Human islet research is providing new insights into human islet biology and diabetes, using islets isolated at multiple US centers from donors with varying characteristics. This creates challenges for understanding, interpreting, and integrating research findings from the many laboratories that use these islets. In what is, to our knowledge, the first standardized assessment of human islet preparations from multiple isolation centers, we measured insulin secretion from 202 preparations isolated at 15 centers over 11 years and noted five distinct patterns of insulin secretion. Approximately three quarters were appropriately responsive to stimuli, but one quarter were dysfunctional, with unstable basal insulin secretion and/or an impairment in stimulated insulin secretion. Importantly, the patterns of insulin secretion by responsive human islet preparations (stable Baseline and Fold stimulation of insulin secretion) isolated at different centers were similar and improved slightly over the years studied. When all preparations studied were considered, basal and stimulated insulin secretion did not correlate with isolation center, biological differences of the islet donor, or differences in isolation, such as Cold Ischemia Time. Dysfunctional islet preparations could not be predicted from the information provided by the isolation center and had altered expression of genes encoding components of the glucose-sensing pathway, but not of insulin production or cell death. These results indicate that insulin secretion by most preparations from multiple centers is similar but that in vitro responsiveness of human islets cannot be predicted, necessitating preexperimental human islet assessment. These results should be considered when one is designing, interpreting, and integrating experiments using human islets.


Recent research on democratization has examined the relationship between exposure to information communication technology (ICT) and democratization. Supporters of the positive influence of ICT believe that it can further democratization by providing an alternative source of information and by helping activists organize against an authoritarian regime. However, cases where authoritarian governments have prevented successful democratic transition despite the use of ICT by the opposition challenge claims ICT promotes democracy. What is especially problematic for proponents of the democratizing influence of ICT are cases where a relatively unrestricted ICT coexists with an authoritarian regime. In other words, even when governments allow a "free" internet, ICT still has a minimal effect. Why? One, ICT does not always succeed in organizing protests against the regime because of the high level of coercive capacity and/or elite cohesion of the authoritarian regime, enabling leaders to resist pressure to democratize. Second, ICT will only have a limited impact if the local opposition forces are weak. Third, even if ICT helps facilitate mass mobilization, the resulting activities are often insufficient to bring about full democratization because of structural and institutional barriers to democratization. In this article, I test these hypotheses by explaining the cases of Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, both countries with authoritarian governments and relatively free access to ICT.


We analysed location priming effects, and thus the ability to integrate visual information across subsequent trials in the three studies presented in the following chapters.
Based on previous findings in healthy subjects priming effects occur under conditions that require no attentional shifts in-between subsequent trials, i.e. with the subject's fixation maintained and the search displays presented at retinotopically equal locations with respect to the fixation cross (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1996; Geyer, Krummenacher, & Muller, 2007). In study 1 we tested whether location-based priming effects would outlive spatial shifts of attention in healthy subjects. The basic assumption, derived from Pisella and Mattingley´s (2004) account was they would, and that the outliving would be based on intact spatial remapping mechanisms operating in healthy subjects along with attention shifts. The aim of study 1 in view of further investigations in patients, i.e. in studies 2 and 3 was to test the suitability of the priming paradigm to serve our purpose to investigate spatial remapping abilities, and furthermore, in patients, purported deficits.
To test whether priming effects would outlive saccadic shifts of overt attention, subjects had to re-fixate the fixation cross in turns on the left and on the right side of the monitor between subsequent trials. In two separate experiments priming effects were measured at post-saccadically retinotopic and spatiotopic locations, respectively, and compared to effects in a control experiment requiring no attention shifts. The experiments were also applied in study 2. To test whether priming effects would outlive covert shifts of attention subjects´ attention was distracted between subsequent trials while their fixation was maintained. In two separate experiments priming effects were measured after exogenous and endogenous distraction, respectively, and compared to a control experiment without distraction. The experiments were also applied in study 3. The presence of priming effects despite interfering attention shifts could be taken as evidence that processes that integrate visual information along with attention shifts, i.e. spatial remapping mechanisms, operate flawlessly in healthy subjects.
The aim of study 2 was to test whether the parietal cortex provides the neural correlate of spatial remapping as assumed by Pisella and Mattingley (2004). To that end, we tested whether spatial remapping deficits would occur after saccadic shifts of overt attention in patients with right parietal lesions. Deficits were expected to be indicated by altered or disturbed priming effects in those patients as compared to priming effects in healthy control subjects and furthermore, in patients with right-hemispheric lesions not involving the parietal lobe. Latter patients (without parietal lesions) were tested, to control for and differentiate between deficits occurring more generally after right-hemispheric damages and specific deficits occurring after right parietal damages. Moreover, given the crucial role of priming for visual search (Chun & Nakayama, 2000) disturbed priming as an indicator of deficient spatial remapping would provide support for the assumption made by Pisella and Mattingley (2004) that spatial remapping deficits contribute to visual search impairments as they are often observed in patients with right parietal lesions.
The aim of study 3 was to test the model's assumption that spatial remapping is required after spatial shifts of covert attention. Again, we compared priming effects of patients with right parietal lesions to those of patients with right-hemispheric lesions without parietal involvement, and healthy subjects. We expected priming effects to be disturbed in patients with right parietal lesions provided that covert attention shifts induce spatial remapping requirements, and that the anatomical site of spatial remapping mechanisms operating to integrate visual information across spatial shifts of covert attention is located in the parietal lobe.


From cool allegory to haughty beauty, images of women have appeared on paper money across the world for almost 200 years. These images are carefully chosen to convey messages appropriate to a particular time and place. Proud Britannias and crowned monarchs, glamour girls and cotton-pickers have all been summoned to proclaim the wealth of a bank, the power of a state or the glory of a nation. The ways in which female figures on mass-produced objects both reflect and reinforce our conflicting perceptions of women and their place in society, is explored in this title. Virginia Hewitt is also co-author of "As Good as Gold: 300 Years of British Bank Note Design".


There is much more to Dodge v. Ford Motor Company than meets the eye. Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting. But Dodge is a part of the corporate law canon because it is about much more than this. This essays shows that what the Michigan Supreme Court did was actually an elegant solution to a complex legal and policy issue. The history of case and the parties also shows how many prominent aspects of corporate law and practice have long and under-appreciated histories. Henry Ford failed twice as an entrepreneur before finding success with the Ford Motor Company. His failures, which he blamed on meddling investors, presaged not only his conflict with the Dodges, but also show the importance of allocating and exercising control rights deftly. The history demonstrates how modern techniques for allocating control rights separately from economic rights would have helped the parties avoid costly and acrimonious litigation. Perhaps most interestingly, however, the back-story of the case shows that it is not clear at all that the parties wanted to avoid litigation. Both the Dodges and Henry Ford used the legal process as a tool in what was at base a business dispute. To paraphrase von Clauswitz, litigation is business by other means. The history of this case provides a prototypical example and also shows an example of how courts can resolve disputes well in these cases. This essay also shows how practices common today in venture capital transactions, corporate reorganizations, and other areas of corporate law and practice appear vividly in the back-story of this case. Many seemingly new ideas are not, and examining their historical roots can help us better understand them and their place in our modern understanding of corporate law.


The influence of information technology (IT) exceeds in providing financial and operational support to organizations.ITis being used to facilitate customer and supplier involvement indesigningspecialized product offerings, implementing process improvements, enhancing manufacturing flexibility, and controlling manufacturing operations. Together, these advances areenabling firmsto not only customize their product offerings (i.e. mass customization) and market themat prices close to thosequoted by traditional mass producers but also contribute to organizational performance (OP).Organizational performance (OP) is the extent to which a firm fulfills its market and financial goals. Whilemuch research on mass customization has been reported in the literature, empirical studies investigating the impacts of IT on creating cooperative and integrative relationships with customers and suppliers and the impacts of these relationships on the level of mass customizationand organizational performance aresparse and represent a missing link in manufacturing research. The contributions of this study include supply chain relationship in SMEs andLEs, mass customization, and organizational performance.Using data collected from 220 manufacturers, this studyfinds that large firms (LEs) have higher levels of cooperative relationships with suppliers and customers and enjoy higher levels of mass customizationand organizational performance than small and medium size firms (SMEs).


