Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept is a quite widely described method for selection and evaluation of suppliers. The literature on the subject brings a number of purchasing analyses in field of IT equipment, means of transportation or industrial appliances. This time the authors present a broader approach that goes beyond to date analyses. They focus on underestimated facet of the concept. A matter of interest is a discussion on internal processes in enterprise that impinge on TCO's deterioration. The aim of this paper is an attempt to prove that TCO can also be a measurable tool for identification of internal problems of enterprise. In this way its silo nature is shown and implications of lack of holistic approach are mentioned. This article presents a list of chosen processes' disruptions and their impact on TCO increase, e.g. additional transaction costs in an audited company. As demonstrated in the paper, the organisation itself can cause events that make its financial result worse. Thus, a few tools to identify and eliminate those causes have been introduced, creating a controlling mechanism. Understanding of this approach testifies to a level of organisation's maturity considering not only purchasing but also planning of entire business. Purchasing department itself emphasizes its strategic role. Relevant limitation is a way of financial settlement of core activity. Calculation of production costs takes into account only used materials and components. However, an excessive or redundant inventory becomes usually a cost at a later time. Barrier can be a wage regulation depending on profit margin instead of Activity Based Costing approach. Future research should focus on enlightening the TCO's idea and implications of its non-use.


We investigate collective nonlinear dynamics in a blue-detuned optomechanical cavity that is mechanically coupled to an undriven mechanical resonator. By controlling the strength of the driving field, we engineer a mechanical gain that balances the losses of the undriven resonator. This gain-loss balance corresponds to the threshold where both coupled mechanical resonators enter simultaneously into self-sustained limit cycle oscillations regime. Rich sets of collective dynamics such as in-phase and out-of-phase synchronizations therefore emerge, depending on the mechanical coupling rate, the optically induced mechanical gain and spring effect, and the frequency mismatch between the resonators. Moreover, we introduce the quadratic coupling that induces enhancement of the in-phase synchronization. This work shows how phonon transport can remotely induce synchronization in coupled mechanical resonator array and opens up new avenues for metrology, communication, phonon-processing, and novel memories concepts.


The paper addresses changes in income and wealth inequality in the first decades of modern economic growth. It relies on wealth data gained from probate inventories established in those provinces of the Habsburg Empire that eventually formed the Republic of Austria. These sources cover the whole population in the period between 1820 and 1913, including unpropertied persons. The analysis is based on a sample that consists of about 7,000 cases. The paper first examines wealth distribution on an aggregate level, using the Gini coefficient as a measure of inequality. It shows that the Austrian economy follows a Kuznets curve but that rise and decline are not particularly steep. These results are then compared with development within the regions, which yields quite different results for the regions involved. These results do not show the consistent picture of high inequality in more advanced regions and low inequality in backward regions that might be expected following the basic assumptions underlying the Kuznets curve. The explanation of the specific development within the different regions includes factors like class structure, family structure and patterns of inheritance, which explain why sectorial change, urbanization and other processes did not create a uniform pattern of wealth distribution in those


A 5-month-old previously healthy, full-term female presented to a pediatric emergency department with 2 weeks of left leg swelling. Her parents denied any history of trauma, pain, fevers, weight loss, and easy bruising or bleeding, and family history was negative for cancer. The patient had been feeding and eliminating well.


Proxy signature schemes can be used in many business applications such as when the original signer is not present to sign important documents. Any proxy signature scheme has to meet the identifiability, undeniability, verifiability and unforgeability security requirements. In some conditions, it may be necessary to protect the proxy signer's privacy from outsiders or third parties. Recently, several studies about proxy signature schemes have been conducted but only Yu et al.' anonymous proxy signature scheme proposed in 2009 attempting to protect the proxy signer's privacy from outsiders. They claimed their scheme can make the proxy signer anonymous. However, based on our research, we determined that this was not the case and the proxy signer's privacy was not anonymous. Hence, in this paper, we propose a new anonymous proxy signature scheme that truly makes the proxy signer anonymous while making it more secure and efficient when compared with Yu et al.'s scheme in 2009. Our proxy signature scheme consists of two constructions. First, we mainly use random numbers and bilinear pairings to attain the anonymous property in our proxy. Secondly, we increase the security, integrity, and efficiency of our proxy through modifications.


The TAA came into effect 1 October 2012 and is applicable to all Tax payers including municipalities registered for VAT. The essence of the Act is to enable SARS to collect revenue more efficiently, lowering cost of tax administration, simplification of provisions, and enhancements clarifying the law. The intended impact of the Act is a simplified and harmonised action between tax payers and SARS.


Genetic and physical maps illustrate the arrangement of genes and DNA markers on a chromosome. The relative distances between positions on a genetic map are calculated using recombination frequencies, whereas a physical map is based on the actual number of nucleotide pairs between loci. These maps are a key resource for understanding genome organisation. They are the basis for map-based cloning and marker-assisted selection, serving as a bridge between breeding and sequencing research. A comparison of marker position and order may provide interesting insight into the evolutionary history of even distantly related species. Physical and genetic maps can unravel the complexities of large duplicated genomes intractable to sequencing efforts; whereas in species more amenable to genetic studies high-resolution maps provide the scaffold on which whole genome sequences are assembled. A complete genome sequence is a physical map at its highest resolution.

Key Concepts:

Genetic maps are based on the recombination frequency between molecular markers. These maps are population specific.

Physical maps are an alignment of DNA sequences, with distance between markers measured in base pairs.

Unique DNA sequences called molecular markers are compared to each other to determine correct marker order (genetic map) and used to identify overlapping segments of larger DNA pieces (physical map).

Genetic mapping is based on recombination, the exchange of DNA sequence between sister chromatids during meiosis.

High-resolution genetic and physical maps serve as the scaffold for genome sequence assembly.

Tightly correlated marker order between species can identify conserved syntenic regions.

Keywords:

recombination;
genome;
molecular marker;
synteny;
genetic map;
physical map


Group populations take many different types of actions in order to influence government, but how those actions are received depends on the traits of group populations. This article uses data on national-level voluntary associations in the United States from 1974 to 1999 to investigate group survival and discuss how it affects representation. The results demonstrate the existence of density dependence, significant positive effects for group-level resources, group-level characteristics, and government attention on group survival. These findings also include counterintuitive significant negative effects for public attention suggesting that increases in public attention lead to group replacement rather than group survival.


This report is part of the California Energy Commission (CEC) EPIC project (EPIC-14-009), Optimizing Radiant Systems for Energy Efficiency and Comfort. The main goal of this research was to determine the building characteristics of projects with radiant heating and cooling and assess their real world energy use compared to standard benchmarks for building energy performance. The energy use was self-reported through surveys and utility data and is based on whole building site energy use for a minimum of 12 months. The report describes the general building characteristics including type, size, location and climate zone of 23 buildings in North America with radiant distribution systems for both heating and cooling the predominant area of the building. The study found that almost all of the 23 buildings outperformed peer buildings and national benchmarks, suggesting that radiant systems are part of the integrated approach that can lead to low energy consumption in commercial buildings. Some operator perspectives from the survey are included to inform design and operation factors regarding radiant systems.


DESCRIPTION
Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths for men and women in the United States. The American College of Physicians (ACP) developed this guidance statement for clinicians by assessing the current guidelines developed by other organizations on screening for colorectal cancer. When multiple guidelines are available on a topic or when existing guidelines conflict, ACP believes that it is more valuable to provide clinicians with a rigorous review of the available guidelines rather than develop a new guideline on the same topic.

METHODS
The authors searched the National Guideline Clearinghouse to identify guidelines developed in the United States. Four guidelines met the inclusion criteria: a joint guideline developed by the American Cancer Society, the U.S. Multi-Society Task Force on Colorectal Cancer, and the American College of Radiology and individual guidelines developed by the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and the American College of Radiology. GUIDANCE STATEMENT 1: ACP recommends that clinicians perform individualized assessment of risk for colorectal cancer in all adults. GUIDANCE STATEMENT 2: ACP recommends that clinicians screen for colorectal cancer in average-risk adults starting at the age of 50 years and in high-risk adults starting at the age of 40 years or 10 years younger than the age at which the youngest affected relative was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. GUIDANCE STATEMENT 3: ACP recommends using a stool-based test, flexible sigmoidoscopy, or optical colonoscopy as a screening test in patients who are at average risk. ACP recommends using optical colonoscopy as a screening test in patients who are at high risk. Clinicians should select the test based on the benefits and harms of the screening test, availability of the screening test, and patient preferences. GUIDANCE STATEMENT 4: ACP recommends that clinicians stop screening for colorectal cancer in adults over the age of 75 years or in adults with a life expectancy of less than 10 years.


ABSTRACT A nominal 1500 STP-L PAssively Cooled, Electrically heated hydride (PACE) Bed has been developed and tested. The bed contained 12.6 kg of a La-Ni-Al alloy and used aluminum foam to improve heat transfer within the bed. Steady-state temperature measurements made at constant power showed a nonuniform bed temperature profile. Protium absorption rates were measured at pressures of 253 kPa, 413 kPa, and 680 kPa with forced convection cooling air flow rates ranging from 50 to 150 SLPM air. Absorption tests were also performed simulating the absorption of tritium and a method for estimating this rate using protium absorption data presented. Desorption rates were measured at pressures ranging from 20 kPa to 933 kPa using dual and single 400 watt electric heaters and found desorption rates were only impacted at the beginning and the end of a desorption cycle by the use of a single heater.


