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During the third Icebreaker ODEN expedition to the North Pole, Arctic Ocean 2001, the surface of open leads between the pack ice was investigated for physical parameters. The major purpose was to evaluate the occurrence of a surfactant microlayer in the leads. This was done by estimating sea-surface tension and collecting sea-surface microlayers in open leads (SMOL). Three collection methods used for SMOL were rotating drums covered with hydrophilic Teflon, thin hydrophobic Teflon sheets, and glass plates. Collections were successfully made at 14 stations between 21 July and 21 August 2001, at geo-positions between 86°29‘ N and the geographical North Pole. Surface tensions resembled surfactant-free seawater surfaces during the first 2 weeks of August but were depressed by 6−9 mN m-1 during the third week of August. Variations in SMOL physical properties were large between stations. Weather conditions and collection equipment functionality are discussed in relation to results.

This article describes the University of Iowa’s process of system migration from selection and data conversion to implementation and presentation of this new system to staff, faculty, students, and the public. Following a three‐year selection effort, Ex Libris’ Aleph500 was chosen as the new system. Staff effort during the selection process and implementation is analyzed and quantified. A comprehensive review of implementation efforts is described including system and client configuration, functional testing and problem reporting, training, and local programming.

Tse and Nicholson (2014) have tested a small-group instructional intervention that they propose as a modification to enhance reading progress among low attainment 6-year-olds in a “text-centered” teaching approach. The authors (T&N) cite a Ministry of Education (2003) handbook to describe this approach. It has four main components (pp. 91–101): (i) Teacher Reading of texts to listening children, (ii) Shared Reading in which the children engage in watching the text print (“Big Books”) as the teacher shows how it matches the spoken text, (iii) Guided Reading in which there is detailed teacher support of the individual children's attempts at reading a text (e.g., for “using word-level information to decode new words” p. 97), (iv) Children's Independent Reading of texts (with minimal errors) by themselves for individual levels and interests. This report of T&N, however, lacked evidence about what the children received of each of these components prior to, and concurrent with, the intervention study. Without such evidence we cannot tell in what way the instructional interventions were the same, different from, or in conflict with other instruction received. T&N's proposed modification to the Shared Reading component was to combine it with systematically taught explicit phonics (a “sounding out” procedure in which the child pronounces successive sounds of letters of a word to generate an oral reading response). For theoretical justification of this modification, T&N cited some of the claims of Gough and Hillinger (1980) but omitted others, that phonics “gives the child artificial rules …… to learn the real rules” (p. 192), which “are unconscious and implicit” (p. 187). This implies that phonics is a heuristic procedure for initial instruction but subsequently discarded without any disadvantage [although Thompson et al. (2009) found evidence to the contrary]. Neither T&N nor their citation of Gough and Hillinger provide justification for the particular phonics rules (e.g., final e-marker of “long” vowels) and corresponding sounds (e.g., for vowel digraphs) selected for instruction (T&N, Table 2) of these 6-year-olds with word reading test ages in the lower half of the normative distribution, and a mean aural vocabulary test age of 4 years 8 months (determined from BPVT norms using raw scores in T&N, Table 4). T&N found no effect of their intervention on the children's aural vocabulary but were silent on why the overall text-centered approach, with their modification, would be suitable for children with an apparent large developmental lag in understanding spoken English. TN and for comparison between measures, whether such opportunities were equal or different. For each reading measure the writer determined the percentage of word items that provided this opportunity among items in the applicable reading-level range. For example, this was 34% of items providing opportunities in the decoding skills measure. It was, however, 16% in the isolated word reading, and in this there were also 16% that provided conflicting opportunities because the taught procedures could not work (e.g., final-e marker of “long vowels” in the words one, love). The decoding skills items had no conflicting opportunities. Hence, any superior score gains for this measure could be just an artifact of more (workable) opportunities. Another unbalanced feature of the design is noted. The phonics procedures demonstrated to the children were followed up by their individual attempts at weekly “quizzes” (TN Figure 4). There were no similar individual opportunities involving text reading, which could disadvantage performance on that measure. The pre- to post-test performance gain of the intervention that combined phonics with shared reading was compared with the mean of the gains of shared reading and explicit phonics interventions, each taught separately. In these comparisons of performance gains, oral reading of isolated words and decoding skill (pseudowords) had substantially greater gains for the combined intervention than the separate interventions. In contrast, the gain in word accuracy in oral text reading was not greater for the combined intervention, failing to reach a statistically significant difference (T&N, Table 5). This orthogonal contrasts analysis, although relevant to the purpose of the study, was not sufficient for this randomized treatments-versus-control design. It also required statistical comparisons between the performance gains of the combined intervention sample and the (math-only) sample that controlled for gains in reading performance from influences external to the intervention. Without these there is no basis to confirm the T&N interpretation that the combined instructional treatment had some significant effects. Speed of reading was a score in the test of text reading but was not reported, although relevant to comparison of phonics and text-centered instruction (Thompson et al., 2008). And critically, there was no report of the extent to which the children made successful use of the taught explicit phonics in their word responses in text reading, or any of the other reading outcomes. Without this information we are left to speculate whether TN Thompson, 2014) from the isolated word exemplars for the taught phonics rather than the children's use of the phonics. Apart from omission of the required statistical comparisons, the design and its implementation in this study may rate above average on a list of validity criteria such as Troia (1999) but our focus has been mainly on ambiguities in validity not often recognized in research on instructional interventions. Included in these are lack of information and evidence for (i) the context of both prior and concurrent instruction, (ii) how the intervention fits wider teaching goals and other instructional needs of the participants, (iii) the extent, and balance, of opportunities in the outcome measures to use procedures that were taught, and (iv) children's use of those procedures in such opportunities, (v) testing contrary predictions from alternative theories.

