In this paper we suggest and critically discuss new ways in which the gap between forest science, policy making and practice can be spanned – using the lessons from a just completed four-year Latvian–Danish project as a case for working towards better transfer of scientifically based knowledge into forestry. Forest covers nearly 50% of the Latvian total land area. Forests in Latvia contribute increasingly to the national economy, play an important amenity role and are internationally recognised as harbouring a wide array of European threatened plant and animal species, securing a high level of biodiversity. At the same time, forest legislation is in place and the forest science has been well-established in Latvia. Thus, the resource is in place, is more or less intact and, seemingly well protected in a legal sense, and has been the subject of scientific study. However, there is a severe lack of interaction between forest science and practice and policy making. In the paper, the current situation in the forestry sector and some of the underlying barriers to a successful interface between science, practitioners, decision makers and other forest professionals are characterised. A thematic analysis of the problems encountered during the project phase in relation to bridging the gap between science and policy is carried out. Finally, three main types of suggestion are given as how to improve the dialogue and knowledge link between science and practice and policy making in Latvia.


WebSQL is an interactive Internet tool for teaching Structured Query Language (SQL). It can be accessed from a Web Server running at the University of Minnesota or downloaded and installed on a Web Server at any accredited educational institution. It facilitates the learning of SQL by providing an interface to major database management systems for query execution on the web. It allows students to learn with large, rich databases, without the usual problems associated with installing client/server database systems in a lab on a traditional campus. The accompanying interactive SQL tutorial makes use of the these advantages in by allowing students to invoke the WebSQL query interface and dynamically modify and execute any example query.


Who governs in the international organizations (IOs) that promulgate global norms on trade and commercial law? Using a new analytic approach, this paper focuses on previously invisible attributes of a global legislature – the state and non-state delegations and delegates that create universal norms for international trade and commercial law through the most prominent trade law legislature, the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). Based on ten years of fieldwork, extensive interviews, and unique data on delegation and delegate attendance and participation in UNCITRAL's Working Group on Insolvency, we find that the inner core of global trade lawmakers at UNCITRAL represent a tiny and unrepresentative subset of state and non-state actors. This disjunction between UNCITRAL's public face, which accords with a global norm of democratic governance, and its private face, where dominant states and private interests prevail, raises fundamental questions about legitimacy and efficacy of representation in global lawmaking


The technical textiles domain with its classifications into twelve broad segments leaves a great space where Indian industry has the large scope to deliver good results. It can also set an example in the times of turbulences that may occur anytime in today's changing business environment. The global demand for conventional textiles and clothing in which India possessed historically competitive advantages has fallen owing to the stiff competition due to new world economic order as a result of the phasing out of quotas. If we delve deep into the current turmoil in the textiles sector we may comprehend the loose ends that could be fixed with the improved infrastructure, product and market diversification and innovations in the area of technical textiles and investments thereof. It is in this context this paper first describes turbulent times with reference to global slowdown deeply affecting the Indian textiles and clothing industry and then salient features of technical textiles with its growing global as well as the domestic market size. Further, an attempt has been made to underscores the sector specific opportunities and the initiatives being taken by the government, and industry to strengthen the county's inherent competitive advantages in manufacturing and exporting textiles and clothing so that the diversification and innovations in the area of technical textiles may result in quantum leaps in production and export growths and rejuvenate the textiles sector and country may become the world leader in this segment of textiles as well.


Aim: To compare diagnostic values and laboratory variables of alanine - aminopeptidase (microsomal AAP), γ-glutamyl transferase (γ-GT), β2- microglobuline (β2-M), C Reactive Protein (CRP) and index for disease activity (PASI) in early diagnosis in previously untreated Psoriatic arthritis (Psa). To determine the effect of untreated Psoriatic arthritis on tubular function, sensitivity of the Brush Border region as well as the diagnostic value of the enzymes originating from proximal renal tubules. Methods: From the standard methods of the International Federation for Clinical Chemistry (IFCC) we used the kinetic method for determination of alanine - aminopeptidase (microsomal AAP), γ-glutamyl transferase (γ-GT) and MEIA (Microparticles Enzyme Immunoassay (Abbot Axsym system) for determination of β2-microglobuline in urine. We examined samples (serum and urine) from 70 participants (35 Psa untreated, 35 healthy control group). RF and CRP are determined with Latex agglutination test in the same participants. Results: From 35 examined patients with Psa, 12 pts showed presence of AAP enzymuria (test sensitivity was 34.28%), 8 pts showed presence of γ-GT (test sensitivity was 22.85%), while the presence of β2-microglobuline in urine was low (test sensitivity 0%). Conclusion: AAP has better sensitivity than γ-GT and β2-microglobuline in the detection of asymptomatic renal endothelial changes in untreated Psa.


Administration of methylpentynol to human subjects depressed their autonomic reactions to a difficult motor task and impaired their performance. Hexobarbitone affected neither autonomic reactions nor performance, though it impaired hand steadiness. The results suggest that the modes of action of methylpentynol and of hexobarbitone are different.


With the present situation in the Far East the reverse of what it was in the first part of the last century it is interesting to note that many Japanese have a very different memory of the circumstances that preceded their entry into World War II than prevails in the West. The official Western narrative of Japan's pre-war history echoes that enunciated by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the "Tokyo trial"), which stated that a Japanese "criminal, militarist clique" launched a "war of aggression" for the "domination" of East Asia and "the rest of the world." Since then the People's Republic of China (PRC), Japan's well-armed, though key trading partner, has taken every opportunity to lecture Japan on its past "aggressive imperialism" when criticizing what the Japanese view as domestic matters, such as visits by government officials to commemorative shrines, and corrections to post-war history textbooks. Although the "politically correct" strata in Japan accepts the Tribunal's condemnation, the view taken by many Japanese of the era before what they call the "Greater East Asian War" remains markedly contrasted from that dictated by the Tokyo trial, and an elaboration of this Japanese view will facilitate a better understanding of post-war Japanese actions. In the first half of the last century, core Japanese interests included raising the people's standard of living and more equal relations with the West, and to these ends, Japanese policy was molded around that of the United States, a wealthy and powerful state, rather than that of its culturally and racially related neighbor China, which was at that time completely dominated by foreign interests. The more favorable view of Japan's role sees the country's pre-war policy with respect to China as having responded intermittently to fluctuating circumstances, through accommodation and appeasement, rather than the attempt to fully subjugate China. In fact, the Japanese today still tend to react in a similar way towards the PRC and believe that a more aggressive reaction could lead to an unfavorable outcome for Japan, as it did in the past.


Knowing the 3D motions in a dynamic scene is essential to many vision applications. Recent progress is mainly focused on estimating the activity of some specific elements like humans. In this paper, we leverage a neural motion field for estimating the motion of all points in a multiview setting. Modeling the motion from a dynamic scene with multiview data is challenging due to the ambiguities in points of similar color and points with time-varying color. We propose to regularize the estimated motion to be predictable. If the motion from previous frames is known, then the motion in the near future should be predictable. Therefore, we introduce a predictability regularization by first conditioning the estimated motion on latent embeddings, then by adopting a predictor network to enforce predictability on the embeddings. The proposed framework PREF (Predictability REgularized Fields) achieves on par or better results than state-of-the-art neural motion field-based dynamic scene representation methods, while requiring no prior knowledge of the scene.


The inspection of wetlands in the Ecuadorian highlands has gained importance due to the environmental issues linked to the growth of human activities and the expansion of the agricultural and livestock frontiers. In this sense, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been amply used in monitoring activities such as the super-vision of threatened ecosystems, where cyclic measurements and high-resolution imagery are needed. However, the harsh operating conditions in the Andean highlands and sensitive ecosystem restrictions demand efficient propulsion configurations with low environmental impact. Electrical distributed propulsion (EDP) systems have surged as a forefront alternative since they offer benefits in both the propulsive and aerodynamic performance of fixed-wing UAVs. In this chapter, an EDP system is sized for a design point at the Andean operating conditions. Thereafter, two propulsion configurations were established based on off-the-shelf components, and their performance was characterized through analytical approaches. These results highlight the trends in power consumption and performance when the number of propulsors is increased. A significant contribution of this work is to exhibit important patterns in the performance of electric propulsion by using commercial components, and to set the operating limitations that can be further explored for analogous configurations in larger UAVs.


The distribution of steppe‐like habitats and, consequently, species dependent on these habitats in Eurasia is currently highly fragmented beyond the zone of continental climate, as a result of unfavourable climatic conditions and anthropogenic transformation of the environment. This patchy distribution may pose a threat for persistence of steppic species, especially in central Europe. To develop conservation strategies, it is essential to collect information on genetic structure of the species occupying this kind of habitats. We investigated the genetic structure and diversity of central and eastern Coraebus elatus (F.) populations using sequences of mtDNA and an anonymous fragment of the nuclear genome. Both markers exhibited similar pattern, indicating the presence of four or five highly differentiated evolutionary units (2.1–3.2% sequence divergence in mtDNA and 0.7–2.1% in the nuclear marker) encompassing populations from the Caucasus, the Azov Sea coasts, central Europe with the Balkans (with further substructuring) and probably western Europe. These clusters should be considered evolutionary significant units for the conservation biology of this species, and may form the basis for a future taxonomic revision. Pattern of C. elatus diversity suggests that this species presently occupies not only continental 'warm‐stage' refugia formerly described in Pontic and Pannonian areas but also cryptic steppic 'warm‐stage' refugia in north‐central Europe. In line with other studies on steppic beetles, our data strongly suggest that such species are strongly structured genetically, with very limited genetic variation within populations, which may have very serious consequences for their persistence in the future.


