This study deals with the attitude of European firms towards personnel policies analysed on a national basis. Provided the relevance of Human Resources (HR) practices in terms of the internal organisation of knowledge of the firm, we assess the main characteristic of personnel policies in 12 European countries both in terms of HR department position within the firm and in terms of human capital development practices. Not only is the issue significant in terms of Human Resource Management but also in terms of the debate on the role of the institutions in determining personnel policies, and notably in terms of the debate on the "varieties of capitalism". For this purpose the paper develops a cluster analysis among 16 European countries showing the possible influence of institutional models on personnel policies. The same analysis is also developed for intertemporal comparative purposes. The second part of the paper analysis relates personnel policies to the phenomenon of Corporate Universities (CU), being they intended as a vehicle of firms' capability to react to organisational and technological change. Within the complex relationship between firm's organization and knowledge CU may in fact represent a consistent way to keep HR departments and firms' strategies tightly connected, possibly assuming a systemic vision of the firm open to employees and in some cases to other stakeholders. The main features of European Corporate Universities will thus be acknowledged by looking at their main characteristics, with particular reference to their relation with HR departments and to the external factors that have contributed to their development. The paper uses theoretical tools provided by economic literature on training, human capital and knowledge management, combining them with a descriptive analysis of the empirical evidence coming from data on both Corporate Universities and firms' personnel policy at European level. In particular data on firms' personnel policy will come from the survey performed in 2005 by Cranet, the largest academic research network dedicated to a comparative analysis of developments in Human Resource Management in public and private organisations. Such data will be integrated by surveys on firms' training practices at European level and by the (limited) empirical literature dealing with European Corporate Universities.


The background of this research is how to improve employee performance shoes industry in Tangerang Regency, Banten Province. The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze influence both partial and simultaneously leadership, work compensation, work environment and job satisfaction toward employee performance Shoes Industry in Tangerang Regency, Banten Province.The research method used descriptive, verificative, causality to test the hypothesis. This study was conducted through a survey of 200 respondents from a population of 413 permanent employee in three shoes factories in Tangerang Regency, Banten Province. Instrument tests were also conducted on 30 respondents prior to field research. The research analysis used descriptive and explanatory statistic method. Data were analyzed with Structural Equation Model (SEM) using LISREL 8.7 software. The results of this study, processed by using 2nd CFA (Second Order Confirmatory Factor Analysis). This research proves that there are positive and significant influence of leadership, work compensation and work environment to job satisfaction either partially or simultaneously with coefficient of determination (R2) equal to 60%. Furthermore, this study proves that the variables of leadership, work compensation, work environment and job satisfaction influence employee performance with contribution of 85% with the most dominant variable influencing job satisfaction is work compensation. While the most dominant variables influencing employee performance is work environment. The findings of this study explain that job satisfaction variables mediate the three variables of leadership, work compensation and work environment on employee performance, so that job satisfaction variable as mediating variable, but the dominant variable influencing employee performance is work environment, especially physical environment dimension with work facility as indicator. Meanwhile, to increase job satisfaction need to pay attention to work compensation, especially in financial compensation, especially insurance.


Summary A 26-year-old-ma n who had suffered a severe electrical injury 3 years previously presented with blurred vision in his left eye caused by a posterior subcapsular cataract with nuclear sclerotic changes and peripapillary chorioretinal scarring. The pattern of retinal atrophy surrounding the optic nerve suggests a possible path of electrical current to the eye and demonstrates the selective tissuedamage that may occur in electrical injuries.


STUDY QUESTION
The 13th European in vitro fertilization (IVF)-monitoring (EIM) report presents the results of treatments involving assisted reproductive technology (ART) initiated in Europe during 2009: are there any changes in the trends compared with previous years?

SUMMARY ANSWER
Despite some fluctuations in the number of countries reporting data, the overall number of ART cycles has continued to increase year by year and, while pregnancy rates in 2009 remained similar to those reported in 2008, the number of transfers with multiple embryos (3+) and the multiple delivery rates declined.

WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY
Since 1997, ART data in Europe have been collected and reported in 12 manuscripts, published in Human Reproduction.

STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION
Retrospective data collection of European ART data by the EIM Consortium for the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE); cycles started between 1st January and 31st December are collected on a yearly basis; the data are collected by the National Registers, when existing, or on a voluntary basis.

PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS SETTING, METHODS
From 34 countries (-2 compared with 2008), 1005 clinics reported 537 463 treatment cycles including: IVF (135 621), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI, 266 084), frozen embryo replacement (FER, 104 153), egg donation (ED, 21 604), in vitro maturation (IVM, 1334), preimplantation genetic diagnosis/screening (PGD/PGS, 4389) and frozen oocyte replacements (FOR, 4278). European data on intrauterine insemination using husband/partner's semen (IUI-H) and donor (IUI-D) semen were reported from 21 and 18 countries, respectively. A total of 162 843 IUI-H (+12.7%) and 29 235 IUI-D (+17.3%) cycles were included. Data available from each country are presented in the tables; total values (as numbers and percentages) refer to those countries where all data have been reported.

MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE
In 21 countries where all clinics reported to the ART register, a total of 399 020 ART cycles were performed in a population of 373.8 million, corresponding to 1067 cycles per million inhabitants. For IVF, the clinical pregnancy rates per aspiration and per transfer were 28.9 and 32.9%, respectively and for ICSI, the corresponding rates were 28.7 and 32.0%. In FER cycles, the pregnancy rate per thawing was 20.9%; in ED cycles, the pregnancy rate per transfer was 42.3%. The delivery rate after IUI-H was 8.3 and 13.4% after IUI-D. In IVF and ICSI cycles, 1, 2, 3 and 4+ embryos were transferred in 24.2, 57.7, 16.9 and 1.2%, respectively. The proportions of singleton, twin and triplet deliveries after IVF and ICSI (combined) were 79.8, 19.4 and 0.8%, respectively, resulting in a total multiple delivery rate of 20.2%, compared with 21.7% in 2008, 22.3% in 2007, 20.8% in 2006 and 21.8% in 2005. In FER cycles, the multiple delivery rate was 13.0% (12.7% twins and 0.3% triplets). Twin and triplet delivery rates associated with IUI cycles were 10.4/0.7% and 10.3/0.5%, following treatment with husband and donor semen, respectively.

LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION
The method of reporting varies among countries, and registers from a number of countries have been unable to provide some of the relevant data such as initiated cycles and deliveries. As long as data are incomplete and generated through different methods of collection, results should be interpreted with caution.

WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS
The 13th ESHRE report on ART shows a continuing expansion of the number of treatment cycles in Europe, with more than half a million of cycles reported in 2009. The use of ICSI has reached a plateau. Pregnancy and delivery rates after IVF and ICSI remained relatively stable compared with 2008 and 2007. The number of multiple embryo transfers (3+ embryos) and the multiple delivery rate have shown a clear decline.


Painters are exposed to a range of complex chemical mixtures which include organic solvents and dye products with known carcinogenic and mutagenic potential. Trade painters or those manufacturing paints and coatings have increased rates of non-malignant diseases and cancers; including lung cancer, acute leukaemia, bladder cancer, and cancers of the oesophagus, larynx, biliary system, liver, skin, and large bowel. A series of case-control studies of painters, based on the New Zealand Cancer Registry, are presented. These concerned 19,904 male patients registered for the period 1980-4 who were aged 20 or older at the time of registration. For each cancer site studied, the registrants for all other cancer sites formed the control group. Three cancer sites were associated with work as a painter--namely, bladder tumours (odds ratio (OR) 1.52, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.00-2.31), kidney and other urothelial tumours (OR 1.45, 95% CI 0.85-2.50), and multiple myeloma (OR 1.95, 95%, CI 1.05-3.65). Risks for multiple myeloma were greater among car or spray painters and signwriters (OR 2.81) compared with construction and general painters (OR 1.80). No increased risk was found for leukaemia or for respiratory, biliary, skin, or gastrointestinal cancers.


An online survey seeking responses from academic staff and postgraduate students in all five faculties of the University of Adelaide was conducted in February 2004. The survey sought perceptions from teaching staff on the use of feedback from student evaluations and its relationship to staff development activity. Majority of survey respondents found student feedback reports were useful in their teaching or course development and agreed that student feedback information should be a key factor in the planning of staff development activities. The majority also indicated that Head of School/Department should be using the student feedback information to determine staff development activities but did not consider that senior managers, such as Deans or Deputy Vice-Chancellors, should be engaged in determining academic staff development activities.


When sensor nodes are located around a sink node in a wireless sensor network (hereafter referred to as WSN), their energy will be consumed more quickly. Hence it's necessary to make a proper relocation of the sink node to prevent the surrounding sensor nodes from excessive energy consumption. In view of this, this paper proposes an energy-aware sink relocation (hereafter referred to as EASR) scheme, which is able to realize the adaptive adjustment on the transmission range according to the energy status of the sensor nodes in addition to the establishment of conditions for sink relocation. If the relocation condition is met, sink node will move toward the optimal direction based on the energy status of the surrounding sensor nodes. The simulation result shows that the EASR scheme proposed in this paper is able to prolong effectively the network lifetime.


BACKGROUND
Nervous system involvement in Lyme disease may mimic certain psychiatric disorders. We studied whether it is worthwhile to conduct routine screening of psychiatric inpatients for serologic evidence of Lyme disease.

