Succeed in statistics with EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN USING ANOVA with accompanying STUDENT SUITE CD-ROM! With a practical approach, this statistics text provides you with instructions on how to perform both simple and complex analyses by hand, through regression, and through SPSS and SAS so that you will be prepared to effectively design and analyze research projects. Examples and exercises found throughout the text help clarify difficult concepts. Use the accompanying CD-ROM and the book-specific website to access data sets for these examples and exercises. All chapters follow a similar outline allowing you to readily and easily find the material you are looking for.


Reduced pregnane neurosteroids such as allopregnanolone and pregnanolone are potent neuromodulators able to affect a number of membrane receptors, including gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)(A), N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA), 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT)(3), and sigma(1) receptors. The present study used a drug discrimination procedure to assess further the receptor effects of pregnanolone in vivo. Rats were trained to discriminate 5 mg/kg pregnanolone from saline in a two-lever operant task maintained by food reinforcement. The opiate agonist morphine and the negative GABA(A) modulator dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate did not substitute for pregnanolone. All of the GABA(A) positive modulators tested (allopregnanolone, epipregnanolone, androsterone, pentobarbital, midazolam, and zolpidem) dose dependently substituted for pregnanolone. The direct GABA-site agonists 4,5,6,7-tetrahydroisoxazolo[4,5-c]pyridin-3-ol and muscimol failed to substitute for pregnanolone. Ethanol and the sigma(1) receptor agonist SKF 10047 fully substituted for pregnanolone, and the NMDA antagonist MK-801 partially substituted for pregnanolone. The 5-HT(3) antagonist tropisetron did not substitute at any dose tested. The 5-HT(3) agonist SR 57227A reached full substitution, whereas the other 5-HT(3) agonist tested, m-chlorophenylbiguanide, produced partial substitution. These results suggest that positive GABA(A) modulation, but not direct agonism, confers a discriminative stimulus effect similar to pregnanolone. Additionally, antagonism of NMDA receptors and activation of 5-HT(3) and sigma(1) receptors modulate stimulus effects similar to the pregnanolone cue. Overall, the data suggest that pregnanolone produces discriminative stimulus effects representative of a wide-spectrum sedative hypnotic.


A story of one child's growth in writing, "Lessons from a Child" explains how teachers can work with children, helping them to teach themselves and each other. Matters of classroom management, methods for helping children to use the peer conference, and ways mini-lessons can extend children's understanding of good writing are all covered here. Most important, the sequences of writing development and growth are thoroughly discussed.


Pricing accommodation is a complex process. This study attempted to provide guidelines for determining competitive prices for hotels and guesthouses in South Africa, the two types of accommodation that hold the largest share of the South African market. A survey was conducted in cooperation with the major role players in South Africa's accommodation sector: the South African Tourism Service Association (SATSA), the Federated Hospitality Association of Southern Africa (FEDHASA), and the Tourism Grading Council of South Africa (TGCSA). A total of 2,288 questionnaires were sent out via e-mail and 247 were returned completed. The significance of the mean price differences of the star grading levels was tested, and hotels and guesthouses were compared using an independent t test. A significant difference was found between the prices of hotels and guesthouses, especially in the five-star category. The study also revealed a 20% difference between the prices of the star categories. The pricing guidelines provided here can sustain competitiveness with growing profitability.


This document describes ALPS, a data format for defining simple
descriptions of application-level semantics, similar in complexity to
HTML microformats. An ALPS document can be used as a profile to
explain the application semantics of a document with an application-
agnostic media type (such as HTML, HAL, Collection+JSON, Siren, etc.).
This increases the reusability of profile documents across media
types. Editorial Note (To be removed by RFC Editor) Distribution of
this document is unlimited. Comments should be sent to the IETF Media-
Types mailing list (see [1]).


Magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) and absorption spectra of multiferroic HoFe3(BO3)4 of 5I8 → 5F2 and 5F3 f–f transitions are measured at T = 90 K. The absorption spectra are expanded into Lorentzian components, and the transition intensities are obtained. The Zeeman splitting of some transitions is determined using the MCD and absorption spectra. The MCD spectra and Zeeman splitting are theoretically analyzed in the free-atom |J, ±MJ〉 wave function approximation by using the concept of a crystalline quantum number. An inconsistency is revealed when this concept is applied to ions with an integer moment, and a modification of the concept is proposed. Anomalously intense vibronic repetitions of electronic transitions from excited sublevels of the ground multiplet are found.


The purpose of this study is to perform a literature review of risk management in megaprojects and systematize the risks studied in the literature. A systematic search of the main databases has been performed. The contributions include: (1) a bibliometric analysis of articles; (2) the systematization and classification into nine categories of the risks found in a content analysis of the articles; and (3) the identification of possible areas of interest for research and practice. Risks are comprehensively categorized to assist practitioners during the identification phase, while potential areas for future lines of research are presented for academics.


Observations of wave motion are described, particularly of the horizontal particle velocities, up to a maximum of 25 m from the shoreline on Slapton Beach, Start Bay. For the first time on a natural beach, the observed velocities reveal directly the presence of short period edge waves, modes of wave motion trapped to the shoreline by refraction. These edge waves occurred at the first subharmonic (σ/2) of the incident wave frequency σ, and their exponential decay in amplitude with distance from the shoreline was consistent with edge waves of mode number zero with a longshore wavelength of 34 ± 6m. The implications of these observations are discussed in the light of recent laboratory experiments and theories of edge wave generation, and a possible swash interaction mechanism for generating subharmonic wave motion on Slapton beach is described. A steady longshore current prevented these subharmonic edge waves from forming cuspate or crescentic features in the nearshore beach material. Small shoreline cusps observed on Slapton beach on other occasions were consistent with edge waves at the frequency of the incident waves themselves.


Multinational corporations now look toward China with both trepidation and anticipation.The speed and scope of Chinese economic growth is changing the global distribution of power and resources, possibly to the detriment of the major industrial powers. But this same transformation presents tremendous opportunities for companies who understand China well enough to leverage both its accomplishments and its deep-seated problems for corporate benefit. Longtime China scholar Kenneth Lieberthal brings to bear a unique combination of experiences as former top government official, political scientist, professor of international corporate strategy, and consultant. In Managing the China Challenge , he draws on his deep understanding of China's political and economic systems and the priorities of local and national leaders to illuminate the strategies foreign companies must master to succeed in the Middle Kingdom. In straightforward language, using numerous concrete examples to support his ideas and recommendations, Lieberthal cogently presents not only how to benefit from doing business in China, but also how to avoid the serious risks that the endeavor entails. The implications Lieberthal lays out for corporate strategy are wide-ranging and critically important.


This article analyzes the famous Mexican website El Blog del Narco as symptomatic of the type of publicity common in contemporary Mexico and the manner in which violence has structured the citizen journalism sector of the Mexican blogosphere. The article interrogates how the blog's mode of production and its reliance on anonymity has propelled the bloggers—in particular, an anonymous blogger who refers herself as "Lucy"—to the level of civic heroes and how a global community of sympathizers made sense of her actions. In this violent context, Lucy has used anonymity as a necessary mechanism to construct a place of trust and safety. In the process, Lucy has embodied the contradictory figure of the anonymous hero. The analysis is indebted to Seyla Benhabib's classic interrogation of Hanna Arendt's notions of publicity—in particular, Arendt's ideas of heroicity and self-disclosure.


Regulation of Financial Intermediaries in Emerging Markets Edited by T T Ram Mohan, Rupa Rege Nitsure and Mathew Joseph Response Books, A division of Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, 2005. The financial sector has undergone a rapid transformation during the last ten years. Unlike what it was during 1951 to 1991, today's financial sector is grappling with the twin issues of globalization and democratization. The Indian financial sector is in the process of formulating a vision for 2020. In any such exercise, it has to take on questions such as: Where does it stand now? Where it would like to be and why? How it could get there? It should also take a clear stand on views such as: Finance promotes growth; finance follows growth; finance does not matter; finance hurts growth; and; finance matters for crises. This volume is a collection of papers discussed at the ICICl Research Center-IIMA International Conference on 'Regulation of Financial Intermediaries in Emerging Markets' held in March 2002. Besides an introductory note from Rupa Rege Nitsure, Mathew Joseph and T T Ram Mohan, the volume comprises eight chapters covering themes such as critical issues in banking sector, cross country analysis of external governance and bank profitability, regulation of banks, regulation of financial conglomerates, and nonperforming assets. The introductory note summarizes the discussions on the theme of the conference and presents a bird's-eye view of the papers presented. T T Ram Mohan identifies some critical issues such as recapitalization of domestic banks, corporate governance in the financial sector, bank privatization, nonperforming assets situation in banks have been focused in the note. James R Barth and Susanne Trimbarth observe that there is a significant positive correlation between the size of a country's financial system and its real GDP per capita. They identify 'best practices' areas as bank powers; entry policies; capita; adequacy; supervisory power and autonomy; deposit insurance; loan classification, provisioning, asset allocation, internal management; etc., and state ownership. They indicate some open issues on which there are big cross-country differences as regards bond and derivatives market, off-balance sheet activities of banks, role of venture capital, comparative advantage and absolute advantage in financial services, and e-finance and globalization. James R Barth, Valentina Hartarska, Daniel E Nolle and Triphon Phuminwasana observe that healthy banking systems require more insightful regulation and supervision. In their view efficient functioning of financial systems requires both the corporate governance and the external governance. They, however, say that very little attention has been paid to the corporate governance of banks. Quoting Caprio and Levine, they identify four sources of governance for banks: Shareholders, debt-holders, the competitive discipline of output markets and governments. They recognize accountability standards, strength of external audits, financial statement transparency, and external rating and credit monitoring as the subcomponent of . the external governance. The empirical results of their study indicate that external governance does indeed matter for bank profitability and the magnitude of the effects of external governance measures is also economically significant. Uwe Neumann and Philip Turner address questions about the desirability of a market-orientated, risk sensitive framework for banks in emerging market economies. …


