Medical images are proliferating at an explosive pace, similar to other types of data in e-Science. Technological solutions are needed to enable machines to help researchers and physicians access and use these images optimally. While Semantic Web technologies are showing promise in tackling the information challenges in biomedicine, less attention is focused on leveraging similar technologies in imaging. We are developing methods and tools to enable the transparent discovery and use of large distributed collections of medical images in cyberspace as well as within hospital information systems. Our approach is to make the human and machine descriptions of image pixel content machine-accessible through annotation using ontologies. We created an ontology of image annotation and markup, specifying the entities and relations necessary to represent the semantics of medical image pixel content. We are creating a toolkit to collect the annotations directly from researchers and physicians as they view the images on medical imaging workstations. Image annotations, represented as instances in the ontology can be serialized to a variety of formats, enabling interoperability among a variety of systems that contain images: medical records systems, image archives in hospitals, and the Semantic Web. The ontology-based annotations will enable images to be related to non-image data having related semantics and relevance. Our ultimate goal is to enable semantic integration of images and all the related scientific data pertaining to their content so that researchers and physicians can have the best understanding of the biological and physiological significance of image content.


The CCAAT-binding factor is a heterooligomeric transcription factor that is evolutionarily conserved in eukaryotes. In yeast, the DNA-binding component that interacts with the CCAAT consensus sequence in promoters consists of the subunits termed Hap2p, Hap3p and Hap5p. In yeast and fungi, a fourth subunit, Hap4p, is required for regulating gene expression. The goal of this research is to understand the function of the Candida albicans CCAAT-binding factor and how it relates to virulence and pathogenicity. C. albicans is a human opportunistic pathogen responsible for a variety of mucosal and systemic infections that result in significant morbidity and mortality, particularly in immunosuppressed individuals. C. albicans responds to environmental changes by altering its morphology between the yeast and hyphal forms during infection, and the ability to transition between the two forms is required for virulence. We have previously demonstrated that C. albicans hap5Δ/hap5Δ mutants are defective in the yeast-to-hyphal transition in vitro under several conditions and become hyperfilamentous when deprived of glucose as a sole carbon source (Eukaryotic Cell 4:1662-1676, 2005). Moreover, the hap5Δ/hap5Δ mutant shows no CCAAT-binding activity, suggesting the lost of the CCAATbinding factor alters the ability of cells to undergo the normal yeast-to-hyphal transition. This research will show that the hap2Δ/hap2Δ mutant also abolishes DNA-binding activity and exhibits the same phenotypic deficiencies as hap5Δ/hap5Δ mutants. Two distinct functional homologs of S. cerevisiae Hap3p have been identified in C. albicans, designated Hap31p and Hap32p. These subunits form separate CCAAT-binding complexes with Hap2p/Hap5p. Hap31p is a member of the complex under iron replete conditions and Hap32 under low iron conditions. The Hap complex effects the regulation of CYC1 and COX5. Also three distinct homologs of S. cerevisiae Hap4p have been identified in C. albicans, designated Hap41p, Hap42p, and Hap43p. This dissertation is approved for Recommendation to the Graduate Council Dissertation Director:


Fifty years ago, there was 'A discussion on progress and needs of marine science' at the Royal Society [1]. George Deacon wrote in the Introduction (p. 286): 'A hundred years ago the Society often listened to papers about the ocean, but the rapid growth of science … has led to some neglect of large-scale natural processes'. Today, marine science is at the core of many of the most substantial challenges and opportunities facing society. The large-scale natural processes referred to by Deacon, encompassing physics, chemistry and biology, are being perturbed by anthropogenic inputs to the atmosphere, most notably carbon dioxide, and directly and indirectly into the ocean, with substances ranging from radioactive elements to nutrients to endocrine disrupters. Ocean resources are increasingly being exploited. Offshore oil and gas are resources of growing importance to many developing nations, while marine renewable energy is a small but likely to be significant aspect for many coastal communities. Questions over the exploitation of the ocean's living resources can lead to clashes between science and politics. In terms of climate change, we are presently performing a global experiment by putting large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. How the turbulent ocean and atmosphere will react to the resulting changes in radiative forcing and interact with land and ice forms are fascinating scientific problems of intrinsic interest but also with serious ramifications for mankind. Marine science is at the base of addressing these issues. Fundamental research is needed to deepen understanding of ocean processes, understanding that may enlarge or constrain the options for addressing the challenges facing society. What are the critical marine science issues that should be addressed in the next 20 years?


Note: Medical and scientific information provided and endorsed by the Australasian Menopause Society might not be relevant to a particular person's circumstances and should always be discussed with that person's own healthcare provider. This Information Sheet may contain copyright or otherwise protected material. Reproduction of this Information Sheet by Australasian Menopause Society Members and other health professionals for clinical practice is permissible. Any other use of this information (hardcopy and electronic versions) must be agreed to and approved by the Australasian Menopause Society. ID:2021-01-27 1 Information Sheet


Although there are as many answers to the question of how organizations can gain competitive advantage in today's global economy as there are books and experts, one lesson seems very clear: traditional answers and resources are no longer sufficient. This seminal book offers not only an answer regarding how to gain competitive advantage through people, but also a brand new, untapped human resource-psychological capital, or simply PsyCap. Generated from both the positive psychology movement and the authors' pioneering work on positive organizational behavior, PsyCap goes beyond traditionally recognized human and social capital. But PsyCap is not a vague or unscientific concept: to be included in PsyCap, a given positive construct must be based on theory, research, and valid measurement, must be open to development, and must have measurable performance impact. The positive constructs that have been determined to best meet these PsyCap criteria, efficacy (confidence), hope, optimism, and resiliency, are covered in separate chapters in Psychological Capital. After exploring other potential positive constructs such as creativity, wisdom, well being, flow, humor, gratitude, forgiveness, emotional intelligence, spirituality, authenticity, and courage, the authors summarize the research demonstrating the performance impact of PsyCap. They go on to provide the PsyCap Questionnaire (PCQ) as a measurement tool, and the PsyCap Intervention (PCI) as a development aid. Utility analysis indicates that investing in the development of PsyCap as presented in this book can result in a very substantial return. In total, Psychological Capital provides theory, research, measurements, and methods of application for the new resource of psychological capital, a resource that can be developed and sustained for competitive advantage.


This paper examines the interfaces of local community based humanitarian organizations with displaced Karen people in Thai-Burmese border spaces and their claims for cultural rights. It argues that Karen people have to organize themselves in a context where they do not have access to social welfare of the state and in which the state is hostile and oppressive to them. Applying Merry's thesis on the localization and vernacularization of international rights frameworks in the local context, the paper explores the context of power in which different humanitarian actors intervention in the local conflict zone. The author finds that Karen displaced people have differentiated access to humanitarian assistance and that powerful organizations like the Karen National Union are able to benefit while essentializing Karen culture and suppressing internal difference among the Karen to position itself towards the international donor community, thereby becoming "liked" or "preferred" refugees. The paper then also looks at secular and faith-based local humanitarian groups and finds that these groups are deeply embedded in local society and thus able to help effectively. Karen displaced people thus create non-state spaces in border spaces by establishing partnerships with local humanitarian organizations that act as brokers and mediators of international organizations and donors.


Abstract. Understanding the physical processes within the ionosphere is a key requirement to improve and extend ionospheric modeling approaches. The determination of meaningful parameters to describe the vertical electron density distribution and how they are influenced by the solar activity is an important topic in ionospheric research. In this regard, the F2 layer of the ionosphere plays a key role as it contains the highest concentration of electrons and ions. In this contribution, the maximum electron density NmF2, peak height hmF2 and scale height HF2 of the F2 layer are determined by employing a model approach for regional applications realized by the combination of endpoint-interpolating polynomial B splines with an adapted physics-motivated Chapman layer. For this purpose, electron density profiles derived from ionospheric GPS radio occultation measurements of the satellite missions FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC, GRACE and CHAMP have been successfully exploited. Profiles contain electron density observations at discrete spots, in contrast to the commonly used integrated total electron content from GNSS, and therefore are highly sensitive to obtaining the required information of the vertical electron density structure. The spatio-temporal availability of profiles is indeed rather sparse, but the model approach meets all requirements to combine observation techniques implicating the mutual support of the measurements concerning accuracy, sensitivity and data resolution. For the model initialization and to bridge observation gaps, the International Reference Ionosphere 2007 is applied. Validations by means of simulations and selected real data scenarios show that this model approach has significant potential and the ability to yield reliable results.


