OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study is to assess a) the impact of accommodation problems and the role of various coexisting risk factors on respiratory symptoms in elderly population in England. b) the effect of comorbidities on each respiratory symptom and finally c) if poor respiratory function coexists with respiratory symptoms.

METHODS: For the purpose of this study data from Wave II of English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) was used. A number of 7666 participants over 50 years of age took part in the Wave II. Phlegm, shortness of breath and wheezing were selected for analysis. Each respiratory symptom was investigated separately in relation to accommodation problems, age, gender, smoking, BMI, physical activity, wealth, FEV1/FVC and charlson comorbidity index.

RESULTS: Accommodation problems, smoking and the number of comorbidities are significantly correlated with increased occurrence of sputum, shortness of breath and wheezing. Gender and increased age are significant risk factors for sputum (p<0.01) and shortness of breath (p<0.01). Obesity is significantly related with wheezing and shortness of breath (p<0.01) but not with sputum. The moderate and vigorous level of exercise is negatively correlated with shortness of breath and wheezing (p<0.0l). There is a significant negative correlation between the level of gross wealth and the reporting of sputum, shortness of breathe and wheezing (p<0.01).

CONCLUSIONS: Accommodation problems, smoking, the number of comorbidities and the level of gross wealth are significant risk factors for respiratory symptoms in elderly people. Obesity is a risk factor for wheezing and shortness of breath but age and gender influence the prevalence of sputum and shortness of breath. The respiratory symptoms in elderly are followed by airflow limitation.


Abstract: The recent wars in the DR Congo have led to a marked upsurge in both elite and popular discourse and violence around belonging and exclusion, expressed through the vernacular of "autochthony." Dangerously flexible in its politics, nervous and paranoid in its language, unmoored from geographic or ethno-cultural specificity, borrowing energy both from present conflicts and deep-seated mythologies of the past, the idea of autochthony has permitted comparatively localized instances of violence in the DRC to inscribe themselves upward into regional, and even continental logics, with dangerous implications for the future. This article analyzes how the "local"/"stranger" duality of autochthony/allochthony expresses itself in the DRC through rumors, political tracts, and speeches and how it draws energy from imprecise overlaps with other powerful, preexisting identity polarities at particular scales of identity and difference: local, provincial, national, regional. Across each, autochthony operates as a loose qualifier, a binary operator: autochthony is adjectival, relational rather than absolute, policing a distinction between in and out, and yet not indicating, in itself, which in/ou t distinction is intended. Thus many speak of "Sons of the Soil," but of which soil, precisely? The slipperiness between different scales of meaning permits the speaker to leave open multiple interpretations. This indefiniteness is a paradoxical source of the discourse's strength and weakness, suppleness and nervousness, its declarative mood and attendant paranoia.


"When it comes to parenting, three's a crowd." (1) INTRODUCTION While "family life" remains an important source of joy for the vast majority of Americans, (2) the shape and structure of American family units have changed rapidly such that many American families today would have been almost inconceivable even fifty years ago. (3) Just over one-third of Americans say that the institution of marriage is becoming obsolete, and increasingly fewer Americans think that the traditional family structure of one father and one mother living together with their biological children is worth pursuing. (4) As of 2008, only 52% of Americans adults were married. (5) A large majority of Americans no longer think of marriage as the only way to form a new family--86% of Americans identify a single parent and child as a family, 80% identify an unmarried couple living together with a child as a family, and 63% agree that a gay or lesbian couple raising a child together constitutes a family. (6) Families, once established, are becoming increasingly more fluid--more than 40% of American adults have at least one step-relative in their family. (7) In this developing cultural landscape, fewer women feel the need to wait until they are married to bear children, (8) and, as of 2010, roughly 27% of American fathers lived apart from at least one of their children. (9) Multi-partner fertility (having children with more than one partner) has become more prevalent, and accordingly children live in an increasingly diverse array of households. (10) While family units come in a variety of shapes and sizes, there are a number of ways for a child to enter the world as well. Individuals or couples wishing to have a child have many options open to them, including purchasing donor eggs or sperm, arranging for a traditional or gestational surrogate, procuring embryo donations, or some combination thereof. (11) An estimated 30,000-60,000 children are conceived in the United States annually through sperm donations. (12) Over 1% of all children born in the United States every year are conceived using artificial reproductive technologies, which include methods described above as well as methods in which eggs are removed from a woman's ovaries, combined with sperm in a laboratory, and then returned to that woman or another host. (13) In cases where an egg from one person is combined with the sperm from another and implanted into a surrogate, with the intention that the resulting child will be placed with an entirely different set of parents, what a court should do when the surrogate wants to keep the baby (14) or when one or both of the intended parents back out (15) can be an entirely open question. Determinations of parenthood and appropriate custodial arrangements can also be difficult when children are conceived "the natural way." Courts routinely face situations in which a married woman has a child by another man, (16) or where a lesbian woman and a male friend conceive with the intention that she raise the child with her partner (with or without the man's involvement). (17) Determining who a child's parents are has been and remains a very important endeavor undertaken by courts, as state law is largely built on a system that prefers parents over non-parents in making custody determinations and confers certain rights and responsibilities only on the very limited number of people that the state recognizes as "parents." (18) Traditionally, this limited number has been two, but some judges have responded to the unique families that come into their courtrooms by increasing that number. Legislators have considered ways to increase the flexibility that judges have when adjudicating family structures. One such legislator, California State Senator Mark Leno, who was moved by a particularly messy dependency action that turned on the court's determination of a child's parentage, (19) introduced Senate Bill No. …


Over one hundred years ago, the Supreme Court emphatically declared that deportation proceedings are civil, not criminal, in nature. As a result, none of the nearly 400,000 individuals who were deported last year enjoyed any of the constitutional protections afforded to criminal defendants under the Sixth or Eighth Amendments. Among those 400,000 were numerous detained juveniles and mentally ill individuals who, as a result of the civil designation, had no right to appointed counsel. These individuals were thus forced to navigate the labyrinth of immigration law alone. Others were lawful permanent residents who had pled guilty to minor offenses upon the correct advice of counsel that they could not be deported. These individuals later became subject to deportation when Congress retroactively changed the law, unbound by the criminal prohibition against ex post facto laws. The dichotomy between the gravity of the liberty interest at stake in these proceedings - a lifetime of exile from homes and families in the United States - and the relative dearth of procedural protections afforded respondents, has always been intuitively unjust to some. However, over the past twenty years, as immigration and criminal law have become intertwined as never before, the intuitive sense of many has matured into a scholarly movement exploring the criminalization of immigration law. This movement has taken aim at the incoherence of deportation's civil designation. Until recently, however, there was little reason to think the Supreme Court would wade into the waters of the resurgent debate over the nature of deportation proceedings. In Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S.Ct. 1473 (2010), however, the Court surprised almost everyone as it went to great length to chronicle the criminalization of immigration law and ultimately concluded that deportation is - uniquely difficult to classify. The immediate impact of the Padilla decision is the critical recognition that criminal defendants have a right to be advised by their attorneys if a plea they are contemplating will result in deportation. However, I argue, that in time Padilla may come to stand for something much more significant in immigration jurisprudence. When we read Padilla in the context of the Supreme Court's evolving immigration jurisprudence, there is good reason to believe that Padilla is a critical pivot point for the Court. Padilla marks the beginning of a significant reconceptualization of the nature of deportation toward the realization that it is neither truly civil nor criminal. Rather, deportation is different. It is a unique legal animal that lives in the crease between the civil and criminal labels. This article explores the evolving arch of Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding the quasi-criminal nature of deportation proceedings and articulates a principled mechanism by which the scope of respondents' rights can be defined under this new framework.


Now a days only few people go for voting because of their tight schedule. There are many reasons, few may be everyone has to go to voting center, we have to stand in a long queue, many may be tired because of their tight schedule. So we have developed online voting system. But this system has some disadvantage. Phishing attackers directly get the passwords from the user and they enter into the relevant web sites with correct password. Consider an online polling system for corporate companies, polling is happening once in a year to elect the president or secretary or key directors of the company. At present system all the votes are has to assemble at one place on polling day and put their vote. In this approach we are making use of a new scheme which is known as Visual cryptography. In this scheme we are making use of visual information for security. Here we are dividing original image into two shares which are stored in separate database. Whenever these two shares are stacked with each other we get the original image. Once we get the original image it can be used as password. This system is very useful and safe for online remote voting. This system is web based application so that it can be accessed by any authorized person anywhere in the world through internet.


This paper presents a platform for flexible hardware- and model-in-the-loop integration of driver assistance systems in a driving simulator environment. The new platform combines the capabilities of a full-scale vehicle electrical systems test environment with the driver interaction evaluation capabilities of an advanced driving simulator. This enables faster development cycles for driver assistance systems by allowing easy transition between simulation configurations used in the development process (e.g. Software-in-the-Loop and Hardware-in-the-Loop) and, crucially, includes the driving simulator as a key part in all stages of the process. The presented integrated test environment enables easy and fast adaptation to include different driver assistance systems of varying degrees of development maturity and functional integration in an advanced driving simulator. Generic interfaces guarantee flexibility and the architecture enables scalability of the development environment for new functions, ranging from desktop simulation to advanced driving simulators. In this integrated test facility even complex interactive full system tests of potential dangerous scenarios can be easily repeated. As an example a test scenario for a system with autonomous steer intervention will be presented and discussed.