METHODS
Between March 1988 and June 1989, we prospectively screened sera for Lyme disease from adults admitted to an acute care psychiatric hospital in Westchester County. New York, an area in which this infection is endemic. Of all cases of Lyme disease reported to the U.S. Public Health Service in 1988, 16% originated in Westchester County. The prevalence in healthy blood donors from this area were reported to be 0.7%. Sera were tested by fluorescent immunoassay alone (90%) or fluorescent immunoassay plus enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (10%).

RESULTS
Sera from only 1 of 517 patients demonstrated antibodies to Borrelia burgdorferi, the etiologic agent of Lyme disease (0.2% [95% CI, 0.0% to 1.1%]). This patient had a nonreactive Western blot, which suggested a false-positive antibody test.

CONCLUSIONS
We cannot presently recommend routine serologic screening for Lyme disease for adult psychiatric inpatients, even in areas of the United States where this illness is endemic.


Human services literature from a variety of disciplines demonstrates that rural and urban communities pose different challenges and opportunities for service delivery; however, little research specifically explores early learning and care service delivery in rural communities. This qualitative study draws on a critical ecological systems perspective to examine the experiences of rural parents accessing services through a specific service delivery strategy, Best Start networks. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data gathered from two rural communities as part of a larger study examining parent experiences with Best Start in three communities across Ontario (Underwood, Killoran, & Webster, 2010). Three themes emerged that related specifically to the rural experience: (a) Opportunities for Social Interaction; (b) Accessibility of Services; and, (c) Impact of Personal Relationships. Results indicate that certain factors related to rural life and location affected parents' experiences with Best Start services. Drawing on the broadly defined concept of accessibility, implications for rural service delivery are discussed and recommendations for practice and future research are presented.


Fusion Research of Electrical Tomography with Other Sensors for Two-phase Flow Measurement The two-phase flow widely exists in the nature and industrial processes. The measurement of two-phase flows, including gas/solids, gas/liquid and liquid/liquid flows, is still challenging. Fusions of electrical tomography with conventional sensors provide possibilities to improve two-phase flow accurate measurement. In this paper, fusions of (1) electrical resistance tomography (ERT) with electromagnetic (EM) flowmeter, (2) electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) with ERT and (3) ECT with electrostatic sensor are introduced. Some research results of fusion methods are presented and discussed. This paper can provide the theoretical support for the multi-sensor fusion for two-phase flow measurement.


PROPOSED AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION:
"That article two, section one, clause five, be amended so as to read:
'No person except a Citizen of the United States shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.'"
This essay outlines the case for an obvious and overdue amendment to the Constitution of the United States: repeal of the birth-based requirement that excludes naturalized American citizens from presidential eligibility. This amendment's adoption would mark the first successful amendment in the form that Madison and many others originally desired rather than the tack-on kind we've used up until now. Advocating for this amendment offers an opportunity to exercise self-government muscles that have atrophied from civic sloth. Now more than ever, we should work to bring our fundamental law into line with our more fundamental constitutional commitments. There are not two classes of American citizenship, just one. It is time to repeal the Natural Born Citizen Clause.


ZigBee is a standard defines a set of communication protocols for low-data-rate short-range wireless networking. ZigBee-based wireless devices operate in 868 MHz, 915 MHz, and 2.4 GHz frequency bands. The maximum data rate is 250 K bits per second. ZigBee is mainly for battery-powered applications where low data rate, low cost, and long battery life are main requirements. This thesis explores low power RFIC design for various blocks in Zigbee Transmitter.

Zigbee RFTransmitter Comprises of Low Pass Filter, Variable Gain Amplifier, Up conversion Mixer and Power Amplifier.

The proposed VGA is characterized by a wide range of gain variation The single-stage VGA is designed in UMC 0.18-u m CMOS technology and shows the maximum gain variation of 62 dB. The VGA dissipates 630 uA from 1.8-V supply while occupying (250 μm x 167.3 μm) of chip area.

A low-voltage low-power and high linearity up-conversion mixer, designed in UMC 0.18-um RFCMOS technology is proposed to realize the transmitter front-end in the frequency band of 2.45 GHz. The proposed mixer can convert a 5 MHz intermediate frequency (IF) signals to a 2.45GHz RF signals, with a local oscillator at 2.45GHz. Simulation results demonstrate that at 2.45GHz, the circuit provides -11.30dB of conversion gain and the input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of 35.16 dBm, output-referred third order intercept point(OIP3) of 12.88 dBm while drawing only 10mA for the mixer core under a supply voltage of 1.8 V.
A low power Differential class A power amplifier is designed in the UMC 0.18um RFCMOS technology. The class A power amplifier provides 0 dBm output power with a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 22% and Power Gain of 10dB with 1.8V supply voltage. The dc power consumption is only 4.5mW.

And all these blocks were integrated and simulated using Cadence© SpectreRF simulator in UMC-0.18um Mixed Signal CMOS RF models for the best simulation results.


Language errors are the use of language both verbally and in writing that deviates from Indonesian grammar rules. Morphology is a science that discusses forms and word formation, so the analysis of errors in the language level of morphology is to analyze errors about word formation that deviate from Indonesian grammar rules. Language errors especially at the level of morphology I still find in the Riau Pos newspaper. Errors that continue to occur will affect the reader language development. After seeing the phenomenon of the misuse of Indonesian, especially at the morphological level of the Edge-Duri-Dumai news the author felt interested in researching it. The problem in this research is how is the language error in the morphological level on the news of the Edge of the Dumai Riau Pos newspaper ?. The theory that I use is the theory contained in the book Setyawati (2010) and several supporting theories from experts. The method used is a case study method, a qualitative approach. The data collection techniques used are documentation and hermeneutic techniques. The results of the analysis of language errors in the morphological level on the news of the Edge-Dumai-Dumai Riau Pos newspaper was the elimination of affixes as many as 8 errors in the word can, do, try, rehab, commitment, and 3 errors in writing color words. The sound that should be melted is not passed as much as 1 error, namely in the word communicating. As well as 4 errors in the use of affixes that are not appropriate, namely 3 uses of the word concreteisation and the word semisasi. Based on the data collection the author did on the news of the Edge-Duri-Dumai Riau Pos newspaper the author did not find a mistake regarding the melting of sounds that should not melt.


We propose a simple model that is capable of capturing the statistical characteristics of mobile video traces encoded using MPEG4-Part2, AVC and SVC-TS encoding standards. The model can be adjusted to adapt to diverse workload configurations, which gives fellow researchers a great flexibility to evaluate different network traffic scenarios. We also discuss the model-based trace generator and the challenges of its implementation. Moreover, we present the simulation results validating the model using different encoding settings. In addition to that, we provide several insights about our video modeling approach. This will help in testing, simulating and validating mobile video transmission and resource scheduling strategies over broadband wireless networks such as WiMAX and LTE.


Mitral valvular inefficiency, manifest as regurgitation in the presence of atrial fibrillation, supports this hypothesis. Clearly, as the atrial filling curve moves to the left with exercise as heart rate increases and diastole shortens, atrial contraction assumes less importance in valve closure. The conclusion must be that at slow and probably at resting heart rates atrial contraction is indispensable to normal (high) mitral valve efficiency. Provision of a contracting atrial chamber would seem to be an essential part of an artificial heart design that utilizes a leaflet valve at the atrioventricular junction and which operates at near normal heart rates.I am, etc., KENNETH REID. Nuffield Department of Surgery, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford.


A strategy is used by a participant in a persuasion dialogue to select locutions most likely to achieve its objective of persuading its opponent. Such strategies often assume that the participant has a model of its opponents, which may be constructed on the basis of a participant's accumulated dialogue experience. However in most cases the fact that an agent's experience may encode additional information which if appropriately used could increase a strategy's efficiency, is neglected. In this work, we rely on an agent's experience to define a mechanism for augmenting an opponent model with information likely to be dialectally related to information already contained in it. Precise computation of this likelihood is exponential in the volume of related information. We thus describe and evaluate an approximate approach for computing these likelihoods based on Monte-Carlo simulation.


Abstract Climate model results for the Baltic Sea region from an ensemble of eight simulations using the Rossby Centre Atmosphere model version 3 (RCA3) driven with lateral boundary data from global climate models (GCMs) are compared with results from a downscaled ERA40 simulation and gridded observations from 1980–2006. The results showed that data from RCA3 scenario simulations should not be used as forcing for Baltic Sea models in climate change impact studies because biases of the control climate significantly affect the simulated changes of future projections. For instance, biases of the sea ice cover in RCA3 in the present climate affect the sensitivity of the model's response to changing climate due to the ice-albedo feedback. From the large ensemble of available RCA3 scenario simulations two GCMs with good performance in downscaling experiments during the control period 1980–2006 were selected. In this study, only the quality of atmospheric surface fields over the Baltic Sea was chosen as a selection criterion. For the greenhouse gas emission scenario A1B two transient simulations for 1961–2100 driven by these two GCMs were performed using the regional, fully coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean model RCAO. It was shown that RCAO has the potential to improve the results in downscaling experiments driven by GCMs considerably, because sea surface temperatures and sea ice concentrations are calculated more realistically with RCAO than when RCA3 has been forced with surface boundary data from GCMs. For instance, the seasonal 2 m air temperature cycle is closer to observations in RCAO than in RCA3 downscaling simulations. However, the parameterizations of air-sea fluxes in RCAO need to be improved.


