There is now abundant evidence that chronic inflammation in the brain is central to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and that this is precipitated through accumulation of amyloid beta (Aβ) peptides. In this review, we first outline this evidence and how specific receptors on microglia and monocyte/macrophages determine whether extracellular Aβ peptides can be cleared through non‐inflammato‐ ry phagocytosis or instead result in pro‐inflammatory cytokine generation. Most efforts of treatment for AD so far have focused on reduction of Aβ levels (in particular neurotoxic oligomers of Aβ1‐42) in the brain. Recent findings suggest an alternative approach in which pro‐inflammatory responses to Aβ peptides are targeted to reduce injury. Most recently evidence has come to light that Aβ peptides resemble anti‐ microbial peptides which are part of the innate defense system against infection. Such peptides act both by directly inactivating pathogens, but also by modulating respons‐ es of innate immune cells, including phagocytes. Indeed, Aβ peptides, particularly Aβ1‐42, do inhibit a range of potential pathogens, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Coupling this with evidence linking chronic viral, bacteria, or fungal infection to AD suggests that production of Aβ peptides in the brain is part of an innate immune response which might normally be beneficial, but which leads to harm when it is chronic or uncontrolled. This suggests that discovery of the original possibly infectious (or other inflammatory) stimulus for Aβ production would allow early intervention to prevent development of AD.


This paper measures financial integration among selected European Union equity markets over the period July 1990 to June 2006 using daily data. Eleven markets (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom) are included in the analysis. Panel unit root tests are used to test for non-stationarity, and multivariate cointegration, Granger causality and level VAR procedures and variance decompositions are conducted to examine the equilibrium and causal relationships among these markets. The results indicate that there is a stationary long-run equilibrium relationship among, and significant and substantial short and long-run causal linkages between, these markets. The findings offer complementary evidence that a high level of financial integration prevails in the region.


We estimate the health costs of supply-side barriers to accessing medical care. The setting is Colombia, where citizens have a constitutional right to health care, but insurance companies that manage delivery impose restrictions on access. We use administrative data on judicial claims for health as a proxy for unmet demand. We validate this using the register recording all health service utilization, estimating that a one standard deviation increase in judicial claims is associated with pervasive decreases in utilization rates of between 0.25 and 0.71 standard deviations, including in medical consultations, procedures, hospitalizations and emergency care. These restrictions on access manifest in population health outcomes. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in judicial claims increases the all-cause mortality rate by between 0.10 and 0.23 standard deviations. Increases in mortality are pervasive across causes, with the largest increase in deaths from certain cancers. They are also pervasive across the age and sex distribution but larger among individuals over the age of fifty and (weakly) among women and the low-income population.


In Victoria, as in other jurisdictions, there is very little research on the potential risks and benefits of lane filtering by motorcyclists, particularly from a road safety perspective. This on-road proof of concept study aimed to investigate whether and how lane filtering influences motorcycle rider situation awareness at intersections and to address factors that need to be considered for the design of a larger study in this area. Situation awareness refers to road users' understanding of 'what is going on' around them and is a critical commodity for safe performance. Twenty-five experienced motorcyclists rode their own instrumented motorcycle around an urban test route in Melbourne whilst providing verbal protocols. Lane filtering occurred in 27% of 43 possible instances in which there were one or more vehicles in the traffic queue and the traffic lights were red on approach to the intersection. A network analysis procedure, based on the verbal protocols provided by motorcyclists, was used to identify differences in motorcyclist situation awareness between filtering and non-filtering events. Although similarities in situation awareness across filtering and nonfiltering motorcyclists were found, the analysis revealed some differences. For example, filtering motorcyclists placed more emphasis on the timing of the traffic light sequence and on their own actions when moving to the front of the traffic queue, whilst non-filtering motorcyclists paid greater attention to traffic moving through the intersection and approaching from behind. Based on the results of this study, the paper discusses some methodological and theoretical issues to be addressed in a larger study comparing situation awareness between filtering and non-filtering motorcyclists.


This paper describes some fluid dynamic considerations for attaining realistic odor presentation using an olfactory display. Molecular diffusion is an extremely slow process and odor molecules released from their source are spread by being carried off by airflow. Therefore, we propose to use a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation in conjunction with the olfactory display. The CFD solver is employed to calculate the turbulent airflow field in the given environment and the dispersal of odor molecules from their source. The simulation result is used to reproduce at the nose the realistic change in the odor concentration with time and space. However, our initial sensory test for evaluating the proposed method was not completely successful, and we also found some discrepancies between our real-life olfactory sensation and the experience of the CFD-based olfactory display. Here we report some insights to overcome these problems. In the initial sensory test, a nontrivial portion of the subjects did not properly recognize the spatial variation in the odor intensity. The result of our recent sensory test is presented in this paper to show that better contrast in the perceived odor intensity can be provided when the concentration range of the released odor is adjusted for the variation in the olfactory sensitivity of individual subjects. We noted that olfactory adaptation occurred more quickly in the initial sensory test of the CFD-based olfactory display than in real environments. In this paper, we show that olfactory adaptation can be alleviated by modulating the odor concentration randomly to mimic the random fluctuations of the turbulent flow fields in real environments. We also noted in our initial sensory test that there were sometimes discrepancies between our olfactory sensation in real environments and the simulated odor distribution. We show in this paper that the discrepancy can be attributed to the convection caused by the human body temperature that brings an odor vapor that is drifting around our feet up to our noses.


Increasingly, short rotation woody crops are being planted for biofuel/biomass production on unused lands or marginal agricultural lands. Many of these plantations occur near agriculture land which is intensively managed including yearly herbicide applications. Herbicide drift from these applications may cause tree stress and decreasing yields impacting potential biomass production. Quinclorac, a rice herbicide, is often cited as a potential source of tree damage and is the focal herbicide of this study. Five planting stocks, including three eastern cottonwood clones, a hybrid poplar clone, and American sycamore, were assessed for herbicide affects and deployed at three sites across south Arkansas. Stocks were exposed to a full rate labeled for rice (3.175 L ha-1), two rates simulating drift (1/100th and 1/10th the full rate), and a no-spray control. Survival of all Populus clones decreased drastically as quinclorac rate increased, while there was little observed effect on American sycamore. Some variability in treatment response among poplars occurred below the full herbicide rate; however, direct spraying a full herbicide rate on poplars resulted in survival rates below 65 percent and negative growth rates due to dieback. Conversely, photosynthetic rates of remaining leaves increased as quinclorac rate increased. Survival and damage scores of American sycamore, regardless of herbicide rate, remained nearly constant.


Experts from the two labs IMR in Bergen and PINRO in Murmansk met for the first time in 1984 to discuss age determination of capelin. It was concluded that no systematic differences existed between the labs (Gjosaeter, 1985). Analyses during the following years showed that during the joint autumn surveys there were, seemingly, small differences between the age readings on the different participating vessels. On the other hand, judged from catch-at-age data reported to the ICES Northern Pelagic and Blue Whiting Working Group from the winter capelin fishery in the years following the fishing moratorium 1994-1998 and from scientific surveys during the winter-spring period, large discrepancies were found, which could not be attributed to differences in length. To check the presence of systematic differences between the otolith readers at the two laboratories and to study the reasons for such differences, an otolith exchange program and biannual workshops were started. The present report gives an update of results obtained since 2003.


Striped trumpeter, Latris lineata (Forster), are being experimentally cultured by the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute (TAFI) at Taroona, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Fish that survive beyond 30 days develop nervous aberrations associated with a severe granulomatous meningoencephalomyelitis. The myxozoan parasite Pentacapsula neurophila was described as the parasite causing the disease in the striped trumpeter juveniles. Molecular Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using small subunit ribosomal DNA (ssu rDNA) gene sequence and the covariotide evolutionary model, has shown P. neurophila to reside firmly within the clade comprised of Kudoa species, histozoic parasites of fish from the order Multivalvulida with 4 or more shell valves containing polar capsules. This has provided molecular evidence resulting in the proposed new combination of the Kudoidae to include this Pentacapsula species.

A polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnostic assay was developed from the ssu rDNA gene sequence to detect Kudoa neurophila (formerly known as Pentacapsula neurophila). The assay is sufficiently species specific and sensitive enough to detect a small fragment of the parasite ssu rDNA gene (0.1 spore or 60 fg DNA or 4 spores g-1 /25 microlitres PCR reaction). Specifically, the test is capable of detecting early stages of the life cycle within the fish host and consequently diagnosing an infection not normally detected using histology. The PCR test can also be used to screen water supplies and prey cultures throughout the hatchery system to determine bio-security efficacy, assist in epizootiology studies, identify infected alternative or other primary hosts indicating the location of the disease reservoir, and enable a targeted approach to disease prevention in an aquaculture situation.

Histology and in situ hybridisation techniques were incorporated into the study of the histopathology of the disease caused by this parasite to elucidate its entry point on the fish host and migratory pathway to terminal stage sporulation. Kudoa neurophila enters the fish via epithelial cells as early as 25 days post hatch (dph). Parasite cells then appear within plasmodia in skeletal muscle tissue between 50-80 dph. This appears to be the first key proliferation stage which is followed by another plasmodial stage in the peripheral nerve pathways near the spinal cord (70-115 dph). It is during this stage that clinical signs of the disease, such as whirling, become apparent. The presporogonic cells then enter the spinal cord where terminal stage sporulation occurs throughout the brain and spinal cord (105-130 dph) causing acute pathology, eventually resulting in the death of the animal.

