To study the effects of different predators on the behavior and dynamics of their prey, we compared the performance of perch (Perca fluviatilis) and the abundance of their prey resource in four lakes with two different types of piscivory. In two of the lakes, perch were the only fish species present and piscivory was restricted to cannibalism. In the other two lakes, perch co-occurred with piscivorous pike (Esox lucius). Pike grow to larger sizes and can capture larger prey than piscivorous perch. Therefore, perch reach a size refuge earlier in the lakes without pike. Perch in the lakes lacking pike used both the epilimnion and hypolimnion habitats of the lakes, and a high proportion of the perch occurred below the thermocline. In contrast, perch in the lakes with pike were mainly captured along the littoral zone and were never captured below the thermocline. This difference in habitat use was reflected in different diets of perch in the different lakes. Perch in the lakes with pike were also less abundant than those in the lakes lacking pike and the growth rates of individual perch and the densities of predator-sensitive prey (pelagic and littoral) were higher, indicating that the presence of pike resulted in decreased intraspecific competition in perch. Evidence for a behavioral response to predation risk was found in 1+ (1 yr old) perch, which was suggested to be due to predation risk from both larger perch and pike. It is hypothesized that the use of the cold-water hypolimnion habitat by perch in the lakes lacking pike was a response of perch to reduce metabolic demands under conditions of severe resource limitation. Differences in gape limitation between predators species are suggested to have major effects on size-dependent mortalities and growth rates in prey and thereby on overall community dynamics. Evidence for this latter effect was observed in differences in zoo- plankton size structure between the lakes with and without pike.


The dissertation analyzed Architecture of Yan'an revolutionary from 30 years to 40 years in 20 Centuries architecturally. Based on the investigation on site and analysis of relative literatures, the paper acquired feature of Yan'an Architecture. The feature played a significant role on protecting the History、Art and Scientific value of Yan'an during the revolutionary period. Yan'an is not only the foothold of Chinese revolution but also the jumping-off place of Chinese revolution. It is also the import historical turning point of Chinese revolution. Yan'an, as a halidom of Chinese revolution, is a famous city because of historical contribution on the Chinese revolution. Lots of revolutionary site is representation of Heroism Spirit and Yan'an Spirit and spirit treasure of Chinese Communist and Chinese people. Centuries-old history and great contribution of Chinese Revolutionary history decided that cultural site of Yan'an must be plentiful and not be replaced. In conclusion, the red base building from 30 years to 40 years in 20 century in Yan'an has significant meaning of its history, culture, development and continuation. The red base building in Yan'an area has also become a major architectural feature and plays an important role nowadays . We should protect them better.


The authors propose a Magneto-Rheological (MR) fluid damper that utilizes multi pole electromagnets in order to control variable damping effect such as a semiactive damper. The damper consists of a piston, a cylinder, a by-pass pipe, 8 electromagnets, and MR fluid. The electromagnets are installed octagonal around the pipe. When each electromagnet can control both of the magnetic flux density and direction, resisting force can be switched by several types of magnetic field such as artificial orifice. The test damper is manufactured. Resisting force characteristics are measured by using a shaking actuator. Finally, dynamic performance of the damper is confirmed experimentally.Copyright © 2014 by ASME


: Legionella micdadei is a recently described opportunistic pulmonary pathogen that produces an acute, suppurative pneumonia in patients receiving steroid therapy. Most prospective diagnoses have been made by open lung biopsy. We present a case in which the diagnosis was made from cytologic material. The clinicopathologic features of L. micdadei pneumonia are discussed, and criteria for diagnosis from cytologic specimens are presented.


We point out that the LDMX (Light Dark Matter eXperiment) detector design, conceived to search for sub-GeV dark matter, will also have very advantageous characteristics to pursue electron-nucleus scattering measurements of direct relevance to the neutrino program at DUNE and elsewhere. These characteristics include a 4-GeV electron beam, a precision tracker, electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters with near 2$\pi$ azimuthal acceptance from the forward beam axis out to $\sim$40$^\circ$ angle, and low reconstruction energy threshold. LDMX thus could provide (semi)exclusive cross section measurements, with detailed information about final-state electrons, pions, protons, and neutrons. We compare the predictions of two widely used neutrino generators (GENIE, GiBUU) in the LDMX region of acceptance to illustrate the large modeling discrepancies in electron-nucleus interactions at DUNE-like kinematics. We argue that discriminating between these predictions is well within the capabilities of the LDMX detector.


How to promote crowd-funding results successfully are crucial to crowdfunding platforms and crowdfunding projects. The results of crowd-funding projects are determined by investors' subjective behavior, which is triggered by some certain motivations. However, for different investors, the motivation toward a speculative behavior may be different. Thus, it is very necessary to explore and analyze the composition of the motivations behind each investor's decision. In this paper, we identify different motivation modes mainly influenced by the project description, which will be beneficial to identify the investment intention of each investor. Based on the self-determination theory, we first create the corpus targeting different motives by means of the text mining method. Then, we classify the project description and project investment options. Last, we conduct an econometric model to examine the effect of investor's motives on crowd-funding results based on the real dataset from Indiegogo Platform.


The purpose of this thesis is two-fold: to study the impact of a development aid programme on the resources base of a recipient community at the grassroots level, and the success of Participatory Research as an approach to the successful implementation of development aid. The case study is on the Bura Fuelwood Plantation Project (BFPP), which is located on the Bura Irrigation and Settlement Scheme (BISS) in Eastern Kenya. This study focuses on the problem of domestic fuel shortage with women as the main interest group. Participatory Research is used as an approach to assessing the impact of aid on the forestry related resources of the tenant farmers in Bura, and improved stoves are focused on as one domestic strategy to meet the fuel shortage. The hypotheses are that BFPP has had an impact on the resources the people in Bura have for creating their own development strategies, and that the Participatory Research Approach (PRA) can increase the recipients' access to and control of resources within the framework of aid. It is argued that aid programmes create space by establishing parallel structures to existing ones. The concept of Specific Interest Space (SIS) is developed on the basis of fieldwork in Bura to facilitate the analysis of space, in terms of control and distance, from the viewpoint of a group of people sharing a common interest In order to test the hypotheses the forestry related needs and resources of villagers in Bura are analyzed. This analysis focuses on gender, with emphasis on women's needs and resources. It is argued that BFPP introduces new technical, personnel and financial resources. But as the Project maintained control over these resources as well as gained partial control over resources that existed prior to the project, in some cases villagers' opportunities to design and implement their own development strategies in the forestry sector were diminished. The conclusion of the thesis is that the impact of development aid is strongest within a recipient community. Therefore development aid should be based primarily on needs and resources that exist within the community. It is also concluded that PRA can be used within aid framework to initiate and maintain dialogue between donors, implementors and recipients.


This study is about the analysis of the flouting of Grice?s four cooperative principle in the movie entitled Before Sunset. More specifically, the study discussed about conversational maxims that were found in the conversations that occurred between two main characters, Jesse and Celine, in that movie. Besides, the present thesis writer analyzed the implied meanings behind the flouted maxims and the effect on the listeners. In findings the implied meanings and the effect on the listeners, the writer paid attention to the context. In analyzing the conversational maxims, the writer used the theory of the Cooperative Principle by Paul Grice (1975). Besides Grice?s theory, the writer also used some theories about conversational maxims such as from Levinson (1984), Leech (1983) and Cutting (2002). In this theory, the cooperative principles are divided into four parts: maxim of relevance, maxim of quantity, maxim of quality and maxim of manner. The approach of this study was descriptive qualitative. The overall findings showed that there were four maxims flouted in scene one and two. The implied meanings that the speakers used mostly were caused by their untruthful answer. When the speaker flouted the maxims, the listeners still got the message behind the utterances, so mostly conversation still worked well.


Broiler developed to produce meat in a fast manner. Generally, broiler reared by intensive system. Rearing system can be split into two kinds, intensive and free-range rearing system. The aim of this research was assessing the morphometric size of male and female broiler which are raised under intensive and free-range systems. Rearing systems was not have influence on the morphometric size of the chicken except in the length of the tibia, femur, and wing on the third week. Sex have real impact on the length of shank, tibia, wings, femur, and chest circumference, and also significantly affect the width and depth of the chest, neck, and spine lenght in fifth week. Rearing systems both intensive and free-range produced same frame size on broiler chicken.


Robots assisting us in factories or homes must learn to make use of objects as tools to perform tasks, e.g., a tray for carrying objects. We consider the problem of learning commonsense knowledge of when a tool may be useful and how its use may be composed with other tools to accomplish a high-level task instructed by a human. We introduce TANGO, a novel neural model for predicting task-specific tool interactions. TANGO is trained using demonstrations obtained from human teachers instructing a virtual robot in a physics simulator. TANGO encodes the world state consisting of objects and symbolic relationships between them using a graph neural network. The model learns to attend over the scene using knowledge of the goal and the action history, finally decoding the symbolic action to execute. Crucially, we address generalization to unseen environments where some known tools are missing, but alternative unseen tools are present. We show that by augmenting the representation of the environment with pre-trained embeddings derived from a knowledge-base, the model can generalize effectively to novel environments. Experimental results show a 60.5-78.9% improvement over the baseline in predicting successful symbolic plans in unseen settings for a simulated mobile manipulator.


