The 2020 global pandemic led to record grocery sales and significantly accelerated the adoption of online retail services. This trend is expected to grow as mainstream retailers aim to keep up with the speed of delivery from 'digitally native' competitors and changing consumer expectations. Technological innovation is being introduced to different parts of the retail supply chain leading to a changing landscape for jobs. Here we develop the concept of Innovation Work Chains (IWC). We use this framing to discuss how the introduction of different types of innovative technology are likely to impact on employment practices across the supply chain in large-scale grocery retail. This research draws on sector reports and extensive interviews with Walmart US and one of their technology partner organisations in the USA. The focus is on how automation technologies like robots, tracking technologies and AI have become pivotal to the efficient management of retail supply chains. The evidence suggests that an iterative process of adoption and adaption is required to develop company specific solutions. However, legacy systems can pose a challenge to the speed at which automation technologies can be efficiently integrated. The concept of Innovation Work Changes highlights the differential impact on the employment landscape across the retail eco-system


Background: The burden of postpartum depression is significant because it remains unrecognized and it not only affects the mother adversely but also has a negative consequence on the family life and the development of the infant.
Aim: The present study aims to study the prevalence and risk factors of postpartum depression among mothers attending the well baby clinic for vaccination of their
Children.
Methods: Around 200 Gujarati women of postpartum period, up to 1year, were randomly selected and assessed using the semi structured proforma including DSM-IV TR diagnostic criteria for depression and predictive index of postnatal depression, to find out risk factors.
Results: The prevalence rate of postpartum depression was 12.5%. Women who delivered a girl child were observed to have higher odds of getting PPD [OR 5.487, CI ( 1.563,19.258)], also multigravida [OR 5.391, CI (1.17,24.849)], women having past history of miscarriage [OR 4.613 ,CI(1.299,16.385)], women feeling tense during pregnancy [OR11.716, CI (2.729,50.293)],women who could not confide in partner [10.43 ,CI (3.642,28.219] and absence of someone other than mother and partner in whom the woman could confide [OR 8.909, CI(1.869,42.473)] were found to be the strongest predictors for developing postpartum depression.
Conclusion: A significant proportion of Gujarati women had postpartum depression and many psychosocial factors are associated with it.


This book is about representation and the importance of visibility and inclusivity in the stories we tell each other about ourselves. It is therefore also about power and local access to the means of representation in an increasingly globalised world. This book uses one film, 'Broken English' (1996), as a case study to explore in depth 'where New Zealand is at' as a nation. This choice is based on the proposition that this feature film at the time presented a significant 'break' in New Zealand cinema: where feature films before 'imagined' New Zealand overwhelmingly in either monocultural or bicultural terms, this film specifically and deliberately provided a multicultural perspective. By analysing this particular film on different levels and from many different angles, this book works through issues of national identity, by using concepts like ethnicity, race and diaspora. Through interviews with key people and a series of focus groups, the book explores where policy makers, film makers and viewers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds situate themselves and others within contemporary Aotearoa/ New Zealand.


Objectives Inborn errors of immunity (IEI) are prevalent in tribal cultures due to frequent consanguineous marriages. Many of these disorders are autosomal recessive, resulting from founder mutations; hence they are amenable to prevention. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the pathogenicity of novel variants of IEI found among Emiratis. Methods This retrospective data collection study reports novel variants of IEI detected by diagnostic exome sequencing. Pathogenicity prediction was based on scoring tools, amino acid alignment, and Jensen–Shannon divergence values. Results Twenty-one novel variants were identified; nine were frameshift, three nonsense, four intronic (one pathogenic), and five missense (two pathogenic). Fifteen variants were likely pathogenic, of which 13 were autosomal recessive and two uncertain inheritance. Their clinical spectra included combined immunodeficiency, antibody deficiency, immune dysregulation, defects in intrinsic/innate immunity, and bone marrow failure. Conclusion The described novel pathogenic variants are core to a planned national screening program that aims toward IEI prevention. Future studies, however, are needed to confirm their natural history in individual patients and estimate their prevalence in the community.


Recent developments in the asset pricing literature show that a combination of technology and distributive shocks can rationalize observed risk premia when firm ownership is concentrated in the hands of few households. We find that distributive shocks are unnecessary when nominal price rigidity is taken into account. Our results are driven by the income redistribution associated to procyclical variations in profit margins when firms ownership is concentrated, prices are sticky and technology shocks hit the economy. In this regard, standard DSGE models that allow for firm ownership concentration have the potential to replicate both business cycle facts and the moments of financial variables.


As for shallow tunnels through the rock layers, the stability of the overburden rock has a decisive role on the tunnel stability; furthermore, analyzing the stability of the overburden rock is very important to the supporting design and the choice of excavation method. Method of elastic foundation beam is used to research the moment of overburden rock, and the formula of overburden rock stable thickness is finished. Seven sections of JIAOZHOU Bay Subsea Tunnel are took for example to analyze the safety factor of different span and overburden rock thickness, then the stability of overburden rock is analyzed. The results show that the overburden rock safety factors of these seven sections of JIAOZHOU Bay Subsea Tunnel are range from 0.65 to 0.85. Compared with the experimental results, theoretical analysis of the results are more consistent The actual example verifies that the overburden rock stability in this paper is feasible.


In this paper, based on error correction model by using panel data, an empirical analysis of demand for international reserves for 16 Islamic countries is investigated. Besides addressing conventional issues, the model explicitly incorporates the impact of expected export revenues and the impact of the exchange rate system on reserve demand. The results reveal that, short run money market disequilibrium has not any significant effect on demand for international reserves in Islamic countries. In addition, in these countries expected export revenues have positive long run effect while exchange rate flexibility has negative effect on demand for reserve Furthermore, by using the mean-variance approach this paper presents a model for selecting an optimal reserves portfolio for the Islamic countries. The model focuses on the relationship between the composition of reserves and the impact of return and risk of holding each foreign currency. Results reveal that the currency composition of reserves have been influenced by risk and return associated with holding reserves assets denominated in different currencies such that, the share of each currency in composition of foreign reserves have a negative relationship with the risk of each currency in reserves asset.


Behavioral risks including investor sentiment play an important role in Asia's stock market behaviors, but they are theoretically and empirically not well understood in traditional conditional means statistics, partly due to the heterogeneity roles. In contrast to the existing studies, this paper examines the heterogeneity roles of investor sentiment proxies (i.e. CSI, BCS, and FKLI) in influencing various aggregate stock market indices in Malaysia. The proposed sentiment proxies in relation to stock returns are statistically analyzed using mean-based (OLS) and quantile regression (QR) methods to uncover the relationships accross full range of stock market returns conditional distributions. In the analysis, weexamine the possible multidimensional association of various conditional sentiments (i.e. average, sentiment states, market states, and interaction between sentiment and market states) on size (i.e. big firms vs. small firms) and industry (i.e. defensive vs. speculative) segmented data. The OLS analysis does not provide conclusive significant association of sentiment to returns but the QR analysis reveal emerging patterns of sentiment heterogeneity roles. Specifically, the QR analysis reveal an asymmetric association between sentiment to returns with U-curve pattern from negative magnitude in the lower quantiles and positive magnitude in the upper quantiles. The findings are not only consistent with the current hypothesis that sentiment risk strongly affects the small firms and speculative industry but also the big firms. The sentiment-return associations are statistically significant in extreme lower quantiles and in extreme upper quantiles of return distributions. These patterns are consistent with theoretical postulates of prospect theory and evidence of assymetric overreaction of Asian investors to sentiment. Overall, the findings from this paper provide new insights for theoretical understanding and practical application of sentiment risk in the stock market.


In Part One of the series it was suggested that technologies are not innocent, and should be held to moral account. In most interpretations of Western moral philosophy, moral judgement does not extend to non-humans, and for non-humans to be included, a number of objections need to be overcome. The objections include: the arguments that morality is the exclusively domain of humans (considered in Part Two), the argument that non-humans don't really act (considered in Part Three), the argument that technologies are just dumb instruments (considered in Part Four), the free will argument (to be taken up here in Part Five), and the dilution of responsibility argument (forthcoming in Part Six).


Obtention of an optimal peak bone mass decreases the risk of osteoporosis in adult life. An increase of physical activity favors bone mineralization in adults. However, in teenagers sports that could delay puberty can delay bone mineralization, while sports with a normal caloric intake favor mineralization. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of intensity of physical activity and the type of sport, upon bone mineralization before and during puberty. A sample of 144 normal school age children of both sexes aged 7 to 14 years, practicing various degrees of physical activity, was selected. Bone mineral density (BMD) of whole body, spine and hip was measured with a dual photon absorptiometry densitometer and compared with values of normal school children of similar ages. A better adequation of BMD of whole body and spine in school age children with increased physical activity was detected. Prepuberal female gymnasts had decreased BMD of whole body. Puberal school age children with decrease physical activity had diminished BMD. These results led us conclude that physical activity favors bone mineralization in spine and hip, specially during puberty.


This study aims to identify the role of United Nations Radio Stations (represented by Maraya Radio in South Sudan) in promoting the culture of peace and development, and to know if this broadcast service contributes to promoting awareness of such concepts. The study uses appropriate descriptive methodology to measure and analyze the characteristics of media content which are related to these concepts. In addition to that, it examines the effect of these concepts on the audience of such a broadcasting service. This is a descriptive study in which the researchers analyzed the content of the programs related to the concepts of peace and development presented by Maraya Radio. The researchers also distributed a questionnaire to the audience of this radio station in South Sudan to know how they are affected by the programs offered at this station. The study examined three programs of Maraya and analyzed them using artificial week method. The findings show that the topics on peace occupied the first position among all topics covered by Maraya with a percentage of (38.5%). The topics on peace also came first in terms of the time allocated for such programs with a percentage of (49%). The content on the theme of "life without conflict" came first among all the content themes broadcasted by Maraya with a percentage of (20.1%), whereas the content related to the theme of 'enhancing women's image in society' came second with a percentage of (15%), followed by the content on the theme 'encourage to learn' with a percentage of (11.8%).


