Poor literacy remains a decisive barrier to the economic empowerment of many people in the developing world. Of particular importance is literacy in a widely spoken "world language" such as English, which is typically a second language for these speakers. For complex reasons, schools are often not effective as vehicles for second language learning. In this paper we explore game-like language learning on cell phones. We argue that phones are an excellent technology platform in the typical ecologies of developing countries. We present the PACE framework that is intended to support the rapid, scalable development of language learning software localized for a particular community of learners. These learners are usually skeptical of formal education and of cultural biases they encounter in learning "remote" languages in particular. Localization of content is crucial to make the language relevant to them and to encourage them to adopt it.


Foreword. First Part: The Authentic Concepts of Multiplicity, Unity and Whole Number. Introduction. I: The Origination of the Concept of Multiplicity through that of the Collective Combination. The Analysis of the Concept of the Whole Number Presupposes that of the Concept of Multiplicity. The Concrete Bases of the Abstraction Involved. Independence of the Abstraction from the Nature of the Contents Colligated. The Origination of the Concept of the Multiplicity through Reflexion on the Collective Mode of Combination. II: Critical Developments. The Collective Unification and the Unification of Partial Phenomena in the Total Field of Consciousness at a Given Moment. The Collective 'Together' and the Temporal 'Simultaneously'. Collection and Temporal Succession. The Collective Synthesis and the Spatial Synthesis. A: F.A. Lange's Theory. B: Baumann's Theory. Colligating, Enumerating and Distinguishing. Critical Supplement. III: The Psychological Nature of the Collective Combination. Review. The Collection as a Special Type of Combination. On the Theory of Relations. Psychological Characterization of the Collective Combination. IV: Analysis of the Concept of Number in Terms of its Origin and Content. Completion of the Analysis of the Concept of Multiplicity. The Concept 'Something'. The Cardinal Numbers and the Generic Concept of Number. Relationship between the Concepts 'Cardinal Number' and 'Multiplicity'. One and Something. Critical Supplement. V: The Relations 'More' and 'Less'. The Psychological Origin of these Relations. Comparison of Arbitrary Multiplicities, as well as of Numbers, in Terms of More and Less. The Segregation of the Number Species Conditioned upon the Knowledge of More and Less. VI: The Definition of Number-Equality through the Concept of Reciprocal One-to-One Correlation. Leibniz's Definition of the General Concept of Equality. The Definition of Number-Equality. Concerning Definitions of Equality for Special Cases. Application to the Equality of Arbitrary Multiplicities. Comparison of Multiplicities of One Genus. Comparison of Multiplicities with Respect to their Number. The True Sense of the Equality Definition under Discussion. Reciprocal Correlation and Collective Combination. The Independence of Number-Equality from the Type of Linkage. VII: Definitions of Number in Terms of Equivalence. Structure of the Equivalence Theory. Illustrations. Critique. Frege's Attempt. Kerry's Attempt. Concluding Remark. VIII: Discussions Concerning Unity and Multiplicity. The Definition of Number as a Multiplicity of Units. One as an Abstract, Positive Partial Content. One as Mere Sign. One and Zero as Numbers. The Concept of the Unit and the Concept of the Number One. Further Distinctions Concerning One and Unit. Sameness and Distinctness of the Units. Further Misunderstandings. Equivocations of the Name 'Unit'. The Arbitrary Character of the Distinction between Unit and Multiplicity. The Multiplicity Regarded as One Multiplicity, as One Enumerated Unit, as One Whole. Herbartian Arguments. IX: The Sense of the Statement of Number. Contradictory Views. Refutation, and the Position Taken. Appendix to the First Part: The Nominalist Attempts of Helmholtz and Kronecker. Second Part: The Symbolic Number Concepts and the Logical Sources of Cardinal Arithmetic. X: Operations on Numbers and the Authentic Number Concepts. The Numbers in Arithmetic are Not Abstracta. The Fundamental Activities on Numbers. Addition. Partition. Arithmetic Does Not Operate with


The nephelometer experiment carried on the Galileo probe was designed to measure the jovian cloud structure and its microphysical characteristics from entry down to atmospheric pressure levels greater than 10 bars. Before this mission there was no direct evidence for the existence of the clouds below the uppermost cloud layer, and only theoretical models derived from remote sensing observations were available for describing such clouds. Only one significant cloud structure with a base at about 1.55 bars was found along the probe descent trajectory below an ambient pressure of about 0.4 bar, although many indications of small densities of particle concentrations were noted during much of the descent.


A distributed satellite system is composed of several small satellites working collaboratively or symbiotically together on a satellite mission. In such a system, fault detection can be executed in a similar way the distributed and specialized cells of the biological immune system find and counteract sicknesses. This paper proposes the use of an agent-based artificial immune system model for the detection of faults. The method takes into account the reduced memory and computational resources that small satellites have, applying control of population of agents through death and reproduction, and dimension reduction of the signatures that identify the agents. Simulations of the dynamics of the population of agents, of a model adjusted to a system with several satellites, shows emergent properties for encountering faults and counteracting them correspondingly.


Two-stage biological treatment schemes are often prescribed for pulp and paper mill effluents with high COD concentrations, in order to meet effluent standards. Recent conceptual developments in biological treatment of wastewaters indicate that the stoichiometry of the inert organic components is the key issue in performance predictions and the kinetics of degradable organic fraction play a relatively less important role in the compliance of effluent limitations. Besides, the differentiation between initially inert COD and inert metabolic products is very important in two-stage systems, as what is biodegradable for one phase may become non-biodegradable for the next phase in which a different microbial community is sustained. In this study a pulp and paper mill effluent is characterized in terms of its inert COD fractions and the changes induced by two-stage biological treatment to these fractions are observed. © 1998 SCI


We have studied the contribution of proliferation and hypertrophy of glandular cells to the ontogenetic growth of adrenal chromaffin tissue using several methods (organometry, cytometry, cytophotometric quantitation of DNA in the nuclei, radioautographic analysis of 3H-thymidine incorporation, calculation of the mitotic index and proportion of binuclear cells, as well as stereological analysis). Mitotic division of diploid glandular cells is the main cellular mechanism of postnatal growth of chromaffinocytes. It is most prominent during the first 2 weeks of life and is maintained at a rather high level throughout the life of animals (the daily proliferative pool in 6-month-old and 30-month-old rats equals 0.3%). Development of cellular hypertrophy has been noted during the first 6 months after birth. The population of chromaffinocytes throughout life is practically diploid; the proportion of tetraploid (binuclear) cells does not exceed 1-1.5%. The growth of adrenal chromaffin tissue during the first month of life is generally supported by hyperplasia and hypertrophy of norepinephrocytes and later of epinephrocytes. The contribution of cell proliferation and hypertrophy to postnatal growth of each subpopulation appears to be equal.


We studied the effects of hypoproteinemia following 12 days of repeated plasmapheresis and low-protein diet on sodium balance, fluid volumes, and renal hemodynamics in six conscious dogs on 50 mmol sodium intake. Measurements during hypoproteinemia were obtained during a 5-day recovery period starting 20 h after the final plasmapheresis session, with continued low-protein diet. During the plasmapheresis period sodium was retained. Sodium balance became negative on the first recovery day when plasma protein was 29 +/- 1 g/l (control 60 +/- 2 g/l, P less than 0.01), and plasma colloid osmotic pressure (COP) was 9 +/- 1 mmHg (control 22 +/- 1 mmHg, P less than 0.01). Subcutaneous fluid COP was lowered from 14 +/- 1 to 4 +/- 1 mmHg (P less than 0.01). Blood volume, plasma renin activity, and aldosterone were unchanged. Glomerular filtration rate and effective renal plasma flow were slightly reduced (NS), and filtration fraction was unchanged. After a second plasmapheresis period in three of the dogs, plasma protein fell to 26 +/- 1 g/l and COP to 7 +/- 1 mmHg. Now sodium was retained on the first day after stopping plasmapheresis, and renin and aldosterone were high. The next day, when plasma protein was again 29 +/- 1 g/l and COP 8 +/- 1 mmHg, these three dogs were able to completely excrete an infusion of 130 mmol sodium. These data suggest that the level of plasma COP below which dogs on a medium-sodium intake would retain sodium averages 8 mmHg, which is considerably lower than generally thought.


Modification-proof contracts boost commitment and can help overcome information problems. But when such rigid contracts are ubiquitous, they can function as social suicide pacts, compelling enforcement despite significant externalities. At the heart of the current financial crisis is a contract designed to be hyperrigid: the pooling and servicing agreement ("PSA"), which governs residential mortgage securitization. The PSA combines formal, structural, and functional barriers to its own modification with restrictions on the modification of underlying mortgage loans. Such layered rigidities fuel foreclosures, with spillover effects for homeowners, communities, financial institutions,financial markets, and the macroeconomy.This Article situates PSAs in the context of theoretical and policy debates about contract rigidity, bond contract modification, and contractual bankruptcy. We propose a typology of contract rigidities, ranging from formal prohibition on amendment (formal rigidity) to extreme collective action problems (functional rigidity). We then draw on New Deal jurisprudence for strategies to overcome each type of rigidity. These strategies include narrowly tailored legislation that renders the problematic terms unenforceable on public policy grounds, administrative restructuring mandates, and special bankruptcy regimes.The New Deal experience highlights the spillover effects of widespread contract practices, the limits of voluntary modification, and the utility of targeted government mandates to rewrite problematic terms. It also reveals the limits of such mandates. When different kinds of rigidity combine in a complex web of contracts, a comprehensive mechanism like bankruptcy may be necessary, if not always sufficient, to break the logjam.Rewriting PSAs will not resolve today's financial crisis. Yet voluntary foreclosure prevention initiatives are unlikely to succeed as long as contract rigidities persist. The continuing foreclosure epidemic also holds an important lesson for the future: even where contract rigidity makes perfect sense for the parties, pervasive rigidities can have catastrophic consequences for financial stability and for society.


