Copper hydride, CuH, has been prepared by the reduction of aqueous copper sulfate using hypophosphorous acid. The polycrystalline red–brown hydride has been analysed using transmission electron microscopy, powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) and differential scanning calorimetry, and consists of agglomerates of needle-like particles ca. 100 A in size. It is unstable at room temperature and, in an inert atmosphere, decomposes, as shown by powder XRD, to copper metal and hydrogen. Activation energies of 2.0, 8.5 and 4.7 (±0.4) kcal mol–1 were obtained for the induction, acceleratory and decay stages of the isothermal decomposition process below 100 °C. Above this temperature the solid melts.


The use of contact sand to achieve good hydraulic connection between the tension infiltrometer (TI) membrane and the soil is known to introduce an offset between the pressure head set on the bubble tower (h0) and the pressure head applied to the soil surface (hs). The nature and importance of the offset are poorly understood, however. Hence, the objectives of this study were to characterize the offset and to demonstrate its impacts on TI determinations of near‐saturated hydraulic conductivity, K(h), sorptive number, α*(h), flow‐weighted mean pore diameter, D(h), and number of flow‐weighted mean pores per unit area, N(h). The offset, Δh = hs − h0, consists of a constant elevation component and a variable head‐loss component. The elevation component increases hs relative to h0, and comprises most of the offset for low TI flux density, q(h0), and large contact sand hydraulic conductivity, Kcs The head‐loss component decreases hs relative to h0, and becomes more important as q(h0) increases or Kcs decreases. The offset has little effect on the accuracy of K(h), α*(h), D(h), and N(h) when these relationships are insensitive to changes in h0 When the relationships are sensitive to changing h0, the offset can change the shapes of the relationships; cause systematic overestimates of the K(h), α*(h), and D(h) values; and cause systematic underestimates of the N(h) values. The amount of overestimate and underestimate increases with increasing offset and should be corrected using a form of Darcy's law to prevent the introduction of systematic biases in TI results.


Past studies revealed that NGF and fibroblast growth factor (FGF) prevent the death of PC 12 pheochromocytoma cells that otherwise occurs in serum-free medium. Additional agents were tested here for their abilities to promote long-term survival of naive and NGF-pretreated (primed) PC 12 cells in serum-free conditions. Forskolin and permeant cAMP analogs effectively prevented serum-free cell death, as did micromolar levels of insulin and 10–100-nM levels of insulin-like growth factors I and II. In contrast to NGF and FGF, none of these agents caused neuronal differentiation of naive cells or neurite regeneration by primed cells. Each of the agents also prevented rapid cell death in a balanced salt solution, thus apparently ruling out a mechanism dependent on regulation of nutrient uptake. Epidermal growth factor and elevated K+ appeared to slow the rate of cell death, but did not promote long-term survival; phorbol ester, dexamethasone, or vanadate did not prevent cell death. Each of the survival-promoting agents was effective even when macromolecular synthesis was blocked. Because the synthesis inhibitors themselves did not significantly prevent cell death, such findings indicate that survival was promoted by mechanisms that do not require synthesis of RNA or protein. In addition, various lines of experimental evidence (using the kinase inhibitor K-252a or PC 12 cell variants deficient either in protein kinase A activity or in responsiveness to NGF) further suggested that the effective agents maintain survival by independent initial pathways. Regulation of protein kinase activity appears to be a common feature of each pathway and may therefore play a key convergent role in mediating prevention of cell death.


Scatterhoarding by rodents, whereby seeds are collected and stored for later consumption, can result in seed dispersal. Seeds may be covered in litter on the forest floor (cached) or buried. This is particularly so in the Neotropics for large, nutritious seeds, and where primary dispersers are rare or missing. In African forests, contemporary anthropogenic pressures such as hunting, forest degradation, and fragmentation are contributing toward major declines in large frugivores, yet the potential for scatterhoarding to mitigate this loss is largely unknown. In this study, we used thread‐marked seed to explore the balance between seed predation and dispersal by rodents in Afromontane forest. We studied two tree species in three habitats: (1) continuous forest; (2) continuous forest edge, and (3) small, degraded riparian forest patches. We found that seed removal rates were high and almost the same in all three habitats for both tree species, but that the predation/dispersal balance differed among habitats. In continuous forest, more seeds of each species were scatterhoarded than depredated, and rates of scatterhoarding differed between the two species. In all habitats, burying seeds up to 2 cm belowground was more common than caching. Distances seeds were moved was approximately five times greater in continuous forest than in forest edge or riparian patches. We found strong evidence to suggest that the African pouched rat, Cricetomys sp. nov was responsible for the scatterhoarding.


This paper is concerned with feature weighting/selection in the context of unsupervised clustering. Since different subspaces of the feature space may lead to different partitions of the data set, an efficient algorithm to tackle multi-modal environments is needed. In this context, the Multi-Niche Crowding Genetic Algorithm is used for searching relevant feature subsets. The proposed method is designed to deal with the inherent biases regarding the number of clusters and the number of features that appear in an unsupervised framework. The first one is eliminated with the aid of a new unsupervised clustering criterion, while the second is tackled with the aid of cross-projection normalization. The method delivers a vector of weights which offers a ranking of features in accordance with their relevance to clustering.


Written by NEIL GAIMAN Art by SHAWN MCMANUS, COLLEEN DORAN, BRYAN TALBOT, GEORGE PRATT and others Cover by DAVE MCKEAN Take an apartment house, add a drag queen, a lesbian couple, some talking animals, a talking severed head, a confused heroine and the deadly cuckoo. Stir vigorously with a hurricane and Morpheus himself and you get this fifth volume of the SANDMAN series, collecting issues #32-37 of the Vertigo classic. This story stars Barbie, who first makes an appearance in THE DOLL'S HOUSE and now finds herself a princess in a vivid dreamworld. On sale APRIL 27 - 192 pg, FC


DNA methylation appears to be involved in the regulation of gene expression. Transcriptionally inactive (silenced) genes normally contain a high proportion of 5-methyl-2'-deoxycytosine residues whereas transcriptionally active genes show much reduced levels. There appears good reason to believe that chemical agents capable of methylating 2'-deoxycytosine might affect gene expression and as a result of hypermethylating promoter regions of cytosine-guanine rich oncogenic sequences, cancer related genes may be silenced. This thesis describes the synthesis of a number of `electrophilic' S-methylsulphonium compounds and assesses their ability to act as molecules capable of methylating cytosine at position 5 and also considers their potential as cytotoxic agents. DNA is methylated in vivo by DNA methyltransferase utilising S-adenoxylmethionine as the methyl donor. This thesis addresses the theory that S-adenoxylmethionine may be replaced as the methyl donor for DNA methytransferase by other sulphonium compounds. S-[3H-methyl]methionine sulphonium iodide was synthesised and experiments to assess the ability of this compounds to transfer methyl groups to cytosine in the presence of DNA methyltransferase were unsuccessful. A proline residue adjacent to a cysteine residue has been identified to a highly conserved feature of the active site region of a large number of prokaryotic DNA methyltransferases. The thesis examines the possibility that short peptides containing the Pro-Cys fragment may be able to facilitate the alkylation of cytosine position 5 by sulphonium compounds. Peptides were synthesised up to 9 amino acids in length but none were shown to exhibit significant activity. Molecular modelling techniques, including Chem-X, Quanta, BIPED and protein structure prediction programs were used to assess any structural similarities that may exist between short peptides containing a Pro-Cys fragment and similar sequences present in proteins. A number of similar structural features were observed.


Abstract. The VAHINE mesocosm experiment was designed to trigger a diazotroph bloom and to follow the subsequent transfer of diazotroph-derived nitrogen (DDN) in the rest of the food web. Three mesocosms (50 m3) located inside the Noumea lagoon (New Caledonia, southwestern Pacific) were enriched with dissolved inorganic phosphorus (DIP) in order to promote N2 fixation in these low-nutrient, low-chlorophyll (LNLC) waters. Initially, the diazotrophic community was dominated by diatom diazotroph associations (DDAs), mainly by Rhizosolenia/Richelia intracellularis, and by Trichodesmium, which fueled enough DDN to sustain the growth of other diverse diatom species and Synechococcus populations that were well adapted to limiting DIP levels. After DIP fertilization (1 µM) on day 4, an initial lag time of 10 days was necessary for the mesocosm ecosystems to start building up biomass. However, changes in community structure were already observed during this first period, with a significant drop of both Synechococcus and diatom populations, while Prochlorococcus benefited from DIP addition. At the end of this first period, corresponding to when most added DIP was consumed, the diazotroph community changed drastically and became dominated by Cyanothece-like (UCYN-C) populations, which were accompanied by a monospecific bloom of the diatom Cylindrotheca closterium. During the second period, biomass increased sharply together with primary production and N2-fixation fluxes near tripled. Diatom populations, as well as Synechococcus and nanophytoeukaryotes, showed a re-increase towards the end of the experiment, showing efficient transfer of DDN to non-diazotrophic phytoplankton.


