Four internationally-accredited transactional analysis psychotherapists completed semi—structured one-to-one interviews that explored their experiences and sense-making of Internet addiction (IA).  Interpretive phenomenological analysis yielded four higher-order concepts: the complexity of IA; aetiological and predisposing factors; functions and features of IA; and treatment factors. Practical and theoretical implications for future research, clinical supervision, treatment, psycho-educational and political programmes are presented. Of the key emergent findings the Internet was understood by participants as a conduit or medium for addiction given a high prevalence of an underlying 'disorder'.   It was also found that participants believed in the existence of childhood aetiological roots underpinning comorbidity with IA; that attachment difficulties in childhood often predispose individuals to develop issues around loneliness, low self-esteem, control, loss, instability and cognitive dissonance later in life; and that a relationship exists between depression, low self-esteem and escapism as contributing factors.   It is concluded that professionals would benefit from specific trainings concerning childhood attachment difficulties, whilst integrating a psychodynamic approach, or being aware of transference processes, could enhance treatment effectiveness and help safeguard both clients and therapists from counter-therapeutic interventions.


Problem Identification
Advanced practice RNs (APRNs) have become leaders in providing survivorship care. However, outcomes of survivorship care provided by APRNs compared to other providers remain unclear.

Literature Search
A systematic literature search included articles published after 2005 that described a survivorship model of care and use of a survivorship care plan (SCP), as well as reported outcomes.

Data Evaluation
Sixteen studies were appraised and ranked by strength. Literature was evaluated based on the model of care, which included physicians, nurses, and APRNs who provided or reviewed SCPs. Outcomes evaluated were satisfaction, quality of life (QOL), and process/cost efficiency.

Synthesis
Survivorship care is reimbursable when provided by APRNs secondary to the ability to bill for services. Improved patient satisfaction and QOL are demonstrated when survivorship care is provided by APRNs. Incorporation of SCPs into health records improves process/cost efficiency.

Conclusions
Patient satisfaction was reported in all models of care. When compared to groups who received no survivorship care, no differences were reported in QOL, but survivorship care required extensive use of resources. Survivorship care provided by APRNs demonstrated improvement in satisfaction, QOL, and process/cost efficiency.

Implications for Nursing
Incorporating descriptions of care models and associated outcomes into randomized, controlled trials of survivorship care would provide stronger evidence to guide practice. Studies evaluating outcomes of process/cost efficiency should be considered for future research. Outcome research is needed regarding the incorporation of SCPs into electronic health records.


There is growing observational evidence that disk evolution is stellar-mass-dependent. Here, we show that these dependencies extend to the atomic and molecular content of disk atmospheres. We analyze a unique dataset of high-resolution Spitzer/IRS spectra from eight very low mass star and brown dwarf disks. We report the first detections of Ne+, H2, CO2, and tentative detections of H2O toward these faint and low-mass disks. Two of our [Ne ii] 12.81 μm emission lines likely trace the hot (⩾5000 K) disk surface irradiated by X-ray photons from the central stellar/sub-stellar object. The H2 S(2) and S(1) fluxes are consistent with arising below the fully or partially ionized surface traced by the [Ne ii] emission in gas at ∼600 K. We confirm the higher C2H2/HCN flux and column density ratio in brown dwarf disks previously noted from low-resolution IRS spectra. Our high-resolution spectra also show that the HCN/H2O fluxes of brown dwarf disks are on average higher than those of T Tauri disks. Our LTE modeling hints that this difference extends to column density ratios if H2O lines trace warm ⩾600 K disk gas. These trends suggest that the inner regions of brown dwarf disks have a lower O/C ratio than those of T Tauri disks, which may result from a more efficient formation of non-migrating icy planetesimals. An O/C = 1, as inferred from our analysis, would have profound implications on the bulk composition of rocky planets that can form around very low mass stars and brown dwarfs.


Current Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems translate texts sentence by sentence without considering any cross-sentential context. Assuming independence between sentences makes it difficult to take certain translation decisions when the necessary information cannot be determined locally. We argue for the necessity to include crosssentence dependencies in SMT. As a case in point, we study the problem of pronominal anaphora translation by manually evaluating German-English SMT output. We then present a word dependency model for SMT, which can represent links between word pairs in the same or in different sentences. We use this model to integrate the output of a coreference resolution system into English-German SMT with a view to improving the translation of anaphoric pronouns.


In this paper, we investigate the possibility of improvement of the widely-used filtering algorithm for the linear constraints in constraint satisfaction problems in the presence of the alldifferent constraints. In many cases, the fact that the variables in a linear constraint are also constrained by some alldifferent constraints may help us to calculate stronger bounds of the variables, leading to a stronger constraint propagation. We propose an improved filtering algorithm that targets such cases. We provide a detailed description of the proposed algorithm and prove its correctness. We evaluate the approach on five different problems that involve combinations of the linear and the alldifferent constraints. We also compare our algorithm to other relevant approaches. The experimental results show a great potential of the proposed improvement.


BACKGROUND--Studies attempting to identify the prognostic factors that influence the outcome of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) in patients with AIDS using a multivariate analysis are few. In order to identify those prognostic factors amenable to medical intervention, univariate and multivariate analyses were performed on 102 patients with AIDS suffering a first episode of PCP. METHODS--One hundred and two consecutive patients with AIDS (51% drug abusers, 45% homosexuals, and 4% with other HIV risk factors) admitted to our institution between 1986 and 1989 whose respiratory infection was diagnosed by bronchoalveolar lavage were studied prospectively. RESULTS--The overall mortality was 28%, rising to 79% in those patients who required mechanical ventilation. According to univariate analysis the following variables were related to a poor prognosis: age > 35 years; risk factor for HIV infection other than drug abuse; and AIDS diagnosis confirmed before 1988; PaO2 < 8 kPa at admission; severe acute respiratory failure on admission (PaO2/FIO2 < 20 kPa); mechanical ventilation; antibiotic therapy for PCP other than trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole; multiple microbial pulmonary infection; serum lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) > 22.5 mukat/l on admission; serum albumin level < 30 g/l. Multivariate analysis showed that only mechanical ventilation was independently associated with a poor outcome. CONCLUSIONS--The mortality of AIDS patients presenting with a first episode of PCP before 1990 was high (28%). The main prognostic factor associated with poor outcome was the requirement for mechanical ventilation due to severe acute respiratory failure.


SUMMARY The purpose of this paper is to present a robust tracking control algorithm for underactuated biped robots capable of self-balancing in the presence of external disturbances. The biped is modeled as a five-link planar robot with four actuators located at hip and knee joints. A sliding mode control law has been developed for the biped to follow a human-like gait trajectory while keeping the torso nearly upright. The control forces are calculated by defining four first-order sliding surfaces as a linear combination of the torso and the four joint tracking errors. The control approach is shown to guarantee that all trajectories will reach and stay on these surfaces during each step, while the walking cycle stability is maintained through a Lyapunov function. The criteria for asymptotic stability of the surfaces are presented and a numerical search method is implemented for the selection of the corresponding surface parameters. The paper further investigates the robustness of the controller in response to disturbances. Numerical simulations demonstrate the tracking stability of the biped's multistep walk and its human-like response to an external disturbance.


The treatment of any tumour is completely depended what type it is. This paper proposes a set of algorithms which work for the better detection and classification of brain tumour. The MRI image based brain tumour analysis would efficiently deal with classification process for brain tumour analysis. The proposal suggests using three stages namely feature extraction, feature reduction and classification. The discrete wavelet transformation methods (DWT) and principal component analysis (PCA) are used for feature extraction and feature reduction respectively. The k-Nearest Neighbours (k-NN) classifier is used for the classification of the tumour and to tell what type the tumour is Benign or Malignant. By using different methods for feature extraction, feature reduction and classification techniques to extract and calculate the average values of the features of the MRI image and to match the values to the values extracted from the set of input image and classify them to be benign or malignant.


Are lucidly dreaming subjects able to discriminate between two different auditory stimuli using an oddball paradigm? How does the evoked potential (P300) in the EEG during this task look during lucidity, as compared to wakefulness and to non-lucid REM sleep? These are the central questions in Dr. Johannes Oliver Strelen's dissertation, which is summarized in English language in this article. Six experienced lucid dreamers underwent polysomnographic recordings in the sleep laboratory for a total of 21 nights. Their task was to move their eyes from left to right, whenever they heard the target stimulus of an oddball paradigm, which was presented throughout the whole night. Three of the six subjects experienced a verified lucid dream and conducted the given task within it. The performance (correct responses) in the oddball task during lucid dreaming was worse than during wakefulness, but significantly better than what could be explained by chance. Thus, Strelen showed,that it is possible to react to simple auditory stimuli with a pre-defined eye movement, while dreaming lucidly, without waking up in between. Moreover, for two of his subjects, Strelen analyzed the auditory evoked potential (P300) of the EEG signal during the oddball paradigm. In one case, he found a clear, in the other case a questionable P300 peak. The morphology of the P300 EEG pattern for the correctly answered target stimuli during lucid dreaming was similar to the P300 EEG pattern during wakefulness, suggesting that information processing during lucid dreams is closer to wakefulness than to non-lucid REM sleep.