The information gained from the research conducted in this thesis, along with incorporated epizootiology studies, form the foundation of understanding that has assisted the hatchery management team to make informed health management decisions with an outlook to produce healthy juvenile striped trumpeter for on-going research into the development of this species for marine sea cage aquaculture.


The authors observe that mutual funds compete in tournaments based on rank, with investors allocating new money only into top ones and ignoring the rest. They then suggest that losing managers play go-for-broke in order to place high in the contest. They note that, in contrast, venture capital firms and hedge funds compete based on risk-adjusted performance. Thus, they argue that investors' behavioral biases matter more in the alternative asset world. In particular, they feel that investors' loss aversion influences a fee-maximizing manager. It causes a losing manager to scale down risk and a winning one take some. They argue that this provides a risk-mitigating safety valve which is absent in the performance-obscuring tournament, suggesting that there may be more risk in that "tournament" mutual fund environment than in the alternative asset sphere.


There exists a distinct disconnect between scientists' perception of nature and people's worldview. This 'disconnect' though has dialectical relationship with science communication processes which, causes impediments in the propagation of scientific ideas. Those ideas, which are placed at large cultural distance, do not easily become a part of cognitive structure of a common citizen or peoples thought complex. Low level of public understanding of bio-energy technologies is one such sphere of understanding. The present study is based on assumption that public debate on bio-energy is part of the larger human concern about climate change. In this paper we present meta-analyses from published literature and take a look at the surveys that have been carried out at national and international level. In the second section of the article we also present analysis of the survey study carried out in India and locate the shifts in public understanding of science.


Abstract Aim Massive digitalization of natural history collections is now leading to a steep accumulation of publicly available species distribution data. However, taxonomic errors and geographical uncertainty of species occurrence records are now acknowledged by the scientific community – putting into question to what extent such data can be used to unveil correct patterns of biodiversity and distribution. We explore this question through quantitative and qualitative analyses of uncleaned versus manually verified datasets of species distribution records across different spatial scales. Location The American tropics. Methods As test case we used the plant tribe Cinchoneae (Rubiaceae). We compiled four datasets of species occurrences: one created manually and verified through classical taxonomic work, and the rest derived from GBIF under different cleaning and filling schemes. We used new bioinformatic tools to code species into grids, ecoregions, and biomes following WWF's classification. We analysed species richness and altitudinal ranges of the species. Results Altitudinal ranges for species and genera were correctly inferred even without manual data cleaning and filling. However, erroneous records affected spatial patterns of species richness. They led to an overestimation of species richness in certain areas outside the centres of diversity in the clade. The location of many of these areas comprised the geographical midpoint of countries and political subdivisions, assigned long after the specimens had been collected. Main conclusion Open databases and integrative bioinformatic tools allow a rapid approximation of large‐scale patterns of biodiversity across space and altitudinal ranges. We found that geographic inaccuracy affects diversity patterns more than taxonomic uncertainties, often leading to false positives, i.e. overestimating species richness in relatively species poor regions. Public databases for species distribution are valuable and should be more explored, but under scrutiny and validation by taxonomic experts. We suggest that database managers implement easy ways of community feedback on data quality.


While tissue engineering is widely used to construct complex tridimensional biocompatible structures, researchers are now attempting to extend the technique into the fourth dimension. Such fourth dimension consists in the transformation of 3D materials over time, namely, by changing their shape, composition, and/or function when subjected to specific external stimuli. Herein, producing a 4D biomaterial with an internal mechanism of stimulus, using contractile cells as bio‐actuators to change tissue shape and structure, is explored. Specifically, producing cornea‐shaped, curved stromal tissue equivalents via the controlled, cell‐driven curving of collagen‐based hydrogels. This is achieved by modulating the activity of the bio‐actuators in delimited regions of the gels using a contraction‐inhibiting peptide amphiphile. The self‐curved constructs are then characterized in terms of cell and collagen fibril reorganization, gel stiffness, cell phenotype, and the ability to sustain the growth of a corneal epithelium in vitro. Overall, the results show that the structural and mechanical properties of self‐curved gels acquired through a 4D engineering method are more similar to those of the native tissue, and represent a significant improvement over planar 3D scaffolds. In this perspective, the study demonstrates the great potential of cell bio‐actuators for 4D tissue engineering applications.


The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) disease has affected millions of lives, forcing most of us to stay at home and work. However, there is an immediate need to conduct research on potential drugs against COVID-19. In this article, the extent to which major publishers have provided access for the public to read research articles relevant to potential drug candidates for the COVID-19 disease are presented. A systematic search of five electronic databases (Elsevier's ScienceDirect, Taylor & Francis, SpringerLink, Wiley, and New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)) was conducted on April 12-17, 2020. The total number of research articles containing terms 'Ribavirin', 'Remdesivir', 'Hydroxychloroquine OR Chloroquine', 'Favipiravir', 'Lopinavir OR Ritonavir', 'Sarilumab', and 'Tocilizumab', available for the public to read for free were determined. In this study, there was a lack of full access to research articles related to potential drugs of COVID-19 in commercial academic databases, except for 'Remdesivir' and 'Favipiravir' from NEJM.


Nutritional status at a young age is positively associated with an individual?s total human capital accumulated. Higher levels of human capital are in turn strongly correlated with an individual?s economic and social well-being. Health is one such dimension of human capital and improvements in children?s nutritional status improve an individual?s overall lifetime well-being. This paper examines the various child level, household level, and community level characteristics that determine health status among children. The paper uses data from the three waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey to assess the gender-specific determinants of child health outcomes. I do not find any evidence for gender-differential impact of the household and community characteristics in determining child health. I find that household characteristics like parental height have a strong positive effect on determining child health. There is some evidence supporting the positive association between household income and child health. Among the community infrastructure variables ? measure of prevalence of electricity in the community and dummy for presence of paved road in the community are both positively associated with child health. The results obtained here are robust to a number of econometric concerns like measurement error in household income variable, correlation between community time-invariant unobservables and household specific unobservables, correlation between community time-invariant unobservables and community resource availability variables. Community level fixed-effects along with IV techniques used in this paper address the aforementioned methodological concerns.


A new stability-indicating chromatographic ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) method has been developed and validated for determination of Perindopril Arginine (PER) and Amlodipine Besylate (AML) in their dosage form and in the presence of their degradation products. The method was based on ultra-performance liquid chromatography, by which the components were separated on a Acquity UPLC BEH C18, 1.7 µm, 2.1 × 50 mm. part no.186002350 column, using a mobile phase consisting of phosphate buffer pH 2 and acetonitrile (75:25) with ultraviolet detection at 210 nm. Different parameters that affect this new method were optimized to achieve maximum separation for those components. Both drugs were subjected to forced degradation studies under hydrolysis (acidic, alkaline and oxidative stress). The proposed method is considered as stability indicating because of the resolution of the aforementioned drugs from their degradation products. Moreover, the degradation products for both drugs were subjected to LC-MS for structure elucidation. System suitability parameters of the developed method were also tested.


This paper builds on recent generalisations of theory and empirics of comparative advantage and establishes the relative importance of different sources of comparative advantage in explaining trade, with particular focus on policy and institutional factors. The broad policy and institutional areas posited as determinants of comparative advantage in this paper include: physical capital, human capital (distinguishing between secondary, tertiary education and average years of schooling), financial development, energy supply, business climate, labour market institutions as well as import tariff policy. The empirical investigation is performed for bilateral trade of 55 OECD and selected emerging market (SEM) economies and 44 manufacturing sectors covering the entirety of merchandise trade. Our results show that comparative advantage remains an important determinant of trade and that it has changed over time, including as a result of changing policies and institutions. The policy and institutional areas shown to be important determinants of comparative advantage include physical and human capital accumulation (especially secondary and tertiary education), financial development, the business climate, as well as a number of aspects of labour market institutions. The results suggest also that comparative advantage has been — and is likely to be in the future — relatively more important for North-South and South-South trade. Overall, the results underscore the importance of a comprehensive approach to designing economic development policies, which should seek consistency between trade and other policy objectives.


Transition on the Shop Floor – The Restructuring of a Weaving Mill, Hungary 1988-97 While a variety of studies analysed the benign effects of privatisation on firm performance under post-socialist transition using financial data very little is known about how the apparent productivity gains were achieved. This paper follows a weaving mill from 1998 to 1997 on its way of becoming a capitalist enterprise and gives a detailed account of the sources and limits of productivity growth. The data suggests that the factory was not far from the competitive optimum given the size of 'plant and equipment' efficiency gains were mostly achieved by plant size reduction and asset stripping. The gains from this sort of initial restructuring helped many former state enterprises stay on the market but they did not necessarily indicate high levels of adaptability, capacity to innovate and ability to attract outside investors. In economies with many 'seemingly restructured' privatised enterprises the elimination of the former state sector jobs is likely to continue within the private sector. The process may last for years after privatisation as a legal act had been fully accomplished. JEL Classification: L2, J31, D21


The 2013-5 global outbreak of Ebolavirus disease brought to sharp focus the need for diagnostic capacity to be equitably available on a global scale: from the most under-developed areas of resource-limited countries in West Africa to high volume international travel hubs in Europe and the USA. Quick detection of the causal agent of disease is pivotal to containment, contact tracing and clinical action to protect healthcare workers, communities and patients. Nucleic acid testing (NAT) by real time reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) has emerged as the preferred method for reliable patient status confirmation. Presently, this is served through advanced clinical molecular laboratory testing in a <8hr manual process that requires 3.5ml venous blood samples. To meet the demand in West Africa, this has necessitated large-scale mobile laboratory and volunteer biomedical scientist deployment: a solution that has proven eventually adequate, albeit temporary against future re-emergence of this and other haemorrhagic fever disease agents prevalent in the region. The EbolaCheck consortium was formed in August 2014 to address the need for delivering NAT at the point of care. We have developed a novel platform technology that can QUantitatively, RAPidly IDentify (QuRapID) known RNA or DNA targets in viruses, bacteria, or eukaryotic cells directly in crude biofluids, including whole blood, in under 40min using a 5 microliter sample. The portable, battery-operated system lacks microfluidics, pumps or other sensitive/high cost parts making it suitable for the environmental and economic challenges of resource-limited countries. The simple, safe, 5-step sample-to-answer process requires minimal training and informs frontline healthcare workers of diagnostic status, whilst reporting remotely epidemiologically relevant results. Data on biosafety level 2 surrogate Ebolavirus templates presented in encapsulated or enveloped viruses indicate performance comparable to clinical laboratory testing and utility beyond filoviruses. Emerging performance data on live Ebolavirus, non-human primate disease model and patient samples, as well as future development plans will be discussed.


