After enrichment from Chinese rural anaerobic digestor sludge, anaerobic, sporing and nonsporing, saturated fatty acid-beta-oxidizing syntrophic bacteria were isolated as cocultures with H2- and formate-utilizing Methanospirillum hungatei or Desulfovibrio sp. strain G-11. The syntrophs degraded C4 to C8 saturated fatty acids, including isobutyrate and 2-methylbutyrate. They were adapted to grow on crotonate and were isolated as pure cultures. The crotonate-grown pure cultures alone did not grow on butyrate in either the presence or the absence of some common electron acceptors. However, when they were reconstituted with M. hungatei, growth on butyrate again occurred. In contrast, crotonate-grown Clostridium kluyveri and Clostridium sticklandii, as well as Clostridium sporogenes, failed to grow on butyrate when these organisms were cocultured with M. hungatei. The crotonate-grown pure subcultures of the syntrophs described above were subjected to 16S rRNA sequence analysis. Several previously documented fatty acid-beta-oxidizing syntrophs grown in pure cultures with crotonate were also subjected to comparative sequence analyses. The sequence analyses revealed that the new sporing and nonsporing isolates and other syntrophs that we sequenced, which had either gram-negative or gram-positive cell wall ultrastructure, all belonged to the phylogenetically gram-positive phylum. They were not closely related to any of the previously known subdivisions in the gram-positive phylum with which they were compared, but were closely related to each other, forming a new subdivision in the phylum. We recommend that this group be designated Syntrophomonadaceae fam. nov.; a description is given.


Classic metabolomic methods have proven to be very useful to study functional biology and variation in the chemical composition of different tissues. However, they do not provide any information in terms of spatial localization within fine structures. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry imaging (MALDI MSI) does and reaches at best a spatial resolution of 0.25 μm depending on the laser setup, making it a very powerful tool to analyze the local complexity of biological samples at the cellular level. Here, we intend to give an overview of the diversity of the molecules and localizations analyzed using this method as well as to update on the latest adaptations made to circumvent the complexity of samples. MALDI MSI has been widely used in medical sciences and is now developing in research areas as diverse as entomology, microbiology, plant biology, and plant–microbe interactions, the rhizobia symbiosis being the most exhaustively described so far. Those are the fields of interest on which we will focus to demonstrate MALDI MSI strengths in characterizing the spatial distributions of metabolites, lipids, and peptides in relation to biological questions.


AbstractStarting from 2000, the Academic Information System (SIAKAD) could be accessed on-line by the entire academic community of the University of Lampung. SIAKAD used for academic purposes at the University of Lampung, such as card-making Plan Study (KRS), and Study Result Card (KHS). Faculty of Engineering, University of Lampung, which is one of the faculty who are in the shade of the University of Lampung also been wearing SIAKAD on-line for academic administration for its students. But in reality, SIAKAD on-line that used still had some shortcomings, namely, the absence of a recapitulation of how many students pass a graduation period, the average GPA of a graduation, the average GPA per class, how many students graduate, active, Drop Out (DO) a generation in one department, and the average of study period per period graduates. Therefore, in this study there had been made academic information system contains solutions to some of the shortcomings of the SIAKAD on-line used by the University of Lampung and were focused only on the Faculty of Engineering, University of Lampung. The information system was built using the programming language PHP version 5.3.5 and MySQL version 5.0.7 as its DBMS. At first the information system was created on the local host server and then uploaded to the web server of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Lampung. Once the information system was built, the system tested. Testing was done by two scenarios, namely offline scenario and online scenario. In the offline testing, information system that was built could show how average GPA per class, average GPA per period of graduation, student statistics, as well as how many students were active, graduated, not graduated, dropped out (DO), and resigned themselves. Online scenario was done after the system information uploaded to the web server of the Faculty of Engineering. All existing features were also working as intended.Keywords: SIAKAD, information system, modified waterfall, localhost server.


A study was made of the effect of the frequency and intensity of the gas oscillations on mass transfer between a gas and a solid surface, under conditions of a linear oscillation direction and a precisely defined surface shape, for the purpose of obtaining the transport mechanism. For the reaction model, the hydrogenation of C2H4 on Pd catalyst was selected. The reaction was 1st-order. Based on the exptl. conditions, the hydrogenation rate depends only on the C2H4 transport to the catalytic tube wall. The reaction mixt. had the following compn.: C2H4 1, H2 4, O2 0.4, and N2 94.6%; the reaction temp. was 184 Deg, the catalytic zone length 23 cm, the gas velocity 15-60 cm/sec, the permanence time 0.4-1.5 sec and oscillation frequencies 275, 400, 425, 530, 630, 730, 875, 920 and 1325 Hz, the oscillation intensity was ?175 decibels. The reaction rate const. increases with the oscillation pressure from a detd. frequency-depended value and this effect increases at low frequencies. The mass-transfer coeffs. were obtained from the rate consts. A study was made of the variation of these coeffs. with the gas rate, for different oscillation pressures, Reynolds nos., and variation of oscillations. [on SciFinder (R)]


To define the differences in gene expression patterns between glycidyl methacrylate (GMA)-transformed human lung fibroblast cells (2BS cells) and controls. Methods The mRNA differential display polymerase chain reaction (DD-PCR) technique was used. cDNAs were synthesized by reverse transcription and amplified by PCR using 30 primer combinations. After being screened by dot blot analysis, differentially expressed cDNAs were cloned, sequenced and confirmed by Northern blot analysis. Results Eighteen differentially expressed cDNAs were cloned and sequenced, of which 17 were highly homologous to known genes (homology = 89%-100%) and one was an unknown gene. Northern blot analysis confirmed that eight genes encoding human zinc finger protein 217 (ZNF217), mixed-lineage kinase 3 (MLK-3), ribosomal protein (RP) L15, RPL41, RPS16, TBX3, stanniocalcin 2 (STC2) and mouse ubiquitin conjugating enzyme (UBC), respectively, were up-regulated, and three genes including human transforming growth factor ( inducible gene (Betaig-h3), (-1,2-mannosidase 1A2 (MAN 1A2) gene and an unknown gene were down-regulated in the GMA-transformed cells. Conclusion Analysis of the potential function of these genes suggest that they may be possibly linked to a variety of cellular processes such as transcription, signal transduction, protein synthesis and growth, and that their differential expression could contribute to the GMA-induced neoplastic transformation.


We previously found that murine leukemia cells of T cell, B cell, and erythroid ontogeny express a cell membrane antigen that cross-reacts with an idiotype of an anti-retroviral antibody. In the present study, the expression of this antigen (termed AVID, for anti-viral idiotype) by murine erythroleukemia (MEL) cells was examined during chemically induced differentiation. AVID expression by MEL cells was found to be lost when they were treated with either dimethyl sulfoxide or hexamethylene bisacetamide, two chemicals that induce MEL cells to terminally differentiate. The kinetics of disappearance of AVID during inducer treatment reflected the kinetics with which the inducers caused MEL cell commitment to terminal differentiation. Loss of AVID expression by inducer-treated cells was inhibited by dexamethasone, which inhibits commitment and MEL cell differentiation. The subset of inducer-treated cells that expressed the least amount of AVID contained the greatest number of cells committed to differentiate. These results indicate that AVID identifies a novel differentiation antigen of MEL cells.


Abstract A spatio-temporal model of particle or star growth is defined, whereby new unit masses arrive sequentially in discrete time. These unit masses are referred to as candidate stars, which tend to arrive in mass-dense regions and then either form a new star or are absorbed by some neighbouring star of high mass. We analyse the system as time increases, and derive the asymptotic growth rate of the number of stars as well as the size of a randomly chosen star. We also prove that the size-biased mass distribution converges to a Poisson–Dirichlet distribution. This is achieved by embedding our model into a continuous-time Markov process, so that new stars arrive according to a marked Poisson process, with locations as marks, whereas existing stars grow as independent Yule processes. Our approach can be interpreted as a Hoppe-type urn scheme with a spatial structure. We discuss its relevance for and connection to models of population genetics, particle aggregation, image segmentation, epidemic spread, and random graphs with preferential attachment.


Application-specific, parameterized local search algorithms (PLSAs), in which optimization accuracy can be traded off with run time, arise naturally in many optimization contexts. We introduce a novel approach, called simulated heating, for systematically integrating parameterized local search into evolutionary algorithms (EAs). Using the framework of simulated heating, we investigate both static and dynamic strategies for systematically managing the tradeoff between PLSA accuracy and optimization effort. Our goal is to achieve maximum solution quality within a fixed optimization time budget. We show that the simulated heating technique better utilizes the given optimization time resources than standard hybrid methods that employ fixed parameters, and that the technique is less sensitive to these parameter settings. We apply this framework to three different optimization problems, compare our results to the standard hybrid methods, and show quantitatively that careful management of this tradeoff is necessary to achieve the full potential of an EA/PLSA combination.


This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the program's effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop Head Start proposals. The result was a large and lasting discontinuity in Head Start funding rates at the OEO cutoff for grant-writing assistance. We find evidence of a large drop at the OEO cutoff in mortality rates for children from causes that could be affected by Head Start, as well as suggestive evidence for a positive effect on educational attainment.


Cerebrovascular disease (stroke) is the second cause of death and among the top five causes of morbidity in many developed and developing countries. The coincidence of trends of stroke and coronary heart disease mortalities is of question in different countries. This study aims to investigate patterns of increase and decrease of stroke mortality in 48 different countries. The mortality curves of stroke for 48 countries that had reliable data and met other selection criteria were examined using age-standardised death rates for 35–74 years from the WHO. Annual male mortality rates for individual countries from 1950 to 2005 were plotted and a table and graph were used to classify countries by magnitude, pattern and timing of stroke mortality. The natural history of stroke epidemics varies markedly among countries. Different stroke patterns are distinguishable; including "declining" (since the inception of data or 1950), "rise and fall", "rising" (first part of epidemic), and "flat" (no epidemic yet). Further, epidemic peaks were higher in Asia, in particular Japan at 433/105, the former Soviet states at 388/105 and East Europe at 301/105 and lowest in Canada and Australia at 29/105. The different dates of mortality downturn could reflect the times when pharmaceutical treatment of hypertension started to be effective in sufficient numbers of the high risk population and/or there were significant changes in salt consumption. This could be translated to policy interventions for stroke control in countries with rising trend of the disease.