Malicious software authors have shifted their focus from illegal and clearly malicious software to potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) to earn revenue. PUPs blur the border between legitimate and illegitimate programs and thus fall into a grey zone. Existing anti-virus and anti-spyware software are in many instances unable to detect previously unseen or zero-day attacks and separate PUPs from legitimate software. Many tools also require frequent updates to be effective. By predicting the class of particular piece of software, users can get support before taking the decision to install the software. This Licentiate thesis introduces approaches to distinguish PUP from legitimate software based on the supervised learning of file features represented as n-grams. The overall research method applied in this thesis is experiments. For these experiments, malicious software applications were obtained from anti-malware industrial partners. The legitimate software applications were collected from various online repositories. The general steps of supervised learning, from data preparation (n-gram generation) to evaluation were, followed. Different data representations, such as byte codes and operation codes, with different configurations, such as fixed-size, variable-length, and overlap, were investigated to generate different n-gram sizes. The experimental variables were controlled to measure the correlation between n-gram size, the number of features required for optimal training, and classifier performance. The thesis results suggest that, despite the subtle difference between legitimate software and PUP, this type of software can be classified accurately with a low false positive and false negative rate. The thesis results further suggest an optimal size of operation code-based n-grams for data representation. Finally, the results indicate that classification accuracy can be increased by using a customized ensemble learner that makes use of multiple representations of the data set. The investigated approaches can be implemented as a software tool with a less frequently required update in comparison to existing commercial tools.


We investigate the Keplerian (mass-shedding) sequence of rotating neutron stars. Twelve different equations of state are used to describe the nuclear structure. We find four fitting relations which connect the rotating frequency, mass and radius of stars in the mass-shedding limit to the mass and radius of stars in the static sequence. We show the breakdown of approximate relation for the Keplerian frequency derived by Lattimer and Prakash [Science, 304, 536, (2004)] and then we present a new, EOS-independent and more accurate relation. This relation fits the Keplerian frequency of rotating neutron stars to about $2\%$ for a large range of the compactness $M_{S}/R_{S}$ of the reference non-rotating neutron star, namely the static star with the same central density as the rotating one. The performance of the fitting formula is close to $4\%$ for $M_{S}/R_{S}\leq 0.05~M_{\odot}$/km ($f_{K}\leq 350$~Hz). We present additional EOS-independent relations for the Keplerian sequence including relations for $M_{K}f_{K}$ and $R_{K}f_{K}$ in terms of $M_{S}f_{S}$ and $R_{S}f_{S}$, respectively, one of $M_K/R_K$ as a function of $f_{K}/f_{S}$ and $M_S/R_S$, and a relation between the $M_K$, $R_K$ and $f_K$. These new fitting relations are approximately EOS-independent with an error in the worst case of $8\%$. The universality of the Keplerian sequence properties presented here add to the set of other neutron star universal relations in the literature such as the $I$-Love-$Q$ relation, the gravitational binding energy and the energy, angular momentum and radius of the last circular orbit of a test-particle around rotating neutron stars. This set of universal, analytic formulas, facilitate the inclusion of general relativistic effects in the description of relativistic astrophysical systems involving fast rotating neutron stars.


This thesis investigates the articulation of ~he incentives to perform Research and
Development of profit seeking firms. Throughout the thesis, the dynamic evolution
of the distribution of these incentives across firms is the engine of industry
transformation and growth. Thus, in order to a.'5SesS the impact of different industry
characteristics on the market structure, we need a faithful picture of the
context where firms make their R&D choices.
Chapter.one exposes more in detail the motivation to pursue the analysis
developed in each chapter independently, and how they combine to build up' the
search for the understanding of the interactions between R&D, appropriability
and market structure.
Chapter two presents a dynamic model of the firm size distribution. Empirical
studies of the firm size distribution often compare its moments to those of
a log-normal distribution, as implied by Gibrat's Law, and note important deviations.
Thus, the first and basic questions addressed in the first chapter are
how well does the dynamic industry model reproduce Gibrat's Law and how well
does it match the deviations uncovered in the literature. We show that the model
reproduces these results when testing the simulated output USing the techniques,
of the empirical literature. We then use the model to study how structural parameters
affect the firm size distribution. We find that, among other things, fixed and sunk costs increase both the mean and variance of the firm size distribution
while generally decreasing the skewness and kurtosis. The rate of growth in an
industry also raises the mean and variance, but has non-monotonic effects on the
higher moments.
In the third chapter we explore the implications of different degrees of R&D
appropriability on market structure and welfare. We propose a framework to
--
pursue this analysis by extending the A'Â¥arkov-Perfect dynamic industry model
proposed by Ericson and Pakes (E-P, henceforth) (1995) through the introdu~tion
of a non-proprietary productivity component to R&D as part of a dynamic,
stochastic process. We first assume that spillovers are costlessly absorbed and
exploited by firms in the industry, and find that, in this case, a free rider problem
arises, thereby decreasing the incentives for investment. This leads to a lower
amount of innovations being developed in the industry, which in turn, implies
lower consuriier welfare while leaving the degree of concentration in the industry
fairly unchanged. We then model a settmg where it is assumed that in order to
build its absorptive capacity the firm has to engage in some R&D of its own.
In this case, we find that an increase in spillovers will enhance both consumer
and producer welfare substantially, and increases the likelihood of neck-and-neck
competition, therefore reduciJ;lg the level of concentration in the industry. These
results arise from the fact that having absorptive capacity being.built as a byproduct
ofR&D enhances the productivity ofR&D investment, compensating for
the free rider effect associated with the lack of appropriability.
The frameworks used in the two first chapters suffer from the 'curse of dimensionality',
such that the industries under analysis are limited in terms of the
number of agents simultaneously active. In order to overcome this problem, in
chapter four we move away from oligopolistic market structures and propose a model of monopolistic competition, where firms are sufficiently large to generate
a firm size distribution with a certain degree of asYIDlIletry, although each firm
is too small to affect the industry's outcome. Furthermore, we account for industry
growth by having the industry's output increasing over time as a result
ofknowledge externalities. The rich micro set-up of this model is analogous to
.that of E-P (1995), as it is composed by heterogeneous :firms making their in-
.~
vestment decisions in a world of uncertainty, but we abstract from entry and exit
and instead of an oligopolistic market structure we model a monopolistic competition
environment with many, heterogeneous firms. In thiS setting, :firms are
asYmmetric in terms of the technology they use to produce a given commodity,
and they are able to increase the likelihood of decreasing their marginal costs of
production by investing in Cost Reducing R&D. In order to evaluate their future
stream of profits and make their investment decisions :firms only care about the
eV9lution of their efficiency and the long-run efficiency index in the industry. Cutting
down the oligopolistic interactions present in the E-P framework, and having
firms looking at the long-run average industry state, allows us to overcome the
curse of dimensionality usually associated with dynamic models with agent heterogeneity.
Therefore, we are able to simulate the model with a large number
of firms competing in the industry and we show that, contrary to most existing
endogenouS growth models, this model is able to deliver a firm size distribution
with a substantial degree of heterogeneity.
Chapter 6 presents the final remarks to the investigation carried out in this
thesis.


It has been suggested that the association between self-reported occupational noise exposure and vestibular schwannoma (VS) found in several studies, represents recall bias. Therefore, we aim to study the relation in a large case-control study using occupational noise measurements. We performed a case-control study from Sweden of 1913 VS cases diagnosed in 1961-2009 and 9566 age- and sex-matched population controls. We defined occupational history by linkage to national censuses from 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. We estimated occupational noise exposure for each case and control using a job-exposure matrix (JEM). There was no association between occupational noise exposure and VS. Among subjects assessed as ever exposed to occupational noise levels ≥85 dB (214 cases and 1142 controls), the odds ratio for VS per five years of exposure was 1.02 (95% confidence interval 0.90-1.17). Workers with noise levels of 85 dB or higher for at least 15 years (5-year latency period), showed no increased risk of VS (odds ratio 0.98, 0.73-1.31) compared to those who had never been exposed to noise levels of 75 dB or higher. To conclude, our large study does not support an association between occupational noise exposure and VS.


Purpose: In-Depth photon counting detectors (PCXD) use an edge-on configuration and have multi-layer segmentations. The benefit of this configuration for additional spectral information depends on the energy response. Also, inter-layer cross-talk introduces correlation to the signal collected from each layer, which makes the independent Poisson model no longer valid for estimating the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the material decomposition variance. We proposed to use a multivariate Gaussian model as the substitute address the data correlation. Methods: A 120 kVp incident spectrum was simulated and transmitted through 25cm of water and 1cm of calcium. 5- layer In-Depth and 1-layer Edge-On PCXDs with full energy resolution were simulated using Monte Carlo methods. We selected Si, GaAs and CdTe as detector materials. The detectors were defined to have 1mm wide pixels and thickness of 70mm (Si), 10.5mm (GaAs) and 3mm (CdTe). Geant4 was used and energy response functions (ERF) capturing secondary events were obtained, together with the Gaussian parameter estimates. We evaluated the CRLBs of the In-Depth and Edge-On detectors for each material and the systematic variance bounds were compared. Results: For uncorrelated data, the CRLB can assume Poisson statistics. As the data becomes more correlated, the Poisson CRLB fails to capture the cross-talk effect, but a Gaussian model can, and is accurate if the number of photons is not small. The CRLB analysis shows that the effects of the ERF and the noise correlation are significant. If cross-talk can be corrected, the depth information proves to be beneficial and can reduce the variance lower bound by 3% to 10% depending on the detector material. Conclusions: The multivariate Gaussian model was validated to be a good substitute to the Poisson model for PCXD CRLB estimation. It can avoid the errors that would otherwise be caused by correlated measurements.


