Criticism of Flannery O'Connor's fiction, under the spell of the writer's occasional comments, has been unusually susceptible to interpretations based on Christian dogma. None of O'Connor's stories has been more energetically theologized than her most popular, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." O'Connor flatly declared the story to be a parable of grace and redemption, and for the true believer there can be no further discussion. As James Mellard remarks, "O'Connor simply tells her readers--either through narrative interventions or be extra-textual exhortations--how they are to interpret her work" (625). And should not the writer know best what her story is about? A loaded question, to which the best answer may be D. H Lawrence's advice: trust the art, but not the artist. One cannot deny that the concerns of this story are the basic concerns of Christian belief: faith, death, salvation. And yet, if one reads the story without prejudice, there would seem to be little here to inspire hope for redemption of any of its characters. No wishful search for evidence of grace or for epiphanies of salvation, by author or reader, can soften the harsh truth of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Its message is profoundly pessimistic and in fact subversive to the doctrines of grace and charity, despite heroic efforts to disguise that fact. This vexing little masterpiece cannot be saved from itself. It has a will of its own and a moral of its own. There are really only two characters in this story: the Grandmother and the Misfit. The rest are wonderfully drawn--hateful little June Star, or whiny Red Sammy--but they do not figure in the central debate. Although the Misfit is not physically present until the final pages, his influence hangs over the story almost from the beginning, when the Grandmother warns her son Bailey of the dangerous criminal "aloose from the Federal Pen" (The Complete Stories 117). Once the family sets off on their vacation trip, the Grandmother seems to forget her feigned concern, for it is only a strategy by which she hopes to force Bailey to take the family in another direction. But the reader has not forgotten. We wonder only when, and where, the inevitable confrontation will take place. At Red Sam's filling station, we suppose. But O'Connor has other plans, which are fulfilled in a chain of events so contrived, so improbable, and so perfectly appropriate to this earful of cartoon characters, that we can only be delighted by the writer's disdain for the niceties of plotting. It is a brilliant stroke: their car rolls over in a field miles from anywhere; and then, as sure as sundown, the Misfit and his crew slowly move toward them. The story rapidly moves to its climax, when the Misfit shoots the Grandmother dead. But what comes just before that killing interests us even more. The Misfit has already directed the execution of the Grandmother's entire family, and it must be obvious to all, including reader and Grandmother, that she is the next to die. But she struggles on. Grasping at any appeal, and hardly aware of what she is saying, the Grandmother declares to the Misfit: "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" As she utters these shocking words, "She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest" (132). Noting that some squeamish readers had found this ending too strong, O'Connor defended the scene in this way: "If I took out this gesture and what she says with it, I would have no story. What was left would not be worth your attention" (Mystery and Manners 112). Certainly the scene is crucial to the story, and most readers, I think, grant its dramatic "rightness" as a conclusion. What is arguable is the meaning to the Grandmother's final words to the Misfit, as well as her "gesture," which seemed equally important to O'Connor. One's interpretation depends on one's opinion of the Grandmother. …


Culture refers to the shared patterns of feelings, beliefs and behaviour that reflect in the way of living in a society. Cultural factors influence understanding, presentation, diagnosis, management, course and outcome of many diseases. Running nose or Rhinorrhoea is a common condition affecting people of all ages. It is a condition which significantly affects the quality of life. The health care problems of most developing countries are strongly associated with its cultural and social practices and the tremendous effects they exert on it. In certain cases, it is beyond all imagination and realities to conceive the immense impact these socio-cultural factors have in the delivery of health care.(1)


The structure and species composition of the primary lowland dipterocarp forest in Berau is presented. This study mainly focuses on the primary forest based on 3 control plots of 4 ha each, totalling 12 ha, where 93% of the trees (dbh (10cm) were identified at the taxa level. Tree identification led to a collection of herbarium samples and to development of a herbarium reference which now contains more than 3 000 samples representing 45 families, 129 genera and 579 species or taxa. In primary forest, the average figures for density, basal area and standing volume are 530.7 trees 31.5 ha-1 , and 402 m3 ha-1, respectively. In the study area dipterocarps represented 25% of the tree population, 50% of the basal area and 60% of the standing volume. In the three control plots of primary forest (12 ha), 538 different taxa were recognised representing a mean of 182 trees per ha. The families Dipterocarpaceae and Euphorbiaceae were the most important taxa in both density and number of species (61 species each). Two dipterocarp species, namely Shorea leptoderma Meijer ex Wood and Shorea symingtonii Wood were recorded for the very first time in Indonesia. The structure of the forest of Berau is very similar to that of Sabah or other parts of northern Borneo. The main characteristic of this forest is its remarkable richness in dipterocarps which is exhibited in a mean of 29 species per ha. The forests of Sabah are mainly dominated by light-demanding dipterocarp species such as Parashorea spp. and Dryobalonops spp. This could result from important canopy disturbance caused by climatic events like cyclones or long periods of drought. The high species richness of the Berau forest may be linked to a longer-term stability and a relative constancy of the climate in the region.


The health of population, which is based primarily on the result of medical research, has a strong impact upon all human activities. Among the most important medical aspects are considered the good interpretation of data and setting the diagnosis. But medical decision making becomes a very hard activity because the human experts, who have to make decisions, can hardly process the huge amounts of data. So they need a tool that should be able to help them to make a good decision. There are a lot of tools which try to reduce the risk of error apparition in medical life. Diagnosis has a very important role here. It is the first step from a set of therapeutic actions; an error at this level can have dramatic consequences. The presence of technology in diagnosis phase is welcome because of its advantages: pragmatism, repeatability, efficiency, immunity toward perturbation factors that are specific to human beings (fatigue, stress, diminished attention). The technology doesn't replace human experts in this point of medical assistance; it only tries to help them, implementing systems that are able to select or to generate data which are relevant. In medicine, diagnosis is "the recognition of a disease or stipulation by its apparent signs and symptoms" or "the analysis of underlying physiological, Biochemical cause(s) ". Hepatitis B including chronic liver disease is quite common in the world, which may cause damage to hepatocytes. The severity may range from healthy carrier to decompensated cirrhosis. In this paper we have described an intelligent system for the diagnosis of the Hepatitis B virus disease, as Hepatitis is one of the serious diseases which demands expensive treatment and severe side effects can appear very often. The intelligent system consists of the generalized regression neural network which gives the result for whether the patient is Hepatitis B positive or not and the severity of the patient.


The author models the choice between credit cards and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) within a framework where consumers hold lines of credit as instruments of consumption smoothing across state and time. Flexible repayment schemes for lines of credit induce risk-averse consumers with sufficiently high discount rates to underinsure and hold lines of credit instead as a buffer, even when they have access to full and fair insurance markets. Weighing the fixed upfront fees and higher default costs of HELOCs against the advantages of low and income-tax-deductible interest payments, the author finds a threshold level of potential borrowing belowwhich consumers prefer to use credit cards exclusively. Above that threshold, consumers decide touse HELOCs and consolidate all outstanding credit card debt into them; however, a rising probability of default and the resulting loss of equity in the home will put an upper bound on the potential HELOC borrowing that will prevent full debt consolidation.


The interpretation of apparent ages often assumes that a water sample is composed of a single age. In heterogeneous aquifers, apparent ages estimated with environmental tracer methods do not reflect mean water ages because of the mixing of waters from many flow paths with different ages. This is due to nonlinear variations in atmospheric concentrations of the tracer with time resulting in biases of mixed concentrations used to determine apparent ages. The bias of these methods is rarely reported and has not been systematically evaluated in heterogeneous settings. We simulate residence time distributions (RTDs) and environmental tracers CFCs, SF6, 85Kr, and 39Ar in synthetic heterogeneous confined aquifers and compare apparent ages to mean ages. Heterogeneity was simulated as both K‐field variance (σ2) and structure. We demonstrate that an increase in heterogeneity (increase in σ2 or structure) results in an increase in the width of the RTD. In low heterogeneity cases, widths were generally on the order of 10 years and biases generally less than 10%. In high heterogeneity cases, widths can reach 100 s of years and biases can reach up to 100%. In cases where the temporal variations of atmospheric concentration of individual tracers vary, different patterns of bias are observed for the same mean age. We show that CFC‐12 and CFC‐113 ages may be used to correct for the mean age if analytical errors are small.


Ten to 15% of couples are infertile, with the most common causes being linked to the production of few or no oocytes or sperm. Yet, our understanding of human germ cell development is poor, at least in part due to the inaccessibility of early stages to genetic and developmental studies. Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) provide an in vitro system to study oocyte development and potentially treat female infertility. However, most studies of ESC differentiation to oocytes have not documented fundamental properties of endogenous development, making it difficult to determine the physiologic relevance of differentiated germ cells. Here, we sought to establish fundamental parameters of oocyte development during ESC differentiation to explore suitability for basic developmental genetic applications using the mouse as a model prior to translating to the human system. We demonstrate a timeline of definitive germ cell differentiation from ESCs in vitro that initially parallels endogenous oocyte development in vivo by single-cell expression profiling and analysis of functional milestones including responsiveness to defined maturation media, shared genetic requirement of Dazl, and entry into meiosis. However, ESC-derived oocyte maturation ultimately fails in vitro. To overcome this obstacle, we transplant ESC-derived oocytes into an ovarian niche to direct their functional maturation and, thereby, present rigorous evidence of oocyte physiologic relevance and a potential therapeutic strategy for infertility.