Modern crowd counting methods usually employ deep neural networks (DNN) to estimate crowd counts via density regression. Despite their significant improvements, the regression-based methods are incapable of providing the detection of individuals in crowds. The detection-based methods, on the other hand, have not been largely explored in recent trends of crowd counting due to the needs for expensive bounding box annotations. In this work, we instead propose a new deep detection network with only point supervision required. It can simultaneously detect the size and location of human heads and count them in crowds. We first mine useful person size information from point-level annotations and initialize the pseudo ground truth bounding boxes. An online updating scheme is introduced to refine the pseudo ground truth during training; while a locally-constrained regression loss is designed to provide additional constraints on the size of the predicted boxes in a local neighborhood. In the end, we propose a curriculum learning strategy to train the network from images of relatively accurate and easy pseudo ground truth first. Extensive experiments are conducted in both detection and counting tasks on several standard benchmarks, e.g. ShanghaiTech, UCF_CC_50, WiderFace, and TRANCOS datasets, and the results show the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art.


AbstractEnglish title: Outsourcing of operation and maintenance -An interview study about newly reconstituted housing cooperatives motives for outsourcing of operation and maintenance. Swedish title: Outsourcing av drift och underhall -En intervjustudie av nyligen ombildade bostadsrattsforeningars motiv till outsourcing av drift och underhall.Authors: Jonas Lindquist & Carl Melin Published (year): Spring 2013 Tutor: Sven-Ola Carlsson Examinator: Marita BlomqvistBackground: Now days there are no questions for organizations about if they will outsource parts of their business. It is rather a question about what should be outsourced. In terms of organizations our found theory tells what is being outsourced is everything that does not belong to the organization's core business, such as supporting functions. Therefore we would like to find out about what motifs underlying for a housing cooperative to outsource services within operation and maintenance of the property.Problem statement: Why do some recently reconstituted housing cooperatives choose to outsource services within operation and maintenance of the property?Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe why recently reconstituted housing cooperatives choose to outsource services within operation and maintenance, how the work with operation and maintenance is done and also understand what motifs a recently reconstituted housing cooperative have to outsource parts of the operation and maintenance. All this on the basis of theoretical facts and empirical collected data.Method: This thesis is based on a qualitative interview study with a deductive approach. The data collection has consisted of three interviews with three different recently reconstituted housing cooperatives. In each interview has one in their opinion suitable board member of each housing cooperative been involved. The choice of the three different housing cooperatives is based on the requirements of being recently reconstituted and also that they differed in size. One is a small central housing cooperative consisting one house with 27 apartments. One is a large central cooperative consisting three houses with 115 apartments and the last one is a housing cooperative consisting of terraced houses with 54 apartments just outside the city. After the empirical data was all collected it has been compared to already existing theories found for analysis. The analysis in turn has resulted in our conclusions and suggestions for further research.Conclusion: Our conclusions are that within recently reconstituted housing cooperatives there are several different motifs of using outsourcing of operation and maintenance. Seen to the various theories we have chosen the common factor from the three different housing cooperatives were timesaving, which also can be translated into costs. Another factor that primarily relates to the operation are skills shortages. We note that it is almost impossible for a tenant to avoid outsourcing include elevator inspection where required a specific core competencies to accomplish it.


ABSTRACT The transcription factor SKN-1 protects Caenorhabditis elegans from stress and promotes longevity. SKN-1 is regulated by diverse signals that control metabolism, development, and stress responses, but the mechanisms of regulation and signal integration are unknown. We screened the C. elegans genome for regulators of cytoprotective gene expression and identified a new SKN-1 regulatory pathway. SKN-1 protein levels, nuclear accumulation, and activity are repressed by the WD40 repeat protein WDR-23, which interacts with the CUL-4/DDB-1 ubiquitin ligase to presumably target the transcription factor for proteasomal degradation. WDR-23 regulates SKN-1 target genes downstream from p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase, glycogen synthase kinase 3, and insulin-like receptor pathways, suggesting that phosphorylation of SKN-1 may function to modify its interaction with WDR-23 and/or CUL-4/DDB-1. These findings define the mechanism of SKN-1 accumulation in the cell nucleus and provide a new mechanistic framework for understanding how phosphorylation signals are integrated to regulate stress resistance and longevity.


Introduction : Inhibiting factors in clinical learning of nursing students cause a huge gap between the optimum and the current situation in performance of the graduates. Due to the lack of a comprehensive and reliable tool for the identification of these factors in Iran, this study aimed to develop a scale to assess the related items to nursing students' clinical learning. Methods : This descriptive study used Delphi approach to assess factors associated with clinical learning of nursing students in nursing schools of Yazd province in 2013. The expert panel includes all registrars in nursing faculties, nursing clinical tutors; nursing personnel involved in education and years three and four nursing students. In the first round of Delphi, data collection tool was a structured questionnaire with 82 items and an open question for additional suggestions. Sampling method in those with responsibility was purposive, due to their limited number, and in other groups was random. Sample size was 48 of whom 41 agreed to participate in the study. According to the Delphi process, scope and scale of items were studied by 41 members of the panel to reach over than 75% consensus. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS V 17.0 software using various analytic tests. Results : Consensus on the questionnaire items was obtained during the two-round Delphi, and in the final questionnaire, the percentage of agreement between expert panel reached 79.85%. Panel members came to agreement on factors associated with clinical learning questionnaire consisted 89 items in seven domains of educational planning (79.94%), evaluation (76.21%), resources and regulation of clinical environment (81.17%), professional communications (81.25%), clinical instructor (82/62), clinical instructor teaching methods (81.25%) and student learning (81.91%). Conclusion : The clinical learning factors questionnaire for nursing students, with 79.85% consensus of the expert panel, can be considered as a comprehensive and valid questionnaire to assess clinical training and to identify weaknesses and challenges of nursing students' clinical learning in Iran.


Measurements of the ice nucleating ability of aerosol particles in air masses over Florida having sources from North Africa support the potential importance of dust aerosols for indirectly affecting cloud properties and climate. The concentrations of ice nuclei within dust layers at particle sizes below 1 μm exceeded 1 cm−3; the highest ever reported with our device at temperatures warmer than homogeneous freezing conditions. These measurements add to previous direct and indirect evidence of the ice nucleation efficiency of desert dust aerosols, but also confirm their contribution to ice nuclei populations at great distances from source regions.


In dynamic force microscopy, the force sensor is driven on its resonance frequency and the amplitude of the cantilever is sustained at a constant value. The amplitude typically ranges between 0.1 and 30 nm. If a large amplitude is set, the cantilever tip senses both long-range and short-range interaction forces provided that the tip is close to the sample surface. The short-range interactions are decisive for the atomic contrast in atomic force microscopy (AFM) images. They can be separated from the long-range interactions by setting an amplitude which encompasses the typical range of the interaction force, i.e., the subangstrom regime for van der Waals contribution. It is distinctive for cantilevers operated at small driving amplitudes that the cantilever deflection can be considered as a sinusoidal signal superimposed with a quasimonochromatic random signal originating from fluctuations. If one measures experimentally the standard deviation of the phase ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{\ensuremath{\varphi}}$ of the signal with respect to a monochromatic reference signal, a universal relationship between the standard deviation of the phase ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{\ensuremath{\varphi}}$ and the cantilever amplitude ${x}_{0}$ is found. The smaller the ratio of rms amplitude of the sinusoidal signal and the rms value of random signal is, the larger the phase fluctuations are. Phase fluctuations are of importance for measurements at small amplitudes, since they determine the limit of phase-sensitive measurements or the lateral imaging resolution in the so-called pendulum mode of AFM operation. In this paper we develop a heuristic model, which provides an analytical formula for the probability density of phase noise of a sinusoidal signal superimposed by a quasimonochromatic one with respect to a reference oscillator. The variance of the phase noise can be deduced from the distribution functions. The suggested model is verified experimentally and is compared with theoretical predictions. The amplitude-dependent phase fluctuations are a powerful tool to determine the spring constant of the beam or to calibrate its oscillation amplitude.


With few exceptions, the ground collapses that constitute the karst geohazard in engineering activity in limestone terrains are induced by human activity. Subsidence sinkholes, formed entirely within the soil profile, constitute the most widespread karst geohazard, but are largely induced by engineered works, either directly or accidentally. Water table decline (as a result of pumped abstraction or quarry de-watering) and uncontrolled surface drainage input are the two key factors that induce subsidence sinkholes, especially where both are involved. Collapse sinkholes, formed by failure of bedrock over a cavity, are rare in natural karst landscapes, but may be induced by excessive loading imposed on limestone that lies above an open cave; the risks associated with this geohazard should be eliminated by implementation of an appropriate site investigation that includes proof drilling. Case studies to demonstrate the karst geohazard concern: (1) homes damaged by new sinkholes around a de-watered limestone quarry in Pennsylvania; (2) problems with sinkholes for a railway across dolomite karst in South Africa; (3) collapse of ground in pseudokarst in Guatemala; (4) failure of a viaduct pier into an unseen cave in Florida; (5) estimation of potential sizes of collapse sinkholes along a pipeline route over gypsum karst in Turkey. As hazardous new sinkholes in karst are almost entirely induced by either uncontrolled drainage or excessive loading, they should be largely eliminated by appropriate engineering design and works. These need to be based on a proper understanding of karst ground conditions.


