We present a three-dimensional (3-D) geomechanical-restoration method as a reservoir characterization tool in the Permian Basin, west Texas. The Oates SW field produces gas from the Lower Devonian Thirtyone Formation within structural traps. The Thirtyone is a brittle chert with characteristics of a fractured reservoir: field development has experienced variable production trends for decades. To assess the impact of deformation on reservoir properties, we employ 3-D geomechanical restorations to model strain patterns associated with fault displacement and fold growth. We correlate these model strains with independent measures of natural rock strain to assess the viability of the restoration results. A semblance volume generated from 3-D seismic reflection data illuminates secondary faults and fracture zones that are not incorporated in the geomechanical restorations. Our analysis yields strong correlations between low semblance and elevated strain throughout the Thirtyone reservoir. These correlations indicate that restoration strains may be used to describe the distribution of secondary faults and fractures that are not represented in our models, providing predictive capabilities for defining fractured reservoir properties. We integrate strain and semblance with production data to evaluate these correlations at the borehole scale in the study area. We describe how tectonic strain likely enhanced permeability, directly impacting observed production trends. Our characterization of the Thirtyone reservoir demonstrates the ability to accurately predict strain distributions with geomechanical restorations where structure has been a significant factor in the development of reservoir permeability. We suggest that these methods show promise as a reservoir characterization tool for conventional and unconventional development operations.


An interaction protocol for cooperative platoon merge on highways is proposed. The interaction protocol facilitates a challenge scenario for the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) 2016, where two platoons running on separate lanes merge into one platoon due to a roadwork in one of the lanes. Detailed interaction procedures, described with state machines of each vehicle are presented. A communication message set is designed to support platoon controllers to perform safe and efficient manoeuvres.


S. Ballesteros, L.Goran-Nilsson, P. Lemaire, Ageing, Cognition and Neuroscience: An Introduction. P. Andres, Equivalent Part Set Cueing Effects in Younger and Older Adults. E.A. Kensinger, C.M. Leclerc, Age-related Changes in the Neural Mechanisms Supporting Emotion Processing and Emotional Memory. W.A. Meijer, R.H.M. de Groot, P.W.M. van Gerven, M.P.J. van Boxtel, J. Jolles, Level of Processing and Reaction Time in Young and Middle-aged Adults and the Effect of Education. A.H. Gutchess, D.C. Park, Effects of Ageing on Associative Memory for Related and Unrelated Pictures. V. Gaillard, A. Destrebecqz, S. Michiels, A. Cleeremans, Effects of Age and Practice in Sequence Learning: A Graded Account of Ageing, Learning, and Control. J. Andoni Dunabeitia, A. Marin, A. Aviles, M. Perea, M. Carreiras, Constituent Priming Effects: Evidence for Preserved Morphological Processing in Healthy Old Readers. A. Pansky, M. Goldsmith, A. Koriat, S. Pearlman-Avnion, Memory Accuracy in Old Age: Cognitive, Metacognitive, and Neurocognitive Determinants. A. McKinlay, J.C. Dalrymple-Alford, R.C. Grace, D. Roger, The Effect of Attentional Set-shifting, Working Memory, and Processing Speed on Pragmatic Language Functioning in Parkinson's Disease. L. Taconnat, N. Raz, C. Tocze, B. Bouazzaoui, H. Sauzeon, S. Fay, M. Isingrini, Ageing and Organisation Strategies in Free Recall: The Role of Cognitive Flexibility. S. Ballesteros, M. Gonzalez, J. Mayas, B. Garcia-Rodriguez, J. Manuel Reales, Cross-modal Repetition Priming in Young and Old Adults. E. Nilsson, A. Wahlin, Diabetes and Elevated Glycosylated Haemoglobin: Episodic Memory and Utilisation of Cognitive Support. B. Olk, A. Kingstone, A New Look at Ageing and Performance in the Antisaccade Task: The Impact of Response Selection. B. Garcia-Rodriguez, H. Ellgring, A. Fusari, A. Frank, The Role of Interference in Identification of Emotional Facial Expressions in Normal Ageing and Dementia. E. Borella, C. Delaloye, T. Lecerf, O. Renaud, A. de Ribaupierre, Do Age Differences Between Young and Older Adults in Inhibitory Tasks Depend on the Degree of Activation of Information?


The purpose of this quantitative nonexperimental causal comparative research study is to determine if there is a statistically significant difference in reading and math achievement as measured by the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students with disabilities (SWD) who attended the afterschool program of one rural Georgia middle school when compared to sixth, seventh, and eighth grade SWD who did not attend the program. The results of this research are important because they will identify practices used in the specified afterschool program to improve the academic achievement of SWD. A quantitative research method using a causal comparative design was used to assess the impact of the afterschool program on the student achievement of SWD as an intervention to improve student achievement. Using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), the study compared two groups of SWD from each grade level: one group attending the afterschool program and the other group not attending the program. Georgia CRCT reading and math scores of those who participated were compared to students who did not participate in the afterschool program. Results showed that there was no statistically significant difference between the groups of SWD for all grade levels and both reading and math. Conclusions and recommendations for further research are included.


A recurrent problem in generating realistic pictures by computers is to represent natural irregular objects and phenomena without undue time or space overhead. We develop a new and powerful solution to this problem by modeling objects as sample paths of stochastic processes. Of particular interest are those stochastic processes which previously have been found to be useful models of the natural phenomena to be represented. One such model applicable to the representation of terrains, known as "fractional Brownian motion", has been proposed by B. Mandelbrot.The value of a new approach to object modeling in Computer Graphics depends largely on the efficiency of the techniques used to implement the model. We introduce here a new, efficient algorithm for rendering realistic surfaces defined using the stochastic process mentioned above. A major advantage of this technique is that it allows us to compute the surface to arbitrary levels of detail without increasing the database. Thus objects with complex appearance can be displayed from a very small database. The character of the surface can be controlled by merely modifying a few parameters. A similar change allows complex motion to be created inexpensively.As examples of applications of the method, we show an artificial planet viewed at various levels of detail, and a piece of paper being uncrumpled.


cule (CAM) contactin. Coexpression of p2 with a subunits increased functional channel expression, modulated gating, and induced an increase in plasma membrane surface area, possibly by promoting fusion of intracellular vesicles with the plasma membrane. These results suggest that the (32 subunit may bind to tenascin or similar molecules in the extracellular matnx, thereby anchoring sodium channels and/or modulating their expression at specific sites. Thus, the sodium channel p2 subunit may play a key role in the development of excitable membranes.


This work was supported in part by the Human Resources Program in Energy Technology of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP), granted financial resource from the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy, Republic of Korea. (No. 20154030200730), and in part by the BK21PLUS Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea within the Ministry of Education.


Online surveys are increasingly used in educational research, yet little attention has focused on ethical issues associated with their use in educational settings. Here, we draw on the broader literature to discuss 5 key ethical issues in the context of educational survey research: dual teacher/researcher roles; informed consent; use of incentives; privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality; and data quality. We illustrate methods of addressing these issues with our experiences conducing online surveys in educational contexts. Moving beyond the procedural ethics approach commonly adopted in quantitative educational research, we recommend adopting a situated/process ethics approach to identify and respond to ethical issues that may arise during the conduct, analysis, and reporting of online survey research. The benefits of online surveying in comparison to traditional survey methods are highlighted, including the potential for online surveys to provide ethically defensible methods of conducting research that would not be feasible in offline education research settings.


We report a model of microstructured nonzero dispersion shifted fiber (NZ-DSF) suitable for use in a future wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) system with more enhanced performance characteristics than conventional NZ-DSFs. A microstructured fiber has been chosen because of the flexibility in tailoring its dispersion properties, which helps to attain various desired configurations unachievable in conventional fibers. The refractive index profile has been modeled semi-analytically as well as numerically. The single mode fiber design is optimized for low dispersion, ultralow dispersion slope, and low confinement loss at 1550 nm. A large mode area minimizes nonlinearities and facilitates its operation over the entire S, C, and L bands. The optimized dispersion slope has the lowest value among the reported results for conventional NZ-DSFs.


Background: Footballers constitute a unique group of patients with tibial shaft fractures. They tend to have excellent general health and well developed musculature in the leg, and their fractures are generally closed injuries caused by low velocity trauma. However, little has been reported on the outcome after tibial shaft fractures in this group. Objective: To identify patterns of injury, response to treatment, and functional outcome in such a group. Method: Fifty consecutive tibial shaft fractures in adult footballers treated at Merlin Park Regional Hospital over a five year period were analysed. Results: Most of the fractures were type A injuries (AO/ASIF classification). The incidence of complications was low. All patients reported good or excellent satisfaction with their outcome. However, only 54% of patients returned to playing competitive football. Conclusion: Tibial shaft fractures in amateur footballers are associated with good results when traditional outcome criteria are used, but many patients do not regain their previous level of function.


Opinion research is frequently carried out through the Internet and a further increase can be expected. The article focuses on the online access panel, in which respondents are previously recruited through non-probability methods. Despite substantial time- and cost-reduction, online access panel research mainly has to cope with limited Internet coverage and self-selection in the recruitment phase of new panel members. The article investigates whether frequently applied weighting procedures, based on poststratification variables and propensity scores, make online access panel data more representative of the general population. To address this issue, the answers to identical questions are compared between an online self-administered survey of previously recruited online access panel respondents and a face-to-face survey of randomly sampled respondents of the general population. Both respondent groups were surveyed at a similar moment in time (2006-2007) in the same geographical region (Flanders, Belgium). The findings reveal many significant differences, regarding sociodemographic characteristics as well as attitudes towards work, politics and immigrants. The results can be explained by both the specific characteristics of the respondent groups and mode effects. Weighting adjustment had only a minor impact on the results and did not eliminate the differences.


