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well, flatly denied that a patient with a particular condition was in the hospital. The administrator, however, after several calls, agreed that such a patient was there but that premature publicity might cause her anxiety and hazard her health. I therefore agreed not to write anything. When I challenged the doctor with this information he said, "I just wanted to throw you off the scent." This sort of experience makes the plea that journalists should treat doctors more gently seem rather hollow. Doctors with experience of reputable journalists will know that reporters frequently are asked and agree to keep confidence about something, even if it is only to preserve a doctor's identity to protect him from charges of advertising. But if a doctor has a grievance about inaccurate reporting or unethical behaviour by reporters he has the remedy in his own hands. A complaint to the newspaper or perhaps to the Press Council can have a very sobering effect on the journalist involved. It is significant that the Press Council confirms that complaints from doctors about medical matters are extremely rare.-I am, etc., JAMES WILKINSON, Science Correspondent, Daily Express.


The thesis considers influences and originality in dramatic structures in Fo's
theatre from its beginning - Poer nano, Cocorico, Chicchirichi - through his first political review,
Il dito nell'occhio (1953), to the maturity of his political theatre in 1967-73. It focuses on structures of activation and communication with the audience which appear first in Il dito, clearly visible in later works, but more closely in La signora e da buttare (1967) and Grande pantomima con bandiere e pupazzi piccoli e medi (1968). Drawing on Iser's, Foley's, Eco's and Bauman's theories for the formation of meaning, the study of Il dito shows how the spectator is made active through 'citations', words and images, which rely on his knowledge of political and social facts to be deciphered. Derision of the outcast, previously used by Porta, with its distancing effect similar but not equal to Brecht's alienation, also works from within forming the spectator's response. Allusions set in parody and metaphor, derision and open satire are steeped in paradox, which is used not only for comedy but also to heighten tragedy. The themes of Il dito - war, power, slavery, manipulation of minds - and the structures remain remarkably stable in subsequent works. The choice of metaphor as the main dramatic structure to draw cognitive connections with the audience comes to its full in La signora where is applied to gestures and action, to sounds, music, costumes and to Fo's own three-dimensional body mask, to create theatrically a metaphorical meaning more explicit than words. In 1969 he adds empathy by (almost) performing a tragedy on stage, forcing the spectators to act. Guerra di popolo in Cile (1973) makes the audience engage not only mentally with, but also physically in the play.


In embedded real-time systems, Dynamic Power Management (DPM) techniques have traditionally focused on reducing the dynamic power dissipation that occurs when a CMOS gate switches in a processor. Less attention has been given to processor leakage power or power consumed by I/O devices and other subsystems. I/O-based DPM techniques, however, have been extensively researched in non-real-time systems. These techniques focus on switching I/O devices to low power states based on various policies and are not applicable to real-time environments because of the non-deterministic nature of the policies. The challenge in conserving energy in embedded real-time systems is thus to reduce power consumption while preserving temporal correctness. To address this problem, we introduce three scheduling algorithms of increasing complexity: Energy-Aware EDF (EA-EDF), Enhanced Energy-Aware EDF (EEA-EDF) and Slack Utilization for Reduced Energy (SURE). The first two algorithms are relatively simple extensions to the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling algorithm that enable processor, I/O device, and subsystem energy conservation. The SURE algorithm utilizes slack to create a non-work-conserving approach to reducing power consumption. An evaluation of the three approaches shows that all three yield significant energy savings with respect to no DPM technique. The actual savings depends on the task set, shared devices, and the power requirements of the devices. When the cost of switching power states is low, the EA-EDF and EEA-EDF algorithms provide remarkable power savings considering their simplicity. In general, however, the higher the energy cost to switch power states, the more benefit SURE provides.


The function of humpback whale song remains elusive. Humpbacks primarily sing on the wintering grounds. Many hypotheses suggest a male advertisement function. It has been suggested that all whales of a population sing the same version of song, and its structure slowly evolves during and between singing seasons. Field observations of 1989 song indicated substantial variation in the song of humpbacks. The question remained, were the differences between individuals greater than those between successive songs of an individual. The songs of 11 whales were sampled during an 8 day period, to reduce the probability that song evolution would affect the results. Six units from three themes were sampled from four songs from each whale. Unit duration, lowest frequency, bandwidth, frequency of peak amplitude, and source level were measured. A repeated measures ANOVA found significant differences between individual whales and no such differences were found between successive songs of the same individual. These data ind...


The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is creating a wealth of new opportunities as well as a variety of new risks for human rights practice. Given the pace of innovation in the development and use of ICTs, our understanding of their impact on human rights lags. This report provides a crucial and in depth look at ICT initiatives and trends across the key human rights practices of prevention, fact-finding, and advocacy, identifying both risks and opportunities. In prevention, ICTs can be harnessed to protect human rights defenders, to prevent violations in police-civilian interactions, and in data-driven early warning systems and communication-based conflict prevention. That said, ICTs also create new security risks for human rights defenders and can violate the right to privacy. In fact-finding, ICTs afford the spontaneous and solicited participation of civilian witnesses in the production of human rights evidence. Of course, a greater volume and variety of information from unknown and untrained sources creates problems of misinformation and verification, which technology only goes so far to mitigate. In advocacy, ICTs provide new channels for quickly and visibly mobilizing publics, for directly engaging with advocacy targets, and for spreading awareness of human rights. That said, the effects of these new advocacy channels are unclear, and they may imperil categories of human rights and the reputations of human rights organizations. The report also considers how digital divides and the political economy of ICTs influence the nature, extent, and distribution of these opportunities and risks. In doing so, it outlines a research framework for understanding ICTs and human rights practice to underpin academics' and practitioners' assessment, development, and deployment of ICTs for and in the spirit of human rights. An earlier version of this report, prepared for an expert meeting ahead of the June 2015 session of the UN Human Rights Council, informed the thematic report on ICTs and the right to life presented at that session by the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions. As such, the projects profiled represent a snapshot of that timeframe; this report is therefore accompanied by a regularly updated, student-run Tumblr blog, ictandhr.tumblr.com, which welcomes submissions on new initiatives.


This paper gives a new algorithm that based on normalized autocorrelation robustness selection. Aiming at the situation that the voice was vitiated by noise and the difference of pollution extent between different parts of the voice, we recognized that preserving the polluted parts of voice will bring in negative affection to the confirmation system of speaker. Normalized autocorrelation not only shows the correlation of short-time voice frame, but also shows the polluted extent of voice. As a result, we can wipe off the deeply polluted voice through the normalized autocorrelation. Experiments have shown that through the procedure of normalized autocorrelation we can not only wipe off the polluted voice, but also improve confirmation ability of speaker in high noise environment.


Bowen, Chen and Cheng (2008) document a negative association between analyst following and the discount at issuance of seasoned equity offerings which, they argue, provides evidence of a direct link between analyst following, information asymmetry and cost of capital. While the empirical setting is novel and the analysis is careful, I argue that the causal links are less clear. In particular, I consider whether the evidence demonstrates that (a) analyst following causes a reduction in information asymmetry, (b) a reduction in information asymmetry causes the lower discount at equity issuance, and (c) the lower discount at equity issuance implies a lower cost of capital. In particular, prior literature suggests that analysts are attracted to firms with less information asymmetry, potentially reversing the causality between analyst following and information asymmetry. Further, the discount at issuance behaves much like price pressure, suggesting that analyst following may reflect investor attention rather than a reduction of information asymmetry. Finally, the discount is only one component of the cost of capital. To the extent that analyst following reduces the previously-documented mispricing at equity issuance it may actually increase overall cost of capital.


Density evolution is often used to determine the performance of an ensemble of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes under iterative message-passing algorithms. Conventional density evolution techniques over memoryless channels are based on the independence assumption amongst all the processed messages in variable and check nodes. This assumption is valid for many algorithms such as standard belief propagation (BP) and min-sum (MS) algorithms. However, there are other important iterative algorithms such as successive relaxation (SR) versions of BP and MS, and differential decoding with binary message passing (DD-BMP) algorithm of Mobini et. al., for which this assumption is not valid. The dependence created among messages for these algorithms is due to the introduction of memory in the iterative algorithm. In this work, we propose a model for iterative decoding algorithms with memory which covers SR and DD-BMP algorithms as special cases. Based on this model, we derive a Bayesian network for iterative algorithms with memory over memoryless channels and use this representation to analyze the algorithms using density evolution. The density evolution technique is developed based on truncating the memory of the decoding process and approximating it with a finite order Markov process, and can be implemented efficiently. As an example, we apply our technique to analyze the performance of DD-BMP on regular LDPC code ensembles, and make a number of interesting observations with regard to the performance/complexity trade off of DD-BMP in comparison with BP and MS algorithms.


