We propose a clientele-based model of the yield curve and optimal maturity structure of government debt. Clienteles are generations of agents at different life cycle stages in an overlapping-generations economy. An optimal maturity structure exists in the absence of distortionary taxes and induces efficient intergenerational risksharing. If agents are more risk-averse than log, then an increase in the long-horizon clientele raises the price and optimal supply of long-term bonds. But while a welfare-maximizing government caters to clienteles, it does not accommodate fully their demand, and limits issuance of long-term bonds to a level where these earn negative expected excess returns.


The collision of India with Asia results in a rapidly changing stress pattern around both Himalayan syntaxes. The maximum compressive stress, which is north- south north of the indenter, fans radially through nearly 180° around the syntaxes to accommodate the necessary strike-slip motion on the edges of the indenter. Thus, the whole Indochina Peninsula was swept by the migrating stress and associated strain pattern as the eastern syntaxis moved to the north. As a result, the maximum horizontal component of the stress field is predicted to have been first oriented east-west, then north-south. We propose that this changing stress field controlled the opening of the sedimentary basins and of the South China Sea as well as the direction of motion of the major strike-slip faults.


The influence of characteristics of multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) on the properties of polystyrene-block-polybutadiene-block-polystyrene (SBS) / MWCNT composites was investigated. The three types of MWCNTs which have a different in the degrees of graphitization (CNT-1; φ 87 nm, G/D ratio 9.09 and CNT-2; φ 87 nm, G/D ratio 0.78) and the diameter (CNT-3; φ 10-15 nm) were used as a filler. The composites were prepared using a mixing roll. The tensile moduli of the composites were improved even at low concentration of MWCNTs. The volume resistivity of the composite compounded with CNT-1 was markedly decreased at the lowest content of MWCNT, 4.4 vol%. The new peak of the loss tangent (tanδ) was observed around –10 °C in the temperature dependence of tanδ for the composites compounded with CNT-1. These results suggest that another relaxation system in SBS was newly formed by compounding CNT-1.


This paper investigates the potential benefits for a country from investing in data transparency. The paper shows that increased data transparency can bring substantive returns in lower costs of external borrowing. This result is obtained by estimating the impact of public data transparency on sovereign spreads conditional on the country's level of institutional quality and public and external debt. While improving data transparency alone reduces the external borrowing costs for a country, the return is much higher when combined with stronger institutional quality and lower public and external debt. Similarly, the returns on investing in data transparency are higher when a country's integration to the global economy deepens, as captured by trade and financial openness. Estimation of an instrumental variable regression shows that Sub-Saharan African countries could have saved up to 14.5 basis points in sovereign bond spreads and decreased their external debt burden by US$405.4 million (0.02 percent of gross domestic product) in 2018, if their average level of data transparency was that of a country in the top quartile of the upper-middle-income country category. At the country level, Angola could have reduced its external debt burden by around US$73.6 million.


This study assessed the small scale farmers' perception of institutions and information channels on climate change and adaptation in Embu County, Kenya. A survey was conducted on 411 households and 25 key informants on their perception of institutions and information channels towards climate change and adaptation where stratified random and purposive sampling was done respectively. The data were subjected to descriptive statistics, chi-square, linear regression, and Likert scale analysis. The results showed that formal institutions are more likely to influence small scale farmers' ability to perceive climate variability risks and opt for adaptation mechanisms. Out of twelve information channels identified by the farmers, only five are more likely to influence climate variability adaptation mechanisms. While life-experience was the only channel significant to perception on climate variability impacts on agriculture. On the access and utilization of climate-related information, small-scale farmers are in a position to implement although many barriers were cited. The results indicate the need for the farmers, agricultural, and climate-related institutions to work closely to enable co-learning to raise awareness and to help disseminate agricultural-related information.

 Key words: Institutions, information channels, climate change, adaptation, perception.


ABSTRACT The Catholic Church has recently issued a call for "educating to fraternal humanism" that envisions a pluralist society in which all voices are to be heard. This contrasts with previously held positions of outright rejection of pluralist society (Augustinian Thomism) or Christianisation (Whig Thomism). This paper advances a Dominican Thomist vision of a post-secular society comprising three realms, namely sacred, secular and profane. Dominican Thomism is founded upon human reasoning whereby Catholic and liberal thinkers collaborate to build this society with a fortified secular realm that is a buffer against the other two realms. In such a secular realm the public sphere is pluralist and open to all voices. A socially productive pedagogy is the starting point and this paper points to a dialogic RE intervention in the classroom that offers much promise.


Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) bone cement comprises liquid methyl methacrylate monomer and PMMA beads, the former encapsulating the beads and polymerising within 10 minutes of mixing. Up to 7% volumetric shrinkage accompanies the exothermic polymerisation reaction and subsequent cooling induces residual thermal stresses when the cement is restrained around implant components. The authors have measured shrinkages, calculated residual stresses by closed form solutions and measured stresses by a range of methods. Full field optical displacement measurement has been used to derive strains and stresses in rings of cement cooling by 50oC under representative restraints and the hole drilling technique has been applied to cured PMMA cement. A strain gauged transducer developed to measure shrinkage forces in cement rings for derivation of contact stresses. The theoretical results predict stresses in the range 10-25MPa for a range of curing temperatures. These results are supported by the experimental methods and also by subsequent finite element models. The acquisition of these results required experimental characterisation of proprietary PMMA cements, particularly in terms of elastic modulus (up to 2.65GPa) and Poisson's Ratio (0.455). It is concluded that the thermally induced stresses are sufficient to cause cracking around hip replacement femoral stems at the stem/cement interface, in the immediate post-curing phase and prior to functional loading of the implant. Cracks of this type have been reported from clinical studies and the authors have reproduced such cracks in laboratory models of hip replacements. It is proposed that the cracks are likely to propagate by the mechanism of fatigue under cyclic loading. It is concluded that thermal stresses are important in failure of hip replacements by aseptic loosening, the most common reported indicator for implant revision. There are few references in literature that address this issue directly, however the results of this work are supportive of the measurements and observations reported and provide an explanation and understanding of the initiation of failures.


Transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) has been considered the standard treatment for intermediate-stage hepatocellular carcinoma according to BCLC algorithm. However, it has been unclear about the TACE-related predictive bio-markers and underlying molecular mechanisms. This investigation revealed that HCCs with higher HIF-1α suffered from unfavorable OS after TACE. mRNA expression microarray revealed that HIF-1α was potential target of p-STAT3 which was verified by ChIP and immunoblotting assay. Activation of IL-6/STAT3/HIF-1α signaling was found to promote EMT and chemoresistance to Doxorubicin in vitro and in vivo by regulating SNAI1. Hypoxia did not enhance HIF-1α expression and influence cell growth and chemoresistence to Doxorubicin in HCC cells when STAT3 expression was abolished. Taken together, HIF-1α overexpression in HCC tissues predicted the unfavorable outcome of HCCs after TACE and IL-6/STAT3 pathway resulted in EMT induced-metastases and chemoresistance of HCC after TACE through HIF-1α/SNAI1 axis.


This paper shows the results from Suriya (2011) that tourism-induced activities especially souvenir production can distribute income to the poor and then reduce poverty in a village which operates community-based tourism. The reason is that souvenir production requires many unskillful labors. Then the poor can easily participate in the activities and gain the spillover effect. In contrast, core tourism activities which are homestay, trekking, cultural show, etc. cannot reduce poverty in the village because the incomes from these activities concentrate at the richer households who afford the investment. However, to support community-based tourism, the government cannot ignore supporting the richer households in the village because core tourism is the pre-requisite for tourism-induced activities. Without core tourism, tourists will not come to buy souvenir in the village. Then the effect of souvenir production on poverty reduction will vanish. The paper also introduces the five factors of income distribution in community-based tourism and suggests the conditions to maintain the sustainability of community-based tourism.


It is known that renal scintigraphy is the best imaging modality in the diagnosis of urinary leakage. Usually, only planar images are diagnostic but sometimes they are unclear when urinoma is small and adjacent to kidney or bladder. In other respects, planar images can be false-positive in the case of increased blood flow of abdominal wall. We suggested using SPECT/CT in differential diagnosis. An atlas of SPECT/CT is presented, which includes 3 cases that urinoma was diagnosed by SPECT/CT, which were unclear on planar images, and one case that urinary leakage suspicion on planar image was ruled out by SPECT/CT.


In the report "Attention-related increases in cortical responsivity dissociated from the contingent negative variation" by M. W. Donald, Jr., and W. R. Goff [172, 1163 (1971)] line 12 of reference 20 should read "P300 and CNV with performance efficiency."


In the era of multicore systems, it is expected that the number of cores that can be integrated on a single chip will be 3-digit. The key to utilize such a huge computational power is to extract the very fine parallelism in the user program. This is non-trivial for the average programmer, and becomes very hard as the number of potential parallel instances increases. Task-based programming models such as OmpSs are promising, since they handle the detection of dependencies and synchronization for the programmer. However, state-of-the-art research shows that task management is not cheap, and introduces a significant overhead that limits the scalability of OmpSs. Nexus# is a hardware accelerator for the OmpSs runtime system, which dynamically monitors dependencies between tasks. It is fully synthesizable in VHDL, and has a distributed task graph model to achieve the best scalability. Supporting tasks with arbitrary number of parameters and any dependency pattern, Nexus# achieves better performance than Nanos, the official OmpSs runtime system, and scales well for the H264dec benchmark with very fine grained tasks, among other benchmarks from the Starbench suite.


