The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is very well established and widely employed in the metaethical literature. However, I argue that there are actually two different senses of the distinction at large: the hetero-/homogeneous sense and the dependence/independence sense. The traditional, unqualified distinction ought, therefore, to be amended, with each use of the distinction being stipulated as used in either the hetero-/homogeneous sense or the dependence/independence sense. Careful analysis of various metaethics supports that there are these two senses – analysis, in particular, of a neo-Kantian metaethic, according to which reasons are agent-relative in the dependence sense but agent-neutral in the homogeneous sense, and – perhaps surprisingly – of Utilitarianism, according to which reasons are agent-neutral in the independence sense but agent-relative in the heterogeneous sense.


The aim of this work was to investigate the point of view of studients of Higher Police School in Szytno and the Law University of Lithuania towards physical culture and their opinion regarding the level of a policeman's physical preparedness. Using a special questionnaire 208 students of Szytno Higher Police School in 1998 and 208 students of the Police faculty of the Law University of Lithuania in 1999 were questioned. The mathematic processing of the data collected has been caried out. In analysing the data, the frequency of answers was evaluated (n – by the number of answers and proc. – by the per cent). For the data evaluation according to the per cent we have used the methods proposed by E. Vaisvila (1974). The generalisations of the material enable us to claim that the respondents of both countries positively assess physical culture and its impact on the health and overall training. The future officers treat physical culture as a significant factor in the development of profesionalism. The respondents stressed that the existing system of physical training and fighting self–defence is not efficient enough. Therefore, certain improvements are necessary.


The source of improving people life standard depends, alongside other factors, on efforts oriented towards education, research, and knowledge enrichment. It is also related to development and dissemination of high performance technology, with knowledge development, skills and abilities, professional training able to realize, disseminate, and use innovation. However, these investments in human capital will lead to good results by extending the active life of skilled workers, by improving the general health status of the population, by preserving the environment, by improving food products quality. All these are the more valid for Romania's economy, the more it needs to be integrated in the Western European area, which is a highly competitive area. Or, relative sub-investment in autochthonous human capital might force our country to develop comparative advantages in border fields from the point of view of productivity, to specialize in fields that intensively use raw materials, to turn into a low paid labour market.


John Pateman was a distinguished British microbial geneticist. He came from a working-class area of London and a non-academic background. His earliest contribution to genetics was the discovery (together with John Fincham) of intracistronic complementation, an important phenomenon to understand the relationship of genetic information and protein structure; this at a time when the actual coding relationships of DNA and proteins were not yet worked out. Later on, he and his students made a fundamental contribution to the understanding of control of gene expression in eukaryotic microorganisms, providing some of the earliest examples of positive control. This work also led to the discovery of a new enzyme cofactor, the only one discovered through purely genetic evidence. He worked at various universities in Britain and Australia and trained a number of students who further developed the subject.


Cross dialectal communication results in poorer performance than within-dialect communication in a variety of listening tasks. However, some listeners appear to be less affected than others, and this paper explores the factors behind interlistener variation in a listening in noise task. 63 native speakers of American English transcribed 120 HINT sentences, which were presented mixed with noise at -3dB SNR. The sentences had been recorded by six young males: two speakers of Standard American English (SAE), two speakers of Southern American English (STH), and two non-native, L1-Chinese speakers (NNS). Participants were asked to transcribe what they heard as best they could, and were scored on keywords correct. While everyone did much worse with NNS than SAE and STH, participants who self-reported being accented did significantly significantly better with STH (and trend better with NNS) than those who reported being unaccented. Additionally, participants who reported being in a good mood did significantly better with SAE sentences than speakers who reported being in a bad mood. Finally, there was a main effect of extraversion, such that extraverts did worse overall than introverts. The results suggest that individual differences account for some of the interlistener variation in cross-dialectal listening task, and exploring these metrics further may help us understand the cognitive mechanisms involved in processing unfamiliar dialects. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol22/iss2/20


The quality of care in nursing homes has been evaluated from many varying perspectives, but few studies have analyzed quality in light of complaints made to state survey agencies by residents, their family members, or other individuals interacting with the nursing home. This study analyzed complaints, investigation of complaint allegations, and complaint-related deficiency citations to determine their effect, if any, on the quality of care in nationwide nursing homes. Using the Online Survey Certification and Reporting (OSCAR) survey dataset for facility characteristics and the complaint investigation dataset for outcomes of complaint investigation, analyses conducted included descriptives, correlations, conceptual mapping for complaint-related deficiencies, chi-square tests of independence, t-tests, and generalized estimating equations. At baseline, approximately 66% of nursing homes were for-profit and roughly 53% belonged to a chain membership, while the average percent of residents receiving Medicaid for care reimbursement was 60%. Results indicated that nursing homes differed significantly by profit status and chain membership on whether a complaint was received and whether a deficiency citation was issued following a complaint investigation. Additionally, certain facility and resident-aggregated characteristics, as indicated by odds ratios, were associated with an increase in the likelihood of receiving a complaint or a complaint-related citation. With respect to facility characteristics, for-profit nursing homes and those nursing homes belonging to a chain membership were found to have more complaints and more complaint-related deficiency citations than nonprofit nursing homes and non-chain facilities. vi Resident-aggregated characteristics, such as a nursing home having more residents restrained, more residents with a catheter, or more residents with a diagnosis of depression, indicated a greater likelihood of receiving a complaint or complaint-related deficiency citation in longitudinal analyses. While additional research could aid in interpreting the effect of complaints on quality of care in nursing homes, study results indicate several facility and resident-aggregated factors that may aid in better understanding of quality of care and improve the training of surveyors and nursing home staff to improve quality of care for residents.


This article undertakes a broad-based empirical review of Intellectual Property (IP) litigation in United States federal district courts from 1994 to 2014. Unlike the prior literature, this study analyzes federal copyright, patent and trademark litigation trends as a unified whole. It undertakes a systematic analysis of more than 190,000 individual case filings and examines the subject matter, geographical and temporal variation within federal IP litigation over the last two decades. This article makes a number of significant contributions to our understanding of IP litigation. It analyzes time trends in copyright, patent and trademark litigation filings at the national level, but it does much more than simply count the number of cases; it explores the meaning behind those numbers and shows how in some cases the observable headline data can be positively misleading. Exploring the changes in the distribution of IP litigation over time and their regional distribution leads to a number of significant insights, these are summarized below. Just as importantly, one of the key contributions of this article is that it frames the context for more fine-grained empirical studies in the future. Many of the results and conclusions herein demonstrate the dangers of basing empirical conclusions on narrow slices of data from selected regions or selected time periods. Some of the key findings of this study are as follows: First, the rise of Internet file-sharing has transformed copyright litigation in the United States. More specifically, to the extent that the rate of copyright litigation has increased over the last two decades, that increase appears to be entirely attributable to lawsuits against anonymous Internet file sharers. These lawsuits largely took place in two distinct phases: the first phase largely consisted of lawsuits seeking to discourage illegal downloading; the second phase largely consists lawsuits seeking to monetize online infringement. Second, in relation to patent litigation, the apparent patent litigation explosion between 2010 and 2012 is something of a mirage; however there has been a sustained patent litigation inflation over the last two decades the extent of which has not been fully recognized until now. The reason why this steady inflation was mistaken for a sudden explosion was that the true extent of patent litigation was disguised by permissive joinder.Third, in relation to the geography of IP litigation, it appears that filings in copyright, patent and trademark litigation are generally highly correlated. The major exceptions to that correlation are driven by short term idiosyncratic events in copyright and trademark litigation — these are discussed in detail — and by the dumbfounding willingness of the Eastern district Texas to engage in forum selling to attract patent litigation. The popularity of the Eastern District of Texas as a forum for patent litigation is a well-known phenomenon. However, the data and analysis presented in this study provides a new way of looking at the astonishing ascendancy of this district and the problem of form shopping in patent law more generally.


How to motivate academically struggling students? For those tracked in the vocational stream in France, two alternatives paths are competing: full-time vocational training and apprenticeship. Little research has been done on comparing the effectiveness of these two competing templates as ways to keep students at school and to allow them to graduate and continue further studies. In this paper, we compare schooling outcomes between apprenticeship and full-time vocational schooling, focusing on dropping-out, graduation and participation in further training. In order to do so, we estimate probit models with two simultaneous equations stating for both apprenticeship and our alternative measures of subsequent academic success. We exploit variations in the local apprenticeship share and in its interaction with the before-tracking pupils' academic achievement to identify whether apprentices experience more educational success than students in full-time vocational schooling. Our results clearly indicate that endogeneity of the apprenticeship decision need to be taken into account: naive estimates strongly point in the direction of apprentices being associated with worse educational outcomes. Nevertheless, estimates which deal with the endogeneity issue highlight the opposite: even though following an apprenticeship rather than being enrolled in full-time vocational high school is not associated with any significant effect on the probability to drop-out, apprenticeship training leads to a higher probability of success at the exam and of continuing further education.


