Nine new species, six in the new genus Lepetodrilus and three in the new genus Gorgoleptis, are proposed in two new families, which together compose the new archaeogastropod superfamily Lepetodrilacea, as yet known only from the deep-sea hydrothermal-vent habitat in the eastern Pacific. Shells are limpet-shaped, of non-nacreous aragonite, with tough periostracum enveloping the shell edge. The apex is posterior, in some species projecting posteriorly, and deflected to the right. Sculpture is lacking or of beads or imbricate radial ribs. The muscle scar is horseshoe-shaped and narrowed posteriorly. The radula is rhipidoglossate and unique in forming a V-alignment of lateral teeth descending toward the rachidian. The families differ in morphology of the first lateral tooth, morphology of the ctenidium, and in placement of the penis: on the right ventral side of the neck in Lepetodrilidae and an outgrowth of the left oral region in Gorgoleptidae. Gorgoleptidae further differ in retaining the operculum and in having a posterior periostracal band shielding the posterior viscera and extending adjacent to the operculum. Anatomy is treated in part II by Fretter (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 318, 33 (1988)). Three species (L. pustulosus, the type species of Lepetodrilus, L. elevatus and L. cristatus) are known from the Galapagos Rift and two sites on the East Pacific Rise, near 21 $^\circ$ N and 13 $^\circ$ N. One species, L. ovalis, is known from the two sites along the East Pacific Rise. The remaining species are as yet known only from single sites: L. guaymasensis from the Guaymas Basin, L. fucensis from the Juan de Fuca and Explorer Ridges, G. emarginatus from 21 $^\circ$ N, G. spiralis from 13 $^\circ$ N, and G. patulus from the Galapagos Rift. Only one of the broadly distributed species, L. elevatus, exhibits sufficient geographical variation to warrant the recognition of a subspecies, L. elevatus galriftensis, n. subsp., at the Galapagos Rift. These species are known only from sites exposed to warm hydrothermal effluent, not from the hotter environments of the black smokers or from cold sulphide seeps. Shell characters are most similar to the `tapersnout' superfamily, yet to be described, from which these species differ in having pitted sculpture on the protoconch. The Jurassic to early Cretaceous Symmetrocapulidae had similar shell proportions but were much larger; the Symmetrocapulidae are best considered an archaeogastropod sister group. The hydrothermal-vent habitat has been available throughout geological time; hydrogen sulphide toxicity should prevent invasions of new kinds of predators, thus promoting stability and longevity of species established in this community. Differences from other archaeogastropods at the superfamily level suggest that the origin of the Lepetodrilacea took place in the late Palaeozoic to early Mesozoic, the time at which other living archaeogastropod superfamilies appeared. The rift-vent habitat was most likely entered via shallow to successively deeper sites along ridge crests. Unique anatomies and radular characters are considered remnants of early archaeogastropod diversity from the period in which archaeogastropods were the dominant gastropods in shallow seas.


Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids have anti-inflammatory effects in vitro, and high dietary levels are associated with a lower incidence of inflammatory diseases. However, only limited effects have been demonstrated in asthma. The effects of dietary supplementation with fish oil for 10 months in 29 children with bronchial asthma was investigated in a randomized controlled fashion. In order to minimize the effects of environmental inhaled allergens and diet, this study was performed in a long-term treatment hospital. Subjects received fish oil capsules containing 84 mg eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and 36 mg docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) or control capsules containing 300 mg olive oil. The daily dosages of EPA and DHA were 17.0-26.8 and 7.3-11.5 mg x kg body weight(-1), respectively. Asthma symptom scores decreased and responsiveness to acetylcholine decreased in the fish oil group but not in the control group. In addition, plasma EPA levels increased significantly only in the fish oil group (p<0.0088). No significant side-effects were observed. The present results suggest that dietary supplementation with fish oil rich in the omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid is beneficial for children with bronchial asthma in a strictly controlled environment in terms of inhalant allergens and diet.


An extensive survey of the experimental research on the static and/or dynamic characteristics of fixed geometry, hydrodynamic journal bearings, available in English, in the open literature is presented. The type(s) of bearing, size of bearing(s) and range of parameters measured in each work are reported for slightly over 100 published experimental works. In addition, some general observations about the available experimental data sets are made. This annotated survey is intended to help the analytical community by providing an extensive list of sources of experimental data for use in analysis verification. It is intended to help the experimental community by highlighting the shortcomings of the available literature, as well as by providing a list of sources for appropriate data to help with current and future test rig debugging.


Nonexperimental data are used to evaluate impacts of a Bolivian preschool program on cognitive, psychosocial, and anthropometric outcomes. Impacts are shown to be highly dependent on age and exposure duration. To minimize the effect of distributional assumptions, program impacts are estimated as nonparametric functions of age and duration. A generalized matching estimator is developed and used to control for nonrandom selectivity into the program and into exposure durations. Comparisons with three groupschildren in the feeder area not in the program, children in the program for 1 month, and children living in similar areas without the programindicate that estimates are robust for significant positive effects of the program on cognitive and psychosocial outcomes with 7 months' exposure, although the age patterns of effects differ slightly by comparison group.


Abstract. Devonian bactritids are described for the first time from South America. They come from siliciclastic rocks of the Talacasto Formation in the Precordillera Basin, west-central Argentina. The host strata span the Lochkovian—Emsian and contain other non-ammonoid cephalopods as well, thus refuting the alleged virtual absence of cephalopods in circumpolar Devonian basins from southwestern Gondwana (the Malvinokaffric Realm). We report Bactrites gracilis and Devonobactrites? sp., whose wide distribution contrasts with the endemic paleobiogeographic signature of some other taxonomic groups in these basins. Furthermore, new Lochkovian and Pragian records of Bactrites sp. provide new insights into the earliest bactritid records worldwide.


Resume Populations indigenes et zones protegees: droits, principes et pratiques Les populations indigenes, bannies de force, des zones protegees par La 'conservation Coloniale', ont cause des problemes sociaux graves tout en provoquant une reponse vigoureuse. Maintenant, les partisans de la conservation de l'environnement acceptent les progres de la loi internationale qui reconnaissent les droits des indigenes et ont fait changer la categorisation de zone protegee; ceci afin de permettre aux indigenes d'etre proprietaires et d'avoir un pouvoir de controle. Les principes qui reconnaissent ces droits et les Directives qui permettent de les appliquer ont ete adoptes. Des obstacles de taille sont toujours en pratique. Cependant, des exemples positifs laissent voir des solutions. Resumen Gentes indigenas y zonas protegidas: derechos, principios y practica Las poblaciones indigenas excluidas pot la fuerza de las zonas protegidas por la 'conservacion Colonial' causaron problemas sociales serios pero tambien provocaron una reaccion energica. Ahora, los conservacionistas aceptan los cambios progresistas de la ley internacional. Estos cambios reconocen los derechos indigenas y han cambiado la categorizacion de zona protegida. De este modo, se les permite a los indigenas ser propietarios y controlar estas zonas. Se han adoptado principios que reconocen estos derechos y las Lineas Directrices que los aplican. Obstaculos enormes siguen en practica mas ejemplos positivos van sugeriendo soluciones. Colonial Conservation It is easy to forget, now that conservation has become a mainstream concern of the global community and the subject of international treaties, that the idea of conserving nature through the creation of protected areas is a relatively recent invention. The idea was born in the tumultuous rush of land grabbing during the American conquest of the West, when settler families, the US cavalry, gold miners, cowboys and Indians struggled to impose their different visions of life and land use on the continent. One of the first to conceive of the idea of a 'national park' was the artist George Catlin, who ventured into the Wild West in the 1830s to capture through his oil paintings the dignified visages of the 'Plains Indians'. Musing on what he felt would be the inevitable disappearance of the their way of life he wrote: And in future what a splendid contemplation ... when one ... imagines them as they might be seen, by some great protecting policy of government preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes ... A nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty! (Catlin 1841: vii, emphasis in original). However, when the first such park was actually created thirty years later, it was during the disruptions of the American Civil War at a time when a devastating series of 'Indian Wars' was being waged to subdue Indian autonomy and realise the country's 'manifest destiny' (Colchester 1994: 2-6). It was this dominant vision of conquest, combined with 'wilderness preservation' (Ibid.), which defined the way the first parks were created in the USA at Yosemite in 1864 and Yellowstone in 1872. As Keller and Turek (1998: 20-22) relate, the startling landscapes of Yosemite, substantially an outcome of Native American land use systems, were proposed for conservation by the very same settlers who, twelve years previously, had waged the 'Mariposa Indian War' against the area's indigenous people--the Miwok. In this one-sided struggle, forces sanctioned by the US Government made repeated attacks on Indian settlements. Villages were burned to the ground to force the Indians out of the area and to starve or freeze them into submission. …


