This paper predicts phases of the financial cycle by using a continuous financial stress measure in a Markov switching framework. The debt service ratio and property market variables signal a transition to a high financial stress regime, while economic sentiment indicators provide signals for a transition to a tranquil state. Whereas the in-sample analysis suggests that these indicators can provide an early warning signal up to several quarters prior to the respective regime change, the out-of-sample findings indicate that most of this performance is owing to the data gathered during the global financial crisis. Comparing the prediction performance with a standard binary early warning model reveals that the Markov switching model is outperforming the vast majority of model specifications for a horizon up to three quarters prior to the onset of financial stress.


The past two decades have seen a rapid expansion of the corporate agenda in the field of health and health care. Rather than moving toward a system of universal access to medical care in the United States, the access to and quality of clinical services is being turned over increasingly to the insurance industry. Patients are now "clients" and clinical services are "product lines." More clinical research is now funded by the pharmaceutical industry than the National Institutes of Health; pharmaceutical dollars pay the salaries of top academics and set the national research agenda. Clinicians and patients alike are wooed by sophisticated advertising campaigns (often disguised as education) that promote expensive drugs of dubious efficacy. The insertion of "market rationality" into health care has not brought the hoped for curbing of health care costs. The United States, despite spending more per capita on medical care than any other country in the world, continues to perform poorly on many health indicators, with a life expectancy at birth that ranks twenty-seventh in the world. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is an atmospheric simulation system which is designed for both operational and research use. WRF is currently in operational use at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s national weather service as well as at the air force weather agency and meteorological services worldwide. Getting weather predictions in time using latest advances in atmospheric sciences is a challenge even on the fastest super computers. Timely weather predictions are particularly useful for severe weather events when lives and property are at risk. Microphysics is a crucial but computationally intensive part of WRF. WRF Single Moment 5-class (WSM5) microphysics scheme represents fallout of various types of precipitation, condensation and thermodynamics effects of latent heat release. Therefore, to expedite the computation process, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) appear an attractive alternative to traditional CPU architectures. In this paper, we accelerate the WSM5 microphysics scheme on GPUs and obtain a considerable speedup thereby significantly reducing the processing time. Such high performance and computationally efήcient GPUs allow us to use higher resolution WRF forecasts. The use of high resolution WRF enables us to compute microphysical processes for increasingly small clouds and water droplets. To implement WSM5 scheme on GPUs, the WRF code was rewritten into CUDA C, a high level data-parallel programming language used on NVIDIA GPU. We observed a reduction in processing time from 16928 ms on CPU to 43.5 ms on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). We obtained a speedup of 389× without I/O using a single GPU. Taking I/O transfer times into account, the speedup obtained is 206×. The speedup was further increased by using four GPUs, speedup being 1556× and 357× for without I/O and with I/O, respectively.


The literature on cooperatives often conceptualizes cooperativism as an organized effort to embrace community participation. Through the analysis of agrarian cooperatives in Sicily that were formally established to counter the Mafia and by ethnographically exploring the notion of community for cooperativism, this article aims to problematize this idea of cooperatives as "community economics". It proposes an anthropological approach that critically analyzes divisions of labor and the internal factions' divergent concepts of "community". In Sicily, workers in "anti-Mafia" co-ops recognize a sense of community and "way of life" in Mafia-influenced mobilizations outside the cooperative environment, contrary to the co-op administrators' legalistic views of community. The article illuminates how the fact that often co-op members draw on different ideas of community can lead to contradictions and tensions, especially as there are different social realities underlying those ideas.


Information system's models on higher level of abstraction have become a daily routine in many software companies. The concept of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) published by standardization body OMG1 since 2001 has become a concept for creation of software applications and information systems. MDA specifies four levels of abstraction: top three levels are created as graphical models and the last one as implementation code model. Many research works of MDA are focusing on the lower levels and transformations between each other. The top level of abstraction, called Computation Independent Model (CIM) and its transformation to the lower level called Platform Independent Model (PIM) is not so extensive research topic. Considering to a great importance and usability of this level in practice of IS2Keywords: transformation, MDA, CIM, PIM, UML, DFD. development now our research activity is focused to this highest level of abstraction – CIM and its possible transformation to the lower PIM level. In this article we are presenting a possible solution of CIM modeling and its analytic method of transformation to PIM.


Abstract Complications relating to spinal anaesthesia following antiplatelet therapy are unclear. We report on a patient with a known history of chronic obstructive airway disease with respiratory tract infection who presented for emergency pseudoaneurysm repair. He underwent recent coronary stent implantation and was treated with clopidogrel and aspirin. Despite dual antiplatelet therapy, spinal anaesthesia was administered safely with prior platelet transfusion. Therefore, regional anaesthesia can be considered in selected patients with prior platelet transfusion on dual antiplatelet drugs when it is deemed to be necessary.


In this article, I explore how immigrants from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau living in Portugal use mobile phones in their daily lives in Lisbon. Whereas one might assume that mobile phones and other new information technologies facilitate transnational communication between Africa and Portugal, the ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Lisbon from 1999 to 2003 revealed a different scenario. Instead, mobile phones as imagined and used by the Guinean immigrants I met in Lisbon revealed less about transnationalism and globalization than they did about constructing community and identity in a new locale. As Guinean immigrants in Portugal reconfigured their relationship to their former colonizers and struggled to make their way in a new, multicultural Europe, they used their mobile phones to engage local networks, shape local identities, and transform Lisbon's sprawl into an African migrant village. Here, I highlight the gendered dimensions of this process and contend that Guinean men's and women's varied uses of mobile phones in Lisbon underscore contrasting experiences of migration, mobility, and belonging.


The usual punishment for large-scale tax fraud in Australia is imprisonment. This is despite the fact that the offence does not harm an identifiable individual and many offenders have no prior criminal history. There are numerous variables that are relevant to the sentencing calculus. However, in relation to tax offences the courts have consistently stated that the most important consideration is general deterrence. The reason that offenders who defraud the revenue normally go to jail is to deter other potential offenders from engaging in similar conduct. Ostensibly, this is a tenable justification. In this article we argue that this rationale is, however, empirically and normatively flawed. There is no proof that harsh penalties for tax offences increase compliance. Moreover, from a deontological perspective it is morally wrong that a person should be sacrificed to set an example for others. This papers suggests that in order to match tax sanctions and investigative procedures with the current knowledge about what works and what does not, three steps need to be taken: (i) the penalties for tax fraud should not be increased in a bid to deter would-be offenders; (ii) stern sanctions should continue to be imposed in cases of tax fraud (fines would generally suffice to satisfy this goal) and (iii) more tax audits need to be performed in order to increase the perception in people's mind that if they cheat on their tax they will detected. This paper focuses on the sentencing law in Australia. However, the analysis regarding the efficacy of imprisonment to deter tax fraud is relevant to all jurisdictions.


This study presents the dynamic and steady state stability improvement of a tidal power generation system (TPGS) assisted power system model (i.e. single machine infinite bus (SMIB) system) using a thyristor controlled series capacitor (TCSC). To achieve this objective, the TCSC used in the studied model is optimally designed using quasi-oppositional harmony search algorithm (QOHSA). The complete dynamic equation of the studied power system is realised based on d–q-axis decomposition. Eigenvalue analysis is performed using the frequency-domain approach to study the steady-state stability while the time-domain-based simulation is carried out to determine the dynamic stability of the studied system. To corroborate the effectiveness of QOHSA, results yielded by this algorithm are compared with those obtained using particle swarm optimisation technique. It may be inferred from the results obtained in this study that the QOHSA tuned TCSC outperforms the other in improving the overall stability of the TPGS-based SMIB system following disturbance. Furthermore, a similar analysis is extended to the TPGS-based multi-machine power system model to validate the efficiency of QOHSA in optimal designing of TCSC for dynamic stability improvement.


The Water Framework Directive seeks to achieve the enhancement of aquatic ecosystem quality for all waters across Europe. However, it recognizes the need to accommodate social and economic considerations, so Heavily Modified Water Bodies may be designated where achievement of the Directive's objectives may result in disproportionate costs. This necessitates the use of cost and benefit data, which may be hard to acquire. Benefits and costs of implementing the Directive also can be tested at the national level. This paper considers the evaluation of costs and benefits at 2 scales in Scotland: microlevel analysis, for case studies on the rivers Tummel and Dee and the Forth Estuary, and macrolevel analysis. In the microlevel analysis, costs of hydroelectric power generation are compared with the marginal benefits of increased fisheries revenues and are argued to be disproportionate. In the estuary environment, the benefits of returning an area to ecologically productive salt marsh and mudflats are compared with the costs of lost agricultural revenue. In the macrolevel analysis, we compare the costs to impacted industries with the estimated national benefits from implementing the Directive. We find that for Scotland as a whole, implementation is predicted to result in positive net social benefits.


Genetic programming is a metaheuristic search method that uses a population of variable-length computer programs and a search strategy based on biological evolution. The idea of automatic programming has long been a goal of artificial intelligence, and genetic programming presents an intuitive method for automatically evolving programs. However, this method is not without some potential drawbacks. Search using procedural representations can be complex and inefficient. In addition, variable sized solutions can become unnecessarily large and difficult to interpret.

The goal of this thesis is to understand the dynamics of genetic programming that encourages efficient and effective search. Toward this goal, the research focuses on an important property of genetic programming search: the population. The population is related to many key aspects of the genetic programming algorithm. In this programme of research, diversity is used to describe and analyse populations and their effect on search. A series of empirical investigations are carried out to better understand the genetic programming algorithm.

