We should not think of aesthetic form in terms of shape, but rather, as Susanne Langer argues, as a reflection of "orderliness" or relation. When thinking of form, we should not think of Keats's Grecian urn (embodying in its shape the beauty of the eternal)--not, at least, if this leads us to think of the urn's reified shape as somehow fundamental and therefore a kind of language. Rather, we should think of the relation between binary code and the image it produces on a computer screen, as prototypically "formal." Such images certainly do have shape, but those shapes are the product of underlying acts (here a set of computer instructions), which accordingly are more fundamental. This allows us to understand Coleridge's mature insistence on the reciprocal formality of the Father and the Son (for in any case the Son cannot have "shape" in any spatial sense). It also allows us to rehabilitate Coleridge's problematic concept of organic form. Building on Louis Arnaud Reid's arguments against the representative theory of perception, I argue that the qualitative dimensions of everyday sensory perceptions cannot in themselves be characterized by primary qualities like spatial shape, for it is absurd to think that we have anything like Polaroid snapshots floating around within our synapses. Rather, the qualitative dimensions of sensory perception (colour, perceived shape, and so forth) are "presentations" of the relevant aspects of the world--presentations which bear a formal relation rather than immediate likeness to the world. Sense-perception is thus "formal." And we can thus also claim that an art work formally embodies its meanings; that the concept of "form" has work to do; and that form is implicitly qualitative, being characterized by texture, sound qualities, shapeliness, etc..


A near real-time flood detection algorithm giving a synoptic overview of the extent of flooding in both urban and rural areas, and capable of working during night-time and day-time even if cloud was present, could be a useful tool for operational flood relief management. The paper describes an automatic algorithm using high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite data that builds on existing approaches, including the use of image segmentation techniques prior to object classification to cope with the very large number of pixels in these scenes. Flood detection in urban areas is guided by the flood extent derived in adjacent rural areas. The algorithm assumes that high-resolution topographic height data are available for at least the urban areas of the scene, in order that a SAR simulator may be used to estimate areas of radar shadow and layover. The algorithm proved capable of detecting flooding in rural areas using TerraSAR-X with good accuracy, classifying 89% of flooded pixels correctly, with an associated false positive rate of 6%. Of the urban water pixels visible to TerraSAR-X, 75% were correctly detected, with a false positive rate of 24%. If all urban water pixels were considered, including those in shadow and layover regions, these figures fell to 57% and 18%, respectively.


The main consumer products derived from ostriches are feathers, leather and meat. Despite progress in optimizing production practices, additional information is still necessary about the value of various raw materials as feed to ensure cost-efficient production. This study aimed to determine the effects of the gradual replacement of soybean oilcake meal with sweet lupin (Lupinus angustifolius) seed in the diet of feedlot ostriches on the feather, leather and meat production characteristics. The chicks received a standard commercial pre-starter ostrich diet, with the trial utilizing 141 ostrich chicks (± 10 chicks per group), beginning with the starter phase (83 days posthatching) and reared until 11 months of age. Five iso-nutritional diets were formulated for each feeding phase (starter, grower and finisher) according to specifications for each phase. In each phase, a control diet (Diet 1, 0% lupin diet (LD)) was formulated using soybean oilcake meal as the sole protein source and Diet 5 (100LD) was formulated to include the maximum amount of sweet lupin according to the specifications for the species and feeding phase. The maximum amount of sweet lupin included in 100LD therefore differs among the three feeding phases. The remaining three diets were formulated by gradually replacing soybean oilcake meal with lupins in the following increments: 100 : 0 (0LD); 75 : 25 (25LD); 50 : 50 (50LD); 25 : 75 (75LD), and 0 : 100 (100LD). There were three replications per treatment, resulting in 15 groups of birds. Feed and water were supplied ad libitum. No differences were found for moisture, crude protein and ash contents of the meat. However, the intra-muscular fat content was significantly influenced by the sweet lupin content of the diet. No differences were found for any of the feather classes that were measured. Regarding leather traits, the treatment diets had no effect on the crust sizes, leather grades, nodule diameters, and nodule densities. Differences were observed for leather thickness and pinhole number. It can be concluded that the sweet lupin inclusion levels evaluated in this study had little influence on leather traits, meat composition and feather classes.


Understanding the event structure of sentences and whole documents is an important step in being able to extract meaningful information from the text. Our task is the identification of phenotypes, specifically, pneumonia, from clinical narratives. In this paper, we consider the importance of identifying the change of state for events, in particular, events that measure and compare multiple states across time. Change of state is important to the clinical diagnosis of pneumonia; in the example "there are bibasilar opacities that are unchanged", the presence of bibasilar opacities alone may suggest pneumonia, but not when they are unchanged, which suggests the need to modify events with change of state information. Our corpus is comprised of chest Xray reports, where we find many descriptions of change of state comparing the volume and density of the lungs and surrounding areas. We propose an annotation schema to capture this information as a tuple of .


Cellular metabolic reprogramming is an important mechanism by which cells rewire their metabolism to promote proliferation and cell growth. This process has been mostly studied in the context of tumorigenesis and less is known about its relevance for non-pathological processes and how it affects whole animal physiology. Here, we show that Drosophila female germline cells reprogram their carbohydrate metabolism, upregulating the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) to produce eggs. Strikingly, this cellular reprogramming strongly impacts nutrient preferences. PPP activity in the germline specifically increases the animal's appetite for sugar, the key nutrient fueling this metabolic pathway. We furthermore provide functional evidence that the germline alters sugar appetite by regulating the expression of the fat body secreted satiety factor fit. The cellular metabolic program of a small set of cells is therefore able to increase the animal's preference for specific nutrients through inter-organ communication to promote specific metabolic and cellular outcomes.


It is often expected that one financial education intervention should offer similar performance in changing financial behaviour to determine its role in social marketing. Behaviour change takes time and it needs different approaches to different segmentations. It involves multifaceted aspects and cannot always be controlled by the organisers. If the performances of an intervention are not consistent, should we reject or endorse it?
This paper takes a critical view of the application of social marketing mix concepts from 4Ps and segmentation in designing and assessing the impact of a financial education intervention. The short course "Managing My Money" (the MMM) was designed and delivered through direct and online channels. Using the dataset from a large research project of the True Potential Centre for the Public Understanding of Finance (PUFin) at the Open University in co-operation with the Coventry University, funded by the Money Advice Service's What Works Fund.
There were diversified experiments to explore the impact of one financial education intervention which distributed to specific target audiences in different places. This seeks to explore what works and does not work for different populations in improving their personal financial behaviours including saving and borrowing. This paper selected the datasets of 438 members of New Central Credit Union (NCCU) from 1953 NCCU members and 1257 members of Coventry District Credit Union (CDCU) from 1322 CDCU members who lived in Coventry and categorised into neighbourhood segmentation by wards. The purpose is to explore how a specific neighbourhood environment might influence individual saving and borrowing behaviour. Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) was used to design the experiment and to assess the impact of the intervention toward saving and borrowing behaviours among the control and experimental group. The experimental group received either face-to-face intervention at a workshop or printed materials and an online course, while the control group did not receive any of these treatments.
This paper offers a case study to explain why one financial education intervention does not always offer the repeated performance through the lens of social marketing. Some findings are useful to social marketers and educators, in the use and evaluation of a financial education intervention, to promote desirable saving and borrowing behaviours. Changing borrowing behaviour is more multifaceted than changing saving behaviour. It requires a sensitive approach in dealing with simultaneous savers and debtors. Individual financial capacity constrains their saving and borrowing behaviour change. Neighbourhood segmentation is useful in explaining the limitations when intervening in a financial behaviour change.


Abstract Conclusion: Risk factors associated with increased carriage rates are the same in children with recurrent acute otitis media (rAOM) as in healthy children. These are also known to be risk factors for the development of AOM itself. Objectives: The aim of this study was to describe risk factors for nasopharyngeal carriage in a cohort of young children at high risk of developing rAOM. Methods: Children with an onset of AOM before 6 months of age, indicating an 80% risk of developing rAOM, were enrolled in a vaccination trial on heptavalent PCV. These children were monitored for 3 years during healthy and AOM periods with nasopharyngeal cultures, physical examinations, and questionnaires. Results: A total of 109 children were included at a mean age of 5 months; 105 were followed for 3 years, 89 (82%) of whom developed rAOM. Risk factors associated with increased carriage of all major AOM pathogens were age <2 years, concurrent AOM, and fulfilment of rAOM criteria. Having siblings in day care was associated with increased carriage of Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae, recent antibiotic treatment was associated with H. influenzae and Moraxella catarrhalis carriage, and winter season was associated with M. catarrhalis carriage alone.


Synopsis Learning and memory were assessed in 24 monozygotic (MZ) pairs of individuals discordant for schizophrenia or delusional disorder and seven normal pairs of MZ twins. On declarative memory tasks, the affected group displayed a pattern that might best be characterized as dysmnesic in that they performed significantly worse than the discordant unaffected group on story recall, paired associated learning, and visual recall of designs, but they learned over time, had relatively preserved recognition memory, and did not show profoundly accelerated rates of forgetting. Effortful, volitional retrieval from the lexicon, measured by verbal fluency, was also compromised in the affected group. On the other hand, procedural learning of the motor skill in a pursuit rotor task was relatively intact in the affected group. Comparisons of the normal group and unaffected group indicated that the latter group had very mild impairments in some aspects of episodic memory, namely, immediate and delayed recall of stories and delayed recall of designs. It is highly unlikely that the impairments observed in the affected group can be attributed to differences in genome, family environment, socioeconomic circumstance, or educational opportunity, as all of these were controlled by the twin paradigm. Rather, the impairments appear to be related to the intercession of disease. The neuropsychological profile is consistent with frontal lobe and medial temporal lobe dysfunction, as noted in this sample as well as other samples of schizophrenic singletons. Significant correlations between many measures of memory and global level of social and vocational functioning within the discordant group were also found. Thus difficulties in rapidly acquiring new information and propitiously retrieving old information may burden patients with schizophrenia in many of the transactions of everyday life.


