A 'booster' system is described that enables measurement and recording of achievement of students in school-based assessments to emphasise performance relative to personal targets based on prior attainment. The aim is to achieve the expected added value for each student. Success has been defined as reaching a common, quantified goal comprising the score achieved in an assessment and a 'boost' that reflects the intrinsic ability of the student; the weaker the student, the bigger the boost towards the goal. This booster system has enabled reliable teacher assessments of National Curriculum levels to be computed and has avoided the lowering of esteem of weaker students.


Objective : To find out the correlation between personal social problem and stress on Midwifery Diploma program students of general class at Midwifery Academy of panti Wilasa Semarang in school year 2008/2009. Method : Analytic study with cross sectional approach. The sample of the research was 99 midwifery diploma program students of general class first semester Midwifery Academy of panti Wilasa Semarang. The data was collected by using questionnaires with a personal social problem and stress scale. Then, it was analyzed by SPSS program version 13.0 using Rank Spearman correlation coefficient test with significant level 0,05. Result : The most student with personal social problem in enough heavily category (50,5%), and no one student is in very heavy catagory. The most student with stress in enough stress(47,5%) and lower category (47,5%), and least at very low category (2%). The result from the calculation using SPSS an rh0xy= 0,880 with the significancy level at 0,05 and n = 99. Conclusion : There is a significant correlation between the personal social problem and stress. The correlation between them is positive and the relation is very strong.


Bollywood is now witnessing a sea change, into its every aspect of functioning is it film making or Film Financing. The article explains the concept of film financing in respect of Bollywood, related structures, patterns, formats of film financing. It also offers brief comparison with Hollywood's film financing to further understand variety of issues lying unresolved right from the beginning. The penultimate section takes into account the Future Prospects by detailing about the level of professionalism, corporatisation and investment coming from various sources, before coming down to the conclusion.


We conducted a single-arm clinical trial in Ethiopian visceral leishmaniasis/HIV-coinfected patients using pentamidine secondary prophylaxis. The 2-year risk of relapse was 37%. Patients reaching a CD4 count >200 cells/µL after 12 months of prophylaxis can safely discontinue pentamidine.


Offices represent the latest frontier in the drive to automate workplaces. Following hard on advances in factories, transportation and communications, office equipment seems destined for major changes. Vendors, buyers, economists, all sorts of people loudly proclaim the many virtues of the new systems. Yet there seems to be a distinct reluctance to seriously discuss or in some cases even to acknowledge, issues of importance with those kept out of the decision‐making process but who are most directly affected.


Blockchains facilitate decentralization, security, identity, and data management in cyber-physical systems. However, consensus protocols used in blockchains are prone to high message and computational complexity costs and are not suitable to be used in IoT. One way to reduce message complexity is to randomly assign network nodes into committees or shards. Keeping committee sizes small is then desirable in order to achieve lower message complexity, but this comes with a penalty of reduced reliability as there is a higher probability that a large number of faulty nodes will end up in a committee. In this work, we study the problem of estimating a probability of a failure in randomly sharded networks. We provide new results and improve existing bounds on the failure probability. Thus, our framework also paves the way to reduce committee sizes without reducing reliability.


Abstract : The emphasis of this research is on the development of mathematical programming tools for the design of S/F communication networks. An analytical model for the system is first presented and discussed. The design variables (routing of messages, channel capacities, topology, etc.) are then defined and proper design criteria (delay, cost, thruput, etc.) are established and expressed in terms of the variables. Next, various design problems are defined and investigated; the most significant of them here follow: (1) Find the minimum cost channel capacity assignment, given the routing of the messages and the maximum admissible delay T; (2) Find the routing which minimizes the delay, given the channel capacities (and therefore the cost); (3) Find the routing and capacities assignment which minimizes the cost, given the maximum admissible delay T. (4) Find the topology, routing and capacities assignment which minimizes the cost, given the maximum admissible delay T. (Author Modified Abstract)


Single chip microprocessor performance is projected to rise from around 32 bit 100 MIVs in 1990/1 towards 64 bit 1000 MIP''s by the end of the decade. New approaches to high speed parallel interconnections could clearly impact the exploitation of such massive computing power. In this paper we describe feasibility studies on optical interconnects. We explore the potential of optics to meet the speed power and crosstalk requirements for future VLSI IC interconnection. Indium Phosphide based quantum well modulators and photodetectors have been studied for coupling data to and from the I. C. Multimode waveguides are promising for the optical pathway.© (1991) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.


This article would like to highlight one sayyids family which for a long time had been marginal in the academic world – the Sayyids of Jamalullail of Perak. This article argues that they have contributed significantly to the Islamisation and the administration of the Perak Sultanate since its establishment in the early 16 th century until the early 20 th century, particularly through their position as Orang Kaya Menteri Paduka Tuan for several generations. Hence, utilizing several manuscripts available in the National Archive of Malaysia and the SOAS Digital Collections, and supported by other relevant sources, their origins and contributions to the Perak Sultanate will be discussed and highlighted accordingly. Even at one time, these sayyids dominated Orang Besar Empat offices of the Perak Sultanate, except Temenggung . As Orang Kaya Menteri Paduka Tuan who is in charge of religious matters, these Sayyids compiled a set of laws known as the Ninety-nine Laws of Perak which signify an intellectual legacy of the Malay society. This set of laws is important in understanding the Islamisation process and the interactions between Islam and adat in Malay society.


Z. K lim e nt, M. Mat 0 u S k 9 va: Runoff changes according to human impact on the landscape. Geografie-Sbornik CGS, 111,3, pp. 292-304 (2006). The main aim of our research project was to determine the extent to which the outflow can be influenceg by the human interventions in three-selected water basins in Bohemian Forest (Sumava Mountains) and foothills. The rainfall-runoff analyses using both the single and double mass curves over the period of the hydrologic observations were taken as a basic methodology. Beside mean discharge, precipitation, snow and air temperature trends, analysis of land cover change and human impact on the river network and drainage areas development were applied too. The greatest deviations were widely observed in the period between the 2nd half of the seventies and in the 1st half of the eighties. The whole system came slowly back to its initial condition in the early nineties. The runoff trend deviation has been related to the nature and human factors, mainly to current climatic changes and changes of landscape retention potential.


Studies of small groups of patients utilizing rigid protocols have been published concerning the efficacy of continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII). The results have demonstrated marked improvement in glycosylated hemoglobin values, blood glucose concentrations, reversibility of vascular permeability of the eye, a decrease in microscopic hematuria and a decrease in hypoglycemic reactions, Because of these encouraging results it becomes incumbent to attempt to offer this form of treatment to a broader segment of the diabetic population in a more traditional practice setting. The results of a large clinical trial have been recently published by physicians practicing in a large urban multi-specialty circumstances. Our experience although less in number spans a longer period of time (36 months) and represents that of a teaching community hospital.


Because of continuous competition in the corporate industrial sector, numerous companies are always looking for strategies to ensure timely product delivery to survive against their competitors. For this reason, logistics play a significant role in the warehousing, shipments, and transportation of the products. Therefore, the high utilization of resources can improve the profit margins and reduce unnecessary storage or shipping costs. One significant issue in shipments is the Pallet Loading Problem (PLP) which can generally be solved by seeking to maximize the total number of boxes to be loaded on a pallet. In many previous studies, various solutions for the PLP have been suggested in the context of logistics and shipment delivery systems. In this paper, a novel two-phase approach is presented by utilizing a number of Machine Learning (ML) models to tackle the PLP. The dataset utilized in this study was obtained from the DHL supply chain system. According to the training and testing of various ML models, our results show that a very high (>85%) Pallet Utilization Volume (PUV) was obtained, and an accuracy of >89% was determined to predict an accurate loading arrangement of boxes on a suitable pallet. Furthermore, a comprehensive analysis of all the results on the basis of a comparison of several ML models is provided in order to show the efficacy of the proposed methodology.


We report a clinical case of an 11-year-old boy with de novo partial duplication of chromosome 21st pair and some clinical features of Down syndrome. Using hr – CGH method (high resolution Comparative Genomic Hybridization) we detected a quantitative change (a duplication) in 21q21 – q11.2 region. To confirmed the results of hr-CGH analysis we used Quantitative Fluorescent Real Time PCR method with four primers for two different genes located in duplication region.


Abstract Top slag melting experiment was conducted in a silicon molybdenum furnace with tire cord steel billet. The influence of top slag composition on the plasticity of CaO–Al2O3–SiO2–MgO inclusion and inclusion plasticization conditions was calculated by thermodynamic software FactSage. Use the thermodynamic calculation to guide the laboratory experiments to study slag compositions influence inclusions composition. Then industrial experiments were conducted based on the theoretical calculation and results of laboratory experiments. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) were used to determine the morphology and composition of inclusions in steel. All studies show that in the CaO–Al2O3–SiO2–10% MgO diagram, when CaO = 8–48%, SiO2 = 35–75%, Al2O3 = 0–32%, inclusions are in the plastic area. When basicity of top slag is certain, Al2O3 content in inclusions increases with the increase of Al2O3 content in the slag, and the distribution of inclusions becomes scattered with the increase of Al2O3 content in slag. Inclusion plasticization can be achieved when the binary basicities of top slag are 0.6, 0.8–1.2, 1.4 and corresponding w(Al2O3)s are 2–15%, 2–10%, <2%. According to industrial experimental results, when top slag basicity decreases from 1.5 to 0.67–0.9 and Al2O3 content decreases below 10 wt%, the inclusion falls into plastic area. It is feasible in practice to control the CaO–Al2O3–SiO2–MgO inclusions plastic through adjusting Al2O3 content in slag.