This article examines the racialization of Iran and Iranians by excavating the treatment of Iran in the naturalization cases from the early twentieth century. In so doing, the article highlights both the continuities and disjunctures of a racialization process that began long before there were identifiable populations of Iranians in the country or the United States had developed a coherent foreign policy vis-à-vis "the Middle East." Iranians and Iranian Americans find themselves in a precarious position in contemporary race discourse. On the one hand, Iranians are formally categorized as white by the state. Likely as a result of this categorization, few scholars have taken up the question of how Iranians are raced, particularly in the context of law and public policy. On the other hand, if and when the community is discussed in academic or popular literature on race, it is thrown into the emergent, amorphous category of "Arab and Muslim." While it is true that the racialization of Iranians, Arabs, and Muslims is an overlapping process that similarly affects all three communities, an analysis of the law reveals that the racialization of Iranians has a distinct lineage in American foreign and domestic policy, such that in the same moment that the state rendered Arab Americans white for purposes of naturalization, Iranians were deployed as the primary colored referent from which Arabs should be distinguished. I call this process "peripheral racialization." This article attempts to prompt questions about the role of American foreign policy interests in race-ing Iranians in the United States. The example of Iran is particularly salient in the contemporary context, for it has much to tell us about the operation of white supremacy in America's efforts to develop and maintain a modern empire in "the Middle East."


Cross-dressing convicts, effeminate bushrangers and women-shortage woes - here is the first ever history of sex in Australia, from Botany Bay to the present-day. In this highly readable social history, Frank Bongiorno uses vivid examples to chart the changing sex lives of Australians. He shows how a predominantly male penal colony gave rise to a rough and ready culture- the scarcity of women made for strange bedfellows, and the female minority was both powerful and vulnerable. Then came the Victorian era, in which fears of sodomy helped bring an end to the transportation of convicts. Tracing the story all the way to the present, Bongiorno shows how the quest for respectability always has another side to it, and how the contraceptive pill changed so much.Along the way he deals with some intriguing questions - were the Kelly gang gay? why did the law ignore lesbianism for so long? - and introduces some remarkable characters, both reformers and radicals. This is the thought-provoking story of sex in Australia. With a foreword by Michael Kirby, AC CMG 'A great book, a compound of wit and tragedy, as you'd expect from the subject matter, plus wide learning and common sense.' Alan Atkinson, author of The Europeans in Australia


In a time where ignorance brings tension between cultures, and blindly justifies violence and hate, the need for knowledge, understanding and wisdom is urgent. In the West, most of us find ourselves mystified by a growing cultural force resistant to Western ideologies. Instead of seeing this as an inherent antagonism, we should foster understanding of other cultures and avoid hate, violence, fear and war. This paper will explore a complex ethical system based on Muslim orthodox theology and the mystical philosophy of the Sufis. Al-Ghazali (1058-1111 C.E.) is one of Islam's most prominent and profound figures. His ethical system reflects his deep commitment to reconciliation between orthodox theology and mystical practice. From al-Ghazali we will dive deep into the human psyche and find the origins of the ethical human. Through knowledge of this prolific figure, we can hope to gain some understanding of a rich and elegant religious culture.


Annual surveillance mammography is recommended after a diagnosis of breast cancer. Previous studies have suggested that surveillance mammography varies by demographics and initial tumor characteristics, which are related to an individual's access to health care. The Military Health System of the Department of Defense provides beneficiaries with equal access health care and thus offers an excellent opportunity to assess whether racial differences in surveillance mammography persist when access to care is equal.


Some time ago Mr. J. van Rijn van Alkemade, the Hague, presented to the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie a most remarkable double tusk of a Sumatran elephant. Mr. Van Rijn van Alkemade could provide us with the following particulars about the specimen. It was shot in the residency of Palembang before 1906 and the above mentioned double tusk was presented to his father at that time Resident of Palembang. The elephant was a four tusker, the other double tusk, which was of a corresponding shape as the one presented to the Museum, came into the hands of a Chinese dealer. Double tusks in elephants are reported in more than one occasion and it is also a known fact that sometimes twisted tusks in elephants can occur (cf. Colyer: Variations and diseases of the teeth of animals, 1936, pp. 548—551). As far as I am aware a double tusk of which one is about straight, the other twisted around the first has never been reported till now. The tusks have been cut off and, unfortunate enough, the skull has not been preserved, therefore the situtation "in facto" is unknown and every comment upon how these teeth originated must remain speculative. As the first winding of the spiral tusk passes on the right side of the normal one and the tip of the former is damaged on the same side it is not unlikely that we have the rightsided pair before us. As said above one of the tusks is nearly straight, though it shows at its basal part a slightly upwards directed curve as to give place to the twisted tusk to pass underneath of it. The distal part bends slightly upwards as in normal tusks. The length measured in straight line is 87 cm, height at base 5.5 cm, breadth at base 6.5 cm. The spiral tusk has a length in straight


The results of fatigue tests performed on a small wire rope (1+6+12) of about one mm overall diameter are reported. The tests were performed in a special 17 roller device. Three series of tests were performed with: cylindrical rollers, rollers with V shaped and with round shaped grooves. The tests were aimed at establishing the different fatigue lives with the different grooves to verify whether the lives with V shaped groove were greater than those obtained with cylindrical rollers and not too different from those obtained with standard round grooves. The scope of the research was, in effect, to find a shape of groove which would react in the same way with ropes of different diameters and also be able to produce a fatigue life comparable with that obtained with round, custom made grooves designed for a single rope diameter. Thus it would be possible to reduce the cost of wire rope fatigue tests by reducing the number of different pulleys needed.


Until a few decades ago, structural and regional geology were traditionally the preserve of field geologists. They usually mapped areas of outcropping deformed rocks and supplemented their work by laboratory studies of rock deformation and by theoretical work. Structural geology became tied to the geology of uplifts, folded belts, and underground mines, all of which were accessible to direct observation. Since World War II we have witnessed a tremendous development of geophysics in oceanography and in petroleum geology. Academic geophysicists in oceanography led their geological colleagues into modern plate tectonics and industry geophysicists developed reflection seismology into a superb structural mapping tool that penetrated the subsurface.

Today we are facing a situation where instruction and textbooks in structural geology are almost entirely dedicated to rock deformation, analytical techniques in detailed field geology and summaries of plate tectonics. Illustrations based on reflection seismic profiles are virtually absent in textbooks of structural geology. These texts illustrate only the parts of the proverbial elephant, together with some conjecture, but without ever offering a glimpse of the whole elephant.

Some of the reason cited for the relative scarcity of published reflection profiles are: 1) the confidentiality of exploration data; 2) difficulties in the photographic reduction and reproduction of seismic profiles for a book format; 3) the two-dimensional nature of vertical reflection profiles; and 4) the obvious distortions in reflection profiles that are typically recorded in time.

The AAPG leadership felt that it was time to attempt to correct the situation and to produce this picture and work atlas. The first volumes, of what may become a series of volumes, are addressing an audience that includes: petroleum geologists concerned with structural interpretations; exploration companies that provide in-house training; the AAPG continuing education program; and academic colleagues interested in updating their curricula in structural geology by inclusion of reflection profiles from the "real world" in their teaching.

The atlas is not meant to be a textbook in reflection seismology (instead we listed some at the end of this introduction) nor a text in structural and/or regional geology. Our intent is simply to provide a teaching tool.


For many decades, scholars have puzzled over why the market for judicial clerks has been characterized by increasingly early bidding, with interviews and offers extended at progressively early points in a student's law school career. An important article published recently by Jolls, Avery, Judge Posner and Alvin Roth reported the results of a study the authors conducted of judges and clerks documenting the many ways in which the market operated inefficiently. In their view, the clerk market corresponds to other markets studied chiefly by Roth that show timing disturbances claimed to be market failures. The authors recommended adoption of a modified matching program, similar to the program that matches medical residents with hospitals. This paper reanalyzes the clerkship market and the other markets studied by Professor Roth from the standpoint of the costs and benefits of information acquisition. It shows that, far from market failure, the use of time as a currency in the market, represents the working out of market forces where other, more traditional terms of trade - in particular, price - are unavailable. The paper also shows that virtually all of the other markets studied by Roth that show timing peculiarities are characterized by restraints on the use of price to clear the market.


The interest in the performance of ancient Greek poetry has grown dramatically in recent years. But the competitive dimension of Greek poetic performances, while usually assumed, has rarely been directly addressed. This study provides for the first time an in-depth examination of a central mode of Greek poetic competition--capping, which occurs when speakers or singers respond to one another in small numbers of verses, single verses, or between verse units themselves. With a wealth of descriptive and technical detail, Collins surveys the wide range of genres that incorporated capping, including tragic and comic stichomythia, lament, forms of Platonic dialectic and dialogue, the sympotic performance of elegy, skolia, and related verse games, Hellenistic bucolic, as well as the rhapsodic performance of epic. Further, he examines historical evidence for actual performances as well as literary representations of live performances to explore how the features of improvisation, riddling, and punning through verse were developed and refined in different competitive contexts. Anyone concerned with the performance of archaic and classical Greek poetry, or with the agonistic social, cultural, and poetic gamesmanship that prompted one performer to achieve "mastery" over another, will find this authoritative volume indispensable.


