weeks before this. She was ill, with pyrexia of 101'F (38 5°C) and arthritis involving the hands, wrists, feet, the left knee, right elbow, and the hips. There were widespread skin lesions. Hyperkeratotic and pustular rash covered the toes, with marked nail involvement. Similar lesions were on the heels. There were psoriasiform patches on the palms and there were also nail changes on some fingers, the affected nails occurring where there was maximal joint involvement of the fingers. Discrete psoriasiform patches were present in the scalp and on the trunk and limbs. Subsequently, she developed guttate psoriatic lesions on the trunk and rupoid psoriasiform plaques on the limbs. There was no involvement of the urethra, cervix, conjunctivae, or buccal mucous membrane. Investigations showed E.S.R. (Westergren) 100-130 mm/1 hr., W.B.C. 9,700, (polymorphs 83%, lymphocytes 13 %). Blood cultures, R.A. test, and L.E. tests, were negative. X-ray of os calcis and iliosacral joints did not show abnormality. Over a long period, her general condition gradually improved. A.C.T.H. injections appear to have had a good effect. She now has minimal joint involvement and minimal skin lesions. Without knowledge of the transient urethritis, cervicitis, and buccal lesions early in the disease, I would have accepted this as a case of arthropathic psoriasis.-I am, etc., RODERICK HOWELL Swansea, Glam.


In hybrid process of electrolytic magnetic abrasive finishing (EMAF), there are usually two structures on the tool design, separated or composited. This paper has been focused on the design of the composite tool. How to make electrolyte reach working area is a problem which should be solved for the EMAF process when the composite tool is used, therefore a hollow structure of magnetic pole has been put forward as one possible solution. To understand the effects of the structure parameters of the tool on the abrasive brush of EMAF, Finite Element Method (FEM) has been employed to establish the magnetic field model and analyze the distribution of magnetic induction on the workpiece surface and magnetic pole.


Abstract The objective of this article is to conduct a narrative literature review on multisensory integration and propose a novel information processing model of presence in virtual reality (VR). The first half of the article introduces basic multisensory integration (implicit information processing) and the integration of coherent stimuli (explicit information processing) in the physical environment, offering an explanation for people's reactions during VR immersions and is an important component of our model. To help clarify these concepts, examples are provided. The second half of the article addresses multisensory integration in VR. Three models in the literature examine the role that multisensory integration plays in inducing various perceptual illusions and the relationship between embodiment and presence in VR. However, they do not relate specifically to presence and multisensory integration. We propose a novel model of presence using elements of these models and suggest that implicit and explicit information processing lead to presence. We refer to presence as a perceptual illusion that includes a plausibility illusion (the feeling that the scenario in the virtual environment is actually occurring) and a place illusion (the feeling of being in the place depicted in the virtual environment), based on efficient and congruent multisensory integration.


An approach for forecasting the leakage power and the delay of the dual threshold domino OR gates based on Wavelet Neural Networks (WNN) in 45 nm technology is proposed. The forecasting system has fast convergence and high precision. By studying the impact of the dual threshold voltage technique (DTV) on leakage reduction and delay increase, it successfully forecasts the nonlinear changing of the leakage power and delay of the different inputs domino OR gates. At last, the reason for the forecasting error and the trend of the forecasting curve are explained, respectively.


This paper reports original results on the synthesis of Carbon/Nitrogen/Iron-based Oxygen Reduction Reaction (ORR) electrocatalysts by CO2 laser pyrolysis. Precursors consisted of two different liquid mixtures containing FeOOH nanoparticles or iron III acetylacetonate as iron precursors, being fed to the reactor as an aerosol of liquid droplets. Carbon and nitrogen were brought by pyridine or a mixture of pyridine and ethanol depending on the iron precursor involved. The use of ammonia as laser energy transfer agent also provided a potential nitrogen source. For each liquid precursor mixture, several syntheses were conducted through the step-by-step modification of NH3 flow volume fraction, so-called R parameter. We found that various feature such as the synthesis production yield or the nanomaterial iron and carbon content, showed identical trends as a function of R for each liquid precursor mixture. The obtained nanomaterials consisted in composite nanostructures in which iron based nanoparticles are, to varying degrees, encapsulated by a presumably nitrogen doped carbon shell. Combining X-ray diffraction and Mossbauer spectroscopy with acid leaching treatment and extensive XPS surface analysis allowed the difficult question of the nature of the formed iron phases to be addressed. Besides metal and carbide iron phases, data suggest the formation of iron nitride phase at high R values. Interestingly, electrochemical measurements reveal that the higher R the higher the onset potential for the ORR, what suggests the need of iron-nitride phase existence for the formation of active sites towards the ORR.


Features

Presents a user friendly, readable and practical style
Offers evidence-based approach
Focuses on psychological, emotional and spiritual needs
Helps practitioners to distinguish religion from spirituality and understand the relationship between them
Highlights the cultural and organizational issues that must be addressed to support spiritually competent care
Summary

This practical guide tackles the important issues of spirituality in health care, emphasising the role of organisations in developing a culture of leadership and management that facilitates spiritual care. Spirituality is a central part of holistic care that addresses physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of care in an integrated way.

The chapters are written by experts in their fields, pitched at the practitioner level rather than addressing 'spirituality' as a purely theoretical concept. Each one describes the realities of spiritually competent practice and show how it can be taught and put into practice in a variety of areas and settings, including

         Undergraduate and Postgraduate education

         Acute healthcare settings

         Mental health

         Primary care

         End of Life Care

         Creative organisations

         Social services

Ideal for practitioners, educators, trainees and managers in nursing and healthcare, the book is also relevant reading for occupational therapists, physiotherapists, social workers and psychologists.


This study was performed to investigate whether peroxisome proliterator-activated receptor-gamma (PPAR-gamma) exerted an anti-inflammatory effect on rheumatoid synovial cells and inhibited dysregulated proliferation. The expression of PPAR-gamma mRNA in cultured human synoviocytes and THP-1 cells was analysed by RT-PCR. PPAR-gamma was expressed in normal, osteoarthritis (OA), rheumatoid arthritis (RA) synovial cells as well as a human monocytic cell line, THP-1. In RA and OA synoviocytes, the induction of inflammatory cytokine mRNA expression such as TNF-alpha and IL-1beta was significantly inhibited by the natural PPAR-gamma agonist, 15 deoxy-Delta(12,14)prostaglandin J(2)(15d-PGJ(2)). The effect of PPAR-gamma on the nuclear factor (NF)-kappaB activity was tested by electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA). Both troglitazone and 15d-PGJ(2)markedly inhibited TNF-alpha-induced NF-kappaB activation at 30 microM. However, PPAR-gamma agonist neither reduced proliferation nor induced apoptosis in RA synoviocytes when measured by XTT assay and fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS) analysis. In contrast, it induced apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner in THP-1 cells and augmented TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL)-induced apoptosis as well. In conclusion, these data demonstrate that PPAR-gamma is expressed in human synoviocytes and THP-1 cells, and the PPAR-gamma activation inhibits expression of inflammatory cytokines in RA synoviocytes. Furthermore, PPAR-gamma activation induces apoptosis by itself and augments TRAIL/Apo2L-induced apoptosis in THP-1 cells. These results suggest that PPAR-gamma agonists may provide a new therapeutic approach for RA.


The helium standard of Japan, referred to as HESJ, is an interlaboratory standard for the 3He/4He ratio. While the ratio of 3He and 4He of the HESJ was previously determined by a relative comparison to atmospheric helium, the absolute value of the 3He/4He ratio of the HESJ has not been directly determined yet. Therefore, it relies on the early measurements of that of atmospheric helium. The accuracy of the absolute 3He/4He ratios of the atmosphere and other working standards including HESJ is crucial in some applications of helium isotopes, such as tritium‐3He dating, surface‐exposure age determination based on cosmogenic 3He, and the accurate measurement of the neutron lifetime. In this work, new control samples of helium gases with 3He/4He ratios of 14, 28, and 42 ppm were fabricated with accuracy of 0.25–0.38% using a gas‐handling system for a neutron lifetime experiment at Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex. The relative 3He/4He ratios of these samples and the HESJ were measured using a magnetic‐sector type, single‐focusing, noble gas mass spectrometer with a double collector system. As a result, the absolute 3He/4He ratio of the HESJ was determined as 27.36 ± 0.11 ppm. The atmospheric 3He/4He ratio was determined as 1.340 ± 0.006 ppm, based on this work.


Having a right that is not respected is not the same as having no right at all. At least this should not be the case. Failure to receive something to which you are entitled should lead to formal redress or failing that, protest. The rights-based discourse has a wider importance. If and when it is or should be used is significant. In terms of access to social protection (including social and humanitarian assistance), the rights-based discourse means there is no difference between refugees and others who fail to receive the protection to which they are entitled, such as Internally Displaced People (IDPs). This introduces two key tensions, both of which we explore in this paper. The first concerns the identification of the institution responsible for fulfilling the right, as determined in state-led/formal humanitarian system of social protection. The second concerns the alternatives displaced people may identify when Northern mandated forms of social protection fail, or when the conditions for the enjoyment of that protection are too onerous. These alternatives constitute a second system of social protection. We conclude that although they are unequal, both systems are currently necessary, even as a language of rights is only appropriate in relation to the first tension. Ultimately greater coordination and collaboration between the two systems is necessary.