The use of deep neural networks (DNNs) has improved performance in several fields including computer vision, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition (ASR). The increased use of DNNs in recent years has been largely due to performance afforded by GPUs, as the computational cost of training large networks on a CPU is prohibitive. Many training algorithms are well-suited to the GPU; however, writing hand-optimized GPGPU code is a significant undertaking. More recently, high-level libraries have attempted to simplify GPGPU development by automatically performing tasks such as optimization and code generation. This work utilizes Theano, a high-level Python library, to implement a DNN for the purpose of phone recognition in ASR. Performance is compared against a low-level, hand-optimized C++/CUDA DNN implementation from Kaldi, a popular ASR toolkit. Results show that the DNN implementation in Theano has CPU and GPU runtimes on par with that of Kaldi, while requiring approximately 95% less lines of code.

Background Styrene is an important building-block petrochemical and monomer used to produce numerous plastics. Whereas styrene bioproduction by Escherichia coli was previously reported, the long-term potential of this approach will ultimately rely on the use of hosts with improved industrial phenotypes, such as the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Results Classical metabolic evolution was first applied to isolate a mutant capable of phenylalanine over-production to 357 mg/L. Transcription analysis revealed up-regulation of several phenylalanine biosynthesis pathway genes including ARO3, encoding the bottleneck enzyme DAHP synthase. To catalyze the first pathway step, phenylalanine ammonia lyase encoded by PAL2 from A. thaliana was constitutively expressed from a high copy plasmid. The final pathway step, phenylacrylate decarboxylase, was catalyzed by the native FDC1. Expression of FDC1 was naturally induced by trans-cinnamate, the pathway intermediate and its substrate, at levels sufficient for ensuring flux through the pathway. Deletion of ARO10 to eliminate the competing Ehrlich pathway and expression of a feedback-resistant DAHP synthase encoded by ARO4K229L preserved and promoted the endogenous availability precursor phenylalanine, leading to improved pathway flux and styrene production. These systematic improvements allowed styrene titers to ultimately reach 29 mg/L at a glucose yield of 1.44 mg/g, a 60% improvement over the initial strain. Conclusions The potential of S. cerevisiae as a host for renewable styrene production has been demonstrated. Significant strain improvements, however, will ultimately be needed to achieve economical production levels. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12934-014-0123-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