Robert Sedgewick has thoroughly rewritten and substantially expanded and updated his popular work to provide current and comprehensive coverage of important algorithms and data structures. Christopher Van Wyk and Sedgewick have developed new C++ implementations that both express the methods in a concise and direct manner, and also provide programmers with the practical means to test them on real applications.Many new algorithms are presented, and the explanations of each algorithm are much more detailed than in previous editions. A new text design and detailed, innovative figures, with accompanying commentary, greatly enhance the presentation. The third edition retains the successful blend of theory and practice that has made Sedgewick's work an invaluable resource for more than 250,000 programmers!This particular book, Parts 1-4, represents the essential first half of Sedgewick's complete work. It provides extensive coverage of fundamental data structures and algorithms for sorting, searching, and related applications. Although the substance of the book applies to programming in any language, the implementations by Van Wyk and Sedgewick also exploit the natural match between C++ classes and ADT implementations.Highlights Expanded coverage of arrays, linked lists, strings, trees, and other basic data structures Greater emphasis on abstract data types (ADTs), modular programming, object-oriented programming, and C++ classes than in previous editions Over 100 algorithms for sorting, selection, priority queue ADT implementations, and symbol table ADT (searching) implementations New implementations of binomial queues, multiway radix sorting, randomized BSTs, splay trees, skip lists, multiway tries, B trees, extendible hashing, and much more Increased quantitative information about the algorithms, giving you a basis for comparing them Over 1000 new exercises to help you learn the properties of algorithms Whether you are learning the algorithms for the first time or wish to have up-to-date reference material that incorporates new programming styles with classic and new algorithms, you will find a wealth of useful information in this book.


The current times of constitutional transformation in the EU place the following question on the agenda: Is the ongoing economic crisis demarcating the end of the original conception of a 'European Economic Constitution' as it has developed since the early days of the EEC? Or are we witnessing simply a shift towards a new more encompassing model of an EU 'Economic Constitution' in which economic government and economic governance tools are used in parallel to deepen integration and continue the spill-over of economic integration into previously national policies? This contribution traces and evaluates conceptual, regulatory, institutional and legitimacy-related changes and challenges to the EU's model of the 'Economic Constitution' as the basic EU legal framework governing economic policy. This chapter argues that the EU's constitutional framework in the form of the existing Treaties and General Principles of EU law did not provide an adequate legal framework to cope with the ongoing crisis. This failure has, in our view, initiated an ongoing transformation of the EU's 'Economic Constitution' as we know it. Laying the foundations for the transformation took place in several consecutive steps mostly on the intergovernmental level and often as a combination of EU law, public international law and in some cases mixed with private law instruments. The nature of this evolution creates challenges with regard to ensuring compliance of these newly developed structures with the Union's foundational principles of ensuring transparency, democratic legitimacy, fundamental rights and effective review mechanisms in the context of a system under the rule of law. In order to illustrate the modes of the continuous transformation of the 'Economic Constitution' and to evaluate the direction it is taking, this chapter will start with tracing its origins and follow its evolution over time. It thereby distinguishes two separate but interlinked elements of the 'Economic Constitution.' It first looks at the original focus of European regulation regarding what we refer to as 'micro-economic' matters with policies including competition law and the control of state aids. This chapter then turns to the evolving focus of EU law the larger questions of economic and fiscal policies which we refer to in the following as the 'macro-economic' element of the constitutional framework.


Stewart platform (SP) mechanisms have wide application area on aerospace and manufacturing industry with its nonlinear structure allowing spatial motion capabilities. However, nonlinearities in the structure of the mechanism lead to complications in the dynamics of the system and result in complex control algorithms for dexterity in motion and force/torque feedback. Therefore, this paper aims to represent stiffness control by means of independent joint fuzzy-PD control algorithm with gain scheduling on an experimental 3x3 SP parallel robotic mechanism to be used as a fly-by-wire flight control unit. Model and real system responses are compared employing simple stiffness control so that the model is valid for control design trials. Following the selection of optimum control coefficients of self-tuning structure, responses are compared with alternative control algorithms like fuzzy-PD, self-tuning fuzzy PD and PD controllers. Optimum control coefficients are selected minimizing force error integral over a spiral force path on nine chosen points of the workspace. However, torque feedback is applied minimizing the torque error for simple angular motions. System responses for selected controllers are presented and discussed.


Eating well is essential for children in their early years. There is clear evidence that the first 1000 days of life (the 9 months of pregnancy and the first 2 years of life) are particularly critical for ensuring healthy growth and development and to ensure all children meet their full potential. It is also important that children 2-5 years eat well to establish good eating patterns, to protect their teeth and to ensure they arrive in school at a healthy body weight and with a good and varied appetite.
Families who choose a vegan diet may wish to bring their children up as vegans from birth, and it is important that all those that support families with infants and children on a vegan diet have clear, expert information on how to ensure energy and nutrient needs are met. The new practical photographic resource Eating well for vegan infants and under 5s provides information, recipes and portion size information for early years settings as well as practical advice relevant to all infants and children on eating well.


The expanding use of ubiquitous computing has created a significant demand on existing network infrastructures. The demands of voice, video, and data on the same medium require a quality of service (QoS) at a level acceptable to users. Many network providers simply scale their networks to increase bandwidth and hardware to deal with the increasing demands. However, a network may still reach its design limits with peak traffic or malicious overuse of resources. In addition, with technology changing at a rapid pace, it is difficult to provide sufficient staffing to monitor and adjust the network settings to avoid issues during periods of network saturation. One of the common method to address these issues involves implementing a traffic shaper. A traffic shaper is a computer network management technique by which data sent across the network is delayed or routed in a way to accommodate a specific level of traffic to reach a desired QoS. There are many existing traffic shaping algorithms, each performing well under specific circumstances improving some QoS measures. The algorithms make use of queuing schemes to sort and send traffic based on the parameters provided to the system. To determine the need for this research, a survey was administered which revealed dissatisfaction with QoS of the wireless network. The purpose of this study focused on the development of a traffic shaping algorithm that would improve the QoS on a local area network on a university campus. The goal of the research was to create a new architecture that would allow a router to dynamically shift between different queuing mechanisms to improve network delay and packet loss without negatively impacting data throughput. The Multi-Mode Self-Adaptive (MMSA) algorithm was proposed to define a mechanism for this architecture. The MMSA was implemented within the code of a Cisco® router in the OPNET Modeler software and tested in a simulated university network environment. The results of the simulation revealed an improvement in end to end delay and packet loss rate with an insignificant change in average transmit rate between the router and the external server. The results of this research can be used as a basis for future research to create a new QoS framework. The new framework could be implemented in a router to allow configurations tailored to the network requirements of a service provider. DEVELOPMENT OF A MULTI-MODE SELF-ADAPTIVE ALGORITHM TO CREATE AN EFFICIENT WIRELESS NETWORK ON A UNIVERSITY CAMPUS A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Technology Approved: ____________________________________________ Dr. Jin Zhu, Chair ___________________________________________ Dr. Paul Gray, Co-Chair ___________________________________________ Dr. Shashi Kaparthi, Committee Member ___________________________________________ Dr. Ali Kashef, Committee Member ___________________________________________ Dr. Hong Nie, Committee Member


We report results from an experimental study on the formation of stable–streamlined and helical cavity wakes following the free-surface impact of Leidenfrost spheres. Similar to the observations of Mansoor et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 743, 2014, pp. 295–326), we show that acoustic ripples form along the interface of elongated cavities entrained in the presence of wall effects as soon as the primary cavity pinch-off takes place. The crests of these ripples can act as favourable points for closure, producing multiple acoustic pinch-offs, which are found to occur in an acoustic pinch-off cascade. We show that these ripples pacify with time in the absence of physical contact between the sphere and the liquid, leading to extremely smooth cavity wake profiles. More importantly, the downward-facing jet at the apex of the cavity is continually suppressed due to a skin-friction drag effect at the colliding cavity-wall junction, which ultimately produces a stable–streamlined cavity wake. This streamlined configuration is found to experience drag coefficients an order of a magnitude lower than those acting on room-temperature spheres. A striking observation is the formation of helical cavities which occur for impact Reynolds numbers $Re_{0}\gtrsim 1.4\times 10^{5}$ and are characterized by multiple interfacial ridges, stemming from and rotating synchronously about an evident contact line around the sphere equator. The contact line is shown to result from the degeneration of Kelvin–Helmholtz billows into turbulence which are observed forming along the liquid–vapour interface around the bottom hemisphere of the sphere. Using sphere trajectory measurements, we show that this helical cavity wake configuration has 40 %–55 % smaller force coefficients than those obtained in the formation of stable cavity wakes.


In the first book on intertextuality in Pliny the Younger, Professor Marchesi invites a new reading of Pliny's collection of private epistles: the letters are examined as the product of an authorial strategy controlling both the rhetorical fabric of individual units and their arrangement in the collection. By inserting recognizable fragments of canonical authors into his epistles, Pliny imports into the still fluid practice of letter-writing the principles of composition and organization that for his contemporaries characterized other writings as literature. Allusions become the occasion for a metapoetic dialogue, especially with the collection's privileged addressee, Tacitus. An active participant in the cultural politics of his time, Pliny entrusts to the letters his views on poetry, oratory and historiography. In defining a model of epistolography alternative to Cicero's and complementing those of Horace, Ovid and Seneca, he also successfully carves a niche for his work in the Roman literary canon.


Missionary Positions challenges common Christian assumptions about sex workers. Using feminist, postcolonial perspectives, interviews with pastoral practitioners and personal narrative, Lauren McGrow carves out a space for the dynamic theological agency and life complexity of sex workers to be acknowledged.


We analyse if the presence of the invasive Discoglossus pictus and the native Epidalea calamita in the same geographic area can shape the dynamics of infection by Batrachochytridium dendrobatidis (Bd). Both amphibian species share breeding habitat preferences in the area (i.e. ephemeral and temporary ponds) and are common syntopic competitors. We sampled adults of either species in a total of nine breeding localities in Catalonia (NE Iberian Peninsula): six localities within sympatric geographic areas, two localities outside the current invasion range of D. pictus, and one locality comprising solely D. pictus due to its recent introduction and the ancient extinction of E. calamita. We analysed the prevalence and intensity of infection by Bd in 183 individuals (81 D. pictus and 101 E. calamita). The presence of Bd was detected in eight of the localities, all of which had not been yet confirmed as positive for the fungus. Only in one locality, with presence of D. pictus, Bd presence was not detected. Mean prevalence was slightly but non-significantly higher in E. calamita (46.5%) than in D. pictus (36.6%). Allopatric populations of E. calamita showed significantly lower prevalence of Bd infection than sympatric ones, but similar differences were not found for infection intensity. Likewise, no significant differences were found in infection intensity between allopatric and sympatric D. pictus populations. The presence of abundant Bd outside the invasion range of D. pictus supports the assertion that Bd has not been introduced in the studied area because of D. pictus invasion. However, the presence of the two species in sympatry may enhance the infection rates and therefore the prevalence of Bd in the native species.


