Despite the abundance of localization applications, the tracking devices have never been truly realized in E-textiles. Unobtrusive and flexible integration of tracking devices with clothes is difficult to achieve with standard PCB-based devices. An attractive option would be direct printing of circuit layout on the textile itself, negating the use of hard PCB materials. However, due to high surface roughness and porosity of textiles, efficient and reliable printing of electronics on textile has remained elusive. In this paper, an interface layer is first printed on the textile to facilitate the printing of a complete localization circuit and antenna for the first time. The tracking device utilizes WiFi to determine the wearer's position and can display this information on any internet-enabled device, such as smart phone. The device is small enough (55 mm × 45 mm) and lightweight (22g with 500 mAh battery) for people to comfortably wear it and can be easily concealed in case discretion is required. The device operates at 2.4GHz with communication range of up to 55 meters, and localization accuracy of up to 8 meters.


ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to highlight some conceptions of ethical competence identified in interviews with teachers in religious education in Sweden, and within analyses of policy documents in a Swedish and an Icelandic educational context. As a starting point we take seven interviewed teachers' comments about what they view as important ethical competences for their pupils to have. A comparative analysis of Swedish and Icelandic policy documents with regard to the conceptual understandings of ethical competence is made, as well as a comparison between the policy documents and teachers' comments. The Icelandic curriculum is chosen because it differs from the Swedish one in a sense relevant to an analysis of the teacher interviews. The analyses imply a tension between theoretical and analytical conceptions of ethical competence and an action competence. Finally, some possible threads to consider in developing a broadened and deepened understanding of ethical competence are outlined.


This study was to explore the association of low-density lipoprotein receptor related protein 5 (LRP5) gene polymorphism with bone mineral density (BMD), bone turnover markers and glycometabolism in postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and/or osteoporosis (OP) in Shanghai. 354 unrelated Han Chinese post-menopausal women were recruited from Shanghai and divided into 4 groups: OP group (n=90), T2DM group (n=96), T2DM + OP group (n=90) and control group (n=78). The LRP5 genotypes were determined by DNA sequencing. The BMD was measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. The bone transformation indicators and glycometabolism index (HbA1c and Fasting insulin) were also detected. The association of LRP5 polymorphism with BMD, bone turnover markers and glycometabolism was evaluated. Result showed that, In OP group, the BMD of L2-4 was higher in patients with rs3736228 CC genotype than those with CT/TT genotypes (P<0.05). After adjustment for age, body mass index (BMI) and years of menopause, A1330V polymorphism was still associated with BMD of L2-4 (P<0.01). In the control group, HbA1c was significantly higher in patients with A1330V CC genotype than those with CT/TT genotypes (P<0.05), but no significant difference was found after adjustment for BMI, age and years of menopause (P>0.05). Thus, LRP5 gene is an impressionable gene in postmenopausal women with OP in Shanghai. T2DM patients have a high BMD when compared with controls, which may be related to BMI and FINS. LRP5 genotype is not an impressionable gene in postmenopausal women with T2DM in Shanghai.


Our paper empirically investigates the effects of agricultural supports on the exports of eighteen Turkish agricultural commodities to 72 countries over the 1965-2010 period. As we use PSE (Producer Support Estimate) and NRA (Nominal Rate of Assistance) as indicators of agricultural supports, our study considers not only agricultural subsidies but also all the efforts of government to support agriculture through both domestic and border measures. Our estimation results show that agricultural supports along with border measures have mixed effects on the export of Turkish agricultural commodities, and agricultural supports are as important as exchange rates in the determination of the export patterns of Turkish agricultural commodities. We also investigate the effects of real exchange rate and its volatility on the exports of Turkish agricultural commodities. Although they are generally positive, our estimated coefficients on real exchange rates in the analysis exhibit mixed results.


This article ascertains whether Japan's possession of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has a legal basis that is opposable to China. It departs from the traditional approach that focuses on historic titles and ancient maps. It applies an alternative approach that is based on the status quo post bellum or the relative legal position of the parties at the end of armed hostilities. This approach is warranted by the practice of China, Japan and the Allied powers of defining the status quo in the East China Sea as a frame of reference for the future disposition of the islands. Primary records of their conduct in the period 1945–1952 reveal consensus that: (i) the islands are part of Nansei Shoto rather than of Formosa; (ii) they remained under the residual sovereignty of Japan and (iii) they were being claimed by Japan but not China. The conduct of the parties proximate to 1945–1956 indicate that there was no prior existing title to the islands that would contradict the status quo. Rather, during the period 1952 up to the critical date of 1970, the positive acts of the Republic of China and the acquiescence of the People's Republic of China confirmed the status quo.


The role of acidification and chelating agents in the solubilization of uranium (U) from contaminated soil was examined in a series of experiments. Soil acidification and the addition of chelating agents were the two methods compared initially. The results indicated that the addition of citric acid solubilized more U than acidification or the other amendments tested. This increase in U solubility was, however, transitory. A subsequent experiment indicated that citrate concentration had a more dramatic effect on U solubility than did acidification. The greatest soluble U concentration during this experiment (775 mg kg -1 soil, or ∼85% of the total U) was observed after 24 h in the presence of 20 millimoles citrate kg -1 soil at pH 5. The persistence of U solubility over the 96-h experimental period was primarily a function of pH and citrate degradation. In a separate experiment, in which citric acid rather than citrate was added to contaminated soil, the soluble U concentrations observed were generally lower than those observed in the presence of citrate. Citric acid decreased soil pH to values ≤3.6, and solubilized higher concentrations of Al and Fe than observed in the presence of citrate. Since the maximum solubilization of U was observed at pH 5, the implication of these results is that a combined approach, using both soil acidification and citric acid addition, may be necessary to maximize the phytoextraction of U from soils with a pH > 6.0.


This work presents computational results of a reduced order model for the rapid calculation of conducting object characterisations as a function of frequency in metal detection. Such characterisations are called their spectral signature. We present a brief description of the eddy-current model and the magnetic polarizability tensor (MPT) used for our object characterisations. The transmission problem required for the computation of the MPT and its discretisation is then described followed by a summary of the reduced order model. As an illustration of the capabilities of the approach for characterising realistic objects, we show MPT spectral signatures of a British £1 coin.


This paper examines the causal relationship between inequality and a number of macroeconomic variables frequently found in the inequality and growth literature. These include growth, openness, wages, and liberalisation. We review the existing cross-country empirical evidence on the effects of inequality on growth and the extent to which the poorest in society benefit from economic growth. The linkage between growth, redistribution and poverty is also analysed. In the review of literature mainly empirical examples from 1990s are taken. In addition we test the conditional and unconditional relationship between inequality and growth in the post World War II period using WIDER inequality database. Regression results suggest that income inequality is declining over time. Inequality is also declining in growth of income. There is a significant regional heterogeneity in the levels and development over time. The Kuznets hypothesis represents a global U-shape relationship between inequality and growth.


Philip H. Sheridan's reputation in the Civil War often overshadows his longer and more significant roles as the nation's chief Indian fighter and commander of the army. "Phil Sheridan and His Army" is the first comprehensive biography and study of that later career. Formed by his experience in the Civil War and Reconstruction era, Sheridan came to see himself as the instrument of the United States' social and political destiny to open the West for white settlement and development. Paul Hutton analyzes Sheridan's relations with his subordinates, the institutional nature of his army, his campaigns, the logistics of them, and the special circumstances of defeating, pacifying, relocating, and negotiating with the Indians. At the same time, Gilded Age politics and laissez-faire capitalism shaped the grim future of the Indian--and of Sheridan's beleagured quasi-peacetime army. This definitive, abundantly illustrated history also fills out other sides of General Sheridan, who commanded Chicago after its great fire, quelled its labor riots, launched Buffalo Bill Cody on his career, served as an observed in the Franco-Prussian War, played a key role in the 1876 election crisis, and championed a national park system free from commercial exploitation.


This study examined the effects of a computer-mediated intervention on "at-risk" preschool students' receptive vocabulary development, computer-literacy skills, and enthusiasm for leaning. Twenty-two preschool-aged children attending an urban primary public school and participating in government subsidized school lunch program participated in the study.
A pretest/posttest control-group design and case-study participant observations were used for data collection. Students were assigned to one of two treatment groups. Eleven preschool students with pretest School Readiness Composite (SRC) standard scores of 80, or below, on the Bracken Basic Concept Scale-Revised (BBCS-R), were assigned to the intervention group. Eleven pre-school students matched by age level and teacher comprised the comparison group. The intervention group received computer-mediated instruction while the comparison group received classroom teacher instruction.
The first research question examined the effect of the intervention on students' receptive vocabulary analyzing groups' pretest and posttest BBCS-R School Readiness Composite mean scores. Combined analysis of a Two-Factor Repeated Measures and a Posttest only ANCOVA revealed that computer-mediated instruction was as effective as classroom teacher instruction in helping "at-risk" students acquire readiness receptive vocabulary.
The second research question examined the effect of the intervention on "at-risk" students' computer-literacy skills analyzing participants pretest and posttest mean scores on the Computer Input Observation Rubric (CIOR), a rubric developed by the researcher. Analysis of One-Factor ANOVA and of Two-Factor Repeated Measures indicated that computer intervention significantly increased students' computer literacy skills.
The third research question examined the impact of computer-mediated intervention on preschool students' enthusiasm for learning and followed descriptive case study methodology. Students' level of task involvement and positive-self statements confirmed enthusiasm for learning with technology.