This Essay fills an important gap in social and legal policy literature, addressing the intersection of sex and mass incarceration as a serious blind spot in legal analysis. It highlights the fact that between the years 1977-2007, the population of women in prison grew by 832% — nearly twice the rate as men during that same period. This staggering increase now results in more than one million women incarcerated in prison, jail, or tethered to the criminal justice system as a parolee or probationer in the U.S. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) underscores the problem, explaining in a "Special Report" that "[s]ince 1991, the number of children with a mother in prison has more than doubled, up 131%," while "[t]he number of children with a father in prison has grown [only] by 77%." In fact, the U.S. now incarcerates more women than anywhere else in the world: more than Russia, China, India, and Brazil combined, resulting in numerous unchecked collateral harms. These realities are overlooked in legal scholarship, but address in this Essay. The Essay considers two works, James B. Jacobs' The Eternal Criminal Record, and Alice Goffman's On The Run to make important contributions to the literature that extend beyond these works. Among its claims, it argues that women's incarceration hovers invisibly, overshadowed by a male dominant criminal justice lens. In Part I, it critiques Goffman's book as fitting within a paradigm that pays too little attention to ethical standards and moral considerations involving Black human research subjects. This is particularly relevant in light of Goffman's hunger for one of her primary research subject's "killer to die." It argues that cognitive bias — perceiving poor, African American human subjects as already marginal, blinds researchers to appreciating the harms in which they may expose their subjects. Part II turns to the missing narrative of women and mass incarceration in the U.S. It sheds light on and analyzes the complex patterns that frame women's subjugation to law enforcement — issues absent in On The Run. Part III analyzes the extra-legal and collateral consequences of policing women, including felony disenfranchisement, loss of housing, and the chilling impacts on their children. It unpacks, what Professor James Jacobs terms, the eternal criminal record, and teases out findings in his compelling new book of the same title.


This document reviews the artworks created in the form of visual narratives of cancer survivors. The work sought to explore the subjective experience of cancer and explore potential functions of art therapy in oncology care. Previous research found stages of the cancer trajectory and psychosocial benefits of art therapy. Fifteen adult cancer survivors created visual narratives and participated in this qualitative inquiry. The research was action-based and used arts based and qualitative methodologies. Eight themes emerged and reflected stages of the cancer experience and corresponding functions of art therapy participation. The themes included: diagnosis and the onset of the cancer journey; instilling hope through imagery and recognizing strength in self-expression; ongoing treatment and support; relaxation and re-focus by means of creation, repetition and containment; transition to life after cancer; defining ongoing survivorship and reestablishing resilience; post-cancer growth; and refining a creative identity and reimagining the self. The work will add to competencies of art therapists working in oncology care and add literature supporting the addition of art therapy to oncology treatment centers.


Plant small RNAs (sRNAs) are pivotal regulators of gene expression, which are crucial in maintaining genome integrity and flexibility during development, abiotic and biotic stress responses. Current evidence suggests that sRNAs might be inherent to the sophisticated plant innate immune system battling bacteria. However, the role of sRNAs during anti ‐ fungal plant defences is less clear. Therefore, this chapter investigates the sRNA‐mediated plant antifungal responses against the hemibiotrophic fungi Colletotrichum higginsianum and Colletotrichum graminicola in their respective compatible hosts Arabidopsis thaliana and Zea mays. A phenotypic and metabolomic analysis of A. thaliana sRNA mutants in response to C. higginsianum infection was performed, showing a hormonal and meta‐ bolic imbalance during fungal infection in these plants. To find whether fungal-induced sRNA could directly regulate defence genes in an agricultural important plant model, the expression of maize miRNAs in response to C. graminicola leaf and root infections was investigated. The results revealed the tissue-specific local and systemic adaptation of the miRNA transcriptome, where only a few miRNAs were targeting defence pathways. The general picture presented here points towards a role of sRNAs as fine-tuners of genetic and metabolomic defence response layers. This chapter also further discusses the poten ‐ tial of utilizing sRNA-based fungal control strategies.


This paper borrows from network analysis to study the impact of trade and financial integrations on output drop during the 2008-2009 crisis. Using network analysis, I show that international trade and financial linkages have different effects on economic activity. Relationships involving the trade of goods appear to explain the severity of the crisis to some extent, whereas financial relationships do not. This finding suggests that real shocks that occur through the trade channel cannot be easily and quickly absorbed by connected economies, while financial shocks can be absorbed more easily among partners. The global shift from complex products to safer assets in the wake of the subprime crisis supports this view.


Excerpt: Most academic disciplines throughout the world have been in the higher education curriculum for hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years. Teaching itself has certainly been around as long as the earliest of any given discipline. After all, without teaching no profession is possible. How else would a core set of knowledge be taught to those interested in the theoretical constructs, conceptual frameworks, and the successes/failures of those who have worked previously in the discipline? Unfortunately, the concept of consistently teaching from a base of scholarly activity is relatively new. What happens, then, when the very concept of how to teach disciplinary knowledge at the university level is questioned for the lack of having a scholarly basis? There is certainly a professional discipline of "Education," but much of that literature is not consulted by those teaching at the university level, perhaps based on an assumption that the bulk of the scholarly work is predominantly on instruction at the primary grades. The issue I raise here is how are we to convince faculty members, both new and experienced, that our work as higher education educators within the framework of teaching should be based solidly on a professional body of scholarly work. It would seem to me imperative that all faculty members should anchor every instructional and curricular aspects of their work on some form of scholarship.


Pre-clinical animal tests are used to assess drug efficacy and safety, but are limited by factors such as their suitability as a model for humans, robustness, cost, and ethical issues. While an organ-on-a-chip using human cells is promising for recapitulating human physiological conditions, it is highly desirable in investigations of the side effects of drugs to integrate more than one type of tissue using a designed circulatory system. We have developed a microfluidic device—an Integrated Heart/Cancer on a Chip (iHCC)—using human healthy heart cells (hCMs) and liver cancer cells (HepG2) to recapitulate the side effects of an anti-cancer drug, doxorubicin (DXR), to achieve individual cultures of cells from different tissues on a single device with three sets of artificial blood circulation loops, microfabrication technology for micro valves and a pump provides accurate fluid operation. Using improved soft lithography adopting numerical optimization simulation, the microfluidic device was fabricated with on-chip integration of pneumatic valves and a peristaltic micropump establishing precision fluid flow. The iHCC developed allows modelling of the side effects of DXR on heart cells caused by the production of toxic metabolites (doxorubicinol; DXRol) by HepG2 cells and the delivery of DXRol to heart cells via the circulation loop. Our findings open the door towards the development of a "Body-on-a-Chip."


A PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM THE PREMIER On behalf of the Government of Ontario, I am delighted to congratulate all those whose efforts have made possible this inaugural issue of Esurio: Ontario Journal of Hunger and Poverty. Our government firmly believes that everyone in Ontario must have the opportunity to succeed, and this means responding to the needs of low-income Ontarians across the province. That is why our government has created a new cabinet committee on poverty — one that is working hard to develop a focused strategy to reduce child poverty and to lift the standard of living of more Ontario families. We have made children the first priority of this strategy because by helping kids now, we can break the cycle of poverty. By bringing together diverse voices and perspectives, Esurio will do much to further theory and practice in alleviating hunger and poverty and addressing food security issues. I commend the Ontario Association of Food Banks and Meal Exchange for your dedication to helping those in need throughout Ontario, and for your commitment to this laudable initiative. I would also like to thank everyone — students, community members and academics — who contributed to the creation of Esurio: Ontario Journal of Hunger and Poverty. Please accept my best wishes for much success in your inaugural year and in those that follow.


Can fiduciaries be made to serve public goals? The movement under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("ACA") towards universal access to health insurance requires us to focus on the fiduciary relationships between large organizations providing access to healthcare and the populations they serve. These relationships have become a collective undertaking instead of a direct, personal relationship. In this Article, I introduce the concept of the collective fiduciary in response to the shift towards uniform, national goals in the realm of health insurance and healthcare. Only through a collective approach can we hold fiduciaries accountable for the welfare of many instead of one or a few individuals. While other scholars have focused on the individual whose fortunes or health are controlled by a fiduciary, this has made it difficult to collect information about fiduciary actions and obtain consistent and coherent decisions from fiduciaries. My argument here is that this is not a problem that can be fixed at the level of the individual fiduciary or individual beneficiary. I examine the expansion of the role of the fiduciary as a result of growing demand for private welfare benefits in the United States. My concern here is with the expansion of health insurance and the administration of health benefits. If patients are denied benefits, then they are effectively denied access to service providers. In a space where the government has been, until now, largely absent both by choice and because of a lack of agreement on policy direction, individual decisions by fiduciaries add up to the only large scale policy existing for private benefits. Fiduciaries can and will undo the goal of expanding access to healthcare under the ACA unless ERISA's fiduciary regime (the example I focus on in this Article) is altered. Though I explore several possible solutions, I ultimately argue that fiduciary duties are only meaningful when denials of benefit claims are supervised and capped by government actors.