The present paper employs Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations to reveal nanoscale ion separation from water/ion flows under an external electric field in Poiseuille-like nanochannels. Ions are drifted to the sidewalls due to the effect of wall-normal applied electric fields while flowing inside the channel. Fresh water is obtained from the channel centerline, while ions are rejected near the walls, similar to the Capacitive DeIonization (CDI) principles. Parameters affecting the separation process, i.e., simulation duration, percentage of the removal, volumetric flow rate, and the length of the nanochannel incorporated, are affected by the electric field magnitude, ion correlations, and channel height. For the range of channels investigated here, an ion removal percentage near 100% is achieved in most cases in less than 20 ns for an electric field magnitude of E = 2.0 V/Å. In the nutshell, the ion drift is found satisfactory in the proposed nanoscale method, and it is exploited in a practical, small-scale system. Theoretical investigation from this work can be projected for systems at larger scales to perform fundamental yet elusive studies on water/ion separation issues at the nanoscale and, one step further, for designing real devices as well. The advantages over existing methods refer to the ease of implementation, low cost, and energy consumption, without the need to confront membrane fouling problems and complex electrode material fabrication employed in CDI.


Romance languages such as Italian or Spanish preserve fricative voicing contrasts in word-final position, while their neutralization has been reported for European Portuguese, but the behavior of Romanian fricatives remains understudied. Previous work with Romanian fricatives suggests a pattern of final devoicing but, due to the specific properties of the corpus analyzed, it is unclear if this is limited to the presence of secondary palatalization and/or the result of morphological conditioning. In this study, we apply speech processing tools to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the voicing contrast in fricatives in contemporary spoken Romanian. We examine a corpus of prepared speech from newscasts and semi-spontaneous TV debates (86 speakers) and compare our results to previous findings from a corpus of controlled experimental speech (31 speakers). Our classification tool employs cepstral coefficients and hidden Markov model (HMM)-defined temporal regions to identify the properties of these segments. Our findings conform to typological predictions regarding partial devoicing in coda position, especially at more posterior places, but we find little support for voicing neutralization in Romanian fricatives more generally. Our study thus documents the properties of Romanian fricatives and contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of contrast maintenance in phonological systems.


While writing instructors often assign student self-assessment essays with the goal of motivating their students and helping them to develop writerly self-awareness, the reality of the classroom power dynamic limits what can be accomplished in such essays. Students might feel pressured to construct versions of their "selves" that are simply reproductions of traditional student roles rather than to engage in honest, meaningful reflection. Scholars in the fields of Education, Assessment and Composition Studies have noted the lack of research into the political and ethical implications of requiring students to compose these essays. This dissertation answers the call for research into students' complex negotiations of identity when presented with the task of self-assessment. Using case study methodology, it follows two college-level introductory writing courses that implemented student selfassessment and self-evaluation/grading. This study uses Robert Brooke's Identity Negotiations Theory to demonstrate how instructors constructed the assignment via handouts and in-class discussions, often giving subtle cues to students regarding the versions of "self " that would be privileged, and how students responded to these cues in their self-assessments. Additionally, oneon-one interviews provide insight into instructors' and students' motivations during this process. The study catalogs a number of fully cooperative or "bought in" student stances to the task of self-assessment, as well as apathetic/compliant and resistant stances. It also demonstrates how students shifted their stances throughout their essays as they attempted to define and negotiate their student and writer roles. Documented patterns include students' imitation and appropriation of academic discourse and narratives of academic progress; their construction of the persona of a developing or struggling writer (often accompanied by an attempt to mitigate the risk of revealing weaknesses); and their use of external standards and "safe" criteria such as effort when evaluating their own work. The study also highlights students who appeared to misread expectations and perform a student or writer role inconsistent with the values of the course, the instructor and the institution. This dissertation proposes an ethical implementation of self-assessment in which students and teachers attempt to build a "better version" of the task that acknowledges, critiques and incorporates role-based negotiations.


We have developed and realized a concept which is very well suited for a quick recognition of highly correlated patterns. For a hetero-associative memory we used a minimal optimized output code (index memory). We constructed a tree structure in which the assignment of indices has been optimized by simulated annealing. Thus the algorithm for optimal stability of the learned patterns works most effectively. Special care was taken of recognizing « real » objects, e.g. scanned letters. Here the characteristic noise is very anisotropic. We have slightly modified the minimal overlap strategy of Krauth and Mezard [1] by training with this specific noise, and could improve the performance of our network. In order to get insight into the network and its behaviour we used a measure called constructivity which shows clearly the anisotropic effects. We trained a network to recognize a scanned text and to produce the associated text file. Due to the architecture of the network many processes can be treated in parallel. Therefore we used transputers for the implementation.


Abstract An ~1:1 mixture of ferrihydrite and nanocrystalline akaganeite (β-FeOOH; 10.15 nm) was incubated with Shewanella putrefaciens (strain CN32) under anoxic conditions with lactate as an electron donor and anthraquinone-2,6-disulfonate (AQDS) as an electron shuttle. The incubation was carried out in a 1,4-piperazinediethanesulfonic acid (PIPES)-buffered medium, without PO43- at circumneutral pH. Iron reduction was measured as a function of time (as determined by 0.5 N HCl extraction), and solids were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), electron microscopy, and Mössbauer spectroscopy. The biogenic reduction of Fe3+was rapid; with 60% of the total Fe (FeTOT) reduced in one day. Only an additional 10% of FeTOT was reduced over the next three years. A fine-grained (~10 nm), cation-excess (CE) magnetite with an Fe2+/FeTOT ratio of 0.5-0.6 was the sole biogenic product after one day of incubation. The CE magnetite was unstable and partially transformed to micrometer-sized ferrous hydroxy carbonate [FHC; Fe2(OH)2CO3(s)], a rosasite-type mineral, with time. Ferrous hydroxy carbonate dominated the mineral composition of the three year incubated sample. The Fe2+/FeTOT ratio of the residual CE magnetite after three years of incubation was lower than the day 1 sample and was close to that of the stoichiometric magnetite (0.33). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of biogenic FHC, and was only reported twice in literature but in a very different context. Ferrous hydroxy carbonate appeared to form by slow reaction of microbially produced carbonate with Fe2+-excess magnetite. The FHC may be an overlooked mineral phase that explains the infrequent occurrence of fine-grained, biogenic magnetite in anoxic sediments.


Abstract. Land use changes are altering the hydrologic system and have potentially large impacts on water resources. Rapid socio-economic development drives land use change. This is particularly true in the case of the rapidly developing city of Pune, India. The present study aims at analyzing past land use changes between 1989 and 2009 and their impacts on the water balance in the Mula and Mutha Rivers catchment upstream of Pune. Land use changes were identified from three Rivers catchment multitemporal land use classifications for the cropping years 1989/1990, 2000/2001, and 2009/2010. The hydrologic model SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) was used to assess impacts on runoff and evapotranspiration. Two model runs were performed and compared using the land use classifications of 1989/1990 and 2009/2010. The main land use changes were identified as an increase of urban area from 5.1% to 10.1% and cropland from 9.7% to 13.5% of the catchment area during the 20 yr period. Urbanization was mainly observed in the eastern part and conversion to cropland in the mid-northern part of the catchment. At the catchment scale we found that the impacts of these land use changes on the water balance cancel each other out. However, at the sub-basin scale urbanization led to an increase of the water yield by up to 7.6%, and a similar decrease of evapotranspiration, whereas the increase of cropland resulted in an increase of evapotranspiration by up to 5.9%.


This review aimed to examine the current literature on foster care, with a particular focus on what constitutes a successful foster placement. The definition of a 'successful placement' in this context is a placement that not only does not break down, but one where the child manages to adequately adjust to a stable life in foster care. The review considers findings from the literature on foster care, along with empirical studies and theoretical papers from the developmental psychopathology and resilience literature base that further inform our understanding of this area. The review presents and critiques the literature in three main domains 1) how the children's previous experiences influence the foster placement, for example their experiences of maltreatment, 2) the significance of the foster carer- foster child relationship, for example the importance of a secure base in care, and 3) the influences on a placement from the wider system of people and professionals involved in the child's welfare, for example the social worker and the child's birth family. The review concludes with an extended critique of the literature and suggestions for future research.


Except religious and aristocratic buildings, most of the constructions and houses in the first ages of the former European cities and towns are made of cob and timber. The gradual transformation of this architecture in stone and brick constructions – the so-called "petrification" – is one of the most important processes within the cities and towns. Nevertheless, until now, this phenomenon has been little studied by historians and archaeologists (for instance Lilley 2002; Schofield & Vince 2005; Clark 2009). Therefore, the modes and chronology of these progressive architectural transformations are still uncertain."Petrification" is a significant process that makes it possible to approach a new range of important issues in urban history. It concerns the general aspect of the cities and towns and stands for an obvious change of the landscape and the evolution of material culture. From a social viewpoint "petrification" changes the way in which houses are in contact with each other and it consequently modifies town politics as well as the relationship between neighbourhoods. In conclusion, "petrification" changes deeply the urban life. From an economic viewpoint the "petrification" process has important implications on the organisation of urban supply of building materials. The town-countryside relationship progressively evolved: suburban forests, clay deposits and stone quarries are form now on subject to control attempts and new management strategies. In the same way the urban market connections with regional and international trade flows also change to meet the new urban needs concerning buildings.By integrating the different viewpoints of this complex issue we propose to elaborate a new methodology taking the former city of Brussels (duchy of Brabant then former Low Countries) as example : building archaeology data will be combined with dendrochronology, dendrology, radiocarbon dating and rereading of historical sources in order to bring further clarifications and to go beyond the traditional architecture history.