To investigate the material removal characteristic of paste polishing, experimental investigations based on Taguchi method have been carried out. In the experiments, the dwell time was fixed 300 seconds and the bonnet position was 4. The four variable factors (precess angles, head speed, head pressure and tool offset) with 3 levels were chosen to design the orthogonal array. With the designed orthogonal array, two groups of experiments have been implemented to verify the repeatability of paste polishing. The experimental results indicated that the sizes and shapes of polishing spot varied with polishing parameters, the most influential parameter was precess angle and its contribution was 37.39%. However, the results of material removal rates did not coincide with the principle of Preston equation. This meant that the paste polishing was not a deterministic polishing and cannot be used to correct the form polishing.


The WHO recommends limiting non-milk extrinsic sugars (NMES) consumption to ≤ 10 % energy to reduce the risk of unhealthy weight gain and dental caries, and to restrict frequency of intake to ≤ 4 times/d to reduce risk of dental caries. Older adults, especially those from low-income backgrounds, are at increased risk of dental caries, yet there is little information on sugars intake (frequency of intake and food sources) in this age group. The aim of this report is to present baseline data from a community-based dietary intervention study of older adults from socially deprived areas of North East England, on the quantity and sources of total sugars, NMES, and intrinsic and milk sugars, and on frequency of NMES intake. Dietary intake was assessed using two 3-d estimated food diaries, completed by 201 participants (170 female, thirty-one male) aged 65–85 years (mean 76·7 (sd 5·5) years) recruited from sheltered housing schemes. Total sugars represented 19·6 %, NMES 9·3 %, and intrinsic and milk sugars 10·3 % of daily energy intake. Eighty-one (40·3 %) exceeded the NMES intake recommendation. Mean frequency of NMES intake was 3·4 times/d. The fifty-three participants (26·4 %) who exceeded the frequency recommendation ( ≤ 4 times/d) obtained a significantly greater percentage of energy from NMES compared with those participants who met the recommendation. The food groups 'biscuits and cakes' (18·9 %), 'soft drinks' (13·1 %) and 'table sugar' (11·1 %) made the greatest contributions to intakes of NMES. Interventions to reduce NMES intake should focus on limiting quantity and frequency of intake of these food groups.


: Based on a standard idea-based model of endogenous growth we test the hypothesis that regional innovative activity is path-dependent, and investigate the geographical scope of knowledge spillovers. Using data for West-German regions, two alternative indicators of the stock of knowledge are specified. One is based on patent applications, the other on numbers of researchers. With patents as indicator the path-dependence hypothesis is rejected, and knowledge spillovers from neighboring regions appear to be irrelevant. With numbers of researchers as indicator, by contrast, there is evidence for both path-dependence, and the relevance of interregional knowledge spillovers. Several extensions and refinements are discussed which may help resolving these apparent contradictions.


For the structural engineer, spatial visualization ability is especially important for understanding the correct positioning of structural elements in a design. In order to improve the student's spatial visualization ability, in this investigation the development of activities was proposed using an application for mobile devices with the resources of Augmented Reality (AR). The activities were planned for the Reinforced Concrete subject in the eighth semester of the Civil Engineering course of the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Eighteen students enrolled in that subject in the first semester of 2019 did the proposed activities. Four activities were developed using the RA resources for the Sketchfab application. The instrument chosen for the evaluation of student perception was a questionnaire based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), which was adapted in this study. By the students' answers about the usefulness and ease and intention of using the resources, it was concluded that the RA is an important resource to improve their spatial visualization ability because they facilitate the visualization of the details of the structures and make the learning more fun.


A recently developed formalism for structural representation—called Evolving Transformations System (ETS)—is discussed as suggesting a radically different direction for the development of computer/information science. One can gain an initial intuitive understanding of the ETS object representation by generalizing the temporal process of the (Peano) construction of natural numbers: replace the single 'structureless' unit out of which a number is built by one of several more general structural units. The new formalism points to the informational view of nature in which the basic object encoding is temporal, event-based, while the ubiquitous in science 'spatial' object instantiation can be constructed on the basis of the former. Thus, this far-reaching structural generalization of natural numbers emerges as a universal form of both temporal and structural representation that can be variously instantiated, depending on the desired target medium, e.g. 3D-space, biotic, network, etc. Moreover, the ETS representation satisfies a unique and very desirable property not possessed by any other known language, scientific or spoken: its syntax and semantics are congruent.


We present products of hidden Markov models (PoHMM's), a way of combining HMM's to form a distributed state time series model. Inference in a PoHMM is tractable and eÆcient. Learning of the parameters, although intractable, can be e ectively done using the Product of Experts learning rule. The distributed state helps the model to explain data which has multiple causes, and the fact that each model need only explain part of the data means a PoHMM can capture longer range structure than an HMM is capable of. We show some results on modelling character strings, a simple language task and the symbolic family trees problem, which highlight these advantages.


The authors describe some differential diagnostic criteria of atypical syringomyelia and pseudosyringomyelitic acropathy. It was found that trophic disorders in the skin, metatarsal bones were in atypical syringomyelia usually associated with sensibility disorders of the dissociated type in the zone of corresponding segments. In pseudosyringomyelitic acropathy trophic and skin changes precede sensibility disorders and do not always correspond to innervation zones of the lower extremities. Dysraphic state is of importance for the diagnosis of syringomyelia.


: The protective activity of antiserum and immunoglobulin to the toxic components of P. aeruginosa slime was studied in experiments on passive mouse protection. Sheep antiserum, or immunoglobulin obtained from this antiserum, was found to have a pronounced protective effect (antimicrobial action) in the infection of mice with a homologous or heterologous P. aeruginosa strain. Normal sheep serum and its globulin fraction also had a definite unspecific antimicrobial and antitoxic activity as revealed in experiments on the passive protection of mice infected with P. aeruginosa.


Understanding traffic matrices is useful for network design and so forth, but it is difficult to directly measure traffic matrices in IP networks. There is an existing method to estimate traffic matrices by link traffic information which is easy to measure, and routing information. However, this method requires significantly longer computation time as network size grows. This paper proposes large-scale traffic matrix estimation methods using a divide-and-conquer approach. The network is divided into multiple blocks, traffic matrices are estimated per block and estimation results are combined. In terms of division and combination, this paper proposes two detailed methods. By simulation, it is shown that both of the proposed methods can significantly improve computation time, while keeping estimation accuracy of the existing method. In particular, one of the proposed methods can perform traffic matrix estimation within practical computation time in a network of thousands of nodes.


A nonlinear latent variable model for the topographic organization and subsequent visualization of multivariate binary data is presented. The generative topographic mapping (GTM) is a nonlinear factor analysis model for continuous data which assumes an isotropic Gaussian noise model and performs uniform sampling from a two-dimensional (2-D) latent space. Despite the, success of the GTM when applied to continuous data the development of a similar model for discrete binary data has been hindered due, in part, to the nonlinear link function inherent in the binomial distribution which yields a log-likelihood that is nonlinear in the model parameters. The paper presents an effective method for the parameter estimation of a binary latent variable model-a binary version of the GTM-by adopting a variational approximation to the binomial likelihood. This approximation thus provides a log-likelihood which is quadratic in the model parameters and so obviates the necessity of an iterative M-step in the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. The power of this method is demonstrated on two significant application domains, handwritten digit recognition and the topographic organization of semantically similar text-based documents.


Plain abdominal roentgenograms are usually adequate for the treatment of patients with small-bowel obstruction. There is a select group of patients who may benefit from a more precise diagnosis or by nonoperative therapy for whom contrast roentgenograms may be helpful. Contrast roentgenograms were performed in 68 (21%) of 327 patients who had nondiagnostic abdominal films, atypical histories or findings, or those in whom nonoperative resolution would be highly desirable. Sixty-eight percent of 48 contrast tracers gave useful information, whereas 75% of 24 contrast enemas were helpful. Contrast material passed through a site of obstruction in 34 patients, yet 13 (38%) still required an operation. Contrast material did not pass in 16 patients and only one avoided a surgical procedure. No difference was noted between barium sulfate or water-soluble contrast material or how it was administered.


Eph receptor tyrosine kinases and their ligands, the ephrins, appear to lie functionally at the interface between pattern formation and morphogenesis. We review the role of Eph and ephrin signalling in the formation of segmented structures, in the control of axon guidance and cell migration and in the development of the vasculature. We address the question of how the specificity of response is achieved and discuss the specificity of ephrin-Eph interactions and the significance of structural domains in Eph receptors.


We propose a new principle for transfer learning, based on a straightforward intuition: if two domains are similar to each other, the model trained on one domain should also perform well on the other domain, and vice versa. To formalize this intuition, we define the performance gap as a measure of the discrepancy between the source and target domains. We derive generalization bounds for the instance weighting approach to transfer learning, showing that the performance gap can be viewed as an algorithm-dependent regularizer, which controls the model complexity. Our theoretical analysis provides new insight into transfer learning and motivates a set of general, principled rules for designing new instance weighting schemes for transfer learning. These rules lead to gapBoost, a novel and principled boosting approach for transfer learning. Our experimental evaluation on benchmark data sets shows that gapBoost significantly outperforms previous boosting-based transfer learning algorithms.


Online platforms and communities establish their own norms that govern what behavior is acceptable within the community. Substantial effort in NLP has focused on identifying unacceptable behaviors and, recently, on forecasting them before they occur. However, these efforts have largely focused on toxicity as the sole form of community norm violation. Such focus has overlooked the much larger set of rules that moderators enforce. Here, we introduce a new dataset focusing on a more complete spectrum of community norms and their violations in the local conversational and global community contexts. We introduce a series of models that use this data to develop context- and community-sensitive norm violation detection, showing that these changes give high performance.