A modern approach for generating individualized web-sites is to compose a page out of individual elements, for instance XML-fragments, which is eventually transformed to . If the generated pages differ for each user, then the required transformation processes put a heavy load on the server, hence slowing down response times significantly. The learning environment ACTIVEMATH uses this composing approach to generate learning courses that suit best the needs and goals of the individual learner. For instance, depending on their current knowledge, different users that learn the same content get presented courses that differ in length and in amount and difficulty of exercises and examples. Currently, the learning materials are transformed in one step from XML to (or other output formats). The learning materials are encoded in a language called OMDoc which encodes semantically the fragments as well as the mathematical formulae. This article hence provides an approach to the answer ``How can Semantic Web technology be used to improve adaptation and information retrieval?''. Moreover the ability to generate multiple output formats from the same content source is a central requirement of the architecture. It provides a first step towards device adaptation providing, currently, an on-screen version and a printable PDF version. This article describes the architecture we developed to solve the performance problems that arouse out of the page generation process. In this architecture, the generation process is divided into several layers, with each layer adding/transforming well-specified data. Among other advantages, this approach allows caching of individual transformed fragments. We hope that in this way the performance problems can be reduced.


A number of suggestions have been advanced for more efficient diagnosis and treatment of blow-out fractures of the orbital floor. The diagnosis is often missed on routine examination because the fracture either is not suspected or else is masked by facial edema or lacerations. A number of treatments have been devised, but none has proved acceptable to all investigators. The purpose of this paper is to report our experience at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania with blow-out fractures, with special attention to the histories of 10 patients treated by antral packing with petrolatum impregnated gauze. Mechanism and Causes of Injury The orbital contents are protected by a ring of strong bony abutments. These are composed of the supraorbital arch of the frontal bone superiorly; the zygoma laterally; the frontal process of the maxilla medially; and the thick rim of the orbital floor, formed by the zygoma and maxilla,


ABSTRACT Background New technologies show promise in the construction of self-administered home-based programs for targeting language impairments, in overcoming mobility problems and in providing access to care in a cost-effective and time-saving way. Aims In the present study, we investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of a self-administered home-based program for treating word-finding difficulties in persons with Alzheimer's disease. Methods & procedures Ten participants practised word repetition training on a smart tablet for two weeks. Two slightly different training conditions were adopted; they varied as to the order of the presentation of the word to be repeated and the corresponding picture. Outcomes & Results Both training modalities proved effective in improving naming accuracy on the treated items. There were hints of greater treatment efficacy when the picture was presented before the word to be repeated. Furthermore, when the trial started with the word, the degree of general cognitive impairment and lexical semantic deficits correlated with the effect size of the training benefit. By contrast, the picture first training did not have this modulatory effect. Finally, no generalisation to untreated items was observed in naming accuracy, but was detectable with a more sensitive stem completion task. Conclusions Our study provides compelling evidence in favour of the feasibility and efficacy of a homebased program for remediating anomia in AD.


We report here the experimental results on a field effect refractive index change into gallium nitride (GaN) structures. This effect is characterized through the common prism-coupling technique with the application of a vertical direct-current electric field. Surface plasmon propagation was used to increase the sensitivity of the electro-optic measurements. We have obtained a large refractive index variation for GaN epilayer, around 1.4×10−2 at 1.55μm wavelength. In order to understand the origin of the index modulation, we have conducted a scanning transmission electron microscopy analysis and discussed the influence of threading dislocations density acting as traps and thermo-optic effect. According to recent works, we observed experimentally the optical response of a non-linear electro-optic effect on GaN on Si(111) substrate and estimated a Kerr coefficient of about 2.14×10−16m2 V−2.


A common problem of both conventional and real-time PCR assays is failure of DNA amplification due to the presence of inhibitory substances in samples. In view of this, our aim was to develop and evaluate internal amplification controls (IACs) for use with an existing duplex real-time PCR assay for Campylobacter coli and Campylobacter jejuni. Both competitive and non-competitive IACs were developed and evaluated. The competitive approach involved a DNA fragment of the coding region of the fish viral haemorrhagic septicaemia virus, flanked by the mapA PCR primers, whilst the non-competitive approach utilized an extra set of universal 16S rDNA primers. Both IAC-PCR assay types were evaluated using cultures of Campylobacter and chicken caecal content samples. Both IACs were sensitive to caecal inhibitors, making them suitable for detecting inhibition which could lead to false-negatives. Results showed that both IACs at optimum concentrations worked well without reducing the overall sensitivity of the PCR assay. Compared to culture, the optimized competitive IAC-PCR assay detected 45/47 positives (sensitivity 93.6 %, specificity 80.1 %); however, it had the advantage over culture in that it could detect mixed infections of C. coli and C. jejuni and was capable of giving a result for a sample within a day.


The process of replacing each edge of a regular polyhedron with a square results in the creation of a new object, similar to the process of Stott expansion. However, following the edge to square transformation, the resulting object's surface no longer has genus zero. In some cases, the object also contains bumps or craters to accommodate the additional length of material. This process can be generalized to any polyhedral form having equal length edges, such as Platonic solids, Archimedean solids, prisms, and anti-prisms. Examples are shown for these particular classes of polyhedra using a variety of materials and symmetries.


This article analyses some of the potential language policy scenarios in a democratic, integrated European Union. It examines how a functional multilingual, democratic, ecological language policy in the European Parliament may ensure equal participation in, and benefit from, democratic processes for both majority and minority language communities. How multilingualism is managed and language policy is formed will be crucial in creating the identity of a future European Union, which the author discusses through a reinterpretation of what the EU might stand for; summarised in the notions of an English Union, an Elite Union, an Equal Union or an Esperanto Union. Language policy issues are especially important with regard to education, as multilingual education could be viewed as a democratic tool safeguarding active citizen participation in an intergovernmental forum such as the EU. Based on a three-language model it is possible to sustain a secure ethnic identity or identities via teaching through the mother tongue(s), as well as by acquiring at least one lingua franca and additional languages through carefully planned and well-organised multilingual education. The article concludes, in the long term, that the optimal language policy alternative would be one employing a planned language (such as Esperanto) as lingua franca, as a relay language and as an internal working language for the EU institutions.


The interaction between the land surface and the atmosphere is of significant importance in the climate system because it is a key driver of the exchanges of energy and water. Several important relations to heat waves, floods, and droughts exist that are based on the interaction of soil moisture and, for instance, air temperature and humidity. Our ability to separate the elements of this coupling, identify the exact locations where they are strongest, and quantify their strengths is, therefore, of paramount importance to their predictability. A recent rigorous causality formalism based on the Liang–Kleeman (LK) information flow theory has been shown, both theoretically and in real-world applications, to have the necessary asymmetry to infer the directionality and magnitude within geophysical interactions. However, the formalism assumes stationarity in time, whereas the interactions within the land surface and atmosphere are generally nonstationary; furthermore, it requires a sufficiently long time series to ensure statistical sufficiency. In this study, we remedy this difficulty by using the square root Kalman filter to estimate the causality based on the LK formalism to derive a time-varying form. Results show that the new formalism has similar properties compared to its time-invariant form. It is shown that it is also able to capture the time-varying causality structure within soil moisture–air temperature coupling. An advantage is that it does not require very long time series to make an accurate estimation. Applying a wavelet transform to the results also reveals the full range of temporal scales of the interactions.


THREE YEARS AGO, Rafferty and colleagues celebrated the development of research and development (R&D) in the nursing professions by saying that 'there has rarely been a time in the history of nursing and midwifery research to be quite so optimistic about the future' ( Rafferty et al 2002 ).


Physical geography in the UK is extraordinarily rich and diverse. It provides insights into processes and forms in the natural environment, including climate and atmosphere, geomorphology and landscape, biogeography and ecosystems, hydrology and water science, oceans and soils. The use, application and development of technologies, including Earth observation, GIS, and geochronological tools, are integral parts of contemporary physical geography. This report is the first to compile evidence on the health and influence of UK physical geography. It uses documented evidence, most of which is in the public domain, to describe the nature and demand for physical geography in schools, the shape and size of physical geography in universities, the achievements and global influence of UK physical geography and its academic community, and the aspirations and skillsets offered by the next generation of physical geographers. Physical geography brings a unique spatial perspective, and the capability to integrate across scales and subdisciplinary systems. It links to aspects of environmental science, mathematics, physics and life sciences. It sets intellectual agendas both within and beyond geography, and leads eminent international collaborative research programmes. The 'de-siloing' of science in the 21st century in response to big 'whole world' societal-environment challenges demonstrates the value of approaches which have always been integral to UK physical geography. UK physical geography is international in outlook, is world-leading in many subareas, and influences the discipline worldwide. This is achieved through many routes including: international research partnerships; the training given to overseas students in UK geography departments, particularly at graduate level; and the roles played by UK-based academics in international professional bodies, international journal editorships and major conferences. UK physical geography research is funded from diverse sources and punches well above its weight in terms of success rates at the UK Research Councils. In the last decade, European funding has also been vital in supporting UK physical geography research. New substantial funding opportunities are emerging including through the UK's Global Challenges ResearchFund and Industrial Strategy, which physical geography is well placed to engage with.Additionally, the opportunities for postgraduate doctoral research in physical geography have been enhanced with the advent of the UK Research Council doctoral training programmes. The future of physical geography is bright. It is witnessing a resurgence in popularity in schools in England. Curriculum changes, increasing physical geography's presence within A-Levels in England and Wales, are positive developments, as are a greater emphasis on fieldwork, individual project work and data skills. These provide opportunities for physical geography to bolster its position within the discipline in schools and beyond. The situation is not consistent across the UK; it is hoped that changes can be made in the content of Scottish Highers that leads to greater balance in the content of physical and human geography. At university, physical geography is a popular and growing subject choice and attracts some of the highest-calibre students to its undergraduate degrees. As well as being taught in UK university geography undergraduate programmes, physical geography is widespread in other degree structures and departments. Successful course delivery is contingent upon institutions providing appropriate access to laboratory facilities, fieldwork opportunities and quantitative training. Physical geography undergraduates perform well in their degrees, express high level of courses satisfaction, and have excellent employment outcomes compared to many disciplines. The independent review of this report by a panel of eminent overseas experts confirms that "it is beyond doubt that UK physical geography is a leading force worldwide as evidenced by all the metrics discussed in this report". Nonetheless, there are challenges, detailed within the report, that need to be addressed to enhance the scientific academic and public presence, inclusivity, resourcing, autonomy, and global reputation of UK physical geography. It is recommended that a working group representative of constituent bodies within UK physical geography, led by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG), is set up to take forward the ssues associated with thesechallenges.