Proper grind control has been limited by the inability to track the particle sizes in the overflow in real-time and on an individual cyclone basis. Instruments based on older technology, such as those using ultrasonics, laser diffraction, or mechanical calipers, do not perform real-time measurements, having typical update rates of three to nine minutes. In addition, they require samplers, typically have low uptime rates, and cannot cost effectively monitor individual cyclones. These limitations have been overcome with the advent of a new technology, acoustic impact based particle size tracking (PST). This new measurement has enabled higher level control of the particle size through control of the grind circuit and individual cyclones. The first commercial implementation of acoustic impact based particle size tracking has resulted in a system that monitors the overflow of every cyclone in a cluster with real-time four-second updates. This paper details the calibration and resulting accuracy of this technology under different cyclone overflow pipe orientations, different ore types, particularly with varying specific gravities, and different size fractions. The results from seven different concentrators will be presented. The dry solids specific gravities ranged from 2.7 to 4.1. The overflow pipe orientations ranged from vertical to horizontal. The size fractions varied from a P80 of 75 to 200 microns. The total measurement accuracies obtained were within 5 percentage points for one standard deviation. These accuracies were measured under plant operating conditions as referenced to samples obtained from the overflow pipes and sieved using both wet and dry sieving procedures.


This paper makes a number of recommendations to academic leaders and practicing academics on promoting the uptake of technology-enabled learning (TEL) across their institutions and on their programmes. The approach throughout is to privilege the academic voice and to reflect the views of practicing academics and their students. The authors – the heads of an academic department and of a service department - describe their case study approach, primarily covering staff and students in two different universities. The results are analysed in the context of existing change and adoption models. The authors conclude that existing models are inappropriate and posit their own model for the adoption of TEL, described as 'Policy-led, large-scale, incremental adoption.' The impact of the study is assessed. The authors acknowledge that there is no single best practice for full adoption of TEL across a university. We contend that this analysis and these recommendations will equip academic leaders and curriculum designers to deliver the benefits of effective adoption of TEL across subject disciplines.


A statistical analysis of the largest weather-driven hazards in the UK contradicts the typical view that each predominates in distinct events that do not interact with those of other hazard types (i.e., are 'primary'); this potentially has implications for any multi-hazard environments globally where some types of severe event are still thought to occur independently. By a first co-investigation of long (1884–2008) meteorological time-series and nationwide insurance losses for UK domestic houses (averaging £1.1 billion/yr), new systematic interactions within a 1 year timeframe are identified between temporally-distinct floods, winter wind storms, and shrink–swell subsidence events (P < 0.03); this increases costs by up to £0.3 billion/yr (i.e., 26%), although impacts will be spatially variable depending upon the interplay of hazards. 'Memory' required in the environmental system to cause these intra-annual links between event types appears to reside in soil moisture and, tentatively, sea surface temperatures. Similar, unidentified interactions between non-synchronous events are likely worldwide, and the analytical methods we have developed to identify and quantify them are suitable for application to meteorological, geological (e.g., volcanic) and cryospheric (e.g., avalanches) hazards.


Application markets such as Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store have played an important role in the popularity of smartphones and mobile devices. However, keeping malware out of application markets is an ongoing challenge. While recent work has developed various techniques to determine what applications do, no work has provided a technical approach to answer, what do users expect? In this paper, we present the first step in addressing this challenge. Specifically, we focus on permissions for a given application and examine whether the application description provides any indication for why the application needs a permission. We present WHYPER, a framework using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify sentences that describe the need for a given permission in an application description. WHYPER achieves an average precision of 82.8%, and an average recall of 81.5% for three permissions (address book, calendar, and record audio) that protect frequently-used security and privacy sensitive resources. These results demonstrate great promise in using NLP techniques to bridge the semantic gap between user expectations and application functionality, further aiding the risk assessment of mobile applications.


[Extract] The Great Barrier Reef is often used to show the imminent crisis we are supposedly facing from climate change. It is photogenic, the water sparkles blue, the fish and corals are beautiful and delicate, and most who see it - particularly marine biologists - fall in love with it. It is abhorrent to even contemplate that it could be destroyed or damaged by humanity.

The claimed imminent peril faced by the Great Barrier Reef has captured the public's imagination. When then US president Barack Obama visited Australia, he remarked that he wanted global action on climate change, so that maybe his daughters would have a changed to see the Great Barrier Reef. A visiting architect to my university revealed that his daughter, on discussing the latest reef bleaching event at school, came home depressed that she would probably never be able to see the Great Barrier Reef. Most of the world's population seems to have been persuaded that it has no more than a few years left.

There is no doubt that every decade or so, abnormally high seawater temperatures can cause corals to bleach (Marshall & Schuttenberg 2006). Bleaching is when the coral expels the symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) which normally live inside an individual coral polyp. The polyps are the animals, generally a few millimetres across, that make the calcium carbonate structure of the coral.

Thousands or even millions of polyps make up an indificual coral. The symbiotic algae live inside the polyp and make energy from sunlight; they share this energy with the polyp in exchange for a comfortable environment. However, when the water gets much hotte than normal, something goes wrong with the symbionts and they effectively become poisonous to the polyp. The polyp expels the symbionts and - because it is the symbionts that give the polyp its colour - the coral turns white. Without the symbionts, the polyp will run out of energy and die within a few weeks or months, unless it takes on more symbionts that float around naturally in the water surrounding the coral.

The ghastly white skeletons of bleached coral, particularly when seen on a massive scale, make graphic and compelling images to demonstrate the perils of climate change. The fact that this only happens when the water gets much hotter than normal makes it a plausible hypothesis that coral bleaching is caused by anthropogenic climate change. It is also often claimed by scientists that mass bleaching has only occurred since the 1970s, and that it is a recent phenomenon that did not occur 100 years ago when the water temperature of the Great Barrier Reef was 0.5°°C to 1.0C degrees cooler (Hughes 2016).

Despite this apparently plausible hypothesis, it will be argued in this chapter that there is perhaps no ecosystem on Earth better able to cope with rising temperatures than the Great Barrier Reef. Irrespective of one's views about the role of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in warming the climate, it is remarkable that the Great Barrier Reef has become the ecosystem, more than almost all others, that isused to illustrate and claim environmental disaster from the modest warming we have seen over the course of the last century.


Description: A comprehensive exploration of the mathematics behind the modeling and rendering of computer graphics scenes Mathematical Structures for Computer Graphics presents an accessible and intuitive approach to the mathematical ideas and techniques necessary for two– and three–dimensional computer graphics. Focusing on the significant mathematical ideas, the book establishes key algorithms used to build complex graphics scenes. Written for readers with various levels of mathematical background, the book develops a solid foundation for graphics techniques and fills in relevant graphics details often overlooked in the literature. Rather than use a rigid theorem/proof approach, the book provides a flexible discussion that moves from vector geometry through transformations, curve modeling, visibility, and lighting models. Mathematical Structures for Computer Graphics also includes:-Numerous examples of two– and three–dimensional techniques along with numerical calculations-Plenty of mathematical and programming exercises in each chapter, which are designed particularly for graphics tasks-Additional details at the end of each chapter covering historical notes, further calculations, and connected concepts for readers who wish to delve deeper-Unique coverage of topics such as calculations with homogeneous coordinates, computational geometry for polygons, use of barycentric coordinates, various descriptions for curves, and L–system techniques for recursive images Mathematical Structures for Computer Graphics is an excellent textbook for undergraduate courses in computer science, mathematics, and engineering, as well as an ideal reference for practicing engineers, researchers, and professionals in computer graphics fields. The book is also useful for those readers who wish to understand algorithms for producing their own interesting computer images.


With lower and more flexible distribution temperatures, fourth generation district heating systems can utilize renewable energy sources, while meeting the requirements of low-energy buildings and energy conservation measures in the existing building stock. 4DH is an international strategic research centre located at Aalborg University, which develops 4th generation district heating technologies and systems (4GDH). This technology is fundamental to the implementation of the Danish objective of being fossil fuel-free by 2050 and the European 2020 goals. The research centre is working between 2012 and 2017, with The Danish Council for Strategic Research as main financier and the participating 31 Danish and international companies and universities as co-financiers. Thirteen PhD student projects constitute a vital part of the research centre. In 4GDH systems, synergies are created between three areas of district heating and cooling, which also sum up the work of the 4DH Centre: Grids and components; Production and system integration, and Planning and implementation. This paper presents an overview of the progress and results achieved after more than two years of work. This includes the basic definition paper, the two Heat Roadmap Europe pre-studies, annual conferences, additional demonstration projects, initiated European project proposals, an international PhD course based on the new international textbook, PhD student seminars, all PhD student subjects, and a list of major papers and articles written so far within the research centre.