In 1997 the Indiana Department of Transportation adopted the Superpave mixture design method and attendant specifications for hot-mix asphalt pavements. Prior to Superpave, the Indiana Department of Transportation aggregate frictional requirements were based on average daily traffic volumes and were divided into low, medium, and high volume categories. With the implementation of Superpave in Indiana, aggregate frictional requirements were reassigned to categories based on equivalent single axle load values. The purpose of the research is to determine whether average daily traffic or equivalent single axle load has a greater effect on the frictional resistance of a hot-mix asphalt pavement, to confirm and update, if necessary, the current equivalent single axle load based breakpoints for aggregate frictional requirements, and to evaluate the effects of aggregate physical properties on frictional resistance. Statistical analyses were conducted on inventory skid data to observe the effects of average daily traffic and equivalent single axle loads. It was determined that average daily traffic may have a greater effect on frictional resistance than equivalent single axle load. Additional statistical analyses were conducted to verify categorical breakpoints which indicated that the former average daily traffic breakpoints are correct and that the upper bound equivalent single axle load breakpoint may need some modification. Aggregates were tested for acid insolubility, differential wear, and frictional resistance. Acid insolubility results and physical property data obtained from quality assurance files were correlated to aggregate frictional resistance. Collected quality assurance data included bulk specific gravity, percent absorption, percent loss from impact, and percent loss from brine freeze/thaw. It was observed that the aggregates used in this study had a negligible amount of insoluble material and therefore had an insignificant effect on the frictional resistance. Terminal frictional resistance increased with decreasing bulk specific gravity, and increased with increasing percent absorption and percent loss from impact. Correlation between terminal frictional resistance and brine loss was very weak. Differential wear measurements were taken on stone-slag aggregate blends to determine the effectiveness of blends used in pavement mixtures. Differential wear results indicated that the high friction component of each blend could be improved by blending with softer carbonate aggregates, which also may be more cost effective.


PURPOSE
To evaluate the effect of CO2 laser treatment through topically applied amine fluoride solution on demineralised enamel.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Sixty extracted human molar crowns were selected and cut longitudinally into half. One half was subjected to a 10-day pH-cycling procedure to create caries-like lesions, whereas the other was left non-demineralised. The following treatments were randomly assigned (one treatment per tooth, on respective non-demineralised and demineralised matched specimens): exposure to a 1% amine fluoride solution for 15 s without irradiation (group I), irradiation for 15 s with a continuous-wave CO2 laser (group II), or laser-treatment for 15 s through the amine fluoride solution applied immediately beforehand (group III). Fluoride uptake (n = 30) and acid resistance (n = 30) were determined after treatment. Enamel surface alterations after laser irradiation were monitored using scanning electron microscopy.

RESULTS
In groups I and III, an increased fluoride uptake was detected (p < or = 0.05). Laser irradiation through topical fluoride resulted in an increased acid resistance of sound and demineralised enamel specimens in deeper layers (p < or = 0.05). In addition, less surface alterations were observed in SEM examination of specimens irradiated through the amine fluoride solution compared with counterparts treated with laser only.

CONCLUSIONS
CO2 laser light application through an amine fluoride solution may be instrumental in enhancing acid resistance of sound and demineralised enamel.


When creating modern and visually appealing user experiences for the interaction with industrial robots, previously known and universally applicable paradigms in app and web design can be utilized to increase accessibility and usability of the to be created service. This is especially the case when the expected user group consists of untrained and inexperienced users and therefore system interaction focus is laid more on build progress overview, safety for human and robot, as well as overall simplification of complicated features. In this paper, we present four of the most important paradigms of modern graphical user experiences in web and app design that can be used to forward the concept of interacting with an industrial robot without any experience-related thresholds. By redesigning an existing interaction concept of a working robot cell system for assembly tasks in a small and medium-sized enterprise environment the presented paradigms are being utilized. The achieved improvements are then examined in a before-after user study to analyze the paradigm's success in suiting the user's expectation and anticipation using the redesigned service.


Mechanisms in controlling the growth of heterotrophic bacteria have seldom been explored in the tropical South China Sea (SCS). This study reports the tempospatial distribution patterns and the controlling mechanisms of bacterial biomass (BB), production (BP), and specific growth rate (Bμ) from one summer (Jun 2010; 4 transects) and two winter (January and December 2011; one transect each) cruises along the northern SCS-shelf. In summer, all three bacterial variables showed strong gradients with greater readings at the inner-shelf then decreasing seaward. The positive correlations of bacterial production rate (BP) and bacterial specific growth rate (Bμ), with primary production (PP), chlorophyll-a, and dissolved organic carbon observed in summer indicate a high possibility of bottom-up (substrate supply) control. Positive bacterial temperature response was observed in the inner to mid-shelf area in winter. There, Bμ changed proportionally with temperature up to ca. 22°C. The Q10 (the increase of reaction rate for a temperature rise of 10°C) for Bμ was ~4.0, which was in the range reported by coastal studies. Very high BP/PP ratios (summer average: 89 ± 92%; winter average: 131 ± 88%) indicated bacteria carbon demand relied heavily on allochthonous organic carbon sources such as river input and re-suspension processes, and that the SCS-shelf might be net heterotrophic in these two seasons. In winter, BP/PP ratios changed positively with temperature in areas inside the midshelf, suggesting that the coastal zone might become a stronger CO2 source during cold season under a warming climate, if anthropogenic loadings of inorganic nutrients and organic matter remain high in the future. Article history: Received 15 February 2017 Revised 9 January 2018 Accepted 19 January 2018


Called out to investigate a suspected suicide in a luxury high-rise apartment, forensic scientist Theresa MacLean only just escapes with her life when the building is blown to smithereens. An accident - or something more sinister? A mostly empty block of trendy apartments in downtown Cleveland seems an unlikely terrorist target. The following day, Theresa is examining another suspected suicide in a wealthy neighbourhood when the cop accompanying her is shot dead by an unseen assailant. Could the two events be connected? As Theresa painstakingly pieces the clues she uncovers evidence of a dark secret in the murdered cop's past.


This book provides an indispensable guide for establishing a firm SOA governance foundation. Easy to read, comprehensive, pragmatic...excellent job. --Nick Laqua, Enterprise SOA Architect, Cathay Pacific Airways SOA Governance is a must-read that provides an in-depth look at the organizational, managerial, procedural, and technical aspects that any SOA project needs to consider. If youre investing in SOA, youll benefit greatly by having this excellent resource available to you as you contend with the many challenges of creating your own SOA governance. --David E. Michalowicz, Principal, Information Systems Engineer, The MITRE Corporation With this book Thomas Erl [and his team] do a great job in outlining a framework to implement an SOA governance program. For each stage of the project lifecycle, necessary governance precepts and processes are described concretely by referring to the service-orientation principles and SOA patterns. This makes it an indispensable source of information for any SOA practitioner or any professional who plans to start an SOA initiative. --Jean-Paul De Baets, Principal SOA Architect, Fedict (Belgian Federal Government Information and Communication Technology Service) This book on SOA governance provides both thoughtful and carefully crafted narrative and the supplementation of poignant real-world case studies that will help practitioners calibrate guidance to realities on the ground. This is a terrific book that will be heavily used--with tab stickers, dog-ears, highlighting, and column notes abounding to show for it--as practitioners strategize and subsequently iterate through organizational learnings on their journeys to SOA maturity. --David S. Rogers, Manager, IEEE Conferences Business and Technology Solutions Office Thomas Erls SOA Governance clarifies the principles behind this crucial capability for SOA adoption. Finally, a contribution that serves as a guide for project managers, architects, and any related role that has a common goal: the establishment, administration, and vision behind a service-enabled enterprise. Accenture sees this book as a milestone that will support the rationale behind selling and delivering SOA governance projects around the world. --Dr. Matthias Ziegler, Accenture; Dr. Jure Zakotnik, Accenture; Thomas M. Michelbach, Accenture Thomas Erls SOA Governance book fills in an important missing piece for any organization wanting to move to--and succeed with--an enterprise commitment to implement SOA and realize its overarching benefits. Of equal importance, however, is the fact that the basic concepts and frameworks that the book instantiates in the context of SOA can also be productively applied in other contexts that are not formally SOA-esque, but where complexity is in need of formal governance. --Charles N. Mead, MD, MSc., Senior Technical Advisor to the Director, National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT) Chair, Architecture Board, Health Level 7 (HL7) SOA Governance is the best read on governance and software delivery processes since the publication of RUP; it is the book that defines the standard Service Delivery Processes for all project lifecycle models and defines the necessary conditions and roadmap to reach SOA in the IT organization. --Filippos Santas, IT Architect, Credit Suisse Private Banking, Switzerland, and Certified SOA Trainer Achieving your service-oriented goals requires controlled growth and change, which are best accomplished through rigorous governance. The authors of this work drive to the heart of governance and show you how to manage your portfolio of services. --Kevin P. Davis, Ph.D., Software Architect The Definitive Guide to Governing Shared Services and SOA Projects SOA Governance: Governing Shared Services On-Premise and in the Cloud is the result of a multi-year project to collect proven industry practices for establishing IT governance controls specific to the adoption of SOA and service-orientation. Authored by world-renowned experts in the fields of SOA, IT governance, and cloud computing, this comprehensive book provides clear direction as to what does and does not constitute SOA governance and then steps the reader through the most important industry governance practices, as they pertain to individual SOA project lifecycle stages. With a consistent, vendor-neutral focus, and with the help of case study examples, the authors demonstrate how to define and position precepts, organizational roles, processes, standards, and metrics. Readers benefit from thorough and visually depicted cross-references and mapping between roles, processes, precepts, and project stages, enabling them to fully explore dynamics and dependencies and thereby learn how to use these governance controls to create their own custom SOA governance systems. This important title will be valuable to every practitioner concerned with making SOA work, including senior IT managers, project managers, architects, analysts, developers, administrators, QA professionals, security specialists, and cloud computing professionals. Topic Areas Defining SOA governance Establishing an SOA governance office and program Working with proven SOA governance precepts and processes Identifying organizational roles and relating them to SOA governance Associating design-time and runtime SOA project stages with SOA governance controls Governance considerations specific to shared services Roles, precepts, and factors specific to cloud-based services Understanding and categorizing SOA governance products and technologies Applying governance controls as early as the planning stages and measuring their success in subsequent stages Using vitality triggers to govern shared services on an on-going basis SOA governance controls that pertain to business information documents and policies


