Agriculture faces challenges in meeting rising demand for food, feed, fibre and fuel while coping with pressure from globalisation, limited natural resources and climate change. Farmers will choose management practices based on their goals and available resources and these practices will influence farm performance. The aim of this thesis was to understand farmers' crop and farm management practices and their links to farm(er) characteristics, productivity, biodiversity, marketing channels and perceptions of climate change. Specific objectives were to i) identify factors influencing crop choice and crop rotations on organic farms, ii) evaluate effects of management practices on barley performance indicators, iii) investigate farmers' perceptions and adaptation strategies to climate change, and iv) explore linkages between marketing channels, farm characteristics and biodiversity. Information from semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire, barley growth and yield indicators and biodiversity records were used. In total, 31 farms (9 conventional, 22 organic) were studied in the Uppland province in Sweden. Crop choice and rotation on organic farms were mainly determined by price, need for feed, traditions, biophysical factors and environmental concerns. Arable farmers often grew cereals for their profitability, and their crop choices resulted in rotations that required intensive management to maintain high yields. Barley grain yield was significantly higher on conventional than organic farms, suggesting that chemical fertilisers and herbicides are more effective than organic manures or good crop rotations. Several older farmers (>50 years) perceived a change in climate that they associated with longer growing seasons, extreme weather events and more pests and weeds. To deal with weather variability and climate change, organic farmers tended to use proactive approaches such as crop rotation and diversification, while many conventional farmers shifted sowing and harvesting time and used more crop protection. Farmers sold their products through local, distant and a combination of marketing channels. Farmers selling locally tended to have smaller farms with higher biodiversity than farmers using distant marketing channels. This thesis demonstrates that management practices are often influenced by farmers' goals, experience and farm characteristics. Combining qualitative and quantitative research contributes to better understanding of management practices and their links with farm characteristics, crop yield, climate change adaptation, marketing and farm biodiversity. This knowledge will be useful in regional policies, farm advisory and training.


Performance Based Navigation (PBN) is a concept developed by ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) that specifies the operational performance required in an airspace, route or approach procedure. A Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) enhances the performances of the existing satellite navigation system. It is used to deploy Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) approach for PBN procedures. The required performance level for vertical guidance is directly linked to approach category criteria. The real performance provided by an SBAS for a single-frequency user depends on the physical characteristics of the ionospheric layer. As Sub-Saharan Africa corresponds to geomagnetic equator region, the question of ionosphere dynamics characterization in equatorial zone is central to gauge what SBAS performance level can be achievable. In the equatorial zone the dynamics of the ionosphere is subject to complex physical phenomena, involving rapid recombination of ion-electron pairs. Moreover these phenomena are transient with high local spatial and temporal gradients. These zones promote the occurrence of scintillation phenomena, bubbles (strong local fall of TEC (Total Electron Content)), and small scale gradients, which must be evaluated for the ionosphere modeling and integrity data generation. Based on a large volume of GNSS measurements covering more than four years of data collected, Thales Alenia Space associated with IRAP (Astrophysics and Planetology Research Institute, Toulouse, France), present a panorama of observed physical events through the ionosphere in Sub-Saharan Africa zone. The main purpose of this study is to establish a clear view on the physical mechanisms that drive the equatorial ionosphere dynamics and the effects on GNSS measurements. This study is supported by information coming from TEC values, TEC gradients amplitudes, and the nature of scintillation events as intensity, impact area and occurrence in time. Conclusion of these activities is to highlight that ionosphere conditions above sub-Saharan area are consistent with the performances level of SBAS approach with vertical guidance. Indeed scientific analyses show that a precise service level is possible on this zone with a very good level of availability above the main airports.


Vaccines play a vital role in public health by preventing infectious disease across the globe. Vaccine formulations represent a weakened form of a microbe or toxin that is injected into the human body to elicit an immune response, generating antibodies to protect against a future infection. To this day, it is a challenge to identify and engineer important antigens and epitopes to focus this immune response in a safe and effective manner. The example of Bordetella pertussis is used to highlight the problems and lessons learned in designing a vaccine for this global epidemic. In particular, this review will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of chemical versus genetic detoxification and whole cell versus acellular vaccines in the context of pertussis. The latter part of this review will provide a summary of general strategies, such as epitope mapping and manipulation, synthesis of truncated variants, reverse vaccinology, and structural vaccinology, that have been successful in addressing increasingly complex diseases. Collectively, these techniques provide an invaluable set of tools to focus the immune response by finding and engineering specific antigens and epitopes.


The actions of the organic "Ca antagonists" verapamil and D-600 were tested on pinched-off presynaptic nerve terminals (synaptosomes) from rat brain, and on the frog neuromuscular junction. 45Ca uptake was measured in control media, and in depolarizing media containing either 75 mM potassium or veratridine, an alkaloid that opens sodium channels. The extra uptake induced by depolarizing media appears to be mediated by voltage-sensitive Ca channels. Synaptosome depolarization was indirectly determined with the voltage-sensitive fluorescent dye, di-pentyl oxacarbocyanine. Verapamil or D-600 (100 µM) inhibited the K+-induced 45Ca uptake by about two thirds, but had no effect on the K+-induced synaptosome depolarization; this inhibition of Ca uptake is, presumably, due to block of Ca-channels. Veratridine-induced 45Ca influx was more than 80% inhibited by verapamil or D-600 (100 µM), and veratridine-induced depolarization was almost completely blocked. These observations indicate that Na channels as well as Ca channels are inhibited by verapamil and D-600. Recordings of miniature end-plate potentials were used to evaluate the actions of verapamil and D-600 at the frog neuromuscular junction, after miniature end-plate potential frequency had been made sensitive to changes in the bathing Ca concentration by raising the external K+. Miniature end-plate potential frequency was not affected by verapamil(40-50 µM) or D-600 (10 µM) but was significantly reduced by Mn2+ (0.2 mM), a known blocker of Ca channels. Although verapamil and D-600 appear to be very potent antagonists of Ca currents in heart and smooth muscle, we conclude that Ca channels in vertebrate neurons are much less sensitive to these drugs.


The South African government continues to provide post-settlement support to emerging farmers, with the objective of improving productivity through targeted funding or conditional grants. The Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme (CASP), which came into effect in 2004, provides funding targeted at supporting emerging farmers. CASP has six pillars, of which this study focused on one, which is capacity building and training. The study investigated the assessment of the impact of training on the projects' beneficiaries who had benefited from the CASP pillar of training and capacity building in the Limpopo Province. The methodology applied was the difference-in-difference technique. Projects that benefited from funding were regarded as the treatment group and those that did not benefit from the programme were regarded as the control group. The justification for the research was that while the government had financed CASP through fiscal allocation since 2004, because CASP is a conditional grant, there was a need to review the programme, focusing on establishing whether the budget allocation had achieved its intended objectives during this time. The objectives of the study were to measure whether there had been an improvement in the beneficiaries' income levels. It focused on the status of the projects prior to the beneficiaries receiving training and benefiting from capacity building, and what the status was after receiving training through the programme, with the key determinant being an increase in income levels. Not all funded projects had benefited from the particular pillar investigated here. The selection of the beneficiaries to be trained was based on a skills audit which treated the groups as homogeneous, which was found to be inappropriate because of the differences in the prior skills, education levels and the specific interests of individuals. The findings were that there was variation in the increase of income levels. There was a positive relationship between training and reported increase in income levels in some projects, and a negative relationship between training and income levels for other projects. It was interesting that income levels increased for projects that had benefited from the CASP pillar of training and capacity building when the projects were analysed as a group, but when projects were analysed individually, it was revealed that there was a marginal decrease in income levels. There should be a shift in policy. The focus on training and capacity building should be a priority and should occur prior to the projects receiving infrastructure support. The 10% of the total CASP budget allocated for training and capacity building needs to be reviewed, taking into account that low skills levels continue to be the main reason why projects are not sustainable. There is also a need to review the impact of training. The type of training offered should not be generic for all projects, it should be differentiated to suit the both the people and the commodities concerned and Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za v should be more biased towards entrepreneurship, as this would enable emerging farmers to grow their business units and realise increased income levels.


Apply NASA SoS Innovations to Your Own Work From aeronautics and manufacturing to healthcare and disaster management, systems engineering (SE) now focuses on designing applications that ensure performance optimization, robustness, and reliability while combining an emerging group of heterogeneous systems to realize a common goal. Use SoS to Revolutionize Management of Large Organizations, Factories, and Systems Intelligent Control Systems with an Introduction to System of Systems Engineering integrates the fundamentals of artificial intelligence and systems control in a framework applicable to both simple dynamic systems and large-scale system of systems (SoS). For decades, NASA has used SoS methods, and major manufacturersincluding Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, BAE Systemsnow make large-scale systems integration and SoS a key part of their business strategies, dedicating entire business units to this remarkably efficient approach. Simulate Novel Robotic Systems and ApplicationsTranscending theory, this book offers a complete and practical review of SoS and some of its fascinating applications, including: Manipulation of robots through neural-based network control Use of robotic swarms, based on ant colonies, to detect mines Other novel systems in which intelligent robots, trained animals, and humans cooperate to achieve humanitarian objectives Training engineers to integrate traditional systems control theory with soft computing techniques further nourishes emerging SoS technology. With this in mind, the authors address the fundamental precepts at the core of SoS, which uses human heuristics to model complex systems, providing a scientific rationale for integrating independent, complex systems into a single coordinated, stabilized, and optimized one. They provide readers with MATLAB code, which can be downloaded from the publisher's website to simulate presented results and projects that offer practical, hands-on experience using concepts discussed throughout the book.


BACKGROUND
Mendelian susceptibility to mycobacterial disease (MSMD) is a rare primary immunodeficiency, caused by non-tuberculous mycobacteria or Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine and characterized by severe diseases in childhood.