Understanding of seed ageing, which leads to viability loss during storage, is vital for ex situ plant conservation and agriculture alike. Yet the potential for regulation at the transcriptional level has not been fully investigated. Here, we studied the relationship between seed viability, gene expression and glutathione redox status during artificial ageing of pea (Pisum sativum) seeds. Transcriptome-wide analysis using microarrays was complemented with qRT-PCR analysis of selected genes and a multilevel analysis of the antioxidant glutathione. Partial degradation of DNA and RNA occurred from the onset of artificial ageing at 60% RH and 50°C, and transcriptome profiling showed that the expression of genes associated with programmed cell death, oxidative stress and protein ubiquitination were altered prior to any sign of viability loss. After 25 days of ageing viability started to decline in conjunction with progressively oxidising cellular conditions, as indicated by a shift of the glutathione redox state towards more positive values (>−190 mV). The unravelling of the molecular basis of seed ageing revealed that transcriptome reprogramming is a key component of the ageing process, which influences the progression of programmed cell death and decline in antioxidant capacity that ultimately lead to seed viability loss.


We propose a new family of subgradient- and gradient-based methods which converges with optimal complexity for convex optimization problems whose feasible region is simple enough. This includes cases where the objective function is non-smooth, smooth, have composite/saddle structure, or are given by an inexact oracle model. We unified the way of constructing the subproblems which are necessary to be solved at each iteration of these methods. This permitted us to analyse the convergence of these methods in a unified way compared to previous results which required different approaches for each method/algorithm. Our contribution rely on two well-known methods in non-smooth convex optimization: the mirror-descent method (MDM) by Nemirovski-Yudin and the dual-averaging method by Nesterov. Therefore, our family of methods includes them and many other methods as particular cases. For instance, the proposed family of classical gradient methods and its accelerations generalize Devolder et al.'s, Nesterov's primal/dual gradient methods, and Tseng's accelerated proximal gradient methods. Also our family of methods can partially become special cases of other universal methods, too. As an additional contribution, the novel extended MDM removes the compactness assumption of the feasible region and the fixation of the total number of iterations which is required by the original MDM in order to attain the optimal complexity.


http://journals.cambridge.org/ans Antarctic Science provides a truly international forum for the broad spread of studies that increasingly characterize scientific research in the Antarctic. The journal attracts papers from all countries currently undertaking Antarctic research. Whilst emphasising interdisciplinary work, the journal publishes papers from environmental management to biodiversity, from volcanoes to icebergs, and from oceanography to the upper atmosphere. No other journal covers such a wide range of Antarctic scientific studies. To subscribe contact Customer Services


Our laboratory has shown that the efficacy of bladder cancer intravesical therapy is in part limited by the poor penetration of drugs into the urothelium. We further found that paclitaxel, because of its lipophilicity, shows a higher penetration than other commonly used drugs such as mitomycin C and doxorubicin. However, the commercial formulation of paclitaxel (i.e., Taxol) contains Cremophor, which forms micelles that entrap the drug and reduce its free fraction. The present study evaluated the effect of DMSO on paclitaxel release from Cremophor micelles and paclitaxel penetration in bladders of dogs given an intravesical dose of paclitaxel (500 microg/20 ml in 0.22% Cremophor, 0.21% ethanol, and 50% DMSO). Cremophor produced a concentration-dependent reduction of the free fraction of paclitaxel (reduced to 23% at 0.25% Cremophor). This Cremophor effect was reversed by DMSO in a concentration-dependent manner, resulting in a 92% free fraction at 50% DMSO. DMSO also increased the average size of Cremophor micelles from 13 nm to 230 nm at 50% DMSO. A comparison of the tissue penetration data in the presence of Cremophor and/or DMSO indicates the following effects of DMSO: (a). increase in urine production rate and, consequently, a 36% reduction of the final urine concentration; (b). 2-fold increase in paclitaxel penetration across bladder urothelium; (c). increase in drug removal from bladder tissues (30% more rapidly); and (d). a 60% increase of the amount of drug in bladder tissue. These results indicate that DMSO caused rearrangement of Cremophor micelles, reversed the entrapment of paclitaxel in Cremophor micelles and thereby increased the free fraction of paclitaxel in solution, enhanced the urine production rate and enhanced drug removal by the perfusing capillaries, with an overall effect of increasing the bladder tissue delivery of paclitaxel formulated in Cremophor.


Currently, run-time operating systems are widely used to implement concurrent embedded applications. This run-time approach to multi-tasking and inter-process communication can introduce significant overhead to execution times and memory requirements-prohibitive in many cases for embedded applications where processor and memory resources are scarce. In this paper, we present a static compilation approach that generates ordinary C programs at compile-time that can be readily retargeted to different processors, without including or generating a run-time scheduler. Our method is based on a novel Petri net theoretic approach.


A major problem in reconstructing degenerative intervertebral discs is to obtain sufficient nucleus pulposus (NP) seeding cells with normal physiologic functions. The current study adopted a three‐dimensional microcarrier culture system for massive cell expansion and evaluated the biological characteristics and physiological functions of the propagated adult degenerative NP cells. Isolated adult NP cells were cultured in either microcarrier stirring culturing system or traditional monolayer cultivation. The growth characteristics, proliferation, extracellular matrix secretion, and apoptosis potential were examined to evaluate the different features of the two cultivation methods. Compared to the monolayer cultivation system, the adhesion time of NP cells in the three‐dimensional microcarrier culture system appeared longer with relatively transient stable growth period. MTT and 3H‐TdR assays suggested significantly elevated proliferation and higher thymidine incorporation rates in cells from microcarrier system compare to cells in the monolayer system at the exponential growth phase (p < 0.05). Western blot data complimented the immunostaining results that the NP cells in the microcarrier system expressed significantly more protein levels of both type collagens at the exponential growth phase than that in the monolayer system (p < 0.05). Further, significantly more 35S labeled proteoglycan incorporation was noticed in the cells on the microcarriers at both the stable growth and the exponential growth phases (p < 0.05 and p < 0.01). In conclusion, the three‐dimensional microcarrier stirring culture system provides a means of fast and massive propagation of NP seeding cells which maintain their normal physiological characteristics and functions. © 2013 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 31: 858–863, 2013


The authors highlight the importance and discuss the criticality of distinguishing between constructs and methods when comparing predictors. They note that comparisons of constructs and methods in comparative evaluations of predictors result in outcomes that are theoretically to conceptually uninterpretable and thus potentially misleading. The theoretical and practical implications of the distinction between predictor constructs and predictor methods are discussed, with three important streams of personnel psychology research being used to frame this discussion. Researchers, editors, reviewers, educators, and consumers of research are urged to carefully consider the extent to which the construct-method distinction is made and maintained in their own research and that of others, especially when predictors are being compared. It is hoped that this discussion will reorient researchers and practitioners toward a more construct-oriented approach that is aligned with a scientific emphasis in personnel selection research and practice.


Public transit systems in major urban areas usually operate under deficits and therefore require significant subsidies. An important cause of this deficit, particularly in the developing world, is the high fare evasion rate mainly due to an ineffective control policy or the lack of it. In this paper we study new models for optimizing fare inspection strategies in transit networks based on bilevel programming. In the first level, the leader (the network operator) determines probabilities for inspecting passengers at different locations, while in the second level, the followers (the fare-evading passengers) respond by optimizing their routes given the inspection probabilities and travel times. To model the followers' behavior we study both a nonadaptive variant, in which passengers select a path a priori and continue along it throughout their journey, and an adaptive variant, in which they gain information along the way and use it to update their route. For these problems, which are interesting in their own right, we design exact and approximation algorithms, and we prove a tight bound of 3/4 on the ratio of the optimal cost between adaptive and nonadaptive strategies. For the leader's optimization problem, we study a fixed-fare and a flexible-fare variant, where ticket prices may or may not be set at the operator's will. For the latter variant, we design an LP-based approximation algorithm. Finally, employing a local search procedure that shifts inspection probabilities within an initially determined support set, we perform an extensive computational study for all variants of the problem on instances of the Dutch railway and the Amsterdam subway network. This study reveals that our solutions are within 5% of theoretical upper bounds drawn from the LP relaxation. We also derive exact nonlinear programming formulations for all variants of the leader's problem and use them to obtain exact solutions for small instance sizes.The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2016.1560 .


Abstract Small (m-scale) peridotite enclaves at Planany (central Czech Republic) are separated from their gneissic host rocks by a narrow (cm-scale) reaction rim comprising an inner, tremolite + phlogopite zone and an outer, essentially monomineralic phlogopite zone. Both retain an Mg# very similar to that of the peridotite (Mg# = 81), but relative to this reference frame, show large increases in LILE (K, Rb, Ba) and radionuclides (U, Th). On a smaller scale, however, there has been a mineralogically-controlled decoupling of various components, particularly among the HFSE and REE, the former favouring the phlogopite-rich outer layer of the reaction rim, the latter the amphibole-rich inner zone. Taken together, however, the reaction zones preserve key compositional features of their inferred protolith.


Administration of D-penicillamine and lathyrogens such as β-amino-propionitrile to animals markedly alters connective tissue by preventing the normal cross-linkage of elastin and collagen. It had been shown that β-aminopropionitrile blocks the cross-linkage of elastin and collagen by preventing the initial step in cross-linkage: the conversion of lysine in peptide linkage to α-amino adipic-δ-semialdehyde. We show that penicillamine acts after the initial step, causing the accumulation of an elastin rich in α-amino adipic-δ-semialdehyde.


