Background: During treatment planning for dental implant placement, there is a need for assessment of alveolar bone. Bone evaluation limited to the use of panoramic and or periapical radiographs may be insufficient, as it provides only two-dimensional information about the implant sites. Computed tomography (CT) provides three-dimensional information. The measurement of alveolar ridge dimensions can be accomplished using ridge-mapping technique. This technique involves penetrating the buccal and lingual mucosa down to the alveolar bone (following the administration of local anesthetic) with calipers and measures the bucco-lingual width of the underlying bone. Purpose: The aim of the study is to compare the techniques, i.e. ridge mapping, direct surgical exposure, and CT scan, which are used to measure the alveolar ridge bone width, and determine their accuracy in the clinical application. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted on 20 patients who reported to the Out-patient Department (OPD) of Prosthodontics and Crown and Bridge, PGIDS, Rohtak (Haryana) for replacement of edentulous span with dental implant. Width of alveolar ridge was studied by three techniques, i.e. CT scan procedure, ridge mapping, and direct surgical exposure at two points (3 mm from the crest of ridge and 6 mm from the crest of ridge), and then taking measurements of surgical exposure as the control group, the measurements obtained from the other two techniques were compared and then accuracy of these methods was assessed. The mean, standard deviation, standard error of mean, and degree of freedom were calculated and subjected to statistical analysis using Student's unpaired t test. Results: Results suggested that there is no significant difference in the measurements obtained by direct surgical exposure technique, ridge-mapping technique, and CT technique. Conclusion: Use of ridge-mapping technique along with panoramic and intraoral radiograph is adequate in cases where the pattern of resorption appears more regular and where mucosa is of more even thickness. It is suggested to use CT scan technique in situations where the alveolar ridges are resorbed, there is presence of maxillary anterior ridge concavities, vestibular depth is inadequate, and ridge mapping is not feasible.


Numerical simulation of heat transfer enhancement by adding cross twisted-tapes of two different widths in the circular tubes was performed.The character of heat transfer and flow resistant as well as the PEC value were analyzed with comparison.The results showed that the flow resistant was reduced considerably with slight reduction of the heat transfer in the turbulent flow when the cross twisted-tape width was reduced,accordingly,the thermal performance factor was augmented.


Taking The fourth Wohe Bridge in Huanyuan county of Anhui as example the construction process of this bridge is simulated in detail.The construction features of this prestressed concrete cable-stayed bridge with small span,one pylon and single cable plane are analyzed,at the same time corresponding construction control measures and control objectives are proposed.


Program slicing is a technique to extract from a program a set of statements (referred to as a slice) that have certain properties; such techniques are widely used, for example, for simplification and maintenance of software. This paper proposes a particular method to generate a slice that is formally represented by using a path dependence flow graph (PDFG), namely, by means of interpretive execution of the PDFG based on data-flow computation (1). Since the proposed method is a generalization of the conventional method of interpretive execution of PDFG based on data-flow computation, the same scheme of computation control can be employed as is used in other techniques of PDFG analysis, for example, infeasible path detection (2). The slicing algorithm is specified for nodes in the form of local rules. Therefore, by partially modifying those rules, new varieties of slices can be easily obtained, for example, more precise slices (3). During firing control in data-flow computation, executable nodes are found, and slice is generated simply by consecutive execution of rules at those nodes, which implies simple computation control (4). Since control of slicing can be distributed among nodes, parallel processing is possible (5). A generalized method that offers generation of slices not obtainable by conventional methods is proposed. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 28(11): 22–33, 1997


The Presidency plays a central role in the functioning of the Czech political system. Among others, the President convenes the first sitting of the Chamber of Deputies after elections and must appoint the Government before it can seek parliamentary confidence. Therefore, the emergency hospitalization of President Miloš Zeman after the 2021 parliamentary election presented politicians with a hitherto unprecedented dilemma. Although a full-scale constitutional crisis was eventually averted, the incident still demonstrated the ambiguity and limitations of constitutional provisions on presidential inability and the temporary transfer of presidential powers in the Czech Republic. This article discusses the respective constitutional provisions and assesses their expedience in light of recent events. Drawing on historical precedents and political debates from the last 30 years, the article proposes options for reform and argues that constitutional crises will remain a real possibility unless political actors agree on at least a minimum of procedural requirements and codify these in organic law.


Volunteers provide organizations with numerous resources and can work to make a positive difference in the community. Volunteer rates in the United States are declining making it very important for organizations that rely on volunteers to work more effectively and efficiently with their volunteers. The recruitment and retention of volunteers are some of the biggest issues volunteer organizations face. By understanding the challenges encountered when working with volunteers and using theory to identify ways these challenges can be overcome to create a positive experience, volunteer commitment is built and recruitment and retention rates increase.


Bitumen exploration was flagged off at Irele, a Nigerian field in 2003. The relationship between the seepage pollutants and receiving water bodies is the focus of this study. We hereby present the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) level in two categories of bitumen contaminated waters; source (RS) and delivery (RD) points. Results were compared with uncontaminated water (RC) as control experiment. The PAHs were extracted by Liquid-Liquid extraction using dichloromethane and analyzed by Gas chromatography with mass spectrometer detector (GC-MS). The mean concentration of PAHs was 8.39, 3.93 and 0.57 ppb for source, delivery point and control respectively. The Benzo[e]pyrene concentrations obtained were higher than 1-10 ppb in most samples, indicating anthropogenic and petrogenic sources of the pollutants. Most of the PAH concentrations obtained were within natural concentrations, However, Benzo (e) pyrene and Indenol (1, 2, 3 – cd) pyrene exceeded the expected limit. The predominance of 4-6 member ring showed that the PAHs were more of pyrolytic than mixed sources. Method validation gave the Limit of Detection (LOD) and Limit of Quantification values in the range of 0.03-0.12 and 0.10-0.61 respectively. The Pearson product moment correlation (PPMC) coefficient (r) was used to determine the interactions of the PAHs detected with parametric factors. All the physicochemical parameters studied except pH shows positive correlation. Statistical test at P <0.05 indicated that the difference in PAHs concentrations is not significant when compared with maximum acceptable PAHs concentration (MAC) for water, which is an indication that the water is safe.Bangladesh J. Sci. Ind. Res.53(4), 319-326, 2018


The present investigation aimed to assess the health problems and diseases associated with obesity in Saudi Arabian adolescent girls, and to evaluate the impact of obesity and weight reduction program with xenical (Orlistat) drug treatment on health status of tested obese adolescent patients. This study was performed on a group of 160 obese adolescent girls, aged 15 – 20 years, attending Physical Rehabilitation and Obesity Treatment Centers at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The obese patients group, under investigation, was selected from the adolescent girls who want in the treatment of obesity after obtaining their consent to participate in this study. The present results revealed that most tested obese adolescent girls suffered with a lot of health problems and diseases. The obesity was associated with deterioration of health status for obese subjects. Also, the weight reduction program with xenical (Orlistat) drug treatment caused a significant loss (≤ 0.01) in body weight of obese adolescent girls by 7.42 and 11.35 % after 30 and 60 days respectively. In addition that tested weight reduction program with orlistat treatment exhibited a significant enhancing impact (≤ 0.01) on all tested health status parameters of obese patients ; especially when obese patients engaged with tested weight – reduction program based upon being on a nutritionally balanced , reduced – calorie dietary regimen and practicing the physical activities regularly at least 6 hours a day , as showing by its enhancing effect on liver functions, serum lipid profile , liver and renal functions and by its lowering effect on blood glucose , insulin and LDL cholesterol levels ; within the reference reported range of all health status items for health individual adolescent girls. Therefore, it is recommended that the obese adolescent girls and women should be orally treated with xenical drug capsules with their obligation by being on a dietary regimen ; a nutritionally balanced , reduced – calorie diet (800 – 1200 calorie) , and practicing the physical activities regularly at least 6 hours a day. [Hend Hassan Ali Ganbi. The Impact of Obesity and Weight Reduction Program with Xenical Drug Treatment on Health Status of Obese Adolescent Girls in Saudi Arabia. Journal of American Science 2010;6(11):944-958]. (ISSN: 15451003).


Despite the increasing availability of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing and emphasis on routine HIV testing, many individuals develop advanced acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and often present to care with an opportunistic infection as the sentinel event. Whereas concurrent opportunistic infections may occur, coexisting Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia and disseminated cryptococcosis with cryptococcal pneumonia as an initial presentation of undiagnosed AIDS is uncommon. Human immunodeficiency virus testing is indicated when an individual presents with an opportunistic infection without a known HIV infection diagnosis. Given the wide availability and convenience of rapid testing, individuals may be tested with an oral rapid HIV assay, which can yield false-negatives, even in advanced HIV disease. We present the case of a man with undiagnosed AIDS who presents with concurrent P. jiroveci pneumonia and cryptococcosis and 2 false-negative oral rapid HIV test results.


Nowadays, the emergence of new technologies gives rise to a huge amount of data in different fields such as public transportation, community services, scientific research, etc. Due to the aging population, healthcare is becoming more important in our daily life to reduce public burdens. For example, manually archiving massive electronic medical files, such as X-ray images, is impossible. However, precise classification is essential for further work, such as diagnosis. In this report, we applied a spectral clustering algorithm to classify chest disease X-ray images. We also employed the "pure" K-means algorithm for comparison. Three types of indexes are used to quantify the performances of both algorithms. Our analysis result shows that spectral clustering can successfully classify chest X-ray images based on the presence of disease spots on the lungs and the performance is superior to "pure" K-means clustering.