Abstract. The aerosol direct radiative effect (ADRE) is defined as the change in the solar radiation flux, F, due to aerosol scattering and absorption. The difficulty in determining ADRE stems mainly from the need to estimate F without aerosols, F0, with either radiative transfer modeling and knowledge of the atmospheric state, or regression analysis of radiation data down to zero aerosol optical depth (AOD), if only F and AOD are observed. This paper examines the regression analysis method by using modeled surface data products provided by the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET). We extrapolated F0 by two functions: a straight linear line and an exponential nonlinear decay. The exponential decay regression is expected to give a better estimation of ADRE with a few percent larger extrapolated F0 than the linear regression. We found that, contrary to the expectation, in most cases the linear regression gives better results than the nonlinear. In such cases the extrapolated F0 represents an unrealistically low water vapor column (WVC), resulting in underestimation of attenuation caused by the water vapor, and hence too large F0 and overestimation of the magnitude of ADRE. The nonlinear ADRE is generally 40–50% larger in magnitude than the linear ADRE due to the extrapolated F0 difference. Since for a majority of locations, AOD and WVC have a positive correlation, the extrapolated F0 with the nonlinear regression fit represents an unrealistically low WVC, and hence too large F0. The systematic underestimation of F0 with the linear regression is compensated by the positive correlation between AOD and water vapor, providing the better result.


SUMMARY: Streptomycin is a specific antiviral agent for a variety of bacteriophages active against Streptococcus faecium, S. faecalis, S. liquefaciens and S. zymogenes since it inhibits bacteriophage growth even when the host is resistant to the antibiotic. An analysis of the mode of action of the antibiotic in this system reveals that it probably has two effects. If the antibiotic is present before adsorption, it inhibits injection of the phage DNA. This effect is readily reversible. If the antibiotic is added after adsorption, it appears that injection is not inhibited, but that the phage genome is inactivated. The antibiotic has no effect on replication of the phage once the genome has become established in the host cell. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the phage DNA exists transiently at a streptomycin-accessible site, and then moves to a site of replication which is inaccessible to the antibiotic. Streptomycin-resistant phages probably have a different injection mechanism from streptomycin-sensitive phages. The senior author has reported similar findings for an RNA bacteriophage of Escherichia coli. The implications of this work for virus chemotherapy and for analysing the mode of penetration into the cell of virus nucleic acid are discussed.


Getting all stressed out by vitamin C Few experimental cancer therapies have incited as much debate as vitamin C. Yet the mechanistic effect of vitamin C on cancer cells is still poorly understood. Yun et al. studied human colorectal cancer cells with KRAS or BRAF mutations and found that they "handle" vitamin C in a different way than other cells, ultimately to their detriment (see the Perspective by Reczek and Chandel). Because a certain receptor is up-regulated in the mutant cells, they take up the oxidized form of vitamin C (dehydroascorbate). This leads to oxidative stress, inactivation of a glycolytic enzyme required by the mutant cells for growth, and finally cell death. Whether the selective toxicity of vitamin C to these mutant cells can be exploited therapeutically remains unclear. Science, this issue p. 1391; see also p. 1317 Cancer cells with certain mutations take up the oxidized form of vitamin C, which fatally disrupts their metabolism. [Also see Perspective by Reczek and Chandel] More than half of human colorectal cancers (CRCs) carry either KRAS or BRAF mutations and are often refractory to approved targeted therapies. We found that cultured human CRC cells harboring KRAS or BRAF mutations are selectively killed when exposed to high levels of vitamin C. This effect is due to increased uptake of the oxidized form of vitamin C, dehydroascorbate (DHA), via the GLUT1 glucose transporter. Increased DHA uptake causes oxidative stress as intracellular DHA is reduced to vitamin C, depleting glutathione. Thus, reactive oxygen species accumulate and inactivate glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH). Inhibition of GAPDH in highly glycolytic KRAS or BRAF mutant cells leads to an energetic crisis and cell death not seen in KRAS and BRAF wild-type cells. High-dose vitamin C impairs tumor growth in Apc/KrasG12D mutant mice. These results provide a mechanistic rationale for exploring the therapeutic use of vitamin C for CRCs with KRAS or BRAF mutations.


Petunia vein-clearing virus (PVCV), a tentative member of the caulimovirus group of plant pararetroviruses, was first identified in petunia (Petunia hybrida Vilm.) in Germany in the hybrid cv. Himmelröschen (1). A similar virus was recently identified in Minnesota in the petunia cv. Fantasy Pink grown from seed in commercial greenhouses. This virus has spherical particles 46 to 47 nm in diameter in preparations negatively stained with 1% uranyl acetate or sodium phosphotungstate, pH 7.0, and which contain a double-stranded DNA genome approximately 7.3 kb in size. The virus was shown by immunoelectron microscopy (IEM) to be closely related serologically to PVCV. No serological relationship to any other caulimoviruses was detected. Like PVCV, which is transmitted only by seed and grafting, the Minnesota virus isolate was not transmitted by mechanical inoculation to petunia or any other indicator plant. Symptoms associated with infection by PVCV in cv. Fantasy Pink consisted of mild vein clearing to severe vein yellowing, and reduction in leaf size and internode length. Symptoms were most frequently expressed when plants were under water and nutrient stress. Vigorously growing plants usually showed no symptoms, and no virions were detected by IEM in partially purified extracts from such plants. This suggests that infection of petunia hybrids by seed-borne PVCV may possibly be more widespread, but may go unnoticed because virus-induced symptoms may not be elicited in plants growing under favorable conditions. References: (1) D. Lesemann and R. Casper. Phytopathology 63:1118, 1973.


Fast and easy Internet and knowledge access by just a click are some of the characteristics of the twenty first century. This means that this knowledge has been acquired fast and superficially. Thus, discernment turns into something ephemeral, because there is not a profound examination of the aspects dealt with. This is caused by the enormous quantity of information found that, in many cases, does not reflect reality. In this sense, teachers can find multitasking students that can perform many activities but without reflexively undertaking them. Education tries to solve these type of problems so the learning-teaching process is as significant as possible. Therefore, future teachers should always have tools for keeping students' attention, as well as to raise interest in the studied subjects. Within these new tools, escape rooms are, because they not only increase students' motivation but also encourage teamwork and reflexive learning, as the tasks to be solved are complex. However, as male and female present different perspectives towards gamification, in this work, escape rooms have been studied applying a gender perspective. In the University of Seville, Spain, a descriptive-interpretative exploratory study took place intending to analyse future female teachers' conceptions about escape rooms. A 17-item questionnaire was applied to 99 female students of the Degree in Primary Education. Results show that subjects highly valued the ludic part of the escape rooms as a didactic activity, which fosters significant learning. Students also appreciated that the activity was close to their reality and that it was integrating students' interests in the Primary Education classroom. The main conclusion of the study is that, even if there is room for improvement and there is a need to make them more appealing to female students, escape rooms are considered an excellent educative resource as well as an adequate alternative teaching methodology.


We present an analysis of eight years of Fermi-LAT (>0.1 GeV) γ-ray data obtained for the radio galaxy NGC 1275. The γ-ray flux from NGC 1275 is highly variable on short (∼days to weeks) timescales, and has steadily increased over this eight year timespan. By examining the changes in its flux and spectral shape in the LAT energy band over the entire data set, we found that its spectral behavior changed around 2011 February (∼MJD 55600). The γ-ray spectra at early times evolved largely at high energies, while the photon indices were unchanged at later times despite rather large flux variations. To explain these observations, we suggest that the flux changes at the early times were caused by injection of high-energy electrons into the jet while, later, the γ-ray flares were caused by a changing Doppler factor owing to variations in the jet Lorentz factor and/or changes in the angle to our line of sight. To demonstrate the viability of these scenarios, we fit the broad band spectral energy distribution data with a one-zone synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model for flaring and quiescent intervals before and after 2011 February. To explain the γ-ray spectral behavior in the context of the SSC model, the maximum electron Lorentz factor would have changed at the early times, while a modest change in the Doppler factor adequately fits the quiescent and flaring state γ-ray spectra at the later times.


The Oncology Reference Center (ORC) of Aviano (Italy) organization principles are based on the criteria of effectiveness efficiency and cost-effectiveness in compliance to clinical autonomy leading to the continuous improvement of services provided and the research activities in order to ensure maximum level of safety for patients and operators. Within these values the adoption of environmental sustainable management voluntary systems such as ISO 14000 and EMAS has been evaluated and proposed. To this note the Initial Environmental Analysis (IEA) is presented allowing basic targets for improvement and implementation of environmental management programs as well as highlighting the effectiveness of the adoption of sustainable management of voluntary EMAS instrument. Phases to define and evaluate the environmental factors were analysed and the relationship between the site and the surrounding zone was performed according to the characteristics of "sensitivity" and "vulnerability" of the affected area. Specifying different degrees of priority which the problems must be managed to a medium priority rating was found for short term interventions Some improvements in the hospital waste management were identified among these the preparation of guidelines applicable to current operational practices are the most reliable.


The non-backtracking matrix and its eigenvalues have many applications in network science and graph mining, such as node and edge centrality, community detection, length spectrum theory, graph distance, and epidemic and percolation thresholds. Moreover, in network epidemiology, the reciprocal of the largest eigenvalue of the non-backtracking matrix is a good approximation for the epidemic threshold of certain network dynamics. In this work, we develop techniques that identify which nodes have the largest impact on the leading non-backtracking eigenvalue. We do so by studying the behavior of the spectrum of the non-backtracking matrix after a node is removed from the graph. From this analysis we derive two new centrality measures: X-degree and X-non-backtracking centrality. We perform extensive experimentation with targeted immunization strategies derived from these two centrality measures. Our spectral analysis and centrality measures can be broadly applied, and will be of interest to both theorists and practitioners alike.


