The rapid expansion of production of North American petroleum crude oil from shale has led to a significant increase in rail transport of crude oil. Broken rails are frequent causes of train accidents. Ultrasonic rail defect inspection is widely used to prevent train accidents caused by broken rails, thereby reducing the hazardous materials transportation risk. This paper describes a new methodology to estimate unit-train crude oil transportation risk by the frequency of location-specific rail defect inspection. The risk model was used to develop a Pareto optimization model that determines the frequency of segment-specific rail defect inspection to reduce the total-route risk in a cost-effective manner. A numerical case study was developed to illustrate the application of the risk analysis and optimization models. This research is intended to provide new methods and information to assist the railroad industry in optimizing investment in infrastructure improvement, thereby mitigating the risk of rail transport of crude oil and other hazardous materials.


The study evaluated the efficiency of co-extruded polypropylene (PP) and low density polyethylene (LDPE) in extending the shelf-stability of unam inung traditional meat product during storage under ambient conditions. Fresh pork was processed, in traditional way, into unam inung meat product and stored for 6 months, under ambient room conditions as unpackaged, clay pot packaged (traditional method), and those packaged in polypropylene (PP), low density polyethylene (LDPE) and co-extruded polypropylene/low density polyethylene (PP/LDPE). Samples were withdrawn at intervals of one month for evaluation of quality changes. Results show that the storage room temperature (25.95-27.91 o C) and relative humidity (68.25-77.42%) are suggestive of typical diurnal conditions during the beginning of rainy season in South Eastern States of Nigeria. Relative humidity (RH) which was 69.55% at the beginning of storage reduced to 68.29% in the 2 nd month of storage and subsequently increased thereafter to 77.42% in the 5 th month of storage. Due to increasing RH from the second month of storage, all products increased in moisture content, consequently leading to increases in water activity and reduction in crude protein, fat and salt content due to dilution effect resulting from mass action. These changes were greater in the unpackaged and clay pot packaged samples due to greater access to air and moisture but least in the PP/LDPE coextruded film due to greater restriction to air and moisture transmission. Owing to increasing moisture and water activity from the second month of storage, protein hydrolysis became the dominant protein deteriorative reaction, leading to increases in protein solubility and pH, particularly in the unpackaged but significantly least in the PP/LDPE co-extruded plastic film. Thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) and free fatty acids (FFA) results suggest that both oxidative and hydrolytic rancidity were occurring in the samples but the extent was very low and did not lead to detectable rancidity in any sample. The reactions of the antioxidant vitamins (A,C and E) must have been effective in preventing detectable rancidity, as they all have significant (p<0.05) correlations {r(Vitamin C/TBARS) = -0.743, r(Vitamin C/FFA) = -0.586, r(Vitamin A/TBARS) = -0.882, r(Vitamin A/FFA) = 0.794, r(Vitamin E/TBARS) = -0.753 and r(Vitamin E/FFA) = -0.831}. All the vitamins continued to reduce during storage. Total viable count and mould count significantly (p<0.05) increased in the unpackaged samples throughout storage period presumably due to greater access to moisture and air. These counts reduced in the plastic film packages, particularly PP/LDPE package, probably due to restricted/lower availability of oxygen and moisture. Although all the sensory attributes slightly reduced during storage, the reductions did not lead to significant loss of acceptability. All deteriorative reactions/changes were more adverse in the unpackaged samples and clay pot packaged samples compared co-extruded PP/LDPE packaged samples. Thus, unam inung packaged with co-extruded PP/LDPE plastic film is acceptable up to 6 months of storage at ambient room conditions without much loss in quality. On the other hand, the unpackaged and clay pot packaged samples showed much instability and spoilage that they were discarded after about 3 and 5 months respectively.


AMONG THE MANY ODDITIES on display in my home office is a print depicting Captain A. K. Wilson, Royal Navy, engaged in a hand-to-hand fight with an enemy warrior during Britain's 1884-1885 Sudan War, an action for which he would be awarded the Victoria Cross. I often have wondered how a Royal Navy officer--and a captain, no less--found himself in the desert fighting Arab tribesmen. In February 2003, I found myself serving ashore in the Iraqi and Kuwaiti deserts. At the time, I was attached to the Navy's "Deep Blue" team, a unit created to develop innovative, transformational concepts for naval operations. (1) Although my permanent duty station was the Pentagon, I had been assigned temporary additional duties with the staff of U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command (NAVCENT), headquartered in Bahrain. Immediately after arriving in theater, I became NAVCENT's liaison officer to the Coalition ground component (Army) commander, a position I filled throughout the combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). This posting, which took me to Kuwait and Iraq, caused me to reflect upon what the Navy could, and should, be contributing to the ongoing war in Iraq and the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). While I will offer examples from my own experiences in the Middle East, my purpose isn't to tell a personal story, but to put forward ideas on how the Navy might make broader contributions to ongoing operations in that troubled region and on other battlegrounds in the war against terrorism. My recommendations will lack the drama of Captain Wilson's heroic conduct. But, between his time and ours--and throughout the centuries that preceded both of us--there is a common heritage of Navy personnel participating in operations in the littorals and ashore. Historical examples of Sailors engaged in similar missions include America's early 19th century war with the Barbary pirates of North Africa, the deployment of Royal Navy gunners at the Battle of Ladysmith during the Boer War, the Yangtze River patrol that began in 1854 and lasted until 1942 (best known through the book and movie The Sand Pebbles), and Operation Market Time in Vietnam, to name but a few. With its expeditionary culture rooted in its founding and cultivated throughout its history, the Navy always possessed an inherent flexibility that allowed it to be responsive in a variety of combat and related missions. More recently, in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) as well as through all stages of OIF, Navy personnel were deployed to serve as liaison officers, planners, logisticians, and engineers. They also provided security, intelligence, weather, medical, clerical, and other services. Their skills, mobility, and agility made them particularly valuable to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commanders. Expeditionary Missions Many essential missions in Iraq and in the war on terrorism are well suited to the capabilities of the Navy and its expeditionary Sailors. These missions aren't limited to the important and more familiar contributions made by SEALs and Seabees, or to strike missions flown from carriers or launched from surface platforms. The Navy should consider what it can provide across a broader sweep of operational requirements falling outside its commonly accepted roles. Let us consider three examples of Navy contributions to operations in Iraq--examples that focus on defending that nation's vital, yet vulnerable, oil infrastructure. Oil terminal security. On 24 April 2004, in the northern Persian Gulf, two Iraqi oil terminals, known collectively as OPLATs (oil platforms), were attacked by an undetermined number of bomb-laden suicide boats. (2) Fortunately, alert Coalition maritime forces disrupted the attacks, although two Sailors and one Coast Guardsman were tragically killed. In 2004, over 90 percent of Iraq's oil revenues were earned from exports delivered through those terminals. Months before the April attacks, the Coalition Maritime Force (CMF) commander in the Gulf had recognized their vulnerabilities and acted decisively to strengthen their defenses. …


A formidable challenge most school leaders in South Africa face is to improve the academic results in state schools. In terms of their contracts, principals are accountable for the academic results as reflected in examination and test results for their schools. The National Department of Education (currently the Department of Basic Education) has made attempts to implement a performance agreement with principals and deputy principals, which would hold them directly and specifically accountable for the examination results. The article explores the proposed performance agreement and its potential influence on principals' motivation to improve their own, and therefore also the teachers' and learners' academic performance. The focus group interviews conducted with principals and deputy principals indicate that principals do not want to be held accountable, because there are too many factors outside their control. They perceive a performance agreement of this kind as potentially demotivating because they do not feel they would be able to achieve the goals it sets. Keywords : accountability; motivation; performance agreements; performance management; power; school leadership; underperforming school


The Bullwhip effect (BE) refers to the amplification of the variance of orders and inventories along the supply chain as they move away from the customer. This is considered as the main cause of inefficiencies in the management of a traditional supply chain. However, the BE is not relevant in the classic system of water distribution, based on long-term supply management. Nevertheless, current circumstances have drawn a new context, which has introduced the concept of water demand management, in which efficiency and sustainability are of great importance. Then, the time horizon of management has decreased enormously and the supply time takes on an important role. Therefore, the BE must be considered, as it significantly raises the costs of management. On the one hand, this paper brings evidence that the BE appears in a system of real-time management of water demand. On the other hand, it proposes the application of artificial intelligence techniques for its reduction. More specifically, an advanced forecasting system based on artificial neural networks has been used. The BE is heavily damped.


An advantageous property of mesh-based geometric morphometrics (GM) towards landmark-based approaches, is the possibility of precisely examining highly irregular shapes and highly topographic surfaces. In case of spherical-harmonics-based GM the main requirement is a completely closed mesh surface, which often is not given, especially when dealing with natural objects. Here we present a methodological workflow to prepare 3D segmentations containing large cavity openings for the conduction of spherical-harmonics-based GM. This will be exemplified with a case study on claws of hermit crabs (Paguroidea, Decapoda, Crustacea), whereby joint openings – between manus and "movable finger" – typify the large-cavity-opening problem. We found a methodology including an ambient-occlusion-based segmentation algorithm leading to results precise and suitable to study the inter- and intraspecific differences in shape of hermit crab claws. Statistical analyses showed a significant separation between all examined diogenid and pagurid claws, whereas the separation between all left and right claws did not show significance. Additionally, the procedure offers other benefits. It is easy to reproduce and creates sparse variance in the data, closures integrate smoothly into the total structures and the algorithm saves a significant amount of time.