In this work, we aim to understand the mechanisms driving academic collaboration. We begin by building a model for how researchers split their effort between multiple papers, and how collaboration affects the number of citations a paper receives, supported by observations from a large real-world publication and citation dataset, which we call the h-Reinvestment model. Using tools from the field of Game Theory, we study researchers' collaborative behavior over time under this model, with the premise that each researcher wants to maximize his or her academic success. We find analytically that there is a strong incentive to collaborate rather than work in isolation, and that studying collaborative behavior through a game-theoretic lens is a promising approach to help us better understand the nature and dynamics of academic collaboration., Presented at the 1st WWW Workshop on Big Scholarly Data (2014). 6 pages, 5 figures

More attention to the discovery of the limitations of current theories of word reading acquisition would enable progress in development of theories with a wider and more varied range of valid and useful applications. This general opinion is illustrated here with work that makes such an attempt. There have been recent occasional attempts to apply computational connectionist models of adult word reading in simulations of children's normal progress in word and pseudoword reading (Hutzler et al., 2004; Powell et al., 2006), but they failed unless modifications were made that included adding “context-free” letter-sound correspondences to the initial training of the model. Taught phonics sounds for letters are such, as they are not bound to features within a word, such as position and/or the context of other (adjacent or otherwise) letter-sound correspondences of the word. Adding the phonic sounds was justified as a representation of the way children learnt because it was how they were taught reading. This introduces a major potential limitation in application of the model, in so far as it was improved for only one type of teaching, that with phonics. A new multiple-route theory (Grainger et al., 2012) of learning to read words has been proposed which may appear to avoid that problem but much of the learning of the beginner reader is modeled as in the theory of Share (1995). This, however, also requires full knowledge of “context-free” letter sounds for the initial development of word reading (Share, p. 164), as does the widely recognized theory of Ehri (1999, 2005, 2012). The illustration for my opinion focuses on the discovery of the limitations of this feature common to these theories, and on development of theory that accounts for evidence beyond the limitations.

Extracts have been chosen from a wide range of historical and contemporary cases to illustrate the reasoning processes of the courts and to show how legal principles are developed. This chapter deals with the availability of judicial review and its significance in the constitution. First, it considers the claim for judicial review and the exclusivity principle. It determines who can apply for judicial review and against whom and in respect of what activities judicial review may be sought. Next, it examines the discretionary nature of the remedies available in judicial review proceedings, including how the courts exercise this discretion. The chapter concludes with an examination of the courts' response to legislative attempts to exclude or oust judicial review.

Extracts have been chosen from a wide range of historical and contemporary cases to illustrate the reasoning processes of the courts and to show how legal principles are developed. This chapter examines the role, policy, and administration of Parliament. It focuses on the House of Commons, exploring the principles of ministerial responsibility and the accountability of the government to Parliament. The chapter describes various procedures and reforms of select committees and looks at activities on the floor of the House of Commons. It also considers reforms seeking to rebalance power between Parliament and the Executive, and to enhance the contribution of back-bench MPs.

Extracts have been chosen from a wide range of historical and contemporary cases to illustrate the reasoning processes of the courts and to show how legal principles are developed. This chapter introduces the nature and constitutional role of judicial review. It then examines the various grounds of review, which have been placed in three classes: illegality, procedural impropriety, and irrationality. The chapter also discusses the substantive aspect of legitimate expectations and the relationship between irrationality and proportionality in pure domestic law.

The versatile functionality of microbial biocatalysts offers a promising solution to the growing need to replace conventional, petroleum-derived fuels, chemicals, and materials with sustainable alternatives from renewable biomass. Whereas metabolic pathway engineering and strain optimization have greatly expanded the range of attainable bioproducts, it is by coupling microbial biosynthesis with traditional chemical conversions that the diversity of products that can ultimately be derived from biomass is truly beginning to reach its full potential. As will be the focus of this short review, such ‘hybrid’ strategies are now facilitating the generation of new and useful value-added bioproducts from renewable sources, the likes of which have previously been unattainable via biological routes alone.