Vision transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated great potential in various visual tasks, but suffer from expensive computational and memory cost problems when deployed on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we introduce a ternary vision transformer (TerViT) to ternarize the weights in ViTs, which are challenged by the large loss surface gap between real-valued and ternary parameters. To address the issue, we introduce a progressive training scheme by first training 8-bit transformers and then TerViT, and achieve a better optimization than conventional methods. Furthermore, we introduce channel-wise ternarization, by partitioning each matrix to different channels, each of which is with an unique distribution and ternarization interval. We apply our methods to popular DeiT and Swin backbones, and extensive results show that we can achieve competitive performance. For example, TerViT can quantize Swin-S to 13.1MB model size while achieving above 79% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset.


This paper considers the bioethics of estranged biological kin, who are biologically related people not in contact with one another (due to adoption, abandonment, or other long‐term estrangement). Specifically, I am interested in what is owed to estranged biological kin in the event of medical need. A survey of current bioethics demonstrates that most analyses are not prepared to reckon with the complications of having or being estranged biological kin. For example, adoptees might wonder if a lack of contact with biological kin could someday affect their medical care (or affect the medical care of their biological relatives). Estranged biological kin, such as adoptees, present us with a chance to think about human connection. After sketching several organ‐donation and adoption tropes, I argue that a feminist analysis of vulnerability and dependency is helpful for understanding the confusing ties of estranged biological kin. I conclude by proposing a medical registry that would put adoptees and others in touch with their estranged biological kin on a medically as‐needed basis.


Benchmarking (also "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking") is a process used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice, usually within their own sector. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to adopt such best practice, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to challenge their practices.


Abstract. Nitrogen oxides (NOx≡ NO + NO2) are of central importance for air quality, climate forcing, and nitrogen deposition
to ecosystems. The Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS)
is now providing hourly NO2 satellite observations over East Asia,
offering the first direct measurements of NO2 diurnal variation from
space to guide understanding of NOx emissions and chemistry. The
NO2 retrieval requires independent vertical profile information from a
chemical transport model (CTM) to compute the air mass factor (AMF) that
relates the NO2 column measured along the line of sight to the NO2
vertical column. Here, we use aircraft observations from the Korea-United
States Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) campaign over the Seoul metropolitan area (SMA) and around the Korean Peninsula in May–June 2016 to better understand the factors controlling the NO2 vertical profile, its diurnal
variation, the implications for the AMFs, and the ability of the GEOS-Chem CTM to compute the NO2 vertical profiles used for AMFs. Proper representation of oxidant chemistry is critical for the CTM simulation of
NO2 vertical profiles and is achieved in GEOS-Chem through new model
developments, including aerosol nitrate photolysis, reduced uptake of hydroperoxy (HO2) radicals by aerosols, and accounting for atmospheric
oxidation of volatile chemical products (VCPs). We find that the
tropospheric NO2 columns measured from space in the SMA are mainly
contributed by the planetary boundary layer (PBL) below 2 km altitude,
reflecting the highly polluted conditions. Repeated measurements of NO2
vertical profiles over the SMA at different times of day show that diurnal
change in mixing depth affecting the NO2 vertical profile induces a
diurnal variation in AMFs of comparable magnitude to the diurnal variation in the NO2 column. GEOS-Chem captures this diurnal variation in AMFs and
more generally the variability in the AMFs for the KORUS-AQ NO2 vertical profiles (2.7 % mean bias, 7.6 % precision), with some outliers in the
morning due to errors in the timing of mixed-layer growth.


Background: Fish is a source of many nutrients that can be beneficial during pregnancy, as well as a source of neurotoxicant contaminants such as methylmercury. Previous investigations of fish intake in relation to neurodevelopment have focused on possible damage from contaminants, whereas potential benefits of fish consumption have been relatively unexplored Methods: We evaluated the association between maternal fish intake during pregnancy and offspring's early development of language and communication skills in a cohort of 7421 British children born in 1991–1992. Fish intake by the mother and child was measured by questionnaire. The child's cognitive development was assessed using adaptations of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory at 15 months of age and the Denver Developmental Screening Test at 18 months of age. Mercury was measured in umbilical cord tissue for a subset of 1054 children Results: Total mercury concentrations were low and were not associated with neurodevelopment. Fish intake by the mother during pregnancy, and by the infant postnatally, was associated with higher mean developmental scores. For example, the adjusted mean MacArthur comprehension score for children whose mothers consumed fish 4 or more times per week was 72 (95% confidence interval = 71–74), compared with 68 (66–71) among those whose mothers did not consume fish. Conclusions: When fish is not contaminated, moderate fish intake during pregnancy and infancy may benefit development.


Vaccination is a commonly used disease control strategy in dairy farming in the UK. Farmers perceive their veterinarian to be the most important source of information for vaccination advice. However, poor compliance and perceived confusion on appropriate vaccination strategies suggest that there is variation in the advice that farmers are receiving. This study compared veterinarians', veterinary students' and farmers' perceptions and approach to vaccination strategies on dairy farms through the use of survey questions, discussion groups and a posed case scenario. The vaccination advice for one case scenario was variable between many participants in this study. Results suggest that although veterinarians are aware of suboptimal farmer compliance, and they recognise the motivators and barriers of farmers to comply with vaccination, actions to improve farmer compliance could be improved. Suggestions are given to provide veterinarians with, currently lacking, information which is helpful in the decision-makin...


The cloud has emerged as a successful computing paradigm allowing users and organizations to rely on external providers for storing and processing their data and making them available to others. Undoubtedly, security is one of the significant concerns in cloud computing. However, one of the major security concerns is to protect against network intrusions that affect confidentiality, availability and integrity Cloud resources and offered services. In this paper, we present a new framework, that allows collaboration between Hybrid Intrusion Detection System (Hy-IDS), Firewalls and Mobile Agents. Deploying security mechanisms in cloud computing environment to detect and stop intrusion attempts through our framework. However, the security mechanisms unfolds in four phases: using mobile agents in a virtual environment to collect malicious data in order to detect intrusions. Then, generation of appropriate response actions local and remote from malicious data, which were collected in the first phase. In addition, dynamic deployment of response actions through virtual or physical firewall. Finally, dynamic deployment of updates in cloud computing based on mobile agents. Therefore, the collaborative framework of security management could identify and address new distributed attacks more quickly and effectively Keywords— cloud computing, confidentiality, firewall, Mobile Agents, security.


This study investigated the perceptions of nursing educators concerning the amount and kinds of computer training that should occur in the nursing degree program. Data were collected in two phases: a semi-structured interview of experts in the application of the computer to nursing and a random sample of nursing educators in 2-year and 4-year nursing degree programs. The panel of experts identified objectives within each of seven domains: programming and algorithms, skills in computer usage, major uses and applications, limitations of computers, personal and social aspects, and relevant values and attitudes. The responses of this panel were used to generate an universe of computer literacy objectives. The sample of nursing educators then identified a subset of objectives within the universe that they felt nursing students should master in order to be computer literate. The survey found that nursing educators desire graduates of nursing degree programs to understand how a computer works and to develop skills in using application programs. They do not expect nursing graduates to acquire programming skills, however, they do expect the graduates to acquire skills in using the computer as a tool in nursing. These skills include using a word processor for writing nursing care plans, using computer-aided instruction as a learning tool, using a hospital computer information system, using a computerized library database, and using software for statistical computations.


A tung oil (TO) based monomer for rigid thermosetting polymer was synthesized, characterized, and copolymerized with styrene in this study. Tung oil was alcoholyzed with pentaerythritol (PER) to get tung oil pentaerythritol alcoholysis products (TOPER), and the optimized conditions were explored according to the yields of TOPER analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The resulting alcoholysis products were maleinated to form tung oil maleate half ester (TOPERMA), and the reaction conditions were determined by monitoring the reaction extents of TOPER and maleic anhydride (MA) with 1HNMR spectroscopy. The TO alcoholysis and maleinization reaction products were characterized by IR, 1HNMR, and electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) techniques. At last, the TOPERMA mixture was cured with styrene (St), and the initiator tert-butyl peroxy benzoate (TPB). Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) was employed to characterize the curing process. Mechanical properties of the cured TOPERMA/St resin further confirmed the best procedure for the maleinization reaction. The loading of TO reached about 30% weight of the resulting thermosetting polymer. This promising material from renewable resources can be a potential substitution for petroleum products when used as sheet molding compounds.


Climate change and overfishing are increasingly causing unanticipated changes in marine ecosystems (e.g. shifts in species dominance). In order to understand and anticipate these changes, there is a crucial need for indicators that summarise large quantities of information into a few relevant and accessible signals. Seabirds have been suggested as good candidates for ecological indicators of the marine environment; however, few studies have critically evaluated their value as such. We review the role of seabirds as ecological indicators, and discuss their limitations and drawbacks, as compared to other types of indicators. In addition, we highlight the statistical consequences of inverse inference when using seabird data as indicators. We discuss the use of integrated indices and the use of seabirds as autonomous samplers of the marine environment. Finally, we highlight the necessary steps preceding the use of seabirds as indicators. We conclude that, in order to use seabird time series properly, the use of recent advances both in statistics and in remote sensing is a way to move forward. This, along with the assessment of their usefulness, should enable us to use seabird indicators appropriately for managing urgent conservation problems.


