A major Western concern is that young people avoid science and technology programs. At various times, and in different countries, governments, funding agencies and businesses have made large investments in recruitment campaigns with the objective to increase students' interest and attract new groups of students to these disciplines. In particular, girls and women have been the target group for many of these campaigns. The assumption is that if young people understood how exciting and interesting science is, they would choose these subjects. In other words, the problem is that young people "don't understand what is best for their own good". In addition, research has shown that primary and pre-school student teachers often feel alienated by science education (Appleton & Kindt 2002) and that it may be difficult for these students to reconcile the role of teacher of young children with the role of science teacher in their identity formation (Danielsson & Warwick 2012). However, feminist science educators suggest that students' lack of interest is caused by character and image of the disciplines (Brickhouse 2001; Scantlebury 2012). Feminist philosophers' of science have challenged the view of natural sciences as objective, and argue that knowledge production is human activities that are socially and culturally situated (Haraway 1988; Harding 1986). A noted problem with science is its elitist image. Science is portrayed as difficult and demanding, and as requiring a special talent from those who study or engage with the discipline. A feminist pedagogical stance is to visualize and discuss cultural, social, and historical dimensions of science. This has also proved advantageous for the acquiring of science content knowledge (Sible et al 2006). Therefore, we argue, that one important aspect of science teacher education is to problematize science (education), e.g. by including feminist critiques of science (Capobianco 2007; Mayberry 1998).In this paper we explore the impact of a feminist teaching intervention within teacher education, focusing on the research question: What occurs when students are situated in the encounter between feminist critique of natural sciences and teacher education? What kind of obstacles can be identified and how will these effect pre-service teachers' pedagogy of science? The intervention, data collection and analysisIn an ongoing research and intervention project we are studying how an increased awareness of gender issues in science and in science teaching among student teachers influences their identities as teachers, and their teaching of science. We have followed a cohort of approximately 120 pre-service teachers (early years to lower secondary) from two universities in Sweden, through their first year of science courses. As an integral part of these science courses our intervention has introduced critical perspectives on gender and science as related to the culture of science and a feminist critique of the sciences. The project as a whole is framed theoretically by Hirdman's (1990) and Harding's (1986) theories of gender order in society, where gender is constituted on different levels: the structural, the symbolic and the individual (Harding 1986; Hirdman 1990; Rubin 1975). Hirdman (1990) describes this pattern from two perspectives: first, the separation of the two sexes and second, the superior status of the male standard. The formation of gender consolidates differences between the sexes and the female gender is always subordinate the male one, independent of status, class, time, and space.


As a dark side of leadership, scholars have shown that abusive supervision (AS) has negative consequences for subordinates work, organizations and society. This study focuses on the detrimental effects of AS on employee turnover intention, which is one of the major concerns for firms in China. We examined the underlying psychological mechanism between AS and turnover intention, specifically by focusing on the mediational role of psychological capital (Luthans et al., 2007) based on the conservation of resources theory (COR, from Hobfoll, 2002). By explaining the process of how AS can deplete individuals' resources, which leads to protective behaviour and attitudes, we attempt to integrate COR theory into the existing AS literature. We also investigated the moderating role of broader organizational contexts represented by organizational justice perception in the relationship between AS and turnover intention, showing boundary conditions where the effects of AS can be amplified with regard to overall organizational justice perception.Based on survey data collected from young factory workers in northern China, this study finds that abusive supervision is positively correlated with turnover intention. Psychological capital, especially optimism, mediates this relationship. In addition, when workers perceived high levels of procedural and distributive organizational justice, this association between abusive supervision and turnover intention was even stronger. Furthermore, the perception of procedural organizational justice also moderated the mediation mechanism of optimism between abusive supervision and turnover intention.This paper enriches the extant studies by considering the relationship between abusive supervision and its negative consequences for manufacturing workplaces in a non-western country, a context that has been little studied. In addition, by showing how psychological capital and the perception of organizational justice affect the AS-turnover intention relationship, this paper provides a nuanced and deeper understanding of the psychological mechanism and organizational context of abusive supervision.


The complexity of contemporary international communication requires an analysis of the transfer phenomena occurring within it. This paper addresses the subject from the perspective of cultural approaches to translation by adopting the concept modes of discursive transfer, which refers to any form of text processing that can be produced within and/or across cultures and media (translation, summary, adaptation for children, comic strip or film, etc.). To illustrate the transformations that textual material can undergo, I draw on the well-known example of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and its discursive multiplication within the book industry. Focusing more specifically on cover illustrations and plot summary, I adopt a cross-cultural perspective and present a comparison and contrast of the English, US, and Spanish editions.


The asymmetrical multiconnection three-stage rearrangeable Clos network is considered, where, in general, many-to-many connections are allowed between input and output terminals. The problem of routing the connections over the switches is efficiently solved. The computational complexity is improved from O(mf(3)) to O(f(4)) using a network flow model for the routing problem, where f is the number of first-stage switches and m is the number of second-stage switches; the number of third-stage switches is assumed to be of the same order as f. Note that the O(f(4)) complexity is independent of the number of second-stage switches. Using an appropriate data structure, the computational complexity of an edge-coloring approach to the routing problem is lowered from O(mK(2)) to O(m(f(2) + K log K)), where K is the aggregate capacity of the interconnecting links between all first-stage switches and a second-stage switch; the aggregate capacity of the interconnecting links between a second-stage switch and all third-stage switches is assumed to be of the same order as K. This makes the edge-coloring approach competitive for small values of m and K. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


1. Treatment of dehydroretinol with hydrogen chloride in light petroleum or toluene-p-sulphonic acid in benzene produces a substance with u.v.-absorption maxima at 284, 296, 310, 350, 368, 388, 408 and 433nm. and antimony trichloride colour maximum at 620nm. This compound is tentatively named compound 433 after its absorption maximum at 433nm. 2. Treatment of dehydroretinol with ethanolic hydrogen chloride produces, besides 3-ethoxyanhydroretinol, some compound 433 also. 3. Compound 433 is present in several freshwater-fish liver oils. 4. The i.r. spectrum of compound 433 shows only a band attributable to a conjugated ethylenic system. 5. The course of changes that lead to the formation of compound 433 is discussed.


This study focuses on the detection of wireless network modem signals in the environment using C# language in Visual Studio. Net 2008 editor, obtaining data like the MAC (Media Access Control) address, SSID(Service Set IDentifier), canal used, signal quality level, type of authorization and type of encoding used in detected wireless networks and representative mapping of detected wireless network signals. An application developed here in for this purpose utilizes Native Wifi, an open source code API designed and owned by Microsoft.

 Key words: Wireless networks, native wifi, service set identifier, media access control, wireless modem signals.


