INTRODUCTION The past decade has seen considerable attention focused on competitiveness of U.S. firms in foreign markets. A wide body of literature on causes and consequences of global competitiveness has suggested a number of possible factors contributing to the diminished competitiveness of U.S. firms. Among others, studies by Baumol (1986), Jorgenson (1984), Plant and Welch (1984), Haveman and Wolfe (1984), Bishop (1989), and Kendrick (1980) have linked the U.S. education system to economic measures. As the discussion below shows, most of these studies have focused on secondary school systems. The role of scientists and engineers trained through the higher education system in enhancing the competitiveness of an economy has not been closely examined. These studies have assumed that productivity growth is the critical factor in competitiveness and therefore studied relationships of various factors to productivity growth. This study shows the impact of education on selected measures of competition in the high technology sector of an economy. As the U.S. economy increasingly moves towards a knowledge-based economy, this sector will play an increasingly important role in earning a high standard of living in the future. High technology industries provide the high value-added goods and services needed to ensure high wages which are necessary if the standard of living in the United States is to be maintained at a level competitive with other industrial countries. REVIEW OF EARLIER STUDIES In one of the early studies cited above, Baumol (1986) attributes the decline in the relative productivity growth rate in the U.S. to the phenomenon of convergence of productivity levels of various countries, concluding that the U.S. does not have a significant competitive problem. He suggests that though extraordinary investments or innovations in a country may be able to help a country sustain a higher productivity growth rate over a short run, the long run convergence in growth is inevitable due to the ability of other countries to imitate those innovations rather quickly. However, he observed no sign of convergence among the less developed countries and notes that "part of the explanation may well be ielated to product mix and education" (p. 1080). Although he points toward tle role of education when analyzing the phenomenon of declining productivity rates in relation to the third world countries, no formal analysis is included in the study. Jorgenson (1984) clearly demonstrated that education has had an impact on U.S. productivity growth. In his study on the contribution of education to the economic growth of the U.S. from 1948 to 1973, approximately 11 percent of the economic growth during this period could be attributed to education. Plant and Welch (1984) also undertook a similar study and found a similar relationship. Jorgenson used a growth-accounting model to measure increases in productivity caused by education in terms of added earnings to individuals who received the education. His methodology treated labor with different education as inputs with different marginal productivity. Plant and Welch argued that inputs (labor and capital) used in the production of education could also be used to produce other goods and services. This opportunity cost to the economy in terms of the foregone goods and services is not accounted for in the growth-accounting moded. Therefore they used an alternative approach utilizing education as an intermediate factor in a surplus-accounting model, concluding that the contribution of education to the economic growth is significant, although their estimate of the contribution is smaller than that calculated by Jorgenson. In a study of the effects of education on health, child care, and other nonmarket activities (which are also important elements of the standard of living), Haveman and Wolfe (1984) concluded that returns to education are not fully reflected in wage differentials. …


The idea that the predominant way of engaging with architecture is through vision is not uncommon but also not always the most appropriate given that buildings are also experienced through other senses such as touch. This consequence that emphasises visual aesthetics in order to appreciate and understand architecture probably has much to do with the assumed but rather vaguely defined role of the architect as designer in the practice of architectural design. A resulting misapprehension is that architects designing for visual appreciation think that they are actually designing physical space for embodied tactile engagement.

This prioritisation of vision in the way architects think about and approach design is questioned through the design project of the Tactile Window in which the position of the architect is redefined through inhabiting the roles of archivist, archaeologist and author during the design process.

A 16th century portrait of Queen Elizabeth I known as the Ditchley portrait, currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery is used as the source from which the design of the Tactile Window is derived from and to which it refers back to. Questioning the validity of vision as the sole means of engaging with the work, information about the portrait and working methods gathered from the three roles mentioned above are drawn on and applied to the making of this Tactile Window that becomes an alternative Ditchley portrait. Through exploring the hidden historical and current narratives of and in the existing portrait, the presence of the portrait is alluded to on an alternative physical site. Key to this are the working methods of an invented archival system of design reasoning, the unearthing of archaeological texts and assuming of authorship within the individual frameworks of the roles of archivist, archaeologist and author.

The role of architect as archaeologist takes onboard the unearthing of associated drawings and writings as well as the methods of organising and applying the recovered information to the system set up by the architect as archivist. Through the careful process of archiving and analysing this information, a new site that is located within both the physical and historical contexts of interest is discovered. The architect as author then draws upon the elements in this archival system to construct the alternative Ditchley portrait in the new site of the Echoing Cedar.

The Tactile Window is a reading of the Ditchley portrait in which information about and in the painting is transformed into a design proposal for an inhabited structure. The intended method of interaction with this alternative portrait is not merely restricted to vision but relies on engagement with the other senses. This experience is further enhanced by the interplay with certain site conditions such as wind and rain in order to allude to specific aspects of the Ditchley portrait that are not visually apparent in the existing work.


The parish, the lowest level of hierarchy in the medieval church, was the shared responsibility of the laity and the clergy. Most Christians were baptized, went to confession, were married, and were buried in the parish church or churchyard; in addition, business, legal settlements, sociability, and entertainment brought people to the church, uniting secular and sacred concerns. In The People of the Parish, Katherine L. French contends that late medieval religion was participatory and flexible, promoting different kinds of spiritual and material involvement. The rich parish records of the small diocese of Bath and Wells include wills, court records, and detailed accounts by lay churchwardens of everyday parish activities. They reveal the differences between parishes within a single diocese that cannot be attributed to regional variation. By using these records show to the range and diversity of late medieval parish life, and a Christianity vibrant enough to accommodate differences in status, wealth, gender, and local priorities, French refines our understanding of lay attitudes toward Christianity in the two centuries before the Reformation.


Loss-of-function mutations in parkin are the major cause of early-onset familial Parkinson's disease. To investigate the pathogenic mechanism by which loss of parkin function causes Parkinson's disease, we generated a mouse model bearing a germline disruption in parkin. Parkin–/– mice are viable and exhibit grossly normal brain morphology. Quantitative in vivo microdialysis revealed an increase in extracellular dopamine concentration in the striatum of parkin–/– mice. Intracellular recordings of medium-sized striatal spiny neurons showed that greater currents are required to induce synaptic responses, suggesting a reduction in synaptic excitability in the absence of parkin. Furthermore, parkin–/– mice exhibit deficits in behavioral paradigms sensitive to dysfunction of the nigrostriatal pathway. The number of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra of parkin–/– mice, however, is normal up to the age of 24 months, in contrast to the substantial loss of nigral neurons characteristic of Parkinson's disease. Steady-state levels of CDCrel-1, synphilin-1, and α-synuclein, which were identified previously as substrates of the E3 ubiquitin ligase activity of parkin, are unaltered in parkin–/– brains. Together these findings provide the first evidence for a novel role of parkin in dopamine regulation and nigrostriatal function, and a non-essential role of parkin in the survival of nigral neurons in mice.


The lasing spectra and thresholds of a selectively pumped photonic molecule composed of two microdisks is investigated using effective index approximation and full-wave 2-D electromagnetic equations. The lasing eigenvalue problem formulation is used to find modal frequencies and threshold values of material gain. The influence of the optical coupling between active and passive microdisks on the lasing eigenvalues and directionalities of emission is studied. It is shown that for strong coupling the effect of making one of the resonators passive leads to the doubling of the threshold.


This study investigates the type of reading strategies used by Engineering students at Palestine polytechnic University. It also explores the differences between students of high proficiency and those of low proficiency in terms of the type of strategies used as well as the correlation between these types of strategies and the students' reading ability. The participants are 100 sophomore engineering students who are enrolled in their second English course at the university. The data were collected by using a self reported questionnaire and reading comprehension passages. Results show that the most frequent types of strategies used by all students are the global strategies followed by problem solving ones and finally the support ones. They also reveal a significant correlation between the global strategies used and the students' reading comprehension ability. Furthermore, the study shows differences between low-proficient readers and high proficient ones in terms of the frequency and type of strategies used.


The growing deployment and advanced development of high-speed train systems calls for provisioning of broadband Internet services, which cannot be readily provided by the existing radio frequency technology. Thus, an alternative technology, namely, free space optics (FSO), has been proposed to overcome the bandwidth bottleneck problem. However, as each FSO base station (BS) only covers a short length along the track, a large number of BSs are required to realize the seamless coverage, thus incurring high capital expenditures to the railway operator as well as frequent handover processes, which may degrade the system performance. In order to solve this problem, we propose a dual transceivers scheme in a ground-to-train communications system. Since two transceivers of a BS can point to different directions, laser beams of the BS can be transmitted forwardly and backwardly such that the total coverage length of each BS is remarkably extended. Furthermore, the two coverage areas of a BS's transceivers are not contiguous along the track, thus forming a blackout area between them. In this case, two transceivers of a train, which are deployed at the front and back of a train, respectively, can cooperate to maintain continuous ground-to-train FSO communications. Therefore, the number of the BSs is reduced, and the impact of frequent handovers is alleviated. The performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated via extensive simulations.