Must good deeds be rewarded and wrongdoers punished? Would God be unjust if He failed to punish and reward? And what is it about good or evil actions and moral identity that might generate such necessities? These were some of the vital religious and philosophical questions that eighth- and ninth-century Mu'tazilite theologians and their sophisticated successors attempted to answer, giving rise to a distinctive ethical position and one of the most prominent and controversial intellectual trends in medieval Islam. The Mu'tazilites developed a view of ethics whose distinguishing features were its austere moral objectivism and the crucial role it assigned to reason in the knowledge of moral truths. Central to this ethical vision was the notion of moral desert, and of the good and evil consequences--reward or punishment--deserved through a person's acts. Moral Agents and Their Deserts is the first book-length study of this central theme in Mu'tazilite ethics, and an attempt to grapple with the philosophical questions it raises. At the same time, it is a bid to question the ways in which modern readers, coming to medieval Islamic thought with a philosophical interest, seek to read and converse with Mu'tazilite theology. Moral Agents and Their Deserts tracks the challenges and rewards involved in the pursuit of the right conversation at the seams between modern and medieval concerns.


This study advocates that the EU support a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder initiative to achieve synergy from regional cooperation in the wider Black Sea area. The background for this initiative is first provided through an overview of the challenges, recent developments and EU interests in this region. Different models of regionalism have been promoted by the EU in the European periphery, and these are schematised with a focus on their respective advantages and disadvantages. Finally guidelines for an EU initiative are set out under: 1) objectives and sector-specific actions, 2) its scope in terms of variable geographic geometries of desirable cooperation in the region and 3) a Framework of institutional and financial arrangements to support the process. An overarching mechanism is required to give political cohesion, ownership, visibility and strategic purpose to the process, and this could well be based on an annual, high-level meeting, drawing on the model of the Black Sea Forum Summit in Bucharest on 5 June 2006.


Many neurons in the auditory forebrain of the mustache bat act as coincidence detectors for signals separated in time by up to 20 msec. Differences in path lengths cannot adequately explain how the nervous system delays one signal relative to the other to such a large degree. Several researchers have proposed that an inhibitory mechanism might account for long delays, but it has not been known where these delays are created. Previous studies, using a variety of mammals, have reported that the inferior colliculus contains some cells with much longer latencies than those of cells in lower auditory centers, suggesting that the inferior colliculus might be the site where long delays are generated. We characterized the latencies of cells in the 60 kHz contour of the mustache bat inferior colliculus and examined how GABAergic inhibition affected the latencies of those cells. Evaluations of the influence of GABA were made by documenting changes in response latency that occurred when GABAergic inputs were reversibly blocked by iontophoretic application of the GABAA antagonist bicuculline. Prior to bicuculline application, latencies varied over a wide range among the population of cells and we observed a pattern of latency changes with dorsoventral location. The pattern was that the population of neurons in the dorsal regions of the inferior colliculus had a wide range of latencies while the population in more ventral regions had progressively narrower latency ranges. Thus, while some cells at each depth had comparably short latencies, the average latency of the population at a given depth was long in the dorsal inferior colliculus and became progressively shorter ventrally. The same characteristic distribution of latencies and pattern of latency changes with depth were observed for cells that had different aural preferences, different rate-intensity functions, and different discharge patterns, suggesting that latency is an important organizational feature of the inferior colliculus. Bicuculline substantially shortened latency in about half of the cells studied, and it dramatically altered the pattern of latency changes with depth. These results suggest that GABA normally lengthens response latencies and creates a dorsoventral grading of delays in the inferior colliculus. This wide range of latencies could provide the large latency differences necessary for the coincidence detectors in the medial geniculate body tuned to signals separated by up to 20 msec.


This paper puts forward equity as an important structural element to understanding negotiation outcomes. We first advance bargaining theory to incorporate the self-serving use of equity. Agents are predicted to push equity principles which benefit them more than other parties, in particular those which are disadvantageous to parties with large bargaining power. Based on unique data from a world-wide survey of agents involved in international climate policy, we then study how participants assess the support of the equity criteria by major parties in the climate negotiations. Comparing these results with cost estimates from a POLES model, we find that the perceived equity preferences of the respective countries or groups of countries are in general consistent with our hypothesis of a self-serving use of equity criteria and thereby lend support for our theoretical model. While this self-interest is recognized by the participants of our survey for the positions of the USA and the G77/China as well as Russia, the EU manages to be seen as choosing (self-serving) equity arguments out of fairness concerns and in order to facilitate the negotiations.


OBJECTIVES
We sought to better understand the determinants of oral health disparities by examining individual-level psychosocial stressors and resources and self-rated oral health in nationally representative samples of Black American, Caribbean Black, and non-Hispanic White adults.

METHODS
We conducted logistic regression analyses on fair or poor versus better oral health using data from the National Survey of American Life (n = 6082).

RESULTS
There were no significant racial differences. Overall, 28% of adults reported having fair or poor oral health. Adults with lower income and less than a high school education were each about 1.5 times as likely as other adults to report fair or poor oral health. Higher levels of chronic stress, depressive symptoms, and material hardship were associated with fair or poor oral health. Adults living near more neighborhood resources were less likely to report fair or poor oral health. Higher levels of self-esteem and mastery were protective, and more-religious adults were also less likely to report fair or poor oral health.

CONCLUSIONS
Social gradients in self-rated oral health were found, and they have implications for developing interventions to address oral health disparities.


Composite slabs made of steel and concrete behavior is still today something difficult to
predict. The purpose of the current project is to advance in this area with the help of Finite
Elements (FE). The complex phenomena of interaction occurring between the steel deck
and concrete are modeled using finite elements. Current tests are costly and take a lot of
time, as the constructions of the slabs require time and money. Moreover, designing
methods based on full-scale specimens proposed by Eurocode 4 [1] introduce parameters
that decrease the real resistance on the safe side of the assumption. This fact is translated
into a large increase of material and therefore expenses. Furthermore, these methods do not
explain accurately the real comportment of these kinds of slabs.
This report presents the results obtained of the modeled simulations using FE comparing
them with the results of carried out bending tests of slabs of four different commercial steel
sheeting profiles tested at "Laboratori d'estructures i resistencia de materials" (LERMA) [2]
[3] [4] [5] [6] in the UPC. The modeling builds an accurate geometrical model of full scale
bending tests with the ability of describing macro and micro behaviors. The project also
focuses on the improvement of concrete modeling, tries to explain some behaviors and
compare some ranges of geometrical variables while the reliability of the model is
contrasted.
As a result of the progresses achieved during the development of the project, part of the
findings of this research were submitted as article to EUROSTEEL 2014 that will take
place in Naples on September [7]. Its full content is presented in the Annex.


Abstract Nuclear star clusters are unambiguously detected in about 50–70% of spiral and spheroidal galaxies. They have typical half-light radii of 2–5 pc, dynamical mass ranging from 106 – 107 M⊙, are brighter than globular clusters, and obey similar scaling relations with host galaxies as supermassive black holes. The nuclear stellar cluster (NSC) which surrounds Sgr A*, the SMBH at the center of our galaxy, is the nearest nuclear cluster to us, and can be resolved to scales of milliparsecs. The strong and highly variable extinction towards the Galactic center makes it very hard to infer the intrinsic properties of the NSC (structure and size). We attempt a new way to infer its properties by using Spitzer MIR images in a wavelength range 3–8 μm where the extinction is at a minimum, and the NSC clearly stands out as a separate structure. We present results from our analysis, including extinction-corrected images and surface brightness profiles of the central few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way.


Triassic megaspore assemblages from Svalbard, Arctic Norway, are described for the first time based on the analysis of the Upper Triassic (Carnian–Norian/Rhaetian) Kapp Toscana Group on the island of Hopen. Two megaspore zones are described: the late Carnian 'Dijkstraisporites beutleri Zone' (undifferentiated De Geerdalen Formation), and the Norian/Rhaetian 'D. beutleri–Verrutriletes preutilis Zone' (Svenskøya Formation). Megaspores are attributed to heterosporous lycopsids, and probably correspond to the microspore Aratrisporites, which was observed in palynological preparations. Megaspore occurrence was highest in delta‐plain and associated with lake‐mire deposits. However, their close association with marine microfossils suggests episodic marine influence and is consistent with previous interpretations that some Triassic lycopsids occupied marginal marine habitats. The absence of megaspores in the overlying Hopen Member and Flatsalen Formation is probably related to a marine transgression during the early Norian, as indicated by the recovery of low diversity assemblages of agglutinated foraminifera. The transition to ostracod‐dominated microfaunas in the middle part of the formation is consistent with a regionally extensive maximum flooding surface, prior to a return to megaspore‐dominated assemblages in the fluvio‐deltaic deposits of the Svenskøya Formation. Despite the abundance of their mega and microspores, lycopsid fossils are almost entirely absent within palaeobotanical collections from the island, which we ascribe to their herbaceous habit and consequent low preservation potential. The results of this study show lycopsids to be an important component of the local ecosystem and thus contribute to a more complete understanding of the Late Triassic floras of northern‐most Pangaea.