Three ladies and three families will help us recreate the role of elite women in the court of the Spanish Habsburgs in the period comprised between Philip IV's reign and the regency of his wife, Mariana of Austria. We take the lives of three women who started their careers at palace and linked their life paths with the diplomatic career of their relatives. When young, the three women were ladies-in-waiting of Queen Mariana of Austria when she was queen consort and later when she was queen regent. We analyse the role they played in the life courses of their noble houses and in the careers of the rest of their


All-inclusive opto electronics guideA valuable "must-have" tool for electronic and optical engineers, this Handbook is the only single-volume, tell-it-all guide to the use of optical devices and light in electronics systems. Developed by a towering figure in the field, this manual familiarizes you with UV, VUV and X-Ray lasers; visible, solid-state, semiconductor and infrared gas lasers; FEL and ultrashort laser pulses; visible and infrared optical materials; infrared and imaging detectors; optical fibers and fiber optic sensors; holography; laser spectroscopy and photochemistry; high resolution lithography for optoelectronics; and much more. In this up-to-the-minute edition you'll find new chapters on optical communications, electro-optic devices, and high intensity optical fields, in addition to extensively updated material throughout, and abundant charts, diagrams and data tables.


A great divide exists within Italy: the North is prosperous while the South remains relatively poor. The divide has persisted and regions have failed to converge, contradicting neo-classical growth theory. With this in mind, the following research aims to contribute toward the dialogue pertaining to the divide and its persistence by discussing Mafia presence and entrepreneurship. Little has been done to establish a solid relationship between entrepreneurship and Mafia presence, and even fewer studies have been conducted utilising a solid measurement of Mafia presence that can be used for meaningful discourse. Using probit and ordered probit to obtain marginal effects, the research shows that Mafia presence has no sound relationship with entrepreneurial desire, yet has a significantly negative one with entrepreneurial outlook. The research exposes a pattern of discouragement and suggests that Mafia presence suppresses entrepreneurship; limiting the amount of firms and investment that flows through communities in the South. Policy makers should enact policy and increase enforcement to quell Mafia expansion and reduce Mafia presence in areas already under control.


ABSTRACT The problem of safe and affordable credit for low-income consumers has remained a conundrum for policy makers. More pointedly, sustainable participation of historically disadvantaged and low-income consumers in the mainstream credit market has proved to be problematic in South Africa. Despite the introduction of the National Credit Act 34 of 2005 ("NCA") numerous South Africans are still trapped in debt. To alleviate this problem the NCA was amended by the National Credit Amendment Act 19 of 2014 ("NCAA") to promote responsible lending and borrowing. Nonetheless, certain regulations that were promulgated under the NCAA were challenged in Truworths v Minister of Trade and Industry 2018 (3) 558 (WCC) ("Truworths") on the basis that they discriminated against the informally employed and financially excluded since they require consumers to provide bank statements, pay slips or financial statements as proof of income. This article presents a reflective appraisal of Truworths in the light of its support for access to credit by those on the peripheries of South Africa's credit market. Although the authors applaud the decision in Truworths as having the potential to open up the credit market to the financially excluded, they also raise concerns about whether striking down regulations that encourage consumers to open bank accounts is the optimal approach to promoting financial inclusion in South Africa. Keywords: National Credit Act; Financial inclusion; Over-indebtedness; Historically disadvantaged individuals; Low-income consumers; Affordability assessment regulations; Reckless lending


for an Invited Paper for the APR11 Meeting of The American Physical Society Astrophysical Measurement of the Ultradense Matter Equation of State FERYAL OZEL, University of Arizona Neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe and may contain hyperon-dominated matter, condensed mesons, or even deconfined or strange quark matter. Because of their low temperatures and high chemical potentials, the physical conditions in their interiors differ greatly from the dense conditions of the early universe or those achieved at hadron colliders. This region of the QCD phase diagram can best be probed through astrophysical observations that measure the masses and radii of neutron stars. I will discuss how we can break degeneracies in the measurements of neutron star properties by combining recent developments in our understanding of their atmospheres with observations of multiple spectroscopic phenomena from X-ray binaries. I will present unique measurements of the masses and radii of a number of neutron stars in low-mass X-ray binaries and show the equations of state of neutron star matter that are compatible with these observations. These measurement constrain, for the first time, the pressure of cold matter above nuclear saturation density and offer tantalizing evidence for new degrees of freedom at ultrahigh densities.


Many plant species reorient their organs in response to dynamic environmental conditions. Petiole hyponasty is an upward movement of petioles driven by a higher rate of cell expansion on the lower (abaxial) compared with the upper (adaxial) side. Hyponasty is common among rosette species facing environmental stresses such as flooding, proximity of neighbors, or elevated ambient temperature. Thermally induced nastic leaf behaviors are termed leaf thermonasty andmay play a role in protecting heat-sensitive tissues from the radiant heat of the soil surface. Park et al. (pp. 1185–1197) demonstrate that a developmentally regulated polarity of auxin flow underlies thermonasty in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Under warm conditions, the transcription factor PHYTOCHROMEINTERACTING FACTOR4 (PIF4) stimulates auxin production in the leaf. This results in the accumulation of auxin in leaf petioles, where PIF4 directly activates a gene encoding the PINOID (PID) protein kinase. PID is involved in polarization of the auxin transporter PIN-FORMED3 to the outer membranes of petiole cells. The leaf polaritydetermining ASYMMETRIC LEAVES1 directs the induction of PID to occur predominantly in the abaxial petiole region. These observations indicate that the integration of PIF4-mediated auxin biosynthesis and polar transport, and the ASYMMETRIC LEAVES1-mediated developmental shaping of polar auxin flow, coordinate leaf thermonasty, which facilitates leaf cooling in warm environments.


This new edition of a widely adopted primary and supplementary text explores human adaptations to environments over time. It is biologically and culturally sophisticated, drawing on an impressive array of archaeological and paleontological research. Campbell proceeds from earlier, simpler biomes to later, more complex ones, examining selected aspects of the prehistory and history of the human species. Human Ecology offers a succinct introduction to the history of these adaptations within ecosystems: a shared concern among anthropologists, biologists, environmentalists, and the general reader. In the years since this book was first published, the problems that the human species has faced have become more serious. As predicted, world population has rapidly increased, and with it starvation, malnutrition, and disease. Our precious environment is being devastated. In particular, the tropical rain forests, our richest resource, are being cut and burned at an alarming rate with the accompanying degradation of the forest soils. Their flora and fauna, including their human inhabitants, are being destroyed. All this is being done for short-term financial gain without any long-term planning or understanding of the risks involved. There are no simple and humane short-term solutions to the central problem of increasing population pressure. In the long-term, the only hope of making possible a life of quality for all, rather than a life of starvation and squalor, is through education. It is essential that we understand the limits that exist to the earth's productivity and the overriding importance of maintaining richly diversified fauna and flora. If we understand how we arrived at this life-threatening situation, the resolution will become clear. Non-violent and viable solutions do exist and can be implemented, but the human race first must understand and face up to the nature of its frightening predicament.


Urea Cycle Disorders ( UCD ) are among the most common genetic diseases of the metabolism and ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency (OTC), an X-linked defect is the most frequent among them. It is responsible for hyperammonemia that can lead to chronic neurological illness and potentially to death in case of delayed diagnosis and treatment. With regards to the OTC deficiency there is great clinical heterogeneity with early-onset phenotypes with mostly poor prognosis and late-onset phenotypes with a better one. In the article it is reported the case of a 8 years old patient with diagnosis of OTC deficit with late-onset phenotype. The kid was brought to our hospital because of continuous vomiting and gastro- intestinal disorders, associated with irritability and lethargy later resulted into coma. Measurement of plasma ammonia concentration, followed by measurement of plasma amino acid and urine orotic acid levels allowed to diagnose the OTC deficit, lately confirmed by molecular genetic studies. The patient has been promptly treated with Sodium Phenylbutyrate, Arginine and discontinuing the protein intake. Gradually the ammonemia value decreased, and general and neurological conditions improved with resolution of the coma. To conclude, for patients presenting unexplained neurological symptoms, confusion and decreased level of consciousness, up to coma, urea cycle disorders and in particularly OTC deficiency should be considered in the differential diagnosis and an urgent ammonia level determined. In case of hyperammonemia, the treatment should be started immediately , even without a precise ethiologic diagnosis.


The IgNITE Medical Case Competition is an annual research case competition organized by students at the University of Ottawa. Our mission is to provide high school and university students the opportunity to gain valuable research experience while networking with industry professionals. Each year students, in teams of 1-4, are paired with an experienced mentor to develop and present a novel research proposal within the specified theme of the competition. During the competition, students are taught the fundamental principles underlying three lab techniques which they can then use in their proposal or their future research career. This year's theme was Regenerative Medicine and competitors learned about Immunofluorescence, Western Blot, and CRISPR-Cas9. In 2020-2021 the IgNITE community grew internationally with 570 high school and university students across the world participating in the competition. In this booklet we present the Top 40 teams and invite you to visit our website (www.ignitecompetition.org) to watch their pitch proposal videos. We hope you enjoy reading through some of this year's top proposals and invite you to join our growing community.