This paper is concerned with effects of the wall flexibility on the seismic behavior of groundsupported cylindrical silos. It is a well-known fact that almost all analytical approximations in the literature to determine the dynamic pressure stemming from the bulk material assume silo structure as rigid. However, it is expected that the horizontal dynamic material pressures can be modified due to varying horizontal extensional stiffness of the bulk material which depends on the wall stiffness. In this study, finite element analyses were performed for six different slenderness ratios according to both rigid and flexible wall approximations. A three dimensional numerical model, taking into account bulk material-silo wall interaction, constituted by ANSYS commercial program was used. The findings obtained from the numerical analyses were discussed comparatively for rigid and flexible wall approximations in terms of the dynamic material pressure, equivalent base shear and bending moment. The numerical results clearly show that the wall flexibility may significantly affects the characteristics behavior of the reinforced concrete (RC) cylindrical silos and magnitudes of the responses under strong ground motions.


We demonstrate that in circuits and systems comprised
of nanoscale magnets, magnet shape-dependent switching
properties can be used to perform Boolean logic. More specifically,
by making magnets with slanted edges, we can shift the
energy barrier of the device (i.e. so it is not at a maximum when a
device is magnetized along its hard axis). In clocked systems, we
can leverage this barrier shift to make AND or OR gates that are
not majority-based. Advantages include reduced gate footprint
and interconnect overhead as we eliminate one gate input. In
this paper we report and discuss: (i) micromagnetic simulations
that illustrate how magnet shape can facilitate non-majoritygate-
based, reduced footprint logic, (ii) preliminary fabrication
and testing results which illustrate that shape engineering can
induce energy barrier shifts, and (iii) additional micromagnetic
simulations that show other ways in which we might leverage
shape in circuits made from nanoscale magnets.


This article examines the impact of environmental regulation within countries as well as regulatory distance between countries on international technology transfer. We employ a recently-assembled dataset of automobile emission standards and corresponding data on non-resident patent filing of automotive environmentally sound technologies (ESTs) in 49 countries between 1992 and 2007. Our analysis shows that an important factor shaping transfers is relative regulatory distance in that countries are more likely to receive newly-innovated technologies from source countries whose regulatory standards are "closer" to their own. Absolute stringency matters as well, consistent with conventional wisdom, although raising domestic environmental standards as such only leads to higher inflows of ESTs in developing countries. Novel to the literature, we show that regulatory standards in the third markets of a country's trading partners also influence transfers: countries receive more ESTs from a specific source country where they export more to markets whose regulatory standards are similar to those of the source country of the transferred technologies. As concerns both domestic regulation and regulation in a country's major export markets, it is therefore regulatory distance that matters most rather than absolute regulatory levels.


This paper explores the weather–ridership relationship and its potential applications in transit operations and planning. Using the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) in Illinois as a case study, the paper investigates the impact of five weather elements (temperature, rain, snow, wind, and fog) on daily bus and rail ridership and variation across modes, day types, and seasons. The resulting relationships are applied to the CTA ridership trend analysis, showing how preliminary findings may change after controlling for weather. The paper emphasizes the importance of having a theoretical framework encompassing weather and travel.


Changes in agricultural practices are considered a possible option to mitigate climate change[1]. In particular, reducing or suppressing tillage (no-till) may have the potential to sequester carbon in soils, which could help slow global warming[1]. On the other hand, such practices also have a direct effect on regional climate by altering the physical properties of the land surface[2]. These biogeophysical effects, however, are still poorly known. Here we show that no-till management increases the surface albedo of croplands in summer and that the resulting cooling effect is amplified during hot extremes, thus attenuating peak temperatures reached during heatwaves. Using a regional climate model accounting for the observed effects of no-till farming on surface albedo, as well as possible reductions in soil evaporation, we investigate the potential consequences of a full conversion to no-till agriculture in Europe. We find that the summer cooling from cropland albedo increase is strongly amplified during hot summer days, when surface albedo has more impact on the Earth's radiative balance due to clear-sky conditions. The reduced evaporation associated with the crop residue cover tends to counteract the albedo-induced cooling, but during hot days the albedo effect is the dominating factor. For heatwave summer days the local cooling effect gained from no-till practice is of the order of 2 degrees. The identified asymmetric impact of surface albedo change on summer temperature opens new avenues for climate engineering measures targeting high impact events rather than mean climate properties.


Programmed cell death-1 (PD-1), a member of the CD28 superfamily, is primarily expressed on the surface of T cells. The normal function of PD-1 is to dampen the immune activity and promote self-tolerance of activated CD8 + cytotoxic T cells by suppressing T cell inflammatory reactions. Binding of PD-1 with its ligand PD-L1 (or B7-H1) or PD-L2 (or B7-DC) excessively leads to the exhaustion of CD8 + cytotoxic T cells (1). In most of patients with advanced cancers, CD8 + cytotoxic T cells are exhausted owing to the engagement of PD-1 by the aberrantly expressed PD-L1 on tumor cells and/or nurse cells in the tumor microenvironment.


A technique for deriving ice temperature in the Arctic seasonal sea ice zone from passive microwave radiances has been developed. The algorithm operates on brightness temperatures derived from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) and uses ice concentration and type from a previously developed thin ice algorithm to estimate the surface emissivity. Comparisons of the microwave derived temperatures with estimates derived from infrared imagery of the Bering Strait yield a correlation coefficient of 0.93 and an RMS difference of 2.1 K when coastal and cloud contaminated pixels are removed. SSM/I temperatures were also compared with a time series of air temperature observation from Gambell on St. Lawrence Island and from Point Barrow, AK weather stations. These comparisons indicate that the relationship between the air temperature and the ice temperature depends on ice type.


The effect of the membrane potential (K(+)-valinomycin system) on the Mg2+, ATP-dependent transport of Ca2+ in inside-out vesicles of myometrium sarcolemma has been studied. The membrane potential was identified by using a cyanine potential-sensitive probe, diS-C3-(5). In the presence of valinomycin (5.10(-8) M) the inside-out directed K+ gradient (delta psi = -86 mV, with a negative charge inside) stimulated the initial rate of the energy-dependent accumulation of Ca2+ transfer whereas the oppositely directed K+ gradient (delta psi = +72 mV, with a positive charge inside) had no effect on this process. The K+ gradient was formed by isotonic substitution of K+ in intra- or extravesicular space for choline +. At the same time, in the absence of K+ gradient the Mg2+, ATP-dependent accumulation of Ca2+ in membrane vesicles did not depend on the chemical nature of the cations (K+ or choline+) used for isotonicity. The decrease of delta psi from 0 to -86 mV affects the initial rate of Ca2+ accumulation but not the maximal content of the accumulated cation. Preliminary dissipation of the membrane potential (delta psi = -86 mV) in Mg2(+)-free isotonic (with respect of K+ and choline+) media containing ATP and Ca2+ resulted in the inhibition of Mg2+, ATP-dependent Ca2+ transport induced by subsequent addition of Mg2+. These results indicate that the negative (intravesicular) electrical potential activates the Ca-pump of smooth muscle sarcolemma. This activation is based on the increase in the turnover number of the Ca2+ transporting system but not on its affinity for the transfer substrate. The use of the absolute reaction rates theory made it possible to establish that the Ca-pump effectuates the transport of a single positive charge in inside-out vesicles of smooth muscle plasma membranes, i.e., the energy-dependent transport of Ca2+ occurs either as a symport (with an anion (Cl-) or an antiport with a monovalent cation (K+) or a proton. It is assumed that the potential dependence of the Ca-pump in the smooth muscle plasma membrane plays a role in the realization of effects of mediators and physiologically active substances that are manifested as stimulation of the contractile response and depolarization of the sarcolemma. In is quite probable that the delta psi-dependent Ca-pump is also responsible for the maintenance of intracellular homeostasis of monovalent cations (K+, H+, Cl-) in smooth muscle tissues.


In this work alumina based composites ceramics with a polymeric precursor (polysiloxane) and metallic Ti with two different size particle distribution, Ti without milling (ATM) and 5h milling (ATM5), were characterized. PMS thermogravimetric curve indicates that the weight loss percentage was about 20%. The densities achieved were 3,50g/cm3 and 3,70g/cm3 for samples prepared with Ti as received and 5h milling, respectively. During decomposition of the polymer during pyrolysis and sintering, the particles of the matrix may react with carbon and Si from the polymer precursor, metallic Ti and gas atmosphere, nitrogen, to form different phases. The ATM samples presented Al2O3 and TiCN. The specimens prepared with 5h milling Ti (ATM5) is constituted by mullite besides Al2O3 and TiCN. The ATM5 samples have smaller densities than ATM but there is no significant difference in the hardness values.