Abstract. Large variability is inherent to turbulent flux observations. We review different methods used to estimate the flux random errors. Flux errors are calculated using measured turbulent and simulated artificial records. We recommend two flux errors with clear physical meaning: the flux error of the covariance, defining the error of the measured flux as 1 standard deviation of the random uncertainty of turbulent flux observed over an averaging period of typically 30 min to 1 h duration; and the error of the flux due to the instrumental noise. We suggest that the numerical approximation by Finkelstein and Sims (2001) is a robust and accurate method for calculation of the first error estimate. The method appeared insensitive to the integration period and the value 200 s sufficient to obtain the estimate without significant bias for variety of sites and wide range of observation conditions. The filtering method proposed by Salesky et al. (2012) is an alternative to the method by Finkelstein and Sims (2001) producing consistent, but somewhat lower, estimates. The method proposed by Wienhold et al. (1995) provides a good approximation to the total flux random uncertainty provided that independent cross-covariance values far from the maximum are used in estimation as suggested in this study. For the error due to instrumental noise the method by Lenschow et al. (2000) is useful in evaluation of the respective uncertainty. The method was found to be reliable for signal-to-noise ratio, defined by the ratio of the standard deviation of the signal to that of the noise in this study, less than three. Finally, the random uncertainty of the error estimates was determined to be in the order of 10 to 30 % for the total flux error, depending on the conditions and method of estimation.


We present a new learning architecture: the Decision Directed Acyclic Graph (DDAG), which is used to combine many two-class classifiers into a multiclass classifier. For an N-class problem, the DDAG contains N(N - 1)/2 classifiers, one for each pair of classes. We present a VC analysis of the case when the node classifiers are hyperplanes; the resulting bound on the test error depends on N and on the margin achieved at the nodes, but not on the dimension of the space. This motivates an algorithm, DAGSVM, which operates in a kernel-induced feature space and uses two-class maximal margin hyperplanes at each decision-node of the DDAG. The DAGSVM is substantially faster to train and evaluate than either the standard algorithm or Max Wins, while maintaining comparable accuracy to both of these algorithms.


In many parts of the world, notably in South Asia, crop intensification is resulting in more crops being grown on stored soil moisture, under which conditions the topsoil commonly dries out during crop growth. In the Mediterranean climatic region also, topsoils dry out particularly during the later part of the growing season. Implications of the drying of topsoils for crop nutrition in general are poorly understood. Crop intensification in South Asia is also leading to increased mechanisation and the emergence of minimum tillage sowing of crops. The key research question for the present thesis is availability of phosphorus (P) for chickpea grown with stored residual soil water in the context where placement of P fertilizer with the seed is accomplished by mechanised planters. This study investigated the P nutrition of chickpea considering uptake from topsoil and subsoil and factors affecting P availability, distribution and remobilization throughout the growing season when P fertilizer was supplied with the seed or below the seed (in the subsoil) under well-watered and dry topsoil conditions. Short-term (up to 12 or 24 days) glasshouse studies assessed the risk of toxicity for seed emergence and early growth of chickpea when P fertilizers were placed with seed in well-watered soil. In sand, seed-placed P fertilizers (diammonium phosphate and triple superphosphate) depressed chickpea germination and seedling growth while seed-placed P was safe in sandy clay loam soil at rates equivalent to 20 kg P/ha even in the scenario where the seed was sown in wide rows (up to 60 cm) that results in higher effective P fertiliser concentration around seed. In the field when chickpea was sown in four soils (sandy clay loam- clay loam texture) with a drying surface, the seed-placed P fertilizer at 20 kg P/ha as triple superphosphate had no suppressive effect in the early growth stage of chickpea but the grain yield improvement was very small (~10% over the nil P). Under a drying topsoil, chickpea accumulated P until late pod filling stage irrespective of P fertilizer treatments. From the accumulated P, plants remobilized a substantial amount of P (52% of total in vegetative shoot parts) which contributed the equivalent of 69% of the total pod P. The remobilization of P from the vegetative parts was not sufficient for the pod P requirement but rather concurrent P uptake from the soil was needed to complete the P requirements of the pods. These results suggested that continual P uptake of chickpea depended on uptake from the subsoil P where moisture was available after drying of the topsoil. To assess the contribution of subsoil P to P uptake by chickpea under dry topsoil condition, a glasshouse study was setup by supplying P levels in the subsoil (10-30 cm). This study also showed that chickpea continued to accumulate P until late podding stage when the topsoil was completely dried; the pod P content was contributed by both remobilized P (70%) and concurrent uptake of P (30 %), but the level of P in the dry topsoil had no effect on total P content of the plant or its pods. Fractionation of P in rhizosphere soil showed that chickpea depleted sparingly-soluble 0.1 M NaOH-extractable inorganic P (NaOH Pi) in addition to labile P fractions. The drawdown of depleted P fractions was greater in the subsoil than the topsoil. The response of carboxylate exudation of chickpea under dry topsoil condition was investigated in the final glasshouse study. Under dry topsoil condition, chickpea exuded substantially higher amounts of total carboxylates in the well-watered subsoil compared to the dry topsoil. Malonate was the principal form of carboxylate followed by malate and citrate. The depletion of sparingly-soluble P forms (NaOH Pi from both the P-supplied topsoil and subsoil and the 1 M HCl extractable inorganic P from the subsoil without added P) suggests a link between the carboxylates excreted in the subsoil rhizosphere and the depletion of sparingly soluble P fractions. In conclusion, chickpea continued to take up P during the whole period of dry matter accumulation including during pod filling. Under conditions where the topsoil dried out mostly before flowering, the post-flowering P uptake is most likely to have been acquired from the subsoil. In this study, substantial root growth and carboxylate exudation by chickpea into the moist subsoil has been demonstrated suggesting a possible mechanism for mobilisation of subsoil P reserves for uptake during pod filling. The seed-placed P fertilizer had limited positive effect on chickpea grain yield in the field possibly due to shallow depth of fertilizer placement into topsoil which was dry when the plant's P demand was high. Subsoil placement of P fertilizer showed promise for improving P uptake and grain yield of chickpea under dry topsoil condition. Further studies are required under different soils and environmental conditions to assess the contribution of subsoil P to the P nutrition of chickpea.


Since the first H-mode discharges in 2010, the duration of the H-mode state has been extended and a significantly wider operational window of plasma parameters has been attained. Using a second neutral beam (NB) source and improved tuning of equilibrium configuration with real-time plasma control, a stored energy of Wtot ∼ 450 kJ has been achieved with a corresponding energy confinement time of τE ∼ 163 ms. Recent discharges, produced in the fall of 2012, have reached plasma βN up to 2.9 and surpassed the n = 1 ideal no-wall stability limit computed for H-mode pressure profiles, which is one of the key threshold parameters defining advanced tokamak operation. Typical H-mode discharges were operated with a plasma current of 600 kA at a toroidal magnetic field BT = 2 T. L–H transitions were obtained with 0.8–3.0 MW of NB injection power in both single- and double-null configurations, with H-mode durations up to ∼15 s at 600 kA of plasma current. The measured power threshold as a function of line-averaged density showed a roll-over with a minimum value of ∼0.8 MW at . Several edge-localized mode (ELM) control techniques during H-mode were examined with successful results including resonant magnetic perturbation, supersonic molecular beam injection (SMBI), vertical jogging and electron cyclotron current drive injection into the pedestal region. We observed various ELM responses, i.e. suppression or mitigation, depending on the relative phase of in-vessel control coil currents. In particular, with the 90° phase of the n = 1 RMP as the most resonant configuration, a complete suppression of type-I ELMs was demonstrated. In addition, fast vertical jogging of the plasma column was also observed to be effective in ELM pace-making. SMBI-mitigated ELMs, a state of mitigated ELMs, were sustained for a few tens of ELM periods. A simple cellular automata ('sand-pile') model predicted that shallow deposition near the pedestal foot induced small-sized high-frequency ELMs, leading to the mitigation of large ELMs. In addition to the ELM control experiments, various physics topics were explored focusing on ITER-relevant physics issues such as the alteration of toroidal rotation caused by both electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) and externally applied 3D fields, and the observed rotation drop by ECRH in NB-heated plasmas was investigated in terms of either a reversal of the turbulence-driven residual stress due to the transition of ion temperature gradient to trapped electron mode turbulence or neoclassical toroidal viscosity (NTV) torque by the internal kink mode. The suppression of runaway electrons using massive gas injection of deuterium showed that runaway electrons were avoided only below 3 T in KSTAR. Operation in 2013 is expected to routinely exceed the n = 1 ideal MHD no-wall stability boundary in the long-pulse H-mode (⩾10 s) by applying real-time shaping control, enabling n = 1 resistive wall mode active control studies. In addition, intensive works for ELM mitigation, ELM dynamics, toroidal rotation changes by both ECRH and NTV variations, have begun in the present campaign, and will be investigated in more detail with profile measurements of different physical quantities by techniques such as electron cyclotron emission imaging, charge exchange spectroscopy, Thomson scattering and beam emission spectroscopy diagnostics.


