Social Policy in China: Development and Well-being, by Chak Kwan Chan, King Lun Ngok and David Phillips. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2008. xiv + 234 pp. £60.00 (hardcover), £22.99 (paperback). China's economic achievements of the past three decades have been remarkable. To accelerate productivity, the Chinese leaders changed the economic base of China's socialist system from state-owned enterprises (SOE) and people's communes to modern business corporations and family-based farming. By introducing the Household Responsibility System in the countryside, restructuring SOEs and allowing private business activities, however, they also destroyed almost completely the institutional and financial bases of China's previous welfare system, which was provided through work units and communes and centered on principles of equality and all-round supply. To establish a new welfare system compatible with a market economy, the Chinese government had to implement numerous reforms. This book explores these reforms in detail in the five key policy areas of social security (old age pension, Minimum Standard of Living Scheme and support for the poor), labor (active employment policy and unemployment insurance), health, education and housing. This wide-ranging concept of social security goes beyond financial assistance, but it does not discuss occupational injuries, although mining accidents especially have attracted much attention elsewhere. The authors do not limit human beings to their existence as economic actors. Each of the key areas is examined using a human well-being framework comprising eight dimensions: physical as well as psychological well-being, social integration, fulfillment of caring duties of parents towards children, human learning and development, self-determination and participation, equal value, and just polity. This framework, adapted from Chan and Bowpitt, uses human dignity to evaluate the performance of state welfare. It enables the authors to provide not only factual information on policies but also an in-depth understanding of the impact of welfare changes on the quality of life of the Chinese people. The framework is explained in Part 1 of the book, which also contains short overviews of social policy in the context of economic reforms and the making of social policy in China. Part 2 consists of five chapters exploring the key policy areas. Each chapter starts with a brief review of the relevant welfare policy before the economic reforms, followed by an overview of policy changes in the reform era and an examination of the impact of reforms on human well-being. The third and final part of the book systematically summarizes achievements and weaknesses in each policy area, presenting the results in the form of texts and well-arranged tables. The examination clearly reveals the abysmal gap between China's economic and social development. By basing its reform policies on decentralization and marketization, the Chinese government created a highly divisive and discriminatory welfare system, leaving many disadvantaged groups unprotected. …


This study explores domestic inter-regional merger flows. Theoretical considerations based on monitoring are developed. The empirical part of the study is based on the comprehensive public data on domestic mergers and acquisitions that is matched to the micro-level data sources maintained by Statistics Finland in order to obtain several variables that help to characterize the companies involved. The Finnish evidence reveals that geographical closeness matters a great deal for inter-regional merger flows. This means that a great number of domestic mergers occur within narrowly defined regions. Domestic merger flows substantially reinforce the core-periphery dimension. The most important finding from matched data is that the strong ability by an acquiring company to monitor the target (measured by the knowledge embodied in human capital) is able to support mergers that occur across distant locations, other things being equal. Geographical closeness and proximity across industries are not related, based on the Finnish evidence.


AIMS
The aim of this study was to detect and characterize the presence of metallo-beta-lactamase (MBL) production in multidrug resistant (MDR) P. aeruginosa collected from clinical samples in a tertiary care hospital.

METHODS AND MATERIALS
A total of 67 non-repetitive isolates of MDR P. aeruginosa recovered from various clinical specimens were screened for MBL production by IPM/MEM-EDTA combined disc test. Polymerase chain reaction was performed on all isolates using bla(IMP) and bla(VIM) consensus primers to characterize them genotypically.

RESULTS
Among 67 P. aeruginosa isolates, 62.7% (42/67) and 70.1% (47/67) were resistant to imipenem and meropenem respectively and 47 (70.1%) were found to be MBL producers. Among this 47 MBL-producing isolates, 41 (61.1%) strains carried the bla(VIM) gene and 2 (3%) strains carried the bla(IMP) gene. Three strains were phenotypically negative but positive genotypically for bla(VIM) gene. One strain was resistant to both imipenem and meropenem but did not show phenotypic positivity.

CONCLUSION
This study confirms the dissemination of bla(VIM) genes among MDR Pseudomonas aeruginosa and hence it is indispensible to identify and aptly control the threat of horizontal and vertical transfer.


Presents an innovative approach used by one company to integrate its ISO 9000‐certified management system with a recognised TQM framework (the Baldrige model). The company concerned developed its ISO 9000 system to address all elements of the Baldrige criteria. Of particular note is its process improvement approach that prioritises improvement projects based on their expected impact on the company's Baldrige score. This approach supported by an online Lotus Notes system helps the company to manage over 200 projects, covering different business units, in a systematic, fact‐based way. All projects (with the exception of some strategic projects) pass through this system and therefore this system provides one of the key methods with which the company continuously improves and moves closer to fully satisfying its stakeholders' needs. A detailed description of this process improvement approach is provided including a number of key measures reporting on the effectiveness of the system.


Background: Peripheral nervous system damages reverse as retrograde to alpha neuron cell bodies and cause spinal degeneration. The fact that herbs, due to their antioxidant properties, have an important role in viability and reproduction of neurons has led to the application of their extracts. Hence, this study was done to determine the neuro-protective effects of the hydroalcoholic extract of Nigella sativa on alpha-motoneurons degeneration after sciatic nerve injury in rats. Materials and Methods: In this experimental study, 24 male Wistar rats with average bodyweight of 250-300gr were divided into four groups of six: Control, compression, A (compression+hydroalcoholic extract 50mg/kg), and B (compression+hydroalcoholic extract 75mg/kg). In compression and treatment groups, the right leg sciatic nerve was subjected to compression (30seconds). In treatment groups, the extract was injected intraperitoneally two times after compression. After 28 days, lumbar segments of spinal cord, L2-L4, were sampled through perfusion method. After going through tissue passage stages, they were cut in serial sections (7μ) and stained with toluidine blue. Then the density of alpha motoneurons of the spinal cord ventral horn was measured by dissector method. Results: Neuronal density showed a significant difference between the compression and control groups (p<0.05). Also, in treatment groups A and B, it had a significant increase compared to the compression group (p<0.05). Conclusion: The results indicated that the hydroalcoholic extract of Nigella sativa has neuroprotective effects and the increase in neuronal density is relevant to the amount of extract used.


Heteroepitaxial growth of SiC on n-Si(111) substrates is performed by a low pressure chemical vapor deposition process. The effects of different carbonized temperature and carbonized time on the crystalline quality and the residual strain of 3C-SiC films are discussed. The results show that the residual strain is obviously reduced and the crystalline quality is greatly improved at the best carbonized temperature of 1000°C and the carbonized time of 5 min. Under these optimized carbonization conditions, thick epitaxial films of about 15 μm with good crystalline quality and low residual strain can be obtained.


Summary • In a free-air CO 2 enrichment (FACE) study, above-ground growth of Liquidambar styraciflua (sweetgum) trees was measured in a closed-canopy stand to test hypotheses about long-term effects of rising [CO 2 ] in a deciduous forest. • Allometric relationships were established between above-ground dry mass and basal area, height, taper and wood density for all trees in the 314-m 2 plots. Leaf area index was calculated from leaf litter mass. • In the first year of exposure, elevated [CO 2 ] stimulated stand-level aboveground dry matter increment by 33%, but in the second year the growth stimulation was reduced to 15% and was no longer statistically significant. Leaf area index was not affected by CO 2 enrichment in either year. • These results indicate that large trees that are no longer in an exponential growth phase retain the capacity to respond to elevated [CO 2 ]. The combined 2-yr response of a 24% increase in growth per unit leaf area is consistent with predictions from earlier studies. A longer-term data set is needed to resolve the reason for different responses in the 2 years.


Epidemiological studies suggest a negative association between prostate cancer risk and dietary intake of cruciferous vegetables. These vegetables have a characteristic sulphur metabolism, delivering specialised compounds including glucosinolates, such as glucoraphanin, and S-methyl cysteine sulfoxide (SMCSO). An interim analysis of ongoing clinical trials at Quadram Institute Bioscience suggested an increase in inorganic sulphate, adenosine 5'-diphosphate (ADP) and potential antioxidant capacity of prostate tissue following broccoli consumption.

Sulforaphane, a hydrolytic product of glucoraphanin, influences multiple pathways relevant to prostate cancer prevention. Furthermore, degradation of SMCSO produces reactive intermediates, which induce apoptosis in prostate cancer cells, and ultimately yields high proportions of inorganic sulphate in human metabolism. Sulphate is likely to drive synthesis of phosphoadenosine 5'-phosphosulphate. Adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP) fuels this process, producing ADP and phosphate. As cancerous cells are unable to adjust their metabolism, depleting ATP by diet could prove an effective strategy for cancer prevention.

A high-dose, randomised, parallel-unblinded broccoli-intervention study was carried out in men awaiting trans-perineal prostate biopsies. Global metabolomic and targeted metabolite analyses were undertaken on prostate, adipose and urine samples to test the biological availability and activity of sulphur-containing metabolites from the study diet. In vitro experiments were undertaken to investigate the effects of sulforaphane and SMCSO on real-time prostate bioenergetics and redox status of proteins relevant to prostate cancer. S

MCSO was present at significantly higher levels (p<0.01) in both the urine and prostates of men receiving a broccoli-enriched diet. Whereas sulforaphane and its conjugates were undetectable in tissue. Levels of ATP and sulphate were not different between study groups. At physiological concentrations neither sulforaphane nor SMCSO affected mitochondrial function or redox status in vitro.

