Pesticides are essential for the control of infestation of disease, insect pests and weeds on different crops. Due to wide usage of synthetic pesticides which may lead to increased exposure and associated environmental and health risks among small-holder farmers in Zambia, a study was undertaken to understand how knowledgeable farmers are on pesticide use and practices. A total of 418 small scale farmers were randomly sampled from Mkushi, Mpongwe, Luangwa, Mbala, Solwezi, Chipata and Kalomo Districts of Zambia. Data pertaining to types of pesticides use, handling, storage and disposal was solicited using structured questionnaires. The data collected was analyzed using SPSS. Findings revealed that of the sampled farmers 43%, 30%, 25% and 17% used Glyphosate, Dicamba, Paraquat and Atrazine respectively as herbicides in Maize. 21% and 14% used Cypermethrine and Monocrotophos respectively as insecticides in both Maize and Soybean. 81% of the sampled farmers used empty containers for either storing drinking water or salt while only 15% wore protective clothing when applying pesticides. Pesticide mishandling occurred regardless of the amount of experience a farmer had using pesticides. 68% of the sampled farmers had never received any formal basic training in pestic ide use, hence a clear knowledge gap. The fact that receipt of basic training was the main predictor of a farmers' level of knowledge on pesticide use, a farmer who had received basic training in appropriate chemical pesticides use, as opposed to one who had not, had a better chance of using chemical pesticides safely and in the right quantities. Keywords— Pesticides, Agriculture, Knowledge, Practices, Farmers.


Tithonium Chasma is the northern trough of the western grabens of Valles Marineris (Mars). In the eastern part of the canyon system an elevated body that displays dome shape morphology is located. According to OMEGA mineralogical data the dome appears to be constituted by magnesium sulphate (kieserite). The main features of the dome have been investigated in detail using HRSC, MOC and THEMIS data. Several of the morphologies characterising the surface of the dome such as gully excavation and lobe-shaped deposits are connected to a slow flowage motion caused by the partial melting of interstitial ice in a periglacial environment or permafrost rich soil. Analysis of the dome surface highlighted some landforms that strongly resemble karst landforms that occur on Earth. We carried out a comparison of the features displayed by the martian dome with the features of a terrestrial salt diapir located in the area of the Persian Gulf. The results of our study indicate that from the morphological point of view martian and terrestrial domes show noticeable similarities. Considering the different characteristics of the environment between Mars and Earth the similarities displayed in martian and terrestrial domes seem remarkable, and it allows us to suppose that both domes could also be similar from the mineralogical composition point of view.


American options are financial instruments that can be exercised at any time before expiration. In this paper we study the problem of pricing this kind of derivatives within a framework in which some of the properties—volatility and dividend policy—of the underlaying stock can change at a random instant of time, but in such a way that we can forecast their final values. Under this assumption we can model actual market conditions because some of the most relevant facts that may potentially affect a firm will entail sharp predictable effects. We will analyse the consequences of this potential risk on perpetual American derivatives, a topic connected with a wide class of recurrent problems in physics: holders of American options must look for the fair price and the optimal exercise strategy at once, a typical question of free absorbing boundaries. We present explicit solutions to the most common contract specifications and derive analytical expressions concerning the mean and higher moments of the exercise time.


Anxiety sensitivity (AS) is a risk factor for the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Research has demonstrated that regular physical exercise can have salubrious effects on a variety of physical and mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety; however, little is known regarding whether alternative forms of exercise may impact AS. The present study examined the comparative effects of anaerobic exercise and aerobic exercise on AS among individuals with elevated AS. Twenty-four college students with elevated AS were randomly assigned to complete 20 minutes of aerobic exercise, anaerobic exercise, or no exercise condition. Results indicated that AS scores generally declined over time, with scores decreasing from baseline to session three, p = .02, d = .9. The results suggest that anaerobic exercise significantly decreased AS scores over time, p = .03, d = .85, whereas aerobic exercise did not display significant reduction in AS over time, p = .22, d =.81. Although change scores for the aerobic condition did not significantly differ from the control condition, the observed effect sizes were comparable to those noted in previous research. The implications of these results and potential directions for further research are discussed.


This article focuses on the problem: what external (stakeholder) and internal (structural/organizational) factors drive companies in the food- and agribusiness towards innovative environmental management? Innovative companies are those considered to have adopted a supply-chain perspective, instead of a focus on the single business unit. We propose that innovativeness is associated with stakeholder wishes (the government, the public environmental policy being a major influential factor), in combination with structural characteristics of the firm (like R&D-efforts, culture and managerial competences). We surveyed 492 companies in 2002, to get insight into the causes of innovativeness in the Dutch agri-food sector, and supplemented this data by means of a similar questionnaire in 2005. Structural equation modeling and correlation analysis were applied. The research provided evidence that companies are restricted by, and therefore not comfortable with, public environmental policies, which seem to obstruct innovativeness rather than stimulate it. Firms that (1) have enough internal (physical, financial, social) resources to innovate, and (2) are more embedded in a web of (commercial) stakeholder wishes, prove to be more innovative. Suggestions are made to shift the corporate and public policies towards a supply chain-oriented approach by granting benefits for vertical cooperation in supply-chains.


1.1 Aim of the Thesis

This thesis has been carried out at the Department of Chemistry of Naples University, Italy, and at the Department of Physical Chemistry 1 at Lund University, Sweden, during the period 2005-2008.
The aim of the thesis has been the design and the physico-chemical characterization of amphiphilic superstructures, such as micelles and liposomes, to be used as nano-devices in cancer diagnosis and therapy.
The past quarter century of outstanding progress in fundamental cancer biology has not translated into even comparable advances in the clinic. Inadequacy in the ability to administer therapeutic moieties, so that they will selectively reach the desired targets with marginal or no collateral damage, has largely accounted for this discrepancy. Similar limitations apply to contrast agents for imaging applications.
There are two synergistic goals that should be striven for to increase the efficacy per dose of any therapeutic or imaging contrast formulation: to increase its targeting selectivity and to endow the agent comprising the therapeutic or the diagnostic formulation with the means to overcome the biological barriers that prevent it from reaching its target. An ideal therapeutic system would be selective directed against cell clusters that are in the early stages of the transformation towards the malignant phenotype.
The realization of such a system faces different challenges, including the identification of suitable bio-active molecules or chemical processes able either to deliver the therapeutic/contrast agent toward the cancer cells or to avoid biological and biophysical barriers.
On these bases two different systems have been developed in the present research project: 1) The first system was formed by two amphiphilic unimers, one chelating a Gadolinium complex, that is the most common contrast agent used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), the leading technique for the diagnosis of tumors, and the other one containing a peptide, the CCK8, showing high affinity for the cholecystokinin receptors which are overexpressed in different tumor pathologies. 2) The second system was formed by a unimer containing a pyridinium ring able to coordinate Ru(III) complexes, which offer new interesting perspectives in the selective attack of tumor metastases.


We consider asymptotics for orthogonal polynomials with respect to varying exponential weights wn(x)dx = e−nV(x)dx on the line as n ∞. The potentials V are assumed to be real analytic, with sufficient growth at infinity. The principle results concern Plancherel-Rotach-type asymptotics for the orthogonal polynomials down to the axis. Using these asymptotics, we then prove universality for a variety of statistical quantities arising in the theory of random matrix models, some of which have been considered recently in [31] and also in [4]. An additional application concerns the asymptotics of the recurrence coefficients and leading coefficients for the orthonormal polynomials (see also [4]).

The orthogonal polynomial problem is formulated as a Riemann-Hilbert problem following [19, 20]. The Riemann-Hilbert problem is analyzed in turn using the steepest-descent method introduced in [12] and further developed in [11, 13]. A critical role in our method is played by the equilibrium measure dμV for V as analyzed in [8]. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


Henry Grimm's The Chinese Must Go appeared at the peak of the vitriolic anti-Chinese sentiment that broke out in California in the 1870s. (1) This racial drama touched on the national debate over "the Chinese question" and used theatrical performance as a persuasive ideological force to advocate exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the United States. According to David Roediger, this farce provided "a way for men to carouse after work" at the Anti-Coolie Club, a white working-class male "preserve for communal bonding." (2) Unlike most of the nineteenth-century yellow-face performances that distorted Chinese immigrants mainly for comic effect, Grimm's play enunciates rigorous dialectical criticism of the Chinese. Drawing upon the work of recent scholars such as Yong Chen, James Moy, and Floyd Cheung, who have used Chinese language sources such as newspapers, letters, diaries, diplomatic writings, and Chinese government reports in order to explicate what was done to the Chinese and how the Chinese reacted to it, this essay examines the place of Chinese workers in a late nineteenth-century American ethnic/gender hierarchy. (3) I explore the issues concerning Chinese immigrants by assuming various perspectives along a spectrum from Euro-American to Chinese, arguing from such vantage points that ethnicity and gender play a significant role both in reiterating negative stereotypes and in complicating or resisting them. While James Moy claims that Grimm's farce indicates that the earlier American construction of the "deceitful" Chinese was required to rationalize a strategy that white Americans would later employ in their dealings with Asians, (4) I would suggest that Grimm's melodrama criticizes not only Chinese supporters but anti-Chinese agitators as well. The play's satire on white workers may partially explain why, in fact, there is no record of a performance of the play at any established theater in San Francisco, (5) while a later production at the Bird Cage Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, outside California where the play is set and the characters are satirized, is known to have received "thunderous applause." (6) Floyd Cheung maintains that Grimm's play articulates American racial stereotypes that waver between the frighteningly feminized and the menacingly masculine. He observes that the play's depictions of the Chinese as threatening reveal an underlying Euro-American anxiety about masculinity. (7) Cheung's reading corrects Dave Williams's assertion that late nineteenth-century American playwrights portrayed the Chinese only as effeminate, powerless, and comical, rather than as economically or culturally dangerous. (8) Yet Grimm's play manifests not only an ambiguous gendering of the Chinese, but an equivalent contradictory gendering of white workers. While seeming to be masculine in driving off the Chinese with violence, for instance, a white worker could be regarded as feminized because of his failure to compete legitimately for "respectable" work. In The Chinese Must Go, the contradictory gendering of both Chinese and white laborers stems not only from Euro-American gender anxiety, but from misconceptions of the Chinese immigrant experience in the United States. I. Feminization of Chinese Laborers Grimm's portrayal of Chinese workers appears to convey populist antagonism against the Chinese. The play depicts the Blaine family in San Francisco and their reliance on Chinese helpers for their daily housework. William, a tailor, and his son Frank blame Chinese labor for their financial tribulations and attempt to justify their ill treatment of the Chinese by claiming that they are deserving of punishment. Not coincidentally, their surname--Blaine--is likely to allude to a contemporary politician, James Gillespie Blaine (1830-93), a Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, known to have strongly favored Exclusion Acts against Chinese immigration. (9) The title of the play, in fact, was borrowed from the slogan of the Workingmen's Party of California, a white labor union that sought anti-Chinese legislation. …


