Author(s): Mills, Gregory Matthew | Advisor(s): Krstic, Miroslav | Abstract: The work in this thesis describes our attempts for theoretical advancements to and the experimental results of extremum seeking schemes. Extremum seeking is a form of adaptive control where an unknown but assumed concave objective function is maximized. While many black-box optimization schemes exist, each with their own particular assumptions and nomenclature, extremum seeking analysis in the controls community typically deals with an unknown objective function associated with the non-linear equilibrium profile of a dynamic process. An elegant and rigorous analysis paradigm exists for the general structure of this problem. It exploits the time scale difference in process, estimation, and learning dynamics so as to use averaging and singular perturbation theory. The slowest timescale approximates a continuous optimization algorithm. The middle timescale constructs estimates for the `slower' learning algorithm. And the fastest timescale are the process dynamics. In reality, optimization problems are typically not unconstrained. A real process will likely have some physical limitation or a even a user imposed virtual limitation. In order to enforce input constraints to the extremum seeking setting, we must better understand the constrained optimization algorithm the "average" extremum seeking system will approximate.We initially investigate the use of continuous-time gradient based optimization scheme for the convex programming problem. The dynamics of the optimization parameter are described by a continuous projection of the map's gradient and appear an appropriate target system for the average extremum seeking system. We then assume a general unknown quasi-concave objective function and provide that the 1-dimensional sinusoidal extremum seeking scheme is domain-limited semi-globally practically asymptotically stable about the constrained minimum. The incorporation of a projection operator prohibits the estimate system from leaving the constraint set and the perturbed system from leaving the constraint set dilated by the perturbation amplitude.The usual working assumption is that the extremum seeking process will regulate the system to a neighborhood of the output's extremal value. However, it does not need to be the case. We present a generalization to the scalar Newton-based extremum seeking algorithm which through perturbation-induced measurements of an unknown steady-state input-to-output map, maximizes the map's higher derivatives. The Newton-based extremum seeking approach removes the dependence of the average convergence rate on the unknown Hessian of the higher derivative, an effort to improve performance over standard gradient-based extremum seeking. We prove local stability of the algorithm for general nonlinear equilibrium profiles of dynamic maps and extend this abstraction to multiplayer non-cooperative games, but limit our attention to a 2-player game for notational simplicity and length considerations. Experimental results and a discussion of application process are shown for a negative ion surface plasma source . The converter voltage of a $H^{-}$ ion source is utilized by the Los Alamos linear accelerator is optimized in order to maximize the output intensity of the beam current.


Packaging plays an important role in today's competitive market as a means of attracting consumer attention, due to the growth of self-service retail and other changes in consumer buying patterns. The main objective of this thesis is to examine packaging elements that can influence consumer purchase decisions of body wash products in the Klang Valley, Malaysia, in order to have a better understanding of which packaging elements primarily affect shoppers' purchasing judgements.
To pursue these objectives, the authors developed a research framework for packaging which divides the main objective into two sub-objectives. The first of these seeks to determine the influence of visual packaging elements on consumer purchase decisions, while the second focuses on the influence of informational packaging elements on such decisions. Independent variables like graphics and color, shape and size are categorized under visual elements, while informational elements include product information and technology image.
The study adopts a descriptive research design methodology. Data was collected through survey questionnaires from 385 respondents selected at random. The data analytical methods used in this thesis are descriptive analysis, reliability analysis and multiple regression analysis. A descriptive analysis analyzes the respondents' demographic profile and consumer perceptions of packaging. A reliability test was then carried out to check for consistency based on the average correlation between variables. Finally, a multiple regression analysis seeks to identify the relationship between consumer purchase decisions and two independent variables, namely visual elements and informational elements.
This research confirms that packaging elements can have an important influence on consumer purchase decisions of body wash products. Its findings further show that informational elements are more likely to influence consumers in their purchase decisions than visual elements.


Based on the stimulation and restriction of road simulation, the 5-DOF motorcycle multi-body dynamic model is derived, and the differential equation of motion and state-space formulation are developed according to Lagrange Equation. By iterating the load spectra, which was sampled on Hainan Proving Ground, the driving signal of motorcycle road simulation is obtained. With the driving signal as input, the motorcycle dynamics is simulated using MATLAB program, then the simulation and experiment are compared. The result shows that motorcycle dynamics can be analyzed and estimated precisely by combining road simulation with computer simulation.


Context. The Helios measurements of the angular momentum flux L of the fast solar wind lead to a tendency for the fluxes associated with individual ion angular momenta of protons and alpha particles, Lp and Lα, to be negative (i.e., in the sense of counter-rotation with the Sun). However, the opposite holds for the slow wind, and the overall particle contribution LP = Lp + Lα tends to exceed the magnetic contribution LM. These two aspects are at variance with previous models. Aims. We examine whether introducing realistic ion temperature anisotropies can resolve this discrepancy. Methods. From a general set of multifluid transport equations with gyrotropic species pressure tensors, we derive the equations governing both the meridional and azimuthal dynamics of outflows from magnetized, rotating stars. The equations are not restricted to radial flows in the equatorial plane but valid for general axisymmetric winds that include two major ion species. The azimuthal dynamics are examined in detail, using the empirical meridional flow profiles for the solar wind, constructed mainly according to measurements made in situ. Results. The angular momentum flux L is determined by the requirement that the solution to the total angular momentum conservation law is unique and smooth in the vicinity of the Alfven point, defined as where the combined Alfvenic Mach number MT = 1. MT has to consider the contributions from both protons and alpha particles. Introducing realistic ion temperature anisotropies may introduce a change of up to 10% in L and up to ∼1. 8k m s −1 in azimuthal speeds of individual ions between 0.3 and 1 AU, compared with the isotropic case. The latter has strong consequences on the relative importance of LP and LM in the angular momentum budget. Conclusions. However, introducing ion temperature anisotropies cannot resolve the discrepancy between in situ measurements and model computations. For the fast-wind solutions, while in extreme cases LP may become negative, Lp never does. On the other hand, for the slow solar wind solutions examined, LP never exceeds LM, even though LM may be less than the individual ion contribution, since Lp and Lα always have opposite signs for the slow and fast wind alike.


This work describes a Java based development platform which is intended to support ad hoc network researchers in application and protocol design. Software development within this environment is expected to follow a bottom up approach. Basic functionality is implemented in elementary components which can be combined to more complex ones by using well defined interfaces. With dynamically changing network links being rather the common case than a failure situation, asynchronous communication has been selected as the main communication paradigm within this platform. Reusability of components in different execution contexts by providing an appropriate machine abstraction is a further important design decision which drove the platform development. Code written once can be executed in a pure simulation mode, in a hybrid setting with real devices being attached to a running simulation and, finally, in a setting using real devices only. Software development following this three-tier development process paired with the platform's rich visualization features emerged to significantly ease the burden of debugging and parameterizing in such highly dynamic and inherently distributed environments. In conjunction with a core middleware platform a rich set of generic services has been implemented with the most important ones being described in this work. Several application programs have already been implemented on top of these services. These applications which are described in this work as well serve as a proof of concept for both the platform itself and the utilized set of generic services


Author(s): Schmidt, Lawrence David Warren | Abstract: This dissertation addresses several questions in financial economics. A common thread is the study of conditional distributions and higher moments. The first chapter proposes state-dependent, idiosyncratic tail risk as a key driver of asset pricing dynamics. In standard models, the only sources of priced macroeconomic risk govern time- variation in aggregate consumption and/or preferences. When markets are incomplete, agents care not just about the level of consumption, but also its redistribution across agents. Administrative earnings data suggest that the conditional tails of the cross-sectional distribution of labor income growth rates are highly cyclical; its left and right tails become fatter and thinner, respectively, in recessions. These features are consistent with a model in which households are exposed to rare, very large shocks and the probability of these shocks varies over time. My paper measures, prices, and demonstrates the quantitative importance of labor market event risk. The second chapter studies investor redemption behavior from money market mutual funds in September 2008. These funds are a popular alternative to bank accounts for cash investments, particularly for large corporations and institutional investors. Like banks, MMF investments have a liquidity mismatch between assets and liabilities that can create the potential for a run. There is an active debate about the mechanisms generating run-like behavior, particularly about the importance of strategic complementarities-- investors' self-fulfilling beliefs about other investors' actions (i.e. "panic"). Data from the money market provide empirical evidence of the quantitative importance of complementarities in the data. Another area of asset pricing where time-varying distributions becomes important is option pricing. The third chapter studies the relationship between the option-implied distribution of market returns and estimates of the distribution obtained from time series methods. The ratio of the two densities, the pricing kernel, provides "model-free" insights about preferences. Standard models predict that the pricing kernel should be a monotonically decreasing function of the market return, but many estimates violate this property. We develop a formal, nonparametric test of pricing kernel monotonicity, provide general conditions under which the test is applicable, then perform the test using SaP 500 options data. We frequently reject the hypothesis of monotonicity


Effluent quality of vertical tube biological reactor (VTBR) was simulated by support vector machine. Average R2 of the training set and the test set were used to balance the fitness and the predictive ability of SVR models, and evaluate the general performance of SVR models. Following a special grid search procedure, optimal parameters were determined for these SVR models. Results indicted that these SVR models have good fitness and predictive ability. The developed model may be integrated into an advanced control system for the VTBR using different control strategies with further work. Furthermore, SVR was found to be a useful and promising tool that is worth consideration in the prediction of effluent of wastewater treatment processes.


