Appetite, originally evolved to ensure we consume enough of diverse nutrients to survive famines, has lost its survival advantage in our modern society, where food is plentiful. The hedonic aspect of appetite can indeed induce over-consumption of food, a major cause for the obesity pandemic. In this context, ghrelin, the only hormone known to promote feeding, is of particular interest because studying it helps us understand how food consumption is regulated and provides potential targets for the treatment of obesity. With the aim to further our understanding of the effects of ghrelin within the brain, we sought to investigate, first, the valence/emotion signal carried by ghrelin signalling in the brain and, second, novel central regions that mediate ghrelin's feeding effects. Firstly, using simple behavioural tests measuring preference/avoidance in rats and mice, we demonstrate that ghrelin injection into the brain carries a negative valence signal, which leads to the animals avoiding situations paired with this injection. Secondly, our results show the hypothalamic supramammillary nucleus (SuM) to be a brain area activated by peripheral ghrelin injection as well as by anticipation of chow and palatable food, two physiological states associated with elevated ghrelin blood levels. Moreover, ghrelin delivery directly into the SuM could drive a feeding response. Thirdly, we found the lateral parabrachial nucleus (lPBN) of the brainstem, an area rich in ghrelin receptor (GHSR), to be a novel target for the effects of ghrelin on food intake and dietary choice, whereby intra-lPBN ghrelin injection increased consumption of both standard chow and high-fat diet when presented separately and induced an increase in only chow intake when the rats were offered a choice diet consisting of chow, lard and sucrose. This ghrelin treatment did not alter food motivation or reward as tested by sucrose-induced operant responding and conditioned place preference for chocolate, respectively. Fourthly, using Ghsr-IRES-Cre mice and a Cre-inducible viral vector, we provide evidence that the GHSR-expressing cells of the lPBN are necessary for the development of diet-induced body weight gain via a role in the regulation of energy intake (as opposed to energy expenditure) and dietary choice (notably sucrose intake). The lPBN GHSR-expressing cells were identified as a distinct population from the well-described anorexigenic lPBN cells containing the calcitonin gene-related peptide. In summary, the work presented in this thesis determines the reinforcing properties of central ghrelin administration as being negative and identifies the SuM and lPBN as novel brain targets for ghrelin's effects on feeding. Furthermore, the GHSR-expressing cells of the lPBN are introduced as a neuronal population of importance in feeding and body weight control, thus providing a novel potential target for pharmacological therapies against obesity and other eating disorders.


The National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) was designed to test a compact, quasi-axisymmetric stellarator configuration. Flexibility and accurate realization of its complex 3D geometry were key requirements affecting the design and construction. While the project was terminated before completing construction, there were significant engineering accomplishments in design, fabrication, and assembly. The design of the stellarator core device was completed. All of the modular coils, toroidal field coils, and vacuum vessel sectors were fabricated. Critical assembly steps were demonstrated. Engineering advances were made in the application of CAD modeling, structural analysis, and accurate fabrication of complex-shaped components and sub-assemblies. The engineering accomplishments of the project are summarized.


Some New Zealand local authorities elect to provide financial information on their websites. Literature examining the behaviour of managers in the public sector suggests that agency relationships in the sector motivate such managers to provide information to enable the monitoring of their actions. This literature identifies a number of characteristics and variables that proxy for agency costs in the public sector. The recent development of the Internet provides an opportunity for examining voluntary disclosure in the public sector and, in particular, in the local government environment. This paper examines the voluntary Internet financial reporting practices of local authorities. Five variables associated with voluntary disclosure size, type of local authority, profitability (surplus), leverage and press visibility are examined. The results of the univariate analysis indicate that size, council type, and press visibility are associated with local authorities' choice to report financial information on the Internet. However, the results of multivariate analysis indicate that only size and type of council are associated with the quantity and type of financial disclosure on the Internet. Possible limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are discussed in the paper.


Background
This article describes the current state of the health of the public in England and the state of the public health professional service and systems.

Sources of data
Data sources are wide ranging including the Global Burden of Disease, the Commonwealth Fund and Public Health England reports.

Areas of agreement
There is a high burden of preventable disease and unacceptable inequalities in England. There is considerable expectation that there are gains to be made in preventing ill health and disability and so relieving demand on healthcare.

Areas of controversy
Despite agreement on the need for prevention, the Government has cut public health budgets by a cumulative 10% to 2020. Public health professionals broadly supportive of remaining in the EU face an uphill battle to retain health, workplace and environmental protections following the 'Leave' vote.

Growing points and areas timely for developing research
There is revitalized interest in air pollution. Extreme weather events are testing response and organizational skills of public health professionals and indicating the need for greater advocacy around climate change, biodiversity and protection of ecological systems. Planetary health and ecological public health are ideas whose time has certainly come.


I. INTRODUCTION Although regulations often have no direct fiscal impact, they pose real costs to consumers as well as businesses. Regulations aimed at protecting health, safety, and the environment alone cost over two hundred billion dollars annually -- about two-thirds as much as outlays for federal, nondefense discretionary programs.(1) Yet, the economic impacts of federal regulation receive much less scrutiny than the budget.(2) To encourage the development of more effective and efficient regulations, Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton have directed agencies to perform economic analyses of major regulations that show whether a regulation's benefits are likely to exceed its costs and whether alternatives to that regulation are more effective or less costly. Each president also attempted to increase agency accountability for decisions by requiring that the President's Office of Management and Budget ("OMB") review all major regulations. More recently, Congress embraced regulatory reform and inserted accountability provisions(3) and analytical requirements into laws such as the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1996, the Small Business Enforcement and Fairness Act of 1996, and the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995.(4) The most prominent and far-reaching of these regulatory reform efforts are President Reagan's Executive Order 12,291 and President Clinton's Executive Order 12,286. Both require agencies to prepare a Regulatory Impact Analysis ("RIA") for all major federal regulations.(5) Agencies have prepared RIAs for almost twenty years in accordance with the executive orders and guidelines for economic analysis provided by the OMB.(6) This Article suggests that the impact of RIAs has fallen short of the expectations of regulatory reform advocates in part because agencies do not fully comply with OMB's guidelines.(7) The RIAs typically do not provide enough information to enable regulatory agencies to make decisions that will maximize the efficiency or effectiveness of a rule.(8) This conclusion is based on the results of an evaluation of forty-eight major environmental, health, and safety regulations and their associated RIAs.(9) The authors completed a "regulatory scorecard" for each of the forty-eight regulations, which includes a checklist of the requirements for a good economic analysis outlined in the Executive Order and the OMB guidelines.(10) The study of RIAs shows that agencies only quantified net benefits -- the dollar value of expected benefits minus expected costs -- for 29 percent of the forty-eight rules, even though the Executive Order directs agencies to show that the benefits of a regulation "justify" the costs.(11) The agencies also did not adequately evaluate alternatives to the proposed regulation, another element of the Executive Order. Agencies failed to discuss alternatives for 27 percent of the rules and quantified the costs and benefits of alternatives for only 31 percent. In addition, the agencies often failed to present the results of their analysis clearly. Agencies provided executive summaries for only 56 percent of the rules. This Article also offers specific suggestions for improving the quality of RIAs, which will in turn improve the allocation of regulatory resources. These include: (1) the use of clear executive summaries; (2) the provision of on-line RIAs; (3) improved evaluation of regulatory alternatives; and (4) improved assessment of net benefits. Part II of the paper describes the methodology of the study. Part III presents the results. Part IV describes in detail the policy recommendations to improve RIAs. II. METHODOLOGY This study builds on previous efforts to evaluate the quality of RIAs.(12) Whereas previous studies evaluated a few RIAs in great detail, this study assesses the quality of forty-eight RIAs published from April 1996 to July 1999.(13) This approach is advantageous because it is possible to identify common strengths and weaknesses among many RIAs, a task that no previous study has undertaken. …


Alternative risk premia (ARP) strategies are traditionally assumed to diversify both equity and bond market risk. We investigate the nature and risk characteristics of commonly known investable ARP strategies using investment bank strategy data. While most of the strategies have low full sample betas to both equity and commodity markets, several strategies exhibit statistically significant positive betas to bond markets. Additionally, characteristics of most ARP strategies change in the tails of equity and bond market distributions. Consequently, we propose a framework for diversified ARP portfolio construction that uses a hierarchical risk allocation process instead of whole sample volatilities and correlations.


A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. This paper shifts the focus to task-based motivation and finds that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based motivation. Moreover, in the presence of significant task motivation, mission motivation has no additional effect on effort. The evidence emerges from experiments with nearly 250 medical and nursing students in Burkina Faso. The students exert effort in three tasks, from boring to interesting. In addition, for half of the students, mission motivation is present: their effort on the task generates benefits for a charity. Two strong results emerge. First, task motivation has an economically important effect on effort, more than doubling effort. Second, mission motivation increases effort, but only for mundane tasks and not when the task is interesting. Moreover, even for mundane tasks, the effects of mission motivation appear to be less than those of task motivation.