Following an approach in October 1998 by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (PCA), the Health Service Commissioner (HSC) and the Commissioners for Local Administration in England (CLA), the Cabinet Office conducted a review of the public sector ombudsmen in England which reported in April 20001 and a consultation paper based on the review was issued in June 2000.2 The key conclusions of the Review were

During 1993, estuarine surface water samples were collected from the mid-Texas coast (Corpus Christi to Port Lavaca, TX). Agricultural watershed areas as well as tidal creeks immediately downstream were chosen as sampling sites along with adjoining bay sampling stations. Collections were made throughout the growing season (February to October 1993) before and after periods of significant (1.25 cm) rainfall. All samples were initially screened for the presence of pesticides using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) test kits (EnviroGard) for triazine herbicides and carbamate insecticides. All samples were extracted and then analyzed using gas chromatography (GC) for quantification of atrazine. Only samples testing positive for carbamate insecticides via ELISA were further extracted for GC analysis to quantify aldicarb and carbofuran. Additionally, laboratory toxicity tests using phytoplankton were examined from published, peer-reviewed literature and compared with the atrazine field levels found in Texas. Results of ELISA screening indicated the presence of triazine herbicides in nearly all samples (93%). GC analysis further confirmed the presence of atrazine concentrations ranging from0.01-62.5 microg/L. Screening tests also found detectable levels of carbamate insecticides (aldicarb and carbofuran) that were also confirmed and quantified by GC. Comparison of measured concentrations of atrazine compared with published toxicity tests results indicated that there was a potential environmental risk for marine/estuarine phytoplankton in surface waters of Texas estuaries, particularly when the chronic nature of atrazine exposure is considered.

This study investigated whether two groups of6-year-old beginning readers taught to read by aphonics and by a ``book experience'' non-phonicsapproach would differ in reading comprehension as wellas the processes of word recognition. The two groupswere matched for word recognition but despite this, thephonics taught children had higher readingcomprehension. Phonics taught children produced morecontextually appropriate errors, and in both singleword and text reading made more spoken attempts atreading unknown words. The non-phonics taught childrenhad much faster reading reaction times to familiarwords but they scored less in phoneme segmentation andnonword reading tasks. Compared with the non‐phonicsgroup, the phonics group spent more time in attemptsat identifying unknown words and this included usingcontextual information, which apparently resulted inmore rehearsal of the meaning of the story text andhence better reading comprehension performance.

Sixty cancer patients who were undergoing radiation therapy to the pelvis of at least 4,000 cGy in 20 fractions over four weeks were randomized to take or not take Metamucil. Results were analyzed for the presence of radiation-induced diarrhea in two groups: patients taking Metamucil (n = 30) or not taking Metamucil (n = 30). The Murphy Diarrhea Scale was developed to assist in the synthesis of data collected in daily patient-reported diaries. Results were analyzed using ANOVA F-tests. Metamucil significantly decreased the incidence (p = 0.049) and severity (p = 0.030) of diarrhea and showed a strong trend in reducing the use of anti-diarrhea medication (p = 0.062). According to this pilot study, Metamucil was an effective method of controlling radiation-induced diarrhea. Results of this pilot study have implications for clinical practice and nursing research.

(2000). IMPROVED PROCEDURE FOR THE LARGE SCALE SYNTHESIS OF 1,2,3,4,4a,9b-HEXAHYDRODIBENZOTHIOPHENE. Organic Preparations and Procedures International: Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 169-173.

Phonological processing problems have been consideredcritical in explaining developmental readingdisability. Reading disabled children were comparedwith two matched reading-level normal control groupson indicators of phonological processing. The readingdisabled children had lower nonword readingperformance than the phonics taught controls. However, performance was equivalent to that of thecontrols without phonics teaching. Therefore anonword reading deficit was not in itself diagnosticof developmental reading disability. The readingdisabled children and the non-phonics control groupwho exhibited lower nonword reading did not differfrom the phonics taught control group in phonemeawareness, nor in magnitude of the word regularityeffect. Nevertheless, within all groups thosechildren with higher phonemic awareness skills showedlarger word regularity effects and better nonwordreading. Processes involving two sources of knowledgefor phonological recoding are discussed asexplanations of these and many previous results onphonological deficits and of the phonological effectsof phonics instruction.

