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Assessment of ocular irritation is a regulatory requirement in safety evaluation of industrial and consumer products. Although a number of in vitro ocular irritation assays exist, none are capable of fully categorizing chemicals as stand-alone assays. Therefore, the CEFIC-LRI-AIMT6-VITO CON4EI (CONsortium for in vitro Eye Irritation testing strategy) project was developed to assess the reliability of eight in vitro test methods and computational models as well as establishing an optimal tiered-testing strategy. For three computational models (Toxtree, and Case Ultra EYE_DRAIZE and EYE_IRR) performance parameters were calculated. Coverage ranged from 15 to 58%. Coverage was 2 to 3.4 times higher for liquids than for solids. The lowest number of false positives (5%) was reached with EYE_IRR; this model however also gave a high number of false negatives (46%). The lowest number of false negatives (25%) was seen with Toxtree; for liquids Toxtree predicted the lowest number of false negatives (11%), for solids EYE_DRAIZE did (17%). It can be concluded that the training sets should be enlarged with high quality data. The tested models are not yet sufficiently powerful for stand-alone evaluations, but that they can surely become of value in an integrated weight-of-evidence approach in hazard assessment.

Background Women who have experienced childhood trauma may be at risk for postpartum depression, increasing the likelihood of negative outcomes among their children. Predictive pathways from maternal childhood trauma to child outcomes, as mediated by postpartum depression, require investigation. Methods A longitudinal sample of South African women (N=150) was followed through pregnancy and postpartum. Measures included maternal trauma history reported during pregnancy; postpartum depression through six months; and maternal-infant bonding, infant development, and infant physical growth at one year. Structural equation models tested postpartum depression as a mediator between maternal experiences of childhood trauma and children’s outcomes. A subset of women (N=33) also participated in a lab-based emotional Stroop paradigm, and their responses to fearful stimuli at six weeks were explored as a potential mechanism linking maternal childhood trauma, postpartum depression, and child outcomes. Results Women with childhood trauma experienced greater depressive symptoms through six months postpartum, which then predicted negative child outcomes at one year. Mediating effects of postpartum depression were significant, and persisted for maternal-infant bonding and infant growth after controlling for covariates and antenatal distress. Maternal avoidance of fearful stimuli emerged as a potential affective mechanism. Limitations Limitations included modest sample size, self-report measures, and unmeasured potential confounders. Conclusions Findings suggest a mediating role of postpartum depression in the intergenerational transmission of negative outcomes. Perinatal interventions that address maternal trauma histories and depression, as well as underlying affective mechanisms, may help interrupt cycles of disadvantage, particularly in high-trauma settings such as South Africa.

This paper presents an architecture for integrating cloud computing and enterprise systems based on the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) model. The public/private approach used in RosettaNet provides the conceptual basis to capture information used in the cloud and by users of the cloud locally in their own systems. The architecture is then examined using information in the context of REA and the cloud-based software developed by Workday to illustrate different characteristics of the approach.

Recently, technological developments, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), have facilitated the identification of individual things and information sharing regarding their behavior throughout the supply chain. Such developments have generated the capabilities of a highly visible supply chain (HVSC): a supply chain where the location of arbitrary individual things can be determined at any point in time by all appropriate supply chain partners, made possible by an “Internet of Things” for the supply chain, referred to as a “Supply Chain of Things.” A critical component of a Supply Chain of Things is an ontology to facilitate the visibility and interoperability of things along the supply chain. As a result, the objective of this paper is to define an ontology that leverages the availability of an individual thing's (object) identification information within the context of a standard set of economic phenomena that support multiple views in a range of data architectures. Our design science approach begins with a set of ontological primitives and gradually defines structuring principles that provide guidance for the design of supply chain systems that are characterized by increased visibility and interoperability and which facilitate management of and collaborative decision making about supply chain activities. The EAGLET ontology is named after its five primitives: E vent, AG ent, L ocation, E quipment, and T hing. The following are some of its unique characteristics: location and equipment are recognized as ontological primitives, and creating and destroying of containment structures is explicitly modeled; the economic phenomena underlying the supply chain are defined from an independent view, as opposed to a trading-partner view; the supply chain is defined from three different perspectives: the physical flow, the chain of custody, and the chain of ownership; event sequences that resemble the economic scripts underlying the supply chain are defined.

