This paper describes a feedforward-feedback steering controller designed to simultaneously achieve vehicle stability and accurate path tracking at the limits of handling. Steering feedback through a lookahead control scheme exhibits desirable stability properties at the limits of handling, but at the expense of significant path tracking errors. Results from a linear analysis show that lateral tracking error is minimized when the steering controller constrains vehicle sideslip to be tangent to the desired path. While incorporating this desired behavior into the steering feedback results in accurate lateral path tracking, the resulting closed loop system exhibits poor stability margins. However, applying the sideslip tracking behavior as a steady-state feedforward control law creates a robust steering controller capable of accurate path tracking and oversteer correction at the physical limits of tire friction. Experimental data collected from an Audi TTS test vehicle on a 1.3 km stretch of race track demonstrates the performance of the controller design.


abstract While earlier cinemas were built in response to growing urban populations during the twentieth century, the first wave of multiplexes in India were built in anticipation of future wealth. In recent years, multiplex developments have been targeting various areas identified for growth in the urban redevelopment plans now being adopted across India, anticipating a larger "consuming class" spreading beyond existing pockets of affluence and occupying suburban and satellite townships in what were until recently brown and greenfield sites. Exclusive leisure facilities such as the multiplex illustrate the growing socio-spatial segregation in Indian cities, and suggest the ways the consuming classes are transforming urban space in their own image. As such, while the significance of the multiplex to cultural perspectives in the "New India" is widely noted, they also illustrate much broader issues of the political economy of India that are almost never discussed in the same breath as cinema, including taxation and investment, environmental management and the politics of land zoning and land acquisition.


ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Rome, three starkly modern buildings house a comprehensive medical facility whose concept and operation contrast as much with the usual public-sector Italian health care as the sleek architecture does with the antiquities of the city center. Rome American Hospital was opened as a profit-making venture by a group of Italian investors in May 1990, because of what Charles W. Neumann, an American and its chief executive officer, calls "the pressing demand for private health care in Italy." "It's ironic, isn't it?" Neumann asks. "Every European country that has a very large national health care commitment is looking for ways to reduce that commitment or shift it a bit more to the private sector. And in the United States, you're looking at just the opposite." Neumann was managing director of the European division of the Hospital Corporation of America Inc, which planned the Rome facility then turned


Multivariate time series (MTS) prediction plays a key role in many fields such as finance, energy and transport, where each individual time series corresponds to the data collected from a certain data source, so-called channel. A typical pipeline of building an MTS prediction model (PM) consists of selecting a subset of channels among all available ones, extracting features from the selected channels, and building a PM based on the extracted features, where each component involves certain optimization tasks, i.e., selection of channels, feature extraction (FE) methods, and PMs as well as configuration of the selected FE method and PM. Accordingly, pursuing the best prediction performance corresponds to optimizing the pipeline by solving all of its involved optimization problems. This is a non-trivial task due to the vastness of the solution space. Different from most of the existing works which target at optimizing certain components of the pipeline, we propose a novel evolutionary ensemble learning framework to optimize the entire pipeline in a holistic manner. In this framework, a specific pipeline is encoded as a candidate solution and a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is applied under different population sizes to produce multiple Pareto optimal sets (POSs). Finally, selective ensemble learning is designed to choose the optimal subset of solutions from the POSs and combine them to yield final prediction by using greedy sequential selection and least square methods. We implement the proposed framework and evaluate our implementation on two real-world applications, i.e., electricity consumption prediction and air quality prediction. The performance comparison with state-of-the-art techniques demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach.


Until recently it was widely believed that the ability of female mammals (with the likely exception of women) to identify and seek out a male breeding partner relied on the detection of non-volatile male pheromones by the female's vomeronasal organ (VNO) and their subsequent processing by a neural circuit that includes the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB), vomeronasal amygdala, and hypothalamus. Emperical data are reviewed in this paper that demonstrate the detection of volatile pheromones by the main olfactory epithelium (MOE) of female mice which, in turn, leads to the activation of a population of glomeruli and abutting mitral cells in the main olfactory bulb (MOB). Anatomical results along with functional neuroanatomical data demonstrate that some of these MOB mitral cells project to the vomeronasal amygdala. These particular MOB mitral cells were selectively activated (i.e., expressed Fos protein) by exposure to male as opposed to female urinary volatiles. A similar selectivity to opposite sex urinary volatiles was also seen in mitral cells of the AOB of female mice. Behavioral data from female mouse, ferret, and human are reviewed that implicate the main olfactory system, in some cases interacting with the accessory olfactory system, in mate recognition.


Background: The incidence of difficult laryngoscopy and intubation in obese patients is higher than in the general population. Classical predictors of difficult laryngoscopy and intubation have been shown to be unreliable. We prospectively evaluated indirect mirror laryngoscopy as a predictor of difficult laryngoscopy in obese patients. Materials and Methods: 60 patients with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30, scheduled to undergo general anesthesia, were enrolled. Indirect mirror laryngoscopy was performed and was graded 1-4 according to Cormack and Lehane. A view of grade 3-4 was classified as predicting difficult laryngoscopy. Additional assessments for comparison were the Samsoon and Young modification of the Mallampati airway classification, Wilson Risk Sum Score, neck circumference, and BMI. The view obtained upon direct laryngoscopy after induction of general anesthesia was classified according to Cormack and Lehane as grade 1-4. Results: Sixty patients met the inclusion criteria; however, 8 (13.3%) patients had an excessive gag reflex, and examination of the larynx was not possible. 15.4% of patients who underwent direct laryngoscopy had a Cormack and Lehane grade 3 or 4 view and were classified as difficult. Mirror laryngoscopy had a tendency toward statistical significance in predicting difficult laryngoscopy in these patients. Conclusions: This study is consistent with previous studies, which have demonstrated that no one individual traditional test has proven to be adequate in predicting difficult airways in the obese population. However, the new application of an old test - indirect mirror laryngoscopy - could be a useful additional test to predict difficult laryngoscopy in obese patients.


Purpose: Different types of crime occurring in or near tourist areas is an important issue. Lack of knowledge of dangerous places and reduced vigilance due to the holiday mood make tourists more vulnerable to criminal activities. This thesis, popular in literature, was subjected to empirical verification in this article on the example of Poland, which has a coastline of 770 km along the southern Baltic Sea. Approach/Methodology/Design: The study was based on quantitative data on crime and tourism traffic available for the coastal zone of Poland at the level of 15 counties and city counties, and the extensive analysis of the literature. The tourist traffic data were collected for the number of tourists served in accommodation establishments in total and in hotels. For these two types of accommodation establishments, the four data categories were used. They were all analyzed in absolute terms and per 100 sq km. Finally, 16 indicators of tourist traffic were used in the analysis. Data on the number of committed crimes registered by Police were obtained according to the seven types of crimes. They were all analyzed in absolute terms and per 100 sq km. Two methods of quantitative spatial analysis of all abovementioned indicators were used, the location quotient – LQ, the Pearson's correlation coefficient – R, in conjunction with the adjusted coefficient of determination ARSQ. Findings: The concentration of tourist traffic is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the concentration of crime in the coastal zone of Poland. The analysis of density indicators confirmed that the high spatial concentration of tourism promotes a high spatial concentration of crime. Correlation analysis confirmed that both tourists in total and foreign tourists, especially those accommodated in hotels, are particularly vulnerable to criminal crimes. A strong correlation between crimes against property and against life and health has been unequivocally confirmed. Practical Implications: The results of the research showed that to reduce crime in coastal tourist areas, the scope of monitoring and supervision should be extended around hotels and facilities visited by wealthy and foreign tourists. Programs for making these tourists aware of the threats of crimes against property and against life and health should be implemented. Originality/Value: The presented research results are the first such attempt in the specific conditions of a country undergoing political transformation. A significant number of types of crime and forms of tourism were analyzed.


Isolation of unknown compounds for structural identification and the collection of target molecules to generate unavailable standards remain a challenge when dealing with complex samples. While tedious multistep purification is commonly used, it is not appropriate for a limited amount of sample or when a full recovery of expensive molecules is required. Two-dimensional preparative chromatography in a comprehensive mode provides an effective means to collect a large number of molecules in such a case. However, there is currently a lack of metrics to estimate preparative performances with a minimal number of experiments. An in silico comparative study of various pairs of chromatographic systems is proposed, focusing on the occupation rate and the homogeneity of peak spreading in the 2D separation space. Off-line combination of centrifugal partition chromatography (CPC) with liquid chromatography (LC) exhibits numerous advantages for 2D preparative separation. Our in silico approach was illustrated through the isolation of eight bioactive compounds with very similar structures from Cyclopia genistoides plant by CPC×LC. The column screening was performed considering predictive 2D plots in light of the preparative performance descriptors and compared to real 2D preparative separations.


It's one of the biggest news stories for years. A charismatic, white-haired Australian sets up a website devoted to publishing leaked documents in the public interest, and then, allegedly with the aid of a disaffected American soldier, starts releasing startlingly honest cables from the US diplomatic service - with explosive results. In this lively, up-to-the-minute book, technology and politics analyst Micah Sifry tells the story of WikiLeaks in the context of the growing movement for transparency in politics and of the crowdsourcing activism that the Internet and in particular Web 2.0 has made possible. In particular, he looks at the achievements of open-source web projects that collate information for individuals and governments alike, and describes how crowdsourcing initiatives have analysed MPs' expenses, recorded political violence in Kenya and reduced bribery in India. Finally, he discusses the rather ambivalent attitudes displayed by political elites, many of whom have embraced the idea of open government in opposition only to go quiet once in power. Fascinating, thoughtful and often eye-opening, this is an essential guide to the new age of transparency.


