In this paper it's studied how density influences fatigue strength of two sintered steels; one standard, diffusion alloyed material and one sinter hardened pre alloyed chromium material. Fatigue testing on materials at different densities are performed and compared. Furthermore, extreme value statistics is applied to the pore structure to determine the size of the largest pore, and fracture mechanics is used to link fatigue strength to porosity. It's found that there is a strong correlation between fatigue limit and largest pore size. For the sinter hardened material it's found that a LEFM model can be used to predict fatigue crack initiation, whereas for the diffusion alloyed material with a complex microstructure initiation is a more complex interaction between porosity and the softer micro constituents.


A case study of the Clausius-Williamson hypothesis sheds light on the development of the physical sciences during the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, Rudolf Clausius and Alexander William Williamson independently developed similar hypotheses at a time when physics and chemistry were beginning to be considered independent endeavors. Some thirty years later, after specialization took root, their names were associated; the two hypotheses became the hypothesis of Clausius-Williamson . How and why were these distinct investigations conducted in the 1850s unified in the 1880s? The current historiography addresses the Clausius-Williamson hypothesis as it is featured in subsequent interpretations by Svante Arrhenius, but does not thoroughly analyze the published writings of Clausius and Williamson themselves. This paper reappraises Clausius's and Williamson's works in their original context and analyzes how their hypotheses came to be associated. This case study emphasizes how the relationship between physics and chemistry evolved in the nineteenth century. More specifically, it underscores the limited communication between these disciplines in the 1850s and the rise of interdisciplinarity in the 1880s, which led to the creation of a new field: physical chemistry. From the study of the emergence and success of the theory of ionic dissociation and physical chemistry, I show that referring to the authoritative figures of Clausius and Williamson legitimized and valorized investigations at the borderlands of physics and chemistry in a context of increased specialization.


ABSTRACT The junction between the memory of violence of the past and fictional registry is a dimension of post-dictatorial society's cultural dynamics. While the testimonial narrative is dominant in the literary sphere, the archive as a repository of memory and documental inscription, with the capacity to iterate and transit from one social field to another, challenges regimes of truth and lineal temporality of official memory. This article identifies, characterises and compares the way in which records are employed in contemporary Chilean post-dictatorship narrative. The archive enables us to problematise and contextualise the relation to the recent dictatorial past and the opening up of new fields of reflection. The incorporation of records in four recent Chilean post-dictatorship novels (Puño y Letra by Eltit; Sprinters, Los Niños de Colonia Dignidad by Larra; La Dimensión Desconocida by Fernández and Monte Maravilla by Lafferte) is achieved through quotes or theme development. Such resources bring to light the fascination as well as the scepticism that archives generate in literature, as well as their effectiveness for expressing the intricate, and even contradictory, mechanisms of memory.


During the first half of the twentieth century, despatches about the coldest corner of the British Empire were circulated to three, sometimes four, of its southern neighbours under the British crown: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. Of these four, South Africa seemed the least interested in Antarctica, despite the keen interest of some influential individuals and a strategy of bringing Antarctica into the imperial fold through British dominions that were proximate to Antarctica. In this context, we ask how South Africa viewed itself in relation to the Antarctic to the south and the British metropole to the north. We discuss the key activities that connected South Africa to Antarctica—whaling and weather forecasting. Moreover, we consider some of the enterprising plans for a South African National Antarctic expedition, and what these plans reveal of South Africa's perception of itself as a southern country. This article interlinks with a growing scholarship that is critical of treating Antarctic history as politically and culturally isolated, including showing how the relatively simple natural and political ecology of the Antarctic can throw into relief multiple national and international concerns.


The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) offers a bottom-up, locally situated and contextualized approach to enhancing educational practice. It has been championed for several years, yet remains curiously undervalued within the academy, despite clear benefits for curricular development and staff engagement. This paper reflects upon the production of an auto-ethnographic reflective evaluation of SoTL activities relating to architectural education, forming part of the first author's portfolio-based assessment for a Professional Doctorate in Education (Ed D). The paper evaluates the challenges and potential of undertaking this doctoral assessment path, which appears to be seldom employed, at least in the UK. Particular attention is placed on negotiated assessment by portfolio as a key driver for practical value, and the flexibility that this route affords for academics to shape their professional development through SoTL activities. Affordances and challenges of this pathway for practitioner-led scholarship and doctoral recognition are illuminated.


The primary objective of this research is to develop large scale robust optimization algorithms providing sustainable solutions for bulk port operations accounting for uncertainties and disruptions in operations. While significant contributions have been made for container terminals, relatively little attention has been directed to the use of operations research methods and techniques to optimize bulk port operations. In this research we aim to develop large scale mathematical models for bulk port operations, with emphasis on integrated planning; furthermore, we plan to include robustness to account for uncertainties in operations. A broader objective of our work is to study how the methodologies developed for bulk ports can be extended to multi-modal transport operations, including other domains such as container ports, airlines and railways, with a view to optimize the usage and operations of existing infrastructure to achieve sustainability in the mobility of goods and people. The devised models and algorithms will be tested and validated in a realworld context using as a case study, the SAQR port in Ras Al Khaimah, UAE. Fig. 1 Ship loading into big vessels Fig.2 Conveyor system for bulk material transfer


Dear Editor-in-ChiefPhysicians in ancient Persia played an important role in development of medicine in the medieval Europe. One of the most influential figures of this era was Avicenna. Avicenna (980 -1037AD) was , a great Islamic and Iranian physician and the author of more than 335 books on medicine, philosophy and other branches of knowledge, and his masterpiece," The Canon of Medicine "which was the text book of medicine for more than 6 centuries in Europe and the Persian empire. The purpose of this study is to present the view point of Avicenna about reasoning for liver's condition (1). The structure of Iranian Traditional Medicine is based on some principles such as the fact that heart, brain and liver are the main organs of our body i.e. the human survival depends on their existence (2).Liver is the origin of natural qova (Natural power). The most important function of liver is to produce humours (akhlat) for nourishing, growing and developing of body (3). Liver is the organ composed of flesh, vessels, and a sensitive membrane. Of course the very liver does not have sense itself, its color is like the color of frozen blood (4).Liver is the origin of the body's vessels. Masarrigha vessels (mesenteric Vessels) and the branches of the Bab's vein are originated from the concave part of the liver .These two vessels go towards stomach and intestine to absorb chylus (5), that is, product of gastric digestion or the first digestion, from them and then deliver it to liver for the second stage of digestion or hepatic digestion, to produce Humours (6) .There is relation between balancing of these Humours and different diseases such as hyper cholesterolemi (7). Vena cava vein is originated from its convex part in order to deliver food to all organs and take the urine, made of the waste created from the second stage of digestion, to the kidneys (4).According to the above mentioned points, quoted from Iranian Traditional Medicine literatures knowing liver, diagnosis and treatment of its diseases take an important role. But Avicenna without any facilities for diagnosis of liver diseases introduced some criteria in order to reasoning for the liver's condition. In that era the emphasis was more on history and physical exam of the liver to reason for its condition. Our study shows that there are 10 criteria of reasoning for the liver's condition as follows:1) The reason based on palpation of the liver's location:i. If the place were warm or cold, dry or wet we can conclude about the liver's temperament (2,8).ii. If the place were stiff or tumescent, it implies the stiffness or stiff swelling or tympani of the liver.2)The reason based on liver ache:Different kinds of liver ache illustrate different diseases of liver such as obstruction, swelling, tympani etc (9, 10).3)The reason based on liver function:Such as absorption, digestion, repulse blood or dam towards body, urine towards kidneys, yellow bile or safra towards gallbladder and black bile or sauda towards spleen4) The reason based on shared organs with liver:Such as stomach, spleen, lungs, heart, tongue etc. …


Background: Numerous studies have shown platelet-rich plasma (PRP) preparations differ with respect to the inclusion of certain blood components, which may affect the host's cellular response. Hypothesis: This study evaluated the inflammatory effect of Biomet GPS III leukocyte-rich PRP (LR-PRP) versus MTF Cascade leukocyte-poor PRP (LP-PRP) after intratendinous injection in an animal model. The authors anticipated that LR-PRP would incite a greater acute inflammatory response than LP-PRP. Study Design: Controlled laboratory study. Methods: A total of 17 skeletally mature New Zealand White rabbits were tested. In all cases, healthy patellar tendons were treated. In the control animals, one patellar tendon was injected with 2 mL autologous whole blood, and the other was injected with 2 mL sterile saline. Seven total tendons were injected with whole blood, and 7 tendons were injected with saline. In the experimental animals, one patellar tendon was injected with 2 mL LR-PRP, and the other was injected with 2 mL LP-PRP. Ten tendons were injected with LR-PRP, and 10 tendons were injected with LP-PRP. Animals were euthanized at 5 or 14 days after injection. Tendons were harvested and stained using hematoxylin and eosin and scored semi-quantitatively for total white blood cells (WBCs), mononuclear cells (macrophages and lymphocytes), polymorphonuclear cells (PMNs), vascularity, fiber structure, and fibrosis. Results: At 5 days after injection, tendons treated with LR-PRP had significantly greater overall tendon scores (6.3 ± 1.79 vs 1.8 ± 1.64, P = .012), as well as mean scores for fiber structure (1.4 ± 0.22 vs 0.50 ± 0.50, P = .012), denoting disrupted composition, total WBCs (1.1 ± 0.89 vs 0.10 ± 0.22, P = .014), mononuclear cells (macrophages and lymphocytes) (0.80 ± 0.45 vs 0.10 ± 0.22, P = .014), vascularity (1.7 ± 0.27 vs 0.80 ± 0.16, P = .008), and fibrosis (1.0 ± 0.35 vs 0.3 ± 0.45, P = .037) compared with tendons treated with LP-PRP. Otherwise, there were no significant differences in mononuclear cells (P = .590), PMN cells (P = 1.00), total WBCs (P = .811), vascularity (P = .650), or total tendon score (P = .596) in any of the treatment groups at 14 days. Conclusion: Compared with leukocyte-poor Cascade PRP, leukocyte-rich GPS III PRP causes a significantly greater acute inflammatory response at 5 days after injection. There is no significant difference in the inflammatory response or cellularity regardless of the injection type at 14 days after intratendinous injection. Clinical Relevance: Platelet-rich plasma injections are frequently prepared using commercial systems and are administered for clinical treatment of chronic tendinopathy. It is important to characterize the cellular responses elucidated by different injection preparations to further understand their effect on tissue healing and aid clinical decision making. Future investigations are necessary to apply these findings to the clinical setting.


