Abstract Background and Purpose: It is unclear whether very old patients benefit from organized inpatient (stroke unit) care. The aim of this work was to compare the clinical outcome of patients with first-ever ischemic stroke aged either ≥80 or <80 years who were treated conservatively (without cerebral revascularization) in a university-based stroke unit. Patients and Methods: We included 147 (11%) patients ≥80 years and 1241 (89%) patients, <80 years. All patients underwent clinical examination, blood tests, electrocardiography (ECG), brain imaging and cerebrovascular ultrasound. Additional investigations were done at the discretion of the treating physician. The modified Rankin scale (mRS) score was used to assess the 3-month outcome (favorable: mRS, 0–1; poor: mRS, 2–6; death of any cause). Results: Stroke severity did not differ between both groups [median National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score, 4]. Younger patients underwent magnetic resonance (MR) imaging of the brain, MR and catheter angiography and echocardiography (p<0.001) more frequently, whereas older patients underwent computed tomography of the brain and 24-hour ECG (p<0.001) more frequently. Stroke prevention included clopidogrel (p<0.001) and heparin (p=0.047) more often in older patients and aspirin (p=0.016) in younger patients. Recurrent ischemic events were similarly frequent in old (7%) and young (5%) patients. Favorable outcome was equally prevalent in old (71%) and young (76%) patients, whereas mortality was higher in older patients (7 and 3%, p=0.007). Admission NIHSS score ≥12 was the only independent predictor of unfavorable outcome (odds ratio, 19.6; 95% confidence interval, 9.7–39.6; p<0.001). Conclusion: Our work provides further evidence that also the oldest patients may benefit from conservative stroke unit care.


This thesis is an investigation of methods and architectures for autonomous multi-agent reconfigurable controllers. As part of the analysis two components are looked at: the fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) component and the controller reconfiguration (CR) component. The FDD component detects and diagnoses faults. The CR component on the other hand, adapts or changes the control architecture to accommodate the fault. The problem is to synchronize or integrate these two components in the overall structure of a control system. A novel approach is proposed. A multiagent architecture is used to interface between the two components. This method allows the system to be viewed as a modular structure. Three types of agent are defined. A planner agent Ap, a monitor agent Am and a control agent Ac. The monitor agent takes the role of the FDD component. The planner and control agents on the other hand take the roles of CR component. The planner decides which controller to use and passes it on to Ac. It also decides on the parameter settings of the system and changes it accordingly. It belongs to the reactive agent category. The planner agent's internal architecture maps its sensor data directly to actions using a pre-set rule based conditional logic. It was decided that this architecture would reduce the overall complexity of the system. The monitor agent Am belongs to the learning agent category. It uses an algorithm called adaptive resonance theory neural network or ART-NN to autonomously categorize system faults. Am then informs the other agents of the fault status. ART-NN was chosen due to the fact that it does not need to be trained with sample data and learns to categorize data patterns on the fly. This allows Am to detect unmodelled system faults. The control agent Ac also belongs to the learning agent category. It uses a multiagent reinforcement learning algorithm to learn a controller for the system at hand. Once a suitable controller has been learnt, the parameters of the controller are passed to Ap for it to be stored in its memory and learning is terminated. During control execution mode, controller parameters are sent to Ac from Ap. The novel approach is demonstrated on a case study. Our laboratory-built 4-wheeled skid-steering vehicle complete with sensors is designed as a way of demonstration. Several faults are simulated and the response of the demo system is analyzed.


Influenza vaccination often results in a large percentage of low responders, especially in high-risk groups. As a first line of defense, natural killer (NK) cells play a crucial role in the fight against infections. However, their implication with regard to vaccine responsiveness is insufficiently assessed. Therefore, this study aimed at the validation of essential NK cell features potentially associated with differential vaccine responsiveness with a special focus on NKG2C- and/or CD57-expressing NK cells considered to harbor memory-like functions. To this end, 16 healthy volunteers were vaccinated with an adjuvanted pandemic influenza vaccine. Vaccine responders and low responders were classified according to their hemagglutination inhibition antibody titers. A majority of responders displayed enhanced frequencies of NKG2C-expressing NK cells 7- or 14-days post-vaccination as compared to low responders, whereas the expression of CD57 was not differentially modulated. The NK cell cytotoxic potential was found to be confined to CD56dimCD16+ NKG2C-expressing NK cells in the responders but not in the low responders, which was further confirmed by stochastic neighbor embedding analysis. The presented study is the first of its kind that ascribes CD56dimCD16+ NKG2C-expressing NK cells a crucial role in biasing adaptive immune responses upon influenza vaccination and suggests NKG2C as a potential biomarker in predicting pandemic influenza vaccine responsiveness.


Currently in the United Kingdom there are over 100 bridges containing hinge joint components,introduced to simplify and standardise designs. Visual inspection of hinge joints notedbridge deck waterproofing failure, which can cause steel reinforcement bar corrosion. This reinforcement
is crucial to the integrity of the joint, and the loss of reinforcement section can inducehigher stresses leading to eventual failure by yielding. The Transport Research Laboratory createda model of two hinge joint assemblies typical of those found in reinforced concrete slabbridges. The model had notched reinforcement bars at the hinges. The aim of this investigationwas to determine the effectiveness of the acoustic emission (AE) technique in detecting and locatingthe cracking of concrete at the throat. AE sensors were attached to the steel reinforcementbars using waveguides and to the concrete face of the model. The model was statically loadeduntil failure. To allow the visual inspection and logging of concrete cracking around the throat,the load was applied in stages with a brief hold period between each stage. AE results showed that it was possible to identify and locate cracking of the concrete around the throat and that this technique needs to be further evaluated on bridge structures under live loading.


Colorectal cancer is one of the major causes of cancer-related mortality in humans in both developed and developing countries. Dietary patterns influence the risk of colon cancer development, while plant-derived foods have gained great interest, due to the high content of antioxidants. Corinthian raisins (Currants, CR) and Sultanas (S) (Vitis vinifera L., Vitaceae) are dried vine fruits produced in Greece with many culinary uses in both the Mediterranean and the Western nutrition. In the present study, we investigated the effects of CR and S on human colon cancer cells. Methanol extracts of CR and S were used at different concentrations. The total polyphenol content and anti-radical activity were measured by Folin-Ciocalteu and DPPH, respectively. Antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-proliferative effects on HT29 cell culture were evaluated. All extracts exhibited DPPH˙ scavenging activity in a dose-dependent manner. Both products suppressed cell proliferation, while the levels of glutathione and cyclooxygenase 2 were significantly decreased. A significant reduction in IL-8 levels and NF-kappaB p65 activation was also observed. Both antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects were dependent on the duration of exposure. Results indicate that the methanol extracts of CR and S exhibit anti-radical activity in vitro, as well as cancer preventive efficacy on colon cancer cells, with S having slightly higher activity. The beneficial properties of these unique dried grapes are attributed to their high content of phenolic compounds.


In a multiagent system where each agent has only an incomplete view of the world, optimal coalition formation is difficult. Coupling that with real-time and resource constraints often makes the rationalization process infeasible or costly. We propose a coalition formation approach that identifies and builds sub-optimal yet satisficing coalitions among agents to solve a problem detected in the environment. All agents are peers and autonomous. Each is motivated to conserve its own resources while cooperating with other agents to achieve a global task or resource allocation goal. The (initiating) agent-that detects a problem-hastily forms an initial coalition by selecting neighboring agents that it considers to have high potential utilities, based on the capability of each neighbor and its respective inter-agent relationships. The initiating agent next finalizes the coalition via multiple concurrent 1-to-1 negotiations with only neighbors of high potential utility, during which constraints and commitments are exchanged in an argumentation setting.


Ratcheting communication strengthens privacy, specifically in the presence of internal state exposures or random coin corruptions. This is called post-compromise security. There have been several such secure protocols proposed in the last few years. The strongest level of security comes with a high cost, because of the need for HIBE or at least public-key cryptography. In this paper, we first design a lightweight protocol called liteARCAD which is solely based on symmetric cryptography, hence only forward secure. We then present a generic hybrid protocol allowing to compose any two protocols so that the sender can select which of the two protocols to use. When composing liteARCAD and a post-compromise secure protocol, the sender can decide to ratchet or not. For instance, the sender can ratchet once a while, or after letting his device unattended. When doing so with infrequent ratchet, we obtain the strongest security at the price of efficient symmetric cryptography. We then propose the notion of security awareness. This lets a sender learns, after a while, if his message was safely received (i.e. if it was received and if no adversary can decrypt it, except from trivial attacks) and that no finished active attack occurred (i.e. active attack must continue forever or be detected). We finally propose a generic strengthening to add security awareness to any protocol.


