A good understanding of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs' motivations for export becomes imperative for the achievement of High Impact Programme - Going Export under the Malaysian Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Masterplan (2012 – 2020). Research has demonstrated that systematic study of values can generate insights about entrepreneurial behaviour. Values are often linked to entrepreneurial intention but to date, a detailed, well-developed and empirically tested model from values to entrepreneurial intention is missing. Extant literature also suggests that it is critical for future research to account for the context within which international entrepreneurship occurs. There are several objectives for this study. The first objective is to propose and empirically test a theory-driven research framework that coherently integrates entrepreneurial values and the Theory of Planned Behaviour in the context of small and medium-sized international entrepreneurship. The second objective is to identify entrepreneurial values that significantly influence the three determinants of export intention, i.e. Behavioural Beliefs, Normative Beliefs and Control Beliefs. The third objective is to investigate the significance of the three antecedents of intention in predicting export intention in a collectivist country. The fourth objective is to determine the relative weightage of the three antecedents of intention in predicting Export Intention in a collectivist country. The fifth objective is to test the moderation effect of observed heterogeneity (i.e. gender, ethnicity, current exporting status of entrepreneurs) as well as unobserved heterogeneity on the integrative framework. The final objective is to provide insights to fine tune public policies that aim to facilitate a greater level of exporting by SME entrepreneurs and further the economic progress of Malaysia. This is a post-positivist and cross-sectional study conducted via survey questionnaire on 243 small and medium-sized entrepreneurs in Malaysia. Data were analysed using Structural Equation Modelling techniques (AMOS and Partial Least Squares). The results revealed that this integration is supported by data and therefore, extended the theory of entrepreneurship about the impact of entrepreneurial values on entrepreneurial intention. Self-direction and Stimulation values significantly influence the antecedents of Export Intention. Besides this, Behavioural Belief Strength is a stronger predictor of export intention than Control Belief Strength. The group-specific Partial Least Squares results enhanced the overall explanatory power of the integrated model. In other words, the motivations from entrepreneurial values to export intention are moderated by observed heterogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity. Some structural paths are not generalizable across observed heterogeneity, which mean that there are some differences between the two groups. Overall, this integration of entrepreneurial values and the Theory of Planned Behaviour significantly enhances the understanding of the causal relationship between small and medium-sized entrepreneurs' values and export intention. Moreover, the results demonstrate that an aggregate-level of analysis can be misleading. From analysis by observed and unobserved heterogeneity, this study adds to the body of knowledge about human variations in behaviour and the associated reasons; hence, the academic community becomes more enlightened and 'worldly'. The significant theoretical contributions to the international entrepreneurship literature from this study are in international entrepreneurship theory, multi-disciplinary integration and intra-national diversity. This study is evaluated against two influential articles in terms of Theoretical Contributions and Contextualizing Theory Building in Entrepreneurship Research. The results from both evaluations are satisfactory.


A novel 40-Gb/s constant envelope optical frequency shift keying (FSK) transmitter and the transmission characteristics are investigated both by simulation and experiment. Meanwhile, to increase the spectrum efficiency of FSK, we propose a novel optical minimum-shift keying (MSK) scheme and analyze its performance compared with other MSK schemes and other traditional modulation formats. Simulation and experimental results show that the novel FSK scheme could be a potential candidate for the future high speed transmission and label switching systems. And the novel MSK scheme deserves future deep research for its potential excellent performance.


The study was conducted to evaluate the varietal performance of sweet orange genotypes at National Citrus Research Program, Dhankuta, Nepal during 2015. Twenty 20 exotic as well as local genotypes planted in 2005 were evaluated for their fruit physio-chemical characteristics at their 10-years aged. Three genotypes: Malta Blood Red, Dhankuta Local and Valencia Late have resulted as superior genotypes for fruit yield characteristics. Some genotypes Delicious Seedless, Salustiana and Hamlin also exhibited excellent performance for their fruit size and weight; however these genotypes produced lower fruit number per plant. Pineapple, Meisheu-9, and Washington Navel had higher TSS. There was similar fruit maturity period commenced from 14 November to 28 December among the genotypes. Based on the results, the genotypes showing distinct characteristics of fruit yield and quality including fruit maturity period should be promoted to make variety diversity in Nepal.
Int. J. Appl. Sci. Biotechnol. Vol 6(4): 308-312


Primary repair of the cleft lip is often associated with secondary deformities, which require revision and secondary reconstruction. Patients with one or all of the following, a tight lip restricting use of orthodontic appliances, absence of a Cupid's bow, or absence of vermilion tubercle, were treated with the Abbé island flap. A triangular muco-musculo-cutaneous island flap was designed in the central segment of the lower lip. A full-thickness incision of skin, muscle, and mucosa was made in the midline of the upper lip, dividing the lip into two segments, and the island Abbé flap was inserted. One week after surgery, the pedicle of the island flap was divided and the inset of the flap completed. Sixty patients with severe secondary cleft lip deformities (36 males and 24 females) were treated. Good aesthetic and functional results were achieved during 1 to 17 years of follow-up. Insertion of the Abbé flap resulted in release of the tight upper lip and a new, inconspicuous scar. Use of orthodontic appliances was facilitated, and tightness of the tissue, which restricted the expansion of the alveolar process, was eliminated. Adequate tissue was transferred to the upper lip, which improved the bulk of the lip and vermilion tubercle. The retrusion of the midface and the projection of the upper lip were also improved, and the upper and lower lips became better balanced. Donor site morbidities were insignificant. Use of the Abbé flap in selected patients resulted in successful reconstruction of secondary cleft lip deformities.


Chairman Little: This session has a title of "Preventive Psychiatry." I am not sure that it is an entirely correct or happy one. Psychiatry is still a bad word to a good many people, including some physicians, yet it has a real connection with the kind of thing in which we are all interested. What we will discuss is psychiatry in the sense that we are concerned in understanding and helping people, in this case, children. Yet it is not psychiatry in the sense that we are concerned with long term treatment of severe disturbances of adjustment. It is an application of psychiatric knowledge and skill by pediatricians within the framework of pediatric practice. The emphasis is on preventing disturbances in adjustment or on correcting early and relatively shallow-rooted ones.
 For a long time many pediatricians have been giving a great deal more than good medical care to sick and well children. On their rounds and in their offices they have consciously and unconsciously helped many children through helping their parents. They help parents by supporting, encouraging and advising them in the difficult job of being parents, and in so doing, they indirectly but concretely help many children. It isn't easy to do this, at least I don't find it so. In the first place, we aren't trained for it. If we develop any skill at it, it comes from experience, which can be painful and slow, and from something that we call intuition. As a matter of fact, our medical training, at least that part of it concerned with our handling of the patient with a medical problem, is often a serious drawback.


Printed wiring board placement optimization of high‐speed placement machines in a high volume surface mount line was studied based on more careful analysis of the board layout beforehand. In this method, the target is to get the board area to be assembled as small as possible in each successive placement machine, paying the most attention on component coordinates already during preliminary line balancing phase. Optimization and line balancing principles, that had showed promising results already in the first studies when compared to globally used well‐known commercial optimization systems, were now further developed. Results presented and illustrated in this paper show remarkable, comparable, improvement in both cycle time reduction and in balance of the whole surface mount line. The main difference between this method and the advanced commercial solutions is explained in detail. Board layout, feeder arrangement, sequence of fiducial registration, and XY‐table movement were taken into deeper consideration in the method.


This paper explores key methodological and analytical issues encountered in an exploratory study of teenage girls' views and experiences of violence, carried out in Scotland. Researching the ways in which girls conceptualize, experience and use violence raises a number of dilemmas due in part to the sensitive nature of the research topic, and the age and gender of those taking part. Drawing on feminist debates about objectivity, the role of the researcher, power relationships in the production of knowledge, and representation, this article highlights the difficulties of adapting such principles to the day-to-day practicalities of conducting empirical research on girls and violence. It shows how the research itself has been enhanced by having to engage with and work through this complexity.


The biodiversity and distribution patterns of epiphytic hydroids were studied in kelp forests (composed of Laminaria digitata, Saccharina latissima and Alaria esculenta) located in an Arctic glaciated fiord (Hornsund, west Spitsbergen). In total, twenty-eight species were found colonizing algae, stones connected to holdfast, and overgrowing the surface of other animals associated with kelps. The characteristics of the algal host (e.g. algae species, age, rhizoid volume or biomass) did not show any effect upon hydroid species richness or species composition. High hydroid biodiversity was strongly dependent on microsubstrate heterogeneity. The highest biodiversity as well as frequency of hydroid occurrence were noted at a site located furthest from the glacier and characterized by the lowest sediment concentration and sedimentation rate. Sexual reproduction also seemed to be inhibited by glacier-derived disturbance. Of ten fertile species found at the 'clearest' site only two were fertile at sites under the strong influence of such perturbations. Potential physical drivers of species occurrence were linked to the activity of tidal glaciers, particularly to high loads of mineral sedimentation and iceberg scouring.


Choreographies capture the collaboration aspects between two or more processes. Explicit choreography notations have been included in the upcoming version 2.0 of the Business Process Model and Notation language (BPMN 2.0). This paper presents a first evaluation of the choreography modeling capabilities of BPMN 2.0 and presents a summary of the evaluation of BPEL-based approaches. The result is that BPMN 2.0 does not support reference passing and is tightly tied to technical configurations.