Image and video sensors are increasingly being deployed in complex systems due to the rich process information that these sensors can capture. As a result, image data play an important role in process monitoring and control in different application domains such as manufacturing processes, food industries, medical decision-making, and structural health monitoring. Existing process monitoring techniques fail to fully utilize the information of color images due to their complex data characteristics including the high-dimensionality and correlation structure (i.e., temporal, spatial and spectral correlation). This paper proposes a new image-based process monitoring approach that is capable of handling both grayscale and color images. The proposed approach models the high-dimensional structure of the image data with tensors and employs low-rank tensor decomposition techniques to extract important monitoring features monitored using multivariate control charts. In addition, this paper shows the analytical relationships between different low-rank tensor decomposition methods. The performance of the proposed method in quick detection of process changes is evaluated and compared with existing methods through extensive simulations and a case study in a steel tube manufacturing process.


Background
Haemophilus ducreyi (HD) and Treponema pallidum subspecies pertenue (TP) are major causative agents of cutaneous ulcer (CU) in the tropics. Azithromycin is recommended to treat sexually transmitted HD infections and has good in vitro activity against HD strains from both genital and skin ulcers. We investigated the efficacy of oral single-dose azithromycin on HD-CU.

Methods
We conducted a community-based cohort study in Lihir Island, Papua New Guinea, from October 2014 through May 2016. Consenting patients with skin ulcers >1 cm in diameter were eligible for this study and had collected a lesional swab for polymerase chain reaction (PCR). All participants were treated with single-dose azithromycin (30 mg/kg) and were followed up for assessment of clinical resolution. We retrospectively classified patients according to PCR results into HD, TP, and PCR-negative groups. The primary endpoint was healing rates of HD-CU at 14 days after treatment.

Results
We obtained full outcome data from 246 patients; 131 (53.3%) were HD PCR positive, 37 (15.0%) were TP positive, and 78 (31.7%) were negative for all tests. Healing rates were 88.5% (95% confidence interval [CI], .82-.93) in the HD group, 78.4% [95% CI, .63-.89] in the TP group, and 74.4% (95% CI, .64-.83) in the PCR-negative group. If we included the participants with improved ulcers, the healing rates increased to 94.7%, 97.3%, and 89.7% respectively. HD cases classified as not healed all converted to HD-negative PCR.

Conclusions
Based upon clinical resolution and PCR conversion to HD negative, a single oral dose of azithromycin is efficacious for the treatment of HD-CU. These results have implications for the treatment of individual patients and for the use of antibiotics in public health strategies to control CU in the tropics.


Chromium is a high value metal and the retention of the same during the refining of high carbon ferrochrome as well as high alloy steel has significant economic and environmental impacts. The loss of chromium during the decarburization is generally minimized using argon-oxygen mixtures thereby reducing the oxygen partial pressure (P O2 ) of the oxidant gas. In the current study, experiments were carried out in an induction furnace and CO 2 was introduced with the view to partly reduce P O2 and partly as an oxidizer. During these experiments, the decarburization of molten Cr-alloy was conducted using pure O 2 , pure CO 2 or O 2 +CO 2 mixtures. The results demonstrated that the Cr loss can be minimized under CO 2 introduction. The kinetic analysis showed that the mass transfer is effective due to the production of 2CO gas molecules from one CO 2 molecule during the reaction which will improve the stirring of the bath. Besides, CO 2 reacts with carbon in melt is an endothermic reaction, introduction of CO 2 could be a cooler during the refining process, hence the temperature could be controlled by controlling the diluting gas amount, in this case, the over heat of bath refractory could be prevented and the lifetime of refractory could be extended.


This study presents descriptive data from the 2009 Riks-SOM, a national Swedish public opinion survey (n=1501) on trust in the Swedish public safety answering point (PSAP), 112/SOS Alarm. Of special importance in the study is the trust in light of citizens' perception of mobile phones as a "lifeline" in everyday life. The main conclusion is that vulnerable groups like citizens with foreign citizenship, citizens in the largest towns of Sweden (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo), the elderly and people in poorer health have relatively the lowest levels of trust in 112/SOS Alarm. Another conclusion is that a rather large number of individuals, who believe that a mobile phone increases the security in everyday life to a very high degree, also seem to have very high levels of trust in 112/SOS Alarm. The study appears to be the first main public opinion survey on the issue of trust in PSAP in correlation to the view of the mobile phone as a lifeline.


This article presents the proceedings of a symposium held at the meeting of the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (ISBRA) in Mannheim, Germany, in October 2004. The organizers and chairs were Karl F. Mann, Fred Rist and Carrie L. Randall. The presentations were (1) Searching for the acamprosate and naltrexone responders, by Karl Mann on behalf of the Project Predict Research team (K. Mann, R. Bruck, H. Gann, U. Zimmermann, A. Heinz, M. Smolka et al.), (2) Treatment outcomes from the United Kingdom Alcohol Treatment Trial (UKATT), by Nick Heather on behalf of the UKATT research team (N. Heather, A. Copello, Ch. Godfrey, R. Hodgson, J. Orford, D. Raistrick, I. Russell, G. Tober), and (3) Conjoint screening and Brief intervention for Alcohol and Nicotine misuse in primary health care (BrIAN), by Fred Rist on behalf of the BrIAN research team (Ralf Demmel, Ines Aulhorn, Jutta Hagen, Barbara Scheuren, Fred Rist).


More than 20 years after the publication of the Butler report which led to the establishment of medium-secure units, many of its recommendations have not been implemented. There is still a shortage of beds in medium-secure units. A survey of 18 of the 25 units in England and Wales has revealed wide variations in size as well as staffing ratios. National leadership and more coherent planning is needed.


In the financial industry, face-to-face conversation is an essential for sales. Similar to call-center monitoring, there is a significant need to monitor the conversation for compliance checks. In certain business scenarios, there is a need to record an employee's speech while protecting the customers' confidentiality and privacy. In this paper, we propose a small-scale microphone array system specially designed to record only the agent's speech. For the suppression of the customer's speech, we used CSP-based post-filtering. However, using small number of microphones, it is difficult to suppress unwanted speech completely. Because post-filtering using correlations of the multiple channels often affected by the spatial aliasing between speakers. We introduced the weighted-CSP to attenuate susceptible bins to the interfering speaker. Also we introduced flooring after the post-filtering to mask residuals. This combination helps prevent the customer's speech to be transcribed.


Estonian participation in the Russian Army in the Great War remains virtually invisible in relation to the dominant narratives of the Western Front and Eastern Front. Perhaps this peripherality is sufficient reason to foreground it through personal narratives of common soldiers. "Memory sources" require attention to the conditions of their textual production, the poetics of their composition, and their uses of rhetoric with respect to a (familial or more extensively public) readership. Though war diaries are often imparted a greater trustworthiness than memoirs, ostensibly because of their immediacy or simultaneity with events, retrospective personal accounts often artfully make use of diary conventions. This article examines the World War I diaries of Estonian soldiers from the archives, and those recently made available to the general public in a monumental publication, historian Tonu Tannberg's 2015 edited collection of heretofore unpublished Estonian World War I letters, memoirs, and diaries. First the article addresses the trope of the "simple soldier" with limited schooling, and the paradox that such writers often show a remarkable capacity for observation and articulation. However "simple" a remembered account may seem, its rhetorical dimension is social, thus historical, as are the narrative scaff olding and texture. As a counterpoint, this article also examines the literary memoirs of World War I written by popular author Oskar Luts, who participated in the war as a pharmacist, and asks the question of what textual resources make memoirs "literary".Thirdly, the article considers interpretive templates for the contextual analysis of 196 Estonian memory texts from this period. Indeed, for Estonia, there was no "lost generation" or "generation of 1914", as Robert Wohl has defi ned it. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the German occupation of Estonia in 1918, the birth of the Estonian Republic in February 1918, and the War of Independence 1918–1920 were a chaotic cascade of events. In the following decades in the Estonian Republic assigned priority of memorability to the War of Independence, and to the World War I experience of those Estonian officers who went on to lay a foundation for the cadre of the armed forces of the Estonian Republic between the wars. This cumulation and acceleration of events obscured the previous layers, thus permanently sedimenting and occluding the cultural memory of World War I beneath these layers. Mapping the absence or occlusion of World War I remembrance through the use of autobiographical texts or textual remains is a topic of renewed research in the context of the hundred-year anniversary of World War I across Europe. Keywords World War I, autobiographical memory, diaries, soldiers, masculinity, cultural memory.


We have obtained evidence that rat Schwann cells synthesize and secrete type IV procollagen. Metabolic labeling of primary cultures of Schwann cells plus neurons and analysis by SDS PAGE revealed the presence of a closely spaced pair of polypeptides in the medium of these cultures that (a) were susceptible to digestion by purified bacterial collagenase, (b) co-migrated with type IV procollagen secreted by rat parietal endoderm cells, and (c) were specifically immunoprecipitated by antibodies against mouse type IV collagen. Limited pepsin digestion of metabolically labeled medium or cell layers produced a pepsin- resistant fragment characteristic of pro-alpha 1(IV) chains. Removal of neuronal cell bodies from the cultures immediately before labeling did not reduce the amount of type IV procollagen detected in the medium. This indicated that Schwann cells, not neurons, were responsible for synthesis of type IV procollagen. We believe type IV procollagen is a major constituent of the Schwann-cell extracellular matrix based upon (a) its presence in a detergent-insoluble matrix preparation, (b) its presence in the cell layer of the cultures in a state in which it can be removed by brief treatment with bacterial collagenase or trypsin, and (c) positive immunofluorescence of Schwann cell-neuron cultures with anti-type-IV collagen antibodies. Secretion of type IV procollagen was substantially reduced when Schwann cells were maintained in the absence of neurons. This observation may account for the previously reported finding that Schwann cells assemble a basal lamina only when co-cultured with neurons (Bunge, M. B., A. K. Williams, and P. M. Wood, 1982, Dev. Biol., 92:449).