Invasive cervical cancer remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, especially among women in the developing world where screening is either deficient or absent. Of all agents linked to the causation of this disease, high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) appears to be the strongest factor. However, not all women with HPV develop cervical cancer. Steroid contraception has been postulated to be one mechanism whereby HPV exerts its tumorigenic effect on cervical tissue. Steroids are thought to bind to specific DNA sequences within transcriptional regulatory regions on the HPV DNA to either increase or suppress transcription of various genes. Although some earlier studies were reassuring as no increased incidence of cervical cancer was observed, subsequent research has shown a causative association, especially among long-term users. The role of steroids was further enhanced by the discovery of hormone receptors in cervical tissue. Some earlier studies of oral contraceptive steroids found no increased risk, even after controlling for other risk factors, including smoking and number of partners. However, prospective studies have shown a greater progression of dysplasia to carcinoma-in-situ with more than 6 years of oral steroid contraceptive use. Similar findings were also evident from other work, including the Royal College of General Practitioners Oral Contraception Study. The WHO Collaborative Study of Neoplasia and Steroid Contraceptives showed a relative risk of 1.2 for invasive cancer in users of the long-acting progestational contraceptive, depo-medroxyprogesterone acetate. However, in users of more than 5 years duration, an estimate of 2.4 was reported. The upstream regulatory region (URR) of the HPV type 16 viral genome, mediates transcriptional control of the HPV genome and is thought to contain enhancer elements that are activated by steroid hormones. It has been shown that steroid hormones bind to specific glucorticoid-response elements within HPV-DNA. Experimental evidence has revealed that high–risk type HPV 16 are able to stimulate the development of vaginal and cervical squamous cell carcinomas in transgenic mice exposed to slow-release pellets of 17 β-estradiol in the presence of human keratin-14 promoter. Squamous cell carcinomas developed in a multi-stage pathway only in transgenic mice and not in nontransgenic mice. The E6 oncoprotein of HPV 16 has been shown to bind to the p53 tumor suppressor gene and stimulate its degradation by a ubiquitin-dependent protease system. Steroid hormones are thought to increase the expression of the E6 and E7 HPV 16 oncogenes, which in turn bind to and degrade the p53 gene product, leading to apoptotic failure and carcinogenesis. However, the molecular basis of this remains to be proven.


Research participants can be expected to share legally sensitive information only when they are confident that those with whom they are sharing it can be trusted to maintain its security and confidentiality. However, researchers can never be certain that their participants' data will not become the target of a judicial order for disclosure in the form of a subpoena or search warrant. Judicially compelled disclosure places the researcher in a conflict of duties between honouring the ethical responsibility to protect participant confidentiality on the one hand, and the legal duty to comply with the law on the other. Criminologists Ted Palys and John Lowman argue that, where such a conflict arises, the researcher retains the right to resist disclosure as a matter of principle; on the grounds that ethical principle transcends law, researchers may adopt an "ethics-first" approach in which a disposition to noncompliance with compelled disclosure would guide research practice from the earliest stages of research design. The alternative to an ethics-first approach would be the "law-of-the-land" approach in which participants would be informed that confidentiality would be maintained only to the extent permitted by law. Under a law-of-the-land approach, the researcher would comply with a judicial order for disclosure once all legal means of resisting it have been exhausted.
There are three arguments in Palys and Lowman's case for ethics-first:
(1) that the best way to protect confidentiality is to "Wigmorize" it in anticipation of a judicial test of privilege;
(2) that to offer a qualified promise of confidentiality would be to undermine any claim to privilege according to Wigmore criteria; and
(3) that to warn participants about the possibility of court-ordered disclosure is unnecessary, because such an eventuality does not qualify as a reasonably foreseeable risk.
All three arguments are subject to criticism on legal grounds, while the suggestion that civil disobedience can be an appropriate way of responding to compelled disclosure is criticized on philosophical grounds.


New bio-magnetostratigraphic data have been acquired from the Burdigalian part of the Moria section in the Umbria–Marche Apennine (Central Italy). The investigated sedimentary sequence is 55 meters thick and comprises the transition between the Bisciaro and the Schlier formations (Auctorum), composed of five meters of indurated marly limestones, followed by about 40 meters of blue marly clays capped by 10 m of alternating clays and calcareous layers. According to existing literature, the sequence contains the so-called "Piero della Francesca Level" (Auctorum), a few-centimeters-thick biotite-rich level. The sequence has been sampled for paleomagnetic and calcareous plankton analyses. Four magnetic polarity zones have been documented in the middle and upper part of the section. The calcareous plankton content shows different degrees of preservation, from poor to good for calcareous nannofossils and poor to medium for planktonic foramini fers. Several useful biohorizons have been observed and chronologically constrained through calibration to the magnetostratigraphic data. The studied section ranges from the top of Chron C5Dr.1n to Chron C5Cn.2r, covering the time interval from 17.7 to 16.4 Ma (according to the ATNTS04) almost continuously, with a small hiatus of at least 34 ka at the C5Dn/C5Cr transition. The integration of our results with those from previous studies of the same section and comparisons with data from other Mediterranean and North Atlantic sequences allows to evaluate the synchrony of the observed biohorizons with other parts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean during a still relatively poorly known time interval.


The banking sector in Kenya plays an important role in the growth of the economy, and thus this sector needs to be stable, over the years this sector has faced challenges which have impacted on profitability of most institutions. Hence, the sector adopted the concept of Bancassurance as a form of diversification to improve its fortunes. However, despite the introduction of this sophisticated concept, there is very little empirical evidence on whether the concept has a significant effect on Profitability of the banks which have largely adopted the concept. And this was the thrust of this empirical investigation. The objective of the study was to determine the effect of bancassurance on profitability of selected commercial banks in Kenya, between the years 2012 to 2016. Profitability was operationalized into Net income, Return on Asset and Return on Equity. The study adopted descriptive survey method. Purposive sampling was used to pick respondents for the study; the target population of six best commercial banks in Kenya was adopted. These were banks offering bancassurance services. Data was analysed by descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis. Data presentation was in the form of tables and graphs. The study found a positive and statistically significant effect of interest income from banc assurance, customer retention and acquisition and the risk diversification on financial performance of selected commercial banks in Kenya. The number of insurance products on offer did not have a statistically significant effect on profitability of the banks under study. Hence, the study concludes that Bancassurance is a significant component of the banks revenue stream which should be given more prominence as the banks strive to remain profitable.


User participation has been promoted to improve the quality, responsiveness, and outreach of public services in India. This qualitative study evaluates new grassroots institutions—Village Education Committees and Mothers' Committees—in Andhra Pradesh, which promoting parents' participation in the management and monitoring of local schools and maternal/child health services. Although the committees were found to have increased participation in public affairs by the poor and brought about some improvements in service quality, inclusive and meaningful participation has often been hindered by illiteracy and lack of information, as well as caste, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities. The article suggests that there are considerable tensions between inclusive participation and committee effectiveness as members need skills, status, and resources in order to have a meaningful impact on service provision. In addition, research findings point to the need for more structured opportunities for committee members to interact with authorities and service providers, as well as for children to voice their concerns and ideas. Lastly, in order to tackle childhood poverty more holistically, the focus of these committees should be revised to give greater emphasis to improving service quality improvements and cross-sectoral synergies, rather than the current move narrow focus on infrastructural development and singlesector initiatives.


Crowd-based knowledge production is attracting growing attention from scholars and practitioners. One key premise is that participants who have an intrinsic "interest" in a topic or activity are willing to expend effort at lower pay than in traditional employment relationships. However, it is not clear how strong and sustainable interest is as a source of motivation. We draw on research in psychology to discuss important static and dynamic features of interest and derive a number of research questions regarding interest-based effort in crowd-based projects. Among others, we consider the specific versus general nature of interest, highlight the potential role of matching between projects and individuals, and distinguish the intensity of interest at a point in time from the development and sustainability of interest over time. We then examine users' participation patterns within and across 7 different crowd science projects that are hosted on a shared platform. Our results provide novel insights into contribution dynamics in crowd science projects. Moreover, given that extrinsic incentives such as pay, status, self-use, or career benefits are largely absent in these particular projects, the data also provide unique insights into the dynamics of interest-based motivation and into its potential as a driver of effort.


This volume brings together papers presented at "The Age of Plastic: Ingenuity + Responsibility," a Smithsonian symposium hosted by the Museum Conservation Institute on June 7–8, 2012. The event was conceived as a cross-disciplinary exploration of plastic as technological material, cultural phenomenon, preservation challenge, and force on the environment. Writers, scientists, conservators, historians, filmmakers, designers, and policy makers offer researched and first-hand accounts from life in the Plastic Age. Papers are organized to highlight the importance and complexity of plastic material culture through juxtaposition of countervailing positive and negative viewpoints. The volume features observations on innovation in plastic with past and contemporary examples of furniture design, failed experiments with proteinaceous fibers before World War II, the transition of celluloid from ivory simulant to unique identity, the space program, and bioplastics in automobiles. Studies of the rise of food packaging further explore how plastic shapes and is shaped by our culture. Preservation challenges that new, often unstable plastic poses for the cultural heritage community are explored through case studies of novel conservation treatments, research into new deterioration phenomena, and knowledge transfer. The relationship between plastic and the environment is probed with perspectives on pollution, advantages of plastic to living zoological collections, and recycling. Intended primarily for the cultural heritage community but also relevant to other fields, this volume demonstrates the importance and challenges of documenting the remarkable ongoing evolution of plastic materials that now are integral to the artifact record as markers of achievement and records of the innovation process. Madden, Odile, A. Elena Charola, Kim Cullen Cobb, Paula T. DePriest, and Robert J. Koestler. Smithsonian Contributions to Museum Conservation , number 7, viii + 181 pages, 139 figures, 5 tables, 2017.


This paper adopts an "advice for action" approach to feedback in educational practice: addressing how provision of "hints" to participants before they write academic essays can support their understanding and performance in essay-writing tasks. We explored differences in performance by type of hint, and whether there was a transfer of better performance in subsequent essays. Fifty participants were recruited, consisting of eight men and 42 women aged 18-80. Participants were assigned in rotation to four groups, and asked to write two essays. Groups 1 and 3 received hints before Essay 1, whilst Groups 2 and 4 received hints before Essay 2. Groups 1 and 2 received essential hints; Groups 3 and 4 received helpful hints. Essays were marked against set criteria. The results showed that an "advice for action" approach to essay-writing, in the form of hints, can significantly improve writers' marks. Specifically higher marks were gained for the introduction, conclusion and use of evidence: critical components of "good" academic essays. As the hints given were content-free, this approach has the potential to instantly benefit tutors and students across subject domains and institutions and is informing the development of a technical system that can offer formative feedback as students draft essays.