Objective The aim was to investigate whether polymorphisms in the SLCO1B1 gene, encoding the hepatic uptake transporter OATP1B1, influence the short-term effects of pravastatin on cholesterol synthesis. Methods We determined plasma concentrations of lathosterol and cholesterol up to 12 h after intake of a single dose of 40 mg pravastatin in 41 healthy Caucasian subjects, in whom SLCO1B1 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP; 521T>C and −11187G>A) and haplotypes (*15B and *17) had been previously shown to be associated with considerably elevated plasma pravastatin levels. Results The effects of pravastatin on plasma lathosterol concentration and lathosterol to cholesterol concentration ratio, which are established markers of the rate of cholesterol synthesis in vivo, were significantly smaller among the three heterozygous carriers of the SLCO1B1 *17 haplotype (containing the −11187G>A, 388A>G and 521T>C SNPs) as compared with non-carriers. Significant inverse relationships were found between pravastatin area under the concentration–time curve (AUC) values and effects of pravastatin on lathosterol and lathosterol to cholesterol ratio among the whole study population. Conclusion These results suggest that uptake of pravastatin into hepatocytes is impaired in carriers of the SLCO1B1 haplotype *17, resulting in higher plasma pravastatin concentrations but lower concentrations of pravastatin in hepatocytes and thereby in a smaller inhibitory effect on cholesterol synthesis. The cholesterol-lowering response to pravastatin may be impaired in carriers of the *17 haplotype.


Many countries need to stimulate savings, and especially voluntary pension planning, to meet the demands of an ageing population. This is especially true for the female population as women are expected to live longer while simultaneously having accumulated lower pension wealth. Sweden has been a front-runner in introducing tax-deferred designated pension accounts to stimulate private pension saving, along with self-directed individual public pension accounts. However, a particular feature of these tax-deferred designated pension accounts was that savings were taxed through a presumptive return. In this Article, we show that with heterogeneous risk preferences, this tax policy makes designated pensions unattractive for risk-averse individuals. Using data on self-directed choices and designated pension savings, we empirically confirm our result. In particular, we show that as women are on average more risk averse compared to men, this tax policy had negative effects for women. This Article thus sheds light on the importance of accounting for risk preferences in policymaking addressed towards stimulating adequate pension planning. The Article additionally sheds light on the overall negative consequences of a presumptive tax design such as, e.g., the Dutch "Box-III" tax system.


A Strategy for Introducing Spiritual Formation at Cedar Hills Church M. Colin Moody Doctor of Ministry School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary 2016 The purpose of this project was to introduce the paradigm and practices of spiritual formation through an intensive small group experience. The experience aimed to equip adults to initiate and sustain a lifetime of continuous spiritual growth. This approach was tested through two pilot projects at Cedar Hills Church in Sandpoint, Idaho, and was designed to serve as an ongoing part of Cedar Hills' adult ministry. To develop a theology of spiritual formation, this study begins with an examination of Scripture, highlighting transformation as a central concept for Christian growth. This transformation unfolds in divine-human partnership and progressively aligns a person's beliefs, practices, and affections with Jesus Christ. Further scriptural study develops an active, reflective, and collaborative view of spiritual formation. This theological framework guided the design of a small group intensive called Experiments in Spiritual Formation. A total of twenty-three participants engaged in two separate pilot projects. The first session of the intensive featured several inventories to help participants identify their season of spiritual growth. Following sessions utilized A Spiritual Formation Workbook, based on the six streams of spiritual formation identified by Richard Foster, to propel understanding of and engagement in spiritual formation traditions and practices. Concluding sessions celebrated progress and invited participants to formulate plans for their ongoing spiritual growth. Based on participant feedback and the author's observations, this project did effectively introduce participants to spiritual formation and spurred new levels of engagement in their spiritual growth. To translate the growth of participants during the intensive into ongoing growth, future iterations will provide resources to help participants engage in a small group community for collaborative spiritual growth. For the larger Christian community, the project confirms the importance of a spiritual formation framework, the significance of experimentation, and the value of collaborative communities of practice in promoting spiritual development. Content Reader: A.J. Swoboda, PhD Words: 300 To my grandfather Oscar Moody, who loved God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind and loved his neighbor as himself


This thesis examines the causes, processes and consequences of industrial specialization. Specifically, three sets of questions are addressed. First, how do trade and financial openness affect industrial specialization across countries? Second, how does trade openness affect industrial composition across industries and how do firm-level dynamics play an important role? Third, what are the macroeconomic consequences of specialization? In particular, how does specialization matter for economic growth and cross-border portfolio investments? Chapter 2 investigates the roles of trade and financial openness, separately and in conjunction with each other in affecting industrial specialization. The results show that both trade and financial openness have a positive relationship with industrial specialization. In addition, the effect of trade (financial) openness on specialization is enhanced by the level of financial (trade) openness, suggesting that they are complementary in their effects on specialization. Chapter 3 takes a closer look at which industries are driving the trade-specialization nexus, and how firm-level dynamics play a critical role. I argue and find that industries need 'room to move' in order for increasing trade openness to translate into increased specialization. The true drivers of the trade-specialization nexus are productive firms, who benefit from the increase in trade-openness and can appropriate resources from less productive firms. This causes the industry in which they operate to expand, at the expense of other industries, in which there is no room to make such moves. In order words, the intra-industry potential for reallocation determines whether there is a trade-specialization nexus. While chapters 2 and 3 focus on the determinants and processes of industrial specialization, chapters 4 and 5 examine its macroeconomic consequences. Chapter 4 first develops a proxy for the maturity of a country's export bundle based on the product life cycle theory. Then, the results show that the effect of export maturity on growth is very different across three clusters of countries. In the most developed cluster, countries tend to grow more rapidly when they export new and innovative products that are in an early stage of the product life cycle. In contrast, a cluster of emerging countries appears to grow faster by exporting more mature products that are in the later stages of their life cycle. Finally, the effect of export maturity on growth seems insignificant in the cluster of developing countries. While chapter 2 has established the finding that financial openness promotes specialization through risk-sharing, chapter 5 investigates the reverse linkage by examining the effects of ongoing changes in industrial structure on cross-border portfolio investments in a bilateral setting. The results reveal a strong negative relationship between structure dissimilarity and bilateral portfolio investments, indicating that investors tilt their foreign portfolio towards countries with similar industrial structures. The diversification motive therefore does not seem to play a role. These finds suggest that investors have a preference for familiarity when investing abroad. In other words, they prefer to invest in similar countri


The kinetics and the titre of the serum neutralising antibodies have been studied for 55 months, in eight cows already vaccinated against rabies with a commercial vaccine. The titres remained stable during this period and increased after the booster injection 16 months after the primary immunization. The protection obtained with this vaccine was tested. These cattle and five controls were inoculated in each masseter muscle in the 55th month with a street rabies virus suspension (5 x 10(5) MICLD50). None or very low serum neutralising antibody titres were found among the controls. However, the inoculation of street rabies virus elicited an irregular immune response among the vaccinated cows. All the controls died whereas all the cows which had received one booster injection survived.


The present study deals with the synthesis andfunctionalization of mesoporous silica nanoparticles as drug delivery platforms. SBA-15 nanorods with high surface area (1010 m2g-1) were functionalized by post grafting method using 3-mercaptopropyl trimethoxysilane (MPTS). The parent and thiol-functionalized SBA-15 nanorods were used as nanocarriers for an anticancer drug (gemcitabine). The characterization of all samples were done by small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), N2 adsorption/desorption, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), FTIR and UV spectroscopies. The adsorption and release properties of all samples were investigated. It was found that the surface functionalization increases the interaction between the carrier and gemcitabine and results in the loading enhancement of the drug. The obtained results reveal that the surface functionalization leads towards significant decrease of the drug release rate. These findings demonstrate that the functionalized mesoporous system is appropriate drug delivery platform due to their loading content and the possibility to modify drug release.


Aging is a process of eliminating the network's ability to repair itself gradually. Elderly tend to get the decreased on the musculoskeletal system. The decreased of the musculoskeletal system is characterized by pain in the joints, for example the knee joint. Knee pain is a regenerative joint diseaseand also one signs and symptoms of osteoarthritis. One way to reduce the knee pain is using the non-pharmacologic therapy with elderly gymnastic. The purpose of this research is to provide elderly exercise intervention in older adults with knee pain to reduce the pain. The benefit of this research is to train the ability of muscles and joints to reduce the knee pain scale in the elderly. The method used a quantitative research design with experimental and one type of group pre-post test design. The population in this study were elderly men and women in the Social Rehabilitation Unit "Margo Mukti" Rembang District.The instrument used a VAS pain scale or Baourbanis and observation sheet. Sampling used a minimum number of samples for quantitative experimental studies as many as 15respondents. Implementation of the elderly gymnastic can be done in the morning before breakfast for about 15 - 45 minutes. The research was conducted on February 27, 2012 until March 3, 2012 at the Social Rehabilitation Unit "Margo Mukti" Rembang District. This study used a statistical test of Wilcoxon. The resultof this research showed that the significance p-value 0.001, which means the sig <α = (0.05). It was concluded that elderly gymnastic are effectively overcome the knee pain in elderly at the Social Rehabilitation Unit"Margo Mukti" Rembang District and this elderly gymnastic is expected to help community to reduce the knee joint pain


Attitude or speech reports in English with a non-parenthetical syntax sometimes give rise to interpretations in which the embedded clause, e.g., "John was out of town" in the report " Jill said that John was out of town", seems to convey the main point of the utterance while the attribution predicate, e.g., " Jill said that", merely plays an evidential or source-providing role (Urmson, 1952). Simons (2007) posits that parenthetical readings arise from the interaction between the report and the preceding discourse context, rather than from the syntax or semantics of the reports involved. However, no account of these discourse interactions has been developed in formal semantics. Research on parenthetical reports within frameworks of rhetorical structure has yielded hypotheses about the discourse interactions of parenthetical reports, but these hypotheses are not semantically sound. The goal of this paper is to unify and extend work in semantics and discourse structure to develop a formal, discourse-based account of parenthetical reports that does not suffer the pitfalls faced by current proposals in rhetorical frameworks.


