The genus Lathyrus is closely related to Vicia and belongs to the family Leguminosae. Most species in this genus are diploids with 2n = 14. The divergence and evolution within this genus is accompanied by a three-fold increase in chromosome size which is directly correlated with a four-fold increase in their nuclear DNA amounts. The fraction of DNA responsible for the variation in total amounts of DNA in this genus consists of repetitive and non-repetitive DNA in a consistent ratio of 4. 1 to 1.0. Quantitative comparisons of the total DNA and of DNA constituents show discontinuity in the pattern of variation among the species of this genus. The constraints upon the composition of DNA among species and the discontinuity in the pattern of variation would suggest genome evolution by a succession of spasmodic changes rather than by a continuous progression. This investigation was carried out with two major objectives in mind, 1) to determine the nature of DNA variation accompanying the evolution of this genus and 2) to compare among species the relative changes in nuclear components which are closely correlated with DNA changes. Multivariate analysis was used to classify the data. MATERIALS AND METHODS


It is the load on the crane beam and the conditions of the welding that influence the stress round about the support crack between the web and the upper flange of a welded steel crane beam. Using finite element analysis software ANSYS, the stress of the welded steel crane-girders subjected to different eccentric wheel loads were analyzed. Cycles of eccentric wheel loads is the main reason to lead to the support crack appear. Some measures are put forward based on the discussion.


The proton-proton coupling constants in cyclopentadiene, cyclohexadiene, cycloheptatriene, cyclooctatetraene, cyclopentene and cyclohexene have been calculated using the finite perturbation INDO method. The carbon geometry was taken from the corresponding electron diffraction studies. The theory gives satisfactory agreement with experiment. In terms of the many factor structural model, distance and angle distortions have been studied in ethylene, cis-1,3-butadiene and cis-2-butene. It has been established that these distortions produce noticeable changes only for those protons whose co-ordinates are changed. The coupling constants across three, four and five bonds are discussed separately in connection with the structural factors and the σ–π contribution. Finally, variations in the proton co-ordinates in cyclopentadiene are used to optimize the proton couplings.


The work presents an alternative method for encoding shape-information of video objects, which is a new requirement in the recent revolution of video codec scheme: compressing and transmitting object-based video streams. The proposed method takes the advantage of the latest development in the video encoding — motion compensation on the base of mesh presentation of frame — to complete its target. The so-called constrained Delaunay mesh is deployed to represent video objects, which are detected from a previous video object detector. This special mesh structure in one hand constructs the base for successive motion compensation taking root on mesh-vertices. In another hand, the virtue of its constrained property opens a possibility to encode the shape of video object implicitly, through the bounding polygon of the mesh. Hence, this lossy presentation of the shape-information reduces the amount of transmitted information. We discuss the trade-off between the precision of shape approximation and necessary bandwidth. We integrate the shape encoder into a mesh-based video codec scheme. The simulating results of quality and bitrate are encouraging. K e y w o r d s: shape coding, Delaunay mesh, VOP, MPEG-4 The recent MPEG-4 Visual coding technique is the first standard, which allows the transmission of arbitrarily shaped video objects (VOs). In the new scenario of video transmission, scene consists several VOs, which in turn possess their own textures, motions and shape information. The bitstreams of these VOs and the accompanying composition information can be multiplexed such that the decoder is able to decode the VOs separately and arranges them into a video scene in accordance with users' demand. In comparison with the older members of the MPEG family, such as MPEG-1/2, the foremost new challenge posed to developers is how to send the transparency and the shape of VOs to decoders efficiently. Within the scope of this work, we restrict ourselves to opaque objects only, where binary shape information (showing whether pixel belongs to associated object or not) is satisfactory. Basically, there are three methods to encode this type of information: Chroma-keying: actually no dedicated transmitting channel is necessary since the shape information is encoded implicitly in the texture information of the VOs. It is possible thanks to the fact that the background object of a simple scene often has a static, homogenous and distinguishable color: the chroma-key (background color). Pixels with a color similar to this predefined value are considered as the external ones. The remains belong to the VO. The 1important advantage of this method is its low computational and arithmetic complexity. Pixel-based: at first, the silhouette of VOs is created by assigning two different intensities (1 and 0) to internal and to external pixels of a given VO. The resulting binary mask then can be treated as an independent "texture" and encoded as usual. Exploiting the bi-values of the


In this study, a novel thermoelectric infrared microsensor (TIMS) is designed by using commercial CMOS IC processes with subsequent bulk-micromachining process. This microsensor has the advantages of high fill factor, low noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD), and simple fabrication process. The key feature is that thermocouple cantilever beams with low solid thermal conductance have been placed under the membrane of thermoelectric infrared microsensor. In order to improve the performance of the infrared sensor, the basic physical characteristics of this sensor have been analyzed. Finite element analysis is used to simulate the electro-thermo-mechanical behavior of the device and to demonstrate the feasibility of our design. Besides, a method for manufacturing the infrared microsensor is also provided and the performance of the presented design has been examined. The analytical results concluded that lowering down the number of the thermocouples does not affect the responsivity but do reduce the total resistance. Also, the detectivity and responsivity are obviously increased for the proposed TIMS. Finally, the deviation between the theoretical and the simulated results is discussed.© 2003 ASME


The is improved patient care. Reports from the research bench and from the examination table lead to recognition and understanding of disease pathogenesis and diagnosis, to theory and practice of therapeutics, and to concepts of prevention and prognosis. The content of a report should never be sacrificed for style, but there is no reason why clarity and cogency cannot be enhanced by correct and compelling word choice. Patient care is enhanced when a compelling title draws a reader to a compelling report. Patient care is enhanced when the compelling report is couched in easily understandable and memorable terms. Thought conditions language; language conditions thought; clear thinking leads to clear language and vice versa: this is true in the world at large; this is largely true in the world of science and medicine; and it may be especially true in the dermatologic world. Medicine in general, dermatology in particular, has ingots


Communication is a fundamental process in collaborative work. In natural conditions, communication between team members is multimodal. This allows for redundancy, adaptation to different contexts, and different levels of focus. In collaborative virtual environments, however, hardware limitations and lack of appropriate interaction metaphors reduce the amount of collaboration. In this poster, we propose the design and use of a vibrotactile language to improve user intercommunication in CVE and, consequently, to increase the amount of effective collaboration.


LEONARDO, Natália Gomes e Silva. Evaluation of sodium hypochlorite and calcium hypochlorite solution pH in different storage conditions – a preliminary study.2013. XX f. Final Paper (Especialization in Endodontics) – Faculdade de Odontologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, 2013. Irrigating solutions and auxiliary chemical solutions are used in chemical-mechanical preparation of root canals with the aim of promoting your cleaning, expansion and modeling. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare the pH values of sodium hypochlorite solutions (NaOCl) and calcium hypochlorite solutions (Ca[OCl]2) under different storage conditions for 4 weeks. The solutions of NaOCl and Ca(OCl)2 were obtained at concentrations of 0.5%, 1%, 2.5% and 5.25%. The pH of freshly manipulated solutions and stored in local temperature, 8oC and 37oC were evaluated with pH digital. Descriptive analysis was used to evaluate the results. The NaOCl and Ca(OCl)2 solutions showed extremely alkaline values of pH immediately after the preparation. More concentrated solutions showed highest pH values. In local temperature, 0.5% NaOCl solutions showed decrease in pH value. Ca(OCl)2 solutions maintained their pH stable when storage in local temperature and in 8oC during 4 weeks. The 0.5% Ca(OCl)2 solution showed decrease when storage in 37oC. 0.5% and 1% NaOCl solutions showed important variations when stored under refrigeration and in 37oC. The analysis of the present study may suggest that Ca(OCl)2 solutions shows alkaline character and seems to demonstrate stability in different storage conditions.


Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) and the delayed development of object permanence is often not questioned, and is rarely understood. The following paper attempts to explore this idea and suggests reasons for why such development is delayed and the possibility that certain difficult behaviours seen in children with ASC are less likely to be connected to having poor theory of mind and more connected to lacking generalized concepts of object permanence.


The moorish expulsion from the Kingdom of Granada and their dispersion throughout Castile, was one of the great mass population movements during the early modern age. It was a migration ordered by Felipe II after the Alpujarras war that displaced some 80,000 moorish after the armed conflict. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the case study of the Pastrana Ducal town, which in 1570 is the place of arrive one of the most important items, and the support/uprooting that its presence leaves on the urban structure of this population. Their abrupt arrival and the construction of a new neighborhood to host them, sponsored by the I Duke of Pastrana, Ruy Gomez de Silva and financed by rich moorish merchants, are studied. And the footprint of integration that silently generated its presence and the reproduction of popular gardens of andalusi tradition.


Peculiarities of formation and evolution of tweed structures on the surface of high-purity aluminum polycrystalline foils under cyclic tension were studied using an atom force microscope and a white light interferometer. Tweed structures of micron and submicron sizes were found on the foils at different number of cycles. In the range of 42,000 < N < 95,000 cycles destruction of tweed patterns is observed, which leads to their disappearance from the surface of the foils. Formation of tweed structures of various scales is discussed in terms of the Grinfeld instability.


In the view of the distribution and balance of energy, mathematic model of biomass gasification and waste incineration combined power generation system was simplified in this paper. The non-linear regular theory and genetic algorithm was briefly introduced and applied for optimization. The results show that these two methods based on Matlab software have common advantage of avoiding complex program editting. The genetic algorithm has better capacity for searching optimization and observability than the non-linear regular theory.