This study* evaluated computer-aided analysis techniques applied to Thematic Mapper Simulator (TMS) data for the purpose of mapping forest cover types. Specifically, classification results obtained using a supervised set of training statistics and various combinations of three and four channels subsets of the seven available TMS channels are compared for three classification algorithms: L2, GML, and SECHO. In the analysis, the best three and four channel subsets were determined by mInImum transformed divergence criteria. A Karhunen-Loeve or Principal Component linear transformation was applied to the 1979 TMS data set and supervised training statistics were generated for classifying the transformed data. Classification results from applying the same three classification algorithms on the transformed data are compared to results from the untransformed data sets. Results from the untransformed TMS data show a higher performance using the four simulated Landsat channels (CH2:0.52 O.60fJm; CH3: 0.63 0.69fJm; CH4: 0.760.90fJm; CHS: 1.00 -1 .30fJm) than from the best four channels selected by the minimum transformed divergence criteria. The contextual classifier known as SECHO (Supervised Extraction and Classification of Homogeneous Objects) performed significantly better than either of the two perpoint classifiers for the untransformed data. Overall classification results of the K-L transformation increased for the L2 algorithm, but decreased for both the GML and SECHO algorithms. * This work was supported by NASA under Contract No. NAS9-lS889.


Abstract The aim of this article is to study how problem definitions of gender equality affect the possible outcomes of gender equality initiatives. The Swedish Municipal Rescue Services were chosen as the empirical example because they offer a workplace where women are greatly under-represented despite years of gender equality efforts. The article analyses how reasoning around gender equality shapes and constructs problem formulations around gender and equality. This article contributes to the debate on the conditions of gender equality founded on gender equality definitions, and how this relates to the potential for change. The gender equality efforts within the Rescue Services are problematized based on Bacchi's policy analysis model. We do so by analysing the applications attracted by a call for a gender equality initiative within the Municipal Rescue Services—A Fire Station for Everyone. The article argues that, to some extent, the problem definitions in this case undermine gender equality initiatives as they place women—whom they wish to recruit to the Rescue Services to make it more gender equal in a numerical sense—in a paradoxical position as both problem and solution. Nor do they problematize power issues. It is stated that the given problem descriptions do not leave a lot of room for change, but that the method used to analyse the problem descriptions can be an important tool for understanding why gender equality initiatives may struggle to achieve their intended objectives.


We present "appearance-from-motion", a novel method for recovering the spatially varying isotropic surface reflectance from a video of a rotating subject, with known geometry, under unknown natural illumination. We formulate the appearance recovery as an iterative process that alternates between estimating surface reflectance and estimating incident lighting. We characterize the surface reflectance by a data-driven microfacet model, and recover the microfacet normal distribution for each surface point separately from temporal changes in the observed radiance. To regularize the recovery of the incident lighting, we rely on the observation that natural lighting is sparse in the gradient domain. Furthermore, we exploit the sparsity of strong edges in the incident lighting to improve the robustness of the surface reflectance estimation. We demonstrate robust recovery of spatially varying isotropic reflectance from captured video as well as an internet video sequence for a wide variety of materials and natural lighting conditions.


In this paper, we have investigated the relationship between the depolarization effects and the wintertime sea ice thickness in the landfast ice region where smooth thick first-year ice (FYI) and deformed old ice coexisted by using C- and X-band spaceborne polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data (RADARSAT-2 and TerraSAR-X). We have found a strong correlation between the in situ sea ice thickness and the SAR-derived depolarization factors (copolarized correlation and cross-polarized ratio). The observed relationships have demonstrated not only a categorical difference between FYI and multiyear ice (MYI) but also a one-to-one continuity in the scatter plots, rather than being clustered. It clearly shows that the observed correlations are not merely from the categorical difference in scattering mechanism between FYI and MYI and that there might exist a one-to-one relationship between thickness and depolarization factors at least in our deformed ice case. This suggests that depolarization factors could be effective SAR parameters in the estimation of wintertime sea ice thickness. Numerical model simulations explained some portions of the correlation by employing multiple scattering on the sea ice surface and volume scattering within the low-density subsurface layer.


We address a logistics districting problem faced by a parcel company whose operations consist of picking up and delivering packages over a service region. The districting process aims to find a partition of the service region into delivery and collection zones that may be served by a single vehicle that departs from a central depot. Criteria to be optimized are to balance workload content among the districts and to create districts of compact shape. A solution approach based on a hybrid procedure that combines elements of GRASP and Tabu Search (TS) is proposed to solve large-scale instances. Numerical experimentation is performed considering different instance sizes and types. Results show that the proposed solution approach is able to solve large-scale instances in reasonable computational times with good quality of the solutions obtained. To determine the quality of the solutions, results are compared with CPLEX solutions and with the current real solution to highlight the benefits of the proposed approach. Conclusions and recommendations for further research are provided.


This practice-based research examines platforms and encounters that have a participatory character as a strategy to create lived and shared experiences where new forms of appropriation of the city can emerge. The selected case studies propose and initiate certain urban experiences that induce changes in perception, the exchange of perspectives, and that denaturalize habits and patterns of behavior. I suggest that when these sensitive experiences become imprinted in body memory, they can empower citizens to have more active, creative, and/or critical attitudes towards their environments. Searching for new repertoires of everyday practices that contest commodification of both the body and the city, this thesis is oriented towards open-ended processes of constructing mentalities rather than those of planning changes on the material conditions of public space. It uses forms of academic investigation that merge intellectual debate and experimental practice, joining art, urbanism and social engaged practices in an extradisciplinary (Howes 2007) attitude towards the city. Based on the materials generated by the case studies (combining theoretical knowledge with artistic sensibility), the affective and corporeal involvement of researchers in the situations they analyze and co-create, is sustained in opposition to the traditional academic critical distance.


The importance of e-learning systems is increasing mainly due to the growing number of companies that need to train their employees. But companies need to make the process of creating e-learning contents more efficient, this can be achieved reusing e-learning materials. This happens especially in big companies with a considerable amount of contents developed and stored. This paper presents an approach to indexing and retrieval of e-learning contents based on Textual Case-Based Reasoning. We describe how we represent contents as cases and how the indexing and retrieval mechanisms work. We also describe experimental work that defines a first setup for the reasoning mechanisms implemented.


This study examines the impact of legitimacy on the dynamics of interorganizational networks within the nongovernmental organizations' children's rights community. The 27-year period of analysis included a critical community event: the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Building on theories of organizational evolution, hypotheses proposed that (1) ratification of the UNCRC served to codify and more broadly communicate the legitimate norms of the community, and (2) dissemination of normative information made it easier (a) for less experienced organizations to form and maintain partnerships, and (b) for organizations to form partnerships without reference to shared third-party contacts or dominant organizations. Data analysis via a longitudinal network model supported the hypotheses. Further investigation via an event history analysis suggested that these effects were largely confined to links among organizations in the children's rights community and not to links made by these organizations to more general others.


Objectives: To develop a model for breaking bad news that meets the needs of people with intellectual disabilities (IDs). Design: A two-phase qualitative study featuring: (I) focus group meetings, on-line focus groups and one-to-one interviews; (II) structured feedback from participants and other stakeholders. Setting: Participants were drawn from National Health Service hospitals, Primary Care Trusts, independent organisations and on-line forums across England. Participants: 109 participants were purposively selected: 21 people with mild/moderate IDs, 28 family carers, 26 ID professionals and 34 general health professionals. Outcome measure: Feedback on a preliminary model for breaking bad news to people with IDs was collected from 60 participants and other stakeholders to assess relevance and acceptability, before the model was finalised. Results: Breaking bad news is best seen as a process, not an event or a linear series of events. Bad news situations usually constitute a wide range of discrete items or chunks of information. 'Building a foundation of knowledge' is central to the model. Information needs to be broken down into singular chunks of knowledge that can be added over time to people's existing framework of knowledge. Three other aspects should be considered at all times: capacity, people and support. Conclusions: Patients who have IDs do not easily process verbal information in a clinical setting. The new model for breaking bad news to people with IDs needs to be tested in practice using robust outcome measures. The model's relevance to wider patient groups should also be evaluated.


The demand for medicinal products derived from plasmas are increasing on a global scale. In particular, the demand for intravenous immunoglobulin has continuously been increasing. The increase in the capacity of commercial plasma fractionators is prominent compared with that of non-profit plasma fractionators; thus, the percentage of plasmapheresis has increased with respect to that of plasma from whole blood. The inequality between the consumption of plasma-derived medicinal products and supply of raw plasma among developed countries and developing countries is due to the direct, proportional relationship between the consumption of plasma-derived medicinal products and the size of gross domestic products. Each country decides on its own system to achieve a stable supply of plasma-derived medicinal products. Although domestic production is an ideal option, many countries establish contracts with plasma fractionators. Owing to a great ripple effect, safety measures are increasingly applied, so detailed review should be conducted with consideration given to the cost-effectiveness and the situation unique to each country. (Korean J Blood Transfus 2017;28:113-125)


Concrete bridge decks are prone to ice accumulation. Bridge decks freeze before the roads approaching them freeze, making wintry highway travel treacherous. Road salts and deicing chemicals are effective for ice removal but cause damage to concrete and corrosion of reinforcing steel in concrete bridge decks. The resulting rapid degradation of existing concrete pavements and bridge decks is a major concern to transportation and public-works officials. The use of insulation materials for ice control and electric or thermal heating for deicing have been attempted, with unsatisfactory results. Conductive concrete is a cementitious admixture containing electrically conductive components to attain high and stable electrical conductivity. Due to its electrical resistance and impedance, a thin conductive concrete overlay can generate enough heat to prevent ice formation on a bridge deck when connected to a power source. In 1998, Yehia and Tuan, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, developed a conductive concrete mix specifically for bridge deck deicing. In this application, a conductive concrete overlay is cast on the top of a bridge deck for deicing or anti-icing. The mechanical and physical properties of the conductive concrete mix after 28 days have met ASTM and AASHTO specifications. Two concrete slabs were constructed with a 9-cm (3.5-in.) conductive concrete overlay for conducting deicing experiments in the natural environment. Deicing and anti-icing experiments were conducted in five 1998 snowstorms. Average power of about 590 W/m2 (55 W/ft2) was generated by the conductive concrete overlays to prevent snow and ice accumulation.