Abstract. Setiawan E, Muzaki FK, Nurhayati APD, Maulidina N. 2019. Record of shallow-water sponges in Simeulue Island, Aceh Province, Indonesia. Biodiversitas 20: 3246-3257. The first and present study on shallow water sponges in Simeulue islands, Aceh Province, Indonesia recorded more than twenty species of marine sponges. This first assessment was also part of Ekpedisi Widya Nusantara X (E-WINN X) coastal chapter 2017 where was conducted in Simeulue islands, Aceh. Most of the recorded sponges are common species that are also recognized inhabiting a broad distribution in the West Indo-Pacific marine ecoregion. All recorded shallow-water sponges are Demospongian sponges. Among the three selected types of shallow water sponge habitats, a number of sponges are achieved mostly in shallow reefs in comparison to sandy and mangrove lagoons. The current study on species recorded also documents general characteristic enriches and highlights the importance of filling the gaps in distributional patterns of sponges on the west coast of Sumatra.


Protein kinase C (PKC) has been widely implicated in positive and negative control of cell proliferation. We have recently shown that treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells with phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) during G1 phase inhibits the progression into S phase, an effect mediated by PKCδ-induced up-regulation of the cell cycle inhibitor p21Cip1. However, PMA treatment in asynchronously growing NSCLC cells leads to accumulation of cells in G2/M. Studies in post-G1 phases revealed that PMA induced an irreversible G2/M cell cycle arrest in NSCLC cells and conferred morphological and biochemical features of senescence, including elevated SA-β-Gal activity and reduced telomerase activity. Remarkably, this effect was phase-specific, as it occurred only when PKC was activated in S, but not in G1, phase. Mechanistic analysis revealed a crucial role for the classical PKCα isozyme as mediator of the G2/M arrest and senescence, as well as for inducing p21Cip1 an obligatory event for conferring the senescence phenotype. In addition to the unappreciated role of PKC isozymes, and specifically PKCα, in senescence, our data introduce the paradigm that discrete PKCs trigger distinctive responses when activated in different phases of the cell cycle via a common mechanism that involves p21Cip1 up-regulation.


Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. Many of them reach a point at which they say "Enough is enough." After living for years with poisoned air and water, contaminated soil, and pollution-related health problems, they start to take action--organizing, speaking up, documenting the effects of pollution on their neighborhoods. In Sacrifice Zones, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods "sacrifice zones." And he argues that residents of these sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical pollutants, need additional regulatory protections. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond the disheartening statistics and gives us the voices of the residents themselves, offering compelling portraits of accidental activists who have become grassroots leaders in the struggle for environmental justice and details the successful tactics they have used on the fenceline with heavy industry.


Abstract The U.S. has a chronic shortage of reasonably-priced housing. Decades of policy and program intervention at federal, state, and local levels has not substantively alleviated this problem. Consequently, alarmingly high proportions of the population spend over 30% of their income on housing costs and are deemed housing cost-burdened. Housing cost-burdened households have a much lower quality of life than those that are not. Thus, the housing affordability problem is a serious social concern. Is this problem also holding back the U.S. economy? I explore whether the lack of reasonably-priced housing adversely impacted per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the 100 most populous metro areas of the country. I use publicly available data for three time points (2000, 2010, and 2015) and changes in the proportion of cost-burdened households in metros as the experimental variable. I find that decreases in housing affordability had a statistically significant negative effect on economic growth in these metros. Over 80% of the national GDP is generated in U.S. metros, and increasing housing affordability there may help grow the U.S. economy. Therefore, policies to increase housing affordability, long seen as a social imperative, may well be an economic imperative also.


Steam generator tubes are expanded inside tubesheet holes and the crevice gap between tubesheet and the tube should be minimized. To examine tube expansion area, eddy current testing is usually used. In this paper, absolute and differential signals are computed by a numerical method for several different locations of transition region and signal variations due to tubesheet, tube expansion and operating frequencies are observed. Results show that low frequency is good for identifying the location of tubesheet, and high frequency is good for the measurement of expanded tube diameter and the recognition of transition region. In general, absolute signal is good for measuring tube diameter and the differential signal has advantages of locating tubesheet and both ends of the transition region.


This thesis presents an ethnographic process for identifying the needs for collaborative tools within an organisation and a participatory design method for matching these to existing off the shelf technologies. This process is developed through, and illustrated with, a case study looking at tools to support collaborative software development teams at Airbus. The thesis begins by exploring the background to systems development processes as well as methods for identifying needs and understanding the context of use. It then presents an in depth description of ethnographic studies carried out at Airbus in which the needs of software development teams are identified, along with high-level requirements for supporting these. These focus on ways to aid traceability of design decisions in a lightweight and flexible manner. A description of the process used to develop a participatory design workshop that sought to bridge the gap between the output of the ethnographic work and the selection of potential solutions is provided. This includes three pilot studies used to refine the method and a final workshop held with stakeholders at Airbus. The thesis then describes the evaluation of two potential solutions, the Livescribe Echo Smartpen and a Motorola Xoom tablet computer with a number of apps installed. Through evaluations it was possible to identify the Smartpen as being the most feasible technology, although some barriers to use still existed. Finally the thesis concludes with a summary of the process developed, reflections on the methods used, and an outline of the case study. Limitations and recommendations for the future are also outlined.


Development of new treatments against Mycobacterium ulcerans infection has become crucial because of its wide-scale prevalence throughout the world. The effects of dihydrofolate reductase inhibitors, used either singly or in combination with dapsone against M. ulcerans were evaluated in vitro. When used singly, epiroprim was the most potent, with MICs between 0.5 and 1.0 mg/L, while trimethoprim was totally ineffective. The MICs of K-130 and brodimoprim ranged from 1.0-2.0 mg/L for the former to 2.0-16.0 mg/L for the latter. When combined with dapsone, synergic effects were observed with epiroprim. These results indicate the great potential of epiroprim in treating M. ulcerans infections.


We have measured the random packing density of monodisperse colloidal silica ellipsoids with a well-defined shape, gradually deviating from a sphere shape up to prolates with aspect ratios of about 5, to find for a colloidal system the first experimental observation for the density maximum (at an aspect ratio near 1.6) previously found only in computer simulations of granular packings. Confocal microscopy of ellipsoid packings, prepared by rapidly quenching ellipsoid fluids via ultra-centrifugation, demonstrates the absence of orientational order and yields pair correlation functions very much like those for random sphere packings. The density maximum, about 12% above the Bernal random sphere packing density, also manifests itself as a maximum in the hydrodynamic friction that resists the swelling osmotic pressure of the ellipsoid packings. The existence of the density maximum is also predicted to strongly effect the dynamics of colloidal non-sphere glasses: slightly perturbing the sphere shape in a sphere glass will cause it to melt.


In recent years, the notion of local robustness (or robustness for short) has emerged as a desirable property of deep neural networks. Intuitively, robustness means that small perturbations to an input do not cause the network to performmisclassifications. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for verifying robustness properties of neural networks. Our method synergistically combines gradient-based optimization methods for counterexample search with abstraction-based proof search to obtain a sound and (δ -)complete decision procedure. Our method also employs a data-driven approach to learn a verification policy that guides abstract interpretation during proof search. We have implemented the proposed approach in a tool called Charon and experimentally evaluated it on hundreds of benchmarks. Our experiments show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms three state-of-the-art tools, namely AI2, Reluplex, and Reluval. CCS Concepts • Theory of computation → Abstraction; • Computing methodologies → Neural networks;


The shift from surveillance to promotion requires paediatricians to play several roles in a larger multidisciplinary and multi-agency team

Child health surveillance programmes aim to prevent disease, detect physical and developmental abnormalities, and promote optimum health and development. There is growing evidence over the past decade that early intervention can change the life course for disadvantaged children. The emphasis has shifted from detecting developmental problems to preventing them and, in recognition of this change, the term "child health surveillance programme" has given way to "child health promotion programme". Putting this programme into practice calls for awareness of the evidence as to what works. The evidence supports the need for a universal preschool service for all families and targeted intensive home visiting for high risk children. Preschool intervention and education benefit all children but particularly those at risk of educational failure. Children's Centres may offer the opportunity to provide a more effective integrated service. The shift from surveillance to promotion requires paediatricians to play several roles in a larger multidisciplinary and multi-agency team, contributing to health promotion as well as facilitating early identification and providing expert diagnostic and management services.

The current interest and investment in the promotion of optimum health and development for children is the result of emerging evidence that outcomes and life chances can be improved by preschool intervention programmes, coupled with growing concerns about health inequalities, educational under-achievement, juvenile crime, and social exclusion.1 Such concerns are not new; efforts to address their root causes date from the 19th century when there was a major public investment in sanitary reform and other environmental improvements. In the first half of the twentieth century, the major health concerns were nutritional deficiencies and infectious diseases. As these scourges came under control, more attention could be devoted to child rearing issues, …


Clinical peculiarities and pathogenesis of mild cerebrocranial trauma (CCT) in 106 children aged 1-14 years were studied. The boys made up 66.03% of this group. Neurologic, immunologic (CIC, immunoglobulins A, M, G) and biochemical (level of thyobarbituric acid, TBA-active products) investigations were performed on day 1 and 10 after the trauma. There were increased levels of CIC and TBA-active products on the 1st day, while after the recovery (to the 10th day) elevation of these indices was less pronounced pronounced. The authors made a conclusion about participation of both immunologic and biochemical alterations in pathologic process resultant in disorders of metabolism and microcirculation. Thus, such children need longer pathogenetic therapy to prevent development of neurologic complications in the remote period of CCT.