The research begins by studying the relationship between diversity and search. The effect of increased population diversity and a metaphor of search are then examined. This is followed by an investigation into the phenomenon of increased solution size and problem difficulty. The research concludes by examining the role of diverse individuals, particularly the ability of diverse individuals to affect the search process and ways of improving the genetic programming algorithm.

This thesis makes the following contributions: (1) An analysis shows the complexity of the issues of diversity and the relationship between diversity and fitness, (2) The genetic programming search process is characterised by using the concept of genetic lineages and the sampling of structures and behaviours, (3) A causal model of the varied rates of solution size increase is presented, (4) A new, tunable problem demonstrates the contribution of different population members during search, and (5) An island model is proposed to improve the search by speciating dissimilar individuals into better-suited environments.

Currently, genetic programming is applied to a wide range of problems under many varied contexts. From artificial intelligence to operations research, the results presented in this thesis will benefit population-based search methods, methods based on the concepts of evolution and search methods using variable-length representations.


This paper deals with ways in which gestural "pictures" are made, i.e., manual depictions of phenomena in the world. The view that "iconic" gestures uniformly function by way of some resemblance between signifier and signified is rejected, giving way to an understanding of depiction by gesture as the achievement of a heterogeneous set of practices, some of which rely on relations of contiguity or indexicality to evoke commonly known objects or scenes. Others seem to be derivative of other representation methods (e.g., drawing on surfaces). The paper reviews some existing work on gestural depiction methods, offers a working heuristics, and illustrates some of its categories. It is suggested that some of the basic ways in which actions of the hands evoke the world in gesture correspond to fundamental modes of existence and activity of human hands in the world: hands depict by enacting their familiar, "real-world" capacities as users, transporters, experiencers, assemblers, molders, and shapers of things.


This paper examines the political difficulty of enacting welfare-enhancing Pigouvian taxes. Using referenda in a market experiment with externalities, we investigate the effect of trial periods on the acceptability of two theoretically equivalent variants of Pigouvian taxes. While implementing either tax is in subjects' material self-interest, we find significant levels of opposition to both tax schemes, though the level differs considerably. Results show that trial runs can overcome initial tax aversion, significantly increasing acceptability. The effect is robust across tax schemes, but a trial with one scheme does not affect the acceptability of the other. Trial periods also mitigate initial biases in preferences of alternative tax schemes.


Abstract A challenging question facing policy makers in the criminal justice arena is how to best encourage the safe and effective reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals in such a way that they become well-integrated and productive members of our communities. This article argues that blending theoretical components of restorative justice with strategies thought to improve social capital may result in better long-term outcomes of the reentry process. Policy recommendations are offered for constructing restorative reentry programs that promote evidence based outcomes.


Within the Department of Defense over the past decade, a focus on enhancing Warfighter resilience and readiness has increased. For Special Operation Forces (SOF), who bear unique burdens for training and deployment, programs like the Preservation of the Force and Family have been created to help support SOF and their family members in sustaining capabilities and enhancing resilience in the face of prolonged warfare. In this review, we describe the shift in focus from resilience to human performance optimization (HPO) and the benefits of human performance initiatives that include holistic fitness. We then describe strategies for advancing the application of HPO for future initiatives through tailoring and cultural adaptation, as well as advancing methods for measurement. By striving toward specificity and precision performance, SOF human performance programs can impact individual and team capabilities to a greater extent than in the past, as well as maintaining the well-being of SOF and their families across their careers and beyond.


Introduction Our study objective was to analyze the optimum conditions for pregnancy in kidney transplanted women. For that, we conducted a retrospective study was from 1992 to April 2011 about 17 pregnancies in 12 kidney transplanted patients followed in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Organ Transplant Unit of the Military Hospital of Tunis. Methods We studied nephrological parameters and obstetric pathologies encountered during pregnancy and the potential impact of pregnancy on graft. Our main outcome measures were: time between renal transplantation and conception, birth of a living child, renal graft defect. Results The mean age at the time of renal transplantation was 30.11 years. The average age at the time of conception is 34.23 years. The average time between renal transplantation and the occurrence of pregnancy was 46.94 months. More than 40% of pregnancies were not planned. Of the 17 pregnancies, 12 have advanced beyond the first trimester with 91.6% resulting in the birth of a living child. Toxemia was found in 60% of cases, low birth weight in 50%, preterm in 30% and intrauterine growth retardation in 20% of cases. Cesarean section was indicated in all cases. Graft survival was 90% with a mean of 6 years after delivery. Conclusion Pregnancy in kidney transplanted patients is a high-risk pregnancy, but pregnancy does not appear to affect graft function through certain conditions.


Conventional zero-shot learning (ZSL) methods recognise an unseen instance by projecting its visual features to a semantic space that is shared by both seen and unseen categories. However, we observe that such a one-way paradigm suffers from the visual-semantic ambiguity problem. Namely, the semantic concepts (e.g. attributes) cannot explicitly correspond to visual patterns, and vice versa. Such a problem can lead to a huge variance in the visual features for each attribute. In this paper, we investigate how to remove such semantic ambiguity based on the observed visual appearances. In particular, we propose (1) a novel latent attribute space to mitigate the gap between visual appearances and semantic expressions; (2) a dual-graph regularised embedding algorithm called Visual-Semantic Ambiguity Removal (VSAR) that can simultaneously extract the shared components between visual and semantic information and mutually align the data distribution based on the intrinsic local structures of both spaces; (3) a new zero-shot recognition framework that can deal with both instance-level and category-level ZSL tasks. We validate our method on two popular zero-shot learning datasets, AwA and aPY. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.


With the completion of the Mechanistic–Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) and the recent designation of the MEPDG software as "AASHTOWare® Pavement ME Design," the standard for CRCP design has undergone significant changes from the 1993 AASHTO Pavement Design Guide. CRCP performance problems observed in the past, such as material durability, base erosion, steel placement and content, and construction methods have been addressed, and the improved pavement design procedure reflects modern construction practices, pavement layer materials, specifications, and best concrete pavement engineering practices. The primary purpose of this technical summary is to provide engineers with the basic mechanistic–empirical design background and criteria utilized in the AASHTO Pavement ME Design software for CRCP. Secondly, this technical summary describes the key CRCP design inputs to assist the pavement engineer through the CRCP design process with the AASHTO Pavement ME Design software, including identifying the most sensitive design inputs and features. Finally, example problems are included in this document to demonstrate the robustness of the new design software for both new CRCP and CRCP overlays in different climatic zones. It is expected that as the mechanistic–empirical design procedure for CRCP continues to evolve, refinements in the failure mechanisms and data inputs likely will be made, providing even greater reliability in the design process.


With the increased use of crowd simulation in animation, specification of crowd motion can be very time consuming, requiring a lot of user input. To alleviate this cost, we wish to allow a user to interactively manipulate the many degrees of freedom in a crowd, whilst accounting for the limitation of low-dimensional signals from standard input devices. In this thesis we present two approaches for achieving this: 1) Combining shape deformation methods with a multitouch input device, allowing a user to control the motion of the crowd in dynamic environments, and 2) applying a datadriven approach to learn the mapping between a crowd's motion and the corresponding user input to enable intuitive control of a crowd. In our first approach, we represent the crowd as a deformable mesh, allowing a user to manipulate it using a multitouch device. The user controls the shape and motion of the crowd by altering the mesh, and the mesh in turn deforms according to the environment. We handle congestion and perturbation by having agents dynamically reassign their goals in the formation using a mass transport solver. Our method allows control of a crowd in a single pass, improving on the time taken by previous, multistage, approaches. We validate our method with a user study, comparing our control algorithm against a common mouse-based controller. We develop a simplified version of motion data patches to model character-environment interactions that are largely ignored in previous crowd research. We design an environment-aware cost metric for the mass transport solver that considers how these interactions affect a character's ability to track the user's commands. Experimental results show that our system can produce realistic crowd scenes with minimal, high-level, input signals from the user. In our second approach, we propose that crowd simulation control algorithms inherently impose restrictions on how user input affects the motion of the crowd. To bypass this, we investigate a data-driven approach for creating a direct mapping between low-dimensional user input and the resulting high-dimensional crowd motion. Results show that the crowd motion can be inferred directly from variations in a user's input signals, providing a user with greater freedom to define the animation.


Or So We've Heard is an ongoing collaboration with Helen Sharp and local residents across the council areas of Armagh, Banbridge, Craigavon, Cookstown & Dungannon. For the project we organised a series of research gathering events across the council areas where we gathered place nicknames, remedies, recipes cures and contemporary urban myths and anecdotes. The unofficial and vernacular material collected does not appear on city street maps or other official, formal state or city documents. The interest in unofficial information stems from a concern regarding the politics of how place is described at a local level. This vernacular, word of mouth information was published in 2009. This book is illustrated with drawings and photographs relating to these areas. Research Events:It's Midsummers in Lurgan (21 June 2008); It's Halloween in Dungannon (Or So We've Heard) (10 October 2008); It's Lughnasadh in Banbridge (Or So We've Heard) (31 July 2008); Tea and Tours in Moneymore (Or So We've Heard) (29 August 2008); Hedgerow Harvest Its May Day in Dungannon (Or So We've Heard) (1 May 2009)


In present study, we aimed to investigate the pathological changes induced by subchronic oral toxicity induced by sub lethal dose of Di (2-ethyl hexyl) phthalate (DEHP) in Japanese common quail. Forty male quails at one day old were divided randomly into two equal groups, the first group (treated group) was orally administrated by 10% of LD50 of DEHP (557.41 mg/kg of body weight) for 42 days, while second group (control group) left without treatment throughout experiment period. The results of current study showed that there is congestion of kidney, microscopically they showed presence of hyaline degeneration in renal tubules, glomerulosclerosis, wide spread of degenerative and necrotic lesions in renal tubules, hemorrhage, infiltration of inflammatory cell especially macrophages and lymphocytes in interstitial tissue of kidney. While grossing of liver showed hepatomegaly with hemorrhage, microscopically the sections showed wide distributing of vacuolar degeneration (fatty change) in different size and shape of vacuoles in cytoplasm of affected hepatocytes, infiltration of inflammatory cells mainly macrophages and lymphocytes. In conclusion, the oral administration of DEHP at dose 557.41 mg/kg of body weight for 42 days induced degenerative and necrotic irreversible changes in both kidney and liver of Japanese quail that affect their health and production.