The Huron-Wendat people of the Great Lakes region were a powerful and complex nation with a significant population and a rich history and culture when the Europeans arrived in the early seventeenth century.  In early studies of Amerindian-European contact, historians argued that French Europeans radically transformed various aspects of a static Huron-Wendat culture, including in economics, religion, and material culture.  In more recent studies, contemporary historians correctly question this view, as it gives little attention to Amerindian agency. This essay is intended to contribute to the discourse concerning Amerindian agency, specifically as relates to the transformation of Huron-Wendat 'deathways' in the seventeenth century.


Batesian mimicry has been repeatedly reported in syrphid flies (Diptera: Syrphidae), with noxious Hymenoptera identified as the models, including bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Aculeata). Despite the number of detailed studies of bumblebee mimics from the Holarctic, only minimal biological and ecological information is available for the same phenomenon in most other biogeographical regions. Here, we analyse in detail a case of Batesian mimicry by the syrphid fly Aneriophora aureorufa Philippi towards the bumblebee Bombus dahlbomii Guérin from Patagonia, a relationship only briefly noted previously in taxonomic studies. A. aureorufa possesses strikingly similar red tawny colouration to the highly hairy body of its model, and somewhat resembles it also in size. Cluster analysis suggests that the mimicry is more pronounced towards larger rather than smaller bumblebee workers. The mimicry is visually very good, but there was no evidence of a behavioural component. Foraging activity of both species seems to be largely restricted to the endemic plant Eucryphia cordifolia. The time spent on flowers was much higher in syrphid flies than in B. dahlbomii and other pollinators, and the time spent between flower visits largely overlapped between all the tested species. The endemic distribution, the apparent plant specialisation, and the invasion of alien bumblebees, make B. dahlbomii and A. aureorufa potentially threatened in some parts of the austral American forests, a priority conservation area.


It seems inherently improbable that an academic researcher can ask and answer a clinical question that matters to a patient.

The US health care system is in disarray. Our medical research juggernaut is assaulted on all sides by concerns about federal financing, corporate loyalties (and royalties), and translating research into clinical practice. We spend billions of dollars, conduct more clinical trials, and obtain more "outcomes." But it seems like no one really gets any better.

There seems to be a major disconnect between academic multicenter, rigorous protocol-driven Phase III trials and actual community life and clinical practice. Treatments and guidelines rigorously studied at the academic health center frequently fail to make it into every day clinical practice or individual patient life. Practice-based research and community-oriented primary care both seek to take research out of the academic medical center into the community, and while successful, their approach may only be half right.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) may be one approach to help us out of the mess we're in. CBPR links the researcher and the individual community member in a manner that will dramatically change both. Patients spend their time living their lives, not hanging out at a medical office. Most medical care is chosen and acted on by the patient living in his/ her own personal or community context. Individuals decide when to access professional medical care, what to believe about their medical diagnosis and treatment, what over-the-counter medication to take, what supplement or complementary care to obtain, and how and when to take their prescribed treatments. Really, it is the ordinary citizen that distills all the available medical knowledge and translates it into his/her own life. Not to include them in the production of that knowledge is a grave disservice and severely limits our research findings. CBPR may be an important element of practice redesign in the coming decade to assure that changes in the clinical office reflect the needs of patients. Participatory research should be an essential element in the NIH Roadmap that seeks to quickly and efficiently link medical problem to medical researcher, and back to the patient. CBPR gives traction to ideas that have been percolating in clinical primary care research for the last century.

Julie Stevenson and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Prescription for Health Program have put together an outstanding annotated bibliography on the history and recent advances in CBPR, available through the STFM Family Medicine Digital Resources Library at http://www.fmdrl.org/879. CBPR has moved from the fringe of clinical research to become a standard, widely accepted research method. This annotated bibliography provides a single document to assist the novice in beginning his/her own work in CBPR. It provides the seasoned researcher with a wealth of information on successes, failures, and outcomes in participatory research. This manuscript has distilled the more than 100 articles about CBPR into a quintessential primer on participatory research.

This work is not a metaanalysis, nor is it an exhaustive list of all the articles published on CBPR. The success of CBPR would make that undertaking nearly impossible, and certainly unreadable. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has provided a comprehensive literature review on CBPR. This work really is a guided tour, describing the state-of-the-art in CBPR. Ms Stevenson serves as the docent on this tour and covers major themes, definitions, policies, guidelines, evidence, and insights on CBPR. This manuscript could serve as the core reading list for an introductory curriculum on CBPR.

The benefit of participatory research goes far beyond the simple notion of asking a patient what he/she thinks about a research idea. Participatory research occurs in the community, where people live their lives, and live their medical care. Participatory research allows for studying the process of wellness and illness, the manner in which individuals seek diagnosis and treatment, the interplay between patient and health care provider or institution. It is in participatory research where what matters to the common folk bubbles up to the clinical trial, where the act of living one's life is inextricably connected to living one's health, and where that interface between a patient's daily life and health care's greatest aim can be explored and medical care improved.

Use this annotated bibliography. Keep a copy on your desk. Read the papers cited within. Practice participation. Discover good things.


Although it is no longer debatable that sedentary behaviors are an actual cause of many metabolic diseases, the physiology of physical inactivity has been poorly investigated for this purpose. Along with microgravity, the physiological adaptations to spaceflights require metabolic adaptations to physical inactivity, and that is exceedingly well-simulated during the ground-based microgravity bed-rest analogs. Bed rest thus represents a unique model to investigate the mechanisms by which physical inactivity leads to the development of current societal chronic diseases. For decades, however, clinicians and physiologists working in space research have worked separately without taking full awareness of potential strong mutual questioning. This review summarizes the data collected over the last 60 years on metabolic adaptations to bed rest in healthy subjects. Our aim is to provide evidence that supports the hypothesis that physical inactivity per se is one of the primary causes in the development of metabolic inflexibility. This evidence will focus on four main tenants of metabolic inflexiblity: 1) insulin resistance, 2) impaired lipid trafficking and hyperlipidemia, 3) a shift in substrate use toward glucose, and 4) a shift in muscle fiber type and ectopic fat storage. Altogether, this hypothesis places sedentary behaviors upstream on the list of factors involved in metabolic inflexibility, which is considered to be a primary impairment in several metabolic disorders such as obesity, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes mellitus.


The paper analysed level of adequacy of perceived strategies for funding universities in Nigeria. Two out of the five (5) questions raised to direct investigation were answered while the remaining one (1) question was hypothesized. Data for the study were collected with a questionnaire titled "Strategies for Adequate University Funding Questionnaire, SAFUQUE". The questionnaire was administered on 7317 major stakeholders out of which the responses of6227(i.e. 85.10 percent) were found usable for analysis. The findings revealed that five (5) strategies: sponsorship of special academic programmes by employers of labour; payment of realistic tuition fees; payment of reasonable bursary awards; synergic management of available resources and; government allocation of grants based on ZBB were unanimously adopted for university adequate funding. The study also found out that major stakeholders in Nigerian universities do not significantly differ in rating the level of adequacy of university funding strategies. Stakeholders in Nigerian universities are positively disposed towards sharing the cost of university administration. On the basis of this conclusion, it was recommended among others that universities should on a continuous basis ascertain total cost of financing administration and work out appropriate and acceptable sharing formula amongst stakeholders.


Fuzzy computing (FC) has made a great impact in capturing human domain knowledge and modeling non-linear mapping of input-output space. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of FC systems for detection of money laundering behaviors in financial transactions and monitoring of distributed storage system load. Our objective is to demonstrate the power of FC for real-world applications which are characterized by imprecise, uncertain data, and incomplete domain knowledge. For both applications, we designed fuzzy rules based on experts' domain knowledge, depending on money laundering scenarios in transactions or the "health" of a distributed storage system. In addition, we developped a generic fuzzy inference engine and contributed to the open source community.


Introduction: During academic year 2012-13 (FY 2013) coverage for neurology patients at Strong Memorial Hospital (SMH) changed. Non-vascular neurologists admitted patients, many of whom were not evaluated by vascular neurologists. Previously stroke patients were evaluated by/admitted to a vascular neurologist.

Hypothesis: We sought to determine if this translated into differences in care, hypothesizing decreased utilization of vascular imaging (VI) and compliance with regulatory measures.

Methods: Metric data were obtained from SMH Get with the Guidelines (GWTG) from July 1, 2011-March 31, 2014. Reports were reviewed for percent compliance. SAH patients and acute stroke metrics were excluded. VI data were obtained from the Stroke Treatment Alliance of Rochester registry and reviewed for percent testing completed. Stable was defined as less than 5% change.

