OBJECTIVE: Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) is characterized by lung cysts, whose development is associated with matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) hyperactivity, principally that of MMP-2 and MMP-9. Our objective was to compare LAM patients and controls in terms of the levels of these MMPs, as well as to determine the safety and efficacy of treatment with doxycycline, a potent MMP inhibitor. METHODS: Prospective clinical study involving female LAM patients who received doxycycline (100 mg/day) for six months. Urine and blood samples were collected for the quantification of MMP-2 and MMP-9 before and after the treatment period. Samples from 10 healthy women were also collected. RESULTS:Of the 41 LAM patients who started the treatment, 34 completed the protocol. Serum and urinary MMP-9 levels were significantly lower in the controls than in the LAM patients (p < 0.0001). Comparing pre- and post-treatment values, we found that the median level of MMP-9 in serum decreased from 919 ng/mL to 871 ng/mL (p = 0.05), whereas that of MMP-9 in urine decreased from 11,558 pg/mL to 7,315 pg/mL (p = 0.10). After treatment, the median level of MMP-2 in serum was significantly lower (p = 0.04) and urinary MMP-2 levels were undetectable. Nausea, diarrhea, and epigastric pain were the most prevalent adverse affects and were often self-limiting. There was only one case in which the patient discontinued the treatment because of side effects. CONCLUSIONS: We have demonstrated, for the first time, a decrease in serum and urine levels of MMPs in LAM patients treated with doxycycline, which proved to be a safe medication, with mild and well-tolerated side effects.


Clustering multi-view data has been a fundamental research topic in the computer vision community. It has been shown that a better accuracy can be achieved by integrating information of all the views than just using one view individually. However, the existing methods often struggle with the issues of dealing with the large-scale datasets and the poor performance in reconstructing samples. This paper proposes a novel multi-view clustering method by learning a shared generative latent representation that obeys a mixture of Gaussian distributions. The motivation is based on the fact that the multi-view data share a common latent embedding despite the diversity among the various views. Specifically, benefitting from the success of the deep generative learning, the proposed model can not only extract the nonlinear features from the views, but render a powerful ability in capturing the correlations among all the views. The extensive experimental results on several datasets with different scales demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under a range of performance criteria.


China's pledge to reach carbon neutrality before 2060 is an ambitious goal and could provide the world with much-needed leadership on how to limit warming to +1.5°C warming above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. But the pathways that would achieve net zero by 2060 are still unclear, including the role of negative emissions technologies. We use the Global Change Analysis Model to simulate how negative emissions technologies, in general, and direct air capture (DAC) in particular, could contribute to China's meeting this target. Our results show that negative emissions could play a large role, offsetting on the order of 3 GtCO2 per year from difficult-to-mitigate sectors, such as freight transportation and heavy industry. This includes up to a 1.6 GtCO2 per year contribution from DAC, constituting up to 60% of total projected negative emissions in China. But DAC, like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and afforestation, has not yet been demonstrated anywhere approaching the scales required to meaningfully contribute to climate mitigation. Deploying NETs at these scales will have widespread impacts on financial systems and natural resources, such as water, land and energy in China.


O Roberta T. Garner, "Virtual Social Movements" O Charles Tilly, "Social Movements Here and Elsewhere, Now and Then" O W. Richard Scott, "A Call for Two-Way Traffic: Improving the Connection Between Social Movement and Organizational/lnstitutional Theory" O Elisabeth S. Clernens, "How Shall We Organize? Privatizers, Volunteers, and Policy Innovation in the 1990s" O Charles Perrow, "The Rationalist Urge in Sociology and Social Movements: Zald as History" O Gerald F. Davis and Doug McAdam, "Corporations, Classes, and Social Movements After Managerialism" O Nicola Beisel, "Searching for the Lost Race: Culture in Texts and Images in the Abortion Debate" O Yeheskel (Zeke) Hasenfeld, "Human Service Organizations and the Production of Moral Categories " O John D. McCarthy, "Reinvigorating ZMRM: ZaldlMcCarthy Resource Mobilization" O Doug McAdam, "Revisiting the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: Toward a More Synthetic Understanding of the Origins of Contention"


Centerness is defined as a quality of multi-agent systems (groups) where agents share a common set of system goals and interact so the system will achieve those goals. A pair of measures is identified to capture the two dimensions of centerness: distance-weighted fragmentation and average goal centerness. As a case study, the measures of centerness are applied to six teacher professional development groups within the Information Technology in Science Center for Teaching and Learning. The calculated measures of centerness of these groups generally conform to the expectations. Insights on using this measure of centerness to evaluate centerness in other professional development programs are included.


We performed bulk-sensitive x-ray absorption (XAS) in the partial fluorescence yield (PFY) mode, and resonant x-ray emission (RXES) measurements of the solid solution Sc (7 at.%):Ce at the Ce L-3 (2p-->5d) and M-4,M-5 (3d-->4f) absorption edges. We deduce an increasing 4f-band hybridization from the gamma-phase stable at room temperature to the low-temperature alpha-Ce, consistent with the "Kondo collapse" scenario for the transition. The enhanced intrinsic resolution of PFY-XAS allows us to resolve the elusive three-peak structure predicted by theory. Thanks to the selective enhancement typical of RXES, we could estimate the small but non-negligible contribution of the f(2) configuration in the hybrid ground state, and its change in the two phases. The linear dichroism effect in the M-4,M-5 RXES spectra is consistent with the observed hybridization of 4f and conduction states.


Leprosy is still an important problem in about 80 countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, some 2.4 million persons being estimated to have the disease in 1994. The WHO-recommended standard multidrug therapy (MDT) was introduced in the 1980s and has been shown to be effective in combating the disease. Experiences based on many thousands of patients treated with MDT over the past decade indicate extremely low relapse rates (cumulative relapse rates around 1%). By the end of 1993, some 5.6 million patients had been cured, and the global cumulative MDT coverage of registered patients had reached 89%. The number of registered cases fell from 5.4 million in 1985 to 1.7 million in 1994. The significant progress made in leprosy control enabled the World Health Assembly in 1991 to set a goal for eliminating leprosy as a public health problem by the year 2000. One important epidemiological factor is that leprosy is very unevenly distributed: 80% of the problem is confined to only five countries and 92% to just 25 countries. The elimination strategy envisages identifying and treating with MDT a total of about 5 million cases from 1994 to the year 2000. The cost of dealing with these cases has been estimated at US$ 420 million, including US$ 150 million for the drugs.


OBJECTIVES: To estimate women's understanding of the definition of full term and the gestational age at which it is safe to deliver an otherwise healthy pregnancy. METHODS: A national sample of 650 insured women who recently gave birth were surveyed about their beliefs related to the meaning of full term and the safety of delivery at various gestational ages. Descriptive statistics including means and 95% confidence intervals were calculated for the demographic variables and survey measures; multivariate logistic regression analyses were also performed. RESULTS: Twenty-four percent of women surveyed considered a baby of 34–36 weeks of gestation to be full term, and 50.8% believed full term to occur at 37–38 weeks of gestation, while only 25.2% considered full term to occur at 39–40 weeks of gestation. In response to, "What is the earliest point in pregnancy that it is safe to deliver the baby, should there be no other medical complications requiring early delivery?" 51.7% choose 34–36 weeks of gestation, and 40.7% choose 37–38 weeks of gestation, while only 7.6% choose 39–40 weeks of gestation. CONCLUSION: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that elective deliveries not occur before 39 weeks of gestation. However, many women believe that full term is reached before 37 weeks of gestation, and most believe full term occurs before 39 weeks of gestation. Nearly half believe it is safe to deliver before 37 weeks of gestation, and almost all believe it is safe to deliver before 39 weeks of gestation. The data reported here suggest that many women believe that term is reached early and that a safe delivery does not require waiting to 39 weeks of gestation. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: III


Indonesia has different types of plants and fruits. Fruits, vegetables, and tubers can contain beta-carotene and are antioxidants. Generally, local fruits have bright colors such as red, orange and yellow, such as mango, papaya, orange, persimmon, etc. The purpose of this study was to identify beta-carotene compounds found in fruit. The findings are designed to inform the public about the importance of beta-carotene in fruit. The samples measured in this study included pineapple, papaya, guava, Medan orange, star fruit, melon, mango, banana, and dragon. All samples are from traditional markets in Bekasi. The research method used was UV-Vis spectrophotometry. Beta-carotene measurements were performed at a wavelength of 450 nm. The highest content of beta-carotene was found in pineapple at 123.36 micrograms per milliliter, while the lowest was found in dragon fruit, at 2.253 micrograms per milliliter. Pineapple flesh contains sugar, vitamins, minerals, and retinol, and its pale yellow color indicates the presence of beta-carotene.


This paper proposes an adaptive discrete finite-time synergetic control (ADFTSC) scheme based on a multi-rate sensor fusion estimator for flexible-joint mechanical systems in the presence of unmeasured states and dynamic uncertainties. Multi-rate sensors are employed to observe the system states which cannot be directly obtained by encoders due to the existence of joint flexibilities. By using an extended Kalman filter (EKF), the finite-time synergetic controller is designed based on a sensor fusion estimator which estimates states and parameters of the mechanical system with multi-rate measurements. The proposed controller can guarantee the finite-time convergence of tracking errors by the theoretical derivation. Simulation and experimental studies are included to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


In this paper, an adaptive PID sliding mode controller is proposed for the position control of electro-hydrostatic actuator(EHA) systems with system uncertainties and saturation in the motor. An EHA prototype is developed and system modeling and parameter identification are executed. Then, adaptive PID sliding mode controller and optimal anti-windup PID controller are designed and the performance and robustness of the two control systems are compared by experiment. It was found that the adaptive PID sliding mode control system has better performance and is more robust to system uncertainties than the optimal anti-windup PID control system.


Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: a Clinical Manual Authors: Deborah L. Cabaniss, Sabrina Cherry, Carolyn J. Douglas, Anna R. Schwartz Wiley-Blackwell Publishing USD 82.50;pp379; ISBN: 978-0470684719 When talking about psychodynamic psychotherapy, one could easily associate it with Freud and his theories on unconsciousness and ego. Yet to most young trainees in psychiatry, little is known about how this form of psychotherapy is conducted after decades of development. Do we still need a couch that the patient will be lying on, and to talk about whatever comes into his or her mind? Do we still attempt to interpret how one's Oedipal complex is unresolved? This clinical manual is a useful guide for psychotherapists or trainees in psychiatry who are interested in knowing how psychodynamic psychotherapy is conducted. Born as a syllabus for psychiatry residents in the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the primary aim of this book is not to delve deeply into the theoretical issues, which might be too complex to comprehend for beginners. Rather, it is set out as a blueprint for clinicians to use as a reference when they are beginning to practise this form of psychotherapy. The book is divided into 7 parts. The authors first gave a brief and concise introduction to the principles and theories of psychodynamic psychotherapy, explaining how it is believed to work. It is then followed by how the therapist should choose and evaluate patients, in which different forms of ego functions and defences were taught, so that we could make formulations for individual patients and tailor-make the therapy. The third part goes back to more technical issues that are common to many forms of psychotherapy like setting boundaries, establishing a therapeutic alliance, logistic issues for the sessions, and so forth. Having discussed the basic concepts, part 4 focuses on the techniques of listening, reflecting and intervening in the course of psychodynamic psychotherapy. These could help the therapist assess the level of defence and ego function, so as to choose an appropriate intervention. With these techniques on hand, the manual then goes on to talk about their application into elements in psychodynamic psychotherapy such as resistance, transference, and dreams. Part 6 demonstrates how, by using all these skills on the different elements in the therapy, one could eventually bring about changes and target problems such as interpersonal difficulties, poor self-esteem, and weakened ego functions. The last part of the book focuses on specific issues related to the termination of therapy that a therapist should become familiar with. …


There is a significant unmet need for treatments of patients with acute lung injury (ALI) and/or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The primary mechanism that leads to resolution of alveolar and pulmonary edema is active vectorial Na(+) and Cl(-) transport across the alveolar epithelium. Several studies have suggested a role for adenosine receptors in regulating this fluid transport in the lung. Furthermore, these studies point to the A(2A) subtype of adenosine receptor (A(2A)R) as playing a role to enhance fluid transport, suggesting that activation of the A(2A)R may enhance alveolar fluid clearance (AFC). The current studies test the potential therapeutic value of the A(2A)R agonist GW328267C to accelerate resolution of alveolar edema and ALI/ARDS in rats. GW328267C, at concentrations of 10(-5) M to 10(-3) M, instilled into the airspaces, increased AFC in control animals. GW328267C did not increase AFC beyond that produced by maximal β-adrenergic stimulation. The effect of GW328267C was inhibited by amiloride but was not affected by cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator inhibition. The drug was tested in three models of ALI, HCl instillation 1 h, LPS instillation 16 h, and live Escherichia coli instillation 2 h before GW328267C instillation. After either type of injury, GW328267C (10(-4) M) decreased pulmonary edema formation and restored AFC, measured 1 h after GW328267C instillation. These findings show that GW328267C has beneficial effects in experimental models of ALI and may be a useful agent for treating patients with ALI or prophylactically to prevent ALI.


Disseminated Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) infection has reached epidemic proportions and is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in AIDS patients. We have developed a liposomal preparation of amikacin, VS107, which incorporates the drug in 54-65 nm diameter unilameller phospholipid vesicles and is stable at 4 degrees C for more than 4 months. VS107 exhibits superior microbiological and pharmacological activity over the free amikacin and improves the survival of mice in the established model for MAC infection. The serum half-life of VS107 in mice was 9.1 h and a peak serum level of 730 mg/L was obtained after administering three doses of 160 mg/kg. For the therapeutic study, beige mice infected with 10(7) cfu M. avium complex strain 101 were randomised to be treated with placebo liposomes, buffer, free amikacin or VS107 The drugs were administered via the caudal vein thrice weekly for 1, 3, 5 or 7 weeks beginning 5 days after infection. After 51 days of treatment with VS107, the number of viable M. avium in the liver and spleen was a 100 fold lower than was achieved with conventional amikacin (P < 0.01), and more than six decimal logarithms lower than was found untreated controls (P < 0.001). VS107 was well tolerated and might be a suitable candidate for treating human MAC infections.


BACKGROUND
Studies that have evaluated the use of intravenous vitamin C in adults with sepsis who were receiving vasopressor therapy in the intensive care unit (ICU) have shown mixed results with respect to the risk of death and organ dysfunction.

METHODS
In this randomized, placebo-controlled trial, we assigned adults who had been in the ICU for no longer than 24 hours, who had proven or suspected infection as the main diagnosis, and who were receiving a vasopressor to receive an infusion of either vitamin C (at a dose of 50 mg per kilogram of body weight) or matched placebo administered every 6 hours for up to 96 hours. The primary outcome was a composite of death or persistent organ dysfunction (defined by the use of vasopressors, invasive mechanical ventilation, or new renal-replacement therapy) on day 28.

RESULTS
A total of 872 patients underwent randomization (435 to the vitamin C group and 437 to the control group). The primary outcome occurred in 191 of 429 patients (44.5%) in the vitamin C group and in 167 of 434 patients (38.5%) in the control group (risk ratio, 1.21; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.04 to 1.40; P = 0.01). At 28 days, death had occurred in 152 of 429 patients (35.4%) in the vitamin C group and in 137 of 434 patients (31.6%) in the placebo group (risk ratio, 1.17; 95% CI, 0.98 to 1.40) and persistent organ dysfunction in 39 of 429 patients (9.1%) and 30 of 434 patients (6.9%), respectively (risk ratio, 1.30; 95% CI, 0.83 to 2.05). Findings were similar in the two groups regarding organ-dysfunction scores, biomarkers, 6-month survival, health-related quality of life, stage 3 acute kidney injury, and hypoglycemic episodes. In the vitamin C group, one patient had a severe hypoglycemic episode and another had a serious anaphylaxis event.

CONCLUSIONS
In adults with sepsis receiving vasopressor therapy in the ICU, those who received intravenous vitamin C had a higher risk of death or persistent organ dysfunction at 28 days than those who received placebo. (Funded by the Lotte and John Hecht Memorial Foundation; LOVIT ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT03680274.).


Mobile devices, namely smart phones and tablets, have recently experienced remarkable proliferation. Beside private users, companies realize the potential of increasing the mobile productivity of their workforce. In this paper, we take a business-to-business perspective on mobile app stores by evaluating the potential of particular app stores for business-related apps. For this purpose, we first review the existing landscape of mobile app stores, and then assess their suitability for business-tobusiness purposes. For some mobile platforms there already exist alternatives to the official app store. We also judge if they could serve as model for B2B purposes. Overall, we highlight three distinct cases from this analysis: the "Google case", the "Apple case" and the "Web case". For all of them we show how the distribution of B2B could fit in. We then take a look at the specific aspects that should be considered for designing app stores for B2B needs. We suggest concepts for realizing these aspects. Some of the aspects, however, remain open. We discuss them and propose considerable potential for further work.


The Ta-Nb-Zr-REE-rich McKeel Lake alkali granite pegmatite-aplite dike swarm is hosted within the late Silurian multiphase alkali granite intrusion (Welsford) near Browns Flats in southwestern New Brunswick. A steep easterly dipping series of pegmatite-aplite dikes trending 170° can be traced 150 m along strike; they are up to 40 cm wide, closely spaced (10–20 cm apart), and interconnected by narrow branching dikelets that generally trend perpendicular to the overall strike direction. The Welsford intrusion has mantle A-type affinities characterized by enrichment of Zr, Ta, Nb, Th, and rare earth elements (REE). Two separate sets of dikes have been identified: (1) an unmineralized fine-grained porphyry, which occurs at depth and seems to be the youngest intrusive phase; and (2) a mineralized pegmatite-aplite dike swarm (419 ± 20 Ma) that crops out at surface. The mineralized pegmatite-aplite dikes likely represent a late magmatic, highly fractionated phase of the Welsford intrusion. XRF and INAA data indicate that the Welsford intrusions and related pegmatite-aplite dikes show elevated levels of Ta (74–220 ppm), Nb (750–3,040 ppm), Zr (1,450–36,000 ppm), Y (540–3,070 ppm), Th (170–870 ppm), U (60–250 ppm), Ce (430–1,950 ppm) and Yb (110–290 ppm). Electron microprobe analysis of two samples identified Ta-Nb- and REE-rich phases: euxenite, fergusonite, aeschynite, (Y)-aeschynite, and a REE carbonate.


Introduction The natural order of sequence in considering the relations between the Mesozoic floras of North and South America must be the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous. Triassic Rocks of Triassic age are known in many and widely separated parts of the world, and they are of great thickness, which implies a varied and relatively long-continued period of geologic activity. It is also evident from the thick deposits of coal known at several points, and in other ways, that vegetation must have been fairly abundant and considerably varied in character; yet the determinable forms of plant life that have thus far been recovered from the Triassic are surprisingly few in number—in fact, it is doubtful if the known flora far exceeds 300 species. This is, of course, to be largely attributed to the fact that much of the deposits were laid down under marine conditions, where one would hardly . . .