Based on the classified voting system of SEO from 2002 to 2005,the paper studies the monitoring function of the Chinese institutional investors.Firstly,the authors examine the stock market responds to firms' equity financing proposals and find that there is significant positive reaction after announcement with vetoing an equity financing proposals.Secondly the authors find that the funds vote against equity financing,but the securities don't do so.Further analysis finds that the high-level fund holdings with approved equity financing proposals have better future performance.The evidence is consistent with the view that institutional investors play an active role in corporate governance and in controlling the insider expropriation through equity financing.


The evaluatee's psychological deviation in the educational evaluation is an important factor which will influence the evaluation effects. Their accomadation, precaution, perfunctoriness, sensitivity, worries and anxiety are display of such psychological deviations which result form many factors. To overcome these deviations, we must take some measures for readjustments.


This study was conducted to investigate the effects of the National Board Certification Pilot Project in Iowa. Initiated in 1998, the Project provides monetary incentives for teacher certification, reimbursement.for registration fees, and a support program for teachers pursuing certification. The effects of this program on teachers' professional development, provision of professional services, teacher induction and retention, and teaching quality were studied. Overall, 564 of the 1,018 teachers surveyed responded (55%) . In addition, 287 principals of teachers who have been involved in certification were also surveyed. And 134 responded (47%) . General findings indicate that teachers who have been involved in National Board Certification in Iowa are more involved in professional development activities, and provide more professional services to their school districts. They also demonstrate significant differences in teaching quality when compared to teachers who have not been involved in the certification process. The survey instruments are attached, and an appendix contains supplemental data tables. (Contains 23 tables, 29 figures, and 8 references.) (SLD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the ori inal document. Impact Study of the National Board , Certification Pilot Project in Iowa, ,,.. Spring 2001 ,


Based on the characteristics of amphoteric surfanctants,alkyl betaine,which have positive charge when the solution pH is smaller than their isoelectric points,the determination method for alkyl betaine homologous compounds,i.e. Octyl-Betaine(BS-8) ,Dodecane-Betaine(BS-12) ,Octadecane-Betaine(BS-18) in soil solution using the Gold Orange Ⅱ Method were studied in this paper. The results showed that the optimum pH for BS-8 and BS-12 determination is below 3.6,and for BS-18 is below 2.0. The volume of gold orange Ⅱ used in determination of BS-18(6.5 mL) is more than that of both BS-8 or BS-12(3.0 mL) . Chloroform is the extractant of both BS-12 and BS-8,but ethyl acetate as extractant have a better effect for BS-18. The detection limits of BS-8,BS-12 and BS-18 are 0.01 μg·mL-1,0.05 μg·mL-1 and 0.1 μg·mL-1 respectively,and the linear ranges of standard curves between absorbance and the concentration of BS-8,BS-12 and BS-18 are 0.10~40.00 μg·mL-(1R2= 0.998 7) ,0.10~40.00 μg·mL-(1R2= 0.998 9) ,1.00~50.00 μg·mL-(1R2=0.999 0) ,respectively. The recovery ratios of BS-8,BS-12 and BS-18 are 100.4%~101.2%、99.31%~102.0% and 96.25%~105.0% respectively. The common cations and anions in the soil solution in a certain range have no effect on the accuracy of this method.


We present a modular feedforward neural network for solving difficult classification problems. It is based on a hybrid architecture including RBF, PCA, and MLP modules, and is extremely efficient in terms of computational effort and number of parameters. Simulation results for the well-known 2-spirals benchmark problem are presented, and the possibility of using the proposed architecture as an autoassociative network is also outlined.


Abstract Liquid crystal (LC) waveguide claddings with different boundary couplings have been electrically switched. It is observed that the cut-off voltage of guided modes significantly decreases with decreasing the azimuthal surface anchoring energy of the LCs. An LC-covered planar lightwave modulator with low driving voltage of 12 volts is demonstrated by controlling the surface azimuthal anchoring energy of LC claddings using photoalignment technique.


A time-lapse imaging experiment was conducted to estimate various atmospheric parameters for the imaging path. Atmospheric turbulence caused frame-to-frame shifts of the entire image as well as parts of the image. The statistics of these shifts encode information about the turbulence strength (as characterized by Cn2, the refractive index structure function constant) along the optical path. The shift variance observed is simply proportional to the variance of the tilt of the optical field averaged over the area being tracked. By presuming this turbulence follows the Kolmogorov spectrum, weighting functions can be derived which relate the turbulence strength along the path to the shifts measured. These weighting functions peak at the camera and fall to zero at the object. The larger the area observed, the more quickly the weighting function decays. One parameter we would like to estimate is r0 (the Fried parameter, or atmospheric coherence diameter.) The weighting functions derived for pixel sized or larger parts of the image all fall faster than the weighting function appropriate for estimating the spherical wave r0. If we presume Cn2 is constant along the path, then an estimate for r0 can be obtained for each area tracked, but since the weighting function for r0 differs substantially from that for every realizable tracked area, it can be expected this approach would yield a poor estimator. Instead, the weighting functions for a number of different patch sizes can be combined through the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse to create a new weighting function which yields the least-squares optimal linear combination of measurements for estimation of r0. This approach is carried out, and it is observed that this approach is somewhat noisy because the pseudo-inverse assigns weights much greater than one to many of the observations.


New technologies have the potential to drastically change the way people and firms conduct business. But the future is difficult to predict, and the inherent uncertainty of a new technology's impact can be troubling. This article describes an exercise that has participants evaluate a 1937 U.S. Government sponsored technology forecast. The forecast identified thirteen inventions that were predicted to have a significant impact on society during the subsequent 10–25 years. These inventions included the television, facsimile machine, mechanical cotton picker, and trailer homes, among others. Participants in the exercise are challenged to evaluate the accuracy of the 1937 forecast, and develop and understanding of the issues inherent in predicting the future impact of new technologies. They are then challenged to identify today's new technologies, and make predictions regarding these technologies' future impact. Today's new technologies may change important aspects of everyday life over the next few decades, and significantly influence the competitiveness of certain firms.

The exercise illustrates how difficult it can be to anticipate the future impact of new technologies. New technologies take time to develop, and most forecasts are overly optimistic regarding the rate of development and adoption. New technologies can also develop in ways not anticipated, and a new technology may have uses that are difficult to foresee. These challenges notwithstanding, it is still important to regularly track new technologies and attempt to anticipate their potential impact. The greatest danger comes not from having inaccurate predictions of the future impact of new technologies, but from having not thought about the potential impacts.

The exercise was developed for use in an executive MBA program to encourage participants to think beyond the budgets and deadlines that drive much of their regular work activity. It was designed to challenge them to reevaluate whether they, and their firm, were thinking about how new technologies might impact their industry. The exercise has the greatest impact and applicability when conducted at corporate programs or with Executive MBA students, but can be used in a typical MBA or MS program as well. It can be conducted in a three-four hour session, or over multiple shorter sessions. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.


Based on Monte Carlo simulations of X‐ray generation by fast electrons we calculate curves of effective sensitivity factors for analytical transmission electron microscopy based energy‐dispersive X‐ray spectroscopy including absorption and fluorescence effects, as a function of Ga K/L ratio for different indium and gallium containing compound semiconductors. For the case of InGaN alloy thin films we show that experimental spectra can thus be quantified without the need to measure specimen thickness or density, yielding self‐consistent values for quantification with Ga K and Ga L lines. The effect of uncertainties in the detector efficiency are also shown to be reduced.


Hospitals, we know, are dangerous places; even when organisational stresses are low and correct procedures are observed, the safety of patients cannot be taken for granted. As stresses increase—for example, when critical information, equipment and supplies fail to be in the right place at the right time, when key personnel (from surgeons and anaesthetists through to nursing staff and porters) are unavailable, and so on—the risks to patients rise. Furthermore, in a stressed medical environment, best practice procedures are less likely to be observed, again increasing the risks faced by patients. However, no one—not even seasoned observers of the actualities of hospital practice—can think that the regulatory environment for patient safety is fit for purpose when, following the publication of the report of the public inquiry into the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust (centring on the deaths of patients at Stafford Hospital), the banner headline on the front page of The Times bluntly warns: 'NHS: No one is safe'. Robert Francis QC, introducing the report, paints a shocking picture of the suffering of hundreds of patients whose safety was ignored for the sake of corporate self-interest and cost control:


Nebulizers, metered dose inhalers (MDIs), and dry powdered inhalers (DPIs) are frequently used to deliver drugs through inhalation drug delivery. These devices generate aerosol in the 0.5-5 /spl mu/m size range that deposits into the various regions of the lung. These inhaled particles may deposit in the various generations of the respiratory system by the complex action of the five deposition mechanisms: interception, impaction, gravitational settling, diffusion, and electrostatic forces. The last deposition mechanism is electrostatic force, which can be significantly important because the deposition of particle fraction in each generation is influenced by the electrostatic charge it carries. Particles of controlled electrostatic charge were generated and deposited in the various stages of the Anderson cascade impactor (ACI) and the effect of particle charge on their deposition in the various stages was studied. It was found that the aerosol with net neutral charge (0 /spl mu/C/g) deposited in the lower stage (fourth stage) of ACI, compared to particles with a net positive or negative charge of 3 /spl mu/C/g that deposited in the upper stage (second stage) of ACI.


Activities related to development of an advanced composites stabilizer for the Boeing 737 commercial transport are reported. Activities include discussion of the design and weight status, stiffness requirements, the finite element model, test programs, quality assurance, and manufacturing producibility studies. Design details of the graphite/epoxy components are virtually complete. Emphasis is placed on the metal and fiberglass trailing edge components. The bending and torsional stiffness properties are satisfactory for both stability/control and for flutter requirements. The finite element model input geometry is revised to reflect the latest changes to production drawings.