Abstract. An experimental setup has been constructed to measure the collection efficiency (CE) of sub-micrometer aerosol particles by cloud droplets. Droplets of a dilute aqueous ammonium sulfate solution with an average radius of 21.6 μm fall freely into a chamber and collide with sub-micrometer polystyrene latex (PSL) sphere particles of known sizes and concentrations. Two relative humidity (RH) conditions, 15 ± 3 % and 88 ± 3 %, hereafter termed "low" and "high", respectively, were varied with different particles sizes and concentrations. After passing through the chamber, the droplets and aerosol particles were sent to the Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry (PALMS) instrument to determine chemical compositions on a single-droplet basis. "Coagulated droplets" (droplets that collected aerosols) had mass spectra that contained signatures from both an aerosol particle and a droplet residual. CE values range from 2.0 × 10−1 to 1.6 for the low-RH case and from 1.5 × 10−2 to 9.0 × 10−2 for the high-RH case. CE values were, within experimental uncertainty, independent of the aerosol concentrations. CE values in this study were found to be in agreement with previous experimental and theoretical studies. To our knowledge, this is the first collection experiment performed on a single-droplet basis with atmospherically relevant conditions such as droplet sizes, droplet charges and flow.


The concept of power is central to international relations. Yet disciplinary discussions tend to privilege only one, albeit important, form: an actor controlling another to do what that other would not otherwise do. By showing conceptual favoritism, the discipline not only overlooks the different forms of power in international politics, but also fails to develop sophisticated understandings of how global outcomes are produced and how actors are differentially enabled and constrained to determine their fates. We argue that scholars of international relations should employ multiple conceptions of power and develop a conceptual framework that encourages rigorous attention to power in its different forms. We first begin by producing a taxonomy of power. Power is the production, in and through social relations, of effects that shape the capacities of actors to determine their circumstances and fate. This general concept entails two crucial, analytical dimensions: the kinds of social relations through which power works (in relations of interaction or in social relations of constitution); and the specificity of social relations through which effects are produced (specific/direct or diffuse/indirect). These distinctions generate our taxonomy and four concepts of power: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. We then illustrate how attention to the multiple forms of power matters for the analysis of global governance and American empire. We conclude by urging scholars to beware of the idea that the multiple concepts are competing, and instead to see connections between them in order to generate more robust understandings of how power works in international politics.This article was first presented at a conference, "Who Governs in Global Governance?" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We thank the participants at the conference, including Emanuel Adler, Alex Wendt, Neta Crawford, Kathryn Sikkink, Helen Kinsella, Martha Finnemore, Jutta Weldes, Jon Pevehouse, Andrew Hurrell, John Ruggie, and especially Duncan Snidal, Robert Keohane, and Charles Kupchan. Other versions were presented at the University of Minnesota and the International Studies Association meetings in Budapest, Hungary in June, 2003. We also want to thank Kurt Burch, Thomas Diez, Tom Donahue, William Duvall, Ayten Gundogdu, Stefano Guzzini, Colin Kahl, Amit Ron, Latha Varadarajan, Michael Williams, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the editors of the journal, and two anonymous reviewers. We also acknowledge the bibliographic assistance of Emilie Hafner-Burton and Jonathan Havercroft.


Osseointegrated dental implants have been successfully used over the past several years, allowing functional replacement of missing teeth. Surface properties of titanium dental implants seem to affect bone cell response. Implant topography appears to modulate cell growth and differentiation of osteoblasts affecting the bone healing around the implant. Optimal roughness and superficial morphology are still controversial and need to be clearly defined. SaOS-2 is a mature osteoblastic cell line, derived from a human osteosarcoma, that several studies have demonstrated to be a relevant cell model due to its large analogies with immature osteoblast cells and better manageability when compared to primary human cell culture. The aim of the present study was to evaluate in vitro the biological behavior of SaOS-2 cells, cultured on two different titanium surfaces, by investigating morphology, adhesion, proliferation, phenotypical bone expression and extra cellular matrix deposition. Our data demonstrate that a sandblasted-acid-etched surface topography, characterized by pore dimension less than 1 μm, may affect in vitro the differentiation of SaOS-2 cells, producing a better differentiation towards an osteoblastic phenotype, as compared to a smooth surface. It is therefore likely that implant surface properties can modulate in vivo the biological behavior of osteoblasts during bone tissue healing.


TEACHING ARITHMETIC I~ THE PRIMARY GRADES. By Robert 1.« Morton, College of Education, Ohio University. Cloth. 242 Jl"'ges. New York, Newark, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco: Silver, Burdett and Company. This is not only the latest treatment of arithmetic teaching in primary grades, but it has corralled all science and art, all philosophy and psychology, all methods and devices, and arranged and rearranged them skilfully and artistically, expanding an old-time fifty pages into 250 pages. Nothing is more complete, could not be more complete, or more adaptable to any teacher's training or lack of training. An interesting feature of Professor Morton's book is the habit he has of discussing the new and "cussing" the old, as it were. It is done goodnaturedly however. For instance, he takes it seriously that there was ever a multiplication table above nine times nine. This is a harmless diversion and probably pleases teachers who like to have something criticised.


A class action can only bind class members who are adequately represented, and thus a class action court necessarily determines representational adequacy. But should class members who were not an active part of that proceeding be able to relitigate adequacy in a collateral forum at a later date so as to evade the binding effect of the class judgment? Courts and scholars have generated a bipolar response to that question, with one side arguing that full relitigation is required by the constitutional nature of the question and the other insisting that no relitigation is permitted because of the issue-preclusive effect of the class court's holding. Despite the richness of this debate, myriad specific questions about the availability, substance, and procedural details of the relitigation opportunity remain unexamined. In this Article, Professor Rubenstein expands the conversation outward by comparing class action law's approach to relitigation of adequacy of representation with habeas corpus's approach to relitigation of ineffective assistance of counsel claims in criminal cases. Using two recent, seemingly unconnected Supreme Court cases - one from each field - as case studies, Professor Rubenstein explains how these cases in fact raise remarkably similar questions. Specifically, the comparison reveals that habeas provides a relatively clear, rule-based system that specifies when - and according to what procedural rules - relitigation is available. Professor Rubenstein concludes by arguing that there are lessons for class action law in habeas's approach: a method for considering when relitigation is appropriate that avoids the extremes of either always or never; a rule system that helps identify issues (such as substantive standards, degrees of deference, burdens of proof, and defaults) that have yet to be carefully examined in class action law; and a template for balancing the competing policy concerns at issue. Without defending current habeas doctrine, and without pretending that habeas and class actions are overtly similar, the Article nonetheless demonstrates that class action law's relitigation problem can learn something through a close look at criminal law's relitigation solutions.


Drawing on evidence from a unique data set of in-depth qualitative interviews with 12 female CEOs (and 139 male CEOs) of global corporations, we explore what enables some women to become CEOs. By drawing on our data from male and female CEOs, we set the scene by comparing the advice they would give to young women as they start their careers. We then focus the rest of our article on the experiences and career trajectory of the 12 female CEOs. We make three theoretical contributions: We identify, at the individual level, how women can take active ownership of their careers as part of a self-acceptance process; how they can embrace gynandrous leadership as part of a self-development process where both feminine and masculine leadership behaviors are embraced, with the feminine being dominant to help move beyond gender stereotypes, and finally, how they translate leadership—rather than combine—gender-based behaviors as part of a self-management process to develop their unique leadership style. For each of these theoretical contributions at the individual level, we also provide two practical recommendations for HR practice and policy, one relating to the intraorganizational context and the second having institutional-level implications. We conclude by discussing implications for future research.


High-density lipoproteins (HDL) possess key atheroprotective biological properties, including cellular cholesterol efflux capacity, and anti-oxidative and anti-inflammatory activities. Plasma HDL particles are highly heterogeneous in physicochemical properties, metabolism, and biological activity. Within the circulating HDL particle population, small, dense HDL particles display elevated cellular cholesterol efflux capacity, afford potent protection of atherogenic low-density lipoprotein against oxidative stress and attenuate inflammation. The antiatherogenic properties of HDL can, however be compromised in metabolic diseases associated with accelerated atherosclerosis. Indeed, metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes are characterized not only by elevated cardiovascular risk and by low HDL-cholesterol (HDL-C) levels but also by defective HDL function. Functional HDL deficiency is intimately associated with alterations in intravascular HDL metabolism and structure. Indeed, formation of HDL particles with attenuated antiatherogenic activity is mechanistically related to core lipid enrichment in triglycerides and cholesteryl ester depletion, altered apolipoprotein A-I (apoA-I) conformation, replacement of apoA-I by serum amyloid A, and covalent modification of HDL protein components by oxidation and glycation. Deficient HDL function and subnormal HDL-C levels may act synergistically to accelerate atherosclerosis in metabolic disease. Therapeutic normalization of attenuated antiatherogenic HDL function in terms of both particle number and quality of HDL particles is the target of innovative pharmacological approaches to HDL raising, including inhibition of cholesteryl ester transfer protein, enhanced lipidation of apoA-I with nicotinic acid and infusion of reconstituted HDL or apoA-I mimetics. A preferential increase in circulating concentrations of HDL particles possessing normalized antiatherogenic activity is therefore a promising therapeutic strategy for the treatment of common metabolic diseases featuring dyslipidemia, inflammation, and premature atherosclerosis.