In order to implement a fiber-optic Fabry-Perot tunable filter with a simple configuration, a concave mirror is made at the end of the optical fiber. The concave mirror is fabricated by attaching a thin polycarbonate (PC) film on the fiber end, pressing the PC film with a fiber ball to form a dimple, and then depositing a multilayer dielectric mirror. The concave mirror aligned to the fiber core makes the cavity alignment easy with a simple alignment configuration. Because of the self-alignment function of this cavity, a small, reliable, and fast filter could be fabricated.


This article explores how professionals talk about girls' and young women's use of violence; more specifically, how violence is constructed and conceptualized and its effects on social work practice. The data analyzed consist of focus group sessions with 11 professionals within social and youth work. The findings revealed that violence is conceptualized through interpretative repertoires as social functionality, psychological functionality, or dysfunctionality, which affect the professionals' conceptualizations of violence and social work practice. Accordingly, a multifaceted understanding of violence is needed, otherwise girls' and young women's violent acts risk being diminished and made into an individual problem to solved.


Purpose – This article aims to bring readers up to date with policy developments in England and Northern Ireland in the last two years since the journal first reported on these issues. Design/methodology/approach – As well as looking at changes to policy and legislation, the paper highlights not only the differences but also the shared concerns for people with intellectual disability living in the two countries, e.g. equal access to healthcare as experienced by the general population. Findings – In spite of shared visions of inclusion and equality in mental health care, there are major differences in how both countries approach these issues. Recently this has been highlighted by significant shifts in policy. In Northern Ireland strategies designed to inform the delivery of evidence based services for the future have been witnessed. Whilst in England there has also been a move towards public protection within mental health legislation and the reaffirmation of the need to move towards more individual services. Whilst policy initiatives in both countries have been encouraging; they need to be implemented so issues such as access to healthcare and geographical disparity are addressed by local providers. Social implications – Although there is a desire for change, the reality is that the policies and legislation introduced to address issues such as accessing mental health care and service standards have still to make a significant impact to people's daily lives. Originality/value – This paper offers an update of current practice and policy relating to mental health for people with intellectual disabilities in England and Northern Ireland.


Objective: To estimate the lifetime prevalence and projected lifetime risk at age 75 years of DSM-IV disorders in New Zealand. Method: A nationwide face-to-face household survey carried out in 2003–2004. A fully structured diagnostic interview, the World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI 3.0), was used. There were 12 992 completed interviews from participants aged 16 years and over. The overall response rate was 73.3%. In this paper, the outcomes reported are lifetime prevalence and projected lifetime risk at age 75 years. Results: The lifetime prevalence of any disorder was 39.5%. The lifetime prevalences for disorder groups were: anxiety disorders, 24.9%; mood disorders, 20.2%; substance use disorders, 12.3%; and eating disorders, 1.7%. The prevalences for all disorders were higher in the younger age groups. Females had higher prevalences of anxiety, mood and eating disorders compared with males; males had higher prevalences of substance use disorders. The estimated projected lifetime risk of any disorder at age 75 years was 46.6% with the median age of onset being 18 years. Adjustment for age, sex, education and household income did not remove all differences between Māori and the composite other ethnic group in the risk of disorder (hazard ratio = 1.1–1.4). After adjustment, hazard ratios for Pacific people ranged from 0.8 to 2.5. Conclusions: These results confirm those of other studies: mental disorders are relatively common and tend to have early onset. Females are more likely to experience anxiety, mood and eating disorders than males, who experience more substance use disorders. Adjustment for socioeconomic factors and demography does not explain all ethnic differences, although remaining differences are small relative to cohort and even sex differences.


Pervasive photo sharing in online social media platforms can cause unintended privacy violations when elements of an image reveal sensitive information. Prior studies have identified image obfuscation methods (e.g., blurring) to enhance privacy, but many of these methods adversely affect viewers' satisfaction with the photo, which may cause people to avoid using them. In this paper, we study the novel hypothesis that it may be possible to restore viewers' satisfaction by 'boosting' or enhancing the aesthetics of an obscured image, thereby compensating for the negative effects of a privacy transform. Using a between-subjects online experiment, we studied the effects of three artistic transformations on images that had objects obscured using three popular obfuscation methods validated by prior research. Our findings suggest that using artistic transformations can mitigate some negative effects of obfuscation methods, but more exploration is needed to retain viewer satisfaction.


It is expected that the income generated by paddy industry will increase up to 988 million per year. In order to achieve this, extension agents plays important role in educating farmers by encouraging them to learn, adopt new technologies and spread them to other farmers. To ensure the success of extension program, the agents should recognize their roles as change agents (as a catalyst, solution giver, process helper, and resource linker) and have ability to acquire competencies to accomplish these roles. Thus, this study aims to explore the level of roles among extension agents. Using a quantitative survey methodology, self-administered questionnaires measuring the roles of extension agents as change agents. A total of 117 extension agents had participated in this study. The extension agents were the officers from various agricultural departments and agencies who serve paddy farmers in Malaysia region in related to extension, marketing, financing, farmers association, production, and others. The finding showed that the level of roles among extension agents is high. Hence, the competency of extension agents in Malaysia is indeed especially as a change agents and one of the important determinants of success for agriculture industry in Malaysia. This study emphasized that in order to improve the performance of agricultural extension agents, one of the way is by getting to know their competencies, skills and abilities. The extension agents, Farmers, policy makers, researchers, academics and people working in agriculture can learn a great deal about what individuals and institutions need to do to develop farmers, personally and professionally.


Considerable debate continues regarding the use of earnings histograms as evidence consistent with earnings management. Durstchi and Easton (2005) offer scaling and sample selection as alternative explanations for apparent discontinuities in cross-sectionally pooled histograms of earnings. We revisit the broad question of whether irregularities in reported earnings numbers can constitute evidence consistent with earnings management. We use a matched-pair design to avoid sample selection issues and study three irregularities in reported earnings per share (EPS). We first study the discontinuity pattern in the last digit (cents) of reported EPS noted by Thomas (1989) that the last digit of EPS is more likely to be zero and five and less likely to be nine for profit firms while the pattern does not appear for loss firms. Second, we consider the threshold irregularity in EPS changes noted by Degeorge, Patel, and Zeckhauser (1999), that one-cent decreases are underrepresented, relative to expectations. Third, we also revisit the rounding pattern in (unreported) third decimals of EPS noted by Das and Zhang (2003) that the one tenth of a cent is more likely between five and nine for profit firms. Our study enhances confidence in each reported irregularity's validity by identifying matched pairs of firm-years reporting EPS under two measurement regimes: one in place during the reporting period in real time, the other subsequently reported to conform to a new reporting standard. We report evidence consistent with EPS management that is not plausibly attributable to either sample selection or scaling.


In this PhD thesis, we focus on the design and performance optimization of multi-channel multi-interface wireless mesh networks. To take advantage of the increased capacity in such networks, a number of issues has to be handled properly. The first contribution of this thesis is a novel classification and formal evaluation of different channel and interface assignment strategies. In particular, we focus on connectivity in terms of topology formation, density of connections, and neighbor discovery. Our second contribution presents broadcast algorithms able to handle any of the multi-channel multi-interface assignment strategies. These algorithms guarantee a broadcast packet to be delivered with a minimum probability to all neighbors. The third contribution of this thesis consists in evaluating network capacity (i.e., throughput) obtained through different channel and interface assignments schemes. More specifically, we propose three mixed integer linear programming formulations to model the routing and bandwidth sharing constraints in presence of interference. We then derive upper and lower bounds for different MAC strategies. The fourth and the last contribution of this thesis is the development of a novel cross-layer routing solution for multi-channel multi-interface mesh networks. In particular, we propose a link-quality aware metric to estimate the residual bandwidth of a link. An on-demand routing protocol selects the routes offering the best throughput. All our contributions are validated through extensive simulations that demonstrate the efficiency of our solutions. In summary, this thesis provide insight into the improvement of multi-channel multi-interface wireless mesh networks, as well as guidelines for network designers in planning efficient deployments.