Research of young people shows a lack of understanding of the term grooming in online communications and that internet risks are taken because internet literacy is poor for this group. However, limited research has investigated the perceptions of young adults in this context. The aim of this study was to understand young adults' perceptions of risk, their internet behaviors, and understanding of the grooming concept. Furthermore, to understand the types of risk behaviors young people engage in online, whether they perceive these behaviors as risky, and what implications this has for vulnerability to negative experiences. An examination of internet communication perceptions and the grooming concept focused on 10 young males and females aged between 18 and 23 years. Semi-structured interviews were conducted at open access youth organizations in the North West of England, UK, and the duration of each interview was approximately 30 min. The data were transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis. Emergent themes were (a) grooming as a concept, (b) virtual lives, and (c) perception of risk. The findings concur there is limited understanding of the term grooming but that explanations may not be simply confined to literacy. Risks being taken online were not always perceived as risky. Recommendations include the need for a more nuanced definition of the term grooming and that more information is available to children and caregivers. Further work should focus on younger participants' perceptions of grooming to address wider issues, together with a focus on risk taking behaviors among other vulnerable groups.


This chapter discusses the relationship between discourse and racism. It argues that discourse both contributes to the (re)production of and fight against racism. In addition to the introduction, the text is divided into three parts. Section 1 provides a selective overview of conceptions of "race" and "racism." It reconstructs the etymology of "race" and conceptualizes "racism" as discrimination against racialized Others on the basis of the marking of natural and cultural differences between allegedly homogeneous groups, the naturalization of cultural differences, the hierarchization and negative evaluation, and the justification of power differences, exploitation and exclusion. Section 2 offers a synopsis of five discourse analytical approaches to the phenomenon of racism, and an illustration of the discourse-historical approach with an example of political discourse taken from an election campaign in Austria in 2010. Section 3 recapitulates in which sense racism is a multifaceted problem and poses questions relating to our current days


This work reports a series of experiments designed to investigate the effects of non-verbal ('mere presence') social situations on the performance of routine, sensitive tasks. The particular conditions examined are coaction, competition and audience presence. Other variables of interest are individual differences (personality, sex and ability) and type of task (motor, cognitive and perceptual). The experiments are primarily based on theories of social facilitation, particularly Zajonc's interpretation of mere presence effects and their relationship to arousal level. However, these social situations are also considered in a broader context and effort is made to theoretically integrate this area of research with the larger body of literature concerning stress and human performance. Bearing this latter concern in mind, a central and somewhat unique feature of this work is the use of 'sensitive' performance tasks and the analysis of data in terms of task strategies and shifts in attention, rather than overall measures which sometimes mask effects. It is concluded that social comparison processes and inter-subject pacing of performance provide a better explanation of the present data than do arousal theories. The generality of these effects across different tasks and subject populations is considered, as is the role of individual differences. A model is offered which outlines the typical sequence of performance related behaviours in mere presence situations and suggestions are made, in terms of this model, for future research.


The impact of comorbid diseases on ovarian cancer survival is largely unknown. We therefore examined (i) the prevalence of comorbidity among ovarian cancer patients and (ii) the impact of comorbidity on ovarian cancer survival and mortality. Using hospital discharge data, we identified Danish women diagnosed with ovarian cancer between 1995 and 2005 (n= 1995 within a population of 1.6 million) and then computed Charlson comorbidity index scores (0, 1–2, and 3+). We estimated the prevalence of comorbidity and computed absolute survival and relative mortality rate ratios (MRRs) according to comorbidity level, using patients with Charlson score 0 as the reference group. During the study period, the proportion of patients without comorbidity fell from 81% to 75%, while the proportion of patients with comorbidity score 1–2 and 3+ rose from 16% to 21% and from 4% to 5%, respectively. Overall 1-year survival increased from 68% in 1995–1997 to 70% in 1998–2000 and to 73% in 2001–2004. For patients with Charlson score 1–2, 1-year adjusted MRRs were 1.1 (95% CI, 0.8–1.6) in 1995–1997, 1.3 (95% CI, 1.0–1.8) in 1998–2000, and 1.7 (95% CI, 1.3–2.4) in 2001–2004. For patients with Charlson score 3+, 1-year adjusted MRRs were 2.4 (95% CI, 1.4–4.3) in 1995–1997, 1.6 (95% CI, 1.0–2.7) in 1998–2000, and 2.2 (95% CI, 1.3–3.8) in 2001–2004. The 5-year MRRs were similar to the 1-year MRRs. One quarter of Danish women with ovarian cancer were found to have comorbid conditions, and 5% had severe comorbidity. Severe comorbidity was a predictor of poorer survival.


This guide is designed to help self-publishers with common questions about the logistics of book publishing and basic book design.


Abstract. The purpose of this study is to analyze the performance of organic vegetable supply chains in each member chain to determine the direction of improvement in the fulfillment of consumer needs optimally. The performance of supply chains at the farm level will be differentiated by individuals and commodities. The analytical method used is the Supply Chain Operational Reference (SCOR) model taking into account the internal and external attributes. The primary data used is taken through observation and interview process, meanwhile secondary data obtained from related institutions. The results of measuring the performance of organic vegetable supply chains at all levels of the responsiveness and flexibility attributes have achieved the superior performance position. Meanwhile, the value of organic vegetable supply chain performance on asset attributes at the farm level only reaches a good position. But at the corporate level has reached the best performance position (superior). In general, the performance of the organic vegetable supply chain on the cost attribute still has not achieved good performance. So there is the need for improvement efforts through minimization of cost in each supply chain activity to improve performance.


Nth-order nonuniform sampling is described for generalized bandpass signal frequency position, bandwidth, sampling rate, frequency-shift and phase-shift. A bandpass extension to the Nyquist criterion is derived, showing that restrictions on bandpass frequency position for odd orders of nonuniform sampling tend to zero as N tends to infinity. Bandpass interpolants based on the sinc function are derived for the generalized Nth-order sampled bandpass signals. It is shown that, for minimum (Nyquist) rate sampling, these interpolants are comprised of N bandpass filters, each with independent phase. The number of bandpass filters comprising the interpolant is found to decrease as the sample rate increases. The advantage of describing Nth-order sampling as the Nth replication and uniform sampling of a signal is demonstrated. Finally, digital implementation of the Nth-order bandpass sampling interpolants is discussed. It is established that it is not practicable to attempt to perform nonuniform bandpass sampling at the theoretical minimum rate, where the interpolation is to be performed digitally. >


This paper presents a Federated Learning (FL) algorithm that allows the decentralization of all FL solutions that employ a model-averaging procedure. The proposed algorithm proves to be capable of attaining faster convergence rates and no performance loss against the starting centralized FL implementation with a reduced communication overhead compared to existing consensus-based and centralized solutions. To this end, a Multi-Hop consensus protocol, originally presented in the scope of dynamical system consensus theory, leveraging on standard Lyapunov stability discussions, has been proposed to assure that all federation clients share the same average model employing only information obtained from their ${m}$ -step neighbours. Experimental results on different communication topologies and the MNIST and MedMNIST v2 datasets validate the algorithm properties demonstrating a performance drop, compared with centralized FL setting, of about 1%.


A religious organization should communicate trustworthiness by attempting correctly to interpret its message and by recruiting new members. Modern communication involves new means of communication like the Internet, which has become an important medium capable of spreading a complex message to a large audience. Religious movements are a growing social and organizational force that employ modern communication methods and criteria. This paper addresses the convergence of religious communication and the Internet, by focusing on trust, a fundamental element of any type of communication, especially of a religious kind. Two main drivers can elicit trust: capabilities (the skill to realize what is promised) and benevolence (the lack of any opportunistic or egoistic goal). This paper employs the content analysis method to analyze the biographies of religious leaders posted on the their official web-sites, in order to verify the existence of these two trust drivers, i.e., leader's capabilities and benevolence. The...


Proceedings: AACR Annual Meeting 2014; April 5-9, 2014; San Diego, CA

Phosphoinositide-dependent kinase-1 (PDK-1) is a serine/threonine protein kinase that phosphorylates members of the conserved AGC kinase superfamily, including AKT and PKC, and is implicated in important cellular processes including survival, metabolism and tumorigenesis. In large cohorts of nevi and melanoma samples, PDK1 expression was significantly higher in primary melanoma, compared with nevi, and was further increased in metastatic melanoma. Selective inactivation of Pdk1 in the melanocytes of BrafV600E::Pten-/- or BrafV600E::Cdkn2a-/-::Pten-/- mice delayed the development of pigmented lesions and melanoma induced by systemic or local administration of 4-HT. Melanoma invasion and metastasis were significantly reduced or completely prevented by Pdk1 deletion. Administration of the PDK1 inhibitor GSK2334470 (PDKi) effectively delayed melanomagenesis and metastasis in BrafV600E::Pten-/- mice. Pdk1-/- melanomas exhibit a marked decrease in the activity of AKT, p70S6K and PKC. Notably, genetic inactivation or pharmacological inhibition of PDK1 were even more effective in attenuating melanoma development and metastasis of human tumors with Pten WT as in genetic model of BrafV600E::Cdkn2a-/-::Pten+/+ mice, representing an additional fraction of human tumors harboring such mutation. Gene expression analyses identified Pdk1-dependent changes in FOXO3a-regulated genes and inhibition of FOXO3a restored proliferation and colony formation of Pdk1-/- melanoma cells. PDK1 effect on FOXO3a and melanoma development and progression appears to be AKT independent. Our studies provide direct genetic evidence for the importance of PDK1, in part through FOXO3a-dependent pathway, in melanoma development and progression.

