Packet classification is a fundamental problem in computer networking. This problem exposes a hard tradeoff between the computation and state complexity, which makes it particularly challenging. To navigate this tradeoff, existing solutions rely on complex hand-tuned heuristics, which are brittle and hard to optimize. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach to solve the packet classification problem. There are several characteristics that make this problem a good fit for Deep RL. First, many existing solutions iteratively build a decision tree by splitting nodes in the tree. Second, the effects of these actions (e.g., splitting nodes) can only be evaluated once the entire tree is built. These two characteristics are naturally captured by the ability of RL to take actions that have sparse and delayed rewards. Third, it is computationally efficient to generate data traces and evaluate decision trees, which alleviate the notoriously high sample complexity problem of Deep RL algorithms. Our solution, NeuroCuts, uses succinct representations to encode state and action space, and efficiently explore candidate decision trees to optimize for a global objective. It produces compact decision trees optimized for a specific set of rules and a given performance metric, such as classification time, memory footprint, or a combination of the two. Evaluation on Class-Bench shows that NeuroCuts outperforms existing hand-crafted algorithms in classification time by 18% at the median, and reduces both classification time and memory footprint by up to 3X.


Lux in Tenebris is a collection of eighteen original interdisciplinary essays that address aspects of the verbal and visual symbolism in the works of significant figures in the history of Western Esotericism, covering such themes as alchemy, magic, kabbalah, angels, occult philosophy, Platonism, Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy. Part I: Middle Ages & Early Modernity ranges from Gikatilla, Ficino, Camillo, Agrippa, Weigel, Bohme, Yvon, and Swedenborg, to celestial divination in Russia. Part II: Modernity & Postmodernity moves from occultist thinkers Schwaller de Lubicz and Evola to esotericism in literature, art, and cinema, in the works of Colquhoun, Degouve de Nuncques, Bruskin, Doitschinoff, and Perez-Reverte, with an essay on esoteric theories of colour.


We introduce LiPopt, a polynomial optimization framework for computing increasingly tighter upper bounds on the Lipschitz constant of neural networks. The underlying optimization problems boil down to either linear (LP) or semidefinite (SDP) programming. We show how to use the sparse connectivity of a network, to significantly reduce the complexity of computation. This is specially useful for convolutional as well as pruned neural networks. We conduct experiments on networks with random weights as well as networks trained on MNIST, showing that in the particular case of the $\ell_\infty$-Lipschitz constant, our approach yields superior estimates, compared to baselines available in the literature.


Affinity-purified class I proteins in detergent solution can be directly immobilized on plastic by a simple dilution procedure. The immobilized Ag retains its native structure and will trigger specific, TCR-mediated degranulation of cloned CTL. Stimulation of the response is dependent on the surface density of Ag, and displays a critical threshold density below which response does not occur. Individual clones differ with respect to the threshold density required for activation, but these differences are not large. With one exception, the cloned lines examined respond to Ag densities comparable to that found on normal allogeneic cells, and critical threshold densities varied over about a fourfold range. Coimmobilization of alloantigen and nonantigenic class I protein of a different specificity has the effect of decreasing the threshold density of alloantigen required for response to occur. This augmentation is specific for class I, coimmobilized class II protein does not affect responses, and is very likely mediated by Lyt-2 (CD8) interaction with nonpolymorphic determinants on the class I protein. Thus, class I alloantigen is the necessary and sufficient ligand for activation of most allogeneic CTL clones, and both TCR and Lyt-2 interactions contribute to the response. The results described here for effector CTL are compared with those previously found in examining the ligand requirements for activation of precursor CTL.


Coaching education is previously suggested to have a positive influence on coaching efficacy among coaches in sport. However, little is known about whether differences in learning approaches in formal coaching education lead to various outcomes in coaching efficacy. With this as a background, the current study explores whether coaching efficacy varies between coaches with different types of formal educational background. Special focus is put on the experience-based and practice-oriented «Topptrener» education programs. A sample of 614 Norwegian coaches from different sports such as cross-country skiing, cycling, athletics, soccer, and handball participated in the investigation. The coaches were split into three groups based on their formal educational background: (1) coaches with «conventional sport-related higher formal education», (2) coaches with «no sport-related higher formal education», and (3) coaches with «experiential and practice-oriented formal education through the 'Topptrener'-programs». When possible, gender differences were accounted for, and years of education and coaching experience were used as covariates; the «Topptrener coaches» showed significantly higher coaching efficacy than coaches in the two other groups (p < .05). These findings are discussed with regard to applied explanations and implications, and possible future research is suggested.


The Ministry of Education (MOE) has prepared through the Kenya Institute Education (KIE) the syllabus for Christian Education subject. The syllabus is comprehensive and has been approved, but the general performance of Christian education remains poor. This study adopted a descriptive approach. The study was carried out in Dagoretti Division in Nairobi district which is located in Nairobi Province. In this study, the units of observation is the performance of the students in Christian Education, subject content mastery, teaching strategies, dedication and commitment, teaching competencies. The unit of analysis is effect of subject content mastery, teaching. A population is the whole group that the research focuses on (Coopers and Schindler 2003). Sampling refers to the process of obtaining information about an entire population by examining only a part of it. Primary data refers to data collected for the first time while secondary data refers to data which has already been collected and analyzed by someone else. The primary data was collected by use of a questionnaire which was be used to record respondents responses. Data collection utilized questionnaires for teachers who carry out administrative activities in the respective departments and their students as well. The process of data analysis involve several stages namely; data clean up and explanation. The study found that the performance of the students in CRE was generally below average. The study finding agrees with KNEC Report Book, (2006) which indicated that Christian Education subject is poorly performed in national examinations. However, they indicated that the curriculum and the materials used in teaching Christian education to the students lacked relevant practical application in the daily life. The study indicated that the performance of students in Christian Education was mainly below average stating that the students would score as low as a mean grade of 4/12. Teachers also motivated their students to work hard. The teachers were found to be able to teach and answer comprehensively the questions asked by their students. They dealt with complex topics bit by bit assessing students understanding and re-administered where necessary, gave student a chance to assist one another and make presentations once they had discussed among themselves. This is indicated by the fact that mainly CRE Syllabus was completed in the next class denying the student adequate time to do revision. The study also


Every text has at least one topic and at least one genre. Evidence for a text's topic and genre comes, in part, from its lexical and syntactic features—features used in both Automatic Topic Classification and Automatic Genre Classification (AGC). Because an ideal AGC system should be stable in the face of changes in topic distribution, we assess five previously published AGC methods with respect to both performance on the same topic–genre distribution on which they were trained and stability of that performance across changes in topic–genre distribution. Our experiments lead us to conclude that (1) stability in the face of changing topical distributions should be added to the evaluation critera for new approaches to AGC, and (2) part-of-speech features should be considered individually when developing a high-performing, stable AGC system for a particular, possibly changing corpus


This American English edition of English Grammar in Use can be used both as a classroom text and as a grammar reference for students. Each unit deals with a particular grammar point (or points), providing clear explanations and examples on the left-hand page, with exercises to check understanding on the facing right-hand page. The book covers many of the problems intermediate students of American English encounter, including tense usage, modals, conditionals, the subjunctive and prepositions. A separate answer key is available for self-study, individual work in the language laboratory and as an easy reference for teachers.


Aluminium (Al)-promoted Fe3O4 magnetic catalysts were prepared by in situ solvothermal synthesis in ethylene glycol and characterized by XRD, SEM, XPS, BET and VSM techniques. The Al promoter significantly enhanced the catalytic activity of Fe3O4 microspheres in the selective oxidation of benzyl alcohol to benzaldehyde with H2O2 in water (yield: 5.6% vs. 43.7% before and after the addition of 1.42 wt% of Al, respectively). The effects of Al source and content, catalyst loading, H2O2 dosage, reaction temperature and time on the catalytic performance of Al-promoted Fe3O4 were also investigated. The Al-promoted Fe3O4 catalysts were magnetically recoverable and reusable at least five times without loss of catalytic activity and selectivity after being rejuvenated with NaBH4 reduction. Theoretical and experimental investigations confirmed that the Al promoter introduced new Al active sites besides the primary iron (Fe) sites on the surface of Fe3O4 microspheres, facilitated the formation of Al–peroxo (Al–OOH) intermediates and reduced the apparent activation energy of the decomposition of H2O2 from 52.3 kJ mol−1 to 41.1 kJ mol−1. The synergistic effect between Fe and Al sites contributes to a much better catalytic activity of Al-promoted Fe3O4 as compared to pure Fe3O4, γ-Al2O3 or their physical mixtures as catalysts.


Generally, the constitutive relations of cell walls, the cell turgor pressure, cell geometry, and the cell-to-cell mechanical interactions all have a bearing on the macroscopic stress strain properties of the whole tissue [1-3]. The challenge is, therefore, to develop rheological theories specially for the cellular structure, so that the applied external stress or strain can be related to the internal stress or strain that arise in the cell walls of the individual cells. Experimental results show that the stiffness of plant and vegetable tissues increases strongly with the cell turgor pressure [1, 3]. Assuming that the cell wall material is homogeneous, isotropic and linear elastic, Nilson et al [1] analysed the small deformations of a lattice of identical sphere cells; Pitt [4] and McLaughlin and Pitt [5] qualitatively modelled the cellular structure as a two-dimensional array of hexagons or cylinders; Pitt and Davis [6] modelled the cell wall as a spherical shell by finite element analysis. Using idealised cell structures and experimentally measured cell wall constitutive laws [3, 7,8,9], Pitt et al modelled the compression of plant and vegetable tissues. In reality, the cell walls of plant and vegetable tissues are polymeric composite materials [10], consisting of relative amorphous matrix and a highly structured network of microfibrils embedded in the cell wall matrix [11, 12]. Consequently, the cell wall properties are different in different directions [11, 13]. Taking a lattice of identical and fluid-filled three-dimensional hexagonal cells as the structural model, and using large elasticity theory, Zhu and Melrose [14, 15] introduced three microfibrils stiffening factors in the three principle directions of the cell walls and derived the effective compressive stress-strain relations for the tissue. However, according to our knowledge, all the existing models are mainly focused on modelling the effective properties of the tissues, and none of them can well demonstrate all the main failure mechanisms for a plant or vegetable tissue when it is under an increasing turgor pressure, or under an external compressive/tensile stress.