Randomized neural network (RNN) is a highly feasible solution in the era of big data because it offers a simple and fast working principle in processing dynamic and evolving data streams. This paper proposes a novel RNN, namely recurrent type-2 random vector functional link network (RT2McRVFLN), which provides a highly scalable solution for data streams in a strictly online and integrated framework. It is built upon the psychologically inspired concept of metacognitive learning, which covers three basic components of human learning: what-to-learn, how-to-learn, and when-to-learn. The what-to-learn selects important samples on the fly with the use of online active learning scenario, which renders our algorithm an online semi-supervised algorithm. The how-to-learn process combines an open structure of evolving concept and a randomized learning algorithm of random vector functional link network (RVFLN). The efficacy of the RT2McRVFLN has been numerically validated through two real-world case studies and comparisons with its counterparts, which arrive at a conclusive finding that our algorithm delivers a tradeoff between accuracy and simplicity.


Using nationally-representative linked employer-employee data for Britain this paper considers whether employers are able to influence the organizational commitment (OC) of their employees through the practices they deploy. We examine the association between OC and two broad groups of HRM practices emphasised in two different strands of the literature, namely "High-Performance Workplace Practices" (HPWPs) and practices associated with "Perceived Organizational Support" (POS). We consider their associations with mean workplace-level OC and individual employees' OC. Although employers may be able to engender greater OC on the part of their employees, the practices that do so are not those emphasized in the HPWP literature, with the exception of consultation and the involvement of employees in decision-taking. POS practices fare a little better but, again, the findings
are far from unequivocal. Furthermore, those practices that are 'effective' in engendering higher OC such as tolerance of absence, recruiting on 'values' and allowing employees to make decisions, tend to have a fairly low incidence in British workplaces. There is, however, one finding which chimes with the ideas underpinning the HPWP literature, namely that there are returns to the use of practices in combination. Analyses of both mean workplace-level OC and individual employee OC find an
independent positive association between OC and the deployment of multiple practices in combination. This evidence is consistent with practices having synergies, as emphasised in some of the HPWP literature.


OBJECTIVE
To investigate the sustained effect of a rehabilitation programme for patients with ankylosing spondylitis, and to compare the effect of this intervention given in a Mediterranean vs a Norwegian setting.

METHODS
A total of 107 patients with ankylosing spondylitis applying for rehabilitation were randomized to a 4-week inpatient rehabilitation programme in a Mediterranean country or in Norway. The participants were evaluated clinically before and after the rehabilitation period (week 0 and 4) and in week 16. The ASsessments in Ankylosing Spondylitis working group's Improvement Criteria (ASAS-IC), and tests of spinal mobility and physical capacity were used to measure treatment response.

RESULTS
An ASAS20 improvement was still present at week 16 in 50% of the patients treated in a Mediterranean and 23% in a Norwegian centre (p = 0.006). The tests of spinal mobility, physical capacity, and almost all patient's assessments of health status (ASAS-IC components) were still improved at week 16 after therapy in both climatic settings. While the improvements in physical capacity were comparable, the spinal mobility and ASAS-IC components improved more, and improvements were sustained longer, after rehabilitation in a Mediterranean setting.

CONCLUSION
Patients with ankylosing spondylitis benefit from a 4-week rehabilitation programme in Norway, but even more so from a similar programme in a Mediterranean setting.


This paper addresses the challenging issue of how to evaluate dynamically learning performance of E-learners' convergence time on the basis of recently adopted interdisciplinary trend. Objectively, this work investigates systematically and interprets realistically some of observed brain functions' educational phenomena while E-learning process proceeds. Herein, ANNs modeling is adopted for realistic measurements of an E-learning performance parameter. More specifically, this parameter considers timely changes of learners' intelligence level before and during learning / training process. At any time instant, the state of synaptic connectivity pattern inside E-learner's brain supposed to be presented as timely dependent weight vector. This synaptic state expected to lead to obtaining spontaneously some learner's output (answer). Obviously, obtained responsive learner's output is a resulting action to any arbitrary external input stimulus (question). So, as the initial brain state of synaptic connectivity pattern (vector) considered as pre-intelligence measuring parameter. Actually, obtained e-learner's answer is compatibly consistent with modified state of internal / stored experienced level of intelligence. In other words, dynamical changes of brain synaptic pattern (weight vector) modify adaptively convergence time of learning processes, so as to reach desired answer. Additionally, introduced research work is motivated by some obtained results for performance evaluation of some neural system models concerned with convergence time of learning process. Moreover, this paper considers interpretation of interrelations among some other interesting results obtained by a set of previously published educational models. The interpretational evaluation and analysis for introduced models results in some applicable studies at educational field as well as medically promising treatment of learning disabilities. Finally, some interesting remarks illustrating comparative analogy between learning performance at neural systems and cooperative learning at Ant Colony System (ACS) are presented.


Abstract Applications typically have several potential sources of parallelism, and in choosing a particular parallelization, the programmer must balance the benefits of each source of parallelism with the corresponding overhead. The trade-offs are often difficult to analyze, as they may depend on the hardware architecture, software environment, input data, and properties of the algorithm. An example of this dilemma occurs in a wide range of problems that involve processing trees, wherein processors can be assigned either to separate subtrees, or to parallelizing the work performed on individual tree nodes. We explore the complexity of the trade-offs involved in this decision by considering alternative parallelizations of combinatorial search, examining the factors that determine the best-performing implementation for this important class of problems. Using subgraph isomorphism as a representative search problem, we show how the density of the solution space, the number of solutions desired, the number of available processors, and the underlying architecture all affect the choice of an efficient parallelization. Our experiments, which span seven different shared-memory multiprocessors and a wide range of input graphs, indicate that relative performance depends on each of these factors. On some machines and for some inputs, a sequential depth-first search of the solution space, applying simple loop-level parallelism at each node in the search tree, performs best. On other machines or other inputs, parallel tree search performs best. In still other cases, a hybrid solution, containing both parallel tree search and loop parallelism, works best. We present a quantitative analysis that explains these results and present experimental data culled from thousands of program executions that validates the analysis. From these experiences we conclude that there is no one "best" parallelization that suffices over a range of machines, inputs, and precise problem specifications. As a corollary, we provide quantitative evidence that programming environments and languages should not focus exclusively on flat data parallelism, since nested parallelism or hybrid forms of parallelism may be required for an efficient implementation of some applications.


The purpose of this study is to understand changes in thinking in patients with diabetes and factors related to the health care providers and significant others that would mediate changes in thinking. Cross-sectional data were collected from three sites. Adults age 21 and older with type 2 diabetes were asked about their thinking regarding diabetes at diagnosis and the present time. In addition, respondents were asked questions about their perceptions of health care providers (that is, physicians, nurses, diabetes educators), significant others, and manage- ment of diabetes. Significant other blame and self-efficacy were found to be partial mediators in thinking about diabetes; the model explained 29 percent of the variance. Social workers are uniquely trained in the person-in-environment framework, which allows flexibility in creating interventions to provide patients with diabetes the support necessary to have a more positive orientation toward diabetes self-management, increase self-efficacy, and reduce feelings of blame from significant others. Improving the support of significant others and the patients' level of self-efficacy can provide mediation of negative thinking, which may result in an environment that supports improved diabetes self-management behaviors.


The Sui Generis Database Rights (SGDR) protection grants an exclusive right on databases when a substantial investment is required to collect and arrange the database contents. Since this specific protection makes any re-use of such contents impossible without an explicit permission, therefore directly impacting on the exploitation of Open Data, managing SGDR (where exsisting) - e.g. by adopting a license - is crucial for any public body who wants to make its data available for re-use. The paper examines the new features introduced in the 4.0 version of the Creative Commons Public Licenses, with particular attention to the treatment of SGDR to describe the suitability of the 4.0 version in the specific field of Open Data licensing and re-use. The evaluation has been conducted in light of the current EU legal framework on database rights, also considering the issue of interoperability with other existing database licenses


Thank you very much for your insightful comments, which are helpful to improve the quality of this research data. Based on your comments, the provincial distribution method in industrial sector and that in ground transport sector have been improved; an additional comparison between this dataset and another two databases (MEIC and PKU) at the provincial level of China has been added, and uncertainties of provincial daily emission in industrial sector and ground transport sector have been re-estimated. The revised parts that correspond to the comments are listed as follows:


The extent to which teachers should make use of theoretical and expert knowledge as opposed to tacit experiential knowledge, and how these might be combined, is a perennial issue in discussions on pedagogy. This book addresses these debates through a creative development of the concept of productive uncertainty. Using case studies focusing on teachers working with children with autism, a particularly fertile crucible for considering uncertainty, the book explores how the radical 20th century psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion's epistemological approach to uncertainty can be used to re-frame Donald Schon's concept of reflection in action, offering a new perspective on the practice of teachers and other caring professionals. Several areas of potential uncertainty are identified, including uncertainty relating to areas of practice including diagnosis, the relationship between expert knowledge and practice, the implications of autism for autonomy and agency, and uncertainties in relation to the understanding of and use of new technologies. A strong argument is made, based on both theoretical and empirical grounds, that in juggling between theoretical and tacit knowledge in the classroom there is more to be gained by staying with the struggle with uncertainty than by fleeing from it too early, into the promise of expert solutions. Consideration is also given to the relative importance of specific theoretical training for teachers, both in general and in relation to working with children with special educational needs, in the context of international and UK policy developments in this area. This book will be of key value to researchers and postgraduates in the fields of education studies, teacher thinking and research, psychoanalytically informed psychosocial studies, as well as to practitioners working in special educational needs/autism education.