Psychological peculiarities of a person in 255 adolescents having disadaptation, aged15-17, have been studied with the help of some psychological techniques - of MMPI-SMALL, of Aisenk, of susceptibility test for dependent behavior. The revealed deviations allow developing algorithm of rendering of specialized help to the given contingent of children.


We investigate the thermodynamics of strongly interacting matter described as a system of quarks and antiquarks in free creation and annihilation, but with pairwise confinement to a volume of hadronic size ( approx. 4..pi../3m/sub ..pi../ /sup 3/). At low temperature, such a system behaves like a hadron gas, giving a quark or an antiquark a spatial mobility of order m/sub ..pi..//sup ts-1/. At high temperature and hence high density, we obtain a gas of free quarks and antiquarks with infinite spatial mobility. By calculating the crossover of low- and high-temperature approximations, we find a phase transition from hadron to quark matter at the critical temperature T/sub c/ approx. = m/sub ..pi../. We compare our results with similar considerations based on the size of hadrons and on perturbative quantum chromodynamics.


Breeding the clavulanic acid high-production strain of Streptomyces clavuligerus by using interspecific protoplast fusion technique was studied.In this studys,ulbactam sodium resistant high-production mutant S.clavuligerus B71-3-10 and glycerin resistant high-production mutant S.clavuligerus B71-14 obtained by the lab in the prophase research were chosen as the parental strains.After the optimization of the protoplast formation and fusion conditions,a genetically stable fusant F14 with higher clavulanic acid production of 650.35 mg/L was obtained finally.The clavulanic acid production of the fusant was 36.77% and 20.84% higher than the parental strain S.clavuligerus B71-3-10 and S.clavuligerus B71-14r,espectively.The results shows that using protoplast fusion technique in the breeding of clavulanic acid high-production strain of Streptomyces clavuligerus is feasible,efficient and prominent.


The recent expansion of the global wildlife trade, both within and between countries, has many potentially negative ecological impacts. Emerging economies, in particular, have a largely overlooked potential for rapid internal growth in this trade. An analysis of ~17 000 wildlife transportation permits – issued in South Africa primarily for commercial purposes by the Western Cape Province's local government – provides insights into this trend. During the past decade, a total of 912 amphibian, bird, mammal, and reptile species were transported to and from locations in the province; 60% of translocated vertebrate species were non-native. Network analysis of the data indicated that the numbers of participants within local trade networks are increasing rapidly. Static and dynamic structural differences emerged between the networks for selected vertebrate Classes. Changes in density and degree were pronounced for mammal and reptile networks but were more constant for birds over the observed time period. All tra...


This paper reports five species and one variety through studying on Potentilla L. plants in the Area of Shuicheng, Potentilla.contigrana Maoim. and P.reptans var.Sericophylla Franch. are recorded for the first time in Guizhou. The author researched into the sorts of plants,distribution,environment,florescence; and introduced the medical-value of Potentilla L.plants。


Four samples of bentonite, two ofperlite, a kaolin and a pumice sample from five mines of Milos Island, have been investigatedfor their Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) and the mineralogical composition (wt. %), by using the Ammonium Acetate Saturation (AMAS) method and X-Ray Powder Diffraction (XRPD) method. respec tively. The bentonite samples contain 68-100 wI. % clay minerals and show CEC values of35-121 meq/100g. while the kaolin sample contain 41 wt.% clay minerals and show CEC value of28 meq/100g. The amorphous materials are the main con stituent of the perlite samples (73-77 wt. %) and pumice sample (88 wI. %). The CEC values ofperlites were 3-4 meq/100g, while the pumice sample showed a CEC value of 73 meq/1 DOg. The CEC of the samples showed positive correlations with the total content of microporous minerals (clay minerals+micas) as well as with the micro porous minerals+amorphous content, mainly affected by the clay minerals content.


Batch sorptions of acetazolamide (AZ) were conducted using four soils from China. Sorption of AZ was found to be impacted by OC, clay content, and soil pH, with higher kd values for soils with higher clay content. The kd values of SOM-removed soils are much lower than those of bulk soils. Sorption data were well fitted with a Freundlich model (r2 > 0.99). Chelating with the metal ions on the surfaces of soil particles was probably involved. With pH increase, the electrostatic attraction between anionic AZ and positively charged soil surface may increase. The sorption capacity decreased when the temperature increased from 20 to 40°C, and the calculated thermodynamics parameters of ΔG0, ΔH0, and ΔS0 indicated that the sorption was a non-spontaneous, physisorption, and exothermic process. Sorption coefficients (kd) for the compound in soil were low (ranging from 0.42 to 1.19 L·kg−1) and indicated that low level sorption of AZ with appreciable risk of ground water contamination.


The Supreme Court's decision striking down a verdict for the Rev. Jerry Falwell in an intentional infliction of emotional distress suit against Hustler Magazine was widely praised as a major victory for freedom of expression. Careful examination of the decision and subsequent cases in the lower courts, however, reveals that the Hustler decision is unclear and limited. It has not dealt decisively with plaintiffs' use of alternative theories of liability to avoid otherwise insurmountable First Amendment barriers to actions for libel or invasion of privacy. The lower courts have done a more effective job of resolving the issue without Hustler.


Objective:To observe the preventive and therapeutic effect of Ganxining capsule on experimental HF rats.Methods:52 SD rats were randomly divided into 5 groups ,the normal group,the model group,the positive control group,the high dose group,and the low dose group.HF rat model was duplicated with Improved Composite Factor Method.Rats of the normal group and the model group were administered normal sodium with dose 10mL/kg,positive control group were administered Colchicine with the dose 0.125mg/kg.The high dose group and the low dose group were administered Ganxining with the dose 26,6.5g/kg respectively.The liver pathology change of each group by HE coloration were compared 6 weeks later.Results:Compared with the model group,each treated group has significant difference in the HF degree (P0.05 or P0.01),the low dose group is the most significant difference in all groups(P0.01).Compared with the model group,the high dose group and the low dose group has significant difference in hepar adiposum (P0.05 or P0.01),but the positive control group has not the significant difference (P0.05).Conclusion:Ganxining capsule could effectively prevent HF of the experimental rats.It is inadvisable for Chinese medicine to treat HF by only increasing the drug quantity.


For the Industrial Cyber-Physical System (ICPS) with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and actuator failures, the integrated mechanism analysis explores the collaborative design challenge of ICPS comprehensive security control and communication and data-driven methods based on a novel Adaptive Discrete Event-triggered Communication Scheme (ADETCS). Firstly, a new kind of ADETCS is presented, and its trigger parameter can adaptively change according to system operation conditions, which can save network communication resources more efficiently. Secondly, a detection mechanism that relies on energy levels is implemented to tackle DoS attacks, facilitating the identification and differentiation of DoS attacks with varying energy levels, whether high or low.. Thirdly, during the course of active intrusion tolerance, a data-driven Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network is adopted to reconstruct and compensate for data lost due to high-energy DoS attacks, which is then combined with the elastic passive intrusion tolerance based on mechanism analysis for DoS attacks with low energy levels, achieving a mixed active-passive intrusion tolerance against DoS attacks. Then, based on time-delay system theory and novel Bessel-Legendre inequalities, the analytical solutions for robust observers and comprehensive security controllers are derived to achieve a trade-off balance between comprehensive security and the effectiveness of communication performance. Ultimately, the effectiveness and accuracy of the suggested method are validated through simulation examples.


Admittedly, the central character in The Tragic Muse is Miriam Rooth, a young actress whose triumphant career elicits a variety of response among the novel's three male-protagonist characters. To the standards of Englishness the novel conspicuously, if imperfectly, ironizes, her origins are obscurely enigmatic. Described as "more than half a Jewess" (James, The Tragic Muse [hereafter TM] 49), with a nose that is "somehow Jewish without the convex arch" (166) and a gaze burdened with a "dark weight" (220), she happens to be the daughter of a well-off English lady and a German-Jewish stockbroker called Rudolf Roth. In a telling aside we learn that the widow, "to smarten [the surname] up, has put another o" (TM 52). By virtue of ideological mechanisms of equivalence and transference at work in the geo-cultural imaginary of the time, mother and daughter are recurrently stigmatized by Anglo-Saxon characters as "wanderers" (TM 51, 52, 96), a label attached indistinctly to Continental artists, Bohemian émigrés, and gypsies. Miriam's beginnings as an actress are not easy. Though a polyglot gifted with a strong memory and urged by the ambition "to play Shakespeare" (TM 95)—her mother introduces her as someone who "knows Juliet, [...] knows Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra" (87)—she becomes a femme de théàtre only after a long training process that includes painful recitation rehearsals of Clorinde in Augier's verse play L'Aventurière (89–90), of Shakespeare's Juliet (99), and of Constance in King John (213–15). She first makes a name as "the great modern personage" (TM 257) playing the leading female part in Yolande and achieves celebrity in a brilliant performance of Juliet whose description and effects cover the final chapters of the novel. The identity of Miriam Rooth, by all standards "the organic center" of the novel, has been the object of much critical speculation. To be sure, the near-mythical figures of Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and Rachel Félix (1820–1858) contribute to the delineation of this composite character. And so does the author and actress Frances Anne Kemble, a niece of the former whom James closely befriended since 1873. She has been described by one critic as "the real life-muse of the novel" (Brownstein 249), but this statement bears qualification. In the two essays he dedicated to her, James praised her "incorrigible passion for the footlights," her "early histrionic triumphs," while conceding that her superior intelligence prevented her from gaining more notoriety as a businesslike actress, for, he argued, "it takes a distinctively inferior mind to content itself with the dramatic profession" (Literary Criticism 1, 1071). To be sure, this strained remark prefigures his later construal of the nature d'actrice in terms of instinct, illiteracy, and ignorance. Interestingly, in a Notebooks entry for 19 June 1884 this idea is described as "Mrs. Kemble's theory" (64). James, moreover, warily rubs in that, although half-foreign and born in "one of the boundaries of Bohemia" (1074), Fanny Kemble can boast of a "complete absence of any touch of Bohemianism in her personal situation" (1070). She is, in short, no conceivable candidate for the real Miriam. The same objection can be raised against Peter Collister's otherwise extremely persuasive identification of Mary Anderson as the real source for Miriam Rooth. The question, then, remains: Who is The Tragic Muse? In this note I want to answer this question by suggesting that this composite character may have been greatly inspired by the life of the actress Mary Frances Scott Siddons (1844–1896), but this claim is premised on— because intimately connected with—a prior identification.