In spring 2015, a multidisciplinary team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison developed a unified, 4-part orientation project that was integrated into 15 undergraduate summer online courses. The team sought to create a newfound informational support structure for summer online students and integrate it with centralized learning technologies so that over the long term it could be scaled to serve a larger audience. This paper presents a description of the inception of the committee and the orientation pilot and its main components, describes the way they were deployed and evaluated, and lists key takeaways for administrators.


Disposal of water treatment residue (WTR), the by-product from the production of potable water, has traditionally been to landfill. The shortage of suitable landfill sites has led to the proposal that WTR be applied to land. Such disposal is only pos sible if the WTR contains no toxic elements that may contaminate soil, water or vegetation. Previous studies have shown that most WTRs in South Africa contain a high concentration of Mn, which was assumed to be from the drinking water treatment chemicals. This study investigated this assumption at one water treatment plant (WTP) in KwaZulu-Natal. Chemical analysis of drinking water treatment chemicals and a mass balance for Mn at the WTP showed that the main source of Mn was brown lime (added during the treatment process), although the raw water also added appreciable amounts of Mn to the WTR due to the volume of water treated. The concentration of Mn in the organic polymers, bentonite, ferric chloride, ferric sulphate and alum was negligible or very low. It is unlikely that the cost increase associated with changing from brown lime to white lime could be justified, given that the environmental impact of Mn is unclear and is generally not considered to be a problem internationally. Different ecosystems will respond differently to Mn loading and deriving a single, national, maximum permissible level for Mn within a WTR to permit land application is thus difficult and inappropriate.


Chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP) is a common and debilitating complication of major surgery. We undertook a pilot study at three hospitals to assess the feasibility of a proposed large multicentre placebo-controlled randomised trial of intravenous perioperative ketamine to reduce the incidence of CPSP. Ketamine, 0.5 mg/kg pre-incision, 0.25 mg/kg/hour intraoperatively and 0.1 mg/kg/hour for 24 hours, or placebo, was administered to 80 patients, recruited over a 15-month period, undergoing abdominal or thoracic surgery under general anaesthesia. The primary endpoint was CPSP in the area of the surgery reported at six-month telephone follow-up using a structured questionnaire. Fourteen patients (17.5%) reported CPSP (relative risk [95% confidence interval] if received ketamine 1.18 [0.70 to 1.98], P=0.56). Four patients in the treatment group and three in the control group reported ongoing analgesic use to treat CPSP and two patients in each group reported their worst pain in the previous 24 hours at ≥3/10 at six months. There were no significant differences in adverse event rates, quality of recovery scores, or cumulative morphine equivalents consumption in the first 72 hours. Numeric Rating Scale pain scores (median [interquartile range]) for average pain in the previous 24 hours among those patients reporting CPSP were 17.5 [0 to 40] /100 with no difference between treatment groups. A large (n=4,000 to 5,000) adequately powered multicentre trial is feasible using this population and methodology.


An important prerequisite for Side-channel Attack (SCA) is leakage sampling where the side-channel measurements (e.g. power traces) of the cryptographic device are collected for further analysis. However, as the operating frequency of cryptographic devices continues to increase due to advancing technology, leakage sampling will impose higher requirements on the sampling equipment. This paper undertakes the first study to show that effective leakage sampling can be achieved without relying on sophisticated equipments through Compressive Sensing (CS). In particular, CS can obtain low-dimensional samples from high-dimensional power traces by simply projecting the useful information onto the observation matrix. The leakage information can then be reconstructed in a workstation for further analysis. With this approach, the sampling rate to obtain the side-channel measurements is no longer limited by the operating frequency of the cryptographic device and Nyquist sampling theorem. Instead it depends on the sparsity of the leakage signal. Our study reveals that there is large amount of information redundancy in power traces obtained from the leaky device. As such, CS can employ a much lower sampling rate and yet obtain equivalent leakage sampling performance, which significantly lowers the requirement of sampling equipments. The feasibility of our approach is verified theoretically and through experiments.


SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, exploits host cell proteins for viral entry into human lung cells. One of them, the protease TMPRSS2, is required to activate the viral spike protein (S). Even though two inhibitors, camostat and nafamostat, are known to inhibit TMPRSS2 and block cell entry of SARS-CoV-2, finding further potent therapeutic options is still an important task. In this study, we report that a late-stage drug candidate, otamixaban, inhibits SARS-CoV-2 cell entry. We show that otamixaban suppresses TMPRSS2 activity and SARS-CoV-2 infection of a human lung cell line, although with lower potency than camostat or nafamostat. In contrast, otamixaban inhibits SARS-CoV-2 infection of precision cut lung slices with the same potency as camostat. Furthermore, we report that otamixaban's potency can be significantly enhanced by (sub-) nanomolar nafamostat or camostat supplementation. Dominant molecular TMPRSS2-otamixaban interactions are assessed by extensive 109 μs of atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. Our findings suggest that combinations of otamixaban with supplemental camostat or nafamostat are a promising option for the treatment of COVID-19.


This thesis investigates the collection of levies by the state from Colombian coffee and Philippine coconut producers and the delegation of authority, to mobilise and regulate the uses of the levies, to producers associations in these sectors. The thesis suggests that these activities constitute an "institutional framework" for state-engineered rents, whereby public authority is appropriated by private agents. It asks why similarly-designed institutions for allocating rents yielded different outcomes: Colombian coffee levies are associated with growth-enhancing and producer welfare-promoting investments in coffee production and
marketing, while Philippine coconut levies are depicted as non-developmental rent capture by associates of a president.

The thesis explains the variation in outcomes by examining the basis in political economy of the power exercised by the leading sectoral organisations,
FEDECAFE in Colombia and COCOFED in the Philippines, and how they articulated this power in the mobilisation of the levies. It finds that the conditions for collective action and the exercise of power were more robust for Colombian coffee than Philippine coconut producers. This meant that while FEDECAFE directly intermediated between coffee producers and the state in the mobilisation
of rents associated with coffee levies, COCOFED shared the power of mobilising rents with other individual political brokers. This variation led to differences in
rent mobilisation: a process that was production-enhancing in Colombia but not in the Philippines.

This work thus shows how variations in the political organisation of rent-seeking may be linked to variations in the developmental outcomes associated with the
collection and deployment of such levies. Doing so, it seeks to contribute to the understanding of the political conditions under which state-engineered rents may be production-enhancing – an important question in late developing countries, where corruption may be endemic, but state-allocated rents nevertheless necessary for promoting development.


Federated Learning (FL) is a novel distributed machine learning which allows thousands of edge devices to train model locally without uploading data concentrically to the server. But since real federated settings are resource-constrained, FL is encountered with systems heterogeneity which causes a lot of stragglers directly and then leads to significantly accuracy reduction indirectly. To solve the problems caused by systems heterogeneity, we introduce a novel self-adaptive federated framework FedSAE which adjusts the training task of devices automatically and selects participants actively to alleviate the performance degradation. In this work, we 1) propose FedSAE which leverages the complete information of devices' historical training tasks to predict the affordable training workloads for each device. In this way, FedSAE can estimate the reliability of each device and self-adaptively adjust the amount of training load per client in each round. 2)combine our framework with Active Learning to self-adaptively select participants. Then the framework accelerates the convergence of the global model. In our framework, the server evaluates devices' value of training based on their training loss. Then the server selects those clients with bigger value for the global model to reduce communication overhead. The experimental result indicates that in a highly heterogeneous system, FedSAE converges faster than FedAvg, the vanilla FL framework. Furthermore, FedSAE outperforms than FedAvg on several federated datasets - FedSAE improves test accuracy by 26.7% and reduces stragglers by 90.3% on average.


There exists an ongoing need to develop and improve methods of detecting radioactive materials. As each radioactive isotope leaves a unique mark in a form of the particles it emits, new materials capable of detecting and measuring these particles are constantly sought. Neutrons and their detectors play a significant role in areas such as nuclear power generation, nuclear decommissioning and decontamination, border security, nuclear proliferation and nuclear medicine. Owing to the complexity of their detection, as well as scarcity of 3He, which has historically been the preferred choice for neutron detection in many application fields, new sensitive materials are sought. Organic and inorganic scintillating crystals have been recognised as particularly good alternatives, and as such systems that utilise them are increasingly common. As they allow investigation of the neutron energy spectra, greater information about the radioactive source can be inferred. Therefore, in this article, an extensive review of scintillating crystals used for neutron detection is presented. By describing the history of scintillating crystals and discussing changes that occurred in their use and development of methods for radiation detection, the authors present a comprehensive overview of the current situation. Supported by a practical example, possible future directions of the research area are also presented.