Foliar fertilization is used to correct nutritional deficiencies in plants. Nutrient concentration and combinations of elements are important for the use and efficiency of fertilizers. The aim of the experiment was to investigate how nutrients, in the form of one-component solutions, are absorbed by leaves and how the combination of multiple elements in the solution affect nutrient uptake. The experiment was carried out on the 20-year-old apple tree 'Selena', in the beginning of August 2016, in the experimental orchard of Crop Research Institute in Prague - Ruzyně. Defined solutions of micronutrients (Fe, Zn, Mn, B) and their mixture were applied in spots (5 μL by micropipette) on marked leaves of apple trees in the orchard. Leaves (4 repetitions, 12 leaves in each variant) were harvested, washed and analyzed five days after application. The increase of studied nutrients concentration in a leaf depended on the concentration of the applied solution. An observed higher content of the nutrients in leaf petioles indicates transport of applied nutrients (including slowly - moving Mn and Fe) from leaves to another place of consumption. Zinc showed the best absorption among the observed elements. Nutrient combination (application of all tested nutrients in one solution) positively influenced the iron intake. Foliar application of investigated elements increased their concentration in leaves from low to optimum levels.


The lack of suitable systems to track farm and meat attributes through supply chains is a recognized market barrier, particularly for midsized farms. Even though midsized farms tend to have a comparative advantage in producing differentiated products, there is a disconnect between how these products are produced and the consumer's ability to distinguish them from commodity products. In many midscale marketing scenarios, the missing link is a functional information value chain to supply product information to consumers who value those attributes. Automatic identification and data-capture technologies offer the feasibility for animal and product data collection and tracking. Radio frequency identification (RFID) and two-dimensional (2D) barcodes provide the essential unique identification, which is the requisite for development of a dynamic traceability system. A study was conducted using RFID of beef animals and transferring information to 2D barcodes on beef carcasses and beef packages. Scanning of 2D barcodes on the resulting beef packages provided farm and animal information, including product origination, via a web-accessible database. When a sample of 347 consumers was presented with a flyer displaying a 2D barcode, 16 percent scanned the code to view the farm-of-origin website. As consumers place increasing value on food choices, traceability systems that clearly differentiate products will result in monetary rewards to participants in the value chain. Adopting traceability systems like the model outlined herein is expected to facilitate creation of regional food systems and serve to better connect consumers with farmers.


The last 25 years have witnessed a rapid increase in regional trade agreements (RTAs). Although RTAs generally aim at lowering tariff and non-tariff trade barriers, an increasing number of trade agreements extend their scope to cover specific policy areas such as environmental protection and sustainable development. This paper establishes a comprehensive typology and quantitative analysis of environment-related provisions included in RTAs. The analysis covers all the RTAs currently into force that have been notified to the WTO between 1957 and May 2016, namely 270 trade agreements. While environmental exceptions, along with environmental cooperation continue to be the most common types of environment-related provisions, many other different types of provisions are incorporated in an increasing number of RTAs. The common feature of all environment-related provisions, including environmental exceptions, is their heterogeneity in terms of structure, language and scope.


This study builds upon the 30-years HCI research of collaborative writing and focuses on users' experience of writing together in today's context. By interviewing 30 participants from both academia and industry, the paper examines how people write together using today's commercially available systems. The analysis focuses on the new co-editing capabilities (e.g., track changes) that are integrated into commercial tools and thus adopted by users widely in the last decade. These capabilities enable new ways of working together (e.g., directly edit the content at the character level at the same time), but users reported reluctance to fully commit to these new working styles. We thus systematically analyze users' rationales of why they do not want to write together while they are writing together with other. We argue that the development of collaborative writing tools is far from finished and these findings provide insights for the design of technology, and suggest future directions for research.


This paper is based on a comparative study of venues that provide public access to information and communication technologies in 25 countries. We study how diverse people can and do access and use ICT and what factors influence availability at these venues. Our aim, through such an analysis is first to map what is available through the public access venues in these countries and second to arrive at policy recommendations to increase public access in these countries.


Field observations, structural analysis, and analytical calculations are utilized to evaluate the strength of intermediate magmas during crystallization in a regional strain field. Two plutons are examined, the subvolcanic 98 Ma old Jackass Lakes pluton, central Sierra Nevada, California, and the voluminous middle crustal 442 Ma old Andalshatten pluton, central Norway. The Andalshatten example contains millimeter- to kilometer-scale xenoliths that display evidence for synmagmatic deformation, including fold reactivation and boudinage, after being isolated in the magma. Fabrics within the pluton adjacent to the xenoliths are usually magmatic, with only local, discontinuous zones of crystal-plastic deformation <1 m from the xenolith contact. Examination of particularly well exposed mafic metavolcanic xenoliths in the Jackass Lakes pluton indicates that all were strained prior to incorporation and then separated from the remaining host rock by brittle cracking. Once isolated from the host rocks, some of these xenoliths were intruded by veins fed by the in situ draining of melt and magma from the surrounding crystal mush zone. The xenoliths continued to deform ductilely at presumably fast strain rates. Axial-planar magmatic foliations within folded granodioritic dikes within xenoliths are parallel to magmatic foliations throughout the Jackass Lakes pluton and metamorphic foliations within the host rocks, indicating that the xenolith deformation occurred within the regional 98 Ma old strain field that affected the pluton.

The behavior of these xenoliths suggests that late in the crystallization history, magmas in both middle crustal and subvolcanic settings behaved as a high-strength crystal-melt mush capable of transmitting deviatoric stresses, which drove both elastic and plastic deformation in the enclosed xenoliths. Simultaneously, intercrystalline melt, and in some cases magma, was drained from the host intrusions into the xenoliths. Rheological modeling based on geochemical data yields an effective viscosity of a crystal-free melt of ~104 Pa s and increased to ~107 Pa s as cooling proceeded to 758 °C and crystal content approached 40% for the Jackass Lakes pluton. Such viscosities are too low to impart or transmit deformation into the xenoliths. The preservation of xenoliths in both plutons is compatible with higher crystallinities and/or magma yield strengths as an explanation to arrest the xenoliths in their final position and allow deformation. Estimated effective viscosities considering magma yield strength and measured density variables (melt and solid) are ~1013 Pa s.


System integrity protection schemes (SIPS) are a widely used solution to the challenges in operating electrical power transmission systems during the last few decades. Since these protection schemes have become an integral part of the system, it must be ensured that their performance satisfies the reliability requirements of electrical utilities, when expressed in terms of dependability and security. This study proposes a method based on Markov modelling and fault tree analysis for assessing the reliability of a generic SIPS, but it is illustrated using the Dinorwig intertrip scheme, located in North Wales and operated by National Grid (Great Britain system operator). In addition, two reliability indices, widely used in the process control industry, are suggested for quantifying the reliability level of SIPS: (i) safety integrity level and (ii) spurious trip level. Many operators tend to have SIPS permanently in service; this reduces the probability of a `failure to operate' because of a problem in the arming software or an error by a human operator that prevented the scheme being armed when required. Therefore, the impact of having SIPS always armed on SIPS reliability is compared with the impact of switching IN the scheme only when the arming conditions are fulfilled.


In recent years, the assessment of environmental performance has been received considerable attention by environmental policy indicators and decision makers. In this regard, this paper applies data envelopment analysis (DEA) as a management tool for evaluating the environmental performance of the firms and uses the extended bounded adjusted measure (extended BAM) for including undesirable outputs in the environmental assessment. On the other hand, congestion points to a situation where inputs are excessively used. The previous studies of congestion mainly considered the framework of desirable outputs, and undesirable outputs have been disregarded in the evaluation. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper introduces an alternative definition and approach to treat congestion in the simultaneous presence of desirable and undesirable outputs. Then, the presented method is applied on 31 administrative regions of China. As a result of this application, it is observed that seven industries are environmentally efficient and also do not show congestion. Four industries evidence congestion in one or both of their inputs. By reducing the amount of congestion in each input, these industries can increase their desirable output and decrease their undesirable outputs.


In the fifth experiment (Monkey 5), 17 mL of fresh whole rat plasma was injected slowly over five minutes and was followed two minutes later by the usual dose of FWV. Initially, ABP was 20/11 .3 kPa (150(85 mmHg) and RAP was 0.3 kPa (2 mmHg); the peak exhaled CO 2 was 6%, and rectal temperature was 37. 5°C. These parameters were not changed by the injection of rat plasma. After injection of FWV, some twitching developed in the arm in which the injections were made. The pupils constricted, but there was neither salivation or lachrymation; ABP rose to 22.6(14 kPa (170/1 05 mmHg) in three minutes, but returned gradually to 20/12 kPa (150(90 mmHg). Right atrial pressure remained unchanged (0.3 kPa to o 4 kPa (2 mmHg to 3 mmHg)), and respiration, peak exhaled CO 2 , pH, and rectal temperature remained unaffected. A second, similar dose of FWV failed to elicit any further changes. Twitching in the arm had ceased, and the animal appeared close to awakening when it was sacrificed one hour and 40 minutes later. At post-mortem the lungs of the first two monkeys (Monkeys 1 and 2) weighed 92 g and 102 g respectively, and showed oedema both macroscopically and on section. Red blood cells were present in the alveoli and in Bowman's spaces of the kidney of Monkey 1. The lungs of the other three monkeys (Monkeys 3, 4, and 5) weighed 34 g, 29 g and 24 g respectively. The lungs of the third and fourth monkeys showed patchy congestion, those of the fifth monkey did not show congestion.


