Inhibitors of IMP dehydrogenase, such as mycophenolic acid (MPA) and mizoribine, which deplete cellular GTP, are used clinically as immunosuppressive drugs. The prolonged effect of such agents on insulin-secreting beta-cells (HIT-T15 and INS-1) was investigated. Both MPA and mizoribine inhibited mitogenesis, as reflected by [3H]thymidine incorporation. Cell number, DNA and protein contents, and cell (metabolic) viability were decreased by about 30%, 60%, and 80% after treatment of HIT cells with clinically relevant concentrations (e.g. 1 microg/ml) of MPA for 1, 2, and 4 days, respectively. Mizoribine (48 h) similarly induced the death of HIT cells. INS-1 cells also were damaged by prolonged MPA treatment. MPA-treated HIT cells displayed a strong and localized staining with a DNA-binding dye (propidium iodide), suggesting condensation and fragmentation of DNA, which were confirmed by detection of DNA laddering in multiples of about 180 bp. DNA fragmentation was observed after 24-h MPA treatment and was dose dependent (29%, 49%, and 70% of cells were affected after 48-h exposure to 1, 3, and 10 microg/ml MPA, respectively). Examination of MPA-treated cells by electron microscopy revealed typical signs of apoptosis: condensed and marginated chromatin, apoptotic bodies, cytosolic vacuolization, and loss of microvilli. MPA-induced cell death was almost totally prevented by supplementation with guanosine, but not with adenosine or deoxyguanosine, indicating a specific effect of GTP depletion. An inhibitor of protein isoprenylation (lovastatin, 10-100 microM for 2-3 days) induced cell death and DNA degradation similar to those induced by sustained GTP depletion, suggesting a mediatory role of posttranslationally modified GTP-binding proteins. Indeed, impeding the function of G proteins of the Rho family (via glucosylation using Clostridium difficile toxin B), although not itself inducing apoptosis, potentiated cell death induced by MPA or lovastatin. These findings indicate that prolonged depletion of GTP induces beta-cell death compatible with apoptosis; this probably involves a direct impairment of GTP-dependent RNA-primed DNA synthesis, but also appears to be modulated by small GTP-binding proteins. Treatment of intact adult rat islets (the beta-cells of which replicate slowly) induced a modest, but definite, death by apoptosis over 1- to 3-day periods. Thus, more prolonged use of the new generation of immunosuppressive agents exemplified by MPA might have deleterious effects on the survival of islet or pancreas grafts.


This paper presents a minimal model of the functioning of program verification and property checking tools based on (i) the encoding of loops as non-iterating programs, either conservatively, making use of invariants and assume/assert commands, or in a bounded way; and (ii) the use of an intermediate single-assignment (SA) form. The model captures the basic workflow of tools like Boogie, Why3, or CBMC, building on a clear distinction between operational and axiomatic semantics. This allows us to consider separately the soundness of program annotation, loop encoding, translation into SA form, and VC generation, as well as appropriate notions of completeness for each of these processes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first formalization of a bounded model checking of software technique, including soundness and completeness proofs using Hoare logic; we also give the first completeness proof of a deductive verification technique based on a conservative encoding of invariant-annotated loops with assume/assert in SA form, as well as the first soundness proof based on a program logic.


Background: Falls are a significant incident among older adults affecting one in every three individuals aged 65 and over. Fall risk increases with age and other factors, namely instability. Recent studies on the use of fall detection devices in the Malaysian community are scarce, despite the necessity to use them. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the association between the prevalence of falls with instability. This study also presents a survey that explores older adults' perceptions and expectations toward fall detection devices. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted involving 336 community-dwelling older adults aged 50 years and older; based on randomly selected participants. Data were analyzed using quantitative descriptive analysis. Chi-square test was conducted to investigate the associations between self-reported falls with instability, demographic and walking characteristics. Additionally, older adults' perceptions and expectations concerning the use of fall detection devices in their daily lives were explored. Results: The prevalence of falls was 28.9%, where one-quarter of older adults fell at least once in the past 6 months. Participants aged 70 years and older have a higher fall percentage than other groups. The prevalence of falls was significantly associated with instability, age, and walking characteristics. Around 70% of the participants reported having instability issues, of which over half of them fell at least once within 6 months. Almost 65% of the participants have a definite interest in using a fall detection device. Survey results revealed that the most expected features for a fall detection device include: user-friendly, followed by affordably priced, and accurate. Conclusions: The prevalence of falls in community-dwelling older adults is significantly associated with instability. Positive perceptions and informative expectations will be used to develop an enhanced fall detection incorporating balance monitoring system. Our findings demonstrate the need to extend the fall detection device features aiming for fall prevention intervention.


Online engagement in policy deliberation is one of the more complex aspects of open government. Previous research on human facilitation of policy deliberation has focused primarily on the citizens who need facilitation. In this paper we unpack the facilitation practices from the perspective of the moderator. We present an interview study of facilitators in RegulationRoom – an online policy deliberation platform. Our findings reveal that facilitators focus primarily on two broad activities: managing the stream of comments and interacting with comments and commenters – both aimed at obtaining high quality public input into the particular policymaking process. Managing the immediate goals of online policy deliberations, however, might overshadow long-term goals pf public deliberation, i.e. helping individuals develop participatory literacy beyond a single policy engagement. Our contribution is twofold: we unpack the practice of human facilitation in online policy deliberation, and suggest both design and process implications for sustainable growth of civic engagement environments beyond the individual case we analyze.


The usefulness of acupuncture (AP) as a complementary and/or alternative therapy in animals is well established but more research is needed on its clinical efficacy relative to conventional therapy, and on the underlying mechanisms of the effects of AP. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI), an important tool in monitoring cardiovascular diseases, provides a reliable method to monitor the effects of AP on the cardiovascular system. This controlled experiment monitored the effect electro-acupuncture (EA) at bilateral acupoint Neiguan (PC6) on recovery time after ketamine/xylazine cocktail anesthesia in healthy cats. The CMRI data established the basic feline cardiac function index (CFI), including cardiac output and major vessel velocity. To evaluate the effect of EA on the functions of the autonomic nervous and cardiovascular systems, heart rate, respiration rate, electrocardiogram and pulse rate were also measured. Ketamine/xylazine cocktail anesthesia caused a transient hypertension in the cats; EA inhibited this anesthetic-induced hypertension and shortened the post-anesthesia recovery time. Our data support existing knowledge on the cardiovascular benefits of EA at PC6, and also provide strong evidence for the combination of anesthesia and EA to shorten post-anesthesia recovery time and counter the negative effects of anesthetics on cardiac physiology.


The number of decapod species associated with the coral Pocillopora damicornis is compared between two regions on the Pacific coast of Panama which are of the same geologic age but differ in environmental characteristics. The relationship between number of species and coral head size does not differ between the two regions but species composition among coral heads is more variable in the fluctuating environment. Thus there are more species (55 compared to 37) associated with corals in the fluctuating environment than in the constant environment. These data impugn the concept that environmental constancy increases species richness. They support the hypothesis that species equilibrium within habitats is maintained by measurable ecological factors—in this case, the effects of a natural physical disturbance.


This thesis in divided into two parts. Part-A describes the isolation and structural studies of three novel flavones from inula grantioides Boiss. In addition, eight other known compounds have also been isolated for the first time from this plant, they are; a sesquiterpene, two known flavones, three triterpenes, a sterol and its glycoside.

w Compounds

1. Grantiodin Phytochemistry, 30 1040 (1991). 2.Nrantionin Z. Natruforsch 46b, 950-954 (1991). 3.Grantiodinin Z. Natruforsch 46b, 950-954 (1991). II.Known compounds unreported from Inula grantioides Pluchidione Z. Natruforsch 46b, 950-954 (1991). 2.5,7-dihydroxy-6,4-dimethoxyflavone 3.5-hydroxy,6,7,4-trimethoxyflavone (manuscript under preparation) Lupeol taraxasterol taraxasterol acetate B-Sitosterol (Phytochemistry, 30, 1040 (1991). Sitosteryl B-D-glucoside (manscript under preparation)

Part B
of this thesis deals with the isolation and structure elucidation of two new spermidine alkaloids from Capparis deciduas (Forssk.) Edgew. Spermidine alkaloids are macrocyclic alkaloids containing, hydroxylated, methoxylated, trains cinnamic acid residues which are linked to each other through oxygen bridge and to spermidine, through amide bonds. These type of compounds may exist in two region isomeric forms with respect to spermidine moiety. Their structure can only be confirmed by X-rays crystallography or through mass spectral fragmentation pattern.

1. New alkaloids

1. Isocodonocarpine Phytochemistry, 28 2493 (1989) 14-N-acetyl isocodonocarpine (manuscript under preparation).


Recently, the sector of the population older than 60 years of age is growing. The assistance for the elderly at their home allows to increase their autonomy and independence while they are living alone. Several fields have emerged to improve the quality of life of the elderly, and to develop environments that offer help, support and assistance during the realization of their daily activities. The identification of activities is a key piece for the provision of assistance to seniors who live alone. This work is focused on the activity recognition of the elderly who live independently at home. Here is presented OPAIEH, an ontology-based platform for activity identification of the elderly at home. The platform includes the ontological model, which allows a new activity characterization. Also, the platform includes a sensors network, a client device, and web server to perform the recognition of different activities that the elderly do inside their home. Furthermore, the platform generates a set of graphs that shows different statistics and behaviours of the users. In order toper form an experimental test on OPAIEH, a case study was developed as a proof of concept about the use of ontologies for the activity recognition task. The results encourages us to continue our work.


