large spans covering due to rational use of structural materials, but the problem of suspended cable structures is initial shape change under the action of non-symmetrical load. The problem can be solved by increasing of relation of dead weight and imposed load, but this methods cause increasing of materials consumption.Prestressed cable truss usage is another way how the problem of shape change under the action of non-symmetrical load can be fixed. The better results can be achieved if we replace top chord with cable truss with cross web. Rational structure of the cable truss for prestressed cable truss top chord was developed using optimization realized in FEM program ANSYS 12 environment. Single cable and cable truss model work was discovered.Analytical and model testing results indicate, that usage of cable truss with the cross web as a top chord of prestressed cable truss instead of single cable allows to reduce total displacements by 13-16% in the case of non-symmetrical load. In case of uniformly distributed load single cable is preferable.


Accurate estimation of fluoride dietary intake is desirable for optimising caries prevention. Little is known about the dietary fluoride intake of children aged 4 years, an age when many permanent teeth are forming. This study was undertaken in Fars Province, Iran, in 1995-1996, where there are big differences in temperature between winter and summer. The aims were to determine: (a) the relative contributions of different components of the diet to fluoride intake, (b) the effect of variation in fluoride concentration in drinking water, and (c) the effect of climate temperature. Temperature varied between +40 degrees C in summer to -5 degrees C in winter. The mean fluoride concentrations in drinking water in the three areas were 0.3, 0.6 and 4.0 mgF/L. Dietary information was obtained by two 3-day diet diaries with interview, validated with reference to international standards. The fluoride content of foods was measured using the silicon-facilitated diffusion method. One hundred and three 4-year-old children completed the study. The mean (and 95% confidence interval) dietary fluoride intakes in each of the three areas, respectively, were 413 (+/- 21), 698 (+/- 89) and 3472 (+/- 557) micrograms/day. Drinks provided 72 to 87% of dietary fluoride--this proportion increased with increasing water fluoride concentration and increasing climate temperature. Tea (infusion) was an important source of dietary fluoride, providing 31 to 38% of total dietary intake. Tap water was a more important source of fluoride than soft drinks. Cooked rice and bread were the most important food source of fluoride and the amount of fluoride they contributed increased as water fluoride concentration increased. The results of this first such survey in the Middle East showed (a) that water (as a drink) and tea were by far the most important contributors to dietary fluoride intake, (b) substantial increases in fluoride intake with increasing water fluoride concentrations, and (c) substantially higher fluoride intakes in summer than in the winter.


Recent research has shown that incorporating equivariance into neural network architectures is very helpful, and there have been some works investigating the equivariance of networks under group actions. However, as digital images and feature maps are on the discrete meshgrid, corresponding equivariance-preserving transformation groups are very limited. In this work, we deal with this issue from the connection between convolutions and partial differential operators (PDOs). In theory, assuming inputs to be smooth, we transform PDOs and propose a system which is equivariant to a much more general continuous group, the $n$-dimension Euclidean group. In implementation, we discretize the system using the numerical schemes of PDOs, deriving approximately equivariant convolutions (PDO-eConvs). Theoretically, the approximation error of PDO-eConvs is of the quadratic order. It is the first time that the error analysis is provided when the equivariance is approximate. Extensive experiments on rotated MNIST and natural image classification show that PDO-eConvs perform competitively yet use parameters much more efficiently. Particularly, compared with Wide ResNets, our methods result in better results using only 12.6% parameters.


BACKGROUND AND AIM
The prevalence of alcohol use has increased globally. Out-of-school youth are a vulnerable group who might have missed opportunities for learning healthy behaviours in a formal school environment. The purpose of this study was to determine the risk perception, pattern of use, and correlates of alcohol use among out-of-school youth in Lagos, Nigeria.

METHODS
A cross-sectional study was conducted among 380 out-of-school youth in motor parks in Lagos State, Nigeria, using interviewer administered questionnaires.

RESULTS
The lifetime prevalence of alcohol use was 61.1%, while 55.5% were current drinkers. Beer (57.3%) was the most consumed type of alcohol, followed by distilled spirits (29.8%). Using the CAGE scoring system, more than half (57.8%) of the current drinkers had a drinking problem. Almost three quarters (70.1%) had experienced at least one episode of alcohol intoxication within the past month. A considerable number of current drinkers (63.5%) desired to reduce their alcohol intake or stop drinking, while 45.5% had made unsuccessful attempts to do so within the past year. Only 28.9% had received assistance to quit or reduce their drinking and of these less than half (39.3%) received assistance from a professional or healthcare worker. Males were more likely to be current drinkers and to have experienced episodes of alcohol intoxication. Parental and peer drinking were associated with alcohol use but not with intoxication.

CONCLUSIONS
It is important to design specific programmes to reduce alcohol use among out-of-school youth in these settings.


The aim of this study was to evaluate production of cytokines by the blood immune cells in patients of different age groups with invasive non-specified type mammary ductal carcinoma, with or without metastases. Production of cytokines by periphery blood immunocompetent cells, either spontaneous and stimulated with polyclonal activators, was assessed in 82 patients with invasive mammary ductal carcinoma. The concentrations of IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, IL-17, IL-18, IL-1p, IL-1ra, TNFa, IFNy, G-CSF, GM-CSF, VEGF и MCP-1 were determined by solid-phase enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The patients were divided into 2 age groups: the first group consisted of 48 patients from 45 to 60 years old; the second group consisted of 34 older patients (61 to 75 years old). Metastases in local lymph nodes were documented in twenty patients from the first group and nine patients from the second group. The younger patients (45-60 years old) with metastases in local lymph nodes showed higher polyclonal activation index of IL-4 and IL-1ra production, when compared to the patients without lymphatic metastases. As for the older patients (61 to 75 years old), their polyclonal activation index of IL-6, IL-8, IL-1ra, G-CFS, GM-CSF production was significantly lower in cases of local lymph nodes metastases. The latter was due to higher level of spontaneous production, which suppressed the influence of polyclonal activators. The index of polyclonal activation upon production of cytokines in patients with lymphatic metastases was shown to be significantly higher for the age group of 45 to 60 years than in the age group of 61 to 75 years old. This fact suggested a highly stimulating effect of polyclonal activators in patients younger than 60 years. It was found that correlation between the index of polyclonal activation of cytokine production, and the indexes of ER, PR, HER2/NEU and Ki-67 receptor expression, which are used for the determination of molecular genetic subtype of the tumor, differ significantly for the distinct age groups.


In this chapter, we study the existence, uniqueness and other properties of solutions of a nonlinear functional second order Volterra integrodifferential equation in a general Banach space. The techniques used in our analysis are the theory of the strongly continuous cosine family, modified version of Banach contraction mapping principle, Schauder fixed point theorem and Pachpatte's integral inequality. 1


This study aims to investigate the cost premiums and cost performance of green building projects. After an extensive literature review, relevant data from 242 traditional and 121 green building projects performed by 30 different companies were collected through a survey in Singapore. The results indicate that the green cost premiums range from 5% to 10% and that project type and size are significant factors affecting the cost premiums. Furthermore, the cost performance is mostly over budget, ranging from 4.5% to 7%. Finally, this study proposes some feasible solutions for cost premiums reduction and cost performance improvement.


This case study focused on the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team during the period from 2004 to 2011, when Graham Henry (head coach) and Wayne Smith (assistant coach) coached and managed the team. More specifically, this case study examined the motivational climate created by this coaching group that culminated in winning the Rugby World Cup in 2011. In-depth interviews were completed with Henry and Smith in March 2012. A collaborative thematic content analysis revealed eight themes, regarding motivational issues and the motivational climate for the 2004–2011 All Blacks team: (i) critical turning point, (ii) flexible and evolving, (iii) dual-management model, (iv) "Better People Make Better All Blacks," (v) responsibility, (vi) leadership, (vii) expectation of excellence, and (viii) team cohesion. These findings are discussed in light of autonomy-supportive coaching, emotionally intelligent coaching, and transformational leadership. Finally, practical recommendations are offered for coaches of elite sport...


It is not only acoustic input into the brain that should be analyzed with neural network but also the resulting voice function. A possibility to get more information is to analyze the voice function in the damaged brain in a co‐work between phonetician, phoniatrician, and neuropsychologists. An attempt was made by combining measurement of phonetograms with airflow and stroboscopy. In 22 clients no correlation was found between the damaged frequency and intensity ranges compared with the mean air‐flow rates (r=0.15 by multivariate analysis). This is possible because frequency and dynamics are regulated in the acoustic brain and airflow is related to respiration. A discussion should be focused upon multifunctional voice analysis and neural networks in the brain, eventually based on measurements with the multifocal equipment by Key‐elemetrics and brain flow measurements [M. F. Pedersen, in Die Krankheit der Stimme, die Stimme der Krankheit, edited by H. Gundermann (Fischer Verlag, New York, 1991), pp. 162–171].


The employment of the term "positive Wassermann reaction" in the title of this paper rather than the use of the word "syphilis" requires an explanation. While syphilitic infection is entirely possible in the presence of a negative Wassermann reaction, and while in certain instances a positive reaction is obtained in persons exhibiting other conditions, it is generally true that positive serologic observations, when reported by a competent laboratory, usually indicate the presence of syphilis in some form. In the routine study of patients admitted to a specialized surgical service, it is frequently the sole indication of such an infection, for often the history and physical examination, particularly in women, are hot sufficiently suggestive. Accordingly, for the purposes of this study, it was thought best to base our observations on the result of Wassermann reactions of all degrees, for in this manner the percentage of error established by "missed" cases would


OBJECTIVE
To discuss the difficulties encountered in the diagnosis of concentric narrowing of the visual fields.