Abstract. This paper presents a summary of the measurements made during the heavily-instrumented Reactive Halogens in the Marine Boundary Layer (RHaMBLe) coastal study in Roscoff on the North West coast of France throughout September 2006. It was clearly demonstrated that iodine-mediated coastal particle formation occurs, driven by daytime low tide emission of molecular iodine, I2, by macroalgal species fully or partially exposed by the receding waterline. Ultrafine particle concentrations strongly correlate with the rapidly recycled reactive iodine species, IO, produced at high concentrations following photolysis of I2. The heterogeneous macroalgal I2 sources lead to variable relative concentrations of iodine species observed by path-integrated and in situ measurement techniques. Apparent particle emission fluxes were associated with an enhanced apparent depositional flux of ozone, consistent with both a direct O3 deposition to macroalgae and involvement of O3 in iodine photochemistry and subsequent particle formation below the measurement height. The magnitude of the particle formation events was observed to be greatest at the lowest tides with the highest concentrations of ultrafine particles growing to the largest sizes, probably by the condensation of anthropogenically-formed condensable material. At such sizes the particles should be able to act as cloud condensation nuclei at reasonable atmospheric supersaturations.


Abstract. Post-processing the output of different rainfall-runoff models allows one to pool strengths of each model to produce more reliable predictions. As a new approach in the frame of the "Prediction in Ungauged Basins" initiative, this study investigates the geographical transferability of different parameter sets and data-fusion methods which were applied to 5 different rainfall-runoff models for a low-land catchment in Central Sweden. After usual calibration, we adopted a proxy-basin validation approach between two similar but non-nested sub-catchments in order to simulate ungauged conditions. Many model combinations outperformed the best single model predictions with improvements of efficiencies from 0.70 for the best single model predictions to 0.77 for the best ensemble predictions. However no "best" data-fusion method could be determined as similar performances were obtained with different merging schemes. In general, poorer model performance, i.e. lower efficiency, was less likely to occur for ensembles which included more individual models.


Objective: To determine the impact of a nutrition education program on preschoolers' snack choices when offered one healthy (grapes) or one unhealthy food (cookies). Methods: This pre/post test experimental study included children ages 3-5 years old (n=45) from one preschool. Each child within a classroom (10-20 children) received the same nutrition education program (All 4 Kids) intervention (9, 30 minute lessons) taught by one registered dietitian over 2-weeks. Pre and post assessments included a snack knowledge and preference questionnaire and an observed snack selection trial to test the impact of the intervention. Children's height and weight were measured and body mass index z-scores calculated. Parental reports of child's food preferences, child demographics and other related variables were collected at baseline. Results: Overall, preschool children did not significantly improve (p>0.05) their snack choice between a healthy and unhealthy choice after the nutrition education program. However, there was significant improvement in reported preferences of healthier snacks (p=0.03) and the ability to distinguish them (p=0.03) from other snacks. Children who were younger (p=0.003) or who had higher nutrition knowledge scores (p=0.002) were more likely to select the healthy snack after the intervention. Conclusions and Implications: A short nutrition education program improves preschool children's knowledge but does not translate to healthier snack selections for all children. More nutrition education at an earlier age may be needed. Future research should investigate the optimal duration of a nutrition education program and what other external influences (parents, childcare) are most influential on snack choice and obesity risk.


The legal system in the United States is a part of a broader, federal political system. Like the policeman on the beat, the role of the federal courts and Congress in disputes between the states is as much to deter anti-social behavior as to intervene to impose order. One function of the legal, administrative and legislative processes is to give the disputants time to reconsider their positions and compromise their goals, to reflect upon their long-term interests, and to consider the wisdom of avoiding a clear-cut determination of winners and losers. In the context of energy severance taxes, these processes have permitted the dispute to be put into the larger perspective that only time and operation of the economic system can give. Although neither the federal courts nor Congress have been willing to act directly to arbitrate the sectional conflict over energy severance taxes, the power of these legal institutions to act has played an important part in permitting economic forces to adjust, albeit it painfully, the energy severance tax controversy. While the Montana and Jicarilla Apache taxes remain in place, their impact upon consumers is minimal and other states have not followed suit. Montana and the Apache Tribe are isolated, their economies staggered by high unemployment and low growth caused in part by the unwise exercise of their sovereign authority to tax. The system has worked to permit time and changed circumstances to defuse the energy severance tax controversy.It is quite likely that state severance taxes will become a sectionalist issue sometime again in the future, for energy sectionalism is little more than a manifestation of the inherent tendency of human beings to take advantage of their neighbors (whom they may not trust anyway) when circumstances permit them to do so. However Commonwealth Edison v. Montana, Merrion v. Jicarilla Apache Tribe, and the response of Congress to the phenomena that caused those cases should give confidence that the system will once more weather the storm. The constitutional powers of the federal courts and Congress are sufficient to protect one group of states from economically predatory actions of other groups, if the courts or Congress choose to exercise them. That those powers exist makes the need for their exercise less likely.


On 8 August 2013, vandals destroyed a Philippine "Golden Rice" Field Trial. Officials and staff of the Philippine Department of Agriculture that conduct rice tests for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) had gathered for a peaceful dialogue. They were taken by surprise when protesters invaded the compound, overwhelmed police and village security, and trampled the rice. Billed as an uprising of farmers, the destruction was actually carried out by protesters trucked in overnight in a dozen jeepneys.


Groundwater at a former manufacturing facility to be converted to retail use located in Bergen County, New Jersey, USA was contaminated with chlorinated solvents principally consisting of Trichloroethene (TCE), Vinyl chloride (VC) and Cis- 1,2-Dichloroethene (Cis-DCE). A patented Fenton-based oxidation process known as the ISOTECSM process was utilized to perform remedial activities at the site. A proprietary blend of chelated iron catalyst and mobility control agents that function in the pH range 5-7 was applied along with stabilized hydrogen peroxide to promote in-situ generation of the potent hydroxyl radical and other free radical oxidants, which occur as intermediaries in Fenton's reaction. Laboratory comparison experiments conducted in soil columns revealed significantly higher mobility and superior sorption characteristics for ISOTECSM catalysts when compared to a conventional Fenton's catalyst such as acidified iron (II) solution. For the highest column length used in the experiments, greater than 95~0 of iron in acidified iron (II) catalyst was adsorbed to the soil as opposed to less than 14% adsorption using the ISOTECSM catalyst. Preliminary laboratory-scale research was conducted to test the process efficacy towards in-situ chlorinated solvent remediation. Based on successfid experimental results that indicated greater than 99'%0 reduction of TCE, VC and cis-DCE; a field-scale treatment program was initiated utilizing a plurality of injection wells installed in a grid fashion throughout the site. Results of treatment indicated over a 98% reduction in total chlorinated contamination detected in the site groundwater within five months, which increased to greater than 99% decrease after one year.


Abstract Neuroepigenetics, which includes nuclear DNA modifications, such as 5-methylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine and modifications of nuclear proteins, such as histones, is emerging as the leading field in molecular neuroscience. Historically, a functional role for epigenetic mechanisms, including in neuroepigenetics, has been sought in the area of the regulation of nuclear transcription. However, one important compartment of mammalian cell DNA, different from nuclear DNA but equally important for physiological and pathological processes (including in the brain), mitochondrial DNA has for the most part not had a systematic epigenetic characterization. The importance of mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA (particularly its mutations) in central nervous system physiology and pathology has long been recognized. Only recently have the mechanisms of mitochondrial DNA methylation and hydroxymethylation, including the discovery of mitochondrial DNA-methyltransferases and the presence and functionality of 5-methylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine in mitochondrial DNA (e.g., in modifying the transcription of mitochondrial genome), been unequivocally recognized as a part of mammalian mitochondrial physiology. Here, we summarize for the first time evidence supporting the existence of these mechanisms and propose the term 'mitochondrial epigenetics' to be used when referring to them. Currently, neuroepigenetics does not include mitochondrial epigenetics – a gap that we expect to close in the near future.


BACKGROUND
The morphological examination of urinary sediment (MEUS) is traditionally associated with urinalysis (UA), with workload implications and the need for automation of its execution.

METHODS
Considering MEUS as a test requiring specialized knowhow and skill for its execution, since 2005 in our laboratory it is performed for inpatients only upon specific request. Eleven years after, we have analyzed the long-term impact of this approach on the provided service. We evaluated results in the 2009-2016 period, in which our hospital did not undergo any change both in the number of beds and in the clinical case-mix.