The late Francis Stuart, the first Australian Ambassador to be resident in Poland, wrote an interesting book about his long career in the Foreign Service. Towards Coming of Age was published in 1989 and Stuart's reflections on his last post abroad, to Poland, included the following: It is fanciful to believe that the Soviet leadership would ever question the infallibility of their official doctrine or relinquish the glacis of subordinate states protecting the Soviet borders... Sadly then, Poland and like countries can expect no more freedom in the future than the circumscribed autonomy they have now. Many would have agreed with him in the late 1980s, but that which he considered fanciful was actually to happen within a few short years. I was fortunate to be a witness to part of this historic transition. I arrived in Poland as Australian Ambassador on 30 September 1980, about three months after the first strikes and just a month after the signing of the Gdansk Agreements between Solidarity and the Polish government. I stayed on until the end of 1984. A previous posting in Moscow had not prepared me for what I found in Poland. The country was in ferment. In Moscow under Brezhnev, the foreign community had been effectively kept in isolation from the local society. Kremlinology had consisted largely of reading between the lines of the tightly controlled Soviet media. In Poland in 1980-81, the local society was not only accessible but positively welcoming and disarmingly outspoken. The Polish media was lifting the lid on what had actually been going on in the country. The inner workings and manifold failings of what professed to be a workers' state were revealed for all to see. As a general rule, diplomats study their host country as detached outsiders from a privileged and protected position. Sometimes, however, they will encounter situations where they will feel drawn to take sides. In my case, Poland in 1980-81 was such a situation. A great majority of Poles, whether farmers, workers or university-educated people, were plainly deeply dissatisfied with their party-dominated governments and their Soviet overlords and had come together determined to insist upon a better future. This was not an overnight development but one born out of a very bitter and troubled history as a Soviet satellite since World War II. Just about everyone I met seemed to know their Polish history intimately and to be guided and inspired by it. This was a nation rebelling against the state, and it was hard not to be drawn to a people so dismissive of the odds stacked against them. I recall no controversy during those years over what Australian policy towards the situation in Poland should be, either within Canberra or between Canberra and the Embassy. Nor do I recall that the Embassy received any strong policy directions from Canberra under the Fraser government. The Embassy's reporting and analysis - generally sympathetic to Solidarity's cause - seemed to be accepted. By and large, Australians in general seemed instinctively sympathetic towards Solidarity's struggle. One unexpected exception that comes to mind was an Australian shipping magnate visiting Poland - much bruised over the years by encounters with Australian unions - who felt sympathy for a government being challenged by a trade union. It is perhaps worth recording here that in the early 1980s there was little institutional expertise in the Department of Foreign Affairs on Eastern Europe as we then called it. Few resources were devoted to it. Our embassies there were small, including the one in Moscow. The Soviet Union - superpower though it then was - did not loom large in the department's priorities. Junior diplomats might think of carving out a career path in South-East Asia or East Asia, but not in Eastern Europe. I sometimes reflected on the oddness of this low priority. There was the fact of the Soviet Union's superpower status, and there was the further fact that Australia hosted significant minorities from the region - regularly augmented by the periodic eruptions there. …


This article addresses the issues of the potential impacts of the introduction of black sigatoka into Puerto Rico under situations in which the government assists growers in managing the spread of the disease, with and without prohibitions on imports of plantains and bananas. An equilibrium displacement model is used to quantify the impact of black sigatoka. The results indicate that under both scenarios the net economic benefits to society were negative. Over the long term, the government would be well-advised to invest in research to develop plantain and banana varieties that are resistant to black sigatoka.


This article focuses on the enigma of Catholic Marian revolutionary movements during the decade-long conflict on the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea at the end of the twentieth century. These religious movements embody the legacy of a colonial history as well as people's responses to poorly monitored resource extraction, social and economic displacement, regional factionalism, and years of fighting by Bougainvilleans against the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. At the same time, the movements' popularity throve on leaders' reputations for their religious knowledge and their mobilization of people based on religious faith. During the conflict Bougainville came to be seen by many residents as holy land ( Me'ekamui ). According to Francis Ona's Marian Mercy Mission and Peter Kira's Our Lady of Mercy movements, the covenant land of Bougainville had to be safeguarded from Satan, represented by Papua New Guinea and an Australian copper mining company, in the freedom struggle conceived as a Marian holy war.


The history of linguistics is presented as a crucial part of linguistics as a whole, in view of its contribution to the understanding of the logical and cognitive structure and evolution of the linguistic discipline itself. The basis for this view is to be found in Saussure's distinction between the 'matter' and 'object' of linguistic science: what changes through time is not merely the object of study, namely, the complex system we call 'language', but also its matter, since the evidence we put forward is not simply given per se, but is selected by the investigator in accordance with certain determinants both internal and external to the discipline. Furthermore, this change affects the way in which evidence and theory are linked, i.e., the cognitive procedures leading from the former to the latter, which in turn are influenced by internal and external factors. This thesis is illustrated in a discussion of three crucial chapters in the history of linguistic thinking: Renaissance philosophy of language, Port-Royal linguistic theory, and Saussure.


Background: Studies of internal migration ask who moves, why they move, and what are the consequences - to themselves, their origin, and their destination. By contrast, studies of those who stay for very long durations are less common, despite the fact that most people move relatively infrequently. Objective: We argue that staying is the dominant, preferred state and that moving is simply an adjustment toward a desired state of stability (or equilibrium). The core of our argument, already recognized in the literature, is that migration is risky. However, we extend the argument to loss aversion as developed within prospect theory. Prospect theory posits that existing possessions, including the dwelling and existing commodities, are attributed a value well beyond their purchase price and that this extends the average period of staying among the loss-averse. Methods: Applying prospect theory has several challenges, including measurement of the reference point and potential degrees of gain and loss households face in deciding to change residence, as well as their own degree of loss aversion. The growing number of large panel sets should make it possible to estimate the degree to which endowment effects are likely to extend durations of residence as predicted by prospect theory. Conclusions: Rational expectations models of mobility focus on the changes in the level of consumption of residential services. By contrast, prospect theory focuses on potential gains and losses relative to the existing dwelling - the reference point. As we confront increasing durations of residence in contemporary society, an application of prospect theory is likely to yield important advantages over existing models of mobility and staying.


This paper deals with the impact of the use of daylight on the overall energy demand for heating, cooling, and lighting in educational buildings. The energy performance of buildings is currently of the utmost importance as current European regulations, starting from 31st December 2020 impose that all new buildings must meet nearly zero-energy building requirements. This paper presents a study of the illuminance distribution in an educational room obtained from measurements and simulation results using two different models. One of the models, integrated with a thermal simulation software, was used to estimate the impact of daylight on the energy demand. The analysis included the use of various window types, lighting control system, reference point location, and daylight calculation model for a sample room in an educational building. Results of the analysis indicate that, due to the high share of lighting demand (reaching up to 78% of the primary energy balance), there is a need to take into account the efficiency of lighting systems during the design process to correctly determine the actual energy balance of a building, increase the quality of the design of lighting systems, as well as to select the optimal parameters of windows.


Rethink, Redesign, Reboot.

 Most people associate performance management with the annual review, which is universally dreaded by employees, management, and HR professionals alike. It's a cookie-cutter, fear-based, top-down approach that emphasizes negatives over positives and stifles healthy career conversations. It's never been shown to motivate anyone to do anything but try to avoid it, but nobody feels like they have any alternative. Tamra Chandler has one—and it works.

 Actually, Chandler doesn't offer a single alternative—she offers an infinite number of them. Each organization that uses her Performance Management Reboot is able to develop its own unique version since it doesn't make a lot of sense for organizations with different cultures, in different industries and sectors, to do things exactly the same way. Grounded in the latest scientific findings about motivation, it's a transparent, employee-driven process that values collaboration over competition and rewards people for acquiring new skills and increasing their contribution instead of hitting arbitrary benchmarks.

 Chandler lays out the general principles and then walks you through each step in creating a performance management process that employees will actually embrace rather than avoid and that will help you meet the three objectives of great performance management: developing your people, rewarding them equitably, and driving your organization's performance. It's the first comprehensive, step-by-step guide to creating a performance management solution that's tailored to your organization's needs and goals and that places the emphasis squarely on your greatest asset: your people.


There have been a number of recent calls for more attention to be given to the auditory in understanding modernity. This article looks at the significant role played by sound in British propaganda in the Second World War, and evidence from audience research about different auditory perceptions, both at home and overseas. In tracing the increasing diversity of English speech in British media – not only by class and region but also by different nations within the English-speaking world – the article argues that such diversity was a key element in what I call an 'allies war', presenting unity between the allied nations. Non-German Europeans were transformed from alien foreigners into members of the family of allies through differentiation of their sound from German. Such diversity did not extend to differences of language. Although Britain became increasingly multilingual with the arrival of refugees, exiles, troops and war workers, British media continued to present a monolingual nation and empire for domestic audiences. Even so, many speakers of non-English languages worked in British cinema and at the BBC. The article looks at some of their contributions to wartime culture and their responses to the media's investment in a monolingual Britain. The question of who sounded civilised – at the heart of diverse verdicts on hierarchies of speech and language – was contested within and between nations. The article concludes by arguing that evidence about different auditory perceptions signalled the increasing erosion of English power over speech and language and subordination to American.


The British campaign in the Sudan in Queen Victoria's reign is an epic tale of adventure more thrilling than any fiction. The story begins with the massacre of the 11,000 strong Hicks Pasha column in 1883. Sent to evacuate the country, British hero General Gordon was surrounded and murdered in Khartoum by an army of dervishes led by the Mahdi. The relief mission arrived 2 days too late. The result was a national scandal that shocked the Queen and led to the fall of the British government. Twelve years later it was the brilliant Herbert Kitchener who struck back. Achieving the impossible he built a railway across the desert to transport his troops to the final devastating confrontation at Omdurman in 1898. Desert explorer and author, Michael Asher has reconstructed this classic tale in vivid detail. Having covered every inch of the ground and examined all eyewitness reports, he brings to bear new evidence questioning several accepted aspects of the story. The result is an account that sheds new light on the most riveting tale of honour, courage, revenge and savagery of late Victorian times.