Expression of a viral interleukin-6 (vIL-6) has been detected in certain Kaposi sarcoma (KS)--associated herpesvirus positive (KSHV(+)) lesions. The release of vIL-6 systemically and its contribution to the pathogenesis of HIV-related malignancies was studied. Serum vIL-6 was detected in 13 (38.2%) of 34 HIV(+) patients with KS, in 6 (85.7%) of 7 HIV(+) patients with primary effusion lymphoma (PEL) and/or multicentric Castleman disease (MCD), and in 18 (60.0%) of 30 HIV(+), mostly homosexual, individuals without KS, MCD, or PEL. By contrast, serum vIL-6 was detected in only 3 (23.1%) of 13 patients with classic KS, 1 (2.5%) of 40 blood donors from the United States, and 4 (19.0%) of 21 blood donors from Italy. Circulating vIL-6 levels were associated with HIV(+) status (P <.0001). However, within the HIV(+) cohort, serum vIL-6 levels were not associated with the occurrence of KSHV-associated malignancies (P =.43). (Blood. 2001;97:2173-2176)


Big data analytics and data mining are techniques used to analyze data and to extract hidden information. Traditional approaches to analysis and extraction do not work well for big data because this data is complex and of very high volume. A major data mining technique known as data clustering groups the data into clusters and makes it easy to extract information from these clusters. However, existing clustering algorithms, such as k-means and hierarchical, are not efficient as the quality of the clusters they produce is compromised. Therefore, there is a need to design an efficient and highly scalable clustering algorithm. In this paper, we put forward a new clustering algorithm called hybrid clustering in order to overcome the disadvantages of existing clustering algorithms. We compare the new hybrid algorithm with existing algorithms on the bases of precision, recall, F-measure, execution time, and accuracy of results. From the experimental results, it is clear that the proposed hybrid clustering algorithm is more accurate, and has better precision, recall, and F-measure values.


The practice of the integrated techniques of teaching children with impaired development of various nosological categories in comprehensive schools together with children with normal development is becoming increasingly extensive alongside with a series of researches in this direction. As it follows, in this complicated process a mentally correctional support of an educated specialist is essential for a child with impaired mental and physical development. The findings of the theoretical analysis of the role and place of the orientation phenomenon in the personality's professional activity have been given. Particular attention is focused upon the content, structure and formation levels of the personality's professional orientation in adolescence; as well as on the peculiarities of the correctional support in the context of the psychological assistance to the children with alternative abilities. The specificity of the empirical research of the peculiarities of future psychologists' professional orientation at the correctional support of alternatively able children has been described. The qualification characterization of a future special psychologist's support has been presented, the techniques and methods of the investigation of the psychological peculiarities of the professional orientation at correctional support have been outlined, the findings of the empirical research have been analyzed. The theoretical and methodological foundations of the psychological provision of the formation process of the future psychologist's professional orientation at the correctional support of the children with alternative abilities have been discussed. The organization of the activity aimed at the development of the future special psychologists' professional orientation has been described, methodological apparatus has been worked out and the approbation results have been adduced. On the basis of the findings the conclusion may be drawn that the suggested methodology is correct, the tasks have been successfully performed, the objective has been achieved, the efficiency of the methodological recommendations has been verified.


This paper first presents cyclic test results and the application of the proposed sandwiched buckling-restrained brace (BRB). The proposed BRB can be easily disassembled in the field. This provides an opportunity for inspection of the core after a large earthquake. The mechanics and cyclic behavior of a novel steel dual-core self-centering brace (SCB) are then proposed and introduced, followed by the testing of a dual-core SCB in order to evaluate its cyclic performance. Both braces achieve an excellent target lateral drift performance of up to 2.5%, thus satisfying the seismic requirement by the AISC Seismic Provisions 2010.


The study of operations strategy (OS) in production organisations has largely focused on the content of highlevel
strategies, and less on their practical enactment. Little attention has been paid to the middle managers
who mediate the space between the strategic intent of production organisations and their operational realities.
The role and strategic agency of such managers has been shown to be influential in shaping, impeding and
enabling OS, but they remain surprisingly absent from much project organisation literature. In this paper, we
examine the role of middle managers in OS practice via a Strategy-as-Practice framework. We study two
project-based organisations, one in Denmark and one in UK, developing lean production processes. In the
Danish case, the change strategy was initiated bottom-up from the project actors, whereas in the UK, the
change strategy was imposed top-down as a strategic management initiative. In both cases, middle managers
played a crucial role in mediating and translating intention. We show how strategy praxis, and the leadership
of operations, is highly distributed within project-based organisations regardless of where change is initiated
from. The findings have resonances for theory on the agency of middle managers, and for the understanding
of micro activities of OS formulation and implementation within project-based forms of organisation.


In this paper we identify demand shocks that can have a permanent effect on output through hysteresis effects. We call these shocks permanent demand shocks. They are found to be quantitatively important in the United States, in particular when the Great Recession is included in the sample. Recessions driven by permanent demand shocks lead to a permanent decline in employment and investment, while output per worker is largely unaffected. We find strong evidence that hysteresis transmits through a rise in long-term unemployment and a decline in labor force participation and disproportionately affects the least productive workers.


Homing-based gene drives are novel interventions promising the area-wide, species-specific genetic control of harmful insect populations. Here we characterise a first set of gene drives in a tephritid agricultural pest species, the Mediterranean fruit fly Ceratitis capitata (medfly). Our results show that the medfly is highly amenable to homing-based gene drive strategies. By targeting the medfly transformer gene, we also demonstrate two different mechanisms by which CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive can be coupled to sex conversion, whereby genetic females are transformed into fertile and harmless XX males. Given this unique malleability of sex determination, we modelled gene drive interventions that couple sex conversion and female sterility and found that such approaches could be effective and tolerant of resistant allele selection in the target population. Our results open the door for developing gene drive strains for the population suppression of the medfly and related tephritid pests by co-targeting female reproduction and shifting the reproductive sex ratio towards males. They demonstrate the untapped potential for gene drives to tackle agricultural pests in an environmentally friendly and economical way.


Over the past few decades, the use of concrete sleepers in North America has increased as a highperformance alternative to timber sleepers, especially in heavy-haul freight corridors. In order to accommodate heavier axle-loads and prevent center cracking, railroads and suppliers have consistently increased the center bending moment threshold that a sleeper must withstand, leading to stiffer elements that may be more prone to brittle cracking. In order to develop an alternate performance assessment method and ultimately improve the design practice for concrete sleepers, laboratory experiments were executed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Using a loading frame, concrete sleepers were subjected to a four-point bending test, while recording the deflection at the center of the sleeper, using a protocol that was adapted from the Manual of Railway Engineering of the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA). Experimentation was performed on some of the most representative concrete sleeper designs that are currently installed in North American heavy-haul freight corridors. The resulting load versus deflection curves illustrate the variability of each of the sleeper's response to load and characterize the stiffness of the sleepers. These results will be used as the basis to develop standardized laboratory tests aimed at optimizing future sleeper designs, to prevent failures due to excessive stiffness or brittleness.


This article explores important recent changes in the way that we treat personal property in commercial finance transactions. Among other things, these changes reduce or eliminate the obligation to give notice of interests in personal property when it is used in commercial finance transactions (as, e.g., collateral for a loan). A principal purpose of notice -filing has been to deter the creation of secret liens, interest s in property that are neither recorded nor otherwise readily observable. Secret liens are universally castigated as abhorrent. Yet, two recent sets of legislative developments suggest that we may care much less about the problem of secret liens than we might acknowledge. First, recent revisions to Article 9 of the U.C.C (which governs many commercial finance transactions) tolerate secret liens as to such increasingly important assets as data, intellectual property, bank accounts, and securities. Second, states have recently begun to enact non -uniform legislation designed to promote "asset securitizations." This legislation gives fully -preemptive effect to the parties' contracts, and would therefore appear to displace rules on notice -filing that might o therwise apply. They effectively end the obligation to give notice. The article considers how we have come to diminish the role of notice -filing, and what that might mean. I argue that tolerance of secret liens challenges a deeply -held intuition about t he relationship between property rights and notice obligations. This intuition enjoys both a new theoretical cache and a long lineage. I also suggest that we have become increasingly tolerant of secret liens because we have been seduced by a series of economic arguments about the alleged inefficiencies of notice -filing. I consider and reject most (but not all) of the economic arguments as incomplete or speculative. The article then suggests that notice -filing systems may perform at least two important informational functions not fully considered by critics of these systems. First, they will act as proxy for the information that might otherwise be generated within tightly -knit merchant communities. Second, they may have important behavioral consequence s both for those required to provide the notice and for the audience for the information thus provided. The article therefore counsels caution in enacting legislation that would diminish or dilute notice -filing in commercial finance transactions.


One of the major demographic trends in the US is the aging of farm operators and landlords suggesting transition of farm ownership in the form of exit and disinvestment. This coincides with economic pressures on farmers' incomes due to recent market volatility. We model retirement age farmers' exit/disinvestment as the outcome of intertemporal utility maximization and identify the extent to which economic and demographic factors affect these choices using the Census of Agriculture farm-level data for the 1992-2012 period. Regression results highlight the role of demographic factors. Minority and female farmers are more likely to exit but female operators are less likely to disinvest, while family farms are less likely to exit. High sales farms are less likely to exit but more likely to disinvest possibly targeting a smaller production scale before retirement. The relative size of the non-agricultural economy is negatively associated with exit but positively with disinvestment, while off-farm work reduces exit probability only a little. However, flow economic variables such as return-on-assets and government payments do not seem to impact exit and disinvestment. These findings are largely consistent with the view that mainly demographic factors and size determine farmers' decisions to retire, which has important policy implications.


Lawsuits seeking gay and lesbian marriage equality are piling up — more than seventy separate cases in thirty-two jurisdictions as of this writing — and advocates are racing to the Supreme Court to see which case might settle the question for the whole nation. As these cases move up swiftly through the federal courts, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see how the Justices can avoid a final reckoning on the question of same-sex marriage during their October 2014 term.This Essay suggests that political process theory provides the most democratically legitimate justification for the Supreme Court to step in and resolve the question of same-sex marriage for the whole country, as it seems increasingly likely to do, at a time when a majority of states still outlaw the practice. In focusing on same-sex couples' right to marry, courts and commentators have largely overlooked the history of how and why the mini-DOMAs were enacted. The history and circumstances surrounding the twenty-eight mini-DOMAs that are embedded in state constitutions deserve a more prominent examination in federal marriage litigation.Collectively, these laws represent a troubling failure of the political process. By strong-arming marriage discrimination into state constitutions — which typically are far more difficult to change than ordinary statutes — during a relatively brief period from 1998 to 2012, mini-DOMA proponents intended to freeze marriage discrimination in place and put it beyond the reach of ordinary democratic deliberation, future legislative reconsideration, and state judicial review. And so the remaining mini-DOMAs should receive searching, skeptical judicial review of their substance because they are the products of a constitutionally suspect lawmaking process.