This review documents the principal changes to the system of housing provision and to housing policy in Ireland which have taken place since 1990, as well as recent social and economic developments pertaining to housing, and examines the range of market and nonmarket housing options currently available. It is envisaged that this information will be of interest to students of disciplines related to housing such as social policy, public administration, regional and urban planning and architecture, to those who work in the housing field and the members of the general public who have an interest in this area. The latest national partnership agreement, Sustaining Progress, commits government to reviewing and reforming several aspects of housing policy and provision in this country, including programmes designed to assist low-income groups, and this document will provide useful background information for this review. By documenting the changes to housing policy and housing provision that have taken place since 1990, it will highlight anomalies or omissions in housing policy and provision, together with the most significant housing related challenges which will face the country in the coming years. It is envisaged that this information will enable policy makers to consider how these issues can be most effectively addressed. The opening chapter of the review highlights several aspects of the system of housing provision in Ireland that are distinctive in the wider European Union (EU) context. For instance the proportion of Irish people who own their own homes is much higher than the EU average, while the proportion who rent is relatively low. Furthermore, in contrast to many other EU member states, most social housing for rent to low-income households in this country is provided by local authorities, rather than non-governmental agencies. The number of dwellings per 1,000 inhabitants in this country is the lowest in the EU, although the Irish housing stock is comparatively young, and it is also distinguished by the high number of standard houses, in contrast to many other EU member states where a large proportion of the housing stock is made up of apartments. Chapter Two reveals that the last decade is distinguished by dramatic changes in the housing system. The years since 1995 have seen marked increases in private house prices (particularly in Dublin), in private sector rents and in social housing need. These trends are related to both economic factors including falling unemployment and rising disposable incomes and demographic factors such as population growth, together with a rise in the number of independent households and falling population size. In response to increased demand, house building rates have increased significantly in recent years, to the extent that housing output in Ireland was proportionately the highest in the EU during 1999, 2000 and 2001. However, private housing output is not concentrated in the parts of the country where demand is highest, while social housing output remains low in historic terms. The second part of the chapter assesses the impact that these changes have had for housing affordability and highlights affordability difficulties in the private rented sector and among lower income households seeking to gain access to the owner occupied sector. Chapter Three sketches the impact which this changing environment had in terms of the evolution of housing policy. The housing policy statements produced by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government (DoEHLG) in the early years of the decade are mainly concerned with ensuring an adequate supply of housing for the lower income sections of the population, principally by means of providing social rented accommodation. As a result of the high price inflation in the housing market in the late 1990s, the focus had necessarily broadened to the housing needs of the general population and a number of significant interventions in the owner occupied and private rented sectors were introduced. The broadening of the housing policy agenda over this period, together with the increased political priority which it was afforded, also 10 Housing Policy Review 1990-2002 had the effect of moving housing and accommodation issues to the core of the national policy agenda and of accelerating the pace of policy development in this area. Since 1996 eight major policy statements on housing have been issued by the DoEHLG. Furthermore, in contrast to the early 1990s when housing policy development was confined mainly to policy statements from this Department, by the late 1990s it had become a key consideration in most national social and economic policy statements including: the National Development Plan (NDP) for 2000 to 2006, the national agreement negotiated between government and the social partners in 2000 and 2003, and the revised National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NAPS) published in 2002. Chapters Four to Seven provide further details of the policy initiatives introduced since 1990 pertinent to the owner occupied, private rented and social rented housing tenures and to households with special housing and accommodation needs. In addition to describing the key features of these initiatives, these chapters also examine the available evidence on their impact on the ground. The key points raised in these chapters are as follows: Chapter Four reveals that the owner occupied sector has seen the greatest number of new initiatives introduced during the period under examination, as four new supports for low-income home buyers have been established since 1990, along with numerous reforms to the more longstanding schemes which target households of this type such as the local authority housing loans and the tenant purchase scheme. The number and variety of the supports now available for low-income home buyers should help to address the full spectrum of need created by the developments in the housing market examined in Chapter Two. However, these complex arrangements obviously raise administrative challenges and there is some variation in the level of take-up of the individual schemes and also over time and geographically. Chapter Five which examines private renting suggests that the longstanding decline of this tenure may have been reversed in recent years. In addition, this sector has recently been the subject of extensive intervention by government on the recommendation of the Commission on the Private Rented Residential Sector that reported in 2000.Many of these interventions are legislated for in the Residential Tenancies Bill which was being considered by the Oireachtas at the time of writing. It is premature to assess the impact of these developments at this stage.However, they have the potential to improve the rights of tenancy of tenants in this sector, address affordability issues and improve housing standards; their achievements in this regard should be kept under review. Chapter Six examines the policy developments in the social rented sector over the last decade. It highlights three principal categories of reform. Firstly, levels of social housing output have been increased significantly since the mid-1990s to meet growing social housing need. Secondly, efforts have been made to diversify the sources of provision, as in addition to increased building of social housing by local authorities, output by voluntary and co-operative bodies has also increased. Thirdly, the social housing policy agenda broadened beyond the traditional focus on matching the quantity of dwellings provided with housing need, and qualitative issues such as the design, planning, management and regeneration of the social rented stock were afforded more attention. These reforms raise a number of challenges for policy makers and practitioners in the housing field. These include: the financing of social housing output; the governance of more complex arrangements for social housing provision and the establishment of systems to assess the success of measures to promote improved social housing design and management. Chapter Seven examines the various supports that are available to the sections of the population with special housing and accommodation needs, e.g. members of the Traveller community, homeless people, older people, people with a disability and asylum seekers and refugees. It reveals that some of these provisions have had a mixed impact in practice and suggests that they merit further examination in order to identify appropriate reforms.


Last week, the Department of Health in London published interim guidelines for responding to a deliberate release of smallpox in the United Kingdom. 1 2 The guidelines describe contingency plans for diagnosis and management of the first cases, vaccination strategies before and in the event of an outbreak, and other essential measures to ensure outbreak preparedness and control. Two of us (RH and DM) have contributed to the development of the guidelines, and the aim of this editorial is to give a brief summary and highlight some of the underlying evidence. (Comments on the guidelines may be sent to firstname.lastname@example.com before the end of this year.)

Developing policies to combat an eradicated infectious disease is difficult for two reasons. Firstly, it is impossible to balance the benefits and risks of interventions against the potential risk from disease. No one knows whether variola virus exists outside the two laboratories approved by the World Health Organization, whether it has fallen into the hands of organisations or individuals with the will and ability to use it as a weapon, or whether it can actually be disseminated in a way that would cause mass casualties. Secondly, the underlying evidence relies on historical data, which were collected in a different, now outdated context and are often incomplete. Nevertheless, analysis of historical data has provided valuable insights into the disease and …


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Perhaps the single most important trend in criticism of sixteenth-century English prose fiction over the past twenty years has been a shift from questions of genre to those treating the nexus of gender, readership, and subject formation. (1) The preponderance of this work has focused on women. Early scholars, noting both the tendency of these works to deal with "women's concerns" such as marriage and courtship, and the frequency with which they directly addressed or were dedicated to women, considered English prose fiction as a tentative challenge to a largely oppressive patriarchal culture. (2) More recent studies of the cultural work of early modern narrative have expressed much ambivalence about the way in which such writing "produced" women: whether texts that presented powerful women were necessarily designed or seen as a means to open up new avenues for women's agency. (3) Whereas Tina Krontiris emphasizes prose narrative as an oppositional form, Caroline Lucas and Helen Hackett are much more reticent, their chief disagreement concerning whether early modern women were frustrated or fairly content with roles that seem by present standards rather impoverished. (4) Others register skepticism about references to women readers. Even in her pioneering work, Suzanne Hull noted both a growth in books addressed to a female audience and continued anxieties about women reading. (5) Jacqueline Pearson expands the latter point, showing how women's reading was often associated with "disease, madness, deception, rebellion, and transgression of the boundaries of acceptable femininity," (6) while even sanguine accounts of the period acknowledge the relative passivity of women readers. (7) Such evidence leads Lori Newcomb to conclude that, even in the sixteenth but especially in the seventeenth century, women readers and prose fiction were often associated to the detriment of both. (8) And while most discussions of gender continue to focus on women, more recent work has opened up the topic to include discussions of men as well. Critics are much more attuned to the homoerotic potential in much Elizabethan narrative. (9) Beyond that, they are framing questions based on the recognition that man, like woman, is made rather than born: What was the role of early modern prose fiction in defining and reinforcing standards of masculinity? How did works that privileged women characters and even addressed women readers cater to men readers as well? As Lorna Hutson convincingly argues, these questions are closely related: prose narratives that seemed to focus on "women's concerns" were also, or perhaps even foremost, about relations between men. (10) Dubbed "the Homer of women" by Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene clearly participated in the growing place for women readers in Elizabethan England. Yet while he directly addressed women on several occasions, his work also epitomizes early modern ambivalence towards them. (11) He dedicated Penelopes Web (1589) to the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, claiming that the work was devoted to "discouering the virtues of your sex," but made an about-face in a immediately subsequent address "To the Gentlemen readers health," apologizing for writing of "womens prattle, about the vntwisting of Penelopes Web." (12) Similar contradictions can be found in A Myrrour of Modestie, which he dedicated to the Countess of Darbie, but only after telling his "gentle readers" that he had written "such trash," and that only "to feede hir fancie I have shewed my self to be so fonde." (13) Retractions of this sort are merely specific examples of the more global palinode of the late penitential writings, where he rejected his amatory work as just so much prodigality. (14) Here I would like to consider the particularly rich meditation on issues of gender and the readership of vernacular prose fiction in Ciceronis Amor of 1589, an initially popular yet now mostly neglected work dating from just before Greene renounced his amatory fiction. …


Aging is associated with left ventricular hypertrophy, dilatation, and fibrosis of the heart. The Fischer 344/Brown Norway F1 (F344/BNF1) rat is recommended for age-related studies by the National Institutes on Aging because this hybrid rat lives longer and has a lower rate of pathological conditions than inbred rats. However, little is known about age-associated changes in cardiac and aortic function and structure in this model. This study evaluated age-related cardiac changes in male F344/BNF1 rats using ECHO, gross, and microscopic examinations. Rats aged 6-, 30-, and 36-mo were anesthetized and twodimensional ECHO measurements, two-dimensional guided M-mode, Doppler M-mode, and other recordings from parasternal longand short-axis views were obtained using a Phillips 5500 ECHO system with a 12 megahertz transducer. Hearts and aortas from sacrificed rats were evaluated grossly and microscopically. The ECHO studies revealed persistent cardiac arrhythmias (chiefly PVCs) in 72% (13/18) of 36-mo rats, 10% (1/10) of 30-mo rats, and none in 6-mo rats (0/16). Gross and microscopic studies showed left ventricular (LV) dilatation, borderline to mild hypertrophy, and areas of fibrosis that were common in 36-mo rats, less evident in 30-mo rats, and absent in 6-mo rats. Aging was associated with mild to moderate decreases of LV diastolic and systolic function. Thus, male F344/BN F1 rats demonstrated progressive age-related (a) decline in cardiac function (diastolic and systolic indices), (b) LV structural changes (chamber dimensions, volumes, and wall thicknesses), and (c) persistent arrhythmias. These changes are consistent with those in humans. The noninvasive ECHO technique offers a means to monitor serial age-related cardiac failure and therapeutic responses in the same rats over designated time intervals.