Tanjungpinang is one of the fish producing cities. fish with a good level of freshness are needed to produce quality fish products. In this case, a system is needed that can recognize fresh and non-fresh fish. In this study using the HSV and GLCM methods as a feature then image recognition is carried out using the Radial Basis Function (RBF). In the RBF recognition method it is necessary to have a central point that becomes the data center. Data center retrieval uses the K-Means method, where this method greatly determines the success of the RBF's introduction. By determining the best number of data centers in the best data center, it is at number 7 with MAD of 0.98. At the time of image acquisition did not pay attention to lighting so as to produce training data with low quality. How in the introduction process using this RBF gets a low level of accuracy, which is equal to 50%


Exercise-induced pulmonary haemorrhage (EIPH) is a highly prevalent disease of racehorses. Recognised for centuries, there has been advances in our knowledge and understanding of the disease, but the cause and prevention of EIPH remains elusive. The aim of this study was to contribute to the knowledge base of EIPH with a broader exploration of risk factors, the impact of race day EIPH on a range of novel and routine performance parameters, and to document the longitudinal nature of the disease.

Subject to timing, tracheobronchoscopy after racing is a reliable technique to detect pulmonary haemorrhage. Although the association between tracheobronchoscopic haemorrhage and pulmonary histological changes has not been substantiated, the grading of tracheal haemorrhage is an accepted marker of disease presence and severity. A prospective, observational and longitudinal study design was used to examine a group of Thoroughbred racehorses competing in Western Australia. Horses were examined with tracheobronchoscopy between 30 and 220 minutes after racing. The examinations were reviewed and graded (0-4) by experienced veterinarians that were blinded to the horses' identity, date of examination and performance. In total, there were 3,794 observations from 1,567 horses collected over a 3-year period.

Using a subset of animals, the association between EIPH and a variety of horse, race and climatic factors were examined. Racing at lower ambient temperature and horses' racing with bar shoes were associated with EIPH presence and increasing severity. Increasing race distance was associated with EIPH being detected and increasing the number of career race starts increased the risk of more severe EIPH.

Using the entire dataset horses with the most severe grades of EIPH (≥3) were significantly more likely to have a lower finishing position and finish further behind the winner, less likely to place in the first 3 positions and collect race earnings, collected less earnings per race start and were slower over the last 600m of the race than horses without EIPH (grade 0). Mild or moderate haemorrhage was not associated with inferior race day performance.

The longitudinal analysis of disease progression was conducted using 747 horses with a minimum of 2 observations. Tracheobronchoscopic EIPH mildly increased in severity over the first thirty race starts. The preceding EIPH score was significantly associated with the current EIPH score. Significant factors associated with the current EIPH score included ambient temperature and the number of days in the current racing preparation. Ambient temperature, weight carried in races and the number of days since last racing was associated with variation in EIPH severity between races.


A partially purified D-xylose isomerase has been isolated from cells of Streptomyces albus NRRL 5778 and some of its properties have been determined. D-Glucose, D-xylose, D-ribose, L-arabinose, and L-rhamnose served as substrates for the enzyme with respective Km values of 86, 93, 350, 153, and 312 mM and Vmax values measuring 1.23, 2.9, 2.63, 0.153, and 0.048 mumol min per mg of protein. The hexose D-allose was also isomerized. The enzyme was strongly activated by 1.0 mM Mg2+ but only partially activated by 1.0 mM Co2+. The respective Km values for Mg2+ and Co2+ were 0.3 and 0.003 mM. Mg2+ and Co2+ appear to have separate binding sites on the isomerase. These cations also protect the enzyme from thermal denaturation and from D-sorbitol inhibition. The optimum temperature for ketose formation was 70 to 80 C at pH values ranging from 7 to 9. D-Sorbitol acts as a competitive inhibitor with a Ki of 5.5 mM against D-glucose, D-xylose, and D-ribose. Induction experiments, Mg2+ activation, and D-sorbitol inhibition indicated that a single enzyme (D-xylose isomerase) was responsible for the isomerization of the pentoses, methyl pentose, and glucose.


Background: Generalized pruritus without primary skin lesion is a heterogenous condition and may persist for long periods, from months to years. Few studies of generalized pruritus have been carried out. Objective: To evaluate the causes, clinical manifestations and treatment courses of generalized pruritus. Methods: A total of 229 new patients (190 newly-visited dermatologic outpatients, 39 consulted inpatients from other clinical departments) with generalized pruritus without skin lesion who visited the Department of Dermatology, Kyungpook University Hospital, Daegu, Korea from July 2005~June 2008 were selected. The data was studied on the basis of a retrospective survey of hospital records. Results: The number of the patients with generalized pruritus was highest in the seventh decade of life. In 57.2% of total patients, generalized pruritus was a symptom of internal disease. Idiopathic pruritus was diagnosed in 20.5% of patients, and senile pruritus in 14.8% of patients. Among internal diseases, endocrine disease was the most common (29.0%). Temperature change was the most frequent aggravating factor (20.3%). For diurnal and seasonal variations, pruritus was frequently aggravated at night (35.9%) and in summer (18.8%). Topical treatment was the most common treatment modality. Conclusion: This study describes the general aspects of generalized pruritus without skin lesion. An approach to the work-up of a patient with pruritus is suggested. (Korean J Dermatol 2009;47(11):1246~1252)


Forty-four selected organic-walled dinoflagellate cyst species have been used for biozonation of the Bathonian, Callovian, and the Upper Jurassic in North Bulgaria. The dinocysts were collected from 49 borehole sections and two exposures. The following dinocyst zones are herein introduced and described: Lithodinium valensii–Gongylodinium erymnoteichos Concurrent-range Zone (lower–middle Bathonian); Ellipsoidictyon reticulatum Assemblage Zone (upper Bathonian–lower Callovian); Dingodinium harsveldtii Taxon-range Zone (middle–upper Callovian); Lambodinium absidatum Assemblage Zone (lower Oxfordian); Scriniodinium dictyotum papillatum–Caddasphaera halosa Concurrent-range Zone (middle–upper Oxfordian); Rhyncodiniopsis gongylos Assemblage Zone (lower Kimmeridgian); Systematophora varispinosa–Gonyaulacysta? crassicornuta Concurrent-range Zone (middle–upper Kimmeridgian); Edmontodinium polyplacophorum Assemblage Zone (lower Tithonian); and Leptodinium? plagatum–Prolixosphaeridium perforospineum Concurrent-range Zone (middle–upper Tithonian). Some of the zones were partly or completely subdivided in subzones. The dinocyst zones and subzones were correlated with the Bulgarian ammonite and calpionellid zones and subzones.


The metaplastic synovial cyst (synovial metaplasia of the skin) is a recently described intradermal cyst lined by a membrane that resembles hyperplastic synovium. All of the reported cases thus far have occurred in adults after surgical incision. A case of metaplastic synovial cyst after partial excision of nevus sebaceus in a 7-year-old girl is herein reported. Pathogenesis and light-microscopic and immunohistochemical features of this case are discussed.


We show that the shapes of integer partitions chosen randomly according to Schur-Weyl measures of parameter $\alpha =1/2$ and Gelfand measures satisfy Kerov's central limit theorem. Thus, there is a gaussian process $\Delta$ such that under Plancherel, Schur-Weyl or Gelfand measures, the deviations $\Delta_n(s)=\lambda _n(\sqrt{n} s)-\sqrt{n} \lambda _{\infty}^{\ast}(s)$ converge in law towards $\Delta (s)$, up to a translation along the $x$-axis in the case of Schur-Weyl measures, and up to a factor $\sqrt{2}$ and a deterministic remainder in the case of Gelfand measures. The proofs of these results follow the one given by Ivanov and Olshanski for Plancherel measures; hence, one uses a "method of noncommutative moments''.


Knowledge of the latitudinal patterns in biotic interactions, and especially in herbivory, is crucial for understanding the mechanisms that govern ecosystem functioning and for predicting their responses to climate change. We used sap‐feeding insects as a model group to test the hypotheses that the strength of plant–herbivore interactions in boreal forests decreases with latitude and that this latitudinal pattern is driven primarily by midsummer temperatures. We used a replicated sampling design and quantitatively collected and identified all sap‐feeding insects from four species of forest trees along five latitudinal gradients (750–1300 km in length, ten sites in each gradient) in northern Europe (59 to 70°N and 10 to 60°E) during 2008–2011. Similar decreases in diversity of sap‐feeding insects with latitude were observed in all gradients during all study years. The sap‐feeder load (i.e. insect biomass per unit of foliar biomass) decreased with latitude in typical summers, but increased in an exceptionally hot summer and was independent of latitude during a warm summer. Analysis of combined data from all sites and years revealed dome‐shaped relationships between the loads of sap‐feeders and midsummer temperatures, peaking at 17 °C in Picea abies, at 19.5 °C in Pinus sylvestris and Betula pubescens and at 22 °C in B. pendula. From these relationships, we predict that the losses of forest trees to sap‐feeders will increase by 0–45% of the current level in southern boreal forests and by 65–210% in subarctic forests with a 1 °C increase in summer temperatures. The observed relationships between temperatures and the loads of sap‐feeders differ between the coniferous and deciduous tree species. We conclude that climate warming will not only increase plant losses to sap‐feeding insects, especially in subarctic forests, but can also alter plant‐plant interactions, thereby affecting both the productivity and the structure of future forest ecosystems.