Sanderson et al's realist review of strategic purchasing identifies insights from two strands of theory: the economics of organisation and inter-organisational relationships. Our findings from a programme of research conducted by the RESYST (Resilient and Responsive Health Systems) consortium in seven countries echo these results, and add to them the crucial area of organisational capacity to implement complex reforms. We identify key areas for policy development. These are the need for: (1) a policy design with clearly delineated responsibilities; (2) a task network of organisations to engage in the broad set of functions needed; (3) more effective means of engaging with populations; (4) a range of technical and management capacities; and (5) an awareness of the multiple agency relationships that are created by the broader financing environment and the provider incentives generated by multiple financing flows.


Summary Objectives We surveyed the UK medical qualifiers of 1993. We asked closed questions about their careers; and invited them to give us comments, if they wished, about any aspect of their work. Our aim in this paper is to report on the topics that this senior cohort of UK-trained doctors who work in UK medicine raised with us. Design Questionnaire survey Participants 3479 contactable UK-trained medical graduates of 1993. Setting UK. Main outcome measures Comments made by doctors about their work, and their views about medical careers and training in the UK. Method Postal and email questionnaires. Results Response rate was 72% (2507); 2252 were working in UK medicine, 816 (36%) of whom provided comments. Positive comments outweighed negative in the areas of their own job satisfaction and satisfaction with their training. However, 23% of doctors who commented expressed dissatisfaction with aspects of junior doctors' training, the impact of working time regulations, and with the requirement for doctors to make earlier career decisions than in the past about their choice of specialty. Some doctors were concerned about government health service policy; others were dissatisfied with the availability of family-friendly/part-time work, and we are concerned about attitudes to gender and work-life balance. Conclusions Though satisfied with their own training and their current position, many senior doctors felt that changes to working hours and postgraduate training had reduced the level of experience gained by newer graduates. They were also concerned about government policy interventions.


Tsunamis impose significant threat to human life and coastal infrastructure. The goal of my dissertation is to develop a robust, accurate, and computationally efficient numerical model for quantitative hazard assessment of tsunamis. The length scale of the physical domain of interest ranges from hundreds of kilometers, in the case of landslide-generated tsunamis, to thousands of kilometers, in the case of far-field tsunamis, while the water depth varies from couple of kilometers, in deep ocean, to few centimeters, in the vicinity of shoreline. The large multi-scale computational domain leads to challenging and expensive numerical simulations. I present and compare the numerical results for different important problems — such as tsunami hazard mitigation due to presence of coastal vegetation, boulder dislodgement and displacement by long waves, and tsunamis generated by an asteroid impact — in risk assessment of tsunamis. I employ depth-integrated shallow water equations and Serre-Green-Naghdi equations for solving the problems and compare them to available threedimensional results obtained by mesh-free smoothed particle hydrodynamics and volume of fluid methods. My results suggest that depth-integrated equations, given the current hardware computational capacities and the large scales of the problems in hand, can produce results as accurate as three-dimensional schemes while being computationally more efficient by at least an order of a magnitude. High-Fidelity Numerical Simulation of Shallow Water Waves


Most of the major theoretical traditions in international relations offer little advice on how costly international moral action could be accomplished. The main exception is the constructivist approach that focuses on the spread of cosmopolitan ethical beliefs through transnational interaction. While the logic of this theory does not imply any limit on the scale of goals that might be achieved, most constructivist empirical work so far has focused on relatively inexpensive moral efforts, such as food aid, and so may not identify the conditions under which states will take on much more costly moral projects. In this article, we test the constructivist theory of moral action against the record of the most costly international moral action in modern history: Britain's sixty-year effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade from 1807 to 1867. We find that the willingness of British abolitionists to accept high costs was driven less by a cosmopolitan commitment to a moral community of all people than by parochial religious imperatives to impose their moral vision on others and, especially, to reform their domestic society. Transnational influences also had no important effect. Rather, the abolitionists' success in getting the British state to enact their program was determined mainly by opportunities provided by the fragile balance of power m British domestic politics. Although testing in more cases is needed, these findings suggest that better explanations of international moral action might be provided by a type of domestic coalition politics model based on what we call "saintly logrolls."


Construal level theory proposes that temporal distance changes people's responses to future events by changing the way people mentally represent those events. The greater the temporal distance, the more likely are events to be represented in terms of a few abstract features that convey the perceived essence of the events (high-level construals) rather than in terms of more concrete and incidental details of the events (low-level construals). The informational and evaluative implications of high-level construals, compared with those of low-level construals, should therefore have more impact on responses to distant-future events than near-future events. This article explores the implications of construal level theory for temporal changes in evaluation, prediction, and choice. The authors suggest that construal level underlies a broad range of evaluative and behavioral consequences of psychological distance from events.


In this study, we examined the effect of School Experience (SE) and Practice Teaching (PT) courses on pre-service chemistry teachers' beliefs towards chemistry teaching over a one-year period. To reach this purpose, participants' beliefs and experiences towards chemistry teaching were monitored closely throughout the varied phases of the two practicum courses. Two pre-service chemistry teachers participated in the study. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews, observation notes, CoRes and reflection papers. Semi-structured interviews focusing on the pre-service teachers' beliefs regarding chemistry teaching were conducted three times while participating in the SE and PT courses. During the PT course before their teaching experiences the participants prepared CoRes, and after their experiences they critiqued their own performances. Moreover, the participants were observed during their student-teaching experiences to identify how they transfer their beliefs into their teaching. Data were analyzed via inductive analyses. Results indicated that both pre-service teachers had stable core beliefs derived from their own experiences as students that remained constant during these courses and guided their practical instruction. Although both participants attended the same courses during the teacher education program, their attitudes while taking the educational courses were different. Factors that shaped pre-service teachers' beliefs towards teaching were presented as the practicum courses enriched with CoRes and reflection papers, observing their mentors, experiences gained from microteaching sessions, and pedagogical and methods courses taken during the pre-service teacher education program. Implications for the formation of pre-service teachers' beliefs towards teaching throughout pre-service teacher education programs were provided.


Human cryptosporidiosis has emerged as an important gastrointestinal infection in the 1990s as a result of the ingestion of mainly contaminated water and to a lesser extent foodstuffs containing the protozoan parasite, Cryptosporidium parvum. This pathogen has particular clinical significance for immunocompromised persons, including AIDS patients and cancer patients receiving toxic chemotherapeutic drug regimens. There have been a limited number of studies performed examining the occurrence of the parasite on vegetables, including lettuce. Detection rates are very dependent on the laboratory isolation technique employed and has ranged from 1.2% to 14.5%. Current best practice of laboratory recovery, isolation and detection methods include detergent removal, oocysts concentration by immunomagnetic separation, followed by a combination of immunofluorescent microscopy and a nested PCR approach. Employment of contaminated non-potable water in the production of vegetables, particularly lettuce, may represent an important potential source of entry of pathogens into food processing and the human food chain. Given that lettuce is an important constituent of hamburger dressing, and the size of the fast-food industry, where lettuce is an important constituent, horticultural producers of lettuce should therefore place special emphasis on developing suitable and efficient Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point strategies for the critical control of oocysts depending on the type of unit operation employed and vegetable being processed. This review aims to examine (i) the incidence of C. parvum in vegetables, particularly lettuce and (ii) laboratory detection methods for the isolation and identification of this parasite from lettuce.


The recent judgment in the Humphreys matter by the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) raises interesting and potentially controversial issues.
In short, the SCA in this matter set aside the finding and conviction of the court a quo on murder, substituting this with a finding of culpable homicide.
As a consequence, the appellant's effective sentence of 20 years' imprisonment for murder and attempted murder was reduced to eight years for culpable homicide, to a limited extent backdated. The question is: How and why did this happen?


The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) has a high seed protein content, between 20 and 30%. The protein quality in common is considered low because of the suboptimal levels of methionine and cysteine in the seed. Phaseolin, the main seed storage protein, accounts for 30-50% of the total seed protein content. Phaseolin only contains about 0.5 to 0.80% methionine. The suggested nutritional requirements for methionine-cysteine in the human diet are between 2.5 and 2.6 %. Previous studies on the germplasm SMARC1N-PN1 showed that deficiency in phaseolin and lectins leads to increased methionine-cysteine up to 2.6% in the bean seed. Dr. Hou, the bean breeder in Manitoba, made a cross between SMARC1N-PN1 and Morden-003. One Hundred and eighty-five recombinant inbred lines (RILs) F2:8 were obtained of this cross through eight generations of inbreeding. In this study I used SDS-PAGE to assess the protein profiles of the RILs according to the phenotypic expression for phaseolin and lectins. The RILs deficient in phaseolin and lectins increased their total methionine-cysteine seed content up to 3.4%. Field trials were conducted to assess the impact of the protein deficiency on the RILs' agronomic traits. The RILs deficient in phaseolin and lectins had a similar agronomic performance as Morden-003 thus can be considered Canadian elite germplasm to develop common bean cultivars with improved protein. Key-words: Phaseolus vulgaris, SDS-PAGE, phaseolin, methionine, cysteine, recombinant inbreed lines


Long before September 11, 2001, Daniel Pipes publicly warned Americans that militant Islam had declared war on America-yet sadly, Americans failed to take heed. The publication of Militant Islam Reaches America finally brought Pipes the attention he deserves. Dividing his work into two parts, Pipes first defines militant Islam, stressing the large and crucial difference between Islam, the faith, and the ideology of militant Islam. He then discusses the relatively new subject of Islam in the United States, and how it has developed rapidly in the last decade. In Militant Islam Reaches America, the product of thirty years of extensive research, Pipes provides one of the most incisive examinations of the growing radical Islamic movement ever written. The paperback edition includes a new essay, "Jihad and the Professors."