In this article, we explore how teachers who make their work public through talk and texts may find their composing complicated by issues of authority. These public composing acts include drafting articles, preparing workshop presentations, authoring op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, developing book manuscripts – creating any of the spoken and written texts by which educators communicate as a field. We draw from three studies in different contexts to examine the authority concerns that teacher-writers experience during the composing process. Our aim is to draw attention to (a) the struggles in process that teachers face as they develop individual pieces and wrestle with rhetorical decisions, as well as (b) the struggles with people, power, and authority that occur as teachers consider how their words, ideas, and experiences circulate in public venues. We see these as intrinsically linked: The writing process is a site where the wider struggles are played out and become visible.


Finite Element Model Updating has recently arisen as an issue of vast importance on
the design, construction and maintenance of structures in civil engineering. Many
algorithms have been proposed, developed and enhanced in order to accomplish
the demands of the updating process, mainly to achieve computationally efficient
programs and greater results.
The present Master Thesis proposes two new algorithms to be used in Finite Element
Model Updating: the Bees Algorithms (BA) and the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm
(ABC). Both were first proposed in 2005, are based on the foraging behaviour of
bees and have been proved to be efficient algorithms in other fields.
The objective of this Master Thesis is, thus, to implement and to test these two new
algorithms in Finite Element Model Updating for a cantilever beam. The Finite
Element Model and the algorithms are programmed, followed by the extraction of
the experimental frequencies and the updating process.
Results, comparison of these two methods and conclusions are given at the end of
this report, as well as suggestions for further work.


Advances in technology are transforming how youth and parents interact with programs. The Strengthening 4-H Communication through Technology project was implemented in eight county 4-H programs in Northwest Minnesota. This article outlines the intentional process used to effectively implement technology in program planning. The project includes: assessing current communication tools used; evaluating participants' preferences for receiving information; educating staff on current research trends; and training teams of youth and adults with the Forrester Research Model (2011) to implement social media as a program communication tool. The process helps staff identify audience and purpose of using technology for their specific needs.


The Internet in China examines the cultural and political ramifications of the Internet for Chinese society. The rapid growth of the Internet has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government, but the government has also rushed to seize control of the virtual environment. Individuals have responded with impassioned campaigns against official control of information. The emergence of a civil society via cyberspace has had profound effects upon China--for example, in 2003, based on an Internet campaign, the Chinese Supreme People's Court overturned the ruling of a local court for the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.The important question this book asks is not whether the Internet will democratize China, but rather in what ways the Internet is democratizing communication in China. How is the Internet empowering individuals by fostering new types of social spaces and redefining existing social relations?


In this paper, we investigate physical-layer security in a random wireless network where both legitimate and eavesdropping nodes are randomly deployed. In the first scenario, we study the basic random network without a protected zone around the source node. The probability density functions (pdfs) for the composite channel gain with both fading and path loss is derived and used to calculate the probability of secure connection and ergodic secrecy capacity. In the second scenario, we consider the use of secrecy protected zone around the source node to enhance the security in a noise-limited network. Here, we study the following two cases: 1) The eavesdroppers are aware of the secrecy protected zone, and 2) the eavesdroppers are unaware of the secrecy protected zone. Moreover, the distribution of the distances between the origin and random nodes outside the secrecy protected zone is derived. In the final scenario, the interferer protected zones around the legitimate receivers are used to improve the physical-layer security by restructuring the interference. The derived analytical results are verified by the Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that the application of secrecy and interferer protected zones lead to significant improvement in security, depending on different system parameters.


Internet architecture and infrastructure are generally not at the top of the concerns of end users, and the overlying logical arrangements of root services, domain names, and protocols remain largely invisible to its users. Recent developments, however—including massive user data leakages, hacks targeting social networking service providers, and behavioral micro‐targeting—have turned a spotlight on Internet governance defined broadly, and its relationship with civil liberties and human rights. The articles in this special issue examine the policymaking role of influential private intermediaries and private actors such as ICANN in enacting global governance via Internet architecture, exploring the implications of such a mode of governance for human rights. They consider: to what extent are human rights standards mediated and set via technical infrastructure, such as the DNS and platform policies, rather than by governmental structures? What are the implications of governance via Internet architecture for individual human rights? And what frameworks—be they legal, technological or policy‐related—are needed to address the contemporary privatization of human rights online, in order to ensure the effective protection of human rights in the digital age?


This study employed both quantitative and qualitative approaches to discuss the impacts of media reputation on customers behavioral intentions. A total of 322 completed questionnaires were analyzed, and found that theoretical framework and uncovered strong links between a numbers of hypothesized antecedent and behavioral intentions. The variable which made the largest contribution to prediction of media reputation from customers is social responsibility. Moreover, fifteen qualitative interviews were conducted. The owner-managers, however, have different points of view, they have thought about their restaurants reputation, but it not come from the media. The main contribution drawn from this study is to connect the media reputation from both sides, one side being the customers and the other the owner-managers of Chinese restaurants.


ii Abstract Seaweed has traditionally been used in Scotland and other countries both as food and for medicinal purposes, which has led to seaweed being investigated for their natural product content. Despite over 30 years of research, the maj ority of species found in Scotland have yet to have their chemistry examined. Extracts of seaweed were tested for antimicrobial a ctivity against marine bacteria. Extracts of Palmaria palmata, Ulva linza, Chondrus crispus and Pelvetia canaliculata showed no detectable activity, while ethyl acetate extracts o f Fucus serratus , Halidrys siliquosa, Osmundea pinnatifida nd Polysiphonia fucoides howed activity against at least six of the seven strains. Extracts were screened for radical s cavenging activity against ABTS, DPPH and superoxide radicals. At least one extract from each brown seaweed showed radical scavenging of at least 80 % towards ABTS ·+ with an ethyl acetate extract of P. fucoides and H. siliquosa quenching DPPH · by at least 90%. Radical scavenging activity appea rs to be dependent total phenolic content of extract. Ext racts were subjected to a series of assays relevant to human health. Ethyl acetate extracts sh owed high antiparasitic activity against Trypanosoma brucei with a P. fucoides extract showing antibacterial activity toward Staphylococcus aureus. Extracts of H. siliquosa and F. serratus showed cytotoxicity to Hela cells with extracts of H. siliquosa showing cytotoxicity to LN CAP AS and PC 3 cell lines. An extract of H. siliquosa underwent chromatography and by applying assay guid ed fractionation, several active fractions were identi fied. These were analysed using NMR and LC/MS and four compounds identified: (2 E. 6E. 14E)-l-(l'-hydroxy-4'-methoxy-6'methyl-phenyl)-5, 13-dihydroxy-12-one-3, 7, 11, 15tetramethylhexadeca-2, 6, 14-triene, a known antibacterial compound, previously identified n H. siliquosa; (2E, 6E, 10E, l4E)-1(1'-hydroxy-4'-methoxy-6'-methyl phenyl)-5, 12 dihy droxy-3.7, 11, 15-tetramethyl hexadeca-2.6, 10, l4-tetraene, previously identifie d in Cystoseira elegans , and now in H. siliquosa; and two compounds that have not been reported bef ore.


The Fordism/postfordism framework has been widely used, but also heavily criticized, in the social sciences. I outline the central points of debate over the use of this framework for analysis of work organization, including the range of models offered as successors to Fordism. I then suggest that, while some criticisms of the concept of postfordism have highlighted important problems and issues, the Fordist/postfordist framework can be elaborated as an analytically coherent, theoretically illuminating approach to the historical, institutional, and comparative analysis of work and employment. Although researchers appear to be using the concept of postfordism increasingly less frequently over the last decade, I argue that it provides a unifying framework within which to analyze work and employment relations in the current phase of capitalism, which is characterized by an apparent variety of new organizational forms within a broader context of increasing disconnectedness of economic institutions. Lean production has become established as the predominant postfordist labor process, widespread in manufacturing but also increasingly being implemented in services. However, this must be distinguished from a broader set of changes in employment relations. © 2011 The Author. Sociology Compass © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


Title of Document: APPLICATIONS OF MULTIPHOTON IMAGING TECHNIQUES TO THE STUDY OF PROTEIN INTERACTIONS. Tilman Rosales, Ph.D., 2009 Directed By: Prof. Robert A. Walker Dept of Chemistry and Biochemistry Several recent improvements in microscopy have been driven by advances in ultrafast laser technology. The goal of the research described in this dissertation was to develop noninvasive, optically based methods to measure the mobility of macromolecules in biologically relevant systems. These methods exploit advances in ultrafast laser science and recent developments in multiphoton spectroscopy techniques. Each of the techniques described in this dissertation is validated and standardized using well characterized systems. We have explored the following techniques: First, 2-photon 2-color Fluorescence Cross Correlation Spectroscopy (FCCS) a powerful technique to measure dilute protein interactions in living cells. We have used FCCS to probe AR-Tif2 (Androgen Receptor activating cofactor) interactions in the presence of casodex, an antagonist yielding decreased binding affinity. On a much faster timescale, exploring rotational rather than translational diffusion, we used molecular dynamics simulations of the model probe perylene to show that there is 'room to wiggle' (sub-ps libration) within pure hexadecane. Third, combining picosecond and microsecond scales, we built a system to measure both rotational and translational motion in one experiment, using advanced Time Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC) techniques. We have tested our ability to measure and link simultaneously the translational rates and decay rates of Alexa488 dye and other biologically relevant fluorophores. Next, exploiting non-linear vibrational spectroscopy, we have imaged the nonfluorescent molecule NAD in DPPC vesicles, the C-H stretch of lipids in vesicles and polystyrene beads, and the O-H stretch of water inside living cells (vs. O-D) to demonstrate the chemically selective imaging capabilities of Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy (CARS) Microscopy. Most recently, we have built a STED (STimulated Emission Depletion) Microscope capable of extracting fluorescent images well below the diffraction limit. The STED microscope was tested using both 170nm fluorescent beads and a novel photochromic dye. APPLICATIONS OF MULTIPHOTON IMAGING TECHNIQUES TO THE STUDY OF PROTEIN INTERACTIONS.