Thyroid Tumorigenesis is typically a well understood process, with well delineated oncogenic factors. Follicular and papillary thyroid cancers are typically survivable, with 5year survival rates being >95% for Stage I-III of both cancer types. Anaplastic thyroid cancer, in contrast, lacks this prognosis, and is the most lethal of all endocrine-related cancers. The median survival time after a diagnosis is generally between 6-8 months, with a 5-year survival rate of <10%. Current treatment for anaplastic thyroid cancers routinely meet roadblocks, as resistance is quickly developed. Even non-discriminatory kinase inactivators, such as sorafenib, which are generally considered a drug of last resort, are unable to effect survival rates. As such, there is a clear need for further investigation of the causes of anaplastic thyroid cancer mechanisms. Previous work in the Carr lab revealed a novel regulatory pathway of an oncogene that is associated with several other endocrine-related cancers, as well as other nonendocrine-related cancers. Specifically, the Runt-related transcription factor 2 (Runx2) was found to be suppressed via direct binding of the thyroid hormone receptor beta 1 isoform (TRß1) to its proximal promotor. Runx2 was previously shown to be associated with increasing malignancy, with Runx2 occurring at low-levels in indolent cell lines, whilst occurring at high-levels in more malignant cell lines. TRß1, conversely, exhibited the opposite relationship. Endogenous levels of TRß1 were found to be high in indolent cell lines and were depleted in malignant cell lines. These findings were further confirmed via tissue microarrays. Restoration of TRß1 in malignant cell lines diminished Runx2 mRNA and protein levels, which was corroborated by evidence from electrophoretic mobility-shift assays, and chromatin immunoprecipitations that TRß1 was able to directly bind Runx2 promotor 1. Current studies have investigated the nuclear protein profile that associates with TRß1 to alter Runx2 transcription. Through EMSA-to-Mass Spectrometry methodologies, as well as novel DNA pulldown techniques, binding partners have been elucidated. Findings have also been confirmed via classical immunoprecipitations. Specifically, our findings show that TRß1 complexes with the brahma-related gene 1 (BRG1) protein, the nuclear co-repressor (NCOR), and BRG1-associated protein 60 (BAF60). BRG1 functions by preferentially recruiting histone deacetylases (HDAC), with BRG1 and the HDAC's acting to alter chromatin, and thus transcription. Future studies aim at examining whether other proteins complex with TRß1 to alter Runx2 transcription, and whether these complexes are altered in aggressive cell lines.


The Hadith of Prophet Muhammad saw, as a source of Islamic teachings, covers almost all aspects of human life. It contains the teachings of a religious ritual as well as the teachings and information related to the daily lifes of human beings. Even the information of some bad behavior happened in the Age of Jahiliyah had become part of the subject that is narrated in the hadith of the Prophet saw. In this paper, the author raise issues about traditions associated with people who lived in the Age of Jahiliyah in hadiths that are prohibited in Islam. Among these traditions was a gambling, harming animals, and drinking the wine, such as the reason for revelation about the prohibition of drinking alcohol, drinking alcohol it self, as well as sanctions for wine drinkers. This study will determine the accuracy all of those hadiths, especially the accuracy in historical perspective. If those hadiths meet the criteria for the validity of the hadith, then they can be used as a source of Islam.


As a law teacher, I have observed these benefits of the case method, particularly with conducive appellate opinions and a skillfully assembled text. But I have also experienced, as I suspect most law teachers have, instances in which a case that lacks a sufficiently revealing narrative seems to mystify more than elucidate. One example is the case of Brown v. Voss, which appears in a number of property law casebooks, including the widely used Property by Jesse Dukeminier and James E. Krier. In Brown v. Voss the State of Washington Supreme Court departs, in a somewhat disingenuous way, from an almost universally accepted common law rule and makes a cross-boundary allocation of property rights. In the process of finding the traditional rule unsuited to the facts of the case, the court presents what the reader suspects is a highly simplified narrative of the dispute between the neighboring residential landowners over a right of way across one of the neighbors' property. What I discovered from exploring the record in the case, related land and other court records, and interviews with the parties was predictable in some ways and startling in others. As the reader of the opinion suspects, the conflict between the neighbors had a dark and bitter emotional history. As one cannot easily suspect, the physical aspects of the property differ in legally significant ways from the court's description and understanding. When the supreme court of Washington decided the case, the controversy, unbeknownst to the court, was moot. And the party who appears to be the loser in the opinion was in reality the winner. The Article proceeds by telling a set of stories about the case within a story about teaching the case, in the process conveying its analytical content in part through narrative form. The Article then discusses how its analyses demonstrate the ways in which a more complete and accurate narrative could provide students with a concrete, evocative context that would enable them to engage in a more fruitful doctrinal and theoretical analysis. Students could better comprehend and evaluate the social and economic meaning of the court's decision because they could assess the court's conclusions about the parties' behavior, they could contemplate whether the relative value of the parties' reallocated rights was as disparate and as simple to assess as the court believed, and they could consider whether the manner in which the court reallocated the parties' rights was practicable. Perhaps most importantly, a more complete and accurate narrative would give students an opportunity to enter imaginatively into the lawyering process.


With great interest, we read the contribution of Vergroesen et al that was published recently in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases .1 In this manuscript, the authors describe the observation that immunoglobulin variable (V) region heavy and light chain transcripts from anti-citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA) IgG-expressing B cells in patients with rheumatic arthritis (RA) contain N-glycosylation sites (Nglycs) acquired by somatic hypermutation, whereas these acquired Nglycs (ac-Nglycs) were absent in tetanus toxoid (TT) specific B cells of healthy individuals. The authors postulate that the introduction of ac-Nglycs generates selective advantages that allow ACPA-expressing B cells to escape from classical selection mechanisms in germinal centres. We agree with the authors that this is an important finding which may have important implications for understanding citrulline-specific immunity in RA.

Here we would like to stress that ac-Nglycs, as a consequence of somatic hypermutation, might be important for RA and for many other rheumatoid and non-rheumatoid autoimmune diseases. We have shown previously2 increased numbers of IgG encoding immunoglobulin variable heavy region gene (IGHV) transcripts with ac-Nglycs derived from B cells and plasma cells residing in the inflamed parotid salivary gland of patients with primary Sjogren's syndrome (pSS) compared with non-pSS sicca controls (24% vs 6%). Importantly, in pSS the IgG encoding transcripts exhibited …


The main characteristics concerning the distribution of two of the most important decapod crustaceans of commercial interest in the Mediterranean Sea, the deep-water rose shrimp, Parapenaeus longirostris, and the Norway lobster, Nephrops norvegicus, are studied in the European Mediterranean waters. The study is based on data collected under the MEDITS trawl surveys from 1994 to 2015 from the Gibraltar Straits to the northeastern Levantine Basin (Cyprus waters). The observed differences can be interpreted as different responses to environmental drivers related to the differing life history traits of the two species. In fact, N. norvegicus is a long-living, benthic burrowing species with low growth and mortality rates, while P. longirostris is an epibenthic, short-living species characterized by higher rates of growth and mortality.


"ElectroEncephaloGram "EEG" Mental Task Discrimination", Master of Science dissertation, Cairo University, 2010. Recent advances in computer hardware and signal processing have made possible the use of EEG signals or "brain waves" for communication between humans and computers. Locked-in patients have now a way to communicate with the outside world, but even with the last modern techniques, such systems still suffer communication rates on the order of 2-3 tasks/minute. In addition, existing systems are not likely to be designed with flexibility in mind, leading to slow systems that are difficult to improve. This Thesis is classifying different mental tasks through the use of the electroencephalogram (EEG). EEG signals from several subjects through channels (electrodes) have been studied during the performance of five mental tasks: Baseline task for which the subjects were asked to relax as much as possible, Multiplication task for which the subjects were given nontrivial multiplication problem without vocalizing or making any other movements, Letter composing task for which the subject were instructed to mentally compose a letter without vocalizing (imagine writing a letter to a friend in their head),Rotation task for which the subjects were asked to visualize a particular three-dimensional block figure being rotated about its axis, and Counting task for which the subjects were asked to imagine a blackboard and to visualize numbers being written on the board sequentially. The work presented here maybe a part of a larger project, whose goal is to classify EEG signals belonging to a varied set of mental activities in a real time Brain Computer Interface, in order to investigate the feasibility of using different mental tasks as a wide communication channel between people and computers.


Academic debates on shame and the involuntary networked circulation of naked pictures have largely focused on instances of hacked accounts of female celebrities, on revenge porn, and interconnected forms of slut-shaming. Meanwhile, dick pics have been predominantly examined as vehicles of sexual harassment within heterosexual contexts. Taking a somewhat different approach, this article examines leaked or otherwise involuntarily exposed dick pics of men of notable social privilege, asking what kinds of media events such leaked data assemble, how penises become sites of public interest and attention, and how these bodies may be able to escape circuits of public shaming. By focusing on high-profile incidents on an international scale during the past decade, this article moves from the leaked shots of male politicians as governance through shaming to body-shaming targeted at Harvey Weinstein, to Jeff Bezos's refusal to be shamed through his hacked dick pic, and to an accidentally self-published shaft shot of Lars Ohly, a Swedish politician, we examine the agency afforded by social privilege to slide through shame rather than be stuck in it. By building on feminist media studies and affect inquiry, we attend to the specificities of these attempts to shame, their connections to and disconnections from slut-shaming, and the possibilities and spaces offered for laughter within this all.


An examination of the impact of mortgage hedging activities on interest rate volatility considers a wide range of interest rate derivatives to isolate the sources that might be contributing to volatility. Over a rolling window providing estimates of key parameters, the measured effects of mortgage hedging on volatility are distorted by two outlier episodes: the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, and the market reaction in the aftermath of the September 2001 events. Eliminating these episodes from the data shows that hedging appears to stabilize rate volatility over some periods while exacerbating it in others. The conclusion: that no simple relationship between hedging and rate volatility is clear.


