The outcome of allogeneic HSCT varies considerably by the disease and remission status at the time of transplantation. Any retrospective or prospective HSCT study that enrolls patients across disease types must account for this heterogeneity; yet, current methods are neither standardized nor validated. We conducted a retrospective study of 1539 patients who underwent transplantation at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Brigham and Women's Hospital from 2000 to 2009. Using multivariable models for overall survival, we created a disease risk index. This tool uses readily available information about disease and disease status to categorize patients into 4 risk groups with significantly different overall survival and progression-free survival on the basis of primarily differences in the relapse risk. This scheme applies regardless of conditioning intensity, is independent of comorbidity index, and was validated in an independent cohort of 672 patients from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. This simple and validated scheme could be used to risk-stratify patients in both retrospective and prospective HSCT studies, to calibrate HSCT outcomes across studies and centers, and to promote the design of HSCT clinical trials that enroll patients across diseases and disease states, increasing our ability to study nondisease-specific outcomes in HSCT.


As a response to the Great Recession, many central banks resorted to unconventional monetary policies, in the form of a balance sheet expansion. Our research aims at analyzing the impact of the ECB policies on stock market volatility in four Eurozone countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) within the Multiplicative Error Model framework. We propose a model which allows us to quantify the part of market volatility depending directly on unconventional policies by distinguishing between the announcement the implementation effects. While we observe an increase in volatility on announcement days, we find a negative implementation effect, which causes a remarkable reduction in volatility in the long term. A Model Confidence Set approach finds how the forecasting power of the proxy improves significantly after the policy announcement; a multi–step ahead forecasting exercise estimates the duration of the effect, and, by shocking the policy variable, we are able to quantify the reduction in volatility which is more marked for debt–troubled countries.


Abstract We evaluate a long-standing program run by one of the largest education foundations in Argentina that offers scholarships and nonacademic mentoring to secondary school students. We randomly assigned 408 grade 6 students within 10 public schools in the Province of Buenos Aires to either receive the program throughout secondary school or not to receive it. After three years, the program improved students' academic behaviors (e.g., studying before an exam or catching up on missed work), but we find little evidence that these changes translated into broader improvements in students' academic mindsets (e.g., self-beliefs about performance and efficacy), perseverance (e.g., grit), or learning strategies (e.g., metacognition). The program also improved students' performance in school during the first year (e.g., grades, attendance, and passing rates), but we do not find similar gains in subsequent years. This may be due to a large share of treatment students being expelled from the program for not meeting its requirements. The program did not improve student learning or personality traits (e.g., conscientiousness). Finally, we find some heterogeneous effects for female students and students from low-income families.


I/O prefetching has been employed in the past as one of the mechanisms to hide large disk latencies. However, I/O prefetching in parallel applications is problematic when multiple CPUs share the same set of disks due to the possibility that prefetches from different CPUs can interact on shared memory caches in the I/O nodes in complex and unpredictable ways. In this paper, we (i) quantify the impact of compiler-directed I/O prefetching - developed originally in the context of sequential execution - on shared caches at I/O nodes. The experimental data collected shows that while I/O prefetching brings benefits, its effectiveness reduces significantly as the number of CPUs is increased; (ii) identify inter-CPU misses due to harmful prefetches as one of the main sources for this reduction in performance with the increased number of CPUs; and (iii) propose and experimentally evaluate a profiler and compiler assisted adaptive I/O prefetching scheme targeting shared storage caches. The proposed scheme obtains inter-thread data sharing information using profiling and, based on the captured data sharing patterns, divides the threads into clusters and assigns a separate (customized) I/O prefetcher thread for each cluster. In our approach, the compiler generates the I/O prefetching threads automatically. We implemented this new I/O prefetching scheme using a compiler and the PVFS file system running on Linux, and the empirical data collected clearly underline the importance of adapting I/O prefetching based on program phases. Specifically, our proposed scheme improves performance, on average, by 19.9%, 11.9% and 10.3% over the cases without I/O prefetching, with independent I/O prefetching (each CPU is performing compiler-directed I/O prefetching independently), and with one CPU prefetching (one CPU is reserved for prefetching on behalf of others), respectively, when 8 CPUs are used.


Enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) for the lysosomal storage disease mucopolysaccharidosis I (MPS I) involves i.v. injection of alpha-l-iduronidase, which can be taken up by cells throughout the body. While a significant immune response to ERT has been shown in patients with MPS I, little is known about what effect anti-enzyme antibodies have on treatment efficacy. In this issue of the JCI, Dickson et al. demonstrate that anti-enzyme antibodies inhibit enzyme uptake and substantially limit the therapeutic efficacy of ERT in canines with MPS I (see the related article beginning on page 2868). Furthermore, the induction of immune tolerance--via oral delivery of cyclosporine A and azathioprine for two months at the time of initiation of ERT with recombinant human alpha-L-iduronidase--improved enzyme uptake in organs. Therefore, transient immunosuppression may enhance ERT for lysosomal storage diseases.


This tutorial presents an introduction to the interaction of light and matter on the attosecond timescale. Our aim is to detail the theoretical description of ultra-short time delays and to relate these to the phase of extreme ultraviolet (XUV) light pulses and to the asymptotic phaseshifts of photoelectron wave packets. Special emphasis is laid on time-delay experiments, where attosecond XUV pulses are used to photoionize target atoms at well-defined times, followed by a probing process in real time by a phase-locked, infrared laser field. In this way, the laser field serves as a 'clock' to monitor the ionization event, but the observable delays do not correspond directly to the delay associated with single-photon ionization. Instead, a significant part of the observed delay originates from a measurement induced process, which obscures the single-photon ionization dynamics. This artefact is traced back to a phaseshift of the above-threshold ionization transition matrix element, which we call the continuum–continuum phase. It arises due to the laser-stimulated transitions between Coulomb continuum states. As we shall show here, these measurement-induced effects can be separated from the single-photon ionization process, using analytical expressions of universal character, so that eventually the attosecond time delays in photoionization can be accessed.


Due to the high value that it placed upon the ownership of land, the common law
traditionally was wary of intervening if the plaintiff non-contractually improved the
defendant's land. For the most part, liability was imposed only if the landowner acted
unconscionably according to the doctrine of proprietary estoppel. Recently, however,
Canadian courts have expanded the scope of relief in two respects. First, the test for
proprietary estoppel has been revised and relaxed. Second, the cause of action in unjust
enrichment is now widely employed as an alternative source of liability. While neither
development is necessarily wrong, the implications of those changes have received too
little attention. A sensitive balance must be struck between the interests of worthy
claimants and the interests of innocent landowners


SIR,-Venugopalan et al concluded that, compared with controls, patients with coarctation of the aorta have relative hypoplasia of the mitral valve which is likely to be more pronounced in patients with mitral diastolic murmurs.I Unfortunately, they do not mention our previous study in which we found that patients with mitral diastolic rumble and coarctation of the aorta have minor abnormalities of the mitral valve or minimal mitral stenosis that significantly increase the rapid ventricular filling and pressure half times and decrease the mitral valve area. LUIS E ALDAY Division of Cardiology, Hospital de Ninios, Bv. Chacabuco 1016,


A cost-effective digital radiographic system with a large field-of-view (FOV) of 17"/spl times/17" has been developed. The cascaded imaging system mainly consists of three parts: (1) a phosphor screen to convert incident X-rays into visible photons; (2) a matrix of 8/spl times/8 array of lens assembly to efficiently collect visible photons emitted by the phosphor screen; and (3) 8/spl times/8 complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors, aligned to the corresponding lens assembly. Although low in cost due to economical CMOS image sensors, the overall performance features are comparable with other commercial digital radiographic systems. From the analysis of signal and noise propagation, the system is not an "X-ray quantum-limited" system, rather the system has secondary quantum sink at the light collecting stage. The system resolution is about 2 line pairs per millimeter from both of measured from X-ray images of a line-pair test pattern and the calculation of the modulation-transfer function. Detailed experimental and theoretical analysis of performance are discussed.


Ultrastructural features of aortic and carotid artery endothelium were investigated using transmission electron microscopy and freeze-fracture methodologies. Morphometric analysis was conducted to quantitate the pinocytotic vesicle population within endothelial cells. A significantly greater volume fraction of vesicles and vesicles/micrometer 3 was found in the carotid artery. The membrane-bound vesicles in the endothelium of the aorta and carotid artery exhibited a greater fractional area than has been reported for capillary endothelium. These findings may indicate a specialized function of the vesicles in large arteries for increasing the total plasma membrane surface area in response to high transmural pressures.


Bone and soft tissue sarcomas are an infrequent group of tumours with a prevalence of 4 in 100,000 people/year. Sarcomas, such as synovial sarcoma, Ewing's sarcoma and osteosarcoma, are more usual in adolescents or in young adults. Neoplasias such as leiomyosarcoma or liposarcoma are more frequent in patients over 55 years. One relevant topic is related to sarcomagenesis elucidation, a key for discovering the early molecular mechanisms involved in the development of sarcomas as well as the identification of reliable molecular markers and possible therapeutic targets. Today, it is known that the cellular context contributes to the phenotype. Analysis of gene expression profiling of human sarcomas revealed tightly clustered groups and could denote the existence of common signalling pathways for each branch. From the molecular point of view, these neoplasias are grouped into two main types: (a) sarcomas showing specific genetic alterations and relatively simple karyotypes, and translocations which originate gene fusions (e.g., EWS-FLI1 in Ewing's sarcoma); or specific genetic mutations (e.g., c-kit in the gastrointestinal stromal tumour), and (b) sarcomas showing unspecific gene alterations and very complex karyotypes, and very numerous gains and losses. This review points out the clinical projection of sarcomagenesis elucidation and knowledge of diverse types of molecular alterations.


