In order to decrease reliance on fossil fuels, renewable energy has become an important topic of research in recent years. The development in the renewable energy source will help in meeting the requirements of limiting greenhouse-gas effects, and conserve the environment from pollution, global warming, ozone layer depletion, etc. There are various naturally available renewable energy sources. One of these sources is solar energy. Solar energy is available in abundance throughout the world and is the cleanest of all known energy sources. There are various devices that can be used to harness solar energy. One of such devices is a thermo-syphon. Thermo-syphon converts the solar energy obtained from the Sun into thermal energy of a working fluid. This thermal energy in the working fluid can be used for various industrial and household activities. In a closed loop thermo-syphon system, the working fluid circulates within the thermo-syphon loop via natural convection phenomenon and does not need any external devices, such as a pump. Therefore, it is considered to be one of the most efficient devices for the heat transfer. Moreover, the absence of a pumping device reduces the manufacturing and maintenance costs of a thermo-syphon system.

The heat exchange process in the thermo-syphon is a complicated process, which considers the heat convection phenomenon. Therefore, to understand the natural convection process in the thermo-syphon and their effect on the thermal performance of the system a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based techniques have been used. Numerical results obtained have been verified against the experimental results, and they match closely with each other. The comparison between the CFD and experimental result, suggest that CFD can be used as an effective tool to analyse the performance of a thermo-syphon with reasonable accuracy. In order to investigate the flow structure within the thermo-syphon system, detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses have been carried out in the present study. The qualitative analysis of the flow field includes descriptions of the velocity magnitude and the static temperature distributions contours within the closed loop thermo-syphon system. Furthermore, the variation in the temperature of water within the storage tank, temperature of the working fluid, heat transfer coefficient, wall shear stress, and local velocity and temperature distribution of the working fluid within thermo-syphon loop have been quantified as a function of time. In addition, numerical studies have been conducted to identify the effects of various geometrical parameters, which include the number of the riser pipes, length-to-diameter ratio of the riser pipe on the thermal performance of a closed loop thermo-syphon system. Moreover, a further investigation has been carried out to analyse the effect of various heat flux conditions and different transient thermal loadings on the thermal performance of a closed loop thermo-syphon system. Based on these analyses some novel semi-empirical relations have been developed to predict the thermal performance of the thermo-syphon, which is one of the focal points of this research.

Another goal of the current study is to improve the thermal performance characteristic of thermo-syphon solar water heating system using an enhancement device to improve the heat transfer. This aspect of the work focuses on the increasing energy conversion from the riser pipes to the working fluid within the thermo-syphon loop. This is accomplished by increasing the surface area of riser pipes by employing several design modifications, such as straight, wavy and helical pipes, within the riser pipes, while maintaining the amount of the working fluid constant within the closed loop thermo-syphon system. In this study, a comparative analysis has been carried out for these new design modifications to identify the best in terms of heat transfer coefficient, heat gain in collector etc., as an indication of thermal performance. According to the findings of this analysis, the model comprising of pipe inside the riser pipe depict better thermal performance as compared to other models. After defining the best design modification, a further detailed investigation has been carried out between the traditional and modified design (straight pipe inside the riser pipe) using experimental and numerical method.

Established methods regarding the design process of thermo-syphons are very limited, and they are severely limited in estimating important design parameters, such as useful heat gain and heat transfer coefficient, which have a significant impact on the thermal performance of thermo-syphon system/loop. A design methodology has been developed to enrich the design process of a closed loop thermo-syphon solar water heating system. The developed methodology is more efficient and reliable since it is capable of estimating various geometrical and thermal parameters, such as collector area, diameter and length of the riser pipes, distance between the centers of the riser pipes, heat transfer coefficient, temperature of the working fluid and the mass flow rate. This design methodology is user friendly and robust.


The internet has had an impact on public relations that goes well beyond significant adjustments in practice made in response to technological change. Mirroring the emergence of "Web 2.0" platforms, the discipline is increasingly articulating its purpose and culture through discourse associated with social media. Concepts such as transparency, authenticity, conversation and engagement can be inextricably linked with the mainstreaming of social media practice; although they are not unique to social media, and predate much of the opening up of platforms and channels seen over the last two decades, their meanings have to a significant degree been negotiated across social media fora. Some will want to trace this history through a chronological narrative of invention, innovation and artefact, others through an examination of core concepts associated with online public relations. This paper seeks to explore ways in which the critical historian can excavate, order and interpret the discourse surrounding the commentary provided by influential PR/social media bloggers, and to identify ways in which this might have influenced emerging normative models. Storytelling and co-creation are an important part of the narrative projected by social media evangelists. It is therefore natural to want to see how these concepts helped in creation of normative practice. The chronological narrative around which the research centres will identify the emergence of new terminology, the rate of acceptance of emerging concepts into the discourse, and the drivers that allowed particular words and framings to become part of a shared understanding. (The research would be grounded primarily in close study of the conceptual language and themes that can be identified within the public discourse, and rather than an attempt to reveal the motivations of key players). The proposition to be tested is that the normative discourse defining 'modern' and 'ethical' public relations practice in the 21st century constitutes, to a large degree, an appropriation and reinterpretation of discourses in social media circles. (Less)


Office 2010 In Depth is the beyond-the-basics, beneath-the-surface guide for everyone who wants to streamline their work with Office 2010, and get more done in less time. Best selling technology expert Joe Habraken provides specific, tested, proven solutions to the problems Office users run into every day: challenges other books ignore or oversimplify. Habraken thoroughly covers all facets of working with Office 2010's core features and techniques, and powerful new enhancements such as: " The updated customizable Ribbon and new Backstage full-screen options menu " Vastly improved image and illustration tools " Live Preview for tasks like Paste, Insert, or Theme change " Improved integration with SharePoint services, Windows Live, and Office Web Apps " And much more Simply put, no other book offers Office 2010 users this much simplicity, usable content, flexibility, and value. As with all In Depth books, Office 2010 In Depth presents comprehensive coverage, breakthrough techniques, exclusive shortcuts, quick access to information, troubleshooting help for tough problems, and real-world examples with nothing glossed over or left out. This book is both a reference and a desk-side resource, providing in depth coverage of important Office 2010 applications features and tools. By Joe Habraken, an Office expert and best selling author Covers the hottest new features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, and Publisher For everyone who wants to get the most out of Office 2010, from hobbyists to power users to corporate developers


Introduction The early prediction and prevention of cardiovascular disease risk factors is highly important in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients. The plasma level of omentin was found to be associated with different disorders such as insulin resistance, diabetes mellitus, obesity, endothelial dysfunction, and atherosclerosis. The aim of the study was to clarify the influence of changes in levels of circulating omentin-1 on insulin resistance in CKD patients with and without type 2 diabetes mellitus. Participants and methods Seventy-eight patients were enrolled in this cross-sectional study: 23 patients with CKD on conservative treatment, 35 patients on maintenance hemodialysis, and 20 healthy volunteers. Serum concentrations of omentin-1 were determined with an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kit. Results Significant difference in plasma omentin-1 level was noticed between diabetic patients and nondiabetic patients in both the predialysis group and the hemodialysis (HD) group. There was also a significant difference in plasma omentin-1 level between nondiabetic patients in the predialysis group and the HD group and between diabetic patients in the predialysis group and hemodialysis group. There were significant negative correlation between plasma Omentin-1 level (ng/ml), fasting insulin level (mIU/ml), HOMA-IR and eGFR (ml/min/1.73m 2 ) while significant positive correlation with IL-6 (pg/ml) and hsCRP (mg/l). Conclusion Plasma omentin-1 concentration was higher in CKD patients. In addition, there was an association between omentin-1 and insulin resistance in hemodialysis patients, which may be considered a cardiovascular risk factor in CKD patients.


Wetlands have been the focus of conservation and restoration efforts for over a century, and governments, international actors (NGOs and academia) and local communities around the world are now increasingly engaging in wetland restoration or avoiding wetland degration activities for climate change mitigation. Yet despite the rapidly growing attention on wetland activities for climate mitigation, finding the appropriate funding sources to set up a wetland carbon project or develop a national wetland carbon program is often a challenge. This report provides guidance for program and project developers from, or working in, developing countries on the numerous funds and finance mechanisms that can provide carbon finance for wetland carbon conservation and restoration. It also highlights ways to access and link carbon activities with non-carbon based sources of financing.


Nearly 4 decades ago, ATP was measured for the first time in an intact ex vivo living organ, the crystalline lens, using 31P nuclear magnetic resonance [1]. At that time and during decades to follow, the millimolar concentrations of this metabolite, known to function principally as the energy currency of intracellular metabolism, was unexplainably and excessively high. In contrast, only micromolar concentrations are required and necessary for intracellular energy metabolism and any of the other known functions of ATP, combined. This elevated millimolar concentration of intralenticular ATP was reported in 14 different mammalian species [1-3], including avian and reptilian species [3]. Not until the report of Patel et al., however, was there evidence for the requirement of millimolar concentrations for ATP, where it functions as a hydrotrope, preventing protein aggregation in both cellular and tissue homogenate preparations.