The structure of G. V. Florovsky's concept of neopatristic synthesis is analyzed and reassessed here in light of the current state of philosophy and theology. As a result, the concept receives a new configuration, in which its core is formed by the ancient Orthodox idea of the Living Tradition, understood as the union of the work of the Church Fathers and the hesychast practice. As for the idea of Christian Hellenism, which formed the core of the previous configuration, it has been relegated to the periphery of the concept. This article reveals the philosophic potential of the concept that has not yet been realized—its hermeneutical aspects, its connection with the mainstream of phenomenology, and so forth. The new configuration is then projected onto the situation of Russian philosophy. I demonstrate that the concept possessed vast conceptual, epistemological, and methodological resources capable of stimulating the creation of a new philosophic formation that would be distinct from the modernist thinking of the Silver Age. However, those resources have remained untapped.


In April 2020, the US government sent economic impact payments (EIPs) directly to households, as part of its measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic. We characterize these stimulus checks as a wealth shock for households and examine their effect on retail trading in Bitcoin. We find a significant increase in Bitcoin buy trades for the modal EIP amount of $1,200. The rise in Bitcoin trading is highest among individuals without families and at exchanges catering to nonprofessional investors. We estimate that the EIP program has a significant but modest effect on the US dollar–Bitcoin trading pair, increasing trade volume by about 3.8 percent. Trades associated with the EIPs result in a slight rise in the price of Bitcoin of 7 basis points. Nonetheless, the increase in trading is small compared to the size of the stimulus check program, representing only 0.02 percent of all EIP dollars. We repeat our analysis for other countries with similar stimulus programs and find an increase in Bitcoin buy trades in these currencies. Our findings highlight how wealth shocks affect retail trading.


An air bypass voice prosthesis and the refinement of a surgical technique has been developed. It involves a one-stage, low retrograde cervical esophagostomy that is functionally and cosmetically feasible since it permits hidden use of the device, while eliminating fistula tract stenosis and aspiration. Most importantly, it provides a natural speech mechanism without any training period. Patients can regain immediate speech following installation of a voice prosthesis with a minimum of maintenance required. Ultimately, they have demonstrated greater self-reliance and developed a high degree of self-esteem which has enabled them to resume a normal way of life.


The kinetics of Na tracer fluxes were reinvestigated in isolated epithelia of frog skin in which the unstirred layers of the corium were removed. The rate of appearance of 22Na in the basolateral solution (JNa13) conformed to a single exponential for tracer buildup with a mean t1/2 of 1.9 min. The Na transport pool labeled isotopically from the apical solution was about 40 neq/cm2 for epithelia bathed in either a chloride or sulfate Ringer solution. Basolateral-to-apical solution unidirectional Na flux (JNa31) was low, averaging 0.7 microA/cm2 and remained low for 40 min of ouabain treatment of the epithelia. In agreement with electrophysiological data, ouabain at 10(-4) M caused an acute inhibition (less than 1 min) of the Na efflux at the basolateral membrane (JNa23), falling to 40.6 and 26.7% of control for epithelia bathed in Cl and SO4 Ringer, respectively. Although furosemide exerted little or no consistent effect on the Na flux of control epithelia, this drug in ouabain-poisoned epithelia caused a substantial inhibition of a neutral, chloride-dependent, ouabain-insensitive Na efflux. It is suggested that ouabain "induces" a neutral mechanism of Na transport at the basolateral membrane of the cells that is chloride dependent and furosemide sensitive.


ABSTRACT Aim WeChat is the most popular social media platform in mainland China, with over 1 billion active users. Although social media is widely used in professional healthcare education in western countries, research on WeChat-based education in healthcare in mainland China is disparate and not systematic. The current study seeks to address this gap. Method A scoping review was conducted to systematically describe studies of WeChat use in professional healthcare education. A comprehensive search involving three international databases in English and Chinese literature was conducted in April 2019. Articles were retained in this study if they were original studies that used WeChat as a tool to facilitate healthcare education in mainland China. Results 25 studies met the inclusion criteria and the majority of studies were either experimental or quasi-experimental. WeChat was used in both university settings and hospital settings. Hybrid education–which integrates WeChat education and face-to-face education–was more common in university settings, whereas hospitals used a combination of hybrid and WeChat-only strategies. Significant heterogeneity was observed regarding the type of accounts and methods for delivering content and facilitating online conversations. A majority of studies found positive outcomes with WeChat education. Conclusions This scoping review addressed a large gap in knowledge about the usage of WeChat in professional healthcare education. Of the existing studies identified, we observed considerable promise for future practice. We provide additional suggestions for conducting future research involving patients and other helping professionals in healthcare education to expand the usage of WeChat.


The therapeutic efficacy of active immunization with B16‐F10.9 melanoma cells transfected with syngeneic major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class‐l genes, modified by infection with Newcastle Disease virus (NDV) or modified by both treatments, was compared. B16‐F10.9 tumor‐bearing mice were treated at various stages of tumor growth and metastasis with irradiated, modified tumor‐cell vaccines. Irradiated tumor cells and H‐2Db transfectants did not stimulate anti‐tumor immunity while H‐2Kb transfectants and NDV‐modified F10.9 cells showing low and high expression of MHC class‐l genes efficiently prevented metastasis of small established tumors. NDV‐modified parental‐cell vaccines functioned optimally and improved overall survival by about 60%, also at early stages of metastasis establishment. A synergistic effect of H‐2Kb expression and virus modification on rejection of micrometastases was observed in mice bearing advanced tumors. Postoperative vaccination of mice carrying multiple metastases with NDV‐modified vaccines caused significant, but incomplete, reduction of metastatic tumor load. The therapeutic effect of NDV‐modified tumor vaccines was dependent on multiple immune mechanisms. Depletion of CD8, CD4 or NK cells by in vivo treatment with monoclonal antibodies reversed the immunotherapeutic effects of the vaccine. Thus, tumor xenogenization and gene modification may act synergistically to vaccinate against advanced tumors, while single modalities can effectively vaccinate against metastasis at early stages of tumor growth.


This scientific detective story is the first book which explains clearly the science used by paleontologists, and the new, cutting-edge techniques that led to the discovery of Seismosaurus, the longest dinosaur yet known--and possibly the largest land animal to have ever lived. Gillette's first-person account of the project answers the most frequently asked questions about Seismosaurus: How was it discovered? How do we know it is a new species? How did it die? Part catalogue of the workings of paleontological science in the 1990s, the book also illustrates the exciting collaboration between Gillette, the chemists and physicists who helped to reconstruct Seismosaurus.


The essays collected in this volume explore the power of the medieval bishop through the neglected and problematic lens of personality, tackling the construction and presentation of medieval personalities by historians and medieval writers in an interdisciplinary manner.The question of personality is a problematic one, beset by complications of cultural distance, the layers of the past, and the limitations of the source material.Recognising these difficulties, this volume draws together character sketches based upon historical narratives and a range of sources, including architecture, liturgical manuscripts, chronicles, and hagiographical material, to show a multifaceted range of means by which historians can construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct episcopal power through the person of the bishop.Building on a previous volume of essays, Episcopal Power and Local Society in Medieval Europe, 900-1400, which examined the construction, augmentation, and expression of episcopal power in local society, this second volume seeks to uncover the impact of the personalities behind that power. Through essays dealing with the construction of cultural and political personalities, the shadows they cast, and the contexts that forged them, this volume brings to life the careers of bishops across medieval Europe from c. 900 to c. 1480. This geographical range and broad time span throws up the similarity in applications and benefits of interdisciplinarity which can be applied to ecclesiastical history, and presents a fascinating range of case studies for consideration.


Multiple-beam interference within wave plates is investigated in terms of the detrimental effects it produces in the data of stellar spectropolarimetry. It is noted that spectral fringe structures occur in the phase delay, the polarizance and, for Pancharatnam designs, the reference axis of the wave plate. The natures of the problems are exposed by considering typical wave plates and experimental procedures used in linear and circular spectropolarimetry. It is demonstrated that the chief bane of accurate measurements is the presence of polarizance fringes, but which can be alleviated by the choice of experimental procedure. For spectral circular polarization studies, problems of cross-talk from any linear polarization present in the source are especially severe. In principle the effects of fringing can be removed in data reductions by calibration measurements of a set of linear polarization standard stars displaying different vibration azimuths and, for circular polarization measurements, knowledge of the linear polarization characteristics of the investigated star must also be known.


