OBJECTIVES
Musculoskeletal development of the upper limbs during exposure to weight-bearing loading is under-researched during early pubescent growth. The purpose was to assess the changes in upper body musculoskeletal strength in young girls following 6 months of non-elite gymnastics participation.

METHODS
Eighty-four girls, 6-12 years were divided into groups based on gymnastics participation: high-training (HGYM, 6-16 hr/wk), low-training (LGYM, 1-5 hr/wk), and non-gymnasts (NONGYM). Volumetric BMD, bone geometry, estimated bone strength and muscle size were assessed at the non-dominant forearm (4% and 66% radius and ulna) with pQCT. DXA assessed aBMD and body composition. Tests for explosive power, muscle strength, and endurance were also performed.

RESULTS
Interaction effects were observed in all variables at the 4% radius. At the 66% ulna, HGYM and LGYM had greater bone mass, size and bone strength than NONGYM, furthermore a dose-response relationship was observed at this location. Body composition was better for HGYM than LGYM and NONGYM, however muscle function was better for HGYM and LGYM than NONGYM.

CONCLUSION
The greatest changes were obtained with more than one gymnastics class per week. Separating gymnastics participation-related changes from those associated with normal growth and development remains difficult, particularly at the 4% radius.


Depression and low self-esteem are issues that confront many adults as they age. These concerns are particularly prominent in older adults who move into long-term care facilities, such as assisted living centers or nursing homes. With the increasing number of older adults, it is important to design interventions that can help decrease depression and increase self-esteem levels in this population. This quantitative study used the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE) and the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) to explore the potential benefits of a four-week, eight-session magic as a therapeutic recreation intervention (magic) program on the self-esteem and depression levels of older adults. Also, the relationship between levels of depression and self-esteem was explored. Though results were not statistically significant, there were improvements in some individuals' depression and self-esteem, showing potential for a magic program to improve depression and self-esteem levels in older adults. Furthermore, a relationship was shown between self-esteem and depression, specifically with high levels of self-esteem correlating with low levels of depression. This result provides supportive evidence that interventions with the potential to improve self-esteem, like magic, could be helpful in decreasing depression. Limitations of this study as well as directions for further research are discussed.


Objective: To explore the effect of the fixation of the bone plate, the hollow screw and the band anchorage in the large segmental fracture of the humerus.
Methods: A total of 108 patients with displaced large fissure of the humerus were selected as the study subjects from January 2015 to January 2017, and they were randomly divided into fixation group (group A), hollow screw fixation group (group B) and bandline anchor fixation group (group C), 36 cases in each group. The intraoperative blood loss, operation time, length of stay and fracture healing time were recorded for the three groups of patients. The shoulder function of the three groups was scored. The complications were recorded in three groups of patients follow up for 2 years.
Results: The intraoperative blood loss and operation time of groups B and C were significantly lower than those of group A (P<0.05). The operation time of group C was significantly lower than that of group B (P<0.05). The time of fracture healing in groups B and C was significantly lower than that in group A (P<0.05). The time of fracture healing in group C was significantly lower than that in group B (P<0.05). The scores of group C were significantly higher than those of groups B and C, and there was significant difference between the two groups (P<0.05). A group of 6 cases of complications, B group of 2 cases, C group of 2 cases.
Conclusion: Compared with the fixation of the plate and the fixation of the hollow screw, the clinical effect of the line anchorage fixation is better, the patient is well recovered and worthy of clinical promotion.


The objective of this paper was to analyze, in terms of marketing strategy, the geographical indications (GIs) as a competitive differential in the wine market. The paper is based on research that targeted the wine consumers from the Distrito Federal (Federal District) with a high degree of involvement with the product. This research had an exploratory-descriptive nature and used selfadministrated structured questionnaires. Marketing strategies, mainly market segmentation and positioning and consumers' behavior, were its conceptual basis. The target group's perceptions about several marketing factors which influence wine consumption, especially the geographical indications, were analyzed. According to the consumers, the GIs are a differentiating factor in this market and a relevant characteristic of the wines. Most of these consumers were willing to pay more for wines that have a GI. Finally, considering the niche market analyzed in this study, it was concluded that the GIs are a differentiating factor. Therefore, the producers, wineries and their respective regions that construct a market positioning based on geographical indications and on consumers with a high degree of involvement with the wine product as their target market can obtain positive commercial results. Palavras-chave: indicacoes geograficas, estrategia mercadologica, mercado do vinho, segmentacao e posicionamento de mercado.


Any number of provocative considerations suggest themselves when we consider the peculiar position of American literature in China--not to say modern American writers, and certainly not to say so contemporary a writer as Thomas Pynchon. The institutional commitment on the part of the Chinese to American literature is quite extensive, and would require a separate essay in itself.


Identification of harvested and fallen trees is a prerequisite for the detection and measurement of changes in forests. This paper presents a three step approach to monitor harvested and fallen trees based on direct comparison of repeated high density airborne LIDAR data. In a first step differences between data sets are obtained from a point to point comparison, such that the data can be reduced to the deviating points only. Secondly, the resulting points are clustered into spatially connected regions using region growing. Finally, individual trees are extracted from the clusters by analysing their relative proximity and by analysing geometric properties of points in the clusters. Two data sets, acquired at a four year interval and covering a forest with mainly deciduous trees, are compared. First results show that most points relating to a change can be extracted and that clustering of these with region growing enables us to efficiently separate harvested and fallen trees from the remaining trees. Grouped harvested trees could not be separated using the region growing approach due to touching crowns. Segmentation of these using spectral clustering however identified individual regions well, but the results depend mainly on the pre-defined number of clusters. Crowns of grouped trees can be therefore separated if the number of trees is known.


As advances in technology make integrating more transistors on a single integrated circuit (IC) feasible, test data volume becomes one of major factors of testing system-on-chips (SoCs). The large volume of test data leads to increasing test application time and needs more expensive Automatic test equipment (ATE) with high memory. In this paper, we present broadcast scan compression based on deterministic pattern generation algorithm to reduce the volume of test data. The proposed method further improves compression ratio of the volume of test data by exploiting advances of both broadcast scan compression and pattern generation using linear feedback shift register (LFSR). The volume of test data can be reduced by feeding multiple scan chains from a few LFSRs and by compressing the data using LFSRs. ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits verify the proposed method and the experimental results show that the compression ratio is up to 10× which means test application time also is reduced extremely.


Background: Psychosocial problems are common in patients with diabetes. However, data on psychosocial issues affecting patients with diabetes in Zambia are scarce. The present study explored sources of stress, stress coping strategies, stigma and perceived quality of life and care as experienced by adolescents living with Type 1 Diabetes in Zambia. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were carried out. Three groups of participants involving adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes (n = 10), caregivers (n = 8) and health practitioners (n = 4) were interviewed. Transcripts were analyzed using a thematic approach. Results: Stress was commonly reported by adolescents mainly stemming from social, psychological and physical sources. To deal with stress, adolescents often employed different coping strategies such as adapting, accepting and avoiding among others. Both internal factors (those relating to the patients themselves) and external factors (those related to the context of the patients') influenced the patients' quality of health care. In addition, low quality of life was an issue among adolescents and their families. Poor diet, low socioeconomic status and lack of medicine were factors affecting quality of health care. Conclusion: Stress was an issue affecting adolescents; the coping strategies employed were sometimes maladaptive such as avoiding injecting themselves to escape stress. Several aspects of quality of life were suboptimal in both adolescents and their families, such as stigmatization, short life expectancy, low socioeconomic status and poor social participation. Findings show that there is an urgent need for a strong response from all stakeholders (governments, patients, organizations and companies) to improve diabetes care and living conditions for young people with type 1 diabetes living in Zambia.


Tom Peters says "Hal Rosenbluth's story is one of the great unsung business success sagas -- and in this fully revised and updated 10th anniversary edition of The Customer Comes Second, Rosenbluth and his co-author Diane McFerrin Peters offer proof that his leadership style is one for the new millennium. The secret of his success, and that of his company, Rosenbluth International is simple: Hal Rosenbluth concentrates on his employees first, and his customers second. This is a formula that has worked for more than two decades, and has transformed his company from a small family business into a global industry leader, grossing over $6 billion. In this classic on counterintuitive management practice, the entrepreneurial genius and visionary leader of Rosenbluth International shows you how to use exceptional service to win in any industry! This insightful and compelling book reveals new ideas for hiring, motivating and managing employees, and shows how best to integrate technological innovation and creative solutions into the everyday work experience to ensure that your employees -- your company's greatest asset -- win you the best customers and propel your business to the greatest heights of success. Rosenbluth's tried and tested methods show you how to build highly effective teams, inspire loyalty and initiative, and turn your workplace into a hotbed of synergy where people produce consistently incredible results. For more than ten years, the strategies and ideas in this book have galvanized CEOs, entrepreneurs and managers everywhere, making fans of business leaders and thinkers like Jeff Greenfield, Scott McNealy and many others. These secrets continue to prove themselves today as Rosenbluth International has rapidly emerged as the foremost travel management company since its industry's devastation following 9/11. Find out how Hal Rosenbluth's winning ideas can transform you and your company: by putting your customer second, you're guaranteed to win!


This paper aims to provide a systematic analysis and formal presentation of high-level scenarios for the future development of Cognitive Radio business ecosystem. It uses the Intuitive Logics as a methodology for constructing four equally probable scenarios in a matrix at the intersection of two identified major uncertainties. The paper shows the importance of using high-level scenarios as a guiding framework for understanding the causal-consequential relationships and actions of different stakeholders that may help in building the strategies for responding and further facilitating the development of Cognitive Radio.