Many people from North-Western Europe have quite long stays in Mediterranean Spain, partly related to phenomena such as 'wintering', seasonal movements and sabbatical holidays, for the most part dwelling in their own houses or apartments. This paper explores intercultural relations of long-term visitors and it raises some questions on differentiation and dedifferentiation in the consolidated holidaymaking context of Costa Blanca (Alicante, Spain). The paper includes visitors' assessments of certain central aspects of their (temporary) life in Spain, based on an exit survey. It is revealed that long-term visitors have far more varied and wide-ranging adjustments to their new and/or temporary surroundings than is usually assumed in news media and in some previous scholarly works. The study also demonstrates that generalised views depicting long-term visitors as secluded and living predominantly in compatriot enclaves are too simple, especially in long-established holiday destination areas. A considerable proportion of long-term visitors make an effort to relate to the language, culture, and social conditions of the host society. It is argued that a more nuanced and complex analysis is needed in order to describe the varied life situations of sojourners and other long-term visitors in Mediterranean Spain.


Motion planning for autonomous driving is a complex task. Planning algorithms face a large, continuous state space and have to provide a feasible and safe trajectory in real-time. Reachable sets that contain all states reachable by a vehicle at a specific point in time, can be used to provide formal guarantees especially regarding safety. The reachable set of a controller of the vehicle can be computed by making assumptions about the limits of the control inputs and disturbances by the environment [1]. If the reachable set of the controller does not intersect with the reachable set of other traffic participants, the calculated trajectory is guaranteed to be safe.


In this paper, the method for measuring the complex permittivity of concrete has been proposed, and using this method the complex permittivity of concrete is measured. This method for calculating the dielectric constant of concrete is used by measuring the deflection and the loss of electromagnetic wave in concrete block for experiments. The measuring device used is a single frequency radar. Measurement process is divided into three steps: measuring attenuation factor alpha of concrete, measuring the refractive index of concrete and calculating the complex permittivity of concrete. The method is simple and feasible in practice.


Increasing demand on microelectronics industry for personal mobile devices is possible by industrial laser processings. Some critical processes require industrial femtosecond fiber lasers showing lots of developments recently which is overviewed in this presentation.


We introduce a three-player nonlocal game, with a finite number of classical questions and answers, such that the optimal success probability of1in the game can only be achieved in the limit of strategies using arbitrarily high-dimensional entangled states. Precisely, there exists a constant0<c≤1such that to succeed with probability1−εin the game it is necessary to use an entangled state of at leastΩ(ε−c)qubits, and it is sufficient to use a state of at mostO(ε−1)qubits. The game is based on the coherent state exchange game of Leung et al.\ (CJTCS 2013). In our game, the task of the quantum verifier is delegated to a third player by a classical referee. Our results complement those of Slofstra (arXiv:1703.08618) and Dykema et al.\ (arXiv:1709.05032), who obtained two-player games with similar (though quantitatively weaker) properties based on the representation theory of finitely presented groups andC∗-algebras respectively.


In this paper, the performance of a new dual-band Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) structure based on square ring and three-pole loading was presented. Two applications which were carried out to verify the feasibility of the FSS structure are using the FSS as the high impedance surface to design absorbing material and as the radome to reduce the antenna Radar Cross Section (RCS). The wave-transparent rate of the FSS is given when a plane wave is incident at some angle. Simulation results shows that the performance of the FSS is stable. In the first application, the absorbing material only designed with the FSS structure and FR4 is thinner than the traditional absorbing material, and the total thickness is low to 3.6 mm. Bandwidth of the artificial electromagnetic material (the absorptivity is more than 80%) is nearly 5.2%. Frequency Selective Radome not only can reduce the RCS, but also can resist external interference to maintain a good working environment for antenna. In the following content, we build an ideal model of antenna and radome system to discuss the influence of the Frequency Selective Radome on the conformal antenna. The results of RCS and antenna performance were compared between cylindrical conformal antenna array with radome or not. It's worth noting that the FSS radome has little effect on the performance of conformal antenna array, moreover it has a significant RCS reduction in pass band. Simulation results show that the FSS can be used to design efficient electromagnetic absorber and radome that all can be applied in RCS reduction.


This paper examines the relation between the cultural policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the music of model plays (yangbanxi 样板戏), especially music produced by Western symphony orchestras, during the ten-year Cultural Revolution in China. It takes the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO) as the focal point of this historical episode. Model plays of the Cultural Revolution promoted communist and revolutionary themes. All aspects of their performance were examined for conformity to Maoist thought. This paper explores how the CCP's ideology and its cultural policy were embodied in revolutionary music, using one of the model plays, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, as an analytical case study. Most of the historical materials cited in this research are held by the SSO Archive. The SSO played a crucial role in creating and performing the music for Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The academic value of its archive has long been overlooked. This paper provides a new perspective on the Cultural Revolution, one viewed through policies of a Western symphony orchestra, and it suggests that scholars apply the term 'cultural policy' more deliberately in future studies of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.


Thank you for downloading attention and information processing in schizophrenia. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have search numerous times for their chosen novels like this attention and information processing in schizophrenia, but end up in malicious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they cope with some harmful bugs inside their computer.


Nucleobase radicals are the major intermediates generated by the direct (e.g., dA•+) and indirect (e.g., dA•) effects of γ-radiolysis. dA• was independently generated in DNA for the first time. The dA•+/dA• equilibrium, and consequently the reactivity in DNA, is significantly shifted toward the radical cation by a flanking dA. Tandem lesions emanating from dA• are the major products when the reactive intermediate is flanked by a 5'-dGT. In contrast, when dA• is flanked by dA, the increased dA•+ pKa results in DNA damage arising from hole transfer. This is the first demonstration that sequence effects lead to the intersection of the direct and indirect effects of ionizing radiation.


The use of water should be minimised. Water should be protected from contamination. Careful storage of manures and application are one of the main priorities. The following minimum manure storage facilities are required:
- minimum capacity for farm yard manure storage is 3m2 per Livestock Unit (not valid for farm with deep litter stables)
- minimum capacity for liquid manure storage is 2m3 per Livestock Unit (not valid for farm with deep litter stables)
- the maximum dose of manure must not exceed: 35 t of FYM per ha, 40 t of compost per ha, 30m3 of liquid manures per ha. The total dose of N applied on a farm must not exceed 170 kg per ha per year.
- a derogation for the first two principles is available for farms in a difficult financial situation. This derogation expires on 25 October 2008 (1.3.4. ? 1.3.6.)


This paper has briefly described the basic characteristics of commonly used fillers, and discussed the selection and technical specification of fillers in coatings production. The development trend of fillers in coatings industry is analyzed.


Bituminous materials salvaged and stockpiled from pre-existing road and airfield pavements have proved to be a valuable source of construction material. The most common design approach has been to combine the salvaged material together with added virgin aggregate and virgin recycling agent in order to meet some selected mix specification. This specification would include both a recommended aggregate grading (by reference to either a recipe table or a grading curve) and a recommended binder content and binder viscosity/penetration. These specifications may be either close to, or quite dissimilar from, the original specification of the salvaged material. The present paper suggests that recycled mixes may be particularly appropriate for design on a performance basis rather than by recipe. A series of studies are reported where recycled mixes designed to satisy a minimum performance in laboratory tests, and where the composition has been based upon the packing properties of the component salvaged and virgin aggregates and on the viscosity characteristics of the old and new binders, have been compared with recycled mixes composed to a British standard 594 30% stone content rolled asphalt wearing course specification. An outline of the procedure adopted for the design of the aggregate grading is shown in the accompanying flow chart. This chart forms a part of the further flow chart appearing in the paper which outlines the complete procedure for recycled mix design and which incorporates the method of selecting type and amount of recycling agent to produce the required binder properties and effects. The laboratory tests carried out have employed the Marshall apparatus and wheel tracking apparatus. Results have shown that the proposed "Birmingham" method is versatile with regard to availability of component materials and that reliable mechanical properties exist in the designed mixes. In this study, mixes designed to the new method had a lower design binder content than those designed to meet the standard compositions of BS 594 and therefore would be more economical. Higher Marshall stability and Marshall quotient were observed than for the rolled asphalt mix both when compared at their respective design binder contents and when compared over a wide range of identical binder contents. Similarly in respect of the wheel tracking test the mixes composed to the Birmingham design procedure have shown a reduced rate of tracking compared with the BS 594 rolled asphalt mixes both when compared at their respective design binder contents and at the same binder contents. This superiority in performance has been apparent at each of three temperatures at which tests have been carried out, viz 20, 35 and 45 deg c, but is more marked at the higher two temperatures.(a) for the covering abstract of the symposium see IRRD 815173.