Gap junctions, composed of connexins, provide a pathway of direct intercellular communication for the diffusion of small molecules between cells. Evidence suggests that connexins act as tumor suppressors. We showed previously that expression of connexin-43 and connexin-32 in an indolent prostate cancer cell line, LNCaP, resulted in gap junction formation and growth inhibition. To elucidate the role of connexins in the progression of prostate cancer from a hormone-dependent to -independent state, we introduced connexin-43 and connexin-32 into an invasive, androgen-independent cell line, PC-3. Expression of these proteins in PC-3 cells resulted in intracellular accumulation. Western blot analysis revealed a lack of Triton-insoluble, plaque-assembled connexins. In contrast to LNCaP cells, connexins could not be cell surface-biotinylated and did not reside in the cell surface derived endocytic vesicles, in PC-3 cells, suggesting impaired trafficking to the cell surface. Intracellular accumulation of connexins was observed in several androgen-independent prostate cancer cell lines. Transient expression of α-catenin facilitated the trafficking of both connexins to the cell surface and induced gap junction assembly. Our results suggest that impaired trafficking, and not the inability to form gap junctions, is the major cause of communication deficiency in human prostate cancer cell lines.


Neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), ubiquitously distributed in the human brain, are implicated in various neurophysiological processes and in the pathophysiology and/or treatment strategies of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, Tourette's syndrome, epilepsy, schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, as well as being particularly affected in tobacco dependence/withdrawal. In the past two decades, researchers have developed an extensive series of radioligands for the assessment of nAChRs in vivo through emission tomography, PET and SPECT. Several radioligands, derivatives of A-85380: 2-[(18)F]FA, 6-[(18)F]FA and 5-[(123)I]IA, are now being employed for the evaluation of nAChR in humans with PET and SPECT. Displaying better imaging properties than (11)C-nicotine and a better toxicity profile than epibatidine analogs, they have allowed quantification of thalamic nAChR in the human brain. Nevertheless, A-85380 derivatives still exhibit slow brain kinetics and a moderate signal-to-noise ratio. Current research efforts on the part of PET/SPECT radiochemists, therefore, have focused on development of new, highly specific and highly selective nAChR radioligands with improved brain kinetics that are able to localize high-affinity nAChRs in vivo. Key examples of new PET/SPECT ligands that are derived from several different structural classes are discussed along with a review of their chemical as well as their in vitro and/or in vivo properties. In particular, new PET nAChR radioligands will be examined that either present faster brain kinetics allowing simple and reliable quantification approaches or higher binding potentials suitable for the evaluation of extrathalamic nAChR.


This thesis describes the development of a model and subsequent new catalyst systems for zirconium catalysed ethylene oligomerisation. The developed model predicts that conditions which favour transition states for β-hydrogen elimination, (i.e. coordinatively unsaturated metal centre, a low lying metal orbital and high Lewis acidity), would lead to better oligomerisation catalysts. This led to the in situ catalytic testing of hemi-labile, bidentate, chelate ligands containing atoms of varying donor ability, i.e. thioacetylacetones, Schiffs bases, picolinic acid and β-aminoketones.
In situ catalytic tests using β-aminoketones (I), the primary ligands in this study, have shown them to be particularly effective in promoting oligomerisation and catalytic testing has shown for the first time the ability to control reactivity and oligomer distribution in zirconium based catalyst systems by variation of ligand substituents. Bulky substituents, R² & R³, reduce catalytic activities. Electron withdrawing groups on the amine (imine in complexes) or ligand backbone increase reactivity. The use of bis-β-aminoketone zirconium complexes (II) resulted in catalytic systems with the highest activity and average oligomer weight. Activity variations between the in situ catalytic testing of free β-aminoketones and preformed complexes have been explained through complex ligand-cocatalyst interactions. It is proposed that a decreased amine basicity reduces the tendency for amine coordination which increases metal centre Lewis acidity thereby resulting in lower average oligomer weight.
Synthetic work has led to the isolation and characterisation of a number of new co- ordination, organometallic and cationic zirconium complexes containing β-aminoketones. Alkyl-zirconium complexes were synthesised by the reaction of free β-aminoketones with the homoleptic tetraalkyl, ZrBz₄. Cationic complexes were synthesised by partial protolysis of the alkyl complexes using PhNMe₂H+BPh₄-. This work introduces a new area of ligand stabilised, highly Lewis acidic, alkyl zirconium chemistry.
VT-NMR studies have led to the identification of stability regimes for alkylated, bis-ligand complexes and indicated that β-aminoketones function as bidentate chelate ligands in most complexes. Electron withdrawing groups on or near the imine led to hemi-labile systems with nitrogen dissociation. Cis-benzyl ligands are found to have an average bonding environment somewhat between a true sigma or dihapto bond with a stronger dihapto character at lower temperatures. Benzyl bonding reflects variations in metal centre Lewis acidity. Cationic, bis-β-aminoketone zirconium complexes contain η²-bound benzyl.
In situ NMR catalysis experiments have shown complex cocatalyst/ligand interactions which depend on the relative basicity of β-aminoketone protons. β-Aminoketones remain bonded to zirconium via oxygen during catalysis and ethylene insertion occurs at zirconium. The new catalytic systems oligomerise ethylene under very mild conditions, RT and 1 atm ethylene.
Interestingly this work has clearly demonstrated that many of the features and catalytic controls currently being developed in zirconium metallocene (and related systems) based catalysts may be achieved more simply from zirconium coordination complexes and their organometallic derivatives.


BACKGROUND
Children of parents with intellectual impairment are thought to be at risk for poor social-emotional well-being. This study investigated the relationship between maternal intellectual impairment and poor child social-emotional well-being.

METHOD
Secondary analysis of data from waves 2-4 of the Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Social-emotional well-being was measured by maternal report at Waves 2-4, with teacher and child self-report at Wave 4. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted.

RESULTS
Unadjusted, maternal intellectual impairment was associated with an elevated risk of overall poor social-emotional well-being at ages 3 and 5, but not at age 7. After controlling for individual, family and environmental characteristics, no statistically significant association was found between maternal intellectual impairment and poor child social-emotional well-being.

CONCLUSIONS
Children of mothers with intellectual impairment are more likely than their peers to be exposed to adverse living conditions. These living conditions may explain, at least in part, why these children face a heightened risk of poor social-emotional well-being at ages 3 and 5. Improving the living conditions of mothers with intellectual impairment may offer a pathway to child social-emotional well-being.


Recent studies have been reported for coeliac disease a new prevalence: 1:200 in Europe, 1:184 in Italy. These improvements have been possible for new diagnostic methods and techniques available today: antigliadin, antireticulin and antiendomysium antibodies. These serologic markers have been detected, in recent advances, new clinical presentations for coeliac disease: not only typical gastrointestinal symptoms (diarrhea, recurrent abdominal pain, etc), but many atypical symptoms have been described: sideropenic anemia, short stature, growth retardation, dermatitis herpetiformis, small alterations, alopecia, etc. New groups of patients have been also identified: some patients, clinically asymptomatic, with positive serology and a small intestinal biopsy suggestive for coeliac disease; they have shown histopathologic improvement with gluten free diet ("silent" coeliac disease). Another interesting group consists of asymptomatic patients with a positive serology for AGA and AEA antibodies, but normal gastrointestinal biopsy with free diet; they develop later in life, mucosal atrophy and normalization after gluten free diet ("latent" coeliac disease). It must be emphasized that classes of antibodies (in association with peroneal biopsy) have been identified in the last years, new clinical presentations of coeliac disease and new associations with other autoimmune pathologies.


Illustrations vii Preface ix Introduction: Nation-States in History 1 John A. Hall PART 1 NATIONAL IDENTITIES Chapter 1: Nationalism, Popular Sovereignty, and the Liberal Democratic State 29 Bernard Yack Chapter 2: What States Can Do with Nations: An Iron Law of Nationalism and Federation? 51 Brendan O'Leary Chapter 3: A State without a Nation? Russia after Empire 79 Anatoly M. Khazanov Chapter 4: The Return of the Coercive State: Behavioral Control in Multicultural Society 106 Peter Baldwin PART 2 STATE SECURITY Chapter 5: States, Security Function, and the New Global Forces 139 T. V. Paul Chapter 6: States and War in Africa 166 Jeffrey Herbst PART 3 STATE AUTONOMY Chapter 7: National Legislatures in Common Markets: Autonomy in the European Union and Mercosur 183 Francesco Duina Chapter 8: The Tax State in the Information Age 213 Christopher Hood Chapter 9: States, Politics, and Globalization: Why Institutions Still Matter 234 John L. Campbell Chapter 10: Globalization, the State, and Industrial Relations: Common Challenges, Divergent Transitions 260 Rudra Sil PART 4 STATE CAPACITY Chapter 11: The State after State Socialism: Poland in Comparative Perspective 291 Grzegorz Ekiert Chapter 12: Rotten from Within: Decentralized Predation and Incapacitated State 321 Minxin Pei Conclusion What States Can Do Now 350 G. John Ikenberry Contributors 373 Index 377


BACKGROUND
Protein consumed after resistance exercise increases postexercise muscle protein synthesis rates. To date, dairy protein has been studied extensively, with little known about the capacity of other protein-dense foods to augment postexercise muscle protein synthesis rates.

OBJECTIVE
We aimed to compare protein digestion and absorption kinetics, postprandial amino acid availability, anabolic signaling, and the subsequent myofibrillar protein synthetic response after the ingestion of milk compared with beef during recovery from resistance-type exercise.

DESIGN
In crossover trials, 12 healthy young men performed a single bout of resistance exercise. Immediately after cessation of exercise, participants ingested 30 g protein by consuming isonitrogenous amounts of intrinsically l-[1-(13)C]phenylalanine-labeled beef or milk. Blood and muscle biopsy samples were collected at rest and after exercise during primed continuous infusions of l-[ring-(2)H5]phenylalanine and l-[ring-3,5-(2)H2]tyrosine to assess protein digestion and absorption kinetics, plasma amino acid availability, anabolic signaling, and subsequent myofibrillar protein synthesis rates in vivo in young men.