Three years ago, participants in the Rural and Agricultural Studies section of the Western Social Science Association (WSSA) inaugurated the tradition of gathering to talk about current publication...

Three studies examined the sources of learning by which children, very early in learning to read, formed correspondences between letters and phonemes when these were not explicitly taught in the whole language instruction they received. There were three classes of predicted knowledge sources: (a) induced sublexical relations (i.e., induction of orthographic–phonological relations from the experience of print words), (b) acrophones from letter names, and (c) transfer from spelling experience. The results of Study 1 indicated that children used both sources (a) and (b). Study 2 results showed that source (a) dominated when the letters were initial components of pseudowords rather than isolated items. The transfer from phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences of the children's spelling was examined in Study 3. The results were not consistent with the use of source (c). The findings of these studies have implications for the question of how early in learning to read children are able to use knowledge from their experience of print words as a source for phonological recoding.

Focal Plane Arrays (FPA) consisting of multiple Sensor Chip Assemblies (SCA) in a precision aligned mosaic are being increasingly used in optical instruments requiring large format detectors. The Joint Milli-Arcsecond Pathfinder Survey Mission (JMAPS) requires very precise positional alignment and stability of its 2 x 2 SCA mosaic at operational temperatures to meet its precision sky mapping mission requirements. Key performance requirements include: detector active area co-planarity, in-plane alignment, and thermal stability. This paper presents an overview of the JMAPS Focal Plane Array Assembly, its alignment and thermal-mechanical stability requirements, and associated test-validated performance in a cryogenic vacuum environment.

Introduction In deep vein thrombosis (DVT), both the induced inflammation response and fibrinolytic capacity are critical in resolving experimental DVT. Unresolved, obstructing thrombi can lead to the burdensome and costly sequelae of the post-thrombotic syndrome. Recently, statins have shown to reduce the incidence of DVT (JUPITER trial). In this study, we investigated the in vivo effects of statin therapy on resolution of already formed DVT using serial intravital microscopy (IVM) imaging and thrombus mass measurements. Methods DVT was induced in C57Bl/6J male mice (N=190) by topical ferric chloride of the femoral vein (chemical injury) or ligation of the IVC (stasis). One day after DVT induction, mice started treatment of atorvastatin (1.14mg/kg), mevastatin (10 mg/kg) or PBS by once daily oral gavage. Serial IVM was preformed at days 2, 4 and 6 utilizing FITC-dextran (ex/em 490/520nm), CLIO-AF555 (ex/em 555/565nm), and MMPSense680 (ex/em 680/700nm) imaging agents for thrombus architecture, macrophage content and MMP activity measurements. Thrombus masses were collected at days 4, 7, 10 in stasis DVT mice and combination statin/enoxaparin (10mg/kg/d, s.c.) were also compared to statin therapy. Platelet activation and coagulation were analyzed using aggregometry and thromboelastography on whole-blood. Results We found that statin therapy reduced DVT burden and inflammation in both chemical- and stasis-induced established DVT up to 10 days compared to control (p Conclusion Statin therapy accelerates DVT resolution despite reducing thrombus related inflammation. The net reduction of thrombus burden tracked with statin-mediated favorable effects on fibrinolysis, coagulation, and platelet function. These results support statins as a translatable therapy to improve the resolution of DVT.

Recently, Friction Stir Welding (FSW) has been demonstrated as a solid-state welding technology capable of joining thick section steel in a single pass. This process’s ability to reduce cycle time and manpower as opposed to traditional joining methods creates an opportunity to significantly reduce the cost of welding thick section steels. Open literature has recently indicated a 25% cost reduction if FSW can be applied to offshore pipe line construction. This study was initiated to establish a robust tool design capable of joining 19-mm (0.75-in) X-70 steel, maximize tool life, and identify cross weld mechanical properties throughout the life of the tool. This presentation will summarize trends identified during tool life testing and the mechanical properties observed as the tool wore. Over 59-m (193-ft) of weld length was realized with a single W-based tool and the ultimate tensile strength throughout welding was near matching to the base metal.