Photodynamic therapy (PDT) of superficial bladder cancer may cause damages to the normal surrounding bladder wall. Prevention of these is important for bladder healing. We studied the influence of photosensitizer concentration, irradiation parameters, and production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) on the photodynamically induced damage in the porcine urothelium invitro. The aim was to determine the threshold conditions for the cell survival.


From Newton's Law of Gravity to the Black-Scholes model used by bankers to predict the markets, equations, are everywhere -- and they are fundamental to everyday life.Seventeen Equations that Changed the World examines seventeen ground-breaking equations that have altered the course of human history. He explores how Pythagoras's Theorem led to GPS and Satnav; how logarithms are applied in architecture; why imaginary numbers were important in the development of the digital camera, and what is really going on with Schrodinger's cat. Entertaining, surprising and vastly informative, Seventeen Equations that Changed the World is a highly original exploration -- and explanation -- of life on earth.


Background: Mortality and morbidity of patients following traumatic brain injury (TBI) remains extremely high. TBI sets into motion a cascade of apoptotic events that includes bcl-2, which inhibits apoptosis. Patients with higher levels of bcl-2 protein after TBI appear to have smaller areas of ischemia and better functional outcomes as measured by Glasgow Outcome Scores (GOS). Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between BCL-2 genotypes in patients with severe TBI and global functional outcomes, cognitive-behavioral outcomes, mortality, and biological/clinical data. Methods: This pilot study was an ancillary study that examined biological/clinical markers in TBI patients and global functional and cognitive-behavioral outcomes after severe TBI (n=230). Nuclear DNA was extracted from CSF or blood. Based on HapMap, the DNA was analyzed for the genotypes of 17 high priority tagging single nucleotide polymorphisms (tSNPs) with a minor allele frequency ≥0.3 via TaqMan® allele discrimination. Biological/clinical data (bcl-2 protein levels, neurometabolites (lactate, pyruvate, and lactate pyruvate (LP) ratio) and cerebral blood flow (CBF) were analyzed following the first five to six (protein only) days post injury. Mortality and global functional outcomes [GOS & Disability Rating Scale (DRS)], analyzed at 3, 6, 12, and 24 months. The cognitive behavioral outcomes [Neurobehavioral Rating Scale -Revised (NRS-R), Trails A, and Trails B] were analyzed at 3, 6, and 12 months post injury. Statistical analysis for BCL-2's relationship with neuropsychological outcomes and biological/ clinical data overtime utilized was mixed modeling, (mortality utilized generalized mixed modeling). Results: There were 3 tSNPs of particular interest: Rs1801018: homozygous variant (GG) significant associated with decreased mortality (p=0.0055; OR=5.01), higher GOS (p=0.0004), lower DRS (p=0.0002), lower Global CBF (p=0.0031), [presence of the variant allele (G)] lower LP ratios (p=0.024); all better outcomes. Rs17756073: presence of variant allele (G) was associated with higher NRS-R (p=0.0331) and longer Trails B times (p=0.0516); both poorer outcomes. Rs7236090: homozygous wild type (CC) was associated with lower bcl-2 protein concentrations when analyzed without outliers (p=0.0056); the literature associates this with poor outcomes.Conclusion: BCL-2 genotypes had a significant relationship with global functional outcomes, cognitive behavioral outcomes, bcl-2 protein concentrations, neurometabolites, and CBF.


Background: Low compliance as one cause of high prevalence of anemia in Indonesia is mainly due to forgetfulness. Nutrition education and short message service (SMS) are expected to become media to send nutrition message and remind pregnant mothers of taking iron tablet. Objective: To identify impact of nutrition education and nutrition message through SMS to knowledge, behavior and compliance of pregnant mothers with taking iron tablet. Method: The study was a quasi experiment that used pre and post test control/non equivalent control group design involving 3 groups of experiment, i.e. nutrition education only, nutrition education and SMS, and control as comparator. Subject of the study consisted of 121 pregnant mothers. The study was carried out from November 2009 to April 2010 at Palangka Raya Municipality in Pahandut, Kayon and Tangkiling Health Centers. Statistical analysis was performed by using paired t-test, ANOVA, Tukey test, and multivariate test. Results: Pregnant mothers that got nutrition education and SMS intervention significantly improved their knowledge and behavior (p<0.05). Pregnant mothers that got nutrition education and SMS had knowledge 18 point higher (coef=18.26), behavior 4 point better (coef=4.07) and probability 4 times more compliant than the control group (OR=3.79; p=0.03). Nutrition education and SMS intervention could increase compliance and significantly affect increase of hemoglobin (Hb) level up to 1.3g/dl (p<0.05). Increase of Hb level went in line with increase of compliance (dose-response) in pregnant mothers with preliminary Hb level <11g/dl. Meanwhile in pregnant mothers with preliminary Hb level ≥11g/dl, increase of Hb level was statistically significant when compliance reached ≥90%.  Conclusion: Pregnant mothers that got nutrition education and SMS had better knowledge, behavior and compliance with taking iron tablet than those that only got nutrition education and the control group. High compliance could significantly increase Hb level.


Introduction: Reference interval (RIs) is the range of values provided by laboratory scientists in a convenient and practical form to support clinician in interpreting observed values for diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of a disease. Laboratories in Nepal uses RIs, provided in the kit inserts by the manufacturers or from the scientific literature, established for western/European population. It is well known that population across the globe differs physiologically, genetically; race, ethnically, lifestyle, food habits and diet which have great impact on the reference values. Thus, it is inappropriate to use RIs that do not represent the local population. This approach highlights for establishing reference values in Nepalese population using the IFCC-CRIDL guidelines published in (C28-A3). Objectives: The objective of this study is to analyze blood lipids concentration in apparently healthy Nepalese population to set up reference values for total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), High Density Lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) and Low Density Lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) and compare with the internationally recommended values. Methods: Reference individuals selected from healthy volunteers according to the IFCC/C-RIDL protocol in (C28 –A3). Volunteers were requested to avoid excessive physical exertion/exercise/excessive eating and drinking and fast overnight for 10-12 hour. Blood samples were collected from 120 subjects from each five centers of the country between 7:00-10:00 am, serum were separated and refrigerated at -20 in a cryo-vials. Finally, 617 samples were transported to Yamaguchi University, Graduate School of Medicine, Ube, Japan for analysis in dry Ice and 30 parameters were measured by fully automated biochemistry analyzer, Beckman Coulter (BC480) in the clinical laboratory. Results: A reference interval for each parameter was calculated from the 95% reference intervals ranging from 2.5% and 97.5% percentiles and, arithmetic mean + 2 SD were also calculated. The 95% reference range for total cholesterol (2.53-6.14), triglyceride was(0.42-3.32),for HDL Cholesterol was (0.28-1.46), for LDL was(1.05-4.00) and for VLDL was (0.054-0.92) for Nepalese population. Conclusion: Nepalese clinicians can take into consideration of reference lipid values of this study for diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of disease.
Int. J. Appl. Sci. Biotechnol. Vol 6(4): 366-372


The article presents the results of a second part of a larger experimental study on the perception of different types of changes in the time courses of rough violin sound signals . In the first part of the study, the sounds of a bowed, open violin string (G), played with different bow speeds and force, resulting in sounds differing in roughnesses, were simultaneously documented by a high speed video camera and recorded. The recordings were used as stimuli in a ranking and rating and pair comparison listening test. The roughness dissimilarity ratings and perceived difference verbal attribute descriptors were connected with stimuli positions in a MDS perception space (for the details of the test conduct and evaluation, see [13]). In the presented second part, the revealed multidimensionality of perceived roughness is studied in the context of time course changes in both the audio and the string motion signals. The signal analysis reveals connection of the two of the possible dimensions of roughness (cracked and buzzing percepts) to a signal variability. The cracked percept is connected to irregularities in both signals, and the buzzing percept, to a superposition of regular waveforms of neighboring harmonics (one bark harmonic triads) in two barks of the audio signal.


Organizations are adopting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to increase operation's efficiency and flexibility. To accomplish these goals, it is necessary to ensure that the architecture and its evolution are compliant with business goals, best practices, legal and regulatory requirements. However, the diversity of domains and stakeholders involved in SOA solutions demands complex and expensive work to validate the architecture compliance. Hence, it can result in high costs and low quality assessment if the organization does not use an effective approach in this scenario. In addition, it would be important to consider standards and open solutions in order to promote interoperability and reuse of available tools, making it easier to spread throughout the organizations. We propose intelliGov, an architecture that aims to solve these problems by using ontologies, semantic rules and queries in order to simplify the compliance validation process. The architecture employs open standards – OWL, SWRL and SQWRL – in its implementation. A case study, executed in a global energy company that is currently adopting SOA, demonstrates gains in quality and costs of the compliance assessment process using the proposed architecture.


We have further developed a two-dimensional endochronic constitutive model applicable to rock in the intermediate strain regime, i.e., approximately 10−6 to 10−3, where nonlinear losses, pulse distortion, and harmonic distortions have been documented in the laboratory. An accurate and efficient computation algorithm has been established and used to fit a set of triaxial laboratory data on Berea Sandstone, obtained by G. N. Boitnott of New England Research, Inc., including nonlinear hysteresis for both hydrostatic compression and shear deformation. The constitutive model has been incorporated into a two-dimensional pseudospectral scheme for simulating nonlinear wave propagation. We compare our numerical pseudospectral scheme with the perturbation solutions to nonlinearly elastic plane wave propagation and find that the two solutions are in close agreement. Applying the numerical scheme to the endochronic constitutive model for Berea Sandstone, we find the following results, which confirm and extend previous results obtained with a one-dimensional model: (1) nonlinear propagation from a monochromatic source excites odd harmonics of the source frequency, (2) the interaction of two monochromatic wave fields leads to energy transfer to other bands corresponding to various combinations of the two source frequencies, (3) amplitudes of the harmonics change with distance and show a trade-off between nonlinearity, intrinsic attenuation (hysteresis), and geometrical spreading, (4) for a broadband pressure source, energy is transferred from the principal band to a higher band at the expense of the components at intermediate frequencies; this is diagnostic of nonlinear interactions, and (5) the harmonic amplitude and energy transfer increase nonlinearly with strain amplitude; i.e., higher strain levels lead to higher energy exchange. These simulations of harmonic generation, interaction, and band expansion, based on a model developed from quasistatic experimental observations, agree with dynamic experimental observations.