Sub-Saharan African countries are characterized by low or absent technological growth. Scholars and the international community have endeavored to solve the long-standing problem, but none of these have produced the expected growth. While the rest of the world is advancing rapidly, Africa is noticeably lagging, even in comparison to other developing regions. It is apparent that previous international strategies cannot solve Africa's technological underdevelopment This study argues that a solution to the problem depends on Africans, who must choose to want a solution and work towards it. An ethnographic study was therefore conducted to investigate the attitudes and worldview of the Ghanaian society towards technology underdevelopment. The study covers both the rural, traditional and urban, modern Ghana. The study, among other things, revealed that the traditional sector is rich in inherited indigenous technology manufacturing, but the methods of production, and therefore, the technologies themselves, have been left undeveloped. The urban/rural divide inhibits positive cultural exchanges and knowledge sharing, thus, limiting the proliferation of indigenous technologies across the different cultures. Urban Ghana, where national policies are drawn, provides no framework for dialogue and participation for indigenous technology development.


Abstract A material system that resists lead-bismuth attack and retains its strength at very high temperatures has been developed that enables increased outlet temperature and the promise of allowing increased coolant velocity and efficiency of lead- and lead-bismuth-cooled reactors if the behavior reported here is confirmed by long-term tests. The development of this system represents an enabling technology for lead-bismuth-cooled reactors. The system is a functionally graded composite (FGC), with separate layers engineered to perform corrosion resistance and structural functions. Alloy F91 was chosen as the structural layer of the composite because of its strength and radiation resistance. An Fe-12Cr-2Si alloy was developed based on previous work in the Fe-Cr-Si system, and was used as the corrosion-resistant cladding layer because of its chemical similarity to F91 and its superior corrosion resistance in lead and lead-bismuth in both oxidizing and reducing environments. The availability of the FGC will have significant impacts on lead-bismuth reactor design. The allowable increases in outlet temperature and coolant velocity lead to a large increase in power density - either to a smaller core for the same power rating or to more power output for the same-size core. In this paper, we report on the overall design of the FGC. We also discuss the general implications for lead-bismuth-cooled reactor design. In a future paper, we will discuss the fabrication and the initial evaluation of the actual product produced using commercial processing methods.


Background: Tannases are enzymes that may be used in different industrial sectors as, for example, food and pharmaceutical. They are obtained mainly from microorganisms, as filamentous fungi. However, the diversity of fungi stays poorly explored for tannase production. In this article, Aspergillus ochraceus is presented as a new source of tannase with interesting features for biotechnological applications. Results: Extracellular tannase production was induced when the fungus was cultured in Khanna medium with tannic acid as carbon source. The extracellular tannase was purified 9-fold with 2% recovery and a single band corresponding to 85 kDa was observed in SDS-PAGE. The native apparent molecular mass was estimated as 112 kDa. Optima of temperature and pH were 40oC and 5.0, respectively. The enzyme was fully stable from 40oC to 60oC during 1 hr. The activity was enhanced by Mn 2+ (33-39%) and NH 4 + (15%). The purified tannase hydrolyzed tannic acid and methyl gallate with Km of 0.76 mM and 0.72 mM, respectively, and Vmax of 0.92 U/mg protein and 0.68 U/mg protein, respectively. The analysis of a partial sequence of the tannase encoding gene showed an open read frame of 567 bp and a sequence of 199 amino acids were predicted. TLC analysis revealed the presence of gallic acid as a tannic acid hydrolysis product. Conclusion: The extracellular tannase produced by A. ochraceus showed distinctive characteristics such as monomeric structure and activation by Mn 2+ , suggesting a new kind of fungal tannases with biotechnological potential. Further, it was the first time that a partial gene sequence for A. ochraceus tannase was described.


Globally, the prevalence of overweight/obesity is increasing at an alarming rate.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 1.9 billion adults worldwide are overweight, and of
these, over 600 million are obese. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of overweight and
obesity in West Azerbaijan, Iran, in 2014.
Materials and Methods: Data were collected as part of the National Food and Nutritional Surveillance
Program (NFNSP). A total of 249 men and women aged 20–60 from West Azerbaijan were included in the
survey conducted in 2014. Body height and weight were measured with light clothing and no footwear after
overnight fasting.
Results: Mean age of the participants was 38.5 ±7.8 yrs. Mean BMI was 28.0±4.9 kg/m2 (men: 26.8±4.2 vs.
women: 29.0±5.3, p<0.001). The prevalence of overweight and obesity was 36.5% (men: 38.6 % vs. women:
34.8%, p: 0.439) and 33.3% (men: 25.4 vs. women: 40.0 %, p: 0.016), respectively. Women were more likely
to be overweight or obese than males (P=0.038). Multiple logistic regression revealed that gender (women vs.
men) (OR, 2.05; CI, 1.15-3.65; p,0.014) and age (OR, 1.06; CI, 1.01-1.1; p,0.004) increased the risk of
becoming overweight or obese. Women who were housewives were five times more at risk of becoming
overweight or obese (OR: 4.93; CI: 1.9-12.3; p<0.001) even after adjusting for age and educational level.
Conclusions: The high prevalence of weight problems in West Azerbaijan is a serious health concern,
especially in women. The lifestyle of housewives is a potential risk factor for weight gain in women.


Customer complaints and compliments are useful
performance indicators of a business enterprise. They are feedback that reveals quite the usual and also the unusual character of the business. Customers that are aggrieved and dissatisfied however tend not to file or voice their complaints because of several reasons.These reasons point to some extent, the way management of an enterprise handles or entertains such complaints.Studies in customers' complaints have shown that accessibility to the company will encourage customers to give their prompt feedback regarding service problems or the uncomfortable
encounters they may have had with the organization.The advances of Internet technologies are quite appropriate and timely given the advantages they provided to the solving of customers complaints or problems.Spontaneous
and immediate respond to complaints are made possible by the accessibility to the management via the e-commerce facilities.Hence, the emphasis on recovery of service underlines the challenges ahead for most business enterprises in Malaysia to effectively manage grievances of their customers.An analysis of procedures to customers'
complaints indicated the bureaucratic nature of complaints handling in these enterprises.Customers want their problems to be solved 'there and then' and expected managers to resolve them immediately.It is rather fortunate that e-commerce has provided that opportunity to make it up with these aggrieved customers.A service recovery concept in the modern era of Internet is also
suggested as vital means to create value in satisfying the customers.


Mesenchymal-epithelial interactions are pivotal for proper pancreatic growth and development. The pancreatic progenitor cells present in the early pancreatic anlagen proliferate and eventually give rise to all pancreatic cell types. The Fibroblast Growth Factor 2b (FGFR2b) high-affinity ligand Fibroblast Growth Factor 10 (FGF10) has been linked to pancreatic epithelial cell proliferation and we have previously shown that Notch signalling controls pancreatic cell differentiation via lateral inhibition. By overexpressing FGF10 under the control of the Ipf1/Pdx1 promoter in mice, we have shown that persistent FGF10 activation in the embryonic pancreas of transgenic mice perturbs pancreatic epithelial cell proliferation and also inhibits pancreatic cell differentiation by maintaining Notch activation. In the Ipf1/Fgf10 transgenic mice, the pancreatic epithelial cells are 'locked' in an undifferentiated progenitor-like state with sustained proliferative capacity. Collectively, our data suggest a key role for FGFR2b/FGF10 signalling in the regulation of pancreatic growth and differentiation and that FGFR2b/FGF10 signalling interact with the Notch signalling pathway.Glucose homeostasis in mammals is critically dependent on co-ordinated glucose uptake, oxidative metabolism and insulin secretion in β-cells. Although, several key genes controlling various aspects of glucose sensing, glucose metabolism, insulin expression and secretion have been identified, we know relatively little about the molecular mechanisms that induce and maintain the expression of genes required for glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS) in β-cells. Attenuation of FGFR1c signalling leads to diabetes in mice. Overexpression of FGF2, a high-affinity FGFR1c ligand, under the control of the Ipf1/Pdx1 promoter also leads to diabetes in mice. The Ipf1/Fgf2 mice present with normal endocrine and exocrine differentiation but display impaired glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS), perturbed expression of genes required for glucose sensing uptake together with oxidative metabolism and increased expression of the FGF-signalling inhibitors Spry-2 and Pyst1/MKP3 in β-cells. Thus, stringent control of FGF signalling activation appears crucial for the maintenance of the regulatory circuit that ensures proper GSIS in pancreatic β-cells and hence normoglycaemia.The Wnt family of ligands via their receptors Frizzled (Frz) have been shown to mediate mesenchymal-epithelial interactions and cell proliferation in a variety of different systems. Expression of a plethora of Wnt ligands and Frz receptors has been previously reported in the pancreas and mice missexpressing Wnt1 and Wnt5a under the Ipf1/Pdx1 promoter display severely perturbed development. Here, we show the temporal and spatial expression of Wnt4, Wnt7b and Frz3 at different stages of pancreas development. To elucidate the role of Wnt signalling in the pancreas, we overexpressed a dominant negative form of mouse Frz8 under the Ipf1/Pdx1 promoter in mice. The Ipf1/Frz8CRD mice display severe pancreatic hypoplasia demonstrating that attenuation of Wnt signalling in the pancreas leads to perturbed pancreatic growth. Nevertheless, the transgenic mice present with normal endocrine and exocrine differentiation and remain normoglycaemic. The maintenance of normoglycaemia in these mice appears to be the consequence of a relative increase in endocrine cell number per pancreatic area combined with enhanced insulin biosynthesis and insulin secretion. Collectively our data provide evidence that Wnt signalling is required pancreatic growth but not adult β-cell function.