The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) has been proposed as a Monte Carlo, derivative-free, alternative to the extended Kalman filter, and is now widely used in sequential data assimilation, where state vectors of huge dimension (e.g. resulting from the discretization of pressure and velocity fields over a continent, as considered in meteorology) should be estimated from noisy measurements (e.g. collected at sparse in-situ stations). Even if the state and measurement equations are linear with additive Gaussian white noise, computing and storing the error covariance matrices involved in the Kalman filter is practically impossible, and it has been proposed to represent the filtering distribution with a sample (ensemble) of a few elements and to think of the corresponding empirical covariance matrix as an approximation of the intractable error covariance matrix. Extensions to nonlinear state equations have also been proposed. Surprisingly, very little is known about the asymptotic behaviour of the EnKF, whereas on the other hand, the asymptotic behaviour of many different classes of particle filters is well understood, as the number of particles goes to infinity. Interpreting the ensemble elements as a population of particles with mean-field interactions (and not merely as an instrumental device producing the ensemble mean value as an estimate of the hidden state), we prove the convergence of the EnKF, with the classical rate 1/\sqrt{N}, as the number N of ensemble elements increases to infinity. In the linear case, the limit of the empirical distribution of the ensemble elements is the usual (Gaussian distribution associated with the) Kalman filter, as expected, but in the more general case of a nonlinear state equation with linear observations, this limit differs from the usual Bayesian filter. To get the correct limit in this case, the mechanism that generates the elements in the EnKF should be interpreted as a proposal importance distribution, and appropriate importance weights should be assigned to the ensemble elements.


Abstract The human thalamus has been suggested to be involved in executive function, based on animal studies and correlational evidence from functional neuroimaging in humans. Human lesion studies, examining behavioral deficits associated with focal brain injuries, can directly test the necessity of the human thalamus for executive function. The goal of our study was to determine the specific lesion location within the thalamus as well as the potential disruption of specific thalamocortical functional networks, related to executive dysfunction. We assessed executive function in 15 patients with focal thalamic lesions and 34 comparison patients with lesions that spared the thalamus. We found that patients with mediodorsal thalamic lesions exhibited more severe impairment in executive function when compared to both patients with thalamic lesions that spared the mediodorsal nucleus and to comparison patients with lesions outside the thalamus. Furthermore, we employed a lesion network mapping approach to map cortical regions that show strong functional connectivity with the lesioned thalamic subregions in the normative functional connectome. We found that thalamic lesion sites associated with more severe deficits in executive function showed stronger functional connectivity with ACC, dorsomedial PFC, and frontoparietal network, compared to thalamic lesions not associated with executive dysfunction. These are brain regions and functional networks whose dysfunction could contribute to impaired executive functioning. In aggregate, our findings provide new evidence that delineates a thalamocortical network for executive function.


The integration of ferroelectric polymer gates on a Mn-doped GaAs magnetic channel provides a promising route for the persistent field-effect control of magnetic properties in high-quality diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMSs) that are otherwise incompatible with traditional oxide ferroelectrics. That control demands the thinnest possible DMS layers, for which to date the Curie temperature (T-C) is severely depressed. Here we show that reducing the channel thickness from 7 to 3-4 nm by etching, followed by a brief 135 degrees C anneal, does not degrade the T-C (similar to 70 K) of the 7-nm film. The channel thinning results in a dramatic threefold increase of the T-C shift controlled by the ferroelectric polarization reversal. Furthermore, we obtain the same exponent (partial derivative 1n T-C/partial derivative 1n R) = gamma approximate to -0.3 for all channels with different thicknesses, regardless of the technique used for T-C determination. These results suggest that the ferromagnetic coupling in an ultrathin 3-nm channel is far from the two-dimensional limit and shows a rather bulklike behavior, similar to well-established 7-nm films.


Parvulins are a group of peptidyl-prolyl isomerases (PPIases) responsible for important biological processes in all kingdoms of life. The PinA protein from the psychrophilic archaeon Cenarchaeum symbiosum is a parvulin-like PPIase. Due to its striking similarity to the human parvulins Pin1 and Par14, PinA constitutes an interesting subject for structural and functional studies. Here, we present the first high resolution NMR structure of an archaeal parvulin, PinA, based on 1798 conformational restraints. Structure calculation yields an ensemble of 20 convergent low energy structures with a backbone r.m.s.d. value of 0.6 Å within the secondary structure elements. The overall fold of PinA comprises the β-α3-β-α-β2 fold typical for all parvulin structures known so far, but with helix III being a short 310-helix. A detailed comparison of this high resolution structure of the first archaeal PinA protein with bacterial and eukaryotic parvulin PPIase structures reveals an atypically large catalytic binding site. This feature provides an explanation for cold-adapted protein function. Moreover, the residues in and around 310-helix III exhibit strong intramolecular dynamics on a microsecond to millisecond timescale and display structural heterogeneity within the NMR ensemble. A putative peptide ligand was found for PinA by phage display and was used for 1H-15N-HSQC titrations. Again, the flexible region around 310-helix III as well as residues of the peptide binding pocket showed the strongest chemical shift perturbations upon peptide binding. The local flexibility of this region also was modulated by ligand binding. A glycine and two positively charged residues are conserved in most parvulin proteins in this flexible loop region, which may be of general functional importance for parvulin-type PPIases.


We study regret minimization in non-episodic factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs), where all existing algorithms make the strong assumption that the factored structure of the FMDP is known to the learner in advance. In this paper, we provide the first algorithm that learns the structure of the FMDP while minimizing the regret. Our algorithm is based on the optimism in face of uncertainty principle, combined with a simple statistical method for structure learning, and can be implemented efficiently given oracle-access to an FMDP planner. Moreover, we give a variant of our algorithm that remains efficient even when the oracle is limited to non-factored actions, which is the case with almost all existing approximate planners. Finally, we leverage our techniques to prove a novel lower bound for the known structure case, closing the gap to the regret bound of Chen et al. [2021].


The emergence of Chinese liberalism carries with it a specific China-centric character that reflects both a Chinese and a foreign focus on the nation's complicated domestic situation. As part of the research dialogue on the intellectual public sphere in China, this article provides a historical perspective of the development of contemporary Chinese liberalism and explores the complexities of those Chinese liberals' engagement with a number of key issues in political thought, both among themselves and with their principal opponents, the New Left. We review four themes in these ongoing debates: the relationship between freedom and equality; the liberals' demands for a more open civil society; their call for balanced social structures, including a mechanism for expressing interest; and their search for a new synthesis of Chinese tradition with a strong nation state. Contemporary Chinese liberals propose their visions for a China that operates within and against a Euro-American-dominated system. Thus, their interpretation of classical liberal texts is characterized by one of creative adaptation, and informed by both local and foreign intellectual resources. The article's ultimate goal is to provide a deeper understanding of the internal debates among Chinese liberals, which may give a sense of the multifarious predicaments and opportunities that China's intellectuals face as China attempts to pursue wealth, power, and a revitalized role in a new world order.


Purpose To investigate the extent of medication discrepancies (MDs) revealed by medication reconciliation (MR) and to assess the potential clinical relevance of the MDs for the patients in a short-term and long-term perspectives. Methods Patients ≥18 years admitted to five internal medicine wards were included in this prospective study. MDs between the medication list obtained by physicians at hospital admission and medication list obtained by a structured MR process by pharmacists were identified and assessed for clinical relevance by an expert team. Clinical relevance was assessed in two ways as (a) if they were not acted upon during the hospital stay (short term) or (b) if they persisted after discharge from the hospital (long term). Results In total 262 patients, age 19–98 (SD 18.94, mean 73.4 years), 58.8% female, were included. 79.4% of the patients had at least one MD with a mean of 3.2 MDs/patient. 80.7% of the MDs were discussed with the physician, and 95.5% of these were acted upon. Of the 438 MDs evaluated by the expert panel, 35.2% and 71.2% were assessed to be of moderate, major or extreme clinical relevance in the short-term and long-term perspectives, respectively. Conclusions By using a structured approach, MDs were identified for 80% of the patients and the majority of the MDs were evaluated to possibly harm the patient in a long-term perspective. The results emphasise that structured MRs may improve patient safety. Trial registration number 2011/542.


