Abstract Background: Long-term exercise training may have negative effects on cardiovascular functions. Measurement and calculation of central hemodynamic parameters can comprehensively evaluate the cardiovascular functions. This study aims to compare the central hemodynamics between young basketball athletes and matched controls. Methods: Total 19 young long-term trained male basketball athletes and 17 matched male recreationally active controls participated. The central hemodynamic parameters such as central blood pressure, pulse pressure, heart rate (HR), augmentation index normalised to 75 bpm (AIx@HR75), augmentation index (AIx), ejection duration (ED), sub-endocardial viability ratio (SEVR) were measured, and total peripheral resistance (TPR), stroke volume (SV) and cardiac output (CO) were calculated. Non-parameter tests and t-test were used to analyse the central hemodynamic parameters between athletes and controls. Results: HR (56 ± 5 bpm versus 79 ± 9 bpm, p < .001), AIx@HR75 (−8 ± 10% versus −1 ± 10%, p < .05), ED (28 ± 2% versus 36 ± 3%, p < .001) and TPR (0.004 ± 0.006 mmHg s/mL versus 0.012 ± 0.006 mmHg s/mL, p < .001) were significantly lower in basketball athletes compared to the controls. SEVR (231 ± 32% versus 159 ± 21%, p < .001) and SV (154 ± 50 mL versus 101 ± 43 mL, p < .01) were significantly higher in basketball athletes than those in the controls. However, there were no significant differences in central blood pressure, pulse pressure, AIx and CO between them. Conclusions: There is no negative effect on central hemodynamics in young basketball athletes after long-term exercise training. The young basketball athletes have a higher myocardial perfusion, higher efficiency of blood supply, stronger vascular functions and better balance of myocardial oxygen of supply and demand than the controls in this central hemodynamic parameters analysis.


A poly(methyl acrylate)(PMA)/ZnAl layered double hydroxide(ZnAl-LDH) intercalation nanocomposite is synthesized by in situ polymerization of methyl acrylate with ogano-modified ZnAl-LDH(O-ZnAl-LDH). Its structure and morphology are confirmed by X-ray diffraction(XRD) and transmission electron microscopy(TEM) image. The d 001 of O-ZnAl-LDH is expanded to 2.85 nm after polymerization from 2.63 nm, which indicates the intercalation of PMA chains into the galleries of O-ZnAl-LDH. The (001) diffraction of PMA/ZnAl-LDH nanocomposite is broad due to the exfoliation of some O-ZnAl-LDH layers. The TEM image shows that the most of the layers of O-ZnAl-LDH are stacked with a distance of about 3 nm while some of them are exfoliated and dispersed disorderly in the PMA matrix.


This chapter examines the decentering of Germany and the gradual rise of the United States into a leading center of academic life in socially oriented history and the social sciences. It focuses on the pathways of two Nordic scholars, Halvdan Koht (1873–1962) from Norway and Heikki Waris (until 1924 Warén, 1901–1989) from Finland. Both men came from the more peripheral milieus of European intellectual and academic life where the transfer, translation, and mélange of ideas from the leading international centers had always been important. They were the pioneering American travelers in their national and disciplinary academic contexts, Koht since 1908 and Waris since the early 1930s. While Koht retained his contact to the discipline of history, Waris adopted in the USA a new professional identity first as a sociologist and later as a scholar of social and public policy. The chapter shows that the patterns of mobility, the encounters, exchanges, and transfers of knowledge, people, and ideas in the first part of the twentieth century were all embedded with asymmetries and center–periphery relations that structured and shaped the development of the transnational academic space in different ways. Koht and Waris were among those scholars who, regardless of all asymmetries, greatly benefited from their exceptionally early contacts with the United States as a rising "superpower." This did not mean the borrowing of wholesale US knowledge packages as such. With Koht and Waris, the negotiation processes were creative and evident albeit in some respects differently constructed.