Results: Improving or stable metrics: VTE prophylaxis, patient education, antithrombotic, anticoagulant, statin at D/C, assessment for rehabilitation, dysphagia screening, smoking cessation, and LDL documented. Increased utilization of MRA (8.4% FY2012 to 16.9% FY2013) and decreased CTA (80.3% FY2012 to 63.5% FY2013) were seen. Several metrics and VI had transient variation seen in figure 1 (high dose statin data incomplete before Q22012).

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Conclusions: Core measures remained stable. This may be attributable to the role of Stroke Nurse Practitioner (NP) which remained constant. The NP is responsible for coordination of care, guideline adherence, and training residents in guideline driven order sets. Anecdotal reports from faculty identified the NP as a source of stroke expertise. There was clear change in utilization of VI and NIHSS. While high dose statin use is difficult to interpret due to incomplete data, there was a large increase following FY2013. This demonstrates measurable benefits of utilizing vascular neurologists and stroke trained NPs to achieve high level care at a large academic institution.

 [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif


During the NASA Pacific Exploratory Mission - Tropics B (PEM-Tropics B) the NO2 photolysis frequency was simultaneously measured by colocated National Center for Atmospheric Research scanning actinic flux spectroradiometer (SAFS) and commercial filter radiometer (FR) instruments on the NASA DC-8 and the NASA P-3B research aircraft. The measurements were collected from early March to mid-April 1999 over the Pacific Ocean, spanning the region between 35°N-25°S latitude and 80°W-170°E Longitude. Over the course of the mission the SAFS and FR instruments performed quite well with both systems reporting data for more than 85% of the PEM-Tropics B flight hours. For both the SAFS and FR systems the reported totaljNO2 is the sum of the signals from independent zenith and nadir viewing instruments. The 1-min average SAFS and FRjNO2 values were quite highly correlated (r2>0.98) for both the zenith and nadir systems in this complex radiation environment. During PEM-Tropics B these instruments exhibited a difference ranging from 5 to 40% (depending on the instrument pair), with the jNO2 FR measurements always being higher. In contrast, a consistent 30% disagreement was observed for the SAFS and FR instruments during PEM-Tropics A. Use of newer NO2 cross-section data would increase the SAFS jNO2 by 4%, while the larger difference between one of the FR and SAFS instrument pairs could be related to a change in the FR instrument sensitivity.


Red fluorescent proteins (RFPs) are widely used probes for monitoring subcellular processes with extremely high spatial and temporal precision. In this work, we employed spectrally resolved transient absorption (SRTA) and two-dimensional double quantum coherence (2D2Q) spectroscopy to investigate the excited state electronic structure of mPlum, a well-known RFP. The SRTA spectra reveal the presence of excited state absorption features at both the low- and high-energy sides of the dominant ground state bleach contribution. The 2D2Q spectra measured at several excitation wavelengths reveal a peak pattern consistent with the presence of more than three electronic states (i.e., ground, excited, and doubly excited). Numerical modeling of this response suggests that the features are consistent with a 1-1-2 electronic structure. The two closely spaced (∼1500 cm(-1)) levels in the double quantum manifold appear at opposite anharmonicities relative to twice the energy of the lowest energy transition. These observations explain the excited state absorption contributions observed in spectrally resolved transient grating and transient absorption measurements and demonstrate the utility of multidimensional spectroscopy in unraveling congested spectra relative to conventional one-dimensional methods.


Abstract How do state tax rates respond to federal tax shocks? This paper presents a novel mechanism of heterogeneous vertical tax externalities across state-levels of fiscal advantage, showing that tax increases can be expansionary – even without their reinvestment. States rich in natural resources have a fiscal advantage in the inter-state competition over production factors which allows them to respond better to increases in federal taxes and, consequently, attract capital from other parts of the nation. We add heterogeneity in fiscal advantage levels to an otherwise standard model of vertical tax externalities and horizontal tax competition. The model shows that, irrespective of federal redistribution, the contractionary effect of a federal tax increase can be overturned in fiscally advantaged states, through an increase in their tax base. Using the case of the U.S., and narrative-based measures of federal tax shocks a-la Romer and Romer (2010), we provide empirical evidence for the various aspects of this mechanism. Specifically, our baseline estimates indicate that, controlling for federal transfers, a 1% increase in the GDP share of capital-related federal taxes at the beginning of a year increases the growth rate of the per capita tax base by approximately 0.7% in high fiscal advantage states at the end of it.


In order to obtain a more accurate assessment of relay performance in real-world outdoor propagation environment and to provide guidelines for the relay-based system deployment in the IMT-Advanced frequency band, the performance of a variety of relay schemes is investigated based on wideband measurements. The measurements were conducted at 2.35 GHz with 50 MHz bandwidth, which is within the frequency bands allocated to the IMT-Advanced system. We pay attention to two aspects: 1) the performance evaluation of a variety of transmission schemes in real propagation environment, and 2) the impact of propagation environment on the relay performance. Based on the measured channel transfer matrix, the achieved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), spatial diversity and capacity of different transmission schemes are analyzed and compared. The measurement results reveal that in the NLOS region of the base station (BS) or in the region far away from the BS, the decode-and-forward (DF) relaying can significantly enhance the system performance.When the quality of the link between the BS and the relay station (RS) is good, the DF can provide larger performance improvement than the amplify-and-forward relaying. It is also found that propagation condition in the link between the RS and MS has major impact on the SNR, but minor impact on the spatial diversity.


Logic is a set of well-formed formulae, along with an inference relation. But the Classical Logic is bivalent; for this reason, very limited to solve problems with uncertainty on the data. It is well-known that Artificial Intelligence requires Logic. Because its Classical version shows too many insufficiencies, it is very necessary to introduce more sophisticated tools, as may be Non- Classical Logics; amongst them, Fuzzy Logic, Modal Logic, Non-Monotonic Logic, Para-consistent Logic, and so on. All them in the same line: against the dogmatism and the dualistic vision of the world: absolutely true vs. absolutely false, black vs. white, good or bad by nature, Yes vs. No, 0 vs. 1, Full vs. Empty, etc. We attempt to analyze here some of these very interesting Classical and modern Non-Classical Logics.


The first highly enantioselective S–H bond insertion reaction was developed by cooperative catalysis of dirhodium(II) carboxylates and chiral spiro phosphoric acids (SPAs) under mild and neutral reaction conditions with fast reaction rates, high yields (77–97% yields), and excellent enantioselectivities (up to 98% ee). The catalytic S–H bond insertion reaction provides a highly efficient method for the synthesis of chiral sulfur-containing compounds and advances the synthesis of a chiral sulfur-containing drug (S)-Eflucimibe. A systematic 31P NMR study revealed that no ligand exchange between dirhodium(II) carboxylates and SPAs occurred in the reaction. The distinct behaviors of cooperative catalysts Rh2(TPA)4/(R)-1a and the prepared complex Rh2(R-1a)4 observed by in situ FT-IR spectroscopy excluded the feasibility of Rh2(R-SPA)4 being the real catalyst. DFT calculations showed that the activation barrier in the proton shift step became remarkably low as promoted by SPAs. Based on the experimental results and the calculations, the SPA was proposed as a chiral proton shuttle for the proton shift in reaction. Additionally, the single crystal structures of several SPAs were measured and used to rationalize the configurations of the S–H insertion products obtained in the reactions. The rigid and crowded environment around the SPAs ensures the high enantioselectivity in the S–H bond insertion reaction.


OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the effectiveness of dynamic plantar pressure assessment to determine patients at high risk for neuropathic ulceration. In choosing the cut point, we looked for an optimum combination of sensitivity and specificity of plantar pressure to screen for neuropathic ulceration.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
A total of 1,666 consecutive individuals with diabetes (50.3% male) presenting to a large urban managed care-based outpatient clinic were enrolled in this longitudinal 2-year outcome study. Patients received a standardized medical and musculoskeletal assessment at the time of enrollment, including evaluation in an onsite gait laboratory.

RESULTS
Of the entire population, 263 patients (15.8%) either presented with or developed an ulcer during the 24-month follow-up period. As expected, baseline peak plantar pressure was significantly higher in the ulcerated group than in the group who did not ulcerate (95.5 +/- 26.4 vs. 85.1 +/- 27.3 N/cm(2), P < 0.001). There was also a trend toward increased pressure with increasing numbers of foot deformities, as well as with increasing foot risk classification (P = 0.0001). Peak pressure was not a suitable diagnostic tool by itself to identify high-risk patients. After eliminating patients without loss of protective sensation, using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, the optimal cut point, as determined by a balance of sensitivity and specificity, was 87.5 N/cm(2), yielding a sensitivity of 63.5% and a specificity of 46.3%.

CONCLUSIONS
The data from this evaluation continue to support the notion that elevated foot pressure is an important risk factor for foot complications. However, the ROC analysis suggests that foot pressure is a poor tool by itself to predict foot ulcers.


Young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people labeled with intellectual disabilities have unique sexual health needs that are not being met. Denial by others of their right to pleasure and the exercise of heightened external control over their sexuality are commonplace. Current research indicates that these youth are at heightened risk for compromised sexual health. This study aimed to explore the ways in which social and environmental conditions influence vulnerability to adverse sexual health outcomes for this population. We used a community-based research approach to conduct qualitative interviews and focus groups with 10 young LGBT people (aged 17–26) labeled with intellectual disabilities. Participants reported multiple limitations on their autonomy that resulted in having sex in places where they did not feel comfortable and were unlikely to practice safer sex. Attempts by authority figures to protect youth through limits on their autonomy may be unintentionally leading to negative sexual health outcomes.