System-related fee payment with a vehicle, comprising: at least one sensor (902) mounted on a vehicle (900) and automatically sensing at least the time during which said vehicle is running; at least one communicator (906) mounted on said vehicle providing an output indicating at least the time during which said vehicle is running; and at least one data processor (910) receiving said output from said at least one communicator, and providing an output of billing information with respect to a rate related to the use of the vehicle which depends on the time during which said vehicle is being operated, wherein the only variables sensed by the at least one sensor (902), which are considered in the billing data, are duration of vehicle use and time of day or night vehicle use.


This study aims to obtain information related to the possibility of whether organizational commitment is influenced by managerial ability, communication and stress. Using a causal study through a survey at the Police Resort Lebak Polda Banten, Indonesia, for a sample of 85 personnel, data for each variable was collected separately by respondents who filled out the questionnaire. The method used in this research is quantitative survey method, while the analysis technique used is path analysis using correlation and regression. The results prove that there is an influence of managerial ability on organizational commitment, there is an influence of communication on organizational commitment, there is an effect of stress on organizational commitment, and there is an influence of managerial ability, communication and stress together on organizational commitment. These findings indicate that organizations need to consider the variables of organizational culture, discipline, and work motivation in planning and developing human resources at the Lebak Police Resort, Banten Police, Indonesia.


Decision-making dynamics are central to In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), an infertility treatment in which patients make a sequence of choices within and across treatment cycles. Patients' strategies are affected by their fertility characteristics, preferences, IVF's treatment technologies, and information gradually revealed during a cycle. Patients may forego treatment because of its expense, or may choose more aggressive treatment to reduce the substantial risk of IVF failure. Several policy interventions are possible to increase IVF access or encourage patients to take more conservative treatments, which reduce the chance of risky twin or triplet pregnancies. We evaluate potential policies after estimating a dynamic structural model of patients'choices within and across IVF treatments. The policies include insurance mandates, direct limits on or additional prices for aggressive treatment, and introducing improved treatment technologies. All policies have significant effects on patient choices and outcomes, but vary substantially in their welfare and cost consequences.


Automatic optimization techniques have been used in recent years for the aerodynamic and mechanical design of turbomachine components. Despite the many advantages, their use is usually limited to simple applications in industrial practice, because of their high computational cost. In this paper, an optimization strategy is presented, which enables the three-dimensional multipoint, multiobjective aerodynamic optimization of turbomachinery blades in a time frame compatible with industrial standards. The design strategy is based on the coupling of three-dimensional inverse design, response surface method, multiobjective evolutionary algorithms, and computational fluid dynamics analyses. The blade parametrization is performed by means of a three-dimensional inverse design method, where aerodynamic parameters, such as the blade loading, are used to describe the blade shape. Such a parametrization allows for a direct control of the aerodynamic flow field and performance, leading to a major advantage in the optimization process. The design method was applied to the redesign of a centrifugal and of an axial compressor stage. The two examples confirmed the validity of the design strategy to perform the three-dimensional optimization of turbomachine components, accounting for both design and off-design performance, in a time-efficient manner. The coupling of response functions and inverse design parametrization also allowed for an easy sensitivity analysis of the impact of the design parameters on the performance ones, contributing to the development of design guidelines that can be exploited for similar design applications.


Thelen et al. present a convincing explanation of the A-not-B error, but contrary to their own claims, their explanation essentially involves mental representations. As is too common among cognitive scientists, they equate mental representations with representations of external physical objects. They clearly show, however, that representations of bodily actions on physical objects are central to the dynamical system producing the error.


Service orientation is rapidly becoming the common practice in the IT world. A price one often has to pay for the advantages of service oriented architectures (SOA) is performance deterioration. SOA performance heavily depends on the allocation of computational resources to services. The needs of services in computational resources are however changing, depending e.g. on the environmental factors and changes in business processes (and hence service orchestrations). To ensure good performance results, the resource allocation should respond to the changes in the SOA environment. In this paper we focus on the detection of the changes in the environment and the prediction of the expected service requests rates. For this purpose we first discover a stochastic model of the service request rates. Then we monitor the system to detect changes in the environment behaviour and signal the necessity to reconsider the resource allocation, providing a prediction of the service request rates for the coming period. Moreover, we monitor whether the model is still a fair reflection of the behaviour, and when necessary, we adapt the model appropriately.


In this article, we propose a PEARM mathematical model to depict the dynamic of a population that reacts in the spread of the gaming disorder with media coverage. The basic reproduction number and existence of free equilibrium point and endimec equilibrium point are obtained with same fundamental properties of the model including existence and positivity as well as boundedness of equilibria are investigated. By using Routh–Hurwitz criteria, the local stability of free equilibrium point and endimec equilibrium point are obtained. Also, we propose an optimal strategy to implement the optimal campaigns through directing children and adolescents to educational and entertaining alternative means, and creating centers to restore the rehabilitation of addicts to electronic games. The existence of the optimal control are obtained by Pontryagain's maximum principle. Finally, some numerical simulations are also performed to illustrate the theoretical analysis of our results, using Matlab software. Our results show that media coverage is an effective measure to quit electronic gaming disorder.


As our profession grows larger and more diverse, as its opportunities increase, the proper conduct of our national meetings becomes a matter of legitimate concern. This booklet brings together explanations and regulations developed over the years. We urge that group officers and readers of papers—and any member who thinks that he may ever read a paper, lead a discussion, or organize a program at the Annual Meeting—read all of the booklet carefully so that they may see how each activity contributes to the success of the whole meeting, which now numbers more than 12,000 in attendance, more than 100 different programs in three days, as many as 600 individual participants, and in 1967 begins to occupy the full facilities of two separate, major hotels.


This volume is the product of separate but parallel studies undertaken by two panels of experts-one from the United States, the other from Western Europe-on new approaches to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional countries. Neither panel sounded a doomsday alarm; each concluded that the chances for controlling proliferation lie in good part on building on the sound foundation of existing policies and institutional structures. Among the other conclusions derived from the parallel studies: The threat of nuclear proliferation is a specific, definable danger in a limited number of countries. The incentives that appear to make nuclear weapons an interesting option to some states must be understood, and potential proliferators must be persuaded that their acquisition will not lead to national security. Effective persuasion is more likely to come from non-nuclear weapon nations. Europe and the United States must collaborate in engaging such third-party persuaders in this endeavor. The panels' intensive examination of the six states of greatest near-term concern leads to the conclusion that the uneasy status quo will probably prevail for the next several years, yet these are volatile situations. The nature of the threat demands an extraordinary degree of international collaboration.


A pot experiment was conducted to study the effects of continuous grafting on nutrient absorption of cutting seedlings of Nasturtium officinale. The result showed that the N content of root, stem, leaf and shoot of N. officinale of one time grafting could significantly improve compared with the ungrafted. The content P and K of stem, leaf and shoot of N. officinale of one time grafting could significantly improve the content of P and K compared with the ungrafted. And N, P and K content in different parts of N. officinale of two times grafting and three times grafting was lower than the ungrafted. Therefore, the stem, leaf and shoot of N. officinale of one time grafting could significantly improve the nutrient absorption of cutting seedlings of N. officinale.


The authors describe a method for combined measurements of the plasma trypsin-like proteinases, alpha 1-antitrypsin and alpha 2-macroglobulin. The values of these parameters' activities in the plasma of normal subjects and patients with peritonitis and liver cirrhosis are presented. The suggested method may be used for identification of the type of disorders in the system of trypsin-like proteinases and endogenous inhibitors in other diseases.


Many aquatic species have restricted dispersal capabilities, making them the most vulnerable organisms to climate change and land use change patterns. These factors deplete Nymphaea species' suitable habitats, threatening their populations and survival. In addition, the species are poorly documented, which may indicate how scarce they are or will become. Members of Nymphaea are ecologically important as well as having cultural and economic value, making them of conservation interest. Therefore, using the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) approach, climatic variables, land use, and presence points were modeled for seven Nymphaea species in South America, using three general circulation models (CCSM4, HADGEM2-AO, and MIROC5) and in two representative concentration pathways (RCPs 4.5 and 8.5) and two scenarios (2050 and 2070). Our results indicated that mean diurnal range (bio2), precipitation of the wettest month (bio13), temperature seasonality (bio15), and land use (dom_lu) were the main influencing factors. For all species, suitable areas were concentrated east of Brazil, and they were variable in northern parts of the continent. Besides, inconsistent expansion and contraction of suitable habitats were noticed among the species. For example, N. amazonum, N. rudgeana, and N. lasiophylla future habitat expansions declined and habitat contraction increased, while for N. ampla and N. jamesoniana, both future habitat expansion and contraction increased, and for N. pulchella and N. rudgeana it varied in the RCPs. Moreover, the largest projected suitable habitats were projected outside protected areas, characterized by high human impacts, despite our analysis indicating no significant change between protected and unprotected areas in suitable habitat change. Finally, understanding how climate change and land use affect species distribution is critical to developing conservation measures for aquatic species.