To examine the pathogenic capacity of Goussia carpell;, a gut-dwelling coccidian parasite of common carp Cyprinus carpio, hematological parameters were recorded from carp following a laboratory-induced infection with this parasite. With the development of the parasite, serum sodium and protein levels decreased, thus indicating an ion loss and the hydration of blood plasma in infected fish. On Days 8 and 11 post exposure (PE) to the parasite, Aeromonas spp.-like bacteria were detected in the liver and the spleen of 8 infected carp out of the 10 carp sampled, while uninfected control carp remained bacteria-free. On these dates, infected carp were listless, and their intestines appeared dilated and were filled with a whitish-yellow gelatinous content. In intestinal scrapings, gamogonic and sporogonic developmental stages of the coccidia were found. Differential white blood cell counts of peripheral blood leukocytes showed an increase in granulocyte numbers on Days 11 and 14 PE. On Days 21 and 28 PE, when the carp had already excreted most of the oocysts, a clear leucocytosis was found. Owing to the osmotic challenge of infected carp, which is caused by ion loss and plasma hydration, and to the invasion of opportunistic bacteria, the infection of carp with G, carpelli should be taken as a serious pathogen affecting stressed or juvenile fish.


Parasitism is a common life strategy throughout the eukaryotic tree of life. Many devastating human pathogens, including the causative agents of malaria and toxoplasmosis, have evolved from a photosynthetic ancestor. However, how an organism transitions from a photosynthetic to a parasitic life history strategy remains mostly unknown. Parasites have independently evolved dozens of times throughout the Florideophyceae (Rhodophyta), and often infect close relatives. This framework enables direct comparisons between autotrophs and parasites to investigate the early stages of parasite evolution. Parasitic red algae have traditionally been defined as either 'adelphoparasites', which infect hosts within their same family or tribe, or 'alloparasites' which infect hosts in other families. Prior to this research, investigations have primarily focused on understanding the development and evolution of 'adelphoparasites'. All adelphoparasites studied to date have been shown to have lost their native plastid and instead incorporate a host plastid when packaging their spores. Additionally, previously published 'adelphoparasite' mitochondrion genomes have reduced coding capacity. The goal of this research was to investigate 1) the evolutionary impact on the plastid of the 'alloparasite' Choreocolax polysiphoniae, 2) the coding capacity of the C. polysiphoniae mitochondrion, and 3) the evolutionary origins of Rhodomelaceae 'alloparasites'. A combination of Sanger-sequencing of targeted PCR products and nextgeneration sequencing of genomic DNA and total RNA was used to investigate the organelles of the 'alloparasites' Choreocolax polysiphoniae, Harveyella mirabilis, Leachiella pacifica, and a previously undescribed species of Leachiella, the 'adelphoparasites' Gracilariophila oryzoides and Gonimophyllum skottsbergii, and the host of C. polysiphoniae, Vertebrata lanosa. Organellar genomes were assembled using CLC genomics workbench and Geneious Pro and subsequently manually annotated using BLAST and Pfam. Comparative analyses of organellar genomes were completed using MAUVE genome alignment software. Total RNA was assembled using the Trinity based pipeline, Agalma and annotated using InterProScan. Analyses of transcriptomic data were completed using Silix and HiFix. This research generated plastid genomes for C. polysiphoniae and its host V. lanosa. The C. polysiphoniae plastid represents the first plastid genome sequenced for a red algal parasite. Interestingly, this plastid has reduced coding capacity and has lost genes involved with photosynthetic processes and its presence challenges the previously proposed paradigm of red algal parasite evolution. Investigations of red algal parasite mitochondria demonstrated that parasites retain fully functional and typical Florideophyceae mitochondria. Finally, an investigation of parasites typically considered as alloparasites supports a monophyletic clade of parasites, which all retain their native plastid genomes, arose and radiated to infect different hosts within the Rhodomelaceae. Data generated here supports previous findings that 'alloparasites' rarely infect hosts in different families. Therefore the terms 'adelphoparasite' and 'alloparasite', which are based on evolutionary relationships to their hosts and do not accurately distinguish types of red algal parasites. Based upon this research, we propose to redefine red algal parasites by their plastid origins as either Archaeplastic parasites (parasites that retain a native plastid) or Neoplastic parasites (those which incorporate a host plastid).


Prefaces ix Notes on the Contributors xiii List of Illustrations xvii Abbreviations xxv COLUM HOURIHANE Introduction 3 PART 1. ICONOGRAPHY JAROSLAV FOLDA Problems in the Iconography of the Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land: 1098-1291/1917-1997 11 DEBRA HASSIG The Iconography of Rejection: Jews and Other Monstrous Races 25 ALISON STONES Nipples, Entrails, Severed Heads, and Skin: Devotional Images for Madame Marie 47 DOROTHY HOOGLAND VERKERK Moral Structure in the Ashburnharn Pentateuch 71 ADELAIDE BENNETT A Woman's Power of Prayer versus the Devil in a Book of Hours of ca. 1300 89 CYNTHIA HAHN Interpictoriality in the Limoges Chasses of Stephen, Martial, and Valerie 109 ANDREAS PETZOLD Of the Significance of Colours: The Iconography of Colour in Romanesque and Early Gothic Book Illumination 125 JAMES D'EMILIC Looking Eastward: The Story of Noe at Monreale Cathedral 135 GIOVANNI FRENI The Architecture and Sculpture of the Portal of the South Side of Arezzo Cathedral 151 AVRIL HENRY Daring Conflation? A Difficult Image in the Genesis Sequence of the Eton Roundels (Eton College, Ms. 177, f. 2r) 169 JOHN V. FLEMING The Personal Appropriation of Iconographic Forms: Two Franciscan Signatures 205 PART 2. METHODOLOGY LUTZ HEUSINGER How to Improve Art-Historical Services 215 HELENE E. ROBERTS The Persistence of Mythological, Religious, and Literary Narratives as Subjects of Works of Art 227 PETER VAN HUISSTEDE The Iconography of The Ship of State by Peter Paul Rubens: A Variant on the Theme Hercules am Scheidewege 243 CAROL TOGNERI ICONCLASS and Its Application to Primary Documents 259 HANS BRANDHORST Ululas Athenas: Owls to Athens 271 JURGEN VAN DEN BERG AND GERDA G. J. DUIJFJES-VELLEKOOP Translating ICONCLASS and the Connectivity Concept of the Iconclass2000 Browser 291 Index 307


This paper analysis performance of energy detection technique for cognitive radio which implies spectrum sensing. Main objective is to reduce interference occur in the cognitive radio systems. Spectrum detection schemes are based on fixed threshold these are sensitive to noise; the energy detection based on dynamic threshold can improve the resistance of noise and get a good performance of detection while without increasing the complexity and improves detection performance. At the same time, security issues of cognitive radio have received more attentions recently since the inherent Properties of CR networks would pose new challenges to wireless communications.


Objectives: The incidence of acute kidney injury in neonates is high and associated with up to a 50% mortality rate. The purpose of this review was to determine the feasibility of using serum cystatin C measurements to assist clinicians in making early and accurate diagnoses of acute kidney injury in neonates. Data Source: We searched for the following seven key words within the PubMed database and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews: cystatin C, neonates, newborn, preterm, premature, kidney failure, and kidney injury. Study Selection: The selected studies included neonates within their study populations and were published in English. We reviewed literature published between January 1990 and May 2012. Data Extraction: Ten studies had conducted serum cystatin C measurements in neonates. Data Synthesis: The cystatin C level in neonates is not influenced by the maternal level and is highest at birth. In most studies, cystatin C levels on day 1 of life ranged between 1 and 2 mg/L, gradually declined during the first year and then remained relatively stable thereafter. Cystatin C levels did not differ between male and female infants, and no significant gestational age-dependent differences were found. Cystatin C levels were increased in cases of sepsis, acute kidney injury, and congenital renal abnormalities. Conclusions: Cystatin C has all of the theoretical properties needed to be an ideal marker of renal function. It can be used to determine baseline renal function on day 1 and is increasingly being used to determine renal function in sick neonates. In the majority of studies, the day 1 cystatin C level ranged between 1 and 2 mg/L, which gradually declined in the first year of life. However, the number of available studies evaluating cystatin C in sick neonates is currently limited, and there are also no studies linking cystatin C levels in sick babies with short-term and long-term outcomes.