The field of orality-literacy studies has helped broaden understanding m many disciplines, but it has not been introduced into discussions of the short story with any rigor, To approach the short story as something other than a kind of truncated novel and thus to consider what it means to read a story, I would like to propose an alternative model for studying the short-story form. That model is the oral epic. The epic is not the oral genre most immediately associated with the short story: Mary Louise Pratt, among other critics, has discussed the proximity of the written story to oral forms of the fairy tale, the exemplum, and the ghost story as it has influenced theoretical discourse surrounding the short story (189-91). The oral epic differs, however, from these shorter forms because of its density and the complex nature of its audience, both of which are relevant to the modern written text. Certainly, this is a genre that dramatically differs from the short story because it is not written down and because, more often than not, it occurs in verse rather than in prose. In his useful book, Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong also warns that for anyone in a literate culture, an oral way of thinking is extremely difficult to imagine.(1) With these reservations firmly in mind, however, we should nonetheless be able to learn something useful about storytelling from the oral epic. This pairing may be helpful to theorists and students of the short story precisely because of its unlikeliness. It is not meant as a way to separate clearly the short story from the novel, but as a way to step around the very comparison between those two written forms that has become the conventional method of understanding what a short story may be. That comparison can at times be no more inevitable than a recurring comparison between a sonnet and a long poem would be in a critical discussion of the sonnet. While the short story and the novel may share the very important qualities of being fictional, narrative, and written in prose, therefore, my aim in these pages is to focus on the story as a genre in its own right, bringing in comparisons to the novel only as occasional points of overlap and reference. The oral-epic episode as a model serves to isolate and render more complex a critical understanding of the short story on a number of ways, and all of these contribute to an approach to the genre that I call a "poetics of immediacy." To begin with, the oral epic gives us another way to understand the density of meaning in short stories. It also provides a paradigm of audience that may bring to light certain aspects of reading the short story that are not as prevalent in discussions of the reading of texts in general. This audience, as it is related to the short story, works on the oral dynamic of a participating community, although the need to situate that community in terms of our myths or our politics can be problematic in a modern context. In the meantime, the density and multiple dimensions of the oral episode suggest another approach to ironic and metaphorical structures within the story form, and that new focus may need to rely more heavily on the unique role of the reader of the short story. 1. The study of oral art, as it occurs in primarily oral cultures, is an ongoing effort for which living examples are dwindling as the world becomes more and more literate. Within a diverse corpus of field studies and material, the work of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and Adam Parry, although controversial, continues to serve as a cornerstone for the literary focus of much of the work on oral epic.(2) Oral narratives are highly formulaic. This formulaic construction applies not only to the surface language of a poem or story, but operates on a much deeper level, so that the most basic ideas that construct a narrative are themselves common and reusable. One of the most familiar instances of oral epic is The Odyssey although, ironically enough, the text we have put at the center of our canon of Western culture is itself a static version of what was probably a constantly changing oral narrative. …


We consider a standard federated learning (FL) setup where a group of clients periodically coordinate with a central server to train a statistical model. We develop a general algorithmic framework called FedLin to tackle some of the key challenges intrinsic to FL, namely objective heterogeneity, systems heterogeneity, and infrequent and imprecise communication. Our framework is motivated by the observation that under these challenges, various existing FL algorithms suffer from a fundamental speed-accuracy conflict: they either guarantee linear convergence but to an incorrect point, or convergence to the global minimum but at a sub-linear rate, i.e., fast convergence comes at the expense of accuracy. In contrast, when the clients' local loss functions are smooth and strongly convex, we show that FedLin guarantees linear convergence to the global minimum, despite arbitrary objective and systems heterogeneity. We then establish matching upper and lower bounds on the convergence rate of FedLin that highlight the effects of infrequent, periodic communication. Finally, we show that FedLin preserves linear convergence rates under aggressive gradient sparsification, and quantify the effect of the compression level on the convergence rate. Notably, our work is the first to provide tight linear convergence rate guarantees, and constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of gradient sparsification in FL.


A procedure is described to correct monochromatic reflectances simulated by a radiative transfer model to narrow-band reflectances measured by a satellite imager and affected by trace-gas absorption in the atmosphere. This atmospheric correction scheme has been implemented in the KNMI/CM-SAF Cloud Physical Properties (CPP) retrieval algorithm, version 3.0. Correction factors have been calculated for three satellite instruments (SEVIRI, MODIS, and AVHRR) and five spectral bands (around wavelengths 0.6, 0.8, 1.6, 2.1, and 3.8 μm). The effect of atmospheric correction on CPP retrievals based on the 0.6and 1.6-μm bands is illustrated using SEVIRI data over Europe. On average, the cloud optical thickness increases by ∼3%, while the particle effective radius decreases by ∼10%.


: The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) phase is designed to increase by an order of magnitude the amount of data to be collected by the LHC experiments. The foreseen gradual increase of the instantaneous luminosity of up to more than twice its nominal value of 10 × 10 34 cm − 1 s − 2 during Phase I and Phase II of the LHC running, presents special challenges for the experiments. The region with high pseudo rapidity ( η ) region of the forward muon spectrometer (2 . 4 > | η | > 1 . 9) is not equipped with RPC stations. The increase of the expected particles rate up to 2 kHz cm − 2 (including a safety factor 3) motivates the installation of RPC chambers to guarantee redundancy with the CSC chambers already present. The current CMS RPC technology cannot sustain the expected background level. A new generation of Glass-RPC (GRPC) using low-resistivity glass was proposed to equip the two most far away of the four high η muon stations of CMS. In their single-gap version they can stand rates of few kHz cm − 2 . Their time precision of about 1 ns can allow to reduce the noise contribution leading to an improvement of the trigger rate. The proposed design for large size chambers is examined and some preliminary results obtained during beam tests at Gamma Irradiation Facility (GIF++) and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN are shown. They were performed to validate the capability of such detectors to support high irradiation environment with limited consequence on their efficiency.


To overcome the offset voltage (VOS) of output buffer due to large variation on characteristics of thin-film transistor (TFT) in low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) technology, a class-B output buffer with offset compensation circuit for the data driver is presented in this paper. This proposed class-B output buffer can operate at 50-kHz operation frequency with a 2-8-V output swing for extended graphic array (XGA) application, and it has been demonstrated in 3-mum LTPS technology. Using the offset compensation technique, the VOS of output buffer can be controlled within plusmn100 mV under 2-to-8 V signal operation to achieve a high resolution and quality liquid crystal display (LCD) panel


Destabilization of the plasma membrane, which is a primary cause of freezing injury, is a consequence of freeze-induced osmotic stresses and cell dehydration. However, the mechanism of injury depends on the magnitude of the osmotic stress and the extent of cell dehydration. Over the range of 0 to -5 $^\circ$ C, destabilization of the plasma membrane in protoplasts isolated from non-acclimated rye leaves is a result of osmotic excursions, because freeze-induced osmotic contraction results in endocytotic vesiculation of the plasma membrane and sufficiently large area reductions are irreversible. At lower temperatures, the protoplasts are subjected to extremely large osmotic pressures (-12 MPa at -10 $^\circ$ C), and there are several changes in the ultrastructure of the plasma membrane, including the formation of aparticulate domains and lamellar- to hexagonal $\_{II}$ -phase transitions. These changes, which are manifestations of demixing of the membrane components, are predicted by a theory of bilayer interactions at low levels of hydration. During cold acclimation, the cryobehaviour of the plasma membrane is altered; osmotic contraction results in the reversible formation of exocytotic extrusions and the propensity for dehydration-induced demixing and lamellar- to hexagonal $\_{II}$ -phase transitions is decreased. In both cases, the differential behaviour is also observed in liposomes prepared from plasma membrane lipids isolated from non-acclimated and cold-acclimated leaves. However, as no lipid species are unique to the plasma membrane of either non-acclimated or cold-acclimated leaves, the differential behaviour is caused by altered lipid-lipid interactions because of different proportions of the lipid species. Hence the behaviour of the plasma membrane can be altered by using a protoplast-liposome fusion procedure to selectively modify the lipid composition of the plasma membrane. These studies provide direct evidence that the increased cryostability of the plasma membrane is a consequence of alterations in its lipid composition.


This report describes the effects of the presence of mica in China clay sand on its physical properties as a roadmaking material. It shows that the addition of coarse mica to a sand reduces the density achieved for a given state of compaction, but that this effect is as much due to the resultant change in grading as to the resilience of the mica. Other effects are considered, including that of fine mica on frost susceptibility. The results are also compared with others from earlier work using a silty-clay thus bringing the known effects of mica together in a single report. Work on measuring the mica content showed that the inclined vibrating table used previously failed to separate the mica in the China clay sands but that a modified density-column separator could be used as an alternative to the dielectric separator. Conclusions from the study confirm that the quantity of mica normally present in the China clay sands is not deleterious and suggests that many problems attributed in the past to mica are quite likely to have resulted from other causes, such as the overall particle-size distribution.(a) /TRRL/


Abstract. A number of circuits controlling feed intake have been identified in rodents in which circulating dietary metabolites are detected by the brainstem and the hypothalamus converting these input signals to anorexic responses. Dietary metabolites used by dairy cows, however, are not identical with those of rodents calling for the elucidation of feedingrelated pathways in ruminants. In the present study we examined potentially relevant plasma metabolites and hypothalamic signalling pathways in ad libitum and restrictively fed early lactating dairy cows. 60 h feed energy restriction led to significantly increased non-esterified fatty acid (NEFA), Gln, Gly, His, and 3-Me-histine but decreased Asp, Asn, beta-Ala, Tyr, and Trp concentrations. In immunohistochemical studies, we found that feed energy restriction is associated with elevated numbers of parvocellular but not magnocellular orexin A neurons in the lateral, dorsomedial and posterior hypothalamic area. In parvocellular orexin A neurons we determined complete colocalisation with cFOS in energy restricted cows. In the majority of orexin A neurons we further found colocalisation with activated adenosine monophosphate activated kinase (AMPK) as well as with peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma (PPARγ). Feed restriction also induced activation (phosphorylation) of AMPK and increased expression of PPARγ when Western Blots were normalized to β-actin. These results suggest that orexin A associated with AMPK and PPARγ signalling is involved in the control of energy homeostasis of dairy cows.