The relationship between people and wildfire has always been paradoxical: fire is an essential ecological process and management tool, but can also be detrimental to life and property. Consequently, fire regimes have been modified throughout history through both intentional burning to promote benefits and active suppression to reduce risks. Reintroducing fire and its benefits back into the Sky Island mountains of the United States-Mexico borderlands has the potential to reduce adverse effects of altered fire regimes and build resilient ecosystems and human communities. To help guide regional fire restoration, we describe the frequency and severity of recent fires over a 32-year period (1985-2017) across a vast binational region in the United States-Mexico borderlands and assess variation in fire frequency and severity across climate gradients and in relation to vegetation and land tenure classes. We synthesize relevant literature on historical fire regimes within 9 major vegetation types and assess how observed contemporary fire characteristics vary from expectations based on historical patterns. Less than 28% of the study area burned during the observation period, excluding vegetation types in warmer climates that are not adapted to fire (eg, Desertscrub and Thornscrub). Average severity of recent fires was low despite some extreme outliers in cooler, wetter environments. Midway along regional temperature and precipitation gradients, approximately 64% of Pine-Oak Forests burned at least once, with fire frequencies that mainly corresponded to historical expectations on private lands in Mexico but less so on communal lands, suggesting the influence of land management. Fire frequency was higher than historical expectations in extremely cool and wet environments that support forest types such as Spruce-Fir, indicating threats to these systems possibly attributable to drought and other factors. In contrast, fires were absent or infrequent across large areas of Woodlands (~73% unburned) and Grasslands (~88% unburned) due possibly to overgrazing, which reduces abundance and continuity of fine fuels needed to carry fire. Our findings provide a new depiction of fire regimes in the Sky Islands that can help inform fire management, restoration, and regional conservation planning, fostered by local and traditional knowledge and collaboration among landowners and managers.


As someone who works with fonts every day, you need to know exactly how fonts work in Mac OS X. Long-time Mac author Sharon Zardetto Aker has the answers you need, explaining where your fonts reside, why they are there, and what to do about duplication and long Font menus. Once that's under control, you'll learn things like the ins and outs of different font installation methods; how to use Font Book to manage, validate, and organize fonts; ways of dealing with legacy Mac OS 9 fonts; and how to make the most of character-rich Unicode fonts. And to help with those maddening font problems, Sharon provides troubleshooting steps and real-world advice for solving problems fast. If you've experienced seemingly inexplicable trouble with characters displaying incorrectly, an inability to type a particular character, fonts missing from Font menus, confusing behavior in Microsoft or Adobe programs, Font Book crashing, or Character Palette misbehaving, Real World Mac OS X Fonts has the help you need. In this book, you'll find the answers to questions like these: What types of fonts can I use with Mac OS X? In what order does Mac OS X access fonts from all their possible locations? How can I figure out what characters are available in a Unicode font? How can I minimize font-related troubles when sharing documents across platforms? How do I go about troubleshooting a font problem? How do I enter special characters? How do I print font samples? How do I work with legacy fonts?


Image resizing of a compressed image can be performed in a spatial domain via decompression, resizing, and recompression, which is computationally inefficient. In order to reduce computation amount, efficient resizing approaches in the compressed domain have been developed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to resize images that are compressed by 8 /spl times/ 8 block-discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based coding. The proposed image-resizing method is performed in the DCT domain and exploits the multiplication-convolution property of the DCT. Filter characteristics of the proposed image resizing method are analyzed by using a multirate filter bank representation. Since the characteristics of our resizing filters are better than those of others and the proposed image resizing method is computationally efficient, it can be widely used in a transcoder and shows visually fine results.


This book provides an easy to understand yet comprehensive view of using Viral marketing to tie the new online marketplace together --a landscape that can appear quite bewildering, even to marketing specialists. With so many options at our fingertips (literally), where do we start? Blogs? Podcasts? Public relations? SEO? Paid search? The list goes on. To make matters worse, technology is changing and new tools are developing almost every day. This book takes a high altitude look at online marketing options, showing us how they developed, why they're important, how they work, and why they work. It jumps into the trenches and shows us how to actually use the tools and implement programs.


ABSTRACT While research has investigated risk-taking in play for children from the age of four years upwards, less is known of risky play with children under four years. A small-scale observational study with children from five childcare settings with differing characteristics was undertaken to explore the occurrence and characteristics of risky play for children under four years of age, in relation to the current understanding of risky play. The study found similarities across the different contexts, which seem to reflect the characteristics of risky play for children aged one to three years. The findings suggest that the existing definition and characteristics of risky play are appropriate for two- and three-year-old children, but for one-year-olds, the study found discrepancies indicating deviations from existing definitions, indicating that the concept may not be so useful for this age group. To develop understanding of risky play, this article suggests new categories and an adapted definition.


Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project. By Jerrold Hirsch. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 293, preface, introduction, notes, index. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper) One of the publications produced in honor of the American Folklore Society's centennial is The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector (Feintuch 1988), an anthology whose opening section comprises essays about movements and personalities of earlier days that contributed to the development of public folklore as we have come to know it in the United States. Historian Jerrold Hirsch's essay on the Federal Writers' Project (here called simply The Project) of the New Deal offers an unprecedented argument for the depth and complexity of motivations guiding the leadership of the Project's folklore work. This endeavor, often glossed over in histories of folklore studies due to a supposed lack of academic rigor and, frankly, a dearth of published results, here receives a fresh and laudatory appraisal that exposes its philosophical foundations. Hirsch shows that Project leaders, pivotally B. A. Botkin, broke with the cultural nationalism so evident in public Americanization initiatives of the early twentieth century, pursuing instead a pluralist vision that celebrated cultural diversity as a source of vitality. Hirsch adumbrates the continuities of this approach toward public folklore in the later twentieth century and beyond, not just as a form of work, but as an ideology. If Hirsch's 1988 essay was a prospectus, his present book, Portrait of America, is a fulfillment. Here he details how Project leaders integrated folklore into a vision to redefine America at a moment of social crisis, and he credits Botkin as the driving force in this populist approach to definition. Folklorists may miss the message, however, because there is barely a hint in this book's chapter titles or introduction of the significance of the contributions of folklorists to the Project's goals. Here and there are nuggets to be found-for example, in Chapter 8, "Toward a Marriage of True Minds: The Federal Writers' Project and the Writing of Southern Folk History," the title a nod to a speech by Botkin (who was of course borrowing from Shakespeare) to the 1939 meeting of the American Historical Association: "If we admitted no impediments to a marriage of true minds between folklore and history, the product of their union would be folk history." In the book's most intriguing chapter, on the South, Hirsch describes the special challenge posed to the Project's pluralist mission by conservative white Southerners, for they, more than other Project writer-contributors, subscribed to a discourse of maintenance of racial and cultural purity. As Hirsch tells us, the treatment of Southern folklore was the greatest test of Botkin's agenda for presenting folklore and American diversity as cultural assets. …


Obtaining customer opinions and customer wishes is increasingly becoming an important part of any entrepreneurial activity for determining customer satisfaction and, subsequently, optimizing products and services as well as strengthen customer loyalty. In catering, there are several ways to capture the guest's satisfaction or dissatisfaction, as well as customer preferences and customer needs across different channels. One way to obtain a customer's opinion is to provide a digital online questionnaire. Unfortunately, the participa-tion of guests in such surveys is usually low. In addition, many online question-naires are aborted prematurely, and questions which require an individual text answer are often left unanswered. Gamification is a process to use game ele-ments, game techniques and game mechanics from games in a different context in order to motivate and force people to do certain activities. This paper dis-cusses whether the use of game elements in an existing gastronomical online questionnaire enhances the engagement of users and whether customer satisfac-tion remains the same. Based on an existing gastronomical online questionnaire from the company ITELL.SOLUTIONS GmbH a gamified questionnaire vari-ant has been developed. Game elements such as points, badges, avatar, story, progress bar and instant feedback have been included. The investigation showed that the use of gamification in questionnaires on open questions did not worsen the involvement of users. The customer satisfac-tion remained unchanged by the embedding of game elements too. Users of the expanded game questionnaire tended to give more precise and longer answers. The completion time also slightly increased for the gamified questionnaire. A direct comparison between the two variants of the questionnaire, showed that users preferred the design of the gamified questionnaire.


Multi-template molecular imprinting technique was employed for the theoretical study about industrial oil denitrification. Prior to the preparation of multi-template molecularly imprinted polymers (MT-MIPs), density functional theory was used for simulating the imprinted pre-assembly systems composed of template (aniline, indole, or 3-methylinndole) and monomer [methacrylic acid, acrylamide (AM), and 4-vinylpyridine]. MT-MIPs were synthesized as surface MIPs simply and successively by seeded emulsion polymerization or two-stage precipitation polymerization. The experimental results were consistent with the simulative results, which demonstrated that AM was more suitable monomer together. In addition, seeded emulsion polymerization synthesized MT-MIPs with better performance compared with two-stage precipitation polymerization. The adsorption kinetics and adsorption isotherm of MT-MIP prepared with AM using seeded emulsion polymerization were fitted with different models. The fitting results indicated that pseudo-second-order kinetics model and Freundlich isotherm model were suitable for describing the adsorption process of AM seeded emulsion polymerization. This study will provide a certain guidance and theoretical basis for introducing the combination of multi-template molecular imprinting technique and computational simulation into the field of industrial denitrification. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The inventory of elite manufactured objects and the large quantity of metal recovered from the Late Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck mirror in many respects palatial gift exchange deliveries as they are recorded in the contemporary Amarna Letters. The excavator of the shipwreck proposes that two men of Aegean origin were on board and that the ship was sailing to the Aegean. By combining data generated from the Uluburun shipwreck with textual and archaeological evidence from the contemporary Near East and Aegean, this paper evaluates the plausibility of a diplomatic voyage en route to the Aegean tied to Mycenaean palatial enterprise.