Natural science research follows a stereotypical pattern and such uniformity makes it easier to recognize and evaluate the results of such research. A similar format has been lacking for design science research. This issue was addressed by Peffers et al. (2008) who defined such a template for design science research for information systems: the design science research methodology (DSRM). In this paper, we first discuss design science research and the DSRM. Then, we illustrate the application of the DSRM to AIS research through retroactive analysis. Finally, we integrate the DSRM into the operational specification of artifact networks and use the REA literature for illustration purposes.

The resource–event–agent (REA) model for enterprise economic phenomena was first published in The Accounting Review in 1982. Since that time, its concepts and use have been extended far beyond its original accountability infrastructure to a framework for enterprise information architectures. The granularity of the model has been extended both up (to enterprise value chains) and down (to workflow or task specification) in the aggregation plane, and additional conceptual type-images and commitment-images have been proposed as well. The REA model actually fits the notion of domain ontology well, a notion that is becoming increasingly important in the era of E-commerce and virtual companies. However, its present and future components have never been analyzed formally from an ontological perspective. This paper intends to do just that, relying primarily on the conceptual terminology of John Sowa. The economic primitives of the original REA model (economic resources, economic events, economic agents, duality relationships, stock–flow relationships, control relationships, and responsibility relationships) plus some newer components (commitments, types, custody, reciprocal, etc.) will be analyzed individually and collectively as a specific domain ontology. Such a review can be used to guide further conceptual development of REA extensions.

The strategies in the synthesis of metal carbide cluster are examined and the full synthesis procedures for a number of heteronuclear metal carbide clusters are presented. Specific classes of carbide clusters prepared are octahedral Fe 5 MC(CO) x y- and Fe 4 M 2 C(CO) x y- clusters and square pyramidal Fe 4 MC(CO) x y- clusters. One synthesis strategy was polyhedral expansion based on [Fe 4 C(CO) 12 2- ] or [Fe 5 C(CO) 14 2- ] reactions with coordinately unsaturated metal complexes or labile complexes that readily yield coordinately unsaturated complexes. Selected oxidative degradations of these octahedral carbide clusters provided a synthesis step comprising elision of an iron center to yield square pyramidal Fe 4 MC(CO) x y- clusters.

The crystal structure of hydridotris(3-t-butyl-1-pyrazolyl)boratothallium(I) is reported. The compound crystallizes in the orthorhombic space group Pnma (No. 62) with a 14.431(4), b 16.299(3), and c 10.562(2) A. The T1 atom of each monomeric unit adopts a pyramidal geometry with respect to the three nitrogen atoms that constitute the “face” of the pyrazolylborate ligand. The average T1-N distance of 2.584(9) A possibly implies some ionic character.

The reaction of SnCl 2 with 2 or 1 equivalents of [HB(pz * ) 3 ]K in CH 2 Cl 2 affords [HB(pz * ) 3 ] 2 Sn (I) or [HB(pz * ) 3 ]SnCl (II) (pz * = 3,5-dimethyl-1-pyrazolyl), respectively. The structures of I and II have been established by X-ray crystallography; I possesses a novel geometry. Compound I crystallizes in the P 1 − space group with a 10.975(1), b 11.067(2), c 14.578(3) A, α 88.64(1), β 85.71(1), and γ 83.74(1)°. Compound II crystallizes in the P 1 − space group with a 8.148(1), b 8.827(1), c 13.546(2) A, α 77.81(1), β 90.02(1), and γ 80.50(1)°.