ABSTRACT The growing number of elderly multilingual speakers suffering from strokes and aphasia requires a change in the services of speech and language pathologists (SLPs), who will be serving culturally and linguistically diverse individuals to an increasing extent. Two American studies have shown that a majority of SLPs who work with multilingual adults in the US felt that their academic and clinical training had left them insufficiently prepared for working with multilingual persons with aphasia (MPWAs). This insecurity may have considerable negative consequences for MPWAs and their families. Little is known about the generalizability of these studies; hence the objective of the present study is to investigate whether the US situation is comparable to a European country with different demographics. A web-based questionnaire was administered to SLPs in Norway, examining multiple factors regarding work setting, professional training, clinical tools and procedures, and service delivery issues with MPWAs. Overall, the results are in line with Centeno's, showing that SLPs make sensible decisions to serve MPWAs despite inadequate education programmes, shortcomings in clinical training, and limited clinical resources. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for professional education and the measures needed to minimize present shortcomings in service delivery to MPWAs.


The aim of this study is to explore the significance of the body as a project for
an understanding of physical activity among women with a spinal cord injury
(SCI). The majority of sociological research has treated the above concepts
in isolation. In order to explore this area the work of sociologist Erving
Goffman (1963) has therefore been used to construct a theoretical framework.
Throughout this study it is assumed that the body occupies a dual location as
the property of the embodied individual, as well as the property of society
where its meaning is constructed. Particular attention is given to the
construction of the social body (focusing upon the rules and expectations
surrounding its construction), in order to reveal the important concepts of
femininity and disability. It will emerge throughout this exploration, how these
Socially constructed concepts may weave a confusing web for a SCI woman
who wishes to work at her body project with the use of physical activity.


Following the global trends and innovations in the communication and information technology, the way of communication between universities and faculties with the students, and among students themselves, became significantly different than a few years ago. The use of social networks and other forms of interactive communication for this type of communication is becoming a trend. The intensity of the communication between the students and the faculties and universities seems to be very intensive during the process of choosing a faculty for enrollment, as well as the short period just before the enrollment starts. In this paper we will make a brief review of the Innovation and Knowledge Management towards eStudent Information System – iKnow, and then present last year's numbers and statistics for the enrollment process at the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering in Skopje, in the aspect of using the social networks. We will describe the procedures and frequency of answering and managing the frequently asked questions, as well as all of the technical support mechanisms used before and during the enrollment days.


Rvb1 and Rvb2 are highly conserved, essential AAA+ helicases found in a wide range of eukaryotes. The versatility of these helicases and their central role in the biology of the cell is evident from their involvement in a wide array of critical cellular complexes. Rvb1 and Rvb2 are components of the chromatin-remodeling complexes INO80, Swr-C, and BAF. They are also members of the histone acetyltransferase Tip60 complex, and the recently identified R2TP complex present in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Homo sapiens; a complex that is involved in small nucleolar ribonucleoprotein (snoRNP) assembly. Furthermore, in humans, Rvb1 and Rvb2 have been identified in the URI prefoldin-like complex. In Drosophila, the Polycomb Repressive complex 1 contains Rvb2, but not Rvb1, and the Brahma complex contains Rvb1 and not Rvb2. Both of these complexes are involved in the regulation of growth and development genes in Drosophila. Rvbs are therefore crucial factors in various cellular processes. Their importance in chromatin remodeling, transcription regulation, DNA damage repair, telomerase assembly, mitotic spindle formation, and snoRNP biogenesis is discussed in this review.


This study aims to continuously measure nasal mucosal temperature without interruption of nasal breathing using infrared thermometry. An infrared thermometer (Medi-Therm 310; Everest Interscience, Inc.) was directed at the nasal septum from a distance of 15 cm. Infrared radiation was continuously collected, then converted to an electrical signal proportional to the mucosal temperature and output to a chart recorder. In 70 subjects the mean nasal mucosal temperature was 30.4 +/- 2.0 degrees C on inspiration and 32.0 +/- 1.8 degrees C on expiration. Using multiple regression, nasal mucosal temperature was significantly related to atmospheric temperature (p < 0.0001) and inversely related to the airway patency of the ipsilateral nasal passage (p < 0.05).


The Internet is a powerful political instrument, which is increasingly employed by terrorists to forward their goals. The five most prominent contemporary terrorist uses of the Net are information provision, financing, networking, recruitment, and information gathering. This article describes and explains each of these uses and is illustrated with examples of each. The final section of the paper describes the responses of government, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and others to the terrorism-Internet nexus.


Municipal wastewater is the largest reservoir of enterobacteria (total coliforms) and a host of other microorganisms. Wastewater also harbors a range of pathogenic, opportunistic pathogenic, and nonpathogenic species. The public health significance of this reservoir may depend upon the physiological status of the wastewater microbial community. Viability and culturability are integral aspects of bacterial physiology but their relationship in the context of wastewater processing and disinfection are poorly understood.

While culturable microbes must be viable, viable organisms may not be culturable, but they can retain metabolic activity, membrane integrity, and the capacity to resume culturability (growth). The ability of an organism to be cultured can be a variable trait. Transient loss of culturability precipitated by disinfection would confound containment assessment and pathogen control.

To better understand the relationship between coliform physiology and disinfection, culture-independent methods are necessary. Such methods can avoid culture-bias and the loss of information reflecting the in situ experience of resident organisms. While the relationship between viable but not culturable bacterial pathogens to public health risk is important, it remains poorly understood and outside the scope of the current study.

In this study, two culture independent methods were used to examine in situ coliform physiology and taxonomic identity during wastewater processing and disinfection. The protein profiling method employed fluor-coupled coliform-specific antibodies and demonstrated that biological treatment regimens produce physiologically different coliform communities readily distinguished by their sensitivity to disinfection.

A new culture-independent method called mRNA profiling was developed using fluor-coupled DNA probes to simultaneously assess wastewater coliform physiology and taxonomic identity. The mRNA profiling method demonstrated that fecal coliforms resident in chlorinated secondary treated wastewater could be resuscitated and comprised a significant fraction of the coliform community.

The project findings together with current treatment strategies may increase treatment plant performance, realize reduce wastewater coliforms content and minimize release of disinfection byproducts into receiving waters.

This title belongs to WERF Research Report Series

ISBN: 9781843397519 (eBook)


Bayes and empirical Bayes methods have proven eeective in smoothing crude maps of disease risk, eliminating the instability of estimates in low-population areas while maintaining overall geographic trends and patterns. Recent work applies these methods to the analysis of areal data which are spatially misaligned, i.e., involving variables (typically counts or rates) which are aggregated over diiering sets of regional boundaries. In this paper we extend this hierarchical modeling approach to the spatio-temporal case, so that misalignment can arise either within a given timepoint, or across timepoints (as when the regional boundaries themselves evolve over time). Implemented using Markov chain Monte Carlo computing methods, our approach sensibly combines the relevant data sources and imposes the necessary constraints over the misaligned regional grids. We illustrate the method through an analysis of the dataset that motivated the method, which relates traac density to pediatric asthma hospitalizations in San Diego County, California. We compare two diierent measures of the traac covariate (neither of which is aligned with the zip code-level asthma data), mapping the resulting tted risk estimates in the Geographic Information System (GIS) ARC/INFO. Results in both cases are consistent with those of several previous authors who have investigated the traac-asthma link.


An important aspect of human emotion perception is the use of contextual information to understand others' feelings even in situations where their behavior is not very expressive or has an emotionally ambiguous meaning. For technology to successfully detect affect, it must mimic this human ability when analyzing audiovisual input. Databases upon which machine learning algorithms are trained should capture the context of social interactions as well as the behavior expressed in them. However, there is a lack of consensus about what constitutes relevant context in such databases. In this article, we make two contributions towards overcoming this challenge: (a) we identify two principal sources of context for emotion perceptions based on psychological theory, and (b) we provide an overview of how each of these has been considered in published databases covering social interactions. Our results show that a similar set of contextual features are present across the reviewed databases. Between all the different databases researchers seem to have taken into account a set of contextual features reflecting the sources of context seen in psychological theory. However, within individual databases, these features are not yet systematically varied. This is problematic because it prevents them from being used directly as resources for the modeling of context-sensitive affect detection. Based on our findings, we suggest improvements for the future development of affective databases.


Racial bias in the twenty-first century endures in the form of racial cumulative disadvantage. It exists in the criminal justice system where people of color suffer from racial biases at multiple decision points. The multiple biases accumulate to create adverse outcomes such as imprisonment for defendants of color; in capital cases, the adverse outcome is death. Defendants of color in the criminal justice system, therefore, contend not with a mere single incident of racial bias, but with multiple instances of racial biases spread among multiple actors across multiple stages that accumulate. Remedying racial cumulative disadvantage entails dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline, requiring racial impact statements to consider cumulative disadvantage effects, and abolishing the death penalty. The goal is to eradicate racial cumulative disadvantage to promote equal advantage and thereby craft a more just society.


The purpose of this study was to calculate costs of milk production, gross production value, gross margin, absolute profit, and relative profit of dairy cattle farms located in the provinces of east Mediterranean region of Turkey. Primary data were collected from 148 dairy cattle farms designated using the Neyman Stratified Sampling method through surveys. Dairy farms were classified into four groups according to the number of cows. The data belong to the 2012 production season. A single product budget analysis method was used for calculating production costs. According to the results, variable costs amounted to 65.91% of total production costs. Feed cost (86.52%) was the main component of variable costs. The cost of 1 kg of milk, on average, was calculated as USD 0.261. The cost of milk was USD 0.499 on group 1 farms, USD 0.399 on group 2 farms, USD 0.272 on group 3 farms, and USD 0.233 on group 4 farms. Among the farms under study, average gross margin value was negative only on group 1 farm, and positive in all other groups. Absolute profit value was positive only on group 4 farm, and negative in all other groups. The average relative profit of the farms was 0.9067. The expansion of dairy farms could be reached by reducing the feed cost as well as increasing the scale of farms.