The demand for cellular data service has been skyrocketing since the debut of data-intensive smart phones and touchpads. However, not all data are created equal. Many popular applications on mobile devices, such as email synchronization and social network updates, are delay tolerant. In addition, cellular load varies significantly in both large and small time scales. To alleviate network congestion and improve network performance, we present a set of opportunistic trough filling schemes that leverage the time-variation of network congestion and delay-tolerance of certain traffic in this paper. We consider average delay, deadline, and clearance time as the performance metrics. Simulation results show promising performance improvement over the standard schemes. The work shed lights on addressing the pressing issue of cellular overload.


Abstract Normalograptus kufraensis sp. nov. occurs as monospecific assemblages in the Tanezzuft Formation at the western margin of the Kufra Basin (Jabal Eghei), southern Libya. These graptolites have parallel-sided rhabdosomes with long, straight virgellae, climacograptid thecae and a full straight median septum. N. kufraensis is intermediate between Ordovician graptolites from the N. angustus (Perner) lineage and the younger sister species N. ajjeri (Legrand) and N. arrikini Legrand. N. kufraensis differs from these taxa as follows: it is broader than N. angustus; it has greater thecal spacing than N. ajjeri or N. arrikini. A table comparing measurements of N. kufraensis with 44 other Normalograptus taxa differentiates it from other members of this morphologically conservative group. Even though N. angustus and N. ajjeri are very long-ranging graptolites, a stratophenetic approach suggests that the specimens from Jabal Eghei may be of late Hirnantian or younger age. The faunal composition and preservation suggests these graptolites occupied the 'cratonic invader' biotope. The stratigraphic succession records deglacial flooding and fluctuating of redox in the Tanezzuft Formation, with the graptolites indicating a short-lived interval of anoxia.


Socio-political uprising against land acquisition for industrial projects, in the recent times, has emerged as a major constraining factor leading to time lags, cost over runs, business uncertainties and even shelving of projects. Varied signals from recent (diverse) private experiences right from Tata's Singur project in West Bengal, Posco's Paradeep project in Orissa to Jindal's Raigarh project in Chattisgarh showcase a variety of tactics to gain access to land for private Greenfield projects. This paper analyses the recent land acquisition styles being adopted by few private businesses. It analyzes the successful land acquisition models vs. the not so successful ones and the lessons therein for infrastructure project proponents. We observe that the chances of failure in land acquisition for the private business would be more if the land acquisition style is thickly sandwiched, by multiple layers of political contestation and authority, between the communities giving up their livelihood rights and the private business interested in the deal. This failure can be attributed to non-co-operative stance adopted by the different parties involved, information asymmetry between the locals and the private business, involvement of more number of intermediaries in communication, involvement of self interested parties (political and other rent seeking agents), and wrong signals and misinterpretation of signals between each other (primarily the locals and the private business). On the other hand, we also observe that the key ingredients of successful land acquisitions includes: less reliance on agricultural land; providing attractive compensation to local communities (with a scope for sharing potential upside); direct engagement with stakeholders; avoiding formal political alignments; and keep low profile with planned communication channels resulting in minimal information asymmetry between the key parties. Based on the study, we advocate that successful land acquisition for Greenfield projects go beyond gaining mandatory legal and environmental licenses to gaining social consent to operate from a wider stakeholder base.


In this article an examination of how we, in the everyday, develop critical engagement with the shifting relations of power and oppression around us is presented. The article explores the role of representations in maintaining the racialized patterns of school exclusion in Britain. Social representations theory is used to investigate how racializing re-presentations pervade and create institutionalized practices, how these re-presentations invade young people's sense of self and ultimately how young people collaborate to resist and reject oppressive relations. The material presented here, from interviews with young people excluded from school, and parents, teachers and others involved in school exclusion, illustrates how young people problematize and critique racializing re-presentations while participating in the conditions of oppression and resistance that pervade their experiences of school. The discussion is divided into three sections. The first examines the institutionalization of stigmatizing representations, visible in social practices. The second section looks at the role of re-presentation in the social construction of 'Black pupils'. The concluding section explores the possibilities of resistance and critical engagement in the everyday. As a whole this reveals how young people develop critical engagement with the re-presentations that filter into and so constitute their realities. This enables an analysis of the role of resistance and contestation in social re-presentation, highlights the importance of participation and community and so invites a critical version of social representations theory. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Buildings in historical city centres are particularly vulnerable to seismic events, as observed from past earthquakes in Bhuj (India, 2001), Bam (Iran, 2003), Sichuan (China 2008), L'Aquila (Italy 2009), Gorkha (Nepal 2015), and most recently in Amatrice (Italy 2016). To reduce damage and loss in historic city centres, seismic vulnerability of buildings should be assessed on site with approaches that take into account how parameters related to geometric/structural features, deficiencies and seismic damage impact on seismic failure modes. Currently, an approach that investigates all these parameters in only one consistent procedure for the identification of failure modes is not available, although, there are numerous methods developed to evaluate the seismic vulnerability. This dissertation aims to tackle such a gap by developing a hybrid approach that investigates causes of failure modes through an analytical method and effects of failure modes through a visual inspection tool. The analytical method proposed in the hybrid approach is FaMIVE (Failure Mechanism Identification and Vulnerability Evaluation method), mechanical method that estimates failure modes, capacity and fragility curves by taking into account geometric/structural features and deficiencies of buildings. The second method is LOG-IDEAH (LOGic trees for Identification of Damage due to Earthquakes for Architectural Heritage) web knowledge based system that complements FaMIVE by estimating failure modes through engineering judgements codified in rules developed to interpret seismic damage observed on buildings. The hybrid approach is validated on the city centres of L'Aquila (Italy) damaged by the earthquake in 2009, characterised by typical historic masonry houses. Through the application, the thesis provides a validation approach that is used to refine the framework of the proposed hybrid method and to provide guidance for those facing the challenge of assessing the seismic vulnerability of historic city centres.


The 70-293 exam is a core exam for the MCSE Windows 2003 certification, and tests professionals on their ability to plan and maintain a Windows 2003 network infrastructure. As of January 2003 there were over 200,000 Microsoft Certified Professionals. Not only will the majority of these be looking to upgrade to their 2003 MCSE, but the exam is expected to grow with new users. This Training Guide offers in-depth coverage of exam topics and offers hands-on instruction that helps readers to pass the 70-293 exam. This book can be used as a sole study guide or it can be used with instructor-led classes, Exam Cram 2 books, and/or CBT training.


We investigated the effect of the butanol fraction from the methanol extract of butterbur (Petasites japonicus Max.) (BMP) on the plasma lipid profiles and oxidative damage of liver in mice challenged with monosodium l-glutamate (MSG). ICR mice (6-8 weeks old, male) were fed BMP (0.1% or 0.3%) for 1 week, and on day 7, MSG (4 mg/g) was administered intraperitoneally to the mice. Administration of MSG resulted in a significant decrease of antioxidant biomarkers such as total glutathione level and antioxidant enzyme activities such as glutathione reductase (GR), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), glutathione S-transferase (GST), and quinone reductase (NQO1), whereas the thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS) value was increased in liver tissue. However, BMP supplementation markedly enhanced the hepatic antioxidant enzyme activities, including GPx, GR, GST, and NQO1, whereas it lowered TBARS, compared to the MSG-treated group. Moreover, BMP supplementation decreased total cholesterol, atherogenic index, and low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol, compared to the MSG-treated group. Based on these results, it was proposed that BMP improve the plasma lipid profiles and decrease the oxidative stress by up-regulating the hepatic antioxidant enzymes in mice challenged with MSG.