Resistance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) strains is an increasing problem worldwide. Since no public health data are available for urban populations in Germany, we investigated resistance in our hospitalized patients (n = 1,011) over the last 7 yrs. We therefore evaluated clinical data and results of susceptibility tests (breakpoint technique/proportion method) for isoniazid, streptomycin, rifampin, pyrazinamide, protionamide and ethambutol. Since 1987, there has been a relatively constant rate of 5.9% (3.9%-7.8%) for single-drug resistance (SDR), but an increasing rate of multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains (> or = 2 first-line drugs) from 1.7% in 1987 to 5.8% in 1993. Sixty nine percent of patients with MDR strains showed resistance to two drugs, and 31% to three or more drugs. Risk factors for SDR and MDR tuberculosis revealed previous therapy (odds ratio (OR) (95% confidence interval (95% CI)); SDR 2.2 (1.7-4.0); MDR 4.5 (2.3-8.8)); and foreign-born status (SDR 2.2 (1.3-3.6); MDR 3.5 (1.8-6.8)) to be the most important factors associated with resistance. Both primary and acquired resistance were higher in foreign-born than in German-born patients. We conclude that there was a considerable increase in multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in our hospital from 1987 to 1993. Since previously treated patients and patients born in countries with a high level of primary resistance had an increased risk of drug-resistant tuberculosis, we would advise a four drug regimen as initial therapy in those patients.


: Reconsolidation theory proposes that retrieval can destabilize an existing memory trace, opening a time-dependent window during which that trace is amenable to modification. Support for the theory is largely drawn from non-human animal studies that use invasive pharmacological or electroconvulsive interventions to disrupt a putative post-retrieval restabilization ('reconsolidation') process. In human reconsolidation studies however, it is often claimed that post-retrieval new learning can be employed as a means of 'updating' or 'rewriting' existing memory traces. This proposal warrants close scrutiny because the ability to modify information stored in the memory system has profound theoretical, clinical, and ethical implications. The present study aimed to replicate and extend a prominent 3-day motor-sequence learning study (Walker, Brakefield, Hobson, & Stickgold, 2003) that is widely cited as a convincing demonstration of human reconsolidation. However, in four direct replication attempts ( N = 64) we did not observe the critical impairment effect that has previously been taken to indicate disruption of an existing motor memory trace. In three additional conceptual replications ( N = 48), we explored the broader validity of reconsolidation-updating theory by using a declarative recall task and sequences similar to phone numbers or computer passwords. Rather than inducing vulnerability to interference, memory retrieval appeared to aid the preservation of existing sequence knowledge relative to a no-retrieval control group. These findings suggest that memory retrieval followed by new learning does not reliably induce memory updating via reconsolidation.


Decision-making biases can be systematic features of normal behaviour, or deficits underlying neuropsychiatric symptoms. We used behavioural psychophysics, spiking-circuit modelling and pharmacological manipulations to explore decision-making biases in health and disease. Monkeys performed an evidence integration task in which they showed a pro-variance bias (PVB): a preference to choose options with more variable evidence. The PVB was also present in a spiking circuit model, revealing a neural mechanism for this behaviour. Because NMDA receptor (NMDA-R) hypofunction is a leading hypothesis for neuropathology in schizophrenia, we simulated behavioural effects of NMDA-R hypofunction onto either excitatory or inhibitory neurons in the model. These were tested experimentally using the NMDA-R antagonist ketamine, yielding changes in decision-making consistent with lowered cortical excitation/inhibition balance from NMDA-R hypofunction onto excitatory neurons. These results provide a circuit-level mechanism that bridges across explanatory scales, from the synaptic to the behavioural, in neuropsychiatric disorders where decision-making biases are prominent. Significance People can make apparently irrational decisions because of underlying features in their decision circuitry. Deficits in the same neural circuits may also underlie debilitating cognitive symptoms of neuropsychiatric patients. Here, we reveal a neural circuit mechanism explaining an irrationality frequently observed in healthy humans making binary choices – the pro-variance bias. Our circuit model could be perturbed by introducing deficits in either excitatory or inhibitory neuron function. These two perturbations made specific, dissociable predictions for the types of irrational decisionmaking behaviour produced. We used the NMDA-R antagonist ketamine, an experimental model for schizophrenia, to test if these predictions were relevant to neuropsychiatric pathophysiology. The results were consistent with impaired excitatory neuron function, providing important new insights into the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.


This article examines history mediation and the relationship between education and academia. The aim is to investigate historical representations of the Christianisation in Sweden from 1915 to 1996, by doing a comparative analysis of the content in research publications and history textbooks for upper secondary school (or the equivalent). The research field and the textbooks are perceived as two different knowledge arenas. The analysis shows how the two arenas are more harmonious and consistent in their representations of Christianisation during the early twentieth century. In the mid-twentieth century, the arenas deviated from each other for an extended period, before finally becoming more unitary again by the end of the century. The impact of the schools' steering documents, as well as the distinctiveness of the two arenas, seems to constitute the conditions for inconsistencies between them at different times. The analysis also suggests that the educational applicability of the knowledge content in contemporary research, likewise impacts the relationship between the two arenas.


The human sulfotransferases (SULTs) regulate the activities of hundreds if not thousands of small molecule metabolites via transfer of the sulfuryl-moiety (-SO 3 ) from the nucleotide donor, PAPS (3'-phosphoadenosine 5'-phosphosulfate), to the hydroxyls and amines of the recipients. Our understanding of the molecular basis of SULT catalysis has expanded considerably in recent years. The basic kinetic mechanism of these enzymes, previously thought to be ordered, has been redefined as random for SULT2A1, a representative member of the superfamily. An active-site cap whose structure and dynamics are highly responsive to nucleotide was discovered and shown to be critical in determining SULTs selectivity – a topic of long-standing interest to the field. We now realize that a given SULT can operate in two specificity modes – broad and narrow – depending on the disposition of the cap. Very recent work has revealed that the caps of the SULT1A1 are controlled by homotropic allosteric interactions between PAPS molecules bound at the dimer's active sites. These interactions cause the catalytic efficiency of SULT1A1 to vary in a substrate-dependent fashion by as much as two orders of magnitude over a range of PAPS-concentrations that spans those found in human tissues. SULT catalysis is further complicated by the fact that these enzymes are frequently inhibited by their substrates. This review provides an overview of the mechanistic features of SULT1A1 that are important for the design and interpretation of SULT1A1 assays.


SYNOPSIS Objective. The present study was designed to examine the extent to which mothers' emotional (i.e., empathy, negative emotions) and cognitive (i.e., accurate detection of distress, goals about infant crying, and emotion efficacy) responses to infant distress are related to maternal sensitivity in tasks designed to elicit infant distress. The author assessed mothers' emotional and cognitive responses to distress both prenatally in response to unfamiliar infants and postnatally in response to own infant. Also, the author examined the extent to which pre- and postnatal measures correlated with one another and with sensitivity to distress. Design. The author interviewed 101 mothers prenatally about their responses to videotapes of crying infants, then videotaped mothers interacting with their own infants at 6-months postpartum in 2 emotionally arousing tasks during which maternal sensitivity and infant distress were rated, and subsequently interviewed mothers about their thoughts and feelings during the emotionally arousing tasks using a video-recall procedure. Results. Mothers' pre- and postnatal goals in relation to infant distress and emotional reactions to infant distress were the most consistent predictors of sensitivity, but prenatal accurate detection of infant distress also predicted sensitivity. Furthermore, mothers' goals, emotional reactions to crying, and accurate distress detection buffered maternal sensitivity from the negative effect of observed infant distress. That is, infant distress was less strongly negatively associated with sensitivity when mothers had more infant-oriented goals, reported fewer negative emotions in response to infant crying, or were skilled at detecting infant distress. Conclusions. Assessing mothers' emotional and cognitive responses to infant distress provides insights into the origins of sensitivity to infant distress. The author discusses methodological issues relevant to assessing mothers' emotional and cognitive responses to infant distress.


Salmonella constitutes a genus of zoonotic bacteria of worldwide economic and health importance. The current view of salmonella taxonomy assigns the members of this genus to two species: S. enterica and S. bongori. S. enterica itself is divided into six subspecies, enterica, salamae, arizonae, diarizonae, indica, and houtenae, also known as subspecies I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IV, and VI, respectively [1]. Members of Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica are mainly associated with warm-blooded vertebrates and are usually transmitted by ingestion of food or water contaminated by infected faeces. The pathogenicity of most of the distinct serotypes remains undefined, and even within the most common serotypes, many questions remain to be answered regarding the interactions between the organism and the infected host. Salmonellosis manifests itself in three major forms: enteritis, septicaemia, and abortion, each of which may be present singly or in combination, depending on both the serotype and the host involved. Although currently over 2300 serovars of Salmonella are recognized, only about 50 serotypes are isolated in any significant numbers as human or animal pathogens [2, 3] and they all belong to subspecies enterica. Of these, most cause acute gastroenteritis characterized by a short incubation period and a severe systemic disease in man or animals, characterized by septicaemia, fever and/or abortion, and such serotypes are often associated with one or few host species [4–6]. It is the intention of this review to present a summary of current knowledge of these host-adapted serotypes of S. enterica. The taxonomic relationships between the serotypes will be discussed together with a comparison of the pathology and pathogenesis of the disease that they cause in their natural host(s). Since much of our knowledge on salmonellosis is based on the results of work on Typhimurium, this serotype will often be used as the baseline in discussion. It is hoped that an appreciation of the differences that exist in the way these serotypes interact with the host will lead to a greater understanding of the complex host–parasite relationship that characterizes salmonella infections.