The present study aimed to investigate the role of processing in women's responses to thin idealized images of beauty. A sample of 144 women viewed magazine advertisements containing either thin ideal or product images. Instructional set was manipulated with three levels: control, social comparison, and fantasy instructions. It was found that exposure to thin ideal images led to increased negative mood and body dissatisfaction, while instructional set had its effect on positive mood and body dissatisfaction. For thin ideal images, social comparison instructions led to greater negative mood and body dissatisfaction, while fantasy instructions led to improved positive mood. Importantly, regression analyses indicated that both comparison processing (negatively) and fantasy processing (positively) were associated with women's response to thin ideal images. It was concluded that the nature of the processing women engage in is crucial to their response to thin ideal images.


Abstract: Nineteen patients with a variety of types of epidermolysis bullosa were initially assessed in an open study of a treatment regime for the genetic type of epidermolysis bullosa. Nine of the ten patients admitted to the hospital for treatment showed definite objective improvement with decreased number of blisters and increased rate of healing of blisters. The mean percentage decrease in blister numbers from the time of admission until discharge from hospital was 76%. Sixteen patients were followed as outpatients for 5–11 months. Two patients continued to show objective improvement, while eight reported more rapid healing of their blisters. Six patients failed to improve. This treatment has a beneficial effect in inpatients with epidermolysis bullosa. The improvement may be due to the intense topical treatment rather than to a specific item of the therapy. In the long term, this treatment has little effect on the formation of new blisters, but an accelerated healing of blisters is reported by 50% of the patients.


Three aspects of trigeminal pain are considered: the peripheral mechanisms of pain from teeth and from the cornea, and the role of the trigeminal brainstem nuclei in pain. Pain is probably the only sensation that can be evoked by stimulation of dentin or dental pulp in man. Five nerve-endings enter dentinal tubules from the pulp but do not extend into the outer dentine, which is nevertheless sensitive. In teeth of limited growth in experimental animals, the dental pulp is supplied by A beta, A delta and C fibres and these are associated with two categories of receptor: one responds to cooling and to other stimuli that cause displacement of the contents of the dentinal tubules such as probing and drying the dentine, and the other group responds most vigorously to heating. Some cold sensitive units have A beta fibres and the evidence suggests that stimulation of these is capable of evoking both muscle reflexes and pain and, near threshold, 'pre-pain' sensations. Thermal stimulation of the cornea produces sensations of pain and, with less intense stimuli, irritation, Mechanical stimulation also produces pain but it is not clear whether, below the pain threshold, such stimuli produce touch sensation or some other sensation related to pain. Histologically, the nerve-endings in the corneal epithelium consist of fine, bare processes closely associated with the surface of the epithelial cells. Recordings in experimental animals have shown that many of the receptors respond to several different forms of stimulus and their properties correlate well with those predicted from psychophysical experiments in man. The results of trigeminal tractotomy in man and recordings from the trigeminal brainstem nuclei in anaesthetized animals, have generally indicated that nucleus caudalis is the main relay in the pain pathway from the face and associated structures. Recent observations have, however, shown that tractotomy does not produce complete analgesia of this region and responses to thermal stimulation of teeth and noxious stimulation of other oro-facial tissues have been recorded from the more rostral parts of the brainstem nuclear complex. The surgical procedures employed to set up an animal for stereotaxic recording may induce long-lasting depression in the excitability of neurons in these nuclei, which masks some of their properties. The mechanism of this depression has not been established.


We consider the problem of modulation and estimation of a random parameter U to be conveyed across a discrete memoryless channel. Upper and lower bounds are derived for the best achievable exponential decay rate of a general moment of the estimation error, E|Û-U|ρ, ρ ≥ 0, when both the modulator and the estimator are subjected to optimization. These exponential error bounds turn out to be intimately related to error exponents of channel coding and to channel capacity. While in general, there is some gap between the upper and the lower bounds, they asymptotically coincide both for very small and for very large values of the moment power ρ. This means that our achievability scheme, which is based on simple quantization of U followed by channel coding, is nearly optimum in both limits. Some additional properties of the bounds are discussed and demonstrated, and finally, an extension to the case of a multidimensional parameter vector is outlined, with the principal conclusion that our upper and lower bounds asymptotically coincide also for a high dimensionality.


Proposed lie-detection technology based on neuroscience poses significant challenges for the law. The law must respond to the science with an adequate understanding of such evidence, its significance, and its limitations. This paper makes three contributions toward those ends. First, it provides an account of the preliminary neuroscience research underlying this proposed evidence. Second, it discusses the nature and significance of such evidence, how such evidence would fit with legal practices and concepts, and its potential admissibility. Finally, it analyzes the constitutional protections that may limit the compelled production of such evidence.


Localization of the hazardous gas source plays an important role in the protection of public security, since it can save a lot of time for subsequent rescue works. For gas source localization (GSL), a large number of gas sensor nodes can be rapidly deployed to construct a wireless sensor network (WSN) and cover the whole concerned area. Although least-squares (LS) methods can solve the problem of GSL in WSNs regardless of the distribution of measurement noises, centralized LS methods are not power efficient and robust since they require the gathering and processing of large-scale measurements on a central node. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed method for GSL in WSNs, which is performed on a sequence of sensor nodes successively. Each sensor node in the sequence conducts an individual estimation and a convex combination. The individual estimation is inspired by the LS formulation of the problem of GSL in WSNs. The proposed method is fully distributed and computationally efficient, and it does not rely on the absolute location of the sensor nodes. Extensive simulation results and a set of experimental results demonstrate that the success rate and localization accuracy of the proposed method are generally higher than those of the trust-region-reflective method.


In this position paper we highlight a shortcoming of current QoE management approaches that typically do not take into due account the resulting user behavior. As a result, a divergence is introduced between the predicted and the actual QoE, the later being affected by the reaction of the user to resource assignments. We believe the following two factors to be among those having the highest impact in this respect: the user (im)patience, and tolerance to low quality. To illustrate our claims, we model an example scenario where a user requests an online service, such as an online authentication service. The request is processed by a system with limited resources, which may also cause the request to be blocked or buffered, with a consequent impact on the QoE. Some aspects of aborting users, blocked users, and QoE of served users are investigated by means of a simple queueing system, $M/M/s/n+M$ which takes impatience into account. Insights from this theoretical study show that an increase in the user patience results in a decrease of the average QoE in the system, as the user may consume system resources without waiting to be finally served. Based on these findings, we argue the importance of incorporating these aspects of quality, often ignored in both QoE modeling and management, into any QoE management system that is expected to improve the provider's bottom line.


While trying to optimize sharp distillation processes, the number of possible column sequences significantly increases as the number of components that make up the feed mixture increases. As a result, proper sequencing with maximum exergetic profit and minimum exergy destruction becomes harder to achieve. In this study, an exergoeconomic multi-objective optimization was applied to the distillation sequences of three separate hydrocarbon mixture cases, by means of a genetic-algorithm-based solver software. A computer program (DISMO) was developed in-house to achieve this functionality. The results indicate that the created algorithm was quite applicable in determining the optimum sequencing in distillation, as it successfully created the Pareto Solution Set and suggested the optimum configurations. This study also presented an opportunity to conduct a parametric investigation on various weighting factors for objective functions. As the importance given to a specific objective was increased, the optimization results had a tendency to favour that specific objective through arrangement of sequencing as expected, though the profit and sequencing converged to a single result after a certain threshold.


This report examines market opportunities in British Columbia for Alberta produced table potatoes. The report also seeks (1) to assess the cost competitiveness of the Alberta table potato sector, compared with costs of potato production in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States (US); (2) to provide a preliminary understanding of potential trade flows and trading volumes based on relative cost competitiveness; and (3) to assess the importance of particular potato attributes to table potato buyers in British Columbia. The study also undertakes a description of the environment in which trade takes place between Alberta and British Columbia. This is done to document conditions under which inter-province trade takes place, and to attempt to assess whether trade regulations affect Alberta shippers differently than shippers located in British Columbia. No overt barriers to trade were found. However, some rules do appear to impose different trade practices on potatoes moving across provincial boundaries compared to potatoes that are grown and sold within British Columbia. The study finds that, based on available cost estimates, Alberta producers are strongly cost-competitive in the British Columbia table potato market. However, potato production in the Pacific Northwest is also cost-competitive in the British Columbia table potato market. While Pacific Northwest production dwarfs that of Alberta, application of similar supply functions in the two regions suggests that there is a market for both Alberta and the Pacific Northwest in the British Columbia table potato market. This estimate is made in the context of new, and in our view better than recent past, estimates of the size of the British Columbia table potato market for 1996. These estimates suggest that British Columbia-based producers face serious cost constraints to expanding potato output and that the table potato market in British Columbia represents an opportunity for 51,500 metric tonne to be supplied by competing regions. Finally, the study reports on an assessment of table potato attributes considered important to potato buyers in the British Columbia market. British Columbia buyers appear willing to pay the highest prices for potatoes that are white, medium size, and of British Columbia origin. Potatoes from Alberta and the Pacific Northwest become equally attractive compared to British Columbia potatoes when prices are slightly below those received by sellers of equivalent British Columbia grown potatoes. Study estimates suggest that table potatoes grown in Alberta are valued equally by British Columbia buyers when potatoes grown in Alberta are priced $7.70 per tonne below those of local potatoes, and Pacific Northwest potatoes are valued equally to those grown locally when Pacific Northwest potatoes are priced about $13.90 per tonne below local prices. These estimates should be viewed with caution since (a) they are "best" ones given the levels of confidence of the study results, and (b) they represent a current perception about the desirability of non British Columbia grown table potatoes. Such perceptions may be long-term or fleeting, and may be subject to change as perceptions of BC buyers change with time or with new information.