This thesis presents a novel approach to type theory called "pure subtype systems", and a core calculus called DEEP which is based on that approach. DEEP is capable of modeling a number of interesting language techniques that have been proposed in the literature, including mixin modules, virtual classes, feature-oriented programming, and partial evaluation. The design of DEEP was motivated by two well-known problems: "the expression problem", and "the tag elimination problem." The expression problem is concerned with the design of an interpreter that is extensible, and requires an advanced module system. The tag elimination problem is concerned with the design of an interpreter that is efficient, and requires an advanced partial evaluator. We present a solution in DEEP that solves both problems simultaneously, which has never been done before. These two problems serve as an "acid test" for advanced type theories, because they make heavy demands on the static type system. Our solution in DEEP makes use of the following capabilities. (1) Virtual types are type definitions within a module that can be extended by clients of the module. (2) Type definitions may be mutually recursive. (3) Higher-order subtyping and bounded quantification are used to represent partial information about types. (4) Dependent types and singleton types provide increased type precision. The combination of recursive types, virtual types, dependent types, higher-order subtyping, and bounded quantification is highly non-trivial. We introduce "pure subtype systems" as a way of managing this complexity. Pure subtype systems eliminate the distinction between types and objects; every term can behave as either a type or an object depending on context. A subtype relation is defined over all terms, and subtyping, rather than typing, forms the basis of the theory. We show that higher-order subtyping is strong enough to completely subsume the traditional type relation, and we provide practical algorithms for type checking and for finding minimal types. The cost of using pure subtype systems lies in the complexity of the meta-theory. Unfortunately, we are unable to establish some basic meta-theoretic properties, such as type safety and transitivity elimination, although we have made some progress towards these goals. We formulate the subtype relation as an abstract reduction system, and we show that the type theory is sound if the reduction system is confluent. We can prove that reductions are locally confluent, but a proof of global confluence remains elusive. In summary, pure subtype systems represent a new and interesting approach to type theory. This thesis describes the basic properties of pure subtype systems, and provides concrete examples of how they can be applied. The Deep calculus demonstrates that our approach has a number of real-world practical applications in areas that have proved to be quite difficult for traditional type theories to handle. However, the ultimate soundness of the technique remains an open question.


Slipped capital femoral epiphysis is a rare complication of growth hormone therapy. We report on a young man with pituitary insufficiency, diagnosed and treated with growth hormone at the age of 14 9/12. The patient withdrew from treatment after 6 months of growth hormone therapy without significant catch-up growth or complications. At the age of 21 8/12 years slipping of the left femoral capital epiphysis became apparent 2 1/2 months after treatment with growth hormone had been resumed in combination with low dose testosterone. Young adult patients with unfused epiphyses undergoing growth hormone substitution should be informed that pain in the lower extremities during therapy may be an important sign of a complication of growth hormone therapy. In this age group, patients complaining of pain in the limb should alert the physician to the possibility that a slipped capital femoral epiphysis may be present.


Video installation art is a collaboration of sound, image, and space, with a closer relationship to music and art than to cinema. Accordingly, those working in this genre are often both artist and musician, a double role that represents a radical departure from the artist/musician divide of many other audio-visual genres. Because it is single authored, video installation can invert many elements of the filmmaking process: while it is common procedure to add a soundtrack to film during post-production, for instance, many video artists use sound as their starting point, often basing whole works on a musical structure. While such an inversion invites reconsideration of musical audibility and film narrative, video work, when installed, also challenges the notions of screen space and realism. An audience is no longer offered the single-point perspective of film, but is instead enveloped within a three-dimensional space. And as image expands beyond the four sides of the cinema screen – a space occupied previously by music alone – important questions are raised: what happens to music when film breaks from the containment of the screen? when it destroys its own boundaries? Focusing on the work of Bill Viola, this paper explores the ways in which video installation art confronts methods of film exhibition and audience engagement, and investigates how such confrontation redefines the roles of music and image in film.


Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Poetics, by Michael Heller. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2005. 247 pp. $21.95. When poet and critic Michael Heller wrote his first book of prose, Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), the Objectivists were the neglected stepchildren of American modernism, overshadowed by the far more famous poets who influenced them (Pound, Williams) and by the bravura public careers of the poets that followed (Robert Lowell, W H. Auden, and the New American Poets of the 1950s and 60s). Twenty years later, the core group of Objectivists are routinely anthologized, with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Lorine Neidecker-all but the last of them Jewish-seen as major figures in their own right and in the history of American verse. Heller, too, has finally begun to receive the attention he deserves, not least as the leadoff figure in the "Objectivist Continuities" chapter of Norman Finkelstein's Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity. Uncertain Poetries, a selection of Heller's essays, talks, and reviews from the past twenty years, shows how far the range of this poet's interests have carried him beyond the Objectivist tradition-and how thinking deeply within this tradition, as well as outside it, has carried him into a distinctive, appealing account of the relationship between poetry and "tradition" more generally. Heller strikes a keynote for the collection in the opening sentence of "The Uncertainty of the Poet," a meditation on the painting of that name by the Italian modernist Georgio de Chirico. "I am here," he declares, "investigating the floating filigree of doubt and fear, that feeling of being on the edge, which often accompanies poetic composition" (p. 3). Heller's essays pursue the "edgy" encounters incumbent upon writing poetry: encounters with oneself, one's culture, one's imagined future readers, and most profoundly with what Gershom Scholem described, in a passage Heller cites, as "the abyss in which the freedom of living things is born" (p. 230). By opening his collection with an essay on de Chirico's enigmatically allegorical cityscape, Heller joins a fine tradition of poets who have explored their own poetics by writing about visual art. Heller writes with sympathy and sensuous intelligence on Pound's relationship with the sculptor GaudierBrzeska and Rilke's interest in Rodin and Cezanne, the painter who gave the German poet "a way to use the past" (p. 57), and uses the contrasts between their disparate Romantic and Vorticist versions of modernism to triangulate his own ideas about nature of form and the uses of artistic tradition. The Rilke who set himself to study at Cezanne's easel, Heller writes, did so to learn to write "a poetry in which precision and uncertainty were inextricably joined" (p. 59). To Heller, lyric poetry ought to articulate both affirmation and doubt-ideally, in fact, it should do so simultaneously, although as several essays make clear, the poem will be just as well off if it tracks the poet's trajectory from "the museums of received ideas" (p. 178) into the open space of the new, or "from the known into the unknown," as George Oppen put it in a passage Heller cites (p. 200). Heller's emphasis on this "double-sidedness of the literary act" (p. 3) serves to distinguish his poetics from those promulgated by the Language poets, that radically skeptical, radically theoretical cadre of poets who announced their presence in the early 1980s. That the Language poets saw themselves as heirs to the Objectivists seems to have sparked a need, on Heller's part, to distinguish his vision of that inheritance from theirs; several essays here, notably "Avant-Garde Propellants of the Machine Made of Words," take up how his own ideal of a poetry that frees us from intellectual dogma and orthodoxy differs from their revolutionary ambitions. …


The propagation process of crack in the nanocrystalline Ni is simulated via the quasicontinuum method. The results show that the stress near the crack tip could prompt the disassociation of grain boundaries, and the formation of stacking faults and deformation twins. Farther front the crack tip, fewer deformation twins can be found. There are more stacking faults than deformation twins in the grains, which approximately have the same distance to the crack tip. The effect on deformation twins front the variation of local stress and generalized planar fault energies is manifested by these results. The distribution of hydrostatic stress on atomic-level around the crack tip is also calculated. It is shown that nanovoids can be easily created in grain boundaries in front of the crack tip. There exists an intense tensile stress state in the grain boundary regions around these nanovoids. As a result of the stress accumulation, the crack propagates along the grain boundaries. Our simulated results qualitatively uncover the propagation process of crack in nanocrystalline Ni, which agrees well with the relevant experimental results.


We establish new results on the space BV of functions with bounded variation. While it is well known that this space admits no unconditional basis, we show that it is "almost" characterized by wavelet expansions in the following sense: if a function f is in BV, its coefficient sequence in a BV normalized wavelet basis satisfies a class of weak-� 1 type estimates. These weak estimates can be employed to prove many interesting results. We use them to identify the interpolation spaces between BV and Sobolev or Besov spaces, and to derive new Gagliardo-Nirenberg-type inequalities. 1. Background and main results


A conference paper presented at the NIP24: International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication 2008, September 2008, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. This paper describes the design and digital fabrication of a series of "smart" devices which exhibit changes in shape and/or surface texture in response to external stimuli. Such stimuli include changes in temperature, pressure, or the application of electric current.
Smart shape-changing devices which exhibit dynamic visual and tactile characteristics may in future be incorporated into the design of interactive products and systems, providing a new multi-sensory dimension in the communication of information to product users.
Working devices employing shape memory alloy, electroactive polymer and bio-actuation technologies are presented. These have been fabricated through a combination of laser cutting, photopolymer jetting (3D printing system by Objet Geometries Ltd), and vacuum casting of silicone rubber. Here the use of soft, compliant materials has enabled the realization of devices with novel tactile qualities. Possible functional and aesthetic applications for such devices will include product interfaces which respond to users and/or changes in their environment.
The paper reports on an interdisciplinary investigation which brings together design, smart materials and digital fabrication technologies. Implications of the research are identified within the area of multi-sensory product interface design.