Hepatoce l lu lar carc inoma (HCC) i s known as a hypervascular tumor (1,2). Various angiogenic pathways are known to be deregulated and involved in HCC; diverse proangiogenic and anti-angiogenic factors establish complex networks to regulate tumor vasculature in HCC (2,3). Therefore, multiple anti-angiogenic therapies have been developed and approved to treat patients with advanced HCC over the last decade (1,4-8). Because the efficacy of anti-angiogenic therapies was modest and transient, there has been an intense effort to discover biomarkers that can select patients with more favorable responses, thereby optimizing the clinical benefit of anti-angiogenic therapy in HCC (9-12). Recently, Zhu et al. suggested biomarker-based antiangiogenic therapy in patients with HCC after sorafenib based on the results of a pivotal REACH-2 trial (8). This is the first positive trial with biomarker-based patient selection to open the personalized medicine era of advanced HCC (13). The REACH-2 trial is a randomized, double-blind, phase III clinical trial comparing ramucirumab, an antiVEGFR2 monoclonal antibody, versus placebo as a secondline treatment after first-line sorafenib treatment in patients with advanced HCC. In REACH-2 trial, patients with a baseline alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) ≥400 ng/mL were included based on the results of previous phase III REACH trial in which patients with high baseline AFP showed improvements in overall survival (OS) (14). All patients were treated with first-line sorafenib and Child-Pugh class A. Stratification factors were geographic region, ECOG performance status, and macrovasclar invasion. A total of 292 patients were randomized to either ramucirumab (n=197) or placebo group (n=95) in a 2:1 ratio. The primary endpoint of the trial was OS and the secondary endpoints were progression-free survival (PFS), time-to-progression (TTP), objective response rate (ORR), and safety profiles. Patients in the ramucirumab group were treated with intravenous injections of ramucirumab (8 mg/kg) on day 1 of 14-day cycle. Ramucirumab showed superior OS (median 8.5 vs. 7.3 months; HR 0.710; P=0.0199) and PFS (median 2.8 vs. 1.6 months; HR 0.452; P<0.001) (Table 1). Although disease control rate was significantly higher in the ramucirumab group (59.9% vs. 38.9%, P=0.0006), there were no significant changes in ORR (5% vs. 1%; P=0.1697), indicating ramucirumab, like other anti-angiogenic agents, is more suited to tumor stabilization than regression of HCC. Safety profiles showed consistent results with previous trials of ramucirumab. The most common adverse events related to ramucirumab were fatigue (27%), followed by peripheral edema (25%) and hypertension (25%). Overall, this study met its primary endpoint and demonstrated the efficacy of ramucirumab in patients with advanced HCC and AFP ≥400 ng/mL who had been previously treated with sorafenib. The pooled analysis of REACH (only patients with AFP ≥400 ng/mL) and REACH-2 trials also revealed consistent results (Table 1). When a total of 542 patients were analyzed, ramucirumab Editorial Commentary


Businesses continue to struggle to achieve sustainable competitive advantage for better profitability and strategic positioning in the competitive markets. The underpinned understanding in achieving sustainable competitive advantage is driven by organizational objectives. However, the sustainability of the business, business continuity and sustainable competitive advantage depends on both external and internal factors of the firm. Indeed, a unified theory of the firm is necessary to provide insights for rigorous, dynamic and comprehensive strategic management analyses. Hence, this study has attempted to investigate the influence of Tawhidic paradigm in managing firms' for sustainable competitive advantage from Malaysian perspective. Data has been collected from 242 public listed companies listed in the main board of Bursa Malaysia. The respondents were asked to evaluate items from 4 different constructs through a 6 point scale varied from never, rarely, slightly, sometime, usually, and always. Furthermore, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) has been run for exploring the relationship that exists among the different salient variables which in turn measures the influence of Tawhidic paradigm in managing firms for sustainable competitive advantage in Malaysia. Based on the results, it can be perceived that Tawhidic paradigm is to a great extent influenced by organizational goals and objectives as well as organizational knowledge and innovation. The Tawhidic approach contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of the development of a unified theory of the firm.


Interaction of water with Cu2O has many prominent industrial and environmental applications. This study represents detailed density-functional theory calculations investigating the adsorption of a water molecule on a Cu2O(110):CuO surface; one of the two most stable Cu2O surfaces under practical catalytic conditions of temperatures and pressures. We report herein structural geometries and binding energies for all plausible molecular and dissociative interaction of H2O with the surface. The water molecule is found to interact weakly with the Cu2O(110):CuO surface, forming several vertical and flat orientations where the latter was found to offer the most preferred site with a binding energy at 0.389 eV. Dissociation of a water molecule on this surface is found to incur a modest endothermcity of 0.71 eV.


BACKGROUND
Risk communication in public health emergencies is an essential part of any emergency response.

AIM
The World Health Organization (WHO) aims to provide WHO Member States, partners and stakeholders involved in emergency preparedness and response structures evidence-based, up-to-date, system-focused guidance.

METHODS
Guideline development followed WHO standards.

RESULTS
These guidelines give recommendations in the following areas: (1) approaches for building trust and engaging with communities and affected populations, (2) approaches for integrating risk communication into existing national and local emergency preparedness and response-structures, and (3) planning, conducting, and evaluating emergency risk communication in practice.

CONCLUSION
Specific step-by-step instructions are beyond the remit of these recommendations. These will be provided by WHO in other formats in the future.


The electric power consumption of water injection of oilfield accounts for a larger proportion of the total cost of production.By comparison of the reconstruction plan of pumping stations and pumping series characteristic analysis to reduce energy consumption,the paper presents the technology of power booster injection controlling high power pumps(Pump-Control-Pump).The application of PCP in water injection system for Hai-1 solved the problems of low pump efficiency,large pressure,and high consumption of injection pumps,which saved energy significantly.


We developed a low cost floor-based personnel detection system, we call a smart carpet, which consists of a sensor pad placed under a carpet, the electronics reads walking activity to provide an automated health monitoring and alert system. We extended the functionalities of the smart carpet to improve its ability to detect falls, alert health care personnel, estimate gait parameters, and count number of people walking on the carpet. Results showed that our system detects falls, using computational intelligence techniques, with 96.2% accuracy and 81% sensitivity and 97.8% specificity. We extracted and estimated gait parameters, and compared it to the GAITRite system (the gold standard), so that the system reliably estimates the walking speed, stride length and stored time with percentage errors of 1.43%, -4.32%, and -5.73% respectively. Recent results show that the system can count number of people with high accuracy. We developed a database system and web applications for immediate alerts on adverse events, and retain these data in the cloud for years, if necessary, to provide further data analysis.


A design method is proposed that optimises the design of flexible manufacturing systems. The attribute design method (ADM) integrates 3D modelling, a new classification and coding system, a 2-layer backpropagation neural network and financial appraisal techniques. The method was developed in detail for the TIM welding system. The emphasis of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of the ADM to optimising the design of flexible manufacturing systems.


Monitoring the massive volume of data streaming from managed nodes in Telecommunication networks reacting in a timely manner is increasingly critical for modern Telecommunications Operations Support Systems (OSS). Given the large number and the varieties of the nodes in a telecoms network, the streaming monitoring data is naturally diverse and the volume is often at scales of multiple millions data points each second. These data are well modelled using formal syntaxes (e.g. Management Information Bases), making formal semantics and automated reasoning a viable solution for Telecom data modeling and correlation. This paper proposes an approach that will leverage recent developments in Semantic Reasoning and Big Data. The paper introduces how we propose to use RDF stream reasoning methods for real time event correlation, combined with MapReduce technologies in order to decentralize the large number of reasoning and correlation tasks that need to be undertaken in real time. The proposed approach is currently being implemented and will be evaluated using the diverse data types and volumes that are expected.


Classification rules are an important tool for disc overing knowledge from databases. Integrating fuzzy logic algorithms into databases a llows us to reduce uncertainty which is connected with data in databases and to increase discovered knowledge's accuracy. In this paper, we analyze some possible variants of making classification rules from a given fuzzy decision based on cumulative informatio n. We compare their classification accuracy with the accuracy which is reached by stat istical methods and other fuzzy classification rules.


In this simulation study, the bias in regression coefficient estimates was investigated in a four-predictor multiple regression model involving four missing data treatments, namely expectation maximization (EM), mean substitution (MS), pairwise deletion (PD) and regression imputation (RI) methods. This was done under different conditions of percent missing, pattern of systematically missing data and non-normality.
Findings indicate no significant difference across the four MDTs in the bias for b2, b3 and b4, the regression coefficients of X 2 , X 3 and X 4 , respectively. Therefore, only the bias in b1, the regression coefficient of the variable with no missing data, is reported.
 Overall, the bias under monotonic missing pattern was lower than that under non-monotonic missing pattern. For monotonic pattern, the lowest bias was under regression imputation (RI), followed by expectation-maximization method (EM). For this pattern, mean substitution (MS), pairwise deletion (PD) and regression imputation (RI) consistently overestimated the population parameter, regardless of percent missing and level of non-normality. The overestimation consistently increased with percent missing.
The findings under non-monotonic pattern indicate that RI had the lowest bias, followed by EM. MS and PW consistently overestimated the population parameter. EM and RI, on the other hand, tended to consistently underestimate the population parameter under non-monotonic pattern.
 Keywords : Missing data, bias, regression, percent missing, non-normality, missing pattern > East African Journal of Statistics Vol. 1 (2) 2006: pp. 185-197


This essay examines a few of the theories of Bertrand Russell about our mind. His comprehensive psychological study tries to reconcile materialistic and anti-materialistic tendencies in science. He postulates a fundamental reality ("neutral stuff") out of which both mind and matter consists.


Based on the teaching of foreign literature of humane spirit education as the research object,this paper discusses the implementation of foreign literature teaching humanities spirit education of the necessity and some methods and means.The present foreign literature teaching of college Chinese professional in implementing the humanistic spirit education are obvious shortage.We should choose teaching materials,teaching methods,examination mode,etc.,to promote the implementation of humanistic spirit education,and improve students' humanities quality and comprehensive ability.