Background and Purpose— Small subcortical white matter infarcts are a common stroke subtype often associated with cognitive deficits. The lack of relevant models confined to white matter has limited the investigation of its pathophysiology. Here, we examine tissue and functional outcome after an ischemic lesion within corpus callosum in wild-type (WT) mice and in mice null for a gene, NOTCH3, linked to white matter ischemic injury in patients. Methods— WT and NOTCH3 knockout mice were subjected to stereotactic microinjections of the potent vasoconstrictor endothelin-1 at the level of periventricular white matter to induce a focal ischemic lesion. Infarct location was confirmed by MRI, and brains were examined for lesion size and histology; behavioral deficits were assessed ⩽1 month in WT mice. Results— Ischemic damage featured an early cerebral blood flow deficit, blood–brain barrier opening, and a lesion largely confined to white matter. At later stages, myelin and axonal degeneration and microglial/macrophage infiltration were found. WT mice displayed prolonged cognitive deficit when tested using a novel object recognition task. NOTCH3 mutants showed larger infarcts and greater cognitive deficit at 7 days post stroke. Conclusions— Taken together, these data show the usefulness of microinjections of endothelin-1 into periventricular white matter to study focal infarcts and cognitive deficit in WT mice. In short-term studies, stroke outcome was worse in NOTCH3 null mice, consistent with the notion that the lack of the NOTCH3 receptor affects white matter stroke susceptibility.


The construction of the shallow tunnel at Brezno started using the Pre-Vault Method. The tunnel excavation, in complicated geological conditions, led to many difficulties which finally resulted in a collapse, when a significant part of the temporary tunnel lining collapsed. Various options for re-excavating the tunnel were evaluated prior to further construction. Finally a decision was made to separate the collapsed area into sections 9 m in length using 16 m-wide, transversally oriented pile walls, to improve the stability of the collapsed ground. The walls were constructed from the surface prior to excavation. It was also decided to re-excavate a collapsed area using the Sprayed Concrete Lining (SCL) method. Due to problematic soft ground conditions, which had been made even worse by the collapse, some additional support measures had to be considered prior to re-excavation (ground improvement, micropile umbrellas embedded into the pile walls, etc.)This paper describes numerical modelling of the tunnel re-excavation through the collapsed area. Initial calculations of the tunnel re-excavation were made using a 2D finite element method. Subsequently, further calculations to evaluate the rock mass behaviour in the collapsed area were provided in 3D. The 2D calculations were used to provide sensitivity studies, while 3D modelling was mainly used for evaluating the tunnel face stability (impact of the pile walls, impact of ground improvement) together with other factors (length of advances, moment of the temporary invert closure, etc.) The results of the modelling were compared with the monitoring results.The paper also briefly describes the construction experience (technical problems, performance of various support measures, etc.) The excavation and the primary lining construction were completed in 2006, and the tunnel was opened for traffic in April 2007.


In this study, we focus our interest on patterning a conventional electron beam resist by electron field emission exposure using Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). We have fabricated 50-140 nm deep structures in InAs with the resolution less than 100 nm through 20 nm thick PMMA resist that was exposed. According to our knowledge, electron field emission exposure of resist has already been performed on gold, silicon but never on InAs substrate. Compared with other semiconductors, InAs has the Fermi level pinned in the conduction band leading to the superior electric property even for nanometer scale structures. Using electron field emission exposure technique, structures deeper than 100 nm can be performed that is enough to release suspended free structures after chemical etching, being ideal for nanowire and NanoElectroMechanical Systems (NEMS). In the following, we will describe the experimental setup and results of fabrication.


Affine motion compensated prediction (AMCP) is an advanced tool which may be incorporated into future video compression standards. There are numerous coders already using AMCP . However the increased number of motion vector components is a disadvantage and quantizing these components can have significant consequences on the difference macro blocks (DMBs). This paper examines the quantization of affine motion vector (AMV) coefficients, by deriving a quadratic relationship between DMB energy and AMV quantization step size. Mathematical derivations and simulations are provided, including two literature comparisons demonstrating the benefits of this work. In the first comparison, the quantization of orthogonalized AMVs in is compared with quantization guided by the novel quadratic model. In the second comparison, Nokia's MVC coder is modified to use the quadratic model to generate quantization step sizes for various granularities; sequence, frame, and quarter-frame, demonstrating up to 8.7% bit rate reductions. Model driven AMV quantization step size choices are shown to be very close to and even outperform limited exhaustive search AMV quantization step size choices, at a quarter of the computational cost


This study proposed the triple-layer remote phosphor (TRP) structure to enhance the color quality and the emitted luminous flux of white LEDs (WLEDs). The TRP structure consists of three different phosphor layers that are arranged as follows: the yellow YAG:Ce3+ phosphor at the bottom, the red phosphor layer CaMgSi2O6:Eu2+,Mn2+ at the top and the green Ba2Li2Si2O7:Sn2+,Mn2+ phosphor between these two ones. The aim to use the red CaMgSi2O6:Eu2+,Mn2+ phosphor is to control the red light component so that the color rendering index (CRI) could be increased. While the green Ba2Li2Si2O7:Sn2+,Mn2+ phosphor is applied to manage the green light component, leading to the rise in luminous efficacy (LE) of WLEDs. Moreover, when the concentrations of these two phosphors are raised, that of the yellow phosphor YAG:Ce3+ has to be decreased to remain the average correlated color temperatures (ACTTs) in a range from 6000 K to 8500 K. Furthermore, not only the CRI and LE but the color quality scale (CQS) is also analyzed by controlling the two green and red phosphor concentrations. The researched results show that the higher the concentration of CaMgSi2O6:Eu2+,Mn2+, the more enhancements in the CRI will be made. In contrast, when the Ba2Li2Si2O7:Sn2+,Mn2+ concentration increases, the CRI significantly decreases. Meanwhile, CQS is likely to considerably rise in a concentration range from 10% to 14% of CaMgSi2O6:Eu2+,Mn2+, regardless of the presence of Ba2Li2Si2O7:Sn2+,Mn2+ concentration. Especially, in parallel with the improvement of CRI and CQS, the LE could be also increased by more than 40% due to the decline in back-scattering lights and the green lights supplement. From these details, the results of this study are valuable references for manufacturers to achieve the goals of enhancing color quality and luminous efficiency of WLEDs.


LOFAR is the LOw‐Frequency Radio interferometer ARray located at midlatitude (52°53′N). Here we present results on ionospheric structures derived from 29 LOFAR nighttime observations during the winters of 2012/2013 and 2013/2014. We show that LOFAR is able to determine differential ionospheric total electron content values with an accuracy better than 0.001 total electron content unit = 1016m−2 over distances ranging between 1 and 100 km. For all observations the power law behavior of the phase structure function is confirmed over a long range of baseline lengths, between 1 and 80 km, with a slope that is, in general, larger than the 5/3 expected for pure Kolmogorov turbulence. The measured average slope is 1.89 with a one standard deviation spread of 0.1. The diffractive scale, i.e., the length scale where the phase variance is 1rad2, is shown to be an easily obtained single number that represents the ionospheric quality of a radio interferometric observation. A small diffractive scale is equivalent to high phase variability over the field of view as well as a short time coherence of the signal, which limits calibration and imaging quality. For the studied observations the diffractive scales at 150 MHz vary between 3.5 and 30 km. A diffractive scale above 5 km, pertinent to about 90% of the observations, is considered sufficient for the high dynamic range imaging needed for the LOFAR epoch of reionization project. For most nights the ionospheric irregularities were anisotropic, with the structures being aligned with the Earth magnetic field in about 60% of the observations.


This report provides review of importance of power system protection and presents different techniques available in practical situations. The material provided in this report is available online on different resources. Moreover, this report examines different types of faults in power system and discusses the consequences of the faults. Moreover, it also talks about different methods of protection schemes applied for various faults occurred on power system equipment such as transformer, generator, bus, transmission and distribution lines and motors. Furthermore, different relaying techniques are also discussed briefly which are used extensively throughout the report for explaining the importance of these techniques in fault detection and damage prevention. SKM power tool is used for simulation purpose. The simulation result are displayed and explained. Moreover, short circuit calculation and equipment selection method is also discussed in this report.


The field survey of two natural villages found that the relationship capital plays an important role in rural public sports service benefiting from the rural elite operation mode. However, negative effect brought by the relationship capital should not be neglected, including distorting the social equity, increasing social transaction cost, and weakening the public trust in government. It is a top priority to effectively evade its negative effect and bring into full play huge potential of the relationship capital.


The present paper discusses the behavior of the reinforced concrete beams subjected to torsion by applying the endochronic plastic model in conjunction with the softened truss model. The endochronic constitutive equations are developed to describe the behavior of concrete. The mechanical behavior of concrete is decomposed into hydrostatic part and deviatoric part. New definition of the bulk modulus and the shear modulus are defined in terms of compressive strength of concrete. Also, new deviatoric hardening function is developed. Then, the endochronic constitutive equations of concrete are applied with the softened truss model for the behavior of the reinforced concrete beams subjected to torsion. The theoretical results obtained based on the present model are compared with the experimental data. The present model has shown the ability to describe the behavior of reinforced concrete beams subjected to torsion.