This thesis examines a particular cultural object: dance music magazines. It explores the co-imbrication of the magazines with dance music and considers how a reconfiguration of the field of genre theory can help to dismantle the generic separations of 'textual' and 'industrial' approaches to cultural objects. The main argument of the thesis is as follows.

The magazine industries produce an object of cultural exchange which is made commercially viable through a narrowing of its target audiences. These audiences arise in the space created by the dance music industries' negotiation of an imagined contest between 'underground' authenticity and 'mainstream' productivity. In turn, dance music magazines produce a powerfully exclusive space for the communication networks of the dance music genre by capitalising on the desire to stabilise genre and therefore taking up generic instability as a positive youth marketing strategy.

According to this position, genre is thought of as that which schematises the ordinary cultural operation of making decisions. The ethics of genre means that each generic judgment or decision is a moment of enacting opinion, and thus of participating within the negotiation of community. With respect to dance music in particular, its ethics is set up as a response to (what are perceived as) deliberate misunderstandings in the traditional media and is energetically taken up through dance music journalism's defensive celebration of the ephemeral and negotiated performativity of the (personal and collective) rave.

Each of the chapters of this thesis was designed to approach dance music magazines from a different angle: the first as 'industries'; the last as 'citizenships'; and between these a bridging overview of 'genres'. In order to undertake a thorough investigation, both the industries which produce, and the citizenships which use, a cultural object must be considered. These approaches are immediately complementary: citizenships participate in the regulation of genre through negotiating the ordering of generic rules; and those rules impact upon and are simultaneously ordered through the operation of industries.


Fault tolerance is fundamental to the further development of mobile agent applications. In the context of mobile agents, fault-tolerance prevents a partial or complete loss of the agent, i.e., it ensures that the agent arrives at its destination. We present FATOMAS, a Java-based fault-tolerant mobile agent system based on an algorithm presented in an earlier paper (2000). Contrary to the standard "place-dependent" architectural approach, FATOMAS uses the novel "agent-dependent" approach. In this approach, the protocol that provides fault tolerance travels with the agent. This has the important advantage to allow fault-tolerant mobile agent execution without the need to modify the underlying mobile agent platform (in our case ObjectSpace's Voyager). In our performance evaluation, we show the costs of our approach relative to the single, non-replicated agent execution. Pipelined mode and optimized agent forwarding are two optimizations that reduce the overhead of a fault-tolerant mobile agent execution.


If you are faced with the challenge to learn the Adobe Creative Suite, you probably also find yourself faced with the challenge of carrying five big books to help you learn all that you need to know. Why take on more than is necessary? Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Creative Suite 2 All in One has all the answers to your Adobe Creative Suite questions in one easy-to-use book. You will learn all of the products and technologies in a logical, well-integrated fashion. Understand the fundamentals of how they work separately and together to maximize your potential with: Adobe Photoshop CS2 Adobe Illustrator CS2 Adobe GoLive CS2 Adobe InDesign CS2 Adobe Version Cue CS2 Adobe Bridge Adobe Stock Photos Adobe Acrobat 7.0Get up to speed quickly and easily on all of the Adobe CS2i¾ products with the help of Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Creative Suite 2 i¾ All in One.


Abstract. Spatio-temporal variability of crop growth descriptors is of prime importance for crop risk assessment and yield gap analysis. The incorporation of three bands (viz., B5, B6, B7) in 'red-edge' position (i.e., 705 nm, 740 nm, 783 nm) in Sentinel-2 with 10–20 m spatial resolution images with five days revisit period have unfolded opportunity for meticulous crop monitoring. In the present study, the potential of Sentinel-2 have been appraised for monitoring phenological stages of potato over Bardhaman district in the state of West Bengal, India. Due to the competency of Vegetation indices (VI) to evaluate the status of crop growth; we have used the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI), and the Normalized Difference Index45 (NDI45) for crop monitoring. Time series analysis of the VIs exhibited increasing trend as the crop started approaching maturity and attained a maximum value during the tuber development stage and started decreasing as the crop advances to senescence. Inter-field variability of VIs highlighted the need of crop monitoring at high spatial resolution. Among the three vegetation indices, the GNDVI (r = 0.636), NDVI (r = 0.620) had the highest correlation with biomass and Plant Area Index (PAI), respectively. NDI45 had comparatively a lower correlation (r = 0.572 and 0.585 for PAI and biomass, respectively) with both parameters as compared to other two indices. It is interesting to note that the use of Sentinel-2 Green band (B3) instead of the Red band (B4) in GNDVI resulted in 2.5% increase of correlation with biomass. However, the improvement in correlations between NDI45 with crop biophysical parameters is not apparent in this particular study with the inclusion of the Vegetation Red Edge band (B5) in VI. Nevertheless, the strong correlation of VIs with biomass and PAI asserted proficiency of Sentinel-2 for crop monitoring and potential for crop biophysical parameter retrieval with optimum accuracy.


Sediment yield data is generally not available for smaller hydrologic units and it becomes difficult to identify the most vulnerable erosion zonethat can be treated on a priority basis. The study area is 163407 ha lies between 23° 13′ 12"N 23° 33′ 1′′ N latitude and 85° 10′ 28′′ E 85° 54′ 16′′ E longitude having 3870 streams linked with 7 order of streams and divided in to 20 miniwatersheds. The evaluation of morphometric and Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) parameters using remote sensing and GIS for prioritization of miniwatersheds in Subranerakha Subcatchment, Jharkhand, India. Furthermore, attempt was also made to compare the ranks obtained from both parameters to ascertain the validity of ranks of USLE. The ranks of USLE were found more appropriate and are considered for the prioritization of miniwatersheds. Five categories of priority viz., very high, high, medium, low and very low, were used to classify the miniwatersheds. The prioritization results reveal that four miniwatersheds viz. USR7, USR8, USR10 and USR5 fall under the category of very high priority. The area is grouped in to very severe, moderately severe, moderate, slight and very slight erosion susceptibility zones. GIS and remote sensing based evaluation of morphometric and USLE parameters for ranking them is an immense help in the prioritization of small hydrologic units. Further the technology is helpful in erosion susceptibility zone mapping based on ranks obtained from morphometric and USLE parameters for evaluation of conservation measures for ridge to valley treatment.


BACKGROUND
and objective Previous studies from areas with high mortality in West Africa have not found diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine to be associated with the expected reduction in mortality, a few studies suggesting increased mortality. We therefore examined mortality when DTP was first introduced in rural areas of Guinea-Bissau in 1984-1987. Setting Twenty villages in four regions have been followed with bi-annual examinations since 1979.

SUBJECTS
In all, 1657 children aged 2-8 months. Design Children were weighed when attending the bi-annual examinations and they were vaccinated whenever vaccines were available. DTP was introduced in the beginning of 1984, oral polio vaccine later that year. We examined mortality for children aged 2-8 months who had received DTP and compared them with children who had not been vaccinated because they were absent, vaccines were not available, or they were sick.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE
Mortality over the next 6 months from the day of examination for vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

RESULTS
Prior to the introduction of vaccines, children who were absent at a village examination had the same mortality as children who were present. During 1984-1987, children receiving DTP at 2-8 months of age had higher mortality over the next 6 months, the mortality rate ratio (MR) being 1.92 (95% CI: 1.04, 3.52) compared with DTP-unvaccinated children, adjusting for age, sex, season, period, BCG, and region. The MR was 1.81 (95% CI: 0.95, 3.45) for the first dose of DTP and 4.36 (95% CI: 1.28, 14.9) for the second and third dose. BCG was associated with slightly lower mortality (MR = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.30, 1.33), the MR for DTP and BCG being significantly inversed. Following subsequent visits and further vaccinations with DTP and measles vaccine, there was no difference in vaccination coverage and subsequent mortality between the DTP-vaccinated group and the initially DTP-unvaccinated group (MR = 1.06, 95% CI: 0.78, 1.44).

CONCLUSIONS
In low-income countries with high mortality, DTP as the last vaccine received may be associated with slightly increased mortality. Since the pattern was inversed for BCG, the effect is unlikely to be due to higher-risk children having received vaccination. The role of DTP in high mortality areas needs to be clarified.


