The retail infrastructure has witnessed a transformation with the rapid growth of electronic commerce, especially in the last two decades. E-business all over the world has become a popular medium for buyer-seller transaction as a means that complements and supplements the experiences of a physical store. Although the application of technology-based online retail services has grown rapidly in recent years, an understanding to attract, retain, and satisfy customers in such contexts remains limited. A marketer often encounters the difficulty of constituting a framework that could be used for constructing, managing, and evaluating its service delivery through the Internet. Based on a literature review, followed by an empirical study, this paper outlines the results of a study conducted to identify the critical success factors in online retailing. The literature review helped conceptualize the variables for the study. The Quality Function Deployment Technique was applied to identify performance indicators critical to success of online retailing. These were prioritized qualitatively through Interpretive structural modeling. Such an integrated framework of critical success factors would enable a better understanding of customers' needs and assist marketers while constructing, managing, and evaluating their online marketing strategies in the Indian context.


Today's pornography constitutes a semiotic laboratory capable of meticulously describing some characteristics of the cultures from which it comes and for which it is intended. In it, the role of the face is preeminent and assumes relevance both from a diegetic and a formal point of view. A face which makes itself a sign and is articulated in a dialectic between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axis, finding expression as an aspectual device, establishing a peculiar semiotic procedure of absentia in praesentia, and highlighting an eminently enunciative dimension of the textual genre. Thus a facial semiotics of pornography becomes to all effects a cultural semiotics, which through the exploration of a transversal genre – both in its mainstream and more niche actualizations – produces significant results in defining how cultures of the face, including extrapornographic ones, delineate themselves. The aim of this article is to verify this peculiar facial semiotics through a case history that stretches from traditional to contemporary pornography, also analysing the "facial pornography" website beautifulagony.com and the visual works of some contemporary artists.


Application of acoustophoresis to cell and particle separation in microchannel filled with fluid medium has been drawing increasing attention in many disciplines in the past decades due to its high precision and minimum damage to the matters of interest. Previous studies on particle separation often rely on the size-dependent feature of the acoustic radiation force (ARF), while the acoustic streaming effect (ASE) is a hurdle as the particle size goes down. Sub-micron particles circulate according to the streaming vortices and become inseparable from the particles settled on the pressure node. Instead of suppressing the ASE, this study intends to utilize the combined effect of ARF and ASE on sub-micron particle sorting by altering the microchannel's cross-sectional shapes. The roles of ARF and ASE on particles with 0.2um and 2um in radius in various cross-sectional shapes are studied numerically. The studied geometries include 1. rectangular, 2. trapezoidal, and 3. triangular. The results show that changing the cross-sectional shapes affects the acoustic field's magnitude and distribution, the streaming patterns, the magnitude of streaming velocity, and the movement of sub-micron particles. In non-rectangular microchannel, sub-micron particles circulate towards and settle at the center of the streaming vortices. This phenomenon shows the potential to manipulate the streaming-dominant particles, thereby enhancing the acoustophoretic particle sorting performance.


The platinum(II) complex [(dcpp)Pt(C7H7)H] (1) [dcpp = 1,3-bis(dicyclohexylphosphanyl)propane] reacts under 1 atm of CO to form the bis(carbonyl) complex of Pt0, [(dcpp)Pt(CO)2] (2). Complex 2 slowly crystallizes in toluene solution to form crystals of the Pt0 dimer [(dcpp)(η1-CO)Pt{μ-C(O)}Pt(dcpp)] (3) in which one Pt atom is only three-coordinated with the diphosphane dcpp and one μ-C(O), while the other is coordinated in a tetrahedral arrangement with one μ-C(O) and one η1-CO. Complexes 2 and 3 were characterized in solution by 31P NMR spectroscopy, and complex 3 readily reacts with O2 to form the carbonate complex, [(dcpp)Pt(CO3)] (4). The reaction of the dimeric complex 3 with MeI allows the insertion of a methyl group into the carbonyl group to form the PtII complex [(dcpp)Pt(C(O)Me)I] (5). Reaction of another equivalent of MeI with complex 5 leads to the formation and elimination of acetone and the bis(iodide) complex [(dcpp)PtI2] (6). X-ray crystal structures of complexes 3 and 4 are reported along with DFT calculations and mechanistic studies of the formation of 3, 4, 5, and 6.


This paper studies the major determinants that affect the country choice of the talented Italian scientists and researchers who have at least a bachelor's from Italy and live abroad. There are three alternative country choices: the US/Canada, the UK, and other EU countries. On average, the brainy Italians exhibit a higher predicted probability to go to the US. Ceteris paribus, both push and pull factors are important. While having a Ph.D. from outside Italy predicts the UK choice, having extra working experience from outside Italy predicts migration to other EU countries. Those who stay abroad temporarily for two to four years are definitely more likely to go to the UK. Specialization in the fields of humanities, social sciences, and health are strong determinants of migration to the UK. For the move to the US, while the humanities area is a significant deterrent, health is a positive deciding factor. Lack of funds in Italy constitutes a significant push to the US.


ABSTRACT In the early decades of the twentieth century the question of mental disabilities was widely discussed in Italy, while the first special schools for the intellectually impaired were set up. An important role was played by the Franciscan friar Agostino Gemelli (1878–1959), a physician, renowned psychologist, and founder in 1921 of the Catholic University of Milan. Gemelli promoted relevant psychological research on intellectual disabilities, based on empirical and measurable processes. He considered only scientific studies necessary to promote appropriate educational actions. Gemelli and his collaborators developed from a biological point of view the classification elaborated by the famous psychologist and psychiatrist Sante De Sanctis (1862–1935). Moreover, in 1926 Gemelli established the School for special teachers and assistants for disabled children in the Catholic University of Milan, with the aim of making the "special" teachers confident with medical, psychological and pedagogical issues. This institution did not have a "Catholic colour": indeed, Gemelli called professors of great fame to teach in his School, without concern for their ideological thoughts. All his work was characterised by the cooperation between science and religion: the experimental method did not contrast with Catholic values. This paper is based on unpublished documents from different archives.


September 1, 1999, saw the opening of Paris Las Vegas, the most ambitiously themed of Las Vegas's resorts to that date. In 2001, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le Fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain were released to huge popular success. These two films share with the Vegas resort the mobilization of the brand or commodity "Paris," and function via a shared alchemy of appeals to potential consumers (tourists and viewers in all cases). All feature prominent use of totemic Parisian imagery to situate their narratives, and invite us to travel to a "Paris" born of collective memory. This paper examines how Paris is commodified by the films and resort, as well as what these three examples can reveal about the image of Paris as an imaginary construct. It is necessary to examine the three phenomena as equal manifestations of a spike in an enduring fascination with particular concepts of Paris in the popular imagination and in the uses of commodity culture – a vogue heightened around the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next. Analysis of the of the Parisian phenomenon circa 1999-2001 – as manifest by the resort and the two feature films – benefits from consideration of its relationships to Guy Debord's theories of the spectacle, and to theorizations of nostalgia and the touristic drive. This analysis reveals how the brand of Paris may have been mobilized in an especially pronounced way at this particular cultural moment to serve as a container or palliative for anxieties around the impending turn of the century, the new millennium and the global changes this particular passage of time seemed to underline.


Mycobacillin, a cyclic polypeptide antifungal antibiotic effectively inhibits the growth of promastigote form of the protozoal organism, Leishmania donovani, strain 81 in liquid medium. Oxygen uptake by intact cells of the protozoa with exogenous glucose is appreciably reduced within first 30 minutes in presence of the antibiotic at a concentration of 15 microng/ml. Appreciable leakage of intracellular 260 nm and 280 nm absorbing materials takes place from the protozoan cells incubated with the antibiotic at similar concentration.


Biballism is an infrequent hyperkinetic disorder characterized by involuntary, intermittent, violent, uncontrollable contractions of the proximal muscles of the limbs. Biballism is classically ascribed to a lesion in the controlateral subthalamic nucleus or its connections but other causes have been reported. These include infections (bacterial, viral parasitic), cerebrovascular lesions, tumors, toxics, and systemic disease (systemic lupus erythematosus). Although poorly understood, the pathophysiology of hemiballism is widely believed to involve hyperactivity of the dopaminergic system. The prognosis of these abnormal movements, formerly poor, has been improved by the use of neuroleptics and drugs acting on the different neurotransmitter systems. A unique case of biballism at resolution of a febrile coma in a 4 1/2 year old is reported. The EEG showed diffuse slow waves. A hyperdense lesion was visible in the right thalamic region on the cerebral CT scan. The magnitude of the abnormal movements decreased under haloperidol. The etiology of this case of biballism is discussed.


In this study, microbial quality and antimicrobial resistance of faecal bacteria from a Portuguese river were assessed. River water samples collected upstream and downstream of a wastewater treatment plant, throughout a 3-month period, were used for the enumeration of Escherichia coli and Enterococcus spp. The highest numbers found for E. coli and enterococci were 1.1 × 10⁴ and 1.2 × 10⁴ colony forming units (CFU)/100 ml, respectively. In total, 144 isolates of E. coli and 144 of enterococci were recovered and tested for antimicrobial susceptibility; 104 E. coli and 78 Enterococcus spp. showed resistance to one or more antimicrobial drugs. Overall, 70 and 32 different resistance patterns were found for E. coli and enterococci, respectively. One E. coli showed resistance to imipenem and 29 isolates were extended spectrum β-lactamase-producers. Multidrug-resistant E. coli belonged mostly to groups A, B1 and group D. Enterococcus spp. were mostly resistant to rifampicin, tetracycline, azithromycin and erythromycin; six isolates showed resistance to vancomycin, presenting the VanA phenotype. The high levels of E. coli and enterococci and the remarkable variety of antimicrobial resistance profiles, reinforces the theory that these river waters can be a pool of antimicrobial resistance determinants, which can be easily spread among different bacteria and reach other environments and hosts.