In this paper we analyze the emulation of two-dimensional meshes, butterfly networks, and spanning trees on meshes, Boolean cubes, and Cube Connected Cycles (CCC) networks. We consider three timing models for signal propagation dong a wire: constant delay, capacitive delay, and resistive delay. We ais0 present novel layouts for hypercubes and CCCs that offer better performance for some problems, while essentially maintainingthe performance for other problems. The mesh interconnection performs better on all emulations for all delay models,if the communication throughput determines the performance. With resistive delay model, meshes also offer the best latency for all emulations. The hypercube and CCC layouts yield lower latency for emulating butterlly networks and spanning trees for the constant delay and capacitive delay models.


Being a distance education institution, our current infrastructure does not allow group or collaborative work on undergraduate level. Although students are allowed to work together and assist each other, each student is required to submit individual attempts for assignments and/or projects. Assignments that are so similar that we could not accept them as individual attempts are considered cheating. According to the literature, cheating in assignments and projects is a problem in educational institutions at all levels. Students often use ingenious ways to disguise dishonesty. It is not always possible to determine the extent of the problem due to the inability to identify all instances, especially in modules with large student numbers. We investigated this problem in a second-level computing module. The examination results of students suspected of cheating were analysed and compared with the results of the rest of the students (the control group). This was done for 2004 and 2005. In this paper we report on our findings in this regard.


A fundamental problem in interconnection network theory is to design permutation networks with as few cells as possible and a small programming or setup time. The well-known networks of Benes and Waksman have asymptotically optimal cell counts, but the best setup algorithm available for such networks with n inputs requires O(n log2 n) sequential time. As an alternative, this paper considers another class of permutation networks which are collectively referred to as cellular permutation arrays. Using a group theoretic formulation, a natural correspondence is established between such permutation networks and iterative decompositions of symmetric groups through cosets. Based on this correspondence, the setup problem is reduced to iteratively determining the leaders of the cosets to which the permutation to be realized belongs. This, in turn, leads to linear-time setup algorithms for cellular permutation arrays. The paper describes these algorithms in detail for two families of cellular permutation arrays reported in the literature.


This paper examines the ideology of the German Neukirchen Mission and its implication on education in Tana River County, Kenya 1887 to 1986. Western education and Christianity in Africa were introduced by Christian missionaries from Europe as early as the 16 th century but took root in around the mid-nineteenth century. In Tana River, several missionary organizations ventured in the area notably the Methodist Missionary Society (MMS), the German Neukirchen Mission (GNM), the Holy Ghost Fathers (HGF) and the Swedish Mission. They all gave up in the area due to a multiplicity of hardships save for the GNM which hang on and continued with evangelization and education. Consequently, there is need to look at the ideology of the GNM that influenced its resolve to persist in an area shunned by its contemporaries. An understanding of GNM's ideology would come in handy in helping to improve education standards in the area bearing in mind that the same problems that bedeviled the region have to a large extent remained to date The study had three objectives which were: to identify the educational institutions opened by the GNM in Tana River County 1887-1986; to establish the hardships experienced by the GNM in Tana River County in the period 1887-1986 and to examine the ideology which influenced GNM's activities in Tana River County in the period 1887-1986.  The time frame was 1887 to 1986. This period covers the time the GNM arrived in Tana River to the year the first secondary school was established at Ngao i.e 1986. Ngao served as GNM's mission base or station since the arrival of the missionaries in the region. The study was historical in nature and utilized a historical research design. Sources of data were both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources were mainly drawn from the Kenya National Archives (KNA) and schools and churches in Tana River. Document analysis was also utilized as a data collection method. The research instruments were interview schedules and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs). Respondents to these research instruments were retired educationists, civil servants and politicians, church leaders and village elders selected through purposive and snowball sampling techniques; all totaling 33. Collected data was analyzed through qualitative and quantitative methods while documents were analyzed through external and internal criticism. The study found out that the GNM established 31 primary schools 28 of which are still operational. The GNM missionaries experienced several challenges among them deportation during the two World Wars, frequent Somali attacks, floods, poor transport network, malaria infections and inadequate finances. The ideology was examined under five perspectives namely The Great Commission, Faith Mission, Reformed Theology, Social Darwinism and Socio-Political and Economic view point. The study recommends improvement of road and school infrastructure, investing more on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions, opening of a secondary school wing in every primary school, delocalization of teachers and establishment of  an institution of higher learning in the area.


Building on real options literature, this study shows that the use of a staged approach for the management of innovation projects affects the innovation output of firms differently depending on firm characteristics and ambitions. In particular, while staged project management increases the effect of inno- vation expenditures on new product sales for firms envisaging incremental or continuous innovations, this moderating effect is absent for firms aspiring radical innovations. In addition, while staged project management has a pos- itive moderating effect in firms with resource slack, this is not the case when firms are resource-constrained. We further investigate the underlying mecha- nisms to this latter finding by demonstrating that in resource-abundant firms staged project organization is associated with delaying projects until more information becomes available. Thereby these firms reap the waiting value inherent to real options reasoning. By contrast, resource-constrained firms using staged project management are shown to abandon a larger share of their innovation projects and to concentrate resources on fewer projects. It appears, however, that, due to budgetary pressure, they make the decision to abandon at a too early stage where uncertainty is insufficiently resolved. This can explain why there is no effect of staged project management on the sales of resource-constrained firms from new products. The paper contributes to theory development on when and why the staging of innovation projects affects the innovation output of firms and to the literature on real options reasoning in general.


In this work, we investigate pre-training of neural network based speaker embeddings for low-latency speaker change detection. Our proposed system takes two speech segments, generates embeddings using shared Siamese layers and then classifies the concatenated embeddings depending on whether they are spoken by the same speaker. We investigate gender classification, contrastive loss and triplet loss based pre-training of the embedding layers and also joint training of the embedding layers along with a same/different classifier. Training is performed on 2-second single speaker segments based on ground truth speaker segmentation of broadcast news data. However, during test, we use the detection system in a practical low-latency setting for annotating automatic closed captions. In contrast to training, test pairs are now created around automatic speech recognition (ASR) based segmentation boundaries. The ASR segments are often shorter than 2 seconds causing duration mismatch during testing. In our experiments, although the baseline i-vector based classifier performs well, the proposed triplet loss based pre-training followed by joint training provides 7-50% relative F-measure improvement in matched and mismatched conditions. In addition, the degradation in performance is less severe for network based embeddings as compared to using i-vectors in the variable duration test conditions.


Cuvier's beaked whales were sighted once on each of three different surveys over Antalya Canyon, in June and September 2015. Sightings took place in waters between 600 and 1000 m in depth and at 8 km from the closest shore. While the first sighting was positively identified as Cuvier's beaked whale (Ziphius cavirostris (G. Cuvier, 1823)), latter sightings could not be identified to the species level. Nevertheless, noting that latter sightings had a similar spatial and temporal distribution to the first one and that there is an overwhelming difference between the probabilities of sighting Cuvier's beaked whales versus Mesoplodon sp. In the Mediterranean Sea, all three sightings were assumed to be Cuvier's beaked whales. Group size was recorded as two for the first two sightings and one for the last sighting. We hereby report the most recent Cuvier's beaked whale sightings from the Levantine Basin and the first ones from Antalya Bay, as well as compile the previous sighting and stranding information on beaked whales in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The current study supports previous modeling results showing the northern region of the Levantine Sea to be of importance to the species distribution in the Mediterranean Sea and we propose that the species is indeed regularly present in the area. However, consistent regional surveys are needed in order to validate these conclusions.


The study area is situated in the Sub-Himalayas of Azad Jammu and Kashmir in District Sudhnoti near Pallandri city. The main purpose of study is to give a research proposal to construct a short traffic tunnel project in realization Azad Jammu and Kashmir in Pakistan Himalaya and to reduce the route of cities that are located in Sudhnoti District. Untill recently, numerous hydro tunnels were leading Himalaya tunneling industry for last decades. Traffic tunnels now are being constructed with the collaboration of international contractors. The route from Islamabad to Rawalakot includes lots of mega and mini projects that are under construction. Azad pattan hydropower project, Azad Pattan landslide management and renovation of Gui Nala to Rawalakot road is one of them. Despite all these developments there is no appropriate source that could facilitate and link nearby cities and towns but this tunnel could be the reason for the mobility of people and equipment from Pallandari to Rawalakot, Azad Pattan and Islamabad. It will help urbanization and economical aspect of the region. Furthermore, this research is based on structural and stratigraphic exploration of study area. The project area is surrounded by Salt Range Thrust to the South, Jhelum Fault to the West, Riasi thrust to the East, and it lies in the south of Hazara Kashmir Syntaxes. The major folds in this area are Dhardarch Syncline, Pallandari Anticline and Chechhan Anticline.


1. The first dehydrogenation step of peroxisomal beta-oxidation involves the reduction of O2 to H2O2. Production rates of H2O2 and acetyl units by purified rat liver peroxisomes oxidizing palmitoyl-CoA were equal, indicating that H2O2 production is a reliable index for the release of acetyl units during peroxisomal fatty-acid oxidation. 2. Measurements of H2O2 and acid-soluble oxidation products during [1-14C]palmitoyl-CoA oxidation by purified peroxisomes revealed that the number of acetyl units released per molecule of palmitoyl-CoA oxidized rapidly decreased with increasing unbound palmitoyl-CoA concentrations. Structural damage to the peroxisomes caused by detergents or other treatments also decreased the number of acetyl units released. Under conditions where oxidation proceeded linearly with time the theoretical maximum of 5 acetyl units released per molecule of palmitoyl-CoA oxidized [Lazarow (1978) J. Biol. Chem. 253, 1522--1528] was never reached. 3. Expressed in terms of acetyl units produced and measured at low unbound-palmitoyl-CoA concentrations, mitochondrial oxidation was 10--20-fold higher than peroxisomal oxidation. 4. ATP stimulated peroxisomal palmitoyl-CoA oxidation approx. 2-fold. The ATP effect required the presence of Mg2+ and was lost when peroxisomal membranes were disrupted by Triton X-100 or high concentrations of unbound palmitoyl-CoA. 5. Disruption of peroxisomes by detergents, freeze--thawing, osmotic or mechanical treatment did not stimulate palmitoyl-CoA oxidation in the presence of ATP, indicating that peroxisomal fatty-acid-CoA oxidation was not latent. In the absence of ATP, Triton X-100 stimulated peroxisomal palmitoyl-CoA oxidation approx. 2-fold.