The bcr/abl fusion in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) creates a chimeric tyrosine kinase with dramatically different properties than intact c-abl. In P210 bcr/abl, the bcr portion includes a coiled-coil oligomerization domain (amino acids 1-63) and a grb2-binding site at tyrosine 177 (Tyr177) that are critical for fibroblast transformation, but give variable results in other cell lines. To investigate the role of the coiled-coil domain and Tyr177 in promoting CML, 4 P210 bcr/abl-derived mutants containing different bcr domains fused to abl were constructed. All 4 mutants, Delta(1-63) bcr/abl, (1-63) bcr/abl, Tyr177Phe bcr/abl, and (1-210) bcr/abl exhibited elevated tyrosine kinase activity and conferred factor-independent growth in cell lines. In contrast, differences in the transforming potential of the 4 mutants occurred in our mouse model, in which all mice receiving P210 bcr/abl-expressing bone marrow cells exclusively develop a myeloproliferative disease (MPD) resembling human CML. Of the 4 mutants assayed, only 1-210 bcr/abl, containing both the coiled-coil domain and Tyr177, induced MPD. Unlike full-length P210, this mutant also caused a simultaneous B-cell acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL). The other 3 mutants, (1-63) bcr/abl, Tyr177Phe bcr/abl, and Delta(1-63) bcr/abl, failed to induce an MPD but instead caused T-cell ALL. These results show that both the bcr coiled-coil domain and Tyr177 are required for MPD induction by bcr/abl and provide the basis for investigating downstream signaling pathways that lead to CML.


Latent class analysis was applied to the data to identify homogenous subtypes or classes of self-injurious thoughts and behaviour (SITB) based on indicators indexing suicide ideation, suicide gesture, suicide attempt, thoughts of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), and NSSI behaviour. Analyses were based on a sample of 1,809 healthy adults. Associations between the emergent latent classes and demographic, psychological, and clinical characteristics were assessed. Two clinically relevant subtypes were identified, in addition to a class who reported few SITBs. The classes were labelled: 'low SITBs' (25.8%), 'NSSI and ideation' (25%), and 'suicidal behaviour' (29.2%). Several unique differences between the latent classes and external measures emerged. For instance, those belonging to the 'NSSI and ideation' class compared with the 'suicidal behaviour' class reported lower levels of entrapment, burdensomeness, fearlessness about death, exposure to the attempted suicide or self-injury of family members and close friends, and higher levels of goal disengagement and acute agitation. SITBs are best explained by three homogenous subgroups that display quantitative and qualitative differences. Profiling the behavioural and cognitive components of suicidal and non-suicidal self-injury is potentially useful as a first step in developing tailored intervention and treatment programmes.


Three Operator Splitting (TOS) (Davis&Yin, 2017) can minimize the sum of multiple convex functions effectively when an efficient gradient oracle or proximal operator is available for each term. This requirement often fails in machine learning applications: (i) instead of full gradients only stochastic gradients may be available; and (ii) instead of proximal operators, using subgradients to handle complex penalty functions may be more efficient and realistic. Motivated by these concerns, we analyze three potentially valuable extensions of TOS. The first two permit using subgradients and stochastic gradients, and are shown to ensure a $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{t})$ convergence rate. The third extension AdapTOS endows TOS with adaptive step-sizes. For the important setting of optimizing a convex loss over the intersection of convex sets AdapTOS attains universal convergence rates, i.e., the rate adapts to the unknown smoothness degree of the objective. We compare our proposed methods with competing methods on various applications.


This study assessed the impact of teacher feedback on student achievement in learning three tennis skills (forehand, backhand, and the serve). It also described teacher feedback patterns in teaching beginning tennis. Subjects consisted of a professional tennis instructor and 40 undergraduate male and female students enrolled in two beginning tennis classes. Fifteen 30-min instructional sessions were videotaped and audiotaped within a 10-week period. Subjects were pretested and posttested on the three tennis skills. The tapes were coded for type and frequency of teacher feedback. The mean occurrence of teacher feedback directed to individual students was about 1 (M = 1.4, SD = .9) feedback statement each session. Feedback statements which were predominantly directed to a single student (96.5%) were typically terminal (89.4%). Prescriptive or corrective feedback (52.6%) occurred slightly more often than evaluative feedback (47.4%). Feedback was more frequently directed toward part of the movement (42.9%) than toward the outcome of the movement (29.5%) or the whole movement (27.6%). When feedback was directed toward part of the movement, 91.2% of the time it was directed toward a spatial characteristic of the movements involved in performing the skill. Comparison of pretest and posttest skill achievement scores showed significant improvements for all the three tests. The quantity of teacher feedback per se and skill achievement were not related. Indications are that knowledge of performance (KP)— the equivalent of teacher feedback in teacher behavior research— operates differently than knowledge of results (KR) in motor


The aromatic β-carboline norharmane was determined in workers, nymphs, and ergatoids of Reticulitermes speratus (Kolbe) (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae) by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Norharmane levels in workers, nymphs, and ergatoids collected in May (~4.3 ng/termite) were higher than those in November (~0.2 ng/termite). Fluorescence of norharmane was observed in histological sections in whole animals and in the fat body. Norharmane, at a final concentration of 1 mM, stimulated juvenile hormone epoxide hydrolase (JHEH) activity of enzyme extract from ergatoids, but inhibited JHEH activity at higher concentrations. The elevated JHEH activity stimulated by norharmane should accelerate juvenile hormone metabolism in R. speratus.


Three types of constant rate of strain (CRS) consolidation tests were conducted on samples of undisturbed Ariake clay, using a newly developed consolidometer, to investigate the anisotropic consolidation behavior of the clay. CRS tests conducted using vertically cut specimens (with respect to the in situ condition) tested with vertical (or end) drainage (with respect to test condition) were designated as CRS-V-V tests. Specimens cut vertically but with radial drainage were designated CRS-V-R, whereas those cut horizontally and tested with vertical drainage were designated CRS-H-V. The test results show that the ratio of the consolidation yield stress of a horizontally cut specimen (pch) to that of a vertically cut specimen (pcv) is in a range from 0.5 to 1.0. Both pcv and pch increased about 15 % with a tenfold increase in strain rate, but there was no clear difference in the degree of strain-rate dependency for pcv and pch. Values of the coefficient of consolidation obtained from CRS-H-V (chh) and CRS-V-R (chv) test are larger than those measured in CRS-V-V (cv) tests, and it has been identified that these differences arise mainly from the anisotropy of hydraulic conductivity (k). The ratio of k in the horizontal direction (kh) measured in a CRS-V-R test to that in the vertical direction (kv) from a CRS-V-V test is about 1.65, and the ratio of chv/cv is about 1.54. The value of kh from a CRS-H-V test is generally smaller than that from a CRS-V-R test.


The phosphorus-31 nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum of β-adenosine-3'-β-adenosine-5'-phosphoric acid in its aqueous solution (pH = 9.2) was studied. The signal consisted of eight peaks caused by the spin-spin coupling of the phosphorus nucleus with three protons, two on the 5' carbon, and one on the 3' carbon. The coupling constants were 3.4, 6.5, and 8.1 hertz; from these values the dihedral angles of the three P-O-C-H systems were estimated.


DOI: 10.7508/rmm.2015.03.008 Abstract Background: Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is one of the major agents for increasing number of serious hospital and community acquired infections. The aim of this study was to investigate the occurrence of the MRSA and mecA gene among nosocomial and environmental specimens in Kurdistan hospitals and determining the antibiotic resistance of the isolates. Materials and Methods: A total of 264 clinical and environmental Staphylococcus was isolated from Kurdistan medical University Hospitals, in February 2011 to June 2012 Iran, and their susceptibility patterns to different antibiotics were determined. Furthermore, agar screen method was used to determine oxacillin resistant isolates. Finally, using PCR, the oxacillin resistant isolates were tested for the presence of mecA gene. Results: In this study, from 88 (93.18%) Staphylococcus aureus isolates, 82 were found resistant to oxacillin using agar screen method and mecA gene was detected in 66 strains (75%). Our results showed that the agar screen method is more reliable in determination of MRSA strains compared to PCR. Conclusion: In this research the studied MRSA were found with high prevalence and mecA was widespread in S. aureus isolates in Sanandaj.


The aim of this thesis is to examine the experience of time of four professional occupational groups working in public sector organisations and the factors affecting this experience. The literature on time and work is examined to delineate the key parameters of research in this area. A broad organisation behaviour approach to the experience of time and work is developed in which individual, occupational, organisational and socio-political factors are inter-related. The experience of secondary school teachers, further education lecturers, general medical practitioners and hosoital consultants is then examined. Multiple methods of data collection are used: open-ended interviews, a questionnaire survey and the analysis of key documents relating to the institutional settings in which the four groups work. The research aims to develop our knowledge of working time by considering the dimensions of the experience of time at work, the contexts in wlhich this experience is generated and the constraints these contexts give rIse to. By developing our understanding of time as a key feature of work experience we also extend our knowledge of organisation behaviour in general. In conclusion a model of the factors relating the experience of time to the negotiation of time at work is presented.


Eutrophication has become the primary water quality issue for many urban landscape waters in the world. It is a focus in this paper which analyzes Enhanced Thematic Mapper images and quality observation data for 12 consecutive years in 20 parts of the urban landscape water in Xi9an City, China. A water quality model for urban landscape water based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) was established. Based on in situ monitoring data, the model is compared with water quality retrieving methods of multiple regression and back propagation neural network. Results show that the Genetic Algorithm-SVM (GA-SVM) method has better prediction accuracy than the inversion results of the neural network and the traditional statistical regression method. In short, GA-SVM provides a new method for remote sensing monitoring of urban water eutrophication and has more accurate predictions in inversion results [such as chlorophyll a (Chl-a)] in the Xi9an area. Additionally, remote sensing results highly agreed with in situ monitoring data, indicating that the technology is effective and less costly than in situ monitoring. The technology also can be used to evaluate large lake eutrophication.