Citation Format: Marzia Scortegagna, Chelsea Ruller, Yongmei Feng, Rossitza Lazova, Harriet Kluger, Jian-Liang Li, Surya K. De, Robert Rickert, Maurizio Pellecchia, Marcus Bosenberg, Ze'ev Ronai. PDK1 in melanoma development and metastasis. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2014 Apr 5-9; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2014;74(19 Suppl):Abstract nr 59. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2014-59


Cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) guidelines recommend analysis of the oxygen (O2) pulse for a late exercise plateau in evaluation for obstructive coronary artery disease (OCAD). However, whether this O2 pulse trajectory is within the range of normal has been debated, and the diagnostic performance of the O2 pulse for OCAD in physically fit individuals, in whom V˙O2 may be more likely to plateau, has not been evaluated. Using prospectively collected data from a sports cardiology program, patients were identified who were free of other cardiac disease and underwent clinically‐indicated CPET within 90 days of invasive or computed tomography coronary angiography. The diagnostic performance of quantitative O2 pulse metrics (late exercise slope, proportional change in slope during late exercise) and qualitative assessment for O2 pulse plateau to predict OCAD was assessed. Among 104 patients (age:56 ± 12 years, 30% female, peak V˙O2 119 ± 34% predicted), the diagnostic performance for OCAD (n = 24,23%) was poor for both quantitative and qualitative metrics reflecting an O2 pulse plateau (late exercise slope: AUC = 0.55, sensitivity = 68%, specificity = 41%; proportional change in slope: AUC = 0.55, sensitivity = 91%, specificity = 18%; visual plateau/decline: AUC = 0.51, sensitivity = 33%, specificity = 67%). When O2 pulse parameters were added to the electrocardiogram, the change in AUC was minimal (−0.01 to +0.02, p ≥ 0.05). Those patients without OCAD with a plateau or decline in O2 pulse were fitter than those with linear augmentation (peak V˙O2 133 ± 31% vs. 114 ± 36% predicted, p < 0.05) and had a longer exercise ramp time (9.5 ± 3.2 vs. 8.0 ± 2.5 min, p < 0.05). Overall, a plateau in O2 pulse was not a useful predictor of OCAD in a physically fit population, indicating that the O2 pulse should be integrated with other CPET parameters and may reflect a physiologic limitation of stroke volume and/or O2 extraction during intense exercise.


We propose a convex multilabel framework for image sequence segmentation which allows to impose proportion priors on object parts in order to preserve their size ratios across multiple images. The key idea is that for strongly deformable objects such as a gymnast the size ratio of respective regions (head versus torso, legs versus full body, etc.) is typically preserved. We propose different ways to impose such priors in a Bayesian framework for image segmentation. We show that near-optimal solutions can be computed using convex relaxation techniques. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proportion priors allow for highly accurate segmentations, avoiding seeping-out of regions and preserving semantically relevant small-scale structures such as hands or feet. They naturally apply to multiple object instances such as players in sports scenes, and they can relate different objects instead of object parts, e.g. organs in medical imaging. The algorithm is efficient and easily parallelized leading to proportion-consistent segmentations at runtimes around one second.


The creation of the Social Exclusion Unit by the present government in 1997 is just one example of the increased desire by both academics and policy-makers to understand more about the factors that lead to individuals and communities becoming excluded from mainstream society. Of the many aspects of social exclusion which have featured in recent debate, this article focuses on two. The first is to describe the nature and the extent of social exclusion in the areas in which it is concentrated in the United Kingdom. The second is to examine the role that labour-market factors play in creating, reducing, or sustaining geographical concentrations of social exclusion. The article draws upon the results of social surveys conducted in deprived areas and discusses the arguments for tackling local concentrations of social exclusion through area-based initiatives. Copyright 2000 by Oxford University Press.


E-learning has provided men with new opportunities in teaching-learning procedures. A historical review of educational systems literature reveals that elearning has spread out among people much faster than any other learning methods. E-learning as a state-of-the-art technology, has caused great innovations in materials development in those societies in which new methods and procedures could hardly ever been accepted. Technological innovations and the development of telecommunications such as Television Stations and Channels, Satellites, Mobile, and Internet have made it possible for the children and teenagers in the Middle East to access to the latest news and information. Of course, these developments have endangered both political and educational systems in some aspects. The present paper while pointing to some of the recent development in the field of e-learning in the Middle East, tries to examine the political and educational systems reactions to this phenomenon.


The problem of digital finite communication bandwidth (DFCB) control has come to the attention of the research community in connection with a growing interest in the development of distributed and/or networked control systems. In these systems, actuators, sensors, and other components are connected via data-rate constrained links such as wireless radio, etc. In this paper, we consider a scalar model of DFCB control that accommodates time-varying data-rate constraints, such as might occur with intermittent network congestion, and asynchronism of sampling and control actuation. Because of the possibly unpredictable fluctuation of the data-rate, we are interested in feedback control designs that will tolerate significantly constrained data-rates on feedback loops, while providing acceptable performance when such data-rate constraints are not in force. In light of a very basic notion of acceptable performance, we show that control designs with different number of quantization levels tolerate constrained data-rates differently. This leads to the conclusion that binary control represents the most robust control quantization under data-rate constraints imposed by time-varying congestion on the feedback communication channel. The advantage margin of binary control is further investigated numerically with and without the sampling-control asynchronism being considered. We show that the advantage margin is more substantial when the sampling-control asynchronism is significant. A design of quantized (binary) feedback with side channel information is proposed, and stability properties are discussed. We conclude the paper by examining performance limitations of our binary coding in the presence of noise.


Wireless technologies have gained tremendous popularity over the last couple of years. Such popularity causes dense and usually chaotic, i.e., unplanned and unmanaged, deployments of wireless devices in indoor environments such as homes and offices. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communication, wireless interference is becoming the most serious issue in these dense and usually chaotic wireless deployments. Existing techniques, however, cannot solve the interference problem at this scale and meet this growing demand for wireless capacity.
In this dissertation, we propose to tackle the interference problem by optimizing spatial reuse (increase the number of simultaneous transmissions in an area without using additional frequencies) using directional transmission and power control. We propose two directional systems: DIRC for enterprise wireless networks with directional APs and omni-directional clients, and Speed for future wireless networks with directional APs and directional clients. While directional antennas can be very useful, there are certain cases where deploying directional antennas can be very difficult, e.g., due to cost or size issues. Thus, in order to extend the optimization of spatial reuse to existing omni-directional antenna networks, we also propose Opera that uses the technique of power control to achieve spatial reuse for these networks. Both techniques of directional transmission and power control can allow multiple transmissions to happen simultaneously even in the same channel and even when the nodes are closely located in an area.
While there are many systems use directional transmission and/or power control in outdoor application scenarios, achieving spatial reuse in our application scenario, i.e., chaotic deployment of wireless devices in indoor environments, is decidedly more complicated. This is primarily due to the key characteristics of these scenarios: Due to both rich scattering and unplanned node locations, the signal and interference patterns from the senders to the receivers are rather unpredictable. The problem is further complicated by the fact that today's carrier sensing based medium access control (MAC) protocols interact poorly with both techniques.
In this dissertation, we first show that contrary to conventional wisdom, directional transmission and power control can be very effective even in rich-scattered indoor environments. Then, we show how to build the three systems in a practical and lightweight fashion to exploit the capabilities of directional transmission and power control. Specifically, we use the SINR model to facilitate choosing the appropriate antenna orientations and power levels, and we also use a timeslot and timeslot reservation based MAC protocol (both centralized and distributed versions) to coordinate the APs and the clients. Finally, we evaluate our systems in several indoor testbeds to illustrate their effectiveness in practice.
Our contributions demonstrate that there exist practical and lightweight solutions to maximize indoor wireless spatial reuse.


significantly in all the three groups, nor was there any difference in the ratio of the UA to MCA S/D, RI or PI values. The immediate outcome of all these pregnancies was good, with one shoulder dystocia and brachial plexus palsy in the GDM group. Conclusion: In contrast to fetal growth restriction, the UA and MCA Doppler measurements were insensitive to large-for-gestationalage, and were unable to distinguish diabetic pregnancies with macrosomic babies from normal pregnancies.


The zebrafish detour (dtr) mutation generates a novel neuronal phenotype. In dtr mutants, most cranial motor neurons, especially the branchiomotor, are missing. However, spinal motor neurons are generated normally. The loss of cranial motor neurons is not due to aberrant hindbrain patterning, failure of neurogenesis, increased cell death or absence of hh expression. Furthermore, activation of the Hh pathway, which normally induces branchiomotor neurons, fails to induce motor neurons in the dtr hindbrain. Despite this, not all Hh-mediated regulation of hindbrain development is abolished since the regulation of a neural gene by Hh is intact in the dtr hindbrain. Finally, dtr can function cell autonomously to induce branchiomotor neurons. These results suggest that detour encodes a component of the Hh signaling pathway that is essential for the induction of motor neurons in the hindbrain but not in the spinal cord and that dtr function is required for the induction of only a subset of Hh-mediated events in the hindbrain.


The idea behind cloud computing is to deliver Infrastructure-, Platform- and Software-as-a-Service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) over the Internet on an easy pay-per-use business model. However, current offerings from cloud providers are based on proprietary technologies. As a consequence, consumers run into a risk of a vendor lock-in with little flexibility in moving their services to other providers. This can hinder the advancement of cloud computing to small- and medium-sized enterprises. To address these issues, standardization efforts have to take place in order to support further developments in the clouds. Standardized exchange mechanisms and interfaces are crucial in order to facilitate interoperability. In this paper, we look at several cloud standards, such as Open Virtualization Format, Open Cloud Computing Interface, and Cloud Data Management Interface, and analyze them against a taxonomy in order to point out their role for interoperability in IaaS. The taxonomy presents important IaaS topics, such as access mechanism, virtual appliance, security, and service-level agreement.


