This is a Bachelor Degree Project report based on the design of a plastic vending cup.The project is carried out in cooperation with the company Promens Lidkoping,manufacturer of a wide range of plastic products as food packaging, trays, pots, cups andsheets for the food industry. A vending cup is a product used to contain hot beverages which come from vendingcoffee machines. It is a product daily used in many different environments as hospitals,offices, libraries and common places, etc. Consequently it is aimed at a varied public. The redesign was focused mainly on the aesthetics aspect attempting to transmit aninnovative touch that would change the concept of today's simple vending cup in a waythat it attracts the customer's attention. The so called Mistral Vending Cup is a plastic cup which is out of the ordinary currentvending cup by means of a new bright colour, orange, and also its innovative shape, inthis field, constituted basically from organic lines and curve surfaces unlike the today'svending cups. The Mistral Vending cup introduces a great change, a new era in thehistory of the vending cups due to its organic shapes never seen in the market.


We present a novel method of constructing a Doppler resilient pulse train of Golay complementary waveforms, for which the range sidelobes of the pulse train ambiguity function vanish inside a desired Doppler interval. This is accomplished by coordinating the transmission of a Golay pair of phase coded waveforms in time according to the 1's and -1's in a biphase sequence. The magnitude of the range sidelobes of the pulse train ambiguity function is shown to be proportional to the magnitude spectrum of the biphase sequence. Range sidelobes inside a desired Doppler interval are suppressed by selecting a sequence whose spectrum has a high-order null at a Doppler frequency inside the desired interval. We show that the spectrum of the biphase sequence obtained by oversampling the length-2M Prouhet-Thue-Morse (PTM) sequence by a factor m has an Mthorder null at all rational Doppler shifts θ0 = 2πl/m, where l ≠ 0 and m ≠ 1 are co-prime integers. This spectrum also has an (M - 1)th-order null at zero Doppler and (M - h - 1)thorder nulls at all Doppler shifts θ0 = 2πl/(2hm), where l ≠ 0 and m ≠ 1 are again co-prime and 1 ≤ h ≤ M - 1.


Thomas Berry's "intimacy with the natural world" is not an alternative to the anthropocentric-biocentric dispute, which belong to the same rationality. The frontier story and environmentalism are both part of the same rationality because they ignore people. While anthropocentrism is focused on the utilization of natural resources, biocentrism is focused on nature's conservation. The frontier and environmental narrative provides the explicit genealogy of intimacy-alienation, which are always in counterpoint with each other. Further still, if intimacy means only "intimacy with the natural world", then it is a hypostatization of "wilderness" that indicates more alienation. Nevertheless, in my interpretation, intimacy has become inherently humanistic. Because intimacy and alienation represent the dialectical naturalization of humans and humanization of nature, they configure more an appositional polarity than an oppositional dualism. If intimacy is taken out from its biocentric encasement and moved to a humanistic perspective, then it seems to be a plausible normative concept. Since the evolution of humanism coincides with the three hermeneutical cycles (Renaissance humanism/frontier story: 1500--2000; Enlightenment humanism/Industrial Revolution: 1800--2000; Existentialism/Environmentalism: 1960--2000), I retain its major tenets, such as autonomy, moral choice, thinking, the search for meaning, and virtues. The critique on Western tradition should not be centered on being humanistic as in its distorted anthropocentric capitalist drive. Capitalism is oriented to satisfy itself rather than people's needs. Economy depends on politics, which depends on ethics. As such, they are oriented to care for human life in first place and subsequently to preserve and sustain the production and reproduction of all life. Hence, population growth and the development of human life is the only source of meaning. Rather than an obstacle, it should be the variable through which we should program any project. Malthusianism is axiologically eliminated from this analysis. Transformed urban, rural, and natural landscapes are "normative and moral landscapes" that ought to support life in general and humane life in particular. The ethics of liberation has life as guiding principle and opposes to alienation. Intimacy has finally acquired a new meaning as the liberation of the victim's oppression.


Public key cryptography is widely used to provide Internet security services. PKI is the infrastructure that supports public key cryptography and revocation of certificates implies one of its major costs. In this paper we propose a model to compare revocation policies and use it to compare the main revocation policies: OCSP and Overissued-CRL.


Educational experience, I suggest, depends on having embodied experience from which one can learn. What can one learn from virtual experience? One can acquire information online, but can one craft that personal practical knowledge that derives from being experienced? That ongoing project requires that information be worked through—idiosyncratically—incorporating the new into one's prior knowledge and emotional-intellectual gestalt, thereby cultivating the capacity for (situation-specific) judgment. Despite policymakers' insistence that technology structure almost every classroom experience, many educators appreciate that their subjective presence is prerequisite to social learning. These facts and convictions inform this brief commentary on "experience."


By exploring the Science Teacher program students' misconceptions, this study is aimed to eliminate their misconceptions about geometric optics with conceptual change texts. At the first stage, the data were obtained by applying a three-tiered multiple choice test containing 19 questions, improved for Agriculture Education, Faculty Science Teaching Department 90 sophomore students and a classic exam related to the subject in autumn season. To determine misconceptions concerning the geometric optics, randomly chosen 10 sophomore students were interviewed with 10 open-ended questions. Findings obtained from the test and interviews showed that students have misconceptions about "propagation of light", "reflection of light" and "refraction of light". At the second stage, the sample composed of 90 students was separated into two group as experimental group and control group. The conceptual change texts were prepared then to apply for instructional method in experimental group. By being parallel to each other conceptual change text method for experimental group and traditional lecturing method for control group were applied respectively. Later the test consisting 19 multiple choice test were applied as post-test in both experimental and control group. The data appearing coherent of 35 each of experimental and control group were taken into consideration. Reliability of the test that used as pre-test and post-tests were calculated by Cronbach-Alfa coefficient as 0.69 by using SPSS-11 for Windows. The study showed that the conceptual change texts are more effective than traditional method for instruction to eliminate students' misconceptions about geometric optics.


Analysis of drugs in hair differs from their analysis in other tissues due to the extended detection window, as well as the opportunity that segmental hair analysis offers for the detection of changes in drug intake over time. The antipsychotic drug chlorprothixene is widely used, but few reports exist on chlorprothixene concentrations in hair. In this study, we analyzed hair segments from 20 deceased psychiatric patients who had undergone chronic chlorprothixene treatment, and we report hair concentrations of chlorprothixene and its metabolite desmethylchlorprothixene. Three to six 1-cm long segments were analyzed per individual, corresponding to ~3-6 months of hair growth before death, depending on the length of the hair. We used a previously published and fully validated liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method for the hair analysis. The 10th-90th percentiles of chlorprothixene and desmethylchlorprothixene concentrations in all hair segments were 0.05-0.84 ng/mg and 0.06-0.89 ng/mg, respectively, with medians of 0.21 and 0.24 ng/mg, and means of 0.38 and 0.43 ng/mg. The estimated daily dosages ranged from 28 mg/day to 417 mg/day. We found a significant positive correlation between the concentration in hair and the estimated daily doses for both chlorprothixene (P = 0.0016, slope = 0.0044 [ng/mg hair]/[mg/day]) and the metabolite desmethylchlorprothixene (P = 0.0074). Concentrations generally decreased throughout the hair shaft from proximal to distal segments, with an average reduction in concentration from segment 1 to segment 3 of 24% for all cases, indicating that most of the individuals had been compliant with their treatment. We have provided some guidance regarding reference levels for chlorprothixene and desmethylchlorprothixene concentrations in hair from patients undergoing long-term chlorprothixene treatment.


Objectives COVID-19 has led to rapid changes in rehabilitation service provision for young people living with traumatic brain and/or spinal cord injury. The aim of this project was to understand the experiences of rehabilitation service providers during the acute response stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we aimed to identify innovative approaches to meeting the ongoing needs of young people with traumatic brain and/or spinal cord injury during this time. Setting This study was conducted at a research institute and involved remote interviews with key informants around Australia and internationally. Participants Key informants from 11 services supporting children and/or adolescents with traumatic brain injury and/or spinal cord injury were interviewed using a semistructured interview guide. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results Three key themes emerged: (1) recognising and responding to the experiences of families during the pandemic, (2) the impact of greater use of telehealth on care delivery, and (3) realising opportunities to enhance family-centred care. Conclusions These themes capture shifting perspectives and process changes relevant to longer term practice. Research findings suggest opportunities for future service development, enabling service delivery that is more family centred, flexible and efficient in meeting the needs of families. Understanding these experiences and the changed nature of service delivery provides important insights with implications for future service improvement.


One hour after administration of L-dopa (50 to 300 milligrams per kilogram), there is a marked disaggregation of brain polysomes in immature rats. Adult animals show a similar response, but require larger doses of the amino acid (500 milligrams per kilogram). Single doses of L-dopa significantly elevate amounts of tryptophan in the brain; hence their effect on polysomes does not result from the unavailability of this amino acid.


Honeybuzzard, one of the main characters of Angela Carter's début novel Shadow Dance (1966), has been described by one critic as playing like a big cat, tirelessly and cruelly; "anything and anyone is fair game" (Sage 11). Honeybuzzard has organised his life completely in accordance with the play impulse, and he is not interested in anything structured by rational behaviour, work or profit. He is engaged in a constant process of making the Pleasure Principle triumph over the Reality Principle as he acts according to his capricious desires, which will turn increasingly violent and destructive as the narrative spirals towards its transgressive dénouement.Honeybuzzard's violence can possibly be read as "a kind of (anti-)morality play which aims to undermine through exaggeration" (Gamble 54), but I think this reading does not fully acknowledge the subversive potential of his playful behaviour. In this paper, I propose to read Honeybuzzard's nihilist play through the prism of surrealism – a movement itself known for its proliferating playfulness as well as its self-professed subversive aims.