Between 2002 and 2005, Lufthansa, Swiss and KLM in cooperation with PrivatAir, start-up airlines Eos and MAXjet individually, launched scheduled business class-only services between Europe and the US. This paper qualitatively analyses the new business model from the strategic and operational point of view. Different approaches based on pull or push motivation have been identified and the characteristics of the service offerings extensively examined. From the strategic aspect, the analysis has proven that the products have an inherent value benefit for the respective target group. It has been established that short and ultra-long haul routes are not viable for the business model. The main shortcoming of the offering is the lack of connectivity as opposed to network carriers, resulting in dependency on the local demand. For the start-up airlines, establishment of market presence and goodwill is critical. In the area of operating economics, pilot crew and navigation charges have a higher impact than in the mixed class operation. Airport charges and administrative overhead build a larger portion of total expenses in case of traditional airline services. No significant evidence against the viability of the premium airline model could be found. (author's abstract)


The purpose of this paper is to measure the technical efficiency of farms on the basis of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and to present an analytical method of farm diagnosis using measurements obtained for melon farms in Japan. The paper first describes the objectives of melon farms operating under the marketing strategy of agricultural cooperatives and explains DEA, which measures the technical efficiency of such farms. It then uses this analytical method to measure technical efficiency for each farm and demonstrates h6w technical efficiency is dependent not only on the management performance of production of melons and other crops but also on the number of full-time farm workers. In addition, the effect of management perlormance on technical efficiency is analysed quantitatively for each size group of full-time farm workers. The paper also illustrates how DEA can be used for farm diagnosis when the management performance of inefficient melon farms is compared with that of efficient farms. DEA is able to indicate some efficient farms as the optimum solution that should be treated as the model for the improved management of inefficient farms. Data are drawn from a sample of 91 melon farms in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture.


1. The variation of the lift and drag of fruit-fly wings with angle of attack and velocity was compared with that of thin plates.

2. High drag and low ratios of lift to drag characterized these airfoils, the primary difference being the absence of stalling in the fly wings.

3. Flow photographs and determinations of stall point on thin plates suggested that the fly wing behaves as if encountering a Reynolds number below the actual value.

4. At positive angles of attack camber improved the aerodynamic characteristics of fly wings; at negative angles uncambered wings were superior.

5. The structural basis for the performance of fly wings and the relationship of their characteristics to their opening conditions are discussed.


Potentiation of glucose-induced insulin secretion by intestinal factors has been described for many years. Today, two major peptides with potent insulinotropic action have been recognized: gastric inhibitory peptide and truncated forms of glucagon-like peptide I, GLP-I(7–37) or the related GLP-I(7–36)amide. These hormones have specific β-cell receptors that are coupled to production of cAMP and activation of cAMP-dependent protein kinase. Elevation in intracellular cAMP levels is required to mediate the glucoincretin effect of these hormones: the potentiation of insulin secretion in the presence of stimulatory concentrations of glucose. In addition, circulating glucoincretins maintain basal levels of cAMP, which are necessary to keep β-cells in a glucose-competent state. Interactions between glucoincretin signaling and glucose-induced insulin secretion may result from the phosphorylation of key elements of the glucose signaling pathway by cAMP-dependent protein kinase. These include the ATP-dependent K+ channel, the Ca++ channel, or elements of the secretory machinery itself. In NIDDM, the glucoincretin effect is reduced. However, basal or stimulated gastric inhibitory peptide and glucagon-like peptide I levels are normal or even elevated, suggesting that signals induced by these hormones on the β-cells are probably altered. At pharmacological doses, infusion of glucagon-like peptide I but not gastric inhibitory peptide, can ameliorate postprandial insulin secretory response in NIDDM patients. Agonists of the glucagon-like peptide I receptor have been proposed as new therapeutic agents in NIDDM.


We present a model of symbol manipulation implemented using spiking neurons and closely tied to the anatomy of the cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus. The model is a generalpurpose neural controller which plays a role analogous to a production system. Information stored in cortex is used by the basal ganglia as the basis for selecting between a set of inferences. When an inference rule is selected, it commands the thalamus to modify and transmit information between areas of the cortex. The system supports special-case and general-purpose inferences, including the ability to remember complex statements and answer questions about them. The resulting model suggests modifications to the standard structure of production system rules, and offers a neurological explanation for the 50 millisecond cognitive cycle time.


Few data exist on the environmental risks of biological control. The weevil Rhinocyllus conicus Froeh., introduced to control exotic thistles, has exhibited an increase in host range as well as continuing geographic expansion. Between 1992 and 1996, the frequency of weevil damage to native thistles consistently increased, reaching 16 to 77 percent of flowerheads per plant. Weevils significantly reduced the seed production of native thistle flowerheads. The density of native tephritid flies was significantly lower at high weevil density. Such ecological effects need to be better addressed in future evaluation and regulation of potential biological control agents.


While Parkinson's disease has been described nearly 200 years ago, the mechanisms leading to the degeneration of selectively vulnerable populations of neurons, such as dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, remain mostly unknown. Our poor understanding of the disease etiology has dramatically hampered the rational development of therapies interfering with the processes underlying neuronal degeneration. Current therapeutic approaches provide symptomatic relief, but fail to slow down the course of Parkinson's disease. In addition, the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease relies primarily on the clinical assessment of motor symptoms that become detectable only when a large part of the nigral dopaminergic neurons have already degenerated. There is therefore a strong need to better understand the pathological processes underlying early stages of Parkinson's disease to improve the tools for diagnosis as well as to develop effective disease-modifying therapies. Towards these goals, it is important to develop, analyze and validate animal models, which faithfully replicate the human disease. In particular, the induced degeneration of nigral dopaminergic neurons in the adult mammalian brain provides an experimental tool to evaluate in vivo how the disease process leads to motor symptoms. Although neurotoxins such as 6-hydroxydopamine produce a selective degeneration of nigral dopaminergic neurons, their mode of action is clearly different from what takes places in the human pathology. During the last decade, the identification of genes linked to familial inheritance of Parkinson's disease led to the development of novel animal models based on the actual genetic cause of these rare forms of the disease. Alpha-synuclein, an abundant brain protein encoded by a gene involved in autosomal dominant forms of Parkinson's disease, is now considered a primary actor in the pathogenesis of this neurodegenerative disorder. Our laboratory has developed a rat model of Parkinson's disease based on the over-expression of human α-synuclein in the rat substantia nigra using adeno-associated viral vectors. In this model, α-synuclein over-expression progressively leads to a moderate loss of nigral dopaminergic neurons. Remarkably, animals develop motor deficits that are partly due to impaired neurotransmitter release in the remaining dopaminergic axons. This model system, where some nigral dopaminergic neurons survive in presence of overabundant human α-synuclein, can be used to explore early pathologic mechanisms that undermine the nigrostriatal system prior to outright neurodegeneration. The first part of this thesis investigates the detrimental effects of α-synuclein accumulation on the secretory pathway at the level of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and Golgi apparatus in the rat substantia nigra. We found that a significant proportion of the nigral neurons expressing α-synuclein display a pathological fragmentation of the Golgi apparatus. This effect has been explored by co-expressing the small GTPase Rab1A, a positive regulator the ER-to-Golgi vesicular trafficking. Interestingly, Rab1A co-expression does not prevent nigrostriatal degeneration but significantly corrects the motor deficits caused by α-synuclein. These results show that enhancing the ER-to-Golgi vesicular trafficking partially protects dopaminergic neurons from the α-synuclein-induced pathology in vivo, by restoring Golgi morphology in the remaining neurons and significantly preserving motor behavior. In order to further investigate the possible implication of the ER in the stress caused by α-synuclein, we evaluated the effects on the pathology induced by A53T α-synuclein of Salubrinal, an inductor of the PERK pathway of the unfolded protein response. Similarly to Rab1A, the Salubrinal treatment robustly reduced Golgi fragmentation and delayed the appearance of motor symptoms, without preventing nigrostriatal degeneration. Taken together, these results indicate that α-synuclein over-expression impairs the ER/Golgi system in rat dopaminergic neurons and thereby leads to neuronal dysfunction in the surviving nigral neurons. The second part of this thesis explores potential biomarkers for early stages of Parkinson's disease using ultra high field 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The technology of magnetic resonance spectroscopy allows for the non-invasive quantification of abundant brain metabolites including metabolic markers and neurotransmitters. We measured metabolite levels in the striatum following nigral injection of an adeno-associated viral vector to express human α-synuclein and induce mild degeneration. The observed changes were compared to similar measurements made following intoxication with 6-hydroxydopamine to induce near complete nigro-striatal denervation. Expectedly, the level of the metabolic marker N-acetyl aspartate considered to reflect neuronal degeneration was significantly decreased only in the 6-hydroxydopamine model and failed to detect the mild neuronal loss induced by α-synuclein. On the other hand, we found an increase in striatal GABA concentration clearly detectable in both models. This result indicates that the measurement of GABA levels by magnetic resonance spectroscopy can be used as a sensitive marker for the striatal effects of α-synuclein accumulation. The increase in GABA levels observed in conditions of mild degeneration suggests that the functional deficits induced by human α-synuclein can have measurable consequences on neurotransmitter levels in the nigrostriatal system before extensive neuronal loss. Therefore, assessments of the neurotransmitter levels by magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the basal ganglia could be a promising approach for the early detection of Parkinson's disease. Overall, this thesis work shows that neurodegeneration is not the only actor in the α-synuclein-induced phenotype. We demonstrate that modifiers of α-synuclein toxicity at the ER/Golgi level mainly improve motor deficits without any effect on α-synuclein-induced degeneration. In addition, the over-expression of α-synuclein has detectable effects on the homeostasis of striatal neurotransmitters. If confirmed in human patients, these results may improve our understanding of the processes leading to the initial motor symptoms and open new avenues for early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.


Intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) has been introduced into a wide spectrum of clinics worldwide. In tomotherapy, literally "slice therapy", highly conformal treatments are possible because of an increase in the number of treatment slices into which the target is segmented would lead directly to an improvement in three-dimensional dose conformality.With Peacock System (NOMOS Corporation), the IMRT is doing so using conventional clinical linear accelerators (Linacs) fitted with an integrated multileaf collimator (MLC). This system comprised of the MIMiC, a tertiary "bolt-on" MLC, and a dedicated inverse treatment planning system (Corvus). The introduction of dynamic-arc-IMRT with Serial Tomotherapy started in the mid 1990. The first patient was treated in 1994. Between November 2007 and September 2012, at the Operative Unit of Radiotherapy of V. Fazzi Hospital of Lecce, 180 patients were treated with Serial Tomotherapy. Of those, 52 patients received Cerebral Ipofractionated Stereotactic IMRT with Talon; 66 prostate cancer patients were designed to deliver SIB-IMRT (78,4Gy to the prostate while simultaneously delivering 66,5Gy to seminal vesicles in 35 fractions); 20 patients received SIB-IMRT for Nasopharyngeal cancer (69.9Gy in 2.33Gy fractions to PTV1, 60Gy in 2Gy fractions to PTV2 and 54Gy in 1.8Gy fractions to PTV3), 28 patients received brain IMRT and 14 patients were irradiated on the spine and bone marrow for palliation or other. This slice-wise method of treatment is known to produce extremely conformal dose distributions due to its ability to specifically match the dose distribution on each slice to the shape of the target volume on that same slice. The major criticism of contemporary IMRT is that we cannot be certain of the geometry (relative position and shape) of the tumour or organs at risk (OARs) at each treatment episode. Careful and exacting protocols are employed to attempt to localize these in the treatment plan and during the patient's set-up.


The current system of taxing the income of multinational firms in the United States is flawed across multiple dimensions. The system provides an artificial tax incentive to earn income in low-tax countries, rewards aggressive tax planning, and is not compatible with any common metrics of efficiency. The U.S. system is also notoriously complex; observers are nearly unanimous in lamenting the heavy compliance burdens and the impracticality of coherent enforcement. Further, despite a corporate tax rate one standard deviation above that of other OECD countries, the U.S. corporate tax system raises relatively little revenue, due in part to the shifting of income outside the U.S. tax base. In this proposal, we advocate moving to a system of formulary apportionment for taxing the corporate income of multinational firms. Under our proposal, the U.S. tax base for multinational corporations would be calculated based on a fraction of their worldwide income. This fraction would simply be the share of their worldwide sales that occur in the United States. This system is similar to the current method that U.S. states use to allocate national income across states. The state system arose due to the widespread belief that it was impractical to account separately for what income is earned in each state when states are highly integrated economically. Similarly, in an increasingly global world economy, it is difficult to assign profits to individual countries, and attempts to do so are fraught with opportunities for tax avoidance. Under our proposed formulary apportionment system, firms would no longer have an artificial tax incentive to shift income to low-tax locations. This would help protect the U.S. tax base while reducing the distortionary features of the current tax system. In addition, the complexity and administrative burden of the system would be reduced. The proposed system would be both better suited to an integrated world economy and more compatible with the tax policy goals of efficiency, equity, and simplicity.


To give: A science of religion and missiological perspective. Human nature has been depicted as being utilitarian. This means that man considers all social action in terms of an optimalisation of privilege for the self. Marcel Mauss challenged this theory by investigating the possibility of human nature as being anti-utilitarian. Man does not give in order to receive. Human social action is not necessarily motivated by what man stands to gain. The diaconate of the church can be seen as the social action of giving. There is a close connection between the diaconate and the apostolate as actions of giving by the church. This article wants to determine whether these actions by the church are utilitarian in nature. Sundermeier's use of the concept of convivence is used to illustrate how the church acts in an anti-utilitarian fashion when engaging in the diaconate and the apostolate. The social theory of Mauss, the missionary perspective of Sundermeier and the theology on the diaconate by Moltmann are brought into conversation with one another in order to illustrate the anti-utilitarian activities of the church in society.


We investigate theoretically and experimentally the detrimental effect of fiber dispersion on the synchronization of an optoelectronic phase chaos cryptosystem. We evaluate the root-mean square synchronization error and the cancellation spectra between the emitter and the receiver in order to characterize the quality of the optical fiber communication link. These two indicators explicitly show in temporal and spectral domain how fiber dispersion does negatively affect the phase chaos cancellation at the receiver stage. We demonstrate that the dispersion management techniques used in conventional optical fiber networks, such as dispersion-compensating modules/fibers or dispersion shifted fibers, are also efficient to strongly reduce the detrimental effects of fiber propagation in phase chaos communications. This compatibility therefore opens the way to a successful integration of more than 10-Gb/s phase chaos communications systems in existing networks, even when the fiber link spans over more than 100 km.


A planar photonic crystal waveguide based on the semiconductor-on-insulator (SOI) materials system is analyzed theoretically. Two-dimensional (2-D) calculations and comparison with dispersion relations for the media above and below the finite-height waveguide are used to obtain design guidelines. Three-dimensional (3-D) calculations are given for the dispersion relations and field profiles. The field profiles obtained using 2-D and 3-D calculations are qualitatively similar. However, we find that compared with 2-D calculations, the frequencies of the guided modes are shifted and the number of guided modes changes. The theoretically predicted frequency intervals, where the waveguide supports leakage-free guidance of light, are compared with an experimental measurement for propagation losses. Two out of three frequency intervals coincide with low-measured propagation losses. The poor guidance of light for the third frequency interval is explained theoretically by investigating the vertical localization of the guided modes.


This paper presents estimates based on individual data of downward nominal and real wage rigidities for thirteen sectors in Belgium, Denmark, Spain and Portugal. Our methodology follows the approach recently developed for the International Wage Flexibility Project, whereby resistance to nominal and real wage cuts is measured through departures of observed individual wage change histograms from an estimated counterfactual wage change distribution that would have prevailed in the absence of rigidity. We evaluate the role of worker and firm characteristics in shaping wage rigidities. We also confront our estimates of wage rigidities to structural features of the labour markets studied, such as the wage bargaining level, variable pay policy and the degree of product market competition. We find that the use of firm-level collective agreements in countries with rather centralized wage formation reduces the degree of real wage rigidity. This finding suggests that some degree of decentralization within highly centralized countries allows firms to adjust wages downwards, when business conditions turn bad.


Abstract Applicants for any given job are more or less suited to fill it, and the firm will select the best among them. Increasing the wage offer attracts more applicants and makes it possible to raise the hiring standard, thereby improving the productivity of the staff. Wages that optimize on the trade-off between the wage level and the productivity of the workforce are known as selection wages. As men react more strongly to wage differentials than females, the trade-off is more pronounced for men and a profit-maximizing firm will offer a higher wage for men than for women in equilibrium. The argument is not confined to issues of sex discrimination; rather it is of relevance for all labor markets where labor heterogeneity is important and supply elasticities vary systematically across occupations.


Discrete mixed membership modeling and continuous latent factor modeling (also known as matrix factorization) are two popular, complementary approaches to dyadic data analysis. In this work, we develop a fully Bayesian framework for integrating the two approaches into unified Mixed Membership Matrix Factorization (M3F) models. We introduce two M3F models, derive Gibbs sampling inference procedures, and validate our methods on the EachMovie, MovieLens, and Netflix Prize collaborative filtering datasets. We find that, even when fitting fewer parameters, the M3F models outperform state-of-the-art latent factor approaches on all benchmarks, yielding the greatest gains in accuracy on sparsely-rated, high-variance items.


A program has been planned and developed to diagnose and identify brain cancer. The program employs computer-based techniques in the detections of tumor fragments or tumors, and in photographs of various Astrocytoma brain tumor patients, it classifies the type of tumor utilizing Artificial Neural Network. For the diagnosis of the brain tumor, photographs of the patients afflicted by cancer were created utilizing image processing technique such as imaging segmentation,histogram equalization, image enhancement, morphologic surgery and feature extraction.Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) is used for the detection of surface characteristics in the observed tumor. Such properties are contrasted with the functionality contained in the knowledge base.To order to identify various forms of brain cancers, a neuro fuzzy concept was eventually created. The entire system was verified in two stages: first, the phase of learning / training as well as second, the phase of recognition / testing.The device was equipped through documented MRI images from patients with impaired brain cancer from the Department of Radiology of Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH). Known brain cancer tests of impacted MRI scans are often obtained from TMH and used for device monitoring. The method has been shown to be effective in classifying these samples.