The articles in this issue are about error. Error was rarely discussed "out loud" in the medical journals until the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in the US published its 1999 report "To err is human" documenting the many lives that were lost as a result of errors in the delivery of health care. Even today, physicians find it hard to talk about their errors, not simply because of the fear of a lawsuit, but out of embarrassment and their sense of personal failure. In the years since the IOM report, we've seen much more in the news, the peer-reviewed literature and from the leadership of our institutions about avoiding errors, much of it couched under kinder terms, such as safety and quality. To avoid laying blame (which might hinder disclosure of errors), the focus has shifted to how systems of care contribute to a patient sustaining harm. Anyone who has attended a patient safety lecture has been entertained by Reason's diagram of all the holes in the swiss cheese lining up. But to face facts, physicians do make errors. And while it is important to engineer the delivery system so that the errors can be caught (and sometimes prevented), we also need to understand how our own thinking processes lead us to make errors in the first place. For this reason, our issue on error begins with an insightful commentary by Pat Croskerry, an emergency physician and psychologist who is an internationally recognised expert on patient safety and diagnostic errors. Cognitive bias, he explains, is lurking behind every patient interaction to potentially trip us up. Finding ways to recognise —and mitigate—that cognitive bias is essential to improving our ability to make good diagnostic decisions. We then present two 'studies in scarlet,' so to speak: investigations of the types of diagnostic errors physicians make. Okafor and colleagues analysed 509 incidents voluntarily reported by physicians and found that 209 were related to diagnostic errors. They classified the errors as cognitive, system related or unremediable; while system factors were found in 34% of cases, cognitive errors were more frequent, occurring in 41% of cases. Medford-Davis and colleagues reviewed the charts of 100 adult ED patients presenting with abdominal pain who were discharged, or who returned within the next 10 days and were hospitalised. 35 of the patients had diagnostic errors, with about 1⁄2 of these considered to have the potential for serious harm. Most of the errors could be classified as due to failure to obtain an appropriate history or physical, not ordering appropriate tests, and failure to follow up on the tests. In a third report by Broder and colleagues, you will undoubtedly identify with the young emergency physician who finds himself in the middle of a procedure with an unfamiliar piece of equipment, and continues the procedure, with a resulting complication. The paper dissects many contributors to error: perceived time constraints, lack of experience, lack of control over the environment (such as equipment choices) over-confidence, and nonintuitively designed and marked devices. This paper, which might rightly be titled "anatomy of an error" also demonstrates what measures can be taken to prevent this from happening again. Looking at our errors is one way to avoid them in the future. Additionally, we need, as Dr Croskerry writes, to devise strategies to mitigate our cognitive bias. One of these is to improve the accuracy and details of our history and physical examination, as greater understanding of the problem can prompt a wider differential. I would argue this is particularly important for our younger physicians, who have not encountered the breadth of disease or its many manifestations, and who may be too quick to jump to an investigation to answer the question. Two papers in this issue address workplace strategies to avoid errors for cases that may be particularly challenging. Haworth et al created a proforma for the documentation of the exam in patients with facial injuries, resulting in much more detailed description of injuries. Marsh et al took advantage of the imprinting of childhood games by adapting "Rock, Paper Scissors" (in Brooklyn NY it was "rock, paper, scissors, match, actually) to "Rock, Paper, Scissor, OK", creating an aide memoire for examining nerve function in children with upper extremity injuries. What about pre-hospital care? Patterson and colleagues, who previously published a study in the EMJ about teammate familiarity in the ED, provide a study demonstrating workplace injuries are far more frequent (100 fold) for paramedics who worked one shift together compared with those who work 10 or more together in a two-year period. Murphy and colleagues describe the development of key performance indicators for prehospital care, going far beyond the traditional focus on response time. While conducted in Ireland, the results of this study have universal application. This month's View from Here describes a stabbing case in which the victim received suboptimal care—and how they have used this event to make major improvements. Finally, we present a provocative idea that may allow physicians to acknowledge uncertainty. In our first "Concepts" paper, Whyte and Vincent remind us of the concept of measurement uncertainty (MU) which gives a range of the possible values of the test, rather than single figure. The authors argue that by reporting MU clinicians would need to rely on their clinical impression (based on history and physical) to interpret the result, thereby restoring the power of clinical observation expounded by Sir William Osler. Given all these articles on error and how we might prevent it, you might wonder how safe emergency medicine is. Ramlakhan and colleagues review the many potential hazards we face, and the data on how they impact patient safety. Surprisingly, they conclude that "when compared with other clinical areas or specialties, the ED is not particularly unsafe." Perhaps its because, as this issue shows, we are willing to think about thinking, acknowledge our errors, and are continually working to mitigate against the threats we face, even if in the end, we are only human.


Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, leads primarily to respiratory symptoms that can be fatal, particularly in at risk individuals. However, neurological symptoms have also been observed in patients, including headache, seizures, stroke, and fatigue. The cause of these complications is not yet known, and whether they are due to a direct infection of neural cells, such as neurons and astrocytes, or through indirect effects on supportive brain cells, is unknown. Here, we use brain organoids to examine SARS-CoV-2 neurotropism. We examine expression of the key viral receptor ACE2 in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) revealing that only a subset of choroid plexus cells but not neurons or neural progenitors express this entry factor. We then challenge organoids with both SARS-CoV-2 spike protein pseudovirus and live virus to demonstrate high viral tropism for choroid plexus epithelial cells but not stromal cells, and little to no infection of neurons or glia. We find that infected cells of the choroid plexus are an apolipoprotein and ACE2 expressing subset of epithelial barrier cells. Finally, we show that infection with live SARS-CoV-2 leads to barrier breakdown of the choroid plexus. These findings suggest that neurological complications may result from effects on the choroid plexus, an important barrier that normally prevents entry of immune cells and cytokines into the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and brain.


There has been a proliferation of taught masters' degrees for nurses in recent years, and like masters' programmes in other disciplines, the aspirations of such educational endeavours are far from unanimous. This article reports on part of a wider study, and focuses on a qualitative analysis of the perspectives of two key sets of stakeholders, namely academic education providers, and senior clinical nursing personnel, on masters' education for nurses. Fifteen participants were interviewed in depth, and data were subjected to a qualitative content analysis. Findings indicated that while both sets of participants invoked the discourse of the 'knowledgeable doer', that is, the notion of amalgamating a high level of theoretical knowledge with practical know how, there were also differences in how each group deployed this discourse. Academics tended to emphasize the 'knowing that' or theoretical aspect of the discourse, whereas those in senior clinical roles adduced the practical component more strongly. We argue that the discourse of the 'knowledgeable doer' is far from stable, unified and universally agreed, but rather comprises competing elements with some emphasised over others according to the subject position of the particular individual. We locate the diverse perspectives of the two sets of stakeholders within debates about the status of masters' programmes in relation to vocational and liberal education.


Real-world predictive data mining (classification or regression) problems are often cost sensitive, meaning that different types of prediction errors are not equally costly. While cost-sensitive learning methods for classification problems have been extensively studied recently, cost-sensitive regression has not been adequately addressed in the data mining literature yet. In this paper, we first advocate the use of average misprediction cost as a measure for assessing the performance of a cost-sensitive regression model. We then propose an efficient algorithm for tuning a regression model to further reduce its average misprediction cost. In contrast with previous statistical methods, which are tailored to particular cost functions, this algorithm can deal with any convex cost functions without modifying the underlying regression methods. We have evaluated the algorithm in bank loan charge-off forecasting, where underforecasting is considered much more costly than overforecasting. Our results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the average misprediction costs of models learned with various base regression methods, such as linear regression, model tree, and neural network. The amount of cost reduction increases as the difference between the unit costs of the two types of errors (overprediction and underprediction) increases.