Steady and highly efficient high spot monitoring has a significant effect during the emergency response progress when emergency happens.This paper presents a real-time emergency response monitoring system based on a low-flying airship to realize real-time supervision under complex circumstance.The system is composed by three main parts:video pre-processing and target tracking,target aiming and location,remote sensor monitoring system.Pre-processing method based on video stabilization and target tracking technology has been implanted to the system to enhance the monitoring and tracking functions.Harris corner detector method has been employed to estimate motions between two consecutive frames in order to stabilize the video;motion filtering algorithm based on Kalman-average filter has been implemented to separate the intentional and unintentional motion with the help of GPS track path;while target tracking algorithm based on Mean Shift method has been implemented to track the target.At the same time,a 3-dimension platform with airship mounted GPS system and compass system have been used to aim the target by adjusting the angles of videography platform.Little airdrop sensors have been implemented to solve the remote detecting and monitoring.The emergency monitoring system using airship as platform introduced in this paper provides a new real-time emergency monitoring solution,and will strongly support emergency response.


Medicine makes progress in two general ways: from the information that accrues from the collection of data, and from the interpretation of information by the construction of theories. The theory may precede the information; some theories may remain unproven or become redundant; but there is danger in information without theory. We like to think that our actions in clinical practice are based on sound scientific observations and reasoning, but much is done out of habit, or for empirical reasons, or because it was accepted as correct many years ago and has never been questioned. Specialists in all branches of medicine can give examples. The controlled clinical trial is the recognised structure for framing questions intended for the rational improvement of clinical practice, although doctors have a poor record of taking notice even of well constructed trials [I] while at the same time tending to take undue notice of what is effectively hearsay evidence [2]. In anaesthesia, progress has followed a better understanding of physiology and pharmacology, with the introduction of new drugs, of new techniques, and of new equipment. Clinical trials, if suitably framed, are well suited to investigations of new drugs and can work well with new techniques, although there is then the almost inevitable problem of bias caused by difficulties making observations and patients truly blind to the choice of treatments. The framing of a clinical trial-in other words, the collection of objective data-an become much more difficult when the question is whether outcome is improved by new equipment. New equipment demands investment by the companies who make it and its potential benefits are usually extolled by the enthusiasts who are its first users. Patients in clinical trials d o better than similar patients not in trials [3], so it is not surprising that new equipment, particularly if it requires an operator to be with the patient, is perceived as improving outcome. The more expensive the equipment, and the more ill the patient, the more difficult a proper evaluation becomes. The more exposure an innovation is given, the more difficult it becomes to question its utility [4,5]: 'The emotions caused by apparently early benefits in inadequately designed studies may otherwise overpower reason.' [S]. If the new equipment is not directly curative but is instead a source of new information, then it becomes even more difficult to resist early impressions that collecting this information is an improvement in clinical management. In our specialty, the microprocessor and allied technology allow us to measure more and more variables more and more frequently, particularly in the intensive care unit. The new technology certainly gives us more to look at and may give us more to do; but does this necessarily confer benefit on the patient-more benefit, that is, than conferred by having a concerned clinician at the patient's side? One such innovation is the continuous measurement of the oxygen saturation of mixed venous blood (Svo,). An article, circulated by a manufacturer of the equipment but printed under the auspices of the Northeastern Intensive Care Society (based in Newcastle, England) in November 1990, is an example of what I believe to be false logic in promoting widespread use of new techniques. After a few pages of useful discussion of physiology and of the practical application of the pulmonary artery catheter, the writer, a British intensivist now resident in the United States, addresses the question, 'What is this all for?' 'It is more difficult to demonstrate that having this information available produces a n improved outcome. Despite the work of Rao, and Schultz a t Valhalla few other clear cut studies suggesting an influence on outcome can be measured with [the] current level of understanding and available therapies.' This is as clear a statement of current knowledge as one could wish. There are two possible routes for the progression of the argument: that more studies need to be done; or that, a t the least, it is a technique that is useful in teaching. Instead, the acknowledged lack of evidence is ignored and critics of the technique are attacked. 'There is a small but stridently vocal group of critics which routinely decries "The Cult of the Swan-Ganz Catheter". These shrill assertions, generally supported by even less data than the studies they seek to attack, must in my view assume the burden of proof. In other words it must be shown that the avoidance of any morbidity associated with the use of right heart catheters produces a net improvement in patient outcome!' Note the pejorative terms 'stridently vocal' and 'shrill assertions'; and the exclamation mark carries the implication that it is absurd to suppose that the risks can possibly outweigh the benefits. (The parenthesized quote was the title of an article.) Much more importantly, the burden of proof has been turned around. It is emphatically nor the task of doubters to provide counterproof of the value of a new therapy or technique; it is the task of the believers to provide solid evidence of efficacy. The writer continues: 'The wise clinician would rarely opt for a situation which gave him less information not more.' [author's italics] This is not so. We no longer, for instance, request X rays before routine abdominal surgery. Information must not be sought for its own sake; the wise clinician seeks information only when it is useful [6]. Having attempted to justify the use of the pulmonary artery catheter despite considerable evidence that it confers no real benefits [7], the author recommends the routine use of continuous monitoring of S o , in all critically ill patients. The recommendation is based on a


In 2011, Li and Lee proposed a novel user authentication scheme with anonymity for wireless communications. In particular, Li and Lee defined two more session keys and adopted Diffie-Hellman key agreement method for their scheme to establish two more session keys. However, since modular exponential computation demands plenty of resources, their scheme is very inefficient. Thus, in this paper, we address the drawbacks of Li and Lee's scheme and propose an efficient user authentication scheme for wireless communications with same functionality and security.


The gayal (Bos frontalis) belonged to the only semi-wild and semi-domestic cattle that distributed in the Dulong River and Lujiang River region and Assam state of Indian, northern of Bangladesh, and some hilly area of Myanmar and Bhutan. According to the past research and investigation, the results showed that: (1) The amounts, shape and structure of chromosome of gayal (Bos frontalis) weren't same to the yellow cattle (Bos taurus) and wild cattle (Bos gaurus), whose amounts of chromosome (2n) were 58, 60 and 56, respectively. There were two pairs of acrocentric chromosomes for wild cattle, one for gayal but not for yellow cattle. The amounts of arms were same among three kinds of cattle. (2) The environment that gayal lived was so poor that the diets mainly were bamboo, southernwood and weed grass, however, the rate of growth was so quickly that live weight was 140, 218, 264, 296 and 342 kg when the ages was 0.5,1, 1.5, 2 and 3 years, respectively. (3)The gayal also had typical bodily form and very good meat performance, which diameter of muscle fiber was less than others kinds of cattle. The water holding ratio, the muscle tenderness and muscle succulency were higher than others kinds of cattle significantly. (4) The reproductivity was so strong that the female gayal could produce one calf per one year and also could produce profitable hybrid offspring crossing gayal bulls with yellow cattle and cows. As a result, there were not only very high applied values in academic aspects but also in exploitation and utilization.


about the likelihood of the law's eventually withering away, and his pragmatic and selective attitude towards support for the legal system will not appeal to the more stout-hearted. However, this is precisely what is refreshing about Marxism and Law, that Collins combines an introductory, explicatory text with some distinctive views of his own. But whilst his book does convey a more faithful picture of Marxist legal theory than has hitherto been presented, the text also contains some strange incidental statements. For example, it is surely an error to claim that France is an "entirely codified legal system" (p. 62), just as it is rather unconventional (on the same page) to describe common law as supplementary to statute when everyone from Dr. Johnson to Lord Scarman has understood the contrary to be the case. Alongside such minor blemishes, there is perhaps a more general point to be made: namely, in this reviewer's opinion, that the analytical, matter-of-fact tone of the book inclines too much to belie the intellectual fervour that Marxist philosophy can generate. True, E. P. Thompson's and Althusser's disagreement over the empirical verification of Marxist doctrine is mentioned, Weber's and Unger's "idealist tendencies" are adverted to; but such disputes within Marxism—which, in a way, are what prove its most stimulating attributes—are hardly pursued. This is natural in an introductory work, but Marxism and Law may still leave the student puzzled as to how such a philosophy can exert so powerful a grip on the imagination of so many members of the intelligentsia. It may not, then, win converts. Nevertheless, it provides a very good basic study of the Marxist outlook on law and, as such, will come to satisfy a significant and felt jurisprudential need.


The admissible region is defined as the set of physically acce ptable orbits (i.e., orbits with negative energies). Given additional constraints on orbital semimajor axis, eccentr icity, etc., the admissible region is further constrained, resulting in the constrained admissible region (CAR). Based o n known statistics of the measurement process, the hard constraints are replaced by a probabilistic representatio . This results in the probabilistic admissible region (PAR ), which can be used for orbit initiation in Bayesian tracking. Additional constraints are incorporated, by considering some given statistics over inclination and right ascension of the ascending node. This results in a four-dimensional PAR distribution. Noting that the concepts presented are ge n ral and can be applied to any measurement scenario, the idea is illustrated using a short-arc, angles-only observa tion scenario.


sample solution: header: Let n 2 N. Let UL be an arbitrary list of n numbers from f0; 1; 2; 3; 4g. I want to show that has odd takes no more than U(n) = n+ 1 steps. body: I assign 1 step to the body of the loop. This means that has odd takes no more than n steps to examine every member of list UL, and no more than 1 more step to return False. In all, no more than U(n) = n + 1 for any list of length n, including a list that generates the worst case. steps.


Abstract The aim of this work is to show that interval positive fractional discrete-time linear systems are asymptotically stable if and only if the respective lower and upper bound systems are asymptotically stable. The classical Kharitonov theorem is extended to interval positive fractional linear systems.