To address the growing field of on-line, out-of-hospital health care a front-end ADC for portable electrocardiographic systems has been designed. The converter is realized as a first-order, 3-bit Σ∆ with an oversampling ratio of 512. Performance is optimized to adhere to the standard IEC60601-2-47, which governs ambulatory ECG equipment. The single ended design achieves a dynamic range of 16 bits for signal offsets up to ±1.25 V. Measured power consumption is 60 μW with supplies of 2.6 V analog and 2.2 V digital.


Emerging market multinationals resort to knowledge acquisitions from their overseas subsidiaries to springboard and realise their global ambitions. Drawing from the knowledge-based view and social capital perspective, this study explores the effects of organisational collaboration and tacitness on multiple dimensions of reverse knowledge transfer (RKT). Data were collected through a survey, from senior and middle level managers of parent Indian multinationals, pertaining to RKT from their overseas subsidiaries. The hypotheses are analysed using PLS modelling. The results demonstrate positive effects between the extent and benefits of RKT. Collaboration was found to have a positive influence on both dimensions of RKT. Tacitness also has a positive impact on the benefits from RKT. The implications of the findings and the limitations of the study are discussed along with suggestions for future research.


Cancer is a disease that affects and kills millions of people worldwide. Breast cancer, especially, has a high incidence and mortality, and is challenging to treat. Due to its high impact on the health sector, oncological therapy is the subject of an intense and very expensive research. To improve this therapy and reduce its costs, strategies such as drug repurposing and drug combinations have been extensively studied. Drug repurposing means giving new usefulness to drugs which are approved for the therapy of various diseases, but, in this case, are not approved for cancer therapy. On the other hand, the purpose of combining drugs is that the response that is obtained is more advantageous than the response obtained by the single drugs. Using drugs with potential to be repurposed, combined with 5-fluorouracil, the aim of this project was to investigate whether this combination led to therapeutic benefits, comparing with the isolated drugs. We started with a screening of the most promising drugs, with verapamil and itraconazole being chosen. Several cellular viability studies, cell death and proliferation studies, mainly in MCF-7 cells (Michigan Cancer Foundation-7, human breast adenocarcinoma cells) were performed. Studies were also carried out to understand the effect of the drugs at the level of possible therapeutic resistance, evaluating the epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Combining all the results, the conclusion is that the combination of verapamil and itraconazole with 5-fluorouracil had benefits, mainly by decreasing cell viability and proliferation. Furthermore, the combination of itraconazole and 5-fluorouracil seemed to be the most effective, being an interesting focus in future studies.


A methodology to fabricate high aspect ratio (HAR) SU-8 micro structures on piezoelectric and metallic substrates is presented. In this work, several fabrication trials were carried out to optimize the SU-8 fabrication process. The fabrication recipe mentioned in the SU-8 (Microchem, USA) datasheet is employed for the initial fabrication trials. The SU-8 structures (micropillars) fabricated during these trials resulted in poor bonding with the surface of piezoelectric substrate. In the later trials a thin film of OmniCoat (Microchem, USA) is coated over the substrate before coating the SU-8 film to improve the adhesion quality of the SU-8 micropillars to the substrate. The fabrication methodology used during the trails and results on the quality of the fabricated HAR SU-8 pillars are discussed in the paper.


A typical software module evolves through many versions over the course of its development. To maintain compatibility with module clients, it is crucial that a module's behavior at its interface does not change in an undesirable manner across versions. The problem of introducing changes which break interface behavior remains one of the most daunting challenges in the maintenance of large software modules. Static equivalence checking of sequential programs is a useful mechanism to validate semantic equivalence across refactoring changes. However, most changes corresponding to bug fixes and feature additions change the behavior of programs; equivalence checking tools are of limited help in such cases. In this work, we propose the notion of conditional (partial) equivalence, a more practical notion of equivalence in which two versions of a program need only be semantically equivalent under a subset of all inputs. We provide a compositional method for checking conditional equivalence and a fix-point procedure parameterized by an abstract domain for synthesizing non-trivial conditions under which two programs are equivalent. Additionally, we propose a method called differential inlining to lazily construct summaries of behavioral differences along differential paths interprocedurally, for recursionfree programs. We discuss preliminary experience of a prototype implementation on a set of medium sized C benchmarks.


Increased mucosal vascularity is a hallmark of airway inflammation in asthma. It was hypothesised that this would lead to a detectable increase in respiratory heat and moisture loss (RHML), which would reflect the degree of airway inflammation present. A total of 23 subjects with asthma and 18 healthy controls had RHML measured in a cross-sectional study. The measurements were made using a device that combines temperature and humidity measurement during inspiration and expiration and allows precise control over inspirate conditions and ventilatory pattern. The subjects with asthma underwent parallel measurements of exhaled nitric oxide, sputum eosinophil percentage and exhaled breath condensate pH. Mean±sd RHML was elevated in patients with asthma (98.1±7.3 J·L−1) compared with control subjects (91.9±4.5 J·L−1). RHML measurement in asthma correlated with sputum eosinophil percentage. This novel correlation between thermal and cellular measurements in asthma suggests that both of these noninvasive indices are sensitive to the degree of underlying chronic airway inflammation.


Large deviation results are given for a class of perturbed nonhomogeneous Markov chains on finite state space which formally includes some stochastic optimization algorithms. Specifically, let {Pn} be a sequence of transition matrices on a finite state space which converge to a limit transition matrix P . Let {Xn} be the associated nonhomogeneous Markov chain wherePn controls movement from time n − 1 ton. The main statements are a large deviation principle and bounds for additive functionals of the nonhomogeneous process under some regular ity conditions. In particular, when P is reducible, three regimes that depend on the decay of certain "connection" Pn probabilities are id entified. Roughly, if the decay is too slow, too fast or in an intermediate range, the large deviation behavior is trivial, the same as the time-homogeneous chain run with P or nontrivial and involving the decay rates. Examples of anomalous behaviors are also given when the approach Pn → P is irregular. Results in the intermediate regime apply to geometrically fast running optimizations, and to some issues in glassy physics.


This report discusses the definition and modeling of reference architectures that specify the security aspects of distributed systems. NSA''s MISSI (Multilevel Information System Security Initiative) security reference architecture is used as an illustrative example. We show how one would define such a reference architecture, and how one could use such a definition to model as well as check implementations for compliance with the reference. We demonstrate that an ADL should have not only the capability to specify interfaces, connections and operational constraints, but also to specify how it is related to other architectures or to implementations. A reference architecture such as MISSI is defined in Rapide [10] as a set of hierarchical interface connection architectures [9]. Each Rapide interface connection architecture is a reference architecture - an abstract architecture that allows a number of different implementations, but which enforces common structure and communication rules. The hierarchical reference architecture defines the MISSI policies at different levels - at the level of enclaves communicating through a network, at the level of each enclave being a local area network with firewalls and workstations and at the level of the individual workstations. The reference architecture defines standard components, communication patterns and policies common to MISSI compliant networks of computer systems. A network of computers may be checked for conformance against the reference architecture. The report also shows how one can generate architecture scenarios of networks of communicating computers. The scenarios are constructed as Rapide executable models, and the behaviors of the models can be checked for conformance with the reference architecture in these scenarios. The executable models demonstrate how the structure and security policies in the reference architecture may apply to networks of computers.


The first iron-catalysed enantioselective Suzuki-Miyaura coupling reaction has been developed. In the presence of catalytic amounts of FeCl2 and (R,R)-QuinoxP*, lithium arylborates are cross-coupled with tert-butyl α-bromopropionate in an enantioconvergent manner, enabling facile access to various optically active α-arylpropionic acids including several nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) of commercial importance. (R,R)-QuinoxP* is specifically able to induce chirality when compared to analogous P-chiral ligands that give racemic products, highlighting the critical importance of transmetalation in the present asymmetric cross-coupling system.


The thymic stromal microenvironment is required for the generation of immunocompetent T lymphocytes. However, the different thymic stromal cell types have not been fully characterized and their roles regarding T-cell development are not completely understood. To address the phenotypic characteristics of the epithelial component of the human thymic microenvironment as well as its functional involvement in T-cell development, we have established cloned thymic epithelial cell (TEC) lines from fetal and postnatal human thymuses by an explant technique, repeated subculture, and limiting dilution cloning. These cloned TEC lines were shown to be derived from cortical epithelium and to express a number of cell-surface molecules including CD40, major histocompatibility complex (MHC) HLA-ABC and HLA-DR antigens, homing- associated cell-adhesion molecule (H-CAM), intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), leukocyte function-associated antigen 3 (LFA-3), and beta 1 subfamily integrins. Finally, both postnatal and fetal TEC clones were shown to produce interleukin-1 alpha (IL-1 alpha), IL-6, and IL-7. These well-defined cloned TEC lines may provide useful tools for the study of TEC biology and for the understanding of the precise role played by TEC in human T-cell development.