Sabine-Neches Estuary, near Beaumont, TX, receives wastewater effluents from over 160 industrial and municipal treatment plants. The concentrations of trace metals (Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn), Al, Fe, Mn, and organic carbon were determined in four dated sediment cores. A reliable geochronology and reconstruction of the history of trace metal inputs of these sediments was possible because the 239,240 Pu profiles closely trace the bomb fallout history into the environment. Down-core variations of aluminum-normalized enrichment factors for these metals demonstrate that the sediments of this estuary have remained relatively 'pristine' with respect to trace metal contamination since 1860. While the concentrations of Pb and Zn at various depths in the sediment column are slightly enriched, Co, Cr, Cu, and Ni are depleted. The sedimentary and biogenic particles that are presently being deposited are also depleted in trace metals. Lack of strong enrichment for trace metals like Cu can be attributed to the short residence time of water, low salinity conditions, and possibly strong complexation of these metals with organic matter.


Wheat harvested from the University of Maryland Agronomy Farm in June 1959 contained 20 to 50 micromicrocuries of strontium-90 per kilogram of grain. More than 90 percent of the strontium-90 came from deposition on aboveground plant parts, and less than 10 percent was taken up through the soil. About 1 to 2 percent of the strontium-90 fallout during the time the heads were exposed was retained in the grain.


Very little is known about the influence of the social-psychological context on children's aggressive behavior. The purpose of this research was to examine the interrelations of group contextual factors and the occurrence of aggressive behavior in 22 experimental play groups of 7- and 9-year-old African-American boys. Group context was examined before, during, and after an aggressive act as well as during nonaggressive periods. The results showed that there are dimensions of group context (i.e., negative affect, high aversive behavior, high activity level, low group cohesion, competitiveness) that were related to the occurrence of aggressive behavior between 2 children in the group. Group context influenced how children reacted to aggression between its members (e.g., siding with the victim), which in turn influenced the quality of the postaggression group atmosphere. This study suggests that individual-within-context information be incorporated into theories of aggression among children.


Asset management is a systematic process of maintenance, modernization, and operation of infrastructure assets in an economically efficient way. For these reasons, asset management has been considered as an emerging concept applied in the area of transport management. Many countries have developed procedures to evaluate pavement infrastructure assets; however, these applications generally have focused on main interurban and urban roads. The objective of this paper is to present a methodology to determine the asset value of low-volume roads and to quantify the impact of maintenance policies on such asset value. As a case study, the proposed methodology was applied to the unpaved road network of Chile, considering different maintenance policies and their impact on the evolution of the road network asset value. A complete analysis that considered the impact of maintenance policies under different budgetary conditions was performed. The analysis was done by using the HDM-4 program, since it performs technical and economic valuations considering a reposition value method. Relationships close to linear were found between final asset value of the unpaved road network under a 20-year valuation. Results showed that medium levels of investment are needed to maintain the network asset value. A small increase of the initial asset value of a network is obtained with high levels of investment. Asset valuation is a good and simple tool that helps agencies during a first-level management process. However, it is not recommended on its own as an optimization tool for the allocation of resources, as social costs and benefits associated with each investment strategy need to be considered.


Before commencing on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction examination of the systems for employing expert testimony, a brief look at the main jurisprudential traditions lays a proper foundation for the subject matter. There are many commentaries on the differences between traditions of legal systems of Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. Most juridical systems fall into one of two groups, each exhibiting dis-tinct legal philosophies and characteristics. On one hand, there is the tradition employed in the English-speaking world, which is typically described as the Anglo–Saxon jurisprudence, commonly referred to as employing an adversarial approach. On the other hand, there is the civil law system that is based on the Napoleonic Code, which in turn was modified from the Roman Law model. The civil law system is often called the inquisitorial or investigative system. An effective comparison of the two main legal philosophies is fraught with difficulties. Both systems share some terminology, but the terms used have significantly different meanings in each. The rules of how the tribunals function, what the roles of various law professionals are, and how decisions are made, including the uses of juries and panels of judges, also differ between these two systems. The inquisitorial system is broadly based on a search for the truth and is structured around an exhaustive analysis of the evidence by a specialist judge or, as this official is called in the French legal system, the juge d'instruction or examining mag-istrate. One who is familiar with the inquisitorial system might be tempted to compare the examining magistrate to the prosecutor of the American system, but such comparison is inappropriate. An examin-ing magistrate is a member of the judicial branch, whereas a prosecutor is typically in the service of the executive branch. The adversarial system is grounded on a system of rules of evidence designed to limit the "factual" evidence that may be presented to the court. The pur-pose of these rules of evidence is to avoid injecting into the lay jury's fact-finding process, any proof that is of little relevance to resolving disputed issues. Fur-ther, judges in adversarial system jurisdictions have the ability to also exclude evidence of doubtful reli-ability or that would unfairly prejudice the jury to an accused in a criminal case. This does not occur in civil law systems where all evidence is effectively analyzed by the examining magistrate, although it must be added that the examining magistrate does not have any role to play in any subsequent trial. In the adversary system, questions of fact are decided by a jury, or, if no jury is present (called a bench trial), by the judge. In a jury trial, the judge decides the issues of law and instructs the jurors in the legal principles that they must apply to the facts, as they have found them to be established by evi-dence that has been presented. The most common type of evidence that is excluded from the trier of fact in adversary system courts is evidence of bad char-acter. The rationale behind excluding, what in many cases can be directly relevant evidence, is that the evi-dence of the bad character of the accused may have a prejudicial effect on the minds of jurors that out-weighs its probative value, thus leading to a verdict based on prejudice rather than "fact". Counsel for the accused would, at the Voir Dire, which is the prelimi-nary hearing before the court and conducted without a jury, make an application (or present a "motion") that certain evidence should not be admitted. In England and Wales, the rules on bad character evidence estab-lished for over 100 years in the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898, have now been fundamentally altered by the passage of the Criminal Justice Act of 2003, which increased the circumstances where evidence of character is admissible despite its potential prejudicial effect. Other evidence that has increasingly come under scrutiny for exclusion is autoptic or forensic evidence. The use of forensic evidence is of powerful probative value, but it can also be inherently misleading in that the reliability of scientific evidence often falls below the trier of fact's faith in it. In recent years, a number of high profile cases regarding expert testimony have drawn attention to the often fallible nature of such evidence. Forensic evidence is now much more likely to be questioned at the Voir Dire as to not only its relevance but also its accuracy. One common misconception held in the adversar-ial world is that, in civil law systems, the accused is "guilty until proved innocent". That is incorrect. All European civil law systems are intimately tied to


This paper reports the outcome of a study carried out in four Algerian high schools with 240 Students to obtain a deeper insight into their perceptions of challenges that they are facing in Learning English as a Second Foreign Language in the classroom, in addition, to see whether the gender plays a vital role in challenges. Quantitative data were collected by means of students' questionnaire. The results have shown that the majority of the respondents agree that all, except for one of the statements, which was "I think of a sentence in French first and then translate it into English" contribute to the challenges as English Language learners in Algeria. Hence, it can be concluded that there are six main challenges faced by Algerian students in learning English as a Second Foreign Language. These challenges are the lack of vocabulary in writing, the insufficient amount of speaking lessons to improve speaking skills, the time taken to recall exact pronunciation while giving the explanation, grammar problems in writing, oral fluency while presenting and the lack of confidence in reading in class.


Variations in the formation of brachial plexus are common and have been reported by several investigators in relation to origin of roots, trunks, cords, divisions and branches. The nerves of the extremities are especially vulnerable to injury because of their long course and superficial distribution. The basic anatomy of median and ulnar nerves in the upper limb is well described in the textbooks. Previously, an ample amount of work has been done upon the communications between the median and ulnar nerves in the forearm and hand. In the present case, an unreported pattern was seen where whole of the ulnar nerve was arising from the median nerve in the arm during routine under graduate dissections, in left upper limb of a 60 year old male. Its phylogeny and clinical implications are discussed in detail. A lack of awareness of variations might complicate surgical repair and may cause ineffective nerve blockade.


Head Checking (HC) is a major type of Rolling Contact Fatigue (RCF) in
railway rails across the globe. It mainly occurs on curved tracks in the rail
shoulder of the gauge side and at the gauge corner because of the large
lateral force. The related track radii are between 500 – 3000 m. It initiates
from the surface due to high surface shear stresses arising at wheel-rail
contact.
HC has severe economic consequences as well as on the safety of railway
operations. The serious accident caused by HC at Hatfield in the United
Kingdom in October 2000 raised awareness to treat it seriously. The yearly
total HC treatment-related cost was about 50 million euros in the Netherlands
when the occurrence of HC was at its highest.
Although a number of treatment methods for HC are possible, it is concluded
that preventing or retarding HC initiation by optimal rail profile design is the
most effective in terms of implementability, cost and time span. This thesis
therefore aims at the design of an anti-HC profile of rails, based on a
fundamental understanding of the mechanical mechanism of HC initiation.
To such end, an investigation has been carried out on the quantitative
relationship between HC occurrences, contact geometry, stresses and microslip.
HC initiation has been reproduced under controlled laboratory conditions
on a full-scale wheel-rail test rig. At the same time, HC initiation has been
monitored in the field under service conditions. Using a non-Hertzian rolling
contact solution method, it is found that HC initiation location tends to be at a
distance 7 – 12 mm from the gauge face, where the surface shear stress is
the highest as a result of the large geometrical spin in the wheel-rail contact.
The optimization is therefore focused on the gauge part of the profile, with the
objective of relieving the maximum shear stress. As the 54E1 rail is
predominantly used on the Dutch railway network, the optimization is
performed on it. After a statistical analysis of the AHC performance of the
54E1 and 46E3 profiles, it is concluded that an undercut of the 54E1 profile at
the gauge corner, with the maximum undercut at about 9 mm from the gauge
face, should achieve the objective. Together with a number of constraints
arising from the existing 54E1 profile, from vehicle running performance, track
structure and contact mechanics, an optimal Anti Head Checking 54E1 (AHC
54E1) profile is designed.
This designed profile has shown its merits:
By avoiding contact in the HC-prone part of the rail, the maximum surface
shear stress is greatly reduced, mainly owing to the decrease of spin in the
contact.
A monitored field test shows that the AHC 54E1 profile can largely delay the
HC formation and once HC arises, it also decreases the crack growth by a
factor of half. The AHC profile changes due to wear, so that it has to be
restored with cyclic grinding to maintain its effectiveness.
Large-scale application on the Dutch railway network shows that
HC in 2008 was reduced by about 70% with respect to 2004 when HC was
the most widespread.
At the same time, no negative influence of the AHC 54E1 on the running
performance of the trains has been reported, either from the monitored site or
from the large-scale application.
As a result, the AHC 54E1 profile has been normalized as a standard
European rail profile named 54E5 at 1:40, see prEN 13674-1, June, 2009.
Recommendations for further research and development are made at the end
of the thesis.