Fly ash is a system of dry ash handling system burning coal by b oiler before getting to the chimney so as not to pollute the environment (air). Abu will pass the E lecture Static Recipient ( ESP ) and be temporarily accommodated at hopper . Then the ash will be transferred through the pneumatic AV pump system to fly ash silo . Fly ash transfer system failure occurred due to disruption of the pneumatic control system pump pa da AV system. This is because of the dome valve insert seal on AV pump leak and control system pneumatic fault because of contaminated by fly ash dust . The working intensity of the AV pump system in operation creates friction between the dome valve and dome valve insert seal which can cause erosion and leak on the dome valve insert seal . Frequent leakage at dome valve insert seal , has an impact on the spare part control system pneumatic contaminated by fly ash dust which causes damage to pneumatic spare parts and the cessation of the transfer process of ash to fly ash silos.The research was conducted with the addition of protection to the system pneumatic control AV pump by installing a quick exhaust valve on the system pneumatic AV pump in fly ash system , so that dust does not enter the AV pump's pneumatic control system when a dome valve insert seal leaks .


Wireless networks are being integrated into the modern automobile. The security and privacy implications of such in-car networks, however, have are not well understood as their transmissions propagate beyond the confines of a car's body. To understand the risks associated with these wireless systems, this paper presents a privacy and security evaluation of wireless Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems using both laboratory experiments with isolated tire pressure sensor modules and experiments with a complete vehicle system. We show that eavesdropping is easily possible at a distance of roughly 40m from a passing vehicle. Further, reverse-engineering of the underlying protocols revealed static 32 bit identifiers and that messages can be easily triggered remotely, which raises privacy concerns as vehicles can be tracked through these identifiers. Further, current protocols do not employ authentication and vehicle implementations do not perform basic input validation, thereby allowing for remote spoofing of sensor messages. We validated this experimentally by triggering tire pressure warning messages in a moving vehicle from a customized software radio attack platform located in a nearby vehicle. Finally, the paper concludes with a set of recommendations for improving the privacy and security of tire pressure monitoring systems and other forthcoming in-car wireless sensor networks.


Political discourse involves particular lexical choices, grammatical features, rhetorical devices, and nonverbal signals. Politicians often capitalize on them in order to influence recipients' state of mind and persuade them to share their world image. Particular persuasive strategies are used as tools to deliberately manufacture mass consent. On their part, the addressees of political discourse are not often aware of the effects of these particular discourse features in terms of audience control. This paper aims at discussing discourse analysis as a diagnostic tool for the assessment of power relations and the transmission of ideological beliefs. In the spirit of Critical Discourse Analysis and in particular Fairclough's (1989) ten-question model, the paper proposes a multimodal analysis of Barack Obama's Victory Speech . The study reveals that the detection of political messages (in this case, the importance of national unity) is triggered by the presence of ideologically significant lexical elements, grammatical features, rhetorical techniques, and discourse markers that function as ideological cues. Their simultaneous distribution, together with specific non-verbal markers (i.e. eye gaze and baton signs). contributes to reinforcing the proposed ideological beliefs.


Family size affects welfare in two ways. First, if family increases and income is constant, income has to be spread over more family members. This would suggest that a family increase would yield a welfare decrease. However, the fact that families have children, even if technically avoidable, points to a value of children as consumption goods. In this paper we analyze two attitude questions, viz. the Income Evaluation Question and the Cantril Question. The first may be interpreted as capturing the first effect only, while the second captures both. We derive family equivalence scales based on the two questions and we find quite different scales. Furthermore we show that both scales do not satisfy the IB-property.


It is proposed that a single connection at the transport layer be implemented as multiple source routes in the network layer, resulting in a balanced loading of network resources. The paths are not necessarily of equal length. The problem of traffic bifurcation at the source, which achieves path splitting, is solved by computing the flows on all the links in the network to minimize a given objective function, such as average delay or packet loss probability. The use of the Join-Biased Queue (JBQ) rule to effect the required traffic splitting is proposed. The superiority of the JBQ rule over other schemes is demonstrated. It is shown that the values obtained for the flows depend on the objective function being optimized. A bound on the size of the destination resequencing buffer, necessary for packets that are received out of order, is computed.<<ETX>>


Currently two main tracks are considered for integration of photonic circuits. Silicon based integration may be more cost effective; however implementation of some functionalities like laser, is problematic. In contrast InP offers complete solution of photonic integration including laser diodes.Additionally, much higher speeds may be anticipated from InP based integration. As in the case of ordinary integrated circuits, attempts to increase degree (density) lead to undesired coupling-crosstalk between the components. Three types of cross coupling may be clearly distinguished: optical, RF(electric) and thermal. Each of them has its specifics, physical mechanisms and methods of analysis. Modeling RF crosstalk will be in the focus of this project.To drive active components, such as laser and photodiodes, conducting tracks are integrated with photonic components. In multichannel photonic IC chips these tracks become very dense leading to strong parasitic electrical couplings between them. This crosstalk becomes more problematic in high speed photonic IC chips where the frequency of the RF signals (modulation, detection) is in the range up to 10GHz and beyond. Thus modeling of the crosstalk between RF tracks (also between RF and DC) is of prime importance. This is the main task of the project. A further task is analysis of the crosstalk using developed models and considering designs allowing reduced cross coupling.


The fact that war changes roles and responsibilities within society, while exposing men and women of all ages and classes to new threats and opportunities, has become increasingly recognised. Civil wars disrupt and destroy civilian life. Men leave, die in combat, are brutalised, lose employment, or resort to despair, violence, or apathy. Women assume enormous burdens of work and all manner of different tasks and responsibilities, lose their security and their protectors, and are victimised and marginalised. Yet few members of peacekeeping missions have any training in dealing with the civilian population, much less the specific issues relating to gender relations. In response to this, a basic training package titled Gender and Peace Support Operations has been designed for use in pre-deployment induction. This article describes the background to its development and outlines how it is expected to be used and evolve in the future.


The Activated Partial Thromboplastin Time (APTT) test, Cephotest, was compared to other APTT methods in current use in 4 specialized coagulation laboratories. In 3 of 4 laboratories, the sensitivity of Cephotest was superior (P less than 0.001) to that of the local APTT method. There was no statistically significant difference between the APTT methods with regard to precision of repetitive testing. In each laboratory, the normal range of Cephotest was estimated on freshly collected plasma samples from healthy subjects. A mean value between 28.8 and 35.8 s, with a standard deviation of 1.1-3.3 s, was obtained. It is concluded that the composition of the APTT method if of importance for the sensitivity of this test, but does not influence the precision of repetitive testing to a significant degree. The use of a standardized reagent facilitates comparison of the results obtained with the APTT method from one laboratory to another.


The weak-localization of the two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in a modulation-doped Al0.22Ga0.78N/GaN single quantum well has been investigated through the magnetoresistance measurements. The elastic scattering time τε, dephasing time τφ and spin-orbit(s-o) scattering time τso at various temperatures are obtained. The fitting parameters indicate that the inelastic scatterings to the 2DEG are mainly due to the piezoelectric field and the alloy disorder in the AlxGa1-xN barrier. When the second subband in the triangular quantum well at the heterointerface is occupied by the 2DEG, the anti-weak localization is observed clearly, which is due to the strong spin-orbit interaction. The spin-orbit effect dominates the quantum correction of the conductivity in the upper subband. The intersubband scattering becomes stronger with increasing temperature.


The purpose of the study to determine the effect of various doses of manure on the growth and yield of red spinach.  Randomized Factorial Experiment is used with three replications. The first factor is the dose Manure P1 = 5 tons/hectare; P2 = 10 ton/ hectare; P3 =Dose manure 15 t / ha. The second factor is the concentration of EM-4, among others K1 = dose of 5 ml/liter of water/polybag; K2 = dose of 10 ml/liter of water/polybag; K3 = dose of 15 ml/liter of water/polybag. Of the two factors 9 combination treatments are obtained which was then repeated 3 times.  There was no significant interaction at F5% test level on all variables studied i.e plant height, leaf number and gross weight per plant at all age of observation. There were significant effects of manure dose factor studied, mainly on plant height variables, number of leaves and gross weight per plant; and statistically, a better value in all of these variables is achieved by treatment P3  manure dose of 15 ton/ha. EM-4 concentration factor has significant influence on plant height variables, number of leaves and gross weight per plant; statistically, a better value in all of these variables are also achieved by treatment of the K3 of 15 ml/liter of water/polybag.