The Conceicao mine, which is located in the Itabira district, southern Sao Francisco craton, is a rare example of gold and palladium mineralization hosted by jacutinga, an altered Lake Superior-type iron-formation. The mine sequence consists of three metamorphosed lithostratigraphic units, which are from the oldest to the youngest: (1) an Archean volcano-sedimentary sequence, (2) a Paleoproterozoic iron-formation, and (3) a Paleoproterozoic quartzite. These units are cut by mafic intrusive rocks and, with the exception of intrusive contacts, all contacts between the various units are structural and interpreted as thrust faults. The rocks were subjected to three phases of folding: (1) D1, characterized by tight asymmetric and isoclinal folds, which develop locally into sheath folds (the D1 fabrics are the S1 foliation and elongation lineation); (2) D2, represented by tight, large-scale folds and associated parasitic folds; and (3) D3, characterized by open folds with an associated crenulation cleavage. The D1 and D2 deformation are interpreted to be products of simple shear with a transport direction consistently east over west. These rocks were metamorphosed to typical mineralogy of amphibolite facies conditions during the D1 phase of folding.

The Conceicao orebody consists of a single quartz vein surrounded by jacutinga. The vein is parallel to the S1 foliation, which is locally oriented west-southwest and dips 55° to 75° NW, and was folded by D2 deformation. It extends 100 m downdip in the direction of the Le elongation lineation and 400 m along strike. The jacutinga consists of centimeter-scale layers of muscovite, specular hematite (hematite I), and octahedral hematite grains (hematite II) with remnants of magnetite, and a finely laminated envelope around the quartz vein, which is composed mainly of Fe hydroxides, hematite (hematite III), kaolinite, muscovite, and tourmaline. The quartz vein is dismembered and quartz grains are partially corroded and filled by Fe hydroxides and kaolinite. The ore minerals, interpreted to have formed during the main hydrothermal event, are palladian gold (up to 3.2 wt % Pd) and an unknown Pd-Sb-As mineral (tentatively identified as mertierite II), which are typically included in hematite II octahedra. A few grains of palladian gold (up to 0.9 wt % Pd) were found mantling hematite II grains. Native gold is commonly associated with Fe hydroxide in the finely laminated alteration envelope around the quartz vein and is interpreted to have precipitated during weathering.

The similarities between the Au-Pd orebodies at the Conceicao and Caue deposits (referred to as "jacutinga-type" deposits) suggest that they were formed by the same processes and their characteristics favor an epigenetic model for gold and palladium concentration in the iron-formation. Since the Cretaceous, these Archean and Proterozoic rocks have been weathered, and the hydrothermal silicates and oxides have been replaced by kaolinite and Fe(Mn) hydroxides; gold and palladium have been remobilized and reprecipitated as pure metals or Pd oxides.


In future generations, electronic systems will rely extensively on advanced IC technology to achieve higher performance levels. However, with limits placed on the level of integration that can be obtained on a single IC, a need still exists for an interconnection hierarchy to provide the necessary density transform between system components. A recent addition to many high performance interconnection structures has been the Multichip Module. By eliminating the conventional IC package, MCMs have dramatically reduced the electrical length between devices, thereby minimising propagation delay, crosstalk, and attenuation. Although MCM techniques will offer many performance advantages, they also present many design challenges at subsequent levels of interconnection. This paper will focus on the requirements of MCM backplanes interconnecting several modules and, as a solution, will present recent work on advanced metal core substrates. MCM substrates provide a tremendous density advantage, however, the interconnection between modules is still a formidable task. Modules often have I/O densities of 300 to 500 leads per square inch and typically dissipate 10 to 50 watts per square inch. In addition, with sub‐nanosecond rise times, the distance between modules is often sufficient for signal paths to be treated as transmission lines. In an effort to meet these requirements, metal core circuits based on copper, copper Invar, and copper molybdenum have been fabricated using 0·0025 in. diameter embedded discrete wiring technology. Combined with a Kevlar surface layer suitable for wire bonding and blind laser drilled vias to access the internal wires, this technique offers many benefits. As many as 4 conductors can pass between holes on 0·050 in. centres in a single wiring layer only 0·018 in. thick. With the absence of interstitial vias, additional substrate area can be dedicated to create a sizeable thermal path, essential to conduct the heat from the MCM to an internal metal core. Together, these features have made this an attractive approach for interconnecting multichip modules.


This article draws upon psychological and sociological literature to explore the issues that arise in eliciting and presenting a refugee narrative when the claim is based upon sexual orientation. Rigid notions of homosexual identity may consciously or subconsciously shape decision-makers' approaches in this field. First, we identify psycho-social issues of particular significance to lesbian, gay and bisexual claimants which may act as barriers to eliciting their narrative of self-identity, including: a reluctance to reveal group membership as the basis of a claim, the experience of passing or concealment strategies, the impact of shame and depression on memory, common experience of sexual assault, and sexualisation of the identity narrative in the legal process. Secondly, we explore factors which inhibit the reception of such narratives in the legal process. In particular we explore the psychological 'stage model' of sexual identity development and examine the pervasive impact this model has had upon decisionmakers' 'pre-understanding' of sexual identity development as a uniform and linear trajectory.


The composition of glycolipids and their changes in the placenta were investigated in the normal pregnant rat. Total lipid fractions extracted from the placenta between days 12 and 20 of pregnancy (day 0 = oestrus) were subjected to glycolipid analysis using DEAE-Sephadex chromatography, silica-gel HPLC, silica-gel TLC, TLC/immunostaining, matrix-assisted secondary-ion mass spectrometry in the negative-ion mode and 1H NMR. Glycolipids identified in the rat placenta were: gangliosides GM3 (NeuAcLacCer and NeuGcLacCer) and GD3 (NeuAcNeuAcLacCer, NeuAcNeuGcLacCer and NeuGcNeuAcLacCer), and neutral glycolipids ceramide monosaccharide (CMH) (GlcCer), ceramide disaccharide (CDH) (LacCer), ceramide trisaccharide (CTH) (Gb3Cer) and ceramide tetrasaccharide (CQH) (Gb4Cer). The content of neutral glycolipids was higher than that of gangliosides throughout pregnancy. Of the neutral glycolipids, CMH and CTH predominated and the level of CDH was low at mid-pregnancy. During late pregnancy, CMH and CTH decreased and CDH increased markedly. CQH remained at a low level throughout pregnancy. Of the gangliosides, GM3 was predominant on days 12-16 and then decreased, whereas GD3, which was low on day 12, increased slightly on day 16 and maintained the same level thereafter. Immunohistochemical studies indicated that these changes in the expression of major gangliosides from GM3 to GD3 occurred in labyrinthine trophoblasts. Thus expression of these glycolipids appears to change markedly during pregnancy.


Fish farming is the only type of aquaculture in Serbia. Fish farming is mostly carried out in cyprinid and salmonid (trout) fishponds (over 95% of the total fish produced), with considerably lower ichthyoproduction being practiced in cages and some bodies of open water such as reservoirs and channels. Serbian aquaculture currently includes 12 fish species, 4 of which are allochthonous (non-native). With the exception of the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and, to a certain extent, grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella), silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) and bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis), allochthonous fish species have no economic importance. The presence and abundance of certain allochthonous species in fishponds and open waters have a negative effect on the total ichthyoproduction.


: Current trends and controversies in the antiepileptic drug therapy are reviewed from a clinical view. The usefulness of prophylactic therapy of febrile seizures and posttraumatic seizures or posttraumatic epilepsy is compromised by difficulties in the management of the patients especially by noncompliance. Previously untreated epilepsies can be treated successfully in 70--80% of the patients. Phenytoin or carbamazepine are equally effective for generalized tonic-clonic seizures of focal seizures, while absence seizures are controlled by ethosuximide or valproic acid. Only when the epilepsy is uncontrolled despite high plasma concentrations which cannot be raised because of side effects, a second drug should be given. A second drug is successful in about one out of six patients with focal epilepsy. Phenytoin, carbamazepine, phenobarbital and primidone seem to be equally effective for these drug-resistant cases. Status epilepticus can be treated with intravenous diazepam or phenytoin and, if necessary, with an infusion of phenytoin. Rectal diazepam is useful for acute pediatric therapy. Drugs of second choice are clonazepam, phenobarbital, lidocaine, and clomethiazole. In the pregnant epileptic patient a drop in the plasma concentration of antiepileptic drugs mainly through non-compliance and seizure provocation through sleep deprivation are major sources for the deterioration of epilepsies during pregnancy. The "fetal antiepileptic drug syndrome", malformations and an increased risk for epilepsy in the child are discussed as an interaction of parental epilepsy and drug-exposure during pregnancy. Finally, the interpretation of abnormal clinical chemistry data is reviewed. Disorders of the liver, bone, thyroid gland and blood are rarely seen in treated epileptic patients usually when specific risk factors are present. The over-interpretation of laboratory abnormalities e.g. an isolated increase of gamma-GT may lead to iatrogenic deterioration of epilepsy when the effective dose of the drug is reduced for unfounded fear of hepatic toxicity.