There is a growing concern that the widespread use of computers, mobile phones and other digital devices before bedtime disrupts our sleep with detrimental effects on our health and cognitive performance. High-speed Internet promotes the use of electronic devices, video games and Internet addiction (e.g., online games and cyberloafing). Exposure to artificial light from tablets and PCs can alterate individuals' sleep patterns. However, there is little empirical evidence on the causal relationship between technology use near bedtime and sleep. This paper studies the causal effects of access to high-speed Internet on sleep. We first show that playing video games, using PC or smartphones, watching TV or movies are correlated with shorter sleep duration. Second, we exploit historical differences in pre-existing telephone infrastructure that affected the deployment of high-speed Internet across Germany (see Falck et al., 2014) to identify a source of plausibly exogenous variation in access to Broadband. Using this instrumental variable strategy, we find that DSL access reduces sleep duration and sleep satisfaction.


Coral bleaching is often characterized by high spatial variation across reef systems. Using a field survey and manipulative experiment, we tested whether the physical structure of coral reefs modifies environmental conditions that, in turn, influence spatial variation in bleaching in 3 scleractinian corals, Pocillopora verrucosa, Acropora elseyi, and Porites rus. Corals inhabit mainly the hard-bottom seafloor, or dead or partially dead coral heads ('bommies'). Bommies (0.10 to 3.0 m tall) position corals at different water depths and expose them to differences in light, temperature, hydrodynamics, and sedimentation, factors that can influence patterns of bleaching. We conducted our study in association with a 14 d warming event that caused bleaching in lagoons of Moorea, French Polynesia. Bleaching in naturally occurring colonies of Pocillopora spp. and Acopora spp. was greater on the seafloor (0 m tall) than on short (0.35 to 0.40 m tall) and tall bommies (1.0 to 1.2 m tall). Bleaching in P. verrucosa and A. elseyi transplanted to reef structures in the experiment generally decreased with increasing reef height (seafloor > short bommies > tall bommies). P. rus did not bleach under any conditions observed. Regression analyses revealed that reef structure controlled current speed and sedimentation at the microhabitat scale (from centimeters to meters), and that these factors regulated bleaching and mortality in P. verrucosa and A. elseyi. Our results imply that the physical structure of shallow water reef habitat influences the performance of coral colonies by modifying environmental stress, and that accounting for this structure is important in managing coral reef systems.


Previous research has associated the development of social phobia with parental rearing practices, learning influences such as conditioning, vicarious transmission and verbal acquisition, and the individual's own response to social situations. The present study aimed to further investigate these possible antecedents of social phobia. A Learning History Questionnaire (LHQ) was completed by patients with social phobia (n=55), patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; n=30), and non-patient controls (n=30). The LHQ focused on events that occurred before the age of 14 (the median age of onset for social phobia). The results indicated the importance of parental rearing practices such as not actively encouraging participation in social situations and emotional coldness. Difficulties with peer group were highlighted as important contributors to conditioning experiences. Individual response factors, especially post-event rumination, are potentially associated with the development of social phobia. Four of the 12 significant variables were unique to the social phobia group when the results from the PTSD group were taken into account. Further research is required to clarify the extent to which the environmental factors assessed in this study specifically contribute to the development of social phobia or to the development of anxiety more generally.


We all know we should give to charity, but who really does? In his controversial study of America's giving habits, Arthur C. Brooks shatters stereotypes about charity in America-including the myth that the political Left is more compassionate than the Right. Brooks, a preeminent public policy expert, spent years researching giving trends in America, and even he was surprised by what he found. In Who Really Cares, he identifies the forces behind American charity: strong families, church attendance, earning one's own income (as opposed to receiving welfare), and the belief that individuals-not government-offer the best solution to social ills. But beyond just showing us who the givers and non-givers in America really are today, Brooks shows that giving is crucial to our economic prosperity, as well as to our happiness, health, and our ability to govern ourselves as a free people.


Interest groups' policy position documents constitute an important data source for estimating their policy positions and lobbying success. We examine applications of quantitative text analysis to research these documents in the context of the European Commission's open consultations. We show a considerable degree of incongruity between this method's assumptions and the text characteristics of EU position documents. We examine how these incongruities affect the validity of position estimates and conduct an empirical analysis of documents submitted in one consultation on CO2 car emissions. We compare estimates derived on both quantitative and qualitative content analysis and find relatively limited correspondence between the two. These observed differences matter substantively: they result in different findings concerning levels of interest groups' lobbying success.


This paper assessed the "Impact of Oil and Gas Resource Exploration on the Environment" of Delta State oil producing communities of Nigeria. It examined the problems associated with oil exploration and its mitigation. Primary and secondary data were used to source data for the set objectives. The theoretical framework was based on the resource curse theory and the environmental externalities theory. It was established that various problems such as oil spillage, retardation of vegetation growth, soil infertility, ill-health to members of the community, displacement of the people of the area, constant protestation of host communities, socio-economic deprivation, and perceived marginalization of the people are associated with oil resource exploration. This research concludes that the oil bearing communities have not adequately been compensated for harm done them through degradation of the ecosystem caused by several years of oil exploration. Their oil resource wealth has been turned to oil resource curse as they are disempowered, and condemned to perpetual underdevelopment. It is recommended that Federal Government should exert maximum efforts in assuring strict compliance of its legal instruments by the oil participating industries for a sustainable development in the region.


Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular protozoan parasite of the phylum Apicomplexa, and toxoplasmosis is an important disease in immuno-compromised individuals - especially AIDS patients, organ transplant recipients and patients receiving anti-cancer chemotherapy. Toxoplasmosis also has economic importance as it results in spontaneous abortion in economically important animals. Due to emerging drug resistance and the possible side effects of the existing therapeutics there is a necessity to explore new drug targets. Sphingolipids are essential components of eukaryotic cell membranes and signal transduction pathways. Mammals produce sphingomyelin (SM) via a SM synthase, whereas yeast, plants and some protozoa utilise an inositol phosphorylceramide (IPC) synthase to produce IPC. IPC synthases have no mammalian equivalent and have been proposed as targets for anti-fungals and anti-protozoals. In this study sphingolipid scavenging from the host was shown to be non-essential for Toxoplasma proliferation indicating de novo synthesis is key. To investigate this pathway in the parasite an orthologue of the SM synthase from the related apicomplexan Plasmodium falciparum was identified in the genome database as being encoded by a single copy gene. Subsequently it was characterized as a functional orthologue of the yeast AUR1p (IPC synthase), with mass spectrometry identifying this lipid species in parasite extracts for the first time. Like AUR1p and the human SM synthase, the Toxoplasma sphingolipid synthase (Tg SLS) is Golgi localized. However, unlike AUR1p Tg SLS is resistant to the inhibitor aureobasidin A and also facilitates production of a minor complex sphingolipid suggested to be SM. Further study characterized the sphingolipid synthases from the Trypanosoma species (protozoan Kinetoplastida) and the plant Arabidopsis. Bioinformatic and phylogenetic analyses of these and previously characterized SM and IPC synthases, indicate them to be a family of evolutionarily related, but functionally diverse, enzymes. Many of these may prove to be targets for pharmaceutical or herbicidal intervention.


Australia's ageing population is growing and so too is the number of older persons who experience abuse. Divorce, ill-health, disability, the death of a partner, dependency, poverty, social isolation, gender, and even the accumulation of assets, can heighten a person's vulnerability to abuse — physical, social, sexual, psychological, financial or neglect. Addressing elder abuse from a legal and policy perspective is not, however, simple. Perceived Commonwealth dominance in the ageing portfolio, despite the lack of a comprehensive legislative mandate to safeguard older Australians; a lack of innovative legal reform at the state level; ageism; the invisibility of our older people; a lack of awareness within the community of both the prevalence, nature and the signs of elder abuse; together with the absence of an international normative framework for protecting the rights of older persons, have together created a situation where elder abuse is simply not widely acknowledged as a serious issue in Australia and is inadequately addressed under existing laws. This article examines the current legal situation in Australia and calls for a collaborative national strategy for preventing and responding to elder abuse, incorporating a rights-based approach to the review and reform of state and territory laws. Recognising that elder abuse involves the denial of a person's basic human rights, including the right to live free from abuse, exploitation or neglect, this article calls for a national inquiry into elder abuse by the Australian Human Rights Commission.


Grenada is the southernmost volcanic island of the Lesser Antilles. A series of volcanic centres ranging from Pliocene to Recent in age are present overlying a folded Lower to Middle Tertiary volcano-sedimentary formation. Eruptions of silica-undersaturated alkali basalt and picrite magmas have occurred repeatedly during the evolution of these centres. Calc-alkaline andesites and dacites show a close field association with the basalts and picrites. Recent activity on the island has been explosive in nature. A model of variable volumes of Upper Mantle partial melting is proposed to account for the diversity of major, trace and Rare Earth element compositions and strontium isotope ratios of the basalts and picrites. Geochemical, petrographic and mineralogical criteria suggest that the andesites and dacites are related to these basic melts by fractional crystallisation processes. In addition the chemical compositions and strontium isotope ratios of the andesites and dacites reflect the diverse compositions of the parental basalt magmas. The petrography and mineralogy of the andesites and dacites is similar to calc-alkaline suites elsewhere in the arc. Some of the basalts and picrites contain abundant olivine and sector and oscillatory zoned clinopyroxene phenocrysts. In some basalts, phenocryst amphibole is present. An origin by partial melting of an Upper Mantle pericotite source is proposed. Alternative sources are examiner: but partial melting of a subducted lithospheric plate does not appear to be a significant petrogenetic process in Grenada, Fractional crystallisation of olivine, clinopyroxene and spinel is mainly responsible for the development of a normal calc-alkaline trend towards increasing silica-saturation in the magmas. Subsequent crystallisation of plagioclase feldspar and then amphibole is also important in the development of a trend towards silica- rather than alkali-enrichment in the residual melts. The significant feature of the Grenada vulcanicity is the occurrence within a restricted geographic range of magmas of contrasted geochemical characteristics. The local volcanic and tectonic history of the southern part of the Lesser Antilles island arc are probably the most important factors in the development of these unusual characteristics.