The present paper explores middle‐class fathers' educational work by studying how they and their partners are involved in their children's education at home, in school, and how they investigate school options and make decisions about educational issues. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of 30 dual‐earner couples in the Greater Los Angeles area, this article analyses how fathers position themselves in relation to discourses on parental involvement in education. In order to demonstrate the variety of ways fathers are involved three case studies are presented. It is illustrated how the men, by drawing on a discourse on involved fatherhood, position themselves in line with an ideal of parental involvement in education. Fathers who are doing less educational work than their spouses offer accounts for not taking a greater educational responsibility by drawing on a breadwinner discourse or by depicting mothers as gatekeepers of father involvement.


It is argued that the success of real-time intelligent computing hinges on reconciling the unpredictability and vigor of the inference process with the real-time requirement that control system responses must be both appropriate and timely. The use of progressive reasoning, which provides a means of relaxing the demands made on the inference process without violating real-time constraints, is considered. It is a technique that successively refines a solution while making available intermediate, albeit suboptimal, solutions. Factors that influence the successful use of progressive reasoning are examined. A small case study involving autonomous vehicle collision detection and avoidance is presented to illustrate the use of progressive reasoning in a typical automation environment.<<ETX>>


Objective The study was designed to describe the hospital incidences and annual hospitalization rates for venous thromboembolic disease by age and sex in France and the United States on the closest possible methodological bases. Methods French statistics are from the PMSI MCO (Programme de médicalisation des système d'information de médecine, chirurgie et obstétrique (French national hospital discharge register)) national database. These are compiled for each calendar year by collating résumé de sortie anonymisé (RSA, anonymous discharge summary) files forwarded and validated by health establishments with admissions in medicine, surgery, obstetrics, and odontology. They are compared to the data issued from the US National Hospital Discharge Survey which is equivalent to the PMSI in France and uses the International Classification of Diseases-9 for encoding the data. These data were published in the Morbidity, Mortality Weekly Report of the Centre for Disease Control. Results In the US, 547,996 hospital stays involve venous thromboembolic diseases, 348,558 deep venous thrombosis (DVT), and 277,549 pulmonary embolism (PE). Of these 78,511, or 14%, include a diagnosis of both DVT and PE. The hospital incidence of venous thromboembolic disease is 1.4%, DVT 0.9%, and PE 0.7%. In France, of the 26,658,228 annual hospital stays, 273,931 include venous thromboembolic disease, 179,286 DVT, and 139,345 PE while 44,700, i.e. 16.3%, include both DVT and PE. The hospital incidence of venous thromboembolic disease is thus 1.0%, DVT 0.6%, and PE 0.5%. The overall annual hospitalization rates for venous thromboembolic disease, DVT, and PE are respectively 274, 179, and 139 per 100,000 inhabitants in France and 239, 146, and 121 per 100,000 inhabitants in the US. Conclusion Venous thromboembolic diseases occur in France and the US in 1% of all hospital stays and are responsible for an annual hospitalization rate that exceeds 200 per 100,000. The scale of these annual incidences should prompt us to question the quality of prevention put in place and/or its efficacy.


SUMMARY This study investigated the eventual protective effects of L-carnitine against renal and liver damage caused by high doses of diclofenac sodium in mice. A pilot study, designed to determine the highest toxic dose of diclofenac, was conducted on 32 Swiss Albino adult mice randomly divided into 4 equal groups according to the drug dose: 0 (control), 2.5 (low), 5 (moderate) and 10 mg/kg/day (high dose) for 5 days by the subcutaneous route. Serum biochemical parameters (BUN and creatinine concentrations and AST, ALT and ALP activities) were measured as well as GSH and MDA contents in liver and in kidney at the end of the treatment. The 2 highest dosages of diclofenac have induced significant increases of the serum markers and MDA accumulation in tissues whereas the kidney and liver GSH contents were depressed in parallel. Besides, a strong dose-effect relationship was evidenced. In the second experimental step, 4 groups of 8 mice received subcutaneous injections for 5 days of saline solution (NaCl, 20 mL/g body weight/day) (group I), of L carnitine (500 mg/kg/day) (group II), of diclofenac sodium (10 mg/kg/day) (group III) and of diclofenac (10 mg/kg/day) plus L carnitine (500 mg/kg/day 3 days before and 2 days during the diclofenac treatment) (group IV) respectively. The diclofenac treatment alone or in combination with L carnitine induced liver and kidney damage as attested by significant increases of the serum markers and by tissue MDA accumulation. Nevertheless, these variations were significantly reduced in co-treated mice. Whereas the GSH pools in liver and kidney were markedly depressed in the group III, they were significantly enhanced in mice treated with L carnitine alone, and remained unaffected in co-treated mice (group IV) compared to the controls. These results demonstrated that the diclofenac toxicity is due to lipid peroxidation and impairment of the antioxidant systems in liver and kidney and that a co-treatment with L carnitine can partially alleviate it by restoring antioxidant capacity.


SIR,-Dr. Raymond Greene and Dr. Katharina Dalton (Journal, May 9, p. 1007) suggest that water retention may be the link between the menstrual period and attacks of migraine, bronchospasm, nasal congestion, "rheumatic" pains, and various dermatoses. Two dermatoses which commonly flare up at period time are rosacea and neurodermatitis. When this list is reviewed it will be seen that all the disorders named belong to the "stress disorder" group, and their association with emotional tension is well established. Thus it may be that the period sets off attacks of these disorders only when it provokes conflict and emo'tional excitation. It is a familiar clinical observation that a woman who has migraine attacks each month will lose them when her conflicts over sex feeling and the female role in life are dealt with by psychotherapy. The same is true of vasomotor rhinitis, tension pain (Hench's "psychogenic rheumatism"), and the stress disorders of the skin. Water retention, of itself, could not be the whole explanation of these cyclic reactions. It is, perhaps, one of the mechanisms through whose agency mental tension effects physical changes.-I am, etc.,


An error polynomial is defined, the coefficients of which indicate the difference at any instant between a system and a model of lower order approximating the system. It is shown how Markov parameters and time series proportionals of the model can be matched with those of the system by setting error polynomial coefficients to zero. Also discussed is the way in which the error between system and model can be considered as being a filtered form of an error input function specified by means of model parameter selection.


For a long time, colicin M was known for killing susceptible Escherichia coli cells by interfering with cell wall peptidoglycan biosynthesis, but its precise mode of action was only recently elucidated: this bacterial toxin was demonstrated to be an enzyme that catalyzes the specific degradation of peptidoglycan lipid intermediate II, thereby provoking the arrest of peptidoglycan synthesis and cell lysis. The discovery of this activity renewed the interest in this colicin and opened the way for biochemical and structural analyses of this new class of enzyme (phosphoesterase). The identification of a few orthologs produced by pathogenic strains of Pseudomonas further enlarged the field of investigation. The present article aims at reviewing recently acquired knowledge on the biology of this small family of bacteriocins.


The purpose of this study was to determine whether varying levels of computer anxiety have an effect on computer-based testing of United States Air Force technical training students. The first chapter presents an overview of computer-based testing, defines key terms, and identifies questions addressed in the research. The rationale for conducting this study was that little research had been done in this area.
The second chapter contains a review of the pertinent literature related to computer-based testing, computer anxiety, test reliability, validity, and gender differences in computer use. Due to the lack understanding concerning any effects of computer anxiety on computer-based testing, this has been a worthwhile topic to explore, and it makes a significant contribution to the training field.
The third chapter describes the qualitative research methodology used to conduct the study. The primary methodology was an analysis of variance comparison for groups of individuals who displayed high or low computer anxiety to their respective mean computer-based or paper-based aircraft maintenance knowledge testing scores. The research population consisted of United States Air Force aircraft maintenance craftsmen students attending training at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas.
The fourth chapter details the findings of the study. The findings indicate that there was no significant difference between the groups of students rated with high computer anxiety and low computer anxiety while testing with computers. Additionally, no significant differences were detected while testing alternative hypotheses covering differences between groups of students rated with high computer anxiety and low computer anxiety testing by traditional paper-and pencil methods. Finally, a reference section identifying the literature used in the preparation of this dissertation is also included.


A Site & Incitement Symposium panel discussion on Sense of Place in Artist Books, with Sarah Bodman, a Research Fellow for Artists Books, and Masters Program Leader for Multidisciplinary Printmaking, at Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, Department of Art & Design; Betty Bright, independent scholar and curator; Jeff Rathermel, Artist and Executive Director of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts; and Marianne Combs, Journalist and reporter for Minnesota Public Radio, host of State of the Arts, a weekly program dedicated to Minnesota's arts community.
Availble from: http://ias.umn.edu/2012/11/07/sense-of-place-in-artist-books/


CASE DESCRIPTION
A 12-year-old Thoroughbred was examined because of signs of depression, neck stiffness, and poor performance.

CLINICAL FINDINGS
Physical examination revealed that the horse was dull, appeared depressed, was reluctant to raise its neck and head above a horizontal plane, and had a temperature of 38.5°C (101.3°F). No radiographic or scintigraphic abnormalities of the neck were found; however, high plasma fibrinogen concentration and relative lymphopenia were identified and the horse was seropositive for antibodies against Borrelia burgdorferi. Analysis of CSF revealed neutrophilic inflammation, and results of a PCR assay of CSF for B burgdorferi DNA were positive. Immunologic testing revealed severe B-cell lymphopenia and a low serum IgM concentration consistent with common variable immunodeficiency.