The understanding and assessment of environmental impact on heritage assets is of the highest importance for heritage preservation through well-organized maintenance based on proper decision-making. The effort towards development of protocol that would enable comparison of data on heritage assets in Europe and Mediterranean countries was done through EU Project European Cultural Heritage Identity Card. The special attention was paid to classification of environmental and man-induced risks to heritage. In the present paper the idea of EU CHIC is presented. Environmental risks are discussed in context of their influence on structure of heritage buildings that are exposed to sudden environmental impacts.


The effect of Eucalyptus globulus wood kraft pulping conditions on the chlorine dioxide consumption in elemental chlorine free bleaching of pulps was investigated. When the pulping is extended (kappa number decreases), the bleachability [as (OXE/ton)/kappa number] is reduced, suggesting that residual lignin and other oxidizable unsaturated structures in pulp become less reactive as their content in the pulp decreases. For the same unbleached pulp kappa number, the increase in active alkali and sulfidity used in pulping improves bleachability, whereas the pulping temperature (150-170°C) does not affect the bleaching response. The increase in liquor-to-wood ratio has a detrimental effect on the bleachability. No clear correlation could be established between unbleached pulp brightness and its bleaching response. Overall, the results obtained show a good correlation between the integral of the relative reaction rate constant (H factor) used in the pulping and pulp bleachability, with a low H factor being beneficial to the bleaching response of the pulp.


This research is to fabricate a Pb/WC-ZrO2 inert electrode used in zinc electrodeposition. First, the potential-pH diagram of Pb-H2O system was constructed and the thermodynamic stable region was calibrated in the diagram. On the basis, the co-deposition of Pb, WC and ZrO2 particles from fluorboric acid solutions was realized on the surface of Pb-4wt%Sb substrate. The results show that deposition amounts of ZrO2 and WC particles in the inert electrodes increase with increasing ZrO2 concentrations in the bath, WC particle is easier to deposit into the inert electrodes than ZrO2 particle. The distribution of WC and ZrO2 particles as the second phase within metal matrix Pb is very uniform. Compared with Pb-1wt%Ag alloy electrode, Pb/9.91wt%WC-3.62wt%ZrO2 inert electrode possesses better catalytic activity of oxygen evolution.


Amine-functionalized siloxane oligomers were synthesized and used successfully to prepare colloidal Au particles smaller than 1 nm. Using NMR to follow the interaction of Au(THT)Cl with the functionalized siloxane, it was determined that the amine ligands displaced the THT ligand effectively. By comparison with other functionalized siloxane oligomers/compound, parameters such as density of ligating groups, oligomer steric barrier and reduction rates were found to be essential for the formation and stability of subnanometer Au particles. Without further treatment, the formed Au particles were active catalysts for the reduction of p-nitrobenzaldehyde by triethylsilane, forming an imine as the major coupling product. Deposition of the Au colloids onto silica, followed by thermal treatment to remove the organic groups resulted in subnanometer Au on silica, indicating this to be a promising method of fabricating subnanometer supported Au catalyst.


I examine the properties of cross sectional estimates of multipliers, elasticities, or pass-throughs when the data is generated by a conventional multi-unit time series specification. A number of important biases plague estimates; the most relevant one occurs when the cross section is not dynamic homogenous. I suggest methods that can deal with this problem and show the magnitude of the biases cross sectional estimators display in an experimental setting. I contrast average time series and average cross sectional estimates of local fiscal multipliers for US states.


High-concurrency asynchronous training upon parameter server (PS) architecture and high-performance synchronous training upon all-reduce (AR) architecture are the most commonly deployed distributed training modes for recommendation models. Although synchronous AR training is designed to have higher training efficiency, asynchronous PS training would be a better choice for training speed when there are stragglers (slow workers) in the shared cluster, especially under limited computing resources. An ideal way to take full advantage of these two training modes is to switch between them upon the cluster status. However, switching training modes often requires tuning hyper-parameters, which is extremely time- and resource-consuming. We find two obstacles to a tuning-free approach: the different distribution of the gradient values and the stale gradients from the stragglers. This paper proposes Global Batch gradients Aggregation (GBA) over PS, which aggregates and applies gradients with the same global batch size as the synchronous training. A token-control process is implemented to assemble the gradients and decay the gradients with severe staleness. We provide the convergence analysis to reveal that GBA has comparable convergence properties with the synchronous training, and demonstrate the robustness of GBA the recommendation models against the gradient staleness. Experiments on three industrial-scale recommendation tasks show that GBA is an effective tuning-free approach for switching. Compared to the state-of-the-art derived asynchronous training, GBA achieves up to 0.2% improvement on the AUC metric, which is significant for the recommendation models. Meanwhile, under the strained hardware resource, GBA speeds up at least 2.4x compared to synchronous training.


Towards the end of their secondary education, students face significant pressures in their decision about their career plan. These pressures are internal and external, personal and social, individual and from the reference group. This paper aims at understanding the reasons driving engineering students' choices, their perceived needs and aspirations. Moreover, it discusses how, in that process, students are constrained by family and friends and are conditioned by factors such as their socioeconomic and cultural background, employability prospects and gender. The construction of a career map/plan and the reasons and motivations for the option of an engineering career are reviewed, based on the qualitative analysis of students' discourses. The data indicate the relevance of several criteria such as social status, intelligence, gender, competences, values and interests in the construction of career aspirations. All these levels are highly influenced by self-esteem, which is closely related to the social value of training options and career paths.


The blastoderm edge migrates by the active locomotion of a multilayer of epithelial cells, the so-called margin of overgrowth (MO), that uses the vitelline membrane as its substratum. The structural unity formed by the margin of overgrowth cells and their rapid migration suggest coordination of locomotion between individual cells. Using transmission electron microscopy of thin sections and freeze-fracture, we attempted to determine if the pattern of junctions of the migrating margin of overgrowth is related to the suggested cell--cell cooperation between individual cells in this region. In the leading edge there are large areas of closely apposed cell membranes. Incipient desmosomes and small gap junctions were observed. Tight junctions consisted of isolated strands or isolated networks of tight-junctional strands. In the proximal part of the margin of overgrowth the size of the gap junctions increased and the desmosomes were fully developed. Tight-junctional strands were either isolated or arranged into an isolated network. A broad belt of tight junctions was observed at the transition between margin of overgrowth and non-marginal cells. The distribution of the junctional elements in the MO suggests that junctions contribute to the maintenance of the structural and functional organization of the margin of overgrowth. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of the junctions might give information about the mechanism of locomotion of the margin of overgrowth.


Over the last 30 years declining rainfall and increased aquifer abstraction have heavily impacted water availability and ecosystems on the Gnangara Groundwater System (GGS). The mammal fauna of the area is considered to have been rich, with up to 28 terrestrial and 5 volant native species recorded since European settlement. This study investigated previous and current distribution of mammals on the GGS, and assessed potential impacts of predicted rainfall and groundwater declines on mammals. A general survey was conducted at 40 sites, and targeted trapping was undertaken for Hydromys chrysogaster and Isoodon obesulus fusciventer at wetlands. Nine native and seven introduced terrestrial mammal species were recorded during the general survey and capture rates were very low (1.05%). The most commonly captured native species was Tarsipes rostratus. There is evidence that only 11 (9 recorded and 2 considered to be extant) of the 28 historically recorded terrestrial native mammals still persist in the area. The species predicted to be most susceptible to rainfall and groundwater level declines include H. chrysogaster, I. obesulus fusciventer, and T. rostratus. Management and recovery actions required to protect mammals under predicted climatic changes include identification and maintenance of refugia and ecological linkages, supplementation of lakes, development of ecologically appropriate fire regimes, and control of predators.


Grown software systems often contain code that is not necessary anymore. Unnecessary code wastes resources during development and maintenance, for example, when preparing code for migration or certification. Running a profiler may reveal code that is not used in production, but it is often time-consuming to obtain representative data this way. We investigate to what extent a static analysis approach which is based on code stability and code centrality, is able to identify unnecessary code and whether its recommendations are relevant in practice. To study the feasibility and usefulness of our static approach, we conducted a study involving 14 open-source and closed-source software systems. As there is no perfect oracle for unnecessary code, we compared recommendations of our approach with historical cleanup actions, runtime usage data, and feedback from 25 developers of 5 software projects. Our study shows that recommendations generated from stability and centrality information point to unnecessary code. Our results suggest that static analysis can provide quick feedback on unnecessary code that is useful in practice.


Peripheral monocytes are short-lived and are replenished from hematopoietic stem cells whose proliferation is believed to be confined to the bone marrow. Human peripheral monocytes are assumed not to be able to proliferate. In this study we show that CD137 (ILA/4-1BB), a member of the tumor necrosis factor receptor family, induces a widespread and profound proliferation of human peripheral monocytes. Macrophage colony-stimulating factor and granulocytemacrophage colony-stimulating factor are essential, but not sufficient for proliferation. Additional soluble autocrine factors induced by CD137 are required. Induction of proliferation is mediated via reverse signaling through a CD137 ligand, expressed constitutively by peripheral monocytes. The ability of CD137 to induce proliferation in human peripheral monocytes is not shared by any other known molecule. r 1999 by The American Society of Hematology.


Oncology covers numerous different disciplines of interest to practising oncologists as well as those in other branches of medicine. For example, The Molecular Biology of Cancer will interest many "generalists," whereas Physics and Radiation Planning is probably of relevance only to those training in, or practising, radiation oncology. Many books contain sections that would be useful to the generalist and other sections which are of interest only to specialists. The division into the following groups is therefore somewhat arbitrary.

* Clinical Oncology. J G Rees. (£12.95.) Castle House Publications, 1989. ISBN 0-8194-0133-X.