The paper, drawing on ancient ideals of knowledge: pure versus practical, argues that natural sciences cannot provide a real worldview by themselves. This is because they have features such as ambiguity of the scientific description of reality, meaninglessness of mathematical models employed, and non-referential character of many important scientific notions. This would leave the human desire to understand the world unfulfilled, if other sources of knowledge are excluded. But if they are allowed, then a proper way of reconciling independent or even seemingly divergent views has to be found. Among complementary sources of a worldview, many accept religion, or rather the rational reconstruction of religious beliefs – theology. This paper suggests that some important concepts found in the contemporary philosophy of science – among them underdetermination and incommensurability – point to ways which may allow for the provision of methodologically acceptable constructs, based on the two pillars – science and theology; constructs, which could go beyond vague metaphors towards a consistent worldview.


Abstract—This paper deals with computer-aided design of digital systems and presents a formal method for designing a digital system via state tables. The steps of the design method can be summarized as follows: a) a system is described by a set of microprograms written in a "transfer language," b) the set of microprograms is translated into a set of flow tables by an algorithm, and c) the flow tables are converted into logical diagrams by synthesis procedures. The purpose of step a) is to aid the designer in describing the system; the result of step b) makes it possible to reduce the logical complexity of the system by using systematic techniques of the sequential network theory; and the result of step c) is a system of interconnected sequential networks, operating simultaneously which may include iterative asynchronous networks.


Introduction In British Columbia, Canada, women have longer work disability durations for musculoskeletal injuries than men, even after adjustment for confounders. This study investigated if different types of health care utilisation in the first four weeks of injury explain differences in disability duration. Methods Three cohorts were identified from compensation claims for back strain, limb fractures and connective tissue injuries. Claims were restricted to at least four-weeks disability for a standard health care utilisation window. Quantile regression investigated the effect of physician visits (log count), physical therapies and prescriptions (yes/no), on disability days (censored at 365) at the 25th, 50thand 75th percentile by gender. Results In multivariable models, physician visits were associated with shorter disability durations for both genders across injury cohorts. For example, for connective tissue injuries, an increase of one physician visit was associated with 44 fewer days [95% CI-64.8,–23.9] for women and 56 fewer days for men [−74.2,–37.5], at the 75th percentile. Opiate prescriptions were associated with longer disability durations for factures only, with 39 more days [95% CI 16.1, 61.3] for women and 46 more days [32.1, 59.3] for men, at the 75th percentile. The effect of physical therapies varied by injury and gender. Discussion Physician visits in the first weeks of a compensation claim may be part of return-to-work procedures associated with shorter disability. Opiate prescriptions in the first weeks of a fracture may be a measure of severity associated with longer disability. Health care utilisation did not readily explain longer disability durations for women.


The ability to control engineering process execution is of vital importance for the success of an engineering project. Thus many studies have been focusing on capitalizing knowledge and practices of systems engineering processes. We proposed in a former work a complete solution (SysPEM: System Process Engineering Metamodel) to this problem starting from the engineering process models to process orchestration and execution control. One of the main components of this solution is a scheduling engine able to reach balance between time consumption and the respective interest of each resource. But, as we implemented our solution in the context of a real-life case study, we noticed its inability to provide high quality schedules when the available resources are severely reduced, this limitation is due to the fact that the scheduling engine is limited to using the available resources given as input as an absolute constraint. In this paper we will provide a solution to this problem through the proposition of additional resources in a cost optimization context. Our work is strongly linked to our former publications, conveniently cited in this paper, as the completion of the original solution and, as we shall see at the end of the paper, shall be considered in the context of the same case study in order to review execution results.


To detect bots, a lot of detection approaches have been proposed at host or network level so far and both approaches have clear advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we propose EFFORT, a new host-network cooperated detection framework attempting to overcome shortcomings of both approaches while still keeping both advantages, i.e., effectiveness and efficiency. Based on intrinsic characteristics of bots, we propose a multi-module approach to correlate information from different host- and network-level aspects and design a multi-layered architecture to efficiently coordinate modules to perform heavy monitoring only when necessary. We have implemented our proposed system and evaluated on real-world benign and malicious programs running on several diverse real-life office and home machines for several days. The final results show that our system can detect all 15 real-world bots (e.g., Waledac, Storm) with low false positives (0.68%) and with minimal overhead. We believe EFFORT raises a higher bar and this host-network cooperated design represents a timely effort and a right direction in the malware battle.


A total of 45 tibial shaft fractures, all conservatively treated and with union delayed for more than 16 but less than 32 weeks were entered in a double-blind multi-centre trial. The fractures were selected for their liability to delayed union by the presence of moderate or severe displacement, angulation or comminution or a compound lesion with moderate or severe injury to skin and soft tissues. Treatment was by plaster immobilisation in all, with active electromagnetic stimulation units in 20 patients and dummy control units in 25 patients for 12 weeks. Radiographs were assessed blindly and independently by a radiologist and an orthopaedic surgeon. Statistical analysis showed the treatment groups to be comparable except in their age distribution, but age was not found to affect the outcome and the effect of treatment was consistent for each age group. The radiologist's assessment of the active group showed radiological union in five fractures, progress to union in five but no progress to union in 10. In the control group there was union in one fracture and progress towards union in one but no progress in 23. Using Fisher's exact test, the results were very significantly in favour of the active group (p = 0.002). The orthopaedic surgeon's assessment showed union in nine fractures and absence of union in 11 fractures in the active group. There was union in three fractures and absence of union in 22 fractures in the control group. These results were also significantly in favour of the active group (p = 0.02). It was concluded that pulsed electromagnetic fields significantly influence healing in tibial fractures with delayed union.


An immunological mechanism has been suggested for some of the case reports of the spontaneous remission and regression of cancer after an acute infection [1]. The basic suggestion made is that two or more acute inflammatory responses are occurring at about the same time in these cancer patients. Furthermore, it is suggested that two or more acute inflammatory responses occurring at about the same time may negate the inhibitory effect of systemic inflammation on innate immunity. It is suggested that the activation of innate immunity cells (NK cells, Dendritic cells, etc.) in these cancer patients results in the spontaneous remission of cancer.


Single-component, self-setting and injectable calcium phosphate cement (CPC) based on amorphization process of dicalcium phosphate dehydrate (DCPD) is proposed. After preparation of DCPD by wet chemistry, the material was dry milled in an Attritor high energy process (at 400 RPM) during 20 minutes. Experiments were also conducted using a regular ball milling process at 15 and 30h residence time. Amorphization of DCPD confirmed using FTIR, XRD and 31 P solid-states NMR (cross-polarization and decoupling). Upon hydration of amorphized DCPD powder with saline (0.55 ml/g), putty-like consistency produced. The paste hardened in 30 minutes at 37°C and reached a compressive strength of about 20 MPa. The final product was a low crystalline calcium deficient apatite, similar to the composition and structure of bone mineral.


The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes towards criminality among adolescent people. The main goal of this study is to find out, which risk factors are for criminal behavior among the youth. It's also to understand if gender and ethnicity of the adolescent people plays any part in their attitudes towards criminality and risk factors for criminal behavior. The study has been carried out using a quantitative method for the data collection. The theoretical approach in this study is achieved using system theory and deviance behavior. Data has been collected from adolescent people from high school, ranging from the age of 16 to 20. All of the participants in the study are teenagers whom are studying in high school in Sweden. The results show that there are many different risk factors, which affect the adolescent criminal behavior. One of the risk factors shown are parental control in knowing whom their children socialize with. Also the adolescents own attitudes towards crime and especially socialization with other criminal teens are contributing risk factors for the teens to commit criminal acts. Gender has been shown to have a significant role when it comes to young people's attitudes and involvement in criminal acts. Male participants show a larger scale of criminal participation compared to women, and they generally have a more positive attitude towards criminal behavior than women. Ethnicity has also been found to have a significant role in the study. Participants with other ethnic origin than Swedish respondents view themselves as a more crime prone group than Swedes, it is also a high proportion of respondents with Swedish background who believes this. This study has provided a greater understanding of how young people's attitudes towards crime looks like, and what aspects affect criminal behavior.