Thirty-five cases of cryptococcosis of the central nervous system (CNS) were studied, 17 of them submitted to renal transplantation. The objective was to evaluate the therapeutic responses observed in the group of kidney transplant patients with CNS cryptococcosis. They were submitted to amphotericin B therapy, with emphasis to the renal function. The results in this group were compared with the outcome in the group of patients with the same infection, submitted to the same therapeutic scheme, but without previous impairment of renal function. Among the 35 patients, 20 were male; the age varied between 4 and 76 years. Associated clinical conditions were noticed in 25 patients, 17 of them with renal transplantation. Among 35 patients, 10 died in the first days of the treatment; 25 patients were effectively treated for CNS cryptococcosis, 18 of them with associated clinical conditions; 15 were kidney transplant patients. The drugs used in the treatment of CNS cryptococcosis were, as possible, the amphotericin B by intravenous and intrathecal route (lumbar puncture) associated with 5-fluorocytosine. Seven patients died during the treatment; then, of the 35 patients who were initially evaluated, 17 died and 18 were successfully treated, with a death rate of 48.57%. Various intercurrences were observed with the use of amphotericin B and 5-fluorocytosine. The clinical and therapeutic results recorded in this study were compared with the information met in literature. The analysis of the results emphasizes the need of the discovery of better and less toxic drugs than those currently used. Amphotericin B still is the most important drug in the treatment of CNS cryptococcosis and the therapeutic scheme currently recommended consists in the association of amphotericin B and 5-fluorocytosine, and there has been also advantage in the simultaneous use of intravenous and intrathecal amphotericin B. Statistical analysis of the results showed that there is no harm with the use of intravenous amphotericin b in renal transplanted patients with cryptococcosis of the central nervous system.


OBJECTIVE
This paper explores women's experiences of drought in Australia. Despite the significance of drought for rural life in Australia, there is little research seeking to understand its psychological consequences. There is also a need to recognise gendered experiences of drought and for research that addresses its long-term effects as people age in prolonged drought-affected areas.

DESIGN
The study explores longitudinal qualitative data collected by the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health. Free-text comments (n = 217), collected via mailed survey at five time points (1996, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007) from the same 77 women, were subjected to a narrative analysis.

PARTICIPANTS
Participants from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health who were aged 45-50 when the study began in 1996.

RESULTS
Findings indicate that drought has an impact on women as they age, particularly in reference to menopause, access to support systems and retirement.

CONCLUSION
This study concludes that the experience of drought cannot be disentangled from the realities of gender and ageing.


One preferred way of coping with the openness or indeterminacy of future is to elaborate 'fictional expectations' that enable action by defining possible outcomes. In this article, I propose to focus on the career of the impact foresight model to analyse how agro-economists combine imaginaries, narratives, data and calculative technologies addressing the long-term future of agriculture. Impact is a partial equilibrium model, which has become increasingly comprehensive. Its modular structure now enables it to interweave scenarios produced by other legitimate institutions, and to run simulations for a number of configurations of climate change and socio-economic evolutions. In this article, foresight models are taken to be material discursive devices. My argument is that their evolutions as technologies and the framing of the future they operate should not be analysed separately. Transforming radical uncertainty into controlled variability – magnitude of change, they explicitly endeavour to 'bound' uncertainty. But it is 'bounded' in a way that is highly dependent on the knowledge infrastructure upon which the models rely. Quantified modelling also makes it possible for economists to compare rival models and create alignments or negotiate zones of consensus, that is, a certain form of knowledge on the future. In the case under scrutiny, technological choices and data processing work contribute to reinforce a certain point of view – market, production and technology-oriented – on food security. Studying infrastructure and model design therefore allows a better understanding of path dependency and cognitive lock-in effects regarding the way the future is envisaged and narrated.


Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) ranks among the most rapidly evolving cancers in the Western world. The majority of HCCs develop on the basis of a chronic inflammatory liver damage that predisposes liver cancer development and leads to deregulation of multiple cellular signaling pathways. The resulting dysbalance between uncontrolled proliferation and impaired predisposition to cell death with consecutive failure to clear inflammatory damage is a key driver of malignant transformation. Therefore, resistance to death signaling accompanied by metabolic changes as well as failed immunological clearance of damaged pre-neoplastic hepatocytes are considered hallmarks of hepatocarcinogenesis. Hereby, the underlying liver disease, the type of liver damage and individual predisposition to apoptosis determines the natural course of the disease as well as the therapeutic response. Here, we will review common and individual aspects of cell death pathways in hepatocarcinogenesis with a particular emphasis on regulatory networks and key molecular alterations. We will further delineate the potential of targeting cell death-related signaling as a viable therapeutic strategy to improve the outcome of HCC patients.


Competence measurement in (longitudinal) large-scale assessments, such as in the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), imposes specific demands on the scaling of the competence data. These challenges include scaling issues such as the question on how to deal with different response formats as well as with missing values in the scaling model. They also include design aspects, as for example, the incorporation of adaptive testing and the inclusion of students with special educational needs in the assessment. Especially in longitudinal designs the question of linking of competence scores across different cohorts and measurement occasions arises. With this article we aim at pointing out some of the challenges one has to meet when scaling competence data of (longitudinal) large-scale assessments, at giving an overview of research we have conducted within the NEPS to find solutions to these questions, and at pointing out some directions for future research. While for most of the topics we give an overview of the research that has been conducted in NEPS, we more thoroughly describe the research we have conducted on investigating the assumptions necessary for linking of different cohorts in NEPS. We specifically target the question whether the same competence may be measured coherently across the whole lifespan. The results show that for linking the Grade 9 reading test to the adult reading test, measurement invariance does not hold for all items. The implementation of the research results into the scaling of NEPS competence data is described and the applicability of the research results to other large-scale studies is discussed.


Background A major systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) susceptibility locus lies within a common inversion polymorphism region (encompassing 3.8 – 4.5  Mb) located at 8p23. Initially implicated genes included FAM167A-BLK and XKR6, of which BLK received major attention due to its known role in B-cell biology. Recently, additional SLE risk carried in non-inverted background was also reported. Objective and methods In this case –control study, we further investigated the 'extended' 8p23 locus (~ 4  Mb) where we observed multiple SLE signals and assessed these signals for their relation to the inversion affecting this region. The study involved a North American discovery data set (~ 1200  subjects) and a replication data set (> 10 000  subjects) comprising European-descent individuals. Results Meta-analysis of 8p23 SNPs, with p < 0.05 in both data sets, identified 51 genome-wide significant SNPs (p < 5.0 × 10−8). While most of these SNPs were related to previously implicated signals (XKR6-FAM167A-BLK subregion), our results also revealed two 'new' SLE signals, including SGK223-CLDN23-MFHAS1 (6.06 × 10−9 ≤ meta p ≤ 4.88 × 10−8) and CTSB (meta p = 4.87 × 10−8) subregions that are located > 2 Mb upstream and ~ 0.3  Mb downstream from previously reported signals. Functional assessment of relevant SNPs indicated putative cis-effects on the expression of various genes at 8p23. Additional analyses in discovery sample, where the inversion genotypes were inferred, replicated the association of non-inverted status with SLE risk and suggested that a number of SLE risk alleles are predominantly carried in non-inverted background. Conclusions Our results implicate multiple (known+novel) SLE signals/genes at the extended 8p23 locus, beyond previously reported signals/genes, and suggest that this broad locus contributes to SLE risk through the effects of multiple genes/pathways.


Hogan (1993) has proposed a version of marginal cost pricing for electricity transmission transactions that include a component for reactive power to support voltage at demand nodes. His examples support the notion that the cost of satisfying voltage constraints can be quite high. We show that in his simplest example the price on this constraint results from an uneconomic and artificial characterization of the problem, namely an inefficient and unnecessarily constrained dispatch. By eliminating this characterization, the price of reactive power falls to a very modest level. Our counterexample has implications for the institutional arrangements under which transmission pricing reform will take place. We believe that environment will be an open access competitive setting, where dispatch is still controlled by one group of participants. Manipulation of marginal transmission costs becomes quite feasible in complex networks through subtle changes to dispatch. Therefore an open access regime using marginal cost pricing must involve either some kind of monitoring and audit function to detect potential abuses, or alternatively, institutional restructuring to eliminate conflicts of interest.