In recent years, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become one of the leading paradigms in software design. Among the key advantages behind SOA is service composition, the ability to create new services by reusing the functionality of pre-existing ones. Despite the availability of standard languages and related design and development tools, ``manual'' service composition remains to be an extremely error-prone and time-consuming task. No surprise, the automation of service composition process has been and still is a hot topic in the area of service computing.

In addition to high complexity, modern service-based systems tend to be dynamic. The most common examples of dynamic factors are constantly evolving set of available services, volatile execution context, frequent revision of business policies, regulations and goals, etc. Since dynamic changes of the execution environment can invalidate service compositions predefined within a service-based system, the cost of software maintenance in this case may increase dramatically. Unfortunately, the existing automated service composition approaches are not of much help here. Being design-time by their nature, they intensively involve IT experts, especially for analysing the changes and respecifying formal composition requirements in new conditions, which is still a considerable effort. To make service-based systems more agile, a new composition approach is needed that could automatically perform all composition-related tasks at run time, from deriving composition requirements to generating new compositions to deploying them.

In this dissertation, we propose a novel service composition framework that (i) handles stateful and nondeterministic services that interact asynchronously, (ii) allows for rich control- and data-flow composition requirements that are independent from the details of service implementations (iii) exploits advanced planning techniques for automated reasoning and (iv) exploits modeling methodology that is applicable in dynamic environment.

The corner stone of the framework is the explicit context model that abstracts composition requirements and constraints away from the details of service implementations. By linking services to the context model on the one side, and by expressing composition requirements and constraints in terms of the context model on the other side, we create a formal setting in which abstract requirements and constraints, though being implementation-independent, can always be grounded to available service implementations. Consequently, we show that in such framework it is possible to move most human activities to design time so that the run-time management of the composition life cycle is completely automated. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first composition approach to achieve this goal.

A significant contribution of the dissertation is the investigation of the problem of dynamic adaptation of service-based business processes. Here, our solution is based on the composition approach proposed. Within the thesis, the problem of process adaptation plays the role of the key motivator and evaluation use case for our composition-related research.

The most part of the ideas discussed in the thesis are implemented and evaluated to prove their practical applicability.


The present invention via the target wireless access network for configuring a context for a connection for transmitting packet data services to the mobile terminal. The mobile terminal is connected to the municipal radio access network to the first packet data service is supplied to the mobile terminal via a wireless network City. In addition, the present invention provides an authentication server, a packet data gateway and a packet data service support node associated with the context configuration method. The present invention, like in UMTS for example, to provide a way to be able to establish a connection for transmitting the packet service to the mobile terminal from the radio access network in a high speed as possible, before the connection to the mobile terminal to the target wireless access network, by establishing a context, via the target wireless access network it is proposed to preset the service provider of the packet data.


Abstract Integrated geophysical surveys can provide new insights into the geologic structures controlling groundwater flow in the Edwards Aquifer, one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the United States and the sole source of drinking water for the city of San Antonio, Texas. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of integrated geophysical surveys at a site near two monitoring wells at the western edge of the Knippa Gap, where groundwater flows across the Balcones fault system and downdip into the Maverick Basin. In this area, normal faults controlling groundwater flow are partially obscured by Tertiary sediments, such as the Leona Gravel. Simultaneous inversion of transient electromagnetic (TEM) and direct current (DC) resistivity data picks the major stratigraphic boundaries, including the top of the Austin Chalk and the top of the Edwards Aquifer itself, at a depth of 237 m (780 ft). These results are in excellent agreement with gamma and lithology logs from the two wells located at the survey site. Large-loop (100-m-side; 324-ft-side) TEM profiling successfully delineates normal faults in the section, in excellent agreement with faults modeled from ground magnetic data. In total, four normal faults were identified by these surveys. Two of these faults were previously known from well log interpretation and two were previously unknown. In addition, the TEM profiles image these faults in the sedimentary section, to the top of the Edwards Aquifer. Thus, modeling TEM soundings, profiles, DC resistivity soundings, and magnetic data together provides a comprehensive view of the geologic structures influencing groundwater flow in this faulted, compartmentalized aquifer.


Capecitabine and oxaliplatin, two relatively new cancer drugs, should be considered for the adjuvant treatment of stage III (Dukes's type C) colon cancer after surgery, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recommended. Separate appraisals of docetaxel and paclitaxel for early breast cancer after surgery found insufficient evidence to make recommendations.

Previous NICE guidance said that the standard treatment for stage III (Dukes's type C) colon cancer after surgery was a six month course of 5-fluorouracil and folinic acid given intravenously. NICE also said that this treatment should be offered to all patients who are fit enough to tolerate it after surgery for Dukes's type C colon cancer (in which the tumour has spread to lymph nodes) and that it should begin within six weeks of surgery.

NICE's new appraisal reviewed the clinical and cost effectiveness data for two of the newer drugs. Capecitabine is an orally administered …


Systems that provide automated game-design support — whether fully automated game generators, or tools to assist human designers — must be able to maintain a representation of a game design and add or remove game mechanics to support incrementally modifying the game. The system should then be able to reason about the design to support the designer. For example, it might point out that the set of mechanics makes the game unwinnable; or that there's only one complex possible way to beat the game; or that some room is impossible to get to. In addition, the same representation should be actually playable as a game. Existing game representations encode a fairly narrow range of games, most commonly symmetric board games; these representations are also difficult to extend or revise. We propose an architecture based on the event calculus, a logical representation designed for reasoning about time in an elaboration-tolerant way, meaning that designs can be changed by adding or removing sets of axioms rather than modifying brittle hard-coded representations. The resulting game design is a declarative specification in formal logic, so can be critiqued by making queries that are answered through logical inference. Since it specifies the game's simulation rules, it may be executed by logical inference as well; if symbols specifying input and graphical representation are appropriately mapped to input devices and a graphical display, the same declarative representation can be executed as a fully interactive, graphical game. We describe how to organize a library of game-design mechanics using this event-calculus framework, and describe a simple tile-based game, showing how it can be easily modified, critiqued and debugged, and played.


'Therapists or clinicians need to be creative and flexible when working with patients for whom English is a second language, but they do not necessarily need to have the ability to speak the patient's first language'.


In this paper, we focus on the low-power scheduling problem with multiple threshold and/or supply voltage technologies in high-level synthesis. We propose a unified scheduling approach which is applicable to various optimization problems, including: 1) dynamic power and resource usage co-optimization; 2) leakage power optimization; and 3) dynamic power and leakage power co-optimization. To deal with different objectives with high flexibility, three problems are divided into two common subproblems including delay assignment and resource density variance minimization, then a vertex potential-based mobility allocation model is proposed to solve two subproblems simultaneously. Experimental results show that, for dynamic power and resource co-optimization, our scheduling approach produces optimum solutions for all six benchmarks with 15 groups of data; for leakage power optimization it also greatly excels the latest existing work, by 20% leakage power reduction and 52 times speedup. Besides, for dynamic and leakage power co-optimization, the Pareto solutions are studied.


Chemical signals are the most widely used form of sexual communication throughout the living world. However, there is in general little knowledge about what these signals actually communicate. The role of chemical signals, i.e. pheromones, in sexual behaviour has traditionally been seen as restricted to mate attraction and species recognition. This thesis reviews the evidence for pheromones as indicators of mate quality, and then investigates three important factors for mate quality signals – individual variation, heritability and cost – by using the male pheromone of the lekking fruit fly Drosophila grimshawi as a model.The experiments presented indicate that the pheromone of D. grimshawi has multiple functions, and that these functions vary with social context. Thus, with regard to females, the pheromone seems to act mainly as a species/mate recognition signal, since females show little preference for the amount of pheromone deposited by a male. Moreover, males invest less in pheromone production when subjected to females as compared to when subjected to rival males. However, the pheromone seems to be costly in production since males that invest much in pheromone deposition has a shorter lifespan. This suggests a function for the pheromone in male-male interactions. Males can distinguish their own pheromone depositions from those of a strange male, and also discriminate between pheromone depositions from one and two strange males. This might give them the ability to assess the size of a lek and the competitive capacities of rivals, information that should be useful when optimizing sexual behaviour.In conclusion, the pheromone seems to act as an honest mate/competitor quality signal in some social contexts, and as a non-costly species/mate recognition signal in other. In addition, I show for the first time that a chemical signal has differential fitness costs, and that an insect is able to distinguish between individual odour signatures.


Abstract With the growth of the Internet, crowdsourcing has become a popular way to perform intelligence tasks that hitherto would be either performed internally within an organization or not undertaken due to prohibitive costs and the lack of an appropriate communications infrastructure. In crowdsourcing systems, whereby multiple agents are not under the direct control of a system designer, it cannot be assumed that agents will act in a manner that is consistent with the objectives of the system designer or principal agent. In situations whereby agents' goals are to maximize their return in crowdsourcing systems that offer financial or other rewards, strategies will be adopted by agents to game the system if appropriate mitigating measures are not put in place. The motivational and incentivization research space is quite large; it incorporates diverse techniques from a variety of different disciplines including behavioural economics, incentive theory, and game theory. This paper specifically focusses on game theoretic approaches to the problem in the crowdsourcing domain and places it in the context of the wider research landscape. It provides a survey of incentive engineering techniques that enable the creation of apt incentive structures in a range of different scenarios.