This paper provides an overview of the social-psychological factors that are likely to influence the trust and acceptance of shared SAE Level 4 Automated Vehicles (AVs). It begins with a short summary of what influences users' engagement in ride-sharing for conventional vehicles, followed by the factors that affect user acceptance and trust of robotic systems. Using studies of human robot interaction (HRI), recommendations are made on how to improve users' trust, acceptance and use of shared AVs. Results from real-world studies and on-line surveys provide some contradictory views regarding willingness to accept and use the systems, which may be partly due to the fact that on-line users have not had actual interactions with AVs. We recommend that the pathway to adoption and acceptance of AVs should be incremental and iterative, providing users with hands-on experience of the systems at every stage. This removes unrealistic, idealised, expectations, which can ultimately hamper acceptance. Manufacturers may also use new technologies, social-networks and crowd-sourcing techniques to receive feedback and input from consumers themselves, in order to increase adoption and acceptance of shared AVs.


The goal of medical treatment for Crohn's disease includes improving patients' quality of life while reducing the need for hospitalization and surgery. The current medical armamentarium includes 5-aminosalicylates, corticosteroids, immunomodulators, and biologic agents. In the past, response to treatment was measured by clinical improvement in symptoms; however, with the advent of disease-modifying medications, mucosal healing has emerged as an increasingly important goal of therapy. Mucosal healing, or endoscopic remission, is associated with increased rates of clinical remission, fewer hospitalizations, and fewer abdominal surgeries. Both the immunomodulator and biologic classes of medications are effective at inducing mucosal healing. Despite several limitations, mucosal healing has become a desirable and valid measure of disease activity.


A growing body of academic literature discusses the problem of wrongful convictions — i.e., convictions of factually innocent defendants for crimes they did not commit. But how often do such miscarriages of justice actually occur? Justice Scalia cited a figure of 0.027% as a possible error rate. But the conventional view in the literature is that, for violent crimes, the error rate is much higher — at least 1%, and perhaps as high as 4% or even more.
This Article disputes that conventional wisdom. Based on a careful review of the available empirical literature, it is possible to assemble the component parts of a wrongful conviction rate calculation by looking at error rates at trial, the ratio of wrongful convictions obtained through trials versus plea bargains, and the percentage of cases resolved through pleas. Combining empirically based estimates for each of these three factors, a reasonable (and possibly overstated) calculation of the wrongful conviction rate appears, tentatively, to be somewhere in the range of 0.016%–0.062% — a range that comfortably embraces Justice Scalia's oftencriticized figure.
If this Article's tentative error-rate range is correct, it means that previous scholarship has significantly overstated the risk of wrongful conviction. Moreover, it is possible to compare the lifetime risk of being wrongfully convicted to the risk of being a victim of a violent crime. The relative risk ratio appears to be about 30,000 to 1. This decidedly skewed ratio suggests that reform measures for protecting the innocent may need to be cautiously assessed to ensure that they do not interfere with the important goal of prosecuting the guilty.


Hydrodynamic characteristics (mixing in the liquid phase) in a bubble column with a non-Newtonian liquid phase (aqueous solutions of carboxymethylcellulose, or CMC, at different concentrations) were measured and correlated. Experiments in a 0.2-m diameter, 2.4-m-high bubble column were carried out to determine degree of mixing in the liquid phase at various gas and liquid flow rates. The axial dispersion model was used in the two operating modes, batch and continuous, and the tanks-in-series model was used just in the case of continuous mode. The axial dispersion model with closed-closed boundary conditions fit experimental data quite well and thus was used to estimate the axial dispersion coefficient. This parameter was higher in batch mode than in continuous mode, and its trend was to increase as superficial gas velocity increased.


This guideline has been developed for paid child performers in the entertainment industry who are working in live performance, film, television, or another recorded medium. Where tutoring or travel is part of the workday, these guidelines also apply.


Thirty sites were sampled in southern Biscayne Bay and Manatee Bay in December 1999 to determine the extent of toxicity in sediments. Analyses and assays included: pesticides and phenols in seawater; chemical contaminants in sediment; amphipod mortality, HRGS P450, sea urchin sperm fertilization and embryology, MicrotoxTM, MutatoxTM, grass shrimp AChE and juvenile clam mortality assays; sea urchin sperm, amphipod and oyster DNA damage; and benthic community assessment. Sediment sites near the mouth of canals showed evidence of contamination. Contaminant plumes and associated toxicity do not appear to extend seaward of the mouth of the canals in an appreciable manner. Concentrations of contaminants in the sediments in open areas of Biscayne and Manatee Bays are generally low. (PDF contains 140 pages)


This paper addresses the intercalibration of the infrared channels 1 (10.9 mum), 2 (11.9 mum), and 4 (3.8 mum) of the Stretched Visible and Infrared Spin Scan Radiometer (SVISSR) onboard China's geostationary satellite FengYun 2C (FY-2C) against the channels of the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard Terra and of the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS) onboard Aqua. The effects of the wide spectral range of SVISSR channels 1, 2, and 4 were evaluated. Three methods, including the ray-matching method, the radiative transfer modeling method, and the high spectral convolution method, were developed in a tropical region using the SVISSR/FY-2C, MODIS/Terra, and AIRS/Aqua measurements in December 2006 and 2007. The results reveal that the onboard calibration of SVISSR/FY-2C was stable during that period; however, calibration discrepancies exist between MODIS and SVISSR channels and between AIRS and SVISSR channels. The intercalibration coefficients of SVISSR/FY-2C channels were obtained for each of the three methods.


The Armenian Studies have a very long tradition in Italy. However, the establishment of the official teaching of Armenian at Ca' Foscari is particularly significant. It is a direct continuation of many Armenian traces present in the lagoon city for centuries, such as the birth of the first Casa Armena in Europe in 1245, the prosperous diplomatic relations between the Republic of Serenissima and the Kingdom of Armenia, the printing of the first Armenian book in 1512, the arrival of Armenian merchants from Julfa, who highly contributed to the economy of Venice, and finally the institution of the Mekhitarist Congregation of the Armenian monks on the island of San Lazzaro, recognised by Napoleon as Academia Armena Sancti Lazari. After an historical excursus, the paper will go on to detail some significant periods of Armenian Studies at Ca' Foscari.


Cultural goods are increasingly significant under neoliberal conditions of regulatory restructuring that favor investments in informational capital in so-called "knowledge economies." Linguistic difference, linguistic practice, and increasingly standardized genres of representation have been constitutive of new technologies of government and reterritorialization in Latin America in the last quarter-century as global policy regimes that valorize diversity have been interpreted and implemented. The argument is presented through a critical multiscalar survey of recent ethnographic research in Latin American contexts in which we can trace the ways and means through which international trade, intellectual property, and biodiversity regimes have influenced representations and management of knowledge to effect new forms of spatialization. Indigenous social collectives constituted as self-managing communities have embraced possessive, if not necessarily proprietary, attitudes toward traditional knowledge, plant genetic resources, and food sources, learning to mark goods and services to indicate culturally specific conditions of origin. As culturalized communities become subjects of neoliberal government, however, they are called upon to project their distinctive assets so as to make them politically and economically legible to new interlocutors. This has provoked new forms of reflexivity around assets, goods, values, and norms, and provided new resources for rights-based struggles in an emerging field of cultural politics in which neoliberal multiculturalism is vernacularized in more embedded markets and more pluralist polities.


Underlay femtocells have recently emerged as a key technology that can significantly improve the coverage and performance of next- generation wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for interference management that enables a number of femtocells to cooperate and improve their downlink rate, by sharing spectral resources and suppressing intra-tier interference using interference alignment. We formulate a coalitional game in partition form among the femtocells and propose a distributed algorithm for coalition formation. Using our approach, the femtocell access points can make individual decisions on whether to cooperate or not, while maximizing a utility function that captures the cooperative gains and the costs in terms of transmit power for information exchange. We show that, using the proposed coalition formation algorithm, the femtocells can self-organize into a network partition composed of disjoint femtocell coalitions, which constitutes the recursive core of the game. Simulation results show significant gains in terms of average payoff per femtocell, reaching up to 30% relative to the non-cooperative scheme.


