The scalar initial value problem \[ u_t = \rho Du + f(u), \] is a model for dispersal. Here $u$ represents the density at point $x$ of a compact spatial region $\Omega \in \mathbb{R}^n$ and time $t$, and $u(\cdot)$ is a function of $t$ with values in some function space $B$. $D$ is a bounded linear operator and $f(u)$ is a bistable nonlinearity for the associated ODE $u_t = f(u)$. Problems of this type arise in mathematical ecology and materials science where the simple diffusion model with $D=\Delta$ is not sufficiently general. The study of the dynamics of the equation presents a difficult problem which crucially differs from the diffusion case in that the semiflow generated is not compactifying. We study the asymptotic behaviour of solutions and ask under what conditions each positive semi-orbit converges to an equilibrium (as in the case $D=\Delta$). We develop a technique for proving that indeed convergence does hold for small $\rho$ and show by constructing a counter-example that this result does not hold in general for all $\rho$.


The purpose of this paper was to characterize proteins secreted from the human nonpigmented ciliary epithelial (HNPE) cells, which have differentiated a rat retinal ganglion cell line, RGC-5. Undifferentiated RGC-5 cells have been shown to express several marker proteins characteristic of retinal ganglion cells. However, RGC-5 cells do not respond to N-methyl-D aspartate (NMDA), or glutamate. HNPE cells have been shown to secrete numbers of neuropeptides or neuroproteins also found in the aqueous humor, many of which have the ability to influence the activity of neuronal cells. This paper details the profile of HNPE cell-secreted proteins by proteomic approaches. The experimental results revealed the identification of 132 unique proteins from the HNPE cell-conditioned SF-medium. The biological functions of a portion of these identified proteins are involved in cell differentiation. We hypothesized that a differentiation system of HNPE cell-conditioned SF-medium with RGC-5 cells can induce a differentiated phenotype in RGC-5 cells, with functional characteristics that more closely resemble primary cultures of rat retinal ganglion cells. These proteins may replace harsh chemicals, which are currently used to induce cell differentiation.


Branch instructions are recognized as a major impediment to exploiting instruction level parallelism. Even with sophisticated branch prediction techniques, many frequently executed branches remain difficult to predict. An architecture supporting predicated execution may allow the compiler to remove many of these hard-to-predict branches, reducing the number of branch mispredictions and thereby improving performance. We present an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of those branches which are frequently mispredicted and examine the effectiveness of an advanced compiler to eliminate these branches. Over the benchmarks studied, an average of 27% of the dynamic branches and 56% of the dynamic branch mispredictions are eliminated with predicated execution support.


Avian coronaviruses (ACoVs) are continuously evolving and causing serious economic consequences in the poultry industry and around the globe. Owing to their extensive genetic diversity and high mutation rates, controlling ACoVs has become a challenge. In this context, the potential contribution of wild birds in the disease dynamics, especially in domesticated birds, remains largely unknown. In the present study, five hundred fifty-seven (n = 557) cloacal/fecal swabs were collected from four different wild bird species from eight Egyptian governorates during 2016 and a total of fourteen positive isolates were used for phylodynamics and evolutionary analysis. Genetic relatedness based on spike (S1) gene demonstrated the clustering of majority of these isolates where nine isolates grouped within Egy/variant 2 (IS/885 genotype) and five isolates clustered within Egy/variant 1 (IS/1494/06 genotype). Interestingly, these isolates showed noticeable genetic diversity and were clustered distal to the previously characterized Egy/variant 1 and Egy/variant 2 in Egyptian commercial poultry. The S1 gene based comparison of nucleotide identity percentages revealed that all fourteen isolates reported in this study were genetically related to the variant GI-23 lineage with 92⁻100% identity. Taken together, our results demonstrate that ACoVs are circulating in Egyptian wild birds and highlight their possible contributions in the disease dynamics. The study also proposes that regular monitoring of the ACoVs in wild birds is required to effectively assess the role of wild birds in disease spread, and the emergence of ACoVs strains in the country.


AIM
The Korean Multiple Myeloma Working Party performed a nationwide registration of multiple myeloma patients via a web-based data bank system.

METHODS
We retrospectively analyzed registered data from 3,209 patients since 1999.

RESULTS
The median overall survival (OS) was 50.13 months (95% confidence interval: 46.20-54.06 months). Patients < or =40 years demonstrated a longer OS than patients >65 years of age (median OS 71.13 vs. 36.73 months, p < 0.001). Patients who received novel agents at any time during their treatments showed a longer OS than patients who did not (median OS 42.23 vs. 55.50 months, p < 0.001). Response to treatment was associated with OS, with tandem autologous stem cell transplantation (SCT) producing longer OS than single autologous SCT.

CONCLUSIONS
We demonstrated associations between survival outcomes and treatment modalities as well as baseline disease characteristics in a registry of multiple myeloma patients using a web-based data analysis.


The magnetorotational instability (MRI) is a crucial mechanism of angular momentum transport in a variety of astrophysical accretion disks. In systems accreting at well below the Eddington rate, such as the central black hole in the Milky Way (Sgr A*), the plasma in the disk is essentially collisionless. We present a nonlinear study of the collisionless MRI using first-principles particle-in-cell plasma simulations. We focus on local two-dimensional (axisymmetric) simulations, deferring more realistic three-dimensional simulations to future work. For simulations with net vertical magnetic flux, the MRI continuously amplifies the magnetic field, B, until the Alfvén velocity, vA, is comparable to the speed of light, c (independent of the initial value of vA/c). This is consistent with the lack of saturation of MRI channel modes in analogous axisymmetric MHD simulations. The amplification of the magnetic field by the MRI generates a significant pressure anisotropy in the plasma (with the pressure perpendicular to B being larger than the parallel pressure). We find that this pressure anisotropy in turn excites mirror modes and that the volume-averaged pressure anisotropy remains near the threshold for mirror mode excitation. Particle energization is due to both reconnection and viscous heating associated with the pressure anisotropy. Reconnection produces a distinctive power-law component in the energy distribution function of the particles, indicating the likelihood of non-thermal ion and electron acceleration in collisionless accretion disks. This has important implications for interpreting the observed emission—from the radio to the gamma-rays—of systems such as Sgr A*.


Abstract:Zola's La Curée is a novel famously dominated by visual themes (fashion, architecture, ostentation, myopia). This study turns La Curée on its ear and interrogates what has heretofore received little critical notice—the novel's aural poetics. In his portrayal of Renée Saccard as a failed listener, Zola engages nineteenth-century theories of the neurogenic origin of language and anticipates later insights about the socially conditioned nature of aural interpretation. Renée's failure as an interpreter of verbal cues problematizes the notion of auditory transparency and suggests that the visual construct of the écran réaliste in Zola's aesthetics can be reimagined as another membrane through which language is mediated—the eardrum.


Seamount subduction along subduction-zone plate boundary thrusts has long been implicated as a mechanism for abrasion and tectonic erosion of the base of the overriding plate. However, tectonic erosion processes have not been examined in detail with high-quality three-dimensional (3-D) seismic reflection imaging. In 1999 we acquired 3-D seismic reflection data from the Nankai Trough subduction zone to image the plate boundary fault and the overlying accretionary wedge structure. Fortuitously, these data reveal a small (to 1 km high) basement ridge that has subducted to 7 km subseafloor. Updip from the basement ridge, a 1-km-thick sequence of sediment from the base of the accretionary wedge appears to be missing. We interpret these data as evidence for tectonic erosion of the base of the accretionary wedge following the basement ridge subduction. Tectonic erosion has removed more than 25 km 3 from the updip edge of the seismogenic zone and carried it down into the seismogenic zone. The tectonically eroded sediments are presumed to enhance fault-zone fluid content, potentially reducing fault-zone effective stress, and may temporarily inhibit earthquake rupture potential. After the passage of the ridge the boundary fault returns to its former position in a period of enhanced underplating.


We discuss a proposal to make small artificial black holes (ABH's) using a huge laser. Because of Hawking radiation, they would be extremely powerful energy sources. We investigate the technical problems of using them to make power plants and starships. The first suggestion is due to Hawking. Next, we consider what challenges the ABH proposal would pose for a future quantum theory of gravity. The form of a theory which would allow us to compute the necessary corrections to classical theory is considered. It is widely believed that every black hole produces a new baby universe on the other side of its singularity. If this is true, ABH technology will involve future humanity in the creation process of universes. Finally, we ponder the effects that the ABH proposal would have on the culture of a future society, particularly if the baby universe theory is correct. The changes in our economic life and understanding of our role in the cosmos would be so profound as to have a "spiritual" aspect.


Deep learning on an edge device requires energy efficient operation due to ever diminishing power budget. Intentional low quality data during the data acquisition for longer battery life, and natural noise from the low cost sensor degrade the quality of target output which hinders adoption of deep learning on an edge device. To overcome these problems, we propose simple yet efficient mixture of pre-processing experts (MoPE) model to handle various image distortions including low resolution and noisy images. We also propose to use adversarially trained auto encoder as a pre-processing expert for the noisy images. We evaluate our proposed method for various machine learning tasks including object detection on MS-COCO 2014 dataset, multiple object tracking problem on MOT-Challenge dataset, and human activity classification on UCF 101 dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better detection, tracking and activity classification accuracies under noise without sacrificing accuracies for the clean images. The overheads of our proposed MoPE are 0.67% and 0.17% in terms of memory and computation compared to the baseline object detection network.