Abstract Background: Clinical skills and the ability to perform procedures is a vital part of general medicine. Teaching these skills to aspiring doctors is a complex task. It starts with a good theoretical preparation and some practical experience at university. On graduating from university, each doctor is faced with the task of transforming theoretical knowledge into the practical, procedural skills of a competent professional. This study aims to assess the perceptions of intern doctors working in regional hospitals in the Western Cape of their skills training both at undergraduate level and during the intern year. Methods: Focus groups involving 25 interns with 11 months' experience from five regional hospitals were used. Six themes were identified. These were undergraduate training, the student's attitude, the intern's approach to learning skills, opportunities for interns in regional hospitals, backup and support, and personal growth in procedural skills. Results: The majority of the participants found that their training at medical school prepared them adequately for the intern year. An obstacle to skills training at university was the structure of the teaching tertiary hospital, with its emphasis on rare diseases and lack of opportunities for hands-on experience. The amount of skills that were learned at university was related to the enthusiasm of the student. Once the student had qualified and was employed in a regional hospital, opportunities to learn skills were available in excess. The benefit of doing an internship in a regional hospital was described as a fine balance between opportunities, responsibilities and backup. In all the focus groups, the interns remarked on the high level of responsibilities that they had to bear, but this spurred them on in the learning of skills. The relationship between intern and senior doctor was important when it came to learning procedures. In most hospitals, the junior doctors perceived the backup cover available to them as adequate. Consensus existed as to the value of such an intern year and its importance in gaining procedural skills. At the start of the year, most interns experienced a lack of confidence, together with a sense of fear that they might not be adequately prepared to do the work expected of them. Confidence seemed to grow as the year progressed, and this was linked to experience and the successful completion of procedures, as well as adequate backup. It was found that, by the end of the year, graduates from different universities with varying emphasis on practical skills all performed at a similar level. Conclusion: The findings of this study affirm the literature in suggesting that skills training at university needs to be standardised by the introduction of a core curriculum in procedural skills. Learning outcomes should be fashioned around the relevant competencies required in the pre-registration year. It is vital for the training of new doctors that the internship year be optimised in terms of opportunities and backup as part of a strategy to improve skills training. The value of regional hospitals in teaching junior doctors clinical skills is emphasised.


With advances in molecular genetics have been possible to predict the genetic value of the animal, in particular its potential to transmit desired characters to their offspring, including characters difficult to evaluate or with low heritability, as is the case of the meat tenderization. It is known that Bos taurus indicus features differences in meat tenderization, being assigned this variability to their lowest proteolysis post-mortem, as result of high activity of calpastatin. This inhibitor decreases the activity of calpain, which are the enzymes responsible for the degradation of muscle fibers during the maturation of the meat. Moreover, there were previously observed differences in the frequencies of allele A of calpain among European breeds (Hereford, Aberdeen Angus and Holstein) and Bos taurus indicus (Gir, Guzera and Nelore). This variability has been related to tenderness of meat, as cattle with Bos taurus taurus origin have more tender meat than Bos taurus indicus, showing small values of shear force. One explanation is that the Capn2A product could confer greater proteolytic activity than the encoded by the allele Capn2B. If allele A is associated with tender meat, it will be possible the early identification of the animals that have the potential to produce meat with qualities that attend the needs of the consumer market, in order to add economic value to the final product of the animal production chain. For this reason, biochemical and genetic studies related to calpain and calpastatin systems have been considered promising for the clarification of the physiological changes that occur in muscle structure during the period post-mortem, whose results have contributed to the improvement of meat quality. The objectives of this study were to investigate the RFLP in calpain (Capn2) gene and its relation with meat tenderization in 252 crossbred (Bos taurus taurus x Bos taurus indicus). The analyses were carried through by PCR-RFLP technique using the restriction enzyme HhaI. The meat tenderness analysis was evaluated in Longissimus dorsi by Warner-Bratzler Shear Forcer. The data of shear force (SF) were analyzed by model that included genotype effect (AA, AB, BB), genetic group and, as a covariate, the age at slaughter. The allele A, considered the most favorable for meat tenderization, was more frequent in Angus x Nelore (AxN) than Red Angus x Nelore (RxA), whose frequencies were 0,4697 and 0,3975, respectively. Significant effects were observed (p<0.05) of genetic group and genotype in FC. The average value of FC estimated for RxN was 32.24%, significantly (p<0.05) lesser that of AxN. All the averages of FC estimated for the genotypes AA, AB and BB, in two genetic groups differed (p<0.05) and were, respectively, 3.74, 5.43 and 7.43 in AxN and 2.64, 4.21 and 5.32 in RxN. The results obtained show that such polymorphism can assist the identification of animals for meat quality in crossbred Bos taurus taurus x Bos taurus indicus.


In recent years, the oceans have become a venue for nontraditional uses such as rocket launches, fish farming, and energy production. In 2009, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Google a patent for an ocean-based server farm, powered and cooled by the seas' wind and water. A server farm is simply a collection of computers joined together on a network providing services to remotely connected users. Google argued that the transportability of these server ships would allow easy movement to world regions where such services are needed. In addition, the data center ship would provide a relatively green alternative to power-hungry server farms located on land.If these massive server farms populate the oceans, what regulatory schemes will apply? The server ship's owner may understandably seek the ability to avoid national exercises of jurisdiction. Internet theorists have traditionally resisted state jurisdiction, arguing that cyberspace should provide its own norms. This early view has recently been undercut by successful state exercises of control over various Internet players and the development of new technology allowing geographic segmentation of Internet content and use.This Article will consider and evaluate international law's probable application to state jurisdiction over these server ships and other innovative technologies just beyond view. It argues that the international community should resist additional abridgements of high seas freedoms to address issues relating to server ships or other new maritime uses, absent a compelling international need for additional regulation.


The European Alien Species Information Network (EASIN) was created with the aim to provide easy access to accurate information on alien species in Europe. EASIN allows the retrieval of spatial information from existing online data providers in order to produce integrated georeferenced distribution maps of alien species in Europe. In November 2012, a new data provider, the Hellenic Network on Aquatic Invasive Species (ELNAIS), joined EASIN; this has significantly increased the available georef erenced information on marine/estuarine alien species in Greece. Here, we use maps created by EASIN to show differences in patterns of distribution in the Greek Seas for the most abundant Phyla of marine alien species - Mollusca, Arthropoda, Chordata and Annelida. We also show that the two main pathways of introduction of marine alien species (Lessepsian migration and shipping) are related to different patterns of species spatial distribution in Greece. Overall, the tools provided by EASIN can greatly aid scientists and policy makers in obtaining high quality information on marine alien species in Greece, especially after the association with ELNAIS.


Abstract Molecular dynamics simulations have been performed to understand the size-dependent tensile deformation behaviour of 〈1 0 0〉 Cu nanowires at 10 K. The influence of nanowire size has been examined by varying square cross-section width (d) from 0.723 to 43.38 nm using constant length of 21.69 nm. The results indicated that the yielding in all the nanowires occurs through nucleation of partial dislocations. Following yielding, the plastic deformation in small size nanowires occurs mainly by slip of partial dislocations at all strains, while in large size nanowires, slip of extended dislocations has been observed at high strains in addition to slip of partial dislocations. Further, the variations in dislocation density indicated that the nanowires with d > 3.615 nm exhibit dislocation exhaustion at small strains followed by dislocation starvation at high strains. On the other hand, small size nanowires with d < 3.615 nm displayed mainly dislocation starvation at all strains. The average length of dislocations has been found to be same and nearly constant in all the nanowires. Both the Young's modulus and yield strength exhibited a rapid decrease at small size nanowires followed by gradual decrease to saturation at larger size. The observed linear increase in ductility with size has been correlated with the pre- and post-necking deformation. Finally, dislocation–dislocation interactions leading to the formation of various dislocation locks, the dislocation–stacking fault interactions resulting in the annihilation of stacking faults and the size dependence of dislocation–surface interactions have been discussed.


Understanding the relationship between neural and vascular signals is essential for interpretation of functional MRI (fMRI) results with respect to underlying neuronal activity. Simultaneously measuring neural activity using electrophysiology with fMRI has been highly valuable in elucidating the neural basis of the blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) signal. However, this approach is also technically challenging due to the electromagnetic interference that is observed in electrophysiological recordings during MRI scanning. Recording optical correlates of neural activity, such as calcium signals, avoids this issue, and has opened a new avenue to simultaneously acquire neural and BOLD signals. The present study is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of simultaneously and repeatedly acquiring calcium and BOLD signals in animals using a genetically encoded calcium indicator, GCaMP6. This approach was validated with a visual stimulation experiment, during which robust increases of both calcium and BOLD signals in the superior colliculus were observed. In addition, repeated measurement in the same animal demonstrated reproducible calcium and BOLD responses to the same stimuli. Taken together, simultaneous GCaMP6-based fiber photometry and fMRI recording presents a novel, artifact-free approach to simultaneously measuring neural and fMRI signals. Furthermore, given the cell-type specificity of GCaMP6, this approach has the potential to mechanistically dissect the contributions of individual neuron populations with respect to BOLD signal, and ultimately reveal its underlying neural mechanisms.