Author(s): Jimenez, Ivo | Advisor(s): Maltzahn, Carlos | Abstract: Reproducibility is the cornerstone of the scientific method. Yet, in the computational and data-intensive branches of science, a gap exists between current practices and the ideal of having every new scientific discovery be _easily_ reproducible. At the root of this problem are the dysfunctional forms of communication between the distinct stakeholders of science: researchers, their peers, students, librarians and other consumers of research outcomes working in ad-hoc ways; groups of individuals organized as independent silos, sharing minimal information between them, all of them with the common task of publishing, obtaining, re-executing and validating experimentation pipelines associated to scientific claims contained in scholarly articles and technical reports. This dissertation characterizes the practical challenges associated to the research lifecycle (creation, dissemination, validation, curation and re-use of scientific explorations) and draws analogies with similar problems experimented by software engineering communities in the early 2000's. DevOps, the state-of-the-art software delivery methodology followed by companies and open source communities, appeared in late 2000's and addresses these analogous issues. By framing the problem of research delivery (iterating the research lifecycle) as a problem of software delivery, it becomes possible to repurpose the DevOps methodology to address the practical challenges faced by experimenters across the domains of computational and data-intensive science. This thesis presents Popper, an experimentation protocol for writing articles and carrying out scientific explorations following DevOps principles. Popper brings agility to research delivery in a domain-agnostic way by considering the end-to-end research delivery cycle, making it easier for all the stakeholders of science to publish, access, re-execute and validate experimentation pipelines. This dissertation also presents reusable tools in the domain of computer systems research. In a research delivery context, this toolset covers the multiple phases of the research lifecycle and helps systems research practitioners carry out validations of scientific claims in this domain in an agile manner. For this work, I was awarded the 2018 Better Scientific Software Fellowship, an initiative from the US Department of Energy whose goal is to foster best software development practices among the US scientific community. The Popper CLI tool, and its associated education materials, are currently being used to train new generations of scientists on how to be aware and guard against the multiple practical challenges in reproducibility.


Pine rosin (colophony) has been identified as a new adulterant in cannabis oil for vaping. Its inhalation toxicity is a significant health concern. For example, pine rosin fumes are released during soldering, and have been cited as a causative agent of occupational asthma. Symptoms also include desquamation of bronchial epithelium, which has been observed in EVALI patients. The sample analyzed herein also contains medium chain triglycerides and oleamide, the latter of which is found in the synthetic marijuana product Spice, or K2. A combination of NMR and HPLC-ESIMS was used to unambiguously identify major pine rosin ingredients such as abietic and other resin acids. Comparison to commercial samples of pure pine rosin confirmed the assignment.


Arnold Gehlen is the 20th century thinker and philosopher of philosophical and political anthropology. He is best known for his theory of institutions that connects the problems of contemporary man with a reflection on the "initial" state of human being. Gehlen often referred in his research to the works of classics of modern philosophy. His views on human nature are definitely bringing him close to the 17th century English thinker Thomas Hobbes. What strikes within the comparison of these two authors is Gehlen's transfer of Hobbes's assumptions to modern science. The pessimistic vision of modern human relations is grounded on the basis of a careful description of both man as an individual being and the history that shaped him. Certainly Gehlen's research is an interesting way to modern reinterpretation of Hobbes's views on the consequences of human nature.


In this paper, an energy method is presented to predict the static tensile strength of double-braided ropes which are composed of two separable layers. An actual constitutive relationship of individual rope components is employed, so this approach is valid for predicting the whole stress/strain curve of ropes. Extremes of zero-friction and infinite-friction conditions are explicitly considered. Experimental results agree well with the predictions for small nylon and polyester-fiber ropes. In particular, experimental-failure strains lie between the limits predicted by the above two extreme conditions owing to a realistic partial-frictional constraint. The predictions obtained from a force-balance method are also included for comparison. The discrepancy is then discussed.


Observations from three optical ground stations and the wind imaging interferometer on the upper atmosphere research satellite have been combined to describe a "springtime transition" in atomic oxygen. At each station the transition is characterized by a rapid 2-day rise in the night-time oxygen airglow emission rate by a factor of between 2 and 3, with a subsequent decrease by a factor of about 10 in the same period of time. This latter state of extremely weak oxygen airglow indicates a depletion of atomic oxygen that persists for many days. The characteristic signature is similar at both mid-latitude and high-latitude stations and is also observed in the hydroxyl airglow, except that immediately following the enhancement, the hydroxyl emission rate does not fall below the value it had before the event. Airglow rotational temperatures behave coherently with the emission rate. WINDII data show that the airglow emission rate perturbation is a planetary scale feature associated with strong vertical motions and that the event may be associated with the winter-to-summer zonal wind reversal. Data from the northern springtimes of 1992 and 1993 are reported upon in detail, with additional data from 1995 to confirm the persistence of the phenomenon.


A new micro deflection scheme has been proposed for pixel addressing in color field emission display devices. With a pair of in-plane micro deflectors, three color pixels in an image call can be illuminated by a single field emitter array instead of three field emitter arrays in the conventional pixel addressing scheme. The feasibility of micro deflection concept is confirmed by 3-D computer simulation using a charge density method. The new scheme offers four times higher display resolution than conventional pixel addressing scheme without losing image brightness. The fabrication of micro deflectors and driving circuitry are comparable to the conventional addressing scheme.


Web-based games can permit players to take on multiple roles, and in the past such roles have generally been defined in terms of characters in game narratives. In this report on early work, we propose adding a live-programming role to games that may involve the kind of problem solving that requires "thinking outside of the box." The live programmer can be empowered by the game designers to bend the rules, within certain bounds. We demonstrate the concept using a prototype multi-role game in which players must bring Covid-19 outbreaks under control by performing a sequence of pre-designed actions. The live programmer is able to adjust parameters of the actions, and even disable actions or create new ones. We suggest that having the live programming role in such a game can foster learning about the game domain and structure in different way than usual game playing or modification. Such a live programming role may also be appropriate in some simulation environments and emergency management systems. Finally, we discuss several issues raised by the existence of the live programming role: player power and fairness, "live scripting" (one form of live programming), and characterizations of game sessions in terms of evolution of game state versus evolution of game state plus code versions ("full trajectories").


'An enthralling account' Independent 'A fascinating book...researched with an awesome thoroughness' Daily Telegraph 'Hampton's excellent book should be compulsory reading for everyone involved in the 2012 London Olympics' Daily Mail Critic's Choice The budget for the 2012 Olympic village alone is already a billion pounds short. The likelihood of corporate sponsorship recedes with every day of the credit crunch. How on earth are we going to match the opening and closing ceremonies of Beijing, let along top them? Fortunately, London has been through just such hard times before in the run-up to an Olympics, and in 1948 it showed just how to run a fantastic Games on a tiny budget - indeed, make them all the better for it. Janie Hampton's book about the last time the Olympics came to London is a tale of female competitors sewing their own kit, teams ferried to the Games on red London buses and billeted in Spartan hostels or even army camps, and the main stadium being hastily cleared of greyhound racing to allow the athletics to take place. The total budget was GBP760,000, great athletes like Emil Zatopek and Fanny Blankers-Koen thrilled the crowds, and at the end a profit was turned! This is a book that becomes more relevant and ironically entertaining every day nearer to 2012. Janie Hampton is also the author of a bestselling biography of Joyce Grenfell. She lives in Oxford


Background: Anti-chromatin antibodies have recently been described in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and it has been suggested that their presence is associated with lupus nephritis. Objective: To assess the prevalence and clinical associations of these antibodies in SLE. Methods: The presence of anti-chromatin antibodies in 100 patients with SLE was investigated by an enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). To determine the specificity of these antibodies, 100 patients with primary Sjögren's syndrome, 30 with primary antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), 10 with systemic sclerosis, and 100 normal controls were also tested. Results: Positive levels were detected in 69/100 (69%) patients with SLE. In contrast, they were found in only 8/100 (8%) of those with primary Sjögren's syndrome, in 1/10 (10%) with systemic sclerosis, in 2/30 (7%) with primary APS, and in none of the 100 healthy controls. Patients with anti-chromatin antibodies had a twofold higher prevalence of lupus nephropathy than those without these antibodies (58% v 29%, p<0.01). A significant correlation was found between the levels of anti-chromatin antibodies and disease activity score as measured by the European Consensus Lupus Activity Measurement (ECLAM; p=0.011). Conclusions: The measurement of anti-chromatin antibodies appears to be a useful addition to the laboratory tests that can help in the diagnosis and treatment of SLE. These antibodies are both sensitive and specific for SLE, and are a useful marker for an increased risk of lupus nephritis.


Sliding experiments lubricated with hydroxyl silicate magnesium particles as additive were performed under ambient condition and different loads by using an AMSLER friction and wear tester. The surface topographies and compositions of worn surface of 45 steel rings were analyzed by SEM and EDAX. The experimental results show that the friction load had great effect on generation of the frictionally-formed protective coating. No protective coating formed on the worn steel surface under lower friction load. However, a smooth and continuous protective coating can be developed on the worn surface of the steel when the friction load is high enough. The chemical composition of the protective coating is roughly the same as the additive. The additive can be fractured, stretched and flowed along the sliding direction under high contacting stress and instantaneous flash temperature, which result in coating being formed.