Headstrong and naive, the young Italian aristocrat Fabrizio del Dongo is determined to defy the wrath of his right-wing father and go to war to fight for Napoleon. He stumbles on the Battle of Waterloo, ill-prepared, yet filled with enthusiasm for war and glory. Finally heeding advice, Fabrizio sneaks back to Milan, only to become embroiled in a series of amorous exploits, fuelled by his impetuous nature and the political chicanery of his aunt Gina and her wily lover. Judged by Balzac to be the most important French novel of its time, "The Charterhouse of Parma" is a compelling novel of extravagance and daring, blending the intrigues of the Italian court with the romance and excitement of youth.


Objectives & Background Adolescents' opinions regarding health care is under-represented. The Royal Hospital for Sick Children Edinburgh is due to relocate to a new site in 2017 when it will also increase its age limit to <16 years (currently <13 yrs). This study investigates adolescents' opinions on the Emergency Department (ED) and determines what is important to them to ensure that we get it right. Methods An extensive literature search was performed which identified four key topics which formed the design of the questionnaire. Inclusion criteria were individuals aged between 12–16 years, presenting to the Royal Infirmary ED where adolescents are currently seen. The questionnaire was distributed to the ED for a month. Qualitative interviews were also conducted throughout the month using a template based on the questionnaire. Results In total, 140 responses were received. The most important factor in an ED, according to adolescents was cleanliness (average importance rating of 4.69). The least important factor was entertainment which was given an importance rating of 2.46. However, when prompted to select one factor, being treated quickly was the most important (figure 1). Only 21% of respondents knew of the proposed move of the ED department, and overall this was deemed a positive idea (78%). Four main areas were considered when evaluating the results of our study. As age increased, the proportion of individuals preferring to be treated with adults increased. However, greater satisfaction was achieved when treated in child or adolescent-specific wards which suggests the use of age specific areas. Privacy was a concern expressed by adolescents potentially giving scope for improvement. The majority of respondents felt safe within an ED setting, however a small proportion did not. Our study suggested the feeling of safety is created by healthcare workers and familiarity with staff and the environment. Waiting times were consistently deemed important and reduced this would increase patient satisfaction. Conclusion Literature specifically focusing on adolescents in this topic is limited. Our study attempts to fill in some of these gaps. Being seen quickly, cleanliness and clear explanations of treatments and procedures are the most important factors throughout the sample. The implications derived from our results suggest that the new ED adopt some changes including improving safety and waiting times to ensure we achieve high patient satisfaction. Figure 1


Medullary thyroid cancer (MTC) compromises 3-5% of all thyroid cancers and arises from parafollicular or calcitonin-producing C cells. It may be sporadic (75% of cases), or may occur as a manifestation of either the hereditary syndrome Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia type 2 (MEN 2A or MEN 2B) (25% of cases), or rarely as an isolated familial syndrome (FMTC). Complete surgical resection comprising in most cases total thyroidectomy with central lymph node dissection at an early stage of the disease is the only potential cure for MTC. The familial form of the disease, MEN-2A occupies a unique place in surgical history, having been the first disease where surgical removal of an affected organ was undertaken before the development of malignancy, solely on the basis of genetic testing. Total thyroidectomy prior to the development of invasive cancer completely avoids an otherwise lethal malignancy. Timing of prophylactic surgery is based on models that utilise genotype-phenotype correlations, which have now been stratified into three risk groups based on the specific codon involved. MTC should be followed with postoperative serial serum calcitonin levels to survey for persistent or recurrent disease as indicated by detectable levels. The challenge however, if calcitonin levels are increased, is to find the source of its production. The first localisation technique recommended would be ultrasound of the neck, since there is a high frequency of local recurrence and cervical node metastasis, followed by a total body CT scan and bone scintigraphy.


Segment 7 of influenza A virus produces up to four mRNAs. Unspliced transcripts encode M1, spliced mRNA2 encodes the M2 ion channel, while protein products from spliced mRNAs 3 and 4 have not previously been identified. The M2 protein plays important roles in virus entry and assembly, and is a target for antiviral drugs and vaccination. Surprisingly, M2 is not essential for virus replication in a laboratory setting, although its loss attenuates the virus. To better understand how IAV might replicate without M2, we studied the reversion mechanism of an M2-null virus. Serial passage of a virus lacking the mRNA2 splice donor site identified a single nucleotide pseudoreverting mutation, which restored growth in cell culture and virulence in mice by upregulating mRNA4 synthesis rather than by reinstating mRNA2 production. We show that mRNA4 encodes a novel M2-related protein (designated M42) with an antigenically distinct ectodomain that can functionally replace M2 despite showing clear differences in intracellular localisation, being largely retained in the Golgi compartment. We also show that the expression of two distinct ion channel proteins is not unique to laboratory-adapted viruses but, most notably, was also a feature of the 1983 North American outbreak of H5N2 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus. In identifying a 14th influenza A polypeptide, our data reinforce the unexpectedly high coding capacity of the viral genome and have implications for virus evolution, as well as for understanding the role of M2 in the virus life cycle. Form


This paper presents MEDIATOR, a feature recognition system which is designed to be maintainable and extensible to families of related manufacturing processes. A problem in many feature recognition systems is that they are difficult to maintain. One of the reasons may be because they depend on use of a library of feature-types which are difficult to update when the manufacturing processes change due to changes in the manufacturing equipment. The approach taken by MEDIATOR is based on the idea that the properties of the manufacturing equipment are what enable manufacturable shapes to be produced in a part. MEDIATOR's method for identifying features uses a description of the manufacturing equipment to simultaneously identify manufacturable volumes (i.e. features) and methods for mamtfacturing those volumes. Maintenance of the system is simplified because only the description of the equipment needs to be updated in order to update the features identified by the system.


Time domain synchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) is the basis technology for digital television standard (DTV) employed in some countries thanks to its high spectral efficiency when compared to traditional cyclic prefix OFDM. Moreover, it does not require pilot usage in frequency domain channel estimation. Instead of data usage as cyclic prefix, pseudo-noise (PN) sequences are transmitted in guard intervals. Due to interference from the previous OFDM data symbol, the received signal in guard interval can be decomposed into a small-sized signal that contains only PN sequences utilizing the inter-block-interference (IBI)-free region in the convolution matrix. Due to sparsity, multipath fading channel can be obtained by the application of compressed sensing (CS) technique to reconstruct the high-dimensional sparse channel from the decreased-size of received signal through the known PN sequence matrix. In this study, the effect of the size of IBI-free region on CS and Bayesian CS (BCS) based channel estimation is investigated. Accordingly, reconstruction error performances of basis pursuit (BP) and BCS are compared. Simulation results show that the channel estimation can be improved by trading-off the length of the IBI-free region. However, an increase in IBI-free region leads to decreased energy efficiency at both the transmitter and receiver side.


Julie Powell's "Julie & Julia" is the story of the culinary blogging sensation that inspired the hit film. Julie Powell spent a year cooking her way through Julia Child's impossible "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". Her experiences were recorded in the hilarious bestselling book and film "Julie and Julia". But what she did next took even adventurous Julie by surprise. She trained as a butcher. Apprenticed at Fleisher's, she cut, chopped, hammered, sliced and cleaved her way through herds of meat; got splattered in gore; grew big muscles; and showed she has what it tool to make it as a woman in a man's world. At the same time she embarked on a passionate, red-blooded affair that threatened her marriage, and, at times, her sanity. "A remarkable confessional of butchery and adultery". ("Harper's Bazaar"). "Highly readable ...beautiful writing, effortlessly filling pages with virtuoso descriptions of animal slaughter and human travail". ("Sunday Times"). "Powell makes you see how butchery might be enjoyable, even cathartic". ("Spectator"). Julie Powell started to entertain readers on her infamous blog, on which she pledged to cook all the recipes from Julia Child's iconic cookbook "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". The blog achieved a dedicated following and, as a result of this, it evolved into "Julie & Julia" - a novel which connects Julie's blog to a reworking of Julia Child's biography. "Julie & Julia" was adapted for film by Nora Ephron in 2009 and starred Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.


Background & Objective: One of the plants used in traditional medicine is lemon which has analgesic effect. However, little research has been performed on the analgesic effect of lemon and mechanisms of action with an emphasis on neurotransmitters systems. Therefore, the present study set to investigate the peripheral effects of lemon essential oil on somatic pain using formalin test with an emphasis on histaminergic system in male Wistar rats. Materiala & Methods: Sixty male rats weighing approximately 200-250g and aged 14-16 wk were divided into 10 groups: sham (Salin + Formalin 1% intraplantar), three treatment groups with lemon essential oil (EO) (12.5, 25 and 50 mg/kg), three treatment groups with Chlorpheniramine (5, 10 and 20 mg/kg), 1 treatment group with Histamine (10 mg/kg), 1 pretreatment group with Chlorpheniramine (20 mg/kg) + EO (50mg/kg), and 1 pretreatment group with Histamine (10 mg/kg) + EO (50 mg/kg). Formalin test was used to assess somatic pain. Data analysis was performed using one-way ANOVA. Results: Intraperitoneal injection of lemon essential oil reduced the pain response induced by formalin in both phases (P<0.05). Pretreatment with chlorpheniramine and lemon essential oil enhanced the analgesic response in both phases (P<0.05). Conclusion: Lemon essential oil had analgesic effects, probably caused by the histaminergic system.