103 cases of chronic abdominal pain after contraceptive operations were diagnosed and treated with laparoscopy from March 1989 to May 1994 in our institute. In those patients 95 cases were tubal sterilization 5 were IUD insertion or removal and 3 were induced abortion. The examine results showed that 7 cases were normal (6.8%) 96 were abnormal (93.2%). Some patients had two or more pathological changes. Among those changes there were 77 cases with pelvic adhesion (74.75%) 39 cases with omentum adhesion (37.86%) 15 with pelvic veins congestion (14.56%) 7 with intestinal adhesion (6.8%) 7 with endometriosis (6.8%) 5 with bladder adhesion (4.85%) 1 with foreign body in pelvic cavity and 1 on uterine wall 3 with other reasons. We used laparoscopy to separate loose adhesion in 32 patients and take out foreign bodies in 2 patients and thus relieved some patients pain. We think that the laparoscope has a special role n diagnosing and treating female chronic pain after contraceptive operations. (authors)


Mobile and compact C-arm systems are routinely used in interventional procedures for fluoroscopic CT imaging. The mechanical requirements guarantee for a maximum of flexibility and mobility but restrict the mechanical rotation range (e.g. 165°) and the lateral size of the field of measurement (FOM), typically about 160 mm. Recently, the rotate-plus-shift trajectory for the acquisition of complete datasets from 180° minus fan-angle has been published.1, 2 Here, we combine the rotate-plus-shift trajectory with a shifted detector approach for a fully motorized C-arm system. As the isocenter in non-centric C-arms can be freely chosen, the shifted detector can be equally well absorbed with an offset of the C parallel to the transaxial detector direction. The typical rotation range of 360° used in shifted detector trajectories is replaced by a double rotate-plus-shift scan requiring a rotation range of at least 180° minus fan-angle. The trajectory increasing the diameter of the FOM by up to a factor of two is presented and the practical application of variations with an asymmetric FOM is shown. For image reconstruction we use our modified FDK algorithm that is equipped with a generalized redundancy weight. The presented trajectory can increase the applicability and flexibility of C-arm systems and has the potential to perform intra-operative large volume control or overview scans and thus reduce the patient's risk.


The modern computation system is growing rapidly. Every computation depends on the general arithmetic operations that are indirectly involves decimal numbers. The decimal numbers are represented in binary notation. The decimal number system is very flexible to everyone and computations are easier than any other system. Even though there is problem while dealing with this decimal number system. With increase value of decimal number complexity increases. When these higher valued numbers are converted to binary number for computer computations, this leads huge usage of resources. The solution for this problem is RESIDUE number system. The RNS converts the huge valued number into group of small numbers, this makes computations easy and uses of less resources, which is the main advantage of the RNS system. From past twenty years research is going on Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) and the focus here is to describe its application to stochastic systems. The complexity occurs while decoding the received encoded data. More often the transmitted data is subjected to the channel noise which influences the original signal. To overcome this problem many error correction codes (ECC's) are introduced. This paper proposes an error detection and correction code called hamming code. The hamming code not only detects the errors as conventional codes but also it is able to correct the data. The property of error correction, detection and its simple nature can make this code popular. The process of hamming code and its architecture is described in the paper.


Satellite image processing has a crucial role in remote sensing field. The cameras or sensors embedded on satellites receive raw images which can be improved and used to various applications. To raise the resolution of acquired images super-resolution reconstruction technology is applied. In this paper a valuable satellite image enrichment using adaptive super-resolution is presented. Super-resolution reconstruction technology recreates a high resolution image using a set of low resolution images. Vandewalle motion estimation is employed to correct motion error between low resolution images. Two reconstruction methods are used to recreate a high resolution image. The quality of the recreated image is evaluated using PSNR and SSIM value. Finally, as a comparison a graph is plotted for SSIM values for the dataset images and PSNR values of the dataset images. Experimental results and graphs shows that the result is more accurate when the image is reconstructed by minimizing the error using divergence parameter. IndexTerms Super-resolution reconstruction, satellite video image, motion estimation, quality evaluation. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________


The phenomenon of embryonic diapause has been reported to possibly affect ovarian follicular development. The aim of the current study was to identify the impact of the embryonic diapause period on follicle number and oocyte quality in the European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus). In this species, the embryo undergoes five months of developmental delay. We have determined the antral follicle count (AFC), oocyte morphological quality, oocyte meiotic resumption capacity and the transcriptome profile in immature (GV) and in vitro matured (MII) oocytes obtained during embryonic diapause and after embryo reactivation. A drop in AFC, number of oocytes suitable for in vitro maturation and oocytes reaching the MII stage was observed after embryonic reactivation. A large impact of the diapause period was evident when MII oocytes were compared against GV oocytes using an RNA-seq approach. A total of 1028 genes significantly differed between MII and GV oocytes during diapause and 1795 genes after reactivation. These genes included PDE3A and SOD2, known for being involved in oocyte meiotic arrest and oxidative stress. In addition, tumour-related genes included NDRG3, NCSTN and UGDH, which have been associated with cell proliferation, migration and metabolism, were found. Comparing diapause versus reactivation, differential transcript abundance in both GV and MII oocytes was observed (44 and 32 differentially expressed genes, respectively). Our results suggest that the embryonic diapause and reactivation periods modulate follicular dynamics, influencing the oocyte towards lower quality after reactivation. This is may be related to increased apoptosis, abnormal mitochondria function/structure and metabolic dysfunction in the maturing oocyte. Introduction Embryonic developmental delay, termed embryonic diapause, occurs in more than 130 mammalian species. However, this process is still enigmatic and not fully understood to date [1, 2]. In the European Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus), the only known ungulate that exhibits this phenomenon, the rut starts at the end of July/beginning of August. The female roe deer is considered a seasonally monoestrus breeder [3], with an estrus duration of approximately 36h [4]. The start of the breeding season and further ovulation are modulated by melatonin. In animals receiving melatonin implants in mid-April, a sharp decreased in prolactin and an advancement of the ovulatory period by 72 days, indicated by the increment of blood progesterone (P4) concentrations, has been reported [5]. Proceedings of III International Symposium on Embryonic Diapause DOI: 10.1530/biosciprocs.10.015 © Third International Symposium on Embryonic Diapause


In absorbing Taoist moral theories,Han Fei took Tao as the basis of virtues,regarding Tao as the metaphysical and ultimate foundation of virtues.He believed that Tao,virtue,benevolence,righteousness and rites form a successively developing chain.Through combination of virtue and rite,and then the combination of rite and law,he asserted that law is an inevitable outcome of the evolution from Tao to benevolence,to righteousness and to rites.At same time,Han Fei integrated Tao and Li,taking Li as the traits and natural development law of all things,and in political area as law of administrating a state.He held that governance is to ″handle affair on basis of Tao and Li″.In this way he interpreted the origin of law through the co-generating and co-dependent relationship between Tao,Li and law.


1. Background Computer simulation is today the so-called third methodology, next to theory and experimentation. Molecular simulation is widely used for many biological problems, for example the discovery of new drugs through the so-called structure-based drug design or the identification of proteinprotein interactions [1]. There are numerous simulation techniques that can be applied, amongst which molecular dynamics (MD) is widely regarded as the most rigorous and powerful one [2]. Every year, tens of thousands of scientific publications cite the use of this technique, and the size of MD projects is likely to increase by the end of the decade (see Figure 1). Unfortunately, MD, like other simulation techniques, suffers from heavy computational time and production of large raw data. The amount of data necessary to represent a rigid biomolecule (~100Kb) can increase 5 orders of magnitude (~10Gb) when simulated. The MD community is demanding standards for data management and storage as it is currently struggling with large files, in application-specific formats, spread over a large number of fragmented research laboratories. Advances in simulation data management should provide a valuable help in the dayto-day research activity and support future grand challenges. ScalaLife (Scalable Software services for Life Sciences) is a European initiative that launched a cross-disciplinary Competence Center (http://www.scalalife.eu) for life sciences. ScalaLife performed code optimization, benchmarking on different architectures for simulation application, as well as designed new standards for efficient MD data storage and interoperability. We present in this paper a set of proposed standards and best practices developed during the ScalaLife project. Figure 1. Expected exponential growth of biomolecular simulation. The Y-axis represents the simulation scale calculated multiplying simulation length (in nanoseconds) with size (in number of atoms). From PRACE Scientific Case 2012-2020.


A statistical experimental design called the Fast 4-1 Series is used to assign mass values to in-house standard UF/sub 6/ cylinders. This design is intended to minimize the number of weighings of large cylinders yet provide acceptable estimates of mass values and their precision. 5 refs.


The present invention discloses a geothermal type parquet addition to aldehydes and manufacturing method thereof. In order to increase the effect of addition of formaldehyde addition to aldehyde parquet, the present invention provides a geothermal parquet-type addition to aldehydes, which comprises a substrate floor, four cross-section defines the base of the tongue and groove floor, the floor-yl the above material is provided from bottom to top with a padding layer, an anti spit paint, primer layer and topcoat layer, the bottom surface of the floor is provided with a waterproof layer of the substrate; wherein said topcoat layer comprises three layers: from and the upper, respectively lower topcoat wear, scratch-resistant topcoat layer and topcoat layer in addition to aldehyde; in the present invention, the abrasion resistant top coat (layer), a scratch resistant top coat (layer) was used It is a common environmental UV paint. Geothermal of the invention in addition to formaldehyde in addition to aldehyde parquet effect in line with national standards, product quality greatly improved.