APART from emphysema of the bullous type, which is not unusual and occurs in all parts of the lung, there appears to be a different, more uncommon form. Its characteristics are striking enough for one to regard it as an entity, for which we propose the name "progressive bilateral bullous emphysema." The disease is usually recognized after the second decade and is apparently limited to men. The process begins in the apexes and gradually increases, until in extreme cases both upper and lower lobes are replaced by large cystlike areas. The usual history is that of cough, slowly increasing dyspnea, recurrent infections of the respiratory tract, asthma-like attacks and cachexia. Death occurs from intercurrent infections or when insufficient pulmonary tissue is left to carry on normal respiratory exchange. The following 8 cases were observed in the Jefferson Hospital during a period of three years. Case 1. —A 48 year old


In this paper we analyze a finite element method for solving a quadratic eigenvalue problem derived from the acoustic vibration problem for a heterogeneous dissipative fluid. The problem is shown to be equivalent to the spectral problem for a noncompact operator and athorough spectral characterization is given. The numerical discretization of the problem is based on Raviart-Thomas finite elements. The method is proved to be free of spurious modes and to converge with optimal order. Finally, we report numerical tests which allow us to assess the performance of the method.


A Note from the Editors

We are delighted to welcome you to Volume 10 of the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal (VURJ), a selection of some of the finest research conducted within the undergraduate community at Vanderbilt University. In the decade since its inception, VURJ has featured over 100 articles in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
After a brief hiatus in 2014, VURJ came back stronger than ever, boasting our most diverse and selective issue yet. With 73 submissions from students at all four of Vanderbilt's undergraduate schools, 19 outstanding articles were selected for publication. All submitted manuscripts underwent a rigorous multi-step review process, including two to three rounds of readings by trained peer reviewers, and final selection for publication by VURJ's team of associate editors. In this issue, you will learn about and explore a diverse selection of topics from arts in trauma therapy to the resurrection of extinct species, an exciting assortment that provides a small glimpse into Vanderbilt's thriving and dynamic academic community.
We encourage you to engage further with this community by contributing some of your own work to our next issue, or by applying to join our team of editors.
Happy reading and best wishes,
Jelena Belenzada
Editor in Chief, 2014-2015

Eriny Hanna
Editor at Large, 2014-2015


Blockchain technology's (BT) Ethereum Smart Contracts [1] allows programmable transactions that involve the transfer of monetary assets among peers on a BT network independent of a central authorizing agency. Ethereum Smart Contracts are programs that are deployed as decentralized applications, having the building blocks of the blockchain consensus protocol. This technology enables consumers to make agreements in a transparent and conflict-free environment. However, the security vulnerabilities within these smart contracts are a potential threat to the applications and their consumers and have shown in the past to cause huge financial losses. In this paper, we propose a framework that combines static and dynamic analysis to detect Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability due to an unexpected revert in Ethereum Smart Contracts. Our framework, SmartScan, statically scans smart contracts under test (SCUTs) to identify patterns that are potentially vulnerable in these SCUTs and then uses dynamic analysis to precisely confirm their exploitability of the DoS-Unexpected Revert vulnerability, thus achieving increased performance and more precise results. We evaluated SmartScan on a set of 500 smart contracts collected from the Etherscan [2]. Our approach shows an improvement in precision and recall when compared to available state of the art techniques.


— Recently, several designs of single fed circularly polarized microstrip antennas have been studied. Relatively, a few designs for achieving circular polarization using triangular microstrip antenna are available. Typically existing design of single fed circularly polarized triangular microstrip antennas include the use of equilateral triangular patch with a slit or a horizontal slot on the patch or addition a narrow band stub on the edge or a vertex of triangular patch. In other word, with using a narrow band tune stub on middle of an edge of triangle causes of facility to compensate the possible fabrication error and substrate materials with easier adjusting the tuner stub length. Even though disadvantages of this method is very long of stub (approximate 1/3 length of triangle edge). In this paper, instead of narrow band stub, a wide band stub has been applied, therefore the length of stub by this method has been decreased around 1/10 edge of triangle in addition changing the aperture angle of stub, provides more facility for designing and producing circular polarization wave.


Part I: General Theory. Hermans, The Dialogical Self: Between Exchange and Power. Bertau, Some Considerations About the Development of the Dialogical Self. Lewis, Todd, Toward a Neuropsychological Model of Internal Dialogue: Implications for Theory and Clinical Practice. Cooper, Encountering Self-otherness: 'I-I' and 'I-Me' Modes of Self-relating. Part II: Theory and Clinical Practice. Angus, McLeod, Self-multiplicity and Narrative Expression in Psychotherapy. Stiles, Osatuke, Glick, Mackay, Encounters Between Internal Voices Generate Emotion: An Elaboration of the Assimilation Model. Whelton, Greenberg, From Discord to Dialogue: Internal Voices and the Reorganization of the Self in Process-experiential Therapy. Hermans, Hermans-Jansen, The Dialogical Construction and Reconstruction of a Personal Position Repertoire. Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces: The Multiplicity of Self and the Psychoanalytic Relationship. Verhofstadt-Deneve, Dillen, Helskens, Siongers, The Psychodramatic 'Social Atom Method' with Children: A Developing Dialogical Self in Dialectic Action. Part III: Reconstructing Dialogical Processes in Severely Affected Patients. Neimeyer, Arvay, Performing the Self: Therapeutic Enactment and the Narrative Integration of Traumatic Loss. Dimaggio, Salvatore, Catania, Strategies for the Treatment of Dialogical Dysfunctions. P.H. Lysaker, J.T. Lysaker, Dialogical Transformation in the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia. Semerari, Carcione, Dimaggio, Nicolo, Procacci, A Dialogical Approach to Patients with Severe Personality Disorders. Part IV: Methodological Issues in the Psychotherapeutic Process. Osatuke, Gray, Glick, Stiles, Barkham, Hearing Voices: Methodological Issues in Measuring Internal Multiplicity. Leiman, Dialogical Sequence Analysis.


The Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, is an invasive mosquito species that is considered a potential vector of about 22 arboviruses, among which dengue, chikungunya and Zika. Here we report the first record of Aedes albopictus in the territory of the Republic of Kosovo. The first finding, in July 2020, was driven by a photo of an adult mosquito published by a citizen in social media. The subsequent field investigation in July 2020 confirmed the presence of adult mosquitoes by human landing catch and collection of eggs in ovitraps at the village Zhur. Monitoring was performed for 7 weeks with ovitraps and BG-Sentinel adult traps at 36 sampling stations from 7 localities, in the Southern part of Kosovo, on the border with Albania. Fifty-two out of 81 ovitrap samples resulted positive for the presence of Ae. albopictus. A total of 2,711 eggs are collected in 22 out 36 stations and a total of 78 adults from 4 out 4 stations with BG Sentinel trap and 15 adults with handled electric aspirator. Our finding shows that the tiger mosquito is expanding its geographical range in the Balkans, southeastern Europe.


Retrospective review of isolates of Capnocytophaga, a genus of capnophilic gram-negative bacilli, referred to the Massachusetts State Laboratory Institute in Boston revealed 31 patients with infection due to Capnocytophaga, 16 in nonimmunocompromised hosts. These infections included empyema (three patients), lung abscess (one), sinusitis (one), conjunctivitis (three), subphrenic abscess (one), wound (three), osteomyelitis (one), and bacteremia (three). Two of the wound infections were closed-fist injuries involving bone or soft tissue. Capnocytophaga was frequently isolated as part of a polymicrobial infection with other oral flora. There was only one death in the nonimmunocompromised group. In contrast, of 15 immunocompromised patients with 16 episodes of bacteremia due to Capnocytophaga, 87% had leukopenia and 73% had significant oral pathology such as gingivitis, mucositis, or ulceration. Five immunocompromised patients died. Thus, Capnocytophaga species may cause disease in both nonimmunocompromised and immunocompromised hosts. Isolation of this organism should suggest an oral source for infection.


Background and Aim: Nowadays, regarding the increased human and geological activities, concentrations of toxic and carcinogenic disinfectant by-products– like Trihalomethanes -which have an organic base, in drinking water sources, has worryingly increased. Thus, the present study aimed at surveying the amount of dissolved organic carbon (doc) removed from aqueous solution by Fenton process. Materials and Methods: In this descriptive study, the outcome of removing dissolved organic carbon derived from natural water with initial concentrations 2, 4, and 8 mg/l using one-liter water containers by means of Fenton Process at PHs 2, 3, 4, and 5 due to adding 20, 40, 60, and 80 mg/l of H 2 O 2 and Ferrous ions with 4, 8, 12, and 16 mg/l concentrations at oxidation time 5, 10, 20, and 40 minutes was calculated. Finally, the outcome of carbon removal was assessed by means of TOC analyzer. Results: It was found that the most outcome of dissolved organic carbon removal (about 97%) belonged to 10/1 H 2 O 2 and Ferrous ion , while dissolved organic carbon PH was 3 and its initial concentration was 2mg/l and oxidation time was 40 minutes. Conclusion: Generally speaking, it was confirmed that the improved Fenton Oxidation Process can efficiently be used to refine water containing dissolved organic carbon. The method was found to be highly and relatively fast compared to conventional existing techniques and also, it can be concluded that the Fenton process has the potential to be utilized for the cost-effective removal of DOC from water and wastewater.


In the animal kingdom, continuously erupting incisors provided an attractive model for studying the enamel matrix and mineral composition of teeth during development. Enamel, the hardest mineral tissue in the vertebrates, is a tissue sensitive to external conditions, reflecting various disturbances in its structure. The developing dental enamel was monitored in a series of incisor samples extending the first four weeks of postnatal life in the spiny mouse. The age-dependent changes in enamel surface morphology in the micrometre and nanometre-scale and a qualitative assessment of its mechanical features were examined by applying scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). At the same time, structural studies using XRD and vibrational spectroscopy made it possible to assess crystallinity and carbonate content in enamel mineral composition. Finally, a model for predicting the maturation based on chemical composition and structural factors was constructed using artificial neural networks (ANNs). The research presented here can extend the existing knowledge by proposing a pattern of enamel development that could be used as a comparative material in environmental, nutritional, and pharmaceutical research.