TREATMENT AND OUTCOME
The horse responded well to do×ycycline treatment (10 mg/kg [4.5 mg/lb], PO, q 12 h for 60 days) and returned to normal exercise. However, 60 days after treatment was discontinued, the horse again developed a stiff neck and rapidly progressive neurologic deficits, including severe ataxia and vestibular deficits. The horse's condition deteriorated rapidly despite IV oxytetracycline treatment, and the horse was euthanatized. Postmortem examination revealed leptomeningitis, lymphohistiocytic leptomeningeal vasculitis, cranial neuritis, and peripheral radiculoneuritis with Wallerian degeneration; findings were consistent with a diagnosis of neuroborreliosis.

CLINICAL RELEVANCE
Nervous system infection with B burgdorferi should be considered in horses with evidence of meningitis and high or equivocal serum anti-B burgdorferi antibody titers. Evaluation of immune function is recommended in adult horses evaluated because of primary bacterial meningitis.


With their humane wisdom, Tove Jansson's world-renowned Moomins stories have made a great difference in readers' lives. First published in 1945, they have become true classics of children's literature and are loved by readers across the world. Targeted both at nostalgic adults and a new generation of Moomins fans, this wonderful little book features funny and insightful slogans and deep thoughts from the Moominvalley, as well as original quotes and drawings from Tove Jansson's beloved Moomins stories.


The behavioral revisions to the design are frequent in the late stage of the semiconductor chip development. Quite often, their realization emphasizes incrementality that seeks minimum perturbation of the existing implementation. This tutorial paper poses the engineering change order (ECO) problem as the functional decomposition and proposes its solution in the form of the Boolean equations. We hope that the sufficient generality of the statement will be useful in extending the existing stateof-the-art design revision techniques. To assist in this process, we present an observed variety of design revisions encountered in the chip development cycle. The knowledge of such frequent and realistic ECOs is essential in advancing a tool's ability to yield compact implementation updates. We believe that sharing our experience of practical ECOs would benefit the research community in developing an open-source tool.


We consider negotiation over resources among self-motivated agents. Negotiation occurs over time: there are time constraints that affect how each agent values the resource. The agents also consider the possibility that they will encounter each other in future negotiations. We cope with agents having incomplete information, emphasizing probability management techniques. Questions arising in this research are: 1. When is it worth it for an agent to lie? 2. How beneficial can such lies be? 3. Is the system with a lying agent robust? 4. How can lies be discouraged? The main contributions of this work are our ability to deal with multiple encounters among agents, and our treatment of the problem that enables elementary mutual learning.


Digitizing public services is, at the moment, an essential necessity for numerous governments around the world. An improved government through digitization will not only have a growing effect on businesses, but it will also be able to intensify citizen engagement and push for economic growth. During the last 10 years more countries have progressively begun to provide digital services to their citizens. Therefore, in order to address this development, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution of the digital government literature in order to describe the aspects of digital transformation in the public sector and how it is related to knowledge management. In this study the methodology is quantitative and it is based on a review and a survey made with the main goal being the estimation from several collected data on how the digital transformation process in the Public Administration takes place and what its relationship is with knowledge management. The review study is based on articles found on Scopus database and it addresses the role that digital government research plays in the theory and practice of knowledge management. In the survey study, 54 employees working for the services of the two governmental areas of the Portuguese Ministry of the Environment were surveyed. The results show that the research on the theme is still at an exploratory stage due to the lack of studies relating digital government to knowledge management effectiveness in the public sector. The results also show that the success of digital government seems to be related with the quality of the organizations' knowledge management, complementing each other for significant improvements in the public sector. In terms of originality, this study aims to contribute and stimulate data-driven discussions regarding the impacts of the digital transformation in the public sector and their relation with the implementation of knowledge management practices. The results offer insights into future research needs.


Abstract The rise of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is not well understood at this point. This paper starts by comparing the Islamic State to the Vietnamese communists in a revolutionary warfare framework and makes a causal argument that the Islamic State's defeat of the Sahwa (Awakening) movement in Iraq was the key to its successful establishment of control of most Sunni areas and the mobilization of its population for support. Islamic State operational summaries and captured documents are used to quantitatively establish the impact of the subversion campaign against the Sahwa and Iraqi government and trace the efforts of operatives in tribal outreach and recruiting. This research provides a valuable insight into the return of a powerful method of insurgency as well as a glimpse into the vast clandestine network that provides the strength of the Islamic State movement.


Evaluation of plasma viscosity has been underutilized in the clinical practice. Plasma viscosity is determined by water-content and macromolecular components. Plasma is a highly concentrated protein solution, therefore weak protein-protein interactions can play a role that is not characterized by electrophoresis. The effect of a protein on plasma viscosity depends on its molecular weight and structure. The less spheroid shape, the higher molecular weight, the higher aggregating capacity, and the higher temperature or pH sensitivity a protein has, the higher plasma viscosity results. Plasma is a Newtonian fluid, its viscosity does not depend on flow characteristics, therefore it is simple to measure, especially in capillary viscosimeters. Its normal value is 1.10-1.30 mPa s at 37 degrees C and independent of age and gender. The measurement has high stability and accuracy, thus little alterations may be pathologically important. Inflammations, tissue injuries resulting in plasma protein changes can increase its value with high sensitivity, though low specificity. It can increase in parallel with erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), but it is not influenced by hematocrit (anemia, polycytemia), or time to analysis. Based on these favorable features, in 1942 plasma viscosity was recommended to substitute ESR. In hyperviscosity syndromes plasma viscosity is better in follow-up than ESR. In rheumatoid arthritis, its sensitivity and specificity are better than that of ESR or C-reactive protein. Plasma fibrinogen concentration and plasma viscosity are elevated in unstable angina pectoris and stroke and their higher values are associated with higher rate of major adverse clinical events. Elevation of plasma viscosity correlates to the progression of coronary and peripheral artery diseases. In conclusion, plasma viscosity should be measured routinely in medical practice.


Well‐being (i.e., satisfaction, happiness) is a latent variable, impossible to observe directly. Hence, questionnaires ask people to grade their well‐being in different life domains. The most common practice—comparing well‐being by means of descriptive analysis or linear regressions—ignores that the underlying collected well‐being information is ordinal. If the well‐being function is ordinal, then monotonic transformations are allowed. We demonstrate that treating ordinal data by methods intended to be used for cardinal data may give an incorrect impression of a robust result. Particularly, we derive the conditions under which the use of cardinal method to an ordinal variable gives an illusionary sense of robustness, while in fact one can reverse the conclusion reached by using an alternative cardinal assumption. The paper provides empirical applications.


Elijah Anderson's subcultural explanation for the adoption of the "code of the street" has directed scholarly attention toward specific cultural norms and scripts that encourage or sanction violence in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. We provide an explicit test of the general assumption that the code of the street is predominantly endorsed by youth residing in urban communities. Using data on 2,183 juvenile offenders committed to the State of Georgia's Department of Juvenile Justice between July 2002 and December 2003, we examine youths' strength of endorsement of code-specific attitudes. Importantly, these delinquent youth formerly resided in Georgia zip codes of varying degrees of urbanism, from highly urbanized to isolated rural areas. The findings suggest a considerable generalizability in strength of endorsement of the street code among delinquent youth residing in very distinctive types of territorial units. These analyses illustrate that the contemporary preoccupation among criminologists with an urban-based theory of the code may be misguided; the street code has broader reach than the inner city and is, in general, neither race-specific nor more strongly endorsed among delinquent youth in highly urbanized areas.


Fruits were collected from the trees indexed for healthiness and freedom from disease from the entire three former field as well as former field. The experiments were conducted during 2011-12 at Research Farm of the Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Pampoli, East Kameng, Arunachal Pradesh. Five representative orchards were selected from each formers field for collection of 1500 number of small and large fruits, respectively. Fruit were chosen from 5 randomly selected plants on the basis of fruit size. Small and large sized fruits were collected from all the four formers of East Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh. The highest fruit weight (161.3 g/fruit), TSS acid ratio (8.0) along with lowest juice (40.9%) was observed in big size fruits. Maximum juice (53.2%), minimum waste index (0.68). Fresh fruit marketing purpose whereas small sized fruits with higher percentage of juice can be recommended for juice preparation.


An improved generalized law for combined energetic-probabilistic size effect on the nominal strength for structures failing by crack initiation from a smooth surface is used for practical purposes - the paper proposes a procedure to capture both deterministic and statistical size effects on the nominal strength of quasibrittle structures failing at crack initiation. The advantage of the proposed approach is that the necessity of time consuming statistical simulation is avoided, only deterministic nonlinear fracture mechanics FEM cal- culation must be performed. Results of deterministic nonlinear FEM calculation should follow deterministic- energetic formula, a superimposition with the Weibull size effect, which dominates for large sizes using the energetic-statistical formula, is possible. As the procedure does not require a numerical simulation of Monte Carlo type and uses only the results obtained by deterministic computation using any commercial FEM code (which can capture satisfactorily deterministic size effect), it can be a simple practical engineering tool.


Background: Because of a lack of comparative data on anticoagulant use in the advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) population, guidelines recommend warfarin for atrial fibrillation and venous thromboembolism (VTE) treatment in these patients. However, apixaban has specific dosing recommendations in CKD leading to use in clinical practice. Objective: To evaluate major bleeding, stroke, and thromboembolism rates in patients with CKD stage 4, stage 5, and dialysis on apixaban or warfarin therapy. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of patients with advanced CKD receiving apixaban or warfarin. The primary outcome was the occurrence of major bleeding at 3 months after enrollment. Secondary outcomes included occurrence of major bleeding, occurrence of ischemic stroke, and recurrence of VTE at 3 to 6 and 6 to 12 months. Results: A total of 604 patients were included in the analysis. The percentage of apixaban and warfarin patients with a major bleed at 0 to 3, 3 to 6, and 6 to 12 months were 8.3% versus 9.9% (P=0.48), 1.4% versus 4% (P=0.07), and 1.5% versus 8.4% (P<0.001), respectively. There were no differences in rates of ischemic stroke or recurrent VTE at any time period. Conclusion and Relevance: Patients with advanced CKD taking apixaban had similar bleeding rates at 3 months compared with those taking warfarin. However, those who continued therapy had higher major bleeding rates with warfarin between 6 and 12 months. This study provides knowledge on the effects of a direct oral anticoagulant in a population that was excluded from all major trials.