The Damara Tern Sterna balaenarum is
Africa's smallest breeding tern and is a near-endemic breeder to Namibia (Simmons 2005). It is globally Near-threatened (IUCN 2009) and breeds on the coastal mainland where the cold Benguela Current meets the Namib Desert. All but a small fraction leave south-western Africa for non-breeding grounds on the west African coast (Simmons 2005). Birds leave their respective breeding grounds at the end of the austral summer, latest April, and move northward along the Namibian coast where they coalesce with other post-breeding Damara Terns into larger flocks before migration (Braby et al. 1992). Groups then migrate northward to over-winter in countries such as coastal Gabon, Congo, and even as far as Nigeria (Bourdillon 1944, Elgood et al. 1973, Wallace 1973), Liberia (Borrow and Demey 2001) and Senegal (Brown 1979).


Emerging data suggest that signaling by heparin-binding growth factors is influenced by the sulfation state of N-acetylglucosamine residues of heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPGs). Here we report that the recently identified protein HSulf-1, a heparin-degrading endosulfatase, encodes a cell surface-associated enzyme that diminishes sulfation of cell surface HSPGs. The message encoding this enzyme is readily detectable in a variety of normal tissues, including normal ovarian surface epithelial cells, but is undetectable in 5 of 7 ovarian carcinoma cell lines and markedly diminished or undetectable in ∼75% of ovarian cancers. Similar down-regulation is also observed in breast, pancreatic, renal cells, and hepatocellular carcinoma lines. Re-expression of HSulf-1 in ovarian cancer cell lines resulted in diminished HSPG sulfation, diminished phosphorylation of receptor tyrosine kinases that require sulfated HSPGs as co-receptors for their cognate ligands, and diminished downstream signaling through the extracellular signal-regulated kinase pathway after treatment with fibroblast growth factor-2 or heparin-binding epidermal growth factor. Consistent with these changes, HSulf-1 re-expression resulted in reduced proliferation as well as sensitivity to induction of apoptosis by the broad spectrum kinase inhibitor staurosporine and the chemotherapeutic agent cisplatin. Collectively, these observations provide evidence that HSulf-1 modulates signaling by heparin-binding growth factors, and HSulf-1 down-regulation represents a novel mechanism by which cancer cells can enhance growth factor signaling.


Background and Purpose Hemodilution may be a useful form of therapy for patients with carotid occlusive disease and hemodynamic ischemia. Accordingly, we evaluated the effects of hemodilution on cerebral hemodynamics and oxygen metabolism in patients with carotid artery occlusion. Methods Using positron emission tomography, we analyzed regional cerebral blood flow, oxygen extraction fraction, oxygen metabolic rate, and blood volume before and after isovolemic hemodilution in five patients with unilateral internal carotid artery occlusion and minor stroke. Hemodilution was accomplished by phlebotomy of 400 mL and infusion of 400 mL of hydroxyethyl starch. Results Before hemodilution, the patients had a significant decrease in blood flow and oxygen transport along with significantly elevated oxygen extraction fraction in the cerebral hemisphere with carotid artery occlusion compared with six control subjects. After hemodilution, the hematocrit and arterial oxygen content decreased from 41.2% and 18.6 mL/dL to 36.3% and 16.5 mL/dL, respectively. Both cerebral blood flow and oxygen transport were increased and oxygen extraction fraction was decreased without any change in oxygen consumption. The degree of increase in blood flow and oxygen transport was positively correlated with the ratio of oxygen extraction fraction to blood volume before hemodilution. Conclusions These findings indicate that hemodilution improves oxygen transport as well as blood flow in patients with internal carotid occlusion and decreased perfusion and that this improvement may be more prominent in patients with a severely compromised hemodynamic state. Thus, hemodilution may be useful in patients with hemodynamic ischemia.


What must a poor person plead to gain access to the federal courts? How do courts decide when a poor litigant is poor enough? This Article answers those questions with the first comprehensive study of how district courts determine when a litigant may proceed in forma pauperis in a civil lawsuit. This Article shows that district courts lack standards to determine a litigant's poverty and often require litigants to answer an array of questions to little effect. As a result, discrepancies in federal practice abound — across and within district courts — and produce a pleading system that is arbitrary, inefficient, and invasive. This Article makes four contributions. First, it codes all the poverty pleadings currently used by the 94 federal district courts. Second, the Article shows that the flaws of these pleading procedures are neither inevitable nor characteristic of poverty determinations. By comparing federal practice to other federal means tests and state court practices, the Article demonstrates that a more streamlined, yet rights-respecting approach is possible. Third, the Article proposes a coherent in forma pauperis standard — one that would align federal practice with federal law, promote reasoned judicial administration, and protect the dignity of litigants. Such a solution proves that judges need not choose between extending access to justice and preserving court resources. In this instance and perhaps others, judges can serve both commitments of the federal system. Fourth, the Article illustrates how to study procedure from the bottom up. Given the persistent levels of inequality in American society, no account of civil procedure is complete without an understanding of how poor people litigate today.


The emerging high-speed Ethernet is expected to take full advantage of the currently deployed optical infrastructure, i.e., optical transport network over wavelength division multiplexing (OTN/WDM) networks. Parallel transmission is a viable option towards this goal, as exemplified by several IEEE and ITU-T standards. The optical virtual concatenation protocol in the OTN layer defined in ITU-T G.709 enables high-speed Ethernet signals to be decoupled into low rate virtual containers. The multiple lane distribution layer defined in IEEE 802.3ba facilitates the optical parallel transmission by stripping Ethernet signals into multiple low rate lanes which can be mapped onto optical channels. In this paper, we propose a new optimization framework for parallel transmission in OTN/WDM networks to support high-speed Ethernet. We formulate the parallel transmission optimization as an integer linear programming problem encompassing three sub-problems: parallel wavelength routing and assignment, usage of electronic buffering for skew compensation, and bufferless parallel transmission. To reduce computational complexity, we deploy multi-objective evolutionary optimization. The numerical results show that parallel transmission in OTN/WDM networks is feasible, and optimal solutions can be obtained with minimum resource consumption and bufferless system design.


There is a vast empirical literature rejecting uncovered interest parity(UIP) on the basis of regressions of the actual exchange rate change against the forward premium/discount. In this paper, whilst we confirm the conventional regression analyses, we argue that they constitute only an indirect test of UIP and that there are serious econometric flaws in such regressions that make them an unreliable means of testing for UIP. Instead, we propose a two new profitability based tests of the UIP condition based on actual dollar returns of being in the domestic and foreign currency and we find evidence that in fact the UIP condition in fact seems to be holding for three of the four parities studied even though the conventional test would have rejected UIP in all four cases. Not only do our economically more meaningful profitability based tests lead us to accept the UIP condition for three of four currencies studied but they also seem to offer superior econometric properties compared to the conventional regression analyses.


The hard Fourth Amendment cases, especially those involving surveillance, ask whether the police investigative tactic at issue counts as a "search"; if not, the Fourth Amendment does not apply at all. Under the Court's main test, at least for surveillance without a trespass, the police conduct a "search" if they invade a person's reasonable expectation of privacy.But when the Court assesses Fourth Amendment privacy, it treats it as an all-or-nothing concept without regard to the relation between the person searched and the person searching. For example, the Court has held that when the police rummage through a person's garbage left curbside, this conduct does not amount to a search. The Court reasoned that a person does not expect privacy in his garbage in relation to animals, scavengers, or children, and therefore has no privacy in his garbage with respect to anyone, including the police.This Article argues that in assessing the Fourth Amendment, the Court should take into account the relational nature of privacy, and acknowledge that we have a greater expectation of privacy as against the government than we do as against our neighbors and friends. In fact, we desire and expect the highest level of privacy when the government pursues a criminal investigation, and it is here the Fourth Amendment should play its greatest role. This follows based upon the relational nature of privacy, certain lines of Supreme Court precedent, such as the inventory and administrative search cases, and the history of the Fourth Amendment, rooted especially in the seminal John Wilkes cases, which were initiated as a criminal case.


Sustainability of public (social) housing estates is fundamental to all stakeholders within and external to that
estate environment. It determines and influences the outlook of the built environment and whether it has an
appropriate and effective post-construction management practice. The public (social) housing estates provided,
however, have had the pitfalls of sustainability, such that the issues that bring about sustainable housing estates
are not well understood and integrated into a desirable state. The imperative to meet the Millennium
Development Goals and sustainable development agenda in terms of housing needs, accessibility and
affordability is diminished. This paper aims to evaluate public (social) housing estates beneficial sustainability
factors in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. The paper used both qualitative and quantitative approaches in data
collection and analysis. The findings indicate that the identification, understanding, and inclusion of the
sustainability factors were negligible in the current practice. It further reveals that the importance and relevance
of these factors in achieving sustainable housing estates were predicted to be very high. The paper further shows
that these beneficial factors have strong relationships to continuous successful inflows and outflows of benefits.
Therefore, more effort is needed in their integration in the housing management approach. The paper
recommends that while the implementation of the sustainability factors are all feasible; transparency,
accountability, partnership and good governance should be considered as underpinning these sustainability
factors' successful implementation in sustaining social (public) housing estates and the benefits.


Analyzing discrete event sequences has become a popular field in recent years. In the area of business process mining, numerous techniques have been developed to discover the structure of business processes by means of traces they leave behind in information systems. In organizational routines literature, these traces have been identified as a valuable source of information to investigate the dynamics of routines and how they evolve over time. However, both areas have been discussed in separation only. But in both areas alike the fundamental problem is to acquire knowledge about regularities in sequences of events based on observations thereof, and thus, we argue that process mining has the potential to advance research on organizational routines. As with any data analysis problem, one has to deal with problems due to noisy data and small samples. Thus, we show in this paper how to apply simple statistical tools to pattern detection in sequences. Subsequently, we integrate this into the popular algorithm. This paves the way for statistically controlling the risk of falling for erroneous results. To the best of our knowledge, no process mining algorithm is capable of doing this. We are convinced that this will facilitate applicability in organizational routines studies.