Under two assumptions, we determine the distribution of the difference between two functions each counting the numbers less than or equal to x that are in a given arithmetic progression modulo q and the product of two primes. The two assumptions are (i) the extended Riemann hypothesis for Dirichlet L-functions modulo q, and (ii) that the imaginary parts of the nontrivial zeros of these L-functions are linearly independent over the rationals. Our results are analogues of similar results proved for primes in arithmetic progressions by Rubinstein and Sarnak.


Good stratigraphy mapping of a site is essential in archaeological explorations but Guar Kepah, Penang, Malaysia had no detailed subsurface mapping done previously up till now. As many archaeological remnants in the vicinity have an affiliation with shell middens, better understanding on Guar Kepah's strata will increase the efficiency of uncovering the shell middens while also saving a huge amount of energy in excavating. This research aims to distinguish Guar Kepah's buried shell midden from the surrounding strata using electrical resistivity method. The study area is composed of three shallow strata of unconsolidated soil with low resistivity values. The sandy-clay layer has the lowest resistivity (< 40 Ωm), followed by densely packed shell layer (40–70 Ωm) and sandy layer (> 70 Ωm). The presence of shells indicates that the uppermost strata is of marine origin, which automatically makes Gula Formation the youngest formation in Guar Kepah due to the absence of terrestrial deposits (Beruas Formation) on top of the layer. The shell layer from the resistivity profiles suggests that the layer has relatively uniform thickness throughout the site. The layer also becomes undulating and shallow towards the south (dipping), making the top sandy-clay soil become thinner or absent in the south. The dipping feature of the shell layer acts as an indicator that Guar Kepah used to be a beach ridge during sea transgression, and further proves that the area was once a marine environment. However, the shell layer at the southern zone poses an anomaly where it suddenly dips toward the centre. As a result, two zones were marked as potential shell middens at the south-western zone (only exhibits one side of the midden that is dipping towards centre) and south-eastern zone (shell midden elongated to the east). Subsequent excavation based on this study had successfully exposed the south-eastern midden and Shell Midden at Guar Kepah 100 proved that resistivity method could be used not only in stratigraphy identification, but also in characterising shell layer and detecting shell midden.


SUMMARY: Chemotaxis of a bacterium such as Escherichia coli is assayed by measuring the number of organisms attracted into a capillary tube containing an attractant. Rate of bacterial accumulation in capillaries and a concentration-response curve for l-aspartate taxis are presented and interpreted, and the effect of bacterial concentration is reported. Other parameters of the assay were studied, such as the volume of fluid in the capillary and the size of the capillary opening. The concentration gradient of chemical was also described. Escherichia coli chemotaxis requires EDTA to allow motility, a buffer to maintain the pH at its optimum near neutrality, and l-methionine if it cannot be synthesized. Under certain conditions there is stimulation by inorganic ions, either by K+ or, less effectively, by Na+. Chemotaxis is dependent on temperature, there being a 20-fold increase in the number of bacteria accumulating in a capillary when the temperature is raised from 20 to 30 °C.


Increasing use of high throughput genomic scale assays requires effective visualization and analysis techniques to facilitate data interpretation. Moreover, existing tools often require programming skills, which discourages bench scientists from examining their own data. We have created iCanPlot, a compelling platform for visual data exploration based on the latest technologies. Using the recently adopted HTML5 Canvas element, we have developed a highly interactive tool to visualize tabular data and identify interesting patterns in an intuitive fashion without the need of any specialized computing skills. A module for geneset overlap analysis has been implemented on the Google App Engine platform: when the user selects a region of interest in the plot, the genes in the region are analyzed on the fly. The visualization and analysis are amalgamated for a seamless experience. Further, users can easily upload their data for analysis—which also makes it simple to share the analysis with collaborators. We illustrate the power of iCanPlot by showing an example of how it can be used to interpret histone modifications in the context of gene expression.


ABSTRACT Scrap material recovery and recycling companies are producing wastewater in which common pollutants (such as COD, nutrients and suspended solids), toxic metals, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) frequently can exceed the discharge limits. Lab-scale optimisation of different possible physical–chemical treatment techniques was performed on the wastewater originating from three different companies in view of further testing at pilot-scale testing and implementation at full-scale. The lab-scale tests demonstrate that sedimentation or hydrocyclone treatment as stand-alone technique cannot be used for proper treatment of this type of wastewater. Dual bed filtration or coagulation/flocculation proved to be more promising with removal efficiencies of about 71–95% (dual bed filtration) and 61–97% (coagulation/flocculation) for the above-mentioned pollutants (metals, PAH and PCB).


Lateral movement from the principal trajectory, or "swing", can be generated on a cricket ball when its seam, which sits proud of the surface, is angled to the flow. The boundary layer on the two hemispheres divided by the seam is governed by the Reynolds number and the surface roughness; the swing is fundamentally caused by the pressure differences associated with asymmetric flow separation. Skillful bowlers impart a small backspin to create gyroscopic inertia and stabilize the seam position in flight. Under certain flow conditions, the resultant pressure asymmetry can reverse across the hemispheres and "reverse swing" will occur. In this paper, particle image velocimetry measurements of a scaled cricket ball are presented to interrogate the flow field and the physical mechanism for reverse swing. The results show that a laminar separation bubble forms on the non-seam side (hemisphere), causing the separation angle for the boundary layer to be increased relative to that on the seam side. For the first time, it is shown that the separation bubble is present even under large rates of backspin, suggesting that this flow feature is present under match conditions. The Magnus effect on a rotating ball is also demonstrated, with the position of flow separation on the upper (retreating) side delayed due to the reduced relative speed between the surface and the freestream.


Recently, the Bayesian analysis of the two-component mixture of lifetime models under singly type I censored samples was discussed. The Bayes estimation of the parameters of mixture of two Rayleigh distributions (MTRD) is developed under doubly censoring. Different informative priors, under squared error loss function and k-loss function, have been assumed for the posterior estimation. The performance of different estimators has been compared in terms of posterior risks by analyzing the simulated and real life data sets.


Linear active-power-only power flow approximations are pervasive in the planning and control of power systems. However, AC power systems are governed by a system of nonlinear nonconvex power flow equations. Existing linear approximations fail to capture key power flow variables, including reactive power and voltage magnitudes, both of which are necessary in many applications that require voltage management and AC power flow feasibility. This paper proposes novel linear-programming models (the LPAC models) that incorporate reactive power and voltage magnitudes in a linear power flow approximation. The LPAC models are built on a polyhedral relaxation of the cosine terms in the AC equations as well as Taylor approximations of the remaining nonlinear terms. Experimental comparisons with AC solutions on a variety of standard IEEE and Matpower benchmarks show that the LPAC models produce accurate values for active and reactive power, phase angles, and voltage magnitudes. The potential benefits of the LPAC model...


Good health is essential for good performance and the welfare of dairy cows, and nutrition is an important component of good health. Health is influenced by the interaction between the innate adaptive components of the immune system and other factors, such as the local and systemic inflammatory response, which can sometimes be more harmful than useful. Therefore, for dairy cows, particularly those in the periparturient period, it is important to avoid, or reduce as much as possible, any kind of infectious, parasitic or metabolic disease and the associated inflammation. Such inflammation can impair cow performance by lowering milk yield, dry matter intake, fertility and energy efficiency, and can reduce liver function. Good nutrition is essential in maintaining a functional immune system, while also avoiding other causes of inflammation, such as tissue damage, and digestive and metabolic syndrome-related disorders. Provision of appropriate nutrients, such as antioxidants, omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid and vitamin D can have anti-inflammatory effects. In the future, ways to reduce inflammation while maintaining a good immune defence must be developed and the susceptibility of the cow to diseases and inflammation evaluated. Ideally, we would be able to selectively breed for cows with a lower susceptibility to both diseases and inflammation.


We report on a series of experiments with convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on top of pre-trained word vectors for sentence-level classification tasks. We show that a simple CNN with little hyperparameter tuning and static vectors achieves excellent results on multiple benchmarks. Learning task-specific vectors through fine-tuning offers further gains in performance. We additionally propose a simple modification to the architecture to allow for the use of both task-specific and static vectors. The CNN models discussed herein improve upon the state of the art on 4 out of 7 tasks, which include sentiment analysis and question classification.


Objective: To study the Knowledge, Attitude, and Use of Pit and Fissure Sealants by Dentists in Nairobi. Materials and methods: This was a descriptive cross-sectional study which was done between May and June 1999. Questionnaires were distributed to 115 dentists who were sampled through convenience sampling. Setting: Nairobi Subjects: Dentists in public and private practice. Results: Sixty nine dentists (60%) responded. (50.7%) of the dentists had average knowledge on PFS. Majority of the respondents (92.7%) agreed that Pit and fissure sealants should be part of preventive measures for dental caries. (65%) claimed to use Pit and fissure sealants with only a third using them regularly. The Pediatric dentists used sealants frequently. Conclusion: Application of PFS was not practiced much in Nairobi and sealant usage was associated with dentist's knowledge about them. There is need to disseminate knowledge on PFS to the dentists and sensitize the public about prevention of dental decay using sealants.