Analysis of the recent pandemic (H1N1) 2009 (pH1N1) virus indicates a probable origin in pigs. However, it was not reported in pigs prior to its detection in humans. Several cases of pH1N1 virus infections in animals have been reported, mainly in pigs but also in other animals including turkeys. Occasionally, pigs have been infected following exposure to pH1N1 infected humans. In pigs, a subclinical course was common and when clinical signs were seen (coughing, fever) they were generally mild. Presently, the clinical impact of pH1N1virus on the EU pig population is considered minimal. In poultry, outbreaks of pH1N1 have been reported only in turkey breeder flocks. So far, there is no evidence that pH1N1 virus is able to spread horizontally among turkeys. Awareness should be raised about the risk of infecting breeder turkeys with pH1N1 virus during artificial insemination. To date, no infection of wild birds with pH1N1 virus has been reported. From an animal health perspective, no specific disease control measures are considered necessary. Vaccines based on the pH1N1 virus appear to induce protection in swine similar to that induced by the existing swine influenza virus (SIV) vaccines. Such vaccines efficiently prevent disease by reducing virus replication in the lungs. However, voluntary vaccination of swine with these vaccines has not halted the circulation of SIV in swine. There is no urgency for vaccination of pigs against pH1N1 virus. Currently, no vaccines against H1 viruses for poultry are available but at present, there is no need to vaccinate poultry against pH1N1 virus. Monitoring of circulating influenza viruses in swine and poultry populations should be instigated to monitor the evolution of the pH1N1 virus including changes in virulence. © European Food Safety Authority, 2010


Key Points European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) is now the main item on Europe's security agenda because of a focus on establishing a crisis management force capable of acting independently of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Although transatlantic policies will be colored by issues such as the Kyoto treaty, missile defenses, and relations with Russia, ESDP is likely to dominate defense debates as the European Union (EU) tries to meet the Helsinki Headline Goal of developing a corps-sized expeditionary force that can deploy military forces capable of ensuring diverse tasks and establish new political and military structures that will enable the EU to guide and direct such operations. To meet the Helsinki Goal, the European Union must surmount three problems: ensuring sufficient forces, building confidence in the quality of their performance, and finding substitutes for critical NATO assets. The approaches that EU members take to these tasks may indicate how serious they are about meeting the goal in fact as well as in name. As the Bush administration develops policies on transatlantic relations, it should move away from efforts to restrict EU development. The United States will benefit if EU states are more able and, even more importantly, willing to take responsibility for solving security problems without relying on U.S. involvement. The extent of European dependence on the United States poses a greater threat to U.S. interests than what might develop if the European Union becomes a more independent actor in defense policy. ********** Building a capacity for "the eventual framing of a common defense policy which might in time lead to common defense" has been a major European Union (EU) preoccupation since the Maastricht Treaty in 1991. The Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 defined the area for defense coordination as "humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping tasks, and tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking" (known as the Petersburg Tasks). The project gained momentum after Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain and President Jacques Chirac of France agreed at St. Malo in 1998 that "the Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises." The St. Malo summit agreement committed the two leading military powers in Europe to building capabilities and institutional structures for a common defense. Britain's acceptance of an EU defense role facilitated the consolidation of effort between the European Union and Western European Union. By gaining an agreement that European defense efforts will remain intergovernmental--that is, coordinated among members in the Council of Ministers rather than the supranational European Commission--Britain was assured that it could prevent the European Union from making decisions over British objections. The United States also benefited from the St. Malo approach because it kept decisions (which require unanimous approval by member states) at a level that allows considerable U.S. influence. That agreement preserves America's ability to work bilaterally as well as multilaterally to ensure that EU choices are consistent with U.S. national interests. An enormous amount of the work needed to translate the St. Malo agreement into practice has been done in the European Union and in national planning staffs to advance the prospects for EU defense policy and capabilities. However, more work has been done to create an organizational structure than to improve forces to carry out the mandate. New Structures The European Union has agreed on a decisionmaking process and created the necessary supporting staffs. It established the post of High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy to advise the council on defense issues and gave the job to Javier Solana, former Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). …


We present quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of increasing the Early Retirement Age (ERA) on older workers' retirement decisions. The analysis is based on social security reforms in Austria in 2000 and 2004, and administrative data allows us to distinguish between pension claims and job exits. Using a Regression Kink Design, we estimate that, within a birth cohort, a 1.0 year increase in the ERA leads to a 0.4 year increase in the average job exiting age and a 0.5 year increase in the average pension claiming age. When the ERA increases, many older workers remain in their jobs longer.


In this thesis, the structure from motion problem for calibrated scenes containing independently moving objects (IMO) has been studied. For this purpose, the overall reconstruction process is partitioned into various stages. The first stage deals with the fundamental problem of estimating structure and motion by using only two views. This process starts with finding some salient features using a sub-pixel version of the Harris corner detector. The features are matched by the help of a similarity and neighborhood-based matcher. In order to reject the outliers and estimate the fundamental matrix of the two images, a robust estimation is performed via RANSAC and normalized 8-point algorithms. Two-view reconstruction is finalized by decomposing the fundamental matrix and estimating the 3D-point locations as a result of triangulation. The second stage of the reconstruction is the generalization of the two-view algorithm for the N-view case. This goal is accomplished by first reconstructing an initial framework from the first stage and then relating the additional views by finding correspondences between the new view and already reconstructed views. In this way, 3D-2D projection pairs are determined and the projection matrix of this new view is estimated by using a robust procedure. The final section deals with scenes containing IMOs. In order to reject the correspondences due to moving objects, parallax-based rigidity constraint is used. In utilizing this constraint, an automatic background pixel selection algorithm is developed and an IMO rejection algorithm is also proposed. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared against that of a robust outlier rejection algorithm and found to be quite promising in terms of execution time vs. reconstruction quality.


The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic has rapidly transformed the whole world and forced us to look through comorbid diseases and risk factors from a different perspective. COVID‐19 shows some inherent risk factors like cardiovascular comorbidities independent from age, gender, and geographic location. One of the most peculiar features of the COVID‐19 pandemic is that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 respiratory infections disproportionately impact patients with hypertension, diabetes, and other cardiovascular comorbidities rather than those with allergic respiratory diseases and immune‐compromised conditions. Migraine is a complex neuro‐vasculo‐inflammatory disorder that is also packed frequently with certain medical conditions including vascular disorders, hypertension, allergic diseases such as asthma and systemic inflammatory disorders. Accordingly, 2 different questions arise during the pandemic: (1) Do share comorbidities of cardiovascular diseases and hypertension increase the risk of symptomatic COVID‐19 for migraine patients? (2) Do comorbid allergic and atopic diseases, including asthma act as opposite influencers alongside with female gender? This paper focuses on the co‐existence of comorbidities of COVID‐19, in comparison with migraine, based on a wide clinical dataset and available reports. Discussed mechanisms include potential strategic roles of angiotensin‐converting enzyme 2, angiotensin‐II, and nucleotide oligomerization domain‐like receptor family, pyrin domain containing 3 inflammasome, playing remarkable parts in the pathogenesis of COVID‐19 and migraine. There are also some clues about the importance of endothelial and pericyte dysfunction and neuroinflammation in COVID‐19 infection, related to complications and survival of the patients. The large epidemiological studies as well as basic research, focusing on migraine patients with COVID‐19 will clarify these vital questions during the upcoming periods.


Employment of di-2-pyridyl ketone and poly-carboxylates in CuII chemistry afforded four complex hydrogen-bonded frameworks, one one-dimensional (1D), one 2D and three 3D coordination polymers. Di-2-pyridyl ketone underwent several metal-assisted transformations to yield three CuII structural units which, in combination with the poly-carboxylate anions of the trimesic, isophthalic, 5-hydroxy-isophthalic and pyromellitic acids, provided access to extended frameworks by dative or hydrogen bonds. All nine complex frameworks were realized in terms of their topological analysis. The 3D and the 2D polymers consisted of [Cu2] dimers and were found to be dominated by ferromagnetic interactions. The origin of the ferromagnetic coupling was attributed to the counter complementarity of the simultaneous alkoxo/syn,syn-carboxylate bridges within the dimers.


The principle of the novel static polarization wind imaging interferometer (NSPWII) [Acta Opt. Sin. 28, 700 (2008)] based on a pyramid prism is described. Since the measured wind velocity and temperature depend on the transmittance of the pyramid prism, the deflection of the prism introduced by vibration would produce some measuring errors. In this paper, with an assumed deflection case, we analyze its influence on the derived wind velocity and temperature theoretically. The relative error of the inversion temperature and variety of the inversion velocity as they changed with the deflection angle are discussed.


A group of type III bursts in solar radio bursts, observed with the 2.6–3.8 GHz spectrometer of the Beijing Astronomical Observatory on April 15 1998, is selected and analyzed. The type III bursts are associated with a large number of spikes, which have been recorded by the spectrometer at high temporal resolution (8 ms). We report the observational characteristics of the type III bursts and the corresponding spikes including duration, frequency bandwidth, drift rate and quasi-periodicity. Afterwards we discuss the space scale, the brightness temperature and the magnetic field strength at the emission source region. Finally we investigate the mechanism which would cause the quasi-periodicity of the type III bursts and the short time scale of the spikes theoretically. It is suggested that the type III bursts and the spikes differ clearly between their source regions in the space scale, the brightness temperature, the magnetic field strength and the magnetic structure.


A control-oriented model of a typical four-speed automatic transmission is developed by using the bond graph modeling method. The planetary gear set model utilizes the Karnopp friction model for hydraulic and one-way clutches, in order to provide a favorable computing efficiency. The full gear set model is reduced for various phases of the park/ reverse and park/drive engagements. The reduced gear set models and linearized torque converter model are used as a basis for an algebraic analysis of the engagement dynamics. The analysis is originally conducted for the basic case of fully applied brake, and it is then extended by an analysis of the influence of wheel dynamics in the brake-off case. The analysis results are verified by computer simulations and experiments.