Under the frequency domain framework for weakly dependent functional time series, a key element is the spectral density kernel which encapsulates the second‐order dynamics of the process. We propose a class of spectral density kernel estimators based on the notion of a flat‐top kernel. The new class of estimators employs the inverse Fourier transform of a flat‐top function as the weight function employed to smooth the periodogram. It is shown that using a flat‐top kernel yields a bias reduction and results in a higher‐order accuracy in terms of optimizing the integrated mean square error (IMSE). Notably, the higher‐order accuracy of flat‐top estimation comes at the sacrifice of the positive semi‐definite property. Nevertheless, we show how a flat‐top estimator can be modified to become positive semi‐definite (even strictly positive definite) in finite samples while retaining its favorable asymptotic properties. In addition, we introduce a data‐driven bandwidth selection procedure realized by an automatic inspection of the estimated correlation structure. Our asymptotic results are complemented by a finite‐sample simulation where the higher‐order accuracy of flat‐top estimators is manifested in practice.


Recreational water users may be exposed to elevated pathogen levels that originate from various point and non-point sources. Current daily notifications practice depends on microbial analysis of indicator organisms such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) that require 18-24 hours to provide sufficient response. This research evaluated the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for real time prediction of E. coli concentration in water at Toronto beaches (Ontario, Canada). The nowcasting models were developed in combination with readily available real-time environmental and hydro-meteorological data during the bathing season (June-August) of 2008 to 2012. The results of the developed ANN models were compared with historic data and found that the predictions of E. coli concentrations generated by ANN models slightly outperforms than currently used persistence model with better accuracy. The best performing ANN models for each beach are able to predict approximately 74% to 82% of the E. coli concentrations.


This book, designed for the clinical nephrologist and specialist pathologist, has something for everyone with an interest in renal disease. As the title ofthe book implies, clinico-pathological correlations are the essence ofthe text. The importance of establishing a normal baseline for glomerular architecture is stressed in the comparison of postmortem appearances with cadaveric biopsies taken at the time of transplantation, and normal renal biopsies. The basic patterns of glomerular damage are defined and distinguished from superimposed lesions. The chapters include a review of the relevant publications followed by "the Royal Melbourne experience" defining in detail both clinical and morphological features. Reference is made to the first edition so that this volume relates to the collective experience of some 12,000 biopsies. Detailed analysis shows how the presence or absence of superimposed lesions relate to prognosis in the various forms of glomerulonephritis. The wealth of material presented gives insight into the evolution of glomerular diseases, and the value of precise morphological characterisation in the context of repeated biopsies is emphasised. Other major sections include a discussion of lesions involving glomeruli and blood vessels; tubulo-interstitial disorders; and end stage renal failure and renal transplantation. The book is well illustrated with both light and electron micrographs, but contains some inaccuracies in the cross referencing of some of the figures. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this excellent book, the text of which is well supplied with up to date references. The kidney: a clinicopathological study is a must for those engaged in the routine interpretation ofrenal biopsies and the study of renal disease, and is also a useful addition to the library of those with more general interests.


Little is known about the etiology of tumors of the brain and central nervoussystem(CNS);however,epidemiologic studieshave indicated recentlythat excess brain and CNS tumor risk may be associated with employment in certain occupations or industries. Some studies have shown that certain white-collar professional groups (eg, artists, laboratory professionals, veterinarians, embalmers) appear to havean elevated riskof brain tumors, and theyraisethe issueof a diagnostic sensitivity bias. Someblue-collar occupationalgroups, includingrubber workers, oil refineryworkers, chemical plant workers, polyvinylchloride workers, machinists, and others, have been reported to havean elevatedrisk of brain tumors. Most of these workers are potentially exposed to multiple chemicals; nevertheless they have some exposuresin common, for example, exposureto organic solvents, lubricating oil, acrylonitrile and vinyl chloride, formaldehyde, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and phenolic compounds


The purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to identify factors that influenced prospective and experienced secondary level science teachers' reasoning as they evaluated or selected tasks to formatively assess their students' understanding of scientific concepts. The analysis of the coded written responses revealed two categories of factors that influenced the teachers' reasoning: (1) characteristics of the task and (2) characteristics of students or the curriculum. Characteristics of the task related to qualities of the task regardless of the learning environment in which it would be used, such as the level of student thinking demanded by a task. Characteristics of the students and the curriculum related to the learning environment in which an assessment task would be implemented, such as students' abilities to complete the task. Both prospective and experienced teachers' task evaluations were influenced by the same factors related to the characteristics of the task, although their interpretations of the meaning of each factor varied. In addition, experienced teachers' task evaluations were more likely than prospective teachers to be influenced by factors related to characteristics of students and the curriculum. The findings are discussed as a conceptual framework that presents the identified factors along three different dimensions: (1) the influence of task, student, and curriculum characteristics, (2) the influence of expectations for success, and (3) the influence of teaching experience. 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 1113-1130, 2008


popular with candidates for examinations, particularly as an aid to the spot diagnosis of short cases which still provides the crucial test of a candidate's clinical ability in the British philosophy of examinations. The present work has brought to a new high level the use of illustration as a means of conveying a quick and vivid impression, as exemplified by the presence in a book ofjust over 300 pages of 341 illustrations, a high proportion of which illustrate a multitude of conditions under the same heading. The tribute of the author to the artist is well earned, and one could extract much of what the book has to give by studying primarily the illustrations with their captions. The dogmatism of the text even on arguable matters makes the book rather an uncertain guide in anything more profound than a help to spot diagnosis. A notable omission is that of orthopwdic conditions, which would lend themselves particularly well to this type of presentation. DAVID PATEY


multi-media teaching is the trend for improving teaching approach, yet what is currently prevalent in university education is its low interaction and inefficient knowledge absorption level. According to the characteristics of multimedia teaching, this paper discussed application of informational teaching resources in university music teaching and explored ways to improve the quality of music teaching. This paper took chorus conduction in university music course as experiment subject, through analysis of teaching resources based on Android system and its design principle, analysis of teaching machine based on android system covered various aspects which included teaching process, resources interface, interactive approaches, and effect assessment. The paper used methods like interview, statistics and comparing the efficiency difference before and after its application. Through the research, we found that optimized android teaching system can improve students' scores and overall quality level, which provides ideas and data backup applications of modern teaching resources in university music course.


Films of CdS for photovoltaic devices were electrochemically deposited on tin oxide coated glass substrates at different conditions. The films were found to be smooth and uniform with a small grain size. X-ray diffraction measurement and analysis indicated a hexagonal phase rather than the cubic phase. The surface composition of the films was investigated by Auger Spectroscopy. Electrochemical deposition parameters were studied to obtain the optimum conditions for the best CdS films. Our films are compared from the pinhole number and particulate point of view with the films prepared by other methods.


This study aims to empirically examine the effect of auditors' independence, audit tenureship, firm
characteristics on audit quality in Nigeria. The population of the study comprises a sample of ten (10)
listed pharmaceutical companies listed on the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX). The time period for the
study covers audited financial statements of the companies from 2013-2019. The study focused on two
explanatory variables: auditors' independence and audit tenure, and two control variables: firm size and
firm age. While the dependent variable audit quality was proxied by big four firms and non-big four
firms. The secondary source of data was adopted in this study. The data collected were analyzed using the
panel regression techniques. The results suggest that all of the explanatory and control variables have a
positive and significant effect on audit quality. The study recommends that auditors' independence is
directly proportional to audit quality, thus audit firms should be independent in order to enhance audit
quality. Auditor-client engagement should not exceed 3years in order to avoid familiarity threat. In
addition, firms are advised to engage the services of one of the big audit firms since it results to improved
audit quality. Younger firms should understudy older firms to learn from the experiences that they have
acquired over the years that impact positively on audit quality.


Vietnam, a developing country, has had comparatively good health and human survival at low cost. The economic reform changed the health care system, and private pharmacies during the last 5 years have taken over a majority of the drug distribution. Problems include weaknesses in drug regulation and reported increases in antibiotic resistance. This case study, a purposive sample of two private pharmacies in Hanoi, explored management, including dispensing, inventory and ®nancing, using the concept of triangulation. Observations and interviews of customers were complemented by stock inventory and interviews of the pharmacy sta€. Drugs were classi®ed according to the ATC code and the essential drug list of Vietnam. Pretested protocols were used. In all 1833 encounters were studied during the 2 weeks, out of which 286 were children. Less than 1% of customers came with prescriptions and 94.9% decided by themselves which drugs to buy. Antibiotics represented 17%, of which 90% were broad spectrum. Ampicillin dominated, both in children and adults. Some 50% of the antibiotics were given for 2.5 days or less. Less than 50% of the drugs were essential drugs (ED) on dispensing and even less on inventory. Antibiotics and vitamins were the most commonly sold drugs and, overall, brand names dominated. Little if any drug information was observed. Antibiotics were said to represent the most pro®table drugs, according to the pharmacy sta€. More than 20% of all products were combination drugs, including irrational and popular products with antibiotics and corticosteroids and combinations of aspirin, phenacetin and ca€eine. This study shows an unexpectedly high proportion of customers, being ``Tu Lam Bac Sy'' (their own doctors), deciding themselves which drugs to buy. Although the ``Doi moi'' renovation has led to much improved drug availability, at least in urban setting, our case study highlights major problems in need of urgent actions. In particular the prevailing practices regarding antibiotics and combination drugs need to be seriously scrutinized and drug regulatory mechanisms should be enforced.