In the process of establishing model of cable-stayed bridge by use of ANSYS,it is necessary to input the initial cable force precisely.But there is no simple method provided by ANSYS to obtain the initial internal force directly,so other alternative methods should be used,such as element birth and death,the initial strain method and the temperature load method.After discussing the problems of single simulation method and cyclic iteration method,a new method based on matrix analysis is proposed.This method considers the mutual influence of cable force,modifies the cyclic iteration formula,and simulates precisely the cable forces of cable-stayed bridges.At the same time,the conventional cyclic iteration method is proved as special cases of matrix analysis method.The feasibility is verified by cable force simulation of Sutong cable-stayed bridge.The method also provides thought to further develop ANSYS and solve similar problems.


This paper studies the problem of adaptive fuzzy tracking control for a class of pure-feedback switched nonlinear systems with unknown gain. First, the studied system is handled by using the mean value theorem, the initial pure-feedback nonlinear systems become affine nonlinear systems. Then, the unknown signal is handled through a linear transformation, the Nussbaum-type functions are used to design an effective controller for the processed system. To avoid the issue of 'explosion of complexity' caused by mean value theorem and backstepping procedure, a first-order sliding-mode differentiator is employed to simplify the calculation. Combined with the average dwell time (ADT) method, a set of switching signals are given to sure the stability of the system. The Lyapunov theorem is used to verify that all signals are semiglobal uniformly ultimately boundness (SGUUB), and the errors can be regulated arbitrarily small. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.


By the use of a 59Fe tracer technique esti mates were obtained of the colony-forming units (units ratio and of the total number of CFU in the spleen and the peripheral blood of mice during


Prelude to the problematique of law and new governance: from phronesis to compromise Economy, polity, and the European experience The European Commission and the law making process: compromise as a category of praxis Procedural rationality, power, and the bureaucratic mode of thinking Ruptures in established practice: the directive on the patentability of computer implemented Law's practical wisdom: elements of a theory of law making in the EU Bibliography Index.


Scarcity of water often reduces the regional production of soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) in many areas where it is grown. Contemporary climate change is characterized by increase in frequency and intensity of drought, yet little is known about the successful strategies of soybean cropping systems to drought stress at the regional scale. An effective way to improve the understanding is how to reduce the yields variability across regional fields and consequently increase total soybean production under drought conditions. In this study, using a series of household surveys and on-field trials conducted during a severe drought in 2007 provided data for 118 soybean fields throughout Hailun County of Northeast China, the triggers of regional yield variability and the relative importance of the determining factors were investigated. Regression trees analysis showed that regional soybean yield variability was mainly induced by soil available phosphorus and the amount of P applied, which explained 16.3 and 15.2% of the yield variation, respectively. Under drought stress, regional yields improvement could be accessed by altering P application rates. The productivity of soybean over the region did not increase when P application rate reached a threshold of 55.67 kg/ha. The results suggest that investing more P fertilizer was an effective management strategy for improving regional soybean production in Northeast China in such drought years and the level of effectiveness varied with the application rates.


RT-PCR is the standard gold technique for testing the presence of RNA of the coronavirus causing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) due to its high specificity and sensitivity. Despite its general use and reliability, no lab in the world is immune to the generation of false positives. These errors cause a loss of confidence in the technique's power and damage the image of laboratories. More importantly, they can take a toll on tested individuals and have economic, psychological, and health-associated effects. Most false positives are caused during a manual operation inside the laboratory. However, not much has been published about the errors associated with particular laboratory techniques used to detect the virus since the beginning of the actual pandemic. This work precisely reflects on events that occur during manual RT-PCR diagnostics in a COVID-19 laboratory, providing tips for reducing false-positive results.


This paper considers the issue of whether the 140,000 people still on the Live Register at a time of boom contained a high proportion of "unemployables". It devises a clear operational definition of employability and, using both national and local data, concludes that the proportion of persons on the Register who could be considered unemployable was quite small - no more than about 10 per cent. It examines the factors which seem to lead to unemployability (poor education, older age, location) and considers the possibility of "profiling" those on the Register to improve the effectiveness of placement procedures for jobs and training.


It is well known that many of the major island-names of the archipelago consisting politically of Ireland, the United Kingdom and Crown dependencies are etymologically obscure. In this paper, I present and analyse a corpus of those which remain unexplained or uncertainly explained, for instance Man and Ynys Mon, Ar(r)an, Uist, Seil, Islay, Mull, Scilly, Thanet, Sark, among others. It is timely to do this, since in the disciplines of archaeology and genetics there is an emerging consensus that after the last Ice Age the islands were repopulated mainly by people from a refuge on the Iberian peninsula. This opinion is at least superficially compatible with Theo Vennemann's Semitic and Vasconic hypotheses, i.e., that languages (a) of the Afroasiatic family, and (b) ancestral to Basque, are important contributors to the lexical and onomastic stock of certain European languages. The unexplained or ill-explained island names form a sufficiently large set to make it worthwhile to hope for the emergence of some hard evidence bearing on their collective linguistic heritage, and therefore to give – or fail to give – preliminary support to Vennemann's hypotheses.


The pair annihilation effects on the Karpman–Washimi magnetization in quantum electron–positron pair plasmas are investigated in this paper. It is shown that the pair annihilation effect suppresses the ponderomotive magnetization and cyclotron frequency. It is also shown that the ponderomotive magnetization increases with an increase in the ratio of positron density to electron density if the pair annihilation probability is less than 50%. However, it is found that the ponderomotive magnetization decreases with increasing density ratio if the annihilation probability is more than 50%. It is also shown that the pair annihilation effect become more significant with increasing density ratio.


Is it possible to refer to such a thing as "creative writing studies"? And if the answer is yes, then what does the term mean? Many readers o? College English might find that creative writing studies strikes a discordant note. Why not simply use the term "creative writing," as so many people?including many who teach and practice it?seem content to do? Among some students and teachers of creative writing, there would likely be outright resistance to the use of the term creative writing studies as a descriptor of what they practice and profess. Although some might wonder why there would be so much fuss about adding one simple word to the mix, others would argue that the addition of that single word makes a great deal of difference. And perhaps it does. At colleges and universities within the United States, almost all of the disparate areas covered by the umbrella of "English" are commonly referred to, or at least understood as, types of "studies." English studies is the broad field of which they are


A classical spin-one lattice gas model is used to study the competition between short-range ferromagnetic coupling and long-range antiferromagnetic Coulomb interactions. The model is a coarse-grained representation of frustrated phase separation in high-temperature superconductors. The ground states are determined for the complete range of parameters by using a combination of numerical and analytical techniques. The crossover between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic states proceeds via a rich structure of highly symmetric striped and checkerboard phases. There is no devil's staircase behavior because mixtures of stripes with different period phase separate.


In this paper, a novel dual‐band multilayer frequency selective surface (FSS) with high selectivity and miniaturization characteristics is proposed. The FSS consists of a top and bottom resonant layer and an intermediate coupling layer. The top and bottom resonant layers provide dual‐band passbands, and the cross‐coupling between the three layers makes the structure produce four transmission zeros (TZs) distributed two‐by‐two on both sides of the passband to improve the sharp roll‐off characteristics of the structure. Use bent structures in the top and bottom layers of the cell design to achieve miniaturization of the elements. FSS provides stable performance in incident angles from 0° to 45° with different polarizations of incident waves (TE and TM wave). The lower band of FSS works at 9.1 GHz and the higher band works at 10.26 GHz, the cell size of FSS is 0.157 λ 0 × 0.157 λ 0 × 0.015 λ 0 $0.157{\lambda }_{0}\times 0.157{\lambda }_{0}\times 0.015{\lambda }_{0}$ , FSS samples were made and tested, and the test results fit well with the simulation results.


When two companies merge, the information technology (IT) departments of the two companies are also merged. This merger typically requires the development of a meaningful data center costing methodology that can be used for planning, budgeting and cost justification. This paper describes the merger of Tampa Electric Company and Peoples Gas System and the development of a costing methodology for the combined IT organization.


SUMMARY Ventilated ceiling system is an energy-saving replacement ventilation system for maintaining comfortable working environment in kitchens. The technology was introduced from Germany, but there have been no clearly determined relationships between their designs in an electric kitchen and the ventilation design standards and no established design methods. This study aims to establish design methods of ventilated ceiling systems appropriate for electric kitchens by assessing the thermal environment created and energy consumed by the systems while changing the amount of ventilation and the temperature of the air supplied. The ventilated ceiling system formed thermal stratification, which improved displacement ventilation, and maintained a good thermal environment in the working area. To meet the standards of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the system should be operated at a ventilation rate of 25 times per hour with supply air at 16 o C or a ventilation rate of 20 to 40 times per hour with supply air at or below 20 o C.


Little research has examined the predictors of employed parents' perceived importance of family-supportive programmes. Therefore, this study examined the relationship of gender, parenting demands (number of children living at home and age of youngest child), family-related tangible support (spouse tangible support and other-family tangible support), and work–family conflict (work—>family and family—>work conflict) to the perceived importance of six family-supportive programmes (flextime, compressed work week, job sharing, child-care assistance, work at home and reduced work hours). Survey data were obtained from a sample of 252 employed parents. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that age of youngest child and family—>work conflict were the most consistent predictors. Implications of the findings for the outcome evaluation of family-supportive programmes are discussed.