SMCSO accumulation in tissue after broccoli consumption may mediate the putative effects of cruciferous vegetables towards prostate cancer prevention through its degradation to highly-reactive intermediate products.


Decline in the desire to have children is a common problem in the developed world, and it is a challenge in post-soviet countries, including Hungary. Changing lifestyles, perceptions and financial stress are the underlying reasons. The Czech, Slovakian, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and French government interventions are analysed with focus on family subsidies and fiscal policies, in comparison to the decisions taken by the Hungarian government after 2010. Research is built on the assumption that child benefits (family allowances and housing subsidies) increase the willingness to have children.


As of September 11, 2022, 57 669 reports of monkeypox infection raised global concern. Previous vaccinia virus vaccination can protect from monkeypox. However, after smallpox eradication, immunization against that was stopped. Indeed, therapeutic options following the disease onset are of great value. This study aimed to review the available evidence on virology and treatment approaches for monkeypox and provide guidance for patient care and future studies. Since no randomized clinical trials were ever performed, we reviewed monkeypox animal model studies and clinical trials on the safety and pharmacokinetics of available medications. Brincidofovir and tecovirimat were the most studied medications that got approval for smallpox treatment according to the Animal Rule. Due to the conserved virology among Orthopoxviruses, available medications might also be effective against monkeypox. However, tecovirimat has the strongest evidence to be effective and safe for monkeypox treatment, and if there is a choice between the two drugs, tecovirimat has shown more promise so far. The risk of resistance should be considered in patients who failed to respond to tecovirimat. Hence, the target‐based design of novel antivirals will enhance the availability and spectrum of effective anti‐Orthopoxvirus agents.


With increasing recognition of the importance of technological innovations in economic development, scholarship on innovation management - seeking to understand the context, process and management of technological innovations, as distinct from their purely scientific, engineering and technical aspects - has been steadily rising as well. This field of research has been instrumental in discovering important concepts that have subsequently informed innovation management in industry, public R&D and academia. In the past two decades, India has also significantly advanced the pace of technological innovations, as evident from patents filed out of the country. However, there is little understanding of whether research on innovation management in the country has also witnessed a similar trend. The present article seeks to address this gap. We looked at the abstracts and keywords of 58 articles related to technology and innovations in India published in 21 journals during the period 1991-2013. We conclude that the trend is not very encouraging. We discuss its implications and offer suggestions for future research.


There are many techniques have been used in the surgical treatment of prostatitis, prostatic abscesses and prostatic cysts. Partial or complete prostatectomy, marsupialization, or debridement and drainage have all been advocated; unfortunately all of these techniques are associated with complications such as incontinence, cyst or abscess recurrence, etc. More recently, prostatic omentalization has been described. In this procedure, after opening and draining any cystic cavities or abscesses within the prostate, a portion of the omentum is passed through the prostate by blunt dissection. This improves the vascular supply to the affected tissue and prevents re-formation of a closed cystic/abscess cavity. It is very effective in preventing recurrence of disease. In this paper, we will describe omentalization of the prostate.


OBJECTIVE
This study aimed to investigate the significance of parotid gland invasion in predicting distant metastasis of adenoid cystic carcinoma in the external auditory canal.

STUDY DESIGN
Single-institution retrospective cohort study.

METHODS
A retrospective review of patients with adenoid cystic carcinoma of the external auditory canal who underwent surgery was performed. Information on patient demographics, parotid gland invasion, tumor stage, perineural invasion, lymphovascular invasion, and follow-up data were collected and analyzed.

RESULTS
One hundred twenty-nine patients were identified for review. Parotid gland invasion was noted in 45 patients (34.9%). Parotid gland invasion was significantly associated with tumor stage, perineural invasion, distant metastasis, and postoperative adjuvant therapy. Distant metastasis was noted in 30 patients (23.3%). Multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis identified parotid gland invasion as an independent risk factor for predicting distant metastasis. The 5-year distant metastasis-free survival rate was 83.6% for patients without parotid gland invasion and 61.8% for patients with parotid gland invasion (p = 0.010).

CONCLUSIONS
The parotid gland invasion rate is relatively high in adenoid cystic carcinoma of the external auditory canal and is significantly related to tumor stage. Parotid gland invasion is associated with worse distant metastasis-free survival.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE
4 Laryngoscope, 2023.


Abstratct. Phytoplankton growth and elemental composition are influenced by a number of factors such as photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and nutrient availability. However, little is known about the influence of solar ultraviolet radiation (UVR) and interactions with nutrients on algal growth processes in situ. We tested the effects of solar radiation and phosphorus supply on algal growth kinetics and elemental composition in two boreal lakes (northwestern Ontario, Canada) during summer 1999. Growth bioassays (at five phosphorus concentrations) assessed changes in algal growth and elemental composition exposed to (1) ultraviolet A [UVA], ultraviolet B [UVB], and photosynthetically active radiation [PAR], (2) UVA and PAR, and (3) PAR only. Growth rates, calculated from changes in seston carbon and chlorophyll, responded strongly to both P and UVR. Results indicated that phytoplankton growth was co-regulated by P limitation and UVR suppression, with highest growth rates found in high P, low UVR treatments. Phytoplankton exposed to both UVA and UVB generally grew more slowly than those exposed to PAR only, even at high P levels. UVB and UVA reduced maximum growth rates by 8-66% and 1 1-21 %, respectively. Phytoplankton growth was more strongly affected by UVB in spring than later in summer, possibly due to shifts in the dominant species present. Manipulations of light and P supply both significantly affected seston C:P ratios. UVR reduced sestonic C:P. Such changes in growth rates and C:P ratios from UVR exposure may have important implications for pelagic food web dynamics.


A single exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) chart is effectively used to monitor the process mean and/or variance simultaneously. An EWMA-semicircle (EWMA-SC) chart designed from the economic-statistical perspective is proposed, which incorporates Taguchi's quadratic loss function into Lorenzen and Vance's cost model. Moreover, economic-statistical performance and the effect on process capability index are compared to those with sum of square EWMA (SS-EWMA) and maximum EWMA (MaxEWMA) charts. The optimal decision variables - namely, sample size n, sampling interval time h, control limit width L and smoothing constant λ - are obtained by minimising the expected cost function. Via simulations, the EWMA-SC chart is found to incur the smallest expected cost when a process mean and variance simultaneously shift. However, the MaxEWMA chart incurs the lowest cost of defective products when a process means shifts on its own. [Received: 1 May 2017; Revised: 22 August 2018; Accepted: 3 January 2019]


When dietary unsaturated fatty acids (UFAs) are present, Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells down‐regulate expression of the gene OLE1, which encodes the enzyme Δ9 desaturase, responsible for all endogenous production of UFAs. A screen was designed to isolate mutants defective in recognition of the presence of UFAs, and subsequent transcriptional regulation of the Δ9‐desaturase. Using a reporter gene construct controlled by the OLE1 promoter, several mutants were identified and one mutant, KH2, was chosen for additional characterization. The mutation that renders KH2 incapable of molecular response to UFAs is a recessive trait due to a single mutation, we call nro1 (no regulation of OLE1). KH2 does perform normal post‐transcriptional regulation of the desaturase, indicating its effect is limited to transcriptional regulation. In order to identify the gene responsible for this phenotype, a yeast genomic library was transformed into the nro1 mutant, and plasmids that returned the mutant to wild type phenotype were chosen for further evaluation. These plasmids may contain the gene NRO1, encoding the protein responsible for the sensing of exogenous UFAs. Supported by a Walker‐Barr Summer Research Scholar Award from Hope College Biology Department


In this paper, we study the impact of selection methods in the context of on-line on-board distributed evolutionary algorithms. We propose a variant of the mEDEA algorithm in which we add a selection operator, and we apply it in a taskdriven scenario. We evaluate four selection methods that induce different intensity of selection pressure in a multi-robot navigation with obstacle avoidance task and a collective foraging task. Experiments show that a small intensity of selection pressure is sufficient to rapidly obtain good performances on the tasks at hand. We introduce different measures to compare the selection methods, and show that the higher the selection pressure, the better the performances obtained, especially for the more challenging food foraging task.


Engineering design applications require the support of long transactions in cooperative environments The problem of the existing copy/update/merge approaches is that the partial effects of a committed transaction may be not part of the merged version. The paper introduces a new cooperative transaction model, which allows updates to be progressively notified or propagated into other transactions accessing the same object. To support incremental update propagation and notification, the authors use the term dynamic dependency to define the intertransaction dependency relationships among all the objects checked out from the public database. Consistency in multiple copies of the same object is achieved by a two-phase delta-merge protocol. The model provides a synchronization of cooperative updates performed in several workspaces without using locking mechanisms.


Transcription in vitro by the RNA polymerase of infectious haematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV), a salmonid rhabdovirus, was investigated using different reaction conditions to maximize RNA synthesis. The use of HEPES buffer rather than Tris buffer, and the addition of S-adenosyl-L-methionine to the reactions resulted in a sixfold increase in RNA synthetic activity to 6400 pmol UMP incorporated/mg viral protein/hour. The RNA transcripts produced in this system contained polyadenylated species which co-migrated with IHNV mRNA species 2, 3, 4 and 5 from IHNV-infected cells. The transcripts were shown to be functional mRNA species by their ability to direct the synthesis of viral proteins in vitro.