Traditionally, wireless network protocols have been designed for performance. Subsequently, as attacks have been identified, patches have been developed. This has resulted in an "arms race" development process of discovering vulnerabilities and then patching them. The fundamental difficulty with this approach is that other vulnerabilities may still exist. No provable security or performance guarantees can ever be provided. We develop a system-theoretic approach to security that provides a complete protocol suite with provable guarantees, as well as proof of min-max optimality with respect to any given utility function of source-destination rates. Our approach is based on a model capturing the essential features of an ad-hoc wireless network that has been infiltrated with hostile nodes. We consider any collection of nodes, some good and some bad, possessing specified capabilities vis-a-vis cryptography, wireless communication, and clocks. The good nodes do not know the bad nodes. The bad nodes can collaborate perfectly, and are capable of any disruptive acts ranging from simply jamming to noncooperation with the protocols in any manner they please. The protocol suite caters to the complete life cycle, all the way from the birth of nodes, through all phases of ad-hoc network formation, leading to an optimized network carrying data reliably. It provably achieves the min-max of the utility function, where the max is over all protocol suites published and followed by the good nodes, while the min is over all Byzantine behaviors of the bad nodes. Under the protocol suite, the bad nodes do not benefit from any actions other than jamming or cooperating. This approach supersedes much of the previous work that deals with several types of attacks including wormhole, rushing, partial deafness, routing loops, routing black holes, routing gray holes, and network partition attacks.


This paper studies and identifies driver`s steering manoeuvre behaviour in near rear-end collision. Time-To-Collision (TTC) is utilized in defining driver's emergency threat assessment. The target scenario is set up under real experimental environment and the naturalistic data from the experiment are collected. Four normal drivers are employed for the experiment to perform the manoeuvre. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is proposed to model the behaviour of the driver`s steering manoeuvre. The results show that all drivers manage to perform steering manoeuvre within the safe TTC region and the modelling results from ANN are reasonably positive. With further studies and improvements, this model would benefit to evaluate the driving reliability to enhance traffic safety and Intelligent Transportation System.


Generating application-level content within network simulations and/or testbed environments tends toward an ad-hoc process reliant primarily on evaluator expertise. Such ad-hoc approaches are laborious and often fail to capture important aspects of how content is distributed within traffic. Further, while many tools allow for the generation of a wide-range of content types, there exists no coherent model for populating these tools with the necessary data. To address these issues we propose two models for dynamically generating content so as to provide a systematic means for populating a test with relevant data. First we create content targeting Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) that are severely impacted by the composition of the traffic combined with the set of known signatures. Most NIDS evaluation techniques employ on/off models where a packet is either malicious or not. Such evaluation ignores the case where the content of a benign packet partially intersects with one or many signatures, causing more processing for the NIDS. To address this hole in evaluation we propose a traffic model that uses the target NIDS signature set to create partially-matching traffic. This partially-matching traffic then allows the systematic examination of the NIDS across multiple scenarios. Such evaluation provides insight into the idiosyncrasies of a NIDS that would remain hidden if evaluated under current methodologies.
Next, we broaden our content generation model to account for all network applications. We create a content generative model for identifying, harvesting, and assigning application-level content to simulated traffic. This model ties consumers of content to the producers of the content as well to a particular content category. This approach then allows for said content to be tied to a workload generator or simulator of choice to evaluate a given network application. Finally, we discuss the implementation of these models and potential optimizations for high-speed environments. Ultimately, the models provided here allow for the systematic generation of content for network applications and serves to bridge the gap in current evaluation methodologies between network traffic simulation and content.


This path-breaking book addresses the ongoing implications for traditional pharmaceutical companies and biopharmaceutical start-ups of the realignment of the industry knowledge-base. The theoretical approach draws on the modern theory of the firm and related ideas in order to better define the concept of the business model, which is employed to guide the case studies and empirical analysis in the book.


Appropriateness of representation of a biological object surface as an equipotential surface has been proved for conditions of a quasistatic exposure to EMF of frequencies lower than 1 MHz. The conditions, at which a self capacitance of a biological object is its basic electrical parameter, have been considered. A factor of animal-to-human approximation of low-frequency EMF exposure conditions was estimated on the basis of equal dose loading in biological objects of different geometric sizes.


I am a Linguist provides a fascinating account of the academic adventures of multi-faceted linguist, R.M.W. (Bob) Dixon. There is fieldwork (and lengthy grammars) on Dyirbal, Yidin and other Aboriginal languages of Australia, the Boumaa dialect of Fijian, and Jarawara from the dense jungles of Amazonia. Theoretical studies include adjective classes, ergativity and complement clauses. There are also detective novels, science fiction stories, and pioneering work on blues and gospel discography. Interspersed with the autobiographical narrative are explanations of how linguistics is a scientific discipline, of the development of universities, of diminishing academic standards, and of the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. The book is written in an easy, accessible style with numerous illustrative anecdotes. It will be an inspiration to young linguists and of interest to the general reader curious about what a scientific linguist does.


Music performance depends critically on precise processing of time. A common model behavior in studies of motor timing is isochronous serial interval production (ISIP), that is, hand/finger movements with a regular beat. ISIP accuracy is related to both music practice and intelligence. Here we present a study of these associations in a large twin cohort, demonstrating that the effects of music practice and intelligence on motor timing are additive, with no significant multiplicative (interaction) effect. Furthermore, the association between music practice and motor timing was analyzed with the use of a co‐twin control design using intrapair differences. These analyses revealed that the phenotypic association disappeared when all genetic and common environmental factors were controlled. This suggests that the observed association may not reflect a causal effect of music practice on ISIP performance but rather reflect common influences (e.g., genetic effects) on both outcomes. The relevance of these findings for models of practice and expert performance is discussed.


Acute renal failure (ARF) is a syndrome associated with high mortality rate in humans. ARF now known as acute kidney injury (AKI) represents a significant and devastating problem in clinical medicine. This work was performed on adult male albino rats to study the possible protective effects of ginger which is considered as one of the promising medicinal plants and N-acetylcystiene on acute tubular necrosis induced by glycerol. Sixty adult male Albino rats divided into 5 groups each were included in this study. Kidney tissue specimens were processed for histological study; hematoxylin and eosin (H & E), immunohistochemical staining for caspase3 and mRNA gene expression study by real time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) through the assessment of catalase (CAT) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx1) genes. The renal CAT gene expression was found to be decreased in the glycerol group (affected group). Administration of ginger extract and N-acetylcystiene separately or combined before glycerol significantly increased the CAT and GPx1 gene expression.  We concluded that the administration of oral ginger extract and N-acetylcystiene separately and combined had prophylactic role in ARF.  Also the combination of both had synergistic effect.

 Key words: Ginger, N-acetylcysteine, renal failure, glutathione peroxidase, catalase gene.


The aim of our research was to compare delta B-11 measurements performed with thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) and sector field-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (SF-ICP-MS) and evaluate the feasibility of implementing stable isotope methods in European water framework directive (WFD) monitoring programs. The comparison was based on delta B-11 measurements of 192 ground-and surface water samples and 15 leachates of nitrate pollution source materials (organic and mineral fertilisers). The precision of delta B-11 measurements attainable with SF-ICP-MS, 2 sigma= +/- 2.6 parts per thousand; (n = 192), is as expected lower than the precision achieved by TIMS, 2 sigma= +/- 0.3 parts per thousand (n=183). However the ease of use, rapidity and availability of SF-ICP-MS on one hand and the observed variability in delta B-11 in ground-and surface water on the other (from -3.4 to +37 parts per thousand), demonstrates that using SF-ICP-MS as an isotopic screening method would promote the use of isotopic methodology for WFD monitoring. Based on the results of the different case studies it is shown that retrieving precise information on the identification of pollution sources from delta B-11 values requires reaching the best analytical precision and accuracy possible. Hence, the superior precision of TIMS advantages tracing of nitrate pollution sources. However for some cases, e. g. trying to decipher contributions between sources with really distinct delta B-11 signatures (e.g. manure and sewage effluent), SF-ICP-MS results lead to the same conclusions and can therefore be used as a first approachable screening method for the determination of delta B-11 in WFD monitoring programs.


This study aims to develop a Natural Language Processing based decision support system built from a repository of knowledge drawn from referral letters written between primary care doctors and specialist medical consultants. The developed system translates pre-processed referral letters into a semantic matrix of document vectors and a set of vocabulary features, based solely on the words used within each referral letter. The system applies a one-versus-rest heuristic using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to convert a multinomial classification problem into individual binary classifications. Each document is matched to its probabilistic best fit specialism. The National Health Service Wales sourced 111,700 examples. Accuracy of 91.8% against 29 medical specialities is achieved. Accuracy increases to 97.4% and 99%, respectively, when also including one or two nearest neighbours to the best fit, providing a basis for informing the decision making of a medical professional. The study demonstrates the efficacy of using referral letters to allow or classification into specialisms and subsequent allocation of specialist care. The approach taken in this study does not require added ontologies and is readily extendable. The system offers support to medical professionals, particularly within training scenarios or where access to opinion may be in short supply.