Background and Objectives Walking is the most natural and important activity of daily living as it refers to the primary type of terrestrial human locomotion. Analyses of gait patterns typically examine the speed and manner in which people prefer to walk. Even though humans can walk at speeds ranging from near 0 km/h to 9 km/h, they typically only use a very limited range of speeds around 4.5 km/h in their daily life (Bohannon & Andrews, 2011). The preferred walking speed (PWS) is used in clinical settings as an indicator of a person's mobility. For example, elderly people, or those suffering from osteoarthritis prefer to walk at slower speeds. Therefore, improving their PWS is considered as a significant clinical goal. Many studies on gait analysis tried to identify the basic parameters of normal unconstrained gait in different populations. Despite the fundamental common shared characteristics, walking patterns may vary from a person to another according to several factors such as age, gender, physical characteristics, etc. In a study examining the "pace" of random pedestrians in 31 cities around the world, differences in the walking speed were found to be linked to parameters such as climate, economic variables, size of population and cities (Levine & Norenzayan, 1999). More recently, a study has put forward the impact of the cultural background on walking norms by revealing several significant differences in basic gait parameters between young Kuwaiti and Swedish adults (Al-Obaidi et al., 2003). Specifically, the authors presented the first evidence concerning walking patterns in a population from the Gulf region and proposed an interpretation to the found differences that is linked to traditional clothing and foot wear. This reveals the need for a specific normative database targeting healthy young Qataris. Creating such databases for Qatar is desirable for rehabilitation purposes for people with impaired walking patterns (e.g., elderly fallers, people suffering from stroke consequences, hemiplegia, Parkinson disease, etc). For instance, the aim of this study is to evaluate the preferred walking speed and manners in which young male and female Qatari adults walk as compared to non-Qatari participants with similar physical characteristics. To characterize walking patterns we used spatiotemporal kinematic indicators such as stride length, stride frequency and support phase duration. The associated physiological cost and perceived exertion of walking at a preferred pace will also be examined to test for possible differences. We expect to see differences between the preferred walking patterns of Qatari and non-Qatari participants as proposed by Al-Obaidi and collaborators (2003). Methods 34 healthy volunteers participated in the experiment and were distributed in four groups according to their gender and ethnic cultural background (wearing cultural clothing or not): 9 Qatari females (21.33 ± 2.11 years), 9 Qatari males (24.00 ± 2.40 years), 9 non-Qatari females (22.00 ± 1.49 years) and 7 non-Qatari males (22.83 ± 1.73 years). Participants were asked to perform two sessions on the same visit with a total duration of 1.5 hours. The first session started after 10 minutes of familiarization and warm-up on a medical treadmill (Lode Valiant, the Netherlands) and consisted of a determination test of the preferred walking speed (PWS) using a standardized protocol (Jordan, Challis, and Newell, 2007). In the second session, participants walked at their PWS for three minutes. Using a gas analyzer (Metalyzer 3B, Cortex, Germany) and a synchronized heart rate monitor (Polar, Finland), the relative oxygen uptake (VO2, mlO2/kg/min) and heart rate (HR, beats/min) were collected at the last minute when a steady state was reached and the metabolic cost of transport (MCT, mlO2/kg/km) was computed according to the individual PWS. Furthermore, the rating of perceived exertion (RPE) was collected using the Borg Scale (6–20). Spatiotemporal kinematic data such as stride length (SL, cm/stride), stride frequency (strides/sec) and contact phase duration within a stride (Contact, sec) were computed using a video analysis and modeling tool (tracker 4.91) from 15 strides filmed in the middle of the three-minute trial at PWS with a sampling frequency of 25 Hz. Using independent t-tests, comparisons were made for Qatari men versus non-Qatari men and for Qatari women versus non-Qatari women for each of the eight variables. All statistical analyses were performed in Statistica 7.1 package with a level of significance set at p < .05. Results No significant differences were found in the physical characteristics (i.e., body height and body weight) between Qatari male and non-Qatari male groups or between Qatari female and non-Qatari female groups (Table 1). This validates the fair investigation of differences in other variables. As shown in Table 1, no significant differences in all tested variables were noted between Qatari and non-Qatari female participants. However, results revealed a significantly lower PWS and CPD for Qatari males compared to non-Qatari males (Table 1). Furthermore, Qatari males had a significantly lower SF compared to non-Qatari male participants (Table 1). All other tested variables were non-significantly different between Qatari and non-Qatari male groups. Table 1 Conclusions Our results showed significant differences in the preferred walking patterns between Qatari and non-Qatari as expected. Surprisingly, these differences only concerned male groups while female groups exhibited non-significant differences in the speed or the manner in which they preferred to walk. Specifically, the slower walking pattern of Qatari male participants doesn't seem to be explained by any of the tested physiological (metabolic) or perceptual factors. Spatiotemporal parameters however seemed to be better candidates in explaining the discrepancy in the preferred walking speed. Results on stride characteristics indicate that the time required to perform one stride and the time where the foot is in contact with the ground (within one stride) was significantly longer for Qatari male participants compared to non-Qataris in the same gender group. Although all participants were wearing their sports outfits during the experiment, results could be interpreted as long-term adaptations in gait patterns to wearing traditional clothing and/or footwear. Indeed, male (i.e, thobe) and female (i.e., abaya) cultural clothing in Qatar are not similar in their structure and material which might explain why differences were only found in male and not female volunteers. This interpretation was also proposed in a previous study on Kuwaitis walking patterns (Al-Obaidi et al., 2003) that suggested a need to include diverse cultural background when developing databases on normal walking for different ethnic groups. Further investigations would be needed to create a larger database with a bigger sample and extend the findings of this pilot study. References Al-Obaidi, S., Wall, J. C., Al-Yaqoub, A., & Al-Ghanim, M. (2003). Basic gait parameters: A comparison of reference data for normal subjects 20 to 29 years of age from Kuwait and Scandinavia. Journal of rehabilitation research and development, 40(4), 361–366. Bohannon, R. W., Andrews, W. A. (2011). Normal walking speed: a descriptive meta-analysis. Physiotherapy. 97, 182–189. Jordan, K., Challis, J. H., & Newell, K. M. (2007). Walking speed influences on gait cycle variability. Gait & Posture, 26(1), 128–34. Levine, R. V., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). The Pace of Life in 31 Countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 30, 178–205.


Objectives: To estimate the proportion of the male population that reports having paid for sex in different regions. Methods: Clients of sex workers were identified from representative samples of men asked in face-to-face interviews whether they had had sex in exchange for money or whether they had paid for sex, in the last 12 months. A total of 78 national household surveys and nine city based surveys were selected for inclusion. Where such surveys were not available, results of behavioural surveillance surveys and of research studies were also used. Using national estimates, a median percentage of men who reported paying for sex was calculated for each region. Results: The median percentage of men who exchanged sex for money in the last 12 months in all regions was around 9–10%, with estimates from 13% to 15% in Central African region, 10 to 11% in Eastern and southern Africa, and 5–7% in Asia and Latin America. Estimates for men who paid sex were much lower at around 2–3% with ranges from 7% in the South African region to 1% in Asia and West Africa. Conclusions: Although errors of measurement and critical issues of definitions and interpretation exist, this compilation represents a first attempt to obtain reasonably coherent estimates of the proportion of men who were clients of sex workers at regional level. Large discrepancies between regions were found. Further improvements in national estimates will be critical to monitor coverage of HIV prevention programmes for sex workers and clients, and to improve estimates of national HIV infection prevalence levels in low and concentrated HIV epidemics.


Many investors occasionally receive what they believe to be nonpublic information about a security. Others feel that by applying superior analytical skills to public information, they are able to arrive at valuable insights that are not generally appreciated. In either case, there is a substantial opportunity for profit if the investor is correct. The investor must be correct on two counts. First, the estimate of the worth of the information must be reasonably accurate in terms of its impact on the price of the stock, and second, the investor must make a realistic assessment of the likelihood that the market already has received the information or insight in question. This paper is concerned only with the latter problem. The probability distribution of the date on which the market receives information already in the hands of the investor is calculated for a simple model of information propagation. It is then shown how this probability distribution can be brought to bear on the management of a portfolio.


Critical Path Method (CPM) and Performance Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) are widely recognized as the most effective methods of keeping large, complex construction projects on schedule, under budget, and up to professional standards. But these methods remain underused because they are poorly understood and, due to a host of unfamiliar terms and applications, may seem more complicated than they really are. This encyclopedia brings together, in one comprehensive volume, all terms, definitions, and applications related to the time and cost management of construction projects. While many of these terms refer to ancient and venerable building practices, others have evolved quite recently and refer specifically to modern construction and management techniques. Sources include hundreds of professional books, trade journals, and research publications, as well as planning and scheduling software vendor literature. The detailed glossary of all applicable terms includes a cross-referenced listing of examples that describe real-world applications for each term supplied. An extensive bibliography covers all applicable books, articles, and periodicals available on project planning, scheduling, and control using CPM and related subjects. This book is an important quick reference and desktop information resource for construction planners, schedulers, and controllers, as well as civil engineers and project managers. It is also the ultimate research tool for educators, students, or anyone who seeks to improve their understanding of the management of modern construction projects.


A Contoversial Spirit offers a new perspective on the origins and nature of southern evangelicalism. Most recent historians have focused on the differences between evangelicals and non-evangelicals. This has led to the perception that during the "Era of Awakenings" (mid-18th and early 19th centuries) American evangelicals constituted a united front. Philip N. Mulder dispels this illusion, by examining the internal dynamics of evangelicalism. He focuses on the relationships between the Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists who introduced the new religious mood to the South between 1740 and 1820. Although the denominations shared the goal of saving souls, he finds they disagreed over the correct definition of true religion and conversion. The Presbyterians and Baptists subordinated the freedom, innovation and experience of the awakenings to their particular denominational concerns. The Methodists, on the other hand, were more aggressive and innovative advocates of the New Light awakenings. They broke through the insularity of the other two groups and revolutionized the religious culture of the emerging nation. The American Revolution exacberated the growing competition and jealousy among the denominations by displacing their common enemy, the established Anglican church. Former dissenters now turned to face each other. Free religious competition was transformative, Mulder argues. The necessity for competing for converts forced the Presbyterians and Baptists out of their narrow confines. More importantly, however, competition compromised the Methodists and their New Light ideals. Methodists had presented themselves as an ecumenical alternative to the rigid and rancorous denominations of England and America. Now they turned away from their open message of salvation, and began using their distinctive characteristics to separate themselves from other denominations. The Methodists thus succumbed to the evangelical pattern set by others - a pattern of distinction, insularity and competition. Examining conversion narratives, worship, polity and rituals, as well as more formal doctrinal statements in creeds and sermons, Mulder is able to provide a far more nuanced portrait of southern evangelicals than previously available, revealing the deep differences between denominations that the homogenization of religious history has until now obscured.