Abstract: The widespread use of computer-based risk models in the financial industry during the last two decades enabled the marketing of more complex financial products to consumers, the growth of securitization and derivatives, and the development of sophisticated risk-management strategies by financial institutions. Over this same period, regulators increasingly delegated or outsourced vast responsibility for regulating risk in both consumer finance and financial markets to these privately owned industry models. Proprietary risk models of financial institutions thus came to serve as a "new financial code" that regulated transfers of risk among consumers, financial institutions, and investors. The spectacular failure of financial-industry risk models in the current worldwide financial crisis underscores the dangers of regulatory outsourcing to the new financial code. This Article explains how financial institutions used the "new financial code" to shift, spread, and price financial risk using the template of the stages of securitization of consumer-credit products, hedging through credit default swaps, and overall portfolio management. This Article then examines several explanations for the failures of risk models, which contributed to the current crisis, including flaws in the design of risk models and agency costs associated with those models. It also outlines several lessons for regulatory outsourcing from the current crisis, including the following: * Bank regulators should scrap those provisions of Basel II that allow certain banks to set their own capital requirements according to their internal risk models; * Regulators should promote "open source" in code (or the models) used to market financial products to consumers, price securitizations and derivatives, and manage financial-institution risk; and * The failure of risk models used to price securitizations and derivatives reveals some of the comparative advantages of equity securities in spreading risk. INTRODUCTION The revolution in quantitative finance that occurred over the last two decades produced models that enabled the rapid growth of securitization and derivatives.1 This Article demonstrates that financial regulators delegated or outsourced to these computer-based risk models the responsibility of regulating a wide range of risk transfers in the economy - from consumer finance to global financial markets. These risk models failed spectacularly in the global financial crisis that started in the subprime mortgage market, and this outsourcing of regulation exacerbated the crisis. To understand the crisis, the failure of risk models, and the dangers of regulatory outsourcing, it is helpful to sketch out the system by which mortgages are connected to asset-backed securities, derivatives, and financial risk to global financial institutions.2 Securitization uses the future payment streams from mortgages and other credit products to create securities that are sold to investors. These investors not only acquire the right to these payment streams, but also assume a portion of the financial risk that borrowers will not make payment on the underlying mortgages when due; securitization thus carves up the risk associated with mortgages and other securitized assets into slices, which are then spread among investors.3 Those investors could then use credit derivatives and other derivatives to offload parts of this risk to counterparties in exchange for paying premiums to those counterparties.4 Securitization and derivatives created a system for transferring risk and spreading it among those investors who could theoretically bear risk most efficiently.5 Each part of this risk-transfer system was enabled by private, computer-based industry risk models that were built using innovations in quantitative finance. These models include the following: * Data-mining and credit-scoring software used by financial institutions to market mortgages, loans and other financial products to individual consumers (this marketing includes not only setting the price of those products to match the risk of individual borrowers, but also creating complex features in those products that can be tailored for certain categories of consumers);6 * Pricing models used by financial institutions to structure and price the securitization of those consumer financial products;7 * Models used by credit-rating agencies to assign ratings to the asset-backed securities issued in securitizations;8 * Models used to price those derivatives that further hedge the risks of asset-backed securities;9 and * Models used by financial institutions to manage their investment portfolios and set their overall risk-management policies. …


An assessment of the genetic diversity among peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) cultivars released in the USA would be useful to scientists working with this crop. This study was conducted to determine contributions from ancestral lines and coefficients of parentage (r) for peanut cultivars released in the USA. Pedigrees were constructed and examined to determine relative contributions of ancestral lines. In addition, r values were calculated for 820 pairwise combinations of 41 cultivars and mean genetic contributions of the ancestral lines were determined. Among runner market-type peanuts, 'Dixie Giant' was a germplasm source in all pedigrees, 'Small White Spanish-l' occurred in over 90% of the pedigrees, and the two lines contributed nearly 50% of the germplasm of runner cultivars. The r values among seven of the eight runner eultivars developed since the release of 'Florunner' in 1969 averaged 0.32. Inclusion of the eighth cultivar, Tifrun, which is only distantly related to the other seven, lowered the r value to 0.20. The Virginia market-type cultivars had a more diverse genetic background, with only Dixie Giant and 'Jenkins Jumbo' contributing more than 10% of the germplasm. The r values for the Virginia cultivars released since 1969 averaged 0.21. The average r value for crosses between runner and Virginia market types was 0.16, while Spanish cultivars, with the exception of Tifspan, were unrelated to either runner or Virginia cultivars. The coefficients of parentage can be used by researchers conducting breeding, genetic, or physiological studies where knowledge of the genetic diversity of peanut cultivar backgrounds is important.


Addressing a critical need for effective vocabulary practices in early childhood classrooms, we conducted a design experiment to achieve three goals: (1) developing a comprehensive model for early childhood vocabulary instruction, (2) examining the effectiveness of this model, and (3) discerning the contextual conditions that hinder or facilitate its implementation. Guided by sociocultural theory and the design experiment framework, our study was conducted in one Head Start classroom and included a control class for comparison. The resulting model extends the existing instruction in several ways and effectively increases children's target vocabulary knowledge. Contextual constraints were identified (high teacher turnover, low teacher buy-in, and rigid teacher roles) and addressed by working with the teachers towards developing a community of practice.


While Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) has emerged as a focus of attention in the context of corporate governance in recent years, the implementation of ERM by Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) has garnered relatively little attention from lawmakers and regulators. To rectify this gap, this chapter explores two important ERM issues applicable to SMEs. First, we examine the integration of ERM principles in the operations of SMEs, specifically including the implementation of legal risk management, and describe the structural and attitudinal factors that hinder its effectiveness. Second, we examine ERM-oriented corporate governance regulations, and consider their potential usefulness to SMEs. Drawing from our analysis of these two issues, we suggest ways in which SMEs can more effectively implement and use ERM.


A previously published multiscale model for early-age cement-based materials [Pichler, et al.2007. "A multiscale micromechanics model for the autogenous-shrinkage deformation of early-age cement-based materials." Engineering Fracture Mechanics, 74, 34-58] is extended towards upscaling of viscoelastic properties. The obtained model links macroscopic behavior, i.e., creep compliance of concrete samples, to the composition of concrete at finer scales and the (supposedly) intrinsic material properties of distinct phases at these scales. Whereas finer-scale composition (and its history) is accessible through recently developed hydration models for the main clinker phases in ordinary Portland cement (OPC), viscous properties of the creep active constituent at finer scales, i.e., calcium-silicate-hydrates (CSH) are identified from macroscopic creep tests using the proposed multiscale model. The proposed multiscale model is assessed by different concrete creep tests reported in the open literature. Moreover, the model prediction is compared to a commonly used macroscopic creep model, the so-called B3 model.


Background: The synaptic protein neuroligin-2 is present on the pancreatic β cell surface and affects insulin secretion. Results: Insulin secretion increases when β cells contact adjacent cells expressing neuroligin; soluble neuroligin inhibits secretion. Conclusion: Clustered neuroligin-2 enhances insulin secretion in a transcellular manner, likely by promoting secretory microdomain formation. Significance: Transcellular protein-protein interactions paralleling the transsynaptic interactions that drive synapse formation may guide β cell functional maturation. Normal glucose-stimulated insulin secretion is dependent on interactions between neighboring β cells. Elucidation of the reasons why this cell-to-cell contact is essential will probably yield critical insights into β cell maturation and function. In the central nervous system, transcellular protein interactions (i.e. interactions between proteins on the surfaces of different cells) involving neuroligins are key mediators of synaptic functional development. We previously demonstrated that β cells express neuroligin-2 and that insulin secretion is affected by changes in neuroligin-2 expression. Here we show that the effect of neuroligin-2 on insulin secretion is mediated by transcellular interactions. Neuroligin-2 binds with nanomolar affinity to a partner on the β cell surface and contributes to the increased insulin secretion brought about by β cell-to-β cell contact. It does so in a manner seemingly independent of interactions with neurexin, a known binding partner. As in the synapse, transcellular neuroligin-2 interactions enhance the functioning of the submembrane exocytic machinery. Also, as in the synapse, neuroligin-2 clustering is important. Neuroligin-2 in soluble form, rather than presented on a cell surface, decreases insulin secretion by rat islets and MIN-6 cells, most likely by interfering with endogenous neuroligin interactions. Prolonged contact with neuroligin-2-expressing cells increases INS-1 β cell proliferation and insulin content. These results extend the known parallels between the synaptic and β cell secretory machineries to extracellular interactions. Neuroligin-2 interactions are one of the few transcellular protein interactions thus far identified that directly enhance insulin secretion. Together, these results indicate a significant role for transcellular neuroligin-2 interactions in the establishment of β cell function.


We present here a novel method to assess coastal vulnerability to tsunami based on GIS (Geographical Information System), ASTER imagery (Advanced Spaceborn Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) and SRTM-3 elevation model (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission-3). We developed this method within the CRATER project (Coastal Risk Analysis for Tsunamis and Environmental Remediation) and applied it on the whole western coast of Thailand. As result, we generated a set of vectorial vulnerability maps with a geometrical resolution of 90m (scale 1:450 000). This approach provides a low-cost and quick tool to analyse extended coastal tracts, and prioritize investments for prevention measures or for further high-resolution analysis.


455 beautiful color photographs and engaging text showcase mens belt buckles from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Military, police, fire service, western, and youth group buckles are well represented, along with intriguing multi-function buckles containing cigarette lighters, knives, and guns. Masculine lifestyles are reflected through these personalized buckles, ranging from buckles used by scouting organizations worldwide and bronc riding champions to those employed by the Highway Patrol and Secret Service. Collecting tips and values are included. This is an excellent reference for the dealer and collector, and an inspirational guide for clothing and jewelry designers and fashion historians.


