The main objective of college finance courses should be critical thinking in financial settings. Instructors assigning papers therefore should be concerned about not just writing fundamentals, but also students' ability to develop well‐reasoned arguments that are expressed effectively. Finding the right reference materials is likely to be an important first step toward identifying important topics and issues in finance, and then formulating and expressing cogent arguments about them. Unfortunately, paper writers too often begin by selecting topics that sound interesting, followed by information searches that tend to yield either popular articles that are short on analysis, or academic publications with solid analysis based on quantitative content well over their heads. Students should instead be encouraged to take the "middle way" of the reference‐driven approach: that is, find analytical materials written at a level they can comprehend and choose topics supported by those sources. The ideal tools for building the critical thinking of undergraduate finance students can be found in two sources: the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, which presents articles written with practitioners in mind by academics, as well as edited transcripts of roundtable discussions between academic theorists and corporate practitioners; and the subset of finance articles in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Both of these publications are written mainly by top academic thinkers, but without the complicated mathematics that can discourage students. The author also offers access to files that facilitate the search for articles in both of these journals based on topics, phrases, or authors.


Pregnancy in rodents is associated with important maternal metabolic changes. Early pregnancy is considered to be an anabolic phase of nutrient storing, while in late pregnancy, a catabolic phase develops to help meet the metabolic demands of the rapidly growing conceptus. Similarly, major changes also occur in the IGFs, IGF-binding proteins (IGFBPs) and GH axis. In the rat, maternal serum IGF-I levels increase from early to mid-pregnancy, after which IGF-I levels decline. Conversely, as IGF-I levels decline, pituitary-derived rat GH increases twofold. This coincides with a decrease in IGFBP-3 and the appearance of an IGFBP protease. However, the physiological role of these changes is unclear. The aim of our study was to examine the roles of GH, IGFs and IGFBPs during pregnancy in a unique isolated GH-deficient rat model, spontaneous dwarf rats. Pregnancy in GH-deficient dams resulted in a significantly reduced litter number, and maternal weight gain (day 21-day 1) was reduced by 28% when compared with dams with normal GH levels (GH-normal dams). In the sera of GH-normal dams, IGF-I levels increased 2.6-fold by day 4 of pregnancy and then progressively declined to below non-pregnant levels. Serum IGF-II levels were low and remained unchanged. Western-ligand blot analysis showed that IGFBP-3 was present in non-pregnancy and early pregnancy sera, but declined dramatically after day 12. This decline in IGFBP-3 coincided with the detection of an IGFBP protease. In contrast, in non-pregnancy sera from GH-deficient rats, serum IGF-I concentrations were 10% of the levels seen in GH-normal females, and neither IGF-I nor IGF-II concentrations changed with pregnancy. Furthermore, in GH-deficient dams, serum IGFBP-3 (as assessed by Western-ligand blot analysis) was low in non-pregnancy and early pregnancy sera, and became undetectable by day 12 of pregnancy. The low concentrations of IGFBP-3 in early pregnancy serum from GH-deficient rats coincided with IGFBP-proteolytic activity, and the decline in serum IGFBP-3 after day 16 was the result of increased protease activity. In conclusion, isolated GH deficiency results in: (1) reduced maternal weight gain and correspondingly smaller litter sizes; (2) low and unchanged maternal serum IGF-I levels; (3) low, but declining, serum IGFBP-3 levels; and (4) activity of IGFBP protease(s) detectable in early and late pregnancy, which may modulate the bioavailability and bioactivity of IGFs by regulating IGFBP-3.


This speculative article endeavours to highlight the polemics and disputations of knowledge transformation, while simultaneously demonstrating the productive possibilities of such disputations via three examples of refractions. The latter are generated within the crises and critiques of the discourses within which Social Theory, Human Rights and Philosophy are located. They are further cultivated and sharpened by the interplays between these discourses, suggesting the possibility of self-transforming knowledge constellations. The article concludes that the political import of refractions allows the prospects of just social practices to come sharper into view.


Maternal health, and in particular the issue of reducing maternal mortality, has been a prominent feature of the global health policy agenda for the past three decades. However, maternal health has rarely become a political priority at national levels, with policy uptake and implementation proving relatively disappointing. In this paper, we compare the experience of Rwanda, Bangladesh, Uganda and Ghana in reducing maternal mortality, relating policy uptake and, in particular, implementation to the underlying balance of power and institutions, or political settlement, on which these countries' politics is based. Rwanda's 'dominant-developmental' political settlement has enabled a vigorous, joined-up approach to maternal mortality reduction, while, at the other end of the spectrum, Ghana's inclusive-competitive settlement has been less effective in matching policy commitment with implementation. Uganda and Bangladesh's more intermediate settlements present a more mixed experience. The paper argues that policy reformers should try to optimise their maternal mortality reduction strategies within the context of the political settlement in which they operate. That implies a government-supporting strategy in more dominant developmental settlements, while engaging non-state actors or building out from pockets of effectiveness in other types.


XML documents are becoming ubiquitous because of their rich and flexible format that can be used for a variety of applications. Giving the increasing size of XML collections as information sources, mining techniques that traditionally exist for text collections or databases need to be adapted and new methods to be invented to exploit the particular structure of XML documents. Basically XML documents can be seen as trees, which are well known to be complex structures. This chapter describes various ways of using and simplifying this tree structure to model documents and support efficient mining algorithms. We focus on three mining tasks: classification and clustering which are standard for text collections; discovering of frequent tree structure which is especially important for heterogeneous collection. This chapter presents some recent approaches and algorithms to support these tasks together with experimental evaluation on a variety of large XML collections.


This article presents a framework for modeling defaultable debt under alternative recovery conventions (for a wide class of processes describing recovery rates and default probability). These debt models have the ability to differentiate the impact of recovery rates and default probability, and can be utilized to invert the market expectation of recovery rates implicit in bond prices. Among potential applications, the framework can be used for pricing and hedging credit derivatives that are contingent on the default event and/or recovery levels. Empirical implementation of these models suggests two central findings. First, the recovery concept that specifies recovery as a fraction of the discounted par value has broader empirical support. Second, parametric debt valuation models can provide a useful assessment of recovery rates embedded in bond prices. This article has attempted to model recovery and comprehend their impact on debt values.


Research is needed to help identify interventions that will improve the capacity or functioning of health systems and thereby contribute to achieving global health goals. Well conducted, randomized controlled trials (RCTs), insofar as they reduce bias and confounding, provide the strongest evidence for identifying which interventions delivered directly to individuals are safe and effective. When ethically feasible, they can also help reduce bias and confounding when assessing interventions targeting entire health systems. However, additional challenges emerge when research focuses on interventions that target the multiple units of organization found within health systems. Hence, one cannot complacently assume that randomization can reduce or eliminate bias and confounding to the same degree in every instance. While others have articulated arguments in favour of alternative designs, this paper is intended to help people understand why the potential value afforded by RCTs may be threatened. Specifically, it suggests six points to be borne in mind when exploring the challenges entailed in designing or evaluating RCTs on health system interventions: (i) the number of units available for randomization; (ii) the complexity of the organizational unit under study; (iii) the complexity of the intervention; (iv) the complexity of the cause-effect pathway, (v) contamination; and (vi) outcome heterogeneity. The authors suggest that the latter may be informative and that the reasons behind it should be explored and not ignored. Based on improved understanding of the value and possible limitations of RCTs on health system interventions, the authors show why we need broader platforms of research to complement RCTs.


National alien species databases indicate the state of a country's biodiversity and provide useful data for research on invasion biology and the management of invasions. In South Africa there are several different published alien species databases, but these databases were created for different purposes and vary in completeness and information content. We assessed the information content of published South African alien species databases in the context of other such databases globally, and evaluated how the information content of South African databases varies across taxonomic groups. Although introduction pathway, date of introduction, region of origin and current broad-scale distribution data are available for most taxonomic groups assessed (60% – 90%), data on invasion status, introduction effort and introduction source are available for few taxonomic groups (5% – 18%). South African alien species databases have lower information content than the detailed databases available in other parts of the world and thus cannot be utilised to the same extent. We conclude with 11 recommendations for improving South African alien species databases. In particular, we highlight the data types that should be incorporated in future databases and argue that existing data should be collated in a single, standardised meta-database to facilitate cross-taxon comparisons, highlight gaps in effort, and inform managers and policy makers concerned with alien species.


Soil physical and chemical properties are important in crop production since they control the availability of plant water and nutrients. Optical diffuse reflectance sensing is a potential approach for rapid and reliable on-site estimation of soil properties. One issue with this sensing approach is whether additional calibration is necessary when the sensor is applied under conditions (e.g., soil types or ambient conditions) different from those used to generate an initial calibration, and if so how many sample points are required in this additional calibration. In this study, these issues were addressed using data from 10 fields from 5 states in the north-central USA, selected to represent ranges in climate, soil, and landscape characteristics. Results showed that data from soil regions and horizons with variations spanning those expected in sensor use should be included in the initial calibration of a sensor. Otherwise, modification of the initial sensor calibration with a minimum of 8 to 12 sample points for each new soil region and horizon would be needed. These results will provide useful guidelines for calibration and field application of an optical diffuse reflectance sensor to estimate soil properties.