With this new issue of High Ability Studies, I commence the first editorship of my professional career. It is a real honor for me, and I am deeply grateful to the General Committee of the European Council of High Abilities (ECHA) for this opportunity. I feel genuinely overwhelmed by your confidence in me, and this incredible opportunity to lead such a prestigious journal in the field of giftedness and talent. I also want to express my gratitude to Dr. Albert Ziegler, the last Editor-in-Chief of the journal. I fondly remember our first meeting in Nuremberg, during my academic stay at your university in 2016. Since then, I feel extremely fortunate to have known a fantastic person like you, even beyond our research collaborations. Further, I extend my gratitude to Manuel Hopp, who is the Assistant Editor of the journal and was also one of my partners during my stay in Nuremberg. Both of you have ensured the smooth transition of the journal's editorship. In fact, all the contributions of the present issue have been processed under Dr. Ziegler's editorship. This journal has experienced significant growth since its inception. During my doctoral thesis apprenticeship about underachievement in secondary education, High Ability Studies had a great impact on me. Through the journal, I discovered crucial contributions that shed light on the international community. In my opinion, the journal has achieved three important advances: (1) the establishment of a consistent and dynamic theoretical perspective regarding giftedness and talent; (2) an open perspective concerning high abilities in formal and informal contexts; and (3) the application of distinct methodologies in specific domains, such as STEM, sports, or arts. In conjunction, these achievements invest in the expected communion between theorists and practitioners. Given my experience as an educational counselor in both primary and secondary education, I think that we should continue to progress in this direction. Thus, empirical studies should be the basis to construct a more solid and dynamic theory. As a clear example of this goal, it is important to mention the journal's latest issue on selfregulated learning (SRL) by gifted, talented, and high-achieving learners. I sincerely believe that these contributions will have a consistent impact on effective SRL systems in different contexts. HIGH ABILITY STUDIES 2020, VOL. 31, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/13598139.2020.1783855


Dilute ferromagnetic spin systems are considered in the Griffiths phase below the percolation threshold. It is shown that, for relaxational dynamics, the spin autocorrelation functions are bounded both above and below by functions of the form exp(-A(1n t)d(d-1)/) (Ising systems) and exp(-Bt12/) (Heisenberg systems), establishing these as the correct asymptotic forms.


At √s = 7 TeV, the standard model (SM) needs at least 10 (fb) -1 integrated luminosity at LHC to make a definitive discovery of the Higgs boson. Using binary tetrahedral (T') discrete flavor symmetry, we discuss how the decay of the lightest T' Higgs into γγ can be effectively enhanced and dominate over its decay into bb. Since the two-photon final state allows for a clean reconstruction, a decisive Higgs discovery may be possible at 7 TeV with the integrated luminosity only of ~1 (fb) -1 .


OF THE THESIS LEADERSHIP INVOLVEMENT IN PREVENTING THE MISUSE OF THE GOVERNMENT TRAVEL CHARGE CARD by Donald Richard Kaipo Bal Jr. American Public University System, June 28, 2015 Charles Town, West Virginia Professor Christi Bartman, Thesis Professor The research paper examines the misuse of the Government Travel Charge Card (GTCC) Program in the military and the lack of leadership involvement in the GTCC process. One area of concern is that military leaders are not taking proactive steps to mitigate the problem. Research of multiple Inspector General Reports from various government agencies were used to determine if leadership involvement was evident. Leadership culpability was analyzed under the context of both leadership and ethical theories. More specifically, the research focused on transformational and transactional leadership theories in addition to utilitarian and deontological theories, which drew a more comprehensive picture of why leaders are not involved in the process and how they could employ these theories to become more proactive leaders in managing the process. The results indicated that proactive leadership would aid in mitigating the issue and that the combination of both leadership theories will enhance the leader's ability to combat GTCC misuse in addition to fostering good ethical conduct within their organizations. LEADERSHIP INVOLVEMENT 6


In extracts from Jacques Delors' foreword to the book by Pascal Fontaine, Jean Monnet, l'Inspirateur, published in 1988, the former President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995 pays tribute to Jean Monnet, considered as the founding father of a united Europe.


Villin belongs to the family of actin-binding proteins. Its mRNA expression levels in gastrointestinal tract tissues of turkeys were studied in twelve healthy animals, BUT9 breed, divided in two groups. The first group consisted of untreated birds and served as control. The second group was treated with danofloxacin mesylate at a dose rate of 6 mg/kg/24 hours. Villin mRNA expression was detected in the crop and the proventriculus, and high levels were measured in the small and large intestines. Additionally, the profile of villin mRNA expression was tested after danofloxacin treatment. Its expression pattern was not statistically significantly changed. Moreover, in consideration of previous findings, villin was tested as a reference gene for quantitative RT-PCR experiments. Results showed that it was more stable than β-actin and that together with glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase, it can be used as housekeeping genes for intestinal tissues such as duodenum, jejunum, ileum, caecum and colon.


A flexible, generically applicable and inexpensive data acquisition system (DAS), for machine tool condition monitoring, has been designed, constructed and installed as part of a European Union sponsored project. The DAS is more than just a data logger and an array of sensors. It also consists of a methodology for analysing data logging requirements and a relational database that supports this methodology. The database is held on a central 'maintenance management' computer. The monitoring to be carried out by the DAS is specified through this database, which contains detailed information about the DAS's facilities. This feature makes it simple to reconfigure the DAS to implement new monitoring requirements and to customize its operation to meet the needs of different machines. The information in the database is transformed into a look-up table that is read by the software that sets up and controls the data logging processes.


Abstract Strumigenys is one of the most diverse ant genera in the world and arguably the most morphologically diverse, exhibiting an exceptional range of mandible shape and function. A new species, Strumigenys ayerstheysp. nov., discovered in the Chocó region of Ecuador is described. With two morphological characters, this species is shown to be a morphologically unique outlier among Strumigenys globally, having predominately smooth and shining cuticle surface sculpturing and long trap-jaw mandibles. Using µCT scans, we produced 3D images of the worker ant and static images to examine and compare mandible articular morphologies with most morphologically similar members of the mandibularis species group. Cuticular, pilosity, and articular mandible morphological differences supports placing the new species in its own new species group.


Introduction:
 Chronotropic incompetence is a common feature in patients afflicted by heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). However, the specific mechanisms remain unknown.

 Aim:
 To probe the mechanisms of chronotropic incompetence in HFpEF.

 Methods:
 Dahl salt-sensitive rats were fed high-salt diet (8% NaCl). Rats fed normal-salt diet (0.3% NaCl) served as controls. Echocardiography was used to confirm the development of diastolic dysfunction and preserved EF. Telemetry devices were implanted and treadmill exercise tests were performed to assess heart rate response to exercise. Sinus node recovery time (SNRT) was measured
 in vivo,
 and
 ex vivo
 optical mapping was performed in isolated sinoatrial node (SAN) tissue to measure heart rate response to isoproterenol.

 Results:
 HFpEF rats showed decreased E/A ratio (17%, p<0.05) and increased E/E' ratio (40%, p<0.05) compared to controls, indicative of diastolic dysfunction, while EF remained unchanged in both groups. Resting mean blood pressure was elevated in HFpEF rats compared to controls (75%, p<0.05). HFpEF rats exhibited low chronotropic response to maximal exercise, in association with prolonged cSNRT (46%, p<0.05), indicative of abnormal SAN function. Despite unchanged baseline heart rate,
 ex vivo
 high-resolution optical mapping in isolated SAN tissue revealed delayed slow diastolic depolarization of spontaneous action potentials underlying the lower β-AR responsiveness, as well as slowed conduction (in association with histologically-evident increases in SA fibrosis). Next-generation RNA sequencing revealed that SAN from HFpEF rats shows numerous changes in transcripts associated with ion channels, protein kinases, and tissue remodeling. At the single SAN cell level, HFpEF rats showed decreased abundance of L-type Ca
 2+
 channels (Ca
 v
 1.3, 55%) and hyperpolarization-activated "pacemaker" channels (HCN4, 67%) by western blot; such protein changes were associated with remarkable reductions of both currents.

 Conclusions:
 Chronotropic incompetence in HFpEF is due, in large measure, to intrinsic abnormalities of the SAN. Among these, a depressed membrane "clock" features prominently in the underlying mechanism.


To the Editor .—

We read with interest the recent joint statement of the AAP, Committee on the Fetus and Newborn and the Canadian Paediatric Society, Fetus and Newborn Committee,1 the recent letter to the editor by Taylor et al,2 and the response by Dr Barrington3 on the topic of postnatal glucocorticoids for chronic lung disease in the neonate. The use of steroids, dexamethasone in particular, to treat or prevent chronic lung disease (CLD) is controversial. Although we applaud the efforts of the Academy to bring some sense to this quagmire, we have serious reservations about some of the conclusions and recommendations.

Our major concern is that conclusions in the AAP report relating to neurodevelopmental outcome after glucocorticoid treatment were based largely on 2 published meta-analyses performed on 54 and 8 studies5 that appear to be seriously flawed. In a comment on the latter paper, Taylor et al2 discussed the impropriety of combining 8 heterogeneous studies that differed in age at initiation of glucocorticoid therapy, dose and duration of therapy, and tests (and timing of these tests) used to determine neurodevelopmental outcome. Their succinct and valid arguments apply equally well to the meta-analysis of 5 studies,4 and need not be repeated. It was disappointing to note that the AAP report accepted the findings of these 2 analyses without any stated reservations and then went on to recommend restrictive conditions for using postnatal glucocorticoids.