RESULTS
From 2009 to 2013 an average of 2264 MEUS and 10,204 UA per year were ordered, respectively, with an average ratio of 22.2%. Since 2014, a change on computerized order entry involving MEUS caused a further decrease of its requests (in average, 923 per year), which was not associated to a decrease in UA (in average, 9810 per year) (in average, MEUS/UA 9.4%). MEUS requests came mainly from Paediatrics (47.8%), Nephrology (20.9%) and Rheumatology (18.3%) wards. By filling a satisfaction survey, clinical wards evaluated the provided service as satisfactory, while highlighting some critical issues, mainly referred to preanalytical phase.

CONCLUSIONS
The alternative proposal for managing MEUS presented in this paper markedly reduces the number of requests and increases their appropriateness. This is achieved without any negative impact on patient care.


Located in the easternmost part of the Mediterranean Sea, offshore Lebanon remains a frontier, untested basin surrounded by many discoveries and proven working petroleum systems. Large gas fields have been discovered in clastic reservoirs within the southern portion of the Levantine Basin, these sediments are derived from the Nile Delta cone to the south, proving the existence of good quality pre-salt clastic reservoirs. These Nile Delta derived sediments are predicted to extend into the northern sector of the Levantine Basin, thus depositing offshore Lebanon. The 10,000 sqkm 3D dataset helps to indicate the presence of turbidites and fan systems across the Levantine Basin. Biogenic gas is now proven in many clastic and carbonate discoveries in close proximity to this region. In addition, the narrow margin and deeper sections of the basin are believed to have the potential for additional thermogenic oil prone source rocks charging both deeper basin clastics and rifted Mesozoic carbonates units along the Levant Margin. With a 2nd Licence Round announcement imminent and the first wells offshore Lebanon scheduled for 2019 the industry attention remains focused offshore Lebanon and the whole general Eastern Mediterranean province.


The authors describe an intelligent tool designed to aid managers of software development projects in planning, managing, and controlling the development process of medium- to large-scale software projects. Its purpose is to reduce uncertainties in the budget, personnel, and schedule planning of software development projects. It is based on dynamic models for the software development and maintenance life-cycle process. This dynamic process is composed of a number of time-varying, interacting developmental phases, each characterized by its intended functions and requirements. System dynamics is used as a modeling methodology. The resulting software life-cycle simulator (SLICS) and the hybrid expert simulation system of which it is a subsystem are described. >


* Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines. Carolyn Kitch. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 256 pp. $49.95 hbk. $18.95 pbk. In The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media, Carolyn Kitch argues contemporary stereotypes of women derive from idealistic-in both the positive and negative meaning of that word-cover and advertising illustrations of the New Woman that emerged in a variety of mass circulation magazines between 1890 and 1930, the period in which magazines developed as the first national media. Essentially, in this early examination of the influence of magazines on American culture, Kitch narrowly focuses her booklength argument on the lasting impact of artists' repetitive images and framing techniques on the definition of women and women's roles in the twentieth century. Her analysis offers important insights about the intersection of social change, gender relations, media, and promotional culture as the country entered a new century. In Pages from the Past, Kitch also examines how magazines shape readers' understanding of American culture-past, present, and future. In this second book, however, Kitch wraps her argument around the abstract concept, and one growing in popularity among cultural historians, of collective memory. Employing this concept, she asserts that first magazines and later movies and television-through selectivity, repetition, and revision-have framed historical events, experiences, commodities, personages, generations, and periods into a simplified, shared, individually and collectively meaningful memory of U.S. life. Unlike the focused argument of her first book, though, Pages from the Past follows the sense-making processes of collective memory creation through a variety of magazine phenomena. These include newsmagazine use of the decade as a summary device to construct a seemingly unified historical narrative that emphasizes commonalities across decades while differentiating the decades through contrast and labeling; newsmagazine application of a World War II conception of male heroism to events, the first responders, and soldiers in Iraq following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon; increasing magazine memorialization of celebrities in profiles that link their too-short lives with the experiences of ordinary citizens; creation and celebration in Ebony and American Legacy of a created historical narrative in which past and contemporary African Americans can place themselves; newsmagazine labeling in cover stories of supposed divergent generations, from the Greatest Generation to Generation Y, with the baby boomers serving as touchstone in this narrative; the popularity and centrality of such nostalgia magazines as Reminisce and Good Old Days for a fading generation convinced that the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s better represent traditional American values than does the contemporary world; and magazine dependence on anniversary issues, whether of a short five years or an entire century, to weave historical narratives in which recycled editorial content merges with and defines American culture for readers. …


Industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs) is the fast growing network of interconnected things that collects and exchange data using embedded sensors planted everywhere. Several IIoT applications such as the ones related to healthcare systems are expected to widely utilize the evolving 5G technology. This 5G-inspired IIoT paradigm in healthcare applications enables the users to interact with various types of sensors via secure wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs). Users of 5G networks should interact with each other in a seamless secure manner. And thus, security richness is highly coveted for the real time wireless sensor network systems. Asking users to verify themselves before every interaction is a tedious, time-consuming process that disrupts inhabitants' activities, and degrades the overall healthcare system performance. To avoid such problems, we propose a context-sensitive seamless identity provisioning (CSIP) framework for the IIoT. CSIP proposes a secure mutual authentication approach using hash  and global assertion value to prove that the proposed mechanism can achieve the major security goals of the WMSN in a short time period.


The focal point of all papers in this thesis is income inequality in Chile. In some of them household income is analyzed, in others monthly earnings or the wage rate are used. In the first and fourth paper a long-run analysis is done, while in the second and third I concentrate my attention only on the 1990s. Despite the different periods covered, the variables analyzed, and methods used, in general the thesis attempts to bring to light the factors that help to explain the levels and changes of income inequality in Chile, a country that has a marked position among the most unequal in the region and has gone through great political and economic changes in the last decades. Moreover, Chile posses some surveys of fairly good quality that permit longrun or country-wide analysis of the distribution of earnings and income. Therefore, Chile is not only an interesting country to study, but it is also encouraging. The first paper summarizes the development of household income and earnings inequality of several groups of the Chilean labor market during the period 1958-2004. Furthermore, it surveys the explanations given in existing studies to the levels of and trends in income inequality in the last decades. With the exception of the early 1970s, income inequality deteriorated from 1957-63 to the 1987-90 period, before declining in 1991-98. The rate of return to university education, as well as the dispersion of hourly earnings of males and white-collar workers, has generally followed the overall pattern of inequality. Education was found to be a key factor behind the dispersion of incomes and earnings in Chile, explaining 13-40% of the inequality, depending on the survey, definition of income, year, method, and sample used. Openness and trade has been suggested to be important to understand the deterioration of Chile's distribution of wages through the increased demand for skilled workers that followed the external sector liberalization after the mid 1980s. Evidence that increased female labor-force participation and higher rates of unemployment have an inequality increasing effect is provided by various studies. The second paper focuses on several important but relatively unexplored issues in the body of relevant literature. Using a Bootstrap technique, and analyzing selfemployed workers separately from employees, this paper presents several interesting results. Wage and salary and household income inequality deteriorated significantly at the end of the decade while the dispersion of self-employment incomes deteriorated in the 2000-03 period with respect to 1992 and 1996-98. Accounting for 20%-40%, the between-group component of education was an important factor to explain the level of inequality. But as income disparities between educational groups grew larger during the 1990s, education played a dominant role to explain even the change of wage and salary and self-employment income inequality. This was corroborated analyzing the Gini coefficient of household income by source, which reveals that its underlying components changed in size although the Gini remained at 0.54 all the three years analyzed. The earnings of employees and the self-employed with university education accounted for over 26% of the Gini coefficient of household income in 1990. By 2003, this share had gone up to 40%. The contribution of earnings of primary educated employees and self-employed workers declined from 7% to less than 2% over the same period. The third paper studies the distributional effects of an occupational change that occurred in Chile's labor market from 1992 to 2000. During this period the employment structure shifted towards informal employment (from 9% in 1992 to 15% in 2000), but also towards professional occupations (19% in 1992 to 26% in 2000). Both within-group and between-group composition-effects increased inequality, while within-group and between-group change in variance reduced it. However, using the inequality-decomposition of Fields and Yoo (2000) to analyze the inequality withinoccupations it is found that even education and hours-worked had an increasing effect in overall inequality, while all the other variables in the earnings equation, and especially the residuals, had an inequality-decreasing effect. The fourth paper analyzes in detail the inequality of hourly earnings of male workers in Santiago. Analyzing the years 1974, 1987, 1992, 2000, and 2003 I concentrate my attention on the extreme values in inequality of the last decades. Using an Oaxaca-Blinder type decomposition, but implementing quintile regressions, I am able to decompose changes in the male wage inequality into a price effect, a composition effect, and a residual. The first important finding is that inequality in the upper part of the distribution seems to be more important than the dispersion in the lower part to total inequality. Second, the large deterioration of male wage inequality between 1974 and 1987 was the result of the combined price effect and composition effect. For other inequality changes the price effect was dominant. Among the variables included in the quintile wage equations, such as age, education, occupation, and sector, education was the one with the largest composition effect.