** Treatment of Cancer. 2nd edn. Ed K Sikora, K Halnan. (pounds sterling99.50.) Chapman and Hall, 1990. ISBN 0-412-29400-1.

* Molecular Biology for Oncologists. Ed J Yarnold, M Stratton, T McMillan. (450 guilders.) Elsevier, 1993. ISBN 0-444-81507-4.

Clinical Oncology is a very easily readable general introduction to this subject. It would be just as useful to a newly qualified doctor as to the interested medical student. The style is concise and it clearly discusses many of the issues that clinicians find mystifying when first faced with certain types of cancer and …


OBJECTIVES
To determine whether the provision of appropriate medication and comprehensive information before the ragweed pollen season enables patients to manage their hay fever successfully, achieving satisfactory symptom control and quality of life, to examine patient characteristics that may predict successful symptom management and to learn which factors patients consider when making treatment choices.

DESIGN
Single-group prospective cohort management study.

SUBJECTS
Ninety adults sensitive to ragweed pollen recruited from those who had participated in previous clinical studies and from those who responded to advertisements in the local media.

INTERVENTION
Aqueous beclomethasone dipropionate nasal spray and comprehensive information about optimal therapy (starting before the ragweed pollen season and continued throughout at a dose of 400 micrograms/d) and how it may be used less intensively with an as-required regimen.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Symptom control, patient satisfaction, quality of life and medication use.

RESULTS
More than 80% of the patients reported very good symptom control and were very satisfied. In all, 62% chose to use less than the optimal daily dose. Patients who had less than optimal symptom control used significantly less of the nasal spray than those with very good control either because they wanted to keep medication use to a minimum or because they were unable to remember to take their medication. The only significant predictor of inadequate control was an acknowledged inability to remember to take medication. Symptoms and trust in the practitioner were the primary factors perceived by the patients to determine their treatment choices.

CONCLUSION
When provided with aqueous beclomethasone dipropionate nasal spray and comprehensive information on the drug and dosing, most patients are successful in managing their hay fever.


The objectives of the study were to present a new approach for nerve-sparing radical hysterectomy (NSRH) with the assistance of magnifying lenses and to describe the differences in autonomic nerve plexus trauma between NSRH type III and conventional radical hysterectomy (RH) types II and III with the aid of immunohistochemistry. Eighteen women with FIGO stage IB1–IB2 cervical cancer underwent loupes-assisted NSRH (n= 8), RH type II (n= 6), and RH type III (n= 4). Biopsies were taken intraoperatively from uterosacral ligament (USL) and cardinal ligament (CL), as well as from anterior vaginal wall (AVW) and posterior vaginal wall (PVW). Immunohistochemistry was approached with the use of S-100 protein, a general nerve marker. The percentage area of immunoreactivity (PAI) was used as an objective quantitative measure of nerve fibers within the ligaments. The PAI was greater in RH-III biopsies from both USL and CL (P< 0.001) when compared with RH-II and NSRH biopsies. For AVW and PVW, PAI differences were not statistically significant (AVW, P= 0.119; PVW, P= 0.067). Uterine-supporting ligaments represent a major pathway for autonomic nerves to the pelvic organs. As significantly more autonomic nerves are transected during the division of the uterine-supporting ligaments in RH type III, a more careful approach in the dissection of the ligaments through nerve-preserving techniques seems to be necessary in order to prevent iatrogenic intraoperative injury of the pelvic plexus and reduce or prevent postoperative complications.


Proceedings: AACR Annual Meeting 2014; April 5-9, 2014; San Diego, CA

Small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) accounts for approximately 15% of primary lung cancer and has the poorest outcome of all its histological types. One of the major reasons of extreme aggressiveness of SCLC is that it recurs shortly after initial therapy with multidrug resistance (MDR) phenotype. However, standard therapeutic strategy for relapsed-SCLC has not been established yet. As one of the targetable receptor tyrosine kinases, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) was reported to be a negative prognostic factor in extensive-disease SCLC (Micke et al. Int J Cancer. 2001;92:474-9). We found that HER2 was more frequently overexpressed in SCLC cell lines of Japanese origin (6/10) compared to those of Caucasian origin (0/3). We also detected HER2 expression in SCLC tissues in 7 out of 25 patients tested by our highly sensitive immunohistochemistry system. Moreover, we found that HER2 was upregulated when HER2-positive SCLC cells acquired MDR. Trastuzumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody against HER2, exerted differential levels of killing effect on HER2-positive parental and chemoresistant SCLC cells only when Fcγ receptor-positive natural killer (NK) cells coexisted. This result suggests that trastuzumab-induced SCLC cell-killing effect was caused mainly via antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) but not via direct inhibition of HER2 signal. Among these cell lines, etoposide-resistant SCLC cells were most susceptible to trastuzumab in vitro and in vivo, and the antitumor effects of trastuzumab were not only dependent on the amount of HER2 expression on SCLC cells. We focused on cell-cell contact between SCLC cells and NK cells to determine the molecule affecting trastuzumab-mediated ADCC other than HER2. We found that intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)-1 was abundantly expressed on etoposide-resistant SCLC cells, and trastuzumab-mediated ADCC was canceled in the presence of an ICAM-1 functional blocking antibody. These results indicate that ICAM-1 expression on SCLC cell surface is indispensable to augment trastuzumab-mediated ADCC. Thus, trastuzumab could overcome etoposide-resistance in SCLC. On the contrary, irinotecan-resistant SCLC cells were still refractory to trastuzumab. The reason for this was thought that they not only lacked ICAM-1 expression but also came to produce abundant vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Bevacizumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody against VEGF, treatment could significantly inhibit the in vivo growth of irinotecan-resistant xenografts through decreasing microvesseles in mice. These results suggest that bevacizumab-mediated antiangiogenesis is a promising therapeutic strategy to salvage irinotecan-resistance.

Collectively, targeting stepwise HER2 and VEGF could overcome MDR in SCLC and bring about a favorable outcome for patients with relapsed-SCLC.

Citation Format: Toshiyuki Minami, Takashi Kijima, Osamu Morimura, Yuhei Kinehara, Masayoshi Higashiguchi, Kotaro Miyake, Haruhiko Hirata, Yoshiko Takeuchi, Kiyoharu Fukushima, Yoshitomo Hayama, Koji Inoue, Izumi Nagatomo, Yoshito Takeda, Hiroshi Kida, Atsushi Kumanogoh. Targeting stepwise HER2 and VEGF can overcome multidrug resistance in small cell lung cancer. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2014 Apr 5-9; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2014;74(19 Suppl):Abstract nr 4506. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2014-4506


Courts have struggled toward a unified theory to explain when the trustee has exclusive jurisdiction to sue a third party for harms done to a bankrupt debtor, and when creditors have exclusive jurisdiction to sue the third party. Courts have proclaimed that when every creditor can sue the third party, then none of them can, and the right belongs solely to the trustee. Creditor rights are "generalized." If only a proper subset of creditors can sue the third party, then the trustee is not able to subrogate to the subset. Such creditors are "particularized." This paper proclaims the test a failure. It announces the result rather than producing it. There are no generalized creditor rights or particularized creditor rights. There are only creditor rights and causes of action that are property of the estate. As for creditor rights, the trustee is subrogated to fraudulent transfer avoidance rights under Bankruptcy Code § 544(b)(1). Otherwise, the trustee is not subrogated. "Piercing the corporate veil" is not a generalized creditor right and not a cause of action at all. It is the assertion that two persons are the same person. If the corporate veil can be pierced, property of the apparent third person is actually property of the bankruptcy estate. For this reason, the trustee has control and the creditors are kept at bay by bankruptcy's "automatic stay." The article defends the recent settlement with the Sackler family in the historic Purdue Pharmacy opioid bankruptcy as entirely within the province of the bankruptcy estate.


Advances in processor design, display technology, and lithium polymer batteries have led to a new generation of powerful, compact, and highly mobile devices. There is a range of different physical interfaces available, from the original Palm Pilots and Psion Organisers to the new generation of pocket PCs and personal digital assistants (PDA's). We focus on the stylus/touch-screen-based Compaq iPaq PDA. Combining a PDA with wireless communication technology has the potential for extending the application of computing in business. Many businesses already use handheld data recording devices. A drawback is the need to return the device to a computer to upload the information into the system, where it can be processed and made available to other applications. Using wireless devices this delay can be removed, providing a more accurate and up-to-date data repository. In order to see how a desktop to PDA migration might be carried out, a prototype interface to a mainstream accounting and stock control system was built to run on a Compaq iPaq 3850. Some of the problem areas of migrating server/desktop functionality to handheld devices, including wireless communication, device limitations, and security were demonstrated and explored with this interface. The informal feedback from the users will be fed into a redeveloped version of the system which will then be evaluated using a formal experiment The main lesson learnt was that providing desktop/server functionality on a mobile device requires more than copying a system's existing functionality and shrinking the interface to fit on a smaller screen. User feedback from a prototype system supported the idea that applications benefit from a redesign process when being ported to a mobile environment.


Local governments are increasingly taking the initiative in environmental governance. But can they make any difference in addressing current environmental challenges, which are becoming more and more global in scope? This PhD thesis explores and analyses the outcomes of proactive initiatives in the field of building energy efficiency, and the governance approaches taken. It addresses outcomes both in the socio-technical system that constitutes the building, and in the institutional sphere. The overarching objective is to contribute to knowledge on the role of local initiatives in addressing current environmental challenges.

The thesis focuses on a number of governance initiatives in the form of policies or strategic approaches in urban development projects in Sweden, and one in Denmark. The primary focus has been on proactive initiatives for enhancing the energy efficiency of new buildings. Through a case study approach, the research is based on a combination of methods for data collection, including document studies, interviews and participant observation to analyse the governance approaches in local governance initiatives and the different types of outcomes.