The landscape of Uyo metropolis is littered with buildings marked with 'stop work' order and this study sought to investigate the process of obtaining building plan approval and its impact on building construction or property development in the area. A cross-section of two hundred and twelve (212) applicants of building plan approval between 2011 and 2015 were surveyed. The gathered data were analyzed using simple percentages and relative importance index. The study found that less than half of the applicants received approval to commence building development and that it took an average of 6 months to 12 months to secure the approval. It was also shown that majority of buildings in Uyo metropolis are without building plan approval. Poor communication between the planning authority and developers, the high cost of application fees, and the extended period time it takes to obtain approval were found to be some of the challenges encountered by the applicants. This study also found that the existing procedure of building plan approval usually slow down the pace of construction activities and encourage unapproved construction of buildings. The study amongst other recommendations advocated for a total reform of the existing building plan approval system.


Background: The objective of the establishments of the Emergency Departments (ED) in Denmark is to optimize patient treatment. We want to see if the efforts in the ED have an effect on how patients perceive quality. This working paper describes patients' experiences in the beginning of the process, and then we compare the results with the Danish National Survey of Patient Experiences (LUP). Design/Methods: The study is based on a survey. The questionnaire contained 15 questions, included some related to LUP, supplemented by departmentspecific questions. The study was initiated in 2009 comprising 12 weeks. The inclusion criteria were as follows: patient seeking ED; 18 years old or older; oriented to person, place and time. Patient had to be triaged as orange, yellow or green and admitted to the ED for a minimum of two hours. Data are compared with the cumulative data from the LUP in the same year. Chisquare (chi2) is used for significance testing and a confidence interval of 95 % is used. Results: 383 patients participated in the study (193 men, 190 women, mean age 64 years). The response rate was 64 %. The patients were highly satisfied with the treatment at the ED (73,3 % versus 36,1 % in LUP) despite the fact that 40,9 % experienced delays at the arrival at the ED, 22,5 % experienced delays in treatment and 21,3 % reported that they didn´t receive any information about the length of any given waiting time. This corresponds to the experience nationwide in the LUP. Patients in this study experienced fewer errors (medication errors 1,3 % versus 6,2 % in LUP, injury occurred during examination / surgery / treatment 0,5 % versus 5,2 % in LUP) compared to LUP nationwide. Side 2 Of the departmentspecific questions, it appears that staff was approachable, 98,4 % answered yes, 76, 5% got the information they needed, and 77,8 % felt consistency of information between staff members. 85,8 % were confident to be discharged after a maximum 24 hours of hospitalization.


A large-scale study of DNA sequencing databases (Jorgenson E., et al., 2018) to search for hereditary susceptibility to early erectile dysfunction revealed an association with the rs17185536-T polymorphism regulating the expression of topologically associating domain, among which is the SIM1 gene, which plays an important role in maintaining mass body and sexual function. The proximity of the rs17185536 locus to the CCNC (cyclin C), PRDM13 (histone methyltransferase) and USP45 (ubiquitin-specific peptidase 45) genes suggests the possible involvement of this polymorphism in the pathogenesis and other diseases associated with impairments of these genes.Materials and methods. The study included a total of 280 people: 81 of which were healthy donors, 116 pregnant women, 25 patients with polycythemia vera, 29 with essential thrombocythemia, and 29 with primary myelofibrosis.Results. Using the original method of determining the polymorphism rs17185536, the allele of specific PCR-RT showed that the prevalence of the T allele among all examined patients was 19 %, and variants of the genotypes: C/C with 73 %, C/T with 23 % and T/T with 4 %, which corresponds to Winkler e. a. data. The absence of statistically significant differences in the frequency of occurrence of this polymorphism in the pathology of pregnancy and in chronic myeloproliferative diseases indicates a low probability of involvement of rs17185536-T in the pathogenesis of these diseases. In the group of pregnant women, there is an association of the rs17185536-T allele with obesity, uterine fibroids and the development of preeclampsia.Conclusions. For the first time, using the original method of analysis, it was confirmed that the Russian population has a comparable prevalence of the gene of hereditary susceptibility to impotence. Despite the topographic proximity of the rs17185536 locus to the genes regulating the repair and functioning of DNA, its polymorphisms do not affect the risk of chronic myeloproliferative diseases developing. The association of the rs17185536-T allele with the risk of developing a pregnancy pathology requires further study.