This paper presents a helper thread prefetching scheme that is designed to work on loosely coupled processors, such as in a standard chip multiprocessor (CMP) system or an intelligent memory system. Loosely coupled processors have an advantage in that resources such as processor and L1 cache resources are not contended by the application and helper threads, hence preserving the speed of the application. However, interprocessor communication is expensive in such a system. We present techniques to alleviate this. Our approach exploits large loop-based code regions and is based on a new synchronization mechanism between the application and helper threads. This mechanism precisely controls how far ahead the execution of the helper thread can be with respect to the application thread. We found that this is important in ensuring prefetching timeliness and avoiding cache pollution. To demonstrate that prefetching in a loosely coupled system can be done effectively, we evaluate our prefetching by simulating a standard unmodified CMP system and an intelligent memory system where a simple processor in memory executes the helper thread. Evaluating our scheme with nine memory-intensive applications with the memory processor in DRAM achieves an average speedup of 1.25. Moreover, our scheme works well in combination with a conventional processor-side sequential L1 prefetcher, resulting in an average speedup of 1.31. In a standard CMP, the scheme achieves an average speedup of 1.33. Using a real CMP system with a shared L2 cache between two cores, our helper thread prefetching plus hardware L2 prefetching achieves an average speedup of 1.15 over the hardware L2 prefetching for the subset of applications with high L2 cache misses per cycle. Index Terms—Helper thread, prefetching, chip multiprocessors, processing-in-memory system. C


Joanna Watson has trained all her life to fly, and when her family is tasked by the International Space Agency (ISA) with settling Tau Ceti e, an ostensibly habitable new planet, Jo looks forward to piloting one of the shuttles. When a freak accident on their ship kills her brother and causes her a severe heart injury, the ship nonetheless proceeds to Tau. There the travelers find themselves in danger as official records of the planet have suspiciously omitted its inhabitants—"the Sorrow," an authoritarian society with glowing bodies living in an underground cavern city, and the predatory phytoraptors. Bitter, literally heartbroken, but persistent, Jo leads a gang of teens deeper into the mysteries of this planet and its residents. The conflict between all three parties is forced and awkward, as is Jo's sudden romance with a smart-mouthed cadet, but the issues may engage young readers with classic Trek tastes. The story concludes with Jo back in the pilot's seat as the remainder of the human race arrive on Tau, indicating that the battle for—and destruction of—the planet will only get worse and more desperate, so interested readers may hope for a sequel. WJ


The article begins with a discussion of the judicial debate on the confirmation procedure before the International Criminal Court, which arose in the pretrial proceedings in the Gbagbo case. The author argues that in finding that a confirmation of the charges decision should be based on 'the strongest possible case based on a largely completed investigation', Pre-Trial Chamber I imposed too high a standard of proof, and that adopting such standards could potentially disrupt proceedings by blurring the boundaries between pretrial and trial stages. This would ultimately be detrimental to the rights of the accused, both in terms of the right to a speedy trial and the presumption of innocence. Even if available evidence does not appear sufficient to sustain a possible conviction at trial, a case could still be worthy of trial if the PreTrial Chamber established that doubts and inconsistencies regarding the credibility of the evidence would be more properly addressed and solved through the examination of witnesses.


When consumers do not only care for the intrinsic consumption component of commodities but also for the value of a commodity, it can be rational to purchase products as they become more expensive. Standard revealed preference conditions are however unable to take diamond effects into account. We develop a theoretical model and the associated revealed preference conditions to analyze commodities with different degrees of diamondness. On the basis of real consumer data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, we test the empirical performance of different models with and without diamond effects. It turns out that allowing for diamond effects improves the predictive success of the models. We also link the newly identified diamondness weights to the visibility of commodities. The results suggest that visible goods are more likely to induce diamond effects.


This report sets out the main findings from the global study commissioned as part of the development of the DFID-funded Fragility and Conflict Global Programme, co-ordinated by Amanda Buttinger in the Programme Policy Team at Oxfam GB. There is a growing sense within Oxfam that traditional approaches to working with civil society are yielding insufficient results in conflict-affected and fragile states. This global study was undertaken to help develop innovative approaches to strengthening civil society in such settings and, in particular, to identify lessons for the development of three planned pilot programmes. It was based on a review of existing literature and interviews with representatives of INGOs, academic institutions, and donors, complemented by a scoping exercise undertaken in South Sudan in September 2011.


Now days, mobile App is a very popular and well known concept due to the rapid advancement in the mobile technology and mobile devices. Due to the large number of mobile Apps, ranking fraud is the key challenge in front of the mobile App market. Ranking fraud refers to fraudulent or vulnerable activities which have a purpose of bumping up the Apps in the popularity list. In fact, it becomes more and more frequent for App developers to use tricky means, like increasing their Apps' sales or posting fake App ratings, to commit ranking fraud. While the importance and necessity of preventing ranking fraud has been widely recognized. After understanding the details of ranking fraud and the need of ranking fraud detection, the paper proposes a ranking fraud detection system for mobile Apps. The proposed system mines the active periods such as leading sessions of mobile apps to accurately locate the ranking fraud. These leading sessions can be useful for detecting the local anomaly instead of global anomaly of App rankings. Besides this, by modeling Apps ranking, rating and review behaviours using statistical hypotheses tests, we investigate three types of evidences, they are ranking based evidences, rating based evidences and review based evidences. Furthermore, we propose an aggregation method based on optimization to integrate all the evidences for fraud detection. Finally, the proposed system will be evaluated with real-world App data which is to be collected from the App Store for a long time period.


We explore the effect of microbial activity stimulated by root exudates on the penetrometer resistance of soil and its elastic modulus. This is important because it is a measure of the mechanical strength of soil and it correlates closely with the rate of elongation of roots. A sandy soil was incubated with a synthetic root exudate at different temperatures, for different lengths of time and with selective suppression of either fungi or bacteria. The shape of the temperature response of penetrometer resistance in soil incubated with synthetic exudate was typical of a poikilothermic temperature response. Both penetrometer resistance and small strain shear modulus had maximum values between 25 and 30°C. At temperatures of 20°C and less, there was little effect of incubation with synthetic root exudate on the small strain shear modulus, although penetrometer resistance did increase with temperature over this range (4–20°C). This suggests that in this temperature range the increase in penetrometer resistance was related to a greater resistance to plastic deformation. At higher temperatures (> 25°C) penetrometer resistance decreased. Analysis of the DNA sequence data showed that at 25°C the number of Streptomyces (Gram‐positive bacteria) increased, but selective suppression of either fungi or bacteria suggested that fungi have the greater role with respect to penetrometer resistance.


A convolution is a loop, or a fold, as the folds of the brain are sometimes termed the cerebral convolutions. But it is a loop in another sense, in the way stories or narratives are often referred to as convolutions (or convoluted) if their plots and themes are complex and resist any linear, straightforward reading. These senses are well established, but in this thesis I propose a new interpretation of convolution (or convolving), as a metaphor for a type of process imbedded in multiple texts, discourses and disciplines, primary amongst which are literature, neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Highlighting this looping, reflexive process means actively engaging in it, as I do, and thus I ultimately promote the heretofore unremarked phenomenon of convolution as a self-conscious practice.

The thesis tracks this overarching metaphor of convolutions through a series of sub-metaphors, or instantiations of convolutions, each of which comprises a chapter. The introductory chapter interrogates the revolutionary rhetoric of neuroscience, and proposes a convolutionary approach gleaned from literature to replace it. The first chapter proper explains that science sees itself as a quest with the brain its ultimate goal, but that more often than not, this quest is quixotic - and that if acknowledged, quixotism can actually be illuminating. The second chapter argues that neuroscientists paint themselves in the vein of literary detectives, and in doing so, are as susceptible to the genre's pitfalls as its boons. The third chapter claims that if the brain is a labyrinth, then so too is the brain science that deems it as such, and literature's treatment of the figure of the labyrinth (the treatment itself labyrinthine) can provide a productive framework for analysing this claim. The fourth chapter examines the unchallenged but ubiquitous metaphorical assumption that lies behind the idea of neurons firing, and asks if the overlooked ethical quandary at the nexus of brains and bullets would not benefit from the more self-aware ballistic analyses of literary texts. A concluding chapter brings all these overlapping threads together, suggesting how the notion of convolutions might have important ramifications beyond neuroscience and literature - for new textual methodologies and epistemological categories, for new interdisciplinary endeavours, and above all, for new conceptions of the self.


ABSTRACT: In a recent Public Opinion Quarterly article "Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?," John Zipp and Rudy Fenwick pit themselves against "right-wing activists and scholars," citing our scholarship (Klein and Stern 2005a; Klein and Western 2005). Here we analyze Zipp and Fenwick's characterization of our research and find it faulty in three important respects. We then turn to their "liberal v. conservative" findings and show they concord with our analysis. If one feels that it is a problem that humanities and social science faculty at four-year colleges and universities are vastly predominantly Democratic voters, mostly with what may called establishment-left or progressive views, then such concerns should not be allayed by Zipp and Fenwick's article. This Reply was submitted to Public Opinion Quarterly on October 16, 2006, except that the submission did not include the Summary and without Appendix 1 that appear here at the end of the paper.


DATE 2011-06-16 CLIENTS REF. Tarjei N. Malme, Frede Engen, Cecilie F. Nygaard, Ole Hansen NUMBER OF PAGES/APPENDICES: 15 This report summarizes the activities and results from the research project ·au spill containment by use of air bubbles". The goal of the pro;ect has been to investigate how air bubble induced flows can be used as a barrier against oil spills in coastal and environmentally sensitive areas and to prepare for industrial development of bubble based systems. Through a series of laboratoryand field experiments it has been demonstrated that a bubble oil boom (BOB) can be designed to block surface contamination for currents higher than 1 knot This is roughly a doubling of the capacity compared to existing commercial pneumatic systems. It seems likely that an appropriately designed BOB can withstand higher currents also. The key new element to the BOB iS the "bubble raff -idea, Le. a grating of parallel spargers to produce an area-distnbuted bubble source instead of a single line source. The area-distributed bubble source yields a significantly stronger plume upwelling flow with less variability /turbulence and thus thicker outwelling flow at the surface than that from a single line source for a given air flow rate, constituting a significantly more effective barrier against a surface oil slick. PREPARED BY Svein Helge Gj0sund OiECXEDBY Thomas A. McOimans APPROVED BY Vegar Johansen REPORT NO. ISBN A 19518 978-82-12-05122-3 REPORT NO. CLASSIFICATION Unrestricted


We present a uniform asymptotic expansion of the wobbling kink to any order in the amplitude of the wobbling mode. The long-range behaviour of the radiation is described by matching the asymptotic expansions in the far field and near the core of the kink. The complex amplitude of the wobbling mode is shown to obey a simple ordinary differential equation with nonlinear damping. We confirm the t-decay law for the amplitude which was previously obtained on the basis of energy considerations.