Taberam Soni, Labh Singh, Amar Singh, and other artists live and work in the hill-villages of the lower Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh, India. There they fashion face-images of deities ( mohras ) out of thin sheets of precious metal. Commissioned by upper-caste patrons, the objects are cultural embodiments of divine and earthly kinship. As the artists make the images, they also cross caste boundaries in a part of India where such differences still determine rules of contact and correspondence, proximity and association. Once a mohra has been completed and consecrated, its maker is not permitted to touch it or enter the temple in which it is housed; yet during its creation the artist is sovereign, treated deferentially as he shares living quarters with the high-caste patrons. Making Faces tells the story of these god-makers, the gods they make, and the communities that participate in the creative process and its accompanying rituals. For the author, the process of learning about Himachal, its art and artists, the people who make their home there, involved pursuing itinerant artists across difficult mountainous terrain with few, if any, means of communication between the thinly populated, high-altitude villages. The harsh geography of the region permits scant travel, and the itinerant artisan forms a critical link to the world outside; villages that commission mohras are often populated by a small number of families. Alka Hingorani evokes this world in rich visual and descriptive detail as she explores the ways in which both object and artisan are received and their identities transformed during a period of artistic endeavour. Making Faces is an original and evocative account, superbly illustrated, of the various phases in the lifecycle of a mohra , at different times a religious icon, an art object and a repository of material wealth in an otherwise subsistence economy. It will be welcomed by scholars and students of anthropology, material culture, religion, art history, and South Asian studies.


Agricultural policy in the United States over the past threequarters of a century has involved supporting farmers in the unpredictable business of growing crops. Until 1973, such domestic supports took the form of a loan-based system that controlled crop prices. The current payment-based system, put into place after 1973, has encouraged overproduction and run afoul of WTO trade rules. Moving back to a loanbased system, or incorporating elements of such a system into U.S. agricultural legislation, could potentially cure problems of overproduction and other domestic ills. A loan-based system could also bring the United States back into alignment with WTO trade rules, protecting it from potentially expensive sanctions by other countries. Furthermore, it is important to understand the ramifications of such a loan-based system because all farm bills since 1949 are simply modifications to loan-based "permanent provisions," and in the absence of new legislation, these provisions


This paper describes the development of mathematical models, which represent static and dynamic properties of the AQUAI-MOD ® hydraulic controller coupled with a standard pressure reducing valve (PRV) as well as a new experimental set-up for testing the controller and calibrating and validating the models. The purpose of the AQUAI-MOD ® controller is to modulate the PRV outlet pressure according to the valve flow. The controller has been experimentally tested to assess its operation in different conditions and operating ranges and in all cases showed good performance. The mathematical models of the PRV and its controller have been developed and solved using the Mathematica software package to represent both steady state and dynamics conditions. The numerical results of simulation of the mathematical model have been compared with experimental data and showed a good agreement in magnitude and trends. The model can be used to simulate the behaviour of the PRV and the AQUAI-MOD ® hydraulic controller in typical network applications. It can also be used at the design stage to size the controller components and to compute the required set points for the minimum and the maximum pressure before installing the controller in the field.


Globalization and modernization of society, cultural differences on the one hand and mixture of cultures on the other hand requires multicultural competence from helping professionals, including social workers. According to scientific literature, multicultural competence, as well as other professional competences, consists of knowledge, attitudes and skills, the education of which should be consistent, continuous and lasting whole lifetime. In order to assess multicultural competence development in social work education, research was conducted surveying social work fourth-year students and interviewing graduates with international social work practice. Respondents were asked about different aspects of multicultural education during their studies: knowledge and skills necessary for multicultural competence, multicultural experience, multicultural competences and social work education. Data analysis showed that students' opinion about knowledge and skills related to multicultural competence is positive, but critical. They themselves defined what they need for improvement of their multicultural competence. Survey research revealed that social work student during their studies exercised at least three forms of multicultural social work: activities at the national level, professional exchange of knowledge and international practice. Social work graduates with multicultural social work practice stated that multicultural competence not only enables social workers for an easier free movement within the European Union labour market, possibility to participate in the creation of European social capital, but also have a positive impact on personal and professional growth.


The automatic generation of elastic-plastic stress fields (EPSF) for structural concrete members by means of the finite element method has been demonstrated as a suitable approach for the design and assessment of D regions. This methodology allows accounting for an elastic-plastic behaviour of the materials. For concrete, no tensile strength is considered, and the compression softening hypothesis of Vecchio & Collins is incorporated to take into account the effect of the transversal cracking on the compressive strength of concrete. In this paper, the application of this tool for the analysis of the failure load and cracking conditions at serviceability is investigated over a series of experimental tests on dapped-end beams (DEB). The failure of DEB occurred in most cases by spalling of the concrete cover on top of the suspension reinforcement. The models with the EPSF predicted also consistently this failure mode. Contrary to classical approaches of stress fields, where the tensile strength of the concrete cover is neglected (leading thus to conservative estimates of the strength for members failing by cover spalling), it is shown in this paper that EPSF can be suitably adapted to reproduce this failure mode by introducing a fictitious reinforcement in the cover. This reinforcement is introduced to reproduce cover spalling for a critical opening of the spalling cracks developing. With this assumption, a very good estimate of the experimental ultimate loads is consistently obtained, also for prestressed elements and for steel-fibre reinforced members (for which the contribution of the fibres is introduced in the model as an equivalent plastic tensile strength of the concrete). A methodology for the determination of the crack width in the critical regions of DEB for service load levels by using EPSF is also investigated. It is assumed a rigid-plastic approximation for the bond stresses near the crack. The methodology gives also reasonable and consistent estimates of the crack widths for DEB specimens, particularly for those with diagonal reinforcement, in which the cracking process is more stable.


Metaphorical analogies have been popular in different forms of reasoning, theatre and drama analogy among them. From the semiotic perspective, theatre is a representation of reality. Characteristic to theatrical representation is the fact that for creating representations of reality it uses, to a great extent, the materiality and cultural codes that also constitute our everyday life; sometimes the means of representation are even iconically identical to the latter. This likeness has inspired numerous writers, philosophers and, later, social scientists to look for particular similarities between social life, drama and theatre. In this paper I chose two particular approaches from the social sciences that make use of the metaphorical analogy of theatre in quite different, yet, to certain extent, also overlapping ways — Victor Turner's concept of "social dramas" from anthropology and Erving Goffman's "dramaturgy" of social interactions from sociology. The former bases his analogy more on the structure of the dramatic text and on a key resemblance in the (dramatic) conflict, whereas the latter builds his analogy on the principles of performing used in theatre, and regards characters and roles as major resemblances between action on stage and in social space. This paper examines these key resemblances and sheds light on what kind of interpretations of culture  and society emerge when theatre analogies are put into action. In the concluding section some general problems, related to extended metaphors and analogical explanations the researcher needs to face with, are discussed.


Danube, the second longest river in Europe through a tortuous path in the Black Forest to the Black Sea. The river arises through union sources: Breg, Brigach, Donau Quelle and joins the sea by three branches: Chilia, Sulina and St. George forming the Danube Delta. As space crosses so large and diverse to establish the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River which aims to ensure the sustainable use and equitable access to water resources along the river basin, the Commission's work jumpers Danube River Protection Convention which is an important instrument for cooperation and transboundary water management in the Danube basin. Romania was in 2007 president of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River. Romania is interested to protect the water of the river, given the length that it crosses the country and the fact that the arms of the Danube flows into the Black Sea forms one of the most rare and beautiful wetlands, named Danube Delta. It is appreciated that the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve has become as compared to other deltas of Europe and the Earth has retained a high biodiversity, that a multitude of species from a variety of systematic units. In the European continent, Delta retained natural habitat. This area has special significance both ornithological aspect and morphological and climatic factors have described it as a very important reserve. Nature reserves in the area of 41500 ha were delineated in three different biotypes of the delta and was placed in the international studies program "Man and Biosphere" attached to UNESCO to recognize the importance of Romanian scientific nature reserves and the richness and variety of flora and fauna elements.


Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the most widely used method of estimating joint posterior distributions in Bayesian analysis. The idea of MCMC is to iteratively produce parameter values that are representative samples from the joint posterior. Unlike frequentist analysis where iterative model fitting routines are monitored for convergence to a single point, MCMC output is monitored for convergence to a distribution. Thus, specialized diagnostic tools are needed in the Bayesian setting. To this end, the R package boa was created. This manuscript presents the user's manual for boa, which outlines the use of and methodology upon which the software is based. Included is a description of the menu system, data management capabilities, and statistical/graphical methods for convergence assessment and posterior inference. Throughout the manual, a linear regression example is used to illustrate the software.


This paper develops a method that improves researchers' ability to account for behavioral responses to policy change in microsimulation models. Current microsimulation models are relatively simple, in part because of the technical difficulty of accounting for unobserved heterogeneity. This is all the more problematic because data constraints typically force researchers to limit their forecasting models to relatively few, mostly time-invariant explanatory covariates, so that much of the variation across individuals is unobserved. Furthermore, failure to account for unobservables often leads to biased estimates of structural parameters, which are critically important for measuring behavioral responses. This paper develops a theoretical approach to incorporate (univariate and multivariate) unobserved heterogeneity into microsimulation models; illustrates computer algorithms to efficiently implement heterogeneity in continuous and limited dependent models; and evaluates the importance of unobserved heterogeneity by conducting Monte Carlo simulations.


Churn is an inherent property of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Despite its relevance, yet, there is not a universal tool to bring researchers the opportunity to compare their contributions under the same general conditions. To fill this gap, we present the first open-source, simulator-independent tool for churn modeling.


