Cooperation is one of the behavioral traits that define human beings, however we are still trying to understand why humans cooperate. Behavioral experiments are designed to shed light into the mechanisms behind cooperation -- and other behavioral traits. This dissertation is focused on advancing the field of behavioral experimentation using experiments based on citizen science, and it is divided in two blocks. In the first, we present two platforms, one to understand how it can serve as a catalyst to promote of scientific thinking and engage in science, and another to study traits of human behavior with a suite of behavioral games. Both platforms are designed to help creating experiments in the wild and to encourage the participation within the framework of citizen science. In the second block we evaluate the platforms through a set of experiments, and we analyze the existence of behavioral patterns. First, we study the robustness of the platform by looking whether equal strategies emerge in replicas of the same experiment performed with different population samples. In the second experiment we analyze the behavioral patterns that emerge when participants face a set of social dilemmas. The last two experiments are collective-risk dilemmas framed in climate change. In one, we study how the resource inequalities generate unfair behaviors. The other is carried out within a given ecosystem to study the tensions that exist between actors of the collective. Considering the experiments' results, we can comprehend how we behave when we face social dilemmas, and consequently evaluate behavioral traits and the emergence of behavioral patterns. The designs, the results and the methodology of analysis presented in this work will help set the basis for future behavioral experiments in the field.


Vibroarthrographic (VAG) signals, emitted by human knee joints, are non-stationary and multi-component in nature and time-frequency distributions (TFD) provide powerful means to analyze such signals. The objective of this paper is to classify VAG signals, generated during joint movement, into two groups (normal and patient group) using the characteristic parameters extracted by time-frequency transform, and to evaluate the classification accuracy. Noise within TFD was reduced by singular value decomposition and back-propagation neural network (BPNN) was used for classifying VAG signals. The characteristic parameters consist of the energy parameter, energy spread parameter, frequency parameter, frequency spread parameter by Wigner-Ville distribution and the amplitude of frequency distribution, the mean and the median frequency by fast Fourier transform. Totally 1408 segments (normal 1031, patient 377) were used for training and evaluating BPNN. As a result, the average value of the classification accuracy was 92.3 (standard deviation ±0.9)%. The proposed method was independent of clinical information, and showed good potential for non-invasive diagnosis and monitoring of joint disorders such as osteoarthritis and chondromalacia patella.


This is a case of a 40-year-old man with a background history of alcohol dependence syndrome presented with brief history of overt auditory hallucination. His presentation is acute in onset with primary auditory hallucination, retained personality and insight with no evidence of thought disorder or clouding of consciousness. No abnormalities were found following a medical work-up including blood investigation and MRI brain. A diagnosis of alcohol-induced psychotic disorder (AIPD) was made and he was commenced on a second-generation antipsychotic (olanzapine) with favourable response. AIPD is a rare complication of chronic alcohol abuse which leads to acute prominent auditory hallucination and paranoid ideation. Antipsychotic medication remained the mainstay of treatment for AIPD, but the evidence remained quite limited. Please click PDF below to download the full paper...


We present a novel method to recover images of faces, particularly when large spatial regions of the face are unavailable due to data losses or occlusions. In contrast with previous work, we do not make assumptions on the data neither during training nor testing (such as assuming that the person was seen before or that all faces are perfectly aligned and have identical head pose, expression, etc.). Instead, we propose to tackle the problem in a purely unsupervised way, leveraging a large face dataset. During training, first we cluster faces based on their landmark's positions (obtained by an automatic face landmark estimator). Then, we model the face appearance for each group using sparse coding with learned dictionaries, with one dictionary per cluster. At test time, given a face to recover, we find its belonging cluster and occluded area and restore missing pixels by applying the group-specific sparse appearance representation learned during training. We show results on two "in the wild" datasets. Our method shows promising results on challenging faces and our sparse coding approach outperforms prior subspace learning techniques.


Approximately a decade ago, superconducting maglev train prototypes started to be developed. Researchers from China, Germany, and Brazil have built prototypes carrying people based on superconducting levitation technology. The Brazilian MagLev project, named MagLev-Cobra, started in 2000 with a small-scale prototype that was concluded in 2006. After that, efforts toward a full-scale test vehicle for 30 passengers began. This vehicle will be composed of 4 modules, each one 1.5 m long, with six levitation cryostats and a linear induction motor. The first module and 12 m of test track are already constructed and this paper will describe the following tests: air gap as a function of load, temporal air gap stability, linear motor traction force, and vehicle acceleration. The paper will also describe the construction details of module, linear motor, and the rail.


Downy woodpeckers (Picoides pubescens) benefit from foraging in mixed-species winter flocks by decreasing their vigilance level and increasing their feeding rate. I investigated one mechanism, auditory cues, downy woodpeckers use to obtain information on the presence of other flock members and potential predators. Experiments with predator models and with recorded alarm calls and contact calls from flock members yielded the following results. Downy woodpeckers use the contact calls of other flock members to assess the presence of flocks members. Woodpeckers foraging alone but with the recorded contact calls of flock members showed lower vigilance levels and higher feeding rates than woodpeckers foraging alone with no recordings or with the control recordings. Woodpeckers respond to the other species' alarm calls as an indication of potential predators and also to their contact calls as an all clear signal afterwards. Downy woodpeckers decreased their vigilance levels and resumed foraging faster when the contact calls followed the presentation of predator models or alarm calls than when these were presented alone.


1. The first appearance of a calcareous spicule or spicular element, both ancestrally and in the actual development, was probably a minute vacuole in a cell of the dermal layer, filled with an organic substance perhaps identical with the intercellular ground substance, within which the minute sclerite appeared as a crystal or concretion. 2. The ancestral sclerite, though crystalline in structure, soon assumed a non-crystalline form as a whole, as an adaptation to its secondarily acquired function of support, and as it grew in size the contents of the vacuole formed the spicule sheath. 3. The ancestral form of spicule in the Calcarea was a simple monaxon, placed tangentially and completely embedded in the body-wall, lying between two adjacent pores. 4. From this ancestral spicule the forms of spicule now occurring in the Calcarea arose as follows: (a) the primitive monaxon acquired a distal portion projecting from the surface, as in the existing primary monaxons; (b) groups consisting each of three primitive monaxons became united by their contiguous ends to form a single triradiate system; (c) to some of the triradiate systems thus formed a fourth ray was added, secreted by the pore-cell, giving rise to the quadriradiate system ; (d) some of the triradiate systems, by loss of one ray and placing of the other two in a straight line, or by loss of two rays, perhaps became modified into secondary monaxon spicules. 5. The power of secreting a monaxon sclerite was primitively possessed by every cell of the dermal layer, and this condition appears to be retained in Leucosolenia. In Clathrina, on the other hand, all the skeletogenous cells migrate inwards from the dermal epithelium, and form a connective-tissue layer distinct in function from the contractile, undifferentiated dermal epithelium. In Leucosolenia also the actinoblasts of the triradiate systems form a deeper layer, but the dermal epithelium secretes primary monaxons--at least in the young form--and is non-contractile. 6. The forms of the spicules are the result of adaptation to the requirements of the sponge as a whole, produced by the action of natural selection upon variation in every direction.


BACKGROUND AND AIMS
While the climbing habit allows vines to reach well-lit canopy areas with a minimum investment in support biomass, many of them have to survive under the dim understorey light during certain stages of their life cycle. But, if the growth/survival trade-off widely reported for trees hold for climbing plants, they cannot maximize both light-interception efficiency and shade avoidance (i.e. escaping from the understorey). The seven most important woody climbers occurring in a Chilean temperate evergreen rainforest were studied with the hypothesis that light-capture efficiency of climbers would be positively associated with their abundance in the understorey.

METHODS
Species abundance in the understorey was quantified from their relative frequency and density in field plots, the light environment was quantified by hemispherical photography, the photosynthetic response to light was measured with portable gas-exchange analyser, and the whole shoot light-interception efficiency and carbon gain was estimated with the 3-D computer model Y-plant.

KEY RESULTS
Species differed in specific leaf area, leaf mass fraction, above ground leaf area ratio, light-interception efficiency and potential carbon gain. Abundance of species in the understorey was related to whole shoot features but not to leaf level features such as specific leaf area. Potential carbon gain was inversely related to light-interception efficiency. Mutual shading among leaves within a shoot was very low (<20 %).

CONCLUSIONS
The abundance of climbing plants in this southern rainforest understorey was directly related to their capacity to intercept light efficiently but not to their potential carbon gain. The most abundant climbers in this ecosystem match well with a shade-tolerance syndrome in contrast to the pioneer-like nature of climbers observed in tropical studies. The climbers studied seem to sacrifice high-light searching for coping with the dim understorey light.


In this clinical update, we selected recent publications relevant to common neurological concerns in women, with specific attention to stroke, cognition, and headache. We have chosen to highlight articles on sex differences in stroke and stroke treatment, the effect of hormone therapy on stroke risk and on cognition, and symptoms of the migraine postdrome.


This paper presents a first attempt at an integrated systems analysis of drinking water systems using Microbiological Risk Assessment (MRA) and Material Flow Analysis (MFA) with focus on the comparison of central physical-chemical treatment (conventional system) and local membrane filtration. The MFA shows that energy use is the most significant environmental impact of the three studied drinking water systems, but there are no considerable differences in energy use comparing central physical-chemical treatment and local membrane filtration. According to the MRA, the conventional system might not reduce the microbial risks sufficiently, but such a reduction can not confidently be achieved in a one-step ultrafiltration system either, since membrane filter integrity can hardly be guaranteed over the service life of the equipment. A quite costly two-step membrane filtration system, where water for all household purposes passes microfiltration and further reverse osmosis for drinking and cooking, seems to fulfil this criterion. On the other hand, this system does not reduce the microbial risks from ingestion of water from showers compared with the one-step ultrafiltration alternative. In order to achieve drinking water systems with sufficient microbial barriers and with reasonable costs for operation, a promising solution seems to be a combination of one-step membrane filtration and other methods e.g. biological treatment.