The EUCJ Intel decision is a reminder that European competition law looks different from that of the North American jurisdictions where economic effects drive enforcement policy and a tradition of due process and procedural fairness exists. Intel suggests limits to DG Competition's enforcement with regard to due process and is a wake up call for DG Competition to reiterate its commitment to procedural fairness.
Although there is some gap as between North American and European views on economic effects in cases, Intel suggests that this gap may be narrowing. Intel provides a road-map for further reworking of European case law towards more of an effects based approach. Perhaps Intel offers European competition law a GTE Sylvania-like moment with regard to an effects based approach to conduct, where cases had hereunto been form based "by object."


Voiscape is a communication medium by which people can talk each other while moving within virtual sound space freely. By using a prototype of voiscape called VPIIQ (Voiscape Prototype II Q), the effect of difference of QoS caused by network policies was evaluated subjectively. The result showed unexpectedly that the percentage of correct answers was higher in the case in which QoS is lower in the localization test. In the sound localization tests, the percentage of correct answers was higher when subjects performed operations to move or to turn than not to do so. However, in the speaker recognition tests, opposite results were observed.


Context. In the framework of the study of the X-ray and optical emission in supernova remnants we focus on an isolated X-ray knot in the northern rim of the Vela SNR (Vela FilD), whose X-ray emission has been studied and discussed in Paper I. Aims. We aim at understanding the physical origin of the X-ray and optical emission in FilD, at understanding the role of the different physical processes at work, and at obtaining a key for the interpretation of future X-ray observations of SNRs. Methods. To this end we have pursued an accurate "forward" modeling of the interaction of the Vela SNR shock with an ISM cloud. We perform hydrodynamic simulations and we directly compare the observables synthesized from the simulations with the data. Results. We explore four different model setups, choosing the values of the physical parameters on the basis of our preliminary analysis of the X-ray data. We synthesize X-ray emission maps and spectra filtered through the XMM-Newton EPIC-MOS instrumental response. The impact of a shock front at 6 million Kelvin on an elliptical cloud 30 times denser than the ambient medium describes well the shock-cloud interaction processes in the Vela FilD region in terms of spectral properties and morphology of the X-ray and optical emission. Conclusions. The bulk of the X-ray emission in the FilD knot originates in the cloud material heated by the transmitted shock front, but significant X-ray emission is also associated to the cloud material, which evaporates, as an effect of thermal conduction, in the intercloud medium. The physical origin of the FilD optical emission is associated to thermal instabilities. In the FilD knot the X-ray emission associated to the reflected shock front is negligible.


The purpose of this study was to investigate what issues youth are facing in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and to examine how these issues can be brought to the forefront for decision-makers' agendas. Additionally, the study determines whether the concept of youth civic engagement "youth councils" could help to address youth issues and identify the constraints to implementing such a policy proposal. This study utilizes Kingdon's Agenda Setting Theory as a theoretical framework. Additionally, this study used a qualitative methods approach. High school students and public officials from the government were participants in the study. The literature review confirmed strong relationships between youth civic engagement and positive youth development. Five high schools were selected for focus group sessions and 15 in-depth interviews were conducted with government officials. All data were transcribed and coded by themes for data analysis. Both content analysis method and NVivo were used to determin emerging themes. The study found that if youth civic engagement could be implemented, several constraints need to be overcome. The first issue is that youth are not encouraged to talk and discuss their opinions. This would have to be addressed in schools by enhancing the school environment and providing training for teachers. The second issue is the need to enhance youth image in the Saudi society, from being identified as troublemakers to being seen as a valuable asset. This may occur by allowing youth to be part of the city and neighborhood councils. The last issue is the importance of building trust between government and youth through public dialogues and direct connections between them.


In the last two decades, both the conception and the practice of participatory culture have been transformed by the new affordances enabled by digital, networked, and mobile technologies. This exciting new book explores that transformation by bringing together three leading figures in conversation. Jenkins, Ito and boyd examine the ways in which our personal and professional lives are shaped by experiences interacting with and around emerging media.Stressing the social and cultural contexts of participation, the authors describe the process of diversification and mainstreaming that has transformed participatory culture. They advocate a move beyond individualized personal expression and argue for an ethos of doing it together in addition to doing it yourself.Participatory Culture in a Networked Era will interest students and scholars of digital media and their impact on society and will engage readers in a broader dialogue and conversation about their own participatory practices in this digital age.


Every year power outages cost billions of dollars and affect millions of people. Historical data shows that between 2000 and 2016, 75% of power outages (in terms of duration) were caused due to severe weather events. Due to climate change these severe weather events are becoming more frequent. The National Association of Regulatory Commissioners have recently emphasized on the importance of building electricity sector's resilience thus ensuring long term reliability and economic benefits for the stakeholders. These severe weather events are called High Impact Low Frequency (HILF) events, which means that these events may not occur every year, but when they happen, the impact is likely to be severe. So, it is imperative that the risk of power outages due to severe weather events and their economic impact is persistent. To mitigate the risk, utilities need to invest heavily so that the impacts due to these HILF events can be minimized. Under this situation, utilities face three key questions (1) where to invest (2) how much to invest and (3) how to justify the investment. Therefore, there is a need to develop a framework for investment related decision-making, which can identify the optimal strategies for minimizing the economic impacts of severe weather induced power outages under different budget conditions. It is equally important to understand the cascading impacts of the sustained power outages during natural disasters before investment can be planned for building resilience in electricity sector. The existing frameworks to access the costs of severe weather induced power outages grossly undermines the overall economic impacts. This research has (1) assessed the economic loss due to severe weather induced power outages in terms of loss of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and (2) developed a framework for identifying the optimal risk reduction strategies to minimize the economic impact. For assessing the economic impact, this research has adopted Inoperability Input-Output Model (IIM) using 20 years of historical data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The proposed framework has the flexibility to accommodate the risk appetite of the decision maker. The framework can be used by the Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) for the rate approvals from the State Utility Regulatory Commissions by justifying the importance of their resilience building projects to the State's economy.


Under the best of circumstances, policymakers from China, the United States or any other major power must attempt to reconcile at least three competing priorities: national security, economic viability and moral authority. Each of these three dimensions of foreign policy typically has its own separate and conflicting logic. security issues are most often seen in realist terms, assuming a world of anarchy and the inevitability of zero-sum games (e.g., I can gain only at your expense). Economic problems are usually addressed from a quite a different perspective, assuming instead opportunities for interdependence and mutual benefit in a struggle, often understood in liberal terms, over how the benefits are to be shared (e.g., we both gain; but each will try to get the bigger share). Finally, moral questions are typically perceived in terms of absolutist alternatives (e.g., "mine vs. yours, or even good vs. evil") -- we might choose to coexist, to compete, or even to fight over who is right, but the outcome is rarely a compromise. These three dimensions of foreign policy also seem to represent a rough hierarchy of priorities: first security, then economics and finally questions of morality. If the state is threatened, national security takes precedence. Economic policy is reshaped to support national defense, and moral debate tends to be suspended for the national emergency (e.g., my country, right or wrong). If, however, there is no major perceived threat to state security, then economic priorities take precedence. Finally, moral issues are most likely to receive priority in those countries, like the Group of Seven today, which perceive no military threat from any other state and which are economically well off. This is not necessarily the hierarchy of foreign policy priorities that one might prefer; rather, it is presented here as a general approximation of what seems to happen in response to changing world events. Human rights has emerged as one of the foremost moral issues of the post-Cold War world. Foreign ministry officials and national security advisors are being pressed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and citizen activists to take human rights abuse more seriously as a foreign-policy priority. Systematic monitoring and detailed reporting of human rights abuse by NGOs (e.g., Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Freedom House), individual journalists and government reports (like the annual Department of State country reports) have produced a growing database to support comparative analysis and sustained policy debate. This paper is an analysis of how the United States and China are treating the issue of human rights in their bilateral relationship. It assumes that no matter how much some U.S. and Chinese officials and trade council lobbyists may hope that the issue will disappear, NGOs and citizen activists in both countries will keep human rights high on the agenda of Sino-American relations -- particularly in a post-Cold War world characterized by a sharp decline in state-to-state security threats and increasing general economic prosperity. Human rights, however, cannot be treated in isolation. In order to implement an effective and sustainable human rights policy, it must be designed in a way to complement security and economic concerns. Especially when considering that each of the three main dimensions of foreign policy is customarily treated in terms of a separate logic, human rights, like any moral foreign-policy priority, must be considered in terms of a broad concept of "national interest." This analysis attempts to show how both Beijing and Washington might address human rights as a foreign policy issue more effectively -- and in ways that could enhance economic and security cooperation between China and the United States rather than threaten it. There is an emerging consensus among analysts that the recent differences in Sino-American relations have the potential to evolve into a strategic confrontation between the two countries. …


This paper discusses the findings of fifteen focus groups that explored civilian perceptions and experience of police corruption in South Africa. The research was conducted in and around three cities, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, in mid-2010. The paper suggests that a 'tough' approach to policing is unlikely to win public favour or change public perceptions. Instead the South African Police Service (SAPS) needs to concentrate on moulding itself into an organisation of well-trained professionals. Above all, the police have to treat South Africa's citizens respectfully.