This paper studies the statistical behavior of an affine combination of the outputs of two least mean-square (LMS) adaptive filters that simultaneously adapt using the same white Gaussian inputs. The purpose of the combination is to obtain an LMS adaptive filter with fast convergence and small steady-state mean-square deviation (MSD). The linear combination studied is a generalization of the convex combination, in which the combination factor lambda(n) is restricted to the interval (0,1). The viewpoint is taken that each of the two filters produces dependent estimates of the unknown channel. Thus, there exists a sequence of optimal affine combining coefficients which minimizes the mean-square error (MSE). First, the optimal unrealizable affine combiner is studied and provides the best possible performance for this class. Then two new schemes are proposed for practical applications. The mean-square performances are analyzed and validated by Monte Carlo simulations. With proper design, the two practical schemes yield an overall MSD that is usually less than the MSDs of either filter.


In the last years, the state of the art of NLP research has made a huge step forward. Since the release of ELMo (Peters et al., 2018), a new race for the leading scoreboards of all the main linguistic tasks has begun. Several models have been published achieving promising results in all the major NLP applications, from question answering to text classification, passing through named entity recognition. These great research discoveries coincide with an increasing trend for voice-based technologies in the customer care market. One of the next biggest challenges in this scenario will be the handling of multi-turn conversations, a type of conversations that differs from single-turn by the presence of multiple related interactions. The proposed work is an attempt to exploit one of these new milestones to handle multi-turn conversations. MTSI-BERT is a BERT-based model achieving promising results in intent classification, knowledge base action prediction and end of dialogue session detection, to determine the right moment to fulfill the user request. The study about the realization of PuffBot, an intelligent chatbot to support and monitor people suffering from asthma, shows how this type of technique could be an important piece in the development of future chatbots.


Nutrition is considered to be one of the key components in the development of most chronic degenerative dis- eases so that medical nutrition therapy has become important in their primary prevention. Food-based dietary guidelines provide the following values: the Lowest Threshold Intake (LTI), the Average Requirement (AR) and the Population Ref- erence Intake (PRI) or Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA). RDA indicates the quantity of a nutrient that must be present in the food supply if the dietary requirements of most of the population are to be met. Contrary to the established optimistic belief about Mediterranean diet, we have repeatedly documented widespread unhealthy dietary behaviours in adult subjects living in Pisa. The distribution of energy sources was incorrect and fibre consumption did not match general guidelines. Moreover, mild to moderate combined element (calcium) and vitamin (vitamin B1, folates, vitamin D, and vi- tamin E) deficient intakes were observed. The finding of essential nutrient deficiencies in otherwise over-nourished adults prompted us to reconsider the variety and abundance of foods required to guarantee the reference requirements for those substances and which are the historical, environmental, and contingent factors able to prevent the adequacy of food sup- plies in meeting physiological needs.


Isomeric asymmetric and symmetric dimethyl arginine (ADMA and SDMA respectively) residues are excreted in urine and are putative markers of cardiovascular and chronic kidney diseases. In this work, we demonstrate simultaneous and quantitative detection of endogeneous ADMA and SDMA from urine samples of healthy subjects using MALDI-TOF MS without any chromatographic separation. The DMA isomers yielded [M + H]+ ions along with their product ions formed due to MALDI in-source fragmentation. The precursor ions were validated using MALDI-TOF MS/MS as well as direct injection ESI-Q-TOF MS/MS. ADMA and SDMA generated unique product ions at ∼ m/z 46 and ∼ m/z 172 respectively in the MS-mode itself. These were advantageously used for full scan-mode absolute quantification of the isomeric metabolites. The m/z observed for all the ions was within 10 ppm mass accuracy. The calibration method was established by generating internal standard normalized peak area-based concentration response curves using synthetic standards. Good linearities (R2 > 0.95) with acceptable intra-assay, inter-assay variation (within 15% RSD) and excellent recoveries were observed for quality control samples. Finally, endogeneous concentrations of the metabolites were determined in urine from healthy subjects (n = 11). ADMA and SDMA were found to be in the range of 1.6–8 μM and 2.9–9.1 μM in urine and were in agreement with previously reported physiological levels.


The effect of adding epinephrine to small doses of spinal bupivacaine on the duration of sensory motor block has not been carefully investigated.Twelve volunteers underwent hyperbaric bupivacaine spinal anesthesia (7.5 mg) with and without epinephrine (0.2 mg) in a randomized, double-blind, cross-over fashion. Sensory block was assessed with pinprick, transcutaneous electrical stimulation (TES) equivalent to surgical stimulation (at umbilicus, pubis, knee, and ankle), and tolerance of a pneumatic thigh tourniquet. Motor block was assessed with isometric force dynamometry. Discharge criteria were defined as return of pinprick sensation to dermatome S2, ability to ambulate, and ability to urinate. Extent of sensory block to pinprick over time was unaffected by the addition of epinephrine. However, epinephrine prolonged tolerance of TES at the pubis, knee, and ankle (33-48 min, P < 0.05) and of thigh tourniquet (30 min, P < 0.01). Motor block was prolonged by epinephrine at the quadriceps and gastrocnemius muscles (by 23 and 51 min, respectively, P < 0.002). Achievement of discharge criteria was prolonged by 48 min by the addition of epinephrine (P < 0.01). Thus, epinephrine may prolong surgical anesthesia for lower abdominal and lower extremity surgery and delay time until patients achieve discharge criteria. Implications: Using a cross-over study design, 12 volunteers underwent bupivacaine spinal anesthesia with and without epinephrine. This study suggests that adding epinephrine to bupivacaine may prolong surgical anesthesia and also delay patients' discharge. (Anesth Analg 1998;86:973-7)


Abstract The fate of Turkey's non-Muslim minorities has been somehow linked to the country's foreign policy since the eighteenth century. Throughout the Ottoman era, the early years of the Republic and the Cold War period, foreign policy issues had a mostly negative impact on the treatment of the non-Muslim minorities, engendering the state's suspicion and repression. This has changed at the turn of the twenty-first century, with the emergence of a new variable in Turkish foreign policy: The European Union. Reforms undertaken by Ankara since then have considerably transformed the scene, although challenges do still remain, demonstrating the dialectical nature of the issue.


The purpose of this study was to identify factors which affect rural women's participation in rice cultivation (RWPRC) in Mazandaran Province, Iran. The population of this research consisted of all rural women in Mazandaran Province, Iran. By using a multi-stage random sampling, 300 rural women were selected as statistical sample. The research instrument was a structured questionnaire including some close-ended questions whose validity and reliability were confirmed by a panel of expert and through a Cranach's alpha test (α= 0.86), respectively. The descriptive results indicated that RWPRC was close to a moderate level.  Furthermore, it was shown that the main reasons for rural women's participating in rice cultivation were helping family economy, obtaining extra income, and gaining production surplus, in the order of importance. In addition, these results illustrated the highest RWPRCs were in selecting seed, transplanting and Preparing pre-germinated seedling storage, respectively. Moreover, the findings showed significant relationships between RWPRC and some of its individual and professional characteristics. Finally, the results of the multivariate regression analysis revealed that 42.9 % of variability in RWPRC stems from household income, family size, and land size under rice cultivation. Finally, it is recommended for extension organizations to give attention to the role of gender in agriculture for better extension planning.


The AZ31 magnesium alloy flow stresses have been investigated in the strain rates of 0.03~3s-1 and temperature range of 300~400°C. The result showed that dynamic recovery and dynamic recrystallization occurred obviously during the hot compression of AZ31 magnesium alloy. In order to represent the flow stress of plastic deformation accurately, the constitutive equation was built by using the dynamic recovery model and dynamic recrystallization model, and its parameters of the constitutive equation were determined by multivariate nonlinear regression analysis. The two-step constitutive equation not only expressed the variation of flow stress with strain rate, deformation temperature and strain, but also revealed the characteristic of dynamic recrystallization kinetics of AZ31 magnesium alloy. Its accuracy was higher than the flow stress of hyperbolic sine model, and the maximum relative errors of two constitutive equation models calculation values compared with experiment data were 5% and 6.5% respectively.


Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has proved to be an excellent diagnostic tool in evaluating the musculoskeletal system. This article illustrates one particular facet of musculoskeletal MRI: investigation of the rotator cuff tendon complex.


ABSTRACT Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) was applied to 75 Candida albicans isolates, including 2 that were expected to be identical, 48 that came from diverse geographical and clinical sources, and 15 that were sequential isolates from two patients. DNA fragments (≈500 bp) of eight genes encoding housekeeping functions were sequenced, including four that have been described before for C. albicans MLST, and four new gene fragments, AAT1a, AAT1b, MPI, and ZWF1. In total, 87 polymorphic sites were found among 50 notionally different isolates, giving 46 unique sequence types, underlining the power of MLST to differentiate isolates for epidemiological studies. Additional typing information was obtained by detecting variations in size at the transcribed spacer region of the 25S rRNA gene and tests for homozygosity at the mating type-like (MTL) locus. The stability of MLST was confirmed in two sets of consecutive isolates from two patients. In each set the isolates were identical or varied by a single nucleotide. Reference strain SC5314 and a derived mutant, CAF2, gave identical MLST types. Heterozygous polymorphisms were found in at least one isolate for all but 16 (18.4%) of the variable nucleotides, and 35 (41%) of the 87 individual sequence changes generated nonsynonymous amino acids. Cloning and restriction digestion of a gene fragment containing heterozygous polymorphisms indicated that the heterozygosity was genuine and not the result of sequencing errors. Our data validate and extend previous MLST results for C. albicans, and we propose an optimized system based on sequencing eight gene fragments for routine MLST with this species.


Governments have adopted the rhetoric of promoting transparency, citizen engagement, and accountability through technological innovation. The provision of open government data has been encouraged as a foundational reform in that direction. This study argues that, in Paraguay's education sector, these reforms were never capable of matching said rhetoric. Using a case study design, the research shows that the stated goals of intuitively simplifying information to facilitate citizen monitoring of funds for education infrastructure were never realistically attempted by the government. It will advocate the relevance of considering the relationship between politics, accountability, and technology to uncover transparency façades.