Objectives: This study is to analyze Acupuncture Methods(鍼法) using Five Transport Points(五輸穴) and to consider the direction of development. Methods: This study focuses on Acupuncture Methods(鍼法) using Five Transport Points(五輸穴) that Five Phase Theory(五行學說) has been applied as a compound and it is designated Five Phase-Five Transport Points-Acupuncture Method(FPT Acupuncture Method, 五行五輸穴鍼法). Principles, Acupuncture Points(經穴), standards of diagnosis and treatment subjects of FPT Acupuncture Methods used in practices of Korean Medicine (韓醫學) were analyzed through updated literature. Next, the theoretical issues of FPT Acupuncture Methods regarding the composition of selecting exclusively on Five Transport Points(五輸穴) and targeted treatment subjects were investigated. Based upon the investigation, the future direction of development was studied. Results & Conclusions: Firstly, pattern identification and treatment of FPT Acupuncture Methods targeted mostly on Viscera and Bowels(臟腑). However, some showed the tendency to Five Phases Reductionism(五行 還元主義) which attempts to apply Five Phase Theory(五行學說) to symptoms that were not related to Viscera and Bowels(臟腑). Secondly, Five Transport Points(五輸穴) are theoretically related to 'Viscera and Bowels in Concept of Visceral Manifestation(臟象臟腑)'. Thirdly, when the cause of the symptoms exceeds the main therapeutic range of FPT Acupuncture Methods, it is effective to add Acupuncture Points(經穴) excluding Five Transport Points(五輸穴). And also, it is efficient to use Acupuncture Methods(鍼法) that is not based on principles of Five Phase Theory(五行學說). For the accomplishment, further researches on the approaches to apply basic Korean Medical principles such as Three Yin and Three Yang(三陰 三陽) into Acupuncture Methods(鍼法) and Acupuncture Points(經穴) are necessary.


Government policy for the long-term management of the UK's higher-activity radioactive waste
is geological disposal as outlined in the 2008 Managing Radioactive Waste Safely (MRWS)
White Paper. The Government remains firmly committed to this policy and continues to hold the
view that the best means of selecting a site for a geological disposal facility (GDF) is an
approach based on voluntarism and partnership.
Feedback from a wide range of stakeholders has indicated that a robust presentation of what is
known, and what is not known, about the geology of any prospective area is needed at an early
stage in the MRWS process. The existing BGS GB3D model provides the only nationally
consistent representation of the bedrock geology of Great Britain to depths of at least 1km. The
links between this dataset and the underpinning geological evidence needed to be strengthened
and rigorous peer review performed to enable an enhanced dataset to inform the MRWS process.
So the objective of this study was to further develop the GB3D model in England and Wales by
the incorporation of about 300 deep boreholes into the existing framework of cross-sections, reroute
some sections to incorporate the borehole data and provide additional sections to densify
the network in order to produce a robust, verifiable and defensible dataset.


In an effort to promote further the internal market, the European Commission has proposed the Common Frame ofReference (CFR) and the creation of an optional model for an optional European Civil Code. fVithin the CFR, insurance law is prominent due to the importance ofthe insurance sector for the EU economy, the character of insurance contracts as a special bread of cross-border trade, and the need to complete the internal insurance market. To this effect, the Reinsurance Directive 2005/68/EC and the Solvency II Directive have been shaped in an effort also to fill the gap for homogenous insurance and reinsurance regulation. In examining the current status of EU insurance and reinsurance law, the EU policy and reasoning behind it, and the latest developments regarding the proposed CFR and optional instrument for an optional European Civil Code, we assess tlie future of European insurance law, the best way to achieve harmonisation in the insurance sector and the anticipated impact of harmonisation on the internal market. Key tvords: EUpolicy, Common Frame ofReference, contract law, directive, insurance, reinsurance, harmonization


In Western countries alcohol misuse is the most frequent cause of thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency (TD) and consequent neuro-impairment. Studies have demonstrated that between 30 and 80% of alcoholics are thiamine deficient, and this puts them at risk of developing the Wernicke-Korsakoff (WK) syndrome. The relative roles of alcohol and TD in causing brain damage remain controversial and it is important to try to determine the role played by each factor. Animal studies support an additive effect of alcohol exposure and TD, and indicate the potential for interaction between alcohol and TD in human alcohol-related brain damage. Early diagnosis of alcohol-related TD is therefore an important aspect of effective intervention and treatment. Alcohol biomarkers provide a direct and indirect way of estimating the amount of alcohol being consumed, the duration of ingestion and the harmful effects that long-term alcohol use has on body functions. Appropriate use of these markers is very helpful when considering a diagnosis of alcohol-related TD.


In early written corrective feedback studies, there were a lot of attempts to test if the feedback types are effective. This study was based on the assumption prevailing in the new era of studies of written corrective feedback, that feedback is effective. Firstly, it aims to compare the think-aloud protocols of the preferred and unpreferred feedback types which were chosen by 20 English learners (10 in preferred, and 10 in unpreferred feedback). To this aim, learners were asked to write diaries for six weeks. In each session, concurrent think-aloud protocols were employed and learners' verbal reports were extracted, and their mental processes were coded through developing a table of mental operations. In the second part of the study, the relative effectiveness of the preferred and unpreferred feedback was measured. Using the Chi-square goodness-of-fit test, the findings of the first part showed a significant difference between the mental operations for each feedback type. The results for the second part suggested that there is a significant difference between the effectiveness of the preferred and unpreferred feedback types. This latter finding indicates that the preferred feedback can facilitate the development of the accuracy in L2 learners' writing more than the unpreferred feedback.


Summary.  People with haemophilia experience a progressive deterioration of their functional health status. Regular clinical assessment of functional health status provides insight into their process of disablement. As such, the development of a core‐set of measurement tools is warranted. The aim of this study was to gather data to prepare a (preliminary) core set of clinically relevant and feasible instruments to assess the functional health status of adults with haemophilia, and to indicate their psychometric qualities. Therefore, clinimetric instruments frequently used in two haemophilia‐resembling diseases (Rheumatoid Arthritis and Osteoarthritis) were reviewed from the literature. An extensive search in Medline yielded 13 relevant review articles, incorporating a total of 182 instruments, of which 40 were appropriate for haemophilia. Of these 40 instruments 3 measure body structures, 13 body functions, 19 activities (of which 5 are performance based and 14 self‐report based), and 3 measure participation. This classification is based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. Detailed information regarding the psychometrics (reliability, validity and responsiveness) of four instruments is described fully in the literature, whereas the psychometrics of the majority of the other instruments are only partly described. The results of this literature study may contribute to the formation of a (preliminary) core set of clinimetric instruments to assess the functional health status of adults with haemophilia. Decisions on the final core set should be held within the Musculoskeletal Committee of the World Federation of Haemophilia.


This paper introduces a novel topology of the proposed converter that has these merits: (i) the topology of the converter is based on conventional boost and buck-boost converters, which has caused its simplicity; (ii) the voltage gain of the converter has provided higher values by the lower value of the duty cycle; (iii) due to the use of high-efficiency conventional topologies in its structure, the efficiency of the converter keeps its high value for a great interval of duty cycle; (iv) besides the increase of the voltage gain, the current/voltage stresses of the semiconductors have been kept low; (v) the continuous input current of this converter reduces the current stress of the capacitor in the input filter. It is worth noting that the proposed converter has been discussed in both ideal and non-ideal modes. Moreover, the operation of the converter has been discussed in both continuous/discontinuous current modes. The advantages of the converter have been compared with recently suggested converters. In addition, the different features of the converter have been discussed for different conditions. In the small-signal analysis, the appropriate compensator has been designed. Finally, the simulation and experimental results have been reported for 90 W output power, 90 V output voltage, 3-times voltage gain, and 100 kHz switching frequency.


Abstract A singular lower Aptian lithofacies from the western Maestrat Basin (Iberian Chain) highlights the reaction of carbonate platform paleocommunities to natural disturbances of regional to global significance. It is composed mainly of sand- to cobble-sized coral rubble rigidly bound by Lithocodium aggregatum and is coeval with the early Aptian Oceanic Anoxic Event (OAE1a) and the intensified greenhouse conditions connected with this event. Severe storms induced by high atmospheric concentrations of CO2 had a recurrent catastrophic impact on coral populations, giving rise to sub-basin–wide coral rubble levels. Physical responses to elevated atmospheric CO2 levels, such as increased nutrient fluxes, together with low sedimentation rates, and the presence of a hard substratum, favored the mass occurrence of Lithocodium crusts, large flattened Palorbitolina lenticularis, and bioeroders such as lithophagid bivalves and endolithic sponges. These encrusted coral rubble deposits are here interpreted as records of chemical and physical disturbances linked to the OAE1a. Due to significant extension and normal faulting recorded in the lower Aptian of the western Maestrat Basin, however, earthquake-induced natural stresses might also have played a part in the generation and reworking of these coral rubble deposits.


Abstract Aims To describe heparin dosing requirements in patients who underwent catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation with uninterrupted anticoagulation using dabigatran etexilate (dabigatran) or warfarin to attain therapeutic activated clotting time (ACT) in the RE-CIRCUIT® study. The RE-CIRCUIT study showed significantly fewer major bleeding events in the dabigatran vs. warfarin treatment group. Unfractionated heparin was administered during the procedure to maintain ACT >300 s. Methods and results Patients were randomly assigned to dabigatran 150 mg bid or international normalized ratio-adjusted warfarin. Ablation was performed with uninterrupted anticoagulation and continued for 8 weeks after the procedure. Heparin was administered after placement of femoral sheaths before or immediately after transseptal puncture. Ablation was performed in 635 patients (dabigatran, 317; warfarin, 318); data were available from 396 patients administered heparin (dabigatran, 191; warfarin, 205). Most frequent time window from last dose of study drug to septal puncture was 0 to <4 h in the dabigatran (41.3%) and 16 to <24 h in the warfarin arms (44.7%). Overall mean (standard deviation) heparin dose was similar between the dabigatran and warfarin groups [12 402 (10 721) vs. 11 910 (8359) IU, respectively]. Heparin dosing requirement to reach therapeutic ACT was lowest when time from last dose of dabigatran to septal puncture was 0 to <4 h. Conclusion Patients treated with dabigatran required a similar amount of unfractionated heparin as those treated with warfarin to achieve an ACT of >300 s during ablation. More heparin units were required when the time from the last dose of dabigatran to septal puncture increased.