Severe climatic disturbance events often have major impacts on coral reef communities, generating cycles of decline and recovery, and in some extreme cases, community-level phase shifts from coral-to algal-dominated states. Benthic habitat changes directly affect reef fish communities, with low coral cover usually associated with low fish diversity and abundance. No-take marine reserves (NTRs) are widely advocated for conserving biodiversity and enhancing the sustainability of exploited fish populations. Numerous studies have documented positive ecological and socio-economic benefits of NTRs; however, the ability of NTRs to ameliorate the effects of acute disturbances on coral reefs has seldom been investigated. Here, we test these factors by tracking the dynamics of benthic and fish communities, including the important fishery species, coral trout (Plectropomus spp.), over 8 years in both NTRs and fished areas in the Keppel Island group, Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Two major disturbances impacted the reefs during the monitoring period, a coral bleaching event in 2006 and a freshwater flood plume in 2011. Both disturbances generated significant declines in coral cover and habitat complexity, with subsequent declines in fish abundance and diversity, and pronounced shifts in fish assemblage structure. Coral trout density also declined in response to the loss of live coral, however, the approximately 2:1 density ratio between NTRs and fished zones was maintained over time. The only post-disturbance refuges for coral trout spawning stocks were within the NTRs that escaped the worst effects of the disturbances. Although NTRs had little discernible effect on the temporal dynamics of benthic or fish communities, it was evident that the post-disturbance refuges for coral trout spawning stocks within some NTRs may be critically important to regional-scale population persistence and recovery.


Context: Systematic Reviews (SRs) are means for collecting and synthesizing evidence from the identification and analysis of relevant studies from multiple sources. To this aim, they use a well-defined methodology meant to mitigate the risks of biases and ensure repeatability for later updates. SRs, however, involve significant effort. Goal: The goal of this paper is to introduce a novel methodology that reduces the amount of manual tedious tasks involved in SRs while taking advantage of the value provided by human expertise. Method: Starting from current methodologies for SRs, we replaced the steps of keywording and data extraction with an automatic methodology for generating a domain ontology and classifying the primary studies. This methodology has been applied in the Software Engineering sub-area of Software Architecture and evaluated by human annotators. Results: The result is a novel Expert-Driven Automatic Methodology, EDAM, for assisting researchers in performing SRs. EDAM combines ontology-learning techniques and semantic technologies with the human-in-the-loop. The first (thanks to automation) fosters scalability, objectivity, reproducibility and granularity of the studies; the second allows tailoring to the specific focus of the study at hand and knowledge reuse from domain experts. We evaluated EDAM on the field of Software Architecture against six senior researchers. As a result, we found that the performance of the senior researchers in classifying papers was not statistically significantly different from EDAM. Conclusions: Thanks to automation of the less-creative steps in SRs, our methodology allows researchers to skip the tedious tasks of keywording and manually classifying primary studies, thus freeing effort for the analysis and the discussion.


Refining adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership, Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young boys, cross-kingdom diplomacy and coronation. The first comparative and thematic study of child rulership in this period, Ward analyses eight case studies across northwestern Europe from c.1050 to c.1250. The book stresses innovations and adaptations in royal government, questions the exaggeration of political disorder under a boy king, and suggests a ruler's childhood posed far less of a challenge than their adolescence and youth. Uniting social, cultural and political historical methodologies, Ward unveils how wider societal changes between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries altered children's lived experiences of royal rule and modified how people thought about child kingship.


In the previous paper the author reported the pathological studies on the animals affected by Echinostoma cinetorchis with some endemiological observations presenting the fundamental knowledge on the pathogenicity of this worm. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the mechanism of heterotopic parasitism of this worm and pathologic changes in the liver which have been found unexpectedly on the two cases of affected animals as introduced briefly in the previous paper. The experiments revealed the mechanism of this curious heterotopic parasitism of this intestinal parasitic trematoda, i.e. 1. Repeated feeding of metacercaria proved that this worm acutually can invide into the liver (passing through the common bile ducts) and grow in the intrahepatic ducts. 2. The feeding test proved that the worms invide more frequently into the liver of starved animals than of those of normally nurished, indicating the starvation gave a better condition for the invasion into the liver. 3. On the other hand, the massive parasitism in intestine also caused frequent intrahepatic invasion, though the massive feeding of metacercaria not always resulted in the massive intestinal parasitism. The pathologic changes seen on the attacked liver are summarized as follows. 1. The defect or desquamation of the epithelium of the bile ducts surrounding the worm body, which will be the results of mechanic injury given by the parasite. 2. Generallized cholangitis and pericholangitis which would be induced by the mechanic injury followed by bacterial infection. This was accompanied by the inflammatory changes of the parenchym and the vessels of pfortal system. 3. Focal necrosis of the liver cells caused by the secoundery induced disturbances of circulatory system which developed to the purulent foci elswhere. 4. Exsudative and proliferative inflammation on the tissues surrounding the eggs of the worm.


Compound palmar ganglion of tubercular origin with carpal tunnel syndrome is an uncommon condition. The aim of this study is to make awareness among practitioners so that the condition can be diagnosed and treated at an early stage before it spreads and destroy the surrounding structures. We present a 50-old-female with a painless swelling of the right wrist and palm of 1-year duration. Furthermore, the patient had a history of paresthesias and numbness of median nerve distribution. Local examination revealed a fluctuating, dumbbell-shaped swelling of the right wrist and palm with numbness of radial three and a half fingers. All the radiographic and laboratory tests were within the normal limits. Patient was treated with thorough debridement and decompression of carpal tunnel along with anti-tubercular therapy. Although rare, tubercular tenosynovitis with carpal tunnel syndrome must be kept in mind as a differential diagnosis of chronic tenosynovitis especially in the developing countries.


Objectives: This study aims to analyze the profile and relevance of pharmaceutical interventions (PIs) in the management of tuberculosis (TB) at inpatient settings. Patients and methods: Cross-sectional descriptive study conducted from March to December 2014 within the inpatient unit of pneumophtisiology department, Ivory Coast. Information collected was based on the classification of drug-related problems (DRPs) and PIs outlined by the French Society of Clinical Pharmacy. A score was assigned to each PI according to the importance of the potential clinical impact. This score was correlated with the severity of clinical consequences avoided by the intervention. The listing of interventions was made by pneumophtisiology specialists. The score assigned to each intervention ranged from 0 (without clinical impact) to 3 (vital clinical impact). The acceptance rate of interventions by physicians was evaluated. Results: Of 130 patients, 28.5% received PIs. The main reasons for interventions were drug– drug interactions (26.4%), noncompliance with recommendations (24.5%), and adverse effects (24.5%). Antituberculosis drugs were involved in 40.3% of DRPs. Interventions were predomi-nantly proposals for monitoring treatment effectiveness and safety parameters (52.7%) followed by proposals of therapeutic choice (28.1%). All interventions were accepted by the physicians. Most interventions (59.6%) were listed as interventions with significant clinical impact. Conclusion: The presence of a pharmacist at inpatient setting has contributed to the prevention and resolution of problems related to the pharmacotherapeutic management of TB. Pharmacists can position themselves as major players in the therapeutic management of TB inpatient in resource-limited setting.


Samuel Gompers, the charismatic chief of the American Federation of Labor at the turn of the century, claimed to represent the interests of all workers in North America, but it was not until American corporations began to export jobs to Canada via branch plants that he became concerned with representing Canadian workers. Within a very short time the Canadian labour movement was rationalized into a segment of the American craft-union empire. In order to secure the loyalty of these new recruits, the AFI reduced the national trade-union centre of Canada, the Trades and Labor Congress, to the level of an American state federation of labour. But Gombers failed to perceive the different political, historical, and cultural climates north of the forty-ninth parallel, and his policies inevitably generated friction. Although some Canadian workers felt sympathy for labour politicians inspired by left-wing doctrines and the social gospel movement, Gompers strove to keep Canadian socialists at bay. And although Canadian workers expressed considerable interest in governmental investigation of industrial disputes, Gompers remained inimical to such moves. Canadian labour groups desired a seat on international labour bodies, but Gompers would not allow them to speak through their own delegate. Canadian unions deemed rivals to AFL affiliates were banished. Dues were siphoned off into union treasuries in the US, and American labour leaders kept firm control over organizing efforts in Canada. Perhaps most importance, the AFL s actions at the TLC convention of 1902 its opposition to dual unionism helped spawn a separate labour movement in Quebec. Yet by 1914, following nearly two decades of effort by Gompers, many Canadian workers had become his willing subjects. Though others struggled to loosen Gompers grip on the Canadian labour movement, Canadian trade unions appeared firmly wedded to the AFL s continentalism . The story of Gompers in Canada has never been properly treated: this book is a significant addition to Canadian and American labour history and to the study of American expansion. Based upon exhaustive research in the Gompers papers, the AFL-CIO archives, and in various Canadian manuscript and newspaper sources, it clearly reveals one importance aspect of the growth of American s informal empire at the turn of the century."


This research analyzes whether the flexibility of the Korean labor market has improved following the financial crisis by looking at the change in employment flexibility and persistence of unemployment in response to business fluctuations. As analysis methods, this research first employs a simple model, which includes a dummy variable, the time- varying-parameter model, and a time-varying-parameter model with heteroskedasticity over time allowed. The results indicate that, employment flexibility, which reflects labor market flexibility in the short-term, has improved since the financial crisis. Flexibility can be assessed from a longer-term perspective based on persistence of unemployment and the results indicate that, on average, it has not eased compared to the pre-crisis period, but has weakened somewhat compared to the period just before the crisis. The implications of the research outcome for government policy on labor market flexibility are that future efforts need to be directed towards weakening persistence of unemployment through such means as vocational training, employment agencies and relaxation of restriction. In addition, by introducing a time-varying-parameter model, this research easily captures the general direction and structural changes of the estimated coefficient over time without specifying the point in time of structural change by continuously altering the estimated coefficient; and second, this research identifies the need for heteroskedasticity in order to account for the shock caused by the financial crisis when examining Korea's unemployment rate data.