Children with sickle cell disease (SCD) frequently present with acute pain. The abdomen, a common site of acute SCD‐related pain, may be present in a variety of gastrointestinal (GI) pathologies. Limited data exist on prevalence and workup of abdominal pain in patients with SCD during acute pain events.


Sensor data can be used to detect changes in the performance of a system in near real-time which may be indicative of a system fault. However, there is a need for efficient and robust algorithms to detect such changes in the data streams. In this paper, sensor data from a marine diesel engine on an ocean-going ship are used for anomaly detection. The focus is on cluster-based methods for anomaly detection. The idea is to identify clusters in sensor data in normal operating conditions and to assess whether new observations belong in any of these clusters. New observations that obviously do not belong to any of the identified clusters, may be regarded as anomalies and call for further scrutiny. The cluster-based approaches to anomaly detection presented in this paper are truly unsupervised, and they are applied to sensor data with no known faults. Being fully unsupervised, however, the cluster based approaches do not need to explicitly assume that all observations in the training data are fault-free as long as the amount of faulty data is not large enough to form a separate cluster. Moreover, anomalies in the training data may be detected. Various clustering techniques are applied in this paper to provide a simple and unsupervised approach to anomaly detection. This could then be used as an efficient initial screening of the data streams before more detailed analysis is applied to suspicious parts of the data. The methods explored in this study include K-means clustering, Mixture of Gaussian models, density based clustering, self-organizing maps and spectral clustering. The performance of the various methods is reported, and also compared with that of other methods recently proposed for anomaly detection such as auto associative kernel regression (AAKR) and dynamical linear models (DLM). Overall, cluster-based methods are found to be promising candidates for online anomaly detection based on sensor data.


Recent discoveries have led to the recognition of atherosclerosis as an inflammatory disease consisting of elements similar to established autoimmune disorders. Triglyceride rich lipoproteins (TGRL) are elaborated during the postprandial state and give rise to remnant particles known to be a risk factor for atherosclerosis. We have developed a model of repetitive injury wherein human aortic endothelial cells (HAEC) were repetitively exposed to human TGRL freshly isolated from plasma following consumption of a 30% fat meal. Preincubation over 3 days with TGRL was not itself inflammatory, but in conjunction with acute stimulation, upregulated VCAM‐1 and E‐selectin expression up to 2‐fold that of HAEC stimulated by TNF‐alpha alone. Monocyte adhesion in shear flow to a HAEC monolayer, which formed the substrate of a parallel plate flow chamber, also increased by 1–2 fold in response to repetitive injury with TGRL followed by acute stimulation. This increased adhesive efficiency was specific for monocytes, as neutrophil adhesion was not significantly affected by TGRL preincubation. HAEC activation involved binding of TGRL to the vLDL receptor LR11 and this was blocked by co‐incubation with receptor‐associated protein (RAP), a high affinity inhibitor of the LDL receptor‐related protein (LRP) and a low affinity inhibitor of the LDL receptor. This repetitive injury model reveals events linking apolipoprotein binding and inflammation of aortic endothelium, crucial to elucidating lesion pathology.


We develop kinematic models of diffusion generated by supergranulation at the solar surface. These models use current observations for the size, horizontal velocity, and lifetime of supergranules. Because there is no observational description of the appearance and disappearance of supergranules, we investigate models using several plausible evolution processes, including the effect of different lifetime distribution functions for the cells. The results are quite insensitive to the methods chosen to replace old supergranules, the distribution of cell lifetimes, and even the cell lifetime itself, for mean lifetimes between 15 to 30 hr. Calculated diffusion coefficients range between 500 and 700 sq km/s, in agreement with the best fit diffusion coefficients used by Sheeley and his collaborators to model the large-scale distribution of magnetic fields over the solar surface. However, our models do not explain the field distribution in plage, and they predict that virtually all the strong field in quiet Sun exists in relatively isolated clumps. We suggest possible mechanisms for the creation of plage and the bright network seen in quiet Sun.


Gated field emission wedges of varying lengths have been fabricated and tested. These wedges emit at 180-200 V from multiple emission sites that are approximately evenly distributed along the wedge. This results in emission currents that scale with the length of the wedge. The maximum emission current observed is about 0.1 mu A/ mu m of wedge length, beyond which localized failure events occur. These localized failure events sometimes cause the wedge emitter to short to the gate, but frequently the emission characteristic of the wedge is not seriously affected as long as most of the wedge remains intact. A single wedge may undergo up to hundreds of individual failures and still emit.<<ETX>>


Since 2013, the government has issued the National Health Insurance (JKN) program through the Social Security and Health Administration (BPJS Kesehatan) to provide social and health insurance services. JKN participants will get a Healthy Indonesia Card (KIS) to ease the burden of medical expenses at the hospital. During the pandemic of Covid-19, Noongan Hospital was included as one of the referral hospitals for COVID-19 patients for nearby hospitals and health centers with a coverage of the Southeast Minahasa district, North Sulawesi. Noticeably, 70% of its patients use the JKN-KIS card to get health treatments and more than half the number of patients are outpatients. To anticipate the number of outpatients visits using JKN-KIS, a web-based application was built to generate a predictive model using the C4.5 algorithm. The performance of this predictive model has a classification accuracy of 91,7% and both precision and recall of 95%. The number of outpatient visits using JKN-NIS has increased by 83,33% since the pandemic of Covid-19. Examination flow, medical check-up, queue length, doctor's expertise, and health treatment objectives are the most influencing factors for outpatient visits. This predictive model provides future insights for the hospital management to rationally allocate healthcare resources and improve the efficiency of outpatient services. Keywords—3 Health Treatments, C4.5 Algorithm, Prediction, Covid-19


ABSTRACT This study presents the use of geographical information system (GIS) datasets and methods to investigate landslide susceptibility in the rugged mountainous terrain of Shigar and Shyok Basins in northern areas of Pakistan. Study area is situated in Karakorum mountainous region where catastrophic landslides occur frequently and pose a serious threat to local living conditions. Landslide susceptibility index maps were prepared by combining four main indicators groups: (1) human induced parameters, which contain Landsat 8 imagery and distance from roads; (2) topographical parameters, which include slope, aspect and plan curvature; (3) hydrological parameters, which contain stream power index, topographic wetness index and distance from drainage and (4) geological parameters, which consist of lithology and distance from major thrusts and faults. These layers were prepared in GIS environment, and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) based heuristic approach was adopted to generate final landslide susceptibility map for this preliminary regional level landslide hazard study. Three different susceptibility zones have been identified in the region. AHP weights with 0.04 consistency ratio were used in the preparation of final map. The final landslide susceptibility map of the study area indicates that the low, moderate, and high landslide susceptibility classes are respectively covering 23.2% (4745 km2), 45% (6737 km2), 23.2% (3444 km2) when distance from roads, distance from drainage and distance from major thrusts and faults parameters were not incorporated in the analysis. Including distance from roads, distance from drainage and distance from major thrusts and faults parameters layers to the final landslide susceptibility analysis shows that moderate susceptibility class is the predominant landslide susceptibility category covering 88% (13,412 km2) of the study area characterized by steep slopes (30°–45°), low positive plan curvature (0–1) and weak lithology.


Main factors resulting in warpage of profiled hinge have been studied .Of them,uniform working rate causes uneven aggravated deformation leading to warpage of profiled hinge.The related working processes and measures to solve the problem are discussed.


Albinism and achiasma are congenital conditions severely affecting the normal routing of input through the visual pathways. However, these conditions do not have the profound deleterious effects on perception that would be expected from their impact on visual pathway structure. Evidence in human experiments suggests that in both conditions, these aberrant inputs are mapped onto the primary visual cortex (V1) in superimposed visual hemifield representations. This leads to the hypothesis that intracortical interactions drive the development of hemifield dominance-driven feature preference maps, to make these representations available to be perceived relatively normally. However, current experimental protocols limit the possibility of directly observing this putative arrangement. In this thesis, computational modelling based on input-driven visual development was used to observe the likely map organization of V1 in these conditions, using a two-eyed ocular dominance model of GCAL, a selforganizing map-based model of the primary visual cortex. When the misrouting of inputs was simulated in the model, the resulting receptive fields and orientation map organization supported the theory that V1 rearranges into an interdigitating pattern dominated by hemifield dominance columns.


This chapter is based on research undertaken for the Leadership Foundation in HE (LFHE). It views the experiences of disabled leaders through the lens of ableism and considers ways in which the sector could positively address ableist practices in order to promote equality and diversity.