School Social Work: An Evidence-Informed Framework for Practice offers school social work students and veteran practitioners a new framework for choosing their interventions based on the best available evidence. It is the first work that synthesizes the evidence-based practice (EBP) process with recent conceptual frameworks of school social work clinical practice offered by leading scholars and policymakers. Many other books on EBP try to fit empirically validated treatments into practice contexts without considering the multiple barriers to implementing evidence-based practices in places as complicated and multi-faceted as schools. Additionally, there are vital questions in the literature about what the best levels for intervention are in school social work. Responding to the complexity of applying EBP in schools, this volume offers a conceptual framework that addresses the real-world concerns of practitioners as they work to provide the best services to their school clients. For each domain of school social work practice, the authors critically review interventions, presenting the current research with guidelines for addressing such implementation issues as cost, school culture, adaptations for special populations, and negotiating multiple arenas of practice. In addition, the chapters are grounded in the process of evidence-based practice, illustrating how school practitioners can pose useful questions, search for relevant evidence, appraise the evidence, apply it in keeping with client values, and monitor the results. Written by four school social work scholars with over four decades of theoretical, research, and practice experience, this volume will be relevant to both research faculty studying school social work interventions and students learning about school social work practice.


We welcome readers to the first special issue (11.1) of the Journal of Health Management. We hope the readers find the articles and various reviews enriching and provocative, both in terms of the range of ideas and critical approaches addressed. The key theme of this double issue concerns the political limits of mega-development projects such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The primary focus of the articles collected here is to provide an insightful, constructive and in-depth critique of the United Nations (UN) MDGs along with critical deliberations on their short- and long-term implications not only for health management but also for a wide range of issues around development and social change.


OBJECTIVE
To construct the multi epitope prokaryotic expression plasmid and appropriate engineering bacteria expressing the multi-epitope fusion protein of urea membrane channel protein (UreI), urease B subunit (UreB) and adhesin (HpaA) of Helicobacter pylori, then study its microbiological characteristics.

METHODS
The target sequence contains multi epitope gene sequence of Helicobacter pylori were designed and synthesized, subsequently; it was subcloned into the expression vector pET28a (+), confirmed by restriction enzyme digestion and DNA sequencing. The fusion protein rIBA was expressed in E. coli Rosseta (DE3) and analyzed by Western blot.

RESULTS
The plasmid of pET28a(+)/IBA was constructed successfully, confirmed by endonuclease digestion and sequence analyze. The expressed rIBA protein with relative molecular mass about 40 x 10(3) and can be detected by Western blot.

CONCLUSION
The prokaryotic engineering bacteria expression multi-epitope of the Helicobacter pylori was constructed successfully. The recombinant protein rIBA expressed by the engineering bacteria can be identified by Sydney strain 1 of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori SS1) specific antibody IgY, which demonstrated that the rIBA has high correlation with H. pylori SS1.


BACKGROUND: The Romberg's syndrome is a disease that was first described more than a century ago, and during this period had several names. It is characterized by a slow and progressive atrophy of the tissues of a hemiface, can affect all tissues and can also display neurological and ocular manifestations. The aim of this study is to report a series of patients with progressive hemifacial atrophy, addressing treatment options for each individual case. METHODS: Was conducted a retrospective, descriptive and analytic study of the patients treated in our service, Plastic Surgery at the Hospital de Clinicas - Universidade Federal do Parana, and the Centro de Atendimento Integral ao Fissurado Labio Palatal (CAIF), at Curitiba, PR, Brazil. RESULTS: Were analyzed 13 patients, 10 (76.9%) female and 3 (23.1%) male. The age of onset of symptoms ranged from 2 to 15 years. The first medical consultation with an specialist occurred at 11.7 years. The left hemiface was most commonly affected. Seven (53.8%) patients underwent surgery. CONCLUSIONS: The Romberg's syndrome is a rare disorder, devastating to facial appearance, and it has been widely studied. Despite great advances in medicine, its etiology definition and the treatment directed to its cause is still only a wish.


With the aim of reducing carbon emissions and increasing hygrothermal comfort, buildings across the UK are undergoing energy retrofits. With historic buildings, it is important that retrofit actions have a limited negative impact on the building's fabric and cultural significance. Work to date in the UK has focused on the retrofit of historic solid masonry construction, with little research into the retrofit of historic timber-framed buildings. Changes to these buildings must be managed through the use of established conservation principles. However, where infill panels are beyond repair or have previously been substituted with inappropriate materials, there exists the potential to retrofit a material with a higher thermal performance. Nonetheless, it must be ensured that this retrofit does not create interstitial hygrothermal conditions that could threaten the survival of surrounding historic fabric. In this paper the authors present the hygrothermal simulation and physical monitoring of three different potential replacement infill panels. Results from Glaser calculations, WUFI® Pro and WUFI® 2D are compared to measured results of physical test panels mounted between two climate-controlled chambers. Whilst all three prediction methods successfully identified interstitial condensation where it was measured to occur, major discrepancies existed both between simulated and measured results, and between different simulation methods.


Traditionally, the human soul is regarded as a nonphysical concept that can only be examined by psychiatrists and theologists. In his new book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis", Nobel Laureate Francis Crick boldly straddles the line between science and spirituality by examining the soul from the standpoint of a modern scientist, basing the soul's existence and function on an in-depth examination of how the human brain "sees".


Obesity and diet-related chronic disease are increasing problems worldwide. In response, many governments have enacted or are considering taxes on energy-dense foods. Perhaps the most commonly-recommended policy is a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). This paper estimates the extent to which a tax on SSBs is passed through to consumers in the form of higher prices. We examine the first city-level tax on SSBs in the U.S., which was enacted by the voters of Berkeley, California in November, 2014. We collected the prices of various brands and sizes of SSBs and other beverages before and after the implementation of the tax from a near-census of convenience stores and supermarkets in Berkeley, California. We also collected prices from stores in a control city: San Francisco, where in a similar voter referendum failed despite majority support. Estimates from difference-in-differences models indicate that, across all brands and sizes of products examined, 43.1 percent (95 percent confidence interval: 27.7 percent - 58.4 percent) of the Berkeley tax was passed on to consumers. The estimates also are consistent with cross-border shopping. For each mile of distance between the store and the closest store selling untaxed SSBs, pass-through rose 33.3 percent for 2-liter bottles and 25.8 percent for 12-packs of 12-ounce cans.


This contribution puts forward an explorative account of the Swiss political parties' presence on Twitter. Social media in general, and the Twitter micro-blogging service more in particular, have recently received a lot of attention by social science scholars and political observers, yet the validity of these data sources is heavily disputed. This study takes one step back and tries to establish an empirically testable data base for party communication on Twitter in Switzerland, a context which is not well studied so far. More precisely, this study serves two main purposes. First, the representativeness of Swiss party accounts on Twitter in terms ideology, location and language is assessed. Subsequently, social network analysis is applied to provide evidence on the degree of political homophily and party elite dominance. It can be shown that the Swiss partisan Twitter sphere is systematically biased towards the political left and urban areas. Furthermore, it is revealed that Twitter users are separated into a handful of highly networked actors and many peripheral ones. These results have direct implications for social scientists and political observers interested in harnessing reliable social media data.


A survey and analysis of visual measurement of camera and object position in visual sub-space (eigenspace) is provided leading to several improvements to existing methods, as well as new approaches. Specifically, novel techniques were developed to allow robust measurements in the presence of occlusions and other dynamic scene changes which is known to be a significant challenge in pose measurement methods for important applications such as visual servoing, autonomous robotics in manufacturing and tele-robotics including aerospace, medical operations and others.
Local image information is shown to retain positional information in unoccluded regions that can then be used to determine position in the presence of significant dynamic occlusion. Local information is also shown to be more prone to ambiguity errors due to a lack of salient positional information. A subsectioning and recombination strategy is developed that features the advantages of local eigenspace in-dependence for robustness to occlusion while maintaining the inherent resistance to ambiguity available from global eigenspace analysis. This is achieved by computing modified global projections, while excluding information from occluded sections. A new method for occlusion detection using an eigenspace reconstruction error measure is also developed and evaluated.
A wide variety of experimental measurements are provided to demonstrate the performance of the new methods using an accurate XYZ platform and CCD cameras with metallic, machined parts. Experimental measurements are also performed to demonstrate improvements for eigenspace position accuracy through the use of multiple cameras. Several techniques are employed to combine and fuse multiple images from decoupled cameras whereby cameras are used for determining position in different directions to improve accuracy. Subsequently, multiple cameras are applied to achieving three dimensional translational position measurements in visual subspace.