As a result of rapid development and growth of populated areas in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, several high voltage power transmission systems operating at various voltages up to 380 kV have been put into service and flashover difficulties with insulators of these systems caused by pollution of different types have been experienced. In order asses the pollution behaviour of line insulators in the Western Region of the Kingdom, two insulator types (longrod and cap-and-pin) have been subjected to natural pollution at four selected localities for 100 days and 2 years periods, without voltage being applied. The naturally polluted insulators have been tested in the High Voltage Laboratory of King Abdulaziz University. The investigation has shown that heavy pollution can accumulate on the insulators operating in Jeddah areas for over two years and the tested longrod insulator which is used in some part of the system can safely be used for years without any preventive measure. The cap-and-pin type appeared to be more appropriate for the region and leakage current recorder has been recommended for a better estimation of the insulator cleaning period.


The R package bclust is useful for clustering high-dimensional continuous data. The package uses a parametric spike-and-slab Bayesian model to downweight the effect of noise variables and to quantify the importance of each variable in agglomerative clustering. We take advantage of the existence of closed-form marginal distributions to estimate the model hyper-parameters using empirical Bayes, thereby yielding a fully automatic method. We discuss computational problems arising in implementation of the procedure and illustrate the usefulness of the package through examples.


The mechanical properties of materials change depending upon the strain rate that
they are subject to. Robust models that capture the materials response at different
strain rates are important. High strain rates from 100s‐1 to 10000s‐1 are undergone in
impact applications. The most widely used method to characterise materials at high
strain rates is the Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar (SHPB).
This project deals with the set‐up and calibration of a Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar for
the dynamic testing of metallic materials at high strain rates. The features of the
equipment needed are discussed, as well as the instrumentation and the connections
between the different components. A calibration routine is also presented in this text.
A finite element analysis of a SHPB calibration test has been performed with LS‐DYNA.
The model consists of two bars put together and does not include a specimen. The
time dependent strain and stress pulses obtained are very well correlated to the
theory. The results from a calibration test in the laboratory at Cranfield University are
also presented. It is observed that the level of accuracy of the finite element model is
better than that of the experimental calibration test.
A complete analysis of a SHPB with a metallic specimen is also performed with finite
elements in LS‐DYNA. The results achieved are extremely close to those predicted by
some hand calculations. The creation and application of a routine with Matlab that
corrects the dispersion effect in the model is a key point to increase the accuracy of
the results. The dispersion correction routine consists of a technique that enables to
filter out the high frequency components of the sampled signal; therefore, part of the
noise is removed. This is performed after the time domain data is converted into the
frequency domain, after using the Fast Fourier Transform. This routine has also been
applied to the experimental results obtained through the calibration test.


In six years of data collection years in space, the experiment PAMELA has discovered very interesting features in cosmic rays, namely in the fluxes of protons, helium, electrons, that might change our basic vision of the mechanisms of production, acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays in the Galaxy. In addition, PAMELA measurements of cosmic antiproton and positron fluxes are setting strong constraints to the nature of Dark Matter. The continuous particle detection is allowing a constant monitoring of the solar activity and detailed study of the solar modulation for a long period, giving important improvements to the comprehension of the heliosphere mechanisms. PAMELA is also measuring the radiation environment around the Earth, and has recently discovered an antiproton radiation belt.


We study cohomological gauge theories on total spaces of holomorphic line bundles over complex manifolds and obtain their reduction to the base manifold by U(1) equivariant localization of the path integral. We exemplify this general mechanism by proving via exact path integral localization a reduction for local curves conjectured in hep-th/0411280, relevant to the calculation of black hol e entropy/Gromov-Witten invariants. Agreement with the four-dimensional gauge theory is recovered by taking into account in the latter non-trivial contributions comin g from one-loop fluctuations determinants at the boundary of the total space. We also study a class of abelian gauge theories on Calabi-Yau local surfaces, describing the quantum foam for the A-model, relevant to the calculation of Donaldson-Thomas invariants.


Perhaps the real paradox of Zeno's Arrow is that, although entirely stationary, it has, against all odds, successfully traversed over two millennia of human thought to trouble successive generations of philosophers. The prospects were not good: few original Zenonian fragments survive, and our access to the paradoxes has been for the most part through unsympathetic commentaries. Moreover, like its sister paradoxes of motion, the Arrow has repeatedly been dismissed as specious and easily dissolved. Even those commentators who have taken it seriously have propounded solutions with which they profess themselves to be perfectly satisfied. So my question is: will Zeno's Arrow survive into the millennium just begun?


The pathogen Gremmeniella abietina causes severe damage to native Pinus sylvestris and introduced Pinus contorta var. latifolia in Sweden. The recent G. abietina outbreak in 2001–2003, caused by the large tree type (LTT), affected at least 480,000 ha of middle-aged P. sylvestris stands and forced Swedish forest owners to sanitary clear-cut large areas of valuable forests. There was, however, little knowledge of survival and growth loss of infected trees and risks involved in replanting P. sylvestris in the G. abietina-infected slash. In this thesis, G. abietina disease incidence on P. sylvestris seedlings planted after sanitation felling was studied, with and without removal of infected P. sylvestris slash. Furthermore, survival and vitality of G. abietina in the slash was studied by spore germination tests of pycnidia collected from infected slash at regular intervals. One year after planting, G. abietina pycnidia were found on 32% of the control seedlings and total infection, including stem cankers, reached 44%. Removal of infected slash reduced the number of infected seedlings by 50% and seedling mortality by 27%, one year after planting. The vitality of G. abietina in the slash was as high in pycnidia collected in 13- to 18-months-old slash as in pycnidia collected in fresh slash. It is recommended to wait at least two years after sanitary fellings before replanting with P. sylvestris. To improve the accuracy of predictions of mortality and growth losses in infected, pole-sized P. sylvestris stands, mortality, diameter growth and insect colonisation were monitored and related to crown defoliation in four 40-year-old stands in 2001–2005. Of the killed trees, 84% were at least 90% defoliated the year before they died and trees with less than 90% defoliation were only killed in the initial phase of the outbreak. A majority of the trees were killed directly by G. abietina whereas less than one third died after colonisation by pine shoot beetle (Tomicus piniperda), a pest that was mainly found on dead trees or trees with at least 95% defoliation. A greater fraction of small trees died and generally did so more rapidly than larger trees. Regression analysis indicated that a mean defoliation of 2/3 of the crown resulted in an average loss of 50% in diameter increment. Based on this study, a defoliation limit of 75–80% is recommended for sanitary cutting of P. sylvestris trees in the initial phases of an outbreak, and a limit of ca. 90% for trees that survive the initial phases of an outbreak. The interest in the productive P. contorta as an alternative to P. sylvestris is currently increasing in Sweden. To study the resistance of P. contorta to LTT G. abietina, seedlings of P. contorta and P. sylvestris were planted in gaps of an infected 40-year-old P. sylvestris stand in 2005. After two years, 45% of the P. contorta seedlings and 32% of the P. sylvestris seedlings were infected. However, mortality was lower and the mean length of infected tissue on surviving seedlings significantly shorter in P. contorta (3.9 cm) compared to P. sylvestris (10.4 cm). Furthermore, 47% of the P. contorta seedlings had developed new leader shoots in 2007, compared to 19% of the P. sylvestris seedlings. Histopathological examinations of infected shoots showed that both P. contorta and P. sylvestris produce ligno-suberised boundaries that are involved in the active defence in the shoots, preventing major crown dieback. The results indicate that P. contorta is more resistant to LTT G. abietina than P. sylvestris.


Animal welfare evaluation is a difficult task. Behavioural and physiological parameters are commonly used, but their interpretation is not always robust. The study of vocal behaviour as an indicator of animal welfare has proven to be effective in some terrestrial captive mammals, but little is known about its application in marine mammals. The acoustic activity of two beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) was monitored during two procedures: (1) before and after air transportation to new facilities and (2) before and after the introduction of four harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) to the same facilities. After transportation, the underwater vocalization rate dropped dramatically, remained very low during the next 4 wks, and did not reach the same level as before the transport until the 5th wk. Similarly, the vocalization rate decreased just after the introduction of the harbour seals, and it remained low for 2 wks. The observed decrease in the acoustic activity of beluga whales in both situations and the persistence of this change through time suggest that the acoustic behaviour in this species is very sensitive to environmental stressors. We propose that observation of underwater acoustic activity in captive beluga whales is a potentially effective method to monitor stress level and adaptations to environmental changes in their facilities. This technique must be explored further since it could be valuable in cetacean management in oceanaria and rehabilitation centres.