Data augmentation is critical to the success of modern deep learning techniques. In this paper, we propose Online Hyper-parameter Learning for Auto-Augmentation (OHL-Auto-Aug), an economical solution that learns the augmentation policy distribution along with network training. Unlike previous methods on auto-augmentation that search augmentation strategies in an offline manner, our method formulates the augmentation policy as a parameterized probability distribution, thus allowing its parameters to be optimized jointly with network parameters. Our proposed OHL-Auto-Aug eliminates the need of re-training and dramatically reduces the cost of the overall search process, while establishes significantly accuracy improvements over baseline models. On both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, our method achieves remarkable on search accuracy, 60x faster on CIFAR-10 and 24x faster on ImageNet, while maintaining competitive accuracies.


Accurate thermal prediction of gas turbine blades is essential to ensure successful operation throughout the design life. Large Gas turbines operate in different conditions based on customer requirements, due to which turbine blades are subjected to variations in thermal loading conditions. Simulating this behavior using conventional finite element modeling involves detailed and time-consuming analyses for calculation of blade temperature, which can be further utilized to assess cyclic and creep life. This paper deals with developing and utilizing machine learning based surrogate models to predict the sectional temperature (output) of a radially cooled blade. The surrogate models are developed to predict the output using turbine inlet temperature, hot gas mass flow, cooling air temperature and cooling air mass flow as input to the machine learning (ML) model. All thermal parameters for ML model have been obtained from CFD based 3D thermal calculations. A comparative study is presented between linear regression, decision tree, random forest, and gradient boost ML models, to select the model with the least mean absolute error. Additionally, hyperparameter optimization is performed using grid search to minimize the error. The results show that the linear regression-based model outputs the least mean absolute error of 6.5°C and the highest dependence of the output is on the turbine inlet temperature, followed by the cooling air temperature. The findings show a good agreement between the predicted output of the surrogate model and multi-dimensional physics based thermal calculations, while offering a considerate reduction in analysis time.


Purpose: The transplantation of cryopreserved human amniotic membrane has been introduced recently for the reconstruction of the ocular surface. However, in some diseases the transplant usually dissolves rather quickly and early detachment may occur. Therefore, we tried to stabilize the amniotic transplant by applying glutaraldehyde for collagen cross-linking of the membrane. Methods: 18 human amnions were prepared. 4 × 4 cm pieces of amnion were treated with 0.1% glutaraldehyde solution for 30 min. Biomechanical force-elongation measurements were performed and resistance to enzymatic digestion by 0.1% collagenase solution was tested and compared to cryopreserved and untreated fresh amnion. 8 patients with various ocular surface defects were treated with cross-linked amnion and compared to 5 patients with cryopreserved amnion. Results: The force of the amnion cross-linked with glutaraldehyde at 2.5 mm elongation was increased statistically significant by 175% versus fresh amnion and 76.8% versus the cryopreserved amnion. Glutaraldehyde-treated membranes were virtually completely resistant to enzymatic digestion, while fresh and cryopreserved amnions were dissolved completely by day 7. In patients, the cross-linked membrane was preserved for up to 90 days without any signs of dissolution of the membrane and good transparency. Conclusions: Collagen cross-linking using glutaraldehyde leads to a significant increase in the biomechanical strength and enzymatic resistance of amnion, better transparency and less wrinkling. The cross-linked membrane does not dissolve for months and is well suited for the surface reconstruction of the cornea.


Efficient and reliable electrocardiogram (ECG) compression system can increase the processing speed of real time ECG transmission as well as reduce the amount of data storage in long-term ECG recording .In this paper,  different methods of ECG data compression are compared. This paper has done a survey of various kinds of ECG data compression techniques. The proposed method of ECG Data Compression is intended to attain a lossless compressed data with relatively high compression ratio (CR) and low PRD (Percent Root Mean Square Difference). Different transformation may be used  for data compression. This requires very less space for decompression. It also provides low noise and has excellent restoration quality. It reduces redundancy that occurs in an ECG signal.


Background: A key challenge in meeting the palliative care needs of people in advanced age is the multiple healthcare and social service agencies typically involved in their care. The 'patient navigator' model, originally developed in cancer care, is the professional solution most often recommended to address this challenge. However, little attention has been paid, or is known, about the role that family carers play in enabling their dying relatives to negotiate service gaps. Aim: To explore the role family caregivers play in helping people dying in advanced old age navigate health services at the end of life. Design: Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews and analysed via thematic analysis. Setting/participants: A total of 58 interviews were conducted in New Zealand with the family caregivers of 52 deceased older relatives who had been participants in Life and Living in Advanced Age: a Cohort Study in New Zealand. Results: Fragmentation of services was the key concern, causing distress both for the older person and their family caregivers. Carers identified and engaged with appropriate services in order to facilitate care and treatment. Their involvement was not always met by healthcare professionals with respect or regard to their knowledge of the older person's needs. Conclusion: Family caregivers are trying to help their older relatives overcome the limitations of fragmented health systems at the end of life. They are doing so at times by stepping in to perform patient navigator tasks usually conceptualised as a role for statutory services to carry out. Programmes and services need to be implemented that will better support family carers who are acting as care navigators.


Background: There is much to be realised in the educational potential of national and world heritage sites. Such sites need to be supported in sharing their resources with a wide and international public, especially within formal education. Two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) heritage site visualisations could serve this need. Our study focuses on the teacher-perceived possibilities and benefits for education around such visualisations. Purpose: We describe how a group of UK teachers perceive the potential of cross-curricular learning that could arise from an Italian world heritage site. The teachers commented on 2D visualisations of artefacts from this site, as well as the design of a 3D immersive environment to serve educational purposes. We consider as follows: (1) how the cross-curricular teaching potential of such resources is perceived, and (2) what design features of a 3D immersive environment teachers suggest are needed for educational explorations. Sample: We recruited 10 teachers from the Midlands region of the UK and carried out semi-structured interviews. Methods: Interviews were transcribed and a thematic analysis applied to the conversations. Questioning was grounded in the examination of 2D and 3D visual resources. This provoked cross-curricular and educational design thinking. Results: Teacher responses highlighted a wide range of cross-curricular possibilities. However, they expressed a more 'assimilative' than 'accommodative' approach when relating resources to the curriculum. Such 'assimilation' involved seeing the site artefacts as raw material for more instrumental 'curriculum activities' (e.g. within art and design, geography, maths or literacy) rather than a more accommodative approach whereby curricular disciplines were exercised to make new meaning from the artefacts. In relation to 3D technology design, most teachers highlighted three technology features that would render it well matched to educational practice and three educational benefits over non-3D immersive environments. Conclusions: Teachers can easily imagine a rich range of opportunities to utilise 2D and 3D heritage site artefacts within the curriculum. However, the largely assimilative nature of this cross-curricular appropriation suggests the value of providing more guidance and support to teachers in the interpretation and application of artefacts. Their design suggestions can usefully inform construction of educational features within 3D immersive technologies that support heritage site experiences.


In this paper, an entropy-constrained vector quantiser (ECVQ) scheme with finite memory, called finite-state ECVQ (FS-ECVQ), is presented. This scheme consists of a finite-state vector quantiser (FSVQ) and multiple component ECVQs. By utilising the FSVQ, the inter-frame dependencies within source sequence can be effectively exploited and no side information needs to be transmitted. By employing the ECVQs, the total memory requirements of FS-ECVQ can be efficiently decreased while the coding performance is improved. An FS-ECVQ, designed for the modified discrete cosine transform coefficients coding, was implemented and evaluated based on the unified speech and audio coding (USAC) scheme. Results showed that the FS-ECVQ achieved reduction of the total memory requirements by 92.3%, compared with the encoder in USAC working draft 6 (WD6), and over 10%, compared with the encoder in USAC final version (FINAL), while maintaining coding performance similar to FINAL, which was about 4% better than that of WD6.


BACKGROUND
Sesame is a significant food allergen causing severe and even fatal reactions. Given its increasing prevalence in western diet, sesame is listed as an allergenic food requiring labeling in the United States and EU. However, data on the population reaction doses to sesame are limited.

METHODS
All sesame oral food challenges (OFCs), performed either for diagnosis or for threshold identification before the beginning of sesame oral immunotherapy (OIT) between November 2011 and July 2021 in Shamir medical center were analyzed for reaction threshold distribution. Safe-dose challenges with 90-120 min intervals were also analyzed.

RESULTS
Two hundred and fifty patients underwent 338 positive OFCs, and additional 158 safe-dose OFCs were performed. The discrete and cumulative protein amounts estimated to elicit an objective reaction in 1% (ED01) of the entire cohort (n = 250) were 0.8 mg (range 0.3-6.3) and 0.7 mg (range 0.1-7.1), respectively, and those for 5% of the population (ED05) were 3.4 mg (range 1.2-20.6) and 4.5 mg (range 1.2-28.8), respectively. Safe-dose OFCs showed similar values of ED01 (0.8, 0.4-7.5 mg) and ED05 (3.4, 1.2-22.9 mg). While doses of ≤1 mg sesame protein elicited oral pruritus in 11.6% of the patients, no objective reaction was documented to this amount in any of the challenges, including safe-dose OFCs.