The aim of the present work was to study cerebral hemodynamics and cognitive function in patients suffering from coronary artery disease (CAD) in the short- and long-term periods after coronary bypass grafting (CBG). The study accrued 65 patients who underwent myocardial revascularization using cardiopulmonary bypass (43 persons) and without heart interruption (22 persons). In 21 cases, CBG using cardiopulmonary bypass with a purpose of preventing cerebral events was supplemented by administration of instenon manufactured by the Nycomed Company, Perfusion tomoscintigraphy of the brain and neuropsychological testing were provided to all the patients prior to CBG, 14 days and 6 months following surgery. CBG coupled with preventive administration of instenon or beating heart operation allow to appreciably minimize the risk of disorders of cerebral hemodynamics and cognitive function in the long-term postoperative period.


PURPOSE
The purpose of this study was to identify the factors influencing self-identity and menopausal symptoms their influence on level of depression in middle-aged woman.

METHODS
Participants were 135 middle-aged women who were living in city B, were 45-60 years old, informed of study purpose, and agreed to participate. Data were collected from December, 2012 to January, 2013 using scales measuring depression, self-identity, and menopausal symptoms. Data were analyzed using t-test, ANOVA, Scheffe test, Pearson Correlation Coefficients, and Multiple Stepwise Regression.

RESULTS
Level of depression was low, self-identity was slightly high, and menopausal symptoms were relatively low in these middle-aged women. There were significant differences in depression by perceived health status and perceived economic status. Depression had a moderate negative correlation with self-identity (r=-.49, p<.001) and a moderate positive correlation with menopausal symptoms (r=.57, p<.001). Menopausal psychological symptoms were the factor most affecting depression and explained 37% of the variance in depression. A total of 51% of variance in depression was explained by menopausal symptoms (psychological and physical), self-identity, and perceived economic status.

CONCLUSION
Thus, an effort to improve self-identity, especially a plan to attenuate menopausal psychological symptoms is needed to reduce depression.


Background Overdiagnosis is a phenomenon where an indolent cancer is diagnosed that otherwise would not have caused harm to the patient during their lifetime. The rising incidence of papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) in various regions of the world is attributed to overdiagnosis. In such regions, the rates of papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) are also rising. We aimed to study whether a similar pattern of rising PTMC is found in Kerala, a state in India, where there has been a doubling of thyroid cancer incidence over a decade. Methods We conducted a retrospective cohort study in two large government medical colleges, which are tertiary referral facilities in the state of Kerala. We collected data on the PTC diagnosis in Kozhikode and Thrissur Government Medical colleges from 2010 to 2020. We analysed our data by age, gender and tumor size. Results The incidence of PTC at Kozhikode and Thrissur Government Medical colleges nearly doubled from 2010 to 2020. The overall proportion of PTMC in these specimens was 18.9%. The proportion of PTMC only marginally increased from 14.7 to 17.9 during the period. Of the total incidence of microcarcinomas, 64% were reported in individuals less than 45 years of age. Conclusion The rise in the number of PTCs diagnosed in the government-run public healthcare centres in Kerala state in India is unlikely to be due to overdiagnosis since there was no disproportionate rise in rates of PTMCs. The patients that these hospitals cater to may be less likely to show healthcare-seeking behavior or ease of healthcare access which is closely associated with the problem of overdiagnosis.


Importance
COVID-19 has highlighted widespread chronic underinvestment in digital health that hampered public health responses to the pandemic. Recognizing this, the Riyadh Declaration on Digital Health, formulated by an international interdisciplinary team of medical, academic, and industry experts at the Riyadh Global Digital Health Summit in August 2020, provided a set of digital health recommendations for the global health community to address the challenges of current and future pandemics. However, guidance is needed on how to implement these recommendations in practice.

Objective
To develop guidance for stakeholders on how best to deploy digital health and data and support public health in an integrated manner to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics.

Evidence Review
Themes were determined by first reviewing the literature and Riyadh Global Digital Health Summit conference proceedings, with experts independently contributing ideas. Then, 2 rounds of review were conducted until all experts agreed on the themes and main issues arising using a nominal group technique to reach consensus. Prioritization was based on how useful the consensus recommendation might be to a policy maker.

Findings
A diverse stakeholder group of 13 leaders in the fields of public health, digital health, and health care were engaged to reach a consensus on how to implement digital health recommendations to address the challenges of current and future pandemics. Participants reached a consensus on high-priority issues identified within 5 themes: team, transparency and trust, technology, techquity (the strategic development and deployment of technology in health care and health to achieve health equity), and transformation. Each theme contains concrete points of consensus to guide the local, national, and international adoption of digital health to address challenges of current and future pandemics.

Conclusions and Relevance
The consensus points described for these themes provide a roadmap for the implementation of digital health policy by all stakeholders, including governments. Implementation of these recommendations could have a significant impact by reducing fatalities and uniting countries on current and future battles against pandemics.


Fire fighters are exposed to potentially carcinogenic combustion and pyrolysis products during the course of their work. The present study was designed to test 43 fire fighters and matched controls for DNA damage which might be related to occupational carcinogen exposures. Using peripheral blood lymphocytes, we examined (a) baseline sister chromatid exchange (SCE) frequency and (b) SCE induction by in vitro mutagenic challenge with mitomycin C. Using nucleated peripheral blood cells, we examined (c) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-DNA adduct levels by assessing benzo(a)pyrene diol epoxide (BPDE)-DNA antigenicity. Exposures were determined from histories of fire-fighting activity. The presence of confounding factors (e.g., tobacco smoking, charcoal-broiled food consumption, etc.) was determined by questionnaire. Plasma cotinine levels were measured to assess recent exposures to tobacco smoke. White fire fighters exhibited a significantly higher risk for the presence of detectable BPDE-DNA antigenicity than white controls (odds ratio, 3.4; 95% confidence interval, 1.08-10.5 after adjustment). Consumption of charcoal-broiled food less than 3 times a month was associated with a smaller proportion of individuals exhibiting measurable (positive) BPDE-DNA antigenicity, while consumption of broiled food greater than 3 times a month did not affect the proportion of positive individuals. Daily alcohol consumption was associated with a larger proportion of individuals exhibiting positive BPDE-DNA antigenicity, (P = 0.07). Tobacco smoking and charcoal-broiled food consumption, but not fire fighting, were associated with increased levels of baseline SCE. Sensitivity to SCE induced by mitomycin C in cultured peripheral lymphocytes was similar in fire fighter and control groups. However, sensitivity of individual fire fighters to mitomycin C-induced SCE was correlated with number of fires fought in the previous 24 h.


The phenomenon of fitnah could be traced throughout history in different regions and cultures. The Arab spring events of 2011–2012 are not an exception in this context. The next outburst of protest activity occurred where it was not expected in the near future—in Ukraine. If we compare the events in the Arab countries in 2011 and Ukraine in 2013–2014, it can be concluded that in essence they fit the characteristics of fitnah very well, which are attributed to it by the Arabic political culture. In both cases, the fitnah acquired permanent character turning into anarchy and chaos ("fouda"). The government/the ruling power found itself unprepared for such manifestations of fitnah and miscalculated the threat posed by the protesters. From our perspective, in the modern world this phenomenon can be explained by the rapid development of Internet technologies that gives the opposition an opportunity to prepare a protest virtually, in an area not totally controlled by the government.


Many cholera bacteria are perfectly benign, but some strains have become deadly pathogens by acquiring packages of genes from elsewhere in their environment. New research on page 1910. reveals an agent that may be responsible for this Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation: a bacteriophage, a virus that infects the cholera bacterium itself. This phage carries the genes that encode the toxin that causes the disease's life-threatening diarrhea. The new discovery raises questions about the development of live cholera vaccines and suggests a transfer mechanism for other bacterial virulence genes.


Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] genotypes usually yield about the same under high K fertility as under moderate K fertility. The objective of this study was to verify the results of a preliminary screening test, which revealed that the FC31702 and 'Lincoln' genotypes were responsive and nonresponsive, respectively, to high K fertility.
FC31702 and Lincoln soybeans were grown under moderate (approximately 130 kg K/ha) and high (approximately 193 kg K/ha) K fertility on a Beltsville silt loam soil for 3 years. 'Cutler,' a recommended cultivar for Maryland, also was included the last 2 test years. Seed yield and percent K in the leaves during the growing season were determined