Atomoxetine (ATX) is a selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor approved since 2002 for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children, adolescents, and adults as an alternative treatment to methylphenidate. Within the framework of a project evaluating the use of alternative biological matrices for therapeutic monitoring of psychoactive drugs in paediatric and non-paediatric individuals, the excretion of ATX and its principal metabolites has been recently studied in oral fluid and hair. The aim of this study was to describe the excretion profile of ATX and its metabolites 4-hydroxyatomoxetine (4-OH-ATX) and N-desmethylatomoxetine (N-des-ATX) in sweat following the administration of different dosage regimens (60, 40, 35, and 18 mg/day) of ATX to six paediatric patients. Sweat patches were applied to the back of each participant and removed at timed intervals. ATX and its metabolites were measured in patches using a previously validated liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometric (LC-MS/MS) method. Independently from the administered dose, ATX appeared in the sweat patches 1 h post administration and reached its maximum concentration generally at 24 h. Peak ATX concentrations ranged between 2.31 and 40.4 ng/patch and did not correlate with the administered drug dose, or with body surface area. Total ATX excreted in sweat ranged between 0.008 and 0.121 mg, corresponding to 0.02 and 0.3% of the administered drug. Neither 4-OH-ATX, nor N-des-ATX was detected in either of the collected sweat patches. Measuring ATX in sweat patches can provide information on cumulative drug use from patch application until removal.


Cerebral autoregulation is the process of maintaining blood flow to the brain almost constant despite changes in arterial blood pressure (ABP) with the assumption that changes to other physiological condition are small. Assessment of cerebral autoregulation plays a key role in diagnosis, monitoring and prognosis of cerebrovascular disease clinically. In this work Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound was used to measure middle cerebral artery velocity, arterial blood pressure (ABP) was non-invasively measured using a finger cuff device (Finapres). Mathematical models that characterize the cerebral autoregulatory system have been used in the quantitative assessment of function/impairment of autoregulation as well as in furthering the understanding cerebral hemodynamics. Using spontaneous fluctuations in arterial blood pressure (ABP) and CO2 as inputs and cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFV) as output, the autoregulatory mechanism has been modeled using linear and nonlinear (Laguerre Volterra Networks), single-input (SI, only ABP) and multi-input (MI, ABP and CO2) approaches. From these models, a small number of measures have been extracted to provide an overall assessment of autoregulation. It was also investigated whether or not some of the poor performance previously reported can be overcome by improved modeling (characteristics of the nonlinear models) and choice of autoregulation parameter to extract cerebral autoregulation. In this work, lower inter and intra subject variability of the parameters were considered as the criteria for identifying improved measures of autoregulation. Search for improved analysis is then extended, using the data-driven approach based on subspace distance (SSD). The performance of this method is compared to alternatives previously proposed, using data from healthy volunteers in normo- and hyper-capnia (to induce transient impairment of autoregulation). The subspace distance (SSD) provides a means of determining the distance of an estimated model to others known to have been obtained from normal or impaired autoregulation, considerably. The smallest average distance with respect to each of these sets then determines how far from normal/impaired a given recording lies. For comparison, indexes of autoregulation were obtained from methods used in previous work, including the phase of the frequency response at 0.1Hz (P1), and the 2nd parameter of a 1st order FIR model (H1). The main advantage of this method is that it does not require picking parameters but is driven by the data (the model) itself. The method was found to be promising and provided better distinction between normocapnia and hypercapnia compared to other autoregulatory parameters studied in this section. Multivariate adaptive filters (multivariate recursive least square (MI-RLS)) and multivariate moving window (MI-MW) to study the effect of PETCO2 in the dynamic of time-varying characteristic of cerebral autoregulation were applied to study the multivariate, time-varying characteristics of cerebral autoregulation. Here also SI-RLS, SI-MW, MI-MW and MI-RLS methods to baseline, hypercapnia and normocapnia measurements from our volunteers individually were applied. Autoregulation was quantified by both time-varying phase-lead and amplitude using pressure pulse input. It was also noticed that multivariate models deal very well with the transient at the beginning of hypercapnia compared to univariate models and autoregulatory parameters extracted from MI-RLS provide the least variation. The results from multivariate time-varying coherence showed that it can provide significantly higher values at low frequencies (f Finally, a new tentative approach of hardware and software system for the measurement of blood flow control was carried out in Southampton General Hospital which allowed the inducement of random, step-wise changes in blood pressure and inspired carbon dioxide (CO2) level that can be easily and safely repeated and may be applicable as a clinical tool. This experiment benefited from the use of LBNP (Lower-body-negative pressure). It generates a controllable pressure variation, built around the lower limbs of a subject resulting in temporary lowering the blood pressure. The initial assessment of this dataset is presented.


There are identified the main causes that conduct to the degradation state of land quality in vineyards. These are the subject of natural and anthropogenic factors, leading to varying qualitative and quantitative of soil indicators. Reforms in agriculture led to the extension of the forms of soil degradation of vine plantations. The worst and most widespread form of soil degradation is erosion by water (surface and depth, with various intermediate stages). Anthropogenic factors favoring the growth rate of erosion processes are: irrational land parceled, excessive exploitation, deforestation of erosion protection forest belts, and abandonment of anti-erosion complex works. The paper reflected the soil protection measures in vineyards. The erosion protection is based on organizational, agro-technical, phyto-technical and hydro- technical measures. The direct effect of this system is reduced leakage and erosion processes, increase the soil water reserves and productivity of vineyards. One of the most effective phyto-ameliorative measures of soil erosion protection in the vineyards is grassing the spaces between vines rows.


Aim. To study phenotypes of clinic and 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure (BP), to determine their associations with arterial stiffness parameters, and to assess global cardiovascular risk (CVR) in young patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D).Material and methods. The presented cross-sectional single-center study included 81 T1D patients without a history of hypertension (HTN) and other cardiovascular diseases (CVD) (men — 39%; median age — 27 years; median duration of T1D — 6 years). All participants underwent a routine clinical and laboratory testing, measurement of clinic and 24-hour ambulatory BP (BPLab Vasotens), assessment of central BP and arterial stiffness parameters using applanation tonometry technique. BP phenotypes were analyzed with diagnostic criteria for HTN by ESC/ESH 2018 guidelines. CVR was assessed using the SCORE 10-year risk calculator (ESC 2019). The differences were considered significant at p<0,05.Results. The prevalence of true HTN was 6,2%, masked HTN — 38,3%. Isolated nocturnal HTN was revealed in 30,7% of patients with clinic BP <140/90 mm Hg. The subgroup with masked HTN was dominated by patients with normal clinic BP (58,1%) and in most cases was characterized by isolated diastolic BP increase (64,5%). Masked HTN was associated with a higher carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) (median — 7,2 versus 6,3 m/s, p=0,002). The most common profiles of nocturnal BP decrease were non-dipper (63.9%) and night-picker (16.6%). High and very high CVR was recorded in 87,7% of patients. Conclusion. Hypertension occurs in 44,5% of young patients with type 1 diabetes and is characterized by a high prevalence of masked isolated nocturnal HTN and non-dipping. Masked HTN is associated with a higher carotid-femoral PWV. High and very high 10-year CVR was recorded in 87,7% of patients.


A novel sensor for the determination of parathion-methyl based on couple grafting of functional molecular imprinted polymers (MIPs) was fabricated which is developed by anchoring the MIP layer on surfaces of silica particles embedded CdSe quantum dots by surface imprinting technology. The synthesized molecular imprinted silica nanospheres (CdSe@SiO2@MIP) allow a high selectivity and sensitivity of parathion-methyl via fluorescence intensity decreasing when the MIP material rebinding the parathion-methyl molecule. Compared with the MIP fabricated in traditional method, the template of parathion-methyl was easier to remove from the CdSe@SiO2@MIP imprinted material. Under optimal conditions, the fluorescence intensity of parathion-methyl at the imprinted sensor was detected by spectrofluorophotometer. The relative fluorescence intensity of CdSe@SiO2@MIP decreased linearly with the increasing concentration of parathion-methyl ranging from 0.013 mg·kg−1 to 2.63 mg·kg−1 with a detection limit (3δ) of 0.004 mg·kg−1 (S/N=3), which is lower than the MIP in tradition. The imprinted film sensor was applied to detect parathion-methyl in vegetable samples without the interference of other organophosphate pesticides and showed a prosperous application in the field of food safety.


The properties of SNS Josephson junctions in YBa/sub 2/Cu/sub 3/O/sub 7-/spl delta// thin films have been investigated, which were fabricated by oxygen irradiation at 200 keV through a 50 nm wide slit in an implantation mask. After annealing the irradiated microbridges at 500/spl deg/C in an oxygen atmosphere, the implanted region has a reduced but finite transition temperature, allowing Josephson coupling in a temperature window of <15 K. Close to the coupling temperature the critical current shows a nearly complete modulation in an applied magnetic field. This indicates a homogeneous current distribution in the junctions and therefore a homogeneous defect distribution throughout the implanted and subsequently annealed region of the superconducting microbridges. Over the entire temperature range of Josephson coupling, the junctions exhibit resistively shunted junction like I-V characteristics with additional excess current. Furthermore, the exponential dependence of the critical current on temperature is in good agreement with conventional superconductor-normal-superconductor proximity effect theory.