Near Feshbach resonances, n|a| 3 >> 1, systems of Bose and Fermi particles become strongly interacting/dense. In this unitary limit both bosons and fermions have very different properties than in a dilute gas, e.g., the energy per particle approaches a value h 2 n 2/3 /m times a universal many-body constant. Calculations based upon an approximate Jastrow wavefunction can quantitatively describe recent measurements of trapped Bose and Fermi atoms near Feshbach resonances. The pairing gap between attractive fermions also scales as Δ ∼ h 2 n 2/3 /m near Feshbach resonances and is a large fraction of the Fermi energy-promising for observing BCS superfluidity in traps. Pairing undergoes several transitions depending on interaction strength and the number of particles in the trap and can also be compared with pairing in nuclei.


Few studies have addressed the consequences of physical interactions between NK and T cells, as well as physical interactions among NK cells themselves. We show in this study that NK cells can enhance T cell activation and proliferation in response to CD3 cross-linking and specific Ag through interactions between 2B4 (CD244) on NK cells and CD48 on T cells. Furthermore, 2B4/CD48 interactions between NK cells also enhanced proliferation of NK cells in response to IL-2. Overall, these results suggest that NK cells augment the proliferation of neighboring T and NK cells through direct cell-cell contact. These results provide new insights into NK cell-mediated control of innate and adaptive immunity and demonstrate that receptor/ligand-specific cross talk between lymphocytes may occur in settings other than T-B cell or T-T cell interactions.


Ultrasonographic fetal measurements from 293 singleton pregnancies were obtained within 7 days of delivery. Biparietal diameter, abdominal circumference, femur length, and actual birth weight data of the first 93 fetuses in the study were used as variables to determine the best mathematical model for relating estimated fetal weight to biparietal diameter, abdominal circumference, and femur length. With the aid of a computer, three regression equations were derived. The best model was Log10 (weight) = 0.77125 + 0.13244 (AC) - 0.12996 (FL) - 1.73588 (AC x AC)/1000 + 3.09212 (FL x AC)/1000 + 2.18984 (FL/AC); (R2 = 0.987). The accuracy of this formula was then compared prospectively, first with the formulas published by Shepard and coworkers, Rose and McCallum, and Hadlock and colleagues in the entire sample of 200 patients, second in 46 large, 101 appropriate, and 53 small for gestational age fetuses, and then in 44 fetuses of pregnancy complicated by diabetes. The difference between actual and estimated birth weights generated by the study formula had no systematic error (Student's t-test, P > 0.05) in cumulative data, and in small or appropriate and large for gestational age fetuses. As this derived formula is very cumbersome to manipulate, tables have been prepared with computer assistance to read the estimated fetal weight directly.


Seriously undernourished patients have a bigger tendency to metabolic acidosis than euthrophic individuals. The objective of the present work was to realize a study of the renal tubular function in 30 severely undernourished children. The investigation was a prospective, descriptive and transversal study. A test of overload with 5% sodium bicarbonate was realized to 30 seriously undernourished children whose primari etiology was marasmus, kwashiorkor or with mixed conditions, with ages of 6 months to 5 years, from both sexes, hemodynamically stable, with metabolic acidosis, hiperchloremia and positive urinary anion gap. The relation calcium/creatinine and the index uric acid/creatinine were determined. The absolute and relatives frequencies, average values and standard deviations were calculated. Infants represented 80% of the evaluated patients. The clinical forms kwashiorkor and mixed forms, of chronic evolution prevailed. Distal tubular renal acidosis was observed in 12 patients (40%) after the test overload with 5% bicarbonate. The average values of the relation calcium/creatinine of children 2 years was 0.265 +/- 0.222. The uric acid/creatinine index was 0.57 +/- 0.28. Metabolic acidosis is frequent in serious infantile undernourishment, which, according to the results observed, obeys to distal renal tubular dysfunction. The interpretation of the relation calcium/creatinine and the uric acid/creatinine index is difficult, becoming necessary to increase the investigations in these patients.


In this work, the effect of the milling time on the densification of the alumina ceramics with or without 5wt.%Y2O3, is evaluated, using high-energy ball milling. The milling was performed with different times of 0, 2, 5 or 10 hours. All powders, milled at different times, were characterized by X-Ray Diffraction presenting a reduction of the crystalline degree and crystallite size as function of the milling time increasing. The powders were compacted by cold uniaxial pressing and sintered at 1550°C-60min. Green density of the compacts presented an increasing as function of the milling time and sintered samples presented evolution on the densification as function of the reduction of the crystallite size of the milled powders.


Pertains to acting for the stage, directing, criticism, theory and philosophy, theatre history, costume, lighting, set design and scenography, stage movement, sound engineering, puppetry, voice and diction, and dramaturgy.


Author(s): Kuan, Pei-Chen | Advisor(s): Mueller, Holger | Abstract: Light-pulse atom interferometers have been used as quantum inertial sensors and for precision tests of fundamental laws of physics. For higher contrast, we apply conjugate Ramsey-Borde interferometers to cancel out vibrational noise and top mirror tilting to compensate the Coriolis force. For higher sensitivity, we implement Bragg diffraction and Bloch oscillations for large momentum transfer to increase the enclosed area of our atom interferometer. We also utilize Raman sideband cooling in our experimental setup, which increases the overall signal about twentyfold, and increases the contrast by suppressing the thermal expansion of the atom cloud.By combining measurements of recoil frequency and a frequency comb, we present the first clock referenced to the mass of a single particle. The rest mass of a particle defines its Compton frequency, mc^2/h through relativity and quantum mechanics, and thereby sets a fundamental timescale. Our clock stabilizes a 10 MHz radio frequency signal to a certain fraction of the cesium Compton frequency. Future work could result in an elementary particle (electron) or even antimatter (antihydrogen) clock, opening up new ways to test CPT symmetry and the equivalence principle. We also present our progress towards a new determination of the fine structure constant. The fine structure constant value obtained by our cesium Compton clock measurement is about three times better compared with the earlier cesium recoil frequency result. After combining Bragg diffraction and Bloch oscillations, we achieved 0.33 ppb sensitivity (0.66 ppb uncertainty of the recoil frequency measurement) in 6 hours, which is about two times better than the previous best recoil frequency measurement. The leading systematic effect is also reduced by a factor of 2.75.


The dual-actuator hard disk drive (HDD) with two actuators mounted in the diagonal corners of the baseplate allows faster data access with relatively slower spindle speed. However, the mechanical interaction between the actuators tends to affect the head positioning accuracy. In this paper, the dual-actuator structure is formulated as a dual-input dual-output (DIDO) system and then identified in frequency domain. Based on the interaction models, the feedforward decoupling control (FDC) is developed to compensate for the vibration due to interaction. Experimental results on a dual-actuator prototype demonstrate that the position error signal (PES) value due to interaction is reduced by 72% even under the severest condition.


BACKGROUND
Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common condition, present in 12-21% of women of reproductive age. Up to 70% of women with PCOS remain undiagnosed.

OBJECTIVE
This article summarises the 2011 national PCOS guideline, Evidence-based guideline for the assessment and management of polycystic ovary syndrome, for the general practice context, with particular reference to the needs of Indigenous Australian women.

DISCUSSION
Women with PCOS may present with a wide range of symptoms. The Rotterdam criteria are the most widely accepted for diagnosis and the national guideline references these criteria. Women with PCOS have a higher risk of metabolic syndrome and its cardiovascular sequelae. This is particularly important for Indigenous women who are already at increased baseline risk. Management of PCOS involves attention to current symptoms, fertility and psychosocial issues, as well as prevention of related future health problems including diabetes. Resources are available to help guide management and patients may benefit most from a team approach to care.


With environmental sustainability gaining traction, it is imperative to assess its integration in Regional Trade Agreements. In this context, this paper sought to assess the integration of environmental sustainability in Regional Trade Agreements in Africa. Two Regional Trade Agreements, the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the European – Africa, Caribbean Pacific (EU-ACP) partnership, were analysed. Actors engaged in environmental sustainability within these two agreements were mapped: orchestrators, intermediaries and targets. The results indicate: environmental sustainability has been increasingly integrated into the agreements; developed country partners of both agreements have taken lead in orchestrating environmental sustainability, with developing and least developed countries as the targets; the EU-ACP has integrated environmental sustainability to a larger extent than AGOA. This paper concludes that developing and least developed member countries in Regional Trade Agreements need to be further mainstreamed with a more prominent role towards the realisation of the environmental sustainability dimension.


Many Carlin-like Au deposits occur within the late Paleozoic and Triassic Youjiang basin of southwest China. The Huijiabao trend in Guizhou Province contains over 300 metric tons (t; 10.6 Moz) of Au at an average grade of 7 to 18 g/t in a narrow corridor that is about 20 km long and 5 km wide. Petrographic and SEM studies of pyrite in barren host rocks and high-grade orebodies led to the recognition of four stages of pyrite. Py1 consists of fine-grained framboidal crystals in black mudstone. Py2 is comprised of coarser grained euhedralsubhedral clusters that are spatially related to organic matter. Py3 is coarse grained, euhedral, and occurs as overgrowths on Py1 and Py2. Py3's porous texture, inclusion of randomly oriented detrital minerals, and association with quartz recrystallization suggest it was deformed during Late Triassic orogenesis with Py1 and Py2. Py4 generally occurs as rims on Py1 to Py3 and is intergrown with arsenopyrite.

Sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP) δ 34S analyses of each pyrite type and arsenopyrite show that Py1 is related to Py2 and that Py3 is related to Py4 and arsenopyrite. The S isotope compositions of Py1 (−7.5 to +5.9‰) and Py2 (−5.3 to +7.9‰) are bimodal, which suggests that H2S was generated by biogenic sulfate reduction in open marine and sulfate limited systems during sedimentation and/or diagenesis. The compositions of Py3 (−2.6 to +1.5‰), Py4 (−1.2 to +1.5‰), and arsenopyrite (−0.8 to +0.9‰) are homogeneous and have an intermediate range of values near 0‰ that suggest that H2S was derived either from average pyrite (0.2‰) in sedimentary rocks or from a concealed magmatic source. Laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer (LA–ICP–MS) trace element analyses (As, Ni, Co, Cu, Ag, Se, V) support different origins and show that Py3 and Py4 are ore related. The lower w (Co)/ w (Ni) and w (S)/ w (Se) ratios of Py1 and Py2 are consistent with formation during sedimentation or diagenesis, whereas the higher ratios of Py3, Py4, and arsenopyrite are consistent with a hydrothermal origin. The lower concentrations of Au in Py1 (0.23–2.5 ppm) and Py2 (0.06–12 ppm) show that little Au was added during sedimentation or diagenesis. The higher concentrations of Au in hydrothermal Py3 (1.1–110 ppm) and Py4 (0.34–810 ppm) indicate that most of the Au was introduced during subsequent hydrothermal fluid flow. The low Au contents of arsenopyrite (0.09–0.52 ppm) suggests they formed from Au-depleted fluids. The Au/As ratios of Py1 and Py2 are typical of diagenetic pyrite whereas Py3 and Py4 have ratios that approach those of ore-stage pyrite in Nevada Carlin-type deposits. The fracturing of Py3 and its cementation by Py4 suggests that ore fluid movement was associated with deformation.

Published isochron ages on arsenopyrite (Re-Os ~200 Ma) and late calcite-realgar veinlets (Sm-Nd ~135 Ma) in the Huijiabao trend are older than mafic dikes (84 Ma) exposed ~20 km to the east. If the 200 and 135 Ma ages are valid, H2S and Au may be derived from a sedimentary source because igneous intrusions of this age have not been found. If these ages are not valid and the gold deposits are actually Late Cretaceous in age, then H2S and Au may be derived from a magmatic source. Additional geochronology and isotopic tracer studies are needed to resolve this uncertainty.


Optical fiber platforms are promising for plasmonics research and applications, thanks to their compactness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, which are further leveraged by easy accessibility to numerous fiberized sources and devices. In this chapter, the author particu- larly pays attention to novel surface plasmon polariton (SPP) devices implemented onto optical fiber platforms. First, the author investigates novel circular metallic nanoslit-based optical fiber facets for the generation of axially symmetric SPPs with significantly enhanced noise characteristics. Second, the author investigates novel metallic Fresnel-zone-plate opti- cal fiber facets for super-variable focusing with incident wavelength and for selective focusing with incident polarization. Third, the author investigates novel metal-coated angled optical fiber facets for versatile SPP coupling and its application to wavelength-dependent off-axis beaming, which offer high efficiency, unidirectionality, and perfect compatibility with fiberized light sources. The author expects that these investigations will broaden both fiber optics and plasmonics research fields, and also be useful for various novel applications, including micro-/nanomachining, optical trapping, and biomedical sensing, for example.


OBJECTIVES
To assess the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of central venous catheters (CVCs) treated with anti-infective agents in preventing catheter-related bloodstream infection (CRBSI).

DATA SOURCES
Major electronic databases were searched from 1985 to August 2005.

REVIEW METHODS
The systematic clinical and economic reviews were conducted according to accepted procedures. Only full economic evaluations (synthesis of costs and benefits) comparing the use of anti-infective central venous catheters (AI-CVCs) with untreated CVCs or other treated catheters were selected for inclusion in the economic review.

RESULTS
A total of 32 trials met the clinical inclusion criteria. Seven different types of AI-CVC were identified, with the most frequently tested being chlorhexidine and silver sulfadiazine (CHSS) (externally treated), CHSS (externally and internally treated) and minocycline rifampicin (internally and externally treated). In general, the trials were of a poor quality in terms of reported methodology, microbiological relevance and control of confounding variables. The pooled result suggests a statistically significant advantage for AI-CVCs in comparison to standard catheters in reducing CRBSI [odds ratio (OR) 0.45, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.34 to 0.60, 24 studies, I-squared = 0%, fixed effects]. Analysis by subgroups of catheters demonstrates that antibiotic-treated catheters and catheters treated internally and externally decrease CRBSI rates significantly (OR 0.26, 95% CI 0.15 to 0.46, six studies, I-squared = 0%, fixed effects, and OR 0.43, 95% CI 0.26 to 0.70, nine studies, I-squared = 0%, fixed effects, respectively). Catheters treated only externally demonstrate a wider CI and non-significant effect (OR 0.67, 95% CI 0.43 to 1.06, nine studies, I-squared = 0%, fixed effects). A treatment effect was also found for trials with an average duration of between 5 and 12 days, and for the one study with a mean duration of over 20 days. There was a statistically significant treatment effect for both femoral and jugular insertion sites and for those studies reporting a mix of insertion sites. The treatment effect was not observed in trials using exclusively subclavian insertion sites. Of the four trials that compared treated catheters, one reported a benefit of antibiotic-treated catheters over catheters treated externally with CHSS. All three sensitivity analyses testing for study design differences reported a statistically significant treatment effect. The review was limited owing to the quality of the trials included, marked differences in the definitions and methods of diagnosis of CRBSI, and inconsistent reporting of risk factors and patient population factors. Furthermore, two-thirds of trials were commercially funded. The economic performance (cost-effectiveness and potential cost-savings) of using AI-CVCs to reduce the number of CRBSIs in patients requiring a CVC was also reviewed. Results show that the use of AI-CVCs instead of standard CVCs can lead to a reduction in CRBSIs and decreased medical costs. To complement the reviews, a basic decision-analytic model was constructed to explore a range of possible scenarios for the NHS in England and Wales. Results show that for every patient who receives an AI-CVC there is an estimated cost-saving of 138.20 pounds. The multivariate sensitivity analyses estimate potentially large cost-savings, depending on the size of the population, under a wide range of cost and clinical assumptions. However, those considering the purchase of AI-CVCs should ensure that their patient populations and the important characteristics of local clinical practice are indeed similar to those described in this economic evaluation.

CONCLUSIONS
Overall, AI-CVCs are clinically effective and relatively inexpensive and therefore their integration into clinical practice can be justified. However, the use of these anti-infective catheters without the appropriate use of other practical care initiatives will have only a limited success on the prevention of CRBSIs. Comparative trials are required to determine which, if any, of the treated catheters is the most effective. Pragmatic research related to the effectiveness of bundles of care that may reduce rates of CRBSI is also warranted.


In this double-blinded, randomized, multicenter study, we examined analgesic efficacy and tolerability of tramadol in postoperative pediatric patients. Eighty-one postsurgical ASA physical status I and II patients ages 7–16 yr received oral tramadol (approximately 1 or 2 mg/kg) for postoperative analgesia when they were ready to transition from morphine patient-controlled analgesia to oral analgesics. Rescue analgesia consisted of morphine patient-controlled analgesia or an oral equivalent dose of oxycodone. Patients rated their pain just before the administration of tramadol and at regular intervals for 8 h afterwards using the Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale. The 2-mg/kg group required approximately half as much rescue analgesia as the 1-mg/kg group (P = 0.006). Parents rated the larger dose more favorably. Adverse events were generally mild to moderate in severity (vomiting [10%], nausea [9%], pruritus [7%], rash [4%]) and similar between the two treatment groups. There were no significant changes in hemodynamic variables, respiratory rate, or Spo2 percentages between the two treatment groups or in all patients compared with pretreatment values.


Effective laboratory animal models of bacterial meningitis are needed to unravel the pathophysiology of this disease. Previous models have failed to simulate human meningitis by using a directly intracerebral route of infection. Hyaluronidase is a virulence factor of Streptococcus pneumoniae. In this study, a novel model of murine meningitis is described. Intranasal administration of S. pneumoniae with hyaluronidase induced meningitis in 50% of inoculated mice, as defined by a positive cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) culture and an inflammatory infiltrate in the meninges. None of the mice inoculated without hyaluronidase developed meningitis. Hyaluronidase was found to facilitate pneumococcal invasion of the bloodstream after colonization of the upper respiratory tract. Meningitis was characterized by pleocytosis of CSF and the induction of proinflammatory cytokines and CXC chemokines in brain tissue. These results indicate that this murine model mimics important features of human disease and allow for the use of this model for studying issues related to the pathophysiology and the treatment of pneumococcal meningitis.


Solar simulators are a fundamental instrument to characterize solar cells parameters, as they can reproduce the operating conditions under which the solar cells are going to work. However, these systems are frequently big, heavy, and expensive, and a small solar simulator could be a good contribution to test small prototyping devices manufactured in research labs, especially if it could manage the irradiation at any wavelength interval in a custom way. We have designed, developed, and calibrated a small solar simulator made entirely with LEDs, no optics inside, and electronically controlled through a PC using an Arduino microcontroller. The whole structure is 3-D printed in black PLA plastic. The electrical current through the LEDs, and thus the spectral irradiance of the simulator, is controlled with a very intuitive LabVIEW interface. As our calibration proves, we have built an easily reproducible and low-cost Class AAA solar simulator in a central illumination area of 1 cm2, according to the IEC60904-9 standard. This means that the homogeneity in that area is under a 2% deviation in spatial terms, below 0.5% in temporal terms, and is a factor of a 3% close to the AM1.5G sun reference spectrum. The system can be built and used in any research lab to get quick tests of new small solar cells of any material.


Exhaust ejectors are good ventilations and cooling equipments. By the method of numerical simulation, researches on cylindrical exhaust ejector, lobed exhaust ejector and lobed exhaust ejector with twisted blades are conducted in this paper to study the effects of different ejector structures on flow field uniformity. The results show that: lobe structure can well improve the velocity field uniformity and temperature uniformity field of the ejector; meanwhile it can also ensure that there is no obvious change of the ejector coefficient, but the total pressure loss is larger; while the flow field of lobed exhaust ejector with twisted blades possesses more uniformity.