The authors of this volume argue that urban education is in urgent need of reform and that, although there have been plenty of innovative and even promising attempts to improve conditions, most have been doomed. The reason for this, they agree, lies in the failure of our major cities to develop their "civic capacity" the ability to build and maintain a broad social and political coalition across all sectors of the urban community in pursuit of a common goal. Drawing upon an ambitious eleven-city study funded by the National Science Foundation, the authors synthesize and make sense of the enormous amount of data from Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Not only is this a vivid report from the front lines of big city schooling, but this work challenges us to rethink our approach to the crisis in our schools. The authors vigorously contend that it is essential for all (or most) important actors in an urban community to join together in a shared vision of what is wrong in the schools and how to fix it, and to pursue that vision strongly and systematically over a long time. That can only happen, however, if those same actors develop the ability and willingness to set aside narrow aims and opportunistic behavior in favor of pursuing the collective good. Written for a wide spectrum of potential readers including educators, social scientists, policymakers, and every citizen who cares about his or her child's education this book restores coalition politics to the center of educational reform and reminds us to look well beyond pedagogy and management theory for solutions to problems that are immune to the usual remedies. Drawing on select cases, the authors show that effective civic coalitions can be built. The struggle for reform can be won. "


Borobudur is a famous tourism destination which is listed as a World Heritage Site listed in 1991. Recently the condition of the temple is threatened with many problems related to tourist behaviors, overcrowded vendors and traders, as well as managerial issues. This research was carried out with literature study, field observation, peer discussion and seminar. Reflecting the history, this research tried to explain the rise and fall of civilization. This research tried to explain Borobudur as magnet for tourism destination and tourism as locomotive for community and regional development. There are five reasons why glory of civilization can fall even dramatically: (1) horizontal conflicts among social groups; (2) intrigue and struggle for power among elite leaders; (3) expansion and occupation from foreign power; (4) environmental degradation; and (5) disasters like volcanic eruption, earthquake and tsunami. Borobudur has many enigmas, when and why the fall of its civilization. It is not easy to explain these enigmas. The results of this research are: (1) it is possible combination of causes the fall of Borobudur civilization, but the most possible was volcanic eruptions of Merapi. (2) Borobudur has problems related to the tourist number who disturb the stone relief and statues when they climb up the temple (3) Tourists disappointed to lack of hospitality and low quality of services provided by the management as well as the vendors and traders. (4) The problems of conservation related to environmental changes. Among others, prime recommendation is "Rethinking Borobudur" to get new alternative and strategy to manage this world heritage.


: Traditional medicine men coexist with physicians and hospitals on the 25,000 square mile Navajo Indian Reservation. Most seriously ill Navajos utilize both systems of health care. This natural experiment of coexistence emphasizes several general characteristics of all healing. Traditional ceremonies are successful because they are integrated into Navajo belief systems and meet needs of sick people not dealt with by the available Western medicine. Physicians and other healers simply remove obstacles to the body's restoration of homeostasis or, as the Navajo say, to harmony. Reductionism limits the spectrum of obstacles considered relevant (eg, causes of illness), but an alternate model might include emotional, social, or spiritual phenomena equally as significant to healing as are biochemical phenomena. In that context, nonmedical healers, as well as physicians, can potentially influence factors relevant to getting well.


Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in ankle joint stiffness and the associated changes in the gastrocnemius muscle and tendon due to static stretching. Seven healthy male participants lay supine with the hip and knee joints fully extended. The right ankle joint was rotated into dorsiflexion from a 30° plantar flexed position and the torque measured by a dynamometer. The ankle joint was maintained in a dorsiflexed position for 20 min (static stretching of the calf muscles). We performed surface electromyography of the medial and lateral gastrocnemii, the soleus, and the tibialis anterior of the right leg to confirm no muscle activity throughout static stretching and the passive test (passive dorsiflexion). During static stretching, the ankle joint angle and elongation of the gastrocnemius were recorded by goniometry and ultrasonography, respectively. Tendon elongation of the gastrocnemius was calculated based on the changes in the ankle joint angle and muscle elongation. In addition, the relationships between passive torques and ankle joint angles, and elongation of muscle and tendon, were examined before and after static stretching. The ankle dorsiflexion angle and tendon elongation increased significantly by 10 min after the onset of static stretching, while there was no further increase in muscle length. In addition, ankle dorsiflexion angle and tendon elongation at an identical passive torque (30 N · m) increased significantly (from 24±7° to 33±5° and from 17±2 mm to 22±1 mm, respectively) after static stretching. However, muscle elongation was unchanged. In conclusion, the current results suggest that an increase in the ankle joint dorsiflexion angle due to static stretching is attributable to a change in tendon not muscle stiffness.


This unit opens with detailed discussions on the latest principles of sterile technique and preparation of culture media. Step‐by‐step protocols describe trypsinizing and subculturing monolayer cultures, passaging suspension cultures, freezing and thawing cells, counting cells using a hemacytometer, and preparing cells for transport.


German private health insurance faces new challenges. The classical tools of cost containment are no longer sufficient to keep up with ever increasing expenses for health care, and international competitors with managed care experience from their home markets are on the point of entering business in Germany. Although the American example of managed care is not fully compatible with customer demands and state regulations, some elements of this approach will gradually be introduced. First agreements were signed with networks or individual preferred providers in outpatient care and rehabilitation medicine. Insurance companies become more and more interested in supporting evidence based guidelines and programmes for disease and case management. The pros and cons of various other health management tools are discussed against the specific background of the quite unique German health care system.


The fabrication of precise hemispherical shape is challenging with standard planar lithography techniques. A suitable alternative is the fabrication by inkjet printing. This paper presents a method based on drop-on-demand inkjet printing on pre-patterned silicon substrates allowing the controlled fabrication of SU-8 hemispherical cup-like structures with inner cavities of sub-nano-liter volumes. Examples are given for cups of 100μm in diameter with inner cavity volumes of 5pL, 20pL and 45pL. Arrays of 360 hemispherical SU-8 cups have been fabricated with a yield above 96%. The 4% of exceptions are also described and shown as a method for achieving almost complete SU-8 spheres.


Inventory of records of Jack County housed in the Jack County Courthouse in Jacksboro, Texas. Begins with an introduction and explanation of the roles of various county government offices. Describes the records of the County Clerk: as Secretary for Commissioners Court, County Clerk: as Reporter, County Clerk: as Reporter for County Court, District Clerk, Tax Assessor-Collector, Justice of the Peace, Sheriff, County Judge, County Treasurer, and County Auditor.


Since 1998, The EurObserv'ER barometer measures the progress made by renewable energies in each sector and in each member State of the European Union in an as up-to-date way as possible (with figures less than 12 months old). EurObserv'ER produces a series of figure-backed indicators covering energetic, technological and economic dimensions.


Malevolent creativity (MC), or intending to inflict harm in original ways, is an aspect of creativity that has received little empirical attention. It reasons that generating malevolently creative products in response to a problem is dependent upon individual differences and environmental factors, especially with regard to the social and emotional content of a particular problem. A personality variable strongly associated with how individuals acknowledge and respond to such social and emotional content is emotional intelligence (EI). Individuals with higher EI often solve problems in cooperative, beneficial, and positive ways, which seems contrary to solving a problem with MC. In addition to testing whether EI is negatively related to MC in general, we analyzed whether that negative relationship would persist even after controlling for cognitive ability and task effects. Those questions were examined across two studies. Results suggest that individuals with lower EI are more likely to respond to different types of problems with increased instances of MC even when the social or emotional content of those problems are factored out. The implications and limitations of these studies, as well as future directions for the study of MC, are discussed.


A high switching frequency voltage-mode buck converter with fast voltage-tracking speed and wide output voltage range has been proposed. A novel error amplifier(EA) is presented to achieve a high DC gain and get high phase margin, including a resistor and capacitor net, a unit gain block and a high gain block. The investigated converter has been fabricated with GF 0.35μm CMOS process and can operate at 6 MHz with the output voltage range from 0.6 to 3.4 V. The experimental results show that the voltage-tracking speed can achieve8.8μs/V for up-tracking and 6μs/V for down-tracking. Besides, the recovery time is less than 8 s while the load current suddenly changes 400 mA.


The main objectives of this PhD thesis are to investigate health inequality in low- and middle-income countries in Asia. The thesis consists of four independent chapters. The first two chapters explore the inequality of opportunity in health and the last two chapters evaluate the conditional cash transfer programmes. Chapter 1 explores the inequality of opportunity in child health in ten developing countries in Asia, i.e. Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives, India, Cambodia, Myanmar, East Timor, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. We quantify the degree of inequality in child nutritional status between children with advantaged parental socio-economic backgrounds and those with disadvantaged parental socio-economic backgrounds. We then investigate the factors contributing to the observed disparities. The results provide strong evidence that priority should be given to protecting children from marginalised households in order to mitigate the inequality in child health. Chapter 2 proposes a new approach to measuring the inequality of opportunity with copulas to overcome some of the shortcomings of the existing methods. The proposed approach is applied to the inequality in body mass associated with its intergenerational transmission from parents to children in Indonesia. Chapter 3 evaluates the conditional cash transfer programme in Indonesia, the Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH). We estimate its impacts on the entire distributions of child health and household expenditure. We explore the mechanism by which the PKH affects child nutritional status by decomposing the treatment effect on health into the part that can be explained by the change in household expenditure and the remaining part that is due to behavioural changes. An improvement in height among children aged 24-36 months is observed. Its improvement is explained not by the increase in household expenditure but by the behavioural changes of the beneficiaries. Chapter 4 re-visits the conditional cash transfer programme in India, the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) and examines the existing non-experimental evidence of its impact on maternal healthcare use through the partial identification approach. We find that the average treatment effects estimated in the previous studies are outside of the average treatment effect bounds estimated under weaker but more credible assumptions, thereby suggesting that average treatment effect in previous studies may have been over- or under-estimated due to untenable identification assumptions.