The Cova da Moura neighborhood, located in the suburbs of Lisbon, is currently facing a serious conflict between two approaches to urban planning. On one side, Portuguese state institutions are attempting to regulate an area that emerged forty years ago through illegal occupation by immigrants. On the other side, neighbors are opposing to any urban plans proposed by the Portuguese state and are demanding recognition and urban policies to protect the neighborhood's cultural uniqueness. The article discusses in detail this conflict, which highlights two opposite territorialization planning models: the one that is built on citizens' status, using Cartesian criteria, and the other which is based on the notion of neighbor and which relies on the idiosyncrasies of concrete experiences.


A simple method of scoring the Thurstone Attitude Scales is presented, which does not involve the use of a judging group and yet is found in several samples to be consistently more reliable than the original method of scoring. The scores obtained by the two methods correlate highly (median r= .88), indicating that they are measuring essentially the same thing.


Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by a progressive loss of upper and/or lower motor neurons (Bruijn et al., 2004). Dysfunction and death of these neurons lead to muscle weakness, atrophy and spasticity. A fatal event for the majority of patients is a failure of the respiratory muscles, which generally occurs within one to five years of disease onset. The typical age of onset is between 50 and 60 years, and the prevalence rate is 5 – 10 cases per 100,000 populations (de Belleroche et al., 1996). No effective cures for this disease are currently available, and the pathomechanism still remains controversial. The majority of ALS cases have no genetic component (sporadic ALS, sALS), while about 10 % are inherited in a dominant manner (familial ALS, fALS). Historically, ALS has been described by Charcot and Joffroy in 1869 (Charcot & Joffroy, 1869), and linkage analysis of fALS families was performed in 1991, by which the genetic locus was identified to be linked to chromosome 21q (Siddique et al., 1991). In 1993, Rosen et al. (Rosen et al., 1993) and Deng et al. (Deng et al., 1993) have found that mutations in the Cu,Zn-superoxide dismutase (SOD1) gene, which lies on chromosome 21q, are associated with fALS. Because SOD1-related fALS exhibited several clinicopathological similarities to sALS, various animal models including rodents, worms and flies have been constructed, in which mutant forms of SOD1 are expressed. Using these models, furthermore, various drugs have been continuingly tested to cure or alleviate ALS. In 2001, ALS2 (or called alsin) has been also identified as a new gene associated with a rare, recessively inherited and slowly progressed juvenile onset form of ALS, which is, however, significantly different from the disease phenotypes of sALS (Hadano et al., 2001; Yang et al., 2001). Accordingly, studies on mutant SOD1 have served as a "gold standard" for a long time and provided valuable insight into molecular pathomechanisms of ALS. Recent progress on genetic analysis has fuelled the identification of other genes responsible for fALS: for example, TAR DNA-binding protein-43 (TDP-43) gene reported in 2008 (Gitcho et al., 2008; Kabashi et al., 2008; Sreedharan et al., 2008; Van Deerlin et al., 2008), Fused in Sarcoma (FUS) gene in 2009 (Kwiatkowski et al., 2009; Vance et al., 2009). Each of TDP-43 and FUS mutations describes approximately 4 % of total fALS cases, which is a smaller number than that of SOD1 mutations (~20 % of total fALS cases). Unlike SOD1, however, TDP-43 and/or FUS pathologies are observed in many of sALS patients (Deng et al., 2011b; Mackenzie et al., 2007) and also in other neurodegenerative diseases (Lagier-


200 Background: The management of cancer-related pain is challenging in the age of the opioid epidemic. Patients who struggle with substance misuse or chemical coping use these substances to dull emotional and or existential suffering. Buprenorphine is often used for cancer pain due to less reported euphoria when compared to other opioids. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of patients in an outpatient palliative care clinic at a tertiary comprehensive cancer center who were prescribed buprenorphine for cancer pain. Total oral morphine equivalent (OME), as well as use of adjuvant non-opioid neuropathic pain medication, were assessed prior to transition to buprenorphine. Chemical coping behavior was defined as patients taking opioids for emotional pain in excess of the maximum prescribed amount. Pain scores were reported before and after buprenorphine administration using a Likert pain scale (0-10). Patients were also assessed for the presence of withdrawal symptoms after transition to buprenorphine. Results: Patients were predominantly female (75%), slightly more than half had a psychiatric diagnosis (56%), a majority were on non-opioid neuropathic pain medication (93%), and the majority were identified as chemical copers (75%). For all patients, the mean pain score prior to buprenorphine (pain pre) was 8.3 and the mean pain score on follow up post buprenorphine (pain post) was 6.1, with a reduction in mean pain score (pain change) of -2.0 (p = 0.059). Patients without chemical coping behaviors reported a significantly greater reduction in pain scores compared to patients with chemical coping (pain change -5.0 vs -1.3, p = 0.02). Illicit drug use and psychiatric co-morbidity were not associated with differences in reported pain scores. Only a small number of patients reported withdrawal symptoms (6%) during buprenorphine transition. Conclusions: Rotation to buprenorphine led to a trend of reduction in pain score, though not statistically significant. Patients without chemical coping experienced greater reductions in pain score than those with chemical coping behavior. Illicit drug use and psychiatric co-morbidity were not associated with differences in reported pain.


Multilevel adding load triaxial test has some advantages,so it is useful for engineering to discuss the application.The effect of controlled strain and consolidation time on soil shear strength is discussed through CU triaxial shear test. Based on the tests and analyses,the useful conclusions that the controlled strain should be rather large in the first shearing stage,and a bit large in the second stage,then small the third are drawn;this paper also points out that the consolidation time in the first stage can affect more on the strength of the soil than time in other stages.


I analyze empirically the effects of both urban and industrial agglomeration on men's and women's search behavior and on the efficiency of matching. The analysis is based on the Italian Labor Force Survey micro-data, which covers 520 randomly drawn Local Labor Market Areas (66 per cent of the total) over the four quarters of 2002. I compute transition probabilities from non-employment to employment by jointly estimating the probability of searching and the probability of finding a job conditional on having searched, and I test whether these are affected by urbanization, industry localization, labor pooling and family network quality. In general, the main results indicate that urbanization and labor pooling raise job seekers' chances of finding employment (conditional on having searched), while industry localization and family network quality increase only men's. Moreover, neither urban nor industrial agglomeration affect non-employed individuals' search behavior; although men with thicker family networks search more intensively.


Firstly,this paper classified the prefectures of Sichuan into four types at different economic developmental levels according to the main relative economic indicators of 1999,by the method of aggregative value measurement.After it contrasted and analyzed the four type prefectures according to their average total indicators and their average relative ones,it exposed their distributional characteristics and analyzed their developmental terms and directions.Secondly,took the GDP of prefectures in Sichuan of 1999 and 1978 as examples,this paper contrased and analyzed the dynamic characteristics of unbalanced regional economic development.


We state a number of related questions on the structure of perfect matchings. Those questions are inspired by and directly connected to Quantum Physics. In particular, they concern the constructability of general quantum states using modern photonic technology. For that we introduce a new concept, denoted as inherited vertex coloring. It is a vertex coloring for every perfect matching. The colors are inherited from the color of the incident edge for each perfect matching. First, we formulate the concepts and questions in pure graph-theoretical language, and finally we explain the physical context of every mathematical object that we use. Importantly, every progress towards answering these questions can directly be translated into new understanding in quantum physics.


The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between experiences of collegiate athletics and fundamental competencies for working persons ["Action", "Thinking", and "Teamwork"] in collegiate rugby players, and to clarify the effects of experiences in collegiate athletics on fundamental competencies for working persons. One hundred and thirteen collegiate rugby players completed questionnaires of the Experience Scale in Athletic Clubs (Shimamoto & Ishii, 2008) and Scale of Fundamental Competencies for Working Persons (Kitajima et al., 2011). Analyses using the Pearson's correlation coefficients demonstrated the significant correlation between "self-disclosure experience" and "Action", "Thinking", and "Teamwork"; "daily life guidance from leaders experience" and "Teamwork"; "challenge and achievement experience" and "Thinking", and "Teamwork"; "support from others experience" and "Action", "Thinking", and "Teamwork"; "effort and endurance experience" and "Action", "Thinking", and "Teamwork". In addition, the results of multiple regression analysis demonstrated that "self-disclosure experience" affected "Teamwork", and "support from others experience" and "effort and endurance experience" affected "Action".


This study examined the effect of a "communication skills practice" introduced in Nihon Fukushi University in the first half of the year 2013. A questionnaire was administered to 55 individuals who underwent this exercise and 96 other who received opportunities to practice sports. The questionnaire comprised a communication apprehension measure for negative aspects, and a communication skills measure for positive aspects. The analysis revealed the following: (1) overall self-assessment of students' communication skills was lower in the communication skills group than the sports practice group at the first exercise session, and (2) the communication skills group had a greater number of positive scores on all aspects, post-practice than pre-practice; however this improvement tendency was not observed in the sports practice group. Additionally, the feedback from students' reports has indicated that features of this practice that they found impactful included fundamental lesson's contents and "larger network of relationships with other undergraduates," and "being able to objectively evaluate oneself through scores in the practice sessions."


Findings – The information practices of the groups developed in different ways depending on a number of factors consistent with informed learning. Students were motivated by achieving high grades, and data reveal that students respond to surveillance from teaching staff and each other by communicating outside of the official discussion board space. This is illuminating because by resisting power in this way students develop new practices that are specifically relevant to their group, and shows how dominant power and resistance to it help develop facets of informed learning.