Acute exacerbations of chronic inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease) are characterised by an increase in immunoglobulin G (IgG) positive cells in the mucosa, whereas uninflamed mucosa of inflammatory bowel disease patients displays only moderately increased or normal numbers of these cells. Previous data suggest that acute exacerbations of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease can be distinguished by different IgG subclass expression of mucosal immunocytes and a different IgG subclass production pattern of lamina propria lymphocytes. A procedure to obtain enough intestinal mononuclear cells from biopsy specimens to measure in vitro IgG and IgG1 production in control subjects and various patient groups has been established. IgG2 could be measured in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis only, as the concentrations in control subjects were below the sensitivity of the ELISA method. We found that IgG and IgG1 production correlated with the degree of local inflammation in both diseases, even in slightly inflamed mucosa, compared with control subjects. The proportion of IgG1 subclass was significantly increased in severely inflamed mucosa of both ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease patients. A major difference between Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis mucosa is apparent in mild or no inflammation. In Crohn's disease mucosa in remission, the IgG1/IgG ratio is comparable with that in controls, yet ulcerative colitis mucosa still displays significantly increased proportions of IgG1. In addition, the IgG2/IgG ratio is 0.12 in ulcerative colitis and 0.19 in Crohn's disease patients. The results show the dependence of local IgG and IgG1 production on the degree of inflammation and that an increase in subclass IgG1 in ulcerative colitis is present at all stages, including remission. These findings support the hypothesis that different immunoregulatory mechanisms are involved in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Environmental stimuli or genetic background may be responsible for the observed differences.


Object recognition requires complicated domain-specific rules. For many problem domains. it is impractical for a programmer to generate these rules. A method for automatically generating the required object class descriptions is needed - this paper presents a method to accomplish this goal. In our approach. the supervisor provides a series of example scene descriptions to the system. with accompanying object class assignments. Generalization rules then produce object class descriptions. These rules manipulate non-symbolic descriptors in a symbolic framework; the resulting class descriptions are useful both for object recognition and for providing clear explanations of the decision process. We present a simple method for maintaining an optimal description set as new examples (possibly of previously unseen classes) become available. providing needed updates to the description set. Finally. the system's performance is shown as it learns object class descriptions from realistic scenes - video images of electronic components.


Two cracks were discovered in a deck plate of an aircraft during overhaul and repair after 659 h of service. The cracks were on opposite sides of the deck plate in the flange joggles. The plate had been formed from 7178-T6 aluminum alloy sheet. Analysis (visual inspection, 0.2x/2x/2.3x electron microscope fractographs, hardness testing, and electrical conductivity testing) supported the conclusions that the failure was caused by fatigue cracks originating on the inside curved surface of the flanges. The cracks had initiated in surface defects caused by either corrosion pitting or forming notches, acting in combination with lateral forces evidenced by the moderate distortion of the fastener holes. Recommendations included eliminating the surface defects by revised cleaning and/or forming procedures. Revised design and installation should also alleviate the lateral forces.


Wind power, a renewable energy source, can play an important role in electrical energy generation. Information regarding wind energy potential is important both for energy related modeling and for decision-making in the policy community. While wind speed datasets with high spatial and temporal resolution are often ultimately used for detailed planning, simpler assumptions are often used in analysis work. An accurate representation of the wind speed frequency distribution is needed in order to properly characterize wind energy potential. Using a power density method, this study estimated global variation in wind parameters as fitted to a Weibull density function using NCEP/climate forecast system reanalysis (CFSR) data over land areas. The Weibull distribution performs well in fitting the time series wind speed data at most locations according to R2, root mean square error, and power density error. The wind speed frequency distribution, as represented by the Weibull k parameter, exhibits a large amount of spatial variation, a regionally varying amount of seasonal variation, and relatively low decadal variation. We also analyzed the potential error in wind power estimation when a commonly assumed Rayleigh distribution (Weibull k = 2) is used. We find that the assumption of the same Weibull parameter across large regions can result in non-negligible errors. While large-scale wind speed data are often presented in the form of mean wind speeds, these results highlight the need to also provide information on the wind speed frequency distribution.


This 2007 book assists the practitioner seeking to enforce a foreign judgment in the United States or a US-rendered judgment abroad in navigating the lack of procedural uniformity that exists and in planning strategies likely to ensure effective enforcement. As a handbook, it provides the practitioner with a framework and resources with which to approach and further research the laws of the relevant state or country. In Part One, the guide takes the practitioner chronologically through the process of obtaining a US court's recognition and enforcement of judgments rendered abroad. Part Two takes the practitioner through the process of obtaining an overseas jurisdiction's recognition and enforcement of judgments rendered in the United States. Part Three assesses the current trends in the US and in the international trade environment regarding enforcement of judgments which may be made by foreign courts.


The purpose of this study is to investigate the statistical characteristics of fault core thickness and fault displacement, and to state the relationship between these two fault attributes. Field work was carried out At Tidwell Draw, in the San Rafael region of Utah, USA; and along the Moab Fault adjacent to the entrance to Arches National Park. Data from these sites were statistically analyzed, and exceedence frequency plots of fault core thickness and fault throw were drawn. These exceedence frequency plots were then redrawn on several scales, and graphical analyses were conducted to determine the frequency distribution of fault core thickness and fault throw. Following that, the data was then plotted together on a bivariate scatter plot, and analyzed for linear correlation in graphs of different scales. The data from the Moab Fault site was augmented with data gathered from photographs. Analysis suggests that results of data gathered from photographs can produce similar results and can be an acceptable method to obtain data from difficult locations. Results of these analyses reveal that fault throw at these locations is distributed following a power law distribution pattern, and that fault thickness tends to follow a lognormal distribution. Analysis of a global data base involving data from selected previously published works reveal that for many data sets, exceedence frequency plots of displacement reveal that frequency distribution tends to follow log-normal trends, rather than power law trends. The similar results display log-normal distribution for fault thickness as well. Emphasis is placed on the importance of analyzing EF plot in all scales in order to form the most accurate interpretation of data distribution Bivariate analysis of fault displacement and fault core thickness for the global data set exhibited a power law relationship with an exponent of 0,728 with a global goodness of fit regression of 74,2%. Although the data from Tidwell Draw displayed a regression of 52,0% for a power law relation with exponent value of 0,683, the data plotted consistent with the global plot. The data from the Moab Fault site also plotted consistent with the global plot. Although the Moab Fault data showed a weak regression for the power law relationship with exponent equal to 0,497, when the data was combined with another data set covering the upper ranges of the Moab Fault attributes, the combined Moab Fault data set showed a power law relationship with an exponent of 0,715 with a goodness of fit regression of 88,0%, exceeding the regression of both of the Moab Fault data sets and the global data set. This result indicates that 1) A large data set covering a broader range of displacement and fault core thickness will produce better results, and 2) data sets having most in common will produce better results when combined than data having least in common. This confirms a statement Evans, 1990 that for best results, data sets to be compared should be as similar as possible to avoid poor analysis.


Medicaid is a persistent target of federalism-based accusations that the federal government is infringing states' sovereignty in the area of health care. Such claims have been used to advance policy proposals to radically reduce Medicaid funding and roll back entitlements, in the name of protecting state power and increasing state flexibility. Such claims have also played a prominent role in legal disputes over Medicaid administration as states push for the elimination or curtailment of private rights enforcement of federal spending conditions. The stakes are high in both instances. And for both, we need to move past simplistic and outdated accounts of federalism that treat federal power as an inherent threat to state authority and states as passive recipients of burdensome federal mandates imposed from on high. This view is inconsistent with the modern reality of the federal-state relationship in Medicaid as one that is often negotiated, dynamic, and in which states are powerful, if not equal, partners.
This more modern federalism account has two implications. In the legal arena, it provides useful context for understanding the Supreme Court's recent decisions around preemption–based enforcement of federal spending conditions. The decisions arose out of challenges to state Medicaid rate setting, an area of Medicaid administration in which we see negotiated or dynamic federalism constantly at work. The Court's rate-setting decisions reflect a nuanced approach to determining the availability of equitable relief from state violations of spending conditions – one that exhibits a deep respect for state flexibility consistent with federal program goals, while also affirming the importance of private enforcement of certain Medicaid protections. A modern understanding of the federal-state relationship in Medicaid shows why this balanced approach – as opposed to the wholesale rejection of rights enforcement advanced by the states – is more faithful to the legislative balance struck in the Medicaid statute. In the policy arena, this modern insight supports preserving this balance. The negotiated federalism model undermines claims that a dramatic rollback of Medicaid entitlements and block granting funds are necessary or even effective for achieving greater state flexibility. Indeed, such proposals would create de facto constraints on state power that would reduce flexibility in areas of state discretion, while threatening essential access guarantees that for decades have been understood to be non-negotiable.