Background We aimed to evaluate the performance of the Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) creatinine–cystatin C equation in a cohort of elderly Chinese participants. Materials and methods Glomerular filtration rate (GFR) was measured in 431 elderly Chinese participants by the technetium-99m diethylene-triamine-penta-acetic acid (99mTc-DTPA) renal dynamic imaging method, and was calibrated equally to the dual plasma sample 99mTc-DTPA-GFR. Performance of the CKD-EPI creatinine–cystatin C equation was compared with the Cockcroft–Gault equation, the re-expressed 4-variable Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) equation, and the CKD-EPI creatinine equation. Results Although the bias of the CKD-EPI creatinine–cystatin C equation was greater than with the other equations (median difference, 5.7 mL/minute/1.73 m2 versus a range from 0.4–2.5 mL/minute/1.73 m2; P<0.001 for all), the precision was improved with the CKD-EPI creatinine–cystatin C equation (interquartile range for the difference, 19.5 mL/minute/1.73 m2 versus a range from 23.0–23.6 mL/minute/1.73 m2; P<0.001 for all comparisons), leading to slight improvement in accuracy (median absolute difference, 10.5 mL/minute/1.73 m2 versus 12.2 and 11.4 mL/minute/1.73 m2 for the Cockcroft–Gault equation and the re-expressed 4-variable MDRD equation, P=0.04 for both; 11.6 mL/minute/1.73 m2 for the CKD-EPI creatinine equation, P=0.11), as the optimal scores of performance (6.0 versus a range from 1.0–2.0 for the other equations). Higher GFR category and diabetes were independent factors that negatively correlated with the accuracy of the CKD-EPI creatinine–cystatin C equation (β=−0.184 and −0.113, P<0.001 and P=0.02, respectively). Conclusion Compared with the creatinine-based equations, the CKD-EPI creatinine–cystatin C equation is more suitable for the elderly Chinese population. However, the cost-effectiveness of the CKD-EPI creatinine–cystatin C equation for clinical use should be considered.


A porous ZnO nanoparticle layer coating composed of columnar ZnO nanoparticle piles and a multiple-beveled substrate was used to enhance the light extraction efficiency of GaN-based flip-chip light-emitting diodes (FC-LEDs), which were grown on high-purity SiC substrates. The SiC substrate was multiple-beveled by fabricating an 'X' pattern on the face of it, followed by a deposition of a porous ZnO nanoparticle layer on the 'X'-patterned surface. A porous ZnO nanoparticle layer was fabricated with gas phase cluster beam deposition in a glancing incidence. The incident angular-resolved light transmission of the ZnO nanostructure beyond the critical angle of total internal reflection (TIR) was greatly enhanced. The light output power of the LED was improved by nearly 60% compared to the original planar GaN-based LED on an SiC substrate (FC-SLED), which contained a significant enhancement supplemental to the 18% electroluminescence (EL) enhancement realized with the 'X'-pattern beveling. We demonstrated that a dual enhancement of light extraction efficiency was achieved by using the hierarchical surface consisting of microscale textures (the multiple-beveled surfaces) and nanoscale structures (the ZnO nanoparticle layers).


Responses of macroinvertebrate communities to human pressure are poorly known in large rivers compared with wadeable streams, in part because of variable substrate composition and the need to disentangle pressure responses from underlying natural environmental variation. To investigate the interaction between these factors, we sampled macroinvertebrates from the following: (i) submerged wood; (ii) littoral substrates < 0.8 m deep; and (iii) inorganic substrates in deep water (> 1.5 m) benthic habitats in eleven 6th‐ or 7th‐order New Zealand rivers spanning a catchment vegetation land cover gradient. Cluster analysis identified primary site groupings reflecting regional environmental characteristics and secondary groupings for moderate gradient rivers reflecting the extent of catchment native vegetation cover. Low pressure sites with high levels of native vegetation had higher habitat quality and higher percentages of several Ephemeroptera and Trichoptera taxa than sites in developed catchments, whereas developed sites were more typically dominated by Diptera, Mollusca and other Trichoptera. Partial regression analysis indicated that the combination of underlying environment and human pressure accounted for 77–89% of the variation in Ephemeroptera, Trichoptera and Plecoptera taxa richness, %Diptera and %Mollusca, with human pressure explaining more variance than underlying environment for %Mollusca. Analysis of replicate deepwater and littoral samples from moderate gradient sites at the upper and lower ends of the pressure gradient indicated that total Trichoptera and Diptera richness and %Diptera responded to land use differences in these boatable river catchments. Responses to human pressure were substrate specific with the combination of littoral and deepwater substrates providing the most consistent response and yielding the highest number of taxa. These results indicate that multiple substrate sampling is required to document the biodiversity and condition of boatable river macroinvertebrate communities and that spatial variation in the underlying natural environment needs to be accounted for when interpreting pressure–response relationships. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


We derive new bounds for the mixing parameter, /spl gamma/, within the cross-correlation constant modulus algorithm (CC-CMA) for blind source separation and equalization in non-ideal multiuser environments. Channel undermodelling and noise are considered when the complex sources are circularly symmetric. These tighter bounds are obtained by surface topography of the error performance surface of the CC-CMA algorithm, and replace earlier work which suggested that /spl gamma/>4/3. The validity of the bounds is confirmed by simulation studies.


Abstract Social insects have evolved both communal and individual traits that reduce the impacts of their numerous parasites and pathogens. Among the individual traits, innate‐immune responses have the potential to reduce both individual mortality and the spread of pathogens among colony members. An understanding of the costs and benefits of such responses can provide a more complete understanding of a primary risk of social life, horizontal disease transmission among colony members. Here we assess the impacts of individual immunity on colony‐level disease in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies following exposure to an important bacterial pathogen (Paenibacillus larvae subsp. larvae, cause of the disease American foulbrood). Colony‐level disease rates were negatively correlated with the immune responsiveness of colony members, as assessed by larval transcript levels for the gene encoding the antibacterial peptide abaecin. Concomitantly, colonies whose members mounted a stronger abaecin response showed significantly lower productivity, indicating a colony‐level cost to this immune response. The results show considerable variation across colonies in an immune trait important for survival, and point toward a significant trade‐off between this trait and colony productivity.


Data from published studies were combined and analyzed to develop best-fit equations and curves quantifying the change in sick building syndrome (SBS) symptom prevalence with ventilation rate. For each study, slopes were calculated, representing the fractional change in SBS symptom prevalence per unit change in ventilation rate per person. Values of ventilation rate, associated with each value of slope, were also calculated. Linear regression equations were fit to the resulting data points, after weighting by study size. Integration of the slope-ventilation rate equations yielded curves of relative SBS symptom prevalence versus ventilation rate. Based on these analyses, relative SBS symptom prevalence increases approximately 23percent (12percent to 32percent) as the ventilation rate drops from 10 to 5 L/s-person and relative prevalence decreases approximately 29percent (15percent to 42percent) as ventilation rate increases from 10 to 25 L/s-person.


This study investigates how primary school headteachers of Cyprus lead a particular change, namely ICT implementation. Specifically it investigates the leadership styles headteachers use when leading the particular change, focusing on the possession of attributes of transformational, transactional and passive leadership.

In addition, it seeks relationships between headteachers' leadership styles and particular variables such as headteachers' beliefs about this change, headteachers' educational background and headteachers' training in leadership and management. Moreover, it explores teachers' perceptions of their headteachers' leadership styles and how these affect teachers' beliefs about the particular change. It finally examines headteachers' perceptions about their training for headship and for leading change attempting to identify deficiencies and needs they have when leading change.

In order to investigate the research topic and address the research questions a survey, along with interviews and document collection, were conducted. Instrumentation included questionnaires distributed to headteachers and teachers, interviews conducted with them and document analysis which included minutes of staff meetings. The questionnaire sample consisted of 95 primary schools, giving 95 headteachers and 475 teachers (5 teachers from each school). Responses were received from 42 headteachers and 207 teachers. Five headteachers from the respondents who gave consent were selected and interviews were conducted with them and with three teachers from each school. Also minutes of staff meetings from the same schools were collected for analysis.

Findings reveal that headteachers of this study report using more transformational leadership styles than transactional or passive ones however possessing higher levels of some aspects of transformational leadership and lower levels of others. It was found that while headteachers are concerned with their teachers' personal, professional and intellectual needs they have difficulties in addressing these needs by providing intellectual stimulation and modeling behaviour on how to implement ICT more effectively. They also report dissatisfaction with their training for headship as well as for leading change and define a number of needs that would enable them to carry out their role more efficiently and effectively and possibly use higher levels of transformational leadership practices. These needs reveal that headteachers expect from the Ministry of Education and Culture to act more as a transformational leader. Teachers were found to agree with headteachers' responses in most of the issues, however with some difference in the mean of each variable. This could imply that teachers have higher expectations from their headteachers and need them to act even more as transformational leaders. In addition, headteachers' beliefs about change were found to affect all dimensions of transformational leadership, whereas no correlation was found between beliefs and transactional leadership. Correlation was also found to exist between all dimensions of transformational leadership, as well as contingent reward, and teachers' beliefs about change. Finally, no relationship was found between headteachers' educational background as well as knowledge in leadership and management with their leadership styles, other than that of educational background with vision and modelling behaviour.