In this article a model is presented to compare a wide range of promotional instruments including Financial Instruments (FI) supported by the European Structural and Investment (ESI) Funds. The model is based on three elements, which are already developed and widely used and brings the result together in one formula. The model is applicable e.g. to low-interest loans, quasi-equity and equity instruments, their respective grace periods (repayment-free years), extended tenors (maturities), indemnities, as well as to tax exemptions and grants. It also includes the special cases of revolving funds. In addition, the model can depict the administrative costs as well as the re-financing advantages where appropriate. It fulfills the special requirements for ex-ante assessment for financial instruments co-financed by ESI Funds in respect to value added, multiplier and leverage as required by the EU regulations for the 2014–2020 programming period. The model is robust and easy to implement, and supplies funding recipients, funder and funding intermediaries such as development banks with the information they need for decision-making purposes.


The cat's reputation and place in society have been subject to twists and turns of fate that are all reflected in art. While cats were deified by the ancient Egyptians, they were vilified by the medieval Church, before the Renaissance and Baroque periods saw their gradual rehabilitation. By the eighteenth century cats had become popular household pets worldwide. Generations of artists have treasured their contrariness and beauty, and while the cat does not always occupy centre stage in paintings, it always adds an extra symbolic dimension to a picture, or illuminates its meaning in an unexpected way. This sumptuously illustrated book examines the relationship between cats and humans from ancient times to the present, offering fascinating insights into the prominence of the cat in art in cultures worldwide. Thematic chapters explore in detail a rich and rewarding collection of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures, creating a book that will have enduring appeal among art lovers and cat lovers alike.


The radial and mixed-inflow turbines have been widely used for the turbocharger application. The design of a turbocharger turbine with good performance still presents a lot of challenges. Apart from the traditional requirements such as high efficiency and low stress, the turbine blade is also required to achieve certain performance targets at multiple operating points, high unsteady efficiency under pulsating flow condition, reduced moment of inertia (MOI) and high vibration characteristic. To meet these challenges it is important to optimise the radial and mixed-inflow turbines for the aerodynamic performance at multiple operating points and the structural performance subject to MOI, stress and vibration constraints. In this thesis we propose an approach based on 3D inverse design method that makes such a design optimisation strategy possible under industrial timescales. Using the inverse design method, the turbine blade geometry is computed iteratively based on the prescribed blade loading distribution. The turbine's aerodynamic and mechanical performance is evaluated using CFD and Finite Element Analysis (FEA). A linear regression is performed based on the results of a linear DOE study. The number of design parameters is reduced based on a sensitivity analysis of the linear polynomial coefficients. A more detailed DOE with around 60 designs is generated and Kriging is used to construct a response surface model (RSM). Multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is then used to search the optimal designs which meet multiple constraints and objectives on the Kriging response surface. The radial filament blading is always applied by the conventional design method to reduce the stress, while the inverse designed blade is three-dimensional (3D). Two radial filament modification (RFM) methods are proposed to control the stress level of 3D blades. Radial turbines with a backswept leading edge (LE) designed using the inverse design method show improved cycle-averaged efficiency. An optimal design is obtained through the second optimisation. Its performance is evaluated in both the aerodynamic and mechanical aspects based on CFD and FEA simulations. The CFD model is validated against the experimental results of the baseline design. The numerical results show that the optimal design leads to better performance in almost all aspects including improved efficiency in the low U/Cis (velocity ratio), reduced maximum stress, reduced MOI, and increased vibration frequencies.


Language testing has been defined as one of the core areas of applied linguistics be- cause it tackles two of its fundamental issues: the need to define and reflect on the appropria- teness of Second Language Acquisition models and constructs by data analysis from language tests and the importance of facing the ethical challenge deriving from the social and political role language tests play nowadays. Language testing has thus a twofold impact in a variety of con- texts. In the first instance, it constitutes a scientific impulse for which research is needed to de- velop and implement the technical design of tests. Secondly, language testing has also become subject of debating because the use and interpretation of test results introduce ethical issues concerning the concept of 'fairness' in the construction, administration, evaluation and interpre- tation of language tests. In fact, language tests are always designed and used to make decisions on the basis of a process in which information about test takers is gathered from an observed performance under test conditions. This inevitably leads to the development of codes of ethics in educational testing environments and to the elaboration of theories of validity and validation.


Abstract:The Frenchness of the Commune understandably has often structured the way that the Parisian uprising is studied and archived. And yet, as Kristin Ross's work has powerfully shown, the Commune always exceeded national boundaries. This article reconsiders the Commune's extra-national reach by turning to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century US, where it re-emerges not as a failed foreign past but rather as an unexpectedly rich site of unfinished possibility for US radicals. Examining in particular the ways that the figure of Louise Michel crucially animates the politics and public persona of American women radicals such as Emma Goldman, I show what gets lost when the Commune gets abridged from accounts of Goldman's life and activism. I conclude by turning to the Commune's electrifying resurgence during the 1929 Gastonia Strike to rethink the post-1917 institutionalization of the Commune in the US and the backlash it continued to provoke into the 1930s.


Bioscience courses in health programmes increasingly include students with limited 'on-campus' or face-to-face teaching exposure. These students need resources that are flexible, technologically innovative, easily accessible, and above all, engaging. We created and evaluated a bank of short (7-15min) Anatomy & Physiology (A&P) concept-captured video tutorials (CCVTs), accessible and downloadable through University websites. The CCVTs were linked with formative quiz questions. Utilising a prospective, semi-longitudinal design, we explored the effect of CCVTs on summative student performance across three geographically and socially disparate campuses of the same University in Queensland, Australia. Overall, 1,263 course participants had access to the CCVTs from ~630 first year undergraduate nursing students. Of these, 1 in 3 students engaged with the CCVTs. Comparative pre/post quizzes evaluated the impact of CCVTs on concept consolidation. Five out of ten CCVTs in semester 1 and eight out of ten in semester 2 promoted and enhanced concept consolidation. The level of CCVTs accessed (engagement) was positively correlated with individual course grades (pass/fail) and overall marks/100. The participating cohorts highly rated (4.3/5) the perceived usefulness of the CCVTs as supportive learning resources. Thus, the establishment of a relatively low-tech, remotely accessed, online learning resource can enrich student experience and performance in perceivably difficult biosciences courses.


Abstract The contribution explores the implications of disagreements about rights in the 'multi-layered' European polity for the autonomy of EU fundamental rights law. It argues that insomuch as the EU's weak claim to supra-national political authority is corroborated by a strong case for economic integration, the internal market operates not simply as a constraining factor in the effective realisation of fundamental rights, but provides the very foundation of their autonomous interpretation in the EU legal order. Sections II and III elaborate upon the relationship between conflicts of authority in the European legal space and the autonomous interpretation of EU fundamental rights law under conditions of political disagreement. Section IV links the argument to the often-alleged instrumentalisation of EU fundamental rights in the service of the market. Sections V and VI substantiate the guiding contention of the contribution—that the autonomy of EU fundamental rights law is rooted in the unity of the market—with an analysis of pertinent case law. The concluding section suggests that the transformation of the EU into a 'genuine' human rights polity must proceed through a politicisation of the market by virtue of fundamental rights law.


Recent scholarship about the role of sentencing reform in reducing high levels of incarceration has focused on evidence-based, offender-specific solutions, such as how to better assess offenders' risk of recidivism and their amenability to diversionary programs. This Article proposes a new, systemic approach. In particular, it suggests that in cases where the primary rationale for steep sentences is crime reduction, as opposed to retributive notions of harm and blameworthiness, judges ought to engage in an evidence-based examination of how the government is making "use" of the sentences it seeks in its law enforcement efforts. And where the government's efforts fall short, so too should the sentences. The proposal would not only result in more rational and just sentences, it also has the potential to enhance public safety.Although law enforcement and prosecutorial strategy have conventionally been viewed as the exclusive territory of the Executive Branch, this Article contends that judges are in fact appropriate and competent institutional actors to examine them. This Article explores these issues in the context of the federal government's most formal and direct intervention into the prosecution of street crime, Projects "Triggerlock" and "Safe Neighborhoods," which, in the name of crime control, have resulted in a ten-fold increase in the number of federal "felon-in-possession" prisoners over the past twenty years.


Elevated runoff export and declines in soil microbial biomass and enzyme activity following forest conversion are known to reduce soil inorganic nitrogen (N) but their relative importance remains poorly understood. To explore their relative importance, we examined soil inorganic N (NH4+ and NO3−) concentrations in relation to microbial biomass, enzyme activity, and runoff export of inorganic N in a mature secondary forest, young (five years old) Castanopsis carlessi and Cunninghamia lanceolate (Chinese fir) plantations, and forests developing through assisted natural regeneration (ANR). The surface runoff export of inorganic N was greater, but fine root biomass, soil microbial biomass, enzyme activity, and inorganic N concentrations were smaller in the young plantations than the secondary forest and the young ANR forests. Microbial biomass, enzyme activity, and runoff inorganic N export explained 84% and 82% of the variation of soil NH4+ and NO3− concentrations, respectively. Soil microbial biomass contributed 61% and 94% of the explaining power for the variation of soil NH4+ and NO3− concentrations, respectively, among the forests. Positive relationships between microbial enzyme activity and soil inorganic N concentrations were likely mediated via microbial biomass as it was highly correlated with microbial enzyme activity. Although surface runoff export can reduce soil inorganic N, the effect attenuated a few years after forest conversion. By contrast, the differences in microbial biomass persisted for a long time, leading to its dominance in regulating soil inorganic N concentrations. Our results highlight that most of the variation in soil inorganic N concentration following forest conversion was related to soil microbial biomass and that assisted natural regeneration can effectively conserve soil N.