A key finding is that the local governance initiatives investigated have played a role in environmental governance through outcomes across socio-technical systems and institutional spheres. The combination of different modes of governing, including authoritative and enabling modes of governing as well as governing by provision, was important for fostering the construction of more energy efficient buildings. Another important element in these governing processes was the active governing throughout the development process. In terms of institutional change, it was shown that relation-building and knowledge advancement were fostered successfully, while it was more difficult to actually mobilise for change. The research also showed how local initiatives are shaped by institutions at higher tiers of government and that the local initiatives also contributed to shaping institutions at the national level. Based on this, the thesis argues for national policy frameworks, which better capture the benefits of local frontrunners.


News media organizations have been experimenting with immersive journalism formats in recent years. The search for new ways to tell stories is driven by technology and has given rise to new –and not so new– forms of expression. The initial enthusiasm has dissipated over the years, so the uncertainty of the future of immersive journalism justifies the study of the most potential ways of using this technology in journalism. This research was carried out in Finland and Spain, and it is based on a textual narrative analysis and a reception study comparing the online article and 360º video versions of the report Fukushima: Contaminated Lives from El país. The results identify the affordances of both formats and confirm that immersive journalism has the capacity to generate a greater emotional effect based on a greater perception of presence, realism and involvement, also having a positive impact on increasing interest and changing opinions on related topics. The narration of online article seems to work better only if there is large amount of information that has to be understood and contextualized. However, authors claim that, instead of an essential break, there are similarities between both formats, which are situated on the same continuum of emotionality and rationality. These findings also indicate that immersive storytelling can be an important part of the emotional or affective turn in contemporary journalism. The sensation of presence and empathy towards distant and complex realities emerge as the main distinguishing values of the kind of immersive journalism that Fukushima: Contaminated lives represents.


The authors review psychology's historical, competing perspectives on human motivation and propose a new comprehensive theory. The new theory is based on evolutionary principles as proposed by C. Darwin (1859) and modified by W. D. Hamilton (1964, 1996), R. L. Trivers (1971, 1972), and R. Dawkins (1989). The theory unifies biological, behavioral, and cognitive approaches to motivation. The theory is neuropsychological and addresses conscious and nonconscious processes that underlie motivation, emotion, and self-control. The theory predicts a hierarchical structure of motives that are measurable as individual differences in human behavior. These motives are related to social problem domains (D. B. Bugental, 2000; D. T. Kenrick, N. P. Li, & J. Butner, 2003), and each is hypothesized to solve a particular problem of human inclusive fitness.


Marine scientists incorporate a wide array of observations and models to understand the oceans, their dynamics, and the life they support. The development of new sensing technologies such as satellites, gliders, and robotic floats, as well as increasing public interest and funding for projects to investigate the ocean's role in climate change, has transformed marine sciences into "big data" sciences. But the observational scientist still faces numerous obstacles in measuring ocean characteristics such as sea surface height, currents, temperature, salinity, water color, ocean chemistry, and undersea life: electromagnetic radiation does not readily penetrate its waters, which makes it harder to conduct observations and communicate with underwater instruments, and because oceans are full of life, so called "biofouling" is a challenge to observing, especially in the sun-lit layers near the surface. Nevertheless, new technologies such as robotic vehicles and new sensors are enabling observations throughout the ocean water column. These technologies, coupled with rapidly advancing ocean models, are revolutionizing our understanding of the marine biosphere. \[Image: UCSB undergraduates Andie Rupprecht and Sean Jawetz recover a robotic stand-up paddle board used for measuring ocean currents. Photograph by Libe Washburn.\]

Video available: https://vimeo.com/527397347


Coupled transcription and translation of plasmid-ColE1 DNA in vitro under optimized conditions gave one major product. This has an apparent weight of 71 000, the same N-terminal sequence as colicin E1 and was not digested by deoxyribonuclease or ribonuclease. It differed from colicin E1 in its C-terminal residue and amino acid composition. It had lower specific activities in cell killing and in the fluorescence-enhancement in vitro assay of Phillips & Cramer [(1973) Biochemistry 12, 1170--1176] than did colicin E1, but both proteins bound in equimolar amounts to colicin-sensitive and colicin-resistant cells. The product of plasmid-ColE1-DNA-directed protein synthesis was converted into a protein indistinguishable in structure and activity from colicin E1 by incubation in the reaction mixture, after deoxyribonuclease and ribonuclease treatment, for a further 20 h at 37 degrees C. A protein with similar properties to the 71 000-dalton product in vitro was identified in extracts of a ColE1+ colicin-tolerant mutant of Escherichia coli K12. It is concluded that this protein probably represents a pre-form of colicin E1 which may be involved in colicin-E1 secretion or cellular colicin-E1 immunity in colicin-E-producing cells, or both of these processes.


The present study aims to investigate the temperature field by using the different heat fluxes, such as rectangle heat flux, triangular heat flux, inclined triangular heat flux, circular heat flux. To obtain a reliable figure of temperature field induced by grinding, temperature-dependent properties of work materials were taken into account and a convection model with an effective cooling factor was introduced. A thorough analysis using the finite element method showed that predictions were very agreed with the results of the experiment. Finally, the present paper showed that the contact angle must be taken into account in future models.


The question of "which method" is fundamental to the utility of educational policy research within postcolonial contexts such as the Anglophone Caribbean.  Although qualitative approaches are more sensitive to these unique contexts, the heterogeneity of populations and spaces are a significant threat to the generalizability and transferability of findings.  Therefore, to generate comprehensive and contextualized theory, Caribbean policy researchers must adopt a multiplist philosophy which explicitly privileges multiple and mixed methods.  This paper first describes some critical issues related to education policy research in the Anglophone Caribbean and global South.  It then illustrates the value of promoting epistemological diversity in this context by examining three mixed methods research (MMR) policy studies conducted in Trinidad and Tobago.  All three illustrative studies were guided by paradigm stances favouring the mixing of methods.  The findings suggest that MMR does offer a degree of flexibility that might capture heterogeneity and lack of local knowledge. Integrated findings were divergent and comprehensive, but there was limited instrumental use by policymakers.  Additionally, indigenous epistemologies were not adopted. The future challenge is for Caribbean policy researchers to make better use of MMR designs that incorporate indigenous epistemologies and employ strategies to enhance the political legitimation of findings.


Climate prediction is important in the overall development.NTTProvinceis considered as the area to which climate data and information are very critical. This region needs to optimize its programs to enhance climate forecast application for better regional development. The available climate information is not adequately used for early warning information for agricultural planning and development. The climate equipment and tools are owned and maintained by several institutions with the data used for their own purposes. This paper suggests that the quality of climate information is necessary to improve, so are the climate equipment and tools. The establishment of Climate Forum is required to revitalize related institutions dealing with climate information and to integrate various related resources for development.


Purpose: Tasquinimod (Active Biotech) is an oral immunomodulatory, anti-angiogenic, and anti-metastatic agent that delayed metastatic disease progression in a randomized placebo-controlled phase II trial in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). Here, we report long-term survival with biomarker correlates from this trial. Experimental Design: Two hundred and one (134 tasquinimod and 67 placebo) men with mCRPC were evaluated. Forty-one men randomized to placebo crossed over to tasquinimod. Survival data were collected with a median follow-up time of 37 months. Exploratory biomarker studies at baseline and over time were collected to evaluate potential mechanism-based correlates with tasquinimod efficacy including progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Results: With 111 mortality events, median OS was 33.4 months for tasquinimod versus 30.4 months for placebo overall, and 34.2 versus 27.1 months in men with bone metastases (n = 136), respectively. Multivariable analysis demonstrated an adjusted HR of 0.52 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.35–0.78; P = 0.001] for PFS and 0.64 (95% CI, 0.42–0.97; P = 0.034) for OS, favoring tasquinimod. Time-to-symptomatic progression was improved with tasquinimod (P = 0.039, HR = 0.42). Toxicities tended to be mild in nature and improved over time. Biomarker analyses suggested a favorable impact on bone alkaline phosphatase and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) over time and a transient induction of inflammatory biomarkers, VEGF-A, and thrombospondin-1 levels with tasquinimod. Baseline levels of thrombospondin-1 less than the median were predictive of treatment benefit. Conclusions: The survival observed in this trial of men with minimally symptomatic mCRPC suggests that the prolongation in PFS with tasquinimod may lead to a survival advantage in this setting, particularly among men with skeletal metastases, and has a favorable risk:benefit ratio. Clin Cancer Res; 19(24); 6891–901. ©2013 AACR.


The history of Western music, historically, has been changing for a long time; from one period to other period until the present day. In music, the chaging automatically changes its forms, styles, characteristics, harmony, and particularly its aesthetics values. Then, the changing triggers development. Dominantly the development is inluenced by two dominant aspects, i.e. internal aspect and external aspect. The music history said that the period of Middle Ages was influenced by political religion which was placed under Chatolic church authorization. Renaisance period was influenced by spirit of individualism and humanism, and also enthusiasm of anthropocentrism. The Barock era was shadowed by the political changing in Western Europe. The Classic dan Romantic period was shaded by the passion of territorial expansion and nationalism that was marked by Franch Revolution. After World War I and II the social changes were determined by the development of technology. It becomes significant factor. In musicology context, the development of technology has created several new music instruments. The relationship between internal and external aspect occurs correlative and the aesthetics values in music has been influenced by several aspects above. The existence of music is not caused by itself, but it influenced by another aspects.