Background: Laryngoscopy and intubation cause hypertension and tachycardia which can lead to myocardial ischemia or cerebrovascular hemorrhage in patients with raised intracranial pressure, hypertension. The objective of this study was to compare the efficacy of dexmedetomidine (1 mcg/kg) and fentanyl (2 mcg/kg) in attenuating hemodynamic response to laryngoscopy and intubation.
Methods: Sixty patients scheduled for elective surgeries under general anaesthesia were randomly divided into two groups: Group D and Group F. Group D received dexmedetomidine 1 mcg/kg and group F received fentanyl 2 mcg/kg intravenously over 10 min prior to induction of anesthesia. All the drugs and techniques of anesthesia were standardized in patients in both the groups. Heart rate, systolic, diastolic and mean arterial pressure were recorded at following intervals: at baseline, after drug administration (at 2 and 5 min), after induction, and at 1, 2 and 5 min after intubation.
Results: Heart rate and blood pressure was found to be significantly lower in dexmedetomidine group as compared to fentanyl group at 1, 2 and 5 min after intubation.
Conclusions: Dexmedetomidine 1 mcg/kg is superior to fentanyl 2 mcg/kg for attenuation of hemodynamic response to laryngoscopy and intubation.


The purpose of this article is to analyse the way in which the motherhood role is organised in the media, producing specific modes of female subjectivation. Based on a Foucaultian framework, I characterise enunciating oneself, organising oneself and controlling oneself as techniques of the self used by the mother-subjects. I thus undertake a discursive analysis of two sets of materials: one consisting of articles from the magazines Veja and Caras, from 1992 to 2002, about "famous mothers" (Cassia Eller, Luciana Gimenez, Vera Fischer and Xuxa); and, the other, consisting of articles published in the magazine Crescer, between January 2001 and July 2002. I show how this mechanism organises these techniques of the self in order to create a logic where the mother-individual is asked to focus on herself and consider that taking care of herself is taking care of the other (her son) and, in this way, leading the mother-individuals to recognise themselves as objects visible to themselves and to enunciate themselves as subjects transformed by maternal practices.


Distinguished Professor Don Chalmers retired from the Law Faculty at the University of Tasmania on Friday 10 July 2020. This article is dedicated to Don, providing a brief account and acknowledgment of his fine contributions to legal research and education and law reform, particularly in the field of health and medical law, research ethics and policy reform. He has been an excellent colleague, mentor, leader, teacher, and researcher. He deserves to enjoy a long and rewarding retirement, though we, and many others, will not allow him to slip entirely out of the limelight. Don is still much needed, and still has so much to give in our ongoing quest to ensure that legal, research ethics and policy responses are adequate in reaping the benefits and responding to the challenges of biomedical advances.


of the two chambers of the Netherlands States General. Beginnings of an organized central government with financial agencies are traced at a very early date. Even though the earlier States General were unicameral, the present bicameral form seems first to have appeared with the Batavian Republic in 1798. The last chapter of some forty pages by E. van Raalta treats of the States General in the most recent period, 1918-1963, and is accompanied by tables showing the political party representation in both chambers during the period. The memorial volume prepared with scientific care is concluded by a list of the members of the earliest and of the most recent States General.—JAMES B. CHILDS, Library of Congress.


The consequences of homologous blood transfusion have a remarkable impact on the obstetric population which mainly consists of young healthy women. The risk involved in possible post-transfusion complications is directly proportional to the number of homologous blood units that are being transfused. Autologous transfusion is riskless for the fetus' well being. The main obstetrical problem is that it is impossible to foresee to the maximum extent all cases in need of blood transfusion which might get either an excessive amount or an insufficient amount of autologous transfusion. Blood predonation is the most suitable method in the obstetrics service. Reported below are the findings concerning the autologous transfusion experience performed by the OB/GYN Department at the Hospital San Daniele del Friuli, Udine for the period 1989-1993, where a new method of autologous donation was performed on 44 pregnant women who delivered by C-section. The autologous program is considered an easy one in the OB/GYN field, without complications for the fetus' well being and also feasible for small hospitals.


The price discovery structure for eggs used for manufacturing purposes in Canada has been pretty much the same for the last 25 years, and is based on the Urner Barry (UB) index. However, eggs used for manufacturing has evolved during the same period, from a marginal 10% of total egg consumption to currently more than 30%. Thus, the representativeness of the UB index is an important issue for the Canadian industry. The representativeness has been questioned in the past in the US and Canada. This study focuses on the representativeness of the UB index by looking at causality links between the ECI spot market and the UB index. Our results indicate a good representativeness and seem to indicate a complementarity between the ECI and UB.


[Purpose] This study was carried out to examine the effect of the application of group exercise program composed to induce interests and assertive participation of adults with cerebral palsy on the self-efficacy and activities of daily living, as well as to provide basic clinical data that are effective and trustworthy in enhancing the physical and emotional interaction in the future. [Subjects and Methods] Those among the 23 adult with cerebral palsy who are the subjects of research and able to participate only in the evaluation of measurement tools prior to and after the experiment were allocated to the control group while only those who can participate in the group exercise program implemented over 12 sessions were allocated to the experimental group. For the control group, a range of motion of joint exercise and stretching exercise were executed on the arms, legs and trunk, while for the experimental group, group exercise that is implemented with participation of several subjects simultaneously was executed 2 times a week with 40 minutes for each session over a period of 6 weeks for the total of 12 sessions. [Results] In both the experimental group and the control group, there were statistically significant changes in the average scores of self-efficacy and activities of daily living after the exercise in comparison to that prior to the exercise. Moreover, there were statistically significant differences in self-efficacy and activities of daily living in terms of quantity of change prior to and after the exercise between the two groups. [Conclusion] Therefore, group exercise program composed to induce physical and emotional interaction, and active participation of adults with cerebral palsy can be considered as an effective intervention method in improving their self-efficacy and activities of daily living.


Impact assessments of highway construction work zones (CWZs) are mandated for all federally funded highway infrastructure improvement projects. However, most existing approaches are ad hoc or project specific, so they are incapable of being benchmarked for any particular spatial region. A novel multicontextual approach to modeling the traffic impact of urban highway CWZs is proposed and tested in this paper. The proposed approach is unique because it models the impact of CWZ operations through a multicontextual quantitative method using big data for improved accuracy. In this study, a machine-learning technique was adopted to predict long-term traffic flow rates and the corresponding truck percentages. With the use of these predicted values, stereotypical patterns of traffic volume-to-capacity ratios were created for typical urban nighttime closures. Third-order curve-fitting models to achieve potential work zone travel time delays in heavily trafficked large urban cores were then developed and validated. This study will greatly help state and local governments and the general traveling public in major cities know the potential traffic flow resulting from construction and thereby facilitate progress on highway improvement projects with the better-informed work zone traffic flow and thus improve safety and mobility in and between CWZs.


In the general introduction of the road-accident phenomenon inside and outside Iran, the results of previous research-works and international conferences and seminars on road-safety have been reviewed. Also a sample-road between Tehran and Mashad has been investigated as a case-study. Examining the road-accident data and iriformation,first: the information presented in road-accident report-forms in developed countries is discussed and, second: the procedures for road-accident data collection in Iran are investigated in detail. The data supplied by Iran Road-Police Central Statistics Office, is analysed, different rates are computed, due comparisons with other nations are made, and the results are discussed. Also such analysis and comparisons are presented for different provinces of Iran. It is concluded that each province with its own natural, geographical, social and economical characteristics possesses its own reasons for the quality and quantity of road-accidents and therefore must receive its own appropriate remedial solutions. The question~ of "what is the cost of road-accidents", "why and how evaluate the cost", "what is the appropriate way of approach to such evaluation" are all discussed and then "the cost of road-accidents in Iran" based on two different approaches: "Gross National Output"and "court award" is computed. It is concluded that this cost is about 1.5 per cent of the country's national product. In Appendix 3 an impressive example is given of the trend of costs and benefits that can be attributed to investment in road-safety measures.


In the centuries following the conquest of Granada in 1492, the Alhambra's iconic Fountain of Lions underwent numerous changes. More than a hundred years ago, a process of restoring the object to its original appearance under Nasrid rule was initiated. The joint interpretation of archaeological findings and historical texts guided the process of writing and rewriting the early biography of an object whose physical form has gradually been reshaped according to these narratives. The present article focuses on a brief period in the complex history of the fountain—the decades surrounding the conquest of Granada—and revisits Islamic and Christian written testimonies, emphasizing their inherent limitations as documentary sources. By introducing a hitherto unknown Neo-Latin poem, the article calls into question the early biography of the Fountain of Lions as it has been narrated so far, thereby challenging recent modifications to the fountain.


In digital forensic investigations, reports are used to communicate the results of a digital forensic investigation. In addition to the submission of typed reports, investigators often supplement these reports by using forensic software to generate a detailed report of their analysis. This report includes their evidential findings and also provides logs indicating the steps taken during the examination of digital evidence. Although it may take several months to a year before the case goes to court, investigators must still be able to recall the case facts. In this paper, we propose the development of a conceptual report management tool that graphically organizes the facts of the case. This map would allow investigators and prosecutors to quickly and easily collaborate and review the significant details of the case in preparation for court.