Globally-fluctuating climate imposed serious abiotic stresses on the agricultural sector, leading to noticeable, and sometimes disastrous, losses in yields and/or quality of crops; however, in certain cases, plants could survive stress with relatively low reductions, and sometimes even with some enhancements as a reaction to changed environment, especially in the case of mild stress. An experiment was conducted in 2017 and 2018 in Debrecen, Hungary to evaluate the mild drought stress influence on the yield and quality of three soybean cultivars. The results showed that both ES Pallador and Pedro cultivars could achieve more yield when subjected to mild drought conditions; however, protein concentration was enhanced in ES Pallador whereas slightly degraded in Pedro under drought. The cultivar Pannonia Kincse followed different trend; both yield and protein concentration were reduced under drought. Oil concentration of the three cultivars did not show significant changes; however, it always followed opposite trend to that of protein concentration. It could be concluded that both ES Pallador and Pedro are recommended to be grown under rain fed conditions in Debrecen, whereas Pannonia Kincse is recommended under irrigation conditions.


Ensemble of a dark grey wool mohair consisting of:

A) Jacket in boxed style. Single breasted with three large, circular, horn buttons and bound buttonholes; notched collar. Bracelet length, set-in sleeves. Lined in dark gray silk.

Designer's label at inside center back neckline: "Made in France / Boutique / Christian Dior / Paris " and stamped on label: "10118"

B) Dress. Sleeveless, with shallow, wide rounded neckline. Natural waist with an A-line over skirt and with under skirt of dark gray silk and 7" hemline of matching wool creating a tiered or multi-layer look. Center back zipper with hook & eye. Skirt lined in dark gray silk and bodice lined in black organza with black grosgrain ribbon petersham and black silk noil support structure.


In this paper we consider the suitability of the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model for an inclusive information environment. The AccessForAll approach to digital information asserts that every user has an equal right to information resources. The FRBR study identified bibliographic records users and, for them, determined a minimum set of entities, and their attributes and relationships, to determine a model of a record or resources that was necessary to satisfy what were, at the time, determined to be recommended user requirements. Our examination of the FRBR model shows that, in fact, more attributes are probably necessary for an inclusive environment.


On the 19th-century American stage, the call for a "romanticized" representation of the Indian was part of the national effort to produce an indigenous literature. The popularity of such Indian stereotypes as the resistant but rapidly vanishing Noble Savage Metamora and the acquiescent Indian Princess Pocahontas was sustained by a wider political ideology that sought to define the limits and character of a distinctly American national identity. However, the highly sentimentalized Indian stereotypes that dominated the American stage in the 1820s and 1830s gradually turned white Americans' attention from the historical reality of the Indians, whose presence had long required political action, to the imaginative realm of myth and symbol. John Brougham, an Irish actor-playwright who immigrated to America in 1842, quickly captured the essential discrepancy in the perception of the Indian as image/fiction and the native as reality. With his two burlesques, Met-a-mora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847) and Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855), Brougham signaled the end of the serious Indian dramas of the 1820s and 1830s and awakened the American audience of the time into an awareness of the absurdly false images they had been seen for so long and the excessively sentimentalized acting style they had been applauding. Through their essentially humorous approach to the national image of the Indian, Brougham's burlesques constitute a reliable register of the social, political, and cultural context of mid-19th-century American society. His Indian characters are rendered closer to the lower classes and satirize the dominant political ideology that offered white Americans a world vision and historical sense that blurred their perception of the interaction between myth and history, thus permitting them to celebrate the Indian-symbol while abusing the native.


This project offers a provisional, practitioner-oriented notion of 'computational ambivalence' in experimental music, addressing how many musicians sensitive to the non-neutrality of music technologies resist adopting a single overarching stance towards software, and therefore cannot extricate their technological questioning from music making itself.

Computational ambivalence is established in relation to three idiosyncratically-defined 'threads' — experimental music, music computing, and critical cultural computing — and is exhibited in and through a 'field guide', speculative historical case studies on Iannis Xenakis's Theraps and James Tenney's Quintext, reflections on my own musical practice, and an accompanying portfolio of music and software.


Jean Rhys's Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography was not actually written by Rhys, but by novelist David Plante in an act that can only be characterized as ghostwriting. This essay theorizes ghostwriting in the context of autobiography and life writing, and shows how the ghostwriting process results in contested layers of written and spoken texts. Rhys resists the ghostwriter's displacement of her spoken text by quoting her own written texts verbatim throughout Smile, Please, thus in effect auto-ghostwriting her autobiography.


Planning for drought relief and floods in developing countries is greatly hampered by the lack of a sufficiently dense network of weather stations measuring precipitation. In this paper, we test the utility of three satellite products to augment the ground-based precipitation measurement to provide improved spatial estimates of rainfall. The three products are the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) product (3B42), Multi-Sensor Precipitation Estimate–Geostationary (MPEG) and the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR). The accuracy of the three products is tested in the Lake Tana basin in Ethiopia, where 38 weather stations were available in 2010 with a full record of daily precipitation amounts. Daily gridded satellite-based rainfall estimates were compared to (1) point-observed ground rainfall and (2) areal rainfall in the major river sub-basins of Lake Tana. The result shows that the MPEG and CFSR satellites provided the most accurate rainfall estimates. On average, for 38 stations, 78 and 86% of the observed rainfall variation is explained by MPEG and CFSR data, respectively, while TRMM explained only 17% of the variation. Similarly, the areal comparison indicated a better performance for both MPEG and CFSR data in capturing the pattern and amount of rainfall. MPEG and CFSR also have a lower root mean square error (RMSE) compared to the TRMM 3B42 satellite rainfall. The bias indicated that TRMM 3B42 was, on average, unbiased, whereas MPEG consistently underestimated the observed rainfall. CFSR often produced large overestimates.


This thesis is concerned with computational problems relevant to simulate elastically deformable bodies with changing topology. In particular, I present interactive techniques for the physically-based simulation of cuts in elastic bodies, for the collision detection among these dynamically separating objects, and for the modeling of residual stress in intact soft tissues to simulate the flap shrinkage after cutting. One motivation of this research is to enhance the functionality and performance of surgery simulators, which are becoming accepted in preoperative surgical planning and in surgical skills training, and the potential of which is yet to be fully exploited.


U_60 ([UO_2(O_2)(OH)]_60^60− in water) is a uranyl peroxide nanocluster with a fullerene topology and O _h symmetry. U_60 clusters can exist in crystalline solids or in liquids; however, little is known of their behavior at high pressures. We compressed the U_60-bearing material: Li_68K_12(OH)_20[UO_2(O_2)(OH)]_60(H_2O)_310 ( $Fm\bar 3$ F m 3 ¯ ; a = 37.884 Å) in a diamond anvil cell to determine its response to increasing pressure. Three length scales and corresponding structural features contribute to the compression response: uranyl peroxide bonds (<0.5 nm), isolated single nanoclusters (2.5 nm), and the long-range periodicity of nanoclusters within the solid (>3.7 nm). Li_68K_12(OH)_20[UO_2(O_2)(OH)]_60(H_2O)_310 transformed to a tetragonal structure below 2 GPa and irreversibly amorphized between 9.6 and 13 GPa. The bulk modulus of the tetragonal U_60-bearing material was 25 ± 2 GPa. The pressure-induced amorphous phase contained intact U_60 clusters, which were preserved beyond the loss of long-range periodicity. The persistence of U_60 clusters at high pressure may have been enhanced by the interaction between U_60 nanoclusters and the alcohol pressure medium. Once formed, U_60 nanoclusters persist regardless of their associated long-range ordering—in crystals, amorphous solids, or solutions.


From its beginnings as a single link between two research institutions in 1969, the Internet has grown in size and scope, to become a global internetwork connecting over 700 million computers, and 1.7 billion users. No longer a niche facility for scientific collaboration, the Internet now touches the lives of the world's population, irrespective of their occupation or geography. It is used by people the world over, to pay bills, read the news, listen to music, watch videos, telephone or video-conference friends and family, and much more. The Internet is the premier communications network of our age.
Unfortunately, however, there are some respects in which the Internet lags the networks it replaces. In particular, with respect to reliability, the Internet falls far short of the Public Switched Telephone Network which proceeded it. Whereas the PSTN sought, and often delivered the vaunted "five nines" of reliability, the Internet struggles to compete. As for the cause of this reliability shortfall, available evidence indicates that much of the shortfall is due to the unreliability of IP routers themselves.
Given the importance of a reliable Internet to contemporary society, vendors and researchers have proposed a number of solutions to either improve the reliability of individual IP routers, or to make networks more resilient to the unavailability of a single router. While having some promise, these existing solutions face significant obstacles to widespread deployment. Thus, in this dissertation, we endeavor to find or construct a practical, readily deployable, method for mitigating the outages caused by IP routers.
To achieve our goal, we take inspiration from previous proposals, which advocated the use of link migration. These proposals improve network resilience, by moving links away from a failed (or failing) router, to an in-service router. To understand the constraints of a practical solution, and resolve the limitations of previous proposals, we conduct extensive experimentation, and study source code and protocol specifications. Using the insights produced by these studies, we construct a practical, readily deployable migration solution with sub-second outage times.


We, humans, created clocks to measure time and invented maps to navigate to locations. However, these tools only assist our natural capabilities for processing temporal and spatial information as we guide our lives through time and space – capabilities, that we share with other species. However, our bodies are not equipped with a sensory organ for the passage of time. Time is ultimately not a material object of the world for which we have a unique receptor system as we have ears for sound or eyes for light, with respective processing stages in the brain. The perception of duration – the interval between two successive time points of events – is essential for survival. Animals must integrate durations to reach sources of food or find mating partners or adapt fundamental cognitive processes such as decision-making and planning of action.