A quantitative molecular model was derived to predict drug affinities for 5-hydroxytryptamine3 (5-HT3) receptors. The model was based on the molecular characteristics of a "learning set" of 40 pharmacological agents that had been analyzed previously in radioligand binding studies. Molecules were analyzed for various structural features, i.e., the presence of a benzenoid ring and nitrogen atom, substitutions on the benzenoid ring, the location of the substitutions on the nitrogen, and the molecular characteristics of the most direct pathway from the benzenoid ring to the nitrogen. Weighting factors, based on published 5-HT3 receptor affinity data, were then assigned to each of 10 molecular characteristics. The derived computational model predicts accurately the affinities of the learning set for the 5-HT3 receptor (r = 0.98; p less than 0.001). The computational model was then used to predict the receptor affinities of a "test set" of 40 pharmacological agents. The predicted values for these agents also correlate significantly (r = 0.83; p less than 0.001) with drug affinities for the 5-HT3 receptor, as determined by radioligand binding assays. This first line screening approach allows for the accurate prediction of drug affinities based on molecular characteristics with minimal dependence upon animal tissues or radioactivity.


To determine the risk factors by evaluating patients with uterine perforation after intrauterine devices (IUD) placement. Also, it was to make suggestions and contribute to the literature in order to prevent uterine perforation after the IUDs placement and how we should behave when we encounter these patients. Twenty-two patients with uterine perforation after IUDs placement (patient group) diagnosed and treated at our clinic and 30 patients with IUDs in place in the uterine cavity (control group) were retrospectively evaluated and compared. IUDs insertion by a midwife and during the breastfeeding and puerperal period significantly increased the frequency of uterine perforation after IUDs placement, while insertion during the menstrual period significantly reduced risk. Uterine perforation after IUDs placement were most frequently localized in the myometrium (54.5%) and the douglas (13.6%). Uterine perforation-related complications were absent in 59.1% of patients. Of patients, 40.9% underwent hysteroscopy, 18.2% laparoscopy. The diagnostic method was ultrasonography alone at a rate of 68.2%. IUDs could be inserted during menstruation where possible, and patients could be informed about the high risk of uterine perforation after IUDs placement associated with the breastfeeding and puerperal periods. We recommend that IUDs be inserted with ultrasonography in this period. Midwives should receive regular training in order to increase their knowledge and experience on this subject. We recommend ultrasonography as the primary diagnostic method. Those with IUDs embedded in the myometrium can primarily undergo hysteroscopy, and those with IUDs in the abdomen can undergo laparoscopy or laparotomy.


Abstract:Signed languages around the world have tended to maintain an "oral," unwritten status. Despite the advantages of possessing a written form of their language, signed language communities typically resist and reject attempts to create such written forms. The present article addresses many of the arguments against written forms of signed languages, and presents the potential advantages of writing signed languages. Following a history of the development of writing in spoken as well as signed language populations, the effects of orthographic types upon literacy and biliteracy are explored. Attempts at writing signed languages have followed two primary paths: "alphabetic" and "icono-graphic." It is argued that for greatest congruency and ease in developing biliteracy strategies in societies where an alphabetic script is used for the spoken language, signed language communities within these societies are best served by adoption of an alphabetic script for writing their signed language.


Building the prediction model(s) from the historical time series has attracted many researchers in last few decades. For example, the traders of hedge funds and experts in agriculture are demanding the precise models to make the prediction of the possible trends and cycles. Even though many statistical or machine learning (ML) models have been proposed, however, there are no universal solutions available to resolve such particular problem. In this paper, the powerful forward-backward non-linear filter and wavelet-based denoising method are introduced to remove the high level of noise embedded in financial time series. With the filtered time series, the statistical model known as autoregression is utilized to model the historical times aeries and make the prediction. The proposed models and approaches have been evaluated using the sample time series, and the experimental results have proved that the proposed approaches are able to make the precise prediction very efficiently and effectively.


A pot experiment was carried out to determine the effect of foliage spraying of silicon (Si) on growth and ornamental characteristics of calendula grown under salt stress and greenhouse conditions. A factorial experiment based on completely randomized design was conducted with 3 levels of Si (0, 50 and 100 mg/l) and 3 levels of NaCl (0, 100 and 200 mM) with 4 replications. At flowering stage, Si was applied with spraying two times in two week intervals. NaCl was also applied as drench (200 ml per pot) in two days interval. The results showed that salinity decreased the growth, SPAD values, flower number per plant and flower diameter. However, foliar applications of Si resulted in greater root, shoot and total dry weight, plant height and leaf area of calendula plants under salt stress. The highest SPAD values were obtained under 100 mg/l Si application in all NaCl treatments. Salinity decreased number of flower per plant and flower diameter as ornamental characteristics; however Si increased them under salinity stress. Plants treated with 100 mg/l Si had the highest flower diameter at 100 mM of NaCl. Electrolyte leakage increased by salinity, however foliar application of Si significantly reduced electrolyte leakage under salt stress. These results suggest that the negative effects of salinity on the growth and ornamental characteristics of calendula plants can ameliorate by foliar application of Si treatments.


This paper examines the relationship between the cash richness of a firm, governance and the propensity to use equity or cash as the method of payment within European transactions. Strong corporate and country level governance have a positive impact on the probability to use cash as a method of payment. This supports the notion that the level of cash is influenced by agency conflicts, and acquisitions are a means to reduce cash holdings. The findings are robust to alternative measures for cash holdings as well as governance. The analysis furthermore shows that ownership structure is only significant for the method of payment decision in continental Europe, but not in Anglo-Saxon countries. My findings do not support the hypothesis that cash rich firms use significantly more equity than non-cash rich firms to compensate the vendor.


As highlighted in the recent systematic review by Stimpson et al (2002), we know little about the relative efficacies of the treatment interventions that are routinely deployed for those with depressive disorders that have not responded to standard, first-line treatment approaches. Accepted practice is, at best, systematic 'trial and error', with sequential antidepressant monotherapy and/or combinations of antidepressant drugs with 'augmenting agents'. This haphazard medicinal approach to managing the patient with poorly responsive depressive disorder is compounded by the lack of available information on the effectiveness and optimal role for psychological treatment methods. Given the high prevalence of depressive disorders and their frequent presentation to both primary and secondary care health services, it is a source of embarrassment that we remain so ignorant. Nevertheless, it is against this backdrop of uncertainty that we must now evaluate the relative merits of a novel intervention that has captured considerable media and lay interest: vagus nerve stimulation (VNS™).


Abstract. The recent introduction of new technologies such as augmented reality, machine learning and the worldwide spread of mobile devices provided with imaging, navigation sensors and high computational power can be exploited in order to drammatically change the museum visit experience. Differently from the traditional use of museum docents or audio guides, the introduction of digital technologies already proved to be useful in order to improve the interest of the visitor thanks to the increased interaction and involvement, reached also by means of visual effects and animations. Actually, the availability of 3D representations, augmented reality and navigation abilities directly on the visitor's device can lead to a personalized visit, enabling the visitor to have an experience tailored on his/her needs. In this framework, this paper aims at investigating the potentialities of smartphone stereo-vision to improve the geometric information about the artworks available on the visitor's device. More specifically, in this work smartphone stereo-vision will used as a 3D model generation tool in a 3D artwork recognition system based on a neural network classifier.


Purpose To examine the relationships between blindness, the intervention of cataract surgery and all-cause mortality in a rural Ethiopian population. Design Population-based, interventional prospective study. Methods Community-based detection methods identified blind Ethiopian persons from two selected kebeles in Amhara region, Ethiopia. Data from 1201 blind patients were collected—628 cataract-blind and 573 blind from other conditions. Free cataract surgery was provided for consenting, cataract-blind patients. Follow-up surveys were conducted after 12 months (±1 month)—the main outcome measure for this report is all-cause mortality at 1 year. Results During the follow-up period, 110 persons died from the selected population (mortality 9.2%), which consisted of those cataract-blind patients who received cataract surgery (N=461), cataract-blind patients who did not receive surgery (N=167) and all non-cataract-blind patients (N=573). Of the 461 patients who received cataract surgery, 44 patients died (9.5%). Of the 740 patients who did not receive surgery, 66 died (8.9%)—28 patients from the cohort of cataract-blind patients who did not receive surgery (16.8%) and 38 patients from the cohort of non-cataract blind (6.6%). Subgroup analysis revealed significantly increased odds of mortality for cataract-blind patients over 75 years of age who did not receive surgery and for unmarried patients of all age groups. Conclusions In this population, mortality risk was significantly elevated for older cataract-blind patients when compared with non-cataract-blind patients—an elevation of risk that was not noted in an age-matched cohort of cataract-blind patients who underwent cataract surgery as early as 1-year follow-up.


ABSTRACT Over the last decade, there has been a steady increase in the number of Indigenous graduate research students in Australia, yet research and pedagogy has not kept pace with changes underway in the sector. From an extensive search of literature published between 2000 and 2017, 15 papers (representing 10 research projects conducted by seven teams or authors) were identified that addressed Indigenous graduate research student experience. Overall, the literature tends to focus on identifying barriers to completion, noting in particular the impact of financial difficulties, social isolation and racism. A research degree is a key site for the assertion and legitimation of Indigenous knowledges, and it is here that Indigenous students are navigating tensions between legitimated disciplinary practices of the centre and the peripheral status of Indigenous knowledges. We, therefore, adopt Herbert's 'centre–periphery' model to interpret the research, arguing that this framework explains the focus on barriers, the neglect of pedagogy centred on academic excellence and student strengths, and research relationships between students and Indigenous communities. Our review identifies the need for a systematic research agenda specifically focused on Indigenous student success at the graduate research level, and looking internationally in order to assess the performance and strategies of Australian higher education providers in comparison to international institutions meeting the aims of First Nations research communities. This approach, we suggest, should move beyond an analysis of the nature of enablers and barriers to focus on Indigenous Higher Degree by Research success.