Typically, aircraft roll control is accomplished by simultaneously moving ailerons together and in opposite angular direction. Nevertheless, throughout the flying range, more particularly in cruise conditions, it is highly desirable to increase aircraft aerodynamic performance by a differential control of the lift distribution over the wing span. Recent European design studies concerning morphing devices, such as the Clean Sky multifunctional flap or the SARISTU trailing edge device, have largely proved the potential of novel aircraft structural systems, aiming at adaptively modify the wing structural shape to reduce the induced drag penalty associated with off-design flight conditions. In particular, wing camber variation was achieved through adaptive wing trailing edges because of the highly associated L/D ratio enhancements. Such projects proved also the aileron region to be the one where higher cruise benefits could be achieved by local camber variations. Following the enthusiastic results, achieved with the Adaptive trailing edge device, a new challenge has been faced up. The former configuration did in fact refer to the standard position of the flap, leaving apart the aileron region. There are several reasons to leave that part unchanged. The most relevant may be associated to the fact that the aileron has a critical function in the aircraft flight and its collapse could lead to dramatic failures. The investigated configuration would have lied over an extended region of the aileron instead than a limited part, as in the case of a flap, characterised by a large chord. As a direct consequence, the available volumes are reduced and the installation of integrated actuators could have been a problem. Finally, the aeroelastic response of the device is critical as well and its strong modification should have been deeply studied. On the other hand, the studies on the ATED showed as the region, farer from the root, gave a more significant contribution to the aerodynamic behaviour. So, it was really interesting to investigate the possibility to extend the adaptive trailing edge technology to the aileron region. The occasion was given by a joint Italian/Canadian research activity fostered by the Consortium de Recherche et d'Innovation en Aerospatiale au Quebec (CRIAQ). The activity aimed at realising a full-scale demonstrator of a wing section in the tip region for investigating the capability of wing box and trailing edge morphing device, to ensure a certain level of flow control and aerodynamic performance variations, respectively. The first issue was in charge of the Canadian team (ETS, NRC, Thales Aerospace, Bombardier AS), while the Italian group (University of Naples and CIRA) aimed at realising a device for the aileron camber control. The enlisted problems were all evident at the very first approach. Volume limitation forced the designers to follow a different strategy. Instead of having a couple of actuators acting on each rib, the architectural layout was specialised per each single bay. At the aileron root this possibility was maintained, while the more external two bays were commanded by a single actuator. In other words, the last two segments were made of two slave and a master ribs, driven by a single actuator. Calculation showed as this configuration was able to maintain the specified loads. Aeroelastic studies confirmed the reliability of the device, in sense that the selected architecture was demonstrated to be safe in the design flight conditions. The adaptive aileron finally maintained the original capability while ensuring morphing characteristic. This target was accomplished by realising a device with two separate motor system. The first, acting on the main aileron shaft, to preserve its characteristic dynamic response for flight control. The second, acting on the rib, implemented the searched camber variations to follow the aerodynamic necessities related to fuel consumption. Another relevant point concerns the skin. In order to check the possibility of skipping the need of implementing a compliant solution, a heavy and sophisticated element, the single hinged blocks were properly shaped to slide one into the other like a meniscus. This solution was however strongly correlated to manufacture tolerances and the assembly precision, because small deviation could have had a significant impact on the kinematic performance. As usual, vantages and disadvantages try to compensate each other.
The innovative device can be considered as a system with augmented capabilities aimed at working in cruise, by means of symmetric deflection, to obtain a near optimum wing geometry enabling optimal aerodynamic performance. The approach, including underlying concepts and analytical formulations, combines design methodologies and tools required to develop such an innovative control surface. A major difficulty in the development of morphing devices is to reach an adequate compromise between high load-carrying capacity to withstand aerodynamic loads and sufficient flexibility to achieve the target shapes. These targets necessitate the use of innovative structural and actuation solutions. When dealing with adaptive structures for lifting surfaces, the level of complexity naturally increases as a consequence of the augmented functionality of the designed system. In specific, an adaptive structure ensures a controlled and fully reversible transition from a baseline shape to a set of different configurations, each one capable of withstanding the associated external loads. To this aim, a dedicated actuation system shall be designed. In addition, the adopted morphing structural kinematics shall demonstrate complete functionality under operative loads. Such a morphing device wants to augment the former device by adapting local wing camber shape and lift distribution through a quasi-static deflection, its excursion ranging into few unit of degrees, positive and negative. In a morphing aircraft design concept, the actuated system stiffness, load capacity and integral volumetric requirements drive flutter, strength and aerodynamic performance. Design studies concerning aircraft flight speed, manoeuvre load factor and actuator response provide sensitivities in structural weight, aeroelastic performance and actuator flight load distributions. Based on these considerations, actuation mechanism constitutes a very fundamental aspect for adaptive structures design because the main prerequisite is to accomplish variable shapes within the physical constraints established by the appropriate actuation arrangement.
This thesis addresses the design of a morphing aileron with a specific focus on the structural actuation system sizing and integration while the structural sizing was under Unina responsibility. Particular focus is given to the numerical validation of the entire aileron integrated with the actuation leverage by means of FE model and experimental tests campaign. The aileron actuation system is driven by load bearing servo-electromechanic rotary actuator in a distributed and un-shafted arrangement which combine load carrying and actuation capacities. The use of electro-mechanical actuators is coherent with a "more electric approach" for next-generation aircraft design. Such an actuation architecture allows the control of the morphing structure by using a reduced mass, volume, force and consumed power with respect to conventional solutions. Benefits are obvious. No hydraulic supply buses (easier to maintain and store without hydraulics leaks), improved torque control, more efficiency without fluid losses and elimination of flammable fluids. In addition, it is potentially possible to move individual ribs either synchronously or independently to different angles (twist) in order to enhance aerodynamic benefits during flight. On the other side, actuators susceptibility to jamming may represent the most important drawback that can be tested and prevented by means of an iron bird facility.
Finally, the realised system was assembled onto a wing model and tested in a wind tunnel at the National Research Council (NRC) facilities in Ottawa (CAN). On the same model, the adaptive wing box was also installed. The adaptive aileron device proved its functionality in real flow conditions and the main aerodynamic results are herein presented and widely described.
The developed device has a lot of further potentialities, that will be object of further works and publications and that are currently explored by the authors: for instance, by giving it a large bandwidth, it could be used as an additional load alleviation device for the outer wing in order to reduce peak loads for gusts. Moreover it can be tailored for active load control distribution in order to modify spanwise lift distribution obtaining a reduced wing root bending moment; in such a manner a lightweight design can be assessed.


To map the preferred cleavage sites of xyloglucan endotransglycosylases (XETs; EC 184.108.40.206) along the donor substrate chain, we incubated the enzymes with tamarind (Tamarindus indica) xyloglucan (donor substrate; approximately 205 kDa; 21 microM) plus the nonasaccharide [(3)H]XLLGol (Gal(2).Xyl(3).Glc(3). [(3)H]glucitol; acceptor substrate; 0.6 microM). After short incubation times, to minimize multiple cleavages, the size of the (3)H-labelled transglycosylation products (determined by gel-permeation chromatography) indicated the positions of the cleavage sites relative to the non-reducing terminus of the donor. There was very little difference between the size profiles of the products formed by any of ten XETs tested [one native XET purified from cauliflower (Brassica oleracea) florets, four native XET isoenzymes purified from etiolated mung-bean (Phaseolus aureus) shoots, native XETs purified from lentil (Lens culinaris) and nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) seeds, and three insect-cell-produced thale-cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) XETs (EXGT, TCH4 and MERI-5)]. All such product profiles showed a good fit to a model in which the enzyme chooses its donor substrate independently of size and attacks it, once only, at a randomly selected cleavage site. The results therefore do not support the hypothesis that different XET isoenzymes are adapted to produce longer or shorter products such as might favour either the efficient integration of new xyloglucan into the cell wall or the re-structuring of old xyloglucan within an expanding wall.


In high latitudes the large difference between the mean annual temperature at the ground surface and in the unfrozen sediments beneath bodies of water can affect ground temperatures to depths of several hundred feet. The effect is of particular interest near the edge of the ocean where it depends upon the magnitude of the temperature difference between the land surface and ocean bottom, the thermal properties of the ground materials, and past changes in climate and/or shore-line configuration. Theoretical considerations suggest that, except where there are transgressing shore lines, permafrost to depths greater than about 100 feet beneath the ocean bottom is not to be expected at points farther than a few thousand feet offshore. Similar considerations indicate that geothermal installations along the Arctic coast can give information regarding post-Pleistocene shore-line changes. The geothermal effects of bodies of water offer an explanation for the anomalously large outward earth-heat flow recently reported by A. D. Misener for Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, N. W. T., Canada.


In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the CLIC multiTeV linear collider option, the drive beam complex at the CLIC Test Facility (CTF3) at CERN is providing highcurrent electron pulses for a number of related experiments. By means of a system of electron pulse compression and bunch frequency multiplication, a fully loaded, 120 MeV linac is used to generate 140 ns electron pulses of around 28 Amperes. Subsequent deceleration of this high-current drive beam demonstrates principles behind the CLIC acceleration scheme, and produces 12 GHz RF power for experimental purposes. As the facility has progressed toward routine operation, a number of studies aimed at improving the drive beam performance have been carried out. Additional feedbacks, automated steering programs, and improved control of optics and dispersion have contributed to a more stable, reproducible drive beam with consequent benefits for the experiments.