This paper presents new estimates of the development of the urban population andthe urbanization ratio for the period spanning the Song and late Qing dynasties. Urbanizationis viewed, as in much of the economic historical literature on the topic, as an indirectindicator of economic development and structural change. The development of the urbansystem can therefore tell us a lot about long-term trends in the Chinese economy between1100 and 1900. During the Song the level of urbanization was high, also by internationalstandards – the capital cities of the Song were probably the largest cities in the world. This remained so until the late Ming, but during the Qing there was a downward trend in the levelof urbanization from 11–12% to 7% in the late 18th century, a level at which it remained untilthe early 1900s. In our paper we analyse the role that socio–political and economic causesplayed in this decline, such as the changing character of the Chinese state, the limited impactof overseas trade on the urban system, and the apparent absence of the dynamic economiceffects that were characteristic for the European urban system.


In this article we describe the development of a part-of-speech (POS) tagger for Dutch messages from the Twitter microblogging website. Initially we developed a POS tag set ourselves with the intention of building a corresponding tagger from scratch. However, it turned out that the output of Frog, an existing high-quality POS tagger for Dutch, is of such quality that we decided to develop a conversion tool that modifies the output of Frog. The conversion consists of retokenization and adding Twitter-specific tags. Frog annotates Dutch texts with the extensive D-Coi POS tag set, which is used in several corpus annotation projects in the Netherlands. We evaluated the resulting automatic annotation against a manually annotated sub-set of tweets. The annotation of tweets in this sub-set have a high inter-annotator agreement and our extension of Frog shows an accuracy of around 95%. The add-on conversion tool that adds Twitter-specific tags to the output of Frog will be made available to other users.


Plant uptake is one of the environmental processes that influence contaminant fate. Understanding the magnitude and rate of plant uptake is critical to assessing potential crop contamination and the development of phytoremediation technologies. We determined (1) the partition-dominated equilibrium sorption of lindane (LDN) and hexachlorobenzene (HCB) by roots and shoots of wheat seedlings, (2) the kinetic uptake of LDN and HCB by roots and shoots of wheat seedlings, (3)the kinetic uptake of HCB,tetrachloroethylene (PCE), and trichloroethylene (TCE) by roots and shoots of ryegrass seedlings, and (4) the lipid, carbohydrate, and water contents of the plants. Although the determined sorption and the plant composition together suggest the predominant role of plant lipids for the sorption of LDN and HCB, the predicted partition with lipids of LDN and HCB using the octanol-water partition coefficients is notably lower than the measured sorption, due presumably to underestimation of the plant lipid contents and to the fact that octanol is less effective as a partition medium than plant lipids. The equilibrium sorption orthe estimated partition can be viewed as the kinetic uptake limits. The uptakes of LDN, PCE, and TCE from water at fixed concentrations increased with exposure time in approach to steady states. The uptake of HCB did not reach a plateau within the tested time because of its exceptionally high partition coefficient. In all of the cases, the observed uptakes were lower than their respective limits, due presumably to contaminant dissipation in and limited water transpiration by the plants.


BERT model has been successfully applied to open-domain QA tasks. However, previous work trains BERT by viewing passages corresponding to the same question as independent training instances, which may cause incomparable scores for answers from different passages. To tackle this issue, we propose a multi-passage BERT model to globally normalize answer scores across all passages of the same question, and this change enables our QA model find better answers by utilizing more passages. In addition, we find that splitting articles into passages with the length of 100 words by sliding window improves performance by 4%. By leveraging a passage ranker to select high-quality passages, multi-passage BERT gains additional 2%. Experiments on four standard benchmarks showed that our multi-passage BERT outperforms all state-of-the-art models on all benchmarks. In particular, on the OpenSQuAD dataset, our model gains 21.4% EM and 21.5% F1 over all non-BERT models, and 5.8% EM and 6.5% F1 over BERT-based models.


We report on trace gas and major atmospheric constituents results obtained by the Vehicle Cabin Atmosphere Monitor (VCAM) during operations aboard the International Space Station (ISS). VCAM is an autonomous environmental monitor based on a miniature gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. It was flown to the ISS on shuttle mission STS-131 and commenced operations on 6/10/10. VCAM provides measurements of ppb-to-ppm levels of volatile trace-gas constituents, and of the atmospheric major constituents (nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide) in a space vehicle or station. It is designed to operate autonomously and maintenance-free, approximately once per day, with a self-contained gas supply sufficient for a one-year lifetime. VCAM is designed to detect and identify 90% of the target compounds at their 180-day Spacecraft Maximum Allowable Concentration levels.


This chapter discusses theoretical and methodological issues concerning doing critical discourse analysis in China. The authors believe that China's unique social, cultural and political context justifies an assumption that the Western originated paradigm of critical discourse analysis needs tailoring and appropriating when being applied in China. Starting from this assumption, the chapter discusses four issues relevant to discourse approach to the socio-political transformations in China: a 'wider' angle critical perspective, a research focus on the functionality of discourse, the emergent public sphere, and qualitative research method. It is argued that, while the first two issues are basically important for an appropriation of CDA in China, the second two issues needs to be given more attention, for the new media has become a new tool for discourse struggles, and the qualitative research methodology needs to be given more weight in CDA-related social research in China. Keywords: Western originated CDA; appropriation of CDA in China; four issues


Functional connectivity, quantified using landscape genetics, can inform conservation through the identification of factors linking genetic structure to landscape mechanisms. We used breeding habitat metrics, landscape attributes, and indices of grouse abundance, to compare fit between structural connectivity and genetic differentiation within five long‐established Sage‐Grouse Management Zones (MZ) I‐V using microsatellite genotypes from 6,844 greater sage‐grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) collected across their 10.7 million‐km2 range. We estimated structural connectivity using a circuit theory‐based approach where we built resistance surfaces using thresholds dividing the landscape into "habitat" and "nonhabitat" and nodes were clusters of sage‐grouse leks (where feather samples were collected using noninvasive techniques). As hypothesized, MZ‐specific habitat metrics were the best predictors of differentiation. To our surprise, inclusion of grouse abundance‐corrected indices did not greatly improve model fit in most MZs. Functional connectivity of breeding habitat was reduced when probability of lek occurrence dropped below 0.25 (MZs I, IV) and 0.5 (II), thresholds lower than those previously identified as required for the formation of breeding leks, which suggests that individuals are willing to travel through undesirable habitat. The individual MZ landscape results suggested terrain roughness and steepness shaped functional connectivity across all MZs. Across respective MZs, sagebrush availability (<10%–30%; II, IV, V), tree canopy cover (>10%; I, II, IV), and cultivation (>25%; I, II, IV, V) each reduced movement beyond their respective thresholds. Model validations confirmed variation in predictive ability across MZs with top resistance surfaces better predicting gene flow than geographic distance alone, especially in cases of low and high differentiation among lek groups. The resultant resistance maps we produced spatially depict the strength and redundancy of range‐wide gene flow and can help direct conservation actions to maintain and restore functional connectivity for sage‐grouse.


Detection of weak narrowband absorption by molecular lines is usually a topic of linear-optical technology. In this paper we demonstrate nonlinear-optical enhancement and shape control of atmospheric absortion lines using a broadband ultrashort-pulse oscillator and nonlinear fiber propagation. The absorption signal is generated inside the passively mode-locked mid-IR Cr:ZnS laser. The nonlinear interaction with the broadband ps-long pulse causes the narrow-band ns-long absorption signal to acquire a 90° phase shift with respect to the pulse [1]. The signature of such an absorber on the output spectrum is a dispersion-like modulation, which can be much stronger than absorption modulation itself. This effect has been experimentally observed using the atmospheric water vapour absorption lines around 2.5 μm in Cr:ZnSe laser [1, 2]. Additional modulation increase has been predicted to occur near the spectrum edge if the laser is operating in a chirped-pulse (dissipative soliton) regime.


The search for silvicultural information, including the seedling production methods, about alternative forest tree species for forestry with economic purposes have increased in the last years. In this work, the influence of the volume of tubes at sizes of 115, 180 and 280 cm3, on the growth of seedlings of Guanandi (Calophyllum brasiliense Cambess.) and Australian Cedar (Toona ciliata M. Roem. var. australis (F. Muell.)) was evaluated. The substrate used was composed by mixture of 80% of commercial substrate and 20% of clay. The collar diameter and the height of the seedlings were evaluated at 60, 90, 120 and 150 days after transplantation. In the last mensuration the dry weight of the aerial plant, of the root system and the total weight, and the Quality Index of Dickson were also determined. There was an effect of the tube volume on the growth and the quality of the seedlings, and the reaction of the Australian Cedar was greater. It was concluded the, for the Guanandi, the best tube is that of 180 cm3 and for the Australian Cedar is the tube of 280 cm3.