This article considers the development of a reusable object-oriented array library, as well as the use of this library in the construction of finite difference and finite element codes. The classes in this array library are also generic enough to be used to construct other classes specific to finite difference and finite element methods. We demonstrate the usefulness of this library by inserting it into two existing object-oriented scientific codes developed at Sandia National Laboratories. One of these codes is based on finite difference methods, whereas the other is based on finite element methods. Previously, these codes were separately maintained across a variety of sequential and parallel computing platforms. The use of object-oriented programming allows both codes to make use of common base classes. This offers a number of advantages related to optimization and portability. Optimization efforts, particularly important in large scientific codes, can be focused on a single library. Furthermore, by encapsulating machine dependencies within this library, the optimization of both codes on different architec-tures will only involve modification to a single library.


In a Steer-by-Wire (SbW) system, the mechanical linkages which connect the steering wheel to front wheels are replaced by a digitally controlled steering system. In spite of improved vehicle safety due to better steering capability, the SbW system actuator failure may lead to unwanted steering performance or even instability. A fault tolerant model predictive control (MPC) with fault compensation for SbW systems based on delta operator for actuator faults is proposed. It deploys an observer to estimate both the fault information and the faulty SbW system states. At each sampling time, the MPC immediately compensates for the fault. The gains of the observer and the fault tolerant MPC controller are obtained by solving a linear matrix inequality derived from the Lyapunov theory. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed fault tolerant control strategy can counter the various types of actuator faults and maintain superior steering performance to shift operator-based MPC controller.


Abstract:Ireland experienced dramatic political, social and economic change in the twentieth century, of which the shift from a majority rural to a majority urban population was one of the most notable. These changes are reflected in the nature and form of the built environment. In this essay, the evolution of urban and suburban housing during Ireland's first urban century is considered. Existing patterns of unplanned middleclass suburban expansion were supplemented, from the 1920s, by a programme of planned working-class suburbanization. State intervention thus impacted on the location and form of new housing estates, while layouts owed much to the early British town-planning movement. High levels of owner-occupation in Ireland, the combined result of government policy and individual preference, were also reflected in a preference for particular housing forms. The predominance of the standardised three-or four-bedroom, semi-detached or detached house, was not challenged until the 1990s when there was a surge in apartment provision, largely driven by tax incentives. Changing norms in terms of housing size, facilities and design were shaped by the standards adopted by government and local authorities, as well as to the pressures of the speculative building process.


The function of the ambulance service is changing from one of transportation to one of care, but quality indicators corresponding to the change in function are lacking in the Netherlands, prompting the following research question: 'What are suitable quality indicators for ambulance service in the Netherlands?' A suitable indicator aligns with the definition of ambulance service quality, has as many advantages as possible, has as few disadvantages as possible and is preferably evidence based.
The definition for quality of ambulance service, translated to the Dutch context, is _the degree to which ambulance service, both transport and care, for individuals and populations is consistent with current professional knowledge and minimises mortality and morbidity_. International literature describes 69 quality indicators for ambulance service. Together with four categorisations, quality indicators define seven aspects of ambulance service quality: 'organisation', 'staff', 'material facilities', 'care provision', 'documents & protocols', 'adverse events' and 'patient outcomes'.
Since this research concerns thoughts and opinions, qualitative methods have been used. Data is collected using a literature review, document analysis, semi-structured interviews and observations.
Currently in the Netherlands, seven indicators are implemented and two are used: patient satisfaction and response time. The respondents define five facets of quality of ambulance service: being 'patient centred', 'patient experience', 'skilled staff', 'equipment' and 'transportation'. They want to measure quality through patient satisfaction, prior education accreditation and assessment, amount of restricted procedures performed, the driver style, social skills of nurses and drivers, rate of non-emergency calls and collaboration with the care chain. The disadvantages of quality indicators that the respondents see are administrative burden, decoupling, distrust, injustice and waste of resources. The advantages are benchmarking, improvement of care and practice-based evidence.
The only aspect that science, policy and clinical practice agree upon is patient outcomes, with patient satisfaction as a quality indicator. Five indicators are mentioned in the international literature and by ambulance nurses, drivers, managers and policy advisors: rate of non-emergency calls, prior education, accreditation, assessment of ambulance personnel and patient satisfaction. These indicators correspond with three of the seven aspects of quality: 'organisation', 'staff' and 'patient outcomes'. This set forms a promising starting point for a process of defining suitable quality indicators in the Dutch ambulance service context, measuring the key concepts of quality, that are evidence based and applicable in practice.


The need for increase in fish production in order to improve protein intake by Nigerians led to this study. The study analyzed information needs of backyard fish farmers in Osun State, Nigeria. Specifically, the study investigated the socio-economic characteristics of backyard fish farmers, frequency of performance, importance and difficulties of management practices as well as the constraints facing backyard fish farming. Questionnaire was used to elicit information from 70 backyard fish farmers. The findings indicated that backyard fish farmers in Osun State were mostly males, middle aged, married and most of them rear catfish, Feeding and cleaning are frequently performed by the fish farmers, feeding and maintenance of water quality were of extreme importance and also cleaning and harvesting were found to be extremely difficult. The major constraints facing the fish farmers were capital, security, feed, fingerlings procurement. The paper concluded that backyard fish farmers need training on management practices.


A novel anatase TiO2 with nanostrawberry-like structure with high porosity has been synthesised on ITO, with the aid of microwave power in a very short duration of 6 minutes. The growth of these novel TiO2nanostructures on ITO is attained stoichiometrically by using ammonium hexafluoro titanate, Hexamethylenetetramine, and Boric acid as precursor, capping agent, and reducing agent, respectively. Optical absorption intensity and thickness of these nanostructure layers can be varied by the growth time. A highly porous, 2.25 µm thickest layer has been successfully synthesised on ITO, and the average diameter of these nanostructures was found approximately 70±2.5nm. These highly porous nanostructures are expected to be good candidate for photocatlysis applications and efficient photovoltaic performances of dye sensitised solar cells.


This guideline aims to provide an overview of the present knowledge on aspects of perioperative fasting with assessment of the quality of the evidence. A systematic search was conducted in electronic databases to identify trials published between 1950 and late 2009 concerned with preoperative fasting, early resumption of oral intake and the effects of oral carbohydrate mixtures on gastric emptying and postoperative recovery. One study on preoperative fasting which had not been included in previous reviews and a further 13 studies published since the most recent review were identified. The searches also identified 20 potentially relevant studies of oral carbohydrates and 53 on early resumption of oral intake. Publications were classified in terms of their evidence level, scientific validity and clinical relevance. The Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network scoring system for assessing level of evidence and grade of recommendations was used. The key recommendations are that adults and children should be encouraged to drink clear fluids up to 2 h before elective surgery (including caesarean section) and all but one member of the guidelines group consider that tea or coffee with milk added (up to about one fifth of the total volume) are still clear fluids. Solid food should be prohibited for 6 h before elective surgery in adults and children, although patients should not have their operation cancelled or delayed just because they are chewing gum, sucking a boiled sweet or smoking immediately prior to induction of anaesthesia. These recommendations also apply to patients with obesity, gastro-oesophageal reflux and diabetes and pregnant women not in labour. There is insufficient evidence to recommend the routine use of antacids, metoclopramide or H2-receptor antagonists before elective surgery in non-obstetric patients, but an H2-receptor antagonist should be given before elective caesarean section, with an intravenous H2-receptor antagonist given prior to emergency caesarean section, supplemented with 30 ml of 0.3 mol l(-1) sodium citrate if general anaesthesia is planned. Infants should be fed before elective surgery. Breast milk is safe up to 4 h and other milks up to 6 h. Thereafter, clear fluids should be given as in adults. The guidelines also consider the safety and possible benefits of preoperative carbohydrates and offer advice on the postoperative resumption of oral intake.


The purpose of this study was to develop an advanced 7-axis Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) Polishing Machine from its successful original application of industrial optics manufacture into a process for the manufacture of femoral knee components to improve wear characteristics and prolong component lifetimes.

It was indentified that the successful manufacture of optical components using a corrective polishing procedure to enhance their performance could be applied to femoral knee implant components. Current femoral knee implants mimic the natural shape of the joint and are freeform (no axis of symmetry) in nature hence an advanced CNC polishing machine that can follow the contours associated with such shapes could improve surface finish and conformity of replacement femoral knee bearing surfaces, leading to improved performance.

The process involved generating machine parameters that would optimize the polishing procedure to minimize wear of materials used in femoral knee implant manufacture. Secondly a design of a Non-Uniform Refind B-Spline (NURBS) model for control of the Polishing Machine over the freeform contours of the femoral component. Completing the process involved development of a corrective polishing process that would improve form control of the components. Such developments would improve surface finish and conformity which are well documented contributors to wear and hence the lifeline of orthopaedic implants.

By the means of comparison of this technique to that of a conventional finishing technique using pin-on-plate disc testing it was concluded that performance of the CNC polished components was an improvement on that of the conventional technique. In the case of form control their were slight indications through small decreases in peak to valley (PV) error that the process helped reduce form error and could increase the lifetime of femoral knee replacement components.