SUMMARY Methionine or ethionine, although capable of serving as sole nitrogen source for Prymnesium parvum, cannot replace or spare the vitamin B12 nutrient requirement for the growth of this flagellate. In the presence of vitamin B12 methionine counteracted the inhibition of growth exerted by some vitamin B12 analogues which are substituted at the benzimidazole part of the molecule. No such effect was observed against the inhibition by certain other analogues. Analogue FIII (α-(5-hydroxybenzimidazolyl)-cobamide cyanide) replaced vitamin B12 in the presence of methionine, and to a lesser degree also in the presence of other methyl donors such as methylmethionine sulphonium iodide, dimethylpropiothetin, choline chloride and betaine. The conclusion drawn is that for P. parvum analogue FIII is capable of replacing vitamin B12 in all the metabolic pathways other than methyl-group synthesis. For the latter process, the benzimidazole methyl groups present in vitamin B12 and analogue FIIIm (α-(5-methoxy-benzimidazolyl)-cobamide cyanide) are indispensable.


Rhodopsin is a G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) that is the light detector in the rod cells of the eye. Rhodopsin is the best understood member of the large GPCR superfamily and is the only GPCR for which atomic resolution structures have been determined. However, these structures are for the inactive, dark-adapted form. Characterization of the conformational changes in rhodopsin caused by light-induced activation is of wide importance, because the metarhodopsin-II photoproduct is analogous to the agonist-occupied conformation of other GPCRs, and metarhodopsin-I may be similar to antagonist-occupied GPCR conformations. In this work we characterize the interaction of antibody K42-41L with the metarhodopsin photoproducts. K42-41L is shown to inhibit formation of metarhodopsin-II while it stabilizes the metarhodopsin-I state. Thus, K42-41L recognizes an epitope accessible in dark-adapted rhodopsin and metarhodopsin-I that is lost upon formation of metarhodopsin-II. Previous work has shown that the peptide TGALQERSK is able to mimic the K42-41L epitope, and we have now determined the structure of the K42-41L-peptide complex. The structure demonstrates a central role for elements of the rhodopsin C3 loop, particularly Gln238 and Glu239, in the interaction with K42-41L. Geometric constraints taken from the antibody-bound peptide were used to model the epitope on the rhodopsin surface. The resulting model suggests that K42-41L locks the C3 loop into an extended conformation that is intermediate between two compact conformations seen in crystal structures of dark-adapted rhodopsin. Together, the structural and functional data strongly suggest that the equilibrium between metarhodopsin-I and metarhodopsin-II is dependent upon the conformation of the C3 loop. The biological implications of this model and its possible relations to dimeric and multimeric complexes of rhodopsin are discussed.


During 1996 to 1998, an average of 52% to 55% of the raccoon (Procyon lotor) population on Wolfe Island, Ontario was vaccinated against rabies during proactive trap-vaccinate-release (TVR) operations. However, during 1999, the percent of the population vaccinated declined to 39% and an outbreak (6 cases) of raccoon rabies occurred on the island from December 1999 to January 2000. The raccoon population on Wolfe Island declined dramatically (71% reduction) from 1,067 raccoons (mean density=8.4/km2 [6.4–12.4, 95% CI]) during 1999 to 305 raccoons (mean density=2.4/km2 [0.87–4.1, 95% CI]) in the spring of 2000. Raccoon density immediately following the outbreak was significantly lower in cells with rabies cases, suggesting that rabies had a negative effect on population size. However, raccoon density had doubled by 1 yr following the outbreak. Movement of raccoons on Wolfe Island was as great as 24 km. Male raccoons moved greater distances than females. Movements to surrounding islands were also noted for raccoons ear tagged on Wolfe Island which indicates the island could serve as a focus for greater geographic rabies spread. Point infection control (PIC) during 2000, TVR during 2001–02, and the aerial distribution of Vaccinia-Rabies Glycoprotein (V-RG) baits during 2000 and 2003–05 were used to eliminate rabies from Wolfe Island. No cases have been detected since late January 2000 (to February 2007).


In this paper, a study of quality monitoring technology for the laser welding was conducted. The laser welding and the industrial robotic systems were used with robot-based laser welding systems. The laser system used in this study was 1.6 kW fiber laser, while the robot system was Industrial robot (pay-load : 130 kg). The robot-based laser welding system was equipped with a laser scanner system for remote laser welding. The welding joints of steel plate and steel plate coated with zinc were butt and lapped joints. The remote laser welding system with laser scanner system is used to increase the processing speed and to improve the efficiency of processes. The welding joints of steel plate and steel plate coated with zinc were butt and lapped joints. The quality testing of the laser welding was conducted by observing the shape of the beads on the plate and the cross-section of the welded parts, analyzing the results of mechanical tension test, and monitoring the plasma intensity by using UV and IR sensor. This paper proposes the quality monitoring method and the robot-based remote laser welding system as a means of resolving the limited welding speed and accuracy of conventional laser welding systems.


Abstract. The Indian and East Asian summer monsoons shape the melt and accumulation patterns of glaciers in High Mountain Asia in complex ways due to the interaction of persistent cloud cover, large temperature ranges, high atmospheric water content and high precipitation rates. Glacier energy- and mass-balance modelling using in situ measurements offers insights into the ways in which surface processes are shaped by climatic regimes. In this study, we use a full energy- and mass-balance model and seven on-glacier automatic weather station datasets from different parts of the Central and Eastern Himalaya to investigate how monsoon conditions influence the glacier surface energy and mass balance. In particular, we look at how debris-covered and debris-free glaciers respond differently to monsoonal conditions.
The radiation budget primarily controls the melt of clean-ice glaciers, but turbulent fluxes play an important role in modulating the melt energy on debris-covered glaciers. The sensible heat flux decreases during core monsoon, but the latent heat flux cools the surface due to evaporation of liquid water. This interplay of radiative and turbulent fluxes causes debris-covered glacier melt rates to stay almost constant through the different phases of the monsoon. Ice melt under thin debris, on the other hand, is amplified by both the dark surface and the turbulent fluxes, which intensify melt during monsoon through surface heating and condensation.
Pre-monsoon snow cover can considerably delay melt onset and have a strong impact on the seasonal mass balance. Intermittent monsoon snow cover lowers the melt rates at high elevation. This work is fundamental to the understanding of the present and future Himalayan cryosphere and water budget, while informing and motivating further glacier- and catchment-scale research using process-based models.


Acute respiratory failure secondary to COVID-19 pneumonia may require a variety of non-pharmacological strategies in addition to oxygen therapy to avoid endotracheal intubation. The response to all these strategies, which include high nasal flow, continuous positive pressure, non-invasive ventilation, or even prone positioning in awake patients, can be highly variable depending on the predominant phenotypic involvement. Deciding when to replace conventional oxygen therapy with non-invasive respiratory support, which to choose, the role of combined methods, definitions, and attitudes toward treatment failure, and improved case improvement procedures are directly relevant clinical questions for the daily care of critically ill COVID-19 patients. The experience accumulated after more than a year of the pandemic should lead to developing recommendations that give answers to all these questions. High Flow Oxygen Therapy Literature List 2022


Background Free blood pressure (BP) checks offered by community pharmacies offer a potentially useful opportunity to diagnose and/or manage hypertension, but the accuracy of the sphygmomanometers in use is currently unknown. Aim To assess the accuracy of validated automatic BP monitors used for BP checks in a UK retail pharmacy chain. Design and Setting 52 pharmacies from one chain were visited in a range of locations (inner city, suburban, rural) in central England. Method Monitor accuracy was compared to a calibrated reference device (Omron PA-350), at 50 mmHg intervals across the range 0-300 mmHg (static pressure test), with a difference from the reference monitor of +/-3 mmHg at any interval considered a failure. The results were analysed by usage rates and length of time in service. Results Eight (13%) monitors failed (i.e. were more than 3mmHg from reference), all underestimating BP. Monitor failure rate from the reference monitor of +/- 3 mmHg at any testing interval varied by length of time in use (2/38, 5% before 18 months vs. 4/14, 29% after 18 months; p=0.038) and to some extent but non-significantly by usage rates (4/22, 18% in monitors used more than once daily vs. 2/33, 6% in those used less frequently; p=0.204). Conclusion BP monitors within a pharmacy setting fail at similar rates to those in general practice. Annual calibration checks for blood pressure monitors are needed, even for new monitors, since these data indicate declining performance from 18 months onwards.


In the marriage law in Indonesia, the guardian (wali) becomes very complicated issue. It is certainly not out of the understanding of the scholars, both conventional scholars, contemporary or legislation. Because the arguments are held down by both the Qur'an and hadith still interpretable. Although the validity of guardians according to scholars and the reading of legislation is very diverse, the majority of Muslims still requires a guardian of marriage even if it will be able to fertilize the patriarchal practices. But despite it all, there are values that are contained behind the role of guardian. Among other things, the value of the benefit, equality, consultation, wisdom, freedom, justice and prosperity.


For the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider era, the trigger and data acquisition system of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment will be entirely replaced. Novel design choices have been explored, including ATCA prototyping platforms with SoC controllers and newly available interconnect technologies with serial optical links with data rates up to 28 Gb/s. Trigger data analysis will be performed through sophisticated algorithms, including widespread use of Machine Learning, in large FPGAs, such as the Xilinx Ultrascale family. The system will process over 60 Tb/s of detector data with an event rate of 750 kHz. The system design and prototyping are described and examples of trigger algorithms reviewed.