The research described in this article tried to validate a framework designed for determining the degree of difficulty of a reading comprehension test. This system is primarily based on the characteristics of the texts included in the test. The results of the research show that in fact most of the text-criteria implied in the framework (interest of the topic, familiarity, concreteness, density, structural transparency, explicitness) were good predictors of the actual difficulty of the reading com-prehension test. However, in some cases, it was concluded that, besides the set of text-criteria, the nature of the reading task should also be implied in the determination of the degree of difficulty of the test. A supplementary text-criterion, i.e. linguistic means, was found to be a valuable predictor, which leads us to conclude that this one should be added to the framework somehow.


State transition matrices as used in standard HMM decoders have two widely perceived limitations. One is that the implicit Geometric state duration distributions which they model do not accurately reflect true duration distributions. The other is that they impose no hard limit on maximum duration with the result that state transition probabilities often have little influence when combined with acoustic probabilities, which are of a different order of magnitude. Explicit duration models were developed in the past to address the first problem. These were not widely taken up because their performance advantage in clean speech recognition was often not sufficiently great to offset the extra complexity which they introduced. However, duration models have much greater potential when applied to noisy speech recognition. In this paper we present a simple and generic form of explicit duration model and show that this leads to strong performance improvements when applied to connected digit recognition in noise.


Abstract We ask how Black Protestants frame the connection between religion and science, analyzing fifty in-depth interviews with Black Protestants of different socioeconomic backgrounds who attend churches in two U.S. cities. Although individuals across the sample observe some tension, or incompatibility, between religion and science, Black Protestants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tended to perceive much more tension when compared with those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. However, when science is thought to contribute to improving health conditions (e.g., medical improvements to diagnose or prevent birth defects), individuals from both SES backgrounds framed religion and science as compatible. This lack of tension in regards to medicine challenges prevailing wisdom about lower-income African Americans' attitudes towards medicine. We draw out the implications of these findings for larger discussions about trust toward science and scientific communities, elucidating Black Protestant particularities and perspectives in tensions between science and religion as a foundation for further research.


We report a theoretical evaluation of the properties of iron and titanium impurities in sapphire (corundum structured α-Al2O3). Calculations using analytical force fields have been performed on the defect structure with the metals present in isolated, co-doped and tri-cluster configurations. Crystal field parameters have been calculated with good agreement to available experimental data. When titanium and iron are present in neighbouring face and edge-sharing orientations, the overlap of the d-orbitals facilitates an intervalence charge transfer (FeIII/TiIII → FeII/TiIV) with an associated optical excitation energy of 1.85 eV and 1.76 eV in the respective configurations. Electronic structure calculations based on density functional theory confirm that FeIII/TiIII is the ground-state configuration for the nearest-neighbour pairs, in contrast to the often considered FeII/TiIV pair. Homonuclear intervalence charge transfer energies between both FeIII/FeII and TiIV/TiIII species have also been calculated, with the energy lying in the infra-red region. Investigation of multiple tri-clusters of iron and titanium identified one stable configuration, TiIII–(TiIV/FeII), with the energy of electron transfer remaining unchanged.


What's wrong with black women? Not a damned thing!The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti–black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves. When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. In the '60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won't let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures.Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. "We have facets like diamonds," she writes. "The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling."


Although educational robotics (ER) is considered an innovative and engaging technology for teaching and learning, certain studies emphasize the lack of a coherent and well elaborated pedagogical framework for its implementation. This work contributes toward the development of such a framework by presenting evidence from three case studies implementing ER activities in the school context. The objective has been to explore the impact of various collaboration scripts when used as tools to guide students' groupwork during the ER activity. ER activities have been conducted in three secondary education schools (one lower and two higher) employing the TAPPS, Jigsaw and "Send a problem" collaboration techniques and assigning specific roles to students. Key results (based on observation, students' questionnaire and interviews) include the following: (a) combining the Jigsaw and "Send a problem" scripts had the greatest impact on increasing students' interest and active participation; (b) students' subjective impression of improved learning was generated by structured collaboration, (c) students reported improved understanding of programming structures already known from other contexts, (d) the motive "help my group learn based on my expertise" was rated higher by students. Overall, this study presents and discusses field evidence that contribute to an improved pedagogical framework of in-school ER activities.


Economic models are complex dynamic systems with a lot of uncertainties and fuzzy data. Conventional modeling approaches using well known methods and techniques cannot provide realistic and satisfactory answers to today's challenging economic problems. Qualitative modeling using fuzzy logic and intelligent system theories can be used to model macroeconomic models. Fuzzy Cognitive maps (FCM) is a new method been used to model the dynamic behavior of complex systems. For the first time FCMs and the Mamdani Model of Intelligent control is used to model macroeconomic models. This new model is referred as the Mamdani Rule-Based Fuzzy Cognitive Map (MBFCM) and provides the academic and research community with a new promising integrated advanced computational model. A new economic model is developed for a qualitative approach to Macroeconomic modeling. Fuzzy Controllers for such models are designed. Simulation results for an economic scenario are provided and extensively discussed. Keywords—Macroeconomic Models, Mamdani Rule BasedFCMs(MBFCMs), Qualitative and Dynamics System, Simulation.


Recently, unsupervised methods for monocular visual odometry (VO), with no need for quantities of expensive labeled ground truth, have attracted much attention. However, these methods are inadequate for long-term odometry task, due to the inherent limitation of only using monocular visual data and the inability to handle the error accumulation problem. By utilizing supplemental low-cost inertial measurements, and exploiting the multi-view geometric constraint and sequential constraint, an unsupervised visual-inertial odometry framework (UnVIO) is proposed in this paper. Our method is able to predict the per-frame depth map, as well as extracting and self-adaptively fusing visual-inertial motion features from image-IMU stream to achieve long-term odometry task. A novel sliding window optimization strategy, which consists of an intra-window and an inter-window optimization, is introduced for overcoming the error accumulation and scale ambiguity problem. The intra-window optimization restrains the geometric inferences within the window through checking the photometric consistency. And the inter-window optimization checks the 3D geometric consistency and trajectory consistency among predictions of separate windows. Extensive experiments have been conducted on KITTI and Malaga datasets to demonstrate the superiority of UnVIO over other state-of-the-art VO / VIO methods. The codes are open-source.


Another 2.3 billion people are expected to be added to the planet in just 35 years. By 2050, new systems for food, water, energy, education, health, economics, and global governance will be needed to prevent massive and complex human and environmental disasters. The Millennium Project's futures research shows that most of these problems are preventable and that a far better future than today is possible. Brilliant insights, policy and social innovations, scientific and technological breakthroughs, and new kinds of leadership are emerging around the world. The interactions among future artificial intelligences, countless new lifeforms from synthetic biology, proliferation of nanomolecular assemblies, and robotics could produce a future barely recognizable to science fiction today.


The United States implements much of its social policy through the income tax laws. The Code is rife with tax expenditures for education, housing, community economic development, retirement savings, and health care to name a few. But the IRS is not an agency with expertise in any of these areas and developing such expertise would draw resources away from its core tax administration mission. Commentators have thus called for a series of changes from turning these tax expenditures into outlays for these programs or to divest the IRS/Treasury of most of the administration of social policy tax expenditures. Yet, given American politics and the institutional structure of the federal government, these moves are both unlikely to occur and unwise.

This Article suggests a different and more promising route. It argues that agency coordination between the IRS/Treasury and other federal agencies, called tax coordination, would improve administration, management, and potential outcomes of these social policy tax expenditures. Drawing on the well-established literature in administrative law and public administration regarding agency coordination, this article shows the benefit of tax coordination. It then presents case studies where the IRS works with other agencies to administer certain tax measures for social policy. Finally, it employs insights from the public administration literature to recommend institutional and managerial changes that would make tax coordination successful.


The study measures the total economic value (TEV) of the flow of ecosystem services from the Cagayan de Oro (CDO) River Basin in Mindanao, Philippines. Estimates of the various components of TEV can serve as the basis and justification for the contributions that may be potentially collected from different economic sectors and social groups benefiting from the ecosystem's services under a river basin-wide payment for environmental services (PES) scheme. Through PES, financial resources can be generated and used to reward local initiatives that restore and preserve the ecosystem. This approach has been identified as one strategic way to safeguard and enhance the continuing flow of environmental services from the river basin. Total benefits in the forms of stable supply of good-quality water, flood control, fishing and recreational value, and biodiversity are estimated to be about US$5.0–6.1 million per year.


Abstract Partial migration is a phenomenon in which some individuals of a species are migrants while others are residents. This paper employs the most current information available to provide an overview of the Australian landbird migration system and the occurrence of partial migration. An extensive review of the literature showed that migration occurs in almost 40% of landbird species breeding in Australia, with a large proportion of these containing both migrant and resident populations. Partial migration is found in 44% of 155 non-passerine species and 32% of 317 passerine species examined. Such high proportions of species that are partially migratory are consistent with the suggestion that partial migration is particularly common in austral bird species. The existence of migrant and resident individuals within single populations has not been identified for most species, and the Silvereye, Zosterops lateralis, is the only partially migratory species for which reliable information on percentages of the recaptured population are available. Available evidence suggests that populations with resident and migrant elements are prevalent throughout much of Australia. An understanding of partial migration has important ecological and conservation implications.