Potential vorticity (PV) has been used to understand the intensification and motion of a variety of tropical vortices. Here, atmospheric reanalyses and idealized models are used to understand how the vertical structures of moist convective heating and adiabatic advection jointly shape the vertical structures of PV in tropical depressions. Observationally based estimates reveal a top‐heavy PV structure in tropical depressions, contrasting with bottom‐heavy structures of absolute vorticity and diabatic PV generation. These distinct vertical structures are reproduced in an axisymmetric model which employs the weak temperature gradient approximation for conceptual simplicity and is forced by stratiform and deep convective heating. When applied in isolation, the stratiform and deep convective heatings produce PV maxima at 500 hPa and near the surface, respectively. When these two heatings are applied simultaneously, interactions between the stratiform and deep convective modes enhance the adiabatic advective tendencies produced by the transverse circulation, making the PV distribution more top‐heavy. In the lower and middle troposphere, radial advection also greatly reduces the radius of the PV structure relative to that of the imposed heating, consistent with structures in observed tropical depressions; the implications of these differences in radial structures for using the flux form of the relevant conservation equations (e.g. for PV substance or absolute vorticity) are discussed.


Mottel the Cantor's Son (1907, 1916), one of the most popular Yiddish novels of the twentieth century, is a story of emigration. As such, it is preoccupied with cross-cultural, cross-national, inter-religious, and inter-lingual relations. Aspiring to move from one geographical and cultural setting to another- from the poverty-stricken Eastern-European Jewish town to the promisingly rich and excitingly modern "New World" of North America- the characters, and to some extent also their author, Sholom Aleichem, are busy disparaging their former world and idealizing the new. The translation of the novel into English by Tamara Kahana (published 1953) augments this dynamics in its attempt to assimilate the work to the American canon and reduce its Jewishness. Kahana, being both a Jewish immigrant herself and the author's grandchild, is an involved translator. Rather than an act of mediation and communication, her strategy of translation appears to be an act of appropriation, a rewriting whereby the otherness of the source text is erased. At issue here- for all three agencies that deliver Mottel's story to us (the narrator Mottel, the authorial voice, and the translator)- is an ideal of identity that involves a break with the past. For Mottel and for Sholom Aleichem this ideal is America and the formation of an assimilated American identity; for Kahana it is a perfectly accessible Americanized story. However, in both the original text and in its translation, this ideal is continually subtly subverted, even as it is strenuously articulated and sought.1


Empowered by today's rich tools for media generation and collaborative production, multimedia service paradigm is shifting from the conventional single source, to multi-source, to many sources, and now towards crowdsource, where the available media sources for the content of interest become highly diverse and scalable. Such crowdsourced livecast systems as Twitch.tv, YouTube Gaming, and Periscope enable a new generation of user-generated livecast systems, attracting an increasing number of viewers all over the world. Yet the sources are managed by unprofessional broadcasters, and often have limited computation capacities and dynamic network conditions. They can even join or leave at will, or crash at any time. In this thesis, we first conduct a systematic study on the existing crowdsourced livecast systems. We outline the inside architecture using both the crawled data and the captured traffic data from local broadcasters/viewers. We then reveal that a significant portion of the unpopular and dynamic broadcasters are consuming considerable system resources. Because cloud computing provides resizable, reliable, and scalable bandwidth and computational resources, which naturally becomes an effective solution to leverage heterogeneous and dynamic workloads. Yet, it is a challenge to utilize the resources from the cloud cost-effectively. We thus propose a cloud-assisted design to smartly ingest the sources and cooperatively utilize the resources from dedicated servers and public clouds. In current crowdsourced livecast systems, crowdsourced gamecasting is the most popular application, in which gamers lively broadcast game playthroughs to fellow viewers using their desktop, laptop, even mobile devices. These gamers' patterns, which instantly pilot the corresponding gamecastings and viewers' fixations, have not been explored by previous studies. Since mobile gamers and eSports gamers occupy a large portion of content generators. In this thesis, we target on two typical crowdsourced gamecasting scenarios, i.e., mobile gamecasting and eSports gamecasting, respectively. We investigate the gamers' patterns to explore their effects on viewers and employ intelligent approaches, e.g., learning-based techniques, to capture the associations between gamers' patterns and viewers' experiences. Then, we employ such associations to optimize the streaming transcoding and distribution.


BackgroundGlobalisation has led to increasing importance of creation and maintenance of new buyer-supplier relationships across borders. This has resulted into to an increased focus on the importance of good negotiation skills and competences amongst business teams in order to communicate efficiently and maintain long term relationships in cross-cultural business contexts. These skills and competences have attracted the attention of academicians, who introduced cultural intelligence - a concept that looks at capabilities of interacting in cross-cultural environment.PurposeThe purpose of this study is to identify the presence of cultural intelligence during negotiations and to explain its relation to various negotiation tactics.Frame of referenceThe scope of this research includes academic literature on long-term buyer-supplier relationships while focusing on cross-cultural aspects of such dealings. A major part of the literature review focuses on the concept of cultural intelligence, followed by a discussion of the negotiation process and tactics.MethodologyFor the purpose of this qualitative study an inductive research approach was used. A series of experiments were conducted and observation was the major source of data collection, supplemented with focus group interviews, in order to gain deeper insights into participants´ behaviours during the negotiations. The empirical findings were analysed using a qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA.ConclusionCultural intelligence was identified in the different stages of the negotiation process and its relation to various negotiation tactics was explained based on co-occurrence of these tactics and evidence of culturally intelligent behaviour. This paper sheds light on application of each dimension of cultural intelligence to particular negotiation tactics. We particularly highlight the high level of adaptability and a visibly strong link between three CQ dimensions: metacognitive, motivational and behavioural and three negotiation tactics: active listening, bluffing and relationship focus. This study can perhaps be particularity useful for organizations that use the cross-functional team approach as these teams can be formed according to the CQ strengths of participants, thereby improving the team´s cultural awareness and ability to perform during cross-cultural negotiations.


INTRODUCTION This article addresses both U.S. accounting standards and U.S. law by providing an analysis of repurchase agreements as used by the investment firm Lehman Brothers. The specific questions addressed are whether Lehman Brothers violated accounting and auditing standards and federal securities and financial regulation laws. This paper examines both the accounting practices and securities law and the conflict between them. At the time the repurchase agreements were used, the accounting treatment was considered acceptable under U.S. generally accepted accounting standards ("GAAP"). However, the authors conclude that the accounting treatment of the repurchase agreements, henceforth referred to as Repo 105 transactions, and the subsequent financial statement disclosures were done in violation of numerous U.S. laws. The contradiction between law and accounting/auditing standards is the focus of the article. Prior to the collapse, Lehman Brothers was the 4th largest global financial services firm and the oldest of the five major global financial services firms ("Lehman Brothers"). In addition to Bear Stearns and AIG, Lehman Brothers was a major institution that failed during the financial crisis (McAfee & Johnson, 2010). The failure of Lehman Brothers is believed to have impacted financial markets for weeks ("Case Study: The Collapse of Lehman Brothers," 2009). While it was hardly the sole cause of the financial crisis, the failure of Lehman Brothers was a substantial event causing loss of confidence in the financial and banking systems. The Lehman Brothers event is considered so important in the minds of business and economic analysts that the terms "Lehman-type event" or "Lehman-type moment" is often used in the business press and business cable TV (such as CNBC). For example, analysts ask whether the possible fall of the Greek or Spanish economy would cause a worldwide catastrophe that would qualify as a "Lehman type event" (Kroft, 2012; CNBC, 2011; Pinetree Capital Ltd., 2012, Sandholm, 2011; Martinez, 2011). Lehman Brothers continues to make news with new lawsuits and news reports. On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is the largest reported U.S. bankruptcy--twice as large as the second, Washington Mutual ("The Ten Largest Bankruptcies", 2009). Bank debt at Lehman Brothers was $613 billion. The bankruptcy was prompted by an acute cash shortage. Prior to the bankruptcy filing, investors were aware of Lehman's increasing financial difficulties. However, use of financial statement "window-dressing" through off-balance sheet transactions, such as Repo 105, disguised the extent of the financial difficulties. One can argue that had regulators and investors been informed of the true condition at Lehman Brothers, some of the problems in the financial crisis may have been averted. (The later bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers provided information on the repurchase transactions. Had Lehman Brothers not filed for bankruptcy, the accounting practices may have not been disclosed. Thus, we do not know the extent to which other investment firms used similar accounting treatments to window-dress financials.) Certainly, regulators would have had a clearer picture of the deteriorating financial condition at Lehman Brothers. Of particular concern to investors in Lehman Brothers were the leverage and the leverage ratio (Valukas, 2010, p. 800). The management at Lehman Brothers understood investors' concerns and in 2007 discussed the impact a deteriorating balance sheet and leverage condition would have on the company. The concern was that market declines and ratings downgrades would result if the financial condition were not improved (Valukas, 2010, p. 800). With the implementation of a new accounting standard, Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) 140, effective April, 2001, Lehman Brothers began using a tool to "manage" the balance sheet situation, repurchase agreements, Repo 105 and Repo 108 (Although Repo 105 and Repo 108 are technically different, this difference is in the amount of the cash inflow. …


Objectives: To present a grading system of the protection offered by various types of mouthguard, together with an indication of associated risks, in order to make athletes aware of the consequences of improper or no mouth protection. Methods: A review of the literature on mouthguards, mouthguard materials, and novel laminates for mouthguards was carried out as it was apparent that information on mouthguards was lacking. Studies on stock (or unfitted) mouthguards, mouth formed (boil and bite) mouthguards, and custom mouthguards are reviewed. Results: A scale of protection offered by various mouthguards and novel laminates has been produced, where 0 indicates no mouthguard and 10 indicates a custom made mouthguard offering excellent protection. Conclusions: From work carried out on laminates and the manufacturing processes of mouthguards, it became apparent that information was lacking to enable athletes make informed decisions about the best oral protection for their chosen sport.