CONCLUSIONS
This study provides data on sesame reaction threshold distribution in the largest population of allergic patients studied, with no right or left censored data, and with validation using a safe-dose OFC. It further supports the current methods for ED determination as appropriate for establishing safety precautions for the food industry.


People with invisible illnesses are challenged both by their impairments and the additional hurdles they face when it comes to being believed by others. This presents particular difficulties when seeking to convince those with the authority to make legal findings of discrimination or entitlement to accommodation. By focusing on the historically contested diagnosis of multiple chemical sensitivities ("MCS"), this paper examines the outer limits of how disability is defined and the legal rights given to people whose claims are viewed as suspect. Specifically, comparison is made between MCS employment cases in the United States and Canada.In both jurisdictions, plaintiffs face challenges related to findings of credibility, a prioritization of scientific evidence over experiential knowledge, and efforts to rule out accommodation measures by exaggerating disabilities. In the end result, people with MCS are statistically more likely to succeed in Canada; but, the tide is turning. Twenty-five years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, American courts are becoming more receptive to a plaintiff's lived experience of MCS as a disability. At the same time, Canadian tribunals are increasingly looking to scientific and medical validation at the expense of a claimant's lived reality.As new diseases emerge, the law in both countries must progress to allow medical and scientific evidence to follow, not lead, experiential accounts of disablement in the workplace. Otherwise, the result will be to create a class of people with invisible disabilities who have no hope of being rendered visible by our courts and tribunals.


Reply suggestion models help users process emails and chats faster. Previous work only studies English reply suggestion. Instead, we present MRS, a multilingual reply suggestion dataset with ten languages. MRS can be used to compare two families of models: 1) retrieval models that select the reply from a fixed set and 2) generation models that produce the reply from scratch. Therefore, MRS complements existing cross-lingual generalization benchmarks that focus on classification and sequence labeling tasks. We build a generation model and a retrieval model as baselines for MRS. The two models have different strengths in the monolingual setting, and they require different strategies to generalize across languages. MRS is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangmozhi/mrs.


Professional certification is one mechanism used to assist in maintaining and improving professional or technical competence in numerous professions. It can potentially be used to assist in improving tour guide performance and raising and maintaining guiding standards. The aim of this research was to critically analyse the development of the Australian EcoGuide Program as a basis for building a model for tour guide certification as one mechanism of improving the quality of tour guiding. This was achieved through a review of the relevant literature, and by analysing the content, process, and elements of the EcoGuide Program, and selected industry stakeholders' views of the Program. A mixed methods approach was adopted and five data collection methods were used: a telephone survey, in-depth interviews, focus group interviews, on-site questionnaires and secondary data analysis. Data were collected from six research populations: nature/ecotour guides, nature-based tour operators, members of the EcoGuide Steering Committee, EcoGuide assessors, the Department of Industry, Science and Resources and Australian protected area managers. The results were triangulated to build an understanding of the content, elements, development process and stakeholders' views of the EcoGuide Program. The findings of this analysis are presented in a general model for tour guide certification.


The emergence and spread of a novel coronavirus (2019nCoV) from Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China, has become a global health concern (1). Since the detection of the coronavirus in late December 2019, sporadic imported cases among travelers returning from Wuhan and humanto-human transmission have been reported in several nonWuhan/non-Hubei areas (2,3). We describe the CT features of one family cluster of 2019-nCoV.


This work evaluates the predictive power of the quasi-dynamic shallow landslide model QD-SLaM to simulate shallow landslide locations in a small-scale Mediterranean landscape, namely, the lower portion (2.6 km 2 ) of the Giampilieri catchment, located in Sicily (Italy). The catchment was impacted by a sequence of high-intensity storms over the years 2007–2009, resulting in widespread landsliding, with a total landslide initiation area amounting to 2.6% of the basin area. The effect of high-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) on the quality of model predictions is tested by considering four DTM resolutions: 2, 4, 10 and 20 m. Moreover, the impact of the dense forest road network on the model performance is evaluated by separately considering road-related landslides and natural landslides. The landslide model does not incorporate the description of road-related failures and is applied without calibration of the model parameters. The model predictive power is shown to be DTM-resolution dependent. Use of coarser resolution has a smoothing effect on terrain attributes, with local slope angles decreasing and contributing areas becoming larger. The percentage of watershed area represented by the model as unconditionally unstable (i.e. failing even without the addition of water from precipitation) ranges between 6.3% at 20 m DTM and 13.8% at 2 m DTM, showing an overestimation of the mapped landslide area. We consider this prediction as an indication for likely failing sites in future storms rather than areas proved stable during previous storms. When assessed over the sample of mapped non-road-related landslides, better model performances are reported for 4 and 10 m DTM resolution, thus highlighting the fact that higher DTM resolution does not necessarily mean better model performances. Model performances over road-related failures are lower than for the natural cases, and slightly increase with decreasing DTM resolution. These findings indicate that to realize the full potential of high-resolution topography, more extensive work is needed aiming more specifically to identify the extent of the artificial structures and their impact on shallow landsliding processes.


Wasting marmoset syndrome (WMS) has high incidence and mortality rates and is one of the most important problems in captive common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) colonies. Despite several reports on WMS, little information is available regarding its reliable treatment. We previously reported that marmosets with WMS had high serum levels of matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP9). MMP9 is thought to be a key enzyme in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease, the main disease state of WMS, and is activated by plasmin, a fibrinolytic factor. In a previous study, treating mice with an antibody to inhibit plasmin prevented the progression of inflammatory bowel disease. Here we examined the efficacy of tranexamic acid, a commonly used plasmin inhibitor, for the treatment of WMS, with supportive measures including amino acid and iron formulations. Six colony marmosets with WMS received tranexamic acid therapy with supportive measures for 8 wk. The body weight, Hct, and serum albumin levels of these 6 marmosets were increased and serum MMP9 levels decreased after this regimen. Therefore, tranexamic acid therapy may be a new and useful treatment for WMS.


This is the largest Latin American study of BCR-ABL mutations in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) patients, resistant to imatinib (IM). In 195/467 (41%) patients, mutations were detected. The most frequent mutation was T315I (n = 31, 16%). Progression-free (PFS) and overall survival (OS) at 5 years were lower in patients with BCR-ABL mutations (43% vs. 65%, p = 0.07 and 47% vs. 72%, p = 0.03, respectively) and in those with the T315I mutation (p = 0.003 and p = 0.03). OS and PFS were superior in subgroup who switched to second generation inhibitors (SGIs) after IM failure (OS: 50% vs. 39% p = 0.01; PFS: 48% vs. 30% p = 0.02). BCR-ABL mutations conferred a significant poor prognosis in CML patients.


A detailed controller design for indirect constant power regulation of high intensity discharge (HID) electronic ballast and the experimental implementation of an adaptive passivity-based constant power (PBC) controller has been extensively studied through simulation and the findings are reported in this paper. An indirect method to regulate the inductor current to ensure the lamp constant output power is proposed in order to overcome the difficulties in measuring the output power of the HID ballast. The controller is derived using passivity theory which guarantees global stability and asymptotic convergence of all state errors. The simulation and controller design are based on an average model using the Euler–Lagrange (EL) equations of the system. As the lamp resistance will inevitably change with ageing, an adaptive method is used to compensate for the lamp performance as the lamp ages. This equips the controller the power to adapt to load variations and there is no need to tune the design parameters values each time manually. Another interconnection and damping assignment (IDA)-PBC method is analyzed and simulation results are provided for comparison. Computer simulation and hardware implementation are carried out to verify the system model and to demonstrate the controller is robust.


eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide. Abstract: The Cash for Clunker program aims to stimulate the economy, provide relief for automobile manufacturers and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this research note, I present estimates of the implied cost of carbon dioxide reductions under the Cash for Clunker program. The estimates suggest that the program is an expensive way to reduce greenhouse gases. This is true under a wide range of assumptions regarding the increase in fuel economy of new vehicles purchased under the program, how long the clunkers would have been on the road if not for the program, and whether we account for reductions in criteria pollutants. Conservative estimates of the implied carbon dioxide cost exceed $365 per ton; best case scenario parameter values suggest a cost of carbon dioxide of $237 per ton. Abstract The Cash for Clunker program aims to stimulate the economy, provide relief for automobile manufacturers and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this research note, I present estimates of the implied cost of carbon dioxide reductions under the Cash for Clunker program. The estimates suggest that the program is an expensive way to reduce greenhouse gases. This is true under a wide range of assumptions regarding the increase in fuel economy of new vehicles purchased under the program, how long the clunkers would have been on the road if not for the program, and whether we account for reductions in criteria pollutants. Conservative estimates of the implied carbon dioxide cost exceed $365 per ton; best case scenario parameter values suggest a cost of carbon dioxide of $237 per ton.


Music education has, for many years, championed methods that reinforce traditional modes of transmission, namely individual tuition, ensemble experiences and classroom teaching. This paper re-examines the notion of lifelong learning in music education. In so doing, it examines formal and informal modes of transmission in music education with specific examples from conservatoriums, education faculties and private providers. It takes account opportunities available for music teaching and learning in preschool, school-age education, tertiary, professional development and other forms of continuous education. Examples of best practice are included, along with suggestions for improvements in the way in which music education is approached. In detailed terms, the paper traces options for music education from birth into later life describing new ways of addressing the notion of flexible learning. Furthermore, means of engaging the disengaged are pursued, particularly with a view to finding equitable ways of involving marginal members of the community.