The mitochondrial KATP channel (mitoKATP) is highly sensitive to ATP, which inhibits K+ flux with K1/2 values of 20-40 μM. This raises the question, how can mitoKATP be opened in the presence of physiological concentrations of ATP? We measured K+ flux in liposomes reconstituted with purified mitoKATP and found that guanine nucleotides are potent activators of this channel. ATP-inhibited K+ flux was completely reactivated by both GTP (K1/2 = 7 μM) and GDP (K1/2 = 140 μM). These ligands had no effect in the absence of ATP. The K1/2 for ATP inhibition exhibited quadratic dependence on [GTP] and [GDP], consistent with two binding sites for guanine nucleotides. We also found that palmitoyl-CoA and oleoyl-CoA inhibited K+ flux through reconstituted mitoKATP with K1/2 values of 260 nM and 80 nM, respectively. This inhibition was reversed by GTP (K1/2 = 232 μM) as well as by the K+ channel openers cromakalim (20 μM) and diazoxide (10 μM). Inhibition of mitoKATP by long-chain acyl-CoA esters, like that of ATP, exhibited an absolute requirement for Mg2+ ions. We propose that the open-closed state of the mitochondrial KATP channel is determined by the relative cytosolic concentrations of GTP and long-chain acyl-CoA esters.


Mucosal and systemic immune responses play an important role in the prevention of infections, including infection with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). Influenza virus can efficiently induce mucosal and systemic immune responses, and thus, chimeric influenza viruses expressing the peptides derived from HIV-1 proteins have been generated to elicit immune responses against the inserted peptide. Novel chimeric influenza viruses were generated with full length of the V3-loop of gp120 or cytotoxic T-lymphocyte epitope of gag from HIV-1 inserted into the stalk of NA (NA-V3 and NA-gag, respectively) and the V3-loop was inserted into the intracellular domain of M2 (M2-V3). The immune responses of mice infected with these chimeric influenza viruses were investigated. The intranasal infection of NA-gag induced gag epitopespecific CTLs and the intranasal infection of NA-V3 and M2-V3 induced V3-specific antibodies. The serum from mice infected with NA-V3 neutralized a clinical isolate of HIV-1 and the infection of NA-V3 induced V3-specific secretory antibodies. These results suggest that intranasal infection of these chimeric influenza viruses could induce both humoral and cellular immune responses against an inserted foreign peptide and therefore could be a potential candidate for use as an HIV-1 vaccine.


The Caribbeanization of Black Politics: Race, Group Consciousness, and Political Participation in America examines the impact of the ethnic diversification of African American communities on the prospects for black political empowerment in four "gateway" cities of entry for black ethnic citizens - Boston, Chicago, Miami, and New York City. For the last several years, these cities have experienced an influx of black immigrants from the Cape Verdean Islands, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the West Indies. Many studies conclude that African American group consciousness causes them to participate in politics at higher rates when socio-economic status is controlled for. In this research, I will determine whether group consciousness impacts the political participation for other black groups in the same manner. I also wish to assess the current political incorporation of these groups as indicated by African American and black ethnic office holding. Finally, I will examine the political coalitions and conflicts among African Americans and black ethnics and then predict the future of black political development in these cities.


This study evaluated the causes of false positive Human Immunodeficiency Virus test results (F+HIV), cross reactivity of HIV antibodies with other non HIV antibodies, and efficiency of the serial and parallel testing algorithms. 100 blood samples randomly collected from clients attending the Heart to Heart HIV counseling and testing unit of FMC Umuahia, were screened using the rapid ELISA and Enzyme Immuno Assay (EIA) tests. Discordant HIV results were screened for Anti Streptolycin O (ASO), Rheumatoid factor (RF) and Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg). Of the 100 samples, 73 were negative to HIV antibodies, 11 positive, and 16 discordant results. EIA confirmed 8 of 16 discordant results negative, 5 indeterminate and 3 positive. F+ results were 33%, and false negatives were 4%. A marked percentage of samples exhibited cross reactivity with ASO (8;62%), HBsAg (3;23%), and RF (2;15%). An Odds Ratio (OR) of 33:0 (95% CI  13.8-26.2), showed that Determine rapid test kit is 33 times more likely to give a false positive HIV result than Unigold rapid test kit. The parallel algorithm showed better efficiency than the serial. This study showed that F+HIV test result is prevalent, and cross reactivity is the plausible cause of F+HIV test results. Keywords : Cross- reactivity, false positive, HIV, Umuahia.


Based on the study of synchronous counter and adiabatic circuits, a new design scheme of ternary adiabatic synchronous reversible counter is proposed. According to the theory of three essential circuit elements, circuit structure of four-bit ternary adiabatic synchronous reversible counter is realized by using NMOS transistors with different thresholds and cross-storage structure and combining with the principle of energy recovery. Computer simulation results indicate that the designed circuits have correct logic function. Compared with traditional CMOS counter, the average power consumption of circuits saves up to 67.5%.


The effective treatment of severe pain requires a multimodal approach with a thorough knowledge of the pharmacological properties of the individual drugs. Non-opioid analgesics are surprisingly effective and compare well to opioids. Due to the pain-induced changes in the spinal cord, the resulting tolerance and the specific effect of tumor mediators on the pain process, an effective treatment strategy requires in 10-30% of the tumor patients in the last weeks of their life an interventional approach to pain management. The common techniques involve neuroaxial delivery of local anaesthetics and opioids. There has been an abundant experience with these techniques in the perioperative setting. The indications are uncontrollable pain states and/or severe side effects of pain therapy including the cognitive deterioration with high dose opioids. The complications are mainly technical and are mostly due to catheter obstruction or disconnection. The increasing use of elastomeric pumps reduces the weight of the reservoir and allows the patient an easy adjustment of the flow rate.


Macroeconomic models have largely ignored the importance of gender diversity by assuming that male and female workers are perfectly substitutable in the aggregate production function. Whether this assumption is valid is an empirical question that this paper aims to answer by estimating the elasticity of substitution (ES) between the two types of labor. We apply linear and non-linear techniques to cross-country data at the aggregate level, to cross-country data at the sectoral level, and to firm-level data for the manufacturing sector in China. We find that women and men are far from being perfect substitutes: the ES is below 1 for the aggregate sample, between 1-2 for the sectoral sample, and between 2-3 at firm-level. We discuss why the ES may vary at different levels of aggregation and conclude on the implications of these results for growth accounting and for the gains from gender equality.


SIR,-Having read the letter by M A Gillman and F J Lichtigfeld (4 July, p 64) on the management of alcohol withdrawal symptoms, in which they report on the good results of continuous nitrous oxide and oxygen therapy, I would be interested to know what proportions of the gas mixtures were used, for how long treatment was maintained, and if they encountered any difficulty with bone marrow suppression-the latter being a problem when these gas mixtures were used for the long-term ventilation of patients in intensive care units. This would be relevant as their patients may well be already suffering some degree of immune deficiency owing to their chronic addiction and poor nutrition.


The microvideo platform TikTok has emerged as a popular hub for self-expression and social activism, particularly for youth, but use of the platform's affective affordances to spread awareness of important issues has not been adequately studied. Through an exploratory multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of popular climate change-hashtagged TikTok videos, we examine how affordances of visibility, editability, and association facilitate the formation of affective publics on TikTok. We describe how TikTok's features allow creators to construct and propagate multi-layered, affect-laden messages with varying degrees of earnestness, humor, and ambiguity. Finally, we identify recurring affective themes in popular climate change messages by studying not just in-frame content but also the discursive, intertextual, and memetic linkages that propagate affective publics. Collectively, these audiovisual expressions of personal engagement and awareness demonstrate how media affordances can abet, amplify, and confuse discussions of global issues online. These affordances facilitate a unique kind of activism by helping non-expert users intervene in a discussion that generally takes place among scientists and journalists: the question of how serious a problem climate change is and what to do about it.


Abstract. Snowpack is a multiphase (photo)chemical reactor that strongly influences the air composition in polar and snow-covered regions. Snowpack plays a special role in the nitrogen cycle, as it has been shown that nitrate undergoes numerous recycling stages (including photolysis) in the snow before being permanently buried in the ice. However, the current understanding of these physicochemical processes remains very poor. Several modelling studies have attempted to reproduce (photo)chemical reactions inside snow grains, but these have relied on strong assumptions to characterise snow reactive properties, which are not well defined. Air–snow exchange processes such as adsorption, solid-state diffusion, or co-condensation also affect snow chemical composition. Here, we present a physically based model of these processes for nitrate. Using as input a 1-year-long time series of atmospheric nitrate concentration measured at Dome C, Antarctica, our model reproduces with good agreement the nitrate measurements in the surface snow. By investigating the relative importance of the main exchange processes, this study shows that, on the one hand, the combination of bulk diffusion and co-condensation allows a good reproduction of the measurements (correlation coefficient r = 0.95), with a correct amplitude and timing of summer peak concentration of nitrate in snow. During winter, nitrate concentration in surface snow is mainly driven by thermodynamic equilibrium, whilst the peak observed in summer is explained by the kinetic process of co-condensation. On the other hand, the adsorption of nitric acid on the surface of the snow grains, constrained by an already existing parameterisation for the isotherm, fails to fit the observed variations. During winter and spring, the modelled concentration of adsorbed nitrate is respectively 2.5 and 8.3-fold higher than the measured one. A strong diurnal variation driven by the temperature cycle and a peak occurring in early spring are two other major features that do not match the measurements. This study clearly demonstrates that co-condensation is the most important process to explain nitrate incorporation in snow undergoing temperature gradient metamorphism. The parameterisation developed for this process can now be used as a foundation piece in snowpack models to predict the inter-relationship between snow physical evolution and snow nitrate chemistry.