We investigate the effects of the odd-state part of bare $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ interactions on the structure of neutron stars (NSs) by constructing equations of state (EOSs) for uniform nuclear matter containing $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ and ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ hyperons with use of the cluster variational method. The isoscalar part of the Argonne v18 two-nucleon potential and the Urbana IX three-nucleon potential are employed as the interactions between nucleons, whereas, as the bare $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}N$ and even-state $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ interactions, two-body central potentials that are determined so as to reproduce the experimental data on single- and double-$\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ hypernuclei are adopted. In addition, the ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}}^{\ensuremath{-}}N$ interaction is constructed so as to reproduce the empirical single-particle potential of ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ in symmetric nuclear matter. Since the odd-state part of the $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ interaction is not known owing to lack of experimental data, we construct four EOSs of hyperonic nuclear matter, each with a different odd-state part of the $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ interaction. The EOS obtained for NS matter becomes stiffer as the odd-state $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ interaction becomes more repulsive, and correspondingly the maximum mass of NSs increases. It is interesting that the onset density of ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ depends strongly on the repulsion of the odd-state $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ interaction. Furthermore, we take into account the three-baryon repulsive force to obtain results that are consistent with observational data on heavy NSs.


The purpose of the study was to evaluate the care and outcomes given to pre-eclamptic patients treated in a public hospital in South Africa. Findings: The age distribution of patients in this study is similar to other reports and suggests that pre-eclampsia is probably a disease of young women. Most of pre-eclamptic is probably a disease of young women. Most of the women in the study were less than 21 years old (51.4%). Also, the primigravida were more likely to develop eclampsia compared to the multigravida (p value ˂ 0.05; RR = 1.45). Discussions: Although pre-eclampsia is not preventable, deaths and morbidity from this disease can be prevented thorough early detection, careful monitoring and treatment of the disorder. Therefore, in order to decrease pre-eclampsia related mortality and morbidity appropriate prenatal care must be available to all women irrespective of their social and financial background. Pre-eclampsia is also a unique syndrome of pregnancy that is potentially dangerous for both mother and fetus; close supervision and timely delivery should be provided to all pre-eclamptic women. Conclusion: Pre- eclampsia remains a continuing problem in developing countries. The incidence of pre-eclampsia at this institution is one of the highest in the world. The major avoidable contributing is lack of or absence of antenatal care. In South Africa like other countries there is shortage of staff due to brain drain, leading to long waiting of patients before being seen by doctors or midwives. (Modiba LM. Pre-Eclampsia: Evaluation Of Patient's Care In A In South African Hospital. Life Sci J


Fertilization management can affect plant performance and soil microbiota, involving still poorly understood rhizosphere interactions. We hypothesized that fertilization practice exerts specific effects on rhizodeposition with consequences for recruitment of rhizosphere microbiota and plant performance. To address this hypothesis, we conducted a minirhizotron experiment using lettuce as model plant and field soils with contrasting properties from two long-term field experiments (HUB-LTE: loamy sand, DOK-LTE: silty loam) with organic and mineral fertilization history. Increased relative abundance of plant-beneficial arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and fungal pathotrophs were characteristic of the rhizospheres in the organically managed soils (HU-org; BIODYN2). Accordingly, defense-related genes were systemically expressed in shoot tissues of the respective plants. As a site-specific effect, high relative occurrence of the fungal lettuce pathogen Olpidium sp. (76–90%) was recorded in the rhizosphere, both under long-term organic and mineral fertilization at the DOK-LTE site, likely supporting Olpidium infection due to a lower water drainage potential compared to the sandy HUB-LTE soils. However, plant growth depressions and Olpidium infection were exclusively recorded in the BIODYN2 soil with organic fertilization history. This was associated with a drastic (87–97%) reduction in rhizosphere abundance of potentially plant-beneficial microbiota (Pseudomonadaceae, Mortierella elongata) and reduced concentrations of the antifungal root exudate benzoate, known to be increased in presence of Pseudomonas spp. In contrast, high relative abundance of Pseudomonadaceae (Gammaproteobacteria) in the rhizosphere of plants grown in soils with long-term mineral fertilization (61–74%) coincided with high rhizosphere concentrations of chemotactic dicarboxylates (succinate, malate) and a high C (sugar)/N (amino acid) ratio, known to support the growth of Gammaproteobacteria. This was related with generally lower systemic expression of plant defense genes as compared with organic fertilization history. Our results suggest a complex network of belowground interactions among root exudates, site-specific factors and rhizosphere microbiota, modulating the impact of fertilization management with consequences for plant health and performance.


It is a known fact that most halal food products, especially meat are now sourced from various part of the world and the majority of halal food exporters/producers come from non-Muslim countries. This has led to growing concerns from the halal consumers, especially the Muslim communities with regards to whether the halal status of these food products can really be guaranteed throughout the supply chain in these countries and whether the halal foods claimed are authentic. This study aims to better understand the current halal meat certification in Australia, a predominantly non-Muslim country. By adopting a case study approach, this study uses semi structured interviews and field observations as the primary methods of data collection. Fifteen participants representing the halal certifiers and meat processors participated in this study. This study is  one of the first to identify and discuss conceptually the operations of halal meat supply chain in Australia. It has contributed to the body of knowledge through an understanding of the issues that are affecting halal meat supply chain operations in a non-Muslim majority environment.


The defense of electoral "purity" against intrusion, corruption, and fraud has historically bound US voting to a pernicious set of gendered and racial narratives, chief among them the routine depiction of the ballot as a white woman whose iconic, vulnerable body inscribes the limits of national belonging. By paying particular attention to the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Thomas Dixon Jr., and William Faulkner, the essay traces the fixation on "the purity of the ballot box" from its moorings in the post-Reconstruction South to its reemergence in the disputed 2000 presidential election and its consequence for the doomed Voting Rights Act.


Recombinant preparations of TNF and lymphotoxin (LT) increase the expression of class I MHC antigens on cultured human endothelial cells (EC) without inducing expression of class II antigens. These actions are similar to those of rIFN-alpha or rIFN-beta. However, TNF and LT differ from IFN-alpha/beta in that the former synergize with IFN-gamma for class I regulation whereas the latter do not. Furthermore, LT or TNF do not affect IFN-gamma-mediated class II induction at optimal class I inducing concentrations (100 U/ml), whereas IFN-alpha and IFN- beta (at their optimal concentrations of 1,000 U/ml) are strikingly inhibitory. LT and TNF also can further increase expression of class I antigens on cells already maximally stimulated by IFN-alpha or IFN- beta. A recombinant preparation of IL-6 (formerly called 26-kD protein, IFN-beta 2, or B cell stimulating factor 2) was without effect on class I expression in EC. These data make it seem unlikely that the actions of LT or TNF on EC expression of MHC antigens are mediated through autocrine or paracrine production of IFN-alpha, IFN-beta or IL-6. More importantly, they suggest that LT or TNF are more likely to be immunostimulatory, whereas IFN-alpha or IFN-beta are more likely to be immunoinhibitory in vivo, a consideration of potential relevance for cytokine administration to various patient populations.


Compositionally complex materials (CCMs) present a potential paradigm shift in the design of magnetic materials. These alloys exhibit long-range structural order coupled with limited or no chemical order. As a result, extreme local environments exist with a large opposing magnetic energy term, which can manifest large changes in the magnetic behavior. In the current work, the magnetic properties of (Cr, Mn, Fe, Ni) alloys are presented. These materials were prepared by room-temperature combinatorial sputtering, resulting in a range of compositions with a single BCC structural phase and no chemical ordering. The combinatorial growth technique allows CCMs to be prepared outside of their thermodynamically stable phase, enabling the exploration of otherwise inaccessible order. The mixed ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions in these alloys causes frustrated magnetic behavior, which results in an extremely low coercivity (<1 mT), which increases rapidly at 50 K. At low temperatures, the coercivity achieves values of nearly 500 mT, which is comparable to some high-anisotropy magnetic materials. Commensurate with the divergent coercivity is an atypical drop in the temperature dependent magnetization. These effects are explained by a mixed magnetic phase model, consisting of ferro-, antiferro-, and frustrated magnetic regions, and are rationalized by simulations. A machine-learning algorithm is employed to visualize the parameter space and inform the development of subsequent compositions. Annealing the samples at 600 °C orders the sample, more-than doubling the Curie temperature and increasing the saturation magnetization by as much as 5×. Simultaneously, the large coercivities are suppressed, resulting in magnetic behavior that is largely temperature independent over a range of 350 K. The ability to transform from a hard magnet to a soft magnet over a narrow temperature range makes these materials promising for heat-assisted recording technologies.


The vision of fully automated manufacturing processes was conceived when computers were first used to control industrial equipment. But realizing this goal has not been easy; the difficulties of generating manufacturing information directly from computer aided design (CAD) data continued to challenge researchers for over 25 years. Although the extraction of coordinate geometry has always been straightforward, identifying the semantic structures (i.e., features) needed for reasoning about a component's function and manufacturability has proved much more difficult. Consequently the programming of computer controlled manufacturing processes such as milling, cutting, turning and even the various lamination systems (e.g., SLA, SLS) has remained largely computer aided rather than entirely automated. This paper summarizes generic difficulties inherent in the development of feature based CAD/CAM (computer aided manufacturing) interfaces and presents two alternative perspectives on developments in manufacturing integration research that have occurred over the last 25 years. The first perspective presents developments in terms of technology drivers including progress in computational algorithms, enhanced design environments and faster computers. The second perspective describes challenges that arise in specific manufacturing applications including multiaxis machining, laminates, and sheet metal parts. The paper concludes by identifying possible directions for future research in this area.