In freely moving intact cats and cats with bilateral lesions of the lateral funiculi the foot contact signals and the activity of selected muscles operating at the ankle and knee joints were analysed during walking at moderate speed (0.41.0 mls). No essential changes in the activity of the muscles gastrocnemius lateralis (GL), semitendinosus (ST) and vastus lateralis (VL) were found in operated animals. The tibialis anterior (TA) muscle activity had a shorter duration than the swing phase in operated animals and showed an impaired coactivation with gastrocnemius lateralis (GL) muscle at the end of the swing phase. Pilot experiments indicated that these deficits may be partly compensated for by peroneal nerve electrostimulation. Analysis of regression lines relating the swing duration to the step duration, determined from EMG records, confirmed our previous results, based on foot contact signals (Gbrska et al. 1993), showing that in cats with lateral funicular lesions the swing duration varies much more with the step duration than in intact animals.


Electronic components are normally assembled to printed circuit boards (PCBs). Such components generate heat in operation which must be conducted away efficiently from the small mounting areas to frames where the PCB is fixed. The temperature of the component depends on heat dissipation rate, technology and parameters of mounting, component placement and finally effective thermal conductivity (keff) of the board. The temperature of some components may reach significant magnitudes over 100°C while the PCB frame is kept at near-ambient temperature. The reliability of electronic components is directly related to operating temperature; so the thermal project should be able to provide a correct temperature prediction of all PCB components under the hottest operational condition. In space applications, the main way to spread and reject heat of electronic equipment is by thermal conduction once there is no air available to apply convection-based cooling techniques. The PCB keff is an important parameter for the electronics thermal analysis when the PCB is modeled as a simplified homogeneous board with a unique thermal conductivity. In this paper, an intrinsic uncertainty of such approach is firstly reveled and its magnitude is evaluated for a real space use PCB. The simulation uses SINDA/FLUINT Thermal Desktop and aims to determine the keff of the PCB by comparison between a detailed multi-layered anisotropic model and an equivalent homogeneous single-layer model. The model was validated using available data for two-layered FR4-copper PCB. Multiple simulations are performed with different dissipating component position and mounting area.


Integrating viral vectors hold great promise as gene transfer vectors for gene therapy purposes because they allow maintaining long-term expression of the therapeutic transgene throughout cell divisions. However, many issues related to integration of the provirus remain as a substantial risk for patients. The use of chromatin insulators has been proposed as a possible solution to problems raised by the integration of the vector.


Recently ZnO nanowire films have been used in very promising and inexpensive dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC). It was found that the performance of the devices can be enhanced by functionalising the nanowires with a thin metal oxide coating. This nm-scale shell is believed to tailor the electronic structure of the nanowire, and help the absorption of the dye. Core-shell ZnO nanowire structures are synthesised at low temperature (below 120°C) by consecutive hydrothermal growth steps. Different materials are investigated for the coating, including Mg, Al, Cs and Zr oxides. High resolution TEM is used to characterise the quality of both the nanowire core and the shell, and to monitor the thickness and the degree of crystallisation of the oxide coating. The interface between the nanowire core and the outer shell is investigated in order to understand the adhesion of the coating, and give valuable feedback for the synthesis process. Nanowire films are packaged into dye-sensitised solar cell prototypes; samples coated with ZrO2 and MgO show the largest enhancement in the photocurrent and open-circuit voltage and look very promising for further improvement.


Since the mid-1990s the issue of corporate social responsibility has become an interest of various actors in the international system and an important item on the international agenda. In spite of the absence of a common definition, the concept generally involves claims on transnational corporations to take responsibility for the promotion and protection of human and labour rights in countries where they operate or otherwise conduct business. These claims have contributed to a change in the expectations on the behaviour of companies and result from the persistent advocacy of non-governmental organizations. This study traces the development of corporate social responsibility understood as a new international norm and part of a social construction project with a normative agenda. With a point of departure in the 1970s, different stages of the norm cycle of corporate social responsibility – norm emergence, "norm cascade" and norm internalization – are traced through five selected non-governmental organizations including the Clean Clothes Campaign, the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, Global Exchange, the International Business Leaders Forum, and the International Labor Rights Fund. Although representing different categories of organizations, i.e. Activists, Business Initiatives and Multi-stakeholder Organizations, they are all seen as norm entrepreneurs involved in a process of international norm construction. The argument made is that these norm entrepreneurs through different perspectives in their ideational commitment and strategies of persuasion have been successful in making corporate social responsibility an international concern, which has led to a "cascading" of organizations and initiatives seen from the mid-1990s. At present we experience a clustering of actors around specific initiatives, a norm consolidation, which could be taken in support of a norm internalization of corporate social responsibility.


In this paper, we investigate the effect of dissipation on the entanglement dynamics of a three-level atom in V-configuration with a two-mode quantized field in a cavity optomechanics system. To achieve the purpose, we first deduce the effective Hamiltonian and by the dissipation terms, we evaluate the explicit time-dependent form of the state vector of the whole system by choosing special initial conditions for atom, field and the oscillatory mirror. Then, we obtain the time evolution of atomic linear entropy as a measure of entanglement. The results show that the dissipation reduces the entanglement between the atom and the subsystem of field and mirror.


The 'Goodwin pattern' -- an anti-clockwise rotation in real activity x wage share space recurring at intervals that correspond roughly to the duration of business cycles -- is an enduring feature of high-frequency dynamics in capitalist economies. It is well known that the centre or focus of this rotation shifts over time. More recently, however, the Goodwin pattern seems to have broken down, the wage share no longer increasing as the real economy improves over the course of short-term booms. In this paper, the breakdown of the Goodwin pattern is associated with the consolidation of an `incomes policy based on fear' that is part-and-parcel of neoliberalism. As a result of this in- comes policy based on fear, the institutional structure of the labour market disciplines labour at any rate of unemployment. This decouples wage-share dynamics from the state of the real economy, with the result that as recently witnessed, the wage share is rendered invariant to tightening of the labour market in the course of short-term cyclical booms.


Summary. The digestive fluid of the coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus Hampei, larvae contains aspartic proteases, which show greatest activity at pH 3,0 and a temperature of 40oC. By using isoelectric focusing gels, il was possible to observe two well-defined bands in the intestinal tract. The band of highest activity was found very close to the anodic side and showed a pl of 5,2. The addition of 0,1 uM of Pepstatin A caused a 70% inhibition of protease activity and a 90% inhibition when the concentration was 1 pM. The strong inhibition of the protease activity in the intestinal tract of H. Hampei after addition of Pepstatin A, allowed us to identify this protease as an asparlic-type protease. Other results permitted us to classify this protease as Cathespin D given that when BSA was used as a substrate the enzyme only showed 20% of the total activity with respect to hemoglobin. Incubation of the αAI inhibitor from Phaseolus vulgaris with increasing amounts of this intestinal enzyme from the coffee berry borer, showed that the biological activity of the inhibitor was significantly reduced due to the proteolytic activity. This work constitutes the first elcctrophoretic evidence of αAI proteolysis of P. vulgaris by endogenous proteases from H. Hampei.


Specialized clustered very large instruction word (VLIW) processors combined with effective compilation techniques enable aggressive exploitation of the high instruction-level parallelism inherent in many embedded media applications, while unlocking a variety of possible performance/cost tradeoffs. In this work, the authors propose a methodology to support early design space exploration of clustered VLIW datapaths, in the context of a specific target application. They argue that, due to the large size and complexity of the design space, the early design space exploration phase should consider only design space parameters that have a first-order impact on two key physical figures of merit: clock rate and power dissipation. These parameters were found to be: maximum cluster capacity, number of clusters, and bus (interconnect) capacity. Experimental validation of their design space exploration algorithm shows that a thorough exploration of the complex design space can be performed very efficiently in this abstract parameterized design space.


Anesthetized chronic caval dogs with ascites were given atrial natriuretic peptide (ANF) at 75 ng.kg-1.min-1 iv and were characterized as to natriuretic response [n = 21; urinary excretion rate of Na (UNaV): 28-362 mu eq/min] or lack of response (n = 14; UNaV: 0-10 mu eq/min). Sixteen normal dogs showed an increment in UNaV between 38 and 288 mu eq/min following the same dose of ANF. Both caval "responders" and "nonresponders" were equivalent with regard to pre- and post-ANF hemodynamics and renal function. When various diuretic agents (glucagon, acetazolamide, furosemide, thiazide, amiloride) were administered, equivalent natriuretic responses were obtained between both groups of caval dogs and the controls. An acute saline load (7% body wt), however, produced a greater natriuresis in controls than in caval dogs, but in this latter group the response was similar in responders and nonresponders. When six caval dogs each were initially pretreated with either amiloride or ANF, and then treated with a second agent, an additive natriuretic effect was obtained. These results suggest that tubular resistance to diuretics in caval dogs is unique to ANF, and this peptide appears to act at an additional Na transport site separate from amiloride-inhibitable channels.