The overall study provided results that indicate the the Zeeko process could be used in the application of polishing of hard-on-hard material combinations to improve form control without compromising surface finish hence improving lifetimes of the implant. The results have their limitations in the fact that the wear test performance was only carried out on orthopaedic implant materials using a pin-on-plate wear test rig. Due to the time limitations on the thesis it can be said that further analysis of correcting form without compromising surface finish on entire implant systems under full joint simulator testing which would provide mre realistic contitions would a more definitive answer be achieved.


The functioning of the Golgi complex in protein intracellular transport is most simply understood in terms of its being composed of a sequence of functionally distinct subcompartments. For example, the influence of perturbation of cellular Na+-K+ balance on the transport of secretory and membrane glycoproteins is to greatly slow their passage from relatively proximal to relatively distal subcompartments. To further the understanding of the nature of these subcompartments a rat IgM myeloma has been subjected to analytical subcellular fractionation. Fractions selectively enriched in distinct Golgi-associated activities have been prepared and their membrane proteins compared with those of rough microsomal fractions. The subfractionation is extensive and suggests the possibility of obtaining well resolved Golgi subfractions. Myeloma cells stained intracellularly with Concanavalin A- and wheatgerm agglutinin--peroxidase conjugates show distinct labelling patterns. Concanavalin A stains the entirety of the rough endoplasmic reticulum as well as the proximal face of the Golgi stack. Wheatgerm agglutinin stains the distal face of the stack of Golgi cisternae. The staining patterns are not due to immunoglobulin as they are also observed in myeloma variants that fail to synthesize immunoglobulin.


Including students with special needs in the general education classroom requires that teachers adapt their approaches to teaching to meet all students' needs. However, general education teachers are not always fully aware how best to serve special populations. This study examines what skills and knowledge special education educators feel that general education teachers and teacher candidates need in order to work with students with special needs in the inclusive environment. The researchers interviewed twenty special educators to ascertain which skills and knowledge are most commonly cited as vital to successful general education teacher/student with special needs interactions.  Findings suggest that teacher education and professional development programs can benefit by providing a continuum of learning opportunities in three important areas. General educators should: first, make and carry out informed decisions, based on proper assessments data; second, develop appropriate understanding and compassion for students with special needs and their situations and third, learn to foster effective communication in and out of the classroom with all parties involved in educating this specific group of students.


This dissertation focuses on testing and identifying individual ambiguity preference under the framework of "smooth ambiguity preference" developed by Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (2005). Following the seminal contributions of Allais (1953) and Ellsberg (1961), experimental data have consistently demonstrated that individuals do not behave in accordance with predictions of the expected utility model when they face uncertainty. As one important class of ambiguity utility, the smooth ambiguity model distinguishes ambiguity aversion from risk aversion, which makes the comparative statics possible. However, currently there is little work on testing and recovering such preferences based on observable choices.

The dissertation contains four parts. Chapter 2 uses two approaches to derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for observed individual portfolio choice to be compatible with the smooth ambiguity preference. The first approach is the revealed preference method, and is based on finite observations. The second approach is demand function testing, and is based on infinite observations. Chapter 3 establishes the conditions under which the smooth ambiguity preference can be uniquely identified from individual demand functions. In Chapter 4, I extend the argument of Varian (1988) to multiple observations and incomplete market case to non-parametrically test different shapes of risk aversion, and then to test hypotheses on shapes of ambiguity aversion. In Chapter 5, to use household survey data to identify household risk and ambiguity aversion, I build a simple parametric model to identify household risk and ambiguity aversion from their saving and portfolio choice. The data from the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth 2008 and 2010 support the constant relative risk aversion and constant relative ambiguity aversion hypothesis, and give evidence of the magnitude of household risk and ambiguity aversion.


Plants diversity which spread through Indonesia could grow easily. Sidorejo village is one of the villages in Kabupaten Ngawi in which most of the society still maintain their traditional culture includes in managing natural resources with medicine peculiar effect, as neither prevention nor treatment. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct case study about types of medicinal herbs and its
implementation in traditional treatment system in Sidorejo village. Traditional treatment system based on medicinal herbs is an element arrangement connected to each other and it form whole process and ways of treatment by using medicinal herbs, which is ingredients to subtract, to heal and to eliminate diseases, and mostly has been done for
generations. This experiment has the objective to found out about kinds of medicinal herbs, process and ways of treatment, also the result of traditional treatment system. Type of the experiment is a case study using interview and field observation. Population in this experiment consists of all the society in Sidorejo village that use medicinal herbs. Sample of the experiment being use is parts of the society as respondent (village's elders, labour practitioner (dukun bayi), massage practitioner and potion expert).
Results of the experiment have revealed that kind of herbs or plants that has medicine effect has been found 49 types and 23 suku. Those plants could be use as treatment for disease such as metabolic disturbance, hormonal disturbance, parasites disturbance, virus and bacteria, bone and joint disturbance, disturbance on skin and hair, sex or gender disturbance and also diseases cause by blood, vessels and immune system disturbances. While ways to diagnose the diseases is by asking the symptoms, give a massage, using inner strength (tenaga dalam), particular calculated day (hari pasaran), and continued with potion from medicinal herbs. How to use the medicine is from the inside and from the outside. Treatment system which based on herbs has perceived good response and results from the society in Sidorejo village Kecamatan Karangjati Kabupaten
Ngawi.


The gene encoding cytochrome cnitrite reductase (NrfA) from Desulfovibrio desulfuricansATCC 27774 was sequenced and the crystal structure of the enzyme was determined to 2.3-Å resolution. In comparison with homologous structures, it presents structural differences mainly located at the regions surrounding the putative substrate inlet and product outlet, and includes a well defined second calcium site with octahedral geometry, coordinated to propionates of hemes 3 and 4, and caged by a loop non-existent in the previous structures. The highly negative electrostatic potential in the environment around hemes 3 and 4 suggests that the main role of this calcium ion may not be electrostatic but structural, namely in the stabilization of the conformation of the additional loop that cages it and influences the solvent accessibility of heme 4. The NrfA active site is similar to that of peroxidases with a nearby calcium site at the heme distal side nearly in the same location as occurs in the class II and class III peroxidases. This fact suggests that the calcium ion at the distal side of the active site in the NrfA enzymes may have a similar physiological role to that reported for the peroxidases.


PURPOSE
To assess the relationship between tear inflammatory cytokine ratios (CRs) and signs and symptoms of dry eye disease (DED) to investigate the possible use of tear CRs, which may better address the complexity of cytokine interactions than absolute cytokine levels, as a DED biomarker.

METHODS
Tear concentrations of IL-1b, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, IL-17A, IFN-g, and TNF-a were measured using standardized procedures, as were DED signs (corneal and conjunctival staining scores, tear break-up time, Schirmer test, Meibomian gland plugging, tear osmolarity, composite sign severity score) and symptoms [Ocular Surface Disease Index (OSDI)]. Ratios between pro-inflammatory (IL-1b, IL-8, IL-17A, IFN-g, and TNF-a) and anti-inflammatory (IL-10) cytokines were calculated. Given its opposing roles in inflammation, IL-6 was tested as both a pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine. Correlations between CR and DED symptoms and signs were calculated using Spearman correlation coefficients (rho).

RESULTS
At baseline, 131 patients, 80.2% female and mean age 54.2 years (SD 14.1, range 20-82), from 10 sites of the Dry Eye Assessment and Management study had sufficient tear volumes ≥4 μL for analysis. IL-6:IL-10, IL-8:IL-10, and TNF-a:IL-10 had some significant correlations, mostly with conjunctival or corneal staining or the composite sign severity score (IL-8:IL-10 and conjunctival staining: rho = 0.19, p = 0.03; IL-6:IL-10 and corneal staining: rho = 0.31, p < 0.001; IL-8:IL-10 and corneal staining: rho = 0.21, p = 0.01; IL-6:IL-10 and composite sign severity score: rho = 0.26, p = 0.003; IL-8:IL-10 and composite sign severity score: rho = 0.26, p = 0.003; TNF-a:IL-10 and corneal staining: rho = 0.29, p < 0.001; TNF-a:IL-10 and Schirmer test: rho = -0.23, p = 0.009). CRs had no significant correlation with DED symptoms. All significant correlations using IL-6 in the denominator (anti-inflammatory) produced counterintuitive results based on clinical understanding of the disease.

CONCLUSIONS
Pro- to anti-inflammatory CR was weakly correlated with some DED signs and not with symptoms, as measured by OSDI. Future studies in different dry eye populations are needed and should address sampling biases and tear collection techniques.


To understand the evolution of any trait, one must know both the selective forces that are operating, and the nature of the genetic variance. Usually we are ignorant of both. One attraction of studying life histories is that the traits under study contribute directly to fitness: if we know the .mortality and fecundity schedules of some genotype, we know its fitness. Of course, things are not quite as easy as that, because we need to know mortality and fecundity in the wild, and not in the laboratory, but we are in better shape than we would be if, for example, we were studying courtship or fighting behaviour. Because the contributions of fecundity and longevity to fitness are so direct, the importance of trade-offs is at once obvious. If there were no trade-offs, all organisms would be as fecund as the most fecund, as long-lived as the most long-lived, and would develop as rapidly as the most rapid developer. The problem of trade-offs was mentioned in almost every paper at the symposium, and was a major topic of several — for example, the papers by Charlesworth & Morgan, and by Partridge & Sibly.