CLINICAL FEATURES
A 13-yr-old child was referred to a chiropractic clinic after an ocular examination concerning a 6-month period of minor headaches, which culminated in a more severe attack, during which she had to lie down. Her examination was essentially normal, with the exception of the presence of constricted visual fields when measured to a small stimulus.

INTERVENTION AND OUTCOME
Standard outpatient spinal adjustments were followed by recovery of vision.

DISCUSSION
The recovery of constricted fields of vision with spinal manipulation has now been discussed with greater frequency in the chiropractic literature. The diagnosis of constriction of the visual fields is often the factor that may decide the further management of the patient. In this instance, constriction of the visual fields could easily have been missed, even though clinical examination of the visual fields had been done.

CONCLUSION
Elements in the history and physical examination will suggest when a sensitive assessment of the visual fields may be of benefit to the patient.


THE incidence of breast sarcoma in contrast to all breast malignancies is 0.3% to 2.7%,1-8and the majority of these tumors are fibrosarcomas, with only 62 patients described as having primary lymphoma of the breast.9-38Documented reports present controversy as to the relationship of systemic lymphoma to the proper treatment of the lesion.6,9,14,32Recently, it was our experience to see a patient with lymphosarcoma of the breast, seven months postpartum followed by systemic lymphoma and death five months after diagnosis. Of the reported patients, 28 have died with systemic malignant lymphoma and others have not been followed for a sufficient period to exclude systemic lymphoma. DeCosse et al's32nine patients with five-year survivals following diagnosis and treatment are complicated by sequent lymphoma manifestations in three instances. Oberman38described a patient with five-year survival that had recurrent lymphoma four years after treatment and she has been


This essay examines Hegel's assessment of Islam in terms of its fundamental beliefs, its philosophical tradition, its aesthetics, and its place in the history of philosophy as well as in world history. It then addresses some of the important questions arising from various scholarly assessments of Hegel's treatment of Islam, and it concludes by suggesting how we might make use of Hegel's own dialectical methods in abrogating ethnocentrism.


— Due to their high power-to-weight ratio and low cost, pneumatic actuators are attractive for robotics and automation applications; however, achieving fast and accurate control of their position have been known as a complex control problem. The paper presents a methodology for obtaining controllers that achieve high position accuracy and preserve the closed-loop characteristics over a broad operating range. Experimentation with a number of conventional (or "classical") three-term controllers shows that, as repeated operations accumulate, the characteristics of the pneumatic actuator change requiring frequent re-tuning of the controller parameters (PID gains). Furthermore, three-term controllers are found to perform poorly in recovering the closed-loop system after the application of load or other external disturbances. The key reason for these problems lies in the non-linear exchange of energy inside the cylinder relating, in particular, to the complex friction forces that develop on the piston-wall interface. In order to overcome this problem but still remain within the boundaries of classical control methods, we designed an auto selective classicaql controller so that the system performance would benefit from all three control gains (KP, Kd, Ki) according to system requirements and the characteristics of each type of controller. This challenging experimentation took place for consistent performance in the face of modelling imprecision and disturbances. In the work presented, a selective PID controller is presented for an experimental rig comprising an air cylinder driven by a variable-opening pneumatic valve and equipped with position and pressure sensors. The paper reports on tests carried out to investigate the capability of this specific controller to achieve consistent control performance under, repeated operations and other changes in operating conditions.


Archaeal histone-encoding genes have been identified in marine Crenarchaea . The protein encoded by a representative of these genes, synthesized in vitro and expressed in Escherichia coli , binds DNA and forms complexes with properties typical of an archaeal histone. The discovery of histones in Crenarchaea supports the argument that histones evolved before the divergence of Archaea and Eukarya . Histones and compact nuclear all


I conduct this examination within the context of the global research and development (R&D) organisation of a multinational company (MNC). My research therefore intends to answer a primary research question: What determines the probability of survival of an initiative sent by a foreign R&D subsidiary?
To answer this research question, I proceed as follows: First, to frame the problem within both the subsidiary initiative and international R&D literature, I set out the problem of underutilisation of R&D resources, that is, the effect that occurs when most innovations still come from the MNC's parent firm, even though the MNC controls the resources of its international R&D subsidiaries. Although past research has advocated that in such a setting, subsidiaries should take an entrepreneurial stance and send initiatives to the parent firm to achieve better leverage of their resources and capabilities, empirical results consistently suggest that the problem of underutilisation is still not mitigated. This effect in turn suggests that most subsidiary initiatives are bound to fail. Thus, an investigation of why one initiative survives while another fails is appropriate.
To address this problem, I first develop a theoretical model of the subsidiary initiative process, based on an analogy constructed on a foundation of communication psychology. This model identifies six elements that shape the initiative process. To ensure data availability for empirical testing and better control of unobserved variance, I then focus on one of these six elements, namely, initiative characteristics. Subsequently, I develop six hypotheses that describe initiative characteristics upon which the survival or failure of a subsidiary initiative may depend.
After commenting on the statistical method of survival analysis that I employ throughout this dissertation, I test these hypotheses using a sample of 1,116 subsidiary initiatives that I collected from the global R&D organisation of a Swiss MNC. I extracted these initiative data directly from the firm's initiative database. This research setting allows me to collect unprecedented data on subsidiary initiatives, to rule out problems of unobserved between-firm heterogeneity, unobservable environmental influences, and measurement error from subjective respondents, and to study the MNC's intra-firm organisation directly rather than by proxy measures.
The findings show that initiative survival is positively influenced by the social and geographical closeness of the issuing R&D subsidiary to headquarters, the initiative's alignment with the firm's core areas of activity, and the manager's past success record (i.e., the number of already recognised initiatives sent by that manager). Moreover, initiatives that propose exploitative innovation are more likely to survive than initiatives that propose exploratory innovation. However, inter-subsidiary collaboration has no significant influence on initiative survival.
Finally, I discuss the findings and outcomes of my research and show their implications for theory development and management practice. I also comment on some limitations that suggest opportunities for further research.


OBJECTIVE To describe the case of a patient who developed acute pulmonary emboli (PE) despite long-term anticoagulation with dabigatran. CASE SUMMARY A 69-year-old obese woman was hospitalized for worsening shortness of breath, dyspnea on exertion, and left pleuritic chest pain. On admission, a computed tomography angiogram revealed acute bilateral PE, despite use of dabigatran for atrial fibrillation for approximately 5 years prior to admission. Dabigatran was stopped and therapeutic enoxaparin was initiated concomitantly with warfarin. An investigation into possible causes for the development of the PE, including hypercoagulability, was unrevealing. Since dabigatran should have protected against PE, the patient was questioned regarding adherence to her regimen. She stated that she was adherent but reported using a pillbox. The patient was discharged home on warfarin with an enoxaparin bridge until her international normalized ratio was at least 2.0. DISCUSSION The underlying cause for the patient's acute PE is unknown but could possibly be attributed to obesity and reduced mobility. Although dabigatran should have prevented PE, the presence of interacting drugs, patient-specific pharmacokinetics, suboptimal medication storage, and laboratory abnormalities may have resulted in reduced dabigatran exposure and protection. This is a reasonable hypothesis; however, the patient did not develop a stroke while receiving dabigatran. CONCLUSIONS Our patient developed acute bilateral PE despite receiving long-term anticoagulation with dabigatran. While it is possible that patient-specific factors resulted in reduced dabigatran exposure and efficacy, conclusions cannot be made.


Understanding the effect of modifying the properties of the engine charge on the cyclic variations of ignition timing is one essential aspect of being able to predict and control the ignition timing in Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) engines. This paper investigates cyclic variability of HCCI ignition timing using the experimental data from two different engines at over 300 operating points for five different blends of iso-octane and n-heptane. Experimental results indicate that the cyclic variations of HCCI auto-ignition timing decrease with an increase in the intake manifold temperature and mixture richness, but it increases with an increase in the EGR rate.Copyright © 2007 by ASME


Nonlinear standing waves have been studied in a structure consisting of two lengths of tubing with different diameters. Preliminary theory of this structure is proposed. A 100‐W loudspeaker driver is used as a sound source to excite the larger tube of 45‐mm diameter through a 10‐mm side hole near one end which is closed. The properties of the output at the end of the smaller tube as well as their relation with the input were investigated, and a resonance diagram of the two‐tube structure is completed. At the end of smaller tube of 13‐mm diameter, a sound‐pressure level (SPL) of 176.2 dB has been obtained with a low distortion. Increasing the diameter of the larger tube, it is possible to drive the structure directly with a modern high power loudspeaker to produce high sound intensity in a more extended space. Experiments are in progress. [Work supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.]


Standard statistical language modeling techniques suffer from sparse data problems when applied to real tasks in speech recognition, where large amounts of domain-dependent text are not available. We investigate new approaches to improve sparse application-specific language models by combining domain dependent and out-of-domain data, including a back-off scheme that effectively leads to context-dependent multiple interpolation weights, and a likelihood-based similarity weighting scheme to discriminatively use data to train a task-specific language model. Experiments with both approaches on a spontaneous speech recognition task (switchboard), lead to reduced word error rate over a domain-specific n-gram language model, giving a larger gain than that obtained with previous brute-force data combination approaches.