Vietnamese parents in the current study do not belong to school parent organizations, rarely visit the school or contact the teachers. However, the ten students in this qualitative investigation of parent interviews performed well academically, completing their high school educations with a 4.0 G.P.A. This article presents an examination of how Vietnamese parents acculturate their children, leading to high academic achievement without using the traditionally defined parental involvement methods. Specifically, Vietnamese families provided a structured home learning environment, high academic expectations, attention, love and emotional support, traditional family values, stories of cultural heritage and parental sacrifice, and control of children's social lives. ______________________________________________________________________________


A major requirement both of national and international ethical codes for human experimentation, and of national legislation in many cases, is that new substances or devices should not be used for the first time on human beings unless previous tests on animals have provided a reasonable presumption of their safety. That is so called: Good Clinical Praxis (GCP). There are two international ethical codes intended principally for the guidance of countries or institutions that have not yet formulated their own ethical requirements for human experimentation: The Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Association and The Proposed International Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences and the World Health Organization[1].
Animal experimentation is fundamental to the biomedical sciences, not only for the advancement of specific vital processes, but also for the improvement of methods of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease both in man and in animals. The use of animals is also indispensable for testing the potency and safety of biological substances used in human and veterinary medicine, as well as for determining the toxicity of the rapidly growing number of molecules that never existed before in nature and which may represent a hazard to health. This extensive exploitation by man of animals implies philosophical and moral problems that are not peculiar to their use for scientific purposes, and there are no objective ethical criteria by which to judge claims and counterclaims in such matters[2]. However, there is a consensus that "deliberate cruelty is repugnant".
While many countries have general laws or regulations imposing penalties for ill-treatment of animals, relatively few make specific provision for their use for scientific purposes. Because of differing legal systems and cultural backgrounds there are varying approaches to the use of animals for research, testing, or training in different countries. In the few that have done so, the measures adopted vary widely: on the one hand, legally enforceable detailed regulations with licensing of experimenters and their premises together with an official inspectorate; on the other, entirely voluntary self-regulation by the biomedical community, with lay participation. Many variations are possible between these extremes, one intermediate situation being a legal requirement that experiments or other procedures involving the use of animals should be subject to the approval of ethical committees of specified composition.
The International Guiding Principles are the product of the collaboration of a representative sample of the international biomedical community, including experts of the World Health Organization, and of consultations with responsible animal welfare groups. The International Guiding Principles have already gained a considerable measure of acceptance internationally. European Medical Research Councils (EMRC), an international association that includes all the West European medical research councils, fully endorsed the Guiding Principles in 1984. Here we bring the basic bioethical principles for using animals in biomedical research[3]:

Methods such as mathematical models, computer simulation and in vitro biological systems should be used wherever appropriate,
Animal experiments should be undertaken only after due consideration of their relevance for human or animal health and the advancement of biological knowledge,
The animals selected for an experiment should be of an appropriate species and quality, and the minimum number required to obtain scientifically valid results,
Investigators and other personnel should never fail to treat animals as sentient, and should regard their proper care and use and the avoidance or minimization of discomfort, distress, or pain as ethical imperatives,
Procedures with animals that may cause more than momentary or minimal pain or distress should be performed with appropriate sedation, analgesia, or anesthesia in accordance with accepted veterinary practice. Surgical or other painful procedures should not be performed on unanesthetized animals paralyzed by chemical agents,
Where waivers are required in relation to the provisions of article V, the decisions should not rest solely with the investigators directly concerned but should be made, with due regard to the provisions of articles IV, and V, by a suitably constituted review body. Such waivers should not be made solely for the purposes of teaching or demonstration,
At the end of, or, when appropriate, during an experiment, animals that would otherwise suffer severe or chronic pain, distress, discomfort, or disablement that cannot be relieved should be painlessly killed,
The best possible living conditions should be maintained for animals kept for biomedical purposes. Normally the care of animals should be under the supervision of veterinarians having experience in laboratory animal science. In any case, veterinary care should be available as required,
It is the responsibility of the director of an institute or department using animals to ensure that investigators and personnel have appropriate qualifications or experience for conducting procedures on animals. Adequate opportunities shall be provided for in-service training, including the proper and humane concern for the animals under their care.

Also see Draft CIOMS Guiding Principles 2011 to be used by the international scientific community to guide the responsible use of vertebrate animals in scientific and/or educational activities[4].

Go to:
Alternatives for animal in biomedical research
There remain many areas in biomedical research which, at least for the foreseeable future, will require animal experimentation. An intact live animal is more than the sum of the responses of isolated cells, tissues or organs; there are complex interactions in the whole animal that cannot be reproduced by biological or non-biological "alternative" methods. The term "alternative" has come to be used by some to refer to a replacement of the use of living animals by other procedures, as well as methods which lead to a reduction in the numbers of animals required or to the refinement of experimental procedures.
The experimental procedures that are considered to be "alternatives" include biological and non-biological methods. The biological methods include the use of micro-organisms, in vitropreparations (subcellular fractions, short-term cellular systems, whole organ perfusion, and cell and organ culture) and under some circumstances, invertebrates and vertebrate embryos. The non-biological methods include mathematical modeling of structure-activity relationships based on the physico-chemical properties of drugs and other chemicals, and computer modeling of other biological processes. In addition to experimental procedures, retrospective and prospective epidemiological investigations on human and animal populations represent other approaches of major importance.
There no need specialy underline that the adoption of "alternative" approaches is viewed as being complementary to the use of intact animals and their development and use should be actively encouraged for both scientific and humane reasons.


The author arguments that, from a general perspective, the economic analysis of information and its relation with the law presents fulminate inefficiency. The author develops a study of the economic incentives in general and the manner how private property is constituted in the principal but not the only one of the economic incentives for the production of information and innovation. In strict sense, the author makes ontology of property, showing that it does not allow the inclusion of immaterial and intangible goods since the modern fundament of such institution comes form the appropriation and the homesteading, categories incompatible with the nature of information. Into such argumentation, the author fundaments in the economic incentive theories for information and innovation, initiating with the study of the nature of information and the fallacies that always had surrounded such good. The author concludes showing that intellectual property rights are not the product of an evolutionary process of an institution as the property, but, on the contrary, the proceed from privileges conceded by the State, which its justification and fundament is invalid and equivocal due to the incompatibility of the property and the homesteading rule with the ontology of information.


LAUREN F. KELLY Fibrin deposition in the malaria-infected placenta: a disruption in the balance between coagulation and fibrinolysis (Under the direction of DR. JULIE M. MOORE) Placental malaria is characterized by the accumulation of Plasmodium falciparuminfected red blood cells in the human placenta. This leads to maternal anemia and poor fetal outcome including low birth weight and possibly perinatal death. Primigravidae are more susceptible to the devastating consequences of malaria during pregnancy, suggesting the presence of gravidity-dependent immunological resistance among malaria-exposed women. Common features of placental malaria include monocyte infiltration to the maternal blood space and excessive fibrin deposition, an end-product of blood coagulation. The immune factors involved in the recruitment and activation of maternal immune cells to the placenta and their role in local hyper-coagulation are poorly understood. It is hypothesized that syncytiotrophoblasts, fetal cells facing the maternal blood circulation, secrete these cell mediators as well as procoagulants or anti-fibrinolytics, resulting in the influx of maternal immune cells and clotting/fibrin accumulation. To address this hypothesis, placental plasma samples were collected in malaria-endemic western Kenya and stratified according to placental malaria status and gravidity. The levels of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), which inhibits fibrin degradation, and Tissue Factor Pathway Inhibitor (TFPI), which suppresses clotting, were evaluated by ELISA. Additionally, protein was isolated from placental tissue of these women and semi-quantitative estimation of fibrin and PAI-1 protein by western blot was initiated. Ultimately, elucidation of the coagulation factors expressed during placental malaria, and how they are regulated, will contribute to understanding the immunopathogenic mechanisms occurring at the materno-fetal interface of the malaria-infected placenta. INDEX WORDS: Malaria, Pregnancy, Coagulation, Fibrinolysis FIBRIN DEPOSITION IN THE MALARIA-INFECTED PLACENTA: A DISRUPTION IN THE BALANCE BETWEEN COAGULATION AND FIBRINOLYSIS


Abstract:
 Resource managers increasingly seek to implement cost-effective watershed restoration plans for multiple ecosystem service benefits. Using locally adapted ecosystem service tools and historical management costs, we quantified spatially explicit management costs and benefits (in terms of groundwater recharge and landscape flammability) to assist a state agency in evaluating cobenefits for a predefined restoration scenario (focused on biodiversity benefits) and to prioritize an expanded restoration scenario in the state-managed Pu'u Wa'awa'a watershed ( Hawai'i) now and under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 midcentury climate scenario. Restoring all available areas increases recharge by ∼1.74 million m3/yr (5% of recharge over the entire watershed) under the current climate and does not meaningfully change recharge under RCP 8.5 midcentury, whereas climate change decreases recharge by ∼50%. For landscape flammability, climate change increases the median and maximum probability of fire occurrence across all land use scenarios, and full restoration results in the greatest reduction in landscape flammability under both current and RCP 8.5 midcentury climate scenarios. We demonstrate that location and type of forest restoration influence overall cost-effectiveness of restoration, providing insights for landscape planning for ecosystem services under a limited budget. Across all scenarios, capturing potential benefits at low elevations requires greater expenditures ($13,161/ ha) than at high elevations ($5,501/ ha) due mainly to the substantial costs of removing Pennisetum setaceum (fountain grass), the dominant land cover below 1,000 m. If management focuses on groundwater recharge only, the most cost-effective areas occur at high elevations (>1,000 m), with ample fog interception, although recharge benefits decline across the landscape under RCP 8.5 midcentury. Focusing instead on cost-effective landscape flammability reduction as the primary management objective shifts emphasis toward dry low-elevation areas under the current climate. However, under the RCP 8.5 midcentury scenario, the most cost-effective areas for flammability management shift toward higher elevations with greater potential overlap with recharge benefits.