Abstract:
 Górski, P. & Romański, M. 2016. Rediscovery of the rare liverwort Liochlaena subulata (Jungermanniaceae) in Poland. — Herzogia 29: 810–813. Liochlaena subulata is a rare liverwort in North America and Europe, but relatively common in Asia. In Europe it was reported for the first time in 1969. To date, L. subulata had only one locality in north-western Poland. A new station is situated near the Polish-Lithuanian border in Wigry National Park (north-eastern Poland).


AlGaN photoconductive ultraviolet detectors are fabricated to study their time response characteristics. Persistent photoconductivity, a deterring factor for the detector response time, is found to be strongly related to the grain boundary density in AlGaN epilayers. By improving the crystal-nuclei coalescence process in metal organic vapor phase epitaxy, the grain-boundary density can be reduced, resulting in an-order-of-magnitude decrease in response time.


From the Publisher:
Take a trip through the neural pathways and vital organs of your personal computer with the newest edition of this long-standing bestseller. Glorious full color illustrations make even the most complex subjects easy to understand. Follow PC/Computing senior editor and computer expert Ron White as he shows you the cutting edge technologies, including the Internet, multimedia sound and video, Pentium processors, local bus architecture, Plug and Play, CD-ROM, digital cameras, color printing, and more in new chapters on the hottest, and coolest, PC components.


The Open Science Grid (OSG) provides a distributed facility where the Consortium members provide guaranteed and opportunistic access to shared computing and storage resources. OSG provides support for and evolution of the infrastructure through activities that cover operations, security, software, troubleshooting, addition of new capabilities, and support for existing and engagement with new communities. The OSG SciDAC-2 project provides specific activities to manage and evolve the distributed infrastructure and support it's use. The innovative aspects of the project are the maintenance and performance of a collaborative (shared & common) petascale national facility over tens of autonomous computing sites, for many hundreds of users, transferring terabytes of data a day, executing tens of thousands of jobs a day, and providing robust and usable resources for scientific groups of all types and sizes. More information can be found at the OSG web site: www.opensciencegrid.org.


Staple crops, which have large amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, and/or fats, provide the bulk of calories in people's diets. Perennial plants, which can be productive for many years without the need for replanting, can produce staple foods and environmental benefits, but their agronomic and nutritional properties haven't been considered synthetically in comparison to annual staples. Here we offer a framework to classify perennial staple crops according to their nutritional categories and cultivation status. We assemble literature to report on the yield potential of 51 perennial staple crops, only 15 of which are well-characterized in existing global datasets. We show the extent and distribution of perennial staple crop production in relation to annual crop types, calculate the carbon stocks they hold, and analyze their nutritional content for three macronutrients and nine micronutrients. We found that most perennial staple crops are regional crops (not globally traded) that grow in the subtropics to tropics. At least one perennial staple crop in each of the five nutritional categories has yields over 2.5 t/ha, in some cases considerably higher, competitive with and in many cases exceeding those of nutritionally comparable annual staples. Perennial staple crops only comprise ~4.5% of total cropland. They hold a modest ~11.4 GtC above and below ground, less than one third of the anthropogenic carbon-equivalent emissions for the year 2018, but more than the ~9 GtC held by the same amount of annual cropland. If linear growth in land under perennial staple production continues to 2040, and replaces only annual cropland, an additional ~0.95 GtC could be sequestered. Many perennial crops also had competitive macronutrient density and yield (per unit area) compared to annual staples; moreover, specific perennial staples are abundant in specific micronutrients, indicating that they can be a nutrient-dense part of diets, unlike the most ubiquitous annual staple crops (corn, wheat, rice) that do not appear in the top 85th percentile for any of the nine micronutrients analyzed. Transition of land and diets to perennial staple crops, if judiciously managed, can provide win-win solutions for both food production and ecosystems.


. This paper deals with: (i) the theory ID* which results from ID] by restricting induction on the natural numbers to formulas which are positive in the fixed point constants, (ii) the theory BON(^) plus various forms of positive induction, and (iii) a subtheory of Peano arithmetic with ordinals in which induction on the natural numbers is restricted to formulas which are I in the ordinals. We show that these systems have proof-theoretic strength ipmO.


In this paper, a new model is developed considering diversity of service in service centers location problem. It is assumed that different services can be provided at each service center. The model has three objective functions including: minimizing the sum of customers' travel time and waiting time in service centers, balancing service loads among the given centers, and minimizing the total establishment costs of service centers and assignment costs of servers. Different number of servers can be assigned to each service center. Regarding the allocation of customers to the service centers, each customer patronizes with respect to the distance to the center, the attractiveness of each service center's site for the customer and the number of located servers at the service center. Since the proposed model is of nonlinear integer programming type and is of high complexity in solving, two meta-heuristic based heuristics using particle swarm optimization (PSO) and variable neighborhood search (VNS) are proposed inorder to solve the problem. Different sizes of numerical examples are designed and solved in order to compare the efficiency of the heuristics.


CONTEXT
Editorial peer review is widely used to select submissions to journals for publication and is presumed to improve their usefulness. Sufficient research on peer review has been published to consider a synthesis of its effects.

METHODS
To examine the evidence of the effects of editorial peer-review processes in biomedical journals, we conducted electronic and full-text searches of private and public databases to June 2000 and corresponded with the World Association of Medical Editors, European Association of Science Editors, Council of Science Editors, and researchers in the field to locate comparative studies assessing the effects of any stage of the peer-review process that made some attempt to control for confounding. Nineteen of 135 identified studies fulfilled our criteria. Because of the diversity of study questions, methods, and outcomes, we did not pool results.

RESULTS
Nine studies considered the effects of concealing reviewer/author identity. Four studies suggested that concealing reviewer or author identity affected review quality (mostly positively); however, methodological limitations make their findings ambiguous, and other studies' results were either negative or inconclusive. One study suggested that a statistical checklist can improve report quality, but another failed to find an effect of publishing another checklist. One study found no evidence that training referees improves performance and another showed increased interrater reliability; both used open designs, making interpretation difficult. Two studies of how journals communicate with reviewers did not demonstrate any effect on review quality. One study failed to show reviewer bias, but the findings may not be generalizable. One nonrandomized study compared the quality of articles published in peer-reviewed vs other journals. Two studies showed that editorial processes make articles more readable and improve the quality of reporting, but the findings may have limited generalizability to other journals.

CONCLUSIONS
Editorial peer review, although widely used, is largely untested and its effects are uncertain.


Over recent decades, one of the most important and complex problems facing our society is the multi-drug resistance of human cancer cells and pathogens to most clinically approved therapeutics. Recent advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology have expanded our ability to design and construct nanomaterials with targeting, therapeutic, and diagnostic functions. These multifunctional materials have gained attention as promising tools for selective cancer/bacteria therapy in the absence of current drugs. Photothermal therapy (PTT) is a minimally invasive therapy in which photon energy is converted into heat in order to kill cancer cells. Gold nanoparticles (GNPs) with a high light-to-heat conversion capability are among the most important candidates for PTT. GNP-assisted PTT has shown great success in recent years, suggesting promise for future applications. In this review, we will discuss the current status of GNPs in the photothermal treatment of cancer and bacterial conditions. The review starts with an outline of recent developments in the various methods used for the size- and shape-controlled synthesis of GNPs, followed by a discussion of the modification of GNPs using suitable protecting and functionalizing agents. We will then consider therapeutic outcomes of different types of GNP-assisted PTT in cancer therapy and bactericide through a comprehensive review of the most important results obtained both in vivo and in vitro. The advantages and disadvantages of methods for developing different-shaped GNPs, variations in irradiation conditions, the use of PTT in combination with other therapeutic methods, and a comparison between the PTT efficacies of different-shaped GNPs will also be discussed in detail.


FOR a biologist attaining his doctorate in 1990, David Lindenmayer has been nothing less than prolific. His web page at the Australian National University (ANU) credits him with more than 520 scientific publications and 20 books. This book, Forest Pattern and Ecological Process, brings together his 25 years of research experience in the montane ash forests of Victoria's Central Highlands. That research began in 1983 with studies of the ecology of Leadbeater's Possum Gymnobelideus leadbeateri, an iconic and endangered arboreal marsupial and led to his doctorate from ANU entitled The Ecology and Habitat Requirements of Leadbeater's Possum. I remember reading that dissertation and thinking how good it was and the promise it held for the young biologist who wrote it. I was not wrong.


With conference reporting provided by The ASCO Post, Amber B. Koehler, PA-C, MS, of Mayo Clinic, evaluates data on BTK inhibitors; fixed-duration, first-line treatment with ibrutinib plus venetoclax; and a novel oral BCL2 antagonist for patients with CLL. P. Andrew Allred, MS, PA-C, of Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center, reviews data on a front-line therapy for patients with Ph+ acute lymphoblastic leukemia and brexucabtagene autoleucel, an anti-CD19 CAR T-cell therapy. Donna Catamero, ANP-BC, OCN®, CCRC, of Mount Sinai Hospital, reflects on findings on a BCMA-directed CAR T-cell therapy and a bispecific monoclonal antibody for patients with multiple myeloma.