Abstract Reinforcement contact zones, which are secondary contact zones where species are diverging in reproductive behaviors due to selection against hybridization, represent natural laboratories for studying speciation‐in‐action. Here, we examined replicate localities across the entire reinforcement contact zone between North American chorus frogs Pseudacris feriarum and P. nigrita to investigate geographic variation in hybridization frequencies and to assess whether reinforcement may have contributed to increased genetic divergence within species. Previous work indicated these species have undergone reproductive character displacement (RCD) in male acoustic signals and female preferences due to reinforcement. We also examined acoustic signal variation across the contact zone to assess whether signal characteristics reliably predict hybrid index and to elucidate whether the degree of RCD predicts hybridization rate. Using microsatellites, mitochondrial sequences, and acoustic signal information from >1,000 individuals across >50 localities and ten sympatric focal regions, we demonstrate: (1) hybridization occurs and (2) varies substantially across the geographic range of the contact zone, (3) hybridization is asymmetric and in the direction predicted from observed patterns of asymmetric RCD, (4) in one species, genetic distance is higher between conspecific localities where one or both have been reinforced than between nonreinforced localities, after controlling for geographic distance, (5) acoustic signal characters strongly predict hybrid index, and (6) the degree of RCD does not strongly predict admixture levels. By showing that hybridization occurs in all sympatric localities, this study provides the fifth and final line of evidence that reproductive character displacement is due to reinforcement in the chorus frog contact zone. Furthermore, this work suggests that the dual action of cascade reinforcement and partial geographic isolation is promoting genetic diversification within one of the reinforced species.


The progressive ageing of the population represents a challenge for society. In particular, a strong increase in the number of people over 90 is expected in the next two decades. As this phenomenon will lead to an increase in illness and age-related dependency, the study of long-lived people represents an opportunity to explore which lifestyle factors are associated with healthy ageing and which with the emergence of age-related diseases, especially Alzheimer's type dementia. The project "Factors associated with healthy and pathologically aging in a sample of elderly people over 90 in the city of Madrid" (MADRID+90) brings together a powerful multidisciplinary research team in neurodegenerative diseases that includes experts in epidemiology, neurology, neuropsychology, neuroimaging and computational neuroscience. In the first phase of the project, a stratified random sampling was carried out according to the census of the city of Madrid followed by a survey conducted on 191 people aged 90 and over. This survey gathered information on demographics, clinical data, lifestyles and cognitive status. Here, the main results of that survey are showed. The second phase of the project aims to characterize individual trajectories in the course of either healthy and pathological ageing, from a group of 50 subjects over 90 who will undergo a comprehensive clinical examination comprised of neurological and cognitive testing, MRI and EEG. The ultimate goal of the project is to characterize the biophysical and clinical profiles of a population that tends to receive little attention in the literature. A better understanding of the rapidly increasing group of nonagenarians will also help to design new policies that minimize the impact and future social and economic consequences of the ageing phenomenon.


This paper presents a scheme to accurately tune the quality factor of second-order LC bandpass filters. The information of the magnitude response at the center and one of the cutoff frequencies is used to tune both the amplitude and the quality factor of the filter using two independent yet interacting loops. Furthermore, the synergic interaction between the loops makes the proposed scheme stable and insensitive to the mismatch between the input amplitudes. A chip prototype was implemented in a 0.35-mum CMOS process and consumes 4.3 mA from a single 1.3-V supply. Measurement results show that at 1.97 GHz the quality factor is tunable from 60 to 220 while the amplitude is tunable between -15 and 0 dBm with worst case quality factor and amplitude tuning accuracies of 10% and 7%, respectively


Abstract. We performed measurements of nitrous acid (HONO) during the PRIDE-PRD2006 campaign in the Pearl River Delta region 60 km north of Guangzhou, China, for 4 weeks in June 2006. HONO was measured by a LOPAP in-situ instrument which was setup in one of the campaign supersites along with a variety of instruments measuring hydroxyl radicals, trace gases, aerosols, and meteorological parameters. Maximum diurnal HONO mixing ratios of 1–5 ppb were observed during the nights. We found that the nighttime build-up of HONO can be attributed to the heterogeneous NO2 to HONO conversion on ground surfaces and the OH + NO reaction. In addition to elevated nighttime mixing ratios, measured noontime values of ≈200 ppt indicate the existence of a daytime source higher than the OH + NO→HONO reaction. Using the simultaneously recorded OH, NO, and HONO photolysis frequency, a daytime additional source strength of HONO (PM) was calculated to be 0.77 ppb h−1 on average. This value compares well to previous measurements in other environments. Our analysis of PM provides evidence that the photolysis of HNO3 adsorbed on ground surfaces contributes to the HONO formation.


The cosmic reionization of hydrogen was the last major phase transition in the evolution of the universe, which drastically changed the ionization and thermal conditions in the cosmic gas. To the best of our knowledge today, this process was driven by the ultra-violet radiation from young, star-forming galaxies and from first quasars. We review the current observational constraints on cosmic reionization, as well as the dominant physical effects that control the ionization of intergalactic gas. We then focus on numerical modeling of this process with computer simulations. Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in solving the radiative transfer of ionizing photons from many sources through the highly inhomogeneous distribution of cosmic gas in the expanding universe. With modern simulations, we have finally converged on a general picture for the reionization process, but many unsolved problems still remain in this young and exciting field of numerical cosmology.


Two-dimensional (2D) layered materials as a new class of nanomaterial are characterized by a list of exotic properties. These layered materials are investigated widely in several biomedical applications. A comprehensive understanding of the state-of-the-art developments of 2D materials designed for multiple nanoplatforms will aid researchers in various fields to broaden the scope of biomedical applications. Here, we review the advances in 2D material-based biomedical applications. First, we introduce the classification and properties of 2D materials. Next, we summarize surface and structural engineering methods of 2D materials where we discuss surface functionalization, defect, and strain engineering, and creating heterostructures based on layered materials for biomedical applications. After that, we discuss different biomedical applications. Then, we briefly introduced the emerging role of machine learning (ML) as a technological advancement to boost biomedical platforms. Finally, the current challenges, opportunities, and prospects on 2D materials in biomedical applications are discussed.


Wireless embedded smart cameras provide flexibility in camera deployment in terms of the locations and number of the cameras. However, these battery-powered embedded vision sensors have very limited energy, memory, and processing power. Energy consumption and latency are two major concerns in wireless embedded camera networks. In multi-camera tracking applications, the amount of data exchanged between cameras has an effect on the tracking accuracy, the energy consumption of the camera nodes and the latency. In this paper, we provide a detailed quantitative analysis of the accuracy-latency-energy tradeoff for overlapping and non-overlapping camera setups when different-sized data packets are transferred in a wireless manner. The experiments have been performed with an actual wireless embedded smart camera network employing CITRIC motes, and performing tracking of objects.


Realizing an ideal impedance control system in lower extremity rehabilitation systems is challenged by mechanical impedance of robot hardware. Although some studies in the field of control systems have been helpful in reducing the mechanical impedance of actuators, they have not been able to remove the inertia of robot hardware. This paper introduces an alternative design in which mechanical links are utilized. The mechanical links are driven by one actuator without any complicated servo systems. The design parameters are optimized for the link system to generate the normal walking motion. The simulation data shows that the normal gait patterns are realized successfully. The device is connected to a patient using elastic components, and therefore the inertia of the robot is not directly imposed on the patient. The patient's legs are guided to follow the motion of the robot with the forces generated by the elastic components.


Improving the efficiency of dispatching orders to vehicles is a research hotspot in online ride-hailing systems. Most of the existing solutions for order-dispatching are centralized controlling, which require to consider all possible matches between available orders and vehicles. For large-scale ride-sharing platforms, there are thousands of vehicles and orders to be matched at every second which is of very high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a decentralized execution order-dispatching method based on multi-agent reinforcement learning to address the large-scale order-dispatching problem. Different from the previous cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms, in our method, all agents work independently with the guidance from an evaluation of the joint policy since there is no need for communication or explicit cooperation between agents. Furthermore, we use KL-divergence optimization at each time step to speed up the learning process and to balance the vehicles (supply) and orders (demand). Experiments on both the explanatory environment and real-world simulator show that the proposed method outperforms the baselines in terms of accumulated driver income (ADI) and Order Response Rate (ORR) in various traffic environments. Besides, with the support of the online platform of Didi Chuxing, we designed a hybrid system to deploy our model.


Infant facial features are typically perceived as "cute," provoking caretaking behaviours. Previous research has focused on adults' perceptions of baby cuteness, and examined how these perceptions are influenced by events of the adult reproductive lifespan, such as ovulation and menopause. However, globally, individuals of all ages, including pre‐pubertal children, provide notable proportions of infant care. In this study, we recruited participants in and around northern England, and tested 330 adults and 65 children aged 7–9 using a forced‐choice paradigm to assess preferences for infant facial cuteness in two stimulus sets and (as a control task) preferences for femininity in women's faces. We analysed the data with Hierarchical Bayesian Regression Models. The adults and children successfully identified infants who had been manipulated to appear cuter, although children's performance was poorer than adults' performance, and children reliably identified infant cuteness in only one of the two infant stimuli sets. Children chose the feminised over masculinised women's faces as more attractive, although again their performance was poorer than adults' performance. There was evidence for a female advantage in the tasks: girls performed better than boys when assessing the woman stimuli and one of the infant stimulus sets, and women performed better than men when assessing one of the infant stimulus sets. There was no evidence that cuteness judgements differed depending upon exposure to infants (children with siblings aged 0–2; adults with a baby caregiving role), or depending upon being just younger or older than the average age of menopause. Children and grandparents provide notable portions of infant caretaking globally, and cuteness perceptions could direct appropriate caregiving behaviour in these age groups, as well as in adults of reproductive age.