OBJECTIVE
In this study, we examined eight years followed-up 12 Turkish children with genetically proven MSMD and we tried to evaluate the survival rate with succesfull disease management, rate of consanguinity, molecular, cellular and clinical features of patients. In addition, we wanted to emphasize the importance of early diagnosis before administration of BCG vaccine in countries where this vaccine is routinely used.

METHODS
Twelve patients diagnosed with molecular studies [IFNγR1 complete (n = 1), IFNγR2 partial (n = 3), IL12Rβ1 (n = 6), NEMO (n = 1), STAT1 mutation (n = 1)] were included.

RESULTS
Ten patients (83%) were born from consanguineous parents and frequency of family history for the primary immunodeficiency was 58% (n = 7). All the cases had been immunized with BCG vaccine (Mycobacterium bovis) due to lack of early diagnosis. Two patients had BCG-itis and four patients had "BCG-osis". Survival rate was 75% after successful disease management with antibiotics, anti-tuberculous agents and recombinant IFN-γ.

CONCLUSIONS
It was concluded that MSMD must be differentiated from different forms of primary immunodeficiencies, so clinicians should be aware of MSMD especially in patients with BCG vaccine complications and non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection.


Word embeddings are widely used in NLP for a vast range of tasks. It was shown that word embeddings derived from text corpora reflect gender biases in society, causing serious concern. Several recent works tackle this problem, and propose methods for significantly reducing this gender bias in word embeddings, demonstrating convincing results. However, we argue that this removal is superficial. While the bias is indeed substantially reduced according to the provided bias definition, the actual effect is mostly hiding the bias, not removing it. The gender bias information is still reflected in the distances between "gender-neutralized" words in the debiased embeddings, and can be recovered from them. We present a series of experiments to support this claim, for two debiasing methods. We conclude that existing bias removal techniques are insufficient, and should not be trusted for providing gender-neutral modeling.


An individual narcomedusa assignable to Solmissus incisa sensu lato was observed having ingested a fish at 573 m depth near the southeast slope of the Kaikata seamount, Japan. Solmissus is a very common deep-sea narcomedusan genus that is widely considered to be a predator specializing on gelatinous plankton. Several cryptic species, with differences in the number of tentacles and form of manubrial pouches, are thought to be included in the nominal species Solmissus incisa. Therefore, the present study gives a short description of the morphotype of Solmissus incisa s.l. observed with a fish in its stomach, as well as several individuals of the same morphotype that had ingested gelatinous prey.


In the past decades, sub-pixel mapping algorithms have been extensively developed due to the large number of different applications. However, most of the sub-pixel mapping algorithms are based on single-temporal images, and the results are usually compromised without auxiliary information due to the ill-posed problem of sub-pixel mapping. In this paper, a novel spatial-temporal sub-pixel mapping algorithm based on swarm intelligence theory is proposed for multitemporal remote sensing imagery. Swarm intelligence theory involves clonal selection sub-pixel mapping (CSSM), which evolves the solution by emulating the biological advantage of the human immune system, and differential evolution sub-pixel mapping (DESM), which optimizes the solution by intelligent operations and heuristic searching in the solution pool. In addition, considering the under-determined problem of sub-pixel mapping, the spatial-temporal sub-pixel mapping method is used to obtain the distribution information at a fine spatial resolution from the bitemporal image pair, which exactly regularizes the ill-posed problem. Furthermore, the short-interval temporal information and the fine spatial distribution information within the bitemporal image pair can be integrated for further use, such as timely and detailed land-cover change detection (LCCD). To verify the validation of the swarm intelligence theory based spatial-temporal sub-pixel mapping algorithm, the proposed algorithm was compared with several traditional sub-pixel mapping algorithms, in both synthetic and real image experiments. The experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional approaches, achieving a better sub-pixel mapping result both qualitatively and quantitatively, as well as improving the subsequent LCCD performance.


Network virtualization (NV) is emerged as a key enabler for the success of the future virtualized networks (e.g. 5G networks and smart Internet of Things (IoT)). Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) that addresses the embedding problems of heterogeneous virtual networks (VNs) onto a physical infrastructure is a main challenge in NV. Network topology attributes and network resource-considered (NTANRC) algorithm is a virtual node mapping mechanism that considers essential network features and global network resources for ranking both substrate and virtual nodes prior to embedding each given virtual network request (VNR). In this paper, we propose NTANRC combined with a distributed parallel Genetic Algorithm (GA) for virtual link mapping, namely NTANRC-GA, to solve online VNE problem. Extensive evaluation results show that our proposed solution not only achieves better performance compared to state-of-the-art VNE algorithms, but also challenges the rapid speed of shortest path (SP) method. NTANRC algorithm and the parallel GA-based algorithm are reverse compliments of each other to achieve an efficient VNE solution.


Periodic assessment of released common bean cultivars is essential to screen genotypes that offer superior intercropping advantage to farmers when grown in association with maize. Thus, comparative performance of improved genotypes representing commonly used growth habit and market classes were investigated under sole and intercropping system at Halaba special district, Southern Ethiopia. Treatments consisted of a factorial combination of seven common bean genotypes and two cropping systems, which were arranged in a split plot design replicated three times. Cropping system and genotype were assigned as main and sub plot factors, respectively. Cropping system by genotype interaction was significant for bean grain yield and two of the yield components causing moderate changes in ranking. Relative yield reduction due to association with maize varied from 26% for genotype Sari-1 (Type II) to 67% for Awash Melka (Type III), while maize suffered a smaller reduction, 7%. The total Land Equivalent Ratio (LER) values under intercropping with maize ranged from 1.34 for the improved Hawassa Dume (Type II) to 1.01 for the local cultivar, Red Wolayita (Type III). Genotypes with greater LER were not necessarily all top yielders under sole cropping, because of the genotype by cropping system interaction. Bush and semi bush (Type I and II) types produced the highest intercropping advantage, as a group. The two export bean types, which have a semi climbing (Type III) growth pattern, had the lowest LER values among the improved genotypes. Genotypes such as Hawassa Dume and Sari-1 are preferred to the conventionally used cultivars for maximizing intercropping advantage. Developing bush type export genotypes may help broaden their expansion outside their traditional zones since better performance under intercropping could attract more farmers to adopt them.

 Key words: Bush types, genotype, interaction, intercropping efficiency, semi climbing types.


The films of Fritz Lang depict an entrapping, claustrophobic world in which people are controlled by larger forces. His overriding theme is the struggle against fate and against the traits of human nature that doom us. His life and work spanned six decades of film history-from the silent era through the golden age of German Expressionism of the 1920s and the classic studio system in Hollywood to the rise of the international co-production. In Hollywood he worked for every major studio except Disney. He made blockbusters, modest B movies, and everything in between. Among his films are classics of German cinema-including Metropolis and M. In America he made some of the most notable crime movies (Fury), noir films (The Big Heat), and Westerns (The Return of Frank James) of the studio era. Despite the different time periods, nations, and genres in which he worked, his films remain stylistically consistent. Lang (1890-1976), a notoriously difficult interviewee, granted relatively few interviews apart from short publicity exchanges in the promotion of his films. Fully aware of his public persona, he was a canny self-promoter who carefully constructed half-truths and myths about himself. This fascinating collection covers his conversations about his life and his works over a period of forty years. They reveal how cinema for Lang was an intensely personal art. "For me," he said, "cinema is a vice. I love it intimately. I've often written that it is the art form of our century."


Steam methane reforming (SMR) process is regarded as a viable option to satisfy the growing demand for hydrogen, mainly because of its capability for the mass production of hydrogen and the maturity of the technology. In this study, an economically optimal process configuration of SMR is proposed by investigating six scenarios with different design and operating conditions, including CO2 emission permits and CO2 capture and sale. Of the six scenarios, the process configuration involving CO2 capture and sale is the most economical, with an H2 production cost of $1.80/kg-H2. A wide range of economic analyses is performed to identify the tradeoffs and cost drivers of the SMR process in the economically optimal scenario. Depending on the CO2 selling price and the CO2 capture cost, the economic feasibility of the SMR-based H2 production process can be further improved.


The productivity and quality of alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) is strongly influenced by cutting frequency (F). To clarify that the yield and quality of alfalfa if affected by F, an experiment was conducted on Songnen Plain in Northeast China to investigate the responses of yield components and quality to 3 cutting frequencies (F30, F40 and F60) among 3 cultivars (C) (Longmu, Aohan, Zhaodong). Result from two consecutive years showed that cutting frequency had a greater effect on reducing forage yield and yield components at F40. Cultivars had no effect on 2-year total forage yield and alfalfa quality. Alfalfa at the F40 always had higher crude protein (CP), and neutral detergent fibre (NDF) than F30 and F60 treatments. The interaction (C×F) on forage yield and components (CP and NDF) was not significant. This study provides evidence that: i) 40-day intervals can be advocated for cultivars growing in Northeast China; and ii) at F40  utilization, Longmu is a well-adapted alfalfa variety in the Songnen Plain because of higher yield and quality under three cuttings. Key words : Alfalfa, cutting frequency, yield, quality, Songnen Plain.