Over the past few years World Wide Web has established as a vital resource for news. With the continuous growth in the number of available news Web sites and the diversity in their presentation of content, there is an increasing need to organize the news related information on the Web and keep track of it. In this paper, we present automated techniques for extracting metadata instance information by organizing and mining a set of news Web sites. We develop algorithms that detect and utilize HTML regularities in the Web documents to turn them into hierarchical semantic structures encoded as XML. The tree-mining algorithms that we present identify key domain concepts and their taxonomical relationships. We also extract semi-structured concept instances annotated with their labels whenever they are available. We report experimental evaluation for the news domain to demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms.


The Contemporary paradigm to understand the complexity and diversity is moving to `Becoming` that taken place in reviewing at the relation of various concepts. In Japan, After the collapse of modern architecture has been declared `Metabolism` was appeared. They tried to apply organism`s metabolic system to buildings based on ecological thoughts. But Metaboilsm`s projects had revealed limitations of representation that the city on the mechanical system became a huge scale. As a result, It caused a break the cultural context of the region in Japan. After then, Japanese Architects expressed a pluralistic aspects of modern society for the restoration of disconnected cultural context. From this perspective, The thought of `becoming` is a new role for Contemporary Japanese Architect. This research is focused of projects of SANAA, Ito Toyo, Sou Fujimoto, because they have spatial thought about realizing the space through the ways organizing the various potential possibilities in the simple external form not stimulated. They are realize the `becoming-space` within the architecture. This `becoming-space` gives people in building the new characteristics and experience that potential interactions among user, architecture and nature. It is non-representational space not fixed, but changing organically and variably.


This paper presents a fully integrated, four-stack power amplifier for millimeter-wave wireless applications, designed and fabricated using 45nm CMOS SOI technology. The operation frequency is from 20GHz to 30GHz, with a maximum gain of 13.7 dB. Maximum RF output power, power-added eficiency and output 1dB compression point are 20.5 dBm, 29% and 18dBm, respectively, achieved at 24GHz. EVM of 12.5% was measured at average channel power of 14.5 dBm using 100MHz 16-QAM 3GPP/NR OFDM signal at 26GHz.


The problem of compressing strings of quantum states whose density operators commute is considered. Two versions of the problem are discussed. In the visible case arbitrary operations on the strings are permitted and in the blind case only quantum operations on the density operator of the strings are permitted. Both cases have been reformulated as classical information-theoretic problems, and these problems are solved.


This was a prospective study to investigate whether regular follow-up visits protect against the risks and side effects of an intrauterine device (IUD) insertion. Group A of 199 women were followed up at 6 weeks, and at 2, 6 and 12 months. Group B of 81 women had a follow-up at 6 weeks and at 12 months. The only significant difference between the groups was that Group A had more copper IUDs fitted than Group B. The results showed that there was no statistical difference between the two groups for risks and side effects detected. The authors acknowledge that the numbers in the study are small but suggest that clinic attendance after the 6-week check does not produce additional benefit. Women who experience problems or who have complaints will come for an unscheduled visit. The authors now advise that the women have a check after fitting and then contact the service if they have any problems in the future. The impact of this advice in the UK could produce benefits in freeing up clinic appointments for those who have not already moved to this schedule. This study confirms that reducing the follow-up visits at busy clinics is not detrimental to the women using an IUD provided they are reassured that they can contact the service at any time if they have a problem.


Background. Previous research has shown that children can increase their muscular strength and muscular endurance as a result of regular participation in a progressive resistance training program. However, the most effective exercise prescription regarding the number of repetitions remains questionable. Objective. To compare the effects of a low repetition–heavy load resistance training program and a high repetition–moderate load resistance training program on the development of muscular strength and muscular endurance in children. Design. Prospective, controlled trial. Setting. Community-based youth fitness center. Subjects. Eleven girls and 32 boys between the ages of 5.2 and 11.8 years. Intervention. In twice-weekly sessions of resistance training for 8 weeks, children performed 1 set of 6 to 8 repetitions with a heavy load (n = 15) or 1 set of 13 to 15 repetitions with a moderate load (n = 16) on child-size exercise machines. Children in the control group (n = 12) did not resistance train. One repetition maximum (RM) strength and muscular endurance (repetitions performed posttraining with the pretraining 1-RM load) were determined on the leg extension and chest press exercises. Results. One RM leg extension strength significantly increased in both exercise groups compared with that in the control subjects. Increases of 31.0% and 40.9%, respectively, for the low repetition–heavy load and high repetition–moderate load groups were observed. Leg extension muscular endurance significantly increased in both exercise groups compared with that in the control subjects, although gains resulting from high repetition–moderate load training (13.1 ± 6.2 repetitions) were significantly greater than those resulting from low repetition–heavy load training (8.7 ± 2.9 repetitions). On the chest press exercise, only the high repetition–moderate load exercise group made gains in 1-RM strength (16.3%) and muscular endurance (5.2 ± 3.6 repetitions) that were significantly greater than gains in the control subjects. Conclusion. These findings support the concept that muscular strength and muscular endurance can be improved during the childhood years and favor the prescription of higher repetition–moderate load resistance training programs during the initial adaptation period.


s keyed to the main bibliography by the same numerical series. The main bibliography was compiled and computerized at the University of California, Berkeley, and the text is a photo offset of the actual computer printout. This format has the advantage that the text can go to press without proofreading, which will facilitate supplements and updated editions. Comparative Development of India and China. BY KUAN-I CHEN AND J. S. UPPAL. New York: The Free Press, 1971. Appendix, Notes, References.


Wuxi City is located in the Yangtze River Delta region, China and is underlain by a multi-layered aquifer system in porous Quaternary deposits. Groundwater extraction, mainly from the second confined aquifer, has led to severe regional land subsidence. The ground surface started to recover after the restriction and, ultimately, the banning of groundwater pumping. This paper reports the results of long-term surveys, groundwater piezometric head (GPH) measurements and the monitoring of ground surface deformation by levelling and borehole extensometers. The subsidence is attributed to the compression of both the aquifer and aquitards in the porous strata. The spatial characteristics of subsidence are related not only to the distribution of the GPH, but also to the thickness and compressibility of different strata, the distance from the pumped aquifer and the distribution of pumping. There was a temporal lag in subsidence relative to groundwater drawdown. The uplift is related to a period of recovery following the peak pumping period and groundwater recovery subsequent to the restriction and/or banning of groundwater pumping. The uplift was <10 mm under these two conditions, although the GPH recovered to >40% of the previous maximum at the Qianzhou borehole extensometer station.


The properties of the polarization ellipse are deduced in terms of the ratio of the Cartesian components of the complex electric vector of a beam of radiation by utilizing the Argand representation of a real two-dimensional vector as a complex number.The two components of a beam that are accepted and rejected by a polarizer or a radio antenna are considered as orthogonal components in the directions of two complex orthonormal vectors. The intensities of the corresponding components of a polarized beam are derived and represented on the Poincare sphere. The methods are then applied to the important radio case of the Faraday effect in a uniform magneto-ionic medium. Finally, the measurable quantities characterizing a beam of partially polarized radiation are obtained from a diagonalization of the complex polarization tensor that specifies the beam.


1Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital and College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 2Department of Pathology, National Taiwan University Cancer Center, National Taiwan University Hospital and National Taiwan University College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan Abstract: Pulmonary pleomorphic carcinoma (PPC) generally lacks actionable driver mutations such as epidermal growth factor receptor mutations or anaplastic lymphoma kinase or c-ros oncogene 1 (ROS1) rearrangements. The response to crizotinib, ceritinib, brigatinib, and lorlatinib in ROS1-positive advanced non-small cell lung carcinoma is well established; however, there is little mention of their successful administration in pulmonary pleomorphic carcinoma cases. We report a case of a stage II PPC with recurrence after surgical resection and developed multiple distant metastasis. The tumor was refractory to chemotherapy and immunotherapy with progressive disease. EZR-ROS1 fusion was detected by next-generation sequencing and showed a good response to serial ROS1 inhibitors combined with surgery and radiotherapy. Now under lorlatinib, all her lesions responded well during the follow-up with sustained partial remission for more than 18 months. A sustainable treatment effect can be achieved in pulmonary pleomorphic carcinoma with driver mutations with tyrosine kinase inhibitor treatment. Driver mutations should be regularly tested in pulmonary pleomorphic carcinomas.


Received 8 March 2016; Accepted 8 March 2016 Introduction This special issue of Family Medicine and Community Health is focused on some of the challenges that we face when undertaking cross-cultural academic studies in primary care. It includes both research and teaching studies conducted in several different countries around the world. It highlights some of the challenges we need to address when undertaking such academic work in widely different contexts and cultures. The authors have used a wide variety of methods – chosen to match not only the questions they have asked but also the methods they have chosen which take into account the context in which the studies have been undertaken. The context in which a piece of work has been undertaken differs, of course, in the detail, but in principle, all of the authors in this special issue of Family Medicine and Community Health have faced the same general challenge of ensuring the best quality for their academic work. To do this they have, for example, tried to ensure that the study design chosen is the most appropriate one to answer the individual questions they have asked. In addition, to ensure the highest rigor in their work, they have recognized the importance of using suitable data collection and analysis methods and adopting dissemination strategies which are matched to the different health and educational systems in which they work. However, when reading the articles in this issue, the attentive reader will want to ask himself or herself "how do I decide whether the issues raised by this particular study are applicable in my own situation?"