Introduction Although current microcatheter technologies have advanced in recent years, corresponding endovascular devices still lag behind. Animal models are unable to replicate consistent large and wide neck bifurcation aneurysms with sufficient neurovascular feeder vessels. Testing methods must accurately model vessel tortuosity and flow patterns. Models must detect downstream migration of neurovascular embolic devices. This paper focuses on the development and utilization of an in vitro flow model to test short- and long-term stability of a novel polymer biomaterial (PPODA-QT) for aneurysm occlusion. Materials and methods This research project includes development of innovative in vitro aneurysm vessel model with complex side branching. This project will bring together clinical, biological, and engineering expertise. A full Circle of Willis (CW) in vitro vessel model will be fabricated into vessel analogs. This model will be constructed using a PolyJet® (UV cured) 3D printing process. UV curing creates a model with accurate anatomy and tortuosity. Typical aneurysm positions, verified by our collaborating neuro-interventional surgeon, will be 3D-printed at the basilar bifurcation, the posterior communicating (PCA) branch, and at the anterior communicating (ACA) bifurcation. Flow is regulated through the use of a Super Pump AR (ViVitro Labs). This 3D printed model will be implemented in an in vitro flow model that enables systemic data collection. A data acquisition system (DAQ) integrated with LabVIEW® software will record real time particulation images, pressure drops across the model, and flowrates through each inlet and outlet of the model. Results and discussion The in vitro model is used to simulate and quantify short-and long-term viability of new biomaterials for brain aneurysm embolization. Delivery and balloon microcatheters access the aneurysm model from the introducer at the inlet flow-stream. Inline holography imaging quantifies the number and size of particulate in accordance with (USP) XXV<788>). The PolyJet® 3D printed model has a luminal friction 5x lower than the standard silicone vessel models. Low luminal friction improves endovascular device tracking, providing a realistic feel for surgical simulation. Conclusions This in vitro aneurysm flow model utilizes a UV cured 3D printing technique to emulate device delivery and wear. This model provides a realistic simulation of neurovascular device delivery. Additionally, development of new biomaterials for aneurysm treatment requires models capable of replicating tortuosity and friction characteristics. Traditional additives (used to reduce wall friction) can interfere with deployment and assessment of embolics. Disclosures C. Settanni: None. T. Becker: 1; C; Brain Aneurysm Foundation. 4; C; Aneuvas Technologies Inc. 5; C; Aneuvas Technologies Inc., Northern Arizona University. A. Ducruet: 1; C; Brain Aneurysm Foundation. 5; C; Barrow Neurological Institute, Northern Arizona University. W. Merritt:None. A. Huckleberry: 5; C; Flagstaff Medical Center.


Preterm infants born before 37 weeks of gestation constitute up to 10% of all births, and can
display development that, frequently, differs from those of full- term infants. Studies indicate that
school children born preterm present with a, generally, higher incidence of performing poorly
academically. The present study investigated the perceptions of paediatric OTs regarding the
type of difficulties with which children born preterm present, and explored the role of OT. In the
first, quantitative part of this study, paediatric OTs completed a postal questionnaire (N=353).
The second, qualitative part, used asynchronous, online discussions (N=13), by utilising the
virtual environment of WebCT, to further explore the topic.
The survey was also designed to capture:
• information on the extent of this paediatric population within OT services, and how
identifiable and accessible it is
• OT practices when working with these children
• what informs therapists' clinical decision making.
The discussion groups provided a forum for OTs' "reflexive comment" on the issues emerging
from the questionnaire analysis.
Despite sensorimotor and attentional difficulties reaching the highest frequencies, the findings
revealed rather a combination of problems in most developmental domains. Writing emerged as
the predominant problematic area within the school curriculum. A "persistence" of sensorimotor
difficulties throughout the preschool years also emerged. More frequent and/or severity
difficulties, more medical issues, a higher co morbidity of SLD with other conditions for the
preterm group, were other findings. These insights could lead to a further exploration of the
need for differentiating assessment and treatment practices for this group. Occupational therapy
was highlighted as particularly "advantageous" for this population due to a number of OTspecific
contributions e.g. ability to "detect "subtle" difficulties at a young age. The implications
of a "shift" of more OTs into the area of early intervention, are discussed.
The findings of the study constitute tacit, professional knowledge, and they are based on
subjective clinicians' views. They could, however, help frame hypotheses to be further explored
verified with the use of empirical research.
KEYWORDS: Prematurity; Specific Learning Difficulties; Early Intervention; Paediatric
Occupational Therapy; School; Clinical Decision Making; Assessment; Intervention; Survey;
WebCT; Asynchronous Online Discussions


Background & Aim: Psychological disorders are one the behavioral and psychiatric problems which are highly considered as a clinical issue. This study was conducted to investigate the psychological disorders profile (anxiety, depression and psychological distress) in adult population of Isfahan province. Methods: This cross-sectional study carried out on the obtained data of Sepahan project conducted on the staff of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. Anxiety and depression of the subjects were assessed by "hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS)" and psychological distress was assessed using General Health Questionnaire. Chi-square and logistic regression tests were used. Data were analyzed by SPSS 15. Results: Based on the finding, depression was the most common psychological problem in this study. The frequency of all three psychological problems in women is significantly higher than men. The Odds ratio of psychological distress, Anxiety and depression in women were (CI=1.44-1.91, OR=1.66), (CI=1.57-2.24, OR=1.87) and (CI=1.57-2.04, OR=1.79), respectively. Moreover, the frequency of psychological distress and anxiety in people under 40 was significantly higher than people over 40. The Odds ratio of psychological distress and anxiety in people over 40 was (CI=0.7-0.93, OR=0.81) and (CI=0.79-0.94, OR=0.79), respectively. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that psychological disorders are highly prevalent among adult population of Isfahan province, particularly in women. As a result, the health and treatment authorities should pay further attention to control, prevent and treat these disorders.


The aims of this research were to know the percentage of the brown algae (Sargassum) extract obtained from a cooking method by using of water as a solvent and to determine nitrogen and protein contents in the extract. Results shows that the extract of Sargassum obtained is 9,435 % with total nitrogen, protein, protein–nitrogen, and cytokinin-nitrogen are 3,86 %; 2,89 %; and 3,385 %, respectively. Two method were use to know the activity of Sargassum on the again process of fruits and vegetables (sweet orange, Hanlim norris ant tomato). The methods were as follows: (1) fruits and vegetables were directly wrapped with dried Sargassum and (2) fruits and vegetables were immersed into the sargassum extract with various concentration (between 0 and 50 ppm) with the concentration interval observed in the first method. This may happen because there was no a direct contact between fruits and vegetables with the component  which has the inhibition effect to the aging  process of fruits and vegetables. On the other hand, in the second method, the Sargassum extract is effective in inhibiting  the aging  process of fruits and vegetables. At a suspension concentration of  35  ppm, the sweet orange can be kept for about 70,4 days at a temperatur of 10 0 C, whereas without a treatment with the suspension, it can just be kept for about 31,6 days. The effect to the suspension  with a concentration of 25 ppm to tomatoes are that the storing  time of the fruits can be until 45,4 days at a temperature of 10 0 C. Without a treatment with the suspension, these tomatoes can just be kept for 19,4 days. This is possible due to the assumption that the component existing in the Sargassum extract can cover the pores of sweet oranges and tomatoes so that the air respiration from  and to the fruits and vegetables decrease. Keywords : Inhibition, extract, cytokinin, sargassum, aging


This paper describes the riding robot system named by "RideBot-II" which is a riding robot like as a horse. In order to simulate the riding motions, we developed the saddle mechanism which can generate 4 DOF motions including pitch, roll, bounce and slide movement, and also we controlled the riding motions and the intention of horseman. To generate the riding motions with the bodily sensation, we developed Novel Washout Filter and the algorithms for motion control. And also, we developed some health care service for the health care of horseman. A body state index was proposed that evaluates the personal health state from both the measured physiological variables and the surveyed questions. The physiological variables such as weight, blood pressure, heart rate variability(HRV), accelerated state photoplethysmograph (APG), body fat, and happiness index were measured by the specially designed bio-handle system and survey questions. The efficiency of the proposed ride robot is evaluated in the experiments Keywords-Riding Robot, Horseback Motions, Entertainment, Healthcare, Riding Motion Control.


Marine phospholipids contain a high amount of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which have documented beneficial effect on human health. Due to this, marine phospholipids have a high potential for use in products for human consumption. However, due to the high amount of n-3 PUFAs, marine phospholipids are very susceptible to lipid oxidation, which cause loss of sensory and nutritional value in foods, some oxidation compounds are even toxic. A successful incorporation of marine phospholipids in processed foods would most probably be in the form of lipid dispersions, where some common constituents such as iron would be present. Iron, which is a very important mineral from a nutritional point of view, is also a very strong prooxidant. Studies of oxidation in oil/water systems catalysed by iron would provide valuable information on oxidation kinetics.This thesis summarises the work done on oxidation of marine phospholipids in liposomes. Measurement of dissolved oxygen uptake was chosen as the main method to study lipid oxidation. This fast and simple method enabled screening of the influence of different conditions on oxidation.The mechanism for iron catalyzed oxidation in liposomes is discussed. When Fe2+ was added to liposomes, an initial drop in dissolved oxygen followed by a slower linear oxygen uptake, was observed. Addition of Fe3+ induced only the linear oxygen uptake. The initial fast drop in dissolved oxygen was due to breakdown of preexisting lipid peroxides by Fe2+. In this reaction alkoxy radicals were formed and Fe2+ was oxidised to Fe3+. Fe3+ formed was further reduced by peroxides to Fe2+ at a slow rate (compared to Fe2+ oxidation rate). When equilibrium between Fe2+ and Fe3+ was achieved, the linear oxygen uptake was observed and Fe3+ became the rate limiting factor in the circulation between Fe3+ and Fe2+. Both alkoxy and peroxy radicals are presumably formed by breakdown of peroxides by Fe2+ and Fe3+. These radicals react with fatty acids giving a lipid radical reacting with oxygen.The rate of slower linear oxygen consumption followed Arrhenius kinetics and the variation in activation energy found (60 – 87 kJ/moles*K). The rate of slower linear oxygen uptake in liposomes was proportional to the concentration of iron and the lipid concentration in the assay mixture. The oxygen consumption rate was dependent on pH with a maximum observed between pH 4 and 5. The pH effect was explained by the iron availability and Zeta potential changes at different pH. Different salts had different influence on the linear oxygen uptake in liposomes. Cations (Na+, K+, Ca+, Mg+) did not influence the rate of oxidation in the tested range (Ionic strength (I) 0 - 0.14 M). Among the tested anions: sulphates and nitrates did not change oxygen uptake rate significantly, but chlorides (KCl, NaCl, CaCl2) reduced the oxidation rate down to approximately 45 % and dihydrogen phosphate down to 14 %, when I=0.14M. The effect of Cl- and H2PO4 - was additive. When the liposomes contained different concentrations of chlorides, a linear relationship between oxygen uptake rate and Zeta potential was observed. When phosphate was added, the oxygen uptake rate was not related to the changes in Zeta potential.The influence of pH, temperature, concentration of NaCl, phospholipids and Fe2+ on slower linear rate were described by mathematical equations. The modelled data based on the described equations fitted within 10% standard deviation with observed values.