This study examines the determinants of the security issue decision for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) for a sample of 664 REIT security issuances in the 1993–2001 period. REITs differ from industrial companies because they are sheltered from paying corporate income taxes if they pay out 95 per cent of income as dividends. This restriction forces REITs to use the external markets to raise capital more often than their industrial counterparts. For these reasons, REITs might have different incentives to issue debt versus equity than has been previously found for industrials. The results of the study find that the decision to issue equity is directly related to the expected cost of issuing debt and inversely related to the costs of issuing equity. Investment opportunities are not related to the security issue decision. These results are consistent with the pecking order hypothesis, which differs from previously examined industrial companies where the security issue decision was driven by agency costs. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications


This study investigates the foundation and the first three decades of the teacher training institution at Cheltenham. Its main thesis is that the Cheltenham training college was primarily the work of one man, the Rev. Francis Close who was the incumbent of Cheltenham between 1824 - 1856. He played a key role at every stage including the ini tial period when the first proposal was made in 1845. Contrary to previous accounts it was not founded there in response to a widespread demand for a national institution based on evangelical principles. It was established as a result of Close's religious position within the Church of England, his dominant personality and the situation which he had helped to create in Cheltenham by that time. An evaluation of his career, his work in making Cheltenham a centre of education, his involvement in controversies and his educational ideas reveal him as a leading pioneer of education during the nineteenth century. His ideas on the training of teachers and the way he ensured that they were carried out are particularly important. The second part of the study includes research into the way the college was governed, an account of how it was financed, in particular how it was affected by the Revised Code, the staff, the students and their professional training. composition of the student body The chapter on the includes a detailed analysis of the first 288 students who were trained between 1847 and 1851 and of 2054 who were trained between 1852 and 1878. Throughout this period a very strong element of continuity in attitudes towards religious education and teacher training, which originated with Close, persisted against a background of rapid change.


Opinion 2/13 of the Court of Justice of the European Union (striking down the Draft Agreement on accession to the European Convention on Human Rights) has evoked widespread "outrage." The Court's Opinion is generally derided as "unsubstantiated," purely "self-interested," and "playground politics." This Article disagrees with that assessment. The Article provides the first comprehensive legal analysis and constitutional reconstruction of the Opinion's many objections to show why the Court's concerns are mostly warranted. At the same time, however, the Article explains why accession to the ECHR is not only important for human rights, but also vital to save the European Union itself. Finally, the Article points the way forward by identifying the changes that must be, and can be, made to allow accession to proceed.


We report on experimental demonstration of all-optical switching in a silicon-on-insulator photonic wire nanocavity operating at telecom wavelengths. The switching is performed with a control pulse energy as low as approximately 0.1 pJ on a cavity device that presents very high signal transmission, an ultra-high quality-factor, almost diffraction-limited modal volume and a footprint of only 5 microm(2). High-speed modulation of the cavity mode is achieved by means of optical injection of free carriers using a nanosecond pulsed laser. Experimental results are interpreted by means of finite-difference time-domain simulations. The possibility of using this device as a logic gate is also demonstrated.


In this study, we measured the mobility distribu- tions of cluster and intermediate ions with an ion spectrom- eter near a waterfall. We observed that the concentration of negative 1.5-10 nm ions was one-hundred fold higher than a reference point 100 m away from the waterfall. Also, the concentration of positive intermediate ions was found to be higher than that at the reference point by a factor of ten. This difference was observed only at the smallest sizes; above 10 nm the difference was insignificant.


Protein oxidation can cause aggregation, fragmentation, and affect enzymatic activity and binding partner interactions. Protein oxidation is implicated in a range of agerelated pathologies including neurodegeneration and cancer. The VHR and PTEN phosphatases studied are sensitive to oxidation and regulated by protein-protein interactions. PTEN acts by dephosphorylating phosphatidylinositol (3,4,5)-triphosphate, negatively regulating the Akt pathway as part of a signalling control network that can protect against apoptosis, and is involved in the regulation of cell fate regulation and cancer. VHR is involved in neural development and cancer. A technology workflow for detecting protein oxidation and to correlate oxidative modifications to enzymatic activity and protein-protein interaction was developed; which may contribute towards the advancement of fundamental science as well as potential therapeutic and biomarker target identification in proteins. The technology platform consists of the mass spectrometric technique MS2 to detect, validate, map and quantify oxidative modifications. The technology workflow consists of enzymatic activity assays to correlate modification with changes in activity, targeted MS2 and statistical analysis. The fundamental and distinct contribution to knowledge in this thesis is a systematic mapping of protein oxidative modifications over a range of oxidants and concentrations of hypochlorous acid (HOCl), 3-morpholino-sydnonimine (sin-1) and tetranitromethane for VHR (vaccinia H1 related) and PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homolog on chromosome 10), including modification identification including active site residues and putative binding domain, mapping the relative abundances of those modification and statistically correlating them to changes in enzymatic activity. Additional contributions to knowledge have been i) the nonspecificity and complexity of oxidation profiles and oxidant damage of nitrating agents, that have largely been proposed to be specific without substantial oxidative capacity and ii) expanding the known interactome of VHR (vaccinia H1 related) through array and co-immunoprecipitation.


Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is common in older U.S. adults and the prevalence is anticipated to rise in this age group along with obesity, a prominent risk factor for OSA. Recently, OSA was determined to be highly prevalent among patients with abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) disease. Objectives: Examine associations between OSA risk and physical activity (PA), metabolic syndrome (MetSyn), and exercise responses to cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) in elderly patients with AAA disease. Methods: Elderly patients (n=326 for Studies 1 and 2; n=114 for Study 3) newly diagnosed with small AAAs (aortic diameter ≥2.5 and < 5.5 cm) were recruited. Data collection for all participants included: extraction of medical history and drug information from medical records; completion of a physical examination to assess resting vital signs and anthropometrics; fasting blood draw for several biochemical analyses; completion of a cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET); and completion of interviews and questionnaires for health history, PA, and OSA risk. Results: 57% of subjects were High-risk for OSA and 17% were classified in the highest-risk Berlin Risk Score (BRS) 3 group; these subjects reported fewer blocks walked/day, flights of stairs climbed/day, and expended fewer Calories when engaged in these activities compared to Low-risk counterparts, independent of obesity. Among those at High-risk for OSA, 45% had MetSyn. Subjects with the highest BRS also had the highest prevalence of MetSyn and values for the MetSyn component biomarkers. Exercise capacity and physiological responses at rest, during exercise, and recovery were similar between groups at Highand Low-risk for OSA. Conclusions: Reduced levels of PA among elderly AAA patients at High-risk for OSA could have unfavorable implications for cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk and all-cause and CVD mortality. Subjects demonstrating the most clinical symptoms of OSA showed a significantly higher prevalence for MetSyn and several of the biomarkers that determine MetSyn. In clinical practice, the BRS may be useful for identifying those AAA patients at increased risk for both OSA and MetSyn.


Outsourcing data streams and desired computations to a third party such as the cloud is practical for many companies due to overwhelming flow of information and excessively high resource requirements of their data stream applications. However, data outsourcing and remote computations intrinsically raise issues of trust, making it crucial to verify results returned by third parties. In this context, we propose a novel solution to verify outsourced Group-By, Sum (or histogram) queries that are common in many business applications. We consider a setting where a data owner employs an untrusted remote server to run continuous Group-By, Sum queries on a data stream it forwards to the server. Untrusted clients then query the server for the computed results. More importantly, a client can efficiently verify the correctness of the results by using a small and easy-to-compute signature provided by the data owner. Our work complements previous works on authenticating remote computation of selection and aggregation queries. Moreover, unlike prior work on remote Group-by queries, we support untrusted clients (who can collude with other clients or with the server) and provide stronger cryptographic guarantees. Experimental results on real and synthetic data show that our solution is practical and efficient.


Having visited many parts of our island but little known
to the general traveller, I have, during the past few years,
accumulated materials with respect to the distribution and
variability of our land and fresh-water shells, which may be
helpful in removing some of the existing difficulties in regard
to classification.
Mr. Legrand's very excellent monograph, modestly called
by him "A Collection for a Monograph of Tasmanian Land
Shells," contains a full description of 83 species. Of these
the greater part (55) were described by the eminent Australian
conchologist, Dr. Cox, whose monograph of the Australian
land shells, a work of the greatest value, is necessary to
every one who desires to become familiar with Australian conchology.
The remainder is described by well-known leading
naturalists as follows, viz., Brazier, 16; Pfeiffer, 8; Reeve, 1;
Ferussac, 1; and Leach, 1. The work in addition contains
notes and observations relating to distribution, variability,
and affinities by Mr. Legrand himself, which are not the least
valuable part of the work; and it is illustrated by two beautifully
executed plates containing the enlarged drawings of 27
species.