Background: The OMIC revolution has produced tens of thousands of published gene expression signatures, pathways, and modules associated with cancer biology or patient outcome. Thanks to the TCGA effort to systematically collect molecular data from multiple cancer types, it is now possible to compare these signatures within and across cancers, and to collapse them into a smaller set of non-redundant features. Methods: We scored 3602 TCGA samples representing 12 cancer types for expression of a compendium of 6,898 published gene expression prognostic signatures, co-expression modules, amplicons and pathways, using RNAseq expression profiles. 6477 of these features were from the database MsigDB, and the rest from the literature. To define non-redundant gene-programs, we applied a bimodality filter and used Weighted Gene Correlation Network Analysis (WGCNA) to aggregate the bimodal signatures and pathways into coherent clusters. Associations were assessed using standard statistical methods. Results: From the thousands of cancer signatures in our analysis we identified 22 non-redundant gene-programs, defined as groups of gene signatures with high correlation across the Pan-Cancer dataset. These gene programs represent many of the hallmarks of cancer, including sustained proliferative signaling and DNA repair; immune system signaling; altered glycolytic and fatty acid metabolism yielding resistance to stress; apoptosis evasion; epithelial to mesenchymal transition; co-opted squamous and 'stemness' developmental programs; adhesion and cell-cell communication programs, some using plasma membrane and lipid vesicles; and self-sufficiency in growth signals employing estrogen, EGF, and MYC. More than a third of the original signatures clustered together in the proliferation gene-program. In addition to cell cycle and proliferation pathways, this program includes prognostic signatures for lymphoma, bladder, lung, breast, ovarian and other cancers, suggesting that most prognostic signatures are sensing a common proliferative signal associated with cancer aggression. The presence of two dominant immune signals showed a clear divergence in immune signaling between T cell/B cell immune activation and interferon responsive signaling, with the former correlated with immuno-modulatory treatment targets like CTLA4 and PD1. Interestingly, basal, hypoxic, and squamous differentiation programs were associated with poor outcome in many cancer types; in addition, expression of a more novel program dominated by tumor suppressing miRNA associated with good prognosis. Conclusion: The compendium of gene expression signatures is correlated, and can be reduced to a small set of non-redundant gene-programs that mirror the cancer hallmarks and may provide opportunities for investigating cancer heterogeneity and treatment approaches beyond tissue of origin. Citation Format: Denise M. Wolf, Cheng Fan, Katherine A. Hoadley, Christina Yau, Artem Sokolov, TCGA Network, Josh Stuart, Charles Perou, Laura van 't Veer. Thousands of published cancer signatures and pathways can be collapsed into a handful of non-redundant gene programs: a TCGA pan-cancer analysis. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2014 Apr 5-9; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2014;74(19 Suppl):Abstract nr 360. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2014-360


We will discuss the microarchitecture, design, and testing of the first 8 × 8-bit (by modulo 256) parallel carry-save RSFQ multiplier implemented using the ISTEC 10- kA/cm2 1.0-μm fabrication technology. Partial products are asynchronously generated and sent to the reduction stage at the internal "hardwired" rate of 80 GHz. The 8 × 8-bit RSFQ multiplier uses a two-level parallel carry-save reduction tree that significantly reduces the multiplier latency. The 80-GHz carry-save reduction is implemented with asynchronous data-driven wave-pipelined [4:2] compressors built with toggle flip-flop cells. The design has mostly regular layout with both local and global connections between modules. The multiplier core (without SFQ-to-DC and DC-to-SFQ converters) has 5948 Josephson junctions occupying the area of 3.5 mm2 . The multiplier is designed with the target operation frequency of 20 GHz and has the latency of 447 ps at the bias voltage of 2.5 mV. Despite some challenges due to fabrication process parameter variations and flux trapping, the multiplier chip was fabricated and successfully tested for the vast majority of test vectors by the Stony Brook designers with the assistance of colleagues from Yokohama National University in February 2012. While multiplier test operations were generated at low frequency, each of these operations was executed at the "hardwired" rate of 80 GHz. The fabricated chip operated with the measured DC bias margins of ±5%.


In many jurisdictions, filtered containment venting systems are an integral part of severe accident management guidelines but are normally only used as a last resort, to be manually activated when the containment pressure approaches the containment failure limit. This approach fails to utilize the capability of the filtered venting system to better control containment pressure throughout an accident, and to create capacity for possible future pressurization based on the accident progression. In this paper, smart venting strategies are explored, using a generic single-unit CANDU (660 MWe) plant model in MAAP-CANDU, as a means to mitigate the consequences of a severe accident. These strategies are able to account for both current conditions as well as possible future pressurization. The use of strategic venting offers an improvement in maintaining containment integrity, as well as reducing I-131 releases to the environment by about 10% to 31% compared to last-resort venting, while being feasible for manual operator actions. Overall, this comprehensive analysis demonstrates the capability of a smart venting strategy paired with a filtered containment venting system as an active mitigation tool.


This paper is devoted to the study of a directional lifting transform for wavelet frames. A nonsubsampled lifting structure is developed to maintain the translation invariance as it is an important property in image denoising. Then, the directionality of the lifting-based tight frame is explicitly discussed, followed by a specific translation invariant directional framelet transform (TIDFT). The TIDFT has two framelets ψ1, ψ2 with vanishing moments of order two and one respectively, which are able to detect singularities in a given direction set. It provides an efficient and sparse representation for images containing rich textures along with properties of fast implementation and perfect reconstruction. In addition, an adaptive block-wise orientation estimation method based on Gabor filters is presented instead of the conventional minimization of residuals. Furthermore, the TIDFT is utilized to exploit the capability of image denoising, incorporating the MAP estimator for multivariate exponential distribution. Consequently, the TIDFT is able to eliminate the noise effectively while preserving the textures simultaneously. Experimental results show that the TIDFT outperforms some other frame-based denoising methods, such as contourlet and shearlet, and is competitive to the state-of-the-art denoising approaches.


Exposure of synchronized C3H10T1/2 (clone 8) cell populations of various sizes to N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine (MNNG) at a concentration of 2 micrograms/ml for 30 min at 24 h after release from confluence-induced arrest of proliferation produced neoplastic transformation (formation of foci of morphologically altered cells) by a random but episodic process in a small fraction of the cells at risk soon after treatment. The fraction of dishes that contained type II or type III foci increased as the number of cells at risk increased. In contrast, the development of spontaneous foci is a stochastic process that depends on the number of new cells that form during population growth and is independent of the number of cells that are plated (J. W. Grisham et al., Cancer Res., 48: 5969-5976,1988). When there were small numbers of cells at risk, spontaneous formation of foci was a source of considerable error in evaluating MNNG-induced transformation frequency. In surviving cell populations of less than 1000-3000 cells/100-mm dish, the frequency of induction of foci by MNNG could not be distinguished statistically from the frequency with which foci were expected to form spontaneously. When the fraction of MNNG-treated dishes that contained foci was adjusted for the fraction of pooled control dishes that contained foci, the number of foci induced by a uniform dose of MNNG was found to vary with the number of surviving cells. However, the MNNG-induced transformation frequencies calculated by the Poisson method were independent of the size of the population of cells at risk, provided the population of cells at risk was of sufficient size to allow spontaneous and induced transformation to be distinguished statistically. The results of this study show that the frequency of MNNG-induced transformation can be quantitated in cultures of 10T1/2 cells that contain varying but sufficient numbers of cells at risk when spontaneous transformation is considered. Furthermore, these observations suggest that MNNG-induced transformation of 10T1/2 cells occurs with the frequency and characteristics of a mutation-like change involving a single gene.


We have examined the long arm of chromosome 17 in sporadic breast carcinomas for the loss of heterozygosity (LOH) at 18 polymorphic loci. At least three distinct regions could be identified by the frequency of LOH and confirmed by high density deletion maps of individual tumor DNAs. A proximal region affected by LOH is located in a 22-cM region defined by D17S73 and NME1 and thus is similar in location to the region thought to contain the BRCA1 gene associated with familial breast and breast/ovarian cancer. The central region affected by LOH is bordered by the D17S86 and D17S21 loci and is estimated to be 28 cM in size. The third region is bordered by the D17S20 and D17S77 loci which are 11 cM apart. These results define three independent regions of chromosome 17q which are likely to contain tumor suppressor genes relevant to the etiology of sporadic breast carcinoma.


The computational complexity issue is critical for present and future video applications implemented by relatively new video coding standards, such as the H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding), which has a large number of coding modes. One of the main reasons for the importance of providing an efficient complexity control in video coding applications is a strong need to decrease the encoding/decoding computational complexity, especially when the encoding and/or decoding devices are resource-limited, such as portable devices. In turn, efficient complexity control enables reducing the video coding processing time and enables saving power resources during the encoding and/or decoding process. Since the recent dramatic progress in the development of multimedia technologies has made portable devices widespread everywhere, especially in order to provide or receive real-time video contents, the need to enhance the computational complexity control in video coding applications is expected to be further significantly increased as a function of the dramatic increase in the mobile/portable device penetration into the every-day life environment. In this chapter, the authors perform a comprehensive review of the recent advances in computational complexity techniques for video coding applications. This chapter will not only summarize the recent advances in this field, but will also provide explicit directions for the design of the future complexity-aware video coding applications. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2833-5.ch007


Providing an exploration of the key issues, this book offers practical advice on how to improve the safeguarding and welfare of black children and young people in need.

With contributions from academics, researchers and practitioners, it promotes an understanding of the particular cultural and social issues that affect black children in relation to child protection. It highlights how race and racism, as well as culture, faith and gender, can influence the ways need and risk are interpreted and responded to. Drawing on insights from research evidence, case examples and practice guidelines, it outlines the range of factors that contribute to the vulnerability of black children and describes how to improve techniques of working with minority ethnic families. The book covers issues such as the effects of parental mental health problems, living with domestic violence, child maltreatment, and demonstrates how these might be understood differently for black children and young people. There are also chapters on topics such as female genital mutilation, witchcraft and forced marriage.

Essential reading for all social workers and child protection workers, as well as students and support managers, Safeguarding Black Children provides the tools and understanding needed to better support these children.


Experimental testbeds for evaluating solutions in computer networks, are today required as a complement to simulation and emulation. As these testbeds become larger, and accessible to a broader universe of the research community, dedicated management tools become mandatory. These tools ease the complex management of the testbed specific resources, while providing an environment for researchers to define their experiments with large flexibility. While there are currently several management tools, the research community is still lacking tools that smooth the experimentation workflow. These were key aspects that we considered when developing the management infrastructure for our wireless testbed(AMazING). We developed a experimentation support framework supported by an attractive GUI, automation and scripting capabilities, as well as experiment versioning and integrated result gathering and analysis.