National identity is underpinned by historical representations. Recent research shows that narratives presenting an in-group's history as discontinuous rather than continuous raise collective angst, suggesting that historical discontinuity threatens social identity. This previous research has focused on positive aspects of an in-group's past. The present research aims to extend the findings to go beyond positive histories. We suggest that when the in-group's actions in the past are presented as negative, historical continuity instead of discontinuity will increase perceived identity threat because a negative, continuous history threatens group members' need for a positive social identity in the present. In an experiment with a sample size of N = 316, we manipulated the narrated valence of in-group actions during the historical event of the approval of the German constitutional law by framing the group's actions in either positive or negative terms. In addition, we presented the in-group's history as connected or disconnected to the in-group's present. Results demonstrate that historical continuity only decreased identity threat compared to historical discontinuity when the in-group's past behavior was presented as positive. When the in-group's past was presented as negative, continuity even increased identity threat compared to historical discontinuity. These results were particularly pronounced for people who strongly identified with their national in-group. We discuss implications of the findings for political communication and managing a nation's perception of social identity threat.


Abstract The Southwest Carbon Partnership (SWP), one of seven United States Department of Energy-funded Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships, has been tasked with assessing the CO 2 sequestration potential within the southwestern United States. Carbon dioxide is considered a 'greenhouse' gas and is emitted, in large volumes, by the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial processes. CO 2 capture from point source emitters and subsequent geological sequestration is being considered as a viable short- to intermediate-range mitigation option to combat the phenomena of global warming. Significant fossil fuel reserves and consumers exist within the seven member states of the SWP and, as such, the Partnership is dedicating a large amount of resources to the challenges posed by large-scale CO 2 sequestration. Three distinct phases of work have been or will be performed by the SWP: a Characterization Phase to identify carbon capture and sequestration potential; a Validation Phase to test small-scale field injection of CO 2 ; and a Deployment Phase to test commercial-scale field injection of CO 2 . Each phase presents challenges and opportunities to the refinement of the best approach to safe and efficient geological storage of CO 2 within the SW region of the United States.


The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced in Czechoslovakia as "our Czech" Pavel Šebesta. Querying origins, selves and homelands, his own and in his writings (ethnography/travelogues/fiction on "dwarfs" in the "primeval forest"), this essay traces the multiplicity/borderlands/nomadism of Schebesta/Šebesta, also in his relation to the "Other," a concept/distinction/border that is thus destabilized or blurred. Interweaving apparently separate questions about his life and scholarship, the essay finds continuities and mirroring across distance and otherness. Following-mirroring Šebesta/Schebesta, we recognize the familiar in the strange, Silesia/Moravia in Malaya, the contemporary in the primeval, the "native" in the ethnologist, the head-hunter in the biological anthropologist. The essay's motley style mirrors what has been described as his "jumbled" writing, "highly coloured … scarcely in consonance with the scientific material"; it reflects his nomadism, emphasis on "experiencing together," and the conflict that he sensed between "theories" and "life, rhythm, poetry."


Pixel-level annotations are expensive and time consuming to obtain. Hence, weak supervision using only image tags could have a significant impact in semantic segmentation. Recently, CNN-based methods have proposed to fine-tune pre-trained networks using image tags. Without additional information, this leads to poor localization accuracy. This problem, however, was alleviated by making use of objectness priors to generate foreground/background masks. Unfortunately these priors either require pixel-level annotations/bounding boxes, or still yield inaccurate object boundaries. Here, we propose a novel method to extract accurate masks from networks pre-trained for the task of object recognition, thus forgoing external objectness modules. We first show how foreground/background masks can be obtained from the activations of higher-level convolutional layers of a network. We then show how to obtain multi-class masks by the fusion of foreground/background ones with information extracted from a weakly-supervised localization network. Our experiments evidence that exploiting these masks in conjunction with a weakly-supervised training loss yields state-of-the-art tag-based weakly-supervised semantic segmentation results.


Generative adversial networks (GANs) have shown its ability to create realistic and accurate image-to-image transformation. The goal of this work was to investigate whether deep convolutional GANs can learn to perform advanced ultrasound speckle reduction in real-time. The GAN was trained using a dataset of cardiac images from 200 patients and tested on a separate dataset from 55 patients. A U-net type of generator was used together with a patch-wise discriminator. Three different generator sizes were tested in order to see the tradeoff between speckle reduction accuracy and runtime. The results show that GANs can learn ultrasound speckle reduction. Even though the training set consisted only of cardiac ultrasound images, results from other parts of the body and scanners indicate that the method learns speckle reduction in general, and not just for cardiac images. By reducing the number of filters in the generator, real-time performance was achieved with an average of 11 ms per frame.


Map showing biological resources (birds, habitats, reefs, fishes, etc.) in the St. Petersburg region of the Florida coastline. Scale 1:100,000.


This study examines students' attitudes towards studying kurdology course at university level in Duhok. Attitude is considered as a necessary component in language learning. Therefore, a positive attitude is considered as one of the important factors that have an impact on language learning. By providing insight into the attitudes students towards learning Kurdish, It contributes to the teaching of Kurdish as a foreign language. The main purpose of this research is to reveal students' attitudes towards learning Kurdish and find out how to make their attitudes positive. Language educators who know how to develop positive attitudes in students will be able to conduct interesting and effective classroom activities; get them to be more successful in learning Kurdish. The researcher used a questionnaire to obtain data about the learners' attitudes and analyse them. 112 students from different universities in Duhok participated in this study. The findings shows that there is positive relationship between emotional, behavioural and cognitive attitudes towards learning Kurdish language, however the highest value was for behavioural attitudes.


We demonstrate that eigenvalue problems for ordinary differential equations can be recast in a formulation suitable for the solution by polynomial collocation. It is shown that the well-posedness of the two formulations is equivalent in the regular as well as in the singular case. Thus, a collocation code equipped with asymptotically correct error estimation and adaptive mesh selection can be successfully applied to compute the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions efficiently and with reliable control of the accuracy. Numerical examples illustrate this claim.


At present a set of wholly mature design methods of impeller theory based on existential experiences do not exist, because of the complexity of internal flow characteristics of centrifugal fan. Therfore it will undoubtedly provide helps for the improving of existing mehtods to fully master the existed successful experience. Based on statistical datas, some new methods used to determine the main geometric parameters of centrifugal fan's impeller was proposed in this paper.The paper analyzes the internal relations between a large number of existing aerodynamic sketches and performance parameters of centrifugal fans by means of statistical method and finds regularity, so provides help for simplifing calculation procedures and improving the reliability of impeller design.


To identify chromosomal regions harboring genes influencing the propensity to store fat in the abdominal area, a genome-wide scan for abdominal fat was performed in the Quebec Family Study. Cross-sectional areas of the amount of abdominal total fat (ATF) and abdominal visceral fat (AVF) were assessed from a computed tomography scan taken at L4-L5 in 521 adult subjects. Abdominal subcutaneous fat (ASF) was obtained by computing the difference between ATF and AVF. The abdominal fat phenotypes were adjusted for age and sex effects as well as for total amount of body fat (kilogram of fat mass) measured by underwater weighing, and the adjusted phenotypes were used in linkage analyses. A total of 293 microsatellite markers spanning the 22 autosomal chromosomes were typed. The average intermarker distance was 11.9 cM. A maximum of 271 sib-pairs were available for single-point (SIBPAL) and 156 families for multipoint variance components (SEGPATH) linkage analyses. The strongest evidence of linkage was found on chromosome 12q24.3 between marker D12S2078 and ASF (logarithm of odds [LOD] = 2.88). Another marker (D12S1045) located within 2 cM of D12S2078 also provided evidence of sib-pair linkage with ASF (P = 0.019), ATF (P = 0.015), and AVF (P = 0.0007). Other regions with highly suggestive evidence (P < 0.0023 or LOD > or =1.75) of multipoint linkage and evidence (P < 0.05) of single-point linkage, all for ASF, included chromosomes 1p11.2, 4q32.1, 9q22.1, 12q22-q23, and 17q21.1. Three of these loci (1p11.2, 9q22.1, and 17q21.1) are close to genes involved in the regulation of sex steroid levels, whereas two others (4q32.1 and 17q21.1) are in the proximity of genes involved in the regulation of food intake. This first genome-wide scan for abdominal fat assessed by computed tomography indicates that there may be several loci determining the propensity to store fat in the abdominal depot and that some of these loci may influence the development of diabetes in obese subjects.


The principle objective of this study was to define the anti-bronchoconstrictor effects of inhaled racemic formoterol and its (R,R)- and (S,S)-enantiomers in a new model of methacholine-induced bronchoconstriction in the rhesus monkey. A second long-acting beta(2)agonist, salmeterol, was included for comparison. Anaesthetized, spontaneously breathing rhesus monkeys were set up for measuring airway resistance. Blood pressure, heart rate and serum potassium concentrations were measured concomitantly to gauge systemic exposure and the potential for side effects. Formoterol, 0.14, 0.34 and 1.15 microg/kg, administered by aerosol, induced rapidly developing, sustained, dose-related inhibition of the bronchoconstrictor responses to aerosolised methacholine (maximum 76%) accompanied by sustained, dose-related tachycardia. (R,R)-formoterol, 0.56 microg/kg, induced anti-bronconstrictor effects and an associated tachycardia which corresponded closely to the effects seen following twice the dose of the racemate. (S,S)-formoterol, 0.54 microg/kg, was inactive. Salmeterol, 1.4 microg/kg, had no significant anti-bronchoconstrictor effect whereas doses of 5.5 and 30 microg/kg produced quantitatively similar but submaximal anti-bronchoconstrictor effects (maximum 47%). Sustained dose-dependent tachycardia was seen with salmeterol over the full dose range. Thus, the anti-bronchoconstrictor activity of formoterol resides in the (R,R) enantiomer and the (S,S) enantiomer does not interfere with the activity when present in the racemic form. Furthermore, the data indicate that the present model of methacholine-induced bronchospasm in the rhesus monkey could be useful in defining the key properties of beta(2)agonist bronchodilators such as relative potency, efficacy, duration of action and potential for systemic side effects.