The effect of ruthenium particle size on Fischer–Tropsch synthesis (FTS) has been studied at 513 K, H2/CO = 2 and 15 bar. Supported Ru catalysts with particle sizes ranging from 1.7 to 12 nm were prepared by using different Ru loadings and two different high surface area graphite (HSAG) supports to minimize the metal–support interaction. In addition, the effect of promotion with Cs is also evaluated. Microcalorimetric characterization during CO adsorption and XPS reveal a clear interaction between Ru and Cs. The FTS with Ru-based catalysts is, independent of the presence of promoter, highly structure-sensitive when the Ru particle size is under 7 nm. In this range the turnover frequency (TOF) for CO conversion increases with particle size, reaching a near constant value for Ru particles larger than 7 nm. Cs promoted catalysts display lower TOF values than the corresponding unpromoted samples. This somewhat reduced activity is attributed to the stronger CO adsorption on Cs promoted catalysts, as demonstrated by CO adsorption microcalorimetry. Product selectivity depends also on Ru particle size. Selectivity to C5+ hydrocarbons increases with increasing Ru particle size. For Cs-promoted catalysts, the olefin to paraffin ratio in the C2–C4 hydrocarbons range is independent of the Ru particle size, whereas it decreases for the unpromoted catalysts, showing the prevailing influence of the promoter.


This paper, written by the members of the American Economic Association (AEA) Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, provides an overview of the market for new Ph.D. economists. It describes the role of the AEA in the market and focuses in particular on two mechanisms adopted in recent years at the suggestion of our Committee. First, job market applicants now have a signaling service to send an expression of special interest to up to two employers prior to interviews at the January Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) meetings. Second, the AEA now invites candidates who are still on the market, and employers whose positions are still vacant, to participate in a web-based "scramble" to reduce search costs and thicken the late part of the job market. We present statistics on the activity in these market mechanisms and present survey evidence that both mechanisms have facilitated matches. The paper concludes by discussing the emergence of platforms for transmitting job market information and other design issues that may arise in the market for new economists.


Abstract This article critically examines the approach of technical experts, including engineers, natural scientists, architects, planners, and other practitioners, who are attempting to create more sustainable forms of economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. The authors identify four principal characteristics of expertise–ontological assumptions, epistemological approaches, power inequalities, and practical issues–and employ this framework to test the capability of traditional experts to deliver sustainable development. The authors then provide four alternatives to conventional forms of expertise: the outreach expert who communicates effectively to non-experts, the interdisciplinary expert who understands the overlaps of neighboring technical disciplines, the meta-expert who brokers the multiple claims of relevance between different forms of expertise, and the civic expert who engages in democratic discourse with non-experts and experts alike. All of these alternative forms are needed to manage the often-competing demands of sustainable development projects and they can be described collectively as an "ecosystem of expertise."


The provision of foodstuffs to the Boer commandos during the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902. This article investigates how the Boer commandos in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 obtained their food. During the conventional trench warfare phase this task was performed by government. commissariats that had been established before the war. From the outset, however, commandos on all fronts experienced shortages due to factors such as maladministration, favouritism, the lack of proper transport and an unequal distribution of supplies. In the guerrilla phase the commissariats were attached to the roaming commandos until government sources were depleted. Thereafter the commandos were forced to become self-sufficient, managing with whatever they could find in the area. The British scorched earth policy had destroyed a great deal of the available food, and as a result, serious concern was expressed at the Vereeniging peace talks on the situation in eleven districts of the ZAR and the district of Heilbron in the North-eastern Free State where conditions were particularly bad. This was one of the factors which moved the Boer delegates at Vereeniging to accept the British peace proposals on 31 May 1902.


Convex Transductive Experimental Design (CTED) is one of the most representative active learning methods. It utilizes a data reconstruction framework to select informative samples for manual annotation. However, we observe that CTED cannot well handle the diversity of selected samples and hence the set of selected samples may contain mutually similar samples which convey similar or overlapped information. This is definitely undesired. Given limited budget for data labeling, it is desired to select informative samples with complementary information, i.e., similar samples are excluded. To this end, we proposes Diversified CTED by seamlessly incorporating a novel and effective diversity regularizer into CTED, ensuring the selected samples are diverse. The involvement of the diversity regularizer leads the optimization problem hard to solve. We derive an effective algorithm to solve an equivalent problem which is easier to optimize. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that Diversified CTED significantly improves CTED and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, verifying the effectiveness and advantages of incorporating the proposed diversity regularizer into CTED.


The data management community has recently begun to consider declarative network routing and distributed acquisition: e.g., sensor networks that execute queries about contiguous regions, declarative networks that maintain shortest paths, and distributed and peer-to-peer stream systems that detect transitive relationships among data at the distributed sources. In each case, the fundamental operation is to maintain a view over dynamic network state. This view is typically distributed, recursive, and may contain aggregation, e.g., describing shortest paths or least costly paths. Surprisingly, solutions to computing such views are often domain-specific, expensive, and incomplete. We recast the problem as incremental recursive view maintenance given distributed streams of updates to tuples: new stream data becomes insert operations and tuple expirations become deletions. We develop techniques to maintain compact information about tuple derivability or data provenance. We complement this with techniques to reduce communication: aggregate selections to prune irrelevant aggregation tuples, provenance-aware operators that determine when tuples are no longer derivable and remove them from the view, and shipping operators that reduce the information being propagated while still maintaining correct answers. We validate our work in a distributed setting with sensor and network router queries, showing significant gains in communication overhead without sacrificing performance.


The Sony-Toshiba-IBM Cell Broadband Engine is a heterogeneous multicore architecture that consists of a traditional microprocessor (PPE) with eight SIMD co-processing units (SPEs) integrated on-chip. While the Cell/B.E. processor is designed with multimedia applications in mind, there are currently no open-source, optimized implementations of such applications available. In this paper, we present the design and implementation behind the creation of an optimized MPEG-2 software decoder for this unique parallel architecture, and demonstrate its performance through an experimental study. This is the first parallelization of an MPEG-2 decoder for a commodity heterogeneous multicore processor such as the IBM Cell/B.E. While Drake et al. have recently parallelized MPEG-2 using Streamlt for a streaming architecture, our algorithm is quite different and is the first to address the new challenges related to the optimization and tuning of a multicore algorithm with DMA transfers and local store memory. Our design and efficient implementation target the architectural features provided by the heterogeneous multicore processor. We give an experimental study on Sony PlayStation 3 and IBM QS20 dual-Cell Blade platforms. For instance, using 16 SPEs on the IBM QS20, our decoder runs 3.088 times faster than a 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon and achieves a speedup of over 10.545 compared with a PPE-only implementation. Our source code is freely- available through SourceForge under the CellBuzz project.


This report provides one of the first coherent, readable narratives of the Fukushima nuclear disaster — what happened in the first few days. It is based on new sources available in Japanese and National Diet testimonies, and is an objective overview of events as they unfolded, rather than an ideologically positioned effort of advocacy. The report goes on to analyze the institutional and governance aspects of Japan's nuclear oversight, highlighting the fundamental problems that surfaced during the disaster that stem from deeper structural issues. The report also draws upon expertise from a conference held at Stanford University in February 2012 to analyze the politics and industry structure of Japan's electric power sector, making concrete recommendations for reorganizing the power industry and government oversight structure.


The ability of suspension plasma spraying (SPS) to overcome difficulties associated with feeding of fine (submicron or nano-sized) powders and achieve more refined microstructures than possible in atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) is well established. In recent times, the use of axial injection plasma spray systems has yielded substantial enhancement in deposition rates/efficiencies due to improved thermal exchange between the plasma plume and injected feedstock. The present paper describes utilization of both the above advances in plasma spraying to create various function-dependent coating architectures through simultaneous and/or sequential spraying of hybrid powder-suspension feedstock. A specific variant of such hybrid axial plasma spraying that enables deposition of composite coatings by simultaneous injection of a powder and a suspension is discussed in particular detail. Results obtained using an Al2O3-ZrO2 material system as a case study reveal that composite coatings combining the micron-size features arising from the spray-grade Al2O3 powder and submicron or nano-sized features attributable to the ZrO2 suspension can be conveniently realized. The surface morphology, microstructure, and composition of these coatings, as well as their tribological behaviour determined using scratch and ball-on-disc tests, are presented herein. The utility of this method to develop a wide array of composite coatings is also discussed.