Motion of the sample arm fiber in optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems can dynamically alter the polarization state of light incident on tissue during imaging, with consequences for both conventional and polarization-sensitive (PS-)OCT. Endoscopic OCT is particularly susceptible to polarization-related effects, since in most cases, the transverse scanning mechanism involves motion of the sample arm optical fiber to create an image. We investigated the effects of a scanning sample arm fiber on the polarization state of light in an OCT system, and demonstrate that by referencing the state backscattered from within a sample to the measured state at the surface, changes in polarization state due to sample fiber motion can be isolated. The technique is demonstrated by high-speed PS-OCT imaging at 1 frame per second, with both linear and rotary scanning fiber-optic probes. Measurements were made on a calibrated wave plate, and endoscopic PS-OCT images of ex-vivo human tissues are also presented, allowing comparison with features in histologic sections.


The need for secure data transactions has become a necessity of our time. Medical records, financial records, legal information and payment gateway are all in need of secure data transaction process. There have been several methods proposed to perform secure, fast and scalable data transactions in web services. As the web servers deals with the huge amount of query it becomes really difficult to handle all the query to perform in the limited amount of time , and the failure of this can crash the web service or it may cause transaction failures, which can cause a huge financial losses to the organizations. Batched stream processing is a new distributed data processing paradigm that models recurring batch computations on incrementally bulk-appended data streams. The model is inspired by our empirical study on a trace from large-scale production data-processing clusters at the web server end; it allows a set of effective query optimizations that are not possible in a traditional batch processing model. By applying Bayesian Networks concept we stream the query so that similar queries are batched as cluster of queries which we called them as jumbo query. These batched queries are then commit for the transaction so that the complete process runs without any much load on the servers and they can handle heavy amount of transactions without any failures which lead to any fuss.


A 27-year-old woman with severe chronic hemolytic anemia was found to have reduced red cell hexokinase activity when the degree of reticulocytosis was considered. This enzyme had normal pH-dependent activity, normal Km for glucose, fructose, and mannose, normal Km for Mg adenosine triphosphate (ATP)2- and Ki for glucose-1,6-diphosphate. Furthermore, the pH-dependence and orthophosphate dependence of Ki for glucose-1,6-diphosphate were normal. However, this hexokinase was inactivated rapidly at 44 degrees C. No abnormalities were found in the red cell hexokinase isozymic pattern when it was compared with the profile obtained from cells of similar age. The hexokinase specific activity was reduced in all the red blood cell fractions obtained by density gradient ultracentrifugation; a marked difference in the distribution of cells through the gradient was evident. Among the glycolytic intermediates, a significant decrease of 2,3- diphosphoglycerate was evident. ATP and glucose 6-phosphate were also reduced when compared with cells of similar. Glucose consumption of the hexokinase-deficient cells decreased, but the rate of glucose metabolized through the hexose monophosphate shunt was unchanged. Although the total hexokinase activity in lymphocytes was only reduced by 37%, a marked hexokinase deficiency was detected in blood platelets (20% to 25% of normal activity). The parents and one of two siblings of the patient were heterozygous for the defect, with 66% to 74% of normal erythrocyte hexokinase activity and reduced heat stability of the enzyme. These results, when compared with those obtained in previously reported cases of hexokinase deficiency, provide further evidence of the broad phenotypic variability that characterizes this disorder. Furthermore, it is suggested that failure of energy generation is probably the primary cause of hemolytic anemia in hexokinase deficiency.


With the long-term business trend toward a more balance-sheet oriented focus in accounting, FASB has fixed its attention on how entities account for obligations associated with the retirement of tangible long-lived assets. In the past, many businesses employed an income-statement approach, recognizing the costs related to such obligations ratably over an asset's life as a component of depreciation or expensing the obligations as they are incurred. FASB Statement no. 143, Accounting for Asset Retirement Obligations--which was seven years in the making--shifts to a balance-sheet approach, requiring businesses to recognize a liability for a retirement obligation when they incur it--even if that is far in advance of the asset's planned retirement. This article explains the provisions of Statement no. 143 as companies and their accountants will need to apply them. OVERVIEW OF FASB 143 In FASB's words, Statement no. 143's stated objective is to "establish accounting standards for recognition and measurement of a liability for an asset retirement obligation and an associated asset retirement cost" The new rules regarding the retirement of tangible long-lived assets include these features: * A business must recognize an asset retirement obligation for a long-lived asset at the point an obligating event takes place--provided it can reasonably estimate its fair value (or at the earliest date it can make a reasonable estimate). * The entity must record the obligation at its fair value, either the amount at which the liability could be settled in a current transaction between willing parties in an active market, or--more likely--at a substitute for market value, such as the present value of the estimated future cash flows required to satisfy the obligation. * To offset the credit portion of the asset retirement liability entry, businesses must capitalize the asset retirement costs as an increase in the carrying amount of the related long-term asset. * Businesses must include certain costs in the income statement during the asset's life--namely depreciation on the asset, including additional capitalized retirement costs, and interest for the accretion of the asset retirement liability due to the passage of time. RECOGNITION ISSUES Statement no. 143 applies to tangible long-lived assets, including individual assets, functional groups of related assets and significant parts of assets. It covers a company's legal obligations resulting from the acquisition, construction, development or normal operation of a capital asset. In many cases, the presence or absence of a qualifying legal obligation will be clear. Other situations will require CPAs to carefully analyze the circumstances and the statement's detailed guidance. The statement provides other guidance on the new standard's scope: * A mere plan or intention to dispose of an asset does not require recognition. * Obligations--such as environmental remediation liabilities--related to the improper operation of an asset are not covered. * Businesses may incur retirement obligations at the inception of an asset's life or during its operating life. For example, an offshore oil-and-gas-production facility typically incurs its removal obligation when it begins operating. A landfill or a mine, however, may incur a reclamation obligation gradually over the life of the asset as space is consumed with waste or the mine is dug. In other cases, the obligation may come because of the passage of laws or regulations during an asset's life, such as environmental regulations. MEASUREMENT ISSUES Under Statement no. 143, an entity must recognize an asset retirement obligation at its fair value the amount at which an informed willing party would agree to assume the obligation. However, acknowledging that a market for settling such obligations may not exist, FASB permits CPAs to estimate the obligation's fair value and says that a present value technique is often the best approach. …


Life is not normally distributed – we live in a world of extreme events that skew what we consider 'average.' The chapter begins with a brief explanation of the basic causes of skewed distributions followed by a section on horizontal scalability processes. These are generated by scale-free mechanisms that result in self-similar fractal structures within organizations. The discussion then focuses on one of the most cited mechanisms purported to cause power law distributions: Bak's (1996) 'self-organized criticality'. Using three longitudinal datasets of entrepreneurial ventures at different states of emergence, the chapter presents a method to determine whether data are power law distributed and, subsequently, how critical thresholds can be calculated. The analysis identifies the critical point in both founder inputs and venture outcomes, highlighting the threshold where systems transition from linear to nonlinear and from normal to novel. This provides scholars with a conceptual–empirical link for moving beyond loose qualitative metaphors to rigorous quantitative analysis in order to enhance the generalizability and utility of complexity science.


The sample analysis at Mars instrument evolved gas analyzer (SAM‐EGA) has detected evolved water, H2, SO2, H2S, NO, CO2, CO, O2, and HCl from two eolian sediments and nine sedimentary rocks from Gale Crater, Mars. These evolved gas detections indicate nitrates, organics, oxychlorine phase, and sulfates are widespread with phyllosilicates and carbonates occurring in select Gale Crater materials. Coevolved CO2 (160 ± 248–2373 ± 820 μgC(CO2)/g) and CO (11 ± 3–320 ± 130 μgC(CO)/g) suggest that organic C is present in Gale Crater materials. Five samples evolved CO2 at temperatures consistent with carbonate (0.32 ± 0.05–0.70 ± 0.1 wt % CO3). Evolved NO amounts to 0.002 ± 0.007–0.06 ± 0.03 wt % NO3. Evolution of O2 suggests that oxychlorine phases (chlorate/perchlorate) (0.05 ± 0.025–1.05 ± 0.44 wt % ClO4) are present, while SO2 evolution indicates the presence of crystalline and/or poorly crystalline Fe and Mg sulfate and possibly sulfide. Evolved H2O (0.9 ± 0.3–2.5 ± 1.6 wt % H2O) is consistent with the presence of adsorbed water, hydrated salts, interlayer/structural water from phyllosilicates, and possible inclusion water in mineral/amorphous phases. Evolved H2 and H2S suggest that reduced phases occur despite the presence of oxidized phases (nitrate, oxychlorine, sulfate, and carbonate). SAM results coupled with CheMin mineralogical and Alpha‐Particle X‐ray Spectrometer elemental analyses indicate that Gale Crater sedimentary rocks have experienced a complex authigenetic/diagenetic history involving fluids with varying pH, redox, and salt composition. The inferred geochemical conditions were favorable for microbial habitability and if life ever existed, there was likely sufficient organic C to support a small microbial population.