In this work, we study how to efficiently obtain perfect samples from a discrete distribution $\mathcal{D}$ given access only to pairwise comparisons of elements of its support. Specifically, we assume access to samples $(x, S)$, where $S$ is drawn from a distribution over sets $\mathcal{Q}$ (indicating the elements being compared), and $x$ is drawn from the conditional distribution $\mathcal{D}_S$ (indicating the winner of the comparison) and aim to output a clean sample $y$ distributed according to $\mathcal{D}$. We mainly focus on the case of pairwise comparisons where all sets $S$ have size 2. We design a Markov chain whose stationary distribution coincides with $\mathcal{D}$ and give an algorithm to obtain exact samples using the technique of Coupling from the Past. However, the sample complexity of this algorithm depends on the structure of the distribution $\mathcal{D}$ and can be even exponential in the support of $\mathcal{D}$ in many natural scenarios. Our main contribution is to provide an efficient exact sampling algorithm whose complexity does not depend on the structure of $\mathcal{D}$. To this end, we give a parametric Markov chain that mixes significantly faster given a good approximation to the stationary distribution. We can obtain such an approximation using an efficient learning from pairwise comparisons algorithm (Shah et al., JMLR 17, 2016). Our technique for speeding up sampling from a Markov chain whose stationary distribution is approximately known is simple, general and possibly of independent interest.


The bioavailability and absorption of water soluble phytoconstituents is erratic due to poor solubility of these constituents in gastrointestinal tract. This can be overcome by a novel delivery system known as phytosome technology in which water soluble phytoconstituents are allowed to react with phospholipids. For better and improved bioavailability, natural phytoconstituents must have a good balance between hydrophilicity (helps in dissolution in gastro-intestinal fluids) and hydrophobicity (helps to cross lipid rich cell membranes). This is achieved through phytosome technology. Phospholipids have a dual solubility and acts as an emulsifier. Phytosome technology acts as a bridge between novel and conventional delivery systems. Many products are available in the market based on this phytosome technology which include popular herbal extracts such as Ginkgo biloba, Silybum marianum, grape seed, olive oil flavonoids etc.


The Matriculation Examination, the school-leaving exam taken towards the end of upper secondary education, is the only high-stakes examination in the Finnish school system. As the exam may have a strong impact on the students' further education opportunities, it evokes various feelings and thoughts in students. Yet, there is little research on these reactions. This article, based on a mixed-methods approach, sheds light on students' expectation and experiences of the English test in the Matriculation Examination. A total of 142 secondand third-year students from one upper secondary school shared their views on the possible washback e!ect and test anxiety caused by the exam. Also, the students expressed their ideas and experiences of the validity, reliability and fairness of the test. Although the test did not seem to cause excessive washback, it caused signi"cant stress and anxiety. Furthermore, students seemed rather critical of its validity and reliability.


WITH THE advent of better anesthesia, the use of antibiotics, and improved operative techniques, surgical procedures of increased magnitude are now possible. As a consequence, preoperative and postoperative care has taken on a new and ever-increasing importance. Intravenous therapy is no small part of this care of the surgical patient. Use of an intravenous needle over several days is traumatic, and it is difficult to retain the needle in position. Frequent clots occur, and phlebitis develops in the injured vein. 1 Extravasation of blood or fluids makes it impossible to find the vein again. In a short period, all of the superficial veins have lost their usefulness for intravenous therapy. The patient's partially or completely immobilized arm becomes a source of much physical anguish, and nursing care is increased and the patient cannot be moved without endangering the continuity of the infusion. Because of these well-known undesirable sequelae associated with


The development of new catalysts for high-performance, cost-effective oxygen reduction is crucial in the commercialization of fuel cells. We demonstrate here the use of functionalized polyterthiophene-anchored graphene oxide (GO) composites as new non-metal catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction. Different functional groups containing the monomers 3′-(2-aminopyrimidyl)-2,2′:5′,2′′-terthiophene (APT), 3′-(p-benzoic acid)-2,2′:5′,2′′-terthiophene (TBA) and 3′-(carboxylic acid)-2,2′:5′,2′′-terthiophene (TCA) were synthesized and polymerized with as-prepared GO to form complexes by a potential cycling method. The aminopyrimidyl groups on the poly(APT) backbone served as effective functional groups in the oxygen reduction reaction. The APT–GO complex was formed through hydrogen bonding and a ring-opening reaction of the epoxide group with the amine to form a new C–N bond. It was observed that the C–N bond in the polymer matrix was involved in the direct electrocatalytic reduction of O2 to H2O. The poly(APT–GO) composite showed much better tolerance to fuel cross-over and long-term electrode stability than commercially available Pt/C electrodes.


In this paper we assess whether changes in labor market decisions upon motherhood lead to potential inefficient allocations of talent. Using an event study approach with retrospective data drawn from SHARE for 29 European countries we show that motherhood effects go beyond the well studied effects of labor market participation decisions: the arrival of the first child substantially affects the uptaking of alternative modes of employment, such as part-time and self-employment, that are characterized by flexible or reduced work schedules but also lower pay on average. We also show that the size of labor market responses to motherhood are larger in societies with more conservative social-norms or with weak policies regarding work-life balance. To assess the effects of motherhood over the allocation of talent, we explore how labor market responses to parenthood vary by alternative measures of talent or ability. We find that all women, even those with the highest level of ability and abler than their husbands face large motherhood effects, while men show virtually no changes in the labor market when becoming fathers. We also find that mothers who become self-employed after the birth of the first child are those that are less entrepreneurial-able according to cognitive ability and personality traits shown to impair business survival. Overall, our results suggest relevant changes in the allocation of talent caused by gender differences in nonmarket responsibilities that can have sizable impacts on aggregate market productivity.


Author(s): Bhan, Gautam | Advisor(s): Roy, Ananya | Abstract: Millennial Delhi is a city whose landscape has been scarred by a series of evictions of the homes of some of its most vulnerable citizens. These evictions are different not just in degree but in kind from those that have come before. Evictions at this scale last occurred in Delhi during what is known as the Emergency from 1975-77 when democratic and fundamental rights were suspended. Unlike evictions within the Emergency, however, contemporary evictions have occurred through democratic processes rather than in their absence- they mark a different set of negotiations, legitimations, processes as well as horizons of resistance. A further factor makes contemporary evictions distinct: they were ordered not by the sarkar -the institutions of the executive across local, state and federal scales that govern the national capital - but by the adalat, the Judiciary. They were, in fact, ordered by the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India within a unique judicial innovation in India called the Public Interest Litigation that had been established, ironically, to enable the poor to access justice in the highest courts of the land. To understand how the evictions of the poor can be read as acts in the "public interest," this dissertation argues that we must first locate the basti in the particularity of the production of space in Delhi. The Hindustani word "basti" comes from basna which means to settle or inhabit. It is the term used most often by the poor to describe their homes that are often marked by some measure of physical, economic, and infrastructural vulnerability. The basti is often reduced to the slum, a marker of illegal occupation of land and, more broadly, the dysfunctional landscape of the megacities of the global South. Yet this dissertation argues that more than just a `slum,' built environment, material housing stock, or planning category, a basti is, in fact, a territorialisation of a political engagement within which the poor negotiate their presence in as well as right to the city. It is a spatial manifestation of the negotiations of citizenship. Its eviction then represents not just the demolition of a built environment but the transformation of precisely this political engagement- an erasure of the poor's presence within and right to the city. Put another way, contemporary evictions represent an altered urban politics where a set of familiar referents- development, order, governance, citizens, and the public- are redefined to not only enable evictions but also to see them as acts of good governance, order and planning. Read this way, evictions allow us to access the central theoretical and ethical concern of this dissertation: the politics of the production and reproduction of poverty and inequality in the contemporary Indian city and the negotiations of citizenship that underlie it. Broadly, this dissertation argues that evictions make visible make visible a juridicalisation of politics in the Indian city. This juridicalisation is marked by the emergence of new frameworks, discourses and practices in urban politics that instantiate themselves in the city through the judiciary rather within the more familiar institutional compacts between institutions of representative government and urban residents. The juridicalisation of politics marks the expansion of the jurisdiction not just of the courts but also of the realm of the law within urban politics. As the sphere of authority of the Courts widens in the city, a series of questions, concerns, interventions, processes and debates within urban politics come to be come to seen, articulated, and addressed as juridical questions - they speak and are spoken about within the frameworks of law. Following its concern with the politics of poverty, inequality and citizenship, the dissertation traces juridicalisation along one particular vector: it shows how evictions were made to make "legal sense" within public interest litigations. Four key frameworks thus emerge: (a) planned illegalities; (b) planned development and/as crisis; (b) the impoverishment of poverty; and (c) the juridicalisation of resistance. The dissertation first constructs a spatial history of inhabitation in the city to challenge the assumed relationships between "illegality," planning and the settlements of the poor, arguing that the "illegal" production of urban space in Delhi comprises not just the `slum' but the production of illegal housing by the middle and upper middle classes as well. It does so by problematizing the familiar and commonsensical narrative of the "failure of planning" in the Indian city and showing that the traces of planning ensure that the city may not be as it was planned but it is an outcome of planning. It argues that illegality is the dominant mode of the production of housing in Delhi and that it is within illegalities that the production of urban space in the city must be understood. Questions of urban politics must thus look not at the dichotomy of the legal-illegal but instead at the ways in which planning and planned development produce illegality. Equally, they must interrogate the processes by which particular kinds of urban practices and actors are framed as "illegal" relative to others and what work such a framing is meant to do. Having established the relationship between illegality, planning and planned development in the city empirically, the dissertation then analyses a body of case law in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India to show that the Courts misrecognise illegality in their twin understandings of "encroachment" and "encroacher" when they portray the former as the visible manifestation of what they see as the crisis of the city and the latter as one of the actors primarily responsible for this crisis. Showing how the courts use narratives of the failure of "planned development" and what they call "Government" to justify their interventions into the city, the dissertation describes their attempt to make the city into a governable space using the "Plan in its legal position" to represent an idealized spatial order. Intervening in the crisis of the city towards this idealized order thus becomes not only the primary definition of public interest but also an ethico-moral imperative that acts as a rationality of judicial government.Further, the dissertation argues that the case-law on evictions makes visible the impoverishment of poverty, drawing upon Upendra Baxi's concept of impoverishment as a dynamic process of public decision-making in which it is considered just, right and fair that some people may become or stay impoverished. The Courts enable impoverishment by through the creation of the category of the "encroacher" that binds the identity of the poor to a spatial illegality and becomes the basis of a disavowal of their rights. Additionally, through the discursive erasure of the vulnerability of the poor and the emergence of a new "urban majority" as the subject of urban politics, they transform the poor into improper citizens thereby legitimizing a regime of differentiated citizenship. Using interviews with activists in urban social movements in Delhi, the dissertation further shows how the emergence of the judiciary as the site and object of resistance has resulted in the juridicalisation of resistance: the impact of the presence of the Court within the calculus of negotiation and confrontation as modes of engagement and resistance to evictions. The presence of the Court challenges the choice of strategies of urban social movements, introduces new actors and decision-making processes into movement spaces, alters the content of right-claims and forecloses certain kinds of claimants just as it shapes the political identity and history of basti and its residents themselves. Finally, in conclusion, the dissertation explores how new forms and claims to the city can emerge in response to these challenges that will be not just impassioned, but equitable and effective.