: Two hundred and fifteen patients were examined: 20 athletes, 40 subjects with radiologically normal coronary arteries (NCA) and 155 patients with one or more coronary artery stenoses (82 without, 73 with previous myocardial infarction). Exercise testing was by bicycle ergometry. The ECG recordings obtained by a computerised system had stable base lines and variations in QRS amplitude related to respiration were eliminated. The changes in amplitude of the R wave (delta R) and QRS complex (delta QRS) during exercise are interesting, especially in lead CM5. The amplitude decreases or remains the same in athletes (delta R = -1.3 +/- 3.2 mm; delta QRS = 0.7 +/- 3.4 mm) and in patients with NCA (delta R = -0.2 +/- 2.5 mm; delta QRS = 0.5 +/- 3.1 mm). This contrasted with the coronary group in whom these amplitudes increased significantly (delta R = 1.5 +/- 2.9 mm; delta QRS = 3.1 +/- 3.2 mm, p less than 0,001). These variations did not give indications of ischaemia of another region or of the presence of an aneurysm in patients with previous infarction. The greatest variations in amplitude were observed in patients with signs of previous inferior infarction. Can this method provide diagnostic information in patients without previous myocardial infarction? If positive delta R and delta QRS are defined as increases of at least 1 mm on exercise, the diagnostic value of these changes (sensitivity: delta R = 58.5%, delta QRS = 78%; specificity: delta R = 67.5%, delta QRS = 57.5%) is comparable with the classical signs of: pain (sensitivity: 63%; specificity: 75%) and ST depression of over 1 mm in CM5 (sensitivity: 72%; specificity: 62.5%). In conclusion, in patients without previous myocardial infarction, the reliability of exercise stress testing in diagnosing coronary artery disease can be increased when the following three parameters are taken into consideration: pain, ST segment, delta R or delta QRS or both. When all three signs are negative, the stress test can be considered negative (the 82 coronary patients had at least one positive sign). The positivity of one sign alone corresponds to a normal coronary circulation in the majority of cases. The presence of 2 or 3 positive signs is very much in favour of coronary artery disease.


This paper studies the effect of capital controls on misallocation and welfare in an economy with financial constraints. We build a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms, financial constraints and international trade and calibrate it to the Chilean economy. Since high-productivity and exporting firms need to borrow more to reach their optimal scale, capital controls that tax international borrowing hit them harder. As a result, misallocation increases relatively more for this group of firms, and for young firms that are still trying to reach their optimal scale. In terms of welfare, the model predicts a sizable aggregate loss of 2.39 percent when capital controls are introduced, with welfare decreasing twice as much for high-productivity firms. We empirically corroborate the main insights in terms of misallocation obtained from the model using Chilean manufacturing firm data from 1990 to 2007.


It has been observed that super resolution is possible in the electromagnetic imaging. In the first part of the paper, the possible resolution of image is investigated in the inversion of far-field data using the diffraction tomographic (DT) algorithm, where two cases are considered when the object is in a homogeneous space and in an air-earth half space. The study shows that the resolution of image for inversion of far-field data has been limited theoretically to 0.3536-0.5 wavelength using the DT algorithm in homogeneous-space problems, and it is even worse in half-space problems. If the transmitters and receivers are located in the near-field regime, however, the image resolution is less than 0.25 wavelength, which is the super-resolution phenomenon. In the second part of the paper, the physical reason for the super-resolution phenomenon is investigated using different electromagnetic inverse scattering methods. The study has demonstrated that the information of evanescent waves in the measurement data and its involvement in inversion algorithms is the main reason for the super resolution. Four inversion algorithms are considered for half-space problems: the DT algorithm, the spatial-domain Born approximation (BA), the Born iterative method (BIM), and the distorted BIM (DBIM). The first two belong to linear inverse scattering, while the last two belong to nonlinear inverse scattering. Further analysis shows that DBIM provides a better super resolution than BIM, and BIM provides a better super resolution than BA. Numerical simulations validate the above conclusions.


Using a longitudinal design, prior experience with violence as a victim and opportunity to aggress were examined as predictors of college women's verbal and physical aggression toward romantic partners. Five additional categories of predictors identified in previous research (experienced and witnessed parental aggression during childhood, attitudes accepting of aggression, aggressive/impulsive personality attributes, psychopathology, and prior use of aggression) were also examined. Blockwise hierarchical regression analyses were performed to reveal the best predictors of verbal and physical aggression during the first year of college. Significant predictors of verbal aggression were prior use of verbal aggression in heterosexual conflicts during adolescence, witnessed parental aggression, level of adolescent sexual victimization, being a target of rational conflict strategies during adolescence, and use of physical aggression in romantic adolescent relationships, as well as self-reported verbal aggression as an index of personality, weak emotional ties, number of sexual partners, and approval of sexual intimacy in many types of relationships. Significant predictors of physical aggression were prior use of physical aggression during adolescence, witnessing and experiencing parental aggression, being a victim of physical aggression in adolescent romantic relationships, weak emotional ties, low levels of alcohol/drug use, and opportunity to aggress. A developmental model of aggression in which childhood experiences with family violence contribute to the likelihood of subsequent involvement in relationship violence seems appropriate. Past experience with aggression may be particularly important for women. Cultural expectations about women's roles do not provide the social support for female aggression that is provided for male aggression. Adolescent sexual victimizations and general involvement in conflictual relationships (as target and perpetrator) predicted subsequent verbal aggression, whereas experiencing family violence and sustaining physical aggression in romantic relationships predicted subsequent physical aggression. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.


Whole genome amplification (WGA) has been touted as a possible technique to augment fragment analysis of STRs in amplifying low-levels of DNA recovered from crime scenes or items. Only LCN DNA analysis is routinely used as an additional amplification step; but this is not without problems, such as the increased incidents of stochastic variations. A review of the literature was carried out in order to assess the latest research and to identify a potentially fit for purpose whole genome amplification technique. There are three potential alternative techniques which show promise, miPEP, dcDOP-PCR and MDA used in conjunction with a macromolecular crowder; with the majority of studies investigating the effect of non-crowded MDA on a variety of stains, including degraded, low-level and stains containing mixtures of DNA. A number of techniques are suggested for incorporation into STR analysis depending on the sample type as well as future strands of work.


Business models describe an organisation's activities and how value is delivered to the customer. When it comes to sports tourism, value delivered to the guests takes the form of a sports experience. Indeed, attractive sports experiences have become products that require much effort to design, manage, and eventually sell. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether two cases, having access to similar key resources, could provide tourists with identical sports experiences. The focus will be on the linkage between customer value proposition, sports facilities, and processes as major building blocks of the business providing different sports experiences. A case study method was used for a holistic and in-depth analysis of how sports tourism experiences are delivered by looking at two existing case studies in Istria, Croatia. The concept of experience was used to analyse tennis experiences that these two cases offer to tourists. Data were gathered by observations on site and by qualitative semi-structured interviews with key sports managers and organisers in the case study companies. The research results indicate that despite different approaches, both companies provide its tourists with similar tennis experiences, and that some other variables, primarily features of a sports facility (in our case tennis courts) affect the type of an experience.


Lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) are created by culturing lymphocytes from the peripheral blood and adding Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a ubiquitous human herpesvirus which infects, activates, and transforms B cells. These cell lines are used for genotyping, as targets for cytotoxic cells, and as models for EBV immortalization of B cells, particularly post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD) in which EBV-immortalized cells proliferate in the absence of a cytotoxic T-cell response. Studies have shown more diversity in LCLs than would be expected from cell lines that are often treated as interchangeable. It is not known how their diversity in factors like morphology, growth factor production, or cellular gene expression influences the EBV life cycle. In this study I investigated connections between LCLs' cellular and viral phenotypes, categorizing them as either low in EBV copy number or fluctuating within a high range. As measured by lytic EBV replication and viral gene expression, LCLs showed high or low lytic permissivity, with permissivity defined as the likelihood that a cell will switch from stable latent infection into the lytic EBV life cycle. Permissivity was not affected by blocking the late events of the lytic cycle. I used flow cytometry to characterize 19 aspects of LCL surface phenotype, but found little association with lytic permissivity. Microarrays and PCR were used to identify genes expressed at higher levels in non-permissive LCLs, including transcription factors that maintain B cell lineage. Unfolded protein response (UPR) genes and the UPR protein Grp94 were expressed at higher levels in permissive LCLs. A drug was used to investigate effects of the UPR on permissive and non-permissive LCLs that had been maintained for short or long periods of time. The UPR enhanced permissivity, causing more cells to enter the lytic cycle, but this did not lead to lytic replication. This study enhances our knowledge about EBV life cycles by giving us new information about host factors that contribute to the lytic switch. This data about LCL diversity has public health relevance to the diversity of PTLD cases, since identifying risk factors for PTLD is a significant part of care for EBV-positive transplant recipients.


Virtual Reality technology offers opportunities to create new products, which could be applied to the cognitive rehabilitation of people with acquired brain injury or neurological/psychiatric disorders. The effects provided by Virtual Environments (VE) stimulate cerebral neuroplastic changes, enhancing the rehabilitation process. This article discusses issues related to this field and presents the main features of an Integrated Virtual Environment for Cognitive Rehabilitation development process. Finally, initial results of an experiment with a group of schizophrenic patients are presented.


The effect of boron on microstructure and creep deformation behavior has been investigated for a tempered martensitic 9Cr-3WVNb steel with emphasis on the role of boron free from boron nitrides. Creep tests were carried out at 650oC for up to about 3 x 104 h, using specimens of 10 mm in gauge diameter and 50 mm in gauge length. The addition of boron in combination with no nitrogen addition effectively reduces the coarsening rate of M23C6 carbides by an enrichment of boron in M23C6 particles in the vicinity of prior austenite grain boundaries during creep at 650oC. This stabilizes martensitic microstructure during creep and retards the onset of acceleration creep, resulting in a decrease in minimum creep rate and an increase in creep life. Excess addition of boron and nitrogen causes the formation of boron nitrides during normalizing at 1050-1150oC, which reduces dissolved boron and nitrogen. The dissolved boron enriches in M23C6 carbides, while the dissolved nitrogen causes the precipitation of fine MX carbonitrides. The variation of creep rates in transient region and of the onset time of acceleration creep with various combinations of boron and nitrogen contents can be explained by the dissolved boron and nitrogen concentrations after normalizing into account.