The events triggering autoimmune diseases are to large extent unknown and model diseases are an important tool in studies aiming to elucidate molecular mechanisms in autoimmunity. Autoimmune Addison's disease (AAD) is a rare disease characterized by autoimmune destruction of adrenal glands and most patients with AAD have autoantibodies against the enzyme 21‑hydroxylase in the adrenal cortex. The autoimmune destruction in AAD is however suspected to be initiated by T cells. One of the most important investigations in this thesis was to characterize the T cell response in AAD. It could be concluded the T cells in AAD patients respond to three immunodominant epitopes on the 21-hydroxylase.In addition, this thesis aims to gain updated data on comorbidities, replacement therapy, autoantibody profiles, and metabolic factors in AAD. A cohort of 660 AAD patients was studied and it was found that AAD patients are prone to develop other autoimmune conditions. AAD is one of three main disease components Autoimmune Polyendocrine Syndrome type 1 (APS-1), a rare disorder caused by mutations in the AutoImmune REgulator gene (AIRE) that can be potentially fatal without timely diagnosis. Screening for autoantibodies against interferon-ω, interferon-α4, and interleukin-22 revealed four new APS-1 patients among the AAD cohort, confirmed by the presence of disease causing mutations in the AIRE gene.Cancer Associated Retinopathy (CAR) is a paraneoplastic phenomenon arising as a consequence to an autoimmune response triggered by a malignant neoplasm present in the body. This disease is devastating and it is valuable to identify new biomarkers associated with CAR, not least from a tumor diagnostic perspective. In this thesis, a patient with osteosarcoma and CAR was studied and by screening of a proteom array, and the novel CAR autoantigen Aryl hydrocarbon receptor interacting protein-like 1 (AIPL1) was identified.In conclusion, this thesis covers studies on T cell and B cell responses in AAD. Moreover, it includes an update on clinical and immunological characterisation of AAD patients. Finally, a novel autoantigen in CAR was identified and proposed as a diagnostic marker for the paraneoplastic syndrome.


The effect of insulin on the disposal of intravenous glucose was examined employing the euglycemic insulin clamp technique in 24 normal subjects. When the plasma insulin concentration was raised by approximately 100 μU/ml, total glucose metabolism rose to 6.63 ± 0.38 mg/kg · min. Basal splanchnic (hepatic venous catheter technique) glucose production, 2.00 increased only slightly. These results suggest that the ability of higher doses of insulin to further stimulate glucose metabolism is primarily the result of increased glucose storage by peripheral tissues, most likely muscle. 0.15 ± mg/kg · min, reverted to a small net glucose uptake which averaged 0.33 mg/kg · min over the ensuing 2 h. This represented only 5% of the total glucose metabolized. In contrast, leg (femoral venous catheterization) glucose uptake rose from 1.18 ± 0.14 to 8.40 ± 1.06 mg/kg of leg wt. per min. If all muscles in the body respond similarly to those in the leg, muscle would account for 85% of the total glucose metabolism. To determine the relative contributions of glucose oxidation versus glucose storage by peripheral tissues following hyperinsulinemia, we performed euglycemic insulin clamp studies in combination with indirect calorimetry. Basal glucose oxidation, 1.21 ± 0.10 mg/kg min, rose to 2.28 ± 0.16 (P < 0.01), and this increase above baseline accounted for only 20% of the total glucose metabolized, 5.44 ± 0.38 mg/kg · min. Following insulin, glucose storage increased to 3.18 ± 0.34 mg/kg min and was responsible for 59% of the total glucose metabolized. These results indicate that the primary effect of insulin on muscle tissue is to enhance glucose storage, presumably as glycogen. When a higher degree of hyperinsulinemia (163 ± 19 μl/ml) was created while maintaining euglycemia, total glucose metabolism (7.99 ± 0.58) and glucose storage (5.30 ± 0.80) both increased (P < 0.01) compared with the lower dose insulin clamp study, but glucose oxidation (2.70 ± 0.16 mgμkg min)increased only slightly. These results suggest that the ability of higher doses of insulin to further stimulate glucose metabolism is primarily the result of increased glucose storage by peripheral tissues, most likely muscle.


The circadian clock drives daily rhythms in behavior and physiology, often in anticipation of the coming dusk or dawn. Almost all organisms possess an internal time-keeper, as it represents an adaptation to one of the most ancient selective pressures; the day-night cycle. Mounting evidence suggests the clock plays important roles in critical metabolic and signalling pathways, the sleep/wake cycle, immune function, as well as learning and memory. Perhaps more importantly, misregulation of the clock is associated with metabolic disorders, neurodegeneration, and incidence of cancer. In an effort to unlock the connections between the circadian clock and these downstream effects, researchers have searched for genes with rhytmic transcription driven by the clock. These so-called clock-controlled genes (CCGs) mediate these observed rhythms in important biological pathways. Over the past decade, researchers have searched for these CCGs using microarrays. However, with the growing popularity of high-throughput sequencing, and revelations about both the number and importance of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), investigators have begun to use RNA-seq for their circadian profiles. While RNA-seq has led to important findings about the circadian regulation of RNA editing, small RNAs, and epigenetic modifications, there is still much about its biases and limitations that we are still discovering. To this end, this thesis seeks to build upon this foundation and examine the use of RNA-seq for studying circadian transcription. I applied a hybrid RNA-seq, microarray approach to assay the circading transcriptome in liver, and eleven other mouse tissues. Notably, I saw that 1/3rd of ncRNAs conserved between human and mouse show rhythmic transcription. These rhythmic transcripts are strong candidates for future functional validation, and include important miRNA and snoRNA precursors. Additionaly, I found hundreds novel ncRNAs with rhythmic expression, which may provide novel CCGs. Lastly, I developped and applied a method for identifying the sources of bias in RNA-seq protocols. Taken together, this work extends our understanding of the circadian transcriptome, and the challenges associated with interpreting RNA-seq data. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Genomics & Computational Biology First Advisor John B. Hogenesch


Linear regressions with period and group fixed effects are widely used to estimate policies' effects: 26 of the 100 most cited papers published by the American Economic Review from 2015 to 2019 estimate such regressions. It has recently been shown that those regressions may produce misleading estimates, if the policy's effect is heterogeneous between groups or over time, as is often the case. This survey reviews a fast-growing literature that documents this issue, and that proposes alternative estimators robust to heterogeneous effects. We use those alternative estimators to revisit Wolfers (2006).


This article is trying to present local revenues collection rate in Romania between 2008-2013. It is treating local revenues collection rate from Romania at national, regional, county and local level. The highest local revenues collection rate was 85, 38% in 2013 and the lowest collection rate was 80, 23% in 2009. The average of the collection rate in urban area was 81, 69% and 81, 68%. NV Region has the best collection rate and S Region the lowest. From all 3228 local authorities Mintiu Gherlii from Cluj county has the highest collection rate(114, 46%) and the lowest FruntiAŸeni from Vaslui(41, 81%). We also pointed out the factors that are influencing the collection rate.


Abstract The paper deals with the evaluation of the perception of packaging innovations in terms of their functions through the Kano model. It focuses on the evaluation of the perception of innovation of all main seven functions of packaging, in particular on handling, protective, informative, economic, environmental, promotional and ecological packaging functions. The results indicate that the target groups interested in the new innovative packaging are mostly in age between 41 to 60 years. These groups have the highest requirements for new packaging. The innovations of handling functions of packaging have the most significant influence on the older generation. However, almost all ages categories positively recognize ecological innovations of packaging.


Background. A cleft lip (CL) is a congenital abnormality resulting from failure of union of the medial and nasal prominences with the maxillary prominence during embryonic development. CL may be classified as incomplete, complete, unilateral, bilateral or median. It may be associated with a cleft alveolus or a cleft palate. Definitive correction of a cleft lip is by surgery. In most African settings, the birth of a cleft lip and cleft palate (CLP) baby is associated with witchcraft and ancestral spirits. The parents, particularly mothers, are stigmatised. Objective. To repair CLs in neonates with difficulties in breastfeeding. Methods. Non-syndromic term neonates referred to Polokwane Mankweng Hospital Complex (PMHC) from primary and secondary hospitals with CLP and difficulties in breastfeeding were prospectively admitted to the neonatal unit. Our breastfeeding team supervised and assisted them with breastfeeding. The neonates whose breastfeeding was found to be unsatisfactory were considered for neonatal CL repair.Those who breastfed adequately were booked for later lip repair as per the rule of tens and discharged. Results. From June 2009 to March 2012, 60 children with CLP were referred to PMHC, including 36 neonates. Of these, 23 neonates were unable to breastfeed satisfactorily and were operated at a median age of 9 (range 3 - 28) days. The median weight was 2.8 (1.8 - 3.7) kg. The median haemoglobin was 13.1 (11.5 - 16) g/dL. Conclusion. Neonatal CL repair is an alternative for those with breastfeeding difficulties. Eagerness to breastfeed increased following the lip repair with subsequent improvement in maternal confidence and interaction with the baby. At follow up, weight gain was above the 50th centile on the road to health charts. Early surgery prevents exposure of CL to the public with highly positive possible outcome of decreasing the potential for stigmatisation.


This paper examines the location patterns of and the reciprocal relationships between corporate location and office market in Metropolitan Shanghai. Corporate location is viewed a reflection of the globalization process in which metropolitan economies are restructured and firms relocate. Office market is a product of municipal development planning and market interactions. By applying GIS mapping and statistical analysis tools on data about Shanghai Company Directory, census publications, and primary materials gathered from field reconnaissance surveys, it is found that multiple fragmented corporate clusters emerged in Shanghai. The office market was developed in close connection to the evolving corporate clusters. Further case studies of selected office clusters show that municipal development planning, domestic and global market influences interplayed in shaping the magnitude, function, and yield of office development.