This paper undertakes a structured, focused case-study comparison of housing bubbles in Ireland and Spain, based on the selection of two most-different cases that nonetheless share a common outcome of interest. Both countries were exposed to the same set of changes in their international policy environment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in the form of a low interest rate regime associated with the creation of European Monetary Union (EMU). The two countries have very different economic structures, different political decision-making profiles, and different relationships between the political and banking systems. Yet these two countries had the most extreme experience of housing bubbles during the 200os, and both suffered a similar construction-related economic collapse that ruined their respective banking systems after 2008. The paper argues that the decision-making taking place within their very different domestic institutional frameworks was subordinated to the fact that they shared a similar form of international vulnerability. Both were extremely open to mobile international capital during the 2000s. Their vulnerability to financialization resulted in a common experience of very rapid asset price inflation, which left both countries particularly exposed when the international financial collapse took place. The shared experience of European 'peripherality' meant that two countries belonging to different 'varieties of capitalism' ended up with very similar kinds of economic collapse.


Results are presented from a variety of molecular simulations of phase coexistence using the well established Gay-Berne (GB) liquid crystal model.Firstly, the simulation of bulk phase coexistence using the Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo technique is presented, both for one and two-component GB systems. The one-component results, using a novel parameterisation of the GB, show a rich phase behaviour, displaying both isotropic and nematic-vapour coexistence, in good comparison with previous studies. A method for arriving at the two-component parameterisation is then discussed, followed by a novel application of the Gibbs ensemble to the isotropic-nematic transition in two-component systems. Results in broad agreement with theoretical predictions, subject to a large finite size effect, are obtained.Secondly, upon the basis of the one-component Gibbs results, results are presented from a series of molecular dynamics simulations of a free standing GB film in equilibrium with its own saturated vapour. The introduction of inhomogeneity is shown to induce a preferred molecular alignment in the nematic film perpendicular to the liquid-vapour interface. At slightly higher temperatures the nematic film is wet by the isotropic phase, displaying an intermediate ordering regime where the formation of short-lived nematic domains within the film is observed. This effect has been analysed using orientational correlation functions, and shown to result from a decoupling of the planar and perpendicular nematic ordering caused by the system inhomogeneity. A system-size analysis of this effect has also been undertaken, showing a definite increase in the range of decay of these orientational correlations with increasing system size.


Background: Probiotics are live microbes that colonize the gastrointestinal tract and benefit the host. Preterm infants develop abnormal patterns of bowel colonization, and only a few clinical trials have reported the outcomes of preterm infants treated with probiotics. Purpose: We investigated the rate of colonization of Lactobacillus and the clinical variables affecting the colonization in preterm infants. Methods: Infants with gestational age less than 37 weeks treated at Ewha Womans University Hospital between March 2003 and July 2004 were eligible. Lactobacillus acidophilus (containing 108 CFU) was supplemented orally, mixed with breast milk or formula divided into three doses a day. Stool samples were collected before and 14 days after supplementation of the probiotic. Stool samples were anaerobically cultured on Rogosa agar and identified by Gram stain, catalase test and glucose fermentation test. Clinical characteristics were analyzed. Results: Seventy-three patients with an average gestational age of 33.0 ± 2.5 weeks were studied. Meconium was cultured in 46 patients and Lactobacillus was not detected. Probiotic supplementation began on 3.4 ± 6.8 days, and after 14 days of supplementation, Lactobacillus was cultured in an average of 3.01 × 108 CFU in the stool of 37.0% (27/73) of the patients. There was a tendency towards an increased incidence of sepsis in the Lactobacillus– group (p = 0.082). In the Lactobacillus+ group, a striking increase in feeding tolerance was detected. Conclusion: In preterm infants, with the administration of probiotics, 37% of the preterm infants had Lactobacillus colonized in the gastrointestinal tract and improved feeding tolerance. A double-blind study is in progress for further investigation into the effect on other systemic diseases in premature infants.


ABSTRACT The transcription factor p53 functions not only to suppress tumorigenesis but also to maintain normal development and homeostasis. Although p53 was implicated in different aspects of fertility, including spermatogenesis and implantation, the mechanism underlying p53 involvement in spermatogenesis is poorly resolved. In this study we describe the identification of a spermatogenesis-associated gene, SPATA18, as a novel p53 transcriptional target and show that SPATA18 transcription is induced by p53 in a variety of cell types of both human and mouse origin. p53 binds a consensus DNA motif that resides within the first intron of SPATA18. We describe the spatiotemporal expression patterns of SPATA18 in mouse seminiferous tubules and suggest that SPATA18 transcription is regulated in vivo by p53. We also demonstrate the induction of SPATA18 by p63 and suggest that p63 can compensate for the loss of p53 activity in vivo. Our data not only enrich the known collection of p53 targets but may also provide insights on spermatogenesis defects that are associated with p53 deficiency.


Pilomatricoma is a benign neoplasm originated in the pilosebaceous follicle wich appears as an intradermal nodule during childhood, in most cases. It is generally covered with normal skin, reaching a diameter of 1.5 cm on average, and it often shows no recurrence after surgical excision. The authors describe a case in wich a 26-year-old patient presented a tumoral lesion on the upper left superciliary area was submitted to total excision, and diagnosed as pilomatricoma by the histological study. According to the patient, this lesion had a progressive and slow growth of about two years. Eight months after the first surgical intervention, there was a new tumor growth in the region, this time quicker and worsen, with ulceration on the small skin area that covered the lesion, thus leading to malignity suspicion. After the conduction of a new excision within a security margin, the histological test confirmed that it was a pilomatricoma lesion and the piece displayed no sign of malignity. The patient has been followed up for one year, showing no signs of recurrence so far.


Background and purpose With younger patients seeking reconstructions and the activity-based demands placed on the arthroplasty construct, consideration of the role that implant characteristics play in arthroplasty longevity is warranted. We therefore evaluated the risk of early revision for a monoblock all-polyethylene tibial component compared to a metal-backed modular tibial construct with the same articular geometry in a sample of total knee arthroplasties (TKAs). We evaluated risk of revision in younger patients (< 65 years old) and in older patients (≥ 65 years old). Method Fixed primary TKAs with implants from a single manufacturer, performed between April 2001 and December 2010, were analyzed retrospectively. Patient characteristics, surgeon, hospital, procedure, and implant characteristics were compared according to tibial component type (monoblock all-polyethylene vs. metal-backed modular). All-cause revisions and aseptic revisions were evaluated. We used descriptive statistics and Cox regression models. Results 27,657 TKAs were identified, 2,306 (8%) with monoblock and 25,351 (92%) with modular components. In adjusted models, the risk of early all-cause revision (hazard ratio (HR) = 0.5, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.3–0.8) and aseptic revision (HR = 0.6, CI: 0.3–1.2) was lower for the monoblock cohort than for the modular cohort. In older patients, the early risk of all-cause revision was 0.6 (CI: 0.4–1.0) for the monoblock cohort compared to the modular cohort. In younger patients, the adjusted risk of all-cause revision (HR = 0.3, CI: 0.1–0.7) and of aseptic revision (HR = 0.3, CI: 0.1–0.7) were lower for the monoblock cohort than for the modular cohort. Interpretation Overall, monoblock tibial constructs had a 49% lower early risk of all-cause revision and a 41% lower risk of aseptic revision than modular constructs. In younger patients with monoblock components, the early risk of revision for any cause was even lower.


This paper focuses on the deadlock-free scheduling problem of automated manufacturing systems with shared resources and route flexibility, and develops novel scheduling methods by combining deadlock control policies and hybrid heuristic search. Place-timed Petri nets are used to model the systems and find a feasible sequence of firing transitions in the built model such that the firing time of its last transition is as small as possible. Based on the reachability graph of the net and a minimum processing time matrix, new heuristic and selection functions are designed to guide search processes. The proposed hybrid heuristic search is based on state space exploration and hence suffers from the state space explosion problem. In order to reduce the explored space, the search is restrained within a limited local search window. By embedding the deadlock-avoidance policies into the search processes, a novel deadlock-free hybrid heuristic search algorithm is developed. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm over the state-of-the-art method.