Every computer revolution changes our lives dramatically; so will mobile devices. Mobile devices enable billions of people to capture, share, interact, and consume real-time personal media in new and creative ways. In addition, being devices owned by individuals, they can form an autonomous computing fabric that frees us from the domination of existing centralized proprietary social networking services
 This talk presents a system architecture called Musubi (Mobile, Social, and UBIquitous) that combines a novel and natural mobile social experience with a clean architecture that lets users choose different cloud backup services. In addition, Musubi is an app platform that makes it easy to create privacy-honoring social apps. This can open up new markets for social and collaborative apps in fields like education, health and businesses, where centralized proprietary services are inappropriate. A fully working prototype of Musubi is available on both the Android and iPhone app store.


The ability of Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) to transform resting cell B-cells into immortalized lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCL) provides a continuous source of peripheral blood lymphocytes that are used to model conditions in which these lymphocytes play a key role. Here, the PacBio generated transcriptome of three LCLs from a parent-daughter trio (SRAid:SRP036136) provided by a previous study [1] were analyzed using a kmer-based version of YeATS (KEATS). The set of over-expressed genes in these cell lines were determined based on a comparison with the PacBio transcriptome of twenty tissues provided by another study (hOPTRS) [2]. MIR155 long non-coding RNA (MIR155HG), Fc fragment of IgE receptor II (FCER2), T-cell leukemia/lymphoma 1A (TCL1A), and germinal center associated signaling and motility (GCSAM) were genes having the highest expression counts in the three LCLs with no expression in hOPTRS. Other over-expressed genes, having low expression in hOPTRS, were membrane spanning 4-domains A1 (MS4A1) and ribosomal protein S2 pseudogene 55 (RPS2P55). While some of these genes are known to be over-expressed in LCLs, this study provides a comprehensive cataloguing of such genes. A recent work involving a patient with EBV-positive large B-cell lymphoma was 'unusually lacking various B-cell markers', but over-expressing CD30 [3] - a gene ranked 79 among uniquely expressed genes here. Hypomethylation of chromosome 1 observed in EBV immortalized LCLs [4, 5] is also corroborated here by mapping the genes to chromosomes. Extending previous work identifying un-annotated genes [6], 80 genes were identified which are expressed in the three LCLs, not in hOPTRS, and missing in the GENCODE, RefSeq and RefSeqGene databases. KEATS introduces a method of determining expression counts based on a partitioning of the known annotated genes, has runtimes of a few hours on a personal workstation and provides detailed reports enabling proper debugging.


Asset liquidity in modern financial markets is a key but elusive concept. A market is often said to be liquid when the prevailing structure of transactions provides a prompt and secure link between the demand and supply of assets, thus delivering low costs of transaction. Providing a rigorous and empirically relevant definition of market liquidity has, however, provided to be a difficult task. This paper provides a critical review of the frameworks currently available for modelling and estimating the market liquidity of assets. We consider definitions that stress the role of the bid-ask spread and the estimation of its components that arise from alternative sources of market friction. In this case, intra-daily measures of liquidity appear relevant for capturing the core features of a market, and for their ability to describe the arrival of new information to market participants.


BACKGROUND: Contact lenses (CLs) remain the mainstay in improving vision in patients having keratoconus. With corneal collagen cross-linking (CXL) performed worldwide, whether the same CLs can be used or needs replacement needed to be assessed and considered. AIMS: The aim of this study was to evaluate the changes in CL fitting following CXL. SETTINGS AND DESIGN: This is a retrospective study conducted at a tertiary center. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: We analyzed the medical records of patients who underwent CXL and used CL. Data collected included demographics, pre- and post-CXL refraction, corneal topography, anterior-segment examination, and CL [rigid gas permeable(RGP)] fitting details and duration between CXL and RGP fitting. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: Descriptive analysis and paired t-test were used to compare the pre- and post-CXL data on refraction, visual acuity, and CL parameters. The statistical significance was kept at P < 0.05. RESULTS: Thirty-four eyes (keratoconus = 32, pellucid marginal degeneration = 1, and post-LASIK ectasia = 1) of 27 patients who used CL before and after undergoing CXL were analyzed. Mean duration between CXL and RGP lens use was 2.53 months. Mean sphere and cylinder post-CXL was −4.11 ± 4.32 D and −3.54 ± 2.51 D, respectively. A mean change of 0.75 ± 3.72 D sphere and 0.71 ± 3.39 D cylinder was noted post-CXL. The post-CXL best spectacle-corrected visual acuity (CVA) was 0.52 ± 0.36 and with RGP lens it was 0.09 ± 0.18. There was no significant difference in pre- and post-CXL RGP lens CVA (0.07 ± 0.09 and 0.09 ± 0.18, respectively; P = 0.556). Pre-CXL, 3-point-touch fitting was in 24 eyes (70.59%) and central fluorescein pooling was in 10 eyes (29.41%). Post-CXL, 30 eyes (88.24%) had 3-point-touch and central fluorescein pooling was found in four eyes (11.76%). One patient had CL intolerance after CXL. Of the 32 keratoconus eyes, 62.5% (n = 20 eyes) were prescribed new lenses; 37.5% (n = 12 eyes) continued using own lenses. CONCLUSIONS: There was no significant difference in refraction, topography indices, and RGP lens parameters pre- and post-CXL. However, changes in RGP lens fitting characteristics suggest a possible change in shape or apex location of the cornea after CXL. RGP lenses remain the best option to improve visual acuity after CXL in corneal ectasia.


Prior studies have shown that the majority of FfSE 350 firms do not fully comply with the Code of Corporate Governance (henceforth known as the Code). This is puzzling since the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has advocated the benefits of having high corporate governance standards and yet it would seem that not many firms are taking this initiative seriously. Therefore I am motivated to find reasons why most of the firms still decided not to take this kind of opportunity to inform their shareholders that they are working in tandem with the principles of the Code and would rather following their own measures or standards of good governance. In order to address this, I will investigate what makes the firms that fully comply with the Code differ from than those that do not in term of safeguarding the welfare of stakeholders and controlling managers' behaviour, what set of principles within the Code matter most to the shareholders, and what are the potential costs to the firms if they do not fully comply with the Code. I found that firms that claim full compliance with the Code gave higher compensation to CEOs and lesser disclosure on long term compensation plan. I also discover that firms that comply with the important principles in the Code have lower analyst bias and larger analyst following. There is also some evidence that firms are trying to mask their underperformance by claiming full compliance with the Code in their annual report. I also find that firms that have a low compliance rate with the Code will attract higher negative news than firms that fully comply with the Code. This suggests that there is more than merely claiming full compliance with the Code in the annual report and regulators need to rethink their direction in term of formulating more relevant guidance or principles for promoting better governance among firms.


Paleolimnology combines the disciplines of limnology, geology and ecology, but because of challenges that separate investigators from direct knowledge about past lake conditions, the field is multidisciplinary by necessity. As a result, paleolimnology is influenced continuously by advances in many disciplines. As with limnological studies in recent decades, paleolimnology has diverged largely from the ecological and theoretical focuses of early investigators, but recent studies demonstrate the need for more integration of ecological and paleolimnological research. This paper provides a brief overview of recent paleolimnological investigations that have addressed questions related to theoretical ecology, as well as applied lake-management and climate research issues. We examine the use of transfer function models for estimating past water-quality conditions, and important caveats expressed by investigators about limitations in the development and use of such models. Paleolimnological research has contributed new insights about biological, physical and chemical processes in lakes that have been subject to change because of climate drivers and anthropogenic influences. These findings are relevant to predicting how lakes will respond to climate change, and will require new management approaches in the future. As the range of paleolimnological studies expands, there will be greater need for basic limnological research in order for paleolimnological investigators to better understand how sediments reflect lake processes of those regions.


Over the last 250 years both moral philosophy and ordinary moral opinion have witnessed a remarkable expansion of their conception of the "moral" community, that is, the community of creatures that are thought entitled to basic moral (and ultimately legal) consideration – whatever the precise details of what such consideration requires. "Being human" is what matters now in terms of membership in the moral community, not race, gender, religion, or, increasingly, sexual orientation. (Species membership – hence the "being human" – remains a barrier to entry, however.) How to explain these developments? According to "Whig Histories," this is really a story of expanding moral knowledge. Just as we discovered that the movement of mid-size physical objects is governed by the laws of Newtonian mechanics, and that those same laws do not describe the behavior of quantum particles, so too we have discovered that chattel slavery is a grave moral wrong and that women have as much moral claim on the electoral vote as men. I argue against the Whig Histories in favor of non-Whig Histories that explain the expanding moral community in terms of biological, psychological, and economic developments, not increased moral knowledge. If the non-Whig Histories are correct, should we expect the "species barrier" to membership in the moral community to fall? I argue for a skeptical answer.


Many Asian economies are now experiencing economic hardship, their troubles stemming in part from crises in their banking sectors. Given the important role the banking sector plays in these economies, resolution of their banking crises is a vital first step toward resuming economic growth. Unfortunately, the steps taken so far appear inadequate, and many observers compare current attempts to those of U.S. regulators during our initial efforts to resolve the SL The six New England states also experienced a severe banking crisis, losing more than 15 percent of their banks in the early 1990's. The New England crisis was resolved at far less cost and in a much more timely manner than the S&L crisis. This article examines the behavior and interactions of bankers, regulators, and market participants during the crisis. The author finds that failing New England banks, in their final years, did not increase the riskiness of their operations in a last-chance effort to salvage their firms. Strict regulatory oversight, public disclosure of banking problems, and market discipline also contributed to the success of the resolution.