Autonomy of employees is one way to ensure the flexibility, adaptability and innovation competence needed in organisations working on a global market. This has to be dynamically balanced on a system level by integration of the employees into the organisation. Formulation and communication of an organisational culture is one way to integrate employees to an understanding of the work that increases the chances of co-ordinated behaviour towards the goal of the organisation. The aim of this article is to increase the knowledge about processes leading to integration of employees into the organizational culture. The hypothesis is that culture emerges in the interaction between members of a social group. Thus, the article is studying the importance of communication, the research questions are: What makes the culture of a work group similar to the organizational culture?, How is a work group culture constructed? and How is it possible that some members of the workgroup are integrated in the organizational culture while others are not? Theories used are about culture as an organizing structure emerging in interaction between actors, about organizational culture as a way for management to exert control, and about social networks as a way to describe the interaction processes is. The empirical data comes from a merchant bank in Sweden famous for: long term competitiveness, a decentralized organisation and the use of organizational culture. 105 respondents from ten work groups of this bank have answered questions about their communication and their integration into the organisational culture. The results show that communication between members of a group is a mechanism behind the development of the sub-culture of the group and the integration of each individual member into this subculture. There seems to be a self-reinforcing spiral between collegial talk, especially about goals, plans and changes at the work place, and culture integration. To build a strong subculture it is important to have all members of a group included in this communication, since persons in the periphery of the talk pattern tends to be less integrated. The value system of the group's supervisor is strongly influencing the sub-culture of the work group. Thus, to hire supervisors with the correct values and giving resources to employees for communication is central for an organisation using organisational culture as a tool for control.


Abstract Microbial gene expression in anoxic subseafloor sediment was recently explored in the Baltic Sea and the Peru Margin. Our analysis of these data reveals diverse transcripts encoding proteins associated with neutralization of reactive oxygen species, including catalase, which may provide an in situ source of oxygen. We also detect transcripts associated with oxidation of iron and sulfur, and with reduction of arsenate, selenate and nitrate. Given limited input of electron acceptors from outside the system, these results suggest that the microbial communities use an unexpectedly diverse variety of electron acceptors. Products of water radiolysis and their interactions with sediment continuously provide diverse electron acceptors and hydrogen. Cryptic microbial utilization of these oxidized substrates and H2 may be an important mechanism for multi‐million‐year survival under the extreme energy limitation in subseafloor sediment.


The purpose of this paper is to measure multidimensional poverty in pastoral areas of Ethiopia. It employed both primary and secondary data. The community level primary data was collected using focus group discussion. Secondary data was obtained from Living Standard Measurement Survey of Ethiopia, 2015. Mixed method research was employed to better understand multidimensional poverty. The qualitative result indicated that many groups expressed poverty manifests as loss of livestock's, lack of food, lack of water, lack of schooling and health services. The quantitative result confirmed that there is positive correlation among the three poverty dimension, implying multidimensional hypothesis is accepted. The poverty measure indicated 44% of the sample household found to be poor in two dimensions and 37% poor in one dimension and 8% were found to be poor in three dimensions. The results from mixed approach converge indicating that poverty is multidimensional in pastoral and agro-pastoral areas.


Objectives: The aim of the study was to analyze the diagnostic performance of anti-deamidated gliadin peptide (dGp) immunoglobulin (Ig) G and IgA regarding the age at celiac disease (CD) diagnosis and the anti-dGp IgG usefulness for diagnosing CD IgA-deficient patients. Methods: Anti-dGp IgG and IgA and anti-native gliadin (nGlia) IgA were determined by enzyme fluoroimmunoassay in 100 newly diagnosed anti-tissue transglutaminase (tTG) IgA-positive pediatric and adult patients with CD and in 100 age-matched patients with other digestive pathologies. Anti-dGp IgG was evaluated in 6 CD IgA-deficient patients. Results: When analyzing all of the patients, the anti-dGp IgG assay showed higher diagnostic accuracy (area under receiver operating characteristic curve), specificity, and positive predictive value than anti-dGp IgA and anti-nGlia IgA. All of the diagnostic parameters corresponding to anti-dGp IgG reached the same values as anti-tTG IgA in children 7 years or younger. In older patients, both anti-dGp isotypes showed an inverse behavior, IgG having a higher specificity and positive predictive value but a lower sensitivity and negative predictive value than IgA. Anti-dGp levels were associated with the severity of intestinal lesions, and an inverse association was found regarding age at diagnosis. Both anti-dGp IgG and IgA were found to be positive in the 9 patients with minimal intestinal changes included in the study. All of the patients with CD with IgA deficiency were positive for anti-dGp IgG. Conclusions: The diagnostic performance of anti-dGp depends on the antibody isotype and on the age at CD diagnosis, anti-dGp IgG being a serological marker at least as useful as anti-tTG IgA for detecting CD in children ages 7 years or younger. Our data also indicate that anti-dGp IgG can improve the diagnosis of IgA-deficient patients.


This paper presents a new photonic integrated circuit, namely optical pulse-train generator, which is developed based on the transfer matrix analysis of microrings and utilizes a time-interleaved architecture. This circuit can generate multiple optical pulses sequentially from a single trigger pulse, with the timing and amplitude of each pulse determined by circuit design. Hence it can be applied in optical arbitrary waveform generation and ultrafast electro-optic modulation. A four-tap prototype pulse-train generator design is demonstrated, and the challenge of distributed optical power combining is discussed. The design techniques presented in this paper will find use in other large scale photonic integrated circuit applications.


YI SANG COUNTS TO THIRTEEN. By Sung Rno. Directed by Lee Breuer. Warehouse Theatre 31, Seoul, Korea. 28 June 2009. Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen (Figure 1) is a contemporary American play staged for a Korean audience about the twentieth-century Korean poet Yi Sang (born Kim Haegyeong, 1910-1937). Yi Sang was a self-proclaimed "genius poet" during Korea's Japanese colonial period whose work was little understood. Beginning with his "Twelfth of December" (1930) and As the Raven Flies (Ogamdo, 1931 in Japanese and 1934 in Korean) and continuing with prose works The Wings (Nalgae, 1936) and Chronicle at the End of Life (Chongsaenggi, 1937), his writing baffled his contemporaries. His surrealistic poems were nonsensical, abstract, daring in their deconstruction of reality, and as odd as his adopted name, Yi Sang, which means "strange" in Korean. He was a lonely modernist who has been posthumously recognized as the preeminent surrealist that he was. Korean American playwright Sung Rno, a poet and experimental modernist himself with an MFA from Brown and numerous fellowships and awards, and avant-garde director Lee Breuer worked in unison to recreate Yi Sang's artistic world on stage during the author's residency at Mabou Mines. They took their production to the Seoul International Theatre Festival in 2000. Although Breuer considers that first production of Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen to have been totally unsatisfactory, ongoing interest in his work by Korean artists resulted in his return to Korea in 2009 to redirect the play. Jung Dae Kyung, of Warehouse Theatre 31, invited Breuer and Rno. Jianwoks Gagaelreori Incorporation in Seoul provided $75,000 for the creation of the new version. For this Seoul production, Breuer worked with a Korean team of major actors, designers, and visual artists. Rno modified the play for a Korean audience by translating it into Korean and adding contemporary Korean slang, and Breuer completely reconceived the staging in collaboration with the Korean artists, including set designer Paek Ji Hee. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Breuer's aesthetic--which mixes a stylistic range, meticulous choreography, and powerful visual images--perfectly realized Rno's fifteen-scene play, which was inspired by Yi Sang's surrealistic poems. Together Breuer and Rno created a production that engraved stunning images from Yi Sang's world of poems on the spectators' minds and planted the poet's deep solitude into the spectators' hearts. Korean audiences were mesmerized by the production, which ran for more than a month. Artist Paek Ji Hee designed the small seven- by six-meter stage. A screen spanning the entire rear of the stage is used for digital projections. A hydraulic lift over half the size of the stage rises to create a large central platform. Two wide venetian blinds suspended above it shut and open to reveal action on the platform. Another hydraulic lift at the rear of stage right allows actors to enter and exit the stage from above. Two stagehands in black open and close the blinds, give actors props, and sometimes film live images of the actors projected on the screen. Three male actors--Lee Chang Soo, Shin Dong Ryuk, and Lim Young Joon--play the narrator (Yi Sang) and the characters Blue and Red, respectively. Actress Kim So Jin plays Green. Blue represents Yi Sang's inner self. Red is Yi Sang's best friend, Koo Bon Heong, and Green is his lover, Kum Hong. Red and Green also portray other characters that exist in Yi Sang's poems. The production consists of three acts. The first is about Yi Sang's life, including a scene where Blue (Yi Sang) first meets Kum Hong, a Korean kisaeng (female entertainer-prostitute) with whom he falls in love. In another scene Blue witnesses his best friend, Red, and his lover having an affair in his apartment. The second act moves inside Yi Sang's imagination, where abstract and mysterious thought involving body parts dwell. Some images are drawn from Yi Sang's "Poem XIII" in As the Raven Flies: "Holding the razorblade my arms became severed and fell off. …


Transactions in shares are exempt under Article 135(1)(f) of the Common VAT System Directive. However, in practice, the legal regime applicable to shares is based not on the interpretation of one single provision of the Directive, but rather on the joint interpretation of various inter-connected provisions. Within the last 15 years, the Court has been called to interpret these provisions, within the context of the VAT treatment of dealings in shares, on several occasions. However, far from having resolved all inherent conceptual and practical pitfalls of applying the EU VAT provisions to the sui generis nature of dealings in shares, it is clear that the case-law itself gives rise to various difficulties, thereby heightening the sense of legal uncertainty. This paper provides an analysis of the case-law of the Court in relation to transactions in shares, highlighting its evolution, as well as its consequences, from both a practical, and a conceptual, perspectives.