Background—Elevated baseline levels of B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) and the N-terminal fragments of its prohormone, N-terminal-pro-BNP (NT-proBNP), have been associated with adverse long-term outcome in patients with acute coronary syndromes, whereas the prognostic implications of serial NT-proBNP measurements have not been investigated to date. Methods and Results—NT-proBNP, troponin T, and C-reactive protein were measured at baseline and at 48 and 72 hours in 1791 patients with non–ST-elevation acute coronary syndromes. Death and myocardial infarction were recorded during 30 days of follow-up. After adjustment for independent predictors of cardiac risk, baseline NT-proBNP levels >250 ng/L were associated with higher event rates (adjusted OR, 3.7; 95% CI, 2.3 to 5.7; P<0.001). In troponin T–negative patients, NT-proBNP identified a subgroup of high-risk patients (OR, 5.9; 95% CI, 2.6 to 13.3; P<0.001). The risk in those patients (7.2%) did not significantly differ from that in troponin T–positive patients (9.8%; P=0.25). Importantly, clinical stabilization without refractory ischemia was associated with a rapid (as soon as 48 hours after onset of symptoms) and significant (48 hours; −24%; 72 hours, −49%; both P<0.001) decline in NT-proBNP levels. In patients with high NT-proBNP baseline levels, lack of a rapid decline in NT-proBNP levels (≤250 ng/L) was linked to an adverse short-term prognosis (OR, 33.7; 95% CI, 8.2 to 138.8; P<0.001). In patients with low NT-proBNP baseline levels, a rise in NT-proBNP levels over 72 hours to >250 ng/L was also linked to an adverse 30-day prognosis (OR, 24.0; 95% CI, 8.4 to 68.5; P<0.001). Conclusions—Neurohumoral activation as evidenced by NT-proBNP appears as a unifying feature that is independent of other biochemical markers (myocardial necrosis, inflammation) and is a powerful and independent determinant of the short-term cardiac risk in patients with acute coronary syndromes. Whether serial measurements of NT-proBNP in patients with ACS may be used to more rapidly identify patients suitable for early discharge or more intensive therapy deserves future prospective studies.


Due to the increasing environmental and economic costs associated with nitrogen (N) consumption, improving N use efficiency in rice cultivation systems is of great importance. In this regard, the combined effect of different surface and subsurface drainage systems and water management on the nitrogen harvest index (NHI) of rice was investigated. During three rice growing seasons (2014 to 2016), two rice varieties of Tarom Hashemi and Tarom Daylmani were cultivated under alternate wetting and drying in paddy fields with surface and subsurface drainage systems. At harvest, grain yield and biomass and plant and seed nitrogen were measured. The NHI was determined as the ratio of grain nitrogen to nitrogen absorbed by aboveground part of plant. The amount of NHI was directly related to the amount of urea fertilizer used, varying between 58.31 and 68.45 in different seasons. The average nitrogen absorbed by the Hashemi and Daylmani plants in the subsurface drainage systems was 161.7 and 155.7 kg ha-1, respectively, and in the control was 144.7 and 193.7 kg ha-1, respectively. Also, the average grain yield, grain nitrogen, harvest index and NHI in the subsurface drainage systems were 5329.3 kg ha-1, 105.9 kg ha-1, 37.8% and 67.2%, respectively, and in the control treatment was 4667.7 kg ha-1, 88.6 kg ha-1, 32.4% and 56.3%, respectively. Based on the results, drainage through subsurface drainage systems under intermittent irrigation and drainage management can improve the N use efficiency in rice cropping system


I present the idea and inspiration behind the selection of my Ph.D. topic and elaborate the work done until now with a brief look at the future work. My aim is to enhance the functionality of humans, plants, and things by providing them with add-on low-cost standalone flexible systems capable of integration with IoT based systems to make everything smart. For each subcategory, I chose a research problem to potentially find solutions. For humans, I am working on a foil based acoustic sensor optimized to monitor wheezing by designing its diaphragm. Match filtering will then be used to differentiate between different wheezing sounds. For plants, I am developing a standalone flexible ultra-lightweight platform that monitors the microclimate along plants more accurately from the leaf instead of the soil. For things, I plan to install paper-based humidity and temperature sensors to monitor pill health. The challenge is to figure out an integration strategy for incorporating paper sensors in electronic systems as paper sensors are incompatible with soldering.


Abstract. Since inspection of infrastructures using UAV images seems to be efficient, many systems for infrastructure maintenance using UAV images have been developed recently. For the purpose of more efficient image acquisition, we started an investigation on the possibility of super resolution (SR) of UAV images to obtain high-resolution (HR) orthoimages suitable for infrastructure maintenance. This paper reports an preliminary investigation using existing UAV images acquired for 3D measurement that were not be intended to be utilized for SR. We produced HR orthoimages by three SR methods: image interpolation of a single low-resolution (LR) image by cubic convolution, SR by resampling, and SR based on observation equations. Both SR by resampling and SR based on observation equations utilize multiple overlapping LR images. Results of the investigation demonstrate that SR based on observation equations using multiple overlapping images would be able to provide higher resolution orthoimages than those produced by an ordinary method. The results show that an inaccurate DSM utilized in SR processing degrades the quality of SR results as well. Furthermore, the results illustrate that the quality of the result of SR processing depends rather upon the characteristic of a lens utilized in image acquisition. We think that further investigations on SR using UAV images would be necessary in order to put SR to practical use.


Anjarwati, Sofia. 2017. The Script of Kitab Sakaratul Maut: Text Edit and Pragmatics Review. Thesis, Literature and Indonesian Studies Program, Bachelor Degree, Fakuly of Humanities, Diponegoro University. Semarang

Nur Fauzan Ahmad, S.S., M.A. and Dra. Rukiyah, M.Hum

The script of Kitab Sakaratul Maut (KSM) and Kitab Sakarat Al-maut (KSA) is included in the type of classical malay literature, which is Islamic. Both manuscripts are is stored in PNRI with the call number of ML. 82 no. Rol R#679 in the gorm of prose in Malay which use Arabic – Malay letters. The KSM manuscript was chosen as a research object because it has a more complete text content than the KSA script. The KSM script was written by Lebe Mat Thahir in Pidir on Saturday the 27th of Sya'ban. The script of KSM contains the events when humans face the death and some teaching and prohibition in Islam.
The method of this research consists of three stages, namely : data collecting stage, data analysis stage and presentation of analysis result stage. In the first stage, the researcher chose the script of KSM as the object of study. After that, it is continued to data analysis stage using philological analysis as the reference to obtain the authoritative text. Following this, This research uses pragmatic approach to conduct content analysis, then the result of its analysis is presented using descriptive method.
 The result of this research shows that in the text of Kitab Sakaratul Maut, there are three pragmatic values which are contained in it, such as : religious value, educational value and eschatological value. KSM manuscript contains about the teachings in the face of death the angels who come to human beings later in the grave, guidance of talqin, God's forgiveness of his believers, as well as the teachings of makrifat as an attempt to approach oneself to Allah swt. These values are still relevant to use until this day because all human beings will experience death

Keywords : Sakaratul Maut, classical malay literature, pragmatic value.


Collaborations between the academy and governments promise to improve the lives of people, the operations of government, and our understanding of human behavior and public policy. This review shows that the evidence-informed policy movement consists of two main threads: ( a) an effort to invent new policies using insights from the social and behavioral science consensus about human behavior and institutions and ( b) an effort to evaluate the success of governmental policies using transparent and high-integrity research designs such as randomized controlled trials. We argue that the problems of each approach may be solved or at least well addressed by teams that combine the two. We also suggest that governmental actors ought to want to learn about why a new policy works as much as they want to know that the policy works. We envision a future evidence-informed public policy practice that ( a) involves cross-sector collaborations using the latest theory plus deep contextual knowledge to design new policies, ( b) applies the latest insights in research design and statistical inference for causal questions, and ( c) is focused on assessing explanations as much as on discovering what works. The evidence-informed public policy movement is a way that new data, new questions, and new collaborators can help political scientists improve our theoretical understanding of politics and also help our policy partners to improve the practice of government itself.


The increase in the number of graduates from higher institutions and their inability to secure jobs after graduating would pose serious problems to national development programs.Most of these fresh graduates are new to the working environment and are facing 'culture shock' when entering an organization.Universiti Utara Malaysia has taken a very important step by offering a practicum training program to final year students and exposed them to the working environment.These experiences that the students gain would reduce 'the shock' that they will be facing in the working world.For this purpose, the focus of this research is to address two important issues.First, whether Bachelor of International Business Management (BIBM) students perform well in their practicum training, and second, do these students meet the skills requirements needed by the organizations? The findings revealed that BIBM students did perform well in their practicum training especially those students doing their practicum at public organizations.Even though there were no significant differences in the performance between male and female students, the study did reveal that students performed better at public institutions rather than at private institutions.Chinese students were well ahead of the other students as they were more punctual.Lastly, BIBM students showed that they have the quality and skills that would bring them closer in becoming international managers in the future.


We have investigated temperature-dependent charge transport behavior in thick reduced graphene oxide (RGO) film. Our results show that charges transport through two parallel percolating conducting pathways. One contains large disordered regions as one of its constituents, so its conductance is determined dominantly by variable range hopping (VRH). The other is composed of small and medium disordered regions and crystalline sp2 domains, so its conductance is determined by a serial connection of quantum tunneling and thermal activation. The more oxygen functional groups are removed from GO film upon progressive reduction, the lower the potential barriers between the crystalline sp2 domains and disordered regions become. The contribution of thermal activation to total conductance does not appear evidently for highly reduced GO film having low potential barriers, but thermal activation causes the conductance of moderately reduced film to change continuously, even at low temperatures where the VRH is almost fr...


With the further shrink of the IC dimension, the low K material has been widely used to replace the traditional SiO2 ILD in order to reduce the interconnect delay, the introduction of low k material into silicon imposed challenges on assembly wire bonding process which is further magnified with the shrink of the bond pad. In this paper, 44um fine pitch CMOS90 nm low k device is chosen to develop the wire bond process capability on BGA package. The low k material structure and its impact on fine pitch wire bonding are introduced, the critical factors (wire type, bonding tool, bonding equipment and bonding parameters) and critical responses Ball size, Ball height / Bonded ball diameter ratio, bond placement, wire pull and ball shear) affecting 44um fine pitch low k wire bonding quality and manufacturability were explored, DOE (design of Experiment) was used to optimize the wire bond process, thermal aging test coupled with wire pull/ ball shear test and their corresponding failure mode was studied. The IMC (Inter Metallic coverage) of the Au-Al was addressed also. The optimized process window/ recipe passed package reliability test with 44um fine pitch C90 low K device.