We all know one hard and undeniable truth: Physical beauty comes with tremendous power, and tremendous benefits. Those who possess it are generally luckier in love, more likely to be popular, and more apt to get better grades in school. But very few of us realize just how much looks affect every aspect of our lives. Recent studies document that people blessed with good looks earn about 10% more than their average-looking colleagues. They are also more likely to get hired and promoted at work. What exactly is this "physical attractiveness" phenomenon and how does it affect each and every one of us? Dr. Gordon L. Patzer has devoted the last 30 years to investigating this unsettling phenomenon for both women and men, and how it touches every part of our lives. In Looks, he reveals not only its impact on romance, but also on family dynamics, performance in school, career, courtroom proceedings, politics and government. Looks is the first book to explore how the power of beauty affects both sexes and how the rise of reality TV shows, cosmetic surgery, and celebrity culture have contributed to our culture's overall obsession with being beautiful.Unflinching and topical, Looks uncovers the sometimes ugly truth about beauty and its profound effects on all our lives.


Image processing operations like blurring, inverse convolution, and summed-area tables are often computed efficiently as a sequence of 1D recursive filters. While much research has explored parallel recursive filtering, prior techniques do not optimize across the entire filter sequence. Typically, a separate filter (or often a causal-anticausal filter pair) is required in each dimension. Computing these filter passes independently results in significant traffic to global memory, creating a bottleneck in GPU systems. We present a new algorithmic framework for parallel evaluation. It partitions the image into 2D blocks, with a small band of additional data buffered along each block perimeter. We show that these perimeter bands are sufficient to accumulate the effects of the successive filters. A remarkable result is that the image data is read only twice and written just once, independent of image size, and thus total memory bandwidth is reduced even compared to the traditional serial algorithm. We demonstrate significant speedups in GPU computation.


In this paper we present a conversational dialogue system, CityBrowser II, which allows users to inquire about information about restaurants in Mandarin. Developed in the Galaxy infrastructure with a common, language-independent semantic representation, CityBrowser integrates portability and scalability. By inheriting the infrastructure and main language understanding/generation components from its English predecessor, CityBrowser can easily be transformed to a Mandarin language environment. This paper describes our system implementation, focusing on the language- specific modifications to the original English system. We show that our language-independent yet scalable system infrastructure makes multilingualism a promising task.


A State Private University is established through a State/Central Act by a sponsoring body viz., a society registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860, or any other corresponding law for the time being in force in a State or a Public Trust or a Company registered under Section 25 of the Companies Act, 1956. In a country like India, where higher education is largely inaccessible and unaffordable to a substantial chunk of youngsters, the possibilities that open up before a private university is enormous. While at the same time, it is supposed to provide quality education and beat the competitors, resource constraints and establishing brand image looms large as detriments. In this paper we have looked into the challenges and opportunities of private Universities for imparting Higher Education in terms of Establishment, Admission, Designing courses and Curriculum, Innovations in teaching and learning processes, Research and development, Industry and external collaborations, Usage of ICT, Student support and Progression, Expansion to global market, Governance, Leadership and Management, Innovations and Best practices etc. The Advantages, Benefits, Constraints, and Disadvantages of Private Universities for its stakeholders like students, faculty members, parents, industries and society are also discussed. The opportunities and challenges of National Institutional Ranking framework under stated criteria are analyzed.


Persons with severe mental illnesses (SMI), such as schizophrenia, are at increased risk for comorbid conditions- including type 2 diabetes-independent of therapy. SMI sufferers especially at risk for type 2 diabetes are women, African Americans, and persons older than 45 years. Among the possible causes of increased susceptibility to type 2 diabetes are such schizophrenia-associated conditions as impaired glucose tolerance, overweight, obesity, inadequate nutrition, lack of exercise, and inadequate self-care. Other obstacles to good health care among patients with schizophrenia include impaired communication ability, denial of illness, social withdrawal, and undertreatment because of comorbid conditions. Different antipsychotic medications may also contribute to preexisting insulin resistance or glucose intolerance. Clinicians can optimize care by understanding the most significant barriers for each patient and incorporating this knowledge into an active treatment plan.


Nanoporous silicon (pSi) films on a silicon wafer were loaded with sodium perchlorate (SP) and perfluoropolyether (PFPE) oxidising agents to generate a pyrotechnic energetic material. The potentially violent reaction between the silicon and the loaded oxidising agent was studied using correlated differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and FTIR spectroscopy for samples heated continuously between ambient and 500 °C. We observed that the energetic reaction between pSi and SP depended on the presence of various hydride species on the surface of freshly etched pSi, and on formation of volatile free radical species released during either oxidation of the surface in the presence of air at about 200 °C or during desorption of the hydride above 270 °C in the absence of oxygen. However, energetic reactions between pSi and PFPE were delayed until pyrolysis of the PFPE above 390 °C in the absence of oxygen, suggesting PFPE's suitability for pyrotechnics applications. Correlated thermal and spectroscopic methods of analysis gave new insights into the earliest stages of the reaction of these energetic materials.


Abstract Haemangiopericytoma (HPC) is a rare soft tissue tumour of fibroblastic origin and is part of the solitary fibrous tumour spectrum. The tumour is generally considered to be benign, but can behave clinically as if sarcomatous -- with relentless infiltrative local growth. HPC generally presents in adulthood (median age 45 years for orbital disease) and is equally frequent in both sexes. HPC can arise in any site in the body and presents as a slowly growing, painless mass. We report a case of a 20 year old African male seen at Kikuyu Eye Unit, Kenya, with a 12 year history of a gradually enlarging, painless orbital mass. The patient underwent skin-sparing orbital exenteration with complete tumour excision; histology confirmed diagnosis of HPC.


Background Centre volume is an important determinant of outcomes in patients requiring complex medical treatments or surgical procedures. Heart failure hospitalisation (HFH) has become an increasingly complex and resource intensive clinical event. We evaluated the effect of centre volume on mortality and costs in patients with HFH. Methods This was a retrospective registry-based analysis of adult patients discharged with a primary diagnosis of HF from hospitals across New York (NY) State over a 5-year period, between January 2009 and December 2013, using the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System inpatient discharge files. The primary outcome of interest was in-hospital mortality. All patients were followed from the day of admission to either in-hospital death or discharge alive. Results 300 972 HFHs from 198 facilities across NY State were included. Five-year centre volume was associated with a decrease in in-hospital mortality in unadjusted (HR=0.872, 95% CI 0.863 to 0.881, p<0.001) and adjusted Cox models (HR=0.869, 95% CI 0.859 to 0.879, p<0.001). After dividing the overall cohort into three groups based on 5-year centre volume, groups with medium and high volume centres had lower in-hospital mortality when compared with the group with low volume centres. The results were consistent in various subgroup analyses. Furthermore, hospitals in the higher centre volume groups had increased HFH costs across different severity of illness categories and involved increased use of cardiac procedures. Conclusions Higher centre volume was associated with lower HFH mortality but increased HFH costs and increased cardiac procedures in a cohort of Medicare and non-Medicare beneficiaries.


In recent years, the countermajoritarian difficulty has split into two. According to its traditional version, the difficulty arises when unaccountable Justices strike down statutes passed by electorally accountable branches of government. According to the newer, literal version, the difficulty arises when Justices strike down statutes that are supported by the majority according to public opinion polls. By explicating the difference between the two versions of the difficulty, I expose the deep influence of public opinion polls on American constitutional thought. For many years, scholars conflated the two difficulties under one banner and offered normative justifications for the Court's countermajoritarian authority. In recent years, many constitutional theorists, oriented toward social science, attempt to dissolve the literal countermajoritarian difficulty by showing that the Court is not countering the majority will but following it. I further demonstrate that the distinction helps to explain four additional issues of constitutional theory. First, this distinction explains the connection between the countermajoritarian difficulty and the "passive virtues" technique that Alexander Bickel devised for the Court. Second, it exposes the importance of the distinction between cases that the media covers and non-visible cases. Third, it sheds new light on the basis of the Court's power. Finally, this distinction is crucial for a better understanding of a puzzle that stands at the heart of the rise of judicial power worldwide.


Industrial development has drastically increased greenhouse gas emissions, and this issue will likely continue for a long period of time, further deteriorating the quality of air, soil, and water in the world and jeopardizing human life. Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrogen oxide (NOx) are the primary greenhouse gas sources for global warming and climate change worldwide. Reducing these emissions is a global challenge and has been a major concern. Microorganisms (e.g., microalgae) can be an effective way of addressing some of these concerns. Nanomaterials can also offer structural features for reducing CO2 and other emissions in an environmentally friendly way. Combining microorganisms with nanomaterials can effectively capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and convert them to biofuels for transportation, industrial and household heating, and many other uses. In addition, plants naturally use CO2 emissions and other pollutants for their growth media. Even some biosystems can accumulate various substances in their bodies and reduce toxicity levels. As an outcome of this cycle, concentrations of specific pollutants in the air can be significantly reduced. Carbon dioxide contains an abundant source of carbon, which nurtures the growth of microbial species and plants in the environment, and can be biochemically transformed into renewable energy in order to meet the world's energy demand. This chapter summarizes the most recent developments in the field of CO2 emissions reduction, and applications of nanosystems and biological systems together to address some of the concerns of climate change and global warming.