The development of polymer-layered silicate nanocomposites (PNCs) includes a long list of different possible components such as polymers, nano-additives, and co-additives, together with surface chemistry and various processing conditions. This involves the investigation of a large number of parameters that influence PNC performance. Consequently, fairly extensive research and development work is necessary, and this constitutes an obstacle in the commercialization of nanotechnology. This paper, which is based on experience from research and development for an industrial application, presents a procedure composed of high throughput (HT) screening methods for speeding up the development of PNCs.


Developing virtual classroom training doesn't have to a chore. In fact, once you know each of the steps involved in the process, you can create deliverables that effectively improve employee skills and job performance, regardless of the subject matter. Even dreaded compliance training can become an engaging and exciting experience for your audience.


: Interrelation of parasitological and epidemiological estimations of potential danger of different territories Primorsky Krai concerning presence of natural foci of tick-borne diseases is discussed. Comparative analysis of long-term dynamics of the tick-borne diseases' sickness rate in comparison with long-term dynamics of the vector ticks' abundance has been carried out.


Previous research suggests that male intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrators can be differentiated into subgroups on the basis of personality characteristics, severity of violence perpetrated, and the generality of violent behaviors. Better understanding of variation among partner violent individuals may lead to more effective assessment, treatment, and prevention of violence. Women's perpetration of IPV is vastly understudied relative to men's perpetration, and very limited research has examined whether the dimensions that differentiate abusive men are also useful in describing abusive women. The present study used a sample of young adult women who endorsed perpetration of dating IPV. A model-based cluster analysis was carried out on scores of antisocial and borderline personality characteristics, violence severity, and violence generality to identify subgroups of female IPV perpetrators. Results suggest that female perpetrators are a heterogeneous group and may meaningfully differ on these characteristics as well as developmental experiences and proximal correlates of violence.


Nicotine releases dopamine in the brain by activating neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). Chronic nicotine treatment increases the number of nAChRs, which represents plasticity of the brain. Together these phenomena have been suggested to have a role in the development of nicotine addiction. In the brain nAChRs can be localized synaptically, extrasynaptically or intracellularly. The purpose of these studies was to clarify the effects of chronic nicotine treatment on the localization of beta2 and alpha7 nAChR subunits in brain areas involved in nicotine addiction. Nicotine was administered orally in drinking water to male NMRI mice for 7 weeks. At the end of chronic nicotine treatment the localization of the nAChR subunits was studied in the dorsal striatum and in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) by using electron microscopy. In the brain areas studied beta2 and alpha7 subunits were localized presynaptically and postsynaptically in axon endings and in dendrites. In both areas the majority of the beta2 and alpha7 subunits were localized at extrasynaptic sites. In response to chronic nicotine treatment the beta2 and alpha7 nAChR subunit labelling was increased at synaptic and extrasynaptic sites as well as intracellularly. This suggests that the trafficking of nAChR subunits is increased as a result of chronic nicotine treatment and nAChRs in all parts of neurons could have functional roles in the formation of nicotine addiction.


Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Texas at Austin, and Hunan University (China) have recently devised a new method of preparing highly uniform, solution-processable, phase-pure semiconducting nanosheets. Their approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature, involves the electrochemical intercalation of quaternary ammonium molecules into 2-D crystals, followed by a mild sonication and exfoliation process.


Abstract We studied breeding dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis), yellow-rumped warblers (Dendroica coronata), and spruce-nesting birds from 1997 to 1998 among forests with different levels of spruce (Picea spp.) mortality following an outbreak of spruce beetles (Dendroctonus rufipennis) in Alaska, USA. We identified species using live and beetle-killed spruce for nest sites and monitored nests to determine how the outbreak influenced avian habitat selection and reproduction. We tested predictions that 1) nesting success of ground-nesting juncos would increase with spruce mortality due to proliferation of understory vegetation available to conceal nests from predators, 2) nesting success of canopy-nesting warblers would decrease with spruce mortality due to fewer live spruce in which to conceal nests, and 3) both species would alter nest-site selection in response to disturbance. Juncos did not benefit from changes in understory vegetation; nesting success in highly disturbed stands (46%) was comparable to that in undisturbed habitats throughout their range. In stands with low spruce mortality, nesting success of juncos was low (5%) and corresponded with high densities of red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus). Yellow-rumped warblers nested exclusively in spruce, but success did not vary with spruce mortality. As disturbance increased, nesting warblers switched from selecting forest patches with high densities of live white spruce (Picea glauca) to patches with beetle-killed spruce. Warblers also placed nests in large-diameter live or beetle-killed spruce, depending on which was more abundant in the stand, with no differences in nesting success. Five of the 12 other species of spruce-nesting birds also used beetle-killed spruce as nest sites. Because beetle-killed spruce can remain standing for >50 years, even highly disturbed stands provide an important breeding resource for boreal forest birds. We recommend that boreal forest managers preserve uncut blocks of infested forest within managed forest landscapes and practice partial harvest of beetle-killed spruce rather than commercial clear-cutting of infested stands in order to sustain breeding bird populations until natural reforestation occurs. Because breeding densities do not always reflect fitness, assessing impacts of a massive natural disturbance should include measuring impacts of changes in vegetation on both reproductive success and predator–prey dynamics.


Here, we use and develop first-principles methods based on density functional theory (DFT) and beyond to understand and predict charge transport phenomena in the novel class of nanostructured devices: molecular junctions. Molecular junctions, individual molecules contacted to two metallic leads, which can be systematically altered by modifying the chemistry of each component, serve as test beds for the study of transport at the nanoscale. To date, various experimental methods have been designed to reliably assemble and mea- sure transport properties of molecular junctions. Furthermore, theoretical methods built on DFT designed to yield quantitative agreement with these experiments for certain classes of molecular junctions have been developed. In order to gain insight into a broader range of molecular junctions and environmental effects associated with the surrounding solution, this dissertation will employ, explore and extend first-principles DFT calculations coupled with approximate self-energy corrections known to yield quantitative agreement with experiments for certain classes of molecular junctions.To start we examine molecular junctions in which the molecule is strongly hybridized with the leads: a challenging limit for the existing methodology. Using a physically motivated tight-binding model, we find that the experimental trends observed for such molecules can be explained by the presence of a so-called "gateway" state associated with the chemical bond that bridges the molecule and the lead. We discuss the ingredients of a self-energy corrected DFT based approach to quantitatively predict conductance in the presence of these hybridization effects.We also develop and apply an approach to account for the surrounding environment on the conductance, which has been predominantly ignored in past transport calculations due to computational complexity. Many experiments are performed in a solution of non-conducting molecules; far from benign, this solution is known to impact the measured conductance by as much as a factor of two. Here, we show that the dominant effect of the solution stems from nearby molecules binding to the lead surface surrounding the junction and altering the local electrostatics. This effect operates in much the same way adsorbates alter the work function of a surface. We develop a framework which implicitly includes the surrounding molecules through an electrostatic-based lattice model with parameters from DFT calculations, reducing the computational complexity of this problem while retaining predictive power. Our approach for computing environmental effects on charge transport in such junctions will pave the way for a better understanding of the physics of nanoscale devices, which are known to be highly sensitive to their surroundings.


Many classical postural sway measures are based on linear analysis of different temporal characteristics of the body's center of pressure (CoP). In some of the classical sway analysis methods, the anterior–posterior and the mediolateral aspects are analyzed separately. While these classical measures are found to be affected by aging, they cover different aspects of stability. Moreover, linear postural sway analysis is not efficient due to complexity of the human physiological functions. This study developed a single sway index based on the nonlinear analysis of the multidimensional CoP data and compared it in different participant age groups in different standing tests. The sway index performance was compared with six classical sway measures and six universal sway parameters. In all, 17 younger active lifestyle participants (31 ± 5.7), 12 participants age between 50 and 60 years (56.2 ± 3.3), and 32 older participants age 60 years and above (69.6 ± 6.2) were recruited for this study. Participants were asked to undergo three standing tests of double stance, single stance, and tandem stance all with eyes closed for 20 s. Using a global machine-learnt Gaussian mixture model, the multidimensional CoP data were clustered, and consequently an index was derived based on the results. Most classical and universal sway measures in the single stance and tandem stance were found to be significantly different in younger participants compared with the older ones. Our proposed sway index was significantly different in younger participants compared with 50–60 years participants in addition to older participants. The sway index also outperformed all classical and universal sway measures in the single and tandem stance tests with the sensitivity of 90.9% and 87.5%, the specificity of 82.4% and 84.3%, and AUC of 0.90 (95% CI, 0.81–1) and 0.91 (95% CI, 0.82–0.99), respectively. The findings demonstrated a strong potential of the sway index to be used as a single yet effective sway measurement.


In this paper, we discuss how OpenStack®, an open source cloud computing software platform, can be used to deliver a managed private cloud by describing the IBM Cloud OpenStack Services offering. IBM Cloud OpenStack Services is an enterprise-class infrastructure-as-a-service, running on OpenStack in a selection of worldwide IBM SoftLayer® data centers. This managed service provides the necessary levels of control so that businesses can focus on applications and services, not on the infrastructure and cloud management systems beneath them. We discuss the design challenges that customers encounter when choosing managed private clouds and illustrate an architecture that addresses these challenges using open source technologies.