Introduction
It has been said that through monitoring of drug safety, pharmacovigilance (PV) systems have been instrumental in assisting regulatory decisions on product safety. However, there has been no, systematic, in-depth study of this role. This thesis reports such a study conducted in the UK. On the basis of the results, suggestions are made on how PV data might be produced and used more effectively.

Methods
In Phase 1, a scoping study was conducted to document all changes made to UK product labelling on safety grounds over a 10 year period (September 1st 1995 to August 31st 2005). In Phase 2, all product withdrawals and major labelling changes made during the 10 year study above, were investigated in depth to determine the therapeutic group, source of ADR data cited as the reason for the change; and product survival probability, using Kaplan-Meier modelling. Phase 3, informed by Phases 1 and 2, used a web-based survey (150 respondents) and structured interviews (13 subjects) with healthcare professionals and scientists with a PV role in the NHS, pharmaceutical companies and the UK regulator, to gain views on the current procedures for handling safety issues in the UK and how these might be
improved. Inferences were drawn using interpretative henomenological analysis with NVivo 8 software.

Key findings
Phases 1 and 2 revealed the fragmentary nature of information in the public domain and the difficulties of obtaining unpublished information. Based on public information, Phase 1 showed that 2,630 safety notices were issued affecting 688 individual products. The two main safety notice categories were drug interactions (841;32%) and side effects (537;20%). The rank order of the four most common therapeutic areas in which safety notices occurred was: CNS (23.5%)> anti-infectives (21.6%) > cardiovascular (15.2%) > cancer chemotherapy (10.8%). The ratio of Type A : Type B side effects (ADRs) was 1:3.3.
Phase 2 found that of 518 eligible products launched during the study period, 9 (1.7%) were licensed and withdrawn for safety reasons. The ten-year Kaplan-Meier probability of adverse drug reactions causing the withdrawal of a new product, postmarketingwas 2.2%. All decisions were based on more than one safety data type and all involved UK yellow cards. One decision considered prescription event monitoring (PEM) data.
A total of 164 important safety notices affecting 818 individual products were identified. Of 518 products launched during the study period, 56 experienced at least one major labelling change for safety reasons. The ten-year Kaplan-Meier risk of a product experiencing at least one major labelling change on safety grounds was 13.8%. As with product withdrawals, safety decisions were based on a wide range of data sources of variable quality and quantity. Variation in dissemination of the new safety information was observed. Only one fifth of safety notices warranting a 'Dear Healthcare Professional' letter or a monograph in 'Current Problems in Pharmacovigilance', were accompanied by a boxed warning in the BNF, representing an important inconsistency in notifying prescribers.
As with interview participants, respondents to the on-line questionnaire had difficulties placing the yellow card reports in a formal hierarchy of evidence whilst acknowledging that the data were valuable in the decision making process.
Suggested ways of improving the quality of such reports included making the reporting more accessible and training all those eligible to report. PEM studies were cited by the majority of respondents as a means of generating credible safety data and raising the general quality of the drug safety database. In terms of dissemination and education about ADRs, Drug Safety Updates (which replaced the 'Current Problems' publication from the MHRA in August 2007) were highly thought of; they appeared to be more popular than 'Dear Healthcare Professional' letters and because they were web-based, ought to be accessible by a wider audience.

Conclusions
Safeguarding public health is of utmost importance when making a decision whether or not to withdraw a product or amend its labelling upon the emergence of new safety data. Labelling changes should be made only on the best evidence available at the time and appropriate risk management strategies should be instigated where feasible; not only when a safety signal arises post-marketing, but when a drug is first granted a marketing authorisation.
There is no general consensus on what constitutes 'best evidence' and rating evidence using traditional hierarchies is problematic, The GRADE hierarchy may be an exception. Improving ADR reporting should lead to improved data bases from which to draw safety conclusions. Methods of improving reporting include early instigation and enforcement of risk management plans by the regulator, education of all those eligible to report, greater transparency of regulatory decisions and better and more rapid dissemination of safety change information.


Vasaloppet is a cross country ski event which has been held in Sweden for about 50 years. Now more than 50,000 people of different ages participate in various cross country ski races during the Vasaloppet winter week in Dalarna County. This increasing demand needs good traffic and transportation planning to avoid congestion and provide safe, on time and environmentally friendly transportation for participants and visitors to the area. The key for a good event traffic planning is reliable and up-to-date traffic data which is not available for the Vasaloppet winter week. This study is an attempt to collect traffic data in order to find the movement patterns in the area and estimate origin-destination matrices for the main event of Vasaloppet week. Based on resources and time limitation it was decided to use a web-base d participants' survey in order to collect traffic data. The link to the survey was sent to email address of a sample of 5000 participants. About 64% of the participants drove from their home town to the area and about 31 percent travelled by bus. Train and airplane have a very small share in travel mode to the area. Malungsalen, Mora and Alvdalen are three municipalities in Dalarna County with the highest share in accommodating participants. On the day of the race, bus and car have approximately the same share in travel mode with 45% and 47% respectively.


There has been great interest in the effect of Glycaemic index (GI) of food on weight reduction, obesity, metabolic syndrome and general well being in women. The majority of research into GI was focussed towards improving blood glucose control in diabetes. Also, favourable changes in blood lipids and some beneficial effect in cancers have been reported. The aim of this pilot study is to investigate the impact of ingesting food with varying GI on salivary cortisol and testosterone levels.

A cross-over design was adopted and 8 healthy female subjects volunteered for the study (20–23 years old). The project has received ethical approval by QMUC ethical committee. A diet is said to be of low GI if it has a GI of less than 55, medium GI if it has a GI of 56–69, and a high GI if it is 70 or greater. All subjects consumed a low GI or high GI diet for three days each, with a washout period separating the two. Saliva samples at baseline, after the low GI diet, washout period and high GI diet were collected at 4 different times during the day. Salivary cortisol and testosterone concentrations were measured by ELISA methods.

GI was significantly different between the low and high GI diets. No significant difference in cortisol concentration was found on either diet. Significantly more testosterone was produced on the low GI diet compared to basal values (related t-test P=0.05) (see Table below). It was found that lower calories were consumed on the low GI diet compared to the high GI diet and the subject's normal diet was very similar to the high GI diet.

Steroid Basal Low GI Washout High GI Unit
Cortisol 8.834 11.18 9.54 9.19 ng/mL
Testosterone 83.71 123.2 111.14 101.15 pg/mL

In conclusion, it appears that GI of the diet consumed by females influences a variety of parameters and that a low GI diet might increase salivary testosterone concentrations.

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Regulatory T cells require the transcription factor Helios to stably maintain their identity. Although best known for their pathogen-fighting prowess, T lymphocytes also ensure that the immune response does not run amok. A subset of T cells called regulatory T cells (Tregs) performs this function by, for example, making sure T cells only attack pathogens and not self. T cells can exhibit plasticity in their functions in the face of an inflammatory stimulus. Kim et al. sought to identify the molecules that ensure the stable maintenance of Tregs. Using genetically modified mice, they found that both CD4+ and CD8+ Tregs require the transcription factor Helios to stably maintain their identity. H.-J. Kim, R. A. Barnitz, T. Kreslavsky, F. D. Brown, H. Moffett, M. E. Lemieux, Y. Kaygusuz, T. Meissner, T. A. W. Holderried, S. Chan, P. Kastner, W. N. Haining, H. Cantor, Stable inhibitory activity of regulatory T cells requires the transcription factor Helios. Science 350, 334–339 (2015). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Much like deciding where to go to college, for many students, deciding what to major in is a complex, multi-dimensional process wherein several different variables may influence the final decision. Understanding the motivations behind the decision to enroll in a particular major can shed light on the factors that attract potential students to a major. To understand the key aspects of the decision to major in fashion, in-depth interviews were conducted with 41 female students currently enrolled at two large US universities. Interpretation of issues that surfaced within the interviews revealed commonalities among participants' motivations for selecting the major and thoughts on the link between the major and future professional goals. Results point to the importance of understanding student perceptions of the opportunities provided by a degree in fashion and the implications these perceptions might have for fashion programmes.