Author(s): Markham, Christopher Stephen | Advisor(s): Bray, Jonathan D | Abstract: The strong shaking of the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence caused widespread liquefaction in much of the city of Christchurch, NZ, including large parts of the central business district (CBD). The most intense event of the earthquake sequence with regards to shaking in the CBD was the 22 FEB 2011 Mw6.2 Christchurch event. A reported 185 casualties were caused by the destruction from this event. The financial damage was immense as many of the structures, especially in the CBD, had to be demolished due to damage sustained from the Christchurch earthquake as well as some of the other less intense events. The performance of structures during these events was often related to liquefaction of foundation soils. Understanding the effects of liquefaction on soil and building response is an area of earthquake engineering that continues to challenge practitioners and researchers. This challenging topic makes the study of case histories, such as those provided by the Canterbury earthquakes, an essential component to characterizing and understanding the effects of soil liquefaction on building performance. This thesis focuses on providing insights regarding the seismic response of liquefiable soils through the use of information and data collected in Christchurch, NZ following the Canterbury earthquake sequence. Nonlinear effective stress site response analyses are often used by engineers to model the dynamic response of potentially liquefiable soils during strong shaking. For the presented research, a widely used one-dimensional nonlinear effective stress site response analysis program is used to perform this modelling. Ground motions recorded during six events of the 2010-11 Canterbury earthquake sequence are used in conjunction with the extensive site investigation data that has been obtained in Christchurch to complete site response analyses at several strong motion station sites in the greater Christchurch area. Deconvolved Riccarton Gravel input motions were generated, because representative, recorded rock or firm layer base-motions were not available in the Christchurch area. Nonlinear effective stress seismic site response analyses are shown to capture key aspects of the observed soil response through the comparison of acceleration response spectra of calculated surface motions to those of recorded surface motions; however, equivalent-linear and total stress nonlinear analyses are shown to capture these aspects as well. Biases in the computed motions compared to recorded motions were realized for some cases, but they can be attributed primarily to the uncertainty in the development of the input motions used in the analyses. The study of the consequences of liquefaction on building performance is a complex soil-structure interaction problem that requires the use of well-documented case histories for validation purposes. An extensive site investigation and advanced laboratory testing program was carried out in Christchurch, NZ from April to October of 2014. The aim of this work was to provide characterization of the liquefaction resistance of foundation soils from building sites affected by liquefaction during the Canterbury earthquakes. In-situ penetration tests, such as CPT, are valuable methods for gaining an initial understanding of a site's characteristics and the expected performance of critical soil layers. However, to understand fully the complex response of soil at the element level, laboratory testing of relatively undisturbed soil specimens provide unique insights. To accomplish these goals, "undisturbed" sampling and triaxial testing (monotonic and cyclic) were performed on soils from key building sites in Christchurch's CBD. High quality sampling and testing could be achieved for most of the predominantly silty and sandy soils in the CBD. Test results indicate, though, that loose clean sand specimens were densified significantly during the sampling with the Dames a Moore hydraulic fixed-piston sampler (an Osterberg-type thin-walled sampler). The cyclic resistances measured in the tests on "undisturbed" specimens were generally consistent with those estimated using empirical simplified liquefaction triggering procedures. Important insights regarding the cyclic response of the shallow CBD soils were obtained through the laboratory testing carried out as a part of the research presented in this thesis. Triaxial testing of "undisturbed" soil specimens proved important in understanding not only the stress-strain response of the studied soils, but also allowed for further knowledge regarding the pore water pressure response of the tested soils during both cyclic and monotonic loading. Importantly, insights into how various soil types of the CBD responded to cyclic loading were gained through comparisons of cyclic triaxial (CTX) tests performed on a variety of sand and silty sand soils. It was seen through CTX results comparisons that silty sands (soils classified as SM) and clean sands (SP and SP-SM) responded similarly in cyclic loading, even when the fines content of the tested specimens differed. Monotonic triaxial testing was also performed on reconstituted specimens to characterize the steady state response of several soil units in the CBD. The extensive insight garnered from laboratory testing is critical for informing researchers and engineers studying the case histories provided by the Canterbury earthquakes of buildings founded on liquefiable soils, especially those using numerical-based soil-structure interaction analyses. The results of the monotonic and cyclic tests performed as part of this study provide useful data for calibrating advanced numerical models. Appendices are included as a part of this dissertation to provide supporting information and data not included in the main body of the thesis. A majority of these appendices are included at the end of this thesis; however, there are several additional appendices included as electronic attachments to this dissertation, which provide supplementary information regarding the work presented in Chapters 2 through 4 of this dissertation. Electronic appendices that support the work presented in Chapter 2 include: rotated (fault normal and fault parallel) seismic records for events studied at the strong motion station sites of interest (zip file that contains text files), deconvolved Riccarton Gravel motions for all events studied (zip file that contains text files), and selected results for completed site response analyses (PDF file). Electronic appendices that support the work presented in Chapters 3 and 4 include triaxial test data and results for "undisturbed" soil specimens (zip file that contains text, data, and PDF files).


Using 1128 protein-coding gene families from 11 completely sequenced cyanobacterial genomes, we attempt to quantify horizontal gene transfer events within cyanobacteria, as well as between cyanobacteria and other phyla. A novel method of detecting and enumerating potential horizontal gene transfer events within a group of organisms based on analyses of "embedded quartets" allows us to identify phylogenetic signal consistent with a plurality of gene families, as well as to delineate cases of conflict to the plurality signal, which include horizontally transferred genes. To infer horizontal gene transfer events between cyanobacteria and other phyla, we added homologs from 168 available genomes. We screened phylogenetic trees reconstructed for each of these extended gene families for highly supported monophyly of cyanobacteria (or lack of it). Cyanobacterial genomes reveal a complex evolutionary history, which cannot be represented by a single strictly bifurcating tree for all genes or even most genes, although a single completely resolved phylogeny was recovered from the quartets' plurality signals. We find more conflicts within cyanobacteria than between cyanobacteria and other phyla. We also find that genes from all functional categories are subject to transfer. However, in interphylum as compared to intraphylum transfers, the proportion of metabolic (operational) gene transfers increases, while the proportion of informational gene transfers decreases.


Phylogenetic analyses of the subtribe Ociminae (Lamiaceae) based on four plastid DNA regions (trnL–trnF intergenic spacer, trnH-psbA intergenic spacer, matK and rps16 intron) and two nuclear DNA regions (ITS and ETS) are presented. Bayesian inference was utilized for the reconstruction of phylogenies and for the assessment of statistical support for clades. The phylogeny was used for the investigation of the clade in terms of the distribution of morphology and geography. The subtribe Ociminae is monophyletic and can be simply diagnosed by morphological synapomorphies and is of African origin. The results clarify the relationships among Orthosiphon and its related genera Fuerstia and Hoslundia. Orthosiphon is monophyletic with exclusion Or. fruticosus, and it is a sister to Fuerstia and Hoslundia. Because Fuerstia and Hoslundia formed a monophyletic group with high morphological similarity between them, these genera will be merged under the earliest name Hoslundia. Ocimum is monophyletic with the inclusion of subgenus Nautochilus. Ocimum subgenus Nautochilus is a sister to the rest of Ocimum (subgenus Ocimum and subgenus Gymnocimum). Surprisingly, Orthosiphon fruticosus is a member of subgenus Nautochilus and highly supported, therefore, nomenclatural changes are required if the groups are to remain monophyletic. Analysis displayed strong congruence between the combinable component consensus trees and the traditional classification for most of genera and the results supported by morphological and geographic distribution. However, more taxon sampling to cover some regions of geography missed in this study is required. Moreover, the efficiency of ITS, matK, trnH-psbA and in combination for species identification of Orthosiphon was assessed. For DNA barcode analysis, the determination of intraspecific and interspecific divergence, assessment of barcoding gap, reconstruction of phylogenetic trees and evaluation of barcode regions for species identification (based on best match and best close match) were carried out. The results revealed that ITS is a significant barcode region for identifying Orthosiphon species as a single marker and, for the combination, ITS+matK+trnH-psbA.


This article contemplates the role the U.S. Supreme Court has played in the maintenance of the American two-party system. Specifically, we ask whether the Court has worked to constrain minor parties or to facilitate their efforts to become meaningful political entities. Our examination of litigation involving political parties depicts a Court that has remained "neutral" toward minor and major parties; indeed, we found some evidence of a positive relationship between minor parties and Court decisions, but only after we controlled for three other variables: cycles of American politics, case issues, and Court eras. These and other findings lead us to a number of conclusions about the role the Court plays in the American political system.


The objective of the research was to study the role of the group farmers especially in term of dynamic of the group farmers, empowerment of the dairy farmers, and their relationship. The sampling population is milk cooperative at Bandung district and target population are the dairy farmers as the members of the cooperative. Sample of research were collected by multistage sampling technique with the result that 4 cooperative and 120 person of dairy farmers. The relationship of the variables were tested by Spearman's rank correlation. The results showed that the group of dairy farmers tend by the cooperative as instrument for improving production of milk of dairy farmers but no facility sufficient so the dairy farmers have empowerment. The dynamic group of farmers was low. The empowerment of dairy farmer was low, especially in the role of dairy farmers as manager and individual of autonomy. There was positive significant correlation between the dynamic group of farmers are empowerment of the dairy farmers.


This paper offers a detailed reading of Rimbaud's "obscure" prose pom 'Devotion' from the Illuminations. The reading is based on the central principle that the text is modelled on the form of devotional prayer, a model that Rimbaud adopts only to parody it and transgress against it. The litany is the form adopted by Rimbaud in 'Devotion' and close inspection of the poem shows that he plays with the litanical format and finally subverts its laws to construct something quite different. The poem violates the conventions of its adopted form even though in its early stages it seems to adhere quite faithfully to an established pattern. There is a sense of defamiliarization and depaysement as the reader encounters strange female figures to whom dedications are made in a highly esoteric spiritual world of the poet's own invention. The odd term "Baou" is given attention as is the change of tone from the reverential to the ironic and desultory in mid-poem. The poem may be seen as a ludic text where Rimbaud experiments with the idea of poem as prayer and in its closing stages, as is so often the case in Rimbaud's prose poems, we appear to move towards something more authentic and vital. The laconic and ambiguous closing lines capture a sense of a new and personal spirituality far removed from traditional forms of prayer.