Assessment of teaching and learning internationally and within Nigeria formed the crux of the paper. The focus is the basic and secondary education levels. The main objective is to demonstrate that assessment of teaching and learning are core to education delivery. The concept of assessment was analyzed. Cases of assessments in Africa were cited and compared. Then the analysis went in-depth into the frameworks for assessing teaching and learning internationally and within Nigeria. It revealed the insufficient assessments so far in the Nigerian education system and the commendable decision of the Minister of Education in 2012 to set up a national committee to development national blueprint for assessing learning achievements in Nigeria. Against these backgrounds, the paper made several recommendations that included the need to institutionalize national frameworks for assessing teaching and learning in Nigeria. It also advised that the national frameworks should be compatible with international teaching and learning assessment models so as to enable comparison of findings in Nigeria and internationally. It further called for the establishment of a national forum on teaching and learning assessment driven by the Federal Ministry of Education to promote exchange of best practices; collaboration among stakeholders involved in teaching and learning assessments to boost the exercises; and the implementation of the recommendations of the learning assessments committee set up by the Federal Government.


More than six million patients worldwide are being treated with an oral anticoagulant. Dosing of the anticoagulant is usually managed by a primary care physician, cardiologist, or a specialized anticoagulation clinic. With the introduction of point-of-care testing devices, it is possible for patients to monitor their coagulation time, the international normalized ratio, at home. Selected patients, when properly trained, are capable of managing their oral anticoagulation treatment from home, so-called patient self-management (PSM). PSM has been practiced for many years in Europe, where training centers and reimbursement are well established. Because the US Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently decided to cover PSM, the practice will likely become more common in the United States. This article reviews the evidence behind the efficacy, safety, and cost effectiveness of PSM.


At the beginning of the transformation process in Poland in 1990, local and regional governance structures were practically non-existent. The 'voivodship' was the regional administrative centre, which simply acted as a conduit for the policies of various government departments in Warsaw. The article reviews dominant perspectives on the transformation of regions in post-communist economies. While the evolutionary approach is a good critique of neoliberal approaches, it is argued that it assumes a consensus and congruity of local interests and underplays the role of exogenous influences in shaping emerging governance structures at both the local and national level. The framework adopted in the article is institutionalist, drawing on the importance of informal institutions in shaping local and national economies. Further, power and differentiated interests are seen as central to understanding emerging structures. Finally, the role of exogenous influences such as aid and investment are highlighted in understanding how the regions of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are fitting into the emerging international division of labour. The empirical focus of the article is the Wrocław local economy, with particular reference to changes in the municipality. Transformation is explored in relation to three agents of change. First, the 'nomenklatura' who have converted their social capital of the past into economic capital during the process of transformation. Second, the role of workers is seen as important in either contesting or cooperating with the restructuring process. Finally, the role of imported intellectual capital through foreign investment, consultants and aid is viewed as central to instituting a new set of informal institutions compatible with the market.


Statistical models of infrastructure facility deterioration are typically estimated using panel data sets of in-service facilities. For example, biannual ratings of bridges have been used to develop discrete models of component deterioration by a number of researchers. Unfortunately, these models have not accounted for the presence of heterogeneity in the panel data, which may lead to biased coefficient estimates. Furthermore, researchers have usually imposed a Markovian specification in the development of such models, implying that the probabilistic deterioration in a given period is independent of history. This assumption may be unrealistic for some types of facilities in which early distress initiation leads to accelerated deterioration in later stages of their lives. In this paper, we adopt a random-effects specification to control for heterogeneity in a probit model of bridge-deck deterioration and extend the model to investigate the presence of state dependence. The proposed model yields improved results in comparison with a simple probit model and provides evidence that is inconsistent with the Markovian assumption in bridge-deck deterioration. An implication of this study is that both heterogeneity and state dependence may need to be accounted for in developing probabilistic infrastructure deterioration models.


The Harris Matrix (HM) is the fundamental diagrammatic representation of relative time for an archaeological site and the de facto standard for the representation of a stratigraphic sequence – the backbone for archaeological stratigraphy. It displays all uniquely identified units of stratification in a sequential diagram representing their relative temporal succession. The Harris Matrix Composer is a widely used application in the archaeological community to efficiently create and analyse HMs. However, it does not support explicit dating of HM units, which is an important information for post-excavation investigations of an archaeological site. In this paper we describe an integrated approach for a combination of stratigraphic and chronologic relations. The implicit, chronologic sequence given by the HM becomes explicit as scientists are enabled to define a hierarchical time model and assign units of the HM to temporal intervals or provide exact dating. The system maintains a consistent visual representation, which means that a correct stratigraphic layout is preserved while units are aligned to intervals of the time model. Evaluation of a real-world use case showed that this combined visualisation makes the scientific analysis and interpretation more efficient and reliable. CCS Concepts •Human-centered computing → Information visualization; •Information systems → Temporal data; Spatial-temporal systems; •Applied computing → Archaeology;


Prosodic constructions used to compete for the speaking turn in conversation have been widely studied (French & Local (1983), Kurtic et al. (2013)). Usually, turn competition arises in overlapping talk between at least two speakers. Coordination between participants in their prosodic design of talk (Szczepek-Reed, 2006) and social action (Gorisch et al. 2012), as well as entrainment in more general terms (Levitan et al. 2011), is well established in the literature. Nevertheless, previous studies on turn competition and overlap do not investigate the prosodic design of turn competitive incomings in reference to the orientation of the speakers to each other. Rather, they assume that prosodic constructions are used for turn competition regardless of the co-participants' design of the turn. In this paper, we ask whether the prosodic design of turn competitive talk is co-constructed between two participants talking in overlap. More specifically, we investigate whether the prosodic design of one participant's in overlap talk is developed with respect to the interlocutor's prosodic features during the same portion of overlapped talk, and whether this prosodic matching can discriminate between the overlaps that are competitive and those that are not. 183 Our analyses are based on two-speaker overlaps drawn from a corpus of multi-party face-to face conversation between four friends recorded in British English (Kurtic et al. 2012). 3407 instances of twospeaker overlaps have been extracted from 4 hours of talk. Two independent conversation analysts performed the interactional categorisation of overlaps into competitive and non-competitive for all these two-speaker overlap instances and achieved a good agreement of alpha=0.807 (Krippendorff 2004) as measured on a subset of 808 overlaps selected for our initial analysis. For the analysis of prosodic features we focus on F0 related features: mean, slope, span and contour, all of which have previously been shown to be used by each overlapping speaker separately for turn competition (Kurtic et al. 2009; Oertel et al. 2012). We investigate the similarity in F0 mean, slope and span by correlating these features across the two participants. For F0 contour, a similarity coefficient is computed using dynamic programming method described in Gorisch et al. (2012). We consider the difference in F0 contour similarity in competitive and non-competitive overlaps as an indication of intonational matching being a turn competitive resource. We conduct these analyses for overlaps that are clearly competitive or noncompetitive as indicated by inter-annotator agreement. In addition, we qualitatively explore those cases that annotators disagree on in order to investigate whether they reveal further important interactional or prosodic features of in-overlap talk. Our preliminary results suggest that conversational participants attend and adapt to the interlocutor during overlap depending on whether they return competition or not. We explain our findings in relation to previous work on turn competition in overlap, discuss the quantitative method employed and also address the possible consequences of our results for the study of prosodic realization of other social actions in conversation.


We propose a new pre-roll delay-distortion optimization (DDO) framework that allows determination of the minimum pre-roll delay and distortion while ensuring continuous playback for on-demand content-adaptive video streaming over limited bitrate networks. The input video is first divided into temporal segments, which are assigned a relevance weight and a maximum distortion level, called relevance-distortion policy, which may be specified by the user. The system then encodes the input video according to the specified relevance-distortion policy, whereby the optimal spatial and temporal resolutions and quantization parameters, also called encoding parameters, are selected for each temporal segment. The optimal encoding parameters are computed using a novel, multi-objective optimization formulation, where a relevance weighted distortion measure and pre-roll delay are jointly minimized under maximum allowable buffer size, continuous playback, and maximum allowable distortion constraints. The performance of the system has been demonstrated for on-demand streaming of soccer videos with substantial improvement in the weighted distortion without any increase in pre-roll delay over a very low-bitrate network using AVC/H.264 encoding


Latina undergraduates pursuing an engineering degree continue to be an underrepresented group at four-year universities. Compared to their male counterparts, fewer women enter the field of engineering; however, of those Latino/as who do matriculate, they have the same likelihood of persisting as their White counterparts. Furthermore, a dearth of underrepresented students such as Latino/as and first-generation college students enter or remain in the field of engineering. The need for increased gender and racial/ethnic representation in engineering is a documented need allowing for the production of a wider range of innovative products that take into consideration different perspectives that represent the make-up of the nation as a whole. Recent studies demonstrate that Latinas who are enrolled in the field of engineering remain in engineering at higher rates than other ethnic minorities. In order to increase and retain greater ethnic and gender diversity in engineering, this research seeks to examine what motivates first-generation Latinas in engineering at an urban public university to pursue engineering and persist. Past research has investigated the experiences of first-generation students more generally, without distinguishing specific populations or their choice of study. In addition, several studies investigate why first-generation and underrepresented students drop out of college; some have found that it is due to an unclear purpose for college, adjustment issues to the college environment, and feelings of isolation. The perspectives of first-generation Latina engineering students are captured through conducting eight qualitative in-depth interviews and through analyzing their narratives. This research elucidates some of the reasons why Latinas choose engineering in college and why they continue in engineering using Achievement Goal Theory (AGT) as the theoretical framework. This theory posits that goals are cognitive accounts of what a person tries to accomplish and one's purposes or reasons for doing the task. This research demonstrates that participants displayed a higher sense of purpose, not only in mastery and performance, but also in a sense of self-reliance and intellectual self. This research serves as a point of departure towards highlighting ways in which the field of engineering can become a more desirable major for first-generation Latina women. The results of this work point to specific methods for accomplishing this goal.