Solvent-free microwave extraction (SFME) has been applied to the extraction of essential oils from Melissa officinalis L. and Laurus nobilis L. The results of SFME were compared with those obtained by hydrodistillation (HD) and ultrasound-assisted extraction (USE) of essential oils from dried plant materials. The compositions of the essential oils were identified by GC–MS. The essential oil obtained with SFME contained substantially higher amounts of oxygenated compounds and lower amounts of monoterpenes than the oils obtained by conventional methods. The three different extraction methods used showed differences in the compositions and contents of the essential oils.


This work aimed to identify the mechanical injuries that occur in 'Golden' papaya fruits, and to evaluate the injuries effects on the quality of the fruits at early ripening stage and storage at 22oC and 85% RH for 10 days. The mechanical injuries identified were abrasion, cuts and bruises. Abrasion was caused by 200 mesh sandpaper in a 6 cm2 of peel surface area. Cut injury was obtained by cutting fruits at 30mm length and 5mm depth. Bruises were produced in the papayas by impact, which were dropped from 2 m height onto a hard surface. Each fruit were injured twice in the opposite sides at the widest diameter region. Intact fruits were considered as control. Injured areas by abrasion did not develop the typical yellow color. The luminosity and chroma values were lower in injured areas. Abrasion and impact injuries were responsible for flesh firmness decrease and higher water loss. Magnetic resonance images showed that injured papaya fruits lost their integrity. In the injured areas were visualized clear region due to free water content. The quality of 'Golden' papaya fruits is affect by mechanical injuries, mainly due to the impact and the abrasion injuries.


Synthetic C–S–H and C-A-S-H samples with different Ca/Si molar ratios (1.0 and 1.5) were prepared by precipitation from solution. The effects of incorporations of aluminum ion into C-S-H gels on their microstructure were studied by applying Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), BET nitrogen adsorption and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Results show that in FTIR spectra, peaks nearing 970 cm-1 and 450 cm-1 wave number change obviously with the substitution of Al3+into C/S1.0 C-S-H. In BET diagram, it also can be found that the substitution of Al3+into C/S1.0 C-S-H lower the specific surface area. Furthermore, SEM graphs also show that the morphology change in C/S=1.0 C-S-H after the substitution of aluminum ion. However, little difference can be found in FTIR spectra and BET diagrams after Al3+ doped into C/S1.5 C-S-H. So, it can be concluded that the effects of the substitution of aluminum ion on the structure and morphology of C-S-H are affected by Ca/Si molar ratio


H.264/AVC will be an essential component in emerging wireless video applications thanks to its excellent compression efficiency and network-friendly design. However, a video coding standard itself is only one component within the application and transmission environment. Its effectiveness strongly depends on the selection of appropriate modes and parameters at the encoder, at the decoder, as well as in the network. In this paper we introduce the features of the H.264/AVC coding standard that make it suitable for wireless video applications, including features for error resilience, bit rate adaptation, integration into packet networks, interoperability, and buffering considerations. Modern wireless networks provide many different means to adapt quality of service, such as forward error correction methods on different layers and end-to-end or link layer retransmission protocols. The applicability of all these encoding and network features depends on application constraints, such as the maximum tolerable delay, the possibility of online encoding, and the availability of feedback and cross-layer information. We discuss the use of different coding and transport related features for different applications, namely video telephony, video conferencing, video streaming, download-and-play, and video broadcasting. Guidelines for the selection of appropriate video coding tools, video encoder and decoder settings, as well as transport and network parameters are provided and justified. References to relevant research publications and standardization contributions are given.


Constructions of balanced sampling plans excluding contiguous units, a class of designs introduced by Hedayat, Rao and Stufken, are given which provide a complete solution to this problem when k = 4.


This thesis inquires into how Australasian illustrated junior fiction from 1890-1920 employed the realm of the imagined to negotiate the representation of identity. It examines the mediation of colonialism and emergent nationalisms within the field of study, visual culture. It focuses on the collision of cultures, the transformation of the unfamiliar into the familiar and evaluates the roles of stereotype and gender. The inquiry has been prompted by a number of factors, all of which remain ongoing and salient features in shaping cultural endeavour in New Zealand and Australia. These relate to post-colonial issues of otherness as well as the legacy of socio-political events and mythologies contemporary to the period. Along with 'dying race' and masculine mythologies these constitute Federation, suffrage, exclusionist policy and war. Critical commentary has cogently debated their thematic articulation in Australasian junior fiction as a foundational vehicle for national identity. With a few exceptions it has failed to address this genre from the juncture of image and text, print and production and cultural endeavour. Junior fiction is not only the product of literary endeavour, it is the creation of illustration and design praxis. By examining this interface, the thesis addresses the unrealised needs of students and scholars of visual communication design, illustration and visual culture for whom sociocultural issues: indigeneity, gender and ethnicity are paramount. The research is based on a comparative analysis of New Zealand and Australian illustrated junior fiction. The methodologies of formal and semiotic analyses traditionally employed in the analysis of visual artefacts were applied to unpacking the primary visual material. The illustrations sourced from Australasian children's literature were analysed alongside selected material from cultural vernacular. Two informal interviews were conducted with descendents of New Zealand image-makers. To supplement visual methodologies, graphical discourse was designed as a synthesizing procedure and implemented in the discussion of cultural endeavour and image and text. The results suggest that in addition to the formative events impacting the colonies, postcolonial issues of 'otherness' are key factors in differentiating the colonies from their point of origin and one from the other. Analysis of the findings reveals assimilation, acculturation and socio-cultural identities to be central to the representation of identity. In addition findings reveal sociocultural practices and relationships to be critical in informing how image and text were composed and integrated. The critical conceptualization of visual culture as a field of study, views it to be a place for the critique of the 'master narratives of imperialism and nationalism' (Bal 2003, 22). The research findings have important implications for the historical account of cultural endeavour and disciplinary praxis. The first of these conclusions is that junior fiction contributes significantly to the ongoing construction of nationalist mythologies. The second is that a practitioner-based perspective extends the critical reading into the representation of discourses associated with nationalism. The third is that graphical discourse provides a model to examining historical and contemporary narratives in the production of image and text.


Perceived temporal interval between voluntary action and its outcome is shorter than that between involuntary action and its outcome (i.e., intentional binding). Although the effect is robust and extensively employed as a marker of sense of agency, the nature of intentional binding in multiple actions and outcomes remains unclear. We examined intentional binding in alternated action-outcome dyads. Participants actively or passively pressed a key, followed by a tone, and they again pressed the same key immediately after the preceding tone; resulting in four keypress-tone dyads in a trial. Participants reproduced the duration of alternated keypress-tone dyads or the temporal interval between a dyad embedded in the alternations. The reproduced duration was shorter in the active than in the passive condition, suggesting the intentional binding in action-outcome alternations. In contrast, the reproduced interval between a dyad was longer in the active condition and did not correlate with the reproduced duration of the alternations. These results suggest that subjective time during actions may rely not only on a general internal clock; rather, it may also be modulated by postdictive biases that are flexibly switched based on what we recall.


The American Modernist poet Conrad Aiken attempted not only a thematic rapprochement with music, but also what is usually described as 'musicalization of fiction,' that is to say a more formal type of intermediality. By this token, Aiken occupies a specific place in literary history as an author of formal musical borrowings. Yet, paradoxically, Aiken's use of music remains rather conventional, or traditionalist, so that it only reinforces his marginality within the Modernist world. While Harold Bloom describes Aiken's poetry as attached to the "tradition of High romanticism", I would willingly describe his use of music as an orthodox musical mythography, whereby the crossing of the boundaries between the arts becomes a mere poetic tool, and quite a hackneyed intersemiotic translation. In other words, far from constituting a novelty, intermediality and intersemiotic translatation are signs of an attachment to traditionalist values. Aiken's musical singularity also appears in his novels which seem to have been initially conceived of as purely profitable projects, aiming to improve the poet's income. However, to an extent, Aiken's novels reflect his poetry, building on his intersemiotic poetic statements. Indeed, what comes to the fore, in both Aiken's poetry and his novels, is an almost obsessive questioning of consciousness. And, it is music that plays a heuristic function accompanying images of consciousness. In order to demonstrate Aiken's attachment to musical borrowings and his paradoxically traditionalist approach to intersemioticity, I will first focus on his poetic  manifestos . Second, I shall concentrate on Aiken's musical representations of consciousness, especially in his novel  Blue Voyage  (1927). Finally, I will refer to Aiken's novels in relation to his vision of time as an aesthetic construct in keeping with music.


Background : Uncontrolled population growth is evidenced mainly because of the high fertility. Improving maternal and child health services in Ethiopia were one of the main aims of the health extension program. The impediment of early marriage was revised in the national family code which claims assessment of fertility situations. Objectives : This study aimed at measuring levels and fertility inhibition effects of proximate determinants in Butajira district. Methods : A cross-sectional study was conducted on resident women of reproductive age group recruited from the Butajira Demographic Surveillance System database. A total of 9996 women with different characteristics were thus interviewed. Results : Total fertility rate was 5.3 children per woman with high urban-rural gradient. The non-marriage (Cm=0.66) had the highest fertility inhibition effect followed by postpartum infecundability (Ci=0.68), contraception (Cc=0.77) and abortion (Ca=0.96). Main differences were observed across residential environment and educational status. Abortion had a paramount significance among in school women (ca=0.76). Conclusion : Not being married followed by postpartum infecundability and contraception inhibited high fertility. Abortion significantly reduced fertility among students. Keen awareness about negative consequences of high fertility should be attained. Women ought to be advised to marry late and stay in-school for long years. Extended breast feeding should be maintained for birth spacing. There must be sustained effort to increase contraception use rate. In-school women should be educated on problems of abortions. Youth-friendly contraceptive services must also be made available. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev 2011;25(3):184-191]


Prolactin is a pituitary hormone that plays pivotal role in a variety of reproductive functions. Hyperprolactinemia is a common condition that can result from a number of causes; including use of medications and hypothyroidism, as well as pituitary disorders. Depending on the cause and consequences of hyperprolactinemia, selected patients require specific treatment. The underlying cause of hyperprolactinemia, sex, age and reproductive status must be considered. Management of this condition depends heavily on the cause and on the effects it has on the patient. The definition of the hyperprolactinemia is not uniformed, and in various clinical settings various criteria of this status are used. In the identification of hyperprolactinemia not only simple measurements of the prolactin serum level are used, the dynamic tests with the use of dopamine antagonists have a special role as well. Neither the measurement of the serum prolactin level, nor dynamic tests with dopamine antagonists are able to determine the presence of macroprolactin molecules in the serum, and this can lead clinicians to establish the false diagnosis of hyperprolactinemia.