This paper presents a method for jointly designing the transmitter-receiver pair in a block-by-block communication system that employs (intrablock) decision feedback detection. We provide closed-form expressions for transmitter-receiver pairs that simultaneously minimize the arithmetic mean squared error (MSE) at the decision point (assuming perfect feedback), the geometric MSE, and the bit error rate of a uniformly bit-loaded system at moderate-to-high signal-to-noise ratios. Separate expressions apply for the "zero-forcing" and "minimum MSE" (MMSE) decision feedback structures. In the MMSE case, the proposed design also maximizes the Gaussian mutual information and suggests that one can approach the capacity of the block transmission system using (independent instances of) the same (Gaussian) code for each element of the block. Our simulation studies indicate that the proposed transceivers perform significantly better than standard transceivers and that they retain their performance advantages in the presence of error propagation.


Context. Solar and extrasolar comets and extrasolar planets are the subject of numerous studies in order to determine their chemical composition and internal structure. In the case of planetesimals, their compositions are important as they govern in part the composition of future planets.
Aims. The present works aims at determining the chemical composition of icy planetesimals, believed to be similar to present day comets, formed in stellar systems of solar chemical composition. The main objective of this work is to provide valuable theoretical data on chemical composition for models of planetesimals and comets, and models of planet formation and evolution.
Methods. We have developed a model that calculates the composition of ices formed during the cooling of the stellar nebula. Coupled with a model of refractory element formation, it allows us to determine the chemical composition and mass ratio of ices to rocks in icy planetesimals throughout in the protoplanetary disc.
Results. We provide relationships for ice line positions (for different volatile species) in the disc, and chemical compositions and mass ratios of ice relative to rock for icy planetesimals in stellar systems of solar chemical composition. From an initial homogeneous composition of the nebula, a wide variety of chemical compositions of planetesimals were produced as a function of the mass of the disc and distance to the star. Ices incorporated in planetesimals are mainly composed of H2O, CO, CO2, CH3OH, and NH3. The ice/rock mass ratio is equal to 1 ± 0.5 in icy planetesimals following assumptions. This last value is in good agreement with observations of solar system comets, but remains lower than usual assumptions made in planet formation models, taking this ratio to be of 2–3.


UPDATED—29 April 2018. Metacognition is often described as thinking about thinking and is tightly related to academic success and intelligence. Very specific techniques exist for metacognition to be put in practice and improved. This paper introduces a proof-of-concept system to promote metacognitive skills. Its main purpose is to make learners more effective.


The Brettanomyces / Dekkera yeasts can be found in fermenting must and in wine. Typically they grow after alcoholic and malolactic fermentation during storage of wine in tank, barrel, or bottle. They contribute characteristic bretty flavors which are described as smoky, barnyard, plastic, burnt plastic, vinyl, Bandaid, and creosote. They can also contribute a metallic bitterness. Compounds which are responsible for brett flavor in wine include 4-ethyl phenol, 4-ethyl guaiacol, isovaleric acid, and unidentified burnt plastic compound. Descriptive sensory evaluations show an inverse relationship between fruity and bretty flavor perception. The brett aromas in some wines are considered a positive attribute, especially when present at low concentration. Often these flavors are considered a defect. The wine's varietal and regional flavor characteristics might be completely masked by these flavors and the wine can be unpleasantly bitter. 4-ethyl phenol is used by some wineries as an indicator compound for the activity of Brettanomyces. Yet some wines having a strong brett flavors do contain none or very little 4-ethyl phenol. Preliminary studies show that 4-ethyl phenol is formed all through growth of Brettanomyces. Thus this compound can be used to confirm the presence of bretty flavors. The search for indicator compounds formed during early stages of growth of B. continues. The Brettanomyces yeasts can produce the characteristic brett flavors when growing at low cell density of several hundred to several thousand cells per mL. The fact that these yeasts are often present at low cell numbers and that they are slow growing makes detection difficult. Genetic analyses of wine isolates have shown that only strains of B. bruxellensis grow in wine. Semi-selective plating is performed prior to genetic analysis on media including cycloheximide. The development of DNA based probes has made it possible to reliably identify the yeast once it is plated on a nutrient agar plate. Further developments of specific probes and of probe application techniques will improve the specificity and speed of detection.


One of the serious obstacles to the applications of speech emotion recognition systems in real-life settings is the lack of generalization of the emotion classifiers. Many recognition systems often present a dramatic drop in performance when tested on speech data obtained from different speakers, acoustic environments, linguistic content, and domain conditions. In this letter, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation model, called Universum autoencoders, to improve the performance of the systems evaluated in mismatched training and test conditions. To address the mismatch, our proposed model not only learns discriminative information from labeled data, but also learns to incorporate the prior knowledge from unlabeled data into the learning. Experimental results on the labeled Geneva Whispered Emotion Corpus database plus other three unlabeled databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method when compared to other domain adaptation methods.


Evidence has been accumulated that a different timing in the consumption of meals, namely the chrononutrition, is able to influence the daily metabolic biorhythms, influencing the onset and possibly the treatment of clinical conditions as obesity and diabetes, including the possibility of independently influencing the cardiovascular risk. Behaviors originating from new social customs are able to interfere with these physiological mechanisms activating of genes and proteins that make individuals more or less flexible, capable of adaptation. So, the inability to adapt could favor a higher risk to health. Therefore, chrononutrition is a characteristic of the diet that is important to address further to the amount of energy and macronutrient intake. Once again, even in this area, the Mediterranean dietary style proves to be a healthy reference approach.


Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is a neurogenetic disorder caused by the absence or abnormal inactivation of a critical region of the paternal chromosome 15. Clinical manifestations include marked hypotonia at birth, progressive obesity that starts during the second year of life, stunting, hypogonadism and some dysmorphic features. Some of the symptoms and signs can be explained by growth hormone (GH) deficiency. We report two females aged 12 and 13 years old with PWS. Both were very short and obese, showed blunted GH responses to provocative stimuli and had low plasma levels of Insulin Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1). They have been on GH treatment for more than two years, demonstrating a marked growth acceleration, reduction in their fat mass, improvement of their muscular strength and an increase in their IGF-1 levels.


The authors researched into the mechanisms through which the sympathetic nerve intensifies the vagal stimulation of the gastroduodenal, urinary bladder, uterine and deferent duct motility and the vagal inhibition of heart functioning. It was shown that these phenomena are mediated by preganglionic serotoninergic fibers conducting excitement to intramural serotoninergic neurons. The study found a growing cranio-caudal gradient of the serotoninergic innervation of visceral organs. The mechanism of gastroduodenal motility activation includes intramural serotoninergic neurons, which conduct excitement to 5-HT1,2 -serotonin receptors of the effector tissues. A model of myocarditis and experimental gastric ulcer demonstrated the cardio- and gastroduodenoprotectory effects of the serotonin blockers.


The value and institutional core, which legitimized the historical rise and global domination of the West, is increasingly becoming the object of criticism. The initial coordinates of the liberal consensus, which promised humanity a constant rise in the living standards and opportunities thanks to the universality of the models of self-regulating markets and liberal democracies, find themselves under a revision. The background global trends, including those that unfolded in the Western societies, demonstrate the opposite — stagnation or shrinking of the resource base of the majority of the population against the background of the radicalization of economic inequali ty, corporate game that includes "shorting" the cost of labor (global uberization), the formation of elite democracies with limited access that ignore the principles of equality and interests of the majority. As a result, values, practices and institutions that were previously viewed as pathological deviations, institutional traps and something archaic (backwardness), consistently transform into a new global normality. Thus, theories that describe the contours of the global future mainly in non-market, and sometimes in illiberal categories, are gai ning momentum. These theories document new formats for the distribution of public resources, which are not based on markets and democracy, but rather on rent mechanisms, redistributive political regulation and differentiated value for the state of different social groups. The authors argue that, from the economic standpoint, the emerging new normality is associated with the unfolding consensus that citizens are entitled to the basic political rent or other forms of differentiated access to resources that can provide them with decent existence in the face of the gro wing inefficiency of market communications. From the political standpoint, the new normality manifests itself in the potential communitarian turn, based on a set of left-wing, nationalist and populist discourses, united by the resentment idea of returning to the state (which distributes resources) a key role in regula ting radical inequalities in the interests of the majority.


Teeth restored with post and core restorations present a clinical dilemma if they fracture. An individual with a maxillary anterior six-unit fixed partial denture had one of the canine abutment teeth fracture. The other abutment debonded and the post separated from the core. The fixed partial denture was salvaged by retrofitting a porcelain-fused-to-metal post and core restoration in the fractured abutment.


The complexity of motion planning amidst obstacles is a well modeled and understood notion. What is the increase of the complexity when the problem is to plan the trajectories of a nonholonomic robot? We show that this quantity can be seen as a function of paths and of the distance between the paths and the obstacles. We propose various definitions of it, from both topological and metric points of view, and compare their values. For two of them we give estimates which involve some E-norm on the tangent space to the configuration space. Finally we apply these results to compute the complexity needed to park a car-like robot with trailers.


Urban green space (UGS) provides free breathing space to take time out from the stresses of contemporary life. This paper aims to measure both physical and perceived accessibility to UGS by using GIS and three qualitative methods and make a comparison between the actual travelled path and the analytically calculated ones. GIS-based network analysis determine only 15% of the total population in Leicester meets physical access up to 300m which has been significantly distributed in the most deprived areas. The results derived from 455 questionnaire show a significant relationship between people age, occupation, car ownership, actual travel time and mode of travel with the frequency of use. The average of actual travelled path (come from 270 routes drawn by people) show a longer travelling distance compared to the average calculated by network analysis. People's drawn routes show more travels towards GS in the centre of the City compared to those in the north direction.


