In his General Psychopathology, Karl Jaspers identifies two stages in the genesis of delusions in schizophrenia. The first is a set of primary subjective experiences, which he encompasses under the rubric of "delusional atmosphere,"1 building upon F.W. Hagen's construct of "delusional mood."2 The second is the patient's "working through" those experiences, sometimes "calling for the full strength of an intelligent personality,"1 which leads to delusional ideas. The content of delusions—Jaspers adds—"strikes one as a symbol for something quite different,"1 "is certainly not meant literally and is quite differently experienced from similar content in the case of a person we can fully understand."1 "It is certainly possible to wonder whether the patients have found any content adequate for their actual experience."1

In this issue of the journal, Mishara and Fusar-Poli3 propose that Kapur's model of "aberrant salience"4 may represent a "bridge" between a revised version of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia5 and Jaspers' construct of delusional atmosphere. Abnormal striatal dopamine firing would lead to an aberrant assignment of salience to neutral stimuli and consequently to the emergence of delusional mood.1

One could argue, though, that the overlap between the experiences reported by Kapur in his seminal paper4 and those described by Jaspers under the heading of delusional atmosphere1 is only partial. Common elements are the patients' experience that "something in the world around them is changing, leaving them somewhat confused and looking for an explanation"4 and their feeling that "there is some overwhelming significance in this"4 or that certain objects or persons "signify something," although initially "nothing definite."1

However, absent in Jaspers' description of delusional atmosphere is Kapur's emphasis on the increased intensity of perceptions ("my senses were sharpened," "sights and sounds possessed a keenness that I never experienced before," "my senses seemed alive … things seemed clearcut," "my capacities for aesthetic appreciation and heightened sensory receptiveness … were very keen at this time").4 Experiences of this kind are included by Jaspers in another section of General Psychopathology ("changes in intensity of perception").1 In delusional atmosphere, the intensity of perception is not modified ("perception is unaltered in itself," "perception itself remains normal and unchanged," "sensory richness is not essentially changed")1 and the change in the environment is experienced as quite subtle ("there is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive, and strangely uncertain light").1

Furthermore, not prominent in Kapur's account of aberrant salience, but emphasized by Jaspers in his description of delusional atmosphere, is the "affective" component of the experiences: objects, persons, and events appear "eerie, horrifying"; patients feel that "there is something suspicious afoot"; "a distrustful, uncomfortable, uncanny tension invades them"; they "suffer terribly," because—Jaspers argues quoting Hagen—"no dread is worse than that of danger unknown."1 Not surprisingly, the final outcome of delusional atmosphere is often represented by convictions of being persecuted, attacked, or conspired against, which might be more difficult to explain if the primary experience were just of an exaggerated salience of percepts.

So, there is some overlap between Kapur's description of aberrant salience and Jaspers' account of delusional atmosphere, and the common elements may indeed point to an abnormal striatal dopamine firing. But there are also other elements in Jaspers' description—the "strangely uncertain light" enveloping everything, the feeling that there is "something suspicious afoot," the "distrustful, uncanny tension"—that seem to point to an abnormal dopamine firing at the level of limbic areas such as the amygdala and the hippocampus,6,7 whose involvement in ultra high-risk states and in first-episode schizophrenia has been actually reported by several neuroimaging studies.8–10

Obviously, Jaspers' construct of delusional atmosphere remains of great relevance to psychopathological enquiry and neuroscientific research. However, several assumptions he makes concerning that set of experiences, or patients' "working through" them, have been recently questioned.

First, the experiences encompassed under the heading of delusional atmosphere may not be as "psychologically irreducible" and "phenomenologically final"1 as Jaspers assumes. In recent phenomenological literature, those experiences are in fact often regarded as the outcome of a more remote and gradually evolving impairment of the awareness of self and the world.11. So, rather than representing "a break in the normal life-curve,"1 they may be rooted in a faulty developmental process.