This paper is one of a series aimed at deepening the World Bank's capacity to follow through on commitments made in response to the World Development Report (WDR) 2011, which gave renewed prominence to the nexus between conflict, security, and development. Nigeria is a remarkable illustration of how deeply intractable the cycle of poverty, conflict, and fragility can become when tied to the ferocious battles associated with the political economy of oil. This paper places the corpus of analytic and programmatic work concerning institutional reform in conversation with a now substantial body of work on resource politics and most especially, the debate over the politico-institutional character (sometimes called political settlements or pacting arrangements associated with the order of power) and reform landscape of the petro-state. Recent institution reform policy writing appears to have little to say about the political and economic conditions in which crises and institutional disjunctures may authorize, and thereby enable, agents to embark on institutional reforms. The authors focus on Edo state for two reasons. First, it does not on its face appear to be an obvious location in which to explore a reform experience, given its entanglement in the Niger Delta conflict and the maladies typically associated with state fragility. Second, Edo is of interest also because of the changes that its experience is contributing to the World Bank country team's effort to engage operationally across all its instruments with the political economy of institutional reform in Nigeria, its largest client country in Africa.


People tend to spread information and share their ideas in Twitter, while researchers and policy makers would like to understand public opinion and reactions of people in Twitter towards various events. One way to do that is assessing and predicting the impact of tweets. In this thesis, we tried to answer three questions: (1) "What does impact of a tweet mean?", (2) "How do we measure the impact of tweets or topics?", and (3) "Can we predict the impact of tweets or topics?". In order to address these questions, we first emphasize the role of retweets and their importance in impact assessment. We then show that we can build a model through supervised learning to predict if a tweet will get a high number of retweets. We extracted various features from tweets including content based features through Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). In order to have a more accurate impact assessment, we introduced the concept of hidden retweets. People tend to re-post tweets by adding some extra comments to the beginning or to the end of original tweet. Also they intentionally or unintentionally post the exact or near exact tweets with other people without explicitly retweeting them. Therefore hidden retweets are quite important for measuring the real impact of tweets. However, it is also computationally expensive to identify and count the number of hidden retweets. We show that aggregating hidden retweets can be done efficiently through a lexical similarity based clustering algorithm enhanced with a tree structured index and locality sensitive hashing. We adopted a document clustering based approach for discovering the hidden retweets. We developed and evaluated several clustering algorithms with lexical similarity as the distance measure between tweets. Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) is a widely accepted method to calculate the lexical similarity between short text documents such as tweets, but it is also very expensive. Therefore, we utilized an advanced data structure which is Generalized Suffix Tree (GST) based on Longest Common Substring which is an approximation of LCS. We, then developed a density based clustering approach based for tweet clustering and improved its performance by integrating GST and Locality Sensitive Hashing.


Existing transport layer protocols such as TCP and UDP are designed specifically for point-to-point communication. The increased popularity of peer-to-peer networking has brought changes in the Internet that provided users with potentially multiple replicated sources for content retrieval. However, applications that leverage such parallelism have thus far been limited to non-real-time file downloads. In this article we consider the problem of multipoint-to-point video streaming over peer-to-peer networks. We present a transport layer protocol called R/sup 2/CP that effectively enables real-time multipoint-to-point video streaming. R/sup 2/CP is a receiver-driven multistate transport protocol. It requires no coordination between multiple sources, accommodates flexible application layer reliability semantics, uses TCP-friendly congestion control, and delivers to the video stream the aggregate of the bandwidths available on the individual paths. Simulation results show great performance benefits using R/sup 2/CP in peer-to-peer networks.


We treated 14 patients with scleritis with intermittent pulse doses of intravenous methylprednisolone. There was 13 patients with anterior scleritis and one patient with posterior scleritis. A grading system was developed to quantitate the degree of scleral inflammation and to follow up the response to treatment. A standard protocol of intravenous administration of methylprednisolone was followed, commencing with 1 g on three occasions in the first week. Additional immunosuppression was required in six patients. The therapy improved the patients' conditions, with a significant reduction in the severity of the scleritis in all patients. Side effects included psychological disturbances, hypertension, and elevated glucose levels, but no patient required cessation of treatment. Pulse methylprednisolone treatment alone or in combination with other immunosuppressive agents is an effective therapy in severe scleritis and has fewer potential side effects than more conventional regimens of corticosteroid administration.


Porous carbon from biomass has a great potential to be developed. Biomass as a resource is renewable, abundantly available, and cheap. One application of porous carbon is as an electrode material of supercapacitor due to its advantageous pore properties such as high specific surface area and pore volume. This research prepared porous carbon material from pineapple peel waste and tested it as a supercapacitor electrode. The research steps were material preparation, conversion of pineapple peel to porous carbon, and characterization, including material characterization and electrochemical characterizations. Pineapple peel (under 80 mesh size) was pre-carbonized by hydrothermal method at 1900C for 2 hours under a subcritical condition. After that, biochar was pyrolyzed at 9000C and activated using CO2/N2 (KB-900-50). As a reference, biochar was also pyrolyzed under a nitrogen atmosphere at 9000C without activation (KB-900). Produced porous carbon was characterized (i) pore structures, e.g., specific surface area, average pore diameter, and total pore volume using N2-sorption analysis, and (ii) electrochemical performance, e.g., cyclic voltammetry and galvanostatic method using 1 M H2SO4 electrolyte solution. The result showed that the activation process effectively increased the porosity of porous carbon. Material (KB-900-50) possesses a high surface area of 648 m2/g and a high capacitance value of 78 F/g.


We propose a grid-graph algorithm for interconnect routing and buffer insertion in nanometer VLSI layout designs. The algorithm is designed to handle multiconstraint optimizations, namely timing performance and power dissipation. The proposed algorithm is called HRTB-LA, which stands for hybrid routing tree and buffer insertion with look-ahead. In recent VLSI designs, interconnect delay has become a dominant factor compared to gate delay. The well-known technique to minimize the interconnect delay is by inserting buffers along the interconnect wires. However, the buffer itself consumes power and it has been shown that power dissipation overhead due to buffer insertions is significantly high. Many methodologies to optimize timing performance with power constraint have been proposed, and no algorithm is based on dynamic programing technique using a grid graph. In addition, most of the algorithms for buffer insertion use a postrouting buffer insertion approach. In the presence of buffer obstacles, these postrouting algorithms may produce poor solutions. On the other hand, the simultaneous routing and buffer insertion algorithm offers a better solution, but it was proven to be NP complete. Hence, our main contribution is an efficient algorithm using a hybrid approach for multiconstraint optimization for multisink nets. The algorithm uses dynamic programming to compute incrementally the interconnect delay and power dissipation of the inserted buffers while an effective runtime is achieved with the aid of novel look-ahead and graph pruning schemes. Experimental results prove that HRTB-LA is able to handle multiconstraint optimizations and produces a solution up to 30% better compared to a postrouting buffer insertion algorithm in comparable runtime.


BACKGROUND
There is limited information regarding the usefulness of primary antifungal prophylaxis in patients with advanced human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the efficacy and safety of oral fluconazole treatment for the prevention of systemic fungal diseases related to the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

METHODS
We evaluated the clinical records of more than 1300 HIV-infected patients followed up for 6 years to identify subjects with a CD4+ lymphocyte count less than 0.20 x 10(9)/L (200/microL) and no prior systemic fungal disease. We compared 128 patients who received oral fluconazole (100 mg/d every third week) with 121 subjects who received no antifungal treatment.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
The occurrence of visceral mycoses or death was considered an end point. The frequency of esophageal candidiasis and extrapulmonary cryptococcosis and their related clinical and laboratory features, as well as overall patient survival, were assessed and compared between the 2 study groups.

RESULTS
Subjects not treated with fluconazole experienced a significantly higher incidence of systemic mycoses than patients who received fluconazole: 28.4 vs 8.8 cases per 100 patient-years (P < .001). Fluconazole treatment was more effective in preventing esophageal candidiasis than cryptococcosis and was more effective in subjects with a CD4+ cell count less than 0.10 x 10(9)/L. Moreover, fungal complications occurred later and were associated with a significantly lower CD4+ cell count among treated vs untreated patients, while the duration of antiretroviral therapy did not play a significant role. Although mortality rates were similar in the 2 study groups, the fatal outcome of disease was less frequently caused by a fungal disease in subjects who underwent fluconazole prophylaxis. Fluconazole had a favorable tolerability profile.

CONCLUSIONS
In our experience, primary fluconazole prophylaxis proved safe and effective in the prevention of systemic candidiasis and cryptococcosis in patients with advanced HIV disease but it did not improve overall survival. Prospective controlled trials are advisable to confirm efficacy, to find the drug of choice and its best dosage and schedule of administration, to identify patient subgroups showing the most favorable cost-benefit ratios, and to evaluate the effects on overall life expectancy and the risk of emergence and spread of antifungal drug resistance.


It is now clearly established that alpha-2 adrenergic receptors can be subdivided in three pharmacological subtypes (alpha-2A, alpha-2B and alpha-2C) encoded by distinct genes (alpha 2C10, alpha 2C2 and alpha 2C4, respectively, in humans). Whereas the study of the regulation of the human alpha-2A adrenergic receptor and of the promoter region of the alpha 2C10 gene has being greatly helped by the availability of the colon carcinoma cell line HT29, the study of the other human receptor subtypes has thus far been limited to homologous desensitization/down-regulation in transfected cells, because of the lack of human cellular models constitutively-expressing alpha-2B or alpha-2C adrenergic receptors. Several human cell lines were thus screened, in an attempt to find such models. Radioligand binding studies with [3H]RX821002 and [3H]MK912, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reactions and RNase mapping experiments with pairs of primers and riboprobes specific for each subtype demonstrated that the hepatoma cell line HepG2 and the neuroblastoma cell line SK-N-MC possess alpha-2 adrenergic receptors of the alpha-2C subtype. However, whereas HepG2 expresses exclusively alpha-2C receptors (55 +/- 7 fmol of [3H]MK912 binding sites/mg of protein), SK-N-MC expresses both alpha-2A and alpha-2C subtypes in fairly similar amounts (20 +/- 8 and 23 +/- 3 fmol of [3H]MK912 binding sites/mg of protein, respectively). The study of the inhibition of 3H-labeled antagonist binding by UK14304 demonstrated that a fraction of the receptor population was coupled to pertussis toxin-sensitive G-proteins, which were identified as Gi2 and Gi3 by immunoblotting. The alpha-2 agonist was, moreover, able to decrease forskolin-stimulated cAMP production by 47% in HepG2 and 23% in SK-N-MC, demonstrating that inhibition of adenylyl cyclase is one of the primary mechanisms of signal transduction in both cell lines. HepG2 and SK-N-MC are the first human cell lines unquestionably shown to natively express alpha-2C adrenergic receptors. The discovery of these two models may be useful for future study of the regulation of alpha 2C4 gene expression in cells of different origins and investigation of the reciprocal regulation of alpha-2A and alpha-2C subtype in single cells.