Cell-based antitumor immunity is driven by CD8+ cytotoxic T cells bearing TCR that recognize specific tumor-associated peptides bound to class I MHC molecules. Of several cellular proteins involved in T cell:target-cell interaction, the TCR determines specificity of binding; however, the relative amount of its contribution to cellular avidity remains unknown. To study the relationship between TCR affinity and cellular avidity, with the intent of identifying optimal TCR for gene therapy, we derived 24 MART-1:27-35 (MART-1) melanoma Ag-reactive tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) clones from the tumors of five patients. These MART-1-reactive clones displayed a wide variety of cellular avidities. α and β TCR genes were isolated from these clones, and TCR RNA was electroporated into the same non-MART-1-reactive allogeneic donor PBMC and TIL. TCR recipient cells gained the ability to recognize both MART-1 peptide and MART-1-expressing tumors in vitro, with avidities that closely corresponded to the original TCR clones (p = 0.018–0.0003). Clone DMF5, from a TIL infusion that mediated tumor regression clinically, showed the highest avidity against MART-1 expressing tumors in vitro, both endogenously in the TIL clone, and after RNA electroporation into donor T cells. Thus, we demonstrated that the TCR appeared to be the core determinant of MART-1 Ag-specific cellular avidity in these activated T cells and that nonreactive PBMC or TIL could be made tumor-reactive with a specific and predetermined avidity. We propose that inducing expression of this highly avid TCR in patient PBMC has the potential to induce tumor regression, as an "off-the-shelf" reagent for allogeneic melanoma patient gene therapy.


Switching of single-electron transport is observed in point-contact transistors fabricated in nanocrystalline silicon thin films, where the grain size is /spl sim/10 to 40 nm. The effects may be associated with electrostatic coupling between the grains. At 4.2 K, single-electron oscillations in the device current are switched as a function of the voltages on two separate gates. This is investigated further using single-electron Monte Carlo simulation of a model with two charging grains in parallel and intergrain capacitive coupling. A change in the electron number of a grain occurs due to charging of the other grain by a single electron, causing bistable regions in charge stability versus gate voltage. These effects depend not only on the coupling capacitance but also on the cross capacitances between the grains and the two gates.


Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs), which are pervasive among microbes, create massive protein sequence variation through reverse transcription of a protein-coding RNA template coupled to frequent misincorporation at template adenines. For cDNA synthesis, the template must be surrounded by up- and downstream sequences. Cryo-EM revealed that this longer RNA formed an integral ribonucleoprotein (RNP) with the DGR reverse transcriptase bRT and associated protein Avd. The downstream, noncoding (nc) RNA formed stem-loops enveloping bRT and laying over barrel-shaped Avd, and duplexes with the upstream and template RNA. These RNA structural elements were required for reverse transcription, and several were conserved in DGRs from distant taxa. Multiple RNP conformations were visualized, and no large structural rearrangements occurred when adenine replaced guanine as the template base, suggesting energetics govern misincorporation at adenines. Our results explain how the downstream ncRNA primes cDNA synthesis, promotes processivity, terminates polymerization, and stringently limits mutagenesis to DGR variable proteins.


The AS/AGU rat is a spontaneous recessive mutation which arose in a closed colony of Albino Swiss (AS) rats. It is characterised by disordered locomotion including a wide gait, whole body tremor and frequent falling over in continuous locomotion. It has been demonstrated that there is a substantial dysfunction of the nigro-striatal dopaminergic system which begins with a marked reduction in dopamine release in the striatum, followed by a reduction in whole tissue dopamine levels and, finally, a loss of dopaminergic cells. The mutation has recently been shown to be a stop codon in the gene responsible for the activity of protein kinase C (PKC)-gamma. Although few specific functions are known for this particular isoform (and those that are appear to cover widely disparate types of CNS activity), the PKC family in general has a role in transmitter packaging and release, as well as in ion channel modulation and receptor sensitivity. It is very likely, therefore, that the mutation will affect other transmitter systems in addition to the dopaminergic system already investigated. Furthermore, all human neurodegenerative conditions which combine disordered locomotion with basal ganglia and aminergic dysfunction have shown evidence of effects on several transmitter systems. This study was undertaken, therefore, to look at the integrity and functioning of the raphe-striatal serotonergic system in the mutant, using the parent strain as a control. This is an exciting model, since any differences found must stem directly or indirectly from a single point mutation. Initial experiments were carried out to verify a) the nature of the mutation and b) the connectivity of the dorsal and median raphe nuclei to the striatum in these strains. Immunocytochemical investigations of the AS wild-type showed positive staining for PKC-gamma in many parts of the brain, including cerebral and cerebellar cortices, striatum, substantia nigra and raphe regions; no staining could be found in the AS/AGU mutant. This confirms the identification of the gene mutation. Injections of the tracer cholera toxin-B were made into the dorsal caudate-putamen (a region of the basal ganglia found to be particularly affected in previous work on the dopaminergic system). Cells of the dorsal raphe nucleus (but not the median raphe nucleus) were found to be retrogradely labelled. Labelling occurred throughout the dorsal raphe nucleus, with peak cell numbers occurring in the centre of the rostral-caudal distribution of the nucleus. Approximately a third of the cell bodies were positively stained for CB-T. This confirms that the dorsal caudate putamen receives a strong afferent input from the dorsal raphe nucleus, but that the median raphe does not project to the striatum. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).


This project presents the studies of product development of traditional cooling rice powder or bedak sejuk. Traditional cooling rice powder or can be known as bedak sejuk is a traditional cosmetic product made from rice. This cooling rice powder is applied not only on the face but it can be applied over the whole human body for skin protecting and healing. Through distribution of questionnaires, the improvement of bedak sejuk was decided. A survey to identify the usage percentage of bedak sejuk among students of Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Jeli Campus was first conducted before the questionnaires were distributed. Based on the descriptive analysis of questionnaire obtained, aroma and packaging of bedak sejuk rated as the lowest score. The bedak sejuk was then improved in term of aroma instead of improvement in packaging because of some limitation. The improved bedak sejuk is then further analyzed with microbial testing and heavy metal testing for the safety evaluation of cosmetic product generally. From the study conducted, it shows that the sample bought in the market have the lowest content of microbes which is 0.15x105 cfu/ml. From the result obtained in heavy metal analysis, all samples are not contained mercury, lead and cadmium concentration above the permissible limit. Therefore, all the bedak sejuk' are safe for consumption.


Objective: To elucidate the functional consequences of epileptic encephalopathy–causing de novo mutations in DNM1 (A177P, K206N, G359A), which encodes a large mechanochemical GTPase essential for neuronal synaptic vesicle endocytosis. Methods: HeLa and COS-7 cells transfected with wild-type and mutant DNM1 constructs were used for transferrin assays, high-content imaging, colocalization studies, Western blotting, and electron microscopy (EM). EM was also conducted on the brain sections of mice harboring a middle-domain Dnm1 mutation (Dnm1Ftfl). Results: We demonstrate that the expression of each mutant protein decreased endocytosis activity in a dominant-negative manner. One of the G-domain mutations, K206N, decreased protein levels. The G359A mutation, which occurs in the middle domain, disrupted higher-order DNM1 oligomerization. EM of mutant DNM1-transfected HeLa cells and of the Dnm1Ftfl mouse brain revealed vesicle defects, indicating that the mutations likely interfere with DNM1's vesicle scission activity. Conclusion: Together, these data suggest that the dysfunction of vesicle scission during synaptic vesicle endocytosis can lead to serious early-onset epilepsies.


Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (TDMB) is one popular broadcasting standard that enable digital television transmissions to hand held receivers and cooperative system take advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless channels, uses relay stations as virtual antennas. Relay stations are an attractive solution to penetrate the wireless system with lower transmitting power at the Base station. In this paper, we presented a scheme can switch on/off the power weighting ratio between Base station and Relay station in TDMB cooperative Network. It will control the active relays in different channel propagations effectively. DOI :  http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v12i6.5399 Full Text: PDF


This article investigates the role of political influence, as well as accounting tradition and the equity market, in China's recent changes in accounting regulation. We find that the Chinese government, in part self-motivated and in part under external pressure, has been active in developing accounting standards in harmony with international accounting standards. However, it has retained a uniform accounting system in the Enterprise Accounting System issued in 2000 to accommodate the special circumstances of a transforming government, strong state-ownership, a weak accounting profession, a weak and imperfect equity market, and the inertial effect of accounting tradition and cultural factors. This article also contributes to existing models of accounting system classification by illustrating the need for considering political influence as a factor that affects the rate of transition towards full implementation of international accounting standards.


Economic development and that of consumer society implies large-scale production of solid waste in any determined locality. This becomes a serious environmental problem if there is no suitable infrastructure for its integral management. This paper presents a methodology for designing urban solid waste collection using fixed box systems (FBS), considering temporary variations in the amounts generated and collected. Temporary variation has been included by analysing three generation point factors: weekly extreme coefficient (WEC), daily extreme coefficient (DEC) and daily extreme coefficient of heterogeneous distribution (DECH). Such time-based consideration allows making reasonable designs which can be adjusted to maximum generation and collection rates. The proposed model considers per capita production (PCP), weekly extreme coefficient (WEC) and daily extreme coefficient of heterogeneous distribution (DECH). The proposed methodology can be used for selecting the equipment and the size of the integral management units for urban solid waste.