Abstract:This work develops and conceptualizes a new theory, Post Traumatic Slave Master Syndrome, that is utilized to critically correlate historic patterns of lynching Black women to contemporary violent state (actor) responses to Black women's resistance, specifically relating to the neo-lynching of Korryn Gaines and Sandra Bland. This work deviates from the tradition of analyzing the history and contemporary effects of racism and white supremacy, patriarchy, lynching, policing, and state-sponsored violence from the perspective of the effects upon the victim and instead critiques how white supremacy affects the perpetrator. This chapter contributes to ensuring that Black women resisters continue to #SayHerName.


The mobility of the thumb carpometacarpal (CMC) joint is critical for functional grasping and manipulation tasks. We present an optimization technique for determining from surface marker measurements a subject-specific kinematic model of the in vivo CMC joint that is suitable for measuring mobility. Our anatomy-based cost metric scores a candidate joint model by the plausibility of the corresponding joint angle values and kinematic parameters rather than only the marker trajectory reconstruction error. The proposed method repeatably determines CMC joint models with anatomically-plausible directions for the two dominant rotational axes and a lesser range of motion (RoM) for the third rotational axis. We formulate a low-dimensional parameterization of the optimization domain by first solving for joint axis orientation variables that then constrain the search for the joint axis location variables. Individual CMC joint models were determined for 24 subjects. The directions of the flexion-extension (FE) axis and adduction-abduction (AA) axis deviated on average by 9deg and 22deg, respectively, from the mean axis direction. The average RoM for FE, AA, and pronation-supination (PS) joint angles were 76deg, 43deg, and 23deg for active CMC movement. The mean separation distance between the FE and AA axes was 4.6 mm, and the mean skew angle was 87deg from the positive flexion axis to the positive abduction axis.


Urchins are the last abundant grazers of macroalgae on most Caribbean reefs following the historical overexploitation of herbivorous fishes. The long-spined urchin Diadema antillarum was particularly effective at controlling macroalgae and facilitating coral dominance on Caribbean reefs until its ecological extinction from a catastrophic disease epidemic in the early 1980s. Despite their important role in the structure and functioning of Caribbean reef ecosystems, the natural dynamics of Caribbean reef urchin communities are poorly known due to the paucity of ecological survey data prior to large-scale human disturbances and the Diadema dieoff. To help resolve the baseline abundances and ecological roles of common urchin taxa, we track changes in urchin abundance and composition over the past 3000 yr from analysis of subfossil urchin spines preserved in reef matrix cores collected in Caribbean Panama. Echinometra consistently dominated the subfossil spine assemblage, while Diadema was consistently rare in the subfossil record in this region. Rather than increasing during a period of heightened human exploitation of their fish competitors and predators, Diadema began declining over a millennium ago. Convergent cross mapping (CCM) causality analyses reveal that Diadema abundance is causally related to coral community composition. Diadema is negatively affected by Acropora cervicornis dominance, likely due to the tight association between this coral and the threespot damselfish, an effective Diadema competitor. Conversely, Diadema positively affects the abundance of the coral Madracis mirabilis, possibly via its control of macroalgae. Causal relationships were not detected among abundances of individual urchin taxa, indicating that inter-specific echinoid competition is not a factor limiting Diadema recovery. Our detailed record of prehistorical and historical urchin community dynamics suggests that the failure of Diadema to recover over 30 yr after its mass mortality event may be due in part to the prey release of damselfish following the long-term overfishing of piscivorous fishes.


ABSTRACT The concept of offender reentry is seen as symbolic of correctional change. However, this acknowledgement belies the fact that the concept itself, and thus the parameters of that change, have not been well-defined. Several scholars consider this ambiguity in reentry's meaning – beyond that of change – to be problematic for operating, evaluating, and sustaining efforts advanced in the name of reentry. When viewing these potential problems against claims of correctional change, the need to examine reentry's meaning in an applied setting becomes all the more apparent. The current study does so from the perspective of post-prison supervision professionals employed with The Florida Department of Corrections. Survey questions explore reentry's meaning on three dimensions. They include its status as a new guiding policy, its association with rehabilitation and other goals and activities, and organizational responsibility. The findings are interpreted within the context of understanding correctional change and future policy and research.


All scientific work performed so far to find the causality of the acidification of many Norwegian open waters, have – considerably – increased our knowledge about precipitation and soil water chemistry. But has it improved our understanding of what happens to the water itself – from being rain – or meltwater – to reappearing into the nearest stream channel? Most hydrochemical models so far have been based on too generalized and too simplified concepts of hillslope runoff genesis. It won't mend matters, however, that the last 20-30 years' of investigation within international hillslope hydrology has rendered conflicting results. Most analytical hydrologists today are, thus, anxious to have at least one conceptural model with a correct description of the runoff processes within a natural hillslope. This article tries to open up for a discussion of the relevance of the most adequate conceptual models in hillslope hydrology. Snowmelt runoff is emphasized and based upon our own experience from small forested watersheds in SE-Norway.


Starting college is an exciting and pivotal time for students. During this time, the student will be faced with challenges of his or her social identity and will need to develop or modify identities based on new social situations. Previous research shows that social media play a role in identity development, but there is little information regarding the extent. Are new college students using Facebook during their transition to communicate their new identity/social group to new peers? Are they using Facebook to maintain nostalgia for previous identities/social groups? This information will be valuable to higher education professionals working with these populations – particularly in determining the most effective methods to communicate support during their transition. Using a phenomenological, qualitative approach with individual interviews of new college students in their first semester of college, this study seeks to clarify the college transition and identify what ways new college students are using Facebook during their transition. Participants identified three key themes of their college transition: a fear of not fitting in, wanting a sense of belonging, and wanting to stay connected with high school friends. Overall, the students interviewed had a successful transition and utilized Facebook to assist in each of the three themes they identified. Specifically, though, new college students are using the Group feature of Facebook to create a community of peers. The use of Facebook and Groups leads to a more successful student with a quicker and stronger adjustment to college. Higher education administrators can take advantage of this data to enhance existing strategies to increase student success.


PURPOSE
To study the prevalence, tomographic features, and clinical characteristics of focal choroidal excavation (FCE) in eyes with exudative age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

METHODS
We examined 243 consecutive eyes with exudative AMD with a prototype swept-source optical coherence tomography (OCT) system. Three-dimensional images of the macular area, covering 6 × 6 mm(2), were reconstructed by segmentation of the outer surface of the retinal pigment epithelium.

RESULTS
Three-dimensional swept-source OCT revealed 15 excavations in 12 eyes (4.9%); 10 had a single excavation and 2 had multiple excavations (2 and 3 excavations, respectively). In multiaveraged scans, unusual choroidal tissue was found beneath 5 excavations, bridging the excavation with the outer choroidal boundary. Additionally, the suprachoroidal space was observed beneath 7 excavations-the outer choroidal boundary appeared to be pulled inward by this bridging tissue. In 9 excavations, color fundus photographs showed pigmentary disturbance. Fourteen excavations (93.3%) were located within or adjacent to the choroidal neovascularization area. Compared with eyes without FCE, in eyes with FCE, the mean age was significantly higher (P = 0.040) and mean visual acuity was significantly better (P = 0.014). In addition, polypoidal lesions were observed in 8 of 12 eyes with FCE, but they appeared to have a limited effect on either the rate of FCE (P = 0.44) or the clinical characteristics of the eyes.

CONCLUSIONS
While FCE may be partially related to the choroidal neovascularization associated with exudative AMD, other factors may also influence this association.


Consider a rooted binary tree with $n$ nodes. Assign with the root the abscissa 0, and with the left (resp. right) child of a node of abscissa $i$ the abscissa $i-1$ (resp. $i+1$). We prove that the number of binary trees of size $n$ having exactly $n_i$ nodes at abscissa $i$, for $l \leq i \leq r$ (with $n = \sum_i n_i$), is $$ \frac{n_0}{n_l n_r} {{n_{-1}+n_1} \choose {n_0-1}} \prod_{l\le i\le r \atop i\not = 0}{{n_{i-1}+n_{i+1}-1} \choose {n_i-1}}, $$ with $n_{l-1}=n_{r+1}=0$. The sequence $(n_l, \dots, n_{-1};n_0, \dots n_r)$ is called the vertical profile of the tree. The vertical profile of a uniform random tree of size $n$ is known to converge, in a certain sense and after normalization, to a random mesure called the integrated superbrownian excursion, which motivates our interest in the profile. We prove similar looking formulas for other families of trees whose nodes are embedded in $Z$. We also refine these formulas by taking into account the number of nodes at abscissa j whose parent lies at abscissa $i$, and/or the number of vertices at abscissa i having a prescribed number of children at abscissa $j$, for all $i$ and $j$. Our proofs are bijective.


"To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most influential and widely acclaimed legal novels in American history. It tells the story of a small-town white lawyer who is appointed to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. The lawyer, Atticus Finch, is one of the great legal heroes of American fiction. The story, told from the perspective of Atticus' daughter Scout, explores race, class, gender, family and law. Most of all it is a both critical and loving account of the white South. This article is a personal story about the influence of "To Kill a Mockingbird" on Professor Ifill, an African American civil rights lawyer and law professor. In the piece, she explores the implication of some of the fictional liberties taken by the book's author Harper Lee. Ifill also challenges her own previously uncritical view of the character of Atticus Finch. Ifill then presents the stories of some of the real-life lawyers in Maryland, black and white, who defended black men accused of violent crimes against whites in the 1930s. Professor Ifill learned of the work of these lawyers while researching her 2007 book, "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century."