The objectives of this study were threefold: to understand students' perceptions of activities in a blended learning environment; to determine their preferred learning activities in this context, paralleling the four stages of Kolb's learning cycle; and to determine the effectiveness of the blended learning used, based on scores achieved in an e-business course supported by the BLearning assessment system, a custom-designed reflective assessment tool. A mixed-methods approach was used to identify the students' preferred activities. Findings indicate that (1) blended learning can add interest and variety to improve the students' learning experience, (2) students prefer blended learning activities that match the first three stages of Kolb's learning cycle (concrete experience, reflective observation, and abstract conceptualisation), and (3) data collected from the e-business course exam results show that the blended learning process was effective. In aligning teaching activities to student preferences, the notion of "teaching patterns" is introduced as the teaching perspective on these activities. Findings further indicate that blended learning activities based on the first three stages of Kolb's learning cycle may be more suitable for students who share similar learning preferences.


This study describes the effect of Good Sharia Business Governance implement ation of financial performance as measured by Islamicity Financial Performance Index. The indicator used to explain Good Sharia Business Governance in this study based on the guidelines for its application issued by the KNKG that composed of commissioners, supervisory sharia board (SSB), directors and other information. The method of this study is multinomial logistic regression . The sample used is the Islamic Banks that registered in the BI during the observation period 2011-2015. To determine the sample selection method used purposive sampling. With this method, the obtained 8 Islamic Banks to be used as a sample in this study . The results of this study indicate that simultaneously affect the Islamicity Financial Performance Index. Partially commissioners have influence while DPS, directors, and other information have no effect on Islamicity Financial Performance Index.


Researchers interested in the relationships between place and health have been slow to incorporate a life course perspective, probably due to the lack of readily available historical environmental data. This hinders the identification of causal relationships. It also restricts our understanding as to whether there are accumulative effects over the life course and if there are critical periods in people's lives when places are particularly pertinent. This study considers the feasibility of constructing longitudinal data on the availability of urban green space. The suitability of various historical and contemporary data sources is considered, including paper maps, aerial photographs and tabular land use data. Measures of urban green space are created for all neighbourhoods across the Edinburgh region of Scotland at various points during the past 100 years. We demonstrate that it is feasible to develop such measures, but there are complex issues involved in doing so. We also test the utility of the measures via an analysis of how accessibility to green space might alter over the life course of both people, and their residential neighbourhoods. The findings emphasise the potential for utilising historical data to significantly enhance understanding of the relationships between nature and health, and between health and place more generally. We encourage researchers to use data from other locations to consider including a longitudinal perspective to examine relationships between people's health and their environment.


This paper introduces NSGA-Net --- an evolutionary approach for neural architecture search (NAS). NSGA-Net is designed with three goals in mind: (1) a procedure considering multiple and conflicting objectives, (2) an efficient procedure balancing exploration and exploitation of the space of potential neural network architectures, and (3) a procedure finding a diverse set of trade-off network architectures achieved in a single run. NSGA-Net is a population-based search algorithm that explores a space of potential neural network architectures in three steps, namely, a population initialization step that is based on prior-knowledge from hand-crafted architectures, an exploration step comprising crossover and mutation of architectures, and finally an exploitation step that utilizes the hidden useful knowledge stored in the entire history of evaluated neural architectures in the form of a Bayesian Network. Experimental results suggest that combining the dual objectives of minimizing an error metric and computational complexity, as measured by FLOPs, allows NSGA-Net to find competitive neural architectures. Moreover, NSGA-Net achieves error rate on the CIFAR-10 dataset on par with other state-of-the-art NAS methods while using orders of magnitude less computational resources. These results are encouraging and shows the promise to further use of EC methods in various deep-learning paradigms.


We briefly review the recent developments of probing the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism at high energy colliders such as the CERN LEP2, the Fermilab Tevatron, the CERN LHC and the e + e − linear colliders. Both weakly interacting and strongly interacting electroweak symmetry mechanisms are concerned.


The Leon-Chinandega plains are located in the north-western part of Nicaragua and represent the most important groundwater reservoir of the country. The aquifer is comprised of three hydrogeological units. The top unit is an unconfined alluvial and below a more consolidated volcanic aquifer is found. These aquifers rest on an ignimbrite unit that acts as the basement of the aquifer. The plains are mainly used for agricultural purposes and most of the irrigation comes from upper aquifer wells (not deeper than 70 m) allocated within the shallow unconfined aquifer. Transient electromagnetic soundings (TEM) and continuous vertical electrical soundings (CVES) were carried out in order to obtain information regarding the geology of the study area. Two TEM profiles extending from the Pacific coast towards the volcanic chain were carried out with an approximate separation between soundings of 250 metres. A grid of TEM soundings was also performed in an area located between the towns of Posoltega and Quezalguaque. CVES were carried out in different areas of the plains in order to obtain detailed information on the geology and distribution of the shallow aquifer. This information was later correlated with information available from wells in the area. One of the objectives of this investigation was to test and evaluate the applicability of the TEMfast48 equipment in the study area. In the plains area the TEM method shows very good results where a general geophysical model of mostly a three-layered earth can be obtained. In the coastal areas the models are more irregular and complex. The results from the CVES generally agree with the TEM models but present more details, especially in areas of complex geology. The penetration depth for the TEM soundings reached almost 100 m at most, depending on the depth to a low resistivity layer. In some areas the depth to the basement was estimated with long-layout CVES. In general, it was possible to obtain consistent geoelectrical models of the area and the methods complement each other well. The geoelectrical models are an excellent addition to other investigation methods as they provide an overview of the aquifer system and can serve as a basis for refining the conceptual and numerical models of the aquifer system. This information is expected to become very valuable for the exploration, management and protection of the groundwater resources in the Leon-Chinandega plains to ensure sustainability of the resource.


Ion implantation allows the fabrication of very small MOSFET switching devices with considerably thicker gate insulators. Capacitance from the source and drain to the substrate and to the gate is reduced by more than a factor of two compared to conventional structures. Conversely, for a given thickness, smaller devices can be achieved using ion implantation.


Conventional intensive agriculture is largely reliant on high agrochemical inputs and has resulted in damaging environmental impacts including large scale biodiversity loss. More environmentally sustainable agricultural production methods are required. Ecological intensification is an approach which aims to sustainably increase production by using biodiversity-derived ecosystem services and replacing agrochemical inputs where possible. This can be achieved through modifying agricultural management practices to support ecosystem service-providing beneficial species. This thesis investigates the ecological intensification of commercial apple orchards in the UK. Apples are one of the most economically and nutritionally important fruit crops globally and their production relies upon a number of ecosystem services including pollination, pest regulation, and soil fertility services.
Alleyway cover crops were trialled as a novel management practice which has the potential to improve a number of orchard ecosystem services. Three different cover crop species mixtures, all based on perennial legumes but each with a different rationale, were compared to a standard mown-grass control. Growing cover crops in the alleyways was provided improved habitat quality for beneficial species, attracting greater numbers of natural enemy taxa including predatory beetles, parasitoids, and active-hunting spiders, without increasing the abundance of crop pests. Greater numbers of pollinators were also observed in alleyways sown with cover crops. Despite the greater numbers of beneficial species recorded in the cover crop treatments, no increases in pest regulation or pollination services were detected and no change in production was observed during the timescale of the study.
A second potential benefit of alleyway cover crops is the production of mulch material. Traditionally, organic mulches were used in orchards to help supress weeds underneath the trees, increase soil nutrients, and retain soil moisture, however many of these functions have now been replaced by agrochemical inputs. The cuttings from alleyway cover crops can provide an in-situ source of mulching material. Alleyway cuttings were compared to two traditional mulch materials, compost and straw, and a standard no-mulch control. Alleyway cover crop cuttings boosted numbers of earthworms and enhanced leaf litter decomposition, whilst the traditional straw and compost mulches improved some soil fertility measures including soil organic matter and moisture when compared to the control.
In the final study of the thesis, the importance of pollination is quantified and the methods used to assess pollinator dependence and pollination deficits are tested, with recommendations made about the scale at which these experiments should be carried out. Following pollinator exclusion apple yields were found to fall to 55% whilst supplementary hand pollination led yields to increase to 167% of current 'open' pollination rates, showing that pollination deficits existed in the study orchards. This study also highlights the importance of pollination for fruit quality, a key deciding factor of a crop's economic value. Alleyway cover cropping was found to have positive effects on ecosystem service providers both above and below ground. Even relatively inexpensive cover crop mixtures, combined with a reduction in mowing frequency and increase in mowing height, were found to increase numbers of beneficial species. The findings demonstrate the potential benefits of this multi-purpose habitat management method.


In the first part of this thesis we report results about some "linear" trapdoors that can be embedded in a block cipher. In particular we are interested in any block cipher which has invertible S-boxes and that acts as a permutation on the message space, once the key is chosen. The message space is a vector space and we can endow it with alternative operations (hidden sums) for which the structure of vector space is preserved. Each of this operation is related to a different copy of the affine group. So, our block cipher could be affine with respect to one of these hidden sums.
We show conditions on the S-box able to prevent a type of trapdoors based on hidden sums, in particular we introduce the notion of Anti-Crooked function. Moreover we shows some properties of the translation groups related to these hidden sums, characterizing those that are generated by affine permutations. In that case we prove that hidden sum trapdoors are practical and we can perform a global reconstruction attack. We also analyze the role of the mixing layer obtaining results suggesting the possibility to have undetectable hidden sum trapdoors using MDS mixing layers. In the second part we take into account the index coding with side information (ICSI) problem. Firstly we investigate the optimal length of a linear index code, that is equal to the min-rank of the hypergraph related to the instance of the ICSI problem. In particular we extend the the so-called Sandwich Property from graphs to hypergraphs and also we give an upper bound on the min-rank of an hypergraph taking advantage of incidence structures such as 2-designs and projective planes. Then we consider the more general case when the side information are coded, the index coding with coded side information (ICCSI) problem. We extend some results on the error correction index codes to the ICCSI problem case and a syndrome decoding algorithm is also given.