The present study was conducted to investigate the impact of textile dye on the early seedling stage of 3 crops: barley, maize, and wheat. Seeds were imbibed in different concentrations of textile dye for 12 h and were then grown in a controlled growth room for 8 days with a related dye solution. Some growth and polyphasic chlorophyll fluorescence parameters were measured and analysed to appraise the effect of textile dye on the 3 crops. Although different crop species showed differences in response to different concentrations, textile dye generally affected almost all radicle growth parameters more adversely than coleoptile growth parameters. While photosynthetic performance indexes of wheat increased significantly in all textile dye treatments, those same parameters in barley strongly decreased in all concentrations. While performance indexes of maize increased up to 250 ppm, indexes decreased with the highest dye concentration. Analysis of polyphasic chlorophyll fluorescence and growth parameters allowed for the separation of wheat, which exhibited a better performance than the other crops under textile dye treatment. The results point out that the impact of textile dye is dependent on its concentration and that it is crop-specific. In addition, textile dye may not be detrimental for these 3 crops.


General purpose GPUs are now ubiquitous in high-end supercomputing. All but one (the Japanese Fugaku system, which is based on ARM processors) of the announced (pre-)exascale systems contain vast amounts of GPUs that deliver the majority of the performance of these systems. Thus, GPU programming will be a necessity for application developers using high-end HPC systems.However, programming GPUs efficiently is an even more daunting task than traditional HPC application development. This becomes even more apparent for large-scale systems containing thousands of GPUs. Orchestrating all the resources of such a system imposes a tremendous challenge to developers. Luckily a rich ecosystem of tools exist to assist developers in every development step of a GPU application at all scales. In this paper we present an overview of these tools and discuss their capabilities. We start with an overview of different GPU programming models, from low-level with CUDA over pragma-based models like OpenACC to high-level approaches like Kokkos. We discuss their respective tool interfaces as the main method for tools to obtain information on the execution of a kernel on the GPU. The main focus of this paper is on two classes of tools, debuggers and performance analysis tools. Debuggers help the developer to identify problems both on the CPU and GPU side as well as in the interplay of both. Once the application runs correctly, performance analysis tools can be used to pinpoint bottlenecks in the execution of the code and help to increase the overall performance.


Understanding neural activities is fundamental and challenging in decoding how the brain processes information. An essential part of the problem is to define a meaningful and quantitative characterization of neural activities when they are represented by a sequence of action potentials or a neural spike train. The thesis approaches to use a point process to represent a neural spike train, and such representation provides a conditional intensity function (CIF) to describe neural activities. The estimation procedure for CIF, including particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo (PMCMC) and smoothing, is introduced and applied to a real data set. From the CIF and its derivative of a neural spike train, we can successfully observe adaption behavior. Simulation study verifies that the estimation procedure provides reliable estimate of CIF. This framework provides a definite quantification of neural activities and facilitates further investigation of understanding the brain from neurological perspective.


The nickel(Ⅱ) complex with the new ligand of S-benzyl-β-N-[10-ethylphenothiazine-3-methylene]dithiocarbazate(HL) crystallizes in the triclinic system, space group P1-with a = 7.516(1), b = 11.322(1), c = 13.366(1) (A),α= 84.818(1),β= 81.688(1), y= 76.037(1)°, V= 1090.26(3) (A)3, Z = 1, Dc=1.413 g/cm3, F(000) = 482,μ(MoKα)= 0.774 mm-1 (λ= 0.7103(A)),R = 0.0573 and wR =0.1375 for 3357 observed reflections withⅠ≥ 2σ(Ⅰ). The HL has lost a proton from its tautomeric thiol form and acts as a single negatively charged bidentate ligand coordinating to the nickel ion via the mercapto sulfur and β-nitrogen atoms. The geometry around Ni(Ⅱ) is almost square-planar with two equivalent Ni-N and Ni-S bonds. The nonlinear absorption of HL and NiL2 solutions (in DMF) was measured by open-aperture Z-scan technique at the wavelength of 532 nm.


The water system provides many services to society; industries, municipalities and agriculture all withdraw, use and return water and demand a water quality fit for the intended purposes. Both global production of chemicals and global water withdrawal grow faster than human population. This implies increased chemical threats to water, and creates a strong driver for mitigation to protect human health, ecosystem integrity and ecosystem services. Here we connect the perspectives of the water cycle and the chemical life cycle and review possible mitigation options. We categorize mitigation options in various stages of the chemicals' life cycle, taking various sectors and environmental pathways into account. More technologically oriented versus other types of mitigation options are discerned, and their relevance on spatial and temporal scale is discussed. We review various water treatment techniques in relation to physical–chemical properties of chemicals. Finally we discuss how a mitigation database can be used to assess the effectiveness of interventions, by coupling them to regional or global hydrological models. A solution-focused and systems-oriented perspective combined with a mitigation database offers a common perspective amongst actors on the effects for water quality of possible mitigation options throughout the chemical's life cycle, in various sectors and at various places in the water system. This can stimulate coherent implementation of effective mitigation options, cross-sectoral learning and further innovations to improve water quality.


This paper describes our research into the nature of everyday driving, with a particular emphasis on the processes that govern driver behaviour in familiar, well-practiced situations. The research examined the development and maintenance of proceduralised driving habits in a high-fidelity driving simulator by paying 29 participants to drive a simulated road regularly over three months of testing. A range of measures, including detection task performance and driving performance were collected over the course of 20 sessions. Performance from a yoked control group who experienced the same road scenarios in a single session was also measured. The data showed the development of stereotyped driving patterns and changes in what drivers noticed, indicative of inattentional blindness and "driving without awareness". Extended practice also resulted in increased sensitivity for detecting changes to foveal road features associated with vehicle guidance and performance on an embedded vehicle detection task (detection of a specific vehicle type). The changes in attentional focus and driving performance resulting from extended practice help explain why drivers are at increased risk of crashing on roads they know well. Identifying the features of familiar roads that attract driver attention, even when they are driving without awareness, can inform new interventions and designs for safer roads. The data also provide new light on a range of previous driver behaviour research including a "Tandem Model" that includes both explicit and implicit processes involved in driving performance.


This article claims that insofar as they continue to omit analyses of colonialism and racialization, retellings of the biblical Exodus and of twentieth-century Black-Jewish relations—two massively significant narratives in the U.S. Black Christian imaginary—will inevitably continue to fuel the Zionist impulse that prevents much of Afro-Christianity from intentionally engaging Palestinian justice. Furthermore, the religious trope of chosenness, along with the dominant narration of the European Jewish Holocaust moment, have provided a politico-ethical basis for a unique type of dispensation that filters the two aforementioned retellings to ultimately deselect non-Jewish Palestinians from a recognizably complex humanity. The tools of the Black radical tradition, however, coupled with a reimagining of coalitional politics, carve out a radical Black Christian sensibility that is best equipped to speak to the devastations of military occupation and racist exclusion and forge life-giving relationships within the freedom struggles against them.


Arctic marine mammals and the communities that depend on them for subsistence are facing unprecedented rates of environmental change. Comparative studies of policy implementation are necessary in order to identify key mechanisms of successful environmental governance under challenging conditions. This study compares two federal agencies responsible for the conservation of Arctic marine mammals. Drawing on multiple methods, I develop indepth case studies of the policy implementation process for managing bowhead whale and polar bear subsistence hunting. I examine how and why agency approaches to conservation differ and assess policy effectiveness. The analysis focuses on three aspects of institutional performance as drivers of policy outcomes: historical events, organizational culture, and structural relationships with stakeholders. The study begins by tracing the development of marine mammal management in Alaska through time. I find that definitions of subsistence developed under previous eras continue to shape debates over wildlife management in Alaska, confounding ecologically relevant policy reform. I next examine the roles of agency culture, policy history, and relationships with stakeholders in influencing how agencies implement contemporary harvest assessment programs. Findings suggest that the internal orientation of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service makes it more likely to retain control over management programs than the more externally oriented National Marine Fisheries Service. Furthermore, these policy approaches affect the development of social norms at the local level. Through a social network analysis, I demonstrate that the extent to which policy programs are integrated into the existing social networks of a village affects policy success. Hunter participation in and support for policies is stronger when there are local centers of coordination and meaningful policy deliberation. Finally, I assess existing policies regarding both species to examine whether or not contemporary policy approaches address key drivers of system change and provide effective feedback channels. Findings demonstrate that both agencies have focused on regulating harvests; I argue that in order to foster resilience of the system into the future, policy actors must reconfigure management approaches and policies towards the protection of functional seascapes. I propose two strategies in order to govern for recovery (polar bears) and resistance (bowhead whales).


