereas amplitude tomography does not provide satisfactory results. The third experiment shows that imaging with both original and reciprocal datasets is somewhat helpful in improving the imaging quality by reducing the impact of noise. In the last experiment, we studied models with conductive zones extended into the borehole plane with different lengths, which were not accurately recovered with amplitude tomography. The experiment implies that it is difficult to determine the extent of a mineralised zone that has been intersected by one of the boreholes. Due to the large variation of the wavelength in the radio‐frequency range, we suggest investigating the local electric properties to select an operating frequency prior to a survey. We conclude that straight‐ray tomography with either amplitude or phase data cannot provide high‐quality imaging results. We suggest using more general methods based on full electromagnetic modelling to interpret the data. In circumstances when computational time is critical, we suggest saving time by using either induction methods for borehole separations less than one wavelength or wave‐based methods (only radiation fields are considered) for borehole separation larger than two wavelengths.


Bureaucracies are dynamic and interactive sociocultural worlds that drive knowledge production, power inequalities and subsequent social struggle, and violence. The authors featured in this special section mobilize their ethnographic data to examine bureaucracies as animated spaces where violence, whether physical, structural, or symbolic, manifests in everyday bureaucratic practices and relationships. The articles span geographic contexts (e.g., United States, Canada, Chile, Eritrea) and topics (e.g., migration, extractive economies, law and sociolegal change, and settler colonialism) but are bound together in their investigation of the violence of the administration of decisions, care, and control through bureaucratic means.


Recent work has shown that architectural isolation can be violated through software side channel attacks that exploit microarchitectural performance optimizations such as speculation to leak secrets. While turning off microarchitectural optimizations can preclude some classes of attacks, we argue that performance and security do not have be in conflict, provided processors are designed with security in mind. We espouse a principled approach to eliminating entire attack surfaces through microarchitectural isolation, rather than plugging attack-specific privacy leaks. We argue that minimal modifications to hardware can defend against all currently-practical side channel attacks and without significant performance impact. As an application of this approach, we describe the Sanctum processor architecture that offers strong provable isolation of software modules running concurrently and sharing resources, and Sanctoom, a speculative, out-of-order variant with similar properties. These processors provide isolation even when large parts of the operating system are compromised, and their open-source implementations allow security properties to be independently verified. Biography Srini Devadas is the Webster Professor of EECS at MIT where he has been on the faculty since 1988. His current research interests are in computer security, computer architecture and applied cryptography. Devadas received the 2017 IEEE W. Wallace McDowell award and the 2018 IEEE Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement award for his research in secure hardware. He is the author of "Programming for the Puzzled" (MIT Press, 2017), a book that builds a bridge between the recreational world of algorithmic puzzles and the pragmatic world of computer programming, teaching readers to program while solving puzzles. Devadas is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, an Everett Moore Baker and a Bose award recipient, considered MIT's highest teaching honors. 275 2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC) DOI 10.1109/HiPC.2018.00038


ABSTRACT The Western Whipbird (Psophodes nigrogularis) has a highly disjunct west–east distribution across southern Australia. Earlier morphological analyses recognised four subspecies in one species: P. n. nigrogularis and P. n. oberon in south-west Western Australia, and P. n. leucogaster of the Eyre and Yorke Peninsulas and the Murray Mallee, and P. n. lashmari, restricted to Kangaroo Island, both in eastern Australia. Later morphological analyses elevated P. n. nigrogularis to monotypic species rank, and placed the remaining western and two eastern taxa as three subspecies of a second species P. leucogaster. Initial mtDNA analysis questioned both arrangements but could not include all taxa. We used mtDNA sequence data from all available specimens of the entire group (DNA extracted from cryo-preserved tissues, toe-pads and feathers; holotypes excepted) to derive a more stable view of species limits. The samples fell into two strongly divergent but geographically structured groups, completely reflecting the eastern and western components of the distribution. Thus we see merit in treating the two geographical groupings as two species, P. nigrogularis in the west and P. leucogaster in the east, each having two subspecies. Nuclear data could test whether the two western subspecies in particular are genetically isolated or currently exchanging genes.


This year marks an historic chapter in the story of international aid. On 24 October 2020, it will be 50 years since high-income countries committed to spending 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) on aid to low- and middle-income countries.  This paper examines how aid has helped to improve the wellbeing of people in low- and middle-income countries. It discusses how donors' broken promises on the 0.7% target have limited the potential of aid to reduce poverty and inequality. Oxfam has calculated that in the 50 years since the 0.7% promise was made, high-income countries have failed to deliver a total of $5.7 trillion in aid. Finally, this paper reflects on the future of aid.