The aim of this work was to quantify the most significant impact from the polluted environment and to review the correlation between pollution indicators and the content and structures of Tanacetum vulgare L. (Tansy). Heavy metals as mercury, lead, cadmium, chromium and nickel are considered as pollution indicators. The micro and macro elements concentration of S, P, K, Ca, Mg, Na, Fe, Si, Al and Mn were tested too. The concentration of the essential oil was analyzed as indicator of Tansy environmental adaptability. Essential oils are practically agents which represents correlation between plant and environment. The type of Tansy was selected for laboratory research, because it belongs to most speeded urban flora and vegetation, in which the imperative to adapt is very strong. All those parameters was monitored on two different locations: industrial zone (anthropogenic) and park area (non anthropogenic) for comparison, as zero stage of the environment, before pollution. The diferences were also recorded in the morphological and anatomical structure and chlorophyll a and b content of the Tansy and they were caused by differences of cumulative environmental conditions, with dominant efects of the contamination degree of the location, soil type and microclimate.


Objective For both subconcussive impacts and traditionally-defined concussion, neither the number of head impacts nor the magnitude has had a strong correlation to the incidence or severity of injury. Recent modelling work has suggested that impulse may be an important biomechanical factor, and therefore it is hypothesised that it may be a good predictor of subconcussive neurophysiological changes. Design Observational study. Setting American high school football team. Participants Nine male high school football athletes (mean age=16.4, range=15–17) volunteered. All participants were enrolled with parental consent. Assessment of risk factors Head impacts were monitored at all practices and games with the Head Impact Telemetry System. Baseline neurophysiology was measured prior to contact activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) visual n-back task protocol. Subjects returned throughout the season and were re-evaluated according to the same protocol. Outcome measures Kinematic impulse was computed from head impact telemetry. Changes in neurophysiology were determined as the difference in the 2 vs. 1-back contrast. This contrast was determined for 116 anatomically defined regions of interest (ROI). Main results Stepwise regressions (P=0.05) relating kinematic impulse to ROI-specific changes in neurophysiology yielded significant correlations for 57/116 ROIs. 22/116 ROIs had an R2 value greater than 0.70. Correlations were found bilaterally for 16 anatomical ROIs, including the executive pre-frontal regions, basal ganglia, and thalamus. Conclusions The relationship between kinematic impulse and fMRI changes reported here are the strongest correlations to subconcussive changes reported to date. Correlations were observed bilaterally in regions associated with concussion symptoms. Competing interests None.


This article investigates the role of interaction kinesics in human–robot interaction (HRI). We adopted a bottom-up, synthetic approach towards interactive competencies in robots using simple, minimal computational models underlying the robot's interaction dynamics. We present two empirical, exploratory studies investigating a drumming experience with a humanoid robot (KASPAR) and a human. In the first experiment, the turn-taking behaviour of the humanoid is deterministic and the non-verbal gestures of the robot accompany its drumming to assess the impact of non-verbal gestures on the interaction. The second experiment studies a computational framework that facilitates emergent turn-taking dynamics, whereby the particular dynamics of turn-taking emerge from the social interaction between the human and the humanoid. The results from the HRI experiments are presented and analysed qualitatively (in terms of the participants' subjective experiences) and quantitatively (concerning the drumming performance of the human–robot pair). The results point out a trade-off between the subjective evaluation of the drumming experience from the perspective of the participants and the objective evaluation of the drumming performance. A certain number of gestures was preferred as a motivational factor in the interaction. The participants preferred the models underlying the robot's turn-taking which enable the robot and human to interact more and provide turn-taking closer to 'natural' human–human conversations, despite differences in objective measures of drumming behaviour. The results are consistent with the temporal behaviour matching hypothesis previously proposed in the literature which concerns the effect that the participants adapt their own interaction dynamics to the robot's.


What is a poetry reading, how does the performed poem differ from the poem published on the page, and first and foremost: how do we read it? This article understands the poetry reading as an independent form of expression, which neither ranks above nor below the written poem, but can be placed alongside it. Contrary to the printed poem, the audience often only has access to the performed poem once – while it is being performed – and is subsequently forced to rely on the memory of the specific reading and situation. Similarly, the body, the voice, the place, the time – and, in the case of recorded readings, also the remediation – are vital to how the poetry reading creates meaning. The article methodologically investigates: How do we approach the poetry reading from an analytical and a theoretical perspective, and includes readings of three poetry readings by Vanessa Place, Pia Juul and Jacques Roubaud.


Introduction: This study compares the efficacy in terms of pain relief and complications of intra-articular Botulinum toxin-A (BoNT-A) with intra-articular Triamcinolone versus Triamcinolone alone in the treatment of osteoarthritic knee pain of severe grade. If effective, BoNT-A may help in reducing the long term adverse effects due to prolonged analgesic consumption and reduce/delay requirement of knee replacement surgeries. Materials and Methods: In this prospective study, 30 patients of either sex, aged between 40 to 60 years with physical status ASA classes I or II suffering from knee joint osteoarthritis with knee pain and functional impairment were divided into 2 groups: The OA patients which received Botulinum toxin-A with Triamcinolone (Group A) & OA patients which received only Triamcinolone (Group B). Only patients with advanced OA of the knee; radiographically verified with a Joint space <2 mm were included. The efficacy of pain relief in the 2 groups were compared using Visual analog score (VAS) and Oxford knee Score and followed upto 6 months. Results and Conclusions: On comparing the VAS Score during the follow up period, there was a significant difference between groups A and B upto 3 months. During post treatment follow up, there was significant difference in pain relief as measured by the Oxford Knee score from 4 weeks to 6 months, where Group A patients fared much better in terms of pain relief than group B with a highly significant value of P=<0.001 during the time period of 6 weeks to 6 months. The study shows that the use intra-articular Botulinum toxin-A with steroid is far superior to intra-articular steroid alone in terms of pain relief as well as functional outcome.


Both before and after the 1959 revolution, the Catholic Church in Cuba deviated from the norm in Latin America. This is in large measure due to the unique historical and social experience of Cuba, as well as to the fact that the church remained until the early 1960s largely a missionary outpost of Spain. When the revolution occurred, the Catholic Church was frozen in a pre-Vatican II mold which was reinforced by an exodus of clergy, religious and laity. The economic and diplomatic embargo of Cuba further isolated the church from progressive trends within the international church. Thus, the ferment unleashed by Vatican II (1962–5) and the Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellín, Colombia (1968) had less impact than changes resulting from the Cuban Revolution. As a consequence, the Catholic Church in Cuba entered the 1970s with limited theological and pastoral resources to meet the challenge of a consolidated Marxist/Leninist revolution. As an institution, the Catholic Church in Cuba is, as it was in 1959, the weakest in all of Latin America.


The recent accession of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe to the European Union significantly changed many of its social and economic characteristics. For example, a situation was created where income differences between regions in the EU are on a par with those between Britain and some African countries. Regional differences in productivity and employment levels within the EU are even more stark than income differences. This monograph examines the policies that should be used to address the poor economic performance of New Europe's old industrial and agricultural regions. The author finds traditional regional policy wanting, but feels there might be a role for the 'new regionalism' that is focused on trying to boost the productivity of peripheral regions. However, using Poland as a case study, he is able to show that, if new-style regional policies are introduced without policies aimed at liberalisation, lower taxes and reduced employment protection, then nothing of substance will be achieved. This analysis has profound implications for the EU more widely. If there is to be economic liberalisation within the EU then there probably has to be political reform too.


Over the past year, several courts have relied on the Establishment Clause to enjoin President Trump's entry bans. None of these decisions showed any hesitation before extending the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause domestic jurisprudence to the foreign context, with respect to the denial of entry and visas to aliens abroad. Judge Jay Bybee, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc in Washington v. Trump, challenged the "unreasoned assumption that courts should simply plop Establishment Clause cases from the domestic context over to the foreign affairs context ignores the realities of our world." Indeed, the federal government's brief stressed that Supreme Court case law "addressing domestic questions involving local religious displays, school subsidies, and the like... have no proper application to foreign-policy, national-security, and immigration judgments of the President."
Judge Bybee and the government are correct. The Supreme Court's Establishment Clause precedents concerning domestic matters — such as school prayer and public displays of religion —have had no place in the realm of foreign affairs and national security. Specifically, Congress's longstanding practices afford benefits to aliens of certain religious sects, and disadvantage others that do not share those beliefs. The lower courts should have hesitated before extending this doctrine to the immigration context. If the Supreme Court opts to extend this doctrine, the Justices will have to account for the myriad other ways in which the government countenances the use of religion in the immigration context.


By no means is King Tubby's sound entirely reducible to the tools he used, but I propose that the affordance of the tools and the way in which many of them were repurposed had a substantial effect on the identity of that sound. His repurposing of various machines such as the high-pass filter and the four-track tape, and the inherent limiting factors present in them, channeled his creativity and helped produce his distinctive style.

 Given the paucity of written documentation of Jamaican music practices coupled with the variegated and often conflicting oral accounts, a material approach is one which, by focusing on the physical evidence expressed in the tools and technologies used, attempts to cut through the layers of mythology and reveal the working conditions in Tubby's studio and some of the relationships between them and Tubby's experimental music practices.