Since the beginning of the new century, our country has made more efforts and attached increasing importance to colleges and universities. The number and scale of various large-scale equipment in the teaching process of colleges and universities are also growing rapidly and steadily. However, the management of these large-scale machinery and equipment is still dominated by traditional manual management mode, and there are practical problems existing in the use and management system such as low use efficiency, unreasonable purchase and obvious management loopholes. Based on these conditions, this paper takes the management system of largescale machinery and equipment as the research direction, and proposes financial index, internal process index, scientific research development index and interest-related index to construct an index system structure, then it uses a combined algorithm which integrated the improved Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with the entropy weight method to calculate the impact factors of each index, at last, this paper puts forward specific countermeasures and suggestions according to the size of the impact factors, in the hopes of providing support for the use and management of equipment in the teaching process of colleges and universities.


The aim of this study is to investigate how comprehensible L1 Finnish speakers' L2 Swedish is considered to be and whether any listener- or speaker-specific background factors relating to the comprehensibility judgements can be found. The research material consists of Swedish read-aloud texts by 21 Finnish-speaking upper secondary school students. Judgements are given by 64 native Swedish-speakers (Finland-Swedish n = 35, Sweden-Swedish n = 29) using a verbalized scale from 1 to 7. The study shows that L2 Swedish, pronounced by L1 Finnish speakers, is on average considered to be comprehensible but the listener has to concentrate closely. Both Finland-Swedish and Sweden-Swedish listeners gave similar ratings. Only two background factors correlated with the comprehensibility ratings: the speaker's latest school grade in Swedish had a negative correlation, whereas the speaker's usage of Swedish on his/her spare me correlated positively with the comprehensibility ratings.


The ability to control the glycosylation pattern of recombinant viral glycoproteins represents a major prerequisite before their use as vaccines. The aim of this study consisted of expressing the large soluble ectodomain of glycoprotein B (gB) from Human Cytomegalovirus (HMCV) in Nicotiana tabacum Bright Yellow-2 (BY-2) suspension cells and of comparing its glycosylation profile with that of gB produced in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells. gB was secreted in the BY-2 culture medium at a concentration of 20 mg/L and directly purified by ammonium sulfate precipitation and size exclusion chromatography. We then measured the relative abundance of N-glycans present on 15 (BY-2) and 17 (CHO) out of the 18 N-sites by multienzymatic proteolysis and mass spectrometry. The glycosylation profile differed at each N-site, some sites being occupied exclusively by oligomannosidic type N-glycans and others by complex N-glycans processed in some cases with additional Lewis A structures (BY-2) or with beta-1,4-galactose and sialic acid (CHO). The profiles were strikingly comparable between BY-2- and CHO-produced gB. These results suggest a similar gB conformation when glycoproteins are expressed in plant cells as site accessibility influences the glycosylation profile at each site. These data thus strengthen the BY-2 suspension cultures as an alternative expression system.


Five infants with phenylketonuria who received their phenylalanine primarily from breast milk were compared with five other infants with PKU who received infant formula as their primary phenylalanine source. No significant differences between both groups were observed for weight gain, the daily phenylalanine intake, and mean plasma phenylalanine concentrations. This study shows that breast feeding can be continued in young infants with their difficult to predict weight gain and daily changing phenylalanine requirements.


In this paper, a novel optimization methodology is investigated to optimize the resource allocation in a satellite system where variations of fading conditions are added to those of traffic load. A neural approximation technique is studied to exploit on tine optimal reallocation laws, as functions of the state of the network. No closed-form expressions for the system dynamic equations and the functional cost are needed. Simulation results show how the proposed technique outperms two other optimization strategies, based on a certainty equivalent assumption and on the application of perturbation analysis, respectively.


There is wide consensus that entrepreneurial talent lies in the ability to discover and exploit market opportunities by taking the relevant risky decisions. By determining the nature of the discovery and exploitation processes, institutions and technology play an essential role in shaping entrepreneurial opportunities and the nature of entrepreneurial talent. Building on these premises, the aim of our research work is to investigate the sources of entrepreneurial talent in Italy. In addition to the standard controls, various indices of occupational opportunities are used in order to determine how tacit and codified knowledge determine the returns on different occupational choices in different environments. The data are drawn from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW), a large-scale household survey conducted biannually by the Bank of Italy. The original data-set has been integrated with a wide variety of environmental variables drawn from different data sources describing the social, technological and institutional context of the entrepreneurial activity. Our empirical analysis supports the conclusion that the choice to become an entrepreneur in Italy is strongly and positively affected by a privileged access to tacit knowledge, thus confirming previous analyses on the role of social learning (e.g. Guiso and Schivardi, 2005). On the other hand, we show that the returns on codified knowledge in entrepreneurial activities increase in more creative environments. Indeed, a further aim of the paper is, hopefully, to offer more general insights into the nature of technological opportunities and talent which go beyond the Italian case.


The Lusitanian Basin of West-Central Portugal is one of a family of formerly adjacent North Atlantic margin basins. Like others of its type (e.g. the Jeanne d'Arcand Western Approaches basins) early phases of rifting and subsidence occurred as far back as the Triassic. During the Late Jurassic rifting phase in the development of the Lusitanian Basin marine shelf and slope systems were replaced by alluvial fan and fluvial environments which prograded from the nonh during the late Kimmeridgian. Continental environments, periodically punctuated by marine incursions, persisted over northern and central areas of the basin at least until the end of the Jurassic. The deposits of these continental and shallow marine systems are here defined as the Lourinha formation, which is sub-divided into five members. Sedimentary structures, textures and sand body geometries suggest that the Praia da Amoreira member was deposited in a distal alluvial fan setting where sheet-flooding preceded the establishment of channelised flow. The presence of calcretes suggests a semi-arid/sub-tropical climate with markedly seasonal rainfall. The fan systems,confined to the western margin of the basin, passed laterally into meandering fluvial systems, the deposits of which form the Porto Novo member. A marine transgression from the south resulted in the establishment of shoal-water delta systems, the deposits of which form the Praia Azul (lower delta plain) and Assenta (upper delta/fluvial plain) members. The largely continental Assenta member is punctuated by thin, laterally extensive marine horizons which suggest rapid relative rises in sea level. In northem and eastern parts of the basin the deposits of sandy fluvial systems are replaced by those of the gravelly Santa Rita member, which appear to have been sourced from the east. In a number of the above units evidence for the operation of active extensional processes is to be found The deposition of the Lourinha formation preceded the final Aptian rifting event which resulted in the formation of the North Atlantic Ocean. However, it may have heralded and been contemporaneous with, an earlier phase of sea floor spreading, later abandoned, thought to have occurred In the area of the present day Tagus Abyssal Plain.


This volume contains articles representing the courses given at the 2005 RSME Santalo Summer School on 'Recent Trends in Cryptography'. The main goal of the Summer School was to present some of the recent mathematical methods used in cryptography and cryptanalysis. The School was oriented to graduate and doctoral students, as well as recent doctorates. The material is presented in an expository manner with many examples and references. The topics in this volume cover some of the most interesting new developments in public key and symmetric key cryptography, such as pairing based cryptography and lattice based cryptanalysis.


This article explores representations of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia in two examples of Japanese popular theatre. The first example is from a Takarazuka production that pre-dates the occupation by less than a year and thus aims to quell public anxieties about Japan's impending colonial aggression. The second occurs sixty years later in a play that tells the story of a doomed romance between a Japanese soldier and an Indonesian dancer. The following essay explores ways in which each production uses Indonesian cultural imagery within a larger framework that presents pan-Asian identity as an aspect of Japanese nationalist ideology.


According to the cerebellar deficit hypothesis [CDH; (Nicolson, Fawcett, & Dean, 2001)], cerebellar dysfunction can place children at risk for developmental dyslexia. In a recent meta-analytic review, Alvarez and Fiez (2018) proposed a neural model for how the cerebellum interfaces with the cerebral reading network (CDHn). This model posits that two regions in the cerebellum, one in lobule HVIIB and one in lobule Crus1, are interconnected with the cerebral cortex to form a dorsal fronto-parietal and a ventral fronto-temporal circuit, respectively. Moreover, the CDHn model asserts that these circuits are functionally specialized, with the dorsal circuit biased towards phonological processing and the ventral circuit biased towards semantic processing. This dissertation employs functional connectivity and neural activation measures obtained with magnetic resonance imaging to empirically test the CDHn model, with an a priori focus on the five regions proposed as constituents of its dorsal and ventral circuits. Resting-state analyses tested for patterns of functional connectivity between the predefined constituents, with a special interest in circuit specialization within an inferior frontal junction region that is part of both circuits. Univariate and multivariate methods were used to characterize the predicted phonological versus semantic task biases between the dorsal and ventral circuit, respectively. Finally, the products of these analyses were used to test whether activation in cerebellar regions VIIB and Crus1 modulate neural representation in the cerebral constituents of the dorsal and ventral circuits, respectively. Conventional connectivity analyses revealed stronger evidence supporting the ventral circuit. However, success in our more unique connectivity approach to find circuit specialization within the frontal region implicated the presence of dissociative dorsal and ventral networks. As predicted, the parietal region successfully characterized a task-bias for phonological processing; no biased effect within the frontal region; and a trend towards a semantic bias within the temporal region. All cerebral regions succeeded in the multivariate task-dissociation. Although the cerebellar regions did not exhibit predicted functional specialization, the univariate analyses did uncover interactions of tasks, and Crus1 engagement was successful in modulating the semantically related properties of the temporal region. Overall, we found encouraging but incomplete support for the recently proposed CDHn model.