This paper demonstrates experimentally, theoretically, and numerically a wide-range tunability of electrothermally actuated microelectromechanical arch beams. The beams are made of silicon and are intentionally fabricated with some curvature as in-plane shallow arches. An electrothermal voltage is applied between the anchors of the beam generating a current that controls the axial stress caused by thermal expansion. When the electrothermal voltage increases, the compressive stress increases inside the arch beam. This leads to an increase in its curvature, thereby increasing its resonance frequencies. We show here that the first resonance frequency can increase monotonically up to twice its initial value. We show also that after some electrothermal voltage load, the third resonance frequency starts to become more sensitive to the axial thermal stress, while the first resonance frequency becomes less sensitive. These results can be used as guidelines to utilize arches as wide-range tunable resonators. Analytical results based on the nonlinear Euler Bernoulli beam theory are generated and compared with the experimental data and the results of a multi-physics finite-element model. A good agreement is found among all the results. [2016-0291]


Purpose: To report tuberculosis (TB) T-spot diagnosis and management of two cases of presumptive tubercular retinal vasculitis in Singapore.Method: Retrospective case reports.Results: Two patients were diagnosed with presumptive TB retinal vasculitis using clinical features, TB T-spot test and ancillary investigations. They were successfully treated with a combination therapy of oral steroids, anti-tuberculosis medications and pan retinal photocoagulation (PRP). Follow-up demonstrated resolution of symptoms and signs with no complications arising from anti-tuberculosis medications.Conclusions: TB retinal vasculitis presents diagnostic and therapeutic challenges. Ocular TB diagnosis is often presumptive, as confirmatory evidence of organisms from the eye has low yield. The results of culture and Mantoux test require a long waiting period. TB T-spot provides rapid results with high sensitivity and specificity, thus holding promise as a diagnostic tool. Management of TB retinal vasculitis is multi-modal and multi-disciplinary requiring oral steroids and pan-retinal photocoagulation by the ophthalmologists and anti-tuberculosis medications by the Physicians.


OBJECTIVES
To compare preventive dental utilization for children with intellectual and/or developmental disability (IDD) and those without IDD and to identify factors associated with dental utilization.

METHODS
We analyzed Iowa Medicaid dental claims submitted during calendar year (CY) 2005 for a cohort of children ages 3-17 who were eligible for Medicaid for at least 11 months in CY 2005 (n = 107,605). A protocol for identifying IDD children was developed by a group of dentists and physicians with clinical experience in treating children with disabilities. Utilization rates were compared for the two groups. Crude and covariate-adjusted odds ratios were estimated using conditional logistic regression modeling.

RESULTS
A significantly higher proportion of non-IDD children received preventive care than those identified as IDD (48.6 percent versus 46.1 percent; P < 0.001). However, the final model revealed no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Factors such as older age, not residing in a dental Health Professional Shortage Area, interaction with the medical system, and family characteristics increased one's likelihood of receiving preventive dental care.

CONCLUSION
Although IDD children face additional barriers to receiving dental care and may be at greater risk for dental disease, they utilize preventive dental services at the same rate as non-IDD children. Clinical and policy efforts should focus on ensuring that all Medicaid-enrolled children receive need-appropriate levels of preventive dental care.


Abstract Impermanence is part of the natural order of the world. When leaders fight against it, they try to control what is uncontrollable; in the process, they miss opportunities to use adversity for the benefit of their organizations. The turn in the business cycle is a good time for leaders to focus on organizational values and purpose. In Shakespeare's As You Like it, Duke Senior, his throne usurped, has been exiled into the Forest of Arden. Even so, life is not all bad, he allows, "(for) sweet are the uses of adversity." Duke Senior does not say he's glad for adversity; but he prefers to use his adverse circumstances wisely, rather than to spend his life complaining. Part of the work of a leader is to be comfortable with change. Very few would be surprised if the coming years bring unprecedented changes in the external world. How to respond to rapid change is a challenge all of us and our organizations will face. All of us have known loss, some more than others. But until very recently, most Americans alive today have known decades of uninterrupted, increasing prosperity. Indeed, in March 2009, The International Monetary Fund reported "that the world economy, reeling from financial crisis, was on track to shrink for the first time in 60 years."1 Most of us have not experienced the full cycle of economic life; like a society that has somehow lengthened summer beyond its normal time, we have forgotten that winter is a normal part of life. Unlike Duke Senior, we have no idea how to make good use our adverse circumstances. Collectively as a society, we are like aging athletes who demand that the doctor shoot us up with inappropriate remedies to maintain our youth. When an athlete's body is artificially maintained, the inevitable decline is even worse. Some losses are expected in a vibrant, free-market economy. When we demand to be bailed out of our particular losses, we guarantee that we will no longer enjoy the benefits of freedom. And the more we try to stave off loss through artificial means, both the severity and the length of the resulting decline are magnified. For decades, it has been as if giant grow-lights were placed over America's gardens. Many thought that winter had been abolished by omniscient policy makers. Yet, the signs of change and the signs of rot were there to see amidst the artificial boom. Among those who were blind then, are those who still cannot see today. They think the answer is to get stronger bulbs for the grow-lights; as they do just that, they burn the incipient seeds of spring. In his fascinating interpretation of "Ecclesiastes," Rami Shapiro translates Solomon's timeless message in Ecclesiastes 1:14: "I have explored all that is done in this world of seemingly separate beings and selves, and behold there is no profit in it. There is nothing but emptiness, im permanence, and the pursuit of control that arises when you do not see the truth."2 The truth inherent in Solomon's wisdom is not nihilist; but rather, it liberates us to lead more effectively in the world. There is nothing that can be made permanent, and our attempt to secure permanence creates suffering as Shapiro notes in his interpretation of Ecclesiastes 2:17: The truth of impermanence haunted me, and I soured on life The suffering of life overwhelmed me and I sought refuge in depression. But I could not escape the truth of what I had seen: all our doing is in quest of sanctuary from impermanence We seek to think our way to certainty; to buy our way to security; to pleasure ourselves to eternity. But nothing brings us the permanence we crave... It is not wisdom, wealth, or pleasure that brings us pain, but the mistaking of those for something they are not, the use of these to grasp something that is not. Our quest for permanence is the root of our suffering.3 To escape from i m permanence, our ego counsels magical thinking. …


We numerically investigate the critical behavior of the Hubbard model on the honeycomb and the π-flux lattice, which exhibits a direct transition from a Dirac semimetal to an antiferromagnetically ordered Mott insulator. We use projective auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo simulations and a careful finite-size scaling analysis that exploits improved renormalization-group invariant observables. This approach, which is successfully verified for the 3D XY transition of the Kane-MeleHubbard model, allows us to extract estimates for the critical couplings and the critical exponents. The results confirm that the critical behavior for the semimetal to Mott insulator transition in the Hubbard model belongs to the Gross-Neveu-Heisenberg universality class on both lattices.


Engineering and manufacturing organisations share best practices in order to develop their operations to achieve competitive advantage. Such sharing requires transferring knowledge between an organisation's individuals. To accomplish this, many engineering and manufacturing firms rely mainly on information and communications technology (ICT) in managing sharing knowledge and best practices. Augmented Reality (AR) has recently been described as a supportive tool to share detailed and complex data which could be used by manufacturing organisations. Accordingly, this research project will investigate the potential role of facilitating Knowledge Transfer utilising Augmented Reality.
In order to investigate how Augmented Reality impact on knowledge transfer, a detailed knowledge transfer process model is employed. Based on the employed model, knowledge transformation is found as a critical process that represents transforming information into knowledge as well as converting knowledge into different forms. Hence, an investigation of the potential impacts on tacit/explicit knowledge possible conversions is presented.
In order to conduct this investigation, this paper uses an Augmented Reality Organisation as a source for its data; it analyses the contents of the engineering-and-manufacturing-related-talks delivered at the Augmented World Expo 2014 conference. The analysis is carried out through testing the presented applications in the presentations against the pre-identified characteristics that represent each conversion mode.
In this paper, it is found that AR is a promising technology that plays a significant role in several knowledge transformation modes. AR can facilitate the four different types of knowledge transformation i.e. tacit-tacit, tacit-explicit, explicit-tacit and explicit-explicit. However, it is also found that all of the applications that can possibly facilitate tacit-tacit knowledge conversion are underdeveloped applications (in-lab tests). Nevertheless, AR can facilitate knowledge transfer and sharing best practices in engineering and manufacturing firms in a way that can support competitive advantages by increasing efficiency, quality and minimising waste.


This essay asks how the practices and assumptions of legal communications in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American world affected governance of the British North American colonies. Historians have long argued that the strengthening of English imperial oversight of the colonies in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries required the cultivation of an assortment of legal communications techniques. Yet the empire's communications practices had a double nature. While they facilitated greater imperial oversight, they also inadvertently shielded a significant measure of local control and diversity in the colonial legal systems. To pursue this claim, I will contrast legal communications in the English and Spanish colonial empires. Comparison with Spanish America reveals basic presuppositions of the English system. It also suggests several particularities, orientations, and limitations that made Anglo-American legal communications an unreliable and inconsistent agent of imperial centralization. Exploring the double nature of these communications practices in a comparative context is the central ambition of my essay. My article challenges the weak geographical determinism implicit in many studies of New World imperialism. This perspective assumes that the great distance between England, France, Spain, and Portugal and their American colonies gave settlers and officials in the colonies a degree of autonomy and initiative not enjoyed by subjects and magistrates back home. Imperial administrators, confronted by the Atlantic, could exert only an inefficient and episodic supervision of New World colonies. I try to show, by contrast, that while England and Spain both confronted the problem of distance, they addressed the problem in different ways. Distance provides (by itself) a weak explanation for the various systems of legal communications that the European empires created to span the Atlantic and facilitate imperial governance. These systems arose in empires with different assumptions about the purpose of colonies and the nature of proper government, with dissimilar legal cultures and metropolitan administrative institutions, and with disparate colonial populations, resources, trade patterns, and educational and religious establishments. In all cases, communication across the Atlantic linked metropoles to colonial groups with their own interests and normative assumptions. Colonists maintained their own highly variable local legal communications that magnified, suppressed, and reinterpreted commands and messages from the metropolis. The article contributes not only to the comparative study of New World imperialism, but to early American political history. Scholars have long observed that the large degree of local control of legal institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries decisively influenced the shape of colonial politics and the nature of the Revolutionary movement. The essay uses comparative history to explore how local notables in British North America exercised substantial control over the means of communication as well as the means of administration. Local notables embedded in social networks influenced which audiences would know what about imperial directives and about the legal heritage that supposedly united colonies and metropolis. They shaped the meaning of the shared heritage and of imperial directives in the process of disseminating them. Understanding the dynamics of Anglo-American legal communications helps explain the persistence of a significant measure of local control and diversity in the eighteenth-century colonial legal systems, a factor important in the course and aftermath of the Revolution.