 I show how criticism of this music can benefit from such a material approach, and this type of analysis can also be usefully applied to other electronic music makers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, and therefore be used as a way of comparing and contrasting diverse musical styles. However, this chapter focuses on showing how Tubby's innovative use coupled with the material affordances in his instruments contributed to the sound associated with his studio, and clearly demonstrates the diffusion of the compositional process between the roles of engineer, producer, and performer - here unified in one individual.


Transforming growth factor-beta 1 (TGF-β1) modulates regeneration after injury through induction of fibroblast proliferation, migration, and differentiation into myofibroblasts. Induction of myofibroblast differentiation by TGF-β1 requires expression of integrin-linked kinase (ILK). I now show that ILK interacts with TGF-β receptor type II (TβRII) in primary dermal fibroblasts. Further, colocalization of ILK and TβRII can be observed at the cell membrane and in intracellular vesicles. The association of TβRII and ILK does not require TGF-β1 stimulation, kinase activity of TGF-β1 receptor type I or TβRII, and it does not involve interactions between ILK and focal adhesion-associated proteins. When this interaction is abolished by targeted inactivation of the Ilk gene, TβR signalling is diminished, as demonstrated by decreased phosphorylated SMAD2 levels in response to TGF-β1 treatment. This can be restored by exogenous expression of human ILK or by inhibition of TβRII degradatory pathway. Thus, ILK is essential for normal TβR signalling.


The Live Fish Carrier Industry is a specialized shipping segment in Norway, transporting and processing live salmon. The underlying driver for the segment is the production of salmon in aquaculture. With an absence of academic research on the topic, this thesis will try to fuse the attention from the academic society. By modeling the supply and demand of LFC operations, we observe a surplus on the demand side of the market. A turning point occurred in 2013 when the supply increased more than the demand. New, large and expensive vessels entered the market, and substantial capacity will enter in 2017. This will eliminate the demand surplus, and create a movement towards market balance. The operations of the vessels are managed by the salmon producers. Our positional tracking analysis indicates that the vessels are not utilized efficiently. The vessels are operating across a large range of regions, within a six-month period. The analysis provides grounds for an argument that large vessels, individually, are covering fewer regions than the smaller vessels. The smaller vessels are unlikely to capture long charter contracts, and consequently have to move more between regions. This operational pattern is a reason for concern, when the risk of spreading diseases is high. There are several reasons to operate in the LFC industry. From a salmon producer's perspective, we believe that the supplied services can be looked upon as an insurance from random shocks of lice and diseases on the biomass. The value of an average cage has increased with 400% the last ten years, which consequently will increase the value of having excess LFC-capacity. From our analysis based on the Return on Shipping Investments model, the average financial return is 12.6%. We conducted a freight rate sensitivity analysis to assess the effect on NPV of a new LFC investments. The findings show that LFC owners are investing in a profitable asset, despite considerable changes in the market.


Couples are considered infertile if they are unable to conceive after one year of regular unprotected sex. The impact of lifestyle and environment on human fertility may vary depending on aetiology, demographic characteristics, genetic variation and other factors. As used by previous researchers, semen parameters were used to measure male infertility. Therefore, a decrease in semen quality is considered as a major factor in male infertility (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semen_quality).

Previous studies (Kidd et al.2001,Eskenazi et al.2003, de La Rochebrochard and Thonneau 2003) have found that older men tend to have lower semen quality than younger ones. Testicular hyperthermia (elevated temperature) also has been known to affect male fertility. Men who like taking hot baths or sit in a sedentary position for a long time are at risk of having infertility. The objectives of this study are to identify the relationship between socio-demographic profile, lifestyle and environmental factors and semen quality, and to identify risk factors of poor semen quality among men attending the National Population and Family Development Board's (NPFDB) Subfertility Clinic.

This study was done in Andrology Laboratory, NPFDB. Five hundred men from couples having their first infertility consultation between September 2010 abd June 2011 were recruited. Each patient was required to register, deposit semen and fill in the quesstionnaire. Sperm concentration, morphology and motility from semen analysis were used to study the relationship between semen quality and independent variables. Reference limits used were 15 cells x 10'6/ml, 4% and 40 %, respectively (World Health Organization, 2010). For statistical analysis, descriptive statistic, t test and ANOVA were used; 0.05 alpha value was chosen.

Results showed that one-third of the study population were between 26 to 30 years of age and another one third were aged between 31 to 35 years old; mean age was 33.2. majority were Malays (71.2%), resided in Selangor (64.3%) and professionals (41.6%). Semen quality showed a negative relationship (p<0.05) with age. Meanwhile, sperm motility varied significantly for different ethnic group. Chinese (57.75%) had the highest motile-sperm compared to Malays (53.44%) and Indians (46.60%). Among lifestyles variables, frequency of sexual intercourse had a posive relationship (p<0.05) with sperm motility, whilst sedentary position had negative relationship (p<0.05) with the latter. Regression analysis was used to predict the risk factors of poor semen quality. This study found that men above 30 years old were two times more likely to have low sperm motility than men in the twenties. Moreover, less frequent sexual activity between couples was more likely (p<0.05) to have abnormal sperm compared to those who had sexual intercourse more frequently.

In conclusion, this study suggested that age over 30 years and infrequent sexual activity were the risk factors to lower semen quality. Even though not regarded as a risk factor, sedentary work position had a negative impact on sperm motility. These factors may affect male fertility and cause difficulty in conception. Public awareness through advocacy programs and talks on infertility and its risk factors should be carried out regularly. Public education should be carried out to advice men to practice a healthy lifestyle and work life balance. This study has shown encouraging results, and should be replicated in the general population in Malaysia.


Socially responsible investing (SRI) represents an investment process that refl ects environmental and social preferences. The fi nancial industry is in a unique position to move corporations towards corporate sustainability. However, there is often little transparency regarding the metrics used to evaluate corporate social and environmental performance and the trade-offs involved in the evaluation. In this paper we discuss the various trade-offs of sustainability screening methodologies. We show that the rating of companies varies signifi cantly according to whether the screening is based on toxic releases and regulatory compliance or on the quality of environmental policy and disclosure. We base our analysis on the evaluation of the performance of 15 fi rms in the chemical sector. The analysis indicates that fi rms that have the most advanced reporting and environmental management practices tend also to have higher levels of toxic releases and lower environmental compliance. We provide methodological recommendations to help stakeholders evaluate corporate environmental performance. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.


In an attempt to improve neuroreceptor distribution volume (V) estimates, the authors evaluated three alternative linear methods to Logan graphical analysis (GA): GA using total least squares (TLS), and two multilinear analyses, MA1 and MA2, based on mathematical rearrangement of GA equation and two-tissue compartments, respectively, using simulated and actual PET data of two receptor tracers, [18F]FCWAY and [11C]MDL 100,907. For simulations, all three methods decreased the noise-induced GA bias (up to 30%) at the expense of increased variability. The bias reduction was most pronounced for MA1, moderate to large for MA2, and modest to moderate for TLS. In addition, GA, TLS, and MA1, methods that used only a portion of the data (T > t*, chosen by an automatic process), showed a small V underestimation for [11C]MDL 100,907 with its slow kinetics, due to selection of t* before the true point of linearity. These noniterative methods are computationally simple, allowing efficient pixelwise parameter estimation. For tracers with kinetics that permit t* to be accurately identified within the study duration, MA1 appears to be the best. For tracers with slow kinetics and low to moderate noise, however, MA2 may provide the lowest bias while maintaining computational ease for pixelwise parameter estimation.


Microbes are intimately involved in the iron cycle. First, acquisition of iron by microorganisms for biochemical requirements is a key process in the iron cycle in oxygenated, circumneutral pH environments, where the solubility of Fe(III) (oxyhydr)oxides is extremely low. Second, a number of aerobic (using O2) and anaerobic (living in the absence of O2) autotrophic bacteria gain energy for growth from the oxidation of dissolved and solid-phase Fe(II) compounds to Fe(III) (oxyhydr)oxides. Third, heterotrophic Fe(III)-reducing bacteria close the chemical loop by reducing solid-phase Fe(III) minerals back to dissolved and solid-phase Fe(II). Together these metabolic processes control the partitioning of the Earth's fourth most abundant crustal element, and they are additionally tied to the cycling of several major nutrients (e.g. carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur) and trace elements (e.g. phosphorus, nickel) in modern and ancient environments.


Abstract. The western Pacific warm pool (WPWP) is an important heat source for the atmospheric circulation and influences climate conditions worldwide. Understanding its sensitivity to past radiative perturbations may help better contextualize the magnitudes and patterns of current and projected tropical climate change. Here we present a new Mg/Ca-based sea surface temperature (SST) reconstruction over the past 400 kyr from the Bismarck Sea, off Papua New Guinea, along with results from a transient earth system model simulation. Our results document the primary influence of CO2 forcing on glacial/interglacial WPWP SSTs and secondary effects due to changes in wind-driven tropical boundary currents. In addition to the SST, deep ocean temperature reconstructions from this core are linked with Southern Ocean temperature and sea-ice variations on timescales of ~ 23 kyr. It is proposed that Southern Hemisphere insolation changes serve as pacemaker for sea-ice variations in the Southern Ocean, which in turn modulate windstress curl-driven upwelling of carbon-rich waters, hence controlling atmospheric CO2 and tropical WPWP temperatures.