As for the trend identification, the literature is full of quantitative studies, but with respect to two-probability distribution function (PDF) description remains at qualitative level. The main purpose of this paper is to convert the two-PDF description into quantitative form for objective and quantitative assessments. Such a goal is achieved on the basis of innovative trend templates, which indicate the arithmetic averages and the standard deviations of the two equal length halves of the given temperature record. Two-PDF explanations are represented by three combinations as changes in the arithmetic averages, standard deviations and in both parameters through their logical connections with the innovative template description. The application of the methodology is given for four mean annual temperature records from Istanbul City, Turkey. Global warming variations are described quantitatively as increases or decreases in the statistical parameters. The proposed methodology can be applied for any temperature record in the world.


Primary REE-enriched fluorapatite and fluorbritholite-(ce) in nepheline syenite from the Mariupol Massif (SE Ukraine), contain textural and chemical evidence of late- to post-magmatic metasomatic alteration. REE mobilization and replacement of the primary phases by fluid-mediated coupled dissolution-reprecipitation strongly depended on the distance between the altered minerals in the host rock. fluorapatite and fluorbritholite-(ce) forming individual pristine grains were partially replaced by the same phase with a new composition, resulting in the presence of patchy zoning in altered grains. the increased REE contents in altered fluorapatite rim domains are related to REE mobilization from the altered REE-depleted rim domains of the fluorbritholite-(ce). the REEs were transported by a fluid with high f activity. the alteration of fluorapatite and fluorbritholite-(ce) grains in contact resulted in the partial replacement of the primary phases by the same phase with a new composition, but also in the partial replacement of the fluorapatite by secondary monazite and fluorite. the REE mobilized from the fluorbritholite-(ce) in the presence of a f-rich fluid in an alkali-rich system promoted formation of monazite as the new phosphate REE-host. the presence of secondary parisite in the altered domains of the fluorapatite and fluorbritholite-(ce) indicates a co2 component in the fluid during metasomatic alteration.


In this paper, based on bifuzzy theory, we have studied the multiobjective programming problem under bifuzzy environment, and presented the expected-value model which is a deterministic multiobjective problem. To the expected value model, the concepts of non-inferior solution are defined, and their relations are also discussed. According to practical decision-making process, a solution method, called the method of main objective function, has been studied, whose results can facilitate us to design algorithms to solve the bifuzzy multiobjective programming problem.


This article will focus on exploring gender and sexuality within the law school. Largely silent from Twining's 'grand tour', these two areas are now key parts of the law school landscape, having become firmly established as key elements of law school discourse and legal scholarship in the years since Blackstone's Tower was published. The Blackstone's Tower of Twining's imagination was, Twining suggested, 'holding up a mirror to a familiar world', and it was a world that made only passing reference to gender and no reference to sexuality. Feminism is mentioned twice in 244 pages, whilst queer—still emergent within legal scholarship in 1994—is not referenced at all. A once radical and vital text can perhaps appear antiquated to today's readers. Yet, this should not be regarded as a criticism of the text but rather a reflection of how the law school and legal scholarship has transformed since 1994. Whether in the number of gender and/or sexuality and law courses that now permeate through the UK law school, or the extraordinary growth first of feminist scholarship and more recently queer scholarship, the law school has been profoundly impacted by socio-legal shifts in gender and sexuality research. This is scholarship that does not merely serve as 'another' theory or an addendum to jurisprudence, for these theories have offered the ability to reshape the very architecture of the law school and to re-imagine Blackstone's Tower for what it is and what it can be. This article seeks to explore that journey and offer a glimpse of future possibilities.
Keywords: legal education; gender; sexuality; queer; feminism; gay; pedagogy; LGBTQ; teaching.


A number of design and development methods, including participatory design and agile software development, are premised on an underlying assumption of equality amongst relevant stakeholders such as designers, developers, product owners, and end users. Equality, however, is not a straightforwardly accepted feature of all cultural perspectives. In this paper, we discuss the situation of equality-centric methods in a culturally mixed setting. We present a case study of the Girl Game Workshop, a game development event intended to empower young women through game design and to promote diversity in game creation. While conducting the workshop, the organisers encountered numerous issues, which presented challenges to their assumptions of the desirability of an emphasis on equality during game design and development. In this paper, we focus on seven key themes relating to equality that emerged from an ethnography conducted during the workshop, including location, cultural and classroom hierarchies, gender, "girl games", stakeholders and boundaries, and risk mitigation.


This report presents the results of the repeatability evaluation for the 2nd International Competition on Verifying Continuous and Hybrid Systems (ARCH-COMP'18). The competition took place as part of the workshop Applied Verification for Continuous and Hybrid Systems (ARCH) in 2018. In its second edition, twenty-five tools submitted artifacts for the repeatability evaluation and applied to solve benchmark problems for seven competition categories. The repeatability results represent a snapshot of the current landscape of tools and the types of benchmarks for which they are particularly suited and for which others may repeat their analyses. Due to the diversity of problems in verification of continuous and hybrid systems, as well as basing on standard practice in repeatability evaluations, we evaluate the tools with pass and/or failing being repeatable.


— An experimental study of anaerobic treatment was performed by hybrid upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (HUASB) reactor to treat produced water (PW) of an onshore crude oil terminal (COD: 1597 mg/L, NH 3 -N: 14.7 mg/L, phenol: 13.8 mg/L, BOD 5 : 862 mg/L, sodium: 6240 mg/L and chloride 9530 mg/L). The produced water with high salinity and other toxic substances will inhibit the methanogens performance if there is no adaptation on biomass before anaerobic digestion. COD removal from produced water was investigated at five different dilutions of produced water and tap water (TW) without any nutrient addition and pre-treatment. The dilution ratios were 1PW:4TW, 2PW:3TW, 3PW:2TW, 4PW:1TW and 5PW:0TW. The reactor was evaluated at mesophilic operating condition (35 ± 2 °C) at 5 days of HRT for 250 days continuous feed. The average COD removals for 1PW:4TW, 2PW:3TW, 3PW:2TW, 4PW:1TW and 5PW:0TW were found to be approximately 76.1%, 73.8%, 70.3%, 46.3% and 61.82% respectively, with final average effluent COD of 123.7 mg/L, 240 mg/L, 294 mg/L, 589 mg/L and 738 mg/L, respectively.


This paper presents an approach for segmentation of digital medical images using a multi-phase probabilistic approach. The first phase of the approach is enhancement of the image data using an unsharp mask sharpening algorithm. This vastly improved the clarity of the images prior to segmentation. The segmentation of an object within the image is then achieved through two more phases. The first phase is a thresholding process, where each pixel is scored based on a similarity criterion for a chosen seed point. Pixels with a score satisfying a required minimum are selected into the segmented region. A second phase is then instituted for pixels not initially selected. This phase involves a probability selection, based on a Monte Carlo simulation. A probability for each pixel is formulated based on the pixel's intensity and location. This probability is them compared against a random probability to determine if the pixel is included in the segmented region. To facilitate the processing of multiple image slices, an automated relocation algorithm was developed to move determined seed points from image to image as the shape, size, or location of the object (i.e. organ) changes. The concepts and techniques developed were tested on three separate medical studies with one being shown in this paper. The results showed that the image enhancement process outlined features and details within the data that were not previously apparent. The segmentation process extracted the desired object more completely when compared to other segmentation techniques.


Reliability studies of a demonstrated asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch with all-optical packet routing are presented. Calculations are based on available reliability data for commercial components. An additional inherent redundancy is shown to improve switch availability. Our calculation results further show that a proposed multiplane switch satisfies the general reliability requirement for switching systems.


Bone–muscle crosstalk plays an important role in skeletal biomechanical function, the progression of numerous pathological conditions, and the modulation of local and distant cellular environments. Previous work has revealed that the deletion of connexin (Cx) 43 in osteoblasts, and consequently, osteocytes, indirectly compromises skeletal muscle formation and function. However, the respective roles of Cx43-formed gap junction channels (GJs) and hemichannels (HCs) in the bone–muscle crosstalk are poorly understood. To this end, we used two Cx43 osteocyte-specific transgenic mouse models expressing dominant negative mutants, Δ130–136 (GJs and HCs functions are inhibited), and R76W (only GJs function is blocked), to determine the effect of these two types of Cx43 channels on neighboring skeletal muscle. Blockage of osteocyte Cx43 GJs and HCs in Δ130–136 mice decreased fast-twitch muscle mass with reduced muscle protein synthesis and increased muscle protein degradation. Both R76W and Δ130–136 mice exhibited decreased muscle contractile force accompanied by a fast-to-slow fiber transition in typically fast-twitch muscles. In vitro results further showed that myotube formation of C2C12 myoblasts was inhibited after treatment with the primary osteocyte conditioned media (PO CM) from R76W and Δ130–136 mice. Additionally, prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) level was significantly reduced in both the circulation and PO CM of the transgenic mice. Interestingly, the injection of PGE2 to the transgenic mice rescued fast-twitch muscle mass and function; however, this had little effect on protein synthesis and degradation. These findings indicate a channel-specific response: inhibition of osteocytic Cx43 HCs decreases fast-twitch skeletal muscle mass alongside reduced protein synthesis and increased protein degradation. In contrast, blockage of Cx43 GJs results in decreased fast-twitch skeletal muscle contractile force and myogenesis, with PGE2 partially accounting for the measured differences.


Abstract Insect seminal fluid commonly comprises a complex cocktail of proteins and other biochemical components that migrate away from the female reproductive tract to sites elsewhere in the female body and elicit changes in female reproductive behaviour. The transfer of male seminal fluid molecules to reproductive and somatic tissues of the female Queensland fruit fly ('Q‐fly') Bactrocera tryoni is examined and some putative target sites identified. Male Q‐flies are fed a diet containing radiolabelled (35S) amino acids, which are incorporated into male accessory gland products. Radioactivity diminishes within the accessory glands and increases in all assessed parts of the female body during copulation, indicating the transfer of these products into the female soma via the reproductive tract. There are significant changes in the absolute and proportional radioactivity profiles among female tissues over the next 22 h, with substantial reductions in the thorax and increases in the head. This is consistent with accumulation of behaviour‐modifying male products at binding sites in the female head. Parallels can be drawn between the data in the present study and seminal fluid distribution profiles and receptor binding documented in other insects.