Intracellular recordings were made from 475 rat substantia nigra zona compacta neurons in vitro. The region from which recordings were made was rich in catecholamine fluorescence. Two groups of neuron, termed principal neurons (95% of the total) and secondary neurons (5% of the total) were clearly distinguishable according to one or more of the following 4 electrophysiological properties. Secondary neurons (23 cells) (1) fired spontaneous action potentials at frequencies greater than 10 Hz, or were quiescent (30%); (2) had action potentials less than 1 msec in duration; (3) did not show time-dependent inward rectification with step hyperpolarization; and (4) had slope conductances of about 4 nS (between -75 and -90 mV). In contrast, principal neurons (1) fired spontaneous action potentials in the range 1–8 Hz, or were quiescent (33%); (2) had action potentials greater than 1 msec in duration; (3) showed pronounced time-dependent inward rectification; and (4) had steady-state membrane slope conductances of around 22 nS (between -75 and -90 mV). Secondary cells were not affected by dopamine but were hyperpolarized by baclofen, GABA, and the mu opioid receptor agonist Tyr-D-Ala-Gly-MePhe-Gly-ol (DAGO). On the other hand, dopamine and baclofen inhibited firing and/or hyperpolarized all principal cells tested, but mu or delta opioid receptor agonists had no effect. The properties of these 2 cell types broadly correspond with those described by electrophysiological studies in vivo, in which case the majority, or principal, cells are believed to be dopaminergic.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


"Career development theories can be considered cognitive development theories as well." This statement by Dr. Susan KHm in her examination of the relationship between level of cognitive development and career decision-making, has particular relevance for vocational rehabilitation practitioners. A significant number of the clients they serve have either a cognitive impairment, a learning disability, or a major mental illness or psychiatric diagnosis which impairs cognitive functioning in areas where ego strength is required for the analytical activities regarding definition of self and perceptions of the world around them. The implication for the vocational rehabilitation counselor is that they must create a process of career decision-making for their client that attempts to compensate for their client's cognitive deficits while at the same time seeking to enhance their ego strength by structuring involvement in vocational activities that result in ego enhancing outcomes. For instance, in dealing with clients with a history of addiction, there is a particular dynamic which can be described as "shooting for the moon." This revolves around the client choosing a career goal that is far beyond what their past performance would indicate is a realistic option. They may then spend years on a subsidized road towards this goal, which will never be reached. Clients with a history of addictive behaviors may tend to reject counselor suggestions for intermediate steps, or refuse the counselor's attempts to prescribe information gathering homework assignments. There may be a tendency to look at outside factors as the reason for lack of success, rather than the goal itself, or their own failure to follow through on the smaller tasks necessary to achieve progress. For individuals whose career development or academic preparation was interrupted by psychiatric problems or serious physical injury, it can be difficult to accept that their previous goal may now be unrealistic. They may see the counselor as unsupportive if they do not concur with their desired aim career-wise. Review of data from the client's history contrasted with the requirements of the particular vocational goal may help them to see that their expressed goal is not feasible. Working to achieve a workable compromise becomes the challenge. Continuing to encourage client responsibility in the vocational exploration process with clear tasks is important. A statement in Dr. Klim's preceding article which deserves strong attention is that, in reference to Peterson, Sampson, et al's emphasis on process in their approach to career decision-making and the delivery of career services, there is rarely one correct solution and each solution presents a new set of problems to be solved. For many who come for vocational rehabilitation services and for many who go through the career choice process, their self-perceived options are limited by geographic proximity to their comfort zone, such as parameters set by the need to live in family supported housing. For many, the "day job" becomes a "career." Collecting information about the world of work often has more to do with collecting information on jobs in their county or town or neighborhood. For instance, I observed as a vocational counselor in Rhode Island, one of the smallest states in the U.S., it was commonly acknowledged that many clients would not consider a job requiring travel to even the next town, despite the availability of private or public transportation. This is in sharp contrast to many workers in that area that on a daily basis travel as far as Boston, an hour or longer away, to practice their profession or trade. Dr. Klim writes that career development involves both vocational exploration and self-concept development, and that interests, abilities and values are more clearly delineated as an individual moves through the process. The imperative for the vocational rehabilitation counselor is to guide the client through the information gathering process. …


This article examines the adverse effects of federal case law and legislation on tribal courts and tribal courts' ability to incorporate tribal customary law. Tribal customary law is the law given to tribes by holy deities which governs tribal ways of life. It is important to maintain tribal customary law because it strengthens tribal communities' identities and cultural foundations. While Supreme Court precedent has, at different times, both restricted and promoted tribes' ability to use tribal customary law to adjudicate the cases of tribal members, federal legislation including the Major Crimes Act, the Indian Civil Rights Act, the Tribal Law and Order Act, and the Violence Against Women Act continues to restrict tribes' ability to apply customary law in tribal courts. To illustrate one way in which current federal Indian policy limits tribes' ability to use customary law, the author highlights the ways in which two-spirit tribal members are excluded and ignored by the protections established in the Violence against Women Act. As the use of tribal customary law is critical to the maintenance of tribal sovereignty, this article advocates for corrections to these legislative restrictions to promote tribal court's use of tribal customary law.


Chinese development projects in Africa are often portrayed as exploitative, self-serving and conflict provoking. In this paper we answer the question of whether Chinese aid in Africa really does affect conflict and changes attitudes towards China. We combine geo-located information on the number, size and type of Chinese aid projects between 2000 and 2012 with panel data on conflict on the African continent to estimate the impact of the presence of Chinese development projects on violence at the district level. We also exploit a large cross-sectional data set about Africans' attitudes towards China from the 6th wave of the Afrobarometer survey to differentiate between two possible mechanisms: conflict as a competition for resources or conflict as a result of cultural animosity towards China. We use two types of instrumental variables to argue for a causal relationship. In line with the previous literature, we find that the presence of aid projects increases conflict, particularly civilian riots, in Western, Eastern- and Southern African districts. However, we also show that aid projects with no physical Chinese presence (purely financial flows, such as budget support) are the driver behind the increase in conflict, which is suggestive evidence for the rent-seeking channel. Moreover, we do not find that the presence of aid projects provokes a particular hostility towards China. Districts with more Chinese aid projects in the previous 15 years do not hold more unfavorable views towards China than districts with fewer projects.


Examining the history of nationalism's pervasive influence on modern politics and cultural identities, Lloyd Kramer discusses how nationalist ideas gained emotional and cultural power after the revolutionary upheavals in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Nationalism in Europe and America analyzes the multiple historical contexts and intellectual themes that have shaped modern nationalist cultures, including the political claims for national sovereignty, the emergence of nationalist narratives in historical writing and literature, the fusion of nationalism and religion, and the overlapping conceptions of gender, families, race, and national identities. Kramer emphasizes the similarities in American and European nationalist thought, showing how European ideas about land, history, and national destiny flourished in the United States while American ideas about national independence and political rights reappeared among European nationalists and also influenced the rise of anticolonial nationalisms in twentieth-century Asia and Africa. By placing nationalist ideas and conflicts within the specific, cross-cultural framework of Atlantic history and extending his analysis to the twentieth-century world wars, Kramer offers readers a thoughtful perspective on nationalism's enduring political and cultural importance throughout the modern world. |Kramer discusses how nationalist ideas gained emotional and cultural power after the revolutionary upheavals in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. By placing nationalist ideas and conflicts within the specific, cross-cultural framework of Atlantic history and extending his analysis to the twentieth-century world wars, Kramer offers readers a thoughtful perspective on nationalism's enduring political and cultural importance throughout the modern world.


Vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) mediates a broad range of biological responses by activating two related receptors, VIP receptor 1 and 2 (VIPR1 and VIPR2). Although the use of native VIP facilitates neuroprotection, clinical application of the hormone is limited due to VIP's rapid metabolism and inability to distinguish between VIPR1 and VIPR2 receptors. In addition, activation of both receptors by therapeutics may increase adverse secondary toxicities. Therefore, we developed metabolically stable and receptor-selective agonists for VIPR1 and VIPR2 to improve pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic therapeutic end points. Selective agonists were investigated for their abilities to protect mice against MPTP-induced neurodegeneration used to model Parkinson's disease (PD). Survival of tyrosine hydroxylase neurons in the substantia nigra was determined by stereological tests after MPTP intoxication in mice pretreated with either VIPR1 or VIPR2 agonist or after adoptive transfer of splenic cell populations from agonist-treated mice administered to MPTP-intoxicated animals. Treatment with VIPR2 agonist or splenocytes from agonist-treated mice resulted in increased neuronal sparing. Immunohistochemical tests showed that agonist-treated mice displayed reductions in microglial responses, with the most pronounced effects in VIPR2 agonist-treated, MPTP-intoxicated mice. In parallel studies, we observed reductions in proinflammatory cytokine release that included IL-17A, IL-6, and IFN-γ and increases in GM-CSF transcripts in CD4+ T cells recovered from VIPR2 agonist-treated animals. Moreover, a phenotypic shift of effector to regulatory T cells was observed. These results support the use of VIPR2-selective agonists as neuroprotective agents for PD treatment. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor 2 can elicit immune transformation in a model of Parkinson's disease (PD). Such immunomodulatory capabilities can lead to neuroprotection by attenuating microglial activation and by slowing degradation of neuronal cell bodies and termini in MPTP-intoxicated mice. The protective mechanism arises from altering a Th1/Th2 immune cytokine response into an anti-inflammatory and neuronal sparing profile. These results are directly applicable for the development of novel PD therapies.


eSports–organized video game competitions–are growing in popularity, with top tournaments drawing crowds of spectators rivaling traditional sporting events. Understanding the extent to which eSport operates similarly to traditional sport is vital to developing marketing strategies for the eSport industry and informing academic research on eSport. Prior research has examined eSports in isolation from traditional sports, overlooking direct comparisons to understand the degree to which eSport spectators are motivated similarly to traditional sport spectators. The current study measures widely-used sport consumption motives to examine their influence on eSport spectatorship and game attendance frequency. In South Korea, spectator motives across one traditional sport (soccer) and two eSport contexts ( FIFA Online 3 and StarCraft II ) were measured. MANOVA results identify similar patterns for 11 out of 15 motives across the three. Significant differences between contexts include vicarious achievement, excitement, physical attractiveness, and family bonding. Multiple regression analysis results show that spectators across contexts have distinct sets of motives influencing game attendance. The current study demonstrates that traditional sport and eSports are similarly consumed, suggesting that sport industry professionals can manage and market eSport events similarly to traditional sport events.