This study was undertaken to evaluate the extent of existing residential park facilities
provision in Seri Manjung New Town, Perak Darul Ridzuan in fulfilling users'
recreation needs. Basically, this study answered four objectives namely, to compare
the provision of existing park facilities with the Planning Standard requirement, to
describe current use pattern of residential parks in Seri Manjung New Town, and to
estimate users' recreation needs based on the Importance Performance Analysis of
residential park facilities.
The data was successfully collected through park observations and questionnaire
survey. The response rate for questionnaire survey was good whereby all 420
questionnaires from sample respondents were successfully collected. Descriptive
analysis and Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) were applied as the main
instruments to evaluate park facility performance. The use pattern of residential
parks in the study area was described based on nine items namely income, frequency
of park visit, age group, gender, visiting time, guardian permission, night park visit,
popular recreation activity, and responsibility towards park facility. The IPA
assessed the park facilities performance in fulfilling users' needs.
The outcomes of this study generally showed that Manjung Municipal Council failed
to meet the standard requirement in the provision of park facilities in the study area. Among the seven parks, only one park achieved 67% compliance rate, four (4) parks
at 50% and two (2) parks managed to comply only 25% of the standard requirement.
Findings on the IPA indicated that among the seven residential parks, three parks
needed attention (high importance but low performance) while the rest were rated as
good work (high importance and high performance).


Computation should be a good blend of theory and practice, and researchers in the field should create algorithms to address real world problems, putting equal weight on analysis and implementation. Experimentation and simulation can be viewed as yielding to refined theories or improved applications. The Workshop on Computation: Theory and Practice (WCTP)-2011 was the first workshop organized jointly by the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Institute of Scientific and Industrial ResearchOsaka University, the University of the Philippines Diliman, and De La Salle UniversityManila devoted to theoretical and practical approaches to computation. The aim of the workshop was to present the latest developments by theoreticians and practitioners in academe and industry working to address computational problems that can directly impact the way we live in society. This book comprises the refereed proceedings of WCTP-2011, held in Quezon City, the Philippines, in September 2011. The 16 carefully reviewed and revised full papers presented here deal with biologically inspired computational modeling, programming language theory, advanced studies in networking, and empathic computing. .


Background: Peutz-Jeghers syndrome (PJS) is caused by germline STK11 mutations and characterised by gastrointestinal polyposis. Although small bowel intussusception is a recognised complication of PJS, risk varies between patients. Objective: To analyse the time to onset of intussusception in a large series of PJS probands. Methods:STK11 mutation status was evaluated in 225 PJS probands and medical histories of the patients reviewed. Results: 135 (60%) of the probands possessed a germline STK11 mutation; 109 (48%) probands had a history of intussusception at a median age of 15.0 years but with wide variability (range 3.7 to 45.4 years). Median time to onset of intussusception was not significantly different between those with identified mutations and those with no mutation detected, at 14.7 years and 16.4 years, respectively (log-rank test of difference, χ2 = 0.58, with 1df; p = 0.45). Similarly no differences were observed between patient groups on the basis of the type or site of STK11 mutation. Conclusions: The risk of intussusception in PJS is not influenced by STK11 mutation status.


This comprehensive, engaging guide to applied research distills the expertise of the distinguished ethnographer and methodologist Pertti Pelto over his acclaimed 50-year career. Having written the first major text promoting mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in applied ethnography in the 1970s, Pelto now synthesizes decades of innovation, including examples from around the world that illustrate how specific methods yield immediate results for addressing social problems. Ideal for researchers, students, training programs, and technical assistance projects, this thorough text covers the key topics and skills required: gaining entry, recording and organizing field data, a host of specialized techniques, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods, building and training research teams, rapid assessment and focused ethnographic studies, short- and long-term ethnography, writing up results, non-Western perspectives on research, and more.


A 25 year old woman could not obtain a prescription for contraceptives at a clinic because the physician did not prescribe them for reasons of "medical judgment as well as professional ethical concerns and religious values." She obtained the prescription at a clinic two minutes away. A crusade was started against the physician and two colleagues with the same views. Crusaders argued that in a 'secular' state health care system, physicians should be forbidden to act on their moral or religious beliefs. Physicians who refuse to prescribe contraceptives face a difficult challenge, since aggressive contraceptive promotion has left most people unaware of alternatives. Further, the social progress of women is widely attributed to contraceptives, so that failure to provide them risks an adverse reaction. Nonetheless, based on a respectful understanding of female fertility cycles and other factors, plausible reasons can be given to justify refusal to prescribe contraceptives and recommendation of Natural Family Planning. The Supreme Court of Canada has acknowledged that secularists are believers, no less persons with religious beliefs. There is no legal warrant for the idea that a secular state must be purged of the expression of religious belief. The claim that a secular state or health care system is "faith-free" is radically false. Both religious belief and secularism can result in narrow dogmatism and intolerance, as demonstrated by the crusade against the physicians. Since the practice of medicine is an inescapably moral enterprise, every decision concerning treatment is a moral decision. Since the practice of morality is a human enterprise, the secular public square is populated by people with many moral viewpoints. To discriminate against religious belief is a distortion of liberal principles. Moreover, if religious believers can be forced to do what they believe to be wrong, so can non-religious believers. This would establish a destructive and dangerous 'duty to do what is wrong.' It is essential to maintain the integrity of physicians and well-being of patients. After abortion was legalized, a difficult compromise emerged that safeguards both, while protecting the community against a purported 'duty to do what is wrong.' Nonetheless, some people are trying to entrench that duty in medical practice, moving from a purported duty to provide or facilitate abortion to a duty to kill or facilitate the killing of patients by euthanasia. It is unacceptable to compel people to commit or even to facilitate what they see as murder, and punish or penalize them if they refuse. It is equally unacceptable to insist that physicians must not act upon beliefs, because it is impossible; one cannot act morally without reference to beliefs. Such policies are inconsistent with the central place occupied by individual conscience and judgment in a liberal democracy. Freedom of conscience can be adequately accommodated in a society characterized by a plurality of moral and political viewpoints if appropriate distinctions are made. The first of these is the distinction between the exercise of perfective freedom of conscience: pursuing an apparent good - and preservative freedom of conscience: refusing to participate in wrongdoing. The state can sometimes legitimately limit perfective freedom of conscience by preventing people from doing what they believe to be good, but it does not follow that it is equally free to suppress preservative freedom of conscience by forcing them to do what they believe to be wrong. To force people to do something they believe to be wrong is always an assault on their personal dignity and essential humanity, and it always has negative implications for society. It is a policy fundamentally opposed to civic friendship, which grounds and sustains political community and provides the strongest motive for justice. It is inconsistent with the best traditions and aspirations of liberal democracy, since it instills attitudes more suited to totalitarian regimes than to the demands of responsible freedom. Even the strict approach taken to limiting other fundamental rights and freedoms is not sufficiently refined to be safely applied to limit freedom of conscience in its preservative form. Like the use of potentially deadly force, if the restriction of preservative freedom of conscience can be justified at all, it will only be as a last resort and only in the most exceptional circumstances. That a young woman had to drive around the block to fill a birth control prescription does not meet this standard.


Reliable temperature time series are necessary to quantify how our world is changing. Unfortunately many non-climatic artefacts, known as inhomogeneities, affect these time series. When looking at real world data it is often not possible to distinguish between these non-climatic artefacts and true climatic variations that are naturally found in our world. Therefore, trying to remove the non-climatic artefacts with complete confidence is problematic, but leaving them in could lead to misinterpretation of climate variations. In creating realistic, homogeneous, synthetic, daily temperature series the truth can be known about the data completely. Known, created inhomogeneity structures can be added to these series, allowing the distinguishing between true and artificial artefacts. The application of homogenisation algorithms to these created inhomogeneous data allows the assessment of algorithm performance, as their returned contributions are being compared to a known standard or benchmark, the clean data. In this work a Generalised Additive Model (GAM) was used to create synthetic, clean, daily temperature series. Daily data pose new challenges compared to monthly or annual data owing to their increased variability and quantity. This is the first intercomparison study to assess homogenisation algorithm performance on temperature data at the daily level. The inhomogeneity structures added to the clean data were created by perturbing the inputs to the GAM, which created seasonally varying inhomogeneities, and by adding constant offsets, which created constant inhomogeneities. Four different regions in the United States were modelled, these four regions are climatically diverse which allowed for the exploration of the impact of this on homogenisation algorithm performance. Four different data scenarios, incorporating three different inhomogeneity structures, were added and evaluations also investigated how these impacted algorithm performance. Eight homogenisation algorithms were contributed to this study and their performance was assessed according to both their ability to detect change points and their ability to return series that were closer to the clean data than they were on release. These evaluations sought to aid the improvement of these algorithms and enable a quantification of the uncertainty remaining in daily temperature data even after homogenisation has taken place. Evaluations were also made of the benchmarks as it was important that benchmark weaknesses were taken into account. It was found that more climatologically diverse regions were harder to model and less climatologically diverse regions were easier to homogenise. Station density in a network and the presence of artificial trend inhomogeneities did not impact algorithm performance as much as changes in autocorrelations did, and the latter area was an area that most algorithms could improve on. This work feeds into the larger project of the International Surface Temperature Initiative


Many modified genetic codes are found in specific genomes in which one or more codons have been reassigned to a different amino acid from that in the canonical code. We present a new framework for codon reassignment that incorporates two previously proposed mechanisms (codon disappearance and ambiguous intermediate) and introduces two further mechanisms (unassigned codon and compensatory change). Our theory is based on the observation that reassignment involves a gain and a loss. The loss could be the deletion or loss of function of a tRNA or release factor. The gain could be the gain of a new type of tRNA or the gain of function of an existing tRNA due to mutation or base modification. The four mechanisms are distinguished by whether the codon disappears from the genome during the reassignment and by the order of the gain and loss events. We present simulations of the gain-loss model showing that all four mechanisms can occur within the same framework as the parameters are varied. We investigate the way the frequencies of the mechanisms are influenced by selection strengths, the number of codons undergoing reassignment, directional mutation pressure, and selection for reduced genome size.