Interstate environmental harms, which occur when decisions or actions in one state produce negative environmental impacts in another state, have challenged environmental law and American federalism for over a century. While even the strongest advocates of state primacy in environmental policy concede that interstate environmental harms necessitate federal governance, federal adjudication and regulation have done little to address the problem. This is due, in part, to a failure to fully understand the causes of interstate environmental harms. This article provides a new framework for understanding interstate environmental harms as political externalities caused by a combination of inadequate information, public process bias, and traditional economic externalities. To address these causes, this article proposes a new state-based approach termed interstate environmental impact assessment. Interstate environmental impact assessment would provide a procedural mechanism for an affected state and its citizens to influence the source state and minimize or prevent interstate environmental harms. The process itself would address the causes of the political externality, and also produce information to improve federal adjudication and regulation when disputes arise over continuing harms.


This thesis is about elites in general, and the acquisition and maintenance of power in particular. The last concern of the thesis is democracy. For this reason, the classical elite theorists' and the democratic elite theorists' perceptions of the elite were critically analyzed. Moreover, power for becoming a part of the elites and power of the elites were discussed. In addition to these discussions, ideas of classical and democratic elite theorists about the possibility of democracy under elite rule and the compatibility of it with the elite theory were questioned. This inquiry concluded that, according to elite theories there are elite groups in societies. They are powerful and prestigious. However, the power sources for becoming political elites and power sources of the elites are different from one elite theorist to another. Nevertheless, it was claimed that according to democratic elite theorists the power of elites can be restricted thanks to democracy. Furthermore, they argue that democracy is compatible with the theory of elite and it is possible to have democracy under the rule of the elites. Thus, chapter one was designed so as to provide a general view of classical elite theorists' perception of elites. Chapter two provided the basic discussion between classical and democratic elite theorists about power sources and democracy.


Data are presented to show the effect of polarization of the incident beam on the reflectance factors of a number of reflecting materials in the visible spectrum. Data on the degree of polarization in the reflected radiation are also given. The significance of these data in colorimetry is discussed, and it is shown that serious errors may sometimes occur because of polarization in color-measuring instruments.


We describe Algorithms for Calibration, Optimized Registration, and Nulling the Star in Angular Differential Imaging (ACORNS-ADI), a new, parallelized software package to reduce high-contrast imaging data, and its application to data from the SEEDS survey. We implement several new algorithms, including a method to register saturated images, a trimmed mean for combining an image sequence that reduces noise by up to ∼20%, and a robust and computationally fast method to compute the sensitivity of a high-contrast observation everywhere on the field of view without introducing artificial sources. We also include a description of image processing steps to remove electronic artifacts specific to Hawaii2-RG detectors like the one used for SEEDS, and a detailed analysis of the Locally Optimized Combination of Images (LOCI) algorithm commonly used to reduce high-contrast imaging data. ACORNS-ADI is written in python. It is efficient and open-source, and includes several optional features which may improve performance on data from other instruments. ACORNS-ADI requires minimal modification to reduce data from instruments other than HiCIAO. It is freely available for download at www.github.com/t-brandt/acorns-adi under a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license.


Background: Type E hepatitis is a viral infectious disease, which affects the liver and can vary from an asymptomatic simple infection to a sudden-onset fatal disease, especially among pregnant women. The objective of the present study was to survey awareness and knowledge of general physicians working inKhorramabad in 2012.
Materials and Methods: This is an epidemiological and descriptive study, which assesses physicians' awareness of hepatitis E. The desired data were collected using questionnaires and the collected data were analyzed by descriptive statistical methods, such as tables of frequency distribution, cross-tabulations, means, standard variances, and ratios.
Results: In the present study, 100 general physicians were surveyed, from among whom 62 physicians were male and 38 physicians were female.To assess the knowledge and awareness level of general physicians working in Khorramabad regarding hepatitis E, a 14-item questionnaire was designed. Their awareness and knowledge about the ways the disease is spread and about its prevalence levels was rather poor, but their knowledge regarding other aspects of the disease was moderate. No statistically significant difference was found between knowledge levels among male and female physicians. But, female physicians scored higher in items measuring awareness of prevention methods. The total knowledge score for physicians having practiced for less than 5 years was significantly different from physicians having more than 15 years of practice experience.
Conclusion: General awareness level of general physicians working in Khorramabad regarding hepatitis E is moderate. Given an 8 percent prevalence level of this disease in Khorramabad and the high mortality rates due to the disease, especially among pregnant women and young people, more training is needed for generalphysicians .
Keywords: Hepatitis E, Awareness level, Mortality, General physicians.


Parents want their children's' faces, the most visible part of their bodies, one that marks their identity throughout life, to be perfect. To satisfy this understandably urgent desire, a high quality of primary treatment for cleft lip and palate is essential and must satisfy a double objective: restore normal morphology and normal function. The functional, morphological, and esthetic prognoses depend on the character of the defect, whether it stands alone or is associated in a syndrome with other malformations. Important sequellae flow from the quality of the initial repair, as a consequence of the surgery and other therapies as well as from the deformity itself.Before the year 2000, the Maxillo-facial and Plastic Surgery Service at the Armand Trousseau Hospital of the Pierre and Marie Curie Faculty of Medicine adhered to the protocol that Malek had described, making an initial repair of the soft palate at 3 months and then a cheiloplasty, with upper and lower triangles, and closure of the hard palate at 6 months. Since then we have adopted the more functional approach that Talmant described, integrating systematic nasal surgery and the type of lip surgery that Millard suggested without leaving any residual exposed bone after closure of the osseous cleft. We then perform gingivo-periosteal surgery with bone grafts on patients when they were between 4 and 6 years of age, after orthodontic therapy had been completed. This constitutes the last stage of primary treatment.The therapeutic approach we have been using on our service, which has evolved of over the last 20 years, has come to define its principal objective as integration of extensive rehabilitation into the very first stages of our multi-disciplinary therapy so as to minimize the establishment of faulty functioning of phonation, lip competence, and ventilation while avoiding any intervention that would have a harmful impact on facial growth. This multi-disciplinary approach, which integrates surgical evaluation and protocol, is indispensable and fully justifies treatment of patients with cleft lip and palate at accredited centers.


Consistent with its fumbling of late when dealing with cases involving religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken to reciting the metaphor of play in the joints between the Religion Clauses. This manner of framing the issue before the Court presumes that the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses run in opposing directions, and indeed will often conflict. It then becomes the Court's task, as it sees it, to determine if the law in question falls safely in the narrows where there is space for legislative action neither compelled by the Free Exercise Clause nor prohibited by the Establishment Clause. The conception that the free-exercise and no-establishment texts are in frequent tension, and at times are in outright war with one another, is quite impossible. Each substantive clause in the first eight amendments to the Bill of Rights was designed to anticipate and negate the assumption of certain powers by the national government - a government already understood to be one of limited, enumerated powers. Thus, for example, the free-speech clause further limited national power and the free-press clause did so as well. These two negatives on power - speech and press - can overlap and thus reinforce one another but they cannot conflict. Simply put, it is logically impossible for two negations of a government's delegated power to conflict. Similarly, the free-exercise provision further restricted the nation's powers and no-establishment did likewise. These two negatives can overlap and thereby doubly deny the field of permissible governmental action, but they cannot conflict. To be sure, each clause in its own way works to protect religious freedom. And when circumstances are such that the scope of the clauses overlap, they necessarily complement rather than conflict with each other. However, the Court's imagining these two negations on governmental power as frequently clashing is at the conceptual level simply not possible.


Speech coding at 64 and 32 Kb/s is well developed and standardized. The next bit rate of interest is at 16 Kb/s. Although. standardization has yet to be made, speech coding at 16 Kb/s is fairly well developed. The existing coders can produce good quality speech at rates as low as about 9.6 Kb/s. At present the major research area is at 8 to 4.8 Kb/s. This work deals first of all with enhancing the quality andkcomplexity of some of the most promising coders at 16 to 9.6 Kb/s as well as proposing new alternative coders. For this purpose coders operating at 16 Kb/s and 12 to 9.6 Kb/s have been grouped together and optimized for their corresponding bit rates. The second part of the work deals with the possibilities of coding the speech signals at lower rates than 9.6 Kb/s. Therefore, coders which produce good quality speech at bit rates 8 to 4.8 Kb/s have been designed and simulated. As well as designing coders to operate at rates below 32 Kb/s. it is very important to test them. Coders operating at 32 Kb/s and above contain only quantization noise and usually have large signal to noise ratios (SNR). For this reason their SNR's may be used for comparison of the coders. However, for the coders operating at 16 Kb/s and below this is not so and hence subjective testing is necessary for true comparison of the coders. The final part of this work deals with the subjective testing of 6 coders, three at 16 Kb/s and the other three at 9.6 Kb/s.


The Time Machine in alphabetical order is a complete rendition of the 1960's film version of HG Wells Novella re-edited by us into alphabetical order from beginning to end. In doing so, we attempt to perform a kind of time travel on the movie's original time line through the use of a system of classification. We consider this experiment as using what we have decided to call 'a constrained editing technique' in light of the literary artistic movement Oulipo who would make works through the use of constrained writing techniques.


Elizabeth II is within a few years of becoming the longest-reigning British monarch. A personally quiet, modest and dutiful person, she is far better-informed about the lives of her subjects than they often realize. She has known every Prime Minister since Winston Churchill and every American President since Eisenhower.Yet what of the woman behind the crown? The book seeks to take a new look at this exhaustively-documented life and show how Queen Elizabeth became the person she is. Who, and what, have been the greatest influences upon her? What are her likes and dislikes? What are her hobbies? Who are her friends? What does she feel about the demands of duty and protocol? Is she really enjoying herself when she smiles during official events? How differently does she behave when out of the public eye? Examining the places in which she grew up or has lived, the training she received and her attitudes to significant events in national life, it presents a fresh view of one of recent history's most important figures.