During 1997 and 1998, unusual physical conditions occurred in the Bering Sea: strong May storms and calm conditions in July; record high sea surface temperature; a shallow wind mixed layer; a fresher-than-normal water column; and abnormal cross-shelf currents. Accom- panying these conditions were changes in the dominant phytoplankton, a die-off of seabirds, increased sightings of large whales and diminished returns of salmon. Changes to the physical environment during 1997 and 1998 are placed in context of historical meteorological and oceanographic data sets. Although 1997 had the warmest sea surface temperature ever observed on the south-east Bering Sea shelf, the heat content of the water column was cooler than average. In contrast, during 1998, the sea surface temperature was cooler than in 1997 but the water column had significantly higher heat content. During recent years, the water column has freshened over the middle shelf because of increased sea ice and reduction of on-shelf transport of the saline, high-nutrient water from the slope. The timing of the spring bloom is directly related to the presence of ice. When ice is advected over the south-east shelf during March/April an early, sharp phytoplankton bloom occurs. The absence of ice during this critical time is associated with a May/June bloom. 3


ABSTRACT The article studies the development of social services in Britain, France and Germany since the 1980s. In this period services grew strongly and were extended to large population groups, although the welfare state was in crisis. Moreover, the power of the state was enhanced. The share of public service provision declined somewhat, but this was more than balanced by increased public funding and intensified state control of delivery. The paper argues that the rise of social services does not signal a 'new' welfare state. Rather, the belated expansion of social services compared to other areas is explained by the fact that services have become crucial for the economy and the labour market only recently. Since this was the case, they have followed the classical path of welfare state expansion.


The vignette concerns a study that investigated engagement in mathematical problem solving under difficult conditions. It provides an example of dynamic research design, using chaos theory as a metaphor for both designing research and examining findings, and sets the stage for a later in‐depth article about dynamic research design in education.


For centuries, the Caddos occupied the southern prairies and woodlands across portions of Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Organized into powerful chiefdoms during the Mississippian period, Caddo society was highly ceremonial, revolving around priest-chiefs, trade in exotic items, and the periodic construction of mounds. Their distinctive heritage helped the Caddos to adapt after the European invasion and to remain the dominant political and economic power in the region. New ideas, peoples, and commodities were incorporated into their cultural framework. The Caddos persisted and for a time even thrived, despite continual raids by the Osages and Choctaws, decimation by diseases, and escalating pressures from the French and Spanish. The Caddo Chiefdoms offers the most complete accounting available of early Caddo culture and history. Weaving together French and Spanish archival sources, Caddo oral history, and archaeological evidence, David La Vere presents a fascinating look at the political, social, economic, and religious forces that molded Caddo culture over time. Special attention is given to the relationship between kinship and trade and to the political impulses driving the successive rise and decline of Caddo chiefdoms. Distinguished by thorough scholarship and an interpretive vision that is both theoretically astute and culturally sensitive, this study enhances our understanding of a remarkable southeastern Native people. David La Vere is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and the author of Life among the Texas Indians: The WPA Narratives.


Background : The Italian healthcare system has two components: public and private healthcare providers. Both deliver services on behalf of and payable by the national health care service. This study explores therelationships between public and private healthcare providers. Methods : The number of hospital admissions and length of stay or number of times the service was accessed stratified by year 2000, 2001, 2002; DRG; type of hospital admission (ordinary or day hospital/surgery); health provider category: public institutions without a specific reference territory, public institutions with a specific reference territory and accredited private institutions and medical or surgery DRGs. A distinction is made between those DRGs defined as belonging to the private sector and those falling within the public sector, assuming there is a majority market portion for services primarily supplied by the private sector. Case-mix index was utelised as the indicator for the complexity of the cases treated and the comparative performance index was used as the indicator for efficiency. Lastly in order to evaluate the services delivered with an inappropriate organizational profile reference is made the rulings defining Essential Level of assistance. Results : The results showed a shift in the reallocation of service volumes for ordinary admissions towards the private sector; the reallocation relates to the volumes but not to the types of cases treated, since the DRG mix remained substantially unchanged over the 3-year period and those DRG that absorb 51% of services were essentially constant. The private sector never achieved a market majority quota but rather controlled market niches with minority quotas. The private institutions treated less complex cases and worked with lower efficiency levels than the public sector. There was also a shift in the distribution of admissions from ordinary admissions to day hospital/day surgery regimes with a growth in the proportion of the latter. Conclusions : The study confirmed the predominance of public healthcare providers in the Italian healthcare system as well as their higher complexity and efficiency levels.


A popular application in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the Sentiment Analysis (SA), i.e., the task of extracting contextual polarity from a given text. The social network Twitter provides an immense amount of text (called tweets) generated by users with a maximum number of 140 characters. In this project, we plan to learn a tweet representation from publicly provided data from Tweets in order to infer sentiment from them. One challenge on this task is the fact that tweets are generated from very different users, making the data very heterogeneous (different from regular data which is written in proper English). Another challenge is, clearly, the large scale of the problem. We propose a deep learning sentence representation (called tweet representation) from user generated data to infer sentiment from tweets. This representation is learned from scratch (directly from the words in tweet) over a large unlabeled corpus of tweets. We demonstrate that we achieve state-of-the-art results for SA on tweets.


The article is a critique of the U.S. government's response to regional recovery following Hurricane Katrina, coupled with an argument that policies based on international standards would better serve the hurricane-stricken area. The author contends that part of the problem is that the legal framework for disaster relief, the federal Stafford Act, is insufficient for shaping recovery for catastrophic humanitarian crises that overwhelm state and local governments. Because the Act calls only for discretionary, intermittent federal efforts, and shields such efforts with broad legal immunity, it is a prescription for the sluggish and ineffective governmental action that has hamstrung the Gulf region's recovery. The author maintains that what is needed is a comprehensive recovery program akin to the post World War II Marshall Plan. International standards for humanitarian responses to disaster, specifically the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, serve as a policy framework for such a program. The Principles allow for recognition that a crisis on the scale of Katrina calls for a more robust, centralized, federally-led response that addresses the scope of the problem and the interdependency of its many facets. The article has five parts. First is an analysis of the situation in the region, focusing on the New Orleans area. Here the author identifies three categories of problems - the problem of return and rebuilding, focusing on private property and civic infrastructure; the problem of security, focusing on flood protection, levees, and wetlands; and the problem of government, focusing on inefficiency, incompetence and inadequate resource allocation. The article's second part analyzes the problem in the law. The Stafford Act is reviewed and judicial criticisms discussed. Part three of the article reviews the specific provisions of the Guiding Principles that apply to the Gulf Coast. The author considers the legal status of the Principles, concluding that while certain of the principles may be evolving into customary international law, they are not legally binding but rather intended as a general policy framework. In the fourth part of the article, the author recommends the following sixteen point "Marshall Plan for the Gulf" based on the Principles: 1. The federal government will assume primary responsibility for an integrated recovery effort. 2. All persons displaced or injured by the disaster have recovery rights. 3. Displaced persons willing to return have a right to return and their displacement will end as soon as possible. 4. Living conditions will be established that are materially sufficient to allow persons to return and remain. 5. The government will assist persons whose homes are recoverable to repair and rebuild, and must ensure access to decent and affordable housing. 6. Comprehensive, reliable flood protection measures will be taken, including strengthened levees and coastal wetlands. 7. Ineffective bureaucracies will be replaced by streamlined, efficient, effective and easily understood administrative processes for relief and recovery. 8. The military will be deployed for debris removal and rebuilding. 9. Personal property and possessions will be protected and disaster victims will be reasonably compensated for losses. 10. Gulf Coast residents will have access to health care. 11. The government will reopen schools and take other measures to ensure education for all children in stricken communities. 12. The government will take steps to increase economic opportunities in stricken areas, such as partnerships, incentives and assistance for businesses which reopen or locate in the region. 13. The right of evacuees to participate in politics and civic life must be ensured. 14. Storm victims will be included in recovery planning. 15. Anti-discrimination measures will be enforced to ensure that the disaster and recovery do not have a discriminatory effect. 16. The special needs of at risk groups will be met. In the fifth part of the article, the author posits that U.S. adoption of the Principles as the basis for international disaster recovery efforts forms a moral and political basis for their domestic application in the Gulf. This is demonstrated by formal U.S. policy promoting the Principles as well as actual U.S. implementation of the Principles in Iraq and in response to the 2004 tsunamis.


Lighting is desired for work and it has an impact to occupants' satisfaction with their workspace to improve the preferred luminous condition in day-lit office. This study investigates the acceptable luminance level that meet the requirement for visual comfort through post occupancy evaluations for office buildings in Malaysia. This paper presents the literature that shows an overview of investigation in daylight distribution and availability that relates to acceptable luminance levels in day-lit offices. The investigations are to know until what extend do people aware on luminance environment by obtaining occupant's feedback. The results of a survey are conducted through occupant's respond of daylight availability in work area by using four different layout in office building and the responses from occupants in the same building with different characterized of fenestration. The acceptable daylight availability and luminance levels by occupant for each room can be seen from the field experiment based on photo simulation using High Dynamic Range ( HDR) images and field survey on different layout in office building. This study of daylight distribution in an open plan will result the findings on how peoples' attitude toward openings and the acceptable luminance level is related to visual comfort. Through these variables, it becomes the parameter to this research. It is observed that the office buildings are not designed for daylight utilization, with average daylight factor (DF) lower than 1.5 per cent and not all the office building has achieved MS1525 :2007 minimum work plane luminance (WPI) recommendation of 300-500 lux when electric lights were on [9]. The combination of daylight and artificial light were still needed in office building even though there was plenty of sunlight in this country which was abundance [2]. More than 60 per cent of occupants felt the distribution of daylight is uneven and caused visual discomfort when electric lights were off. The relationship between luminous condition and visual discomfort had the significant to peoples' attitudes toward windows .This resulting key will provide better understanding for the development of window opening, internal shading control for the office occupants and acceptable luminance level in office building in Malaysia.