Cloud computing offers a new way of services and has become a popular service platform. Storing user data at a cloud data center greatly releases storage burden of user devices and brings access convenience. Due to distrust in cloud service providers, users generally store their crucial data in an encrypted form. But in many cases, the data need to be accessed by other entities for fulfilling an expected service, e.g., an eHealth service. How to control personal data access at cloud is a critical issue. Various application scenarios request flexible control on cloud data access based on data owner policies and application demands. Either data owners or some trusted third parties or both should flexibly participate in this control. However, existing work hasn't yet investigated an effective and flexible solution to satisfy this demand. On the other hand, trust plays an important role in data sharing. It helps overcoming uncertainty and avoiding potential risks. But literature still lacks a practical solution to control cloud data access based on trust and reputation. In this paper, we propose a scheme to control data access in cloud computing based on trust evaluated by the data owner and/or reputations generated by a number of reputation centers in a flexible manner by applying Attribue-Based Encryption and Proxy Re-Encryption. We integrate the concept of context-aware trust and reputation evaluation into a cryptographic system in order to support various control scenarios and strategies. The security and performance of our scheme are evaluated and justified through extensive analysis, security proof, comparison and implementation. The results show the efficiency, flexibility and effectiveness of our scheme for data access control in cloud computing.


In targeted display advertising, the goal is to identify the best opportunities to display a banner ad to an online user who is most likely to take a desired action such as purchasing a product or signing up for a newsletter. Finding the best ad impression, i.e., the opportunity to show an ad to a user, requires the ability to estimate the probability that the user who sees the ad on his or her browser will take an action, i.e., the user will convert. However, conversion probability estimation is a challenging task since there is extreme data sparsity across different data dimensions and the conversion event occurs rarely. In this paper, we present our approach to conversion rate estimation which relies on utilizing past performance observations along user, publisher and advertiser data hierarchies. More specifically, we model the conversion event at different select hierarchical levels with separate binomial distributions and estimate the distribution parameters individually. Then we demonstrate how we can combine these individual estimators using logistic regression to accurately identify conversion events. In our presentation, we also discuss main practical considerations such as data imbalance, missing data, and output probability calibration, which render this estimation problem more difficult but yet need solving for a real-world implementation of the approach. We provide results from real advertising campaigns to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.


Acrylamide is a synthetic monomer with a wide scope of industrial applications, mainly as a precursor in the production of several polymers, such as polyacrylamide. The main uses of polyacrylamides are in water and wastewater treatment processes, pulp and paper processing, and mining and mineral processing. The announcement by the Swedish National Food Administration in April 2002 of the presence of acrylamide predominantly in heat-treated carbohydrate-rich foods sparked intensive investigations into acrylamide, encompassing the occurrence, chemistry, agricultural practices, and toxicology, in order to establish if there is a potential risk to human health from the presence of this contaminant in the human diet. The link of acrylamide in foods to the Maillard reaction and, in particular, to the amino acid asparagine has been a major step forward in elucidating the first feasible chemical route of formation during the preparation and processing of food. Other probably minor pathways have also been proposed, including acrolein and acrylic acid. This review addresses the analytical and mechanistic aspects of the acrylamide issue and summarizes the progress made to date by the European food industries in these key areas. Essentially, it presents experimental results generated under laboratory model conditions, as well as under actual food processing conditions covering different food categories, such as potatoes, biscuits, cereals, and coffee. Since acrylamide formation is closely linked to food composition, factors such as the presence of sugars and availability of free amino acids are also considered. Many new findings that contribute towards a better understanding of the formation and presence of acrylamide in foods are presented. Many national authorities across the world are assessing the dietary exposure of consumers to acrylamide, and scientific projects have commenced to gather new information about the toxicology of acrylamide. These are expected to provide new scientific knowledge that will help to clarify whether or not there is a risk to human health from the consumption of foods containing low amounts of acrylamide.


In 1997 The Library of America's "Crime Novels: American Noir" gathered, in two volumes, eleven classic works of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s--among them David Goodis's moody and intensely lyrical masterpiece "Down There," adapted by Francois Truffaut for his 1960 film "Shoot the Piano Player." Now, The Library of America and editor Robert Polito team up again to celebrate the full scope of Goodis's signature style with this landmark volume collecting five great novels from the height of his career. Goodis (1917-1967) was a Philadelphia- born pulp expressionist who brought a jazzy style to his spare, passionate novels of mean streets and doomed protagonists: an innocent man railroaded for his wife's murder ("Dark Passage"); an artist whose life turns nightmarish because of a cache of stolen money ("Nightfall"); a dockworker seeking to comprehend his sister's brutal death ("The Moon in the Gutter"); a petty criminal derailed by irresistible passion ("The Burglar"); and a famous crooner scarred by violence and descending into dereliction ("Street of No Return"). Long a cult favorite, Goodis now takes his place alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the pantheon of classic American crime writers."


ABSTRACT This article engages Goan diasporic dynamism in littoral East Africa – Mozambique and Zanzibar, respectively. It begins by considering a series of images taken by Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel, that of a rural Goan fishing community living across the bay from Lourenço Marques (present day Maputo), in the small village of Catembe in the early 1970s on the eve of Portuguese decolonisation. It then places this photo archive in dialogue with one compiled by Ranchhod Oza, of Capital Art Studio in Stone Town, Zanzibar, with a focus on his visual representations of a minority Goan community during the 1950's that took up positions as tailors and bakers (and photographers) in this urban setting that was once a thriving centre of cosmopolitanism and global trade. That both of these communities are the product of Indian oceanic circuits of exchange mobility will suggest the role that understudied minority communities had in forming port cities scattered across littoral Africa. Using these visual bodies to think about intersections and divergences of representations of Goan-ness in two distinct locations and timeframes, the article brings new cultural forms, i.e. the visual, to the fore for elaborating on the (Goan) African everyday, expressive moments captured on film.


Somatostatin receptor (SSTR)–targeted peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) represents a promising approach for treatment-refractory meningiomas. Methods: We performed an individual patient data meta-analysis, including all published data on meningioma patients treated with SSTR-targeted PRRT. The main outcomes were toxicity, response to treatment, progression-free survival (PFS), and overall survival (OS). We applied the Kaplan–Meier method to estimate survival probabilities and report incidence rates per 100 person-years. We applied Cox proportional hazards models to determine the effect of covariates. Results: We screened 537 papers and identified 6 eligible cohort studies. We included a total of 111 patients who had treatment-refractory meningioma and received SSTR-targeted PRRT. Disease control was achieved in 63% of patients. The 6-mo PFS rates were 94%, 48%, and 0% for World Health Organization grades I, II, and III, respectively. The risk of disease progression decreased by 13% per 1,000-MBq increase in the total applied activity. The 1-y OS rates were 88%, 71%, and 52% for World Health Organization grades I, II, and III, respectively. The risk of death decreased by 17% per 1,000-MBq increase in the total applied activity. The main side effects comprised transient hematotoxicity, such as anemia in 22% of patients, leukopenia in 13%, lymphocytopenia in 24%, and thrombocytopenia in 17%. Conclusion: To our knowledge, this individual patient data meta-analysis represents the most comprehensive analysis of the benefits of and adverse events associated with SSTR-targeted PRRT for treatment-refractory meningioma. The treatment was well tolerated, achieved disease control in most cases, and showed promising results regarding PFS and OS.


Circadian rhythms are thought to be generated by interlocked feedback loops of gene expression. Period (PER) proteins are essential components of the transcriptional feedback cycle and for phase-shifting the clock to different times of day, but the mechanism by which they repress transcription is not clear. Brown et al. have identified two PER-associated proteins, NONO and WDR5, that differentially modulate PER activity. NONO, an RNA-binding protein whose activity is essential for normal clock function, antagonizes PER-mediated repression. In contrast, WDR5, a histone methyltransferase adaptor, enhances PER-mediated repression. These regulatory proteins may impart resilience to the circadian oscillator in the face of fluctuations of clock components due to stochastic gene expression and environmental changes. S. A. Brown, J. Ripperger, S. Kadener, F. Fleury-Olela, F. Vilbois, M. Rosbash, U. Schibler, PERIOD1-associated proteins modulate the negative limb of the mammalian circadian oscillator. Science 308, 693-696 (2005). [Abstract] [Full Text]


In order to realize completely new functional design approaches one has to deal with combinations of
different geometries, materials and construction methods. The acquisition of the needed data for a
totally new initial model is complex and therefore the design of new light structures is typically done
by changing or optimizing existing solutions. In contrast, the new database-driven engineering and
design tool ELiSE 3D draws on the shell design of high-strength, unicellular marine organisms such as
diatoms and radiolaria to provide design concepts for large scale technical lightweight structures.
Since about 100.000 different species with different light structure geometries are known, a systematic
use of this pool of potentially technically usable structures has a high potential to design and improve
lightweight constructions in different industries. Here we show, that unique design solutions can be
found efficiently and integrated to a consistent workflow.


Electron beams have been used for treating cancer patients for many years. However, with IMRT, IGRT, proton therapy, and new brachytherapy techniques coming to the forefront, does electron beam therapy still have a role in today's clinics? The physics of electron beam radiotherapy is fairly well understood, but it remains an underutilized modality at most facilities. After starting with a historical overview to provide an appropriate perspective, the session will discuss current technology for generating electron beams and measuring their dose distributions. General principles for planning electron radiotherapy, including both established and new techniques will be a significant focus. The use of electron beams in special procedures, such as total skin electron irradiation and intraoperative treatments, will be be discussed. Treatment planning requires accurate dose calculations, so dose calculation methodologies will be reviewed. Finally, we will briefly share our vision of the future of electron radiotherapy.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Learn about the history of electron radiotherapy that is relevant to current practice. 2. Understand current technology for generating electron beams and measuring their dose distributions. 3. Understand general principles for planning electron radiotherapy 4. Be able to describe how electron beams can be used in special procedures such as total skin electron irradiation and intraoperative treatments. 5. Understand how treatment planning systems can accurately calculate dose distributions for electron beams. 6. Learn about new developments in electron radiotherapy that may be common in the near future. John A. Antolak: no conflicts Kenneth R. Hogstrom: • Research funding from Elekta, Inc. • Research funding from .decimal, Inc.