In Sarawak, Litsea garciae are known as "Engkala". The tree of 'Engkala' can grow in inland riparian forest and secondary forest. This medium-sized tree have long brittle spreading branches and the leaves lanceolate or obovate often with unequal side (asymmetric) and non-hairy. This seasonal fruit turn pink, or pinkish, greenish white when it is ripping depending on the variety. It is used as antidote against scorpion, centipede and snake bite by Bidayuh and Iban communities. It is also used to treat muscular pains, sprained ankles and knees, skin disease and blood in stools. The metanolic leaves, barks and fruits extracts of L. garciae were tested for its nutritional value, antioxidant and antibacterial activities. The nutritional values, such as N, P, K, Ca, Mg, Fe, Mn, Cu, Zn, B, moisture, ash, protein, carbohydrates and fat were determined based on MS677 and ICP-AES. The antioxidant assay was carried out using DPPH, free radical scavenging activity while the antibacterial assays were carried out using minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and disk diffusion method against five bacteria. The findings showed that L. garciae is a good source of carbohydrate and protein. In addition, it is also demonstrated weak activities towards antioxidant and antibacterial. The phytochemistry study on this plant is being carried out to identify bioactive compounds. Preliminary results suggest that L. garciae is rich in stearic acid. This common saturated fatty acids derived from plants may be used in the production of biodegradable soaps and cosmetics such as shampoo and shaving cream products.


The role of starch in frozen dough was investigated by freezing and thawing wheat starch suspension for 3, 7, and 10 cycles. Freezing caused an increasing damaged starch and leaching materials, as well as the morphological changes of the starch granules. After 10 cycles of freezing and thawing, the relative crystallinity and short-range order increased by 4.3% and 0.251, respectively. These changes resulted in a substantial increase in the gelatinization temperatures, melting enthalpy, and pasting viscosities. Freezing/thawing-treated starch (FTS) showed high susceptibility to enzyme hydrolysis while the resistant starch content of 10 FTS decreased by 28%. Compared with the native starch, an apparent decrease was observed in the specific volume of 86% substitution of bread with FTS while the crumb firmness significantly increased (p > 0.05). Our results showed that freezing could significantly alter the structural and functional properties of wheat starch, thus facilitating irreversible structural transformations from dough to bread.


A preference over menus is said to be an indirect preference if it is induced by a preference over the objects that make up those menus, i.e., a menu A is ranked over B whenever A contains an object that is preferred to every object in B. The basic question we address in this paper is the following: suppose an observer has partial information of an agent's ranking over certain menus; what necessary and sufficient conditions on those rankings guarantee the existence of a preference over objects that induces the observed menu rankings? Our basic result has a wide variety of applications. (1) It gives a characterization of rankings over prices that could be extended to a bona fide indirect utility function. (2) It leads to a generalization of Afriat's (1967) theorem that allows for imperfectly observed choices. (3) It could be used to characterize observations that are consistent with a multiple preferences model. (4) It leads to a characterization of a model of choice generated by minimax regret.


Collaborative machine learning (ML) is an appealing paradigm to build high-quality ML models by training on the aggregated data from many parties. However, these parties are only willing to share their data when given enough incentives, such as a guaranteed fair reward based on their contributions. This motivates the need for measuring a party's contribution and designing an incentive-aware reward scheme accordingly. This paper proposes to value a party's reward based on Shapley value and information gain on model parameters given its data. Subsequently, we give each party a model as a reward. To formally incentivize the collaboration, we define some desirable properties (e.g., fairness and stability) which are inspired by cooperative game theory but adapted for our model reward that is uniquely freely replicable. Then, we propose a novel model reward scheme to satisfy fairness and trade off between the desirable properties via an adjustable parameter. The value of each party's model reward determined by our scheme is attained by injecting Gaussian noise to the aggregated training data with an optimized noise variance. We empirically demonstrate interesting properties of our scheme and evaluate its performance using synthetic and real-world datasets.


A study of earnings in the culture sector is important to an understanding of the vitality of this sector. It is also an issue of significant interest to many culture organizations and lobby groups. The Canadian Framework for Culture Statistics1 classifies 48 occupations2 as culture occupations. Using data from the 1996 and 2001 Censuses of Population,3 this article discusses the employment income in culture occupations4 and compares it with the employment income of all occupations.


Objective: Describing the long-term mental health of Australians is limited as many reports rely on cross-sectional studies which fail to account for within-person changes and age-related developmental processes which may bias estimates which ignore these phenomena. We examined the 17-year trajectories of mental health in 27,519 Australian adults. Methods: Household panel data of 27,519 participants aged 18 years and over from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey provided at least one observation of mental health over a 17-year period from 2001. On average, participants reported 7.6 observations. Mental Health was assessed annually using the Short-Form Health Survey-36 mental health scale. Results: Over time, there were only very small changes in mental health and only for the youngest and oldest adults. Over time, there was consistent evidence for better metal health with increasing age, although for the very old, there appear to be substantial declines. These patterns were consistent between sex. In line with an existing literature, males reported better mental health over life span, although the declines of mental health in very-late-life are particularly pronounced for males. Conclusion: Decline in mental health was only reported by the youngest and oldest respondents, and was notable only in the last 4–5 years. However, the magnitude of the decline was small and further follow-up will be needed to determine whether this is a trend of substantive declining mental health for these specific age cohorts. In contrast, the more consistent finding is that there has been no substantive change in the level of mental health in Australia over the last 17 years. Analysis of the mental health trajectories of baseline age-cohorts confirmed that age differences are consistent over time.


Data analysts must make sense of increasingly large data sets, sometimes with billions or more records. We present methods for interactive visualization of big data, following the principle that perceptual and interactive scalability should be limited by the chosen resolution of the visualized data, not the number of records. We first describe a design space of scalable visual summaries that use data reduction methods (such as binned aggregation or sampling) to visualize a variety of data types. We then contribute methods for interactive querying (e.g., brushing & linking) among binned plots through a combination of multivariate data tiles and parallel query processing. We implement our techniques in imMens, a browser‐based visual analysis system that uses WebGL for data processing and rendering on the GPU. In benchmarks imMens sustains 50 frames‐per‐second brushing & linking among dozens of visualizations, with invariant performance on data sizes ranging from thousands to billions of records.


Urban and building energy simulations are usually initiated with typical meteorological year weather data. However, the locations where these historical datasets were collected (usually airports) do not represent the local, site specific micro-climates that cities develop. An idealised "urban unit model" (250m radius) has been developed for use with simulation modelling as a method for adapting commonly available weather data files to the local micro-climate. The idealised "urban unit model" presented in this work is based on the main thermal and morphological characteristics of nine sites with residential / institutional (university) use in Hangzhou, China. This newly introduced idealised "urban unit model" was implemented into micro-climatic simulations using a Computational Fluid Dynamics – Surface Energy Balance analysis tool (ENVI-met, Version 4). Following model validation, two scenarios were developed, one for assessing the impact of vegetated surface's location on air temperature in relation to the air temperature measurement point (3.5m above ground) and a second one for analysing the effect of the vegetated surface area on the average urban unit (250m radius) air and surface temperature. The performance of the "urban unit model" was deemed satisfactory and the performance evaluation indices were comparable to previously published work (RMSE:1.3; MAPE:3.1%). The results of Scenario 1 (spatial distribution of green space in the urban unit) showed that the location of the vegetated surface had only marginal impact on the air temperature at the middle grid cell of the urban unit. As would be expected, the air temperature was lower for the case where the vegetation was at the centre of the model. Scenario 2 (changing the green space percentage in the urban unit) revealed that the increase of green space resulted in an increase in the occurrence frequency of air temperatures towards the cooler end of the temperature distribution. This study concluded that in places with a humid subtropical climate such as Hangzhou, for successive hot, dry summer days, the reduction in soil water content can negate, to a large extent, the cooling benefits of added vegetation. This work presents a methodology that addresses the implications of urban morphology representation for micro-climate modelling.


Standard 3.9 of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (1999) demands evidence of model fit when item response theory (IRT) models are employed to data from tests. Hambleton and Han (2005) and Sinharay (2005) recommended the assessment of practical significance of misfit of IRT models, but few examples of such assessment can be found in the literature concerning IRT model fit. In this article, practical significance of misfit of IRT models was assessed using data from several tests that employ IRT models to report scores. The IRT model did not fit any data set considered in this article. However, the extent of practical significance of misfit varied over the data sets.