The levying of withholding taxes on non-residents by the source state is a long-standing topic in EU tax law. The recent case Brisal and KBC Finance, concerning a withholding tax levied on an outbound interest payment, constitutes just the last addition to the line of judgments on this issue rendered over years by the Court of Justice of the European Union. In Brisal the Court first confirmed that Member States are permitted to use different techniques for charging a tax on residents and non-residents for the same item of income, i.e. through a final-year assessment and an immediate retention upon the payment. However, the judiciary of Luxembourg found that residents and non-residents are in a comparable situation with respect to the deductibility of operational costs and thus both categories shall be treated equally in this regard. Although this conclusion could most likely have been anticipated in light of precedent decisions of the Court, the judgment in Brisal is equally remarkable since it disrupts a fundamental tenet of taxation of income earned by non-residents without a permanent establishment, i.e. that the source state can levy a withholding tax on the gross amount of such income and that the expenses of the underlying activity have to be considered by the residence state. Besides and more generally, the decision confirmed that the CJEU is increasingly willing to scrutinize the methods for calculating the tax base adopted by Member States in cross-border scenarios.


Floriculture is the art and knowledge of growing flowers to perfection. It deals with the cultivation of flowers and ornamental crops from the time of planting to the time of harvesting. Over 140 countries are engaged in floriculture production. In India floriculture is considered as a sunrise industry and givesit 100 per cent export-oriented status. Total area under floriculture in India is the second largest in the world and only next to China. Rose has ever been the world's most beautiful nature's creation. Rose is symbol of love, adoration and innocence and friendship. Perfume industries and pharmaceutical sector depends upon it. A large quantity of rose is used for decoration purpose. This study aims to probe out the growth in production and export performance of rose from India and its trend over the years. It also estimates the future export and production for the next ten years. The data used for the analysis is fully based on secondary sources and the period selected for the present study was from 2011-2012 to 2020-2021. Major tools used were CGR, CAGR, Standard Deviation and Simple Linear Trend Equation. It turned out that the trend in rose production and export shows negative in India for the period 2011-12 to 2019-20.


The current PASSAGE syntactic representation is the result of 9 years of constant evolution with the aim of providing a common ground for evaluating parsers of French whatever their type and supporting theory. In this paper we present the latest developments concerning the formalism and show first through a review of basic linguistic phenomena that it is a plausible minimal common ground for representing French syntax in the context of generic black box quantitative objective evaluation. For the phenomena reviewed, which include: the notion of syntactic head, apposition, control and coordination, we explain how PASSAGE representation relates to other syntactic representation schemes for French and English, slightly extending the annotation to address English when needed. Second, we describe the XML format chosen for PASSAGE and show that it is compliant with the latest propositions in terms of linguistic annotation standard. We conclude discussing the influence that corpus-based evaluation has on the characteristics of syntactic representation when willing to assess the performance of any kind of parser.


The Upper Burnett district of southeast Queensland, Australia is a landscape of working class resilience in the face of natural and institutional oppression. The Upper Burnett was the site of numerous small goldmining towns throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Physically, most of these towns now survive only as archaeological remnants, yet both the tangible heritage elements and the intangible forms of labour heritage, such as stories in the landscape and of movement between places, contribute to the shared and continued attachment of the Burnett community to its mining history. Historical archaeological, sociological and landscape studies, including long-term projects working with descendents of the mining families, have provided detailed insight into the palimpsest of meanings applied to the social landscape of the working class inhabitants. Oral history, documentary and archaeological research have been conducted on the townships of Paradise, Mount Shamrock, Monal and Cania. The cultural landscape of these towns can be seen as a complex heritage of working class pastimes, networks of labour through kin and fictive kin relationships, strategic movement across the region and the interaction between communities. Although the local museums tend to memorialise the physical heritage of the goldmining through collecting and displaying the impressive material culture (such as stampers, berdan pans, mine wheels, etc.), it is the stories, meanings, diaries, and the continued attachments to these places today that play the larger role in the remembering of the working class past.


Iron-oxidizing bacteria, Leptothrix ochracea, produce biogenous iron oxide (BIO), while the heat treatment of BIO gives its magnetized material (m-BIO). In this study, they were chemically modified with silane coupling agents to give organic–inorganic hybrid materials, which were then used as immobilization supports for enzymes. BIO-M, which was prepared by modifying BIO with 3-methacryloxypropyltrimethoxysilane, was found to be the best immobilization support. The immobilized lipases showed remarkably high catalytic activity; for example, Burkholderia cepacialipase (BCL) immobilized on BIO-M showed a turnover frequency of 33 000 h−1 for 1-phenylethanol (1a). m-BIO-M, which was prepared by modifying m-BIO with 3-methacryloxypropyltrimethoxysilane, was also used as an immobilization support. Although the lipases immobilized on m-BIO-M showed lower catalytic activity than those immobilized on BIO-M, the former could be separated and reused easily by using a magnet. These immobilized enzymes could be recycled at least five times and are environmentally benign biocatalysts.


The majority of rare diseases are genetic, and regardless of advanced high-throughput genomics-based investigations, 60% of patients remain undiagnosed. A major factor limiting our ability to identify disease-causing alterations is a poor understanding of the morbid and normal human genome. A major genomic contributor of which function and distribution remain largely unstudied are the transposable elements (TE), which constitute 50% of our genome. Here we aim to resolve this knowledge gap and increase the diagnostic yield of rare disease patients investigated with clinical genome sequencing. To this end we characterized TE insertions in 1000 Swedish individuals from the SweGen dataset and 2504 individuals from the 1000 Genomes Project (1KGP), creating seven population-specific TE insertion databases. Of note, 66% of TE insertions in SweGen were present at >1% in the 1KGP databases, proving that most insertions are common across populations. Focusing on the rare TE insertions, we show that even though ~0.7% of those insertions affect protein coding genes, they rarely affect known disease casing genes (<0.1%). Finally, we applied a TE insertion identification workflow on two clinical cases where disease causing TE insertions were suspected and could verify the presence of pathogenic TE insertions in both. Altogether we demonstrate the importance of TE insertion detection and highlight possible clinical implications in rare disease diagnostics.


The position of Czech universities at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century is briefly described and specific features are emphasized. The academic staff was faced with new challenges as new developments in Czech society took place. Participation in different international programmes and opportunities to obtain relevant information about trends in higher education in Europe and the world have been of crucial importance. This assistance together with changes in home legislation has accelerated the transformation process in Czech higher education. The main part of this paper is an attempt to summarize the response of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (UWB) to the outside world as shown in its development plan. Using UWB as an example of a medium-sized university, the paper describes the process of analysing this university's potential and its external environment, which led to the formulation of the university's development plan. In implementing this plan the main aim is to change the attitudes of the staff (both academic and non-academic). Positive results and barriers yet to be overcome are presented.


This Essay examines the contentions of U.S. government lawyers that the U.S. should abandon the provisions of the Geneva Conventions in favor of a de novo legal regime that would govern the capture, detention, treatment and trial of enemy prisoners taken in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), whether captured in the U.S. or abroad. In particular, it examines the question of extraordinary rendition - transferring detainees abroad for detention and interrogation either from the United States, on behalf of the United States, or from occupied Iraq. Although the numbers of prisoners rendered abroad has been relatively few, the covert nature of the operations, and the allegations of prisoner mistreatment raise very troubling questions about the wisdom and the legality of the U.S. rendition program. It concludes that extraordinary rendition is not permissible under existing, applicable and well-established norms of international law. Additionally, because renditions are carried out in secret, employ extralegal means, and often result in prisoner abuse, including cruel treatment, torture, and sometimes death - they appear to be emblematic of the larger human rights concerns that trouble many of the detention and interrogation practices employed by the U.S. government since September 11, 2001. Of particular concern is that rather than explicitly amending the law or articulating clear, narrowly tailored justifications for derogating from the law, derogations that would presumably be temporary and specific, such as the derogations permitted under international human rights treaties, government officials have sought to redefine legal norms in an exceptional burst of "executive activism" in ways that are neither particularly plausible or persuasive. This use of legal subterfuge is deeply troubling in and of itself, as well as in regards to it potentially harmful consequences. Finally, the Essay questions the efficacy, as well as the wisdom, of these extralegal policies.


Four volunteers judged eight levels of thermal stimuli induced by a Hardy dolorimeter, varying in intensity from extremely painful to a low level seldom even perceived. Half of the 406 stimuli were applied during acupuncture and half either before insertion or after removal of the needles. The experimental design minimized or eliminated factors other than the needles themselves, i. e., no medication was given, the subjects were scientists accustomed to objectivity and, on a preceding day or days, all had become experienced in assigning numbers (individually chosen) to the sensations produced by the different stimuli. Galvanic skin resistance was also tested. The results did not show any influence of acupuncture on perception of pain or on galvanic skin resistance.