The scientific investigation of works of art has an essential role in understanding museum collections and is fundamental in establishing successful conservation and restoration strategies. In the multidisciplinary environment of museums, scientists work with conservators and curators not only to more profoundly understand works of art but to better preserve them, and this often involves using analytical techniques borrowed from different disciplines of Earth sciences (e.g. mineralogy, geochemistry, and petrology). Two case studies – the stones of Angkor (Cambodia) and a blue paint mineral pigment – demonstrate how the Earth sciences are helping to identify, determine provenance, and conserve a broad spectrum of works of art. The impact on archaeological and art historical scholarship is substantial


In this study, electrophoretic deposition (EPD) technique was used to deposit titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) thin films on conducting glass substrates for application in photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants in water. Phenol was used as a model pollutant. The EPD suspension related parameters and deposition conditions were first optimized for good quality film deposits. The suspension stability and deposition conditions that result in good adherence of TiO 2 particles to the substrate with homogeneous film coatings  are ethanol, a TiO 2 solid loading of 4 wt%, a 0.2 wt% iodine concentration in the solvent and a deposition voltage of 20 V in a time of 3.5 minutes. The photocatalytic activity of TiO 2 thin films decreased exponentially with the ultraviolet light (UV) illumination time and it was also dependent on film thickness, and sintering temperature of the TiO 2 thin films. Highest rate of photocatalytic activity was observed at an optimal film thickness of 95 ± 2 µm sintered at 300 °C. The implications of these results are discussed for design of inexpensive wastewater purification systems for light industries as well for semi urban small communities. Keywords: Electrophoretic deposition, Titanium dioxide, Photocatalysis


Abstract The present study is intended to get to know the levels of perimeter diurnal environmental noise of four hospitals in the city of Lima. The measurement mode used at each hospital was A-weighting, with an integration time of five minutes per recording. It was measured in the FAST mode with calibrations made at the beginning and end of the measurement day. Statistical analysis consisted of the mean comparison T test which was applied at all the hospitals considered in the study. At the four hospitals, at all the hours of measurement and both on working days and non-working days (Sunday), LAeq mean values are higher than 83 dBA. On working days, two periods of maximum noise from 08:00 to 10:00 in the morning and from 17:00 to 19:00 in the afternoon coincide with the start and end of working hours. The perimeter diurnal environmental noise levels determined at the vicinity of four hospitals show higher values in all cases to those established by the Peruvian National Environmental Standards for Noise for special protection areas both for working days and for non-working days. Noise that comes from the dense and disorganized traffic of Lima plays a fundamental role in this behaviour.


We introduce a method to learn a hierarchy of successively more abstract representations of complex data based on optimizing an information-theoretic objective. Intuitively, the optimization searches for a set of latent factors that best explain the correlations in the data as measured by multivariate mutual information. The method is unsupervised, requires no model assumptions, and scales linearly with the number of variables which makes it an attractive approach for very high dimensional systems. We demonstrate that Correlation Explanation (CorEx) automatically discovers meaningful structure for data from diverse sources including personality tests, DNA, and human language.


A study has been made of the removal of the copper (II) ions from aqueous solution by dispersed-air flotation, dissolved-air
flotation and liquid-liquid extraction techniques. Precipitation of the copper (II) species has been achieved by complexing
with a long-chain a-dioxime, 5,6-decandionedioxime, which was synthesised and characterised by spectroscopic and analytical techniques.
The effects of-variables, including recycle volume and solution pH, on the removal by flotation of copper (II) in the presence of the dioxime have been studied and the results discussed in terms of the flotation process. It has been found in general that flotation was complete within two minutes and redispersion tended to occur with extended flotation times. The flotation process produced-good removal of copper (It) ions (395%) from solutions with pH >6.0.
Liquid-liquid extraction studies were carried out using the dioxime dissolved in octan-l-ol and the •results obtained have been used to compare liquid-liquid extraction and flotation processes and to obtain information concerning the nature of the extracted species.
The extraction of copper (II) was studied as a function of pH and of varying copper (II):oxime ratio. The results were analysed
in terms of the general extraction equation: rnHA "'n/x (HxA)(mn)/x + nHx and it was established chat under the extraction conditions studied n = 2 and (mix) 2.
The non-aqueous phasein the liquid-liquid extraction system studied was varied in order to investigate the effect on the extraction of copper (II), and the copper (II) concentration was varied at a constant oxime concentration to determine whether there was evidence of polymerisation in the extracted species.
The results obtained indicated the existence of such polymerisation but it was not possible to establish unequivocally the actual degree of polymerisation from the graphical methods of analysis used.


In this paper, the design and manufacturing of a highly sensitive capacitive‐based soft pressure sensor for wearable electronics applications are presented. Toward this aim, two types of soft conductive fabrics (knitted and woven), as well as two types of sacrificial particles (sugar granules and salt crystals) to create micropores within the dielectric layer of the capacitive sensor are evaluated, and the combined effects on the sensor's overall performance are assessed. It is found that a combination of the conductive knit electrode and higher dielectric porosity (generated using the larger sugar granules) yields higher sensitivity (121 × 10−4 kPa−1) due to greater compressibility and the formation of air gaps between silicone elastomer and conductive knit electrode among the other design considerations in this study. As a practical demonstration, the capacitive sensor is embedded into a textile glove for grasp motion monitoring during activities of daily living.


We examined correlatively the joint effects of light, supporting plant characteristics, plant size, and floral display on pollinia removal and fruit production of 103 individuals of the orchid Brassavola nodosa (L.) Lindl. at Peter Douglas Cay, Belize, Central America. This orchid is epiphytic on red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle L. [Rhizophoraceael), and grows from 1-300 cm above ground. Light levels above each orchid, measured as direct site factor using hemispherical canopy photography, were 6-46 percent of potential direct sunlight. To characterize plant size, we counted the number of leaves of each plant and measured its longest leaf and the leaf subtending each inflorescence. The largest orchids were found in areas of high light availability, high above ground, and on large support structures. From June through early August 1993, and again in December 1993, orchids were surveyed every 3-4 days for reproductive status and success (removal of pollinia and/or fruit production). The 48 plants that flowered during these 7 months had more and longer leaves than the 55 plants that did not flower at any time in this time period. Plants flowered continuously throughout the summer; a complete reproductive cycle (bud appearance to fruit set) lasts 2-5 weeks. Pollinia were removed from 12 percent, and fruits were set by 30 percent, of the flowers produced in the summer. Because fruit set was much lower in the fall, the total proportion of fruit production relative to flower production over the 7-month study period was only 13 percent. Path analysis indicated that direct site factor, height above ground, and diameter of supporting structures significantly contributed to plant size and floral display area. In turn, floral display significantly affected both male and female reproductive success. We condude that resources limit flower production and components of floral display, whereas pollinator availability likely limits reproductive success in Brassavola nodosa.


A teacher for over 30 years, author, Michael "Doc" Pennock, as he is affectionately called, knows that to connect with youth, you have to connect to their most heartfelt concerns. In "Questions from Seventh Period", Doc Pennock gives clear, concrete answers to the tough questions about love, life and faith that concern Catholic teens the most. Doc Pennock answers questions like, "The Da Vinci Code claims Jesus was married. Is this true?", "What's so wrong with drinking a few beers or smoking pot" and more. This book will inspire teens with prayers, fun factoids and stories, while sharing wise answers and sound guidance.


In this study, Taguchi method is used to find out the effect of micro alloying elements like vanadium, niobium and titanium on the hardness and tensile strength of the normalized cast steel. Based on this method, plan of experiments were made by using orthogonal arrays to acquire the data on hardness and tensile strength. The signal to noise ratio and analysis of variance (ANOVA) are used to investigate the effect of these micro alloying elements on these two mechanical properties of the micro alloyed normalized cast steel. The results indicated that in the micro alloyed normalized cast steel both these properties increases when compared to non-micro-alloyed normalized cast steel. The effect of niobium addition was found to be significantly higher to obtain higher hardness and tensile strength when compared to other micro alloying elements. The maximum hardness of 200HV and the maximum tensile strength of 780 N/mm 2 were obtained in 0.05%Nb addition micro alloyed normalized cast steel. Micro-alloyed with niobium normalized cast steel have the finest and uniform microstructure and fine pearlite colonies distributed uniformly in the ferrite. The optimum condition to obtain higher hardness and tensile strength were determined. The results were verified with experiments.


The purpose of this research was to determine the effect of urea and cow urine application on the growth of oil palm ( Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) in main nursery. The research used Completely Randomized Design (CRD) consist of 16 treatments with three replications. The treatment given is giving urea and cow urine with concentrations as follows: Factor I, giving urea; U0: 0 g urea/polybag with 10 kg of top soil, U1: urea 0.91 g/polybag with 10 kg of top soil, U2: urea 1.82 g/polybag with 10 kg of top soil and U3: urea 3.64 g/polybag with 10 kg of top soil. Factor II, giving cow urine; K0: cow urine 0 cc/l of water, K1: cow urine 40 cc/l of water, K2: cow urine 45 cc/l of water and K3: cow urine 50 cc/l of water. Data obtained from this research were statistically analyzed by Analysis of Variance and further test DNMRT at 5% level. Parameters observed were: plant height growth, diameter of hump growth, number of leaves gain, root volume and plant fresh weight. The results show that interactions of giving urea and cow urine significantly affect to parameters diameter of hump growth, number of leaves gain, root volume and plant fresh weight. Giving urea 1,82 g/polybag and cow urine at concentrations of 45 cc/l of water is the best applcations for oil palm growth in main nursery. Keywords : urea, cow urine, main nursery


Modified policy iteration (MPI) is a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm that contains the two celebrated policy and value iteration methods. Despite its generality, MPI has not been thoroughly studied, especially its approximation form which is used when the state and/or action spaces are large or infinite. In this paper, we propose three implementations of approximate MPI (AMPI) that are extensions of the well-known approximate DP algorithms: fitted-value iteration, fitted-Q iteration, and classification-based policy iteration. We provide error propagation analysis that unify those for approximate policy and value iteration. We develop the finite-sample analysis of these algorithms, which highlights the influence of their parameters. In the classification-based version of the algorithm (CBMPI), the analysis shows that MPI's main parameter controls the balance between the estimation error of the classifier and the overall value function approximation. We illustrate and evaluate the behavior of these new algorithms in the Mountain Car and Tetris problems. Remarkably, in Tetris, CBMPI outperforms the existing DP approaches by a large margin, and competes with the current state-of-the-art methods while using fewer samples.