Sheep were immunized by weekly oral infections with Haemonchus contortus for 9 weeks followed by anthelmintic treatment. They were challenged either 9 or 22 weeks later with PBS (sham controls) or one million exsheathed L3 surgically injected in the abomasum, and killed 24 h or 48 h later. Sheep challenged 9 weeks after immunization displayed varying degrees of tissue eosinophilia that showed a significant inverse relationship with the number of intra‐epithelial mast cells (globule leucocytes). Close association of eosinophils with tissue larvae was observed mainly in the gastric pits (24 h) or on the mucosal surface (48 h). All L3‐challenged sheep in this group had detectable globule leucocytes and tissue IL‐4 mRNA, as measured by Southern blot RT‐PCR. In contrast, sheep challenged 22 weeks after immunization had no detectable globule leucocytes or IL‐4 mRNA and although they exhibited consistent tissue eosinophilia, eosinophils were not closely associated with tissue larvae. Scanning and transmission electron microscopy of sheep sensitized and rested for 9 weeks before challenge showed that L3 surrounded by eosinophils were at varying stages of damage and structural collapse. These studies strongly indicate that eosinophils can damage and probably kill gastrointestinal nematode larvae in vivo. In addition, they also suggest that effective killing by tissue eosinophils may depend on other microenvironmental factors such as intra‐epithelial mast cells and IL‐4.


Based on time-dependent perturbation theory, the author established a fundamental equality between Bardeen's tunnelling matrix element and Heisenberg's resonance energy. Applying this equality to the hydrogen molecular ion, he derived a simple analytic expression for the potential curves in the attractive-force regime, which is found to be accurate to better than 1*10-4 au throughout the entire regime. By extending it to the many-body case, he presents a unified view of scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The fundamental equality then has a measurable consequence: for metals, the observed attractive atomic force F and the observed tunnelling conductance G should conform to the general equation F=-f kappa epsilon (GRK)12/, where kappa is the inverse decay length of the surface wavefunction near the Fermi level, epsilon is the width of the conduction band of the metal, RK is von Klitzing's constant and f is a dimensionless factor of the order of unity, which depends on tip geometry. The equation is found to be in quantitative agreement with recent results of combined experiments of AFM and STM. Conceptually, it means that the imaging process in STM is a sequence of bond forming and bond rupturing. From the computational point of view. the equality between Bardeen's tunnelling matrix element and Heisenberg's resonance energy may open a new first-principles method for calculating potential curves of molecules and the exchange coupling responsible for magnetism.


Tomato plays a critical role in meeting nutritional food requirements, generating income and creating employment for both the rural and urban populations in Kenya. However, its production is threatened by the Fusarium wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. lycopersici, root knot nematodes (Meloidogyne spp), Fusarium wilt-root-knot nematode complex and Tomato leaf miner (Tuta absoluta) among others. Yield losses of 80-100% in some instances, have been reported due to the Fusarium wilt - root knot nematode complex. Field experiments were set up in two sites (Kagio and Mwea) in Kirinyaga County in Central highlands of Kenya to evaluate the effectiveness of various Integrated Pest Management (IPM) packages for the management of fusarium wilt-root knot nematode disease complex in tomatoes. The trials were established in two seasons, the long rains (March – July 2016) and the short rains (September 2016- January 2017). The IPM packages tested were NatuGro system (a combination of soil improvers, plant biostimulants and Trichoderma harzianum T22), a fungicide (carbendazim), Nemix (Bacillus sp. based biocontrol agent) and bionematicide (Paecilomyces lilacinus T251) applied either singly or in combination. Root knot nematode (RKN) gall index, as a measure of nematode disease severity was assessed twice during the experimental period; at flowering and mid fruit stage, while severity of fusarium wilt was assessed using the vascular wilt rating scale of 0-5. Fusarium wilt incidence was evaluated biweekly from 2 weeks after transplanting by visual assessment of wilt symptoms and expressing them as a percentage of total number of plants per plot. Both total and marketable tomato yields were determined at the end of the experimental period (4 months after transplanting). Integrating NatuGro system, Carbendazim and P. lilacinus was most effective in reducing RKN disease severity and damage and improving tomato growth followed by NatuGro system applied singly. Fusarium wilt severity and incidence were low throughout the experimental period and in all the treatments in both experimental sites.


This article provides an overview of an ITS-related application developed for Urban transport systems in Russia.

In today's society, where the public relies increasingly on the transport network, Russian Federation, as the many other countries, faces tough challenges ahead. From congestion, safety to environmental impact, technology provides a rich variety of options to address existing and future concerns, and Intelligent Transport Systems are at the forefront.

Deregulation of public transport in Russian market places new challenges for national transport companies. There is an increasing need of new service models and operational schemes allowing improved transport offer and competitive advantages. Investments are necessary to optimize the use of transport resources and increase the quality of service for the customers.

Information and communications technologies play a fundamental role to achieve these objectives. This is the case with both flexible transport, where telematics allows to optimize resources and improve mobility services for the customers, and with optimization of regular, line based transport services.

Thereupon, coordinate (position data), time and the navigation support (CTNS) together with telecommunications became a main informational background for automation basic technologies for the Urban transport systems.


Elementary grade students with reading difficulties do not always receive effective intervention; this can prevent them from becoming fluent readers. Students with social, emotional and behavioral disorders (SEBD) often lack appropriate social skills, which can augment challenges associated with learning to read. Response to Intervention (RTI), using a multi-tiered system of support, adapts to a student's learning and/or behavioral difficulties by applying evidence-based interventions to address individual student needs. This study evaluated the effects of combining a Tier 1 core reading instruction program with a Tier 2 intervention, Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) for reading for students with SEBD. It was hypothesized that PALS would improve students' overall reading skills. Using a multiple baseline across dyads design, six students with both reading difficulties and SEBD participated in daily PALS peer tutoring sessions. Students' oral reading fluency was measured semiweekly using curriculum-based measures. The percentages of active listening and prompting, as broadly defined by the PALS intervention manual, also were calculated. Although the results indicate the intervention did not work as hypothesized, the findings highlight factors that should be considered when developing reading instruction programs for students with SEBD. Implications for school practice are discussed.


The Formosan pangolin, Manis pentadactyla pentadactyla Linnaeus, is an endangered species currently. To understand the termite species available as pangolin food sources, a field survey was conducted in a 120-ha habitat in Southeast Taiwan. One hundred and thirty three termite samples were collected, representing 7 species in 6 genera and 3 families. These were Kalotermitidae: Glyptotermes fuscus Oshima, G. satsumensis (Matsumura), and Neotermes koshunensis (Shiraki); Rhinotermitidae: Reticulitermes flaviceps (Oshima); Termitidae: Nasutitermes parvonasutus (Shiraki), Odontotermes formosanus (Shiraki), and Pericapritermes nitobei (Shiraki). Based on abundance, colony size, and lifetype, we concluded that O. formosanus and R. flaviceps are likely to represent the major termite species consumed by Formosan pangolins.


Thermogenic hydrocarbons entirely deriving from the thermal degradation of organic matter usually exhibit methane to ethane plus propane ratios smaller than 100. We present hydrocarbon distribution data of continental hydrothermal gases, whose methane has been independently identified to derive from the abiogenic reduction of CO2. We find that excess amounts of methane with respect to thermogenic hydrocarbon distributions are characteristic for the investigated gases. A similar pattern is observed for well discharges whose temperatures are too high to support any microbially mediated methanogenesis. These findings strongly suggest that abiogenic methane production in continental-hydrothermal systems is a more widespread process than previously assumed. The maximum contribution of such emissions to the modern atmospheric CH4 budget is estimated at ~1%.


The article builds on analyses of the Post-Soviet trend of Russian-Turkish relations in the Black Sea region while focusing on the features of transnational cooperation in the modern geo-strategic context. The Black Sea region is found to be a priority area of cooperative ties between Russia and Turkey. Revival of Russian presence in this macro-region leads to an increase of the meridional connectivity of this trans-regional space. It is concluded that during the March events of 2014 the deeper mutual unconformity took place between the spheres of Russian geo-strategic interests and the Black Sea segment of the so-called "Turkish World" (i.e., Turk Dunyasi). It is shown that the abandonment of the "South stream" gas project in favor of  the "Turkish route" has signifi cantly increased the meridional communication in the Black Sea region. This brings to importance the development of the Russian-Turkish Black Sea coast being as a special geo-economic concept. The gas transportation system is to become its cornerstone with the Istanbul megametropolis being the biggest settlement center of this transnational system. Keywords: Black Sea Region, Russia, Turkey, Transnational Cooperation, Geopolitics, Geoeconomics JEL Classifications: F41, F5, R1


Investigation of macromolecular structure and dynamics is fundamental to understanding how macromolecules carry out their functions in the cell. Significant advances have been made toward this end in silico, with a growing number of computational methods proposed yearly to study and simulate various aspects of macromolecular structure and dynamics. This review aims to provide an overview of recent advances, focusing primarily on methods proposed for exploring the structure space of macromolecules in isolation and in assemblies for the purpose of characterizing equilibrium structure and dynamics. In addition to surveying recent applications that showcase current capabilities of computational methods, this review highlights state-of-the-art algorithmic techniques proposed to overcome challenges posed in silico by the disparate spatial and time scales accessed by dynamic macromolecules. This review is not meant to be exhaustive, as such an endeavor is impossible, but rather aims to balance breadth and depth of strategies for modeling macromolecular structure and dynamics for a broad audience of novices and experts.