People with chronic mental disorder, mental handicap or personality disorders may experience difficulties in forming intimate relationships and responding sexually. This review discusses the impact of major psychiatric disorders, mental handicap and substance abuse on sexual maturation and functioning. The significant social, psychological and biological factors are described.


With the exponentially increasing volume of online data, searching and finding required information have become an extensive and time-consuming task. Recommender Systems as a subclass of information retrieval and decision support systems by providing personalized suggestions helping users access what they need more efficiently. Among the different techniques for building a recommender system, Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the most popular and widespread approach. However, cold start and data sparsity are the fundamental challenges ahead of implementing an effective CF-based recommender. Recent successful developments in enhancing and implementing deep learning architectures motivated many studies to propose deep learning-based solutions for solving the recommenders' weak points. In this research, unlike the past similar works about using deep learning architectures in recommender systems that covered different techniques generally, we specifically provide a comprehensive review of deep learning-based collaborative filtering recommender systems. This in-depth filtering gives a clear overview of the level of popularity, gaps, and ignored areas on leveraging deep learning techniques to build CF-based systems as the most influential recommenders.


Acheson and Empire offers a compelling reassessment of Dean Acheson's policies toward the former colonial world during his period as secretary of state from 1949 to 1953. John T. McNay argues that Acheson inherited through his own personal history a way of understanding the world that encouraged imperial-style international relationships. This worldview represented a well-developed belief system rooted in his Ulster Protestant heritage that remained consistent throughout his life. By exploring relationships of the United States with Britain and countries formerly or then controlled by Britain, such as India, Ireland, Iran, and Egypt, McNay shows the significance of Acheson's beliefs. McNay argues that Acheson's support of existing imperial relationships was so steadfast that it often led other nations to perceive that the United States was nothing more than a front for British interests. He believes this approach to foreign policy damaged American relations with emerging countries and misled the British regarding possibilities of an Anglo-American partnership. Acheson and Empire contends that the widely accepted view of Acheson as a foreign policy realist is misleading and that historians should acknowledge that his affinity for the British Empire went beyond his clothing and mannerisms. McNay maintains that the widely accepted view of Acheson as one of a group of "wise men" who shaped the Cold War world by basing their decisions on cold calculation of American interests should be reconsidered. Drawing from extensive research in archival sources, including the Truman Library, the National Archives, the Public Record Office in London, and Acheson's personal papers at Yale, Acheson and Empire offers a fresh look at Dean Acheson that runs counter to previous biographies and many histories of the Cold War.


This paper compares the market-based and accounting-based performances of listed commercial banks among eight Asian emerging markets such as China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand over the period 2005-2010. Marketbased performance is measured by Tobin's Q ratio and accounting-based performance is measured by three conventional ratios for a bank: net interest margin, return on assets and return on equity. It is found that Indonesian banks have the highest average Tobin's Q of 1.14, return on assets of 1.82 percent and net interest margin of 5.34 percent, whereas banks in China and India have the highest average return on equity of 18.22 percent. Banks in Korea, Taiwan and Thailand have the lowest average Q ratio of 1.00. Banks in Taiwan also have the lowest average return on assets of negative 0.57 percent, return on equity of negative 7.80 percent and net interest margin of 1.97 percent. Q is shown to be significantly positively related to return on assets and return on equity, but there is no significant relationship between Q and net interest margin. Further, the determinants of each type of performance are found to be different. The GLS regression result reveals that return on assets is significantly positively associated to the bank's capital adequacy; return on equity is significantly positively linked to asset quality; net interest margin is significantly positively affected by capital adequacy and negatively affected by liquidity; whereas the Q ratio is significantly positively related to capital adequacy and asset quality. Finally, the different regression results for banks in each single emerging market indicate that the market-based and accounting-based performances of commercial banks in different emerging market are affected by different factors in different ways. J EL classification: G2; G21


We describe a stable type II optical parametric oscillator operated above threshold that provides 9.7 +/- 0.5 dB (89%) of quantum noise reduction on the intensity difference of the signal and idler modes. We also report the first experimental study, to our knowledge, by homodyne detection of the generated bright two-mode state in the case of frequency-degenerate operation obtained by the introduction of a birefringent plate inside an optical cavity.


Major advances in the design and fabrication of ultra-high performance logic and memory circuits were recently reported by IBM research scientists. The devices operate on entirely different principles from the silicon transistor circuits used in all of today's computers. The experimental circuits, made of Josephson junctions, switch in 50 to 100 picoseconds (trillionths of a second), and the memory cells have an access time of 7 nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Even more important than these high switching speeds, the Josephson circuits generate only microwatts of heat–thousands of times less than high-speed transistor circuits. This permits them to be packed very closely together, an essential quality since with such high switching speeds the time an electrical impulse takes to move from one circuit to the next becomes the major limitation on a computer's speed. In 100 picoseconds, for example, an electrical signal moves about half an inch.


In previous work, we proposed the prototype environment SNet based on the Trust-Confidence-Distrust (TCD) approach for the representation and dynamic evaluation of agent-based designs for interorganizational networks. There are two major ingredients: i* for modeling the domain statically and ConGolog for analysing it dynamically via simulations. In the context of i*, several other approaches that try to enrich i* models to allow for more formal analyses exist. In this paper, we compare our approach with two of them, Formal Tropos and Secure Tropos. While the intended use of these is quite different from SNet, there are a number of commonalities, which will be highlighted in this paper as well as the differences, including complementary forms of analysis such as model checking versus simulation.


With ever growing data volume and model size, an error-tolerant, communication efficient, yet versatile distributed algorithm has become vital for the success of many large-scale machine learning applications. In this work we propose m-PAPG, an implementation of the flexible proximal gradient algorithm in model parallel systems equipped with the partially asynchronous communication protocol. The worker machines communicate asynchronously with a controlled staleness bound s and operate at different frequencies. We characterize various convergence properties of m-PAPG: 1) Under a general non-smooth and nonconvex setting, we prove that every limit point of the sequence generated by m-PAPG is a critical point of the objective function; 2) Under an error bound condition of convex objective functions, we prove that the optimality gap decays linearly for every s steps; 3) Under the Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz inequality and a sufficient decrease assumption, we prove that the sequences generated by m-PAPG converge to the same critical point, provided that a proximal Lipschitz condition is satisfied.


Secreted prokaryotic effector proteins have evolved to modulate the cellular functions of specific eukaryotic hosts. Generally, these proteins are considered virulence factors that facilitate parasitism. However, in certain plant and insect eukaryotic/prokaryotic relationships, effector proteins are involved in the establishment of commensal or symbiotic interactions. In this study, we report that the AvrA protein from Salmonella typhimurium, a common enteropathogen of humans, is an effector molecule that inhibits activation of the key proinflammatory NF-κB transcription factor and augments apoptosis in human epithelial cells. This activity is similar but mechanistically distinct from that described for YopJ, an AvrA homolog expressed by the bacterial pathogen Yersinia. We suggest that AvrA may limit virulence in vertebrates in a manner analogous to avirulence factors in plants, and as such, is the first bacterial effector from a mammalian pathogen that has been ascribed such a function.


Since 1855, 28 species of clam shrimps (Laevicaudata, Spinicaudata, Cyclestherida) have been described from Australia, although three have been synonymized. One new species of Eocyzicus is described herein. It has a distinctive rostrum that is slightly different in male and females and the clasper has a three segmented palp. With this new species the Australian fauna comprises 26 valid species of clam shrimps. We provide a list of all described species, including their known localities and a key to the genera of Australian clam shrimps.


Offshore wind energy is one of the most competitive renewable energy resources available to us, which until now been underexploited. Most of the problems associated with wind farm installation like land acquisition, low wind conditions and its visual impact can be eliminated to large extent by going offshore. In fact it is expected that by the year 2020, 40GW of offshore wind power capacity will be in operation. In an offshore context the wind turbine design methodologies have to address new challenges. For optimal performance the turbine needs to be huge in size and for horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWT) the diameter has already reached a size of 200m. Till now little attention has been paid to vertical axis offshore wind turbines. However, within the NOWITECH project new concepts for vertical axis turbine have been proposed and it might not take a long time before such turbines may become an realistic alternative for use offshore. The current work characterizes variable turbulence intensity flow field around a rotating vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) in an offshore context. Complete three dimensional numerical transient simulations are performed accounting for the variation of multiple turbulence intensity levels associated with the oncoming wind. Usually offshore winds are highly turbulent in nature partially because of the rapid changes in wind directions along with the sea-air interaction. The results from the study indicate that due to the increase in the turbulence intensity level of 5% to 25% the performance of wind turbine decreases by almost 23% to 42% compared to no turbulence in the incoming wind field. c © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of SINTEF Energi AS.