Like other new religious movements, Armenian neo-paganism shifted from exploring alternatives to Soviet ideology to searching for a national religious identity and spiritual salvation. The movement's organization was founded in 1991 by Slak Kakosyan, a returned exile who also wrote the movement's central book. It is loosely organized, but has up to 100 members and several hundred followers. The neo-pagans draw on—and reinterpret—pre-Christian deities, Armenian nationalist mythology, and ancient historiography. They have invested the reconstructed Hellenistic temple of Garni for their rituals. Striving for national religious unity, they also incorporate elements of Armenian Christianity into their beliefs and practices. The article describes the Armenian neo-pagan movement, drawing on interviews and ethnographic observation. In Russian, summary in English.


Nuclear energy is presented as a real option in the face of the current problem of climate change and the need to reduce CO2 emissions. The nuclear reactor design with the greatest global impact throughout history and which has the most ambitious development plans is the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). Thus, a global review of such a reactor design is presented in this paper, utilizing the analysis of (i) technical aspects of the different variants of the PWR design implemented over the past eight years, (ii) the level of implementation of PWR nuclear power plants in the world, and (iii) a life extension scenario and future trends in PWR design based on current research and development (R&D) activity. To develop the second analysis, a statistical study of the implementation of the different PWR variants has been carried out. Such a statistical analysis is based on the operating factor, which represents the relative frequency of reactors operating around the world. The results reflect the hegemony of the western variants in the 300 reactors currently operating, highlighting the North American and French versions. Furthermore, a simulation of a possible scenario of increasing the useful life of operational PWRs up to 60 years has been proposed, seeing that in 2050 the generation capacity of nuclear PWRs power plants will decrease by 50%, and the number of operating reactors by 70%.


The war novel is a significant genre in twentieth-century Canadian fiction. Central to that genre has been the soldier's narrative. Canadian war novelists have often situated the soldier's story in opposition to how war has functioned in Canadian cultural memory, which usually posits war as a necessary, though brutal, galvanizing force. This dissertation on how novelists depict the Canadian soldier represents a crucial opportunity to examine Canadian cultures of militarization and how Canadian identity has been formed in close identification with the mutable figure of the soldier. The most sophisticated Canadian war novels engage with how militarism functions as a grand narrative in Canadian society, while enabling Canadians to speak about issues related to war that tend to be over-simplified or elided. This dissertation examines emblematic Canadian war novels – The Imperialist by Sara Jeanette Duncan, Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison, Turvey by Earle Birney, Execution by Colin McDougall, The Wars by Timothy Findley, Broken Ground by Jack Hodgins, The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart, etc. – in order to trace how the representation of the Canadian soldier has shifted throughout the twentieth-century. Canadian war novels are culturally cathartic exercises wherein received notions of Canadian moral and military superiority can be safely questioned. The Canadian soldier, often characterized in official discourse as the personification of duty and sacrifice, has been reimagined by war novelists throughout the twentieth century as a site of skepticism and resistance. In many Canadian war novels, the soldier affords the opportunity to claim counter-histories, reject master narratives, and posit new originary myths.


This paper presents a discrete-time predictive control strategy for a voltage-source inverter based on computation of a deadbeat control law and its approximating suboptimal voltage vector at every sampling interval. The controller, in addition to compensating for the inherent delay in the system, employs a simple prediction filter to suppress the disturbance caused by the back-EMF voltages and improve robustness against parameter variations across the load. Discussions on the effect of the back-EMF prediction on the performance and robustness of the system is provided. It is shown that the proposed control strategy yields satisfactory transient and steady-state behavior and that the closed-loop system can tolerate a wide range of parameter variations and model uncertainty.


ABSTRACT Greenways are multi-objective planning tools for sustainable development that take several criteria into account. In order to resolve the conflicts among objectives, greenway planning requires advanced strategies for decision-making processes and techniques. To aid in this, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) systems have significant capacity to analytically prioritize and select alternatives. This research develops a strategy for defining, prioritizing and selecting greenway alternatives with the support of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) based on an empirical study in the urban region of Trabzon (Turkey). The study finds that AHP has promising capacity to analytically prioritize alternatives and rationally select the best alternative.


Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) is a heterogeneous group of disorders associated with early death due to opportunistic infection. Stem cell transplant (SCT) is now considered the standard of care for SCID because it represents the only hope of cure, and as techniques have improved it is increasingly a consideration for children with less severe primary immunodeficiencies (PIDs). Despite its being available in South Africa, to date only a handful of transplants have been performed. Major limiting factors are a lack of awareness of both the condition and the possibility of cure by means of SCT. Despite a relative paucity of matched sibling donors and limited access to umbilical cord blood stem cells, most patients can be transplanted from a haploidentical maternal donor. Age at transplant is an important prognostic factor and patients with SCID should be transplanted as early as possible. A family history of death in infancy due to severe or recurrent infection or the development of Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) infection should prompt early consideration of a PID, since delays in diagnosis and transplant preparation frequently lead to complications which compromise the chances of successful SCT.
The purpose of this article is to give the primary paediatrician and the immunologist insight into the practicalities and pitfalls of SCT for PID. We hope to encourage prompt and efficient referral of patients for transplant and to foster effective shared care of these patients.


Existing generalization bounds fail to explain crucial factors that drive generalization of modern neural networks. Since such bounds often hold uniformly over all parameters, they suffer from over-parametrization, and fail to account for the strong inductive bias of initialization and stochastic gradient descent. As an alternative, we propose a novel optimal transport interpretation of the generalization problem. This allows us to derive instance-dependent generalization bounds that depend on the local Lipschitz regularity of the earned prediction function in the data space. Therefore, our bounds are agnostic to the parametrization of the model and work well when the number of training samples is much smaller than the number of parameters. With small modifications, our approach yields accelerated rates for data on low-dimensional manifolds, and guarantees under distribution shifts. We empirically analyze our generalization bounds for neural networks, showing that the bound values are meaningful and capture the effect of popular regularization methods during training.


SUMMARY: The cultural, biochemical and morphological characteristics of six cultures of Simonsiella and four cultures of Alysiella are described. The multicellular filaments of both Simonsiella and Alysiella, originally termed "disk-bacteria", are ribbon-like, non-sporing, non-branching, aerobic and Gram-negative. They are greater than 2 μ wide, exhibit gliding motility on solid media and ferment carbohydrates. The family Simonsiellaceae fam.nov. is proposed to include the genus Simonsiella Schmid and the genus Alysiella Langeron. Amended descriptions of the species Simonsiella crassa Schmid and of Alysiella filifornis (Schmid) Langeron are given.


Productivity varies widely between industries and countries, but even more so across individual firms within the same sectors. The challenge for governments is to strike the right balance between policies designed to increase overall productivity and policies designed to promote the reallocation of resources towards firms that could use them more effectively. The aim of this book is to provide the empirical evidence necessary in order to strike this policy balance. The authors do so by using a micro-aggregated dataset for 20 EU economies produced by CompNet, the Competitiveness Research Network, established some 10 years ago among major European institutions and a number of EU productivity boards, National Central Banks, National Statistical institutes, as well as academic Institutions. They call for pan-EU initiatives involving statistical offices and scholars to achieve a truly complete EU market for firm-level information on which to build solidly founded economic policies.


Content-addressable memory (CAM) and associative memory (AM) are types of storage structures that allow searching by content as opposed to searching by address. Such memory structures are used in diverse applications ranging from branch prediction in a processor to complex pattern recognition. In this paper, we review the emerging challenges and opportunities in implementing different varieties of CAM/AM structures. Beyond-CMOS silicon and nonsilicon memory technologies hold significant promise in implementing dense, fast, and energy-efficient CAM/AM structures. We describe circuit/architecture level implementations of CAM/AM using these technologies, as well as novel applications in different domains, including informatics, text analytics, data mining, and reconfigurable computing platforms.


Plastic deformation in cubic metals is relatively simple due to the high crystallographic symmetry of the underlying structure. Typically, one unique slip mode can provide arbitrary deformation. This is not true in lower symmetry hexagonal metals, where prismatic and basal slip (the usual favored modes) are insufficient to provide arbitrary deformation. Often, either pyramidal slip and/or deformation twinning must be activated to accommodate imposed plastic deformation. The varied difficulty of activating each of these deformation mechanisms results in a highly anisotropic yield surface and subsequent mechanical properties. Further, the relative activity of each deformation mode may be manipulated through control of the initial crystallographic texture, opening new opportunities for the optimization of mechanical properties for a given application.


Legal analysis in tort litigation should encourage deeper engagement with the plaintiff's pain and suffering. Focusing more on understanding the causes and experience of human suffering – the Zen approach – will advance traditional tort goals of compensation and deterrence, as well as provide the plaintiff with a more positive litigation experience. This Article argues that current practices in tort litigation place too much emphasis on bodily harm and expert testimony, and unnecessarily position the plaintiff as a victim. Alternatively, a Zen approach recognizes that the body and mind are linked, places greater weight on direct, experiential testimony, and acknowledges the complexity and fluidity of the plaintiff's identity.


PURPOSE
Our aims were to determine adherence to American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) guidelines on colorectal cancer (CRC) surveillance and to evaluate differences in practice patterns and clinical outcomes between an academic institution (Princess Margaret Hospital [PMH]) and a community cancer hospital (Credit Valley Hospital [CVH]).

PATIENTS AND METHODS
Patients with stage II/III CRC who were diagnosed between January 1, 1999, and December 31, 2001, were identified, and their records were retrospectively reviewed.