Introduction: Salvia macrosiphon Boiss. (Lamiaceae) is an aromatic perennial herb that its phytochemical analysis has shown presence of flavonoid and phenolic compounds. Material and Methods: Essential oil of the aerial parts of S. macrosiphon collected from south of Iran was obtained by hydrodistillation and analyzed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Cytotoxic activity of the essential oil and the total extract of this herb were investigated by using MTT assay on three cell lines. Results: Twenty six components, representing 100% of the total oil, were identified. The main components of the essential oil were Linalool (19%), β-Cedrene (14.64%) and β-Elemene (13.33%). Both of the total extract and the essential oil showed remarkable cytotoxic activity against all tested cell lines. Moreover, the volatile oil exhibited significant antioxidant and anti-acetylcholinesterase activities; however the total extract did not exhibit any effect on inhibition of acetylcholinesterase. Conclusion: According to achieved results, this herb could be considered as a valuable source of antioxidant, cytotoxic and anti-AChE compounds.


Infants' sensitivity to social or behavioral contingency has been examined in the field of developmental psychology and behavioral sciences, mainly using a double video paradigm or a still face paradigm. These studies have shown that infants distinguish other individuals' contingent behaviors from non-contingent ones. The present experiment systematically examined if this ability extends to the detection of non-humanoids' contingent actions in a communicative context. We examined two- to three-year-olds' understanding of contingent actions produced by a non-humanoid robot. The robot either responded contingently to the actions of the participants (contingent condition) or programmatically reproduced the same sequence of actions to another participant (non-contingent condition). The results revealed that the participants exhibited different patterns of response depending on whether or not the robot responded contingently. It was also found that the participants did not respond positively to the contingent actions of the robot in the earlier periods of the experimental sessions. This might reflect the conflict between the non-humanlike appearance of the robot and its humanlike contingent actions, which presumably led the children to experience the uncanny valley effect.


In separate but complementary letters to the editor of Tax Notes, Calvin Johnson (University of Texas School of Law) and Lawrence Waggoner (University of Michigan Law School) respond to an article by Dennis Belcher and seven other practicing attorneys that defend the GST exemption for perpetual trusts. In Federal Tax Rules Should Not Be Used to Limit Trust Duration, 136 Tax Notes 832 (Aug 13, 2012), the attorneys argue that the duration of a trust is a state law issue. Their article is actually a response to a Shelf Project article: Lawrence W. Waggoner, Effectively Curbing the GST Exemption for Perpetual Trusts, 135 Tax Notes 1267 (June 4, 2012), Doc 2012-9442, 2012 TNT 110-14, available electronically at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2083804.In Perpetual Trusts: The Walking Dead, 136 Tax Notes 1215 (Sept. 3, 2012), Johnson argues that the harm to the national wealth done by perpetual trusts is a federal responsibility. Trusts reduce the value of wealth, and settlors could figure that out if they were not seduced by the tax exemption. Specific settlor instructions get out of date and become an impediment after a generation. Delegating to trustees accountable to no one means trusts are managed primarily for the benefit of the trustees. Perpetual trusts become monsters, the walking dead. The federal exemption is motivating the harm; federal law is responsible for the harm that perpetual trusts cause.In Congress Should Effectively Curb the GST Exemption for Perpetual Trusts, 136 Tax Notes 1216 (Sept. 3, 2012), Waggoner reaffirms his Shelf Project proposal and his criticism of the Treasury Department's proposal for dealing with perpetual trusts. The Treasury Department's proposal would leave many trusts and much wealth GST exempt for much longer than Congress originally intended. The Waggoner proposal, if enacted, would be much more effective. Belcher and the other attorneys argue that Congress should do nothing (a position refuted by Johnson), but if Congress is to do something, the attorneys essentially embrace the Treasury proposal.


Background
Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), which studies have shown is beneficial for adults with type 1 diabetes, has not been well-evaluated in those with type 2 diabetes receiving insulin.

Objective
To determine the effectiveness of CGM in adults with type 2 diabetes receiving multiple daily injections of insulin.

Design
Randomized clinical trial. (The protocol also included a type 1 diabetes cohort in a parallel trial and subsequent second trial.) (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02282397).

Setting
25 endocrinology practices in North America.

Patients
158 adults who had had type 2 diabetes for a median of 17 years (interquartile range, 11 to 23 years). Participants were aged 35 to 79 years (mean, 60 years [SD, 10]), were receiving multiple daily injections of insulin, and had hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels of 7.5% to 9.9% (mean, 8.5%).

Intervention
Random assignment to CGM (n = 79) or usual care (control group, n = 79).

Measurements
The primary outcome was HbA1c reduction at 24 weeks.

Results
Mean HbA1c levels decreased to 7.7% in the CGM group and 8.0% in the control group at 24 weeks (adjusted difference in mean change, -0.3% [95% CI, -0.5% to 0.0%]; P = 0.022). The groups did not differ meaningfully in CGM-measured hypoglycemia or quality-of-life outcomes. The CGM group averaged 6.7 days (SD, 0.9) of CGM use per week.

Limitation
6-month follow-up.

Conclusion
A high percentage of adults who received multiple daily insulin injections for type 2 diabetes used CGM on a daily or near-daily basis for 24 weeks and had improved glycemic control. Because few insulin-treated patients with type 2 diabetes currently use CGM, these results support an additional management method that may benefit these patients.

Primary Funding Source
Dexcom.


Most fast excitatory synaptic transmission in the nervous system is mediated by glutamate acting through ionotropic glutamate receptors (iGluRs). iGluRs (AMPA, kainate, and NMDA receptor subtypes) are tetrameric assemblies, formed as a dimer of dimers. Still, the mechanism underlying tetramerization—the necessary step for the formation of functional receptors that can be inserted into the plasma membrane—is unknown. All eukaryotic compared to prokaryotic iGluR subunits have an additional transmembrane segment, the M4 segment, which positions the physiologically critical C-terminal domain on the cytoplasmic side of the membrane. AMPA receptor (AMPAR) subunits lacking M4 do not express on the plasma membrane. Here, we show that these constructs are retained in the endoplasmic reticulum, the major cellular compartment mediating protein oligomerization. Using approaches to assay the native oligomeric state of AMPAR subunits, we find that subunits lacking M4 or containing single amino acid substitutions along an "interacting" face of the M4 helix that block surface expression no longer tetramerize in either homomeric or heteromeric assemblies. In contrast, subunit dimerization appears to be largely intact. These experiments define the M4 segment as a unique functional unit in AMPARs that is required for the critical dimer-to-tetramer transition.


Long memory latency and limited throughput become performance bottlenecks of GPGPU applications. The latency takes hundreds of cycles which is difficult to be hidden by simply interleaving tens of warp execution. While cache hierarchy helps to reduce memory system pressure, massive Thread-Level Parallelism (TLP) often causes excessive cache contention. This paper proposes Adaptive PREfetching and Scheduling (APRES) to improve GPU cache efficiency. APRES relies on the following observations. First, certain static load instructions tend to generate memory addresses having very high locality. Second, although loads have no locality, the access addresses still can show highly strided access pattern. Third, the locality behavior tends to be consistent regardless of warp ID. APRES schedules warps so that as many cache hits generated as possible before any cache misses generated. This is to minimize cache thrashing when many warps are contending for a cache line. However, to realize this operation, it is required to predict which warp will hit the cache in the near future. Without directly predicting future cache hit/miss for each warp, APRES creates a group of warps that will execute the same load instruction in the near future. Based on the third observation, we expect the locality behavior is consistent over all warps in the group. If the first executed warp in the group hits the cache, then the load is considered as a high locality type, and APRES prioritizes all warps in the group. Group prioritization leads to consecutive cache hits, because the grouped warps are likely to access the same cache line. If the first warp missed the cache, then the load is considered as a strided type, and APRES generates prefetch requests for the other warps in the group. After that, APRES prioritizes prefetch targeted warps so that the demand requests are merged to Miss Status Holding Register (MSHR) or prefetched lines can be accessed. On memory-intensive applications, APRES achieves 31.7% performance improvement compared to the baseline GPU and 7.2% additional speedup compared to the best combination of existing warp scheduling and prefetching methods.


Finding relevant segments in meeting recordings is important for summarization, browsing, and retrieval purposes. In this paper, we define relevance as the interest-level that meeting participants manifest as a group during the course of their interaction (as perceived by an external observer), and investigate the automatic detection of segments of high-interest from audio-visual cues. This is motivated by the assumption that there is a relationship between segments of interest to participants, and those of interest to the end user, e.g. of a meeting browser. We first address the problem of human annotation of group interest-level. On a 50-meeting corpus, recorded in a room equipped with multiple cameras and microphones, we found that the annotations generated by multiple people exhibit a good degree of consistency, providing a stable ground-truth for automatic methods. For the automatic detection of high-interest segments, we investigate a methodology based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and a number of audio and visual features. Singleand multistream approaches were studied. Using precision and recall as performance measures, the results suggest that (i) the automatic detection of group interest-level is promising, and (ii) while audio in general constitutes the predominant modality in meetings, the use of a multi-modal approach is beneficial.


