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This thesis aims to explore the meanings behind rural reading rooms (tushushi) in Yunnan Province, PRC. Rural reading rooms are small libraries attached to the village Party compound in Chinese villages; for the past decade 600 000 reading rooms have been established in administrative villages in China, and now benefit more than 1 billion farmers in what is arguably the world’s most important deve
This Thesis examines what possibilities Member States have to impose levies on CO2 emissions from motor vehicles in the light of EU indirect tax legislation and the Eurovignette Directive. In this Thesis, carbon tax on fuel and a CO2 differentiated road toll are studied as levying options. Motor fuel is an excise good to which the harmonised EU excise duty system applies. Accordingly, the questi
This article offers an overview of the IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive, which hosts digitized texts and images of early isiXhosa newspapers and books from 1870-1914. The archive offers new opportunities for a range of research across multiple fields, and responds to debates around the importance of African intellectual traditions and their indigenous language sources in generating
Due to their natural and inherent way of capturing concurrency, dataflow descriptions of stream programs have seen prevalent usage in fields such as video processing, networks and scientific computing. They are often deployed on manycore, heterogeneous and distributed architectures. Despite robust research on the topic, obstacles still exist in evaluating the performance of stream programs accurat
There are no known estimates of the prevalence, severity and impacts from breathlessness in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to explore the prevalence, severity, self-attributed underlying conditions and impacts of breathlessness limiting exertion in community-dwelling adults in India. This exploratory, population-based online survey recruited a pre-planned sample of 3,000 adult
Digital technologies have enabled novel forms and reconfigurations of value creation, delivery, and capture. These new reconfigurations challenge the conventional notion of value creation with digital business models. On that premise, the widening of privacy concerns, alert us that organizations of the elite digital, like Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify, design technology to feed on personal data, ba
Research in community ecology has tended to focus on trophic interactions (e.g., predation, resource competition) as driving forces of community dynamics, and sexual interactions have often been overlooked. Here we discuss how sexual interactions can affect community dynamics, especially focusing on frequency-dependent dynamics of horizontal communities (i.e., communities of competing species in a
Background: We aimed to study the long-term effect of smoking on coronary atherosclerosis progression at the segmental level. Methods: Angiographic data (1989-2017) on current, former, and nonsmokers were collected from the Swedish Coronary Angiography and Angioplasty Registry. The Western Denmark Heart Registry was used to validate the results. Patients with clinically indicated angiography with
Background: Multiple clinical practice guidelines and head computed tomography decision rules exist for emergency department (ED) triage of children with traumatic brain injury (TBI). These vary in structure, aim, target cohort, and outcomes, yet are used clinically in similar populations. We compared important clinical and practical characteristics of all major guidelines in a large, real-world p
Background: Mapping social and geographical disparities in health outcomes helps to identify vulnerable groups that should be targeted for intervention. This study aims to assess the disparities in cardiometabolic multimorbidity, the presence of at least two cardiometabolic diseases (CMD), including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke, among middle-aged adults across socio-geographical inte
Purpose: Preeclampsia is a serious pregnancy complication without curative treatment. The central nervous system (CNS) is affected in severe cases of preeclampsia. Until now, no biomarker or other predictive method has been established for predicting severe CNS injury, including the development of eclampsia and/or long-term complications. In this systematic review, we aimed to investigate the asso
Precise statistics about crop types and productions can support establishing more efficient decisions in the food security framework. The applicability of remote sensing imagery has been confirmed worldwide in crop-related studies. In this chapter, time series Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images were integrated, along with crop inventory, to generate crop-type maps in Imperial County, CA, USA, within
Introduction The recognition of breathlessness in clinical practice appears suboptimal, despite its prevalence and impact. This study aimed to explore the content of clinical conversations about breathlessness and patients’ level of self-reported openness when discussing their breathlessness. Methods A cross-sectional, online survey of Australian adults (≥18 years) stratified to the 2016 National
Young birds in cold environments face a range of age-specific thermal challenges. Studying the thermal biology of young birds throughout ontogeny may further our understanding of how such challenges are met. We investigated how age and environmental parameters influenced surface temperature gradients across various body regions of wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) chicks on Bird Island, South
Preeclampsia (PE) is a pregnancy disorder associated with placental dysfunction and elevated fetal hemoglobin (HbF). Early in pregnancy the placenta harbors hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) and is an extramedullary source of erythropoiesis. However, globin expression is not unique to erythroid cells and can be triggered by hypoxia. To investigate the role of the placenta in increasi
Chemical processing by plasma is utilized in many applications. Plasma-related studies, however, are challenging to carry out due to plasmas' transient and unpredictable behavior, excessive luminosity emission, 3D complexity and aggressive chemistry and physiochemical interactions that are easily affected by external probing. Laser-induced fluorescence is a robust technique for non-intrusive inves
Recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL), defined as three or more consecutive miscarriages, is hypothesized to share some of the same pathogenic factors as placenta-associated disorders. It has been hypothesized that a defect implantation causes pregnancy loss, while a partially impaired implantation may lead to late pregnancy complications. The aim of this retrospective register-based cohort study was to
BACKGROUND: Accumulating evidence suggests a relationship between endometrial cancer and ovarian cancer. Independent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for endometrial cancer and ovarian cancer have identified 16 and 27 risk regions, respectively, four of which overlap between the two cancers. We aimed to identify joint endometrial and ovarian cancer risk loci by performing a meta-analysis of
Introduction: Patients with midgut neuroendocrine tumours (NETs) suffer from decreased health-related quality of life (HRQoL), in large part due to bowel symptoms. However, it is unknown which bowel symptoms affect HRQoL the most. An enhanced understanding of this is essential to better focus treatment on this aspect of the disease. This study aimed to determine which bowel symptoms affect HRQoL t