RESULTS
A total of 244 and 97 patients were eligible at PMH and CVH, respectively. Surveillance patterns, including blood tests, imaging studies, and colonoscopies, were inconsistent with ASCO recommendations in a significant proportion of patients. Clinic visits occurred more frequently and imaging studies were more commonly ordered at PMH than at CVH (P < .001). In contrast, CVH performed a higher median number of blood count and liver function tests (P = .001) per patient than PMH. The rates of carcinoembryonic antigen monitoring and surveillance colonoscopies were not statistically different between centers (P = .67 and P = .43, respectively). There were a total of 70 CRC recurrences: 53 (75.7%) were detected by surveillance (44 at PMH and 9 at CVH) and 17 (24.3%) by patient symptoms (9 at PMH and 8 at CVH). For recurrences detected by surveillance, 38% were resectable, whereas only 18% of those detected by symptoms were resectable.

CONCLUSION
Colorectal cancer surveillance revealed noticeable departures from ASCO guidelines, with the academic institution using a more intensive surveillance strategy with imaging studies than the community cancer center. Surveillance was associated with a higher proportion of resectable tumor recurrences than was detection by patient symptoms.


Arabic has a long history of contact with languages outside the Middle East (Lapidus, 2015; Beg, 1979). In Asia, the spread of Arabic began with the trade network that connected the Middle East with South Asia, South-East, East Asia and East Africa from the fifth century. It intensified with the rise of Islam from the seventh century onwards (Morgan & Reid, 2010; Azirah & Leitner, 2016). In this paper we investigate the impact of Arabic on today's English in the context of Asian Englishes. More specifically we ask if the contact of Arabic with English in Asia has led to the creation of an Arabic-Islamic layer of English in countries that have a majority or a significant minority of Muslims. Would such a layer add a new dimension to the texture of English and be integrative across national Englishes? Or would it be divisive inside individual countries? In order to explore such issues we created a corpus of Arabic loanwords in Asian Englishes. Such a database will contribute to a better coverage of the impact of Arabic in dictionaries and to the study of English as a (multiple) national, regional and global language.


A small animal model for studying dengue disease is of critical importance to furthering many areas of dengue research, including host immunity, disease pathogenesis, and drug and vaccine development. Recent characterization of the AG129 mouse model has demonstrated it to be one of the only models at this time that permits infection by all four serotypes of dengue virus (DENV), supports replication in relevant cell and tissue types comparable to human infection, and allows antibody‐mediated protection and enhancement of DENV infection. Thus, this model enables testing hypotheses arising from epidemiological observations and in vitro experiments in an in vivo system with a functional adaptive immune response. This review provides a brief overview of the development of a mouse model of DENV infection, describes the work completed to date characterizing the AG129 model, and examines several of the unanswered questions remaining in the field.


A new performed, semi-rigid, polyethylene catheter, with built-in torque control, has been devised for entry to the pulmonary artery in complete transposition of the great arteries. It has been used 19 times in 17 patients: 18 times the pulmonary artery was entered from the right atrium (via the left atrium and ventricle) in a time between 40 s and 15 min (median 5 min); the patients' ages were 2 days to 6 years (median 8 months) and their weights were 3.1 to 13.3 kg (median 6.9 (kg: in the remaining 1 day-old patient, the procedures was terminated because of atrial flutter. The catheter was introduced into the axillary vein in 3 patients and thesaphenous or femoral vein in the remainder. It is suitable for angiocardiography, and the other heart chambers and vessels were easily entered.Thus the catheter has certain advantages over previously described methods for entry to the pulmonary artery, particularly when there is inferior vena caval thrombosis, or when angiocardiography is necessary. Its use does depend on the presence of an interatrial communication, so a method for entry to the pulmonary artery by retrograde catheterization from the axillary artery using a different catheter is also presented; this was successful in 2 patients with ventriculal sepatal defect.


In the multi-agent path finding problem (MAPF) we are given a set of agents each with respective start and goal positions. The task is to find paths for all agents while avoiding collisions, aiming to minimize a given objective function. Many MAPF solvers were introduced in the past decade for optimizing two specific objective functions: sum-of-costs and makespan. Two prominent categories of solvers can be distinguished: search-based solvers and compilation-based solvers. Search-based solvers were developed and tested for the sum-of-costs objective, while the most prominent compilation-based solvers that are built around Boolean satisfiability (SAT) were designed for the makespan objective. Very little is known on the performance and relevance of solvers from the compilation-based approach on the sum-of-costs objective. In this paper, we start to close the gap between these cost functions in the compilation-based approach. Our main contribution is a new SAT-based MAPF solver called MDD-SAT, that is directly aimed to optimally solve the MAPF problem under the sum-of-costs objective function. Using both a lower bound on the sum-of-costs and an upper bound on the makespan, MDD-SAT is able to generate a reasonable number of Boolean variables in our SAT encoding. We then further improve the encoding by borrowing ideas from ICTS, a search-based solver. In addition, we show that concepts applicable in search-based solvers like ICTS and ICBS are applicable in the SAT-based approach as well. Specifically, we integrate independence detection, a generic technique for decomposing an MAPF instance into independent subproblems, into our SAT-based approach, and we design a relaxation of our optimal SAT-based solver that results in a bounded suboptimal SAT-based solver. Experimental evaluation on several domains shows that there are many scenarios where our SAT-based methods outperform state-of-the-art sum-of-costs search-based solvers, such as variants of the ICTS and ICBS algorithms.


Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the issue of post-disaster livelihood recovery through economic rehabilitation, with the illustration of post-tsunami promotion of microentrepreneurship activities generating employment and income among the affected populations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines two field case studies in Aceh (Indonesia) and Tamil Nadu (India), where a well-established European NGO carried out economic relief and microentrepreneurship rehabilitation in 2005-2007. Findings – Despite unlimited trust in rapid reconstruction capacity, post-tsunami livelihood recovery has been chaotic and uncoordinated. Contrary to humanitarian agencies in charge of emergency relief, only a few development agencies and NGOs were able to deliver a rapid rehabilitation of microeconomic activities existing locally before the disaster. Research limitations/implications – There are values but also obvious limits to comparing the micro-level experiences of a major European NGO in two different locations such as Aceh and Tamil Nadu, and to deducing macroand meso-level lessons to be learned. Practical implications – There are difficulties in benchmarking the divison of labour but necessary coordination among development agencies and their humanitarian counterparts in the field of post-disaster sustainable economic rehabilitation. Originality/value – Post-disaster economic security and livelihood recovery are at the forefront of current international policy research in humanitarian and development cooperation circles. Documented case studies and lessons to be learned are still scarce for feeding possible best practices.


Background Middle-aged and older American men and women have almost twice the rate of diabetes of men and women in England. This differential was not explained by conventional risk factors including age, smoking, social position and body mass index (BMI). Methods This study used large and representative samples of non-minority adults aged 52–85 years taken from the 1999–2006 American National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and the 2004 English Longitudinal Study of Aging. The surveys contain self-reported and objective biological disease markers of diabetes as well as indicators of major risk factors for diabetes including anthropometric measures of BMI, height and waist circumference. Results The older American population has much higher rates of diabetes than the English population—a differential not yet explained, but this population also has higher waist circumference at each level of BMI than does the equivalent group in England. By controlling for such waist circumference differences and allowing for different effects of waist on diabetes in each country, approximately three-quarters of the country differences for women and 38% among men can be explained. Conclusions Higher rates of diabetes in the US old-age population than in England were largely accounted for by raised waist circumference and not BMI differences, especially among women. In addition, elevated diabetes risk associated with higher waist circumference in the USA as opposed to England could arise as a result of a number of different mechanisms. Investigation of the relative importance of such mechanisms is an important topic for further study.


Experiments were performed to analyse the natural killer cell (NK)‐like cytotoxicity frequently expressed by human antigen‐specific cytolytic T lymphocytes (CTL). To this end, several monoclonal antibodies (MoAbs) previously shown to identify a novel function‐associated molecule (FAM) involved in human NK function were utilized. Flow cytometry revealed that these MoAbs reacted with the majority of human NK, but only with a subpopulation of CTL isolated from primary mixed lymphocyte cultures. Preincubation of CTL with the MoAbs inhibited the NK‐like lysis of K562 targets. Experiments with anti‐CD3 MoAb demonstrated that neither the NK‐like cytotoxicity of CTL nor the lytic activity of NK were mediated by the CD3 complex. Expression of the novel FAM was found to develop in T‐cell cultures at the time that NK‐like cytotoxicity was observed. Repeated in vitro antigenic stimulation of CTL was shown to result in loss of NK‐like cytotoxicity, as well as loss of the FAM on the CTL surface. Thus, NK‐like cytotoxicity displayed by antigen‐specific CTL appears to be mediated by a novel FAM that is identical to that structure found on NK.


It is generally supposed that diffusion is the main factor controlling the process of powder sintering. In this work it is shown that plastic deformation achieved by means of dislocation movement is also an important constituent of the sintering process. Since temperature essentially affects dislocation mobility, the temperature ranges of cold, warm and hot deformation are discussed. The stresses occurring on powder sintering leading to plastic deformation of the material are estimated. On the base of results recommendations are made for selecting the optimal condition for the sintering of powders.