Limitations on transmission by an uncooled InGaAlAs Fabry-Perot (FP) laser in 10-Gb/s operation are experimentally and theoretically investigated. The InGaAlAs laser has both high relaxation-oscillation frequency and superior light-current characteristics over a wide temperature range, making it suitable for uncooled operation at 10 Gb/s. Over most of the temperature range used in transmission testing with standard-dispersion fiber, a small power penalty of 1 dB for a bit error rate (BER) of 10/sup -12/ was obtained in transmission over 4-7 km at the measured temperature range, whereas an error floor was seen in transmission over greater distance, despite the negative chromatic dispersion between the fiber and laser light. Theoretical analysis of these results indicates that mode-partition noise (MPN) imposes the major limitation on transmission distance. Moreover, the minimum transmission distance was estimated as 2.1 km, even when the production tolerance of lasing characteristics and zero-dispersion range of installed fiber are taken into account.


This paper presents the modelling and simulation of automatic position control (APC) in an 8-high cold rolling mill hydraulic system built by CERI (Capital Engineering and Research Incorporation). Key feature of the rolling mill APC system is introduced. From modelling, the servo valve and cylinder models are built, and from simulation the dynamic response of the system can be predicted for selecting system components and optimizing system performance. As system dynamic response is not only depending on the servo valve but also on all components in the system, root locus method is applied to analyze APC system dynamic response. Simulation results with different parameters are compared. Additionally, compared with a 6-high cold rolling mill APC system, the APC system dynamic responses of CERI 8-high rolling mill can reach better results than those obtained in the 6-high rolling mill system.


Cloud Computing is an emerging field of technology that relies on sharing of resources over the Internet to achieve economy of scales. It has gained momentum among both individuals and corporate sectors due to a variety of applications such as ease of administration, mobility and collaboration, reduction of hardware and licensing cost, and scalability. Researchers are also trying to explore and analyze the Cloud environment, but due to the lack of resources for performing large-scale experiments, they mostly rely on Cloud simulators. In this regards, several Cloud simulators have been developed to analyze different features as evaluation of fetching a virtual machine, power consumption of network equipment's, resource consumptions and allocation of memory. However, according to the best of our knowledge, none of these simulators provide any support for analyzing the security aspects of the Cloud. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a new Cloud simulator, entitled as secure Cloud Simulator (sec Cloud Sim). The sec Cloud Sim is an extension of existing iCan Cloud simulator, which provides the basic security features of authentication and authorization. After the successful implementation, we have evaluated the performance of sec Cloud Sim and iCan Cloud in terms of packet rate, processing time, response time, and time delay. Our performance evaluation results revealed that sec Cloud Sim has a low performance impact as compared to iCan Cloud. This low performance impact of sec Cloud Sim is due to the integration of security features to iCan Cloud architecture.


Diesel fuel consist of several hundreds of substances on organic basis. Experimental and numerical investigationsof this multicomponent fuel are hard to interpret in detail, since the behavior of the multicomponent mixture is complex. Physical and chemical data of this system is not available under engine relevant conditions. Instead, fundamental research substitutes diesel with pure substances, where a big database exists.Prior work already showed, that overall spray propagation (including vapor phase) is nearly independent on the injected fuel. This is due to the high air entrainment at present diesel engine conditions (very high injection pressure and dense ambient atmosphere). The high air entrainment shortly behind the nozzle exit (within the first 5 mm penetration) creates a situation where properties of the ambient gas dominate the spray propagation resulting in similar mass and momentum distributions even for different fuels, if the injection conditions are kept constant. On the other hand, the liquid length is clearly different for different fuels, so that location and time of the phase change differ with consequences on the time available for mixture formation in the gas phase. The paper describes the liquid length as a function of the enthalpy necessary for the phase transition (given by the fuel and fuel temperature at injection) and the injection conditions (ambient gas properties, injector design and injection pressure). We compare two different models describing the enthalpy balance. Siebers et al. presented "Model I", where mass transfer dominates the enthalpy transfer and evaporation takes place. In our own "Model II" evaporation is suppressed, resulting in a heat transfer driven enthalpy transfer without mass transport. The calculations are validated with experimental data.The liquid length is optically accessible by Mie-Scattering imaging techniques, the complete spray evolution by Schlieren technique. The experimental study was carried out in the high-pressure combustion vessel "OptiVeP" at FAU. The data shown in this paper derived from measurements with dodecane injected at 1200 bar into 613 K ambient. The ambient pressure varies from 1 – 10 MPa. A Continental research injector with a 115 µm hole and L/D of 6.5 was used. Nitrogen atmosphere suppressed ignition.Increasing the ambient pressure leads to a change in the mechanism in phase transition. It switches from a masstransfer dominated regime to a heat transfer dominated regime at high ambient pressures. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/ILASS2017.2017.4764


The purpose of this study is to develop a new system to control effective discharge of active substances such as agricultural chemicals. To synthesize a naturally dissolvable polymer; ε-caprolactone and diglycolide were copolymerized with ethylene glycol as an initiator to produce macrodiol. As macrodiol has hydroxyl groups in both ends, they are modified with methacryloyl chloride for photochemical networking. After standard macromonomer produced by this procedure was physically mixed with methylene blue, it was networked with ultra-violet rays to be filmed. This film is naturally dissolvable and hydrolytic. As a result of hydrolytic test with a crosslinked structure of 10 % methylene blue, it decreased by 9 % for seven weeks in 37 °C phosphate buffer solution (pH = 7). Thus, we verified that active substance can be discharged from a crosslinked structure for a long time at a constant rate under room temperature.


The use of Platelet-Rich-Plasma (PRP) may provide a new and improved treatment option for early Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ) Osteoarthritis (OA). However, there are no studies on its use in TMJ arthritis in the literature. The present study compares 30 early onsets OA patients divided equally into 3 groups who had experienced no pain reduction following conservative and minimally invasive arthrocentesis and arthroscopy treatment. All patients had retrodiscitis and synovitis on arthroscopic examination and were without systemic joint disease, septic, or autoimmune arthritis. Only patients with unilateral TMJ symptoms were included in this study. Pain intensity was recorded for each patient using a 0-10 VAS scale. Maximum Interincisal Opening (MIO) was also recorded. This assessment was performed at the pretreatment and then at an examination 3 months after administration of 2 intra-articular applications of autologous PRP (Group A), 2 intra-articular injections of Hyaluronic Acid (HA) (Group B), or commencement of conservative therapy only with soft diet and analgetics (Group C). The results after 3 months revealed that intra-articular injection of autologous PRP appeared to be an effective treatment method for patients with early OA in this study. At the 3-month follow-up, patients from group A improved their mouth opening significantly. Majority of the PRP patients (Group A) showed decreased pain. The average pain score before PRP administration was 7, while 3 months after PRP administration the pain score was 3.5. In conclusion, the use of PRP is an effective treatment option for early TMJ OA.


Clinical and experimental data provide evidence for interactions between aerobic and anaerobic organisms in abscess formation. The organisms present represent a subset of those normally found at nearby mucosal surfaces. Certain organisms, most notably B. fragilis, emerge from the normal flora as important in abscess formation. Suspected virulence factors for B. fragilis include oxygen tolerance, capsular polysaccharide and the other enzymes produced by this organism. Other factors, as yet incompletely understood, probably play a role. In addition, the large number of organisms present in an abscess, the presence of antibiotic inactivating enzymes, the hostility of the anaerobic environment to antimicrobial activity and host defences, as well as the fibrous capsule surrounding an abscess, contribute to the persistence of infection despite antibiotic therapy and the need for drainage. The contribution of both aerobic and anaerobic organisms in the formation of abscesses must be remembered when one chooses antibiotic therapy for such infections.


Existing and projected economic losses caused by floods all over the world have generated a growing consensus about the need for investment in flood risk mitigation. Most of the evidence on the returns to risk reduction in developing countries is based on cost-benefit analysis performed for specific measures, lacking a comprehensive appraisal of alternatives. This paper presents an integrated approach to consistently prioritize potential flood mitigation measures in a river basin and determine the economically desirable investment level in flood risk reduction. An optimization model is developed to select the type, size and schedule of flood risk mitigation measures over a planning horizon. The model is formulated as a dynamic mixed integer linear program and applied to a river basin where severe floods have occurred historically. A variety of individual and combinations of risk reduction measures are used as inputs for the model. Initial analysis is conducted for different scenarios of flood damage growth, investment financing constraints, and decision-makers' preferences towards extreme and future losses. Results show that the optimal investment plans vary according to different assumptions and scenarios. The proposed integrated approach can inform the design of investment plans for flood risk reduction based on sound economic principles, providing valuable support to decision-makers.


The purpose of this study is to explore the intellectual structure of Library and Information Science (LIS) in Pakistan during the period 2001 to 2018 applying the co-word analysis. The trends, patrons and tendencies of LIS in Pakistan will be explored by measuring the correlation coefficient of selected key words extracted from the articles indexed in Library and Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) by the Pakistani authors. To find out the dynamic change in the field of LIS, fifteen years was separated into further two periods i.e. 2001-2008 and 2009-2018. Through co-word analysis, and with the help of Gephi software (Sci2) the analysis was done and results shows that the trend was directed from library to information science and the word "research" was the most prominent in the network of data and in Pakistani LIS field. Keyword: LIS-Pakistan, Co-word analysis, Research trends-Pakistan, science citation index, Bibliometric research


One distinctive characteristic of Taiwanese city streets is the omnipresence of convenience stores. These clean, brightly lit stores are in operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and offer a wide range of constantly updated lifestyle products and services. Past research in convenience stores have often overlooked the work experiences of convenience store employees, and their contribution to the overall service experience. Thus, the goal of this exploratory study is to explore the convenience store work environment, and to provide some suggestions for in-store technological enhancements. Data was collected through in-depth interviewing, field study observations and Living Lab methodologies. Our research reveals that convenience store employees experience several types of physical, mental and emotional strains throughout their shifts. These strains are often derived from excessive physical exertion and unpleasant interactions with customers. We suggest that certain in-store technological enhancements, such as seamless sensing and seamful actuating, can serve to alleviate employee sense of pressure and anxiety during customer interactions.