This article investigates issues of modesty, sexuality, and womanhood in a community of young Jordanian women working in folkloric dance companies in twenty-first-century Amman. Using feminist performance ethnography, it contrasts the gendered codes in play in the hoshiyya — a Bedouin courtship dance — with how women dancers enact and revise such codes in everyday life. The article explores choreographies of gender through a careful reading of tensions between the moving bodies of men and the embodied practices of the woman soloist onstage. It also compares this model with the narratives and corporeal practices of the women dancers in daily life. I argue that the women rationalize their professional dancing and protect their reputations in a patriarchal context through self-disciplining practices and by disavowing their sexuality during what they understand as a temporary period of girlhood.


The article raises questions about the nature and legal nature of the legal categories "risk" and "safety", revealed their role in the system of legal phenomena. The author analyzes the role and importance of the definition "safety" in the conceptual device of civil law of Russia. Gives a detailed critical review of the current Russian civil legislation, application practices, legal literature on the specified problematic. Process of formation of the modern domestic concept of risk in civil law is considered. Existing theories of risk are analyzed; issues of risk and civil law relationship are touched in the article. Risk is considered as property of a subject of civil law which is reflected on the civil law regulation method. The author finds out continuity and updating elements, reveals laws of evolution of the theory of risk in the civil law, and defines ways of the decision of debatable questions. The risk theory allows by logic operations over concepts to transform the general principles to concrete forms of regulation of legal processes. In article the accessory of risk and safety to base categories of civil law also is proved. It has important theoretical value as defines character of practical activities on realization of legal regulation of real estate of the raised risk within the limits of society safety, and also life and health of citizens, including in the civil-law ways. Safety in modern conditions gets standard registration in the current legislation and it isn't as abstract-absolute category any more. Simultaneously safety starts to be considered as the socially-legal phenomenon having the dual nature. On the one hand, safety is the basic condition of maintenance of the vital interests of the person, and also national interests of the state and a society in various spheres (economic, political, social, etc.). On the other hand, safety is opposed in some cases to freedom as its maintenance is reached, including, and by means of restriction of the subjective rights. The dialectics of investigated concepts expressed in the categorial device of civil law becomes complicated if to consider it within the dialectics of social and cultural development of a society. It is area absolutely unexplored, but extremely perspective from the point of view of the legal theory. The theoretical base created thus is checked further by practice and forms the basis of practical offers and recommendations about perfection of mechanisms of civil-law regulation in a modern society.


FAMILIAL DEPRESSION and ADHD in TODDLERS WITH ASD 2 This study explored the relationship between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in toddlers and familial depression, specifically maternal depression. The data on toddlers in this study were collected from the Early Detection of Autism Study at the University of Connecticut. It was hypothesized that there would be a significant relationship between toddlers' ASD diagnoses and familial depression compared to families with non-ASD toddlers. More specifically, it was hypothesized that there would be a significant relationship between ASD diagnoses and maternal depression, due to the challenges and stressors that result from taking care of toddlers with ASD. This study's findings did not support the original hypotheses, suggesting that the incidence of depression, maternal or familial, may not be higher in the families of toddlers with ASD compared to families of non-ASD toddlers. However, further research is necessary to support this conclusion.


We developed a home-made Sample-Holder Unit used for 2D nano-positionning with millimeter traveling ranges. For each displacement axis, the system includes a long range traveling stage and a piezoelectric actuator for accurate positioning. Specific electronics is integrated according to metrological considerations, enhancing the repeatability performances. The aim of this work is to demonstrate that near-field microscopy at the scale of a chip is possible. We chose here to characterize highly integrated optical structures. For this purpose, the sample-holder is integrated into an Atomic Force Microscope in order to perform optical imaging. To demonstrate the overall performances, a millimeter scale optical images have been realized.


Mutation testing is a powerful, but resource intense technique for asserting software quality. This report investigates two claims about one of the mutation operators on procedural logic, the relation operator replacement (ROR). The constrained ROR mutant operator is a type of constrained mutation, which targets to lower the number of mutants as a "do smarter" approach, making mutation testing more suitable for industrial use. The findings in the report shows that the hypothesis on subsumption is rejected if mutants are to be detected on function return values. The second hypothesis stating that a test case can only detect a single top-level mutant in a subsumption graph is also rejected. The report presents a comprehensive overview on the domain of mutation testing, displays examples of the masking behaviour previously not described in the field of mutation testing, and discusses the importance of the granularity where the mutants should be detected under execution. The contribution is based on literature survey and experiment. The empirical findings as well as the implications are discussed in this master dissertation.


ABSTRACTWe here report on a study that examines the performance of a water based personal condensation particle counter (CPC) PUFP C100 (Enmont, LLC) when sampling a variety of different test aerosols. Three additional CPCs were included in the study, namely, the general purpose water based CPC model 3787 (TSI) as well as the more than 20 year old CPC model 3022 (TSI) and ultrafine CPC model 3025A (TSI), both based on butanol. The responses of these CPCs were compared to a reference ultrafine CPC model 3776 (TSI). Test aerosols included hydrophilic NaCl, moderately hydrophobic carbon and highly hydrophobic DEHS aerosols of various sizes and concentrations. The CPC PUFP C100 measured according to its specifications with high precision and accuracy as long as the particles were not highly hydrophobic, but failed to adequately measure the concentrations of highly hydrophobic DEHS aerosols. Its detection efficiency for very small particles, e.g., 5.4 nm, was decreased, which was expected based on its particle size detection limit. The TSI water CPC model 3787 showed a similar behavior for all aerosols, except that this CPC was able to accurately measure the concentration of 5.4 nm NaCl particles. The concentrations measured with the two old and unserviced butanol CPCs were highly correlated with the concentrations delivered by the reference CPC. Nevertheless, the concentrations measured with both old CPCs were clearly below the reference concentrations.


Human pressure could compromise the provision of ecosystem services if we do not implement strategies such as ecosystem stewardship to foster sustainable trajectories. Barriers to managing systems based on ecosystem stewardship principles are pervasive, including institutional constraints and uncertain system dynamics. However, solutions to help managers overcome these barriers are less common. How can we better integrate ecosystem stewardship into natural resource management practices? I draw on examples from the literature and two broadly applicable case studies from Alaska to suggest some generalizable principles that can help managers redirect how people use and view ecosystems. These include (1) accounting for both people and ecosystems in management actions; (2) considering historical and current system dynamics, but managing flexibly for the future; (3) identifying interactions between organizational, temporal, and spatial scales; (4) embracing multiple causes in addition to multiple objectives; and (5) acknowledging that there are no panaceas and that success will be incremental. I also identify next steps to rigorously evaluate the broad utility of these principles and quickly move principles from theory to application. The findings of this study suggest that natural resource managers are poised to overcome the barriers to implementing ecosystem stewardship and to develop innovative adaptations to social- ecological problems.


In this paper we show that the incompressible Euler equation on the Sobolev space $H^s(\R^n)$, $s > n/2+1$, can be expressed in Lagrangian coordinates as a geodesic equation on an infinite dimensional manifold. Moreover the Christoffel map describing the geodesic equation is real analytic. The dynamics in Lagrangian coordinates is described on the group of volume preserving diffeomorphisms, which is an analytic submanifold of the whole diffeomorphism group. Furthermore it is shown that a Sobolev class vector field integrates to a curve on the diffeomorphism group.


David Wessel's Slabs is being conserved as an important element of CNMAT's collection of electronic music and computer music instruments and controllers. This paper describes the strategies being developed to conserve the instrument and how we are reaching for the goals of both maintaining the symbolic value of the instrument as a prize-winning, highly-regarded example of the "com-posed instrument" paradigm and "use value" as an example students and scholars can interact with to develop their own composed instruments. Conservation required a sensitive reconfiguration and rehousing of this unique instrument that preserves key original components while rearranging them and protecting them from wear and damage.


We designed plasmonic lenses and analyzed their chromatic aberration using the finite element method (FEM) in frequency domain with perfectly matched layers (PML). Plasmonic lenses permit subwavelength focusing of light in the visible and in the near infrared. The focal distance of these devices depends on the wavelength operation due to the dispersive characteristics of the lens structures and the refractive index of their constituent materials. With a uniform incident wave normal to the lens surface, focusing of light by surface plasmon polariton (SPPs) through a plasmonic lens is obtained in the axial direction. The design of three plasmonic lenses in Silver (Ag), Gold (Au) and Copper (Cu) films at two central operation wavelengths of 650 nm and 810 nm, in both, cylindrical and rectangular geometries were considered and the chromatic aberration of the lenses were analyzed by monitoring the peak position of the electromagnetic (EM) field when the wavelength changes from 625 nm to 675 nm and from 785 nm to 835 nm..