The present study aimed at exploring the dimensionality of the Italian version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale-version 3 (UCLA LS3), in relation to self-esteem (Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale — RSES), social anxiety (Social Interaction Anxiety Scale — SIAS), and adult attachment (Attachment Style Questionnaire — ASQ), in 350 Italian young adults. An innovative Exploratory Structure Equation Modeling approach (ESEM — Asparouhov & Muthén, 2009) was used. Thanks to the combination of explorative (EFA) and confirmative (CFA) factor analysis methods, ESEM allowed to simultaneously estimate an EFA measurement model with rotations and a traditional SEM model, to investigate UCLA LS3 latent structure and convergent validity. A three-factor ESEM model presented a satisfactory fit to the data. The Italian UCLA LS3 scale resulted to be composed by the interrelated dimensions of Isolation, Relational Connectedness and "Trait" Loneliness. ESEM structural part showed ASQ subscales and SIAS to systematically predict loneliness dimensions, whereas the RSES affected only the Isolation factor.


Nitric oxide can modify cysteine residues on proteins and produce an S-nitrosylated derivative (see the review by Lane et al.). Gu et al. report that such a modification of matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9) activates the enzyme. MMP-9 nitrosylation and activation were observed in rodent brain tissue upon stroke, and treatment of cultured neurons with NO-activated MMP-9 caused apoptosis. This activation pathway may contribute to neuronal cell death that is associated with the extracellular matrix disruption observed in cerebral ischemia and neurodegenerative diseases. P. Lane, G. Hao, S. S. Gross, S-Nitrosylation is emerging as a specific and fundamental posttranslational protein modification: Head-to-head comparison with O-phosphorylation. Science's STKE (2001), http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sigtrans;2001/86/re1 [Abstract] [Full Text] Z. Gu, M. Kaul, B. Yan, S. J. Kridel, J. Cui, A. Strongin, J. W. Smith, R. C. Liddington, S. A. Lipton, S-Nitrosylation of matrix metalloproteinases: Signaling pathway to neuronal cell death, Science 297, 1186-1190 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text]


—We consider the problem of designing a fair scheduling algorithm for discrete-time constrained queuing networks. Each queue has dedicated exogenous packet arrivals. There are constraints on which queues can be served simultaneously. This model effectively describes important special instances like network switches, interference in wireless networks, bandwidth sharing for congestion control and traffic scheduling in road roundabouts. Fair scheduling is required because it provides isolation to different traffic flows; isolation makes the system more robust and enables providing quality of service. Existing work on fairness for constrained networks concentrates on flow based fairness. As a main result, we describe a notion of packet based fairness by establishing an analogy with the ranked election problem: packets are voters, schedules are candidates and each packet ranks the schedules based on its priorities. We then obtain a scheduling algorithm that achieves the described notion of fairness by drawing upon the seminal work of Goodman and Markowitz (1952). This yields the familiar Maximum Weight (MW) style algorithm. As another important result, we prove that the algorithm obtained is throughput optimal. There is no reason a priori why this should be true, and the proof requires non-traditional methods


Deep learning models for graphs have advanced the state of the art on many tasks. Despite their recent success, little is known about their robustness. We investigate training time attacks on graph neural networks for node classification that perturb the discrete graph structure. Our core principle is to use meta-gradients to solve the bilevel problem underlying training-time attacks, essentially treating the graph as a hyperparameter to optimize. Our experiments show that small graph perturbations consistently lead to a strong decrease in performance for graph convolutional networks, and even transfer to unsupervised embeddings. Remarkably, the perturbations created by our algorithm can misguide the graph neural networks such that they perform worse than a simple baseline that ignores all relational information. Our attacks do not assume any knowledge about or access to the target classifiers.


This thesis explores the processes through which tourist souvenirs forge connections between people and place, in order to offer a renewed geographical encounter with theories of cultural materiality. It adopts the concept of the 'souvenir-object' to prioritise the capacities objects have to relate to and represent place, thereby offering a dynamic approach to understanding the significance of tourist souvenirs in tourists' and producers' lives. The thesis is based upon multi-locale ethnographic research in Swaziland (Southern Africa) and the UK. It adapts an innovative 'following' approach to research how souvenir objects are produced, designed, sold and purchased, taken home, displayed, given away and forgotten about. Each chapter explores different facets of the relations between people and objects, or objects and places, through the sites of souvenir production and consumption. In summary, this thesis offers an in-depth analysis of the souvenir industry in Swaziland and discusses how souvenir-objects are central to tourism practices. Theoretically and empirically, the thesis engages with affectivity and object presence, using the tourist souvenir as a vehicle to develop theories of relational materiality within social and cultural geography more broadly. I explore how tourist souvenirs have the potential to negotiate and re-work how they relate to their surrounding geographical imaginaries. The project also considers how tourist souvenirs fit awkwardly into tourists' homes and it explains how the dynamics of appropriation surrounding this are always in process. Finally it examines how meaningful materialities of tourist souvenirs also emerge out of their multi faceted and enduring presence in producers lives. Overall, this thesis demonstrates how the tourist souvenir creates connections between people and places which are necessarily partial and fragmentary. The capacities objects have to inhabit multiple spaces poses a challenge to studies of tourism, material culture and consumption that are often underpinned by taken for granted notions of connectivity.


Global trends in a new multi‐satellite surface soil moisture dataset were analyzed for the period 1988–2010. 27% of the area covered by the dataset showed significant trends (p = 0.05). Of these, 73% were negative and 27% positive. Subtle drying trends were found in the Southern US, central South America, central Eurasia, northern Africa and the Middle East, Mongolia and northeast China, northern Siberia, and Western Australia. The strongest wetting trends were found in southern Africa and the subarctic region. Intra‐annual analysis revealed that most trends are not uniform among seasons. The most prominent trend patterns in remotely sensed surface soil moisture were also found in GLDAS‐Noah and ERA Interim modeled surface soil moisture and GPCP precipitation, lending confidence to the obtained results. The relationship with trends in GIMMS‐NDVI appeared more complex. In areas of mutual disagreement more research is needed to identify potential deficiencies in models and/or remotely sensed products.


Relative changes in specific absorption rates owing to perturbing metallic spectacles in proximity to the face are investigated. A representative electrical property biological matter model with twenty five distinct tissue types based on images of an adult male is used with the FDTD method. Both plane wave and dipole source stimuli are investigated and are used to represent a mobile cellular-enabled personal digital assistant held in front of the face. Results show that metallic spectacles may alter significantly specific absorption rate (SAR) level distributions within the head. The frequency range investigated is 1.5-3.0 GHz. Specific attention is given to energy interactions with the eyes. Results are given for several common spectacle frame shapes in addition to whole head energy absorption comparisons. Whole head and single mirrored half head sensitivity data are also presented. A Pareto ranked genetic algorithm (GA) is used to search for the spectacles that cause the highest and lowest SAR in the eye.


Abstract This article illustrates how the ECCC is struggling to combine successfully two distinct institutional responses to crimes, by being both a criminal tribunal, with its formal rules of procedure and focus on retributive justice, and a quasi-truth and reconciliation commission, with its more flexible approach to participatory rights for victims and focus on reconciliation. The article highlights the advantages and challenges of adopting a 'two for the price of one' model within the Cambodian context and uses the experiences of the ECCC to underscore important lessons for future ad hoc and hybrid courts.


In their new groundbreaking study reviewed in this special issue, The Trans
Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution
(2018), sociologist Ann Travers details the experiences of transgender
children in the US and Canada, some as young as four years of age, who
participated in research interviews over a five-year period. Establishing a
unique picture of what it means to grow up as a trans child, Travers offers
numerous examples of daily life and challenges for children like, for example,
Martine and Esme, both of whom sought to determine their own gender at
an early age: Martine and her family recount how at the age of seven she
responded to her upcoming appointment at a gender clinic by asking if the
doctor would have "the machine where you walk in as a boy and walk out
as a girl," while Esme's story begins in preschool and leads to the care of a
"trans-affirmative doctor" (168) from the age of six and the promise of hormone
blockers and estrogen at the onset of puberty. Although Travers's work
is devoted to and advocates for trans children as a whole, its implications
for our understanding of and research into girls and girlhood cannot be
understated. What does it mean to "walk out" of that machine in the doctor's
office "as a girl?" What happens when you displace the seemingly monumental
onset of puberty from its previous biological imperatives and reproductive
futures? How might feminist work on girlhoods, which has sought
to challenge sexual and gender binaries for so long, approach an encounter
with what Travers calls "binary-conforming" or "binary-identifying" (169)
trans girls or with the transgender boys in their study who, at first, respond
to the conforming pressures of adolescence very similarly to cisgender girls
who will not ultimately transition away from a female identity?