Red blood cell (RBC) zinc (Zn) concentration reflects a patient's mean thyroid hormone level over the preceding several months. The aim of this study was to examine whether RBC Zn level can be used as an indicator to distinguish painless thyroiditis-associated transient hypothyroidism (TH) from permanent hypothyroidism (PH). RBC Zn level was measured in 30 untreated PH patients with Hashimoto's thyroiditis and 7 untreated TH patients with painless thyroiditis in whom preceding transient thyrotoxicosis had been confirmed. RBC Zn concentration was significantly lower in TH patients than that in PH patients. There was a positive correlation between RBC Zn and serum TSH, and the latter was clearly lower in TH patients than that in PH patients. However, RBC Zn level was again significantly lower in TH patients than PH patients despite of the comparable serum TSH levels in both groups when RBC Zn was evaluated in patients with serum TSH levels of less than 50 mU/L. Thus TH patients could be identified with RBC Zn measurement, allowing us avoidance of unnecessarily prolonged T4 administration to them.


The fracture energy release rate , which is the important parameter of ice pressure calculation model that is built on energy balance method, is the fracture mechanics performance of ice material. It is related with these factors such as ice material temperature T, which must be measured by experiment. It is the experimental method of fracture mechanics used in this paper. These ice specimens on the different thickness T were tested with fracture mechanics method at low-temperature testing machine, to obtain the fracture flexibility change rate of ice body which contains pre-crack and the values of under different conditions of T, which could determine fracture energy release rate of ice body during the ice pressure generated, which provide the necessary experimental data to establish ice layer pressure calculation model for the application of energy balance method.


The history wars are far from over: the question is, do they resonate beyond the limited public sphere in which they play out? What do Australians think of their history in light of these politicised historical debates? By way of answer, this article examines the enduring public contest over the past and then investigates more elusive, but no less significant, everyday conversations about Australian history around the country. By proposing a method of 'oral historiography' to gauge contemporary historical understandings in Australia, it brings a critical new perspective to these ongoing debates. It offers ordinary people a chance to contribute to national discussions about Australian history and it challenges some of the more simplistic and troubling assumptions of the history wars. This article has been peer-reviewed.


Conventional western social science scholars hold the view that the current crisis in Zimbabwe is but the consequence of misgovernance by President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF led government. This paper debunks this viewpoint and considers it a short-circuit analysis of the complex nature of Zimbabwe's crisis. Instead, the political economy approach is adopted which is considered more far-reaching, holistic, historic, dialectic, and more empirically-scientific-based. The critical analysis of the crisis reveals that the key to the current socio-economic and political impasse in Zimbabwe lies in the nature of the social organization of production and the class character of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe's social system which are strongly tied to the land issue. To this end, the paper confirms that Zimbabwe's economy, polity and social relations are organized in a manner that many Zimbabweans are at the fringe of the social structure. The main argument of this paper is that social organization of production in Zimbabwe is such that does not guarantee ordinary Zimbabweans access to land to produce their basic material needs, and to participate in making decision about how this major means of production is organized for production, distribution and consumption. This paper concludes by noting that the way out of the current crisis in Zimbabwe lies in a radical overhauling of the feeble social organization of production while not undermining the importance of a congenial political milieu in Zimbabwe.


BACKGROUND
Contact tracing of sexual partners is an important part of the clinical management of sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and initiation of contact tracing is the responsibility of the diagnosing clinician. Research has shown that some general practitioners would like to improve their skills in this area.

OBJECTIVE
This article outlines new resources and evidence to assist GPs to initiate contact tracing when a patient is diagnosed with an STI.

DISCUSSION
Most STIs are diagnosed in general practice so the involvement of GPs in contact tracing is crucial. The aims of contact tracing are to prevent re-infection of the index case, minimise complications and reduce the population prevalence of STIs in the community. Contact tracing begins with a conversation with the index patient about informing their sexual partner(s). The patient can then decide to inform their own contacts (patient referral) or organise for someone else to inform them (provider referral). Initiating contact tracing in general practice can be particularly effective if the resources and methods are tailored to the specific needs of the index patient. New resources provide clearer guidelines and tools to assist GPs in this area.


The purpose of this study was to find out the constraints that the school management committee members face that contribute to inefficient financial management in Kenyan
public primary schools. The school management committee were enshrined in the Kenya constitution (1964) under the education Act cap 211 of 1968 which was revised in 1980. The school management committee functions as contained in the Act include financial management, planning and development of physical facilities in the school together with the human resource management. However, the Act does not specify training that school management committee members should undergo in preparations for their roles in school management. The objectives that guided the study sought to find out factors that influence the ability of financial management by SMC, establish source of financial management in public primary schooL Effects of school financial management on the status of public primary schools and measures to improve school financial management were established. The research methodology employed for this study was descriptive survey. It employed random stratified sampling technique. The target population was 62 public primary schools. The sampled population had 20 public primary schools, 20 head teachers, 20 school management committee chairpersons and 1 D.E.O. Questionnaires were used to collect data from the head teachers and S.M.C Chairpersons while an interview schedule was used to gather data from the D.E.O. The data collected was validated and coded before analysis. Quantitative data was analyzed manually to establish the final constraints that faced the school management committee in Manga District. The fmdings of this study were that head teachers were not trained to carry out financial management roles in schools. This study further revealed that school management committee chairpersons had low levels of education that could not allow them to perform the expected roles in financial management in public primary schools. Sources of funds and lack of trained and qualified non- teaching staff rated highest as key factors among the S.M.C financial management constraints. Literature review revealed that although the roles of S.M.C in school financial management are spelt out, on the ground the functional relationship in the area of school financial management is not specific. The outcomes of the effective school financial management identified by the study include: ideal infrastructure, high enrolment, discipline, low staff turnout among others. The study concluded that low academic qualifications among the school management committee members impacted negatively on school financial management, thus setting up of strict nomination criteria for school management committee chairpersons will assist in financial management issues. Based on the finding, it was recommended that Ministry of Education to raise the minimum academic requirement for school management committee chairpersons to form four levels, budgeting the be a compulsory requirement before public primary schools are allowed to operate and the school administration should recruit qualified bursars / accounts clerks in the country.


The present study investigated the effect of pet interaction on stress reduction and positive mood enhancement among pet-owners and non-owners. Sample of pet-owners (n = 90) and non-owners (n = 90) was taken from University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Lahore. Both, male and female participants were included in the sample. The instruments used were Short Stress State Questionnaire (
 Helton, 2004
 ), Brief Mood Introspection Scale (
 Mayer & Gaschke, 1988
 ) and Pet Interaction Observation Checklist. Data was statistically analyzed by one way Analysis of Variance and Independent Sample t-test. Reduction in stress and increase in positive mood were found for both pet-owners and non-owners for the pet interaction groups as compared to control groups. However, no significant differences were found between the dog interaction group and cat interaction group for both pet owners and non-owners. Moreover, pet-owners had lower scores on stress and higher scores on positive mood after pet interaction as compared to non-owners. Lastly, it was shown that individuals who interacted with pets for more than five minutes had lower scores on stress and higher scores on positive mood as compared to those who interacted for five minutes or less. The findings have implications for Animal Assisted Therapy for psychological well-being.


Abstract There is little research on treating symptoms of sexual orientation-obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD). Semantic networks represent a new cognitive approach for understanding cognitive mechanisms of SO-OCD. Specifically, we tested whether the self-help cognitive technique of association splitting (AS) developed from this approach would be efficacious in reducing SO-OCD symptoms and thought suppression. One hundred and twenty heterosexual undergraduates (82 females, 38 males) were randomly assigned to either the AS or waitlist control group. At baseline and four weeks later, participants completed items assessing SO-OCD symptoms, measures of sexual obsessions and thought suppression, and an association task in which they generated associations to different cue words. Generated associations were coded based on SO-OCD relevance and emotional valence. Results indicated reductions in SO-OCD-relevant associations across levels of emotional valence and SO-OCD-irrelevant negative associations, and increases in SO-OCD-irrelevant positive and neutral associations, only in the AS group. Furthermore, there were reductions in SO-OCD symptoms, sexual obsessions, and thought suppression only in the AS group. Importantly, these findings were obtained with overall large effect sizes. AS appears to be an efficacious self-help technique in reducing SO-OCD symptoms, sexual obsessions, and thought suppression. Clinical implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed.


Background and Purpose— Induced hypertension is widely used to treat delayed cerebral ischemia (DCI) after aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage, but a literature review shows that its presumed effectiveness is based on uncontrolled case-series only. We here report clinical outcome of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage patients with DCI included in a randomized trial on the effectiveness of induced hypertension. Methods— Aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage patients with clinical symptoms of DCI were randomized to induced hypertension or no induced hypertension. Risk ratios for poor outcome (modified Rankin Scale score >3) at 3 months, with 95% confidence intervals, were calculated and adjusted for age, clinical condition at admission and at time of DCI, and amount of blood on initial computed tomographic scan with Poisson regression analysis. Results— The trial aiming to include 240 patients was ended, based on lack of effect on cerebral perfusion and slow recruitment, when 21 patients had been randomized to induced hypertension, and 20 patients to no hypertension. With induced hypertension, the adjusted risk ratio for poor outcome was 1.0 (95% confidence interval, 0.6–1.8) and the risk ratio for serious adverse events 2.1 (95% confidence interval, 0.9–5.0). Conclusions— Before this trial, the effectiveness of induced hypertension for DCI in aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage patients was unknown because current literature consists only of uncontrolled case series. The results from our premature halted trial do not add any evidence to support induced hypertension and show that this treatment can lead to serious adverse events. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT01613235.