SUMMARY We investigated how demand for war derived scrap metal influenced livelihoods, forest use and environmental outcomes near the biodiverse Annamite Mountains in Central Vietnam. We focused on one community, Khe Tran, and interviewed local villagers, active collectors from other communes, traders and officials. We also visited the forest. Collection is illegal during the dry season due to concerns about fires. Despite the threat of unexploded ordnance, villagers did not judge metal collection especially dangerous. Though metal is declining, scrap collection remained the principle reason people entered the forest. Though many Khe Tran villagers had past experiences as metal collectors most now favoured cultivation and plantation management. In contrast many collectors from elsewhere lacked such options. Collectors often sought other products when looking for metal, thereby facilitating trade in these forest products (e.g. bamboo and rattan). Alternative livelihood options are required for those reliant on this finite and declining resource.


Gene regulatory networks present a wide variety of dynamical responses to intrinsic and extrinsic perturbations. Arguably, one of the most important of such coordinated responses is the one of amplification cascades, in which activation of a few key-responsive transcription factors (termed master regulators, MRs) lead to a large series of transcriptional activation events. This is so since master regulators are transcription factors controlling the expression of other transcription factor molecules and so on. MRs hold a central position related to transcriptional dynamics and control of gene regulatory networks and are often involved in complex feedback and feedforward loops inducing non-trivial dynamics. Recent studies have pointed out to the myocyte enhancing factor 2C (MEF2C, also known as MADS box transcription enhancer factor 2, polypeptide C) as being one of such master regulators involved in the pathogenesis of primary breast cancer. In this work, we perform an integrative genomic analysis of the transcriptional regulation activity of MEF2C and its target genes to evaluate to what extent are these molecules inducing collective responses leading to gene expression deregulation and carcinogenesis. We also analyzed a number of induced dynamic responses, in particular those associated with transcriptional bursts, and nonlinear cascading to evaluate the influence they may have in malignant phenotypes and cancer. Received: 20 Novembre 2014,  Accepted: 24 June 2015;  Edited by: C. A. Condat, G. J. Sibona;  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4279/PIP.070011 Cite as: E Hernandez-Lemus, K Baca-Lopez, R Lemus, R Garcia-Herrera, Papers in Physics 7, 070011 (2015) This paper, by E Hernandez-Lemus, K Baca-Lopez, R Lemus, R Garcia-Herrera , is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 .


In this communication, it is shown that a nondiffracting vortex beam (i.e., a higher order Bessel beam with azimuthal phase variation) can be generated in the near field by synthesizing an inward cylindrical traveling-wave distribution over a finite aperture antenna. A radial line slot array (RLSA) is then designed to prove the concept. The collimated vortex beam is excited in the proximity of the RLSA, within a region properly defined by the nondiffracting range of the generated beam. The radial dependence of the longitudinal electric field of the vortex-beam magnitude follows a first-order Bessel function, and its phase presents a linear azimuthal variation. Full-wave results validate the generation of the nondiffractive higher order Bessel beam within the radiative near field of the launcher.


Ruthenium(II)-arene diphosphine complexes are shown to be effective precursors for the catalytic hydrogenation of the C=C bond in an aqueous biphase using molecular hydrogen as the hydrogen source. A mechanistic study performed in water, utilizing high gas pressure NMR spectroscopy and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, and experiments involving the variation of pH, enables indirect identification of the catalytically active species resulting from the substitution of the chloride with the dihydrogen ligand. Similar catalytic experiments are carried out in ionic liquids (ILs), such as [bmim][BF4] and [bmim][TfO] using an analogous precursor, but no conversion is observed and the ruthenium(II) species does not undergo any chemical change during the reaction. The dissociation of chloride, leading to the catalyst, is inhibited in these ILs due to a lower solvation of chloride. An estimate of the bmim-chloride interaction, which is lower than the water-chloride interaction, is determined by 1H NMR spectroscopy. To ensure the formation of the active species in such ILs, the coordinated chloride is abstracted beforehand and replaced by acetonitrile, which restores the catalytic activity. An alternative approach to overcome the chloride dissociation problem consists of improving the solvation of the chloride in the IL medium. To accomplish this, water is added as a co-solvent in the IL phase and, under these conditions, the activity is restored. In order to assess the reactivity of chloride ions in ILs, a relative scale for the solvation of chloride is given for a series of [cation][Tf2N] ILs. This scale, based on the reaction enthalpy for the dissociation of a chloride-templated metallacage, yields the following order of chloride solvation: [C5e3am][Tf2N] < [bmpy][Tf2N] < [bmim][Tf2N] ≤ [bdmim][Tf2N] < [bpy] [Tf2N] ≪ [mimeOH][Tf2N]. In Tf2N-based ILs, the catalytic activity of hydrogenation reactions using the same Ru(II) precursor in the presence of chloride is totally modified. In a series of [cation][Tf2N] ILs, the rate of formation of the catalyst, which is promoted by chlorides, is shown to depend on the solvation of chloride.


While several intoxications can be successfully treated with specific antidotes, intoxications with the steroid glycoside digitoxin still represent a major challenge. Besides conventional approaches, CytoSorb® hemoadsorption might be another treatment option. We report on an 81-year-old female patient treated in our intensive care unit (ICU) with severe digitoxin intoxication, acute renal failure, and urinary tract infection (UTI). As physiological digitoxin elimination kinetics are known to appear slow, and also in regard to the renal failure, the decision was made to initiate continuous renal replacement therapy combined with CytoSorb hemoadsorption. The patient was hemodynamically stabilized within the first 4 h of treatment and initially required catecholamines to be stopped within 24 h of treatment. Pre- and post-adsorber drug level measurements showed a rapid elimination of digitoxin. Antibiotic treatment with piperacillin/tazobactam was initiated, and despite CytoSorb hemoadsorption therapy and its known potential to reduce plasma concentrations of several drugs, the UTI was successfully treated. After 3 days of CytoSorb treatment, digitoxin plasma levels were stable and almost normalized, and no clinical signs of intoxication were present. Five days after presentation, the patient was transferred from the ICU in a stable condition. CytoSorb hemoadsorption may be an easily available, efficient, and less cost-intensive therapy option than treatment with the Fab fragment, which is the currently recommended therapy for digitalis intoxications. Therefore, the use of CytoSorb might represent an alternative treatment for life-threatening complications of digitoxin intoxications.


This essay comments on the three substantive articles comprising the University of Toronto Law Journal's symposium on ferae naturae and the law of property. It argues that the articles collectively represent a reconsideration of the influential thesis developed by Robert Ellickson in Order without Law, that when members of any community resolve disputes arising in the course of some shared activity they are prone to do so in ways that avoid the costs that law imposes on the process of settlement because 'coordination to mutual advantage without supervision by the state' works better than order with it. Rather than confirming law's unimportance, this essay argues, the articles collectively demonstrate the importance of law. The essay recognizes, however, that some of the ways in which the importance of law is demonstrated are distinct from the measures of importance originally considered by Ellickson. Following their lead, the essay considers additional criteria by which we might assess the significance of the law of property in wild animals– not least whether that law has taken the animals themselves into consideration.


Total DNA concentration in 0.2-μm-pore-size Nuclepore filter filtrates (<0.2-μm fraction) of Tokyo Bay water was estimated to be 9 to 19 ng/ml by an immunochemical quantification method. Almost 90% of the DNA in the <0.2-μm fraction was found in the size fractions larger than 3.0 � 105 Da and 0.03 μm, and most was not susceptible to DNase digestion, that is, consisted of non-DNase-digestible DNA (coated DNA). A significant amount of DNA was obtained from the <0.2-μm fraction of the seawater by three different methods: polyethylene glycol precipitation, direct ethanol precipitation, and ultrafilter concentration. Gel electrophoresis analysis of the isolated DNAs showed that they consisted mainly of coated DNAs with a similar molecular sizes (20 to 30 kb [1.3 � 107 to 2.0 � 107 Da). The abundance of the ultramicron virus-sized coated DNA in natural seawater suggests that these DNA-rich particles can be attributed to marine DNA virus assemblages and that they may be a significant phosphorus reservoir in the environment.


Curcumin has several pharmacological effects including anti-inflammatory, reduce kidney damage, hepatoprotector, and inhibiting tumor growth in ovarian cancer. The use of curcumin is limited because it has low bioavailability and low capacity to reach target organs. This limitation is overcome by making it in the form of nanoparticles. This study aim to determine curcumin levels on some organ in healthy rat groups and on ovaries at ovarian cancer models rat that given curcumin and curcumin nanoparticles. Measurement of curcumin levels using UPLCMS/MS. Determination of curcumin level in the organ was carried out in 2 treatment groups, group that received curcumin and group that received curcumin nanoparticles orally with a single dose of 100 mg/kg Body Weight (BW). At 180 minutes, rats were decapitated for liver, kidney and ovaries. The ovarian cancer rats were also divided into 2 groups and given curcumin and curcumin nanoparticles with repeated doses of 100 mg/kgBW/day and after 30 days, ovarian cancer rats were decapitated for the ovaries. In the group that received curcumin, the concentration of curcumin in the liver, kidney and ovaries were less than the detection limit, whereas in the group that received curcumin nanoparticles, the levels of curcumin are 1,866.6±22.60 ng/g in liver, 114.87±13.36 ng/g in kidney and 136.864±11.15 ng/g in ovaries. In ovarian cancer rats, levels of curcumin in the group receiving curcumin is 2.29±1.15 ng/g and 17.76±4.85 ng/g in the group receiving curcumin nanoparticles. Curcumin nanoparticles can increase the distribution of curcumin in liver, kidney, ovaries in healthy rats and in ovaries at ovarian cancer model rats.