In 2010, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) established a programme replacing the borough directorates responsible for adult mental health services with three Clinical Academic Groups (CAGs), each of which took on a subset of adult services straddling all four boroughs. Care pathways were also introduced. We studied the Mood Anxiety and Personality CAG, which took on assessment and treatment teams and psychotherapy services.

Objectives
We aimed (1) to understand the CAG programme using realistic evaluation and (2) to assess whether or not it led to changes in activity and health-care quality.

Methods
Qualitative analysis was based on interviews and project documents. Quantitative analyses were based on electronic patient records and compared care in community mental health teams (CMHTs) and psychotherapy teams before and after CAG implementation. Analyses of activity covered caseload, counts of new episodes, episode length and number of contacts per episode. We also looked at CMHT costs. Analyses of effectiveness covered processes (pharmacological and psychological treatment of depression in CMHTs) and outcomes (effect on the Health of the Nation Outcome Scales total score or the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation 10-item version total score). Analyses of safety examined the rates of self-harm among current or recent CMHT patients. Patient centredness was represented by waiting time.

Results
The first core component of SLaM's CAG programme was the CAG restructuring itself. The second was the promotion of care pathways; interpreted as 'high level pathways', these schematised processes of referral, assessment, treatment, reassessment and discharge, but abstracted from the details of treatment. The three mechanisms of the CAG restructuring were increasing oversight, making teams fit the template of team types defined for each CAG ('CAG compliance') and changing financial accounts by grouping services in new ways; these mechanisms resulted in further reconfigurations. The use of high-level pathways supported service redesign and performance management. In CMHTs and psychotherapy teams activity tended to decrease, but this was probably not because of the CAG programme. CMHT costs were largely unchanged. There was no evidence that the CAG programme altered effectiveness or safety. Effects on waiting times varied but these were reduced in some cases. Overall, therefore, the CAG programme appeared to have had few effects on quality. We attributed this to the limited effect of the programme on individual treatment.

Conclusions
SLaM's CAG programme had clear effects on service reconfiguration at team level, with high-level pathways changing the ways that managers conceptualised their work. However, our quantitative work indicated no clear effects on quality. Thinking about how to use care pathways in ways that complement 'high-level' pathways by supporting the delivery of evidence-based treatments is a strategy that could help SLaM and other providers. Future research should look at the genesis of organisational change and how this is altered through implementation; it should also look at the effectiveness of care pathways in mental health services.


Physico-chemical gradients and local biotic interactions combine at different scales to cause spatial heterogeneity among lake zooplankton. However, current understanding is based overwhelmingly on natural systems and there have been few assessments of zooplankton spatial pattern in artificial lakes subjected to intensive management. Here, we investigate spatial structure among crustacean zooplankton at scales ranging from 1 m to 2700 m in the newly-formed Cardiff Bay (UK). We hypothesised that zooplankton spatial structuring in Cardiff Bay would be weakened by artificial aeration that was expected to create intense, continuous disturbance that homogenised physico-chemical conditions. Water quality across Cardiff Bay varied only moderately, and variations in zooplankton community composition were weakly related to temperature, oxygen, chlorophyll-a concentration and salinity at scales of around 2 km. However, spatial pattern explained over 60 % of variance in zooplankton composition at the smallest scales (0-5 m), implying that inter-specific interactions were involved. Additionally, the numerically dominant zooplankton (Daphnia hyalina (Leydig 1860), Eurytemora affinis (Poppe 1880) and Eucyclops agilis (Koch 1838)) had highly contagious distributions in warmer locations with increased chlorophyll-a reflecting aggregated response to abundant food. These data suggest that local biotic interactions among zooplankton and broader-scale links between dominant species and their algal food are sufficiently intense to persist despite the homogenising effects of artificial aeration and lake mixing. Such spatial pattern and scale-dependence has ramifications for zooplankton sampling while illustrating the self-organising capacity of predator-prey interactions even in novel, disturbed environments.


School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92-019, Auckland, New Zealand, National Cancer Institute, Argonne National Laboratory, Biosciences Division, Bldg 202, Room Q142, Argonne, IL 60439, USA, PO Box 6395, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648-0395, USA, and Macromolecular Crystallography (BESSY-MX), Institute F-I2, Elektronenspeicherring BESSY II, AlbertEinstein-Str. 15, D-12489 Berlin, Germany As 2009 ended, a scientific scandal of epic proportions shook macromolecular crystallography to its core. On 9 December last year, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), USA, announced that, after a thorough examination of the available data, the structures associated with the PDB codes 1bef, 1cmw, 1df9, 2qid, 1g40, 1g44, 1l6l, 2ou1, 1rid, 1y8e, 2a01 and 2hr0 were based on fabricated data and recommended that they be removed from the public record (see http://main.uab.edu/Sites/reporter/articles/71570/). Even our journals fell victim to this deception: 1cmw, the deposition code for a structure of DNA polymerase I from T. aquaticus (TaqP), was published in Acta Cryst. D about a decade ago (Urs et al., 1999). As serious as this is, there are reasons to suspect that these 12 structures may not be the only problematic ones. Macromolecular crystallography has faced challenges to the quality of its science in the past. In the mid 1980s a few structures were published that turned out to be incorrect. Space groups were determined incorrectly, the wrong hand of the heavy-atom structure was chosen or parts of the protein chain were traced incorrectly. As serious as these errors were, they were honest errors. They were caused by the limitations imposed by the experimental data, by the lack of proper validation tools and probably also by the mounting pressure on the scientists to be first, to publish first and to publish well. These incidents justifiably tarnished the unrealistic reputation of macromolecular crystallography for scientific infallibility, but they also precipitated very positive developments. A great strength of crystallography is the ability to rigorously check structural models against the experimental data. Stimulated by those few errors, many new validation and cross validation tools were developed by the community. These developments still continue and today it is virtually impossible for crystallographers to arrive at an incorrect structure, except when they are determined to ignore all the warning signs. The current crisis is a significant step to the dark side. From the UAB report, it appears that the scientist responsible did not base the structures on experimental diffraction data, but rather made a more-or-less educated guess on what the structures might be, fabricated the underlying data and, we must assume, duped collaborators. Since science is a social exercise based on mutual trust, this deception is an affront to honest scientists everywhere. Our own journals have always strived to provide as much information as possible to our editors and referees in order to make sure that each structure is properly assessed and evaluated before it is published. We ask the authors of structural papers to provide a large amount of experimental evidence in the experimental tables, and, for some time now, we have encouraged them to provide the validation report that they obtain from the Protein Data Bank upon deposition of coordinates. We now go one step further: we will make the submission of a validation report mandatory for every structure that is submitted to our journals. This will force some changes that may cause discomfort to authors, by requiring deposition before submission, but this discomfort is the price for assuring quality. We also follow closely the work of the worldwide PDB's validation task force and will do our best to offer authors the benefits of any new developments. We hope that by requiring validation reports at the time of submission we send an important signal to our authors that it is in their own interest to be as transparent as possible, to other journals to follow us in that direction, and to the scientific community at large that macromolecular crystallography will do its very best to make it harder and harder for such deceptions to slip through the net in the future.


Whilst many media historians have examined television's prehistory in Britain and the United States. Literature examining the history of television in Australia, prior to the 1956 inauguration, is far less developed. Much of the literature on Australian television history begins at 1956 and disregards the compelling prelude to television. As evident within this article, there is still a gap in the literature associated with the history of television in Australia. This article makes evident that Australia's association and awareness of television dates back well before 1956. The article explores two areas associated with the prehistory of Australian television, the representation of television in the Australian newspapers and public awareness. It will draw attention to the early public discussions, particularly in the press, which influenced Australians' perception of television prior to its official inauguration during 1956.


Beneficial invertebrates (predators and parasitoids) can make significant contributions to the suppression of insect pest populations in many cropping systems. In Australia, natural enemies are incorporated into integrated pest management programs in cotton and horticultural agroecosystems. They are also often key components of effective programs for the management of insect pests of grain crops in other parts of the world. However, few studies have examined the contribution of endemic natural enemies to insect pest suppression in the diverse grain agroecosystems of Australia. The potential of these organisms is assessed by reviewing the role that natural enemies play in the suppression of the major pests of Australian grain crops when they occur in overseas grain systems or other local agroecosystems. The principal methods by which the efficacy of biological control agents may be enhanced are examined and possible methods to determine the impact of natural enemies on key insect pest species are described. The financial and environmental benefits of practices that encourage the establishment and improve the efficacy of natural enemies are considered and the constraints to adoption of these practices by the Australian grains industry are discussed.


Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states. These disparities reflect both technical and economic factors, as well as the social, political, and ecological gaps between how communities see energy development and national/global policy goals. Known as the "local-national gap", many nations struggle with fostering meaningful conversations about the role of alternative energy technologies within communities. Mitigation of this problem first requires understanding the distribution of existing alternative energy technologies at the local level of policymaking. To address the limitation of existing adoption trend analysis at the scale of local governance (e.g., county governments), this paper demonstrates a novel method for contextualizing solar technology adoption by using the State of Georgia in the United States as an exemplar. Leveraging existing work on the Gini Coefficient as a metric for measuring energy inequity, we argue these tools can be applied to analyze where gaps exist in ongoing solar adoption trends. As we demonstrate, communities that adopt solar tend to be concentrated in a few counties, indicating existing conversations are limited to a circumscribed set of social networks. This information and the model we demonstrate can enable focused qualitative analyses of existing solar trends, not only among high-adoption areas but within communities where little to no adoption has occurred.


This article reviews 40 years of the Journal of Consumer Research ( JCR ). Using text mining, we uncover the key phrases associated with consumer research. We use a topic modeling procedure to uncover 16 topics that have been featured in the journal since its inception and to show the trends in topics over time. For example, we highlight the decline in family decision-making research and the flourishing of social identity and influence research since the journal's inception. A citation analysis shows which JCR articles have had the most impact and compares the topics in top-cited articles with all JCR journal articles. We show that methodological and consumer culture articles tend to be heavily cited. We conclude by investigating the scholars who have been the top contributors to the journal across the four decades of its existence. And to better understand which schools have contributed most to the knowledge of consumer research over this history, we provide an analysis of where these top-performing scholars were trained. Our approach shows that the JCR archives can be an excellent source of data for scholars trying to understand the complicated, challenging, and dynamic field of consumer research.