Switchable mirrors modulate incident light by changes in the reflectivity of thin films that are converted by chemical reactions from a metallic reflective state to a semiconducting transparent state. The reactions may be effected by exposure to a gas, by treatment with a liquid reagent, or by electrochemical means. The changes in optical properties coincide with phase transformations. In the examples reviewed here, the reactions are accompanied by substantial volume changes and atomic rearrangement. Bismuth, antimony, and antimony alloy films are switched by electrochemical lithiation. Copper films are electrochemically oxidized to Cu(I) and Cu(II) oxides, which are transparent and opaque, respectively. Morphological changes in all films during cycling lead to degradation in performance without loss of active material. Strategies to improve the cycling stability of these systems are discussed.


This Ph.D. thesis addresses both theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to land management decisions of farm households in developing countries working under an imperfect market and institutional setting (with case studies from Ethiopia). Using techniques in experimental economics, efforts are also made to assign some quantitative measures to the most important parameters (such as risk and time preferences) in the same decision making process. Paper I: A Dynamic Economic Model of Soil Conservation with Imperfect Markets and Institutions In this paper, we develop a dynamic soil conservation model that explicitly incorporates labor, capital and land market imperfections and their interactions to suit the problems of smallholders in many developing countries. We use the model to analyze the impact of these institutional and market imperfections on the optimal levels of labor allocations into cultivation and conservation efforts. Increased transaction cost in factor markets is found to have a direct impact on soil conservation effort by increasing its shadow prices and curtailing its demand. It also has an indirect impact on soil conservation by affecting the shadow price of the soil stock and hence enhancing or curtailing its demand depending on the initial factor endowments of farm households, the relative strength of conservation and cultivation inputs on the soil dynamics, the profit share of cultivation input, and the degree of interaction across the factor markets. The overall impact is thus inconclusive. Various possible scenarios are explored in the model. Paper II: Risk Preferences of Farm Households in Ethiopia This study measures farmersâ?? attitudes towards risk using an experimental approach for a sample of 262 farm households in the Ethiopian highlands. We find more than 50 percent of the households in the severe to extreme risk aversion category, with a constant partial risk aversion coefficient of more than 2.00. With careful construction of the experiment, the natures of absolute and partial risk aversion are examined, and our data supports the presence of Decreasing Absolute Risk Aversion (DARA) and Increasing Partial Risk Aversion (IPRA) behavior. The validity of some of the expected utility theory predictions is tested, and the predictions of risk neutrality for smaller stakes and predictions of similar preferences for gains and losses, which stem from the major tents of the theory (concavity and asset integration), are not supported by our experiment. Paper III: Time Preferences of Farm Households in Ethiopia This study measures


Polarization mode dispersion (PMD), a potentially limiting impairment in high-speed long-distance fiber-optic communication systems, refers to the distortion of propagating optical pulses due to random birefringences in an optical system. Because these perturbations (which can be introduced through manufacturing imperfections, cabling stresses, installation procedures, and environmental sensitivities of fiber and other in-line components) are unknowable and continually changing, PMD is unique among optical impairments. This makes PMD both a fascinating research subject and potentially one of the most challenging technical obstacles for future optoelectronic transmission. Mitigation and compensation techniques, proper emulation, and accurate prediction of PMD-induced outage probabilities critically depend on the understanding and modeling of the statistics of PMD in installed links. Using extensive data on buried fibers used in long-haul high-speed links, the authors discuss the proposition that most of the temporal PMD changes that are observed in installed routes arise primarily from a relatively small number of "hot spots" along the route that are exposed to the ambient environment, whereas the buried shielded sections remain largely stable for month-long time periods. It follows that the temporal variations of the differential group delay for any given channel constitute a distinct statistical distribution with its own channel-specific mean value. The impact of these observations on outage statistics is analyzed, and the implications for future optoelectronic fiber-based transmission are discussed


Objectives Absent outcome data from randomized clinical trials, management of hypertension in acute ischaemic stroke remains controversial. Data from human participants have failed to resolve the question whether cerebral blood flow (CBF) in the peri-infarct region will decrease due to impaired autoregulation when systemic mean arterial pressure (MAP) is rapidly reduced. Methods Nine participants, 1–11 days after hemispheric ischaemic stroke, with systolic blood pressure more than 145 mmHg, underwent baseline PET measurements of regional CBF. Intravenous nicardipine infusion was then used to rapidly reduce mean arterial pressure 16 ± 7 mmHg and CBF measurement was repeated. Results Compared with the contralateral hemisphere, there were no significant differences in the percent change in CBF in the infarct (P = 0.43), peri-infarct region (P = 1.00) or remainder of the ipsilateral hemisphere (P = 0.50). Two participants showed CBF reductions of greater than 19% in both hemispheres. Conclusion In this study, selective regional impairment of CBF autoregulation in the infarcted hemisohere to reduced systemic blood pressure was not a characteristic of acute cerebral infarction. Reductions in CBF did occur in some individuals, but it was bihemispheric phenomenon that likely was due to an upward shift of the autoregulatory curve as a consequence of chronic hypertension. These results indicate individual monitoring of changes in global CBF, such as with bedside transcranial Doppler, may be useful to determine individual safe limits when MAP is lowered in the setting of acute ischaemic stroke. The benefit of such an approach can only be demonstrated by clinical trials demonstrating improved patient outcome.


This paper examines the sizable role of rehypothecation in the shadow banking system. Rehypothecation is the practice that allows collateral posted by, say, a hedge fund to its prime broker to be used again as collateral by that prime broker for its own funding. In the United Kingdom, such use of a customer's assets by a prime broker can be for an unlimited amount of the customer's assets while in the United States rehypothecation is capped. Incorporating estimates for rehypothecation (and the associated re-use of collateral) in the recent crisis indicates that the collapse in non-bank funding to banks was sizable. We show that the shadow banking system was at least 50 percent bigger than documented so far. We also provide estimates from the hedge fund industry for the - churning - factor or re-use of collateral. From a policy angle, supervisors of large banks that report on a global consolidated basis may need to enhance their understanding of the off-balance sheet funding that these banks receive via rehypothecation from other jurisdictions.


Compiler Optimizations form a very important part of compiler development as they make a major
difeerence between an average and a great compiler. There are various modules of a compiler-which
opens opportunities for optimizations on various spheres. In this thesis, a comparative study of
vectorization is done exposing the strengths and weaknesses of various contemporary compilers.
Additionally, a study on the impact of vectorization on tiled code is performed. Different strategies
for loop nest optimization is explored. An algorithm for statement reordering in loops to enhance
performance has been developed. An Integer Linear Program formulation is done to improve loop
parallelism, which makes use of loop unrolling and explicitly parallel directives. Finally, an attempt
for optimal loop distribution is made. Following loop nest optimization chapter, an explanation
of interprocedural register allocation(IPRA) for ARM32 and AArch64 is given. Additionally, a
brief description of the problems for implementing IPRA for those architectures is presented. We
conclude the chapter with the performance results with IPRA for those platforms. In the last
chapter, a description of VoPiL, a static OpenMP verifier in LLVM, is presented. A brief description
of the analysis and the results are included.


Generally, learning systems suffer from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Since E-Learning systems are digital by their very nature, their introduction rises the issue of modeling the didactic design in a way that implies the chance to apply Knowledge Engineering Techniques (like Machine Learning and Data Mining). A modeling approach called storyboarding, is outlined here. Storyboarding is setting the stage to apply Knowledge Engineering Technologies to verify and validate the didactics behind a learning process. Moreover, didactics can be refined according to revealed weaknesses and proven excellence and successful didactic patterns can be inductively inferred by analyzing the particular knowledge processing and its alleged contribution to learning success.