Chapter 1 Defining Public Administration Chapter 2 The Political and Cultural Environment of Public Policy and Its Administration Chapter 3 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government Chapter 4 Intergovernmental Relations Chapter 5 Honor, Ethics, and Accountability Chapter 6 The Evolution of Management and Organization Theory Chapter 7 Organizational Behavior Chapter 8 Managerialism and Information Technology Chapter 9 Strategic Management and Government Regulation Chapter 10 Leadership Chapter 11 Personnel Management and Labor Relations Chapter 12 Social Equity Chapter 13 Public Financial Management Chapter 14 Program Audit and Evaluation


BACKGROUND
Cardiometabolic risk is the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes, or stroke, which are leading causes of mortality and morbidity worldwide.

OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was to determine the potential of low-calorie cranberry juice (LCCJ) to lower cardiometabolic risk.

METHODS
A double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-arm study was conducted with controlled diets. Thirty women and 26 men (mean baseline characteristics: 50 y; weight, 79 kg; body mass index, 28 kg/m(2)) completed an 8-wk intervention with LCCJ or a flavor/color/energy-matched placebo beverage. Twice daily volunteers consumed 240 mL of LCCJ or the placebo beverage, containing 173 or 62 mg of phenolic compounds and 6.5 or 7.5 g of total sugar per 240-mL serving, respectively.

RESULTS
Fasting serum triglycerides (TGs) were lower after consuming LCCJ and demonstrated a treatment × baseline interaction such that the participants with higher baseline TG concentrations were more likely to experience a larger treatment effect (1.15 ± 0.04 mmol/L vs. 1.25 ± 0.04 mmol/L, respectively; P = 0.027). Serum C-reactive protein (CRP) was lower for individuals consuming LCCJ than for individuals consuming the placebo beverage [ln transformed values of 0.522 ± 0.115 ln(mg/L) vs. 0.997 ± 0.120 ln(mg/L), P = 0.0054, respectively, and equivalent to 1.69 mg/L vs. 2.71 mg/L back-transformed]. LCCJ lowered diastolic blood pressure (BP) compared with the placebo beverage (69.2 ± 0.8 mm Hg for LCCJ vs. 71.6 ± 0.8 mm Hg for placebo; P = 0.048). Fasting plasma glucose was lower (P = 0.03) in the LCCJ group (5.32 ± 0.03 mmol/L) than in the placebo group (5.42 ± 0.03 mmol/L), and LCCJ had a beneficial effect on homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance for participants with high baseline values (P = 0.035).

CONCLUSION
LCCJ can improve several risk factors of CVD in adults, including circulating TGs, CRP, and glucose, insulin resistance, and diastolic BP. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01295684.


We propose a five-player common-pool resource (CPR) game with endogenous coalition formation. We show that the level of extraction from the CPR depends on the size of each coalition that is formed and on the final coalition structure. These predictions are tested in a laboratory experiment. We consider two treatments: dictator vs. veto. In the dictator treatment, at each stage of the coalition formation game, a randomly chosen player imposes the coalition size and selected members cannot refuse to become a member. In the veto treatment, players have the right to refuse joining the current coalition if they want to and make counter-proposals. We observe that the formation of the grand coalition is more frequent in the dictator treatment. However, with the repetition of the coalition formation game, the grand coalition becomes more frequent under both treatment, and past experience of a grand coalition increases the likelihood that the current coalition structure is the grand coalition. Finally, the possibility to form coalitions is beneficial at reducing CPR extractions, compared to the singleton structure, in both treatments.


Long‐term modifications in hydrological conditions due to river damming result in varied effects on fish diversity, which can be stronger in a reservoir cascade. Therefore, we assessed changes in fish diversity over a 28‐year period, in a series of reservoirs along the Araguari River Basin, a Neotropical drainage in Brazil, in both lentic environments (reservoirs) and the lotic stretches between them. We used linear mixed models to assess long‐term changes in fish diversity. Diversity was measured as α diversity (fish species richness) and β diversity (Jaccard's and Raup–Crick's dissimilarity index). Beta diversity was then partitioned into turnover (species replacement) and nestedness (species loss). To understand fish species replacement along the cascade, we modelled turnover with four covariates: age, richness of native and non‐native fish species, and longitudinal position of sampling site along the cascade. The reduction of total richness and the increase in non‐native richness were related to reservoir age. These effects were similar in both lotic and lentic environments, with no significant difference between them. We also observed a decrease in native fish richness over time, with a slight tendency for lentic environments to lose more species than lotic environments. Dissimilarity in fish assemblage increased over time and β Raup–Crick results corroborated those derived from β Jaccard, yielding similar significant temporal trends. Changes in fish species composition occurred predominantly due to turnover, compared to nestedness. We observed a greater species loss in reservoirs, suggesting that the transformation from a lotic environment into a lentic had greater impact on fish assemblages than the flow regulation of the lotic stretches downstream of the dams. Our results suggest that species replacement can be explained mainly by the increase of non‐native fish richness, followed by the longitudinal position along the cascade in an upstream–downstream direction, and reservoir age. This study reveals that, even after 2 decades of monitoring, we still observe important changes in fish assemblages, demonstrating the importance of long‐term monitoring to assess biodiversity. Our findings reinforce the importance of long‐term fish monitoring schemes for the investigation of the effects of non‐native fish species on native fish assemblages.


Shimon Even's Graph Algorithms, published in 1979, was a seminal introductory book on algorithms read by everyone engaged in the field. This thoroughly revised second edition, with a foreword by Richard M. Karp and notes by Andrew V. Goldberg, continues the exceptional presentation from the first edition and explains algorithms in a formal but simple language with a direct and intuitive presentation. The book begins by covering basic material, including graphs and shortest paths, trees, depth-first-search, and breadth-first search. The main part of the book is devoted to network flows and applications of network flows, and it ends with chapters on planar graphs and testing graph planarity.


The performance of trained neural networks is robust to harsh levels of pruning. Coupled with the ever-growing size of deep learning models, this observation has motivated extensive research on learning sparse models. In this work, we focus on the task of controlling the level of sparsity when performing sparse learning. Existing methods based on sparsity-inducing penalties involve expensive trial-and-error tuning of the penalty factor, thus lacking direct control of the resulting model sparsity. In response, we adopt a constrained formulation: using the gate mechanism proposed by Louizos et al. (2018), we formulate a constrained optimization problem where sparsification is guided by the training objective and the desired sparsity target in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments on CIFAR-{10, 100}, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet using WideResNet and ResNet{18, 50} models validate the effectiveness of our proposal and demonstrate that we can reliably achieve pre-determined sparsity targets without compromising on predictive performance.


You will prepare a dilution series of monodisperse silica microspheres and measure the Abs 600 in your plate reader. The size and optical characteristics of these microspheres are similar to cells, and there is a known amount of particles per volume. This measurement will allow you to construct a standard curve of particle concentration which can be used to convert 600 nm absorbance measurements into an estimated equivalent number of cells.


Textile industries is known as one of the most basic industries in any country and usually the main characteristic of these industries sewage is its being colored which is because of the use of colored materials in these industries. A-R-T-I-C-L-EI-N-F-O A-B-S-T-R-A-C-T Article Notes: Received: Dec 1, 2015 Received in revised form: Jun 28, 2016 Accepted: Mar 5, 2016 Available Online: Mar 29, 2016 Background & Aims of the Study: Malachite Green (MG) is the most commonly used substance for dying cotton, food & pharmacy industries, paper, leather and silk. On inhalation it can cause difficult breathing, while on the direct contact it may cause permanent injury of the eyes of human and animals, burning sensations, nausea, vomiting, profuse sweating, mental confusion and methemoglobinemia; also it can causes cancer in livers. The aim of this study is the removal of Malachite Green (MG) dye from aqueous solutions, using MnFe2O4/Al2O3 nanophotocatalyst by UV/H2O2 process which was used as a low cost method. Materials & Methods: In this research, photocatalytic decomposition of malachite green in water was done by nanocatalyst MnFe2O4/Al2O3 in discontinuous photoreactor under UV light and the injection of H2O2. In order to identify and analyze the provided catalyst, SEM image and XRD diffraction pattern were used. The effect of operational factors in the photocatalytic decomposition of the desired pollutant such as pH, the initial thickness of the dye, the thickness of H2O2 and the quantity of the catalyst were investigated. Results: The finding showed that the right conditions for the elimination of the pollutant included pH equals 4, the initial thickness of the dye being 10 ppm, the thickness of H2O2 being 250ppm, the amount of catalyst being 50mg, the Correlation Coefficient being 0.998 and the dye removal was 94 percent at the end of the experiment. the reaction of Malachite green decomposition was in terms of kinetics investigated through integral method as well; also it showed the kinetic reaction is the first type and the constant speed rate is K=0.047 Conclusions: According to the results, because of the complexity of dye structure, biological system was not able to remove the dye as efficient as hybrid system of advanced oxidation processes UV/H2O2 with nanophotocatalyst as an efficient way to remove the Malachite green dye from water solution is obtained that increases the decomposability of organic materials. This way has proved to be able to decompose the hard compounds that are resistant to decomposition.


We present Dionysus, a system for fast, consistent network updates in software-defined networks. Dionysus encodes as a graph the consistency-related dependencies among updates at individual switches, and it then dynamically schedules these updates based on runtime differences in the update speeds of different switches. This dynamic scheduling is the key to its speed; prior update methods are slow because they pre-determine a schedule, which does not adapt to runtime conditions. Testbed experiments and data-driven simulations show that Dionysus improves the median update speed by 53--88% in both wide area and data center networks compared to prior methods.