The future distribution grid known as the smart grid will become more distributed in both infrastructure and control. IEC 61850 and IEC 61499 are two industrial standards addressing the challenges presented by a decentralized infrastructure. This paper contributes to system engineering of smart grid automation by enabling automatic generation of IEC 61499 control systems from IEC 61850 specifications. The areas which this paper fills is proposing a method to formally capture the logical node to logical node message passing which is lacking in the IEC 61850 standard. The proposed method is to represent an IEC 61850 protection scheme as a graph and then integrate it into the IEC 61850 ontology developed previously. The case study used is a sympathetic tripping protection scenario which demonstrates how the process of developing the graph model from the protection scheme and applying ontology rules to automatically generate the resultant IEC 61499 function blocks with meaningful connections between the logical nodes.


ABSTRACT The study used data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey to explore three hypotheses: (1) that income and wealth both predict economic security perception, mental health, and physical health; (2) that gradients in health outcomes are better explained by wealth than income; and (3) that economic security perception is better explained by wealth than income. We conducted fixed effects regression analysis. After controlling for other variables in our model, both income and wealth appeared to have positive and significant associations with economic security perception and a range of mental health outcomes, but not physical health. There was also some evidence to support our second hypothesis, that gradients in health outcomes are better explained by wealth than income, however only for mental health. Our third hypothesis was not supported by the data. While both income and wealth were strongly related to economic security perception, it was better explained by income than wealth. We recommend that future studies are designed to evaluate the role of economic security as a mediating variable in the relationship between income, wealth and health, because the implications are substantial.


Recently, there are many e-commerce search engines that return information from Web databases. Unlike text search engines, these e-commerce search engines have more complicated user interfaces. Our aim is to construct automatically a natural query user interface that integrates a set of interfaces over a given domain of interest. For example, each airline company has a query interface for ticket reservation and our system can construct an integrated interface for all these companies. This will permit users to access information uniformly from multiple sources. Each query interface from an e-commerce search engine is designed so as to facilitate users to provide necessary information. Specifically, (1) related pieces of information such as first name and last name are grouped together and (2) certain hierarchical relationships are maintained. In this paper, we provide an algorithm to compute an integrated interface from query interfaces of the same domain. The integrated query interface can be proved to preserve the above two types of relationships. Experiments on five domains verify our theoretical study.


The article is continuing the research "Modelling and Assessment of Russia's National Power", dedicated to calculating the index of national power, which is currently the most informative and popular indicator in the world that integrally characterizes the aggregate potential of a particular country and allows at the same time to compare the level of its power and socio-economic development with the other countries' level. The research results were published in the "Economic Strategies" magazine No. 2 for 2020. [1]. If the national power of the state, in fact, determines its potential capabilities and mainly gross indicators are used for the calculation, then the national security indicators are calculated on the basis of normalized values (as a rule, per capita) and witness the development level of one or another component of the country's socio-ecologic and economic system, as well as efficiency of using the existing potential. It should be reminded that in terms of the National Integral Strength Index, which includes many components, Russia ranks fourth in the world, slightly behind India. In this article, using the methods of multivariate statistical analysis, we'll calculate the national security indicators of the UN member states, also defining the position of Russia, but in addition, we'll also estimate the threshold values for all the factors of national security considered in the work. In the last part of the paper, we'll give a medium-term forecast of national security.


A new variety of duplex steels with superior mechanical properties has been studied. They exhibit a very interesting combination of strength (tensile strength of 680 MPa) and ductility values (more than 45% total elongation) due to the competition between different plasticity mechanisms. These steels contain two phases: austenite and ferrite and are characterized by low stacking fault energy at room temperature. In this work, four duplex steels with different chemical composition and phase volume fraction are studied. Residual and internal stresses in each phase were determined using the classical X-ray diffraction sin²ψ method. In the as-received state, both longitudinal and transverse residual stresses are in compression (until -350 MPa) for the ferrite and in tension (until +410 MPa) for the austenite. However, residual stresses in the austenitic phase decrease when its volume fraction increases. Moreover, internal stress distribution in one alloy was determined by X-ray diffraction during an in situ tensile test. The austenitic phase stress along the loading direction is higher than the macroscopic applied one, which is higher than the ferritic stress state, verifying a mixture rule and consistent with the initial residual stresses. For an applied macroscopic strain of about 1%, the austenite phase is subjected to a stress of about 600 MPa whereas the stress in the ferritic phase is about 300 MPa. It was also observed that as macroscopic strain increases, stress difference between the austenite and the ferrite decreases.


Explosion and impact problems are generally characterized by the presence of shock waves, intense localized materials response and intensive loadings. Most of the wave propagation hydro-codes for such problems use traditional grid based methods such as finite difference methods (FDM) and finite element methods (FEM). Though many successful achievements have been made using these methods, some numerical difficulties still exist. These numerical difficulties generally arise from large deformations, large inhomogeneities, and moving interfaces, free or movable boundaries. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a Lagrangian, meshfree particle method, and has been widely applied to different areas in engineering and science. SPH method has been intensively used for simulating high strain hydrodynamics with material strength, due to its special features of meshfree, Lagrangian and particle nature. In this paper, some recent developments of the SPH in modelling explosion and impact problems will be introduced. A modified scheme for approximating kernel gradient (kernel gradient correction, or KGC) has been used in the SPH simulation to achieve better accuracy and stability. The modified SPH method is used to simulate a number of problems including 1D TNT detonation, linear shaped charge and explosively driven welding. The effectiveness of the modified SPH method has been demonstrated by comparative studies of the SPH results with data from other resources.


Most Americans get their health care in small physician practices. Yet, small practice settings are often unable to provide the same range of services or participate in quality improvement initiatives as large practices because they lack the staff, information technology, and office systems. One promising strategy is to share clinical support services and information systems with other practices. New findings from the 2009 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Primary Care Physicians suggest smaller practices that share resources are more likely than those without shared resources to have advanced electronic medical records and health information technology, routinely track and manage patient information, have after-hours care arrangements, and engage in quality monitoring and benchmarking. This issue brief highlights strategies that can increase resources among small- and medium-sized practices and efforts supported by states, the private sector, and the Affordable Care Act that encourage the expansion of shared-resource models.


Following the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis, the European Union has introduced policies for eradicating transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), including scrapie, from large ruminants. However, recent European Union surveillance has identified a novel prion disease, 'atypical' scrapie, substantially different from classical scrapie. It is unknown whether atypical scrapie is naturally transmissible or zoonotic, like BSE. Furthermore, cases have occurred in scrapie-resistant genotypes that are targets for selection in legislated selective breeding programmes. Here, the first epidemiological study of British cases of atypical scrapie is described, focusing on the demographics and trading patterns of farms and using databases of recorded livestock movements. Triplet comparisons found that farms with atypical scrapie stock more sheep than those of the general, non-affected population. They also move larger numbers of animals than control farms, but similar numbers to farms reporting classical scrapie. Whilst there is weak evidence of association through sheep trading of farms reporting classical scrapie, atypical scrapie shows no such evidence, being well-distributed across regions of Great Britain and through the sheep-trading network. Thus, although cases are few in number so far, our study suggests that, should natural transmission of atypical scrapie be occurring at all, it is doing so slowly.


Insufficient project stakeholder and team management has frequently resulted in conflicts and partial failures. Stakeholder integration and integrated project delivery (IPD) provide real opportunities for organizations to achieve more than they could on their own and are a way to improve construction project productivity. The purpose of this study is to analyze what the preconditions and challenges are for successful stakeholder integration in construction projects. This paper discusses the nature and preconditions of stakeholder integration in the construction industry, while its main purpose is to take a look at the level of integration in an IPD project. Our results are derived from the analysis of both current literature and an empirical case study. According to the theoretical findings, twelve preconditions for integration were found, and the empirical case study strongly supported these findings. Despite the good results and the project's high level of integration, the main challenges for stakeholder integration seem to be mostly related to a lack of trust and communication among stakeholders, and thus all of the stakeholders should be involved as early as possible. In addition, the nature and process of IPD is still pretty unfamiliar to many people, which increases suspicion towards it.


Waveguide coupling to closed loop coupled-resonator optical waveguides is explored. By coupling a CROW chain back on itself, a reduction in individual resonant linewidth is achieved making these slow light modes more conducive to periodic filters toward novel frequency-comb integration. Through numerical simulation by finite-difference time-domain methods, the importance of waveguide symmetry conditions for coupling is illustrated. The impact of unit cavity mode symmetry strongly impacts the necessary coupling geometry to both cavities and waveguides. Design insight into different waveguide coupling schemes is provided while aiming to achieve transmission of the resonant structure exhibited by the isolated resonator.


Up until the final four decades of the Qing Dynasty, fiscal extraction in imperial China was primarily a matter of taxing agricultural production, generally in the form of an annual property tax assessed on the basis of landholding, and collected in either grain or cash. All major dynasties prior to the Qing wielded this fiscal instrument somewhat flexibly, with large-scale reforms, usually leading to significantly higher taxes, occurring around mid-dynasty, but the Qing broke this trend: the absolute volume of agricultural taxes remained locked in place for the great majority of its 278-year life-span, despite a near tripling of both the population and the economy. This eventually rendered the Qing fiscal state an extreme outlier in both horizontal and vertical comparisons: relative to the economy it governed, not only was it much smaller than its major early modern competitors, ranging from Japan to Western European states to other central Asian empires, but it was also probably the smallest post-Qin dynastic state by far. Preexisting scholarship has largely failed to identify, let alone explain, this sudden and dramatic shift in fiscal policy towards the end of China's imperial history. There are a number of possible explanations for it, some of which have appeared in the preexisting literature, but the most promising one — which has not appeared — seems to be that the extraordinary circumstances of the Ming-Qing transition served as the catalyst for a decisive conservative turn in Chinese fiscal thought, pushing the Qing state into a fundamentally different political and institutional equilibrium than its predecessors.