The perception of time is not associated with specific sensory pathways but uses a highly distributed system in the brain. The medial prefrontal cortex appears to be one prominent member for time perception and duration processing. Cells in the frontal cortex exhibit climbing neural activation as a potential neural mechanism for the representation of duration. Climbing activity has been widely associated with mnemonic functions in temporal information processing.
To get a better understanding of how duration estimation as a temporal integration process in the supra-second range is represented in the rodent brain, I performed in-vivo extracellular recordings in the medial prefrontal cortex of behaving Mongolian gerbils (Meriones unguiculatus). Specifically, I sought to find out if characteristic effects of magnitude estimation, like range effect, regression effect, and scalar variability, are captured by the encoding system. I designed and established a time estimation task, which required subjects to judge duration in a retrospective and prospective manner:
First, subjects had to measure the experience of an unexpected time stimulus in hindsight and second reproduce this duration of experience in time passing.
Experiments were performed in a virtual reality behavioral setup in which subjects traveled along a virtual linear corridor. Locomotion was tracked with an optical sensor-equipped treadmill.
I showed that the behavioral paradigm I used is effective in reproducing known behavioral effects, such as range effect, regression effect, and scalar variability in experiments with humans. I succeeded in using the timing task paradigm with gerbils and gained comparable results to humans. My experiments demonstrate that gerbils can learn and perform complex time estimation experiments that are more intense in cognitive processing than time discrimination tasks or experiments based on peak procedure paradigms.
With recordings in gerbil medial prefrontal cortex, I showed that prefrontal neurons respond with various patterns of neural activity to the passage of time. However, relevant patterns were mostly observed for prospective time estimation while reproducing a known time stimulus until a future point in time than for retrospective time estimation, where duration had to be judged for past events.
The majority of prefrontal neurons responded by ramping neuronal activity. In doing so, the size of the time stimulus was encoded in gradually adapted total discharge rate, or by gradually adapted ramping speed in a generalized activity pattern until reaching a unified threshold. The adaptation of ramping speed was put into effect by temporally scaling the response pattern, notably towards the end of time reproduction. The applied scaling followed the prediction of stimulus sizes, yet with minor oversizing.
Hence, a key discovery was that no matter the neurons' response, the rate at which they adjusted their activity depended on the time interval required.
I also investigated whether cells encoded the accuracy and precision of the duration estimate after the end of a trial, where animals were informed about their performance via visual feedback and appetitive reinforcement. On a populational level, the adaptation of firing rates to the level of accuracy demonstrated that regression effects, resulting from strategies to cope with uncertainty about sensory information, are represented by neuronal activity. Precision of duration estimates was represented by the magnitude of firing as well, although to an internal reference instead of an absolute external value. Using higher firing rates to provide higher information content for less regression and low variance corroborates the fact that the objective of timed behavior is maximal accuracy and minimal variance.

Therefore, my results demonstrate that the medial prefrontal cortex in rodents profoundly provides timer functions at an internal clock stage. However, the prefrontal cortex does not exclusively code for time but also fulfills mnemonic functions by integrating the outcome and interaction of the decision with the environment. This integration might serve to compare the present outcome with previously stored values in memory. Activity during delay phase supports the idea that the prefrontal cortex concurrently acts as a memory stage integrating prior knowledge and updating posterior knowledge about the stimulus duration in accordance with Bayesian inference.


Experimental evolution studies have examined coevolutionary dynamics between bacteria and lytic phages, where two models for antagonistic coevolution dominate: arms‐race dynamics (ARD) and fluctuating‐selection dynamics (FSD). Here, we tested the ability for Pseudomonas aeruginosa to coevolve with phage OMKO1 during 10 passages in the laboratory, whether ARD versus FSD coevolution occurred, and how coevolution affected a predicted phenotypic trade‐off between phage resistance and antibiotic sensitivity. We used a unique "deep" sampling design, where 96 bacterial clones per passage were obtained from the three replicate coevolving communities. Next, we examined phenotypic changes in growth ability, susceptibility to phage infection and resistance to antibiotics. Results confirmed that the bacteria and phages coexisted throughout the study with one community undergoing ARD, whereas the other two showed evidence for FSD. Surprisingly, only the ARD bacteria demonstrated the anticipated trade‐off. Whole genome sequencing revealed that treatment populations of bacteria accrued more de novo mutations, relative to a control bacterial population. Additionally, coevolved bacteria presented mutations in genes for biosynthesis of flagella, type‐IV pilus and lipopolysaccharide, with three mutations fixing contemporaneously with the occurrence of the phenotypic trade‐off in the ARD‐coevolved bacteria. Our study demonstrates that both ARD and FSD coevolution outcomes are possible in a single interacting bacteria‐phage system and that occurrence of predicted phage‐driven evolutionary trade‐offs may depend on the genetics underlying evolution of phage resistance in bacteria. These results are relevant for the ongoing development of lytic phages, such as OMKO1, in personalized treatment of human patients, as an alternative to antibiotics.


Without evidence, research would be nearly impossible.
Whereas a conjecture in mathematics must be proven logically until it is accepted as theorem, most research disciplines depend on empirical evidence.
In the natural sciences, researchers conduct experiments to create the most objective evidence to evaluate hypotheses.
In the humanities and social sciences, most evidence is extracted from textual sources.
These can be news articles spanning several decades or transcribed interviews.
However, not every document or interview contains statements that support or contradict a hypothesis, causing a time-intensive search that might be sped up with modern natural language processing techniques.

Finding evidence ---or evidence detection--- is a fast growing field that is currently gaining relevance because of the increased focus on detecting fake news.
Some research focusses not only on evidence detection, but also on linking evidence to hypotheses, or evidence linking.
Other work aims at speeding up the decision processes regarding whether a hypothesis is valid or not.
Yet another focus of research in evidence detection aims at finding evidence in medical abstracts.
Although these approaches are promising, their applicability to research in the humanities and social sciences has not yet been evaluated.
Most evidence detection and evidence linking models are also static in nature.
Usually, we first create a large dataset in which text snippets are labelled as evidence.
This dataset is then used to train and evaluate different models that do not change after their initial training.
Furthermore, most work assumes that all users interpret evidence in a similar way so that a single evidence detection or evidence linking model can be used by all users.

This PhD project aims at evaluating whether modern natural language processing techniques can be used to support researchers in the humanities and social sciences in finding evidence so that they can evaluate their hypotheses.
We first investigated how real users search for evidence and link this to self-defined hypotheses.
We found that there is no canonical user; some users define hypotheses first and then search for evidence.
Others search for evidence first and then define hypotheses.
We also found that the interpretation of evidence varies between different users.
Similar hypotheses are supported by different pieces of evidence, and the same evidence can be used to support different hypotheses.
This means that any evidence detection model must be specific to a single user.

User-specific evidence detection models require a large amount of data, which is labour-intensive to create.
Therefore, we investigate how much data is necessary until an interactively trained evidence detection model outperforms a well generalising, state-of-the-art model.
In our evaluation, we found that an evidence detection model, which had first been trained on external data and then been fine-tuned interactively, requires only a few training documents to yield better results than a state-of-the-art model trained only on the external data.

Regarding the practical benefit of this research, we built an annotation or coding tool allowing users to label sentences as evidence and link these pieces of evidence to self-defined hypotheses.
We evaluated this tool, named EDoHa (Evidence Detection fOr Hypothesis vAlidation), in a user study with a group of students and one with colleagues from the research training group KRITIS.
EDoHa and the data to pre-train evidence detection and evidence linking models are published under an open source licence so that researchers outside the research training group can also benefit from it.
This project contributes not only to evidence detection and natural language processing, but also to research methodologies in qualitative text-based research.


Partial compliance with assigned treatment regimes is common in drug trials and calls for a causal analysis of the effect of treatment actually received. As such observed exposure is no longer randomized, selection bias must be carefully accounted for. The framework of potential outcomes allows this by defining a subject-specific treatment-free reference outcome, which may be latent and is modelled in relation to the observed (treated) data. Causal parameters enter these structural models explicitly. In this paper we review recent progress in randomization-based inference for structural mean modelling, from the additive linear model to the structural generalized linear models. An arsenal of tools currently available for standard association regression has steadily been developed in the structural setting, providing many parallel features to help randomization-based inference. We argue that measurement error on exposure is an important practical complication that has, however, not yet been addressed. We show how standard additive linear structural mean models are robust against unbiased measurement error and how efficient, asymptotically unbiased inference can be drawn when the degree of measurement error bias is known. The impact of measurement error is illustrated in a blood pressure example and finite sample properties are verified by simulation. We end with a plea for more and careful use of this methodology and point to directions for further development.


The interactions of a beam of hard and spatio-temporally coherent X-rays with a soft-matter sample primarily induce a transverse distribution of exit phase variations δϕ (retardations or advancements in pieces of the wave front exiting the object compared to the incoming wave front) whose free-space propagation over a distance z gives rise to intensity contrast gz. For single-distance image detection and |δϕ| ≪ 1 all-order-in-z phase-intensity contrast transfer is linear in δϕ. Here we show that ideal coherence implies a decay of the (shot-)noise-to-signal ratio in gz and of the associated phase noise as z(-1/2) and z(-1), respectively. Limits on X-ray dose thus favor large values of z. We discuss how a phase-scaling symmetry, exact in the limit δϕ → 0 and dynamically unbroken up to |δϕ| ∼ 1, suggests a filtering of gz in Fourier space, preserving non-iterative quasi-linear phase retrieval for phase variations up to order unity if induced by multi-scale objects inducing phase variations δϕ of a broad spatial frequency spectrum. Such an approach continues to be applicable under an assumed phase-attenuation duality. Using synchrotron radiation, ex and in vivo microtomography on frog embryos exemplifies improved resolution compared to a conventional single-distance phase-retrieval algorithm.