In her essay "Re-Interpreting Hermeneutics: U-topias from the Continent," Donatella Di Cesare poses a decisive question, more important than ever for philosophy today: if philosophy were to become a koine, what price would it pay? In line with Gianni Vattimo's thesis that hermeneutics has become a common idiom of Western culture in the past few decades, what is the price that hermeneutics has already paid?1 The need for precision is something that touches upon philosophy at its core, linking this current endeavor to the larger narrative of philosophy that includes, of course, its own dissolution and recovery. Such endeavors are not new, but are bound by a sort of kindredness, a family resemblance that allows for originality even when philosophy skulks beneath the weight of conceptual hand-me-downs that too often result in imitation or irony rather than a genuine reappraisal of philosophy's role in human life. And this is the trouble with the koine and our recovery from it: the way to resuscitate philosophy as hermeneutics, and hermeneutics as philosophy, may rest not in the confines of philosophy alone, but in its connection to everyday lifein the very heart of the chaotic rabble from which philosophy all too often attempts an escape. Di Cesare's question not only points to the possible advantages of this reappraisal, but more importantly, to the dire consequences of not justifying the relevance of philosophy's role in contemporary life. I want to take the occasion of this response to focus specifically on the vital task confronting philosophy in the face of everyday wisdom that has traditionally been known as "common sense" (sensus communis). I will reflect specifically on Luigi Pareyson's 1971 work, Truth and Interpretation, and in particular the work's final chapter where he demonstrates the necessary connection between philosophy (and especifically, philosophical hermeneutics) and everyday experience, human pursuits, and even to the legacy of the great Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico.2 Di Cesare has, through the lens of Heidelberg, effectively shed light upon the Italian style of hermeneutics through a critique of its misplaced nihilism, focusing specifically on the importance of "understanding" and the experience of "being struck by something" (Anstoss) characteristic of Gadamer's hermeneutics. In response, I would like to drag the debate back into the dark, foggy confines of Turin in order to push a more Pareysonian reading of the task that confronts a philosophical hermeneutics based not on understanding and "being struck," but on interpretation and kindredness (congenialita). My contention is that if hermeneutics begins with understanding rather than interpretation, it can never become a philosophical hermeneutics that submits its own presuppositions to critique. Faced with the koine of hermeneutics, how can we make hermeneutics, now become common idiom, philosophical again? Is the koine of interpretation the inevitable result of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics and its claim to the universality of interpretative understanding? Rather than claim the primacy of understanding, I will argue that Pareyson's reflection on common sense emphasizes the circular reciprocity between philosophy and experience, that is, between interpretation and understanding. Gadamer on the Sensus Communis Gadamer's outline of the guiding concepts of the human sciences in the first section of Truth and Method serves not only to differentiate these sciences from the natural sciences, but also to prepare the reader for the type of truth that Gadamer sees, in the broadest sense, as hermeneutic. His work in the first section, then, is not merely a preface to the core of his argument; it is, more importantly, the conceptuai groundwork that will make any application of such a truth to the human sciences possible. In Part I of Truth and Method ("The Question of Truth as it Emerges in the Experience of Art"), Gadamer aims to explain the mode of being of the work of art and introduce the concept of Erfahrung as a replacement for Erlebnis to describe the aesthetic experience, and consequently, the nature of truth in the human sciences. …


Many on a daily basis use time based alarms. Spatial alarms extend the very same idea to location-based triggers, which are fired whenever a mobile user enters the spatial region of the location alarms. Spatial alarms provide critical capabilities for many mobile location based applications ranging from personal assistants, inventory tracking to industrial safety warning systems. In this paper we present an energy efficient framework for processing spatial alarms on mobile clients, while maintaining low computation and storage costs. Our approach to spatial alarms provides two systematic methods for minimizing energy consumption on mobile clients. First, we introduce the concept of safe distance to reduce the number of unnecessary mobile client wakeups for spatial alarm evaluation. This mechanism not only reduces the amount of unnecessary processing of the spatial alarms but also significantly minimizes the energy consumption on mobile clients, compared to periodic wakeups, while preserving the accuracy and timeliness of the spatial alarms. Second, we develop a suite of techniques for minimizing the number of location triggers to be checked for spatial alarm evaluation upon each wakeup. This further reduces the computation cost and energy expenditure on mobile clients. We evaluate the scalability and energy-efficiency of our approach using a road network simulator. Our client based framework for spatial alarms offers significant improvements on both system performance and battery lifetime of mobile clients, while maintaining high quality of spatial alarm services, especially compared to the conventional approach of periodic wakeup and checking all alarms upon wakeup.


Gait recognition is a technique that identifies or verifies people based upon their walking patterns. Smartwatches, which contain an accelerometer and gyroscope have recently been used to implement gait-based biometrics. However, this prior work relied upon data from single sessions for both training and testing, which is not realistic and can lead to overly optimistic performance results. This paper aims to remedy some of these problems by training and evaluating a smartwatch-based biometric system on data obtained from different days. Also, it proposes an advanced feature selection approach to identify optimal features for each user. Two experiments are presented under three different scenarios: Same-Day, Mixed-Day, and Cross-Day. Competitive results were achieved (best EERs of 0.13% and 3.12% by using the Same day data for accelerometer and gyroscope respectively and 0.69% and 7.97% for the same sensors under the Cross-Day evaluation. The results show that the technology is sufficiently capable and the signals captured sufficiently discriminative to be useful in performing gait recognition.


While much of the commentary on obstacles to stem cell research focuses on patents, material transfer agreements (MTAs) governed by state contract and property law present equal if not greater challenges to researchers. This Article argues that the life sciences in general, and the stem cell field in particular, are increasingly employing a lease-license model - similar to that used by the software industry - such that end users only license and/or lease both patent rights and the biological materials themselves. The absence of a sale allows owners of patents and physical biological materials to impose greater restrictions on end users than the owners could impose in the context of even a conditioned sale. At the same time, owners can often weave together their intellectual property rights and physical property rights in contracts such as MTAs to allow each type of property right to reinforce the other. However, the control afforded by such a model can be used for both positive as well as negative purposes. The Article uses the case of the control of stem cell patents and stem cell lines by Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and its affiliate, the WiCell Research Institute, to illuminate this new trend in the life sciences. While the current stem cell research landscape is dominated by WARF's position, the Article offers ways that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and other public entities may use de facto research use exemptions to patent infringement to evade some of the reach of WARF's patents. The Article concludes by recommending that CIRM, and other stem cell research facilitators, initiate a comprehensive title chain plan that would govern biological materials from their original collection from donors through the materials' transfer first to non-commercial research entities and ultimately to commercialization firms. In this way, CIRM could play a role in encouraging positive uses of the lease-license model that could reduce the confusion and conflict currently surrounding the ownership, control, and use of biological materials in the life sciences.


The twentieth century witnessed a profound shift in both socialism and social reform. In the early 1900s, social reform seemed to offer a veritable religion of redemption, but by the century's end, while socialism remained a vibrant force in European society, a culture of extreme individualism and consumption all but squeezed the welfare state out of existence. Documenting this historic change, After Progress: European Socialism and American Social Reform in the 20th Century is the first truly comprehensive look at the course of social reform and Western politics after Communism, brilliantly explained by a major social thinker of our time. Norman Birnbaum traces in fascinating detail the forces that have shifted social concern over the course of a century, from the devastation of two world wars, to the post-war golden age of economic growth and democracy, to the ever-increasing dominance of the market. He makes sense of the historical trends that have created a climate in which politicians proclaim the arrival of a new historical epoch but rarely offer solutions to social problems that get beyond cost-benefit analyses. Birnbaum goes one step further and proposes a strategy for bringing the market back into balance with the social needs of the people. He advocates a reconsideration of the notion of work, urges that market forces be brought under political control, and stresses the need for education that teaches the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Both a sweeping historical survey and a sharp-edged commentary on current political posturing, After Progress examines the state of social reform past, present and future.


Since the Chinese Leader Den Xiaoping approved the formation of the 14 new special economic zones in addition to the original four (Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen) in 1984, the socialist modernization in China has entered into a new era of growth (Anyansi-Archibong 1989). Ji (1991) noted that in the Eighth Five-Year Plan proposal and the 10-Year Program for Social and Economic Development, the Central Committee of the China's People's Congress emphasized that maintenance of economic reform and an open door policy were mandatory. More than 200 new laws, regulations, decrees, and rules related to foreign investment have been implemented to govern a wide range of affairs including direct investment, new technology transfer, business negotiated contracts, taxation, land control, foreign-exchange control, etc., in the 10-year period ending in 1991. No doubt the Chinese Government intended to provide a stable and yet exciting investment environment. Giant multi-national corporations which have prominent brand name products and huge financial resources, such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, and Philip Morris, were able to negotiate very favorable joint venture contracts to set up their operations to take advantage of the stable environment, comparative low labor costs, and huge domestic market potential in the People's Republic of China (PRC) (Hong Kong Economic Times 1993, 1994) However, small business entrepreneurs in the U.S. have encountered problems when they have attempted to negotiate business contracts with their counterparts in the PRC because of their lack of competitive advantage as compared to the giant corporations on the one hand and their poor understanding of Chinese negotiation styles on the other. Firms headquartered in Hong Kong have been major players in opening of the China market. However, there is comparatively little literature concerning Sino-Hong Kong negotiations. A report showed that from 1979 to 1991, 62.2 percent of all foreign investments in the PRC were generated by Hong Kong and Macau (Hong Kong Economics Journal 1993). Therefore, we believed a study of Hong Kong businessmen's approach to Chinese negotiations was needed. This article reveals the findings of research related to negotiation between Hong Kong entrepreneurs and their Chinese counterparts in order to provide executives of small businesses some distinctive insights to negotiation styles in the PRC. Literature Review Pye (1982) found that Chinese negotiation styles were different from those in the West and proposed some tactics to deal with these cultural differences. Mente (1992) noted that the foreign team should prepare for a variety of stress-causing situations because the Chinese intentionally did not give direct answers. Gordon (1986) said that Chinese negotiators were famous for their shrewdness. Their representatives were experienced in the art of posturing, pricing, psychology, and the effective use of timing. They operated by knowing their adversary's strengths and weaknesses well enough to get maximum advantage. Lee and Lo (1988) surveyed 136 American firms who were members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, and they concluded that "relationship" was important. Persuasion was primarily accomplished behind the scenes in order to have a successful negotiation with the PRC. Stewart and Keown (1989) conducted research on 50 traders with China from a variety of western firms in Hong Kong. They concluded that these traders should expect to spend vast amounts of time elaborating on technical features and negotiating price and should be expected to make sudden demands or changes apparently to put the Western teams at a disadvantage. In addition, they noted that non-personal factors such as product and financing were more important than the personal and cultural factors. However, recent research by Leung and Wong (1993) on 150 firms in Hong Kong revealed that "personal relationship" or "guanxi" was of paramount importance when a firm participated in trade with China. …