A critical distress in asphalt concrete pavements is fatigue cracking, which results in decreased ride quality and fuel economy, and provides an avenue for water intrusion, which causes a pavement system to deteriorate rapidly. Given the poor state of the infrastructure network, changes are needed in the current mixture design process to promote innovation and alternative approaches to production. This study addressed this need by pursuing the following objectives: (a) relate mixture stiffness, fatigue, and pavement system characteristics for performance-based mixture design; (b) identify a simplified viscoelastic continuum damage (S-VECD) output parameter that most clearly distinguishes between poor and satisfactory performance when combined with dynamic modulus information; and (c) evaluate the impact of recycled materials on performance indicators for fatigue cracking. The results show that a pavement structure selection process related to the S-VECD failure criterion produces better performance predictions than does a stiffness-based approach. Promising correlations with performance exist for the pseudostiffness at failure and storage modulus for an Interstate pavement structure, phase angle for a state highway surface and base course, and model term alpha for the same state highway base course.


A number viruses are known to infect roses, ranging from those in the genera Nepovirus, and Ilarvirus, which have been reported since the inception of rose virology, to recently discovered viruses in the genera Carmovirus, Closterovirus, Emaravirus, Luteovirus, Rosadnavirus, and Potyvirus. Of the viral diseases in rose, arguably the most damaging is Rose rosette (RRD), which is associated with the Emaravirus, Rose rosette virus (RRV). The objective of this thesis is to fill in the gaps in knowledge on the epidemiological aspects of RRD and RRV. There has been significant progress in the epidemiology of the RRD agent prior to the discovery of Rose rosette virus (RRV). The elusive agent was known to be graft transmissible, vectored by the eriophyid mite, Phyllocoptes fructiphilus in an uncharacterized manner, and associated with virus-like double membrane-bound bodies. RRV, the putative casual agent, was detected in all plants with RRD symptoms. However, this correlation does not prove causation of the disease. Given the complex symptomology observed the question of whether RRV causes RRD solely or as part of a virus complex, as is the case of numerous disorders of perennial plants, once thought to be caused by a single virus, was still unclear. Resistance is an important first line of defense when managing any disease, and here we identified potential sources resistance for producers, rosarians, and breeders. To date few viruses, believed to be transmitted by eriophyid viruses have been conclusively demonstrated to do so. The mode of transmission is elucidated for an even smaller subset of those viruses. In this study Koch's postulates were fulfilled for RRV; additional RRV genome segments were discovered; Phyllocoptes fructiphillus was verified as a vector of RRV; resistant rose varieties were identified; and the acquisition and inoculation access periods (AAP and IAP respectively) for RRV were determined.


On 15 June 1998, a diplomatic conference in Rome will open a five-week session to remedy one of the long-standing gaps in the implementation system for international humanitarian law by adopting a treaty to establish a permanent international criminal court. Although the current effort within the United Nations to set up a permanent court began half a century ago with a proposal in 1947 by Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, the French judge on the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, it is not widely known that the first serious such proposal appears to have been made more than a century and a quarter ago by Gustave Moynier, one of the founders, and longtime President, of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He wrestled with many of the same problems which will face the drafters of the statute at the 1998 diplomatic conference and the strengths and weaknesses of his proposal still have relevance today. This short essay describes that proposal and its origins, reviews the reaction to it of his contemporaries and its impact on subsequent history and concludes with an assessment of the merits of Moynier's plan.


Policy Points Regulatory agencies may have limited evidence on the clinical benefits and harms of new drugs when deciding whether new therapeutic agents are allowed to enter the market and under which conditions, including whether approval is granted under special regulatory pathways and obligations to address knowledge gaps through postmarketing studies are imposed. In a matched comparison of marketing applications for cancer drugs of uncertain therapeutic value reviewed by both the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), we found frequent discordance between the two agencies on regulatory outcomes and the use of special regulatory pathways. Both agencies often granted regular approval, even when the other agency judged there to be substantial uncertainty about drug benefits and risks that needed to be resolved through additional studies in the postmarketing period. Postmarketing studies imposed by regulators under special approval pathways to address remaining questions of efficacy and safety may not be suited to deliver timely, confirmatory evidence due to shortcomings in study design and delays, raising questions over the suitability of the FDA's Accelerated Approval and the EMA's Conditional Marketing Authorization as tools for allowing early market access for cancer drugs while maintaining rigorous regulatory standards. Context Regulatory agencies are increasingly required to make market approval decisions for new drugs on the basis of limited clinical evidence, a situation commonly encountered in cancer. We aimed to investigate how regulators manage uncertainty in the benefit‐risk profiles of new cancer drugs by comparing decisions for the world's two largest regulatory bodies—the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA)—over a 5‐year period. Methods We systematically identified a set of cancer drug‐indication pairs for which data on efficacy and safety was less complete than that required for regular approval at time of market entry from 2009 to 2013, as determined by the FDA's use of Accelerated Approval (AA) or the EMA's use of Conditional Marketing Authorization (CMA) pathways, and matched these across the two agencies. Using publicly available information, we compared regulatory pathways and outcomes, final approved indications, and postmarketing obligations imposed by the agencies. Findings We identified 21 cancer drug‐indication pairs that received FDA AA, EMA CMA, or both. Although most applications relied on identical pivotal trials across the FDA and the EMA, regulatory pathways often differed; 57% of indications received either FDA AA or EMA CMA, and regular approval by the other agency. After approval, the EMA more often accepted single‐arm studies to confirm clinical benefit compared to the FDA (75% vs. 29% of indications), and the FDA more commonly requested randomized controlled trials (85% vs. 50%). Forty‐one percent of confirmatory trials after FDA AA were conducted in different populations than the approved indication, compared to 13% after EMA CMA. Both agencies relied primarily on surrogate measures of patient benefit for postmarketing obligations. After a median follow‐up of 7.25 years, 40% of FDA and 61% of EMA postmarketing obligations after AA and CMA, respectively, were delayed. Conclusions US and European regulators often deemed early and less complete evidence on benefit‐risk profiles of cancer drugs sufficient to grant regular approval, raising questions over regulatory standards for the approval of new medicines. Even when imposing confirmatory studies in the postmarketing period through special approval pathways, meaningful evidence may not materialize due to shortcomings in study design and delays in conducting required studies with due diligence.


Demographic change is transforming the EU population structure for the coming decades. One
challenge that society faces is to preserve social welfare when elderly persons comprise a larger
proportion of the total population. Allowing people to work beyond the current retirement age
may help slow the growth of the maintenance burden for welfare costs, and creating situations
where larger numbers of older employees can work longer and complete more working hours
can improve conditions for preserving and developing welfare. However, a prolonged working life
presupposes several conditions; one of these is that legal regulation of the labor market must support
employers' willingness to hire and retain older workers in employment. This article explores
employers' attitudes toward regulations in Swedish collective agreements—regulations which
are of particular importance if employers are to increase hiring and retention of older workers
in employment.


This document redefines how the explicit congestion notification (ECN)
field of the outer IP header of a tunnel should be constructed. It
brings all IP in IP tunnels (v4 or v6) into line with the way IPsec
tunnels now construct the ECN field. It includes a thorough analysis
of the reasoning for this change and the implications. It also gives
guidelines on the encapsulation of IP congestion notification by any
outer header, whether encapsulated in an IP tunnel or in a lower layer
header. Following these guidelines should help interworking, if the
IETF or other standards bodies specify any new encapsulation of
congestion notification.


Mercury is neurotoxic, and numerous studies have confirmed its ototoxic effect. However, the diagnosis and follow-up of mercury exposure require understanding the pathophysiology of the chemical substance. Based on a systematic literature review, this study aimed to demonstrate whether mercury is ototoxic and to analyze its mechanism of action on the peripheral and central auditory system, in order to contribute to the diagnosis and follow-up of exposure. This was a systematic review of studies published on the effects of mercury exposure on the auditory system. The full text of the studies and their methodological quality were analyzed. The review identified 108 studies published on the theme, of which 28 met the inclusion criteria. All the articles in the analysis showed that mercury exposure is ototoxic and produces peripheral and/or central damage. Acute and long-term exposure produces irreversible damage to the central auditory system. Biomarkers were unable to predict the relationship between degree of mercury poisoning and degree of lesion in the auditory system.