Background: The acquisition of proliferative and invasive phenotypes is considered a hallmark of neoplastic transformation; however, the underlying mechanisms are less well known. Lipid phosphate phosphatase-3 (LPP3) not only catalyzes the dephosphorylation of the bioactive lipid sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) to generate sphingosine but also may regulate embryonic development and angiogenesis via the Wnt pathway. The goal of this study was to determine the role of LPP3 in tumor cells. Results: We observed increased expression of LPP3 in glioblastoma primary tumors and in U87 and U118 glioblastoma cell lines. We demonstrate that LPP3-knockdown inhibited both U87 and U118 glioblastoma cell proliferation in culture and tumor growth in xenograft assays. Biochemical experiments provided evidence that LPP3-knockdown reduced b-catenin, CYCLIN-D1, and CD133 expression, with a concomitant increase in phosphorylated b-catenin. In a converse experiment, the forced expression of LPP3 in human colon tumor (SW480) cells potentiated tumor growth via increased b-catenin stability and CYCLIN-D1 synthesis. In contrast, elevated expression of LPP3 had no tumorigenic effects on primary cells. Conclusions: These results demonstrate for the first time an unexpected role of LPP3 in regulating glioblastoma progression by amplifying b-catenin and CYCLIN-D1 activities.


This thesis analyses media-elite interactions in post-authoritarian Indonesia. The introduction of legally guaranteed press freedom and democracy following President Suharto's fall in 1998 changed the relationship between the media on the one hand and the political and business elite on the other. But what has been the significance of press freedom for elite politics?

The argument of this thesis is that the politico-business elites have, to differing degrees, harnessed the concept of press freedom by incorporating the media as a political weapon in their power struggles over key positions in political institutions and over political resources. Crucially, the heterogeneous and mostly privately owned media companies positioned themselves as actors in the intra-elite contestations.

Through a set of case studies on intra-elite power struggles that escalated into scandals, this thesis examines the ways in which the elite has integrated the media into those struggles, and analyses the vested interests of the owners and practitioners of the media in those struggles. Ultimately, it establishes two key points. First, the elite has employed scandal as a an opportunity to change the composition of a democratically elected government; and second, during those political scandals the owners or prominent editors of particular media organisations, either consciously or otherwise, have formed temporary coalitions with particular elite factions based on shared interests defined by structural conditions and personal relations.

The dissertation's focus on media-elite interactions is prompted by the lingering dominance of elites within Indonesia's political economy, the domination of the media landscape by a small number of media conglomerates whose owners are either members of the politico-business elite themselves or linked to the latter in various forms, and, further, that the media have become important sites for intra-elite contestation over political power.

By placing its analytical focus explicitly on the nature of the relationship between the commercial mainstream news media and the politico-business elite in times of intra-elite power struggles fought out in the public sphere, this approach moves away from media-centred investigations, normative concerns and liberal concepts as the dominant way of thinking about the media's democratic functions.


Hints on the Art and Science of Government was the first treatise on statecraft produced in modern India. It consists of lectures that Raja Sir T. Madhava Rao delivered in 1881 to Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III, the young Maharaja of Baroda. Universally considered the foremost Indian statesman of the nineteenth century, Madhava Rao served as Dewan (or prime minister) in the native states of Travancore, Indore and Baroda. Under his command, Travancore and Baroda came to be seen as "model states," whose progress demonstrated that Indians were capable of governing well. Rao's lectures summarise the fundamental principles underlying his unprecedented success. He explains how and why a Maharaja ought to marry the classical Indian ideal of raj dharma, which enjoins rulers to govern dutifully, with the modern English ideal of limited sovereignty. This makes Hints an exceptionally important text: it shows how, outside the confines of British India, Indians consciously and creatively sought to revise and adapt ideals in the interests of progress. This landmark edition contains both the newly rediscovered, original lecture manuscripts; and an authoritative introduction, outlining Rao's remarkable career, his complicated relationship with Sayaji Rao III, and the reasons why his lectures have been neglected-until now.


Exercising can be considered harmful when done in polluted environments. Thus, mass concentration of particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) found in two fitness centers along Pedro Gil were quantified through gravimetric methods. Personal cascade impactor with air pump was employed to collect particulates inside the fitness centers. Maximum PM concentration were obtained at the naturally ventilated facility (118.750μg/m3 for PM10 and 53.125μg/m3 for PM2.5) while minimum values were obtained at the mechanically ventilated facility (44.792μg/m3 for PM10 and 15.625μg/m3 for PM2.5). Meteorological parameters such as temperature and relative humidity, and activity inside the fitness centers, among other factors, were associated with the difference in PM levels between the two sites.


Is it merely coincidence that three essays from the relatively small cluster of discussions dealing with "A Grammarian's Funeral" use questions in their titles? (1) Or is there something about the poem that is subtly disturbing, tantalizingly dubious? Ever since Richard D. Altick proposed that the poem might be a mock encomium, in the tradition of Erasmus' Praise of Folly, there has been a nagging sense that here too a straightforward reading misses Browning's characteristic irony. Most recently, A. D. Nuttall has taken, or rather mistaken, those complexities as a confusing failure by the poet: When Browning is in command of his antithesis the poem is strong; when he cannot decide what kind of knower we are to wonder at it is weak. An immediate consequence is that the reader is less moved than he or she would otherwise have been. I think that Browning knew that something was wrong. (p. 97) "While the judgment about the garbling of the tone and the message is valid, the blame should be placed on the fictional narrator, not on Browning. The mistake is easy to fall into if one begins with the assumption that the poem is an expression of Browning's unequivocal admiration for the heroic grammarian. At the root of Nuttall's misreading is an allegiance to the view that Browning spoke in his own voice to praise the grammarian-scholar. Many critics have held similar opinions. In turn, such views have sought validation through identifying the historical model for the ideal grammarian. Various prototypes have been suggested: Thomas Linacre; Jacobus Milichius; Isaac Casaubon; Greek scholars such as Theodorus Gaza, Argyropoulos, Demetrius Chalcondyles, and Janus Lascarius; Philip Charles Buttmann; Didymus Chalcenteros; and even Socrates. (2) Yet no one, to the best of my knowledge, has attempted to align Browning's grammarian with one of the most remarkable literary depictions of a grammarian, namely that of Brunetto Latini in Canto XV of Dante's Inferno. There is no need to review the evidence for Browning's undisputed familiarity with Dante's works. Browning had used the tactic of appropriating a character from Dante in the expansion of Sordello from the Purgatorio. (3) "A Grammarian's Funeral" is dated to the mid 1850s and "was probably written after Browning's return to Florence" (DeVane, p. 270). It is quite plausible that a sojourn in Dante's home city had returned him to the forefront of Browning's concerns at the time. The connection to Canto XV of the Inferno has important consequences for understanding Browning's intentions. As will become apparent, the grammarian is properly situated in Men and Women beside figures such as Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, caught between the demands of the mind and the needs of the body. The allusion to Brunetto Latini entails consideration of the themes of love and gender that predominate throughout Men and Women but have been neglected in "A Grammarian's Funeral." What Roma King has said about those figures generally will apply to the grammarian as well: Browning treats love as many things and from many points of view. Most of his lovers, however, are frustrated and unhappy, their vision of an ideal love a tantalizing dream which only intensifies the pain of their unfulfilled longings. (4) At the end, the tormented grammarian emerges as a tragic figure who deserves more pity than admiration. In order to follow Browning's argument, it is first necessary to present the case of Brunetto Latini in some detail. Like Browning's grammarian, Brunetto is no longer alive when readers encounter him in Dante's text. And, like the grammarian, he is on the move despite being dead. The Pilgrim-Poet and Virgil are passing through an especially desolate region when they encounter the sodomites running across the plain. One of them is familiar to the Pilgrim: Cosi adocchiato da cotal famiglia, fui conosciuto da un, che mi prese per lo lembo e grido: 'Qual maraviglia! …


Schmutzdecke" is developed by particle deposition of a few centimeters deep on the top of the sand layer in slow sand filters. It plays an important role in removal mechanisms and is responsible for the significant increase of head loss during operation. After several weeks of filter operation, the surface area of the bed becomes clogged due to deposition of suspended solids. Cleaning of the bed top is required when the final head loss occurs. Since the operation costs of slow sand filters depend on cleaning intervals, the operation cost decreases by increasing the time of filtration run. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of bed top layer mixing on filter performance. Two experimental pilots (one test and one control) were built from 240 mm PVC pipe 170 cm high. The sand media depth in each filter was 60 cm with a uniformity coefficient of 2.3 and effective size of 0.2 mm. During the 149 days, 30 cm of the top layer of the test filter bed was mixed every other day and filter performance was evaluated and compared with the unmixed control filter. This research indicated that the rate of head loss decreased with bed top layer mixing and that filtration run increased to more than two times the typical value without notable effects on effluent quality.