This article reports on an initiative at the Vaal Triangle Campus (VTC) of North-West University (NWU) towards the active encouragement of functional multilingualism in tertiary education. More specifically, in an effort to support the potential use of Sesotho (Southern Sotho) and isiZulu in the teaching-learning environment at this campus, it was decided that an important first step should be an accurate and reliable determination of students' levels of academic literacy (AL) in these two languages. Such a measurement would provide an  indication of student readiness to make productive use of any extra learning support offered in these languages. Since there are no measuring instruments available to assess students' academic literacy levels in Sesotho and isiZulu at tertiary level, it was decided thattranslating an existing test may be the most productive option in this case. The test selected for translation into Sesotho and isiZulu was the Test of Academic Literacy Levels (TALL), a test that has consistently shown high reliability measures in the assessment of students'academic literacy levels in English. Because Sesotho is the home language used by the majority of students (other than English and Afrikaans) at the VTC, it was decided that Sesotho would be treated as priority in terms of the completion of the project. The article  therefore documents the translation process for Sesotho, and discusses primarily positive findings regarding the creation of a conceptually and functionally adequate Sesotho version of the TALL through a process of translation.


Civil society generally refers to a sphere where individuals exercise their freedom and rights through voluntary, independent associations. Spurred by world political events, the discourse of civil society shifted to a democratising mission against the tyranny of the state. It was also during the 1980s in Malaysia, middle-class non-governmental organisations (NGOs) blossomed and advocated for human rights issues such as feminism, labour and environment. In the late 1990s, the Internet was hailed as the platform to widen the public sphere in the oppressive environment of media in Malaysia, especially its broadcasting industry. The following two decades witnessed how websites, blogs and social media became the staple platform to influence public opinion especially before general elections.
This thesis explores the relationship between civil society and new media using the study of native customary rights (NCR) land community-based organisations (CBOs) in Sarawak, Malaysia. Sarawak, the largest state of the Bornean Island, formed the Federation of Malaysia with Sabah in 1963 bound by an agreement that secured their oil royalty and native status as Bumiputra (prince of the soil). Sarawak is rich with natural resources, flora, fauna and cultural heritage with over 27 ethnic groups residing on the land. However, over the years, Sarawak lost much of its assets due to illegal deforestation and native land grabbing. Since the 1970s, environmental groups and activists have fought hard to reinstate the definition of NCR against state-given provisional leases (PLs) awarded to logging and palm oil manufacturing companies.
This research uses the analytical framework from Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci's notion of civil society to understand the potential of new media in expanding the NCR land advocacy in Sarawak. Gramsci sees civil society as an arena of struggles between ruling and ruled classes to achieve hegemony, referring to cultural domination by shaping consent. To Gramsci, this consensus has to be constantly maintained through superstructural institutions such as religion, education, media and tourism. Therefore, civil society is the complex sphere where the state exerts its authority without having to resort to military forces, unless the hegemony is broken.
The current state of literature suggests that the contribution of new media to Malaysian political changes is more to do with instantaneous online activities and rarely related to ongoing organising processes. Academic research studies about native customary land in Sarawak are largely technical, focused on geological mapping and land laws. By taking on the Gramscian framework, this thesis rejects the liberal paradigm that defines civil society as an autonomous sphere that unanimously aims for the common good, participated in by rational individuals. There is more to explore beyond the celebratory claims of freedom brought about by NGOs and new media. Characterising civil society as a complex arena of conflicting interests and actors is a more realistic way to understand the CBOs' empowerment efforts related to Sarawakian subalterns and their interests. Interviews with the CBOs personnel and web-based analysis of their online platforms showed deep-seated distrust not only toward the state and new communication technologies, but among NGOs, indigenous ethnic groups, and churches. The Gramscian civil society framework allows the research to synthesise the potentials of new media in the CBOs' organising activities as separate yet interrelated entities against the background of the lower status of Sarawak indigenous people. The research further contributes insights into the sturdy trenches of civil society that protect the state – officially sanctioned media systems, education, religion and national identities. By way of conclusion, the research suggests that the CBOs should consolidate their advocacy and venture into the site of hegemony to establish and normalise their cultural image.


Federal, State and local water supply, regulatory, and planning agencies require easy-touse, technically-defensible, decision-support (DS) applications that can evaluate impacts of proposed water withdrawals, determine baseline streamflow conditions needed for sustainability of aquatic habitat, and estimate inflows to drinking-water-supply reservoirs for safe yield analyses at ungaged locations. An interactive, point-and-click DS application is developed in combination with a geographic-information system to address these needs. The DS application estimates unimpacted daily streamflow at any user-selected location – gaged or ungaged -on a perennial stream in Massachusetts. A new method is proposed to estimate a daily flow-duration curve at an ungaged site by exploiting the strong structural relationship among streamflow quantiles. This method offers improvement -particularly for low flows -over traditional regression-based approaches that relate flows at selected flow quantiles to measurable basin characteristics. A time series of daily flows is then created by transferring the timing of the daily flows at an index gage to the ungaged site at equivalent exceedance probabilities. Estimated daily streamflows show remarkably good agreement with observed daily flows and are generally comparable to the agreement obtained from a calibrated rainfall-runoff model. A jack-knife cross-validation experiment indicates that the agreement between observed and estimated flow series at an ungaged site is also remarkably good.


Objective: The present study aims to give the current clinical status of vascular complications in Diabetes Mellitus and its risk factors evaluation. Methods: The present prospective cross sectional study was carried out at St. Joseph Hospital, Guntur, A P., India including both out-patient and in- patient departments. The odds ratio and its 99% confidence interval (CI) were calculated for certain risk factor affecting diabetic complications patients. Results: All the results were based on 70 diabetic patient records. The no of female diabetic patients are 35 (50%). Most of the patients, 63.7% have microvascular complications alone, and of these diabetic nephropathy was the most common complication, accounting for 31.8%, followed by neuropathy 17.3%, retinopathy 14.4%, and macrovascular complications like angina (11.5%), atherosclerosis (8.69%) and diabetic foot (4.34%). High LDL and low HDL associated with more diabetic complications. 24% patients reached targeted HbA1c level and 17% had fair fasting plasma glucose concentration. Conclusion: From this study, the findings indicated that age, BMI and triglyceride concentrations are associated with vascular complications. More attention must be paid to elderly diabetic patients with appropriate treatment for high triglycerides. Screening and intervention programs should be implemented early at the diagnosis stage, and risk factors should be treated aggressively. Public health strategies are required in order to improve the current status of diabetic patients and to decrease the rate of prevalence of vascular complications. Key words: Diabetic nephropathy, neuropathy, retinopathy, diabetic foot, microvascular, macrovascular, atherosclerosis.


Social innovation presents new opportunities for participation and inclusion. Yet, many social innovation projects or initiatives are characterised by a power law distribution, where a large majority of contributions are provided by a very small portion of people. Besides, most of these initiatives lack a systematic structure and incentivization mechanism, but merely rely on irregular volunteer-driven participation. This not only impinges upon their long-term sustainability, but also significantly reduce their ability to scale over time.Prior attempts at resolving these issues have been focusing for the most part on hierarchical structures or transaction-based models that mainly replicate traditional market logics. We propose here a new model of distributed governance for social innovation communities, based on a gratitude-based reward and reputation system that could promote inclusion and participation within these communities, without incurring the costs associated with centralized decision-making and without engaging into the distortive effects of today's market-based transactions.