The honey bee pollen/nectar diet is rich in bioactive phytochemicals and recent studies have demonstrated the potential of phytochemicals to influence honey bee disease resistance. To unravel the role of dietary phytochemicals in honey bee health it is essential to understand phytochemical uptake, bioavailability, and metabolism but presently limited knowledge exists. With this study we aim to build a knowledge foundation. For 5 days, we continuously fed honey bees on eight individual phytochemicals and measured the concentrations in whole and dissected bees by HPLC-MS/MS. Ample phytochemical metabolization was observed, and only 6–30% of the consumed quantities were recovered. Clear differences in metabolization rates were evident, with atropine, aucubin, and triptolide displaying significantly slower metabolism. Phytochemical gut uptake was also demonstrated, and oral bioavailability was 4–31%, with the highest percentages observed for amygdalin, triptolide, and aucubin. We conclude that differences in the chemical properties and structure impact phytochemical uptake and metabolism.


Proposed "information privacy" rules that give us the power to "control . . . information about ourselves" and to mandate "fair information practices" sound appealing. Why, after all, should a business be able to communicate information about its clients without the clients' permission, and why should the media be able to publish unnewsworthy private information about us for the whole world to see? The difficulty is that the right to information privacy -- the right to control other people's communication of personally identifiable information about you -- is a right to have the government stop people from speaking about you. And the First Amendment (which is already our basic code of "fair information practices") generally bars the government from "control[ling the communication] of information," either by direct regulation or through the authorization of private lawsuits. This article makes two main points: (1) While privacy protection secured by contract turns out to be constitutionally sound, broader information privacy rules are not easily defensible under existing free speech law. (2) Creating new free speech exceptions to accommodate information privacy speech restrictions could give us much more than we bargained for: Most of the justifications given for information privacy speech restraints are directly applicable to other speech control proposals that have already been proposed, and accepting these justifications in the attractive case of information privacy speech restrictions would create a powerful precedent for those other restraints. My chief goal is to consider, as concretely as possible, what these unintended consequences of various justifications for information privacy speech restrictions might be. I ultimately conclude that these consequences are troubling enough that I must reluctantly oppose such information privacy rules. But I hope the article will also be useful to those who are committed to supporting information privacy speech restrictions but would like to design their arguments in order to minimize the risks that I identify, and even to those who welcome the possibility that information privacy speech restrictions may become a precedent for other restrictions because they believe the Court has generally gone too far in protecting, say, nonpolitical speech or speech that injures the dignity of others.


Amenable to extensive parallelization, Google's web search application lets different queries run on different processors and, by partitioning the overall index, also lets a single query use multiple processors. to handle this workload, Googless architecture features clusters of more than 15,000 commodity-class PCs with fault tolerant software. This architecture achieves superior performance at a fraction of the cost of a system built from fewer, but more expensive, high-end servers.


Structures made of fibrous composite materials are heterogeneous in nature due to different geometrical orientations of fibers in a laminate. To analyze these structures, it is extremely difficult and time consuming to retain their true structural representation. To overcome this difficulty, homogenized material properties can be evaluated for different levels, so- called equivalent property, which is usually adopted. In this homogenization approach, macroscopic homogeneity and their characteristics of structural response need to be considered. In this study, equivalent properties of a composite in lamina, laminate and structural levels are defined as the properties of a homogeneous orthotropic composite to represent a material's anisotropic heterogeneous behavior. A set of equations for evaluating equivalent mechanical and thermal properties in lamina and laminates as well as structures is developed. The developed model is applied to angled lamina and various laminates. For a structural case, an I-Beam is analyzed utilizing the concept of narrow beam. Results indicate that the modified method is a significant improvement over the conventional method and can give accurate results in most composite laminate analyses.


It seems that hardly a week goes by without a new report about animals performing marvelous feats we once thought only humans could do: Crows make tools, chimpanzees seem to mourn their dead, and rats supposedly empathize with one another9s pain. For many researchers, the new evidence represents a welcome shift from behaviorist paradigms often associated with psychologist B. F. Skinner, which denied nonhuman species anything approaching advanced cognition. Yet recently, some researchers have been pushing back against attributing humanlike qualities to other animals without considering cognitively simpler explanations. This more skeptical contingent was present in force at two recent meetings* sponsored by the Royal Society. At both, researchers explored what animals are really doing when they engage in seemingly complex behaviors, rather than reported still more discoveries of their impressive abilities. Some researchers blamed the news media, and even some scientists, for exaggerated interpretations of animal behavior.


Bovine serum albumin (BSA) protected nanoclusters (Au and Ag) represent a group of nanomaterials that holds great promise in biophysical applications due to their unique fluorescence properties and lack of toxicity. These metal nanoclusters have utility in a variety of disciplines including catalysis, biosensing, photonics, imaging and molecular electronics. However, they suffer from several disadvantages such as low fluorescence quantum efficiency (typically near 6%) and broad emission spectrum (540 nm to 800 nm). We describe an approach to enhance the apparent brightness of BSA Au clusters by linking them with a high extinction donor organic dye pacific blue (PB). In this conjugate PB acts as a donor to BSA Au clusters and enhances its brightness by resonance energy transfer (RET). We found that the emission of BSA Au clusters can be enhanced by a magnitude of two-fold by resonance energy transfer (RET) from the high extinction donor PB, and BSA Au clusters can act as an acceptor to nanosecond lifetime organic dyes. By pumping the BSA Au clusters using a high extinction donor, one can increase the effective brightness of less bright fluorophores like BSA Au clusters. Moreover, we prepared another conjugate of BSA Au clusters with the near infrared (NIR) dye Dylight 750 (Dy750), where BSA Au clusters act as a donor to Dy750. We observed that BSA Au clusters can function as a donor, showing 46% transfer efficiency to the NIR dye Dy750 with a long lifetime component in the acceptor decay through RET. Such RET-based probes can be used to prevent the problems of a broad emission spectrum associated with the BSA Au clusters. Moreover, transferring energy from BSA Au clusters to Dy750 will result in a RET probe with a narrow emission spectrum and long lifetime component which can be utilized in imaging applications.


Silicon dimer-containing reconstructions on Si(100) can be induced by submonolayer amounts of rare earth (RE) metals. The tilt of dimer bonds in such reconstructions can be controlled by the coverage and electronic properties of RE adsorbates. In this study, we have utilized improved high-resolution photoelectron spectroscopy with the synchrotron radiation and density functional theory (DFT) calculations to exploit the structural and electronic properties of the Sm/Si(100)(2 x 3) system. A careful analysis of photoelectron spectra, in combination with DFT calculations of surface core-level shifts for silicon atoms in energetically plausible structural models, has allowed us to establish the favorable atomic configuration of Sm/Si(100)(2 x 3) with a buckled Si dimer and to explain characteristic features of Si 2p line shape in detail. It is shown that the dimer buckling leads to a significant core-level binding-energy splitting of the first-layer Si atoms, affecting the lower-binding-energy region of Si 2p spectra drastically. An interpretation of the Si 2p line shape for RE/Si(100)(2 x 3) that is based on combined initial state and complete screening data is suggested. The mechanism underlying the buckling and symmetrization of silicon dimers in RE/Si(100) reconstructions is discussed.


We present the Database of Catalan Adjectives (DCA), a database with 2,296 adjective lemmata enriched with morphological, syntactic and semantic information. This set of adjectives has been collected from a fragment of the Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans and constitutes a representative sample of the adjective class in Catalan as a whole. The database includes both manually coded and automatically extracted information regarding the most prominent properties used in the literature regarding the semantics of adjectives, such as morphological origin, suffix (if any), predicativity, gradability, adjective position with respect to the head noun, adjective modifiers, or semantic class. The DCA can be useful for NLP applications using adjectives (from POS-taggers to Opinion Mining applications) and for linguistic analysis regarding the morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of adjectives. We now make it available to the research community under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Spain license.


This paper presents evidence of banks using accounting discretion to overstate the value of distressed assets. In particular, we show that the stock market applies far greater discounts to a bank's real estate loans and mortgage-backed securities than are implicit in the book values of these assets, especially following the onset of the U.S. mortgage crisis. This suggests that bank balance sheets overvalue real estate related assets during economic slowdowns. Estimated discounts are smaller for distressed banks, as these banks derive relatively large benefits from the financial safety net to offset asset impairment. We also find that bank share prices, especially for banks with large exposures to mortgage-backed securities, react favorably to recent changes in accounting rules that relax fair value accounting. Banks with large exposures to mortgage-backed securities are also found to provision less for bad loans. Finally, we find that banks, and especially distressed banks, use discretion in the classification of mortgage-backed securities so as to inflate the book value of these securities. Our results provide several pieces of compelling evidence that banks' balance sheets offer a distorted view of the financial health of the banks, especially for banks with large exposures to real estate loans and mortgage-backed securities, and suggest that recent changes that relax fair value accounting may further distort this picture.


Sectors of rice blast fungus, Pyricularia grisea, frequently appeared on potato dextrose agar amended with edifenphos and iprobenfos. Thus, we assessed the sector-forming frequency of isolates of P. grisea and compared the fungicide sensitivity between wild types and sectors against the fungicides. The 905 isolates of the fungus were obtained from rice-growing locations in Korea from 1997-1998. When the isolates were grown on potato dextrose agar amended with minimal inhibitory concentrations of edifenphos (20 g a.i./ml)and iprobenfos (55 g a.i./ml), they produced sectors that overcame the effect of the fungicides. Among the 905 isolates tested, 9.0% produced sectors against edifenphos and 5.6%, against iprobenfos. Different sector-forming frequencies were also observed among the 11 locations of Korea. Sectors obtained from the fungicide-amended media generally grew more than their counterpart wild types grown on the media with either edifenphos or iprobenfos, regardless of their origins. In this study, greater relative growth of sectors over wild types of tested isolates can support the resistant characteristic of the fungus to survive against the fungicides. Therefore, the results indicate that the sectoring in rice blast fungus, P. grisea, may play a role in the occurrence of fungicide resistance.