A leading strategy in international efforts to reverse ongoing losses in biodiversity is the use of protected areas. We use a broad range of data and a review of the literature to show that the effectiveness of existing, and the current pace of the establishment of new, protected areas will not be able to overcome current trends of loss of marine and terrestrial biodiversity. Despite local suc- cesses of well-designed and well-managed protected areas proving effective in stemming biodiver- sity loss, there are significant shortcomings in the usual process of implementation of protected areas that preclude relying on them as a global solution to this problem. The shortcomings include techni- cal problems associated with large gaps in the coverage of critical ecological processes related to individual home ranges and propagule dispersal, and the overall failure of such areas to protect against the broad range of threats affecting ecosystems. Practical issues include budget constraints, conflicts with human development, and a growing human population that will increase not only the extent of anthropogenic stressors but the difficulty in successfully enforcing protected areas. While efforts towards improving and increasing the number and/or size of protected areas must continue, there is a clear and urgent need for the development of additional solutions for biodiversity loss, par- ticularly ones that stabilize the size of the world's human population and our ecological demands on biodiversity.


The Staff Performance Management System (SPMS) was introduced and implemented in the public service at the start of the 2003/2004 financial year. Apart from being called to align with the Constitution and other relevant acts, it signalled a change in approach and philosophy to measure performance. One of the aims of this new system was to assist in communicating and reinforcing the organisation strategies, values and norms and to integrate individual and corporate objectives. It also aims to ensure that employees are evaluated in terms of a system that is fair, objective, transparent and which provides equitable rewards and recognition. Prior to the implementation of the system it was envisaged that the SPMS should be a system that is characterised by the following: • Managers/supervisors provide leadership and integrate performance with other aspects of their work by accepting primary responsibility to manage the people entrusted to them. • Employees understand that their performance directly contribute to the ongoing success or the organisation. • Individual employees have a full understanding of their work responsibilities and the standards of work expected of them. • Individual employees receive regular and structured feedback on their performance. • Valued performance is recognised and rewarded. However, when the system was implemented no norms and standards were developed against which performance of staff at the Gene Louw Traffic College could be managed. The focal point of this study was to collect data on the current practices of the SPMS as implemented at the Gene Louw Traffic College in order to analyse the data and to identify possible challenges. The key question that stimulated this study is – How can the SPMS be improved to prevent low morale? Recommendations are made regarding the proper implementation of the system, development of norms and standards, SPMS training and incentives in order to alleviate low morale and inefficient performance.


Abstract This article describes a system used for embedding of tissues for the preparation of frozen sections. This novel system uses simple techniques and apparatus to accomplish face-down embedding in freezing-temperature steel wells. The system is easy to learn and offers many advantages over conventional methods, including speed, high precision and predictability, and reduced tissue wastage. The system is easily adapted in most existing cryostats, uses no additional consumables, and requires minimal maintenance


Buried in info? Cross-eyed over technology? From the bottom of a pile of paper, disks, books, e-books, and scattered thumb drives comes a cry of hope: Make way for the librariansthey can help! Those who predicted the death of libraries forgot to consider that, in the automated maze of contemporary life, none of usexpert and hopelessly baffled alikecan get along without human help. And not just any help: we need librarians, the only ones who can save us from being buried by the digital age. This Book Is Overdue! is a romp through the ranks of information professionalsfrom the blunt and obscenely funny bloggers to the quiet, law-abiding librarians gagged by the FBI. These are the pragmatic idealists who fuse the tools of the digital age with their love for the written word and the enduring values of free speech, open access, and scout-badge-quality assistance to anyone in need.


ABSTRACT Chromatin modification triggered by bacteria is a newly described mechanism by which pathogens impact host transcription. Listeria monocytogenes dephosphorylates histone H3 through the action of listeriolysin O (LLO); however, the underlying mechanism is unknown. Here we show that an unrelated pore-forming toxin, Aeromonas aerolysin, also provokes H3 dephosphorylation (dePH3). As reported for aerolysin, we show that LLO and related toxins induce a pore-dependent K+ efflux and that this efflux is the signal required for dePH3. In addition, LLO-induced K+ efflux activates caspase-1. However, we demonstrate that dePH3 is unlinked to this activation. Therefore, our study unveils K+ efflux as an important signal leading to two independent events critical for infection, inflammasome activation and histone modification.