Abstract This article is a personal review of the development of physical geodesy during 1984-2014. The period is characterized by an intensive advance in both data and theory to meet the growing technical demands in GPS/GNSS applications and scientific needs in geoscience. As a result,many parts of theworld are nowmapped with a 1cmdetailed geoid model, and the global long- to mediumwavelengths of the gravity field and geoid are homogeneously determined to 1 mGal and 1 cm by satellite-only dedicated satellite gravity missions. The future can expect to see even higher demands for accuracy and reliability to satisfy the specifications for a pure geoid model based vertical datum.


This study investigated lipid peroxidation and enzymes activities in Black jaw tilapia Sarotherodon melanotheron from Agboyi Creek with aim of assessing contamination status of sampling site in Agboyi creek in comparison to a reference site in Langbasa, Palava Island. Water quality parameters recorded no significant differences (p<0.05) between sites and were within limits recommended by Federal Ministry of Environment (FMEnv) throughout study period. The mean levels of heavy metals (Fe, Cu, Mn, Zn, Pb, and Cd) concentrations were also within maximum concentration recommended except for Fe. The levels of Thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS) (2541.67 nmol /mg Protein) and Superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity (54.66 Min/mg/pro) increased significantly (p<0.05) in liver of S. melanotheron from Agboyi creek in relation to reference site. Catalase (CAT) activities on the other hand were significantly decreased in liver of S. melanotheron from Agboyi creek in relation to reference location. The decrease of catalase (CAT) activity in the liver of S. melanotheron together with increase of SOD activity, could explain the increased lipid peroxidation (LPO) levels in the liver. The antioxidant induction in liver of examined fish samples suggests exposure to contaminants with potential for severe damage to tissues of biota and calls for continuous monitoring and effective policy to protect this ecosystem.Keywords: Antioxidant enzymes, Lipid peroxidation, Liver, Agboyi creek


This paper extends the analysis by Dall'erba and Le Gallo dealing with the impact of structural funds on the growth process of European regions. Like most of the other 18 contributions assessing the efficiency of structural funds, our article was based on a global model of b-convergence: one coefficient pertaining to the structural funds variable was estimated for the whole sample. In this paper, we extend this approach by performing local estimations, where one coefficient is estimated for each region, so that the impact of structural funds can be regionally differentiated. As in the previous contribution, the presence of spatial spillover effects is taken into account using spatial econometric techniques, but here we apply a Bayesian locally linear spatial estimation method on a conditional b-convergence model, which allows global and local b-convergence to be viewed in a continuous fashion. Our results indicate that structural funds have a weak global impact on the European Union regional growth process, but that their local impacts are very diverse, with a positive influence on the growth of British, Greek, and southern Italian regions.


Kinship verification has a number of applications such as organizing large collections of images and recognizing resemblances among humans. In this paper, first, a human study is conducted to understand the capabilities of human mind and to identify the discriminatory areas of a face that facilitate kinshipcues. The visual stimuli presented to the participants determine their ability to recognize kin relationship using the whole face as well as specific facial regions. The effect of participant gender and age and kin-relation pair of the stimulus is analyzed using quantitative measures such as accuracy, discriminability index d', and perceptual information entropy. Utilizing the information obtained from the human study, a hierarchical kinship verification via representation learning (KVRL) framework is utilized to learn the representation of different face regions in an unsupervised manner. We propose a novel approach for feature representation termed as filtered contractive deep belief networks (fcDBN). The proposed feature representation encodes relational information present in images using filters and contractive regularization penalty. A compact representation of facial images of kin is extracted as an output from the learned model and a multi-layer neural network is utilized to verify the kin accurately. A new WVU kinship database is created, which consists of multiple images per subject to facilitate kinship verification. The results show that the proposed deep learning framework (KVRL-fcDBN) yields the state-of-the-art kinship verification accuracy on the WVU kinship database and on four existing benchmark data sets. Furthermore, kinship information is used as a soft biometric modality to boost the performance of face verification via product of likelihood ratio and support vector machine based approaches. Using the proposed KVRL-fcDBN framework, an improvement of over 20% is observed in the performance of face verification.


Many rivers are classified as groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs), owing to the contribution of groundwater to their base flow. However, there has been little explicit recognition of the way groundwater influences riverine biota or processes, how degrees of ecological dependency may vary, and the management implications of this dependency. The permeable beds and banks of these GDEs where surface water and groundwater exchange are termed 'hyporheic zones'. They are often inhabited by invertebrates, with varying reliance on groundwater, although the ecological roles of these invertebrates are little known. Upwelling hyporheic water can promote surface primary productivity, influence sediment microbial activity, and affect organic matter decomposition. In many intermittent streams, variable groundwater inputs alter the duration of flow or water permanence, and the duration and timing of these largely govern the biota and rates of many ecosystem processes (e.g. leaf decomposition). Not only is the physical presence of water important, thermal and chemical conditions arising from groundwater inputs also have direct and indirect effects on riverine biota and rates or types of in-stream processes. Differing degrees of dependency of rivers on groundwater mediate all these influences, and may change over time and in response to human activities. Alteration of groundwater inputs through extraction from riparian wells or changes in local water table have an impact on these GDEs, and some current management plans aim to restrict groundwater extraction from near permeable river channels. However, these are often 'blanket' restrictions and the mechanisms of GDE dependency or timing of groundwater requirements are poorly understood, hampering refinement of this management approach. More effective management of these GDEs into the future can result only from a better understanding of the mechanisms of the dependency, how these vary among river types and what in-stream changes might be predicted from alteration of groundwater inputs.


In modern cities, most citizens are interested in buying from e-shops or mostly buy from large shopping brands. This is a challenge for small and medium-sized retailers, who cannot afford to maintain IT infrastructures and skills. The ongoing R&D project SMARTBUY, tries to close this gap by providing a platform for small and medium-sized retailers to become the place where they can easily make their products and promotions visible online for local audiences, along with a mobile application for customers. An important issue in this context is the evaluation of the retailers. In this work, we introduce a new evaluation application for assessing the quality of the retailer services. Customers have the chance to rate the behavior and the offers that the retailers provide to them. This evaluation service is based on the SMARTBUY platform and is developed upon the OrganiCity Experimentation Platform. The evaluation application is a novel approach to generate knowledge for the retailer shops inside a future city using both data from open city datasets as well as feedback from citizens. Such an application is deemed useful to both customers, to identify retailers with best offers and services, and retailers as an incentive to improve their services.


The aim of this in vitro study was to evaluate measurement accordance using an electronic apex locator for estimation of working length in endodontics when different restorative materials for interim crown restoration are utilized. For this study, 13 single-rooted premolars with endodontic occlusal access cavity were prepared. To establish the working length of each tooth, these were mounted in alginate and with the help of an electronic foramen locator and endodontic file K-file # 15, the working length was established. This length was later compared to the estimated working lengths using different intermediate restoration materials. These materials were: Superior Chemfil, Ketac TM Molar Easymix and Filtek z350 resin. In the electronic measurements, an acceptable tolerance range of variation up to ± 0.5 mm was considered. Highest discrepancies were considered erroneous. For these measurements, central tendency and dispersion were analyzed. The Bland-Altman method was used, and the ANOVA test with a significance level of p <0,05 for statistic difference. Regarding measurements' acceptability and the type of interim restoration material utilized, 7 were acceptable, and 6 were unacceptable for ChemFil Superior, 12 were acceptable and 1 unacceptable for KetacTM Molar Easymix, and 11 were acceptable and 2 were unacceptable for Filtek Z350 composite resin. The average difference between all electronic measurements was 0.29 (± 0.44). Chemfill Superior showed the most prominent variation between measurements 0.58 (± 0.45). When using an electronic apex locator, measurements showed statistically significant differences depending on the interim restoration material of choice (p<0.05). In conclusion, the measurement accordance using electronic apex locator to estimation the working length is higher, however the electronic estimation of working length can be significatively affected by the material chosen for interim temporary restoration.