This research is concerned with the subject of Human Resource Accounting (HRA) and how two particular HRA models may be operationalized. The two models concerned are the "Stochastic Rewards Valuation Model" and the "Replacement Cost Model". The research takes the form of three case exercises in which managers from different organisations used a computerized simulation model to assist them in their employee resourcing. In the process of using this simulation figures were obtained that could operationalize the two HRA models under consideration. These figures and the managers explanation for heir computation and application are used to compare the two HRA models and to evaluate their utility. The conclusions drawn are that whilst managers implicitly hold human resources to have value, in the normally accepted nontechnical sense, the two HRA models do not provide a consistent way of measuring it. Whilst the models themselves may therefore have limited utility it was however concluded that the process of operationalising them is seen to be useful.


This study describes the character of submarine mass movement and associated deformation as revealed by an exceptionally well-exposed portion of a seismic-scale mass-transport deposit (MTD) within the upper Miocene Mohakatino Formation (Taranaki Basin, New Zealand). The North Awakino MTD is at least 55 m thick and crops out along the northern Taranaki coastline for ∼11 km in wave-cut platforms and in cliffs as much as 100 m high. Spectacular soft-sediment deformation features are developed in remobilized sediment gravity flow deposits that initially accumulated within a low-gradient intraslope basin. Sedimentary facies within the North Awakino MTD comprise laterally extensive, thick- to thin-bedded volcaniclastic sandstone and mudstone. Distinct postdepositional deformation styles are associated with bedding type: folds developed in thick-bedded sandstone are larger (fold heights to tens of meters) and more laterally continuous (to 1 km) than those developed in thinner bedded facies. Regional geologic relationships suggest that nearly the full width of the North Awakino MTD is exposed in outcrop, providing a rare opportunity to observe lateral relationships between the marginal and central portions of the MTD. We conducted a rigorous paleoslope analysis of slump fold, fault, and bedding orientations using both existing and newly proposed methodologies. Separate analysis of seven subregions within the North Awakino MTD reveals that the predicted MTD transport direction varies widely along the outcrop extent. Most notably, slump folds and faults within the inferred margins have mean orientations that are suborthogonal to those within the central portions of the MTD. This relationship is hypothesized to be a consequence of edge effects that may be related to lateral compression along the margins of the MTD. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of accounting for spatial heterogeneity in slump structure orientations when determining the paleoslope orientation through kinematic analysis. Our inference of west-directed translation suggests that the North Awakino MTD formed in response to a local change in the bathymetric slope orientation that was likely the result of tectonically induced basin deformation.


Just how many millions are there? China's huge English-knowing population of 200–350 million is often cited as evidence of the language being nativized in the world's most populous country. We may note, however, that the words user and learner are used interchangeably in reference to its speakers of English. When however the focus is on the nativization of English in China, a country in Kachru's 'Expanding Circle' of Englishes, it is imperative to distinguish between users and learners of the language. Kachru points out that institutionalized varieties of English in Outer Circle countries have four functions: the instrumental, the regulative, the interpersonal, and the imaginative/innovative. For English to perform any such functions, there needs to be a large number of proficient bilingual users of the language – which seems not to be the case in China, where English is primarily learned in the classroom as a foreign language. This means that college graduates should have learned the most English, but some constraining factors have prevented the majority of them from obtaining an advanced level of proficiency.


USING SHAPE INFORMATION FROM NATURAL TREE LANDMARKS FOR IMPROVING SLAM PERFORMANCE Bilal Turan M.S. in Computer Engineering Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. Selim Aksoy March, 2012 Localization and mapping are crucial components for robotic autonomy. However, such robots must often function in remote, outdoor areas with no a-priori knowledge of the environment. Consequently, it becomes necessary for field robots to be able to construct their own maps based on exteroceptive sensor readings. To this end, visual sensing and mapping through naturally occurring landmarks have distinct advantages. With the availability of high bandwidth data provided by visual sensors, meaningful and uniquely identifiable objects can be detected. This improves the construction of maps consisting of natural landmarks that are meaningful for human readers as well. In this thesis, we focus on the use of trees in an outdoor environment as a suitable set of landmarks for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Trees have a relatively simple, near vertical structure which makes them easily and consistently detectable. Furthermore, the thickness of a tree can be accurately determined from different viewpoints. Our primary contribution is the usage of the width of a tree trunk as an additional sensory reading, allowing us to include the radius of tree trunks on the map. To this end, we introduce a new sensor model that relates the width of a tree landmark on the image plane to the radius of its trunk. We provide a mathematical formulation of this model, derive associated Jacobians and incorporate our sensor model into a working EKF SLAM implementation. Through simulations we show that the use of this new sensory reading improves the accuracy of both the map and the trajectory estimates without additional sensor hardware other than a monocular camera.


The article deals with the importance of the issue of urban competitiveness in the context of global processes of power rescaling. Different interpretations of the concept of urban competitiveness, its key aspects as well as the importance of raising the competitiveness of cities for the socio-economical development of the city of a country are discussed in the article as well. In order to increase the competitiveness of a city, it is crucial to correctly identify the markets of the competition as well as key factors influencing the competitiveness. Different authors identify different factors and there is no universally accepted classification of the factors: it ranges from "internal" and "external", "economic" and "strategic", "static" and "dynamic" to "given" and "acquired". Therefore the article pays a strong attention to the analysis of levels and markets for urban competition and the factors determining urban competitiveness.


Background. Carbon monoxide (CO), a byproduct of heme catalysis, has lately received considerable attention as a regulatory molecule in cellular and biological processes. CO has been shown to provide potent protection against a variety of tissue injuries. We hypothesized in this study that low concentration CO would be beneficial for organ allografts, which frequently undergo several types of injury such as ischemia/reperfusion, alloimmune reaction, and inflammation Methods. The efficacy of low-dose CO was examined in a fully allogeneic LEW to BN rat heterotopic heart transplantation (HHTx) model. Recipients were kept in air or exposed to low-dose CO (20 ppm) for 14, 28, or 100 days after HHTx under short-course tacrolimus Results. CO treatment (d0–28, 0–100) was remarkably effective in prolonging heart allograft survival to a median of >100 from 45 days in the air-control group, with significant reductions of arteritis, fibrosis, and cellular infiltration, including macrophages and T cells. CO inhibited intragraft upregulation of Th1 type cytokines (IL-2, IFN&ggr;), proinflammatory mediators (IL-1&bgr;, TNF&agr;, IL-6, COX-2), and adhesion molecule. Shorter CO exposure in early (0–13d) and late (14–28d) posttransplant periods also prolonged graft survival, with a significant inhibition of inflammatory mediators Conclusions. These results show that low dose CO inhalation protects heart allografts and can considerably prolong their survival. CO appears to function via multiple mechanisms, including direct inhibition of Th1 type cytokine production and regulation of inflammatory responses.


This Article, awarded the 2011-12 Liberty Mutual Prize by Boston College Law School, identifies four different conceptions of insurance that have operated in the debates about insurance and insurance law in recent decades, analyzes these conceptions, and examines the normative agendas that drive them. These are the contract, public utility-regulated industry, product, and governance conceptions. Although these conceptions adopt very different perspectives, each is a way of struggling with the two fundamental questions that modern insurance law has continually faced. The first question involves the extent to which the language of an insurance policy should determine its legal effect. This is the insurance law version of the age-old question of the validity of one-sided provisions in contracts of adhesion. Because virtually all insurance policies, including high-end corporate insurance policies, are standard-forms, it is a question at the core, not the periphery, of insurance law. The second question involves the proper influence of what are sometimes called "public law" values on the scope of private insurance coverage. This is a version of the question with which much of modern private law struggles. To what extent should private law be about doing justice between two contracting parties, and to what extent should it also be concerned with other, more nearly public law matters, such as the impact of litigation outcomes on the future behavior of other parties, or equal treatment of similarly-situated policyholders? Ultimately, the Article argues, adopting a particular conception of insurance is no substitute for making or rejecting the normative choices that each conception entails. It is not our concepts, but our political, economic, and social values that underlie and underwrite legal doctrines and practices. Nonetheless, sometimes we do not see through our conceptual structures but instead are led around by them. This is part of what is taking place in the contests among different conceptions of insurance. In such circumstances it takes the kind of critical analysis this Article undertakes in order to expose the normative agendas that are doing the actual work within each conceptual structure.


Electronic sound synthesis continues to offer huge potential possibilities for the creation of new musical instruments. The traditional approach is, however, seriously limited in that it incorporates only auditory feedback and it will typically make use of a sound synthesis model (e.g., additive, subtractive, wavetable, and sampling) that is inherently limited and very often nonintuitive to the musician. In a direct attempt to challenge these issues, this paper describes a system that provides tactile as well as acoustic feedback, with real-time synthesis that invokes a more intuitive response from players since it is based upon mass-spring physical modelling. Virtual instruments are set up via a graphical user interface in terms of the physical properties of basic well-understood sounding objects such as strings, membranes, and solids. These can be interconnected to form complex integrated structures. Acoustic excitation can be applied at any point mass via virtual bowing, plucking, striking, specified waveform, or from any external sound source. Virtual microphones can be placed at any point masses to deliver the acoustic output. These aspects of the instrument are described along with the nature of the resulting acoustic output.