The plan has the following components, each one of which is discussed in this document: i. Mission Statement ii. Technology Goals Objectives 1. Adopt a service bureau or governance agreement for cooperative information technology programs, including cost allocation formula. 2. Maintain a shared, comprehensive automated library system. 3. Maintain a wide area network (WAN) using frame relay technology. 4. Maintain contracts with two Internet Service Providers and regularly evaluate performance. 5. Seek to conform to all relevant standards. 6. Provide "express catalogs" near building and reference area entrances in all libraries. 7. Provide one or more "electronic access centers" for patrons in each library, regardless of size. 8. Replace "dumb" terminals with PCs and utilize a multi-tier PC strategy. 9. Configure all of the PCs, existing and future, with a Web browser. 10. Configure all PCs with printers, and attach coin boxes or debit card readers to all "electronic access center" patron devices. 11. Provide access to a CD-ROM server from all workstations. 12. Maintain a Web site. 13. Undertake a cooperative special files and imaging program. 14. Establish and maintain a small micro lab in each facility of more than 25,000 square feet. 15. Maintain spares inventories and contract for local maintenance. 16. Use competitive bidding for shared online reference services. Avoid proliferation of the same information in multiple formats. 18. Upgrade staff work surfaces to accommodate information technologies. 19. Accommodate information technologies when building or remodeling library facilities. 20. Implement a theft detection system for each library with more than $1 million worth of library materials. 21. Designate a full-time system manager and network specialist. 22. Maintain staff training and patron orientation programs. 23. Seek funding from external sources. 24. Phase in implementation over a four-year period. These components are discussed in detail on the following pages. i. MISSION STATEMENT The libraries are committed to providing and making accessible the best possible informational, educational, cultural, and recreational materials and services to the citizens of their service area. ii. TECHNOLOGY GOALS The libraries' most important technology goal is to give all citizens access to information regardless of format, and regardless of where the information is stored. The secondary goal is to make that access available from anywhere in the service area insofar as possible, including from all sizes of libraries, from homes, and from offices. To carry out its mission and technology goals, the consortium has developed a plan which consists of the following objectives: 1. Adopt a service bureau or governance agreement for cooperative information technology programs, including a cost allocation formula. Libraries which share information technologies need a written agreement among them which spells out their rights and obligations. This can be either a service bureau agreement in which one library provides services to others per agreed-upon terms; or a governance agreement in which the participants all have an equity interest in the information technology. The former approach is normally adopted when one library is substantially larger than the others; the latter when they are comparable in size. One of the following will be the basis for cooperation: Service Bureau Agreement The following Agreement is entered into between the -- Library, hereinafter known as the "host library" and the -- -- Libraries, hereinafter known as the "client libraries" for the purchase of goods and services by the client libraries from the host library. …


Learning on Grassmann manifold has become popular in many computer vision tasks, with the strong capability to extract discriminative information for imagesets and videos. However, such learning algorithms particularly on high-dimensional Grassmann manifold always involve with significantly high computational cost, which seriously limits the applicability of learning on Grassmann manifold in more wide areas. In this research, we propose an unsupervised dimensionality reduction algorithm on Grassmann manifold based on the Locality Preserving Projections (LPP) criterion. LPP is a commonly used dimensionality reduction algorithm for vector-valued data, aiming to preserve local structure of data in the dimension-reduced space. The strategy is to construct a mapping from higher dimensional Grassmann manifold into the one in a relative low-dimensional with more discriminative capability. The proposed method can be optimized as a basic eigenvalue problem. The performance of our proposed method is assessed on several classification and clustering tasks and the experimental results show its clear advantages over other Grassmann based algorithms.


In about ten years of activity, the Scientific Committee of EFSA has been successful in addressing a number of challenging areas of increasingly complex nature related to scientific and procedural aspects of risk assessment in the food and feed chain. The scientific outputs adopted so far by the Scientific Committee are summarised and assigned to the three main areas of responsibility that the Scientific Committee covers: (i) opinions dealing with innovative risk assessment methodologies; (ii) opinions aiming at ensuring transparency and improving quality of specific components of risk assessment; and (iii) opinions addressing risk assessment of specific multisectoral issues. The main future challenge for the Scientific Committee will be in assisting EFSA to implement its 'Science Strategy' for the years 2012-2016, a recently developed and highly sophisticated approach: (i) to further develop EFSA's scientific excellence, and other core values, such as openness, transparency, independence and responsiveness; (ii) to optimise the use of European risk assessment capacity across the EU; (iii) to develop and harmonise methodologies and approaches to assess risks associated with the food/feed chain; and (iv) to strengthen the scientific basis for risk assessment and risk monitoring in the food/feed chain.


Higher-order Markov models are more powerful than first-order models, but suffer from an exponential increase in model parameters with order, which leads to data scarcity problems during training. A more efficient approach is to use mixed-order Markov models, which model data sequences with contexts of different lengths. This study proposes two algorithms for inferringmixed-orderMarkov chains and hiddenMarkovmodels (HMMs), respectively. The basis of these algorithms is the prediction suffix tree (PST), an efficient representation of a mixed-order Markov chain. The smallest encoded context tree (SECT) algorithm constructs PSTs from data, based on the minimum description length principle. It has no user-specifiable parameters to tune, and will expand the depth of the resulting PST as far as the data set allows it, making it a self-bounded algorithm. It is also faster than the original PST inference algorithm. The hidden SECT algorithm replaces the underlying Markov chain of an HMMwith a prediction suffix tree, which is inferred using SECT. The algorithm is efficient and integrates well with standard techniques. The properties of the SECT and hidden SECT algorithms are verified on synthetic data. The hidden SECT algorithm is also compared with a fixed-order HMM training algorithm on an automatic language recognition task, where the resulting mixed-order HMMs are shown to be smaller and train faster than the fixed-order models, for similar classification accuracies.


Processing tree data structures usually requires a pushdown automaton as a model of computation. Therefore, it is interesting that a finite automaton can be used to solve the constrained approximate subtree pattern matching problem. A systematic approach to the construction of such matcher by finite automaton, which reads input trees in prefix bar notation, is presented. Given a tree pattern and an input tree with m and n nodes, respectively, the nondeterministic finite automaton for the pattern is constructed and it is able to find all occurrences of the pattern to subtrees of the input tree with maximum given distance k. The distance between the pattern and subtrees of an input tree is measured by minimal number of restricted tree edit operations, called leaf nodes edit operations. The corresponding deterministic finite automaton finds all occurrences in time O(n) and has O(|A|m) states, where A is an alphabet containing all possible node labels. Note that the size is not exponential in the number of nodes of the tree pattern but only in the number of errors. In practise, the number of errors is expected to be a small constant that is much smaller than the size of the pattern. To achieve better space complexity, it is also shown how dynamic programming approach can be used to simulate the nondeterministic automaton. The space complexity of this approach is O(m), while the time complexity is O(mn).


Eleocharis dulcis (Chinese water chesnut), locally Kalimantan named Purun Tikus, is a plant that grown in highly acidic swamps areas in South Kalimantan. Eleocharis dulcis (ED) , was usually used as material for traditional handicrafts. Therefore it is necessary for develop and innovate to convert the material becomes valuables. This research focus on the study of biocomposite nanoparticles of ED and its potentials as an adsorbent to reduce concentration of Pb 2+ ion, Total Suspended Solid (TSS) and color from Sasirangan textile industry wastewater. The synthesis of the biocomposite nanocomposite was made by solvothermal synthesis. Firstly, ED stemsdried was cutted to small size (250 micron), then through delignification process to eliminate lignin by 1% w/v NaOH solution. ED delignification put into hydrothermal reactor, right afterward was carried out by one-pot solvothermal reaction of 1,6-diaminohexane, iron (III) chloride hexahydrate, and ethylene glycol at 200 o C for 6 h.The process was produced two types of biocomposites, without the amino group (EDB-M) and the amino group (EDB-MH). The characterization results shown by SEM, magnetic nanoparticles have been formed on the surface of EDfiber.The ED biocomposite nanoparticles (EDB) with diameter size around 30–50 nm could be obtained. X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) analysis showed treatment of EDdelignification was increased the porosity of the fiber, shown by increased Crystalinity Index (CrI) about 72.75%. The biocomposites adsorbent, EDB-M and EDB-MH had adsorption capacity for Pb 2+ ions about 44.21 mg/g and 55.62 mg/g at equilibrium pH (pH e ) of 6 and equilibrium time of 2 hour. The effectiveness of reduced TSS was about of 91.9% and 98.1%. Beside that, the colour intensity of color was decreased about 96.7% and 97.8% for the EDB-M and EDB-MH, respectively.


Let's get hyggelig in Denmark – a qualitative case study about place branding in times of mediatization In a world that is coined by globalization, individualization, commercialization and mediatization, place brands try to use their cultural assets to distinguish them- selves from others and compete for tourists. Although literature on place branding acknowledges the importance of culture, there is still a lack of culturally informed research in the field of place branding. The aim of this study is to bridge this gap by analyzing how mediatization informs the reproduction and transformation of cultural assets in the place branding process. The case of VisitDenmark's brand communication with the Danish concept of hygge which can be roughly translated to coziness is chosen as an example of this phenomenon. Theories on the role of culture for place branding and mediatization are used as a framework. The analy- sis is based on interviews with marketing and communication managers at Vis- itDenmark, text and images on VisitDenmark's website, Instagram posts and a German magazine called Hygge as an example of how foreign media present the concept. Results show how cultural assets are commercialized, simplified and transferred to another context through the place branding process and its presence in other media. In addition, the concept of hygge presents a counter-balance to so- ciocultural developments in many Western societies such as stress and infor- mation-overload. One possible downside of the concept's popularity is that Danes could become alienated to their own cultural concept due to these changes. In the end, the study proposes a new theoretical concept to account for place branding theory and practice that puts culture at its core: Cultural place branding. Keywords: place branding, mediatization, culture, cultural place branding, Denmark, hygge (Less)


Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are gaining extensive attention for their application in graph data. However, the black-box nature of GNNs prevents users from understanding and trusting the models, thus hampering their applicability. Whereas explaining GNNs remains a challenge, most existing methods fall into approximation based and perturbation based approaches with suffer from faithfulness problems and unnatural artifacts, respectively. To tackle these problems, we propose DEGREE \degree to provide a faithful explanation for GNN predictions. By decomposing the information generation and aggregation mechanism of GNNs, DEGREE allows tracking the contributions of specific components of the input graph to the final prediction. Based on this, we further design a subgraph level interpretation algorithm to reveal complex interactions between graph nodes that are overlooked by previous methods. The efficiency of our algorithm can be further improved by utilizing GNN characteristics. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of DEGREE on node classification and graph classification tasks.