H uman space exploration is in deep trouble. The challenge is to maintain momentum, visibility, and funding just when the public and the U.S. Congress are preoccupied with problems of security and economic recovery. President Bush's budget request for 2003 cuts funding for the International Space Station (ISS) vehicle and operations and would eliminate its costly Crew Return Vehicle, meant for use in case of an emergency. Substantially less money is sought for biological and physical science experiments aboard the ISS. In February 2002, the new NASA administrator, Sean O'Keefe, was unable to assure the U.S. House Committee on Science that the ISS may ever grow beyond what NASA calls "core complete."

That is not good news, because a core complete station is a minimal station. With a full-time crew of only three, able to use but a fraction of the 30 equipment racks the station holds, a vast opportunity for significant space research will be squandered. Most of the crew's time will continue to be spent on maintenance and repair. (A docked shuttle, another Soyuz capsule, or a Safe Haven might help out somewhat.) The proposed cuts would eliminate the fundamental biology core program and much of the materials science and engineering research, as well as telescience and simulators to assist the investigators. The critical Centrifuge Accommodation Module, including animal habitats and the ability to supply artificial gravity, has been repeatedly delayed—now until 2008. The National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which is developing measures to ensure crew health in long-duration missions, also faces drastic cuts just as its programs are reaching fruition.

U.S. Representative Ralph Hall, ranking Democrat on the U.S. House Committee on Science, fears that a minimal station with a projected 40% cut in its research budget leaves "a station that's hard to justify to the American taxpayers as being worth the billions of dollars we've already put into it." The congressional budget decision, anticipated this summer, represents a watershed for serious space science.

As we are assembling the greatest international laboratory ever conceived, even the space science community is losing its patience. The loss would extend far beyond U.S. science. We have long-standing international agreements with colleagues in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Canada—commitments the United States should honor. Only the continuous presence of a trained crew, available for substantial research as operators and subjects, will allow us to attack critical problems in space life sciences, materials research, physics, technology, and Earth observations. Even in its earliest days, the ISS revealed unexpected cataract development in the astronauts and embarked on a new radiation monitoring program for rare ionized heavy particles. Increasingly large protein crystals have already been grown in weightlessness and depend on the long exposures to zero gravity of the ISS. A major physics investigation, the 6-metric-ton Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, will search for antimatter particles in space beginning in 2004. In contrast, the Russian space station Mir wasn't fully equipped, and the Shuttle-borne Spacelab and Spacehab missions of up to 2 weeks were too short to track long-duration processes.

One reasonably questions the expenditure of scarce national research resources on health measures to permit space exploration when there isn't even a plan for a plan to explore Mars with astronauts. The answer is that the R&D is complex and time-consuming and that we can ill afford to wait until a Mars mission is undertaken in order to begin to find out how to protect the crew. Furthermore, the solutions to problems of space biology and physiology bear on related clinical problems of bone loss, orthostatic hypotension, balance disorders, and radiation protection on Earth. Without a productive station, there is little future for further human space exploration and all of the education and technology spin-offs that accompany it.

NASA has been considering the establishment of a nongovernmental organization to allow the research community to participate in a streamlined operation of the ISS. This works well for the Space Telescope and should help the ISS as well. The problems facing the ISS cannot be brushed aside, and unless it is restored to its promised capability we will have little opportunity to achieve the scientific return afforded by this unique laboratory. We must do better.


Benefits of interdisciplinary student participation in a university's entrepreneurial activities are well known. Still, institutional barriers (structural, temporal, spatial, economic, attitudinal) conspire to block participation. Aided by the NSF's Pathways to Innovation Program, the authors conducted a field experiment to increase STEM student participation in a high-profile business proposal competition (BPC). The experiment employed two interventions: informal social networks and bricolage – the innovative and parsimonious use of existing resources. Utilizing these interventions, the authors collaborated to innovatively exploit the Business College's BPC and Engineering College's capstone engineering projects course (CEP). The goal was to facilitate and track STEM students' BPC participation. Participation was voluntary, and not graded. Participation in the BPC increased from 10 STEM students to 27 and the number of BPC finalists increased from 1 STEM-business interdisciplinary team to 4 following the intervention. Findings demonstrate that social network and bricolage-inspired intervention appear useful in increasing STEM student and interdisciplinary team BPC participation and success.


Sugar apple fruit are widely appreciated because of their flavor and functional qualities. However, the final value of the fruit varies according to its physical, physicochemical, and organoleptic qualities. The production and attributes that make up the quality of fruit can be influenced by climatic seasonality in both seasons (dry and wet). Therefore, this work aimed to evaluate whether the production and quality of fruit production of different size classes of A. squamosa L. in two seasons are affected by climatic seasonality. The experiment consisted of a randomized block design, with 4 blocks and 10 plants per block. The variables evaluated were number of fruit per hectare, production, and yield. The postharvest evaluation of the fruit consisted of a completely randomized experimental design, in a 3 × 2 factorial scheme, which referred to the three sizes and two seasons, and evaluated fruit length and diameter; firmness; fruit, bark, and seed weight; number of seeds; soluble solids; hydrogen ionic potential (pH); titratable acidity (TA); and ratio. The 2014 season had larger fruit in relation to those of the 2015 season; conversely, it showed a lower number of fruit per plant, production, and yield, besides inferior organoleptic quality. Fruit of size class 2 stood out in the 2014 season because of their physical characteristics. However, they had inferior organoleptic quality when compared with fruit of the same size collected during the 2015 season. Fruit of size class 3 (≥8.1 cm) had greater firmness, providing longer durability and shelf life.


While individual tree genotypes are known to differ in their impacts on local soil development, the spatial genetic influence of surrounding neighboring trees is largely unknown. We examine the hypothesis that fine root dynamics of a focal tree is based on the genetics of the focal tree as well as the genetics of neighbor trees that together define litter inputs to soils of the focal tree. We used a common garden environment with clonal replicates of individual tree genotypes to analyze fine root production, turnover and allocation with respect to modeled neighborhood: 1) foliar mass, 2) foliar condensed tannins (CT), 3) genetic identity of trees, and 4) genetic dissimilarity of neighbors. In support of our central hypothesis, we found that the presence of genetically dissimilar trees and high leaf CT contributions to the soil predicted increased fine root production. In fact, the modeled effects of neighbors accounted for ~90% of the explanatory weight of all models predicting root production. Nevertheless, the ultimate fate of those roots in soil (turnover) and the balance of fine roots relative to aboveground tree mass were still more predictable based on the genetics of the individual focal trees (explaining 99% of the variation accounted for by models). Our data provide support for a method allowing a comparison of the relative effects of individuals versus spatial neighborhood effects on soils in a genetic context. Such comparisons are important for placing plant-soil feedbacks in a genetic and evolutionary framework since neighbors can decouple feedbacks between an individual and the surrounding environment.


The expectations of every user of today's internet is becoming relatively high more especially as the internet applications are becoming steadily sensitive to time and delays. The critical nature of some of these applications is more apparent now that they are real-time. These pose a whole lot of challenges to network operators and service providers because they will not only need to provide these services to users but also ensure that these services rendered meet up to quality expectations and standards. It is therefore very necessary and important for them to provide good quality of service with appreciable good performance at no incurable costs- that is while maximizing revenue- to them. A need therefore arises for the adoption of a scalable method or tool for meeting up to these challenges. Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) stands out to be the choicest tool and key for providing these requirements because of its traffic engineering (TE) capability in IP network and as such the internet needs to be equipped with this all-embracing technology. This report presents the performance analysis of this technology (MPLS TE) vis-a-vis the traditional IP with respect to the average throughput, Quality of service rendered, delay suffered and minimization of congestions or traffic overflow in a bid to seeing how and why MPLS is more capable in optimizing traffic applications when adopted by service providers and network operators. And from the conclusion of the analysis and results it would have been established that MPLS appeared to be more capable in the optimization of traffic applications with respect to the above characteristics when compared with the traditional IP.


The Advanced Light-Duty Powertrain and Hybrid Analysis (ALPHA) tool was created by EPA to evaluate the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions of Light-Duty (LD) vehicles [1]. ALPHA is a physicsbased, forward-looking, full vehicle computer simulation capable of analyzing various vehicle types combined with different powertrain technologies. The software tool is a MATLAB/Simulink based desktop application. The ALPHA model has been updated from the previous version to include more realistic vehicle behavior and now includes internal auditing of all energy flows in the model [2]. As a result of the model refinements and in preparation for the mid-term evaluation (MTE) of the 2022-2025 LD GHG emissions standards, the model is being revalidated with newly acquired vehicle data. In the effort to model the current and future US Light-Duty fleet there are times when complete and exact engine and powertrain component data are unavailable and must be approximated using components with comparable levels of performance and technology. This paper presents the testing and ALPHA modeling of a CVT-equipped 2013 Nissan Altima 2.5S using comparable powertrain technology inputs. A brief overview of recent improvements in CVT performance and efficiency is provided. ALPHA's CVT shift strategy, ALPHAshiftCVT, is introduced and its performance is compared with data from the Altima. Fuel economy and carbon emissions results over a wide range of drive cycles were within 5% of measured values and the city/highway weighted combined fuel economy and carbon emissions were within approximately 1% of measured values, providing confidence in the proxy powertrain approach.