Since environmental pollution caused by chemical and energy industries
has increased for several decades, there is a social expectation that
scientists and engineers try to design sustainable chemical processes, to
generate less hazardous materials and more environmentally friendly sources of
energy production. In this review the roles of Ionic Liquids (ILs) and IL based solvent
systems as proposed alternative for conventional organic solvents are
described. Since there are already many reviews on benefits of ILs, after a very brief
review of ILs we focus mostly on aspects that are not covered in other reviews,
in particular the known limits of these solvents. In addition, different methods to
measure the physicochemical properties relevant to their use in energy storage
applications such as fuel cells and batteries are introduced. The physicochemical properties
that are reviewed are thermal properties, conductivity and chemical reactivity.
The focus of the review is on the literature after 2008, with the exception of
some important historic articles on ILs.


Purpose: Asthma exacerbations are a leading cause of hospital and emergency department admissions at pediatric institutions. The objective of this study was to determine if patients who obtain discharge medications from a pediatric institution's outpatient pharmacy after an admission for asthma have a lower thirty-day readmission rate than those who do not obtain discharge medications from the outpatient pharmacy. Methods: This multi-phase retrospective study included an initial chart review, an intervention period, and a second chart review of the intervention period. The chart reviews included patients ages two years and older with a discharge diagnosis of asthma or wheezing. During the intervention phase, pharmacists promoted use of the outpatient pharmacy by patients admitted for these conditions using multiple methods. In each chart review, the patients readmitted for asthma or wheezing within thirty days were classified as either outpatient pharmacy users (OPP users) or non-OPP users. Differences in readmission rates between OPP users and non-OPP users, as well as differences in overall OPP utilization, were analyzed before and during the intervention phase using a Chi-square test. Results: The initial chart review found no significant difference in thirty day readmission rates between OPP users and non-OPP users (6.2% and 7.5%, respectively; χ 2 = 1.15; p = 0.274). The number of OPP users increased significantly from the first chart review to the second (11.8% and 45.9%, respectively; χ 2 = 929.04, p < 0.001). The second chart review revealed that OPP users had a significantly lower readmission rate than non-OPP users during the intervention phase (2.3% and 10.9%, respectively; χ 2 = 52.5; p < 0.001). Conclusion: Obtaining discharge medications from the OPP was associated with a lower thirty-day readmission rate in children with asthma. Promoting use of the OPP for transitional care should continue to be part of future efforts to decrease hospital readmissions.


"The Lesser Declamations", dating perhaps from the 2nd Century A.D. and attributed to Quintilian, might more accurately be described as emanating from 'the school of Quintilian'. The collection - here made available for the first time in translation - represents classroom materials for budding Roman lawyers. The instructor who composed these specimen speeches for fictitious court cases adds his comments and suggestions concerning presentation and arguing tactics - thereby giving us insight into Roman law and education. A wide range of scenarios is imagined. Some evoke the plots of ancient novels and comedies: pirates, exiles, parents and children in conflict, adulterers, rapists, and wicked stepmothers abound. Other cases deal with such matters as warfare between neighbouring cities, smuggling, historical (and quasi-historical) events, tyrants and tyrannicides. Two gems are the speech opposing a proposal to equalise wealth, and the case of a Cynic youth who has forsworn worldly goods, but sues his father for cutting off his allowance. Of the original 388 sample cases in the collection, 145 survive. These are now added to the Loeb Classical Library in a two-volume edition, a fluent translation by D. R. Shackleton Bailey facing an updated Latin text.


Female agricultural land ownership and operatorship are on the rise in Iowa and across the nation, but little research exists that explores agricultural conservation outreach to women and gendered differences in conservation knowledge and attitudes. The authors surveyed all agricultural landowners and operators in the Clear Creek Watershed in eastern Iowa about conservation knowledge and attitudes, as well as preferred sources of information about conservation. Clear Creek is a high-visibility watershed for conservation outreach for several reasons, including its long-standing watershed stakeholder council and its connection to the impaired Iowa River. Analysis of the survey results demonstrated that female respondents had significantly lower levels of knowledge about best management practices and significantly more positive attitudes towards conservation and collaboration than men. Meanwhile, women looked to the same sources for conservation information as male respondents, including neighbors, friends, and conservation agencies like the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Cooperative Extension, and the Farm Service Agency. These gendered results have significant consequences for the future of agricultural conservation practice and policy and for the subsequent health of the nation's soils and waterways. While lacking in knowledge about specific conservation practices, female respondents valued conservation practices, looked to government agencies for information about conservation, and expressed interest in collaborating with government entities for conservation on their land. Agricultural conservation practitioners can use these findings to tailor outreach efforts that will more effectively reach the nation's female landowners and operators.


Landfill covers are intended to protect buried waste from water seepage and biointrusion for thirty to thousands of years, yet most cover studies are limited to a few years and do not directly investigate net changes in the soil profile that affect changing landfill performance. We evaluated water balances, vegetation cover, rooting patterns, and soil profiles of two landfill‐cover designs (two plots each) more than a decade after installation at semiarid Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM, USA: a conventional design of 20 cm of topsoil over compacted crushed‐tuff and an integrated design of 71 cm of topsoil over an engineered barrier designed to induce lateral flow (geotextile overlying 46 cm of gravel). Water balances for both designs had ~3% of precipitation as seepage; the integrated plots lost <1% of water as interflow, probably because the barrier interface had only a 5% slope. The conventional design had a net loss of stored soil water and proportionally more evapotranspiration than the integrated design. After more than a decade, (i) vegetation changes included increased biomass and species diversity on most plots, with proportionally fewer invading species and more extensive rooting in the integrated plots; (ii) the geotextile was largely unchanged; and (iii) infiltration and subsequent water penetration occurred primarily via macropores, including root channels and animal burrows. Both cover designs effectively minimized seepage during their initial decade, but observed effects of environmental processes such as succession and burrowing are expected to become progressively more important determinants of cover performance over additional decades.


In 1732 Ambrose Madison, grandfather of the future president, languished for weeks in a sickbed then died. The death, soon after his arrival on the plantation, bore hallmarks of what planters assumed to be traditional African medicine. African slaves were suspected of poisoning their master. For Montpelier, his estate, and for Virginia, this was a watershed moment. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia examines the consequences of Madison's death and the ways in which this event shaped both white slaveholding society and the surrounding slave culture. At Montpelier, now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and open to the public, Igbo slaves under the directions of white overseers had been felling trees, clearing land, and planting tobacco and other crops for five years before Madison arrived. This deadly initial encounter between American colonial master and African slave community irrevocably changed both whites and blacks. This book explores the many broader meanings of this suspected murder and its aftermath. It weaves together a series of transformations that followed, such as the negotiation of master-slave relations, the transformation of Igbo culture in the New World, and the social memory of a particular slave community. For the first time, the book presents the larger history of the slave community at James Madison's Montpelier-over the five generations from the 1720s through the 1850s and beyond. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia revises many assumptions about how Africans survived enslavement, the middle passage, and grueling labor as chattel in North America. The importance of Igbo among the colonial slave population makes this work a controversial reappraisal of how Africans made themselves ""African Americans"" in Virginia. Douglas B. Chambers is a professor in the history department at the University of Southern Mississippi.


Hypertension in pregnancy does not always lead to preeclampsia. Differentiating between these two conditions is challenging and requires enormous resources. A biomarker which could predict the clinical onset of the severe pathology of preeclampsia would be very useful. Several multicentric prospective studies have demonstrated that the cytokines involved in angiogenesis potentially may be used as biomarkers to predict preeclampsia, using precise automated immunoassays. The results of studies of these immunoassays indicate that they have a negative predictive value, making it possible to rule out development of preeclampsia for at least one week. A part of this review paper is also the consensus statement of international experts in the use of angiogenic markers focused on the status of the risk of preeclampsia, and their use in clinical practice.


The subject of God has often been touched on in the movies. European directors like Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini and many others have dealt directly with the theme throughout their careers, and Hollywood too has told stories based on the Bible, the lives of the saints and the martyrdoms of ordinary people. "The Hidden God," which accompanies a film series of the same name organized by The Museum of Modern Art and screening in October and November of 2003, explores the ways in which a sense of God may appear in films, whether or not it is understood as such or is visible to the eye. This book contains over 50 essays by a wide range of writers, who find God encoded not only in explicitly religious subjects but in westerns, horror movies, comedies and many other genres, and in films from all over the world. In the times, places and societies these filmmakers explore, God may be lost, found, absent entirely or seen by only a few, whether saint or sinner.