Three stimuli were used to compare the signals necessary for interleukin (IL-2) receptor expression and IL-2 production: triggering of the T-cell antigen receptor/CD3 complex (Ti/CD3) by CD3 antibodies, activation of protein kinase C (PKC) by phorbol esters, and elevation of intracellular calcium levels by calcium ionophore. The salient observations were that IL-2 responsiveness, which reflects IL-2 receptor expression, and T-cell proliferation which requires both IL-2 production and IL-2 receptor expression, are not co-ordinately regulated. Firstly, a low threshold of CD3 activation or a brief (1 hr) exposure of T cells to maximal CD3 stimulation is sufficient to induce IL-2 responsiveness, but higher levels of activation for a prolonged period are necessary to ensure a T-cell proliferative response. Secondly, in response to optimal T-cell stimulation there is a short (2-4 day) period of T-cell proliferation followed by a prolonged phase of IL-2 responsiveness (10-14 days). Differences in the kinetics and signalling requirements for IL-2 receptor expression and IL-2 production, regulated at the level of mRNA expression, provide a molecular basis for these observations. A major difference between induction of IL-2 production and IL-2 receptor expression is that the dual signals of calcium and PKC are necessary for IL-2 production, but a sole stimulus of PKC is sufficient for IL-2 receptor expression. Also, a low level stimulation of PKC will induce IL-2 receptor expression but higher levels of PKC stimulation are required for IL-2 production. As a consequence, triggering of a single receptor, namely the Ti/CD3 complex, results in IL-2 responsiveness, but an additional signal that activates PKC is necessary for IL-2 production. These observations suggest that a Ca2+/PKC dual signal model does not explain completely the signal transduction pathways that regulate T-cell growth. Moreover, precise regulatory mechanisms have evolved to control the homeostasis of the autocrine proliferative response of a T-cell population.


Nitrous oxide (N2O) is an important greenhouse gas and the major source of stratospheric reactive nitrogen (NOy), an active participant in the stratospheric chemistry controlling ozone depletion. Tropospheric N2O abundances are increasing at nearly 0.3% yr−1 and this increase is expected to continue in the near future as are direct stratospheric NOy perturbations, for example, from aircraft. In order to test and gain confidence in three-dimensional (3-D) model simulations of the stratospheric N2O-NOy system, a simplified photochemistry for N2O and NOy is developed for use in chemistry transport models (CTMs). This chemical model allows for extensive CTM simulations focusing on uncertainties in chemistry and transport. We compare 3-D model simulations with measurements and evaluate the effect on N2O and NOy of potential errors in model transport, in column and local ozone, and in stratospheric temperatures. For example, with the three different 3-D wind fields used here, modeled N2O lifetimes vary from 173 to 115 years, and the unrealistically long lifetimes produce clear errors in equatorial N2O profiles. The impact of Antarctic denitrification and an in situ atmospheric N2O source are also evaluated. The modeled N2O and NOy distributions are obviously sensitive to model transport, particularly the strength of tropical upwelling in the stratosphere. Midlatitude, lower-stratospheric NO2/N2O correlations, including seasonal amplitudes, are well reproduced by the standard model when denitrification is included. These correlations are sensitive to changes in stratospheric chemistry but relatively insensitive to model transport. The lower stratospheric NOy/N2O correlation slope gives the correct net NOy production of about 0.5 Tg N yr−1 (i.e., the cross-tropopause flux as in the Plumb-Ko relation) only when N2O values from 250 to 310 ppb are used. As a consequence, the Synoz calibration of the flux of O3 from the stratosphere to the troposphere needs to be corrected to 550±140 Tg O3 yr−1.


As the most severe drought over the Northeastern United States (NEUS) in the past century, the 1960s drought had pronounced socioeconomic impacts. Although it was followed by a persisting wet period, the conditions leading to the 1960s extreme drought could return in the future, along with its challenges to water management. To project the potential consequences of such a future drought, pseudo‐global warming simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model are performed to simulate the dynamical conditions of the historical 1960s drought, but with modified thermodynamic conditions under the shared socioeconomic pathway SSP585 scenario in the early (2021–2027), middle (2041–2047), and late (2091–2097) 21st century. Our analysis focuses on essential hydroclimatic variables including temperature, precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, snowpack, and surface runoff. In contrast to the historical 1960s drought, similar dynamical conditions will generally produce more precipitation, increased soil moisture and evapotranspiration, and reduced snowpack. However, we also find that although wet months get much wetter, dry months may become drier, meaning that wetting trends are most significant in wet months but are essentially negligible for extremely dry months with negative monthly mean net precipitation. For these months, the trend toward wetting conditions provides little relief from the effects of extreme dry months. These conditions may even aggravate water shortages due to an increasingly rapid transition from wet to dry conditions. Other challenges emerge for residents and stakeholders in this region, including more extreme hot days, record‐low snow pack, frozen ground degradation and subsequent decreases in surface runoff.


Understanding of hydrodynamics involved in the flow around tidal turbines is essential to enhance their performance and resilience, as they are designed to operate in harsh marine environments. During their lifespan, they are subjected to high velocities with large levels of turbulence that demand their design to be greatly optimised. Experimental tests have provided valuable information about the performance of tidal stream devices but these are often conducted in constricted flumes featuring turbulent flow conditions different to those found at deployment sites. Additionally, measuring velocities at prospective sites is costly and often difficult. Numerical methods arise as a tool to be used complementary to the experiments in investigations of tidal stream turbines. In this thesis, a high-fidelity large-eddy simulation computational approach is adopted and includes the immersed boundary method for body representation, due to its ability to deal with complex moving geometries. The combination of these numerical methods offers a great balance between computational resources and accuracy. The approach is applied and validated with simulations of vertical and horizontal axis tidal turbines, among other challenging cases such as a pitching airfoil. An extensive validation of predicted hydrodynamics, wake developed downstream of the devices or structural loadings, outlines the accuracy of the proposed computational approach. In the simulations of vertical axis tidal turbines, the blade-vortex interaction is highlighted as the main phenomenon dominating the physics of these devices. The horizontal axis tidal turbine is simulated under different flow and turbulence intensity conditions, in both flat and irregular channel bathymetries. This thesis seeks to assess and enhance the performance, resilience and survivability of marine hydrokinetic devices in their future deployment at sea.


Food scholars and advocates have long asserted that commodification is one of the fundamental injustices of our dominant, industrial food system, as it stands in direct opposition to the notion of food as a human right. The informal social economy, with its concerns for solidarity, participation, service, and community building, offers examples of what de-commodification— that holy grail of food justice—might look like. This article reports on one particular informal social economy manifestation of decommodification, the community orchard. The author argues that decommodification must be seen not only as the absence of commodity production but as the presence of a different economy and underlying ethos – that of the gift. Lewis Hyde's theory of the gift provides a lens through which to understand the profound ways that gifting changes community orchardists' relationships to land, to food, to labour, and to those who co-produce and enjoy the fruit with them. Gift theory also furthers our understanding of food commons (of which the community orchard is but one example) as decommodified spaces. The author suggests that theorizing community orchards through the lens of gift theory provides insight into the values and mindsets that characterize non-commodity-oriented food production, which is a necessary step in the direction of innovation and the development of models that are more ecological, community-oriented, and just.


From mechanical principles and postmortem observations of coxofemoral joints of dogs, a hydrostatic mechanism influencing hip joint stability was discovered. This discovery led to the development of a stress-radiographic positioning method to quantitate hip joint laxity in dogs. The method incorporated 2 views with the dog in supine position and hips at neutral flexion/extension angle: a compression view, with the femoral heads fully seated in the acetabula; and a distraction view, with the femoral heads at maximal lateral displacement. An index measurement method was formulated to quantitate the relative degree of joint laxity appearing in either the compression or distraction view. Clinical evaluation of 6 dogs was done to compare the compression/distraction method with the standard hip-extended radiographic method. Also, the stress-radiographic method was performed on 16-week-old Borzoi and German Shepherd Dogs to compare the characteristics of inherent hip joint laxity in these breeds. In all dogs tested, hip joint laxity was masked by the standard hip-extended view as indicated by a 2.5-fold improvement in sensitivity to hip joint laxity of the new method (P less than 0.00001). Moreover, the mean hip joint laxity of 16-week-old German Shepherd Dogs exceeded the mean hip joint laxity of Borzois by 79% (P less than 0.00001). Reports in the literature document the incontrovertible association of hip joint laxity to the development of hip dysplasia in dogs. We believe the ability to accurately quantitate hip joint laxity will provide key diagnostic and prognostic criteria for the selection of pet dogs, and more importantly, breeding stock.


The object of the observations made by the author during the total solar eclipse of June 19, 1936 was to determine the degree and the direction of polarization of light in the outer puts of the solar corona. To investigate the dependence of polarization on the wave length the observations were carried out in two regions of the spectrum. Six photographs of the corona were obtained three plates for each region of the spectrum. A special design made it possible to take all the photographs with one polarization camera.
A marblit mirror analyser is mounted in front of the object glass. An auxiliary silvered mirror is placed parallel to the analysing marblit one (Fig. 1). The object glass and mirrors can revolve as a whole around the optical axis of the object glass. It we rotate the camera and, consequently, the plane of polarization by 60 each time we obtain six positions, corresponding to six photographs.

One series of photographs was taken on normal plates -Ilford Special Rapid (backed)- without filter, the second one on Ilford Hypersensitive Panchromatic plates (backed) with a filter transparent for λ> 5700A.
Τhe length of exposures was 9 seconds for the first series and 15 seconds for tηe second one. The limit of the density of the images sufficient for photometric purposes was at a distance of 25' from the limb.

The observations of the eclipse were carried out under a perfectly clear sky and the proposed program was fulfilled. The plates were calibrated by means of a tube photometer. The grey screen, scattering the direct sunlight, was used as a source of light.

The defect of the photographs consisted in a certain disturbance of images («blur") attaining from 0.2 mm on the plate no. 6 to 1.2 mm on the plate no. It was established that the disturbance was caused by the vibration of the analyser mirrors due to the operation of the shutter.
The plates were measured with a simplified photoelectric microphotometer constructed by V. B. Nikonov. The zone from 10' to 40' from the limb was suitable for photometric measurement.
The vibration acted in one direction.