This study examined an early college high school English teacher's instructional method of introducing poetry through Blind Date Poetry. Blind Date Poetry was created by the teacher to introduce her students to 25 poems in a 90-min class session. The study was to find if the poetry introduction engaged and motivated students to learn poetry. The collected data showed that students preferred autonomy, quick decision-making, and personal interest when being introduced to poetry. Also, the instructional method increased students' engagement and motivation to learn about the poems they had chosen.


This paper addresses an architecture for solving the dynamic vehicle routing problem with time windows(DVRPTW) and capacitated fleet using the ant colony system(ACS) metaheuristic. All customers are known in advance,but their demands take place at any instant within a time horizon. The architecture has been developed to run in a centralized fashion, having two main elements, i.e, the events manager element and the ACS element. The events manager element is the central structure of the solution architecture. The static problem element receives the orders and selects them according to their time windows, sending them to the ACS element. It defines, at each static problem,the number of routes and the sequence of customers to be served. All routes arose from the ACS Element are dispatched to the events manager, that will be responsible for assigning them to the vehicles. All the architecture provided results are feasible and all the time windows are always respected.


Nowadays, experiential learning and outdoor education are increasingly relevant due to phenomena of 'extinction of experience' (Pyle, 1993), 'plant blindness' (Wandersee & Schussler, 2001) and 'nature deficit childhoods' (Louv, 2005). This paper revisits experiential learning and outdoor education concepts and some of their development history for European and North American contexts. It highlights plant biodiversity as an important issue for outdoor education due to current risks of biodiversity loss/erosion within agriculture (Linos, et al ., 2014; Mousavi et al. , 2017). It describes an experiential learning initiative held in Portugal, in 2019, at an olive tree collection ( Olea europaea L.) planted for a research project during the 1980s-1990s. The initiative was structured with outdoor visits as a complement to classroom learning. It engaged five teachers and 117 students, aged 8-9 years. Data from students and teachers questionnaires results are evaluated as a way to counteract the above phenomena and to benefit children training. Existing research indicates the role of provision of supportive and stimulating environmental conditions during childhood to strengthen individual competencies to make decisions able to accelerate transition for more sustainable societies (U.N., 2019). This paper results articulates with existing research and can be useful to inform effective outdoor programme design.


Steel Fiber Reinforced Self-stressing Concrete (SFRSSC for short) is a new type of high performance cementitious composite with self-expansive performance and high crack resistance. SFRSSC is actually a kind of expansive concrete which self-stresses, namely pre-compressive stresses, are induced by dint of some restrictions generally provided by steel bars and steel fibers to concrete expansion after hydration of expansive cement. As a result of chemical reaction, concrete achieved pre-stresses by itself different from mechanical pre-stressed concrete, so called steel fiber reinforced self-stressing concrete. In this paper the material experiments of 40 SFRSSC prisms are carried out to determine the rule of the self-expansive behavior. According to the theoretical model, a procedure how to determine the self-stress is supplied in order to supply references to the structural applications of steel fiber reinforced self-stressing concrete.


The list of causes of hypertension is quite long. However, the diagnostic procedure for detection of such forms should take in account the fact that the cause of nearly 95% of the cases with high blood pressure is unknown, i.e. primary or essential. The most often form of secondary hypertension is seen in patients with chronic renal disease, whereas renovascular, endocrine, cardiovascular or neurologic disorders all show a prevalence of less than 1%. Careful anamnestic evaluation and clinical examination combined with few simple laboratory tests allow the detection of most cases with secondary hypertension. Diagnosis of renovascular hypertension may require a more expended work up which, however, should only be performed in case of clinical suspect. Furthermore, the procedure in case of suspected endocrine disorders is of high clinical relevance, since hormonal analysis and/or radiologic examinations may be very expensive.


Speech intelligibility can be enhanced by integrating information from other modalities, e.g., vision (Sumby & Pollack 1954) or direct manual touch (Gick et al. 2008).  There are, nonetheless, many circumstances where shared visual attention may be hard to establish, or where in-person contact may be infeasible (e.g., in a noisy collaborative environment). We use vibrotactile feedback to enhance intelligibility in acoustically noisy conditions by providing stimulation in a manner similar to the laryngeal vibrations felt during voiced speech. Participants were asked to discriminate between words in noise, distinguished in voicing and vowel height. In a pilot study we contrasted vibrator placement (fingers vs. neck) with different vibration styles. In untrained perceivers we found that vibrotactile feedback increased accuracy regardless of placement. This effect, though significant, was not strong enough to be useful for everyday speech enhancement. We then conducted a full study using trained participants and found strong evidence for vibrotactile enhancement of speech intelligibility in acoustically noisy environments.


The frozen estate in Malaysia is increasing year to year. Many researchers suggest that giving hibah as one of the solution to reduce the number of frozen estate in Malaysia. Nevertheless, the previous researches indicate that the hibah giving behavior among Muslim in Malaysia is still low. It raises the question of what are the factors that will influence someone to give hibah. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose model of hibah giving behavior. The proposed model was introduced to examine whether attitude, religious value and service quality are the determinants of hibah giving behavior. The review of past literatures conceptualized that attitude and religious value as the internal factors while service quality as the external factor that can influence the hibah giving behavior. Three hypotheses were proposed to see the relationship between variables and hibah giving behavior. Lastly, both theoretical and practical implications were also discussed in this study. Keywords: Hibah Giving Behavior, Attitude, Service Quality, Religious Value. JEL Classifications: D1, D31, M49, Z12


Classification of a rough 3D surface from 2D images may be difficult due to directional effects introduced by illumination. One possible way of dealing with the problem is to extract the local albedo and gradient surface information which do not depend on the illumination, and classify the texture directly using these intrinsic characteristics. In this paper we present an algorithm for simultaneous recovery of local gradient and colour using multiple photometric images. The algorithm is proven to be optimal in the least squares error sense. Experimental results with real images and comparison with other approaches are also presented.


This paper reports the results of focus groups obtained as part of a full study that uses a mixed method approach to answer the following question: what are the cultural values that impact on e-service use in Saudi Arabia? In order to answer this question we reviewed culture theories, dimensions, and models that have been identified in the literature. Four focus groups interviewing experts and general users (customers) of online services in Saudi Arabia have been completed aiming at the end to identify the uncovered elements of Saudi culture in the literature, which hopefully will result in developing a framework of cultural values that affect e-service use in Saudi context. This paper will firstly, introduce the importance of culture and define the aspects of Saudi culture. It will then describe the method used, and finally discussing the findings of the focus groups. Findings revealed four factors that have not been covered in the literature and need to be investigated namely: nepotism, the lack of human interaction, services oriented culture, and the career path.


From cation-exchange capacity, specific surface, thermal, and elemental analysis data, formulas were derived for typical soil montmorillonites selected on the basis of X-ray diffraction analysis after removal of free iron oxides and amorphous constituents. The formula of montmorillonite in the fine clay from Houston soil, fell on the beidellite end of the montmorillonite-beidellitenontronite series, with more than half of the exchange charge, X, corresponding to 115 me. per 100 g. of colloid, originating in the tetrahedral sheet. Representing the montmorillonite end of the series, the Miami silt loam and Black Cotton soil, the clays had octahedral origin of over half the total negative charge. Nontronitic composition was represented by several fine clays derived from basic rocks.


The concept of an employee assistance programme (EAP) as a workplace intervention is relatively new in the public sector. Originally it was established to assist employees with socio-economic problems. The stresses of the modern working environment, the many changes in the South African working situation and especially the advent of HIV / AIDS has changed the profile of the EAP in the public sector drastically. The EAP signifies a socially responsibility acceptance by the employer to assist the employee with certain problems The South African legislative framework provides for the protection of employees' rights in the workplace, both in the private and the public sector.
Buffalo City Municipality (BCM) in the Eastern Cape has initiated and developed and EAP for its employees. Starting off with a comprehensive HIV/AIDS programme, the full programme will be phased in over a three-year period. To set the scene for the EAP BCM engaged various service providers to assist with an HIV prevalence study and a Knowledge Attitude and Practice (KAP) study amongst all employees of the Municipality. An HIV/AIDS strategy was developed and adopted out of which an action plan for 2004-2005 was developed. It was decided to engage the services of a service provider to manage the EAP, known as the Employee Wellness Centre, to ensure confidentiality and uptake.
The challenge of an EAP lies in where the employer's responsibilities starts and ends and it is therefore of the utmost importance that the aims and objectives of the EAP are clearly defined and communicated. The EAP should also be subjected to assessment in order to ensure an effective service.


Mechanical properties of HTS cable cores have been experimentally investigated. As is well known, HTS tapes with Ag-sheathed Bi-2223 have weak mechanical properties. Most attention to the weakness have been concentrated on the tape itself. However for realizing HTS cables, it is necessary to examine mechanical properties of the cable, because the performances of HTS cables are affected by stresses during cable production and their final uses. Three mechanical tests were performed; (1) a thermal cycle test, (2) a bending test and (3) a tensile test. In the thermal cycle test, Ic was not influenced. In the bending test, Ic depended on a bending radius, and a bending radius of less than 500 mm caused a significant problem to the conducting and shielding layers of the cable. It was also found that a flexible former was more suitable for the HTS cable than a copper pipe former, although its pressure drop was higher for liquid nitrogen. The tensile test indicated that tensile strains of up to 0.3% did not decrease Ic, and at 0.5% tensile strain Ic decreased to 10% of the initial Ic. These results are useful for HTS cable design.