Previous research highlights the importance of two distinct types of informed trading in the options market: trading on the price direction of underlying stocks, and trading on their uncertainty. Surprisingly, however, the studies considering these in a unified framework are scant.This study attempts to fill the gap. We predict that when both directional andvolatility information could motivateoptions trading, the return predictability of options volume hinges onthe shape of the volatility smirk.Consistent with this prediction, we find thatthe negative relationship between options volume and future stock returns is concentrated in stocks exhibiting steep volatility smirks. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 37:1053–1093, 2017


Cities are investing in data-driven smart technologies to improve performance and efficiency and to generate a vast amount of data. Finding the opportunities to innovatively use this data help governments and authorities to forecast, respond, and plan for future scenarios. Access to real-time data and information can provide effective services that improve productivity, resulting in environmental, social, and economic benefits. It also assists in the decision-making process and provides opportunities for community engagement and participation by improving digital literacy and culture. This paper aims to review and analyze current practices of data-driven smart applications that contribute to the smooth functioning of urban city systems and the problems they face. The research methodology is qualitative: a systematic and extensive literature review carried out by PRISMA method. Data and information from different case studies carried out globally assisted in the inductive approach. Content analysis identified smart city indicators and related criteria in the case study examples. The study concluded that smart people, smart living, and smart governance methods that have come into practice at a later stage are as important as smart mobility, smart environments, and smart economy measures that were implemented early on, and cities are opening up to new, transparent participatory governance approaches where citizens play a key role. It also illustrates that the current new wave of smart cities with real time data are promoting citizen participation focusing on human, social capital as an essential component in future cities.


Molybdenite occurs mainly in three mineralization types in Greece: (a) porphyry Mo-Cu-(±Te-Ag-Au), (b) reduced intrusion-related Mo-W systems (skarn, intrusion-hosted) and (c) shear zone-related Cu-Au-Bi-Mo. In porphyry-Mo-Cu prospects the molybdenite is the main ore constituent together with pyrite in quartz stockworks crosscutting sericite±carbonate altered porphyry stocks (dacite at Pagoni Rachi/Kirki, Myli/Esymi, Konos/Sapes, Melitena/Rhodopi and Stypsi/Lesvos; microgranite at Ktismata/Maronia; monzonite at Sardes/Limnos, Fakos/Limnos and Skouries/Chalkidiki). Reduced intrusion-related systems are characterized by the presence of molybdenite, pyrite and wolframite-scheelite in intrusion-hosted sheeted quartz veins and/or dissemination (granodiorite at Kimmeria/Xanthi, Plaka/Lavrion and leucogranite at Pigi/Kilkis and Seriphos) and skarn-hosted ores (Kimmeria/Xanthi). Finally in the shear-zone Stanos prospect molybdenite accompanies chalcopyrite, native Bi, Bi-tellurides and sulfosalts. The studied molybdenites display a wide spectrum of their rhenium content ranging from almost Re-free molybdenites at Stanos, to very low-Re molybdenite in the intrusion-related systems (Lavrion, Serifos, Pigia and Kimmeria), and high to ultrahigh-Re molybdenites in the northern Greek porphyries. The rare mineral rheniite (ReS2), occurs along with Fe-Cu sulfides, Pb oxides, and native Sn in Pagoni Rachi and Konos prospects. Rheniite and high-Re molybdenite precipitated under oxidizing conditions and from relatively acid hydrothermal solutions, whereas Re-poor molybdenites are indicative of reduced conditions mostly dominant in the intrusion-related systems. At the northern Greek porphyry-Mo prospects, magmas previously enriched from their mantle source rocks were responsible for extreme contents of rhenium in molybdenite.


A welding method has been developed that makes use of fundamental mode laser pulses. These pulses show single-mode relaxation oscillations with a high peak power first spike causing breakdown of the material surface. The laser emission following the first spike can be adapted to the welding requirements and the material properties. Metallurgical problems of intermixing of dissimilar materials in the weld puddle have been investigated with an electron beam microprobe analysis. In the case of materials which normally show bad weldability uniform welds with maximum strength could be achieved by local addition of welding agents to the weld puddle. The lap weld of a stainless-steel spring with a nickel-iron baseplate has been performed with Nb as welding agent.


Objectives To determine whether a patient's level of assertiveness and other factors influences her comfort level in asking her provider to wash his or her hands. Methods In this pilot study, we developed a survey to gather cross-sectional information on a variety of factors that might explain patient willingness to ask her health-care provider to wash his or her hands. Three primary predictor variables are analyzed: (1) patient assertiveness; (2) patient familiarity with her healthcare provider; and (3) whether the patient has observed hand-washing behavior. Fifty patients participated from the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department of Metropolitan Hospital Center. Results Less assertive patients are much less likely than assertive patients to ask physicians to wash hands (25% versus 68%; Fisher's exact test P = 0.0427). Among the 3 assertiveness questions included in the survey, the ability to ask physicians questions during visits is most strongly indicative of willingness to ask about hand washing. Familiarity with the names of regular health-care providers has a statistically significant impact on willingness to ask about hand washing. Evidence suggests that observing hand washing behavior affects willingness to ask, but differences are not statistically significant. Results by socioeconomic status such as age, education, income, and race/ethnicity are inconclusive. Conclusions A patient's level of assertiveness alone is not sufficient to determine her willingness to inquire about the hand-washing behavior of her provider. A high percentage of patients did not see their provider engaging in adequate hand washing behavior. If patients feel comfortable with their provider to inquire about their care and request hand-washing behavior, health outcomes are affected by reducing the rates of health care–associated infections.


This article, written with parents as co-authors, has two aims: (1) to provide a critical view of the English child protection system based on parents' views and to locate these views within contemporary child protection studies and (2) to present the transformative value of co-production in the context of child protection studies both as a form of critical scholarship and as a means to influence policy and practice. The current children's social work system in England does not achieve good outcomes for families, and many children and parents frequently experience it as stigmatizing, inhumane, and harmful. The article presents the experience and recommendations for change produced by parents with a broad range of experience with child protection services in England. The Parents, Families and Allies Network worked with five allied organizations in which parents identified the extensive range of problems that the current system presents and ways forward to achieve more supportive, humane, and inclusive practice with families. Seven main themes emerged: a better definition of need and response to need; partnership, participation, and humane practice; improving legal representation and support in legal proceedings; better support in care proceedings; permanence that maintains links; a better response to domestic violence; and the lack of support for disabled children. The article discusses five features of the project that supported meaningful co-production: taking a political stance, choosing clear and feasible aims, incorporating a range of knowledge, the participation of parents with lived experience throughout all phases of the project, and not settling with just knowledge production.


Why do businesses such as fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels cluster? In the classic analysis of Hotelling, firms cluster to attract consumers who have travel costs. We present an alternative model where firms cluster because one firm is free riding on another firm's information about market demand. One consequence of this free riding is that an informed firm might forego a market that it knows to be profitable. Furthermore, an uninformed firm might earn higher profits when research costs are high, because it can credibly commit to ignorance.


Professor Pepper responds to Professor Luban's and Professor Kaufman's critiques of his defense of the lawyer's traditional amoral ethical role. While agreeing with much of Professor Kaufman's observations ("A Commentary on Pepper's 'The Lawyer's Amoral Ethical Role'"), Professor Pepper suggests why a guiding theory (a model) and rules for lawyer's ethics may be preferable to generally unguided discretion. In regard to Professor Luban's "The Lysistratian Prerogative: A Response to Stephen Pepper," the rejoinder suggests that friends and spouses are the wrong analogy for the lawyer's relation to the client. Lawyers are more appropriately thought of as part of the formal regime enabling access to and use of the law. Friends and spouses are not. They are more appropriately thought of as part of the more important and probably more effective informal net of restraint and judgment surrounding each of us. For that reason lawyers ought not to deny access to lawful conduct and legal devices to their clients on the basis of their varied personal and possibly idiosyncratic moral bases. For spouses and friends to do so, however, is perfectly appropriate and often admirable and helpful. Professor Pepper goes on to argue that Professor Luban's construct of "low realism" essentially avoids the difficult issue of legal realism for lawyers elaborated in his article rather than addressing it.


Two hundred and two family doctors in practice responded to a survey that identified orthopaedics as a surgical specialty in which they would have benefited from more training. Forty percent felt unprepared to apply casts or manage fractures. Learning objectives were either not used or used ineffectively, according to the majority of respondents. Fifty percent reported that indicating a career interest in family medicine resulted in a negative bias toward them during surgery clerkship. The results indicate the need for an increased allocation of curricular time to orthopaedics and an augmented emphasis on outpatient experiences.


ABSTRACT The proteins encoded by gene 7 of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) have been demonstrated to have proapoptotic activity when expressed from cDNA but appear to be dispensable for virus replication. Recombinant SARS-CoVs bearing deletions in gene 7 were used to assess the contribution of gene 7 to virus replication and apoptosis in several transformed cell lines, as well as to replication and pathogenesis in golden Syrian hamsters. Deletion of gene 7 had no effect on SARS-CoV replication in transformed cell lines, nor did it alter the induction of early apoptosis markers such as annexin V binding and activation of caspase 3. However, viruses with gene 7 disruptions were not as efficient as wild-type virus in inducing DNA fragmentation, as judged by terminal deoxynucleotidyltransferase-mediated dUTP-biotin nick end labeling (TUNEL) staining, indicating that the gene 7 products do contribute to virus-induced apoptosis. Disruption of gene 7 did not affect virus replication or morbidity in golden Syrian hamsters, suggesting that the gene 7 products are not required for acute infection in vivo. The data indicate that open reading frames 7a and 7b contribute to but are not solely responsible for the apoptosis seen in SARS-CoV-infected cells.