Challenge of Ins-1 cells, a rat beta-pancreatic cell line, with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) promoted the expression of type 2 nitric oxide synthase (NOS-2) in a cooperative way. Treatment of Ins-1 cells with IGF-I significantly inhibited the expression of NOS-2, especially at subsaturating concentrations of LPS and IFN-gamma. The inhibitory effect of IGF-I on NOS-2 expression was abrogated when cells were incubated with wortmannin or LY294002, two inhibitors of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase. Transient expression of the p110 subunit of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase impaired the LPS and IFN-gamma-dependent NOS-2 promoter activity in cells transfected with a 1-kb fragment corresponding to the 5'-flanking region of the NOS-2 gene. However, expression of a dominant negative form of p85 abolished the inhibitory action of IGF-I on the NOS-2 promoter activity. Analysis of the decreased NOS-2 promoter activity in cells incubated with IGF-I showed a lower nuclear factor KB binding as determined by electrophoretic mobility shift assays. The synthesis of NO, produced after LPS and IFN-gamma challenge, triggered an apoptotic response in these cells. IGF-I reduced apoptosis mainly through the decreased synthesis of NO. However, in activated cells treated with N-[3-(aminomethyl)benzyl]acetamidine, a specific NOS-2 inhibitor, IGF-I completely abolished the NO-independent apoptosis. This protection from apoptosis was dependent on phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase activity. These results suggest an important anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic role for IGF-I in beta-pancreatic cells, with both actions depending on the activation of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase.


Pathogenicity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) is mediated by the ESX‐1 secretion system, which exports EsxA and EsxB, the major virulence factors that are co‐secreted with EspA and EspC. Functional information about ESX‐1 components is scarce. Here, it was shown that EspC associates with EspA in the cytoplasm and membrane, then polymerizes during secretion from M. tb. EspC was localized by immuno‐gold electron microscopy in whole cells or cryosections as a surface‐exposed filamentous structure that seems to span the cell envelope. Consistent with these findings, purified EspC homodimerizes via disulphide bond formation, multimerizes and self‐assembles into long filaments in vitro. The C‐terminal domain is required for multimerization as truncation and selected point mutations therein impact EspC filament formation, thus reducing secretion of EsxA and causing attenuation of M. tb. The data are consistent with EspC serving either as a modulator of ESX‐1 function or as a component of the secretion apparatus.


Mobile communications are becoming integrated into society at an explosive rate. While 2 generation (2G) systems limit the user to basic services such as voice and low-bit rate data, 3G networks are characterized by their ability to accommodate wideband multi-media traffic with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. In the design of a system the Medium A ccess Control (MAC) layer is responsible for multiplexing heterogeneous traffic onto a common transmission link and its design is critical to the overall performance of a system. A number of MAC protocols for wireless networks have been proposed in the literature the majority having time division multiple access (TDMA) at the MAC layer. However in 3G systems there is a trend towards the use of code division multiple access (CDMA) due to its proven advantages in a wireless environment. Although several papers on CDMA based MAC protocols have been published, virtually none of them tackle the analysis aspect of the protocols. Those papers that do perform analyses of CDMA protocols don't often consider heterogeneous traffic, and even fewer support QoS. The thesis addresses these shortcomings by proposing a MAC protocol that supports QoS in the form of Bit Error Rate (BER) and packet delay guarantees. The thesis begins by giving an overview of proposed wireless ATM and 3G CDMA protocols and then details how power control may be used to support BER guarantees. Various Markov based analyses are presented along with Monte-Carlo Simulations. An Equilibrium Point Analysis is then performed and the work discusses how such analyses are generally infeasible for systems supporting heterogeneous traffic. After an overview of conventional scheduling algorithms the thesis proceeds to outline a novel approach by which delay guarantees may be offered using packet dropping rates as the QoS metric. Using a stochastic source model as opposed to the conventional leaky bucket traffic regulator the thesis diverges significantly from conventional literature. The thesis also details how to calculate the probability of QoS violation and concludes with suggestions on further research avenues. As a whole the work is unique in its approach to analyse heterogeneous traffic and the methods it uses to construct session admission zones for QoS guarantees.


The CAP instruments have played a positive role in creating changes in the agricultural sector and in rural areas, although they have not attained many of the objectives for which they were designed. The agriculture (and mostly the semi-subsistence farms) and rural areas have little chances of development without the financial support of the EU, especially in poorer countries. Therefore, the political rank attributed to the problems of the development of farming and rural areas in the EU policy is important. In the present article, these issues are presented on the basis of the example of the Mazowieckie voivodeship. The first stage of implementation of the EU agriculture and rural development support programmes in Poland has not been fully successful. First of all, the development disproportions in the region have not diminished, which resulted mostly from the amount of funding, not sufficient for the existing needs, and a too short period of implementation. The most visible improvement in the rural areas occurred in technical infrastructure equipment, mostly for transport purposes. A slight improvement in the agrarian structure of farming also took place. Currently, the beneficial solution for all the EU countries is a multifunctional development of agriculture which implies the multifunctionality of rural areas. Only a multifunctional development of agriculture and rural areas can assure sustainable development.


Abstract. Mass balances of Scandinavian glaciers are mainly influenced by winter precipitation and summer temperature. We used simple statistical models to assess the relative importance of summer temperature and winter precipitation for annual balances of eight glaciers in Scandinavia. Winter precipitation was more important for maritime glaciers, whereas summer temperature was more important for annual balances of continental glaciers. Most importantly relative importances of summer temperature and winter precipitation were not stable in time. For instance, winter precipitation was more important than summer temperature for all glaciers in the 25-year period 1972–1996, whereas the relative importance of summer temperature was increasing towards the present. Between 1963 and 1996 the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) index was consistently negative and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) Index was consistently positive between 1987 and 1995, both being favourable for glacier growth. Winter precipitation was more important than summer temperature for annual balances when only considering subsets of years with high NAO-index and negative AMO-index, respectively, whereas the importance of summer temperature was increased analysing subsets of years with low NAO-index and positive AMO-index, respectively. Hence, the relative importance of precipitation and temperature for mass balances was probably influenced by the state of the AMO and the NAO, as these two indexes are associated with changes in summer temperature (AMO) and winter precipitation (NAO).


Extracting model from source code helps to ensure the implementation in accord with design. The properties of interest can be checked on implemented system via the extracted model. Previous approaches usually abstract the source at the level of intermediate language or assembly code. We are building a module to automatically extract CSP# model from C# source code and use PAT (Process Analysis Toolkit) to check the properties. As PAT support user-defined C# data type, We make the extracted model adapting to either program-implied or user-defined abstraction level.


How does aid coordination work within the United Nations, and how can it be improved? This study examines the role of resident coordinators – normally the UN's highest ranking official on the ground – in forging coherence among the three dozen organisations that together form the UN development system. A functioning system of resident coordinators has been deemed key for the functioning of the UN development system overall. The proliferation of actors and the fragmentation of aid are important determinants for the organization of development cooperation, including for the UN development system. Against this background, the study considers the case for aid coordination within the United Nations, examines its institutional setup, historical evolution and differentiation over time. A particular focus concerns the United Nations Development Programme as manager of the resident coordinator system. The study offers relevant lessons on how to mandate, organize and manage aid coordination at the country-level.


The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of cockpit noise on aircraft pilot psychomotor performance on a simulated tracking task. The performance of thirtytwo participants was measured on a vertical and horizontal tracking task. In the control group, eight participants were used in a quiet condition. In the experimental group, eight participants were exposed to low intensity cockpit noise (50 dBA), eight participants were exposed to medium intensity cockpit noise (60 dBA) and eight participants were expose to high intensity cockpit noise (70 dBA). The performance of the control and experimental groups was measured in an advanced simulator flight-tracking task for 60 minutes with no rest periods. The results confirmed that noise does have an effect on pilot performance in the cockpit. Results also supported the contention that advanced flight simulators create meaningful aircraft environments for aircraft pilots. Noise affected the performance of the pilots on several performance measures (vertical and horizontal control inputs during straight and level flight).


