Concept mapping can be a useful tool in social work practice at all levels. Mapping can help clarify and increase comprehension of abstract concepts, such as community capitals or assets. This paper describes community capitals, presents a simple method for mapping community assets conceptually, and demonstrates this method through two case examples. The cases detail activities of two organizations involved in work with communities. The development and leveraging of capitals is illustrated in both instances. Following the case examples, the significance and value of mapping in social work and suggestions for future research are discussed based on the mapping exercise.


Recovery of biodegradable plastics from activated sludge is a promising sustainable technology. In this study, polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) – a biodegradable plastics material was produced by activated sludge performing enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) in batch experiments under anaerobic, aerobic and anaerobic/aerobic conditions. Under anaerobic conditions, the PHB content of 28.8% of dry biomass weight was obtained, while under aerobic or anaerobic/aerobic conditions, the maximum PHB content of 49-50% was achieved. The PHB production rate with respect to the volatile suspended solids (VSS) was 70 mg/g VSS·h under aerobic conditions, and this increased to 156 mg/g VSS·h under anaerobic condition and to 200 mg/g VSS·h under aerobic conditions with energy also supplied from polyphosphate. A side stream, with initially anaerobic conditions for PHB accumulation and phosphorus release, and then aerobic conditions for PHB accumulation, was proposed. In this side stream, biomass with a high PHB content and a high PHB production rate could be both achieved.


Abstract The article presents the results of comprehensive studies of the influence of peloids from different geographic regions of Ukraine and different genesis on the course of experimental pathology. Methods:At the first stage of research we have determined the type of peloids these are medium-mineralized weakly sulfide magnesium-sodium silt peloids, low-ash organic sapropels, and peat low-mineralized high-ash sulfide-free peloids. Physicochemical parameters have been established: mass fraction of moisture, volumetric weight, hydrogen sulfide content, contamination with particles with a diameter greater than 0.25 × 10-3 m, shear stress, stickiness, specific heat capacity, the content of organic substances, colloidal complex, the concentration of water conduit ions (pH) , redox potential (Eh). In the second stage of the study, 55 white rats were examined for the state of the liverʹs detoxification function (by carrying out a metabolic test using sodium thiopental) and the morphological form of the liver in normal conditions and toxic alcoholic hepatosis. The toxic alcoholic hepatosis model was induced by daily (30 days) intragastric watering of animals with a 25% solution of ethyl alcohol. From the 15th day, the rats received a course of applications: a cake with the corresponding peloids was applied to the bare part of the back. Results: It was determined that the peloids used had a positive effect on animalsʹ condition, which was expressed in the restoration of the detoxification function of the liver and its structural and functional organization. The most substantial positive effect is observed when using silt-sulfide peloids, which, according to the authors, is due to the peculiarities of their physicochemical composition (increased content of magnesium, chlorides, sodium, as well as hydrogen sulfide). Conclusion: Based on the results obtained, it was concluded that the studied peloids meet the criteria for the quality of therapeutic peloids in terms of physicochemical parameters, biological activity, and expands the possibilities of their application in balneology.


In this research we attempt to resolve inconsistencies in the relationship between task conflict and team creativity by examining both how this relationship is mediated, and in what condition it would be expected to exist. Motivated information processing theory and extant research on conflict and creativity suggest that team information elaboration may be a salient mechanism through which task conflict affects creativity. Moreover, team psychological safety climate may answer questions of when this effect operates. An analysis of data from 230 employees in 41 teams supported conditional indirect relationship between task conflict and team creativity as proposed. Theoretical and practical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.


Introduction: We report a case of sino-nasal sarcoma (SNS) which is a rare malignant tumor that forms in the nasal structure and only a few cases that were reported in the literature. Case Report: The patient was a 35 years old woman. She presented with a history of right nasal obstruction from a couple of months at the time of presentation and recent attacks of epistaxis. Diagnosis of SNS was made after careful history taking, Computed tomography (CT) scan and confirmed by a secondary biopsy histology report that was done in Harvard Medical school. The patient underwent surgery and the mass was excised endoscopically. Her symptoms have improved significantly and after two years follow up there was no recurrence of the tumor. Discussion and Conclusion: In conclusion, Biphenotypic Sino-nasal sarcoma is a very rare and newly diagnosed entity. However, it should be kept in mind while dealing with any suspicious nasal masses in patients especially in females.


The Southworth hypothesis predicts that inframarginal food stamp recipients should choose the same bundle of goods, whether they receive coupons or cash. Empirical research has contradicted this prediction. Here, we present a model that retains some attractive features of the Southworth hypothesis, while relaxing the key assumption that appears to be incorrect. In particular, we allow different forms of benefits to have distinct effects on desired, or unrestricted food spending. Two categories of previously commonly used empirical models are evaluated as special cases of our more general model. We estimate this model using data from two cash-out experiments.


: A case is reported of pancreatic carcinoma recognized four years after bile peritonitis complicated cholecystectomy. The patient possessed all the known significant risk factors associated with pancreatic carcinoma. The wider recognition of risk factors for pancreatic adenocarcinoma might lead to closer follow-up of patients with multiple factors and possible earlier diagnosis and treatment leading to increased survival in patients with the disease.


Several states have recently implemented driver license reforms that give unauthorized immigrants access to driver licenses, aiming to reduce uninsured driving and lower premium costs. We test this expectation in the context of California's Assembly Bill 60 (AB60). AB60 gives about 2.6 million unauthorized immigrants access to driver licenses, making it the largest policy of its kind. Exploiting cross ‐ county variation in the estimated number of AB60 licenses, we find no measurable effects on auto insurance uptake or premium costs. A power analysis and multiple robustness checks corroborate this conclusion. We interpret our results to suggest that most newly licensed unauthorized immigrants were already driving before the reform to access work and basic services. Further-more, unauthorized drivers may already have had access to an insured vehicle. Our research revisits prominent claims about the effects of driver license reforms and provides much ‐ needed empirical evidence to a controversial policy debate.


One day our customer, a famous chip producer, suggested a project which was very unusual for us. We had to develop a system with PDA client using C#, Microsoft Compact .NET library and SQL CE. Application data was stored in a huge third-part master database with hundreds of tables. We had never worked with PDAs before and our customer itself was not sure about the whole idea. To complicate things further, we were living in a different continent from our customers. We cautiously started with a two week technology spike using Extreme Programming. This experience report describes the challenges we faced applying XP to offshore development and how we overcame those challenges to deliver a successful product to our customers.


Purpose The effectiveness of gamma knife stereotactic radiosurgery to obliterate brain arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) may be diminished by the preoperative adjunctive use of endovascular liquid embolic agents. The purpose of the present investigation was to determine if commercially available liquid embolic agents reduce the radiation dose to the target owing to attenuation of the Co-60 beam. Method and materials (1) The apparent linear attenuation coefficients for 120 keV to 140 keV x-rays in the embolized regions were retrieved from CT scans for several patients with AVM malformations who had undergone embolization procedures with liquid embolic agents for the purposes of reduction in nidal volume. Based on these coefficients and our virtual model of gamma knife with basic ray tracing, we obtained the path lengths and densities for the embolized regions. The attenuation of Co-60 beams was then calculated for various sizes and positions of AVM embolized regions and the number of beams used for treatment. (2) Published experiments for several high atomic number materials were used to estimate the effective Co-60 beam attenuation coefficients for N-butylcyanoacrylate (n-BCA, suspended in ethiodized oil) and ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer (EVOH, with suspended micronized tantalum powder) used in the AVM embolizations. The dose reduction during gamma knife radiosurgery was calculated based on the Co-60 energy attenuation coefficient. (3) Dose measurements were obtained in a phantom study with EVOH to confirm the estimates generated in the theoretical model described in (2) above. Results Based on apparent CT (keV) attenuation coefficients, the cumulative effect of either of the embolic agents decreased the dose delivered in gamma knife radiosurgery from −8 to −15% in a theoretical mod. Using the effective attenuation coefficient for Co-60 energies in the dose calculation yielded a 0.2% dose reduction per beam and less than 0.01–0.2% dose reduction in total. These theoretical results were validated in a phantom study. Conclusion Dose reduction due to attenuation of the Co-60 beam by the AVM embolization material is negligible for both n-BCA and EVOH, owing to the high energy Co-60 beam.


Larvae from two Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) lineages were subjected to different storage densities. An experiment was conducted arranged in a 4 x 2 factorial scheme, four storage densities (6.25, 12.50, 18.75 and 25.00 larvae L) and two lineages (GIFT and Thai). Larvae from the lineage GIFT and Thai (4,000) were distributed in 32 aquariums with 8 liters of water each, in a randomized order with four replications. The larvae were maintained in the aquariums with constant aeration and natural photoperiod for 36 days. Limnological variables were within the proper range to the specie. Data were subjected to ANOVA, and the Tukey test was used for the density effects. Regarding the biological variables, there was no interaction between lineage and density. The GIFT lineage presented better performance on total length and biomass at the 36 day. Regarding the densities of each lineage, the greater length, weight and weight gain results were found with a density of 6.25 larvae L, however, an increase in biomass and a space use optimization occurs using 25 larvae L. Therefore, the lineage GIFT at density of 25.00 larvae L is indicated for larval culture.