Background Long non-coding RNA of myocardial infarction associated transcript (lncRNA-MIAT) has a reported role in microvascular dysfunction. This study aimed to investigate the role of lncRNA-MIAT and its effects on transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) signaling in patients with diabetic retinopathy and in ARPE-19 adult retinal pigment epithelial cells in vitro. Material/Methods Study participants provided plasma samples and included patients with non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (n=52), patients with diabetes without diabetic retinopathy (n=63), and healthy controls (n=56). Plasma levels of lncRNA-MIAT and TGF-β1 were detected by quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), respectively. Pearson correlation analysis was performed on the plasma data, and the diagnostic relevance of plasma levels of lncRNA-MIAT for diabetic retinopathy was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. Cells of the human retinal pigment epithelial cell line, ARPE-19, were cultured in high glucose with construction and transfection of a MIAT expression plasmid vector. Viability of ARPE-19 cells was detected by the MTT assay and Western blot measured the expression levels of TGF-β1. Results Plasma levels of lncRNA-MIAT were significantly increased in patients with diabetic retinopathy compared with patients with diabetes without diabetic retinopathy and with healthy controls. ARPE-19 cells cultured in a high glucose environment showed reduced cell viability and upregulation of lncRNA-MIAT expression. Conclusions Increased plasma levels of lncRNA-MIAT were significantly associated with the presence of diabetic retinopathy, and increased expression of lncRNA-MIAT reduced the viability of ARPE-19 cells in vitro by upregulating TGF-β1 signaling.


The susceptibility of individuals to obesity has been reported in many developed countries with predisposition of humans to obesity associated with high calorie diets and unhealthy lifestyles. Obesity may closely be involved in cell suicide in various organ diseases with the importance of accelerated aging that requires early intervention with drug therapy to prevent diseases such as non alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) that has increased in children and reached to approx. 40% of the global population. Obesity is induced by various diets and lifestyle factors such as stress, anxiety and depression which are important to consider with the global increase in obesity and are possibly linked to the rise in individuals with brain disorders that involve neurodegeneration. Xenobiotics such as the endocrine disruptor chemicals that have increased in the environment in various developed countries lead to various chronic endocrine diseases as populations divert towards unhealthy diets and lifestyles with induction of NAFLD and obesity. The amount and nature of food intake that improves and increases liver lipid and xenobiotic metabolism in obese individuals have become important to decrease the risk for increased adiposity in man. High fibre or protein diets that contain leucine may improve liver glucose, lipid and xenobiotic metabolism and require further investigation with xenobiotics such as endocrine disruptors involved in appetite dysregulation and metabolic disorders in developed countries. The use of anti-obese drugs that reduce food intake and improve hypercholesterolemia and cardiovascular disease has been assessed in obesity with drug therapy closely involved either in the prevention or induction of NAFLD and obesity in man.


When courts decide cases, the decisions make law because they become precedent that binds future courts under the doctrine of stare decisis. This article argues that some principles governing judicial lawmaking are functionally constitutional principles because they go to the validity of a particular attempt at judicial lawmaking (just as the constitutional principles governing legislative lawmaking determine the validity of lawmaking by legislatures). Because even poorly reasoned judicial decisions can still be effective lawmaking acts, it is important to distinguish between constitutional and non-constitutional principles and arguments. While a non-constitutional principle can be a basis for examining the wisdom or merits of a particular lawmaking act, only constitutional principles can assess whether the lawmaking act is valid.Although the constitutional principles governing judicial lawmaking are not necessarily set forth in a written constitution, this article articulates a methodology for identifying the fundamental constitutional limits on judicial lawmaking. It then explains how this constitutionalist approach fits with various strands of legal theory, including formalism, realism, positivism, legal process, and critical legal studies. Finally, this article begins to examine the implicit constitution that governs judicial lawmaking in the federal system, explicating some of the key issues that define its contours and that can shape future development and critique.


Perhaps the largest debate in network Ecology, the emergence of structural patterns stands out as a multifaceted problem. To the methodological challenges –pattern identification, statistical significance– one has to add the relationship between candidate architectures and dynamical performance. In the case of mutualistic communities, the debate revolves mostly around two structural arrangements (nestedness and modularity) and two requirements for persistence, namely feasibility and stability. So far, it is clear that the former is strongly related to nestedness, while the latter is enhanced in modular systems. Adding to this, it has recently become clear that nestedness and modularity are antagonistic patterns –or, at the very least, their coexistence in a single system is problematic. In this context, this work addresses the role of the interaction architecture in the emergence and maintenance of both properties, introducing the idea of hybrid architectural configurations. Specifically, we examine in-block nestedness, compound by disjoint subsets of species (modules) with internal nested organization, and prove that it grants a balanced trade-off between stability and feasibility. Remarkably, we analyze a large amount of empirical communities and find that a relevant fraction of them exhibits a marked in-block nested structure. We elaborate on the implications of these results, arguing that they provide new insights about the key properties ruling community assembly.


The neuropathological findings in six patients who developed neurological signs after the onset of "septic shock" caused by Gram-negative septicaemia are described. The changes in the brains were characteristic of acute haemorrhagic leucoencephalitis, and there was evidence, particularly in the kidneys, of disseminated intravascular coagulation with tubular necrosis and, in some, appearances indistinguishable from membrano-proliferative glomerulonephritis. It is agreed that acute haemorrhagic leucoencephalitis is another manifestation of a generalised Shwartzman reaction, and it is suggested that activation of complement is the final common pathway that produces tissue damage in the brain and kidney.


The Corinthian correspondence reveals that the apostle Paul was deeply engaged in polemics with his opponents and critics in Corinth, who questioned his modus operandi and challenged his apostolic authority. Paul's response, which was both ironical and paradoxical, was based on his own understanding of the cross of Christ, in which divine power was demonstrated through apparent human weakness. This thesis attempts to show that Paul's response, which involved many kinds of "body language", was nothing less than a drastic inversion of the social ethos of his time. Unlike his Corinthian critics who apparently followed the current Greco-Roman ethos, Paul was operating on a world view which was diametrically opposed to it. This thesis consists of three Parts. Part I is on crucifixion in antiquity, which was a most powerful "body language", compared with the ancient idea of "noble death" in both Greco-Roman and Maccabean traditions, according to which the crucifixion of Jesus could only be a most vivid and terrifying symbol of extreme human suffering, weakness, degradation and shame. Part II is devoted to the study of Greco-Roman rhetoric, with special emphasis on the orator's delivery as "body language". Paul's intention to invert the current social ethos was again clear when he deliberately chose "to proclaim the gospel...not with eloquent wisdom" (1 Cor. 1.17), and that he came to Corinth "in weakness and in fear and in much trembling" (2.3). Part in is a study of the peristasis catalogue (or the list of tribulations), especially its positive use by philosophers and moral teachers in the Greco-Roman tradition, to demonstrate manly virtues such as courage and endurance. However, this was only one side of the coin. "The other side of the coin" showed that the peristasis catalogue, especially through the "body language" it contained, could also signify shame, humiliation, and human degradation rather than manly virtues. The thesis takes the view that it was this negative side that Paul had in mind when he provided lists of his own suffering. In the end, the crucifixion of Christ, Paul's unconventional manner of proclamation and his view on peristasis, all combined to turn the current Greco-Roman social ethos up-side-down. And "body language" has provided the vital link between the three: crucifixion, rhetoric and peristasis.


In livestock species, a rapid growth in high-throughput omics data has accelerated the pace of studies that target to dissect economically important traits to provide better quality animal products to consumers. In pig industries, young boars are generally castrated to remove boar taint, a phenotypic and inheritable trait well-known by an abnormally bad smell and taste in pork meat derived from some uncastrated male pigs. Existence of porcine reference genome made possible to catalogue genome-wide QTLs, candidate genes and biomarkers in associations with boar taint and other industrially significant traits in pigs. The aim of this paper to review the contribution of bioinformatics resources and omics technology in boar taint related studies. This paper also provides concise details about state-of-the-art sequencing technology.


Cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) are electrochemical techniques to characterize reversibility of electron transfer and impedance at the electrode-solution interface, respectively. Reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and conductive polymer PEDOT:PSS are often used to enhance electron transfer at electrode surface. This chapter provides a step-by-step methodology of CV and EIS conducted on screen-printed carbon electrode (SPCE) modified with rGO-PEDOT:PSS and brief discussion on the CV and EIS results. The CV of rGO-PEDOT:PSS shows a reversible electron transfer in comparison to SPCE modified with PEDOT:PSS. For EIS, rGO-PEDOT:PSS was found to reduce the Warburg impedance, suggesting enhanced electrode conductivity. These results suggest that rGO-PEDOT:PSS is a suitable material for biosensing purpose.


'Nine Walks' is a body of work resulting from my engagement with the Media Arts Research Walking Group at Sheffield Hallam University who are exploring the role of walking in as a social, developmental and production space for the creative arts. / My participation in the walking group is an extension of my investigation of the journey as a creative, conceptual and contemplative space for photography which in turn reflects an interest in the role of the accident, instinct and intuition and the 'found subject' in the creation of photographic work in a personal response to place and space. / The walks provided both a formal structure and a creative time and space within which instinct and intuition could freely operate. Themes, subjects and relationships suggested themselves during the walks or while editing and sequencing images. / The results are part mapping, part an exploration of location and part an expression of an interior narrative. / This work contributes to an ongoing inquiry into the journey as a creative, conceptual and contemplative strategy for the production of photography. / The resulting images have been used to create photo-sequences and a short video piece that will form the basis of a future publication (published Winter 2015 - Spring 2016) exploring the creation of visual narrative through juxtaposition, sequence, design and materials. / 'Nine Walks' was presented at 'Where Next - Steps Towards the Future of Walking Arts' An International Symposium held at Falmouth University in April 2015.


Purpose: India's Polytechnics are a fundamental part of its (vocational) education and training system but are largely ignored in VET research. Understanding the status quo and potential of India's (vocational) education landscape requires an understanding of the role played by the Polytechnics, particularly in view of the Indian government's major efforts to implement a functioning VET system. Because little is known about the function and embeddedness of the Polytechnics the article therefore aims to examine how polytechnics are embedded in the Indian education and training system and what functions they perform for the actors within the system.Methods: The article begins by describing the systemic embeddedness of Polytechnics in the Indian education system and demonstrates their role and function in relation to a range of stakeholder groups (individuals, employers, society and the economy). Problem-centred face-to-face interviews Interviews were conducted with the principals of 14 Polytechnics in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai, among other cities. Semi-standardized interview guidelines were used to conduct the interviews. The interviews were analyzed by qualitative content analysis.Results: The results show that polytechnics perform various functions in the Indian education system. The Polytechnics teach both theoretical and practical skills, which is a special feature of the Indian system at this level. Qualification takes place at an intermediate level, which means that graduates have the opportunity to enter a company after graduation, where they can hold a kind of supervisor position. It is precisely these employees that are increasingly being sought by Indian companies. In addition, polytechnics provide a pathway to higher education, so students can use the opportunity to switch to a college once they have their diploma at the Polytechnic. Furthermore, the Polytechnics offers its graduates a good opportunity to become self-employed through the wide range of specializations and the practice-oriented skill development. In addition, the Polytechnics offer numerous opportunities to promote socially disadvantaged groups. Conclusion: The survey findings illustrate the importance of Polytechnics to the various stakeholder groups, demonstrating their "multidimensional bridging function" within the Indian education and training system.


In 1997 the Department of Health announced their intention to reform the Mental Health
Act 1983. Since publishing the first Green Paper in 1999, the proposed reforms have
received major criticisms from virtually all 'stakeholders' in mental health care. This PhD
offers a genealogy of (bio)political action during the process of reforming the Act. The
focus is on the period from August 2002 to September 2003, with particular reference to
the activities of self proclaimed 'service users' and 'survivors' in two independent protest
groups: 'NO Force' and . Protest Against the Bill'.
The methodological premise (chapters two and three) is born from something of a lacuna
in post-Foucauldian governmentality studies which, although well posited, offer little in
the way of advancing a genealogy of governmental contestation. My focus is twofold.
Firstly, by advancing a (post)Foucauldian understanding of resistance - which, with
respect to power, 'always comes first' (Deleuze 1988) - I aim to develop the relationship
between 'biosociality' or 'life politics' (Rabinow 1996, Rose 200 I) and mental health
law. Secondly, I seek to draw on the correlate of governmentality: agonism, taking it into
governmental contestations in broadly 'liberal democratic' societies by focusing on what
Tully (1999) calls "the free agonic activities of participation" (171). Together these
advance my focus on agonistic 'games of truth' enacted during the reform process.
This general methodological premise underpins my three major fieldwork chapters.
Chapter four focuses on agonism in actu through the process of demonstrating (in the
form of a protest march undertaken by No Force). Beginning with, as Barry (200 I) notes,
the techniques and technologies "of telling and witnessing the truth" (176), I move
through, and beyond Foucault, with respect to the importance of mediatisation and
circulation in agonistic truth telling today. Chapter five expands on my understanding of
life politics to offer a genealogy of the imbrications between human rights (law) and
mental health (law) during the reforms. Here recourse to (human) rights is posited neither
simply as a (dangerous) 'empty category' nor exemplary of an expanding 'vital life' but
having a distinct genealogy emerging from problematisations in mental health law.
Finally, in chapter six, I tum to the use of testimony from 'psychiatric survivors'. This
form of biopolitical truth speech is not only illuminating of agonistic games of truth but
also of that which is other to it (those who do not speak) and that what falls at the limits
ofbiopolitical truth speech (for those who cannot speak).


Abstract 1819

The DNA mismatch repair (MMR) pathway is responsible for repair of spontaneous errors arising during DNA replication, thus maintaining the integrity of the genome. DNA MMR is frequently dysregulated in some forms of leukemia. We and others have shown that microsatellite instability, the hallmark of dysfunctional DNA MMR, is present in up to 90% of therapy-related myeloid leukemia, 50% of relapsed myeloid leukemia, but is rarely seen in de novo leukemia. Paradoxically, functional MMR mediates the cytotoxicity of certain chemotherapeutic agents, particularly methylating agents and the nucleoside analogue 6-thioguanine (6-TG), and dysregulation of the MMR pathway confers tolerance to these agents. In the present study, using cell lines harboring defects in MMR components, we show that MMR status also modulates response to the nucleoside analogue cytarabine (Ara-C) and to other therapeutic nucleoside analogues commonly used in the treatment of leukemia. We initially determined gene and protein expression levels of the major MMR components (MSH2, MSH3, MSH6, MLH1 and PMS2) in two psuedo-isogenic cell line pairs, and investigated the ability of cell extracts to bind to defined mismatches in electrophoretic mobility shift assays. In cytotoxicity assays, the cell lines HL-60R (which demonstrates 200-fold overexpression of MSH3) and MT-1 (which lacks functional MSH6 due to bi-allelic gene mutation) were tolerant to the cytotoxic effects of a methylating agent, methylnitrosourea (MNU), and 6-TG, relative to their respective parental cell lines. We also generated a panel of fully isogenic MMR-defective cell lines in which either MSH2, MSH3 or MSH6 protein was reduced to almost negligible levels using short hairpin RNA-mediated gene knockdown. Knockdown of either MSH2 or MSH6 conferred tolerance to the killing effects of MNU and 6-TG by virtue of loss of MutSα activity (a heterodimer of MSH2 and MSH6 responsible for recognition of base:base mispairs), whereas knockdown of MSH3 did not affect cellular response to these agents. Consistent with a role for MMR in affecting cellular response to other nucleoside analogues used to treat leukemia, the cell lines also displayed differential toxicity to the killing effects of Ara-C, clofarabine, cladribine and fludarabine compared to their MMR-proficient parental counterparts, however the exact response was dependent on the specific nature of the MMR defect. Cell lines with a reduction in MSH2 protein demonstrated hypersensitivity to cytotoxicity induced by these nucleoside analogues. Conversely, MSH3 knockdown conferred resistance to the cytotoxic effects of these agents. These data suggest that DNA MMR can affect response to nucleoside analogues via multiple mechanisms, and may also involve interaction of DNA MMR components with other DNA repair pathways. One possibility is that these agents induce base lesions in DNA recognized by DNA MMR components. Consistent with this model, we have shown that Ara-C induces DNA polymerase slippage in vitro , generating a substrate potentially recognized by MutSβ (a heterodimer of MSH2 and MSH3 responsible for recognition of small insertions and extrahelical loops). Furthermore, we have also shown that Ara-C is mutagenic at the thymidine kinase and hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase loci in the TK6 cell line. Taken together, these data suggest that cellular MMR status affects response to nucleoside analogues and furthermore, the specific nature of the defect is important in determining the exact response. These findings have implications for the use of nucleoside analogues in the treatment of cancers where MMR dysfunction has been identified to occur with high frequency, such as therapy-related and relapsed acute myeloid leukemia.

Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.