This personal account describes the unfolding of the 1948 war in the Galilee from the vantage point of a Nazareth physician. Covering the period from the months preceding the end of the Mandate in May to
 the eve of Israel9s final military assault on Arab Galilee (Operation Hiram) in late October, the memoir focuses on the repercussions of the evolving situation for Nazareth and its hinterland, highlighting
 the prevailing mood, the haphazard military and civil defense preparations, and the relief efforts of the local population. Nazareth, an all-Arab town of some 15,000 inhabitants, over 60 percent of whom
 were Christian and the rest Muslim, was assigned to the Arab state under the UN Partition Plan. Though conquered by the new state of Israel in July 1948, Nazareth was spared the devastation visited upon
 the other Arab and mixed (Jewish and Arab) towns of Palestine because of its importance to world Christendom and the presence in the town of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and other international Christian institutions.


This article investigates the reason(s) for what has polemically come to be termed as Hamlet's procrastination in the light of existential doctrine of Sartre and explain how Hamlet's crippling fears of : (a) having to resolve and,(b) then actualize the decision embroil him in the existential dilemma of futilely evading the responsibility only to realize, albeit at the heavy price of losing what he calls 'the eternal jewel' i.e., his own life, that it is the very essence and condition of our being and cannot be escaped. As Sartre claimed that even in not making a decision, a man takes an alternative decision i.e. of not performing the act, and is subsequently caught up in the clutches of responsibility again. This article analyzes in the theoretical backdrop of existential theory, using the descriptive-cum-analytical method, the notion of 'fear of freedom' and asserts that Hamlet had been the victim of this existential dilemma of not making the final decision, in order to avoid the burden of responsibility.


Mutations in the p53 tumor suppressor gene have been found in most human tumors. Analyses of the spectrum of p53 mutations in certain tumor types have shown a bias for mutations originating from lesions presumed to be in the untranscribed strand of the gene. This implies strand specificity for the formation or repair of DNA damage. We measured the induction and repair of ultraviolet light‐induced cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPD) in each strand of the human p53 gene in a normal human lung fibroblast cell line using quantitative Southern hybridization. We found that the removal of CPD from the transcribed strand was more rapid than that from the untranscribed strand of this gene, although the frequency of CPD induction was similar in both strands. Preferential repair of the transcribed strand of the p53 gene may account for the mutational spectra of this gene in human tumors. © 1994 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


In Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Susceptible (SEIS) compartmental models, an infected population is divided into two categories; symptomatic infected individuals represented by the I variable, and asymptomatic infected individuals, people who are not yet infectious, or those who are just exposed to infection, represented by the variable E. In these models, an infected population recovers with no immunity, and then, it moves immediately to the susceptible compartment once it becomes recovered, For this, we devise a multi-regions SEIS discrete-time model which describes infection dynamics when an epidemic is emerging in regions that are connected with their neighbors by movement. The main goal from this kind of modeling, is to introduce after, controls variables which restrict movements of the infected individuals coming from the vicinity of the region targeted by our control strategy, called here; the travel-blocking vicinity optimal control approach. A grid of colored cells is presented to illustrate the whole domain affected by the epidemic while each cell represents a sub-domain or region. The infection is supposed starting from only one cell located in one of the corners of the grid, while the region aiming to control, is supposed to be located in the 4th line and 7th column of the grid, as an example to show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy when it is applied to a cell with 8 neighboring cells.


If you are someone affected by severe mental illness your personal identity may be invalidated as an inpatient on a psychiatric ward (Goffman, 1961; Rosenhan, 1973). This can also happen, however, and frequently does, in community psychiatric contexts such as outpatient settings and day services where one would expect a more personal approach to support. My dissertation presents a combination of four qualitative research studies, alongside theoretical analysis, to support this thesis and offer some alternative reflections on how we might reconceptualise community psychiatric services.
The first paper draws on my personal experience as both a voluntary and paid support worker for voluntary sector organisations to provide examples of how the contract culture has evolved in local authorities, and how the loyalties of the dayservice providers have tended to shift from the actual service users to the funders instead. The fourth study returns to this issue and is based upon a case study analysis of a social inclusion day-service. It was found that the service users were being asked to fit their lives and identities into rigid services and intervention frameworks that were contractually driven, rather than led by their own needs.
Loss of identity and agency was found to occur in the more formal outpatient facilities. Study 2 presents a discourse analysis study of how the loss and the return of agency in therapeutic relationships are signalled by linguistic structures adopted in the narratives of psychiatric outreach service users. Study 3 incorporates thematic analysis to investigate the positive and negative experiences of compliantly 'engaged' community mental health team outpatients. These apparently compliant outpatients nevertheless often felt invalidated as human beings. They mainly attributed this sense of de-personalisation to brief contact with frequently changing psychiatrists, the rigid intervention frameworks, and practitioners showing a lack of courtesy and personal concern.
Study 5 presents further evidence of the failings of contemporary community intervention frameworks by contrasting the lives of two individuals affected with severe mental illness. Their narratives reveal the richness of their lives and aspirations and the systemic failure of community psychiatric services to address their personal needs. The final general discussion summarises the weaknesses in contemporary intervention frameworks and draws on the work and thoughts of the early pragmatists (most notably George Herbert Mead and John Dewey) to propose a pragmatic way forward. Community practitioners need to move away from forcing service users' lives into fixed frameworks, and instead should acknowledge and accommodate the shifting personal complexities of being a human living with a mental illness.


For the first time, the exchange of greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and H2O vapour, between the biosphere and the atmosphere at an eastern Himalayan site in India has been investigated. This study was carried out over a high altitude (2286 m asl) evergreen coniferous forest (27.04°N, 88.08°E), where we measured the fluxes of CO2 and H2O vapour along with the sensible and latent energy using the eddy covariance method both above (38 m) and within (8 m) the canopy, the soil-CO2 flux and the vertical profile of CO2 during spring (March–April) in 2015. The mean eddy flux of CO2 above the canopy was –2.8 ± 6.5 µmol m–2 s–1, whereas it was 0.6 ± 0.4 µmol m–2 s–1 within the canopy. The mean flux of H2O vapour above the canopy (1.5 ± 1.8 mmol m–2 s–1) was three times higher than within the canopy (0.5 ± 0.6 mmol m–2 s–1). The mean flux of CO2 emitted from the soil surface was 1.6 ± 0.1 µmol m–2 s–1. The diurnal variation showed high sequestration of CO2 during daytime, when the negative flux increased beyond –10 µmol m–2 s–1. We observed that precipitation significantly enhanced CO2 sequestration (by approximately fourfold) as well as H2O vapour emissions (by approximately threefold) by the tall canopies. Overall, during the entire study period, the net ecosystem exchange (NEE) was –656.5 g CO2 m–2, suggesting that the evergreen coniferous forest in the eastern Himalaya acts as a net sink of CO2 during spring. Therefore, we can estimate the sequestration of anthropogenic carbon emission by the eastern Himalayan forest ecosystem, improving the national greenhouse gas inventory.


Conducted trials indicated that the nutritional evaluation of the potential of fermented SOFPM in the diets of pullet chicks, pullet growers and layers revealed among other things that:(i) Fermented sun-dried SOFPM contained phyto-nutrients: saponin, phytate, limonene, oxalate, flavonoid and tannin. (ii)Longer period of fermentation improved proximate nutrients (crude protein, nitrogen free extract and ME), while it decreased crude fibre and phyto-nutrient constituents of SOFPM. (iii) The proximate nutrients of fermented SOFPM are inferior to those of maize.(iv) Pullet chicks could attain average live weight of about 600g statistically comparable to the control group even at 30% substitution of maize by 24SOFPM or 48SOFPM. 24SOFPM was more cost effective than 48SOFPM. (v) 24SOFPM or 48SOFPM inclusion in the diets of pullet chicks did not produce any adverse sign on the health of pullet chicks thereby proving that the levels of phytonutrients present in the SOFPM are not toxic to pullet chicks. (vi) The inclusion of 24SOFPM or 48SOFPM in the diets of pullet chicks resulted in progressive reduction in feed cost/25kg, feed cost/bird.


A new class of cooperative multicriteria games is introduced which takes into account two different types of criteria: private criteria, which correspond to divisible and excludable goods, and public criteria, which in an allocation take the same value for each coalition member. The different criteria are not condensed by means of a utility function, but left in their own right. Moreover, the games considered are not single-valued, but each coalition can realize a set of vectors - representing the outcomes of each of the criteria - depending on several alternatives. Two core concepts are defined: the core and the dominance outcome core. The relation between the two concepts is studied and the core is axiomatized by means of consistency properties.