Dutch Ships and Sailors provides an infrastructure for maritime historical datasets, linking correlating data through semantic web technology. It brings together datasets related to recruitment and shipping in the East-India trade (mainly 18th century) and in the shipping of the northern provinces of the Netherlands (mainly 19th century). For the northern provinces, the database contains data on the personnel recruited, the ships, and other variables (Monsterrollen Noordelijke Nederlanden). For the VOC, the datasets involved contain data on the recruitment of personnel in the Dutch Republic (VOC Opvarenden), the voyages of ships to Asia and back (Dutch-Asiatic Shipping), the mustering of ships and crew composition in Asian waters (Generale Zeemonsterrollen).


Disputes over the status of Abu Musa and the Tunbs dominate the maritime history of the southern Persian Gulf as recorded for the last hundred years in the archives of the Foreign Office and the British government in India. This collection of primary source material makes available for the first time the vital historical evidence pertaining to the status of the islands. It highlights the interaction of interstate relations and claims, traditional trade and tribal activity and the extent to which natural resources dictate national claims. The issues involve Iran, the UAE, Abu Musa, the Tunbs, the lower Persian Gulf islands and the Strait of Hormuz. These volumes present balanced historical evidence on the long-standing dispute over island sovereignty, documenting successive Iranian claims and also the positions taken by the British government on behalf of the Qasimi shaikhdoms before UAE independence.


Four conceptual models have been proposed to explain the spread of the Impresso-Cardial Neolithic in the west Mediterranean. The purpose of this model is to provide a platform to test and compare multiple hypotheses for the spread of the Neolithic in the west Mediterranean. The model includes farmer village agents and forager band agents which occupy individual patches. Farmer agents found new agricultural villages (new Farmer Agents are created) when the population of a village reaches its carrying capacity or by random chance (dependent upon the model being tested). Forager agents may become farmer agents, a process which is initiated by different rules within a conceptual model. The agents are located on a GIS (Geographic Information System) based landscape which incorporates a map of the west Mediterranean (Italy, southern France, the Iberian peninsula and the northern coast of Africa). As the simulation progresses, farmer agents spread to new locations and the timing of the arrival of agriculturalists to a region is recorded. Through this process, multiple hypotheses of agricultural spread can be compared to one another and their relative success in explaining the spread of the Neolithic can be assessed.


Three Essays on Corporate Policies Olga Kuzmina Different fields of economics have historically tended to focus on firms' strategies in isolation. In contrast, a lot of the recent work explores how various aspects of firm behavior interact with each other. This dissertation contributes to this growing literature by studying the interdependences of organizational and financial policies within firms in different contexts. The first essay studies the interactions between acquisition decisions of multinationals and innovation decisions in the subsidiaries they buy. My coauthors Maria Guadalupe and Catherine Thomas, and I use a rich panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms and a propensity score reweighting estimator to show that multinational firms acquire the most productive domestic firms, which, on acquisition, conduct more product and process innovation (simultaneously adopting new machines and organizational practices) and adopt foreign technologies, leading to higher productivity. The proposed model of endogenous selection and innovation in heterogeneous firms can explain both the observed selection patterns and the innovation decisions. The innovation upon acquisition is further shown in the data to be associated with the increased market scale provided by the parent firm, thereby highlighting the role of foreign ownership in increasing the benefits from innovation. This work has potentially important implications for the evolution of within-industry productivity distributions. Under the mechanism described in the paper, foreign entry may lead to divergence of productivity and contribute to the stylized fact of large and persistent productivity differences even within narrowly defined industries. I further use this rich dataset in my second essay to establish a causal relationship between the use of flexible contractual arrangements with labor and capital structure of the firm. Using the exogenous inter-temporal variation from government subsidies, I find that hiring more temporary workers leads firms to have more debt. Since temporary workers, unlike permanent ones, can be fired at a much lower cost during their contract duration, or their contracts may be not extended upon expiration, a firm can more easily meet its interest payments and avoid bankruptcy when faced with a negative shock. I interpret this result as evidence of flexible workforce decreasing operating leverage which, in turn, promotes financial leverage. This study therefore contributes to the literature exploring the interactions between firm employment decisions and corporate policies by providing evidence for a new channel – the one of flexible employment contracts. Given the overwhelming extent of labor reforms in continental Europe in recent years that are aimed at offering more job security to workers, it is important to understand how such policies would affect firms, and for that it is necessary to model the interdependences of firms' strategies. Finally, my third essay looks at a different type of firms – hedge funds. Although, they do not produce goods in a strict sense of the word, they provide valuable services to investors by smartly investing into large selections of assets. Hedge funds are a very interesting type of financial firms to study due to their lower regulation and reporting standards that enable them to use some know-how trading strategies and potentially outperform other investors. A part of such outperformance can be explained by higher risks born by certain hedge funds, which outlines the broad question we explore in this paper with my coauthor Sergiy Gorovyy. We use a proprietary dataset obtained from a fund of funds to study the risk premia associated with hedge fund transparency, liquidity, complexity, and concentration over the period from April 2006 to March 2009. We are able to directly measure these qualitative characteristics by using the internal grades that the fund of funds attached to all the funds it invested in, and that represent the unique information that cannot be obtained from quantitative data alone. Consistent with factor models of risk premium, we find that during the normal times low-transparency, lowliquidity, low-complexity, and high-concentration funds delivered a return premium, with economic magnitudes of 5% to 10% per year, while during bad states of the economy, these funds experienced significantly lower returns. We also offer a novel explanation for why highly concentrated funds command a risk premium by revealing that it is mostly prevalent among the non-transparent funds where investors are unaware about the exact risks they are facing and hence cannot diversify them away. The large an significant return premium associated with more secretive, less transparent hedge funds has an important policy implication with respect to whether hedge funds should be required to disclose the information regarding their trades and positions, especially in the light of the recent regulatory changes, including the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act passed in July 2010, the consequences of which are yet to be evaluated.


Background: Coverage for childhood vaccinations has fallen below Healthy People 2020 targets. Known barriers to childhood immunizations include vaccination opposition, low parental education, low income, health systems' policies, and misinformation. Known facilitators include high parental income and education levels; clinician reminders; more convenient immunization schedule; and vaccine information provided by healthcare providers.
Purpose: The purpose of this program evaluation was to explore the barriers and facilitators for completion of childhood immunizations among students in a rural middle school.
Methods: Data was collected from an immunization record audit at a School-Based Health Center (SBHC), key informant interviews, and a tool that determined readability of vaccination information.
Findings: A record audit of 52 students revealed an immunization coverage of 92.3%. More White students had incomplete immunization coverage than minority students. The readability of required government vaccination information was at the 11th grade reading level.
Conclusions: The SBHC model is effective for ensuring immunization coverage of required immunizations. Specific facilitators include clinician reminders and convenience of appointments, both provided by the SBHC. An immunization infographic might offer easy understandability to supplement the required vaccination information sheets.


This experiment assessed the relation between children's comprehension skill and their knowledge about stories, as measured by their ability to tell stories from picture sequences or title prompts. To investigate the direction of any relation between comprehension skill and story knowledge, the performance of 7- to 8-year-old less skilled comprehenders was compared to that of two control groups: same-age skilled comprehenders matched for reading accuracy, and younger skilled comprehenders matched for comprehension age. The main findings were that, although the groups did not differ in their use of conventional story features, such as beginnings, settings and endings, they did differ in the quality of the story structure they produced, at least in the topic prompt condition. Also, as predicted, stories elicited with picture prompts were better structured overall. In the easier, picture prompt, condition the less skilled group also performed more poorly than the skilled group, but not significantly more poorly than the comprehension-age match group. These results demonstrate that the differences in the story knowledge, found between the same-age skilled and less skilled comprehenders, are not simply the result of differential experience in reading comprehension. Instead, they suggest that knowledge about story structure may play a causal role in the less skilled comprehenders' comprehension difficulties. Possible sources of these differences are discussed.


An encounter with the death of another is often an occasion when the bereaved need to be sustained in their loss, relieved of the anxiety that the meeting with death engenders, and comforted in their grief. It is a time when those left behind often seek to redress wrongs in themselves or in the relationships that death has shaken and upset. In both collective and individual responses to the trauma of encountering death, we witness efforts to counter the misfortune and to explain the meaning of the loss, to turn memory into blessing, to reconcile life with death, to regenerate life, and redeem both the bereaved and the dead. Sometimes loss may transform the bereaved in ways that lead to growth and maturity; other times a loss leads to unremitting anger or melancholia. There may be a variety of spiritual expressions that the bereaved experience in their time of loss, but there appears to be some common elements in all of them. Overtime, survivors' feelings are transformed into growing exploration of the spiritual, a profound sense of rebirth, newfound feelings of self-mastery or confidence, and a deeply held conviction that "life goes on." The contributions to this volume are based on a conference held in New York on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001. Contributors include Peter Metcalf, Robert Jay Lifton, Ilana Harlow, Robert A. Neimeyer, Samuel Heilman, and Neil Gillman. This sensitive and heartfelt volume relates specifically to issues of death, bereavement, and mourning in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, but the applications to other individual and catastrophic events is obvious. The contributions do not simply explore how people deal with bereavement or are psychologically affected by extreme grief: they address how people can try to find meaning in tragedy and loss, and strive to help restore order in the wake of chaos. The multidisciplinary perspectives include those of anthropology, psychology, theology, social work, and art.