Methylene bisthiocyanate and its decomposition products showed very high bioactivity on Meloidogyne spp.juveniles with LC50 and LC95 values at 0.722 0 and 1.662 7 μg/mL,respectively.Pathogenicity of Meloidogyne spp.juveniles declined after the nematode treated with methylene bisthiocyanate at 1 μg/mL for 10 min.The respiration of juveniles treated with 0.5 μg/mL methylene bisthiocyanate for 5 min increased significantly,while declined for longer time treatment(5 min-12 h).The inhibition of methylene bisthiocyanate at 2.5 μg/mL on the respiration of juveniles was higher than that at 0.5 μg/mL.The electrolytic conductivity of the suspension solution of the juveniles treated with methylene bisthiocyanate was higher than that of untreatment.The conductivity increased with the higher concentration of methylene bisthiocyanate and kept constant at the period of 15-120 min.


The article uses energy consumption intensity and pollution emission intensity as the ecological efficiency,and computes the contribution degree of industrial structure change to the energy consumption intensity and pollution emission intensity between 2002 and 2007 by direct factor decomposition method and Divisia factor decomposition method.The results show that: the industrial structure change makes a negative effect to energy consumption intensity and pollution emission intensity.So,for the purpose of energy saving and emission reduction,we should not only depend on technology progress,but also on industrial structure adjustment.


The purpose of this white paper is to provide a range of information to potential designers of oblique wing aircraft, including theoretical and conceptual foundations, general performance characteristics and mission-based optimization, more detailed parametric design studies, and other supporting resources. A collection of technical papers related to oblique wings has been compiled as part of this study. Many of these papers have not been widely distributed, but are now available and linked to this paper.


In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of distributed optimization algorithms. This study focused on the distributed convex optimization problem over an undirected network. The target was to minimize the average of all local objective functions known by each agent while each agent communicates necessary information only with its neighbors. Based on the state-of-the-art algorithm, we proposed a novel distributed optimization algorithm, when the objective function of each agent satisfies smoothness and strong convexity. Faster convergence can be attained by utilizing Nesterov and Heavy-ball accelerated methods simultaneously, making the algorithm widely applicable to many large-scale distributed tasks. Meanwhile, the step-sizes and accelerated momentum coefficients are designed as uncoordinate, time-varying, and nonidentical, which can make the algorithm adapt to a wide range of application scenarios. Under some necessary assumptions and conditions, through rigorous theoretical analysis, a linear convergence rate was achieved. Finally, the numerical experiments over a real dataset demonstrate the superiority and efficacy of the novel algorithm compared to similar algorithms.


Professor Jack Sasson reviews Ruth, A New Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary, by EDWARD F. CAMPBELL, JR., Anchor Bible 7 ; Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1975.


Product Owners (PO) in the Scrum framework have an important role in the development process. While the POs primal description is straightforward - the actual implementation of this role in industries is not. Many companies face the difficulty of assigning the right level of tasks and responsibilities to this role. To provide solutions to this problem, the Product Owner role became a subject of research. However, most of the studies focus on the actual state of the role to propose solutions on how to tailor it. What is missing is the Scrum Teams perspective. Therefore, we were interested in the Teams expectations on the Product Owner role. Which tasks do they expect to be performed by this role and how would they characterize a perfect Product Owner? In an attempt to answer this question, we conducted an online survey in the oil and gas industry and gathered feedback from all members of the Scrum Team. Our findings indicate that the Scrum Team expects the Product Owner to write user stories and prioritize the backlog solely. Other tasks are expected to be done either in direct collaboration with the management or the scrum master or are not expected to be done by the Product Owner role at all. Also, the respondents would characterize a perfect Product Owner primarily as trustworthy.


Overhead, high power transmission lines have secured rights of way on agricultural lands in Minnesota. The economic impact of such utility crossings, including effects on land price, was investigated. Sale records and survey data were analyzed. Buyers, sellers, and brokers were interviewed concerning inconvenience, radio interference, appearance, and loss of irrigation possibilities due to the transmission lines. In nine affected sales, there was only one case in which less money was indicated for the farm because of the presence of a transmission line.


Nonlinear effects in laser-plasma interaction are of particular interest in the study of nuclear fusion. The nonlinear force is derived using symplectic geometry for the Hamiltonian formulation of the force density as gradients of the energy density.


Hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies (HNPP) phenotypes are heterogeneous. We report the case of a 52‐year‐old woman without medical history, who complained of bilateral hand weakness suggestive first of a motor neuron disorder. The presence of a diffuse predominant distal demyelinating neuropathy suggested a deletion of PMP‐22 gene, which was confirmed by genetic analysis. This case report underlines a novel phenotype related to the deletion of PMP‐22 gene.


The article investigates the role of business model innovation by Industry 4.0 solution providers and their impact on process innovation of their customers. Industry 4.0 solution providers are hereby seen as the enablers and providers of Industry 4.0 technologies, which provide access to several potentials of Industry 4.0 technologies to their customers. In particular, the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that provide solutions that are based on Industry 4.0 technologies for their customers are investigated, which in turn can improve and innovate their own processes. Frist, the article presents an overview of the current state of research and a brief theoretical background. Second, the article bases its findings on an empirical study of 111 Industry 4.0 providers from Germany that are SMEs. Analyzing the results of questionnaires, correlations between Industry 4.0 solutions and two perspectives are examined: benefits for the solution providers and benefits for process improvements and innovations of the customers. Subsequently, the article discusses these findings, closing the article with both managerial and research implications.


The fuzzy cluster and different multivariate statistical techniques were used to evaluate landscape water bodies (LWB) of Wenzhou using data sets of 7 different sites. The fuzzy cluster and hierarchical cluster analysis grouped seven sampling sites into three clusters i.e. highly pollution level (HPL), medium pollution level (MPL) and less pollution level (LPL) sites based on the similarity of water quality characteristics. The factor analysis showed that factor1 included BOD, COD, TP and NH4-N, whereas factor1 included Chla. The order of general pollution in LWB was Chasan north River, Chasan south River, Wenshiyuan River, Maanchi Park, Zhongsan Park, Jiusan Park and Xiusan Park. The results of fuzzy cluster and hierarchical cluster analysis are in good agreement with the discriminant analysis. The fuzzy cluster and multivariate statistical techniques are useful tools of data mining for evaluation and classification of landscape water bodies and may be applicable to analysis and assessment of other surface water.


The purpose of this research was to identify the stressful factors international and national referees. The subjects of the research include of (N=723) Iranian international and national referees which 605 of them participated in the study. The SOSS questionnaire was used to collect information that included 29 questions and statements and 15 faculty members identified its validity and its internal consistency was proved on 30 referees (r=0.93). Data were analyzed by Freidman Test and U-Man Whitney tests and analyze of variance in the significant level of P≤0.05. The results indicated that among six stressors the fear of failure, personal and technical performance, and evaluation of performance were higher levels respectively. There were not significant differences between ranking of stress factors on international and national referees, but the group sports referees have high stress on interpersonal conflict and time condition problems, and the factor of evaluation of performance, personal problems and technical performance have the most effect to cause stress. Also low background has a high percentage of stress which related to personal & interpersonal conflict factor.


The CDQ furnace automation system of Xinxing Ductile Iron Pipes Company Coking Plant achieved the automatic control for locomotive traction device,coke tank automatic positioning,coke cans lifting and walking,load device,cooling coke and discharging coke,pre-stored inventory and level of the stored room,circulating fan and drum level,etc.After the system application,the CDQ produced stable,the yield and quality of the CDQ were improved.


Large scale global optimization (LSGO) is a very important and extremely difficult task in optimization domain, which is urgently needed for scientific and engineering applications. Recently, decompose-and-conquer strategy has become a promising method to handle LSGO problems. In this paper, we propose a new strategy variance priority (VP) to improve the classical cooperative co-evolution framework. Based on this proposed strategy, a new LSGO algorithm, variance priority based cooperative co-evolution differential evolution (VP-DECC), is developed. The advantages of VP strategy over the other decompose-and-conquer strategies are experimentally investigated. Especially, it has shown excellent performance in dealing with more complex problems.


Swiss forests produce more hardwood – mainly beech – than the local woodworking industry can absorb. Where beech wood is exposed to weather, it cannot be used without a previous chemical treatment due to its naturally bad resistance to decay and insect attacks. The coloured heartwood of beech also restricts its use, especially in the furniture industry. An ultrasonic pre-grading allows to reach a higher added value for beech timber. Sylvatest and Sylvatest Duo, two instruments based on ultrasonic measurements, detect irregularities in the wood structure and allow timber-grading with regard to mechanical properties. Together with thermic treatments, which improve their resistance and durability, these techniques provide new utilisation possibilities for hardwood in the construction industry.


The European Union (EU) during the last decade has shown itself to be less robust than globalists imagined. Globalists believed that supranationality was weatherproof, that it would always outperform national alternatives, and that it would survive adversity. Economic stagnation and Brexit falsified these expectations. This chapter investigates one aspect of the EU's transnationalist plight — incompatible goals and the difficulty of mutual accommodation, especially during hard times. Globalists contend that the harmony of shared dreams assures that dreams will come true and that there is no need for some nations to impose their will on others. EU experience has belied the supposition. Close investigation reveals that supranational government is less robust than advocates claim, precisely because conflicting national interests make it difficult for members to subscribe to a common dream. This causes some to try to impose their will on others, and dissenters to head for the exits. Latent incompatibility does not doom globalization, but it does expose the vulnerability of globalism's premises and the schemes propensity to malfunction. Indeed, it is possible that transnationality instead of being a hallmark of EU superiority is an albatross…


The ZEUS and H1 collaborations have reported an excess of events compared to Standard Model predictions at large Q 2 in neutral current deep inelastic scattering. This paper presents an update of these results including new data recorded up to the summer of 1997. In addition a similar analysis of the charged current channel and a preliminary neutral current cross section measurement are presented.