Abstract. High-resolution in situ balloon measurements of water vapour, aerosol, methane and temperature in the upper tropical tropopause layer (TTL) and lower stratosphere are used to evaluate the processes affecting the stratospheric water budget: horizontal transport (in-mixing) and hydration by cross-tropopause overshooting updrafts. The obtained in situ evidence of these phenomena are analysed using satellite observations by Aura MLS (Microwave Limb Sounder) and CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) together with trajectory and transport modelling performed using CLaMS (Chemical Lagrangian Model of the Stratosphere) and HYSPLIT (Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) model. Balloon soundings were conducted during March 2012 in Bauru, Brazil (22.3° S) in the frame of the TRO-Pico campaign for studying the impact of convective overshooting on the stratospheric water budget. The balloon payloads included two stratospheric hygrometers: FLASH-B (Fluorescence Lyman-Alpha Stratospheric Hygrometer for Balloon) and Pico-SDLA instrument as well as COBALD (Compact Optical Backscatter Aerosol Detector) sondes, complemented by Vaisala RS92 radiosondes. Water vapour vertical profiles obtained independently by the two stratospheric hygrometers are in excellent agreement, ensuring credibility of the vertical structures observed. A signature of in-mixing is inferred from a series of vertical profiles, showing coincident enhancements in water vapour (of up to 0.5 ppmv) and aerosol at the 425 K (18.5 km) level. Trajectory analysis unambiguously links these features to intrusions from the Southern Hemisphere extratropical stratosphere, containing more water and aerosol, as demonstrated by MLS and CALIPSO global observations. The in-mixing is successfully reproduced by CLaMS simulations, showing a relatively moist filament extending to 20° S. A signature of local cross-tropopause transport of water is observed in a particular sounding, performed on a convective day and revealing water vapour enhancements of up to 0.6 ppmv as high as the 404 K (17.8 km) level. These are shown to originate from convective overshoots upwind detected by an S-band weather radar operating locally in Bauru. The accurate in situ observations uncover two independent moisture pathways into the tropical lower stratosphere, which are hardly detectable by space-borne sounders. We argue that the moistening by horizontal transport is limited by the weak meridional gradients of water, whereas the fast convective cross-tropopause transport, largely missed by global models, can have a substantial effect, at least at a regional scale.


ABSTRACT For the soybean pathogen Phytophthora sojae, chemotaxis of zoospores to isoflavones is believed to be critical for recognition of the host and for initiating infection. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying this chemotaxis are largely unknown. To investigate the role of G-protein and calcium signaling in chemotaxis, we analyzed the expression of several genes known to be involved in these pathways and selected one that was specifically expressed in sporangia and zoospores but not in mycelium. This gene, named PsGPA1, is a single-copy gene in P. sojae and encodes a G-protein α subunit that shares 96% identity in amino acid sequence with that of Phytophthora infestans. To elucidate the function, expression of PsGPA1 was silenced by introducing antisense constructs into P. sojae. PsGPA1 silencing did not disturb hyphal growth or sporulation but severely affected zoospore behavior, including chemotaxis to the soybean isoflavone daidzein. Zoospore encystment and cyst germination were also altered, resulting in the inability of the PsGPA1-silenced mutants to infect soybean. In addition, the expressions of a calmodulin gene, PsCAM1, and two calcium- and calmodulin-dependent protein kinase genes, PsCMK3 and PsCMK4, were increased in the mutant zoospores, suggesting that PsGPA1 negatively regulates the calcium signaling pathways that are likely involved in zoospore chemotaxis.


Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) and scrub typhus are disorders with similar clinical features; therefore, differentiating between them is difficult. We retrospectively collected data from 183 SFTS and 178 scrub typhus patients and validated an existing scoring system to develop a more sensitive, specific, and objective scoring system. We first applied the scoring systems proposed by Kim et al. to differentiate SFTS from scrub typhus. Multivariable logistic regression revealed that altered mental status, leukopenia, prolonged activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT), and normal C-reactive protein (CRP) level (≤1.0 mg/dL) were significantly associated with SFTS. We changed the normal CRP level from ≤1.0 mg/dL to ≤3.0 mg/dL and replaced altered mental status with the creatine kinase (CK) level. The modified scoring system showed 97% sensitivity and 96% specificity for SFTS (area under the curve (AUC): 0.983) and a higher accuracy than the original scoring system (p = 0.0308). This study's scoring system had 97% sensitivity and 98% specificity for SFTS (AUC: 0.992) and a higher accuracy than Kim et al.'s original scoring system (p = 0.0308). Our scoring system that incorporated leukopenia, prolonged aPTT, normal CRP level (≤3.0 mg/dL), and elevated CK level (>1000 IU/L) easily differentiated SFTS from scrub typhus in an endemic area.


Oceans Governance in the Twenty-first Century analyses the development of national, regional and international initiatives and arrangements directed towards governance of the world's seas and oceans.

The authors examine those factors that shape oceans governance, as well as the supports and constraints affecting policy development and implementation. In addition, the book invaluably includes discussion of contemporary international and selected regional initiatives – including the development of a maritime policy by the EU. The processes and outcomes that have arisen in the development of oceans policy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US are also summarised. This analysis centres on the key elements of institutional design, policy capacity, and the policy framework adopted as important supports to facilitate integrated oceans management. The book concludes that, despite increased attention to the oceans over the past two decades, major challenges remain, even where states have made concerted efforts to develop new approaches to ocean management.

Marcus Haward and Joanna Vince's thorough study will appeal to researchers and academics at under and postgraduate levels working in the field of environmental management, as well as oceans and coastal management and governance. It will also be highly useful to policy makers with responsibilities for oceans and coastal management.


A research effort currently underway is described in this paper. The project comprises the design and implementation of project performance measurement systems in construction companies, with the dual purpose of supporting continuous improvement for company operations and to generate a database with empirical information on projects. This database will be useful to develop third party benchmarking to contribute to the improvement of the industry as a whole. This research proposes the development of computer models that combine empirical information with expert knowledge to perform model based benchmarking. The achievement of the objectives of this research should affect the way in which performance is measured and decisions are made in projects. The implementation of performance measurement systems, that include measures adapted to lean construction can be a real driver for continuous improvement of project processes. The compilation of empirical information, and its integration with the experience found in the industry and in project teams, will provide new evidence on project performance. This will assist in exploring the mechanisms and existing interactions through the use of simulation models. The proposed analysis may take a first step in deriving first principles on project performance. This research project lends itself to a collaborative research effort which could be carried out in different countries and locations.


The approach of the subject concerning the training of specialists in the domain of logistic structures and services in the region of the inferior Danube is enlisted within a larger context, the Strategy of the Danube, but also in a more restrained one, the Program of Cross-Border Cooperation Romania – Bulgaria, 2007-2013. The Strategy of the Danube represents a project initiated in the year 2008 by Germany, Austria and Romania to which subsequently there adhered the other states on the Danube and which became a program of the European Commission. It shall have allotted a budget of 50 milliards euro until the year 2013. It shall be preponderantly addressed to the population in the Danube Basin, which is estimated at 115 millions, following to be developed through cross-border projects. In December 2010 there is foreseen the approval of the Action Plan for the program the Strategy of the Danube by the European Commission. The integration process needs premises and conditions for further development. One of them is the connectivity and it supporting system – the logistics. The problem of the connectivity is one of the pillars of the Danube strategy, which could play an important role in the Lower Danube Macro region's development. Those problems need different approaches, specialized research and training. The situation of the two countries in the domain of fluvial logistics may be characterized as unsatisfactory in relation to their potential. At the present moment there is a single bridge which connects the two countries (Giurgiu – Ruse) and several travels with the passage boat. The harbour infrastructures are old and inefficient. There are no modern multi-modal platforms or a coherent vision in their design. The transportation on the Danube is insufficiently exploited. As well, the river is not capitalized in other domains, too: agriculture, pisciculture, energy, ecology, tourism, arrangement of the territory, etc.Within a more restrained context, but correlated with the Strategy of the Danube, Romania and Bulgaria cooperate within the Cross-Border Program 2007-2013. Within it, the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest and thee Economic Academy Dimitar Apostolov Tsenov in Svishtov proposed themselves to collaborate in the domain "Cooperation concerning the development of human resources – the joint development of abilities and knowledge".


Understanding narrative content has become an increasingly popular topic. Nonetheless, research on identifying common types of narrative characters, or personae, is impeded by the lack of automatic and broad-coverage evaluation methods. We argue that computationally modeling actors provides benefits, including novel evaluation mechanisms for personae. Specifically, we propose two actor-modeling tasks, cast prediction and versatility ranking, which can capture complementary aspects of the relation between actors and the characters they portray. For an actor model, we present a technique for embedding actors, movies, character roles, genres, and descriptive keywords as Gaussian distributions and translation vectors, where the Gaussian variance corresponds to actors' versatility. Empirical results indicate that (1) the technique considerably outperforms TransE (Bordes et al. 2013) and ablation baselines and (2) automatically identified persona topics (Bamman, O'Connor, and Smith 2013) yield statistically significant improvements in both tasks, whereas simplistic persona descriptors including age and gender perform inconsistently, validating prior research.


This article explains the relationship between witchcraft and entrepreneurship from the viewpoint of the extended family and the entrepreneur in Namibia. When one addresses the issue of witchcraft in the Namibian context, it is clear that it is due to the unequal distribution of resources within the country, whereby the top 30% elite receives more than 90% of the resources and the majority of the population only receives 10% of the resources. As this is a national problem within the country, it has also an impact on how the communities work together in their daily activities. Communities have a tendency to be jealous of each other, although none of them are better than the other. This forces some communities to practice witchcraft, which is called traditional medicine (bieljas) in the Namibian context.