In this study, I examine the robustness of an unconventional monetary policy in a cost channel economy. The unconventional monetary policy proposed by Schmitt-GrohA© and Uribe (2017, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, SGU henceforth), recommends a tight monetary policy during a liquidity-trapped recession to stimulate the economy and to avoid jobless recovery. The results of my study show that the existence of the cost channel implies that the SGU policy induces sharp initial contractions in the employment rate and the growth rate, and a sharp increase in inflation following a negative confidence shock. Welfare is lower in cost channel economies compared to no-cost channel economies due to the SGU policy recommendation. Two alternative interest rate-based exit policies are also examined. The Overshoot interest rate policy, irrespective of the presence of the cost channel, is superior to the SGU policy with regard to welfare. The Staggered policy has lower immediate pain in the cost channel economy compared to the SGU policy or the Overshoot policy. However, welfare-wise, the Staggered policy is inferior to the other two policies examined in both economies considered.


This paper uses a simple open economy interest rate determination model to empirically examine an important aspect of pre-crisis monetary and exchange rate policy. It investigates whether sterilisation of the reserve effects of capital inflows helped keep interest rates sufficiently high that they may have prolonged the inflow of capital. Despite the use of a pre-crisis sample in this study, the issues in this paper have relevance today given the recent trend in foreign capital inflow for Asia. The empirical section is concerned with the effect of reserve flows on the interest rate and is divided into two parts. The first tests for a contemporaneous effect of the basic model using OLS and IV methods. The second generalises the model to assess for lagged effects by way of VAR analysis. The results show that there are some contemporaneous effects of sterilisation on the domestic interest rate though the effects are stronger when estimating the lagged model.


This paper proposes a new cryptographic primitive, named identity-based conditional proxy re-encryption (IBCPRE). In this primitive, a proxy with some information (a.k.a. re-encryption key) is allowed to transform a subset of ciphertexts under an identity to other ciphertexts under another identity. Due to the specific transformation, IBCPRE is very useful in encrypted email forwarding. Furthermore, we propose a concrete IBCPRE scheme based on Boneh-Franklin identity-based encryption. The proposed IBCPRE scheme is secure against the chosen ciphertext and identity attack in the random oracle.


The ubiquity of mobile devices together with their potential to bridge classroom learning to real-world settings has added a new perspective to contextualising mathematics learning, but this needs further exploration. The aim of this thesis is to examine the effects of using mobile technologies on students' attitudes, engagement and achievement in mathematics. The study starts with a systematic review of maths and mobile learning studies followed by three iterations of data collection. The three studies were mixed-methods studies guided by the micro, meso, macro (M3) Evaluation Framework. The studies included eight mobile learning sessions spread over three months covering topics on geometry and information handling. These sessions were conducted as collaborative learning activities in indoor and outdoor settings. Participants were Primary 6 and 7 students from three different schools in Scotland. In Study 1 (a single-group design, n=24), students had positive evaluations of mobile learning but some technical problems experienced lessened their initially positive views. There was a small effect in student self-confidence (ES=.20) and a significant positive difference between pre and post-test achievement scores. Breakdowns identified via the critical incident analysis in Study 1 informed the activity design of Study 2. In Study 2 (a quasi-experimental design, n=52), students had more positive perceptions about the use of mobile technology. The experimental group had higher gain scores on the maths test than the control group. In Study 3, a randomised controlled trial over six weeks (n=74), students also had positive evaluations of the mobile learning activities but this varied by gender. Analysis of the maths test scores with pre-test as covariate showed both groups had significantly improved their scores, but no significant treatment effect was found. For items relating to common student misconceptions on angles, students in the experimental group had significantly higher gains than the control group. The overall results from the three studies provide some evidence that students can have positive perceptions about the use of mobile technologies and that these can be effective in supporting students' engagement and performance in mathematics, especially when learning takes place outside the classroom. It also showed that the success of a mobile learning intervention is dependent on various factors, such as student and teacher characteristics, stability of the technology and content compatibility, among other factors. There were several limitations including sample size, length of intervention, and programme fidelity. Implications for practice and future researchers are discussed.


The following paper presents a novel audio-visual approach for unsupervised speaker locationing. Using recordings from a single, low-resolution room overview camera and a single far-field microphone, a state-of-the art audio-only speaker localization system (traditionally called speaker diarization) is extended so that both acoustic and visual models are estimated as part of a joint unsupervised optimization problem. The speaker diarization system first automatically determines the number of speakers and estimates "who spoke when", then, in a second step, the visual models are used to infer the location of the speakers in the video. The experiments were performed on real-world meetings using 4.5 hours of the publicly available AMI meeting corpus. The proposed system is able to exploit audio-visual integration to not only improve the accuracy of a state-of-the-art (audio-only) speaker diarization, but also adds visual speaker locationing at little incremental engineering and computation costs.


Along the isolated headwaters of the Kentucky River-Cutshin and Greasy creeks-folklorist Leonard Roberts found the Couches, a remarkable mountain family of gifted memory and imagination. For half a century they had preserved the traditional ways of their forebears-the farming methods, the household arts, and the games, ballads, dances, and tales that were their chief entertainment. In Up Cutshin and Down Greasy, brothers Dave and Jim Couch, born about the turn of the century, recall clearly their childhood days on Sang Branch of Greasy and Clover Fork of Big Leatherwood. Dave, a professional moonshiner and bottlegger in his younger days, tells of his brushes with the law. Jim engaged in lumbering and coal mining, with a little moonshining on the side. His accounts of mine accidents, in particular the one that cost him his leg, give an insight into the minds of those who risk their lives underground for the sake of high pay. First published in 1959, the book is available once again in paperback to pleasure a new generation of readers.


This paper is an exploratory research which sought to discover ideological constructions in column titles by contributors of Philippine Daily Inquirer's (PDI) Youngblood and Highblood columns. By unveiling ideological constructs in the title, certain pedagogical implications were reviewed on the premise that samples of these columns may have found their way in the education system as models of quality personal essay. Analysis was done through the examination of process types and lexicalization. Fairclaugh's Critical Discourse Analysis and Halliday's Process Types and lexicalization served as the theoretical foundations of the study. Data used in the analysis were those published in PDI's website from October, 2011- October 2012. It was found that young and old contributors write about experiences pertaining to concrete actions, contradicting earlier studies on Filipino youth and the elderly. Moreover, lexical choices of young contributors point to themselves as being goal-oriented, adventure-driven, and assertive, yet weak, frustrated and dependent. Consequently, the elderly contributors portray themselves as energetic, politically- and socially-aware, wise, yet nostalgic, sickly, and age-conscious. Out of these results, implications to language teaching and learning are underscored.


Sap-sucking insects pose a significant biosecurity risk as they can cause direct damage to plants and may also vector serious plant pathogens. However, there is a paucity of tools for rapidly estimating the host range of such insects during a biosecurity incursion. The Electrical Penetration Graph (EPG) technique has been developed over the past 50 years for analysing, quantifying, and comparing the feeding behaviours of both phloem and xylem sap-sucking insects. Electrically generated waveforms associated with insects' probing and feeding behaviours may allow a rapid assessment of the potential host range of invading sap sucking insects. This paper reviews the development and use of EPG, assesses potential for host-range testing of recent incursions, analyses when and how the EPG tool could be applied for response, and identifies seven points where EPG could aid biosecurity incursion response decision making. Three recent biosecurity responses could have benefited from EPG.


Contemporary society and modern law permanently revise concepts of marriage and family and generate new models of family creation that comprise alternative to the traditional family model. Often such new models are based not on the human nature but on the personal interests of adults. The rights and legal interests of the child in such cases are simply ignored. The current article discusses the problems how the substitution of traditional family that is understood as the union of a man and a woman by alternative family creation models, such as e. g. same-sex persons matrimony that has recently been legalised in several countries, effect the content of parenthood. In this case it is important that alongside with the traditional concept of biological parenthood the concept of psychological parenthood is being developed. Moreover, currently this concept of parenthood gains weighty meaning in legislation as well as in the judicial practice. The problems of psychological parenthood in turn are closely linked with the in vitro fertilization that is one of the most significant factors determining the formation of psychological parenthood concept. The principal aim of the article is to analyse the effects that above mentioned social and as well legal phenomena have on the rights and legal interests of children. The authors claim that personal interest's of adult persons are given priority over the children's rights in majority of discussed cases, the rights of parents often are not unionized with the corresponding duties towards children. This more and more frequently leads to the situations when the child is put into the position of the object and not the subject of law.


The beginnings of adolescent and young adult treatments are tested by transference feelings that are highly mobilized from the outset. Drive excitation and ambivalence characterize the analytical situation and the resistances reinforced by the fear of betraying primal love objects. The treatment of a twenty-three years old obsessive man, examined in the light of the Rat Man case, supports this hypothesis.