This Editorial addresses the crucial issue of which research methodology is most suited for capturing the complexity of psychosocial interventions conducted in 'real world' mental health settings. It first examines conventional randomized controlled trial (RCT) methodology and critically appraises its strengths and weaknesses. It then considers the specificity of mental health care treatments and defines the term 'complex' intervention and its implications for RCT design. The salient features of pragmatic RCTs aimed at generating evidence of psychosocial intervention effectiveness are then described. Subsequently, the conceptualization of pragmatic RCTs, and of their further developments – which we propose to call 'new generation' pragmatic trials – in the broader routine mental health service context, is explored. Helpful tools for planning pragmatic RCTs, such as the CONSORT extension for pragmatic trials, and the PRECIS tool are also examined. We then discuss some practical challenges that are involved in the design and implementation of pragmatic trials based on our own experience in conducting the GET UP PIANO Trial. Lastly, we speculate on the ways in which current ideas on the purpose, scope and ethics of mental health care research may determine further challenges for clinical research and evidence-based practice.


This Article demonstrates how faulty information in the marketplace creates misperceptions about school quality and makes diverse schools appear less desirable than their competitors. This distorts parental choices about where to purchase a home and, in turn, contributes to the de facto housing segregation that continues to characterize the United States.To date, the diversity penalty and resulting harms this Article identifies have received little attention in the legal literature. Through empirical analysis of popular school rankings from Illinois, New Jersey, and Ohio, the Article fills the gap by showing how aggregated proficiency testing data masks demographic differences and reinforces the myth that schools comprised of mostly economically-advantaged and White students are better than those that serve a diverse mix of students. The Article next analyzes school report cards and accountability metrics from 18 states and concludes that most state-sponsored messages about school quality also emphasize such data, with the inevitable effect of making diverse schools appear less effective than any rational assessment of their outcomes would justify. This dynamic creates a cascade of social harms, including promoting residential and school segregation, and making it more difficult to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged and more advantaged students. The Article proposes ways that federal and state policy makers can utilize school outcome data to encourage rational parental choices and thereby contribute significantly to both better and more diverse schools.


When have you gone into an electronics store, picked up a desirable gadget, and found that it was labeled "Made in Russia†? Probably never. Russia, despite its epic intellectual achievements in music, literature, art, and pure science, is a negligible presence in world technology. Despite its current leaders' ambitions to create a knowledge economy, Russia is economically dependent on gas and oil. In Lonely Ideas, Loren Graham investigates Russia's long history of technological invention followed by failure to commercialize and implement. For three centuries, Graham shows, Russia has been adept at developing technical ideas but abysmal at benefiting from them. From the seventeenth-century arms industry through twentieth-century Nobel-awarded work in lasers, Russia has failed to sustain its technological inventiveness. Graham identifies a range of conditions that nurture technological innovation: a society that values inventiveness and practicality; an economic system that provides investment opportunities; a legal system that protects intellectual property; a political system that encourages innovation and success. Graham finds Russia lacking on all counts. He explains that Russia's failure to sustain technology, and its recurrent attempts to force modernization, reflect its political and social evolution and even its resistance to democratic principles. But Graham points to new connections between Western companies and Russian researchers, new research institutions, a national focus on nanotechnology, and the establishment of Skolkovo, "a new technology city.†Today, he argues, Russia has the best chance in its history to break its pattern of technological failure.


Bank regulation in general and capital regulation in particular are widely perceived as having become stiffer in the 1990s. The stiffer regulatory environment in turn is argued to have curtailed bank lending. This article determines the extent to which capital standards changed in the 1990s and examines the relationship between capital positions and the bank lending. The empirical results suggest that capital standards did increase in the 1990s. The analysis also shows that bank loan growth rates are positively related to capital-to-assets ratios. Moreover, sensitivity of bank lending to capital positions appears to have increased in the 1990s. Regionally, capital regulation likely had the most pronounced. effect on bank lending in New England.


While Le Corbusier9s famous "journey to the east" has been the subject of numerous investigations as an important chapter in the great modernist9s formative years, his days in Romania while en route to Constantinople are thinly covered. Le Corbusier and the Romanian Cula helps to fill that gap by focusing on one important detail: discovery of the identity and location of a much-discussed building he sketched while there and its importance for both traditional Romanian architecture and Le Corbusier9s emerging vision of modernity. Judith Bing 9s discussion of her long search and unexpected discovery draws on firsthand knowledge of vernacular architecture in the Balkans, including Romania, and a long-standing interest in the early travels and subsequent modern architecture of Le Corbusier.


This paper concentrates on the trends in peer-reviewed longitudinal panel studies under scientific direction. Household panel studies have succeeded in broadening their disciplinary scope. Numerous innovations such as questions dealing with psychological concepts, and age-specific topical modules, physical health measures, measures of cognitive capabilities, behavioral experiments have been incorporated into various panel studies or are soon to be introduced. In the UK, the household panel study Understanding Society comprising 40,000 households was launched in 2009 and recently added an "innovation sample"; in the Netherlands, the new LISS household panel study launched in 2006 with over 5,000 households will be used for the testing of innovative measurement methods. The microdata from household panel studies like PSID (US Household Panel Study), BHPS (the predecessor of UK HLS), HILDA (Australian Panel Study), and SOEP (German Socio-Economic Panel) are in continuously high demand by the research and policy advisory community. More important than "discovering" entirely new survey areas is "tailoring" the details of existing survey content to new, more specific (theoretical) questions, and thus maintaining proven and widely used elements of survey content. In the years to come, "tailoring" survey content will be the real challenge facing surveys that are integrated into the existing research infrastructure like HILDA, LISS, PSID, SHP (Swiss Panel), SOEP, and Understanding Society. We argue that, in the future, household panel studies should be designed to take the "margins" of the life course more fully into account. Indeed, household surveys are ideally suited to gather comprehensive data on these life phases. They can be improved, on the one hand, by including specific topics about the fetal phase of life and early childhood of children born into the panel, and on the other hand, by including better information about late life and death. In the middle of the life course, improved questions on income, savings, consumption, and wealth, as well as psychological constructs will play a central role, as will specific "event-triggered" questionnaires on central life occurrences such as marriage, divorce, and entry into and exit from unemployment. In order to substantially improve the statistical power of long-term longitudinal data, we propose an absolute minimum number of observations of about 500 persons per birth and age cohort. As of now, only the British Understanding Society will meet this target. A positive side-effect of such an enlargement is a significantly improved potential for analyses of relatively small groups within the population: for example, lone parents or specific immigrant groups. Another positive side-effect would be an improved potential for regional analyses. For example, in Germany, a cohort size of about 500 persons implies a survey sample size of about 20,000 households, which is large enough for analyses in the majority of federal states. Multidisciplinary panel studies will become even more important if they are accepted as reference datasets for specialized surveys that are independent of the original panel study (e.g., observational studies such as twin studies and laboratory or intervention studies). To enhance this important function, new types of service are needed, including advice on special surveys and possibly also data preparation for special surveys.


Three dimensional (3-D) structures are widely utilized and critical to device functionality in many applications, such as PBG (photonic band gap) crystals, DOE's (diffractive optical elements), blazed gratings, MEMS, NEMS etc. The performance characteristics of such structures are highly sensitive to their dimensional fidelity, which is strongly influenced by the fabrication process. In most cases, the fabricated structures were of microscale and regular shapes and their applications were therefore prohibited accordingly. In this study, grayscale electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching were employed to fabricate complex 3-D structures. With the aid of a unique algorithm, PYRAMID which aims at correcting proximity effect of EBL, three arbitrary shape 3-D structures were successfully fabricated on photoresist and Si substrate respectively. A series of major factors involved in fabrication process, dose coefficient, base dose, spot size, line spacing, developing time, developer concentration and ultrasonic agitation were studied one by one along with fabrication results. Design of Experiment was used to statistically determine the significance of individual factor and the cross effect of multiple factors and perform an optimization and prediction based upon existed experimental results. It is revealed that base dose, developing time, developer concentration and their interactions are significant factors in terms of as-fabricated structure geometry and resolution. A response optimization based upon experimental results were performed and 20 solutions were found consequently. Compare these solutions with the experimental factors used to achieve optimum response, it is concluded that the optimized solutions agree with experimental data.


Abstract To evaluate the efficacy and safety of pentosan polysulfate sodium (PPS) in relieving symptoms of interstitial cystitis, the authors retrospectively reviewed charts of 260 patients in whom interstitial cystitis had been diagnosed. Subsequently, they conducted a follow-up phone interview or mail survey of those patients who were treated with PPS to investigate changes in the patients' symptoms, adverse effects, and change in quality of life. The control group consisted of patients whose interstitial cystitis had been diagnosed at cystoscopy and had a duration of at least 1 year and who had taken at least one or more oral medications for their symptoms. The average length of treatment was 9.3 months among the 27 subjects on PPS therapy. The mean length of time that they had diagnosed interstitial cystitis was 35.63 months and 48.78 months for the PPS-treated and control groups, respectively, with no statistically significant difference. Changes in frequency, urgency, and pain were greater in the treatment group and statistically significant (P = .11, P = .49, and P = .004, respectively). No change occurred in the rate of nocturia in the PPS-treated group compared with that in the control group. Symptoms of both groups improved over time, but improvement was statistically significantly greater in the treatment group (P = .001) over the treatment interval. The most common side effect attributable to PPS was diarrhea in 15% of subjects. Pentosan proved to be an efficacious option for reducing the debilitating symptoms of interstitial cystitis.