Programs do good things, but also do bad, making software security more than a fad. The authority of programs, we do need to tame. But bad things still happen. Who do we blame?

From the very beginnings of access control: Should we be safe by construction, or should we patrol? Horton shows how, in an elegant way, we can simply do both, and so save the day.


North Bengkulu Sub-Province is one of the center area palm production in Bengkulu Province. PT. Agricinal is one of the national private big plantation in North Bengkulu Sub-Province, meed needs raw material become from central plantation company and from society plantation. This Research aim to know how many FFB inclusion from society plantation North Bengkulu Sub-Province in PT. Agricinal (1), knowing result of forecast the FFB availibility in society plantation North Bengkulu Sub-Province (2) and CPO price in PT. Agricinal during 16 month future in start in 2005 September until 2006 December (3), and knowing CPO cost of goods manufactured in PT Agricinal in last period 2005 August (4). This research was carried out on 2005 September in North Bengkulu Sub-Province. The analysis data Method was adapted with that aim is descriptive analysis, exponential smoothing method and process cost of goods manufactured method. Based on result of research was knowing average FFB inclusion in PT. Agricinal from society plantation in North Bengkulu Sub-Province equal to 6.734,69 ton or 50,60% (1). Result of forecast was availibilited FFB in society plantation North Bengkulu Sub-Province for 16 period in the future had been tended increasing (2). Result of forecast of CPO price in PT. Agricinal for 16 period in the future had been tended increasing (3). And result calculation of basic CPO cost of goods manufactured in PT. Agricinal in the last period 2005 August, known that CPO cost of finish good is equal to Rp 11.637.231.132,35 and CPO cost of work in proses is equal to Rp 4.562.873,65 (4). Key Word : FFB Inclusion and CPO Price


A household's fi nancial security is essential for the satisfaction of the needs and wants of its members, both communal and individual. It constitutes a kind of foundation for all of a household's fi nancial decisions that impact its standard of living. The article aims to assess the level of fi nancial security of Polish households in 2005–2013. The research draws on data from Genworth Index, HBS conducted by the Central Statistical Offi ce (GUS) and Social Diagnosis (Diagnoza spoleczna) overseen by the Social Monitoring Council. The study shows that Poland is characterized by a low level of fi nancial security relative to other European countries, especially Western and Scandinavian. More than three-quarters of Polish households experience fi nancial problems and exhibit both a low propensity to save, and low savings rates.


Our study was designed to determine whether hydrogenated fat high in trans monoenes concentration affected prostaglandin synthesis. Corn oil (CO), butter (B), hydrogenated vegetable oil (HF) and coating fat (CF) were used in this study. These fats were fed to rats for 10 wk at 10 g/100 g diet. The phospholipid (PL) fatty acid content of platelets, aorta and heart was determined by gas liquid chromatography, and the in vitro aorta production of prostacyclin (PGI2) from exogenous or endogenous arachidonic acid (AA) was measured using the radioimmuno-assay (RIA) method. Serum thromboxane B2 (TXB2) released by platelets as thromboxane A2 (TXA2) during incubation of whole blood was also measured by this method. In the group fed CF, AA was significantly lower in the PL of aorta, platelet and heart, and the ratio 20:3(n-9)/20:4(n-6) was greater than in the groups fed CO, B or HF, indicating that the group fed CF was essential fatty acid (EFA) deficient. Although AA was significantly lower in the aorta and platelet PL of the group fed HF compared to the group fed CO, that difference did not affect the amounts of PGI2 or TXB2 produced in these groups. The group fed CF had significantly less PGI2 and TXB2 released by aorta and platelets than the other groups. This was the result of the reduced level of AA and the presence of higher amounts of 20:3(n-9) acid in the PL, which might act as a competitive inhibitor for cyclooxygenase. The aortic production of PGI2 from exogenous AA did not differ among the groups indicating that prostaglandin synthetase was not affected by the dietary fat. We conclude that the consumption of hydrogenated fats high in trans 18:1 acids with adequate amount of linoleic acid had no effect on the amount of thromboxane or prostacyclin produced by platelet or aorta in vitro. J. Nutr. 129: 15–24, 1999.


The author of this book is a pioneer in the field of sociological research. In this classic re-issue, the author interviewed 60 women to find out what it is really like to have a baby. Covering pregnancy, birth and child care, the book relies on the stories mothers tell to discuss whether and why women want to become pregnant, how they imagine motherhood to be, the experience of birth, post-natal depression, feeding and caring routines, and the challenges for the domestic division of labour and to fathers. It shows that most women are unprepared for the birth or the work of caring for a baby, but also for the joys that a baby can bring. As topical today as the day it was written, this important book was the first to examine first-time motherhood in the words of those experiencing it, and it continues to influence generations of researchers today.


The work reported here is a 2D numerical study on the buoyancy-driven low speed flow of humid air inside a rectangular cavity partially filled with solid cylindrical objects and whose vertical walls are maintained at 1.2 and 21 oC. This is a case of double diffusion where both temperature and concentration gradients are significant. Detailed calculations were carried out and results compared with reliable data, with the aim of investigating the influence of surface emissivity on heat and moisture transport. The Rayleigh number of the fluid mixture (air and water vapour) based on the height of the vertical wall is found to be 1.45 x 109.
In the computations, turbulent fluxes of the momentum, heat and mass were modelled by low-Re (Launder-Sharma) k-e eddy viscosity model. The effect of radiation has been found to be significant even for the moderate temperature difference of 19.8 oC between the hot and the cold walls with the humid air participating in the radiation heat transfer. Variations of average Nusselt number and buoyancy flux are analysed and profiles of turbulent quantities are studied in order to observe the net effect of the intensity of turbulence. It has been found that a change in surface emissivity influences the humidity distribution and heat transfer within the cavity. It was also observed that during natural convection process the air/water vapour combination results in an increase in the heat transfer as compared to pure natural convection. An increase in heat transfer is observed using thermo-physical materials of higher surface emissivity. It can thus be implied that with the appropriate choice of components, the fluid flow, heat and mass transfer due to natural convection can be increased passively.


Objective: To assess the appropriateness of medication used among the elderly in a community setting and to identify issues related to medication safety in a community setting. Methods: The study was conducted in a selected Grama Niladhari division in Colombo district. Cluster sampling was used to select households. All aged ≥ 60 years living in each of these household were interviewed by two pharmacists and regular medicines used by them were recorded from health records. Potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) were detected using the 'Screening tool of older people's prescriptions (STOPP) and Screening tool to alert to right treatment (START)' criteria. Results: Among the 246 households, data were collected only from 68 patients. The rest were excluded as some residents (N=144) were uncooperative (did not open gate or not at home), and some (N=34) did not have their health records. The most common non-communicable diseases among the interviewed patients were hypertension (61.8%), and diabetes (52.9%). There were 42 patients with at least one PIM. Of the 79 PIMs detected among the interviewed patients, 36.7% were related to STOPP, and 63.3% to START criteria. The highest number of PIMs were associated with statins (N=15) and antiplatelet drugs (N=15). Of the health records assessed, there was at least one inadequate information in 24 health records. Conclusions: PIMs were identified in the prescriptions of elderly. Although it is important to frequently assess their medications, it is a challenging task in the community due to incomplete and unavailability of health records.


In this study, the insolvent cotton farmers from the East San Joaquin Valley were all in their middle years (35 to 64), but 64% were over 45 years of age. They had a larger number of dependents than average for farms in this area, and a higher level of education than the average farm operator in California. Also, on the average, they had spent more years in farming than had farmers in the state as a whole. Most were part-owners or tenants in an area in which 64 per cent of the farm operators owned their farms, but their farms were larger than the average farm in the study area. Once insolvent, very few of the "straight" bankrupts returned to farming as farm operators, and their bankruptcies had a marked impact on the flow of income in communities around which they centered.


A large single crystal of a compound from the family of coordination polymer [Co(NCS)2(L)2]n chains was synthesized and its magnetic properties are reported. [Co(NCS)2(4-(3-phenylpropyl)pyridine)2]n is ferromagnetic with Tc = 3.39 K. Single-ion ab initio calculations predict an almost Ising-type magnetic anisotropy and the direction of the magnetic easy-axis nearly along the Co-Npy bond of the apical pyridine-based co-ligand. Both predictions are confirmed by single-crystal magnetic measurements. The magnetic relaxation of the single crystal sample significantly differs from the powder sample data, and clearly shows the presence of two separate relaxation processes. The process dominant below 3.2 K demonstrates a single chain magnet (SCM) behaviour, with a crossover between single-wall and two-wall processes, in spite of the fact that the system is ferromagnetically ordered. The faster process that dominates just below Tc is attributed to spin waves. Micromagnetic Monte Carlo simulations of the investigated compound show that the dipolar field cancels for some chains located at the border between 3-dimensional domains. Such chains are responsible for the measured ac signal, and demonstrate the SCM behaviour. The quantitative analysis of the SCM relaxation time is supported by preparing and examining a corresponding diamagnetically diluted compound, [CoxCd1-x(NCS)2(4-(3-phenylpropyl)pyridine)2]n (x = 0.013), which behaves as a field-induced single-ion magnet. The relaxation pathways for single Co(ii) spins are determined to be Raman, direct, and quantum tunneling processes, which were included in an improved approach to describe the magnetic relaxation in the Co(ii)-based SCM compound.


