The Role of Environmental Activists in Governing Riverscapes: The Case of the Yamuna in Delhi, India

Introduction India’s current urbanization process poses multiple challenges for urban environmental governance. Environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) have emerged as important actors challenging the state to better protect the environment and take actions against urban environmental degradation. A series of case studies indicates that environmental activism seems to be able to make a difference when linking multiple scales and reminding government agencies of their responsibili..

Sai Balakrishnan. Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India

What role do agrarian capitalism and regional caste/class formation play in the making of post-liberalization urban India? And, what can we learn from these agrarian-urban entanglements to better understand current processes of urbanization in India? These are some of the main questions Sai Balakrishnan specifically addresses in her book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India. The book is an empirically rich and highly informative narrative of “agrarian-urban ..

Динамика частотного реверса асинхронного двигателя

Для исследования реверсирования асинхронного двигателя сравниваются два способа частотной и противовключением. Анализируются различные законы изменения частоты статора и их влияние на быстродействие, пульсации момента, плавность

A Multi-Component Prime-Boost Vaccination Regimen with a Consensus MOMP Antigen Enhances Chlamydia trachomatis Clearance

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fimmu.2016.00162BACKGROUND: A vaccine for Chlamydia trachomatis is of urgent medical need. We explored bioinformatic approaches to generate an immunogen against C. trachomatis that would induce cross-serovar T-cell responses as (i) CD4(+) T cells have been shown in animal models and human studies to be important in chlamydial protection and (ii) antibody responses may be restrictive and serovar specific. METHODS: A consensus antigen based on over 1,500 major outer membrane protein (MOMP) sequences provided high epitope coverage against the most prevalent C. trachomatis strains in silico. Having designed the T-cell immunogen, we assessed it for immunogenicity in prime-boost regimens. This consensus MOMP transgene was delivered using plasmid DNA, Human Adenovirus 5 (HuAd5) or modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) vectors with or without MF59(®) adjuvanted recombinant MOMP protein. RESULTS: Different regimens induced distinct immune profiles. The DNA-HuAd5-MVA-Protein vaccine regimen induced a cellular response with a Th1-biased serum antibody response, alongside high serum and vaginal MOMP-specific antibodies. This regimen significantly enhanced clearance against intravaginal C. trachomatis serovar D infection in both BALB/c and B6C3F1 mouse strains. This enhanced clearance was shown to be CD4(+) T-cell dependent. Future studies will need to confirm the specificity and precise mechanisms of protection. CONCLUSION: A C. trachomatis vaccine needs to induce a robust cellular response with broad cross-serovar coverage and a heterologous prime-boost regimen may be an approach to achieve this.AB was funded by the Wellcome Trust. RS was supported by the European Community’s European 7th Framework Program ADITEC (HEALTH-F4-2011-18 280873).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Bivariate random-effects meta-analysis and the estimation of between-study correlation

BACKGROUND: When multiple endpoints are of interest in evidence synthesis, a multivariate meta-analysis can jointly synthesise those endpoints and utilise their correlation. A multivariate random-effects meta-analysis must incorporate and estimate the between-study correlation (ρ(B)). METHODS: In this paper we assess maximum likelihood estimation of a general normal model and a generalised model for bivariate random-effects meta-analysis (BRMA). We consider two applied examples, one involving a diagnostic marker and the other a surrogate outcome. These motivate a simulation study where estimation properties from BRMA are compared with those from two separate univariate random-effects meta-analyses (URMAs), the traditional approach. RESULTS: The normal BRMA model estimates ρ(B )as -1 in both applied examples. Analytically we show this is due to the maximum likelihood estimator sensibly truncating the between-study covariance matrix on the boundary of its parameter space. Our simulations reveal this commonly occurs when the number of studies is small or the within-study variation is relatively large; it also causes upwardly biased between-study variance estimates, which are inflated to compensate for the restriction on [Formula: see text] (B). Importantly, this does not induce any systematic bias in the pooled estimates and produces conservative standard errors and mean-square errors. Furthermore, the normal BRMA is preferable to two normal URMAs; the mean-square error and standard error of pooled estimates is generally smaller in the BRMA, especially given data missing at random. For meta-analysis of proportions we then show that a generalised BRMA model is better still. This correctly uses a binomial rather than normal distribution, and produces better estimates than the normal BRMA and also two generalised URMAs; however the model may sometimes not converge due to difficulties estimating ρ(B). CONCLUSION: A BRMA model offers numerous advantages over separate univariate synthesises; this paper highlights some of these benefits in both a normal and generalised modelling framework, and examines the estimation of between-study correlation to aid practitioners