This is the first comprehensive study of Russian political and social thought in the post-Communist era. The book portrays and critically examines the conceptual and theoretical attempts by Russian scholars and political thinkers to make sense of the challenges of post-communism and the trials of economic, political and social transformation. It brings together the various strands of political thought that have been formulated in the wake of the collapsed communist doctrine. It engages constructively with the numerous attempts by Russian political theorists and social scientists to articulate a coherent model of liberal democracy in their country. The book investigates critical, as well as favourable voices, in the Russian debate on liberal democracy, a debate often marked by eclecticism and, at times, little conceptual discipline. As such, the book will be of great interest both to Russian specialists, and to all those interested in political and social thought more widely.


Peptidoglycan, the substance in mycobacteria thought to be responsible for inducing adjuvant arthritis, and endotoxin (lipopolysaccharide or LPS) share many inflammatory properties. Since repeated administration of LPS produces tolerance, i.e., resistance to the toxic and inflammatory effects of LPS, we tested whether LPS and/or LPS tolerance might influence inflammation due to mycobacterial adjuvant. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were injected with Escherichia coli LPS or saline intraperitoneally and then challenged with 100 micrograms killed Mycobacteria butyricum (adjuvant) in the footpad. A single dose of 100 micrograms LPS three or 24 hours before adjuvant markedly, but transiently, reduced the local footpad swelling that begins within hours of the adjuvant injection and histologically resembles a sterile abscess. Animals that received multiple doses of LPS and were therefore tolerant or animals that received LPS 72 hours before adjuvant demonstrated adjuvant-induced footpad swelling nearly equal to controls. The anti-inflammatory effect of LPS was transient since footpad swelling in all groups was nearly comparable six days after the adjuvant injection and LPS failed to inhibit consistently the arthritis that develops two or more weeks after adjuvant injection. These studies establish that LPS can markedly inhibit the prodrome of adjuvant arthritis (footpad swelling due to M. butyricum), that inhibition of this prodrome does not prevent the subsequent development of arthritis, and that LPS tolerance diminishes this anti-inflammatory effect of LPS.


A two-parameter constraint-based fracture mechanics approach is used to explain the effect of the constraint on the apparently anomalous behavior of short fatigue cracks. The different levels of stress constraint are quantified by the T-stress, and microstructurally as well as mechanically short cracks are discussed. Short cracks generally behave more sensitively to the constraint than the long ones. It is shown that in most cases, the existence of short cracks goes hand in hand with an intrinsic loss of the constraint, which contributes to a decrease of their fatigue threshold values and accelerates their growth. In this paper, the above effect is quantified and conclusions concerning the applicability of the fracture mechanics parameters and approaches to the estimation of the residual fatigue life of structures are discussed.


Turbulent flowfield downstream of a perpendicular airfoil–vortex interaction (Abstract) Experiments were performed to document the turbulent flowfield produced downstream of an airfoil encountering an intense streamwise vortex. This type of perpendicular airfoil–vortex interaction commonly occurs in helicopter rotor flows. The experiments presented here thus provide useful information for the prediction of helicopter noise, particularly BWI noise. Three-component velocity and turbulence measurements were made in unprecedented detail using a computerized miniature four-sensor hot-wire probe system; revealing much about the structure and behavior of this flow over a range of conditions. The interaction between the vortex and the airfoil wake leaves the vortex surrounded by a large region of intense turbulence unlike the turbulence surrounding an isolated vortex. Even for close separations, the vortex core passes the airfoil virtually unchanged. However, vorticity of opposite sign is shed by the airfoil in response to the angle of attack distribution induced by the vortex resulting in an unstable circulation distribution according to Rayleigh's criterion. Simple theoretical models adequately describe the shed vorticity distribution of the airfoil and the unstable circulation distribution it imparts on the vortex. As the flow develops, the vortex continuously distorts the airfoil wake. The strain rates imparted by the vortex on the spanwise vorticity contained in the airfoil wake result in an anisotropic, turbulence producing stress field. For several chord lengths downstream, the vortex core remains laminar and little change is seen in the unstable circulation distribution. While the vortex core is laminar, turbulent fluctuations measured in the core are the result of inactive wandering motions and the characteristic length and velocity scales of the flat portion of the vortex wake appear to be appropriate scales for the fluctuations. Eventually, the vortex core becomes turbulent as indicated by an increase in high frequency velocity fluctuation levels of more than an order of magnitude. Subsequently, the circulation distribution reorganizes to a stable distribution. A loss in core circulation occurs due to a decrease in the peak tangential velocity which is proportionately larger than the increase in the vortex core radius. The peak tangential velocity decreases to the point where it is exceeded by the axial velocity deficit—another unstable situation. These effects increase with decreased separation between the vortex and the airfoil, but appear to be largely independent of airfoil angle of attack an only weakly dependent upon vortex strength.


The Kor River (Fars province) was divided into three parts and water and fish specimens were collected monthly and the concentrations of four heavy metals were determined using the Induction Coupled Plasma Method. As middle sampling zone was the main entrance and discharges of industries into the River, the concentrations of heavy metals in tissue of fish from this zone were significantly higher (p 0.05) were detected between the two sexes and species. Maximum concentrations of lead, mercury and cadmium in fish tissues were higher than the permissible levels for human consumption. Significant changes in the concentrations of steroid hormones were also noticed between the middle and two other sampling zones. Also in middle sampling zone, pathological changes in blood cells, liver, and kidneys of fishes were significantly higher. So heavy metals exposure can effectively decrease estrogenic and androgenic secretion in fish. The results confirmed exposure of fishes to heavy metals not only disrupts reproductive hormones' secretion, but also induces some pathological changes.


Nonsense mutations are single nucleotide variations within the coding sequence of a gene that result in a premature termination codon (PTC). The occurrence of such PTCs most often leads to a complete loss of protein function and a reduction in messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) levels due to the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD), a cellular surveillance mechanism that triggers selective degradation of mutant transcripts. Therapeutic approaches to circumvent the consequences of nonsense mutations may act at different levels: (i) the genomic deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) by replacing the defective gene; (ii) the mRNA by inducing the excision of the mutation-bearing exon during splicing, or by inhibiting the NMD-associated degradation and (iii) the protein by suppressing the premature termination of translation using transfer RNA (tRNA) suppressors or drugs inducing readthrough. Indeed, a combination of these approaches may be necessary, and it is most likely that they will lead to a mutation-specific, personalised medicine.

Key Concepts:

Nonsense mutations may lead to loss or gain of function pathological mechanisms.

Premature termination codons (PTC) resulting from nonsense mutations trigger transcript degradation through the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) mechanism.

Mutant mRNA escaping NMD lead to the synthesis of truncated proteins potentially deleterious.

Skipping of nonsense mutation-bearing exons can be induced by antisense oligonucleotides and leads to internally deleted proteins that retain some functionality.

tRNA suppressors enable the reintroduction of a 'sense' amino acid and the translation of the full-length protein by competing with the termination factor eRF1.

Drug-induced readthrough of PTC may allow synthesis of full-length functional proteins.

Synergetic action between NMD inhibitors and readthrough inducers may potentialise reexpression of full-length proteins with restored functionality.

Therapeutic approaches will most likely be mutation and disease specific.

Keywords:

nonsense mutations;
premature termination codons;
inherited disorders;
therapeutic approaches;
exon skipping;
antisense oligonucleotides;
nonsense mediated decay;
tRNA suppressors;
readthrough;
aminoglycosides


A large literature investigates the relation between oil and conflict, yet no empirical study has found any link between oil and coups d'´etat. Using a new data set on oil production separated into onshore and offshore production, and covering 172 countries from 1900 to 2012, onshore oil is seen to promote coup while offshore oil prevents them. A likely mechanism is that onshore oil motivates military build-ups, while offshore oil does not. From a political leader's point of view, a large military is a double-edged sword, because it may turn against him and stage a coup.


A clear distinction generally exists between processes of design generation and processes of design production. The profusion of digital fabrication tools and technologies make evident such distinctions in the context of design production but at the same time carry potential for material and fabrication-based processes promoting generative design methods. Such strategic application and customization of digital fabrication tools, inherent in and inclusive to the process of design generation, require the knowledge and skill-set of production associating material to its fabrication and assembly methods. The paper addresses the area of fabrication based design and the term Rapid Gestalt is proposed to suggest that certain skills acquired through fabrication-customization processes, achieved through material formation, may contribute to fabrication-guided design protocols. Through the demonstration of some design experiments for multi functional and responsive structural skin systems, the paper classifies several forms of fabrication-informed production processes in which the notion of Rapid Gestalt is manifested through material selection, fabrication-method and assembly logic. The conception, development and application of such classification express a shift in contemporary design discourse promoting the notion of mass customization in the context of generative processes of design fabrication.