Abstract Chytridiomycosis is an emerging infectious disease of amphibians caused by the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, and its role in causing population declines and species extinctions worldwide has created an urgent need for methods to detect it. Several reports indicate that in anurans chytridiomycosis can cause the depigmentation of tadpole mouthparts, but the accuracy of using depigmentation to determine disease status remains uncertain. Our objective was to determine for the Mountain Yellow-legged Frog (Rana muscosa) whether visual inspections of the extent of tadpole mouthpart depigmentation could be used to accurately categorize individual tadpoles or R. muscosa populations as B. dendrobatidis-positive or negative. This was accomplished by assessing the degree of mouthpart depigmentation in tadpoles of known disease status (based on PCR assays). The depigmentation of R. muscosa tadpole mouthparts was associated with the presence of B. dendrobatidis, and this association was particularly strong for upper jaw sheaths. Using a rule that classifies tadpoles with upper jaw sheaths that are 100% pigmented as uninfected and those with jaw sheaths that are <100% pigmented as infected resulted in the infection status of 86% of the tadpoles being correctly classified. By applying this rule to jaw sheath pigmentation scores averaged across all tadpoles inspected per site, we were able to correctly categorize the infection status of 92% of the study populations. Similar research on additional anurans is critically needed to determine how broadly applicable our results for R. muscosa are to other species.


The difficult determinations of causation that arise in tort cases are particularly troublesome to the courts and lawyers when plaintiffs claim that the use of a defendant's product caused their injuries or disease. A perfect illustration of this issue is the concern that hepatitis B vaccine may cause or exacerbate a demyelinating disease in exceptional cases, in particular multiple sclerosis and Guillain-Barre syndrome. Indeed, scientific available data does not support such a suggestion, but French judgments specify circumstances under which the causal relationship between these vaccines and these diseases may be proven by presumptions of fact. In these cases, the opportunity to use presumptions for proving such a link does not seem to be justified.


On a beautiful Mediterranean coast, in the newly-established state of Israel, one way of life violently and abruptly ended and a new one began, when the inhabitants of Tantura squarely faced the war on 22–23 May 1948 for a brief period of 25 days—from the Jewish occupation of the village, the arrest of the men and the expulsion to Furaydis of the rest of the population, via the second expulsion to Jordan, to the settlement of Kibbutz Nachsholim. How did this happen exactly? Why did the Jews act as they did, and how did they construct their cultural world and mental horizons? And how are we to tell this story?


This paper reports a research study that investigated the application of a model of team-based philosophy to test the efficacy of an 'institutional partnership' between a UK university (hereinafter referred to as UNI) and a regional social enterprise development agency (hereinafter referred to as SEDA) as they sought to set-up and develop a work-integration social enterprise (WISE). Funding was granted initially to support the set-up and development of the WISE with the additional requirement of evaluating the 'institutional partnership' and its ability to transform a funded project into a financially sustainable WISE. The research design was longitudinal, conducted over a period of 18 months and had three data collection phases; 'early', 'middle' and 'late'. This paper reports the analysis of data gathered during the 'middle' phase of this research. Individual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants involved in the partnership organisations and the WISE programme delivery staff. Qualitative analysis of the interview data revealed five emergent themes, which were subsequently interpreted by the researchers as: 'Objectives', 'Partnership', 'Staff/management interaction', 'Problems' and 'Individual Perceptions'. The theme 'Objectives' revealed that the overall philosophy of the company had not changed from the 'early' phase but a clearly defined pathway leading to the company becoming a sustainable social enterprise still remained elusive. The theme 'Partnership' revealed that there was no evidence of an effective partnership being created between the organisations involved and there was a deepening conflict within the UNI representatives based on the length of time required for the company to provide income for the UNI. The theme 'Staff/management interaction' revealed the links between the appointment of an unsuitable Agency Manager and the failure of the company to initiate procedures to address issues of future sustainability. The theme 'Problems' highlighted the negative impact of the Agency Manager on the company. This impact was considered by the board to be significant enough for them to require the Agency Manager to leave the company, which he subsequently agreed to do. Other problems were deemed to be related to recruitment processes, which resulted in the appointment of ineffective members of staff. This problematic recruitment process was partly attributed to recruiting staff from within the one of the employment enhancement programmes. Although this recruitment process supported the company's social enterprise philosophy it produced problems because the staff appointed were incapable of meeting the funder's mandatory reporting criteria on more than one occasion. The theme 'Individual perceptions' revealed the few positive observations made by two staff members related to their enhanced experience and enjoyment as a result of working at the WISE. The results of the analysis of the data from this 'middle' phase, when compared to criteria from the adopted team-based model, suggests that the partnership and WISE staff were still operating as a 'loose group' and had not yet metamorphosed into an 'effective team'


Embedding algorithms are a method for revealing low dimensional structure in complex data. Most embedding algorithms are designed to handle objects of a single type for which pairwise distances are specified. Here we describe a method for embedding objects of different types (such as authors and terms) into a single common Euclidean space based on their co-occurrence statistics. The joint distributions of the heterogenous objects are modeled as exponentials of squared Euclidean distances in a low-dimensional embedding space. This construction links the problem to convex optimization over positive semidefinite matrices. We quantify the performance of our method on two text datasets, and show that it consistently and significantly outperforms standard methods of statistical correspondence modeling, such as multidimensional scaling and correspondence analysis.


Purpose: GSK2126458 (GSK458) is a potent inhibitor of PI3K (α, β, γ, and δ), with preclinical studies demonstrating broad antitumor activity. We performed a first-in-human phase I study in patients with advanced solid tumors. Materials and Methods: Patients received oral GSK458 once or twice daily in a dose-escalation design to define the maximum tolerated dose (MTD). Expansion cohorts evaluated pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, and clinical activity in histologically and molecularly defined cohorts. Results: One hundred and seventy patients received doses ranging from 0.1 to 3 mg once or twice daily. Dose-limiting toxicities (grade 3 diarrhea, n = 4; fatigue and rash, n = 1) occurred in 5 patients (n = 3 at 3 mg/day). The MTD was 2.5 mg/day (MTD with twice daily dosing undefined). The most common grade ≥3 treatment-related adverse events included diarrhea (8%) and skin rash (5%). Pharmacokinetic analyses demonstrated increased duration of drug exposure above target level with twice daily dosing. Fasting insulin and glucose levels increased with dose and exposure of GSK458. Durable objective responses (ORs) were observed across multiple tumor types (sarcoma, kidney, breast, endometrial, oropharyngeal, and bladder cancer). Responses were not associated with PIK3CA mutations (OR rate: 5% wild-type vs. 6% mutant). Conclusions: Although the MTD of GSK458 was 2.5 mg once daily, twice-daily dosing may increase duration of target inhibition. Fasting insulin and glucose levels served as pharmacodynamic markers of drug exposure. Select patients achieved durable responses; however, PIK3CA mutations were neither necessary nor predictive of response. Combination treatment strategies and novel biomarkers may be needed to optimally target PI3K. Clin Cancer Res; 22(8); 1932–9. ©2015 AACR.


Ultra-thin-body (UTB) channel materials of a few nanometers in thickness are currently considered as candidates for future electronic, thermoelectric, and optoelectronic applications. Among the features that they possess, which make them attractive for such applications, their confinement length scale, transport direction, and confining surface orientation serve as degrees of freedom for engineering their electronic properties. This work presents a comprehensive study of hole velocities in p-type UTB films of widths from 15 nm down to 3 nm. Various transport and surface orientations are considered. The atomistic sp 3 d 5 s*-spin-orbit-coupled tight-binding model is used for the electronic structure, and a semiclassical ballistic model for the carrier velocity calculation. We find that the carrier velocity is a strong function of orientation and layer thickness. The (110) and (112) surfaces provide the highest hole velocities, whereas the (100) surfaces the lowest velocities, almost 30% lower than the best performers. Additionally, up to 35% velocity enhancements can be achieved as the thickness of the (110) or (112) surface channels is scaled down to 3 nm. This originates from strong increase in the curvature of the p-type UTB film subbands with confinement, unlike the case of n-type UTB channels. The velocity behavior directly translates to ballistic on-current trends, and correlates with trends in experimental mobility measurements. V C 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3556435]


ABSTRACT Objective: This in vitro study aimed to compare the degree of root roughness in human teeth after using hand curettes, stainless steel, and diamond ultrasound tips. Material and Methods: The scaling was performed on the root surface of 36 human teeth previously standardized and randomly divided into three groups (n = 12). The roughness degree was measured with the aid of a rugosimeter, before and after the scaling, through readings perpendicular and parallel to the scaling direction. The statistical analysis comprised Wilcoxon and Kruskal-Wallis tests (p < 0.05). The qualitative and visual complementation of the results was performed by scanning electronic microscopy. Results: The scaling executed with hand curettes increased root roughness (before - Ra median = 0.1583 µm; after = 0.7783 µm; before - Rz median =1.667 µm; after = 7.350 µm). The degree of root roughness also increased when stainless steel ultrasound (before - Ra median = 0.1483 µm; after = 0.3933 µm; before- Rz median = 1.567 µm; after = 4.333 µm) and diamond tips were used (before - Ra median = 0.1800 µm; after = 2.457 µm; before - Rz median = 1.850 µm; after = 18.58 µm). Conclusion: The superficial roughness significantly increased in all groups.  The scaling with diamond tips promoted the greatest root roughness than hand curettes and ultrasound tips. Keywords: Dental biofilm; Dental scaling; Periodontics; Superficial roughness.