Extract of garlic (Allium sativum L.), Neem (Azadirachta indica L.); BAU-Biofungicide (Trichoderma based preparation) and Bavistin DF (Carbandazim) and Potent 250 EC (Propiconazole) were tested in laboratory and field conditions for eco-friendly management of diseases of rice (Oryza sativa, L.) cv BRRI dhan28. BAUBiofungicide (2%) was found to have profound effect in inhibiting the mycelial growth of Bipolaris oryzae (brown spot), Cercospora oryzae (narrow brown leaf spot) and Rhizoctonia solani (sheath blight) in vitro and marked reduction of disease incidence of brown spot, narrow brown leaf spot and sheath blight in the field. It was noted that significantly low incidence of narrow brown leaf spot and sheath blight disease was observed in plots sprayed with Carbendazim (0.1%) in the field as well as mycelial growth inhibition of Cercospora oryzae and Rhizoctonia solani was found in Carbendazim (0.1%) under laboratory condition. Highest (20.20%) grain yield was increased in Propiconazole (0.1%), while (17.84%) higher increase grain was obtained with BAU-Biofungicide (3%). No statistical significant difference was observed between yield of BAU-Biofungicide and Propiconazole. Most of the detected seed borne pathogens were controlled by BAU-Biofungicide and Propiconazole. Maximum germination (%) was observed over control when seeds were treated with BAU-Biofungicide (2%). BAUBiofungicide (2%) exhibited (40.45%) higher increase in vigour index over control. Results indicated that the greatest antagonistic effect of BAU-Biofungicide was found in reducing disease incidence and increased grain yield as an alternative option of synthetic fungicide.


Democracy, anticipated by American and other Western powers to prevent economic chaos and political conflict within and among states, is not evolving as expected. Since 1991, Western governments have been providing large amounts of democratic assistance to the Former Soviet Union yet few, if any, of the recipient countries have developed into genuine democracies. This research argues that part of the failure resides in United States (US) democracy assistance's inadequate consideration of gender within democracy programming. The lack of effective gender analysis has not only been detrimental to women but has served to obscure comprehensive and vital components of democratic transitions. The field research conducted for this dissertation demonstrates: (I) that gender is more central to women's self- identification than ethnicity; (2) that the meaning, as well as significance, attached to ethnic identity vary between women and men; (3) that there is a greater male identification with ethnicity and with official identities such as citizenship; and (4) that women are more fully involved in the associations that make up civil society than men. Feminist and socio-political science theories are utilised to examine the interrelations of ethnicity and gender within modern Kyrgyzstan-the laboratory of US democratic programming and a country self-promoted as the "island of democracy" within a region prone to ethnic conflict, divided by gender and of geo-political strategic importance. US development practice provides the contextual frame for exploring the relationship of gender and ethnicity. As civil society is a mainstay in US democracy assistance, this so-called independent variable in democratic consolidation is used as a micro framework in this analysis. Gender/feminist theory provides a crosscutting tool intended to expand the theories, data, and analysis of this research to include a gendered perspective. The case study and corresponding field research test the hypothesis that ethnicity is gendered and that it is relevant to democracy assistance. Finally, the conclusion considers the unexplored nexus surrounding these relationships relative to US democratic assistance programming.


Egomotion and scene estimation is a key component in automating robot navigation, as well as in virtual reality applications for mobile phones or head-mounted displays. It is well known, however, that with long exploratory trajectories and multi-session mapping for long-term autonomy or collaborative applications, the maintenance of the ever-increasing size of these maps quickly becomes a bottleneck. With the explosion of data resulting in increasing runtime of the optimization algorithms ensuring the accuracy of the Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) estimates, the large quantity of collected experiences is imposing hard limits on the scalability of such techniques. Considering the keyframe-based paradigm of SLAM techniques, this paper investigates the redundancy inherent in SLAM maps, by quantifying the information of different experiences of the scene as encoded in keyframes. Here we propose and evaluate different information-theoretic and heuristic metrics to remove dispensable scene measurements with minimal impact on the accuracy of the SLAM estimates. Evaluating the proposed metrics in two state-of-the-art centralized collaborative SLAM systems, we provide our key insights into how to identify redundancy in keyframe-based SLAM.


The coup d'etat of September 1930 marks a break in the evolution of psycho and sociogenesis processes aimed at keeping a modern and democratic political activity in Argentina. It reverses the ruling-ruled relationship, strengthening state intervention in society to the weakening of the formal spaces of the "political." The Argentine Patriot League, founded in 1919 under the motto "Order and Fatherland" is a parastatal institution that acts as a channel of prosecution of the rulingruled relationship. It also allows the selection and cooptation of new members to the political class. It is a channel of diffusion of new interventionist ideas from the ruling minority to the rest of society. The proposed objective is to characterize and interpret, from a political sociology, similarities and differences between the work of the Argentine Patriotic League and the measures taken by the State Auditor that separately deserve , the attention of the historiography. The new social actions between ruling-ruled and the original contexts where they occur, allow the emergence of new "social technologies" being implemented from the State and from this nationalist institution that precede and go beyond the institutional breakdown of 1930.


Multimedia information retrieval: That is the desire to make computers see, hear and understand like humans do. Is it possible to give perception to machines, to make them understand facial expressions, hummed melodies, stock charts and ECG curves? If yes, the computer would become an even more valuable companion in business and private life. Think of the possibilities in, for example, healthcare, home security, online customer support or market analysis. This book explains what is possible in multimedia information retrieval today and what is not. We introduce the basic concepts, explain why the first step is always summarization and the second classification, which is essentially applying human understanding of some context on the summary. We group and discuss the various methods that have been proposed for the summarization of audio, visual and other media information. In classification, we build on today's psychological understanding of human cognition. Successfully, we transfer concepts of human similarity perception on machine classification. We cluster machine learning methods by their approach, model and process. On top of that, we link back from the state of the art methods of multimedia information retrieval to human cognition: We propose artificial neural structures for the building blocks of media summarization and classification. The result is a balanced introduction into the field that starts from graduate IT knowledge and ends at the current frontiers of multimedia research.


Introduction Transplantation of bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) or Schwann cells (SCs) can increase axonal regeneration in peripheral nerve injuries. Based on our previous investigations, the goal of the present work was to examine the individual and synergistic effects of the two different cell types in sciatic nerve injury. We pursued to evaluate the effects of BMSCs and SCs co-transplantation on the functional recovery after sciatic nerve injury in rat. Methods In this experimental research, adult male Wistar rats (n = 32, 250-300g) were used, BMSCs and SCs were cultured, and the SCs were confirmed with anti S100 antibody. Rats were randomly divided into 4 groups (n = 8 in each group): 1-control group: silicon tube filled with fibrin gel without cells; 2-BMSCs group: silicon tube filled with fibrin gel seeded with BMSCs; 3-SCs group: silicon tube filled with fibrin gel seeded with SCs and 4-co-transplantation group: silicone tube filled with fibrin gel seeded with BMSCs and SCs. The left sciatic nerve was exposed, a 10 mm segment removed, and a silicone tube interposed into this nerve gap. BMSCs and SCs were transplanted separately or in combination into the gap. BMSCs were labeled with anti-BrdU and SCs were labeled with DiI. After 12 weeks electromyographic and functional assessments were performed and analyzed by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results Electromyographic and functional assessments showed a significant difference between the experimental groups and controls. Electromyography measures were significantly more favourable in SCs transplantation group as compared to BMSCs transplantation and co-transplantation groups (p < 0.05). Functional assessments showed no statistically significant difference among the BMSCs, SCs and co-transplantation groups (p < 0.05). Discussion Transplantation of BMSCs and SCs separately or in combination have the potential to generate functional recovery after sciatic nerve injury in rat. The electromyography evaluation showed a greater improvement after SCs transplantation than BMSCs or the co-transplantation of BMSCs and SCs.


I augment the standard rational addiction model to include an insurance component whereby the effects of addiction can be mitigated. The model implies that increasing the level of insurance in the future induces a forward-looking individual to consume more of a harmfully addictive good currently. I test this implication using the adoption of mental health parity mandates in some states during the 1990s as an exogenous shock on the availability of future insurance. I examine the effects of this shock on the consumption of alcohol and find that parity legislation led to a statistically significant increase in alcohol consumption. To account for the possible endogeneity of the adoption of mental health parity mandates, I perform an instrumental variables analysis of beer consumption, and find that my original analysis underestimates the effect by a factor of ten.


The uplink of a multiuser cognitive radio network, wherein secondary users communicating with a secondary access point coexist with primary users communicating with a primary access point, is considered in this paper. Primary and secondary users' signals coexist in the same frequency band, and the transmit powers of the secondary users are constrained so that the interference from the whole secondary network to each primary user does not exceed a prescribed threshold. Given this constraint, a noncooperative power control game for maximum energy efficiency with a fairness constraint on the maximum received powers for the secondary users has been considered. The considered game is shown to admit a unique Nash equilibrium, also in the case in which energy efficiency is maximized with respect to both transmit power and choice of the linear uplink receiver. Based on large system analysis, a one-shot procedure for computing the users' transmit powers at the Nash equilibrium with no need for iteration among users is also derived. Numerical simulations confirm the theoretical results on the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium, confirm the effectiveness of the results obtained through the large system analysis, and show that secondary users have a beneficial impact on the whole network throughput, at the price of a moderate degradation in the performance of the primary users.