In developing polymer membranes that response to prevents liquid water from penetrating through, while at the same time permitting moisture past out through, polymer membrane with various structure ranging from dense to highly asymmetric morphologies (0.01 - 0.25 mm) were fabricated through three different techniques; blends, curing and grafting fabrication. From FT-IR analysis, BP/PEG (blends, curing and grafting) were fully converted into solid polymer membrane with functional group of N-H stretching in region 3350 - 3250 cm-1. Morphological result of BP/PEG shows three types of surface; open, close and blind surface with cylindrical blind and ink bottle shaped structure randomly. Due to lower porosity of skin over a symmetric support acts as a barrier, BP/PEG polymer membranes resultant no water permeability as compared to BP/DMF, which exhibit extremely higher water permeability with value 0.161 L/s.m3 at lower concentration. Water absorption analysis shows that mechanical properties of the prepared membranes were significantly influenced by their structure and amount of water absorbed. Thus, BP/PEG (blends, curing and grafting) preparation gave lower amount of water absorption with less than 0.01% water absorption increment rather than BP/DMF 12% (w/v) with highly porosity value of 0.07%. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) reviewed that the hard segment decomposition temperature was occur at 295 0C – 395 0C, meanwhile for soft segment at 370 0C – 500 0C. Based upon modulus, tensile, strain and tear strength also energy at break, evidently shows that the BP/PEG (grafting) method gave the best performance on physical and mechanical properties with highest mean value of 12419 N/mm, 14.11 MPa, 38.289 %, 50.67 N/mm and 21.627 N respectively. Reciprocally, PEG solvent does significantly increase the mechanical properties with the reaction of BP rather than DMF solvent with varieties of concentration. Moreover, BP/PEG membrane from each fabrication technique had obvious dense porous structural feature with open, close and blind pores in practically boundless development as of adequate final use in membrane application.


We review recent developments in the arithmetic of K3 surfaces. Our focus lies on aspects of modularity, Picard number and rational points. Throughout we emphasise connections to geometry.


The article reviews the epidemiology, pathophysiology and recent clinical research on aspiration prophylaxis and preoperative fasting before surgical procedures. Elective, pain-free patients should be allowed a glass of clear fluid up to two hours before start of anaesthesia. A light meal should be allowed up to four hours before the procedure. The anaesthesist should always make an individual evaluation of patients with pain or gastrointestinal obstruction, or who have received opioids. Aspiration of gastric contents and/or prophylactic use of histamine H2 antagonist or sodium citrate may be considered. The use of prophylactic treatment should always be evaluated against the side-effects of such treatment and the very low occurrence of serious sequelae from aspiration of gastric contents into the lungs.


The present study aim is to analyze the phytochemicals present in Mitracarpus hirtus leaf extracts by using Qualitative phytochemical analysis, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The leaf extracts were prepared using three different solvents. The phytochemical analysis Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis were performed using standard methods. The FTIR spectroscopic studies revealed different characteristic peak values with various functional groups present in the compounds of respective extracts. The FT-IR analysis shows the presence of different functional groups such as alcohols, phenols, alkanes, carboxylic acids, aldehydes, ketones, alkenes, primary amines, aromatics, esters, ethers, alkyl halides and aliphatic amine compounds, which showed major compounds present in the leaf extracts. The present study generated the FTIR spectrum profile for the medicinally important plant Mitracarpus hirtus. The present study provides evidences that different extracts of Mitracarpus hirtus leaf is useful to cure many serious diseases which remained still problematic and for further isolation of bioactive compounds from the plant which could be of interest for the development of the new drug.


Two-phase (acid-gas) anaerobic digestion can improve process performance relative to conventional, mesophilic, single-phase anaerobic digestion. However, few studies have considered the impact of phase separation on microbial community structure. We compared six full-scale, two-phase digestion (TPD) facilities and four conventional digestion (CD) facilities at municipal wastewater treatment plants by collecting performance data and evaluating microbial community structure via Illumina 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Sequence data indicated that nearly complete phase separation was achieved in all TPDs with few syntrophic bacteria or methanogens detected in acid phase digesters (APDs). Thermophilic methane phase digesters (MPDs) exhibited poor performance relative to mesophilic MPDs consistent with substantially lower relative abundances of syntrophic bacteria and methanogens in thermophilic MPDs. Although known syntrophic acetate oxidizers were only detected at very low levels in MPDs (0.11 ± 0.20%), the low abundance of aceticlastic methanogens observed suggests that syntrophic acetate oxidation plays a prominent role by yet to be described populations in TPD. TPDs exhibited greater microbial diversity than CDs, likely due to APDs supporting more diverse populations of hydrolytic and fermentative bacteria.


Although the neurophysiological basis of insect flight control has been studied extensively and successfully in animals attached to rigid tethers, these conditions disrupt the natural feedback between the subject's intentions, sensory input, and motor output. Understanding how individual control algorithms are integrated at a behavioral level requires acquisition and modification of biopotentials in completely untethered, free-flying animals. Herein, I present and test a miniaturized animal-computer interface for use with freely-flying Manduca sexta hawkmoths. This device is capable of simultaneously acquiring two independent biopotential signals, applying electrical neuromuscular stimulation, and correlating collected and applied signals with behavioral data from high-speed videography. Application of this device may offer substantial insight into how insects fly and, by replicating these mechanisms, facilitate wider application of micro air vehicles through improved flight efficiency, stability, and maneuverability. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


Falling, especially in old age, is a serious health threat. Depending on the severity of such accidents, risk of injury, and the helpless state of the elderly and infirm persons, it is difficult to impossible for the concerned persons to call for help. This kind of situation and its associated perceptions already cause anxiety. There is, therefore, much interest in fall detection for persons in need of care and caregivers as these systems promise security and help when needed, and they also provide a feeling of safety. However, modern fall detection systems are mostly wearables or are expensive in their implementation. As such, this paper focuses on a novel approach to fall detection, developed in two iterative main cycles and finally implemented in a real apartment for testing purposes. The proposed fall detection aims to be installed into the baseboard of a room, which allows an easy and cost‐effective integration of the proposed system. Especially in rooms like the bathroom, where discretion is very important, the proposed system benefits from its use of light barriers instead of image recognition to identify a fallen person. Additionally, the collected data can be wirelessly transmitted to a server via a gateway using XBee modules and Wi‐Fi. The latest developments of the fall detection prototype, including the hardware and software implementation, will be presented in this paper, and its strength and weak points will also be discussed. © 2018 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


Abstract The role of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in regulating endothelial function through the DNA damage response (DDR) remains poorly understood. In this study, we demonstrate that lncRNA maternally expressed gene 3 (Meg3) interacts with the RNA binding protein polypyrimidine tract binding protein 3 (PTBP3) to regulate gene expression and endothelial function through p53 signaling ─ a major coordinator of apoptosis and cell proliferation triggered by the DDR. Meg3 expression is induced in endothelial cells (ECs) upon p53 activation. Meg3 silencing induces DNA damage, activates p53 signaling, increases the expression of p53 target genes, promotes EC apoptosis, and inhibits EC proliferation. Mechanistically, Meg3 silencing reduces the interaction of p53 with Mdm2, induces p53 expression, and promotes the association of p53 with the promoters of a subset of p53 target genes. PTBP3 silencing recapitulates the effects of Meg3 deficiency on the expression of p53 target genes, EC apoptosis and proliferation. The Meg3-dependent association of PTBP3 with the promoters of p53 target genes suggests that Meg3 and PTBP3 restrain p53 activation. Our studies reveal a novel role of Meg3 and PTBP3 in regulating p53 signaling and endothelial function, which may serve as novel targets for therapies to restore endothelial homeostasis.


Newcastle disease is common viral poultry disease which leads to a massive killing of chicken if preventive measures are not well taken. In this paper, we develop and analyze a deterministic model to investigate the role of wild birds and environment on the transmission dynamics of Newcastle disease in village chicken. We compute the basic reproduction number $\left(\mathcal{R}_{0}\right)$, a threshold that tells the presence of the disease in a population. Finally, we performed the sensitivity analysis of parameters to see their relationship with the basic reproduction number $\left(\mathcal{R}_{0}\right)$. The numerical results show that the basic reproduction number $\left( \mathcal{R}_{0}\right)$ is more sensitive to the contact rate between the susceptible village chicken, wild birds and contaminated environment. This implies that, more contamination of the Newcastle virus into the environment increase the chance for the repeatedly occurrence of the disease. The results also shows that increasing the clearance rate of Newcastle disease virus in the environment reduces the rate of spread of the disease in chicken population. Therefore, contaminated environment plays a crucial role in the transmission of Newcastle diseases in the village chicken population.


Background: Celiac disease (CD) often presents with symptoms of diarrhea and malabsorption, termed classical CD. However, it can also present as nonclassical CD, which is commonly associated with nongastrointestinal symptoms. Studies suggest that nonclassical CD tends to have less severe symptoms than classical CD, which may affect both adherence to a gluten-free diet (GFD) and psychological stress. Therefore, we compared adherence to a GFD and psychological measures, including quality of life (QOL) and somatization, between patients with nonclassical and classical presentations of CD. Methods: Patients at a tertiary care center with biopsy-proven CD, who completed a Talley Bowel Disease Questionnaire and the Short Form-36 at diagnosis and who had been on a GFD for at least 1 year, were included in this study. Patients were further surveyed to assess gastrointestinal symptoms, QOL, Somatization Symptom Checklist (SSC), and adherence to a GFD. Results were compared between patients with classical versus nonclassical CD presentation. Results: Among 122 patients included in this study, 62 had classical CD and 60 had nonclassical CD. At diagnosis, health-related QOL was lower in the classical CD group than in the nonclassical CD group. After following a GFD, both groups had improved QOL after following a GFD, and body mass index significantly increased in both groups. Most subscales of QOL, SSC scores, and adherence to the GFD were similar between the groups, except the Short Form-36 Mental Component summary scores that were still lower in the classical CD (48.4 vs. 52.6 nonclassical CD group; P=0.03). Conclusions: Despite QOL at diagnosis being higher in those with nonclassical CD versus lower in those with classical CD, both groups had improved QOL and achieved a similar QOL after following a GFD.