Several bathymetrically consistent Recent benthic foraminiferal biofacies have been recognized from the continental slope south-east of Cape Cod. Faunal assemblages are dominated by Globobulimina / Bulimina (upper slope; less than 1,000 m) and Uvigerina peregrina (lower slope-uppermost rise; water depths between 1,000 and 2,500 m). The Globobulimina / Bulimina assemblage coincides with the oxygen minimum zone; this agrees with the occurrence of Globobulimina in Mediterranean sapropels, organic-rich sediments deposited under anoxic conditions. Previous studies have noted the association of U. peregrina with bathyal water depths, deep-water temperatures of 3 to 4 ° C, and water of low oxygen content. However, correlations between abundance of U. peregrina and water depth or temperature are not the same everywhere, and no correlation with dissolved oxygen in the water column is seen on the United States continental slope and rise. The highest abundances of U. peregrina coincide with maxima of organic carbon and silt within the slope sediments. This suggests that the distribution of U. peregrina in this region may be influenced more by low oxygen in the sediments, rather than by low oxygen content of the overlying water.


Summary.  This study sought to identify attributes of treatment important to haematologists in making their decisions regarding optimal care for inhibitor patients in the United States. A conjoint analysis using a discrete choice experiment was conducted to elicit factors that are most important to haematologists. Twelve product attributes were chosen based on published literature and expert opinion: risk of human viral infections, possibility that the titre of the inhibitor may rise, reduction in the likelihood of dose‐related thromboembolic events, the number of infusions required to stop haemorrhage, infusion preparation time, infusion time, infusion volume, time required to stop bleeding, time required to alleviate pain, prophylaxis use, ability to undergo major surgery and cost of medications. Thirty haematologists completed the questionnaires via face‐to‐face interviews at a scientific meeting in April 2006. Data were analysed using a multinomial logit model to obtain the relative importance of each attribute. Responding haematologists had considerable experience in treating haemophilia patients with inhibitors (average : 13 ± 9  years). 'Time required to stop bleeding' was the most important factor affecting treatment decisions [relative importance (RI) = 16.3%]. Physicians also preferred treatments that resulted in quick pain relief [RI = 12.9%], reduced the possibility that the titre of inhibitor may rise [RI = 12.8%], required fewer number of infusions to stop a haemorrhage [RI = 12.7%] and reduced the risk of human viral infection [RI = 10.8%]. This study revealed that certain clinical outcomes attributes are the most preferred and important. These findings can assist decision makers in their assessments of optimal first‐line care.


The paper considers the relationship between anonymity and normativity on different websites. The 'accounts' concept (speech patterns which help the actor to explain personal or anyone else's unsuitable conduct in a situation under assessment) is used to analyze normativity. The author describes the modern discussion concerning anonymity on the Internet and gives an attempt to explore the anonymity continuum based on the cases of the «Podslushano» project and #yaneboyusskazat flash mob.The «Podslushano» community moderators publish anonymous stories of users on behalf of community while the #yaneboyusskazat posts are published on authors' personal web pages. At the same time, in the flash mob community normativity is formed which affects the social acceptability. So the study provides a comparison between various factors defining normativity and social acceptability.The position of the website on the anonymity continuum can set a range of social acceptability of content to be published on that website as well as the degree of conformity to the group norms of the website.


Increasingly, distributed systems are being used to provide enterprise level solutions with high scalability and fault tolerance These solutins are often built using Web servces that are composed to perform useful business functions Acceptance of these composed systems is often constrained by a number of non-functional properties of the system such as availability, scalability and performance There are a number of drstribution patterns that each exhibit different non-functional charactmstics These patterns are re-occuring distribution schemes that express how a system is to be assembled and subsequently deployed.

Traditional approaches to development of Web service compositions exhibit a number of Issues Firstly, Web service composition development is often ad-hoc and requires considerable low level coding effort for realisatlon Such systems often exhibit fixed architectures, making maintenance difficult and error prone Additionally, a number of the non-funchonal reqwements cannot be easily assessed by exammng low level code.

In this thesis we explicitly model the compositional aspects of Web service compositions usmg UML Activity diagrams Ths approach uses a modehng and transformation framework, based on Model Dnven Software Development (MDSD), going from high level models to an executable system The framework is guided by a methodological framework whose primary artifact is a distribution pattern model, chosen from the supplied catalog.

Our modelling and transfomation framework improves the development process of Web service compositions, with respect to a number of criteria, when compared to the traditional handcrafted approach Specifically, we negate the coding effort traditionally associated with Web service composition development Maintenance overheads of the solution are also slgnificantly reduced, while improved mutability 1s achieved through a flexible architecture when compared with existing tools We also improve the product output from the development process by exposing the non-functional runtime properties of Web service compositlons using distribution patterns.


Traditionally International Marketing texts look out from one culture and attempt to export or adapt ideas that work at home to a different culture. Apart from the odd vignette showing how cultural misunderstandings can affect business relations, very little material exists on the realities of marketing to different cultures both externally – beyond the borders of a country or continent – and internally – that is marketing to different cultural communities at home.
Cross-cultural Marketing explores the key roles that multiculturalism plays in different societies and its impact on marketing theory and practice and will examine the importance of the cultural context in different societies' marketing practices. Marketing has a strong cultural context and a great deal of marketing activities takes place in settings that are context-specific. Thus, cultural contexts of marketing have become inescapable issues in both the study and practice of marketing.
The text considers the various branches of marketing activity – communication, services, relationships, branding, product strategy, pricing, e-commerce, consumer behaviour – and places them in a cross-cultural context. There are eight valuable case studies dealing with issues as varied as the pharmaceutical industry and the AIDS crisis in Africa and the introduction of the Euro to international Rugby websites and cultural issues in retailing. The contributors are drawn from a variety of cultures across all continents.
Cross-cultural Marketing is a valuable resource for students following an undergraduate or postgraduate course on international marketing or international business.


This work, based on the author's MA thesis, concentrates on simultaneous move quantum games of two players. A numerical algorithm based on the method of best response functions, designed to search for pure strategy Nash equilibrium in quantum games is constructed. It is then used show that there is a critical degree of entanglement above which a pure strategy Nash Equilibrium does not exist. The behavior of the two payoffs approach the cooperative classical ones. Bayesian quantum games are defined, and it is shown that under certain conditions, there {\it is} a pure strategy Nash equilibrium in such games even when entanglement is maximal. The basic ingredients of a quantum game based on a two-players {\it three} decisions classical games are presented. This requires the definition of trits (instead of bits) and quantum trits (instead of quantum bits). It is shown that in this quantum game, there is no classical commensurability in the sense that the classical strategies are not obtained as a special case of the quantum strategies. An entanglement operator transforming a pure two qutrit state into a maximally entangled one is explicitly constructed.


Evolution is the common theme linking everything in biology from individual alleles to languages. Darwin believed that those who were mathematically inclined had a different insight and he regretted not having it. He probably would feel gratified knowing that now evolution has gained a solid mathematical foundation. The general principles of evolution can be represented by precise mathematical equations. Simplicity is invoked by making use of the minimum factors that matter.
But we cannot even imagine how many factors a single honeybee takes into account to vouch for a particular flower. How can we take this complexity into account if we aim at retrieving simple tractable explanations of biological principles? This thesis addresses this problem particularly in two scenarios: Static and dynamic fitness landscapes. A fitness landscape is a tool for visualising the the fitness of a population in a space in which each dimension is a trait affecting the fitness. The population is ever searching for fitness maxima on this landscape. This is the process of adaptation. In a static fitness landscape the fitness is fixed, determined by the trait combination. Here we present results pertaining to the time required for a population to move from one point to another on this landscape if the paths consists of broad valleys or narrow ridges. In dynamic fitness landscapes the fitness is a function of the population composition. Hence as the population moves over the landscape the landscape changes shape and the fitness maxima can be eternally moving. To analyse frequency dependence we employ evolutionary game theory. Traditional evolutionary game theory deals with two player games with two strategies. This thesis invokes higher dimensions and non-linearities by studying multiple players and strategies. Important results from the two player two strategy case are generalised to multiple players. Finally we employ this theoretical development to analyse a possible evolutionary application in genetic pest management.


This paper studies the role of human capital in gender wage disparities. Despite increasing convergence of male and female human capital attainments, substantial differences remain. We focus on the human capital dimensions specific for a certain gender as additional drivers of the pay differential. Relying on PIAAC (the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) data, we incorporate both formal educational attainment and actual cognitive skills in the definition of human capital. The results showed that the association between higher skill and formal education is particularly low for Estonian men, whereas wage returns for these skills are remarkably high in Estonia, compared to other Nordic states. It suggests that factors other than formal education play a substantial role in human capital accumulation in the case of Estonian males but not so remarkable in the case of Nordic countries.


Nonsurgical cosmetic procedures have become increasingly common and important to plastic surgery practices. Many physicians have either opened a medical spa or have thought about integrating a medical spa into their aesthetic practices. The authors (plastic surgeon and marketing professional) have shared their views on opening a medical spa and the trials they went through. This article describes the positives and negatives of opening a spa from construction through personnel.