A detailed study of aeromagnetic anomalies across the Mahanadi Basin on the east coast of India has brought out a concealed basement depression, trending ENE-WSW, in the Rajnagar-Paradeep region. In this article, the aeromagnetic data pertaining to the Rajnagar-Paradeep region are analyzed quantitatively for their basement structure. The inferred basement depression, bounded on the north by a low-angle normal fault and in the south by a steep fault, characterizes the features of a typical half-graben structure. Furthermore, the southern boundary fault of the inferred depression correlates with an ENE-WSW-striking northward-dipping fault in the offshore region. The fact that the marine gravity anomaly also shows discrete lows over this region substantiates the aeromagnetic interpretation.


: Alkaline phosphatase of Escherichia coli, isolated by procedures which do not alter its intrinsic metal content, contains 1.3 +/- 0.3 g-atom(s) of magnesium and 4.0 +/- 0.2 g-atoms of zinc per mol of molecular weight 89 000 (Bosron et al., 1975). Substitution of Co(II) for Zn(II) and/or Mg(II) results in spectral properties which can be correlated with enzymatic activity. Magnesium does not activate the apoenzyme but augments the activity of 2-Co(II) enzyme almost 3-fold and that of the 4-Co(II) enzyme 1.3-fold. The magnesium-induced increase in activity of the 2-Co(II) enzyme is accompanied by spectral changes which are consistent with an alteration from largely octahedral-like to pentacoordinate-like coordination geometry. Magnesium increases the intensity of the absorption and magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) signals of the 4-Co(II) enzyme but without evidence of changes in coordination geometry. Cobalt when bound to the magnesium sites results in octahedral-like EPR spectra, unperturbed by phosphate which significantly affects cobalt at the pentacoordinate-like sites. In the absence of magnesium, 6 g-atoms of cobalt are required to maximize the spectral properties, but activity does not increase further after the addition of only 4 g-atoms of cobalt, while activity is optimal with only 2 g-atoms of cobalt. Hydrogen-tritium exchange measurements indicate that magnesium also stabilizes the dynamic structural properties of the apo- and 2-Co(II) enzymes but has little effect on the structure of 4-Co(II) phosphatase. The response to magnesium of both the spectral properties and enzymatic activities of cobalt alkaline phosphatase demonstrates that magnesium regulates cobalt (and zinc) binding and modulates the activity of the resultant products.


Members of the family Arcidae (phylum Mollusca, Class Bivalvia)
typically occur in habitats ranging from the intertidal zone on waveexposed
sandy shores to the marginally subtidal areas of sheltered mudflats
bordering mangroves. They also occur at much higher tidal levels within
the mangrove system (e. g. tambaks) and even extend into deeper subtidal
areas. This study confirms that Anadara granosa possesses remarkable
behavioural and physiological adaptations to deal with short-term
fluctuations in environmental conditions.
Both A. granosa and A. antiquata are gonochoristic species.
Planktotrophic post-fertilisation development is associated with the
production of large numbers of small (45-65µm) eggs during their
iteroparous life cycle. A few individuals were reported with both male and
female gametes present within the same individual follicles; these appear
to be sequential protaridric hermaphrodites with only a single sex change
during their life history. However, A. antiquata grows to a larger size prior
to the onset of reproduction. A. granosa exhibited major spawnings during
July-September 1992 and June-August 1993 with other spawnings in
February and March 1992 and 1993.
Allometric growth in both A. granosa and A. antiquata seems to be
associated with the development of a broad, light weight shell necessary
for life in relatively soft sediments. Two distinct ecomorphs of A. granosa,
one rounded and one elongated form, are described. Although the growth
bands within the shell of A. antiquata are difficult to interpret, those in A.
granosa are clearly defined and have been shown to have a tidal
periodicity which reflects the predominantly diurnal component of the
mixed semidiurnal tidal regime. These growth bands exhibit a semilunar
pattern in which narrower growth increments are produced during or a few
days after spring tides whilst wider increments are produced during neap
tides. The width of the growth increments was also shown to vary
seasonally with groups of narrow increments deposited during FebruaryMarch
and July-September when the clams were spawning, whilst the
widest increments were laid down during May-June. This pattern of
narrow and wide increments was used to estimate the age of individual
clams and the age composition of the population. Whereas the population
of A. granosa at Wedung consited of younger clams (1-4 years old) the
population at Tapak consisted mainly of older (6-12 years old) clams.


This chapter contrasts the process of urbanization in China and in India. It characterizes the differences in outcomes with regard to the provision of urban infrastructure and the development of informality in each country. The role of local autonomy and governance structures help to explain extraordinary differences in per capita levels of infrastructure and in levels of informality in urban real estate and labor markets. In China, incentives for local urban growth, combined with the practice of Hukou — household registration permit limiting access to the rapidly developing cities — has resulted in massive growth of a formally housed new urban middle class but with important social and environmental limitations. In India, on the other hand, urbanization, although slower, occurs outside of formal institutional processes without adequate financing and delivery of public goods and services, resulting in large-scale informality. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the challenges faced by China and India in managing their continued urban growth.


The paper uses the surface texture parameter RSm as a case study to examine the concepts of unambiguous definitions of measurands and the stability of these definitions. The paper begins by reviewing the current ISO definition of RSm, illustrating the ambiguities and lack of stability in the current ISO definition. The representational theory of measurement, which is the current dominant paradigm for measurement, will be briefly discussed. The representational theory of measurement will be used as a framework to incorporate a generic definition of stable measurand definitions. Here a measurand is considered mathematically stable if a 'small' difference in the value of a measurand implies a 'small' difference in the property it purports to characterize. This is a completely general and very powerful result. A new stable and unambiguous definition of RSm will be presented which uses these results.


This paper analyses how systematic stabilisation policy by monetary authorities may change individual price adjustment decision. The model is a stochastic dynamic menu cost model that results in (S,s)-price rules where the price is fixed inside a band. The resulting price rigidity causes output to fluctuate, and hence there is room for stabilisation policy. This paper shows that such a policy might actually be destabilising in the sense that the zone of fixed prices widens, leading to larger output fluctuations. In fact, output can be completely stabilised by a policy that amplifies shocks.


Vector Synthesis is a computational art project inspired by theories of media archaeology, by the history of computer and video art, and by the use of discarded and obsolete technologies such as the Cathode Ray Tube monitor. This text explores the military and techno-scientific legacies at the birth of modern computing, and charts attempts by artists of the subsequent two decades to decouple these tools from their destructive origins. Using this history as a basis, the author then describes a media archaeological, real time performance system using audio synthesis and vector graphics display techniques to investigate direct, synesthetic relationships between sound and image. Key to this system, realized in the Pure Data programming environment, is a didactic, open source approach which encourages reuse and modification by other artists within the experimental audiovisual arts community.


XR5944 and XR11576 are two potent DNA interactive agents, previously shown to be capable of stabilising topoisomerase I and II cleavable complexes in vitro. This thesis investigated the possibility that the mechanism(s) of action of these compounds may be unrelated to that of topo inhibition. These studies made use of a wide range of drug-sensitive and resistant cancer cell lines. It was demonstrated that both XR5944 and XR11576 retain potent cytotoxicity in cancer cell lines presenting with atypical drug resistance to single topoisomerase poisons. XR5944 showed less potency in cell lines expressing ABC-transporter proteins, but this may not be sufficient to compromise the activity of this potent anti-tumour agent in the clinical setting. The mechanism of XR11576 induced cytotoxicity was not affected by any of these transporters and from this and other observations it may possess a different mechanism of action from XR5944. An apoptotic response was observed in XR5944 and XR11576 treated cells. Factors such as Bax and t-Bid were expressed in increasing amounts in response to treatment and implicated the mitochondrial route of apoptosis in these compounds' mechanism of cell kill. Both XR5944 and XR11576 induced appreciable levels of DNA-protein crosslink formation and induced a p53 DNA damage response in drag treated cells. Differences in the timing of onset and extent of DNA damage and p53 induction were noticed between the two compounds. Overall, XR5944 was slower at causing these DNA interactive effects in line with the onset of cytotoxicity. However, this did not appear to pose any particular problems, such as scheduling of dosing, with regard to its in vivo activity, as shown by the work of others. These findings suggest that both XR5944 and XR11576 promote potent cytotoxicity in cancer cell lines showing multiple mechanisms of drug resistance and, therefore, should be of use in the clinic for the treatment of drug resistant tumours. The data presented in this thesis suggest that neither agent exerts its cytotoxicity via a topo directed effect. Furthermore, some of the data generated suggests that these two compounds may differ from each other in their mechanisms of action.


Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the status of the teaching profession has begun to erode in the Caucasus and Central Asia as evidenced in such indicators as a teacher shortage, the feminization of the profession, an over-aged teaching force, a low transition rate from teacher education graduation to professional service, and a decrease of enrollment in teacher education programs at colleges and universities. While all of these indicators have been well documented, this article considers another indicator which may signal the low status of the teaching profession – the comparatively low results of centralized university examinations among students entering pre-service teacher education programs compared to more competitive, high-demand higher education programs. Using data from centralized university admission tests in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan for the 2007–08 academic year, the article illustrates that it is the lowest-performing students who are typically entering pre-service teacher education institutions, thus further undermining the prestige of the teaching profession and the quality of education in the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia.