Injury aetiology models that have evolved over the previous two decades highlight a number of factors which contribute to the causal mechanisms for athletic injuries. These models highlight the pathway to injury, including (1) internal risk factors (eg, age, neuromuscular control) which predispose athletes to injury, (2) exposure to external risk factors (eg, playing surface, equipment), and finally (3) an inciting event, wherein biomechanical breakdown and injury occurs. The most recent aetiological model proposed in 2007 was the first to detail the dynamic nature of injury risk, whereby participation may or may not result in injury, and participation itself alters injury risk through adaptation. However, although training and competition workloads are strongly associated with injury, existing aetiology models neither include them nor provide an explanation for how workloads alter injury risk. Therefore, we propose an updated injury aetiology model which includes the effects of workloads. Within this model, internal risk factors are differentiated into modifiable and non-modifiable factors, and workloads contribute to injury in three ways: (1) exposure to external risk factors and potential inciting events, (2) fatigue, or negative physiological effects, and (3) fitness, or positive physiological adaptations. Exposure is determined solely by total load, while positive and negative adaptations are controlled both by total workloads, as well as changes in load (eg, the acute:chronic workload ratio). Finally, we describe how this model explains the load—injury relationships for total workloads, acute:chronic workload ratios and the training load—injury paradox.


A critical edition an ancient manuscript, which has resulted in discovery of Cassian the Sabaite, whom Medieval forgery extinguished, by attributing heavily interpolated Latin translations of this Greek original to a figment called 'John Cassian'. This erudite Sabaite intellectual is Pseudo-Caesarius and the author of Pseudo Didymus' De Trinitate.


Development of diode laser pumped mode-locked sources for use as short pulse oscillators for chirped pulse amplification (CPA) experiments using the VULCAN Nd:glass laser has been investigated. To achieve subpicosecond pulses we studied the performance of a recently reported laser crystal, NdxLa1-xMgAl11O19 (Nd:LMA). Using an active mode-locking technique (frequency modulation, or FM mode-locking) bandwidth-limited pulses of 16 W peak power and 14 psec duration were obtained. The pump source was a 0.5 W single stripe diode-laser. In order to obtain sub-picosecond pulses it was necessary to pump the Nd:LMA crystal with higher pump powers and use the more powerful mode-locking technique of additive-pulse mode-locking (APM). A detailed discussion is given of the performance of the Nd:LMA laser pumped with high power diode-lasers and also the pumping and cavity configurations which lead to successful laser operation. In free running operation up to 560 mW and 1.1 W output power was achieved in single and multi mode operation respectively when the crystal was pumped with a 3 W and two 3 W diode-lasers. A brief study is also made of the aspects of the thermal effects, such as thermal lensing and thermally induced birefringence, which may affect the laser performance. Both the Fabry-Perot and Michelson additive-pulse mode-locking configurations were used, and are discussed in detail. With the Fabry-Perot set up, transform-limited pulses of 420 fsec duration were obtained. The average output power was 18 mW, corresponding to an energy per pulse of 0.19 nJ. In the Michelson arrangement the average output power was 120 mW with nearly the same pulse duration which corresponds to a pulse energy of 1.6 nJ. The use of the additive pulse mode-locked laser-diode-pumped Nd:LMA laser as a seed source for the VULCAN Nd:glass amplifier system at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is discussed. Use of this seed source allowed the achievement of extremely high peak power (30 TW) sub-picosecond (800 fsec) pulses from this amplifier system. We also present detailed measurements of the main characteristics of this laser.


The rust caused by Puccinia substriata var. penicillariae in Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) induces yield losses in this forage crop. Considering the lack of information about this disease in Brazil, this research on its epidemiology has been carried out. The mean latency period, the frequency of infection process and size of lesions on four genotypes of pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) ENA 1, Composto II, BRS 1501 and HKP were evaluated in the greenhouse. In vitro, the germination of the urediniospores was monitored at different temperatures (10, 15, 20 and 25oC), with or without light. After this, the infection process was compared for the genotypes Guerguera, Souna III, BRS 1501 and ENA 1, in a growth chamber, with the leaf wetting time of 0, 1, 2, 4, 8 and 12 hours, with or without light, and in greenhouse, on the genotypes ENA 1, Guerguera and Souna III, with the leaf wetting times of 3/4, 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 hours. A mean latency period for pearl millet rust between 10 and 12 days was shown, and the urediniospores germinated in a wide range of temperatures, from 10 to 25oC, with or without light, with a maximum germination at 17.5oC in the dark. In these conditions, the germination of first spores initiated for less than 45 min at a maximum percentage of 88.2%, with 1.7 h of incubation. Leaf infection can also start after 45 min of leaf wetting after inoculation, but there is a beneficial effect of dark and longer leaf wetting time.


We present the first learned index that supports predecessor, range queries and updates within provably efficient time and space bounds in the worst case. In the (static) context of just predecessor and range queries these bounds turn out to be optimal. We call this learned index the Piecewise Geometric Model index (PGM-index). Its flexible design allows us to introduce three variants which are novel in the context of learned data structures. The first variant of the PGM-index is able to adapt itself to the distribution of the query operations, thus resulting in the first known distribution-aware learned index to date. The second variant exploits the repetitiveness possibly present at the level of the learned models that compose the PGM-index to further compress its succinct space footprint. The third one is a multicriteria variant of the PGM-index that efficiently auto-tunes itself in a few seconds over hundreds of millions of keys to satisfy space-time constraints which evolve over time across users, devices and applications. These theoretical achievements are supported by a large set of experimental results on known datasets which show that the fully-dynamic PGM-index improves the space occupancy of existing traditional and learned indexes by up to three orders of magnitude, while still achieving their same or even better query and update time efficiency. As an example, in the static setting of predecessor and range queries, the PGM-index matches the query performance of a cache-optimised static B+-tree within two orders of magnitude (83×) less space; whereas in the fully-dynamic setting, where insertions and deletions are allowed, the PGM-index improves the query and update time performance of a B+-tree by up to 71% within three orders of magnitude (1140×) less space.


We report on a suite of microchondrules from three unequilibrated ordinary chondrites (UOCs). Microchondrules, a subset of chondrules that are ubiquitous components of UOCs, commonly occur in fine‐grained chondrule rims, although may also occur within matrix. Microchondrules have a variety of textures: cryptocrystalline, microporphyritic, radial, glassy. In some cases, their textures, and in many cases, their compositions, are similar to their larger host chondrules. Bulk compositions for both chondrule populations frequently overlap. The primary material that composes many of the microchondrules has compositions that are pyroxene‐normative and is similar to low‐Ca‐pyroxene phenocrysts from host chondrules; primary material rarely resembles olivine or plagioclase. Some microchondrules are composed of FeO‐rich material that has compositions similar to the bulk submicron fine‐grained rim material. These microchondrules, however, are not a common compositional type and probably represent secondary FeO‐enrichment. Microchondrules may also be porous, suggestive of degasing to form vesicles. Our work shows that the occurrence of microchondrules in chondrule rims is an important constraint that needs to be considered when evaluating chondrule‐forming mechanisms. We propose that microchondrules represent melted portions of the chondrule surfaces and/or the melt products of coagulated dust in the immediate vicinity of the larger chondrules. We suggest that, through recycling events, the outer surfaces of chondrules were heated enough to allow microchondrules to bud off as protuberances and become entrained in the surrounding dusty environment as chondrules were accreting fine‐grained rims. Microchondrules are thus byproducts of cyclic processing of chondrules in localized environments. Their occurrence in fine‐grained rims represents a snapshot of the chondrule‐forming environment. We evaluate mechanisms for microchondrule formation and hypothesize a potential link between the emergence of type II chondrules in the early solar system and the microchondrule‐bearing fine‐grained rims surrounding type I chondrules.


More than any other colony, Virginia looked to the West for its future. After the French and Indian War, the Royal Proclamation of 1754 declared that officers and soldiers would be paid with parcels of Western land, vaguely extending about eighty miles in all directions from Lexington. By 1768 most of the area had been explored by the Long Hunters, including Daniel and Squire Boone, James Knox, Hasker Mansker, and the Skagg Brothers. These brave, enterprising men battled both with nature and with the Indians, bringing their families to settle this rough frontier. "Virginia's Western War" traces the little-known period of colonial history.


Typical human-robot interaction (HRI) is through tele-operation or point-and-click interfaces that require extensive training to become proficient and require the user's complete attention to operate. For unmanned platforms to reach their full potential, users must be able to exert supervisory control over those platforms. This requires more effective means of communication in both directions, including high-level commands given to the vehicle and meaningful feedback to the user. Our aim is to reduce the training requirements and workload needed to interact with unmanned systems effectively and to raise the level of user interaction with these systems so that supervisory control is possible. In this paper we describe an intelligent user interface, called the Smart Interaction Device (SID) that facilitates a dialogue between the user and the unmanned platform. SID works with the user to understand the user's intent, including asking any clarification questions. Once an understanding is established, SID translates that intent into the language of the platform. SID also monitors the platform's progress in order to give feedback to the user about status or problems that arise. We have incorporated multiple input modalities, including speech, gesture, and sketch as natural ways for a user to communicate with unmanned platforms. SID also provides multiple modes of feedback, including graphics, video and speech. We describe SID's architecture and some examples of its application in different domains.


This paper explores the differences between boys and girls in their approach to ICT. Data were gathered from students in the final grades of high school in the Swiss Canton Ticino as part of a wider European project, with a particular focus on the potential uptake of a study or professional career in ICT. Preliminary focus groups with teachers and interviews with women with a job in ICT were followed by a quali-quantitative study which involved 539 students. Results indicate that there are no big gender differences when it comes to ICT use and perception. Small differences are found in the perception of the gender digital divide, while relevant differences were found in the perception and values attached to future professional or academic careers in ICT.