Screening of hydrocarbon degrading microorganisms isolated from three habitats in Western New York State by selective enrichment technique, resulted in the collection of 20 distinct species. All strains were cultivated in liquid media with crude oil as a sole carbon and energy source. Bacterial strains capable of degrading hydrocarbons belong to the genera Serratia marcescens, Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas sp. Carbon dioxide evolution experiments were used as the major indicator of microbial degradation of oil in biometric flasks. The measurements of CO2 evolution rates have shown to effectively evaluate the biodegradation rates by providing significant data within a short period. The chemical composition of the residual oil was determined by gaschromatographic techniques. The results indicate that the highest accumulation of carbon dioxide and the highest degradation efficiency of medium chain alkanes were observed on Leepershank crude oil, whereas degradation of Mexican crude oil with a composition of higher saturated and substituted hydrocarbons was prolonged. Additionally, biodegradation of Smakover oil was significantly reduced due to a high content of aromatic and cyclic hydrocarbons. Noticeable formation of solubilizing agents was observed by GR1 (not yet identified clone) and Serratia marcescens. The results also suggest that the application of bacterial consortiums containing combinations of two isolated strains enhanced the degradation of Mexican crude oil and also lead to a successful utilization of complex organic industrial waste. The bacterial mixture of GR1 clone and Acinetobacter baumannii demonstrated the highest growth and CO2 evolution on both substrates among all tested bacterial blends.


Kim, Straub, and Keyes introduced the statistical temperature molecular dynamics (STMD) algorithm to overcome broken ergodicity by sampling a non-Boltzmann flat energy histogram as noted in Kim, Straub, and Keyes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97: 050601 (2007). Canonical averages are calculated via reweighting to the desired temperature. While STMD is promising, its application has been almost entirely to simple or model systems. In this dissertation the implementation of STMD into the biosimulation package CHARMM is used to simulate the methionine enkephalin pentamer peptide with a methione terminal cap in a droplet of CHARMM TIP3P water molecules. Chain thermodynamics is analyzed from the novel perspective of the statistical temperature as a function of potential energy, TS(U), automatically generated by STMD. Both the minimum in the slope of TS(U), and the peak in the heat capacity as a function of temperature, calculated via reweighting, indicate a collapse transition at Tθ ≈ 253K. Distributions of dihedral angles are obtained as a function of temperature. Rotamer regions found in the literature are reproduced, along with unique regions not found previously, including with advanced algorithms, indicating the power of STMD enhanced sampling.


Fundamentals: a synopsis of the strategies and efficient resolution techniques used for modelling and numerically simulating the drying process the use of macroscopic equations to simulate heat and mass transfer in porous media modelling and simulating simultaneous liquid and vapour transport in partially saturated porous materials. Drying wood: high- temperature kiln drying of softwood timber: the role of mathematical modelling modelling the effect of heterogeneity on wood drying a numerical prediction of the effect of airflow and wet bulb temperature on the stress development during convective wood drying. Drying of granular and particulate solids: modelling heat and mass transfer in coupled systems during absorption and desorption finite element modelling of grain drying a mathematical model for constant and intermittent batch drying of grains in a novel rotating jet spouted bed theoretical study of heat and mass transfer during frying of granular products modelling convective drying of granular materials application to natural rubber. Miscellaneous applications: mathematical modelling of dielectrically-enhanced drying mathematical models for the primary and secondary drying stages of the freeze-drying of pharmaceutical on trys and in vials a model for superheated steam drying of particles in an impinging stream dryer mathematical modelling of kiln and on-site drying of concrete mathematical modelling and numerical techniques for multi-cylinder paper dryers.


Reasoning by analogy is fundamental to Common Law method and yet until recently has received relatively little analysis except as part of the Doctrine of Precedent. In this article we shall attempt an analysis of the nature of analogy in general, its relationship to logic and its place in reasoning with cases, statutes and codes. We shall then review some theoretical discussions of analogy and the link between reasoning by analogy and justificatory reasoning, ending with an analysis of justification in terms of principle, policy and considerations of fairness underlying the Doctrine of Precedent. The analysis of justification provides some insights into what are 'material' resemblances for the purposes of reasoning by analogy in the law.


Abstract. Canopy and aerodynamic conductances (gC and gA) are two of the key land surface biophysical variables that control the land surface response of land surface schemes in climate models. Their representation is crucial for predicting transpiration (λET) and evaporation (λEE) flux components of the terrestrial latent heat flux (λE), which has important implications for global climate change and water resource management. By physical integration of radiometric surface temperature (TR) into an integrated framework of the Penman–Monteith and Shuttleworth–Wallace models, we present a novel approach to directly quantify the canopy-scale biophysical controls on λET and λEE over multiple plant functional types (PFTs) in the Amazon Basin. Combining data from six LBA (Large-scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia) eddy covariance tower sites and a TR-driven physically based modeling approach, we identified the canopy-scale feedback-response mechanism between gC, λET, and atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (DA), without using any leaf-scale empirical parameterizations for the modeling. The TR-based model shows minor biophysical control on λET during the wet (rainy) seasons where λET becomes predominantly radiation driven and net radiation (RN) determines 75 to 80 % of the variances of λET. However, biophysical control on λET is dramatically increased during the dry seasons, and particularly the 2005 drought year, explaining 50 to 65 % of the variances of λET, and indicates λET to be substantially soil moisture driven during the rainfall deficit phase. Despite substantial differences in gA between forests and pastures, very similar canopy–atmosphere "coupling" was found in these two biomes due to soil moisture-induced decrease in gC in the pasture. This revealed the pragmatic aspect of the TR-driven model behavior that exhibits a high sensitivity of gC to per unit change in wetness as opposed to gA that is marginally sensitive to surface wetness variability. Our results reveal the occurrence of a significant hysteresis between λET and gC during the dry season for the pasture sites, which is attributed to relatively low soil water availability as compared to the rainforests, likely due to differences in rooting depth between the two systems. Evaporation was significantly influenced by gA for all the PFTs and across all wetness conditions. Our analytical framework logically captures the responses of gC and gA to changes in atmospheric radiation, DA, and surface radiometric temperature, and thus appears to be promising for the improvement of existing land–surface–atmosphere exchange parameterizations across a range of spatial scales.


Abstract Aim. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) are in a bidirectional relationship. This prospective study focused on associations between parameters common to the pathogenesis of insulin resistance, inflammation and hepatic steatosis in T2DM patients with metabolic imbalance. Methods. We used clinical data, insulin resistance and inflammation indices, and hepatic steatosis markers from 120 patients. Results. The patients (44% men, mean age 58) had a mean body mass index (BMI) of 32 kg/m2 and mean T2DM history of 6 years. With exceptions, significant correlations were found between metabolic, inflammatory and hepatic parameters. Conclusions. In T2DM patients with poor glycemic control, hepatic steatosis correlates significantly with insulin resistance and inflammation. Increased prevalence and poor prognosis of these diseases together justify the need for NAFLD screening of diabetic patients.


Peer reviewed article. The US and the EU financial markets share, by and large, the same size and level of complexity. However, the EU institutional architecture of securities supervision looks far less sophisticated than the American one. The article gives an account of the different legal architectures provided by the European and US jurisdictions for the public supervision of securities markets and aims at revealing the main features of both systems. The first part shows the overall framework of financial supervision in the EU and in the US, while the second one concerns the aims, functions and organization of the two securities regulators – namely ESMA for Europe and SEC for the US. Finally, the third and last part compares the regulatory and enforcement powers of the two agencies.


This study examines the problems relating to alcohol abuse in the workplace. The factors investigated include workplace safety, absenteeism and tardiness, productivity, and job satisfaction. Questions were also included to ascertain the individual's alcohol consumption patterns, both current (past 30 days) and over the past year. Finally, questions pertaining to the organisations' rules and policies on alcohol consumption were asked. The survey was undertaken in three organisations, two of which were private, and the third was a government department. The research sample of 280 subjects was drawn using the cluster sampling method. The data obtained from the sample was quantitatively analysed, by making use of various descriptive and inferential statistics. Qualitative data analysis was also conducted. Results indicated that a mere 2.5% of the subjects were notified by their organisations about the problems of alcohol abuse in the workplace. It is essential that organisations provide adequate information to their employees, both on the organisations' rules and policies on alcohol consumption, and on the workplace consequences of excessive alcohol consumption. Furthermore, a recommendation which follows from the results is that the organisations should implement an alcohol and drug abuse programme, which would ideally consist of a written policy on alcohol consumption at work, and the establishment of an Employment Assistance Programme (EAP), in addition to testing for alcohol levels at work.


The management segment of the Spokane Visitor and Convention Study includes a review of city enterprises and the Spokane Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. The purpose of this report is to analyze existing information and studies; to analyze current operations, management structure, financial information, policies, and interrelationships among the several enterprises; to determine whether unit-heads share common objectives; to suggest management alternatives that might be considered by the city, the Bureau, and/or unit heads; and to recommend an information system that could be used by all units.