This study documents the size and nature of "Hindu-Muslim" and "boy-girl" gaps in children's school participation and attainments in India. Individual-level data from two successive rounds of the National Sample Survey suggest that considerable progress has been made in decreasing the Hindu-Muslim gap. Nonetheless, the gap remains sizable even after controlling for numerous socio-economic and parental covariates, and the Muslim educational disadvantage in India today is greater than that experienced by girls and Scheduled Caste Hindu children. A gender gap still appears within as well as between communities, though it is smaller within Muslim communities. While differences in gender and other demographic and socio-economic covariates have recently become more important in explaining the Hindu-Muslim gap, those differences altogether explain only 25 percent to 45 percent of the observed schooling gap.


Abstract While there are a plethora of algorithms for detecting changes in mean in univariate time-series, almost all struggle in real applications where there is autocorrelated noise or where the mean fluctuates locally between the abrupt changes that one wishes to detect. In these cases, default implementations, which are often based on assumptions of a constant mean between changes and independent noise, can lead to substantial over-estimation of the number of changes. We propose a principled approach to detect such abrupt changes that models local fluctuations as a random walk process and autocorrelated noise via an AR(1) process. We then estimate the number and location of changepoints by minimizing a penalized cost based on this model. We develop a novel and efficient dynamic programming algorithm, DeCAFS, that can solve this minimization problem; despite the additional challenge of dependence across segments, due to the autocorrelated noise, which makes existing algorithms inapplicable. Theory and empirical results show that our approach has greater power at detecting abrupt changes than existing approaches. We apply our method to measuring gene expression levels in bacteria. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.


Individuals vary in their responses to stroke and trauma, hampering predictions of outcomes. One reason might be that neural circuits contain hidden variability that becomes relevant only when those individuals are challenged by injury. We found that in the mollusc, Tritonia diomedea, subtle differences between animals within the neural circuit underlying swimming behavior had no behavioral relevance under normal conditions but caused differential vulnerability of the behavior to a particular brain lesion. The extent of motor impairment correlated with the site of spike initiation in a specific neuron in the neural circuit, which was determined by the strength of an inhibitory synapse onto this neuron. Artificially increasing or decreasing this inhibitory synaptic conductance with dynamic clamp correspondingly altered the extent of motor impairment by the lesion without affecting normal operation. The results suggest that neural circuit differences could serve as hidden phenotypes for predicting the behavioral outcome of neural damage. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.02598.001


The first book-length study devoted to this topic, Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy offers an important contribution to scholarship on the theatre as well as on early modern attitudes in France, specifically on the subject of lying and deception. Unusually for a scholarly work on seventeenth-century theatre, it is particularly alert to plays as performed pieces and not simply printed texts. The study also distinguishes itself by offering original readings of Moliere alongside innovative analyses of other playwrights. The chapters offer fresh insights on well-known plays by Moliere and Pierre Corneille but also invite readers to discover lesser-known works of the time (by writers such as Benserade, Thomas Corneille, Dufresny and Rotrou). Through comparative and sustained close readings, including a linguistic and speech act approach, a historical survey of texts with an analysis of different versions and a study of irony, the reader is shown the manifest ways in which different playwrights incorporate the comedic tropes of lying and scheming, confusion and unmasking. Drawing particular attention to the levels of communicative or mis-communicative exchanges on the character-to-character axis and the character-to-audience axis, this work examines the process whereby characters in the comedies construct narratives designed to trick, misdirect, dazzle, confuse or exploit their interlocutors. In the different incarnations of seducer, parasite, cross-dresser, duplicitous narrator/messenger and deluded mythomaniac, the author underscores the way in which the figure of the liar both entertains and troubles, making it a fascinating subject worthy of detailed investigation.


This study investigated whether two different versions of an online professional development course produced different impacts on the intended outcomes of the course. Variations of an online course for middle school algebra teachers were created for two experimental conditions. One was an actively facilitated course with asynchronous peer interactions among participants. The second was a self-paced condition, in which neither active facilitation nor peer interactions were available. Both conditions showed significant impact on teachers' mathematical understanding, pedagogical beliefs, and instructional practices. Surprisingly, the positive outcomes were comparable for both conditions. Further research is needed to determine whether this finding is limited to self-selected teachers, the specifics of this online course, or other factors that limit generalizability.


The rapid development of communication and information technology opens up fascinating perspectives, which go far beyond the state of the art in mechatronics: mechatronic systems with inherent partial intelligence. These so called self-optimizing systems adapt their objectives and behavior autonomously and flexibly to changing operating conditions. On the one hand, securing the dependability of such systems is challenging due to their complexity and non-deterministic behavior. On the other hand, self-optimization can be used to increase the dependability of the system during its operation. However, it has to be ensured, that the self-optimization works dependable itself. To cope with these challenges, the multi-level dependability concept was developed. It enables predictive condition monitoring, influences the objectives of the system and determines suitable means to improve the system's dependability during its operation. In this contribution we introduce a procedure for the conceptual design of an advanced condition monitoring based on the system's principle solution. The principle solution describes the principal operation mode of the system and its desired behavior. It is modeled using the specification technique for the domain-spanning description of the principle solution of a self-optimizing system and consists of a coherent system of eight partial models (e.g. requirements, active structure, system of objectives, behavior, etc.). The partial models are analyzed separately in order to derive the components of the multi-level dependability concept. In particular, the reliability analysis of the partial model active structure is performed to identify the system elements to be monitored and parameters to be measured. The principle solution is extended accordingly: e.g. with system elements required for the realization of the dependability concept. The advantages of the method are shown on the self-optimizing guidance module of a railroad vehicle.


MMORPGs [1] are big business; large numbers of people engage in some form of online gaming experience. Given the prevalence of such virtual spaces there is an increasing awareness that disputes can, and often, do arise about property and rights in online games. Online games and MMORPGs are governed by EULAs. Each user is required to consent to the EULA of the particular game or world they seek to use. EULAs are not the only problem for the users of MMORPGs. Contractual allocation of copyright prevents users selling their in‐game property, game accounts and avatars to other users. Users had sought to sell game accounts and in‐game assets on online auction sites until developers prevented gamers from doing so. Gaming and MMORPG disputes are appearing before courts in the real world; Bragg v Linden Labs, BlackSnow v Mythic and Hernandez v IGE are just three examples concerning property rights and contractual issues in Virtual Worlds and MMORPGs. There are a host of legal issues raised in relation to properties and rights in cyber spaces, although the most interesting concern the contractual nature of restricted rights and the limitations on intellectual property granted to users. This paper seeks to explore some of these, and briefly outline the potential options for alternative mechanisms, including consideration of the intellectual property rights of both users and developers in light of the recent US judgement in MDY Industries v Blizzard Entertainment concerning copyright infringement. [1] Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games


In recent years much debate has centred on Greece's reform capacity. Despite the fact that the need for reform has been at the forefront of the political agenda for decades, successive governments have seen their proclaimed reform programmes frustrated and, more often than not, defeated by powerful domestic opposition. This apparent weakness in orchestrating and implementing reform has often been conceptualised by reference to the structural weaknesses of Greek public policy; amongst them: the distortions in the system of interest mediation (Mavrogordatos, 1988; Lavdas 1997); deeply-entrenched notions of statism (Pagoulatos 2005); partidocratzia (Liritzis 1984); the organisational and regulatory weakness of the Greek public administration (Spanou 2001); and an anaemic civil society that has been unable to produce and sustain reformist advocacy coalitions (Pollis 1987, Makrydimitris 2002). More recently Featherstone and Papadimitriou (2008), extending Tsebelis (1995), have also made reference to the 'Greek paradox', contrasting poor reform outcomes to the relatively few constitutional veto points of the Greek political system. Indeed the strong bias of the electoral system in favour of one-party governments, the relatively weak system of checks and balances provided by the Greek Constitution as well as the strongly centralised nature of the Greek state point to a system of governance where the Executive dominates. At the top of this system sits the Prime Minister whose formal powers, since the 1985 constitutional amendment, are amongst the most extensive in the European experience. Yet, at the same time, the existence of powerful informal veto-points (Immergut, 1992; Haverland, 2000) is acknowledged as blocking power and reform capacity. Despite its pivotal role for the process of domestic reform, the topic of Prime Ministerial leadership has escaped systematic scholarly attention. With only a few exceptions (for example, Sotiropoulos 2000), much of the existing literature has failed to go beyond descriptive legalistic accounts of formal competences or place the Greek case in a comparative perspective. Building on an extensive set of personal interviews and the comparative literature on leadership styles and core executive management (Peters, Rhodes and Wright 2000), this paper seeks to address this gap by focusing on three main themes: a) the evolution of formal Prime Ministerial powers since transition to democracy in 1974 and its effects on public policy making; b) the comparative examination of leadership styles of five PMs of the Metapolitefsi period (K. Karamanlis, Papandreou, Mitsotakis, Simitis, K. Karamanlis); and c) the evolution of management structures and strategic resources available to the PM in coordinating the work of the Cabinet (Ministerial Council) and managing the workload of the Office of the Prime Minister. By engaging in a theoretically informed manner with these issues we hope to contribute to a better understanding of the way in reform agendas are articulated, designed and implemented by the senior echelons of the Greek executive.