Morphogen gradients are concentration fields of molecules acting as spatial regulators of cell differentiation in developing tissues and play a fundamental role in various aspects of embryonic development. We discovered a family of self-similar solutions in a canonical class of nonlinear reaction-diffusion models describing the formation of morphogen gradients. These solutions are realized in the limit of infinitely high production rate at the tissue boundary and are given by the product of the steady state concentration profile and a function of the diffusion similarity variable. We solved the boundary value problem for the similarity profile numerically and analyzed the implications of the discovered self-similarity on the dynamics of morphogenetic patterning.


Feature
 Issue on Optical Performance Monitoring (OPM). The
 next-generation integrated performance monitor (NGIOPM) will prove to be a necessary
 tool for MCI to monitor and maintain its optical transmission network. The functions
 and requirements described for NGIOPM are intended for incorporation into various
 transmission network elements such as add-drop multiplexers (ADMs), optical
 cross-connect switching, regenerators, and other optical components. The NGIOPM will
 (i) provide transmission integrity including guaranteed performance to customers
 service-level agreements (SLAs) as well as meeting company engineered transmission
 performance objectives; (ii) reduce costs by eliminating or decreasing labor
 intensive testing; and (iii) increase network reliability by reducing network
 downtime.


While debugging message-passing parallel applications, a notoriously difficult bug to solve is a race condition: messages from different sources may arrive at a processor in any order, and the processing of these messages in some particular order is not handled correctly by the application. What compounds the difficulty is that this bug may not manifest itself until the application is deployed at large scale, and even then it may happen only in a small fraction of runs. By allowing a developer to quickly test the outcome of the computation resulting from handling several messages in a specific order while the application is running, we enable a fast way to inspect the application for the existence of race conditions. Furthermore, this can help reduce the need for large machine allocations to discover race conditions. A fundamental component of the feature is the capability to perform the provisional delivery of a message quickly, providing an equally fast rollback.


The research presented in this thesis concerns the investigation and development of Bragggrating-based integrated cavities for the rare-earth-ion-doped Al2O3 (aluminium oxide) waveguide platform, both from a theoretical and an experimental point of view, with the primary purpose of realizing narrow-linewidth, monolithic channel waveguide lasers.
To determine the optimum design parameters and for understanding the operation
principles of Bragg-grating-based rare-earth-ion-doped channel waveguide lasers, a mathematical model of such a laser is implemented. The mathematical description consists of laser rate equations, which describe the population dynamics of rare-earth ions, as well as coupled mode equations, which describe the operation of waveguide Bragg gratings.
Making use of reactive co-sputtering from high purity metallic targets, rare-earth-iondoped Al2O3 waveguide layers are deposited onto thermally-oxidized silicon substrates, after which channel waveguides are etched using a chlorine-based reactive ion etching process. A high-resolution lithography technique, known as laser interference lithography is used to define the Bragg-grating structures, which are finally etched via reactive ion etching into a SiO2 cladding layer on top of the waveguides.
Optimized waveguide and grating geometries allowed various rare-earth-ion-doped integrated channel waveguide lasers to be demonstrated. These include an erbium-doped Al2O3 distributed feedback channel waveguide laser having a linewidth of 1.7 kHz, as well as highly efficient ytterbium-doped Al2O3 distributed feedback and distributed Bragg reflector lasers with slope efficiencies as high as 67%.
The use of two local phase shifts in a distributed-feedback structure enables the demonstration of a dual-wavelength distributed feedback channel waveguide laser. This device is used for the photonic generation of a microwave signal via the heterodyne detection of the two optical waves emitted by the laser. By varying the values of the respective phase shifts, various laser cavities producing microwave signals with frequencies ranging between 12.43 GHz and 23.2 GHz are demonstrated. The stability performance and narrow-linewidth of these free-running lasers show the great potential of using rare-earthion-doped monolithic waveguide lasers for the photonic generation of stable microwave
signals in novel applications such as phased array antennas.
Another innovative application of the photonic generation of stable microwave signals is the demonstration of an integrated intra-laser-cavity micro-particle optical sensor based on a dual-wavelength distributed-feedback channel waveguide laser. Real-time detection and accurate size measurement of single micro-particles with diameters ranging between 1 µm and 20 µm is achieved. This represents the typical size of many fungal and bacterial pathogens as well as a large variety of human cells. A limit of detection of ~ 500 nm is deduced. The sensing principle relies on measuring changes in the frequency difference
between the two longitudinal laser modes as the evanescent field of the dual-wavelength laser interacts with micro-sized particles on the surface of the waveguide.


The growth and development in the capital markets can be achieved when markets operate under a safe, sound and transparent environment. Prevention, detection and deterrence of market manipulation and insider dealing are preliminary conditions to attract more investors to, and increase the capacity of the markets. Turkish legislator has enacted a new Capital Market Act on the very last days of 2012, which replaces the Capital Market Act number 2499. This article analyses the new market abuse regime introduced by this Act, which regulates main framework of preventing and combating insider dealing and market manipulation. This article argues that the new Turkish market abuse regime recognizes developments in this field of securities law, and includes almost all necessary mechanisms and tools to deal with abusive practices in the capital markets. However, its impacts on the markets remain to be seen.


International civil litigation in China is on the rise in recent years. This trend inevitably continues with China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Given increasing foreign engagement in doing businesses with China, a better understanding of the Chinese judicial system becomes essential in terms of protection of foreign business interests. Jurisdiction, choice of law and enforcement of judgment are three primary concerns of foreign parties seeking judicial relief and remedies in China. Questions commonly asked include: what are the bases for a Chinese people's court to assert jurisdiction over foreign parties; what are the standards to determine judicial competence; how a Chinese people's court decides which law is going to be applied in each particular case involving "foreign elements"; and whether a judgment could be effectively enforced and by what means. Fear that China lacks the rule of law and an independent judicial system produces hesitancy to conduct business in China and pursue legal rights. Creating the public confidence in the judiciary is one of China's most important tasks as it seeks to attract international business. Judicial independence and justice are major challenges facing the ongoing Chinese judicial reform.


We have made a precise comparison of the wavelength passed by a Hg198 Zeeman filter with that of the 2537-A absorption line of an atomic beam. This was done by passing the light from the filter through the atomic beam and then comparing the amplitudes of the two peaks in the resulting reversed lines. A calibration was obtained by measuring the ratio of peak amplitudes with the beam tilted at various angles to the optic axis so as to introduce known Doppler shifts. The wavelengths of the Zeeman filter and atomic beam are shown to be equal to about one part in 109.


Arguably, from the programmer's perspective, the programming model is the most
important characteristic of any computer system. Perhaps this explains why,
after many decades of research, architects and programmers alike continue to
debate the appropriate programming model for parallel computers. Though
thousands of programming models have been developed, standards such as PVM and
MPI have made send-and-receive based message-passing the most popular
programming model for distributed memory architectures. This thesis explores
modifying the Single-Chip Message-Passing (SCMP) architecture to more
efficiently support send-and-receive based message-passing. The proposed system
is compared, for performance and programmability, to the active messaging
programming model currently used by SCMP.

SCMP offers a unique platform for send-and-receive based message-passing. The
SCMP design incorporates multiple multi-threaded processors, memory, and a
network onto a single chip. This integration reduces the penalties of thread
switching, memory access, and inter-process communication typically seen on
more traditional distributed memory parallel machines. The mechanisms proposed
in this thesis to support send-and-receive based message-passing on SCMP
attempt to preserve and exploit these features as much as possible.


Abstract. Galvanic distortions of magnetotelluric (MT) data, such as the static-shift effect, are a known problem that can lead to incorrect estimation of resistivities and erroneous modelling of geometries with resulting misinterpretation of subsurface electrical resistivity structure. A wide variety of approaches have been proposed to account for these galvanic distortions, some depending on the target area, with varying degrees of success. The natural laboratory for our study is a hydraulically permeable volume of conductive sediment at depth, the internal resistivity structure of which can be used to estimate reservoir viability for geothermal purposes; however, static-shift correction is required in order to ensure robust and precise modelling accuracy. We present here a possible method to employ frequency–domain electromagnetic data in order to correct static-shift effects, illustrated by a case study from Northern Ireland. In our survey area, airborne frequency domain electromagnetic (FDEM) data are regionally available with high spatial density. The spatial distributions of the derived static-shift corrections are analysed and applied to the uncorrected MT data prior to inversion. Two comparative inversion models are derived, one with and one without static-shift corrections, with instructive results. As expected from the one-dimensional analogy of static-shift correction, at shallow model depths, where the structure is controlled by a single local MT site, the correction of static-shift effects leads to vertical scaling of resistivity–thickness products in the model, with the corrected model showing improved correlation to existing borehole wireline resistivity data. In turn, as these vertical scalings are effectively independent of adjacent sites, lateral resistivity distributions are also affected, with up to half a decade of resistivity variation between the models estimated at depths down to 2000 m. Simple estimation of differences in bulk porosity, derived using Archie's Law, between the two models reinforces our conclusion that the suborder of magnitude resistivity contrasts induced by the correction of static shifts correspond to similar contrasts in estimated porosities, and hence, for purposes of reservoir investigation or similar cases requiring accurate absolute resistivity estimates, galvanic distortion correction, especially static-shift correction, is essential.