This rich compendium on the lives and doctrines of philosophers ranges over three centuries, from Thales to Epicurus (to whom the whole tenth book is devoted); 45 important figures are portrayed. Diogenes Laertius carefully compiled his information from hundreds of sources and enriches his accounts with numerous quotations. Diogenes Laertius lived probably in the earlier half of the 3rd century CE, his ancestry and birthplace being unknown. His history, in ten books, is divided unscientifically into two 'Successions' or sections: 'Ionian' from Anaximander to Theophrastus and Chrysippus, including the Socratic schools; 'Italian' from Pythagoras to Epicurus, including the Eleatics and sceptics. It is a very valuable collection of quotations and facts. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Diogenes Laertius is in two volumes.


Background: Sub-Saharan Africa has a long history of struggling with child undernutrition. The prevalence of undernutrition is still high and knowledge about this public health problem and the underlying causes is essential for children's health. Aim: To evaluate the anthropometric status of children under five in the Bandja village of Cameroon. Methods: A cross-sectional study was undertaken that included 388 children. Undernutrition was evaluated in terms of wasting, stunting and underweight. Information on sex, age, birth order, birth interval, duration of breastfeeding, and mother's age at birth, occupation and educational level were collected. Results: The prevalence of wasting, stunting and underweight was 3.2%, 16.4% and 5.2%, respectively. Boys were more stunted than girls (OR 2.24; 95% CI 1.16–4.34). Children less than 30 months were more often wasted than older children (OR 17.70; 95% CI 1.82–172.40). The first and second born in order were more stunted than the third or later born in order (OR 2.06; 95% CI 1.02–4.18). Children of farming mothers were more often stunted (OR 2.87; 95% CI 1.35–6.13) and underweight (OR 3.47; 95% CI 1.09–11.09) than others. Children still being breastfed were more underweight (OR 6.52; 95% CI 1.31–32.43) than those whose mothers had finished breastfeeding. Conclusion: Undernutrition is highly prevalent in Bandja, and is more common among boys, younger children, first born in order, children still being breastfed and children of farming mothers. This study underlines the importance of intervention to prevent and reduce undernutrition among children.


Weak values arise experimentally as conditioned averages of weak (noisy) observable measurements that minimally disturb an initial quantum state, and also as dynamical variables for reduced quantum state evolution even in the absence of measurement. These averages can exceed the eigenvalue range of the observable ostensibly being estimated, which has prompted considerable debate regarding their interpretation. Classical conditioned averages of noisy signals only show such anomalies if the quantity being measured is also disturbed prior to conditioning. This fact has recently been rediscovered, along with the question whether anomalous weak values are merely classical disturbance effects. Here we carefully review the role of the weak value as both a conditioned observable estimation and a dynamical variable, and clarify why classical disturbance models will be insufficient to explain the weak value unless they can also simulate other quantum interference phenomena.


Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) provide an elegant and versatile way to sample sets of items that balance the point-wise quality with the set-wise diversity of selected items. For this reason, they have gained prominence in many machine learning applications that rely on subset selection. However, sampling from a DPP over a ground set of size $N$ is a costly operation, requiring in general an $O(N^3)$ preprocessing cost and an $O(Nk^3)$ sampling cost for subsets of size $k$. We approach this problem by introducing DPPNets: generative deep models that produce DPP-like samples for arbitrary ground sets. We develop an inhibitive attention mechanism based on transformer networks that captures a notion of dissimilarity between feature vectors. We show theoretically that such an approximation is sensible as it maintains the guarantees of inhibition or dissimilarity that makes DPPs so powerful and unique. Empirically, we demonstrate that samples from our model receive high likelihood under the more expensive DPP alternative.


In this study, we reveal the suppression of non-specific hydrophobic interaction in poly(ethylene-co-glycidylmethacrylate) (PEGM) based spongy monolith (SPM), PEGM-SPM, which has recently be reported as a new platform of separation medium for affinity chromatography in our previous study, by an simple acidic treatment. Additionally, the immobilization procedures of protein-A toward the PEGM-SPM and the separation conditions for immunoglobulin G (IgG) were optimized for further effective affinity separations. As a result of treatment by a mixture of trifluoroacetic acid and acetonitrile, the hydrophobicity was dramatically suppressed in the PEGM-SPM. The optimizations for the density of PEGM in the PEGM-SPM, the protein A immobilization, and the binding/releasing conditions showed that variety of proteins and peptides were not retained on the protein A immobilized spongy column at all while IgG was absolutely separated by a simple stepwise pH gradient condition.


In the multiethnic EU contest, the European Institutions encourage all citizens to be multilingual by learning at least two languages in addition to their mother tongue, including the local languages to maintain alive their cultural backgrounds and preserve their ethnic identity. The objective of this study is to verify whether the local language used in marketing communication strategies could significantly affect the consumers' preferences for food product and their decisions. The theoretical framework is given by the consumer motivational approach that enlarges the traditional consumer theory including other determinants of consumers decisions as the language and ethnicity; the empirical analysis is performed with the multivariate conjoint analysis to evaluate the influence of the cross cultural influence in consumer's choice. A number of students from the university of Udin have been interviewed with a questionnaire focusing on preferences for a simulated packed sandwich product distributed by vendor machine inside the University space to test the influence of local language. The results suggest some reactions to the messages reported by package in different languages depending on the level of language knowledge and suggest their use for potential demand segmentation to generate niche markets. These results can be generalized to the many regional markets in the EU where the identity construct evocated by the local language can be used in market communication strategies to increase the local food demand and customization.


Abstract This article discusses the renewed urgency for broader liberal arts education at professional military schools (PME) for mid-level officers and recommends broadening the academic backgrounds of civilian faculty. The article compares the teaching environment for faculty with more traditional college teaching to illustrate some of the disadvantages to teaching in PME that may be obstacles to recruitment of civilian faculty. Introduction The collapse of the USSR which brought such profound changes to the international security environment also altered the responsibilities for the U.S. military by increasing their role in "peacetime engagement;" a role that closely resembles diplomacy. Moreover, the ongoing war against terrorism and war in Iraq require the military to engage in "nation building" that is quite different from more traditional combat missions. Given both conditions, the U.S. officer corps increasingly requires a sophisticated understanding of international and regional politics in order to function effectively. Fortunately, the military has a longstanding tradition of professional military education (PME) and each service has its own intermediate and top-level schools. For example the U.S. Army has its two schools at different locations with the intermediate Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and its top level Army War College at Carlisle Pennsylvania. The Navy runs both its Naval Command and Staff College and War College from Newport, Rhode Island. The Navy also runs the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California which grants graduate degrees in engineering, science and national security affairs. The Air Force has both its Air Command and Staff and Air War College co-located at Maxwell Air Force base in Alabama. The Marines have both their Command and Staff College and War college at Quantico, Virginia. The service schools are supplemented by the joint schools of the National Defense University (NDU) located in Washington, D. C. and composed of two top level schools: The National War College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. NDU's intermediate level school is the Joint Armed Forces Staff College located in Norfolk, Virginia. The difference between intermediate and top level schools lies with the rank of officers enrolled: the former enrolls majors while the latter educates lieutenant colonels or colonels. Completion of an intermediate and top-level program has long been important for career advancement of officers. As such professional military education bears some resemblance to other post-graduate professional programs. However, the shift from military training to graduate level rigor is relatively new to PME institutions. PME schools began or expanded efforts to gain accreditation and with it authority to grant masters degrees as a result of Congressional hearings held from 9 December 1987 to 22 September 1988. [1] This article argues on behalf of broadening the background of civilian academics recruited to PME to ensure a balance among disciplines as well as a balance between those with prior military service and those without. This article will then discuss pedagogical considerations for PME that are different from traditional college teaching and that may present obstacles to recruitment of such a faculty. Broadening Civilian Faculty Given the growing importance of integrating more liberal arts education into PME, careful thought should be given to the nature of the academics recruited as faculty. Two important criteria for faculty qualifications must be considered: academic disciplines most appropriate for enhancing the liberal arts component of PME and the value of prior military service. Currently the disciplinary bias of PME faculties lies with military history. An emphasis on military history seems natural for PME because the practical concerns of military education require that students know and understand aspects of the art of warfare. …


Introduction: Fibroepithelial polyps are a type of mesenchymal lesion that typically occurs in women of reproductive age. These lesions can be polypoid or pedunculated and are usually solitary. They are typically asymptomatic and do not grow larger than 5 cm in diameter. However, there are few reported cases of giant fibroepithelial polyps of the vulva. In these cases, tumors cause usually symptoms including bleeding, discharge and general discomfort (with sensation of a mass). Case Report: Here we report a painful giant fibro epithelial polyp on the left labia majora in a 47-year-old Tunisian nulliparous woman. The mass was pedunculated, firm, 10cm in diameter. It was excised and the histological examination confirmed the diagnosis of fibro epithelial polyp with myxoid stroma and abcesses. Conclusion: The current case is characterized by huge fibro epithelial polyp of the vulva, rare disorder which may cause symptoms resulting from its size. Abcesses can be added to the main complications of these tumors such as bleeding, discharge and superficial ulceration.


In the future, one may imagine a new breed of antitrust humor. Jokes might start along the following lines: "Two Artificial Neural Network and one Nash equilibrium meet in an online (pub) hub. After a few milliseconds, a unique silent friendship is formed…"

Back to the present; we are not sure how this joke might end. Nor can we estimate how funny future consumers would find it. We can, however, explain, at present, how technological advancements have changed, and will continue to change, the dynamics of competition and subsequently the distribution of wealth in society. How algorithms may be used in stealth mode to stabilize and dampen market competition while retaining the facade of a competitive environment. That tale is at the heart of this paper.