Cocaine is big business and getting bigger. Governments spend millions on an unwinnable war against it, yet it's now the drug of choice in the West. How did the cocaine economy get so huge? Who keeps it running behind the scenes?In The Candy Machine Tom Feiling travels the trade routes from Colombia via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to London and New York. He meets Medillin hitmen, US kingpins, Brazilian traffickers, and talks to soldiers and narcotics officers who fight the gangs and cartels. He traces cocaine's progress from legal 'pick-me-up' to luxury product to global commodity, looks at legalization programmes in countries such as Switzerland, and shows how America's anti-drugs crusade is actually increasing demand.Cutting through the myths about the white market, this is the story of cocaine as it's never been told before.


Contrastive-based self-supervised learning methods achieved great success in recent years. However, self-supervision requires extremely long training epochs (e.g., 800 epochs for MoCo v3) to achieve promising results, which is unacceptable for the general academic community and hinders the development of this topic. This work revisits the momentum-based contrastive learning frameworks and identifies the inefficiency in which two augmented views generate only one positive pair. We propose Fast-MoCo - a novel framework that utilizes combinatorial patches to construct multiple positive pairs from two augmented views, which provides abundant supervision signals that bring significant acceleration with neglectable extra computational cost. Fast-MoCo trained with 100 epochs achieves 73.5% linear evaluation accuracy, similar to MoCo v3 (ResNet-50 backbone) trained with 800 epochs. Extra training (200 epochs) further improves the result to 75.1%, which is on par with state-of-the-art methods. Experiments on several downstream tasks also confirm the effectiveness of Fast-MoCo.


We have investigated the possibility of using diffuse reflectance polarimetry to detect changes caused by different molecular compounds and concentrations in tissue-simulating phantoms. The effects of glucose, B-alanine and l-lysine at different concentrations in turbid media have been investigated separately. This approach is based on the effect of optical properties on the polarization state of light. The results show that this method has potential for determining changes in molecular concentrations in highly scattering biological media from polarization images.


The dynamics of social reality reveals methodological explanations regarding the role, the functions and the use of educational culture. The existence of an assumng process of some well-defined managerial strategies implies highlighting the manner in which a cultural dimension becomes pragmatic at the social level. In these conditions, contexts, conditionings and requirements in defining and explaining the educational culture are significant. Methodological issues brought into question reveal an explanatory approach that legitimizes assumptions regarding the acceptance of E-learning within the educational culture. The issue of assuming a learning situation is becoming one of major importance given that it is performed at the level of educational activities. Therefore, educational actors involved in this process are in contact with didactic methods designed to facilitate the learning process. It is about students and teachers using in practice the new learning technologies through a new teaching methodology, methodology that has in the center of its own area of concern the e-learning paradigm. However, not every time educational media prove their usefulness in the work carried out. For this purpose, we focus this analysis on the relationship between simulation and solving educational activities in relation to the new learning technologies (especially the teaching resources as e-learning). Moreover, we take into account, within this approach, the ways of dealing and explicitation of certain problematic didactic situations / contexts encountered during the educational activities compared to behavior of the actors involved these activities. Therefore, we believe that efficiency and quality of e-learning in contemporary education depends mainly on the ways of assuming didactic strategies related to new technologies of learning.


The objective of energy efficient routing protocol is to increase the operational lifetime of the wireless sensor networks. Multipath routing protocols enhance the lifetime of the wireless sensor networks by distributing traffic among multiple paths instead of a single optimal path. Transmission of secured data is also an important research concern in the wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a secure node disjoint multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks is proposed. Here, the data packets are transmitted in a secure manner by using the digital signature crypto system. It is compared with an ad hoc on-demand multipath distance vector routing protocol. It shows better results in terms of packet delivery fraction, energy consumption, and end-to-end delay compared to the ad hoc on-demand multipath distance vector routing.


Aim Having reviewed earlier the role of probiotics in obesity and other associated metabolic disorders like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), engineering probiotics for cholera and other neuronal diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson disease with incidence of obesity and diabetes mellitus (DM) so much on the rise, Here the aim of this systematic review is to highlight the influence of dietary patterns, like fatty acids, other lipids on role of maternal stress and the neuropsychiatric disease (NPD) formation along with influence of probiotics in reverting them. Method A systematic review was carried out using the PubMed, Web of Science, Medline, Embase, Cochrane reviews, and Google Scholar, Search engine with the MeSH Terms; "Impaired lipid metabolism"; "Oxidative stress"; "inflammation"; "Gut Microbiota (GM)"; "NPD"; "Schizophrenia (SCZ)"; "Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)"; "Bipolar disorders (BD)"; "Gamma amino butyric acid (GABA)"; "5-hydroxy tryptamine (5HT)"; "Brain derived neutrotrophicfactor (BDNF)"; "Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA)"; "Saturated (SFA)"; "Depression"; "Resolvins"; "Protectins"; "Short chain fatty acids (SCFA)"; "Probiotics"; "Fecal Transplantation" from 1990 till June 2020. Results We found a total of 900 articles under various subheadings of GM and NPD and probiotics with NPD and SCZ, ASD. One hundred ninety-two (192) articles got selected for this comprehensive review. No meta-analysis was conducted. Conclusion We observed a marked correlation among dietary habits, like utilization of Western diet (WD) with marked escalation of intake of high fat, high sugar rich diet escalated n6 PUFAS over n3 PUFAS and influence on GM that is not helpful in digestion of the nondigestible fibers in form of starch along with generation of butyrate aiding in certain beneficial effects and on formation of various neurochemicals like escalation of BDNF while increased GABA, reduced 5HT formation alteration of tryptophan metabolism is seen in these WD food and we have tried to detail the role of SCFA formation, generation of resolvins and how they work in the formation of various NPD besides maternal diet during pregnancy and how it determines infants microglial priming and later determinants of early stress.


Exchanging structured business documents is inevitable for successful collaboration in electronic commerce. A prerequisite, for fostering the interoperability between business partners utilizing different business document standards, is a mapping between different standards. However, the effort involved in creating those mappings is hard to estimate. For example, the complexity of standardized formats is one crucial aspect affecting the effort of the mapping process. Therefore, a notion of complexity is desirable for both, manual as well as automatic mapping processes. For this reason we develop an initial set of metrics, based on well established metrics for XML Schema, allowing to analyze the complexity of business document standards. Having such metrics at hand allows estimating the complexity and hence the mapping effort of a business document standard, prior to the actual mapping process. We demonstrate the complexity metrics on three different business document standards from the electronic commerce domain.


Abstract Publicly traded Chinese firms recently reformed their ownership structures by converting non-tradable shares, which constituted two-thirds of shares outstanding and were held largely by the state, into shares that could trade on domestic exchanges. To facilitate this reform, tradable shareholders were compensated with stock grants from non-tradable shareholders. Our analysis focuses on the level of compensation, the compensation ratio, the ratio of new tradable shares granted to tradable shares outstanding before the reform. Contrary to the predictions of asset-pricing models, most firms set the compensation ratio around 0.3. We explain this surprising convergence using institutional theory. In doing so, we analyze the power and interests of all relevant actors – not just owners, but also state regulators, executives, and other agents — and draw on insights from resource-dependence and agency theories. We find strong evidence of coercive and mimetic isomorphism, but no evidence of normative isomorphism. Because our dependent variable is continuous (a ratio), we are able to show that the mimetic effects we observe cannot be attributed to coercion or norms. Thus, we not only explain an empirical puzzle, we also advance institutional analysis of isomorphism by clearly distinguishing three isomorphic forces that have been conflated in much previous research.


The role of source cloud spatial coherence in a Mach-Zehnder-type atom interferometer is experimentally investigated. The visibility and contrast of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and three thermal sources with varying spatial coherence are compared as a function of interferometer time. At short times, the fringe visibility of a BEC source approaches $100%$ nearly independent of $\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulse efficiency, while thermal sources have fringe visibilities limited to the $\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulse efficiency. More importantly for precision measurement systems, the BEC source maintains interference at interferometer times significantly beyond the thermal source.


In many robotics problems, there is a significant gain in collaborative information sharing between multiple robots, for exploration, search and rescue, tracking multiple targets, or mapping large environments. One of the key implicit assumptions when solving cooperative multi-robot problems is that all robots use the same (homogeneous) underlying algorithm. However, in practice, we want to allow collaboration between robots possessing different capabilities and that therefore must rely on heterogeneous algorithms. We present a system architecture and the supporting theory, to enable collaboration in a decentralized network of robots, where each robot relies on different estimation algorithms. To develop our approach, we focus on multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with multi-target tracking. Our theoretical framework builds on our idea of exploiting the conditional independence structure inherent to many robotics applications to separate between each robot's local inference (estimation) tasks and fuse only relevant parts of their non-equal, but overlapping probability density function (pdfs). We present a new decentralized graph-based approach to the multi-robot SLAM and tracking problem. We leverage factor graphs to split between different parts of the problem for efficient data sharing between robots in the network while enabling robots to use different local sparse landmark/dense/metric-semantic SLAM algorithms.


Interest in ternary blend organic photovoltaics (OPVs) has been triggered by improved power conversion efficiency (PCE), simple fabrication, and a variety of material combinations. They typically consist of a p-type donor, an n-type fullerene, and a secondary p-type donor, where the two donors undergo complementary photoabsorption to increase the photocurrent. In contrast to this general strategy, we have incorporated propeller-shaped, high-bandgap triptycene (TP) into a bulk heterojunction (BHJ) composed of a conjugated polymer (P3HT, PTB7, and PffBT4T) and methano[60]fullerene (PCBM). The TP molecules self-organize into two-dimensional (2D) layers. Based on their energy levels, these layers are not expected to trap charge carriers. The performance of these OPV devices is discussed in conjunction with film morphology, transient photoconductivity, mobility, crystalline structure, and surface free energy. Herein, we demonstrate that the PCE of the crystalline polymer (PffBT4T):PCBM with 5 wt% TP is slightly improved (maximum: 9.41%, average: 8.96 ± 0.23%) without the use of a solvent additive, along with much enhanced long-term stability. This is presumably due to the presence of the TP sheet that acts as a nucleation agent and facilitates the crystallization of the polymer. The features of the TP scaffold give rise to a high-performance, additive-free ternary BHJ. Thus, further exploration through chemical functionalization of TP is warranted.