A34 Introduction Overexpression of HER-2 oncogene is reported in more than 60% of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) breast cancer, including 30% estrogen receptor negative chemotherapy resistant high-grade tumors with metastatic phenotype. Recent studies show high correlation between MRI characteristics and lower ER score, higher grade, much higher CD68 count (inflammatory marker) and extensive comedo necrosis of DCIS. The inflammatory cytokine IL-8 is found to be overexpressed in most ER- breast cancers and is recently suggested as a marker of tumor invasion and metastasis. Curcumin (CUR) the active component of the spice turmeric, known for its immunomodulatory, antimutagenic and antitumorigenic properties and was found to inhibit cell proliferation and mitogenic signal transduction pathways in ER negative, HER-2 positive DCIS breast cancer model. Material and Methods Normal 184-B5 breast epithelial cells and transformed 184-B5/HER cells in log phase were exposed to 0, 5, 10 and 20 μM CUR for 24 and 48 hours and analyzed for dose response, cell viability, cell cycle distribution, gene expression and HER-2 signal transduction protein markers. Results 184-B5/HER cells exhibit hyper-proliferation, shorter population doubling time, higher saturation density, reduced rate of apoptosis, higher anchorage independent growth and tumorigenecity compared to the non-tumorigenic ER-, PR-, HER2-, EGFR+ and p53+ parental immortalized 184-B5 cells. Cell cycle analysis of 184-B5/HER cells exposed to 20μM CUR showed cytostatic arrest of growth, 85% inhibition of colony formation, decreased G0/G1: S+G2/M ratio and increased apoptosis. Microarray data showed 557 probes to be modulated in 20μM CUR (24 hrs) treated 185-B5/HER cells (117 upregulated, 380 downregulated). These include reduced expression of cell cycle regulatory genes such as cyclin A (-2.79), cyclin B2 (-3.89), cyclin D1 (-1.50), cdk2 (-1.69) and Cdc25c (-3.80). Decreased levels of Cyclin B2, cdk2 and Cdc25c cell cycle proteins in 184-B5/HER cells, reflect CUR induced cell cycle arrest in S and G2/M phases. Treatment with CUR decreased NFkB (-1.86) in 184-B5/HER cells suggesting modulation of downstream signaling pathways including the inflammatory cascade. We observed a 10 fold higher levels of interleukin-8 (IL-8) gene expression in 184-B5/HER cells compared to 184-B5 cells, while treatment with CUR dramatically reduced the IL-8 gene expression as revealed by both microarray and real-time PCR. Conclusion Treatment of breast epithelial 184-B5/HER cells with CUR show preventive efficacy in this ER negative DCIS model via cytostatic arrest in S and G2/M phases of the cell cycle, by downregulation of ERK pathway and induction of apoptosis, verified at both the gene and protein levels. Moreover, CUR down-regulates key regulatory proteins such as NFkB and IL-8 expression thus preventing the inflammatory cascade and possible progression of DCIS into invasive ductal carcinoma. Reduced expression of metastatic molecular marker IL-8 by CUR in 184-B5/HER cells suggests its preventive/therapeutic potential [Support: NIH-NCI CA122394]. Citation Information: Cancer Prev Res 2008;1(7 Suppl):A34.


Mangrove Sonneratia caseolaris is a potential host for endhopytic fungi that commonly produce strong dan unique antibiotic. The objective of the research was to compare the antibacterial activity of Penicillium notatum ATCC 28089 and endophytic fungus Penicillium sp. R1M isolated from Mangrove Sonneratia caseolaris. First step of the research was observation the growth curve of each isolate. Second step was isolation of their metabolites to be used in the antibacterial activity assay against Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 9144 and Escherichia coli ATCC 8739. The results showed that both isolates indicated different growth curves. Penicillium sp. R1M experienced shorter adaptation phase, than P. notatum ATCC 28089. The secondary metabolites of P. notatum ATCC 28089 was isolated on day 8, while those of Penicillium sp. R1M isolated on day 6. The result of antibacterial assay  confirmed  that the  extracts of mycelia Penicillium sp. R1M show inhibition diameter in the growth of S. aureus and E. coli  with 11.5 ± 0.6 mm and 10.6 ± 0.4, mm, respectively, while the medium extracts of P. notatum ATCC 28089 were 9.3 ± 0.9 mm and 7.4 ± 0.1 mm, respectively. The  inhibitory zone diameter of  medium extracts. Penicillium sp. R1M against S. aureus and  E. coli were correspondingly 7.5 ± 0.1 mm and 7.1 ± 0.8 mm,  while the medium  extracts of P. notatum ATCC 28089 were 9.3 ± 0.6 mm and 7.4 ± 0.4 mm, respectively. Mycelial extracts of  Penicillium sp. R1M showed better antibacterial activity than those of P. notatum ATCC 28089. On the other hand the medium extracts showed the opposite results.


This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 대한한의학원전학회지 2020년 2월 33권 1호 pISSN 1229-8328 eISSN 2713-850X J Korean Med Classics 2020:33(1) 135-147 https://doi.org/10.14369/jkmc.2020.33.1.135 JKMC Journal of Korean Medical Classics


Root fractures are defined as fractures involving dentine, cementum, and pulpal and supportive tissues. They comprise about 0.5–7% of all dental injuries. Horizontal root fractures are commonly observed in the maxillary anterior region and 75% of these fractures occur in the maxillary central incisors. Case report: This case report is about a 26-year-old male referred to the endodontic department of Zahedan dental school 3 days after motorcycle accident. Radiographic examination shows a horizontally root fracture of the right mandibular central incisor in the apical third. Initially, the coronal fragment was repositioned and this was radiographically confirmed. Then, the stabilization splint was applied and remained for 50 days. Two weeks splinting which radiographic examination showed the lesion adjacent to the fracture line, the two visit endodontic treatment of the coronal portion was started and the root canal was obturated with gutta percha points. Conclusion: One-year follow-up examination revealed the clinical and radiographic signs of healing with hard tissue repair of the fracture line.


A venerable tiger, old and toothless now, looks back over his life from cubhood and early days roaming wild in the Indian jungle. Trapped into a miserable circus career as 'Raja the magnificent', he is then sold into films (co-starring with a beefy Tarzan in a leopard skin) until, finding the human world too brutish and bewildering, he makes a dramatic bid for freedom. R.K. Narayan's story combines Hindu mysticism with ripe Malgudi comedy, viewing human absurdities through the eyes of a wild animal and revealing how, quite unexpectedly, Raja finds sweet companionship and peace.


A most readers of this journal know, in July 2011, the XXIII meeting of the International Arthurian Society—organized by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter—took place in Bristol, England. Over the course of a week, hundreds of participants presented papers, attended sessions, enjoyed excursions to Arthurian sites, and connected with scholars and colleagues from all over the world. At the suggestion of the editors of Arthurian Literature (Elizabeth Archibald and David Johnson) it was also decided that Arthuriana and Arthurian Literature should join forces and publish the best of the papers presented at the conference. This issue of Arthuriana marks the culmination of over a year of collaborative work on the part of the editors of the respective journals. This year, the annual Arthurian Literature will feature articles that originated as papers presented at the conference, and all four issues of the quarterly Arthuriana will do the same. In other words, for both publications the year 2013 will be 'the best of Bristol.' In 2014 we will return to our regular publication schedule, with several fine articles already 'in the chute.' This first of the four special issues of Arthuriana features articles that are concerned in some way with eco-criticism, the natural world, landscapes, and geography. 23.2 will focus on representations of Merlin, while 23.3 and 23.4 are loosely organized around themes of Grail-ing, Arthurian legends as children's literature, modern interpretations of the stories, and, appropriately, apocalypses and ends. I would like to thank Elizabeth Archibald and David Johnson for their hard work and good cheer as we have embarked on this endeavor together; this collaborative project has been a pleasure and a privilege from its inception, and I look forward to future instances in which these two journals will work in concert to continue to bring the latest in important Arthurian scholarship to all those who study and love the legend.


This paper is concerned with one of the three requirements of a sustainable transport system, namely the environmental dimension. It starts by presenting components and interactions of the transport and traffic systems using causal diagrams. Generic traffic problems are identified and their causes categorized. A classification of demand and supply-based policies and measures that can be used in designing environmentally sustainable transport strategies is depicted. Such strategies are targeted towards minimizing the generic traffic problems encountered in metropolitan cities, i.e., traffic congestion, accidents, environmental degradation and energy inefficiencies. In this paper, Travel Demand and Land Use Management are considered as two of the basic pillars for designing environmentally sustainable transport strategies. Criteria for comparing demand versus supply-based policies are suggested. These are applied to assess the benefits and limitations of each policy, hence assisting decision makers in the prioritization and choice of such policies.


The purpose of this research is to inform business people, especially managers and executives who are facing strategic decision making the benefits and risks of relying on intuition. Hence, they can have a clear mind about to what extend they can trust their intuitions. After reviewing briefly the history of the development of intuition concept and the main ideas of strategic decision making, we have conducted a thorough research about this topic from the following ten aspects: availability, timing, efficiency, flexibility, synthesis, accuracy or effectiveness, reliability, security, storage, and transferring.


This study was conducted as part of a larger investigation into the effect of management practices on selected sown cover crops and the effects thereof on grapevine performance. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of these cover crops on plant parasitic nematode populations under natural field conditions. The trial site was in an own-rooted Sultanina vineyard situated in the Lower Orange River of the Northern Cape Province. Three management practices were applied selectively to ten cover crop species, with two control treatments consisting of weeds. Nematodes were monitored for a period of four years. 'Saia' oats were indicated as being poor hosts to both root-knot and root-lesion nematodes, while 'Overberg' oats showed poor host status against ring nematodes. 'Midmar' ryegrass and 'Paraggio' medic were also poor hosts for root-knot nematodes, while grazing vetch appeared to be a good host for root-knot nematodes. The most notable result from this study was the relatively high numbers of all three nematodes on the vine row, as opposed to the inter-row where cover crops were established. This indicates that vines were much better hosts for these nematodes than the cover crops. It is recommended that if more definite trends are to be observed, Brassica species, which have direct toxic/repellant effects on nematodes, should be tested.


Current methods for predicting stress distribution on a cell surface due to optical trapping forces are based on a traditional ray optics scheme for fixed geometries. Cells are typically modeled as solid spheres as this facilitates optical force calculation. Under such applied forces however, real and non-rigid cells can deform, so assumptions inherent in traditional ray optics methods begin to break down. In this work, we implement a dynamic ray tracing technique to calculate the stress distribution on a deformable cell induced by optical trapping. Here, cells are modeled as three-dimensional elastic capsules with a discretized surface with associated hydrodynamic forces calculated using the Immersed Boundary Method. We use this approach to simulate the transient deformation of spherical, ellipsoidal and biconcave capsules due to external optical forces induced by a single diode bar optical trap for a range of optical powers.