In this paper, from a measurement study and analysis of SMS based on traces coming from a nationwide cellular telecommunication operator during a two month period, we propose a DTN (Delay Tolerant Network) like network protocol for delivering SMS. More precisely, we perform a temporal and spatial analysis of the Mexico City cellular network considering geolocalized SMS. The temporal analysis allows us to detect events and to check for overloading periods, with abnormal or unexpected traffic, and to study the evolution of classical parameters such as activity or distance between source and destination. The spatial analysis is based on the Voronoï diagram of the base stations covering Mexico City. We explain how SMS traffic can be characterized. Such key characterization allows us to answer the question: is it possible to transmit SMS using phones as relay in a large city such as Mexico City? We defined a simple network protocol to transmit SMS from a source to a destination. This DTN like protocol does not need routing nor global knowledge. The protocol takes benefit from the locality of SMS, the density of phones in Mexico City and the mobility of phone users. We studied a mobile dataset including 8 millions users living in Mexico city. This gave use a precise estimation of the average transmission time and the global performance of our approach. After 30 minutes, half of the SMS were delivered successfully to destination.


Drones have been a hot topic in recent years particularly when used in war and in domestic police operations. Drones have also attracted attention because of high-profile plans to use them for package delivery, among other things. While the glamourous and future uses of drones catch media attention, drones are already being used in the private sector for more mundane purposes including surveying, infrastructure inspection and real estate sales promotion. While the privacy threats of military and police drones are widely discussed, privacy concerns of private drones have attracted much less consideration.This paper looks at the privacy risks of private drones in Canada. It begins with an overview of the uses of private drones and their regulation in Canada. Regulation of drones in Canada is quite permissive and does not address the privacy risks. The paper then presents several privacy theories and a deeper discussion of two problems caused by technology such as drones: data aggregation and erosion of privacy in public. The paper then considers some theoretical and practical legal protections that might be used to protect against drone privacy invasion. The more theoretical include the torts of trespass and nuisance. The more practical include the tort of intrusion upon seclusion and the Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act. The paper concludes that the dominant theories of privacy embedded in Canadian law are not fully prepared for the challenge of drones, though the tort of intrusion upon seclusion holds some promise for the future.


The optimization of job-shop scheduling is very important because of its theoretical and practical significance. In this paper, a computationally effective algorithm of combining PSO with AIS for solving the minimum makespan problem of job-shop scheduling is proposed. In the particle swarm system, a novel concept for the distance and velocity of a particle is presented to pave the way for the job-shop scheduling problem. In the artificial immune system, the models of vaccination and receptor editing are designed to improve the immune performance. The proposed algorithm effectively exploits the capabilities of distributed and parallel computing of swarm intelligence approaches. The algorithm is examined by using a set of benchmark instances with various sizes and levels of hardness and is compared with other approaches reported in some existing literature works. The computational results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


Nucleic acid integrity assessment is an important aspect of quality control for many applications in molecular biology. A number of methods exist (electrophoresis- or PCR-based), but they are not universally applicable. Some of them need huge amounts of input, process certain amount of samples, require expensive equipment, only work specifically on (c)DNA, (m)RNA, certain species or certain tissues, or produce fragments covering a small length range. We investigated if the ubiquitin C gene (UBC) could be used to develop flexible, multi-use PCR-based (deoxy)ribonucleic acid integrity assays. UBC gene analysis (in human, mouse, pig, cow, horse, sheep, dog and cat) shows that UBC is a highly conserved and ubiquitously expressed gene (reference gene in RT-qPCR), that encodes a polyubiquitin precursor (containing tandem repeats of at least 5 ubiquitin monomers of 228 bp) in a single exon. On average, ubiquitin monomers show a nucleic acid sequence identity of 96% at intraspecies level and 93% at interspecies level. Based on a multiple alignment of all monomer ubiquitin sequences of all investigated species, we could design a single degenerated primer pair generating PCR amplicons of 137, 365, 593 and 821 bp on low amounts of high quality DNA of all investigated species (down to 10 pg) and on cDNA reverse transcribed from high quality RNA from different tissues (e.g. heart, liver, brain, kidney). Increasing levels of nucleic acid degradation resulted in a decrease of amplification products starting with the longer amplicons. We conclude that UBC is suited to develop a single, cheap, universal assay to estimate the presence, integrity and amplificability of native mammalian nucleic acids. In addition, we used the same strategy to design a similar assay to check the quality of bisulfite treated mammalian DNA.


In this paper, we present a detailed, systematic study of the controlled overgrowth of Pd on Au nanorods. Pd nanoshells with fine-controlled dimensions and architectures were overgrown on single-crystalline Au nanorods through seed-mediated growth using H2PdCl4 as the Pd precursor and ascorbic acid as the reducing agent in the presence of cetyltrimethylammonium chloride (CTAC) or cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as the surface capping agent. The effects of surface capping agent, ascorbic acid to H2PdCl4 ratio, reaction temperature, and structure-directing foreign ions, such as Ag+, on the dimensions and architectures of the resulting Au@Pd core–shell heteronanostructures were systematically studied. At 30 °C, Au nanorods coated with polycrystalline Pd shells were obtained using CTAC as the surface capping agent, while single-crystalline Au@Pd core–shell nanocuboids formed in the presence of CTAB. The thicknesses of the polycrystalline and single-crystalline Pd shells were fine-controlled by adjusting the molar ratio of ascorbic acid to H2PdCl4. At an elevated reaction temperature of 60 °C, irregularly shaped and cylindrical co-axial core–shell nanorods were obtained in CTAC and CTAB, respectively. By introducing Ag+ ions into the Pd growth solution, Au nanorods coated with segregated Pd nanoislands and dumbbell-like core–shell heteronanostructures were obtained as a consequence of the underpotential deposition of Ag and sustainable galvanic replacements that concurred during the Pd overgrowth processes. The effects of the Pd shell dimensions and morphologies on the plasmonic properties of the Au@Pd core–shell nanostructures were also investigated.


The quality of initial professional pharmacy education (IPPE) is receiving growing attention in the development of modern health policy. This is due to the gradually extended role of pharmacists, a global shortage of pharmacy workforce and their skill-mix imbalances, all of which require improvements to respond to the expanding and ever-changing population health needs. To achieve enhanced and equitable quality worldwide, evidence that can be used as a global basis for identifying gaps and challenges to assist strengthening IPPE is demanded. The purpose of this research was to generate evidence to construct the first global map of the attributes of quality IPPE for assisting the improvement of IPPE across nations. The research questions what are the differences and commonalities in the current IPPE practices worldwide, and if there are globally shared attributes for high quality IPPE, which can support further development of professional roles. A mixed-methods approach was implemented to investigate personal and institutional factors in a global context. To seek students' factors in the quality IPPE, a global online survey on students' learning processes and experiences was conducted, resulting in 4,105 student responses from 78 countries. To investigate teaching and institutional attributes of IPPE, an attached email global survey on IPPE institutions and programmes and a curriculum content analysis were conducted, which compared country-level institutional information from 110 countries and territories as well as contrasting in-depth curricula content data from 16 countries. The combined findings provide measures of current IPPE practices across nations. This includes differences in approaches to learning between regions and nations; pharmacy model to foster the adoption of deep approach to learning; global variation regarding capacity, provision, and regulations; and variation in curricula content when contrasting science and practice components. The thesis provides evidence for a policy review of IPPE to assist with enhancing global quality.


An anatomic lobectomy is the most common surgery in general thoracic surgery, and it is called a pneumonectomy if the scope of resection is expanded and a segmentectomy if this scope is reduced. A thoracoscopic lobectomy is undoubtedly a representative surgery of the application of thoracoscopic technology in thoracic surgery, showing that the thoracoscopic technology can meet the diagnostic and treatment needs for lung disease, which leads to a greatly expanded scope of its application. This chapter will describe the thoracoscopic anatomic lobectomy, segmentectomy, and pneumonectomy. Before we introduce the surgery, we will first take a brief look at the anatomy of the lung (Figures 1,2).


To enable virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) that treats anxiety disorders by gradually exposing the patient to fear using virtual reality (VR), it is important to monitor the patient's fear levels during the exposure. Despite the evidence of a fear circuit in the brain as reflected by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the measurement of fear response in highly immersive VR using fNIRS is limited, especially in combination with a head-mounted display (HMD). In particular, it is unclear to what extent fNIRS can differentiate users with and without anxiety disorders and detect fear response in a highly ecological setting using an HMD. In this study, we investigated fNIRS signals captured from participants with and without a fear of height response. To examine the extent to which fNIRS signals of both groups differ, we conducted an experiment during which participants with moderate fear of heights and participants without it were exposed to VR scenarios involving heights and no heights. The between-group statistical analysis shows that the fNIRS data of the control group and the experimental group are significantly different only in the channel located close to right frontotemporal lobe, where the grand average oxygenated hemoglobin Δ[HbO] contrast signal of the experimental group exceeds that of the control group. The within-group statistical analysis shows significant differences between the grand average Δ[HbO] contrast values during fear responses and those during no-fear responses, where the Δ[HbO] contrast values of the fear responses were significantly higher than those of the no-fear responses in the channels located towards the frontal part of the prefrontal cortex. Also, the channel located close to frontocentral lobe was found to show significant difference for the grand average deoxygenated hemoglobin contrast signals. Support vector machine-based classifier could detect fear responses at an accuracy up to 70% and 74% in subject-dependent and subject-independent classifications, respectively. The results demonstrate that cortical hemodynamic responses of a control group and an experimental group are different to a considerable extent, exhibiting the feasibility and ecological validity of the combination of VR-HMD and fNIRS to elicit and detect fear responses. This research thus paves a way toward the a brain-computer interface to effectively manipulate and control VRET.