ABSTRACT This article addresses why the US in its military operations tends to focus on only one dimension in war – the military narrowly understood. More precisely, in the US case, its armed forces tend to be preoccupied with platforms and understand military capabilities as those that deliver death and destruction. I explain this one-sided understanding of the military dimension in war with how the US armed forces think about future war. How the US understands future war is, in turn, a reflection of how it organizes its long-term defense planning procedures. In particular, by approaching the concept of future as by and large structurally determined, a focus on platforms becomes natural. Investments in weapons systems, too, are more easily motivated to Congress since it is easier to attach a price to developing, for example, a new submarine than it is to attach a price to the cost of developing a military organization that is adaptive, learning and anticipating. The understanding of the future as something that happens whether you like it or not is particularly odd in the US context where of course a central tenet of the American dream is that the individual creates her own future.


This paper develops a model for the pricing of US Equity Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT's), based upon economic fundamentals. The analysis compares the theoretical price generated by our model with actual prices in order to examine the existence of REIT's pricing bubbles. Our price modeling employs a novel approach by applying a special case of the CCAPM, inclusive of stochastic taxation, to derive the price dividend ratio as a function of the parameters of the log normal distribution of the rate of growth of after-tax dividends, stochastic dividend taxation, and the coeffi cient of relative risk aversion. We find that Equity REITs, during our sample period, 1972-2013, were overvalued for a substantial portion of the time period. During this forty-two year span, Equity REITs were underpriced according to our model for only nine years. More surprisingly, contrary to a popular belief, during and after the so-called, "Great Recession,"2008-2013, equity REITs were underpriced for only one year (i.e., 2008).


Single modality treatment of advanced gastrointestinal cancer has been associated with unfavorable outcomes. Radiotherapy as an important component of the combined modality therapy of gastrointestinal tract tumors may achieve down-staging, increase resection rate while preserving sphincter function, decrease local recurrence rate, and improve survival rate. Precision radiotherapy has better conformity, accuracy, and lower toxicity. Precision radiotherapy will become more and more important in the combined modality therapy of gastrointestinal tract cancer.


This article explores the materiality of disaster politics through the practice of mapping during the 2007 wildfires in Southern California. It examines the process of production of two different maps, the maps produced by San Diego County and a popular Google My Map created by local media and academic institutions, in order to explore how an unfolding disaster comes to be understood. This article argues that the interplay between different technological and human entities to produce each map in turn produced different spaces of disaster in ways that challenged priorities of disaster preparedness and response. Specifically, the different mapping practices in 2007 produced different relationships to temporality, boundaries and responsibility, making different aspects of the disaster visible while constructing different threats and definitions of danger. They juxtaposed representational and relational knowledge as well as the value of prevention and demonstration. This article draws on data collected through textual analysis of government and scientific documents as well as interviews and observations of key actors, their mapping practices, and socio-technological networks.


In this work we address a game theoretic variant of the shortest path problem, in which two decision makers (players) move together along the edges of a graph from a given starting vertex to a given destination. The two players take turns in deciding in each vertex which edge to traverse next. The decider in each vertex also has to pay the cost of the chosen edge. We want to determine the path where each player minimizes its costs taking into account that also the other player acts in a selfish and rational way. Such a solution is a subgame perfect equilibrium and can be determined by backward induction in the game tree of the associated finite game in extensive form.
We show that the decision problem associated with such a path is PSPACE-complete even for bipartite graphs both for the directed and the undirected version. The latter result is a surprising deviation from the complexity status of the closely related game Geography.
On the other hand, we can give polynomial time algorithms for directed acyclic graphs and for cactus graphs even in the undirected case. The latter is based on a decomposition of the graph into components and their resolution by a number of fairly involved dynamic programming arrays. Finally, we give some arguments about closing the gap of the complexity status for graphs of bounded treewidth.


This book analyzes the E.U.'s approach to P2P, a digital age technology that highlights the tensions between the Internet and a territorial and fragmented copyright law. It aims at providing the necessary legal qualification and context to understand why the E.U., while following an economic and socially onerous path, has thus far failed to achieve its deterrence goals. It is argued that a solution to this conundrum must be based on the use of copyright law and policy as tools for market organization and innovation growth, with respect for rights holders and users (sometimes) opposing interests and the existing legal framework. The best answer to mass online P2P uses seems to be that of collective rights management, as it offers an organized licensing and remuneration system compatible with the interests of stakeholders. This is especially true in the E.U., home to a developed and sophisticated market of CMOs, subject to numerous ECJ and Commission decisions, as well as varying E.U. institutional approaches, all pointing towards a preference for multi-territorial and pan-European licensing models. In this context, this book tests the compatibility of several non-voluntary and voluntary approaches to P2P with international treaties, the acquis or simply strategic policy considerations.


We present an approach to simulating underwater bubbles. Our method is sparse in that it only simulates a thin band of water around the region of interest allowing us to achieve high resolutions in turbulent scenarios. We use a hybrid bubble representation consisting of two parts. The hero counterpart utilizes an incompressible two-phase Navier-Stokes solve on an Eulerian grid with air phase also represented via FLIP/APIC particles to facilitate volume conservation and accurate interface tracking. The diffuse counterpart captures sub-grid bubble motion not "seen" by the Eulerian grid. We represent those as particles and develop a novel scheme for coupling them with the bulk fluid. The coupling scheme is not limited to sub-grid bubbles and may be applied to other thin/porous objects such as sand, hair, and cloth.


Collaborative learning is well recognised as a pedagogical practice that promotes socialisation and learning among students from kindergarten to the university level and beyond. Children, adolescents, and adults learn from each other in a vast array of formal and informal settings in schools and the wider community. This book brings together a diverse range of international scholars to profile new pedagogical developments in collaborative learning and to highlight how these practices have been implemented. The term collaborative learning is used very broadly in this volume and includes cooperative learning, peer learning, and peer collaboration. The proponents of these practices argue that by working together, students have many opportunities to learn and develop a greater understanding of others with diverse social, personal, and academic competencies. The emphasis in this volume is on chapters that have a strong evidence-base for the work that is presented. This includes chapters that present empirical studies, research reviews, case studies and theoretical reviews because there is much to be gained by sharing and learning about what happens and how different pedagogical practices have been implemented. These chapters include pedagogical practices in mathematics learning, classroom-based talk, literacy, learning processes, group work, pre-service teacher education, teacher professional development, web-based technologies, and affective education and development. This book will have appeal to pre-service and experienced teachers who are interested in how different collaborative pedagogies can be embedded in different curricula to promote student engagement with learning. It will also be valuable as a reference text in post-graduate courses that focus on research training in education.


We investigated the cell-death mechanisms induced in esophageal cancer cells in response to the chemotherapeutic drugs, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and cisplatin. Chemosensitive cell lines exhibited apoptosis whereas chemoresistant populations exhibited autophagy and a morphology resembling type II programmed cell death (PCD). Cell populations that respond with autophagy are more resistant and will recover following withdrawal of the chemotherapeutic agents. Specific inhibition of early autophagy induction with siRNA targeted to Beclin 1 and ATG7 significantly enhanced the effect of 5-FU and reduced the recovery of drug-treated cells. Pharmacological inhibitors of autophagy were evaluated for their ability to improve chemotherapeutic effect. The PtdIns 3-kinase inhibitor 3-methyladenine did not enhance the cytotoxicity of 5-FU. Disruption of lysosomal activity with bafilomycin A1 or chloroquine caused extensive vesicular accumulation but did not improve chemotherapeutic effect. These observations suggest that an autophagic response to chemotherapy is a survival mechanism that promotes chemoresistance and recovery and that selective inhibition of autophagy regulators has the potential to improve chemotherapeutic regimes. Currently available indirect inhibitors of autophagy are, however, ineffective at modulating chemosensitivity in these esophageal cancer cell lines.


The formation and accretion of ice on aircraft wings during flight can be potentially disastrous and existing in-flight deicing methods are either bulky or power consuming. This paper investigates the use of shear wave deicing driven by a macro fibre piezoelectric composite actuator on a composite plate typically used for aircraft wings. While the few existing research on this novel deicing approach focused on either theoretical studies or single frequency mode optimization that required high-excitation amplitudes, this study revealed that the use of multimodal excitation through broadband frequency sweeps has the potential to promote the chance of shear stress induced deicing at a relatively small excitation amplitude. The results reported here form the foundation for a pathway towards low power and lightweight deicing mechanism for in-flight aircraft wings.


On the backdrop of the "put options" and "call options" - two common contracts in the practice of the capital markets - lies this comparative law analysis concerning the approach taken by three jurisdictions to the concept of the unilateral promise.
The outcome of the discussion is a criticism toward the English jurisdiction where this concept is missing, the same being replaced, in a non-convincing way, by the similar concept of the "unilateral contract". In addition to this, the requisite of the consideration, peculiarly requested in that jurisdiction, could even result in putting at risk, in some circumstances, the same validity and enforceability of these typologies of transactions.
As to the Scottish jurisdiction, stranded between its ancient Roman roots and its "British ties", the work seeks to demonstrate that, although the "unilateral promise" is accepted in this jurisdiction (these making both "put options" and "call options" theoretically safe under this jurisdiction), there is still a non-perspicuous categorization of the concept and, particularly, a possible "blunder" in the way this jurisprudence seems to put together, in a sort of conceptual "melting pot", both the promise to the public (in incertam personam) and that aimed at the conclusion of the contract. However, this possible erroneous view - quite transparent in the light of the civilian jurisdiction adopted as comparator (the Italian one) - could find a potential "way-out", should the Scots legal system eventually adopt a code in the matter of the contracts more in line with its traditions and peculiarities.