I t came as something of a surprise to this author when, towards the end oflast year, the Deputy Director of the Australian Wheat Board, Mr. Michael Shanahan, told farmers to "get down on their knees" and beg tbe government for assiftance. This advice goes against the grain iC you 11 excuse the pun of current economic wisdom and represents a direct challenge to the policies of the National Farmers' Federation (NFF). The NFF's line on subsidisation is unambiguous and uncompromisin_g. The way to create a lean, productive and Internationally competitive agriculture is for Australian farmers to become more efficient and to abandon their traditional demands for state intervention in agriculture. Emciency can only be achieved, it is asserted, if farmers are progressively exposed to free-market forces. Government actions both at home and abroad are viewed negatively as distorting price signals and creating barriers to international trade.


Previous investigations have revealed that the impairments of the cross-phase modulation (XPM) in dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) systems include two aspects: the XPM-induced phase noise and the XPM-induced polarization scattering. Such XPM phenomena are strongly dependent on the transmission system configurations and are nonintuitive. In this paper, a simple fiber model is proposed to facilitate the determination of XPM effects. By employing this model, the phase noise and polarization scattering are calculated based on the system configurations and the time-consuming computation by the split step Fourier method is avoided. The proposed model is verified by the dual polarization quadrature phase-shift keying coherent DWDM experiments and simulations in terms of the variance and autocorrelations of phase noise and polarization crosstalk as well as their dependence on relative polarization states and the overall Q-impairment. The proposed model helps deeper analysis of XPM phenomena, and eventually, leads to development of various XPM mitigation methods through transmission system design and coherent receiver DSP.


Reasons for working independently are often based on individual decisions to make a life-change, youthful engagement to work differently, social representations of added-value enterprise or innovation, and tangible action in social responsibility. Be concerned: Laure She turned 20 in 2010. From an early age, she was much concerned about the environment: forest loss, melting polar ice caps, decline of animal and plant species, plastic waste everywhere etc. Beyond environment, she asked herself what to do in a seriously flawed social system that fosters hierarchy and inequality, neglects innovation and collective intelligence or just cannot listen to real people voices. She had always loved fashion and consequently trained as a designer. She spent most of her internships in the fashion business. They « were fine », however she felt she « was a resource, used far below (her) potential, with long hours and small pay. » Going independent was an obvious way to work the way she wanted to, enabling her to reconcile her creative drive with her respect for the environment. After she tried and tested several approaches, she found her way: to create remarkably wearable clothes out of fabric offcuts, with designs of her own, based on open-source models. « I took the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. It was hard, but I did it! » Exploring interdisciplinarity: Emilie In 2000, she celebrated her 20th birthday. Her life motto could be « Science and research, what else? ». With extensive scientific backgrounds and prizes, she got her first job in a lab team where she explored many issues on bioactive textiles, a sector she had not initially thought of. There, she discovered that client companies would not easily capitalize on results for further development. Somewhat disappointed, she decided to find a different place where she could carry out her research, test, improve, develop and sell. A high-tech fashion lab was the answer. She is now an expert in monitoring and repairing body organs with interactive textile. « You don't think of textile as the first solution, do you? Developments are long and costly, and you have to do with the health lobby. But very few people do the same, so, it's just a dream job. » Go with the Internet revolution: Nathalie She was 18 in the mid 1990's. After a business degree, she started work in the trade sector. There, she discovered screens and PCs, Internet and e-mails. Retail became e-tail, and, for a large mail-order company, she developed web services to replace order, delivery and return processing or targeting and communication. She enjoyed every minute of that world-wide-web decade! When she realized that the revolution was aimed at companies more than at end consumers, she went back to basics and it was clear that further revolution was impossible within a large company. So with her redundancy allowances, she created an independent company to help clients think the web differently. She advises her client companies on how to communicate differently with the consumers and respect their own ways of information gathering e.g. through social networks. « I am proud to have launched some successful companies or product lines, only with web communication. In my age group, I met quite a number of entrepreneurs who tried and most were successful. It's cool to tell tax people that you brought added value to your country, and make it richer ». Fight back for quality: Catherine She was 20 years old in the 1980's. Fashion was synonymous with appearance and glamour. All girls dreamt of beauty recipes.  Dress like Cindy, do your make-up like Linda and hair like Iman… we will make you enter into the elite circle of the 3% most beautiful women . Who was that «we»? Brands! For a long time, she had been working with super-brands who would compete over beauty promises and would all do their best to deliver on them. She spent amazing years with a sparkle in her eye for each new brand project and its communication, until she started to lose some of her faith. Why invent endless attire that would clutter up your closet? Why not change for clothes to be loved, cherished and worn for ever? She decided to go independent and choose craft-handed art clothes, decoration, and objects at their real price. « People will find here products they touch, feel and ultimately fall in love with. In a day, you need them, to pass stress and frantic ventures. They help you a lot and are easier to handle than meditation. » The entrepreneur: Alice Alice Gras obtained four diplomas, in fashion design (ESMOD), fashion business (ISEM) and two MBAs in management and entrepreneurship (ESG). When she was a student, and later in her first experiences, she discovered that future fashion entrepreneurs lacked spaces where high-quality equipment and varied competencies could be brought together in a friendly and collaborative way, to create innovative prototyping and short runs, with both contemporary and traditional tools e.g. weaving looms, sewing machines, 3D printers etc. While learning management, she created  Hall Couture , a shared working space dedicated to contemporary fashion, where entrepreneurs, designers, artists, textile engineers, makers could create, meet and share their passion for clothing conception, provided that it was local, innovative, high-quality and responsible. Fashion revolution is a matter she had profound  thoughts for and she made the following comment: Photo: Makery « Fashion is changing because we face new paradigms, global mistrust and stress on natural resources. New services and products, rooted in our time, are complex and demand a mindset change. So fashion designers need to work with interdisciplinarity. For instance, interactive garments require computing, engineering as much as pattern-making and style and can be made in this place inspired by Hacker Spaces and Fab Labs, more than by classical factories. Fashion is changing because of new ethics. People and companies working here are concerned with long-term issues, recyclability, environment, people employability, skills' transfer before artisans and quality die out faster than fashion itself. Fashion is changing because this is the time for DIY-ers to make their own clothes based on genuine experiences of human desire, wearability, interaction with each environment starting with how they want to feel in their clothes every morning. » To keep her company running, she rents the working space and a showroom where designers can show and sell their first collections without having to make the jump to a full boutique. Day after day, she keeps close to residents' needs, shares new product-service ideas to make the community alive and maintains the creative atmosphere of the place. Part of her business model involves her close collaborator Claire Eliot, to advise companies, train their employees or mentor early project owners on all kinds of issues such as design, pattern-making, computing, and entrepreneurship. Wishing her success is the best we can do for her!


In this paper, we study a problem of target tracking and circumnavigation with a network of autonomous agents. We propose a distributed algorithm to estimate the position of the target and drive the agents to rotate around it while forming a regular polygon and keeping a desired distance. We formally show that the algorithm attains exponential convergence of the agents to the desired polygon if the target is stationary, and bounded convergence if the target is moving with bounded speed. Numerical simulations corroborate the theoretical results and demonstrate the resilience of the network to addition and removal of agents.


This paper describes a new robust regular polygon detector. The regular polygon transform is posed as a mixture of regular polygons in a five dimensional space. Given the edge structure of an image, we derive the a posteriori probability for a mixture of regular polygons, and thus the probability density function for the appearance of a mixture of regular polygons. Likely regular polygons can be isolated quickly by discretising and collapsing the search space into three dimensions. The remaining dimensions may be efficiently recovered subsequently using maximum likelihood at the locations of the most likely polygons in the subspace. This leads to an efficient algorithm. Also the a posteriori formulation facilitates inclusion of additional a priori information leading to real-time application to road sign detection. The use of gradient information also reduces noise compared to existing approaches such as the generalised Hough transform. Results are presented for images with noise to show stability. The detector is also applied to two separate applications: real-time road sign detection for on-line driver assistance; and feature detection, recovering stable features in rectilinear environments.


Abstract In this work, the modeling of triaxially braided composites was explored through a semi-analytical discretization. Four unique subcells, each approximated by a "mosaic" stacking of unidirectional composite plies, were modeled through the use of layered-shell elements within the explicit finite element code LS-DYNA. Two subcell discretizations were investigated: a model explicitly capturing pure matrix regions, and a novel model which absorbed pure matrix pockets into neighboring tow plies. The in-plane stiffness properties of both models, computed using bottom-up micromechanics, correlated well to experimental data. The absorbed matrix model, however, was found to best capture out-of-plane flexural properties by comparing numerical simulations of the out-of-plane displacements from single-ply tension tests to experimental full field data. This strong correlation of out-of-plane characteristics supports the current modeling approach as a viable candidate for future work involving impact simulations.