The main aim of the study is to understand student attitudes towards different aspects of school using data from the late 1960s and 35 years later, and to analyze the impact both from teachers and students on classroom climate. Another important aim in order to accomplish this is to develop suitable instruments and methods. The starting point of the empirical work was a 40-item attitude questionnaire that was used in the Didactical Process Analysis (DPA) project conducted in Goteborg in the late... mer 1960s, which comprised 60 classrooms and 1600 grade 6 students. This attitude questionnaire was reanalyzed using two-level confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the reanalysis resulting in seven factors describing differences in student attitudes within classrooms, three factors describing attitude differences between classrooms. The original 40-item questionnaire was expanded with 31 new items concerning school environment, teaching and interaction between the students, and between the teacher and the students. This instrument was administered to 78 classes, with the participation of 1696 students and 78 teachers in Goteborg. The first objective was to compare the attitudes of students now with the DPA investigation 35 years ago using identical items. The analysis focused both on item-level data and on factor scores computed from the two-level CFA model. The results showed a general improvement in attitudes. A differentiated picture was seen on the within-class level with significant changes in peer relational factors but not in school factors. The present curriculum with its focus on interaction aspects of learning may have implemented changes in relational patterns and created a more positive student attitude. On between-class level all three factors had increased their levels of attitudes, but the variation among classes was wide. The second objective was to analyze differences between the points of view of students and their teachers, and to analyze which factors explained classroom differences in attitudes. Differences in teacher-student perspectives were seen on item level. The students' attitudes emphasized the importance of positive interaction with both teacher and peers. Teachers noted the level of work ambitions, stress and disturbance among students. The factors of most importance for classroom differences in attitudes concerning work atmosphere and social relations were a sensible management of deviancy, and creation of a safe and orderly environment.


The overarching focus of this research is to examine the role and effectiveness of formal network organizations in mitigating barriers to disaster relief. I address this larger focus by examining the impacts of one formal network organization, the Partnership for Quality Medical Donations (PQMD) on its twelve NGO members. Specifically, the study addressees the following questions: 1) How does PQMD function? 2) What effects has PQMD had on its NGO members' relationships with each other, especially in the context of disaster response efforts? The research design for this study uses a qualitative framework. The study includes a literature review, content analysis of PQMD's website, research from a previous study with the same organization, and new interviews with representatives from nine NGO members, as well as the executive director of PQMD. My findings indicate that PQMD has been able to successfully bring together 27 different organizations (private and nonprofit), and mitigate the barrier of lack of central authority and lack of trust, to discuss their concerns, learn from one another, learn about one other, and create relationships that lead to better communication and collaboration in humanitarian relief. Although PQMD is working on a much smaller scale, I argue that researchers can look at this formal network organization to better understand how to improve the coordination of humanitarian aid on a worldwide scale and can glean lessons from this group.


Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of an individual with diabetes on late adolescents, a period during which many behaviors and models of thought are formed and the awareness of health risks develop.
Methods: This study was carried out with 385 late adolescents randomly selected at the Ankara Baskent University Campus. Participants were given a questionnaire of 33 questions to determine their demographical characteristics; their habits related to diet and exercise; and their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours regarding diabetes mellitus together with the Health Anxiety Inventory-Short Form (HAI-SF).
Results: Participants were divided into two groups: relatives of DM patients and relatives of non-DM patients. Late adolescents with DM in their family showed significant differences in nutritional choices for healthy snack foods and were found to have a more accurate understanding of "what to expect when a person in the risk group for DM is fed to reduce the risk". There was no statistically significant difference in the data except these two areas.
Conclusion: The results of the present study found that the awareness of health risks of late adolescents with DM in their family is insufficient. Developing behavioral changes and raising awareness in late adolescents who are at risk of developing DM will be a protective measure against it.


AB: Pollen and dinoflagellate cyst assemblages from core GeoB9503-5 retrieved from the Senegal mud-belt are analyzed to reconstruct paleoenvironmental changes in western Sahel during the late Holocene. Our study emphasizes significant coeval changes in continental vegetation and oceanic conditions in Senegal area. Initial dry conditions were followed by a period of increased precipitation at ~ 2900 yr BP when the environment became enriched in woody plants and plants requiring wet conditions and the marine phytoplankton became dominated by dinocysts of river plume affinity. We interpret these observations as the result of enhanced Senegal River runoff and by inference, greater monsoonal humidity between ~ 2900 and 2500 yr BP which we refer to as "little humid phase". The environment slowly became drier again, as indicated by slight increase in desert elements and at ~ 2200 yr BP, a trend towards wetter conditions is evident from the marked increase in pollen and dinocyst fluxes as well as fresh water algae and plant cuticles, defining another humid phase in Senegal. These alternating arid/humid phases during the late Holocene reflect most probably the weakening/strengthening of the African monsoon, potentially driven by the latitudinal migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and its associated tropical rainbelt.


The classical Hall effect presents a surprisingly unusual and challenging problem in electrostatics, with boundary conditions that are not of Dirichlet, Neumann, or of mixed Dirichlet and Neumann type. These unusual boundary conditions create several difficulties not normally encountered in standard problems, and ultimately lead to expansion of the electric potential in a nonorthogonal basis set. We derive the boundary conditions for the potential in a rectangular geometry, construct a solution for the potential, and discuss the relation between this problem and problems of the standard mixed type. We also address a commonly encountered misconception about the current distribution.


We describe intrinsic behavior due to the high ordering of nanocrystals at the mesoscopic scale. The first example shows well-defined columns in the formation of cobalt nanocrystals when an applied magnetic field is applied during the evaporation process. Collective breathing properties between nanocrystals are demonstrated. In both cases, these features are observed when the nanocrystals are highly ordered in fcc supra-crystals.


This study explored the relationship between Korean-speaking English learners' L1 writing ability, their general English proficiency, and their L2 writing performance. It further investigated whether the relationship among these variables would remain the same depending on the difficulty of the English writing task. One hundred nine Korean learners of English wrote one argumentative essay in Korean and two argumentative essays in English, one on a more difficult topic and the other on an easier topic. The participants' general English proficiency was measured by their scores on a standardized test. In the analysis using Structural Equation Model (SEM), the present study showed that in general, Korean students' English writing performance was significantly influenced by their L1 writing ability and by their general English proficiency. When the models were tested separately by English topic, the influences of general English proficiency were weaker for a more difficult topic than for an easier one, while the effect of L1 writing on L2 writing stayed the same regardless of the topic difficulty.


The "Queen of Spades and Other Stories" is a collection of short fiction showcasing Alexander Pushkin's application of Romantic sensibilities to uncompromising studies of human frailty. This "Penguin Classics" edition is translated with an introduction by Rosemary Edwards. "The Queen of Spades", one of Pushkin's most popular and chilling short stories, tells of an inveterate card player who develops a dangerous obsession with the secret of an old lady's luck, which he believes will bring him the wealth he craves. "The Negro of Peter the Great", a story based on the life Pushkin's own great-grandfather, is a vivid depiction - and criticism - of both French and Russian society, while "Dubrovsky" is the Byronic tale of a dispossessed young officer. "The Captain's Daughter" tells of a young man sent to military service - based on the actual events of the rebellion against Catherine II, it demonstrates Pushkin's unparalleled skill at blending fiction and history. Together these four stories display the versatility and innovation that earned Pushkin his reputation as a master of prose and established him as the towering figure in Russian literature. Rosemary Edmonds' translation is accompanied by an introduction examining Pushkin's simplicity of style and the powerful influence he exerted on his country's literature. Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) was born in Moscow in 1799. Leaving school in 1817, he spent three years in St Petersburg working in the Foreign Office and writing erotic verse. His flirtations with pre-Decembrist movements and his revolutionary verses lead to his exile in 1820. After a stay in the Caucasus and Crimea he was sent to Bessarabia, where he began to write more seriously, beginning Eugene Onegin and Tsygany. In 1831 he retired to a family estate, married, and his literary output slackened. He was mortally wounded in a duel and died in January 1837. If you enjoyed "The Queen of Spades", you might like Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot", also available in "Penguin Classics".


There is a wide consensus that an object explicitly embodies an abstraction, but the exact meaning of this statement is not necessarily well understood. This paper argues that the abstraction embodied by an object (or a component) implementation is nothing else than its specification. This implies that abstrac-tion does not appear automatically, it must be carefully constructed and maintained. The paper goes on to show, with the support of an example, that defining contracts for an objects operations does not nec-essarily result in a complete specification for this object (for example, specification invariants are a dif-ferent concept from invariants associated to operation contracts). Finally, the paper shows via an example the difference between object specifications and interface specifications.