This benchmarking study compares how railway investments are procured in five European countries: Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. In total, 19 procurement managers and project managers were interviewed. This study compares the national rail clients' procurement strategies regarding: delivery system, reward system, contractor selection, and collaboration model. Historically, these clients have used in-house production. The first step towards a gradually increased usage of the market was to outsource the construction activities while keeping the design and development competence in-house. All five countries have mainly used Design-Bid-Build contracts in their initial outsourcing. However, the last few years there is a discernible trend in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and the UK towards allocating more design and development responsibilities to contractors (i.e. Design-Build contracts) and increasing the strategic focus on cooperation. The UK and the Netherlands are forerunners in this trend that can be viewed as a third step in the transition towards a market oriented railway sector. Norway and Sweden is in the middle of this transition, whereas Germany has not initiated this change. The transition towards a gradually increased usage of the market has two main dimensions; degree of cooperation and degree of contractor freedom, which differs among the countries. The UK and Sweden focus on increasing both these dimensions, while The Netherlands and Norway mostly focus on increasing the degree of contractor freedom. Germany still limits both dimensions by performing design and development in-house and letting contractors compete for construction work in Design-Bid-Build contracts. Due to historical and cultural reasons, Deutsche Bahn in Germany is very hesitant to engage in collaboration with external suppliers; focusing on competition is considered more appropriate and less controversial.


An o-nitro-O-aryl oxime was observed to exhibit a short OO contact, which exhibited characteristics consistent with a chalcogen bond. The O-N bond length of the oxime was appreciably longer than the expected value, and NBO calculations indicated the presence of a n(O) → σ(O-N) orbital delocalisation. Topological analysis of the experimental electron density of two analogues shows the presence of a bond path between the two oxygen atoms, with ρ(r) and ∇2ρ(r) values consistent with an electrostatic interaction. Finally, electrostatic potential calculations indicate the presence of a σ-hole, the "smoking gun" indicating a Ch-bond. These results are unusual as oxygen is not typically considered to be a Ch-bond donor, especially in unactivated systems such as oximes.


Governors control the revolution speed of heat engines such as diesel engines, steam turbines and gas turbines. Precise and prompt tests for the control performances of governors are essential both in governors' manufacturing processes and in governors' maintenance processes. In the conventional governor test systems controlled by analog type electronic controllers, the incorporation of heat engine's dynamics to the test system have been considered very difficult to realize. This study suggests a new governor test system controlled by a digital controller using a personal computer. The application of the digital controller to the test system instead of the analog type electronic controller have brought about the following advancements; (1) heat engine's dynamics could be implemented easily in the test system, (2) automatic test data acquisition both in steady state and in transient state enables us to save test time and to enhance the reliability of the tests.


The results of study of the activity of cytochromeoxidase in the blood formed elements in 84 patients suffering from diabetes mellitus before and after the treatment are presented. In patients with the primarily detected disease the activity of the enzyme was reduced, and in its prolonged course--it was elevated. A tendency to normalization of the enzyme activity was noted as a result of treatment in all the forms of the course of the disease; however, the interstitial metabolism failed to become restored completely.


A computer-assisted morphometric study has been carried out on the ultrastructural features of the cholinergic synaptic junctional areas in the dentate gyrus supragranular layer of 11-month-old female Wistar rats and in littermates fed a vitamin E deficient diet for 10 months. The number of synapses/micro m(3) (numerical density: Nv), the average area of the junctional zones (S) and the total synaptic contact area/micro m(3) (surface density: Sv) were the three parameters taken into account. Nv and Sv significantly decreased, while S increased in the vitamin E deficient group. A size distribution of S showed that while in the normally fed animals the percentage of an enlarged synapses (0.16 micro m(2)>) accounts for 19% of the whole population, in the vitamin E deficient rats it raises at 44%. Relating the number of synapses to the number of dentate gyrus granule cells, the synapse-to-neurone ratio appeared to be decreased by 30% in the vitamin E deficient animals. It is currently reported that number (Nv) and size (S) of the synapses are in a close inverse relationship which aims at maintaining constant the total synaptic surface area (Sv) in a discrete volume of the neuropil, therefore, taken together per experimental group of rats, these parameters represent a reliable index of the synaptic morphological plasticity. Our present findings clearly document that the structural dynamics of the hippocampal cholinergic synapses are markedly affected by the absence of vitamin E from the diet and, in turn, support that an increased peroxidative stress may play a central role in the widely reported vulnerability of the cholinergic terminals with advancing age.


Calvin is an IoT framework for application development, deployment and execution in heterogeneous environments, that includes clouds, edge resources, and embedded or constrained resources. Inside Calvin, all the distributed resources are viewed as one environment by the application. The framework provides multi-tenancy and simplifies development of IoT applications, which are represented using a dataflow of application components (named actors) and their communication. The idea behind Calvin poses similarity with the serverless architecture and can be seen as Actor as a Service instead of Function as a Service. This makes Calvin very powerful as it does not only scale actors quickly but also provides an easy actor migration capability. In this work, we propose Calvin Constrained, an extension to the Calvin framework to cover resource-constrained devices. Due to limited memory and processing power of embedded devices, the constrained side of the framework can only support a limited subset of the Calvin features. The current implementation of Calvin Constrained supports actors implemented in C as well as Python, where the support for Python actors is enabled by using MicroPython as a statically allocated library, by this we enable the automatic management of state variables and enhance code re-usability. As would be expected, Python-coded actors demand more resources over C-coded ones. We show that the extra resources needed are manageable on current off-the-shelve micro-controller-equipped devices when using the Calvin framework.


The reform process in India has so far mainly concentrated at the central level. India has yet to free up its state governments sufficiently so that they can add much greater dynamism to the reforms. Greater decentralization of decision making from the center to the states will lead to greater competition among the states and therefore to higher efficiency and productivity in these regions. Policy making at the sub-national level is essential in order for the state governments to be able to follow development strategies suitable to their socio-economic, cultural, and geographic characteristics. Coastal states, for example, can follow a more focused export-led growth strategy, or states with a large pool of trained manpower, such as IT professionals in Tamil Nadu or Karnataka can lay more emphasis on IT and service sector. A few of the Indian States have been more reform-oriented, such as Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, but states, such as Haryana, Kerala, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and West Bengal have a lot to catch-up with. Of course, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are even further behind. We analyze the state-level situation in fifteen major states based on the progress of state-level policy reform. Accordingly, we have divided these states into three categories of reformers. These are the reform-oriented states, intermediate reformers and the lagging reformers. We then examine the performance of these states in terms of SDP growth, foreign direct investment, industrial investment proposals, and software exports among other variables. Real annual average growth rates of per capita gross state domestic product bear testimony to the fact that our group of reform-oriented states are the fastest growing states in India in the post-reform period. Also, these states have performed better in attracting both domestic and foreign investment, software exports, and in the areas of primary health and education.


Although the literature on avertin (tribromethanol) rectal anesthesia has become voluminous since the production of the chemical compound tribromethanol by Willstatter and Duisberg, in 1923, there are only a few investigations on the effects in normal persons of the drug administered alone, in the dosage used in basal anesthesia. Before we were willing to employ avertin anesthesia on a large scale in hospital practice, we deemed it advisable to investigate the effects of the drug in normal persons. The numerous reports recorded present either experiments on animals or observations on persons with such complicating factors as operation, auxiliary medication and supplementary anesthesia. METHOD We studied avertin anesthesia in fifteen normal people with a view to obtaining information on the uncomplicated effects of the drug. We made observations on the following: age, sex, weight, dosage, constitution, pulse, temperature, respiratory rate and amplitude, condition of the reflexes, state of consciousness, presence of


Following the news is generally understood to be crucial for democracy as it allows citizens to politically participate in an informed manner; yet, one may wonder about the unintended side effects it has for the mental well-being of citizens. With news focusing on the negative and worrisome events in the world, framing that evokes a sense of powerlessness, and lack of entertainment value, this study hypothesizes that news consumption decreases mental well-being via negative hedonic experiences; thereby, we differentiate between hard and soft news. Using a panel survey in combination with latent growth curve modeling (n = 2,767), we demonstrate that the consumption of hard news television programs has a negative effect on the development of mental well-being over time. Soft news consumption, by contrast, has a marginally positive impact on the trend in well-being. This can be explained by the differential topic focus, framing and style of soft news vis-à-vis hard news. Investigating the effects of news consumption on mental well-being provides insight into the impact news exposure has on variables other than the political ones, which definitively are not less societally relevant.


Highlighting the language ideologies and speech practices critical to missionization, this paper examines the introduction of evangelical Christianity in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, and its uptake in local communities. It analyzes the mission's linguistic and cultural ideologies—valorization of the vernacular language, rejection of cultural practices—and the consequences of these opposing valences. It details Bosavi pastors' mediation and transmission of these ideologies through their translating practices, showing how local interpretations produced innovation in linguistic categories and transformation of cultural repertoires. I argue that this perspective contributes to continuity and discontinuity debates in the anthropology of Christianity. This paper also details how this mission's tropes of division and separation and oppositional binaries when translated in Bosavi provided the linguistic categories that guided Bosavi Christians in reshaping the moral geographies of their communities. Finally, it addresses related shifts in the local significance of place and emplaced experiences more broadly, what I call "dis-placement," the result of mission initiatives carried out by local pastors through which relationships between persons, activities, memory, and place become transformed and lose their meaning.


The new Keynesian framework as presented in Clarida et al. (2002) suggests that in an open economy, the natural rate of interest consists of a local component (the expected growth of domestic total factor productivity) and a global component (the expected growth of world output). We estimate an augmented Taylor-type rule for Israel and confirm that the above-mentioned components contain valuable information about the monetary interest rate. In particular, a large part of the decline in the monetary interest rate in 2008-2009 is explained by the exceptional decline in world growth. With regard to the other and more traditional components of the rule, we find a high and significant response of the monetary interest rate to the inflation gap, the output gap, and the real exchange rate gap.