In some routine studies of larval condition based on RNA:DNA ratios, heads and/or guts are removed for further age and feeding analysis. Also, during capture larvae are often found with their eyes missing. In this work we analysed tissues effects (muscle, head, eye, gut and the whole larvae) on RNA:DNA ratios from different species ( Sardina pilchardus, Engraulis encrasicolus, Atherina presbyter and Paralichthys orbignyanus ) in different developmental stages and from different locations. For all species and development phases, it was shown that RNA:DNA ratios in the head were significantly lower than in muscle or gut. The comparison of RNA:DNA ratios of head with or without eyes did not show significant differences. In a comparison of results from muscle from two tail sections, RNA:DNA ratios were higher for the anterior section in Sardina pilchardus and Engraulis encrasicolus larvae. Caution is needed when RNA:DNA ratios are compared with other studies employing different dissection protocols. For the species studied we propose conversion factors to be applied to RNA:DNA ratio data when different body sections are analysed. We discuss the most appropriate tissues for assessing nutritional condition in fish larvae, based on trends in concentrations of nucleic acids and ratios during starvation experiments.


Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that are arbitrarily located so that the interconnections between nodes are dynamically changing. In MANET mobile nodes forms a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. A routing protocol is used to find routes between mobile nodes to facilitate communication within the network. The main goal of such an ad hoc network routing protocol is to establish correct and efficient route between a pair of mobile nodes so that messages delivered within the active route timeout interval. Route should be discovered and maintained with a minimum of overhead and bandwidth consumption. This paper presents performance evaluation of five different routing protocols i.e. Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), dynamic state routing (DSR), Fisheye State Routing (FSR), landmark Routing Protocol(LANMAR), and Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) in variable speed and simulation time. We have used random waypoint mobility model to design the network and performed simulations by using QualNet version 5.0 Simulator from Scalable Networks. Performance of AODV,DSR, FSR, LANMAR, and ZRP is evaluated based on Average end -to-end delay, Packet delivery ratio, Throughput and Average Jitter.


Abstract. Carbonaceous aerosols are related to adverse human health effects. Therefore,
identification of their sources and analysis of their chemical composition is
important. The offline AMS (aerosol mass spectrometer) technique offers quantitative separation of organic
aerosol (OA) factors which can be related to major OA sources, either primary
or secondary. While primary OA can be more clearly separated into sources,
secondary (SOA) source apportionment is more challenging because different
sources – anthropogenic or natural, fossil or non-fossil – can yield
similar highly oxygenated mass spectra. Radiocarbon measurements provide
unequivocal separation between fossil and non-fossil sources of carbon. Here
we coupled these two offline methods and analysed the OA and organic carbon
(OC) of different size fractions (particulate matter below 10 and
2.5  µ m – PM 10 and PM 2.5 , respectively) from the Alpine
valley of Magadino (Switzerland) during the years 2013 and 2014
(219 samples). The combination of the techniques gave further insight into
the characteristics of secondary OC (SOC) which was rather based on the type
of SOC precursor and not on the volatility or the oxidation state of OC, as
typically considered. Out of the primary sources separated in this study,
biomass burning OC was the dominant one in winter, with average
concentrations of 5.36  ±  2.64  µ g m −3 for PM 10 and
3.83  ±  1.81  µ g m −3 for PM 2.5 , indicating that wood
combustion particles were predominantly generated in the fine mode. The
additional information from the size-segregated measurements revealed a
primary sulfur-containing factor, mainly fossil, detected in the coarse size
fraction and related to non-exhaust traffic emissions with a yearly average
PM 10 (PM 2.5) concentration of
0.20  ±  0.24  µ g m −3
(0.05  ±  0.04  µ g m −3) . A primary biological OC (PBOC) was also
detected in the coarse mode peaking in spring and summer with a yearly average
PM 10 (PM 2.5) concentration of
0.79  ±  0.31  µ g m −3
(0.24  ±  0.20  µ g m −3) . The secondary OC was separated
into two oxygenated, non-fossil OC factors which were identified based on
their seasonal variability (i.e. summer and winter oxygenated organic carbon, OOC) and a third anthropogenic OOC factor which correlated
with fossil OC mainly peaking in winter and spring, contributing on average 13 %  ±  7 %
(10 %  ±  9 %) to the total OC in PM 10 (PM 2.5) . The winter OOC was also connected
to anthropogenic sources, contributing on average
13 %  ±  13 % (6 %  ±  6 %) to the total OC in PM 10 (PM 2.5) . The
summer OOC (SOOC), stemming from
oxidation of biogenic emissions, was more pronounced in the fine mode, contributing on average 43 %  ±  12 %
(75 %  ±  44 %) to the total OC in PM 10 (PM 2.5) . In total the non-fossil OC
significantly dominated the fossil OC throughout all seasons, by contributing
on average 75 %  ±  24 % to the total OC. The results also
suggested that during the cold period the prevailing source was residential
biomass burning while during the warm period primary biological sources and
secondary organic aerosol from the oxidation of biogenic emissions became
important. However, SOC was also formed by aged fossil fuel combustion
emissions not only in summer but also during the rest of the year.


We have used the cryosection immunogold technique to study the composition of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis phagosome. We have used quantitative immunogold staining to determine the distribution of several known markers of the endosomal-lysosomal pathway in human monocytes after ingestion of either M. tuberculosis, Legionella pneumophila, or polystyrene beads. Compared with the other phagocytic particles studied, the M. tuberculosis phagosome exhibits delayed clearance of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules, relatively intense staining for MHC class II molecules and the endosomal marker transferrin receptor, and relatively weak staining for the lysosomal membrane glycoproteins, CD63, LAMP-1, and LAMP-2 and the lysosomal acid protease, cathepsin D. In contrast to M. tuberculosis, the L. pneumophila phagosome rapidly clears MHC class I molecules and excludes all endosomal-lysosomal markers studied. In contrast to both live M. tuberculosis and L. pneumophila phagosomes, phagosomes containing either polystyrene beads or heat-killed M. tuberculosis stain intensely for lysosomal membrane glycoproteins and cathepsin D. These findings suggest that (a) M. tuberculosis retards the maturation of its phagosome along the endosomal-lysosomal pathway and resides in a compartment with endosomal, as opposed to lysosomal, characteristics; and (b) the intraphagosomal pathway, i.e., the pathway followed by several intracellular parasites that inhibit phagosome-lysosome fusion, is heterogeneous.


The major challenge of European Union's agricultural industry is to ensure sustainable supply of quality food that meets the demands of a rapidly growing population, changing dietary patterns, increased competition for land use, and environmental concerns. Investments in research and innovation, which facilitate integration of external knowledge in food chain operations, are crucial to undertaking such challenges. This paper addresses how SMEs successfully innovate within collaborative networks with the assistance of innovation intermediaries. In particular, we explore the roles of innovation intermediaries in knowledge acquisition, knowledge assimilation, knowledge, transformation, and knowledge exploitation in open innovation initiatives from the wine industry through the theoretical lens of absorptive capacity. Based on two case studies from the wine industry, we identified seven key activities performed by innovation intermediaries that complement SMEs' ability to successfully leverage external sources of knowledge for innovation purposes. These activities are articulation of knowledge needs and innovation capabilities, facilitation of social interactions, establishment of complementary links, implementation of governance structures, conflict management, enhancement of transparency, and mediation of communication. Our in-depth qualitative study of two innovation intermediaries in the wine industry has several important implications that contribute to research and practice.


Concerns about speed and politics focus on the loss of the self-present political subject, whose critical will can direct and legitimate political discourse. The hope of sustaining such a subject is understood to be threatened by the erosion of the ideal-normative grounds that are said to support critical subjectivity (e.g. the city, the community, public space). While the concerns about the character and control of public space are certainly to be taken seriously, it is not clear why we should attach these concerns to a loss of a critical political subjectivity and an erosion of public debate. The argument here begins by acknowledging that speed is an ambivalent quality in politics, both creating a potential to open debate to new identities, and posing the risk that oppositional politics will stall in hard oppositions, or in a failure to recognize that which is truly novel in an event. Both of these risks require that recognized identities begin to 'leak', and become open to a world whose potential exceeds the recognized permutations of the possible. This thesis explores how a public, and its implied subjectivities, are maintained 'at speed', within the multiple timespaces of the contemporary city. Instead of an objective speed that comes from without, and overwhelms the subject, time is conceptualized as duration; an immanent view of time in which speed is characterized as repeated disruptions. A public can form around these repeated disruptions. The public is understood to be an assemblage, in Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term, which is sustained by the circulation of texts. A public actualizes wherever, and whenever, there is a successful conjunction of text and context. These conjunctions are not determined, but are only determinable in the event of their actualization. However, it is possible to create a diagram of the assemblage which highlights the potential that exists for the formation of a public, as well as the potential to go beyond recognized subjectivities and open the assemblage to a process of becoming. This thesis creates such a diagram for the smog-event in Toronto, Canada, and engages in an 'experimental critique'. An experimental critique seeks to explore how the event has been placed into circulation in the public sphere, and to encourage experimentation with the limits of recognised identities and possibilities that are sustained in the public assemblage.