Ionic liquids (ILs) are defined as organic salts with melting points below 100 °C. Such ionic compounds are typically formed using bulky cations and/or bulky anions in order to produce liquids or lower melting solids. ILs have been widely explored in several research areas including catalysis, remediation, solvents, separations, and many others. The utility of such compounds has also been recently broadened to include solid phase ionic materials. Thus, researchers have pushed the boundaries of ILs chemistry toward the solid state and have hypothesized that valuable properties of ILs can be preserved and fine-tuned to achieve comparable properties in the solid state. In addition, as with ILs, tunability of these solid-phase materials can be achieved through simple counterion metathesis reactions. These solid-state forms of ILs have been designated as a group of uniform materials based on organic salts (GUMBOS). In contrast to ILs, these materials have an expanded melting point range of 25 to 250 °C. In this chapter, we focus on recent developments and studies from the literature that provide for fine tuning and enhancing properties through transformation and recycling of diverse ionic compounds such as dyes, antibiotics, and others into solid state ionic materials of greater utility.


Sulindac (cis-5-fluoro-2-methyl-1-[p-(methylsulfinyl) benzylidene] indene-3-acetic acid), an inhibitor of prostaglandin synthesis, has been reported to cause regression of colon polyps in patients with familial polyposis coli and Gardner's syndrome. We examined the effect of sulindac on the growth of primary colon carcinomas in rats. Colon tumors were induced in 18 rats by repeated subcutaneous administration of dimethylhydrazine. The site and diameter of each tumor were measured via laparotomy and colonoscopy. Rats were randomized to receive either sulindac (10 mg/kg) twice daily or vehicle (0.5% methylcellulose). After 4 weeks of treatment, the site and size of tumors in the colon were again recorded. In eight rats receiving sulindac, no new tumors were identified, while in 10 control rats, 13 additional tumors were found after treatment. There was a significantly greater increase in size of the tumors in the control group (56.4 mm for 26 tumors) compared with the rats receiving sulindac (9.3 mm for 14 tumors). We report that sulindac inhibits the rate of development and the rate of growth of colon tumors in the rat.


Most previous attempts at the development of a "smart tattoo" for glucose monitoring in diabetes--implantable fluorescent microspheres that can be implanted intradermally and interrogated transdermally using light--have focused on the encapsulation of a competitive binding assay for glucose within hydrogel microspheres or polyelectrolyte microcapsules. We recently reported on the development of a microsphere sensor based on an enzymatic scheme, combined with an oxygen-quenched fluorescent reporter element. A novel feature of this design is the use of polyelectrolyte multilayer nanofilms, which are assembled stepwise on the surface of the microspheres, for modulation of glucose and oxygen mass transport, allowing them to be designed for sensitive and safe operation within the "oxygen deficit" present in the skin. In this work, a flow-through sensor testing apparatus was used to demonstrate the reversible response of the sensors under controlled, dynamic conditions. The sensors were shown to be sensitive over at least 0-140 mg/dL glucose, with a response time of less than 2 min. This report also identifies some current problems with the approach, and gives potential solutions towards the development of a practical implantable sensor for glucose monitoring in diabetes.


This paper studies the impact of output growth on output growth uncertainty by considering two important issues hitherto not properly and adequately addressed to in the existing empirical studies specifying this relationship. These are: (i) the possible existence of a threshold level of output growth, and the consequent identification of two regimes characterized by high and low output growth, and (ii) whether or not the coefficient capturing the causal link is different in these two output growth states. This paper proposes a regime switching model to study this asymmetric effect for 16 OECD countries. Based on monthly time‐series observations, our results strongly support that the impact varies significantly between the two output growth regimes with the coefficient in the high growth regime being negative for majority of the countries.


The increase of industrialization, the overuse chemical fertilisers and mining activities are brought about heavy metal-led environment pollution, especially agricultural land. This leads to more boron (B) contamination and accumulation in the soil. This study was carried out to evaluate B uptake from the soil of ornamental cabbage grown as a hyperaccumulator plant under B stress conditions in a controlled greenhouse on plant morphology, physiology, antioxidant enzyme activity the effects of humic acid (50mg kg-1 B + 2% humic acid -HA) and chelate [0.5 g kg-1 chelate (EDTA)] applications. According to the results, especially chelate application significantly increased the B uptake of the plant, and B accumulation was higher in the plant shoot than in the root. However, HA and chelate applications brought out the negative effects of B stress on growth and physiological characteristics and reinforced the increases in malondialdehyde (MDA) content and superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) enzyme activities. In conclusion, this study shows that HA and chelate additions increase the efficiency of the use of ornamental cabbage to remove excess boron from the soil. According to these results, it is possible to increase the use of ornamental cabbage for phytoremediation purposes, especially with chelate application.


The visible light communication (VLC) refers to the communication technology which uses the visible light source as a signal transmitter, the air is used as the transmission medium, and the appropriate photodiode as a signal receiving component. Visible light should be considered as the medium for wireless transmission because it has got few advantages over other standard wireless transmissions. LED's can be switched on and off faster, which helps for data transmission. To encode data in the light can be done by varying the rate at which the light flicker ON and OFF to give different strings of 1s and 0s. The intensity of the light is modulated so rapidly that human eye can't detect, so the output appears to be constant. The photo detector at receiver side receives different strings of 1s and 0s and receiver decodes it in its original form. This data then can be saved to receiver computer. In this way data can be transferred from one computer to another computer.


The current proposal for the next revision of the Ada language considers the possibility to map the language parallel features to an underlying OpenMP runtime. As previously presented, and discussed in previous workshops, the works on fine-grain parallelism in Ada map well to the OpenMP tasking model for parallelism. Nevertheless, and although the general model of integration, and the semantic constructs are already reflected in the proposed revision of the standard, the integration of these new features with the Real-Time Systems Annex of Ada is still not complete. This paper presents an overview of what is supported and the still open issues.


Acidities of iridium hydride intermediates were shown to be critical in some transformations mediated by the chiral analogues of Crabtree's catalyst, 1-3. To do this, several experiments were undertaken to investigate the acidities of hydrogenation mixtures formed using these iridium-oxazoline complexes. DFT calculations indicated that the acidity difference for Ir-H intermediates in these hydrogenations were astounding; iridium hydride from the N-heterocyclic carbene catalyst 1 was calculated to be around seven pK(a) units less acidic than those from the P-based complexes 2 and 3. Consistent with this, the carbene complex 1 was shown to be more effective for hydrogenations of acid-sensitive substrates. In deuteration experiments, less "abnormal" deuteration was observed, corresponding to fewer complications from acid-mediated alkene isomerization preceding the D(2)-addition step. Finally, simple tests with pH indicators provided visual evidence that phosphine-based catalyst precursors give significantly more acidic reaction mixtures than the corresponding N-heterocyclic carbene ones. These observations indicate carbene-for-phosphine (and similar) ligand substitutions may impact the outcome of catalytic reactions by modifying the acidities of the metal hydrides formed.


Mr A GREEN (Barnet, Herts EN5 4QA) writes: With reference to the excellent article from the Royal Marsden Hospital by Drs Janet E Husband and Stephen J Golding (2 January, p 4), I discussed this with the authors. In view of the fact that neither microscopic nor the earliest lymph node invasion is demonstrated by computed tomography, it appeared essential to define the track or volume within which malignant disease spread up the lymphatics. This has been demonstrated in a series of 35-mm slides covering the lymphatic volume from the pelvis up through the abdomen and thorax to the root of the neck. This surprisingly small volume was agreed for surgical and radiotherapy planning for "curable" cancer with around 100 experienced consultants in surgery, radiology, and radiotherapy, on an extensive tour of Europe, Canada, and the United States. With the help of Professor L McMinn of the department of anatomy and others at the Royal College of Surgeons, this set of slides and an advisory leaflet is now available from Dr D Clarke at the BLAT Centre, BMA House, Tavistock Square, London WC1.


In the European Union, 'principles of good governance' have been instituted across several sectors in response to criticisms from environmentalists, business and the public, because of alleged inefficiency, inadequate policy implementation, democratic deficit and environmental crisis. In fisheries, the pursuit of good governance has gained extra significance because it has been posited as a means to eliminate many of the problems that characterise the sector, including the overexploitation of fish stocks, marine ecosystem degradation and fishing community vulnerability. This article explores good governance reforms put in place to deal with the North Sea fisheries crisis, with particular reference to the newly instated North Sea Regional Advisory Council. First, I describe the current state of North Sea fisheries and the problems associated with European fisheries management. I then show how these problems were dealt with in the European Union's pre-reformed Common Fisheries Policy. Finally, I explore the changes introduced in fisheries after the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy, and suggest that the good governance of fisheries may not represent the panacea that some policy-makers and theorists maintain it is.