We first raised algorithmic tacit collusion in 2015. Our recent book, Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy, provides further context and analysis. We illustrate how online tacit collusion may emerge when products are generally homogeneous, sellers do not benefit from brand recognition or loyalty, and markets are transparent and concentrated.

Since our book elaborates on the four collusion scenarios, we begin here by outlining one model of tacit collusion and its manifestation online. Taking note of advancements in technology and emerging policies, we move the debate forward in reviewing the possible harm and means to address it. We illustrate with several case studies how the move to an online pricing environment, under certain market conditions, may harm the buyers' welfare. We note how new technologies may undermine enforcers' attempts to intervene - as stealth becomes a feature of future strategies.

That tale, of course, is not immune from disruptive strategies. We consider the testing of counter-measures in an "algorithmic collusion incubator" to better understand what effectively destabilizes algorithmic tacit collusion. Further, we consider the effects and likelihood of secret dealings. We note how, somewhat counter-intuitively, secret deals in an online environment could reduce, at times, our welfare.


Urban air pollution is associated with significant adverse health effects. Model-based abatement strategies are required and developed for the growing urban populations. In the initial development stage, these are focussed on exceedances of air quality standards caused by high short-term pollutant concentrations. Prediction of health effects and implementation of urban air quality information and abatement systems require accurate forecasting of air pollution episodes and population exposure, including modelling of emissions, meteorology, atmospheric dispersion and chemical reaction of pollutants, population mobility, and indoor-outdoor relationship of the pollutants. In the past, these different areas have been treated separately by different models and even institutions. Progress in computer resources and ensuing improvements in numerical weather prediction, air chemistry, and exposure modelling recently allow a unification and integration of the disjunctive models and approaches. The current work presents a novel approach that integrates the latest developments in meteorological, air quality, and population exposure modelling into Urban Air Quality Information and Forecasting Systems (UAQIFS) in the context of the European Union FUMAPEX project. The suggested integrated strategy is demonstrated for examples of the systems in three Nordic cities: Helsinki and Oslo for assessment and forecasting of urban air pollution and Copenhagen for urban emergency preparedness.


This research is framed in the development of an agri-food hub in the city of Milan, including retrofitting an historical farmhouse. In particular, it focuses on the renovation of two historical buildings within the farmhouse. It aims to present a method to support the energy retrofit design of protected buildings, assuming the possibility of achieving high energy efficiency and integration of local renewable sources, while respecting the constraints related to the building's historical value. Two envelope scenarios, with internal and external insulation, were developed, simulated with Integrated Environmental Solutions: Virtual Environment tool and evaluated. As main results, for the demand side there are no significant differences in terms of energy loads on yearly basis in the two retrofit scenarios, on the supply side, several aspects were considered, including the local renewable potential. Concluding, the application of the described method to the mentioned case study can support in tackling the challenges of protected buildings energy retrofit.


ABSTRACT Previous research shows the importance of understanding the relationship between fault geometry and current applied tectonic stresses in the prediction of critically stressed faults and their propensity for fluid flow via generated fracture networks along and/or around the fault plane. Data collected from the Penola Trough, onshore Otway Basin, South Australia shows that a more complex 3D failure mechanism may be active, whereby the cap-seal may fracture preferentially to fault failure. An emerging application for a two- and three-dimensional distinct element numerical modelling technique, at the play and prospect level, respectively, which assists in assessing pre-drill seal integrity, is presented by way of two case studies from the Penola Trough. Sensitivity studies at the prospect scale show how (1) fault rock strength, (2) fault zone width and (3) the interaction of two fault sets generates local perturbations in the regional stress field. At the play scale, the depth to which a younger active fault set propagates can be explained by the distribution of stress within the rock mass generated by the present-day far-field stress acting on older regionally significant faults. This work offers a workflow and an additional technique to predict cap-seal integrity prior to drilling.


This article is about a recent wave of literary dystopias published in Israel, most of which center on the soon-to-come destruction of the Jewish state. Notable among these are The Third (Ha-shlishi) by Yishai Sarid (2015), Mud (Tit) by Dror Burstein (2016), and Nuntia (Kfor) by Shimon Adaf (2010). These texts draw on biblical or Rabbinic Hebrew, Jewish sources, and Jewish historical events (specifically the destruction of the First and Second Temples), making them just as much about a dystopian past as they are about a dystopian future. They are, in other words, dystopias of a circular temporality: emerging from and moving toward (Jewish) dystopia. This recent wave of Israeli dystopian narratives is primarily preoccupied with the past and future of Judaism, the Jewish people, and Israel as a secular-yet-Jewish state. Most interesting, perhaps, is the complete absence of Palestinians from these texts and from this dystopic imagination. Despite their obvious presence in Israel's current reality, Palestinians have no role whatsoever in these texts. We are dealing therefore with exclusively Jewish dystopias. Read against some of the dystopian white South African writings under Apartheid, the complete absence of Palestinians in the recently published Israeli dystopias, appears particularly disheartening. Neither partner nor enemy, Palestinians do not even share in a future nightmare with Israeli Jews. We are left with the following questions: Does writing a Jewish Israeli dystopia require eliminating Palestinians from the narrative? Is it possible (how is it possible?) to think of a Jewish (Israeli) future, present, and past without thinking about a Palestinian past, present, and future? Following the example of South African dystopias, this article concludes that for such literary and ethical concerns to be critically explored, Israel must first be (officially) recognized as an apartheid regime.


In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.


How might being outcome dependent on another person influence the processes that one uses to form impressions of that person? We designed three experiments to investigate this question with respect to short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency. In all three experiments, subjects expected to interact with a young man formerly hospitalized as a schizophrenic, and they received information about the person's attributes in either written profiles or videotapes. In Experiment 1, short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency led subjects to use relatively individuating processes (i.e., to base their impressions of the patient on his particular attributes), even under conditions that typically lead subjects to use relatively category-based processes (i.e., to base their impressions on the patient's schizophrenic label). Moreover, in the conditions that elicited individuating processes, subjects spent more time attending to the patient's particular attribute information. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the attention effects in Experiment 1 were not merely a function of impression positivity and that outcome dependency did not influence the impression formation process when attribute information in addition to category-level information was unavailable. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated not outcome dependency but the attentional goal of forming an accurate impression. We found that accuracy-driven attention to attribute information also led to individuating processes. The results of the three experiments indicate that there are important influences of outcome dependency on impression formation. These results are consistent with a model in which the tendency for short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency to facilitate individuating impression formation processes is mediated by an increase in accuracy-driven attention to attribute information.


In considering evolution of transcribed regions, regulatory modules, and other genomic loci of interest, we are often faced with a situation in which the number of allelic states greatly exceeds the population size. In this limit, the population eventually adopts a steady state characterized by mutation-selection-drift balance. Although new alleles continue to be explored through mutation, the statistics of the population, and in particular the probabilities of seeing specific allelic configurations in samples taken from a population, do not change with time. In the absence of selection, probabilities of allelic configurations are given by the Ewens sampling formula, widely used in population genetics to detect deviations from neutrality. Here we develop an extension of this formula to arbitrary, possibly epistatic, fitness landscapes. Although our approach is general, we focus on the class of landscapes in which alleles are grouped into two, three, or several fitness states. This class of landscapes yields sampling probabilities that are computationally more tractable, and can form a basis for the inference of selection signatures from sequence data. We demonstrate that, for a sizeable range of mutation rates and selection coefficients, the steady-state allelic diversity is not neutral. Therefore, it may be used to infer selection coefficients, as well as other key evolutionary parameters, using high-throughput sequencing of evolving populations to collect data on locus polymorphisms. We also carry out numerical investigation of various approximations involved in deriving our sampling formulas, such as the infinite allele limit and the "full connectivity" assumption in which each allele can mutate into any other allele. We find that our theory remains sufficiently accurate even if these assumptions are relaxed. Thus, our framework establishes a theoretical foundation for inferring selection signatures from samples of sequences produced by evolution on epistatic fitness landscapes.


Summary: The aim of this study is to analyse the Roman-Parthian relations under Artabanos II and Tiberius, and the political role played by Armenia, focusing on the agreement between the Roman prince Germanicus and Artabanos II. A scrutiny of military and diplomatic measures taken by Rome, Parthia, and minor kings of Kappadokia, Pontos and Armenia suggests a new perspective of the Roman and Parthian policies towards Armenia under Tiberius and Artabanos II. Artabanos II's triumph over Vonones compelled Rome to revise her policy toward Parthia. Artabanos agreed on a compromise with the ruler of Kappadokia Archelaos, a Roman client king, that involved installing Archelaos' stepson, Zeno, on the throne of Armenia. Germanicus' intervention in Armenia in A.D. 18 led to the conclusion of a compromise settlement between Rome and the Parthians, securing over a decade of peace between the two powers. Zeno Artaxias' coronation at the hands of Germanicus was commemorated by the issue of a set of meaningful silver coins.