This thesis is basically divided into three main topics. The three main topics are reverse engineering approach, fmite element analysis and accident reconstruction for a case study. The study aims to reconstruct an accident reconstruction which involves
a full frontal crash. It starts with reverse engineering stage. This stage describes the process of a human skull model development using reverse engineering approach to obtain the CAD data. The human skull model of actual life size is developed through the Non Contact 3D Digitizer processes. This stage involves the step-by-step process of developing a human skull to obtain CAD data. The CAD data and fmite element model development done at Computer Aided Design, Engineering and Manufacturing (CADEM) Center, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. Then, the next stage is to do the finite element analysis from the CAD data in previous stage. In this stage, it presents the development of one degree of freedom of frontal human head impact test procedure using fmite element simulation. This study is to compare the results between simulation and experimental result conducted by Delye et al., (2007) for validation purpose. To conduct this study, the process involve is to develop finite element modeling of human skull and to analyze the data analysis which
investigating the impact conditions of human skull during a human head impact on the resulting total deformation and stress distribution. There were geometric preparations, selection of elements, selection of materials, application of loadings, and the specification of boundary conditions. The last stage is to reconstruct the accident reconstruction which involves a full frontal crash. In this stage, it describes a full frontal car crash is reconstructed using finite element method to predict skull fractures. Details from the traffic and collision reports are extracted to create the computational environment. The predicted value of maximum stress is 132.01 MPa which exceeds the yield strength of human skull material. From the simulation results,
it shows that the fractures are predicted at the respective velocity and initiated at the impact contact area. In summary, this study hopes to give better understanding on how to develop the three dimensional human skull model from the life size of prototype human skull as well as to do finite element analysis with the respective human skull model. This study also will help the forensic to do the prediction on the real case of accident in term of the velocity involved during the accident.


Videos and movies are increasingly being created, shared and accessed from different platforms and devices, that are supporting georeferencing as a form to enrich their contextualization, demanding for new and more powerful ways to search, browse and view them. An effective access to video is very challenging due to the amount of items available and their inner complexity. Interactive visualization, in complement to video cataloguing, can help to handle this challenge, making information more accessible and useful. Moreover, it is worth doing this navigation ludic, and aesthetically interesting, while providing new ways to search and filter through their properties and their impact on the users. In previous work we focused on the temporal dimension in movies and videos in a way that is possible to explore and access them through time, genre and rating criteria, and inside their contents regarding image, movement, audio, subtitles and emotions. We are now extending our goal by considering the spatial dimension, through trajectories like the ones we find in city tours. We present the design of the main interactive visualizations for navigating georeferenced videos, allowing the user to 1) overview videos shot in a given geographic location in a given moment of time; 2) zoom in the trajectories of individual videos, e.g. by length, speed, age and content of the shootings; 3) access and watch each video content in a specific trajectory, e.g. through color, sound, spoken words, emotions and neighbor connections.


This paper addresses the question to what extent translations in bilingual parallel corpora match with dictionary senses. Automatic matching of corpus translation with dictionary senses depends on the quality of the lexicographic knowledge used, the quality of corpus processing, the impact of statistics to filter relevant entries from the corpora, and finally the quality of the translations in the multilingual corpora. We focus on the influence that the latter variable has on the performance of the automatic matching. Similarly to previous approaches, we relied on Machine Readable Dictionaries (MRDs), a part-of-speech tagger, and bilingual aligned corpora. Additionally, we used a shallow sentence parser for syntactic matching. Two case studies with two different corpora from different domains were conducted. Our test set was the intersection of 500 French communication verbs within the corpora. The results confirm that the performance of the automatic matching varies considerably with the translation quality of the parallel texts.


The ulna is one of the two forearm long bones that, in conjunction with the radius, make up the antebrachium. The bone spans from the elbow to the wrist on the medial side of the forearm when in anatomical position. In comparison to the radius, the ulna is described to be larger and longer. It serves as the origin and/or insertion site for more than a dozen muscles and is involved in motions assisted by the elbow and the wrist joints. Common pathologies are also associated with the bone as several fractures are pathognomonic depending on the location within the ulna, as well as the resulting position of the fractured segments.[1]


BACKGROUND : Injury remains a major health problem for children worldwide. Traumatic injuries cause substantial mortality and morbidity with temporary or permanent disability in children METHODS : This was a prospective observational hospital based study conducted on all the patients aged 16 years and below who presented in the Accident and Emergency room and at the orthopaedic outpatient clinics in the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) with musculoskeletal injuries over a period of fifteen months. All patients who met the inclusion criteria were recruited. Questionnaires were used for data collection. Thorough examination of the injured paediatric patient was done and finding documented in the questionnaire. Fractures of long bones were confirmed in all cases with radiographs. Data obtained was analyzed with Microsoft Excel Starter 2010 by Microsoft Corporation. Redmond, Washington. RESULTS : The age ranged from 4 day (0.01 year) to 16 year with a mean age of6.35± 4.58. Male to Female ratio was 1.9:1. Road traffic accidents were the leading cause of skeletal injuries (49.2%), followed by falls (27.0%). Fractures associated with birth trauma accounted for 12.7%. Younger children were more prone to injuries from falls. The home environment was the second most common environment for children to sustain fractures, the first being the roads. Majority (58.7%) were from families within the lower socioeconomic class. Ninety five percent (95%) of the children who got injured were without adult supervision while crossing the road. Injuries from road traffic accidents peaked between 3pm and 6pm while injuries resulting from falls peaked between 12 noon and 3pm.The femur was the most commonly fractured bone (21.7%). Green stick fractures occurred in 7.9% of the patients seen. Open fractures were seen in 6.3% of the patients. Physeal injuries occurred in 4.8% of paediatric fractures. Some injured paediatric patients (12.3%) were taken to the traditional bone setters prior to presentation at LUTH with 3(4.7%) of them presenting with gangrene of the affected limb. CONCLUSION : Road traffic accident remains the commonest cause of fractures in children. However, injuries sustained at the home environment were quite significant. Emphasis on increase supervision and safety practices at home are strongly recommended. KEY WORDS : Paediatric fracture, limb gangrene, road traffic injuries, mechanism of injury, birth trauma


Around the world and especially in areas of widespread poverty, firms start their operations without registering with relevant authorities (i.e., in the informal economy). We explore whether firms that initiated their operations in the informal economy but later register have a higher propensity to export than firms that register at the time of their foundation. We reason that the experience of having operated informally provides formally registered firms with the advantage of low-cost and flexible exploration but also a domestic legitimacy liability. We suggest that these factors likely contribute to making foreign export markets more attractive after registration. Based on a comprehensive sample of sub-Saharan African firms, we find that, conditional on registration, firms with an informal legacy have a higher propensity to initiate exporting than firms that started their operations formally. We contribute with theoretical and policy-oriented insights on the dynamics of informality and exporting.


The present study aimed at investigating the realia translation strategies used by Iranian translators in the novel "A Thousand Splendid Suns". To do so, the first twenty chapters of this best-seller novel were selected as the source text. Likewise, two Persian translations of this novel were chosen as the target text. While the first translation was carried out by a professional translator, the second translation was done by an amateur one. First, using Mikutytė's (2005) model of realia, all the Cultural-Specific Items (SCIs) were extracted from the source text. These included 735 items. Then, each of the terms was compared with its two corresponding Persian translations to see what strategies have been used. The Researcher used Davies' (2003) model of realia translation strategies. In addition, one more strategy was added to this model named normal translation. This referred to those cases when the translators had not used any of the seven translation strategies proposed by Davies (2003). As the findings of the study revealed, normal translation and preservation were the most frequent strategies used by both of the translators. While the professional translator used additions as the third most frequent strategy, the no-professional one tended to use omissions in most of the cases and this was detected to be the third most frequent strategy. Results also indicated statistically significant differences among the frequencies of the strategies in both translations.


Resampling is an essential step in particle filtering (PF) methods in order to avoid degeneracy. Systematic resampling is one of a number of resampling techniques commonly used due to some of its desirable properties such as ease of implementation and low computational complexity. However, it has a tendency of resampling very low weight particles especially when a large number of resampled particles are required which may affect state estimation. In this paper, we propose an improved version of the systematic resampling technique which addresses this problem and demonstrate performance improvement.


MALDI-TOF MS is a powerful tool to analyze biomolecules owing to its soft ionization nature and generally results in simple spectra of singly charged ions. Moreover, implementation of the technology in imaging mode provides a means to spatially map analytes in situ. Recently, a new matrix, DBDA (N1,N4-dibenzylidenebenzene-1,4-diamine) was reported to facilitate the ionization of free fatty acids in the negative ion mode. Building on this finding, we sought to implement DBDA for MALDI mass spectrometry imaging studies in brain tissue and successfully map oleic acid, palmitic acid, stearic acid, docosahexaenoic acid and arachidonic acid using mouse brain sections. Moreover, we hypothesized that DBDA would provide superior ionization for sulfatides, a class of sulfolipids, with multiple biological functions. Herein we also demonstrate that DBDA is ideal for MALDI mass spectrometry imaging of fatty acids and sulfatides in brain tissue sections. Additionally, we show enhanced ionization of sulfatides using DBDA compared to three different traditionally used MALDI matrices. Together these results provide new opportunities for studies to measure sulfatides by MALDI-TOF MS including in imaging modes.


This paper provides an account of the first phase of Schools Challenge Cymru, the Welsh Government's flagship initiative to promote equity. Broadly stated, Schools Challenge Cymru aims to bring about rapid improvements in the performance of schools serving the more disadvantaged communities, and to use lessons from these developments to strengthen the capacity of the education system to improve itself. The design of the initiative is informed by lessons from the highly acclaimed City Challenge programme in England. It is based on an assumption that education systems have further potential to improve themselves, provided policy makers allow the space for practitioners to make use of the expertise and creativity that lies trapped within individual classrooms. Therefore, the aim is to 'move knowledge around' and, it is argued, the best way to do this is through strengthening collaboration within schools, between schools and beyond schools. The paper contrasts this approach with current international trends, which place an emphasis on the power of market forces to improve educational standards.