Second, Jaspers' assumption that the patient develops his delusional ideas, on the basis of primary abnormal experiences, through cognitive processes that are essentially normal is quite controversial. There are indeed some models supporting that view,12 but several others suggest that a defect of probabilistic reasoning (eg, a tendency to "jump to conclusions") is also involved.13 It has been also hypothesized that an impairment in predictive learning may underlie both pathological experiences and abnormal beliefs: a "global failure of anticipation" may produce a "sense of unexpectedness,"14 which could drive the development of delusions "through establishment of predictive associations that, whilst maladaptive, represent attempts to render the world more predictable."15 Also of note is that several authors16 have built upon Jaspers' view that the content of delusions "is certainly not meant literally and is quite differently experienced from similar content in the case of a person whom we can fully understand,"1 arguing that patients with schizophrenia may not "express beliefs at all, but use what we might call the language of belief to express the bizarre and disorienting nature of their experience."17 Patients may "state that something is true to their experience … which they know not to be true simpliciter."17

Third, that the experiences subsumed under the heading of delusional atmosphere are indeed "quite alien" and "beyond our understanding"1 has been put in question. It has been stated that "the sense of 'finding oneself in the world' shifts in a range of different and often subtle ways, not just in psychiatric illness but throughout the course of everyday life," and that "less extreme" manifestations of that "kind of existential feeling" may be "not so far removed from everyday experience as they might seem."14 Some people may be able to cope with milder forms of those experiences, not develop a delusion and never come to the attention of mental health services.18

How common the primary experiences described by Jaspers are in patients with schizophrenia, how specific they are for that disorder, and whether they are amenable to a systematic assessment, even if retrospective, are all issues open to research. The degree of overlap between such experiences and those currently reported in ultra high-risk states or prodromal stages of psychosis, and assessed through standardized psychometric scales,19 also remains to be explored.

Finally, in the light of the above discussion, it should be acknowledged that the definition of delusion provided by the DSM-III and its successors is less straightforward than it may seem, since several of its elements—that delusions are always beliefs (vs metaphorical utterances),16 that they are always based on an incorrect inference (vs being based on an unimpaired inferential process applied to anomalous experiences),1,12 and that this inference always regards external reality (vs, in some cases, patients' inner mental life)20—have been put in question.


Scheel et al. offer an interesting analysis on the publication rate of counseling-related research articles in counseling psychology's two major journals. In this reaction to their work, the author considers various aspects of their results and contemplates possible explanations for the decline of counseling-related publications.


This paper adopts two methods to abstract low resolution conventional radar and feature parameter of aircraft size and number.It is used as vector,then a neural network is used to classify targets with feature that have been extracted,the results of training and recognition by using BP neural network are given.In the experiment,the effeciency of feature extraction is proved.The experiment result indicates that these methods are valid.


Type of funding sources: None.

 Stuck valve is a very rare and severe complication that occurs in mechanical valve replacement patients with ineffective anticoagulation. However, with COVID-19 restriction measures, it became challenging to regularly assess INR to make sure it falls within the target therapeutic range to prevent this complication.

 We wanted to explore how did the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions impacted mechanical valve replacement patients on chronic anticoagulation and the long-term consequences of limiting their access to health service.

 We present a series of 10 patients on warfarin anticoagulation therapy who either underwent transthoracic echocardiography for a suspected stuck valve or were seen at the outpatient valve clinic with the residual consequences of a stuck valve during the COVID-19 restriction measures in our institute.

 Eight patients were female, two of whom were pregnant at the first trimester and eventually went on to receive an abortion; six patients received urgent valve replacement cardiac surgery; four patients were managed medically e.g. with heparin; none had thrombolytic therapy. Stuck prosthetic valves incident has increased significantly during this period, particularly those in the mitral position for which urgent replacement and prolonged hospitalization including intensive care admission, with high in-hospital mortality rates and high costs were necessary. Mean hospital admission time was 27.5 ± 18.5 days.  The cost of treatment, as average estimated reimbursement, was 11,000 USD for medical admission only, and 43,200 USD when surgery was required, up to 64,000 USD when ECMO was part of patient management.