There is a need to assess the welfare of dairy cows that live outdoors under cold and wet conditions. This study combined a number of techniques to measure stress and make an assessment of welfare in this situation. Two groups of ten non-pregnant, non-lactating Holstein Friesian cows were exposed to a week of wind and rain (WR) or housed indoors (I) with pre- and post-treatment weeks indoors in a cross-over design. Wind and rain consisted of continual air movement (7.1 kph) using fans, water sprinkling for 15 min (3.0 mm) per hour, a mean temperature of 3.4°C and wind chill of –0.3°C. Internal body temperature was recorded every ten min and behaviour for 16 h per day. Blood, faeces and infrared temperatures were sampled at 0800h each morning during treatment weeks, and three times per week during pre- and post-treatment weeks. All cows were challenged with 2 ml Leptoshield Vaccine (CSL Animal Health, Australia) subcutaneously after 3 days of cold exposure to test immune responses. During WR, cows spent a greater proportion of time standing and less time lying down and eating than during I. Infrared temperatures were lower during WR than I in both dorsal and orbital (eye) regions. There was a distinct diurnal pattern of internal body temperature which had a greater amplitude during WR than I resulting from both a lower minimum and a higher maximum. The time of the minimum was 40 min later for WR than I. The overall mean body temperature was 0.07°C higher in WR than I. There were greater increases in plasma and faecal cortisol during WR than I, respectively. Total T4 was higher during WR than I. Non-esterified fatty acid concentration was higher in the week following WR than I. Total white blood cell numbers were lower during WR than I. No treatment differences were found for creatine kinase or for tumour necrosis factor, heat shock protein 90, interleukin 6 or interferon gamma expression in response to vaccination. In conclusion, this study applied a suite of stress measures to dairy cows exposed to extreme cold and wet conditions. Together, these measures indicated activation of the stress axis, physiological and behavioural adaptations to cold and a reduction in welfare. A number of these measures could be used to assess welfare under cold conditions on farms.


In 2015 and 2017 unusual ocean and atmospheric conditions produced many years' worth of rainfall in short periods over Northern Chile's Atacama Desert, resulting in catastrophic flooding in the town of Chañaral. However, the town is not only at risk of fluvial flooding, it is also at risk of tsunamis. Through a community mapping exercise, the authors attempted to establish the level of community awareness about tsunamis, and contrasted it with that of other types of water-related hazards facing the town (namely that of flooding due to high intensity rain). This was then compared with the results of field surveys and tsunami hazard simulations, indicating than overall the community appears to have better awareness than authorities about the threat posed by these types of events. The authors thus concluded that in cases when the community has a high level of hazard awareness (which in the case of Chile was the result of traditional knowledge being transmitted from previous generations) it would be advantageous to include them in discussions on how to improve disaster resilience.


International lawyers have long recognised the importance of interpretation to their academic discipline and professional practice. As new insights on interpretation abound in other fields, international law and international lawyers have largely remained wedded to a rule-based approach, focusing almost exclusively on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Such an approach neglects interpretation as a distinct and broader field of theoretical inquiry.

Interpretation in International Law brings international legal scholars together to engage in sustained reflection on the theme of interpretation. The book is creatively structured around the metaphor of the game, which captures and illuminates the constituent elements of an act of interpretation. The object of the game of interpretation is to persuade the audience that one's interpretation of the law is correct. The rules of play are known and complied with by the players, even though much is left to their skills and strategies. There is also a meta-discourse about the game of interpretation - 'playing the game of game-playing' - which involves consideration of the nature of the game, its underlying stakes, and who gets to decide by what rules one should play.

Through a series of diverse contributions, Interpretation in International Law reveals interpretation as an inescapable feature of all areas of international law. It will be of interest and utility to all international lawyers whose work touches upon theoretical or practical aspects of interpretation.


Continuous mercury monitors (CMMs) have the advantage of performing real-time or near real-time measurement, although they are often vulnerable to measurement interferences. For example, CMMs based on atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) are subject to interferences by components of the sample gas, such as ozone, if they happen to have strong absorption bands or lines overlapping the Hg absorption line. Studies on a selected commercially available CMM showed that 120 ppb of ozone could exert an interference of approximately 63 ng/m 3 on Hg measurement. This interference may consequently affect the risk assessment of human exposure to Hg. On a similar basis, it was found that Hg can also result in significant interferences on an ozone analyzer based on UV absorption. Results showed that Hg at a concentration of 300 ng/m 3 can potentially cause a bias in ozone measurement of approximately 35 ppb, comparable to the average ambient ozone concentration. It should be noted that interferences discussed in this paper are applicable only to UV-absorption-based Hg and ozone analyzers. It is also possible that certain models of such analyzers are not compromised by the reported interferences, and thus, the findings in this work should be considered as analyzer-specific.


Signaling layer protocols specified within the NSIS framework may rely
on the GIST (General Internet Signaling Transport) protocol to handle
authorization. Still, the signaling layer protocol above GIST itself
may require separate authorization to be performed when a node
receives a request for a certain kind of service or resources. This
draft presents a generic model and object formats for session
authorization within the NSIS Signaling Layer Protocols. The goal of
session authorization is to allow the exchange of information between
network elements in order to authorize the use of resources for a
service and to coordinate actions between the signaling and transport
planes.


One of the most dominant cultural narratives is 'the story of mothering' but as many researchers have documented, there is a large chasm between this cultural product and individuals' lived experiences of mothering and being mothered. When individuals talk about their relationships with their mothers, they locate themselves — knowingly or not — politically, economically, and historically. This article analyses data based on in-depth interviews with four men and women between the ages of seventy-five and ninety, and explores the stories they tell about the role of their mothers in relation to the children they were and the adults they became. Of the four cases presented, two involve child beating, in one the mother is absent from the time of the speaker's early childhood, and one is an account of maternal depression. However, as these individuals recount their early memories of their mothers, they do so as people who have developed significantly since that time. Implicitly challenging the deterministic mother-blaming which lies at the heart of key cultural narratives, these men and women reveal a deep level of understanding — both personal and political — of the difficult circumstances which form the context of many peoples' experiences of mothering and being mothered.


Model Decomposition and Constraints to Parametrically Partition Design Space in a Collaborative CAx Environment Felicia Marshall Department of Mechanical Engineering Master of Science An industry survey was conducted to collect information on current collaboration methods and project management and communication structures. The results, along with other design collaboration philosophies, were used to develop a method of coordinating users in a multi-user design space. These thesis methods will regulate collaboration and avoid user collisions in the same model space, either by cooperative interaction or by spatial decomposition with regional blocking. The method partitions the design space by integrating a graphical user interface tool into the engineering application used to define and assign the necessary tasks of the project. A simple implementation of this method proved that it is usable by multiple users, is faster to setup than simple written instructions, and helps to coordinate users to work together efficiently. To enable some of the key capabilities of the method, modern Computer-Aided application (CAx) architecture would need to be revised with multiple users in mind. One constraint example would be to partition the design space geometrically with visible boundaries between user-assigned areas. Current CAx architectures have some selection filtering capability that can be based on mathematical constraint boundaries, but are not designed to globally filter selection and are not very useful in their limited form. A simple solution to working around this limitation has not been found.


Malaria control programs continue to be threatened by drug resistance. To identify new antimalarials, we conducted a phenotypic screen and identified a novel tetrazole-based series that shows fast-kill kinetics and a relatively low propensity to develop high-level resistance. Preliminary structure-activity relationships were established including identification of a subseries of related amides with antiplasmodial activity. Assaying parasites with resistance to antimalarials led us to test whether the series had a similar mechanism of action to chloroquine (CQ). Treatment of synchronized Plasmodium falciparum parasites with active analogues revealed a pattern of intracellular inhibition of hemozoin (Hz) formation reminiscent of CQ's action. Drug selections yielded only modest resistance that was associated with amplification of the multidrug resistance gene 1 (pfmdr1). Thus, we have identified a novel chemical series that targets the historically druggable heme polymerization pathway and that can form the basis of future optimization efforts to develop a new malaria treatment.


We study m-transportability, a generalization of transportability, which offers a license to use causal information elicited from experiments and observations in m>=1 source environments to estimate a causal effect in a given targetenvironment. We provide a novel characterization of m-transportability that directly exploits the completeness of do-calculus to obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions for m-transportability. We provide an algorithm for deciding m-transportability that determines whether a causal relation is m-transportable; and if it is, produces a transport formula, that is, a recipe for estimating the desired causal effect by combining experimental information from m source environments with observational information from the target environment.


The work presented in this paper is part of our investigation in the ROBOSKIN project. The project aims to develop and demonstrate a range of new robot capabilities based on the tactile feedback provided by a robotic skin. One of the project's objectives is to improve human-robot interaction capabilities in the application domain of robot-assisted play. This paper presents design challenges in augmenting a humanoid robot with tactile sensors specifically for interaction with children with autism. It reports on a preliminary study that includes requirements analysis based on a case study evaluation of interactions of children with autism with the child-sized, minimally expressive robot KASPAR. This is followed by the implementation of initial sensory capabilities on the robot that were then used in experimental investigations of tactile interaction with children with autism.


Introduction
End-stage chronic kidney disease (CKD) is characterized by kidney failure with the organ's functions reduced or lost completely, where the kidneys are incapable of filtering excess fluids. Renal replacement therapy may be provided by peritoneal dialysis, hemodialysis or renal transplantation. Among the key indicators for tracking patients' current status are urea and creatinine levels.