Human modeling and relighting are two fundamental problems in computer vision and graphics, where high-quality datasets can largely facilitate related research. However, most existing human datasets only provide multi-view human images captured under the same illumination. Although valuable for modeling tasks, they are not read-ily used in relighting problems. To promote research in both fields, in this paper, we present UltraStage, a new 3D human dataset that contains more than 2, 000 high-quality human assets captured under both multi-view and multi-illumination settings. Specifically, for each example, we provide 32 surrounding views illuminated with one white light and two gradient illuminations. In addition to regular multi-view images, gradient illuminations help recover de-tailed surface normal and spatially-varying material maps, enabling various relighting applications. Inspired by recent advances in neural representation, we further interpret each example into a neural human asset which allows novel view synthesis under arbitrary lighting conditions. We show our neural human assets can achieve extremely high capture performance and are capable of representing fine details such as facial wrinkles and cloth folds. We also validate UltraStage in single image relighting tasks, training neural networks with virtual relighted data from neural assets and demonstrating realistic rendering improvements over prior arts. UltraStage will be publicly available to the community to stimulate significant future developments in various human modeling and rendering tasks. The dataset is available at https://miaoing.github.io/RNHA.


This paper discusses the rationale for phase III testing of neoadjuvant therapy in patients affected by resectable pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The therapeutic management of patients affected by resectable pancreatic cancer is particularly troublesome due to the aggressiveness of the disease and to the limited efficacy and sometimes unfavourable risk-benefit ratio of the available therapeutic tools. Conflicting data on the role of adjuvant chemoradiation have been reported, while adjuvant single-agent chemotherapy significantly improved overall survival (OS) when compared to surgery alone. However, the OS figures for adjuvant chemotherapy remain disappointing. In effect, pancreatic cancer exhibits a prominent tendency to recur after a brief median time interval from surgery and extra-pancreatic dissemination represents the predominant pattern of disease failure. Neoadjuvant treatment has a strong rationale in this disease but limited information on the efficacy of this approach is available from single arm trials with low levels of evidence. Thus, in spite of two decades of investigation there is currently no evidence to support the routine use of pre-surgical therapy in clinical practice. To foster knowledge on the optimal management of this disease, and to produce evidence-based treatment guidelines, there is no alternative to well designed randomized trials. Systemic chemotherapy is a candidate for testing because it is supported by a more robust rationale than chemoradiation. Combination chemotherapy regimens with elevated activity in advanced disease warrant investigation. Caution would suggest the running of an exploratory phase II randomized trial before embarking on a large phase III study.


Many off-policy prediction learning algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, but it remains unclear which algorithms learn faster than others. We empirically compare 11 off-policy prediction learning algorithms with linear function approximation on two small tasks: the Rooms task, and the High Variance Rooms task. The tasks are designed such that learning fast in them is challenging. In the Rooms task, the product of importance sampling ratios can be as large as $2^{14}$ and can sometimes be two. To control the high variance caused by the product of the importance sampling ratios, step size should be set small, which in turn slows down learning. The High Variance Rooms task is more extreme in that the product of the ratios can become as large as $2^{14}\times 25$. This paper builds upon the empirical study of off-policy prediction learning algorithms by Ghiassian and Sutton (2021). We consider the same set of algorithms as theirs and employ the same experimental methodology. The algorithms considered are: Off-policy TD($\lambda$), five Gradient-TD algorithms, two Emphatic-TD algorithms, Tree Backup($\lambda$), Vtrace($\lambda$), and ABTD($\zeta$). We found that the algorithms' performance is highly affected by the variance induced by the importance sampling ratios. The data shows that Tree Backup($\lambda$), Vtrace($\lambda$), and ABTD($\zeta$) are not affected by the high variance as much as other algorithms but they restrict the effective bootstrapping parameter in a way that is too limiting for tasks where high variance is not present. We observed that Emphatic TD($\lambda$) tends to have lower asymptotic error than other algorithms, but might learn more slowly in some cases. We suggest algorithms for practitioners based on their problem of interest, and suggest approaches that can be applied to specific algorithms that might result in substantially improved algorithms.


Accurate assessment of credit risk can improve the performance of bond portfolio managers. Using credit ratings and market-based credit risk models from S&P and Bloomberg, we investigate the performance of four credit risk models in the Rule 144A corporate bond markets in the United States over the 1990–2015 period. The authors divide their sample into straight bonds and convertible bonds and find that (1) when it comes to straight bonds, discrete models such as S&P's credit ratings and Bloomberg ratings determine yields more accurately than the continuous market-based models of S&P and Bloomberg; (2) with regard to convertible bonds, a convertible option has a stronger effect than credit ratings in determining yields, and only Bloomberg default risk ratings, not S&P credit ratings, determine the yields; (3) for convertible bonds, the continuous market-based models of S&P and Bloomberg affect yields more significantly than discrete models; and (4) when it comes to predicting actual defaults, Bloomberg models are superior to S&P's models, and the Bloomberg discrete model has more power than its continuous counterpart.


Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have been reported to induce apoptosis and inhibit cell proliferation in tumor celAcute coronary syndrome is rare in acute carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. Moreover, most of these cases with ST elevation have revealed non-occlusive or normal coronary arteries, but, in our case, we detected to be based on critical coronary artery lesions of ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (MI). We believe that ST elevation MI is associated with increased thrombogenic tendency due to CO poisoning which trigger coronary events in patients with underlying coronary artery disease (CAD). Therefore, careful electrocardiographic and enzymatic monitoring of all patients in the first hours after CO exposure is important for early diagnosis and treatment of this rare complication due to CO poisoning.


Th1 and Th2 cytokines secreted by polarized effector T cells play a pivotal role in the development of autoimmune and allergic diseases. However, the genetic basis of cytokine production by T lymphocytes in humans is poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the genetic contribution to cytokine production and regulation of T cell-specific transcription factors in a prospective twin study. We found a substantial genetic contribution to the production of Th1 cytokines such as IFN-γ and TNF-α with heritabilities of 0.85 (95% confidence intervals, 0.74–0.95) and 0.72 (0.50–0.93), respectively, whereas no genetic influence on production of the Th2 signature cytokine IL-4 was observed. Furthermore, the intrapair variability in IFN-γ production by isolated T cells was lower in monozygotic than in dizygotic twins. In contrast to GATA-3, NFAT, and NF-κB, intrapair variability of T-bet, the master transcription factor of Th1 cells, was very low among monozygotic and high among dizygotic twins, indicative of a strong genetic influence on T-bet (heritability 0.93, 95% confidence interval, 0.84–1.0). Our data provide novel insights into the genetic regulation of human Th cell polarization. These data suggest that signature cytokines and cytokine signaling events of Th1 rather than Th2 cells are genetically determined and implicate that Th2-associated diseases in humans might be due to genetic variations in Th1 cytokine regulation via T-bet. This concept is highlighted by the recent finding that inactivation of the T-bet gene in mice results in development of clinical hallmark features of asthma.


The ends a selection of interesting examples and counterexamples. Keisler obtains a countable structure 91 of uncountable similarity type and two non-principal ultrafilters D, E on u> such that 9lg # 2Ig .


Most intergenerational mobility studies rely on either snapshot or time-averaged measures of earnings, but have yet to examine resemblance of earnings trajectories over the life course of successive generations. We propose a linked trajectory mobility approach that decomposes the progression of economic status over two generations into associations in four life-cycle dimensions: initial position, growth rate, growth deceleration, and volatility. Using father-son dyad data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that men resemble their fathers not only in the overall level of earnings but also in the pattern by which their earnings develop over time. The intergenerational persistence of earnings varies substantially across life stages of both generations; it is strongest for fathers' early-career and sons' mid-career, with an intergenerational elasticity (IGE) as high as .6. This result can be explained by the concurrence of the parent's early career and the offspring's early childhood. Our findings suggest the intergenerational economic association between parents and offspring is not age-constant but is contingent on the respective life stages of both generations and, most importantly, the period during which they overlap.


The tobacco used for a long time by American and Caribbean natives was introduced into Europe at the end of XV century, and essentially during the XVI century, by travelers returning to their Fatherlands. After the tobacco industry was organized, several concerns arose regarding medical and social care for the workers in the tobacco factories. Medical and hygienic aspects were reflected in a whole chapter (the XVII) of the Ramazzini's Treatise on Medicine of Work, published in 1700. Concerning social care for the workers' families, the creation, April 1796, of nursery schools for the children of working women in tobacco factories of the New Spain must be recalled. In opposition to the predictions of some natives and visitors during the last centuries, with the passage of time, the tobacco habit instead of decreasing, became progressively more accentuated in all social classes. To aggravate conditions, at present, the noxious effects of the tobacco smoke are combined with those of environmental contamination. Recent epidemiological reports on the number and health conditions of smokers, as well as the National Antitobacco Program in Mexico, are mentioned.


This study looks into various sources of financing infrastructure and the demands for infrastructure investments and highlights the mismatch between demand and supply of funds for infrastructure financing in India. In order to address this mismatch, and given the constraints of traditional sources of infrastructure finance in India, this paper suggests credit enhancement scheme (CES) as an alternative framework for mobilizing long-term infrastructure finance. It suggests for scaling up CES as one of the options for leveraging global finance for long-term investment in infrastructure projects. The suggested scheme of credit enhancement could be scaled up at the G-20 level for mobilizing finance from sources which were earlier shying away from investing in infrastructure projects (e.g., pension and insurance fund). This study also suggests a possible structure for operationalizing this scheme at the G-20 level. The proposed scheme is not specific to G-20 countries, but could be used by other countries (including developing countries which have low sovereign ratings) to leverage long term finance for infrastructure sector.