Stormwater management basins (SWMB) are used to mitigate urban runoff. The Virginia Department of Transportation relies on dry detention basins planted with mowed turfgrass. However, these basins often retain water; resulting in cattail (Typha spp.) and tree colonization. Managing agencies request cattail eradication and trees are also removed. However, if trees were allowed to remain they could alter basin dynamics, making conditions unsuitable for cattails. In a greenhouse study we tested the impact of three shade (heavy, medium, full sun) and soil moisture (dry, moist, flooded) treatments on cattail growth. After two months, cattail biomass indicated a strong interaction between soil moisture and shade (p<.0001). Increases in shade and reductions in soil moisture resulted in decreased biomass and rhizome length. Heavy shade and dry soil produced the most reductions in cattail growth (95% less biomass, 83% smaller rhizomes than cattails in full sun and flooded soil). However, considerable growth reductions still occurred in medium shade and moist soil (66% for biomass and 74% for rhizome lengths). In a field study in four unmaintained SWMB in Virginia, environmental data (litter layer, water table, soil organic matter, etc.) and vegetation composition (cattail and other herbaceous biomass, and woody vegetation influence index) were collected from 100, 0.25-m 2 plots. Principal component analysis indicated cattails and trees occupy opposing environmental spaces. Water table is most strongly correlated to cattail biomass. While these results suggest trees could eliminate cattails from SWMB, more research is needed to determine the long-term impacts of trees on basin function.


ABSTRACT The synthesis and characterisation of several members of the 1,ω-bis(4-cyanobiphenyl-4′-yl) alkane (CBnCB) and the 1-(4-cyanobiphenyl-4′-yloxy)-ω-(4-cyanobiphenyl-4′-yl) alkane (CBnOCB) homologous series are reported. The new odd members described CB5CB, CB13CB, CB4OCB, CB8OCB and CB10OCB all exhibit twist-bend nematic and nematic phases. The members of these series already reported in literature, CB7CB, CB9CB, CB11CB and CB6OCB, were also prepared in order to allow for a direct comparison of their transitional properties. The properties of these dimers are also compared to those of the corresponding members of the 1,ω-bis(4-cyanobiphenyl-4,-yloxy) alkanes (CBOnOCB). For any given total spacer length, for odd members of these series, the nematic–isotropic transition temperatures and associated entropy changes are greatest for the CBOnOCB dimer and lowest for the CBnCB dimer. These trends are understood in terms of molecular shape. For short spacer lengths, the twist-bend nematic–nematic transition temperature (TNTBN) is higher for the CBnOCB series than for the CBnCB series but this is reversed as the spacer length increases. Of the CBOnOCB dimers, a virtual value of TNTBN was estimated for CBO3OCB and TNTBN was measured for CBO5OCB. These values are considerably lower than those observed for the corresponding members of the CBnCB or CBnOCB series. The dependence of TNTBN on molecular structure is discussed not only in terms of the molecular curvature but also in the ability of the molecules to pack efficiently. As the temperature range of the preceding nematic phase increases, so the twist-bend nematic–nematic transition entropy change decreases and the transition approaches second order for the longer spacers. For comparative purposes, the transitional behaviour of the even-membered dimers CB6CB, CB5OCB and CBO4OCB is reported and differences accounted for in terms of molecular shape. Graphical Abstract


It is commonly known that the magnetostriction of grain oriented silicon steel for electric transformers, is strongly influenced by applied stress on the steel as well as coating stress of the steel and is dominated exclusively by the formation of 90/spl deg/ domain walls. A new concept on a condition for the formation of 90/spl deg/ domain wall considers the total elastic energy which consists of both strain elastic energy and magnetoelastic energy in axes of easy magnetization of Goss texture {110} . It is proposed that 90/spl deg/ domain wall is formed under the condition that the total elastic energies in the three easy axes of magnetization are related by the expression Ex([100]) >


The estimation of duration has been shown to follow Bayesian inference, where people use their prior belief to calibrate the estimation. This explains timing biases such as the range bias where a duration is reproduced as longer when previously encountered durations were longer than shorter. However, it is unclear whether prior belief is based on previously perceived or reproduced durations. In 4 experiments, we show that the range bias occurs between short and long reproduction ranges but not between short and long perception ranges. Further analyses also show that the prior is updated by the most recent reproduced (but not perceived) duration. Together these results support a task-oriented Bayesian inference account of time reproduction, where people use the perceived duration and their past reproduction experience to make an inference about how much time to reproduce.


The competitive implications of intra-industry diversification (chapter 2), the firm-investor network (chapter 3) and resource acquisition across the firm boundary (chapter 4) are of central concern to this thesis. The analysis draws on qualitative evidence, a quantitative, large-scale, longitudinal panel dataset (chapters 2 and 3), as well as conceptual reasoning
(chapter 4). The empirical setting of the analysis is the hedge fund industry, which is characterised by small, entrepreneurial and knowledge-intensive firms.

Whereas the three main chapters of this thesis are constructed and presented as stand-alone papers, three overarching insights emerge. First, intra-industry diversification impacts firm performance and firm survival in non-trivial ways. Whereas the positive effect of intraindustry diversification on survival seems to be driven by the risk reducing effect of beyond sub-sector diversification within an industry, the negative effect on performance seems to be driven by within sub-sector diversification, which may create limited value for investors. Second, the relationship of investment firms and their customers (i.e. investors) is much more
multifaceted than the view of 'investors as passive providers of capital' would suggest. The analysis provides evidence for a performance and survival enhancing impact of the firminvestor network on the hedge fund firm. Third, moderation of complexity via a differential flow of resources is an important, yet underappreciated attribute of the firm boundary, which
may contribute to the creation of resource asymmetries as a basis for competitive advantage.

Although the evidence presented in this thesis is based on the empirical setting of the hedge fund industry, the findings on intra-industry diversification, the firm investor network and resource acquisition across the firm boundary may generalise to other firms in the (financial)
services industry.


Deep neural networks have emerged as a leading approach towards handling many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Deep networks initially conquered the problems of computer vision. However, dealing with sequential data such as text and sound was a nightmare for such networks as traditional deep networks are not reliable in preserving contextual information. This may not harm the results in the case of image processing where we do not care about the sequence, but when we consider the data collected from text for processing, such networks may trigger disastrous results. Moreover, establishing sentence semantics in a colloquial text such as Roman Urdu is a challenge. Additionally, the sparsity and high dimensionality of data in such informal text have encountered a significant challenge for building sentence semantics. To overcome this problem, we propose a deep recurrent architecture RU-BiLSTM based on bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) coupled with word embedding and an attention mechanism for sentiment analysis of Roman Urdu. Our proposed model uses the bidirectional LSTM to preserve the context in both directions and the attention mechanism to concentrate on more important features. Eventually, the last dense softmax output layer is used to acquire the binary and ternary classification results. We empirically evaluated our model on two available datasets of Roman Urdu, i.e., RUECD and RUSA-19. Our proposed model outperformed the baseline models on many grounds, and a significant improvement of 6% to 8% is achieved over baseline models.


This paper constructs and analyzes a reduced nonlinear stochastic model of extratropical low-frequency variability. To do so, it applies multilevel quadratic regression to the output of a long simulation of a global baroclinic, quasigeostrophic, three-level (QG3) model with topography; the model's phase space has a dimension of O(10 4 ). The reduced model has 45 variables and captures well the non-Gaussian features of the QG3 model's probability density function (PDF). In particular, the reduced model's PDF shares with the QG3 model its four anomalously persistent flow patterns, which correspond to opposite phases of the Arctic Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation, as well as the Markov chain of transitions between these regimes. In addition, multichannel singular spectrum analysis identifies intraseasonal oscillations with a period of 35–37 days and of 20 days in the data generated by both the QG3 model and its low-dimensional analog. An analytical and numerical study of the reduced model starts with the fixed points and oscillatory eigenmodes of the model's deterministic part and uses systematically an increasing noise parameter to connect these with the behavior of the full, stochastically forced model version. The results of this study point to the origin of the QG3 model's multiple regimes and intraseasonal oscillations and identify the connections between the two types of behavior.


Environmental education (EE) has expanded in Brazil in diverse educational settings, both formal and non-formal. This text considers EE as provoking political change, stimulating an ethical and ecological rationality and promoting personal values and attitudes, as well as social practices, compatible with the sustainability of life on earth. From this perspective, the principal objective of the article is to reflect on the expansion of environmental education in Brazilian universities in the last twenty years; discuss the changes in public educational policies, since the 1988 constitution; and to consider the possible influence of social movements in organized society, as well as the networks of local, regional and national EE, together with the generalized use of computer technology, as impulses in its expansion. Environmental education constitutes and formalizes itself as a foundation for national policies that contribute to its permanence and deepening in the spaces where it already exists and promotes its inclusion in the other contexts of organized society.


In this paper, we model two drivers which underlie the economic trade-off shareholders face in designing incentives for optimal effort allocation by managers. Therst driver is limited managerial at- tention, by which we mean that performing one task may have an adverse effect on the cost-efciency of performing another. The second is the presence of a performance reporting task, by which we mean the manager's ability to exert personally costly effort to improve the precision (or quality) of his/her perfor- mance measures. We show that the subtle interactions of the two drivers may alter the characteristics of incentive provision. First, we show the interaction may lead to a positive relation between the strength of the incentive and the endogenous variance of the performance measures. Second, the interaction may render an otherwise informative performance signal unused in equilibrium incentive contracts. We show two cases in which an informative signal is unused, for two distinct reasons. In one case the principal does not use the signal whose precision can be improved by the manager, in order to discourages the manager from diverting attention to the performance reporting task (which makes the productive effort more costly). In another case with asymmetric information about the nature of the performance measure- ment system, the principal may discard the signal which cannot be inuenced by the manager in order to encourage a truthful self-report by the manager.