Air exposure (passivation) and subsequent resulfidation caused a substantial increase in the thiophene hydrodesulfurization activity of sulfided Co-Mo/A12O3 catalysts. Since no effect was observed for Mo/A12O3 and Co/A12O3 catalysts, the passivation effect must be related to the CoMoS structure. EXAFS, Mssbauer emission spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy measurements showed that the passivation effect is neither related to a change in the MoS2 dispersion, nor to a change in number and nature of the Co sites. A Co-Mo/TiO2, a Co-Mo/C, and a Co-Mo/A13O3 catalyst, which was prepared with the aid of nitrilotriacetic acid, hardly showed an increase in the catalytic activity after passivation. Because of this, and since the Mo-S coordination number for a Co-Mo/Al2O3 catalyst is increased by passivation, it is concluded that the activity increase originates from a decrease in Mo-support interactions. These interactions are broken when Co atoms migrate to MoOAl bonds during a passivation and resulfidation treatment and assist in the sulfidation of these bonds. Removal of steric hindrance is held responsible for the activity increase. The effect of passivation on the catalytic activity decreased with increasing Co/Mo ratio, probably because at high Co loadings most MoOAl bonds are already sulfided in the first sulfidation step. A maximum activity increase was obtained at a passivation temperature of 340 K. At lower temperatures the oxidation and migration of Co is too slow, whereas at higher temperatures new MoOAl bonds are formed in the passivation treatment. Ni-Mo/Al2O3 catalysts showed the same behavior as Co-Mo/Al2O3 catalysts.


This study employed Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD solution to configure the entire shape of the nozzle. The problems arising from the initial geometrical shape obtained using one-dimensional approach were highlighted. Then with a two-dimensional approach and coded FORTRAN programs, the convergent portion was handled with time matching CFD while the divergent portion was handled with space matching CFD. A post-processing results analysis shows that the results are in agreement with that obtained with the analytical approach. This research has demonstrated significant and tangible benefits of the use of CFD numerical experimentation to optimize the shape of the nozzle. These benefits are not solely limited to performance enhancements, but solution reliability and algorithm development.


Interest in vacuum ultraviolet optical coatings has increased in recent years, due to applications in space research, laser fusion, photochemistry, and analytical chemistry. A number of new high-efficiency coatings have been developed to satisfy the requirements of these applications. Materials limitations, more severe than those in the visible and IR, have limited broadband reflectors to 80-85% average reflectivity in the 1200-2000Å region. A new technology of multilayer dielectric coatings for the vacuum UV, beginning in 1973, has led to laser reflectors with reflectances as high as 95% at wavelengths as short as 1460A. Dichroic coatings with maximum reflectance in one spectral region, and high trans-mission in another, were developed for applications in UV pumping of longer-wavelength lasers, Raman shifting of UV laser lines, and generation of UV harmonics. Very narrowband interference filters, multi-layer dichroic reflective filters, and neutral density filters have been fabricated for rocket spectroscopy applications, as have high-efficiency UV AR coatings for lenses and laser optics. A summary of the current commercial UV coating technology and specific applications is presented,with graphs of reflectance and transmission versus wavelength. A description of measurement equipment and methods is given.


We introduce a mathematical framework to the analysis, design and optimization of Network-Coded Cooperative Diversity (NCCD) protocols. The analysis is applicable to relay-aided protocols based on the error propagation model, which rely on appropriately designed diversity combining demodulators at the destination. Wireless networks with an arbitrary number of sources and relays are considered. Arbitrary multilevel modulations and network codes constructed over a non-binary Galois Field (GF) are analyzed. NCCD protocols based on repetition-based cooperation are investigated. The mathematical analysis shows that NCCD protocols are capable of achieving full-diversity if the GF size is sufficiently large and the network code satisfies the Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) property.


We demonstrated the production of tin oxide (SnO2) one-dimensional (1D) nanostructures on silver (Ag)-coated substrates by the thermal evaporation of Sn powders. Scanning electron microscopy revealed that the product consisted of 1D nanomaterials with average diameters or widths in the range of 50-1300 nm. X-ray diffraction and high resolution electron microscopy coincidentally indicated that the nanostructures were mainly single-crystalline rutile structure of SnO2. The PL measurement with the Gaussian fitting showed visible light emission bands centered at 579 nm and 624 nm.


Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer in the world. The accessibility of the Cancer Genome Atlas  (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus data allows the prognostic evaluation of CRC. Fibroblasts play a key role in the development and progression of tumors while fibroblast‐related risk signature in CRC patients has  rarely  been mentioned.  In  this  study,  TCGA  data was  classified  into  high‐fibroblast  and  low‐fibroblast groups according  to  the median of  fibroblast  content. Among 3845 differentially expressed genes between two groups, 14 prognostic genes commonly expressed  in GSE39582 and TCGA were  identified by LASSO‐COX analysis. Then we established a  fibroblast‐related risk signature  in TCGA training group and validated  in the GSE39582 testing group. The risk score was significantly associated with the overall survival (OS), and the poor prognosis  of  patients  in  high‐risk  group  might  relate  to  the  immune  cell  infiltration  in  the  tumor microenvironment, epithelial‐mesenchymal transition, and extracellular matrix related processes. Overall, we proved that the fibroblast‐related signature could predict the prognosis of patients which might shed light on the treatment of CRC.


Indonesia is facing a water crisis in terms of the scarcity and quality of its water resources. Considering this water-constrained future, it is important that several parties, including companies in Indonesia as one of the significant actors, pay attention to the pristine management and reporting of this scarce resource. This study evaluates the reporting and disclosure requirements of water of Indonesian listed companies in 2014 - 2016. Content analysis was used as the research method to analyse the water disclosure and to evaluate the adequacy of the disclosure against the global disclosure requirement from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G4. The findings of the study show that most of the companies have illustrated the commitment toward water stewardship by reporting on water-related aspects. However, when compared to the global standard, the level of disclosure is still low, which might reflect the lack of demand from stakeholders or the low necessity to seek legitimacy from water reporting. This also implies future opportunities for companies to better perform water management and present a more complete water disclosure for stakeholders.


The purpose of the current investigation was to examine relationships between path changes performed by English FA Premier League soccer players, anthropometric variables and injuries reported. The study involved 25 players for whom typical path change performances were derived from at least six 90 minute matches. The players performed 39.9+13.2 sharp path changes to the side of the non-dominant leg which was significantly greater than the 35.4+12.7 sharp path changes made to the side of the dominant leg (p < .001). There was a negative association between height and the number of each type of path change (r < -.373) as well as a negative association between body mass and the number of each type of path change (r < -.287). There were no significant differences between the 10 players who missed at least one match through injury during the 2007-08 season and the 15 who did not for the frequency of any type of path change. Therefore, understanding the frequency of path changes alone is not sufficient to assess injury risk and it may also be necessary to examine the technique used when making path changes.


Abstract. The production of atmospheric organic nitrates (RONO2) has a large impact on air quality and climate due to their contribution to secondary organic aerosol and influence on tropospheric ozone concentrations. Since organic nitrates control the fate of gas phase NOx (NO + NO2), a byproduct of anthropogenic combustion processes, their atmospheric production and reactivity is of great interest. While the atmospheric reactivity of many relevant organic nitrates is still uncertain, one significant reactive pathway, condensed phase hydrolysis, has recently been identified as a potential sink for organic nitrate species. The partitioning of gas phase organic nitrates to aerosol particles and subsequent hydrolysis likely removes the oxidized nitrogen from further atmospheric processing, due to large organic nitrate uptake to aerosols and proposed hydrolysis lifetimes, which may impact long-range transport of NOx, a tropospheric ozone precursor. Despite the atmospheric importance, the hydrolysis rates and reaction mechanisms for atmospherically derived organic nitrates are almost completely unknown, including those derived from α-pinene, a biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) that is one of the most significant precursors to biogenic secondary organic aerosol (BSOA). To better understand the chemistry that governs the fate of particle phase organic nitrates, the hydrolysis mechanism and rate constants were elucidated for several organic nitrates, including an α-pinene-derived organic nitrate (APN). A positive trend in hydrolysis rate constants was observed with increasing solution acidity for all organic nitrates studied, with the tertiary APN lifetime ranging from 8.3 min at acidic pH (0.25) to 8.8 h at neutral pH (6.9). Since ambient fine aerosol pH values are observed to be acidic, the reported lifetimes, which are much shorter than that of atmospheric fine aerosol, provide important insight into the fate of particle phase organic nitrates. Along with rate constant data, product identification confirms that a unimolecular specific acid-catalyzed mechanism is responsible for organic nitrate hydrolysis under acidic conditions. The free energies and enthalpies of the isobutyl nitrate hydrolysis intermediates and products were calculated using a hybrid density functional (ωB97X-V) to support the proposed mechanisms. These findings provide valuable information regarding the organic nitrate hydrolysis mechanism and its contribution to the fate of atmospheric NOx, aerosol phase processing, and BSOA composition.