It is reported how the N-H-Cl hydrogen bonding in anilinium chloride and trichlorostannate (II) derivatives is affected by methyl and methoxy substitutions in the phenyl ring of an aniline group. Such hydrogen bonding has been confirmed by close N-Cl contacts in an X-ray structure determination on 2-methylanilinium trichlorostannate (II). Crystals are orthorhombic: space group P2121; a = 0.7290(3) nm, b = 1.9096(7) nm, c = 0.8233(4) nm, = β = = 90°; V = 1.1461(8) nm3, Z = 4. The degree of hydrogen bonding manifests itself in changes in the core electron binding energies of the N and Cl atoms as observed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and also by the characteristic shift in the N-H stretching frequency measured by diffuse reflectance infrared spectroscopy. Correlations are observed between changes in the anilinium v(N-H) force constants and changes in the corresponding N(1s) and Cl(2p) binding energies. The varying degrees of hydrogen bonding depend on the positions and types of substituents on the aniline aromatic ring and correlate with their dissociation constants, pKa: but, theoretical analysis of one of the methylaniline hydrochlorides shows that the position of the H atom in the hydrogen bond, N H Cl, is a significantly stronger influence on the fractional charge on nitrogen, suggesting that overall crystal structure may be the determining factor on N charge.


ABSTRACT This paper examines how transgender and gender non-conforming youth are represented and shaped as specific subjects vis-à-vis the cisgendered problematics of the washroom space in schools. In the first part of the paper, I undertake a critical analysis of one policy-informing text on the implementation of the gender neutral washroom in schools to consider how the transgender and gender non-conforming student is constituted through specific discourses of accommodation, submission and protection that delimit their recognisability and force a potential risk of misrecognition. I also draw upon my own empirical research [Ingrey, Jennifer C. 2014. "The Public School Washroom as Heterotopia: Gendered Spatiality and Subjectification." PhD diss., University of Western Ontario] to prioritize transgender and genderqueer voices and provide an analysis of the practice of recognition. The analysis is grounded in [Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Translated and edited by Colin Gordon. New York, NY: Pantheon Books; Foucault, Michel. 2000. "Afterword: The Subject and Power." In Michel Foucault: Power, edited by James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow, 326–348. New York, NY: The New Press] the analytics of subjectivation and pastoral power, [Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York, NY: Routledge] the politics of recognition of the self, [Juang's, Richard M. 2006. "Transgendering the Politics of Recognition." In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker, and Stephen Whittle, 706–719. New York, NY: Routledge] transgendering of the politics of recognition, alongside [Bacchi's, Carol. 2009. Analysing Policy: What's the Problem Represented to Be? Pearson: Frenchs Forest, NSW] critical approach to policy analysis.


Residents of wards 12 and 13 in Mberengwa depend on agriculture as a source of livelihood. They have since developed their own indigenous weather forecasting systems which they have been using in conjunction with meteorological weather forecasts in the planning and execution of their agricultural activities. These systems are used singularly or are complimented with the conventional meteorological forecast from the Meteorological Services Department. The main objective of this research was to identify the abiotic weather forecasting indicators as well as to acquire information on how they are used. Questionnaires, focus group discussions and interviews with key informants were used to collect the data. Key informants were those whose time of residence in the wards was more than 50 years. Investigations revealed that the residents rely mostly on environmental indicators for planning agricultural activities. Results showed that of the two categories of indigenous abiotic weather forecasting indicators, weather forecasts derived from weather indicators were the mostly used followed by forecasts derived from celestial indicators. There were however differences on the interpretations of the behavioural signs or indicators which were used in the production of the forecasts from these abiotic factors.The study recommends that further research should be carried out on the application and on the statistical evaluation of the precision of the indigenous forecasts. Attempts should also be made to document the abiotic weather indicators and the behavioural signs from which these forecasts are derived. The establishment of an effective indigenous weather forecasting system as part of a decision support system would go a long way in improving food security for this area.


Integrins, which are central to cell adhesion, are cell-surface molecules comprising a and b transmembrane subunits. Their extracellular domains bind to external ligands containing the Arg-Gly-Asp tripeptide motif, and this results in the canonical "outside-in" signaling common to many cell-surface receptors: Internal signals transmitted to their intracellular domains alter the ligand-binding competency of the external regions. Xiong et al. present the structure of the complex between the extracellular portions of the integrin aV-b3 and a cyclic peptide. The contacts made by the Arg-Gly-Asp residues lead to conformational changes in the relative orientations of the a and b subunits. J. P. Xiong, T. Stehle, R. Zhang, A. Joachimiak, M. Frech, S. L. Goodman, M. A. Arnaout, Crystal structure of the extracellular segment of integrin V3 in complex with an Arg-Gly-Asp ligand. Science 296, 151-155 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Globally, liver cancer is the sixth most common cause of cancer mortality, with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) being the most common type of primary liver cancer. Emerging evidence states that diet is recognised as a potential lifestyle-related risk factor for the development of HCC. The aim of this systematic review is to determine whether there is an association between diet and the development of HCC. Using the PRISMA guidelines, three databases (MEDLINE Complete, CINAHL and Embase) were systematically searched, and studies published until July 2020 were included. Thirty observational studies were selected. The protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42019135240). Higher adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern, Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010, the Urban Prudent Dietary Pattern, the Traditional Cantonese Dietary Pattern, intake of vegetables, wholegrains, fish, poultry, coffee, macronutrients such as monounsaturated fats and micronutrients such as vitamin E, vitamin B9, β-carotene, manganese and potassium were associated with a reduced risk of HCC. The results suggest a potential role of diet in the development of HCC. Further quantitative research needs to be undertaken within a range of populations to investigate diet and the relationship with HCC risk.


In 2002, surveys were sent to heads of agricultural communications offices at land-grant universities (LGUs) and to journalism placement officers at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Research questions focused on the hiring practices at the LGUs and the placement activities at the HBCUs. Although the LGU offices professed a desire for a diverse workforce, respondents indicated that about 88 percent of their employees and 65 percent of their student workers were Caucasian. Three quarters said they posted job notices on their university's personnel lists and in their local newspapers. Only nine of 40 said they sent notices to journalism schools at 1890 (historically black) LGUs, and only seven sent them to journalism schools at HBCUs. Thirty-five respondents said they used interns, although 30 of those only hired students at their respective universities. Nine of 12 HBCU placement officers said they had never seen a job or internship notice from a LGU. They preferred receiving job or internship notices by surface mail or email. Two thirds of the internships held by their students were unpaid. Although most internships were near campus, respondents said students often seek summer internships near their homes. For LGU communications offices to increase the number of minorities on staff, these offices need to send notices for jobs and internships (especially for summer) directly to minority-serving institutions. Agricultural communications offices at LGUs and minority-serving institutions should work together to develop a system for increasing the number of minority applicants in the LGU pipeline. This professional development is available in Journal of Applied Communications: https://newprairiepress.org/jac/


This article describes the implementation and evaluation of a program to prepare HIV Nurse Practitioners in Zambia. Thirty nurses from all nine Zambian provinces participated in this program. Data on a variety of indicators were collected at baseline and throughout the one-year program including student and supervisor assessments, student performance on pre- and post-tests, clinical and case study assessments, documentation of care in patients' health records, and their performance on final oral and written examinations. Findings indicated that the students were able to achieve the identified competencies and that their supervisors perceived that they would be able to implement their expanded skills to improve care for patients with HIV and AIDS in Zambia. Lessons learned from this initial pilot project will be used to expand the program in order to ensure successful task-shifting to address the critical shortage of health workers in Zambia in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.


A detailed study of alternative modulation formats appropriate for 10-Gb/s wavelength-division-multiplexing metropolitan area networks is performed to evaluate their tolerance to linear impairments such as optical-signal-to-noise-ratio degradation, dispersion, filter concatenation, interband/intraband crosstalk, as well as their interplay. Point-to-point links and optical add-drop multiplexer chain and ring architectures are investigated, and optimum design parameters are obtained. Through extensive sets of simulation results, it is shown that some of these formats are very tolerant to linear impairments when compared with conventional nonreturn to zero.


There is much confusion about what shadow banking is. Some equate it with securitization, others with non-traditional bank activities, and yet others with non-bank lending. Regardless, most think of shadow banking as activities that can create systemic risk. This paper proposes to describe shadow banking as "all financial activities, except traditional banking, which rely on a private or public backstop to operate". Backstops can come in the form of franchise value of a bank or insurance company, or in the form of a government guarantee. Reliance on backstops is in our view a crucial feature of shadow banking, which distinguishes it from the "usual" intermediated capital market activities, such as custodians, hedge funds, leasing companies, etc. JEL Classification Numbers: G21, G23, G28


This paper investigates a transmission scheme that is suitable for short-range multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. Since the distance between two array antennas that face each other is comparable with the size of the array antenna aperture in short-range MIMO, the propagation characteristics are greatly different from those in conventional MIMO. Unlike conventional MIMO, the optimal element spacing, which maximizes channel capacity, exists in short-range MIMO. Moreover, the channel capacity with optimal antenna spacing exceeds the ergodic capacity of independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) channels since optimal eigenvalue distribution, which can maximize channel capacity, is obtained in the short-range MIMO. In this paper, we focus on the actual transmission methods, because complex transmission schemes such as eigenmode transmission or maximum-likelihood detection are required to obtain ideal channel capacity. We clarify that the channel capacity obtained by zero forcing (ZF) at the receiver without beamforming at the transmitter is almost the same as that using eigenmode transmission when considering the optimal element spacing. The effectiveness of short-range MIMO communication is also clarified using a 4 × 4 MIMO testbed with actual signals based on the IEEE 802.11n standard. Simulated and measured results show that optimal element spacing is a key parameter in the short-range MIMO communication. We found that designing antenna arrays with optimal element spacing is a very effective approach to achieving a simple hardware configuration.