New discoveries, revision of existing taxa and the application of cladistic analysis have all shed light on the relationships of basal sauropodomorphs. Nevertheless, the interrelationships proposed in recent studies have varied widely, with some authors advocating the view that Prosauropoda and Sauropoda are monophyletic sister-taxa, whereas others favour an extreme form of prosauropod paraphyly with respect to sauropods. A data set comprising 292 characters for seven outgroups and 27 ingroup sauropodomorph taxa is presented and analysed. The most parsimonious trees suggest that Efraasia, Mussaurus, Thecodontosaurus and Saturnalia are increasingly more distant sister-taxa to the remaining sauropodomorphs. The latter are divided into two monophyletic sister-groups: a plateosaurian clade containing Plateosaurus, Lufengosaurus, Massospondylus, Coloradisaurus and others, and a sauropod clade, which includes melanorosaurs (near its base), Antetonitrus, Chinshakiangosaurus, Vulcanodon, Barapasaurus and eusauropods. Bootstrap values and constrained analyses with Templeton's tests indicate that support for many of the proposed relationships is relatively weak. This results from the inclusion of poorly known taxa, such as Blikanasaurus, and from considerable levels of character conflict. Character mapping indicates several apomorphic features that support the monophyly of a plateosaurian clade or subgroups within it. In addition, it appears that approximately 20 apomorphies are acquired early in basal sauropodomorph evolution, but are reversed to the plesiomorphic state in basal sauropods and eusauropods. Aside from their impact on phylogenetic uncertainty, these reversals may reflect important aspects of early sauropod evolution that relate to shifts in the ecological niches occupied by these taxa.


The research reported within this dissertation investigates how individuals' capacity to assimilate emotionally disruptive events is associated with particular features of episodic and autobiographical memory formation. It is inspired by Rachman's (1980, 2001) formulation of emotional processing, and his subsequent proposals to explore the general mechanisms by which emotional disruptions are overcome. The specific rationale is informed by multilevel emotion theories, theories of post-traumatic stress disorder, and models of emotional processing. The research considered whether individuals who exhibit signs of a poor emotional processing style tend to encode events generally in a sensory-perceptual manner, with comparative deficits in their capacity to conceptually process data. Methodologically, the studies identify poor and effective emotional processors by using Baker et al.'s (2009) emotional processing scale as a grouping measure. The studies explore differences between groups of poor and effective emotional processors' performance over a range of memory tasks drawn from episodic and autobiographical memory studies to detect evidence for a sensory- perceptual style of event and stimulus processing which is presumed to be indicated by a surfeit of perceptual details, heightened reported vividness, and a relative lack in conceptual ordering, narrative coherence and verbal indexing. Three general categories of memory are explored: memory for experimentally presented item lists, memory for extended narrative presentations and memory for naturally occurring events retained in long-term autobiographical memory representations. The evidence suggests a tendency to process in a sensory-perceptual manner amongst poor emotional processors for both experimental item lists, as well as in long term autobiographical memory investigations, whereas few differences between groups emerged for the study of narrative recollection. There was little evidence, by contrast, that effective emotional processors were superior at the conceptual processing of events or data. These results are discussed in terms of providing confirmation for information processing accounts of emotional disruptions and disorders which stress the aetiological significance in psychopathological conditions of how events are encoded, rendering such events accessible to broader autobiographical memory bases and conceptual elaboration. Furthermore, the importance of establishing more robust and testable definitions of conceptual processing is stressed.


Aim: The present study was designed to investigate the effect of different extracts of Excoecaria agallocha L. in the treatment of diabetes and its complications. Diabetes was induced by intraperitoneal administration of streptozotocin (65 mg/kg) for the development of diabetic nephropathy and neuropathy. Diabetic nephropathy was evaluated by assessing levels of fasting blood glucose, glycated hemoglobin (Hb A1C), serum insulin level, albuminuria, serum urea, uric acid, creatinine, and blood urea nitrogen along with altered lipid profile (total cholesterol, triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein [LDL], very LDL, and high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol). Materials and Methods: Oral treatment of diabetic rats with extracts of E. agallocha L. improved renal dysfunction indicated by a significant decrease in urinary albumin; serum creatinine, urea, and uric acid. Moreover, a significant increase in body weight along with a significant decrease in fasting blood glucose and Hb A1C in treated groups was observed. Hyperglycemia-induced oxidative stress in diabetic control rats indicated by a significant decrease in superoxide dismutase and reduced glutathione level with a significant increase in malondialdehyde (thiobarbituric acid reactive substances) levels was also ameliorated by treatment with extracts. Results and Discussion: Development of neuropathy was evident from marked hyperalgesia (thermal as well as mechanical) and tactile allodynia along with reduced Motor nervous conduction velocity (MNCV). An elevated level of nitrite, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β), and interleukin-1β (IL-1β) were also assessed in the sciatic nerve of diabetic neuropathy animals. Treatment with different extracts of E. agallocha L. significantly attenuated elevated thermal and mechanical hyperalgesia. Elevated tactile allodynia assessed using flexible Von Frey filaments was also reversed by extracts. Treatment with both extracts significantly attenuated the parameters of oxidative stress in sciatic nerve of diabetic neuropathy rats. Furthermore, level of nitrite, TNF-α, TGF-β, and IL-1β significantly increased in the sciatic nerve of diabetic neuropathy animals that were ameliorated by treatment with E. agallocha L. extracts. Conclusion: Histopathological changes in kidney, pancreas, liver, and sciatic nerve of diabetic rats were also reversed by the treatment. These findings suggested that treatment with E. agallocha L. ameliorated diabetes and its complications (diabetic nephropathy and diabetic neuropathic pain).


This document specifies a new resource record (RR) for the Domain Name
System (DNS), and how to use it with the Host Identity Protocol (HIP).
This RR allows a HIP node to store in the DNS its Host Identity (HI,
the public component of the node public-private key pair), Host
Identity Tag (HIT, a truncated hash of its public key), and the Domain
Names of its rendezvous servers (RVSs). This memo defines an
Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.


As in other Western European countries, the emergence of a national network for electricity transmission in Sweden was accompanied by a greater degree of State intervention in the electricity supply sector. The aim of this article is to elucidate the institutional background to the decision in 1946 by the Social Democratic government to transfer control of the national grid to the Swedish National Power Board. It is demonstrated that this decision not only was linked to a general industrial policy to promote energy supply. It was also linked to the agricultural and cohesion policies which emerged during the 1940s.


BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Hippocampal development is poorly understood. This study evaluated the normal development of the hippocampal region during the fetal period by using MR imaging. MATERIALS AND METHODS: MR images of 63 fetuses without intracranial pathology were reviewed independently by 2 radiologists with no knowledge of the fetal GA. Three MR images were performed postmortem and 60 in vivo. The progress of hippocampal inversion was analyzed in coronal sections, and the left and right sides of the hippocampal region were compared in every case. RESULTS: The fetuses in the postmortem examinations were at GWs 17–18 and in the in vivo examinations, at GWs 19–36. The hippocampal sulcus was open, bi- or unilaterally, in 39 fetuses. The oldest was at GW 32. The sulcus was closed at GW 21 at the earliest, unilaterally. In 26/63 fetuses (41%), the deepening or closure of the hippocampal sulcus or hippocampal inversion was asymmetric; in 23 fetuses, the right side developed faster. A shallow collateral sulcus was found earliest at GW 17. A deep collateral sulcus was visible earliest at GW 26 unilaterally, but in all fetuses from GW 31 onward, it was seen bilaterally. The orientation of the collateral sulcus was not related to the GA. CONCLUSIONS: There are wide individual temporal variations in the development and the inversion process of the hippocampal sulcus as well as in the formation of the collateral sulcus. Asymmetric development is common, and in most of the asymmetric cases, the right hippocampus develops faster.


We believe that punctuational change dominates the history of life: evolution is concentrated in very rapid events of speciation (geologically instantaneous, even if tolerably continuous in ecological time). Most species, during their geological history, either do not change in any appreciable way, or else they fluctuate mildly in morphology, with no apparent direction. Phyletic gradualism is very rare and too slow, in any case, to produce the major events of evolution. Evolutionary trends are not the product of slow, directional transformation within lineages; they represent the differential success of certain species within a clade—speciation may be random with respect to the direction of a trend (Wright's rule). As an a priori bias, phyletic gradualism has precluded any fair assessment of evolutionary tempos and modes. It could not be refuted by empirical catalogues constructed in its light because it excluded contrary information as the artificial result of an imperfect fossil record. With the model of punctuated equilibria, an unbiased distribution of evolutionary tempos can be established by treating stasis as data and by recording the pattern of change for all species in an assemblage. This distribution of tempos can lead to strong inferences about modes. If, as we predict, the punctuational tempo is prevalent, then speciation—not phyletic evolution—must be the dominant mode of evolution. We argue that virtually none of the examples brought forward to refute our model can stand as support for phyletic gradualism; many are so weak and ambiguous that they only reflect the persistent bias for gradualism still deeply embedded in paleontological thought. Of the few stronger cases, we concentrate on Gingerich's data for Hyopsodus and argue that it provides an excellent example of species selection under our model. We then review the data of several studies that have supported our model since we published it five years ago. The record of human evolution seems to provide a particularly good example: no gradualism has been detected within any hominid taxon, and many are long-ranging; the trend to larger brains arises from differential success of essentially static taxa. The data of molecular genetics support our assumption that large genetic changes often accompany the process of speciation. Phyletic gradualism was an a priori assertion from the start—it was never "seen" in the rocks; it expressed the cultural and political biases of 19th century liberalism. Huxley advised Darwin to eschew it as an "unnecessary difficulty." We think that it has now become an empirical fallacy. A punctuational view of change may have wide validity at all levels of evolutionary processes. At the very least, it deserves consideration as an alternate way of interpreting the history of life.