Pulsed Plasma Thrusters (PPT's) are currently baselined for the Air Force Mightysat II.1 flight in 1999 and are under consideration for a number of other missions for primary propulsion, precision positioning, and attitude control functions. In this work, PPT plumes were characterized to assess their contamination characteristics. Diagnostics included planar and cylindrical Langmuir probes and a large number of collimated quartz contamination sensors. Measurements were made using a LES 8/9 flight PPT at 0.24, 0.39, 0.55, and 1.2 m from the thruster, as well as in the backflow region behind the thruster. Plasma measurements revealed a peak centerline ion density and velocity of approx. 6 x 10(exp 12) cm(exp -3) and 42,000 m/s, respectively. Optical transmittance measurements of the quartz sensors after 2 x 10(exp 5) pulses showed a rapid decrease in plume contamination with increasing angle from the plume axis, with a barely measurable transmittance decrease in the ultraviolet at 90 deg. No change in optical properties was detected for sensors in the backflow region.


Generally, the flexible robot system can be modeled as the two-mass system which consists of a motor and load connected by a spring. Thus, its elasticity causes resonance in the system. By using the conventional PID controller, this method cannot perform well in this situation. Much research has proceeded with the aim of reducing vibration. A new effective control method, the resonance ratio control, has been introduced as a new way to guarantee the robustness and suppress the oscillation during task executions for a position and force control. In this paper, three techniques are proposed for improving the performance of resonance ratio control. Firstly, a new multi encoder based disturbance observer (MEDOB) is shown to estimate the disturbance force on the load side. The proposed observer is not necessary to identify the nominal spring coefficient. Secondly, coefficient diagram method (CDM) has been applied to calculate a new gain of the force controller. A new resonance ratio gain has been presented as 2.0. Finally, the MEDOB and load side disturbance observer (LDOB) are employed to identify a spring coefficient of flexible robot system. By using the proposed identification method, it is simple to identify the spring coefficient and easy to implement in the real flexible robot system. The effectiveness of the proposed identification method is verified by simulation and experimental results.


As the percentage of renewable energy sources grows, excess electrical power from renewables can be converted using electrolyzers to produce hydrogen, which can be stored, and later utilized by industries, homes, or the transportation system. Further, electrolyzers can also be utilized for frequency and voltage control to improve the stability of the power system. In this paper, a novel electrical circuit model for a 400W PEM electrolyzer is designed and validated using the experimental data from a reported paper for a 400W electrolyzer. To demonstrate its adaptive feature, the proposed 400W model is then scaled up to a 1 MW array by series and parallel connections, and the resulting system is validated by comparing it to another reported experimental results of a 1 MW stack. These results reveal that the developed model can reproduce very similar step responses to those obtained from experimental results from the reported 400W electrolyzer and the 1 MW stack. Finally, using the proposed electric circuit model, the step response of the equivalent circuit model to the step-change in the grid frequency has been investigated and the results show that the electrolyzers can respond to frequency step change faster than traditional generators demonstrating that employing electrolyzers can have a great potential to improve frequency stability.


In the course of some work recently undertaken in Dr. Thayer's service to localize the third heart-sound by the use of simultaneous tracings, a remarkably constant, presytolic sound-representation was observed on the electrophonogram ; and its description will be the effort of this paper. The technic employed, the value of the Einthoven electrophonograph, and some of the factors concerned in the audibility of cardiac sounds have been previously discussed ;1but attention may be recalled to the constancy and reliability of apex-tracings obtained in the left decubitus, and to the localization of the first sound by the foot of the ventricular rise of the apex cardiogram In a reconsideration of the tracings of sixteen normal schoolboys, it may be said that the pulse-rate varied from 65 to 100, diastasis2ranged from 0.12 to 0.50 second in the series, and from 0.21 to 0.39 second in an individual case, as


1Liver Unit, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, B15 2TH, UK; 2Department of Cellular Pathology, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, B15 2TH, UK Abstract: Histology remains essential for the diagnosis and management of many disorders affecting the liver. However, the biopsy procedure itself is associated with a low risk of harm to the patient and cost to the health services; samples may not be adequate and are subject to sampling variation. Furthermore, interpretation often depends on the skill of the pathologist. Increasingly, new techniques are becoming available that are altering the indications for liver biopsy. Many diseases of the liver can be diagnosed and managed using serological and radiological techniques; the degree of fibrosis and fat can often be assessed by serological or imaging techniques and the nature of space occupying lesions defined by serology, imaging and use of liquid biopsy. However, these techniques, too, are subject to limitations: sensitivity and specificity is not always adequate for diagnosis or management; some techniques are expensive and often also require expert interpretation. Although there may be less need for liver biopsy today, histology remains the gold standard as well as an essential tool for the diagnosis and management of many conditions, especially where there are multiple pathologies, or where a diagnosis cannot or has not been made by alternative approaches. Until less invasive techniques become more reliable and accessible, liver histology will remain a key investigation.


Low light stress seriously decreased wheat grain number through the formation of aborted spike during the reproductive period, and induced new tiller regeneration to offset the loss of grain number. However, the mechanism by which plants coordinate spike aborted growth and the regeneration of new tillers remains unknown. To better understand this coordinated process, morphological, physiological, and transcriptomic analyses were performed under low light stress at the young microspore stage. Our findings indicated that leaves exhausted most stored carbohydrate in one day of darkness. However, spike and uppermost internode (UI) were converted from sink to source, due to increased abscisic acid (ABA) content and decreased cytokinin content. During this process, genes encoding amylases, Sugars Will Eventually be Exported Transporters (SWEET) and sucrose transporters or sucrose carriers (SUT/SUC) were up-regulated in spike and UI, which degraded starch into soluble sugars and loaded them into phloem. Subsequently, soluble sugars were transported to tiller node (TN) where cytokinin and auxin content increased and ABA content decreased, followed by unloading into TN cells by up-regulated cell wall invertase (CWINV) genes and highly expressed H+ /hexose symporter genes. Finally, expansin genes integrated the sugar pathway and hormone pathway, and regulate the formation of new tillers directly. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.


The current article focuses on attachment style—an individual difference widely studied in the field of close relationships—and its application to the study of social networks. Specifically, we investigated whether attachment style predicts perception and management of social networks. In Study 1, we examined the associations of attachment style with perceptions of network tie strength and multiplexity. In Studies 2a and 2b, we investigated the association between attachment style and network management skills (initiating, maintaining, and dissolving ties) and whether network management skills mediated the associations of attachment style with network tie strength and multiplexity. In Study 3, experimentally enhancing attachment security made people more likely to initiate and less likely to dissolve social ties (for the latter, especially among those high on avoidance or anxiety). As for maintenance, security priming also increased maintenance; however, mainly among people high on attachment anxiety or low on attachment avoidance.


Multiple Facets (MF) is a dynamic enforcement mechanism which has proved to be a good fit for implementing information flow security for JavaScript. It relies on multi executing the program, once per each security level or view, to achieve soundness. By looking inside programs, MF encodes the views to reduce the number of needed multi-executions. In this work, we extend Multiple Facets in three directions. First, we propose a new version of MF for arbitrary lattices, called Generalised Multiple Facets, or GMF. GMF strictly generalizes MF, which was originally proposed for a specific lattice of principals. Second, we propose a new optimization on top of GMF that further reduces the number of executions. Third, we strengthen the security guarantees provided by Multiple Facets by proposing a termination sensitive version that eliminates covert channels due to termination.


This strategic marketing thesis explores the effects of the service environment (servicescape) on customers' loyalty intentions towards UK restaurants. To obtain a deeper understanding of approach-avoidance behaviour, the study draws from broadly parallel perspectives in the economics, psychology and organizational behaviour academies, in conceptualizing and operationalizing loyalty intentions. The organizational behaviour domain was particularly integral to the study as the climate and culture of an organization were shown to respectively determine the cues placed in the servicescape and the performance of service staff, thereby proving useful lenses through which the servicescape could be explored, conceptualized and rigorously tested. In furtherance of conceptualization efforts, a model was developed to evaluate the linear influences of nine servicescape variables on customers' loyalty intentions. Additionally, the model appraised the impact of personal and environmental factors which were believed to moderate the servicescape - loyalty intentions relationship. The insertion of nine servicescape variables and four moderating factors into the model allowed for the development of a global configuration of the servicescape and provided a variation to the traditional servicescapes model. The results of rigorous statistical and econometric testing support ten of the thirteen advanced hypotheses, thus sustaining the adoption of an organizational behaviour perspective as a legitimate approach to servicescape study. To validate these findings, triangulate empirical results and add richness to the study, a series of focus group sessions were conducted to obtain high-quality data on customers' perceptions of servicescape cues. The findings of these sessions were shown to complement utilized empirical techniques and enrich understanding of the restaurant servicescape via the organizational behaviour domain. Consequently, organizational climate and organizational culture should, at the very least, be equated in importance to overall services marketing strategy.