The concept for this study originated at a workshop on Systems Analysis Techniques for International Negotiation sponsored by the Processes of International Negotiation (PIN) Project at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria in October 1991. That meeting was attended primarily by methodologists who have studied and developed a wide range of systematic and quantitative analytical techniques that seek to assist negotiators in effectively accomplishing various aspects of heir practical tasks. All of the participants had published widely on particular methodological tools that, at least theoretically, would increase the process efficiency and outcome satisfaction of negotiating parties.

The PIN Project sponsors of the workshop bluntly confronted these experts with an anomaly: If the analytical methodologies which they developed were so useful, why are they not being applied widely in actual negotiation settings? Under what circumstances were these methods being used, what were the problems encountered, and what were the effects on the negotiation process and outcome?

One of the conclusions reached at the workshop was that these methodological experts had many good ideas to enhance the process of negotiation through the use of analytical techniques, but had very limited conceptions of the practical needs of negotiators. In market terms, they had a good handle on the supply but limited knowledge of consumer demand. Thus, a valuable outcome of the workshop was the recommendation to conduct a study to explore the analytical requirements of practical negotiators. If these needs could be understood, then the appropriate analytical methodologies could be designed and offered to an interested and attentive user group, negotiators. This report is the product of that requirements analysis.


TO THE EDITOR: Unfortunately, the research performed by White and colleagues1 appears to be flawed by selection bias. This is the result of their failure to survey specialists in general medicine, who regularly make decisions on the withholding and withdrawing of life-sustaining medical treatment. Therefore, the findings of the survey may not accurately reflect real legal understanding among the specialists in our health system most frequently required to make these kinds of decisions. General physicians' patients frequently require careful evaluation of any pre-existing advance care directives, and discussion with statutory health attorneys relating to decisions regarding the provision or withholding of lifesustaining treatment.


Community Economic Development ("CED") and community-based social justice non-profits more generally have been criticized by social justice lawyers, legal scholars, practitioners, and activists, who charge that these efforts too often overlook the structural drivers of inequality, strip social justice movements of their confrontational, activist politics, and fail to give community members meaningful control over their programs. Over the past decades, anti-authoritarian activists — perhaps most famously known through Occupy Wall Street — have developed new frameworks for social change movements based on philosophical commitments to horizontalism, autonomism, and prefigurative politics. Many anti-authoritarian activists have turned their attention to creating community-based social change groups. These groups often engage in both activism and service provision, but do so outside of traditional frameworks for community-based organizations. These "community counter-institutions" hold the potential to address some of the critiques of CED models, and may develop to become more confrontational, democratic, and inclusive community-based social change organizations that still provide essential community services as part of their work. Transactional social change lawyers can play an important supportive role in helping anti-authoritarian activists to develop these new models.


Elastic and anelastic properties of single crystal samples of EuTiO3 have been measured between 10 and 300 K by resonant ultrasound spectroscopy at frequencies in the vicinity of 1 MHz. Softening of the shear elastic constants C44 and 1 (C11 − C12 )b y∼20–30% occurs with falling temperature in a narrow interval through the transition point, Tc = 284 K, for the cubic-tetragonal transition. This is accounted for by classical coupling of macroscopic spontaneous strains with the tilt order parameter in the same manner as occurs in SrTiO3. A peak in the acoustic loss occurs a few degrees below Tc and is interpreted in terms of initially mobile ferroelastic twin walls, which rapidly become pinned with further lowering of temperature. This contrasts with the properties of twin walls in SrTiO3, which remain mobile down to at least 15 K. No further anomalies were observed that might be indicative of strain coupling to any additional phase transitions above 10 K. A slight anomaly in the shear elastic constants, independent of frequency and without any associated acoustic loss, was found at ∼140 K. It marks a change from elastic stiffening to softening with falling temperature and perhaps provides evidence for coupling between strain and local fluctuations of dipoles related to the incipient ferroelectric transition. An increase in acoustic loss below ∼80 K is attributed to the development of dynamical magnetic clustering ahead of the known antiferromagnetic ordering transition at ∼5.5 K. Detection of these elastic anomalies serves to emphasize that coupling of strain with tilting, ferroelectric, and magnetic order parameters is likely to be a permeating influence in determining the structure, stability, properties, and behavior of EuTiO3.


Abstract. Much work has been done on quality of geoinformation and interoperability between BIM and GIS. However, the intersection of the two – quality control of the conversion between BIM and GIS – remains uncharted. This discussion paper, based on empirical results, is one of the first steps towards mapping out a framework on errors and quality control in the context of BIM–GIS interoperability. In our work we focus on the conversion from IFC to CityGML, identifying several systematic errors potentially common and/or exclusive to the context of BIM–GIS conversion. Besides exposing several faults pertaining to IFC-sourced 3D city models, we discuss their taxonomy and their potential impact when engaged in applications. This paper is also relevant with respect to the growing popularity of conversion between IFC and CityGML, potentially aiding others to avoid many of the errors that can occur in the process and establishing directions to set up a benchmark to assess the performance of the interoperability workflows.


The Software Communications Architecture (SCA) specification defines a framework that allows modular software components to be developed and assembled to build larger radio applications. The specification allows for these components to be distributed among a set of computing hardware and to be connected by standard interfaces. This research aims to build a spatially distributed SCA application for the Open Source SCA Implementation: Embedded (OSSIE) implementation using low-cost Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) hardware. The system collects signals from multiple spatially distributed collection devices and use those signals to compute precision estimates for the location of emitters using time difference of arrival (TDOA) computations. Several OSSIE components and tools are developed to support this research. Results are presented showing the capabilities of the geolocation system.


Helios 2.0 is an open-source web-based end-to-end verifiable electronic voting system, suitable for use in low-coercion environments. In this paper, we analyse ballot secrecy and discover a vulnerability which allows an adversary to compromise the privacy of voters. This vulnerability has been successfully exploited to break privacy in a mock election using the current Helios implementation. Moreover, the feasibility of an attack is considered in the context of French legislative elections and, based upon our findings, we believe it constitutes a real threat to ballot secrecy in such settings. Finally, we present a fix and show that our solution satisfies a formal definition of ballot secrecy using the applied pi calculus.


About a year ago, I took on the best imaginary job out there: CEO of CryoThaw, the finest company that never existed. I had come across a tweet announcing the 2017 Young Entrepreneurs Scheme competition, sponsored by the University of Nottingham with partners from the U.K. government and industry, in which teams form hypothetical startups based on feasible scientific ideas. As a graduate student unsure of my career plans, I was excited to explore outside academia. I also saw it as a way to develop my leadership skills. So, with the support of my supervisors and funders, I decided to give it a go. I recruited three other students, and we chose to focus on improving organ transplantation. I thought I had everything under control. I couldn't have been more wrong.

![Figure][1]

ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER

> "Team chemistry took off as we spoke our minds, good and bad."

They say successful teams are part art, part science. Initially, we were neither. We were just four students with remarkably different personalities struggling to work toward a shared goal. I had allocated tasks based on each team member's skills, but I confused delegation with leadership and failed to motivate the team to work together. Our initial meetings went in circles—repetitive conversation with no clarity and a lot of time wasted rehashing previous decisions—and frequently ended in turmoil. As a result, the project started with frustration and animosity. The tension between being perceived as my teammates' competent CEO and who I actually was—their grad school buddy with no prior leadership experience or training—became intolerable. I considered opting out of the whole thing.

After a few weeks, a teammate confessed to me that he found our meetings stressful, too. I finally grasped that this culture was unsettling for everyone, not just me. "Oh boy, I suck!" I thought. Something needed to change.

I turned to my go-to tool for working through my thoughts and seeking clarity: I wrote in my notebook. I reflected on our performance and how each team member was an asset. I articulated examples where everyone, myself included, could do better. I thanked them for pushing me. When I saw that what I had written actually made sense, I decided that there was nothing to do but email it to my team as what I called an "open letter from your CEO." Maybe it would help us find a way forward, because otherwise we were going nowhere.

For a day, I could hardly bear to check my email. Then I cut myself some slack and decided I could feel proud of this appreciative, frank, vulnerable email. It felt like progress. Soon, my teammates called and thanked me for what I had written. They were relieved to learn that they were not the only ones struggling. Ultimately, the email served as a bond. And it taught me that being a leader is all about authenticity.