RESULTS
Beef protein-derived phenylalanine appeared more rapidly in circulation compared with milk ingestion (P < 0.001). The availability of phenylalanine during the 5-h postexercise period tended to be higher after beef (64% ± 3%) ingestion than after milk ingestion (57% ± 3%; P = 0.08). Both beef and milk ingestion were followed by an increase in the phosphorylation of mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 and 70-kDa S6 protein kinase 1 during postexercise recovery. Milk ingestion increased myofibrillar protein synthesis rates to a greater extent than did beef ingestion during the 0- to 2-h postexercise phase (P = 0.013). However, the increase in myofibrillar protein synthesis rates did not differ between milk and beef ingestion during the entire 0- to 5-h postexercise phase (P = 0.114).

CONCLUSIONS
Both milk and beef ingestion augment the postexercise myofibrillar protein synthetic response in young men, with a stronger stimulation of myofibrillar protein synthesis during the early postprandial stage after milk ingestion. This trial was registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01578590.


Chest pain is a frequent symptom in patients with pulmonary hypertension of any etiology. Its pathophysiology has not been clearly established, the proposed causes are ischemia due to increased right ventricle wall stress, transient increased pulmonary hypertension resulting in acute pulmonary artery dilatation and external compression of the left main coronary artery (LMCA) by a dilated pulmonary artery. We report and discuss here three cases where the association between chest pain and compression of the LMCA by a dilated pulmonary artery could be shown, and they were treated with coronary stenting.


This study focuses on development of three-roving yarn production system that is inspired from siro-spun technology. Roving funnel and delivery cylinder used in siro-spun technology are redesigned for three-roving yarn production and attached on conventional system. Three-roving yarns produced in ring spinning machine are compared with three plied yarns in terms of physical, mechanical and structural properties. For better assessment of this new system, different raw material types are used in yarn production. Results show that three-roving yarns have better hairiness values and similar mechanical properties for all raw material types. However, unevenness still needs to be improved by further developments on this new system.


At the end of 2010 there are more than 100 new preferential trade agreements being contemplated. At the same time there are approximately 200 existing trade agreements whose provisions leave large additional potential gains from trade on the table. Despite these potential benefits, there appears to be little enthusiasm for recontracting efforts centred on existing agreements. This suggests that there is an inefficient deployment of scarce negotiating resources. Exceptions do exist, such as the European Union, which has strong institutional mechanisms - including, in particular, the Commission - that foster further market integration. While the EU's institutional model may not be suitable for all preferential agreements, incorporating a formal recontracting mechanism into new agreements will provide opportunities to garner additional gains from trade in the future.


For years research has focused on ways to allow remote access via standard communication networks to unique or expensive structures. With the growth of the Internet, one finds more and more devices connected to it. Despite the fact that one may spy on other people with hundreds of cameras, it is currently possible to interact only with a few robots, which often have restricted access. To use a camera over the web, the user usually just sits and watches or sometimes has the ability to choose different camera orientation/views. With a robot, you have strong interaction. For instance, with a mobile robot equipped with an arm you can move along the floor and grasp objects. Discovering the control interface, the user has to understand rapidly the goal of the site and what the possibilities of the robot are in order to achieve them. The article analyses one year of netsurfer behavior regarding the use of KhepOnTheWeb, which was realized to demonstrate some possibilities of remote control of a Khepera mobile robot. After one year of access, we performed an analysis of the log files in order to understand the behavior of the public facing such an installation. This analysis was rather difficult because of the large amount of data involved, and specific software was developed in order to extract and present the relevant information. The goal of the project is presented, the hardware and software components of our robot installation are described, and the analysis of the web server log files is discussed. We also introduce another concept of a remote-controlled robot on the web.


A long-term (34-yr) crop rotation experiment being conducted at Indian Head, Saskatchewan, on a thin Black Chernozem with heavy clay texture, was used to assess the influence of fertilizer (N and P), sweetclover green manure, and alfalfa-bromegrass hay on yield trends of hard red spring wheat grown on wheat stubble in rotations of varying cropping intensity. When no fertilizer was applied, yields of wheat grown on wheat stubble trended downwards for fallowwheat-wheat, presumably due to increased soil erosion and declining fertility. Yield trends remained generally constant for unfertilized continuous wheat, perhaps because of less soil erosion. The inclusion of green manure in an unfertilized green manure-wheat-wheat rotation increased the yields of wheat grown on stubble compared to unfertilized fallow-wheat-wheat, but the yield trends were still negative. We speculated that this was because legumes do not provide any P to the system. The unfertilized fallow-wheat-wheat-hay-hay-hay system maintained stubble wheat yields at a generally constant level due to low soil erosion and because the hay-containing system markedly increased N-supplying power of the soil. The addition of N and P fertilizer at rates based on soil tests resulted in a positive divergence in yield trends of fallow-wheat-wheat and continuous wheat systems. We suggest that legumes require added P if they are to sustain crop production in a manner similar to that provided by responsible use of fertilizers.


For private equity (PE) funds, an initial public offering (IPO) is often an attractive portfolio company exit strategy. However, since the 2008 recession, PE exits typically have taken place over a significantly longer period—usually years after the IPO is launched. As a result, funds must deal with the complex set of public company considerations around executive compensation in the post-Dodd–Frank world, including shareholder advisory votes, shifting governance guidelines of proxy advisory firms such as Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis & Company (Glass Lewis), and the abrupt change that often occurs when the portfolio company ceases to be a "control" company. Before, during, and for sometime after the IPO, the PE sponsor will control the compensation committee. The authors believe that careful planning by committee members, begun well before the IPO is launched, can help committees avoid the significant executive compensation "traps" of Dodd–Frank.


The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the extent to which the use of YP[Dual rate] model for leasehold valuation actually reflects market conditions in practice in England. The qualitative research methodology is adopted where interviews have been conducted via face-to-face and phone with 105 purchasers of leasehold interests in the residential Cressington Heath neighbourhood of Liverpool in 2012. The analysis of the data has been facilitated by the use QSR NVIVO 10 to code the data. It has been established that purchasers of leasehold interests rarely make provision for an ASF in practice. Indeed, what actually happens is the direct opposite of what the model posits - purchasers borrow from banks to procure the property after which they commence paying back by instalments periodically. Also, there are other methods that can be used to make provision for future expenses but the use of the YP[Dual rate] model implicitly assumes that ASF is the only approach, which is unsustainable.Using the model for every leasehold valuation leads to undervaluation of such interests where investors do not actually use the ASF method in practice and the undervaluation is even more pronounced when taxation is introduced. The model should only be considered when a valuer is confronted with a practical situation where the ASF method is used or will be used by a leasehold investor. This study is based on empirical evidence and it is the first of its kind in the UK - arguments against or in favour of the use of the model tend to be theoretical or based on personal opinions uncorroborated with any empirical evidence.


Abstract The hydrodynamic effect of appendages for high-speed passenger vessels, such as Ro-Pax, Ro-Ro and cruiser vessels, is very severe and, therefore, it is essential to carry out the design of appendages for high-speed passenger vessels from the preliminary design stage to the final detail design stage through a full survey of the reference vessels together with sufficient technical investigation. Otherwise, many problems would be caused by mismatches between the appendages and the hull form. This paper investigates the design characteristics of some appendages, such as the side thruster, the shaft-strut, and the stern wedge, based on the design experience accumulated at Samsung, on CFD, and on model test results for high-speed passenger vessels. Further to this investigation, some practical and valuable design guidelines for such appendages are suggested.


This thesis is composed by three articles in seemingly unrelated fields. The first article is exploring the effects of short-sales constraints on the delay of information incorporation into stock prices. The second one is estimating the risk and risk-adjusted return of private equity funds. The last one is investigating whether stock price behaviors are temporarily different around the so-called price barriers. Although the topics are not connected, the methodologies are centered on a classical issue in empirical finance, the market beta. For short-sales constraints, the lagged market beta is used as a barometer to evaluate the price delays of stocks caused by the policy. For private equity funds, their beta is estimated by our new GMM-style methodology. In the last paper, we use the change of the contemporaneous beta to detect the price barriers and then evaluate the barrier effects.


Semantic user modeling techniques use a representation based on concepts that are linked to a Knowledge Base (KB). Current research uses Linked Open Data (LOD) because of its comprehensive interlinked datasets, which allow excellent cross-domain modeling capabilities. LOD semantic user profiles have been employed in the context of Social Networks, which require user's posts as input. Less attention has been paid to other domains for which input documents differ from short and concise posts. In this paper, we perform a comparative study of different LOD semantic user modeling techniques by taking different types of documents as input: short, medium, and long texts. We selected recommending academic documents based on modeling the user's research interests as the evaluation scenario. Academic documents' titles, abstracts, and the body of text were used, respectively, for short, medium, and long documents. Our results showed that expansion strategies work best for short and medium documents while filtering strategies are more appropriate when the whole document is used as input. Finally, we explored diverse alternatives if documents did not include a summary or abstract, and we concluded that, in this case, the two best alternatives are a filtering strategy over the whole text and the use of TextRank algorithm to build a set of key sentences to be used as input of an expansion strategy.