The paper suggests that the private remedy for securities law violations might be unnecessary. Since the primary movers in the litigation are a small number of plaintiff law firms, the actual plaintiffs are by and large irrelevant; their role is to provide a rationale for damage measurement. But if the damages of the plaintiff class bear no logical relation to the social losses, then it might make sense to simply remove the plaintiffs from the process entirely. Plaintiff law firms are, in a sense, bounty hunters, supplementing the SEC's enforcement effort. The paper suggests that the current situation is similar to an open-access fishery and that a more efficient system might result in more sensible management of that fishery. The supplementary role might be better served if the SEC established a set of fines and then licensed some subset of private lawyers to pursue those fines.


Abstract Scapolite oikocrysts, up to 3 cm in diameter, occur in cognate, cumulate nodules from the 2 Ma riftrelated, alkali-basaltic Kula Volcanic Province in Western Turkey. Three scapolite-bearing nodules were found within deposits originating from two adjacent cones. They contain primocrysts of clinopyroxene, biotite, apatite and titanite, together with interstitial kaersutite, biotite, plagioclase and scapolite. Kula scapolites fall mid-way between the meionite (Ca4[Al6Si6O24]CO3) and marialite (Na4[Al3Si9O24]Cl) end-members (~Me45-71). We believe this to be the first report of interstitial magmatic scapolite.


&NA; The aim of this study was to describe registered nurses' experiences with an e-learning education program (ELEP) conducted at a 776-bed teaching medical center in Taipei. The study was completed in three stages: planning, implementation, and evaluation. Nurses who were registered were randomly assigned either to the ELEP or traditional in-classroom program (TICP). Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Forty-two nurses participated (22 in the ELEP and 20 in the TICP). Scores for participants were all > 70 points (out of 100) for both programs. Of the five courses, only teaching and learning and communication showed significant statistical difference between the two groups (p = .001). Nearly all participants (97.6%) felt satisfied with their program (both ELEP and TICP). All nurses passed the nursing care skill tests. Findings should help guide efforts to popularize e-learning education in Taiwan and help create alternative learning methods for future continuing nursing education programs.


Effect of nitric acid and the burning time on the liquid combustion synthesis of spinel LiMn2O4 has been studied, using lithium nitrite and Manganese acetate as raw a material. The results show that the main phases are all LiMn2O4, which can be obtained at 400-600 oC. Before modified, the impurity is Mn3O4 or Mn2O3. After modified, the impurity is only Mn3O4. The aggregation obviously reduced after adding nitric acid, it is indicated that the crystalline increased. With the increasing temperatures, the modified particle size was increased and the aggregation reduced. The initial discharge capacity and cycle stability improved at some extent too. Its first discharge capacity was 104.6, 112.8 and 117.7mAh/g synthesized at 400, 500, 600 oC, respectively, and the 30th capacity retention rate were 84.89%, 80.67% and 73.24%.


As shown by X-ray clinical and laboratory examinations of 495 patients over 18 years of age with primary tuberculosis of the respiratory organs, among primary forms of the specific process most prevalent are tuberculosis of the intrathoracic lymph nodes (tumor form), infiltrative tuberculosis with preroot or lower lobe location and exudative pleurisy. The peak of the incidence was reported in the group of 20-25-year-olds. The disease took an cute course with severe intoxication and symptoms of bronchopulmonary involvement in 45.3%, a torpid course with scare symptoms in 49.7% and a chronic course of primary tuberculosis in 5.0% of the examinees. Paraspecific reactions were observed in 5.9%, hyperergic tuberculin tests typical for primary tuberculosis in 10.9% of the cases. The examination of the sputum for bacterial and altered forms of M. tuberculosis raised frequency of the diagnosis verification by 16.0%. Respiratory tuberculosis in adults runs in the presence of marked disorders in lymphocyte T- and B-systems, antituberculous immunity and metabolic processes. Incidence rate and intensity of the above disorders correlate with severity of tuberculous intoxication and tuberculous lesions. The informative value of the complex of clinicoroentgenological and immunological tests in the diagnosis of primary tuberculosis varies from 44.4 to 79.6% and from 28.3 to 77.5% in dependence on the immunological and biochemical test, respectively.


CONTEXT: Interactive Intensive Mode Teaching (IMT) techniques were used to deliver an engineering design and project management unit at a Chinese university. A proportion of Chinese students studying this unit transferred to the University of Tasmania to complete a Bachelor of Engineering with Honours degree in a further two years (2+2 Program). The unit was delivered over a period of six weeks to large classes (75 and 115 students). At the same time students intending to transfer to UTAS undertook an English language academic skills unit. Both units were facilitated by the introduction of an on-line learning management system (Cloudcampus). PURPOSE: This study examines the effectiveness of the interactive IMT technique for the delivery of KNJ211 Engineering Design and Project Management by comparison with the traditional, didactic style of teaching employed by the same teacher in the previous year; the synergy between the engineering unit and an English language unit, delivered by the second author at the same time, is also explored. APPROACH: The effectiveness of interactive IMT delivery was evaluated through students' performances in aligned assessment tasks comprising a 5-minute video report on design studio group-work, in-class tests of content knowledge and an individual task. Students' engagement with IMT is examined through the lens of their use of Cloudcampus. RESULTS: The students' overall and in-class test results were significantly different from those of the previous year when the unit was delivered by the teacher-centred didactic method. A factor that may have contributed to this outcome is students' unfamiliarity with accessing the on-line content. CONCLUSIONS: Students' technical English language skills present a challenge to
effective delivery of engineering content. Some IMT techniques proved to be effective.


There were, in two generations, three Chamberlains in the first rank of British politics. Joseph, the greatest of them in personality and in the special gifts that qualify for the highest success in public life, would almost certainly have succeeded Gladstone in the leadership of the Liberal party had they not separated in 1886 on the question of Home Rule for Ireland. O f his two sons, Austen was educated for a public career and Neville for business. Austen twice, of deliberate choice, declined a course that might and probably would have led to the Premiership. It was to the younger son Neville that the great prize came, though he had no Parliamentary ambitions during the larger part of his life, and did not enter the House of Commons till he was within a few months of fifty. He did not go to the university as Austen had done but, on leaving Rugby, returned to his home in Birmingham and, after a short time at Mason College, entered an accountants' office. In 1890 his father bought land in the Bahamas for the cultivation of sisal which, he was advised, would produce the best quality of hemp. Neville went out at the age of twenty-one to take charge of the estate. He lived plain and worked hard for seven years and then had to admit failure. The soil was too thin and, after heavy financial loss, the enterprise was abandoned.


Research has documented that adults with baby faces are perceived as possessing different personality characteristics than those with mature-looking faces. Recently, studies have also shown that different faces are associated with different political affiliations. Therefore, we assumed that people with babyish faces would be perceived as having left-wing attitudes and mature-faced people would be perceived as having right-wing attitudes. Moreover, based on the status incongruity hypothesis and on research documenting people's preferences for those who do not violate expectations, we predicted that people whose faces are congruent with their stated political attitudes would be perceived as more socially and physically attractive. An experiment we conducted confirmed these hypotheses and documented that the occurrence of these effects depends on the similarity of attitudes between the participants and the target people.


Two of the persistent problems in finite-difference solutions of the elastic wave equation are the limited stability range of the free-surface boundary condition and the boundary condition's treatment of lateral variations in velocity and density. The centered-difference approximation presented by Alterman and Karal (1968), for example, remains stable only for β/α greater than 0.30, where β and α are the shear (S) and compressional (P) wave velocities. The one-sided approximation (Alterman and Rotenberg, 1969) and composed approximation (Ilan et al., 1975) have similar restrictions. The revised composed approximation of Ilan and Loewenthal (1976) overcomes this restriction, but cannot handle laterally varying media properly.


Background: The mean age of overall incident dialysis patients is 68.9 years for men and 71.4 years for women, and it is increasing yearly, and diabetic nephropathy is the most common underlying disease of it. On the other hand, the number of diabetologist has been insufficient for an ever-increasing number of diabetic patients in Japan. In this context, the examination and treatment of diabetes in non-specialist settings, as well as in specialist settings, have become important. Methods: A multicenter, retrospective, observational study was conducted in Kanagawa, Japan. Laboratory data were compiled for 1 year at intervals of 3 months following the start of sitagliptin treatment. The subjects were divided into three groups by age: < 65 years (n = 148), 65 - 74 years (n = 134), and ? 75 years (n = 127). Laboratory values in comparison with baseline were compared within groups at various time points, and changes from baseline were compared among the different groups. Participating doctors were not diabetologists. Results: In the 65 - 74 and ? 75 years of age groups, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) was decreased significantly from baseline at months 3, 6, 9, and 12, whereas there was no significant decrease from the month-3 value at months 6, 9, or 12. Meanwhile, in the < 65 years of age group, eGFR was decreased significantly from baseline at months 9 and 12, whereas changes at months 3 and 6 were not significant. There were significant differences in the magnitude of eGFR changes among age groups at month 3, but not at months 6, 9, or 12. Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) was reduced significantly at month 3, and the reduced level was maintained until month 12 in all age groups. Conclusions: The efficacy and safety of sitagliptin therapy in the elderly were confirmed in non-specialist settings. These findings will help non-diabetologists choose an appropriate drug in areas where the numbers of diabetic patients and elderly persons are increasing. J Endocrinol Metab. 2020;10(1):23-29 doi: https://doi.org/10.14740/jem634


As part of the programme to support penal reform, "Appui a la Reforme de la Justice (PARJ)", a communication strategy for social and behavioural changes for the prevention of youth delinquency and the promotion of alternative measures to detention was implemented from September 2016 to March 2017 in the cities of Gabes and Manouba (Tunisia). The objective of this communication strategy was to enable parents, professionals, and children themselves to become agents of change and active participants in the fght against juvenile delinquency and in the promotion of alternative measures to detention. The strategy implemented followed a participatory process of communication for development (C4D) and carried out several steps: a baseline evaluation followed by partner's mobilisations. In a second step, a youth mobilisation programme was implemented through a series of dialogues with children in conflict with the law, with children at risk, and with their families. The youths participated in participatory video, rap, grafftists, and social theatre in a transformative storytelling approach. The last step of the strategy was a face-to-face communication campaign using local youth and cultural centres but also involving local institutions where the media products created by the vulnerable youth were presented. The programme showed some very positive results such as improved self-esteem, improved resistance to delinquency, and improved dialogue capacity in the vulnerable children. Despite the short duration of the project, the programme worked with the different targets, and the engagement of the children was overwhelming. Educators in both towns expressed the importance of continuing the project.