In this paper I examine attempts at the deconstruction of racism in the con-temporary Australian context, particularly in the fields of education and multicultural policy and practice. By this, I mean deconstruction not only in terms of the epistemological explanation of racism and multiculturalism in schools, but also the practical imperatives arising from analysis, which include an attempt to dismantle racism. What I am referring to then is a dual analytical and interventionist project which is struggling to make its mark. I choose the areas of multiculturalism and education for two reasons. First, schooling in Australia is a compulsory, universal experience and therefore an important site for examination, both as the reflection and reflector of processes of socialisation. Second, the questions of so-called 'race' and 'race relations' as introduced through multiculturalism, although misshapen and problematic, have made their most widespread inroads into education, albeit often only obliquely through the concepts of culture and ethnicity.


Situated software, a type of opportunistic software, is created by a small subset of users to fulfill a specific purpose. For example, business users have been creating situated software through mashups, which combine data from multiple sources on internal systems or the Internet. Situated software can change the way users access, perceive, and consume information, and can allow users to finally focus on what to do with information, rather than where to find it or how to get to it. However, situated software also has limitations. This article identifies situated software's role, provides examples of its use, traces the Internet's role in its rapid evolution, outlines areas where it is appropriate, describes its limitations, and presents enablers for adopting situated software in an enterprise.


ABSTRACT Molar tooth is a series of peculiar, ptygmatically folded and spar-filled cracks in fine-grained carbonates of Precambrian age. This sedimentary structure appears to be limited in time and space. Our field studies in northern Canada and a survey of literature on Precambrian carbonates worldwide indicates that such features are localized to mid/inner ramp and shallow platform paleoenvironments of Mesoproterozoic and Neoproterozoic age (ca. 1500-650 Ma) with only sporadic occurrences in older and younger strata. As such they are equivalent in terms of texture, location, and abundance to the ubiquitous shallow subtidal, fossiliferous limestones of the Phanerozoic. The amount of synsedimentary calcite spar in molar tooth, in excess of 50% of individual beds and 5-25% of entire formations, is further roughly equivalent to the amount of calcite in calcareous benthic invertebrates in these younger rocks. Thus, there is an evolving trend in such facies through geologic time; Archean-Paleoproterozoic = massive seafloor precipitates; Mesoproterozoic-Neoproterozoic = molar-tooth mudstones and grainstones; Phanerozoic = burrowed and fossiliferous limestones.


Bufalin has been demonstrated to possess a wide range of pharmacological effects. Among these is its antitumour effect, which has been confirmed in multiple organs or tissues and provoked many concerns. However, its cytostatic effect and underlying mechanism in bladder cancer has not thoroughly been elucidated. This study aimed to investigate the hypothesis that Bufalin induces cell apoptosis and inhibits cell growth in bladder cancer through the inactivation of Na+/K+-ATPase (NKA). In the current study, it was demonstrated that Bufalin remarkably inhibited cell viability and induced cell apoptosis in bladder cancer cell line T24. Subsequently, we found that the expression of NKA was significantly supressed in Bufalin-treated cells and the NKA-α3 isoform was most sensitive to Bufalin among all α subunits of NKA. By transfection with NKA-α3 overexpressing plasmids, the expression of the NKA-α3 subunit was upregulated and NKA-α3 overexpression was found to markedly attenuated Bufalin-induced cell apoptosis in T24 cells, suggesting NKA-α3 played a critical role in Bufalin-induced cell apoptosis. Taken together, the present study confirmed that Bufalin promotes tumour apoptosis and inhibits tumour growth in bladder cancer in vitro, and this antitumour effect may be ascribed to the inactivation of NKA.


Cyclic nucleotide-gated (CNG) channels are responsible for signalling in the primary sensory cells of the vertebrate visual and olfactory systems.CNG channels are voltage-independent cation channels formed as tetramers. Each subunit has 6TM, with the pore-forming domain between TM5 and TM6. CNG channels were first found in rod photoreceptors [69, 98], where light signals through rhodopsin and transducin to stimulate phosphodiesterase and reduce intracellular cyclic GMP level. This results in a closure of CNG channels and a reduced 'dark current'. Similar channels were found in the cilia of olfactory neurons [153] and the pineal gland [60]. The cyclic nucleotides bind to a domain in the C terminus of the subunit protein: other channels directly binding cyclic nucleotides include HCN, eag and certain plant potassium channels.Hyperpolarisation-activated, cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN)The hyperpolarisation-activated, cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are cation channels that are activated by hyperpolarisation at voltages negative to ~-50 mV. The cyclic nucleotides cyclic AMP and cyclic GMP directly activate the channels and shift the activation curves of HCN channels to more positive voltages, thereby enhancing channel activity. HCN channels underlie pacemaker currents found in many excitable cells including cardiac cells and neurons [56, 164]. In native cells, these currents have a variety of names, such as Ih, Iq and If. The four known HCN channels have six transmembrane domains and form tetramers. It is believed that the channels can form heteromers with each other, as has been shown for HCN1 and HCN4 [2]. High resolution structural studies of CNG and HCN channels has provided insight into the the gating processes of these channels [117, 121]. A standardised nomenclature for CNG and HCN channels has been proposed by the NC-IUPHAR subcommittee on voltage-gated ion channels [88].


Embodiment has been the tenet of several linguistic theories accounting for how language conceptualizes cognitive and bodily experiences. Studies on linguistic synesthesia and sensory lexicon strengthened the embodiment account by showing that the mapping patterns amongst sense modalities likewise exhibited a tendency from the more embodied to the less embodied. This paper reports a corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese to explore the interaction between embodied senses and conceptual embodiment. We first observed that the perception of là 辣 'spicy' and má 麻 'numbing' was chemesthesis derived from a chemical reaction from the body. In addition, the concept of taste was found capable of being depicted by variegated non-taste lexical items from less embodied sensory domains. This study posits that gustatory properties as abstract cognitive categories are likely to be derived from more embodied senses, yet when the quality of gustatory sensation is the focus, less embodied senses can be adopted to modify it. Corroborated with other recent studies, this study underlines and clarifies the role of embodiment as a versatile tool of linguistic conceptualization among multiple conceptual layers instead of being a fixed set of conceptual objects to select from.


This Special Part of the ANZIAM Journal (Electronic Supplement) contains the refereed papers from the 7th Biennial Engineering Mathematics and Applications Conference (EMAC 2005) held at RMIT University in September 2005. The EMAC series of conferences is held under the auspices of the Engineering Mathematics Group (EMG) (a special interest group of the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ANZIAM) division of the Australian Mathematics Society) and Engineers Australia. The meeting provides a forum for researchers interested in the development and use of mathematical methods in engineering and applied mathematics. A further theme of the conference is the mathematical education of applied mathematicians and engineers.

The EMAC meetings have taken place biennially since 1994, the most recent being held in 2003. EMAC 2003 was the 6th meeting in the series and marked a change to holding the meeting in odd numbered years.

Four keynote papers were presented at the conference; the titles and presenters were:

Convex Optimization and Applications
 Prof. Stephen Boyd, Stanford University, USA
A Unified Approach to Optimisation on Manifolds
 Prof. Jonathan Manton, Australian National University, Australia
Spontaneous Ignition---Assessment of Cause: A Success for Mathematics-in-Industry
 Prof. Graeme Wake, Centre for Mathematics in Industry, Massey University at Albany, New Zealand
Data-based mechanistic modelling: an inductive approach to environmental systems analysis
 Prof. Peter Young, Lancaster University, UK

In addition to the invited presentations, 100 contributed papers were presented at the conference. All of the papers submitted for consideration for inclusion in the EMAC 2005 Proceedings have been peer reviewed by at least two referees, and revised (if required) to satisfy the referees comments.


Social encounters rely on sensory cues that carry nuanced information to guide social decision-making. While high-level features of social signals are processed in the telencephalic pallium, nuclei controlling social behaviors, called the social behavior network (SBN), reside mainly in the diencephalon. Although it is well known how mammalian olfactory pallium interfaces with the SBN, there is little information for how pallial processing of other sensory modalities can modulate SBN circuits. This is surprising given the importance of complex vocalizations, for example, for social behavior in many vertebrate taxa such as humans and birds. Using gregarious and highly vocal songbirds, female Zebra finches, we asked to what extent auditory pallial circuits provide consequential input to the SBN as it processes social sensory cues. We transiently inactivated auditory pallium of female Zebra finches during song playback and examined song-induced activation in SBN nuclei. Auditory pallial inactivation impaired responses to song specifically within the lateral ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus (VMHl), providing the first evidence in vertebrates of a connection between auditory pallium and the SBN. This same treatment elevated feeding behavior, which also correlated with VMHl activation. This suggests that signals from auditory pallium to VMHl can tune the balance between social attention and feeding drive. A descending influence of sensory pallium on hypothalamic circuits could therefore provide a functional connection for the integration of social stimuli with internal state to influence social decision-making. Significance Sensory cues such as vocalizations contain important social information. These social signals can be substantially nuanced, containing information about vocalizer identity, prior experience, valence, and emotional state. Processing these features of vocalizations necessitates processing the fast, complex sound streams in song or speech, which depends on circuits in pallial cortex. But whether and how this information is then transferred to social circuits in limbic and hypothalamic regions remains a mystery. Here, we identify a top-down influence of the songbird auditory pallium on one specific node of the social behavior network within the hypothalamus. Descending functional connections such as these may be critical for the wide range of vertebrate species that rely on intricate sensory communication signals to guide social decision-making.