A ground-based experiment in passive microwave remote sensing of soil moisture was conducted in Huntsville, AL, from July 1-14, 1996. The goal of the experiment was to evaluate the overall performance of an empirically-based retrieval algorithm at S-band and L-band under a different set of conditions and to characterize the site-specific accuracy inherent within the technique. With high temporal frequency observations at S-band and L-band, the authors were able to observe large scale moisture changes following irrigation and rainfall events, as well as diurnal behavior of surface moisture among three plots, one bare, one covered with short grass and another covered with alfalfa. The L-band emitting depth was determined to be on the order of 0-3 or 0-5 cm below 0.30 cm/sup 3//cm/sup 3/ with an indication that it is less at higher moisture values. The S-band emitting depth was not readily distinguishable from L-band. The uncertainty in remotely sensed soil moisture observations due to surface heterogeneity and temporal variability in variables and parameters was characterized by imposing random errors on the most sensitive variables and parameters and computing the confidence limits on the observations. Discrepancies between remotely sensed and gravimetric soil moisture estimates appear to be larger than those expected from errors in variable and parameter estimation. This would suggest that a vegetation correction procedure based on more dynamic modeling may be required to improve the accuracy of remotely sensed soil moisture.


Introduction
The organisation of life into the public/private nexus has long been a site of contestation for feminism. In the highly politicised culture of the 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminists argued that the public/private nexus was repressive in nature and function because the purportedly 'natural' assignment of women to the private realm represented their exclusion from social and political life (Rossler, 2005), thus rendering them publically invisible and depriving women of their civil liberties. Feminists then, fought to dismantle this gendered catergorisation via twofold grounds. First, they sought to increase the visibility of women in public life, and secondly, sought to politicise 'the personal' by arguing that the self of the private realm had its roots in wider social, political and economic contexts, and was ultimately organised in, and regulated by, the public sphere. By carrying the slogan 'the personal is the political', feminists expanded the boundaries of contestation beyond socioeconomic distribution, to include housework, sexuality and reproduction. Consequently, 'the problem with no name', which was previously characterised as isolated and individual, was now recognised as a social-systemic struggle—predicating a collective identity for women as women (Ang, 2001) and enabling a politicised interpretation of needs to enter public discourse and the agenda of the welfare-state (Fraser, 2013). While this paradigmatic change in the meaning of 'political' promised to invoke a gender-sensitive revision of democracy and justice (Markus, 1995), it is my thesis that this political imaginary has been grossly distorted some fifty years later through its appropriation by contemporary feminism.
By examining in some detail the discursive registers of Everyday Sexism[1], an online feminist campaign that puts forth the claim of systemic sexism by cataloguing personal life narratives from women across the globe, I argue that contemporary feminism is engaged in a dangerous double entanglement with the highly individualised idiom of therapy culture. Dovetailed with ascending neoliberalism, this liaison threatens to depoliticise the political, and undo the doings of second-wave feminism.
Discussion
Today, in a digitally mediated world, the partition between the public/private is arguably dissolved as technologies such as the mobile phone invoke an "intersection of worlds" (Schegloff, 2002, p. 286) and as the public sphere becomes saturated with the exposure of private life (Burkart, 2010). Through the widespread publicising of private matters via acts of confession, a therapeutic sensibility premised on emotionalisation has become one of the dominant ways in which actors express, shape and understand themselves and society (Furedi, 2004; Illouz, 2007). This is evidenced in a plethora of social and cultural sites, for example, in social media (i.e. Facebook's 'What's on your mind?'), Internet dating, reality TV, celebrity 'tell all' interviews, and the growing corpus of self-help and autobiographical literature.
The blurring of the public and the private and the emotional turn is a manifestation of, and tribute to, therapy culture (Furedi, 2004; McGee, 2005; Ouelette and Hay, 2008). Therapy culture is marked by the spill of the therapeutic ethos from clinical spaces, in which it emanated, into wider cultural structures, institutions and vernaculars. At the crux of the therapeutic ethos is the belief that "the psychological self, as opposed to the physical or social self or the wider society, is the source of its problems and the main resource for providing potential solutions to these problems" (Swan, 2008, p. 88). As a large body of literature has noted, a key feature of therapy culture is its neoliberal rationality in which "citizen-subjects" (Ouelette and Hay, 2008) are trained to see themselves as "individualized" (Larner, 200, p. 13) and responsible for their own well-being and well-doing (Hazleden 2010). Therapy culture then, predicates the formation of new political subjectivities and forms of selfhood.
Feminism and therapy culture
Everyday Sexism, the hugely popular feminist website[2] rolled out to 17 countries within the first year of its inception, is representative of a larger cultural shift whereby contemporary feminism has not managed to secure immunity from the influences of therapy culture. Rather, the two are engaged in a "double entanglement" (McRobbie, 2004).
On one hand, the affective makeup of Everyday Sexism—the fact that it relies on therapeutic techniques of confession and emotionalism as the basis of its activism, appears to foster the politicisation of the personal by creating discursive spaces for women's personal pains to gain legitimacy in the public sphere. This invokes Lauren Berlant's notion of "intimate publics" (1997) whereby individuals form community through mutual affective ties, in this case, a collective suffering through sexism. The 80,000 testimonials collected by the campaign worldwide have indisputably contributed to the resurgence of public discussion and social self-reflexivity about sexism. Further, since political participation is enacted through the medium of talk (Fraser, 1995), Everyday Sexism mobilises participation by volunteering a feminist vocabulary to its actors, which, as Maria Markus has noted, is a necessary tool for participation in public discourse (Markus, 1995).
At the same time that therapy culture mobilises these opportunities for feminism and the feminist subject, a problematic co-existence of challenges also exist. The emphasis on individualised anecdotes and experiences in Everyday Sexism catalyse a rhetorical reframing of sexism that is personalised and isolated rather than thematic and systematic. This mobillises a feminist subject that translates sexism from a structural problem to an individual affair and cultivates an imperviousness to the role of social, cultural and economic forces in producing inequalities, therefore espousing the therapeutic rationality which renders the life of the individual as a private matter. Consequently, this results in Everyday Sexism's feminist collective being fragmented into a sum aggregation of atomised, autonomous and self-governing persons (Rimke, 2000), which sit in contraposition to feminist precepts of solidarity and collectivity.
Should contemporary feminism continue its dangerous flirtations with the individual idiom of therapy culture, it will mobilise a world where the individual once again becomes the site to which societal problems are raised and where it will be perceived they need to be resolved, thus depoliticising the political, and threatening to undo the victories of second-wave feminism.
Acknowledgments
The author acknowledges the intellectual support and guidance of Associate Professor Pauline Johnson.
References
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Furedi, F 2014, Therapy culture: cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age. Routledge, London & New York.
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Illouz, E 2007, Cold intimacies: the making of emotional capitalism. Polity, Cambridge.
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[1] Everyday Sexism was established in April 2012 by a 25-year-old English woman named Laura Bates. To date, Everyday Sexism has accrued 80,000 testimonials of sexism worldwide.
[2] While Everyday Sexism began as a website-based campaign, it has, as campaigns do in digital media cultures, expanded onto various social media platforms. Everyday Sexism was also published into book form in 2014.


Honokiol, a highly functional phenolic- and alkenyl-containing neolignan natural product isolated from several Magnolia plant species, is an interesting bio-based resource, which is shown to be useful directly as a monomer for the rapid and scalable synthesis of poly(honokiol carbonate) (PHC). PHC was synthesized in one step from the natural product using condensation polymerization methods. Polymers of number average molecular weight (Mn) ranging from 10–55 kDa were obtained on gram scales in yields up to 80%. Thermal analysis demonstrated high thermal stability, with degradation temperatures in excess of ca. 450 °C. Mechanical testing of several PHC polymers indicated a generally increasing storage modulus with increasing Mn and a similar trend with Tg. With an interest toward cardiovascular applications, initial cytotoxicity and fluorescence cell imaging studies were conducted and showed no cytotoxicity toward coronary venular endothelial cells (CVECs), which proliferated on PHC thin films up to a month. Bulk PHC is a robust material, as it underwent slow hydrolytic degradation under basic conditions (ca. 0.1% per day under 1 M NaOH(aq)), and no observable degradation under acidic and neutral conditions, each at 37 °C over 130 days. These polycarbonates serve as potential specialty engineering- or bio-materials derived from a commercially-available natural product monomer.


The frequency spectrum of fluctuations caused by interplanetary scintillations may give a sensitive estimate of the diameter of a radio source. Observations of 3C 138, 3C 245, 3C 267, and 3C 273 give diameters of 0.1, ≤0.04, ≤ 0.2, and ≤ 0.02 second of arc, respectively. Resolution is at least a factor of 5 higher than that obtained to date by means of either radio interferometers or lunar occulations.