Abstract: On 12 February 2017 Turkmenistan held its presidential elections. The incumbent, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, won with an overwhelming margin in a manifestly unfree and unfair contest against a number of puppet candidates. This article argues that Berdimuhammedov's continued interest in propping up a "democratic" façade shows that he remains deeply insecure about his own legitimacy as the country's ruler. In addition, the recent election and earlier legal changes allowing a supposed "multiparty" system suggest that Turkmenistan is seeking to elevate itself in the eyes of the international community, from what Freedom House has called "the worst of the worst" to the level of a "normal" authoritarian regime.


Over-constrained problems are ubiquitous in real-world decision and optimization problems, in particular, those emerging from self-organizing, autonomous systems where the full problem specification is only available at runtime. To address over-constrainedness, several theoretical formalisms to describe soft constraints have been proposed, including weighted, fuzzy, or probabilistic constraints. All of them were shown to be instances of algebraic structures such as valuation structures or c-semirings.

In terms of implemented modeling languages and solvers, however, the field of soft constraints lags far behind the state of the art in classical constraint optimization. Therefore, this dissertation describes MiniBrass, a versatile soft constraint modeling language building on the unifying algebraic framework of partially-ordered valuation structures (PVS). It is implemented as an extension of MiniZinc and MiniSearch. The most important characteristics of MiniBrass, and the ones that distinguish it from previous work, are that it is extensible and modular, supports a variety of concrete soft constraint formalisms, works with many solvers (inherited from MiniZinc), admits a graphical modeling language, and has been applied to several real-life case studies.

Contributions of this dissertation include the following: (1) The design, implementation, and performance evaluation of MiniBrass using 28 benchmark problems and six solvers, (2) A formal foundation that includes the systematic derivation of partially-ordered valuation structures and c-semirings from partial orders using basic category theory, (3) The qualitative soft constraint formalism constraint preferences, and (4) concepts for multiagent optimization with (possibly) antagonistic preferences, including lexicographic and Cartesian products as well as voting operators.


Polyacrylamide (PAAm)–sodium alginate (SA) composite was prepared with different amounts of SA varying in the range between 0.06% and 2% (w/v). The PAAm–SA composite was characterized by the steady-state fluorescence technique. Pyranine was added as a fluoroprobe for monitoring the polymerization. It was observed that pyranine molecules bind to AAm and SA chains upon the initiation of the polymerization. Thus, the fluorescence spectra of the bonded pyranines shift to the shorter wavelengths. Fluorescence spectra from the bonded pyranines allowed us to monitor the sol–gel phase transition, and to test the universality of the sol–gel transition as a function of SA contents. Observations around the critical point show that the gel fraction exponent, β, and the weight average degree of polymerization exponent, γ, agreed with the percolation result for (<0.25% (w/v)) SA contents. However, classical results were produced at (<2% (w/v)) SA contents.


We study whether monetary policy should target the exchange rate in a two-country model with non-atomistic wage setters, non-traded goods and different degrees of exchange-rate pass through. Commitment to an exchange rate target reduces the labor market distortion. Large labor unions anticipate that higher wages depreciate the exchange rate, which triggers an increase in the interest rate and restrain wage demands. However, reduced exchange rate flexibility worsens the distortion stemming from preset pricing. Targeting the nominal exchange rate will be optimal when the labor market distortion is larger than the preset-pricing one. This result arises with cooperation both under producer and local currency pricing, even though the optimal degree of exchange-rate targeting is higher under local currency pricing. In the Nash equilibrium, the terms-of-trade effect raises optimal wage mark-ups thereby reducing the optimal weight on the exchange rate target. The terms-of-trade effect is stronger as openness and substitutability among Home and Foreign goods increase.


We present an XML-based simulation authoring environment. The proposed description language allows to describe mathematical objects such as systems of ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations in two dimensions, or simple curves and surfaces. It also allows to describe the parameters on which these objects depend. This language is independent of the target software and allows to ensure the perennity of author's work, as well as collaborative work and content reuse. The actual implementation of XMLlab allows to run the generated simulations within the open source mathematical software Scilab, either locally when Scilab is installed on the client machines, or on thin clients running a simple web browser, when XMLlab and Scilab are installed on a distant server running a standard HTTP server.


OBJECTIVE: To compare blood pressure measurements in newborn infants using the flush method, pulse oximetry and oscillometry according to Doppler findings. METHODS: Noninvasive blood pressure measurements were made using three techniques (flush method, pulse oximetry and oscillometry) in three groups of newborns: 15 normal term infants, 16 stable preterm infants, and 14 critically ill infants. All measurements were video recorded, edited separately, coded and analyzed independently by three neonatologists. RESULTS: Fifty-seven measurements were made using each method. The flush method and pulse oximetry had a better correlation with Doppler findings than oscillometry (correlation coefficients: 0.89, 0.85, 0.71; p < 0.01). The difference between measurement means, their standard deviations and the 95% confidence intervals when compared with Doppler findings were: -5.2±7.9 (-21.1:10.7) mmHg for the flush method; 0.4±8.9 (-17.5:18.2) mmHg for pulse oximetry; and 6.4±16.1 (-25.8:8.6) mmHg for oscillometry. The flush method had a better agreement with Doppler findings for the diagnosis of hypotension than oximetry and oscillometry. CONCLUSIONS: The flush method and pulse oximetry seem to be useful techniques to measure systolic blood pressure in newborn infants; oscillometry had the poorest agreement with Doppler findings to detect hypotension.


Purpose and Background Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. and costs and estimated $6 to $26 billion annually largely due to hospitalizations. Bridging the Discharge Gap Effectively (BRIDGE) is an NP-driven transitional care program for cardiovascular patients. BRIDGE has demonstrated lower rates of readmission for patients with acute coronary syndrome who participated but not for atrial fibrillation (Afib) patients. We sought to assess differences between Afib patients who participated in the BRIDGE program and those who did not. Conceptual Framework The BRIDGE program is based on the Bumpus Integrated Client-Focused Transitional Care Model that posits that there exists a dynamic relationship between systems and clinicians that simultaneously influences individual behaviors and health outcomes. Methods This was a retrospective study of all patients referred to BRIDGE with a primary discharge diagnosis of Afib. Equal numbers of BRIDGE attendees were randomly matched to non-attendees. Uni-variate techniques were used to compare groups. Results and interpretation of results Of 148 Afib patients referred to BRIDGE, 84 (56.8%) attended BRIDGE, 36 (24.3%) saw cardiologists or primary care providers and 28 (18.9%) saw other providers or were unknown. There was no significant difference in median time to follow up. In total 17 (11.5%) patients were readmitted within 30 days. Nonattendees were more likely (71.4%) to be readmitted with afib/related diagnoses whereas attendees were less likely (40%). There was no significant differences in incidence of comorbid CAD, HTN, CHF or vascular disease between groups. However, of patients readmitted there was a trend toward BRIDGE attendees having more comorbidities. Conclusion This study helps us to better understand readmission patterns of Afib patients. While there was no difference in readmission rates between groups, patients who were readmitted from BRIDGE had more comorbid conditions and were often readmitted for non-Afib conditions while those readmitted by cardiologists had fewer comobidities but were more often readmitted with Afib/related issues. A larger sample is needed to better understand this dichotomy and to determine what measures can be taken to enhance the BRIDGE program for Afib patients. Degree Type Open Access Senior Honors Thesis This open access senior honors thesis is available at DigitalCommons@EMU: http://commons.emich.edu/honors/372


Offering a social approach to landscape through the systematic study of
communication routes, this study redresses the balance between previous social,
historical and data driven archaeological studies of roads, paths and
communication routes, while providing landscape survey projects with the
techniques through which to address social interaction on a regional scale.
Research on roads, paths and communication routes completed over the past 50
years focuses on the technology of road building, descriptive historical accounts
of roads, and anthropological investigations that focus mainly on the role of
communication routes in movement, memory and landscape. Unlike these
previous studies, this research addresses communication routes as socially
embedded material culture.
Since the 1970s many archaeologists working in the Mediterranean have
employed regional survey techniques in order to investigate broader patterns of
human activity in the landscape. Communication routes are notoriously absent
from these survey projects. Interaction is instead extrapolated from topographical
information and sherd densities. In the current climate of landscape archaeology
where interdisciplinary regional survey projects employ ever more complex and
insightful GIS systems in the attempt to understand social landscapes, the absence
of communication data appears glaringly obvious.
Within this thesis I argue that the importance of roads and paths goes beyond the
places they may or may not connect or intersect. Instead, roads and paths are
products of daily practices that reaffirm, redefine and reproduce social and
cultural relations. Through the intensive survey of communication routes in three
distinct regions in Cyprus, (North Palekhori, Mandres and the Akamas Peninsula
Survey Zones), I gained a greater understanding of the interplay between human
activity, expressions of identity, land use and settlement from the Roman to the
British Colonial period.
iii
Although the morphology and structural features of roads, paths and
communication routes vary between these survey zones the underlying themes
involved in the construction, maintenance and use of communication routes cut
across geography and time. This thesis pushes the boundaries of landscape
archaeology and survey methodologies to address: human-land relations,
traditions of road and path building, the role of roads and paths in the negotiation
of power and the entwined nature of communication routes and perceptions of
landscape.