Second Generation Wires. Surface-Oxidation Epitaxy Method for Critical Current Control of YBa2Cu3O7-delta Coated Conductors (K. Matsumoto, I. Hirabayshi, and K. Osamura) Control of the Sulfur C (2 x 2) Superstructure on {100} Textured Metals for RABiTS Applications (C. Cantoni, D. K. Christen, L. Heatherly, F. A. List, A. Goyal, G. W. Ownby, and D. M. Zehner). Inclined Substrate Deposition of Magnesium Oxide for YBCO-Coated Conductors (B. Ma, M. Li, B. L. Fisher, R. E. Koritala, S. E. Dorris, V. A. Maroni, and U. Balachandran) Ion-beam-Assisted Deposition of Magnesium Oxide Films for Coated Conductors (T. P. Weber, B. Ma, U. Balachandran, and M. McNallan) Scaling-up High-Tc Tapes by MOCVD, Spray Pyrolysis, and MOD Processes (S. Beauquis, S. Donet, and F. Weiss). Towards an all Chemical Solution Coated Conductor (O. Castano, A. Cavallaro, A. Palau, J. C. Gonzalez, M. Rossell, T. Puig, F. Sandiumenge, N. Mesters, S. Pinol, and X. Obradors) An Economical Route for Production of High-Quality YSZ Buffer Layers using the ECONOTM Process (M. A. Zurbuchen, S. Sambasivan, S. Barnett, B. F. Kang, A. Goyal, P. A. Barnes, and C. E. Oberly). Latest Developments in Using Combustion Chemical Vapor Deposition to Fabricate Coated Conductors (A. C. King, S. S. Shoup, M. K. White, S. L. Krebs, D. S. Mattox, T. A. Polley, and N. Darnell). Growth of YBCO Thick Films on Nd2CuO4 Buffered Substrates (X. Qi, Z. Lockman, M. Soorie, Y. Bugoslavsky, D. Caplin, and J. L. MacManus-Driscoll). Microstructural Characterization of High Jc, YBCO Thick Films Grown at very High Rates and High Temperatures by PLD (A. Berenov, N. Malde, Y. Bugoslavsky, L. F. Cohen, J. L. MacManus-Driscoll, and S. J. Foltyn). Development of Coated Conductors of Biaxially Textured Substrates: The Influence of Substrate Parameters (R. I. Tomov, A. Kursumovic, M. Majoros, R. Huhne, B. A. Glowacki, J. E. Evetts, A. Tuissi, E. Villa, S. Tonies, Y. Sun, A. Vostner, and H. W. Weber). YBa2Cu3O O7-delta Films Through a Flourine Free TMAP MOD Approach (Y. Xu, D. Shi, A. Goyal, M. Paranthaman, N.A. Rutter, P. Martin, and D. Kroeger). Inclined Substrate Pulsed Laser Deposition of YBCO Thin Films on Polycrystalline Ag Substrates (M. Li, B. Ma, R. E. Koritala, B. L. Fisher, S. E. Dorris, K. Venkataraman, and U. Balachandran). The Growth Modes and Transport Properties of YBaCuO Prepared by Batch and Continuous Liquid Phase Epitaxy (A. Kursumovic, Y. S. Cheng, R. I. Tomov, R. Huhne, B. A. Glowacki, and J. E. Evetts). Effect of Transverse Compressive Stress on Transport Critical Current Density of Y-Ba-Cu-O Coated Ni and Ni-W RABiTS Tapes (N. Cheggour, J. W. Ekin, C.C. Clickner, R. Feenstra, A. Goyal, M. Paranthaman, and N. Rutter). Phase and Microstructure Change of High Critical Current Density TFA-MOD YBCO Coated Conductor (Y. Yamada, T. Araki, H. Kurosaki, T. Yuasa, Y. Shiohara, I. Hirabayshi, J. Shibata, Y. Ikuhara, Y. Iijima, T. Saito, T. Katoh, and T. Hirayama). Growth Kinetics and Texture of SOE NiO/Ni and Ni-Based Alloys RABiTS (Z. Lockman, X. Qi, W. Goldacker, R. Nast, B. deBoer, A. Kursumovic, R. Tomov, R. Huhne, J. E. Evetts, B. A. Glowacki, and J. L. MacManus-Driscoll). Ion Texturing of Amorphous Yttria-Stabilized-Zirconia to form a Template for YBa2Cu3O7 Deposition (P. Berdahl, J. Liu, R. P. Reade, and R.E. Russo). YBCO/YSZ/Hastelloy Superconducting Tapes by IBAD Magnetron Deposition (S. Gnanarajan and N. Savvides). Residual Stress Measurement in YBCO Thin Films (J. H. Cheon and J. P. Singh). Growth Kinetics and Texture of (Nd,Ce) 2CuO4/NiO Buffers on Ni-Based RABiTS (Z. Lockman, X. Qi, J. L. Manus-Driscoll, W. Goldacker, R. Nast, B. deBoer, A. Kursumovic, R. Tomov, R. Huhne, J.E. Evetts, B.A. Glowacki, and R. Major). Ca-Doping of YBCO Thin Films (A. Berenov, J. L. Manus-Driscoll, D. MacPhail, and S. Foltyn). Demonstration of High Current Density YBCO Films on all Solution Buffers (M. Parans Paranthaman, S. Sathyamurthy, H.Y. Zhai, H.M. Christen, S. Kang, and A. Goyal). Bulk Processing. Processing and Properties of Melt Processed Y-Ba-Cu-O Containing Depleted Uranium Oxide (D. A. Cardwell, N. Hari Babu, M. Kambara, C. D. Tarrant and K. R. Schneider). Application of RE123-Bulk Superconductors as a Permanent Magnet in Magnetron Sputtering Film Deposition Parameters (U. Mizutani, T. Matsuda, Y. Yanagi, Y. Itoh, H. Ikuta, and T. Oka). Tailoring Dislocation Substructures for High Critical Current Melt-Textured YBa2Cu3O7 (F. Sandiumenge, X. Obradors, T. Puig, J. Rabier, and J. Plain). Flux-Pinning and Properties of Solid-Solution (Y,Nd)1+xBa2-xCu3O7-delta Superconductors (T. J. Haugan, M. E. Fowler, J. C. Tolliver, P. N. Barnes, W. Wong-Ng, and L. P. Cook). Studies of Grain Boundaries in Melt Textured YBa2Cu3Ox (B. W. Veal, H. Claus, L. Chen, and A. P. Paulikas). High-Tc Bulk-Superconductor-Based Membrane-Magnetic Separation for Water Purification (N. Saho, T. Mizumori, N. Nishijima, M. Murakami, and M. Tomita). Bulk Superconducting Function Elements for Electric Motors and Levitation (T. Habisreuther, D. Litzkendorf, R. Muller, M. Ziesberger, S. Kracunovska, W. Gawalek, O. Surzhenko, J. Bierlich, and T. A. Prikhna). Processing and Pproperties of Gd-Ba-Cu-O Bulk Superconductor with High Trapped Magnetic Field (S. Nariki, N. Sakai, and M. Murakami). Synthesis and Sintering of MgB2 under High Pressure (T. A. Prikhna, Y. M. Savchuk, N. V. Sergienko, V. E. Moshchil, S. N. Dub, P. A. Nagorny, W. Gawalek, T. Habisreuther, M. Wendt, A. B., Surzhenko, D. Litzkendorf, C. Schmidt, J. Dellith, and V. S. Melnikov). Adhesive Coated HTS Wire and other Innovative Materials (A. Rokhvarger and L. Chigirinsky). Melting Equilibria of the BaF2-CuOx System (W. Wong-Ng, L. P. Cook, and J. Suh).


The history of the Jewish convicts in Van Diemen's Land is one that provides the researcher with a wide area to consider. The most important question however would be, what effect did transportation have on the Jewish convict? Was their sense of identity overwhelmed by the artificial Christian emphasis 'offered' by colonial penal society? The evidence perhaps in most cases would suggest that assimilation, induced by environmental factors was the end result of transportation.

There were at least two hundred convicts transported to Van Diemens Land who can be easily identified as been Jewish, with a further one hundred possessing the 'characteristics' of the Jewish convicts (that is , names, aliases, places of birth and trades.) The majority were under thirty, unmarried and from the poorer districts of London. Their exposure to their religion would have been limited (having no wives and children of their own) even though the majority were from an Ashkenazi / Orthodox - traditional background. They were exiled mostly for non-violent crimes. Receiving stolen goods, picking pockets and housebreaking/shop stealing were common crimes amongst the Jewish convicts.

The unusual crimes included a courtmartial for desertion (Levy Frankland), wilfully setting fire to premises (Harris Rosenberg), forging Russian banknotes (Jacob Friedeberg) and a highway robbery in Christchurch, Middlesex (Solomon Lyons). Several convicts were re-sentenced to death for a second crime in Van· Diemens Land whilst many were sent to Norfolk Island, Macquarie Island, Port Arthur, New South Wales and other places of secondary punishment. Jewish convicts were stationed on the remote probation stations, such as Wedge Bay as well as the major towns. This displacement helped to contribute to their sense of isolation. The Majority of convicts if they married, married out of the faith and several converted to Christianity. Many children born to convict women (and men) were inevitably baptised.

Those convicts lucky to have family in Van Diemen's Land or whom were married to Jewish women before being transported were the convicts most likely to survive as Jews, religiously and ethnically. It was this vital connection to their identity that most Jewish convicts lacked. Those that intermarried usually became less involved with the community perhaps because of the guilt felt by marrying out of the faith, a practise rarely pursued in Jewish life. The Christianity of their spouses was often more acceptable to the mainstream than their own religion. All these factors combined to draw the Jewish convict unconsciously away from Judaism and to create a system of 'passive' genocide, a genocide initiated by government policy and the unique social environment of Van Diemen's Land.

The Jewish community that convicts encountered in Van Diemens Land from 1803 to the 1830's was very different from the one which they had left behind. What remained familiar were the attitudes of the Government and the public which resembled those of their counterparts in England, the only differences being the concentration and the focus on the perceived problems in such a small environment. The Jewish community, initially made up of convicts and emancipists did not possess the necessary framework to counter anti -semitic claims of the public or request what were seen as neccesary freedoms from the colonial government.

It was not until the arrival of free Jewish settlers in the 1830's that the community became viable in Van Diemen's Land. Before this important development, the direction that the Jewish convict took would not neccesarily reflect his ethnic and religious past. To understand the response to transportation up to this point then, it is neccesary to look at the society which the Jewish convicts had come from and the society they entered. Without this knowledge we cannot possibility understand the psyche of the Jewish convict.


Various contexts have been offered to explain why Filipinos migrate overseas. This paper contributes to the formulation of such explanations. Firstly, the paper provides a statistical mapping of Filipino migrant workers in various parts of the world, particularly in Japan. It then deals with a closer profile of certain groups of Filipino workers in Japan - the entertainers and the so-called undocumented Filipino workers. Finally, it analyzes Filipino labor migration to Japan in terms of its causes, processes, and consequences. The paper concludes that despite the hostility felt by the Filipinos for the Japanese because of the atrocities committed by the latter against the former in World War II, with the concurrence of the opening of trade relations between the two countries during the 1970s and the economic downturn in Philippines vis-a-vis the economic boom in Japan, Filipinos found plenty of incentives to leave the Philippines for Japan. The paper also shows how Filipino labor migration to Japan is a reflection of the present gradual transformation and incorporation of the Philippine economy into an informal sector of the global capitalist world.