T he current process of pediatric drug development under the auspices of regulatory agencies has not resulted in decreasing the amount of time for the approval of new drugs in children once they are approved for use in adults. During this interval, children are treated ''off-label'' with medications for which an appropriate dose is not determined, long-term efficacy is not established, and meaningful safety data are not collected. Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) have proposed that a placebo arm be included in pediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) maintenance trials of biologic medications that are approved in adults and seeking approval in children. This decision has resulted in the objection of many pediatric gastroenterologists, who believe that extrapolating data from adults is sufficient to support the use of a medication for children and that clinical trials involving placebo in this instance are not ethical. Others believe that although medications used to treat adults with IBD are effective in children, the durability of response and exposure-response may differ, and clinical trials in children should be performed to obtain evidence to support approval. There is enough doubt about the durability of treatment to warrant a placebocontrolled trial in children with ulcerative colitis (UC) who have had a clinical response during induction. The position paper published in this issue of the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, supported by many gastroenterologists and the leadership from the European Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition (ESPGHAN), the European Crohn's and Colitis Organisation, the Global Pediatric IBD Network, and the Canadian Children IBD Network,


A least significant bit (LSB) Steganography is mainly characterized by its hiding capacity and imperceptibility which is measured by Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). There is a trade-off between these two factors. In this paper, an improved LSB Steganography which uses modulus function for data hiding method has been proposed and implemented which is better than previous methods in imperceptibility keeping the hiding capacity same. The proposed Steganography method breaks the secret data into two components. Each component is hidden into cover image pixels using modulo function. Repetition in secret data component is also considered. Results show that the proposed method is better than existing methods unless there is high randomness in secret data.


of urgent problems cast up by a changing, industrialized society. The pluralistic nature of the American social system probably made this inevitable. But Hurst quite properly points to the continuation of this anti-intellectual, anti-conscious planning bias in Twentieth Century America, when the persistence of this attitude may prove fatal. In "Leverage and Support" he compares the more frequent use of law to maintain or modify the ongoing institutions by supporting orderly market processes, maintaining the security of the family, or improving the administration of justice. The "leverage" function of the law is illustrated in tort rules forcing an injured person to maintain the burden of showing why he should be compensated, and in new laws governing the incorporation of businesses. The leverage function has been resorted to far less frequently than the support function. The endless complaints about the mass of new state and national legislation overlooks this fact that most laws are of a "support" rather than "leverage" character. Finally, in a section titled "Force and Fruition;" Hurst describes our excessive readiness to use the criminal law to resolve important problems, rather than seeking more fundamental solutions. But on the whole, our legal order has been rather effective in maintaining conditions under which most citizens could live peaceful lives and carry on productive work. The desire to allow virtually all groups to pursue ends not clearly inimical to society helped create a fair degree of tolerance through law. He concludes on a note of warning with respect to four of the safeguards built into our formal legal process—civil control of the military, limits on political disqualification, protection against compulsion of ideas, and the accountability of civil authority—implying clearly that changed conditions have endangered these rules of our constitutional system. It is typical of Hurst's whole method that the experience of history is made to illumine the problems of present day America. In this way the reason or irrationality of the past can help direct us toward more intelligent solutions of the great issues of this and future eras.—WILLIAM M. BEANBY, Princeton University.


PURPOSE: A method for manufacturing a semiconductor device is provided to prevent moat by forming a CVD oxide layer at lower of a linear nitride layer. CONSTITUTION: A trench(16) is formed by selectively etching a substrate(10) using a pad oxide and nitride pattern as a mask. A well oxide layer(18), a CVD oxide layer(30) and a linear nitride layer(20) are sequentially formed on the trench. A field oxide layer(22) is then formed in the trench and planarized. The pad nitride pattern is removed.


The results of Monte Carlo description of magnetic and transport properties of trilayer structures with Ising-like magnetic films demonstrating giant magnetoresistance effects are considered. The investigation of the magnetoresistance temperature dependence for structures with different thicknesses of the Ising ferromagnetic films shows that these structures are characterized by significantly greater values of magnetoresistance then structures with Heisenberg-like films.


patients, but it does suggest that smoking is concerned in the aotiology of lung cancer in two ways. First there is the direct effect of smoking on the bronchial epithelium, so painstakingly worked out by O. Auerbach" and his colleagues; then there is the effect in some subjects of maintaining a state of chronic infection in the bronchial tree. Some men are heavy smokers and some are chronic bronchitics, but those who are both appear to have the worst prognosis in respect of lung cancer. The explanation of the fact that the English mortality rate from lung cancer is three times the Australian rate (G. Dean, 1962') may be that the English climate and the industrial pollution of the English atmosphere have combined to produce an incidence of chronic bronchitis far in excess of that experienced by most other countries. An explanation of the relationship between smoking and chronic bronchitis has been offered in terms of ..co-carcinogenesis"." Briefly, this hypothesis postulates that chronic exposure to tobacco smoke over the years produces a state of epithelial dysplasia which may progress no farther, but in which the balance towards frank carcinogenesis is easily tipped by the further insult of chronic infection. The work of Auerbach and his colleagues has provided a sound histopathological basis for this concept, and it is further supported by the various epidemiological evidence pointing to chronic bronchitis as also playing an retiological role.


We study the spontaneous temporal symmetry breaking instability in a coherently-driven passive optical Kerr resonator observed experimentally by Xu and Coen in (2014 Opt. Lett. 39 3492). We perform a detailed stability analysis of the Lugiato–Lefever model for the optical Kerr resonators and analyze the temporal bifurcation structure of stationary symmetric and the emerging asymmetric states as a function of the pump power. For intermediate pump powers a pitchfork loop is responsible for the destabilization of symmetric states towards stationary asymmetric ones while at large pump powers we find the emergence of periodic asymmetric solutions via a Hopf bifurcation. From a theoretical perspective, we use local bifurcation theory in order to analyze the most unstable eigenmode of the system. We also explore a non-conservative variational approximation capturing, among others, the evolution of the solution's amplitude, width and center of mass. Both methods provide insight towards the pitchfork bifurcations associated with the symmetry breaking.


This paper clarifies the generating mechanism of machined surface by ball-nosed end milling through geometric analysis. The problem definition is to determine a height of cusp at a voluntary position in milling a spherical surface with a plane cutting edge of straight flute. It is assumed that tool axis is on the plane perpendicular to the feed direction. The necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying the tool rotating angle and its cutting edge at the specified position are originally formulated and their solving procedures based on Newton-Raphson method are mentioned. The number of solutions in these conditions is analyzed and explained geometrically. It is found that a certain area is cut maximum three times by the same edge, regardless of its edge shape. The machined surface by the two and three flutes of end mills are simulated and illustrated graphically with use of a geometric modeling system. A machined surface is illustrated as a combination of colored area corresponding to applied cutting edges, and it is helpful to understand the generating mechanism of machined surface. The computing time to detect the shape of cusp is about one third of that by a previous method reported. Conclusions are briefly mentioned.


Thermal comfort in the room is achieved by maintaining temperatures between 20 °C to 25 °C, as a result of air temperature. The main objective of the present work to study the thermal comfort in office room by changing the design of inlet and outlet duct position using computational fluid dynamics analysis. The present review includes various factors related with thermal comfort of office room, like temperature and air flow inside the office room, that affect the thermal comfort for the occupants. Areas in which additional information is required are identified and comments are made regarding future research directions. From the above literature study, it has been observed that in the field of thermal comfort for the office room lot of work have been seen in worldwide and still going on so there is a scope to work on this field.


Acute pulmonary dysfunction—second to inhalation injury—is prevalent in burn survivors, and is associated with a 24‐fold increase in morbidity and mortality. Systemic inflammation is known to persist many years post‐injury and likely compromises the pulmonary vasculature and respiratory gas exchange in well‐healed burn survivors. Whether pulmonary dysfunction in this population is related to right ventricular (RV) morphology and function remains unknown. Twenty‐six well‐healed burn survivors (age: 42 ± 14; body mass index: 28.1 ± 5.8; body surface area [BSA] burn: 49 ± 22 [range: 20–88]) and 11 age, sex and activity matched controls (age: 34 ± 9; body mass index: 28.2 ± 5.3) were recruited for assessment of maximal aerobic capacity (VO2max; via a graded cycle ergometer test), pulmonary function (diffusing capacity of the lungs for carbon monoxide [DLCO]) and RV morphology and function (via magnetic resonance imaging). Burn survivors were grouped post‐hoc by DLCO and classified as having either low (≤80% predicted; n = 6; %BSA burn: 42 ± 11), moderate (80–100% predicted; n = 11; %BSA burn: 42 ± 23), or high (>100% predicted; n = 9; %BSA burn: 61 ± 22) diffusing capacity. Group differences in RV morphology and function were assessed by one‐way ANOVA with Bonferroni correction where appropriate, and relationships between variables were assessed by partial correlation after controlling for body mass. Group differences were observed between those with low and high diffusing capacity in RV morphology (RV end‐diastolic volume [EDV] index: 73 ± 10mL/m2 vs. 81 ± 11mL/m2 vs. 95 ± 15mL/m2 vs. 84 ± 13mL/m2, low vs. moderate vs. high vs. control, respectively; ANOVA P = 0.012), but not RV function (RV ejection fraction: 54 ± 7% vs. 51 ± 9% vs. 53 ± 6% vs. 51 ± 10%, low vs. moderate vs. high vs. control, respectively; ANOVA P = 0.94). However, correlational analyses revealed that these group differences were primarily related to maximal aerobic capacity, after controlling for body mass (RV EDV vs. VO2max, r = 0.48, P = 0.003; DLCO vs. VO2max, r = 0.77, P < 0.001; RV EDV vs. DLCO, r = 0.57, P < 0.001). Taken together, we interpret these data to reflect RV remodeling due to lower maximal aerobic capacity, as opposed to frank impairments related to burn‐induced pulmonary dysfunction, and thus support a role for aerobic exercise training to improve cardiac function in well‐healed burn survivors.


Introduction:
 Functional mitral regurgitation (FMR) alters left ventricular (LV) remodeling, providing a nidus for non-ischemic fibrosis (NIF). Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) can measure FMR and LV tissue properties. Prevalence, remodeling manifestations, and prognostic implications of NIF in patients with FMR are unknown.

 Hypothesis:
 Among post-myocardial infarction (MI) patients with FMR, NIF associates with advanced LV remodeling and predicts adverse prognosis.

 Methods:
 The population comprised post-MI patients with FMR undergoing CMR. CMR exams were retrieved from a single-center registry, reviewed for MR etiology (degenerative excluded) and analyzed for FMR severity, LV structure/function, and late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) including ischemic pattern MI and NIF, which was defined via established criteria (mid-myocardial or epicardial LGE). Follow-up was performed for all-cause mortality.