Although it has been known for more than a decade that Marfan syndrome - a dominantly inherited connective tissue disorder characterized by tall stature, arachnodactyly, lens subluxation, and a high risk of aortic aneurysm and dissection - results from mutations in the FBN1 gene, which encodes fibrillin-1, the precise mechanism by which the pleiotropic phenotype is produced has been unclear. A report in this issue now proposes that loss of fibrillin-1 protein by any of several mechanisms and the subsequent effect on the pool of TGF-beta may be more relevant in the development of Marfan syndrome than mechanisms previously proposed in a dominant-negative disease model. The model proposed in this issue demonstrates several strategies for clinical intervention.


This paper gives a plethysm formula on the characteristic map of the induced linear characters from the unipotent upper-triangular matrices $U_n(\mathbb F_q)$ to $GL_n(\mathbb F_q)$, the general linear group over finite field $\mathbb F_q$. The result turns out to be a multiple of a twisted version of the Hall-Littlewood symmetric functions $\tilde{P}_n(Y,q)$. A recurrence relation is also given which makes it easy to carry out the computation.


Approximately 10% of school-age children in the United States are enrolled in private schools, relieving the financial burden on public school systems, and the taxpayers who support them, of the cost of their education. At present, the tax code does not allow families who provide this financial relief an income tax deduction, even though such relief is a gift to governments for exclusively public purposes and thus is analogous to a charitable donation. Using the Public Use Microdata Sample of the American Community Survey and the NBER Internet Taxsim calculator, this paper estimates that granting families who enroll their children in private schools an income tax deduction equal to the per-pupil expenditures in their public school district would cost the federal government an average of $7.75 billion per year over the 2006–10 period. This amount is less than 1% of federal income tax revenues. Because private school enrollment, public school expenditures, the likelihood of itemization, and marginal tax rates increase with taxpayer income, the dollar benefits of this change are positively related to income. At the margin, high-income taxpayers would receive about 35 cents in federal and state tax relief for each dollar of per-pupil expenditures forgone.


Nearest Neighbor (NN) search in high-dimensional space is an important problem in many applications. From the database perspective, a good solution needs to have two properties: (i) it can be easily incorporated in a relational database, and (ii) its query cost should increase sublinearly with the dataset size, regardless of the data and query distributions. Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is a well-known methodology fulfilling both requirements, but its current implementations either incur expensive space and query cost, or abandon its theoretical guarantee on the quality of query results.
 Motivated by this, we improve LSH by proposing an access method called the Locality-Sensitive B-tree (LSB-tree) to enable fast, accurate, high-dimensional NN search in relational databases. The combination of several LSB-trees forms a LSB-forest that has strong quality guarantees, but improves dramatically the efficiency of the previous LSH implementation having the same guarantees. In practice, the LSB-tree itself is also an effective index which consumes linear space, supports efficient updates, and provides accurate query results. In our experiments, the LSB-tree was faster than: (i) iDistance (a famous technique for exact NN search) by two orders of magnitude, and (ii) MedRank (a recent approximate method with nontrivial quality guarantees) by one order of magnitude, and meanwhile returned much better results.
 As a second step, we extend our LSB technique to solve another classic problem, called Closest Pair (CP) search, in high-dimensional space. The long-term challenge for this problem has been to achieve subquadratic running time at very high dimensionalities, which fails most of the existing solutions. We show that, using a LSB-forest, CP search can be accomplished in (worst-case) time significantly lower than the quadratic complexity, yet still ensuring very good quality. In practice, accurate answers can be found using just two LSB-trees, thus giving a substantial reduction in the space and running time. In our experiments, our technique was faster: (i) than distance browsing (a well-known method for solving the problem exactly) by several orders of magnitude, and (ii) than D-shift (an approximate approach with theoretical guarantees in low-dimensional space) by one order of magnitude, and at the same time, outputs better results.


Mental control research has found that attempts to suppress unwanted thoughts can backfire when cognitive demands arise or intentional control subsides. The present research examined the relative efficacy of an alternative form of mental control that involves concentrating on desirable thoughts instead of trying to suppress unwanted material. Using a novel cognitive measure that addresses some of the methodological issues associated with previous suppression research, a series of three studies indicates that a concentration strategy of mental control circumvents the problems associated with thought suppression. The findings are consistent with ironic process theory, which maintains that suppression invokes a monitoring process that is exclusively focused on goal-antithetical thoughts, whereas a concentration strategy involves a broader range of monitored thoughts that is less likely to undermine mental control.


Peer victimization research has proliferated over the past few decades as researchers worldwide have identified risk factors, and documented both short-term and long-term consequences, associated with peer harassment. This special issue represents a second generation of peer victimization research in which contextual variables are considered as potential moderators of both risk and outcomes. Context is broadly defined to encompass not only physical location and space, but also developmental periods, social environs, and individual characteristics. The first half of this issue focuses on known risk factors, such as aggression, social withdrawal, anxiety, and peer rejection, with two of these studies demonstrating how peer group context (e.g., bystander behavior and social group norms) moderates children's risk. The second half focuses on mediating processes and contextual factors, such as school engagement, children's perceptions of teachers' responses to bullying, social hopelessness, and perceived family support. In sum, the papers compiled for this special issue reflect the complexity of the bullying phenomena and illuminate promising new directions of research to further our understanding of this ubiquitous problem.


The purpose of the workshop was to teach faculty to use PowerPoint[TM] as a means to integrate technology into their classrooms. The approach to the design of these workshops was to use a modified version of the generic instructional design model, known as ADDIE, as well as use other ID principles when these workshops were implemented. Two constructs were extrapolated from factor analyzing the instructional strategies: Instructional Strategies and Video Support. Two regression analyses were then used to explore which instructional strategies influenced the dependent variables: (1) Workshop Satisfaction and (2) Impact on Teaching. The impact of instructional strategies, planned and employed, produced a strong satisfaction rating for the workshops. Likewise, using video may have added variety to traditionally provided materials in other faculty workshops and, hence, contributing to Workshop Satisfaction. The instructional strategies also explained Impact on Teaching but to a lesser degree than Workshop Satisfaction. Introduction Today's university faculty face many problems from decreased funding and resources to increased diversity in student populations that make it difficult to maintain the traditional faculty roles (Davidson-Shivers, 2002; Miller, 1995; Morrison, 1996). The average work week is 53 hours for faculty, with the hours ranging from an average of 47 hours per week for community college faculty members to an average of 57 hours per week for faculty in doctoral, or research, universities (Kubins, 2002). The traditional workload of higher education faculty at four-year institutions has been based on the three areas of teaching, research, and service. The tendency is that the higher the level within the Carnegie Classification System, the stronger the emphasis is on research (Davidson-Shivers, 2002). However, two-year college faculty are also being encouraged to conduct research in addition to their primary focus on teaching (Tsunoda, 1992). According to Rutherford and Grana (1995), faculty roles in teaching are shifting from knowledge gatekeepers to knowledge facilitators. This change in roles is based on a trend toward active and less authority-dependent learners and students' access to information through technology. In addition, faculty are undergoing change due to the availability of technology for classroom use (Johnstone & Krath, 1996; Young, 1997). Even though this change is eminent and some faculty have made the transition, there are still many who have not incorporated technology into their teaching (Armstrong, 1996). This resistance to change may be due to a variety of factors: faculty may lack the skills to use technology appropriately (Tsounda, 1992); lack of institutional support (Horgan, 1998), and new roles of the professor are not being rewarded (Armstrong, 1996). Faculty may be willing to use new instructional methods and technology in their classrooms as do their institutions (Armstrong, 1996; Lee & Johnson, 1998), but lack the necessary skills to do so (Davidson-Shivers, 2002). While most university faculty have been well schooled in their own disciplines, they are not educated in the use of instructional strategies or technology. Additionally, while university administrators desire that faculty integrate technology, limited training on teaching methods and technology use is provided. Lack of institutional support for such services may be another factor. Teaching and learning centers and programs have evolved in the last decade (Davidson-Shivers, 2002); however, universities may not provide enough faculty development and technological support to meet the needs of faculty. Such support is needed in order to promote technology integration by faculty members. Second, new roles for faculty such as course developer and facilitator are currently being suggested, rather than those of instructor and lecturer. However, incentives for promotion and tenure tend to be based on the traditional roles of instructor rather than facilitator according to Horgan (1998) and the 'publish or perish' paradigm still exists. …


This paper reports the present status of ground water arsenic contamination in the parts of Ambagarh Chowki block in District Rajnandgaon, of Chhattisgarh State. This location is the first arsenic contaminated location reported outside Bengal Delta Plain. The analysis of arsenic contamination measured during year 2008 to 2009 is compared with previously reported synoptic sampling results. This study was necessitated to know and account for the extent of arsenic spread in the groundwater of the area. In the area survey, many new arsenic contaminated locations have been identified in these areas, which were not reported earlier. The water samples were collected from 46 sites of Rajnandgaon District and 78% of the studied locations are contaminated by the presence of arsenic in the range of 2–4,570 µg/L. It was observed that the arsenic levels are fluctuating and appear to be geogenic. Overall the results indicate an urgent need for scientific management of arsenic contamination issues.