It is considered that the driving forces of global change are: changes in the composition of the atmosphere; climate change; and land use changes caused by socio-economic factors and climate change. The purpose of the article was to identify and summarize the available effects of global change on the world's soil resources and to identify the main trends in agricultural production associated with these changes. The article describes the most visible evidences of global change on the planet, in particular climate changes (including the territory of Ukraine). It was revealed that in Ukraine, the increasing of average temperature is predicted to 2°C with fluctuations during the year by 1,5-2,6°C, in 2025-2049, and in 2050-2074 the increasing of average annual temperature is predicted by 3,45°C relative to the base period (1980-2004). It was studied and summarized evidence of the impact of climate change on soil resources related to urban sprawl, melting ice, human impact, extreme events, flooding etc; and on agriculture, such as the earlier emergence of green forest limits shifts, the emergence of a growing number of alien plant species, increase / decrease in crop yields etc. The impacts on the soil because of climate change was attributed with the influence of organic matter, soil biology and soil degradation. The factors of positive and negative impact of global warming and the increasing CO2 on the yield of crops were analyzed, which included the positive physiological effects of CO2 and the extended growing season (during simulation improve yield) and the reducing of water availability, poor vernalization and reduce the growing season (during simulation lowering productivity). The modern methods of adaptation and mitigation of these changes in different regions were described, including management in areas prone to floods and other risks; urban planning and program updates, ecological restoration; soil conservation; afforestation and reforestation; green infrastructure etc.


This article presents an historical analysis of the way governance arrangements in the petroleum industry have affected development of offshore oil resources in the Gulf of Mexico. Global competition over differential rents and natural value available from petroleum extraction were instrumental in the construction of oil prices high enough to support profitable investment offshore. Attention to the social construction of oil prices illustrates how political discourse on national security and conservation helps translate economic logic into strategic political coalitions and state action. The article shows how the unequal flow of resources in a global extractive industry, as organized by transnational corporations and states, interacts with marginal costs and differential rents to influence economic development. Development of Louisiana offshore oil after the second world war was protected by a private international price cartel, federally enforced import quotas and tax laws. Competition in the industry and the OPEC price increases of the 1970s undermined US domination of world oil, but higher oil prices further stimulated investment offshore. The subsequent breakdown of stable governance in the 1980s drove down oil prices, hastened restructuring of the petroleum industry and caused a rapid decline in Louisiana offshore investment. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.


Increased vulnerability to psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, has been associated with higher levels of stress. In the early development of the central nervous system, changes in function of glutamatergic N-Methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors can possibly result in the development of psychosis, cognitive impairment and emotional dysfunction in adulthood. Thus, in this study we examined the behavioural consequences of the exposure of male rats to chronic stress (postnatal days 30-60) and ketamine administration (postnatal days 41-45); both during a sensitive developmental time window. We found that the locomotor activity of both ketamine and ketamine+chronic stress groups was significantly higher compared with that of the control rats. In contrast, the locomotor activity of the chronic stress group was significantly lower compared with all other groups. Examining anhedonia in the sucrose preference test we found a significantly decreased sucrose intake in both ketamine+chronic stress and the chronic stress groups compared with the control rats. No significant differences were observed in sucrose intake between the control and the ketamine group. The object recognition test revealed that the attention to the novel object was significantly impaired in the ketamine+chronic stress group. Similarly, the ketamine+chronic stress group showed the poorest learning ability in the eight-arm radial maze, starting on the 8th day. Finally, throughout the different pre-pulse intensities, the ketamine+chronic stress group showed impaired PPI compared with all other groups. The results indicate that the combination of prepubertal onset of chronic stress and ketamine may serve as a valid novel animal model for schizophrenia-like symptoms.


This study was conducted to find out the effectiveness of school-based inservice training for primary school teachers in enhancing Teacher Professional Development (TPD) in Bagamoyo District of Tanzania. The study used both qualitative and quantitative approaches which involved the use of questionnaires, in-depth interviews, focussed group discussions, class observation and documentary analysis. The study involved a total of 81 respondents including 75 teachers, 05 head teachers and 01 District education officer. Five primary schools out of 21 were sampled. The findings of the study have revealed that teachers were motivated by several factors to participate in professional development activities and these led by need to improve knowledge and possibility of sharing and exchanging views with others (M = 3.22 & M = 3.12 respectively) as significant for many teachers to participate in professional development activities. Regarding teacher-pupils interaction this was found significant in some factors like 'Making effective use of chalk/blackboard (Mean=4.0); Arranges classroom to facilitate learning (Mean = 4.0) and Encouraging pupils to ask questions (Mean =4.0) which unlike others, encouraged much interaction between teacher and pupils hence improvement in learning. Furthermore significant difference was observed for teachers who attended school-based inservice training (M= 29.9, SD = 5.5), and their counterpart who did not attend inservice training (M= 20.2, SD=7.4); t (48) = 3.61, p = .001 (two tailed) in reporting improvement in teaching/ learning methodology implicating the signifance of inservice training to teachers. The study recommended that workshops, seminars and short courses should be promoted and linked to teachers' professional development.


Abstract Cancer incidence and mortality rates in Hungary are the highest in the Central-Eastern European region. Our investigative study examined associations of cancer-prone behavioral risk factors, psychosocial variables and demographic characteristics with cancer treatment on a population level. Data were obtained from the Hungarostudy 2002, a cross-sectional, representative survey of the adult Hungarian population (n=12643). Controlling for all other study variables in a binary logistic regression model, results revealed that the odds of having been treated for cancer were almost twice as high among persons with depression and respondents who experienced negative life events than for those who were not depressed and reported no negative life events. These results send a warning signal to the Hungarian health care system regarding the widespread need for education, prevention, psycho-social screening programs and treatment of depression. Keywords: depression, negative life events, cancer treatment, population study In Hungary, cancer incidence (772.24 per 100 000) and cancer mortality (263.81 per 100 000) rates are the highest in the Central-Eastern European region and among the highest in international comparative analyses based on epidemiological data (Gardos, 2002; WHO, 2006). Also, prevalence of clinical depression (score 19 and higher on the Beck Depression Inventory) in the Hungarian population has been increasing since 1988 when it was 7.5%. The prevalence rose to 14.1% in 1995 and 16.5% in 2002 (Balo & Purebl, 2008). While the associations between psychosocial variables and cancer have been relatively thoroughly-studied in general, no research has specifically addressed these relationships within the Hungarian population. The national representative survey (Hungarostudy 2002) provided a valuable resource to allow the examination of the psychosocial aspects of cancer. Psychosocial variables and their relationship to cancer incidence and progression are discussed in several recent reviews (Balog & Degi, 2005; Bleiker & Ploeg, 1999; Butow et al., 2000; DeBoer, Ryckman, Pruyn, & VandenBorne, 1999; Denollet, 1999; Garssen, 2004; Kallay, Degi, & Vincze, 2007; McKenna, Zevon, MCorn, & Rounds 1999; Petticrew, Fraser, & Regan, 1999). Although evidence is mixed and opinions divided, Garssen (2004) concluded that 70% of the prospective studies reviewed showed an association between psychosocial aspects and cancer outcomes. An even larger number of studies found that these aspects affected cancer progression in particular. Depression in cancer patients is associated with non-disclosure of cancer diagnosis (Degi, 2009), lower quality of life (Grassi et al., 1996; Koller et al., 1996), high suicide rate (Henriksson, Isometsa, Hietanen, Aro, & Lonnqvist, 1995), poorer adjustment to the disease (Watson, Haviland, Greer, Davidson, & Bliss, 1991), poor adherence to medical treatment (Pirl & Roth, 1999), and less optimism about treatment effectiveness (Cohen, de Moor, & Amato, 2001). Further, depression affects many bodily functions such as endocrine and immune functioning, which persistently activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, affects and compromises immune surveillance of tumors and resistance to cancer progression, increases DNA damage and inhibits apoptosis (Gidron, Russ, Tissarchondou, & Warner, 2006; Irie, Miyata, & Kasai, 2005; Levy, Herberman, Lippman, D'Angelo, & Lee, 1991). In general depression is associated with decreased number and cytotoxicity of T and NK (natural killer) cells which influence cancer progression (Levy et al., 1991). Recently it has been suggested that depression is correlated with cancer-related oxidative DNA damage, as levels of 8-OH-dG (8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine) in depressed cancer patients were higher than in controls (Gidron et al., 2006; Irie et al., 2005). It is also important to note that the relationship between depression and cancer is associated with cigarette smoking (Knekt et al. …


With significant foreign direct investment in emerging economies and the European Union requirement that publicly held multinationals present consolidated financial reports, vertical adjustments to information provided by subsidiaries to conform to parent company accounting standards have become important. Yet, this issue has not been investigated significantly. In this study, we explore Brazilian subsidiaries' adjustments for Swedish multinationals to comply with Swedish accounting standards for consolidated financial reports as typical of the issue of vertical adjustments in general. Results show that subsidiaries that are material in consolidated groups seemingly make appropriate adjustments. Other subsidiaries that are not material are inconsistent. Also, some subsidiaries often distort financial results by inappropriately making adjustments before translating to the functional currency. Most subsidiaries use adjustments to smooth income. Lack of guidance and tacit approval from the parent company are possible factors subsidiaries' to make appropriate vertical adjustments. Laxity in the external audit process is apparent.