An earthquake of Mw 6.1–6.31 (Beavan et al. 2011, page 789 of this issue) that struck Christchurch, New Zealand, on 22 February (21 February, UTC) produced recorded ground motion acceleration over 2 g. The event caused widespread damage with dense recordings of non-linear site behavior. Globally, dense near-field recordings of shallow intraplate earthquakes are rare. It is possible that extreme ground motions are common with this type of earthquake and that their rarity is merely a function of inadequate seismic sampling in the near field of such low-probability, high-potency events. To better define the nature of these events, we calculate apparent stress ( τa ) of the three largest earthquakes in the Canterbury sequence and compare them to global and regional data. We then place recorded PGA and spectral accelerations into the context of regional and global ground motion prediction equations and discuss the implications of high-stress events for future seismic hazard estimates for the region. For the February event, we also briefly explore the implications of directivity on measured ground motions in central Christchurch.

The earthquakes that occurred in the Canterbury region of the South Island, New Zealand, from September 2010 to the present have disproportionately large energy magnitudes ( Me ) to their moment magnitudes ( Mw ). They have produced the largest ground motions ever measured in New Zealand. The sequence began with the Mw 7.1 earthquake that occurred about 40 km west of the city of Christchurch on 4 September 2010. The maximum recorded ground acceleration recorded during the event was over 1.25 g, which was experienced near the intersection of the triggering thrust on which the rupture began and the strike-slip Greendale fault that carried most of the moment in the earthquake (Gledhill et al. 2010). Peak ground accelerations (PGA) in the central business district of Christchurch averaged …


Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the expected family involvement of family members of elderly residents in
nursing homes. Methods: This study utilized a descriptive design with a survey research method. Data were collected using the Expect
Family Involvement Questionnaire Scale, which was completed by 112 family caregivers of older adults in nursing homes in
Seoul and Gyeong-gi Province. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: Responses to the questionnaire
indicated the highest value was recorded for the item, 'use of a room for family privacy' with 2.41±0.43 points, followed by the item,
'staff calling family for advice with resident problems' with 2.38±0.38 points and 'education about nursing home programs' with
2.32±0.42 points. Conclusion: In order to promote family involvement in long-term care facilities, various approaches, interventions,
and government supports with the respective of the family are required. The nursing home placement process should include understanding
discuss on the importance of the role of family, and should help promote positive relationships between the elderly residents
and their families. Staffs and administrators of nursing home are to consider the family as a partner rather than visitor.


Multi-disciplinary analysis and optimization (MDAO) has been a long-standing goal in the aerospace community. In order to employ MDAO effectively, one needs to be able to compute the sensitivity of the objective function with respect to the driving parameters in a robust and efficient manner. Over the past decade there have been considerable efforts towards the generation of "adjoint" versions of flow solvers in order to help in this process. Unfortunately, the corresponding efforts have not been expended in the geometry and grid generation processes, especially when the geometries are generated parametrically with a modern computer-aided design (CAD) or CAD-like system. Contained herein is a pair of complementary techniques for computing configuration sensitivities directly on parametric, CAD-based geometries. One technique computes the configuration sensitivity analytically by differentiating the geometry-generating process; the other employs a new finite-difference technique that overcomes the difficulties previously encountered. Modifications to the Engineering Sketch Pad (ESP) (which is built on top of OpenCSM, EGADS, and OpenCASCADE) are described. Then the use of these configuration sensitivities in the computation of the sensitivity of grid-points is discussed. The results of these new techniques are shown on several configurations.


We consider systems of homogeneous linear equations modulo 2 with three variables in each equation and study balanced assignments as solutions to such equations. We prove that it is hard to distinguish systems where there is a balanced assignment that satisfies a fraction 1− ε of the equations from systems where the best balanced assignment satisfies a fraction 2 + ε of the equations assuming that NP is not contained in quasipolynomial time. This improves on a similar result by Holmerin and Khot who relied on the assumption that NP is not contained in subexponential time. The key for the improvement is to replace long codes used by Holmerin and Khot by the low-degree long code. ACM Classification: F.2.2, F.1.3 AMS Classification: 68Q17, 68Q25


The development of diagnostic markers by exploiting the natural allelic variation of candidate genes is a powerful tool in tetraploid potato cultivars for precision breeding regarding complex agronomic traits. Multiple genetic and environmental factors are the basis for important quality traits like starch and processing characteristics. The latter can rely on the balance between tuber starch and sugars that affect potato chip quality due to enzymatic reactions at low temperature (cold-sweetening). The major aim was to screen for superior natural alleles in an interesting set of candidate genes.
A candidate gene approach for starch and chip quality traits mainly targets functional candidates involved in carbohydrate metabolism. First, an α-glucan water dikinase (GWD) and a phosphoglucan water dikinase (PWD) were analyzed which trigger the initiation of starch breakdown in Solanum tuberosum. Second, as a post-transcriptional regulatory factor of vacuolar invertase, a putative invertase inhibitor was studied for its contribution to tuber quality traits and its functional role. In order to identify new candidates which do not operate in the starch pathway, in silico homology studies with well characterized genes on the released Solanum phureja genome and "-omics" approaches were used as an experimental basis. A hitherto uncharacterized 6th invertase and a leucine aminopeptidase (LAP) were obtained as third and fourth candidate genes.
In all candidate genes, SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) having an effect on starch and chip quality traits were identified. The functional candidates GWD and PWD showed moderate association with all tested tuber quality traits and explained between 4 % and 7 % of the phenotypic variance. The 6th invertase (Inv6) showed high associations and explained up to 10 % and 11 % of the phenotypic variation of chip quality and starch quality, respectively. The role of Inv6 remains to be elucidated, as semi-quantitative expression studies showed rather low expression in tubers and no strong increase upon cold treatment. Interestingly, LAP showed the highest association with tuber quality traits and explained up to 17 % of starch variance and 10 % of variance of chip quality after cold-storage. LAP has been selected as a candidate gene based on a proteomics analysis showing strong differences at protein level between good and bad processing genotypes. Finally, superior alleles of the putative invertase inhibitor were identified which explained 10 % of the phenotypic variance of starch quality traits, whereas no association was detected for chip quality traits. Functional analysis revealed a tuber-specific expression pattern. In vitro inhibition assays of heterologously expressed invertase and inhibitor did not confirm an inhibition of invertase activity.
Although natural DNA variants in the different candidate genes showed associations with starch and chip quality traits, their functional role remains to be identified. However, the candidate gene approach is a powerful tool to identify diagnostic molecular markers within functional genes which will facilitate marker-assisted selection and increase breeding efficiency.


In this work, structural, electronic, topological and vibrational properties of corticosterone hormone have been investigated in aqueous, ethanol and methanol solutions by using DFT calculations and experimental available infrared, attenuated total reflectance (ATR), Raman and Ultraviolet spectra. The properties predicted in the different solvents at the B3LYP/6-31G* level of theory were compared with those obtained in gas phase and, with others reported for steroids species at the same level of theory. The universal solvation model has evidenced higher solvation energy for corticosterone in aqueous solution and a higher value in methanol, as compared with the corresponding values to equilenin, equilin and estrone steroids in the same medium. Higher Mulliken charges on O atoms of C=O group of side chain are observed in the three solvents than the corresponding to C=O group of ring A while the MK charges on O atoms of OH group of ring C present higher values than the corresponding to O atoms of OH group of side chain. The natural bond orbital (NBO) studies have revealed a low stability of corticosterone in aqueous solution, as compared with the values in ethanol and methanol solutions, in total agreement with the higher solvation energy and dipole moment in this medium. On the other hand, the atoms in molecules (AIM) analyses support the lower stabilities of corticosterone in the three solutions because only five H bonds interactions different from of gas phase where six interactions are observed. The gap values suggests that corticosterone is most reactive in aqueous solution than the other solutions, as supported by the low stability and higher solvation energy and dipole moment values in this medium. This study shows clearly that the steroid species most reactive, equilenin and corticosterone, are characterized by a high global electrophilicity index value and low nucleophilicity index. Reasonable correlations in the predicted IR, Raman and UV spectra were observed, as compared with the corresponding experimental ones. Additionally, the complete vibrational assignments of all 159vibration modes of corticosterone together with the harmonic force fields and force constants in the different media are for the first time presented.


Pasireotide is a somatostatin analog (SSA) that targets somatostatin receptor subtype 1 (SST1), SST2, SST3, and SST5 with a high affinity. Pasireotide has a better antisecretory effect in acromegaly, Cushing's disease, and neuroendocrine tumors than octreotide. In this study, we compared the effects of pasireotide to those of octreotide in vitro on meningioma primary cell cultures, both alone and in combination with the mTOR inhibitor everolimus. Significant mRNA expression levels of SST1, SST2, and SST5 were observed in 40.5%, 100%, and 35% of meningioma samples, respectively. Pasireotide had a significantly stronger inhibitory effect on cell proliferation than octreotide. The effect of pasireotide, but not of octreotide, was significantly stronger in the group expressing the highest level of SST1 mRNA. Combined treatment with pasireotide and everolimus induced a higher reduction in cell viability than that with octreotide plus everolimus. Moreover, pasireotide decreased Akt phosphorylation and reversed everolimus-induced Akt hyperphosphorylation to a higher degree than octreotide. Using 4E-BP1 siRNA (si4E-BP), we demonstrated that 4E-BP1 protein silencing significantly reversed the response to everolimus, both alone and in combination with SSAs. Moreover, si4E-BP completely reversed the inhibition of cyclin D1 expression level and the increase in p27kip1 induced by SSAs, both alone and in combination with everolimus. Our results strongly support the need for further studies on the combination of pasireotide and everolimus in medical therapy for meningiomas.