Water-processed, aqueous electrolyte supercapacitors are demonstrated incorporating an alternating copolymer of a functionalized 3,4-propylenedioxythiophene unit with a 2,2′-bis(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) unit (PE2) into carbon nanotube textiles. The side chains functionalizing PE2 allow the solubility to be tuned from the organic soluble precursor polymer, to a water-soluble polyelectrolyte, and finally to a solvent resistant form by a dilute acid wash (SR-PE2). Thin SR-PE2 films (60 μg cm−2) are electroactive over a wide potential window with a mass capacitance of 54 F g−1 at a discharge rate of 1.6 s (38 A g−1). These films exhibit a 65% capacitance retention at an 80 millisecond discharge time (560 A g−1). Flexible, free-standing electrodes were fabricated by depositing SR-PE2 onto a nonwoven carbon nanotube textile (CNT-T) and were assembled into symmetrical, flexible supercapacitors where the addition of polymer resulted in a boost in volumetric capacitance by 400 percent compared to the bare CNT-T electrode. Independent of whether the SR-PE2 films are cast from an organic solvent or water, device electrodes exhibit 11.4 F cm−3 (45 mF cm−2, 15.9 F g−1) which leads to an energy density of 0.10 mW h cm−3 at 7.5 mW cm−3 considering the total device volume. The CNT-T imparts a high degree of flexibility allowing the supercapacitors to retain 88% of their charge storage capacity when bent to a 0.8 mm radius as well as complete capacitance retention after 2000 bending cycles to a 3.5 mm radius. The devices assembled in air with a benign KCl electrolyte maintained 83% capacitance retention after 10 000 charge/discharge cycles highlighting the stability of these materials and utility for this processing approach for high throughput energy storage devices.


Lysozyme was partially purified from hen egg white by precipitation of non-lysozyme protein impurities during incubation in the presence of ethanol. The thermal stability of the obtained partially purified enzyme was also characterized. The incubation of diluted egg white for 2-8 h in the presence of 20% ethanol was not very effective for the partial purification of lysozyme by precipitation of major egg white proteins; however, 4- to 6-h or 6- to 8-h incubation of diluted egg white in the presence of 30% and 40% ethanol could be employed more effectively for partial purification of lysozyme. Without applying the incubation period, the highest specific activity was obtained by the treatment of egg white with 40% ethanol. Thus, ethanol at this concentration could be used for a continuous process of partial purification. For batch lysozyme purification, on the other hand, incubation in the presence of 30% ethanol was more appropriate. The activities and protein contents of dialyzed and lyophilized enzymes obtained by 6 h-incubation in the presence of 20%, 30%, and 40% ethanol precipitations were 1878, 6669, and 6115 U/mg powder, and 0.98, 0.90, and 0.93 mg protein per mg powder, respectively. The ranges of thermal inactivation parameters, such as D (D80 °C = 29.2-59 min, D90 °C = 8.8-21 min) and z (z80-90 °C = 17.4-22.3 °C) values of the enzyme, clearly indicated the moderate and variable heat stability of lyophilized lysozymes obtained from different batches of egg white.


Oscillating wave surge converters (OWSCs) are a class of wave power technology that exploits the enhanced horizontal fluid particle movement of waves in the nearshore coastal zone with water depths of 10–20 m. OWSCs predominantly oscillate horizontally in surge as opposed to the majority of wave devices, which oscillate vertically in heave and usually are deployed in deeper water. The characteristics of the nearshore wave resource are described along with the hydrodynamics of OWSCs. The variables in the OWSC design space are discussed together with a presentation of some of their effects on capture width, frequency bandwidth response and power take-off characteristics. There are notable differences between the different OWSCs under development worldwide, and these are highlighted. The final section of the paper describes Aquamarine Power's 315 kW Oyster 1 prototype, which was deployed at the European Marine Energy Centre in August 2009. Its place in the OWSC design space is described along with the practical experience gained. This has led to the design of Oyster 2, which was deployed in August 2011. It is concluded that nearshore OWSCs are serious contenders in the mix of wave power technologies. The nearshore wave climate has a narrower directional spread than the offshore, the largest waves are filtered out and the exploitable resource is typically only 10–20% less in 10 m depth compared with 50 m depth. Regarding the devices, a key conclusion is that OWSCs such as Oyster primarily respond in the working frequency range to the horizontal fluid acceleration; Oyster is not a drag device responding to horizontal fluid velocity. The hydrodynamics of Oyster is dominated by inertia with added inertia being a very significant contributor. It is unlikely that individual flap modules will exceed 1 MW in installed capacity owing to wave resource, hydrodynamic and economic constraints. Generating stations will be made up of line arrays of flaps with communal secondary power conversion every 5–10 units.


An analytic, observational study was performed at multi-centers and hospitals in Khartoum state, during the period from (February –July 2014). The aim of the study was to determine the role of ultrasound in relationship between placental location and fetal gender in second and third trimester of pregnancy. The study excluded congenital abnormal uterus, multiple pregnancies in normal uterus and fetal demises, congenital fetal anomalies, technical factors make fetal gender not clear. The study followed international scanning guideline and protocol to localize placenta and to detect fetal gender. The data was collected, classified and analyzed by using SPSS. The analysis of the results found that the most age group in this study 26-35 years with percentage of 64% , most of them have no history of C/S or abnormal placental location. The most placenta were located posterior, most gender determined in this study were males. The study found that there is good relationship between placental location and fetal gender, when the placenta was located posteriorly high proportion were females, and when located anteriorly high proportion was were males. The study recommended more research should be done with increased duration and sample volume for more accurate results.


If misinformation is information without truth, this article recognizes deformation as a set of processes through which information loses its organization. Deformation grants audiences and intermediaries the agency and the burden to refashion bits, pieces, and fragments of information into coherent and meaningful formulations. Though not necessarily problematic, deformation functions as a pervasive precondition of information disorder. After deductively deriving the concept of deformation, this article presents a case study involving the public communication of physics that describes some of the forces that can facilitate deformation, including challenges of organizational coordination, economic incentives, and technical affordances. This article argues that studies of misinformation should attend better to the informational environment while recognizing that the continuity of information across time and space should be regarded as an achievement.


This paper proposes a new Nash bargaining solution (NBS) based cooperative game-theoretic scheduling framework for joint channel and power allocation in orthogonal frequency division multiple access cognitive radio (CR) systems. Our objectives are to maximize the overall throughput of the CR system with the protection of primary users' transmission, while guaranteeing each CR user's minimum rate requirement and the proportional fairness and efficient power distribution among CR users. Using time-sharing variable transformation, we introduce a novel method that involves Lambert-W function properties and obtain closed-form analytical solutions. A low-complexity algorithm is also developed which does not require iterative processes as usual to search the optimal solution numerically. Simulation results demonstrate that our optimal policies outperform the existing maximal rate, fixed assignment and max-min fairness, while achieving the 99.985% in average of the optimal capacity.


Background: Supporting lifestyle change is an effective way of preventing recurrent events in people with cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, there is a need to develop innovative strategies that increase access to programmes for individuals at high risk of CVD. This study aimed to develop a bank of text messages designed to provide advice, motivation, and support for decreasing cardiovascular risk. Design: Iterative development process with mixed methods Methods: An initial bank of 120 text messages was drafted based on behaviour change techniques, guidelines, and input from clinicians and public health experts. A questionnaire was then administered to participants (n = 53) for evaluation of message content, usefulness, and language. To test the process of delivery, a pilot study was conducted using a specifically designed computer programme that delivered messages to multiple mobile phones according to a pre-specified schedule. Data were collected regarding message timing, delivery, and usefulness. Results: In the qualitative questionnaire, 92% of participants found the messages easy to understand and 86% found the messages contained useful information. Positive feedback was also obtained from the pilot study. Based on these results, together with suggestions provided, several messages were reworded and an additional 44 were written. The need for semi-personalization was also identified and a random set of 103 individualized messages was created. Conclusions: A final bank of 137 mobile telephone text messages designed to support behaviour change and decrease cardiovascular risk have been developed through a multistep iterative process. This provides a scientific approach for future developers of health-related text messages.


The essays in this thesis study stock option schemes and CEO compensation in the publicly listed Finnish firms. The first essay studies the determinants of option scheme adoption. It argues that firms with a higher level of market value per employee are able to provide economic incentives for their personnel at a lower cost, thus encouraging the use of options. In addition, share returns from the past year affect the adoption of selective option schemes, but not broad-based plans. The second essay presents empirical evidence on the productivity impacts of stock option schemes. It shows that when endogeneity and dynamics of options are taken into account, there is no statistical evidence on the link between option schemes and firm productivity. The finding is consistent with the hypotheses that predict negligible effects of option plans on firm performance. The third essay studies whether, instead of productivity, option schemes affect firm technical inefficiency. The findings indicate that in the manufacturing sector broad-based scheme firms have higher mean inefficiency than selective or non-option firms. There is also no statistical support for the hypothesis that option schemes may reduce firm technical inefficiency. The fourth essay studies statistical relationships between CEO compensation, firm performance and firm size. It shows that CEO average compensation has increased substantially in 1996-2002. However, the change in CEO compensation, and especially in the total compensation, can be associated with changes in stock market-based measures of firm performance, such as shareholder value and share return. Also, changes in both accounting (ROA%) and stock market-based firm performance measures in the previous year can be associated with the change in CEO compensation in the following year. CEO pay-for-firm size elasticity is estimated to be close to 0.3.