The use of radiometers for biomedical applications needs a coherent understanding of thermal signals emitted by the tissues. In this paper, we show first, that some precautions have to be taken when measuring a temperature by the classical radiometric method. For instance, the signal emitted by a lossy material depends on its temperature, permittivity and thickness. This remark allows us to find out a new method for measuring microwave permittivity of liquids when using a Dicke radiometer. We propose a modified radiometric method to determine directly the temperature of the material whatever its reflection coefficient. The applicability of this method is tested with a X band set-up including FET microwave amplifiers. Possibilities of using probes for in situ temperature measurements are discussed.


This 1592 Elizabethan Protestant sermon on Isaiah 24.1-3 offers an economic, social and moral portrait of late Tudor England stressing the need for equity. Trigge attacks enclosures as he was to do from a different perspective in his Humble Petition of Two Sisters (1604). He analyses and condemns usury, the hoarding of corn, "great rents and excessive fines", conspicuous spending and the sale of benefits. He also intends the sermon to be "a glasse [wherein] every degree may plainly see their spots and staines : and may bee thereby made indeede beautifull (if they doe not hate to be reformed) against the appearance of Jesus Christ." He discusses vocation in the Commonwealth, expounding the duties of servants and masters, ministers and people. The numerous shortcomings that he detects in his society are interpreted as tokens of the Second Coming, an event which forms the prophetic background of his preaching, its imminence being further stressed by signs in the physical world. The Godly and Fruitfull sermon shows Trigge's mastery of rhetorical techniques, combining the parenetic and protreptic genres, both warning and encouraging his readers to reform their ways in view of the impending judgment. This 1595 printed version offers a learned sermon with a close reading of the Vulgate collated with new Latin translations of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint and supported by references to Josephus, the Sibylline Oracles and other humanist and more traditional sources. Many of the references and quotations are traced in the footnotes providing insights into the reading of an Elizabethan preacher.


Compression tests of 7050 aluminum alloy have been conducted at different temperatures (340, 380, 420, and 460 °C) with strain rate of 0.1 s-1. The deformation behavior and service performance of the alloy are investigated using EBSD technique, TEM and hardness measurement. Results show that the volume fraction of recrystallized grains increases with the increase of deformation temperature. The primary softening mechanisms of the alloy deformed at 340, 380, and 420 °C are dynamic recovery, and dynamic recrystallization is the main softening mechanism of the alloy deformed at 460 °C. The hardness of the 7050 aluminum alloy deformed increases with increasing deformation temperature. Dynamic precipitation appears when the 7050 aluminum alloy was deformed at 340, 380, and 420 °C, and strengthening mechanisms include mechanical hardening and precipitation strengthening. When deformation temperature is 460 °C, solid solution strengthening and grain boundary strengthening are primary strengthening mechanisms.


ABSTRACT Background Placement behaviours of families of adults with intellectual disabilities has received little or no attention of researches to date. Methods A prospective design was adopted to examine changes in placement decisions of 75 family carers over a 12-month period. Factors associated with changes were also examined. Results Over 12 months, 30 families moved closer to considering an out of home placement. Of these 14 had placed their relative in out of home care. Proactive coping strategies were significantly associated with an increased likelihood of continued home care. Conclusion While the results were similar to studies with children with intellectual disability (ID) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a move out-of-home occurred more quickly for adults. This may reflect current social policy and societal attitudes where moving out of home is more normative for adults with ID. The lack of association with all but one carer or care recipient factors suggest that changes in placement tendencies for adults may differ from that of children.


Politics fascinate people—we all live in places with political structures governing many aspects of our daily lives. In several countries, people identify themselves not only with their country but they tend to demonstrate some "regionalism" in their attitude. We have seen examples of regionalism in di↵erent parts of the world (e.g. Kurdistan in Iraq, Catalonia in Spain, Crimea in Ukraine, to name but a few). Politicians at the lower house are elected to represent one particular region in the national congress and the population in those regions expect the politicians to work for the benefit of the region. In this paper we collected data from 6 di↵erent legislatures in Brazil and investigated its structure. One very surprising finding in this study is that politicians appear to put party interest over the interest of the region they represent—we found almost no evidence of regionalism but strong party loyalty. We also found two main legislators characteristics in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies: (i) the party borders are not as clear as in bipartisan systems, a feature that leads to collaborations across party lines, and (ii) the opposition in the last legislatures appears to be diminishing its size and weakening its structure.


The indolizidine alkaloid swainsonine, a potent inhibitor of Golgi alpha-mannosidase II, has been shown to reduce tumor cell metastasis, enhance cellular immune responses, and reduce solid tumor growth in mice. In our previous Phase I study, swainsonine administered by 5-day continuous infusion inhibited L-phytohemagglutinin-reactive N-linked oligosaccharide expression on peripheral blood lymphocytes. Significant toxicities included edema and elevated serum aspartate aminotransferase (AST). One patient with head and neck cancer had objective (>50%) tumor remission. Two patients showed symptomatic improvement. The objectives of this Phase IB trial were to examine the pharmacokinetics, toxicities, and biochemical effects of bi-weekly oral swainsonine at escalating dose levels (50-600 microgram/kg) in 16 patients with advanced malignancies and 2 HIV-positive patients unsuitable for conventional therapy. Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status was </=2. The maximum tolerated dose was defined as 300 microgram/kg/day due primarily to serum AST abnormalities and dyspnea. Other adverse events present in >20% of patients included increase in serum AST (all patients), fatigue (n = 9), anorexia (n = 6), dyspnea (n = 6), and abdominal pain (n = 4). Inhibition of Golgi alpha-mannosidase II occurred in a dose-dependent manner. Examination of immunological parameters revealed a transient decrease in CD25(+) peripheral blood lymphocytes and, in seven of eight patients, an increase in CD4(+):CD8(+) ratios at 2 weeks. Serum drug levels peaked 3-4 h following a single oral dose in most patients and were proportional to dose at levels >/=150 microgram/kg. We conclude that oral swainsonine is tolerated by chronic intermittent administration at doses up to 150 microgram/kg/day. Adverse events considered drug related were similar to those observed in the infusional study but with fatigue and neurological effects also noted. Investigations of alternative dosing schedules with low starting doses are suggested for further clinical testing.


The cookoff of explosives is of great concern for the safety assurance of explosive devices in storage, transportation and handling. It may occur in the situation that explosive devices are subjected to the external heating stimuli such as fire or high-temperature surrounding. In order to gain ever-increasing knowledge toward the cookoff explosion of explosives, we establish numerical program to predict the cookoff explosion of explosive in a metal container. The computational formulation and methods are given in detail. The thermal decomposition and temperature variation in the interior of explosive were found corresponding to several typical external heating conditions. The results demonstrate that the method is beneficial to the future study on this subject.


Correct assignment of airport resources can greatly affect the quality of service which airlines and airports provide to their customers. Good assignments can help airlines and airports to keep to published schedules, by minimising changes in these schedules and reducing delays. Given the expected increases in civil air traffic, the complexities of resource scheduling and assignment continue to increase. For this reason, as well as the dynamic nature of the problems, scheduling and assignment are becoming increasingly more difficult.

The assignment of baggage sorting stations to flights is one of the resource assignment problems at an airport, and like many other real world optimisation problems, it naturally has several objectives, which conflict with each other. A model of the problem is presented, different approaches to obtaining good solutions are looked at and studied to gain an insight into their qualities. Furthermore, algorithms are studied to improve the already good solutions obtained by the approaches considered and their performance is studied where some characteristics of the problem change, such as the number of baggage sorting stations or the topology of the airport.

Changes to the flight schedule on the day of operation may invalidate previous assignments of flights to resources. These perturbations may not only affect the disrupted flights but also other flights already assigned. Some existing approaches are looked at, and others are suggested to take account of these potential perturbations at the time the assignments are generated with the aim of mitigating their detrimental effect on the day of operation.

The constructive search algorithms and robustness methods are potentially important in a wider variety of problems other than the Airport Baggage Sorting Station Assignment Problem (ABSSAP). By way of illustration, the same techniques are applied to the widely studied Airport Gate Assignment Problem (AGAP).


A series of N-cyanosulfonamides has been prepared by reaction of alkyl-, arylalkyl- and arylsulfonyl halides or sulfonic acid anhydrides with cyanamide, or by reaction of cyanogen bromide with sulfamide/sulfamic acid. Other compounds have been obtained from sulfenyl chlorides, acyl chlorides, or tosyl isocyanate and cyanamide. Inhibition of three carbonic anhydrase (CA) isozymes, hCA I, hCA I1 and bCA IV (h = human; b = bovine) with the prepared compounds has been investigated. Very good inhibitors, as well as compounds with moderate activity against these isozymes were found, depending on the R group at which the metal-coordinating moiety of the inhibitor molecule was attached. Compounds of the types RSNHCN and RCONHCN were much less active in inhibiting all the investigated isozymes as compared to the strong inhibitors possessing the general formula RS02NHCN. Susceptibility to inhibition with the N-cyanosulfonamides was generally: hCA I1 > bCA IV >> hCA I. Spectroscopic studies on Co(I1)-substituted hCA I1 proved that the new inhibitors directly bind to the metal ion within the enzyme active site, similarly to the classical inhibitors of the unsubstituted sulfonamide type.


Osteopoikilosis (Spotted Bone, Osteopathia Condensans Disseminata) is a rare autosomal dominant bone disorder with characteristic radiological features. Prevalence has been estimated 1/50.000. The diagnosis usually done according to radiographs which are performed incidentally. Diagnostic lesions of osteopoikilosis are typically diffuse, round or oval, symmetrically shaped sclerotic bone areas. It should be differentiated from osteoblastic metastasis, tuberous sclerosis and mastocytosis due to the similarity of radiological images. We report a case of osteopoikilosis patient presenting with left hip and left groin pain.