Hydrothermal white mica in the Highland Valley district, British Columbia, is present in high-temperature alteration assemblages in early halo veins and in intermediate-temperature sericitic alteration assemblages in D-type veins. Pale-gray white micas characterize early halo veins in the Valley and Bethsaida zone porphyry Cu-Mo deposits, whereas pale-green white micas form texturally similar vein halos along the margin of the Valley deposit and at the Alwin vein. White micas in the Bethlehem porphyry Cu-Mo deposit form part of a sericitic alteration assemblage associated with D-type veins that overprinted K-silicate–altered rocks. Cation compositions in white micas indicate phengitic compositions trending toward aluminoceladonite. Pale-gray phengitic white micas intergrown with bornite-chalcopyrite-molybdenite contain elevated Na, indicating higher formation temperatures than those that characterize phengitic white micas formed during hydrolytic alteration. Bethlehem phengitic white micas have cation compositions similar to those of pale-green phengitic white micas at the Valley deposit margin, Bethsaida zone margin, and the Alwin vein. The Al-OH absorption wavelengths in pale-gray phengitic white micas are shorter than in pale-green phengitic white mica or phengitic white mica in the sericitic assemblage. In the phengitic white micas, alkali elements substituting in the interlayered site are positively correlated, whereas higher-valence elements substituting into the octahedral site show a greater variability. The data confirms that hydrothermal white-mica chemistry varies between paragenetic stages of a porphyry Cu deposit and between multiple porphyry deposits in a district.


Orientation: This article focuses on the job and career satisfaction of a higher education institution in South Africa. The findings from this investigation will assist employees and management alike to understand factors that can improve career and job satisfaction, in order for university "A" to be an employer of choice that will attract, develop and retain suitably qualified employees. Research aim and objective: This study investigates job and career satisfaction amongst university "A" employees. The objective that was set for this research was to determine the level of job and career satisfaction within university "A" and therefore make recommendations to university "A" management on how to purposefully improve the job and career satisfaction and quality of work life (QoWL) of its employees. Motivation for the study: Job and career satisfaction is a challenge in higher education institutions. For organizations to achieve their strategic objectives or goals, employee's satisfaction should be at a high level. Research design, approach and methods: The quantitative approach was employed where structured questionnaires were distributed to the population size of 160 of which 142 were completed, with the response rate of 89%. The reliability score of (0.896) was reached. This indicates a high degree of acceptable consistency. The qualitative data were collected by open ended questions that were presented to the participants and these were analyzed by N-VIVO N10. The researcher also observed the participants and recorded information relating to the research in a field diary. Findings: The findings of this research suggest that career advancement is one of the main reasons identified to lead to job and career dissatisfaction. Even though a high majority of the study participants agree that they have a clear set of goals and aims that enable them to do their job, only a marginal number agree that when they have done a good job it is acknowledged by their line manager. The findings furthermore indicate that employees are not satisfied with the training they receive. Other factors that lead to job and career dissatisfaction include poor organizational culture, disintegrated systems, lack of communication, poor facilities, poor registration processes, remuneration, unfair allocation of duties, work overload and division amongst departments. The finding also show that there are other considerations that may not be regarded as the principal functions of the employees, but these may be very critical determinants of job and career satisfaction such as job insecurity, which was one of the prominent concerns of respondents. Practical/managerial implications: The results from this research could be utilized by management and supervisors, in order to minimize the potential factors that could negatively impact on the job and career satisfaction of employees in higher education institutions. Contribution and value added: Given the importance of job and career satisfaction, it is important to ensure a good QoWL for employees. The study will assist in identifying the critical dynamics of job and career satisfaction at university "A", and highlight those that are a cause for concern and need to be addressed with a view of improving job and career satisfaction and QoWL of employees.


This article is an attempt to presents a mathematical model to optimize oil production from wells which are set to produce oil in accordance with gas lift system. This process is carried out by determining the economic level of oil production of wells and also reduction of production costs by minimizing the rate of gas used for oil production at an optimum level. Therefore, the information on the characteristics of wells are collected and used as input data of the PIPESIM software application. The performance curve of each of the wells was prepared using this application. In the following section, the non-linear multi-objective programming model of oil production optimization has been developed. The validity of the optimum solution depends on the validity of the presented nonlinear mathematical programming model, therefore, the model components and the relationships between them were described. In order to test the validity of the wells' performance charts in the gas-lift system, the obtained data were compared to the real data obtained from one of the wells through a T paired comparison test and their validity was confirmed at a significance level of 5%. The point which is of more considerable importance in the results of this study is if the wells under study undergo the production at maximum level, the maximum production would be 24,326 BPD which would require 34.702 MMScf/D of gas to be injected into the wells. Now if the level of consumed gas would reduce to 14/835 MMScf/D. Decreases in oil production only 5.7%, if the saved gas is for example used in the gas lift system for a number of wells comparable to the number of wells in this study, an increase of over 100% will be achieved in oil production. This would simultaneously reduce the rate of injected gas and increase the oil production.


Active gate driving of power devices seeks to shape switching trajectories via the gate, for example, to reduce EMI without degrading efficiency. To this end, driver ICs with integrated arbitrary waveform generators have been used to achieve complex gate signals. This article describes, for the first time, the implementation details of a digitally programmable arbitrary waveform gate driver capable of a 10-GHz waypoint rate, including comprehensive design considerations for critical high-speed subsystems that codify the tradeoff in flexibility, speed, and area. The design, which is taped out in a 180-nm high-voltage CMOS process, utilizes buffers that switch up to ten times in a single clock cycle to overcome the limited achievable clock speed of high-voltage silicon integrated circuits and a fully digital architecture to provide robustness under high slew rates of the ground rail. The driver IC has networks of 100-ps delay elements that are configured prior to a switching transient, to selectively control an array of fast, parallel-connected drivers with different output impedances. Key to the high timing resolution are high-speed asynchronous circuits for memory readout, output buffering, and pulse generation. The driver IC is experimentally evaluated to have a 100-ps resolution and to operate reliably in a 400-V gallium nitride (GaN) bridge leg, under ground-rail voltage slew rates peaking at over 100 V/ns. Design rules are provided to obtain an architecture with the least area for a given set of timing and impedance resolution requirements. The reported design methods enable complex driving waveforms to be applied during nanosecond-scale transients of GaN power devices and demonstrate how digitally programmable active gate drivers for GaN power FETs can be designed to meet a given set of application requirements.


We quantitatively assessed the effects of a six-session edible horticultural therapy (EHT) program on long-term-hospitalized (LTH) female patients with schizophrenia. A total of 60 patients were enrolled in the project and randomly divided into an experimental group (30 patients, received EHT) and a control group (30 patients, did not receive EHT). The two groups were evaluated before and after EHT using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), the Chinese version Scale of Social Functioning for Psychotic Inpatients (SSFPI), and the Life Satisfaction Index A (LSIA). The clinical symptoms of patients with schizophrenia improved significantly and they recovered social function, but there was no significant change in life satisfaction. In the control group, clinical symptoms recovered but there was no improvement in social function and life satisfaction significantly decreased. In addition, patients in the EHT group expressed satisfaction with the program. In conclusion, EHT can improve the clinical symptoms of schizophrenia and promote recovery of social function; however, its impact on life satisfaction remains unclear.


ABSTRACT On 18 farmer-managed fields in the Forest-Savannah Transitional zone of Ghana, the response of unfertilized maize was investigated as influenced by either a previous short season natural fallow or Mucuna pruriens (L.) DC var. utilis (Wright) Burck. Comparative vector diagnosis of three weeks old seedlings revealed that N was limiting maize growth. The previous Mucuna fallow was at least partly able to compensate N while there was a dilution of all the other macronutrients due to an increased uptake in the Mucuna system. Maize yields were on average 51% higher after Mucuna fallow with 2850 kg ha−1 compared with 1880 kg ha−1 after natural fallow, but the variability between farmers' fields was high. Adaptability analysis revealed that the slash-and-mulch leguminous fallow system was most effective at locations of high productivity while the yield difference to the slash-and-burn natural fallow system was small in farming environments with low productivity. It was concluded that M. pruriens var. utilis fallow is not a suitable technology to reclaim degraded land or to restore soil fertility if growth-limiting factors are not eliminated. Low available P levels and later maize planting significantly reduced the yield difference and hence the risk for M. pruriens to be outperformed by the natural fallow system increased up to 41% with lower values of plant available P and later maize planting. Besides individual yield components such as cob number and cob seed weight, plant population at final harvest accounted for 58% of the variation in yield. Nutrient use efficiency improved significantly for all macronutrients except P but the harvest index was significantly lower at 0.40 after Mucuna fallow compared with 0.43 after natural fallow. N supplied by the Mucuna fallow supported a better growth of the succeeding maize crop but only in the beginning of the cropping season. When the yield level a farmer usually experiences with his common practice on a specific field was applied to the regression models of the adaptability analysis it was possible to make site- specific yield predictions for the M. pruriens system. It was concluded that the application of the adaptability analysis and individual risk assessments might serve as valuable tools to give more site-specific recommendations to farmers instead of blanket messages for entire regions.