This is a retrospective analysis of 47 patients (21 males, 26 females) with osseous or fibro-osseous temporomandibular joint ankylosis. who were referred to our clinic between 1981 and 1998. In all cases, an acrylic marble was used as the interpositional material to prevent recurrence after aggressive resection of the ankylotic mass. The mean mouth opening was 15.65 mm preoperatively and 32.48 mm postoperatively. Complications during the follow-up period, which ranged from 1 to 17 years, included reankylosis in three cases and extrusion and displacement of the acrylic marbles in two cases. The method produced good results and we believe that it is a simple alternative to other interposition arthroplasty procedures. Moreover, it has the advantages of reducing operating time and not requiring any personal skill.


[1] A reconstruction of Milankovitch to millennial-scale variability of sea surface temperature (SST) and sea surface productivity in the Pleistocene midlatitude North Atlantic Ocean (marine isotope stage (MIS) 16–9) and its relationship to ice sheet instability was carried out on sediments from Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Site U1313. This reconstruction is based on alkenone and n-alkane concentrations, U37K′ index, total organic carbon (TOC) and carbonate contents, X-ray diffraction data, magnetic susceptibility, and accumulation rates. Increased input of ice-rafted debris occurred during MIS 16, 12, and 10, characterized by high concentrations of dolomite, quartz, and feldspars and elevated accumulation rates of terrigenous matter. Minimum input values of terrigenous matter, on the other hand, were determined for MIS 13 and 11. Peak values of dolomite, coinciding with quartz, plagioclase, and kalifeldspar peaks and maxima in long-chain n-alkanes indicative for land plants, are interpreted as Heinrich-like events related to sudden instability of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during early and late (deglacial) phases of the glacials. The coincidence of increased TOC values with elevated absolute concentrations of alkenones suggests increased glacial productivity, probably due to a more southern position of the Polar Front. Alkenone-based SST reached absolute maxima of about 19°C during MIS 11.3 and absolute minima of <10°C during MIS 12 and 10. Within MIS 11, prominent cooling events (MIS 11.22 and 11.24) occurred. The absolute SST minima recorded directly before and after the glacial maxima MIS 10.2 and 12.2 are related to Heinrich-like event meltwater pulses, as supported by the coincidence of SST minima and maxima in C37:4 alkenones and dolomite. These sudden meltwater pulses, especially during terminations IV and V, probably caused a collapse of phytoplankton productivity as indicated by the distinct drop in alkenone concentrations. Ice sheet disintegration and subsequent surges and outbursts of icebergs and meltwater discharge may have been triggered by increased insolation in the northern high latitudes.


The technological route of pre-polymerization and post-coordination was employed to obtain a rapid film-forming macromolecular complex emitting white light by simultaneously combining poly (styrene-co-glycidyl methacrylate) with three primary color complexes [r(R)/g(G)/b(B)]. The white light emission of the macromolecular complex was realized by tuning the ratios of the trichromatic complexes or altering excitation wavelengths. Upon excitation at 365 nm, macromolecular complex 5 with R:G:B = 1:10:1 exhibits three discrete characteristic peaks at 458 (blue emission), 543 (green emission), and 612 (red emission) nm. The corresponding CIE coordinates of (0.332, 0.337) are in close proximity to pure white light (0.330, 0.330). Macromolecular complex 3 (R:G:B = 1:8:0.5) achieves white emission being excited at the wavelength of 375 nm. Macromolecular complex 5 was melted at 140 °C, dropped on a 365 nm UV chip, and then cooled to room temperature to fabricate an LED device with CIE coordinates of (0.35, 0.34), CCT of 5306 K, and CRI of 95.2. The prepared macromolecular complex film further shows vivid color reproduction for real objects, confirming the high rendering index of the macromolecular complex. In addition, the macromolecular complex remains stable up to 272.6 °C, meeting the requirements of operating temperature for LEDs. This work establishes a rapid film-forming macromolecular complex with potential application in NUV-WLEDs.


This Article will show how assault weapons might be protected under Heller as a threshold matter, how Stenberg's guarantee of better methodologies to protect life or health applies just as easily to the assault weapons question, and how the response of Court liberals to an assault weapons case will be an important test of the attitudinalist critique. ... With Heller's explicit protection of handguns and other common self-defense guns, the "sporting use" filter and corresponding distinctions based on appearance cannot be sustained. ... But what happens when the SMUs of common firearms are claimed to produce peculiar externalities that the state wants to combat by banning them? ... Both demand analysis that many people find repugnant - for example, the graphic comparisons of late term abortion procedures or discussions of relative wound ballistics between assault weapons and hunting rifles. ... Subsection 1 will elaborate the parallels between the assault weapons and partial-birth abortion claims, apply the principles developed by the Stenberg majority to the assault weapons claim, and elaborate the attitudinalists' challenge that Stenberg poses for Court liberals. ... Disputed Utility and Legislative Discretion Integral to the outcome in Gonzales is the majority's willingness to credit the legislature's judgment that there is overriding evidence of disutility: the contested statute was grounded on a congressional finding that partial-birth abortion is never the best methodology for preservation of the life or health of the mother. ... Justice Kennedy's suggestion that an as-applied challenge gives the Court a better opportunity to quantify and balance utility and risk is easily applicable to the assault weapons question.t Body]


This paper contributes to a better understanding of costs for collective wastewater treatment in the Walloon Region (Belgium). Based on a large set of data, unit costs to population equivalents are modelled. Considering investment as well as exploitation costs, the model includes not only wastewater treatment plants but also collector and sewage networks in an integrated approach at the technical basin level. Beyond this modelling, each type of process is analyzed independently in order to explore the structure of investment costs and their variation factors. Then, the model was used to forecast the upcoming expenses for 36 areas which are not yet equipped with collective wastewater treatment facilities. In light of these results, strategic choices for decision makers are discussed.


The high-temperature partitioning of Fe 2+ and Mg between the two non-equivalent octahedral M1 and M2 sites in synthetic olivine (Fa 50 ) was studied by Mossbauer spectroscopy. Powder samples have been equilibrated in annealing experiments performed under reducing oxygen fugacity at temperatures between 500°C and 800°C followed by rapid quenching in order to prevent redistribution of cations. M-site ordering with Fe 2+ preferring M1, Mg preferring M2 sites increases continuously with rising equilibrium temperature. K D values increase from 1.21 at 500°C to 1.48 at 750°C. The results are consistent with both room temperature as well as in situ high temperature single crystal X-ray diffraction experiments of Heinemann et al. (2003a and b).


We present general methods to study the effect of multitrace deformations in conformal theories admitting holographic duals in Anti de Sitter space. In particular, we analyse the case that these deformations introduce an instability both in the bulk AdS space and in the boundary CFT. We also argue that multitrace deformations of the O(N) linear sigma model in three dimensions correspond to nontrivial time-dependent backgrounds in certain theories of infinitely many interacting massless fields on AdS4, proposed years ago by Fradkin and Vasiliev. We point out that the phase diagram of a truly marginal large-N deformation has an infrared limit in which only an O(N) singlet field survives. We draw from this case lessons on the full string-theoretical interpretation of instabilities of the dual boundary theory and exhibit a toy model that resolves the instability of the O(N) model, generated by a marginal multitrace deformation. The resolution suggests that the instability may not survive in an appropriate UV completion of the CFT.


A horizontal merger is unlikely to be profitable unless it involves the large majority of firms in an industry. This well established result was developed by Salant et al (1983) in a closed economy setting. The present paper studies the profi tability of mergers in an open economy. A cross-border merger provides the acquiring firm with market access. If alternative modes of market entry are sufficiently costly, a merger may indeed be profitable. The relationship between entry costs and the profitability of merger is, however, not a monotonic one. An increase in entry costs may cause a change in the optimal entry mode of rival firms such that a merger may be unprofitable even for higher entry costs. The paper also derives results regarding the nationality of the acquiring firm.


In a recent article series, the authors have promoted convex optimization algorithms for radio-interferometric imaging in the framework of compressed sensing, which leverages sparsity regularization priors for the associated inverse problem and defines a minimization problem for image reconstruction. This approach was shown, in theory and through simulations in a simple discrete visibility setting, to have the potential to outperform significantly CLEAN and its evolutions. In this work, we leverage the versatility of convex optimization in solving minimization problems to both handle realistic continuous visibilities and offer a highly parallelizable structure paving the way to significant acceleration of the reconstruction and high-dimensional data scalability. The new algorithmic structure promoted relies on the simultaneous-direction method of multipliers (SDMM), and contrasts with the current major-minor cycle structure of CLEAN and its evolutions, which in particular cannot handle the state-of-the-art minimization problems under consideration where neither the regularization term nor the data term are differentiable functions. We release a beta version of an SDMM-based imaging software written in C and dubbed PURIFY (http://basp-group.github.io/purify/) that handles various sparsity priors, including our recent average sparsity approach SARA. We evaluate the performance of different priors through simulations in the continuous visibility setting, confirming the superiority of SARA.