The purpose of this project was to document the purposes of Tubists Universal Brotherhood Association, currently known as the International Tuba Euphonium Association, from 1973-2012, and to analyze the effectiveness of the organization in fulfilling the purposes found in its original mission statement. A short history of the organization, along with definitions of the parameters of the project is included. The primary print publication of the organization, the Journal, was examined for evidence of the organization's fulfillment of its mission statement. The original mission statement of the organization was very specific to the written goals of the organization, allowing the writers of articles for the Journal to have clearly defined areas of focus. The articles found within the Journal were examined and categorized into one or more of the purposes found in the mission statement. The results of this research demonstrate that TUBA/ITEA was successful in fulfilling the purposes found in the organization's original mission statement. The articles also reflect that the quantity and quality of articles generally grew over the decades. Further, it is recognized that the organization was able to bring about a more scholarly approach to fulfilling its mission statement. These two outcomes indicate that the members of the tuba and euphonium community will benefit from a documented history of the Journal of the organization. Two areas for further study were identified. First, there were many compositions that were freely distributed with the Journal, known as the "Gem Series." An opportunity exists for scholarly review and analysis of these compositions. Second, an all-inclusive history of the organization would be beneficial, which would include a full listing of personnel involved in leadership positions throughout the organization's history.


This paper examines the potential impact of artificial intelligence (A.I.) on economic growth. We model A.I. as the latest form of automation, a broader process dating back more than 200 years. Electricity, internal combustion engines, and semiconductors facilitated automation in the last century, but A.I. now seems poised to automate many tasks once thought to be out of reach, from driving cars to making medical recommendations and beyond. How will this affect economic growth and the division of income between labor and capital? What about the potential emergence of "singularities" and "superintelligence," concepts that animate many discussions in the machine intelligence community? How will the linkages between A.I. and growth be mediated by firm-level considerations, including organization and market structure? The goal throughout is to refine a set of critical questions about A.I. and economic growth and to contribute to shaping an agenda for the field. One theme that emerges is based on Baumol's "cost disease" insight: growth may be constrained not by what we are good at but rather by what is essential and yet hard to improve.


Recent developments in neural information retrieval models have been promising, but a problem remains: human relevance judgments are expensive to produce, while neural models require a considerable amount of training data. In an attempt to fill this gap, we present an approach that---given a weak training set of pseudo-queries, documents, relevance information---filters the data to produce effective positive and negative query-document pairs. This allows large corpora to be used as neural IR model training data, while eliminating training examples that do not transfer well to relevance scoring. The filters include unsupervised ranking heuristics and a novel measure of interaction similarity. We evaluate our approach using a news corpus with article headlines acting as pseudo-queries and article content as documents, with implicit relevance between an article's headline and its content. By using our approach to train state-of-the-art neural IR models and comparing to established baselines, we find that training data generated by our approach can lead to good results on a benchmark test collection.


If your home was overrun with spirits in the movie Ghostbusters, it was easy to know who to call-Ghostbusters! But for a child or parent to navigate through the maze of Virginia bureaucracies to figure out whom to call when questions or concerns arise about a child in state care can be difficult, if not impossible. A desire to simplify that process formed the impetus for recent Virginia legislation to establish a children's ombudsman office. Indeed, the ombudsman legislation would elevate the ombudsman beyond the role of simply "ghostbusting," or handling each complaint in a vacuum.1 It would also require the ombudsman to analyze these complaints along with other data, and to make recommendations to the agencies for systemic improvements. 2 Finally, the ombudsman would shed light on the workings of the child-serving agencies by submitting annual reports to the General Assembly detailing the complaints handled each year and making recommendations for improvements. 3


RNS can distribute the computation on long operands over small word-width RNS functional units able to operate in parallel. This property is the ground to develop fast arithmetic units. While RNS can boost addition and multiplication performance, other arithmetic operations like division, magnitude comparison, and sign detection are more difficult, when compared with their counterparts in the conventional binary number system. In view of that RNS is mostly utilized for special-purpose applications, e.g., digital filters, which are addition and multiplication dominated. For such applications the RNS capability to represent large numbers and the carry-free nature of arithmetic operations are of interest and can potentially enable fast and low-power arithmetic computation. The overall performance of any RNS based processor is mostly determined by the selected moduli set and the way the modular operations, i.e., addition and multiplication, are implemented in hardware (note that this two issues are intertwined). In this thesis we concentrate on the design of fast and energy effective modular adders able to compute |A + B|_m = (A + B if A + B < m, if otherwise A + B - m) as they are the fundamental building block for any RNS processor. We base our solution on a state of the art approach, i.e., ELM Modular Addition (ELMMA), which utilize anticipated computation in conjunction with fast parallel prefix addition. Our method follows the same anticipation principle but reduces the overall complexity by proposing an alternative design for the adders, which can now directly handle three inputs instead of two. In this way the initial carry-save addition required for ELMMA for the evaluation of the A+B-m is not longer required and this may potentially result in faster and more area and power effective designs. To evaluate the impact of our proposal we considered a number of moduli of practical interest as follows: 2^n - (2^{n-2} + 1), 2^n - 2^{n-2}, and 2^n - (2^{n-3}+1). For the considered moduli we implemented in VHDL two sets of implementations, i.e., one for the state of the art ELMMA and one for our proposal, for the n=16 case. We simulated, debug, and synthesized the designs using Cadence Encounter RTL Compiler for ASIC Designs for 90 nm CMOS technology. Our results indicate that for moduli 2^n - (2^{n-2} + 1), 2^n-2^{n-2}, and 2^n-(2^{n-3}+1), our proposal requires 13%, 32%, and 28% smaller area, is 14%, 3%, and 9% faster, and is 15%, 20%, and 13% more power efficient, respectively, when compared with the state of the art.


We analyze the evolution of the relationship between tax and financial reporting in Italy after the mandatory introduction of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in 2005. Italy represents an interesting case study among European countries, with domestic generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) oriented towards creditor protection and characterized by a close connection of financial and tax accounting. Unusually, the adoption of IFRS is compulsory for the unconsolidated financial statements of listed companies, but the process of alignment of domestic GAAP to IFRS, that has affected some countries, has had little effect on Italy. Thus, two accounting systems, IFRS and Italian GAAP, are used for the preparation of unconsolidated financial statements by different categories of companies and, as a consequence, two different linkages between tax and financial reporting emerge. In order to assess the degree and the direction of the book-tax linkages we use the methodology developed by Lamb, Nobes and Roberts (1998. International variations in the connections between tax and financial reporting, Accounting and Business Research, 28(3), pp. 173–188). IFRS and tax reporting show a high degree of disconnection, while Italian GAAP, in line with the accounting tradition of most continental European countries, are closely related to tax rules. The analysis points out a rapidly evolving situation, with links between accounting systems and taxation becoming tighter, mainly because of the changes in tax law introduced during the last few years.


We present a model of a market failure based on a requirement provision by digital platforms in the acquisition of personal information from users of other products/services. We establish the economic harm from the market failure and the requirement using traditional antitrust methodology. Eliminating the requirement and the market failure by creating a functioning market for the sale of personal information would create a functioning market for personal information that would benefit users. Even though market harm is established under the assumption that consumers are perfectly informed about the value of their privacy, we show that when users are not well informed, there can be additional harms to this market failure.


With over 5,500 km of coastline spanning more than 14 degrees of latitude, Madagascar boasts a diversity of marine and coastal habitats that is unrivalled in the Indian Ocean. These ecosystems are of paramount importance to national food security, as well as the livelihoods and culture of coastal people. Yet Madagascar's fragile marine resources are facing unprecedented threats from climate change, habitat destruction and overfishing. Development of an ecologically robust national marine protected area network presents the only viable means of safeguarding the resilience of remaining healthy ecosystems. But in the current post - crisis context, characterised by a lack of fully functional national environmental governance institutions, severe funding gaps and pervasive coastal poverty, conventional centralised approaches to marine protected area planning and management are unable to respond effectively to the scale and immediacy of the challenge. Given these constraints, the ongoing expansion of local coastal governance efforts will be key to promoting socially viable adaptive management strategies. Encouragingly, the recent rapid growth and scaling - up of locally managed marine areas (LMMAs) in Madagascar is unsurpassed throughout east Africa and the Indian Ocean region, with communities pioneering new and innovative approaches to fisheries management and livelihood diversification. The durability of such local conservation efforts, however, will depend on their capacity to demonstrate the economic as well as biodiversity benefits of sustainable marine resource management. This challenge necessitates placing a renewed focus on proving, quantifying and communicating the utilitarian benefits of marine biodiversity. Making this business case will be a fundamental prerequisite to stemming the tide of marine environmental degradation in Madagascar, and tackling the twin tragedies of coastal poverty and the marine commons.