A dual-drive LiNbO(3) architecture modulator with chirp management is proposed and developed offering SFDR > 25 dB in a 1.4 V bias excursion compared to only 0.5 V bias excursion in a conventional Mach-Zehnder electro-optical modulator (MZ-EOM). The architecture effectively extends the linear regime and enables the optical transmission of wireless systems employing orthogonal division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation such as ultra-wide band (UWB) which require high linearity over a broad frequency range due to their high peak-to-average power ratio (PARP). Radio-over-fiber UWB transmission in a passive optical network is experimentally demonstrated employing this technique, exhibiting an enhancement of 2.2 dB in EVM after 57 km SSMF when the dual-drive developed modulator is employed.


Deoxynivalenol (DON) concentrations in mature wheat grain are usually correlated with symptoms produced by Gibberella zeae infection. However, there have been numerous observations of unacceptably high DON in asymptomatic crops, which can lead to lower-than-expected milling reductions in DON. We conducted a field experiment with winter wheat to examine the effect of infection timing and postanthesis moisture on grain quality and DON accumulation. Seven to eight soft red winter wheat cultivars were grown in three successive years in a misted nursery in Kinston, NC. Spikes were randomly selected for individual spray inoculation at 0, 10, or 20 days after anthesis (daa). Starting at anthesis, plots were subjected to 0, 10, 20, or 30 days of mist. Inoculated spikes and noninoculated controls were collected at harvest-ripeness, and the threshed grain was assayed for Fusarium-damaged kernels (FDK) and DON. In 2 of 3 years, percentages of FDK were significantly lower from 10-daa infections than from those at 0 daa, although DON concentrations were the same at the two inoculation timings in 2 of the 3 years. Those results indicate that the period of maximum susceptibility to wheat spike infections by G. zeae is close to or slightly less than 10 daa in North Carolina. In 2 of 3 years, FDK-DON correlation was greater for 0- and 10-daa inoculations and for 0- to 20-daa misted treatments than for the later-inoculated or longer-misted treatments, respectively. The percentage of "low-FDK, high DON" (LFHD) observations (defined as FDK < or = 4.0%, DON > or = 2 microg g(-1)) was higher in 2007 than in 2005 or 2006 (41, 14, and 18%, respectively). In both 2006 and 2007, high percentages of LFHD observations (> or = 60%) occurred under marginal disease conditions involving late infection. We conclude that late infection is an important factor leading to LFHD grain. Periods of rain soon after anthesis likely favor the low-symptom, high-DON scenario, and conditions that create greater within-crop variability of anthesis timing may also be important.


Background. Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the airways characterized by airflow limitation and airway hyperresponsiveness. Lung density indices on quantitative computed tomography (QCT) are assumed to reflect the degree of air trapping originated from airflow limitation in airway diseases. Purpose. The present study investigated the availability of lung density indices on QCT in clinical evaluation of asthma. Methods. Eleven asthmatic patients and 48 healthy control subjects were prospectively evaluated by QCT, pulmonary function testing, and a methacholine challenge test. High-resolution computed tomography scans were performed at full-inspiratory and full-expiratory phases, and percentage of lung field occupied by low attenuation area (LAA%) and mean lung density (MLD) at both inspiratory and expiratory phases were measured. Results. MLD values at inspiratory phase were significantly increased in asthmatic patients compared with those in healthy control subjects. Inspiratory LAA% values were significantly decreased in asthmatics compared with the values in control subjects. On expiratory scans, MLD values of asthmatics were significantly lower than the values of control subjects. Expiratory LAA% values of asthmatics were significantly higher than the values of control subjects. The LAA% in the expiratory phase showed significant negative correlation with forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1), FEV1/forced vital capacity, and the provocative dose of methacholine causing a 20% decrease in FEV1 in asthmatic patients. Conclusion. These results suggest that lung density indices on QCT may be useful for clinical evaluation of asthmatic patients and increased LAA% in the expiratory phase is associated with airflow limitation and airway hyperresponsiveness in asthma.


The academic debate in Israel on Zionism and its implications for the way the society views itself and the "other" were discussed in part one of this article. This part examines the press, which with partial privatization and the cumulative impact of the Lebanon war and the intifada has undergone a transformation since the late 1980s. While a wider diversity of views and bold reporting on events are now current, the article concludes that the representation of the Palestinians and Arabs in the news columns is fundamentally unchanged. The last part will follow the manifestations of the academic debate in film, theater, novels, music, and poems and will assess the significance of these changes in the culture and worldview of Israeli society as a whole.


In part of speech tagging by Hidden Markov Model, a statistical model is used to assign grammatical categories to words in a text. Early work in the field relied on a corpus which had been tagged by a human annotator to train the model. More recently, Cutting et al. (1992) suggest that training can be achieved with a minimal lexicon and a limited amount of a priori information about probabilities, by using an Baum-Welch re-estimation to automatically refine the model. In this paper, I report two experiments designed to determine how much manual training information is needed. The first experiment suggests that initial biasing of either lexical or transition probabilities is essential to achieve a good accuracy. The second experiment reveals that there are three distinct patterns of Baum-Welch reestimation. In two of the patterns, the re-estimation ultimately reduces the accuracy of the tagging rather than improving it. The pattern which is applicable can be predicted from the quality of the initial model and the similarity between the tagged training corpus (if any) and the corpus to be tagged. Heuristics for deciding how to use re-estimation in an effective manner are given. The conclusions are broadly in agreement with those of Merialdo (1994), but give greater detail about the contributions of different parts of the model.


The effects of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) on muscarinic receptor-stimulated phosphoinositide (PI) hydrolysis in rat cortical slices were studied. NMDA inhibits carbachol-stimulated PI hydrolysis with an IC50 of 9.8 +/- 1.4 microM and a maximal inhibition of 70% at 100 microM. The inhibitory effect of NMDA is not due to increased metabolism of accumulated inositol phosphates. NMDA inhibition of carbachol-stimulated PI hydrolysis was significantly reduced in the absence of extracellular calcium. Although the inhibitory effect of NMDA is observed in the presence of 1.18 mM Mg2+, the concentration-response curve is slightly shifted to the left (5-fold) in the absence of extracellular Mg2+. Antagonists of NMDA-evoked excitations were effective inhibitors of the NMDA modulation of PI hydrolysis, including the competitive antagonist 2-amino-5-phosphonopentanoic acid and the noncompetitive antagonist MK-801. The rank order of potencies of the antagonists were MK-801 greater than phencyclidine = (-)-cyclazocine greater than ketamine = etoxadrol greater than N-allylnormetazocine greater than 2-amino-5-phosphonopentanoic acid. (+)-MK-801 and (-)-cyclazocine were more potent inhibitors, by 4-5-fold, of the NMDA response than their respective isomers, whereas N-allylnormetazocine isomers were approximately equipotent antagonists. The activity of dexoxadrol against NMDA inhibition of carbachol-stimulated PI hydrolysis could not be determined because of its antimuscarinic effects. The rank order of potencies of antagonists, the stereoselectivity of the isomers of MK-801, cyclazocine, and N-allylnormetazocine, and Mg2+ sensitivity of the NMDA inhibitory response suggest that a phencyclidine binding similar to the one located in the cation channel gated by NMDA receptors is associated with the NMDA receptor that modulates muscarinic-stimulated PI hydrolysis.


PURPOSE Because dizziness in older people is often chronic and can substantially affect daily functioning, it is important to identify those at risk for an unfavorable course of dizziness to optimize their care. We aimed to develop and externally validate a prediction model for an unfavorable course of dizziness in older patients in primary care, and to construct an easy-to-use risk prediction tool. METHODS We used data from 2 prospective cohorts: a development cohort with 203 patients aged 65 years or older who consulted their primary care physician for dizziness and had substantial dizziness-related impairment (Dizziness Handicap Inventory [DHI] ≥30), and a validation cohort with 415 patients aged 65 years or older who consulted their primary care physician for dizziness of any severity. An unfavorable course was defined as presence of substantial dizziness-related impairment (DHI ≥30) after 6 months. RESULTS Prevalence of an unfavorable course of dizziness was 73.9% in the development cohort and 43.6% in the validation cohort. Predictors in the final model were the score on the screening version of the DHI, age, history of arrhythmia, and looking up as a provoking factor. The model showed good calibration and fair discrimination (area under the curve = 0.77). On external validation, discriminative ability remained stable (area under the curve = 0.78). The constructed risk score was strongly correlated with the prediction model. Performance measures for risk score cut-off values are presented to determine the optimal cut-off point for clinical practice. CONCLUSIONS We developed an easy-to-use risk score for dizziness-related impairment in primary care. The risk score, consisting of only 4 predictors, will help primary care physicians identify patients at high risk for an unfavorable course of dizziness.


The public trust doctrine is a powerful legal tool in property law that requires the sovereign, as a trustee, to protect and manage natural resources. Historically, the public trust doctrine has been used in relationship to navigable waterways and wildlife management. Despite electricity production's impact on those two areas and the comparatively smaller impacts of renewable energy, electricity production has garnered very little public trust doctrine attention. This Article examines how electricity production implicates the public trust doctrine, primarily through the lens of four states—California, Wisconsin, Hawaii, and New Jersey—and how it would potentially apply to each state's electricity planning and policies. As illustrated in the four case studies, the public trust doctrine can serve the following four purposes: (1) as a tool for citizens to force states to act on renewable electricity development; (2) as a legal defense for states to validate actions encouraging renewable electricity development; (3) as a means for courts to more closely scrutinize electricity decisions made by the state; and (4) as an opportunity for state agencies to supplement and guide imperfect statutes. Together, these four purposes of the public trust can ensure reasonable and timely development of renewable electricity as well as sufficient protection of trust


Distance metric has an important role in many machine learning algorithms. Recently, metric learning for semi-supervised algorithms has received much attention. For semi-supervised clustering, usually a set of pairwise similarity and dissimilarity constraints is provided as supervisory information. Until now, various metric learning methods utilizing pairwise constraints have been proposed. The existing methods that can consider both positive (must-link) and negative (cannot-link) constraints find linear transformations or equivalently global Mahalanobis metrics. Additionally, they find metrics only according to the data points appearing in constraints (without considering other data points). In this paper, we consider the topological structure of data along with both positive and negative constraints. We propose a kernel-based metric learning method that provides a non-linear transformation. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data sets show the effectiveness of our metric learning method.