The most common eating disorders (EDs) according to DSM-5 are anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN) and binge eating disorder (BED). These disorders have received increasing attention in psychiatry due to rising prevalence and high morbidity and mortality. The diagnostic category "anorexia nervosa," introduced by Ernest-Charles Lasègue and William Gull in 1873, first appears a century later in a German textbook of psychiatry, authored by Gerd Huber in 1974. However, disordered eating behavior has been described and discussed in German psychiatric textbooks throughout the past 200 years. We reviewed content regarding eating disorder diagnoses but also descriptions of disordered eating behavior in general. As material, we carefully selected eighteen German-language textbooks of psychiatry across the period 1803–2017. Previously, in German psychiatry, disordered eating behaviors were seen as symptoms of depressive disorders, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, or as manifestations of historical diagnoses no longer used by the majority of psychiatrists such as neurasthenia, hypochondria and hysteria. Interestingly, 19th and early 20th century psychiatrists like Kraepelin, Bumke, Hoff, Bleuler, and Jaspers reported symptom clusters such as food refusal and vomiting under these outdated diagnostic categories, whereas nowadays they are listed as core criteria for specific eating disorder subtypes. A wide range of medical conditions such as endocrinopathies, intestinal or brain lesions were also cited as causes of abnormal food intake and body weight. An additional consideration in the delayed adoption of eating disorder diagnoses in German psychiatry is that people with EDs are commonly treated in the specialty discipline of psychosomatic medicine, introduced in Germany after World War II, rather than in psychiatry. Viewed from today's perspective, the classification of disorders associated with disordered eating is continuously evolving. Major depressive disorder, schizophrenia and physical diseases have been enduringly associated with abnormal eating behavior and are listed as important differential diagnoses of EDs in DSM-5. Moreover, there are overlaps regarding the neurobiological basis and psychological and psychopharmacological therapies applied to all of these disorders.


In this report the effects of using sonification when performing movements in 3D space are explored. User studies were performed where participants had to repeatedly move their hand toward a target. Three different sonification modes were tested where the fundamental frequency, sound level and sound rate were varied respectively depending on the distance to the target. The results show that there is no statistically significant performance increase for any sonification mode. There is however an indication that sonification increases the interaction speed for some users. The mode which provided the greatest average performance increase was when the sound level was varied. This mode gave a 7% average speed increase over the silent control mode. However, the sound level mode has some significant drawbacks, especially the very high base volume requirement, which might not make it the best suited sonification mode for all applications. In the general case we instead recommend using the sonification mode that varies the sound rate, which gave a slightly lower performance gain but can be played at a lower volume due to its binary nature.


Background: Informal caregivers, often family and friends, experience significant psychological and physical distress leading to reductions in health and quality of life (QOL). Mind-body interventions focused on caregivers are often limited and do not address multiple barriers, including caregivers ' economic, geographic, and time constraints. Translation of in-person, community-based interventions to Internet-based delivery may offer greater accessibility for caregivers, leading to increased adherence. Methods: Caring for Caregivers with Mind-Body implements a three-arm, pilot, randomized controlled trial to evaluate the feasibility of delivering a Qigong intervention (Eight Brocades) to cancer caregivers. A total of 54 cancer caregivers will be randomized into one of three 12-week programs: (1) community-based Qigong, (2) Internet-based Qigong, or (3) a self-care control group. Study-specific aims include (1) modify intervention content for online delivery, (2) evaluate the feasibility of recruiting and retaining cancer caregivers into a 12-week clinical trial, and (3) evaluate the feasibility of collecting and managing data, and the suitability of questionnaires for this population. Several outcomes will be assessed, including caregiver QOL, caregiver burden, caregiver distress, perceived social support, physical function, and cognitive function. A 6-month follow-up will also assess longer-term changes in QOL and psychosocial well-being. Discussion: Findings will be used to inform the design and conduct of a large-scale comparative effectiveness trial evaluating caregivers who received Qigong training delivered through community-based vs Internet-based programs. A finding that either or both programs are effective would inform care and options for caregivers.


Serendipity is a popular word that captures a rich
phenomenon with potentially far-reaching implications from a
personal to global level. Serendipity is associated with
revelations, discoveries, life events, and innovations, both big
and small, and the lack of consensus on its definition reflects
this breadth of meaning. Serendipity is defined in this research as
an unexpected experience prompted by an individual's valuable
interaction with ideas, information, objects, or phenomena. While
efforts are being made to facilitate serendipity in digital
environments (e.g., websites, databases, search engines), we know
very little about the complex interaction between the individual
and the environment and what actually facilitates serendipity. In
three phases, this thesis investigated how individual differences
and environmental factors influence work-related serendipity and
how serendipity may be facilitated in digital environments. Phase 1
explored serendipity through semi-structured interviews with 12
professionals and scholars. Based on findings from Phase 1, in
Phase 2 a serendipitous digital environment scale to measure how
well a digital environment supports serendipity was developed,
assessed, and honed though an expert review by eight researchers
and a web-based survey of 107 university students. Phase 3 employed
a web-based survey of 289 professionals and scholars. Through
exploratory factor analysis, the serendipitous digital environment
scale was refined and assessed. Using multivariate analyses,
relationships were explored between serendipity, the underlying
factors of the serendipitous digital environment scale, type of
digital environment, creative environment perceptions, locus of
control, extraversion, and openness to experience. My research
found that the type of digital environment influences the frequency
of serendipity, which in turn shares a relationship with three
factors of the serendipitous digital environment scale – enables
connections, trigger-rich, and leads to the unexpected.
Furthermore, results indicate that individuals' level of
extraversion influences perceptions of serendipity in general. This
research contributes to our knowledge of information seeking and
use through findings that confirm and augment previous models of
serendipity through the identification of what influences
serendipity. This research also underscores the potential to design
for serendipity in digital environments and provides a tool for
developers to assess the serendipitous nature of their
systems.


A high-density expanding recombining plasma is investigated for deposition of a-Si:H thin films. The deposition method allows nigh growth rates and it relies on separation of plasma production in a high-pressure thermal arc, and transport of lragments of injected SiH, monomer lo the substrate. Some characteristics of the plasma are discussed together with an explanation of the dominant chemical kinetics. which proceed mainly through heavy-panicle interactions. The deposition results indeed show very high growth rates from 2-30 nm s-' on areas of 30 cm2. The properties of the layers are characterized by measuring their refractive index (in the range 3.1-3.8) and bandgap (1.21.5 eV). Analysis of the oxygen content in the deposited films shows oxidation of the samples in air, which is probably associated with the microstructure of the layers


This paper is about creativity and innovation in the educational field. Through a literature review, we describe the results of two decades of research on creativity and innovation in the educational and organizational field, to underline what seemed to work and what did not, to enable these processes functioning effectively. In this literature review, a search of publications dealing with the issues of innovation and creativity and the links between these two issues has been made. We decided to put these studies in four theoretical, ex-post created, dimensions: organizational structures, individual characteristics, training methods and pedagogical practices and training content. The content of this article is based on one of the outputs of the European Commission funded project, named CLEAR (Creativity and innovation: pedagogical framework for the learning chain).


Perspective on the paper by Granerod et al (see page 805)

The paper by Granerod et al 1 shows how children seemed to have been "lost" when the Child Health Information Systems (CHISs) were interrogated to provide the routine immunisation statistics (COVER). This was at a time when the reports changed from being based on a resident population to being based on the primary care trust (PCT) responsible population, i.e. those children who were patients of the PCT's GPs, but not necessarily resident within the PCT's geographical boundaries.2 The United Kingdom has probably the most accurate and timely system in the world for monitoring immunisation uptake.3 Most other countries rely on either knowing the numbers of doses of vaccine administered or on representative surveys.4,5 It is of concern that this system was compromised, but the trend of improvement in accuracy reported by the authors is encouraging. However, currently (April 2006), 10 of the 31 PCTs in London are unable to produce any COVER statistics because they are in the process of installing new "interim" CHISs.6

What the authors do not mention is that the CHISs are also frequently used to generate appointments for vaccination. This is particularly so in areas such as inner London. …


We study the maximum speed of quantum computation and how it is affected by limitations on physical resources. We show how the resulting concepts generalize to a broader class of physical models of computation within dynamical systems and introduce a specific algebraic structure representing these speed limits. We derive a family of quantum speed limit results in resource-constrained quantum systems with pure states and a finite dimensional state space, by using a geometric method based on right invariant action functionals on SU(N). We show that when the action functional is bi-invariant, the minimum time for implementing any quantum gate using a potentially time-dependent Hamiltonian is equal to the minimum time when using a constant Hamiltonian, thus constant Hamiltonians are time optimal for these constraints. We give an explicit formula for the time in these cases, in terms of the resource constraint. We show how our method produces a rich family of speed limit results, of which the generalized Margolus–Levitin theorem and the Mandelstam–Tamm inequality are special cases. We discuss the broader context of geometric approaches to speed limits in physical computation, including the way geometric approaches to quantum speed limits are a model for physical speed limits to computation arising from a limited resource.


Abstract: We study the increasing use of stock options to compensate executives in US corporations. As with many technological innovations, the adoption curve exhibits a classic S-shaped pattern: the rate rises slowly at first, then there is a period of rapid acceleration, and finally it tails off as the saturation level is approached. Using a longitudinal data set of Frydman and Saks (2010) supplemented with financial reports compiled by the authors, we argue that the diffusion of options was initially given a jump-start by a change in the tax law, but thereafter it was propelled by a process in which firms learned from the experience of earlier adopters. The notion that options spread primarily through social conformity or 'jumping on the bandwagon' is not borne out by the data.


Mountainous areas in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images suffer severe geometric distortions caused by different look directions. Consequently, ground control point (GCP) extraction hardly obtains accurate results for aircraft positioning. Based on the digital elevation model (DEM) and polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data, we propose a method for extracting GCPs in mountainous areas by introducing the polarization orientation angle shift (POAS) to minimize geometric distortions. In this method, DEM data are used as the reference map by providing POASs at arbitrary look directions to make up for the look-direction sensitivity of POASs transformed from PolSAR data. The geometric distortions between POASs transformed from DEM and PolSAR data are effectively reduced by calculating the POASs from DEM data at the same look direction and look angles of the PolSAR data. In contrast to the SAR data, which have a large dynamic range, the values of POAS are limited to a small interval. Therefore, the illumination distortions induced by visualization can be reduced. Finally, the GCP extraction between the POAS images is conducted by bilateral filter scale-invariant feature transform. Experiments using various data at different look directions demonstrate that the proposed method obtains better-quality GCPs but less invalid keypoints than the method using only intensity images for mountainous areas.