The Dry-Low-NOx (DLN) Micromix combustion technology has been developed originally as a low emission alternative for industrial gas turbine combustors fueled with hydrogen. Currently the ongoing research process targets flexible fuel operation with hydrogen and syngas fuel. The non-premixed combustion process features jet-incrossflow-mixing of fuel and oxidizer and combustion through multiple miniaturized flames. The miniaturization of the flames leads to a significant reduction of NOx emissions due to the very short residence time of reactants in the flame. The paper presents the results of a numerical and experimental combustor test campaign. It is conducted as part of an integration study for a dual-fuel (H2 and H2/CO 90/10 Vol.%) Micromix combustion chamber prototype for application under full scale, pressurized gas turbine conditions in the auxiliary power unit Honeywell Garrett GTCP 36-300. In the presented experimental studies, the integrationoptimized dual-fuel Micromix combustor geometry is tested at atmospheric pressure over a range of gas turbine operating conditions with hydrogen and syngas fuel. The experimental investigations are supported by numerical combustion and flow simulations. For validation, the results of experimental exhaust gas analyses are applied. Despite the significantly differing fuel characteristics between pure hydrogen and hydrogen-rich syngas the evaluated dual-fuel Micromix prototype shows a significant low NOx performance and high combustion efficiency. The combustor features an increased energy density that benefits manufacturing complexity and costs.


Out-of-vehicle time is a well-known major burden of transit travel. Although transit stations' characteristics likely affect people's perceptions of out-of-vehicle time and decisions to use public transit, our understanding of how transit users evaluate stations is limited. This study uses reviews of Los Angeles Metro Rail stations from Yelp.com to conduct descriptive analyses of stations' numeric ratings and to identify the factors users consider important based on content analyses. It also explores spatial and temporal variations in the ratings and factors frequently considered by users, demonstrating how social media content can be used to inform transportation planning.


The higher demand for data traffic and the emergence of new applications has made mobile networks challenging to maintain high data rates for users, in particular those located on the cell's edges. The Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) technology adopted in long-term evolution (LTE) cellular networks allows improving the cell's edge performance. In order to improve throughput performance gain in the downlink, the CoMP scheduler needs to know/deal the channel information for all the collaborating Base Stations. To do so, we propose a method for handling Channel State Information (CSI) feedback, named DCEC: Direct CSI feedback to Elected Coordination station. The DCEC architecture aims to reduce the overhead and latency of the network, and subsequently increase its throughput. To model the proposed architecture in the cellular network, we have used the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) formalism. The simulation results demonstrate that the DCEC architecture significantly decreases the number of CSI feedback packets being transmitted within the network and reduces the feedback latency resulting in higher data rates for users.


Higher efficiency rarely reduces water consumption Reconciling higher freshwater demands with finite freshwater resources remains one of the great policy dilemmas. Given that crop irrigation constitutes 70% of global water extractions, which contributes up to 40% of globally available calories (1), governments often support increases in irrigation efficiency (IE), promoting advanced technologies to improve the "crop per drop." This provides private benefits to irrigators and is justified, in part, on the premise that increases in IE "save" water for reallocation to other sectors, including cities and the environment. Yet substantial scientific evidence (2) has long shown that increased IE rarely delivers the presumed public-good benefits of increased water availability. Decision-makers typically have not known or understood the importance of basin-scale water accounting or of the behavioral responses of irrigators to subsidies to increase IE. We show that to mitigate global water scarcity, increases in IE must be accompanied by robust water accounting and measurements, a cap on extractions, an assessment of uncertainties, the valuation of trade-offs, and a better understanding of the incentives and behavior of irrigators.


Part I Climate Change in West Asia and North Africa 1 Climate Change in West Asia and North Africa (WANA): Overview Mannava V.K. Sivakumar, Alex C. Ruane, and Jose Camacho 2 Implications of Climate Change for Agriculture and Food Security in the Western Asia and Northern Africa Region Ramasamy Selvaraju Part II Climate Change and Environment 3 Climate Change and Soil Quality in the WANA Region Rattan Lal 4 Conserving Green and Blue Water in the WANA Region Hamed Daly-Hassen, Yves Birot, Carlos Gracia and Marc Palahi 5 Climate Change and Land Use in the WANA Region with a Specific Reference to Morocco Mostafa Ibrahim and Rattan Lal 6 Responses of Insect Pests to Climate Change: Effects and Interactions of Temperature, CO2 on Soil Quality Vanessa L. Muilenberg and Daniel A. Herms 7 Climate Change and Locusts in the WANA Region Keith Cressman Part III Climate Change and Food Security: Perspectives from WANA Sub-Regions 8 Climate Change Impact on WANA: Key Researchable Issues and Proposed Measures Ibrahim Hamdan and Susanna Smets 9 Climate Variability and Change in North African Countries F. Driouech, S. Ben Rached, T. El Heirech 10 Climate Change in Drylands of the Eastern Mediterranean: from Assessment Methods to Adaptation Strategies E. De Pauw and W. Gobel 11 Climate Change and Food Security in the Nile Valley and Red Sea Ayman F. Abou Hadid 12 Food Security and Climate Change in West Asia Ibrahim Ortas and Rattan Lal Part IV Mitigation and Adaptation Options for Different Agroeconomic Sectors in WANA 13 Mitigation and Adaptation Options for Rainfed Agriculture in West Asia and North Africa Awni Taimeh 14 Mitigation and Adaptation Options of Climate Change in Irrigated Agriculture in Arab Countries Dia El-Din El Quosy 15 Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Options for the Livestock Sector in the West Asia and North Africa Markos Tibbo and Jeannette van de Steeg 16 Afforestation Potential in the WANA Region to Sequester Carbon and Improve Soil Quality Roger A. Williams Part V Policy, Financial, Institutional and Cooperation Issues 17 Mainstreaming Adaptation to Climate Change into the Development Agenda Nasri Haddad and Kamel Shideed 18 Possible Financial Innovations and Market Mechanisms at the National Level to Cope with Climate Change in WANA Region S.V.R.K. Prabhakar 19 Economic Impacts of Climate Change in the Arab World: A Summary of Case Studies from Syria, Tunisia and Yemen Clemens Breisinger, Perrihan Al-Riffai and Manfred Wiebelt 20 Human Dimensions of Climate Change Adaptation: Factors that Influence Behaviours Eric Toman and Richard Moore Part VI Regional Agricultural Adaptation and Mitigation Framework for Climate Change in WANA 21 Regional Framework for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in the WANA Region Ghassan Hamdallah 22 Adaptation Strategies for Different Sectors in the WANA Region - Summaries of Breakout Group Discussions Mannava V.K. Sivakumar, Faisal Awawdeh, Nasri Haddad, Ibrahim Hamdan, Mark Holderness, Rattan Lal, Ibrahim Ortas, and Selvaraju Ramasamy Part VII Conference Declaration 23 Kuwait Declaration


Azadirachta indica , popularly known as ' Neem ', is a very important plant in the Ayurveda system of medicine. It is known toprevent about 40 types of diseases in home-practice. A previous report showed that the methanolic extract of this plant can effectively control the proliferation of leukemia cells. Therefore, this research focuses on searching for a new molecule with potent anti-leukemic property. Ethanolic extract was prepared from the dried leaves. Four bio-molecules were isolated viz. rutin, isoquercetin, quercetrin and β-sitosterol-3-O-β-D-glucoside from the ethanolic extract by repeated column chromatography and HPLC. Quercetrin structures of the isolated molecules were confirmed by Mass, 1HNMR, 13C NMR spectra analysis. MTT assay revealed that β-sitosterol-3-O-β-D-glucosideeffectively reduced the proliferation of MOLT 4 leukemic cells in a dose and time dependent manner. DAPI staining with confocal microscopy indicated that β-sitosterol-3-O-β-D-glucoside efficiently induced nuclear DNA fragmentation in MOLT 4 cells. Finally, flow cytometry after PI staining showed that the compound has potential to check the cell cycle progression at sub G1 phase. In summary, we can conclude that β-sitosterol-3-O-β-D-glucoside has potential to be good therapeutic drug in leukemia treatment in future.


SUMMARY The histochemical binding of four lectin-peroxidase conjugates to normal human gastric mucosa and gastric carcinoma is described. The lectins were peanut agglutinin (PNA) which is specific for galactose residues and soy bean agglutinin (SBA), Dolichos biflorus agglutinin (DBA) and Helix pomatia agglutinin (HPA) which are specific for N-acetylgalactosamine. Binding of PNA to surface mucous cells or normal gastric mucosa occurred in non-secretors but not secretors and was independent of ABO blood group at all sites. PNA binding was unrelated to the immuno-histochemical demonstration of Thomsen-Friedenreich (T) antigen. DBA and HPA bound selectively to surface mucous cells in normal gastric mucosa from group A secretors but binding at other sites was independent of ABO status. SBA binding showed no relationship with blood group or secretor status. In gastric cancers the major finding was the occurrence of extensive masking of lectin binding sites by sialic acid which was not seen in normal mucosa. Sialic acid masking was most marked with PNA and least marked with DBA. There was no correlation between lectin binding patterns and the stage or differentiation of tumours. Results are consistent with in vitro studies demonstrating increased sialation of membrane glycoproteins following malignant transformation. Difficulties in interpreting the histochemical demonstration of lectin binding in terms of specific glycoconjugates are discussed.