This fundamental monograph introduces both the probabilistic and algebraic aspects of information theory and coding. It has evolved from the authors' years of experience teaching at the undergraduate level, including several Cambridge Maths Tripos courses. The book provides relevant background material, a wide range of worked examples and clear solutions to problems from real exam papers. It is a valuable teaching aid for undergraduate and graduate students, or for researchers and engineers who want to grasp the basic principles.


Dimethyl sulphide (DMS) is an important trace gas, both for its contribution to the global sulphur cycle and also, when oxidised in the atmosphere to sulphates, for its potential to alter the properties of clouds and so potentially affect climate. The precursor to DMS, dimethylsulphoniopropionate (DMSP), is produced by a number of marine micro-algae. This study investigated the role of temperature (10-30C), salinity (20-45), photosynthetically active radiation (PAR, 0-2000+ micromol photons m-2 s-1), daylength, rapidly varying light intensity, CO2 concentration and ambient PAR, ultraviolet A and B exposures on the physiology and production of DMSP in the coccolithophore Gephyrocapsa oceanica. Increasing temperature or CO2 concentration led to decreased cellular DMSP and net DMSP production. Increased PAR, up to the point of photoinhibition (which for G. oceanica} is about 1200 micromol photons m-2 s-1), daylength, salinity and potentially UVR were associated with increased cellular DMSP. Increased PAR above that causing photoinhibition resulted in decreased cellular and net DMSP production. The rate of photosynthetic carbon fixation was modelled as a function of incident light, temperature and CO2 concentration. While the photochemistry of photosystems I and II is essentially temperature independent, the process of carbon assimilation is not. The cell must continually match the photochemical production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reductant with the ability of the Calvin-Benson cycle to utilise this reductant to fix carbon, as this is not possible, an antioxidant system is also required. Low temperatures, and/or low CO2 concentrations, both of which reduce the carbon fixation rate, and/or increased PAR, UVR and/or salinity all potentially lead to an increased need for an antioxidant system to be up-regulated and vice versa. Both the experimental and modelling results obtained are consistent with the hypothesis that DMSP acts as such an antioxidant within the cell, and for salinity, that it may act both as an antioxidant and a compatible osmolyte.


Immunotherapy has emerged as one of the most efficacious form of cancer therapy. We have previously demonstrated MAGED4B short peptides are efficacious in inducing patients9 immune responses in vitro. However, effective vaccination against tumours requires generation of both CD8+ and CD4+ T-cell responses. A critical role of CD4+ helper T cells in the development of CD8+ tumour-specific effector function has been shown by numerous studies. In this pilot study, we aim to compare the efficacy of MAGED4B specific-short peptides (SP), long peptide (LP) and the combination of both short and long peptides in inducing patients9 immune responses in vitro. Briefly, peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from HLA-A2 positive healthy volunteers were incubated with 10 μg/ml of peptide in the presence of IL-2 and IL-7 for 7 days; peptide exposed PBMC were then incubated with cancer cells expressing MAGED4B overnight. Capability of T cells to secrete IFN-γ was accessed using ELISPOT assay and CEF peptides pool was used as positive control. Our data demonstrated that all MAGED4B peptides (short and long) are capable to induce similar and/or higher cytokine secretion compared to CEF peptides pool suggesting that these peptides are highly immunogenic. MAGED4B specific SP are better in inducing cytolytic activity compared to MAGED4B specific LP; however when both LP and SP were mixed as a cocktail, we observed a reduction in cytokine secreting T cells when the immune cells were co-incubated with MAGED4B expressing cell line, advocating an inhibition instead of synergizing reaction. In summary, our data has corroborated our previous finding that HLA-A2 restricted MAGED4B specific SP are immunogenic. However, we did not observed a synergistic event when SP and LP were used in a cocktail, questioning the combinatorial effect of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. These preliminary findings would need to be validated in a bigger cohort of patients. Citation Format: Kue Peng Lim, Ai Leng Chun, Sathibalan Ponniah, Sok Ching Cheong. MAGED4B specific peptides: Short or long or combination? [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the CRI-CIMT-EATI-AACR Inaugural International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference: Translating Science into Survival; September 16-19, 2015; New York, NY. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Immunol Res 2016;4(1 Suppl):Abstract nr A158.


The recent detection of the binary-neutron-star merger associated with GW170817 by both the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo and the network of electromagnetic-spectrum observing facilities around the world has made the multi-messenger detection of gravitational-wave (GW) events a reality. These joint detections allow us to probe GW sources in greater detail and provide us with the possibility of confidently establishing events that would not have been detected in GW data alone. In this Letter, we explore the prospects of using the electromagnetic (EM) follow-up of low-significance GW event candidates to increase the sample of confident detections with EM counterparts. We find that the GW-alert threshold change that would roughly double the number of detectable astrophysical events would increase the false-alarm rate (FAR) by more than five orders of magnitude from 1 per 100 years to more than 1000 per year. We find that the localization costs of following up low-significance candidates are marginal, as the same changes to FAR only increase distance/area localizations by less than a factor of 2 and increase volume localization by less than a factor of 4. We argue that EM follow-up thresholds for low-significance candidates should be set on the basis of alert purity (Pastro) and not FAR. Ideally, such estimates of Pastro would be provided by LIGO-Virgo, but in their absence we provide estimates of the average purity of the GW candidate alerts issued by LIGO-Virgo as a function of FAR for various LIGO-Virgo observing epochs.


Background: An increase in the use of regional anesthesia techniques for postoperative pain relief for analgesia following lower abdominal surgeries. Epidural anesthesia considered as the "gold standard" has been established to provide excellent analgesia as well as attenuation of neurogenic contribution to inflammation. The TAP block provides reliable somatic analgesia in lower abdominal incision surgeries. Use of ultrasound helps incorrect localization of the plane and accurate placement of the needle and catheter.Subjects and Methods:In TAP group under USG guidance 20 ml 0.2% Inj. Ropivacaine was deposited on each side of the abdominal wall. In Epidural group 10 ml of 0.2% Inj. Ropivacaine was administered at skin closure.Results:Systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels were significantly lower in group B as compared to group A (p<0.05). . VAS score was significantly higher in group B as compared to group A (P<0.05). It was observed that a significantly higher number of patients in epidural group required rescue analgesia and at higher dosages (p<0.05).Conclusion:TAP block has almost no complications, keeps the patient hemodynamically stable and offers a good early postoperative analgesia (till 24 hours) when compared to a more accepted modality like epidural analgesia.


Introduction: What Remains: Reflections on Crisis Oral History, Mark Cave Part I: Clamor 1. When All is Lost: Metanarrative in the Oral History of Hanifa, Survivor of Srebrenica, Selma Leydesdorff Oral history by Selma Leydesdorff with "Hanifa," Refugee camp, East Bosnia, April 2004 2. "To Dream My Family Tonight": Listening to Stories of Grief and Hope among Hazaras Refugees in Australia, Denise Phillips Oral histories by Denise Phillips with Reza and Juma, Brisbane and Melbourne, Australia, 2004-2011 3. Exhuming the Self: Trauma and Student Survivors of the Shootings at Virginia Tech, Tamara Kennelly and Susan E. Fleming-Cook Oral histories by Susan E. Fleming Cook with Yang Kim, Derek O'Dell, and Kristina Heeger-Anderson, Blacksburg, Virginia, 2009-2010 4. Talking Cure: Trauma, Narrative, and the Cuban Rafter Crisis, Elizabeth Campisi Oral histories by Elizabeth Campisi with Cuban Rafter Crisis survivors conducted in Miami, Florida, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Rochester, New York, 1998-2001 5. In the Ghost Forest: Listening to Tutsi Rescapes, Taylor Krauss Oral histories by Taylor Krauss with Rwandan Rescapes, Kigali, Rwanda, 2007-2008. 6. The Continuing and Unfinished Present: Oral History and Psychoanalysis in the Aftermath of Terror, Ghislaine Boulanger Part II: Resonance 7. Unlocked: Perspective and the New Orleans Prison Evacuation Crisis, Mark Cave Oral histories by Mark Cave with members of the Louisiana Department of Corrections, Angola, Pineville, and Keithville, Louisiana, March 23 and 24, June 17 and 18, 2009 8. Living Too in Murder City: Oral History as Alternative Perspective to the Drug War in Ciudad Juarez, Eric Meringer Oral histories by Eric Rodrigo Meringer with Juarez residents Jonathan, Rosa and Raul, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, 2009-2010 9. Until Our Last Breath: Voices of Poisoned Workers in China, Karin Mak Oral histories by Karin Mak with "Ren," "Min," "Fu," and "Wu," Huizhou, Guangdong and rural Sichuan, China, August and September, 2007 10. Woven Together: Attachment to Place in the Aftermath of Disaster, Perspectives from Four Continents, Eleonora Rohland, Maike Bocker, Gitte Cullmann, Ingo Haltermann, Franz Mauelshagen Oral histories by Eleonora Rohland, Maike Bocker, Gitte Cullmann, and Ingo Haltermann with residents of New Orleans, Louisiana Accra, Ghana eastern Brandenburg, Germany and Chaiten, Chile, 2009-2010 11. Smile Through the Tears: Life, Art, and the Rwandan Genocide, Steven High Oral history by Jessica Silva with Rupert Bazambanza, Montreal, Canada, June 3 and 12 and July 6, 2008 12. A Spiritual War: Crises of Faith in Combat Chaplains from Iraq and Afghanistan, David Peters Interviews by David W. Peters with "Christina," "Michael," "Timothy," "Craig," and "George," Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC, 2011 13. A Long Song: Oral History in the Time of Emergency and After, Mary Marshall Clark Oral histories by Gerry Albarelli and Temma Kaplan with Mohammad Bilal-Mizra, Talat Hamdani, Zaheer Jaffery, Salman Jaffery, and Zohra Saed, New York City, October 2001 to June 2005 Conclusion: The Fabric of Crisis: Approaching the Heart of Oral History, Stephen Sloan Contributors Index