This study investigated the effect of moisture content on the physical properties and specific heat capacity of Neem (Azadirachta Indica A. Juss) nut kernels. The major, intermediate and minor axial dimensions of the kernels increased from 1.04 to 1.23cm, 0.42 to 0.6cm, and 0.32 to 0.45cm respectively, as the moisture content increased from 5.2 to 44.9 % (db). The arithmetic and geometric mean diameters determined at the same moisture level were significantly different from each other, with the arithmetic mean diameter being higher. In the above moisture range, one thousand kernel weight, true density, porosity, sphericity, roundness and surface area all increased linearly from 0.0987 to 0.1755kg, 632 to 733kgm-3, 6.42 to 32.14%, 41.3 to 47.5%, 22 to 36% and 13 to 24cm2 respectively, while bulk density decreased from 591.4 to 497.4kgm-3 with increase in moisture content. Angle of repose increased from 21.22 to 29.8o with increase in moisture content. The Static coefficient of friction on ply wood with grains parallel to the direction of movement ranged from 0.41 to 0.61, it ranged from 0.19 to 0.24 on on fiber glass, 0.28 to .038 on hessian bag material and 0.25 to 0.33 on galvanized steel sheet. The specific heat of the seed varied from 2738.1- 4345.4J/kg/oC in the above moisture range.


BACKGROUND
Recently, in temperate and neotropical regions of South America the generalist stink bug Dichelops furcatus (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) became a new pest of corn (Zea mays) seedlings. Implementation of no-tillage cultivation system left organic matter covering the soil, which shelters adults of stink bugs during winter. In spring, corn is sowed under soybean stubble and D. furcatus adults start to feed on seedlings. To determine corn-derived volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that attract this stink bug species, we evaluated stink bug preferences from two corn hybrids with contrast germplasm backgrounds, a temperate and a tropical hybrid.

RESULTS
Stink bugs preferred to feed on temperate seedlings rather than on the tropical ones. GC-MS and PCA analysis of VOCs suggested that hybrids emitted contrasting blends. Linalool represented 68% of total VOCs emitted from temperate corn, while in the tropical hybrid this compound represented 48%. Olfactometer experiments demonstrated that linalool was attractive to stink bugs. However, 2 h of D. furcatus attack induced emission of 14 additional VOCs in temperate seedlings, and olfactometer bioassay and blend of VOCs emission suggested that perceived volatiles by stink bugs induced feeding avoidance. The increment of VOCs emission was associated with the induction of JA, JA-Ile, ABA, and IAA, and decreasing of SA concentrations.

CONCLUSION
This is the first time showing a complete profile of defensive phytohormones induced by stink bugs feeding on corn, and further demonstrating that a blend of corn seedling-associated VOCs, mainly composed by linalool, modulates D. furcatus adults' behavior and feeding preferences. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.


. In recent years, neural implicit representations have made remarkable progress in modeling of 3D shapes with arbitrary topology. In this work, we address two key limitations of such representations, in failing to capture local 3D geometric fine details, and to learn from and generalize to shapes with unseen 3D transformations. To this end, we introduce a novel family of graph implicit functions with equivariant layers that facilitates modeling fine local details and guaranteed robustness to various groups of geometric transformations, through local k -NN graph embeddings with sparse point set observations at multiple resolutions. Our method improves over the existing rotation-equivariant implicit function from 0.69 to 0.89 (IoU) on the ShapeNet reconstruction task. We also show that our equivariant implicit function can be extended to other types of similarity transformations and generalizes to unseen translations and scaling.


This paper explores an argument for community-situated spaces of encounter – acting as thresholds – between community and academia, through which: learning can be enhanced; a greater sense of identity and efficacy can be fostered, and a defined agency can be enabled. This proposition prioritises a dialogic relationship in a shared ground of agency and discourse, whose potential is reinforced through a rediscovery of the local arising from the COVID pandemic. The rediscovery of the local has pushed civic-minded universities pre-existing interrogation of their community-based learning practice in the context of marginalised communities; a key challenge is how to foster a dialogic relationship with a community when academia is not really part of the community? A concurrent question considers the spatiality of such practice? Proposed here is a situating of the civic university directly within the community offering opportunity for everyday dialogue on and experience of local life. This proposal re-sites the university's civic initiatives outside the academy in community-based campuses. Central to this campus would be the coming together of the community and academia to envision and action joined-up approaches to multivalent issues. This initiative would simultaneously afford an innovative education while enabling students and staff to contribute to the wider community; at the same time the community campus would serve as an active agent in bringing the community together and reshaping its future. The community campus would act as a dialogic threshold between academia and the community, a space grounded in its social nature, mutual embrace and exchange.


The Drosophila ventral midline cells generate a discrete set of CNS lineages, required for proper patterning of the ventral ectoderm. Here we provide the first evidence that the CNS midline cells also exert inductive effects on the mesoderm. Mesodermal progenitors adjacent to the midline progenitor cells give rise to ventral somatic mucles and a pair of unique cells that come to lie dorsomedially on top of the ventral nerve cord, the so-called DM cells. Cell ablation as well as cell transplantation experiments indicate that formation of the DM cells is induced by midline progenitors in the early embryo. These results are corroborated by genetic analyses. Mutant single minded embryos lack the CNS midline as well as the DM cells. Embryos mutant for any of the spitz group genes, which primarily express defects in the midline glial cell lineages, show reduced formation of the DM cells. Conversely, directed overexpression of secreted SPITZ by some or all CNS midline cells leads to the formation of additional DM cells. Furthermore we show that DM cell development does not depend on the absolute concentration of a local inductor but appears to require a graded source of an inducing signal. Thus, the Drosophila CNS midline cells play a central inductive role in patterning the mesoderm as well as the underlying ectoderm.


The singly authored website and accompanying jointly written research report were externally funded (AHRB/RSL/4349/APN14041) to generate outputs from an AHRB project (AHRB/MRG-AN4349/APN10994) which explored the meanings of social dance as a cultural practice for people over the age of 60 in London and Essex.

The research built on an earlier study of ballroom dancing (Thomas and Miller 1997), which indicated the invisibility of older people in public space and the lack of attention paid to older dancers in dance studies. 'Mapping' this invisible activity among the older age ranges revealed a rich variety of regular dance events, classes and workshops.

The multifaceted qualitative methodology (mapping, interviews, participant observation, dance diaries, coding) included the researchers filming the dancing. Five dance sites were chosen for more in-depth study and further filming. The videos were edited by me and taken back to these sites for comment and to garner further data on movement styles and dancing skills. This process was commended in the AHRB's assessment of the project. The nine website videos, with accompanying textual commentary, which I created, represent the full range of dance activities studied.

The website serves to disseminate the research to a non-specialist audience and the participants (and formed the basis for a future AHRC-funded website www.danceinjuries.org). It illustrates and interrelates with specific points in the report, drawing together the socio, cultural and aesthetic aspects. The older dancers' words in the report, which voice the pleasures of dancing and a strong sense of community as well as loss, have more potency through recourse to the online video ethnography, where their movement skills and style can be seen in action. Subsequent publications by the author (Thomas 2003, 2004) incorporate the online material. Six conference papers (UK, USA, Ireland) and three refereed journals articles emerged from this research.

Evidence: Report, DVD.


The International Symbol of Access (ISA) is one of the most recognized in the world and for last 45 years has been used to show the boundaries of accessibility. Arguably ISA has become a symbol of disability and not of accessibility. ISA's unrepresentativeness for all forms mobility impairment can suggest that any person using these designated areas of access must also require the use of a mobility assisting device or be subject to a process of validation based on stereotypical assumptions and preconceived notions surrounding disability. The misconceptions regarding disability shape the perceptions and expectations of society about physical disability, which leads to the questioning of whether or not an individual is actually disabled. To understand if the perception of disability is influenced by symbolism, a qualitative methodology was used to capture and record the immediate responses when viewing an image of ISA. The results of this study revealed that a majority of the participants envisioned an individual who is dependent or weak and rely on the use of an assistive mobility device.