Aim
The study analyzed saliva as a medium to detect and measure urea and creatinine levels in end-stage CKD patients as well as to use it as criteria for the effectiveness of the dialysis treatment by comparing salivary urea and creatinine levels with their blood levels.

Material and methods
The study targeted 70 end-stage CKD patients from northeastern Bulgaria undergoing hemodialysis treatment. The urea in blood serum was carried out using the UV kinetic method. Creatinine levels were measured using Jaffe reaction colorimetric method without deproteinezation, adapted on an Olympus AU 400 automated biochemical analyzer (Beckman Coulter Inc., USA). Samples from whole unstimulated saliva were collected in a 15 ml sterile test tube as per Navazesh method. The qualitative determination of salivary urea was performed using the UV kinetic method. Creatinine levels in whole unstimulated saliva were measured using Jaffe reaction colorimetric method.

Results
There was a statistically significant reduction in blood urea levels (P=0.000) and in blood creatinine levels (P = 0.000) following hemodialysis. The results revealed that there was no statistically significant dependence between both, the urea levels (P=0.240) and the creatinine levels (P=0.065) in whole unstimulated saliva obtained prior to and after a hemodialysis.

Conclusions
Despite the parallel increase of the urea and creatinine levels in blood serum and in whole unstimulated saliva in end-stage CKD, salivary urea and creatinine levels could not be used as diagnostic biomarkers for the effectiveness of dialysis treatment.


Abstraction is a successful technique in software verification, and interpolation on infeasible error paths is a successful approach to automatically detect the right level of abstraction in counterexample-guided abstraction refinement. Because the interpolants have a significant influence on the quality of the abstraction, and thus, the effectiveness of the verification, an algorithm for deriving the best possible interpolants is desirable. We present an analysis-independent technique that makes it possible to extract several alternative sequences of interpolants from one given infeasible error path, if there are several reasons for infeasibility in the error path. We take as input the given infeasible error path and apply a slicing technique to obtain a set of error paths that are more abstract than the original error path but still infeasible, each for a different reason. The (more abstract) constraints of the new paths can be passed to a standard interpolation engine, in order to obtain a set of interpolant sequences, one for each new path. The analysis can then choose from this set of interpolant sequences and select the most appropriate, instead of being bound to the single interpolant sequence that the interpolation engine would normally return. For example, we can select based on domain types of variables in the interpolants, prefer to avoid loop counters, or compare with templates for potential loop invariants, and thus control what kind of information occurs in the abstraction of the program. We implemented the new algorithm in the open-source verification framework CPAchecker and show that our proof-technique-independent approach yields a significant improvement of the effectiveness and efficiency of the verification process.


Named one of the best books of the year by "The Sunday Times" of London, and already a bestseller in England, Noreena Hertz's "The Silent Takeover" explains how corporations in the age of globalization are changing our lives, our society, and our future -- and are threatening the very basis of our democracy. Of the world's 100 largest economies, fifty-one are now corporations, only forty-nine are nation-states. The sales of General Motors and Ford are greater than the GDP (gross domestic product) of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, and Wal-Mart now has a turnover higher than the revenues of most of the states of Eastern Europe. Yet few of us are fully aware of the growing dominance of big business: newspapers continue to place news of the actions of governments on the front page, with business news relegated to the inside pages. But do governments really have more influence over our lives than businesses? Do the parties for which we vote have any real freedom of choice in their actions? Already sparking intense debate in England and on the Continent, "The Silent Takeover" provides a new and startling take on the way we live now and who really governs us. The widely acclaimed young socio-economist Noreena Hertz brilliantly and passionately reveals how corporations across the world manipulate and pressure governments by means both legal and illegal; how protest, be it in the form of the protesters of Seattle and Genoa or the boycotting of genetically altered foods, is often becoming a more effective political weapon than the ballot-box; and how corporations in many parts of the world are taking over from the state responsibility for everything from providing technology forschools to healthcare for the community. While the activities of business, frequently under pressure from the media and the consuming public, can range from the beneficial to the pernicious, neither public protest nor corporate power is in any way democratic. What is the fate of democracy in the world of the silent takeover? "The Silent Takeover" asks us to recognize the growing contradictions of a world divided between haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. In the face of these unacceptable extremes, Noreena Hertz outlines a new agenda to revitalize politics and renew democracy.


Wild bird movements and aggregations following spells of cold weather may have resulted in the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV) H5N1 in Europe during the winter of 2005–2006. Waterbirds are constrained in winter to areas where bodies of water remain unfrozen in order to feed. On the one hand, waterbirds may choose to winter as close as possible to their breeding grounds in order to conserve energy for subsequent reproduction, and may be displaced by cold fronts. On the other hand, waterbirds may choose to winter in regions where adverse weather conditions are rare, and may be slowed by cold fronts upon their journey back to the breeding grounds, which typically starts before the end of winter. Waterbirds will thus tend to aggregate along cold fronts close to the 0°C isotherm during winter, creating conditions that favour HPAIV H5N1 transmission and spread. We determined that the occurrence of outbreaks of HPAIV H5N1 infection in waterbirds in Europe during the winter of 2005–2006 was associated with temperatures close to 0°C. The analysis suggests a significant spatial and temporal association of outbreaks caused by HPAIV H5N1 in wild birds with maximum surface air temperatures of 0°C–2°C on the day of the outbreaks and the two preceding days. At locations where waterbird census data have been collected since 1990, maximum mallard counts occurred when average and maximum surface air temperatures were 0°C and 3°C, respectively. Overall, the abundance of mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) and common pochards (Aythya ferina) was highest when surface air temperatures were lower than the mean temperatures of the region investigated. The analysis implies that waterbird movements associated with cold weather, and congregation of waterbirds along the 0°C isotherm likely contributed to the spread and geographical distribution of outbreaks of HPAIV H5N1 infection in wild birds in Europe during the winter of 2005–2006.


Prostate cancer is the most common cancer and second leading cause of cancer deaths among men in the United States. Most men have localized disease diagnosed following an elevated serum prostate specific antigen test for cancer screening purposes. Standard treatment options consist of surgery or definitive radiation therapy directed by clinical factors that are organized into risk stratification groups. Current clinical risk stratification systems are still insufficient to differentiate lethal from indolent disease. Similarly, a subset of men in poor risk groups need to be identified for more aggressive treatment and enrollment into clinical trials. Furthermore, these clinical tools are very limited in revealing information about the biologic pathways driving these different disease phenotypes and do not offer insights for novel treatments which are needed in men with poor-risk disease. We believe molecular biomarkers may serve to bridge these inadequacies of traditional clinical factors opening the door for personalized treatment approaches that would allow tailoring of treatment options to maximize therapeutic outcome. We review the current state of prognostic and predictive tissue-based molecular biomarkers which can be used to direct localized prostate cancer treatment decisions, specifically those implicated with definitive and salvage radiation therapy.


Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are associated with negative pregnancy outcomes and are treated with antibiotics. Although beneficial, antibiotic use causes antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and therefore their use needs to be carefully balanced. Antimicrobial guidelines are developed to facilitate appropriate prescribing of antibiotics. This study assessed antibiotic prescribing for UTIs in pregnancy against the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guideline NG109. Fifty antibiotic prescribing records dated from 1st October 2018 to 1st July 2019 were identified from three London-based GP practices. The results show that a mid-stream sample of urine, which is important for the review and tailoring of antibiotic treatment, was collected in 77.6% of cases. Prescribing the first-line antibiotic is important for adequate treatment and good antimicrobial stewardship and results show that 44% of prescriptions were for the first-choice antibiotic. Most prescriptions (56%) were for a second-line or non-recommended antibiotic. Providing self-care advice is key to empowering pregnant women in managing their own health but only 16% of records documented provision of self-care advice. This study highlights important areas of concern in the management of UTIs in pregnancy. However, due to the retrospective design, future work is needed to evaluate the role of AMR in the prescriber's treatment decision-making process.


A highly interactive, integrated and multi-level simulator has been developed specifically to support both the teachers and the learners of modern computer technologies at undergraduate level. The simulator provides a highly visual and user configurable environment with many pedagogical features aimed at facilitating deep understanding of concepts which are often difficult to grasp by the students. The rational behind the development is explained and the main features of the simulator are described. A brief account of the ways in which the simulator has been used to support undergraduate lectures and tutorials is given. The current state of the research in assessing and evaluating the value of the simulations at undergraduate levels is presented.


Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest extant religions in the world, originating in Persia (present-day Iran) during the second millennium BCE. Historical records indicate that migrants from Persia brought Zoroastrianism to India, but there is debate over the timing of these migrations. Here we present novel genome-wide autosomal, Y-chromosome and mitochondrial data from Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians and neighbouring modern-day Indian and Iranian populations to conduct the first genome-wide genetic analysis in these groups. Using powerful haplotype-based techniques, we show that Zoroastrians in Iran and India show increased genetic homogeneity relative to other sampled groups in their respective countries, consistent with their current practices of endogamy. Despite this, we show that Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) intermixed with local groups sometime after their arrival in India, dating this mixture to 690-1390 CE and providing strong evidence that the migrating group was largely comprised of Zoroastrian males. By exploiting the rich information in DNA from ancient human remains, we also highlight admixture in the ancestors of Iranian Zoroastrians dated to 570 BCE-746 CE, older than admixture seen in any other sampled Iranian group, consistent with a long-standing isolation of Zoroastrians from outside groups. Finally, we report genomic regions showing signatures of positive selection in present-day Zoroastrians that might correlate to the prevalence of particular diseases amongst these communities.