Three patients, a woman aged 33 years, a man aged 42 and a woman aged 66, had a loss of hand function. This was due to denervation of a peripheral nerve, in essence the radial, ulnar and median nerves respectively. In the first two cases this was caused by trauma and in the third by compression neuropathy. The problems were loss of wrist and finger extension (a dropping hand) in the first, loss of intrinsic muscle function and thumb adduction in the second and loss of opposition in the third patient. Tendon transfers were performed by diverting a tendon insertion of a still functional muscle to another tendon to correct the disturbed mechanical balance in the affected upper extremity. After initial immobilisation during several weeks intensive rehabilitation was started. All patients had improvement of range of motion and power in the affected wrist and fingers. In this way a better daily function and resumption of work were accomplished.


PURPOSE
The study was done to construct and test a structural model to explain primipara breastfeeding behavior.

METHODS
The participants were 213 primiparas on postpartum wards. Data were analyzed using the PASW 18.0 and AMOS 19.0 programs.

RESULTS
Fitness statistics for the hypothetical model were appropriate (χ² =38.50, p=.070, GFI=.96, RMSEA=.05, AGFI=.93, NFI=.95, TLI=.97, CFI=.98, PNFI=.57, χ²/df=1.43). Breastfeeding behaviors were directly influenced by intention to breastfeed, perceived effectiveness of breastfeeding, and the amount of supplementary feeding. The amount of supplementary feeding had the largest direct impact on breastfeeding behavior. The largest total effect on breastfeeding behavior was intention to breastfeed. The environment of the maternity hospital indirectly influenced breastfeeding behavior. These factors explained 18.9% of variance in the primipara breastfeeding behavior.

CONCLUSION
The results of the study indicate that in order to promote primipara breastfeeding the amount of supplementary feeding immediately after the birth should be limited and an environment that encourages exclusive breastfeeding in the hospital should be provided. The results also suggest it is necessary to provide nursing interventions that increase the intention to breastfeed and the perceived effectiveness of breastfeeding.


Electron dynamics in crystalline semiconductors is described by distinguishing between an instantaneous velocity related to electron's momentum and an average velocity related to its quasi-momentum in a periodic potential. It is shown that the electron velocity used in the theory of electron transport and free-carrier optics is the average electron velocity, not the instantaneous velocity. An effective mass of charge carriers in solids is considered and it is demonstrated that, in contrast to the "acceleration" mass introduced in textbooks, it is a "velocity" mass relating carrier velocity to its quasi-momentum that is a much more useful physical quantity. Among other advantages, the velocity mass is a scalar for spherical but nonparabolic energy bands $\epsilon(k)$, whereas the acceleration mass is not a scalar. Important applications of the velocity mass are indicated. A two-band ${\bm k}\cdot {\bm \hp}$ model is introduced as the simplest example of a band structure that still keeps track of the periodic lattice potential. It is remarked that the two-band model, adequately describing narrow-gap semiconductors (including zero-gap graphene), strongly resembles the special theory of relativity. Instructive examples of the "semi-relativistic" analogy are given. The presentation has both scientific and pedagogical aspects.


Since the communication of the notice of the portion of cranium of the Labyrinthodont Reptile above-named (Quarterly Journal of the Geol. Soc. May 1854), I have been favoured with the view of some other fragments of the same cranium, including parts of the interior or under-surface, with several teeth buried in the coal-matrix, and exposed at the fractured surfaces. In the ordinary Labyrinthodont Reptiles of the European Trias, one or two teeth at the fore-part of the jaws have the form and proportions of large canines, the rest are smaller and more slender pointed teeth. One of the present fragments includes the fore-part of the right maxillary and premaxillary bones, and shows a single large laniariform tooth descending from the fore-part of the maxillary into the substance of the subjacent matrix: in front of the tooth is one of the smaller, pointed, serial teeth: of which teeth other fragments show other examples, the base of the teeth being anchylosed to shallow sockets in the bone. So much, therefore, of the dental system of the Baphetes, as is here exhibited, accords in the general characters of shape and relative size, of disposition and mode of fixation to the jaw, with the dentition of the Labyrinthodonts. A transverse section was taken from about the middle of the large tooth, and exhibited the usual labyrinthic structure: rather less complex than in the Labyrinthodon Salamandroides. The character of the exterior surface of the cranium was indicated in the specimen originally submitted to me by


A Mr 92,000 metalloprotease, originally observed in neutrophils, has been found to be secreted by various normal and malignant cells of fibroblastic, hematopoietic, and epithelial origin. The responsiveness of the various cell types to the tumor promoter phorbol ester (phorbol myristate acetate) to secrete this enzyme and a corresponding Mr 72,000 gelatinase has been determined using gelatin zymograms. The latent zymogen form of the Mr 92,000 enzyme has been purified from phorbol myristate acetate-stimulated HT1080 human fibrosarcoma cells using sequential gelatin-Sepharose affinity chromatography and gel filtration. Selective elution from gelatin-Sepharose allows for a distinct separation of the Mr 92,000 gelatinase from the Mr 72,000 gelatinase. A fraction of the tumor cell derived latent Mr 92,000 enzyme is isolated as an apparent complex with human tissue inhibitor of metalloproteases, which is partially dissociated in sodium dodecyl sulfate and completely dissociated upon reduction of disulfide bonds and upon p-aminophenylmercuric acetate treatment. Organomercurial treatment rapidly allows for autoactivation of the proenzyme to active Mr 83,000 and Mr 75,000 species. At physiological pH, the enzyme rapidly degrades gelatin into small fragments and slowly cleaves native type V collagen at an apparent single site. Native type IV collagen is degraded to a much lesser extent. The NH2-terminal amino acid sequence of the Mr 92,000 proenzyme has been determined and is distinct from the Mr 72,000 gelatinase/type IV collagenase which is constitutively produced by fibroblasts. The Mr 92,000 enzyme is also immunologically distinct from the Mr 72,000 enzyme but immunologically cross-reactive with the neutrophil, high molecular weight gelatinase. The Mr 92,000 enzyme constitutes a distinct member of the matrix metalloprotease family. Its substrate specificity implies a broad physiological role, acting on basement membrane type V collagen as well as on denatured (gelatinized) collagens and thus may be involved in the invasive and migratory phenotype of human cells.


highly variable. This surely also applies to bone accretion. In a remote complex of villages in western Transvaal, where all families are fairly poor and subsist on a similar frugal, near vegetarian diet, we found considerable differences between children, aged 10-12 years", not only in cortical indices of metacarpal but also in haemoglobin, serum cholesterol, and albumin concentrations and transit time. Such variability could not be explained by differences in diet. It would seem that the determinants of bone mass are not understood fully and that bone mass is susceptible to little modification, whether in reaching maximal accretion or during subsequent loss with age. A R P WALKER B F WALKER


Since the Supreme Court's seminal campaign finance ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, (1) the Court continues to disagree over the best way to balance First Amendment free speech rights against the state's interest in fighting the reality or appearance of corruption caused by sizeable campaign expenditures. (2) The debate over corporate campaign expenditures has been a source of particularly sharp disagreement, generating at least six major decisions since the Court's ruling in Buckley. (3) In two recent decisions, the Court held that although corporations could use money in separate political funds for campaign spending, general treasury funds were off limits. (4) In Citizens United v. FEC, (5) however, the Supreme Court expanded corporate campaign spending power by holding that, although "It]he government can regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements," it is unconstitutional for the government to suppress corporate political speech entirely. (6) In doing so, the Court struck down parts of the two previous decisions (7) that limited the ability of corporations to spend money on electioneering communications in federal elections. Although it is too soon to know what effect the Court's decision will have on the electoral process, Citizens United likely will be most significant not for what it means for corporate campaign spending, but for what it signals for the future of campaign finance reform. Not only does the ruling mark the first time that the Roberts Court has struck down a previous campaign finance decision, but also it does so in a way that signals the Court's newfound hostility toward campaign finance regulation in all but the most limited of circumstances. Citizens United is a nonprofit corporation that receives funds from both individuals and for-profit corporations. (8) In 2008, Citizens United created Hillary: The Movie, a ninety-minute documentary about then-Senator and presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and sought to expand the film's distribution by using cable video-on-demand offerings in addition to movie theater and DVD releases. (9) The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), (10) however, barred the use of corporate general treasury funds for electioneering communications. (11) The law did not, however, bar spending by segregated corporate or union funds through the use of political action committees (PACs). (12) Because Citizens United feared that its plans to make Hillary available through video-on-demand before certain 2008 presidential primaries ran afoul of the corporate expenditure prohibition contained in [section] 441b, it sought to have the federal ban as well as the disclaimer and disclosure requirements related to those corporate expenditures declared unconstitutional as applied to Hillary. (13) The district court denied Citizens United's motion for a preliminary injunction and granted the government's motion for summary judgment, holding that the corporate expenditure ban was facially constitutional based on the Supreme Court's ruling in McConnell v. FEC, (14) which, in turn, relied on the Court's earlier holding in Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce. (15) Citizens United appealed its case to the Supreme Court. (16) Following the initial arguments in the case in October Term 2008, the Supreme Court ordered the parties to file supplemental briefs and reargue the case to address whether the Court should overrule Austin and the part of McConnell that addressed the facial validity of [section] 441b. (17) The Supreme Court held five to four that the government could not prohibit corporate-funded independent expenditures. (18) Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy (19) wrote that "the Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker's corporate identity" because "[n]o sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations." (20) With an even larger eight-to-one majority, the Court (21) held that disclaimer and disclosure requirements related to campaign communications were constitutional. …


Recent poverty analysis in Serbia and Montenegro indicates that deep poverty and multiple deprivations appear to have an ethnic dimension and are highly concentrated among the Roma population. Using household survey data from 2003 which allow comparative quantitative analysis of poverty for Roma, including those residing in settlements, and the general population, this paper is the first attempt at studying in depth the extent and determinants of poverty and social exclusion of Roma in Serbia and Montenegro. Reviewing both income and non-income dimensions of poverty in both Republics, the paper finds that Roma poverty stands out significantly from other vulnerable groups such as internally displaced persons and refugees and confirms evidence from other countries in Central and South-East Europe on the multifaceted nature of Roma poverty. The paper also reveals the intergenerational dimension of Roma social exclusion: Substantial education access barriers and the resulting poor educational outcomes of Roma children today predict their continued social exclusion and poverty in the future. Building on an impact analysis of the social protection system on Roma poverty in Serbia, the paper proposes policy measures aimed at tackling poverty and social exclusion of Roma in the context of the implementation of Serbia's and Montenegro's Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005-2015 Action Plans.