In this study, the isotopic composition of neodymium in the marine environment has been determined from analysis of marine ferromanganese precipitates and seawater. An initial survey of the isotopic composition of Nd in the marine environment was made utilizing the analyses of authigenic ferromanganese sediments. These included ferromanganese nodules, metalliferous sediments, and hydrothermal ferromanganese crust deposits. Large variations in eNd(0) values are observed which exhibit a clear separation of the ocean basin. Nd isotopic variations within an ocean basin fall within a relatively small, well defined range which is characteristic of the ocean basin sampled. Based on these results, the following average 143Nd/144Nd ratios for the ocean basins have been determined: Atlantic Ocean, eNd(0) ≈ -12; Indian Ocean, eNd(0) ≈ -8; Pacific Ocean, eNd(0) ≈ -3. These values are considerably lower than eNd(0) values associated sources having oceanic mantle affinities, indicating that the REE in the oceans are dominated by continental sources. Therefore, the variations must reflect primarily the age and 147Sm/144Nd ratio of the continental masses being sampled. Direct measurements of the isotopic composition of Nd in seawater samples from the Atlantic and Pacific are in excellent agreement with the values determined from the ferromanganese sediments indicating that these sediments accurately reflect the isotopic composition of Nd dissolved in seawater. The results clearly demonstrate the existence of distinctive Nd isotopic differences in waters of the major ocean basins. These values correspond to a difference in the absolute abundance of 143Nd between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans of ~ 10(6) atoms 143Nd per gram of seawater. In addition to the isotopic differences observed between the ocean basins, smaller but distinctive variations are observed in the water column of both the Pacific and the Atlantic, indicating different sources of REE at different levels in the water column. This suggests that it may be possible to distinguish the sources of water masses within an ocean basin on the basis of Nd isotopic composition. The isotopic composition of Nd was determined in seawater samples from the Drake Passage in order to monitor the exchange of REE between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which flows eastward through this passage, represents the primary conduit through which the major ocean basins communicate with each other. The isotopic composition of Nd is found to be uniform with depth at all stations and corresponds to eNd(0) ≃ -9.0. This value is intermediate between the values for the Atlantic and the Pacific and indicates that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current consists of about 70 percent Atlantic water. By using a box model to describe the exchange of water between the Southern Ocean and the ocean basins to the north together with the isotopic results, an upper limit of approximately 33 million cubic meters per second is calculated for the rate of exchange between the Pacific and the Southern Ocean. The concentration of Nd exhibits a regular increase with depth at all locations studied. In contrast, Nd isotopic compositions can exhibit substantial variations in the water column which vary depending on the location. Where isotopic differences in the water column occur, substantial lateral transport of REE from different sources and at different levels in the water column is required to maintain these differences. It is shown that the concentration gradients are established without significantly affecting the isotopic distribution, and that the enrichment of Nd in the deep water cannot be a result of resolution of REE scavenged from surface waters. The isotopic distributions are compared to water mass analyses based on temperature and salinity characteristics in the water column at the various sampling locations. It is shown that differences in isotopic compositions in the water column are well correlated with changes in the temperature and salinity characteristics. Thus, the isotopic distributions are fully consistent with the circulation of major water masses. This indicates that while Nd is nonconservative in concentration, the isotopic composition is conserved and can be used as a tracer for studying the origin and circulation of water masses. The results of these studies have provided some important contributions to the understanding of trace element transport in the oceans. First, the Nd isotopic differences in the water column clearly indicate that transport of Nd from the surface to the deep ocean cannot account for the observed increase in concentration of Nd with depth. These isotopic differences must be maintained by lateral transport of the REE and indicates that the concentration gradients of the REE and possibly other trace elements must also be related in part to lateral transport processes. Second, the close correlation observed between changes in Nd isotopic compositions and temperature-salinity relationships in the water column indicates that the lateral transport of REE in the oceans is directly related to the origin and flow of water masses. Thus, the isotopic composition of Nd in seawater is shown to be a useful tracer for studying the sources of injection and transport of trace elements in the oceans. In addition to the seawater studies, the concentrations and isotopic compositions of Nd and Sr were determined in hydrothermal solutions emanating from hot springs on the crest of the East Pacific Rise at 21°N and at Guaymas Basin, Gulf of California. This study represents the first effort to measure the Nd isotopic compositions in hydrothermal solutions. Endmember samples (T = 350°C) from 21°N exhibit a small range in eSr values from -13.4 to -15.7. Correcting to CMg = 0, the pure hydrothermal solutions are estimated to have eSr ≃ -18. These results indicate that the fluids have undergone extensive but not complete exchange with Sr in the depleted oceanic crust (eSr ≃ -30). CSr ranges from 5.8 to 8.7 ppm and is similar to seawater (7.6 ppm) indicating that there must be buffering. Hydrothermal solutions from Guaymas Basin (T = 315°C) rise through several hundred meters of sediment before reaching the sea floor. One sample from here has eSr = +5.8, indicating that the solutions have reacted first with oceanic crust and then sediments. The high Sr concentration in this sample (19.3 ppm) is consistent with late stage interaction between the ascending fluid and carbonate rich sediments. Nd shows a wide range in concentration and isotopic compositions in solutions from 21°N. CNd ranges from 20 to 659 pg/g, indicating substantial enrichments of Nd over typical seawater concentrations of ~3 to 4pg/g. eNd ranges from -10.8 to +7.9. The data clearly show substantial contributions of Nd from depleted oceanic crust to many of the samples analyzed. In spite of enrichments in Nd of up to about 100 times seawater, none of the samples have eNd values equal to MORB (eNd ≃ +10). One sample from Guaymas Basin has eNd = -11.4 consistent with leaching of Nd from sediments derived from old, continental sources. There is some inconsistency in the Nd isotopic data indicating that there is a possibility of contamination during sampling and/or handling of the solutions.


This essay answers the invitation of the organizers of the annual Intellectual Property/Gender Symposium at American University Washington College of Law, after ten years of symposia, to consider how the next ten years of scholarship in the area of intellectual property (IP) "might open up new insights regarding the production of knowledge, commodification, definition and valuation of women's work, and other areas of feminist and queer inquiry." I do so by thinking retrospectively, using two investigative axes, both infused by a feminist frame.The first axis is a literature review, less frequently seen as an end in itself in law than in other disciplines, perhaps to our loss. Examining the scholarship of IP and gender produced over the past ten years, I document what has been accomplished in terms of quantity and publication venues as evidence of shifting conversations and community building. Turning to the content of this work, I argue that with respect to traditional IP, that is, copyright, patent and trademark, considering gender and IP has yielded results in three areas: identifying gender disparity in participation in IP systems and its causes, identifying disparity in the application of IP doctrines to subject matter that involves gender and sexuality, and revealing the gendered nature of facially gender-neutral IP doctrines.The second axis draws upon my personal experiences writing and publishing in the area of gender and IP to consider the methodologies of this project. As an interdisciplinary scholar using history to investigate law, I am frequently forced to confront issues of translation, transcendence and transmittal that I argue are relevant to all scholars interested in what the organizers describe as "creating intellectual property law that fosters social justice." How do we translate the insights of feminist and queer theory into IP and information law, areas where gender has remained remarkably invisible? How do we transcend subject matter boundaries to create new insights? And perhaps most challenging of all, how do we transfer those insights to scholars who do not write or think about gender, to students in classrooms, and to those who write and pass laws so that we shape IP law to promote gender equality? I use the feminist approach of finding the political in the personal to integrate these two axes and identify the key challenges and opportunities for all of us who wish to contribute to the endeavor begun by these symposia.


Density–dependent processes are fundamental in the understanding of species population dynamics. Whereas the benefits of considering the spatial dimension in population biology are widely acknowledged, the implications of doing so for the statistical detection of spatial density dependence have not been examined. The outcome of traditional tests may therefore differ from those that include ecologically relevant locational information on both the prey species and natural enemy. Here, we explicitly incorporate spatial information on individual counts when testing for density dependence between an insect herbivore and its parasitoids. The spatially explicit approach used identified significant density dependence more frequently and in different instances than traditional methods. The form of density dependence detected also differed between methods. These results demonstrate that the explicit consideration of patch location in density–dependence analyses is likely to significantly alter current understanding of the prevalence and form of spatial density dependence in natural populations.


Conformational changes of channel activation: Five enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) mols. (green cylinders) were integrated into the intracellular part of the homopentameric ionotropic 5-HT3 receptor. This allowed the detection of extracellular binding of fluorescent ligands (.bul.) to EGFP by FRET, and also enabled the quantification of agonist-induced conformational changes in the intracellular region of the receptor by homo-FRET between EGFPs. The approach opens novel ways for probing receptor activation and functional screening of therapeutic compds. [on SciFinder (R)]


Moment tensor inversion is a routine procedure to obtain information on an earthquake source for moment magnitude and focal mechanism. However, the inversion quality is usually controlled by factors such as knowledge of an earthquake location and the suitability of a 1-D velocity model used. Here we present an improved method to invert the moment tensor solution for local earthquakes. The proposed method differs from routine centroid-moment-tensor inversion of the Broadband Array in Taiwan for Seismology in three aspects. First, the inversion is repeated in the neighborhood of an earthquake's hypocenter on a grid basis. Second, it utilizes Green's functions based on a true three-dimensional velocity model. And third, it incorporates most of the input waveforms from strong-motion records. The proposed grid-based moment tensor inversion is applied to a local earthquake that occurred near the Taipei basin on 23 October 2004 to demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority over methods used in previous studies. By using the grid-based moment tensor inversion technique and 3-D Green's functions, the earthquake source parameters, including earthquake location, moment magnitude and focal mechanism, are accurately found that are sufficiently consistent with regional ground motion observations up to a frequency of 1.0 Hz. This approach can obtain more precise source parameters for other earthquakes in or near a well-modeled basin and crustal structure.