We show that the historic Davisson-Germer experiment demonstrates formation of standing waves within nickel crystal unitcell. Cartesian Fourier transform cannot offer description in terms of standing waves because Cartesian Fourier theory cannot accommodate π in place of 2π. Thus, formation of standing waves within unitcell in Davisson-Germer experiment necessarily requires spherical polar coordinate description of crystal diffraction. Description in spherical polar coordinates permits to incorporate precision angles from the experiment for better convergence in structure determination calculations.


This book distinguishes Milton's academic importance from his real status, and addresses readers with broad literary interests, who may be ready to think again about a poet whom Dryden saw as superior to both Homer and Virgil. The work is therefore a contribution to the ongoing histories of Milton's reputation in particular, and literary taste in general. This book is about one of England's greatest but most controversial poets. The first two sections cover the early editing, influence and criticism of Milton's minor poems, and some later responses: critical debate on the pastoral poems, imitation of the sonnets, and editorial confusion over "At a Solemn Musick". The third section concerns "Paradise Lost" and its ready recognition as a great poem by the Poet Laureate Dryden and his contemporaries. Milton came to be considered almost equal to Shakespeare; his comparative loss of status was due to criticisms of both his theology and his style. In the fourth and fifth sections, the former are studied in the polemics of Bishop Burgess, J.W. Morris and some modern scholars; the latter in the critiques of Professor Walter Raleigh and Dr. F.R. Leavis.


We introduce Performance Trees (PTs), a novel representation formalism for the specification of model-based performance queries. Traditionally, stochastic logics have been the prevalent means of performance requirement expression; however, in practice, their use amongst system designers is limited on account of their inherent complexity and restricted expressive power. PTs are a more accessible alternative, in which performance queries are represented by hierarchical tree structures. This allows for the convenient visual composition of complex performance questions, and enables not only the verification of stochastic requirements, but also the direct extraction of performance measures. In addition, the tree formalism offers a superset of the expressiveness of Continuous Stochastic Logic (CSL), since all CSL formulae can be represented as PTs. PTs can be used to capture passage time, transient, steady-state and higher order queries of varying levels of sophistication. While they are conceptually independent of the underlying stochastic modelling formalism, in many cases the tree operators we use are already backed up by good algorithmic and tool support for both stochastic verification and performance measure extraction.


Abstract Industrial engineering is a field dealing with optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, and materials. Hence, the scope of industrial engineering is wide and includes various fields, from manufacturing, through banking, different types of services, to administration and healthcare. Various industrial engineering tools could be implemented in healthcare settings. The use of such tools is popular in western economies. For example, simulation modelling of services is popular in the US. However, there is still a very limited number of case studies on the application of such tools in healthcare that would consider the Polish economy. The aim of this paper is to present selected successful applications of lean management tools in the Polish healthcare. This may serve as an inspiration for healthcare organizations to search for and implement methodological approaches to improve their services.


An adaptive controller for activated sludge processes is introduced. The control objective is to keep, in the presence of input constraints, the concentration of the biomass proportional to the influent flow rate, where a prespecified small tracking error of size lambda is tolerated. This is achieved by the so called lambda-tracker which is simple in its design, relies only on structural properties of the process and weak feasibility properties, and does not invoke any estimation or identification mechanism or probing signals. lambda-Tracking is proved for a model of an activated sludge process with unknown reaction kinetics and including unknown time-varying process parameters. It is illustrated by simulations that the lambda-tracker works successfully, and even under practical circumstances which go beyond what we can prove mathematically, it can cope with 'white noise' corrupting the measurement and periodically acting disturbances.


Background. Many studies suggested that academic procrastination is particularly prevalent among learners at university level. However, empirical data on the interactions between academic procrastination and, respectively, learners' attitudes towards cheating (AtC), absenteeism, and learning achievement, are either generally inconclusive or non-existent, especially in English as Foreign Language (EFL) literature. Thus, it is worthwhile to conduct a study to examine these issues in the Indonesian EFL context, home to one of the largest communities of EFL learners in the world.
Purpose. The aim of this study was to investigate academic procrastination of Indonesian EFL learners at university level and the interactions of these learners' procrastination with AtC, absenteeism, and second/foreign language (L2) achievement.
Method. The study used an online survey method and 164 learners from non-English departments participated in this study.
Results. On the basis of descriptive statistics, it was found that the participants reported a moderate level of procrastination in English class. Furthermore, this study found that learners' procrastination significantly and positively correlated with their AtC and absenteeism. This indicated that the more learners procrastinated, the higher their approval of cheating behaviour, and the more likely they were to be absent in English classes. The predictive power of learner procrastination was 16.4% on AtC, and at 8.3% on absenteeism. Moreover, the study also found a significant, negative, and moderate relationship between learner procrastination and their L2 achievement with learners' procrastination being able to predict 16.5% of the total variance in L2 achievement.
Conclusion. Teachers are suggested to promote project-based tasks in groups where the step-by-step progress of learners is continually monitored, feedback given, and rewarded. This could discourage procrastination, absenteeism, as well as cheating behaviours, and potentially promote more optimal L2 achievement.


Software size estimation has an important role on software development life cycle (SDLC) for helping developers to focus on their target and give a control on development process. Estimation needs a method that give high accuracy with minimum result errors that developers can use it as an approach to the real software size they built. Function Point Analysis (FPA) is one of many methods that can estimate the software size. FPA estimate the software size on Function Point that can be used to count the software line of code (LOC). The research aim is to build a software to estimate a software size using FPA method. Rapid Application Development (RAD) is used to develop the software and needs four iteration to complete the development. On 4 th iteration, the Black Box Testing method has been used to evaluate the program, using 13 datas of a software that have been completely developed. The result is, mean relative error on the estimation result for the proposed program is 3,52%.


The construct of teacher efficacy is considered to be one of the factors that have an effect on beliefs, judgements and practices of teachers as well as performances of students in an educational process. With the aim of exploring the factors affecting teacher efficacy perceptions of pre-service teachers, the present study used a mixed methods design, and collected the relevant data from 113 participants majoring in ELT at a state university in Turkey. The analysis of the data yielded a moderate level of overall perceived teacher efficacy in the sample, and the findings of the focus group interviews with 22 participants revealed four main factors that affected the development of teacher efficacy perceptions either positively or negatively: ELT education, practicum experiences, perceived language proficiency, and affective states, out of which practicum experiences had the greatest effect on the perceived teacher efficacy. Accordingly, certain implications were presented concerning language teacher efficacy.


The occurrence of unexpected brittle failure in plastics parts poses a serious and ongoing problem to the plastics industry and therefore a better understanding of the mechanisms of fracture in these materials is needed. Extensive research has been carried out and has led to the evolution of fracture mechanics as a means to evaluate and analyse the brittle failure of materials. The use of linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) parameters such as critical stress intensity factor (Kc) to characterize the toughness of polymers is now quite widespread. However, the application to thermoplastics, particularly rubber-modified materials, is less well developed. Kc corresponds to a critical level of stress intensity at the tip of a crack-like defect and there are criteria to be met for the fracture mechanics parameter to be valid.
PVC-U is a relatively tough polymer but has a disadvantage of being prone to occasional brittleness. Articles made from PVC-U sometimes fail prematurely through brittle fracture during service when the applied stress is concentrated due to the presence crack or other discrete imperfections. To overcome the disadvantage and to increase toughness, multiphase systems consisting of PVC and a rubber component, known as impact modifiers were developed and being used in construction applications. A fracture mechanics approach has been used previously in the evaluation of the toughness of PVC-U pipe materials. Using instrumented falling weight impact tests in the flexural mode, a technique was developed enabling fracture mechanics principles to study impact modified PVC. The main objective of this study is to examine the effect of strain rate on the fracture mechanics data. The other objective was to determine the Kc1 validity criterion for the high impact PVC under these conditions.


Radiocarbon dating studies have demonstrated that soil organic matter (OM) consists of two pools: a labile, short-lived pool that is an energy source for microbes, and a much longer-lived humic substances (HS) pool that is protected from microbial attack and represents the sequestered carbon in a soil. The longer-lived pool has three operationally-defined fractions: fulvic acids (FA, soluble at all pH), humic acids (HA, insoluble below pH ≈ 2) and humins (HU, insoluble at all pH). HA and FA can be extracted from soils and low-rank coals with aqueous bases and fractionated by acidification of the basic solutions. Several other procedures have been published but, to our knowledge, none have been shown to determine quantitatively the HA content of lignites and soils. This paper describes a gravimetric protocol that measures the HA content of four lignites used as commercial sources of HS products and 24 agricultural top soil samples from 13 counties in southern Idaho. No HU was found in the samples. The lignites and soil samples contain from 2-41 %HA and 0.31-9.8 %HA, respectively. Analytical precision limits are attributed to sample heterogeneity. Gravimetric HA measurements can facilitate rapid soil assessment, carbon cycling research and commercial HA products certification. Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002124


This article follows a previous study that has recently been published in Narrare I Gruppi and explored the reasons for the large numeric gap between the regions of the North and South of Italy, referring to the breast cancer screening program adherence rate sponsored by the Italian Healthcare System, that addresses all women living in Italy ranging in age between 48 and 69 years, and proposes a free mammogram every two years. The effectiveness of cancer early detections has been widely demonstrated by medical research; this kind of diagnosis is particularly important in the case of breast cancer. A diagnosis of this form of cancer at its early phases in 97% of cases allows women to survive at least five years after it. However, the different level of trust women feel for healthcare structures is the discriminating element between the North and South of Italy for their access to the screening program. This topic will be thoroughly analyzed by presenting the results of research aimed at evaluating the meaning given to the outcomes of a first exploratory study, this second study also offers the opportunity to share our results within the social context that has generated them. The outcomes of the present research have been presented to a group of "privileged witnesses" living in the South (Naples and its surroundings): 12 women aging from 49 to 65, and 5 healthcare workers (one doctor, 25 two nurses, and two Local Health Authority supervisors); they took part in three Focus Groups for an in-depth look of the theme in question. The analyses of the groups' debates, carried out by means of a software for text analysis (T-LAB), confirmed the results of the previous research: the diffidence and lack of synergy between institutions and healthcare workers are the causes of southern women's lack of participation to the breast cancer screening program. In particular, the comparison between women's and workers' viewpoints shows a different emotional connotation about the possibility to improve participation to the screening: the workers' optimism countervails women's distrust and pessimism.


