Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. Knowledge is relative to time and place, never absolute across time and space (Patton, 2002) Contents CONTENTS CONTENTS ABSTRACT LIST OF PAPERS

Recently, a welcome trend has emerged - in addition to the traditional studies on contents and states of consciousness, levels of consciousness have become a matter of research. However, there are some conceptual and methodological difficulties with this research - the labels used for empirical measurement of levels are ambiguous and underspecified while the research on neural correlates of con...

Simulation with integrated parameter optimization of a given model structure is a well-established technique today. However, with increasing system complexity and flexibility the number of possible structure variants increases. Therefore the potential benefit of automatic model structure optimization becomes significant. During optimization, the introduced framework supports automatic parameter...

Contents 1. Introduction 2. The problem in context — some of the man-made environmental problems with potentially catastrophic consequences for life on earth 3. How did we get here? Evolution of human attitude to nature and the natural environment 3.1.

The nutritive value of leaves of four varieties of cassava - MS 6, TMS 30555, Idileruwa and TMS 30572 was evaluated based on their chemical composition and in vitro fermentation. Crude protein (CP) contents of cassava leaves ranged from 177 to 240 g/kg dry matter (DM), with TMS 30555 showing the highest CP contents. Neutral detergent fibre (NDFom) and acid detergent fibre (ADFom) contents of ca...

Methods of storing, managing and presenting educational multimedia data are proposed. Application of these methods to interactive synchronous and asynchronous Distance Learning systems is discussed. An example system based on the proposed solution is presented in details. The system uses clean organization of educational material and enables storage, management, and presentation of various type...

We often eat heat-coagulated (H-C) food proteins, but there have been few studies on the allergenic activity of H-C proteins after digestion and absorption in vivo. To show that H-C protein is not an allergen after digestion, mice were used to investigate the digestion and absorption of the protein through the intestinal epithelium into portal blood employing immunoblotting and competitive inhi...

In this paper we describe the ongoing work on the Circumstantial Event Ontology (CEO), a newly developed ontology for calamity events that models semantic circumstantial relations between event classes, where we define circumstantial as explicit and implicit causal relations. The circumstantial relations are defined manually in the ontology for classes of events that involve a change to the sam...

[1] Gas phase miscible displacement experiments were conducted to quantitatively investigate the advective and dispersive contributions to gas phase transport in unsaturated porous media over a range of soil water contents. Furthermore, the independence of measured dispersivity values was evaluated through comparison of nonreactive and reactive tracer transport. Methane was used as a nonreactiv...

Liposomes are representative lipid nanoparticles widely used for delivering anticancer drugs, DNA fragments, or siRNA to cancer cells. Upon targeting, various internal and external triggers have been used to increase the rate for contents release from the liposomes. Among the internal triggers, decreased pH within the cellular lysosomes has been successfully used to enhance the rate for releasi...