In the Nowy Sącz Basin, newly exposed Middle Miocene deposits have been studied and sampled in the Kamienica Nawojowska, Poprad and Dunajec rivers. The calcareous nannoplankton of the freshwater to marine deposits was examined. Pale grey and brown clayey shales with plant remains and thin seams of lignite represent the freshwater deposits of the Biegonice Formation. These deposits pass upwards into ca. 50 m thick packet of brackish and marine deposits, represented mainly by dark marly shales with bivalves and gastropods of the Iwkowa and Niskowa formations. These deposits contain relatively rich late Badenian to Sarmatian calcareous nannoplakton (NN6/7 Zone).


Part PDCA (Plan Do Check Action) has an important role in the company. In fact archiving documents, control documents at the office of improvement, analyze the data still use manual way to excel and often the data is lost. The document data is very important because every month there is a meeting and will require such data.
Based on the above problems, then with the making document archiving system is expected to help performance and can get information about the document accurately, efficiently and appropriately. Then made a "System Information Document Archiving".
With this information the system becomes increasing employee performance. Data needs documents and information regarding the structural correspondence can be accessed with the effective and efficient than a system that has been computerized.


Using computer simulations based on an actual distribution 11kV feeder model, this method was qualitatively tested. Then, a relationship between mathematical and simulation results was made. Finally, A comparison of the proposed method and recent literature was written. According to the obtained results of case studies, the protection devices in the Iraqi substations cannot efficiently sense the LSBC fault. The overcurrent relay is completely not sensitive to LSBC, and the neutral current fault relay is only sensitive (0-70)% of the different types of feeders under the study. While the proposed unbalance, the current method had been detected with 87% -93% of 11 kV feeders. The proposed techniques are applicable and compatible with the existing traditional protection of the overcurrent and earth fault protection system in the Iraqi 33/11kV substation.


Southampton heavy hardcore mob DESOLATED are bringing their 10 year journey to an end and Beatdown Hardwear Records has something special to celebrate ...


We study the Heisenberg-Pauli-Weyl uncertainty principle and the Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg interpolation inequalities, on metric measure spaces satisfying measure contraction property. Using localization techniques, we show that these inequalities are valid only on volume cones.


A two-body gas-phase reaction rate coefficient can be given by the usual Arrhenius-type formula which depends on temperature. The UMIST Database for Astrochemistry is a widely used database for reaction rate coefficients. They provide fittings for coefficients valid over a particular range of temperatures. The permissible upper-temperature limits vary over a wide range: from 100 to 41,000 K. A wide range of temperatures occurs in nature; thus, it requires evaluating the rate coefficients at temperatures outside the range of validity. As a result, a simple extrapolation of the rate coefficients can lead to unphysically large values at high temperatures. These result in unrealistic predictions. Here we present a solution to prevent the gas-phase reaction coefficients from diverging at a very high temperature. We implement this into the spectral synthesis code CLOUDY which operates over a wide range of temperatures from CMB to 1010 K subject to different astrophysical environments.


The directors of L'Internationale, a confederation of six European museums, reflect upon the need to develop institutional models based on collaboration rather than ownership.


The paper presents the results of the antimicrobial activity of two aqueous acid solutions of chitosan. Chitosan is a copolymer of glucosamine and N-acetylglucos- amine prepared from chitin by deacetylation. It is a natural and non toxic product that tends to be widely-used in medicine and food industry. The antimicrobial effect was tested against the representative Gram-positive bacteria: Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus cereus and Gram-negative bacteria: Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa and one species of yeast: Candida albicans using disc diffusion test Chitosan had a good antimicrobial action of all tested species. The best antibacterial activity was observed for the acetic acid solution. The acetic acid solution chitosan also present an good antifungal activity.The lactic acid solution of chitosan present antibacterial activity Key words: chitosan; acid solutions, antimicrobial activity.


Introduction: in developing countries, including Colombia, teen pregnancy is a public health problem. It brings social, health and nutritional consequences for the mother/son binomial. Objective: to assess demographic, socioeconomic, food security, health and nutritional status characteristics in a group of pregnant teenagers and their newborns. Methodology: a cross sectional analytical study was performed in 294 pregnant teenagers in their third trimester of pregnancy enrolled in the prenatal care programs of the public network of hospitals in Medellin-Colombia between 2011 and 2012. Association between the .


Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic prokaryotic microorganisms with the capacity to carry out the same type of oxygenic photosynthesis as higher plants. For a long time they have been considered as promising candidates for renewable energy production. Based on their native hydrogenases and subsequent metabolism, various strains can evolve different levels of hydrogen based on both biotic and abiotic factors. Recently, there has been a gradual increase in targeted approaches to engineer the native cyanobacterial cell for increased hydrogen production. This chapter presents and discusses recent strategies to design and construct efficient photosynthetic cyanobacterial cells for producing renewable hydrogen from solar energy and water.


Summary. Twenty‐four women with symptomatic multiple uterine myomas were allocated randomly to treatment with buserelin, 1200μg/day intranasally, for 3 months followed by myomectomy (n = 8) or to immediate myomectomy (n = 16). Pre‐operative treatment with buserelin reduced the mean uterine volume from 432 (SD 165) to 242 (SD 82) ml (P < 0.01) but intra‐operative blood loss and postoperative morbidity were not significantly less in this group. Six months after operation, pelvic examination was normal in all the patients. However, ultrasonography with transvaginal probe demonstrated the presence of myomas of < 1.5 cm in five women (63%) treated pre‐operatively with the analogue and in two women (13%) who underwent immediate surgery (P < 0.05). Induction of a period of hypo‐oestrogenism before myomectomy seems to favour short‐term recurrence of uterine myomas, limiting the efficacy of surgery.


As the precursor of metaphysical poets,John Donne arouses the metaphysical thought of readers by the adoption of "wit" in his poems.The love poems he created combine intelligence with passion,limitlessly affecting the late generation."A valediction: Forbidding Mourning",his early poem,is one of the most representative works of English metaphysical poetry.The analysis of the poem from the stylistic perspective provides a completely new angle for the understanding of it.


Thermal performance of pipe network of continuous heating system controlled by thermostat and flow control valve was simulated in consideration of radiation heat transfer and solved by linear . analysis method. Thermal performance of real apartment building with radiant floor heating system was simulated by equivalence heat resistance-capacity method. This method enables to simulate the unsteady variation of temperature or each element of building. Heat transfer characteristics of each element were also investigated.


The amount of medical information and evidence available to physicians is growing exponentially, but it's of little use if they can't gain access to it. Finding ways to provide that access is the goal of a Mar. 27–28 workshop in Vancouver (see Commentary, page 710), whose intended outcome is a


Macquarie Island preserves largely in-situ Miocene oceanic crust and mantle formed at a slow-spreading ridge. The crustal section on the island does not conform to a simple 'layer cake" pseudo-stratigraphy', but is the result of multiple magmatic episodes. Macquarie Island crust did not grow by top-down cooling, but rather from the base up. Peridotites cooled first and formed the basement into which gabbro plutons were intruded. This was followed by cooling and deformation, and by intrusion of dykes that fed a sheeted dyke–basalt complex. Finally, lava-filled grabens were formed. These relative age relations rule out simple co-genetic relations between rock units.


ABSTRACT In what follows, I show how the process of creating, rehearsing, and presenting a performance ethnography allows me, my family, the witnessing audiences, and readers to view performance as a productive metaphor for the lived experience of familial chronic illness. First, I join my work with ongoing scholarly conversations about performance ethnography and narrative medicine. Next, I demonstrate how to document and analyze a performance process using several principles of narrative medicine. Finally, I make a case for performance as narrative medicine as a pedagogical and medicinal practice.


The Scott-Magat polymer theory, which assumes that polymers have heterogeneous structure and takes into ac- count the polydispersity in the molecular weight of polymers, is a method to model asphaltene precipitation conditions. The traditional Scott-Magat polymer theory based models assume that the precipitated phase consists of asphaltene only. In the present work, we introduce a model based on the Scott-Magat polymer theory assuming that the precipitated phase consists of asphaltene and non-asphaltene components and the oil phase is free of asphaltene (Due to low concentration of asphaltene in the oil phase). It is shown that the latter model is similar to a previously reported thermodynamic model in the literature based on the Flory-Huggins polymer theory (R. Cimino, S. Correra, P.A. Sacomani, C. Carniani, "Thermo- dynamic Modelling for Prediction of Asphaltene Deposition in Live Oils", SPE 28993, Presented at the SPE International Symposium on Oilfield Chemistry held in San Antonio, TX, USA, 14-17 February 1995), in which it is assumed that as- phaltene has a homogeneous structure and the precipitated phase consists of asphaltene and non-asphaltene components and the oil phase is free of asphaltene.


The construction of an environment-friendly society is one goal in the process of constructing China′s eco-civilization.As a medium-to-long-term strategic task,it is urgent to establish an environment-friendly assessment system in order to improve the industrial structure of saving energy resources and protecting the eco-environment.The paper discusses the implications,theories,construction and assessment of an environment-friendly society as well as its key role and the related issues and finally proposes an environment-friendly assessment system based on eco-value-oriented quantitative method.