Wings on cars help keep the vehicle grounded at high speeds and improve traction by producing downward force known as downforce. To generate more downforce, the wings generally need a high angle of attack which leads to increased drag. A car's performance is degraded with drag by the increase in air resistance, so a new method of generating downforce with better drag performance could be beneficial. The Magnus effect is the tendency of a spinning cylinder or sphere to produce force perpendicular to the flow of the air. Cylinders undergoing the Magnus effect have been found to have less drag than comparable wings and can generate lift and downforce with sufficient airflow. Thus, we saw it fit to test if a spinning cylinder was capable of generating more downforce than a typical wing via the Magnus effect. Based on the success of the Magnus effect for lift, we hypothesized similar outcomes when testing for downforce. We tested for downforce by attaching a motor-driven cylinder to a scale and used a leaf blower to simulate high wind speeds. We also tested a standard wing as a control. Overall, we found that at all speeds, the cylinder was significantly more effective at producing downforce with nearly 50% more force produced at the highest velocity while outperforming the wing by larger margins at lower speeds. Our experiments demonstrated that cylinders could be a potential replacement for the wing when downforce is a priority.


We present attributes of snow occurrence and dissipation rates (melt and sublimation) for the Lesotho Highlands, based on remotely-sensed MODIS images from 2003–2016. Multi-temporal imagery is used, with SNOMAP and NDSI algorithms applied to MODIS Rapid Response images. The spatial extent of snow loss was determined by daily repeat measurements of snow coverage, which was calculated from each filtered and trimmed MODIS SNOMAP image using the ArcGIS Spatial Analyst tool. Results indicate an average of 11.5 snowfalls per annum for the years 2003–2016; with snow longevity averaging ca. 10 days following individual snowfalls in mid-winter. Snow cover on the highest south-facing slopes persists longest during the months of June to August, in particular along the southern Drakensberg where it averages ca. 58 days during these 3 months. Mean daily melt increases by 1.6% per 1°C rise during the first 5 days post-snowfall, and by 3.3% per 1°C rise for 6 to 10 days post-snowfall. However, snowmelt rates are spatially highly variable given other factors such as wind deflation and wind-induced sublimation. The observed snow trends have important implications for biosystem functioning, regional climate and hydrology, earth surface processes, and rural livelihoods in the Lesotho Highlands.


In recent years, mobile learning(m-learning) which was included by V-learning(virtualized learning) advocated by College of Information Science and Technology in Beijing Normal University, has been realized as a high-efficiency way of learning. Not only in distance learning, but also in face to face and blended learning, m-learning can provide supports. However, with the increasing number of users, services, education contents and resources, ways of deploying m-learning are difficult to deal with some problems. This paper particularly focuses on three aspects of the troubles of m-learning, limited resources of the mobile devices, storage capacity of massive didactical materials and expensive investment of hardware and software. Then in order to solve them, cloud computing is to be introduced in. Cloud computing, whose distinct features are very appropriate for us to overcome the problems in m-learning, provides reliable, customized and QoS guaranteed dynamic computing environments for end-users. And then other advantages will be analyzed when the cloud technologies are used in m-learning. So the conclusion is cloud computing will be of great significance to the improvement of m-learning.


The main objective of the current study was the extraction, purification, and biochemical characterization of a protein protease inhibitor from Conyza dioscoridis. Antimicrobial potential and cytotoxic effects were also examined. The protease inhibitor was extracted in 0.1 M phosphate buffer (pH 6–7). Then, the protease inhibitor, named PDInhibitor, was purified using ammonium sulfate precipitation followed by filtration through a Sephadex G-50 column and had an apparent molecular weight of 25 kDa. The N-terminal sequence of PDInhibitor showed a high level of identity with those of the Kunitz family. PDInhibitor was found to be active at pH values ranging from 5.0 to 11.0, with maximal activity at pH 9.0. It was also fully active at 50 °C and maintained 90% of its stability at over 55 °C. The thermostability of the PDInhibitor was clearly enhanced by CaCl2 and sorbitol, whereas the presence of Ca2+ and Zn2+ ions, Sodium taurodeoxycholate (NaTDC), Sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), Dithiothreitol (DTT), and β-ME dramatically improved the inhibitory activity. A remarkable affinity of the protease inhibitor with available important therapeutic proteases (elastase and trypsin) was observed. PDInhibitor also acted as a potent inhibitor of commercial proteases from Aspergillus oryzae and of Proteinase K. The inhibitor displayed potent antimicrobial activity against gram+ and gram- bacteria and against fungal strains. Interestingly, PDInhibitor affected several human cancer cell lines, namely HCT-116, MDA-MB-231, and Lovo. Thus, it can be considered a potentially powerful therapeutic agent.


Background: Several environmental and psychosocial risk factors are known for adolescent smoking as the single cause of preventable diseases and premature death. This cross-sectional study aimed to determine the prevalence of cigarette smoking, socio-demographic factors associated with cigarette smoking (age, education level, parents' job, and family's socioeconomic statues), and the role of family and friends in cigarette smoking by high school students.Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study which was conducted in Shiraz, Iran, 900 high school boy students (grades 9-11) were selected through multistage random cluster sampling. They responded a researcher designed anonymous questionnaire about smoking experiences of themselves- and their friends and family members. Chi-square and Mann-Whitney U test and Binary logistic regression analysis were used to analysis of the data, using the SPSS version 17.0.Results: The mean age of the participants was 16.11 (1.16) years and 19.7% of the students were ever smokers. Students' higher educational grade (P=0.001), fathers' lower education level (P=0.03), live with one parent or people other than parents (P=0.024), father's, siblings', and friends' smoking, and family members' cigarette smoking at home (P<0.001), were significantly related to the students' smoking experience. Indeed, having smoker siblings was the strongest predictor of smoking among the students.Conclusion: Cigarette smoking is a public health concern in all families from different socio-economic status. Special attention to orphans and children of divorce, setting rules about cigarette smoking in families, monitoring and being aware of offspring's and their friends' behavior can be recommended.


The strategy used in negotiation depends very much by the personality, character and temperament of the negotiator. The style of each person to negotiate prints it self in approach method of the subject under review and in the manner of communication with other participants to the negotiation. Some participants to the negotiation are very competitive and dominant, sometimes reaching up to an aggressive behavior, they perceiving any relationship as a competition witch must win at any cost. Others, however, may be more disposed to brake down in order to maintain a friendly relationship. In this sense we can conclude that there are participants to the negotiation witch ranging from one extreme to another, they require different strategies and approaches of "subject" of the business negotiation.


Objective: To evaluate the diet quality of free-living men, women, and children choosing peanuts and peanut products. Design: Using data reported in the Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals and Diet and Health Knowledge Survey (CSFII/DHKS) from 1994–1996, food codes were used to sort respondents by use or nonuse of peanuts. Subjects: A nationally representative sample of 4,751 men, 4,572 women, and 4,939 children (boys and girls, 2–19 yrs) who completed 2-day intake records. Measures of Outcome: The two-sample t test was used to analyze differences between peanut users and nonusers for energy, nutrient intakes, Health Eating Index (HEI) scores, and body mass index (BMI). Results: Peanut users (24% of CSFII/DHKS) had higher intakes (p < 0.001) of protein, total fat, polyunsaturated fat (PUFA), monounsaturated fat, (MUFA) (p < 0.01), fiber, vitamin A, vitamin E, folate, calcium, magnesium, zinc, and iron. Percent of energy from saturated fat was not significantly different for men, women or girls and was slightly lower (p < 0.01) for boys. Dietary cholesterol of peanut users was lower for all population groups; this decrease was significant for both men (p < 0.01) and children (p < 0.001). The HEI was calculated as a measure of overall nutrient profile of the diets and was significantly greater for peanut users (men 61.4, women, 65.1, children 66.8) compared to nonusers (men 59.9, women 64.1, children 64.7) for men (p = 0.0074) and children (p < 0.001). Energy intake was significantly higher in all population groups of peanut users (p < 0.001; boys: p < 0.01); however mean BMI for peanut users was lower for all gender/age categories (women: p < 0.05; children: p < 0.001). Conclusions: These results demonstrate improved diet quality of peanut users, indicated by the higher intake of the micronutrients vitamin A, vitamin E, folate, calcium, magnesium, zinc, and iron and dietary fiber, and by the lower intake of saturated fat and cholesterol. Despite a higher energy intake over a two-day period, peanut consumption was not associated with a higher BMI.


The purpose of this study was to determine the learning levels, mistakes, and misconceptions of the 8th grade students on the subject of "angles in geometry" as well as the possible reasons for these situations. Research sample consisted of 30 students attending the 8th grade of a middle school located in the central district of a northern province of Turkey during the 2012 – 2013 academic year. 4 open-ended questions were used in this study. Firstly, the answers given were divided into two: correct and incorrect. Then, incorrect answers were split into sub-categories and tabulated. According to the results of the study, (1) students paid attention to the physical appearances of geometric figures alone without taking into consideration their geometric properties; (2) although they detected some geometric properties of figures, they failed to associate these properties with other knowledge required for solution; (3) they generalized a property that was valid for only a specific condition over different situations; (4) and they did not fully comprehend the concept of parallelism on the subject of angles.


Productivity of workers is greatly affected by their comfort in the workplace. Research has shown that thermal comfort is one of the most influential parameters on worker productivity, and that the running costs of a Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system could be up to ten times lower compared to productivity losses that would be incurred in a free-runing building. With the increased availability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is now possible to continuously monitor multi ple variables that influence a user's thermal comfort and to act pre -emptively to prevent discomfort situations. Smart buildings make use of technology that enable them to become more efficient, reduce costs and emissions and become more transparent in terms of operation. To this end, this work has the following two-fold aim; first, to develop a machine learning model to predict setpoint temperatures in an HVAC system towards the vision of making this system autonomous; second, to use exploratory data analysis techniques to evaluate the current operation and energy performance of an HVAC system in an office block by analyzing and comparing patterns and trends between building management system (BMS) parameters and thermal comfort standards. Results demonstrate that our machine learning model was able to predict the user's setpoint temperature with 94.14% accuracy using only environmental parameters, with this accuracy increasing to 97.68% when time-related features were added to the model. Subsequently, our exploratory data analysis revealed that over 50% of the room temperature readings in our sensor-acquired raw dataset lied outside the comfort zone for all seasons, while the setpoint deviation was equal to zero for only 4.31% of the cases, with an average value of 3.38°C (6.08°F).