Durhuus and Jonsson (1995) introduced the class of "locally onstructible" (LC) 3-spheres and showed that there are only exponentially-many combinat orial types of simplicial LC 3-spheres. Such upper bounds are crucial for the convergenc e of models for 3D quantum gravity. We characterize the LC property for d-spheres ("the sphere minus a facet collapses to a (d− 2)-complex") and ford-balls. In particular, we link it to the classical notions of collapsibility, shellability and constructibility, and o btain hierarchies of such properties for simplicial balls and spheres. The main corollaries from thi s study are: – Not all simplicial 3-spheres are locally constructible. (This solves a problem by Durhuus and Jonsson.) – There are only exponentially many shellable simplicial 3spheres with given number of facets. (This answers a question by Kalai.) – All simplicial constructible 3-balls are collapsible. (This answers a question by Hachimori.) – Not every collapsible 3-ball collapses onto its boundary m inus a facet. (This property appears in papers by Chillingworth and Licko rish.)


Fire exclusion policies have affected stand structure and wildfire hazard in north American ponderosa pine forests. Wildfires are becoming more severe in stands where trees are densely stocked with shade-tolerant understory trees. Although forest managers have been employing fuel treatment techniques to reduce wildfire hazard for decades, little scientific evidence documents the success of treatments in reducing fire severity. Our research quantitatively examined fire effects in treated and untreated stands in western United States national forests. Four ponderosa pine sites in Montana, Washington, California and Arizona were selected for study. Fuel treatments studied include: prescribed fire only, whole-tree thinning, and thinning followed by prescribed fire. On-the-ground fire effects were measured in adjacent treated and untreated forests. We developed post facto fire severity and stand structure measurement techniques to complete field data collection. We found that crown fire severity was mitigated in stands that had some type of fuel treatment compared to stands without any treatment. At all four of the sites, the fire severity and crown scorch were significantly lower at the treated sites. Results from this research indicate that fuel treatments, which remove small diameter trees, may be beneficial for reducing crown fire hazard in ponderosa pine sites.


According to the World Health Organisation countries in transition have witnessed a dramatic rise in delinquency rates. Given that juvenile offending is a pervasive social problem and many theories about its aetiology have been advanced it is not unusual for researchers to understand delinquent behaviour over periods of time. Against this backdrop this study seeks to understand gendered patterns of offending or delinquent behaviour among seven hundred and fifty (750) school going adolescents in a historically Indian township in Chatsworth, KwaZulu-Natal. Using a non-probability, random, sampling method respondents were chosen from two secondary schools in Chatsworth. Results from the study showed significant correlations between gender (male and female) and modes of punishment; norm violations; regulation violations; and malicious damage to property. For instance gender and norm violations results indicated that sleeping out of home without parental permission is not gendered. Both males and females slept out of home without parental permission; gender and regulation violations such as driving a motor vehicle without a driver's licence indicated that respondents violate regulations regardless of gender and gender and regulation violations such as entering a bar or bottle store being under the prescribed age of 18 years old indicates that respondents irrespective of gender enter a bar or bottle store.


Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by alumni UBC. Around the world, popular app- and web-based services such as Uber and AirBnB have disrupted traditional business models and sparked explosive growth in the sharing economy. Consumers have embraced these services for their convenience and cost savings, but as they enter highly regulated industries, they face friction from both traditional operators and hesitant governments who raise legal and safety-related concerns. In some jurisdictions, legislators have responded to their constituents by making regulatory changes allowing these types of companies to legally operate. Vancouverites, however, have seen nothing but delayed decisions and increased regulations that make it difficult – if not impossible – for these services to exist. Hear from UBC and community experts, from Mobi, Car2Go and the City of Vancouver, as they examine the pros, cons, and unanswered questions about the state of the sharing economy in Vancouver.


Across the globe extension or rural advisory service (RAS) networks are experiencing dramatic changes. Rural to urban population shifts, climate variability, and increased competition for limited resources have created a challenging environment. When done effectively, advocacy is one of the most successful tool extensionists possess to increase understanding and visibility for the value and impacts RAS networks can have. Despite the importance of advocacy there has not been any research into the capacities necessary for RAS networks to advocate effectively. To address the gap researchers conducted a three-round Delphi process with an expert panel of 31 individuals from 24 different countries. The panel achieved consensus on 39 specific capacities necessary for RAS networks to advocate effectively. Additional recommendations are provided for RAS networks to develop capacities accordingly.


Genetic manipulation of the deadly malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum remains challenging, but the rise of CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing tools is increasing the feasibility of altering this parasite's genome in order to study its biology. Of particular interest is the investigation of drug targets and drug resistance mechanisms, which have major implications for fighting malaria. We present a new method for introducing drug resistance mutations in P. falciparum without the use of plasmids or the need for cloning homologous recombination templates. We demonstrate this method by introducing edits into the sodium efflux channel PfATP4 by transfection of a purified CRISPR/Cas9-guide RNA ribonucleoprotein complex and a 200-nucleotide single-stranded oligodeoxynucleotide (ssODN) repair template. Analysis of whole genome sequencing data with the variant-finding program MinorityReport confirmed that only the intended edits were made, and growth inhibition assays confirmed that these mutations confer resistance to the antimalarial SJ733. The method described here is ideally suited for the introduction of mutations that confer a fitness advantage under selection conditions, and the novel finding that an ssODN can function as a repair template in P. falciparum could greatly simplify future editing attempts regardless of the nuclease used or the delivery method.


The final disposal of high-level nuclear waste in many countries is preferred to be in deep geological repositories. Compacted bentonites are proposed for use as the buffer surrounding the waste canisters which may be subjected to both thermal and hydraulic loadings. A significant increase in the temperature is anticipated within the buffer, particularly during the early phase of the repository lifetime. In this study, several non-isothermal and non-isothermal hydraulic tests were carried on compacted MX80 bentonite. Compacted bentonite specimens (water content = 15.2%, dry density = 1.65 Mg/m3) were subjected to a temperature of either 85 or 150 °C at one end, whereas the temperature at the opposite end was maintained at 25 °C. During the non-isothermal hydraulic tests, water was supplied from the opposite end of the heat source. The temperature and relative humidity were monitored along predetermined depths of the specimens. The profiles of water content, dry density, and degree of saturation were established after termination of the tests. The test results showed that thermal gradients caused redistribution of the water content, whereas thermo-hydraulic gradients caused both redistribution and an increase in the water content within compacted bentonites, both leading to development of axial stress of various magnitudes. The applied water injection pressures (5 and 600 kPa) and temperature gradients appeared to have very minimal impact on the magnitude of axial stress developed. The thickness of thermal insulation layer surrounding the testing devices was found to influence the temperature and relative humidity profiles thereby impacting the redistribution of water content within compacted bentonites. Under the influence of both the applied thermal and thermo-hydraulic gradients, the dry density of the bentonite specimens increased near the heat source, whereas it decreased at the opposite end. The test results emphasized the influence of elevated temperatures (up to 150 °C) on the thermo-hydro-mechanical response of compacted bentonites in the nuclear waste repository settings.


Terahertz waves correspond to the frequency band of 0.3-3 THz of the electromagnetic spectrum. This region of the spectrum has been considered as a gap since detecting and generating terahertz waves have always been a scientific and a technical challenge. The interesting properties of terahertz waves have been first applied in astronomy and spectroscopy. This has lead the scientific community to develop and invent new technical solutions for this frequency range.
Because of the interesting properties of terahert zwaves, applications have emerged in various domains such as medical imaging, security, safety, quality control and communication. However, the available solutions are bulky and difficult to integrate for portable applications.
Recently, different research groups have shown that standard silicon technology is a potential candidate to replace existing systems for terahertz generation and detection, enabling easy integration with on-chip readout and control electronics.
This PhD dissertation focuses on the design and analyses of room temperature terahertz direct detectors in different silicon technologies, their integration in a large camera system with on-chip readout and control electronics. The thesis addresses also the integration of control circuits for silicon based terahertz source arrays as well as imaging demonstrations.
The first step was to investigate single-pixel detectors in standard 65 nm CMOS bulk and 0.25 µm BiCMOS SiGe technologies. The detectors were antenna coupled and integrated in 3x5 pixel arrays. They made use of the non-linearity of standard devices for detecting the captured power by the integrated antennas. Novel detectors were investigated and led to state-of-the-art performance in terms of operation frequency and sensitivity in comparison with other research on silicon devices.
But, what arouses great interest in standard silicon implementations are the large scale integration possibilities. Therefore, as the second step of this thesis, a 1 k-pixel CMOS based terahertz camera was implemented in a collaborative teamwork during this thesis. It was considered as state-of-the-art device in terms of operation frequency and system integration. Other implementation concepts were investigated and analyzed in this thesis for scalable and adaptable readout circuits.
The implemented detector systems were designed for active illuminations. In fact, their sensitivity can not detect passive radiation from the environment. Therefore, artificial sources were needed. As the third step of this research work, a terahertz control circuit was implemented in a 0.13 µm BiCMOS SiGe technology for a 4x4 source array radiating at around 0.53THz .Control circuits for terahertz sources are a key feature to reduce power consumption and generate arbitrary patterns essential for terahertz active imaging.
As a final part of the thesis, terahertz imaging were demonstrated to show the capability of the implemented detectors, camera and sources. Scanned objects were shown at terahertz frequencies. Real-time terahertz imaging were demonstrated with the 1 k-pixel CMOS camera module as well as the evaluation of a monitoring application for a laboratory terahertz source.