Review of the 11 studies listed in the AAP report reveals that in 5, glucocorticoid therapy was initiated in the first 4 days after birth and in the remaining 6, therapy was begun at 7 days' postnatal age or later. Another way to look at the published data is to …


Background: Coagulase negative staphylococci (CoNS) are gaining importance because of their role as pathogens in certain clinical conditions and their marked resistance to antibiotics. Their species distribution and slime production has important correlation with the antimicrobial susceptibility pattern. Aim of this study was to determine clinically significant CoNS, their species distribution, slime production and antimicrobial susceptibility pattern in a tertiary care hospital. Methods: Identification, speciation and antimicrobial sensitivity testing were performed using standard microbiological techniques. Slime production was also tested by microtiter plate. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was performed by modified Kirby Bauer method as per the CLSI guidelines. Results: A total 204 (49.88%) CoNS were found to be clinically significant. Percentage of clinical significance was high in urine isolates (88.88%) followed by pus (47.78%) and blood (45.56%). The most common CoNS infection was septicaemia (54.9%) followed by abscesses and wound infections (26.5%) and urinary tract infection (15.8%). S. epidermidis (46.1%) was the commonest species in CoNS infection followed by S. haemolyticus (22.1%), S. lugdunensis (11.8%) and S. saprophyticus (8.3%). Slime production was seen in 56.4% isolates by microtiter plate method. Maximum resistance was seen to penicillin (92.25%), followed by cotrimoxazole (73.03%), norfloxacin (73.03%), tetracycline (71.07%), gentamicin (69.6%) and cefoxitin (63.2%). Conclusions: The role of CoNS as pathogen, particularly nosocomial and opportunistic is increasing. Identification of species, slime production and antimicrobial susceptibility of CoNS is highly desirable to permit a more precise determination of host-pathogen relationship and knowledge of pathogenicity. International Sciences prosthetic devices, bacteremia, urinary tract infections, shunt and graft infections, osteomyelitis, ocular and cutaneous infections


Abstract In open Kelly and Jackson networks, servers are assigned to individual stations, serving customers only where they are assigned. We investigate the performance of modified networks where servers cooperate. A server who would be idle at the assigned station will serve customers at another station, speeding up service there. We assume interchangeable servers: the service rate of a server at a station depends only on the station, not the server. This gives work conservation, which is used in various ways. We investigate three levels of server cooperation, from full cooperation, where all servers are busy when there is work to do anywhere in the network, to one-way cooperation, where a server assigned to one station may assist a server at another, but not the converse. We obtain the same stability conditions for each level and, in a series of examples, obtain substantial performance improvement with server cooperation, even when stations before modification are moderately loaded.


Aim at discussing working safety and reliability,the stress and attrition character of slanting axial piston pump were researched.With ferrographic technical methods and stress calculation,the macro micro feature of attrition wear grindings was investigated and researched,as well as relativity and mechanism among attrition character,friction form,stress relation of friction pairs,such as portplate and cylinder portplate face,plunger piston and cylinder hole,slipper and thrust plate,and friction pairs,etc..The result shows,the attrition intensity of kinematic pair and harm effects of oil pollution both have strong correlation with stress of kinematic pair.


The pitch and roll of vessel are measured by sensors of vessel attitude in geodetic coordinate system.With the consideration of the azimuth and pitching of theodolite from optical encoder,the position of LOS stabilization is transformed from deck coordinate system to geodetic coordinate system by usin g coordinate axis circumrotation.Angle changes are measured by optical encoder and sensors of vessel attitude in real time.The error of LOS stabilization is computed in geodetic coordinate system with the data of these changes.The error is effectively compensated by servocontrol system in order to solve the problems of LOS stabilization availably.Practical tracking experiments based on warship prove this system is of high precision in the aspect of LOS stabilization,and is powerful with excellent effect in mitigating the influence of ship-sway.


Although some oil and gas fields had been known in China since long ago, it had not been expected that China would become a major oil producing country because it consists mostly of metamorphic rocks and continental sediment formations in geology. After the revolution, over fifty oil and gas fields have been discovered in 16 continental sedimental basins. Major oil fields are Karamai and Lengho in Northwest and Tachin and Shenri in North and Central East. After discevery of Tachin oil field, production of crude oil climbed rapidly up to 25 million tons in 1971.Oil reserves in the land is estimated at one to three billion tons. In addition to this, vast oil resources are expected in Gulf of Pohai and East Chima Sea.


new insights with which to account for certain linguistic We describe a prototype SK~RED CmAt~eAR for the syntax of simple nominal expressions in Arabic, E~IL~lx, French, German, and Japanese implemented at MCC. In this Oamm~', a complex inheritance ian/cc of shared gr~mmAtlcal templates provides pans that each language can put together to form lansuug~specific gramm-ti~tl templates. We conclude that grammar shsrin 8 is not only possible but also desirable. It forces us to reveal crossliuguistically invm'iant grammatie~ primitives that may otherwise rem~ conflamd with other primitives if we deal only with a single ~.nousge or l-n~uuge type. We call this the process of OaA~O~AT~CAL ̂TOI~aZAT~ON. The specific implementation reported here uses catcgorial tmifr, ation grammar. The topics include the mono-lcvel nominal category N, the functional distinction between ARGUMENT and NON-ARGUMENT of nominals, grammatical agreement, and word order types. Is grammar sharing possible? The multill.eual pmjec~ of MCC a~mpts to build a grammatical system hierarchic~tily shared by multiple languages (Slucum & Justos 1985). ~ ~ as proposed should have an advantage over a system with separate grammars for different languages: It should reduce the ~ of a mnllflinsual rule base, and fecilltat~ the addition of new languages. Bef~e Inesenting evidence for such advantages, however, there is the basic question m be answered: Is grammar sharing at all possible? Although it is well known that languages possess similarities based on genetic, typological, of areal grounds, the question remains whether and how these ~imilarities translate into computational techniques. In this paper, we will describe a prototype shared for simple nominal expressions in Arabic, English, French, German~ and Japanese. x We conclude that grammar sharing is not only possible but also desirable. It forces us to reveal crces-liuguiatic~y invariant grRmmAtiCal primitives that may otherwise confiated with other primitives if we deal only with a single language of language type. We call this the process of ~Tlf.~. ATOMmA~ON 2 forced by grammar sharing. Each language or language type is then characterized by particular combinations of such primitives, often providing Xpreliminary investigations have also been made on Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. 2The verb atom/ze means "to separate of be separated into free atoms" (The Collins English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1986). problems. Before we go into more derail, the following is our view of what general components and mechanisms COllStiUlle 8 shared g r ~ n t l e ~ l SyStemBask mechanisms In a shared grammar:. The process of buildiug a shared grammaT, in our view, requires (i) linguistic description of a set of languages in a common theoretical framework, (ii) a mechanism for E~1~ACr1~O a common grammatical asse~on from two or more assertions, and (fii) a mechanism for MEROINO grammatical asse~ous. The linguistic description should define certain string-combination operations (defined on siring I"YI~) associated with information structures. Then what we do is identify shamble packages of common string-types and information slmctures among independently motivated languuge-spccific grammatical assertaions. These packages are then put into the shared part of the grammnr D and the remaining language-specifics are potential sources for mofe sharing. This extraction is essential in what we call ATOMIZATION, which is basically "breaking up of grammatical a ~ g i o n s into mai ler independeot parts" (Le. decomposition). If we assume that all grammatical aase~iem ~e expressed in terms of FEAI"ORE ST~UCTtn~ES (Shieber 1986), the atomi.Jtlon process would be defined mound the notion of <~2q~.,,H~TION (i.e. reverse of Ut~C.A~ON) as follows: basic a t~s /za~a. . Given two feature structures, Xa for category X in language A end Xb for category X in language B, the shared m'ucture X~t for category X is the ~ ' n O N of Xa and Xb (i.e., the must specific feature slmcmm in commnn with both Xa and Xb). X a is separated out of eithar Xa or Xb, and placed into the shared space. Consequently, a ~ ofdering is established wlm~fin X a s u e ~ Xa and Xb, respectively. There is an underlying assumption that two languagespecific de~uitiom of a commn~ grammatical camgony share something in comn~a no matter how small it is. This means that the linguis~ descriptive basis is questionable if the content of Xa above is nulL Conversely, if clo~ly common information structures appear under languagespecific definitions of distinct grammatical categories, we may suspect a basis for a new common grammatical category. Once the shared and iauguage-spucific pm'ts are separated out, a mechanism for merging them is necessary for successfully incorporating the shared assertion into the language-specific assertion. ~m~c.ATIO~ by n ~ r r ~ . ~ c ~ is such a merging mechanism that we employ in our system (see below). The shared space is a complex inheritance lattice that provides various predefined grammatical assertions that can be freely merged to create languagespecific ones.


Due to the dynamic infrastructure in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET), supporting a reliable and timely service access is one of the main requirements of applications deployed over MANETs. In this paper, a reliability-aware service selection scheme is proposed in which a client node collects and ranks the available service providers based on their estimated response time and reliability. However, estimating the reliability of a service provider in MANET is a challenging issue because it is strongly dependent on the current conditions of the network (dynamic or stable). To estimate the network state based on the local observations, Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is applied prior to the service selection.. The experimental results show that by using our method, not only the unreliable service providers are filtered but also, comparing to the existing service selection methods, lower violations of the client response time requirements (defined in the client SLA) are observed.