People with HIV (PWH) on antiretroviral therapy (ART) experience elevated rates of neurological impairment, despite controlling for demographic factors and comorbidities, suggesting viral or neuroimmune etiologies for these deficits. Here, we apply multimodal and cross-compartmental single-cell analyses of paired cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and peripheral blood in PWH and uninfected controls. We demonstrate that a subset of central memory CD4+ T cells in the CSF produced HIV-1 RNA, despite apparent systemic viral suppression, and that HIV-1–infected cells were more frequently found in the CSF than in the blood. Using cellular indexing of transcriptomes and epitopes by sequencing (CITE-seq), we show that the cell surface marker CD204 is a reliable marker for rare microglia-like cells in the CSF, which have been implicated in HIV neuropathogenesis, but which we did not find to contain HIV transcripts. Through a feature selection method for supervised deep learning of single-cell transcriptomes, we find that abnormal CD8+ T cell activation, rather than CD4+ T cell abnormalities, predominated in the CSF of PWH compared with controls. Overall, these findings suggest ongoing CNS viral persistence and compartmentalized CNS neuroimmune effects of HIV infection during ART and demonstrate the power of single-cell studies of CSF to better understand the CNS reservoir during HIV infection.


"craft's relationship to time is complex …When the potential of this temporal structure is realized, craft can be a powerful mediator between the present and the past, and therefore between the individual and the collective." (Adamson, 2013, 210) "What I need my hands need to talk about" are words taken from an archive of art therapy made in 1952 and are a reflection on the power of art and making by a patient during her recovery from illness. The archive emerged during the course of the HLF funded Graylingwell Heritage Project (GHP) a collaboration between local organisations which aimed to research the social and cultural history of the former West Sussex County Asylum in Chichester. This paper will reflect on the art and making processes used in this project and the ways in which research into patterns of craft and making from the past might allow us to consider what might be of value in the present. Rosy-tinted nostalgia has no place in a consideration of the history of mental health care and then, as now, those with mental health issues were often pushed to the margins of society. The GHP aimed to challenge preconceptions and stigma around mental health, using a reflection on the past and engaged activities in the present to allow stories to become visible. From its foundation in 1897, making activities were embedded in the day-to-day life of Graylingwell Hospital and we drew inspiration from these historical processes in our work with patients, staff and the wider community - making magic lantern slides, knitting and planting were used to explore contemporary experiences of the mental health care system and to gather stories. The resonances between past and present were constantly under scrutiny - the conversation began in the past, but the personal narratives and artwork that arose existed very much in the present. The activities were led by artists who had their own experiences of the mental health system and who had received training in workshop delivery through Outside In's 'Step Up' scheme based at Pallant House Gallery. As Michael Polanyi (1966) says, "We can know more than we can tell" and the value of making experience visible is nowhere more apparent than in working with art in mental health care settings. In 'The Invention of Craft' (2013), Adamson describes the perception of craft in the era after industrialisation as "ameliorating", but says "we should embrace it as a dynamic cultural force in which claims to cultural memory… are intermingled with more active, self-consciously modern, and therefore potentially disruptive forces." (Adamson, 2013, 210). Often making and art are seen as peripheral to the main activities of care, but
a reflection on the past during the GHP brought into focus the importance of engaged activity; a profound sense of need and a desire to be connected to the self and to others through the tangible processes of production emerged - to make "touches on something at the heart of our embodied experience." (Leader, 2016), or perhaps "what my hands need to talk about".


Parallel versions of collision search algorithms require a significant amount of memory to store a proportion of the points computed by the pseudo-random walks. Implementations available in the literature use a hash table to store these points and allow fast memory access. We provide theoretical evidence that memory is an important factor in determining the runtime of this method. We propose to replace the traditional hash table by a simple structure, inspired by radix trees, which saves space and provides fast look-up and insertion. In the case of many-collision search algorithms, our variant has a constant-factor improved runtime. We give benchmarks that show the linear parallel performance of the attack on elliptic curves discrete logarithms and improved running times for meet-in-the-middle applications.


A 2-year supplementation study conducted at Miles City, MT from mid-October to mid-December in 2007 and 2008 evaluated responses of beef cows (n = 141 in 2007, n = 138 in 2008; avg BW = 546 ± 5.2 kg) grazing dormant native range (8.8% CP, 64% NDF, 71% IVDMD) to two different supplementation strategies. Each year, cows were stratified by age and weight at weaning and then assigned to one of two supplements: 1) self-fed loose mineral mix (MIN) or 2) self-fed mineral plus high-bypass protein sources (MIN+PRO; 50% mineral mix, 25% feather meal, 25% fish meal). Target intakes were 70 g/d for MIN and 140 g/d for MIN+PRO. Cows were weighed and hip height and girth measurements were taken at the beginning and end of the 60-d studies. Weight-to-height and weight-to-girth ratio changes were calculated. Data were analyzed with supplement, cow age (2, 3, and 4+), year, and their interactions in the model. In 2007, cows fed MIN consumed 28 g/d and MIN+PRO cows consumed 93 g/d, which was lower than the target amount for both supplements. In 2008, MIN cows again failed to consume the target amount (13 g/d), while MIN+PRO cows consumed just over target amount (160 g/d). Cows lost similar (P = 0.70) amounts of weight during the study regardless of supplement treatment (-22 and -25 ± 5 kg for MIN and MIN+PRO, respectively). Likewise, weight-to- height ratio change (-0.25 and -0.25 ± 0.04) and weight-to- girth ratio change (-0.10 and -0.12 ± 0.02) were similar (P ≥ 0.60) for MIN and MIN+PRO cows, respectively. Year × cow age interactions (P ≤ 0.08) were observed for weight change and weight-to-height ratio change. Two- and 3-yr- old cows lost less weight in 2008 than in 2007, while mature cows lost similar amounts of weight in both years. All cows exhibited less change in weight-to-height ratio in 2008 compared to 2007, with the difference between years most pronounced in younger cows. Protein supplementation at this level did not impact cow performance; however, forage quality was higher than expected, which may have contributed to the lack of response to supplementation with the mineral-protein mix.


Many countries are tightening passenger vehicle fuel economy standards. The literature on passenger vehicle standards has used structural models to estimate their welfare effects. This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of recently tightened fuel economy standards on technology adoption. Specifically, it investigates changes in the rate and direction of technology adoption, that is, the extent to which technology is used to increase fuel economy at the expense of other vehicle attributes. We find that recent US and European standards have both increased the rate of technology adoption and affected the direction of technology adoption. Producers reduced horsepower and torque compared to a counterfactual in which fuel economy standards remained unchanged. We estimate opportunity costs from reduced horsepower and torque to be of similar magnitude as the gains from fuel savings.


Abstract : Coastal and estuarine environments experience large variability and rapid shifts in pCO2 levels. Elevated pCO2, or ocean acidification, often negatively affects early life stages of calcifying marine invertebrates, including bivalves, but it is unclear which developmental stage is most sensitive. I hypothesized that initial calcification is a critical stage during which high pCO2 exposure has severe effects on larval growth and development of bay scallop (Argopecten irradians). Using five experiments varying the timing of exposure of embryonic and larval bay scallops to high CO2, this thesis identifies two distinct stages of development during which exposure to high CO2/low pH causes different effects on bay scallop larvae. I show that any exposure to high CO2 consistently reduces survival of bay scallop larvae. I also show that high CO2 exposure during initial calcification (12-24 h post- fertilization) results in significantly smaller shells, relative to ambient conditions, and this size decrease persists through the first week of development. High CO2 exposure at 2-12 h post-fertilization (pre-calcification), does not impact shell size, suggesting that the CO2 impact on size is a consequence of water chemistry during calcification. However, high CO2 exposure prior to shell formation (2-12 h post-fertilization) causes a high incidence of larval shell deformity, regardless of CO2 conditions during initial calcification. This impact does not occur in response to high CO2 exposure after the 2-12 h period. The observations of two critical stages in early development has implications for both field and hatchery populations. If field populations were able to time their spawning to occur during the night, larvae would undergo initial calcification during the daytime, when CO2 conditions are more favorable, resulting in larger veliger larvae.


The vulnerability of the syntax–semantics interface in simultaneous bilingual first language acquisition is still up for debate; while some scholars have found crosslinguistic transfer at this interface, others found no such influence. To determine which kinds of syntax–semantics interface phenomena may be vulnerable, this study examines the acquisition and use of dative alternation by German-English bilingual children and adults compared with English monolingual children and German and English monolingual adults.The study shows that bilingual children interpret and comprehend dative constructions in English like their monolingual peers but their production of dative constructions in German is influenced by English. This suggests that syntax–semantics interface phenomena relating to the representation of verbs' objects are vulnerable to influence. However, bilingual adults perform like monolinguals in both languages. These results suggest that any indeterminacy in the use of dative alternation in the adult state is due to L1 attrition rather than incomplete L1 acquisition.