Experiments were carried out, to determine the capability of diatomite for the disposal of laboratory residues. Experimentation with different organic solvents (ethyl ether, acetone, ethyl acetate, hexane and ethanol) verified that there is no solvent absorption in the mineral material. Experiments were also carried out with heavy metal cations, in order to quantify their absorption or adsorption in the porous mineral. Ion sequestration was determined and the following order resulted: Cr3+ > Pb2+ > Ag+ > Ni2+ > Zn2+ > Cr2O7 2-. The effect of pH was also studied with nickel, 99,5% removal was observed at pH 7, SO4 2- was 98% removed, followed by Cl - and NO3-. The ideal cation concentration was 4 ppm with a removal efficiency of 99,5%. It is possible to conclude that the absorption material can be used as effusion containment system, rather than a material to eliminate laboratory residues.


Comparison is an essential cognition process of human kind. It is the internal motivation to generate various comparison categories. In 1898, Ma Jianzhong published his famous work Ma's WenTong, which started the study of the category of comparison. However, compared with the studies in other categories, the study in the category of comparison is still weak. This thesis is divided into nine chapters. In the Introduction (Chapter 1), the author presented the significance of this study, research methods as well as language materials resources. The overall study in this PhD work was concluded in Chapter 9. Besides these two chapters, the rest content of this thesis is made up of two sections. Section 1 includes 3 chapters, whereas Section 2 includes 4 chapters, which is specified as follows: Section 1: Systematic Study on the Category of Comparison The Chapter 2 is on the study of category of superiority. The Chapter 3 is about the study on the category of equality. According to nature and function of "W", which exist in sentence structure "X is Wer than Y", Chapter 4 presented the study on the category of superlative. Section 2: Specific Sentence Structures in the Category of Comparison Chapter 5 is on the study of the sentence structure "X is W er than Y". Chapter 6 is on the study of the sentence structure "Not as". The research on particular sentence structures is presented in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 is the study on the topic comparison sentence.


Mesoporous TiO2 nanometer thin films were prepared on fused quartz by the dip-coating sol–gel method from a system containing a triblock copolymer as a template (or pore-forming agent), and then calcined at different temperatures. These films were characterized by X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, BET surface area and UV-visible spectrophotometry. The photocatalytic activity and photo-induced super-hydrophilicity of the films were evaluated by the photocatalytic degradation of acetone and water contact angle measurement in air, respectively. It was found that the thin films calcined at 700 °C not only show the highest photocatalytic activity, but also possess the greatest light-induced hydrophilicity and the slowest conversion rate from the hydrophilic to a hydrophobic state. The former is attributed to the fact that the films calcined at 700 °C are composed of anatase and rutile, which
is beneficial in enhancing the transfer of photo-generated electrons from the anatase to the rutile phase, reducing the electron–hole combination rate in anatase and enhancing its activity. The high light-induced hydrophilicity and slow hydrophilic to hydrophobic conversion rate are due to the synergetic effect of good photocatalytic activity, sufficient surface hydroxyl content and a degree of surface roughness. Because of their high specific surface areas and mesoporous structures, the photocatalytic activity of mesoporous TiO2 thin films is higher than that of conventional TiO2 thin films.


Information Fusion (IF) is about combining, or fusing, information from different sources in order to facilitate our understanding of a complex system and thereby provide insights that could not be gained from any of the individual data sources in isolation. We argue in this paper that there is a need for applying an IF approach in bioinformatics research, since the aim of bioinformatics is to understand complex biological systems using many different data sources providing complementary views of the system. We illustrate this argument with two application examples, where IF-based bioinformatics is applied to the study of stem cell differentiation and lipid digestion, respectively. We also discuss the use of automated information extraction from text sources, which is an essential component of a bioinformatics IF approach, given the abundant literature.


This issue sees the implementation of new designs for the JCOM website and articles and there are plans for further updates over the next year. In a recent survey, we have explored readers opinions of the journal with a view to introducing improvements. Your interests are diverse, which is not surprising for a field which ranges from books and print media, to museums and interactive technologies. We are also reviewing our peer review process to ensure that it meets the needs of our authors.


Development of teeth is under strict genetic control, which ensures the formation and renewal of a certain number of teeth with specific shapes and positions in a reproducible timetable. Gene mutations can disturb normal dental development and affect tooth number, shape, eruption or formation of the hard tissues, enamel, dentin or cementum. These anomalies are often observed as isolated, that is, only dentition is affected, and especially failure to develop all teeth, tooth agenesis or hypodontia is extremely common. Different dental anomalies are also observed in numerous rare developmental syndromes because the genes and genetic networks that regulate tooth morphogenesis and differentiation are also active in the development of other organs and tissues. Tooth anomalies are especially associated with other ectodermal defects and orofacial clefts. Many examples indicate that teeth are often most sensitive to a reduced activity of a specific genetic pathway which is related to the complexity and self-organising features of dental development.

Key Concepts:

Teeth are specialised ectodermal organs.

Development of dentition is regulated by cell interactions by same signalling pathways that are active in other organs and requires modulation of signalling by antagonist factors.

Tooth agenesis (failure to develop all teeth) is one of the most common developmental anomalies.

Most cases of tooth agenesis and supernumerary teeth are caused by reduced rather than complete inactivation of gene activity.

Dental anomalies are often diagnostic indications of a heritable syndrome or systemic disease.

Dental hard tissues do not regenerate after an injury and their development involve unique mechanisms.

Studies into congenital enamel defects are revealing functions for novel proteins that are involved in cellular regulation in ameloblasts and other cells.

Keywords:

tooth agenesis;
hypodontia;
oligodontia;
ectodermal dysplasia;
cleft lip;
cleft palate;
enamel;
dentin;
tooth eruption


A series of novel lipids with designed functionalities were synthesized. These lipids are based on conjugation of α-amino acids and their esters, cationic, anionic, neutral, and photochromic moieties to the lipophilic 9-cis octadecenyl chains by amide, ester, thioester, or amine bonds. Because of the plasticity of lipidic cubic phases, it is envisaged that when mixed with monooleoyl-rac-glycerol (monoolein, MO) and water at appropriate proportions, they would assemble to form bicontinuous lipidic cubic phases (LCPs) that exhibit the well-known material properties of LCPs such as phase stability, optical transparency, and chemical permeability. Moreover, due to the nature and position of the functionality at the headgroup region, we envision them to perform as functional materials by design.


In the past few decades, several developing economies, particularly in East Asia and parts of Latin America, have successfully transformed their economies and acknowledged as newly industrialised economies. The new industrialisers have also emerged as key players in the global economy breaking into lucrative foreign markets in industrialised economies. However, Sub-Saharan Africa has been marginalised by contemporary industrialisation. The unenviable trend has been blamed for the escalation of endemic poverty and inequality in the sub-region, presenting policy makers with considerable challenges. Therefore, the main objectives of this study are to examine the state of industrialisation in Sub-Saharan Africa. It employs empirical data to analyse industrial outputs in the sub-region from 1965 to 2005 and affirms the stagnating trend in the sub-region's industrial output for several countries. The study therefore presents a comprehensive framework aimed at scaling-up industrial policies in Sub-Saharan Africa, modelled after the newly industrialised economies in East Asia.


Background:Patients of MPDS present with varying degrees of unilateral facial pain, masticatory muscle tenderness, joint crepitation and limitation of mandibular movement. The present study was conducted to assess role of physiotherapy in diagnosis and treatment of the Myofascial Pain Dysfunction syndrome. Materials & Methods: 80 patients with Myofascial Pain Dysfunction syndrome of both genders were divided into 2 groups of 40 each. Group I patients were treated with passive movement and group II with relaxation. Resisted static contraction for opening, closing, protrusion and lateral movement were performed on all patients by instructing the patient to attempt these movements against the resistance of the operator's hand so that temporomandibular joint movement is minimal. This test is positive if pain was reproduced in the muscle being statically contracted. The masseter, temporalis, medial and lateral pterygoid were palpated bilaterally on all patients at both the attachments and muscle bellies for assessment of tenderness. Results: In present study, out of 80 patients, males were 35 and females were 45. Resisted static contractions showed pain in 12% and no pain in 82%, on palpation, 30% had pain and 70 % had no and on EMG, spasm was present in 20% and no spasm in 80%. The difference was significant (P< 0.05). Symptom-free or occasional pain was seen in 65% in group I and 76% in group II. Little or no improvement was seen in 35% in group I and 24% in group II. The difference was significant (P< 0.05). Conclusion: Physiotherapy found to be effective in management and treatment of patients with myofascial pain dysfunction syndrome.