An emerging class of data-intensive applications involve the geographically dispersed extraction of complex scientific information from very large collections of measured or computed data. Such applications arise, for example, in experimental physics, where the data in question is generated by accelerators, and in simulation science, where the data is generated by supercomputers. So-called Data Grids provide essential infrastructure for such applications, much as the Internet provides essential services for applications such as e-mail and the Web. We describe here two services that we believe are fundamental to any Data Grid: reliable, high-speed transport and replica management. Our high-speed transport service, GridFTP, extends the popular FTP protocol with new features required for Data Grid applications, such as striping and partial file access. Our replica management service integrates a replica catalog with GridFTP transfers to provide for the creation, registration, location, and management of dataset replicas. We present the design of both services and also preliminary performance results. Our implementations exploit security and other services provided by the Globus Toolkit.


Field measurements and lighting analysis software were used to conduct an evaluation of the illuminance of LED roadway luminaires. Three sets of recently developed LEDs and one set of high-pressure sodium luminaires were installed in the field, and data were collected separately for each luminaire according to Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) LM-50-99. Photometric characteristics provided by the manufacturers of the luminaires were used to assess their performance with AGi32 lighting analysis software, and the results were compared with the field illuminance data. Results showed that field illuminance was sometimes lower than the illuminance indicated by the software; these differences varied in both magnitude and location, depending on the LED luminaire. Multiplicative factors to describe the differences were estimated and ranged from 0.96 (relatively small) to 0.57 (relatively large). Larger differences were located near the light poles and at the middle and third points of the span. These findings suggest that quick checks can be performed by taking illuminance measurements at key points along the span to provide an approximation of the differences between field and software data. Discrepancies between software and field data may be very important in the selection of luminaires for a given road and pedestrian conflict classification, as the field illuminance may not reach minimum levels required by public agencies. This point is illustrated with an example that uses minimum requirements from the Illinois Department of Transportation. Full sets of repeated field data points for state-of-the-art LED roadway luminaires, collected according to IESNA LM-50-99, are presented.


The growth and decay of ocean-island volcanoes are intrinsically linked to vertical movements. While the causes for subsidence are better understood, uplift mechanisms remain enigmatic. Santa Maria Island in the Azores Archipelago is an ocean-island volcano resting on top of young lithosphere, barely 480 km away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Like most other Azorean islands, Santa Maria should be experiencing subsidence. Yet, several features indicate an uplift trend instead. In this paper, we reconstruct the evolutionary history of Santa Maria with respect to the timing and magnitude of its vertical movements, using detailed field work and 40Ar/39Ar geochronology. Our investigations revealed a complex evolutionary history spanning ∼6 m.y., with subsidence up to ca. 3.5 Ma followed by uplift extending to the present day. The fact that an island located in young lithosphere experienced a pronounced uplift trend is remarkable and raises important questions concerning possible uplift mechanisms. Localized uplift in response to the tectonic regime affecting the southeastern tip of the Azores Plateau is unlikely, since the area is under transtension. Our analysis shows that the only viable mechanism able to explain the uplift is crustal thickening by basal intrusions, suggesting that intrusive processes play a significant role even on islands standing on young lithosphere, such as in the Azores.


Abstract. The act of balancing between an intensive agriculture with a high potential for nitrate pollution and a drinking water supply almost entirely based on groundwater is a challenge faced by Denmark and similar regions around the globe. Since the 1980s, regulations implemented by Danish farmers have succeeded in optimizing the N (nitrogen) management at farm level. As a result, the upward agricultural N surplus trend has been reversed, and the N surplus has reduced by 30–55% from 1980 to 2007 depending on region. The reduction in the N surplus served to reduce the losses of N from agriculture, with documented positive effects on nature and the environment in Denmark. In groundwater, the upward trend in nitrate concentrations was reversed around 1980, and a larger number of downward nitrate trends were seen in the youngest groundwater compared with the oldest groundwater. However, on average, approximately 48% of the oxic monitored groundwater has nitrate concentrations above the groundwater and drinking water standards of 50 mg l−1. Furthermore, trend analyses show that 33% of all the monitored groundwater has upward nitrate trends, while only 18% of the youngest groundwater has upward nitrate trends according to data sampled from 1988–2009. A regional analysis shows a correlation between a high level of N surplus in agriculture, high concentrations of nitrate in groundwater and the largest number of downward nitrate trends in groundwater in the livestock-dense northern and western parts of Denmark compared with the southeastern regions with lower livestock densities. These results indicate that the livestock farms dominating in northern and western parts of Denmark have achieved the largest reductions in N surpluses. Groundwater recharge age determinations allow comparison of long-term changes in N surplus in agriculture with changes in oxic groundwater quality. The presented data analysis is based on groundwater recharged from 1952–2003, but sampled from 1988–2009. Repetition of the nitrate trend analyses at five-year intervals using dating of the groundwater recharged in the coming years and a longer time series of the nitrate analyses can reveal the evolution in nitrate leaching from Danish agriculture during the past 10 yr. Similar analyses can be carried out to compare with other regions internationally.


The unequivocal link between physical activity and health has prompted researchers and public health officials to search for valid, reliable, and logistically feasible tools to measure and quantify free-living physical activity. Accelerometers hold promise in this regard. Recent technological advances have led to decreases in both the size and cost of accelerometers while increasing functionality (e.g., greater memory, waterproofing). A lack of common data reduction and standardized reporting procedures dramatically limit their potential, however. The purpose of this article is to expand on the utility of accelerometers for measuring free-living physical activity. A detailed example profile of physical activity is presented to highlight the potential richness of accelerometer data. Specific recommendations for optimizing and standardizing the use of accelerometer data are provided with support from specific examples. This descriptive article is intended to advance and ignite scholarly dialogue and debate ...


The survival of business in a scenario of accelerated globalization and increase competition depends on its degree of competitiveness of the business and the market. In this aspect the comparison among the worlds best standards is fundamental to the improvement of industry practices and procedures for the production of softwood lumber. Canada is an excellent example and parameter to use as a comparison in the softwood lumber industry with Brazils industry. The aim of this study was to compare competive softwood lumber markets between Brazil and Canada using the concepts of performance and efficiency. For this purpose the methodologies used were: constant market share, index of revealed comparative advantage, regression analysis and chi-square test to subsidize the viewpoint of performance. These have been applied to factor analysis, Cluster analysis and the Mann-Whitney test to assess the competitiveness of efficiency. The basis of the analysis for both concepts uses secondary and primary data that reflect current historical terms. The results indicate that Canada is more competitive than Brazil in the softwood lumber industry, however Brazil has better performance bringing together its industry in the face of world adversities.


Handheld devices are becoming more and more popular in education. Educational simulation and modelling are not new soil, but for handhelds they are still much under explored. Due to the difficulties teachers usually face in developing computer models and simulations and the lack of adequate tools for building them, we developed an authoring-tool for handheld educational simulation and modelling, called Sim-H (SIMulation for Handhelds). Sim-H is made by several modules each one relating to a type of simulation application that can be used in an educational context. One of these modules, that we describe thoroughly herein, is the Handheld Model Editor, a modelling tool for handheld devices that can be used to build models to use as such or as the core of educational handheld simulations.


While standard recurrent neural networks explicitly impose a chain structure on different forms of data, they do not have an explicit bias towards recursive selfinstantiation where the extent of recursion is dynamic. Given diverse and even growing data modalities (e.g., logic, algorithmic input and output, music, code, images, and language) that can be expressed in sequences and may benefit from more architectural flexibility, we propose the self-instantiated recurrent unit (SelfIRU) with a novel inductive bias towards dynamic soft recursion. On one hand, the Self-IRU is characterized by recursive self-instantiation via its gating functions, i.e., gating mechanisms of the Self-IRU are controlled by instances of the Self-IRU itself, which are repeatedly invoked in a recursive fashion. On the other hand, the extent of the Self-IRU recursion is controlled by gates whose values are between 0 and 1 and may vary across the temporal dimension of sequences, enabling dynamic soft recursion depth at each time step. The architectural flexibility and effectiveness of our proposed approach are demonstrated across multiple data modalities. For example, the Self-IRU achieves state-of-the-art performance on the logical inference dataset [Bowman et al., 2014] even when comparing with competitive models that have access to ground-truth syntactic information.


The purpose of this paper is to present an example of teacher-librarian collaboration (TLC) in a highly diverse branch of geography as a part of bachelor's seminar teaching. One can say that everything is geography if the phenomenon in question is delimited in a certain region, place or space. Thus every other discipline provides its methods, paradigms and information sources into the use of geography. This obviously presents a challenge to the librarian as he tries to support the geography students' information seeking. The topics can vary between cellular biology applications to sociological perception which also means a large variety in information needs. In our paper we aim to describe different approaches of collaboration this kind of variety requires based on the experiences and feedback gathered in a project, the aim of which was to integrate information literacy (IL) into the academic curriculum. Collaborating with teachers with different backgrounds and from different scientific traditions can be challenging for the librarian. Not only the information sources, databases and methods are different but it is the whole approach to the science that is different. Thus it is fairly obvious that the competence of a single librarian or a teacher is not sufficient for an effective IL instruction. The key here is the collaboration when librarian's information literacy and teacher's academic subject competence complete each other. A successful TLC gives opportunity for both marketing the idea of information literacy and the competence of a library professional. It may also increase the efficiency of teaching and studies and even shorten the time for a student to graduate. Especially in the case of seminar teaching TLC seems to give a valuable opportunity to instruct the students' seminar thesis along the way. In 2008, Kumpula Campus Library launched a project to integrate the IL teaching into the academic curriculum and to enhance the collaboration between the campus library and academic staff. The aim of our case project was to support the bachelor level students in their work of their bachelor's thesis. The librarian participated in the bachelor's seminar by giving a lecture about information literacy and a personal guidance in the students' information seeking process. The main idea was to make a timely intervention in order to give the best possible support to the academic writing across the curriculum. The importance of a timely intervention is well described in the classical text of Carol C. Kuhlthau (1993). The students came from the department of geography in the faculty of science of the University of Helsinki. The personal guidance session was conducted together with the seminar teacher to support both academic writing and information seeking process. After the seminar, the effect of the IL teaching was evaluated by a feedback questionnaire.