The release of colored wastewaters in the ecosystem is a dramatic source of aesthetic pollution, eutrophication, and perturbations in aquatic life. Research devoted to the ill-effects caused by chemicals have acquired importance as a result of the increased care and attention paid to the environment and human health by international, socio-political, and legislative authorities. Compliance with strict quality standards is especially called for, in the case of handling and using toxic substances that affect the environment and health. Growing concern about environmental issues has prompted the industries to investigate appropriate and eco-friendly treatment technologies. The prime need of these industries is to have a simple but effective inexpensive technology for the treatment of wastewater. Photocatalysis is considered as an important part of emerging greener technology as it uses environmentally friendly oxidants (oxygen, hydrogen peroxide or ozone), photocatalysts (titanium dioxide, ferrous ions or its complexes), and ultraviolet (UV) radiation to degrade and mineralize the toxic organic pollutants. In this study, the photodecolorization of Reactive Black 5 dye has been performed using titanium dioxide (TiO2 P-25 Degussa) and zinc oxide (ZnO) using a mixed batch reactor. The rate of degradation was studied in terms of changes in absorption spectra and reduction in chemical oxygen demand (COD). Various process parameters such as catalyst dose, pH, and dye initial concentration have been varied and their effect on the decolorization efficiency has been studied. The photocatalyst zinc oxide was found to be more efficient as compared with titanium dioxide.


Eight bacteriophages effective against Yersinia ruckeri, the enteric redmouth disease bacterium, were isolated. Phage YerA41, a tailed icosahedral virus isolated from sewage enrichments, lysed 34 of 35 strains of Y. ruckeri serovar I, but was inactive against 15 strains belonging to three other serological groups. Six other phages lysed strains of serovars II, V, and I′, a subgroup of serovar I. YerL62, a phage obtained by mitomycin C induction, was specific for one of three serovar V strains. These bacteriophages, particularly YerA41, have potential value for fish disease diagnostic work.


In this article, we sketch the possible consequences of the changing relationships between the government, companies, and NGOs in addressing various transboundary sustainability issues for national and international law. The reasons for dialogue and collaboration with NGOs go beyond the issue of "reputation management." We show that, in particular with regard to transboundary sustainability issues, the limitations of national and international law might further stimulate active relationships between companies and NGOs. Although we think that these limitations are often presented as too absolute, it is clear that the issues are too complex to be solved by government regulation alone. We show that the relationships between companies and NGOs may play an important role in respect of all elements of the regulatory chain: norm-setting, implementation, monitoring and enforcement, and dispute resolution. In some cases, NGOs and companies may decide to start partnerships: the influence of NGOs in such partnerships is essential. In other cases, NGOs may decide to keep a distance in order not to complicate their watchdog role. An interesting question for further research would be whether and how NGOs can keep this watchdog role within partnerships with companies. If the developments discussed in our paper continue, multinational corporations and NGOs may have to perform tasks that are usually performed by large bureaucratic governmental organizations, staffed with thousands of civil servants. Many NGOs will not have sufficient financial capacity and personnel to play this role. Parallel to its legislative role discussed above, the government should consider this problem as well. Once it is clear that the role of States is reduced in favor of a more active role of NGOs and multinational corporations, it seems almost inevitable that in the future governments offer NGOs financial and practical assistance.


The paper describes the supervised method approach to identifying vessel anomaly behaviour. The vessel anomaly behaviour is determined by learning from self-reporting maritime systems based on the Automatic Identification System (AIS). The AIS is a real world vessel reporting data system, which has been recently made compulsory by the International Convention for the Safety of Life and Sea (SOLAS) for vessels over 300 gross tons and most commercial vessels such as cargo ships, passenger vessels, tankers, etc. In this paper, we describe the use of Bayesian networks (BNs) approach to identify the behaviour of the vessel of interest. The BNs is a machine learning technique based on probabilistic theory that represents a set of random variables and their conditional independencies via directed acyclic graph (DAG). Previous studies showed that the BNs have important advantages compared to other machine learning techniques. Among them are that expert knowledge can be included in the BNs model, and that humans can understand and interpret the BNs model more readily. This work proves that the BNs technique is applicable to the identification of vessel anomaly behaviour.


Several sintering additives for hydroxyapatite have been tested in order to enhance its sinterability without decomposing the hydroxyapatite(Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2) and without decreasing the bioactivity and/or biocompatibility. In case of sintered pure hydroxyapatites significant dissolution was occurred after immersion in distilled water or in simulated body fluid. At first the dissolution was iniciated at grain boundary creating the nano-size defects such as small pores and grew up to micro scale by increasing the immersion time. This dissolution resulted in grain separation at the surfaces and finally in fracture. And the dissolution was concentrated on those grains adjacent to pores rather than those in the dense region. So glass-reinforced hydroxyapatite(GR-HA) ceramics were prepared to strengthening the grain boundary to prevent dissolution. Several glasses were added at 0 to 10wt.% and sintered at 1200 °C for 2h in air with moisture protection. Glass phase was incorporated into hydroxyapatite to act as the sintering aids followed by crystallization in order to improve the mechanical properties without reducing the biocompatibility. From dissolution test, significant damage was reduced even more than 7days. X-ray diffraction and SEM showed no decomposition of hydroxyapatite to secondary phases and fracture toughness was increased more than pure hydroxyapatite.


SUMMARY: Several substances have been tested for inhibitory effects on carotenoid biosynthesis in Flavobacterium R1519, an organism which normally produces zeaxanthin (β,β-carotene-3,3'-diol) as essentially its only carotenoid. Diphenylamine, several mixed-function oxidase inhibitors (SKF 525A, SKF 3301A, SKF 7997A3, metopirone base, diphenylpropylacetic acid, piperonyl butoxide), several alkaloids (atropine, brucine, hyoscyamine, pilocarpine, quinidine, quinine, scopolamine, strychnine), some substitued pyridines (pyridine, 3-picoline, 3-ethylpyridine, 5-ethyl-2-methylpyridine) and morpholine showed no specific inhibitory effects. In cultures grown in the presence of CaCl2, β-carotene (10%) and β-cryptoxanthin (10%) partly replaced zeaxanthin. Nicotine specifically inhibited zeaxanthin synthesis. Lycopene (in 5 mM-nicotine) and rubixanthin (in 1 mM-nicotine) accumulated as the new main pigments; [2-14C]mevalonic acid was efficiently incorporated into both. Nicotine thus inhibited the cyclization reaction in carotenoid biosynthesis in Flavobacterium R1519 as in other organisms; in zeaxanthin biosynthesis cyclization appeared to precede hydroxylation. Similar inhibitory effects were produced by (+) and (-) nicotine and by nor-nicotine, but not by the closely related anabasine, myosmine, β-nicotyrine and nor-nicotyrine.


We conduct a global, weakly nonlinear analysis of the magnetorotational instability (MRI) in a Taylor–Couette flow. This is a multiscale, perturbative treatment of the nonideal, axisymmetric MRI near threshold, subject to realistic radial boundary conditions and cylindrical geometry. We analyze both the standard MRI, initialized by a constant vertical background magnetic field, and the helical MRI, with an azimuthal background field component. This is the first weakly nonlinear analysis of the MRI in a global Taylor–Couette geometry, as well as the first weakly nonlinear analysis of the helical MRI. We find that the evolution of the amplitude of the standard MRI is described by a real Ginzburg–Landau equation (GLE), whereas the amplitude of the helical MRI takes the form of a complex GLE. This suggests that the saturated state of the helical MRI may itself be unstable on long spatial and temporal scales.


To handle death may be a difficult task for the living. The deathof a person creates a turbulent situation that needs to be resolved.Ritual actions and burial practices performed within the frameworkof the prevailing social norms are a way to deal with conflictsand changed power relations. This paper deals with such issuesexemplified by the Pitted Ware burial practices seen in theburial ground at Ajvide, Eksta Parish on Gotland. The burial expressionsobserved from this site indicate the use of different ritualsin the treatment of the dead. These are visible by bodies buriedin the supine position in single, or sometimes in double or triplegraves, while some consist of individuals in a "package" where thebody must have been in a state of decay when buried. Well over athousand identified human bone fragments found in the culturallayers indicate bodies that may have been exposed above groundor used secondarily and ultimately dispersed in the area. Emptygraves and graves with missing bones also indicate that bones ofdeceased ancestors may have been of importance in the death ritualsthat assured a "Perfect Death".