Liquid sloshing phenomenon is a result of partly filled tank motions. As a tank moves, it supplies energy to induce and sustain a fluid motion. Both the liquid motion and its effects are called sloshing. The interaction between ship's tank structure and water sloshing inside the tank consists in the constant transmission of energy. As the ship rolls, the walls of a partly filled tank induce the movement of water. Liquid sloshing phenomenon occurring in partly filled ships tanks directly affects the stability of the vessel. However, only static calculations are carried out onboard ships nowadays and static transfer of liquid weight is taken into account in the course of routine stability calculation and assessment. Since previous researches reveal the necessity of dynamic approach towards liquid movement onboard ships, the investigation is focused on problems related to time dependent wave-type phenomena. This aspect is omitted in the course of standard ship stability calculations. The set of numerical simulations of liquid sloshing taking place in moving tanks is carried out. Among many obtained characteristics, the heeling moment due to sloshing is emphasized and thoroughly investigated. The realistic range of possible metacentric heights and rolling periods is examined. The influence of ship's rolling period on the heeling moment due to liquid sloshing is analyzed for one exemplary seagoing vessel as a case study. However, the conclusions can be generalized to some degree and comprise many other ships.


The most great GPS is working on CNS(Car navigation System) and Personal terminal, but ocean has not been. First studied GPS is sailing to ship but We have been connivance that The ship is not need detail navigation. Lately, harbor facilities and transportation service in harbors are complication. We have need accurate ship navigation system. In this paper, author developed algorithms of ellipsoid conversion between WGS84 and BESSEL and develope algorithms of map projection between ellipsoid coordinate system, and plane cartesian system. Author used 3-parameter in covering ellipsoids and used TM and UTM projection in converting between ellipsoid and plane cartesian coordinate. And author analyzed errors through static surveying and dynamic surveying of GPS for proving accuracy of GPS sensor, Furthermore author analyzed deflection error of received position. Finally author developed real time ship navigation system using cheep GPS sensor.


The classical Minkowski sum of convex sets is defined by the sum of the corresponding support functions. The L p -extension of such a definition makes use of the sum of the p th power of the support functions. An L p -zonotope Z p is the p -sum of finitely many segments and is isometric to the unit ball of a subspace of l q , where 1/ p + 1/ q = 1. In this paper, a sharp upper estimate is given of the volume of Z p in terms of the volume of Z 1 , as well as a sharp lower estimate of the volume of the polar of Z p in terms of the same quantity. In particular, for p = 1, the latter result provides a new approach to Reisner's inequality for the Mahler conjecture in the class of zonoids.


Disconnector switch operation in GIS will generate VFTO, which will harm the equipment. Because there are many limitations in field measurement, simulation can overcome the limitations of experimental research, which can replace test measurement to a certain extent. In this paper, three VFTO suppression methods are simulated in ATP-EMTP. By comparing the VFTO amplitudes of the main equipment before and after the suppression measures, the results show that the paralleling closing resistor can significantly reduce the VFTO amplitude of major equipment. Simplifying wiring also have better suppression but will increase the VFTO amplitude of some devices.Although installing the wave blocker can reduce the VFTO steepness and amplitude on the transformer, but it will produce a serious VFTO on the wave blocker. So the latter two methods can only be applied when appropriate. Through this research, to find the application of the suppression measures, thus effectively reducing the hazard of the VFTO in GIS.


We describe the design and structure of a Java library for approximate string matching. The API provides a rich variety of flexible and extensible fuzzy data structures, including lists, tries and maps that support approximate string search and storage. Tests and benchmarks indicate a parity of space and time complexity with traditional, non-fuzzy, collections.


The bgaH gene isolated from Haloferax lucentensis codes for P-galactosidase. To study the function of initiator tRNAs in translation initiation in Haloferax volcanii, the initiator AUG codon of the bgaH gene was mutated to UAG, UAA, UGA, and GUC. Four different H. volcanii initiator tRNA derived mutants with complementary anticodons were also made. When plasmids carrying the bgaH reporter and mutant initiator tRNAs were coexpressed in H. volcanii, the UGA and GUC decoding tRNAs were aminoacylated, but functional 0-galactosidase was produced only in the presence of the latter tRNA. This result confirms that translation can initiate with some alternative codons, but suggests that the amino acid attached to the tRNA also plays a role. It is unknown if leaderless transcripts will have similar requirements, therefore mutant bgaH reporters lacking 5' untranslated regions were also generated. I also describe modifications of the bgaH reporter for studying suppression of termination codons in H. volcanii. The serine codon at position 184 of the bgaH gene was mutated to the termination codons UAA and UAG. H. volcanii serine tRNA derived suppressor tRNAs with complementary anticodons were also generated. These suppressor tRNAs should allow a study of the requirements for suppression of UAG and UAA codons in H. volcanii, in particular the question of whether suppressors of the UAA codon can also suppress the UAG codon in archaea. H. volcanii WFD 11 used as the host does not have any endogenous 3-galactosidase. I have shown that extracts made from H. volcanii transformants can be used to assay for 3galactosidase using either O-Nitrophenyl-p-galactoside or Beta-Glo reagent as a substrate. This latter assay couples the D-Luciferin product of cleavage of 6-O-P-galactopyranosyl-luciferin by P-galactosidase to the more precise and sensitive luciferase assay. Since little is known about translation in archaea, future work will involve modifying identity elements in the initiator tRNA to study their requirements in both initiation and elongation in archaea. Thesis Supervisor: Uttam L. RajBhandary Title: Lester Wolfe Professor of Molecular Biology Acknowledgements: I am grateful to my thesis supervisor Uttam RajBhandary, who has supported me throughout this work, even when it wasn't working. I would also like to thank Caroline K6hrer for the immense amount of discussions we've had in science, sci-fi, and other less important fields. Thanks are also given to the other members of the RajBhandary lab for their input and helpful discussions over the years, especially the members of 68-683 who've made my tenure thoroughly enjoyable. I am also indebted to Vaidyanathan Ramesh for his pioneering work on this project and Neal Copeland for recombineering strain SW102, which helped me overcome a major cloning hurdle. Finally, I want to extend special appreciation to my mom, dad, and brother, who have all helped keep a roof over my head these last few years. Without their support I'm not sure where I'd be, and I'm thankful to have them in my life. Table of


The aim of this work is to control the physical and mechanical properties of a spline surface and achieve a reasonable choice of high-speed cold roll-beating processing parameters. The surface residual stress and surface work hardening at the indexing circle serve as the main evaluation indices of the physical and mechanical properties of the spline surface. The influence degree of the processing parameters on each evaluation index is analyzed using Taguchi theory. An optimized model for improving the Taguchi process capability index that combines Taguchi theory with entropy theory is established, and the integral process capacity index is optimized via the generalized price reduction gradient method. The results of the optimization and the verification test are implemented in a high-speed cold roll forming test for comparison. The results show that the influence of processing parameters on the physical and mechanical properties of the splash surface of the cold roll can be ordered as follows: feed rate > roll round radius > cold roll-beating speed. In addition, the spline surface physical and mechanical properties of the optimal processing parameters were obtained for the combination of a cold rolling speed of 1581 r/mm, feed rate of 42 mm/min, and roll round radius of 2 mm.


PRINCETON, N.J. & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (NYSE:BMY) and Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) today presented findings from EMANATE (Eliquis evaluated in acute cardioversion coMpared to usuAl treatmeNts for AnT icoagulat ion in subjEcts with NVAF), a Phase 4 clinical trial, during a late-breaking hot line presentation at the ESC Congress 2017, organized by the European Society of Cardiology, in Barcelona, Spain. This descript ive, randomized, openlabel trial explored the safety and efficacy of apixaban 5 mg twice daily (2.5 mg lower dose when two of the following were present: age ≥80 years, weight ≤60 kg, or serum creatinine ≥1.5 mg/dL (133μmol/L)) vs. standard of care (parenteral heparin and/or vitamin K antagonist). The outcomes measured in this study were the occurrence of acute stroke, systemic embolism, major bleeding, clinically relevant non-major bleeding and all-cause death in non-valvular atrial fibrillat ion patients undergoing cardioversion. This is an investigational use for Eliquis. Eliquis is not FDA-approved for the reduction of stroke in NVAF patients undergoing cardioversion (please see indications and important safety information for Eliquis later in the press release).


Growth hormone (GH) and insulin‐like growth factor I (IGF‐I) are the principal biomarkers used to assess disease activity in acromegaly, and any discrepancy between them renders interpretation of results inconclusive. Purpose of this study was to assess the frequency of this discrepancy and identify parameters that might affect its occurrence.


Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) enable a growing number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications with large geographical coverage, low bit-rate, and long lifetime requirements. LoRa (Long Range) is a well-known LPWAN technology that uses a proprietary Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) physical layer, while the upper layers are defined by an open standard—LoRaWAN. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of LoRaWAN networks by fine-tuning specific radio parameters. Through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem formulation, we find optimal settings for the Spreading Factor (SF) and Carrier Frequency (CF) radio parameters, considering the network traffic specifications as a whole, to improve the Data Extraction Rate (DER) and to reduce the packet collision rate and the energy consumption in LoRa networks. The effectiveness of the optimization procedure is demonstrated by simulations, using LoRaSim for different network scales. In relation to the traditional LoRa radio parameter assignment policies, our solution leads to an average increase of 6% in DER, and a number of collisions 13 times smaller. In comparison to networks with dynamic radio parameter assignment policies, there is an increase of 5%, 2.8%, and 2% of DER, and a number of collisions 11, 7.8 and 2.5 times smaller than equal-distribution, Tiurlikova's (SOTA), and random distribution, respectively. Regarding the network energy consumption metric, the proposed optimization obtained an average consumption similar to Tiurlikova's, and 2.8 times lower than the equal-distribution and random dynamic allocation policies. Furthermore, we approach the practical aspects of how to implement and integrate the optimization mechanism proposed in LoRa, guaranteeing backward compatibility with the standard protocol.