Mobility network is crucial for ensuring territorial safety with respect to natural and technological hazards.
They represent a basic support to community's everyday life although being exposed elements often
characterized by high vulnerability to different hazards and, in the meanwhile, strategic equipments for
emergency management. Physical damages or the lack in functioning of those networks may greatly
increase the loss of human lives caused by hazardous events as well as produce relevant economic
damages at medium and long term. Although the relevance of the mobility networks in assuring territorial
safety is at present largely recognized, risk analyses have been long focused on buildings' vulnerability or,
even where they have paid attention to mobility network, they have been mainly focused on the physical
damages that a given hazard could may induce on individual elements of such network. It is recent the
awareness that mobility network represents a system, characterized by relevant interdependences both
among its elements and among network infrastructures and urban systems. Based on these assumptions,
this paper points out the heterogeneous aspects of the mobility network vulnerability and their relevance in
increasing the overall territorial or urban vulnerability to hazardous events. Therefore, an in-depth
investigation of the concept of mobility network vulnerability is provided, in order to highlight the aspects
mostly investigated and more recent research perspectives. Finally, a case study in the Campania Region is
presented in order to point out how traditional risk analyses, generally referred to individual hazards, can
sometimes led to invest in the mobility network improvement or development which, targeted to increase
the security of a territory result, on the opposite, in an increase of the territorial vulnerability.


1. Cytochrome c was prepared from horse heart according to the method of Keilin and Hartree (1945). The material obtained was chromatographed on a column of the cation exchange resin Amberlite IRC-50, on which it separated into four fractions. The fastest moving; fraction was found to consist of an iron-free protein. The remaining three fractions comprised a small amount of reduced cytochrome c, the main bulk of the cytochrome c in the oxidised state, and three narrow bands of the acid-modified haem-protein. The oxidised cytochrome c was found to have a purity comparable with that of electrophoretically pure cytochrome c obtained by other workers. 2. A quantitative amino acid analysis of cytochrome c was carried out after hydrolysates of the protein were fractionated on columns of potato starch and Dowex 50, according to the techniques introduced by Moore and Stein (1951) and Stein and Moore (1948). 3. An investigation was made of the N-terminal residues of cytochrome c, using the technique of Sanger (1945). Apart from DHP-lysine only traces of the DWP derivatives of alanine, serine and glutamic acid were observed. It is concluded that these traces were derived from impurities in the cytochrome c preparation. It therefore appears that cytochrome c has no free N-terminal residues, and that it consists of a cyclic chain of amino acids. 4. An autoxidisable peptide, containing the haem prosthetic group, was isolated after digesting cytochrome c with pepsin according to the method of Tsou (1951a). 5. Valine was found to be the K-terminal residue of this peptide. Later experiments showed that leucine may be the next amino acid linked to the free amino group of the valine residue. 5. The peptide was partially hydrolysed by means of concentrated HOI at 37


Reaching protected area (PA) coverage goals is challenged by a lack of sufficient financial resources. This funding gap is particularly pervasive for marine protected areas (MPAs). It has been suggested that marine conservationists examine examples from terrestrial protected areas (TPAs) for potential solutions to better fund MPAs. However, the funding needs for MPAs and TPAs have not been directly compared, and there is risk of management failures if any such differences are not properly considered when designing MPA financial strategies. We perform an in-depth literature review to investigate differences in distribution of costs incurred by MPAs and TPAs across three primary categories; establishment, operational, and opportunity costs. We use our findings to conduct a snapshot quantitative comparison, which we complement with theoretical support to provide preliminary insight into differences between MPA and TPA costs, and how these may influence financial strategies most appropriate for each type of PA. Our research suggests that TPA costs, and thereby funding requirements, are greater for the time period leading up to and including the implementation phase, whereas MPAs have higher financial requirements for meeting long-term annual operational costs. This may be primarily due to the prevalence of private property rights for terrestrial regions, which are less frequently in place for ocean areas, as well as logistical requirements for enforcement and monitoring in a marine environment. To cement these suggestions in greater analytical certainty, we call for more thorough and standardized PA cost reporting at all stages, especially for MPAs and PAs in developing countries. The quantity and quality of such data presently limits research in PA sustainable finance, and will need to be remedied to advance the field in future years.


This article examines a pioneering intervention by government in the control and ownership of media sport under prevailing networked digital media conditions. The 2009 Australian Senate Inquiry into "Sports News and the Emergence of Digital Media" provided a political forum for debate among 44 participants, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Association of Newspapers. The participation of these and other international organizations demonstrated that this national inquiry was of global significance in regulatory and commercial debates over how the "media sport content economy" might operate in the digital age. Our analysis focuses on the causes of the disagreements that prompted the Inquiry, which demonstrated that emerging media sport markets are characterized by complex interaction, tense competition, and awkward overlaps between broadcast media and networked digital communications. This situation has disturbed the established media sport order and destabilized pivotal organizing categories, including the definition of "sports news."


A paper presented at a one-day workshop organised by the libraries of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Institute for the Study of the Americas. This workshop was the culmination of a two-year project dedicated to the cataloguing and promotion of the collections of political ephemera held in the libraries of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Institute for the Study of the Americas. Its aim was to bring together academics, researchers and librarians interested in the holdings both for their value as research collections and because of their nature as ephemera.


The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of gas flow velocity, size of sand
particles, and the distance between tubes immersed in a fluidized bed on heat
transfer coefficient. Experimental tests were conducted on a bundle of copper tubes
of (12.5 mm) diameter and (320 mm) length arranged in a matrix (17×9) and
immersed in a fluidized bed inside a plastic container. One of the tubes was used
as a hot tube with a capacity of (122 W). (25 kg) of sand with three different
diameters of sand particles (0.15, 0.3 and 0.6 mm) was used in these tests at ten
speeds for gas flow (from 0.16 m/s to 0.516 m/s). The results showed a significant
inverse effect of fluidized bed particles diameter on the heat transfer coefficient.
Accordingly, the heat transfer coefficient for (0.15mm) diameter sand was found
to be higher than that of (0.3 mm) and (0.6 mm) sand by about (3.124) and (6.868)
times respectively, in all tests. The results showed good agreement with results
from other studies conducted under the same conditions but with different sand
particle size.


Objective: To determine if mexiletine is safe and effective in reducing myotonia in myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1). Background: Myotonia is an early, prominent symptom in DM1 and contributes to decreased dexterity, gait instability, difficulty with speech/swallowing, and muscle pain. A few preliminary trials have suggested that the antiarrhythmic drug mexiletine is useful, symptomatic treatment for nondystrophic myotonic disorders and DM1. Methods: We performed 2 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trials, each involving 20 ambulatory DM1 participants with grip or percussion myotonia on examination. The initial trial compared 150 mg of mexiletine 3 times daily to placebo, and the second trial compared 200 mg of mexiletine 3 times daily to placebo. Treatment periods were 7 weeks in duration separated by a 4- to 8-week washout period. The primary measure of myotonia was time for isometric grip force to relax from 90% to 5% of peak force after a 3-second maximum grip contraction. EKG measurements and adverse events were monitored in both trials. Results: There was a significant reduction in grip relaxation time with both 150 and 200 mg dosages of mexiletine. Treatment with mexiletine at either dosage was not associated with any serious adverse events, or with prolongation of the PR or QTc intervals or of QRS duration. Mild adverse events were observed with both placebo and mexiletine treatment. Conclusions: Mexiletine at dosages of 150 and 200 mg 3 times daily is effective, safe, and well-tolerated over 7 weeks as an antimyotonia treatment in DM1. Classification of Evidence: This study provides Class I evidence that mexiletine at dosages of 150 and 200 mg 3 times daily over 7 weeks is well-tolerated and effective in reducing handgrip relaxation time in DM1.


The chemical potential u of an electron system is a fundamental property of a solid. A precise measurement of u plays a crucial role in understanding the electron interaction and quantum states of matter. However, thermodynamics measurements in micro and nanoscale samples are challenging because of the small sample volume and large background signals. Here, we report an optical readout technique for u of an arbitrary two-dimensional (2D) material. A monolayer semiconductor sensor is capacitively coupled to the sample. The sensor optical response determines a bias that fixes its chemical potential to the band edge and directly reads u of the sample. We demonstrate the technique in AB-stacked MoTe2/WSe2 moire bilayers. We obtain u with DC sensitivity about 20 ueV/sqrt(Hz), and the compressibility and interlayer electric polarization using AC readout. The results reveal a correlated insulating state at the doping density of one hole per moire unit cell, which evolves from a Mott to a charge-transfer insulator with increasing out-of-plane electric field. Furthermore, we image u and quantify the spatial inhomogeneity of the sample. Our work opens the door for high spatial and temporal resolution measurements of the thermodynamic properties of 2D quantum materials.


BACKGROUND
Attrition is common in alcohol clinical trials and the resultant loss of data represents an important methodological problem. In the absence of a simulation study, the drinking outcomes among those who are lost to follow-up are not known. Individuals who drop out of treatment and continue to provide drinking data, however, may be a reasonable proxy group for making inferences about the drinking outcomes of those lost to follow-up.