Executive Summary
This literature review focuses on exploring issues of service users and carer involvement in the assessment of students" practice. Recommendations are made to inform the development of a National Approach to Practice Assessment for the pre-registration Nursing and Midwifery programmes in Scotland.
Objectives of the Literature Review
 Undertake a literature / evidence review that focuses on exploring issues of service user and carer involvement in the assessment of students" practice.
 Make recommendations based on the above review to inform the National Approach Working Group in formulating guidance to Higher Education Institutions around service user and carer involvement in the assessment of students" practice.
Literature review
Literature was collected following a systematic search and spanned across 17 lay and professional groups. In total a 212 articles were reviewed following application of exclusion criteria. Sixty six papers were finally selected as fully meeting the inclusion criteria. Of these there was a varied and wide ranging use of research methods as well as guidelines / tools and more descriptive / opinion based articles. The most common were descriptive / opinion based, followed by guidelines and tools thus underlining the often reported dearth of evidence based literature in the area of the involvement of service users and carers in the assessment of students" practice.
Findings from the literature review
Following a brief overview of the contextual background, definition of terms and an outline of the continuum of involvement, the findings from the literature review addressed the following areas: The challenges and barriers to the involvement of service users and carers focusing on the hierarchies within Higher Education; the use of superiority as a barrier; and using excuses as a barrier. This is followed by a discussion related to assessment methodologies including assessment methods and processes; issues related to reliability, quality and the context of assessment. The next section addresses the impact of involvement on students, service users and carers which includes an exploration of the benefits of service user and carer involvement in the assessment of students" practice; and the reactions and views of service users, students and staff. Finally the implications for training and support are explored.
Conclusions and recommendations
There are a number of recommendations and advice offered in the literature. Only those specific to the involvement of service users and carers in the assessment of students" practice are presented here.
The culture in which service users and carers are involved in the assessment process must be commensurate with the aims and purpose of such participation. This therefore requires involvement of all those involved (including practice placement personnel), agreement and dissemination of the vision or purpose; two-way communication; setting of ground rules including the ability to challenge the use of jargon and the provision of a supportive environment where service users and carers feel safe to share any concerns or anxieties that they may have (Tew et al. 2004; Basset et al. 2006; Duxbury & Ramsdale 2007; Masters & Forrest unpublished).
Training and support is fundamental to the success of service user and carer involvement. Levin (2004); Speers (2008) and Masters & Forrest (unpublished) recommend ensuring that the involvement of service users and carers in the assessment of students" is not seen to be coercive but rather an opt in or opt out process. Anghel & Ramon (2009) emphasise the need for support not just for service users and carers but also academic and practice staff.
A number of authors recommend the development and use of protocols and guidance in order to provide structure for all those involved (Shennan 1998; Edwards 2003; Speers 2008; Anghel & Ramon 2009; Branfield 2009; Stickley et al. 2010) which should hopefully help with consistency in the assessment process. Levin (2004) suggests that any assessment tool should start from the service users" perspective as opposed to using "trigger questions" related to competencies. Stickley et al. (in press) discuss the development of a service user designed assessment tool (SUSA© – Service User Student Assessment) which over a number of weeks evolved into containing four categories: attitude; communication skills; personal awareness and knowledge. A Likert scale is consistently used to elicit responses and there is sufficient room for individual comment. The tool also contains a glossary of terms for the service user / carer.
In terms of the processes involved, recommendations are multifaceted:
 Consider the terminology used – Stickley et al. (2010) and (in press) suggest referring to service user and carer "assessment" of students" practice as reviewing rather than assessing. The rationale for this is that the term reviewer addresses students" complaints of feeling disempowered and thus the feedback is less likely to be rejected outright.
Literature Review: Involvement of Service Users & Carers in the Assessment of Students" Practice Page 7
 Provide service users and carers with written information that they can read it and retain for future information. Information should include the "reason for seeking feedback; how it will be used and how long any forms or recordings will be kept" (Edwards 2003: 347). Speers (2008) adds that confidentiality in terms of the feedback should also be addressed.
 Service user / carer feedback should be used to enhance the learning experience (Levin 2004).
 Service user / carer feedback should be mandatory in all practice assessments (Levin 2004)
 The selection of the service user / carer from which feedback will be elicited should be a joint process between the mentor / practice teacher and the student. It should not be the student"s selection alone (Levin 2004; Masters & Forrest unpublished).
 Stickley et al. (in press) advise using informal processes (such as witness statements, reflective writing and other portfolio items) to elicit service user / carer feedback. They warn that using more formal mechanisms will require planned training in forming and giving feedback. Furthermore they suggest that using a more formalised procedure may need mentor involvement to aid the feedback process.
In conclusion, the consensus within the literature is to involve service users and carers in the formative feedback (or review) of students in the practice setting. The use of protocols and structured easily understood and implemented tools are recommended as is the inclusive and appropriate level of engagement training for all stakeholders involved in the process.
Both Masters & Forrest (unpublished) and Stickley et al. (in press) identify that further research is required into the manner in which feedback is obtained from service users and carers and how it is then used to inform and enhance the learning process.


Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted a lot of attention over the last few years. They have become a fundamental component of many intelligent transportation systems and VANETs are being used to improve road safety and enable a wide variety of value-added services. Many forms of attacks against VANETs have emerged recently that attempt to compromise the security of such networks. Such security attacks on VANETs may lead to catastrophic results such as the loss of lives or loss of revenue for those value-added services. Therefore making VANETs secure has become a key objective for VANET designers. To develop and deploy secure VANET infrastructures remains a significant challenge. The authors discuss some of the main security threats and attacks that can be exploited in VANETs and present the corresponding security solutions that can be implemented to thwart those attacks.


Stem cell research holds promise for applications in regenerative medicine. However many questions remain. For example, will it be possible to patent therapeutic products in this area? Will the necessary investment be forthcoming? In addition there are still many technical problems to be solved. Technical solutions may involve the use of human embryos and this has created barriers to the use of the technology in a number of countries. There is already a need for the progressive development of appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks to allow both the scientific and clinical research to move forward. Some countries are actively encouraging the developments, for example, the UK. In the USA, although the present government is opposed, State and charitable funding is flowing into this area. In this paper we briefly review the issues surrounding stem cell developments and discuss the possible implications of the trends in media coverage.


This book was born out of the author's conviction that parents, teachers, academics, students and democratically-minded citizens of South Africa need a new educational policy framework capable of restoring hope to education and schools. The author describes the nature of South Africa's educational history, as well as its current crises, and examines crucial events in its breakdown. This study is intended as a contribution to the current debates about education in South Africa, offering alternative and hopeful visions grounded in real suggestions for change and improvement. Mncwabe, an educator in South Africa, sends the message of necessary change in order for a new and peaceful South Africa ever to be built. Contents: Education for Black People in South Africa: The Government's Unfinished Business; The Convoluted Structure of Education in South Africa; High Black Teacher-Pupil Ratio and White-Teacher Retrenchments; Mandela Meets De Klerk on Black Education Crisis; Government School Announcement and Community Responses; The Doors of White Schools Creak Open; Education and Respect for Diversity of Cultures; The Education Renewal StrategyoA Further Ploy To Keep White Schools White; The National, Non-Racial and Democratic Education SystemoThe Only Solution; Bibliography; Index.


The commonly used available scales for measurement of socio-economic status (SES) with some cross regional applicability are old and have lost their relevance. There is a need for the development of a valid and reliable instrument for measurement of SES in rural and urban communities in India. The present study was undertaken to develop a cross regionally applicable scale for the purpose of enlisting true measures of socio-economic items applicable in multilingual, multicultural, multi religious, setting of the country. For developing the scale, 10 components presumably determining the socioeconomic status were selected. These indicators were named as profiles. The final version of the scale was arrived at through two trial administrations on rural and urban families. The basis of selection of the families for the two trials was stratified random. The validity and reliability of the scale was established through defined test-retest methods. Both the initial version as well as the final version of the scale for the measurement of SES of incumbents had ten components. The difference between the two versions was in terms of contents and range of items in different categories of SES. The final version was arrived at through field trials and suggestions of the experts. The reliability of the scale was high with a correlation coefficient.


We describe the design of Kaldi, a free, open-source toolkit for speech recognition research. Kaldi provides a speech recognition system based on finite-state automata (using the freely available OpenFst), together with detailed documentation and a comprehensive set of scripts for building complete recognition systems. Kaldi is written is C++, and the core library supports modeling of arbitrary phonetic-context sizes, acoustic modeling with subspace Gaussian mixture models (SGMM) as well as standard Gaussian mixture models, together with all commonly used linear and affine transforms. Kaldi is released under the Apache License v2.0, which is highly nonrestrictive, making it suitable for a wide community of users.


Three core crimes have emerged as a part of the jurisdiction of international criminal tribunals: war crimes; genocide; and crimes against humanity. Only two of these crimes (war crimes and genocide) have been addressed through a global treaty that requires States to prevent and punish such conduct and to cooperate among themselves toward those ends. Yet crimes against humanity may be more prevalent than either genocide or war crimes, and are a recurrent feature in non-international armed conflicts (NIACs).As such, a global convention on prevention, punishment, and inter-State cooperation with respect to crimes against humanity appears to be a key missing piece in the current framework of international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and international human rights law. Such a convention could help to stigmatize such egregious conduct, could draw further attention to the need for its prevention and punishment, and could help to harmonize national laws relating to such conduct, thereby opening the door to more meaningful inter-State cooperation on the investigation, prosecution, and extradition for such crimes. In July 2014, the International Law Commission embarked on the drafting of such a convention, in the hope of presentation to the U.N. General Assembly within the next five years. These remarks were the opening address at a conference on 'Non-International Armed Conflicts (NIAC): Developments and Challenges' held at Melbourne Law School, Australia, on 17 March 2015.


The field of defense strategies against adversarial attacks has significantly grown over the last years, but progress is hampered as the evaluation of adversarial defenses is often insufficient and thus gives a wrong impression of robustness. Many promising defenses could be broken later on, making it difficult to identify the state-of-the-art. Frequent pitfalls in the evaluation are improper tuning of hyperparameters of the attacks, gradient obfuscation or masking. In this paper we first propose two extensions of the PGD-attack overcoming failures due to suboptimal step size and problems of the objective function. We then combine our novel attacks with two complementary existing ones to form a parameter-free, computationally affordable and user-independent ensemble of attacks to test adversarial robustness. We apply our ensemble to over 50 models from papers published at recent top machine learning and computer vision venues. In all except one of the cases we achieve lower robust test accuracy than reported in these papers, often by more than $10\%$, identifying several broken defenses.