Twelve genotypes of rice collected from the National Cereals Research Institute (NCRI), Badeggi, Bida, Niger State, Nigeria were evaluated to estimate the magnitude of genetic variability and relationship of some agronomic traits of rice and their contributions to yield. The results obtained showed a significant difference (p ≤ 0.05) among the genotypes in all the traits studied. Genotype 'WAB 35-1-FX2' produced a significantly higher grain yield of 3.40 t/ha compared with all the other genotypes in the two years combined. Genotypes 'WAB 33-25', 'WAB 56-1-FX2', 'WAB 56-39', 'WAB 56-125', 'ITA 150' and 'FAROX 16 (LC)' were the most stable grain yielding genotypes across the two years of the experiment. High broad sense heritability (h 2 bs ) was associated with grain yield (h 2 bs = 98.63%), number of spikelets/panicle (98.78%), plant height (98.34%) for the first year planting, whereas in the second year planting, days to 50% flowering (96.72%), days to maturity (94.14%) and grain yield (83.33%) were among the traits that showed high broad sense heritability. The two years combined correlation analysis showed that grain yield correlated significantly and positively with number of spikelets/panicle (r = 0.2358*), number of panicles/m 2 (r = 0.1895*), number of fertile spikelets/panicle (r = 0.1672*) and 1,000 grain weight (r = 0.1247*), indicating that these traits can be phenotypic basis for improving grain yield of rice. Conversely, grain yield exhibited negative correlation with days to 50% flowering (-0.3009) and days to maturity (-0.2650), though not significant. This suggests that rice grain yield can be improved by selecting early flowering and maturing genotypes especially under heat and drought prone conditions.


This paper proposes a practical technique for fast animation of materials such as viscoelastic fluids. A fast animation of such materials is desperately desirable especially for real-time applications such as games. We compute the behavior of viscoelastic fluids approximately instead of the exact simulation by combining two well-established approaches, Smoothed- Particle Hydrodynamics and Shape Matching. This enables fast and stable computations. A combination is done by a simple linear interpolation of velocities. A variety of materials between a fluid and an elastic solid can be represented by changing only a parameter of linear interpolation. We also propose how to bring our approximate method closer to the actual motions of viscoelastic fluids including merging or splitting of objects. We demonstrate a high-speed performance of our method with presenting several interesting results.


Objectives: A large nuchal translucency thickness is associated with chromosomal abnormalities as well as fetal heart malformations and entails referral for further investigations. An association has previously been observed between nuchal translucency thickness and fetal gender. Our aim was to evaluate the gender difference in screen-positive rate using the nuchal translucency 95th percentile as cut-off. Methods: We analyzed data from 7600 women with a normal singleton live birth outcome from The Copenhagen First Trimester Study. A total of 3812 fetuses were male (50.2%). Nuchal translucency measurements were converted to multiples of the median (MoMNT) to correct for the effect of crown–rump length using a previously reported linear regression analysis. Results: The median MoMNT in the total population was 1.03, and larger in male fetuses (1.04 MoM) compared to female fetuses (1.02 MoM), (P < 0.001). Some 49.8% of fetuses with a MoMNT below the 95th percentile were male, compared to 57.3% in the 95–99th percentile group and 58.7% in > 99th percentile group (P = 0.012). The proportion of women with a MoMNT above the 95th percentile was 35% higher in women with male fetuses (5.8%) compared to women with female fetuses (4.3%) (P = 0.003). Conclusions: MoMNT is correlated to fetal gender. Women with male fetuses have a 35% increased nuchal translucency screenpositive rate (5.8%) compared to women with female fetuses (4.3%). This difference in performance may influence the detection rate of Down Syndrome and of heart malformations, and result in different screening performances in the two sexes. However, further studies are required to ascertain whether the difference is of such quantitative significance that it warrants the use of gender-specific cut-offs in nuchal translucency screening.


Fine-scale biomass maps offer forest managers the prospect of more detailed and locally accurate information for measuring, reporting and verification activities in contexts, such as sustainable forest management, carbon stock assessments and ecological studies of forest growth and change. In this study, we apply a locally validated method for estimating aboveground woody biomass (AGWB) from Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array-type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) data to produce an AGWB map for the lowland pine savannas of Belize at a spatial resolution of 100 m. Over 90% of these woodlands are predicted to have an AGWB below 60 tha−1, with the average woody biomass of these savannas estimated at 23.5 tha−1. By overlaying these spatial estimates upon previous thematic mapping of national land cover, we derive representative average biomass values of ~32 tha−1 and ~18 tha−1 for the previously qualitative classes of "denser" and "less dense" tree savannas. The predicted average biomass, from the mapping for savannas woodlands occurring within two of Belize's larger protected areas, agree closely with previous biomass estimates for these areas based on ground surveys and forest inventories (error ≤20%). However, biomass estimates derived for these protected areas from two biomass maps produced at coarser resolutions (500 m and 1000 m) from global datasets overestimated biomass (errors ≥275% in each dataset). The finer scale biomass mapping of both protected and unprotected areas provides evidence to suggest that protection has a positive effect upon woody biomass, with the mean AGWB higher in areas protected and managed for biodiversity (protected and passively managed (PRPM), 29.5 tha−1) compared to unprotected areas (UPR, 23.29 tha−1). These findings suggest that where sufficient ground data exists to build a reliable local relationship to radar backscatter, the more detailed biomass mapping that can be produced from ALOS and similar satellite data at resolutions of ~100 m provides more accurate and spatially detailed information that is more appropriate for supporting the management of forested areas of ~10,000 ha than biomass maps that can be produced from lower resolution, but freely available global data sets.


Previous scholarship has found that African American adolescent girls and young women experience isolation, exclusion in the classroom and are assumed to be ???deviant??? in some research. Such research on Black girls does not include a Black cultural perspective. Nevertheless, Black young women develop methods of resilience throughout their girlhood to overcome these challenges often using these methods into adulthood. Through semistructured interviews and participant observation of four African American teenagers, this qualitative study investigated participants??? lives in an urban community center (???Bridges???) on the East Coast of the United States. Employing the use of grounded theory, the study found four themes. The first theme was that education was important and central to all participants. The young women found teachers??? accessibility, expectations, and curricula to
influence their experiences in the classroom. An appreciation of gender-specific programming was the second theme. The programming helped develop self esteem, positive relationships, and community involvement. A key to this programming was the racial makeup of staff at Bridges, in which Black women were the majority. Third, all participants discussed sexual harassment in their schools, neighborhoods and communities, and emphasized the importance of educating younger peers about topics important in their community including sexual harassment. Finally, all four participants were applying to and getting accepted by colleges. Implications of these themes for the lives of young African American girls are discussed.


Introduction and Objectives: Human movement analysis may be considered an essential tool in clinical and research biomechanics1,2. A number of commercially available systems allow the accurate and quantitative description of a participant's gait3. However, the use of these systems generally limits the user to predefined models or requires users to have significant technical expertise for creating bespoke models. Further, while it is possible to manipulate certain aspects of the established motion analysis process, current platforms do not allow complete customisation. The aim of this investigation was to build a customisable, bespoke biomechanical model (LJC) using an object-oriented application development package with integrated Lua based programmatic scriting modules; D-flow (Motek Medical, The Netherlands). The components of the model include a marker set, a method of calibrating a participant and calculation of kinematics. Methods: A bespoke cluster marker set with strategically placed anatomical markers was implemented. Marker trajectory data was captured, labelled and streamed into D-Flow using Vicon hardware and acquisition software (Vicon Motion Systems, Oxford, UK). A static calibration method was devised whereby the offsets of the calibration markers from the clusters are calculated for each segment. The Winter method4 was used to reconstruct calibration markers during dynamic trials and the Grood and Suntay5 method was used to calculate kinematics. This was implemented in D-Flow using bespoke scripting modules written in Lua programming code. Pilot testing against Plug in Gait (PIG; Vicon Motion Systems, Oxford, UK) was completed with one typically developing adult participant. Results: Flexion angles of the hip, knee and ankle were examined during normal treadmill walking (figure 1). Results demonstrated similarities in trace and range of motion (ROM), however, for all joint angles there was a consistent offset of absolute angle. When the mean difference between datasets was added to PIG data, there was much stronger agreement. Conclusion: Initially, results do not indicate good agreement between PIG and LJC. However, the offset between data sets appears to be consistent across all joints. It may be that inaccurate PIG marker placement contributed to errors in PIG data. Tibial and femoral wands were not used which could contribute to inaccuracies. Further, PIG ankle data suggests that no dorsiflexion occurs throughout the cycle. This is highly unlikely for a typical adult which suggests that there may be some error in PIG data. Work is ongoing to determine the source of the errors. The development of a bespoke biomechanical model allows complete customisation. The model can be altered to allow a choice of marker set or calibration methods. The possibility also exists to build specific functionalities for specific users, providing an advantage over commercially available models.


This work presents a solution for video game scene art stylization in video game engine Unity. The example-based stylization implements the StyleBlit algorithm and is able to provide results for an arbitrary art style. A plugin providing simple integration of StyleBlit method is described and evaluated.