There is abundant evidence that the use of computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) is increasing in emergency departments and more patients are being diagnosed with pulmonary embolism (PE).1,2 The increasing availability and resolution of CTPA technology since the late 1990s has led some to suggest that PE is now being overdiagnosed, which is supported by decreasing PE case–fatality rates and the detection of small, subsegmental clots that do not result in any meaningful right-ventricular dysfunction.3,4 Indeed, recent guidelines allow that not all small PEs require anticoagulation therapy.5 Beyond overdiagnosis, there are potential patient-level harms associated with the liberal use of CTPA imaging, including the consequences of radiation and intravenous contrast exposure.4,6 At the societal level, excess CTPA use contributes to the growing costs of healthcare.2,7 Despite the above concerns, CTPA remains the diagnostic test of choice for PE. There are multiple approaches that are suggested to appropriately use CTPA in the workup of suspected PE, the most common of which is endorsed by best practice publications and combines a clinical score (eg, Well's score) with D-dimer testing, reserving CTPA for those patients with high clinical risk and/or positive D-dimer.8,9 Despite the professional recommendation, studies have shown that the use of PE diagnostic algorithms in clinical practice is suboptimal, resulting in much practice variation and contributing to the overuse of CTPA.10,11 In this issue, as a means of clarifying what measures improve adherence with recommended best practices, Deblois and colleagues12 perform a systematic review of the published interventions that have attempted to reduce CTPA imaging in the diagnosis of PE. Deblois and colleagues are to be commended for summarizing what is unfortunately a very heterogeneous literature, the limitations of which precluded a formal meta-analysis. The authors report that most of the 17 reviewed studies incorporated either electronic clinical decision support (CDS; usually imbedded into a computerized physician order entry) tools or educational interventions in a retrospective, before-and-after design; only 3 studies were experimental and included a control group. Most of the studies included effi cacy, with a few evaluating safety. There was little available evidence regarding cost-effectiveness or barriers to implementation. The most studied approach, CDS, was associated with a decrease in the use of CTPA of between 8.3% and 25.4% along with an increase in PE diagnostic yield of between 3.3% and 4.4%. Likewise, the appropriate use of CTPA (consistent with best practice recommendations) increased with CDS intervention f rom 18% to 19%. The addition of individual performance feedback seemed to enhance the impact of CDS, although this fi nding was limited to one investigation. Conversely, educational interventions to improve physician adherence to best practice approaches were less effective than CDS, with only 1 study describing a signifi cant decrease in CTPA use or increase in diagnostic yield. Although safety data were limited, in aggregate, the reported studies did not suggest any increase in mortality with interventions to reduce CTPA use. As discussed by the authors, CDS was the most studied and most effective intervention to improve appropriate CTPA use, albeit modest in its impact. The lack of contextual details about what factors made CDS effective or not effective makes it diffi cult to make general recommendations. One cited study did include physician reasons for not embracing CDS, which are not surprising in nature and refl ect concerns about impaired effi ciency and preference for native clinical judgement over that of electronic tools. Moving forward, CDS, perhaps coupled with performance feedback, seems to offer the best hope of reducing inappropriate CTPA use. The growing use of electronic medical records, which is accelerated in the United States by the meaningful use provisions of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009, implies that CDS tools are going to be implemented across the spectrum of diagnoses, including that of PE.13 The goals of CDS interventions, namely improved patient safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness, are more likely to be achieved if those studying and designing these electronic tools understand the day-to-day practice of clinical medicine. As summarized by Bates and colleagues14 in the "Ten Commandments for Effective Clinical Decision Support," CDS interventions will be successful in changing physician behavior and promoting the right test or treatment only if they seamlessly fi t into the clinical workfl ow, have no impact on (or improve upon) physician effi ciency, and minimize the need for additional information from the user. As suggested by Deblois et al.,12 future studies of CDS interventions that aim to align CTPA use with recommended best practices should incorporate more rigorous methodological quality, include safety and cost-effectiveness outcomes, and, perhaps most *Address for correspondence and reprint requests: Jason A. Stamm, MD, Geisinger Medicine Center, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, 100 North Academy Drive, Box 20-37, Danville, PA 17821; Telephone: 570-271-6389; Fax: 570-271-6021; E-mail: email@example.com


Online behavioral advertising (OBA) refers to the practice of tracking users across web sites in order to infer user interests and preferences. These interests and preferences are then used for selecting ads to present to the user. There is great concern that behavioral advertising in its present form infringes on user privacy. The resulting public debate — which includes consumer advocacy organizations, professional associations, and government agencies — is premised on the notion that OBA and privacy are inherently in conflict.In this paper we propose a practical architecture that enables targeting without compromising user privacy. Behavioral profiling and targeting in our system takes place in the user's browser. We discuss the effectiveness of the system as well as potential social engineering and web-based attacks on the architecture. One complication is billing; ad-networks must bill the correct advertiser without knowing which ad was displayed to the user. We propose an efficient cryptographic billing system that directly solves the problem. We implemented the core targeting system as a Firefox extension and report on its effectiveness.


Convertible bonds are simply a generic classification for fixed-income securities convertible into a wide range of alternative security forms. One special form , Japanese reset convertibles, have received some notoriety after well-publicized losses. In this paper, several advanced issues relating to japanese-style convertible bonds are discussed. The convertible bonds, issued by Japanese and Taiwanese issuers (among others), have some unique features. Their price and hedge ratios depend on a variety of factors. These include the reset dates; the stock multiplier on each reset date, which is used to determine the conversion price; and the minimal (and maximal) amounts by which the conversion price can be modified. These relationships are quite complex, and an adequate model is essential.


Evolutionary reconstruction of the natural history of an organism ultimately requires knowledge about the development, population genetics, ecology, and phylogeny of the species. Such investigations would benefit from studies of mutational processes because mutations are the source of natural variation. The nematode Pristionchus pacificus has been developed as a model organism in evolutionary biology by comparing its development with Caenorhabditis elegans. Pristionchus pacificus and related species are associated with scarab beetles, and their ecology and phylogeny are well known. More than 200 P. pacificus isolates from all over the world are available for this cosmopolitan species. We generated mutation accumulation (MA) lines in P. pacificus to study spontaneous mutation rates in the mitochondrial genome and compared mutation rate estimates with natural variation between nine representative isolates of the species. The P. pacificus mitochondrial genome is 15,955 bp in length and is typical for nematodes. Pristionchus pacificus has all known mitochondrial genes and contains an unusual suppressor transfer RNA (tRNA) for the codon UAA. This has most likely influenced the spectrum of observable mutations because 6 of 12 mutations found in the 82 MA lines analyzed are nonsense mutations that can be suppressed by the suppressor tRNA. The overall mutation rate in P. pacificus is 7.6 10 8 per site per generation and is less than one order of magnitude different from estimates in C. elegans and Drosophila. Using this mutation rate estimate in a comparison of the mitochondrial genome of nine P. pacificus isolates, we calculate the minimum time to the most recent common ancestor at 10–10 generations. The combination of mutation rate analysis with intraspecific divergence provides a powerful tool for the reconstruction of the natural history of P. pacificus, and we discuss the ecological implication of these findings.


The work reported in this thesis is a feasibility study of the possibilities and practical
problems of applying speech control and natural language understanding techniques to
the use of a computer by a physically disabled person. Solutions are proposed for the
overcoming of some of the difficulties and limitations of the available equipment, and
guidance given for the application of such systems to real tasks.
The use of voice control with a low cost industrial robot is described. The limitations
introduced by the speech control hardware, such as restricted vocabulary size and
artificial manner of speaking are partially overcome by software extensions to the
operating system and the application of natural language understanding techniques.
The application of voice control and audio response to common application packages
and a programming environment are explored.
Tools are developed to aid the construction of natural language understanding systems.
These include an extension to the use of an existing context-free parser generator to
enable it to handle context-sensitive grammars, and an efficient parallel parser which is
able to find all possible parses of a sentence simultaneously.
Machine readable dictionary construction is investigated, incorporating the analysis of
complex words in terms of their root forms using affix transformations, and the incorporation of semantic information using a variety of techniques, such as semantic
fields, the previously mentioned affix transforms, and object-oriented semantic trees.
The software developed for the system is written in Borland Pascal on an IBM
compatible P C , and is produced in the form of library modules and a toolkit to facilitate
its application to any desired task.


Objective To determine the influence of apathy, impulsivity, and behavioral change on survival in patients with frontotemporal dementia, progressive supranuclear palsy, and corticobasal syndrome. Methods We assessed 124 patients from the epidemiologic PiPPIN (Pick's Disease and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, Prevalence and Incidence) study. Patients underwent detailed baseline cognitive and behavioral assessment focusing on apathy, impulsivity, and behavioral change. Logistic regression identified predictors of death within 2.5 years from assessment, including age, sex, diagnosis, cognition, and 8 neurobehavioral profiles derived from a principal component analysis of neuropsychological and behavioral measures. Results An apathetic neurobehavioral profile predicted death (Wald statistic = 8.119, p = 0.004, Exp(B) = 2.912, confidence interval = >1 [1.396–6.075]) and was elevated in all patient groups. This profile represented apathy, weighted strongly to carer reports from the Apathy Evaluation Scale, Neuropsychiatric Inventory, and Cambridge Behavioral Inventory. Age at assessment, sex, and global cognitive impairment were not significant predictors. Differences in mortality risk across diagnostic groups were accounted for by their neuropsychiatric and behavioral features. Conclusions The relationship between apathy and survival highlights the need to develop more effective and targeted measurement tools to improve its recognition and facilitate treatment. The prognostic importance of apathy suggests that neurobehavioral features might be useful to predict survival and stratify patients for interventional trials. Effective symptomatic interventions targeting the neurobiology of apathy might ultimately also improve prognosis.