This research is aimed at determining and analyzing the effect of experiential marketing on repurchase intention through customer satisfaction as intervening variable ( study at The Bagong Adventure Museum Tubuh). This is an explanatory research. The sampling technique used is non probability sample with purposive sampling method. The sample in this study comprised 110 respondents who are the visitors of The Bagong Adventure Museum Tubuh. Data used in this study are primary data and secondary. Data collection instrument is questionnaire measured by using Likert scale. This study uses Partial Least Squares (PLS), supported by software SmartPLS 3.0 , and sobel test is used to examine the relations of the mediating variables. The results showed that experiential marketing consisting of sense , feel , think , act , and relate is able to simultaneously increase repurchase intention of The Bagong Adventure Museum Tubuh. E xperiential marketing consisting of sense , feel , think , act , and relate is able to simultaneously increase customer satisfaction of The Bagong Adventure Museum Tubuh. Customer satisfaction is able to increase repurchase intention of The Bagong Adventure Museum Tubuh. E xperiential marketing consisting of sense , feel , think , act , and relate through customer satisfaction has a positive impact on repurchase intention of The Bagong Adventure Museum Tubuh. KEYWORDS : Experiential Marketing , Customer satisfaction , Repurchase Intention


A compound represented by the formula ** ** structural, or a pharmaceutically acceptable salt or solvate thereof, wherein: R is heteroaryl, wherein said heteroaryl can be unsubstituted or optionally independently substituted with one or more radicals which may be the same or different; each moiety being selected separately from the group consisting of halogen, alkyl, aryl, cycloalkyl, CF3, OCF3, CN, -OR5, -NR5R6, -C (R4R5) n OR 5, -C (O2) R5, -C ( O) R5, -C (O) NR5R6, -SR6, -S (O2) R7, -S (O2) NR5R6, -N (R5) S (O2) R7, -N (R5) C (O) R7 and -N (R5) C (O) NR5R6; R2 is selected from the group consisting of R9, alkyl, alkynyl, aryl, heteroaryl, CF3, heterocyclylalkyl, alkynylalkyl, cycloalkyl, -C (O) OR4, alkyl substituted with 1-6 R9 groups which can be the same or different.


The purpose of this site-specific paper is to describe the different alternatives and their probable relative costs, risks, and uncertainties. A secondary purpose is to raise the issue of methodology for decision making in nuclear waste management. The paper does not attempt to arrive at any recommendations. (LK)


Objective To assess the prevention of dexameth antepartum and the pulmonary surfactant(ps) post partum to prevent the respiratory distress syndrome of newborn(NRSD) and analyze the curative effect and safety.Methods The 120 premature infants from January 2003 to May 2005 were divided into combining group(55 cases) and control group(65 cases).In combining group the dexameth was given antepartum 30 min and ps was given preventively after partum.The control group was only given dexameth or ps post partum.The NRDS incidence,CPAP ventilating rate,complication and mortality were compared between two groups.Results There was significant difference between two group with P0.01(combining group was better than control group).Conclusion The outcome of hyaline membrane disease had been improved better in combining group than in control group so that could decrease the complication and mortality.


This paper describes the recent results on conditioning and dark current measurements of the photocathode rf guns at the photoinjector test facility at DESY Zeuthen (PITZ). For successful operation of high gain SASE FELs, a high phase space density of the electron beam is required. A high gradient in the gun has to be applied to produce high quality space charge dominated beams. In addition, long rf pulses and a high repetition rate should be achieved to provide high average power of the FEL radiation. The first PITZ rf gun has been successfully tested at a mean power up to 27 kW (900 µs, 10 Hz and 3 MW) and has been installed in the VUV-FEL at DESY Hamburg. Another rf gun has been installed at PITZ in January 2004 and is being conditioned for high power tests. The dark current behavior for various cathodes and a multipacting condition are presented.


This case study provides an overview of 'Sidestep', an arts in health project for staff at a specialist child sexual abuse unit in an Irish paediatric hospital, undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of the project was to provide a 'virtual creative space' to support staff across this period of professional and personal challenge. The project was evaluated using pencil and paper questionnaires, and participant feedback is included here, to illuminate the value of an art-based approach to supporting staff well-being at times of crisis and change. Staff described participation in the project as a unique experience which allowed for connection and a sense of ballast during remote working conditions, as well as providing opportunities for meaning-making and reflection. The article is accompanied by images from the project to illustrate the ways in which participants used the image-making process to explore experiences of the pandemic.


The relevance of the research topic is due to the significant role of the religious factor in the political activity of the main opposing forces during the Civil War in Kabarda and Balkaria (1918–1920). The purpose of the work is to analyze the use of the religious factor by both pro-Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces in the subregion to achieve their political aspirations. The study was carried out on the basis of an analysis of documents published and introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, memoirs of contemporaries of the events under consideration, the main scientific publications in which the object of research is touched upon. The following methods were used in the work: analysis, synthesis, microhistoric analysis, historical Psychology. Historicism is a cross-cutting principle of research. The conducted research allows us to conclude that the religious factor, due to its special significance for the peoples of the subregion under consideration, was widely used by all political actors during the Civil War. At the same time, the political success of the Bolsheviks was largely due to the conclusion of a kind of strategic alliance with the politically active part of the local clergy, which, in turn, fulfilled the role of a conductor of Bolshevism in the popular environment. The latter was especially important in view of the need to ethnize the revolution, without which it would be extremely difficult for the Bolsheviks to really strengthen their power in the region.


For 30 years, good fortune has enabled us to contribute to the development of symbolic convergence theory (SCT). SCT is a general theory of communication that helps explain broad aspects of interpersonal, small group, public, organizational, mass, and intercultural communication. SCT explains the communicative force of fantasy-sharing on human action as stemming from its ability to forge a symbolic consciousness that is constitutive of reality. In this chapter, we first depict SCT's heuristic value. Next, we highlight its historical development and grounding research. Then, we set out its anatomical elements providing a clear view of the relationship among its 18 technical concepts. Specifically, we highlight its basic, message, dynamic, communicator, medium, and evaluative concepts. Then, we depict its utility by describing its use in solving real-world problems ranging from physician recruitment to relationship building to creating a new corporate identity and culture. Thereupon, we synthesize the answers to its major criticisms. Finally, we discuss potential avenues for future research and development. We highlight the need for researchers to develop a propensity to fantasize scale and work toward the unification of the force of fantasy and the other communicative forces.


Two new species of Chloropidae (Diptera) from Switzerland. The two species Siphunculina ismayi sp. n. and Speccafrons genavensis sp. n. (Diptera, Chloropidae, Oscinellinae) are described, illustrated and compared with morphologically similar species. Short keys are provided for the two genera for the species of the Western Palaearctic Region.


The multi-modal neuroimage study has dramatically facilitated disease diagnosis. Tensor-based methods are commonly used to represent multi-modal data as multi-dimensional arrays and usually implement matrix decomposition. These methods can be seen as a linear algebraic way for the lossy compression of an array. However, involved lossy operations might have a negative impact on performance, and overlook underlying important complementary information between modalities. This study proposes a Tensor-based Complex-valued Graph Neural Network (TC-GNN) to model multimodal neuroimages as complex-valued tensor graphs by investigating underlying complementary associations and cross-modality message aggregation. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate our method's consistent improvements and superiority over other baseline models in multi-modal brain disease analysis.


The present invention is a nonwoven fabric collector, a battery manufacturing method and a manufacturing system using the same. Nonwoven collector according to an embodiment of the present invention includes an upper and lower conductive nonwoven sheet comprising a network of conductive textile has a higher tensile strength than the conductive nonwoven sheet, wherein the top conductive nonwoven It becomes mediate these coupling between the sheet and said lower conductive nonwoven sheet comprises a tensile reinforcing layer having pores communicating with the upper conductive nonwoven sheet and the lower conductive non-woven sheet. BACKGROUND OF THE 1b


1. Develop and modifying map of benchmark sites on landscapes for sampling. 2. Collect soil samples, characterize, and measure reflectance within stratified landscapes of Woodbridge-Lodi Wine Grape District (WLWGD). 3. Analyze spectral data and compare to collaborators' x-ray diffraction and potassium fixation analyses. 4. Classify images, when available, by applying spectral models within GIS-stratified images of WLWGD and Carneros District. 5. Additional soil characterization with validation samples collected within image classes. 6. Analyze spectral data of validation samples, refine spectral predictive models for minerals and potassium fixation. 7. Repeat image classification in both districts with refined models. Objectives 1 to 3 were addressed in 2007 with objectives 4 to 7 to be addressed during 2008 through acquisition of hyperspectral images of the wine districts. The results to date have demonstrated a spectral relationship to the minerals within the geomorphic regions and the predictive ability of mineral spectroscopy for potassium fixation.


How should a firm price a new product for which little is known about demand? We propose a pricing rule that can be used if the firm can estimate (even roughly) the maximum price it can charge and still expect to sell some units, and the firm need not know in advance the quantity it will sell. The rule is simple: Set price as though the demand curve were linear. We show that if the true demand curve is one of many commonly used demand functions, or even a more complex function, and if marginal cost is known and constant, the firm can expect its profit to be close to what it would earn if it knew the true demand curve. We derive analytical performance bounds for a variety of demand functions, calculate expected profit performance for randomly generated demand curves, and evaluate the welfare implications of our pricing rule.


The paper presents an improved stator flux estimation technique based on a voltage model with some form of low pass filtering. In voltage model-based stator flux estimation, a low-pass (LP) filter is normally used instead of a pure integrator to avoid the integration drift problem due to DC offset, noise or measurement error present in the back electromotive force (EMF). In steady state condition, the LP filter estimator will degrade the performance and efficiency of the direct torque control (DTC) drive system since it introduces magnitude and phase errors, thus resulting in an incorrect voltage vector selection. The stator flux steady state error between the LP filter and a pure integrator estimator techniques is derived and its effect on the steady state DTC drive performance is analyzed. A simple method is proposed to compensate for this error which results in a significant improvement in the steady state drive performances. Simulation based on this technique is given and it is verified by experimental results.