The effect of thermal aging in air on a Nextel(TM) 720 aluminosilicate fibre reinforced alumina matrix material (N72O/AI2O3) has been investigated. Samples were aged at 1100oC for up to 4000 hours as well as for 200 hours at 1100°C, 1200°C, 1300°C, 1400°C and 1480°C. On completion of the thermal aging treatments, the microstructures of the samples were characterised, principally using scanning and transmission electron microscopy. The mechanical properties of the material, flexural strength, Young's modulus and relative toughness, after aging were investigated using three point flexural testing. The as-received material was found to contain many voids and a large quantity of cracking that are believed to arise from in-complete matrix infiltration and green body production, respectively, during manufacture. It was found that the material does not meet the original proposed design criteria for this class of material. Initial results indicate that the 1100°C thermal aging treatment for up to 2000 hours has no detectable effect on the microstructure or properties of the material. After aging at 1100°C for 4000 hours, changes were detected in the material suggesting that prolonged thermal exposure of the material does have an effect on its properties, specifically a reduction in sample thickness indicating that the matrix may have densified slightly and a small increase in modulus and loss of aluminium from the fibre. In contrast, much shorter exposures to higher temperatures lead to significant changes to the microstructure, principally in terms of the reduction in porosity and grain growth in the matrix regions and an embrittlement of the material from an aging temperature of 1300°C, such that the material behaved as a monolithic ceramic after aging at 1480°C. Aging at 1200°C and above was found to cause a progressive decrease in the material thickness indicating a densification of the material. The fibre architecture was found to restrict densification in the plane of the fibre reinforcement. The mechanical properties of the material aged for 200 hours at 1200°C appear unaffected by the thermal aging. The aging of material at 1300°C was found to increase the Young's modulus to a maximum value after aging at 1400°C. Aging at 1480°C appeared to cause a slight decrease in the Young's modulus of the material. Aging of the material at 1300°C and above was found to cause a continuing reduction in the flexural strength of the material until a minimum value was reached after aging at 1480°C. A change in the microstructure of the fibre was initially observed after aging at 1300°C and was more pronounced after aging at 1400°C and 1480"C. A progressive growth of elongated alumina grains in the fibres was observed to occur as the meta-stable aluminium-rich mullite transformed to a silicon-rich mullite within the fibre. After aging at 1480°C the fibre was also observed to contain significant quantities of porosity. Furthermore, the fibre reinforcement appears to have lost aluminium, possibly to the matrix. The results of this investigation have found that the material is stable for aging periods of 2000 hours at 1100°C and for up to 200 hours at 1200°C. Whilst aging regimes of over 2000 hours at 1100°C may be acceptable, evidence has been found to suggest that the material is changing.


An important part of the protein folding process is the consolidation of the protein core through the formation of specific, directional contacts after the initial hydrophobic collapse. Here, we simultaneously monitor formation of core contacts and assembly of secondary structure through salt-induced folding by using resonance Raman spectroscopy. Unfolded barstar at pH 12 was refolded by gradual addition of sodium sulfate salt. Altered spectral characteristics of the Trp53 residue suggest that the core of the protein attains a CH-π interaction at a low concentration of the salt, with an increase in the packing density. Further increase in salt concentration produces a reduction in the solvent accessibility of the core. These data provide evidence that the core of the protein becomes rigid upon the addition of 0.6 M sodium sulfate. This is the first time that the formation of a CH-π interaction has been directly monitored during the folding of a protein.


The purpose of this thesis is to give a mathematical analysis of the power of data reduction for dealing with fundamental NP-hard graph problems. It has often been observed that the use of heuristic reduction rules in a preprocessing phase gives significant performance gains when solving such problems. However, there is little scientific explanation for these empirically observed successes. We use the concept of kernelization, developed within the field of parameterized complexity theory, to give a mathematical analysis of the power of such data reduction techniques. A kernelization, or kernel, is a polynomial-time preprocessing algorithm that transforms an instance of a parameterized problem into an equivalent instance whose size depends only on the parameter. The concept of kernelization therefore formalizes efficient and provably effective preprocessing. In our analysis of fundamental graph problems we utilize various structural measures of graphs as the complexity parameter; these include the vertex cover number, the feedback vertex number, the treewidth, and the vertex-deletion distance to various well-studied graph classes. We parameterize four fundamental classes of graph problems by such graph-structural measures. We determine which of these parameterizations admit kernelizations for which the size of the output is bounded by a polynomial in the parameter. Towards this end, we also develop technical tools to prove that a parameterized problem does not admit a kernel of polynomial size, subject to certain complexity-theoretic assumptions. The four fundamental problems we study are Vertex Cover, Treewidth, Graph Coloring, and Longest Path. For the Vertex Cover problem we introduce novel reduction rules that provably reduce the size of an instance to at most O(k^3) vertices in polynomial time, where k is the size of a feedback vertex set of the input graph. We also prove that the existence of a kernel for the parameterization by the vertex-deletion distance to an outerplanar graph or a clique, leads to a collapse of the polynomial hierarchy and is therefore unlikely. In our analysis of the Treewidth problem, we prove that preprocessing rules that were initially developed for heuristic algorithms, lead to a polynomial kernel for Treewidth parameterized by the vertex cover number. By developing additional rules that eliminate almost-simplicial vertices and shrink clique-seeing paths, we obtain a polynomial kernel parameterized by the feedback vertex number. Finally, we prove that Treewidth and Pathwidth do not admit polynomial kernels parameterized by the vertex-deletion distance to a clique, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. We analyze the kernelization complexity of graph coloring problems with respect to parameterizations that measure the vertex-deletion to graph classes such as cographs and co-chordal graphs. We show that the existence of polynomial kernels is determined by the extremal properties of No-instances of the List Coloring problem on such graph classes. Finally, we investigate Longest Path and related problems, with structural parameterizations. We obtain polynomial kernels for parameterizations by the vertex cover number, the max leaf number, and the vertex-deletion distance to a cluster graph. These results are complemented by a lower bound for the parameterization by the deletion distance to an outerplanar graph


Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874--1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, "the Baroness" was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius. The editor Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary." Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of modernist scholars. In Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel traces the extraordinary life and work of this daring woman, viewing her in the context of female dada and the historical battles fought by women in the early twentieth century. Striding through the streets of Berlin, Munich, New York, and Paris wearing such adornments as a tomato-soup can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick, the Baroness erased the boundaries between life and art, between the everyday and the outrageous, between the creative and the dangerous. Her art objects were precursors to dada objects of the teens and twenties, her sound and visual poetry were far more daring than those of the male modernists of her time, and her performances prefigured feminist body art and performance art by nearly half a century.


The recent isolation of Helicobacter pylori from cats obtained from a commercial supplier has potentially important public health implications. The present study investigated whether H. pylori infection was common in stray cats. Twenty-five cats were examined for the presence of H. pylori by histological examination, culture and two polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays. Histologically, the gastric biopsy specimens from all cats showed large spiral organisms typical of H. felis and not H. pylori. Samples from 23 cats yielded bacterial growth and two had no growth. Colonies grossly similar to H. pylori were tested for catalase, oxidase, urease and Gram's stain reactions. None was H. pylori. All samples tested as positive by the Helicobacter 16S rRNA genus-specific PCR assay and only six cats and a mouse stomach infected with H. heilmannii gave positive results with the adhesin subunit A (hpaA)-specific PCR assay, which is consistent with either H. pylori or H. heilmannii. The helicobacters identified in these samples by PCR were not cultivable and hence were probably H. heilmannii. H. pylori infection is uncommon in stray cats and owning pet cats should not be a threat to public health in relation to H. pylori infection.


Hermeneutical perspectives on violence in the New Testament This article discusses hermeneutical perspectives on violence in the New Testament as they appear in articles in this publication and in New Testament Studies in general. It contrasts the traditional perspective on the New Testament as book of peace with the growing insight in its violent nature. It is followed by a discussion of the multi-faceted nature of both notions of peace and violence and the various forms in which they are expressed. After an analysis of the relationship between violence and its alternatives, the various forms of violence are outlined in terms of their relationship to their experiential realities. This is followed by remarks about an adequate methodology for the study of violence, the way in which violence is countered in the New Testament texts and, finally, three possible explanations for the nature of violence.


Are corporations "persons" with constitutional rights? The Supreme Court has famously avoided analysis of the question, while recognizing that corporations may litigate rights under the Due Process Clause, Equal Protection Clause, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, and Seventh Amendment, but not, for example, the Self-Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment. What theory explains why corporations may litigate some constitutional rights and not others? In this Article, I argue that the doctrine of Article III standing supplies an underlying general theory by requiring a judge to ask: does the organization suffer a concrete constitutional injury to its legal interests? Such analysis has implications for the interpretation of a range of contested constitutional questions. For example, Article III analysis helps us to understand why corporate standing is not appropriate if corporate rights threaten to conflict with claims brought by individuals, while in contrast, associations and nonprofits may more readily derivatively assert the third-party rights of members. By ignoring Article III constraints, and finding that a for-profit corporation could itself assert a statutory injury to the religious beliefs of its owners, the Supreme Court's recent Hobby Lobby opinion threatens to erase the longstanding differences between owners and corporations, parties and third-parties, and for-profit corporations versus other types of entities. Only if Article III doctrine is faithfully applied can organizational standing to litigate constitutional rights effectively develop protections for individuals and organizations alike.


Increased devolution of forest ownership and management rights to local control has the potential to promote both conservation and livelihood development in remote tropical regions. Such shifts in property rights, however, can generate conflicts, particularly when combined with rapidly increasing values of forest resources. We explored the phenomenon of Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) theft in communities in Western Amazonia. Through interviews with 189 Brazil nut collectors in 12 communities in Bolivia and Brazil and participation in the 2006 and 2007 harvests, we quantified relative income derived from Brazil nuts, reported nut thefts, and nut collection and management practices. We found a much greater incidence of reported Brazil nut thefts in Pando, Bolivia than in the adjacent state of Acre, Brazil. Our analyses suggest that three factors may have affected nut thefts in the forest: (1) contrasts in the timing and process of formally recognizing property rights, (2) different historic settlement patterns, and (3) varying degrees of economic dependence on Brazil nuts. Threat of theft influenced Brazil nut harvest regimes, with potentially long-term implications for forest-based livelihoods, and management and conservation of Brazil nut-rich forests in Western Amazonia.