A key characteristic of a friction stir weld is a very fine grain microstructure produced as a result of dynamic recrystallization. The friction stir processing (FSP) technique was applied to modify the through thickness microstructure of a monolithic plate of a magnesium alloy. Grain structure refinement in these alloys could have a significant impact on their strength and ductility opening up their use for high performance defense applications. EWI has been investigating the use of the FSP technique to achieve nano-sized grains in a magnesium alloy, AZ31B. Heat input estimations have enabled the prediction of welding parameters and tool geometries that could achieve significant grain refinement. This presentation will summarize the experimental procedures using active cooling and theoretical efforts undertaken in order to achieve an average stir zone grain size of 500 nm. This work was performed under a cooperative agreement between EWI and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

Tests are made of an aspect of the "knowledge sources" theoretical account of acquisition of reading in which, contrary to the developmental bypass hypothesis, it is postulated that sublexical relations between orthographic and phonological components are formed very early in learning by spontaneous induction from stored print word experience. Experiments 1 and 2, conducted with 5- and 6-year-old children, indicated as predicted that positional frequency of orthographic components in experienced print words influenced reading responses to unfamiliar pseudoword items. In Experiment 3 positional frequency of an orthographic component was manipulated in a training-transfer paradigm. Transfer to pseudoword reading was as predicted. The results could not be given alternative explanations by the developmental bypass hypothesis nor by accounts which predict exclusive use of onset and rime units at this early reading level.

It has been claimed (V. Coltheart, Laxon, Rickard, & Elton, 1988) that learners as well as skilled readers use phonology for multiple functions in reading-for-meaning tasks. This claim was examined using lexical decision and sentence evaluation tasks. It was found in the first experiment that the type of instruction learners had received determined whether there was prelexical use of phonology in responding to items out of sentence context. Type of instruction had no effect when the items were in context. In the second experiment, performances on a homophone sentence evaluation task and a homophone semantic decision task, which excluded sentence processing, were examined. The results suggest that phonology served the function of access to lexical meanings in addition to any function in postlexical sentence processing. The obtained relationships between relative frequencies of the presented and unpresented homophone mates and item accuracy on these tasks were inconsistent with exclusive use of "direct access" but consistent with access of lexical meaning via phonology and application of a "spelling-check" procedure when multiple homophonic meanings are activated.

The spread of multiple myeloma (MM) involves (re)circulation into the peripheral blood and (re)entrance or homing of MM cells into new sites of the BM. Hypoxia in solid tumors was shown to promote metastasis through activation of proteins involved in the endothelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) process. In this study, we hypothesized that MM associated hypoxic conditions activates EMT related proteins and promotes metastasis of MM cells. Hypoxia activated EMT-related machinery in MM cells, decreased expression of E-cadherin and consequently decreased adhesion of MM cells to the BM and enhanced egress of MM cells to the circulation. In parallel, hypoxia increased the expression of CXCR4, and consequently increased the migration and homing of circulating MM cells to new BM niches. Further studies to manipulate hypoxia in order to regulate tumor dissemination as a therapeutic strategy are warranted.

Interactions between multiple myeloma (MM) cells and the BM microenvironment play a critical role in the pathogenesis of MM and in the development of drug resistance by MM cells. Selectins are involved in extravasation and homing of leukocytes to target organs. In the present study, we focused on adhesion dynamics that involve P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-1 (PSGL-1) on MM cells and its interaction with selectins in the BM microenvironment. We show that PSGL-1 is highly expressed on MM cells and regulates the adhesion and homing of MM cells to cells in the BM microenvironment in vitro and in vivo. This interaction involves both endothelial cells and BM stromal cells. Using loss-of-function studies and the small-molecule pan-selectin inhibitor GMI-1070, we show that PSGL-1 regulates the activation of integrins and downstream signaling. We also document that this interaction regulates MM-cell proliferation in coculture with BM microenvironmental cells and the development of drug resistance. Furthermore, inhibiting this interaction with GMI-1070 enhances the sensitization of MM cells to bortezomib in vitro and in vivo. These data highlight the critical contribution of PSGL-1 to the regulation of growth, dissemination, and drug resistance in MM in the context of the BM microenvironment.