Overexpression of des(1‐3) human insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) in the mammary glands of transgenic mice (WAP-DES) inhibits apoptosis during natural, but not forced, mammary involution. We hypothesized that this differential response would correlate with the expression of IGF signal transducers. Forced and natural involution were analyzed in nontransgenic and WAP-DES mice beginning on day 16 postpartum. During natural involution, mammary gland wet weight was higher and apoptosis was lower in WAP-DES than in nontransgenic mice. The WAP-DES transgene had no effect on these parameters during forced involution. Mammary tissue concentrations of the transgene protein were 2- to 10-fold higher than those of endogenous IGF-I. Western blot analysis of pooled mammary tissue extracts demonstrated only slightly higher phosphorylation of the IGF signal transducers insulin receptor substrate-1 (IRS-1) and Akt in the WAP-DES than in nontransgenic mice. Dramatic early reductions in phospho-IRS-1, phospho-Akt, IRS-1, IRS-2, and Akt proteins occurred during forced, but not natural, involution. The abundance of the IGF-I receptor and the messenger RNAs for the IGF-I receptors, IRS-1 and -2, were not affected by either genotype or involution. These findings support the conclusions that mammary cells lose their responsiveness to insulin-like signals during forced involution, and that posttranscriptional or posttranslational regulation of IRS-1 and IRS-2 may play a role in this loss. (Endocrinology 142: 1479 ‐1488, 2001)


Control algorithms combined with microfluidic devices and microscopy have enabled in vivo real-time control of protein expression in synthetic gene networks. Most control algorithms rely on the a priori availability of mathematical models of the gene networks to be controlled. These models are typically black/grey box models, which can be obtained through the use of data-driven techniques developed in the context of systems identification. Data-driven inference of both model structure and parameters is the main focus of this paper. There are two main challenges associated with the inference of dynamical models for real-time control of gene regulatory networks in living cells. Since biological systems are typically evolving over time, the first challenge stems from the fact that model selection needs to be done online, which prevents the application of computationally expensive identification algorithms iterating through large amounts of streaming data. The second challenge consists in performing nonlinear model selection, which is typically too burdensome for Kalman filtering related techniques due the heterogeneity and nonlinearity of the candidate models. In this paper, we combine sparse Bayesian techniques with classic Kalman filtering techniques to tackle these challenges.


A 55-year-old woman had a partial gastrectomy in March, 1959, for carcinoma of the body of the stomach. It was noted at the time of operation that there were many secondaries in the lymph nodes of the gastro-colic omentum and subpyloric region. She had been vaguely ill since 1959 and had been on iron orally. When she joined our practice this summer she complained of a generalized skin rash, tingling in both feet, associated with muscular cramp. Routine clinical examination was negative except for sluggish reflexes in the legs and a soft systolic murmur at the base. Investigations were carried out which showed a haemoglobin of 76%, E.S.R. 25 mm. per hour, W.B.C. 6.700, polymorphs 60%, eosinophils 2%, lymphocytes 36%, monocytes 2%, reticulocytes less than 1%. Haptoglobulins were present. She was referred to a local consultant physician, who carried out further investigations, all of which were normal except for the vitamin-B12 assay, 110 jIug. She has been on vitamin B12 by injection for the last six weeks, and appears to be improving.


In this paper we describe the design, construction, and operation of a first large area double-phase liquid argon Large Electron Multiplier Time Projection Chamber (LAr LEM-TPC). The detector has a maximum drift length of 60 cm and the readout consists of a 40×76 cm2 LEM and 2D projective anode to multiply and collect drifting charges. Scintillation light is detected by means of cryogenic PMTs positioned below the cathode. To record both charge and light signals, we have developed a compact acquisition system, which is scalable up to ton-scale detectors with thousands of charge readout channels. The acquisition system, as well as the design and the performance of custom-made charge sensitive preamplifiers, are described. The complete experimental setup has been operated for a first time during a period of four weeks at CERN in the cryostat of the ArDM experiment, which was equipped with liquid and gas argon purification systems. The detector, exposed to cosmic rays, recorded events with a single-channel signal-to-noise ratio in excess of 30 for minimum ionising particles. Cosmic muon tracks and their δ -rays were used to assess the performance of the detector, and to estimate the liquid argon purity and the gain at different amplification fields.


This paper contributes to the literature on hyperinflation and stabilizations
 by analyzing the great Yugoslav hyperinflation and stabilization during the
 period 1992 to 1994. The paper makes three contributions. First, it provides
 updated and more accurate estimates of key economic variables on economic
 activity, public finances, and seigniorage revenues during hyperinflation
 based on most recent and updated data. Second, it identifies and analyzes
 salient features, causes, transmission mechanisms, and monetary consequences
 of the extreme Yugoslav hyperinflation in the period 1992-1994. It discusses
 what we call the fundamental equations of the Yugoslav hyperinflation and
 their implications for inflation expectations and subsequent stabilization.
 And third, it analyzes the implementation, achievements, and challenges of
 the currency reform and stabilization program that ended hyperinflation,
 highlighting the roles of the currency board, currency reform, and of the
 architect of the program, Dragoslav Avramovic, the then governor of the
 Central Bank of FR Yugoslavia.


Abstract In Part 1 (Wienkers, Thomas & Taylor, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 926, 2021, A6), we described the theory for linear growth and weakly nonlinear saturation of symmetric instability (SI) in the Eady model representing a broad frontal zone. There, we found that both the fraction of the balanced thermal wind mixed down by SI and the primary source of energy are strongly dependent on the front strength, defined as the ratio of the horizontal buoyancy gradient to the square of the Coriolis frequency. Strong fronts with steep isopycnals develop a flavour of SI we call 'slantwise inertial instability' by extracting kinetic energy from the background flow and rapidly mixing down the thermal wind profile. In contrast, weak fronts extract more potential energy from the background density profile, which results in 'slantwise convection.' Here, we extend the theory from Part 1 using nonlinear numerical simulations to focus on the adjustment of the front following saturation of SI. We find that the details of adjustment and amplitude of the induced inertial oscillations depend on the front strength. While weak fronts develop narrow frontlets and excite small-amplitude vertically sheared inertial oscillations, stronger fronts generate large inertial oscillations and produce bore-like gravity currents that propagate along the top and bottom boundaries. The turbulent dissipation rate in these strong fronts is large, highly intermittent and intensifies during periods of weak stratification. We describe each of these mechanisms and energy pathways as the front evolves towards the final adjusted state, and in particular focus on the effect of varying the dimensionless front strength.


Immobilized single horseradish peroxidase enzymes were observed by confocal fluorescence spectroscopy during catalysis of the oxidation reaction of the nonfluorescent dihydrorhodamine 6G substrate into the highly fluorescent product rhodamine 6G. By extracting only the non-Markovian behavior of the spectroscopic two-state process of enzyme-product complex formation and release, memory landscapes were generated for single-enzyme molecules. The memory landscapes can be used to discriminate between different origins of stretched exponential kinetics that are found in the first-order correlation analysis. Memory landscapes of single-enzyme data shows oscillations that are expected in a single-enzyme system that possesses a set of transient states. Alternative origins of the oscillations may not, however, be ruled out. The data and analysis indicate that substrate interaction with the enzyme selects a set of conformational substates for which the enzyme is active.


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Well-designed employee performance appraisals assume great importance by providing park and recreation agencies with information that can guide administrative and developmental decision-making about their most important asset—their human resources. Despite their importance, an agency's performance appraisal system can often be viewed by employees and management as a frustrating and unfair process. Responding to these issues, a pay-for-performance appraisal system was developed in 2004 for the Elmhurst Park District (Elmhurst, IL) that utilized an employee participation model and was guided by the appraisal literature. The purpose of this study was to examine the employees' longer-term reactions to the implementation and administration of the performance appraisal system over the past 10 years. Data was collected at three points: (1) in 2004, prior to the start of the pay-for-performance workshops (n = 56); (2) in 2005 at the conclusion of the workshops and initial implementation of the newly developed system (n = 56); and (3) in 2014–15, 10 years after implementation of the system (n = 51). Drawing from existing management literature and the utilization of an employee participation model, this 10-year follow-up study sought to address the following questions: To what extent are the employees' (1) overall satisfaction, (2) perceptions of accuracy of the appraisal ratings, (3) perceptions of procedural justice, and (4) perceptions of distributive justice with the appraisal system different in 2014- 15 compared to 2005 and the original system in 2004? Analyses indicated that there were significant differences between employees' attitudes toward their agencies'performance appraisal systems in 2004 compared to 2005 and 2014– 15. Study findings and implications for management are discussed.  Subscribe to JPRA


t Abstract Scientific data preparation is the process of extracting usable scientific data from raw instrument data. This task involves noise detection (and subsequent noise classification and flagging or removal), extracting data from compressed forms, and construction of derivative or aggregate data (e.g. spectral densities or running averages). A software system called PIPE provides intelligent assistance to users developing scientific data preparation plans using a programming language called Master Plumber. PIPE provides this assistance capability by using a process description to create a dependency model of the scientific data preparation plan. This dependency model can then be used to verify syntactic and semantic constraints on processing steps to perform limited plan validation. PIPE also provides capabilities for using this model to assist in debugging faulty data preparation plans. In this case, the process model is used to focus the developer's attention upon those processing steps and data elements that were used in computing the faulty output values. Finally, the dependency model of a plan can be used to perform plan optimization and runtime estimation. These capabilities allow scientists to spend less time developing data preparation procedures and more time on scientific analysis tasks. Because the scientific data processing modules (called fittings) evolve to match scientists' needs, issues regarding maintainability are of prime Lmportance in PIPE. This paper describes the PIPE system and describes how issues in maintainability affected the knowledge representation used in PIPE to capture knowledge about the behavior of fittings. Chlen


The aim of the article is to analyse changing partisan constructions of unemployment security in Finland during the 1990s. In the article, a corpus of 143 texts comprising partisan statements on un/employment policies is analysed by using Perelman's (1971/1958) rhetorical design. The focus lies on how the leading parties interpreted state responsibility for labour market failures, the nature of social rights for unemployed persons, and the generosity of unemployment benefits. Were there major reformulations of unemployment security as a reaction to high unemployment, fiscal problems and globalisation? And if so, what kinds of rhetorical argumentation were used in order to legitimate these reformulations? The results show that partisan constructions of unemployment benefits changed in a contractual and reciprocal direction, indicating that elements of so-called workfare rhetoric became rooted in the Finnish political discourse during the Mid-90s. The political elites also moved closer to a narrower interpretation of the concept of social right for unemployed.