Comparisons of hydrographic conditions in the North and South Pacific Oceans in the 1960s and 1985‐94 have been made along five World Ocean Circulation Experiment sections. Below the seasonal mixed layer, statistically significant temporal differences in salinity and temperature have been detected in the water masses that occur in the upper 2000 dbar of the water column. These water mass property differences have been used to estimate the freshwater and heat storage trends in the Pacific over the study period. Along 248N, 108N, and 178S, where either North Pacific Intermediate Water or Antarctic Intermediate Water is present, the upper waters have increased in salinity, while the intermediate and deep waters have decreased in salinity. Although the depthintegrated salinity changes observed along these sections are small, the regional redistribution of freshwater associated with the water mass changes is significant and implies significant redistribution of surface freshwater fluxes over the Pacific. Heat loss has occurred along 478N and 178S, but significant warming has occurred along 248 and 108N, giving the Pacific a net heat gain of 1.79 3 108 Jm 22. The resulting steric sea level change for the area in the Pacific between 608N and 31.58S over the roughly 20-yr study period is estimated to be a rise of 0.85 mm yr21, consistent with those in existing literature, but larger than that estimated from numerical models reported in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Second Assessment Report.


This is a compilation of relevant practices of dealing with environmental and social issues during the planning, design and management of dams. It is designed as an informative learning tool for decision-makers and technical practitioners. The Compendium covers 9 topics selected by the multistakeholder Dams and Development Forum. It discusses the state of the art regarding dealing with the topics around the world. It shows how they are captured by regulatory frameworks and provides a number of examples illustrating how they have been implemented on the ground. Publishing Agency: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).


BACKGROUND
Fatigue is widespread among human immunodeficiency virus-positive (HIV+) patients, yet few studies have assessed effective treatments. The authors conducted a pilot study to evaluate the efficacy of modafinil for fatigue in this clinical population.

METHOD
Response was evaluated after a 4-week open-label trial. Data were collected from February 2003 through January 2004. Responders were offered 8 additional weeks of modafinil. Inclusion criteria included written approval from the primary care physician, clinically significant fatigue, current use of anti-retroviral medications, and the absence of treatable medical conditions known to cause fatigue. Exclusion criteria included untreated major depression and current substance abuse. Major outcome measures were the Fatigue Severity Scale, Chalder Fatigue Scale, Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, Beck Depression Inventory, and neuropsychological tests assessing verbal memory, speed of processing, and executive function. Immunologic and virologic measures were performed at baseline and week 4 to assess safety of treatment.

RESULTS
All 30 patients who enrolled completed 4 weeks of treatment; 24 (80%) were rated as responders. Responders showed statistically significant improvement on all measures of fatigue, depressive symptoms, and executive function, while nonresponders did not. Mean values of CD4 cell count and HIV RNA viral load did not change. The most common side effect was headache, followed by irritability and feeling "hyper."

CONCLUSION
This pilot study shows encouraging results for modafinil in alleviation of fatigue in HIV+ patients. In addition, depressive symptoms were substantially reduced. Improvements on measures of verbal memory and executive function were significant, but in the absence of a placebo control, the magnitude of effect due to practice cannot be determined.


Until the early nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future. Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions—insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets—while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk's rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one's own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name "financial services industry." Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system. Amid the nineteenth-century's waning faith in God's providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortune is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.


Patent classification systems are largely designed for administrative purposes, limiting their value for most research purposes. To address this deficiency, Hall, Jaffe, and Trajtenberg (2001) developed a higher-level classification for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Patent Citation Data File by aggregating U.S. Patent Classification (USPC) classes into six economically relevant technology categories (and 37 sub-categories) and classified granted patents accordingly. While this classification scheme has proved useful for researchers investigating US patent grants, comparable information on pending or abandoned patent applications has been unavailable for several reasons. We apply the NBER sub-categories to published and publicly-available unpublished patent applications as well as in-force and expired patents to create the USPTO Historical Patent Data Files, four research datasets containing time series and micro-level data by NBER sub-category. These new datasets comprise annual information on patent applications, patent grants, and patents-in-force dating back to 1840. Additionally, we provide information on the monthly stocks and flows of utility patent applications and grants from 1981 to 2014. Our hope is that researchers will make use of the data files for primary analysis or as controls for other projects. These data, for the first time, provide for detailed study of patent application disposal and the complex dynamics between new filings, pendency, and abandonment. Historical data enable researchers to put into context recent trends in patenting activity, litigation, and technological change.


Plants are adapted to respond to precise environmental stress conditions, activating specific molecular and physiological changes in order to minimise damage. Response to multiple stresses is therefore different to that to individual stresses. Simultaneous biotic and abiotic stress conditions are of particular interest, as the molecular signalling pathways controlling each interact and antagonise one another. Understanding such processes is crucial for developing broad-spectrum stress-tolerant crops.

This study characterised the molecular response of plants to the concurrent stresses of drought (abiotic stress) and infection with plant-parasitic nematodes (biotic stress). Drought stress increased susceptibility to infection with Heterodera schachtii in Arabidopsis thaliana. The whole-genome transcriptome response to these stresses was analysed using microarrays. Each stress induced a particular subset of differentially expressed genes. A novel programme of gene expression was activated specifically in response to a combination of drought and nematode stress, involving 2394 differentially regulated genes.

A diverse range of processes was found to be important in the response to multiple stresses, including plant hormone signalling, activation of transcription factors, cell wall modification, production of secondary metabolites, amino acid metabolism and pathogen defence signalling. Ten multiple stress-induced candidate genes were selected and their functions investigated using over-expression lines and loss-of-function mutants. Altered susceptibility to drought stress (TCP9, AZI1, RALFL8) and nematode infection (TCP9, RALFL8, ATMGL, AZI1) was observed in several of these lines.

The effect of combined drought and nematode infection on nutritional parameters of tomato fruits was analysed. Drought stress lengthened flowering time and negatively affected carotenoid accumulation. Infection with Meloidogyne incognita reduced yield and ripening time and had a positive effect on the accumulation of phenolic compounds. The stresses in combination increased fruit sugar content.

This work comprises the first whole-genome transcriptome study into combined abiotic and biotic stress. The results highlight the importance of studying stress factors in combination.


In the present study, we examined the binding of [3H][D-Ala2,D-Leu5]enkephalin ([ 3H]DADL) to bovine thalamic membranes. Scatchard plots were linear with a KD of 0.7 nM. However, competition experiments suggested binding heterogeneity. Approximately 20% of [3H]DADL binding was easily inhibited by [D-Pen2,D-Pen5]enkephalin (DPDPE) and was insensitive to morphine, implying labeling of delta receptors. The remaining 80% of binding was quite sensitive to both morphine and [D-Ala2,MePhe4,Gly(ol)5]enkephalin (DAGO) and insensitive to DPDPE, consistent with a mu receptor. However, this binding did not correspond to classical morphine-selective mu receptors. Unlike morphine-selective receptors, this binding had similar affinities for morphine, DAGO, DADL and [D-Ser2,Leu5]enkephalin-Thr6 (DSLET). In addition, it was far more sensitive to naloxonazine's wash-resistant inhibition and magnesium-induced enhancement of binding than either the morphine-selective (mu 2) or delta sites. [3H]DSLET binding yielded results very similar to those using [3H]DADL. In conclusion, approximately 80% of [3H]DADL binding in thalamus corresponds to a mu receptor distinct from the classical morphine-selective site. Based upon the results of our studies, we feel that this binding represents mu 1 receptors. DPDPE (10 nM) can effectively inhibit the binding of [3H]DADL to delta receptors, leaving a relatively homogeneous labeling of mu 1 sites. The availability of this selective binding assay should facilitate additional studies of mu 1 receptors.


Results of measurements of the bidirectional reflection function of snow for the solar zenith angle close to 54/spl deg/ are compared with a recently developed snow optical model based on the representation of snow grains as fractal particles. The model has a high accuracy out of the principal plane for the observation zenith angles smaller than 60/spl deg/. However, the accuracy is reduced in the principal plane. Specular light reflection by partially oriented snow plates on the snow surface not accounted for by the model can play a role for measurements in the principal plane. The model discussed can be used for the grain size retrieval using both ground and spaceborne measurements of the snow reflectance. This is supported by a high accuracy of the model in a broad spectral range 545-2120 nm as demonstrated in this work.


BACKGROUND--Nocturnal airway narrowing is a common problem for patients with asthma but the role of inflammation in its pathogenesis is unclear. Overnight changes in airway inflammatory cell populations were studied in patients with nocturnal asthma and in control normal subjects. METHODS--Bronchoscopies were performed at 0400 hours and 1600 hours in eight healthy subjects and in 10 patients with nocturnal asthma (> 15% overnight fall in peak flow plus at least one awakening/week with asthma). The two bronchoscopies were separated by at least five days, and both the order of bronchoscopies and site of bronchoalveolar lavage (middle lobe or lingula with contralateral lower lobe bronchial biopsy) were randomised. RESULTS--In the normal subjects there was no difference in cell numbers and differential cell counts in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid between 0400 and 1600 hours, but in the nocturnal asthmatic subjects both eosinophil counts (median 0.11 x 10(5) cells/ml at 0400 hours, 0.05 x 10(5) cells/ml at 1600 hours) and lymphocyte numbers (0.06 x 10(5) cells/ml at 0400 hours, 0.03 x 10(5) cells/ml at 1600 hours) increased at 0400 hours, along with an increase in eosinophil cationic protein levels in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (3.0 micrograms/ml at 0400 hours, 2.0 micrograms/l at 1600 hours). There were no changes in cell populations in the bronchial biopsies or in alveolar macrophage production of hydrogen peroxide, GM-CSF, or TNF alpha in either normal or asthmatic subjects at 0400 and 1600 hours. There was no correlation between changes in overnight airway function and changes in cell populations in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid. CONCLUSIONS--This study confirms that there are increases in inflammatory cell populations in the airway fluid at night in asthmatic but not in normal subjects. The results have also shown a nocturnal increase in eosinophil cationic protein levels in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, but these findings do not prove that these inflammatory changes cause nocturnal airway narrowing.