The main aim of the work presented in this thesis is to develop low-cost multi-junction graded bandgap solar cells using electroplated semiconductors. The semiconductor materials explored in this research are CdSe, ZnTe, CdS, CdMnTe and CdTe thin films. These layers were characterised for their structural, compositional, morphological, optical, and electrical features using XRD, Raman spectroscopy, EDX, SEM, UV-Vis spectroscopy, PEC cell, C-V, I-V and UPS measurement techniques respectively. The summary of the results depict that CdSe and CdS semiconductors have hexagonal crystal structures and are mainly n-type in electrical conduction within the explored range of deposition potentials. The crystal structures of ZnTe thin films are hexagonal and the electroplated ZnTe thin films have both n- and p-type electrical conduction. In the literature, the electrical conductivity type of ZnTe thin films has been reported to be p-type. In this work, the developments of n-type ZnTe thin films have been successfully achieved for the first time by using intrinsic doping. Also, the fabrication of p-n homo-junction diodes from intrinsically doped electroplated ZnTe layers have been developed for the first time. Results from analytical techniques showed that CdTe and CdMnTe thin films have cubic crystal structures and can exist as n- and p-type materials. The semiconductor materials investigated in this work have been used for solar cells fabrication. Some of the device structures explored are based on p-n hetero-junction solar cells fabricated from CdS/ZnTe hetero-structure and combination of n-n hetero-junction plus large Schottky barrier (n-n+SB) solar cells fabricated from CdS/CdTe hetero-structure. The highest efficiency obtained for the p-n junction solar cell with device structure glass/FTO/n-CdS/p-ZnTe/Au was -5.3% while the highest efficiency reported in this work for n-n+SB solar cells with device structure glass/FTO/n-CdS/n-CdTe/Au was -7.6%. Multi-junction graded bandgap solar cells with different device structures were also fabricated in this research work. The two most important solar cells in this category are n-n-n plus large Schottky barrier (n-n-n+SB) solar cells fabricated from glass/FTO/n-ZnS/n-CdS/n-CdTe/Au device structures and n-n-p solar cells fabricated from glass/FTO/n-CdS/n-CdTe/p-CdTe/Au device structures. The n-n-p device structure is a combination of one n-n hetero-junction and one n-p homo-junction interface. The experimental investigations carried out on the effect of thickness of p-CdTe on n-n-p device structures showed that thinner p-CdTe layer of -35 nm is most appropriate to be used in the n-n-p solar cells device configuration. The highest efficiency obtained for the n-n-p solar cell device structures was -10.9% while the highest efficiency obtained for the n-n-n+SB solar cell device structures was -12.8% with an active area of -0.031 cm[2].


A new coordination polymer was synthesized hydrothermally using 4,4′-dimethoxy-3,3′-biphenyldicarboxylic acid (H2dmbpdc) and Ca(NO3)2·4H2O. The structure of the new compound, Ca(dmbpdc)(H2O)2 (CPO-70-Ca), was determined from powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) data using simulated annealing, followed by Rietveld refinement of the structure. The framework is based on one-dimensional metal carboxylate chains that are linked by the organic linker into a three-dimensional network with rhombic channels. The as-synthesized material resembles our recently reported compound CPO-69-Ca, and shares the same sra topology. The asymmetric unit comprises one calcium atom, one fully deprotonated linker, one water molecule coordinated to the metal cation as well as one solvent water molecule located in the rhombic channels. The metal cation is eight-coordinate, forming an irregular coordination polyhedron. The thermal behavior of CPO-70-Ca was investigated in an in situ structural analysis by variable temperature powder X-ray diffraction. This study revealed an interesting response to solvent removal from the as-synthesized structure. The results include a partially desolvated version of CPO-70-Ca and a structural transformation to CPO-69-Ca upon full desolvation.


Kokopelli, the fluteplayer, is one of the most popular icons that American culture has adopted from the Native peoples of North America. The Kokopelli name and image are everywhere, adorning everything from jewellery, welcome mats, T-shirts, and money clips to motels, freeway underpasses, nature trails, nightclubs, and string quartets. Kokopelli evokes mystery and wonder, ancient ceremonies and spirituality, Mother Earth and the purity of nature. But what exactly is Kokopelli? Just how Native American is the ubiquitous flute-player? In this readable and fascinating book, the distinguished Hopi scholar Ekkehart Malotki describes the development of the Kokopelli phenomenon in American mass culture from its beginning to Kokopelli's present status as pan-Southwestern icon. He explores the figure's connections with the Hopi kachina god Kookopolo and Maahu, the cicada, and discusses how this rock art image has been appropriated and misunderstood. Kokopelli sheds light on a little-understood aspect of Hopi culture and testifies to the continuing power of Native cultures to spark the popular imagination and interest of outsiders. Ekkehart Malotki is a professor of languages at Northern Arizona University. His books include "Hopi Animal Tales" and "The Bedbugs' Night Dance" and "Other Hopi Tales of Sexual Encounter", both available from the University of Nebraska Press.


After thirty years of impressive economic growth, Vietnam is currently threatened by the middle-income trap since the country struggles with skill mismatches on regional labor markets and with a private domestic sector with little linkages to export-orientated MNEs, due to its low productivity levels.
Therefore, some MNEs have started to step in these institutional voids through CSR practices with the goal to shift their host regions on a more sustainable economic develop-ment path. On the one hand, they enforce the diffusion of global CSR certificates, which consist of international labor and environmental standards, in host regions' local economy. This is supposed to help local firms to become future suppliers in global value chains. On the other hand, they carry out local CSR projects at partnering universities and vocational training institutes in order to improve their host regions' human capital base.
However, it remains unclear whether MNEs' CSR practices are a suitable means to unlock regions from institutional path-dependence. Following recent attempts in economic geography, this dissertations considers a more actor-centered perspective on institutional change. Its goal is to discuss to what extent and under which circumstances MNEs become institutional entrepreneurs through their CSR practices in Vietnamese regions, thereby fostering regional industrial upgrading (RIU) potentials. More precisely, this dissertation presents with the CSR─RIU model a new theoretical framework which explains how global CSR certificates can diffuse into the local economy and how local CSR projects in the education sector may help MNEs' host regions to overcome skill mismatch problems on regional labor market.
Based on statistical data from Vietnam's Technological and Competitiveness Survey 2014 and own-conducted qualitative in-depth interviews with representatives from the business sector and education sector, this dissertation makes the following empirical contribu-tions.
First, global CSR certificates do not have a positive impact on short-term productivity growth among local firms. Hence, it is unlikely that the diffusion of global CSR certificates into the local economy will yield in rising linkages between local firms and MNEs. Furthermore, regional institutions such as CSR support system rather than MNEs belong to the key drivers for the diffusion of global CSR certificates in Vietnam's private domestic sector.
Second, MNEs can indeed establish parts of their home countries' TVET systems through local CSR projects at partnering PEOs in their host regions albeit some adaptions to the local context are inevitable. The case studies also reveal that those public educational organizations are integrated into institution-building initiatives which possess a high spatial, institutional, cognitive and social proximity towards the respective MNEs.
Third, collaborative training models between the business sector and public educational organizations introduced by MNEs have not become institutionalized in the local economy. This can be explained by two facts. First, local firms have not been included in such initiatives. Second, they show a deviating territorial, network and societal embed-dedness compared to MNEs.
To sum up, although numerous MNEs and their partners have undertaken substantial efforts in Vietnam to shift host regions towards a more sustainable development path, their institution-building attempts have so far fizzled out.
Based on these results, the following conclusion can be drawn. MNEs, development agencies and regional authorities might be more successful in triggering a regional institu-tional change in Vietnam if they include local firms in their alliances from the very beginning and equally consider MNEs' and local firms' needs and ideas in these reforms attempts.


In the recent 3 decades, along with the rapid development of national economy, dietary pattern and lifestyle have undergone significant changes in Mainland China. At the same time, the major causes of disease and death in Mainland China have shifted from predominantly infectious disease and diet-related deficiency diseases to overweight/obesity and other non-communicable diseases, including hypertension, stroke, coronary heart disease, diabetes, cancers, etc. The characteristics of the dietary change are the decrease of cereal and vegetable consumption and the increase of animal foods and oil/fat consumption; although the average Chinese dietary pattern remains a plant food based diet. These dietary changes, in combination with the decrease of physical activity (sedentary life), continuous increase of tobacco and alcohol consumption have led to the rapid increase of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The overall contribution of NCDs death to the total death of Chinese people is around 80%. Current evidences have provided enough scientific basis for placing NCDs prevention and control as the high priority in public health; although further studies on the interactions between human genome and lifestyle factors are important for improving the effectiveness of prevention and control strategies. 