Imaging multichannel seismic data for amplitude inversion is a challenging task. The process seeks an inverse for a matrix of very high order that relates the data to a reflectivity model. Due to the irregular coverage of 3D surveys, the matrix is ill-conditioned and its coefficients are badly scaled. In this dissertation, I present a new approach for imaging irregularly sampled 3D data. The strategy is to reduce the size of the full matrix by reducing the size of 3D prestack data before imaging, and to balance the coefficients of the matrix by regularizing the coverage of 3D surveys. I tackle the case of Kirchhoff imaging operators because of their I/O flexibility and computational efficiency. However, after regularization, full-wave extrapolation techniques may become attractive and practical to implement on the regularly sampled prestack volume. For adequately sampled 3D data with varying surface coverage, I use an asymptotic approximate inverse to obtain a good image. I apply a new partial prestack operator named azimuth moveout (AMO) to reduce the size of the prestack data and regularize its coverage by partial stacking. The effects of irregular coverage and varying illumination at depth are reduced by applying a diagonal transformation to the Kirchhoff operator. Problems arise in 3D reflection seismology where fine sampling is not possible and the sparse geometry of 3D surveys results in spatial aliasing. I develop a new dealaising technique which I refer to as inversion to common offset (ICO). Posing partial stacking as an optimization process, the inversion improves the stack when the data are spatially aliased. I present two formulations for ICO, namely data-space and model-space inversion and design an efficient vii implementation of the algorithm in the Log-stretch Fourier domain. To accelerate the convergence of the iterative solution I present a new technique for preconditiong the inversion based on row and column scaling. Results from field marine and land surveys are presented to demonstrate the application of AMO and ICO for regularizing the coverage of 3D surveys and reducing the costs of 3D prestack imaging. The images obtained by prestack migration after regularization are superior to those obtained by migrating the irregularly sampled data. Furthermore, ICO provides a promising approach for reducing the costs of 3D acquisition.


The relevance of the study of human resources management in crisis conditions is determined, firstly, during social change, destroyed the existing usual ways of living, changing values and priorities of society, leading to the disappearance of some and the emergence of other forms of activity. This puts a person a new life task, "creativity" as a manifestation of activity of subject of activity, when the subject and object of the interaction may be reversed, as the operand and the operator. It should be stressed that in modern conditions of dynamic change is changing the paradigm, the subject and methods of management. And, as shows the analysis of the literature, which is especially valuable for economic psychology, psychology of business and management - namely inadequate representation of managers about changes in the economic, political, juridical (legal) entities and the management are the major obstacle to business development and the formulation of effective management of the organization. The problem of the inadequacy of the views of managers about the realities on the basis of which develops business or management is particularly acute for the Russian economy.


Reducing institutional rigidities in product and labour markets is key to lowering unemployment. The impact of such labour and product market reforms, however, depends crucially on the country-specific regulatory framework. In this paper, we estimate the country-specific impact of changes in six categories of institutional regulation conditional on the country-specific regulatory environment for a dynamic panel of 26 OECD countries. We overcome existing problems of modelling a large set of institutional interdependencies by applying a model selection approach which is innovative within this literature. In doing so, we provide evidence for the existence of higher-order institutional interdependencies. We further document that especially for changes in employment protection and the unemployment benefit system the impact on unemployment is mixed across countries, thus questioning the relevance of best-practice policies.


How essential is it to understand the local context in a globalized world? Globalization is a rapid traversing of ideas, attitudes and values across national borders that lead to an interconnectedness and interaction between peoples of diverse cultures and ways of life.

What if the local architectural mosaic depends on strengthening the capacity to invite people with different backgrounds and ideas to establish a connection to their heritage, whilst at the same time complying with globalized architecture? Is there a way to combine the freedom and flexibility of local cultures with the restrictive and regulatory influence of a globalized hierarchy?

This thesis explores the architecture that emerges out of the hybridization of multiple forces to be both locally unique and globally adaptable.


Classification as a cultural artifact serves an epistemological role as disseminator of the culture it embodies. A theory of classification interaction has been proposed that would combine empirical iterations of bibliographic characteristics as factors interacting with traditional conceptual elements in classifications. Nine million UDC numbers extracted from the OCLC WorldCat are sampled and deconstructed, to look for correlations with content-designated components of the associated bibliographic records. Chi-squared is used to locate statistically-significant correlations among nominal-level variables. Results demonstrate a series of footprints of predictable associations. A complex network of associations is revealed and visualized. The results are promising and point to a series of more complex investigations.


Aero-engine compressor blade and disk assemblies are subjected to radially outward centrifugal force due to blade rotation and the bending of the blade due to gas pressure. Static analysis is done initially to find the critical crack orientation at the root of the blade. With simulated initial cracks, the cracks are allowed to grow in low cycle fatigue (LCF) and isochromatics are captured at selected intervals. Using digital photoelasticity, isochromatic images are used along with an over-deterministic least-squares approach to find the fracture parameters. As the stress fields are very complex, a multiparameter solution with a higher number of parameters was needed to model the stress field. Crack growth angles are evaluated using maximum tangential stress (MTS), strain energy density (SED), and generalized MTS (GMTS) criteria. It is observed that the GMTS criterion predicted closer results to that of experimental values, which implied the significance of T-stress in predicting the crack growth angle.


In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), network partitioning is likely to happen due to sparse and mobile nodes with limited transmission ranges. The network partitioning leads to the unavailability of fully connected paths from sources to destinations. To deal with this problem, many routing schemes are proposed such as Epidemic routing and Spray and Wait routing. These schemes obtain high delivery rate but incur high overhead. In this paper, we propose a Different Neighbor-History Spray and Wait (DNH-SaW) routing scheme. DNH-SaW calculates the number of data copies to forward based on the neighbor-history of each receiver. Our simulation result shows that DNH-SaW can reduce overhead up to 27% and increases delivery utility up to 21.68% while achieving comparable delivery probability with previous works.


Objectives To examine whether shaking the head during the DH exam (HSDH) may improve diagnosis of posterior semicircular canal benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (pBPPV) in patients with a negative Dix-Hallpike (DH) examination. Study Design A prospective cohort clinical study on consecutive patients with dizziness, who were seen by 2 experienced neurotologists. Patients underwent a complete neurotology examination, including positioning testing with roll test and DH. Patients with a negative DH underwent a HSDH. Patients with a positive DH (Group 1) or only with a positive HSDH (Group 2) underwent a particle reposition maneuver (PRM), which was a modification of the Epley maneuver. Variables including sex, age, the duration of symptoms until diagnosis, and the number of visits required until cure were examined in each group. Setting A tertiary dizziness clinic and in 2 private clinics. Subjects and Methods All patients diagnosed with pBPPV. Main Outcome Measures DH test after head shaking and comparison of variables between the 2 study groups. Results Sixty nine patients were diagnosed with pBPPV (Group 1). Twelve additional patients were negative on DH but were found positive on HSDH (Group 2), improving the diagnostic yield by 14.8%. There was no statistical relation between the 2 groups and the variables examined; however, there was a trend for longer duration of symptoms (44.3 versus 64 d) and less visits until cure (1.5 versus 1.7 visits) in Group 2. Conclusion Patients with a negative DH should undergo a HSDH. Patients only diagnosed as pBPPV by a positive HSDH may represent a subgroup with a milder form of disease.


Four fishers (Martes pennanti) from an insular population in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, USA died as a consequence of an infection with canine distemper virus (CDV) in 2009. Three fishers were found in close temporal and spatial relationship; the fourth fisher died 4 mo later at a 70 km distance from the initial group. Gross lesions were restricted to hyperkeratosis of periocular skin and ulcera-tion of footpads. All animals had necrotizing bronchitis and bronchiolitis with syncytia and intracytoplasmic inclusion bodies. Inclusion bodies were abundant in the epithelia of urinary bladder and epididymis but were infrequent in the renal pelvis and the female genital epithelia. No histopathologic or immu-nohistochemical evidence for virus spread to the central nervous system was found. One fisher had encephalitis caused by Sarcocystis neurona and another had severe head trauma as a consequence of predation. The H gene nucleo-tide sequence of the virus isolates from the first three fishers was identical and was 99.6% identical to the isolate from the fourth fisher. Phylogenetically, the isolates clustered with other North American isolates separate from classical European wildlife lineage strains. These data suggest that the European wildlife lineage might consist of two separate subgroups that are genetically distinct and endemic in different geographic regions. The source of infection as well as pertinent transmission routes remained unclear. This is the first report of CDV in fishers and underscores the significance of CDV as a pathogen of management concern.


The computer ab initio simulation and analytical theory that revealed unexpected nonergodic properties in a classical Coulomb plasma are reviewed. The results of a many-charged-particle system simulation predict the possible existence of a real metastable plasma, supercooled with respect to its degree of ionisation. The existence of such a plasma state is a consequence of the entropy conservation in isolated Hamiltonian systems free from any stochastic action from outside. The occurrence of a metastable supercooled plasma similar to a supercooled vapour or superheated liquid depends on two conditions. Firstly, all the charged particles should behave exactly according to the laws of classical mechanics (hence, most negatively-charged particles should preferably be heavy ions). Secondly, the plasma ionisation degree should be sufficiently high (α > 10−3) . It is shown from thermodynamic considerations that a mixture of a supercooled plasma with an ideal gas might form a plasmoid of the ball lightning type.