Insect chemosensory genes have been considered as potential molecular targets to develop alternative strategies for pest control. However, in Spodoptera exigua, a seriously polyphagous agricultural pest, only a small part of such genes have been identified and characterized to date. Here, using a bioinformatics screen a total of 79 chemosensory genes were identified from a public transcriptomic data of different developmental stages (eggs, 1st to 5th instar larvae, pupae, female and male adults), including 34 odorant binding proteins (OBPs), 20 chemosensory proteins (CSPs), 22 chemosensory receptors (10 odorant receptors (ORs), six gustatory receptors (GRs) and six ionotropic receptors (IRs)) and three sensory neuron membrane proteins (SNMPs). Notably, a new group of lepidopteran SNMPs (SNMP3 group) was found for the first time in S. exigua, and confirmed in four other moth species. Further, reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) and quantitative real time PCR (qPCR) were employed respectively to validate the sequences and determine the expression patterns of 69 identified chemosensory genes regarding to sexes, tissues and stages. Results showed that 67 of these genes could be detected and reconstructed in at least one tissue tested. Further, 60 chemosensory genes were expressed in adult antennae and 52 in larval heads with the antennae, whereas over half of the genes were also detected in non-olfactory tissues like egg and thorax. Particularly, S. exigua OBP2 showed a predominantly larval head-biased expression, and functional studies further indicated its potentially olfactory roles in guiding food searching of larvae. This work suggests functional diversities of S. exigua chemosensory genes and could greatly facilitate the understanding of olfactory system in S. exigua and other lepidopteran species.


In the past two decades, the United States has applied a growing number of foreign and security measures directly targeting individuals—natural or legal persons. These individualized measures have been designed and carried out by administrative agencies. Widespread application of individual economic sanctions, security watchlists and no-fly lists, detentions, targeted killings, and action against hackers responsible for cyberattacks have all become significant currencies of U.S. foreign and security policy. Although the application of each of these measures in discrete contexts has been studied, they have yet to attract an integrated analysis.

This Article examines this phenomenon with two main aims. First, it documents what I call "administrative national security": the growing individualization of U.S. foreign and security policy, the administrative mechanisms that have facilitated it, and the judicial response to these mechanisms. Administrative national security encompasses several types of individualized measures that agencies now apply on a routine, indefinite basis through the exercise of considerable discretion within a broad framework established by Congress or the President. It is therefore best understood as an emerging practice of administrative adjudication in the foreign and security space.

Second, this Article considers how administrative national security integrates with the presidency and the courts. Accounting for administrative national security illuminates the President's constitutional role as chief executive and commander-in-chief and his control of key aspects of administrative foreign and security action. It also challenges deeply rooted doctrines underlying foreign relations and national security law, including the portrayal of the President as the "sole organ" in international relations. Administrative national security further informs our understanding of the role of courts in this context. It renders more foreign and security action reviewable in principle under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and provides a justification for the exercise of robust judicial power in this category.


Traditional particulate matter (PM) studies focus on atmospheric transport and source identification. Focusing on a problematic airshed in southwestern North America, we analyzed atmospheric characteristics and hydroclimatic conditions leading to high concentrations of PM most representative of dust (PM10). The bi-national airshed of Nogales (Arizona, USA and Sonora, Mexico), has been historically characterized by high PM10 concentrations, which tend to be much higher on the Sonora side. Concentrations in greater Nogales tend to be highest in fall and winter and lowest in summer, despite climatologically moister soil conditions in fall and winter. Within the fall, winter, and spring seasons, days of high and low PM10 concentration were primarily distinguished by the condi- tion of the atmosphere, with less emphasis on soil moisture. However, when PM10 concentrations were high, soil moisture was most important in discerning days of very high concentrations on the Arizona side of the border during the most problematic seasons of fall and winter. This was not the case on the Sonora side. Furthermore, drier soil conditions were linked to anomalies in PM10 on the Arizona side of Nogales that were higher than the corresponding anomaly on the Sonora side. The generation of PM on the Sonora side is less reliant on dry soil than it is on the Arizona side, indicating a higher level of anthropogenic dust production on the Sonora side.


In the last decade, civic crowdfunding has proved to be effective in generating funds for the provision of public projects. However, the existing literature deals only with citizen's with positive valuation and symmetric belief towards the project's provision.  In this work, we present novel mechanisms which break these two barriers, i.e., mechanisms which incorporate negative valuation and asymmetric belief, independently. For negative valuation, we present a methodology for converting existing mechanisms to mechanisms that incorporate agents with negative valuations. Particularly, we adapt existing PPR and PPS mechanisms, to present novel PPRN and PPSN mechanisms which incentivize strategic agents to contribute to the project based on their true preference. With respect to asymmetric belief, we propose a reward scheme Belief Based Reward (BBR) based on Robust Bayesian Truth Serum mechanism. With BBR, we propose a general mechanism for civic crowdfunding which incorporates asymmetric agents. We leverage PPR and PPS, to present PPRx and PPSx. We prove that in PPRx and PPSx, agents with greater belief towards the project's provision contribute more than agents with lesser belief. Further, we also show that contributions are such that the project is provisioned at equilibrium.


The elevated water temperatures and large wetted surface area in cooling water systems present ideal conditions for microbial growth. To reduce contamination in cooling water systems, attention must be paid to equipment design, installation, operation, and maintenance. The aim is to minimize microbial multiplication in these environments, to ensure water treatment is adequate, and to minimize the production and release of aerosols. The approach taken in Australia has been to produce a prescriptive standard, which has been incorporated into uniform building regulations and most of the State Health acts and regulations within Australia. Both chemical and physical monitoring of the water-treatment program are essential for system life and performance, as well as for controlling microorganisms such as Legionella spp. In case study 1, an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease was associated with a hotel. Legionella pneumophila serogroup 1 count was 2.8 X 107 CFU/ml. In case study 2, several cases of Legionnaires' disease occurred at an industrial site at which there were both large process cooling towers (L. pneumophila serogroup 1 count, 1,000 CFU/ml) and small comfort air-conditioning towers (not sampled for legionellae). At both locations, monitoring programs, including water sampling for legionellae, were implemented. No further clinical cases nor significant Legionella spp. detections have been experienced. These case studies are examples only of the increasing awareness of Legionella as an environmental pathogen that has led to control and monitoring strategies on a wide scale in Australia; sampling for legionellae may now be important as a defense under common law.


We report an efficient and environmentally friendly electrochemical approach to perform the bromo cyclization of tryptophol, tryptamine and tryptophan derivatives. The 3a-bromofuranoindolines and 3a-bromopyrroloindolines obtained are of interest in the total synthesis of natural products. This dearomative procedure relies on the generation of an electrophilic bromine reagent by the electrochemical oxidation of MgBr2. No organic byproducts are generated with this protocol which avoids the use of an additional electrolyte.


Effective targeting of interventions is a challenge in development programmes. However, the need to be accountable and demonstrate impact has become critical, and is gradually forcing development practitioners implementing livelihood security programmes to change their operational regimes. Integrating efficient targeting systems makes it possible to effectively monitor and evaluate impact of development programmes. For example, organisations that have been implementing different interventions to reduce or reverse the adverse effects of the HIV and AIDS pandemic regard an efficient targeting system as a prerequisite to enhance the success of these programmes. Past studies have shown that HIV and AIDS in particular, has a broad livelihoods impact. Hence a development programme that integrates all the livelihood dimensions in its targeting is likely to have much greater success in mitigating the impacts of the epidemic. Such a programme would need to know the different dimensions through which the epidemic affects households.


Motivated by the recent experimental realization of a candidate to the Fulde–Ferrell (FF) and the Larkin–Ovchinnikov (LO) states in one-dimensional (1D) atomic Fermi gases, we study the quantum phase transitions in these enigmatic, finite-momentum-paired superfluids. We focus on the FF state and investigate the effects of the induced interaction on the stability of the FFLO phase in homogeneous spin-imbalanced quasi-1D Fermi gases at zero temperature. When this is taken into account, we find a direct transition from the fully polarized to the FFLO state in agreement with exact solutions. Also, we consider the effect of a finite lifetime of the quasi-particle states in the normal-superfluid instability. In the limit of long lifetimes, the lifetime effect is irrelevant and the transition is directly from the fully polarized to the FFLO state. We show, however, that for sufficiently short lifetimes, there is a quantum critical point, at a finite value of the mismatch of the Fermi wave-vectors of the different quasi-particles, that we fully characterize. In this case, the transition is from the FFLO phase to a normal partially polarized state with increasing mismatch.


BACKGROUND
An increase in intra-abdominal pressure causes a decrease in the splanchnic blood flow and the intramucosal pH of the bowel, as well as increasing the risk of ischemia in the colon. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the effect of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) on the ischemia caused by laparoscopy in colonic anastomosis in an experimental model of laparoscopic colonic surgery.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
We divided 30 male Wistar albino rats into three groups: Group A was the control (open colon anastomosis); Group B received LCA (laparoscopic colon anastomosis); while Group C received both LCA and HBOT. Each group contained ten animals. We placed Group C (LCA and HBOT) in an experimental hyperbaric chamber into which we administered pure oxygen at 2.1 atmospheres absolute 100% oxygen for 60 min for ten consecutive days.