Abstract A neutronic feasibility study was performed for a 600-MW(thermal) gas-cooled fast reactor fuel cycle through recycling simulations. Sensitivity calculations were also performed for various physics design parameters such as the plutonium volume fraction of the fuel, fuel burnup, core material volume fraction, and the power density. The results showed that the initial breeding gain of –0.04755 is sufficient to sustain the recycling of the actinides with a reasonable amount of natural uranium and plutonium feed material. The comparative calculation on the core power density has shown that it is feasible to reduce the amount of minor actinides and spent fuel in the high power density core (98.4 MW/m3) compared to the reference core (58.2 MW/m3). It was also found that the fuel cycle cost is saved by 0.4 mills/kW·h for the high power density core compared to the reference core.


This paper addresses the influence of deteriorating structural system characteristics on the value of structural health monitoring (SHM) before its implementation. The value of SHM is quantified as the difference between the life cycle benefits with and without SHM for a structural system subjected to fatigue deterioration. The results indicate that the value of SHM is strongly influenced by the component reliability, comparably moderately by the resistance correlation and conditional moderately by the deterioration correlation between the structural components. doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/308


Compliance monitoring is an integral part of law and policy implementation. A lack of compliance monitoring for the Endangered Species Act (ESA), driven in part by resource limitations, may be undercutting efforts to recover threatened and endangered species. Here we evaluate the utility of freely available satellite and aerial imagery as a cost-efficient component of ESA compliance monitoring. Using data on actions authorized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) under section 7 of the ESA, we show that approximately 40% of actions can be found in remotely sensed imagery. Some types of actions, such as residential and commercial development, roadwork, and forestry, show substantially higher observability. Based on our results and the requirements of compliance monitoring, we recommend FWS standardize data collection requirements for consultations; record and publish terms and conditions of consultations; and encourage their staff to use technology such as remotely sensed data as a central part of their workflow for implementing the ESA.


Countries around the globe are responding to the pressures of globalisation, standardisation, accountability and market rationality. In curriculum reform, we theorise these pressures as neoliberal cosmopolitanism because they are intended to promote a new type of entrepreneurial citizen that navigates an increasingly interconnected global community. However, there is resistance to these pressures by educators who promote a global community based upon principles of critical democracy and multiculturalism. Because public schools are a powerful regulatory force in society, this curriculum struggle between neoliberal and democratic intents is increasingly significant. It is a struggle that defines the size, scope and qualities of our future global community. We used principles of critical discourse analysis to examine brief examples in two countries, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. Our examination illustrates how, although these countries have very different contexts, curriculum often sends competing messages related to neoliberal and democratic intents. Our analysis has implications for curriculum reform and changing understandings of our global community.


Abstract Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate a candidate haemostat (WoundStat™), down-selected from previous in vitro studies, for efficacy as a potential skin decontaminant against the chemical warfare agent pinacoyl methylfluorophosphonate (Soman, GD) using an in vivo pig model. Materials and methods: An area of approximately 3 cm2 was dermatomed from the dorsal ear skin to a nominal depth of 100 µm. A discrete droplet of 14C-GD (300 µg kg−1) was applied directly onto the surface of the damaged skin at the centre of the dosing site. Animals assigned to the treatment group were given a 2 g application of WoundStat™ 30 s after GD challenge. The decontamination efficacy of WoundStat™ against GD was measured by the direct quantification of the distribution of 14C-GD, as well as routine determination of whole blood cholinesterase and physiological measurements. Results: WoundStat™ sequestered approximately 70% of the applied 14C-GD. Internal radiolabel recovery from treated animals was approximately 1% of the initially applied dose. Whole blood cholinesterase levels decreased to less than 10% of the original value by 15 min post WoundStat™ treatment and gradually decreased until the onset of apnoea or until euthanasia. All treated animals showed signs of GD intoxication that could be grouped into early (mastication, fasciculations and tremor), intermediate (miosis, salivation and nasal secretions) and late onset (lacrimation, body spasm and apnoea) effects. Two of the six WoundStat™ treated animals survived the study duration. Conclusions: The current study has shown that the use of WoundStat™ as a decontaminant on damaged pig ear skin was unable to fully protect against GD toxicity. Importantly, the findings indicate that the use of WoundStat™ in GD contaminated wounds would not exacerbate GD toxicity. These data suggest that absorbent haemostatic products may offer some limited functionality as wound decontaminants.


We synthesize literature on the spatial aspects of coupled natural-human systems across a variety of natural resource contexts and introduce a framework that can be used to compare modeling approaches and findings across applications. The important components of these systems include spatial heterogeneity in benefits and costs and connectivity of the network. One or more of these components is necessary for spatial policies to be the efficient solution. We highlight the importance of these components by identifying their role in previous work that shows that spatial differentiation in policy implementation is optimal. We pay particular attention to research highlighting the difference between spatial and aspatial policies and the presence of optimal boundary solutions. Finally, we develop a stylized metapopulation model to relate findings in the spatial bioeconomic literature to the theory of second best in public economics and suggest areas for future analysis.


A number of frameworks for capturing insight phenomena have been proposed, but there are no executable models of knowledge-lean insight problem-solving. Here, an ACT-R model is presented for the nine-dot problem, which implements the Criterion for Satisfactory Progress theory for this problem. The model has two main components: a mechanism for searching for possible moves in the problem representation, and a mechanism for expanding the search to discover new moves not immediately available in the initial problem representation. The model accounts for key phenomena including impasse, fixation and the 'aha' moment, as well as predicting the relative difficulty of different problem variants.


Female soccer athletes are at greater risk for anterior cruciate ligament injury compared with males. Risk factors include altered landing biomechanics and diminished core neuromuscular control, measured using advanced laboratory equipment. There is a need for a clinical measure of core muscle function to better understand kinesiological factors within a female, youth athlete population. The purpose was to determine whether sagittal and frontal plane kinematics during a jump landing task differ based on levels of core endurance in female youth soccer athletes. Participants included healthy, female soccer athletes ages 8–17 years (M = 12.3 years, SD = 2.4 years), height (M = 1.52 m, SD = 0.16 m), and body mass (M = 46.0 kg, SD = 13.7 kg). A quantitative data descriptive laboratory study in a field-based setting was conducted. Sixty-six participants performed the side plank test for time to failure. Three-dimensional biomechanics were collected, and initial contact and peak trunk, hip, and knee joint angles were identified during the deceleration phase of a double-leg jump-landing task. The group with the lowest side plank time displayed decreased knee flexion at initial contact (p = .02) and peak knee flexion (p = .03) and decreased peak hip flexion angles (p = .01). There were no additional statistically significant differences among groups (p > .05). Female youth soccer athletes who have reduced core endurance also display decreased hip and knee flexion, which may place them at risk for anterior cruciate ligament injury.


Since as far back antiquity, philosophers have been inquiring into
the nature of conflict. One of the most prominent ideas to have dominated this
inquiry is that conflict represents an undesirable part of life, one that
stands opposed to the ideals of harmony, co-operation and consensus. Nietzsche,
however, rejects this position, proffering various arguments for why we ought
to positively value conflict. Yet Nietzsche's stance is by no means unambigious.
Commentators sharply disagree regarding the specific form of conflict to which
his endorsement refers. His "hard" readers present him as a warmonger, who
predominantly advocates unmeasured, destructive types of struggle (e.g. war).
Conversely, Nietzsche's "soft" readers claim that he exclusively promotes a
measured, agonal mode of struggle modelled on the non-violent contests (or
agons) that pervaded ancient Greek culture. I contend that both of these
readings are one-sided and require modification. Indeed, the thesis that this
dissertation defends is that Nietzsche promotes both measured and unmeasured
struggle in an entirely coherent manner. I further argue that commentators have
neglected the most significant form of conflict in Nietzsche's thought, which
is characterised by a combination of measured and unmeasured conflict.
This species of struggle is analogous to the biological process of digestion,
which simultaneously involves 1) a measured struggle to incorporate that which
is deemed serviceable to the organism, and 2) an unmeasured struggle to
eliminate material deemed redundant or harmful. This dualistic struggle is what
I term organisational conflict on account of the fact that both incorporation
and exclusion form part of a single overarching impetus to establish healthy
organisation.


Past research has linked adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to physical and mental health problems. Theoretical models imply that ACE exposure is not entirely random but that one type of ACE exposure (e.g., parental incarceration) may be related to increased risk for another type of ACE exposure (e.g., physical abuse); however, the empirical nature of ACE co-occurrence remains unclear. The aim of this study was to examine ACE co-occurrence in a pediatric sample (n = 672). Results indicated that certain types of ACEs do co-occur more often than other types and that a 3-factor solution best fit the data (Abuse, Household Dysfunction, and Mixed). The findings add to the understanding of ACEs and highlight the need to identify underlying common risk factors among specific adverse experiences.


Compression of frontal facial images is an appealing and important application. Recent work has shown that specially tailored algorithms for this task can lead to performance far exceeding JPEG2000. This letter proposes a novel such compression algorithm, exploiting our recently developed redundant tree-based wavelet transform. Originally meant for functions defined on graphs and cloud of points, this new transform has been shown to be highly effective as an image adaptive redundant and multi-scale decomposition. The key concept behind this method is reordering of the image pixels so as to form a highly smooth 1D signal that can be sparsified by a regular wavelet. In this work we bring this image adaptive transform to the realm of compression of aligned frontal facial images. Given a training set of such images, the transform is designed to best sparsify the whole set using a common feature-ordering. Our compression scheme consists of sparse coding using the transform, followed by entropy coding of the obtained coefficients. The inverse transform and a post-processing stage are used to decode the compressed image. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme and compare it to other competing algorithms.