By taking attribute-based measures of service quality, this study establishes clear linkages between customer satisfaction (students) and quality (perception of their experience in the practicum program of the university). The results of this study clearly indicate that student satisfaction is more directly related to functional quality or process of service delivery. The delivery of service through implementation of clear policies and procedures contributed significantly to student satisfaction. The study recommends appropriate internal measures of efficiency and employee compensation as a means to ensure quality and customer satisfaction, and, as a whole, recommends a service marketing system for a high-contact type of service firm such as universities.


The centrally acting alpha 2-adrenoceptor agonist clonidine was used to assess the sensitivity of alpha 2-adrenergic neurotransmission in man, using receptor-binding studies and clonidine-induced growth hormone response. Neither acute (2 micrograms/kg body weight) nor subchronic (3 days, 2 x 150 micrograms/kg body weight) administration of clonidine affected platelet alpha 2-adrenoceptor number in humans as judged by 3H-yohimbine and 3H-UK-14,304 binding. The same treatment also did not modify central postsynaptic alpha 2-adrenoceptor function in the same individuals as assessed by clonidine-induced growth hormone responses. Similarly, subchronic (3 days, 500 micrograms/kg body weight, i.p.) or chronic (14 days, 500 micrograms/kg, i.p.) administration of clonidine to mice failed to change 3H-yohimbine or 3H-UK-14,304 binding sites in membranes prepared from frontal cortex. On the other hand, in vitro experiments using mouse frontal cortex or human platelet membranes showed pronounced reduction of 3H-UK-14,304 but not of 3H-yohimbine binding sites after incubation with several adrenoceptor agonists. The data indicate that acute and subchronic clonidine treatment may not change alpha 2-adrenoceptor sensitivity in humans or mice as assessed both at the functional and receptor level.


Entropy and energy are found to be closely tied on our quest for quantum gravity. We point out an interesting connection between the recently proposed outer entropy, a coarse-grained entropy defined for a compact spacetime domain motivated by the holographic duality, and the Bartnik-Bray quasilocal mass long known in the mathematics community. In both scenarios, one seeks an optimal spacetime fill-in of a given closed, connected, spacelike, codimension-two boundary. We show that for an outer-minimizing mean-convex surface, the Bartnik-Bray inner mass matches exactly with the irreducible mass corresponding to the outer entropy. The equivalence implies that the area laws derived from the outer entropy are mathematically equivalent as the monotonicity property of the quasilocal mass. It also gives rise to new bounds between entropy and the gravitational energy, which naturally gives the gravitational counterpart to Wall's ant conjecture. We also observe that the equality can be achieved in a conformal flow of metrics, which is structurally similar to the Ceyhan-Faulkner proof of the ant conjecture. We compute the small sphere limit of the outer entropy and it is proportional to the bulk stress tensor as one would expect for a quasilocal mass. Lastly, we discuss some implications of taking quantum matter into consideration in the semiclassical setting.


The design of multigirder bridge units with horizontal curvature is complicated by the torsional forces induced by the curvature. The proportioning of girders for preliminary design requires an approximate analysis that accounts for the curvature. This report presents the development and an evaluation of an approximate analysis procedure for curved girder bridges. The V-load method is named because the effects of curvature are represented by self-equilibrating vertical loads acting on the girders. The V-load method, as implemented in the analysis procedure described in this report, is suitable for approximate analysis of preliminary bridge designs. The analysis procedure includes composite behavior, and allows variable radius of curvature and skew supports. Envelopes of bending moment and shear force due to moving track loads can be generated. The V-load method is evaluated by comparing the approximate response with the response from a more refined finite element analysis for a variety of bridge configurations.


Rising feed costs and recurring feed shortages necessitate the investigation into alternative and underutilized feed resources. Nutritional characteristics of species are either unknown or limited to leaves and ground material from small stems. Therefore, the objective was to quantify nutritional characteristics, 48-h true IVDMD (tIVDMD), microbial gas production, and secondary compound characteristics of entire woody plant material of 4 species-, , , and -at immature and mature stages of growth. Immature plants had greater CP concentrations and lower NDF concentrations ( < 0.001) than mature plants regardless of species. Mature plants also had greater ( < 0.001) concentrations of ADF compared with immature plants with the exception of . In general, immature , , and had greater ( < 0.02) tIVDMD and total 48-h and asymptotic gas production than mature plants. Immature and plants were more digested (tIVDMD; < 0.001) than immature and , but tIVDMD did not differ in mature plant material across species. Condensed tannins (CT) were greater ( < 0.001) in immature and than mature plants; differences in CT concentrations among immature species were also detected ( < 0.04). Volatile oil yields were similar across maturity and species with 1 exception: immature yielded more ( < 0.02) volatile oil than mature material. Volatile oil composition across species varied and contained a range of 65 to 70 terpene compounds. The dominant terpenes across species were generally greater ( < 0.05) in immature vs. mature plant material with the exception of . Labdane acids were negligible in , , and and greater in ( < 0.001). Ground material from mature juniper species, although inferior in nutritional quality compared with immature plants, is comparable to traditional low-quality roughage ingredients. Given that has been successfully fed in lamb feedlot diets, the similarities of , and suggest that all three species have potential to be effective roughage ingredients.


RNA-Seq is a powerful technique to provide quantitative information on gene expression. While many applications focus on estimated expression levels, it is also important to determine which genes are actively transcribed, and which are not. The problem can be viewed as simply setting a biologically meaningful threshold for calling a gene expressed. We propose to define this threshold per sample relative to the background level for non-expressed genomic features, inferred by the amount of reads mapped to intergenic regions of the genome. To this aim, we first define a stringent set of reference intergenic regions, based on available bulk RNA-Seq libraries for each species. We provide predefined regions selected for different animal species with varying genome annotation quality through the Bgee database. We then call genes expressed if their level of expression is significantly higher than the background noise. This approach can be applied to bulk as well as single-cell RNA-Seq, on a single library as well as on a combination of libraries over one condition. We show that the estimated proportion of expressed genes is biologically meaningful and stable between libraries originating from the same tissue, in both model and non-model organisms.


In elastic optical networks (EONs), bandwidth fragmentation refers to the existence of non-aligned, isolated and small-sized blocks of contiguous subcarrier slots in the optical spectrum. As they are neither contiguous in the spectrum domain nor aligned along the routing paths, the network operator will have difficulty to use these slots for future connections. In this work, we analyze the effect of bandwidth fragmentation on the blocking probability in EONs. Our theoretical analysis indicates that two factors related to bandwidth fragmentation have effects on the blocking probability: 1) the extent that the available slot-blocks (i.e., blocks of contiguous slots) on different links are aligned on spectrum locations, and 2) the sizes of the available slot-blocks in links' spectra for future requests. When an EON's spectrum becomes more fragmented, the first factor actually reduces the blocking probability, while the second one increases the blocking probability. Their mixed effect determines the overall trend of how the blocking probability will change with bandwidth fragmentation. Our theoretical model can forecast this trend and reveal the relation among the blocking probability, bandwidth fragmentation, request bandwidth distribution, and spectrum utilization. We have also conducted numerical simulations to verify the theoretical analysis, and the simulation results exhibit similar trends as predicted by the theoretical model.


The 'Profitable perennials' project delivered by the Department of Agriculture and Food WA in the south coast natural resource management (NRM) region aimed to facilitate the long term adoption of perennial pastures. NRM is the management of natural resources, such as soils, waterways and biodiversity, to ensure long term sustainability of the resource. The project included the following components: i) research; ii) funding to implement targeted works to protect high-value natural assets in strategic catchments; iii) a devolved grant to support establishment of perennial pastures outside of strategic catchments and; iv) technical support across the whole region to help farmers get perennials on the ground. In 2007 the project was evaluated to determine how the process used, particularly the grant and technical support in strategic catchments, affected adoption of perennial pastures by participants. Barriers and drivers to adoption of perennials were also identified. The project had a varied influence on participant capacity. Key learnings from the delivery and evaluation of this project include: i) genuine landholder involvement in decision making is valuable; ii) technical support at all levels (catchment to paddock) and the strategic use of incentives facilitates accelerated adoption; and iii) evaluation is a useful tool to inform project development.


The continuous shift towards data-driven approaches to business, and a growing attention to improving return on investments (ROI) for cluster infrastructures is generating new challenges for big-data frameworks. Systems originally designed for big batch jobs now handle an increasingly complex mix of computations. Moreover, they are expected to guarantee stringent SLAs for production jobs and minimize latency for best-effort jobs. In this paper, we introduce reservation-based scheduling, a new approach to this problem. We develop our solution around four key contributions: 1) we propose a reservation definition language (RDL) that allows users to declaratively reserve access to cluster resources, 2) we formalize planning of current and future cluster resources as a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem, and propose scalable heuristics, 3) we adaptively distribute resources between production jobs and best-effort jobs, and 4) we integrate all of this in a scalable system named Rayon, that builds upon Hadoop / YARN. We evaluate Rayon on a 256-node cluster against workloads derived from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Cloud-era's clusters. To enable practical use of Rayon, we open-sourced our implementation as part of Apache Hadoop 2.6.