Mine-used tri-ring chains have been bent by hand in some machine-mining enterprises. However, this type of process is old-fashioned. The labor intensity of operating workers is high and production efficiency is low. At the same time, the production quality is also unstable. This type of process has not adapted itself to the manufacture of the product. So, for the mine-used tri-ring chains, a novel and simple auto-bending ring machine has been designed. The machine has the advantage of a simple frame, convenient mould-removal, production efficiency, steady production quality, and so on. The machine can be used for medium and small manufacturing. The machine can also be adapted for auto-bending of tri-ring chains if it is equipped with a delivery device, heating device and the appropriate controlling circuit.


A total of 42 isolates of Haemophilus paragallinarum from Mexico were serotyped by the Kume hemagglutinin scheme. Serovars A-1, A-2, B-1, and C-2 were recognized among 11 (26.2%), 7 (16.6%), 4 (9.5%), and 14 (33.3%) isolates, respectively. A further six isolates (14.3%) showed hemagglutinating activity but could not be classified into any serovar. Commercial vaccines containing Kume serovars A-1, A-2, B-1, and C-2 may provide better protection than those bi- or trivalent infectious coryza vaccines currently used in Mexico.


Public water systems (PWSs) must provide 4-log virus inactivation to comply with EPA's Surface Water Rule (LT2ESWTR) or Ground Water Rule (GWR), while also complying with the Disinfection Byproduct Rule (Stage 2 DBPR). A UV dose of 186 mJ/cm2 meets this inactivation requirement, but increases energy use, capital and operation costs, and causes technical challenges for validating UV performance. The result: many water systems resort to solely using chemical disinfectants, increasing their risk of disinfection byproduct (DBP) formation. This required UV dose is based off previous studies on the wavelength response adenovirus at 254nm, where traditional low pressure (LP) lamps emit UV light. Surrogate microbes like MS2 are used in place of adenovirus in UV reactor validation because they are non-pathogenic and have a similar wavelength response at 254nm. However, recent research shows that adenovirus is more sensitive to low wavelengths (LWs) in the 200nm – 240nm range than MS2. This suggests that adenovirus inactivation can be accomplished more efficiently than its surrogate suggested if polychromatic, medium pressure (MP) lamps are used because they emit UV light in this LW region. Yet MP UV systems do not monitor doses delivered at LWs, so they cannot take credit for the contribution of these doses in adenovirus inactivation. New sensors are being developed by UV manufacturers that look to monitor doses delivered at LWs. These sensors, however, must be proven reliable before they can be used in PWS applications. A water treatment facility in Bethlehem, NH was chosen to host a pilot study, and was outfitted with a Trojan UVSwift 4L12 reactor equipped with innovative LW sensors. The system PLC monitored flow, UVT, sensor responses, and lamp power level. This data was used to analyze system trends and determine the ability of LW sensors to record LWs reliably. LW sensor performance was examined with 5 analyses that measured the precision and accuracy of the sensors. The results of these analyses suggest that the LW sensors have a high level of precision. The sensors were observed to be accurate under low lamp power conditions, however, one analysis suggested there may be secondary sensor response peaks. While further research is recommended to confirm their accuracy, LW sensors are certainly close to being acceptable for PWS use. With this in mind, a life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted to compare the current disinfection strategy at Bethlehem (chlorination) with a strategy using MP UV that accounts for doses delivered at LWs. The LCA included data from DBP formation studies, chlorine demand studies, and models on reactor energy use after taking credit for LW doses. The LCA quantified the tradeoffs of switching to a MP UV disinfection strategy; comparing the increase in energy use and operation costs with the benefits of higher public health protection through a reduction in DBP concentrations, which would put the system back into compliance with the DBPR. While the data used was specific to Bethlehem, the methodology of the LCA can serve as guidance for stakeholders of other PWS that would benefit from a lifecycle perspective examination of the tradeoffs in disinfection strategies.


In this paper an insect-inspired body size learning algorithm is adopted in a humanoid robot and a control system, mainly developed with spiking neurons, is proposed. It implements an evaluation of distances by using the typical parallax method performed by different insect species, such as Drosophila melanogaster. A Darwin-OP robot was used as testbed to demonstrate the potential application of the learning method on a humanoid structure. The robot, equipped with a hand extension, was free to move in an environment to discover objects. As consequence, it was able to learn, using an operant conditioning, which objects can be reached, via the estimation of their distance on varying the length of the equipped tool. The learning scheme was tested both in a dynamical simulation environment and with the Darwin-OP robot.


Free market mechanisms increasingly influence former monopoly sectors such as water and wastewater services with requirements for more transparency and efficiency. Small and large-scale consumers alike demand greater insight into how drinking water tariffs are structured and into the level of service.

Public and private shareholders require guarantees on water supply at a reasonable price, with the requisite quality (both of service and product) and reliability together with careful eco-management. Developing sound policies requires information on key industry issues such as water resources, public health, water services, the environment and the cost of providing the level of the service demanded by customers and regulators.

Similarly, informed decision-making on issues of ownership, industry structure, competition policy and effective regulation requires accurate analysis of performance across the industry throughout the world.

In many sectors of industry Performance Indicators and Benchmarking exercises are widely used as suitable management tools for gaining and maintaining continuous improvement and competitive advantage. Addressing the need to promote best practice principles as part of the advocacy for the advancement of water and sanitation services is currently one of the major governance issues that IWA is challenged to tackle.

The objective is to develop generally accepted procedures and methodologies able to provide decision makers with an overall perception of the utility performance as a sound basis for making strategic choices. This requires the definition of a reference framework for Performance Indicators and Benchmarking methodologies, as well as adequate models of aggregation that fit the basic needs of the key types of user.

The Task Force on Performance Indicators (operating within the IWA Operation and Management Specialist Group) and the Task Force on Benchmarking (operating within the IWA Statistics and Economics Specialist Group) were set up with the remit to develop the definition of such a common language.

The Task Force on Benchmarking moved to the second step, borrowing the European Commission's DG III recommendation that identify benchmarking as an important tool to improve competitiveness of small and medium sized enterprises in Europe according to the methodologies developed and applied in large corporations.

With the objective of developing a generally accepted concept and a methodology with wide applicability, deeper analyses were then made of Process Benchmarking procedures adopted in the Nordic countries and in The Netherlands. As a result this Manual aims to present well-devised guidelines for establishing a management tool based on the use of Process Benchmarking methodologies that will allow future systematic and rigorous performance comparisons to be made within the water industry.

This title belongs to Manual of Best Practice Series

ISBN: 9781843390107 (Print)

ISBN: 9781780402918 (eBook)


About the book: This collection of sixteen articles, written by leading specialists in Classical and English literature, is an important contribution to the critical assessment of Ted Hughes, one of the most popular and controversial English poets of the late 20th century. The chapters are arranged broadly chronologically according to Hughes's publications, and deal with different aspects of his engagement with the culture and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, including translations, original works, classical thought, and ideologies in his drama and verse. Hughes is revealed as a leading figure in literary reception of the Classics in 20th century poetry, a sharply intelligent and sensitive reader of some of the world's foundational texts.


This article takes the history of Polaroid photography as an opportunity to question a presupposition that underpins much thinking on photography: the split between industrial (i.e. useful) applications of photography and its fine art (i.e. aesthetic) manifestations. Critics as ideologically opposed as Peter Bunnell and Abigail Solomon-Godeau steadfastly maintain the existence of this separation of utility and aesthetics in photography, even if they take contrasting views on its meaning and desirability. However, Polaroid, at one time the second largest company in the photo industry, not only enjoyed close relations with those key representatives of fine art photography, Ansel Adams and the magazine Aperture, but it also intermittently asserted the 'essentially aesthetic' nature of its commercial and industrial activities in its own internal publications. The divide between industry and aesthetics is untenable, then, but this does not mean that the two poles were reconciled at Polaroid. While Aperture may have underplayed its commercial connections and Polaroid may have retrospectively exaggerated its own contributions to the development of fine art photography, most interesting are the contradictions and tensions that arise when the industrial and the aesthetic come together. The present article draws on original research undertaken at the Polaroid Corporation archives held at the Baker Library, Harvard, as well as with the Ansel Adams correspondence with Polaroid, held at the Polaroid Collections in Concord, Massachusetts.


Neisseria gonorrhoeae which exhibit high levels of leukocyte association have a surface protein which is considerably diminished in isogenic gonococci which exhibit low levels of leukocyte association (LA). The LA protein exhibits strain variation in molecular weight and immunogenicity. Membranes derived from LA+ and LA- organisms show quantitative differences in their adsorption to leukocytes; these differences are analogous to those found for the intact organisms regarding their association with leukocytes.


We present PARTICIPATE, a technology probe exploring how to strengthen the connection between activities taking place at public libraries and their collections, both in the digital realm and in the physical space. Based on ethnographic studies and participatory design activities, we derive three core implications for place- and activity centric library services. These implications led us to design PARTICIPATE in collaboration with library staff from three European countries. The probe is a mean to investigate how place- and activity-centric digital services in the library space can engage participants in co-creating knowledge, and enable libraries to integrate activities with library collections.