Biological control against the root-knot nematode, Meloidogyne incognita was proven to occur in tomato, Solanum lycopersicom , soil-drenched with different isolates of Trichoderma harzianum and a commercial suspension of Serratia marcescens (Nemaless). The potential of such biocontrol agents to trigger plant defense response was discussed. Nematode reproduction in the presence of such possibly induced systemic resistance (ISR) elicitors was compared with that occurring on untreated plants and treated plants with the carbofuran nematicide. Dosages used were for carbofuran (1 mg ai/kg soil) and for S. marcescens (1 ~ 109 bacterium cells/ml water) 2 ml suspension/kg soil; three different T. harzianum isolates (f 1 , f 3 and f 8 ) were separately added at 50 ~ 10Sup>8 CFU/kg soil. The possible ISR elicitors were tested on two tomato cultivars (Super Strain B and Alisa), which were inoculated with active juveniles (J2) of M. incognita, and plants were kept in a glasshouse. Indices of plant fitness (PFs) resulting from each treatment, which took into account various growth parameters were also determined. Carbofuran followed by S. marcescens and T. harzianum significantly decreased (P . 0.05) nematode development and reproduction when compared with the untreated controls. PF of cv. Alisa was higher than that of Super Strain B, and M. incognita reproduced better on the latter cultivar in all treatments. Polyphenol oxidase (PPO) and β-1,3-glucanase (GLUC) activities were detected in the roots of inoculated and uninoculated control tomato plants. Similar tests were carried out on inoculated plants treated with such ISR elicitors to search for possible enzyme activity changes as a result of resistance induction. Nematode infection did not cause any significant changes in GLUC activity, whilst PPO activity was enhanced in inoculated with respect to uninoculated roots. Treatments with ISR elicitors and carbofuran did not significantly change GLUC activity in both inoculated plants and uninoculated controls. While in the presence of the ISR elicitors, generally, PPO activity did not increase as a result of nematode infestation. Key words : Enzymatic induction, root-knot nematode, nematode management, Serratia marcescens, Trichoderma harzianum, biological control, carbofuran, nematicide, polyphenol oxidase, β-1,3-glucanase, Solanum lycopersicum.


Some road construction projects use petrasoil additive to increase soil stabilization, one of then is the Improvement of Tabarfane-Hokmar (Chemical Petrasoil) Road Project in Aru Selatan Timur District, Aru Islands. To obtain the influence of petrasoil aditive material as soil stabilization in swamp areas, a research is needed. petrasoil additives that powder shape are dissolved in water with 3 variations, namely 500 liters, 750 liters, and 1000 liters of water. Tests which carried out include compaction testing, index properties, and CBR. The results showed that the addition of petrasoil mixture with water without being combined with other added ingredients could lead to increasingly unstable soil conditions where the soil water content increased and the dry weight of the soil diminished, meaning that soil density decreases, and the CBR value of soil decreases.


Dipteryx alata Vogel (Leguminosae) is a native Neotropical tree with a wide distribution in the Brazilian Cerrado that is commonly known as the baru tree. The genetic diversity of 150 D. alata progeny from a germplasm collection was characterized using nine microsatellite markers. Genetic diversity analysis detected 50 alleles ranging from 2 to 14 alleles per locus. The genetic differentiation among populations (θp = 0.097) suggests moderate genetic structuring and high genetic differentiation among progenies (θs = 0.169). The intrapopulation index (f = 0.122) indicates the presence of low endogamy. The effective population size (Ne = 96) shows that the germplasm collection has sufficient representativeness for use as a base population for breeding programmes. These results are useful for the exploitation of the genetic resources of D. alata for future conservation efforts and breeding programmes.


The frequent use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) in combination with gentamicin poses the additional risk of nephrotoxic renal failure. Cyclooxygenase-1 (COX-1) is the main enzyme responsible for the synthesis of renal vasodilator prostaglandins, while COX2 participates predominantly in the inflammatory process. Both are inhibited by non-selective NSAID such as indomethacin. Selective COX-2 inhibitors such as rofecoxib seem to have fewer renal side effects than non-selective inhibitors. The objective of the present study was to determine whether the combined use of rofecoxib and gentamicin can prevent the increased renal injury caused by gentamicin and indomethacin. Male Wistar rats (250-300 g) were treated with gentamicin (100 mg/kg body weight, ip, N = 7), indomethacin (5 mg/ kg, orally, N = 7), rofecoxib (1.4 mg/kg, orally, N = 7), gentamicin + rofecoxib (100 and 1.4 mg/kg, respectively) or gentamicin + indomethacin (100 and 5 mg/kg, respectively, N = 8) for 5 days. Creatinine clearance and α-glutathione-S-transferase concentrations were used as markers of renal injury. Animals were anesthetized with ether and sacrificed for blood collection. The use of gentamicin plus indomethacin led to worsened renal function (0.199 ± 0.019 ml/min), as opposed to the absence of a nephrotoxic effect of rofecoxib when gentamicin plus rofexicob was used (0.242 ± 0.011 ml/min). These results indicate that COX-2-selective inhibitors can be used as an alternative treatment to conventional NSAID, especially in situations in which risk factors for nephrotoxicity are present.


This chapter considers how a cultural shift toward less consumerist lifestyle choices might originate, driven not by moral imperatives or environmental movements, but by the core pursuit of human well-being. The history of consumer society is a reminder that cultural transformation of that magnitude could occur in a relatively short period of time. We hypothesize, drawing on demographic and economic trends, that technologically connected, educated, and open to change millennials might lead the way in that transition. Their diminishing interest in suburban life in favour of cities, constricted economic opportunities, and their size and interconnectedness all point in that direction. We envision a scenario in which the core understanding of well-being will change through the combined effects of changing lifestyles, adaptation to the economic, technological and demographic realities, and emerging new social practices. Extensive research on well-being suggests that such reframing can readily incorporate a shift away from consumerist lifestyles. Government should support this nascent transition through policies that enable young urban families to thrive. They should also identify and foster other emerging cultural changes that result in more sustainable and highly satisfying lifestyles. This chapter is about the United States because it a global leader in the creation of the consumer society, with a per-capita ecological footprint about twice that of Europe, and with many emulators across the world. We contend that the US-grounded analysis presented in this chapter has relevance for other parts of the world, and that it can inform research and debate on similar cultural transitions in other national contexts.


This paper presents a control approach for an experimental transtibial prosthesis that can actively realign the residual limb in relation to prosthetic foot during the stance phase of gait. The realignment objective is to inject positive power into the gait cycle while actively reducing the magnitude of the sagittal moment transferred to the residual limb. The altered gait dynamics of this new type of prosthesis require a control approach that coordinates its function with a user's gait cycle. This paper overviews the mechanical design of the prosthesis development, the proposed finite-state adaptive controller, and presents experimental results for constant cadence walking and adaptation while changing walking speeds.Copyright © 2015 by ASME


Intermittent claudication (IC) is the predominant symptom of peripheral artery disease (PAD), and is associated with reduced exercise capacity. The pathophysiology of IC is related to reduced blood flow and impaired skeletal muscle oxidative metabolism; however, the efficacy of metabolic therapies is not well established. We evaluated the effect of cilostazol plus l-carnitine versus cilostazol alone on exercise performance, quality of life (QOL), and safety. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, PAD patients with stable IC were randomized to either l-carnitine 1 g or matching placebo twice-daily, on a background of cilostazol. Treadmill and QOL assessments were performed at baseline, 90, and 180 days. The primary endpoint was the difference between groups in the natural-log-transformed (ln) ratio in peak walking time (PWT) between baseline and 180 days. The combination of cilostazol and l-carnitine was well tolerated. In the modified intent-to-treat population (n = 145), the mean ln ratio in PWT was 0.241 for cilostazol/l-carnitine versus 0.134 for cilostazol/placebo (p = 0.076), corresponding to mean increases of 1.99 and 1.36 minutes, respectively. In the per-protocol population (n = 120), the mean ln ratio in PWT was 0.267 for cilostazol/l-carnitine versus 0.145 for cilostazol/placebo (p = 0.048). QOL measures were also improved in the cilostazol/l-carnitine group. These findings support larger trials of l-carnitine in combination with cilostazol in the treatment of IC. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00822172


ABSTRACT Background: Research focused on describing the content of informed consent interactions has shed little light on how to best to encourage, support, and nurture adolescent participation in genomic sequencing. Research addressing adolescents' comprehension and agency is needed because sequencing may have significant implications for an adolescent's own future health status, as well as for other members of the adolescent's family. This article explores adolescent participation and decision making during informed consent for exome sequencing. Methods: Investigators recruited 25 adolescents with unexplained hearing loss, cardiac arrhythmias, mitochondrial disease, or neurodevelopmental disorders from an urban teaching and research hospital for participation in a research project offering whole exome sequencing. Twenty-five adolescents ages 12–19 years and their parents completed informed consent sessions with study clinicians lasting up to 90 minutes. Sessions were digitally recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using grounded theory's "constant comparative" method. Results: Adolescent participants were briefly active when asked direct questions. Otherwise, they stayed mostly quiet. Parents functioned as protectors and information holders. Clinicians used proscriptive language to direct families to consider adolescents' preferences, to balance the interests of multiple caregivers, and to give families time to consider their options before making decisions. In two cases of significant family disagreement, providers maintained a nondirective stance toward all parties and excused themselves from the intense discussion by deferring decisions to a later date. Conclusions: Conventional approaches to informed consent may be insufficient to the risks, benefits, and possibilities offered by genomic sequencing. Rather than target autonomy, enhancing the agency of adolescents in decision making may more appropriately address their needs so that all stakeholders provide input and are respected throughout the informed consent process.