BACKGROUND: Ignorance and incorrect beliefs can lead to negligence in prevention, control measures and in seeking appropriate treatment. Involvement of individuals and communities is an important component of Onchocerciasis control activities. To attain community participation and design socially acceptable control strategies, researchers must be familiar with people's knowledge, beliefs and behavior in relation to Onchocerciasis. Such information is scanty as very few studies have been carried out to understand these issues. The objective of this study was to investigate people's knowledge and beliefs in relation to the cause and prevention of onchocerciasis in rural areas of Southwest Ethiopia. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted in February 2008 among 450 study participants selected by multistage probability sampling. Data were collected using a pre-tested interviewer administered structured questionnaire which then were analyzed using SPSS for windows version 11.5. RESULTS: All the 450 respondents had heard about onchocerciasis. A range of causes for onchocerciasis were identified. Overall, 248 (55.3%) of respondents had at least one misconception about the cause of onchocerciasis. There is a range of misconceptions about modes of transmission including contact with infected person, airborne, sharing cloths and sexual. Only 10% knew that black fly breeding in fast flowing rivers and streams as a cause for the transmission. Overall 397(88.2%) said that onchocerciasis is preventable, out of which 376 (94.7%) indicated use of drug as the means of preventing onchocerciasis. Nearly three-forth of respondents 334 (74.3%) rated the severity of onchocerciasis as high. Nearly half (48%) rated the magnitude of onchocerciasis in their village as high, and 195 (43.3%) of them stated that they are highly at risk . CONCLUSIONS: While Onchocerciasis is endemic in the study area, large proportion of the community held misconceptions about its causation, transmission, prevention and risk. Therefore, community interventions for onchocerciasis need to include behaviour change communications aimed at dispelling misconceptions and increasing risk perception.


Public debts capitalize into property prices. Therefore, property owners tend to favor tax over debt financing for government spending. In contrast, tenants do not suffer from debt capitalization. Thus, they tend to favor debt over tax financing. Our model of the resulting democratic fight between property owners and tenants over public debts and taxes predicts that the property ownership rate in a jurisdiction negatively effects the debt level. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis by analyzing a cross-section of the 171 communities in the Swiss Canton of Zurich in the year 2000.


Depending on environmental conditions, the aquatic angiosperm Callitriche heterophylia can develop two different leaf types with distinctive morphological characteristics. Cellular turgor pressure seems to act as the biophysical mechanism responsible for the selection of leaf form in control conditions designed to mimic the natural habitat of this plant. The experimental induction of leaf form involves the ability of various treatments to mediate cell expansion through their effects on turgor pressure or wall extensibility.


The level of bacterial activity is only poorly defined during asymptomatic Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infection. The objective was to study the capacity of a new biomarker, the expression of the T cell maturation marker CD27 on MTB-specific CD4 T cells, to identify active tuberculosis (TB) disease in subjects from a MTB and HIV endemic region. The frequency and CD27 expression of circulating MTB-specific CD4 T cells was determined in 96 study participants after stimulation with purified protein derivative (PPD) using intracellular cytokine staining for IFNgamma (IFNγ). Subjects were then stratified by their TB and HIV status. Within PPD responders, a CD27− phenotype was associated with active TB in HIV− (p = 0.0003) and HIV+ (p = 0.057) subjects, respectively. In addition, loss of CD27 expression preceded development of active TB in one HIV seroconverter. Interestingly, in contrast to HIV− subjects, MTB-specific CD4 T cell populations from HIV+ TB-asymptomatic subjects were often dominated by CD27− cells. These data indicate that down-regulation of CD27 on MTB-specific CD4 T cell could be used as a biomarker of active TB, potentially preceding clinical TB disease. Furthermore, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that late, chronic HIV infection is frequently associated with increased mycobacterial activity in vivo. The analysis of T cell maturation and activation markers might thus be a useful tool to monitor TB disease progression.


We study noise and recording properties of nonoriented barium-ferrite particulate media using micromagnetic modeling. The packing and orientation distribution of the barium ferrite particles are reproduced very well with our packing algorithm. The distribution of switching fields is determined from experimental hysteresis loops. Using these parameters, we perform recording simulations of periodic waveforms written at various frequencies and extract broad-band signal-to-noise ratio (BB-SNR). Comparison to experimental measurements shows very similar signal and noise characteristics, with however a 6 dB offset in BB-SNR values. Other (e.g., mechanical) noise sources would need to be included in the simulations to account for the difference. Nevertheless, the simulations prove very useful to understand and quantify how particle and media parameters contribute to the signal-to-noise ratio. For the present nonoriented particulate medium, we verify that the particle volume distribution affects the noise power according to the existing analytical expression for particulate noise. The particle anisotropy distribution is found to significantly affect the signal roll-off. The related variation in BB-SNR is found to be in good quantitative agreement with experiments. The effects of other parameters on BB-SNR, such as dipolar coupling, medium thickness, and average head-medium spacing, are also presented. An analytical slope model is proposed for nonoriented media that reproduces the simulations and experimental data very well.


In this study, screening of 15 Phaseolus vulgaris cultivars and genotypes (Zulbiye, Kinali, Perla, Kwintus, Ozayse, Tokat Sirik, Musica, Şelale, Nadide, Gina, Serra, Karabag, Funda, and Lepus) and 1 Pisum sativum cultivar (Araka) for host suitability to 4 root-lesion nematodes, Pratylenchus thornei, P. crenatus, P. neglectus, and P. penetrans, was carried out in 2010 and 2011 under controlled conditions. The experiment was set up in a completely randomized block design with 7 replicates. Approximately 1000 adults + juveniles + eggs of root-lesion nematodes in 10 mL of distilled water were inoculated around the base of each bean seedling. The experiments were harvested after a 10-week duration. Nematodes were extracted from soil and roots by modified Baermann funnel technique and counted under a light microscope. Common bean cultivars and genotypes showed differences in host suitability in the 4 root-lesion nematodes. Pratylenchus penetrans reproduced on Zulbiye, Kinali, Nadide, Gold Nectar, Karabag, and Funda. Additionally, P. penetrans had a reproduction index value of slightly higher than 1 on Tokat Sirik, Şelale, and Serra. However, Gina, Musica, Perla, Kwintus, and Ozayse showed poor host reaction to P. penetrans, and P. penetrans did not develop on pea cultivar Araka. Pratylenchus thornei multiplied on Zulbiye, Şelale, Kinali, Lepus, Perla, Nadide, and Araka. The value of the reproduction index was in the range of 1.8-3.1, and there were no significant statistical differences among these cultivars and genotypes. Ozayse, Tokat Sirik, Gold Nectar, Kwintus, Serra, Gina, Funda, and Musica significantly reduced P. thornei populations (P < 0.05). Reproduction indices of P. neglectus and P. crenatus were extremely low in all bean cultivars.


In this work, we develop a load testing architecture for networked virtual environment to reduce the testing time and ensure the stability of the server for distributed applications. It explicitly secures the stability of the server for networked virtual environment and at the same time, it elaborately generates actual loads for testing the performance of the server. Our agent based load testing architecture provides variety of interactions of virtual entities in the virtual worlds to perform realistic simulations. Simulation results show that our proposed architecture ensures the stability and capacity of the servers


The increased non-linear loads in today's typical home are a growing concern for utility companies. This situation might be worsened by the harmonic resonance introduced by the installation of capacitor banks in the distribution network. To mitigate the harmonic distortions, passive or active filters are typically used. However, with the increasing implementation of distributed generation (DG) in residential areas, using DG systems to improve the power quality is becoming a promising idea, particularly because many DG systems, such as photovoltaic (PV), wind and fuel cells, have DG-grid interfacing converters. In this paper, the potential for using photovoltaic (PV) interfacing inverters to compensate the residential system harmonics is explored. A system model including the residential load and DG is first developed. An in-depth analysis and comparison of different compensation schemes based on the virtual harmonic damping impedance concept are then carried out. The effects of the capacitor banks in the system are also studied. The effectiveness of the harmonic compensation strategies under different conditions is verified through analysis and simulations.


The paper aims at presenting a short analytical expose of a phenomenon of a reprimand as a matter of the legal process and, more specifically, the specific – linguistic – way of punishing. The main underlying issue raised in the analysis is the question that could we still 'do sanctions with words' in law and, in particular, the penal one after the critique of the inherence of psychological violence, paternalism and even primitivism in this approach to the process of punishing? Skipping the vast historical background, the research proceeds with more theoretical and current relevant analysis of the linguistic-performativityrich and persisting 'reprimandish' nature of law. The juxtaposition of this nature, with the contemporary tendencies of the insisted reforms in the fields of crime control and the system of punishments allow presenting with the perspective/future of a reprimand as the part of a broader linguistic and educational process/project of changing a criminal and whole society. The research concludes with the underlying idea that the transformation of the system of law and, especially, the field of punishments from affecting primarily the body, to affecting primarily the mind, requires reconsideration, and in such instances as that of a reprimand, rehabilitation of the overall linguistic performativity of law and its socio-holistic educational role.


Cardamom seeds are widely used for flavouring purposes in food and as carminative. Little information has been reported on their pharmacological and toxicological properties or, for their volatile oil which constitutes about 5% of the seed's total weight. A comparative study of the anti-inflammatory activity of the oil extracted from commercial Elettaria cardamomum seeds, in doses of 175 and 280 microliters/kg and indomethacin in a dose of 30 mg/kg against acute carrageenan-induced planter oedema in male albino rats was performed, which proved to be marked. Moreover, investigation of the analgesic activity using p-benzoquinone as a chemical stimulus proved that a dose of 233 microliters/kg of the oil produced 50% protection against the writhing (stretching syndrome) induced by intraperitoneal administration of a 0.02% solution of p-benzoquinone in mice. In addition the antispasmodic activity was determined on a rabbit intestine preparation using acetylcholine as agonist, the results proving that cardamom oil exerts its antispasmodic action through muscarinic receptor blockage.


We demonstrate a direct diode-pumped Kerr Lens Modelocked Ti:sapphire laser producing 13 fs pulses with 1.85 nJ energy at 78 MHz (145 mW) using a single laser diode pump. We also present a similar laser using three spectrally combined diodes, generating >300 mW output power with >50 nm bandwidth. We discuss the use of far-from TEM00 pump laser sources, and their effect on the Kerr lens modelocking process.