Fatigue life calculations have been recently introduced as explicit checks in classification societies rules for shipbuilding. Such checks are based on the classic S-N approach, which cannot be easily applied to the condition assessment of structural details. Fracture mechanics approach allows describing the structural degradation of ageing structures and the reliability framework accounts for the inherent probabilistic aspects of fatigue. This approach gains relevance as many ship tankers are being converted to operate as offshore ships. This paper carries out a sensitivity analysis of the reliability model for fatigue life calculations of typical ship's welded joints based on fracture mechanics, aiming to select the most influencing parameters, before and after inspection updating.© 2006 ASME


Kinetic studies with PCT produce parameter estimates of physiologic models (e.g., glucose metabolism with F-18 FDG and blood brain barrier diffusion with Ga-68 EDTA). We and others have previously shown that blood volume effects can not only affect these estimates but can also be included in the compartmental models as an adjustable parameter. This permits estimation of regional blood volume and increases the accuracy of the other parameter estimates. Because plasma or blood tracer concentrations change rapidly after a bolus injection, we investigated the effect of varying scan intervals on the parameter estimates. Using FDG kinetics in the brain as a model, we simulated initial scan intervals ranging from 12 seconds to 3 minutes on tissue time activitly curves generated from rate constants typical of normal gray matter (including noise) with a CBV of 6cc/100gm. Arterial plasma FDG measurements from an actual patient were used in the simulation. FDG rate constants (k1*, k2*, k3* and k4*) and a fifth parameter representing CBV were iteratively generated for each scan sequence. The estimated CBV was nearly constant (5.7–6.2cc/100gm) over the range of scan intervals tested although the fractional standard error of the CBV estimate increased with longer scan times. This error ranged from about 1% with 12 second scans to about 3% with 3 minute scans. A similar stability in the estimates of k1*, k2*, k3* and k4* was also found. This indicates that initial scan intervals of 1–2 minutes as typically used with NeuroECAT kinetic PCT studies permits accurate estimations of parameters including those with a relatively rapidly changing component such as blood volume in bolus injection studies.


The introduction of African honey bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) to South America in 1956 resulted in one of the most astounding success stories in the history of introduced insect species. The descendants of these bees have spread at an unprecedented speed, and their populations have grown rapidly to high densities throughout their range. Further, Africanized honey bees (which is the name most commonly used to refer to them in the Americas) have had enormous impact on beekeeping and the public, and have generated countless radio, newspaper, and television stories. Indeed, this insect has become such a significant media star that it has been granted its own nickname, the "Killer Bee." Today, these bees have spread through most of South America and all of Central America, and have recently entered the United States from Mexico. Predictions of their impact are serious, and include disruptions of both beekeeping and the production of bee-pollinated crops. The threat from these bees was recognized soon after their introduction and stimulated an enormous amount of research into their biology and potential management and control. What has emerged from these studies is a picture of a bee ideally pre-adapted to its new habitat and impervious (so far) to any proposed or attempted barrier to its spread. This review describes some of the reasons behind the un paralleled success of this unusual insect, discusses its impact in Latin Amer-


The recent paper by MacKichan and coworkers, which appeared in the November, 1977, issue of the Journal, states that there is an important error dependent on renal function when a one‐compartment model is used to calculate drug clearance values from data better fitted to a more complex model. This error is related to the magnitude of the ratios of the exponents and constants of the two‐compartment model and is independent of the pathway of elimination of the drug. Lidocaine, a drug with a rapid metabolism rate, shows an error when a one‐compartment model is used, but this error is independent of renal function.4,5 Even for lidocaine, dosage recommendations calculated from a one‐compartment model are not significantly different from those calculated from a two‐compartment model.4 Thus the general conclusion of MacKichan and coworkers that "the clinical importance of this error cannot be overlooked" requires qualification. MacKichan and co‐workers imply that a one‐compartment model is inappropriate for calculating clearance values for antipyrine, tolbutamide, and pentobarbital in man. The literature documents that there are very small differences in clearance values calculated for these drugs when the one‐compartment model is compared to the two‐compartment model.1–3


Presented herein is a novel algorithm for inference on decision forest models that increases the robustness of the decisions in the presence of missing features in the data. The proposed algorithm ensures that tree decisions are supported by a minimal amount of non-missing features. Experiments have demonstrated that the proposed algorithm not only increases the robustness of the model, but also increase the model's predictive performance. DETAILED DESCRIPTION Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems often combine many different sources of data that are assembled to a single feature vector for an machine learning (ML) classifier, such as random forest, to make a prediction. This situation exists in many different domains. For example, many different sources of information may be used to determine if a single packet flow is related to malware. The sources of information include, for example:  Features extracted directly from the packet flow directly (e.g., duration, size).  If available, ETA features.  If available for a given IP, features from passiveDNS.  If available, information from the TLS certificate.  etc. Many of the features may be unavailable for a given packet flow, but there is still a desire to build a general classifier that is able to utilize all of the information (when available), while remaining robust when some of the features are missing. For such situations, classifiers based on decision trees are good candidates as they are able to handle 2 Brabec and Skarda: ROBUST DECISION FOREST INFERENCE ALGORITHM IN PRESENCE OF MISSING Published by Technical Disclosure Commons, 2020 2 5948X missing values quite naturally. The problem is that without any guard rails, in some situations, the decision of the classifier may be supported by only a handful of non-missing features. This makes the classifier non-robust and very vulnerable to noisy or corrupted features. As the data pipelines in modern ML systems are very complex, it is only a matter of time when a bug or data corruption (it may be in a data source under 3rd party control) breaks the classifier which can have serious impacts. Accordingly, presented herein is a new algorithm for inference over decision forests that greatly mitigates the risk that a small number of corrupted or noisy features will impact the prediction of the forest. Before describing aspects of the proposed algorithm, a brief description of the structure of decision forests and how the standard inference algorithm works is first provided. In particular, a decision forest is an ensemble of decision trees and Figure 1, below, shows a common instance of a single decision tree with five (5) nodes.


Abstract. After destructive natural disasters, it is necessary to quickly grasp the damage situation for the initial response. In recent years, studies on the method of the automatic evaluation of building damages due to disasters using the convolutional neural network (CNN), which is a deep learning methodology for image recognition, were conducted. In these studies, it was clarified that a large number of images are necessary to train the CNN with sufficiently high accuracy. However, the number of images of damaged building is limited. Therefore, in the present study, we used the generative adversarial network (GAN) to automatically generate a large number of imitation images of damaged and undamaged buildings and trained the CNN using imitation images to obtain a higher accuracy rate of the CNN. Then, the validity of the CNN for judgment of "damaged" and "undamaged" using imitation images was confirmed. In addition, photographs of actual buildings were input to the trained CNN as test data.


The principle of operation and design of the harmonic oscillator was introduced and the factors influencing the etching quality of the harmonic oscillator were analyzed in detail.In experiment,the fabrication technology was studied and improved to get the high quality of harmonic oscillator. At 80 ℃,the etching velocity of the improved etching liquid was controlled in (0.53±0.2) μm range.The testing result indicates that the control precision of SiO2 is 0.1 μm,which can be applied in the integrated optical chip of the photoelectric integrated acceleration seismic geophone.


In highly mobile large-scale vehicular ad-hoc networks, routing protocols must be fast and efficient in terms of low routing discovery delay and communication overhead to support the applications such as car talk. Such requirement becomes more difficult to achieve when inducing security enhancement to tackle the authentication of routing messages. In this paper, we propose a lightweight (fast) secure routing protocol, Secure Proactive Tree-based Routing (SPTR) to hit these two points. SPTR makes use of the characteristics of VANET networks, that is, the traffic originates from or terminates at the gateway or road side unit. SPRT also takes advantages of certificate-less ID-based cryptography to provide message authentication. Analysis and simulations show that SPTR has low routing discovery delay and communication overhead in highly mobile large-scale VANET even if authenticating routing messages.


Historic western American art is best understood as myth in visual form. My essay argues that art enshrines the ideals of nineteenth-century white Americans who saw the West as a promised land. Western art's contested reputation today results from its tendency to celebrate frontier expansion as fundamental to the shaping of a distinctive national character.


This series of articles on the color processing for digital cinema is based on the Engineering Guideline, SMPTE 432-1. The DC28 committee thought the information in that guideline would be more widely available if it were published as a series of articles in the SMPTE Journal. This second article in the series describes the reasons for choosing the constants 4095 and 52.37 in the Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM) encoding and decoding equations and discusses white and black points.