Credit has proven to be a necessary tool for economic development affecting positively the welfare of households and individuals. However, one major area in which rural households lack is access to financial markets including credit. The studies included in this thesis contribute to the access to credit literature and the credit constraint/unconstraint impact on some welfare outcomes. The first empirical study examined farm households' access to credit in rural Malawi. Unlike previous empirical studies, particular attention is given to discouraged borrowers who are mostly ignored in such studies. Using the 2010/2011 household survey data from Malawi the study determines the demographic and socio-economic characteristics that distinguish farm households who need credit, who are the discouraged borrowers and who are rejected applicants. A three-step sequential estimation model following a trivariate probit model with double sample selection was adopted. The findings revealed that there were over 7 times more discouraged borrowers than denied applicants. Women were more likely to be discouraged from applying for credit but, if they applied, they were more likely to be successful in obtaining credit than males. This shows that when examining farm households' access to credit discouraged borrowers should be given special consideration.
Capturing discouraged borrowers as also credit constrained, the second empirical study employed a switching model to estimate the impact of credit constraint status on farm productivity for each credit constraint regime. The study further compared the expected production under actual and counterfactual conditions for a household being credit constrained or unconstrained. The findings suggest that a household that is constrained is less productive than a randomly selected household from the sample would but that for the unconstrained household is inconclusive, however, the counterfactual arguments as seen from the analysis shows that being credit unconstrained was beneficial to the increase in productivity.
Studies have shown that undeveloped financial markets have been a major contributing factor increasing inequality, especially in developing countries. The third empirical study examined the impact of household credit constraint on the consumption inequality of rural households in Malawi. Factors that explain the within and between credit constrained and unconstrained status of consumption inequality were examined. The General Entropy (GE) Index and the Regression-Based Inequality Decomposition Methods, Field's (2003) and Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition were employed. The findings show that inequality was more prominent within the groups than between them. Also, the size of households and the value of assets were the major contributors to the within-group inequalities for credit constrained and unconstrained households. Further, only the endowment component was important in explaining the consumption inequality gap between the credit constrained and unconstrained households. Adjusting the level of endowments of constrained households to that of the unconstrained households increased their welfare by 15.7 percent.


We consider the numerical solution of the Laplace equations in planar bounded domains with corners for two types of boundary conditions. The first one is the mixed boundary value problem (Dirichlet-Neumann), which is reduced, via a single-layer potential ansatz, to a system of well-posed boundary integral equations. The second one is the Cauchy problem having Dirichlet and Neumann data given on a part of the boundary of the solution domain. This problem is similarly transformed into a system of ill-posed boundary integral equations. For both systems, to numerically solve them, a mesh grading transformation is employed together with trigonometric quadrature methods. In the case of the Cauchy problem the Tikhonov regularization is used for the discretized system. Numerical examples are included both for the well-posed and ill-posed cases showing that accurate numerical solutions can be obtained with small computational effort.


The minor hemoglobins AIa, AIb, and AIc were studied in mice with either genetic or chemically induced diabetes. Hemoglobin AIc was elevated approximately twofold in all the phenotypically diabetic mice studied (C57BL/KsJ-db/db, C57BL/KsJ-ob/ob, C57BL7/6J-db/db, and alloxan- and streptozotocin-treated mice). Elevation of the hemoglobin Ale in C57BL/6J-db/db mice was of short duration, reflecting the transitory diabetes characteristic of these mice. The degree of increase of hemoglobin AIclevels was unrelated to severity of hyperglycemia, duration of diabetes, age of mouse, or body weight. It is not-known what factor(s) dictates the steady-state concentration of hemoglobin AIc.


Elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC) are new generations of public key cryptosystems that have a smaller key size for the same level of security. The exponentiation on elliptic curve is the most important operation in ECC, so when the ECC is put into practice, the major problem is how to enhance the speed of the exponentiation. It is thus of great interest to develop algorithms for exponentiation, which allow efficient implementations of ECC. In this paper, we improve efficient algorithm for exponentiation on elliptic curves defined over Fp in terms of affine coordinates. The algorithm computes directly from random points P and Q on an elliptic curve, without computing the intermediate points. Moreover, we apply the algorithm to exponentiation on elliptic curves with width-w Mutual Opposite Form (wMOF) and analyze their computational complexity. This algorithm can speed up the wMOF exponentiation of elliptic curves of size 160-bit about (21.7 %) as a result of its implementation with respect to affine coordinates.


This paper studies local human capital externalities and returns to education in Turkey. Data comes from 2006 Household Labor Survey. Instrumental Variables-OLS estimation indicates internal (external) returns amounting to 4.9% (2.4%), while IV estimates using quantile regression range from 3% to 6.9% (1.3% to 3.5%). We discuss further characteristics of the Turkish labor market segmented by gender and show that external returns are uniformly higher for women. Our results also indicate both internal and external returns increase or equivalently the wage distribution spreads out as education increases.


Common method variance (CMV) is an important concern in international marketing research because presumed substantive relationships may actually be due to shared method variance. Because method effects may vary systematically across cultures and countries, accounting for method effects in international marketing research is particularly critical. A systematic review of Journal of International Marketing articles published during a five-year period (2015–2019, N = 93) shows that (1) authors often report post hoc CMV tests but usually conclude that CMV is not an issue and (2) many post hoc tests are conducted using the Harman one-factor test and the marker variable technique, which have serious deficiencies for detecting and controlling CMV. Drawing on a classification and comparative evaluation of the most common statistical approaches for dealing with CMV, the authors recommend two approaches and propose a procedure for dealing with CMV in international marketing research. The procedure, which is based on multisample structural equation modeling, is illustrated with data from a cross-national pan-European survey (N = 11,970, 14 countries), which shows that even though method variance is present in the data, method effects do not seriously bias the substantive conclusions in this particular study.


Phomopsis viticola is the cause of Phomopsis cane and leaf spot disease of grapevines, while Diaporthe perjuncta is associated with bud mortality. The efficacy of nine fungicides (azoxystrobin, flusilazole, folpet, fosetyl-Al + mancozeb, kresoxim-methyl, mancozeb, penconazole, spiroxamine and trifloxystrobin) against isolates of P. viticola and D. perjuncta was determined in vitro using the mycelial growth test. Additionally, azoxystrobin, folpet, kresoxim-methyl, mancozeb, propineb and trifloxystrobin were tested for their ability to inhibit spore germination in vitro. Ten isolates of P. viticola and three of D. perjuncta were used in the mycelium inhibition tests, and five isolates of P. viticola in the spore germination tests. The effective concentration at which mycelial growth was inhibited by 50% and at which 50% of the spores (EC50 value) were inhibited from germinating was calculated for each isolate/fungicide combination. In the mycelium growth test flusilazole, penconazole and trifloxystrobin gave better inhibition at lower concentrations than folpet and fosetyl-Al + mancozeb. No significant differences in the mean ECso values were detected among azoxystrobin, flusilazole, kresoxim-methyl, penconazole, spiroxamine and trifloxystrobin. There were also no significant differences among the mean EC50 values of azoxystrobin, kresoximmethyl and mancozeb. Flusilazole and penconazole inhibited mycelial growth at the lowest mean EC50 values obtained. Kresoxim-methyl and trifloxystrobin inhibited spore germination at lower concentrations than folpet or mancozeb. Folpet required the highest concentration to inhibit 50% germination and was significantly different from mancozeb and propineb. There were also no significant differences among the mean EC50 values of mancozeb, propineb and azoxystrobin. The mean EC50 values of the strobilurin fungicides were not significantly different from one another.  These results indicate that the strobilurin fungicides inhibited mycelial growth and spore germination of P. viticola. Trials need to be conducted to verify these findings under field conditions.


INTRODUCTION
Low-glycemic index diets may improve the glycemic control in type 2 diabetes but the debate over their effectiveness continues.

OBJECTIVES
To test the effects of low-glycemic index diets on acute glycemic control (2 days) by measuring capillary blood glucose in patients with type 2 diabetes.

METHODS
This was a crossover randomized clinical trial with 12 type 2 diabetics which were randomly divided into 2 groups and targeted the following draft diets for low and high glycemic index (LGI and HGI) for 2 consecutive days in 2 consecutive weeks. Group 1 followed an LGI diet in week 1 and an HGI diet in week 2, group 2 adopted the contrary. They were oriented to maintain medication and lifestyle and to follow the recommendations. Measurements were made of glycemia capillaries in 2 days (fasting, before lunch, post-prandial lunch and before dinner) and one last in fasting on day 3. A food record during the days and the counting of carbohydrates meals was made. The software SigmaStat (version 2.03) was used, with a statistical significance criterion of p < 0.05.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The amount of carbohydrates ingested by the LGI group was lower (p < 0.01), showing that the adoption of this diet reduces the intake of carbohydrates, being favorable for diabetics. Mean blood glucose on the first day was lower in the LGI group (p < 0.05).


Butane is a commonly misused volatile agent, and a cause of intoxication. We present a case, who had a syncope and persistent ventricular fibrillation during the course of resuscitation. We discussed the management of this case in the intensive care unit and the accompanying difficulties in the light of the current literature.


An instrument for the continuous recording of cell number has been developed and is being used to record changes in populations of logarithmic and synchronized cultures of protozoan flagellates. A Coulter cell counter is used in conjunction with a counting chamber that is fitted with a flexible polyethylene aperture (75 � in diameter). This aperture rarely becomes blocked and appears to be self-clearing. The unit consists of a proportioning pump, a cell counter, a counting chamber, a rate meter, and a recorder.