METHODS
We used data from the COMBINE study, a multisite, randomized clinical trial, to examine drinking during the 4 months of treatment among individuals who dropped out of treatment but continued to provide drinking data (i.e., "treatment dropouts;" n = 185). First, we estimated the observed treatment effect size for naltrexone versus placebo in a sample that included both treatment completers (n = 961) and treatment dropouts (n = 185; total N = 1,146), as well as the observed treatment effect size among just those who dropped out of treatment (n = 185). In both the total sample (N = 1,146) and the dropout sample (n = 185), we then deleted the drinking data after treatment dropout from those 185 individuals to simulate missing data. Using the deleted data sets, we then estimated the effect of naltrexone on the continuous outcome percent heavy drinking days using 6 methods to handle missing data (last observation carried forward, baseline observation carried forward, placebo mean imputation, missing = heavy drinking days, multiple imputation (MI), and full information maximum likelihood [FIML]).

RESULTS
MI and FIML produced effect size estimates that were most similar to the true effects observed in the full data set in all analyses, while missing = heavy drinking days performed the worst.

CONCLUSIONS
Although missing drinking data should be avoided whenever possible, MI and FIML yield the best estimates of the treatment effect for a continuous outcome measure of heavy drinking when there is dropout in an alcohol clinical trial.


We report the results of a questionnaire and workshop that sought to gain a better and deeper understanding of the contemporary information needs of wildland fire and fuels managers. Results from the questionnaire indicated that the decision to suppress a wildland fire was most often influenced by factors related to safety and that the decision to allow a fire to burn was influenced by a variety of factors that varied according to land management objectives. We also found that managers anticipated an increase in the use of wildland fire, but that these increases will be moderate due to a variety of constraints that will continue to limit the use of wildland fire. From the workshop, we learned that managers will need to become increasingly strategic with their fire and fuels management planning, and that the information used to support tactical fire operations may prove to be insufficient. Furthermore, the managers participating in the workshop indicated the functional linkage between land management and fire management planning is lacking. We suggest that effective fire management planning requires information on the benefits and risks to a wide variety of values at landscape scales, integration with land management objectives, and a long-term perspective.


I. A READER EXPECTATION APPROACH TO WRITING. 1. The Problems of Interpretation and the Efficacy of Reader Expectation Theory. 2. Action and Agency. Single Actions. A String of Actions. Agency. A Few Pedagogical Hints Reviewed. 3. Subject-Verb-Complement Separations. 4. Beginnings and Endings: The Topic and Stress Positions. Structure, Substance, Context, and Some Helpful Boxes. Whose Story? The Topic Position. The Stress Position. 5. Using Topic/Stress to Control Development Within the Paragraph. Overcoming Splat Prose. Style and the Consistency of Choice. Using Topic/Stress to Solve Typical Student Writing Problems. The Multiple Uses of the Stress Position. Topic Changing and Topic Stringing. Exerting Control Over Revision Through Topic Stringing. Seeking Control Over Reader Response. The Toll Booth Syndrome. 6. Paragraphs: Issues, Points, and Purposes. Procrustean Problems in Teaching the Paragraph. Issue. Point. Point Placement and Paragraph Types. A Typology of Paragraphs? Purpose. The Writer's Power to Shape and Change Reader Expectations Concerning Paragraph Structure. Pointless Paragraphs. Connections Between Paragraphs. A Note on Whole Documents. II. PEDAGOGY. 7. Learning and Teaching the Reader Expectation Approach. Learning to Teach Writing from the Perspective of Reader Expectations. Supplementary Techniques and Related Concerns. The Most Common Student Objections to REA. An Example. 8. "I Knew That." Two Typical Responses. Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style." Where Are the Linguists When We Need Them? The Prague School of Linguistics and Functional Sentence Perspective. Thrusts and Parries. III. APPENDICES. Appendix A. A Structural Definition of Rhetoric. Appendix B. A Backwards Look at Error Avoidance. Appendix C. Reader/Listener Expectations from the Past. Appendix D. Bibliography of Works Cited.


Four mononucleating Schiff base ligands, namely HL1, HL2, HL3 and HL4, were prepared via condensation between 2-hydroxybenzaldehyde and 2-morpholinoethanamine, 2-(piperazin-1-yl)ethanamine, 2-(piperidin-1-yl)ethanamine and 2-(pyrrolidin-1-yl)ethanamine, respectively. Then, seven mononuclear manganese(III) complexes were synthesized using the above-mentioned ligands. Complexes 1–3 were prepared with ligand HL1 by using chloride, bromide and iodide salts of manganese(II), respectively. On the other hand, complexes 4, 5, 6 and 7 were prepared by reaction of manganese chloride followed by sodium thiocyanate with ligands HL2, HL3, HL4, and HL1, respectively. All the complexes were characterized by using the usual physicochemical techniques and their solid state structures were obtained from single crystal X-ray analysis. The phosphatase-like activity of these complexes was studied in a 97.5% (v/v) N,N-dimethylformamide–water mixture using the disodium salt of 4-nitrophenylphosphate (4-NPP) as a model substrate to evaluate the role of halo-anions and the auxiliary part of the ligand backbone in the phosphatase like activity. Detailed experimental findings proved that complex 2 is the most active catalyst among all seven complexes and the complex bearing a morpholine ring is the most active catalyst among complexes 4–7.


Canada's human papillomavirus vaccination program should be halted immediately until its safety can be established, a researcher who has studied patient experiences of the vaccine under a government grant has said.

Genevieve Rail, a professor of critical studies of health at Montreal's Concordia University, has a $C273 359 (£135 000; €185 000; $208 000) grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for research entitled "HPV vaccination discourses, spaces and biopedagogies: Affects and effects on youth's bodies and subjectivities." She reports having gathered 170 families whose recounted stories indicate a heavy burden of vaccine injury.

Writing in the Quebec daily newspaper Le Devoir , Rail and her coauthor Abby Lippman, a former professor in McGill University's department of epidemiology, biostatistics, and occupational health, argued that the vaccine was given to schoolgirls without obtaining proper informed consent.1 They said that it had caused serious adverse events around the world, that Canada's system of reporting was inadequate to detect problems, that it was a misplaced priority because cervical cancer was not a leading cause of death, that its efficacy was not proven, that it may even exacerbate precancerous lesions, and that it was fraudulently marketed and too hastily approved.

"Across the world," the authors wrote, "young vaccinated girls are the protagonists in a drama of which only the pharmaceutical companies know the …


Facing the increasing demand for data sharing in distributed environments, computer grids became an attractive technology to manage extended data sets, providing efficient access, publishing, and data discovery. In this paper, we present the structure and implementation of MagCat multi-agent system, that provides a service for publishing and discovery data in grids through metadata. This service is being developed in context of MAG, a grid middleware that explores the mobile agent paradigm as a way to overcome the design and implementation challenges of constructing a grid middleware


Feasibility analysis determines (prior to system execution-time) whether a specified collection of hard-real-time jobs executed on a processing platform can meet all deadlines. In this paper, we derive near-optimal sufficient tests for determining whether a given collection of jobs can feasibly meet all deadlines upon a specified multiprocessor platform assuming job migration is permitted. These tests are general enough to be applied even when the collection of jobs is incompletely specified. We discuss the applicability of these tests to the scheduling of collections of jobs that are generated by systems of recurrent real-time tasks. We also show that our feasibility conditions may be used to obtain global-EDF schedulability conditions.


This paper proposes dynamic power tariff (DPT), a new concept for congestion management in distribution networks with high penetration of electric vehicles, and heat pumps. The DPT concept is proposed to overcome a drawback of the dynamic tariff (DT) method, i.e., DPT can replace the price sensitivity parameter in the DT method, which is relatively unrealistic in practice. Based on the control theory, a control model with two control loops, i.e., the power flow control and voltage control, is established to analyze the congestion management process by the DPT method. Furthermore, an iterative method based on distributed optimization is proposed to determine the DPT rates, which enables active participation of aggregators in the congestion management. The case studies demonstrate the efficacy of the DPT method for congestion management in distribution networks, and show its ability to save congestion management cost compared to the DT methods.


This paper gives examples of how the Antigone policy-based secure group communication system supports applications. The concept behind Antigone came from the applications whose security needs may vary, depending on operating environment, principals in a group, or the data being exchanged. For example, some applications may handle proprietary data that requires confidentiality, others may make press releases or other announcements that only require integrity and authentication. As another example, resource-plentiful infrastructures such as workstations connected via a high-speed local area network will be less concerned with the extra computational cycles and bandwidth required to ensure high-grade security, as compared to resource-constrained handheld wireless devices where performance and battery-life concerns may limit the choice of security mechanisms.


PURPOSE
Breast radiotherapy, particularly electronic compensation, may involve large dose gradients and difficult patient positioning problems. We have developed a simple self-calibrating optical image-guided system, which assists in accurately and reproducibly positioning the patient, by displaying her real-time optical image from a single camera superimposed on a perspective projection of her 3D CT data. Our method requires only a standard high-zoom digital camera capable of live-view mode, set up in the treatment suite at a fixed orientation and position (rotation, R and translation, T).

METHODS
A 10-sphere calibration jig was constructed and CT imaged to provide a 3D model. The camera R and T were determined by taking a photograph of the jig and optimizing an objective function, which compares the true image points to points calculated with a given candidate R and T geometry. Using this geometric information, 3D CT patient data, viewed from the camera perspective, is plotted using a Matlab routine. This image data is superimposed onto the real-time patient image, acquired by the camera, and displayed using standard live-view software. This enables the therapists to view both the current and desired positions of the patient, and guide her into assuming the correct position. The method was evaluated using an in-house developed breast phantom, mounted on a supporting platform, which could be tilted at various angles to simulate treatment-like geometries.