The most difficult to determine arc the errors due to the inaccurate accounting for the fog and to the influence of polarization of scattered sky light received from, the beyond of the moon shadow. The first circumstance influences the degree of polarization . the intensity differences are alone involved in the expression tor direction.

The direction of polarization in most cases differs considerably from the radial one; however, it changes regularly for each position angle. An interesting regularity was detected in the character of distribution of polarization directions.

When we plot on the diagram for each point a vector in the direction of polarization it becomes apparent that this plot resembles the scheme of a field of force, basing 011 which a system of vector lines may be built. It becomes evident that there exists a connection between the direction of polarization, coronal forms and the position of the rotation axis;. In coronal streamers the direction of polarization deviates towards the middle part of the streamer, approaching in it the tangential direction.

We propose to devote our attention to the theoretical interpretation of the results in the nearest future.
Octover, 1937


We have investigated the roles of peripheral and central mu, delta, and kappa opioid receptors and their subtypes in opioid-induced hypothermia in mice. Measuring rectal temperature after i.p. injection, opioid agonists [morphine, fentanyl, SNC80 ((+)-4-[(alphaR)-alpha-((2S,5R)-4-allyl-2,5-dimethyl-1-piperazinyl)3-methoybenzyl]-N,N-diethylbenzamide), U50,488H ((trans-(dl)-3,4-dichloro-N-methyl-N-[2-(1-pyrrolidinyl)cyclohexyl]-benzeneacetamide), and loperamide)] were tested alone or with opioid antagonists [naloxone, beta-funaltrexamine, naloxonazine, naltrindole, 7-benzylidenenaltrexone (BNTX), naltriben, nor-binaltorphimine, 2-(3,4-dichlorophenyl)-N-methyl-N-[(1S)-1-(3-isothiocyanatophenyl)-2-(1-pyrrolidinyl)ethyl]acetamide (DIPPA), and methyl-naltrexone] given 15 min after the agonist. All agonists produced dose-related hypothermia, although at low doses, morphine and U50,488H produced hyperthermia. The effects of morphine and fentanyl were antagonized by naloxone and by the mu(1) antagonist naloxonazine. The delta(2) antagonist naltriben potentiated the hypothermic effect of mu agonists. SNC80-induced hypothermia was blocked by the delta antagonist naltrindole but not by the delta(1) antagonist BNTX. Depending on the dose, the delta(2) antagonist naltriben produced either a potentiation or an attenuation of the effect of SNC80. U50,488H-induced hypothermia was antagonized by the kappa antagonist nor-binaltorphimine but not by acute treatment with the irreversible kappa antagonist DIPPA. The peripherally acting opioid loperamide produced hypothermia that could be blocked by several mu-, delta-, or kappa-selective antagonists as well as the peripherally acting antagonist methyl-naltrexone. Methyl-naltrexone produced a weak potentiation of morphine-, fentanyl-, and U50,488H-induced hypothermia, whereas a significant attenuation of SNC80-induced hypothermia was observed. In conclusion, at high doses, morphine- and fentanyl-induced hypothermia may involve composite action on mu, kappa, and possibly delta opioid receptors after initial activation. In the mediation of delta opioid-induced hypothermia, no clear selectivity between the delta(1) and delta(2) subtypes was defined. The studies provide new evidence that maintenance of the initial effects of agonist/receptor activation vary with the agonist and the receptor. The existence of both central and peripheral components of opioid-induced hypothermia is also emphasized.


The importance of indigenous knowledge is receiving increasing recognition. Some cultural institutions (CI) are responsible for safeguarding indigenous knowledge and they acquire, document, and record works and images of indigenous knowledge which are contained or embedded in the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) of their indigenous communities such as songs, rituals, arts, and medical wisdom. These items of ICH become 'knowledge objects' or 'representations of knowledge' when documented, which are unlikely to represent the indigenous people's knowledge holistically. Indigenous knowledge embedded in the ICH requires interpretations of the processes, rituals, experiences and practices from the indigenous communities.  This interpretivist study, using a knowledge management (KM) lens, examined the knowledge sharing processes of the indigenous people of Sarawak, Malaysia, to understand the nature of indigenous knowledge and knowledge sharing from the perspectives of the indigenous people of Sarawak, in order to assist Sarawak's cultural institutions in safeguarding their ICH.  This research used narrative inquiry as a research methodology, acquiring stories from two clusters of participants, purposively selected from three ethnic groups and from cultural institutions in Sarawak's Civil Service. This study used a knowledge management perspective in analysing the findings. The findings on the nature of indigenous people's knowledge highlight a three-tiered knowledge system. The findings on the CIs' safeguarding efforts elucidate the gap in the management of the CIs' organizational knowledge on safeguarding.  This study makes several important contributions. First, it contributes to the literature about the cultural protocol requirements of the indigenous people of Sarawak before they can share their knowledge. Secondly, this study elucidates the indigenous people's knowledge as a three-tiered system which influences the people's knowledge sharing ways. This system can be used to guide the CIs' practices of safeguarding ICH. The third contribution of this study is that it expands our understanding of the complexity of indigenous knowledge, and creates a conceptual model to aid and guide this understanding. Fourth, this study also contributes towards a greater understanding of the importance of the CIs including the indigenous peoples in the safeguarding practices in order to avoid the decontextualization of the ICH. Thus, this study confirms the importance of the participation of the indigenous people in the CIs' practice of safeguarding ICH.  Another contribution of this study, based on its findings, is the adaptation of three elements of a KM spectrum (Binney, 2001) for the CIs' KM approach in managing their organizational knowledge on safeguarding ICH.


For decades, nonverbal communication scholars have employed manual coding as the primary research methodology for systematic content analysis of nonverbal behaviors such as facial expressions and gestures. Manual coding of visual data, however, is expensive and time consuming and therefore not suitable for studies relying on large-scale data. This article introduces a novel computational methodology that can automatically analyze visual content of human communication from visual data. Based on computer vision techniques, the method allows to automatic detection and classification of diverse facial expressions and communicative gestures that have been manually coded in traditional work. To demonstrate the new method, we develop a computational pipeline to classify fine-grained facial expressions and physical gestures and apply our technique to the first 2016 U.S. presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The results confirm that computational methods can replicate human coding with a high degree of accuracy for bodily movements and facial expressions, as well as nonverbal tics and signature displays unique to individual candidates. Automated coding should soon facilitate rapid progress in quantitative visual communication research by dramatically scaling up existing manual studies.


Computing Bilinear Pairing on sensor platforms has become an important research topic since the introduction of pairing-based cryptography to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Some previous works have provided benchmarks for the pairing computation on sensors. However, a complete pairingbased cryptographic scheme requires much more than just a bilinear pairing operation, and little work has been done yet in this area. In this paper, we present the first fully functional pairing-based cryptographic library for WSNs. The library is fast and lightweight, and has an additional of one identity-based encryption scheme and two short signature schemes included. We also propose several new algorithms and techniques, and show that they significantly improve the speed and reduce the memory usage of the library. The performance results of implementing the three pairing-based cryptographic schemes show that pairingbased cryptosystems are feasible and applicable in WSNs. In particular, the amount of RAM and ROM taken by each of these pairing-based cryptographic schemes is no more than 10% and 20%, respectively, of the total capacities of a MICAz mote.


In this paper, we show how the Eigenfactor(R) score, originally designed for ranking scholarly journals, can be adapted to rank the scholarly output of authors, institutions, and countries based on authorlevel citation data. Using the methods described herein, we provide Eigenfactor rankings for 84,808 disambiguated authors of 240,804 papers in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) — a pre and post-print archive devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities. As an additive metric, the Eigenfactor scores are readily computed for collectives such as departments or institutions as well. We show that a collective's Eigenfactor score can be computed either by summing the Eigenfactor scores of its members, or by working directly with a collective-level cross-citation matrix. To illustrate, we provide Eigenfactor rankings for institutions and countries in the SSRN repository. With a network-wide comparison of Eigenfactor scores and download tallies, we demonstrate that Eigenfactor scores provide information that is both different from and complementary to that provided by download counts. We see author-level ranking as one filter for navigating the scholarly literature, and note that such rankings generate incentives for more open scholarship, as authors are rewarded for making their work available to the community as early as possible and prior to formal publication. NOTE: Because of the incompleteness of the SSRN CiteReader data at this time, please check back at this URL for updated versions of this paper for updated results over the next 2 years. In addition, when citing this paper please include the following: Data as of March 14, 2011.


We present an approach for efficiently training Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) on large amounts of high-dimensional data (e.g., images). In such a scenario, SGD is strongly superior in terms of execution time and memory usage, although it is conceptually more complex than the traditional Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. For enabling SGD training, we propose three novel ideas: First, we show that minimizing an upper bound to the GMM log likelihood instead of the full one is feasible and numerically much more stable way in high-dimensional spaces. Secondly, we propose a new annealing procedure that prevents SGD from converging to pathological local minima. We also propose an SGD-compatible simplification to the full GMM model based on local principal directions, which avoids excessive memory use in high-dimensional spaces due to quadratic growth of covariance matrices. Experiments on several standard image datasets show the validity of our approach, and we provide a publicly available TensorFlow implementation.