In the current 'post-factual age', truth has often been distorted with the aim of serving the political goals of demagogues, especially with regards to debated hot issues, such as the recent migratory crisis. Despite being located further from certain conflict areas on the world map, Australia has also been challenged by influxes of refugees and asylum seekers coming from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Especially since the 2012 reimplementation of the Pacific Solution, the proliferation and manipulation of media contents on the matter has intensified. The main purpose of this small-scale study is to understand what kind of representation strategies populist leaders employ to represent refugees on the social media platform of Twitter and shed light on the nationalist propaganda underlying their tweets. The research relies on a mixed methodology that combines Corpus Linguistics and Discourse-Historical-Approach, which were employed to analyse qualitative data elicited from the Twitter corpus. The findings suggest that there are several similarities between the Euro-American and the Australian populisms, although the former has received greater attention within the literary field. As a matter of fact, refugees are pictured as outlaws or petty criminals, who come massively to Australia to usurp the country's resources while taking advantage of Australia's welfare system. As a whole, they are portrayed as a threat to the unity of the Australian nation, to be neutralised in order to safeguard the integrity and the future prosperity of the country. The ultimate goal of the research is to encourage social media users to become aware of these manipulative discursive practices circulating online and, ultimately, spur them on to oppose an indiscriminate accreditation of untruthful information.


Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), and, in particular, gelatinases (MMP-2 and MMP-9), have been implicated in vascular cell proliferation and/or migration, contributing to intimal thickening, an essential stage in the development of atherosclerosis and restenosis following balloon angioplasty. Endothelin, a strong chemoatractant and mitogen, has been shown to promote smooth muscle cell proliferation and migration by activating MMPs via endothelin-A (ETA) receptors. The positioning of a soft silicon collar around the left carotid artery in rabbits results in intimal thickening. In this study, we investigate the possible role of gelatinases and the effect of a nonselective ETA/ETB receptor antagonist, TAK-044 (5 mg/kg body weight/day, subcutaneously [sc]), on these enzymes. Our results demonstrated that both MMP-2 and MMP-9 activities increased in response to collaring in placebo group, while treatment with TAK-044 significantly suppressed both gelatinase activities and proMMP-2 levels, and inhibited intimal thickening in collared arteries. These results suggest that either enhanced MMP expression or endothelin receptor antagonism may be involved in the formation of intimal thickening in this model.


Mathematical psychology is a sub-field of psychology that started in the 1950s and has continued to grow as an important contributor to formal psychological theory, especially in the cognitive areas of psychology such as learning, memory, classification, choice response time, decision making, attention, and problem solving. In addition, there are several scientific sub-areas that were originated by mathematical psychologists such as the foundations of measurement, stochastic memory models, and psychologically motivated reformulations of expected utility theory. Mathematical psychology does not include all uses of mathematics and statistics in psychology, and indeed there is a long history of such uses especially in the areas of perception and psychometrics. What is most unique about mathematical psychology is its approach to theory construction. While accepting the behaviorist dictum that the data in psychology must be observable and replicable, mathematical models are specified in terms of unobservable formal constructs that can predict detailed aspects of data across multiple experimental and natural settings. By now almost all the substantive areas of cognitive and experimental psychology have formal mathematical models and theories, and many of these are due to researchers that identify with mathematical psychology. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.


: It was shown that the rate and the degree of erythrocytes aggregation brought about by a mixture of protein-chondroitin-4-keratan sulfate (PCKS) and hyaluronic acid (HA) was greater than the sum of the values of the corresponding indices observed during separate independent action of these proteoglycans on the aggregation of the mentioned cells concentrations as in the mixtures. It may be supposed that such phenomenon is connected with formation in the mixture of a hybrid PCKS-HA complex which is more active in respect to the erythrocyte aggregation than its components separately.


Ginger is used for treating motion sickness, nausea and vomiting. The traditional Thai method of preparation is to steam the rhizome before preparing the remedy. There is no report comparing the biological activity and quality of extracts from steamed and non-steamed rhizomes. The objective was to compare the anti-inflammatory activities, cytotoxicity and quality of steamed and non-steamed ginger extracts. All extracts were tested for their potential anti-inflammatory properties via the inhibitory effect on NO and PGE2 production, and cytotoxic activity via sulforhodamine B assay. Loss on drying, total ash and acid insoluble ash determinations were used as quantitation evaluation to standardize the ginger extracts. The results showed that the quality of all samples was within standard guidelines. The anti-inflammatory NO inhibition effect was higher in the steamed ginger ethanol extract (AZOE) than in the non-steamed ginger ethanol extract (HZOE), but lower than prednisolone as a positive control, with IC50 values of 13.47 ± 0.20, 19.64 ± 0.33 and 1.33 ± 0.02 μg/ml, respectively. The effect of PGE2 inhibition of AZOE, HZOE and positive control, had IC50 values of 0.40 ± 0.06, 0.63 ± 0.02 and 0.066 ± 0.004 μg/ml, respectively. However, the steamed and non-steamed ginger ethanol extracts were not cytotoxic to either SKOV 3 or HeLa cells. Steamed ginger had a higher inhibition effect on NO and PGE2 release than non steamed ginger. These results support the traditional Thai method of steaming the rhizome before preparing the medicine.


Abstract Britain was the first modern European country to adopt the widespread practice of cremation, and by 2010, it took place in around three-quarters of all funerals. Although the clergy had ceased to be the exclusive custodians of funeral ritual, their views and example remained highly significant in conveying approval, or disapproval, of cremation to their religious constituencies. This article explores attitudes to cremation amongst the English Anglican and Roman Catholic leadership in the twentieth century. In the first half of the century, a number of high-profile Anglican bishops promoted cremation by both teaching and example. The Roman Catholic Church, however, remained opposed to the practice, which it equated with atheism and inhumanity. Although the Catholic position began to soften from the 1960s, it is evident that some reticence about cremation remains. The different approaches to cremation illuminate a subtle religious and cultural fault line between the two ecclesial communities which has hitherto been little explored. The article highlights the role of the Cremation Society of Great Britain in working with members of both Churches to normalise cremation.


Most scholars who have addressed the problem of categorizing Philippine languages have related UMIRAY DUMAGET (DGTU) most closely to other languages spoken by Negritos in northeastern Luzon, languages in the Cordilleran microgroup. Reid (1994) suggests that DGTU is not a Cordilleran language but rather that it is relatable to Bikol, a Central Philippine language. While the evidence from phonological changes and the pronominal system does not compel us to favor one subgrouping over the other, the lexical data do show that DGTU is most closely related to the Central Philippine languages. Culturally, we can infer that DGTU results from very early contact between the non-Austronesian-speaking Negrito population and speakers of that variety of Central Philippine that evolved into Tagalog, Bikol, and the Bisayan languages. A consequence of this grouping is that any inherited lexeme that DGTU shares with non--Central Philippine languages must be assigned to a higher level. ********** 1. BACKGROUND. (1) East Central Luzon is the homeland of the group of about 3,000 people speaking Umiray Dumaget (DGTU). "Dumagat" is an exonym applied to a wide variety of groups of the Negrito physical type, most of whom prefer the term Agta, Alta, Ayta, or some other derivative of the Proto-Philippines (PPH(Z)) *qaRta[ ] 'person'. (2) Local names for the group in question abound-tagi kellogen, tagi bulus, tagi kabuluwen, tagi depoynga, and so forth--but the designation Umiray has most often been used in the literature (Macleod 1972, McFarland 1980, Walton 1979, Thomas and Gieser 1973, Reid 1994). This language covers a relatively wide area of eastern Luzon from southern Aurora, just south of Baler, along the coast to at least Infanta in Quezon, and westward into Nueva Ecija, Bulacan, and Rizal provinces. Some speakers of this language are found in communities along the northern coast of Polillo Island (Reid, pers. comm.). There is only minor dialect variation among DGTU speaking communities. DGTU is not mutually intelligible with any other Philippine language. Thomas and Gieser (1973:65) grouped the "Dingalan Bay Dumaget group: Umiray, Diteki, Tagi Kabuluwen, Depoynga, Anglat" with other Agta languages under "Northern Negrito group and Luzon various." On the basis of lexicostatistics, Walton (1979:81) subgrouped DGTU with Casiguran Dumagat (DGTC), the pair splitting off from Northern Cordilleran at 45% of shared cognates. This percentage of shared cognates is high, at least as far as DGTU is concerned, undoubtedly because of unexciuded borrowings; Headland and Headland (1974) calculate the percentage of cognates shared by DGTC and DGTU as 36 %, and this writer at 35%. McFarland (1980) also links DGTU with DGTC and the latter's close relatives East Cagayan Negrito, Paranan, and Kasiguranin. The latter are classified together as the Northern Dumagat languages, and DGTU is separated into a class by itself. "Dumagat (Umirey) is very different from the other four, and may actually belong to a different subgroup (such as Northern Cordilleran) or constitute a subgroup by itself' (66). He nevertheless states that the "Dumagat languages are part of the Northern Philippine group, within which their closest relatives are probably the Northern Cordilleran languages" (66). Reid, in contrast, holds that the closest relatives of DGTU are not to be found in the northern Philippines. Rather, "a cursory inspection of sound changes and verb morphology suggests that it is probably a Central Philippine language, related fairly remotely to the Bikol languages" (1994:41). 2. THE PROBLEM. In his 1994 article "Possible non-Austronesian lexical elements in Philippine Negrito languages," Reid argues convincingly that languages spoken by modern Negrito populations are the descendants of creolized Austronesian speech acquired by the Negritos soon after coming into contact with the invading population. …


OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to determine the existing relation between the Oral Lichen Planus (OLP), Recurrent Aphthous Stomatitis (RAS), Burning Mouth Syndrome (BMS) and psychological alterations of the patient, such as stress, anxiety and depression.