FILID, FAIRIES AND FAITH THE EFFECTS OF GAELIC CULTURE, RELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND THE DYNAMICS OF DUAL CONFESSIONALISATION ON THE SUPPRESSION OF WITCHCRAFT ACCUSATIONS AND WITCH-HUNTS IN EARLY MODERN IRELAND 1533 1670 William E. Kramer The European Witch-Hunts reached their peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Betweeen 1590 and 1661, approximately 1500 women and men were accused of, and executed for, the crime of witchcraft in Scotland. England suffered the largest witch-hunt in its history during the Civil Wars of the 1640s, which produced the majority of the 500 women and men executed in England for witchcraft. Evidence indicates, however, that only three women were executed in Ireland between 1533 and 1670. Given the presence of both English and Scottish settlers in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the dramatic discrepancy of these statistics indicate that conditions existed in early modern Ireland that tended to suppress the mechanisms that produced witchcraft accusations and larger scale witch-hunts. In broad terms those conditions in Ireland were the persistence of Gaelic culture and the ongoing conditions of open, inter-religious conflict. In particular, two artifacts of Gaelic Irish culture had distinct impact upon Irish witchcraft beliefs. The office of the Poet, or fili (singular for filid), seems to have had a similar impact upon Gaelic culture and society as the shaman has on Siberian witchcraft beliefs. The Gaelic/Celtic Poet was believed to have magical powers, which were actually regulated by the Brehon Law codes of Ireland. The codification of the Poet's harmful magic seems to have eliminated some of the mystique and menace of magic within Gaelic culture. Additionally, the persistent belief in fairies as the source of harmful magic remained untainted by Christianity throughout most of Ireland. Faeries were never successfully demonized in Ireland as they were in Scotland. The Gaelic Irish attributed to fairies most of the misfortunes that were otherwise blamed on witchcraft, including the sudden wasting away and death of children. Faerie faith in Ireland has, in fact, endured into the twentieth century. The ongoing ethno-religious conflict between the Gaelic, Catholic Irish and the Protestant "New English" settlers also undermined the need for witches in Ireland. The enemy, or "other" was always readily identifiable as a member of the opposing religious or ethnic group. The process of dual confessionalisation, as described by Ute Lotz-Huemann, facilitated the entrenchment of Catholic resistence to encroaching Protestantism that both perpetuated the ethno-religious conflict and prevented the penetration of Protestant ideology into Gaelic culture. This second effect is one of the reasons why fairies were never successfully associated with demons in Ireland. Witch-hunts were complex events that were produced and influenced by multiple causative factors. The same is true of those factors that suppressed witchcraft accusations. Enduring Gaelic cultural artifacts and open ethno-religious conflict were not the only factors that suppressed witchcraft accusations and witch-hunts in Ireland; they were, however, the primary factors.


What is it about the nude female body that inspires irrationality, fear, and pandemonium, or at least inspires judges to write bad decisions? This Article offers an analysis of the Supreme Court's nude dancing cases from a perspective that is surprising within First Amendment discourse. This perspective is surprising because it is feminist in spirit and because it is literary and psychoanalytic in methodology. In my view, this unique approach is warranted because the cases have been so notoriously resistant to traditional legal logic. I show that the legal struggles over the meanings and the dangers of the gyrating, naked female body can be fully understood only when placed within a broader context: the highly charged terrain of female sexuality. By rereading the cases as texts regulating gender and sexuality and not just speech, a dramatically new understanding of them emerges: The nude dancing cases are built on a foundation of sexual panic, driven by dread of the female body. Ultimately, this analysis reveals a previously hidden gender anxiety that has implications not only for the law of nude dancing, but for First Amendment law more broadly. By presenting the ways in which irrational cultural forces shape the Court's supposedly rational analysis in the nude dancing cases, in the end I point toward an unusual conception of First Amendment law: Free speech law governs culture, yet in surprising ways, culture also governs free speech law.


Machine comprehension (MC), answering a query about a given context paragraph, requires modeling complex interactions between the context and the query. Recently, attention mechanisms have been successfully extended to MC. Typically these methods use attention to focus on a small portion of the context and summarize it with a fixed-size vector, couple attentions temporally, and/or often form a uni-directional attention. In this paper we introduce the Bi-Directional Attention Flow (BIDAF) network, a multi-stage hierarchical process that represents the context at different levels of granularity and uses bi-directional attention flow mechanism to obtain a query-aware context representation without early summarization. Our experimental evaluations show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results in Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and CNN/DailyMail cloze test.