Tourism in the wine region of Central Serbia has been gaining more and more affirmation in recent years. This wine destination offers to tourists a rich wine culture and recreation. Also, as a special supplement to wine tourism, ecotourism is especially promoted, in combination with quality wines with geographical origin. The basic analysis of this study is to identify potential locations for ecotourism activities in the wine region of Central Serbia based on physical-geographical elements (topography, altitude, slope, land use / coverage, diversity, distance from rivers) and socio-economic data (proximity to tourist attractions, distance from major roads and places). The integration of the Geographic Information System (GIS) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) greatly facilitates the decision-making process in the assessment of ecotourism activities. As a result of this paper, a map of benefits for the development of ecotourism potentials was highlighted. Very high potential is shown by forest areas that can play a key role in tourism but are not fully used. This analysis helps in two ways: the promotion of ecotourism and viticultural destinations. In particular, in the assessment and implementation for local communities to identify tourism as an opportunity for economic development.


The automated warehouse considered here consists of a number of rack locations with three cranes, a narrow aisle shuttle, and several buffer stations with the roller. Based on analyzing of the behaviors of the active resources in the system, a modular and computerized model is presented via a colored timed Petri net approach, in which places are multicolored to simplify model and characterize control flow of the resources, and token colors are defined as the routes of storage/retrieval operations. In addition, an approach for realization of model via visual C++ is briefly given. These facts allow us to render an emulate system to simulate a discrete control application for online monitoring, dynamic dispatching control and off-line revising scheduler policies.


Traffic congestion has become inevitably exuberant at the edge nodes of metro- and/or wide-area networks due to the triple play transports of voice, data and video information globally supported on the bricolage of modern Internet. Commensurately, the local exchange carriers improvise necessary infrastructure at the physical-layer level across the entire turf of the service area. Pertinent to this context, the scope of this study is to evaluate the conjectural impact on trunk terminations (and related facility) that decide the forecasts on network access line (NAL) requirements at the traditional circuit-switches (of T1hierarchy) located in the premises of a central office (CO) where the changing trends in traffic patterns of telecommunication transports are encountered. For optimal engineering designs of interoffice facility, the dynamics of such NAL requirements is modeled in terms of traffic profiles measured in terms of centum-call-second metric at CO terminations.


Abstract
This paper discusses the effect of micro-fabrics on uniaxial strength of weathered volcanic rocks from Tawau, Sabah. Volcanic rocks consist of basalt and andesite, aged from Pliocene to Quaternary. Weathered rock samples with grade range from slightly weathered (II) to completely weathered (VI) were collected from the road-cut slopes. Micro-fabric analysis was performed using polarizing microscope and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) techniques. Uniaxial strength analysis involved Point Load Test index (PLT) and Unconfined Compression Strength (UCS) test. The petrography analysis of basalt showed the domination of plagioclase with existence of orthoclase and pyroxene in aphanite texture. Meanwhile andesite consists of plagioclase, feldspar and amphibole in porphyritic matrix. Basalt samples with weathering grade from II to V showed the alteration of primary minerals from 12% to 55% and Imp (micro-petrography index) value ranging from 8.8 to < 0.2. Meanwhile andesite showed alteration of primary minerals ranging from 15% to 60% with Imp value of 4.9 to < 0.4. Andesite contains 16.8% stable minerals of quartz and feldspar phenocrysts that remain intact throughout the weathering process. Uniaxial strength results indicated that andesite exhibited a higher strength with value from 181.2 to 87.7 MPa while basalt showed 127.2 to 35 MPa. The porosity of andesite with Grade II to V was 4.1% to 49.5% whereas basalt ranged from2.5% to 47.8%. The uniaxial strength of Grade V showed basalt is slightly higher than andesite with 0.3 MPa and 0.2 MPa respectively. This is due to the presence of more clay minerals in basaltic soil (75.1%) than in andesite soil (65.2%). This study showed that the weathering process is able to alter the microfabric characteristics of rocks which contributes to the decrement of the strength of volcanic rocks.


Abstract Impinging jets are known as a method of achieving high convective heat transfer coefficients. One potential application of impinging jet heat transfer is the air jet cooling of a grinding process. A grinding process generates heat that must be dissipated to avoid thermal damage. To date, this has been achieved using flood cooling with a traditional coolant such as an oil and water mixture; however, using a jet of air in its place has obvious environmental and economic benefits. For a range of grinding test configurations, results are presented of the convective heat transfer from the workpiece, along the notional plane of cut, and of the air flow velocity in a two-dimensional plane perpendicular to the workpiece. It has been shown that a boundary layer that develops around the rotating grinding wheel has the effect of displacing a peak in the distribution of the local heat transfer coefficient from the notional arc of cut. To effectively cool the grinding zone, therefore, it is necessary to penetrate this boundary layer and this can only be achieved when the jet velocity is substantially greater than the tangential velocity of the wheel.


In order to study the working performance of straw baler, this experiment adopts the self-developed test-bed of straw compression and bale. The unit power consumption, piston pressure, connecting rod pull pressure and bale density are obtained through survey and calculation. Then it analysis the influence of the different compression speed and different feeding amounts on machine performance and the components in the constant condition of factors such as straw moisture content. The results show that the best working performance of straw baler occurs when feeding amount is 1.0 kg/s and compression speed is 80 times/min. And the change of compression speed and feeding amount has little effect on bale density.


Research project in Social work funded during 2013 – 2015 by Swedish Armed Forces and Kristianstad University following 30 families of Swedish soldiers and officers participating in a contingent in the northern Afghanistan. This action research study explores the solutions narrated by soldiers, families and parents/relatives in connection with deployment to and readiness to participate in world wide peacekeeping operations. The study design is based on following a contingent in the situation prior to, during and after deployment. The design is open. Data from persons who have participated in other contingents are also collected. Sampling uses a mixed model, which involves interviews, participation in meetings and other actions. Soldiers and soldier's relatives have been and are invited to participate in dialogical interviews, re-narrating and co-creating narratives about their experiences so far and orientation in how to go on. So far, 120 persons have been interviewed including 15 children. The analysis of the data is in its preliminary stages. Further inquiry needs to be done to reveal in more details how social support and the emergent strategies of the families and of the individual family members align themselves in face of the presence of deployment. More exploration is especially needed with regards to the voice of the children.


Expression of the Kdp system sensitizes cells to methylglyoxal (MG) whether this electrophile is added externally or is synthesized endogenously. The basis of this enhanced sensitivity is the maintenance of a higher cytoplasmic pH (pHi) in cells expressing Kdp. In such cells, MG elicits rapid cytoplasmic acidification via KefB and KefC, but the steady-state pHi attained is still too high to confer protection Lowering pHi further by incubation with acetate increases the sensitivity of cells to MG.


Magneto-elastic bilayers (BLs), consisting of a magnetostrictive layer and a non-magnetic counter layer, show highest sensitivity with respect to bending. This paper describes a biomedical application in the field of sleep apnea screening. A multi-parametric detector fixed at the thorax contains two BLs. One BL yields a skin curvature sensor adjusting itself to curvature variations given by physiological activities. The second BL exhibits a free end thus working as a motion sensor. The two signals are fed into artificial neural networks for the detection of events like normal respiration and apneas, as well as body movements and position.


Many cities in the Asia-Pacific region serve as financial centres in their respective national jurisdictions or local areas. Noting that most were engaged in efforts to become premier international financial centres (IFCs) in competition with one another, the Korea National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (KOPEC) convened an international conference in Seoul, Korea in October 2007 to examine the prospects for success for seven such financial centres (Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Wellington), weigh the costs and benefits of such competition for local economies as well as the region as a whole, and derive implications for cooperation among the regional governments. The present volume consists of case studies and commentaries presented at the conference as well as the synthesis report, which draws conclusions from those papers and commentaries. One of those conclusions is that, given the power of scale economies as well as the lack of integration of the financial markets in the region, none of the regional financial centres, even Hong Kong, Singapore or Tokyo, considered alone represents a meaningful rival to London or New York, the two existing global financial centres. The synthesis report thus argues for regional cooperation to integrate all those financial centres into an Asia-Pacific IFC network. It further argues that the present global financial crisis presents a major opportunity for regional governments to create such an IFC network that will challenge London and New York in quality as well as quantity of international financial business while helping the latter two overcome the current global crisis. This would open the path towards a stable and resilient Asia-Pacific financial community, with the constituent regional economies no longer vulnerable to the problems of the so-called original sin and double mismatch.


Recent works in video prediction have mainly focused on passive forecasting and low-level action-conditional pre-diction, which sidesteps the learning of interaction between agents and objects. We introduce the task of semantic action-conditional video prediction, which uses semantic action labels to describe those interactions and can be regarded as an inverse problem of action recognition. The challenge of this new task primarily lies in how to effectively inform the model of semantic action information. Inspired by the idea of Mixture of Experts, we embody each abstract label by a structured combination of various visual concept learn-ers and propose a novel video prediction model, Modular Action Concept Network (MAC). Our method is evaluated on two newly designed synthetic datasets, CLEVR-Building- Blocks and Sapien-Kitchen, and one real-world dataset called Tower-Creation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAC can correctly condition on given instructions and generate corresponding future frames without need of bounding boxes. We further show that the trained model can make out-of-distribution generalization, be quickly adapted to new object categories and exploit its learnt features for object detection, showing the progression towards higher-level cognitive abilities. More visualizations can be found at http://www.pair.toronto.edu/mac/.