The repairing work of terracotta warriors in Emperor Qinshihuang Mausoleum Site Museum is handcrafted by experts, and the increasing amounts of unearthed pieces of terracotta warriors make the archaeologists too challenging to conduct the restoration of terracotta warriors efficiently. We hope to segment the 3D point cloud data of the terracotta warriors automatically and store the fragment data in the database to assist the archaeologists in matching the actual fragments with the ones in the database, which could result in higher repairing efficiency of terracotta warriors. Moreover, the existing 3D neural network research is mainly focusing on supervised classification, clustering, unsupervised representation, and reconstruction. There are few pieces of researches concentrating on unsupervised point cloud part segmentation. In this paper, we present SRG-Net for 3D point clouds of terracotta warriors to address these problems. Firstly, we adopt a customized seed-region-growing algorithm to segment the point cloud coarsely. Then we present a supervised segmentation and unsupervised reconstruction networks to learn the characteristics of 3D point clouds. Finally, we combine the SRG algorithm with our improved CNN(convolution neural network) using a refinement method. This pipeline is called SRG-Net, which aims at conducting segmentation tasks on the terracotta warriors. Our proposed SRG-Net is evaluated on the terracotta warrior data and ShapeNet dataset by measuring the accuracy and the latency. The experimental results show that our SRG-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyoau/SRG-Net.


Commercial agriculture in the dry interior of South Africa is heavily reliant upon irrigation water from the Orange River. Most of this vital water does not fall as rain on South African soil but as rain and snow in the mountains of Lesotho. At various times over the past century fears have been expressed over the impact of soil erosion in the mountain areas of Lesotho on South African water resources. These fears have, on occasion, been translated into political pressure on Lesotho to implement anti-erosion policies such as grazing control in the mountain areas. This paper concentrates on the first period of anti-erosion policies in the mountain areas of Lesotho in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and examines the importance of South African pressures to the adoption of these policies. During this period the issue of soil erosion became an important element in the debate about the transfer of the High Commission Territories (Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana) to South African control and an issue that caused a great deal of concern amongst Lesotho's colonial officials. The subsequent development of an apartheid ideology changed the nature of South African demands in relation to the transfer of the High Commission Territories, and the issue of soil erosion rapidly dropped from the political agenda. The rise and fall of soil erosion as an issue of concern in this period had more to do with internal South African politics than it did with the reality of environmental conditions in the mountain areas of Lesotho.


Background: It is unclear whether any particular time of the day is Vulnerable for suicide attempts. Suicide attempt is a known risk factor for future completed suicide. Aim: To investigate the relationship between the time of suicide attempt and the sociodemograpic and illness characteristics of suicide attempters. Method: Time of attempt, clinical and demographic data and illness variables of 74 patients presenting to hospital following suicide attempt were analyzed. Results: Our results showed 8.a.m. to 11.59 a.m. is the most preferred time of attempt and it is statistically significant. Suicide attempt is significantly more in the day time (between 8 a.m. to 11.59 a.m.). The above time period is significantly associated with place of attempt of the suicide attempters. This is the time period where more young males (20 – 29 years) from rural back ground, married, illiterates and unemployed (significant no. of house wives also) attempt suicide during this time. Depression is the common psychiatric illness and pesticide is the common mode of attempt. More number of cases attempt during the months of August, September and October. Majority of them have experienced more than 5 life events before the attempt. Therefore we conclude that forenoon (8 a.m. to 11.59 a.m.) is the most vulnerable period for attempting suicide. Conclusion: The assessment of patients with history of suicide attempt in relation to the time of attempt is beneficial in formulating suicide prevention strategies.


The delamination phenomenon is common in composite beams as the composite beams are having laminate structures. Delamination leads to development of cracks which reduces the strength of the material and ultimately the material fails to bear the desirable load. In this project, the effect of delamination on free vibration of a rectangular plate with through width delamination was investigated using a finite strip method. The basic understanding of the influence of delamination on natural frequencies of delaminated plate is presented using Ansys13.0. Hamilton's principle is used to derive the equations of motion. In addition other factors affecting the vibration of delaminated plates are discussed. The variables of delamination are:
1. Location of delamination
2. Size of delamination
3. Mode of frequency
The numerical results for free vibration of delaminated plates are presented. As expected, the natural frequency decreases with increase in delamination length. These results obtained from ANSYS 13.0 are compared with the results of other case studies. The simulation and graphs are plotted to correlate the natural frequency and delamination variables.


Load imbalance problem is one of the major obstacles to achieving optimal performance of High Performance Computing applications. The approach of trying to distribute the problem pieces to each node with the hope of balancing execution time has limits since the performance depends not only on data size but also on many other dynamic factors. This paper describes an approach that uses adaptive resource management enabled by the container-based virtualization to solve the load imbalance problem of MPI programs running in the cloud. Our techniques dynamically adjust CPU resource allocation to MPI processes running as container instances according to the current program execution state and system resource status. The resource allocation among MPI processes is adjusted in two ways: the intra-host level, which dynamically adjusts resources within a host, and the inter-host level, which migrates containers together with MPI processes from one host to another host. We have implemented and evaluated our approach on Amazon EC2 platform using real-world scientific benchmarks and applications, which demonstrates that the performance can be improved up to 31% (with an average of 15%) when compared with the baseline.


The NW Dolomites (see fig. 1 and 2) have an area of approximately 1500 sq. km and are situated on the southern flank of the east alpine mountain range. The region consists mainly of permo-triassic and some younger mesozoic strata with a maximal thickness of about 3000 m. This sedimentary series was deposited unconformably on the basement of quartz phyllites, which had been metamorphosed during the hercynian orogenesis. This thesis deals especially with the tectonic evolution of the area. The greater part of the tectonic structures of the permo-triassic strata have previously been explained by most authors, excepting Diener, Accordi and Signorini, as a result of regional, tangential compression related to the alpine orogenesis. But a study of the crucial points of the tectonics showed that an explanation of the structural evolution by means of more locally restricted gravity tectonics should be preferred. The more general principles of the tectonic evolution of the eastern Alps, as expounded by Van Bemmelen (1960 a and b), are accepted as the tectonic setting for the structural evolution of the NW Dolomites in cenozoic time. The NW Dolomites are the northwestern corner of the larger unit of the Dolomites. The latter unit of the southeastern Alps lagged behind during the rise of the east alpine geanticline in tertiary time. This Dolomites-block has been separated from the more elevated, central parts of the geanticline by the large Judicaria and Pusteria faults (with a vertical throw of at least 5 km). Between this fault system and the area of the Dolomites a zone of relative subsidence is intercalated, which has a graben-like or synclinal character (Brenta Alps, Val di Non area, Sarntal Alps, Pusteria Valley). From San Candido this zone extends SE-ward to San Stefano di Cadore, this tract (Valle di Sesto) separates the Dolomites from the Carnian Alps. Parts of this depressed zone have been compressed subsequently by the gravitative spreading of the adjacent higher areas to the NW, N, and NE. (Dietzel, 1960; Van Hilten, 1960; Agterberg 1961). These authors have shown that this marginal belt along its NW, N, and NE side has been subjected to tectogenesis as a result of gravitational reactions to the rise of the east alpine geanticline. The central part of the NW Dolomites, however, has been more or less shielded from this gravitational stress field radiating from the central alpine uplift, by the deformations of this marginal belt. In this central part of the NW Dolomites the tectonic deformations of the sedimentary cover are merely an indirect result of the alpine orogeny. The tertiary uplift of the area caused a strong erosion. This erosion created a considerable relief with more local stress fields due to relief energy. The complicated tectonic structures of the NW Dolomites appear to be almost entirely the result of the local relief-energy produced by differential erosion in the course of the cenozoic time (such as the removal of the soft La Valle and San Cassiano strata between the ladino-carnian reef masses).


One's state of mind will influence her perception of the world and people within it. In this paper, we explore attitudes and behaviors toward online social media based on whether one is depressed or not. We conducted semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 14 active Twitter users, half of whom were depressed and the other half non-depressed. Our results highlight key differences between the two groups in terms of perception towards online social media and behaviors within such systems. Non-depressed individuals perceived Twitter as an information consuming and sharing tool, while depressed individuals perceived it as a tool for social awareness and emotional interaction. We discuss several design implications for future social networks that could better accommodate users with depression and provide insights towards helping depressed users meet their needs through online social media.