The book Economy and State: A Sociological Perspective written by Nina Bandelj and Elizabeth Sowers opposes an economy-state dualism approach to economy-state embeddedness theories. Bandelj and Sowers follow Polanyi's intellectual tradition and analyze the economy as instituted process focusing on the roles of the state. This book explores such fields of interest as property (the state's role in capitalist and socialist economies), money (the state's role in monetary policy, government spending, and taxation), labor (the state's role in redistribution and employment), firms (the state's role in business and industry governance), development (the state's role in advancing economic prosperity), and international and global economy (the state's role in managing the territorial boundaries of economic transactions). Markin argues that the institutional approach that Bandelj and Sowers chose as a core approach for their book is very fruitful for macro-analysis but it is not very appropriate for micro-analysis. In his review, Markin focuses on the roles of the state in turning land, labor and capital into "fictitious commodities" and the state's role in the social construction of economic institutions. As Bandelj and Sowers do not provide a micro-analysis of state regulation of markets, Markin discusses these issues with help of the papers written by other scholars.


INTRODUCTION
To compare outcomes following laparoscopic renal surgery (LRS) and open renal surgery (ORS) in the treatment of pathologic T3a (pT3a) renal cell carcinoma (RCC) using a propensity matched analysis.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The Canadian Kidney Cancer Information System is a prospectively maintained database for patients diagnosed with RCC from 15 Canadian institutions. Patients treated for nonmetastatic pT3a RCC between 2008 and 2015 were included. Propensity score matching for age, gender, tumor size, grade, histology, and surgical approach was performed to compare laparoscopic radical and partial nephrectomy (LRN or LPN) with open radical or partial nephrectomy (ORN or OPN). The primary endpoint was recurrence-free survival (RFS).

RESULTS
Two hundred twenty-six (45%) patients underwent LRS (88% LRN and 12% LPN), and 275 (55%) underwent ORS (75% ORN and 25% OPN). After a median follow-up of 21.1 months, 155 (72 LRS and 83 ORS) patients experienced recurrence. The 3-year RFS was 63% and 50% for the LRS and ORS groups, respectively, p = 0.36. On subgroup analysis, there was no significant difference in RFS among patients who underwent radical nephrectomy (3-year RFS 61% in LRN compared with 46% in ORN group, p = 0.32) or partial nephrectomy (77% in LPN compared with 79% in OPN group, p = 0.82).

CONCLUSIONS
This study is the largest matched analysis comparing LRS and ORS for pT3a RCC. In matched patients, LRS showed no difference in oncologic outcomes compared with ORS and should be considered when technically feasible.


Heuristic search-based planners, such as HSP 2.0, solve STRIPS-style planning problems efficiently but spend about eighty percent of their planning time on calculating the heuristic values. In this paper, we systematically evaluate alternative methods for calculating the heuristic values for HSP 2.0 and demonstrate that the resulting planning times differ substantially. HSP 2.0 calculates each heuristic value by solving a relaxed planning problem with a dynamic programming method similar to value iteration. We identify two different approaches for speeding up the calculation of heuristic values, namely to order the value updates and to reuse information from the calculation of previous heuristic values. We then show how these two approaches can be combined, resulting in our PINCH method. PINCH outperforms both of the other approaches individually as well as the methods used by HSP 1.0 and HSP 2.0 for most of the large planning problems tested. In fact, it speeds up the planning time of HSP 2.0 by up to eighty percent in several domains and, in general, the amount of savings grows with the size of the domains, allowing HSP 2.0 to solve larger planning problems than was possible before in the same amount of time and without changing its overall operation.


The high-speed dental handpieceair-turbine is widely used in cutting and polishing denture structure in dentistry. The impeller of the air-turbine is the important part of the dental handpiece. The objective of the study was to investigate the flowfield of the air-turbine with the gull type impeller and to find the design variables for the optimization. The flowfield of the air-turbine was computed usingANSYS Fluent Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. The airflow inside the air-turbine was analyzed by changing the height and number of the impeller blade and location of the air inlet. The computed results were evaluated by the velocity, pressure and the torque. The torque value was increased when the height of the blade and connecting location of the air-inlet are changed. Keywords— CFD, Gull Type Impeller, Fluent, Moving Wall.


We here present a case of neonatal skin damage due to application of methylene blue (MB) on a newborn's skin. MB use should be completely eliminated in neonatal intensive care units and nurseries, because of three potentially dangerous adverse effects of this compound: (1) It may act as an irritant when applied topically on intact skin, leading to skin reddening up to deep full-thickness eschars; (2) Is possesses photosensitizing properties, and may produce skin reddening followed by blisters and peeling after UV phototherapy; (3) It is a proscribed substance in patients affected by glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, a condition not easily detected in the very first days of life.


In recent years, various works have been done for the improvement of thermoelectric (TE) figure of merit of materials. Among the studied TE materials, PbTe is a typical intermediate-temperature range TE material which has undergone extensive developments and achieved excellent high TE performance. Intensive research has provided PbTe-based TE materials better TE performance by manipulating charge and phonon transports, optimizing carrier density to tune the Fermi level, tailoring band structure to enhance effective mass, and designing all-scale hierarchical architectures to suppress phonon propagation giving the higher figure merit. In the present work, PbTe films were deposited on a pure copper substrate at room temperature using the three-electrode electrodeposition process, and various deposition parameters like mass of the material deposited on the substrate and deposition potential of the synthesized PbTe films were optimized. The synthesized film showed excellent stoichiometric and hydrophilic nature by contact angle measurements. The oxidation and reduction peaks during the cathodic and anodic scans of the electrolyte material were given by cyclic voltammetry (CV). Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) provided the existence of different modes of PbTe in the film. The thermo-emf and thermo-power of the synthesized PbTe film were determined.


Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has received much attention recently in computer vision. Most of the existing works in literature aggregate multi-scale features for depth prediction via either straightforward concatenation or element-wise addition, however, such feature aggregation operations generally neglect the contextual consistency between multi-scale features. Addressing this problem, we propose the Self-Distilled Feature Aggregation (SDFA) module for simultaneously aggregating a pair of low-scale and high-scale features and maintaining their contextual consistency. The SDFA employs three branches to learn three feature offset maps respectively: one offset map for refining the input low-scale feature and the other two for refining the input high-scale feature under a designed self-distillation manner. Then, we propose an SDFA-based network for self-supervised monocular depth estimation, and design a self-distilled training strategy to train the proposed network with the SDFA module. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the comparative state-of-the-art methods in most cases. The code is available at https://github.com/ZM-Zhou/SDFA-Net_pytorch.


"Experts and Novices" is a learning and teaching innovation which was introduced in the Faculty of Business and Law in 2009, designed to help students develop the critical analytical and synthesis skills required for a strong literature review. In brief, the approach involves nominating some students as "experts" and some as "novices" during selected sessions. "Experts" are those students who have completed in-depth reading of five journal articles on their chosen topic, whilst "novices" have just read a chapter from the course text. The "experts" are then responsible for briefing the "novices" on the topic during the session. The underlying thinking is that by having to sort out emerging themes from their reading and discussing these with peers, students would gain more confidence in their ability to synthesise different authors' work critically, in particular by having to decide which research/evidence is most convincing. All of this would be completed in a non-threatening, low-risk environment.
The original inspiration for the initiative evolved from the work on communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) although the initiative has since moved away considerably from the thinking in this area and is now much more closely aligned with notions of student-led learning and co-creation of knowledge.

Since its introduction, the innovation has been disseminated at several conferences (e.g., HEA Business, Management, Accountancy and Finance Conference, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010; the Academy of Marketing Conference, 2011 and the European Conference on Research Methodology for Business and Management Studies, Portugal, 2013). It has been presented at several University workshops and has been adapted by many colleagues with slight changes and re-namings, for example "Masters and Apprentices" and "Taking Part".
The Mini Conference
During this academic year, the authors have added another element to the traditional "Experts and Novices" sessions by introducing the Mini Conference: a vehicle for ensuring all ideas presented during the session are exposed to the whole class. This has been possible due to the extra contact time allocated to the 30 credit module as part of the Kingston University Review of the Academic Framework (RAF) introduced in 2013.
In brief, following two "Experts and Novices" 20 minute discussions, the "experts" are grouped together in small teams of four or five. Their brief is to develop a conference presentation on "Contemporary Developments" in their expert topic. Teams have an hour to prepare and they are required to produce a logical, coherent presentation of their collective ideas. Meanwhile, the "novices" are tasked with preparing a presentation in which they apply their new learning to a practical business scenario. Presentations can use as much or as little technology as the students choose, and last no more than ten minutes. During the mini conference, "Expert" presentations are alternated with "Novice" ones, giving both theoretical and practical aspects to the Mini Conference.
Assessment
The overall individual assignment (worth 60% of the module) is an industry briefing paper on the student's chosen topic. This should combine up to date research (summarised in a literature review) with practical examples and recommendations. The "Experts and Novices" sessions are designed to provide an environment where students can "rehearse" their views, share resources and insights. The three "Experts and Novices" sessions themselves account for 10% of the individual assignment, so a very low amount. In designing the weightings, it was felt that whilst this is enough to ensure attendance and participation, it means there is little pressure on the need for polished presentations.
Student Feedback and Next stages
After each "Experts and Novices" session, students are asked to complete a contribution sheet. This acts as a record for the marking, but is also an opportunity to gain feedback on the structure of the session. Formal evaluation of the mini conference element of "Experts and Novices" will be carried out once the individual assignment has been submitted in January 2015. In this way, students will be able to reflect on the usefulness of hearing their peers' contributions when working on the individual briefing paper. During the Festival of Learning, students will present their views of the effectiveness of the Mini Conference.
References
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge University Press.