 Results:
 467 consecutive FMR patients (74% male, 63±16 years old) were studied, of whom 14% had NIF. Prevalence of NIF increased stepwise with FMR severity (12% mild, 16% moderate, 21% severe; p=0.33). Patients with NIF had higher LV end-diastolic (241±72ml vs 194±64ml) and end-systolic volumes (174±70ml vs 120±63ml), paralleled by lower EF (31±13% vs 41±15%) and stroke volumes (67±20ml vs 74±24ml); all p<0.001. LV infarct size was similar between patients with and without NIF (13±8.6 vs 15±10, p=0.17). During follow-up (mean 3.0±2.5 years), overall mortality was 14% and was increased in patients with advanced (≥ moderate) FMR (HR 1.65 [CI 1.13-2.42], p=0.01) and NIF (HR 2.35 [CI 1.32-4.19], p=0.004: Figure). In multivariate analysis, NIF conferred over a 2-fold increase in risk for death (HR 2.15 [CI 1.20-3.85], p=0.01) independent of age and FMR severity.

 Conclusions:
 Among post-MI patients with FMR, NIF identifies an aggressive phenotype as evidenced by associations with adverse LV remodeling on CMR and increased mortality.


Discriminative locality alignment (DLA) has been successfully applied in similar handwritten Chinese character recognition (SHCCR). But, the performance of DLA heavily depends on the choice of parameters and the optimal parameters among different groups of similar characters are not consistent. To address this problem, we present an improved method with few parameters, called adaptive discriminative locality alignment (ADLA), whose optimal parameters are the same for different groups of similar characters. Further, the kernel discriminative locality alignment (KADLA) is formulated. The experimental results demonstrate that ADLA has higher performance than DLA in recognition rate, and KADLA has even higher recognition rate. In practice, Since KADLA involves much more time and storage cost, ADLA is a better choice for SHCCR.


IgG4-related disease (IgG4-RD) is a multisystemic autoimmune condition characterized by mass forming fibrosclerosing lesions, high concentrations of serum IgG4 and diffuse tissue infiltration with IgG4+ plasma cells. IgG4-RD include many conditions that were previously considered single-organ idiopathic diseases like autoimmune pancreatitis and Mikulicz disease. IgG4-RD may involve practically any organ, but it is more frequent in pancreas, salivary glands, lacrimal glands, lymph nodes, retroperitoneum and kidneys. The diagnosis of IgG4-RD is made by a combination of clinicial, serological, imaging and pathology findings. IgG4-RD usually responds to steroids, but relapses are frequent. IgG4-RD is an underdiagnosed entity due in part to the fact that it was recently characterized and it is not fully known by the medical community. This review has the purpose to increase awareness of IgG4-RD, since it might be encounter by any medical specialty.


Each year, passionate, well-educated college graduates migrate to cities around the country as the new workforce of the American education system. The success of alternative-certification programs such as the New York City Teaching Fellows, of which I was a member, in addition to tradi tional teacher education programs, is suggestive of the need for youth in education leadership; young teachers bring not only new energy to class rooms (an environment that often leads to fatigue and burnout) but also an ability to innovate classroom instruction in a way that fits the needs, desires, and learning styles of today's students. At age 22, just days after graduating from Harvard College, J moved to New York City armed to help reform ur ban education through my role as a high school English teacher; I hoped to instill a love for reading and a passion for schooling by connecting students to dynamic texts with young, vibrant characters and settings that they would understand and appreciate. However, I did not realize that this was a nearly impossible goal to fulfill until / fully understood the characteristics of my school and its community, knowledge not necessarily taught in teacher preparation and certification programs. In my first year of teaching, the divergence of culturai backgrounds between teacher and students—in my own case, urban versus suburban, white versus Latino—began as a hindrance to building relationships inside the classroom; later on, though, these same cultural tensions, as exposed and then


Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the conceptualisation and implementation of learning communities (LCs) at two selected female residences. I argue that learning is mediated by collaborative, social interaction and that learning does not only happen in the classroom, but rather in the everyday living spaces. I therefore propose the implementation of LCs as another alternative to help students navigate the educational landscape. Design/methodology/approach – The author employed a qualitative case study design located in the socio-constructivist paradigm. Such a perspective values participants' perspectives as knowledge is viewed as being constructed collaboratively. Thus, to evaluate the first implementation cycle at Residence X (in 2010), the author conducted semi-structured interviews to hear participant voices on what worked, what did not and what should be improved. Findings – The findings suggest that the engagement in LCs was valuable for learning since it could assist students to co...


This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time cluster of PCs that provides globally synchronized scheduling and predictable message passing. A high-accuracy, fine-grain global clock implementation has been closely coupled with a timebased scheduler to facilitate finely synchronized global scheduling across the cluster. A real-time messaging layer provides predictable communication latencies over the interconnecting Myrinet network. This system provides a solid framework for QoS based real-time communication, and in particular facilitates efficient layering of high-performance real-time distributed middleware such as MPI/RT. We present experiments and results to demonstrate the degree of predictability and synchronization achieved on an 8-node Myrinet cluster.


In this paper we apply multiple viewpoints requirements analyzing method to creative design, through consistency and integration we solve the problem of inconsistency among viewpoints when we analyze innovation requirements with multiple viewpoints method.


We investigated the possibility of utilization of a closed recirculation system (CRS) for egg incubation of tiger puffer Takifugu rubripes. We put 140-200 g of eggs in 6 l hatching jars, and the jars were integrated into two experimental systems, a CRS and a flow-through system. Hatching rate of eggs incubated in the CRS and the flow-through system were 50.2-95.4% and 42.1-84.1% in experiment 1, and 17.7-64.5% and 10.6-69.9% in experiment 2, respectively. In experiment 1, hatching rate in the CRS was significantly higher than in the flow-through system, but not significantly different in experiment 2. During egg incubation, it was necessary to pay attention to the rapid increase of ammonia caused by the hatching. Success of egg incubation in the present study enable the completely controlled aquaculture of tiger puffer by CRS.


This paper presents a method to design and implement an ARIES- supporting log management system in engineering database.Log records are organized by their own LSNs,which makes reading and writing log records more efficiently.This method also speeds up the instance recovery and transaction rollback processes.ARIES can be implemented on this system.


In this study, we reconsider the torsion of nonlinear viscous shafts. Attention is paid to the analytical solution of the nonlinear partial differential equation arising in the problem's formulation, and it is concluded that the stresses τ\dx\dy, τ\dx\dz and the torque \iT(\it) can be found in terms of the partial derivatives of the warping function φ. Theoretical results are given for circular cross sections, and it is shown that the present method gives the same results as those for elastic (\im=0) and perfectly plastic torsion (\im→∞). It is further proved that it is not possible to give analytical solutions for nonregular boundaries, such as rectangular and triangular cross sections.


The machining of parts with irregular PRP and PSP is difficult in WEDM.The principle in WEDM machining of the irregular PRP and PSP parts,NC programming and matters need attention were discussed in this paper.These theories will provide reference for practical manufacturing of such kind of parts.


SUMMARY specific morphinan derivative or a pharmaceutically acceptable acid addition salt, as an active ingredient, excellent chemically stable oral formulations the dissolution properties is disclosed. Oral formulations of the present invention, as an active ingredient a specific morphinan derivative or a pharmacologically acceptable acid addition salts, containing an organic acid that require more water 30mL to dissolve 1g at 20 ° C.. Further, dissolution and improved method of chemical stability of oral formulations, oral formulations containing a specific morphinan derivative or a pharmacologically acceptable acid addition salt thereof as an active ingredient, for dissolving 1g at 20 ° C. in comprising the inclusion of an organic acid that require more water 30 mL.


This study was intended to research the dyeing with natural walnut hull extracts over cotton, flax, rayon, wool, nylon and silk. We studied the dyeing conditions and mordant effect, and observed dyeability. The result are as follows: 1. In the dyeability with natural walnut hull extracts, protein and polyamide fiber has more dye uptake rather than cellulose fiber. 2. The optimum condition in the dyeing with natural walnut hull extracts was at , 12%(o.w.b) concentration in 90 mins. 3. In the case of the dyeability by repeated dyeing number, the dyeability of good dyeability fiber is improved in the first or second dyeing, but that of bad dyebality fiber is improved when it is dyed more repeatedly. 4. In the dyeablity treated with mordants, Al, Sn, and Mg don't have any differences, but Cu and Fe have some difference. The color of Fe mordant is green and the color of Cu mordant is blue. 5. In the case of the color fastness with mordant treatment, nylon is better than silk and wool in color fastness to washing but silk is better than nylon and wool in color fastness to light.


Fatten trial of chickens was carried out with rumexk-1,The result showed that the chickens tasted edible and increased quickly.It was increased 2.96g that comparative group every day.


Rigorous equations are proposed for scalar modes in fibres with cladding limited by a plane, leading to tractable numerical computations. Some results are presented, including data on the accuracy of an asymptotical formula.


IgY against PEDV was obtained from egg yolk of chickens immunized with PEDV.Then IgY was purified by chloroform extraction and ammonium sulfate precipitation.After challenge exposures to PEDV,the neonatal piglets were treated orally with IgY solution in the antibody treatment group and with normal salt solution in the control group after the occurrence of diarrhea.The mortality rate and the fecal scoring were used to evaluate the difference between the antibody treatment group and the control group.The experiment showed that the mortality rate was 100% in the control group,whereas only 16.7% in the antibody treatment group.The result indicates that IgY can be effectively used for piglet diarrhea. 