The conditional phrase translation probabilities constitute the principal components of phrase-based machine translation systems. These probabilities are estimated using a heuristic method that does not seem to optimize any reasonable objective function of the word-aligned, parallel training corpus. Earlier efforts on devising a better understood estimator either do not scale to reasonably sized training data, or lead to deteriorating performance. In this paper we explore a new approach based on three ingredients (1) A generative model with a prior over latent segmentations derived from Inversion Transduction Grammar (ITG), (2) A phrase table containing all phrase pairs without length limit, and (3) Smoothing as learning objective using a novel Maximum-A-Posteriori version of Deleted Estimation working with Expectation-Maximization. Where others conclude that latent segmentations lead to overfitting and deteriorating performance, we show here that these three ingredients give performance equivalent to the heuristic method on reasonably sized training data.


This study investigated the links between racial discrimination and school engagement and the roles of racial socialization and ethnic identity as protective factors in those linkages in a sample of 148, sixth through twelfth grade African American adolescents from working and middle-class two-parent families. In home interviews, youth described their ethnic identity, discrimination experiences at school, and school engagement (school bonding, school grades, school self-esteem), and parents rated their racial socialization practices. Analyses revealed that discrimination was negatively related to school self-esteem and school bonding. Racial socialization had additive effects on school self-esteem and school bonding, but did not moderate the discrimination—school engagement association. For boys, ethnic identity had additive effects on school bonding, but for girls, ethnic identity moderated the relation between discrimination and school bonding: when girls experienced more discrimination and had a lower ethnic identity, they reported lower school bonding. Discrimination, racial socialization, and ethnic identity were not related to school grades.


Rice is the most important crop in Asia and the staple food for most of the world's population. Due to the overwhelming importance of this crop, modelling rice-based farming systems will provide valuable help to compare experimental research findings across regions, extrapolate field experimental data to wider environments, develop management recommendations and decision-support systems, explore
effects of climate change and adaptation options, and prediction of crop yield. There is an increasing demand for the capability to simulate rice-based cropping systems, especially in Asia. Such a system capability will allow expanded investigation of nitrogen dynamics, crop sequencing, intercropping, crop residue management and soil and water management. Incorporation of the ORYZA2000 rice model(Bouman and van Laar, 2006) into APSIM (Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM-Oryza) together with recent work on carbon and nitrogen dynamics in transitional flooded/non-flooded systems(Gaydon et al., 2009) has facilitated long-term simulation of lowland rice-based farming systems scenarios. However, the capability of APSIM-Oryza to simulate rice-based crop sequences involving other crops has undergone limited testing to this point and under a variety of crop management practices and cropping systems. In this paper, we detail testing of the APSIM-Oryza simulation model against an experimental dataset involving lowland rice-rice-soybean crop rotation in West Nusa Tenggara Province(NTB) Indonesia


The ultimate goal of this study is to improve scientific understanding of fire behavior leading to flashover in structural fires. This document summarizes important information in five topic areas: burning rates, radiant ignition, fire spread rates, ventilation limit imposed by size of opening, and flashover criteria.
 These are the main components related to the scientific understanding of the fire growth and flashover problem involved in real-world structural fires. Within each topic area, there are four subsections dealing with background, theory, comments, and references. Main components of the study are to develop improved mathematical simulations so as to improve the accuracy of theoretical calculation and to develop and extend the range of knowledge and modeling capability so as to extend the range of available experimental data.


The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has built up a record of experience and achievements since it was formed 10 years ago as an identifiable approach to sharing online learning materials. In its initial phase, much activity was driven by ideals and interest in finding new ways to release content, with less direct research and reflection on the process. It is now important to consider the impact of OER and the types of evidence that are being generated across initiatives, organisations and individuals. Drawing on the work of OLnet (http://olnet.org) in bringing people together through fellowships, research projects and supporting collective intelligence about OER, we discuss the key challenges facing the OER movement. We go on to consider these challenges in the context of another project, Bridge to Success (http://b2s.aacc.edu), identifying the services which can support open education in the future.


We present a multispeaker, multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis model based on Tacotron that is able to produce high quality speech in multiple languages. Moreover, the model is able to transfer voices across languages, e.g. synthesize fluent Spanish speech using an English speaker's voice, without training on any bilingual or parallel examples. Such transfer works across distantly related languages, e.g. English and Mandarin.
Critical to achieving this result are: 1. using a phonemic input representation to encourage sharing of model capacity across languages, and 2. incorporating an adversarial loss term to encourage the model to disentangle its representation of speaker identity (which is perfectly correlated with language in the training data) from the speech content. Further scaling up the model by training on multiple speakers of each language, and incorporating an autoencoding input to help stabilize attention during training, results in a model which can be used to consistently synthesize intelligible speech for training speakers in all languages seen during training, and in native or foreign accents.


Regulating the melt-pool size to a constant reference value during the build process is a challenging task in Laser Powder Bed Fusion additive manufacturing (LPBF-AM). This paper considers adjusting laser power to achieve a constant melt-pool volume during laser processing of a multi-track build under LPBF-AM. First, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is applied to model the variation of the melt-pool volume along the deposition distance, with physics-informed input features. Then a constrained finite-horizon optimal control problem is formulated, with a quadratic cost function defined to minimize the difference between the melt-pool volume and a reference value. A projected gradient descent algorithm is applied to compute the sequence of laser power in the proposed optimal control problem. The GPR modeling of melt-pool dynamics is trained and tested using simulated data sets generated from a commercial finite-element based AM software, and the same commercial AM software is used to evaluate the control performance. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed GPR modeling and optimal control in regulating melt-pool volume for building multi-track parts with LPBF-AM.


This paper presents an analysis of rigid-body joint-angle measurement based on microelectromechanical-system (MEMS) biaxial accelerometers and uniaxial gyroscopes. In comparison to conventional magnetic and optical joint angular sensors, this new inertial sensing principle has the advantages of flexible installation and true contactless sensing. This paper focuses on the comparison of four different inertial-sensor combination methods that are reported in reference papers and utilizes the theory of rigid-body kinematics to explain and analyze their advantages and weaknesses. Experiments have also been conducted to further verify and strengthen the arguments put forward in the analysis. All experiments in this paper took place on a custom-built rigid-body robot arm model that can be manipulated by hand. Sensor calibration and accelerometer alignment issues are also described, and their details are discussed. The experiment results presented in this paper show significant differences with reference to the achieved angular accuracy for various situations when using the four different sensor combination methods. In some cases, the angular error based on one method is more than 0.04 rad, while that from another method is within ±0.005 rad. The noise levels of angular readings from different methods are also experimentally compared and analyzed. The conclusion drawn serves to guide readers toward a suitable method for their particular application.


We present a detailed analysis of the output beam of high-power edge-emitting angled tapered superluminescent LEDs (A-TSLEDs). A device model, including spontaneous and stimulated emission processes as well as the typical nonuniform carrier-density distribution due to current spreading and carrier diffusion, has been developed and used to interpret the experimentally obtained characteristics of inhouse-fabricated A-TSLEDs. The good match between measured and theoretical results indicates that the model reproduces the A-TSLED operation very satisfactorily and clearly explains the role of the collecting lens on the pronounced asymmetry of some of the measured optical intensity profiles.


In this study, the main objective is to predict buildings heating and cooling energy consumption benefitting from 18 building envelope performance parameters by using artificial neural network. A backpropagation neural network has been preferred and the data have been presented to network by being normalized. 7 Cases application study was carried out with conventional methods. The building energy simulation software DeST was used for the calculations of energy consumption and ANN toolbox of MATLAB was used for predictions. As a conclusion, when the calculated values compared with the outputs of the network, it is proven that ANN gives satisfactory results successful prediction rate of over 97% and will be helpful for designers in designing period of buildings.


Park and Ride schemes using dedicated bus services have become particularly popular over the last 40 years with UK policymakers. This popularity can largely be attributed to the UK policy context and the advocating of Park and Ride to tackle increasing car use, congestion and traffic-related emissions. The aim of this paper is to use existing evidence on the degree to which this has been achieved and provide lessons on how bus-based Park and Ride can be used effectively. From this, lessons are provided that will benefit stakeholders internationally on the use of dedicated link-mode Park and Ride schemes operating at the edge of urban areas. It is found that although Park and Ride has been popular amongst motorists, it has also attracted users of existing public transport services and has generated additional trips, resulting in a counter-productive effect. It is concluded that for Park and Ride to be successful, it should be implemented in tandem with other supply-side measures and alongside sufficiently rigorous restraint instruments. Also, despite the use of frequent and dedicated bus-link services providing a key feature that attracts motorists who would not otherwise use public transport, their use needs to be carefully monitored to avoid low load-factors decreasing levels of efficiency.


The exposure of organ‐cultured pineal glands of Syrian hamsters to forskolin, an adenylate cyclase activator, caused marked increases in melatonin levels when glands were collected at the second half of the dark period and incubated for 4 h. However, when glands were collected at the beginning of the dark period and incubated with the same drug, a significant increase in melatonin content was observed only after 6–8 h. Likewise, when glnds were collected at the beginning of the light period, forskolin stimulated melatonin synthesis only after 6–8 h of incubation with the drug. These results support the existence of a relatively long lag period necessary for the induction of melatonin production in the Syrian hamster pineal gland. Experiments with actinomycin D indicate that RNA synthesis occurs during the lag period; thus, actinomycin D blocks the induction of melatonin synthesis by forskolin in glands collected at the beginning of the dark period and incubated for 8 h. In contrast, when pineal glands were collected from hamsters killed in the second half of the dark period, and incubated with forskolin for either 4 or 8 h, actinomycin D was unable to block the induction of melatonin production. These data suggest that RNA, presumably messenger RNA, which is necessary for increasing hamster pineal melatonin synthesis, is synthesized and accumulates during the first half of the night.