The pace of current technological advancement is phenomenal. In the last few years we have seen the emergence of ever more sophisticated gaming technologies, rich, immersive virtual worlds and new social networking services that enable learners and teachers to connect and communicate in new ways. The pace of change looks set to continue as annual Horizon reports testify (http://www.nmc.org/horizon) and as encapsulated in the following quote from the NSF-report on cyberlearning:
Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real- time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content' (Borgeman et al., 2008: 7).
Clearly new technologies offer much in an educational context, with the promise of flexible, personalised and student-centred learning. Indeed research over the past few years, looking at learners' use of technologies, has given us a rich picture of how learners of all ages are appropriating new tools within their own context, mixing different applications for finding/managing information and for communicating with others (Sharpe and Beetham, 2010).
This paper explores the question: 'What is likely to be the impact of an increasingly 'open' technologically mediated learning environment on learning and teaching in the future? In a world where content and expertise is often free and where services are shifting to the 'cloud', what are the implications for education? Materials for the paper and the presentation at the conference will be made available via our Cloudworks site for learning and teaching (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/index.php/cloud/view/2695.html) along with a set of questions for consideration. The paper draws on research at the Open University, UK. In particular, our work on: – Learning Design (where we are developing tools and resources to help teachers design better learning experiences) – Open Educational Resources (through our OLnet initiative which provides a global research network for those interested in using Open Educational Resources).


While prejudice against Jews has been regarded as a real and ongoing category in Western culture, little attention has been paid to the myths of the 'Jews' and their impact in countries outside the West. My work draws on a wide variety of source material from the past two centuries to examine the images of the 'Jews' as constructed in China. However, my interest here does not lie in the determination of the boundary between the real and fictional aspects of these images. Rather, it lies in the implications associated with the 'Jew' as an 'other', which remains a distant mirror in the construction of the 'self ' amongst various social groups in modern China. In China, representations of the 'Jews' and Judaism are very complex. Although these representations seem to correspond to images of the 'Jews' in Europe, it would be superficial to reduce them to purely 'Western influence'. Representations of the 'Jews' have been endowed with indigenous meaning by modernizing elites since the late nineteenth-century. Unlike anti-Semites of Europe who used the language of Jews as the mark of their inferiority, in China the difference of the 'Jews' has been marked by their 'non-Chineseness'. By creating the 'Jews' as a homogenous group, which acts as a constitutive outsider which embodies all the negative, as well as positive qualities, which were feared or desired by various social groups in China, theses Chinese could thus identify themselves as a integrated reference group: a homogenous 'in-group'. They are thus able to project their own anxieties onto outsiders like the 'Jews'. In this respect, it corresponds to a widespread fear, as well as need of an 'other', which can be found in many cultures and societies. The present thesis does not, however, supply the final answer. It is meant to be a historical study in order to point out that the prejudice about the 'Jews' is not merely a 'western problem', it exists in China. It therefore opens a field for general and wider discussions, not only about the 'Jews', but also about other 'marginalised' groups, such as 'blacks' and 'homosexuals'.


The business model of traditional media has come under attack since the diffusion of the Internet. One of the latest disruption waves are mobile apps. In this paper, we analyze the effect a mobile app has on the lifetimes and lifetime values of customers of print media. For this purpose, we use subscription data and develop a model based on survival analysis that captures the interdependence between two content delivery channels, in our context the offline and the mobile channel. We apply our model to a large dataset received from a publisher who offers a newspaper in a print version and a version for a mobile app. The results suggest that there exists a complementary interdependence between these media, as having a subscription to one of them decreases the hazard to cancel a parallel subscription to the other one. Given this complementarity, we find that the mobile app increases the lifetimes and lifetime values of print customers and vice versa. We also analyze the attribution of these effects.


A considerable number of classical texts in aesthetics and cultural philosophy were originally published outside of the framework of institutionalized academic scholarship. One can begin the modern story with two loners, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, then continue with the Frankfurt School and end the short list with the French "wave" (Blanchot, Bataille). Contemporary aesthetics benefits also from the work of thinkers like Susan Sontag and Nicolas Bourriaud, who have a huge scholarly impact but who built their careers outside academia. We intend to 1) sketch out a short historical overview of the scholars within aesthetics who could be considered to have worked in the institutional margins, 2) ask if there may be a particular advantage to working that way, and 3) defend and develop a more conscious relationship toward academic margins: could we benefit from a more active relationship with this phenomenon? In arts this is commonplace, and concepts like "outsider art," "outlaw art," and "alternative art" are words that point to different spheres of work in a respectable manner. We may find value In using them to give the margins more institutional justification, which would, in the end, profit the whole institution. This is something we hope to see happen in aesthetics.


Shales are becoming the most important source of natural gas in North America, and replacement of coal by natural gas is reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality. Nevertheless, shale gas is facing strong opposition from environmental nongovernmental organizations. Although these organizations have greatly exaggerated the potential negative environmental impacts of shale gas and shale oil, methane leakage and contamination of groundwater and surface water by flowback and produced waters are serious concerns. These contamination pathways are not unique to shale gas and shale oil, and they are manageable.


Experiments at the LHC put much effort into knowing the uncertainty on the jet energy scale (JES) at high pT because it is the largest source of systematic uncertainty in many important analyses. One method for deriving the energy scale correction due to calorimeter response is the Missing ET Projection Fraction (MPF) technique, which utilizes balance in transverse momentum between photon and jet in direct photon events. The momentum range of this method increases with the number of γ + jet events recorded. Multijet events can be used to check consistency of the MPF response at high momentum scales, taking advantage of the large QCD cross-section. This thesis explores pT balance with multijets using a Monte-Carlo based, flavor-corrected MPF response at ATLAS. In addition, the very small W+jets background to γ+jet selection is considered.


L.E.A. Rowson was always known as Tim to his family, friends and colleagues alike. He was a veterinary surgeon who made important contributions to research in reproductive physiology in farm animals and its application to animal breeding. In particular, he was a pioneer of artificial insemination (AI) and embryo transfer, which have become two of the most important technologies for livestock improvement in modern times.He was appointed Director of the first AI centre for cattle breeding in Britain, established at Cambridge in 1942, and played a leading role in the application and rapid growth of this technology. In 1952 he contributed to the development of successful methods for the freezing and long-term storage of bull semen at very low temperatures. This had far-reaching consequences for the future of AI and cattle breeding worldwide.For thirty years he also worked at the Animal Research Station in Cambridge on methods for embryo transfer in sheep and cattle and their use in research and breeding. This culminated in the 1970s with the development of effective methods for collection and transfer of cattle embryos by non-surgical means. The birth of the first calf after transfer of a deepfrozen embryo in 1973 was another landmark, and these advances led quite quickly to the commercial application of embryo transfer in cattle breeding.Tim Rowson is generally regarded as the founder of embryo transfer in farm animals, but important contributions were made by many collaborators. He always considered that he was privileged during his early years to have worked with Dr John (later Sir John) Hammond, F.R.S., who maintained that the function of applied science was to synthesize the detailed knowledge gained from fundamental research into a constructive whole so that it could be used for a specific purpose. Tim was a true disciple of this philosophy and always tried to relate a fundamental approach to a practical outcome.


Over 2,000 teachers in the state of Washington received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices across the 2008–09 and 2009–10 school years. We link data on these RIF notices to an administrative data set that includes student, teacher, school, and district variables to determine the factors that predict the likelihood of a teacher receiving a RIF notice. Not surprisingly, we find that a teacher's seniority is the strongest predictor, but we also find (all else equal) that teachers with master's degrees and those credentialed in the high-need areas of math, science, and special education were less likely to receive a RIF notice. Value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, which can be calculated for a subset of the teachers, were not correlated with the probability of receiving a RIF notice. Finally, simulations suggest that a very different group of teachers would be targeted for layoffs under an effectiveness-based layoff scenario than under the seniority-driven system that exists today.


In this paper, I examine the interrelationship between borderlands, food, and ways in which they perform as pedagogy. First, I define borderlands in relation to art. Second, I discuss food and borderlands as authenticity, hybridity, and race/body. Lastly, I examine various fields of pedagogy including public, border, and food pedagogy and consider how they relate to food. I suggest that the interrelationship between borderlands and food can be used as a pedagogical tool to teach and learn about liminality, tension, contradiction, and hybridity. The hybrid spaces of consumable borderlands challenge food purity and yield unexpected foods such as carne asada fries and hotdog tamales. An important concept of border pedagogy, borderlands can be employed to decenter, reterritorialize, remap and create new knowledge through food materials and processes. The entanglement of public, border, food pedagogy, and tamales is a complicated and dense process wherein knowledge collides with the in-between. Further, the knowledge connected to the experience of dialogue, making and eating food as borderlands enters a liminal space between knowing and not knowing and varies with each encounter.