RESULTS
Our system allowed us to align the breast phantom, with an accuracy of about 0.5 cm and 5°. Better resolution could be possible with a camera with higher-zoom capabilities.

CONCLUSION
We have developed a system to superimpose a perspective projection of a CT image on a patient real-time optical image. Such a system has the potential to improve patient setup accuracy during breast radiotherapy, and could possibly be used for other disease sites as well.


The purpose of the present study was to determine whether different reflective teaching tools obtained the same kind of data. If not, which tool provided the reflective teachers with more reliable data? In order to investigate the research question, a researcher-made questionnaire related to the teachers' decision making was designed. The population of the study consisted of all the Teachers (i.e., around 60 teachers) and students (i.e., around 2500 students) in the English Department of Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch in the academic year of 2006-2007. The method of selecting the research sample was simple random sampling. The research sample was comprised of 10 teachers and 251 students. The design of the study was descriptive (non-experimental correlational). The statistical analysis of data included the application of ANOVA and Pearson Coefficient of Correlation. The ANOVA test showed that the F observed (8.12) was significant at the 0.05 level; therefore, there were significant differences among the kind of data that different reflective tools obtained. Moreover, further analysis emphasized that some reflective teaching tools provided the teachers with more reliable data.


In this report, we extend the concept of system-wide undo from self-contained services to collections of distributed, interacting services, thereby providing an undo-based recovery mechanism to the operators and administrators of distributed services. The extended undo mechanism is targeted at human operator error and other state-affecting problems like software bugs, misconfigurations, and external attack, and provides retroactive repair of past problems. We achieve the distributed extension by appealing to the concept of spheres of undo: spheres of undo surround each component of a distributed service and provide a structuring mechanism that helps identify when undo of one component can affect others. We propose two approaches for composing interacting spheres of undo: one assumes coordination and cascades undo-based recovery from the first undone sphere to all others affected; the other approach assumes independence and handles interacting spheres by compensating for previous communications that become invalid following an invocation of undo. We present criteria that can be used to decide which approach is most appropriate, and give an example using them to choose the appropriate undo approach for a distributed e-shopping service. Finally, we describe initial thoughts on how the compositions might be implemented and propose algorithms for interacting-sphere undo.


One of the most critical and debated issues about the functioning of the classical gold standard is the issue of asymmetries in balance of payments adjustment. London is believed to be by several authors the "conductor of the international orchestra" (Keynes, 1913). This view implies a highly asymmetrically working system which tended to shift the burden of adjustment from the UK onto other countries. The alternative view is that the classical gold standard was a "decentralised multipolar system", at least with reference to the balance of payments adjustment among industrial countries. In this paper we analyse causal relationships, impulse response functions and coherence between weekly US and UK 6-month interest rates using data from the National Monetary Commission (1910; covering the period 1890-1907. The main conclusion is that London was more vulnerable particularly in the medium run to changes in US interest rates than vice versa, contradicting the "conductor of the orchestra view". Comparing the result of the present study with those of Tullio and Wolters (1996), it seems that London was even more vulnerable to interest rate changes in New York than to changes in Paris and Berlin. Copyright 2000 by Scottish Economic Society.


This paper proposes the trusted platform board monitoring TPBM system that enabled effectively detecting and managing abnormal phenomenon based on the trusted platform board not only for security but also for multiple clients connected on the web. In other words, TPBM strengthens weak points of the existing security and provides the function to monitor with human-centric method not only system resources and process status for remote multi-client systems that are operated based on hardware security but also behavior of multiple clients in the cloud computing environment. In addition, measuring instruction level behavior is potentially a more effective protection than a pure software approach. From program's run-time behavior, system state safety can also be analyzed. However, dynamic characteristic of program trace also introduces challenges on what to measure and how to measure. To solve such problems, branch instruction trace BiT profiling tool is introduced to measure processor's instruction level run-time behavior. However, the BiT has provided only the text results of logical error information but not the visual monitoring function by tracing abnormal branch at the level of instruction. In order to resolve this problem, this paper includes the human-centric visual monitoring function for information on abnormal branch trace to TPBM. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Introduction: Problems with appearance may negatively affect the mental health of individuals with disfigurement so, cranioplasty has an important role in improving the physical appearance of patients as well as their psychological symptoms. Objective: This study aims to highlight the aesthetic as well as the psychological outcomes of cranioplasty using the two most widely used synthetic graft materials; polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and titanium mesh. Methods: This is a prospective study conducted on patients with apparent skull deformity who underwent cranioplasty using PMMA or titanium mesh from April 2016 to April 2017 and were followed up for one year. Patients were assessed preoperatively, at three months, and one year postoperatively using the Derriford Appearance Scale 24 (DAS 24) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HADS). Results: 42 patients; 25 males and 17 females were recruited. PMMA was used in 23 patients while titanium mesh was used in 19 patients. There were no significant differences regarding early and late complications between both groups. Revision surgery was necessary in only four cases having equal rates between both groups. There was a marked reduction in DAS 24 and HADS scores postoperatively with better scores in the PMMA group especially at three months after cranioplasty. Conclusion: Cranioplasty had positive effects on patients' distress regarding their appearance and their psychological symptoms. PMMA had better parameters than titanium mesh. Both PMMA and titanium mesh had comparable aesthetic outcomes with no statistically significant difference regarding the complication rates. Keywords: Cranioplasty, Polymethyl methacrylate, Titanium, Physical Appearance, Body, Depression (source: MeSH NLM)


There are numerous approaches to building analysis applications across the high-energy physics community. Among them are Python-based, or at least Python-driven, analysis workflows. We aim to ease the adoption of a Python-based analysis toolkit by making it easier for non-expert users to gain access to Python tools for scientific analysis. Experimental software distributions and individual user analysis have quite different requirements. Distributions tend to worry most about stability, usability and reproducibility, while the users usually strive to be fast and nimble. We discuss how we built and now maintain a python distribution for analysis while satisfying requirements both a large software distribution (in our case, that of CMSSW) and user, or laptop, level analysis. We pursued the integration of tools used by the broader data science community as well as HEP developed (e.g., histogrammar, root_numpy) Python packages. We discuss concepts we investigated for package integration and testing, as well as issues we encountered through this process. Distribution and platform support are important topics. We discuss our approach and progress towards a sustainable infrastructure for supporting this Python stack for the CMS user community and for the broader HEP user community.


We investigate the question of whether phone recognition models trained on large English databases can be used for speaker recognition in another language. Such a crosslanguage use of recognition models is an attractive option when a speaker recognition system is to be ported to a new language without the necessary data resources, while retaining some of the advantages of phone modeling and ASR-based feature extraction. We compare the performance of such systems to a baseline cepstral GMM system (which is inherently language independent), and to a phone-recognition-based system trained exclusively on Arabic data. Our results indicate that cross-language models are highly competitive, and, at least in our case, have a performance advantage over within-language training and the language-independent baseline. We also examine the effect of coverage of colloquial Arabic dialects in the training data.


Two novel thiazolo[5,4-d]thiazole containing donor–acceptor type alternating copolymers, poly[2-(5-(2-decyl-2H-benzo[d][1,2,3]triazol-4-yl)thiophen-2-yl)-5-(thiophen-2-yl)thiazolo[5,4-d]thiazole] (BTzTh) and poly[2-(5-(2-decyl-2H-benzo[d][1,2,3]triazol-4-yl)furan-2-yl)-5-(furan-2-yl)thiazolo[5,4-d]thiazole] (BTzFr) were synthesized by Stille coupling polymerization and their electrochemical and electrochromic properties were explored. Electrochemical activities of the spray-casted polymer films were determined by cyclic voltammetry. To evaluate the effect of thiophene and furan moieties on the optical properties of the copolymers, spectroelectrochemistry studies were performed. To examine the switching abilities, copolymer films were subjected to a double potential step chronoamperometry in their local maximum absorptions. Both thiazolothiazole-containing copolymers showed multichromic properties with low band-gap values 1.7 and 1.9 eV for BTzTh and BTzFr, respectively. The decent electrochromical properties together with solution processability make them important candidates for electrochromic applications. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part A: Polym. Chem. 2013, 51, 3901–3906


Moraines and glacial drift of the White Chuck advance were deposited in early Holocene time in cirques near Glacier Peak, Washington. These sediments overlie Glacier Peak tephra, including layers G, N, F, C, M, T, and B, which were erupted between about 12,500 and 11,250 yr B.P. White Chuck drift is overlain by Mazama tephra layer O, deposited about 6,700 yr B.P. Charcoal collected from till deposited during the White Chuck advance is about 8,300 to 8,400 radiocarbon years old, indicating that the glacial advance that deposited the till occurred about this time and that a previously unrecognized period of cooling and/or increased precipitation of sufficient intensity to produce glacial advances comparable to or greater than those of the recent Little Ice Age occurred in early Holocene time in the North Cascade Range. Other pre-Altithermal moraines from the Cascades, the Rocky Mountains, Laurentide Canada, and Baffin Island may have been produced during this cool period.


A description is given of the methods used in design of Micarta propellers. The most direct method for working out the design of a Micarta propeller is to start with the diameter and blade angles of a wooden propeller suited for a particular installation and then to apply one of the plan forms suitable for Micarta propellers. This allows one to obtain the corresponding blade widths and to then use these angles and blade widths for an aerodynamic analysis.


Gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs) have been rarely reported in patients with Crohn's disease, being usually small and incidentally detected in areas uninvolved by the inflammatory process. We describe the case of a young female patient with Crohn's disease and a fulminant Cushing's syndrome induced by the ectopic secretion of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) by an aggressive gastrointestinal neuroendocrine carcinoma (NEC). Despite a multi-therapeutic approach, including the administration of multiple courses of chemotherapy, hypo-cortisolemic agents, somatostatin analogues, as well as the performance of bilateral adrenal vein embolization followed by bilateral adrenalectomy, patient's condition progressively deteriorated and she died nine months after the diagnosis of NEC due to liver failure. The available literature addressing the possible connection between Crohn's disease and NEC is discussed in detail.