RESULTS
The anastomotic bursting pressure value was found to be higher in the open surgery group (226 ± 8.8) (Group A). The result for Group C (213 ± 27), which received HBOT, was better than that for Group B (197 ± 27). However, there was no statistically significant difference between Group B and Group C. Group A showed better healing than the other groups, while significant differences in the fibroblast proliferation scores were found between Groups A and B. In terms of tissue hydroxyproline levels, a significant difference was found between Groups A and B and between Groups A and C, but not between Groups B and C.

CONCLUSIONS
HBOT increases the oxygen level in the injured tissue. Although HBOT might offer several advantages, it had only a limited effect on the healing of colonic anastomosis in rats with increased intra-abdominal pressure in our study.

KEY WORDS
Anastomosis, Colon, Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment, Oxidative Stress.


Baja California Sur (BCS) is the largest coastal state in Mexico and helps shape the Gulf of California. This northwestern region has a historical, cultural, and ecologic relevance that has recently been reassessed by the growing importance of tourism-related activities. Among them, eco-tourism has been acknowledged to have comparative advantage as a source of economic, environmental and social welfare, provided a process of planning, evaluation, control, and continuous adjustments is put in place. Yet as in the rest of the state territory the municipality of Los Cabos, BCS, Mexico, the most important tourist destination, has inadequate development plans. In the context of a high population and tourist pressure, the area has become extremely vulnerable. In order to counterbalance this trend and generate tools for decision makers, we characterized environmental, social and economic components in the Los Cabos municipality, emphasizing the tourism sector; public participation was included through community and government level workshops. A diagnosis was concluded, which included models and maps of economic aptitude or capacity for each micro region. As proven by our analysis, sustainable tourism could be a means for using natural and social resources in a profitable way. Decision makers and the community of Los Cabos will, nonetheless, face important challenges to strengthen the type of economic activities sustainable tourism involve versus the trend to traditional mass tourism, to secure public access to coasts and beaches, to protect landscape quality and, in general, to manage growth in the region.


The influence of polypropylene fibers has been studied in different proportioning and fiber length to improve the performance characteristics of the lightweight cement composites. Fibers used in two different lengths (6mm and 12mm) and fiber proportions (0.15% and 0.35%) by cement weight in the mixture design. Hardened concrete properties such as: 7- and 28-day compressive strength, splitting tensile strength, flexural strength, water absorption, and shrinkage were evaluated. Fiber addition was seen to enhance the physical and mechanical properties of lightweight concrete. Compared to unreinforced LWC, polypropylene (PP) reinforced LWC with fiber proportioning 0.35% and 12 mm fiber length, caused 30.1% increase in the flexural strength and 27% increase in the splitting tensile strength. Increased fiber availability in the LWC matrix, in addition to the ability of longer PP fibers to bridge on the micro cracks, are suggested as the reasons for the enhancement in mechanical properties.


Children of the Holocaust contains the papers delivered at a conference to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day 2004, which was held under the auspices of the AHRC Parkes Centre at the University of Southampton. The book addresses questions of representation of the Holocaust by and of children, both in text and image. While the volume opens with a theoretical discussion of how and where to locate the voice of the child in a text, the majority of contributions deal with exemplary texts either by single authors or specific groups of survivors. The testimonies at the heart of these essays were written in different European languages, mainly in German, English and Polish. The authors offer a variety of perspectives, ranging from the literary to the historical and art-critical. With its wide range of examples and approaches to the theme, this volume proposes to be more than a concise introduction to the theme of children of the Holocaust. It documents the breadth of issues of this branch of Holocaust studies, which is still largely waiting to be discovered.


Abstract This paper applies established and new testing methods to discover the ventilation performance of various residential building envelope constructions in Australia. Under the definition of 'ventilation performance' we imply the building envelope leakage (or infiltration) of the living space air change rates, the volumetric flow rates and the pathways of air flow between subfloor, living and roof spaces. All of the methods applied and discussed here are on-site, evidence-based performance of actual structures as tested by the Mobile Architecture and Built Environment Laboratory and Air Barrier Technologies. The testing processes primarily involve the Tracer Gas Decay Method (TGDM) and the fan pressurisation method (FPM a.k.a 'blower door'). All the measurements are performed with respect to the external wind speed and direction as well as the typical weather parameters. This paper discusses the differences and similarities of both testing methods as well as several other testing procedures that can inform the researcher on air leakage pathways. Findings of a simultaneous TGDM and FPM air leakage rate comparison are also encountered in this paper. One of the most informative testing methods, is the application of three different tracer gasses introduced into different spaces (subfloor, living and roof) to discover pathways of air flow within residential construction.


Convolutional Neural Networks are widely used to process spatial scenes, but their computational cost is fixed and depends on the structure of the network used. There are methods to reduce the cost by compressing networks or varying its computational path dynamically according to the input image. However, since a user can not control the size of the learned model, it is difficult to respond dynamically if the amount of service requests suddenly increases. We propose User-Resizable Residual Networks (URNet), which allows users to adjust the computational cost of the network as needed during evaluation. URNet includes Conditional Gating Module (CGM) that determines the use of each residual block according to the input image and the desired cost. CGM is trained in a supervised manner using the newly proposed scale(cost) loss and its corresponding training methods. URNet can control the amount of computation and its inference path according to user's demand without degrading the accuracy significantly. In the experiments on ImageNet, URNet based on ResNet-101 maintains the accuracy of the baseline even when resizing it to approximately 80% of the original network, and demonstrates only about 1% accuracy degradation when using about 65% of the computation.


Portfolio construction seeks an optimal trade-off between a portfolio's mean return and its associated risk. Since risk may not be properly described by return volatility we optimize portfolios with respect to various measures of downside risk in an empirical out-of-sample setting. These optimizations are successful for most of the investigated measures when assuming perfect foresight of expected returns, moreover, these findings still hold when using more naive return estimates. The reductions in downside risk are most convincing for semivariance, semideviation, CVaR and loss penalty while value at risk and measures related to skewness appear rather useless for portfolio construction purposes.


Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders and affects over 65 million people worldwide. Despite the continuing advances in anti-epileptic treatments, one third of the epilepsy patients live with drug resistant seizures. Besides, the mortality rate among epileptic patients is 2 – 3 times higher than in the matching group of the general population. Wearable devices offer a promising solution for the detection of seizures in real time so as to alert family and caregivers to provide immediate assistance to the patient. However, in order for the detection system to be reliable, a considerable amount of labeled data is required to train it. Labeling epilepsy data is a costly and time-consuming process that requires manual inspection and annotation of electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings by medical experts. In this paper, we present a self-learning methodology for epileptic seizure detection without medical supervision. We propose a minimally-supervised algorithm for automatic labeling of seizures in order to generate personalized training data. We demonstrate that the median deviation of the labels from the ground truth is only 10.1 seconds or, equivalently, less than 1% of the signal length. Moreover, we show that training a real-time detection algorithm with data labeled by our algorithm produces a degradation of less than 2.5% in comparison to training it with data labeled by medical experts. We evaluated our methodology on a wearable platform and achieved a lifetime of 2.59 days on a single battery charge.


Word embeddings are a powerful approach for analyzing language, and exponential family embeddings (EFE) extend them to other types of data. Here we develop structured exponential family embeddings (S-EFE), a method for discovering embeddings that vary across related groups of data. We study how the word usage of U.S. Congressional speeches varies across states and party affiliation, how words are used differently across sections of the ArXiv, and how the co-purchase patterns of groceries can vary across seasons. Key to the success of our method is that the groups share statistical information. We develop two sharing strategies: hierarchical modeling and amortization. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach in empirical studies of speeches, abstracts, and shopping baskets. We show how S-EFE enables group-specific interpretation of word usage, and outperforms EFE in predicting held-out data.


A number of white supremacist groups enjoy tax-exempt status. As such, these hate groups do not have to pay federal taxes and people who give money to these groups may take deductions on their personal taxes. This recognition not only results in potential lost revenue for government programs, but it also serves as a public subsidy of racist propaganda and operates as the federal government's imprimatur of white supremacist activities. This is all due to an unnecessarily broad definition of "educational" that somehow encompasses the activities of universities, symphonies, and white supremacists. This Essay suggests a change in the Treasury regulations to restrict the definition of educational organizations to refer only to traditional, degree-granting institutions, distance learning organizations, or certain other enumerated entities. With this change, we would no longer allow white supremacists to call themselves charities, remove the public subsidy of such reprehensible organizations, and eliminate the government's implicit blessing of hate groups.


The power wheelchair is an important and convenient mobility device. The demand of power wheelchair is increasing for assistance in mobility. In this paper we proposed a robotic wheelchair for mobility aid to reduce the burden from the disabled and can monitors human bio-sensors. The main issue in an autonomous wheelchair is the automatic detection and avoidance of obstacles and going to the pre-designated place. The proposed algorithm detects the obstacles and avoids them to drive the wheelchair to the desired place safely with panning scan from sensors of distance measurement and monitors human bio-sensor for users. By this way, the disabled will not always have to worry about paying deep attention to the surroundings and his path.