From there, team chemistry took off as we spoke our minds, good and bad. I found my voice as a leader, fostering an environment where we acknowledged our individual strengths and weaknesses, and where I wasn't expected to have all the answers but could nevertheless provide guidance. We read and watched everything we could find about heart transplantation, learned from webinars about startups, networked with experienced entrepreneurs, contacted national health services for data, and arranged consultations with medical experts. Then, one day, a teammate entered the meeting with his hands full of papers and his breath shallow with excitement. "This cryopreservation thing is wicked!" he exclaimed. Soon after, we came up with CryoThaw Heart, a gold nanoparticle and laser–based approach to rapidly freeze and thaw hearts. We put together our business plan, pitched it, got selected for the finals—and won our division as well as the people's choice award.

Looking back, it wasn't just a matter of how successful we turned out to be; it was also how far from successful we were at first. Our initial failures made me realize how being a leader starts with being your better self. Heartbreak doesn't have to be the end of the world. In many ways, it can be a beginning.

 [1]: pending:yes


Soil salinity is a serious threat to agricultural ecological environment and agriculture sustainability. Ever increasing salinity negatively affects processes such as plant growth and development, ultimately causing diminished economic yield and quality of production, and it might cause a worldwide famine in the future. Thus, helping plants adapt to saline soils and increasing their yield and quality is a must. Our study focused on the enhancing role of exogenously applied folic acid (FA) in mitigation of toxicity caused by salt (NaCl). Barley seeds were pre-treated with 50 µ M FA for 24 h and then exposed to salt. Morphological and anatomical changes in seed germination and seedling growth stages were compared between different treatments of salt in laboratory conditions. Adverse effects of salt in both germination and seedling growth stages depended on the concentration of salt treatment (0.0, 0.25, 0.275, 0.30, 0.325 and 0.35 M). It was shown that the application of FA effectively alleviated the salt-induced inhibition, and reduced the negative effects of salt on germination (germination index and vigour index), seedling growth (radicle and coleoptile lengths, fresh weight) and leaf (stomata and epidermis number, stomatal index, stomata sizes of adaxial and abaxial surfaces) parameters. Moreover, FA elevated all examined parameters of barley also under non-stress conditions. Especially, germination and vigour indices were significantly higher than the control. Our results suggest that exogenous FA is involved in the resistance of barley to salt-stress.


p53R2 is a newly identified subunit of ribonucleotide reductase (RR) and plays a crucial role in supplying precursors for DNA repair in a p53-dependent manner. In our current work, all three human RR subunit proteins (p53R2, hRRM2, and hRRM1) were prokaryotically expressed and highly purified. Using an in vitro [H]CDP reduction assay, the activity of RR reconstituted with either p53R2 or hRRM2 was found to be time, concentration, and hRRM1 dependent. The kinetic activity of p53R2-containing RR was about 20–50% lower than that of hRRM2containing RR. Using a synthetic heptapeptide to inhibit RR activity, it was shown that p53R2 bound to hRRM1 through the same COOHterminal heptapeptide as hRRM2. However, hRRM2 had a 4.76-fold higher binding affinity for hRRM1 than p53R2, which may explain the reduced RR activity of p53R2 relative to hRRM2. Of interest, p53R2 was 158-fold more susceptible to the iron chelator deferoxamine mesylate than hRRM2, although the iron content of the two proteins determined by atomic absorption spectrometer was almost the same. To the contrary, p53R2 was 2.50-fold less sensitive than hRRM2 to the radical scavenger hydroxyurea, whereas EPR showed similar spectra of the tyrosyl radical in two proteins. Triapine, a new RR inhibitor, was equally potent for p53R2 and hRRM2. These inhibition studies showed that the iron center and tyrosyl radical are involved in RR activity for both p53R2 and hRRM2. The susceptibility differences to RR inhibitors between p53R2 and hRRM2 may lead to a new direction in drug design for human cancer treatment.


Galaxy–galaxy mergers and close interactions have long been regarded as a viable mechanism for channeling gas toward the central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of galaxies which are triggered as active galactic nuclei (AGNs). AGN pairs, in which the central SMBHs of a galaxy merger are both active, are expected to be common from such events. We conduct a systematic study of 1286 AGN pairs at with line-of-sight velocity offsets Δv < 600 km s−1 and projected separations rp < 100 h−170 kpc, selected from the Seventh Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This AGN pair sample was drawn from 138,070 AGNs optically identified based on diagnostic emission line ratios and/or line widths. The fraction of AGN pairs with 5 h−170 kpc ≲ rp < 100 h−170 kpc among all spectroscopically selected AGNs at 0.02 < z < 0.16 is 3.6% after correcting for SDSS spectroscopic incompleteness; ∼30% of these pairs show morphological tidal features in their SDSS images, and the fraction becomes ≳ 80% for pairs with the brightest nuclei. Our sample increases the number of known AGN pairs on these scales by more than an order of magnitude. We study their AGN and host-galaxy star formation properties in a companion paper.


A description is given of the Intel i860 processor, which was designed for use in low-cost 3D graphics workstations. These products need high performance to support the operating system, simulations, transforms, and shading calculations. The integer unit provides high performance for Unix and other operating systems, the floating-point unit provides high throughput for computationally intensive applications and the processor includes 3D graphics hardware. The sustained high computation rates are supported by on-chip caches. The processor is supported by compilers and other development tools. The i860 processor will enable cost-effective interactive scientific visualization. This includes not only the numeric computation and 3D matrix transforms but also the pixel-intensive shading calculations that normally are either very costly or very slow. Integrating all these capabilities into one component allows design of a desktop unit or a single add-in card for existing personal computers.<<ETX>>


David Sifry's latest quarterly report on the state of the Blogosphere states that ``the size of the Blogosphere continues to double every six months'. According to this report there are 33.5 million weblogs and many of these are actively posting. As the Blogosphere continues to grow, finding good quality feeds is becoming increasingly difficult. In this paper we present an analysis of the feeds subscribed by a set of publicly listed Bloglines users. Using the subscription information, we describe techniques to induce an intuitive set of topics for feeds and blogs. These topic categories, and their associated feeds, are key to a number of blog-related applications, including the compilation of a list of feeds that matter for a given topic. The site FTM! (Feeds That Matter) was implemented to help users browse and subscribe to an automatically generated catalog of popular feeds for different topics.


BACKGROUND
GPs are increasingly expected to meet the needs of patients concerned about their risk of inherited breast cancer, but may lack skills or confidence to use complex management guidelines. We developed an evidence-based, multifaceted intervention intended to promote confidence and skills in this area.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention in improving GP confidence in managing patients concerned about genetic risk of breast cancer.

METHODS

DESIGN
Cluster randomized controlled trial.

SETTING
General practices in the Grampian region of Scotland.

SUBJECTS
GPs and the patients they referred for genetic counselling for risk of breast cancer.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
GPs' self-reported confidence in four activities related to genetics; rates of referral of patients at elevated genetic risk; and referred patients' understanding of cancer risk factors.

RESULTS
No statistically significant differences were observed between intervention and control arms in the primary or secondary outcomes. A possible effect of the intervention on the proportion of referred patients who were at elevated risk could not be discounted. Only a small proportion of intervention GPs attended the educational session, were aware or the software, or made use of it in practice.

CONCLUSIONS
No convincing evidence of the effectiveness of the intervention was found, probably reflecting barriers to its use in routine practice.


Aerogels of nanocellulose (NC) prepared by freeze‐drying of cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) hydrogels and followed by impregnation with methylaluminoxane serve as nanoporous organic supports for immobilizing single site iron catalysts such as bisiminopyridine iron(II) complexes. The resulting catalyst systems, exploiting renewable biomaterials as organic supports, are highly active in low pressure ethylene polymerization. They afford simultaneous control of high density polyethylene (HDPE) particle morphology and facile NC dispersion within the HDPE matrix. In the early stage of ethylene polymerization, mesoscopic shape replication and NC‐mediated templating yield platelets containing an NC core and a HDPE shell, as confirmed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of virgin polyethylene powders. Opposite to conventionally dried CNF hydrogels, forming large agglomerates, this facile NC aerogel‐mediated in situ NC/HDPE nanocomposite formation is vastly superior to melt compounding of HDPE with NC, failing to produce such fine NC dispersions. On increasing NC content to 3.0 wt%, both Young's modulus (+50%) and tensile strength (+40%) increase at the expense of elongation at break (−80%). According to the SEM analysis of NC/HDPE morphology, the dispersion of NC nanosheets together with the in situ formation of "shish‐kebab" polyethylene fiber‐like structures accounted for HDPE matrix reinforcement.


ABSTRACT One of the commodities that became the mainstay of Indonesia's exports is commodities pepper. In Indonesia, many pepper plants grown in the provinces of Lampung, Bangka, West Kalimantan and Aceh. Pepper plants in several regencies / cities in Aceh province. However, the development of commodity pepper planting area tends to decrease in almost every district. Aceh Besar district as a granary, pepper production in Aceh province also decreased acreage planting area. This condition is very contradictory because demand and prices of pepper are high but has not been used optimally. This is a reflection of the low motivation of farmers in pepper farming. The purpose of this study was to determine the level of motivation pepper farmers and determine the factors related to the motivation of farmers. The data analysis method used is Likert measurement scale systems and Spearman rank correlation. The data used are primary data time series period 2008-2013. Based on test results using a Likert scale of measurement that the level of motivation of farmers in pepper farming in Aceh Besar district in the high category. Based on the factors that have been tested using Spearman rank correlation, it is known that factors related to the level of motivation of farmers in pepper farming is the motivation of farmers with the availability of inputs, farmers motivated by cosmopolitan nature of farmers, and the motivation of farmers by supporting institutions. While revenue and service agencies there are not to relation with the motivation of pepper farmers. Keywords: Pepper Farm, Farmer Motivation Levels, External Factors, Spearman Rank Correlation


Rigorous research is crucial to effective work with young people and increasingly youth practitioners need to be able to develop, review and evidence their work using a variety of research and assessment tools. This text equips students and practitioners with a thorough understanding of research design, practice and dissemination, as well as approaches to evidence-based practice.