The article concerns interesting and important issues of compensation for harm caused by illegal actionsof administrative bodies. The article focuses on the current aspect of the issue. The paper proposesnecessary amendments to the legislation related to the issues raised in the article. In particular, thepaper proposes amendments to the legislation, for example the supplement of Art. 2 in the Law ofthe Russian Federation from 27.04.1993 N 4866-1 On appealing against the actions and decisionsviolating the rights and freedoms of citizens' may be supplied with the provision that citizens have theright to file application for damages or losses caused by illegal actions of administrative bodies in theevent of denial letter regarding the implementation of pre-court dispute resolution by an official. Theauthor also proposed to supply Art. 6 of the Law of the Russian Federation from 27.04.1993 N 4866-1On appealing against the actions and decisions violating the rights and freedoms of citizens with theprovision under which in cases established by law, when considering a complaint for damages (harm)caused by unlawful actions (inaction) of an official, court must take into account the obligation to complywith the order of pre-trial dispute resolution procedure for damages (harm) to a maximum of 100,000roubles. Russian law 27.04.1993 N 4866-1 On appealing against the actions and decisions violating therights and freedoms of citizens may include a rule under which unlawful conduct of an official who wouldnot pay damages shall responsible. The author shows the necessity of the changes in the Arbitrazhand Civil procedural Codes of the Russian Federation, the Russian Code of Civil Procedure concerningthe cases when an appropriate subject doe s not voluntarily pay the damages caused by unlawfulactions (inaction) of officials, the amount to be raised through the courts, can be increased. The authorconcluded that legislation should encourage compensation in administrative procedure, as opposed tolarge financial costs in the courts.


The purpose of this study is to assess how inhabitants of the Lidkoping community value or perceive their surrounding in relation to urban planning, specifically the new Hamnstaden urban development. This perception was collected as data mainly through photos, conceived here as visual ethnography, combined with written responses. As the trend of urbanization continues to grow around the world, who or what is determining how cities are built? What elements of our urban environments do we value, and how do we measure these values? Many of the current trends with urban development are inconsistent with sustainable development and new perspectives on the construction of our cities are required to make cities more sustainable. This research uses a qualitative research approach in a case study in an urban development project in Lidkoping to attempt to address some of these questions. The results are very diverse, but the highest-valued elements according to the participants were green space, old buildings, pedestrian space, public art, and cafes.


To promote smoother freeway traffic flow during evacuations, ramps may be closed and thus reduce the number of merging and related speed reduction points. Deciding which ramps to close can be treated as an optimization problem in which the decision variables are integers that indicate whether the ramp is open or closed. This paper examines the problem under multiple demand and budget scenarios for no-notice evacuations. Through the optimization formulation and solution method, optimized closure plans are developed for each scenario and compared with the do-nothing case, and an existing plan is developed with professional judgment. The optimized plans outperform the others in the evacuees' total travel time but are sometimes associated with decreases in overall network throughput. Three ramp closures, consistent across the scenarios, are explored as a reduced closure plan, and evacuee benefits are identified for all of the scenarios over the do-nothing option except in the most congested background traffic scenario. However, even in the most congested case, the three-ramp closure plan improved evacuees' travel times over the plan developed without analytical and simulation support. Although the exact optimized ramp closure plan varies across scenarios and budgets, overlap of the plans can help generate a smaller closure plan that provides benefits over plans that are strictly judgment based and over the do-nothing option in less congested cases.


The study of compact binary in-spirals and mergers with gravitational wave observatories amounts to optimizing a theoretical description of the data to best reproduce the true detector output. While most of the research effort in gravitational wave data modeling focuses on the gravitational wave- forms themselves, here we will begin to improve our model of the instrument noise by introducing parameters which allow us to determine the background instrumental power spectrum while simul- taneously characterizing the astrophysical signal. We use data from the fifth LIGO science run and simulated gravitational wave signals to demonstrate how the introduction of noise parameters results in resilience of the signal characterization to variations in an initial estimation of the noise power spectral density. We find substantial improvement in the consistency of Bayes factor calculations when we are able to marginalize over uncertainty in the instrument noise level.


Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a major causative agent of hospital-acquired infections and infections in cystic fibrosis patients. Treatment of P. aeruginosa is complicated by the presence of intrinsic and acquired multidrug-resistant isolates. Polymyxin B has often been used as the last option to treat the multidrug-resistant isolates. However, polymyxin B-resistant clinical isolates have been increasingly reported worldwide. To understand molecular details of polymyxin resistance we character-ized polymyxin B-resistant clinical isolate of P. aeruginosa . The clinical isolate grew with 4 m g mL (cid:2) 1 of polymyxin B while a reference P. aeruginosa PAO1 grew with 0.25 m g mL (cid:2) 1 . Polymyxin B susceptibility was restored (minimal inhibitory con-centration from 8 to 0.5 m g mL (cid:2) 1 ) by an intact clone of pmrAB , but not by an intact clone of phoPQ or the cloning vector. DNA sequence analysis of pmrB from the resistant isolate revealed a single nucleotide substitution (T to C) substituted methionine to threonine at position 292 of PmrB. Involvement of this amino acid substitution in polymyxin B resistance was confirmed by complementation of a pmrAB null-mutant strain with the pmrAB containing the amino acid substitution. These results suggest that amino acid substitution in PmrB is one mechanism of polymyxin B resistance in clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa .


We show a diffusion enhancement of suspended polystyrene particles in an electrical on/off ratchet. The enhancement can be described by a simple master equation model. Furthermore, we find that the diffusion enhancement can be described by a general curve whose shape is only determined by the asymmetry of the ratchet repeat unit. The scaling of this curve can be explained from an analytical expression valid for small off-times. Finally, we demonstrate how the master equation model can be used to find the driving parameters for optimal particle separation.


Objective To assess possible relationships between occupational exposure to metalworking fluid (MWF) mist and bladder cancer risk. Methods A nested case-control study was conducted within a cohort of workers from 6 steel-producing factories. Cases were diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2006–2012. Three controls per case were randomly selected from the cohort, matched to cases by age at diagnostic and counter-matched according to 4 strata of surrogate measure of exposure to MWF mists, assessed using a job-exposure matrix. Cases (n = 84) and controls (n = 251) provided information during personal interviews on occupational history, including the type of MWF used (straight oils, soluble oils, synthetic fluids), and smoking habits. Experts estimated intensity, frequency and probability of exposure to each MWF mist. Conditional logistic regression, adapted to counter-matching, was used to calculate Odds-Ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI), taking into account the 3 types of MWF mist, and adjusting for smoking and other occupational factors. Results A statistically significant OR for bladder cancer was observed for workers exposed to MWF mist, for over 20 years during occupational history (OR 3.32, 95% CI: 1.48–7.46). ORs were statistically significant for workers ever exposed to straight oils (OR 2.14, 95% CI: 1.05–4.36), for over 20 years during occupational history (OR 5.49, 95% CI: 1.75–17.2). ORs statistically not greater than 1 were observed for workers ever exposed to soluble oils (OR 1.46, 95% CI: 0.71–3.02), for over 20 years during occupational history (OR 2.43, 95% CI: 0.88–6.70). OR was not statistically significant for workers ever exposed to synthetic fluids (OR 1.2, 95% CI: 0.31–3.30). Dose-response relationships were observed with cumulative exposure to MWF mist and straight oils in the last 20 years before diagnosis. Conclusion This study highlighted association between recent exposure to straight oils and bladder cancer risk, but did not detect any relationship concerning soluble oils or synthetic fluids.


This study presents the Yuqiao Reservoir Water Quality Model (YRWQM), a three-dimensional hydrodynamic and water quality model of the Yuqiao reservoir, China. The YRWQM was developed under the environmental fluid dynamics code (EFDC) model and was calibrated and verified to hydrodynamic and water quality data, using two sets of observed data from January 1 to December 31, 2006 and from May 1 to October 31, 2007, respectively. The primary hydrodynamic and transport driving forces are inflows/outflows and surface wind stresses. Considering effects of water transfer and wind on the advection-dispersion processes, the model results showed better agreements with observed data in the reservoir. The YRWQM predicted the variations of water quality resulting from agricultural pollution which flowed into the reservoir with floods lasting for 12 days in 2009. The results indicated that the concentrations of chemical oxygen demand and total nitrogen were increased 225 and 314%, respectively. Considering the interactions between chlorophyll- a and nitrogen in the model, the results indicated the reservoir was not a nitrogen-limited environment. We suggest the management should focus on agricultural pollution strategies for the reservoir during the flood period. The YRWQM could be a useful tool for water sources management in the reservoir.