Presently, we are witness to a global intensification of water-related disasters related to flooding, sinking erosion, and drought, reflecting changes in global water circulation, rising sea levels and changing weather patterns. Indeed, water is often the medium through which the message of climate change is delivered. Conventionally, water-related engineering projects have managed amphibious spaces through terrestrial approaches premised on removing or controlling water, for example by land reclamation and drainage. They can be contrasted with amphibious approaches that take water flows as a given and organize life around it––as exemplified by living in floating villages or houses on stilts, using water as a primary mode of transportation, or growing crops in water. Yet, the amphibious is gaining new life, as water seems to be increasingly flowing back into land , everywhere giving rise to emergencies that call for creative response. Thus, urban planners, engineers, and architects devise new infrastructures and models adaptive to environments that are becoming amphibious once again, or for the first time, and people living in watery environments everywhere find ways of adapting to increasingly amphibious circumstances. Doing so, they are contributing to the ongoing ontological transformation of amphibious worlds. This introduction to the thematic collection on "Amphibious Worlds: Environments, Infrastructures, Ontologies," outlines some of the key issues facing STS and anthropological studies of such worlds, and introduces the papers that follow.


A wealth of physiological and pathophysiological roles have been ascribed to nitric oxide (NO) in the nervous system. Many of these seem diverse and unrelated. However, the widespread role NO has to play in modulation of the nervous system suggests an underlying common and fundamental role. The ongoing popularity of NO research has lead to a mass of literature on the subject yet great controversy still prevails as to the true physiological function of NO in the nervous system.
In this thesis, the existing literature has been critically evaluated. Histological, autoradiographic and electrophysiological research approaches have been used to investigate further the physiological role for NO in the nervous system in the hope of explaining some of the controversy that still prevails.
Due to an unforseen move, two different models have been used during the investigations, the brain and the pituitary gland of the ring dove (Streptopelia risoria) and the superior cervical ganglion (SCG) of the rat. The histological NADPH-diaphorase (NDP) technique was used to show the distribution of the NO synthesising enzyme nitric oxide synthase (NOS) for the first time in the ring dove brain. Previously, the NDP distribution has been mapped in the brain of other species and found to be distinct from all other known neurotransmitters. NADPH-diaphorase is a known marker of the mammalian pontine cholinergic reticular formation. However, findings presented here strongly suggest that the distribution of NOS is far more widespread in structures comprising the avian reticular formation. The distribution of the NO synthesising enzyme and the freely diffusible property of NO make it a highly attractive messenger molecule that might coordinate the spatially distinct structures of the reticular formation enabling them to act as one functional unit.
Nitric oxide is released following NMDA receptor activation. Both the presence and the distribution of this component of the NO-cGMP pathway have been shown here for the first time in the ring dove brain. This has been achieved using receptor autoradiography of the [3H]-MK-801, a ligand that binds to the NMDA receptor channel.
The ring dove is a popular model for the study of behaviour changes and the hormonal control of the avian breeding cycle. Here, a study was set up to compare regional [3H]-MK-801 ligand binding in the brains of non breeding birds (naive) and first time breeders. Quantitative receptor autoradiographic analysis of the ligand binding has shown that significant regional binding changes occur during the breeding cycle of the ring dove. This result implies that the NO-cGMP pathway might have a physiological role in the breeding cycle of the dove and that further investigation of this matter would be worth undertaking.
Here, histological and electrophysiological approaches using the rat SCG model have been employed to investigate the role of NO-cGMP pathway in modulation of synaptic transmission. Histological mapping of the pathway components has reconfirmed that NOS is present in the presynaptic fibres and terminals, but it also suggests that it is restricted to a subpopulation of the principal neurones in the ganglion. Immunocytochemistry of the NO-donor induced cGMP accumulations shows that the satellite cells surrounding the principal neurones are major target sites for NO. This finding is consistent with that seen in the dorsal root ganglion (DRG), and supports a glial target for NO in this tissue. Although, NO-donors depolarise the ganglion and enhance synaptic transmission when extracellularly recording the compound action potential (CAP), intracellular recording did not reveal such clear responses. This difference was attributed to the fact that a subpopulation of the principal neurones receives a NO input. These findings suggest that the SCG is not a particularly efficient model for intracellular investigation of the NOcGMP pathway.
Both intracellular and extracellular investigations into involvement of NO-cGMP pathway in ganglionic L TP suggest that it does not have a role to play in long-term potentiation (L TP) of synaptic efficacy in this tissue. Here, intracellular and extracellular approaches agreed. Further to this, extracellular recording ofLTP of the CAP supported the involvement of the pathway in a short term enhanced synaptic efficacy by a mechanism distinct from L TP. Moreover, it has been shown here that L TP of the epsp can be reliably produced in the SCG. It is therefore suggested that the SCG is a suitable preparation for both intracellular and extracellular investigation of LTP at the peripheral synapse.