IN A FORTHCOMING BOOK, Christine Ingebritsen challenges the view that small states lack power in international relations by pointing to the Scandinavian countries' influence on the setting of international norms. For example, since the early 1970s, Sweden has been particularly active in pushing for environmental norms in various international settings. The Swedish government announced it would continue to do so as well in terms of its EU membership. In 1995 the government promised a skeptical electorate that it would not compromise domestic environmental norms (Kronsell 1997A). Looking back at Sweden's six years of EU membership, we note some evidence that these ambitions have at least partly materialized. One important example is the EU acidification strategy (COM 2001); another, the efforts at common legislation on the control of the use of chemicals. The commitment to environmental issues was stressed further as the strategies for the Swedish presidency of the EU during the first part of 2001 were announced. The main goals of the Swedish presidency were enlargement, employment, and environment. The foundation for the arguments in this article is a set of interviews conducted with participants in EU environmental policy making, (1) as well as studies commissioned by the Swedish government. (2) The main goal in this article is to challenge the arguments that small states have little or no influence in global politics by analyzing Swedish relations to the EU in the area of environmental issues. The article will assess that relationship in terms of what kind of influence can be discerned. SWEDEN IN INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL RELATIONS Ingebritsen (2001) suggests that small states like the Scandinavian countries can make important contributions to world politics as norm setters or as "entrepreneurs of good practice" even with limited power and resources. Norm setting can hence be a means of influencing world affairs. Like other international organizations, the EU too is a norm-generating arena, even more extensive than other international or regional organizations. If we take Ingebritsen's thesis as valid for the international context, it may be relevant to the EU as well. Before looking at exactly how Sweden has exerted influence in the EU, I want to briefly outline the background of Sweden's involvement in international environmental politics and highlight aspects that are relevant for the Swedish position on environmental issues in the EU today. Over the years, the pollution problems perceived as particularly threatening and urgent by policy makers and the public have been problems of a transnational kind. Motivations for Sweden's active involvement in international environmental policy making have been largely associated with environmental vulnerability and a perceived threat to national interests. In other words, many of the environmental issues that Swedish policy makers have pursued internationally have also been issues related to environmental problems that could only be resolved by other nations also taking action. A TRANSNATIONAL AGENDA FOR THE ENVIRONMENT In the 1960S, there was an increasing problem with urban air pollution in Sweden. Within a few years Swedish scientists had discovered that urban air pollution could be traced to high contents of sulfur in heating oil. When alerted to the problem, politicians simply outlawed the use of high-sulfur oil. (3) The urban air quickly improved but acidification remained a problem because the jet stream brought winds, particularly from Germany and Great Britain, with precipitation that polluted Swedish lakes and forests. Starting in the 1970S, policy makers and experts, who had exhausted what could be done within the borders, tried to come to terms with acidification by inaugurating international cooperation. The first UN conference on environmental issues was held in Stockholm in 1972, partly on the initiative of Swedish policy-makers, who also presented their position paper on acid rain to the conference. …


Numerous studies show that mitochondrial energy generation determines the effectiveness of immune responses. Furthermore, changes in mitochondrial function may regulate lymphocyte function in inflammatory diseases like type 2 diabetes. Analysis of lymphocyte mitochondrial function has been facilitated by introduction of 96-well format extracellular flux (XF96) analyzers, but the technology remains imperfect for analysis of human lymphocytes. Limitations in XF technology include the lack of practical protocols for analysis of archived human cells, and inadequate data analysis tools that require manual quality checks. Current analysis tools for XF outcomes are also unable to automatically assess data quality and delete untenable data from the relatively high number of biological replicates needed to power complex human cell studies. The objectives of work presented herein are to test the impact of common cellular manipulations on XF outcomes, and to develop and validate a new automated tool that objectively analyzes a virtually unlimited number of samples to quantitate mitochondrial function in immune cells. We present significant improvements on previous XF analyses of primary human cells that will be absolutely essential to test the prediction that changes in immune cell mitochondrial function and fuel sources support immune dysfunction in chronic inflammatory diseases like type 2 diabetes.


ESA-ESRIN, the European Space Agency Centre for Earth Observation (EO), is the largest European EO data provider and operates as the reference European centre for EO payload data exploitation. EO Space Missions provide global coverage of the Earth across both space and time generating on a routine continuous basis huge amounts of data (from a variety of sensors) that need to be acquired, processed, elaborated, appraised and archived by dedicated systems. Long-term Preservation of these data and of the ability to discover, access and process them is a fundamental issue and a major challenge at programmatic, technological and operational levels. Moreover these data are essential for scientists needing broad series of data covering long time periods and from many sources. They are used for many types of investigations including ones of international importance such as the study of the Global Change and the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Program. Therefore it is of primary importance not only to guarantee easy accessibility of historical data but also to ensure users are able to understand and use them; in fact data interpretation can be even more complicated given the fact that scientists may not have (or may not have access to) the right knowledge to interpret these data correctly. To satisfy these requirements, the European Space Agency (ESA), in addition to other internal initiatives, is participating in several EU-funded projects such as CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic, and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval), which is building a framework to support the end-to-end preservation lifecycle for digital information, based on the OAIS reference model, with a strong focus on the preservation of the knowledge associated with data. In the CASPAR Project ESA plays the role of both user and infrastructure provider for one of the scientific testbeds, putting into effect dedicated scenarios with the aim of validating the CASPAR solutions in the Earth Science domain. The other testbeds are in the domains of Cultural Heritage and of Contemporary Performing Arts; together they provide a severe test of preservation tools and techniques. In the context of the current ESA overall strategies carried out in collaboration with European EO data owners/providers, entities and institutions which have the objective of guaranteeing long-term preservation of EO data and knowledge, this paper will focus on the ESA participation and contribution to the CASPAR Project, describing in detail the implementation of the ESA scientific testbed.


The number of fully online and hybrid (blended) courses in higher education has increased rapidly in recent years. One factor shown to influence effective online learning is the instructional design of such courses. Because continuous improvement in support of student learning is an important part of online education, many colleges and universities have adopted the Quality Matters (QM) program. QM is based on peer review of courses by faculty members who are trained and certified to assess the design of online courses. They provide feedback to instructors in the form of scores on a rubric and recommendations for change. Another approach to implementing QM standards might be to educate interested faculty members in the use of the rubric so they can review and improve their own courses. This research report summarizes a mixed-methods descriptive study focused on the experiences of faculty participants with different kinds of QM training, self-evaluation of a course, and updating of the course. Qualitative and quantitative data converge to support several main findings about using the QM rubric, identifying and making needed changes without help, wanting help from instructional designers with aspects of course improvement, and needing time in faculty workload to review and improve courses.


This article focuses on how to achieve non-trade concerns (NTC) and multifunctional goals that countries may have with minimal trade-distortion. The term 'multifunctional agriculture' focuses on the issue that agriculture, in addition to the production of food and fibre, also may provide national food security, environmental benefits and viable rural areas. The article claims that multifunctionality hardly can justify the use of market support while it may justify budget support. It is argued that just as a tax is widely accepted as the optimum policy for a negative externality, so should the use of a production-related subsidy or payment be accepted as optimum policy for a positive externality or public good that is produced jointly with or complementary to agricultural production. The article concludes with suggestions for WTO agricultural trade rules to prevent such policies from becoming a form of protectionism.


Autonomous machines are moving rapidly from science fiction to science fact. The defining feature of this technology is that it can operate independently of human control. Consequently, society must consider how 'decisions' are to be made by autonomous machines. The matter is particularly acute in circumstances where harm is inevitable no matter what course of action is taken. This dilemma has been identified in the context of autonomous vehicles driving under the regulation of domestic law and, there, governments seem to be moving towards a utilitarian solution to inevitable harm. This leads one to question whether utilitarianism should be transposed into the context of autonomous weapons which might soon operate on the battlefield under the gaze of humanitarian law. The argument here is that it should because humanitarian law includes the core principle of 'proportionality', which is fundamentally a utilitarian concept – requiring that any gain derived from an attack outweighs the harm caused. However, while human soldiers are always able to come to a view on proportionality, albeit subjective, there is much doubt over how an autonomous weapon might determine what is proportionate. There is a very large gap between our embryonic understanding of utilitarianism in relation to autonomous vehicles manoeuvring around a city on one hand; and what would be required for armed robots patrolling a battlespace on the other. Bridging this gap is fraught with difficulty but perhaps the best starting point is to take Bentham's expression of utilitarian mechanics and build upon them. With conscious effort and, ideally, collaboration, states could use the process of applying his classic theory to this very modern problem to raise the standard of protection offered to those caught up in conflict.


Thread-based gas sensor based on poly (styrenecomaleic acid) partial isobutyl/methyl mixed ester and multi-walled carbon nanotube (PSE/MWCNT) nanocomposite for NH3 detection has been designed and created from two simple processes; crochet and immersion (dip) coating processes. This new dimension of fabric-based gas sensors fabrication is suitable for integrating directly into the flexible substrates to be applied as wearable gas detection instruments such as gas-protective clothing, gas safety shoes and gas masks. Soft materials which do not irritate the wearer have been used for this sensor. This work opens a new perspective that overcomes the well-known limitation for creating a fabric-based gas sensor such as the complexity of the production process, high cost and high power consumption in operating. Thus it leads to an innovative integration between science and smart art. As a result, we can make a cheap wireless gas detector based on Xbee communication technology, with low power consumption. This sensor was tested for its selectivity and sensitivity performance toward several volatile compounds, namely ammonia, pyridine, acetic acid, ethanol and acetone. The results revealed that this sensor has higher sensitivity and specificity to NH3 than other gases. It is possible to monitor NH3 until it reaches a concentration of 5 ppm and also has the ability to recover as well.