AIM
The usual bile duct stone may be removed by means of Dormia basket or balloon catheter, and results are quite good. However, the degree of difficulty is increased when stones are larger. Studies on the subject reported many cases where mechanical lithotripsy is combined with a second technique, e.g. electrohydraulic lithotripsy (EHL), where stones are crushed using baby-mother scope electric shock. The extracorporeal shock-wave lithotripsy (ESWL) or laser lithotripsy also yields an excellent success rate of greater than 90%. However, the equipment for these techniques are very expensive; hence we opted for the simple mechanical lithotripsy and evaluated its performance.

METHODS
During the period from August 1996 to December 2002, Mackay Memorial Hospital treated 304 patients suffering from difficult bile duct stones (stone >1.5 cm or stones that could not be removed by the ordinary Dormia basket or balloon catheter). These patients underwent endoscopic papillotomy (EPT) procedure, and stones were removed by means of the Olympus BML-4Q lithotripsy. A follow-up was conducted on the post-treatment conditions and complications of the patients.

RESULTS
Out of the 304 patients, bile duct stones were successfully removed from 272 patients, a success rate of about 90%. The procedure failed in 32 patients, for whom surgery was needed. Out of the 272 successfully treated patients, 8 developed cholangitis, 21 developed pancreatitis, and 10 patients had delayed bleeding, and no patient died. Among these 272 successful removal cases, successful bile duct stone removal was achieved after the first lithotripsy in 211 patients, whereas 61 patients underwent multiple sessions of lithotripsy. As for the 61 patients that underwent multiple sessions of mechanical lithotripsy, 6 (9.8%) had post-procedure cholangitis, 12 (19.6%) had pancreatitis, and 9 patients (14.7%) had delayed bleeding. Compared with the 211 patients undergoing a single session of mechanical lithotripsy, 3 (1.4%) had cholangitis, 1 (0.4%) had delayed bleeding, and 7 patients (3.3%) had pancreatitis. Statistical deviation was present in post-procedure cholangitis, delayed bleeding, and pancreatitis of both groups.

CONCLUSION
Mechanical bile stone lithotripsy on difficult bile duct stones could produce around 90% successful rate. Moreover, complications are minimal. This finding further confirms the significance of mechanical lithotripsy in the treatment of patients with difficult bile duct stones.


For the requirement of the department for aviation accident investigation, a computer information system of processing the broken tape of flight data recorder has been designed. The main principles of the system are that magnetic track images are first preprocessed using image processing techniques, furthermore, the position coordinates of tracks are obtained using image recognizing techniques, finally, the data corresponding to track coordinates are obtained by encoding the track coordinates using the serial-parallel scanning method that is specially designed. The accurate ratio of automatic encoding is 99.3%. The times of automatic encoding are reduced to proximate 5 seconds from about 4 hours of two operators for one frame track image. This system is significant for aviation accident investigations.


We develop and test a multi-level interactive model of the relationships among self-monitoring, co-workers' formal and informal status, and justice-related information flow in a scenario-based field study of 4,011 unique relationships collected from 84 respondents. We predict that individuals high in self-monitoring, because they attend more carefully to social cues and have higher levels of expressive control, will be more likely than low self-monitors to intend to seek, accept, and provide justice-related information as a function of their co-workers' formal status, the size of their co-workers' networks, and the advantageousness of their co-workers' position in the networks (betweenness centrality). This cross-level interaction hypothesis receives strong support in terms of co-workers' network size, limited support in terms of co-workers' betweenness centrality, and no support in terms of co-workers' formal status. We address the implications of these findings for the literature on self-monitoring, social construction of organizational justice, and social networks, as well as the strengths and limitations of our approach.


Motivation: Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) play important roles in many biological processes. Conventional biological experiments for identifying PPI sites are costly and time-consuming. Thus, many computational approaches have been proposed to predict PPI sites. Existing computational methods usually use local contextual features to predict PPI sites. Actually, global features of protein sequences are critical for PPI site prediction. Results: A new end-to-end deep learning framework, named DeepPPISP, through combining local contextual and global sequence features, is proposed for PPI site prediction. For local contextual features, we use a sliding window to capture features of neighbors of a target amino acid as in previous studies. For global sequence features, a text convolutional neural network is applied to extract features from the whole protein sequence. Then the local contextual and global sequence features are combined to predict PPI sites. By integrating local contextual and global sequence features, DeepPPISP achieves the state-of-the-art performance, which is better than the other competing methods. In order to investigate if global sequence features are helpful in our deep learning model, we remove or change some components in DeepPPISP. Detailed analyses show that global sequence features play important roles in DeepPPISP. Availability and implementation: The DeepPPISP web server is available at http://bioinformatics.csu.edu.cn/PPISP/. The source code can be obtained from https://github.com/CSUBioGroup/DeepPPISP. Contact: email@example.com Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


The private sector has an indispensable role to play in advancing climate adaptation and resilience building. The need for private sector solutions to address climate change impacts is even more pronounced in Africa given its sizable needs for adaptation and the limited fiscal space of most African states to adapt and build resilience to climate and disaster risks. However, mobilizing private investment in adaptation is made complicated by the difficulty for firms of measuring and internalizing the opportunity cost of no adaptation, and by limited practical knowledge on the bankability and cost-effectiveness of adaptation solutions. This paper tries to fill some of these knowledge gaps, first by assessing the economic costs of floods and droughts – the two most economically and socially damaging natural disasters in Africa; and second by measuring the upfront private investments needed in each African country to offset the losses induced by these disasters, assuming that such investments would generate a sufficient economic return. Using the traditional dynamic Solow model, we estimate the potential for private investment in adaptation to natural disasters in Africa by estimating the short- and long-term impact of floods and droughts on per capita GDP growth. As opposed to the more commonly used approaches of estimating the impact of natural disasters on productive assets, our methodology is very practical as it focuses on economic flows rather than stocks, is not data demanding, and does not require complex economic or environmental modelling, and can thus easily be applied on a large number of African countries to estimate the private investment potential in adapting to floods and droughts. Our empirical results suggest that the private sector could have an interest in investing up to about $100 billion cumulatively over the next 20 years, or $5 billion per year, to adapt to the current frequency and severity of floods and droughts in Africa. As such, our estimate corresponds to only a small fraction of what is projected by more traditional estimates which include public good requirements, cover a broader set of natural disasters and climate stressors, may project increases in the severity of natural disasters, and retain sometimes higher ambition than just to offset consequences of natural disasters. Nevertheless, our estimate is significant and well above current levels, especially in African countries most prone to floods and droughts.


Objective: The study aimed to know the experiences of young mothers of premature children about the postpartum period.
Method and methods: Qualitative research, conducted at the pediatric outpatient clinic of a university hospital in southern Brazil, in the first semester of 2019. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 young mothers of premature children, respecting the ethical principles of the National Health Council. The data were submitted to thematic analysis content.
Results and Discussion: The results pointed out that, during the postpartum period, feelings of anguish and worry arose due to the specific demands of prematurity, but also moments of pleasure and happiness. Those mothers faced several changes in their routines, mainly because their babies were born prematurely. Due to the complex care that some babies required, they experienced fear that their child would need specialized support until stabilization, the long period of hospitalization and, after discharge, home adaptation, which becomes differentiated for a premature infant.
Final Considerations: Young mothers of premature children need a support network to face negative feelings and changes in daily life.


During batch fermentation, the rate of ethanol production per milligram of cell protein is maximal for a brief period early in this process and declines progressively as ethanol accumulates in the surrounding broth. Our studies demonstrate that the removal of this accumulated ethanol does not immediately restore fermentative activity, and they provide evidence that the decline in metabolic rate is due to physiological changes (including possible ethanol damage) rather than to the presence of ethanol. Several potential causes for the decline in fermentative activity have been investigated. Viability remained at or above 90%, internal pH remained near neutrality, and the specific activities of the glycolytic and alcohologenic enzymes (measured in vitro) remained high throughout batch fermentation. None of these factors appears to be causally related to the fall in fermentative activity during batch fermentation.


Multiple object tracking is a crucial Computer Vision Task. It aims at locating objects of interest in the image sequences, maintaining their identities, and identifying their trajectories over time. A large portion of current research focuses on tracking pedestrians, and other types of objects, that often exhibit predictable behaviours, that allow us, as humans, to track those objects. Nevertheless, most existing approaches rely solely on simple affinity or appearance cues to maintain the identities of the tracked objects, ignoring their behaviour. This presents a challenge when objects of interest are invisible or indistinguishable for a long period of time. In this thesis, we focus on enhancing the quality of multiple object trackers by learning and exploiting the long ranging models of object behaviour. Such behaviours come in different forms, be it a physical model of the ball motion, model of interaction between the ball and the players in sports or motion patterns of pedestrians or cars, that is specific to a particular scene. In the first part of the thesis, we begin with the task of tracking the ball and the players in team sports. We propose a model that tracks both types of objects simultaneously, while respecting the physical laws of ball motion when in free fall, and interaction constraints that appear when players are in the possession of the ball. We show that both the presence of the behaviour models and the simultaneous solution of both tasks aids the performance of tracking, in basketball, volleyball, and soccer. In the second part of the thesis, we focus on motion models of pedestrian and car behaviour that emerge in the outdoor scenes. Such motion models are inherently global, as they determine where people starting from one location tend to end up much later in time. Imposing such global constraints while keeping the tracking problem tractable presents a challenge, which is why many approaches rely on local affinity measures. We formulate a problem of simultaneously tracking the objects and learning their behaviour patterns. We show that our approach, when applied in conjunction with a number of state-of-the-art trackers, improves their performance, by forcing their output to follow the learned motion patterns of the scene. In the last part of the thesis, we study a new emerging class of models for multiple object tracking, that appeared recently due to availability of large scale datasets sequence models for multiple object tracking. While such models could potentially learn arbitrarily long ranging behaviours, training them presents several challenges. We propose a training scheme and a loss function


Morbidity due to schistosomiasis was evaluated in a subpopulation of 14,000 of the randomized sample in the Epidemiology 1, 2, 3 Project. It was measured by using a standardized questionnaire for obtaining medical history and symptoms and by performing standardized physical and ultrasound examinations. Reported herein are descriptions of the methods and training and quality control efforts made to insure that the morbidity data was reliable and consistent when collected by 7 different teams in 9 different governorates.