We extract verified algorithms for exact real number computation from
constructive proofs. To this end we use a coinductive representation of reals
as streams of binary signed digits. The main objective of this paper is the
formalisation of a constructive proof that real numbers are closed with respect
to limits. All the proofs of the main theorem and the first application are
implemented in the Minlog proof system and the extracted terms are further
translated into Haskell. We compare two approaches. The first approach is a
direct proof. In the second approach we make use of the representation of reals
by a Cauchy-sequence of rationals. Utilizing translations between the two
represenation and using the completeness of the Cauchy-reals, the proof is very
short. In both cases we use Minlog's program extraction mechanism to
automatically extract a formally verified program that transforms a converging
sequence of reals, i.e.~a sequence of streams of binary signed digits together
with a modulus of convergence, into the binary signed digit representation of
its limit. The correctness of the extracted terms follows directly from the
soundness theorem of program extraction. As a first application we use the
extracted algorithms together with Heron's method to construct an algorithm
that computes square roots with respect to the binary signed digit
representation. In a second application we use the convergence theorem to show
that the signed digit representation of real numbers is closed under
multiplication.


These notes are designed as a 'data-theory' dialogue, and they consist of 1. a series of short vignettes and empirical research scenarios that have been produced by different hands, but that have been brought together to evoke something of the range of situations that any programme of research on language and identity in contemporary Europe needs to address 2. suggestions about the kind of theoretical and methodological orientation that would need to underpin such a research programme, doing justice to the complexity of the issues intimated in the empirical scenarios. The result is inevitably rather messy/inelegant/heteroglossic. But the overarching proposition is that the research perspectives specified in Section 2 can provide valuable purchase on the range of situations outlined in Section 1, and that conversely, a research programme that fell short of these methodological requirements could risk superficiality, failure - or worse.


Galectin-1 is an anti-inflammatory lectin with pleiotropic regulatory functions at the crossroads of innate and adaptive immunity. It is expressed in immune privileged sites and is implicated in establishing maternal–fetal immune tolerance, which is essential for successful pregnancy in eutherian mammals. Here, we show conserved placental localization of galectin-1 in primates and its predominant expression in maternal decidua. Phylogenetic footprinting and shadowing unveil conserved cis motifs, including an estrogen responsive element in the 5′ promoter of LGALS1, that were gained during the emergence of placental mammals and could account for sex steroid regulation of LGALS1 expression, thus providing additional evidence for the role of galectin-1 in immune–endocrine cross-talk. Maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood analyses of 27 publicly available vertebrate and seven newly sequenced primate LGALS1 coding sequences reveal that intense purifying selection has been acting on residues in the carbohydrate recognition domain and dimerization interface that are involved in immune functions. Parsimony- and codon model-based phylogenetic analysis of coding sequences show that amino acid replacements occurred in early mammalian evolution on key residues, including gain of cysteines, which regulate immune functions by redox status-mediated conformational changes that disable sugar binding and dimerization, and that the acquired immunoregulatory functions of galectin-1 then became highly conserved in eutherian lineages, suggesting the emergence of hormonal and redox regulation of galectin-1 in placental mammals may be implicated in maternal–fetal immune tolerance.


Social media have been increasing obviously and widely due to the fact that it is a media for users who express their emotions using reviews and comments on a variety of areas in life. In the present study, a modest model has been suggested for the assessment of service departments with the use of reviews and comments in social media pages of those departments from various governorates. The utilization of the text mining for the sentiment classification has been used through collecting Iraqi dialect reviews on service department pages on Facebook to be analyzed with the use of the sentiment analysis to track the emotions from the comments and posts. Those have been classified after that to positive, neutral or negative comment with the use of the algorithms of Naive Bayesian, Rough Set Theory, and K-Nearest Neighbors. Out of 13 Iraqi capital (Baghdad) service departments have been tackled, it has been found that 11% of those departments had very good assessment, 18% from these service departments have good assessment, 21% from these service departments have medium assessment, 24% from these service departments have acceptance assessment and 26% from these service departments have bad assessment. The results of the evaluation showed the poor services provided by service departments in the capital Baghdad. Experimental results were helpful for the service departments in improving their work and programs had responded quickly and sufficiently to the customer demands.

Index Terms—Facebook Data, Rough Set Theory, Naïve Bayesian, Sentiment Analysis, K-NN, Text Mining.


The paper presents a novel spectral approach, accompanied by an asymptotic model and numerical simulations for slender elastic systems such as long bridges or tall buildings. The focus is on asymptotic approximations of solutions by Bloch waves, which may propagate in a infinite periodic waveguide. Although the notion of passive mass dampers is conventional in the engineering literature, it is not obvious that an infinite waveguide problem is adequate for analysis of long but finite slender elastic systems. The formal mathematical treatment of a Bloch wave would reduce to a spectral analysis of equations of motion on an elementary cell of a periodic structure, with Bloch–Floquet quasi-periodicity conditions imposed on the boundary of the cell. Frequencies of some classes of standing waves can be estimated analytically. One of the applications discussed in the paper is the "dancing bridge" across the river Volga in Volgograd.


Flexibility has become one of the most useful and necessary weapons in many of today's competitive markets. For companies in situations considering investments in flexibility, it is necessary to assess carefully exactly what flexibility could benefit the company's operations, and how this flexibility can be achieved. Different manufacturing situations are associated with different levels of uncertainty and variations, and therefore call for different sorts of flexibility. Although flexibility has been argued to be available (to a certain point) without major investments in technology, it can be assumed that flexibility is most likely to come at a price. A company should therefore spend considerable effort on identifying what flexibility would be of benefit to the organisation to enhance their performance, and thereafter assess how to achieve it. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of variability and uncertainty, and therefore, the need for flexibility within an organisation by examining market and manufacturing process related factors. Each factor is further examined to find out relevant flexibilities and corresponding methods, tools, and techniques to be used by suggesting proposed manufacturing approaches to organisations. The human factor is suggested as an essential flexibility component as well as a key contributor for selecting, developing, improving and implementing flexibilities in order to succeed in markets that are accelerating and becoming more turbulent.


A convenient and efficient application of heterogeneous Lanthanum-containing SBA-15 systems for the microwave assisted oxidation of a lignin model phenolic monomer, 3-methoxy- 4-hydroxybenzyl alcohol, is reported. Environmental friendly and low-cost H2O2 was used as the oxygen atom donor. The catalyst was prepared by immobilizing Lanthanum species on to the periodic mesoporous channels of siliceous SBA-15. Powder X-ray diffraction data and Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AES) revealed that the host retains its hexagonal mesoporous structure after immobilization and most of the lanthanum species are better dispersed in the calcined materials. The surface area and pore size of La/SBA-15 was considerably decreased indicating the intrapore confinement of the Lanthanum species. The activity of the La/SBA-15 was investigated in the oxidation of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxybenzyl alcohol in the presence of hydrogen peroxide as oxidant. 68% conversion of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxybenzyl alcohol to vanillin or other undetectable by-products was obtained after 30 min of reaction under 200W microwave irradiation, compared to a poor 25% degradation after 24 h under conventional heating. The possibility of recycling the catalyst was studied.


For economic survival, an individual must have human capital and social capital, both comprise the human assets. This study is a design and development of a GIS-enabled human assets mapping (GIS-HAM) tool. It is aimed at mapping-out human assets to easily identify the different skills of the community members which are needed for future employment by various job sectors. The study used the waterfall model as Software Development Life Cycle in designing and developing the GIS-HAM prototype. The GIS-HAM tool was tested in Barangay Manlin, Buug, Zamboanga Sibugay, among randomly selected household heads (n=176) who answered the researcher-made questionnaire and were subjected to focus group discussions and interview. Research has shown that unemployment due to skills and educational qualification mismatch in the labor market is one of the causes of poverty. Majority of the respondents and key informants (82%) were high school level, acquired skills by experience (66%), and had skills in farming (37%). The system has the improved interoperability functions of the Google API, such as Google Map and Visual Analytics, which map and locate the addresses of skilled persons while showing their individual educational attainment, skills, occupation and contact number. Both employer (skills searcher) and employee (job seeker) can match skills to job types. Respondents' evaluation yielded the system being overall functional in terms of content, user-friendliness, and performance. Study recommended that the GIS-HAM be implemented in mobile apps for accessibility of data at any time and be developed using multimedia software to enhance its user interface design.