Stability to the type-I edge localized mode (ELM) in JET plasmas was investigated numerically by analyzing the stability to a peeling-ballooning mode with the effects of plasma rotation and ion diamagnetic drift. The numerical analysis was performed by solving the extended Frieman–Rotenberg equation with the MINERVA-DI code. To take into account these effects in the stability analysis self-consistently, the procedure of JET equilibrium reconstruction was updated to include the profiles of ion temperature and toroidal rotation, which are determined based on the measurement data in experiments. With the new procedure and MINERVA-DI, it was identified that the stability analysis including the rotation effect can explain the ELM trigger condition in JET with ITER like wall (JET-ILW), though the stability in JET with carbon wall (JET-C) is hardly affected by rotation. The key difference is that the rotation shear in JET-ILW plasmas analyzed in this study is larger than that in JET-C ones, the shear which enhances the dynamic pressure destabilizing a peeling-ballooning mode. In addition, the increase of the toroidal mode number of the unstable MHD mode determining the ELM trigger condition is also important when the plasma density is high in JET-ILW. Though such modes with high toroidal mode number are strongly stabilized by the ion diamagnetic drift effect, it was found that plasma rotation can sometimes overcome this stabilizing effect and destabilizes the peeling-ballooning modes in JET-ILW.


There are several commonly used diagnostic methods to detect pestiviruses for routine diagnostic purposes. In the present study, we aimed to compare virus isolation-indirect immunoperoxidase monolayer assay (VI-IIPMA), antigen capture ELISA (ACE), and RT-PCR for the detection of pestiviruses in clinical samples. Out of 246 samples tested (11 serum, 119 swab, 116 tissue), 28 samples (11.39%) were positive and 218 (88.61%) were negative using the VI-IIPMA method. Using ACE, 70 samples (28.46%) were positive and 176 (71.54%) were negative. Finally, using RT-PCR analysis, we detected 19 (7.72%) positive and 227 (92.28%) negative samples. Inconsistencies were observed among results of the three methods: 8 samples were positive using VI-IIPMA but negative using ACE and RT-PCR. In addition, 4 samples that were found to be negative by VI-IIPMA were found to be positive by ACE and RT-PCR. Five samples were positive by ACE and VI-IIPMA. However, 46 samples were found to be positive only by ACE. These results show that the number of positive results detected by ACE is higher than that by VI-IIPMA and RT-PCR. Although ACE may prove advantageous for diagnosing pestiviruses, using a second method in combination with ACE will improve the validity of the results.


Abstract It is important that accurate estimates of crew exposure to radiation are obtained for future long-term space missions. Presently, several space radiation transport codes, all of which take as input particle interaction cross sections that describe the nuclear interactions between the particles and the shielding material, exist to predict the radiation environment. The space radiation transport code HZETRN uses the nuclear fragmentation model NUCFRG2 to calculate electromagnetic dissociation (EMD) cross sections. Currently, NUCFRG2 employs energy-independent branching ratios to calculate these cross sections. Using Weisskopf-Ewing (WE) theory to calculate branching ratios for compound nucleus reactions, however, is more advantageous than the method currently employed in NUCFRG2. The WE theory can calculate not only neutron and proton emission, as in the energy-independent branching ratio formalism used in NUCFRG2, but also deuteron, triton, helion, and alpha-particle emission. These particles can contribute significantly to total exposure estimates. In this work, photonuclear cross sections are calculated using WE theory and the energy-independent branching ratios used in NUCFRG2 and then compared to experimental data. It is found that the WE theory gives comparable but mainly better agreement with data than the energy-independent branching ratio. Furthermore, EMD cross sections for single neutron removal are calculated using WE theory and an energy-independent branching ratio used in NUCFRG2 and compared to experimental data.


In childhood games there is often a child standing on the periphery of the playground, who is called in by the more active members to play the passive supporting part in the drama. The child, usually a girl but not always, is ordered by the dominant brothers to be the nurse or mother in the plot. She is intuitively chosen by the other actors for her passive nature and grateful willingness to be included in childhood's enaction of the play of life; the strong and the weak, the doers and the supporters.


The presence of heavy metals released from industrial activities into water streams is an ever-growing challenge to ensuring a safe and clean aquatic environment. Detection and determination of the levels of these heavy metals in wastewater is an important step before any measures can be taken. In this study we report on a fluorescent sensing probe based on a naphthyl azo dye modified dibenzo-18-crown-6-ether (DB18C6) for the detection and determination of mercury (II) ions in water. The probe showed high sensitivity and selectivity towards the mercury (II) ion among various alkali, alkaline earth, and transition metal ions. The mercury (II) ion quenched the fluorescence of the probe. Stern-Volmer quenching constants (Ksv) were found to be highest for Hg 2+ ion at 1.18 x 105 M -1 compared to 3.85 x 104 M -1 for copper (II) ion. The stoichiometry of the sensor–metal ion interaction was found to be 1:1 for both metal ions using Job plots. The detection limit for Hg 2+ was 1.25 x 10 -8 M. The dye modified crown ether was then used to detect mercury in a water sample from a coal-fired power plant and to determine the amount of mercury in the water sample. Keywords : azo dye, crown ether, fluorescence, mercury (II), sensor, water


To investigate interactive storytelling I have compared views on purpose, language, characters, conflicts and structure in both role-playing books and writing manuals – all used in Sweden today. I found both similarities and differences between the two. The role-playing books capitalized collaboration and challenges, and were not occupied with commercialism, while the writing manuals placed a larger importance in wording, and advocated for realistic, everyday conflicts. However, they largely agreed when it came entertainment, dramaturgy and characters. In conclusion, interactive stories both divert from and resemble traditional storytelling.


3-D virtual worlds are increasing in popularity as a medium for higher education. In this research, we assess the efficacy of two instruction strategies in a virtual world environment, Second Life, and their effects on interactivity, social presence, and perceived learning. The two instruction strategies are direct and interactive instruction strategies. Our findings suggest that the interactive instruction strategy is more effective than the direct instruction strategy in increasing perceived learning, social presence, and classroom interactivity in the virtual world environment. The study also captured data on perceived ease of use and usefulness of the virtual world environment for education. The results show that the virtual world environment is perceived by students to be easy to use for both direct and interactive sessions. Students perceived the virtual world environment to be more useful for the interactive session than for the direct instruction session.


ABSTRACT
 Terrariums have decorated the shelves and counters of biology offices and classrooms for centuries. Living organisms inspire students and teachers alike. These wonderful ecosystems allow for both experimentation and observation of living systems. Here, I outline a new approach to building classroom terrariums. Historically, terrariums have been made using rocks, gravel, soil, wood, leaves, and organic props. This process often creates an immovable terrarium that weighs several hundred pounds. Although this approach will continue to produce beautiful terrariums, new technology has given us the opportunity to create more intricate terrariums that are a fraction of the weight and, therefore, mobile. The step-by-step protocol given here will allow biology professionals with little experience building terrariums an opportunity to explore this rewarding practice.


The initial study of this research applied the particle swarm optimization (PSO) heuristic to the orienteering problem (OP). PSO is a fairly new evolutionary heuristic-type algorithm created by Drs. Eberhart and Kennedy in 1995. Similar to ant colony optimization, motivation for PSO is nature-based on fish schooling and bees swarming. The OP is a variation of the well-known traveling salesmen problem (TSP) and is an NP-hard benchmark problem. Given a set of nodes with associated scores, the objective of the OP is to find a path that maximizes the total score subject to a given time (or distance) constraint. This paper presents an attractive and repulsive particle swarm optimization (ARPSO), which prevents PSO's weakness of premature convergence by maintaining solution diversity while retaining a rapid convergence. The ARPSO solves the OP with significant improvement in results when compared to PSO and is more competitive to known best published results.


It is clear from multiple modeling and field studies that deltas can attain a shelf-edge position under conditions of rising sea level, and this is accepted as an alternative way to form submarine fans without relative sea-level lowstand conditions. However, the relative importance and the range of controls that generate this type of shelf-edge deltas are less well known. To investigate these controls, we input the natural range of seven accommodation and morphological variables to a geometric model that estimates the required sediment load to form the highstand shelf-edge delta. We conduct a one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis on each variable to determine their relative importance. Our results suggest that, other than sediment supply, shelf width is the most important control in forcing deltas to the shelf edge during rising sea level. Two of the traditional stratigraphic trinity, i.e., eustatic sea-level change and shelf subsidence, most likely play less important roles than implied in the literature. This result is consistent with a recent trend in sequence stratigraphic studies encouraging consideration of multiple controls in all interpretations, rather than assuming dominant control by relative sea level.


Natural and post-harvest ethylene-induced pigment changes in the rind of Satsuma mandarin (Citrus unshiu Marc.) fruits respond differently to the exogenous application of growth regulators. Both gibberellin A3 and the synthetic cytokinins N6-benzyladenine and kinetin opposed the ethylene-induced chlorophyll destruction, while the loss of chlorophyll during natural maturation was retarded by the gibberellin but not by the cytokinins. This different behaviour suggests that ethylene may not be playing a central role in the endogenous control of ripening. Carotenoid accumulation during natural maturation is apparently controlled through a different mechanism than chlorophyll loss since it is reduced both by the cytokinins and gibberellin A3.

Kinetin and gibberellin A3 increased to a similar extent the accumulation of reducing sugars and free amino acids, and reduced that of non-reducing sugars in the peel during natural maturation. Their differential effect on chlorophyll loss may not be explained through their effects on sugar accumulation.