A clear practice framework informs the book, outlining the significance of research to youth work, especially in relation to designing and developing services for young people. Research and Research Methods for Youth Practitioners:

Analyses the research/practitioner role
Explores the ethical context of research in youth work
Offers a thorough analysis of key methodological questions in research in practice
Provides a guide to data collection and analysis
Presents five principal research strategies for youth work: ethnographic work and visual methods; interviewing and evaluation; surveys and evaluation; the use of secondary data and documentary analysis; and researching virtual and online settings
Discusses the implications of research for work with young people as well as its dissemination.
Written by experienced researchers and practitioner-researchers, each chapter in this accessible textbook includes an overview, a critical discussion of the pros and cons of the particular method or approach, a case study, a practice-based task, a summary and suggestions for further reading. This textbook is invaluable for student and practising youth workers. It is also a useful reference for other practitioners working with young people.


Want to look at the stars but don't know where to begin? Celestron LLC, in Torrance, Calif., claims its NexStar 11 GPS Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope will do the work for you. When activated, the telescope fixes its location using triangulation made possible by data from the Global Positioning System. Next it determines which stars and planets could be visible from the viewer's location at that particular moment from a database of some 40 000 such objects stored in the telescope's handheld controller. Select an object with the controller and the telescope automatically points itself in the right direction. Connecting a laptop computer to the scope makes way for even more features than the controller's two-line liquidcrystal display permits; standard star-charting programs can create maps of the sky on the laptop screen based on the telescope's location. If the user clicks on an object on the star chart, the NexStar 11 points itself right at it. The telescope has a carbon-fiber optical tube, which should reduce temperature-related expansions and contractions that throw off focus. And for those who want to capture what they see for posterity, the Nexstar 11 has an accessory port for attaching such add-ons as a digital camera.


The performance of niching based or related evolutionary algorithms clearly depends on problem properties as e.g. the number of local optima of a problem. We assume there must be more such properties currently not taken into account and, following from practical experience, suggest two more, namely basin size contrast (BSC), the size relation of the largest and the smallest basin, and global to local optima contrast (GLC), the height relation of the global and an average local optimum. We investigate the effect of these problem properties on the performance of different basin identification methods (as subtasks of niching algorithms), namely nearest-better clustering, detect-multimodal, and Jarvis-Patrick clustering, individually, or in combinations. Employing an existing problem generator that enables complete control and knowledge of basins, instances are generated and validated according to predefined property values and the basin identification performance data is modeled in order to detect similarities that may be interpreted as effects of the stated properties. We also give recommendations concerning usage of basin identification methods in different situations. Our approach is strongly related to the recently suggested general idea of exploratory landscape analysis (ELA).


We numerically simulate ensembles of SU(2) Yang-Mills dimeron solutions with a statistical weight determined by the classical action and perform a comprehensive analysis of their properties. In particular, we examine the extent to which these ensembles capture topological and confinement properties of the Yang-Mills vacuum. This further allows us to test the classic picture of meron-induced quark confinement as triggered by dimeron dissociation. At small bare couplings, spacial, topological-charge and color correlations among the dimerons generate a short-range order which screens topological charges. With increasing coupling this order weakens rapidly, however, in part because the dimerons gradually dissociate into their meron constituents. Monitoring confinement properties by evaluating Wilson-loop expectation values, we find the growing disorder due to these progressively liberated merons to generate a finite and (with the coupling) increasing string tension. The short-distance behavior of the static quark-antiquark potential, on the other hand, is dominated by small, "instanton-like" dimerons. String tension, action density and topological susceptibility of the dimeron ensembles in the physical coupling region turn out to be of the order of standard values. Hence the above results demonstrate without reliance on weak-coupling or low-density approximations that the dissociating dimeron component in the Yang-Mills vacuum can indeed produce a meron-populated confining phase. The density of coexisting, hardly dissociated and thus instanton-like dimerons seems to remain large enough, on the other hand, to reproduce much of the additional phenomenology successfully accounted for by non-confining instanton vacuum models. Hence dimeron ensembles should provide an efficient basis for a rather complete description of the Yang-Mills vacuum.


Background Early diagnosis is vital to HIV control. γδ T cells play critical roles in viral infections, but their activation in acute HIV infected patients and follow up to 18 months has not been described. Methods Changes in γδ T cells, including subsets, function and activation, in treated and untreated acutely HIV-infected patients (n = 79) were compared by cytotoxicity assay and flow cytometry with healthy controls (n = 21) at month 0, 6, 12 and 18. Results In acutely HIV-infected patients, Vδ1 cell proportion was elevated (P = 0.027) with Vδ2 population reduced (P = 0.002). Effector and central memory γδ T cell factions were decreased (P = 0.006 and P = 0.001, respectively), while proportion of terminal γδ T cells increased (P = 0.002). γδ T cell cytotoxicity was compromised over time. Fraction of IL-17-producing cells increased (P = 0.008), and IFN-γ-producing cells were unaffected (P = 0.115). Elevation of a microbial translocation marker, sCD14, was associated with γδ T cell activation (P = 0.001), which increased in a time-dependent manner, correlating with CD4/CD8 T cell activation set-points and CD4 counts. Antiretroviral therapy did not affect these changes. Conclusions γδ T cell subpopulation and functions change significantly in acute HIV infection and over time. Early γδ T cell activation was associated with CD4/CD8 T cell activation set-points, which predict AIDS progression. Therefore, γδ T cell activation represents a potential surrogate marker of AIDS progression.


A gas-accepting microwave ion source built at Chalk River Laboratories, Canada has been tested and further developed at NOSAMS. The source uses microwave energy and a continuously flowing stream of gas to sustain a stable plasma from which positive ions are extracted. With a CO2 gas flow of about 230µL/min the ion source yields 12C+ beams of up to 1 mA. After conversion to negative carbon ions by passage through a magnesium vapor charge exchange canal about 0.08 mA 12C- beams are obtained.A number of experiments performed at NOSAMS have shown that the source is able to accept a wide range of continuous flow systems. Here, we describe a programmed-temperature combustion system which is interfaced to the microwave ion source via a water-removal system, open-split device, and flow-limiting capillary. The combustion system is comprised of two reactors of which the first is temperature controlled within a range between room temperature and 900°C. This reactor also contains a sample chamber with a usable volume of at least 5 cm3. The second reactor is operated at a constant temperature of about 850°C and is used for the oxidation of all carbon produced by sample heating. Argon is used as a carrier gas to transport effluents to the ion source. First results of operation will be presented and discussed.


STUDY OBJECTIVES--To assess the feasibility of estimating intestinal transit time in the general population using self recorded data on stool form, frequency of defecation, and the interdefecatory time interval. DESIGN--Prospective measurement of bowel function. SETTING--Bristol, Avon, UK between 1987 and 1989. SUBJECTS--Subjects were drawn from 1897 people who comprised 72.2% of a stratified random sample of all men aged 40-69 years and women aged 25-69 years on the lists of 19 general medical practitioners. Altogether 1561 subjects (59.4%) recorded bowel function and a subsample of 98 (50 women and 48 men) had intestinal transit time measured. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS--The interdefecatory time interval and stool form (on a validated 1-6 scale sensitive to transit time) were recorded prospectively from three consecutive defecations. In the subsample the mean intestinal transit time was measured simultaneously using a four marker, two stool x ray technique. Multiple regression analysis was used to assess the extent to which intestinal transit time could be predicted from the defecatory data. The formulas obtained were then applied to the whole study population. In women, intestinal transit time was best predicted by the formula 103-1.23 (DF)--4.69 (SFS)+0.638 (IDTI), where DF is the stated defecation frequency per week, IDTI is the interdefecatory time interval, and SFS is the sum of the three stool form scores, for which the correlation coefficient r = 0.736. For men the intestinal transit time = 79-1.33 (DF)--1.88 (SFS)+0.329 (IDTI), for which the correlation coefficient r = 0.541. The predicted intestinal transit time was longer in women than men at equivalent ages. Women of childbearing age had longer transit times than older women. CONCLUSIONS--Observations made by untrained subjects can be used to estimate intestinal transit time in epidemiological studies. A gender related difference in transit time exists.