The importance to consider changes in surface albedo and go beyond simple carbon accounting when assessing climate change impacts of forestry and land use activities is increasingly recognized. However, representation of albedo changes in climate models is complex and highly parameterized, thereby limiting their applications in climate impact studies. The availability of simple yet reliable albedo models can enhance consideration of albedo changes in land use studies. We propose a set of simplified models for estimating surface albedo in a boreal forest. We process and harmonize datasets of remotely‐sensed albedo estimates, forest structure parameters, and meteorological records for different forest locations in Norway. By combining linear unmixing with nonlinear programming, we simultaneously produce albedo estimates at the same resolution of the land cover dataset (16 m, notably higher than satellite retrievals) and a variety of flexible models for albedo predictions. We test different combinations of functional forms, variables, and constraints, including variants specific for snow‐free conditions. We find that models capture the seasonal pattern of surface albedo and the interactive effect of forest structures and meteorological parameters, and many of them show good statistical scores. The cross‐validation exercise shows that the models derived from one area perform reasonably well when applied to other forested areas in Norway, regardless of the temporal and spatial scales. By incorporating changes in forest structure and climate conditions as explicit variables, these models are simple to be used in different applications aiming at estimating albedo changes from forest management and climate change.


This paper discusses economic impacts of climate policies under the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) on population, GDP and technology. The concepts and storylines on the SSPs have been discussed by the international communities on integrated assessment model (IAM) and impact, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV). This economic analysis, focusing on climate mitigation, is conducted by using an energy-economic model, DEARS (Dynamic Energy-economic Analysis model with multi-Regions and multi-Sectors) having economic and energy modules. We assume the climate policy cases as the CO2 emission pathways with the radiative forcings of 4.5, 3.7 and 3.0W/m2 in 2100. The results reveal that the industrial structure changes from energy-intensive to service sectors in all the cases. To compare the results of SSP4 (inequality world) to those of SSP5 (conventional development), the adverse economic impacts in SSP4 with the high prices of fossil fuels are relatively small. On the other hand, the adverse impacts in SSP5 with the low prices are high because the baseline CO2 emission levels are relatively high and the amounts of emission reductions in the policy cases are relatively large. These results are consistent with the SSPs storylines in which SSP4 and SSP5 have low and high challenges for climate mitigation, respectively.


This paper represents an attempt to estimate the level of vertical specialization in China's manufacturing industry using China's input-output tables (1995-2005) compiled by the OECD; describe the trends of evolution in the trade competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry using the 1995-2006 trade data of 24 Chinese industries; and examine the key factors affecting the trade competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry in accordance with the analytical framework of Hummels et al (2001). The estimation results indicate that i) the rapid increase in the vertical specialization levels of China's merchandise sectors (especially the high-tech manufacturing sector) has to some extent explained the explosive growth of China's exports (especially high-tech exports) in recent years; ii) there have been no substantive changes in China's comparative advantages. Such advantages are still attributed to the low-tech manufacturing sector. However, the comparative advantage and trade competitiveness of the high-tech manufacturing sector have been on the rise; iii) vertical specialization has signif icantly enhanced the trade competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry. Foreign market dependence, domestic intermediate input intensity and RD intensity have an obvious promoting effect on the trade competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry.


In this letter, an age of information (AoI)-aware transmission power and resource block (RB) allocation technique for vehicular communication networks is proposed. Due to the highly dynamic nature of vehicular networks, gaining a prior knowledge about the network dynamics, i.e., wireless channels and interference, in order to allocate resources, is challenging. Therefore, to effectively allocate power and RBs, the proposed approach allows the network to actively learn its dynamics by balancing a tradeoff between minimizing the probability that the vehicles ' AoI exceeds a predefined threshold and maximizing the knowledge about the network dynamics. In this regard, using a Gaussian process regression (GPR) approach, an online decentralized strategy is proposed to actively learn the network dynamics, estimate the vehicles ' future AoI, and proactively allocate resources. Simulation results show a significant improvement in terms of AoI violation probability, compared to several baselines, with a reduction of at least 50%.


ABSTRACT The study investigated, for fixed time artificially inseminated (AI) Menz ewes in field trials, the reproductive performance of prostaglandin-based treatments simultaneously to the standard 'P4+eCG' protocol. A total of 483 Menz ewes were assigned to either the 'P4+eCG' protocol, using progesterone impregnated intravaginal sponges in combination with equine chorionic gonadotropin (eCG) injection at sponge withdrawal, or the 'PGFs' treatment where sheep received a single injection of prostaglandin or 'PGF7' and 'PGF11' where ewes were synchronized with 2 injections of prostaglandin 7 or 11 days apart, respectively. AI was implemented with fresh semen at 55 ± 1 h after the end of the hormonal treatment. Conception rate (CR; 60.87 ± 4.2) was highest for PGF11 ewes (P < 0.05); PGFs ewes had the lowest CR (34.07 ± 4.1). Other factors did not affect variation in CR (P > 0.05). A higher proportion of ewes in the P4+eCG group yielded twins and triplets compared to the 3 prostaglandin-based protocols (P < 0.01). Nevertheless, a higher (P = 0.02) proportion (17.11 ± 4.3) of PGF11 ewes yielded twins by comparison to their PGF7 counterparts (2.50 ± 2.5). PGF-based protocol with 2 injections 11 days apart, preceded by a careful selection of non-pregnant ewes for cervical fixed-time AI, is a feasible reproductive management for sheep breeding programmes in Ethiopia.


The national trend to earlier retirement is surprising in light of conventional wisdom holding that older workers are healthy, satisfied and productive employees -sometimes even more so than their younger counterparts. This paper examines whether conventional wisdom is wrong by reviewing existing studies and noting some of their most important shortcomings. New empirical evidence is provided on the links between aging, job satisfaction, and job performance using data from a nationally representative survey of workers.


About the book: The Handbook to Literary Research is a practical guide for students embarking on postgraduate work in Literary Studies. It introduces and explains research techniques, methodologies and approaches to information resources, paying careful attention to the differences between countries and institutions, and providing a range of key examples.

This fully updated second edition is divided into five sections which cover:

Tools of the trade – a brand new chapter outlining how to make the most of literary resources;
Textual scholarship and book history – explains key concepts and variations in editing, publishing and bibliography;
Issues and approaches in literary research – presents a critical overview of theoretical approaches essential to literary studies;
The dissertation – demonstrates how to approach, plan and write this important research exercise;
Glossary – provides comprehensive explanations of key terms, and a checklist of resources.


A major hurdle in pharmaceutical formulation is water insolubility of most of drugs af fecting their stability and bioavailability. If the drug is also insoluble in organic medium, it is difficult to deliver it in a sufficiently bioavailable form and hence it is a great challenge to formulation researchers to overcome such difficulty. Although some approaches are available for enhancing the dissolution of poorly soluble drugs, there has been certain draw backs like use of organic solvents, low drug loading and large doses. However, a new solution to poorly water soluble drug candidates is now available, i.e. nanonisation that leads to much more soluble, more biologically available and safer dosage form of poorly soluble and poorly bioavailable drugs. Controlled release of these drugs is also possible by forming nanostructured matrices. In this article, a brief description of production methods of drug nanoparticles and commercialized methods are presented along with brief overview on second generation of drug nanocrystal (Smart crystal technology), controlled release of hydrophobic drugs and recent works thereof are also presented.


Objectives : To analyse fabrication of artificial tissues and organs for future transplants, to identify effectiveness of 3D bio printing in operating various medical issues and to resolve the patients-specific cancer or relevant diseases through proper therapy. Methods/Statistical Analysis : This report is also consisting of the debates from various authors will be helpful for making effective determination of all operations. However, this thematic analysis will be helpful in bringing a clear view over this bio-engineering technique. However, in the recent time, there have been influences of various techniques and methods for developing and restructuring the organ such as artificial leg, hand and several parts of body. Findings: As per analyzing the applied technique for detruding the t-test statistics on which it can be said that, the t value is 4.97, sig. 2 tailed is 0.001. Therefore, the p value is less than 0.05 which insist that, there is a significant mean difference between 3D bio printing and development in medical facilities. And One-way ANOVA: To analyze outcomes based on dependent variable and independent variable on which hypothesis has been addressed. Thus, as per the signification value which is 0.610 as more than p value (0.05)? Thus, it can be said that, there is no significant mean difference between 3D bio printing and development in medical facilities. Application/Improvements: The gathered data was analysed by implicating statistical tool which brings positive outcomes. Therefore, implication of this technique will be helpful in resolving medical issues.


Abstract Rigorous status estimates of populations of large carnivores are necessary to inform their management and help evaluate the effectiveness of conservation interventions. The African leopard Panthera pardus faces rising anthropogenic pressures across most of its contracting sub-Saharan range, but the scarcity of reliable population estimates means that management decisions often have to rely on expert opinion rather than being based on sound evidence. This is particularly true for Mozambique, where little is known about the ecology or conservation status of leopard populations as a result of prolonged armed conflict. We used camera trapping and spatially explicit capture–recapture models to provide a leopard density estimate in Xonghile Game Reserve in southern Mozambique, which is part of the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier conservation initiative. The estimated population density was 2.60 ± SE 0.96 leopards/100 km2. Our study provides a baseline leopard density for the region and the first empirical density estimate for southern Mozambique. Our results also suggest that current methods used to set trophy hunting quotas for leopards, both in Mozambique and elsewhere in Africa, may be leading to unsustainable quotas, which highlights the importance of robust empirical data in guiding conservation policy.