According to empirical desert advocates, lay moral intuitions are consistent with retributive approaches to punishment, and policymakers can increase compliance with criminal justice policies by punishing in accord with those intuitions. I offer three challenges to empirical desert intended ultimately to strengthen its theoretical underpinnings: First, advocates have cherry-picked certain moral intuitions, while ignoring others. Second, they have yet to demonstrate the weight to assign the compliance induced by empirical desert relative to the weight of other consequentialist considerations. Third, empirical desert arguably exploits laypeople by using their "mistaken" beliefs about punishment to encourage their compliance with consequentialist goals. Such exploitation may trouble defenders of the "publicity condition," which requires that a system of morality be based on principles that can be announced publicly without thereby undermining those same principles. I do not describe precisely how empirical desert advocates should respond to these concerns, but they will make substantial headway by more carefully distinguishing the use of widely-shared moral intuitions to make predictions about people's behavior from the use of those intuitions to justify particular policies. (This article was written for the Brooklyn Law School Symposium, "Is Morality Universal and Should the Law Care?".)


Physiological ecology is concerned with the way that physiological traits fit organisms for the ecological circumstances in which they live, so there is always an implicit evolutionary component to it. This book is concerned with physiological studies that make the evolutionary considerations explicit. The first part explores physiological models that predict how, under different ecological pressures, resources should be invested in such metabolic processes as costs of maintenance, growth patterns and allometries, ageing and physiological adaptability. In the context of the integrated metabolism of whole organisms, the second part of the volume considers aspects of the physiological ecology of specific organisms. The underlying theme of these chapters is the link between genotype and physiological phenotype.


Existing offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically assume that training data is either: 1) generated by a known policy, or 2) of entirely unknown origin. We consider multi-demonstrator offline RL, a middle ground where we know which demonstrators generated each dataset, but make no assumptions about the underlying policies of the demonstrators. This is the most natural setting when collecting data from multiple human operators, yet remains unexplored. Since different demonstrators induce different data distributions, we show that this can be naturally framed as a domain generalization problem, with each demonstrator corresponding to a different domain. Specifically, we propose Domain-Invariant Model-based Offline RL (DIMORL), where we apply Risk Extrapolation (REx) (Krueger et al., 2020) to the process of learning dynamics and rewards models. Our results show that models trained with REx exhibit improved domain generalization performance when compared with the natural baseline of pooling all demonstrators' data. We observe that the resulting models frequently enable the learning of superior policies in the offline model-based RL setting, can improve the stability of the policy learning process, and potentially increase exploration.


PURPOSE
To describe quality of life (QOL) of younger women 4 to 42 months after breast cancer diagnosis and to identify factors associated with impaired QOL.

METHODS
A total of 202 women diagnosed with stage I to III breast cancer at age 50 or younger from 4 to 42 months after breast cancer diagnosis previously completed a mailed survey. Global QOL; health-related QOL as measured by the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Breast Cancer (FACT-B); medical history; symptoms; days of work/activity missed after diagnosis; relationship, sexual, and body image problems; coping strategies; and feelings of preparedness were measured.

RESULTS
General aches and pains and unhappiness with appearance were reported by more than 70% of women. Hot flashes (P = .0007), pain with sexual intercourse (P = .02), and difficulty with bladder control (P = .002) all significantly increased with age. Global QOL was significantly lower than for a nonpatient sample of younger women (P < .0001). In general, few sociodemographic and medical factors were related to QOL. In multivariate analyses, days of work/usual activity missed immediately after diagnosis; relationship, sexual, or body image problems after diagnosis; and coping strategies were related to almost all QOL domains. Ongoing treatment, vaginal dryness, and feeling unprepared for the impact of breast cancer were related to some domains.

CONCLUSION
Younger breast cancer survivors are at risk for impaired QOL up to several years after diagnosis. Younger women, especially those at high risk for lower QOL, may need interventions that specifically target their needs related to menopausal symptoms and problems with relationships, sexual functioning, and body image. Preparing younger woman for the impact of breast cancer may also prove beneficial.


In this paper, we analyze a large dataset of user-generated music listening events from Last.fm, focusing on users aged 6 to 18 years. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we study the music genre preferences of this young user group and analyze these preferences for homogeneity within more fine-grained age groups and with respect to gender and countries. Second, we investigate the performance of a collaborative filtering recommender when tailoring music recommendations to different age groups. We find that doing so improves performance for all user groups up to 18 years, but decreases performance for adult users aged 19 years and older.


This article asks how countries considering the introduction of a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) can use cross-national research on NQFs to inform their deliberations. It proposes a model of policy learning, which uses international experience in a broad range of ways to inform countryspecific policy debates, rather than a policy borrowing approach which scans this experience for unique and transferable models of best practice. As more and more countries introduce NQFs the knowledge base on their design, implementation and impacts is slowly improving, although it is still inadequate and the causal processes involved are complex and often difficult to unravel. The paper presents six "stylised facts" or broad generalisations from the international experience, and discusses some of their implications and the issues that they raise. These are: that qualifications, and therefore NQFs, are social and political constructs; that NQFs are multi-purpose tools; that NQFs differ; that most comprehensive NQFs are multi-level entities; that an NQF may involve diverse change processes; and that an NQF is not the only policy instrument.


An adsorbent was prepared by the functionalization of 2-hydroxyacetophenone-3-thiosemicarbazone onto 3-aminopropyl silica by diazotation and characterized by Fourier transmission infra red spectrometry. The functionalized silica was evaluated for removal of lead(II) ions in aqueous solutions. The maximum adsorption capacity 385 μg/g was obtained with an initial concentration of 1,000 μg/L by the Langmuir isotherm. The results indicated that adsorption data could be fitted better by the Langmuir than the Freundlich isotherm. The adsorption kinetics followed pseudo-second-order reaction and the rate constants of kinetic model were calculated. The experimental results implied that functionalized silica has the potential to work as a good adsorbent for the removal of the heavy metals from contaminated water. This novel adsorbent was found to be easy to synthesize, simple, cost-effective and highly efficient and has potential application in the water purification field.


This contribution reviews the current state of knowledge of non-living resource potentials within the extended "legal " continental shelf (ELCS). The ELCS lies beyond the 200 nautical mile jurisdiction of nation states' exclusive economic zones, but within the outer limits defined by the criteria established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 76 (1982). The offshore non-living resource potentials are based on a statistical evaluation of known occurrences and reserves, the geologic environments favourable for their formation, models for sediment type and thickness, and basement composition. The result is an assessment of the potential for non-living marine resources to occur. The resources are divided into different types, based on their origin. Each is treated separately with a brief description of modes of formation followed by location, grade and resource estimate. Because placer deposits, comprising heavy minerals, gold and diamonds, are limited to near-shore areas they have negligible resource potential in the ELCS regions. Similarly, because phosphorite occurs mainly in the equatorial oceans between 400 m and 1,500 m depth, they too have limited resource potential in ELCS areas. Evaporite deposits occur on many continental margins. However, they only occur within ELCS regions off eastern North America and western central Africa, where their resource potential is low. Polymetallic sulphides (PMS) are formed at volcanically active plate boundaries. With the exception of parts of the west Pacific and off the western coast of North America, where volcanically active plate boundaries are close to the continental margin, PMS resources are low in the ELCS regions. The major resource potential within the ELCS regions is held in iron-manganese nodules and crusts, oil, gas and gas hydrates. Four elemental metals are the main components of value in manganese nodules and crusts: manganese, copper, nickel and cobalt. Extrapolating known occurrences world wide, the total amount of these nodules and crusts within the ELCS regions may be as much as thirteen billion tonnes. Conventional oil and gas comprise an estimated 106 b.b.o.e. (billion barrels of oil equivalent) with a similar estimate of 115 b.b.o.e. for gas hydrates. In total, the resource potential (excluding recovery and production costs) contained within the ELCS regions of the world amounts to an estimated US$ 11,934 trillions (at today's raw commodity prices).


The paper focuses on the fracture of a SENB specimen in a Drop Weight Tear Test. Deep fracture profile occurring during stable propagation is investigated. Typically in the models that correlate the instrumented test results to CTOA values, the position of the fracture development is assumed straight, i.e. independent to specimen thickness. With this assumption in mind, the residual ligament computation is apparently easy. On the contrary, a remarkable fracture tunneling is present: it looks like different pipeline materials present a different attitude to crack tunneling. In order to know the real shape of the fracture, silicone casts of DWTT fractured specimens were made when stable propagation is achieved. The casts are analyzed through tomographycal approach. Through the image processing of DWT tests, it is possible to automatically compute the angle of opening at the superficial crack tip during propagation as well as the overall kinematics during loading. The attention is finally centered on two different steels used in inshore gas piping, X60 and X100, detailing the comparison on the effective stress field acting nearby the crack tip and the energy really involved for the fracture propagation. The loads are applied making use of inclined constraints that allows to change the stress field ahead the crack tip, during the tests. As illustrated within the paper, the highest slopes allow to realize a persistent state of stress ahead the crack tip. This diffusive state of stress has an influence on X100 fracture behavior much more evident than that observed on X60.