A mixed-methods quasi-experimental design was used to identify relationships between adolescent students' attributions for their reading performance and their reading achievement by gathering baseline data from year 9 and 10 students (n = 175) and then investigating the effects of two stages of intervention on a treatment group (n = 22) and a comparison group (n = 16). The first stage of intervention used the instructional activity of reciprocal teaching to teach students cognitive strategies to improve reading comprehension. The second stage of the intervention combined on-going reciprocal teaching with attributional-retraining, aimed at to developing internal attributions for reading performance; specifically effort-related attributions rather than attributions focussing on ability. A baseline sample (which included the treatment and comparison samples as well as students from the wider year 9 and 10 cohort) completed a questionnaire about their attributions for their reading performance. There was no evidence of the hypothesised correlation between a measure of students' incremental mindset (internal, unstable and controllable attribution) and standardised measures of reading comprehension. Analysis of the attribution data for the baseline sample showed evidence that internal and external attributions are not, as theorised, two ends of the same continuum, rather they are separate constructs, albeit negatively correlated. The treatment and comparison groups completed a standardised reading comprehension test and the attribution questionnaire at four time points: pre-intervention; between the two stages of intervention; post-intervention; and delayed post-intervention. A sub-sample of six students, representing a spectrum of reading achievement was interviewed to develop a better understanding of the responses provided in the questionnaire. The combined interventions had no significant effect on students' attributions for their reading performance or on their reading comprehension achievement. Conversely, the first stage of the intervention, reciprocal teaching, did have a significant effect on the treatment group's reading comprehension achievement immediately following the intervention and the group were observed eagerly participating in the activity with significantly increased engagement. The combined qualitative and quantitative data from the interventions provided evidence about the complexity of adolescents' attributional beliefs. Students responded with a wide variety of beliefs that did not conform to the theorised pattern of attributional beliefs. The findings raise questions about how students form attributions for their successes and failures, in particular the direction of the causal relationship between achievement and attributional beliefs.


In this paper, an agent architecture is proposed that can be used to integrate pre-existing components that provide the domain dependent agent functionality. The key integrating feature of the agent is an active message board that is used for inter-component, hence intra-agent communication. The board is active because it automatically forwards messages to components, they do not have to poll the message board. It does this on the basis of message pattern functions that components place on the board using advertisement messages. These functions can contain component provided semantic tests on the content of the message, they can also communicate with any other component whilst they are being applied. In addition an agent management toolkit, called ALFA, is described which offers a set of agent management services. This toolkit consists of a number of servers for storing the code of the components and symbolic descriptions of what agents regarding their component makeup. A third server uses all this information to facilitate launching new agents. Two prototype systems are also presented where the presented infrastructure has been applied. The one involves an agent based system used to control the environmental conditions in a building and the second is an agent based network management application.


This thesis consists of three chapters that investigate the importance of frictions in insurance and labour markets and their effects on macroeconomic outcomes. It asks how the behavior of aggregate employment and unemployment are affected, or the behavior of a planner who sets benefits to maximize welfare, when agents possess a number of risk sharing opportunities and luck in the labour market is the principal component of idiosyncratic risks. Chapter one deals with the technical aspects of this question. I introduce wealth accumulation in a battery of familiar search models and explore the implications for wages, allocations and the amount of risk sharing that firms can provide to their workforce. The second chapter investigates how the government should optimally set unemployment benefits depending on the range of private insurance opportunities in the economy. I consider a class of models that feature heterogeneous agents and wealth accumulation and contrast their properties with another where firms can provide additional insurance to their workforce. I show that the role of public policy is substantially different between the two economies. The third chapter is joint work with Jochen Mankart. We consider another margin of insurance, namely family self insurance, whereby household members can adjust jointly their labour supply to insure against income losses. We investigate how this feature can affect the cyclical behavior of key labour market statistics. In the US data we find that insurance within the family is important in explaining why the labour force is acyclical and not volatile but when we turn to the model we get the converse prediction. We then evaluate what important additions need to be made to our framework to make the model consistent with the data.


We present FRIDAYS, a financial risk information detecting and analyzing system that enables financial professionals to efficiently comprehend financial reports in terms of risk and domain-specific sentiment cues. Our system is designed to integrate multiple NLP models trained on financial reports but on different levels (i.e., word, multi-word, and sentence levels) and to illustrate the prediction results generated by the models. The system is available online at https://cfda.csie.org/FRIDAYS/.


Parallel and distributed languages specify computations on multiple processors and have a computation language to describe the algorithm, i.e. what to compute, and a coordination language to describe how to organise the computations across the processors. Haskell has been used as the computation language for a wide variety of parallel and distributed languages, and this paper is a comprehensive survey of implemented languages. We outline parallel and distributed language concepts and classify Haskell extensions using them. Similar example programs are used to illustrate and contrast the coordination languages, and the comparison is facilitated by the common computation language. A lazy language is not an obvious choice for parallel or distributed computation, and we address the question of why Haskell is a common functional computation language.


Introduction Delhi government operationalised 5.8 km, phase-1 length of (14.8 km long) bus rapid transit system corridor in April 2008. First 6 months of operations witnessed six fatal accidents as against an annual average of nine during the preconstruction period; prompting this study to find reasons and measure efficacy of interventions. Method The corridor operator, Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System, introduced monitoring processes, based on which interventions were planned to improve operations and safety. The study included assessment of various interventions, over a period of 16 months postoperations. These included channelisation of pedestrian crossings and introduction of rumble strips to reduce bus speeds. The analysis of the study was conducted in two parts. First part included comparison of accident trends and second part included study of conflicts postinterventions. Results Fatal accident rate increased by 30%, over preconstruction period, in first 6 months of operations. Type of victims postconstruction were only pedestrians as against a mix of pedestrians, cyclists and motorists earlier. All accidents were limited to conflicts with buses within bus lane with 85% occurring near bus shelter. Fatalities dropped to 'ZERO' postintroduction of rumble strips. Instances of buses speeding over 60 km/h fell by 67%. Pedestrians crossing bus lanes increased by 23%. Conclusion Channelisation of pedestrian crossing did not result in reduced conflicts; however reduction in speeds were achieved through implementation of rumble strips. The study concludes that it is possible to achieve zero death targets on road systems by introducing consistent, monitoring-based intervention processes.


This paper explores preliminary findings from online interviews with educational support workers and web-based diaries with university students with social communication difficulties, concerning student support networks and the implications for retention and progression. Mostly, support workers with the least training and experience were less confident in contributing to the establishment and maintenance of student support networks. However, those with more training and experience were more confident in providing advice and support to develop students' social skills and facilitate broader support networks. Regardless of training and experience, support workers were generally reluctant to engage in peer networking because it places them in danger of crossing professional boundaries. This can have serious negative consequences for those who have peer networking difficulties. Increased student isolation from their peers puts students at risk of dropping out or failing, both at modular and course level. Nevertheless, support workers agree that if there is a clear identified and evidenced need, students should have access to peer networking support to encourage social integration. However, who could provide this peer networking support remains unclear at this phase of inquiry. Emerging issues from student diaries indicate that there are a number of people supporting them; support workers and lecturers can provide visible adjustments, whereas family and peers can provide invisible support.


From the medieval to the early modern period, funeral effigies-- images of deceased monarchs sculpted from wood or wax and dressed in their own clothes--accompanied the corpses of English kings. Although this quaint performance lapsed with the burial of Charles II, other methods of circulating personal images in the absence of the persons themselves proliferated during his reign. The diarist Samuel Pepys records the erotic dimensions of the experience of this early development of celebrity in the modern sense. He remarks on the appropriation of religious icons in so-called "role portraits" of fashionable women, on the increasing availability of these and other popular images as prints, and on the emergence of actors and actresses as living effigies.


The archetypal populist radical right voter is usually thought of as being male, with female voters less likely to back these parties in elections. But many of these parties have nevertheless drawn on a substantial share of support from women. Outlining results from a recent study, Niels Spierings writes that although there is a gender gap in support for populist radical right parties, focusing on their female supporters can provide a more nuanced understanding of their success.


Amid the near frenzied exaltation of economic globalization and a purported decline of the nation state, a range of subnational regional economies and urban metropoles are increasingly being canonized as the paradigmatic exemplars of wealth creation. Indeed, across many of the advanced developed countries a whole host of academics, consultants, influential commentators, politicians and bourgeois interest groups are readily invoking the region to be "the" appropriate site for regulating global capitalism. In a recent article in "IJURR", though, John Lovering disputes this emerging New Regionalism, viewing it to be seriously compromised by several practical and theoretical inadequacies. This article has two principal aims. First, and while sympathetic to the general tenor of Lovering's critique, it offers a rejoinder through some sobering reflections on what might be recovered from the range of New Regionalist perspectives currently vying for attention within critical studies of regional development. Second, it presents a series of future theoretical directions for a geopolitically sensitive regional research agenda, drawing on recent thinking from the new regional geography, globalization and the politics of scale, institutional-relational state theory and the regulation approach. An argument is made that a synthesis of these perspectives might intensify our understanding of the social and political construction of regions, the uneven geography of growth, and the moments of re-scaled "regionalized" state power that now enframe the process of economic governance. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.