Background
The optimal approach to conducting antibiotic stewardship interventions has not been defined. We compared days of antibiotic therapy (DOT) using preprescription authorization (PPA) vs postprescription review with feedback (PPRF) strategies.

Methods
A quasi-experimental, crossover trial comparing PPA and PPRF for adult inpatients prescribed any antibiotic was conducted. For the first 4 months, 2 medicine teams were assigned to the PPA arm and the other 2 teams to the PPRF arm. The teams were then assigned to the alternate arm for an additional 4 months. Appropriateness of antibiotic use was adjudicated by at least 2 infectious diseases-trained clinicians and according to institutional guidelines.

Results
There were 2686 and 2693 patients admitted to the PPA and PPRF groups, with 29% and 27% of patients prescribed antibiotics, respectively. Initially, antibiotic DOTs remained relatively unchanged in the PPA arm. When changed to the PPRF arm, antibiotic use decreased (-2.45 DOT per 1000 patient-days [PD]). In the initial PPRF arm, antibiotic use decreased (slope of -5.73 DOT per 1000 PD) but remained constant when changed to the PPA arm. Median patient DOTs in the PPA and PPRF arms were 8 and 6 DOT per 1000 PD, respectively (P = .03). Antibiotic therapy was guideline-noncompliant in 34% and 41% of patients on days 1 and 3 in the PPA group (P < .01) and in 57% and 36% of patients on days 1 and 3 in the PPRF group (P = .03).

Conclusions
PPRF may have more of an impact on decreasing antibiotic DOTs compared with PPA. This information may be useful for institutions without sufficient resources to incorporate both stewardship approaches.


The purpose of this exploratory study is to provide an understanding of the role of the family in the new product development (NPD) process of small family businesses (SFBs). The impact of the family on the business and innovation activities happens through a combination of social interaction, networks, family business corporate identity, family goals, dynamics, values, culture and heritage that act on the company in several forms of behaviour, actions, decisions and plans, as suggested by Kansikas. Through a conceptual analysis and four case studies the research attempts to conceptualise the impact of the family on SFBs' NPD processes. The objective is to empirically analyse small firms' family pressure in the context of the NPD operations. Theory has been explored in three areas; the first one regards the specific features of family firms and the impact of the 'family' on the business, the second one the activities composing the NPD process, and the third one the NPD and innovation in the specific context of family businesses. The gathered empirical data are analysed by exploring and comparing the understanding of theoretical concepts with qualitative data from the small family firms' innovation processes.


Al2O3/TiAl composites were successfully fabricated by hot-press-assisted exothermic dispersion method with elemental powder mixtures of Ti, Al, TiO2 and Cr2O3. The effect of Cr2O3 addition on the microstructures and mechanical properties of Al2O3/TiAl composites has been characterized. The results show that the Rockwell hardness, flexural strength and fracture toughness of the composites increase with increasing Cr2O3 content. When the Cr2O3 content is 3.5 wt %, the flexural strength and the fracture toughness reach the maximum value of 658.7 MPa and 7.2 MPa•m1/2, respectively. The improvement of mechanical properties is firstly associated with a more homogeneous and finer microstructure developed by addition of Cr2O3; secondly, it is related to the increase of the ratio of α2-Ti3Al/γ- TiAl matrix phases.


We report the preliminary designs and the experimental results of high-speed digital processing elements based on phase-mode logic circuits. The core cell of these elements is a bit-serial adder cell consisting of the ICF gate which is the basic gate of phase-mode logic. Our main target is the application of the logic circuits to Digital Signal Processing. The basic arithmetic operations of DSP are a multiplication and an addition. Basic concept of the phase-mode pipelined parallel multiplier has been proposed previously. We design a 2 /spl times/ 2 AND array block and a 2-bit ripple-carry adder for the primitive parallel pipelined multiplier and also a 2-bit subtractor with a pipelined structure. These processing elements have been fabricated using NEC standard 2.5 kA/cm/sup 2/ Nb/AlOx/Nb process. The low-speed test results of these elements show correct operations. Numerical simulations show that a carry save adder (a 2-bit ripple carry adder) can operate over 10 GHz. We also discuss the prospects of large-scale SFQ DSP based on Nb junction technology.


We report on the results of a two-phase survey aiming to explore the learning preferences and critical thinking skills of graduates in economics, compare the findings with graduates of other disciplines, and identify the determinant dimensions of their developed learning and thinking skills. Kolb' LSIv3, Honey and Mumford's LSQ-80-item, and CCTST Form B have been utilized and results show significant differences: in some dimensions of learning styles; in some scales of critical thinking skills; processing and transforming of information and experience to be the most common determinant dimension in student learning; the use of student active-learning modes to be the determinant of critical thinking skills development; the use of teaching methods to have an impact on learning but their impact on critical thinking is not documented, albeit a further exploration yields indications that need further research.


Silicon carbide based composites are candidates for structural components and fuel claddings in nuclear power plants. In the frame of accident tolerant fuel research, the effective through-thickness thermal conductivity of SiC/SiC prototype claddings is investigated. This property, which is both material and geometry dependent, has been measured with a custom-made radial heat flow apparatus. Conductivities ranging between 0.5 and $\sim4$ W$\cdot$m$^{-1}\cdot$K$^{-1}$ have been measured, well below the literature values of 8 to 15 W$\cdot$m$^{-1}\cdot$K$^{-1}$. This significant difference is due to several factors. Firstly, with the method used here, the components of the conductivity, parallel, and perpendicular to the fibre weave, are fully separated. Secondly, the complex multilayered architectures of the tubes are detrimental, acting as barriers against heat transport. Indeed, in order to be water- and gas-tight, the tubes have to include dense ceramic or metallic layers. The poor adhesion between these and SiC/SiC results in a severely reduced heat transfer. Moreover, the matrix of the composite shows a heterogeneously distributed porosity --  about 20 to 45%. This leads to an inhomogeneous thermal conductivity, along both the length and the circumference of the cladding. Although the total porosity should be lessened in future development steps, it currently contributes to the transport of heat through Mie forward scattering of infrared radiation, an effect known as radiation thermal conductivity. In parallel to these activities, a specific component of SiC/SiC, the pyrolytic carbon interphase, has been investigated using analytical electron microscopy. This work showed that this layer, linking the fibres to the matrix, becomes partially amorphous after irradiation. In-situ ion irradiations evidenced radiation-induced dimensional changes of the said layer, the impact of which would mostly be on the mechanical properties of the composite. Using continuous medium modelling, the effect of a partial amorphisation of the PyC is estimated to a thermal conductivity loss of 20 to 25%. In their current state, SiC/SiC clads do not have a thermal conductivity high enough for them to used in power plants. Indeed, a thermal conductivity locally as low as 1 W$\cdot$m$^{-1}\cdot$K$^{-1}$ results in fuel temperatures high enough for \ce{UO2} to reach its melting point.


SUMMARY: The growth of several selected micro-organisms in rapidly dividing cultures of Chlorella pyrenoidosa TX 71105 was studied. Bacterial proliferation was a function of algal growth and bacterial growth occurred, at least in part, as a result of the excretion of organic substances into the culture medium by rapidly dividing algae. These substances capable of supporting bacterial oxidation and growth were varied in kind and were utilized selectively by the different bacteria. Only a small fraction of the soil and air bacteria grew in the algal cultures. The majority of soil and air bacteria survived in mixed culture for several days but did not increase in numbers. On the other hand, 6 out of 8 bacteria pathogenic for man died promptly in cultures of Chlorella pyrenoidosa; but Salmonella typhi and S. paratyphi grew well for extended periods of time. Fungi capable of producing macrocolonies on potato glucose agar at pH 3.5 did not increase in numbers during 8 days. Yeasts and actinomycetes were not detected by the methods used; bacteriophages were observed with some regularity.


This research addresses the deficit of empirical investigation of changes in industrial and warehouse property markets in the UK. It uses business rates (rating list) data for England and Wales to reveal changes in the quantum and distribution of premises over the last decade. Spatio-temporal analysis using geographical information systems identifies where new industrial and warehouse premises have been developed and examines spatial changes in the distribution of premises between the two sectors. The research focuses on the development of new large distribution warehouses (LDWs) to investigate whether there is a new pattern of warehouse premises located in close proximity to junctions on the national highway network. Findings confirm the emergence of a dynamic distribution warehouse property market where "super sheds" have been developed in areas with high levels of multi-modal connectivity. The comprehensive spatio-temporal analysis of all industrial and warehouse premises in England and Wales reconfigures the previously recognised Midlands "Golden Triangle" of distribution warehouses to a "Golden Pointer" and reveals the emergence of a rival "Northern Dumbbell" of distribution warehouse premises in the North of England. Further analysis using isochrones confirms that 85% of the population of Great Britain is situated within four hours average heavy goods vehicle drive time of these two concentrations of super sheds and over 60% of all LDWs floorspace is within 30 minutes' drive of intermodal rail freight interchanges.


In this paper, we investigate a pure form of the topological mapping problem in mobile robotics. We consider the mapping ability of a robot navigating a graph-like world in which it is able to assign a relative ordering to the edges, leaving a vertex with reference to the edge by which it arrived but is unable to associate a unique label with any vertex or edge. Our work extends and builds upon earlier approaches in this problem domain, which are based on construction of exploration tree of plausible world models. The main contributions of the paper are improved exploration strategies that reduce model ambiguity, a new method of search through consistent models in the exploration tree that maintains a bounded set of likely hypotheses based on the principle of Occam's Razor, the incorporation of arbitrary feature vectors into the problem formulation, and an investigation of various aspects of this problem through numerical simulations.