Neurobiological mechanisms that normally control food intake and energy expenditure can be overcome by environmental cues and by stress. Of particular importance is the influence of the mesolimbic reward pathway. In genetically susceptible individuals, problematic over-eating likely reflects a changing balance in the control exerted by homeostatic versus reward circuits that are strongly influenced by environmental factors such as stress. Both stress and activation of the reward pathway have been shown to increase food intake and promote a preference for palatable, high-energy foods. Recent research has focused on the important role of circulating and central neuropeptides that powerfully regulate the brain response to food cues. For example, ghrelin has a potent positive effect on the motivational aspects of food intake, and central oxytocin may be involved in satiety. Thus, the decision to eat, or indeed to over-eat, involves a complex integrated neurobiology that includes brain centres involved in energy balance, reward and stress and their regulation by metabolic and endocrine factors.


Methods for collecting animal behaviour data in natural environments, such as direct observation and biologging, are typically limited in spatiotemporal resolution, the number of animals that can be observed and information about animals' social and physical environments. Video imagery can capture rich information about animals and their environments, but image-based approaches are often impractical due to the challenges of processing large and complex multi-image datasets and transforming resulting data, such as animals' locations, into geographical coordinates. We demonstrate a new system for studying behaviour in the wild that uses drone-recorded videos and computer vision approaches to automatically track the location and body posture of free-roaming animals in georeferenced coordinates with high spatiotemporal resolution embedded in contemporaneous 3D landscape models of the surrounding area. We provide two worked examples in which we apply this approach to videos of gelada monkeys and multiple species of group-living African ungulates. We demonstrate how to track multiple animals simultaneously, classify individuals by species and age-sex class, estimate individuals' body postures (poses) and extract environmental features, including topography of the landscape and animal trails. By quantifying animal movement and posture while reconstructing a detailed 3D model of the landscape, our approach opens the door to studying the sensory ecology and decision-making of animals within their natural physical and social environments.


Endogenous opiates modulate activity in the mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic system, and this interaction is thought to underlie major aspects of motoric, reward-seeking, and stress-coping behaviors. We sought to determine the ultrastructural substrate for this modulatory action at the level of dopaminergic perikarya in the rat ventral tegmental area (VTA). Using a dual-labeling, immunoperoxidase and immunogold-silver method, we localized antisera directed against leu5- enkephalin (ENK) and the catecholamine-synthesizing enzyme tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) in acrolein-fixed sections through the VTA. ENK-like immunoreactivity (ENK-LI) was visualized within unmyelinated axons and in axon terminals. In terminals, ENK-LI was densely localized to one or more dense-cored vesicles and either densely or lightly detected surrounding small clear vesicles. Immunoreactive dense-cored vesicles were occasionally associated with the presynaptic specialization but were more frequently detected at distant sites along the plasmalemmal surface, often in apposition to astrocytic processes. ENK- immunoreactive terminals formed both symmetric and asymmetric synapses, most frequently on large proximal dendrites. Direct appositions without glial separation were also detected between terminals containing ENK-LI and other ENK-labeled or unlabeled terminals. In contrast to ENK-LI, immunolabeling for TH was primarily detected within perikarya and dendrites in the VTA. Of the ENK-immunoreactive terminals that formed synaptic contacts in single sections, approximately 50–60% were in association with TH-labeled dendrites. The remainder formed synapses on dendrites lacking detectable immunoreactivity for TH. Multiple ENK- immunoreactive terminals occasionally formed convergent synaptic contacts on single TH-labeled or unlabeled dendrites. Furthermore, individual ENK-labeled terminals sometimes formed divergent contacts on two TH-labeled or unlabeled dendrites. When a single ENK-immunoreactive terminal made dual synaptic contacts on TH-labeled dendrites, the latter were usually in close apposition to one another. These findings represent the first ultrastructural demonstration that opioid peptide- containing terminals provide a direct synaptic input to dopaminergic, as well as nondopaminergic, neurons in the VTA. In addition, the morphological evidence suggests that endogenous opioid peptides (1) may be released from nonsynaptic sites, (2) may modulate the release of transmitters from other terminals, and/or (3) may synchronize the activity of multiple neuronal targets in the VTA. These results provide a number of morphological substrates through which opiates may directly or indirectly regulate activity in mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic pathways.


JavaScript is a highly dynamic language for web-based applications. Innovative implementation techniques for improving its speed and responsiveness have been developed in recent years. Industry benchmarks such as WebKit SunSpider are often cited as a measure of the efficacy of these techniques. However, recent studies have shown that these benchmarks fail to accurately represent the dynamic nature of modern JavaScript applications, and so may be poor predictors of real-world performance. Worse, they may guide the development of optimizations which are unhelpful for real applications. Our goal is to develop a tool and techniques to automate the creation of realistic and representative benchmarks from existing web applications. We propose a record-and-replay approach to capture JavaScript sessions which has sufficient fidelity to accurately recreate key characteristics of the original application, and at the same time is sufficiently flexible that a recording produced on one platform can be replayed on a different one. We describe JSBench, a flexible tool for workload capture and benchmark generation, and demonstrate its use in creating eight benchmarks based on popular sites. Using a variety of runtime metrics collected with instrumented versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, we show that workloads created by JSBench match the behavior of the original web applications.


Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) is a self-supervised learning approach for image representation. From an augmented view of an image, BYOL trains an online network to predict a target network representation of a different augmented view of the same image. Unlike contrastive methods, BYOL does not explicitly use a repulsion term built from negative pairs in its training objective. Yet, it avoids collapse to a trivial, constant representation. Thus, it has recently been hypothesized that batch normalization (BN) is critical to prevent collapse in BYOL. Indeed, BN flows gradients across batch elements, and could leak information about negative views in the batch, which could act as an implicit negative (contrastive) term. However, we experimentally show that replacing BN with a batch-independent normalization scheme (namely, a combination of group normalization and weight standardization) achieves performance comparable to vanilla BYOL ($73.9\%$ vs. $74.3\%$ top-1 accuracy under the linear evaluation protocol on ImageNet with ResNet-$50$). Our finding disproves the hypothesis that the use of batch statistics is a crucial ingredient for BYOL to learn useful representations.


Colloidal plasmonic materials are increasingly used in biosensing and catalysis, which has sparked the use of super-resolution localization microscopy to visualize processes at the interface of the particles. We quantify the effect of particle–emitter coupling on super-resolution localization accuracy by simulating the point spread function (PSF) of single emitters near a plasmonic nanoparticle. Using a computationally inexpensive boundary element method, we investigate a broad range of conditions allowing us to compare the simulated localization accuracy to reported experimental results. We identify regimes where the PSF is not Gaussian anymore, resulting in large mislocalizations due to the appearance of multilobed PSFs. Such exotic PSFs occur when near-field excitation of quadrupole plasmons is efficient but unexpectedly also occur for large particle–emitter spacing where the coherent emission from the particle and emitter results in anisotropic emission patterns. We provide guidelines to enable faithful localization microscopy near colloidal plasmonic materials, which indicate that simply decreasing the coupling between particle and molecule is not sufficient for faithful super-resolution imaging.


Fee Travers is in her thirties, single and under pressure to find a male, any male, but preferably one who can breathe unaided. Imogen Banks is also unattached, bright, successful, and delights in being thoroughly bad. She is confident that she can help herself to any man she fancies - especially if he has a wife. Claire Harper has always regarded a husband, a Volvo, two children and a labrador as her destiny. But at 40 and coping alone, she realises a little self-help is required and arranges a marriage for herself. Each woman is breaking the rules of the mating game, but it's Fee who really triggers the trouble. Her aim is to trade in an old-fashioned happy ever after for a new beginning. So why is that so upsetting to those around her? Is a new beginning really too much for single girls to ask for?


The diffusion weighted images acquired with the multiband sequence or the Lifespan protocols shows a type of slice distortion artifact. We find that this artifact is caused by the eddy currents, which can be induced by the diffusion gradient associated with either current DW image or the previous DW images. The artifact can be corrected by further tuning the compensation circuit in the MR hardware, or by a correction algorithm which includes the diffusion gradients from the current and previous DW images.


This paper shows how the CATS (Complete Air Traffic Simulator) can model the controlleri¯s conflict detection task using a sliding time window. Because of uncertainties, detection is by far the most time consuming and cognitively challenging aspect of air traffic control. The processes governing detection are distinct from resolution actions. Few conflicts detected lead to a resolution maneuver. Because future aircraft positions are uncertain, controllers detect many more conflicts or "potential conflicts" than actually occur. In this paper, we solve conflicts in a real time context and compare different uncertainty scenarios. We show how uncertainties impact the number of theoretical potential conflicts detected and the increase the number of unnecessary maneuver actions required to keep the traffic safe. When we deal with realistic uncertainty values, the majority of calculation time in CATS is used for calculating maneuvers that will usually not be transmitted to pilots. This observation reveals the true nature of the controlleri¯s workload today.