President Obama's first year in office can be defined by two words: pragmatism and commitment. His pragmatism is reflected in the decision to continue to pursue the armed conflicts against transnational terrorism, and his refusal to abandon the legal and policy positions of his predecessor that lodge that struggle squarely within an armed conflict paradigm. His commitment is reflected both in his decision to continue the armed struggle against transnational terrorism, and in the actions he has taken to demonstrate US commitment to fundamental humanitarian principles of the law, and to abandon the policy of legal exceptionalism that defined his predecessor's 'authority without obligation' interpretation of the law as it applied to this armed conflict. Any doubt about these dual pillars of his approach to transnational terrorism was eliminated when he delivered his Nobel acceptance speech. In that speech, he challenged the international community to accept the continuing need to meet the threat of transnational terrorism with military force. However, he also emphasized that maintaining the moral high ground in the conduct of hostilities – even when confronting an immoral opponent – is at the very core of the American military tradition.This essay will review what the authors consider the President's most significant humanitarian law related decisions during his first year in office. It will focus on six major aspects of international humanitarian law: 1) the definition of enemy combatant; 2) detainee judicial review; 3) military commissions; 4) self help measures in self-defense; 5) fundamental guarantees under customary international law; and 6) the US position vis a vis the International Criminal Court.


This document describes a work-in-progress development of a distributed sentiment analysis system being developed for industrial usage. This project seeks to leverage advances in open source development in natural language processing and understanding, distributed databases, and distributed processing frameworks, as much as possible to advance the development process and to utilize the most recent technology. This paper describes the tools, technologies, and data sources we've utilized as well as issues we've encountered in their integration.


Background and Aim Critically ill survivors may have functional impairments even five years after hospital discharge. To date there are four systematic reviews suggesting a beneficial impact for mobilisation in mechanically ventilated and intensive care unit (ICU) patients, however there is limited information about the influence of timing, frequency and duration of sessions. Earlier mobilisation during ICU stay may lead to greater benefits. This study aims to determine the effect of early rehabilitation for functional status in ICU/high-dependency unit (HDU) patients. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINALH, PEDro, Cochrane Library, AMED, ISI web of science, Scielo, LILACS and several clinical trial registries were searched for randomised and non-randomised clinical trials of rehabilitation compared to usual care in adult patients admitted to an ICU/HDU. Results were screened by two independent reviewers. Primary outcome was functional status. Secondary outcomes were walking ability, muscle strength, quality of life, and healthcare utilisation. Data extraction and methodological quality assessment using the PEDro scale was performed by primary reviewer and checked by two other reviewers. The authors of relevant studies were contacted to obtain missing data. Results 5733 records were screened. Seven articles were included in the narrative synthesis and six in the meta-analysis. Early rehabilitation had no significant effect on functional status, muscle strength, quality of life, or healthcare utilisation. However, early rehabilitation led to significantly more patients walking without assistance at hospital discharge (risk ratio 1.42; 95% CI 1.17-1.72). There was a non-significant effect favouring intervention for walking distance and incidence of ICU-acquired weakness. Conclusions Early rehabilitation during ICU stay was not associated with improvements in functional status, muscle strength, quality of life or healthcare utilisation outcomes, although it seems to improve walking ability compared to usual care. Results from ongoing studies may provide more data on the potential benefits of early rehabilitation in critically ill patients.


Humans are characterized by an unusual level of prosociality. Despite this, considerable indirect evidence suggests that biological kinship plays an important role in altruistic behaviour. All previous reports of the influence of kin selection on human altruism have, however, used correlational (rather than experimental) designs, or imposed only a hypothetical or negligible time cost on participants. Since these research designs fail either to control for confounding variables or to meet the criteria required as a test of Hamilton's rule for kin selection (that the altruist pays a true cost), they fail to establish unequivocally whether kin selection plays a role. We show that individuals from two different cultures behave in accordance with Hamilton's rule by acting more altruistically (imposing a higher physical cost upon themselves) towards more closely related individuals. Three possible sources of confound were ruled out: generational effects, sexual attraction and reciprocity. Performance on the task however did not exhibit a perfect linear relationship with relatedness, which might reflect either the intrusion of other variables (e.g. cultural differences in the way kinship is costed) or that our behavioural measure is insufficiently sensitive to fine-tuned differences in the way individuals view their social world. These findings provide the first unequivocal experimental evidence that kinship plays a role in moderating altruistic behaviour. Kinship thus represents a baseline against which individuals pitch other criteria (including reciprocity, prosociality, obligation and a moral sense) when deciding how to behave towards others.


Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets gain power in the context of the sexual identity of formalist experimentation. The sonnet had virtually disappeared from English literature after Milton and was held in disapprobation throughout the eighteenth century, at least until it was rescued, prominently, by Charlotte Smith. (1) For a woman to write in this tradition bodies forth not simply a vexed self-representation but also the presence of that very vexation as one grounding of poetic form. As such, instances of the relation between the modes in which a woman's subjectivity can be instantiated and the conditions of loss in which its formal articulation takes shape form the core of the argument that follows. This history begins on familiar ground: Samuel Johnson's complaint that the sonnet is entirely unsuitable to the English language (the entry on "Sonnet" in the Dictionary). Charlotte Smith's re-invigoration of the sonnet can be contextualized as one expression of English nationhood as it occurs in the late eighteenth century. It also bears out the close consciousness of the reciprocity between her sexual identity and the specifically formal configurations of her nationalist daring. Elegiac Sonnets looks to the Renaissance looking to Italy, and so looks to a future whose poetic assertions of individual despair reclaim a cultural moment with authoritative sanction for the cultural transplantation of form. (2) Smith is known now as much for her reinvigoration of the sonnet as for the terrible fortunes she suffered at the hands of a philandering husband who squandered both their fortunes, and for her suffering at the hands of a legal system that denied her redress. Thus, she wrote in response to a public that cou ld pay: she urgently needed revenues from her subscriptions, which opens a difficult ground for considering the relations between form and public expectation. Important also in this regard is Smith's decision to write poetry at all, when clearly the real money to be made was in prose fiction. She did eventually make her mark as a prolific novelist, but she defined herself primarily in terms of the dignity afforded the lyricist. (3) In insisting upon her status as lyric poet, she asserts her membership in a cultural (and class-based) elite, one to which she would claim rightful inclusion in spite of her financial dependencies. She defiantly locates herself within the very public that knows what is worth paying for. Smith appropriates the form associated, during its Renaissance heyday, with a particular kind of mythologizing of woman, one that absolutely cancels her physicality. This scenario resonates deeply with Smith's relentless predicament: a woman trying to make her way in a largely inhospitable world, amidst the dross of domestic despair and financial crisis, lamenting emphatically real losses within a forum that conventionally suspends the concrete actuality of the feminine in favor of mythic presence. For whatever the self-parodying postures inherent in the Renaissance sonnet tradition, the form remained associated with the treatment of woman as abstraction. In writing sonnets, then, Smith performs a sort of double-cross: she takes up the Englishman's right to claim the sonnet as his own, and she subverts the ease with which his affirmation becomes her negation. Smith looks to a form transplanted into England during the Renaissance, just when it had become a part of the greatly celebrated English vitality. Her a ppropriation of an already--and recently--appropriated form to write as a woman (and therefore in ironic response to one aspect of its structure of expectations) is a crucial part of the cultural history of the sonnet and its reemergence. The sonnet "To dependence" is particularly instructive in this regard, and I cite it in full: Dependencel heavy, heavy are they chains, And happier they who from the dangerous sea. Or the dark mine, procure with ceaseless pains. An hard-eard'd pittance--than who trust to thee! …


Low-energy technologies in the Internet of Things (IoTs) era are still unable to provide the reliability needed by the industrial world, particularly in terms of the wireless operation that pervasive deployments demand. While the industrial wireless performance has achieved an acceptable degree in communications, it is no easy task to determine an efficient energy-dimensioning of the device in order to meet the application requirements. This is especially true in the face of the uncertainty inherent in energy harvesting. Thus, it is of utmost importance to model and dimension the energy consumption of the IoT applications at the pre-deployment or pre-production stages, especially when considering critical factors, such as reduced cost, life-time, and available energy. This paper presents a comprehensive model for the power consumption of wireless sensor nodes. The model takes a system-level perspective to account for all energy expenditures: communications, acquisition and processing. Furthermore, it is based only on parameters that can empirically be quantified once the platform (i.e., technology) and the application (i.e., operating conditions) are defined. This results in a new framework for studying and analyzing the energy life-cycles in applications, and it is suitable for determining in advance the specific weight of application parameters, as well as for understanding the tolerance margins and tradeoffs in the system.


The paper specifies a model of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system in which political parties themselves float independent candidates to gain electoral advantage, leading to a Prisoners' Dilemma type game where each party tries to out-maneuver one another. Imposing some intuitively appealing assumptions on this game, we show that the total number of independent candidates across constituencies would follow a Negative Binomial distribution. Empirical results for the 2004 parliamentary election in India reveal a good fit of the Negative Binomial model to data. Results also help to identify a few major determinants of the spatial distribution of independent candidates in India. Results point out that the number of independent candidates across constituencies in a State in India is strongly influenced by political fractionalization in that State, with metropolitan and urban constituencies on an average having more independent candidates. We also find that elite politicians and their family members, ceteris paribus, face more independent candidates. Finally, results establish that number of independent candidates is typically less in reserved constituencies due to reduced number of potential candidates. Our results suggest that FPTP electoral systems as in India need to put appropriate institutional constraints that increase transaction costs of electoral participation for independent candidates.