Traditional metal oxide varistor (MOV) based voltage clamping circuits (VCC) used in solid-state circuit breakers reduce the efficiency of the system due to the high voltage requirement imposed on the main solid-state device. The voltage burden arises from the material properties of the MOV which fixes its clamping voltage at a value more than twice its maximum continuous dc voltage rating. This letter proposes a novel and reliable VCC termed as the electronic MOV (eMOV) to altogether decouple the peak clamping voltage of the MOV from the nominal dc voltage of the system aiming to improve the voltage suppression index (VSI = Vpk/Vdc) of the VCC, thereby reducing the system conduction losses. The eMOV introduces a breakover diode to share the system dc voltage during the standby state and a Silicon controlled rectifier to provide the bypass path for the fault current for quick MOV insertion. Comprehensive design criteria are developed to guide the component selection and overall design. Experimental results at 2 kV dc and 1.1 kA peak current are presented to validate the operation of the proposed eMOV based VCC.


Platypnea-Orthodeoxia Syndrome (POS) is a rare clinical syndrome characterized by dyspnea and hypoxemia while upright that are relieved when the patient is supine. A right to left shunt in combination with several hypothesized hemodynamic or structural factors are needed to develop the syndrome. It is an important source of dyspnea in a small percentage of often-elderly patients. The exact mechanism for the positional increase in the shunt has remained elusive. We present the case of an 85-year-old woman with severe POS. The patient has an atrial septal aneurysm with a Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO). We were able to demonstrate a significant increase in the right to left intra-atrial shunt in the upright position using transesophageal echocardiography and agitated saline study. By analyzing the atrial septal motion, we were also able to provide evidence that the shunt is caused by a reversal in the inter-atrial pressure gradient in the upright position, thus we are able to show for the first time that a reversal of the interatrial pressure gradient can be responsible for the positional shunt.


Loureirin B (LB) is the most radioactive compound of dragon's blood, but its poor pharmacokinetics due to its hydrophobic nature limits its clinical applications. Owing to the excellent biocompatibility of liposomes with body fluid, here phospholipids and cholesterol-based nanoliposomes (NLs) were synthesized using the thin-film evaporation technique as a nanocarrier for LB to overcome associated clinical issues. The NLs exhibited overall vesicular shape, which is favorable for enhanced drug uptake (up to 74.5%), while the particle size of NLs was found to be strongly dependent on lipid concentration that ranges from 58 to 94 nm. Further, a high -potential of -51.2 mV shown by the LB-loaded NLs confirms their high stability and better dispersion in designated solvents/cell plasma as well as proves their ability for homogeneous drug delivery. In vitro flow cytometry results revealed that LB-loaded NLs recover the radiation injury in viable cell from 79.4 to 89.9%, early apoptosis from 3.5 to 0.2%, necrosis from 14.8 to 9.8%, and late apoptosis from 2.3 to 0.0%. In vivo assay showed that LB-loaded NLs successfully improved the pharmacokinetic parameters such as maximum concentration of LB-loaded NLs formulation, elimination rate half-life, area under the curve, and plasma clearance to 3.247 ± 0.631 ng/mL h, 14.765 ± 10.780 min, 2.957 ± 0.201 ng/mL h, and 0.132 ± 0.901 ng/mL h, respectively. Thus, we believe that designing such unique LB-loaded NLs composite not only improved the antiradiation characteristics of LB but also make it suitable for other biomedical applications like drug delivery by enhancing its solubility and dispersion.


The on-line chat system not only realized on-line chat between the people,but also has further strengthened the resources sha-ring function of network.Because chat is multi-points to the multi-points,the thread class and some multi-thread mechanism available in Java is used for implementing multi-points to multi-points chat.Correspondence between the client and Server is realized by making use of Java I/O package and net package.Thread pool technology for server to deal with massive customer requests.The thread pool technology has decreased expense of establishing and destroying thread,which improves the performance of threads' reuse,as a result,the efficiency of server is greatly raised.


Qualitative Spatial & Temporal Reasoning (QSTR)

is a major field of study in Symbolic AI that deals

with the representation and reasoning of spatio-

temporal information in an abstract, human-like

manner. We survey the current status of QSTR

from a viewpoint of reasoning approaches, and

identify certain future challenges that we think

that, once overcome, will allow the field to meet

the demands of and adapt to real-world, dynamic,

and time-critical applications of highly active areas

such as machine learning and data mining.


In the procedure of punishments in public order and security administration,there are some inconsistent,or in other words,some conflicts between Regulations for Procedures of Administration Cases by Public Security Organs and Law of Punishments in Public order and Security Administration,such as "withdrawal","service of process","summary procedure","investigation" and "postponed execution of detention".And during the law-enforcing practice,the public security organs and police should obey the relevant regulations of the latter one,while Ministry of Public Security should have the former one ratified as soon as possible.


Ferulic acid is the most abundant hydroxycinnamic acid in cell wall polysaccharides (Benoit et al., 2008). This acid can perform several functions including antioxidant, antimicrobial or anti-inflammatory and it has reported to play an important role in prevention or treatment of some human diseases particularly atherosclerosis, cancer or diabetes (Srinivasan et al., 2007; Zhao & Moghadasian, 2008). Ferulic acid also has a range of applications in the cosmetic industry where it is used for its anti-aging effect and in the food industry is employed as an additive antioxidant or transformed into other valuable molecules such as flavour precursors of aromatic constituents used in some foods (Ou & Kwok, 2004 ). Feruloyl esterases (EC 22.214.171.124), a class of enzymes that are involved in the hydrolysis of the ester linkages of ferulic and diferulic acids (Koseki et al., 2009), release ferulic acid and other cinnamic acids from plant cell wall polysaccharides (Benoit et al., 2008). Vine trimming shoot and corncob are residues from agroindustrial sector whose lignocellulosic nature made them liable to be valorized as a source of ferulic acid. Consequently, in the present work, these materials were the substrates for enzymatic hydrolysis to produce ferulic acid solutions able to be used as a food additives precursor media and made from an environmentally friendly process. More in detail, Aspergillus terreus CECT 2808 is a fungi strain which was selected in a previous research to obtain feruloyl esterases from vine trimming shoot, corncob or their mixture as carbon sources. The feruloyl esterase activity of enzymatic extracts generated from each material has been evaluated in the same substrate where this enzyme was produced and in the other two. Ultraflo L® was employed as a control. As a result, maximum ferulic acid release by fungi extract were 211  16 mg/L from corncob and 21  0.01 mg/L from vine trimming shoot, so corncob was the material with the major quantity of this hydroxycinnamic acid release after 33 hours of hydrolysis. However, in terms of percentage of ferulic acid release from the total possible to release from the material, vine trimming shoot compared with corncob (16.6  4.3 %) has been the best one with a remarkable yield of extraction of 74.0  0.1 %.


Axiomatic Design is based on function independence axiom whereas it couldn't deal with coupled design involving functional coupling relationships.In order to solve the problem,a new coupling function planning approach was proposed.Firstly,functional coupling relationship was clustered and recognized by Immune Clustering Recognition Algorithm(ICRA).Then,functional coupling degree was measured.Finally,the coupling functions were rearranged via decoupling and tearing operations in order to define realization sequences of various coupling functions.The clustering recognition of functional coupling relationship was aimed to provide support for decoupling and to avoid unnecessary loss of coupling information.A practical example of horizontal shell and tube condenser was studied to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.Certain parameters in ICRA were also discussed.Furthermore,the performance of ICRA was compared with that of genetic clustering recognition algorithm,and the influence of the result of clustering recognition on decoupling was also compared with that of graph-based clustering recognition method.


This study evaluated the impact of hypoxia on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) biogenesis in retinal organoids of patients with Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) with an mtDNA G11778A mutation. The induced pluripotent stem cells derived from the peripheral blood mononuclear cells of LHON patients and a healthy individual were differentiated into three-dimensional retinal organoids with confirmed morphology and retinal ganglion cell (RGC) markers. The retinal organoids were cultured in alternating hypoxic and normoxic states. The ratio of the mtDNA copy number in an organoid to the mtDNA copy number in the white blood cells was calculated. Under both conditions, the control and LHON organoids had similar morphology and RGC marker patterns. Under the normoxic condition, the LHON organoids had a smaller but similar mtDNA copy number ratio as the controls. Hypoxic exposure significantly reduced the mtDNA copy number ratio in both groups. However, the magnitude of reduction was significantly smaller in LHON organoids than in the controls. One LHON patient had a similar and relative mtDNA copy number in the white blood cells to the controls, but the other patient had a much higher number. Therefore, the hypoxic response of retinal mtDNA biogenesis was reduced in LHON patients.


Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successfully used for multichannel speech enhancement in fixed array geometries. However, challenges remain for ad-hoc arrays with unknown microphone placements. We propose a deep neural network based approach for ad-hoc array processing: Triple-Attentive Dual-Recurrent Network (TADRN). TADRN uses self-attention across channels for learning spatial information and a dual-path attentive recurrent network (ARN) for temporal modeling. Temporal modeling is done independently for all channels by dividing a signal into smaller chunks and using an intra-chunk ARN for local modeling and an inter-chunk ARN for global modeling. Consequently, TADRN uses triple-path attention: inter-channel, intra-chunk, and inter-chunk, and dual-path recurrence: intra-chunk and inter-chunk. Experimental results show excellent performance of TADRN. We demonstrate that TADRN improves speech enhancement by leveraging additional randomly placed microphones, even at locations far from the target source. Additionally, large improvements in objective scores are observed when poorly placed microphones in the scene are complemented with more effective microphone positions, such as those closer to a target source.