In this paper results from an investigation focused on coke/iron reactions occurring in the hearth of a blast furnace, below the slag layer, are presented. In this region, as coke dissolves in the iron there is the potential for a mineral layer to form and persist at the coke/iron interface and inhibit the rate of coke dissolution. Key findings of the investigation include that the composition of the mineral layer was principally composed of oxides of aluminium and calcium, present as various calcium aluminates and that the morphology of the layer profoundly affected the rate of carbon transfer. Follow‐up up studies on the kinetics of carbon transfer focussed on how the wetting and interfacial characteristics of iron on the calcium aluminates would affect iron penetration of the mineral layer are also reported and discussed as was a new material, called coke analogue, that could be used in the study of real industrial coke. Analysis of the wetting behaviour of liquid iron on alumina and the calcium aluminates investigated indicated that iron wetting of the mineral layer was not a key parameter in coke dissolution in iron for the coke composition studied. The brief details given for the coke analogue indicated that it did replicate coke dissolution behaviour in iron, though more experimental work is required to fully understand and exploit the potential of this material.


This paper investigates the impact of various encryption techniques (WEP-64, WEP-128 and WPA) on performance of wireless local area network for Windows operating systems (Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista) and for both TCP and UDP protocols. The parameters considered are throughput and response time. The results indicate that security mechanism does influence the wireless performance and different operating systems provide various results.


We study a new problem setting of information extraction (IE), referred to as text-to-table. In text-to-table, given a text, one creates a table or several tables expressing the main content of the text, while the model is learned from text-table pair data. The problem setting differs from those of the existing methods for IE. First, the extraction can be carried out from long texts to large tables with complex structures. Second, the extraction is entirely data-driven, and there is no need to explicitly define the schemas. As far as we know, there has been no previous work that studies the problem. In this work, we formalize text-to-table as a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) problem. We first employ a seq2seq model fine-tuned from a pre-trained language model to perform the task. We also develop a new method within the seq2seq approach, exploiting two additional techniques in table generation: table constraint and table relation embeddings. We consider text-to-table as an inverse problem of the well-studied table-to-text, and make use of four existing table-to-text datasets in our experiments on text-to-table. Experimental results show that the vanilla seq2seq model can outperform the baseline methods of using relation extraction and named entity extraction. The results also show that our method can further boost the performances of the vanilla seq2seq model. We further discuss the main challenges of the proposed task. The code and data are available at https://github.com/shirley-wu/text_to_table.


Paediatric obesity has significant physic, social and psychological implications. Childhood obesity is usually associated in adulthood with increased risk of type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular diseases. Aggregation of cardiometabolic risk factors is already observed at young ages, with a nonlinear association with enhancement of adiposity. Adiponectin is an adipokine that inhibits inflammation, oxidative stress and metabolic syndrome components, namely dyslipidaemia, high blood pressure and insulin resistance. Obesity has been associated with hypoadiponectinaemia in both adult and paediatric patients, which may contribute to co‐morbidities observed in these patients. Interventional studies that aim to tackle obesity reported controversial results. Although the general positive effect on weight loss, inflammatory and cardiometabolic markers has been studied, the impact of these interventional studies on adiponectin remains unclear. Some studies reported that the improvement in adiponectin might only occur in paediatric obese patients with great weight loss or intensive physical exercise; the magnitude of the changes in body composition appears to be of particular importance. A revision about the knowledge on the relation between adiponectin, inflammation and cardiometabolic risk factors in paediatric patients is performed; the impact of interventional studies on adiponectin levels and markers of cardiometabolic risk is also addressed.


Play is viewed as essential to learning and development in early years education and underpins curriculum guidance despite there being limited empirical evidence to support this viewpoint. Play is traditionally defined from an adult perspective which focuses on the observable act of play. However, the research in this thesis draws on children's perspectives of play which also gives insight into playfulness, the approach or attitude taken to an activity and it is this which is thought to facilitate learning. It has been shown that children use cues to define an activity as play and three of the studies employed experimental methodology to utilise these cues and create different practice conditions for children to carry out a convergent problem solving task. Results from these studies showed that children assigned to playful practice conditions exhibited superior performance when solving a task and behaviours conducive to learning compared to children in formal practice conditions. Furthermore, the cue of adult presence was shown to be critical in facilitating improved performance and learning behaviours although this seemed dependent upon whether individual children used the cue of adult presence in making play and not play distinctions.The final study sought to identify how the cue of adult presence might develop through examining adult-child interactions in the classroom environment. In addition, practitioners were interviewed about their understandings of play and learning to see how this might affect their interactions with children. Findings from this study showed that practitioners who were confident in their understanding of play and learning were more likely to provide children with choice and control in their activities and engage with children as play partners. Overall, the findings from this research contribute to the literature in this field by providing empirical evidence for the benefits of playful practice and have implications for practice in early years settings.


Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of group dialectical behavior therapy in the improvement of distress tolerance and emotion regulation among substance abusers. Method: A quasiexperimental study along with pretest-posttest and control group was used for the conduct of this study. The population of the study consisted of all addicts referring to addiction treatment center of Zahedshahr (Omid Center) in summer 2012. From among this population, the number of 28 addicts was selected via convenience sampling as the participants of the study and was randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. The participants responded to Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale and Distress Tolerance Scale as pretest, posttest, and follow-up test. The experimental group received group dialectical behavior therapy for 20 one-hour sessions whereas the control group received only Naltrexone drug. Results: The results showed that dialectical behavior therapy was effective in increasing distress tolerance and emotion regulation in substance abusers. Conclusion: Dialectical behavior therapy training can improve distress tolerance and emotion regulation, which could be the main reason for the continued use of drugs.


ABSTRACT Recent stratigraphic revisions of the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation of Petrified Forest National Park, in conjunction with precise and accurate documentation of fossil tetrapod occurrences, clarified the local biostratigraphy, with regional and global implications. A significant overlap between Adamanian and Revueltian faunas is rejected, as is the validity of the Lamyan sub-land vertebrate faunachron. The Adamanian–Revueltian boundary can be precisely placed within the lower Jim Camp Wash beds of the Sonsela Member and thus does not occur at the hypothesised Tr-4 unconformity. This mid-Norian faunal turnover, may coincide with a floral turnover, based on palynology studies and also on sedimentological evidence of increasing aridity. Available age constraints bracketing the turnover horizon are consistent with the age of the Manicouagan impact event. The rise of dinosaurs in western North America did not correspond to the Adamanian–Revueltian transition, and overall dinosauromorph diversity seems to have remained at a constant level across it. The paucity of detailed Late Triassic vertebrate biostratigraphic data and radioisotopic dates makes it currently impossible to either support or reject the existence of globally synchronous Late Triassic extinctions for tetrapods.


The circuit of myenteric interneurons that regulate excitatory input to longitudinal colonic muscle was identified using dispersed ganglia and longitudinal muscle strips with adherent myenteric plexus from rat distal colon. The preparations enabled measurement of neurotransmitter release from interneurons and/or excitatory motoneurons innervating longitudinal muscle. 1,1-Dimethyl-4-phenylpiperizinium (DMPP) and somatostatin were used to activate myenteric neurons in dispersed ganglia and muscle strips, respectively. DMPP-stimulated vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) release in dispersed ganglia was inhibited by [Met]enkephalin and bicuculline and augmented by naloxone and GABA, implying that inhibitory opioid and stimulatory GABA neurons regulate the activity of VIP interneurons. In muscle strips, VIP stimulated basal and augmented somatostatin-induced substance P (SP) release; the somatostatin-induced increase in SP release was inhibited by VIP-(10-28) and N G-nitro-l-arginine, implying that excitatory VIP neurons regulate tachykinin motoneurons innervating longitudinal muscle. Somatostatin inhibited [Met]enkephalin and stimulated VIP release; basal and somatostatin-stimulated VIP release were inhibited by [Met]enkephalin and bicuculline and augmented by naloxone and GABA, implying that inhibitory pathways linking somatostatin, opioid, and GABA neurons regulate VIP interneurons, which in turn regulate tachykinin and probably cholinergic motoneurons.


A sensitive electrochemical MIP sensor for salbutamol detection based on a graphene nanocomposite modified screen-printed carbon electrode was successfully demonstrated. Insertion of the graphene/ PEDOT:PSS layer prior to the MIP was aimed at enhancing the sensitivity of the sensor. Selection of a functional monomer was carried out using H-NMR titration and a computational calculation was used to further investigate the template-monomer interactions. The MIP layer was constructed on top of the highly conductive nanocomposite by co-electropolymerization of 3-aminophenylboronic acid and o-phenylenediamine in the presence of salbutamol. Using differential pulse voltammetry under optimal conditions, a linear response in the range of 1 nM to 1.2 mM, with an exceptional detection limit of 100 pM (S/N 1⁄4 3) was obtained. The established sensor exhibited good reproducibility, reusability and stability. Additionally, good selectivity in discriminating salbutamol from other structurally related compounds could also be realized. Determination of salbutamol in real swine meat and feed samples was also successfully carried out with good recovery results.


Preventing problem behavior requires an understanding of earlier factors that are amenable to intervention. The main goals of our prospective longitudinal study were to trace trajectories of child externalizing behavior between ages 3 and 10 years, and to identify patterns of developmentally significant child and parenting risk factors that differentiated pathways of problem behavior. Participants were 218 3-year-old boys and girls who were reassessed following the transition to kindergarten (age 5 – 6 years) and during the late school-age years (age 10). Mothers contributed ratings of children's externalizing behavior at all three time points. Children's self-regulation abilities and theory of mind were assessed during a laboratory visit, and parenting risk (frequent corporal punishment and low maternal warmth) was assessed using interview-based and questionnaire measures. Four developmental trajectories of externalizing behavior yielded the best balance of parsimony and fit with our longitudinal data and latent class growth analysis. Most young children followed a pathway marked by relatively low levels of symptoms that continued to decrease across the school-age years. Atypical trajectories marked chronically high, increasing, and decreasing levels of externalizing problems across early and middle childhood. Three-year-old children with low levels of effortful control were far more likely to show the chronic pattern of elevated externalizing problems than changing or low patterns. Early parental corporal punishment and maternal warmth, respectively, differentiated preschoolers who showed increasing and decreasing patterns of problem behavior compared to the majority of children. The fact that children's poor effortful regulation skills predicted chronic early onset problems reinforces the need for early childhood screening and intervention services.