Group communication is the basis for many multimedia and web applications. The group key management is a critical problem in a large dynamic group. All group rekeying protocols incur communication and computation overhead at the group key controller and at the group members. EOFT (enhanced one way function tree) approach uses the CRT tuples of smaller remainders instead of keys of larger bits. EOFT reduces the overall computational and the communication rekeying overhead. This work computes the group key using EOFT with actual numeric values for the keys of the group members. Any computation of the keys is carried out in parallel on their CRT remainders. This work proves that the time complexity of CRT conversion is a negligible one compared to that of the cryptographic functions


Appropriate treatment of agricultural waste is necessary for the protection of public health in rural areas because land-applied animal manure may transmit zoonotic disease. In this study, we evaluated the potential of using a pilot anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) to treat agricultural waste. The AnMBR system, following a conventional complete mix anaerobic digester (CMAD), achieved high removals of biological and chemical agents. The mean log(10) removals of Escherichia coli, enterococci, Clostridium perfringens, and coliphage by the AnMBR were 5.2, 6.1, 6.4, and 3.7, respectively, and for the CMAD were 1.5, 1.2, 0.1, and 0.5, respectively. Compared with other indicators, coliphage was observed most frequently and had the highest concentration in effluent samples. Bovine adenoviruses and bovine polymaviruses (BPyV) were monitored in this study using nested PCR methods. All of the CMAD influent and CMAD effluent samples were positive for both viruses, and three AnMBR effluent samples were BPyV positive. The mean removals of total Kjeldahl nitrogen, total phosphate, chemical oxygen demand, total solids, and volatile solids by the entire system were 31, 96, 92, 82, and 91%, respectively, but there was no removal of ammonium. When the AnMBR was operated independent of the CMAD, AnMBR achieved similar E. coli and enterococci removals as the combined CMAD/AnMBR system. The high quality of effluent produced by the pilot AnMBR system in this study demonstrated that such systems can be considered as alternatives for managing animal manure.


Introduction: In vivo studies show that curcumin, a component of turmeric (Curcuma longa), inhibits signal transduction pathways involved in tumor growth and angiogenesis, induces apoptosis and potentiates the radioresponse of cancer cells by inducing NF-kB activity. However no study has validated its anti-tumor effect in patients undergoing cancer treatment. We performed a randomized double blinded study in patients with locally advanced rectal cancer to assess the efficacy of a combination of capecitabine and radiation therapy with or without curcumin, using pathological complete response (pCR) rate as a surrogate for overall clinical outcomes. Patients and Methods: Between September, 2008 and September, 2010, patients with biopsy-proven, locally advanced adenocarcinoma of the rectum were enrolled and randomized to placebo and curcumin treatment arms in a 1:2 ratio. All patients received pre-operative radiation therapy (50.4 Gy/28 fractions for 5-6 weeks) along with concurrent capecitabine (825 mg/m2 orally twice daily, only on days of radiation) followed by surgery after 6 weeks. Curcumin or placebo capsules (4 g orally, twice daily) were given throughout the chemoradiation therapy period and until surgery, typically 6 weeks later. Patients were evaluated at baseline, weekly during chemoradiation and just before surgery using the MD Anderson symptom inventory (MDASI) and Brief Fatigue Inventory (BFI) questionnaires. In addition, weekly clinical assessment and monitoring of hematological and biochemical parameters was done throughout the treatment course to evaluate treatment-related toxicity. The pharmacokinetics of curcumin was studied using blood samples taken before and one hour after curcumin intake during the second week of chemoradiation. The primary target outcome was pCR evaluated at the time of surgery. This study is registered with Clinicaltrials.gov, number NCT00745134. Results: 22 patients were enrolled in the study and 15 received curcumin. The median age was 61 years and majority were males (13, 59%). The median serum curcumin concentrations before and one hour after curcumin intake did not differ significantly (p = 0.33) and were 3.04 ng/mL (range, 1.24 to 18.88) and 3.32 ng/mL (range, 0.84 to 5.36) respectively. pCR was seen in two patients in the placebo arm and one patient in the curcumin arm (p = 0.23). Acute toxicity was relatively uncommon in both groups: grade 2 diarrhea (1, 7%), grade 2 dermatitis (5, 33%) and grade 3 diarrhea (1, 7%) in the curcumin arm; grade 2 dermatitis (1, 14%) and grade 3 diarrhea (1, 14%) in the placebo arm. Conclusion: Addition of curcumin to capecitabine and radiation therapy did not increase the rate of pCR in patients with rectal cancer. The low bioavailability of curcumin preparation used could explain the lack of efficacy noted in this study. Citation Format: Awalpreet S. Chadha, Sushovan Guha, Sunil Krishnan. A phase II randomized double blind study of curcumin with preoperative capecitabine and radiation therapy followed by surgery for rectal cancer. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2015 Apr 18-22; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2015;75(15 Suppl):Abstract nr CT124. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2015-CT124


We consider the provision of venture capital in a dynamic agency model. The value of the venture project is initially uncertain and more information arrives by developing the project. The allocation of the funds and the learning process are subject to moral hazard. The optimal contract is a time-varying share contract which provides intertemporal risk-sharing between venture capitalist and entrepreneur. The share of the entrepreneur re‡ects the value of a real option. The option itself is based on the control of the funds. The dynamic agency costs may be high and lead to an ine¢cient early stopping of the project. A positive liquidation value explains the adoption of strip ...nancing or convertible securities. Finally, relationship ...nancing, including monitoring and the occasional replacement of the management improves the e¢ciency of the ...nancial contracting.


We study H(div) preconditioning for the saddle-point systems that arise in a stochastic Galerkin mixed formulation of the steady-state diffusion problem with random data. The key ingredient is a multigrid V-cycle for an H(div) operator with random weight function acting on a certain tensor product space of random fields with finite variance. We build on the Arnold-Falk-Winther multigrid algorithm presented in 1997 by varying the spatial discretization from grid to grid whilst keeping the stochastic discretization fixed. We extend the deterministic analysis to accommodate the modified H(div) operator and establish spectral equivalence bounds with a new multigrid V-cycle operator that are independent of the spatial and stochastic discretization parameters. We implement multigrid within a block-diagonal preconditioner for the full saddle-point problem, derive eigenvalue bounds for the preconditioned system matrices and investigate the impact of all the discretization parameters on the convergence rate of preconditioned MINRE S.


A way to optimize performance of relational row store databases is to reduce the row widths by vertically partitioning tables into table fractions in order to minimize the number of irrelevant columns/attributes read by each transaction. This paper considers vertical partitioning algorithms for relational row-store OLTP databases with an H-store-like architecture, meaning that we would like to maximize the number of single-sited transactions. We present a model for the vertical partitioning problem that, given a schema together with a vertical partitioning and a workload, estimates the costs (bytes read/written by storage layer access methods and bytes transferred between sites) of evaluating the workload on the given partitioning. The cost model allows for arbitrarily prioritizing load balancing of sites vs. total cost minimization. We show that finding a minimum-cost vertical partitioning in this model is NP-hard and therefore the problem should obviously not be solved manually by a human DBA. We present two algorithms returning solutions in which single-sitedness of read queries is preserved while allowing column replication (which may allow a drastically reduced cost compared to disjoint partitioning). The first algorithm is a quadratic integer program that finds optimal minimum-cost solutions with respect to the model, and the second algorithm is a more scalable heuristic based on simulated annealing. Experiments show that the algorithms can reduce the cost of the model objective by 37% when applied to the TPC-C benchmark and the heuristic is shown to obtain solutions with costs close to the ones found using the quadratic program.


Summary The goal of this paper is to evaluate artificial neural network in urinary diseases diagnosis. Artificial neural networks are widely used in medical problems. Artificial neural networks are used to disease diagnosis. Feed-forward back propagation neural network is used as a classifier to distinguish between infected or non-infected with two types of urinary disease. Inflammation of urinary bladder and nephritis of renal pelvis origin are diagnosis by artificial neural network. The results of applying the artificial neural networks methodology to diagnosis based upon selected symptoms show abilities of the network to learn the patterns corresponding to symptoms of the person. In this study, the data were obtained from UCI Machine Learning Repository in order to diagnosed diseases. The data is separated into inputs and targets. The symptoms will act as the inputs to the neural network. The targets for the neural network will be identified with 1's as infected and will be identified with 0's as non-infected. In all cases, the percent correctly classified in the simulation sample by the feed-forward back propagation network is 99 percent. The results show that the proposed diagnosis neural network could be useful for identifying the infected person.


This dissertation integrates the concepts of circular causality, emergence, and hierarchical organization through an investigation of the evolutionary dimension within economic thought. The different sections of this dissertation represent complementary perspectives on this theme. The first chapter introduces the concept of circular causality and the technique of causal diagramming. These tools are used in the second and third chapters to highlight the evolutionary dimension within the history of economic thought. The particular theorists and groups of articles discussed include Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, the Increasing Returns debates of the 1920's, Gunnar Myrdal, and Nicholas Kaldor. The significance of the Increasing Returns debates is that it represents a bifurcation within economic theory: a point at which a choice needed to be made between what appeared to be mutually exclusive methods of analysis (i.e., the equilibrium and evolutionary perspective). The implicit decision was to further develop equilibrium theorizing. As a result, both Myrdal and Kaldor were, by necessity, outspoken critics of this equilibrium based methodology. These criticisms are highly significant due to their detailed analysis of what evolutionary theory is not. Hierarchical nesting and the defining characteristics thereof emerge quite naturally within the theories of these above mentioned evolutionary economists. This manifested for some of the later theorists as an implicit, and frequently explicit, refusal to use a general equilibrium framework in their models of the economy (i.e., an aggregation of the parts to form the whole). Such a methodology would have been in direct conflict with their intuitions regarding the economic process. The different layers of the economy that they did identify are found to be amenable to conceptualization as self-reinforcing processes. In the fourth chapter, this hierarchical nesting of concepts is developed more generally, and grounded more firmly, as a residual of mental conception and dualistic thought. It is hoped that these latter ideas might serve as a future foundation, however rough, from which a truly evolutionary perspective can emerge: one which is applicable to the whole range of human experience.