In this project, we analyze the prescription drug use of childhood, adolescent, and young adult cancer survivors identified by the CAYACS program in BC. Understanding the patterns of prescription use and factors associated with the tendency to be on prescriptions is important to policy and health care planners. Since data on actual prescription usage are not available, we use prescription dispensing data as a proxy. We examine the differences in prescription use between survivors and matched controls selected from the general population, and assess the impact of age and other clinical and sociodemographic factors on prescription use. Specifically, we model subjects' on-/off-prescription status by a first-order Markov transition model, and handle the between-subject heterogeneity using a random effect. Our method captures the differences in prescription drug use between survivors and the general population, as well as differences within the survivor population. Our results show that survivors tend to exhibit a higher probability of going on prescriptions compared to the general population over the course of their lifetime. Further, females appear to have a higher probability of going on prescriptions than males over the course of their lifetime. A simulation study is conducted to assess the performance of the estimators of the model.


Sodium metabisulphite (SMBS) is the current standard preservation chemical used in RO plants during shut down. It is a cheap and efficient preservative, but its tendency to oxidize easily has several drawbacks. The use of a non-oxidizing biocide instead could solve some of the issues currently seen with the SMBS, but little has been reported about membrane compatibility and preservation efficiency in the long-term mode. Long-term membrane preservation trials have been executed with three different non-oxidizing biocides: DBNPA (2,2-dibromo-3-nitrilopropionamide), CMIT/MIT (5-chloro-2-methyl-4-isothiazolin-3-one (CMIT) and 2-methyl-4-isothiazolin-3-one (MIT), OIT (2-octyl-2H-isothiazol-3-one) as well as SMBS as the reference chemical. The suitability of these chemicals in this application was confirmed using both new Brackish Water Reverse Osmosis (BWRO) and used membranes with various membrane chemistries (Nanofiltration (NF), BWRO, Sea Water Reverse Osmosis (SWRO)). The preservation trial with new membranes confirmed the long-term stability of the product when stored in the biocide solution while the trial with used elements is closer to realistic plant conditions and validated the efficiency of the biocide against biofouling in the long-term. These results show that the biocides can be equivalent preservatives to SMBS and that the application is economically feasible. The used active concentrations for biocides are storage time and temperature dependent and this should be taken into account when first applying them in the field.


Capacity formulas and random-coding exponents are derived for a generalized family of Gel'fand-Pinsker coding problems. These exponents yield asymptotic upper bounds on the achievable log probability of error. In our model, information is to be reliably transmitted through a noisy channel with finite input and output alphabets and random state sequence, and the channel is selected by a hypothetical adversary. Partial information about the state sequence is available to the encoder, adversary, and decoder. The design of the transmitter is subject to a cost constraint. Two families of channels are considered: 1) compound discrete memoryless channels (CDMC), and 2) channels with arbitrary memory, subject to an additive cost constraint, or more generally, to a hard constraint on the conditional type of the channel output given the input. Both problems are closely connected. The random-coding exponent is achieved using a stacked binning scheme and a maximum penalized mutual information decoder, which may be thought of as an empirical generalized maximum a posteriori decoder. For channels with arbitrary memory, the random-coding exponents are larger than their CDMC counterparts. Applications of this study include watermarking, data hiding, communication in presence of partially known interferers, and problems such as broadcast channels, all of which involve the fundamental idea of binning


Due to the growing interest in the blockchain (BC), several applications are being developed, taking advantage of the benefits that such technology promises to deliver, such as removal of Trust Third Parties (TTP) to verify transactions and data immutability. However, these applications require certain aspects, such as high transaction throughput or data privacy, that early BC implementations (e.g., Bitcoin) did not provide. Thus, a myriad of novel BC implementations was developed, which introduced the issue of choosing the right implementation for a specific use-case. This paper presents a framework, called PleBeuS, to address this selection issue by allowing users to specify policies that rule the automatic selection of the BC that data will be stored. The selection process relies on a cost-aware approach and considers both public and private implementations and their technical characteristics. Moreover, PleBeuS communicates with a BC-agnostic interoperability API to enforce transactions. The evaluation of the PleBeuS prototype showed that it is possible to automatically select a BC-based on user policies, considering cost thresholds and technical details (e.g., BC throughput, deployment), and reduce manual interaction.


In this paper, we present an unequal power allocation technique to increase the throughput of code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems with chip-level interleavers. Performance is optimized, respectively, based on received and transmitted power allocation. Linear programming and power matching techniques are developed to provide solutions to systems with a very large number of users. Various numerical results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed techniques and to examine the impact of system parameters, such as iteration number and interleaver length. We also show that with some very simple forward error correction codes, such as repetition codes or convolutional codes, the proposed scheme can achieve throughput reasonably close to that predicted by theoretical limit in multiple access channels.


Researching (in/as) Motion: A Resource Collection, is edited by Vida L Midgelow (Middlesex University), Jane Bacon (University of Chichester), Paula Kramer (Uniarts Helsinki), and Rebecca Hilton (Stockholm University of the Arts).

Our purpose with this open access, online resource, is to fill a gap in the resources for doctoral candidates, addressing the limited materials available to researchers who are perhaps stuck, entering a process (perhaps for the first time), wanting inspiration, help or reassurances.

We have sought to fill the gap between all those generic 'Introduction to Research Methods' books, and the numerous 'How to Complete a PhD' texts. These texts hardly ever attend substantively to Artistic Research and are generally written in dry, off-putting, 'cleansed' ways. We seek too, to avoid case study approaches, that illustrate neatly completed artistic doctorates, and step away from the oft revisited forays into the ontological and epistemological discourses of Artistic Research. Such texts are vastly useful – but they say little about the real 'doings' of Artistic Research within the doctorate.

We have sought to find something in-between; something that reflects both the particularities and peculiarities of Artistic Doctoral research, while addressing key recurring approaches and concerns in Artistic Research. To achieve this aim we asked contributors to consider how they might provide resources for others; offering handrails, ideas and perspectives for those undertaking an artistic doctorate in the performing arts or wondering if that would be a good thing to do.

The diverse materials – by some forty-six authors – each in different ways, reveal how to work effectively with tacit knowings, attend to the vagaries of the situation and acknowledge the centrality (but not unproblematic nature) of first person, 'expert practitioner', research. Working from the premise that the artistic researcher in dance and performance uses aesthetic, embodied, material and language based ways of knowing, the collection sits at the interface of choreographic and somatic processes when immersed with reflective/conceptual/philosophical thinking, supporting the researcher through what are often uncharted, emergent processes that entail getting lost, being vulnerable and taking risks to develop new understandings and new practices.

 Somatics, Embodiment and Subjectivity
 Making and the Choreographic
 Theorising, Processes and Reflection
 Writing and Languaging
 Documentation, Expositionality and Publics
 Ethics and (Institutional) Critique

The authors in this collection have shared creative-corporeal-material-critical approaches to Artistic research, offering discursive and poetic writings, prompts, hands-on and workshop style tasks, games, scores and the like. In turn, we in invite readers to engage with these diverse contributions by activating the materials – such that reading and doing blur through in motion, lived and experiential explorations. We hope this collection will enable readers to act (make real, take action, to make a difference) through the ways the material resonates via embodied experiments and active questioning.


Less than 1 in 10 drug candidates that enter phase 1 clinical trials actually gets approved for human use. The high failure rate is in part due to unforeseen side effects or toxicity. A better understanding of the role of selectivity and a better insight in the off-target activities of drug candidates could greatly aid in preventing candidates to fail for these reasons. This thesis has tried to address some aspects in this challenging part of drug discovery. The use of activity-based protein profiling as presented in Chapters 2 and 3 in drug discovery and hit-to-lead optimization, and in Chapter 5 and 6 for the interaction profiling of a drug candidate, highlights the versatility and importance of this chemical biology technique. Combined with knowledge derived from biochemical assays, such as that developed in Chapter 4, ABPP can greatly aid the medicinal chemist. The recent surge in popularity of machine learning algorithms, backed by exponential growth of the amount of biological data available, holds great promise for drug discovery. Chapters 7 and 8 showed the applicability of one such algorithm, which was able to quite reliably predict interaction profiles. The challenges in finding, determining and predicting selectivity are far from solved, but, by incrementally expanding our understanding of the binding of small molecules to their (off-)targets, truly selective inhibitors might at some point become a reality or their necessity might be mitigated.