Anisotropy in I/sub c/(B) characteristic of Bi(2223)/Ag tapes results in a considerable decrease in magnet critical current, if the magnet winding is only made with the multifilamentary tape prepared by a standard powder-in-tube (PIT) technique. In case of cylindrical windings, the turns in pancake coils, which are located at the magnet ends, have lower critical currents than those in the other parts of the winding. In order to eliminate this undesired effect, an intensive effort is exerted to develop the tapes which have the filaments with the c-axis oriented in some other direction than the perpendicular one to the broad tape face of the tape is. In this work we present the results of calculations of critical currents of individual turns if such tapes, prepared by a novel tape-in-rectangular tube (TIRT) technique, are utilized in different parts of the winding. The analysis shows that the magnet design has always to be carried out with respect to both the magnetic field distribution in the winding and the specific properties of the tape to be used. This means that the orientation of the filaments in the TIRT tape of each pancake is to be determined with respect to the properties of the local magnetic field. This technology, which may lead to higher critical currents of individual turns, and consequently to higher critical current of the magnet, is discussed together with the natural limitations of engineering current density with respect to practical aspects of applying tape-in-rectangular tube technique to production of the Bi-based tapes with specifically oriented filaments.


Shifting transportation to electrified modes, e.g., rail, is a politically attractive way of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the transportation sector. There is a vivid debate about the effects such a shift has on GHG emission and how these should be assessed and appraised. We argue that this debate largely originates from differences in how the debaters characterize the situation at hand, in particular how markets are organized and which policy instruments are in place. To shed light on this, we start by identifying the appropriate assessment approach in a hypothetical situation without any climate or energy policies and then gradually add realistic circumstances into the equation. Our main conclusion is that evaluating the climate impacts from a transportation shift is a highly complex task in the initial situation. The closer we move towards a climate-policy architecture of the current EU-type, the simpler the task becomes. Given a comprehensive global climate treaty, there is no need for any special treatment of the GHG effects since all relevant effects then would be internalized in producer and consumer prices.


Objective To measure angiogenin, a potent inducer of neovascularization and interleukin-6, as an indicator of acute inflammation, in second-trimester amniotic fluid of patients with elevated maternal serum hCG. Methods In this case-control study, 20 patients with elevated maternal serum hCG (at least 2.0 multiples of median) at triple screen were matched 2:1 with controls on the basis of year of amniocentesis, parity, and race. Inclusion criteria were 1) singleton gestation, 2) no evidence of anomalies, and 3) genetic amniocentesis. Amniotic fluid was immunoassayed for angiogenin and interleukin-6. The immunoassay sensitivity for angiogenin was 0.026 ng/mL, interassay coefficient of variation 4.6%, and infra-assay coefficient of variation 2.9%. For interleukin-6, the immunoassay sensitivity was 2.37 pg/mL, interassay coefficient of variation 2.7%, and intra-assay coefficient of variation 1.9%. Angiogenin and interleukin-6 values were normalized by using natural log transformation for statistical analysis. Statistical analysis included analysis of variance and stepwise regression, with P < .05 significant. Results After correcting (by multivariate regression) for gestational age at sampling and nulliparity, amniotic fluid angiogenin levels were significantly lower in the study subjects than in controls (26% ± 11% lower, P = .004), whereas the interleukin-6 levels did not change significantly (34% ± 40% lower, P = .3). Conclusion Amniotic fluid angiogenin levels are significantly lower in patients with elevated maternal serum hCG at triple screen, suggesting inadequate angiogenesis, but interleukin-6 values do not differ significantly.


First established as a valuable vertebrate model system for studying development, zebrafish have emerged as an attractive animal system for modeling human cancers. Major technical advances have been essential for the generation of zebrafish cancer models relevant to human diseases. These models develop tumors in various organ sites that bear striking resemblance to human malignances, both histologically and genetically. Thus, the focus of cancer research in zebrafish has transcended the need to validate zebrafish as a viable model organism to study cancer biology. With the significant advantages of in vivo imaging, the power of forward genetics, well-established high efficiency for transgenesis, and ease of transplantation, further exploration of the zebrafish cancer models not only will generate unique insights into underlying mechanisms of cancer but will also provide platforms useful for drug discovery.


This study explores developmental changes in the ability to ask informative questions. We hypothesized an intrinsic link between the ability to update beliefs in light of evidence and the ability to ask informative questions. Four- to ten-year-old children played an iPad game asking them to identify a hidden bug. Learners could either ask about individual bugs, or make a series of feature queries (e.g., "Does the bug have antennae?") that could more efficiently narrow the hypothesis space. The task display either helped children integrate evidence with the hypothesis space or required them to do so. Although we found that helping children update their beliefs improved some aspects of their active inquiry behavior, those that updated their own beliefs asked questions that were more context-sensitive and thus informative. The results show how making a task more difficult may actually improve children's active inquiry skills, thus illustrating a type of desirable difficulty.


In the present time, the rural development plans, designed and executed from out, are letting space to other programs, of minor wingspan that traditional but more rooted in the rural reality, as are the proposals of "local development". Example of this is the promotion and shoring the rural industrialization to depart to the same productions obtained in it. In this work we accomplish a panoramic vision of the results reached in those regions where the rural industrialization reached certain development level, and we center us in a special type, as is that who designate AIBRu: integrated agroindustries of rural base. It is considered agroindustries that are integrated vertically but that has not the origin in the transformation, it not in the primary production. The study of case that we effect with the end of recapturing the dynamic potentiality for the rural areas of this type of undertake, we are effecting it over a located district to the southeast of Buenos Aires, Argentina, characterized by the stocks of AIBRus of milk transformation.


Mobility of highly qualified personnel between countries and regions is closely related to the issue of the effective distribution of human resources and the prospects for the innovative development of the state. The focus of this study is the interregional mobility of Russian researchers: the geographical movements of scientists between different regions (subjects of the Russian Federation). The empirical base of the study is the data obtained in 2016-2017 during the questionnaire survey of 1880 Russian researchers. Two main aspects are analyzed: already accomplished movements of researchers (moving for the educational or working purposes) and the "attitude to mobility" - readiness to move in the future. The features of researchers depending on their mobility pattern are analyzed. Among the most researchers who had the experience of moving in the past (both for education and work purposes) develops the "attitude to mobility". In the future, they are more willing to consider various options for moving both "for interest" (to participate in an important large-scale project), and "for money" (to get the job with acceptable level of remuneration). There exists a category of Russian researchers who are ready to move "anywhere": both abroad and within Russia, to large and to small cities. Researchers who are not ready to move to the place that they consider as a small town in a remote region, are concerned about the prospects for professional growth, difficulties for the family, a different lifestyle, change of professional and personal social circle. These aspects should be taken into account in the development of various programs and measures aimed to stimulate internal academic mobility in Russia.


Abstract A pointwise definable model is one in which every object is definable without parameters. In a model of set theory, this property strengthens V = HOD, but is not first-order expressible. Nevertheless, if ZFC is consistent, then there are continuum many pointwise definable models of ZFC. If there is a transitive model of ZFC, then there are continuum many pointwise definable transitive models of ZFC. What is more, every countable model of ZFC has a class forcing extension that is pointwise definable. Indeed, for the main contribution of this article, every countable model of Gödel-Bernays set theory has a pointwise definable extension, in which every set and class is first-order definable without parameters.


Purpose. To report on the present option for management of tendinopathy of the main body of the Achilles tendon. Background. Tendinopathy of the main body of tendo Achillis affects athletic and sedentary patients. Mechanical loading is thought to be a major causative factor. However, the exact mechanical loading conditions which cause tendinopathy are poorly defined. Repetitive mechanical loading induces a non-inflammatory pathology, and repetitive microtrauma ultimately exceeds the healing response. The management of Achilles tendinopathy is primarily conservative. Although many non-operative options are available, few have been tested under controlled conditions. This review article specifically focuses on eccentric training, and on shock wave therapy. Surgical intervention can be successful in refractory cases. However, surgery does not usually completely eliminate symptoms and complications are not rare. Conclusions. Further studies are needed to discern the optimal non-operative and surgical management of midsubstance Achilles tendinopathy.


Mg-xZr damping alloys (x=0.6, 1.5, 2.5, 5, mass %) were prepared by PM (powder metallurgy ) technology, and effects of Zr contents on microstructure, mechanical properties and damping capacities of Mg-xZr damping alloys were researched by three-point bending test and DMA, etc. The results show that the microstructure become into strip-shaped morphology, more granular particles appear in the grain boundaries or inside grains, and the grains are more refined with the increase of Zr additions. Micro-hardness and bending strength of the Mg-xZr damping alloys increase with increasing addition of Zr, and reach the maximum value with Zr addition of 2.5%. The damping capacities of Mg-xZr alloys increase slowly with the temperature from 27°C to 100°C, and increase rapidly above 100°C. The damping peaks appear at temperature of 160°C. Mg-5%Zr alloy exhibits the highest damping capacity, and its tanf value reaches to 0.084. The temperature of the damping peak increases with increasing frequencies, showing the characteristic of relaxation damping.