One of the more curious features of patent law is that patents can be challenged by anyone worried about being sued. This challenge right allows potential defendants to file a declaratory relief lawsuit in their local federal district court, seeking a judgment that a patent is invalid or noninfringed. To avoid this home-court advantage, patent owners may file a patent infringement lawsuit first and, by doing so, retain the case in the patent owner's venue of choice. But there is an unfortunate side effect to such preemptive lawsuits: they escalate the dispute when the parties may want to instead settle for a license. Thus, policies that allow challenges are favored, but they are tempered by escalation caused by preemptive lawsuits. To the extent a particular challenge rule leads to more preemptive lawsuits, it might be disfavored.

This article tests one such important challenge rule. In MedImmune v. Genentech, the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for a potential defendant to sue first. Whereas the prior rule required threat of immediate injury, the Supreme Court made clear that any case or controversy would allow a challenger to file a declaratory relief action. This ruling had a real practical effect, allowing recipients of letters that boiled down to, "Let's discuss my patent," to file a lawsuit when they could not before.

This was supposed to help alleged infringers, but not everyone was convinced. Many observers at the time predicted that the new rule would lead to more preemptive infringement lawsuits filed by patent holders. They would sue first and negotiate later rather than open themselves up to a challenge by sending a demand letter. Further, most who predicted this behavior—including parties to lawsuits themselves—thought that non-practicing entities would lead the charge. Indeed, as time passed, most reports were that this is what happened: that patent trolls uniquely were suing first and negotiating later. But to date, no study has empirically considered the effect of the MedImmune ruling to determine who filed preemptive lawsuits. This Article tests MedImmune's unintended consequences. The answer matters: lawsuits are costly, and while "quickie" settlements may be relatively inexpensive, increased incentive to file challenges and preemptive infringement suits can lead to entrenchment instead of settlement.

Using a novel longitudinal dataset, this article considers whether MedImmune led to more preemptive infringement lawsuits by NPEs. It does so in three ways. First, it performs a differences-in-differences analysis to test whether case duration for the most active NPEs grew shorter after MedImmune. One would expect that preemptive suits would settle more quickly because they are proxies for quick settlement cases rather than signals of drawn out litigation. Second, it considers whether, other factors equal, the rate of short-lived case filings increased after MedImmune. That is, even if cases grew longer on average, the share of shorter cases should grow if there are more placeholders. Third, it considers whether plaintiffs themselves disclosed sending a demand letter prior to suing.

It turns out that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Not only did cases not grow shorter – cases with similar characteristics grew longer after MedImmune. Furthermore, NPEs were not the only ones who sued first and negotiated later. Instead, every type of plaintiff sent fewer demand letters, NPEs and product companies alike. If anything, the MedImmune experience shows that everyone likes to sue in their preferred venue. As a matter of policy, it means that efforts to dissuade filing lawsuits should be broadly targeted, because all may be susceptible.


The Art of Lee Miller by Haworth-Booth was published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in association with Yale University Press in 2007.
Lee Miller (1907--1977) was one of the most remarkable photographic artists of the 20th century. She created Surrealist-inspired photographs of haunting originality, portraits of genius, and daring war photographs. This unprecedented book brings together all of Miller's major vintage prints for the first time, including sensational works never before published, rare and revealing drawings, selections from Miller's writings as a war correspondent for Vogue magazine, and an extraordinary collage from 1937. Miller performed with unique success on both sides of the camera. A renowned beauty, she began her career being photographed as a fashion and fine art model by such luminaries as Arnold Genthe and Edward Steichen, stunning examples of which are included in this book. Miller moved to Paris in 1928, determined to take up photography; there she became the apprentice, collaborator, and muse of Man Ray. In the 1930s and '40s, Miller shot remarkable portraits of such iconic figures as Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dali. Turning her Surrealist eye to unexpected photographic subjects, she earned major commissions from American and European fashion magazines and also became a respected photo-journalist. Miller's startling images of the Dachau concentration camp are among the most powerful records of the Holocaust. Published in conjunction with the centenary of Miller's birth, this beautifully designed and produced book is an essential survey of this fascinating woman's life and career.


We consider the problem of adversarial (nonstochastic) online learning with partial-information feedback, in which, at each round, a decision maker selects an action from a finite set of alternatives. We develop a black-box approach for such problems in which the learner observes as feedback only losses of a subset of the actions that includes the selected action. When losses of actions are nonnegative, under the graph-based feedback model introduced by Mannor and Shamir, we offer algorithms that attain the so called "small-loss" [Formula: see text] regret bounds with high probability, where α is the independence number of the graph and [Formula: see text] is the loss of the best action. Prior to our work, there was no data-dependent guarantee for general feedback graphs even for pseudo-regret (without dependence on the number of actions, i.e., utilizing the increased information feedback). Taking advantage of the black-box nature of our technique, we extend our results to many other applications, such as combinatorial semi-bandits (including routing in networks), contextual bandits (even with an infinite comparator class), and learning with slowly changing (shifting) comparators. In the special case of multi-armed bandit and combinatorial semi-bandit problems, we provide optimal small-loss, high-probability regret guarantees of [Formula: see text], where d is the number of actions, answering open questions of Neu. Previous bounds for multi-armed bandits and semi-bandits were known only for pseudo-regret and only in expectation. We also offer an optimal [Formula: see text] regret guarantee for fixed feedback graphs with clique-partition number at most κ.


During the past four decades the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, has witnessed a remarkable rapid urban growth. This has coincided with lack of a planning framework, weak institutional and poor policies, which have caused haphazard and interrelated land use and transportation issues. Current land use and transport planning policies and practice in Jeddah seem to focus on different visions, with the result that neither land use nor transport issues are dealt with effectively or efficiently. To prevent dealing with these issues in isolation, Jeddah's urban planners require methods of integrated land use transport planning that can cope with the dynamics of Jeddah's urban growth. Dynamic land use and transport interaction models provide a rich method to deal with this. Therefore, in this study a cellular automata (CA)-based LandUse Transport Interaction (LUTI) model was used to assess and simulate different (proposed) land use and transport policy interventions in Jeddah city over a period of 20 years (2011-2031). The impact of both isolated and integrated policy interventions on land use and transportation were explicitly simulated in the model. The results show that the dynamic model provides a useful tool for simulating the various planning visions in the city. As such, it provides an innovative and proactive land use transport planning approach to face land use and transportation challenges in the early planning stages, and facilitates shared visions; policies and integrated strategies that in turn may provide a more sustainable land use and transport future for Jeddah city.


"The Sciences of the Soul" is the first attempt to explain the development of the disciplinary conception of psychology from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Fernando Vidal traces this development through university courses and textbooks, encyclopedias, and nonacademic books, as well as through various histories of psychology. Vidal reveals that psychology existed before the eighteenth century essentially as a "physics of the soul", and it belonged as much to natural philosophy as to Christian anthropology. It remained so until the eighteenth century, when the "science of the soul" became the "science of the mind". Vidal demonstrates that this Enlightenment refashioning took place within a Christian framework, and he explores how the preservation of the Christian idea of the soul was essential to the development of the science. Not only were most psychologists convinced that an empirical science of the soul was compatible with Christian faith; their perception that psychology preserved the soul also helped to elevate its rank as an empirical science. Broad-ranging and impeccably researched, this book will be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe.


Abstract This article comparatively discusses the 14th International Architecture Biennale of Venice, directed by Rem Koolhaas, and the pilot exhibit and architectural design of Louvre Abu Dhabi undertaken by Jean Nouvel, in the context of recent big art events and world museums. Curatorial, historiographical, and installation strategies in these venues are differentiated in order to think through the question of displaying a global history of architecture. I make a distinction between the curatorial practices carried out in the Fundamentals and Absorbing Modernity sections of Venice's Central and National Pavilions as curator-as-author and curators-as-chorus, which I map onto recent historiographical and museum design practices, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, to discuss the geopolitical implications of its installation strategies. I also argue that six methodological perspectives for displaying architectural history emerge from the curator-chorus of Absorbing Modernity, which can be identified as survey, nationalist history, case study, thematic history, archive metaphor, and deferment, all of which contribute to and raise questions about the ongoing project towards a global architectural history. After suggesting a difference between "world" and "global" history of architecture, I call for a more geopolitically conscious and cosmopolitan global history of architecture, by exposing the intactive bonds between the history of modernism and of colonization, as well as the continuing legacy of geopolitical and economic inequalities that operate in such venues.


In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes eventually die due to battery depletion. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in which new nodes are periodically redeployed with certain intervals, called generations, to replace the dead nodes are called multi-phase wireless sensor networks. In the literature, there are several key predistribution schemes proposed for secure operation of WSNs. However, these schemes are designed for single phase networks which are not resilient against continuous node capture attacks; even under temporary attacks on the network, the harm caused by the attacker does not heal in time. However, the periodic deployments in multi-phase sensor networks could be utilized to improve the resiliency of the WSNs by deploying nodes with fresh keys. In the literature, there is limited work done in this area. In this paper, we propose a key predistribution scheme for multi-phase wireless sensor networks which is highly resilient under node capture attacks. In our scheme, called RGM (Random Generation Material) key predistribution scheme, each generation of deployment has its own random keying material and pairwise keys are established between node pairs of particular generations. These keys are specific to these generations. Therefore, a captured node cannot be abused to obtain keys of other generations. We compare the performance of our RGM scheme with a well-known multi-phase key predistribution scheme and showed that RGM achieves up to three-fold more resiliency. Even under heavy attacks, our scheme's resiliency performance is 50% better in steady state.