The three-dimensional printing is a growing field in engineering, civil constructions and pharmaceutical development. The three-dimensional printing is a one-step continuous process. However, conventional manufacturing is batch by batch process hence the three-dimensional manufacturing is advantageous over conventional manufacturing. The three-dimensional technique is cost effective and time-saving process. The three-dimensional printing is a rising era in the development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals such as medical devices, oral dosage forms and some modified-release products. The personalized dose adjustment as per patient preqirement is easier due to three dimensional printing. Hence, the personalized dosage forms are more preferable for potent drugs to avoid the adverse drug reactions and accuracy of a therapeutic drug. The three-dimensional technique equipped with hot-melt extrusion is recently used for the development of various pharmaceutical products. The fused disposition model is commonly employed for the development of layer by layer products. However, the hot-melt extrusion was previously used in pharmaceuticals for solubility enhancement. Currently ample of applications of hot-melt extrusion is explored in research and one of them is the manufacturing of personalized pharmaceuticals. The dose adjustment and personalized pharmaceutical development will be achieved by three dimensional technique equipped with hot-melt extrusion. There is a wide range of polymeric materials with superior properties available for three-dimensional printing of pharmaceuticals. This review briefly discussed the applications of three-dimensional techniques for pharmaceutical development with suitable examples. The current scenario of the techniques and future perspectives are also discussed.


Fiber to the home (FTTH) technology is an attractive solution for providing high bandwidth from the Central Office (CO) to residences and small-and medium-sized businesses. The emergence of Internet Protocol-based communication within households such as VoIP, IPTV, video conferencing, and high definition multimedia shows that there is a need for high-capacity networks that can handle differentiated services. By providing an optical fiber link to a household where the optical network unit (ONU) is located, there will be a tremendous increase in information capacity with respect to Digital Subscriber Line and cable modem technologies that are currently in place. In access networks, Passive Optical Networks (PON) are rapidly replacing copper-based technologies due to a wide range of benefits, one of which is having the capability to transmit data at a higher rate and reach further distances without signal degradation. Under the PON family of technologies, Ethernet PON (EPON) was developed and is specified in the IEEE 802.3 standard outlining the framework that can deliver voice, data, and video over a native Ethernet port to businesses and residential customers. An increasingly important subject to network operators is Quality of Service (QoS). Although the EPON specification provides mechanisms for supporting QoS, it does not specify or define an algorithm for providing QoS. Rather it is up to the CO to design and implement an appropriate algorithm to meet the specifications of services that are offered to their clients. Researchers have extensively studied bandwidth allocation in EPON where the challenge is to develop bandwidth allocation algorithms that can fairly redistribute bandwidth among ONUs based on their demand. These algorithms were developed for the uplink direction, from ONUs to CO, in a network where only a single ONU is permitted to transmit at a time. Another well-established PON technology is Optical Code-Division Multiple Access PON (OCDMA-PON). In recent years, it has become more economical due to hardware advancements and it has gained a lot of attention due to its benefits over EPON. The most attractive benefit of OCDMA-PON is that multiple ONUs may transmit to the CO simultaneously, depending on a number of constraints, whereas EPON is limited to a single ONU transmission at a time. In this thesis, we develop a dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm called Multi-Class Credit-Based Packet Scheduler (MCBPS) for OCDMA-PON in the uplink direction that supports the Internet Protocol (IP) Differentiated Services and takes advantage of the simultaneous nature of OCDMA. The IP Differentiated Services specifications stipulate the following traffic classifications: Expedited Forwarding for low latency, low packet loss, and low jitter applications; Assured Forwarding for services that require low packet loss; and Best Effort which are not guaranteed any bandwidth commitments. MCBPS incorporates the use of credit pools and the concept of a credit bank system to provide the same services as EPON by assigning ONUs specific timeslots to transmit data and also by specifying the amount of bytes from each class. MCBPS is a central office based algorithm that provides global fairness between Quality of Service (QoS) classes while also ensuring that at any given moment the desired number of simultaneous transmissions is not exceeded. We demonstrate through simulation that MCBPS algorithm is applicable in both EPON and OCDMA-PON environments. An in-house simulation program written in the C programming language is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The MCBPS algorithm was tested alongside a benchmark algorithm called Interleaved Polling with Adaptive Cycle Time (IPACT) algorithm to compare network throughput, average packet delay, maximum packet delay, and packet loss ratio. From the simulation results it was observed that MCBPS algorithm is able to satisfy the QoS requirements and its performance is comparable to IPACT where the simultaneous transmission is limited to one. The simulation results also show that as the number of simultaneous transmissions within the network increases, so does the bandwidth. The MCBPS algorithm is able to re-distribute the scaling bandwidth while ensuring that a single ONU or QoS class does not monopolize all the available bandwidth. In doing so, through simulation results, as the simultaneous transmissions increases, the average packet delay decreases and the packet loss ratio improves.


The cancer stem cell hypothesis suggests that tumors contain a small population of cancer cells that have the ability to undergo symmetric self-renewing cell division. In tumors that follow this model, cancer stem cells produce various kinds of specified precursors that divide a limited number of times before terminally differentiating or undergoing apoptosis. As cells within the tumor mature, they become progressively more restricted in the cell types to which they can give rise. However, in some tumor types, the presence of certain extra- or intracellular signals can induce committed cancer progenitors to revert to a multipotential cancer stem cell state. In this paper, we design a novel mathematical model to investigate the dynamics of tumor progression in such situations, and study the implications of a reversible cancer stem cell phenotype for therapeutic interventions. We find that higher levels of dedifferentiation substantially reduce the effectiveness of therapy directed at cancer stem cells by leading to higher rates of resistance. We conclude that plasticity of the cancer stem cell phenotype is an important determinant of the prognosis of tumors. This model represents the first mathematical investigation of this tumor trait and contributes to a quantitative understanding of cancer.


The diurnal variation of galactic cosmic ray flux measured by ground base neutron monitor stations. The local time of maximum intensity tends to depending on latitudinal location. Depending on solar activity, drift effect and diffusion effect controls the local time of maximum intensity for cosmic ray flux. The drift effect occurs due to solar magnetic reversal and the diffusion effect occur due to change in the interplanetary magnetic field scales related to the sunspot cycle. Recently, we installed cosmic ray neutron monitor at Daejeon in south Korea (October 2011) and at Jang Bogo station in Antarctica (December 2015). We want to know the characteristics of two neutron monitors data and adequacy of the data using the local time diurnal variation of cosmic ray flux at two locations and previous studies. We used the plie-up method to analyze diurnal variation for these two stations and used the data from January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2016. In this report, we will present results about diurnal variation of cosmic ray flux at Daejeon neutron monitor and Jang Bogo neutron monitor. This results will tell us if there are good values for the neutron monitor stations.


E-commerce is growing at an unprecedented rate and the fashion industry has recently witnessed a noticeable shift in customers' order behaviour towards stronger online shopping. However, fashion articles ordered online do not always find their way to a customer's wardrobe. In fact, a large share of them end up being returned. Finding clothes that fit online is very challenging and accounts for one of the main drivers of increased return rates in fashion e-commerce. Size and fit related returns severely impact 1. the customers experience and their dissatisfaction with online shopping, 2. the environment through an increased carbon footprint, and 3. the profitability of online fashion platforms. Due to poor fit, customers often end up returning articles that they like but do not fit them, which they have to re-order in a different size. To tackle this issue we introduce SizeFlags, a probabilistic Bayesian model based on weakly annotated large-scale data from customers. Leveraging the advantages of the Bayesian framework, we extend our model to successfully integrate rich priors from human experts feedback and computer vision intelligence. Through extensive experimentation, large-scale A/B testing and continuous evaluation of the model in production, we demonstrate the strong impact of the proposed approach in robustly reducing size-related returns in online fashion over~14~countries.


We present the first randomized polynomial-time simplex algorithm for linear programming. Like the other known polynomial-time algorithms for linear programming, its running time depends polynomially on the number of bits used to represent its input.We begin by reducing the input linear program to a special form in which we merely need to certify boundedness. As boundedness does not depend upon the right-hand-side vector, we run the shadow-vertex simplex method with a random right-hand-side vector. Thus, we do not need to bound the diameter of the original polytope.Our analysis rests on a geometric statement of independent interest: given a polytope A x ≤ b in isotropic position, if one makes a polynomially small perturbation to b then the number of edges of the projection of the perturbed polytope onto a random 2-dimensional subspace is expected to be polynomial.


We present "wq", an open-source framework for developing robust applications allowing volunteers to collect geographic information (VGI) in the field. Successful VGI applications been deployed in various contexts, but much of the effort that is put into common programming tasks cannot be re-used, often because the application code is too closely tied to the problem domain. User-friendly campaign authoring tools are being explored as ways to facilitate the rapid deployment of VGI applications, but many of these tools necessarily enforce a restricted vocabulary of interface elements and database models, limiting their usefulness for more complex VGI project workflows. In contrast, we propose a highly modular, open-source approach that enables reuse of general-purpose components created to facilitate common design patterns -- without enforcing any hard limitations on the database model or interface. The framework builds off of and extends numerous existing open-source projects and leverages open standards (e.g. HTML5), which means it will work across all popular mobile devices as well as desktop browsers. The ideas behind wq arose from our ongoing efforts to generalize an existing data collection application initially created for community-based stream quality monitoring. In this paper we justify the design decisions made in creating wq and suggest general principles that should be taken into consideration when designing systems for collecting, storing, and utilizing VGI.