Obesity and being overweight has become an increasing trend in America's society over the last decade. This disease is not only affecting adults, but children as well. This statistic continues to rise due to controllable and uncontrollable factors, including poor nutrition and unfortunate medical conditions. Researchers have turned to persuasive technology in the form of health games to attack the "Battle of the Bulge." These games fall into three different categories: exergames, casual games and serious games. Our paper will explore these three types of technology and the effect they intend to have in turning America into a healthier place.


This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call 'distributed preparedness'. Distributed preparedness was initially articulated in civil defense programs in the early stages of the Cold War, when US government planners began to conceptualize the nation as a possible target of nuclear attack. These planners assumed that the enemy would focus its attacks on urban and industrial centers that were essential to US war-fighting capability. Distributed preparedness provided techniques for mapping national space as a field of potential targets, and grafted this map of vulnerabilities onto the structure of territorial administration in the United States. It presented a new model of coordinated planning for catastrophic threats, one that sought to limit federal intervention in local life and to preserve the characteristic features of American federalism. Over the course of the Cold War, distributed preparedness extended to new domains, and following 9/11 it has moved to the center of security discussions in the US.


In view of the minimal attention pronunciation teacher preparation has received in second language (L2) teacher education, this study examined the cognition (i.e. beliefs, thoughts, attitudes and knowledge) development of 15 student teachers during a postgraduate subject on pronunciation pedagogy offered at an Australian tertiary institution. Findings revealed that, as a result of taking the subject, student teachers' cognition shifted from teaching individual sounds (i.e. segmentals) to favouring a more balanced approach to pronunciation instruction. That is, teaching the melody of the English language (i.e. suprasegmentals) was seen as important as teaching segmentals. Non-native speakers' self-perceived pronunciation improvement, an increase in their awareness of their spoken English, and native/non-native collaboration played critical roles in facilitating participants' cognition growth. The findings also showed that cognition development is a complex process. The paper concludes with recommendations for preparing L2 teachers to teach English pronunciation in their classroom contexts.


The genesis of Mei-Yu fronts is studied by assuming the fronts are characterized by a line of low-level potential vorticity (PV) anomaly.It is proposed that the frontogenetic process is initiated by the CISK mechanism through the interactions between the PV anomaly and the convection induced by Ek-man layer pumping. The scale contraction produced by the convergence flow of the convection provides the basic frontogenetic forcing. In addition, thecross-frontal horizontal scale of the front contracts at a rate faster than what can be expected from a linear theory, due to the presence of a nonlinear feedback process. The process is due to the fact that the effect of condensation on PV is proportional to the value of absolute vorticity. These processes are illustrated using both a linear analysis and a nonlinear munerical model.


Optimization of the static pressure reset is always critical in the pursuit of maximum savings of fan power and thermal energy consumption in a VAV system. This paper theoretically investigated three static pressure reset methods, i.e. VAV terminal unit damper position based, outside air temperature based and air flow based, and proposed an optimal static pressure reset method. Subsequently, hourly simulations of a building in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, was implemented and validated that the VAV system with the optimal reset method could consume the least fan energy without sacrificing thermal comfort. Furthermore, in consideration of typical advantages of wireless technologies compared with traditional direct digital control (DDC) in building control systems, this paper also proposed a new control strategy combining with the WSN and the damper position based reset method, i.e. cascade VAV optimal control strategy.


Although optimal foraging theory applied to plant expenditure on resource uptake predicts that plant morphology and physiology should be adjusted to make all resources simultaneously limiting, two considerations make it unlikely that resource enrichment experiments will show strong responses to all nutrient additions. First, growth response to enrichment is strongly dependent on costs and demand, and detectable growth responses are only likely for "expensive" resources in high demand. Second, many resources are acquired simultaneously as a result of allocation to a single structure (e.g., various soil resources obtained by roots). This can cause the growth of an optimally foraging plant to be limited by a single resource. Altering the model to allow for more than one allocation currency (such as nitrogen and carbon) has the effect of making plant composition (and therefore demand) dependent on the supply rates of resources. This assumption can sometimes qualitatively change the above predictions, but the biological relevance of such cases is unclear. We conclude that in addition to supply and demand, the pattern of signs (positive or negative) of net correlations in uptake allocation will control the pattern of multiple limitation. Results of enrichment experiments showing limitation by only a single resource do not necessarily refute the perspective of optimal foraging.


Dear Editor, Alveolar soft-part sarcoma (ASPS) is one of the least common soft-tissue sarcomas. It is of particular clinical significance because of the high prevalence of metastases and its microscopic appearance, which may be mistaken for metastatic renal, adrenal, hepatocellular carcinoma, paraganglioma, or alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma1. It accounts for approximately 0.5%-1% of all soft tissue sarcomas and affects mainly adolescents and young adults2. The tumour is generally considered to be malignant and originate in soft tissue, most commonly in the deep tissues of the extremities3. Metastasis may be delayed but eventually occurs in virtually all cases and involves lung, bones, and brain in that order of frequency 3. Synchronous metastases are detected in 20% to 25% of cases4. ASPS show a high incidence of around 30% of brain metastases, being at least 3 times higher than that of other soft tissue sarcomas5. We report a 39-year-old Caucasian woman who appeared with painless progressively enlarging tumour on the upper third of the right shin. The preoperative tissue diagnosis (incisional biopsy) was alveolar soft-part sarcoma. Magnetic resonance imaging of the whole body revealed a 7cm tumour lesion in the posterior compartment of the right calf and bone metastasis in the tibia (Figure 1). Above the knee amputation was performed. The patient recovered uneventfully and arranged for follow-up visits every three months. She is doing well 4 years after the intervention. ASPS are indolent but have a high propensity for metastases. Early diagnosis and complete excision of the small primary tumour are essential in the treatment of alveolar soft-part sarcomas, while adjuvant chemotherapy and /or radiotherapy are disputed.


Sub-vertical natural fracturing is critical for ensuring economic gas production from tight sand reservoirs in many provinces. Over the last seven years, the US Department of Energy (DoE) has sponsored a series of programmes in the continental United States to develop cost-effective technologies for investigating naturally fractured reservoirs. The results from a study of a Laramide-age faulted anticline reservoir in the Lower Fort Union Formation of the Wind River Basin, Wyoming are presented. At the field site a multi-azimuth, multi-offset 3D compressional wave seismic survey was acquired and processed using azimuth-dependent processing followed by multi-azimuth attribute analysis. Geophysical attributes such as velocity, frequency, reflectivity and amplitude variation with offset, together with geological attributes such as depth below closure and distance from faults, were correlated to estimated ultimate recovery of gas for established wells within the field. The correlations were made using linear statistical methods, non-linear rank methods and neural networks to combine attribute results. The geophysical attributes and other geological information were combined into prospectivity maps for areas of highest fracture density. Based on the geophysical and geological results an 80% success rate was achieved at prospecting well locations. A major aspect of the DoE programmes has been the investigation of costeffective protocols for fracture detection. From this study the following procedure is recommended for cost-effective mapping of fractures and associated gas: (1) perform field and remote-sensing reconnaissance of structural trends; (2) acquire 3D P-wave surveys with offsets equal to or greater than target depth in all azimuths; (3) process in at least two dominant structural azimuths; (4) combine best correlated geophysical and geological attributes to fractures for future fracture zone mapping. The implications of the results from this survey have important consequences for the design and implementation of multi-azimuth, multi-offset data acquisition on land and for marine surveys where multi-component ocean bottom cable surveying is used.


Attending sustainability in waste management require an option that employs environmental friendliness. The generation of municipal solid waste is increasing year by year and there are many options for handing and disposing of these wastes. Composting is the natural biological process in which degradable part of waste is transformed to a stable material with excellent characteristics for application on soils. Thus it requires a pretreatment such as removal of big fractions and other contaminants that could affect the composting process and final quality of compost. Such type of technique must be effective efficient and less costly Agricultural application of composted Municipal Solid Waste, as nutrient source for plants and as soil conditioner, is the most cost effective option of MSW management. Municipal solid waste (MSW) compost is increasingly used in agriculture as a soil conditioner but also as a fertilizer. Proponents of this practice consider it an important recycling tool since MSW would otherwise be land filled and critics are concerned with its often elevated metal concentrations. In this review, we show the state of art about the composting of Municipal solid waste (viz. Kitchen waste) and its application in agriculture.


OBJECTIVE
To characterize the frequency, clinical signs, biologic behavior, and response to treatment of tumors of the ear canal in dogs and cats.

DESIGN
Retrospective analysis of medical records.

ANIMALS
Medical records of 81 dogs (48 malignant tumors, 33 benign tumors) and 64 cats (56 malignant tumors, 8 benign tumors).

PROCEDURE
Data were analyzed for cats and dogs with malignant tumors, and risk factors were analyzed for their potential impact on survival time.

RESULTS
Malignant tumor types most commonly reported included ceruminous gland adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and carcinoma of undetermined origin. Median survival time of dogs with malignant aural tumors was > 58 months, whereas that of cats was 11.7 months. A poor prognosis was indicated by extensive tumor involvement (dogs) and by neurologic signs at time of diagnosis, diagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma or carcinoma of undetermined origin, and invasion into lymphatics or blood vessels (cats).

CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS
Malignant tumors of the ear canal in dogs and cats have a propensity for local invasion, but tend not to metastasize. Squamous cell carcinoma and carcinoma of undetermined origin were the most locally aggressive tumors. Malignant tumors of the ear canal are best managed by aggressive surgical excision. Radiotherapy may be useful when tumors cannot be completely removed.