Optical communication is a promising candidate for many emerging networking and parallel/distributed computing applications because of its huge bandwidth. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is a technique that can better utilize the optical bandwidth by dividing the bandwidth of a fiber into multiple wavelength channels. In this paper, we study optimal scheduling algorithms to resolve output contentions in bufferless time slotted WDM optical interconnects with wavelength conversion ability. We consider the general case of limited range wavelength conversion with arbitrary conversion capability, as limited range wavelength conversion is easier to implement and more cost effective than full range wavelength conversion, and it also includes full range wavelength conversion as a special case. We first consider the conversion scheme in which each wavelength can be converted to multiple wavelengths in an interval of wavelengths and the intervals for different wavelengths are "ordered". We show that the problem of maximizing network throughput can be formalized as finding a maximum matching in a bipartite graph. We then give an optimal scheduling algorithm called the first available algorithm that runs in O(k) time, where k is the number of wavelengths per fiber. We also study the case where the connection requests have different priorities. We formalize the problem as finding an optimal matching in a weighted bipartite graph and give a scheduling algorithm called the downwards expanding algorithm that runs in O(kD + Nklog(Nk)) time where N is the number of input fibers of the interconnect and D is the conversion degree. Finally, we consider the circular symmetrical wavelength conversion scheme and give optimal scheduling algorithms for nonprioritized scheduling in O(Dk) time and prioritized scheduling in O(k/sup 2/+Nklog(Nk)) time.


This paper addresses the challenge of automatically extracting the highlights from sports TV broadcasts. In particular, we are interested in finding a generic method of highlights extraction, which does not require the development of models for the events that are thought to be interpreted by the users as highlights. Instead, we search for highlights in those video segments that are expected to excite the users most. It is namely realistic to assume that a highlighting event induces a steady increase in a user's excitement, as compared to other, less interesting events. We mimic the expected variations in a user's excitement by observing the temporal behavior of selected audiovisual low-level features and the editing scheme of a video. Relations between this noncontent information and the evoked excitement are drawn partly from psychophysiological research and partly from analyzing the live-video directing practice. The expected variations in a user's excitement are represented by the excitement time curve, which is, subsequently, filtered in an adaptive way to extract the highlights in the prespecified total length and in view of the preferences regarding the highlights strength: extraction can namely be performed with variable sensitivity to capture few "strong" highlights or more "less strong" ones. We evaluate and discuss the performance of our method on the case study of soccer TV broadcasts.


Elucidating the structure of large biomolecules such as multi-domain proteins or protein complexes is challenging due to their high flexibility in solution. Recently, an "integrative structural biology" approach has been proposed, which aims to determine the protein structure and characterize protein flexibility by combining complementary high- and low-resolution experimental data using computer simulations. Small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) is an efficient technique that can yield low-resolution structural information, including protein size and shape. Here, we review computational methods that integrate SAXS with other experimental datasets for structural modeling. Finally, we provide a case study of determination of the structure of a protein complex formed between the tandem SH3 domains in c-Cb1-associated protein and the proline-rich loop in human vinculin.


Problem under investigation: Many cancer caregivers often have a number of unmet needs that leads to distress, burden, and poor patient outcomes.
 Objective: Identify unmet needs of informal cancer caregivers at Roswell Park, provide a compendium of local community resources, and recommend additional resources that other cancer centers in the nation utilize.
 Background literature and theoretical framework: In the United States there are more than 14.5 million cancer survivors. Cancer caregivers lack the knowledge, support, and self confidence to properly care for their loved ones. The theory of Caregiver Stress states that inputs, which are defined as internal and external factors, are associated with unmet needs and burden. Inputs have a direct impact on outcomes.
 Project methods: Mixed-methods approach to data collection using the Caregiver SelfAssessment Questionnaire and focus groups. Email interviews were conducted with oncology experts at cancer centers around the nation.
 Results: Informal caregivers at Roswell Park expressed feelings of unmet needs and caregiver burden. Oncology experts at various cancer centers in the nation are concerned that caregivers at their institutes are not properly managed; however, a significant number of online and local resources for caregivers were identified but are likely not being utilized to the full potential. Potential significance: Enhance the caregiver role through knowledge of resources to minimize unmet needs and burden.
 Implications: Informing caregivers and healthcare providers of the resources available to them will help minimize unmet needs and lessen the degree of burden that will improve outcomes.


Queuing theory has been extensively used in the modelling and performance analysis of cloud computing systems. The phenomenon of the task (or request) reneging, that is, the dropping of requests from the request queue often occur in cloud computing systems, and it is important to consider it when developing performance evaluations models for cloud computing infrastructures. Majority of studies in the performance evaluation of cloud computing data centres with the use of queuing theory do not consider the fact that the tasks could be removed from queue without being serviced. The removal of tasks from the queue could be due to the user impatience, execution deadline expiration, security reasons, or as an active queue management strategy. The reneging could be correlated in nature, that is, if a request is dropped (or reneged) at any time epoch, and then there is a probability that a request may or may not be dropped at the next time epoch. This kind of dropping (or reneging) of requests is referred to as correlated request reneging. In this paper we have modelled a cloud computing infrastructure with correlated request reneging using queuing theory. An M/M/1/N queuing model with correlated reneging has been used to study the performance analysis of the load balancing server of a cloud computing system. The steady-state as well as the transient performance analyses have been carried out. Important measures of performance like average queue size, average delay, probability of task blocking, and the probability of no waiting in the queue are studied. Finally, some comparisons are performed which describe the effect of correlated task reneging over simple exponential reneging.


: An analytical theory is presented taking into account the effects of the flat adsorbing surface on the equilibrium properties of the long single-stranded macromolecule possessing a secondary structure. Change of the secondary structure is described in terms of Zimm--Bragg theory; adsorbtion properties are calculated for the lattice model without taking into account the 3-dimensional interactions. It is shown that the presence of the adsorbing surface sharpens helix-coil transition, displacing it towards the lower constants of equilibrium (s). A relation of the critical energy of adsorbtion (--epsilonkappa) on s is obtained at different values of the cooperativity factor sigma. This relationship represents a phase diagram of the system. Various sections of this phase diagram corresponding to different dependence of s and --epsilon on the external factors are considered. It is shown that the process of adsorbtion may occur in different manners: either cooperatively or by the phase transition of type II with jumps in one or in three points.


Click on the link to view the Letter. Nigerian Medical Journal | Vol. 54 | Issue 4 | July-August | 2013


We study the relative effectiveness and the efficiency of computing support-bounding rules that can be used to prune the search space in algorithms to solve the frequent item-sets mining problem (FIM). We develop a formalism wherein these rules can be stated and analyzed using the concept of differentials and density functions of the support function. We derive a general bounding theorem, which provides lower and upper bounds on the supports of item-sets in terms of the supports of their subsets. Since, in general, many lower and upper bounds exists for the support of an item-set, we show how to the best bounds. The result of this optimization shows that the best bounds are among those that involve the supports of all the strict subsets of an item-set of a particular size q. These bounds are determined on the basis of so called q-rules. In this way, we derive the bounding theorem established by Calders [5]. For these types of bounds, we consider how they compare relative to each other, and in so doing determine the best bounds. Since determining these bounds is combinatorially expensive, we study heuristics that efficiently produce bounds that are usually the best. These heuristics always produce the best bounds on the support of item-sets for basket databases that satisfies independence properties. In particular, we show that for an item-set I determining which bounds to compute that lead to the best lower and upper bounds on freq(I) can be done in time O(|I|). Even though, in practice, basket databases do not have these independence properties, we argue that our analysis carries over to a much larger set of basket databases where local "near" independence hold. Finally, we conduct an experimental study using real baskets databases, where we compute upper bounds in the context of generalizing the Apriori algorithm. Both the analysis and the study confirm that the q-rule (q odd and larger than 1) will almost always do better than the 1-rule (Apriori rule) on large dense baskets databases. Our experiment reveal that on these baskets databases, the 3-rule prunes almost 100% of the search space while, the 1-rule prunes 96% of the search space in the early stages of the algorithm. We also observe a reduction in wasted effort when applying the 3-rule to sparse baskets databases. In addition, we give experimental evidence that the combined use of the lower and upper bounds determine the exact support of many frequent item-sets without counting.


AIM
In the present study, we tested the reliability and validity of a new light fluorescence device, the FluoreCam.

METHODS
Twenty-five human teeth were sectioned mesiodistally into halves. Group 1 (n=30) included specimens with either sound enamel or natural white-spot lesions (WSL). Group 2 (n=20) included specimens with sound enamel used to create artificial WSL. Using the FluoreCam, baseline scans of enamel surfaces were obtained under standardized conditions. Group1 was scanned again the next day. Group 2 specimens were covered with an acid-resistant nail polish, leaving a 2 × 6-mm enamel window exposed, immersed in Queiroz-solution (64 hours, 37°C/pH5 with agitation), and then scanned again. Random error of the repeated measurements (reliability) was determined using method errors and intraclass correlations (ICC). Systematic error and the ability to detect demineralization (validity) were tested using Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

RESULTS
Method errors for Group 1 replicates were .39 mm2 (area), .72 pixels (intensity), and 5.69 pixels.mm2 (impact). Group 2 method errors were consistently slightly higher than those of group 1. FluoreCam showed highly reliable measurements for group 1 (ICC: 0.93-0.98) and group 2 (ICC: 0.87-0.97). There were no statistically-significant systematic errors for either group (P>.05). In group 2, enamel demineralization was statistically significant in area (P<.001), intensity (P=.001), and impact (P<.001).