Abstract Background: Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS are a major problem in South Africa. This, coupled with a high incidence of teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse, is of grave concern, especially its impact among the young (15–24 years) and in economically poor, rural populations. This study aimed to assess the youths' knowledge, attitudes and behaviours regarding STIs, teenage pregnancy, contraception and substance abuse. Methodology: This is an interview-based, descriptive study. The sample design employed a stratified sample (using schools as strata) of young people aged 15 to 24 years in three schools in the Mhlakulo region, Eastern Cape province. From each school, a sample of learners from grades 10 to 12 was selected randomly. Questionnaires covering relevant parameters were used to interview the learners, after which the data were assimilated and analysed. Results: A total of 150 learners were surveyed (86 females and 64 males). In total, 56% of them knew about STIs. About 88% of the participants learned about STIs from health care workers/nurses/doctors/clinics, the media, educators, the school and friends. Most preferred to communicate to friends (38.67%) and siblings (28%); only 15% communicated with parents. Among the sexually active, 54% reported the use of condoms; of these only 62% used them consistently. Of the participants, 7.33% had more than five sexual partners. Of the young women, 12.8% reported to have fallen pregnant with one-sixth of them wanting to become pregnant. Thirty per cent of those pregnant had to quit school, but did return subsequently. Common contraceptives used were condoms (54%) and pills (58%). Twenty-two per cent of the youths admitted to the use of recreational drugs at some time; most of these were related to alcohol (19.33%). A small fraction (1.33%) used dagga (cannabis). Conclusion: There is lack of knowledge of STIs and their prevention and condom and contraceptive use among young people of this community. Sexual promiscuity and teenage pregnancy in the group is a cause for concern. Substance abuse is another important problem that requires urgent attention.


This comprehensive volume presents indispensable and up-to-date information on viroids and viroid diseases. It provides a single source of information on the properties of viroids, the economic impact of viroid diseases, and methods for their detection and control. It examines the diseases associated with different plant species, the geographic distribution and epidemiology of viroids, diseases of possible viroid etiology, and the future applications of viroids.

Viroids examines the biology of viroids, molecular characteristics, localization and movement, replication, pathogenesis, viroids and gene silencing, classification, viroid-like satellite RNAs, detection of viroids using bioamplification hosts, biological indexing, polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, molecular hybridisation and polymerase chain reaction. The book looks at the geographical distribution and epidemiology of viroids in North America, Australasia, China, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, and at the global level. It covers the control of viroids including quarantine of imported germplasm, availability of viroid-tested propagation materials, thermotherapy, tissue culture, and other conventional strategies as well as biotechnological control approaches. Special topics such as ribozyme reaction of viroids and economic advantages of viroid infection are also included. Other chapters summarise the current state of knowledge concerning viroid diseases of the crop in question and aspects of the natural history of viroids in horticulture. Among the crops covered are potato, tomato, tobacco, cucumber, pome fruits, stone fruits, avocado, citrus, grapevines, hop, chrysanthemum, coleus, columnea, and coconut palm.

The four eminent editors of this watershed volume have assembled an international group of more than 70 scientists who have substantial experience with viroids and viroid diseases. They have produced a cohesive and comprehensive work that can be used by students, researchers, extension agents, and regulators. It may also be of a great value to science managers, policy makers, and industries in formulating policies and products to obtain viroid-free plants and control viroid diseases. The information on plant quarantine and certification programs will help anyone concerned with the safe movement of plant material across international boundaries or within a single country.


textabstractAn important issue in medicine is that the efficacy, the safety and the costs of medical treatment modalities are appropriately in concordance. Patient safety should be the dermatologist's number one priority, especially in the treatment of non-life threatening diseases such as acne, vitiligo and psoriasis. In dermatology, intra-patient studies (right-left studies) provide an ideal means to evaluate the efficacy of topical treatment modalities. Double-blind, crossover studies have proven their benefit in systemic treatment. In addition to the observations by physicians, the patient's quality of life studies became indispensable to determine the overall efficacy of the treatment. Assessing the costs of medical treatment is more complex. The costs of treatments are not only determined by the price of drugs, medical apparatus and duration of treatments, but also by the reduction of patient's working hours, travel costs, and, last but not least, the costs of treating side effects of medication. Physicians and patients are both increasingly aware of the risks of medical interventions.


We introduce a graphical language for relational data called the probabilistic entityrelationship (PER) model. The model is an extension of the entity-relationship model, a common model for the abstract representation of database structure. We concentrate on the directed version of this model—the directed acyclic probabilistic entity-relationship (DAPER) model. The DAPER model is closely related to the plate model and the probabilistic relational model (PRM), existing models for relational data. The DAPER model is more expressive than either existing model, and also helps to demonstrate their similarity. In addition to describing the new language, we discuss important facets of modeling relational data, including the use of restricted relationships, self relationships, and probabilistic relationships. Many examples are provided.


We conducted experiments for developing an in vitro micropropagation protocol starting from meristems of Rudbeckia hirta L. seedlings. We pre-soaked the seeds in sterile ion-exchanged water for 17 hours, and then achieved surface disinfection in two separate steps. First, we used concentrated household sodium-hypochloride solution for 20 minutes and, also for 20 minutes, we applied hydrogen peroxide of 10%, which was followed by washing with sterile ion-exchanged water three times. For the propagation of seedling meristems, the combination of half-strength solid Murashige and Skoog (1962) culture medium containing 10 mg/L of kinetin and 2 mg/L of kinetin + 0.1 mg/L of 2iP proved to be the most suitable. The average number of shoot-buds developed from the seedling axillary meristem in the best culture media varied between 5 and 17. Without separating them, we inoculated the shoot-bud clusters on MS culture medium containing 2 mg/L of IAA. After four weeks of incubation we obtained elongated shoots which we separated and inoculated into a new culture medium and we obtained elongated roots. The rooted plants were gradually acclimatised in the cultivation room, potted and carried to a greenhouse, and then planted in open field for subsequent observation. By adopting this method, our laboratory started the micropropagation of the superior and/or elite genotypes of the Rudbeckia hirta L. being of special value in respect of breeding.


Peak electricity demand in South Africa will exceed the available operational generation capacity in 2007. The state utility, Eskom, is addressing this challenge, inter alia, with the implementation of a national Demand-side Management (DSM) initia-tive. Studies in South Africa have shown that 20%of the total municipal energy is utilised in commer-cial buildings. Telecommunication companies own and operate a large portfolio of diverse buildings within the municipal boundaries. Energy Services Company (ESCO) analyses on these buildings showed huge savings as well as load reduction opportunities. ESCOs however face major prob-lems in evaluating DSM projects on telecommuni-cation facilities. To address these problems a new ESCO procedure for telecommunications facilities was developed and successfully implemented. It was proven that the new ESCO procedure is suc-cessful in solving the unique problems in perform-ing ESCO analyses for telecommunications facili-ties.


ABSTRACT Parents and adolescents (mean age, 15.7 years) from 177 adoptive families participating in the second wave of the Minnesota/Texas Adoption Research Project were interviewed about their post-adoption contact arrangements. The sample included families with no contact, stopped contact, contact without meetings, and contact with face-to-face meetings between the adolescent and birth mother. Openness arrangements were dynamic, and different openness arrangements were associated with different experiences and feelings. Adoptive families with contact reported having higher levels of satisfaction about their openness arrangements, experiencing more positive feelings about the birth mother, and possessing more factual and personal knowledge about the birth mother than did families without contact. Adolescents and adoptive mothers in the contact with meetings group reported the greatest satisfaction with their openness arrangements; those with no contact or stopped contact reported the least satisfaction with their arrangements. Participants having no contact were more likely to want the intensity of contact to increase in the future rather than stay the same. Many participants already having contact wanted it to increase in the future. Fewer than 1 percent of all participants wanted to see the intensity of contact decrease.


How can the object based art help us, as viewers and as makers, to access a supplanted emotional state? One way of positioning yourself within the corpus-field is to step outside the traditional borders of the field and aim for other values within the objects, such as a visible working process, a storytelling or an emotional relationship to the object. It is a way of taking a step from the traditional silversmithing towards some kind of free undefined corpus-art. To reach for suppressed feelings is one way to find an importance within the artistic work, to give it a purpose. By investigating the concept of the sublime and the surrealist movement I try to find examples on how you, both as a viewer and as a maker, can put yourself in an emotional/intuitive state. Through interviews with Jewellery and corpus artists I get a maker's perspective which I compare with my own reactions to their work. Works of art can be used as a catalyst to reach, and maybe also to process, unattended feelings. This creates a strong emotional connection to the work. As a maker you can, for example, do this by working with it as a theme, or by using an intuitive working method. But also as a viewer you can be triggered to expose these feelings. Although, it must be said, that the viewer's experience of artwork is always subjective. I see the focus of emotional communication as a way of verifying the importance of artistic work within the corpus-field.


Beta vulgaris subsp. cicla (BVc, leaf beet) and Beta vulgaris var. rubra (BVr, red beetroot) belong to the Amaranthaceae family and have been used for centuries as food and medicinal plants. The main bioactive phytochemicals of BVr are the betalains, a group of water-soluble pigments derived from betalamic acid, which are divided into two classes: the yellow/orange-coloured betaxanthins (BX) and the red/ violet-coloured betacyanins (BC). The seeds, leaves and roots of BVc are rich in phenolic acids and apigenin-derived flavonoids, namely vitexin, vitexin-2-O-rhamnoside (VOR) and vitexina-2-O-xyloside (XVX). We isolated BVc and BVr phytochemicals in our laboratory and tested them individually and in combination for their anticancer and anti-inflammatory activity. In cancer cells, vitexin flavonoids were able to induce intrinsic apoptosis, while betalains induced extrinsic apoptosis. Combinations of two or three molecules exhibited synergistic antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anticancer activity, particularly towards hepatic, intestinal and urinary bladder tumours.