Results presented in this paper demonstrate the process of material models development for automotive structural steels in order to implement it into the SUV digital twin. Developed digital twin is capable to simulate vehicle crash impact in the same way as full-scale test but among of many parameters it needs correctly defined material models. One of the most difficult things to develop is failure models which simulate the behavior of real material correctly. Usually standard approach considers using only stress-strain curves for several strain rates that does not follow the requirements of advanced model of digital twin. Implementing of damage theory based GISSMO failure description into the vehicle model, especially for high strain rates, leads to achieving good correlation with full-scale crash tests. Also it helps to improve digital twin's quality and speed up overall process of vehicle developing. As a result of research this paper demonstrated the difference of simulations between usual and improved material models


In this paper, we propose a circularly polarized balanced radar front-end topology with a Tx leakage canceller. This radar is composed of a dual-orthogonal fed microstrip patch antenna, a 90deg delay line, a differential cross-coupled oscillator, two Lange couplers, a Wilkinson combiner, and a mixer. We implemented circularly polarized balanced Doppler radars by using a printed circuit board and InGaP/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistor technologies. The front-end chip and module with antenna are 1 mm times 1 mm and 3 cm times 3 cm, respectively. The average Tx-to-Rx isolation is about 36 dB. This radar can measure speeds as low as 0.5 mm/s, which corresponds to a 0.076-Hz Doppler shift. The received signals of the circularly polarized balanced Doppler radar are about two times larger than those of a linearly polarized balanced Doppler radar due to the topology. This result occurs because the proposed radar has an intrinsic loss of only 3 dB in the receiving path.


Three D–A–π–A sensitizers (DOBT-IV to DOBT-VI) with N,N-diphenylthiophen-2-amine as the donor and bis(octyloxy)benzo-[c][1,2,5]thiadiazole (DOBT) as the auxiliary acceptor have been designed and synthesized. Their applications to dye-sensitized solar cells with I−/I3− and Co(II)/(III) electrolytes were measured and characterized. Via fine tuning of the π-bridge, the highest photoelectric conversion efficiency of 7.16% was obtained with Jsc = 16.88 mA cm−2, Voc = 0.662 V and FF = 64.03% for the DOBT-V based dye-sensitized solar cells using the I−/I3− electrolyte under standard global AM1.5 solar conditions. A photoelectric conversion efficiency of 6.14% was obtained with Jsc = 11.35 mA cm−2, Voc = 0.760 V and FF = 71.16% with the Co(II)/(III) electrolyte under standard global AM1.5 solar conditions. The optical and electrochemical properties and the photovoltaic performance were evaluated and investigated using density functional theory calculations, a behavior study of the four performance parameters with dependence of the incident light intensity, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and intensity-modulated photo-voltage spectrometry.


A simple growth model is investigated where particles are deposited onto a substrate randomly and subsequently relax into a position nearby where the binding is strongest. In space dimension d = 2 the surface roughness exponent and the dynamical exponent are ξ = 1.4 ± 0.1 and z = 3.8 ± 0.5. These values are larger than for previous models of sedimentation or ballistic deposition and are surprisingly close to the ones obtained from a linear generalized Langevin equation for growth with surface diffusion. A scaling relation 2ξ = z − d + 1 is proposed to be valid for a large class of growth models relevant for molecular beam epitaxy.


Sixty-two patients with opium and ephedrone abuse were studied. They underwent 24-hour Holter monitoring, resting ECG and echocardiography, 18 of them having volumetric loading with polyglucine, 400.0 ml, i.v. Sinus tachycardia was detected in 67.4%, ventricular extrasystole in 4.7%, supraventricular extrasystole with infrequent paroxysms of supraventricular tachycardia in 11.6%. Despite the fact that signs of heart failure were absent and myocardial contractility was normal at rest, echocardiography along with volume loading allow one to reveal in patients some abnormal contractile alterations in the left ventricle. These include its increased volumes, decreased ejection fraction and circulatory shortening rate of myocardial fibers, which suggests that the compensatory potentials of the myocardium are reduced in drug abuse.


ABSTRACT Results of quantum chemical calculations of the molecules of organic inhibitors (Oin) of corrosion and hydrogen absorption by metals (particularly, p-R-C6H4-SO2-NH2 where R= F, Cl, Br, CH3) both in free state and adsorbed on cluster modeling aluminium surface containing 20 atoms of Al are compared to experimental data on efficiencies of protective action (EPA) against corrosion by this metal. Energies of boundary orbitals (HOMO, LUMO) and dipole moments of isolated molecules of Oin as well as changes of atomic charges on Oin atoms when Oin molecule adsorbed have been computed using semi-empiric MNDO quantum chemistry method. It was found that correlation coefficients between EPA and changes of electric charge on N atom [ΔQ(N)] and O atom [ΔQ(O)] due to adsorption of Oin on the metal surface are the most significant. At adsorption and eventually the protection action of Oin, the specific role of polar groups (such as hydroxile) and specific role of heteroatoms (such as N, S etc) in the framework of the concepts of molecular orbitals and donor-acceptor interaction between adsorbent and adsorbate.


Background: Artemether and lumefantrine display low aqueous solubility leading to poor release profile; hence the need for the use of lipid-based systems to improve their oral bioavailability so as to improve their therapeutic efficacy.
Aim and objective: The objective of this work was to utilize potentials of nanostructured lipid carriers (NLCs) for im- provement of the oral bioavailability of artemether and lumefantrine combination and to evaluate its efficacy in the treat- ment of malaria. This study reports a method of formulation, characterization and evaluation of the therapeutic efficacies of caprol-based NLC delivery systems with artemether and lumefantrine.
Method: The artemether-lumefantrine co-loaded NLCs were prepared using the lipid matrix (5% w/w) (containing beeswax and Phospholipon® 90H and Caprol-PGE 860), artemether (0.1%w/w) and lumefantrine (0.6%w/w), sorbitol (4%w/w), Tween® 80( 2%w/was surfactant) and distilled water (q.s to 100%) by high shear homogenization and evaluated for phys- icochemical performance. The in vivo antimalarial activities of the NLC were tested in chloroquine-sensitive strains of Plasmodium berghei (NK-65) using Peter´s 4-day suppressive protocol in mice and compared with controls. Histopathological studies were also carried out on major organs implicated in malaria.
Results: The NLC showed fairly polydispersed nano-sized formulation (z-average:188.6 nm; polydispersity index, PDI=0.462) with no major interaction occurring between the components while the in vivo study showed a gradual but sus- tained drug release from the NLC compared with that seen with chloroquine sulphate and Coartem®. Results of histopatho- logical investigations also revealed more organ damage with the untreated groups than groups treated with the formulations.
Conclusion: This study has shown the potential of caprol-based NLCs for significant improvement in oral bioavailability and hence antimalarial activity of poorly soluble artemether and lumefantrine. Importantly, this would improve patient com- pliance due to decrease in dosing frequency as a sustained release formulation.
Keywords: Nanostructured lipid carriers; artemether-lumefantrine; malaria; Caprol.


Mixed saliva from two caries-free individuals possessed antimicrobial activity toward Streptococcus mutans and S. sanguis. This inhibitory activity was attributed to the presence of a group of four anionic proteins each of which strongly inhibited the growth of the oral streptococci in a saliva protein-based medium but not in a medium containing amino acids as a nitrogen source. These proteins, with isoelectric points of 4.70, 4.90, 4.98, and 5.05, respectively, neither reacted with antisera to immunoglobulin A, G, or M nor appeared to be functionally related to a number of salivary peroxidases, lactoferrin, or lysozyme. On this basis, they may represent a previously unreported group of growth-inhibitory antimicrobial factors occurring in the saliva of some individuals.


While a number of studies reveal the performance and effectiveness of applying wireless systems to various smart city applications, surprisingly, a market environment, in which we rely on a daily or weekly basis for purchasing essential goods, is still understudied. A wireless system in a market, along with rapidly growing IoT technology, can enable interesting applications such as automated electronic price tag updates, shopping- cart-based advertisements and information display, and automated inventory/stock management. These applications can first benefit market staff by automating routine tasks or opening possibilities for additional profits. Not only that: for everyday customers, these applications provide more reliable services by eliminating many man-made errors and offer additional services that can be enabled by newly gained connectivities. In this work, we introduce application requirements and technical challenges for such smart market applications and pilot deployment experiences in an urban large-scale market. Our pilot deployment experiences of wireless systems in markets provide quantified knowledge on the impact of various in-market activities on the wireless link performance and led us to design MarketNet, a wireless networking architecture suitable for IoTbased smart market systems. We see this work as a first step in bringing the attention of many researchers to a new application area, where wireless systems have the potential to benefit the quality of life of many smart city residents.


Australian pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) were studied in colonies at 2 lakes in New South Wales. Adults regurgitated food for the young. Those up to 2 weeks old took liquid food from inside the tip of the adult's upper beak. Older ones took solid food from the adult's gullet, to age of about 3.5 months. After being fed, the young had convulsions lasting about 1 min; that did not happen after a second feeding immediately after the convulsion. Where there were 2 young of different sizes, only the larger convulsed, and sometimes the smaller was prevented from feeding and died of starvation. The survivor continued to have convulsions after feeding, as did single young, when there was no competition for food. Food was mainly fish; the most abundant fish was goldfish (Carassius auratus); a minor item was perch (Perca fluviatilis). Fish were 60 to 247 mm long and weighed 17 to 320 g. Crustaceans were less important and included freshwater crayfish (Cherax destructor) and shrimp (Macrobrachius sp.).