The DIADEM project aims to develop assistive web-based technologies, in the form of an Expert System (ES), to improve online services access for older adults faced with cognitive decline. Both during the initial analysis and during system trials it is necessary to observe users browsing and interacting with 'complex' online forms. However, establishing what constitutes a 'complex' online form for this target user group, proved to be somewhat of a challenge. Consequently we have developed a set of Bespoke Online Form Selection (BOFS) metrics, which have been used to inform the online form selection and categorising process. BOFS has proved to be a valuable tool to identify complex online forms for use in DIADEM's end-user trials. This paper presents the BOFS metrics, shows how these are aligned with the target user group, and demonstrates how BOFS has been of value within the context of the DIADEM project.


Ran is a multifunctional small GTPase that is involved in nucleocytoplasmic transport, mitotic spindle assembly, and nuclear envelope reformation. Nuclear transport factor 2 (NTF2) facilitates nuclear import of Ran. It binds FxFG repeat-containing domains of the nucleoporins Nup62 (vertebrate) and Nsp1p (yeast). Here, we have identified Arabidopsis Nup62 through its sequence similarity to mammalian Nup62 and yeast Nsp1p. A GFP¬AtNup62 fusion protein is associated with the nuclear envelope in transgenic Arabidopsis plants and interacts in planta with AtNTF2a, one of the two Arabidopsis NTF2 homologs. Overexpression-based co-suppression of AtNup62 leads to severely dwarfed, early-flowering plants, suggesting an important function for Nup62 in plants.


We have studied magnetic pulsations in the 5- to 20-mHz (Pc4) band observed on 7 January 1997 from ∼1400 UT to ∼1600 UT at ground stations located on the nightside. At low latitudes (L < 2) the spectral content of the pulsations did not differ much from the Pi2 pulsations that were observed adjacent to the above interval. However, during the Pc4 event the auroral luminosity measured by the Ultra Violet Imager instrument on the Polar spacecraft was steadily declining toward a very low level. Also, the Geotail spacecraft, located in the plasmasheet at a geocentric distance of ∼30 R E did not detect strong plasma flows. Looking for clues of possible dayside sources for the pulsations, we find that the interplanetary magnetic field measured by the IMP-8 spacecraft made a small (<30°) angle with the Sun-Earth axis. This condition is favorable for generation of ultra-low-frequency (ULF) waves in the region upstream of the bow shock, and it is known that the upstream waves are a major source of Pc4 pulsations observed on the dayside. Pointing to a common upstream energy source, strong low-latitude Pc4 pulsations were observed on the dayside during the period of the nightside Pc4 pulsations. However, the spectrum of the upstream magnetic field oscillations at IMP-8 was characterized by broadband power below 20 mHz instead of a strong peak at the frequency of the observed ground Pc4 pulsations. Plasmaspheric cavity mode resonance may have played a role in filtering the Pc4 pulsations from the broadband input to the magnetosphere.


Bluebell seeds were collected from the same location for five different growth periods (2006–2010). The composition of fatty acids in the triacylglycerols present in bluebell seeds was determined using 1H- and 13C NMR and GC-MS of fatty acid methyl esters with good agreement between the different methods of analysis for the proportion of individual fatty acids. The seed oil comprised 80% ω-9 monounsaturated (C18:1, C20:1, C22:1), 10% ω-6,9 biunsaturated (C18:2) and 10% saturated fatty acids (C16:0, C18:0, C20:0, C22:0). The oil contained 25% of fatty acids with 20 or 22 carbon chain length. Gondoic acid (C20:1) was present at 20% and there was a consistency in the composition of the seed oil for the different harvest years. Based on the composition of bluebell seed oil, possible future uses are suggested and the combination of bio refining bluebell seeds in tandem with conservation efforts is proposed.


In this paper the authors show how it is possible to reduce the number of significant parameters appearing in typical rock mechanics boundary value problems of rock engineering and tunneling. Further, they present methods to gain information concerning the solutions to these problems, presuming the rock mass obeys the well-known, and in geomechanics widely used, Mohr-Coulomb yield criterion. The system of differential equations that governs boundary value problems with a Mohr-Coulomb elastoplastic material can be reformulated by means of simple substitutions in such a way that cohesion and Young's modulus do not explicitly appear. This makes substantial savings of computational effort possible, and contributes to a better understanding of the structure of the solution. Computational results obtained for some values of Young's modulus, cohesion, initial stresses, and boundary tractions can easily be transformed to the results for other values. The transformed equations suggest very clearly the influence of cohesion, i.e., as compared to the effect of a support pressure.


The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural recordings, their degree of spoken accent, their relative use of place and manner cues, the assimilation of these phonemes into native-language categories, and their perceptual maps (i.e., multidimensional scaling solutions) for these phonemes. Most Sinhala speakers had near-chance identification accuracy, Germans ranged from chance to 100% correct, and Dutch speakers had uniformly high accuracy. The results suggest that these learning differences were caused more by perceptual interference than by category assimilation; Sinhala and German speakers both have a single native-language phoneme that is similar to English /w/ and /v/, but the auditory sensitivities of Sinhala speakers make it harder for them to discern the acoustic cues that are critical to /w/-/v/ categorization.


Gender bias has been identified in many models for Natural Language Processing, stemming from implicit biases in the text corpora used to train the models. Such corpora are too large to closely analyze for biased or stereotypical content. Thus, we argue for a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, where the quantitative part produces a view of the data of a size suitable for qualitative analysis. We investigate the usefulness of semi-supervised topic modeling for the detection and analysis of gender bias in three corpora (mainstream news articles in English and Swedish, and LGBTQ+ web content in English). We compare differences in topic models for three gender categories (masculine, feminine, and nonbinary or neutral) in each corpus. We find that in all corpora, genders are treated differently and that these differences tend to correspond to hegemonic ideas of gender.


Discoglossus pictus spawns spontaneously at intervals during the summer under laboratory conditions. During the winter oviposition and pairing can be induced by the injection of chorionic gonadotrophin. The hatching rate is good and there is a low mortality among the tadpoles. Metamorphosis occurs comparatively early and regularly, mainly during the fifth and sixth weeks after hatching. The young toads eat small flies avidly. Under laboratory conditions, however, they lose condition in a month or two and ultimately die, apparently from some deficiency disease. Adult toads are easily maintained on worms, slugs, newborn mice, etc. The tadpoles thrive well on raw liver or dried liver powder. The regularity with which metamorphosis takes place makes Discoglossus tadpoles ideal material for the demonstration of the anti-thyroid activity of thiourea and related substances.


How mental disorder relates to criminal insanity is a contested matter. Norway has a tradition of using a 'medical model' for the definition of criminal insanity that is unique in an international perspective. According to this model, insanity is determined only in relation to a medical criterion, so that all that is required is the presence of a qualifying mental disorder. Criminal insanity is, under the current rule, equated with psychosis, although this rule has recently been subject to a law reform.
This article explains and discusses this medical model by gathering together legal, forensic, and clinical empirical perspectives on the legal meaning and relevance of psychosis. The article will provide an explanation of the background of the medical model in Norwegian law, and the justifications for tying criminal insanity to psychosis. It will also explain how criminal insanity is operationalised in forensic practice, and discuss the legal conceptualisation of psychosis from a medical perspective. A main conclusion is that the legal meaning of psychosis is unclear, and the authors describe several challenges in legal and forensic practice. The authors emphasise the need for further knowledge development in the intersection between law and medicine.


Contrast-enhanced dynamic CT was used prospectively to diagnose and locate the site of active arterial intraabdominal hemorrhage in 18 patients. Active arterial extravasation was confirmed by angiography in five patients and by immediate surgery in nine. Two patients not undergoing surgery or angiography required multiple blood transfusions to correct rapidly falling hematocrit due to a coagulopathy. One patient died of hypovolemic shock, and autopsy confirmed a large acute retroperitoneal hematoma. Another patient with a splenic laceration and massive hemoperitoneum on CT had no active bleeding at the time of surgery, which was delayed 1 hr from the time of the CT. All patients were clinically thought to be hemodynamically stable and had systolic blood pressures greater than 110 mm Hg at the time of CT. In seven patients, hypotension developed either during (two patients) or immediately after (five patients) CT scanning, necessitating either immediate surgery or angiographic embolization. Contrast-enhanced dynamic CT is valuable in the diagnosis and localization of active arterial intraabdominal hemorrhage. Identification of the anatomic site of this potentially life-threatening hemorrhage is critical in determining whether immediate laparotomy or angiographic embolization is the preferred method of treatment.


In this paper we present the Inter-Institutional Gap(IIG) Framework as a novel approach to conceptualizing the often-overlooked interconnectivity of different rule-levels between formal and informal institutions in a resource system. This framework goes beyond the existing concepts of legal pluralism, institutional void, structural hole, and cultural mismatch, each of which offer valuable insights to particular gaps between formal and informal institutions, but do not sufficiently address the interaction at every rule level (i.e. constitutional choice, collective choice and operational choice rules). In order to demonstrate the potential of our framework for better understanding the underlying causes of inter-institutional gaps, we apply it to four case studies that encompass diverse geographical locations, governance scales, and social-ecological systems. Results reveal inter-institutional gaps can be created when there are unintended, unforeseen or hidden gaps between different rule hierarchies in two or more simultaneously operating institutions. More specifically we observe that: i) inter-institutional gaps are co-existing, therefore if a certain gap is identified, other gaps may be expected; ii) certain gaps may reveal latent gaps; and iii) intermediaries may be key to addressing inter-institutional gaps. In many cases, sustainable natural resource management and regulation cannot be achieved without directly addressing the inter-institutional gaps that exist between formal and informal institutions operating in the same resource system. The Framework facilitates analysis and understanding of multi-level governance structures in pursuit of addressing complex natural resource management issues.