The Arab Spring, some scholars point out, occurred at a time when Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other countries had a large share of young people in the adult population. In this interpretation, a so-called youth bulge, or a large proportion of adults concentrated in the 15-to-29 age group, is a good predictor of conflict and instability. The theory makes intuitive sense—the foot soldiers of protests and insurrections are, after all, typically young. Proponents also make their case through historical examples and predictive models. Others contend evidence is limited, outbreaks of unrest depend on a slew of other factors, and a large number of young adults may be an asset as well as a threat.


Roadway dust includes non-biodegradable and hazardous organic pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The objective of this study was to estimate the proportion of non-biodegradable organic matter (NBOM) in roadway runoff using a biodegradability test, and to reveal the effectiveness of its removal using soil infiltration. Total organic carbon (TOC) concentration of roadway runoff was approximately 20 mg/L and its 74% was estimated to be NBOM. The percentage of NBOM in particulate organic carbon (POC) reached 96%, which was much higher than that in dissolved organic carbon (DOC, 40%). Although 5 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were detected in roadway runoff, they were removed by the aerobic biodegradation for 100 days incubation. The soil infiltration was able to reduce NBOM in roadway runoff by 93% in POC and 55% in DOC, whereas the removal efficiencies of biodegradable organic matter in POC and DOC were only 25% and 59%, respectively. Consequently, the soil infiltration is thought to be a potential measure to reduce NBOM loads to water environment through roadway runoff.


Introduction: To evaluate the clinical and demographic characteristics of elderly patients with subconjunctival haemorrhage Materials and Method: We evaluated 47 patients >60 years of age with subconjunctival haemorrhage who were admitted to our clinic. Various parameters were recorded, including age, gender, affected eye, haemorrhage localization, subconjunctival haemorrhage recurrence, presence of systemic and heart diseases, previous ocular surgery, drug use and presence of additional symptoms. Results: Among the 47 patients, 27 (57.4%) were male and the mean age was 67.96 ± 6.71 (range, 60–88) years. The left eye was affected in 23 cases (48.9%) and the right eye in 22 cases (46.8%). In total, 26 patients were taking antithrombotic medications associated with an increased risk of subconjunctival haemorrhage. Among these patients, 15 (57.7%) were taking aspirin, ten (38.5%) were taking warfarin and one (3.8%) was taking clopidogrel. Symptoms capable of inducing haemorrhage were observed in 23 cases (48.9%). These comprised itchiness, which can cause minor ocular trauma (19 cases, 82%), coughing (three cases, 13%) and constipation (one case, 4.35). Hypertension was the most commonly observed condition in the study population. Subconjunctival haemorrhage most frequently presented in the nasal region of the eye (51.1%). Recurrence of subconjunctival haemorrhage was not significantly associated with systemic disease, concurrent medication or itchiness. Conclusion: The majority of elderly patients with non-traumatic subconjunctival haemorrhage were males, and non-traumatic subconjunctival haemorrhage was most frequently observed in the nasal region of the eye. The parameters most frequently associated with subconjunctival haemorrhage were hypertension and aspirin use.


Knowing how atoms rearrange during a chemical transformation is fundamental to numerous applications aiming to accelerate organic synthesis and molecular discovery. This labelling is known as atom-mapping and is an NP-hard problem. Current solutions use a combination of graph-theoretical approaches, heuristics, and rule-based systems. Unfortunately, the existing mappings and algorithms are often prone to errors and quality issues, which limit the effectiveness of supervised approaches. Self-supervised neural networks called Transformers, on the other hand, have recently shown tremendous potential when applied to textual representations of different domain-specific data, such as chemical reactions. Here we demonstrate that attention weights learned by a Transformer, without supervision or human labelling, encode atom rearrangement information between products and reactants. We build a chemically agnostic attention-guided reaction mapper that shows a remarkable performance in terms of accuracy and speed, even for strongly imbalanced reactions. Our work suggests that unannotated collections of chemical reactions contain all the relevant information to construct coherent sets of reaction rules. This finding provides the missing link between data-driven and rule-based approaches and will stimulate machine-assisted discovery in the chemical domain.Code is available at: https://github.com/rxn4chemistry/rxnmapper


Control of the actin cytoskeleton is critical for many cellular processes, particularly cell motility. The actin-depolymerizing factor cofilin is inhibited by phosphorylation. To better understand its regulation, Gohla et al. used classical protein-purification techniques to isolate a protein with phosphatase activity toward cofilin phosphorylated on serine 3. The enzyme they isolated is a member of the haloacid dehalogenase (HAD) superfamily of phosphotransferases. These phosphatases have an unusual catalytic mechanism and were not previously implicated in serine dephosphorylation in mammals. The phosphatase, which the authors name chronophin (CIN), appears to be a physiologically relevant regulator of cofilin. Overexpression of CIN decreased amounts of phosphocofilin in HeLa cells. Depletion of CIN by RNA interference increased the amount of phosphocofilin, increased the amount of Factin, stabilized membrane protrusions and stress fibers, and caused abnormalities in cell division. The findings place new emphasis on understanding the HAD proteins and suggest that CIN could be a therapeutic target in diseases where control of the actin cytoskeleton is disrupted. A. Gohla, J. Birkenfeld, G. M. Bokoch, Chronophin, a novel HAD-type serine protein phosphatase, regulates cofilin-dependent actin dynamics. Nat. Cell Biol. 7, 21-29 (2005). [PubMed]


The northeastern Tibetan Plateau constitutes a transitional region between the low-relief physiographic plateau to the south and the high-relief ranges of the Qilian Shan to the north. Cenozoic deformation across this margin of the plateau is associated with localized growth of fault-cored mountain ranges and associated basins. Herein, we combine detailed structural analysis of the geometry of range-bounding faults and deformation of foreland basin strata with geomorphic and exhumational records of erosion in hanging-wall ranges in order to investigate the magnitude, timing, and style of deformation along the two primary fault systems, the Qinghai Nan Shan and the Gonghe Nan Shan. Structural mapping shows that both ranges have developed above imbricate fans of listric thrust faults, which sole into decollements in the middle crust. Restoration of shortening along balanced cross sections suggests a minimum of 0.8–2.2 km and 5.1–6.9 km of shortening, respectively. Growth strata in the associated foreland basin record the onset of deformation on the two fault systems at ca. 6–10 Ma and ca. 7–10 Ma, respectively, and thus our analysis suggests late Cenozoic shortening rates of 0.2 +0.2/–0.1 km/m.y. and 0.7 +0.3/–0.2 km/m.y. along the north and south sides of Gonghe Basin. Along the Qinghai Nan Shan, these rates are similar to late Pleistocene slip rates of ∼0.10 ± 0.04 mm/yr, derived from restoration and dating of a deformed alluvial-fan surface. Collectively, our results imply that deformation along both flanks of the doubly vergent Qilian Shan–Nan Shan initiated by ca. 10 Ma and that subsequent shortening has been relatively steady since that time.


To decarbonise the current building stock, action is required in order to utilise natural resources as retrofitting tools. This research paper uses bio-based insulation samples in combination with an earth mortar in order to create a hygric buffer to improve thermal comfort within residential properties and select the best performing bio-fibre. Three different bio-fibres were used (Saw Mill Residue and two different types of sheep wool: Wool 1 and Wool 2) in addition to 2 different mix designs and a plain control sample. Bio-fibres were characterised using SEM imaging to define surface morphology as an indication of the materials characteristics. Moisture buffering value (MBV) (where samples were exposed to step changes in relative humidity of 75% and 53% for 8 and 16 hours respectively) was also conducted to give a greater understanding of the dynamic way in which water is transported through the panel. Capillary action was also measured as an indication of the short, medium and long-term deformation water has on earthen-based construction. From 8 different mix designs, M1 SMR was selected for further experimentation.


Normal child development is slow from birth to 25 years. Since Neolithic times, humans have relied on common sense, learned by trial and error, and mourned infants lost to infection and malnutrition. In recent times, knowledge of the process accelerated with increasing interest in child survival and health improvement. Historically, infant survival relied on breastfeeding until pathogens were identified, food technology developed, and infant/child surveillance commenced within the ethos of public health. Today, universal screening of infants from birth aims to identify deviation from the norm in all areas of development, allowing early intervention and correction. The personal experience of health professionals can be a positive factor in reflective practice, questioning orthodoxy and generating new perspectives and corrective strategies. Clinical settings generate practice-based evidence, a prerequisite for research. This concept of the infant as a primary cause of feeding problems demands consideration of a new paradigm and prompts research.


Abstract. This paper reports on investigation of measurement uncertainty in positioning of a terrestrial laser scanner with network RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) service provided by SWEPOS®, Swedish national network of permanent reference stations for GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System). To simulate measurements by a scanner, a rotating flat bar fixed to a prism base, attached to a tribrach, was used. The tests have been carried out with both a rotating GNSS antenna (placed at different distances from the centre of rotation – radii) and a stationary antenna, under different time intervals (1–5 min). The results show that it is possible to achieve a standard uncertainty of less than 10 mm in plane and 16 mm in height, independently of the observation time and radius. Hence, network RTK can be used with advantage for precise direct georeferencing of point clouds, not only for determination of the position of the scanner, but also its orientation.