Reverse Osmosis Water Treatment Plants (RO-WTPs) create potable water and a briny concentrate that must be disposed; often it is discharged into nearby surface waters. Currently, there is no published research to examine effects of this discharge on the ambient environment or on resident and transient biota. One established RO-WTP discharge location was used as a model and compared with a control location within the same embayment and the locations of two RO-WTPs pre-construction. These two plants may discharge up to eight times more concentrate into the estuary. A one-year study used acoustic Doppler current profilers; Hydrolab sondes; a YSI meter; and biological and water collections to profile each location. Water movements at all locations were correlated with wind velocity measured at the USCG-EC weather station and the tide cycle at Mann's Harbor marina. Average velocity was lowest at the established RO-WTP and highest at the two proposed locations in fall 2005. Salinity varied significantly ( p < 0.001) between the established RO-WTP and one of the proposed locations. From the four locations, we collected 21 species of macroinvertebrates. Location and date were not found to be significant. The effect of briny discharge on two species of macroinvertebrates dissipated beyond 5 m of the diffuser. The macrozooplankton (13 taxa) showed significant differences by date but not location while for the nekton (35 species) showed significant temporal differences (Spearman's Rho = 0.669) and moderate differences by location (Spearman's Rho = 0.237). There was no evidence that the RO-WTP has a significant impact on either the macrozooplankton or nekton collected. Overall, the biotic communities sampled from the four locations are typical for oligohaline to mesohaline estuaries. There were no significant differences in diversity for any biota collected. It is recommended that 1) data collection related to the discharge continue; 2) measurable indicators of biotic integrity from oligohaline to mesohaline environments be developed; and 3) post-construction samples at the two proposed RO-WTPs continue so as to investigate the effects of increased volume of brine on the local surface water as well as the resident and transient biota.


Since urban water supply is not yet available for every inhabitant in Hanoi City, numerous residents look for alternative sources such as groundwater and rainwater to compensate the supply shortage. However, in parts of Hanoi, it was reported that groundwater is polluted by various contaminants including arsenic (As) and ammonia (NH 4 -N). Therefore, numerous types of point-of-use (POU) water treatment systems have been used in households, but treatment efficiency has not been well documented. Hence, this study aims to investigate the proliferation and efficiency of household treatment systems. One hundred and seventy households from three communes were selected for a survey of questionnaires and face-to-face interviews. Twenty-four household water treatment systems from six communes were monitored for water sample collection and analysis. The results indicate that sand filter (SF), ceramic filter (CF), microfiltration (MF), anion exchange (AX) and reverse osmosis (RO) were popular POU water treatment systems, but removal efficiency varied among different treatment processes. Groundwater quality shows an average As concentration of 71 μg/L (max. 305 μg/L) and 81% of these samples had As concentration higher than the World Health Organization guideline value of 10 μg/L. An integration of SF and RO can guarantee water with As concentration below 10 μg/L, whereas AX, MF and CF did not remove As at all.


Advanced materials manufacturing methods require clean, non-polluting, high speed and precise processes, and should result in highly reliable final products. However, traditionally, many functional materials are synthesized by slow reaction techniques that are both energy and time consuming. In such cases there is strong demand for more appropriate materials processing methods that could offer increased rapid reaction rates and energy efficiencies, and be environmentally safe. Electric discharge assisted mechanical milling (EDAMM) is a new and exciting materials processing technique which combines the attributes of conventional mechanical and mechanochemical milling with the several additional processing effects which can be generated by the simultaneous application of electric discharges. It is shown that EDAMM can be applied to synthesize a range of functional materials in a matter of minutes, rather than the hours or days required using traditional techniques. This presentation provides an overview of recent developments in the EDAMM method and its application to rapid materials processing, and the synthesis of certain functional materials. In this report, we demonstrate the versatility of EDAMM by; (i) synthesis of hard materials, (ii) synthesis of functional oxides used in electronic, magnetic and optical applications, (iii) rapid reduction reactions including extraction of metals from oxides and sulfides and (iv) synthesis of fine metallic and nonmetallic powders and (v) formation of nano- fragments, including carbon nanoribbons and iron oxide nanorods.


Global compilations indicate that the geochemistry of arc magmatism is sensitive to Moho depth. Magmatic products are prevalent throughout the history of Cordilleran orogenesis and can be employed to constrain the timing of changes in crustal thickness as well as the magnitude of those changes. We investigate temporal variations in crustal thickness in the United States Cordillera using Sr/Y from intermediate continental arc magmas. Our results suggest that crustal thickening began during the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous and culminated with 55–65-km-thick crust at 85–95 Ma. Crustal thicknesses remained elevated until the mid-Eocene to Oligocene, after which time crustal thicknesses decreased to 30–40 km in the Miocene. The results are consistent with independent geologic constraints and suggest that Sr/Y is a viable method for reconstructing crustal thickness through time in convergent orogenic systems.


Effective decision making and business intelligence is highly depended on the quality of data and information available. Hence, data and information of poor quality can lead to poor decision making and is causing a variety of risks in every organization. Recent publications in the IS area have shown the link between information quality and risk from both theoretical and practical perspectives. This paper extends this work by providing a mathematical model based on extensive empirical data to model information risk. Moreover, we provide a practical example how the model can be operationalized to calculate the total risk of an information product based on our case study data. It is an important step towards a comprehensive business impact assessment of information quality, which would allow to build more sensible business cases for information quality improvements for managers.


There are two sectors of banks operating in Indonesia, namely Sharia banks and conventional banks. Improving performance is important in maintaining public confidence in the bank. Efficiency is one of the parameters to measure the performance of Sharia banks. This study measures the comparative level of technical efficiency of Sharia commercial banks and conventional banks by Stochastic Frontier Analysis method during 2011–2015 period by using 10 samples of Sharia commercial banks and conventional banks. Input variables in this study are total deposits, operational costs, and other operational costs. Total financing is an output variable. The results of this study show that total deposits and operational costs have a positive and significant impact on total financing in Sharia and conventional banks. The average score of the technical efficiency of Sharia commercial banks during the period observed is 0.84 and conventional banks is 0.85.


We propose a methodology for a systematic design of grating couplers for efficient excitation of surface plasmons at metal–dielectric interfaces. The methodology is based on a two-dimensional topology optimization formulation based on the H-polarized scalar Helmholtz equation and finite-element method simulations. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated by optimized designs for input and output grating couplers for an Ag-SiO2 interface. The results indicate that slanted grove gratings may raise the coupling efficiency above 68% where the highest previously reported value was 50%.


The home is a node situated at the intersection to complex systems of value, exchange and interaction. These include a multitude of policy and institutional interventions that may be fiscal, social, infrastructure related or environmental in nature, as well as the legal and financial systems that support housing provision. As users we are being asked increasingly to act as 'prosumers', entering into reciprocal relations of resource integration and value creation.
The home is also not just about shelter, it's function as a commodity extends beyond its original use value. It is a cornerstone of asset based welfare, where "individuals are expected to accept greater responsibility for their own welfare needs by investing in financial products and property assets that appreciate over time."1 It is expected that the home will mitigate effects of networks of capital flow on individual households. The affordability of homes poses a barrier to this vision, as the high value of and rising costs of living means people struggle to meet these costs.It is difficult to imagine that trends in asset based welfare, facilitated by the commodification of housing policy and finance, are reversible or even viable.
If the role of the home in asset based welfare is considered from a design perspective, the home is another interface, or 'tap', from which to draw welfare goods. This tap, however, does not rely solely on the government as its source but rather on a range of complex arrangements of institutions and services. Delivery through this tap involves more risk, uncertainty and complexity, as governments' ability for delivery is subject to other agents and wider economic forces. If the view of the home as an interface is broadened, it could involve designing it as a platform where a range of services combine to support asset realisation, governments' ability to deliver welfare goods and enhance the ability of asset holders, to utilise them as a productive force. This broadening of access, can in part, be used to ease risks associated with the complexity involved in delivery of welfare goods. New development and ownership models, can in turn democratise this access to asset accumulation by broadening its range and form.


As a result of the progress of perinatal medicine, more children with very low birth weight (< 1000 g) are born and manage to survive. These premature babies, called ELBW (extremely low birth weight), represent a special category of patients, admitted in the Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) and their treatment and care represent a real challenge for the medical practitioners. Because of the global immaturity and respiratory and hemodynamic instability, this category of premature babies require admission in level III medical units, where special protocols of care are applied. A comprehensive management of these cases entails a thorough history of pregnancy, a good collaboration between pediatrician and obstetrician, a well-trained team that should provide resuscitation at birth if needed and ensure adequate conditions for the transition to extra-uterine life (to minimize heat loss, minimal handling and avoiding hyperoxia). The next step is represented by a strategy of care including short-term and minimally invasive ventilation, cardiovascular support and an adequate nutrition according to gestational age and birth weight. We tried to summarize in this article some theoretical and practical information regarding the nutrition of the ELBW.


A previous study (Deutsch, 1991) demonstrated a striking difference in perception of the tritone paradox between subjects who had grown up in two different geographical regions. Specifically, a group of subjects who had grown up in California were compared with a group who had grown up in the South of England. When the Californian group tended to hear the pattern as ascending, the English group tended to hear it as descending, and vice versa. This raises the question of whether regional differences also exist within the United States in the way this pattern is perceived. The present study examined the percepts of subjects who had grown up in Mahoning and/or Trumbull counties in Ohio. Two groups were compared: those whose parents had also grown up in this area and those for whom this was not the case. A highly significant difference between these two groups of subjects was obtained, with those in the latter group producing a distribution of percepts similar to that found among Californians and those in the former group producing a different distribution. From this and other analyses of the data, it is concluded that regional differences in perception of the tritone paradox do indeed exist within the United States and that there is in addition an effect of familial background.