Introduction The NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme (BCSP) in England has used a guaiac faecal occult blood test (gFOBt) since 2006. In April 2014 the BCSP commenced a six-month FIT Pilot study to assess the clinical, financial and organisational implications of adopting FIT. Method Two regional BCSP Hubs (Southern and Midlands and North West) and associated Screening Centres participated in the pilot study. One in 28 invitees was offered FIT rather than gFOBt. 30,000 FIT invitations provided adequate power for analysis of FIT uptake compared with gFOBt. The OC-SENSOR FIT system (Eiken Chemical Co. Ltd., Japan) was used with a cut-off for positivity of 20 µg haemoglobin [Hb]/g faeces (100 ng Hb/mL buffer). Results 39,460 subjects were sent a FIT and 1,067,120 a gFOBt during the pilot period (April–October 2014). Uptake of FIT was significantly higher than gFOBt (67.6% vs. 60.1%; OR 1.38). The increase in uptake was significantly greater for previous non-responders (FIT 26.6% vs. gFOBt 14.5%; OR 2.13), compared with subjects invited for the first time (61.4% vs 50.2%; OR 1.58) and those who had participated previously (91.0% vs 86.6%; OR 1.57). The increase in uptake was higher in males (FIT 65.5% vs. gFOBt 57.0%; OR 1.89) than females (69.6% vs. 63.2) and was apparent for all quintiles of deprivation. Of particular note is the increase in uptake with FIT compared with gFOBt in the most deprived and traditionally 'hard-to-reach' quintile (55.1% vs 46.9%; OR 1.39). Overall positivity was 7.8% with FIT (cut-off 20 µg Hb/g faeces) and 1.7% with gFOBt (OR 4.87). The increase in positivity was similar in males and females and in all deprivation quintiles, but increased with age. Significantly more colorectal cancers (CRC) (0.22% FIT vs. 0.10% gFOBt; OR 2.25) and advanced adenomas (1.56% vs. 0.30%; OR 5.21) were detected with FIT. The PPV for all neoplasms was significantly higher with FIT (54.7% vs. 50.5%; OR 1.18). At a cut-off of 150 µg Hb/g faeces (750 ng Hb/mL buffer), which yielded a positivity for FIT (1.8%) similar to gFOBt, FIT had a higher detection rate and PPV for advanced adenomas and all neoplasms. Conclusion FIT significantly increased uptake of screening and provides an opportunity to adjust the faecal Hb concentration cut-off for positivity and thus the burden on colonoscopy resource. Further analysis will determine how the faecal Hb concentration measured by FIT could be incorporated into a multivariate risk score for CRC. Disclosure of interest None Declared.


: In this paper, we reuse the Case-Based Reasoning model presented in our last work (Verma et al., 2018) to create a new knowledge intensive similarity -based clustering method that clusters a case base such that the intra-cluster similarity is maximized. In some domains such as recommender systems, the most similar case may not always be the desired one as a user would like to find the closest, yet significantly different cases. To increase the variety of returned cases, clustering a case base first, before the retrieval is executed increases the diversity of solutions. In this work we demonstrate a methodology to optimize the cluster coherence as well to determine the optimal number of clusters for a given case base. Finally, we present an evaluation of our clustering approach by comparing the results of the quality of clusters obtained using our knowledge intensive similarity-based clustering approach against that of the state-of-the-art K-Means clustering method.


Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay. It seems that if your grammar is good, your writing will be good. However, being overly concerned about good grammar can actually be detrimental to good writing. Here's why.


The recent contexts of financial and economic crises have fostered discourses and initiatives for encouraging people to save. Despite there being, for the sake of sustainability, a generalized support to educational measures for increasing savings from early childhood, a complete understanding of why and how people save has not yet been attained. The absence of sociological attention to the engagement of consumers in such financial decisions is particularly scant. This article takes the case-study of a financial education programme for children to suggest future directions for the sociological investigation of savings. Literature review and the analysis of a Portuguese programme revealed a clear absence of sociological insights in financial education programmes' contents and procedures. However, sociological research has already come to relevant findings about social aspects and processes of financial decisions that allow for a better understanding of how consumers, and children in particular, learn about and behave in relation to money, consumption and savings. In our view, the study of savings should pay more attention to several adjoining, concurrent and complimentary practices encompassed in the consumption process. This article contributes not only to fill in the literature gaps identified by the study, but also to counter-offer non-judgemental research regarding current literature on the subject.


Background Obesity is a significant risk factor for Noncommunicable diseases, and it is related to many adverse health consequences. The risk of obesity commonly changes with age, which is called a longitudinal or aging effect. Also, individuals born or enter to the study of the same age have similar living conditions that may influence their obesity risk in a particular way; this is a cross-sectional effect. In the current study, an advanced statistical model is used to distinguish between longitudinal and cross-sectional effects of age on the risk of obesity for men and women. Methods Participants are a group of 6504 Iranian adults over 35 years of age in 2001, who live in the central region of Iran. They were followed up for 12 years in a large community-based study. Various medical indexes, including Body Mass Index, were collected in 2001, 2007, and 2013. The Marginal Logistic Regression model, which includes linear and quadratic effects of the Baseline Age and its difference with current age, is used. Results Between 2001 and 2013, the prevalence of obesity raised from 13% to 18% in men and from 31% to 44% in women. The odds of obesity for women was approximately three times the odds of obesity for men on average adjusting for the age effects. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of age were significantly associated with the odds ratio of obesity. There was a rise in the prevalence of obesity for individuals with Baseline Age 35 to 55 and a decline thereafter. Also, the odds ratio of obesity across one's life course, had about 3% increase, on average, by each year aging, regardless of the age at baseline. Conclusions The high rate of obesity and its fast growth is a serious public health issue among Iranians, especially in adults age 35-55, and women. In the present study, Baseline Age was more strongly associated with the risk of obesity than aging. Considering both cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of age, helps us to understand the effect of age on obesity better and to identify the related factors.


This paper attempts to identify the effects of knowledge transfer capacity and relational capital on the reverse transfer of local market information from subsidiaries within MNC networks. In particular, we try to examine the different influences of those determinants in organizations of different sizes. By using Spearman rank order correlation coefficients, we find that the key drivers for large subsidiaries are knowledge development capability, subsidiary autonomy and trust between subsidiaries and MNCs. The key drivers for medium-size firms are subsidiary willingness, trust and organizational distance. In the case of small firms, reverse knowledge transfer is driven by knowledge development capability, subsidiary autonomy and socialization mechanisms. We believe that these findings offer valuable implications for both MNC managers and also for theory.


On 10 July the Central Election Commission informed the President of Kosovo that it had certified the election results of the 11 June parliamentary election. According to the Rules of Procedure of the Assembly of Kosovo, the Assembly's inaugural session will now be convened by the President within thirty (30) days of the official announcement of election results. The certification has set in motion the process of establishing a new coalition government. This report looks at the results, possible scenarios and upcoming challenges for the parties in the aftermath of one of the most inconclusive election results in Kosovo's recent democratic history.


This work was conducted in a bare land in River Nile State to assess the intensity of wind erosion measured by horizontal traps (IWEh) and wind erosivity (Wr) and their interrelationship for two climatic seasons during (August 2008March 2009, August 2009-March 2010). IWEh was measured monthly in four directions, namely; West (W), North West (NW), North (N), and North East (NE). Wr computed by analyzed mean monthly climatic data. In two seasons the results showed that the IWE and Wr varied in frequency and direction even within the same climatic season. The following results of the first season will be presented as an example, the mean IWEh ranged from 99.9 (W) to 109.8 (NE) with a mean of 104.4 tons ha day, a standard deviation (STD) of 4.13 tons ha day and a coefficient of variation (CV) of 4%. The mean IWEh values for the main month effect ranged from 260 (Sept.) to 2.1 (Nov.) with a mean of 104.4 tons ha day, a STD of 97.49 tons ha day and a CV of 93.4%. Wr ranged from 0 (Nov., 2008) to 745.7 (Mar. 2009) with a mean of 310.4 (m/s) and a CV of 66.7%. Wr decreased in the following order: Mar.> Feb.>Jan.> Oct.>Aug.>Dec.>Sept.>Nov. Wr accounted for about 42% of the variability of the IWE. In two seasons March as an example for winter season gave the higher Wr caused mainly by NW (27.6)%, and N (46.4)% directions respectively. Furthermore the higher percentage contribution of erosive winds in summer season (August) blowing mainly from SW (75% & 65.3%) for first and second season respectively. The IWEh and Wr measured in the second season was much lower than that in the first season; the overall mean IWEh and Wr values in the second season was 44% and 93% of that in the first season respectively, due to the higher monthly variability of Wr. Regression between IWEh and Wr gave a highly significant polynomial relationship, (P< 0.05, r=0.649 and R=42%) and (P< 0.05, r=0.681 and R=46%) for first and second seasons respectively. Key wordsHorizontal wind erosion, wind erosivity, Soil traps, climatic seasons and River Nile State.


ABSTRACT CONTEXT: The seeds from Lupinus mutabilis Sweet, also called "chocho", are an important part of the diet in several countries in South America. Prior to consumption, processing is required to remove toxic alkaloids. These alkaloids are known to have pharmacological properties as antiarrhythmics, antimuscarinics and hypoglycemics. CASE REPORT: We report a case in which a one-year-old male initially presented with altered mental status and respiratory distress and subsequently developed symptoms of anticholinergic toxicity, after ingesting a large amount of chocho seeds. CONCLUSION: In spite of going through a difficult clinical condition, the subject evolved favorably through receiving supportive treatment. The seeds from Lupinus mutabilis provide nutritional benefits when consumed, but people need to know their risks when these seeds are consumed without proper preparation.