DESIGN OF THE STUDY
18 patients with RAS, 9 patients with OLP and 7 patients with BMS, that presented the condition at the moment of the examination, were studied, as well as a control group of 20 healthy patients. Both groups were extracted of hospitals and university centers, where the clinical diagnosis was made by a team of oral pathologists. Two measuring instruments were applied to them about their psychological condition: the Test of Recent Experience, to measure the stress level and scale H.A.D., to determine the level of anxiety and depression; the score given by them were statistically analyzed through T-test and the ANOVA Tukey test.

RESULTS
Our results suggested a statistically significant association between these psychological disorders and the diseases of the oral mucosa in study. It was observed that the stress level is greater in patients with RAS and OLP, depression is particularly high in patients with BMS, and levels of anxiety are raised in the three groups, in comparison with the group control.

CONCLUSIONS
A positive relationship can be established between psychological alterations and RAS, OLP and BMS. The RAS and the OLP stress and anxiety levels were considered as high, whereas the BMS was more related to important levels of anxiety and depression. According to these findings it is possible to assume that psychological factors should be taking into account when oral health wants to be maintain as normal.


Today's Internet is a far cry from the network of academic sharing as which it began. From the ruins of the dot-com bubble has risen a brave new Internet that O'Reilly has named Web 2.0 while others prefer such names as social net. We were interested in what characterizes today's Internet services and set out to study eleven Web 2.0 sites that encapsulated the new breed of Internet services. We found that O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0 describes well what is happening on the Internet today. Today's Internet is indeed about harnessing collective intelligence and about user-contributed content. Huge numbers of items require us to use social navigation with its recommender systems to find items of interest and users have advanced from being simple consumers of content to being a major source of the Web 2.0 content as well. Users contribute content directly by uploading text (in blogs, forums, and reviews), photos, and video clips, and in addition to such intentionally contributed content, the systems generate content by tracking user activities. Moreover, today's Internet services are characterized by sociability. While some services merely provide means for communal discourse, many others, such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook, are based on building and maintaining social networks. Regrettably, the social aspects and user-contributed content of the services have also lead to multi-faceted privacy concerns and even such criminal activities as identity theft and child molestation. Furthermore, copyright violations have become an everyday phenomenon. This survey offers examples of modern, state-of-the-art interface features in today's net and descriptions of the services from the user's viewpoint. The main goal of the presentation is to outline the current state of Internet services together with recent research findings about them. However, we have not shied away from using many blog posts and other writings on the Internet as source material because it is on the Internet where the web of the future is currently being woven.


Diffusion impediments in redox shuttles are a major limitation to realizing high power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) in dye sensitized solar cells (DSCs) using cobalt complexes. Mass transport limitations are strongly dependent on the pore size and the porosity of mesoporous TiO2 films. Herein, we examine the major factors responsible for mass transport limitations and identify ways to minimize them, achieving highly efficient cobalt based DSCs. Depending on the electrolyte and dye used, the pore size and the porosity of the TiO2 films must be modulated to facilitate diffusion of cobalt complexes through pores. The influence of porosity, pore size and viscosity of the electrolyte used on the performance of DSCs with different maximum obtainable JSCs are studied in detail. These effects were studied using two dye solutions, Y123 (0.2 mM) and a cocktail solution of SM342/Y123 (0.2 mM each, 7 : 1). The JSC is affected primarily by lowered pore sizes as a result of the TiCl4 post-treatment. Transient photocurrent decay measurements were performed on devices featuring photoanodes fabricated with differing porosities and pore sizes. This study indicates that in cells featuring only Y123, recombination rates decreased with decreasing porosity of TiO2 films (i.e. higher TiCl4 concentrations used in their post-treatment). Conversely, in DSCs fabricated with the SM342/Y123 dye cocktail, an intermediate TiCl4 post-treatment concentration (20 mM) afforded the lowest recombination rate, resulting in the preservation of a high open-circuit potential (VOC). It was found that this intermediate concentration regime is optimal in order to achieve an efficiency of over 12.7% at full sun intensity with the SM342/Y123 dye cocktail. Finally, it was concluded that the porosity and pore size must be modulated for different dyes and electrolytes to minimize diffusion limitations of the redox species.


Stray light (flare) is formed inside cameras by internal reflections between optical elements. We point out a flare effect of significant magnitude and implication to snapshot hyperspectral imagers. Recent technologies enable placing interference-based filters on individual pixels in imaging sensors. These filters have narrow transmission bands around custom wavelengths and high transmission efficiency. Cameras using arrays of such filters are compact, robust and fast. However, as opposed to traditional broad-band filters, which often absorb unwanted light, narrow band-pass interference filters reflect non-transmitted light. This is a source of very significant flare which biases hyperspectral measurements. The bias in any pixel depends on spectral content in other pixels. We present a theoretical image formation model for this effect, and quantify it through simulations and experiments. In addition, we test deflaring of signals affected by such flare.


The reaction of the chelating ligand 4-[4,6-bis(3,5-dimethyl-1H-pyrazol-1-yl)-1,3,5-triazin-2-yl]-N,N-diethyl-benzenamine, L, with pentacarbonylchlororhenium by conventional heating method produces the complexes fac-[ReL(CO)3Cl2] and fac-[Re2L(CO)6Cl2] in a period of 48 hours. The use of microwaves as the source of heat and the increase in the equivalents of one of the reactants leads to a more selective reaction and also decreases the reaction time to 1 hour. After proper purification, the photophysical properties of fac-[ReL(CO)3Cl] were analyzed. The solid-state photoluminescence analysis showed an emission band at 628 nm independent of temperature. However, in the solution studies, the emission band shifted from 550 nm in frozen media to 610 nm when the matrix became fluid. These results confirm that this complex possess a phenomenon known as rigidochromism.


Historically, chemists have been motivated by problems in total synthesis or by a desire to develop reactions of broad utility. In answer to these challenges, several approaches to fundamental research have been developed. In chapter 1, we describe how our reactivity-driven approach has led to the discovery of numerous synthetic tools. The development of new synthetically useful methodology often rests on an understanding of the mechanistic underpinnings of the desired transformation. This is particularly true when this knowledge forms the basis for subsequent mechanistic proposals. The coordination of an alkyne to a cationic Au(I) complex represents the prototypical mechanistic starting place for many Au(I)-catalyzed reactions. In chapter two, we describe the isolation and characterization of a gold(I)-coordinated alkyne. The crystal structure of this compound is compared to related Ag(I) and Cu(I) compounds. With these structures in hand, we can begin to understand the unique ability of Au(I) complexes to serve as effective %pi;-activation catalysts, especially in understanding why gold is often more effective than copper or silver.In addition to being able to activate %pi;-bonds toward nucleophilic attack, it has been proposed that gold is also capable of stabilizing adjacent carbocations. Such species (i.e. [L-Au-CR2] + ) have been referred to as gold-carbenoids or gold-stabilized carbocations. In chapter 3, we describe a bonding model for these intermediates that suggests that while the gold-carbon bond order is generally less than or equal to one, this bond includes both %sigma;- and %pi;-type bonding. Furthermore, the position of a given Au-stabilized intermediate on a continuum ranging from gold-stabilized singlet carbene to gold-coordinated carbocation is dictated by both the carbene substituents and the ancillary ligand. This model provides an explanation for observed ancillary ligand effects and should enable more efficient reaction optimization.In chapter 4, a series of gold(I)-catalyzed rearrangement reactions of alkynyl sulfoxides, sulfimides and sulfur ylides are reported. Homopropargyl sulfoxides are rearranged to benzothiepinones or benzothiopines, while %alpha;-thioenones are formed in the reaction of propargyl sulfoxides. It is proposed that these reactions proceed via an %alpha;-carbonyl gold-carbenoid intermediate formed through gold-promoted oxygen atom transfer from sulfoxide to alkyne.In chapter 5, the development of a convenient gold(III)-catalyzed synthesis of azepines from the intermolecular annulation of propargyl esters and %alpha;,%beta;-unsaturated imines is discussed. Mechanistic experiments suggest that this formal [4 + 3]-cycloaddition reaction proceeds via a stepwise process involving intermolecular trapping of a gold-carbenoid intermediate and subsequent intramolecular trapping of the resulting allyl-gold intermediate.In chapter 6, we discuss the gold(III)-catalyzed [3+3]-cycloaddition reaction of propargyl esters and azomethine imines. This reaction provides a rapid entry into a wide range of substituted tetrahydropyridazine derivatives from simple starting materials. A mechanism similar to that proposed in chapter 5 is discussed, along with a detailed description of the consequences of this mechanism on the diastereoselectivity of the annulation reaction. In addition, a strategy for rendering this reaction asymmetric is presented.


While general object detection with deep learning has achieved great success in the past few years, the performance and efficiency of detecting small objects are far from satisfactory. The most common and effective way to promote small object detection is to use high-resolution images or feature maps. However, both approaches induce costly computation since the computational cost grows squarely as the size of images and features increases. To get the best of two worlds, we propose QueryDet that uses a novel query mechanism to accelerate the inference speed of feature-pyramid based object detectors. The pipeline composes two steps: it first predicts the coarse locations of small objects on low-resolution features and then computes the accurate detection results using high-resolution features sparsely guided by those coarse positions. In this way, we can not only harvest the benefit of high-resolution feature maps but also avoid useless computation for the background area. On the popular COCO dataset, the proposed method improves the detection mAP by 1.0 and mAP-small by 2.0, and the high-resolution inference speed is improved to 3.0× on average. On VisDrone dataset, which contains more small objects, we create a new state-of-the-art while gaining a 2.3× high-resolution acceleration on average. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/QueryDet=PyTorch.