CONCLUSION
FluoreCam is highly reliable and valid for in vitro assessments of enamel demineralization.


OBJECTIVE
To calculate the financial impact of underuse of generic medications in state Medicaid programs.

DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING
State-by-state data on Medicaid drug spending for 48 states and the District of Columbia in calendar year 2000.

STUDY DESIGN
We compared the total amount paid by each state Medicaid program for brand name prescriptions with the amount that would have been paid for generic versions of the same agent, to estimate the level of unrealized savings from use of substitutable generic drugs. We also examined whether variation in prices between states represented a potential source of unrealized savings.

PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
Analysis of state-by-state Medicaid prescription drug spending in 2000 identified potential savings of $229 million that could have been realized from greater use of generic drugs. If the best available prices from each state had been used nationally, savings would have increased to $450 million. The majority of the unrealized savings were concentrated in a small group of medications, including clozapine, alprazolam, and levothyroxine.

CONCLUSIONS
Federal regulations on prescription drug reimbursement limit the excess spending on brand name drugs in the Medicaid program to a small percentage of total spending, although the absolute dollar amount is large. Further savings could be realized if lowest available prices were used nationwide. Concentrating on specific agents may be a productive way to address the unrealized savings.


1. Available literature dealing with neuropsychopathological changes after exposure to organophosphate insecticides is reviewed. 2. Subacute neurological sequelae following acute organophosphate intoxication include the 'intermediate syndrome', probably a myopathy elicited by excess acetylcholine, and the 'organophosphate-induced delayed neuropathy' (OPIDN), which is caused by particularly neurotoxic organophosphates that inhibit neuropathy target esterase. 3. Long-term toxic effects affecting behaviour as well as mental and visual functions are occasionally observed after exposure to high doses of organophosphates with repeated acute, clinically significant intoxications. 4. The available data do not indicate that asymptomatic exposure to organophosphates is connected with an increasing risk of delayed or permanent neuropsychopathological effects.


Background Lithium is challenging to dose during pregnancy. Aims To provide guidance for dosing lithium during pregnancy. Method Retrospective observational cohort study. Data on lithium blood level measurements (n = 1101), the daily lithium dose, dosing alterations/frequency and creatinine blood levels were obtained from 113 pregnancies of women receiving lithium treatment during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Results Lithium blood levels decreased in the first trimester (−24%, 95% CI −15 to −35), reached a nadir in the second trimester (−36%, 95% CI −27 to −47), increased in the third trimester (−21%, 95% CI −13 to −30) and were still slightly increased postpartum (+9%, 95% CI +2 to +15). Delivery itself was not associated with an acute change in lithium and creatinine blood levels. Conclusions We recommend close monitoring of lithium blood levels until 34 weeks of pregnancy, then weekly until delivery and twice weekly for the first 2 weeks postpartum. We suggest creatinine blood levels are measured to monitor renal clearance.


We study the implementation of quantum key distribution (QKD) systems over quantum repeater infrastructures. We particularly consider quantum repeaters with encoding and compare them with probabilistic quantum repeaters. To that end, we propose two decoder structures for encoded repeaters that not only improve system performance but also make the implementation aspects easier by removing two-qubit gates from the QKD decoder. By developing several scalable numerical and analytical techniques, we then identify the resilience of the setup to various sources of error in gates, measurement modules, and initialization of the setup. We apply our techniques to three- and five-qubit repetition codes and obtain the normalized secret key generation rate per memory per second for encoded and probabilistic quantum repeaters. We quantify the regimes of operation, where one class of repeater outperforms the other, and find that there are feasible regimes of operation where encoded repeaters -- based on simple three-qubit repetition codes -- could offer practical advantages.


In the Republic of Korea a quality control programme has been introduced for industrial hygiene laboratories responsible for monitoring chemicals in working environments. Its development is outlined below.


In contrast to English, Finnish has several postpositions which indicate in front of locations (edella, edessa) and behind locations (takana, jaljessa and perassa). Based on predictions generated from findings from other prepositions in English, and following the prediction by Nikanne (2003) that some postpositions mark motion while others do not, an experiment was designed to examine the influence of movement, alignment, and orientation of located and reference objects on the comprehension of in front of and behind in English and the corresponding Finnish postpositions. Native speakers of English and Finnish had to rate the appropriateness of sentences containing these terms to describe pictures of cars at various positions on a roundabout. The results show similarity between "in front of" and 7quot;behind" terms across languages. While movement does distinguish between "behind" terms in Finnish, in both Finnish and English movement only affected the acceptability of "in front of" and "behind" when reference frame conflicts were present.


The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: Transformation After Tragedy Symposium at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco, Friday, March 22, 2013 Keynote Speech.The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") has a bad reputation. It is associated with constitutional law challenges and community outrage. It played a role in the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, computer programmer, Internet activist and CFAA defendant. It has been decried as a basis for abuse of justice, which is ironic, given its title and focus on punishing abuse. It has been called "the worst law in technology" and "the most outrageous criminal law you've never heard of." It is loathed and feared as a threat to Internet freedom.


Ye'kwana is an Amazonian language of the Cariban family spoken by a group of about 8,700 people in Venezuela and Brazil.
 This paper explores the expression of Path in spontaneous motion events based on spoken data collected for the documentation and description
 of the language including data collected with the Trajectoire elicitation material (Ishibashi et al. 2006).
 In Ye'kwana, Path is mainly expressed by postpositional and adverbial stems: there is a rich inventory of 80 postpositions
 all compatible with locative and either allative or perlative uses and 29 spatial adverbs, most of deictic nature. Source is expressed with
 a dedicated suffix (-nno) which combines with almost all the spatial postpositions and adverbs. The data show that the
 asymmetries in the expression of Path are not only found between Source and Goal but also need to include the expression of Medium for which
 the language has dedicated forms.


Mobile Learning Communities explores the diverse ways in which traveling groups experience learning 'on the run'. This book provides empirical evidence that draws on the authors' 17 years of continuing research with international occupational Travelers. It engages with themes such as workplace learning, globalization, multiliteracies, and emerging technologies which impinge on the ways mobile groups make sense of themselves as learning communities. International in focus, this book deals with an issue of increasing global significance and shows the complexities of the lives and learning experiences of such mobile cultures and their strategies for earning, learning, and living, thus challenging simplistic and stereotypical images of traveling groups still found in mainstream media and popular culture.

Mobile Learning Communities brings together for the first time mobilities and learning communities into a single and comprehensive focus. It provides a detailed analysis of how mobile groups position themselves and how they are positioned by others. This text will appeal to scholars in the field of distance education and educational technology and to researchers in education, cultural studies, and sociology. It will also be of interest to educational instructors, policy-makers, and administrators, as well as teacher educators and pre-service teachers. It paints a vivid picture of the experience of mobility through the words of the mobile learners themselves, but also critiques existing notions of learning and suggests ways of creating new educational futures for all learners and educators.


Synchrotron radiation has been used as a source for spectroscopic experiments in many countries. In this paper, the statistical properties of a light pulse emitted by an electron pulse in a storage ring or a synchrotron are studied in a classical formalism. The field is shown to be gaussian for every wavelength. The coherence time of the filtered synchrotron radiation is calculated.


Background: Prostate cancer (PCa) is a clinically heterogeneous hormone regulated disease with a strong genetic component and characterized by distinct molecular subclasses. Since hormone levels and related transcription factors vary during individual's lifetime, we hypothesized that inherited variants within regulatory elements of the human genome might act as facilitators of specific early somatic events in PCa in age/hormone dependent manner. Methods: We developed a computational approach to nominate heritable facilitators of somatic genomic events in the context of the Androgen Receptor (AR) signaling. Germline variants within functionally active regions of the genome (N=21,364) defined as per ENCODE data were ranked by the so called Trigger Score, which quantifies the fraction of the transcriptome putatively modulated by each variant leveraging individuals' genotypes and transcript levels from a cohort of human benign prostate tissues. Results: We identified 300 polymorphic regulatory elements that associate with DNA repair and hormone regulated transcript levels. In a cohort of 539 PCa and more than 3,000 controls, a variant on 7p14.3 strongly associated with an early recurrent prostate cancer specific somatic mutation in the Speckle-Type POZ protein (SPOP) gene (OR=5.54, P=1.22e-08). Integrated computational analysis suggested a broad transcriptional regulatory impact of the variant. In vitro luciferase assay in PC-3 cells demonstrated allele-specific enhancer activity of the locus that is concomitantly modulated by AR and by CCAAT/Enhancer Binding Protein beta (CEBPB). ChIP assays experiments showed AR and CEBPB binding to the locus. Upon deletion of the genomic locus via CRISPR-Cas9 followed by transcriptome sequencing, we observed differential transcript levels along chromosome 7 between edited versus control cells, but not in edited versus edited or control versus control, and nominated genes that were also predicted to physically interact with the 7p14.3 locus by previously generated Hi-C data from prostate cells. Conclusions: Our study suggests a relevant role in cancer predisposition of non-coding variants that lead to allele specific transactivation with age dependent and tissue specific effect manifesting in early somatic genomic events. Citation Format: Alessandro Romanel, Sonia Iolanda Garritano, Blerta Stringa, Mirjam Blattner, Davide Dalfovo, Dimple Chakravarty, Kellie Cotter, Priyanka Dhingra, Paola Gasperini, Olivier Elemento, Andrea Sboner, Alberto Inga, Ekta Khurana, MarK Rubin, Francesca Demichelis. Inherited determinants of early recurrent somatic mutations in prostate cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr LB-232. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-LB-232