Societies frequently generate public infrastructure and institutional arrangements in order to mediate short-term environmental fluctuations. However, the social and ecological consequences of activities dealing with short-term disturbances may increase the vulnerability of the system to infrequent events or to long-term change in patterns of short-term variability. Exploring this possibility requires the study of long-term, transformational change. The archaeological record provides many examples of long-term change, such as the Hohokam who occupied the Phoenix Basin for over a thousand years and developed a complex irrigation society. In the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, the Hohokam society experienced reductions in complexity and scale possibly associated with regional climatic events. We apply a framework designed to explore robustness in coupled social-ecological systems to the Hohokam Cultural Sequence. Based on this analysis, a stylized formal model is developed to explore the possibility that the success of the Hohokam irrigation system and associated social structure may have increased their vulnerability to rare climactic shocks.


Vision is the most dominant sense among the five senses of human in terms of perception. Visual perception is impossible without light. The sun as the biggest natural light source provides our life with light. Lighting, representing equipment for producing light, has been developed for us to visually perceive things in the dark such as night. Together with the improvement of artificial light sources, lighting has been utilized in various purposes for our everyday products. The roles of lighting can be defined as four dimensions: Visibility, Information transfer, Visual aesthetic enhancement, and Emotion induction. LED has been used in diverse electronic appliances in order to transfer information to the user. For example, the indicator of a battery charger shows whether or not the batteries are fully charged with lighting. Although LED lighting can be controlled with several factors, current products in the market have adopted only a few factors of the lighting: for example, turning on or off and changing colors to indicate the status. Therefore, this study aims to explore new interaction to transfer information with lighting factors. An experiment was designed to identify how lighting factors can be utilized to transfer information. Lighting factors were determined for the experiment. Six factors of lighting were defined based on literature review: Intensity, Color, Area, Movement, Texture, and Distribution. There are three types of information in human-product interaction: the information of a user, the product and the environment. Three products were chosen to represent each type of information: blood pressure gauge, external hard disk, and ozone concentration indicator. Three scenarios were given for each product depending on what level of information is necessary for the user. In order to control each factor of lighting experimental devices were made with Arduino and LED lighting. 30 participants were recruited for the experiment. They were invited to places where the products are actually used, and took part in the experiment. A retrospective interview was followed at the end of the experiment with each product. The data from the experiment was statistically analyzed. According to the results of statistical analysis, lighting factors can play an important role in information transfer. For example, Movement and Color are most effective factor to deliver information, which was in common between three types of product. The other factors of lighting are influential in information transfer depending on particular types of product. The study also revealed the way that lighting factors are selected is related to how urgently the information should be perceived. This implies that lighting is a useful way to intuitively and fast deliver information to people. However, it is also found out that dazzling lighting is not preferable in case that the information is neither important nor urgent to perceive. Therefore, a conclusion was drawn that lighting is an effective means to transfer information. This study will help designers understand the roles of lighting factors in information transfer and furthermore develop products with lighting that people love to use.


SUMMARY Rhesus (Rh) protein involvement in ammonia transport processes in freshwater fish has received considerable attention; however, parallel investigations in seawater species are scant. We exposed pufferfish to high environmental ammonia (HEA; 1 and 5 mmol l–1 NH4HCO3) and evaluated the patterns of ammonia excretion and gill Rh mRNA and protein expression. Gill H+-ATPase, NHE1, NHE2, NHE3, Na+/K+-ATPase (NKA), Na+/K+/2Cl– co-transporter (NKCC1) mRNA, H+-ATPase activity, NKA protein and activity, were also quantified. Activation of NKA by NH4+ was demonstrated in vitro. The downregulation of Rhbg mRNA and simultaneous upregulations of Rhcg1, H+-ATPase, NHE3, NKA, NKCC1 mRNA, H+-ATPase activity, and NKA protein and activity levels suggested that during HEA, ammonia excretion was mediated mainly by mitochondria-rich cells (MRCs) driven by NKA with basolateral NH4+ entry via NKA and/or NKCC1, and apical NH3 extrusion via Rhcg1. Reprotonation of NH3 by NHE3 and/or H+-ATPase would minimise back flux through the Rh channels. Downregulated Rhbg and Rhag mRNA observed in the gill during HEA suggests a coordinated protective response to minimise the influx of external ammonia via the pavement cells and pillar cells, respectively, while routing ammonia excretion through the MRCs. Exposure to hypercapnia (1% CO2 in air) resulted in downregulated gill and erythrocyte Rhag mRNA. Surprisingly, Rhag, Rhbg, Rhcg1 and Rhcg2 proteins responded to both hypercapnia and HEA with changes in their apparent molecular masses. A dual NH3/CO2 transport function of the pufferfish Rh proteins is therefore suggested. The results support and extend an earlier proposed model of pufferfish gill ammonia excretion that was based on immunolocalisation of the Rh proteins. Passive processes and/or Rhbg and Rhcg2 in the pavement cells may maintain basal levels of plasma ammonia but elevated levels may require active excretion via NKA and Rhcg1 in the MRCs.


Taltirelin is a synthetic thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) analog, under development by Tanabe Seiyaku for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. A new drug application (NDA) has been filed in Japan for the treatment of spinocerebellar disease (SCD) and is under review. Data suggest that taltirelin enhances dopamine neurotransmission, although this has been questioned. Taltirelin potentiates acetylcholine (ACh)-induced neuronal excitation in rat cerebral cortex neurons and inhibits high concentration AChinduced desensitization of neuronal excitation. TRH receptors have been located in several parts of the rat brain, including the pituitary, hypothalamus, and brain stem. These data provide support for the claim that taltirelin may have a potential benefit in dementia, which is consistent with limited clinical data. Taltirelin has been shown to be more potent and longer acting than TRH in increasing the amplitude of spinal reflex potentials and withdrawal flexor reflexes in spinal rats after iv administration. The compound is also active after intraduodenal administration, in contrast to TRH, indicating its potential for the treatment of spinal functional disorders. Analysts at Yamaichi had predicted that taltirelin would be launched in Japan in 1998; this was optimistic, though the new drug application is currently under review. Additionally, their prediction was of peak annual sales of less than 5 billion Yen; however taltirelin has been designated as an orphan drug in Japan.


The tremendous success of the Internet has been both a boon and bane for networking research. On one hand, Internet growth has led to a plethora of problems and has prompted work towards next-generation network architectures. While very important, the success of the Internet has also meant that such clean-slate proposals are difficult to deploy. Thus, it is imperative that we find practically deployable dirty-slate solutions. In this thesis, we explore the possibility of tackling network problems in the existing framework through the use of tunnels. Tunneling involves encapsulating protocols in each other and we argue that this can serve as an enabler to the use of existing protocols in novel ways. We have found that, in many cases, such an approach can be used to address the root cause of a problem afflicting the network without necessitating protocol changes. Further, the increasing adoption of tunnels in mainstream networks augurs well for the deployability of such tunnels-based solutions.
In this thesis, we focus on two important network problems and present tunnel-driven, dirty-slate solutions to address them. The first problem is routing scalability and includes the growing size of the Internet routing table. We note that routing table size is problematic since every router is required to maintain the entire table. Consequently, we propose ViAggre (Virtual Aggregation), a scalability technique that uses tunnels to ensure that individual routers only maintain a fraction of the global routing table. ViAggre is a "configuration-only" approach to shrinking the routing table on routers—it does not require any changes to router software and routing protocols and can be deployed independently and autonomously by any ISP. We present the design, evaluation, implementation and deployment of ViAggre to show that it can offer substantial reduction in routing table size with negligible overhead.
The second part of the thesis delves into IP Anycast. The route-to-closest-server abstraction offered by IP Anycast makes it an attractive primitive for service discovery. Further, the growth of P2P, overlay and multimedia applications presents new uses for IP Anycast. Unfortunately, IP Anycast suffers from serious limitations—it is difficult to deploy, scales poorly and lacks important features like load balancing. As a result, its use has been limited to a few critical infrastructure services like DNS root servers. Further, despite such deployments, the performance of IP Anycast and its interaction with IP routing practices is not well understood.
While these are valid concerns, we also believe that IP Anycast has compelling advantages. Motivated by these, we first conduct a detailed study of IP Anycast that equips us with the knowledge of how to maximize its potential. Building upon this, we present PIAS (Proxy IP Anycast Service), an anycast architecture that uses tunnels and proxies to decouple the anycast service from Internet routing. This allows PIAS to overcome IP Anycast's limitations while largely maintaining its strengths. We present simulations, measurement results, implementation and wide-area deployment details and describe how PIAS supports two important P2P and overlay applications.


We demonstrated that simple pre-filtering at the transmitter to constrain the channel bandwidth together with a maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detection algorithm can significantly improve spectral efficiency (SE). 96 × 100-Gb/s bandwidth-constrained polarization-division-multiplexing return- to-zero-QPSK channels were transmitted with 300% SE over 10 610 km using 52-km spans of 150-μ m 2 fiber and simple single-stage erbium-doped fiber amplifiers without any Raman amplification. We also achieved 400% SE over 4370 km using similar techniques.


The e-portfolio development and introduction are based on the fact that the reflective practice of its creation allows students to document and track learning, develop a coherent picture of experience, and improve self-understanding. The study took place at Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia); an assessment tool to design and develop electronic portfolios in the higher education system has been developed and tested in the study. A survey focused on the value of an electronic portfolio, which was positively assessed by the respondents, was conducted. The students participating in the study developed e-portfolios that described their reflections on the learning process and backed the arguments made with proof. The assessment showed that 60% of students should improve their cooperation skills while skills related to conceptualization and implementation, critical thinking and decision-making, assessment and modification, meta-cognition and progress should be developed in 44%, 33%, 52%, and 64% of students, respectively. The research results confirm that e-portfolios provide an appropriate platform for integrative learning that allows students to visualize the relationship between various concepts learned throughout the course and beyond.