Feminists have long been engaged in the debates over surrogacy. During the past thirty years, thousands of women throughout the world have served as surrogate mothers. The experience of these women has been studied by academics in law and in the social sciences. It is apparent that, if properly conducted, surrogacy can be a rewarding experience for women and hence should not be objectionable to feminists. Improperly conducted, however, surrogacy can be a form of exploitation. Compensation is not the distinguishing factor. In this essay, I offer two changes to law that would improve the surrogate's experience of surrogacy. First, the law should treat traditional and gestational surrogacy similarly. Second, a surrogate should be considered a legal parent of the child she bears. These changes would address the most pressing feminist objections to surrogacy and open the way for compensation.


This essay is an edited text of a presentation made by the incoming chair of the University Faculty Senate of Pennsylvania State University to a conference co-sponsored by the American Association of University Professors and faculty at the Pennsylvania State University. The topic of these remarks is shared governance. I will consider shared governance within the increasingly contested governance space of the U.S. public research university. My contextual focus will be on its most fragile element, a faculty senate. I will start with a very brief review of the foundations. The conceptual structures of shared governance are fairly well known but it is always useful to nod in the direction of sources. I then consider the realities of shared governance, considering the law relating to shared governance and its functional challenges. I will suggest the context and the difficulties of shared governance within the a-symmetric power arrangements that are the hallmark of public universities. What I hope to flesh out is an outline of the context in which shared governance might be measured by its form with little attention paid to the effectiveness of its function. I will then consider where a faculty senate can fit into this governance enterprise. I will consider whether shared governance has come to mean more a sharing of the burdens of administration than a sharing of governance. I will end with a consideration of how I see the Penn State Faculty Senate playing a more engaged role within the constraints of shared governance, and the way in which, in the absence of legal protection, the university itself must provide a contractually based protection for the shared governance obligations of faculty.


Combined glacial geologic and palynologic data from the southern Lake District, Seno Reloncavi, and Isla Grande de Chiloe in middle latitudes (40°35'–42°25'S) of the Southern Hemisphere Andes suggest (1) that full-glacial or near-full-glacial climate conditions persisted from about 29,400 to 14,550 14C yr BP in late Llanquihue time, (2) that within this late Llanquihue interval mean summer temperature was depressed 6°–8°C compared to modern values during major glacier advances into the outer moraine belt at 29,400, 26,760, 22,295–22,570, and 14,550–14,805 14C yr BP, (3) that summer temperature depression was as great during early Llanquihue as during late Llanquihue time, (4) that climate deteriorated from warmer conditions during the early part to colder conditions during the later part of middle Llanquihue time, (5) that superimposed on long-term climate deterioration are Gramineae peaks on Isla Grande de Chiloe that represent cooling at 44,520–47,110 14C yr BP (T-11), 32,105–35,764 14C yr BP (T-9), 24,895–26,019 14C yr BP (T-7), 21,430–22,774 14C yr BP (T-5), and 13,040–15,200 14C yr BP (T-3), (6) that the initial phase of the glacial/interglacial transition of the last termination involved at least two major steps, one beginning at 14,600 14C yr BP and another at 12,700–13,000 14 C yr BP, and (7) that a late-glacial climate reversal of ≥2–3° C set in close to 12,200 14C yr BP, after an interval of near-interglacial warmth, and continued into Younger Dryas time. The late-glacial climate signal from the southern Chilean Lake District ties into that from proglacial Lago Mascardi in the nearby Argentine Andes, which shows rapid ice recession peaking at 12,400 14C yr BP, followed by a reversal of trend that culminated in Younger-Dryas-age glacier readvance at 11,400–10,200 14C yr BP.

Many full- and late-glacial climate shifts in the southern Lake District match those from New Zealand at nearly the same Southern Hemisphere middle latitudes. At the last glacial maximum (LGM), snowline lowering relative to present-day values was nearly the same in the Southern Alps (875 m) and the Chilean Andes (1000 m). Particularly noteworthy are the new Younger-Dryas-age exposure dates of the Lake Misery moraines in Arthur's Pass in the Southern Alps. Moreover, pollen records from the Waikato lowlands on North Island show that a major vegetation shift at close to 14,700 14C yr BP marked the beginning of the last glacial/interglacial transition (Newnham et al. 1989).

The synchronous and nearly uniform lowering of snowlines in Southern Hemisphere middle-latitude mountains compared with Northern Hemisphere values suggests global cooling of about the same magnitude in both hemispheres at the LGM. When compared with paleoclimate records from the North Atlantic region, the middle-latitude Southern Hemisphere terrestrial data imply interhemispheric symmetry of the structure and timing of the last glacial/interglacial transition. In both regions atmospheric warming pulses are implicated near the beginning of Oldest Dryas time (∼14,600 14C yr BP) and near the Oldest Dryas/Bolling transition (∼12,700–13,000 14 C yr BP). The second of these warming pulses was coincident with resumption of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation similar to that of the modern mode, with strong formation of Lower North Atlantic Deep Water in the Nordic Seas. In both regions, the maximum Bolling-age warmth was achieved at 12,200–12,500 14 C yr BP, and was followed by a reversal in climate trend. In the North Atlantic region, and possibly in middle latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, this reversal culminated in a Younger-Dryas-age cold pulse.

Although changes in ocean circulation can redistribute heat between the hemispheres, they cannot alone account either for the synchronous planetary cooling of the LGM or for the synchronous interhemispheric warming steps of the abrupt glacial-to-interglacial transition. Instead, the dominant interhemispheric climate linkage must feature a global atmospheric signal. The most likely source of this signal is a change in the greenhouse content of the atmosphere. We speculate that the Oldest Dryas warming pulse originated from an increase in atmospheric water-vapor production by half-precession forcing in the tropics. The major thermohaline switch near the Oldest Dryas/Bolling transition then couldhave triggered another increase in tropical water-vapor production to near-interglacial values.


In many advanced democracies the major political parties have been disrupted either by the rise of new (populist) parties or by hostile takeovers. There is no shortage of plausible explanations: the incomplete recovery from the Great Recession, the impacts of globalization on local economies, and the rise of immigration may each have important roles. In this paper we argue that immigration attitudes have had a powerful impact on the strategic environment of political parties and leaders. While immigration attitudes may be substantially anchored in broader social attitudes, short run economic forces have played an important role in the recent emergence of immigration as a political issue. We show, based on evidence from a comparative study conducted by YouGov in Spring of 2015, that immigration attitudes had, by that time, driven a wedge between the major parties – those that regularly play a role in government – and their supporters. This "immigration gap" opened up enormous space for new political movements to form, either inside existing parties or outside. We suggest that the potential for this kind of destabilization of existing parties or party systems has probably been present for years and that it is rooted both in effects of the long term movement toward global and regional markets, as well as in the effects of shorter term responses to the Great Recession and its prolonged aftermath.


PURPOSE
Our purpose was to determine the utility of functional MR imaging in conjunction with a word-generation paradigm in the assessment of language lateralization.

METHODS
Functional MR imaging and Wada testing for language lateralization was performed in patients with complex partial seizures during the performance of word-generation tasks. A language lateralization quotient was calculated from the number of activated pixels in the right and left hemispheres. A language laterality score was derived from the Wada results as the percentage of correct responses during right internal carotid artery injection minus the percentage of correct responses during left internal carotid injection. A correlation coefficient between the functional MR imaging results and the Wada language laterality scores was calculated.

RESULTS
In 13 patients, hemispheric dominance based on Wada testing was confirmed by functional MR imaging during silent word generation. The Wada laterality scores varied from 100 to -100 and the functional MR imaging scores varied from 100 to -10. The language lateralization scores determined by functional MR imaging correlated significantly with the language lateralization scores derived from Wada testing.

CONCLUSION
Functional MR imaging performed during word generation is an accurate method for lateralizing language function in patients with complex partial epilepsy.


Context: Resting heart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of the modulation of autonomic nervous system (ANS) at rest. Increased HRV achieved by the exercise is good for the cardiovascular health. However, prospective studies with comparison of the effects of yogic exercises and those of other endurance exercises like walking, running, and swimming on resting HRV are conspicuous by their absence. Aims: Study was designed to assess and compare the effects of yogic training and swimming on resting HRV in normal healthy young volunteers. Settings and Design: Study was conducted in Department of Physiology in a medical college. Study design was prospective randomized comparative trial. Subjects and Methods: One hundred sedentary volunteers were randomly ascribed to either yoga or swimming group. Baseline recordings of digital electrocardiogram were done for all the subjects in cohorts of 10. After yoga training and swimming for 12 weeks, evaluation for resting HRV was done again. Statistical Analysis Used: Percentage change for each parameter with yoga and swimming was compared using unpaired t-test for data with normal distribution and using Mann-Whitney U test for data without normal distribution. Results: Most of the HRV parameters improved statistically significantly by both modalities of exercise. However, some of the HRV parameters showed statistically better improvement with yoga as compared to swimming. Conclusion: Practicing yoga seems to be the mode of exercise with better improvement in autonomic functions as suggested by resting HRV.


Continuing in the tradition of the bestselling first edition, this book examines networked surveillance video solutions. It provides the latest details on industry hardware, software, and networking capabilities of the latest cameras and DVRs. It addresses in full detail updated specifications on MPEG-4 and other digital video formats, resolution advantages of analog v. digital, intelligent video capabilities, frame rate control, and indoor/outdoor installations factors. New chapters include cloud computing, standards, and thermal cameras.