Peritrichous bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments. As the bacterium swims forward, all its flagella rotate in synchrony behind the cell in a helical bundle. When the bacterium changes its direction, the flagellar filaments unbundle and reorient the cell for a short period of time before returning to their bundled state and resuming swimming. This rapid bundling and unbundling is, at its heart, a mechanical process whereby hydrodynamic interactions balance with elasticity to determine the time-varying deformation of the filaments. Inspired by this biophysical problem, we present in this paper what is perhaps the simplest model of bundling whereby two, or more, straight elastic filaments immersed in a viscous fluid rotate about their centreline, inducing rotational flows which tend to bend the filaments around each other. We derive an integro-differential equation governing the shape of the filaments resulting from mechanical balance in a viscous fluid at low Reynolds number. We show that such equation may be evaluated asymptotically analytically in the long-wavelength limit, leading to a local partial differential equation governed by a single dimensionless Bundling number. A numerical study of the dynamics predicted by the model reveals the presence of two configuration instabilities with increasing Bundling numbers: first to a crossing state where filaments touch at one point and then to a bundled state where filaments wrap along each other in a helical fashion. We next provide an intuitive physical model for the crossing instability and show that it may be used to predict analytically its threshold, and adapted to address the transition to a bundling state. We then use a macro-scale experimental implementation of the two-filament configuration in order to validate our theoretical predictions and obtain excellent agreement.


: In order to study the potential risk of transferring HIV through human seral gamma-globulin preparations (immunoglobulin), indirect immunofluorescent antibody test (IFA) and Western Blot (WB) assay were applied to 343 random samples (sera) with previous injection of imported human seral gamma-globulins (Ig) positive for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) antibodies between 1981-1987 for the detection of HIV antibodies. All results were negative and tests on all 23 controls who had previously received Ig made in China also gave negative results. However all 12 batches of imported Ig collected from the above-mentioned users, were positive for HIV antibodies when tested by WB and IFA. This study shows that under normal conditions, human seral gamma-globulin does not transmit HIV.


Low-grade fibromyxoid sarcoma (LGFMS) is a rare sarcoma subtype. The most common tumor locations are the deep soft tissue of extremities or trunks. We report a rare case of recurrent LGFMS in the inguinal region involving the scrotum and both testicles. A 38-year-old male patient reported a history of multiple nodular lesions in the left inguinal region accompanied by local inflammation. The patient was submitted for local resection of the lesion at our institution, with histopathological diagnosis of LGFMS. He missed his follow-up, returning with a large bulge in the left inguinal region involving the scrotum with signs of tissue necrosis and local purulent discharge. Surgical exploration was performed and the patient underwent tumor resection in the left inguinal region and the entire scrotum, with bilateral orchiectomy, with the margins enlarged to the right inguinal region and proximal surface of the penis. Local reconstruction was performed with a left fascia lata tensor muscle flap and ipsilateral thigh coverage using partial skin graft. On microscopic examination, the tumor showed spindle cells arranged in bundles, with abundant collagen and myxoid stroma with interspersed prominent vessels. The immunohistochemical study carried out showed immunoreactivity with Ki67 (<5%), immunonegativity with desmin and S100, confirming the diagnosis of LGFMS. Postoperative recovery was good and no recurrence was seen after two years. The patient is in good health, realizing multidisciplinary outpatient follow-up and performing continuous testosterone replacement. Surgical resection with negative margins for localized disease remains the standard treatment for LGFMS.


In this study, the impact collapse tests were performed to investigate collapse characteristics of Al/CFRP member which were composed of aluminum members wrapped with CFRP (Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics) outside aluminum member. Aluminum members absorb energy by stable plastic deformation, while CFRP members absorb energy by unstable brittle failure with higher specific strength and stiffness than those in the aluminum member. In an attempt to achieve a synergy effect by combing the two members, Al/CFRP members were manufactured and impact collapse tests were performed for the members. Based on the respective collapse characteristics of aluminum and CFRP members, the collapse modes and energy absorption capability were analyzed for Al/CFRP member which have different fiber orientation angle of CFRP. Test results showed that the collapse of the Al/CFRP member complemented unstable brittle failure of the CFRP member due to ductile nature of the inner aluminum member and the fiber orientation angle of Al/CFRP members influence energy absorption capability and collapse mode.


In a multiple testing problem where one is willing to tolerate a few false rejections, procedure controlling the familywise error rate (FWER) can potentially be improved in terms of its ability to detect false null hypotheses by generalizing it to control the $k$-FWER, the probability of falsely rejecting at least $k$ null hypotheses, for some fixed $k>1$. Simes' test for testing the intersection null hypothesis is generalized to control the $k$-FWER weakly, that is, under the intersection null hypothesis, and Hochberg's stepup procedure for simultaneous testing of the individual null hypotheses is generalized to control the $k$-FWER strongly, that is, under any configuration of the true and false null hypotheses. The proposed generalizations are developed utilizing joint null distributions of the $k$-dimensional subsets of the $p$-values, assumed to be identical. The generalized Simes' test is proved to control the $k$-FWER weakly under the multivariate totally positive of order two (MTP$_2$) condition [J. Multivariate Analysis 10 (1980) 467--498] of the joint null distribution of the $p$-values by generalizing the original Simes' inequality. It is more powerful to detect $k$ or more false null hypotheses than the original Simes' test when the $p$-values are independent. A stepdown procedure strongly controlling the $k$-FWER, a version of generalized Holm's procedure that is different from and more powerful than [Ann. Statist. 33 (2005) 1138--1154] with independent $p$-values, is derived before proposing the generalized Hochberg's procedure. The strong control of the $k$-FWER for the generalized Hochberg's procedure is established in situations where the generalized Simes' test is known to control its $k$-FWER weakly.


Oxytetracycline (OTC) is an antimicrobial drug widely used in the rabbit for treatment of intestinal and respiratory diseases sustained by Pasteurella spp, Sa/mone//a spp. or E. Coli. This study was carried out to evaluate the distribution and residue depletion of oxytetracycline. The tissue distribution study was performed treating animals with a single dose of 80 mg of OTC per kg body weight (b.w.) in 2.7 kg rabbits. The residue studies were performed administering OTC via drinking water (680 ppm) or via pelleted food (1000 ppm). Real daily intake ranged from 50 to 80 mg per kg b.w. for 5 consecutive days. The drug tissue concentrations were determined by an HPLC method, with a quantification limit (LOQ) of 50 mg.kg·1 and a detection limit of 5-6 mg.kg·1according to considered tissue. The results of the study show that, in rabbits, OTC does not reach very high lissue concenlralions following oral administration via medicated water or feed. Tissue residues fall below MRLs 72 and 48 hours following the withdrawal of medicaled water and feed respectively. Tissue concentrations of OTC following administration via medicated water were greater than those recorded following administration via pellets: e.g, 200 to 700 vs <50mg.kg -1 in muscle or 200 to 600 vs 80 to 280 mg.kg -1 in liver. One hour after the single dose administration, the concentration was 350-850 mg.kg -1 in lung and twice of these values in kidneys.


Surface and groundwater are related systems. They can be used
conjunctively to maximize the efficient use of available resources. Groundwater
may be used to supplement surface water to cope with the irrigation demands to
meet the deficits in low rainfall periods. The parameters involved in the
present study are groundwater availability, surface water availability, water
requirement of crops and crop area. The inclusion of such uncertain parameters
leads to accept the decision making process beyond the consideration of
economic benefits. In the present study, an irrigation
planning model is formulated by considering the conjunctive use of surface and
groundwater. The resources in the present model, i.e. the area, surface water and groundwater availability are
represented by fuzzy set. The linear membership function is used to fuzzify the
objective function and resources. The model is applied to a case study of
Jayakwadi project and solved for maximization of the degree of satisfaction (l)
which is 0.546.


Malaria is a world-wide problem which is estimated to contribute to 2.3% of global disease' and is an increasing problem, particularly in developing countries.2 In Zimbabwe, the development of widespread resistance to antimalarial drugs has been prevented through a comprehensive national malaria strategy including the development and enforcement of national guidelines tor the prophylaxis and treatment of malaria. However, in recent years numerous anecdotal accounts have circulated in the private sector of failure of malaria chemoprophylax is and treatment. This study set out to explore the use of antimalarial drug-products amongst doctors and pharmacists so as to identify potential problems requiring further investigation.


Intermunicipal cooperation offers an interesting alternative in cases when municipalities are too small to provide public services at an efficient level but are reluctant towards municipal amalgamation. Forming a subject consisting of multiple municipalities with a specific focus provides a way how to exploit economies of scale while keeping the municipal identity. In our paper we examine effects of intermunicipal cooperation in the field of municipal solid waste management, using a sample of municipalities from the Czech Republic, where municipal fragmentation is an important issue. Our results suggest that municipalities participating in intermunicipal cooperation focused on waste management experience annual costs saving of almost 6%. In addition to that, intermunicipal cooperation often includes other qualitative and non-financial benefits like better quality of the service or relief from administrative burden, which is especially appreciated by the smallest municipalities with limited administrative staff.