This paper investigates the term structure relations implied by a two-good model in which goods are durable and the preference function of consimters may be non separable both over time and the decision variables. The parameters characterizing preferences are estimated and the implied restrictions on the comovements of consumptions and the returns from following different investment strategies in bonds are examined. Both the durability of goods (modeled by a linear service technology) and the nonseparability of preferences over services from goods are important factors in explaining the time paths of individual returns. However, substantial evidence against our model is obtained when the restrictions associated with two different investment strategies are studied simultaneously. Specifically, the difference between the sample mean returns are too large relative to the difference between the sample covariances of the returns and the marginal utility from acquiring a unit of the numeraire good. Our findings suggest that these discrepancies are not a consequence of either the relatively small variability in aggregate acquisitions of goods, or our small estimates of relative risk aversion.


Following the Russian Revolution, the cultural and political landscape of Russia was strewn with contradictions. The dictatorship, censorship and repression of the Communist party existed alongside private enterprise, the black market and open debates on Socialism. In Russian Society and politics 1921-1929 Vladimir Brovkin offers a comprehensive cultural, political, economic and social history of developments in Russia in the 1920's. By examining the contrast between Bolshevik propaganda claims and social reality, the author explains how Communist representations were variously received and resisted by workers, peasants, students, women, teachers and party officials. He presents a picture of cultural diversity and rejection of Communist constraints through many means including unauthorised protest, religion, jazz music and poetry. In Russian Society and Politics 1921-1929 Vladimir Brovkin argues that these trends, if left unchecked, endangered the Communist Party's monopoly on political power. The Stalinist revolution can thus be seen as a pre-emptive strike against this independent and vibrant society as well as a product of Stalin's personality and communist ideology.


For years, Americans have seen India as a giant but inept state. That negative image is now obsolete. After a decade of drift and uncertainty, India is taking its expected place as one of the three major states of Asia. Its pluralist, secular democracy has allowed the rise of hitherto deprived castes and ethnic communities. Economic liberalization is gathering steam, with six percent annual growth and annual exports in excess of $30 billion. India also has a modest capacity to project military power. The country will soon have a two-carrier navy and it is developing a nuclear-armed missile capable of reaching all of Asia. This landmark book provides the first comprehensive assessment of India as a political and strategic power since India's nuclear tests, its 1999 war with Pakistan, and its breakthrough economic achievements. Stephen P. Cohen examines the domestic and international causes of India's "emergence," he discusses the way social structure and tradition shape Delhi's perceptions of the world, and he explores India's relations with neighboring Pakistan and China, as well as the United States. Cohen argues that American policy needs to be adjusted to cope with a rising India --and that a relationship well short of alliance, but far more intimate than in the past, is appropriate for both countries.


Hollow-beam geometry, in conjunction with mode-selective detection, is of importance for the development of high-sensitivity devices for the measurement of dynamic light scattering in living tissues. Its application to scattering methods in the eye makes it possible to increase diagnostic ability for some diseases that alter the scattering parameters in the vitreous as well as in other transparent tissues of the eye. We present a thorough theoretical analysis of the hollow-beam geometry proposed recently for dynamic light scattering measurements in the human eye. The aims of the analysis are the determination of the excitation and the observation beam profiles at the focal plane and the evaluation of the volume under test in the measurement, which allow prediction of the intensity of the measured signal. The above is carried out with comparisons with the classical setup. From the theoretical point of view, the most appealing feature of the hollow-beam geometry is high collection efficiency combined with high stability. In the analysis performed, the concept of the characteristic length of a scattering system is introduced. With simple formalism, this parameter allows the calculation of the collection efficiency for general beam shaping and is extremely useful for the comparison of the performance of different systems.


In this paper, a novel preamble structure, including a synchronization field (S-field) and a cell-search field (C-field), is proposed for orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing-based cellular systems. An efficient algorithm for downlink synchronization and cell search using the preamble is also proposed. The synchronization and cell-search process includes the initial symbol-timing estimation using continuously or, at least, periodically transmitted downlink signal, the frame detection, the fine symbol-timing estimation, the frequency-offset estimation using the preamble S-field, and the cell identification using the preamble C-field. Performance of each synchronization and cell-search step is analyzed and verified by computer simulation. The overall performance of the synchronization and cell search is then analyzed in terms of the mean acquisition time. It is shown that the proposed preamble with the corresponding synchronization and cell-search algorithm can provide a very robust synchronization and cell-search capability, even in bad cellular environments.


A trihybrid clone of Paulownia fortunei x tormentosa x elongata was used for pulp and paper production using the soda-anthraquinone (AQ) process, comparing the results with those from Paulownia fortunei. An autohydrolysis process had been previously carried out on this raw material. A composite central experimental design and a multiple regression were used for modeling and optimizing the process. A valuable liquid phase could be obtained from the autohydrolysis process of Paulownia, trying to minimize cellulose degradation for pulp and paper production. A compromise to maximize the glucan and minimize the xylan contents in the postautohydrolysis solid phase could be achieved at 187.5ºC and 15 minutes. A suitable cellulosic pulp with kappa number ranging from 12.2 to 69.2 and ISO brightness from 18.2 to 30.6% presented better results than those from other studies. Regarding handsheets physical properties (tensile index 37.3 N·m/g ) and viscosity (848 cm3/g), significant improvements could be obtained when compared with previous results of a similar process using Paulownia fortunei or Paulownia elongata.


OBJECTIVE
To determine whether magnetic resonance imaging measurements observed in the Alzheimer Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) convenience sample differ from those observed in the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging (MCSA) population-based sample.

DESIGN
Comparison of 2 samples.

SETTING
Fifty-nine recruiting sites for the ADNI in the United States and Canada and the MCSA, a population-based cohort in Olmsted County, Minnesota.

PATIENTS
Cognitively normal subjects and amnestic subjects with mild cognitive impairment were selected from the ADNI convenience cohort and MCSA population-based cohort. A simple random sample of subjects from both cohorts in the same age range was selected, and a second sample applied matching for age, sex, educational level, apolipoprotein E genotype, and Mini-Mental State Examination score.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Baseline hippocampal volumes and annual percentage of decline in hippocampal volume.

RESULTS
In the population-based sample, MCSA subjects were older, had less education, performed worse on the Mini-Mental State Examination, and had a family history of Alzheimer disease less often than did ADNI subjects. Baseline hippocampal volumes were larger in ADNI compared with MCSA cognitively normal subjects in the random sample, although no differences were observed after matching. Rates of decline in hippocampal volume were greater in the ADNI compared with the MCSA for cognitively normal subjects and those with amnestic mild cognitive impairment, even after matching.

CONCLUSIONS
Rates of decline in hippocampal volume suggest that ADNI subjects have a more aggressive brain pathologic process than MCSA subjects and hence may not be representative of the general population. These findings have implications for treatment trials that use ADNI-like recruitment mechanisms and for studies validating new diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer disease in its various stages.


Body temperature is precisely regulated to maintain homeostasis in homeothermic animals. Although it remains unproved whether change of body temperature constitutes a beneficial or a detrimental component of the septic response, temperature control should be an important entity in septic experiments. We investigated the effect of body temperature control on the lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced lung injury. Acute lung injury in rats was induced by intratracheal spray of LPS and body temperature was either clamped at 37 degrees C for 5 hours or not controlled. The severity of lung injury was evaluated at the end of the experiment. Intratracheal administration of aerosolized LPS caused a persistent decline in body temperature and a significant lung injury as indicated by an elevation of protein-concentration and LDH activity in the bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid and wet/dry weight (W/D) ratio of lungs. Administration of LPS also caused neutrophil sequestration and lipid peroxidation in the lung tissue as indicated by increase in myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity and malondialdehyde (MDA) production, respectively. Control of body temperature at 37 degrees C after LPS (LPS/BT37, n = 11) significantly reduced acute lung injury as evidenced by decreases in BAL fluid protein concentration (983 +/- 189 vs. 1403 +/- 155 mg/L) and LDH activity (56 +/- 10 vs. 123 +/- 17 deltamAbs/min) compared with the LPS group (n = 11). Although the W/D ratio of lung and MDA level were lower in the rats received temperature control compared with those received LPS only, the differences were not statistically significant. Our results demonstrated that intratracheal administration of aerosolized LPS induced a hypothermic response and acute lung injury in rats and controlling body temperature at a normal range may alleviate the LPS-induced lung injury.