A large landslide failed catastrophically along steep, 90-m (300-ft) high bluffs overlooking the waters of Puget Sound at Tacoma, Washington, in April of 1949, three days after the region was struck by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake. The area of failure was investigated to estimate the static and seismic stability of the pre-earthquake slope and to identify factors that contributed to the failure. Results of static analyses suggest that the slope was marginally stable and that high ground-water conditions would have significantly reduced slope stability. The Newmark analysis of dynamic (seismic) slope stability was used to calculate predicted inertial displacements for the landslide for a range of possible material property and ground-water conditions. Comparison of predicted displacements with a reported displacement suggests that the ground motion could have initiated the large-scale failure. Results of the study provide a basis for discussion and comparison of similar bluffs in the Puget Sound region that may be susceptible to catastrophic, earthquake-induced slope failure.


Supershear earthquakes are rare but powerful ruptures with devastating consequences. How quickly an earthquake rupture attains this speed, or for that matter decelerates from it, strongly affects high-frequency ground motion and the spatial extent of coseismic off-fault damage. Traditionally, studies of supershear earthquakes have focused on determining which fault segments sustained fully-grown supershear ruptures. Knowing that the rupture first propagated at subshear rupture speeds, these studies usually guessed an approximate location for the transition from subshear to supershear regimes. The rarity of confirmed supershear ruptures, combined with the fact that conditions for supershear transition are still debated, complicates the investigation of supershear transition in real earthquakes. Here, we find a unique signature of the location of a supershear transition: we show that, when a rupture accelerates towards supershear speed, the stress concentration abruptly shrinks, limiting the off-fault damage and aftershock productivity. First, we use theoretical fracture mechanics to demonstrate that, before transitioning to supershear, the stress concentration around the rupture tip shrinks, confining the region where damage & aftershocks are expected. Then, employing two different dynamic rupture modeling approaches, we confirm such reduction in stress concentration, further validating the expected signature in the transition region. We contrast these numerical and theoretical results with high-resolution aftershock catalogs for three natural supershear earthquakes, where we identify a small region with lower aftershock density near the supershear transition. Finally, using satellite optical image correlation techniques, we show that, for a fourth event, the transition zone is characterized by a diminution in the width of the damage zone. Our results demonstrate that the transition from subshear to supershear rupture can be clearly identified by a localized absence of aftershocks, and a decrease in off-fault damage, due to a transient reduction of the stress intensity at the rupture tip.


Introduction: A novel non-invasive blood-based cell-free DNA (cfDNA) analysis incorporating genomic and epigenomic assessment has demonstrated high sensitivity and specificity in patients with newly diagnosed colorectal cancer (CRC) (Kim, et al. CCR, 2019). Using an improved epigenomic analysis, we tested a new cohort of individuals with either a negative colonoscopy for advanced neoplasia (CRC or advanced adenoma) or newly diagnosed early-stage CRC. Methods: Whole blood samples were collected from 162 patients with a known diagnosis of CRC (pre-operative; 20 Stage I; 98 Stage II; 39 Stage II; 5 Stage IV), 38 self-declared cancer-free donors, and 205 individuals who were screen-negative for advanced neoplasia by colonoscopy. 5-8mL of plasma was isolated and total cfDNA was extracted and partitioned based on methylation level. Sequencing libraries were prepared and enriched using an integrated genomic and epigenomic cfDNA panel (Guardant Health, Redwood City, CA, USA). Sequencing results were used to analyze genomic, methylation, and fragmentomic signals. By using a thermodynamic model to approximate the physical binding process of methylation partitioning, modeling cfDNA fragmentation with increased resolution, and training on colonoscopy screen-negative samples, we improved the performance of the cfDNA epigenomic analysis. A training cohort of 117 colonoscopy screen-negative controls, 38 self-declared cancer-free controls, and 49 CRC patients (10 Stage I; 21 Stage II; 13 Stage III; 5 Stage IV) was used to train a linear model to combine these multimodal signals. The same cohort was used to establish the classification threshold prior to generating results for any of the validation samples. Results: The assay performance was tested on a blinded held-out cohort of 113 CRC patients (10 Stage I; 77 Stage II; 26 Stage III) and 88 colonoscopy screen-negative controls. Median age was 66 years (39-86) for CRC patients (52% female) and 57 years (20-84) in the colonoscopy screen-negative cohort (73% female). Overall sensitivity for CRC detection was 90.3% (90% Stage I; 88% Stage II; 96% Stage III) and specificity was 96.6%. We define a per sample 'signal-to-noise-ratio9 (SNR) score as the number of standard deviations (SD) from the mean model score observed in the colonoscopy screen-negative cohort. In these terms, our cfDNA detection threshold is 3.8 SD above the mean. The median SNR observed per stage was 6.8 SD (1.2 - 8.6) for Stage I, 6.9 SD (-0.18 - 8.6) for Stage II, and 7.3 SD (2.4 - 8.6) for Stage III. Conclusion: These results provide further support that an integrated genomic and epigenomic cfDNA assay consistently provides sufficient sensitivity and specificity for clinical detection of early-stage CRC. A prospective CRC screening study in a larger cohort of participants is needed to further validate assay performance. Citation Format: Oscar Westesson, Haley Axelrod, Jason Dean, Yupeng He, Paul Sample, Elena Zotenko, Ruth McCole, Mohit Goel, Charbel Eid, Jessica Kurata, Yu Kong, Anna Hartwig, Matthew Snyder, Will Greenleaf, Victoria M. Raymond, Darya Chudova, Ariel Jaimovich, AmirAli Talasaz. Integrated genomic and epigenomic cell-free DNA (cfDNA) analysis for the detection of early-stage colorectal cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr 2316.


This exploratory study proposes the use of artificial neural networks to analyze whole brain fMRI data. Because fMRI data is dimensionally exorbitant, the first step is to reduce the amount of data to a tractable size, which is accomplished using probabilistic independent component analysis (PICA). Then data enters a simple back propagation feed forward neural network. This network outputs correct predictions above chance level in a different sample of subjects. More interestingly, it is found that hidden nodes segregate and concentrate different, but coherent, brain networks, which are the target of interpretations to support cognitive processes during the assessment of brands' logos.


This paper examines the emergence and acquisition of marked accusative objects (Differential Object Marking, DOM, Bossong, 1991) in the spontaneous production of seven early Spanish-English simultaneous bilinguals (henceforth, 2L1) with different linguistic environments. The main finding is that the 2L1 group examined did not acquire differentially marked objects in the period studied, up to 3;6, nor did they behave similarly to Spanish monolingual children (L1) acquiring DOM (Montrul, 2011; Rodriguez-Mondonedo, 2008). The current results support previous claims that link protracted development and incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2008; Montrul and Sanchez-Walker, 2013). Tentatively, this study concludes that under reduced input conditions, 2L1 develop core aspects of their language, such as accusative and dative structures, but cannot acquire language-specific properties, such as the acquisition of the [person] feature needed for DOM in Spanish.


Alzheimer's disease (AD) and many other neurodegenerative disorders belong to the family of protein misfolding diseases. These diseases are characterized by the deposition of insoluble protein aggregates containing an enriched β-sheet structure. To evaluate PET amyloid-imaging tracer [11C]BF-227 as an agent for in vivo detection of various kinds of misfolded protein, a [11C]BF-227 PET study was performed in patients with various protein misfolding diseases, including AD, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) and GerstmannSträussler-Scheinker disease (GSS). BF-227 binds to β-amyloid fibrils with high affinity. Most of the AD patients showed prominent retention of [11C]BF-227 in the neocortex. In addition, neocortical retention of BF-227 was observed in the subjects with mild cognitive impairment who converted to AD during follow-up. DLB patients had elevated [11C]BF-227 uptake in the neocortex. However, FTD and sCJD patients showed no cortical retention of [11C]BF-227. Patients with multiple system atrophy had elevated BF-227 binding in the putamen. Finally, GSS patients had elevated BF-227 uptake in the cerebellum and other brain regions. This chapter confirms that BF-227 can selectively bind to α-synuclein and prion protein deposits using postmortem brain samples. Based on these findings, [11C]BF-227 is not necessarily specific for β-amyloid in AD patients. However, this tracer could be used to detect various types of protein aggregates in the brain. Kazuhiko Yanai Tohoku University, Japan DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-3604-0.ch025


Levels of serum lipid bound sialic acid (LSA) were determined in lung cancer and the inflammatory reaction associated with pneumonia, rheumatoid arthritis and surgical wounding. The mean levels of serum LSA were raised in all these disorders and levels were closely correlated with serum alpha 1-acid glycoprotein (AGP) r = 0.9. Levels of AGP and LSA rose and fell in parallel following cholecystectomy. The major influence on the concentration of serum lipid bound sialic acid is the intensity of the response to inflammation.


BACKGROUND
Stiff-person syndrome (SPS) is an immune-mediated central nervous system disorder characterized by fluctuating muscle stiffness, disabling spasms, and heightened sensitivity to external stimuli. Up to 80% of patients with SPS have anti-glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) antibodies in the serum or cerebral spinal fluid (CSF). Whether these antibodies are clinically relevant and correlate with disease severity is unknown.