A 4-year-old Hispanic boy was referred to our facility because of elevated levels of alanine trans- aminase (ALT) and aspartate transaminase (AST), which were detected during an evaluation of transient abdominal pain while the boy was in Puerto Rico. He was otherwise in perfect health; a review of systems was negative. His past medical history and birth history were noncontributory. Immunizations, including hepatitis B, were up-to-date. The family history was significant for tuberculosis and rheumatoid arthritis.


Many reported series of patients treated with topical Timolol for chronic open angle glaucoma have been changed from other medication after a 'wash-out' period. This four year study reports the ocular hypotensive effect of Timolol in 82 new patients with chronic open angle glaucoma followed for up to 4.5 years. The effects on intraocular pressure, visual acuity, visual field, pupil size, pulse rate, blood pressure and Schirmer's test were recorded and correlated. Corneal sensitivity was also followed in some patients, matched by a series of controls, using the method of Cochet and Bonnet. The results are discussed, and only slight reduction in blood pressure and pulse rate was found, and there was no significant effect on the pupil diameter or Schirmer's test. There was no significant effect on corneal sensitivity. There was only slight tachyphylaxis. Of the 82 patients, 20 patients required extra medical or surgical treatment. 16 patients dropped out through death or failure to attend, and of the remaining 66 patients, 69.7 per cent were controlled by Timolol alone.


: Paramyxoviruses have been described in the osteoclasts in Paget's disease and it has been suggested that the disease was caused by this virus. There is considerable similarity of the histological features of active otosclerosis and Paget's disease and the probable presence of viral antigens in the otosclerotic footplate of the stapes of 15 patients has been investigated by means of immunohistochemical methods. The active otosclerotic lesions of all 15 patients studied displayed a high concentration of antibodies of the IgG-class which was less pronounced in the cytoplasm of the cells of the adjacent enchondral layer. Using polyclonal antibodies against measles and rubella viruses, both antigens could be shown expressed by the chondrocytes of the enchondral layer and by occasional osteocytes and osteoclasts of the otosclerotic lesion. IgG antibodies or viral antigens were absent in the normal bone of the stapes specimens. The interpretation and significance of these findings is discussed, with particular reference to the pathogenesis of otosclerosis.


A comparison of reticle-produced amplitude- and frequency-modulated waves has been made. By calculating the power content of each component of the frequency spectrum of a modulated wave, the optimum values for the parameters of bandwidth and modulation index have been determined. It is shown that an FM system with a modulation index of 1.8 and a bandwidth encompassing only the first sideband pair exhibits the highest effective signal-to-noise ratio. Using these values of bandwidth and modulation index, the FM system exhibits a slight effective signal-to-noise superiority when compared with an AM system operating under similar conditions. The superiority of effective signal-to-noise ratio is lost if either the bandwidth or modulation index departs markedly from its optimum value. The modulation efficiency for various reticle-produced modulated waves has also been calculated.


This article presents preliminary findings from a study designed to evaluate, develop and disseminate a cards resource developed to support dialogue and learning about EDI. Experience of creating cards to explore disciplinary thinking at the Universities of Hertfordshire (UH) and East Anglia (UEA) (Jarvis and Clark, 2020) was instrumental in the design. The resource is based on the concept of using 'serious play', a 'special kind of intense learning experience' (Rieber et al., 1998, p.30, 29, original emphasis) to support reflective, inclusive and transformational learning (Peabody and Noyes, 2017).
Staff and students at UH and UEA who facilitate and attend sessions at which the cards are used are contributing to the research. Before sessions, facilitators are briefed about the guidance, the cards, and possible exercises for using them. At the end of sessions, facilitators and participants are invited to take part in a reflection activity. Facilitators are asked about the context, the activity, observations of participant response to the cards, their learning, the facilitator's learning, and plans for future EDI activities. Participants are questioned about the role of the cards in their learning and thinking, what was learnt, and how this will impact their interaction with others.
Preliminary findings indicate how participants are thinking about their working contexts, in particular how they initiate conversations around their personal lives, and share stories relating to equality, diversity and inclusivity, in order to make abstract terms more vivid.
This study responds to a need to develop research-informed resources to use to encourage respectful, inclusive dialogue to address EDI topics with staff and students in higher education. Drawing on the preliminary findings shared here, new terms are being added to the current card set together with a blank card to allow users to generate their own cards; and a new resource comprising EDI stories is being considered.


A solution for the transient response of a reverse biased semiconductor diode to a step function (voltage) may be found by considering the junction essentially a voltage variable capacitance. The assumptions from which the analysis is made are given and found to be applicable in a wide variety of cases. Specific solutions are obtained for abrupt and linearly graded junctions, and experimental evidence is presented which is in good agreement with the derived equations.


PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES
To investigate older Mexican Americans' perceptions of cancer care delivery, specifically regarding perceived discrimination.

RESEARCH APPROACH
Qualitative.

SETTING
Senior centers and participants' homes.

PARTICIPANTS
5 older Mexican American cancer survivors.

METHODOLOGIC APPROACH
The sample included five Spanish-speaking Mexican Americans with low incomes who were previously diagnosed with cancer. Ages ranged from 68-86 years (X = 76.4). Participants were recruited through several community-based agencies and resources. Interviews were conducted and recorded on audiotape in participants' homes or at a senior center. A demographic questionnaire and the Mini Mental State Exam were administered in English or Spanish.

MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES
Perceptions of healthcare delivery.

FINDINGS
Three themes emerged from the interview data: (a) emotional responses to cancer diagnosis, (b) relationship with healthcare providers, and (c) use of spiritual resources in coping with cancer. Participants denied experiencing any discrimination in health care related to race, ethnicity, income, or language spoken. Perceptions of good and poor-quality health care are described.

CONCLUSIONS
Participants were satisfied with the cancer care they received, with a few exceptions. The role of age and education level in perceived discrimination needs further exploration.

INTERPRETATION
Replication of this study with larger, culturally diverse samples is needed to increase understanding of the role of perceived discrimination in cancer care and to develop culturally responsive, evidence-based healthcare interventions for patients and families coping with cancer.


It was recently shown that a teat that is not used in the first lactation will have a reduced development and milk yield in the second lactation. In the current study, the impact of imposing a suckling period of 2, 7, or 21 d during the first lactation on piglet performance, milk composition, endocrine status, and mammary gene expression of sows in their second lactation was studied. Pregnant Yorkshire gilts were divided into 3 groups according to lactation length: 1) 2-d lactation (2D; = 20), 2) 7-d lactation (7D; = 20), and 3) 21-d lactation (21D; = 21). After weaning, sows were bred and kept for a second parity. In both lactations, litters were standardized to 12 piglets with 12 functional teats and surplus teats were sealed. In the second lactation, piglets were weighed on d 2, 7, 14, 21 (weaning), 31, and 56 postpartum, and sow feed intake was recorded. On d 110 of gestation and on d 21 of lactation, mammary biopsies were performed on 10 sows per treatment to obtain parenchymal tissue samples for determination of mRNA abundance for , , , , , and genes. Milk samples and jugular blood samples were also obtained from sows on d 21 of lactation. Standard composition analyses (DM, fat, protein, and lactose) were done in milk. Concentrations of prolactin, IGF-1, glucose, and urea were measured in blood. There was a tendency for 21D sows to consume more feed than 2D or 7D sows during the first week of lactation ( < 0.10). There was no treatment effect on BW of piglets at any time until d 56 ( > 0.10). Concentrations of prolactin, IGF-1, urea, and glucose in sows on d 21 of lactation were not affected by treatment ( > 0.10). Dry matter, fat, protein, and lactose contents in milk were not altered by treatment ( > 0.10). On d 110 of gestation, gene expression was greater ( = 0.05) in 21D sows than in 7D sows. On d 21 of lactation, gene expression of was greater ( = 0.05) and that of tended to be lower ( < 0.10) in 7D sows than in 2D sows. The mRNA abundance of also tended to be lower ( < 0.10) in 2D sows than in 7D sows. Results indicate that increasing the duration of lactation from 2 d to 7 d or to 21 d in first-parity sows did not improve growth rate of their piglets in the subsequent lactation. This suggests that suckling of a teat for 2 d during the first lactation is sufficient to ensure optimal mammary development.


Safety in the design and operation of coal systems in cement plants is a matter of following known design requirements and practices and following good operational and maintenance procedures. Coal is a fuel, and under the right conditions, can explode and burn. Good alarms and protective devices, coupled with good cleanup and safe maintenance practices, can overcome a potentially hazardous operation.


We report the complex refractive index of methylammonium lead iodide (CH3NH3PbI3) perovskite thin films obtained by means of variable angle spectroscopic ellipsometry and transmittance/reflectance spectrophotometry in the wavelength range of 190 nm to 2500 nm. The film thickness and roughness layer thickness are determined by minimizing a global unbiased estimator in the region where the spectrophotometry and ellipsometry spectra overlap. We then determine the optical bandgap and Urbach energy from the absorption coefficient, by means of a fundamental absorption model based on band fluctuations in direct semiconductors. This model merges both the Urbach tail and the absorption edge regions in a single equation. In this way, we increase the fitting region and extend the conventional ( α ℏ ω ) 2-plot method to obtain accurate bandgap values.