Abstract Background: Generalized Anxiety Disorder is one of the anxiety disorders which presents excessive anxiety and worries as central elements that are difficult to control in many situations or activities. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is one of the most important orientations among psychological intervention in the psychotherapy field. This approach is based on a transdiagnostic perspective. Additionally, this therapy has a strong research foundation especially in the treatment of anxiety disorders and depression. Objective: The present study aims to establish the efficacy of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy in medical students who are suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. Method: The sample of this study consisted of N = 40 first-year medical students (33 women and 7 men) and the average age for the entire group was Mage= 19.22, SD= 1.04. Each student participated at eight therapy sessions. The level of anxiety and irrational beliefs were measured at pre-intervention and post-intervention using psychological questionnaires. Results: Our findings indicate a statistically significant difference between the pre-intervention and post-intervention phase for the level of anxiety with a value of t = 20.31, df =78, P < 0.001, for irrational cognitions with t = 2.44, df =78, P < 0.05, for irrational beliefs with t = 3.45, df =77, P < 0.01, as well as low frustration tolerance with t = 2.57, df =77, P < 0.05 and awfulizing specifically. Conclusion: The Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy intervention is an extremely efficient psychological treatment for improving emotional functioning in medical students.


This paper examines the circumstances under which collective and private corporate political actions are more likely to be substitutes or complements. Using data based on a series of nationwide surveys conducted on privately owned firms in China, I find that firms that are engaged in collective political actions are more likely to pursue private political actions. This positive relationship is stronger in less economically developed provinces and when there are greater opportunities for the state to redistribute economic resources in product and capital markets. Meanwhile, this relationship is weaker in the presence of heavier regulatory burdens and for firms in which the state has some equity or owned by individuals who had prior political careers. These findings contribute to the corporate political action (CPA) literature.


Among all the dwarfing genes reported in pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.], the d2 gene has been most extensively utilized in breeding programs. Its effect on morphological characters, however, has not been adequately studied in the past due to lack of isogenic lines. The objective of this research was to study the effect of the d2 dwarfing gene on several morphological characters by comparing six pair of tall and dwarf near-isogenic lines (isolines) developed in genetic backgrounds of two diverse composites. Tests conducted on plant and seed characteristics at the ICRISAT Center, Patancheru, India and Tifton, GA, showed that dwarf isolines were shorter but had longer peduncles, longer panicles, narrower panicles, thicker culms, wider leaves, and smaller seeds than their tall counterparts. The differences between tall and dwarf isolines for number of total and effective tillers plant −1, leaf sheath length, and time to 50% anthesis were either nonsignificant or inconsistent across locations. Plant height was the only characteristic studied that was not influenced by genetic background. Genetic variation among isolines for effects of the d2 gene on numerous characters indicate the gene can be used to advantage by incorporating it into diverse germplasm.


The aim of this paper is to show that the multigrid approach can provide an efficient two-dimensional Poisson solver used in the analysis of realistic semiconductor devices based on particle simulators. Our robust implementation of the multigrid method is faster by one or two orders of magnitude than standard successive over-relaxation solvers and is capable, at the same time, of efficiently handling highly inhomogeneous grids and irregular boundary conditions relevant for realistic devices. All essential parts of the algorithm, such as coarsening, prolongation, restriction, and relaxation, have been adapted and optimized to deal with these complex geometries and large variations in the charge density. In particular, a new variant of the Gauss-Seidel-type relaxation scheme is introduced that is particularly suited for grids that lack globally dominant directions. As an example, the multigrid Poisson solver has been applied to two different electronic devices, a GaAs High Electron Mobility Transistor and a Si Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor.


Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but is only a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes.


SUMMARY: Desulphovibrio desulphuricans (El Agheila Z), in lactate + sulphate media, required 10 mμmole Fe/ml. for optimal growth; no absolute iron requirement was demonstrable in pyruvate + sulphate media but iron up to 20 mμmole/ml. stimulated growth. In a sulphate-deficient pyruvate medium, in which this strain can grow, iron was not required nor did it stimulate growth. Organisms grown with limited iron formed limited amounts of cytochrome C3, and in the absence of iron were markedly deficient in this; their content of hydrogenase was reduced to a lesser extent and their content of desulphoviridin was only halved. Iron-deficient organisms were able to reduce sulphate only slowly. Less than 1 % of the iron added to cultures was accounted for as cytochrome C3, though only some 6 % of this iron remained in solution after growth.


In recent years, multimedia technologies have become increasingly common in teaching practice. Digital video has provided a welcome alternative to traditional instructional techniques. Though it has been used to facilitate research collaboration [Armstrong, V., & Curran, S. (2006). "Developing a Collaborative Model of Research Using Digital Video." Computers & Education 46 (3): 336–347], it remains an under-utilized resource for presentation and research dissemination in doctoral education. The Innovation Academy at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin has established innovation and entrepreneurship alongside research and education as an integral element of the PhD programme. Since 2010, the Innovation Academy has facilitated the use of digital video within an interactive multidisciplinary learning environment. While enrolled on a Graduate Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, over 100 doctoral students have planned, shot, edited and presented a short video, 'pitching' their PhD research. This paper details the rationale and process of capturing complex research findings using this medium. We explore the challenges of using video to organize empirical data, visually represent theoretical concepts and evaluate its effectiveness in communicating PhD research to non-expert groups, the wider academic community and potential industry partners. Based on our findings, we reflect on how digital video may be used as a valuable tool for learning in action.


A survey of 54 psychiatric units disclosed that 49 (91%) were using electroconvulsive (ECT), principally for major depressive illnesses. During the five-year period 1964 to 1968, fractures and other complications of ECT were uncommon. Sudden death was reported in seven cases. During this period, none of the respondents or their affiliated physicians had been involved in lawsuits relating to the use of ECT. In general, suits for injuries occasioned by the use of ECT seem to be declining. Possible remaining problem areas are the performance of ECT without the prior consent of the patient; the failure to have facilities and personnel available for managing cardiorespiratory emergencies occurring during ECT; failure to diagnose or treat an ECT-related injury; and perhaps the failure to use ECT where the indications are compelling.


This study adopts a multi-attribute hedonic-pricing benchmark valuation approach to the determination of the observed market value of stadium naming rights. Using a sample of 112 naming rights deals covering both major-league and non-major-league facilities in North America over the period of 1979-2002, a hedonic-pricing model is estimated using regression analysis. It is found that the value of stadium naming rights is highly systematic and information-efficient. Naming rights value is principally related to variables reflecting the size of potential target audiences including the economic size of the host city, the facility's capacity, the league status of the resident teams, and the diversity of the facility usage. It is also found that sponsors are prepared to pay a significant premium for virgin sites with no previous name associations.


Social norms play a central role in explaining why people obey the law. Models featuring the expressive function of the law focus on the norm-mediated effect of law on behavior - that is, law influences existing social norms, which in turn influence behavior. In this Article, we focus on the question of how law influences social norms. We seek to understand the characteristics of law that influence people's opinions about the social acceptability of the behavior law seeks to regulate. To address these questions, we examined the practice of sharing digital files of copyrighted material ("file sharing"). We conducted an experiment to identify the characteristics of copyright law that influence perceptions of the consensus about unlawful file sharing. Results suggest that both formal and informal sanctions associated with copyright regulations influence perceptions of file sharing behavior. At the same time, law did not influence perceptions of file sharing behavior in the absence of any sanctions, and making salient the moral justifications for refraining from unlawful file sharing also did not influence perceptions. We discuss the implications of our study both for the theoretical debate about the expressive function of the law, and for the policy debate regarding curbing unlawful file sharing.


The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence regarding the effect of insider ownership on firm value which stems from the lack of such study for the case of Romania. By using a sample of companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, over the period 2007-2011, our results showed a negative effect of insider shareholdings on firm value. Likewise, the negative effect on firm value was confirmed for insider ownership one-year lagged. Thereby, unconcerned to the level of shareholdings, we ascertained the entrenchment effect, opposite to the goal of shareholders wealth maximization.


Thus far, all the stable singlet carbenes consist of a center carbon atom, and electron donor or withdrawing substituents with heteroatoms, such as, N, P, O, and S. Herein, carbene was generated by the lithium–bromine exchange reaction and used to functionalize C60. The reaction mechanisms, including the lithium–bromine exchange and carbene addition reactions, were studied in detail with ab initio density functional theory. The interaction between LiBr and the carbon atom was first characterized as a mainly ionic interaction, combined with the coordinate interaction and hyperconjugation. Then, a novel stable singlet fullerene carbene without the heteroatom, was primitively generated via lithium–bromine exchange and carbene addition reactions; it exhibited a remarkable stability with high singlet–triplet energy gap and HOMO–LUMO energy gap. This computational survey indicates that fullerene carbene will be a potential ligand in the coordinated compounds, and is useful for further functionalization and applications of fullerenes. Furthermore, theoretical results show that the lithium–bromine exchange reaction would be a powerful and feasible tool to functionalize the double bonds in some aliphatic and aromatic olefins, including anthracene, benzene, propylene, ethylene, 1-butene, propanal, and 3-pentanone. Based on the carbene reaction mechanisms and nature of corresponding bonds in their products, two indexes, bond length and the hybridization state of atoms, were suggested to distinguish the carbene addition and insertion to the double bond.