The research on tidal-current energy-capture technology mainly focuses on the conditions of high flow velocity, focusing on the use of differential pressure lift, while the average flow velocity in most sea areas of China is less than 1.5 m/s, especially in the marine aquaculture area, where tidal-current energy is needed to provide green energy locally. Due to the low flow velocity of this type of sea area, it seriously affects the effect of differential pressure lift, which is conducive to exerting the effect of impact resistance. In this regard, the coupling effect of the differential pressure lift and the impact resistance on the blade torque is comprehensively considered, this research puts forward the design method of the lift-–drag-composite thin-plate arc turbine blade. Based on the blade element momentum (BEM) theory and Bernoulli's principle, the turbine dynamic model was established, and the nonlinear optimization method was used to solve the shape parameters of the turbine blades, and the thin-plate arc and NACA airfoil blade turbines were trial-produced under the same conditions. A model experiment was carried out in the experimental pool, and the Xiangshan sea area in Ningbo, East China Sea was taken as the experimental sea area. The results of the two experiments showed the same trend, indicating that the energy-harvesting performance of the lift–drag-composite blade was significantly better than that of the lift blade under the conditions of low flow velocity and small radius, which verified the correctness of the blade design method, and can promote the research and development of tidal energy under the conditions of low flow velocity and small radius.


: Till about twenty five to thirty years back, the areas around our homes and offices used to be unpaved and the rain falling on these areas would percolate into the soil and remain there for being drawn through shallow open wells. With the proliferation of flat complexes, not only have these areas been paved and percolation of rainwater into the soil almost totally stopped, the quantity of water drawn from the soil below has increased manifold. Consequently open wells and not - so - deep bore wells started drying up. The reason is that no sincere attempt is made to replenish the ground water table with rainwater during the monsoon. The Rainwater harvesting is the simple collection or storing of water through scientific techniques from the areas where the rain falls. It involves utilization of rain water for the domestic or the agricultural purpose. The method of rain water harvesting has been into practice since ancient times. It is as far the best possible way to conserve water and awaken the society towards the importance of water. The method is simple and cost effective too. It is especially beneficial in the areas, which faces the scarcity of water. People usually make complaints about the lack of water. During the monsoons lots of water goes waste into the gutters. And this is when Rain water Harvesting proves to be the most effective way to conserve water. We can collect the rain water into the tanks and prevent it from flowing into drains and being wasted. It is practiced on the large scale in the metropolitan cities. Rain water harvesting comprises of storage of water and water recharging through the technical process


Simulation is a powerful tool for the evaluation and analysis of new system designs, modifications to existing systems and proposed changes to control systems and operating rules. Conducting a valid simulation is both an art and a science. This paper provides an introduction to discrete event simulation and the main concepts - system state, events, processes - underlying simulation. It discusses the major world views used by simulation software. It includes a brief discussion of a number of other important issues: the advantages and disadvantages of using a simulation model, the skills required to develop a simulation model, the key steps in conducting a simulation study, as well as some project management guidelines and pitfalls to avoid.


While much of the desalination activity in the U.S is concentrated in southern and western states, the last decade has seen an unlikely location emerge for desalination – the Northeast. With precipitation often exceeding evapotranspiration, the Northeast generally maintains abundant surface and ground water resources that are readily available for human and ecological use. However, shortfalls in water supplies are leading some communities in the Northeast to consider desalination as an alternative water source. Presently, three desalination projects are in operation, while a fourth one is planned for construction. We review the conditions which led these locations to implement desalination projects including average and peak water demands, status of traditional water supply sources, topographical challenges and demographic changes. We identify financing, regulatory challenges and public support as factors critical to the initiation and success of desalination projects. Using information from the four projects, we propose a set of questions communities should consider to determine the viability of desalination projects vis-a-vis alternatives such as leak detection and infrastructure upgrades, conservation through water-efficient fixtures, and development of new surface and groundwater sources. An informed decision can help communities guarantee long-term supplies at optimal cost and minimal harm to the environment.


Although several Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) have been presented at NIME, very few of them remain accessible to the community. Rebuilding a DMI is often a necessary step to allow for performance with NIMEs. Rebuilding a DMI exactly similar to its original, however, might not be possible due to technology obsolescence, lack of documentation or other reasons. It might then be interesting to re-interpret a DMI and build an instrument inspired by the original one, creating novel performance opportunities. This paper presents the challenges and approaches involved in rebuilding and re-interpreting an existing DMI, The Sponge by Martin Marier. The rebuilt versions make use of newer/improved technology and customized design aspects like addition of vibrotactile feedback and implementation of different mapping strategies. It also discusses the implications of embedding sound synthesis within the DMI, by using the Prynth framework and further presents a comparison between this approach and the more traditional ground-up approach. As a result of the evaluation and comparison of the two rebuilt DMIs, we present a third version which combines the benefits and discuss performance issues with these devices.


The study was carried out to characterize two indigenous chickens of Nigeria using protein markers; haemolglobin (HB) and carbonic anhydrase (CA). Separation of the two proteins was achieved by cellulose acetate electrophoresis and direct gene counting method was employed to interpret the result. Palentological statistics was used to generate dendrogram that measured genetic similarity within and between each of the population studied. HB was interpreted into three phenotypes: AA, AB and BB which were genetically controlled two codominant alleles HB A and HB B . Allele frequencies of HB A and HB B in Yoruba ecotype chicken were 0.34 and 0.66, respectively, while those of Fulani ecotype were 0.28 and 0.72, respectively. CA was also interpreted into three phenotypes (FF, FS and SS) which are genetically controlled by two codominant alleles CA F and CA S ; their respective allele frequencies were 0.33 and 0.67 in Yoruba ecotype chicken and 0.24 and 0.76 in Fulani ecotype chicken. Genetic similarity within ecotype indicated 60% in Fulani, 80% in Yoruba and 40% between Yoruba and Fulani at HB locus while at CA locus, genetic similarity was 69% in Fulani ecotype, 50% in Yoruba ecotype and 42% between Yoruba and Fulani ecotype. Cavalli-Sforza genetic distance between the two Ecotypes was 2.1x10 -2 . Conclusively, the two populations were genetically related and further studies should focus on other protein markers and at molecular level. Keywords: Ecotype, protein marker, genetic distance and selection Afr. J. Biotechnol. Vol. 12 No. 50


. We have grown ultrapure MgO from multiply distilled Mg and pure gaseous O 2 , using molecular beam epitaxy to prepare high-quality crystals with levels of trivalent cation impurities reduced by a factor of (cid:24) 10 2 . From studies of Ca and 18 O tracer diffusion on the respective sublattices we infer that the active impurity level during diffusion is a factor of 10 below that of high-quality commercial MgO. In a temperature range where it is insensitive to impurity content the anion diffusion appears consistent with theoretical predictions that anion jumps occur largely by motion of bound vacancy pairs. cation results represent predictions [5] for different levels of trivalent cation


There are few indicator systems available for monitoring and assessing the environmental quality of large-scale regions. We constructed an indicator system for integrated assessment of the environmental quality of the Dianchi Basin. First, the definition of regional environmental quality is determined by both the supply of materials and energy in the region and the extent to which the region is polluted. Second, the indicator categories used for assessment mainly comprise vegetation biomass and the concentrations of various pollutants. Third, owing to spatial heterogeneity of a region, evaluation of the regional environment first requires division into sub-regions, each of which should be relatively homogeneous with regard to physical conditions (e.g. marine and terrestrial) and appearance (e.g. vegetation cover). Finally, the mathematical models for assessing regional environmental quality can be built according to the relationships between the various indicators, the sub-regions and regional environmental quality. The indicator system built using this approach can reflect environmental changes over time and identifies reasons for environmental variation.


The use of non-essential materials in Ghana like granites, cocoa pod ash and shells as fluxes has been studied in the composition of a local brown glaze in the Na2O-K2O-CaO-Al2O3-SiO2 systems to support electrical porcelain glaze development which hitherto relied totally on imported glazes. Chemical analyses have been performed on the various materials and revealed the presence of the right quantities of aluminous-silicate minerals necessary for combinations in glaze development using the Segar classification. It was found that the range of 0.2 - 0.4 molecular weight of the granites, 0.1 - 0.3 for the cocoa pod ash and 0.4 - 0.8 for the shells forming the R2O/RO2 group and the ratio of 1:12 for the clay and the sand was sufficient to cause excellent melt at 1200OC when 5% - 8% of local manganese and 5% local iron oxide were added to the recipe. The molecular weights of the various oxides in the R2O group were calculated from the chemical analyses of the various materials to reflect the right quantities of the oxides. The results also indicate that holding the RO/R2O group within the above limits and varying the clay to sand ratio from1:8 - 1:12, other glaze melting surfaces from matt to gloss are achievable. Physical examination of the melted glaze on the electrical porcelain bodies showed consistent rich brown colour, well vitrified with no crazing, peeling or pin holes, at pottery temperatures of 1140 - 12000C.