This document offers a variety of general recommendations for creating publications that are more preservable. If working with specific preservation partners, however, their capabilities, standards used, and services offered may vary greatly. It is helpful to engage with these partners early to discuss new projects. This gives the preservation partners an opportunity to indicate whether they have local practices that differ from the suggestions here. For example, some preservation services may prefer that specific file formats or metadata standards are used. Discussing the project early can improve the preservation outcomes. These other guidelines can facilitate conversations with preservation partners: enhancing, or implementing a publishing platform. there are standards for bibliographic data (e.g. ONIX, Dublin Core), full-text data (e.g. TEI, EPUB), annotations (e.g. W3C's Web Annotation Data Model), persistent identifiers (e.g. DOIs, Handles, ARK IDs), citations (e.g. MLA, BibTeX), metrics (e.g. COUNTER), accessibility (e.g. W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and more. Preservation workflows scale best when working with common standards. software the new functionality is in other and internally consistent within the platform. the (e.g. with the local changes and if working with a preservation partner, any local changes to the software. The risk of not following a process be loss of the new features during preservation, updates, or platform migration. An undocumented customization the of entire publications. These other guidelines may be helpful when implementing new features: For platforms and publishers working with a preservation service, preservation workflows will be designed based on the sample publications provided. If these are not representative of the full range of functionality that the publishing platform supports, then the preservation workflow developed may miss things that the publisher wants to preserve. Keep a record of the scope of variations that might be found in a publication. As formatting rules for a publication change, expand, or new file formats or arrangements can be expected, inform your preservation institution so that they can adapt their workflows accordingly and avoid missing important features. For more about changes that should be communicated to a preservation service: Ensure that Terms of Use for publication that have user-contributed content are appropriately transparent and cover preservation of this content. being services core 13. Acquire the highest quality version of media to use for preservation 34. For Excessive small metadata files or a complex folder hierarchy within an export package adds complexity to the workflow. Ideally, export processes consolidate metadata into one file per publication, and the folder and file structure are mostly flattened, predictable, and use a consistent naming convention. Metadata should be fully expressed within the metadata file, not via file- and folder names, and should include references to the files being described so that they are easily connected. The complexity of a submitted information package has an impact on the ability of a preservation service to efficiently and quickly convert it to an archival information package. Reducing the number of separate metadata files and folders reduces processing time and can improve stability in the long term by simplifying migration either to a preservation system or to another platform. To the extent that the goal is an automated preservation workflow, the export packages should be consistent across publications. 22. Express metadata in an appropriate structured format information the 25. Ensure that the license for each publication resource covers preservation, and express the license in a structured consistent way as part of the metadata. Clarify license to third party web resources it to them of the a In these if the unique valid DOIs, handles to each publication resource and to provide this as part of the metadata, can maintain connections between the components of a publication and sustain citation links. As an example, consider the case where a video is embedded in an EPUB and it has a caption under it that includes a registered DOI. The DOI points to a page dedicated to the published video. If the publisher no longer has that material, a preservation service may have the option to register the location of its preservation copy with doi.org so that the link would point to a new location. If a resource is local to the publication and is not intended to be cited or described independently, then a meaningful caption provides useful context, but creating persistent identifiers isn't necessary. The EPUB specification defines a list of core media types that are supported. Using formats outside of this list introduces an additional risk for preservation since EPUB reader tools may not support these formats. Publishers should therefore consider whether using something outside of these types is justifiable given that doing so may result in the loss of that media. This more general guideline may also be useful to consider: 11. Use non-proprietary, broadly supported and adopted open file formats Embedding media resources within an EPUB ensures that a future reader will be able to locate these resources and view them in the original context of the work. In order to keep the overall size on an EPUB manageable for access, it may be advantageous to embed lower quality copies of the media and link to higher resolution versions via persistent links such as DOIs. These guidelines also refer to where media content is hosted: These guidelines may also be relevant when considering use 40. If external web content is embedded in a publication, identify the and for collecting this content as part of the publication. A preservation service may not collect web content outside of the agreed upon domain names unless copyright for the content being harvested is clear. If third-party pages and features that are visually embedded in an EPUB or a web-based publication are meant to be preserved, it should be possible to identify which content publishers have the right to collect so that a web crawler can be configured to include or exclude it. One way to differentiate could be to consistently express the rights in the metadata that is supplied to the preservation service. Another option is to apply structured metadata describing the rights status to the HTML. The Creative Commons REL documentation 7 includes examples of this that cover both page- and object-level licenses - this approach could support automated harvesting decisions at either level. Alternatively, a publisher could supply a list of domain names to include for harvest during the initial preservation workflow configuration. These guidelines may also be useful to consider when embedding external web content: Preservation services might not support a workflow that automatically harvests the content of iframes embedded within an EPUB. Even with such a service, the quality could vary greatly, and the content might change following publication. If fallback options are not sufficient a more stable approach would be for the publisher to create an archived copy of the web page featured in the iframe. While there are tools that can be run locally by the publisher to perform single page archiving, there are also third party archiving services such as archive.today or Internet Archive's Save Page Now service that allow you to archive a single page before publication and generate a persistent link for the embedded web content. This link could be included in a descriptive caption under the embedded feature. Publishers should test the outcome of these single page captures as quality can vary depending on the complexity of the website and the harvest method applied. These guidelines may also be relevant: This crawlers can identify the URLs that make up a work. Note that as with <link> tags, the target URLs of <a> tags will likely be crawled even if they do not display text on the page, and so they can be used to guide a crawler to relevant content. Conversely, a crawler cannot determine which of these tags link to content that is not vital to the work, and so using these tags for other purposes or having hidden link tags that are never used can guide the crawler to things that may be out of scope for an archived copy of the publication, such as previous or unused iterations of a page. This guideline may make changes for efficient crawling less critical: 43. Include a sitemap for all web-based publications of 48. Where multiple publications are on a single domain or subdomain, plan the structure of URLs so that the scope of each publication is easily identified via its URL path. Many modern websites depend on JavaScript to load data from the server as the user interacts with the site creating a dynamic experience. This can make it difficult for a web crawler to automatically create a functional copy of a web page since it may not be able to predict all user behaviors that pull new content from the server. Some web developers design websites using a "progressive enhancement" approach in which a baseline of functionality is supported for a variety of environments, including those with scripts disabled. Where this approach is used, the version of the site presented to the user will change if they choose to disable, or cannot support, JavaScript in their environment. They will instead see a scriptless version of the site that presents the core intellectual components of the page in a more static form. If this functionality exists or can be easily supported, it can serve as an alternative way to capture pages using web archiving in cases where the full dynamic version cannot be crawled automatically. This guideline describes an alternative way to manage JavaScript-rich features: 53. For dynamic web page features, favor designs that pre-load data 12. Start discu


ABSTRACT A simple single-step kinetic model consisting of two parallel reactions is proposed for torrefaction of small biomass particles. The model is validated against experimental data on torrefaction of poplar wood fines. Comparison of experimental data and model prediction shows that the results predicted by the proposed simplified model are as accurate as those from the models of Di Blasi and Lanzetta (1997) and Rousset et al. (2006) which involve larger numbers of model parameters – eight and sixteen, respectively – compared to four in the proposed model. This makes it suitable for incorporation into the overall reactor model. At 493 and 553 K, the relative mean errors are found to be 0.056, 0.080, 0.051 and 0.050, 0.100, 0.048 for the proposed model, Rousset et al.'s (2006) model and Blasi and Lanzetta's (1997) model, respectively. The effect of particle size, temperature and residence time on torrefaction of biomass is investigated. A transformation of rate-controlling regime from kinetic to heat transfer is identified with an increase in particle size and temperature. Sensitivity analysis shows that the dimensionless groups such as pyrolysis number, dimensionless heat of reaction and dimensionless activation energy have significant influence on the particle temperature and torrefaction behaviour.


A construct, "A Theory of Nursing Care of Patients Who Have Had Spinal Anesthesia with Regard to the Need for Catheterization," illustrates how a theory for practice discipline, as proposed by Dickoff et al. (1968), may be developed through four levels In the construct, as the theory develops step by step- I) factor-isolating or naming, 2) factor-relating or situation-depicting, 3) situation-relating-a) predictive or b) promoting or inhibiting, 4) situation- producing or prescriptive — based on data collected in practice, direction is provided for the prescription of activity aimed at reaching the goal of the theory.


The use of the concentrations of zinc in archaeological bone as an indicator of past diets and/or health conditions has become widely accepted in bone-chemistry analysis, despite the fact that the theoretical validity for such an application has not been established. In this paper I present a series of critical variables—such as elemental metabolism, bone physiology, the relationship between dietary intakes of an element and its concentration in bone, trophic-level separation in the foodweb, and diagenetic variability—that must be addressed in the process of theoretical validation. I also discuss how studies that support the use of zinc as paleodietary indicator have generally focused on only one or perhaps two of these criteria. Until a sound model based on physiological principles is developed, the use of zinc as a paleodietary indicator remains unproven.


[1] Using a case study from the island of Elba, Italy, we seek to test the hypothesis that the presence of minerals with low frictional strengths can explain prolonged slip on low-angle normal faults. The central core of the Zuccale low-angle normal fault contains a distinctive fault rock zonation that developed during progressive exhumation. Most fault rock components preserve microstructural evidence for having accommodated deformation entirely, or partly, by frictional mechanisms. One millimeter thick sample powders of all the major fault rock components were deformed in a triaxial deformation apparatus under water-saturated conditions, at room temperature, and at constant effective normal stresses of 25, 50, and 75 MPa. Pore fluid pressure was maintained at 50 MPa throughout. Overall, the coefficient of friction (μ) of the fault rocks varies between 0.25 and 0.8, emphasizing the marked strength heterogeneity that may exist within natural fault zones. Also, μ is strongly dependent on fault rock mineralogy and is 0.6 for fault rocks dominated by quartz, dolomite, calcite, and amphibole. Localization of frictional slip within talc-rich portions of the fault core can potentially explain movements along the Zuccale fault over a wide range of depths within the upper crust, although the mechanical importance of the talc-bearing fault rocks likely decreased following their dismemberment into a series of poorly connected fault rock lenses. Additionally, slip within clay-bearing fault gouges with μ between 0.4 and 0.5 may have facilitated movements in the uppermost (<2 km) crust. For several other fault rock components, μ varies between 0.5 and 0.8, and mineralogical weakening alone is insufficient to account for low-angle slip. In the latter fault rock components, other weakening mechanisms such as the development of high fluid pressures, or dissolution-precipitation creep, may have been particularly important in reducing fault strength.