Favoritism is among the most popular topics in educational institutions. Teachers are said to favor certain students over others at school and especially in their classes. Despite this popularity, there are very few studies on this topic. In Turkey, discussion of the topic does not go beyond newspaper articles. This study was therefore undertaken to establish the perceptions of Turkish high school students as to whether their teachers were engaged in favoritism. A total of 896 high school students were contacted for their opinions. Data was collected through questionnaires and analyzed with respect to students' gender, economic status and academic success. The students were found to believe that those whose parents were friends or relatives with the teacher, occupied powerful positions or were economically privileged, and those who held similar political views to the teacher or were physically attractive were favored by the teachers. ********** The ethical principles of the teaching profession include professionalism, responsible service, fairness, equality, loyalty, maintaining a healthy and safe environment, honesty and integrity, trust, objectivity, professional loyalty and continuous development, respect, effective use of resources, respect for human freedom, and compassion (Aydin, 2003; Keith-Spiegel, Witting, Perkins, Balogh & Whitley, 1993). Additionally, by signing the United Nations Convention against Discrimination in Education, many countries, including Turkey, have adopted the principle of non-discrimination in education for all citizens regardless of race, color, gender, language, religion, political or other affiliations, national or ethnic background, economic power or birth rights. Despite these ethical principles and the existence of the Convention, allegations of discrimination or favoritism sometimes surface in education (Milliyet, 7 October 2006). Favoritism is the inclination to favor some person or group not for their abilities but for some irrelevant factor such as a characteristic they possess, or their personal contacts, or merely out of personal preferences (Employee Favoritism, 2006). It destroys equality as it brings certain advantages to people who did not earn them and it also hurts others' good intentions (Nadler and Schulman, 2006). One of the most basic themes in ethics is fairness, stated this way by Aristotle: "Equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally." Favoritism interferes with fairness because it gives undue advantage to someone who does not necessarily merit this treatment. Comparing the effort distribution of the "normal" pupils with the one of the "special" pupils leads to an observation which might be counterintuitive from the perspective of folk-psychology: Regardless of the question whether or not they are highly talented in reality and no matter with what kind of teacher they are matched, "special" pupils never become top achievers in a situation where they are potential favorites (Mechtenberg, 2006). I strongly believe that the biggest dilemma presented by favoritism is that few people see it as a problem. Favoritism in the classroom is one of the most important reasons affecting instruction and thus student success. Factors leading to favoritism among teachers may be listed as follows (Brophy, 1983; Clifton, Perry, Parsonson and Hrymuk, 1986; Delamont 1983; Ritts, Patterson and Tubbs, 1992; Dembo, 1994; Bilton, Bonnett, Jones, Stanworth, Sheard, Webster, 1993; Feldman and S aletsky, 1990; Braun, 1976; Kenealy, Frude, Shaw, 1988; Mortimore, Sammons, Stoll, Lewis, Ecob, 1994): student success, student's social or economic status, gender, physical appearance, familiarity between student and teacher or student's family and teacher (blood relations or friendship), and Parallelism between the ideology (political or religious) of students or their family and the teacher. Student Success Building a positive relationship between the teacher and students helps students become more successful and have more motivation (Al-Houli, 1999; Bhushan, 1985). …


In this paper we report on the development of a modular multi-DoF F/T sensor and its use in the implementation of a sensorized object capable of multi-touch detection. The sensor is composed of six 6-axis F/T sensors spatially organized on the faces of a cube. Different calibration methods are presented to directly tackle the coupling phenomena inherent to the spatial organization of the faces and the lightweight construction of the sensor which would have, otherwise, degraded its accuracy. To assess the performances of the calibration methods, a comparison is reported with respect to the measurements obtained with a commercial force/torque sensor considered as ground truth (ATI Delta). Thanks to the modular design and the possibility to cover the sensitive faces with surface patches of different geometry, a variety of sensorized objects with different shapes can be realized. The peculiar feature that all the components of the contact wrench can be measured on each face with high accuracy, renders it a unique tool in the study of grasp force distribution in humans, with envisioned use both in neuroscience investigations and robotic applications.


This work was carried out with the objective to evaluate the effect of replacement of soybean meal by common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) residue in rations for milking cows on the following variables: intakes and total apparent digestibilities of nutrients, milk production and composition and feeding efficiency. Twelve Holstein cows were randomly assigned to three 4 ´ 4 balanced latin square design. The animals was fed ad libitum total mixed rations, which contained 0; 13; 26 and 39% of raw common bean residue in the concentrate, in substitution of soybean meal. Dry matter (DM), organic matter (OM), non fiber carbohydrates (NFC) and total digestible nutrients intakes were linear depressed by the increasing levels of common bean residue in the concentrate. Neutral detergent fiber (NDF) and indigestible neutral detergent fiber (iNDF) intakes were not affected by the diets and crude protein (CP) and ether extract (EE) intakes presented cubic behavior. The digestibility coefficients (DC) of DM, OM, EE and NDF were not affected by the diets while DC of CP and NFC presented linear decreasing and increasing behavior, respectively. Milk production and composition (fat, protein, lactose, non fat and total dry extracts), as expressed in kg/day, presented linear decreasing for the increasing levels of substitution. No difference was observed for feeding efficiencies among diets. The inclusion of common bean residue in the diets prejudiced the performance of the animals.


Concern about the impacts of ocean acidification (OA) on ecosystem function has prompted many studies to focus on larval recruitment, demonstrating declines in settlement and early growth at elevated CO2 concentrations. Since larval settlement is often driven by particular cues governed by crustose coralline algae (CCA), it is important to determine whether OA reduces larval recruitment with specific CCA and the generality of any effects. We tested the effect of elevated CO2 on the survival and settlement of larvae from the common spawning coral Acropora selago with 3 ecologically important species of CCA, Porolithon onkodes, Sporolithon sp., and Titanoderma sp. After 3 d in no-choice laboratory assays at 447, 705, and 1214 μatm pCO2, the rates of coral settlement declined as pCO 2 increased with all CCA taxa. The magnitude of the effect was highest with Titanoderma sp., decreasing by 87% from the ambient to highest CO2 treatment. In general, there were high rates of larval mortality, which were greater with the P. onkodes and Sporolithon sp. treatments (~80%) compared to the Titanoderma sp. treatment (65%). There was an increase in larval mortality as pCO2 increased, but this was variable among the CCA species. It appears that OA reduces coral settlement by rapidly altering the chemical cues associated with the CCA thalli and microbial community, and potentially by directly affecting larval viability.


Subject matter centers—which emphasize time-bound, externally funded, deliverable-driven projects and teams that engage new stakeholders—are becoming more common in Extension. An important element of such a center is an effective advisory board. This article presents a multifaceted process undertaken by the William D. Ruckelshaus Center as an example of the successful development and use of an Extension-based subject matter center advisory board. Extension-based centers, and other Extension offices and programs, can adapt the practices described to their own situations and tap the expertise and influence of leaders in their areas to address challenges and expand their capabilities, insight, and reach.


Williams v Commonwealth of Australia is a landmark decision of the High Court on the scope of federal executive power in s 61 of the Constitution. The decision is also important for the interpretive methodology adopted by the Court. Notably, each judge based their understanding of s 61 upon federal readings of the Constitution. This methodology raises fresh questions about how the Constitution is to be interpreted, and whether Williams marks a break from orthodox understandings of that task. This article assesses the significance of Williams for constitutional interpretation in Australia, and whether it lays the foundation for a more robust protection of state interests by the High Court.


The limiting element in beta-adrenergic receptor (betaAR)-G(s)-adenylyl cyclase (AC) signal transduction in the cardiomyocyte is not known, but it has been proposed that the level of adenylyl cyclase expression constrains betaAR signaling. To alter the above equilibrium, type V AC was overexpressed in a myocyte-specific manner in the hearts of transgenic mice using the alpha-myosin heavy chain promoter. Expression of type V AC was approximately 75% over endogenous levels as quantitated by [(3)H]forskolin binding. Functional activity of the transgene product was evident in cardiac membrane AC studies, where basal (45 +/- 11 vs 19 +/- 5 pmol min(-)(1) mg(-)(1)) and forskolin+Mn(2+) (695 +/- 104 vs 386 +/- 34 pmol min(-)(1) mg(-)(1)) stimulated activities were increased compared to activities in nontransgenic (NTG) littermates. However, while isoproterenol stimulated activities were higher (74 +/- 12 vs 46 +/- 9.8 pmol min(-)(1) mg(-)(1)), the fold stimulation over basal was not increased in ACV overexpressors compared to NTG (line 14.3 = 2.29 +/- 0.44-fold, line 15.1 = 1.70 +/- 0.1-fold, NTG = 2.62 +/- 0.18-fold). Similarly, in whole cell patch-clamp studies, betaAR-mediated opening of L-type Ca(2+) channels was not found to be enhanced in transgenic ACV myocytes (225 +/- 15 vs 216 +/- 10% of basal currents). Basal and isoproterenol stimulated PKA activities were elevated in the ACV mice compared to NTG, but again the extent of stimulation over basal was not enhanced. Phosphorylated phospholamban was approximately 2-fold greater in myocytes from ACV hearts compared to NTG, indicating that distal elements of the contractile cascade are activated by AC overexpression. ACV mice displayed increased heart rates and fractional shortening as assessed by echocardiography. However, in vivo hemodynamic studies revealed that heart rate and contractility responses to agonist infusion were not enhanced in ACV mice compared to NTG. We conclude that at native stoichiometries, the levels of adenylyl cyclase influence basal activities and cardiac function, but do not constrain betaAR signaling in the cardiomyocyte.


Aspartic acid (Asp) is generally used for estimation of age by measuring the degree of racemization. For other amino acids, however, there are few reports regarding the usefulness of the degree of racemization for the estimation of age. Accordingly, in this study using the femur (obtained from 21 cadavers) as the specimen, we measured the degree of racemization of glutamic acid (Glu) and alanine (Ala) along with Asp in the total amino acid (TAA) fraction as well as in acid-insoluble collagen-rich (IC) and acid-soluble peptide (SP) sub-fractions. We compared the degrees of racemization of each amino acid and the accuracy of the ages estimated from them. The degree of racemization and the reaction rate of racemization were ranked in the order of Asp > Glu > Ala in the TAA and IC fractions, but Asp > Ala > Glu in the SP fraction. It is noteworthy that the degrees of racemization differed between the three amino acids depending on the fraction tested. The correlation coefficient (r) between the degree of racemization and the chronological age was higher in the SP than in the TAA or IC fraction. Among three amino acids, Asp showed the highest correlation coefficient as predicted. The present study confirmed that Asp from the SP fraction is the best indicator for age estimation using racemization rates.


This study provides information allowing for an assessment of the representativeness of the actors involved in the European sectoral social dialogue committee for central government administration. The aim of Eurofound's series of studies on representativeness is to identify the relevant national and supranational social partner organisations in the field of industrial relations in selected sectors. The study identified TUNED (representing employees) and EUPAE (representing employers) as the most important European-level social partner organisations in the sector.