Loading conditions and complex geometry have led the cylinder heads to become the most challenging parts of diesel engines. One of the most important durability problems in diesel engines is due to the cracks valves bridge area. The purpose of this study is a thermo-mechanical analysis of cylinder heads of diesel engines using a two-layer viscoplasticity model. In this article, mechanical properties of A356.0 alloy, obtained by tensile tests at 25 and 200°C. The results of the thermo-mechanical analysis indicated that the maximum temperature and stress occurred in the valves bridge. The results of the finite element analysis of cylinder heads correspond with the simulation results, carried out by researchers.


A pulsed master oscillator power amplifier system is constructed using a double-cladding polarized Yb-doped fiber and an all-fiber Q-switched narrow-linewidth pulsed laser used as seed laser. This system has a high repetition rate and provides a nanosecond pulsed laser with a narrow linewidth and linear polarization. Moreover, it generates amplified radiation with up to 14 W of average power, narrow linewidth (full-width at half-maximum is smaller than 0.12 nm), linear polarization at 1 080-nm wavelength, repetition rate of 51 kHz, and pulse duration of approximately 50 ns. Based on this pulsed amplified radiation, 3.5 W of green laser, with an optical-to-optical efficiency of 27.3%, is obtained via single-pass frequency doubling using a noncritical phase matching KTP crystal.


Membrane-based capacitive deionization (MCDI) is a promising method for desalination that is expected to alleviate the problem of water shortage. Typical CDI processes show limited efficiency in salt removal and experimental results suggest that an improvement in electrode materials could be the cornerstone of MCDI. In this study, bimetallic metal–organic frameworks (BMOFs) have been used as precursors to develop porous carbons for MCDI electrodes. BMOFs are a unique class of MOFs that possess two types of metal ions with properties dependent on the ratio of the metal ions. In our work, we have synthesized a series of BMOFs with different molar ratios of Zn and Co based on ZIF-8 and ZIF-67. By controlling the molar ratio between Zn and Co, we are able to synthesize BMOF-derived porous carbons with different particle sizes and graphitization degrees. Furthermore, the porous carbon derived from a BMOF of Zn : Co = 3 : 1 exhibits a superior salt removal capacity of 45.62 mg g−1 in a 750 mg L−1 NaCl solution at 1.4 V. We attribute this performance to the large ion-accessible surface area and improved electrical conductivity of the carbon derived from the BMOF.


Auxin is a plant hormone, which mainly includes indole acetic acid (IAA). The study was designed to evaluate and compare different techniques used to check the purity of IAA produced by Phanerochaete chrysosporium. Colorimetric method was used for the qualitative and quantitative determination of crude IAA. Partial purification of IAA was carried out by silica gel column chromatography. UV-Visible spectrophotometric analysis revealed the high similarity of the purified compound with standard IAA. Besides having a comparable UVVisible spectrum, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis showed two peaks, which also confirmed the presence of IAA. Thus the article describes efficient production of IAA by Phanerochaete chrysosporium and explores laboratory level experiment design to produce such bioactive compound with different methods to check its purity, which is simple, accurate and rapid to be employed for screening of new compounds.


BACKGROUND
It has been suggested that omega 3 (W3, n-3 or omega-3) fats from oily fish and plants are beneficial to health.

OBJECTIVES
To assess whether dietary or supplemental omega 3 fatty acids alter total mortality, cardiovascular events or cancers using both RCT and cohort studies.

SEARCH STRATEGY
Five databases including CENTRAL, MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched to February 2002. No language restrictions were applied. Bibliographies were checked and authors contacted.

SELECTION CRITERIA
RCTs were included where omega 3 intake or advice was randomly allocated and unconfounded, and study duration was at least six months. Cohorts were included where a cohort was followed up for at least six months and omega 3 intake estimated.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Studies were assessed for inclusion, data extracted and quality assessed independently in duplicate. Random effects meta-analysis was performed separately for RCT and cohort data.

MAIN RESULTS
Forty eight randomised controlled trials (36,913 participants) and 41 cohort analyses were included. Pooled trial results did not show a reduction in the risk of total mortality or combined cardiovascular events in those taking additional omega 3 fats (with significant statistical heterogeneity). Sensitivity analysis, retaining only studies at low risk of bias, reduced heterogeneity and again suggested no significant effect of omega 3 fats. Restricting analysis to trials increasing fish-based omega 3 fats, or those increasing short chain omega 3s, did not suggest significant effects on mortality or cardiovascular events in either group. Subgroup analysis by dietary advice or supplementation, baseline risk of CVD or omega 3 dose suggested no clear effects of these factors on primary outcomes. Neither RCTs nor cohorts suggested increased relative risk of cancers with higher omega 3 intake but estimates were imprecise so a clinically important effect could not be excluded.

REVIEWERS' CONCLUSIONS
It is not clear that dietary or supplemental omega 3 fats alter total mortality, combined cardiovascular events or cancers in people with, or at high risk of, cardiovascular disease or in the general population. There is no evidence we should advise people to stop taking rich sources of omega 3 fats, but further high quality trials are needed to confirm suggestions of a protective effect of omega 3 fats on cardiovascular health. There is no clear evidence that omega 3 fats differ in effectiveness according to fish or plant sources, dietary or supplemental sources, dose or presence of placebo.


Are civil wars partly caused by low economic growth? And do democratic institutions attenuate the impact of low growth on the likelihood of civil war? Our approach to answering these questions exploits that international commodity prices have a significant effect on income growth in Sub-Saharan African countries. We show that lower income growth makes civil war more likely in non-democracies. This effect is significantly weaker in democracies. So much so, that we do not find a link between growth and civil war in countries with democratic institutions. Our results therefore point to an interaction between economic and institutional causes of civil war.


How do structural market conditions affect people's media consumption over time? This article examines the evolution of Chinese pirate film consumption from the mid-1980s to 2005 as a structurational process, highlights its different mechanisms (as compared to those of legitimate cultural markets), and teases out an unconventional path to broadening the scope of societal tastes in culture. The research reveals that, in a structural context consisting of a giant piracy market, lacking advertising or aggregated consumer information, consumers developed "movie talk" from the grassroots. The media environment comprised solely of movie talk guides people's consumption of films toward a heterogeneous choice pattern. The noncentralized, unquantifiable, and performative features of movie talk that may contribute to such an effect are discussed herein.


This final article is part of the trilogy presenting a possible integration of Schema Therapy (ST) and Cognitive Therapy (CT) in Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) treatment. It aims at describing how experiential and cognitive based acceptance techniques might be applied to treat this psychopathological condition. In the first article published in this special issue (Luppino et al., 2018) we reported the main data supporting the role of proximal psychological determinants in the genesis and maintenance of the obsessive symptomatology, highlighting the role of deontological guilt and disgust, and of the Not Just Right Experience. According to these, we described the internal profile of the disorder as conceptualized by Mancini's (2018) cognitive model. In the second manuscript (Tenore et al., 2018) we proposed a conceptualization of OCD, in terms of schemas and modes (as proposed by ST), integrating it with the previously described cognitive model. In agreement with these two articles, the aim of this work is to explain how experiential and cognitive techniques can be integrated to explain obsessive functioning and to achieve a successful treatment. We first describe emotion focused-experiential procedures derived from the ST framework, specifically focusing on imagery techniques, such as diagnostic imagery, rescripting and Healthy Adult imagery. Secondly we explain how chairwork can be applied to change obsessive dysfunctional schema modes. Finally, we focus on cognitive based acceptance intervention aimed at reducing the typical feelings of deontological guilt and disgust, two core emotions in OCD. In the conclusion we briefly resume the major aspects proposed in the three articles, and we present some potential further applications of a joined approach applied to other psychopathological conditions.


Despite the steady decline in birth rate in Taiwan, the number of special education children continues to increase, especially after the implementation of the Early Childhood Education and Care Act in 2012. The most significant increase was seen with placing special education preschoolers in inclusion classrooms. In particular, the number of students receiving itinerant services has grown the most dramatically, accompanied by a decrease in the number of students receiving special education programs delivered in regular classrooms. However, almost half of the counties and cities in Taiwan failed to deliver itinerant services to half of the special education students in their jurisdictions, which signals a shortage of special education support for regular early childhood teachers. The lack of clear guidelines in the current policies for preschool inclusion placement has also led to the neglect of special education inclusion students right to appropriate education. Responding suggestions are
discussed.


Purpose: The aim of this study is to compare the nutritional status of male volunteer donors with professional donors who donate blood very frequently. Design: The sample of the study included 120 volunteer and 120 professional blood donors. The sample was taken from a leading blood bank in Alexandria using a systematic random sampling technique. Data were collected on socioeconomic characteristics, dietary intake and frequency of blood donation. Height and weight were measured and BMI was calculated. Blood samples were taken for hematological and biochemical measurements. Findings:Professional frequent donors were of limited education, low income and came from large families. They were anemic (65.5%) and underweight (32.5%). Their energy, protein and iron intake was inadequate. The better nourished firsttime volunteer donors were less anemic (15.5%) and were overweight (20.8%) or Obese (14.2%).Anemia was hypochromic microcytic characterized by depressed hematological indicators. Frequent blood donation and anemia were associated with lower blood glucose and cholesterol and elevated triglyceride levels. Value: The study points out the high prevalence of malnutrition and anemia among frequent professional blood donors and the need for their nutritional monitoring and supplementation.