Construction of refugees in news has been extensively researched. Less researched is the link between refugees and the construction of the receiving country's national identity. This discourse analysis of letters to the editor in Australia, Canada, and the United States found wide variance in the way refugees and refugee policy were linked to the construction of national identity. Letters were selected if they referred to refugees and fell within a few news cycles of the respective national holidays. These tight criteria yielded a sample manifesting multiple discourses including the nation as protector, the nation as normative leader, the nation among nations, and the nation as a site of individual identity construction.


This special issue of SIGIR Forum marks the 40th anniversary of the ACM SIGIR Conference by showcasing papers selected for the ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award from the years 1978-2001. These papers document the history and evolution of IR research and practice, and illustrate the intellectual impact the SIGIR Conference has had over time. The ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award recognizes conference papers that have had a long-lasting influence on information retrieval research. When the award guidelines were created, eligible papers were identified as those that were published in a window of time 10 to 12 years prior to the year of the award. This meant that the first year this award was given, 2014, eligible papers came from the years 2002-2004. To identify papers published during the period 1978-2001 that might also be recognized with the Test of Time Award, a committee was created, which was led by Keith van Rijsbergen. Members of the committee were: Nicholas Belkin, Charlie Clarke, Susan Dumais, Norbert Fuhr, Donna Harman, Diane Kelly, Stephen Robertson, Stefan Rueger, Ian Ruthven, Tetsuya Sakai, Mark Sanderson, Ryen White, and Chengxiang Zhai. The committee used citation counts and other techniques to build a nomination pool. Nominations were also solicited from the community. In addition, a sub-committee was formed of people active in the 1980s to identify papers from the period 1978-1989 that should be recognized with the award. As a result of these processes, a nomination pool of papers was created and each paper in the pool was reviewed by a team of three committee members and assigned a grade. The 30 papers with the highest grades were selected to be recognized with an award. To commemorate the 1978-2001 ACM SIGIR Test of Time awardees, we invited a number of people from the SIGIR community to contribute write-ups of each paper. Each write-up consists of a summary of the paper, a description of the main contributions of the paper and commentary on why the paper is still useful. This special issue contains reprints of all the papers, with the exception of a few whose copyrights are not held by ACM (members of ACM can access these papers at the ACM Digital Library as part of the original conference proceedings). As members of the selection committee, we really enjoyed reading the older papers. The style was very different from todays SIGIR paper: the writing was simple and unpretentious, with an equal mix of creativity, rigor and openness. We encourage everyone to read at least a handful of these papers and to consider how things have changed, and if, and how, we might bring some of the positive qualities of these older papers back to the SIGIR program.


The contribution of foundation damping to offshore wind turbines (OWTs) is not well known, though researchers have back-calculated foundation damping from "rotor-stop" tests after estimating aerodynamic, hydrodynamic, and structural damping with numerical models. Because design guidelines do not currently recommend methods for determining foundation damping, it is typically neglected. This paper investigates the significance of foundation damping on monopilesupported OWTs subjected to extreme storm loading using a linear elastic two-dimensional finite element model. The effect of foundation damping primarily on the first natural frequency of the OWT was considered as OWT behavior is dominated by the first mode under storm loading. A simplified foundation model based on the soil-pile mudline stiffness matrix was used to represent the monopile, hydrodynamic effects were modeled via added hydrodynamic mass, and 1.00% Rayleigh structural damping was assumed. Hysteretic energy loss in the foundation was converted into a viscous, rotational dashpot at the mudline to represent foundation damping. Using the logarithmic decrement method on a finite element free vibration time history, 0.17% of critical damping was attributed to foundation damping. Stochastic time history analysis of extreme storm conditions indicated that mudline OWT foundation damping decreases the maximum and standard deviation of mudline moment by 8-9%.


Learn BIM the Revit WayRevit is Autodesk's industry-leading Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, and this Autodesk Official Training Guide thoroughly covers core Revit topics such as modeling, massing, sustainability, and more. It also brings you up to speed on advanced techniques such as using Revit in the cloud and how to go direct to fabrication.Organized by real-world workflows, this book covers the interface, templates, worksharing, modeling and massing, visualization techniques for different industries, sustainability, roofs and floors, stairs and railings, documentation, and much more.This Autodesk Official Training Guide teaches you how to use the leading BIM software and also serves as a study aid for Autodesk's Certified Associate and Certified Professional exams Organized according to actual workflows, the book begins with an explanation of key BIM concepts, familiarizes you with the interface, and then moves into actual application Covers modeling and massing, the Family Editor, visualization techniques for various industries, documentation, annotation and detailing, and how to work with complex walls, roofs, floors, stairs, and railings Companion website features before-and-after tutorial files, so readers can jump in at any point Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture helps you learn Revit in a context that makes real-world sense.


Abstract Nest boxes for American Kestrels (Falco sparverius) may alleviate local nest site limitation, but there is concern that periodically opening nest boxes or handling adults may negatively affect nesting success. I monitored 536 kestrel breeding attempts (≥1 egg laid) in about 100 nest boxes in northwestern New Jersey, 1995–2012. To study return rates, I opportunistically captured adults in nest boxes and marked them with U.S.G.S. leg bands and patagial tags. To examine possible effects of this disturbance, I compared nesting success (≥1 nestling surviving to banding age) of marked and unmarked adults. Nesting success was 67% for 270 unmarked pairs, 76% for 25 pairs with only the male marked, 82% for 206 pairs with only the female marked, and 91% for 35 pairs with both adults marked. This significant difference likely reflects differences in the probability of capture: successful attempts last longer and successful parents may be more attentive. To control for these correlations, I examined attempts for which the first disturbance was encountering an adult in the nest box; that bird either flushed from the nest box or was captured and marked. Abandonment was not significantly related to this initial disturbance: breeding attempts continued for 94.3% of attempts in which the male flushed, 93.1% for males handled, 93.7% for females flushed, and 93.2% for females handled. Nesting success also did not differ significantly among these four treatment groups. The timing of the first disturbance did not significantly affect abandonment; breeding attempts continued for 90% of attempts in which males were first disturbed (flushed or handled) during the laying period, 94% for males during incubation, 97% for females during laying, and 93% for females during incubation. Nesting success also was not significantly related to timing of the initial disturbance. Thus, it appears that both the intensity (handling or not) and timing of disturbance had no substantial effect on abandonment or nesting success for this population.


In this paper we describe a network for distributing personalized information within a pervasive university. We discuss the system architecture of our Bluetooth-based CampusNews-system, both, from the administrator and the user viewpoint. We furthermore present first statistical data about the usage of the partial installation at the Koblenz campus together with an outlook to future work.


Computer simulation is a well-established decision support tool in manufacturing industry. However, factors such as wrong conceptualisation, inefficient input data modelling, inadequate verification and validation, poorly planned experimentation and lengthy model documentation inhibit the rapid development and deployment of simulation models. A serious limitation among the above factors is inefficient data modelling. Typically, more than one third of project time is spent on identification, collection, validation and analysis of input data.This study investigated potential problems which influence inefficient data modelling. On the basis of a detailed analysis of data modelling problems, the study recommends a methodology to address many of these difficulties. The proposed methodology, discussed in this thesis, is called MMOD (Methodology for Modelling Of input Data). An activity module library and a reference data model, both developed using the IDEF family of constructs, are the core elements of the methodology. The methodology provides guidance on the best way of implementation and provide a tool kit to accelerate the data modelling exercise. It assists the modeller to generate a customised data model (entity model), according to the knowledge gained from the conceptualisation phase of the simulation project. The resulting customised data model can then be converted into a relational database which shows how the entities and relationships will be transformed into an actual database implementation. The application of the MMOD through simulation life cycle also enables the modeller to deal with important phases in the simulation project, such as system investigation, problems and objective definitions and the level of detail definitions. A sample production cell with different level of detail has been used to illustrate the use of the methodology. In addition, a number of useful methods of data collection and the benefits of using a MMOD approach to support these methods and data rationalisation which accelerates the data collection exercise are also covered. The aim of data rationalisation is to reduce the volume of input data needed by simulation models. This work develops two useful data rationalisation methods which accelerate the data collection exercise and reduce the model complexity. This work produced a novel approach to support input data modelling in simulation of manufacturing system. This method is particularly useful when the complex systems are modelled.


To determine whether root-to-shoot signalling of soil moisture heterogeneity depended on root distribution, wild-type (WT) and abscisic acid (ABA)-deficient (Az34) barley (Hordeum vulgare) plants were grown in split pots into which different numbers of seminal roots were inserted. After establishment, all plants received the same irrigation volumes, with one pot watered (w) and the other allowed to dry the soil (d), imposing three treatments (1 d: 3 w, 2 d: 2 w, 3 d: 1 w) that differed in the number of seminal roots exposed to drying soil. Root distribution did not affect leaf water relations and had no sustained effect on plant evapotranspiration (ET). In both genotypes, leaf elongation was less and leaf ABA concentrations were higher in plants with more roots in drying soil, with leaf ABA concentrations and water potentials 30% and 0.2 MPa higher, respectively, in WT plants. Whole-pot soil drying increased xylem ABA concentrations, but maximum values obtained when leaf growth had virtually ceased (100 nm in Az34, 330 nm in WT) had minimal effects (<40% leaf growth inhibition) when xylem supplied to detached shoots. Although ABA may not regulate leaf growth in vivo, genetic variation in foliar ABA concentration in the field may indicate different root distributions between upper (drier) and lower (wetter) soil layers.