Attachment and viability of different cell types(fibrioblast, chondrocyte and osteoblast ) was observed on two forms of silk (mat & Three-dimensional scaffolds). The osteoblasts behaviors cultured on silk mat were significantly higher than that found on 3-D silk fibroin scaffold (3-D SF scaffold). In the MTT assay, the cell viability of fibroblasts, chondrocyte and osteoblasts seeded on 2-D nanofiber mat was (2-D mat) significantly higher than that found on 3-D SF scaffold. Similar result could be seen from SEM observation and cell attachment study. However, alkaline phosphatase activity was significantly increased on 3-D SF scaffold than on2-D nanofiber


Mung bean (Vigna radiate (L.) Wilczek) is an important traditional food legume crop, with high economic and nutritional value. It is widely grown in China and other Asian countries. Despite its importance, genomic information is currently unavailable for this crop plant species or some of its close relatives in the Vigna genus. In this study, more than 103 million high quality cDNA sequence reads were obtained from mung bean using Illumina paired-end sequencing technology. The processed reads were assembled into 48,693 unigenes with an average length of 874 bp. Of these unigenes, 25,820 (53.0%) and 23,235 (47.7%) showed significant similarity to proteins in the NCBI non-redundant protein and nucleotide sequence databases, respectively. Furthermore, 19,242 (39.5%) could be classified into gene ontology categories, 18,316 (37.6%) into Swiss-Prot categories and 10,918 (22.4%) into KOG database categories (E-value < 1.0E-5). A total of 6,585 (8.3%) were mapped onto 244 pathways using the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genome (KEGG) pathway database. Among the unigenes, 10,053 sequences contained a unique simple sequence repeat (SSR), and 2,303 sequences contained more than one SSR together in the same expressed sequence tag (EST). A total of 13,134 EST-SSRs were identified as potential molecular markers, with mono-nucleotide A/T repeats being the most abundant motif class and G/C repeats being rare. In this SSR analysis, we found five main repeat motifs: AG/CT (30.8%), GAA/TTC (12.6%), AAAT/ATTT (6.8%), AAAAT/ATTTT (6.2%) and AAAAAT/ATTTTT (1.9%). A total of 200 SSR loci were randomly selected for validation by PCR amplification as EST-SSR markers. Of these, 66 marker primer pairs produced reproducible amplicons that were polymorphic among 31 mung bean accessions selected from diverse geographical locations. The large number of SSR-containing sequences found in this study will be valuable for the construction of a high-resolution genetic linkage maps, association or comparative mapping and genetic analyses of various Vigna species.


This study was carried out in order to determine the prevalence of HAI antibodies to BK polyomavirus in general population and patients under dialysis. In the general population 72% of the sera tested were positive, varying from 64% in the 0-5 years age group to 100% in the group above 40 years old. The HAI titers in the 0-5 years age group showed a characteristic "U" shaped pattern distribution. The prevalence in the dialysed patients was similar to the general population. The prevalence rates observed in both groups were not statistically significant. According to these results it can be concluded that BK polyomavirus infection is acquired during very early childhood.


Designers are often recognized as natural entrepreneurs, due to their creative skills and competences in the idea-generation and product development processes. A number of studies shows that creative professionals are more likely to become self-employed. In general though, there are not many studies on design entrepreneurs, and those who has been made, focus on design entrepreneurs' lack business competences in administration, marketing and operation, as well as their lack of skills and priority, when it comes to the development of their businesses. This study will nuance this picture of the design entrepreneur by building upon a new direction within entrepreneurial research, which focuses on entrepreneurial expertise and logic. At a theoretical level, we will show that there are some overlap between the expert entrepreneurial logic (effectuation) and the 'designerly ways of knowing and doing'. We review three cases with novice design entrepreneurs, where we have been able to identify examples of the novice design entrepreneurs using 'effectual logic'. The examples are described and analysed using Sarasvathys 5 principles, showing that 3 of 5 principles are found in the cases.


: Hyperplasia of Brunner's glands is a rare phenomenon. It may cause obstructive symptoms, anemia or the patient may be totally asymptomatic. The diagnosis can be confirmed with endoscopic examination and upper gastrointestinal series. The surgical treatment or hyperplasia of the Brunner's glands should be conservative since the lesion is not premalignant. If complications do occur, local excision is the treatment of choice. Two patients are reported who had Brunner gland hyperplasia as an incidental finding at exploration for pancreatic pseudocyst, and a brief review of the literature is made.


Background: The present study investigated the potential roles of plasma lymphocyte DNA damage, the urotensin-2 receptor (UTS2R), and oxidative changes in patients with varying degrees of migraine-related disability who were in the ictal phase and presented to our emergency department. Methods: This study enrolled 40 consecutive adult patients with migraine attack and 40 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. The same health care professional determined the headache-related disability of each patient's migraine attack using the Migraine Disability Assessment Scale (MIDAS); patients were divided into three groups based on MIDAS score. Plasma lymphocyte DNA damage; UTS2R, malondialdehyde (MDA), and catalase (CAT) levels; total oxidant status (TOS); total antioxidant status (TAS); and the oxidative stress index (OSI) were used as predictors of early oxidative changes. Results: Plasma lymphocyte DNA damage, TOS, MDA levels, and OSI values were significantly higher in patients with migraine compared to controls. Conversely, TAS and CAT and UTS2R levels were markedly lower in patients with migraine compared to controls. Comparisons of the patient groups by MIDAS score revealed significant differences in plasma lymphocyte DNA damage and CAT levels but no differences in TOS, MDA levels, OSI, TAS, or UTS2R levels. MIDAS scores were positively correlated with the degree of lymphocyte DNA damage, but neither of these factors was significantly related to CAT levels. Conclusion: The present data suggest that lymphocyte DNA damage and changes in oxidative/ antioxidative status may reflect an enhanced oxidative damage and an ineffective antioxidant defense system in migraineurs during headache attacks. In addition, lymphocyte DNA damage levels may be an indicator of the degree of migraine-related disability as assessed by MIDAS score.


Recent studies in America and Europe suggest that individual economic self-interest plays little role in explaining individual attitudes towards immigrants. A key piece of evidence for this proposition is that natives do not show particular hostility towards immigrants whose skill levels are similar to their own. We conducted an experimental survey of Hong Kong residents to examine their attitudes towards immigrants from Mainland China. We found that positive attitudes towards low-skilled immigrants were more prevalent among local labourers – whose job security would presumably be under greater threat from them – than among executives and professionals. Similarly, the premium attached to highly skilled immigrants increases significantly with locals' occupational prestige, suggesting that immigrants are more likely to find support among natives who share similar occupational interests. Our results remain robust even after controlling for a range of potential explanatory variables. We conclude with a critical discussion of the use of skill levels to estimate the occupational interests of natives and assess the value of relying on the conventional labour market competition model to generate hypotheses about the role of economic self-interest in shaping immigration preferences.


Eastern filbert blight (EFB), caused by the fungus Anisogramma anomala, is a primary limitation to european hazelnut (Corylus avellana) cultivation in eastern North America. American hazelnut (Corylus americana) is the endemic host of A. anomala and, despite its tiny, thick-shelled nuts, is a potentially valuable source of EFB resistance and climatic adaptation. Interspecific hybrids (Corylus americana × C. avellana) have been explored for nearly a century as a means to combine EFB resistance with wider adaptability and larger nuts. Although significant progress was made in the past, the genetic diversity of the starting material was limited and additional improvements are needed for expansion of hazelnut (Corylus sp.) production outside of Oregon, where 99% of the U.S. crop is currently produced. Our objective was to determine if C. americana can be a donor of EFB resistance. We crossed 29 diverse EFB-resistant C. americana accessions to EFB-susceptible C. avellana selections (31 total progenies) to produce 2031 F1 plants. In addition, new C. americana germplasm was procured from across the native range of the species. The new collection of 1335 plants from 122 seed lots represents 72 counties and 22 states. The interspecific hybrid progenies and a subset of the American collection (616 trees from 62 seed lots) were field planted and evaluated for EFB response following field inoculations and natural disease spread over seven growing seasons. EFB was rated on a scale of 0 (no EFB) to 5 (all stems containing cankers). Results showed that progeny means of the interspecific hybrids ranged from 0.96 to 4.72. Fourteen of the 31 progenies were composed of at least one-third EFB-free or highly tolerant offspring (i.e., ratings 0–2), transmitting a significant level of resistance/tolerance. Several corresponding C. americana accessions that imparted a greater degree of resistance to their hybrid offspring were also identified. In addition, results showed that 587 (95.3%) of the 616 C. americana plants evaluated remained completely free of EFB. These findings confirm reports that the species rarely expresses signs or symptoms of the disease and should be robustly studied and exploited in breeding.


Networking of automated instruments on unmanned platforms has proved to be the most effective way to provide validation data for earth observation optical missions. However, with most current networks, such as AERONET-OC [1] for water and RADCALNET for land [2], the validation data are multispectral and/or limited in viewing geometries, resulting in modelling associated uncertainties to cover all spectral bands of all sensors and to correspond to satellite viewing geometries. Therefore, the HYPERNETS Project is developing a new hyperspectral radiometer to be integrated in automated networks. The main goal of the project is to acquire hyperspectral measurements of water and land reflectance and validate every optical earth observation satellite remote-sensing sensor in the Visible-Near Infrared (VNIR) and Short-wave Infrared (SWIR) spectral range. The present study reports the spectral characteristics of current and future earth observation missions. These characteristics represent the main drivers for the design of the HYPERNETS sensor.