The warming trend for the entire globe (1850 to 2005) is 0.04°C decade–1. A specific warming period started around 1980 and continues until the present. This warming also occurred in the Baltic Sea catchment, which lies between maritime temperate and continental subarctic climate zones. A detailed study of climate variability and the associated impact on the Baltic Sea area for the period 1958 to 2009 revealed that the recent changes in the warming trend are associated with changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic. The number and pathways of deep cyclones changed considerably in line with an eastward shift of the North Atlantic Oscillation centers of action. There is a seasonal shift of strong wind events from autumn to winter and early spring. Since the late 1980s, the winter season (DJFM, i.e. December to March) of the Baltic Sea area has tended to be warmer, with less ice coverage and warmer sea surface temperatures, especially pronounced in the northern parts of the Baltic Sea. There is a tendency for increased cloud cover and precipitation in regions that are exposed to westerlies and less cloud coverage at the leeward side of the Scandinavian Mountains and over the Baltic Sea Basin.


December 2015 saw the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords for Bosnia and Hercegovina. Twenty years on the six non-EU countries of the Western Balkans (Bosnia and Hercegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia, all from former Yugoslavia, plus Albania) aspire to join the Union. The article examines the geographical, linguistic, and historical currents that shaped the region and looks at themes from the last twenty five years that resonate more broadly in international crises today: confronting aggression, the impact of sanctions, "liberal imperialism," weak institutions, the stress of war, identity confusion, and the future of Europe. The article concludes that to avoid a return to violence in the next 20 years, the region needs to be part of wider European governance. For this to be achieved, we need more than two day summits but more pro-active engagement from all sides perhaps returning to the 19th century model of a Congress.


If we are to live in this extensively interconnected world we need to find ways to understand the edges of democracy – those places where people and lives are moved to the margins and silenced – and to provide new ways to enact citizenship in its multiple locations with and beyond nation states. Drawing on theoretical understandings of deliberative democracy as a challenge to conventional models of liberal democracy, and the praxis of conflict transformation, this article frames processes of social justice as a platform for citizenship education. It examines the way that addressing conflict involves understanding the complexity of social change within a globalized and globalizing world. The conclusions provide conceptualizations for co-creating educational processes of engagement that work to provide expansive inclusion.


This case report illustrates hip joint pain caused by electromagnetic waves following an operation for a complex humerus fracture. The subject was a 22-year-old woman. The patient complained of pain in her left hip joint and discomfort, particularly while walking. The subject suffered a fracture in her left upper arm in a traffic accident approximately 3 months previously. She underwent an operation wherein seven titanium bolts were used to fix the humerus. The operation was deemed successful and the prognosis of the operation was also good; however, approximately 3 months after the operation, she developed pain and discomfort in her left hip joint, particularly while walking. Symptoms were improved by covering the surgical field with aluminum foil, blocking electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic waves attracted by the titanium bolts may have induced pain.


We develop a decreasing sequence of upper bounds on the expectation of a convex function. The n-th term in the sequence uses moments and cross-moments of up to degree n from the underlying random vector. Our work has application to a class of two-stage stochastic programs with recourse. The objective function of such a model can defy computation when: (i) the underlying distribution is assumed to be known only through a limited number of moments or (ii) the function is computationally intractable, even though the distribution is known. A tractable approximating model arises by replacing the objective function by one of our bounding elements. We justify this approach by showing that as n grows, solutions of the order-n approximation solve the true stochastic program.


Sensing stereoscopic depth requires that image points be binocularly matched. Therein lies the correspondence problem: how are true matches distinguished from false ones? Conventional algorithms select true matches on the basis of correlated features and adherence to natural statistics, while rejecting false matches as noise. We propose here an alternative that uses the signals present in false matches to delineate the true solution. When visualized in a Keplerian array, binocular matches are symmetrically reflected about an axis that represents a potential solution. Surface properties such as slant and curvature are encoded the transformation that describes how one-half of the matches reflects across the symmetry axis onto the other. To implement this strategy, we convolved left and right images with Gaussian kernels of various standard deviations (spatial frequencies). We then produced Keplerian arrays by comparing filter responses across left and right spatial-frequency combinations. Responses that are minimally different across the eyes gave rise to regions of high symmetry; response position within the Keplerian array gave the location of a solution in space. Solutions possessing natural surface regularities consistently showed minimal differences for one left : right spatial frequency ratio, which is correlated with the local surface slant. As a result, combining responses within particular ratio families can distinguish true matches from false ones. True matches tend to be elongated and smoothly contoured, with symmetry preserved across all members of a ratio family from low to high spatial-frequency combinations. This approach is efficient; preprocessing is minimal since no feature extraction is involved. It can be implemented in machine vision to solve the correspondence problem for depth sensing algorithms. It is robust when tested against perfectly camouflaged surfaces in random dot stereograms and consistent with physiological data showing that false match signals are propagated to higher cortical areas along the dorsal pathway. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


With increasing wind power penetration more and more volatile and weather dependent energy is fed into the German electricity system. To manage the risk of windless days and transfer revenue risk from wind turbine owners to investors wind power derivatives were introduced. These insurance-like securities (ILS) allow to hedge the risk of unstable wind power production on exchanges like Nasdaq and European Energy Exchange. These products have been priced before using risk neutral pricing techniques. We present a modern and powerful methodology to model weather derivatives with very skewed underlyings incorporating techniques from extreme event modelling to tune seasonal volatility and compare transformed Gaussian and non-Gaussian CARMA(p; q) models. Our results indicate that the transformed Gaussian CARMA(p; q) model is preferred over the non-Gaussian alternative with Levy increments. Out-of-sample backtesting results show good performance wrt burn analysis employing smooth Market Price of Risk (MPR) estimates based on NASDAQ weekly and monthly German wind power futures prices and German wind power utilisation as underlying. A seasonal MPR of a smile-shape is observed, with positive values in times of high volatility, e.g. winter months, and negative values, in times of low volatility and production, e.g. in summer months. We conclude that producers pay premiums to insure stable revenue steams, while investors pay premiums when weather risk is high.


The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)-1995 and its successor, TIMSS-1999, provide education researchers, policymakers, and practitioners with rich, comparative data designed to help better understand the performance of educational systems. As such, TIMSS is a valuable tool in current efforts to improve mathematics and science instruction and to educate students in the United States to global standards of excellence. What can we learn from this ambitious and unprecedented international effort to provide meaningful, useful data for the reform of mathematics and science instruction? It is important to reflect on this question as we assess the promise and challenges of using TIMSS-type data in particular, as well as the broader national effort to use data to guide school improvement in general. The first in CPRE's series of Policy Briefs about TIMSS (Dunson, 2000) looked at initial efforts to make use of TIMSS-1995 data. In this Policy Brief, we take a closer look at the ways in which TIMSS-1995 and TIMSS-1999 data have helped to inform changes in policy and practice as schools, districts, and states respond to the call for improvement in mathematics and science achievement. This Policy Brief was prepared to complement CPRE's effort to address this question in a TIMSS Policy Forum, held in Washington, DC, in May 2002. This forum convened TIMSS Benchmarking jurisdiction representatives, teachers, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and technical assistance providers to share successful strategies and ongoing challenges in taking full advantage of TIMSS data. This Policy Brief is based primarily on data collected in structured interviews with Using TIMSS to Inform Policy and Practice at the Local Level By Deborah I. Nelson administrators and teachers in 10 TIMSS Benchmarking jurisdictions (referred to as "Benchmarkers"). These jurisdictions within the United States participated in the TIMSS1999 Benchmarking Study, committing their own resources and time in order to receive data from a representative sample of their own eighth-grade students. TIMSS Benchmarkers thus have international comparative data on their students' achievement and their system variables. Our purposive sample included equal representation from states, districts, and consortia with a variety of demographic characteristics. While TIMSS data have been used nationwide, Benchmarking jurisdictions are notable for their existing commitment to reform of mathematics and science programs and for the fact that they have access to their own local TIMSS1999 data. This Brief is designed to facilitate networking and continued learning from TIMSS; it focuses on Benchmarkers' experiences, but is relevant for anyone interested in using TIMSS to improve mathematics and science instruction. Strategies are reported in summary form. Actual TIMSS data and analysis are not discussed in detail, but related references are provided at the end of this Brief.


The study presented is a research through design of the motivational, story sharing effects of smell, within the context of addiction care. This investigation led to the co-design of the Smell Memory Kit: a kit using eight selected smells as motivational elements to evoke and share autobiographical episodic stories among addiction care clients. A pilot evaluation study with clients (N = 14) of the Kit showed the potential of its effect in evoking and sharing episodic autobiographical stories. Moreover, qualitative analysis of the data links the distinct smells to four qualities of the autobiographical stories (i.e., emotion, clarity, specificity, and age). The research outcomes are promising in depicting the use of smells as sense data to effectively encode practices and experiences which can later be retrieved as simulations through an encounter/exposure to an odour. With regard to design, the present study shows that smells can perfectly function as a design material for storytelling, and more specifically as promising game elements in persuasive game design, motivating clients to elicit and share rich episodic memories.


We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1 matched for chronological age (CA). Phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory were assessed respectively through a phonemic similarity judgment task and through a word span task measuring phonological similarity effects. To assess the use of sublexical and lexical reading procedures, children read pseudowords and irregular words aloud. Results showed that cued speech improved performance on both the phonemic awareness and the reading tasks but not on the phonological short-term memory task. In phonemic awareness and reading, CS+ children obtained accuracy and rapidity scores similar to CA controls, whereas CS- children obtained lower scores than hearing controls. Nevertheless, in phonological short-term memory task, the phonological similarity effect of both CI groups was similar. Overall, these results support the use of cued speech to improve phonemic awareness and reading skills in CI children.