Synthetic macrocyclic receptors generally display unique geometries, preorganized cavities, and tunable binding affinities, which facilitate their application in numerous fields including molecular recognition and self-assembly. Calix[n]arenes and pillar[n]arenes are very prevalent synthetic macrocyclic arenes, whose syntheses, host-guest properties, and supramolecular functions have been intensively studied. In recent years, some new families of synthetic macrocyclic arenes closely related to calix[n]arenes and pillar[n]arenes have emerged and represent new opportunities in modern supramolecular chemistry. Therefore, in this feature article, we present a comprehensive discussion on some newly designed, versatile macrocyclic arene receptors that sprang up during the past decade, focusing on their syntheses, structures, functionalization, and host-guest properties. Future perspectives of synthetic macrocyclic arene chemistry are also given. We hope that this feature article will be a timely and useful reference for those who are exploring new opportunities in functional macrocycles.


This study examines relationships among health information orientation, situational perceptual frames, and active information behaviors pertinent to the safety controversy of genetically-modified (GM) food technology. A web survey was conducted in the US (N = 393). Based on our findings, an integrative model of Kim and Grunig's (2011) Situational Theory of Problem Solving (STOPS) and Dutta-Bergman's (2004) concept of health information orientation is suggested to explain lay health epistemics and various information behaviors about that new food technology. The study's theoretical and practical implications are discussed (86 words).


Nocturia, or waking at night to void, is a common problem among both men and
women of all ages. It is regarded as one of the most bothersome urinary symptoms,
which may lead to sleep disturbance. Although the International Continence
Society (ICS) defined nocturia as waking at night to void one or more times, only a
nocturnal voiding frequency of two or more seems to generate significant bother
and decreased quality of life. Furthermore, nocturia is associated with an increase
in falls and hip fractures and may even be associated with an increased mortality
rate.
Traditionally, urologists have considered nocturia to be an increased urinary frequency
at night without paying much attention to urine volume, whereas internists
have assumed nocturnal frequency to be the result of an excessive urine production
without focus on other lower urinary tract symptoms. Nowadays, both medical
disciplines agree that the causes of nocturia can roughly be divided into the following
categories: 1) sleep disorders, 2) nocturnal polyuria, 3) 24-hour polyuria, and
4) reduced bladder capacity. Clearly, nocturia is a symptom, rather than a disease.
However, regardless of its cause, nocturia appears when the production of urine is
greater than the storage capacity of the bladder.
Although earlier studies have provided information on possible causes of nocturia,
almost all of these studies were cross-sectional and based their data on selfreport
questionnaires. Because of this, the information concerning which factors
are causally related to nocturia remains unclear.
The Krimpen study was initiated in 1995 to monitor the natural history of lower
urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in the aging male and its burden on the general
population of older men. A total of four rounds of data collection were performed.
The three follow-up rounds had a planned follow-up time of 2, 4 and 6 years. Data
collection ended in 2004. In addition to the original design, the general practitioner's
database was checked again after 15 years (2010) for (possible) date of
death. In addition to extensive data on health status, the Krimpen study database
contains data on longitudinal frequency-volume charts (FVC). These FVC data offer
insight into the epidemiology and natural history of both FVC-based nocturia and
nocturnal polyuria.
This thesis describes the natural history of nocturia and of voided volumes, as well
as that of an important contributor to nocturia, i.e. nocturnal polyuria. The association
between nocturia and the mortality rate in older men is also examined. In the
first four chapters an introduction and aims of the study, study design, a review of
the literature and the specific methodology of FVC analysis are presented.


Little information is available about enamel wear caused by zirconia brackets, an inadvertent side effect of orthodontic treatment. The purpose of this study was to examine potential enamel damage induced by contact with zirconia brackets. Sliding and impact wear simulations were performed using bovine enamel specimens positioned at a 25° slant to a zirconium ball to determine wear behaviour. Different chewing patterns, tapping and grinding, were simulated. Specimens were profiled using confocal laser scanning microscopy, and the mean maximum depth and surface roughness were measured. Scanning electron microscopy was also performed. The mean maximum depth of wear values differed according to the number of mastication cycles, with a higher number of cycles producing higher depths of wear. The facet wear depth was significantly greater with the tapping pattern than with the grinding pattern. Scanning electron microscopic observation of the wear facets revealed that surface textures at the edges were rougher than those at the centre of all facets. The results of this study indicated that enamel wear was induced by contact with zirconia brackets during the early period of mastication, and that the patterns and number of cycles of mastication affected the wear progression of enamel.


Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are meant to be akin to foreign territories with respect to trade, tariffs and duties. They can involve private, public, or joint sectors players for development and there are several hundred such zones in India today. In a globalised world, SEZs can play a crucial role in commercial success as epicentres of globalised trade structures This paper, aims at exploring the existing provisions in law and status quo with respect to Special Economic Zones in India, analysing the problems and benefits of the same, while throwing light on specific locations like Nandigram. The question of sustainability is of prime importance with respect to SEZs, because while they are promising avenues of infrastructural development, technical advancement and flow of capitalist wealth, they also exploit and displace several thousands of citizens, while claiming ultimate upliftment and therein lies the paradox. The questions that need to be considered are, as to what conceptions of development does India need to pursue, and whether or not SEZs will turn out to the white elephants for the Indian State; prima- facie heralding development while requiring massive capital inputs, and land acquisition, resulting in displacement, inadequate compensation, and destitution in order to satisfy "public purpose*. The paper compares the costs and benefits of SEZs, discusses the policy debate regarding SEZs, especially in the context of sustainability, in order to deduce whether the development will be inclusive of larger interests, or satisfy corporate agendas, and thereby critique the legal provisions regarding Special Economic Zones. Keywords: SEZs, globalisation, sustainability, Nandigram, land acquisition


Two phase masonry model, which contains elastic mortar and elastic bricks, is analyzed numerically in order to evaluate sensitivity of effective elastic moduli and strength properties to a deviation in the masonry structural parameters. Different methods of masonry homogenization are studied. Effective elastic moduli of the masonry representative volume element are obtained by means of direct finite element simulation and homogenization procedure. Influence of variation in the heterogeneous material microstructure characteristics (influence of brick aspect ratio and orientation angle) on the local stress-strain state and mechanical properties of the representative volume element of the composite considered is analyzed. Mechanical properties obtained by direct finite element modeling and other methods in various literary sources are compared. These studies are relevant for the design of composite materials with a structure similar to masonry.


In this paper, we present Zuzie2, a computer application designed to help people extend their interpretation of the meaning of their activities, and propose that Zuzie2 is effective in cultivating the power of understanding and expression. In an earlier paper we presented the Constructive Scrapbook computer application which has the potential to make the user analyze expressions, extract significances to consider them deeply, and then create new expressions [1]. Zuzie2 is an improved version of the Constructive Scrapbook. Using this tool, in the same way as with the earlier version, the user arranges compositions of pictures in a two-dimensional space, makes various compositions, and switches them freely. In Zuzie2, we have added a new function that enables users to import composition grounds that show the viewpoints of other users into their works. Our objective is to have children and ordinary people use various facets to analyze their activities and then create new expressions. Humans think and express something in a conceptual framework such as ordering, classification, or quantity. However, the thoughts of a single person have limitations due to the fixed frame of viewpoint. We have designed this tool so that the viewpoints of other persons combine with the user's work to form new expressive works. We held a workshop using the Zuzie2 application. The results show that this tool has the potential to make users analyze their activities, import other viewpoints to consider them deeply, and then create new expressions.


Objective. Literature suggests that 'meaning in life' may be a mental strength that enables individuals to function healthily and adaptively in the face of stress events. Therefore, this study aims to examine the longitudinal associations between meaning in life and psychosocial adjustment to the COVID-19 outbreak among Chinese people. Methods. A prospective design was adopted. 154 Chinese college students (Mean age = 20.41 (cid:1) 1.45 years) completed two waves of the assessment. Participants reported their meaning in life before the outbreak (Time 1) and their psychosocial adjustment 7 weeks later after the outbreak had occurred (Time 2). Results. Participants' meaning in life at Time 1 was positively related to life satisfaction and negatively related to depression, anxiety, stress, and negative emotions at Time 2. Additionally, levels of meaning in life at Time 1 were positively associated to COVID-19-related behavioural engagement – prosocial behaviour and information addiction at Time 2. Individuals' perceptions of the outbreak and status of self-quarantine did not moderate these relationships. Conclusion. Findings suggest that individuals' prior level of meaning in life may help them maintain a healthy psychosocial adjustment during disease outbreak, though cautions regarding the possibility to render an addiction to information about the outbreak are warranted.


The mechanism of micropores formed on the surface of polycrystalline pure aluminum under high-current pulsed electron beam (HCPEB) irradiation is explained. It is discovered that dispersed micropores with sizes of 0.1–1 μm on the irradiated surface of pure aluminum can be successfully fabricated after HCPEB irradiation. The dominant formation mechanism of the surface micropores should be attributed to the formation of supersaturation vacancies within the near surface during the HCPEB irradiation and the migration of vacancies along grain boundaries and/or dislocations towards the irradiated surface. It is expected that the HCPEB technique will become a new method for the rapid synthesis of surface porous materials.