The preschool years are a critical time for physical literacy and activity behaviours, key components of early motor development, and early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings are potential targets to promote engagement in these behaviours. Physical literacy is a holistic viewpoint from which to examine the multiple factors that may influence individual physical activity participation. The purpose of this project is to assess the physical literacy of educators and determine which components of physical literacy are associated with behaviours and intentions to provide physical literacy and activity opportunities to children in their care. Employed early childhood educators (n=94) were recruited to participate. Motivation, confidence, knowledge, understanding, physical competence and physical activity were assessed using existing measures or measures created specifically for the study. Overall educator physical literacy was moderate, except for understanding (mean=4.2/5) and physical activity behaviour (steps/day=11,832). Intentions and behaviours were high (mean range=4.2-4.5/5). Significant main effects were seen for understanding and object control skills with a select number of intention and behaviour questions, but no relationship was seen for the remaining components of physical literacy. While measured physical literacy was moderate, this was not associated with on intentions and behaviours for the provision of physical literacy and activity, which were high. Further research is needed to determine if educator reported behaviours translate into quality physical literacy and activity experience in ECEC and sustained physical literacy and activity for children attending ECECs.Acknowledgments: E. Jean Buckler was supported by a CIHR Doctoral Research Award


The present article aims at comparing the Holy Qur'ān's English translations by Maulana Muhammad Ali (1917) and M. Habib Shakir (1980). Shakir was a Pakistani merchant and Muhammad Ali was a scholar of the Qadiani sect. The logic behind the selection of their works was their irrefutable similarity. The main question is whether we can label Shakir's work a revision of Muhammad Ali's or not. The other issue was to identify the percentage of such a similarity. Since the possibility of detecting major differences between the two works was stronger in the selection of equivalents for culture-bound items, and more specifically, for religious-specific concepts, such terms were first extracted from the entire chapters of the Holy Qur'ān and the equivalents adopted by the two translators were identified. It was finally revealed that Shakir has employed more than 80% of the religious-specific terms being selected previously by Muhammad Ali. The similarities were not, of course, limited to RSTs. Even a cursory glance at some Surahs will reveal the indisputable similarity of the two works at various levels, from words to phases, sentences, Signs or even, the entire Surahs. In some research papers, the authors may erroneously consider Shakir's work as an original one and make no mention of Muhammad Ali's. Shakir's work should neither be considered a plagiarism, nor an independent translation: it is merely a revision.


Literature data and the own authors' observations (76 cases), concerning the recognition and treatment of stomach phytobezoars following vagotomy and stomach resection are set forth in the paper. All these formations in the stomach were removed by means of the conservative procedures. Knowledge of the specificity of the phytobezoars manifestations in an operated stomach allows for better understanding and evaluation of the state of the patients who have been subjected to stomach resection of vagotomy.


The petrography and chemistry of epidote and amphibole from the Rio Espinharas hybrid complex (REHC), northeastern Brazil are reported. The Rio Espinharas complex is composed of an intimate association of diorite to shoshonitic metaluminous quartzmonzonite to slightly peraluminous syenogranite. The epidote shows four textural relationships: three are primary and one is resulting from sub-solidus reaction. Euhedral epidote is dispersed and associated mainly with biotite and amphibole. In some cases euhedral crystals of the epidote contain allanite cores, which are subhedral to anhedral and constitute in average less than 20% of the whole grain. The contact between primary epidote and plagioclase is corroded, suggesting reaction with the host-magma. Secondary anhedral epidote is rare and results from plagioclase alteration. The preservation of magmatic epidote in granitic rocks emplaced in the upper crust is attributed to rapid magma ascent, which implies fast upward transport probably by dyking associated to shear zone. The REHC occurs between two transcurrent faults that impose an elongated shape, suggesting that magma filled fractures. The time of 14 years required for dissolution zones of 0.15 mm width of epidote on porphyritic quartz monzonite, corresponds to an average ascent rate of ≥ 700 m year -1 from 7.1 to 2.9 kbar.


This volume looks at three issues high on the health policy agendas of most industrialized countries, including current and ongoing health policy challenges of an aging society; recent developments in pharmaceutical policy; and human resources policies to cope with existing and projected shortfalls of professionals and quality issues. Common threads across countries --independent of the health system or policymaking style --are the public call for accountability in health policy decisionmaking, as well as debates over the most appropriate level of competencies and service delivery cuts. The contributors, health economists and health policy experts from 16 industrialized countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States), offer a range of ideas and approaches for overcoming obstacles in the policy process. The book focuses on policies that are of systemic impact, have generated considerable controversy and media attention, and appear transferable to other health policy settings. It aims to narrow the gap between health services research and health policy.


This article documents short-term mission's engagement with Islam by showing how Islam is represented by sending agencies and how volunteers interact with Muslims. I relate the different styles of representing and engaging with Islam to differences of theological orientation as well as to the particular contexts and practices of short-term mission. This article is based on research in Southern California between 2009 and 2012, including visual and textual content analyses of sending agencies' websites and guidebooks, and interviews with 57 short-term mission participants


Background Porcine intestine is the mainstay of small bowel (SB) surgical simulation.1 These tissues of healthy young animals, although excellent for basic skills, cannot provide high fidelity for more complex surgical simulation involving pathological SB. In addition there is potential infection control and ethical/cultural issues. We explored creating a SB phantom would solve these problems. Methodology SB substitute was created by a double layer processed collagen sausage casing joined by a thin layer of dilute coloured gelatine/ADAMgel (Aqueous Dietary fibre Antifreeze Mix gel) mix. This was filled with fluid spill absorption granules soaked in coloured fluid representing SB content. This was intertwined with and wrapped in a thin film of water rich ADAMgel, and left outside to cure for 48 h. Results The ADAMgel film dehydrated causing it to toughen and become more adherent to SB. This created an excellent model of SB adhesion. Adhesiolysis performed on the specimen felt realistic. The extent and tensile strength of adhesions could be varied emulating anatomical pathology. The SB analogue could be incised, sutured, resected and anastomosed using same equipment and techniques as with human SB. It was not as robust as healthy pig gut, and thus more like SB encountered with adhesions. The SB model can be made more friable by using a single collagen skin, or more robust by adding tubinette between the two layers. A mesentery can be attached to the SB by folding over a collagen sheet and inserting a film of ADAMgel between the two layers. Both diathermy and harmonic scalpel can be used on all components. Conclusion It is possible to create a SB phantom for surgical simulation that emulates pathology and variety. The cost is the same as pig intestine per metre (<£1), but can be stored on the shelf and prepared in shorter lengths. Reference Bijoy M, Thomas M, Dandolu V, Caputo P, Milner R, Hernandez E. Resident education in principles and technique of bowel surgery using an ex-vivo porcine model. Obstet Gynecol Int. 2010;852647


INTRODUCTION A detailed description of the molecular and cellular events controlling the generation of the vast diversity of neuronal and glial cell types that constitute the adult vertebrate central nervous system (CNS) is fundamental to our understanding of the normal functioning of the CNS and to developing treatments for neurological disorders. It is generally accepted that during embryonic development neuroepithelial cells initially and later radial glial cells are neural progenitors that give rise to all neural cell types (Gotz et al., 2002; Doetsch, 2003). The characterisation of the spatial and temporal cues that control the maintenance of these cells, their fate restriction and differentiation into neurons, oligodendrocytes and astrocytes is the subject of intense investigation. A number of studies on the spinal cord dorsoventral (DV) axis have established a framework for understanding the molecular mechanisms controlling neural cell diversity. Secreted signalling molecules including sonic hedgehog (Shh), produced by the notochord and floor plate, and Wnt and bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), produced by the roof plate, act as morphogens to establish domains of expression of transcription factors (Briscoe and Ericson, 1999; Lee and Jessell, 1999). These positional identity factors control the specification of both neuronal and glial subtypes. The basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factor Olig2 is one


We consider the problem of maintaining a large matching and a small vertex cover in a dynamically changing graph. Each update to the graph is either an edge deletion or an edge insertion. We give the first randomized data structure that simultaneously achieves a constant approximation factor and handles a sequence of K updates in K*polylog(n) time, where n is the number of vertices in the graph. Previous data structures require a polynomial amount of computation per update.


Abstract : The only thing constant about change is that it is inevitable. Nothing could be more true about this statement than how it so aptly defines society today. The data base of knowledge acquired by the human race is accelerating at an astonishing, yet sometimes exhilarating, pace. The technological marvels being introduced today were mere dreams a few years ago. Technology is a large part of our very existence; it is responsible for our standard of living. In fact, technology plays a role in every facet of our lives. The field of education is one area, however, that technology has not completely permeated; that is, until recently. Ever since people undertook the task of educating others, they have imparted knowledge through traditional means: lectures, discussions, demonstrations, and tutoring. Recently, though, technological advances have made it possible to use such innovative forms of media as interactive videodiscs and computer systems to teach people in a fashion different from the traditional methods. Education in the Air Force has paralleled this evolution of teaching. Considering the importance of education in the Air Force, one is not surprised that the Air Force devotes a great deal of time, energy, and resources to improving the education of its personnel. In fact, the Air Force Academy recently developed a networked classroom system (NCS) to explore the potentials of innovative educational technologies. However, who can say that using innovative educational technologies to teach students is better than the traditional methods of teaching? Before one determines which style of teaching is better, one should compare the performance of students enrolled in courses using innovative educational technologies to the performance of students enrolled in similar courses taught in the traditional manner.