Some software designers have recently turned for inspiration to the process of building design to improve development practices and increase software's usefulness and effectiveness. Architects' education revolves around the studio course, which promotes: project based work on complex and open ended problems; very rapid iteration of design solutions; frequent formal and informal critique; consideration of heterogeneous issues; the use of precedent and thinking about the whole; the creative use of constraints; and the central importance of design media. M. Kapor (1991) suggested that software practitioners needed to "rethink the fundamentals of how software is made" and proposed the architect's role in building design as a fruitful analogy for software professionals seeking to reform software practice. This analogy helps us focus on usefulness, usability, user needs and practices, and other technical and nontechnical aspects of good software design. It highlights concerns about people's lives and work practices and how people "inhabit" systems. Several authors have explored similarities and differences between software design and building design, including some who have pursued the software implications of architect Christopher Alexander's design patterns.


Drift tube chambers are commonly used in many experiments in High Energy Physics (HEP). This paper addresses the problem of particle track finding in a drift tube chamber. Although drift tubes have, in general, a high efficiency to detect the passage of particles, in a high radiation background some of the particle hits will be masked by background hits. Under the assumption of high tube efficiency, a novel track finding algorithm, denoted as the Drift Tube Hough Transform (DTHT) algorithm, is presented. The DTHT algorithm uses the possible explanations for a lack of particle hits as additional information, and takes into account all possible scenarios that may occur in the tubes. The DTHT is implemented with a novel extension of the Hough transform and employs a ``detect before estimate'' approach that first finds the track candidates and then estimates the track parameters. In order to evaluate the performance of the DTHT algorithm, the algorithm was applied to the Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) of the ATLAS experiment and tested using a muon test beam in a high radiation background. It is shown that the use of the additional information reduces the number of fake track rate significantly. A comparison between the DTHT algorithm and the currently best performed program in the ATLAS software, demonstrated that the DTHT algorithm can achieve higher efficiency while reducing the algorithm complexity.


An encounter of the mature immune system with Ag usually leads to an immune response. If Ag is administered with CD4- and CD8-specific mAbs, the outcome of the response can be tolerance. This form of tolerance is peripheral, Ag specific, and maintained lifelong, and is associated with the suppression of nontolerant cells by CD4 cells of the tolerant host. Here we demonstrate that the degree of suppression is dependent on the number of suppressor cells. A neutralizing anti-IL-4 Ab was partially able to inhibit suppression, indicating a role for IL-4 in the regulation of Th1 rejection responses.


Since their introduction, the use of antipsychotic drugs has been complicated by adverse effects. While the first generation of antipsychotic agents mainly caused motor side effects, the newer antipsychotic drugs are also associated with metabolic disturbance such as diabetes and obesity. The introduction of pharmacogenetics into antipsychotic treatment may be a promising way to improve both safety and effectiveness of therapy. The main objective of the first section of this thesis was to investigate pharmacodynamic polymorphisms as determinants of metabolic disturbances during treatment with atypical antipsychotic agents. The main objective of the second section was to investigate pharmacokinetic genetic polymorphisms as a determinant of the success rate in antipsychotic treatment and the consumption of psychiatric care. The results of the first section showed associations of the LEPR Q223R and LEP -2548 polymorphisms with obesity and dyslipidemia, dependent on other variables such as sex of the subjects, duration of treatment history and on variation in other genes (HTR2C). No convincing associations were found in a study investigating these genotypes with eating behaviour. In the second section, CYP2D6 and CYP2C19 were the two polymorphous enzymes that were investigated, because of the fact that these enzymes play an important role in the metabolism of psychotropic medication and the activity of these enzymes is to a large extent influenced by frequently occurring genetic polymorphisms. Patients were in order of increasing enzyme activity classified as poor metabolizers (PM), intermediate metabolizers (IM), extensive metabolizers (EM) and ultrarapid metabolizers (UM). An association was found of the CYP2D6 UM phenotype with length of hospitalization. Admission of patients with the CYP2D6 UM phenotype lasted twice as long (median 56 days) compared with admissions of patients with the CYP2D6 EM (median 27 days) or CYP2D6 IM phenotype (median 22 days). The CYP2C19 polymorphisms were also associated with the length of hospitalization in patients who were using an antidepressant or antipsychotic drug. CYP2D6 phenotypes were also investigated as a determinant of the success of antipsychotic treatment in a case control design, considering the use of clozapine as a proxy for non response to antipsychotic drugs of first choice. Since clozapine is prescribed only when at least two previous drug therapies were clinically unsuccessful, patients who were treated with clozapine were classified as "non-responders". The results of this study suggested that CYP2D6 phenotype may not be a major determining factor for patients to be switched to clozapine treatment, however, a trend was observed, suggesting an inverse association between CYP2D6 activity and non-reponse. In addition the results suggest that further research is needed with a focus on the clinical consequences of the CYP2D6 ultra rapid metabolizer phenotype. In the general discussion, the findings of the thesis are placed in a broader perspective, focusing on the differences of the development of pharmacogenetic tools between pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics, the relevance of including non-genetic physiological determinants in pharmacogenetic research and on ethical considerations in biobanks for pharmacogenetic research. Finally, some suggestions are done on future perspectives and implications for professional roles of pharmacists, clinical chemists and physicians.


Fish were collected from localities in the Sydney region, New South Wales, Australia, from March 1991 to September 1993. Achoerodus viridis is a benthic carnivore and consumes a wide variety of prey items. Size-specific differences in diet were found. The diet of recruits (17-26 mm SL) collected in seagrass environments was dominated by tanaids, whereas that of rocky reef recruits was dominated by harpacticoid copepods. The diet of rocky reef fish then shifted to gammarid amphipods and other crustaceans (fish 50-150 mm SL) and to mussels and urchins (fish >300 mm SL). Juvenile fish on rocky reefs (450 mm SL) foraged in shallow fringing habitat, whereas adult fish (>200 mm SL) foraged in deeper turf and barrens habitats, reflecting the depth distribution of the species. Feeding rate of larger fish tended to be less than that of smaller fish. Variations in diet and feeding rate were also detected over the year but the patterns were not consistent between years. Among sites, there were differences in diet but these were not related to the position of sites inside an estuary or on the open coast. The results of this study provide information on the feeding ecology of a large labrid fish; this information will aid in understanding the population dynamics of the species.


Abstract The world's sandy beaches, already eroding at rates of concern to coastal managers, are facing a further threat based on predictions of global climate change. Although mean sea level rise has long been recognized as a likely consequence of climate change, it has been suggested that there may also be a change in ocean storminess—that is, the intensity and frequency of storm events. While the effects of a change in wave height can be handled with existing analysis methods, the effects of a change in the rate at which storms arrive are less obvious and harder to predict. As a prelude to model studies investigating coastal response to changes in storminess, it is necessary to have a reliable method for generating storm and wave histories that contain waves that not only conform to known distributions of height and period but that also arrive at the proper rate in time. In the current work a statistical model of the arrival rate of storms and the wave heights within those storms has been developed. Storminess can be modelled by describing interstorm period, storm duration, the average wave height, and the temporal distribution of storm significant wave heights using methods that have been applied in rainfall modelling. The model has been verified against existing wave climate parameters of wave exceedence and wave persistence, and it has been shown to reproduce these statistics reliably.


In this work, a parametric model for a frequency-up-conversion piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) was developed based on the Galerkin method. The PEH is composed of a piezoelectric bimorph and a stopper, which was subjected to a harmonic excitation. Although backward coupling results in a structure dynamic damping, models with neglected backward coupling were often adopted to estimate the output power of a piezoelectric energy harvester. The purpose of this work is to examine the effect of backward coupling on the dynamic response and the output power generation for a frequency-up-conversion PEH. With the same base excitations, we compared the dynamics and output energies of two cases: (1) neglecting the backward coupling effect (BCE) in the model and (2) including the BCE in the model. To obtain the optimum gap with maximum output power, we studied the relationship between the output power and the gap of the steady-state solutions. From the analytical results, it was found that the BCE can be neglected as long as there is no impact or the output power is small. However, once impacts get involved, the piezoelectric backward effect dominates the total damping due to small mechanical damping which is true for most PEH. The backward coupling will significantly diminish both the vibration and output power. Therefore, if the BCE is neglected in an impact-driven frequency-up-conversion PEH, the simplified model will exaggerate the output power.


This paper outlines the benefits of combining wide-area monitoring and control systems with demand-side management applications for more effective network utilization. Besides a general overview of these two powerful technologies in combination, a technical architecture, and economic benefit in the context of power system operation is encouraged. A case, where a wind park's feed into a neighboring system and wind power generation's non-deterministic behavior caused expensive spot market energy purchase, demonstrates the impact of the proposed wide-area measurement system with ripple control for demand-side management. This example underlines application areas for some typical network configurations with decentralized power generation or dedicated corridors to neighbored systems. It further shows the potential of the proposed load-control scheme with respect to economic, ecological, and reliable power system operation against the background of increasingly decentralized and renewable generation units