Abstract This work is a study of DES-like ciphers where the bitwise exclusive-or (XOR) operation in the underlying Feistel network is replaced by an arbitrary group operation. The authors construct a two-round simplified version of DES that contains all the DES components and show that its set of encryption permutations is not a group under functional composition, it is not a pure cipher, and its set of encryption permutations does not generate the alternating group. They present a non-statistical proof that for n ≤ 4 the set of n-round Feistel permutations over an arbitrary group do not constitute a group under functional composition.


Introduction Complex problems are often easier to model with skills1 than primitive (single time-step) actions (Stone, Sutton, and Kuhlmann 2005). In addition, skills have been shown to speed up the convergence rates of planning algorithms both experimentally (Sutton, Precup, and Singh 1999; Silver and Ciosek 2012) and theoretically (Mann and Mannor 2014). Skills are generally designed by a domain expert, but designing a 'good' set of skills can be challenging in highdimensional, complex domains. In some cases, the skills may contain useful prior knowledge but cannot solve the task, resulting in a sub-optimal solution or no solution at all. Given a 'poor' set of skills, we would like to dynamically improve them. Sutton, Precup, and Singh 1999 suggest Interrupting Options (IO) whereby the agent switches skills whenever there exists another skill with higher value than continuing the current skill. Mankowitz, Mann, and Mannor 2014 prove that the IO process converges on the set of skills with optimal switching rules (under mild assumptions). While the potential of IO is promising, previous experiments only showed the advantage of IO in tasks with few states. We experiment with Space Invaders (SI, Figure 1) via the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) using the 1024-bit RAM image as the state (Bellemare et al. 2013). The primitive actions are combinations of move left, move right, do nothing, and shoot. Our hypothesis is that IOs can improve performance compared to learning with a fixed set of skills despite the fact that SI has a large state-space. To test our hypothesis, we constructed a naive set of skills for the domain where each skill repeats one of the primitive actions over-and-over until a termination condition occurs. However, designing a rule that determines the optimal time to switch between skills is challenging, so we gave each skill a constant probability of switching at each timestep. We call the set of skills with this naive termination rule the initial skills set, and our experiments compared learning with the initial skill set to learning with a skill set whose switching rules are dynamically adapted by the IO rule.


Endeavors to develop a non-invasive and reliable device to detect different types of skin cancer in its early stages have been undertaken over the past few years. Although some advances have been made towards such developments, there remains great scope for the development of a non-expensive, compact, reliable, safe, easy to use, fast, sensitive, and non-invasive device. This project will apply the innovative laser feedback interferometry (LFI) technique to skin cancer detection via laser imaging using near-infrared vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs). In this project, the science behind light– tissue interactions has been explored and skin imaging modalities have been elaborately studied. As a result, LFI has been exploited in various configurations to image different modalities such as Doppler flowmetry and confocal reflectance. In addition to single modality imaging, dual-modality imaging has also been proposed and conducted experimentally, to image Doppler flowmetry and confocal reflectance at the same time, using an integrated LFI system. It is shown that dual-modality imaging can yield images with higher contrast which provide more information about morphological and functional characteristics of a target under test. In addition to two-dimensional LFI imaging, three-dimensional imaging systems have also been studied and employed in the laboratory. A tomographic image identifies tissue volume with altered optical properties due to cancerous or other malignant tissue processes. We applied the three-dimensional imaging system to different types of keratinocyte skin cancer phantoms and results show high level of sensitivity in providing tomographic images. Using high numerical aperture lenses, making images at resolutions down to micrometer scales is possible, which is promising for microscopy of biological structures. Furthermore, parallel LFI imaging using an array of 24 VCSELs was also studied theoretically and experimentally as a part of this work. A VCSEL array was used in a parallel read-out LFI imaging system to develop a fast and high resolution device, which eliminates the need to scan mechanically in one dimension. Investigating the complex interactions of the laser beam and tissue requires a powerful and robust simulation technique. Monte Carlo was used as a simulation technique to model the light–tissue interactions occurring in the optical systems in this work. Firstly, we tested and validated the Monte Carlo main engine which was developed in the group, by studying morphological aspects of the simulated and experimental signals in a laser Doppler velocimetry system, and deep insight into the nature of the LFI Doppler spectrum and further conclusions were drawn. Secondly, the Monte Carlo engine was used in