Written by Ganglia designers and maintainers, this book shows you how to collect and visualize metrics from clusters, grids, and cloud infrastructures at any scale. Want to track CPU utilization from 20,000 hosts every ten seconds? Ganglia is just the tool you need, once you know how its main components work together. This hands-on book helps experienced system administrators take advantage of Ganglia 3.x. Learn how to extend the base set of metrics you collect, fetch current values, see aggregate views of metrics, and observe time-series trends in your data. Youll also examine real-world case studies of Ganglia installs that feature challenging monitoring requirements. Determine whether Ganglia is a good fit for your environment Learn how Ganglias gmond and gmetad daemons build a metric collection overlay Plan for scalability early in your Ganglia deployment, with valuable tips and advice Take data visualization to a new level with gweb, Ganglias web frontend Write plugins to extend gmonds metric-collection capability Troubleshoot issues you may encounter with a Ganglia installation Integrate Ganglia with the sFlow and Nagios monitoring systems Contributors include: Robert Alexander, Jeff Buchbinder, Frederiko Costa, Alex Dean, Dave Josephsen, Peter Phaal, and Daniel Pocock.


More
 Americans
 are
 using
 social
 media
 in
 their
 daily
 lives
 and
 finding
 news and
 information
 on
 sites
 such
 as
 Facebook
 and
 Twitter.
 Media
 organizations
 are using
 social
 media
 sites
 to
 locate
 sources
 and
 verify
 information
 to
 increase
 ratings and
 circulation.
 Reporters
 and
 editors
 are
 interacting
 with
 audiences
 more
 than ever
 before.
 The
 result
 is
 a
 weakening
 of
 news
 organizations'
 systems
 of
 editorial control
 and,
 consequently,
 their
 traditional
 gatekeeping
 function. To
 assist
 with
 disseminating
 information
 about
 news
 stories
 and
 engage
 with their
 audiences
 more,
 some
 media
 organizations
 are
 creating
 a
 new
 position
 at newspapers
 and
 broadcast
 stations,
 known
 as
 a
 social
 media
 editor,
 producer
 or manager.
 They
 are
 more
 common
 in
 larger
 news
 organizations
 and
 differ
 from website
 editors
 because
 social
 media
 editors
 focus
 on
 creating
 conversations
 with the
 audience.
 Their
 place
 in
 the
 newsroom,
 however,
 is
 developing
 and
 uncertain, especially
 at
 the
 local
 news
 level.
 This
 study
 aims
 to
 understand
 their
 developing role
 in
 the
 local
 television
 newsroom
 and
 discover
 their
 functions
 and
 how
 editorial decisions
 about
 made
 about
 what
 content
 will
 be
 posted
 to
 social
 media. Through
 long
 interviews
 with
 23
 participants
 in
 social
 media
 editor
 positions around
 the
 country,
 this
 study
 shows
 how
 individuals
 in
 these
 positions
 are responsible
 for
 a
 variety
 of
 roles
 and
 functions,
 and
 many
 others
 in
 the
 newsroom depend
 on
 their
 expertise,
 training
 and
 suggestions
 to
 carry
 out
 their
 daily
 tasks. There
 is
 a
 need
 for
 positions
 like
 these
 in
 media
 organizations,
 and
 they
 are challenging
 the
 traditional
 gatekeeping
 role
 by
 relying
 heavily
 on
 audience
 interest


Expansion of gene families facilitates robustness and evolvability of biological processes but impedes functional genetic dissection of signalling pathways. To address this, quantitative analysis of single cell responses can help characterize the redundancy within gene families. We developed high‐throughput quantitative imaging of stomatal closure, a response of plant guard cells, and performed a reverse genetic screen in a group of Arabidopsis mutants to five stimuli. Focussing on the intersection between guard cell signalling and the endomembrane system, we identified eight clusters based on the mutant stomatal responses. Mutants generally affected in stomatal closure were mostly in genes encoding SNARE and SCAMP membrane regulators. By contrast, mutants in RAB5 GTPase genes played specific roles in stomatal closure to microbial but not drought stress. Together with timed quantitative imaging of endosomes revealing sequential patterns in FLS2 trafficking, our imaging pipeline can resolve non‐redundant functions of the RAB5 GTPase gene family. Finally, we provide a valuable image‐based tool to dissect guard cell responses and outline a genetic framework of stomatal closure.


Biodiesel has been receiving increasing attention due to its renewable nature, lower pollution potential and green house gas benefit compared to mineral diesel. There are numerous factors, which affect the yield of biodiesel in a transesterification process such as reaction temperature, molar ratio of alcohol to oil, catalyst concentration, stirring speed, reaction time, etc. These variables are different for different vegetable oils and they are also affected by the free fatty acid content of the oil. In the present investigation, an attempt has been made to optimise the production process of biodiesel from Karanja oil, which is essentially a non-edible oil. This oil is tree-borne and has a great potential to produce good quality biodiesel in large quantities. In the present investigation, a large array of experiments were carried out on transesterification of Karanja oil with methanol to produce biodiesel under different reaction conditions and an attempt has been made to analyse the effect of various reaction conditions on biodiesel yield. The optimised yield of methyl esters from Karanja oil under the optimal condition was found to be 98-100%


Study Design: Retrospective review of prospective database. Objective: Complication rates for adult spinal deformity (ASD) surgery vary widely because there is no accepted system for categorization. Our objective was to identify the impact of complication occurrence, minor-major complication, and Clavien-Dindo complication classification (Cc) on clinical variables and patient-reported outcomes. Methods: Complications in surgical ASD patients with complete baseline and 2-year data were considered intraoperatively, perioperatively (<6 weeks), and postoperatively (>6 weeks). Primary outcome measures were complication timing and severity according to 3 scales: complication presence (yes/no), minor-major, and Cc score. Secondary outcomes were surgical outcomes (estimated blood loss [EBL], length of stay [LOS], reoperation) and health-related quality of life (HRQL) scores. Univariate analyses determined complication presence, type, and Cc grade impact on operative variables and on HRQL scores. Results: Of 167 patients, 30.5% (n = 51) had intraoperative, 48.5% (n = 81) had perioperative, and 58.7% (n = 98) had postoperative complications. Major intraoperative complications were associated with increased EBL (P < .001) and LOS (P = .0092). Postoperative complication presence and major postoperative complication were associated with reoperation (P < .001). At 2 years, major perioperative complications were associated with worse ODI, SF-36, and SRS activity and appearance scores (P < .02). Increasing perioperative Cc score and postoperative complication presence were the best predictors of worse HRQL outcomes (P < .05). Conclusion: The Cc Scale was most useful in predicting changes in patient outcomes; at 2 years, patients with raised perioperative Cc scores and postoperative complications saw reduced HRQL improvement. Intraoperative and perioperative complications were associated with worse short-term surgical and inpatient outcomes.


Scientific applications do frequently suffer from limited compute performance. In this article, we investigate the suitability of specialized computer chips to overcome this limitation. An enhanced Poisson Boltzmann program is ported to the graphics processing unit and the application specific integrated circuit MDGRAPE‐3 and resulting execution times are compared to the conventional performance obtained on a modern central processing unit. Speed Up factors are measured and an analysis of numerical accuracy is provided. On both specialized architectures the improvement is increasing with problem size and reaches up to a Speed Up factor of 39 × for the largest problem studied. This type of alternative high performance computing can significantly improve the performance of demanding scientific applications. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2009


This paper has presented a novel approach designed to realize multi-section short-term traffic flow synchronization forecasting in terms of road network. First, the road network is split into sub networks in accordance with traffic flow spatial-temporal characteristics. Second, chaos analysis method is proposed to forecast short-term traffic flow. Short-term traffic flow characteristics have been figured out by the phase space reconstruction technology and G-P algorithm. By analyzing the traffic flow database, the chaos characteristics of short-term traffic flow time series are correspondingly obtained. Furthermore, Elman neural network in which the input is reconstructing time series has been employed to achieve multi-section forecasting. In addition, an empirical study has been carried out to illustrate this approach. Consequently, this approach has been verified by using traffic flow field data on the road network. The results which support the use of this approach is indicating higher accuracy in short-term traffic flow forecasting.


Abstract The purpose of this study was to test whether children and adolescents with anxiety disorders exhibit selective processing of threatening facial expressions in a pictorial version of the emotional Stroop paradigm. Participants named the colours of filters covering images of adults and children displaying either a neutral facial expression or one displaying the emotions of anger, disgust, or happiness. A delay in naming the colour of a filter implies attentional capture by the facial expression. Anxious participants, relative to control participants, exhibited slower colour naming overall, implying greater proneness to distraction by social cues. Children exhibited longer colour-naming latencies as compared to adolescents, perhaps because young children have a limited ability to inhibit attention to distracting stimuli. Adult faces were associated with slower colour naming than were child faces, irrespective of facial expressions in both groups, possibly because adults provide especially salient cues for children and adolescents. Inconsistent with prediction, participants with anxiety disorders were not slower than healthy controls at naming the colours of filters covering threatening expressions (i.e., anger and disgust) relative to filters covering faces depicting happy or neutral expressions.


With food scarcity driven by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. "In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil," Lester R. Brown writes. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Brown outlines the political implications of land acquisitions by grain-importing countries in Africa and elsewhere as well as the world's shrinking buffers against poor harvests. With wisdom accumulated over decades of tracking agricultural issues, Brown exposes the increasingly volatile food situation the world is facing.


Despite the fact that the epidemiological evidence linking cigarette smoking with cardiovascular disease is overwhelming, the precise components of cigarette smoke responsible for this relationship and the mechanisms by which they exert their effect have not yet been elucidated. There are however, some promising pointers as a result of recent developments and this review concentrates on new evidence since earlier reviews of this topic. It is now known that the endothelium has a vastly more important role than was ever thought to be the case a decade ago. Its role in health and disease is increasingly understood, as is the relationship between endothelial injury and the development of atherosclerosis. There is considerable evidence that cigarette smoking can result in both morphological and biochemical disturbances to the endothelium both in vivo and in cell culture systems. Cigarette smoke is a complex mixture and only a few components have been extensively studied. Nicotine and carbon monoxide are much less damaging than is whole smoke. However the free radical components of cigarette smoke have been shown to cause damage in model systems. Further work will be necessary to consolidate the evidence base but the data reported in this review suggest that the free radical components of cigarette smoke may be responsible for the morphological and functional damage to endothelium that has been observed in model systems.