Non-speech audio navigation systems can be very effective mobility aids for persons with either temporary or permanent vision loss. Sound design has certainly been shown to be important in such devices [e.g. 1]. In this study we consider the added factor of capture radius. The capture radius of an auditory beacon is defined as the range at which the system considers a user to have reached the waypoint where the beacon is located. 108 participants successfully navigated paths through a virtual world using only nonspeech beacon cues. Performance differed across the capture radius conditions. Further, there was a speed-accuracy tradeoff, which complicates the design decision process. Implications of these results for the design of auditory navigation aids are discussed, as are other ongoing and future studies.


ABSTRACT Background Consumption of unhealthy foods may have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explored how dietary fat intake was impacted in a sample of the UK public who were social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Data were collected from a UK COVID-19 online survey. Fat intake was measured using the Dietary Instrument for Nutrition Education questionnaire. Anxiety and depressive symptoms were assessed using Becks' Anxiety and Depression Inventories, while the short-form Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale assessed mental well-being. Differences between individuals who increased versus decreased fat intake were explored using chi-square or independent sample t-tests. Association between fat intake and mental health was explored using adjusted linear regression models. Results Eight hundred and eighty-seven adults were included. Approximately, 34% recorded medium-to-high levels of fat consumption during social distancing. Around 48% reported decreased fat intake during social distancing compared to usual levels, while 41.3% documented increased fat intake. Fat intake was not significantly associated (P > 0.05) with any measures of mental health. Conclusions A higher proportion of a sample of UK adults social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic recorded decreased fat intake when compared to levels prior to social distancing. There appeared to be no associations between fat intake and mental health.


Leverage Xcode and Objective-C to develop iPhone games with this book and ebook Overview Get started with the Xcode development environment Dive deep into programming with Objective-C A practical and engaging tutorial to create vintage games such as Space Invaders and Galaga In Detail The introduction of the Apple Store has empowered thousands, even millions of people to embrace software development. Using Objective-C and the Xcode IDE, you can produce awesome games and launch them on the Apple Store allowing you to make and sell games quickly and easily. From learning the basics of Objective-C to deploying to the App Store, you'll use this book to learn about game development in a matter-of-fact, helpful manner. Whether you're new to game development, or just want to learn how to leverage Apple's own tools to expand your skill set, you'll quickly move from a beginner to an expert. The book kicks off with the basics of game development, and you will take your first steps with using Xcode, the official Apple programming IDE, before moving on to the most important concepts involved in programming games using Objective-C. This book is a hands-on guide to developing the game of your dreams in no time for the Apple Store. What you will learn from this book Understand the basics of Objective-C and develop code in the iOS language Set up multiple screens in iOS and make easy transitions from one screen to another Create a simple audio-based memory game using basic game logic Display a background image for your game and program your aliens to drop bombs Build a simple user interface using Xcode's interface builder Program your graphics to move using buttons, gestures, and multitouch interactivity Overcome common issues that developers run in to at one point or another Explore the Apple Store and iTunes Connect's submission process and prepare your app for distribution Approach Written as a practical and engaging tutorial, this book guides you through the development of your own exciting, fully featured, games. Who this book is written for If you are a beginner and an enthusiast who dreams about creating games and is in need of some additional inspiration and knowledge, then this book is for you. No programming experience is expected.


The dynamics of organic cations  in metal‐halide hybrid perovskites  (MHPs) have been  investigated using numerous experimental and computational techniques, due to their suspected effects on the properties of MHPs. In this Perspective, we summarise and reconcile key findings, as well as present new data, to synthesise a unified understanding of the dynamics of the cations. We conclude that theory and experiment collectively paint a relatively complete picture of rotational dynamics within MHPs.  This picture  is  then used  to discuss  the  consequences of  structural dynamics  for electron‐ phonon interactions, and their effect on material properties by providing a brief account of key studies that  correlate  cation  dynamics with  the  dynamics  of  the  inorganic  sub‐lattice  and  overall  device properties.


An adaptive framework is presented for ultra-wideband ground penetrating radar imaging of shallow-buried low-contrast dielectric objects in the presence of a moderately rough air-soil interface. The proposed approach works with sparse data and relies on recently developed Gabor-based narrow-waisted quasi-ray Gaussian beam algorithms as fast forward scattering predictive models. First, a nonlinear inverse scattering problem is solved to estimate the unknown coarse-scale roughness profile. This sets the stage for adaptive compensation of clutter-induced distortion in the underground imaging problem, which is linearized via Born approximation and subsequently solved via various pixel-based and object-based techniques. Numerical simulations are presented to assess accuracy, robustness and computational efficiency for various calibrated ranges of problem parameters. The proposed approach has potential applications to antipersonnel land mine remediation.


People's visceral experiences of food – the tastes, textures and aromas – can tell us a great deal about their emotional and affective relations with place. Questions of bodies and embodiment are increasingly becoming a focus for geographers and migration scholars. In this article we extend some of this work by examining how the visceral can shape (and be shaped by) a range of socio-political relations. We concentrate on food and eating as a central political issue and illustrate how a visceral approach can push understandings of migrants' experiences. We focus on a group of 11 migrant women from South Africa, Singapore, Korea, Iraq, Thailand, Hong Kong, Somalia, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and India in their 'new home' in Hamilton, New Zealand. Each of the women prepared and cooked for us a dish that was significant to them in some way. These migrant women are comfortable in their domestic spaces and largely experience cooking not as a burden but as an important way of staying viscerally connected with their 'old home'. Creating a domestic space where the body feels 'at home' can help resituate and reconstitute the diasporic subject. This kind of visceral approach is useful for informing the development of social policy.


The provision of services in rural areas is constrained by a number of issues arising from the remoteness of such areas and the relative sparsity of rural populations. These factors combine to increase the cost of supply and reduce the demand for services, which consequently threatens the viability of service provision whether by the public or private sectors. A possible to solution to these issues lies in the co-location of rural services, which in general means that two or more distinct services are located within the same premises thus reducing the delivery costs associated with one or more of these services. Beyond the simple economics of service provision lies the existence of nonmarket elements of services in terms of benefits to local communities of service provision that might arise from the social elements of local provided services such as community cohesion. This paper applies non-market valuation to quantify these benefits in three case studies across Scotland. The results indicate that relative degree of these benefits can be related to the remoteness of rural communities in that more remote communities particularly value the community aspects of services whereas less remote communities are more resistant to increased distances to access services. More generally, the results provide evidence on the inherent trade-offs between factors such as opening hours, levels of service and distance that can be used in determining the optimal configuration of service provision.


Electrically conductive or electro-active fibers are the key components of smart and interactive textiles, which could be used in medical, sports, energy, and military applications in the near future. The functionalization of high-performance textile yarns/fibers with conjugated polymers can produce conductive fibers with better electro-mechanical properties, which is difficult with commonly used spinning techniques. In this thesis work, textile-based conductive yarns/fibers were prepared by coating viscose and polyester (PET) yarns with the conjugated polymer PEDOT. For coating purposes, an efficient technique called chemical vapor deposition (CVD) was used, which is a solventless technique and can produce PEDOT polymer layers with high conductivity values. The polymerization of EDOT monomer vapors and coating of oxidant (FeCl3 or FepTS) enriched viscose and PET yarns took place simultaneously. The PEDOT-coated viscose and polyester yarns showed relatively high conductivity values, which could be sufficient for many electronic applications.
The polymerization process and the quality of PEDOT polymer strongly depends on different reaction conditions. In this research work, the impact of most of these reaction parameters on the electrical, mechanical, and thermal properties of PEDOT-coated conductive yarns was considered separately. Under specific reaction conditions, it was found that viscose fibers were successfully coated with PEDOT polymer and showed rather high electrical conductivity (≥ 15 S/cm). However, due to the acid hydrolysis of viscose fibers in FeCl3 solutions, the mechanical properties were drastically reduced.
In order to improve the mechanical properties of conductive yarns, a relatively stable and chemical-resistant substrate (PET) was coated with PEDOT polymer. Comparative studies between PEDOT-coated viscose and PET conductive yarns showed that the electrical and mechanical properties were enhanced by changing the substrate material. Later on, PEDOT-coated conductive fibers were treated with silicone elastomer solution and due to the thin silicone layers, the hydrophobic properties, flexibility, and durability of coated yarns was improved. Furthermore, a novel electrical resistance-measuring setup was developed, which can be used not only for fibers but also for fabric structures. The electrical characterization of PEDOT-coated conductive yarns showed that it can be used effectively for sensitive fibers without damaging their surface morphology.
Finally, the use of conductive yarns as stretch sensors was evaluated. For this purpose, small rectangular knitted patches of conductive yarns were prepared and then the change in electrical resistance values at different extension percentages (5–50%) was investigated. The constant variations in electrical resistance values at different extension and relaxation cycles for longer periods of time revealed that the conductive yarns produced have the potential to be used as stretch sensors for monitoring of vital signs in medical and sports applications.