This book investigates the extent to which the European Union intervenes, and should intervene, in domestic labour law. It examines the stated and potential rationales for EU intervention, and argues that there are considerable merits to be derived from separating out the integrationist, economic and social arguments which have been deployed in defence of EU intervention. It critically considers the competence of the EU to act in this field, and seeks to demonstrate that proper regard for the subsidiarity and proportionality principles can contribute to the legitimacy of the EU. The book is informed by the ongoing debate on governance in Europe, and aims to provide insights into the implications of shifts in policy-making technique. From the governance perspective, labour law is a particularly useful focus of study, given the range of traditional and new approaches to governance which have been attempted, from harmonisation through framework measures to the open method of coordination, and the range of actors involved in the policy making process. The intention is not to provide an exhaustive account of European intervention in the labour law arena. Instead it provides a framework to enable the reader to think about the role that the EU has, and should, play in this field, and argues that European level intervention can make a valuable contribution to the making of labour law in European Member States.


Solid models are the critical data elements in modern computer-aided design environments, because they describe the shape and form of manufactured artifacts. Their growing ubiquity has created new problems in how to effectively manage the many models that are now stored in the digital libraries for large design and manufacturing enterprises. Existing techniques from the engineering literature and industrial practice, such as group technology, rely on human-supervised encodings and classification; techniques from the multimedia database and computer graphics/vision communities often ignore the manufacturing attributes that are most significant in the classification of models. This paper presents our approach to comparing the manufacturing similarity assessments of solid models of mechanical parts based on machining features. Our technical approach is threefold: perform machining feature extraction, construct a model dependency graph (MDG) from the set of machining features, and partition the models in a database using a measure of similarity based on the MDGs. We introduce two heuristic search techniques for comparing MDGs and present empirical experiments to validate our approach using our testbed, the National Design Repository.


BACKGROUND: Abusive head trauma is the leading cause of death from physical abuse. Misdiagnosis of abusive head trauma as well as other types of brain abnormalities in infants is common and contributes to increased morbidity and mortality. We previously derived the Pittsburgh Infant Brain Injury Score (PIBIS), a clinical prediction rule to assist physicians deciding which high-risk infants should undergo computed tomography of the head. METHODS: Well-appearing infants 30 to 364 days of age with temperature <38.3°C, no history of trauma, and a symptom associated with an increased risk of having a brain abnormality were eligible for enrollment in this prospective, multicenter clinical prediction rule validation. By using a predefined neuroimaging paradigm, subjects were classified as cases or controls. The sensitivity, specificity, and negative and positive predictive values of the rule for prediction of brain injury were calculated. RESULTS: A total of 1040 infants were enrolled: 214 cases and 826 controls. The 5-point PIBIS included abnormality on dermatologic examination (2 points), age ≥3.0 months (1 point), head circumference >85th percentile (1 point), and serum hemoglobin <11.2g/dL (1 point). At a score of 2, the sensitivity and specificity for abnormal neuroimaging was 93.3% (95% confidence interval 89.0%–96.3%) and 53% (95% confidence interval 49.3%–57.1%), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest that the PIBIS accurately identifies infants who would benefit from neuroimaging to evaluate for brain injury. An implementation analysis is needed before the PIBIS can be integrated into clinical practice.


Emerging infectious diseases may be defined as diseases being caused by pathogens only recently recognized to exist. This group of diseases is important globally, and the experience of the last 30 years suggests that new emerging diseases are likely to bedevil us. As the global climate changes, so changes the environment, which can support not only the pathogens, but also their vectors of transmission. This expands the exposure and effects of infectious disease and, therefore, the importance of widespread understanding of the relationship between public health and infectious disease. This work brings together chapters that explain reasons for the emergence of these infectious diseases. These include the ecological context of human interactions with other humans, with animals that may host human pathogens, and with a changing agricultural and industrial environment, increasing resistance to antimicrobials, the ubiquity of global travel, and international commerce. * Features the latest discoveries related to influenza with a newly published article by Davidson Hamer and Jean van Seventer * Provides a listing of rare diseases that have become resurgent or spread their geographic distribution and are re-emergent * Highlights dengue and malaria, as well as agents such as West Nile and other arboviruses that have spread to new continents causing widespread concerns * Includes discussions of climate influencing the spread of infectious disease and political and societal aspects


A reduction of around 48% of all road fatalities was achieved in Europe in the past years including a reduced number of fatalities with an older age. However, among all road fatalities, the proportion of elderly is steadily increasing. In an ageing society, the European (Horizon2020) project SENIORS aims to improve the safe mobility of older road users, who have different transportation habits compared to other age groups. To increase their level of safe mobility by determining appropriate requirements for vehicle safety systems, the characteristics of current road traffic collisions involving the elderly and the injuries that they sustain need to be understood in detail. Hereby, the paper focuses on their traffic participation as pedestrian, cyclist or passenger car occupant. Following a literature review, several national and international crash databases and hospital statistics have been analysed to determine the body regions most frequently and severely injured, specific injuries sustained and types of crashes involved, always comparing older road users (65 years and more) with midaged road users (25-64 years). The most important crash scenarios were highlighted. The data sources included European statistics from CARE, data on national level from Germany, Sweden, Italy, United Kingdom and Spain as well as in-depth crash information from GIDAS (Germany), RAIDS (UK), CIREN and NASS-CDS (US). In addition, familiar hospital data from Germany (TraumaRegister DGU®), Italy (Italian Register of Acute Traumas) and UK hospital statistics (TARN) were included in the study to gain further insight into specific injury patterns. Comprehensive data analyses were performed showing injury patterns of older road users in crashes. When comparing with mid-aged road users, all databases showed that the thorax body region is of particularly high importance for the older car occupant with injury severities of AIS 2 or AIS 3+, whereas the body regions lower extremities, head and thorax need to be considered for the older pedestrians and cyclists. Besides these comparisons, the most frequent and severe top 5 injuries were highlighted per road user group. Further, the most important crash configurations were identified and injury risk functions are provided per age group and road user group. Although several databases have been analysed, the picture on the road safety situation of older road users in Europe was not complete, as only Western European data was available. The linkage between crash data and hospital data could only be made on a general level as their inclusion criteria were quite different.


The purpose of this study was to describe and analyse the significance of social support to adults with psychiatric disabilities, based on the individual's experiences. This includes research questions concerning what type of social support was perceived to be beneficial or restrictive, which relational aspects were considered having a beneficial or restrictive effect on the support- and recovery process, as well as what strategies and capacities the individual developed on their own in order to cope with their obstacles and disadvantages. The empirical material was based on qualitative inteviews with ten individuals that defined themselves as having psychiatric disabilities. They were each interviewed on three occasions. The repetetive form of the interviews lead to three separate interview guides being created over the course of the data collection process. The goal of the first interview was to get a general idea of the subject's daily life, activities, arenas, relationships and support. The second interview focused on meaningful relationships. The third and final interview had one general and one individual part. The general part focused on the subject's psychiatric disabilities, their opportunities as well as existing and desired support measures. The subject matters in the individual part were related to the previous interviews with each of the participants and aimed to develop or expand on previous discussion. The material was analysed using theories about social support and recovery and was presented with roots in four different networking entities: close and extended family, friends, coworkers and fellow students, as well as formal support instances. The result showed that it is the support with mobilising qualities that is beneficial to the recovery process. It increases the individual's degree of control over their illness, obstacles and challenges. In addition, it appeals to the individual as a central actor and as a person with difficulties as well as resources. The fact that the social support from the various support agencies have varying focus and direction benefits recovery since it increases the individual's opportunity to maintain as well as develop their social bonds and roles within the community. A relational prerequisite for social support is an equal relationship, which benefits the recovery process as it encompasses acknowledgement and acceptance of both the individual on a personal level and of their situation. The type of social support that hinders recovery is the kind that lacks a connection between the individual's perceived problems, their need for support and their over time fluctuating ability to handle their psychiatric disability. This is due to the fact that it robs the individual of control over the situation, increases the need for support and strengthens their perception of themselves as sick. Recovery comes to a halt when the individual isn't included in the support and recovery process, which is clarified in relational aspects such as lacking attentiveness, subpar acceptance as well as rejection. The individual's will and capacity to actively take on the responsibility to steer their recovery in a positive direction was made visible through four groups of strategies that were crystallised through the course of the research; creation of understanding and legitimisation, cultivation, including strategies and the creation of boundaries.


This article presents and discusses the implementation of a direct volume rendering system for the Web, which articulates a large portion of the rendering task in the client machine. By placing the rendering emphasis in the local client, our system takes advantage of its power, while at the same time eliminates processing from unreliable bottlenecks (e.g. network). The system developed articulates in efficient manner the capabilities of the recently released WebGL standard, which makes available the accelerated graphic pipeline (formerly unusable). The dependency on specially customized hardware is eliminated, and yet efficient rendering rates are achieved. The Web increasingly competes against desktop applications in many scenarios, but the graphical demands of some of the applications (e.g. interactive scientific visualization by volume rendering), have impeded their successful settlement in Web scenarios. Performance, scalability, accuracy, security are some of the many challenges that must be solved before visual Web applications popularize. In this publication we discuss both performance and scalability of the volume rendering by WebGL ray-casting in two different but challenging application domains: medical imaging and radar meteorology.