Author(s): Khalil, Alexander K | Abstract: At present, the need for an understanding of both physical and cultural geography is increasingly urgent in America's schools. The present study explores using music as focus for the exploration of geography. Not only is music strongly linked to culture and environment but also its study provides an experiential understanding of a given culture in a way that few others can. Instrumental music, unfettered by practical, semantic, or representational constraints of other traditional art forms, can be considered as one of the most direct forms of cultural expression, reflecting primarily the collective imagination of the culture that developed it and the environment in which it developed. Musical instruments are shaped by a culture's aesthetics and made using locally available materials and technologies.The present article takes as a case study a class at the Museum School, a San Diego Unified School District charter school that emphasizes experiential learning and the arts in its daily curriculum. In this case study, 23 children in grades 4-6 focused their attention on the culture and geography of the Island of Bali, Indonesia, through studying its instrumental music, known as "gamelan."The Museum School has had a Balinese gamelan program as part of its music curriculum since 2000 and thus all of the students approached the subject with substantial experiential knowledge. The course of study, which lasted several weeks, went through four stages of inquiry and discussion. First, the students conducted background research on Balinese music, focusing in particular on organology. Second, the students explored Balinese geography through organology, deducing aspects of the Balinese environment based on the design and construction of the instruments. Third, the students examined Balinese culture through its music, focusing on musical structure. Fourth the students were asked to make connections between Balinese culture and physical geography as seen through music. Finally, the students compared and contrast what they had learned with musics of their own choice, pointing out likely cultural and environmental factors that likely caused the differences and similarities they observed.This course of study helped the students make connections between cultural and physical geography in a nuanced way. Further, although focus on music and art as a subject, the core elements of the class were writing and research skills. Combining these skills with experiential learning not only deepens and nuances understanding of geography but also expands students' cognitive repertoire, providing tools for further exploration.


Technology in the home environment has the potential to support older adults in a variety of ways. We took an interdisciplinary approach (human factors/ergonomics and computer science) to develop a technology "coach" that could support older adults in learning to use a medical device. Our system provided a computer vision system to track the use of a blood glucose meter and provide users with feedback if they made an error. This research could support the development of an in-home personal assistant to coach individuals in a variety of tasks necessary for independent living.


The standard way to get linear scaling in a distributed OLTP DBMS is to horizontally partition data across several nodes. Ideally, this partitioning will result in each query being executed at just one node, to avoid the overheads of distributed transactions and allow nodes to be added without increasing the amount of required coordination. For some applications, simple strategies, such as hashing on primary key, provide this property. Unfortunately, for many applications, including social networking and order-fulfillment, many-to-many relationships cause simple strategies to result in a large fraction of distributed queries. Instead, what is needed is a fine-grained partitioning, where related individual tuples (e.g., cliques of friends) are co-located together in the same partition. Maintaining such a fine-grained partitioning requires the database to store a large amount of metadata about which partition each tuple resides in. We call such metadata a lookup table, and present the design of a data distribution layer that efficiently stores these tables and maintains them in the presence of inserts, deletes, and updates. We show that such tables can provide scalability for several difficult to partition database workloads, including Wikipedia, Twitter, and TPC-E. Our implementation provides 40% to 300% better performance on these workloads than either simple range or hash partitioning and shows greater potential for further scale-out.


Purpose: To describe the methods of performing the water drinking test (WDT) and its applications in glaucoma management.
Methods: This review is based on pertinent publications retrieved by a selective search in PubMed, supplemented by further articles chosen by the authors.
Results: Intraocular pressure (IOP) changes throughout the day. IOP peak has been identified as a risk factor in glaucoma onset and progression. WDT is a simple stress test used by many researchers to elicit IOP peaks in assessing response to glaucoma treatments.
Conclusions: Studies have shown the reproducibility and promising results of WDT in various pharmacological and surgical treatments of glaucoma. It is an important tool in glaucoma management.


Many investigations about superalloys and coatings have been done in the laboratory, but evaluating the degradation condition of hot section components during service is still important not only for repair and reuse but also for outage prevention. Time dependent degradation for 1st stage blades of gas turbine was investigated. The degradation analysis for used blades was divided into microstructure changes by position in the blade and mechanical tests. In the microstructure analysis, the rafting and coarsening of γ', MC decomposition and TCP(Topologically closed packed) phase formation occurred and progressed with increasing service time, and especially at the leading and trailing edge of top layer which should be a check points for used blades. Stress-rupture test results of 25,000 and 52,000 EOH(Equivalent Operating Hours) for used blades were also compared with serviced time and position in each blade.


In this paper, we propose a distributed scheme for data gathering using a mobile data collector in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In our scheme, a mobile data collector moves along a predefined track over the sensing field and data are forwarded to nodes whose transmission disks overlap with the trajectory of the data collector; these nodes are called relaying nodes. Data are classified into two categories: delay-sensitive data and delay-tolerant data. While delay-sensitive data are sent to the data collector directly, delay-tolerant data may be sent to a nearby relaying node, where they wait for the data collector to come and pick them up.

We give a theoretical analysis to quantify the impact of data collector mobility on the lifetime of the network as compared to a WSN with a stationary data collector. Moreover, we use simulations to evaluate our scheme in practice. Simulation results show that our scheme has the potential to prolong the lifetime of the network significantly.


SUMMARY Streptocarpus is a genus showing great variation in vegetative plant architecture and hence provides an attractive system to study the evolution of morphological diversity. Besides species showing an orthodox caulescent plant organization, producing leaves from a conventional shoot apical meristem (SAM), there are species whose body plan is composed of units (phyllomorphs) consisting of a petiole‐like structure and a lamina that has the ability of continued growth. The first of these units is the macrocotyledon, derived from the continued growth of one of the two cotyledons by the activity of a basal meristem (BM), whereas further phyllomorphs develop from a SAM‐like meristem. We carried out anatomical and morphological studies on the macrocotyledon of Streptocarpus rexii showing that the lamina has a bifacial structure, whereas the petiolode is partially unifacial. YABBY transcription factors are known to be involved in organ polarity and also promote lamina growth. We characterized the expression of SrGRAM, an ortholog of the YABBY genes GRAMINIFOLIA (GRAM) and FILAMENTOUS FLOWER (FIL), in S. rexii by in situ hybridization and RT‐PCR. Gene expression pattern during embryogenesis was found to be conserved between SrGRAM and FIL from Arabidopsis. During subsequent seedling development SrGRAM expression in S. rexii was closely associated with the activity of the BM of the macrocotyledon and consecutively produced phyllomorphs, whereas it was excluded from the SAM‐like meristem. Our results suggest that SrGRAM acts in intercalary growth and that an altered regulation of SrGRAM may underlay the evolution of the BM in S. rexii.


: Energy saving is a global priority, as it is helping both energy and environmental sustainability by reducing CO2 emissions. The search for new energy solutions is therefore necessary. In the Mediterranean climate, resources are generally scarce, and all energy sources need to be explored, including biomass from agricultural or industrial waste. There is a clear upward trend in date worldwide production, having doubled its world production in the last 10 years, and this trend is particularly relevant for Mediterranean climate countries, especially in North Africa and nearby countries. This study analyzes the properties associated with the date seed (Phoenix dactylifera L.) to evaluate its suitability and viability as a new biofuel. Specifically, the viability of replacing the existing gas boiler in a university building in the south of Spain with a system of biomass boilers using this biomass was analyzed as a case study. The results reveal that this biomass has HHV values very similar to those of other biomass sources, 19.121 MJ/kg. With the replacement of the gas boiler by a biomass that uses the date seed, a reduction of 95 tons of CO2 per year is obtained and an economic saving of more than 66% is achieved. In short, this work opens new perspectives for the use of this biomass of date seed in boilers and it is an efficient solution for large public buildings such as the buildings of Mediterranean climate universities.


Background: Studies have shown that some children do not participate in sport or exercise because they did not establish early coordination and basic motor skills while at school. Basic motor skills form significant parts of the goals for students to achieve in the Swedish school subject Physical Education and Health (PEH). Aims: The aim was to study effects of an extension of physical activity and motor training, during a period of nine years, on motor skills and marks in the school subject PEH. Furthermore, a motor training program called Motor Development as Ground for Learning [Motorisk Utveckling som Grund för Inlärning] (MUGI) was tested and evaluated. Method: The study is longitudinal and two groups of students were followed during nine school years. At the start of the project the students were seven years old, and 15 years old at the follow-up. An intervention group (n = 161) had one scheduled lesson of physical activity and motor training every school day. A control group (n = 102) had the school's usual two PEH lessons per week. Motor skills observations were carried out in the school years 1, 2, 3, and 9 according to the MUGI checklists. Extra motor skill training, according to the MUGI model, was given to students in the intervention group who had motor skills deficits. The method was hypothetic-deductive and two hypotheses were tested: (1) Students' motor skills will improve with extended PEH and extra motor training according to the MUGI model, and (2) boys' and girls' marks in PEH will improve with extended PEH and extra motor training in school. Findings: The results confirmed the hypothesis that students' motor skills improve with extended physical activity and motor training. After only one year the students in the intervention group had significantly better motor skills (balance and coordination) than students in the control group. These differences remained and were also found at follow-up school years 3 and 9. Differences in motor skills between boys and girls decreased with extended physical activity and extra motor training in school. Significant correlations were found between motor skills school year 2, 3, and 9 and marks in PEH school year 9. The second hypothesis was confirmed by significantly higher marks in the school subject PEH school year 9 in the intervention than in the control group. Although there were no significant differences in motor skills between boys and girls in school year 9, girls had significantly lower marks in PEH than boys. Conclusions: The school has good potential for stimulating students' development of motor skills, but two lessons of PEH per week are not enough. Differences in motor skills between boys and girls may decrease with extended physical activity and extra motor training in school. The MUGI program can be useful as a pedagogic model for observing and improving motor skills in school.