In wave propagation, the phenomenon of dispersion, whereby different frequencies travel at different velocities, can result in significant nonstationarities, i.e., time- and spatially-varying characteristics of the wave. This effect is particularly strong in shallow water sound propagation, due to the waveguide-like action of the ocean bottom and surface.These channel-induced nonstationarities can have a deleterious impact on automatic detection and classification in the absence of signal processing techniques that account for dispersive channel effects.We quantify the effects of dispersion on the spatial and temporal spreading of a propagating wave by considering local temporal, spatial and spectral moments of the modes of the wave. By local moments we mean, for example, the spread (standard deviation) of the wave in time at a particular location; or the average frequency of the wave at a particular time. We implement simple dispersion-based waveguide models of a shallow ocean channel and demonstrate by application to impulsive-source sonar data thatsimple channel models requiring little environmental information can be used to compensate for the effects of dispersion.


In this paper, we design a new iterative low-complexity algorithm for computing the Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT) of an N dimensional signal with a K-sparse WHT. We suppose that N is a power of two and K = O(Nα), scales sublinearly in N for some α ∈ (0, 1). Assuming a random support model for the nonzero transform-domain components, our algorithm reconstructs the WHT of the signal with a sample complexity O(K log2(N/K)) and a computational complexity O(K log2(K) log2(N/K)). Moreover, the algorithm succeeds with a high probability approaching 1 for large dimension N. Our approach is mainly based on the subsampling (aliasing) property of the WHT, where by a carefully designed subsampling of the time-domain signal, a suitable aliasing pattern is induced in the transform domain. We treat the resulting aliasing patterns as parity-check constraints and represent them by a bipartite graph. We analyze the properties of the resulting bipartite graphs and borrow ideas from codes defined over sparse bipartite graphs to formulate the recovery of the nonzero spectral values as a peeling decoding algorithm for a specific sparse-graph code transmitted over a binary erasure channel. This enables us to use tools from coding theory (belief-propagation analysis) to characterize the asymptotic performance of our algorithm in the very sparse (α ∈ (0, 1/3]) and the less sparse (α ∈ (1/3, 1)) regime. Comprehensive simulation results are provided to assess the empirical performance of the proposed algorithm.


Background: Brand strategy tends to become an important management issue. It is therefore interesting to reach a greater understanding about how companies work to make their existing brands stronger. The purpose of a brand is to influence the customers' view of the brand image. The literature is insufficient concerning how leaders handle the process of repositioning a brand, in order to change the brand image. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to, from a management perspective; describe how the process of repositioning a brand continues. The aim is also to describe which aspects within the brand that are changing. Also, our aim is to identify the underlying causes of repositioning a brand. The main focus of the thesis is, however, the first two research questions. Research method: We have conducted 16 personal interviews with representatives of Volvo, Indiska, Scan Foods, Bageri Skogaholm, Coop, Arla Foods, Carlsberg Sverige and Lindex. We also conducted interviews with the advertising agencies that the companies work with.Results: Repositioning a brand is a time-consuming process that involves the whole company. The process constitutes a certain pattern, formed as different steps. The process contains changes in the brand identity and/or changes in the communication. Generally, the process characterizes recruitment of new competence to handle brand issues.


To analyse a musical piece is to some extent a small research project on its own right. Computer aided methods can be very helpful for gathering analytical information about particular description levels of music like melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm / meter, form, etc. Whenever mathematical models are proposed for a family of music-theoretical structures or processes, it is interesting, on the one hand, for the theorist to test these models in computer aided experiments. On the other hand, the analyst compares the automatically generated information by such models with her / his concrete observations about the piece in question. The paradigmatic model proposed in this thesis for the identification of prominent melodic segments aims at contributing to the discourse between the theory and the analysis from a melodic point of view in a practical way. In the so-called similarity neighbourhood model, melodic segments have been defined as consisting of consecutive notes only. A translation invariant representation mechanism based on the interval differences between the consecutive notes have been adapted. To account for contour similarities only, rhythmic features of the melodic segments have been ignored. The similarity neighbourhood model detects the repetition of the melodic segments by following the similarity by proximity principle. The correlation coefficient has been incorporated for calculating the proximity between equal length melodic segments only. The correlation coefficient as a proximity measure accounts for the translations, inversions, small interval changes of the melodies as well as the rhythmic variations without being able to distinguish them, because the rhythmic features of the melodies are ignored. Repetitions of the same melodic segment influences the melodic structure of the given piece in a significant way. The similarity neighbourhood model evaluates the significance of a melodic segment depending on the number of paradigmatic repetitions of the melodic segment normalised by the length. This principle identifies longer melodic segments more significant than the short ones. Considering the consecutive notes only and calculating the proximity relations between equal length melodies reduced the melodic domain to be searched, and enabled the melodic analysis of a complete musical piece. Furthermore, the proximity relations between equal length melodies have been used within the model to reconstruct the similarities as well as the suband super-segment relations between different length melodies. The collection of the sub-segments constitute the whole content of a melodic segment. Similarly, a sub-segment is present in different super-segments. These two perspectives to the suband super-segment relations indicate the contribution of a melodic material into the melodic development of the given piece. In the similarity neighbourhood model, the melodic structure of a given piece has been considered to be the collection of the proximity relations between equal length melodies supported by the suband super-segment relationships. These relationships have been compiled in a so-called prominence profile for the given piece, indicating the distribution of the significant melodies in different lengths throughout the given piece. This approach was tested mainly on the Two-Voice Inventions of J. S. Bach. However, in order to evaluate the generalisibility of the model, a modern piece called Keren of Iannis Xenakis was also analysed. The tests on the Two Part Inventions revealed the consistency of the results obtained by this approach with the results of the traditional music theory. The results of Keren indicate a legitimate segmentation of the piece in music-theoretical terms. The aim of this research has not been to develop a topological model to explain the melodic features of a given piece. However, the terminology used within the model is inspired by topology. A theoretical investigation of the analysis results of the similarity neighbourhood


Choroidal or cutaneous metastasis of gastric cancer is rare. Gastrointestinal cancer was found in only 4% in patients with uveal metastasis. Choroidal metastasis from gastric cancer was reported in two cases in earlier literature. The frequency of gastric cancer as a primary lesion was 6% in cutaneous metastasis of men, and cutaneous metastasis occurs in 0.8% of all gastric cancers. We report a patient with gastric adenocarcinoma who presented with visual disorder in his left eye and skin pain on his head as his initial symptoms. These symptoms were diagnosed to be caused by choroidal and cutaneous metastasis of gastric adenocarcinoma. Two cycles of chemotherapy consisted of oral S-1 and intravenous cisplatin (SPIRITS regimen); this was markedly effective to reduce the primary gastric lesion and almost all the metastatic lesions.


"We This paper explores the phenomenon of singing alone by Korean young people in 'koin norae bang ,' a new type of karaoke that recently emerged in South Korea. Assuming that the popularity of the koin norae bang singing among these young people is deeply associated with the socioeconomic circumstances confronting Korean young people today, I investigate the meaning of this leisure practice for these young people as a reflection of their negotiations with the circumstances constraining their lives. I draw on contemporary youth research, which stresses the structural forces that influence the cultural lives of young people and notes specifically the impact of the changed structure of youth transitions on their leisure experiences. With the high rate of youth unemployment alongside the growth of the participation in higher education, Korean young people today are suffering from the exacerbated living conditions, and their leisure lives are becoming more impoverished. Thus I argue that the leisure form of koin norae bang represents the status of contemporary Korean young people as socially isolated and economically marginalized.


A new type of scintillation detector is being developed with standard microfabrication techniques. It consists of a dense array of scintillating waveguides obtained by coupling microfluidic channels filled with liquid scintillator to photodetectors. Easy manipulation of liquid scintillators inside microfluidic devices allow their flushing, renewal and exchange making the active medium intrinsically radiation hard. The detectors have been fabricated by photostructuration of a radiation hard epoxy resin (SU-8) deposited on silicon wafers and coupled to a multi-anode photomultiplier tube (MAPMT) to read out the scintillation light. They have been characterized by exciting the liquid scintillator in the 200 micrometers thick microchannels with electrons from a 90Sr yielding approximately 1 photoelectron per impinging Minimum Ionizing Particle (MIP). These promising results demonstrate the concept of microfluidic scintillating detection and are very encouraging for future developments.


Executive Summary Municipal solid waste (MSW) management remains a challenge in in Pekanbaru. To avoid the negative externalities associated with improper waste disposal, the development of waste-based power plant (or PLTSa), including through incineration technology, is increasingly viewed as an attractive option. This study estimated that electricity generation potential from MSW in Pekanbaru could reach 0.021 MW/ton MSW and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from incineration PLTSa is around 21.03¢ per kWh. Waste calorific value and feedstock supply are essential to maintain the cost competitiveness of incineration PLTSa in Pekanbaru. JEL


This article presents a numerical study of the stability of a hydraulic excavator during performing lifting operations. A planar dynamic model is developed with six degrees of freedom, which considers the base body elastic connection with the terrain, the front digging manipulator links, and the presence of the freely suspended payload. Differential equations describing the excavator dynamic behavior are obtained by using the Lagrange formalism. Numerical experiments are carried out to study the excavator dynamic stability under different operating conditions during the motion along a vertical straight-line trajectory. It is shown that the arising inertial loads during the movement of the links along the vertical trajectory, combined with the payload swinging and the motion of the base body, decreases the excavator stability. It was found that the excavator stability during following vertical straight-line trajectory decreases considerably in the lower part of the vertical trajectory. If the stability coefficient is close to 1, the payload swinging can cause the separation of a support from the terrain; nevertheless, the excavator stability can be restored. A method for tire stiffness and damping coefficients estimation is presented. The validation of the dynamical model is performed by the use of a small-scale elastically mounted manipulator.