DEPTOR is an endogenous inhibitor of mTOR complexes, de-regulated in cancers. The present study reveals a vital role for DEPTOR in survival of cervical squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). DEPTOR was found to be overexpressed in both cervical SCC cells and tissues and it's silencing in cervical SCC cells induced apoptosis, mainly by up-regulation of p38 MAPK and by inhibiting PI3K/AKT pathway via a feed-back inhibition from mTORC1-S6K. DEPTOR silencing resulted in reduced expression of the nitric oxide synthases iNOS and eNOS, as well as increased activation of ERK1/2 and p38 MAP kinases. Activation of AKT signaling by overexpression of constitutively active-AKT (CA-AKT) failed to overcome the apoptosis caused by DEPTOR silencing. Similarly pharmacological inhibition of ERK also failed to control apoptosis. However pharmacological inhibition of p38 MAPK rescued the cells from apoptosis, indicating the major role of p38 MAPK in cell death induced by DEPTOR silencing. DEPTOR was also found to regulate ERK1/2 in an AKT dependent manner. DEPTOR knockdown induced cell death in SiHa cells overexpressing the anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 and Bcl-xL, indicating strong survival role of DEPTOR in these cells. DEPTOR overexpression activated PI3K/AKT by relieving the negative feed-back inhibition from mTORC1-S6K. DEPTOR regulation was also observed to be independent of HPV E6/E7 oncoproteins, but it might be a molecular co-factor contributing to cervical carcinogenesis. In summary, DEPTOR is found to promote survival of cervical SCC cells and its reduction induced apoptosis via differential effects on PI3K/AKT and p38 MAPK and can be a potential target in cervical SCC.


Climate change and forest governance have always been discussed between scholars, governments and all stakeholders who engage in the issues. Discussions have been arisen from time to time on how devastating the impacts of environment loss caused by the acts of people. These impacts have brought people and countries to see the problems more seriously and attentively.


The virulence of deletion mutants of pseudorabies virus defective in the expression of glycoprotein gI, gp63, or both was tested in 1-day-old chickens and young pigs. In the absence of expression of gI, the virulence of a fully virulent laboratory strain, PrV(Ka), for 1-day-old chickens was reduced approximately fourfold. Inactivation of glycoprotein gp63 appeared also to affect the virulence of PrV(Ka) only slightly, as did inactivation of both gI and gp63. The level of reduction in virulence, however, was considerably more marked in Bartha 43/25aB4, a less virulent virus strain. Inactivation of the expression of gI in Bartha 43/25aB4 reduced virulence for chickens at least 100-fold. The results obtained when the virulence of the mutants for pigs was determined were compatible with those obtained for chickens. These results indicate that gI plays a role in virulence, but that it does so in conjunction with at least one other viral function (a function that is defective in Bartha 43/25aB4).


BACKGROUND AND AIMS The pulmonary symptoms of patients with lung disease may be ascribed to gastro-oesophageal reflux although a causal relationship between acid reflux and coughing or wheezing has not been proved. Does cough cause reflux or does reflux cause cough? The aim of this study was to evaluate 24 hour oesophageal pH tracings of asthmatics with gastro-oesophageal reflux to determine the temporal association between acid reflux and coughing or wheezing. METHODS The oesophageal tracings of 128 asthmatics from the outpatient clinics who underwent oesophagogastroduodenoscopy, oesophageal manometry, and 24 hour oesophageal pH monitoring were analysed. Three possible temporal relationships between the occurrence of acid reflux and the occurrence of coughs or wheezes were evaluated: (1) pulmonary symptoms preceding reflux; (2) reflux preceding pulmonary symptoms; and (3) unrelated occurrence of both events. RESULTS Of 128 asthmatics, 53 recorded five or more coughs and 19 recorded three or more wheezes during the 24 hour recording period. Mean acid contact time was similar in asthmatics with and without pulmonary symptoms (12.2 (1.2)% v 10.4 (0.6)%). Of all coughs and wheezes, 46% and 48%, respectively, were associated with acid reflux. For the individual asthmatic, the likelihood of reflux induced coughing increased as the number of coughs increased. CONCLUSIONS Half of all coughs and wheezes in asthmatics are associated with acid reflux into the oesophagus. While an occasional coughing episode can lead to reflux, it is rather the reflux episode in the vast majority of instances that leads to cough.


Prior knowledge of local increase in sheet metal thickness due to forming of products would contribute to decreasing total product weight by giving the product designer an advance notice of the appropriate sheet metal thickness distribution in a product. A method using simulation to accurately predict such increases would greatly aid the designer in this task. The designer can then distribute thicker parts where a large area moment of inertia is needed from the viewpoint of structural strength in a given section. In terms of optical designing for variable thickness distribution in products, the sheet thickness in a product need not be considered constant. This paper presents the forming prediction during deep drawing. To clarify the mechanism of increase in sheet thickness, a 3-D forming simulation is performed during deep drawing by using the finite element method (FEM). The effects of tool shapes—angle of contact with the original material and the contacting length of the punch with the material—that mainly affect the change in thickness of the original material are investigated. The thickness distribution of drawn cups is measured for comparing the simulation results obtained by FEM with the experimental results. It is shown that controlling the distribution of sheet metal thickness is possible if the original material is relatively thick, and when an appropriate manufacturing method is selected.


Containing over 7000 key terms for business in English and Spanish, this dictionary has been compiled for the non-language specialist who needs to be able to look up the meaning of a word, phrase or acronym in a business context. It is designed to be carried in the pocket or briefcase for quick reference or to be used in the office for general, everyday use in the understanding and preparation of a variety of business documents. The entries have been chosen for their frequency of use and include terms relating to marketing, sales, import and export, finance and accounting, personnel management, transport and distribution.


This paper addresses the problem of achieving full restoration and tolerating as many faults as possible in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks without the capability of wavelength conversion. The problem of finding the maximum number of faults that can be tolerated is modeled as a constrained ring cover set problem, which is a decomposition problem with exponential complexity. The face decomposition algorithm (FDA) that can tolerate one or more faults is proposed. From the results, we know that the maximum number of faults tolerated can be extended from one significantly under various network topologies.


1 The effect of intravenous injections of labetalol at doses of 1 and 2 mg/kg was studied in 15 patients with severe hypertension inadequately controlled by beta-adrenoreceptor-blocking drugs. 2 At a dose of 1 mg/kg there was a slight but statistically insignificant reduction in blood pressure. When 2 mg/kg was given there was a prolonged (6 h) significant reduction in lying blood pressure. At both dose levels there was a small initial increase in pulse rate but forced peak flow was not affected. 3 Side-effects were limited to transient postural hypotension and a feeling of warmth. 4 It is concluded that intravenous labetalol at a dose of 2 mg/kg is safe and effective in rapidly reducing blood pressure in patients already receiving beta-adrenoreceptor-blocking drugs.


This report presents analysis conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) to determine the effectiveness of the risk analysis process used by HUD's Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD). Risk analysis is conducted on recipients of grants from CPD in order to identify those programs most susceptible to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement. CPD staff then monitor the programs identified as high risk as well as a sample of other lower risk programs. This report focuses on risk analysis and monitoring of CPD's four formula grants: the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), HOME Investment Partnerships Program (HOME), Emergency Shelter Grants (ESG), and Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA).


This paper and the companion paper (Rateiro et al., 2011) present an illustrative case of the joint application of experimental tests and numerical simulations for the proper analysis of a complex offshore operation (launching of a sub-sea equipment using one or two vessels). The main idea of the whole study is to compare two methodologies and operational procedures for the installation of the equipment in the seabed, using either one vessel (conventional operation) or two vessels in a synchronized operation in a Y-configuration. The experiment was conducted under a simplified configuration, and uses ODF (one degree of freedom) servo-actuator to emulate the vessels induced motion. The hydrodynamic properties of the equipment was then calculated, and some preliminary conclusions about system dynamics could also be drawn. After that, numerical simulations were conducted, considering the coupled dynamics of the vessels, cables and equipments under irregular sea state. Those simulations were used for determining the limiting environmental condition for a safe operation, and are described in the companion paper. This paper describes the reduced scale experimental setup used for evaluating the hydrodynamic properties of the equipment during a subsea installation under waves excitation. The reduced scale model of the equipment was attached to one or two servo-actuator, that emulate the wave-induced motion. The tests were conducted at the physical wave basin of Numerical Offshore Tank (Tanque de Provas Numerico – TPN). The experiments enabled the preliminary evaluation of the dynamic behavior of the equipment when submerged by one or two launching cables. In the later case (two launching cables), several tests considering phase shifts between the servo-actuator have been conducted. The reduction in the dynamic amplification of cable traction could also be experimentally verified.Copyright © 2011 by ASME