Human erythroleukemia (HEL) cells express megakaryocyte/platelet membrane markers and thus have been used as a model for studying platelet membrane receptors and their coupling to cell signaling pathways. Our previous studies, however, indicated that platelets and HEL cells possess different subtypes of adenosine A2 receptors. Furthermore, we now report that, whereas adenosine inhibits intracellular Ca2+ increases in platelets, it potentiates the rise in intracellular Ca2+ produced by thrombin, prostaglandin E1, thapsigargin, and the calcium ionophore A23187 in HEL cells. Stable adenosine analogs potentiated intracellular Ca2+ increases with a rank order of potencies of 5'-N-ethylcarboxamidoadenosine (NECA) > (R)-(-)-N6-(2-phenylisopropyl)adenosine (R-PIA) >> CGS 21680, suggesting that this effect is mediated by A2b receptors. EC50 values for NECA and R-PIA were 0.8 and 42 microM, respectively. NECA (100 microM) potentiated by 2-3-fold the increase in intracellular Ca2+ produced by 0.3 unit/ml thrombin. This effect was mimicked by cholera toxin and was shared by other Gs-coupled receptors, such as those activated by the prostacyclin analog iloprost and prostaglandin E1, indicating the involvement of Gs proteins. Adenosine analogs also increased intracellular cAMP with the same rank order of potencies. The membrane-permeable analog 8-bromo-cAMP, however, had no effect on intracellular Ca2+ levels, indicating that the potentiation of intracellular Ca2+ increases and the activation of adenylate cyclase are parallel but independent events. The increase in intracellular Ca2+ produced by adenosine is due not to an increase in phosphoinositide hydrolysis but, rather, to an increase in calcium influx, and it is lost if cells are studied in the absence of extracellular Ca2+. We conclude, therefore, that adenosine A2b receptors in HEL cells are coupled to Gs proteins and their activation leads to stimulation of adenylate cyclase and, independently, to potentiation of the rise in intracellular Ca2+. We speculate that A2b receptors in HEL cells activate a calcium channel through a cholera toxin-sensitive mechanism that requires an initial increase in intracellular Ca2+.


Symptomatic animal models have clinical features consistent with human disorders and are often used to identify the anatomical and physiological processes involved in the expression of symptoms and to experimentally demonstrate causality where it would be infeasible in the patient population. Rodent and primate models of dystonia have identified basal ganglia abnormalities, including alterations in striatal GABAergic (ie, transmitting or secreting γ‐aminobutyric acid) and dopaminergic transmission. Symptomatic animal models have also established the critical role of the cerebellum in dystonia, particularly abnormal glutamate signaling and aberrant Purkinje cell activity. Further, experiments suggest that the basal ganglia and cerebellum are nodes in an integrated network that is dysfunctional in dystonia. The knowledge gained from experiments in symptomatic animal models may serve as the foundation for the development of novel therapeutic interventions to treat dystonia. © 2013 Movement Disorder Society


Objective: To examine differences in risky driving behavior and likelihood of traffic crash according to the country of birth of recently licensed young drivers. The groups examined include those born in Australia, those born in Asia, and those born in other countries. Design and setting: The DRIVE study is a prospective cohort study of drivers aged 17–24 years holding their first-year provisional driver license in New South Wales, Australia. Information obtained from 20,822 participants who completed a baseline questionnaire was linked to police-reported traffic crashes. Main outcome measures: Self-reported risky driving behaviors and police-reported traffic crashes in young drivers. Results: Young drivers who were born in Asian countries were less likely to report engaging in risky driving behaviors than their Australian-born counterparts. The proportion of participants reporting a high level of risky driving was 31.5 percent (95% confidence intervale [CI], 30.8–32.1) among Australian-born drivers compared to 25.6 percent (95% CI, 23.1–28.2) among Asian-born drivers and 30.4 percent (95% CI, 28.4–32.5) among those born in other regions. Asian-born participants had half the risk of a crash as a driver than their Australian-born counterparts (relative risk [RR] 0.55; 95% CI, 0.41–0.75) after adjusting for a number of demographic factors and driving and risk-taking behaviors. The comparative risk was even lower among those aged 17 years (RR 0.29; 95% CI, 0.29–0.75). Risk estimates for people born in other regions did not differ to those for Australian-born respondents. Conclusions: The study highlights the lower level of risky driving and significantly reduced crash risk for Australian drivers born in Asian countries relative to those born locally. Further research is needed to examine factors underlying this reduced risk and the impact of the length of residence in the host country.


The book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of medieval Nubian literacy. It contains eleven articles by an international group of scholars, representing different areas of language studies (Greek and Latin epigraphy, Coptology, Old Nubian studies). The articles contain both editions of new textual finds and reconsiderations of well-known sources. The chronology of the texts discussed in the book spans a few hundred years of medieval Nubian history (from the 7th until the 15th century) and their topographical distribution covers a large part of the Middle Nile Valley (from Qasr Ibrim in the north to Banganarti in the south) and beyond (northern Kordofan). The typological variety of the sources, with epitaphs, sepulchral crosses, legal documents, visitors' inscriptions, and dipinti on pottery, provides an insight into the richness of the Christian Nubian civilization.


Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in many graph learning tasks such as node classification, graph classification and link prediction. For the classification task, GNNs' performance often highly depends on the number of labeled nodes and thus could be significantly hampered due to the expensive annotation cost. The sparse literature on active learning for GNNs has primarily focused on selecting only one sample each iteration, which becomes inefficient for large scale datasets. In this paper, we study the batch active learning setting for GNNs where the learning agent can acquire labels of multiple samples at each time. We formulate batch active learning as a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning problem and present a novel reinforced batch-mode active learning framework BiGeNe. To avoid the combinatorial explosion of the joint action space, we introduce a value decomposition method that factorizes the total Q-value into the average of individual Q-values. Moreover, we propose a novel multi-agent Q-network consisting of a graph convolutional network (GCN) component and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) component. The GCN component takes both the informativeness and inter-dependences between nodes into account and the GRU component enables the agent to consider interactions between selected nodes in the same batch. Experimental results on multiple public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.


Moderate effects of pollution on health may exert an important influence on labor market decisions. We exploit exogenous variation in pollution due to the closure of a large refinery in Mexico City to understand how pollution impacts labor supply. The closure led to an 8 percent decline in pollution in the surrounding neighborhoods. We find that a one percent increase in sulfur dioxide results in a 0.61 percent decrease in the hours worked. The effects do not appear to be driven by labor demand shocks nor differential migration as a result of the closure in the areas located near the refinery. Rema Hanna Kennedy School of Government Harvard University 79 JFK Street Cambridge, MA 02138 and NBER email@example.com Paulina Oliva UC, Santa Barbara firstname.lastname@example.com The E ect of Pollution on Labor Supply: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Mexico City∗


Geomagnetically induced currents originating from space weather are a threat to electric power system stability and continued operation. Geomagnetically induced currents can cause major blackouts and cascading failures of electric power systems impacting all interdependent critical infrastructure. This research describes an innovative platform for deploying a magnetometer based measurement system to detect and measure geomagnetically induced currents along electric power transmission lines. Application oriented magnetometers are compared, and individual sensor measurements are leveraged to improve overall accuracy of the sensing system. The proposed system offers advantages in accuracy, reliability, and flexibility over existing geomagnetically induced current measurement systems.


ABSTRACT A central challenge for local skills strategies is whether they can contribute to 'inclusive growth' including more and better jobs across a local economy. Skills strategies, it has been argued, must go beyond simply boosting skills supply and be integrated with policies that shape employer demand for, and utilisation of, skills, including economic development and business improvement. Among developed countries, this is particularly challenging for neo-liberal economies, with weakly regulated labour markets where many firms compete through low wages and low-skill job design. How much progress can be made locally is unclear. The article focuses on England, a highly centralised neo-liberal economy, with high levels of low-wage work and over-qualification. Since 2010, UK governments have promised to empower local communities to drive growth, reforming the infrastructure for sub-national economic development and localising elements of skills policy, as part of a devolution agenda for England set in the context of austerity. There are important questions around how local actors understand the 'skills problem' and whether they can evolve integrative approaches that might contribute to inclusive growth. Drawing upon qualitative research with local actors in the Midlands, the article explores their assumptive worlds in order to shed light on opportunities and constraints.


Integrating CFD & HT models with the general building program raises the computational time of
building simulations as these simulations are usually performed over a period of one year. Within
this context, our aim is to couple a object-oriented modular building program with CFD & HT for
airflow and parallelize the simulation with numerous processors for reducing computational time.
Also the modular nature of the code will allow to resolve selective critical zones with CFD & HT
models while employing simple models for airflow in less critical zones. Thus, there are different
levels of modelling different rooms/elements of the building system depending on the requirements
of a specific case.


ABSTRACT In this study, interelement interferences were evaluated for the determination of arsenic in aqueous samples through laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) hyphenated with a hydride generation sample introduction system. Optimum instrumental and chemical parameters were selected and variation in LIBS signal intensity was recorded for As solution in the presence of comparable concentrations of interfering elements. No significant change in the signal intensity of As(I) 228.8 nm line was observed in the presence of alkali/alkali earth metals; however, the presence of hydride-forming elements has shown a noticeable decrease in the line emission strength of arsenic. The least variation in arsenic signal was observed in the presence of Ge, the most volatile of all. However, the signal has decreased to a greater extent in the presence of Sn, Sb, and Pb. The presence of interfering elements on electron temperature and electron number density of arsenic plasma has also been studied. Plasma temperatures calculated using both As and Ar emission lines in the Boltzmann equation were similar, being around 5000 K. The McWhirter criterion for stationary and homogenous plasmas was utilized for the establishment of the local thermodynamic equilibrium under the plasma conditions studied. Applicability of the technique for multielemental analysis of water samples was tested through spiking experiments. Arsenic signal showed 26% decrease in the multielemental mixture solution. LIBS is among a few atomic spectroscopic techniques that facilitate rapid and simultaneous multielemental analysis without extensive sample preparation steps. However, the analytical performance of the technique still requires more serious efforts to compete with other conventional techniques for routine analysis of environmental samples.