The Micro-X Imaging X-ray Spectrometer is a sounding rocket payload slated for launch in 2011. An array of transition edge sensors will be used to obtain high resolution X-ray spectra of astronomical sources. An Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR) forms the heart of the instrument's cryogenic system. It consists of a Ferric Ammonium Alum (FAA) salt pill in the bore of a low current 4 T superconducting magnet. The detector array is accommodated inside a magnesium housing which is thermally connected to the FAA salt. A bath of superfluid helium functions as a heat sink for the ADR. The helium tank is suspended inside a lightweight aluminum vacuum vessel by a set of reentrant G10 thrust tubes. The cryogenic system has been designed to withstand the extreme structural loads encountered in rocket flight, while at the same time providing hold-times sufficiently long to facilitate convenient operation during the launch campaign. Due to the short duration of a sounding rocket flight, the thermal recovery time constant of the cold mass had to be kept on the order of only a few seconds. In addition, special attention has been paid to minimizing the heating of the cold stage due to the dissipation of vibration originating from the rocket motor. The assembly of the Micro-X cryogenic system has been completed, and performance tests have been carried out. The design of the Micro-X cryogenic system and the results of the performance tests are presented here-in.


MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs involved in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. The first miRNA was discovered less than 20 years ago in the context of studying Caenorabditis elegans development. The discovery of the second miRNA only 10 years ago led to knowledge that these small regulatory RNAs are widely expressed in eukaryotic organisms and involved in almost all cellular processes. It is generally believed that miRNAs predominantly bind to complementary sequences within the 3' untranslated region (3'UTR) of target mRNAs and promote target degradation and/or inhibit target translation. The central nervous system is composed of four principal cell types: neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and microglia. Although miRNAs are known to regulate development and adult functions of neural cells, a genome-wide profiling of miRNA expression across the four cell types had not previously been performed. We therefore undertook this challenge and globally compared miRNA expression in the four discrete neural cell types and discovered that they differ extensively in their miRNA profiles. The global impact and mechanistic determinants of miRNAs on gene regulation is of high current interest. Recent studies have shown that miRNAs play an important role in tissue-specific protein expression, most notably during early development and cell specification. In particular, several miRNAs have been shown to have important deterministic roles in neuronal or glial fate development. We expanded the known repertoire of miRNAs functioning in neural cell fate specification by showing that neuron-specific miR-376a and miR-434 promote neuronal differentiation, while glia-specific miR-223, miR-146a, miR-19 and miR-32 inhibit neuronal differentiation. Previous genomic analyses inferred that miRNAs have had a significant impact on the 3'UTR evolution, and noted that mammalian miRNAs typically have expression levels reciprocal to those of their targets. Consistent with the latter, a recent genome-wide study concluded that mammalian miRNAs predominantly lead to degradation of their target mRNAs. However, conflicting views existed as to the relevance of these findings in neural cells, possibly due to the previous lack of cellular resolution of miRNA expression. We addressed this issue on a genome-wide scale by comparing cell-type-specific mRNA and miRNA expression in isolated primary cultures. These analyses showed that, similar to the previously described findings for non-neural tissues and cell types, glial cells show prominent reciprocity of miRNA and predicted target expression and demonstrate functional effects consistent with preventing inappropriate expression of neuron-specific proteins. In contrast, neuron-specific miRNAs surprisingly showed a correlation to the expression of their targets. We further demonstrated that two of these neuron-specific miRNAs, miR-135b and miR-137, regulate the expression of mRNAs encoding important synaptic proteins and that the dynamics of these mRNA-miRNA pairs are regulated in a neural activity-dependent manner. The unexpected finding that neuronal miRNAs have an exceptional positively correlated relationship to their targets adds a new layer of complexity to the current understanding post-transcriptional gene expression regulation by miRNAs. Moreover, additional features of the unique relationships of miRNAs and signaling in neuronal cells suggest how miRNAs may help neurons regulate their highly specialized functions. MiRNAs have also been implicated as modulators of the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders. Interestingly, since one miRNA can regulate the expression of tens or hundreds of genes, manipulating miRNA levels can have broad positive or negative effects on the disease development and progression. We observed that miRNA-22 regulates expression of multiple neurodegeneration-related genes and that enhancing expression of miRNA-22 in models of neurodegeneration has a significant neuroprotective effect. We therefore propose miRNA-22 as a new candidate therapeutic capable of preventing neurodegeneration, which may be of benefit in a number of human afflictions for which there is currently a high unmet medical need.


Purveyors of knowledge management software have a disconcerting tendency to promote the myth that all problems may be solved by more powerful tools for the exchange of information in the workplace. This fallacy is based on the faulty assumption that knowledge management is about the management of knowledge (as if knowledge were a commodity that could be managed), as opposed to the management of people whose work depends critically on what they know. The origins of knowledge management are far more firmly rooted in the psychological legacy of organizational communication than they are in the technological legacy of information management systems. However, even organizational communication is an inadequate foundation, since various schools of thought in social theory, particularly the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens, inform us that interaction (in the workplace or in any other social setting) is not strictly limited to communication. Knowledge management thus requires moving beyond simplistic models of information exchange to more challenging problems of leveraging social interaction to the advantage of the enterprise. This paper focuses on the claim of structuration theory that the dimension of communication should be supplemented with additional dimensions of power and sanction. This perspective is then examined in light of a case study of crisis management practices, and the case study provides a basis for addressing implications for technological support.


ABSTRACT Introduction: Acute kidney injury (AKI) is frequently diagnosed in the neonatal population, especially in those admitted to intensive care units, and poses several challenges for clinicians mainly because of difficulties in timely identification of renal impairment and the need to administer drugs with potential nephrotoxicity. In this context, research on biomarkers is growing for their implication in the early detection of renal damage and their higher sensitivity in monitoring renal activity, but also as an important tool for drug development. Areas covered: We described the tools currently used to detect renal damage in neonatal settings, their limits and applicability, as well as the role of drugs on renal toxicity occurrence. Subsequently, we discuss current knowledge on new biomarkers for the detection of kidney injury and drug-induced kidney injury in neonates, and the qualification programs developed by regulatory agencies for biomarkers intended as tools in drug development. Expert opinion: Some molecules are emerging as potential biomarkers for early detection of AKI: promising data has demonstrated higher sensitivity and accuracy compared with tools currently used in the clinical setting. In addition, novel techniques (e.g. high power magnetic resonance imaging) to assess long-term consequences of AKI in neonates are in early steps of development.


While embracing the technological change and negotiating the changing demands of its diverse student needs, the University of the South Pacific (USP), is constantly engaging in various forms of curricula reforms to ensure that it best fits its context. The location of Japan –Pacific ICT Centre at USP's main campus has placed greater expectation on USP as the regional hub for ICT to be at the cutting edge in achieving excellence in distance education and e-learning. USP needs to recognize the importance of meeting the needs of its culturally diverse student population and at the same time is accountable to the needs of its member countries and donor partners. A recent move by USP to offer more of its courses through online and blended mode in order to reach out to regional students has been received with mixed reactions by both students and staff. As such there is a need for more research to gauge the effectiveness and inclusiveness in terms of meeting the diverse needs of our regional students, particularly those studying through online, distance and flexible mode (DFL). This research paper presents the results of a small scale study that investigated the significance of this curriculum reform in terms of access and equity and how it is perceived by both Laucala and regional students. More specifically, the paper intends to highlight the perceptions of regional students in online learning and teaching of one of the four interdisciplinary courses, 'Pacific Worlds' (UU204). Since 2012, UU204 has been introduced as a generic course, for all students enrolled at undergraduate level. The course is currently offered to both Laucala and the regional students through a common curriculum content using an online mode. The paper presents a number of interesting results on students' perceptions of e-learning and e-teaching at USP.


This paper investigates the relationship between architecture and theories of the avant-garde in the critical projects of the 1970s, with a focus on the theories of Peter Bürger and Manfredo Tafuri. Both Tafuri and Bürger were writing from within the context of a radicalized Marxism and were fuelled by an intellectual pessimism towards the totalizing systems of cultural production that questioned the role of resistance in aesthetics and the inability of the historical avant-gardes to engage within the political and economic fields of contemporary society. While there is a common ancestry to these two approaches, and mutual acceptance of the failure of the avant-garde project, the work of Tafuri has had an enduring influence on architectural history and theory, while Bürger's synchronous work has attracted only a modest amount of scholarly attention in architecture despite its ongoing legacy in art theory and, particularly, within an American context. This paper argues that Bürger's dialectical approach has a significance for architectural theory and presents a discursive position through which Marxism and architecture can be advanced. Through a detailed reading of these two approaches, the paper attempts to position architecture as a particular strategy of the avant-garde that overshadowed all fields of aesthetic production in the period.


With the increasing development of economy and society in China, uses of public urban places have been changed by an incredible pace, especially in Beijing, the capital of China. The public space in local urban environment plays a significant role for catering to people's functional, social and leisure needs. The focus of this research is to explore the relationship between the retail-oriented public places and people's use within three selected study sites in Beijing, Wangfujing Street, Sanlitun Village, and The Place, and to examine the retail public spaces which can satisfy the physical and psychological needs of people when they take activity in such places. Through literature review to analyse the theoretical issues on different factors, such as culture, urban design, physical setting, historical context, and contemporary use, and especially the retail public places developed in Chinese context, etc. and to establish the awareness of what the research subject refer to and what such places people like to use. And then focus on the public life in the city of Beijing in practice with the aim of finding out how these retail-oriented public places are understood, managed and used, including the use and quality of design amenities for sitting, circulation, and related activities by local people in urban environment. To address this research, a qualitative research methodology is adopted mainly involves observation, interview, and small number of questionnaire. The mixed-methods approach is undertaken by using behaviour mapping and user perception to understand the public environment as a combination of patterns of behaviour and patterns of the physical environment.