The current shear design provisions of the AASHTO LRFD Bridge Design Specifications limit the concrete compressive strength to 10 ksi due to a lack of experimental evidence for their extension to high strength concrete. To overcome this limitation, the National Academy of Sciences funded National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 12-56 "Application of the LRFD Bridge Design Specifications to High-Strength Structural Concrete: Shear Provisions". This report presents an analysis of project 12-56 experimental test data from which an in-depth understanding of the shear response of prestressed girder was obtained and new models were developed. The experimental work comprised a total of 20 tests on ten 52-foot long and 6-foot deep bulb-tee girders. All girders were designed to satisfy the requirements of the LRFD Bridge Design Specifications and then subjected to a uniformly distributed load until failure occurred in shear. The primary test variables were concrete compressive strength (ranging from 10 to 18 ksi), the maximum shear design stress (0.7 to 2.5 ksi), strand anchorage details (straight, unbonded, and draped), and end reinforcement detailing (bar size, spacing, and level of confinement). A large number of both traditional and advanced instrumentation systems were used to measure response. A new data visualization tool was developed to provide a detailed analysis of the dense experimental test data. It was concluded that the AASHTO LRFD Sectional Design Method, as well as the AASHTO Standard Specifications and the Canadian Standard Association A23.3-04 Design Method, could be extended to up to 18 ksi concrete. It is also recommended that the maximum shear design stress be reduced from 0.25 fc' to 0.18fc'. Both the angle and the strength of diagonal cracking could be accurately predicted using Mohr's circle of stress. The web shear behavior could be characterized as a tri-linear relationship separated by web cracking, stirrup yielding, and failure and the inelastic tangent stiffness before stirrup yielding could be modeled as a polynomial function of shear reinforcement ratio. Based on the development of 350 crackbased free-body diagrams, the components of the concrete contribution to resistance (two flanges and web) over the loading history was characterized as a function of the geometric and material properties of the girders. A general expression, which adopted the calculated crack angle for the computation of shear reinforcement contribution and provided clear physical explanation for every part of concrete contribution, was suggested for the future shear design practice. From the measured test results, an analytical model, Crack Displacement Field Theory (CDFT), was developed for predicting the shear response of prestressed/reinforced concrete members. Compared to other existing models, it could capture the discrete displacement due to crack opening and crack slip along crack surface and can take account the variation of stresses in reinforcement due to bond. Based on this model, expressions were derived for shear stiffness and shear resistance at stirrup yielding, and the derived equations produced good agreement with test results.


A new proposal from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would place tighter limits on carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power plants built in the United States. It also would require plants to capture and store some of the emissions. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, however, are still in the early stages of development, and few have been tested at commercial scales. Meanwhile, many planned CCS research projects have been canceled or delayed—including a major planned CCS project that Norway9s government killed last week.


In this paper, we present ultraspherical spectral discontinuous Galerkin method for solving the two-dimensional volterra integral equation (VIE) of the second kind. The Gauss-Legendre quadrature rule is used to approximate the integral operator and the inner product based on the ultraspherical weights is implemented in the weak formulation. Illustrative examples are provided to demonstrate the preciseness and eectiveness of the proposed technique. Moreover, a comparison is made with another numerical approach that is proposed recently for solving two-dimensional VIEs.


Mass transport can significantly limit the rate of reaction and lead to concentration polarisation in electrochemical devices, especially under the conditions of high operating current density. In this study we investigate hierarchically structured micro-tubular solid oxide fuel cells (MT-SOFC) fabricated by a phase inversion technique and quantitatively assess the mass transport and electrochemical performance improvement compared to a conventional tubular SOFC. We present pioneering work to characterise the effective mass transport parameters for the hierarchically porous microstructures by an integrated computed fluid dynamics simulation, assisted by multi-length scale 3D X-ray tomography. This has been historically challenging because either imaging resolution or field of view has to be sacrificed to compensate for the wide pore size distribution, which supports different transport mechanisms, especially Knudsen flow. Results show that the incorporation of radially-grown micro-channels helps to decrease the tortuosity factor by approximately 50% compared to the conventional design consisting of a sponge-like structure, and the permeability is also improved by two orders of magnitude. When accounting for the influence of Knudsen diffusion, the molecule/wall collisions yield an increase of the tortuosity factor from 11.5 (continuum flow) to 23.4 (Knudsen flow), but the addition of micro-channels helps to reduce it down to 5.3. Electrochemical performance simulations using the measured microstructural and mass transport parameters show good agreement with the experimental results at elevated temperatures. The MT-SOFC anode displays 70% lower concentration overpotential, 60% higher power density (0.98 vs. 0.61 W cm−2) and wider current density window for maximum power density than the conventional design.


Traditionally, the measurement of pitch in metrology instruments is thought to be a benign self-compensating function. However, as the measurement uncertainty of metrology instruments is pushed to the nanometer level, evaluation of the performance of the pitch measurement algorithms becomes increasingly important. Such an evaluation was done during the development of the documentation required by NIST for the issuance of the new scanning electron microscope magnification calibration standard SRM 2090. In the course of this evaluation, a new algorithm for the measurement of pitch was developed. This algorithm, although currently applied to the data from the scanning electron microscope, also can be utilized for other types of metrology instrumentation. Traditionally, for a pitch measurement, a line is fitted to each edge of the data independently. Then the distance between some arbitrary threshold value on each of those lines is determined. The new algorithm eliminates the concern for the selection of a threshold. Two data sets are defined -- one for each of the two edges used for the pitch measurement. Then regression lines are fitted to both sets of data simultaneously with the constraint that parallelism is maintained between these lines. In this way, the data sets are always evaluated in pairs. The evaluation of uncertainty for this measurement process has also been made. Comparisons with simulated data show that the mean square and variance of the pitch distance from the new algorithm is smaller than that from the traditional one. The development of the algorithm as well as the analysis of NIST laser interferometer measurements are presented and illustrated with data obtained from SRM 2090 prototypes.


The investigation of palm-based wax esters synthesis was started in a 1-L scale stirredtank
reactor (STR) with 0.5-L working volume using Rushton turbine impeller. The
optimum alcoholysis conditions derived from the Response surface methodology
(RSM) were: temperature 50.4°C, amount of enzyme 16 wt% of palm oil, amount of
palm oil 200 mmol, amount of oleyl alcohol 600 mmol, palm oil-to-oleyl alcohol ratio
3:1 and impeller speed 242 rpm. The corresponding predicted value of percentage
yield and productivity were 91.5% and 106.4 mmol/h respectively as compared to the
actual experimental value of 92.3% and 110.8 mmol/h.
The optimum reaction condition derived from RSM was employed in the 1.5-L STR.
Rushton turbine (RT), AL-hydrofoil (AL-H) and 2-bladed elephant ear (EE) impeller
were used to investigate the mixing performance in the reactor. Of these impellers, RT
was found to give the highest reaction yield of 95.8% and productivity of 344.9 mmol/h at lower agitation speed (250 rpm) as compared to the other two impellers.
Homogeneous solid suspension was achieved by RT impeller at 250 rpm with almost
99% solid suspension height. The shortest mixing time was obtained by the agitation
system with 2-bladed EE impeller due to the larger Di/Dt ratio of the impeller. For all
the impellers tested, the Reynolds number obtained were in the range of 102 <Re< 104,
indicated that the fluid flow pattern fell in the transition region for the agitation range
tested. Although ruptures and cracks of immobilised enzymes were observed in the
agitation system, the high stability of Lipozyme RM IM was proven by its reusability
of more than fifteen times under agitation system of RT impeller, to give reaction
percentage yield of 78.9%, which was only 16.9% reduced from the first cycle.
Subsequently, scale-up production of palm oil esters (POE) to 50-L was successfully
carried out in the 75-L STR based on constant impeller tip speed method. The esters
yield and productivity were increased to 97.2% and 11.67 mol/h, respectively. Higher
reaction rate was observed in the 50-L scale production with the reaction equilibrium
achieved earlier at 4 h of reaction time as compared to the 5 h optimum reaction time
observed in bench-scale study. The esters yield and productivity were not only
maintained during the scaling-up study, but increased gradually from reaction of 0.5-
L, 1.5-L to 50-L.
Analyses of palm-based wax esters were carried out to establish compliance to product
specifications and standards. Important physicochemical properties were analysed
followed a standard Test Methods modified from American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS) as well as Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) standard. Simultaneous
differential scanning calorimetry-thermal gravimetry analysis (DSC-TGA) showed
high thermal stability profile of palm-based wax esters. The dermal irritation assay of
POE showed the non-irritancy of the esters with Human Irritancy Equivalent (HIE)
score below 0.9; whilst an increase of skin hydration of 40.7% after 90 min
application was achieved in the acute moisturising test.
Downstream processing of POE was carried out using liquid-liquid extraction and
crystallisation process to remove the remaining reactants including oleyl alcohol and
lipids impurities in the esters. Ethanol was used as the solvent to remove the remaining
unreacted oleyl alcohol in the POE mixture. The extraction was carried out in
separatory funnel with optimum ethanol to esters ratio 4:1 at room temperature. A
removal of 97% of the unreacted oleyl alcohol was achieved after 3 stages of
extraction with 30 min contact time for each stage at 150 rpm agitation speed of the
water bath shaker. Meanwhile, crystallisation of POE mixture at 23°C for 24 h
incubation time was shown to increase the purity of the esters from 92.0% to 96.1%.