OBJECTIVE
To correlate anti-GAD antibody titers in the serum and CSF of patients with SPS with the degree of clinical severity.

DESIGN
Patients studied the last 6 years.

SETTING
The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD.

PATIENTS
Sixteen patients with typical SPS and elevated serum anti-GAD antibody titers.

INTERVENTIONS
Antibody titers in serum and CSF were measured by radioimmunoassay, and the intrathecal anti-GAD-specific IgG production was calculated.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Comparison of antibody titers with stiffness index and heightened sensitivity scores based on scales that reliably measure disease severity.

RESULTS
The mean disease duration was 11 years (range, 5-30 years). The mean anti-GAD antibody titer in the serum was 51 500 U/mL (range, 24 000-200 000 U/mL); and in the CSF, 181 U/mL (range, 30-400 U/mL). A 10-fold increased intrathecal production of GAD-specific IgG antibodies was noted. No correlation was found between antibody titers in serum or CSF with disease severity. In 4 patients, the anti-GAD antibody titers measured serially during a 2-year period did not correlate with clinical fluctuations.

CONCLUSIONS
In patients with SPS, the anti-GAD antibody titers in serum and CSF do not correlate with disease severity or duration. Anti-GAD antibodies are an excellent marker for SPS, but monitoring their titers during the course of the disease may not be of practical value.


This work proposes to use the photographic capture-recapture technique associated with the GPS positioning (Global Positioning System) to estimate the population and to evaluate the movement of free-roaming dogs in public spaces. An observer on a motorcycle traveled all the streets of Jardim Ipanema and part of Dona Amelia neighborhoods in Aracatuba, SP, totaling a 1.3 Km2 area covered on two days, with a one-week interval between them. The free-roaming dogs were photographed and their geographical locations were determined using GPS, and this geographic record was then used to estimate the spatial and temporal distribution of free-roaming dogs in the neighborhood. A total of 77 dogs were found on the streets, 21 of which were photographed more than once (photo-recaptured). The number of free-roaming dogs was estimated from the capture rate using a linear regression model, revealing a population of 76 animals, corresponding to 7.5% of the canine population living in the neighborhood. The results indicated a higher concentration of free-roaming dogs in a certain neighborhood region that has unpaved streets and most houses had no walls. Furthermore, the highest number of dogs was observed early in the day (between 7 and 9 a.m.) and that, among the dogs observed moving through the neighborhood streets, the longest distance traveled was 520m. It is concluded that the proposed methodology is an efficient tool and can be used when planning public health activities.


BACKGROUND
Antiretroviral therapy (ART) significantly reduces tuberculosis (TB) incidence among persons with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), but the safety and effectiveness of concomitant treatment for both diseases remain unclear.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the impact of ART and anti-tuberculosis treatment on survival and risk of adverse events (AE) among co-infected individuals.

METHODS
In a retrospective cohort study, clinical data were collected from 618 TB-HIV patients treated with rifampin, isoniazid and pyrazinamide ± ethambutol between 1 January 1995 and 31 December 2003. Patients were categorized into two groups: highly active ART (HAART) or no ART. Different HAART regimens were evaluated. Bivariate analysis, multivariate logistic regression and survival analysis using Cox proportional hazards regression were used.

RESULTS
One-year mortality was lower for patients receiving HAART (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 0.17, 95%CI 0.09-0.31) compared to no ART. HAART increased the risk of AE (aHR 2.08, 95%CI 1.29-3.36). The odds of AE when receiving a ritonavir + saquinavir HAART regimen was eight-fold higher compared to no ART (OR 8.31, 95%CI 3.04-22.69), while efavirenz-based HAART was not associated with a significantly increased risk of AE (OR 1.42, 95%CI 0.76-2.65).

CONCLUSION
HIV patients with TB have significantly better survival if they receive HAART during anti-tuberculosis treatment. Efavirenz-based HAART is associated with fewer AEs than protease inhibitor-based HAART.


This Perspectives on Practice manuscript focuses on an innovation associated with "Engaging Teachers in the Powerful Combination of Mathematical Modeling and Social Justice: The Flint Water Task" from Volume 7, Issue 2 of MTE. The Flint Water Task has shown great promise in achieving the dual goals of exploring mathematical modeling while building awareness of social justice issues. This Perspectives on Practice article focuses on two adaptations of the task—gallery walks and What I Know, What I Wonder, What I Learned (KWL) charts—that we have found to enhance these learning opportunities. We found that the inclusion of a gallery walk supported our students in the development of their mathematical modeling skills by enhancing both the mathematical analyses of the models and the unpacking of assumptions. The KWL chart helps students document their increase in knowledge of the social justice issues surrounding the water crisis. Using the mathematical modeling cycle to explore social justice issues allows instructors to bring humanity into the mathematics classroom.


Branching tube flows are examined, for one mother to two, three or more daughter tubes. The case of many daughters (abrupt multi-branching) models blood flow through an arteriovenous malformation in the brain, while that of very few daughters (gradual branching) applies elsewhere in physiology and surgical grafting, as well as other applications including industrial ones. Theory and computation are presented for two- and three-dimensional motions, under the viscous and inviscid effects of small changes in mass flux between the daughter tubes, area expansion and turning of the flow. Specific configurations for which flow solutions are obtained are (a) with two large daughters, (b) with one small daughter/side branch, and (c) with multiple small daughters. The numerous physical mechanisms acting concern overall upstream influence and through-flow, and flow separation and criteria for its avoidance, as well as criteria for the amount of turning and area expansion possible without energy loss and other factors associated with separation, and the role of the branching geometry versus that of the mass-flux distribution in the daughters. In particular, configuration (a) allows substantial separation-free turning and expansion only with certain shaping of the outer wall and an area expansion ratio typically less than 1.2, whereas more daughters involve a balance between geometry and mass flux. In (b), an abrupt pressure jump is induced at the mouth of the small daughter, near which mass-flux effects tend to dominate over geometrical shaping effects. In (c), as the number of daughters increases, the amount of separation-free turning and expansion is found to increase substantially, and the distributed mass-flux influence readily overrides the geometrical influence throughout the branching; there is also an integrated upstream effect of the multi-branching on the incident mother flow even though each daughter flow acts as if independent. Tentative designs based on wall shaping, flux distributions and divider placement are considered for flow improvement/surgery.


Recent studies suggest the association of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases with Chlamydia pneumoniae infection in western populations. It is of great interest whether such an association exists in Asians with their distinct genetic background. Symptomatic patients with coronary heart disease (29) or arteriosclerosis obliterans (10) who underwent directional endo-atherectomy were studied. Atherectomy specimens of coronary and iliac arteries were examined for C. pneumoniae by culture, nested PCR and immunohistochemical stain (IHC) with one Chlamydia genus-specific, two C. pneumoniae species-specific, and two C. trachomatis species-specific monoclonal antibodies. Among the 29 patients with coronary artery disease, C. pneumoniae was detected in the coronary arteries of 13 by IHC, 16 by PCR and 20 by IHC or PCR, or both. C. pneumoniae was also found in the iliac arteries of four patients by IHC, three by PCR and five by IHC or PCR, or both, of the 10 patients with arteriosclerosis obliterans. Attempts to isolate C. pneumoniae by culture were unsuccessful. The re-stenotic rate after atherectomy was higher in the C. pneumoniae-positive group than in the negative group, but not significantly so. These findings support the high incidence of C. pneumoniae in atherosclerotic lesions of symptomatic patients with coronary heart disease and arteriosclerosis obliterans in Asians.


Socio-technical systems is a systems approach to understanding complex systems when interactions between humans and technology are dominant. Thus, the term socio-technical relates to the relationship between complex human activity systems and the technical infrastructure that governs the nature of the system. Socio-technical systems typically have multiple stakeholders, either in charge of systemic development, governing the system, or being affected (directly or indirectly) by it. Thus, in order to understand a socio-technical system, it is important to understand the different roles the stakeholders have within the system of interest. This research contributes in providing a complementarist and pluralist approach in recognizing the roles of stakeholders within socio-technical systems and categorizing them by introducing a formative taxonomy flexible for any socio-technical system, dependent on its context and purpose. Critical systems thinking and boundary critique are utilized as a foundation for categorizing stakeholders, while the onion model along with soft system methodology are used to delineate the stratified spheres of influence each stakeholder category has on the system. Even though, the obligations vary across the different systems context and purposes, the proposed flexible approach is expected to be beneficial to system thinkers and analysts in realization, recognition and categorization of stakeholders within socio-technical systems.


Information security is a major challenge for organizations due to the proliferation of digitization and constant connectivity. It is becoming widely accepted that raising an information security culture, meaning instilling security behaviour in people interacting with ICTs, is key to maintaining a healthy security posture. However the academic field of information security culture has been described as immature, lacks empirical validation, while the constituents of the concept as well as methods, tools, frameworks and metrics for fostering and evaluating it within organisations remain elusive. This paper, based on a critical analysis of relevant literature and practice, provides a research agenda of critical issues that need to be addressed so that users, from security's weakest link, become an important actor for proactive information security. These issues include the need for proper and employable definitions of information security culture and the need to explore the existence of security subcultures, the need to develop frameworks, tools and metrics for guiding, evaluating and comparing security culture raising programs, the need to explore the interplay between organisational elements (in-cluding organisational structure, type and management practices) and security culture, the need to identify the impact of security culture in issues such as innovation adoption, the need to investigate the influence of national and organisational culture on security culture and so on.