In this paper, the band-structure of ultra-thin body (UTB) double-gate (DG) MOSFETs is calculated by empirical tight-binding model, and the the nonparabolicity effects are included in the model by the modified Schrödinger equation with the fitting parameters which are extracted from the band-structure by expanding the dispersion relationship in a power series up to the third order. The characteristics of UTB-DG MOSFET current are simulated and the results are compared by the non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) transport theory based on effective mass approximation (EMA), parabolic quantumconfined masses (PQM) and nonparabolicity effect model (NPE). It is shown that the saturation current is overestimated in the models based on EMA and PQM compared with the model including NPE, and the value rises to 4% when Tsi equals to 3nm. The difference between NPE model and PQM model increases with increment of Vg, but less sensitive to Vds.


The aim of this paper is to identify the mechanisms responsible for the chromatic alteration of Pietra Serena sandstone, the stone used in Florentine Renaissance architecture. This stone has a bluish-grey colour when fresh, but is often oxidized acquiring an ochre-brown or reddish colour on buildings. A mineralogical, chemical, petrographic and physical characterization was carried out on the blocks of Pietra Serena used for the Waldensian Church, located in the centre of Florence, showing a characteristic reddish colouring, and on samples from the quarry from which these blocks were extracted. Micro-Raman and SEM-EDS analyses were performed on the red surfaces of the samples in order to highlight the mineralogical and chemical transformations. The results confirmed that the chromatic alteration of Pietra Serena is caused by the mobilization of Fe 2+ (prevalent in the clay minerals that make up the matrix of this sandstone and in aluminosilicates such as biotite), which is easily oxidized to Fe 3+ in an oxidative environment. This is a consequence of a particular condition of decay, such as the presence of water, CO 2 , low pH.


This paper presents a new technique for computing the barycenter of a set of distance or kernel matrices. These matrices, which define the interrelationships between points sampled from individual domains, are not required to have the same size or to be in row-by-row correspondence. We compare these matrices using the softassign criterion, which measures the minimum distortion induced by a probabilistic map from the rows of one similarity matrix to the rows of another; this criterion amounts to a regularized version of the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance between metric-measure spaces. The barycenter is then defined as a Frechet mean of the input matrices with respect to this criterion, minimizing a weighted sum of softassign values. We provide a fast iterative algorithm for the resulting nonconvex optimization problem, built upon state-of-the-art tools for regularized optimal transportation. We demonstrate its application to the computation of shape barycenters and to the prediction of energy levels from molecular configurations in quantum chemistry.


We present group brain parcellations for clusters generated from resting-state functional magnetic resonance images for 99 cognitively normal elderly persons and 129 patients with mild cognitive impairment, pooled from four independent datasets. The brain parcellations have been registered to both symmetric and asymmetric MNI brain templates and generated using a method called bootstrap analysis of stable clusters (BASC, Bellec et al., 2010). Eight resolutions of clusters were selected using a data-driven method called MSTEPS (Bellec, 2013). We present two variants of these parcellations. One variant contains bihemisphereic parcels (4, 6, 12, 22, 33, 65, 111, and 208 total parcels across eight resolutions). The second variant contains spatially connected regions of interest (ROIs) that span only one hemisphere (10, 17, 30, 51, 77, 199, and 322 total ROIs across eight resolutions). We also present maps illustrating functional connectivity differences between patients and controls for four regions of interest (superior medial frontal cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, striatum, middle temporal lobe). The brain parcels and associated statistical maps have been publicly released as 3D volumes, available in .mnc and .nii file formats on figshare (http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1480461) and on Neurovault (http://neurovault.org/collections/1003/). This dataset was generated as part of the following study: Tam A, Dansereau C, Badhwar A, Orban P, Belleville S, Chertkow H, Dagher A, Hanganu A, Monchi O, Rosa-Neto P, Shmuel A, Wang S, Breitner J, Bellec P for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (2015) Common Effects of Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment on Resting-State Connectivity Across Four Independent Studies. Front. Aging Neurosci. 7:242. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2015.00242 Finally, the code used to generate this dataset is available on Github (https://github.com/SIMEXP/mcinet). Specifications Table