Significance The significance of forest mortality on ecosystem services, and water, carbon, and nutrient cycling is indubitable. While there is a general agreement that climate change-induced heat and drought stress is expected to intensify forest mortality, the concurrent influence of changes in atmospheric humidity and CO2 concentration remains unclear. Here, the response of mortality risk to projected climate change is evaluated in 13 biomes across the globe. Our results show that increasing specific humidity and CO2 concentration partially offset the intensification of risk by changing precipitation and air temperature. The risk response is also mediated by plant hydraulic traits. The study provides a mechanistic foundation for estimating future responses of forest mortality risk, which can facilitate ecosystem management. Climate-induced forest mortality is being increasingly observed throughout the globe. Alarmingly, it is expected to exacerbate under climate change due to shifting precipitation patterns and rising air temperature. However, the impact of concomitant changes in atmospheric humidity and CO2 concentration through their influence on stomatal kinetics remains a subject of debate and inquiry. By using a dynamic soil–plant–atmosphere model, mortality risks associated with hydraulic failure and stomatal closure for 13 temperate and tropical forest biomes across the globe are analyzed. The mortality risk is evaluated in response to both individual and combined changes in precipitation amounts and their seasonal distribution, mean air temperature, specific humidity, and atmospheric CO2 concentration. Model results show that the risk is predicted to significantly increase due to changes in precipitation and air temperature regime for the period 2050–2069. However, this increase may largely get alleviated by concurrent increases in atmospheric specific humidity and CO2 concentration. The increase in mortality risk is expected to be higher for needleleaf forests than for broadleaf forests, as a result of disparity in hydraulic traits. These findings will facilitate decisions about intervention and management of different forest types under changing climate.


A new specimen of aistopod from the famous Stephanian deposits of Montceau-les-Mines was discovered in the collections of the Museum d'Histoire naturelle d'Autun. It is the first nodule of this site that has been studied by X-ray tomography. This specimen is probably a juvenile of the genus Phlegethontia, also known in the Westphalian of North America and eastern Europe. The teeth of this animal seem pedicellate, which would reveal that this character was more homoplasic than previously suggested. It also seems that aistopods were terrestrial rather than aquatic.


Occupational hazards in dentistry can result in injuries and reduced income if work -time is lost. Injuries include percutaneous insults, inhalation of noxious chemicals, hearing loss and musculoskeletal disorders (MSD). The prevalence of MSD among South African dentists is uncertain. This descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted to determine that prevalence and associated risk factors among dentists in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa. A convenience sample (n=350) of dentists registered with the South African Dental Association (SADA) were sent a questionnaire interrogating their medical and work history and their work-related posture. One hundred and nine (31%) responded.
Almost all (99.1%) reported pain in the hands, neck, lower back and/or a shoulder, while 22.5% reported hand symptoms. Nearly three quarters (73.6%) rotated their necks during clinical work and 68.6% tilted a shoulder towards their dominant hand. A strong association (p value = 0) was found between the number of years in practice and work-related pain in the neck. The prevalence of MSD was very high when compared with international data.
Self-recognition is most important in preventing occupational injuries. This study suggests the need to include ergonomic work practice during training to create awareness of the risk of MSD and to promote wellbeing.


3D NAND flash memory with advanced multi-level cell techniques provides high storage density, but suffers from significant performance degradation due to a large number of read-retry operations. Although the read-retry mechanism is essential to ensuring the reliability of modern NAND flash memory, it can significantly in-crease the read latency of an SSD by introducing multiple retry steps that read the target page again with adjusted read-reference voltage values. Through a detailed analysis of the read mechanism and rigorous characterization of 160 real 3D NAND flash memory chips, we find new opportunities to reduce the read-retry latency by exploiting two advanced features widely adopted in modern NAND flash-based SSDs: 1) the CACHE READ command and 2) strong ECC engine. First, we can reduce the read-retry latency using the advanced CACHE READ command that allows a NAND flash chip to perform consecutive reads in a pipelined manner. Second, there exists a large ECC-capability margin in the final retry step that can be used for reducing the chip-level read latency. Based on our new findings, we develop two new techniques that effectively reduce the read-retry latency: 1) Pipelined Read-Retry (PR²) and 2) Adaptive Read-Retry (AR²). PR² reduces the latency of a read-retry operation by pipelining consecutive retry steps using the CACHE READ command. AR² shortens the latency of each retry step by dynamically reducing the chip-level read latency depending on the current operating conditions that determine the ECC-capability margin. Our evaluation using twelve real-world workloads shows that our proposal improves SSD response time by up to 31.5% (17% on average)over a state-of-the-art baseline with only small changes to the SSD controller.


Context. The dynamics of prominence fine structures present a challenge to our understanding of the formation of cool plasma prominence embedded in the hot corona. Aims. Observations performed by the high resolution Hinode/SOT telescope allow us to compute velocities perpendicular to the lineof-sight or transverse velocities. Combining simultaneous observations obtained in Hα with Hinode/SOT and the MSDP spectrograph operating in the Meudon solar tower, we derive the velocity vectors of a quiescent prominence. Methods. The velocities perpendicular to the line-of-sight are measured using a time-slice technique and the Doppler shifts velocity using the bisector method. Results. The Doppler shifts of bright threads derived from the MSDP show counterstreaming of the order of 5 kms −1 in the prominence and reaching 15 kms −1 at the edges of the prominence. Even though they are minimum values because of seeing effects, they are of the same order as the transverse velocities. Conclusions. These measurements are very important because they suggest that the vertical structures detected by SOT may not be true vertical magnetic structures in the sky plane. The vertical structures could be a pile up of dips in more or less horizontal magnetic field lines in a 3D perspective, as proposed by many MHD modelers. In our analysis, we also calibrate the Hinode Hα data using MSDP observations obtained simultaneously.


Abstract Transabdominal ultrasound not always allows to determine the nature of ascites based solely on its characteristics. Aim The aim of the study was to present difficulties in determining the nature of ascites using transabdominal ultrasonography solely based on extra-organ lesions as well as, after the inclusion of the overall abdominal assessment and the clinical picture. Materials and methods A total of 18 patients with non-neoplastic ascites and 62 patients with neoplastic ascites whose final diagnosis was based on cytological and histopathological findings were evaluated between 2005 and 2015. Abdominal ultrasound was performed to detect the presence of fluid in all accessible spaces, and, additionally, to determine the presence of potential peritoneal tumor implants as well as to evaluate the parietal peritoneum and the greater omentum. Different digital ultrasound machines equipped with 3–6 MHz and linear 7–12 MHz transducers were used in the study. Double-sided Fisher's exact test with statistical significance at p < 0.05 was used for the analysis of the obtained results. Results Statistically significant differences between benign and neoplastic ascites were found for: anechoic peritoneal fluid (<0.0001); fluid and thickened omentum with smooth surface (<0.0001); fluid and thickened omentum with smooth surface and varices (0.01); fluid and thickened omentum with hypoechoic foci (0.049); fluid and thickened omentum with tumor implants (0.009). The inclusion of the overall assessment of abdominal organs and the clinical data allowed for an improvement in ultrasonographic diagnostic accuracy in benign and neoplastic ascites from 83.3% and 67.7% to 94.4% and 93.5%, respectively. Conclusions When used alone, an assessment of acoustic fluid characteristics and extra-organ peritoneal lesions limits the possibility to differentiate between benign and malignant ascites. These results improve after the inclusion of sonographic assessment of all abdominal organs in combination with clinical data.


Tamoxifen and other structurally related nonsteroidal antiestrogens possess properties in addition to their estrogen antagonist activity including inhibition of both calmodulin and protein kinase C. The present studies were designed to test whether the estrogen-reversible (estrogen receptor mediated) and estrogen-irreversible effects of nonsteroidal antiestrogens on cell cycle progression in vitro were mediated at the same or different points within the cell cycle and if the estrogen-irreversible effects coincided temporally with that of a calmodulin antagonist, R24571. Initial experiments investigated the effects of ICI 164384, a pure estrogen antagonist, on proliferation kinetics in asynchronous cultures of MCF-7 human breast cancer cells. At concentrations greater than 1 nM ICI 164384 significantly reduced growth rate while at greater than or equal to 50 nM, ICI 164384 completely arrested growth after the first 24 h of exposure. Concentrations up to 5 microM failed either to cause more profound effects on growth or induce cytotoxicity. Growth inhibition was associated with a decrease in the proportion of S phase cells and an accumulation of cells in G1 phase, and was completely reversed by the simultaneous addition of equimolar estradiol. In order to identify the points of action within the cell cycle of ICI 164384, and the estrogen-reversible and estrogen-irreversible components of the nonsteroidal estrogen antagonist, hydroxyclomiphene, and the calmodulin antagonist, R24571, experiments were undertaken with MCF-7 cells synchronized by mitotic selection. The mean point of action was assessed by delaying addition of the drugs for increasing time periods following mitotic selection and using DNA flow cytometry to determine the proportion of the population affected by drug administration at a specific time within G1 phase. These studies showed that sensitivity to ICI 164384 was restricted to the early part of G1 phase and that the mean time of action was 4.9 h after the beginning of G1 for this pure estrogen antagonist. The mean times of action of the estrogen-reversible (4.1 h into G1 phase) and estrogen-irreversible (4.1 h) mechanisms of action of hydroxyclomiphene, and R24571 (4.0 h), all appeared to be within a similar time frame in early to mid G1 phase. It is concluded that ICI 164384 inhibits breast cancer cell proliferation by inducing a transition delay in G1 phase and that the point of action of this pure estrogen antagonist in early G1 phase is indistinguishable temporally from that of nonsteroidal antiestrogens and calmodulin antagonists.