 Despite governments' efforts to implement telemedicine and virtual clinics, COVID-19 restrictions and health-messaging affected the routine follow-up of non-COVID-19 patients. We report dramatic consequences to this drastic change in healthcare: clinical complications, lost lives and inflated healthcare costs in patients with a prosthetic valve. We believe that non-COVID-19 patients have paid, and will continue to pay in the future, a price that is much greater than those patients who have suffered from COVID-19. Active engagement of patients should be implemented in a time of emergencies, and further studies should address the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of public policies aimed to decrease the burden of avoidable complications and missed diagnoses. Abstract Figure. Fluoroscopy in a 70 years old patient


ABSTRACT To judge from the liner notes, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen recognized a connection between 1977's Aja and the Homer's archaic Greek epic, the Odyssey. This paper offers a reading of the album with the goal of revealing some of the nuances and effects of the intertextual overlap between album and poem. In particular, Odysseus's masculine performances are used to explore the masculine persona of Aja's narrating voice, who, like Odysseus, deploys a trickster poetics in navigating their fluctuating song-worlds. Thereby, these singing personae make their strange homes in and through their ambiguous masculine performances.


Deep learning has made important contributions to classification tasks applied to fault diagnosis. However, it is crucial to integrate the technologies into real industrial applications through cost-effective hardware. Edge computing, a new computing paradigm, has the potential to accelerate system response time, reduce bandwidth for transmission, and use fewer computing resources. In this article, the distillation quantization compression method based on energy entropy is applied to compress the convolutional neural network (CNN), which is deployed on a Cortex-M4 series microcontroller with only 192 kB of RAM and 512 kB of ROM. Additionally, based on the fault mechanism of rolling bearings, this article integrates the attention mechanism and envelope spectrum to verify the effectiveness of feature extraction by the CNN model, which effectively weakens invalid features in the distillation quantization process. The experimental results show that the proposed method has excellent performance in terms of memory overhead and inference speed, which has great potential in industrial applications.


In nonintegrable Hamiltonian systems, energy initially localized in a few degrees of freedom tends to disperse through nonlinear couplings. We analyze such processes in systems of many degrees of freedom. As a complement to the well-known Arnold diffusion, which describes energy diffusion by chaotic motion near separatrices, our analysis treats another universal case: coupled small oscillations near stable equilibrium points. Because we are concerned with the low-energy regime, where the nonlinearity of the unperturbed Hamiltonian is negligibly small, existing theories of Arnold diffusion cannot apply. Using probability theories we show that resonances of small detuning, which are ubiquitous in systems of many degrees of freedom, make energy diffusion possible. These resonances are the cause of energy equipartition in the low-energy limit. From our analysis, simple analytic equations that relate the energy, the degrees of freedom, the strength of nonlinear coupling, and the time scale for equipartition emerge naturally. These equations reproduce results from largescale numerical simulations with remarkable accuracy. @S1063-651X~96!04311-5#


Tracking and location of a high speed water rentry vehicle is assured by the inclusion of an acoustic source. An acoustic generator in the form of a piezoelectric transducer is potted in polyurethane and fills a volume aft of a disc-shaped wall in the re-entry vehicle. The potting compound couples the acoustic generator to the metal skin to enable acoustic transmission from the vehicle to the tracking range. Optionally, a layer of material is interposed between the potting compound and the vehicle's metal skin to aid in acoustically coupling the generator's output to the metal skin. No structural modifications of the entry vehicle are required yet the pinger is capable of sustaining re-entry shock.


Managers of tourist destinations and products worldwide are in a constant search for innovation, improving their design processes, tourist service and promotion, with the intention of increasing the interest of travelers and improving the experience of their visit. In this context, new communication formats are emerging, highlighting audiovisual production in different formats, such as audiovisual series, as an effective and innovative format. This article will analyze the production of audiovisual series related to wildlife observation and in particular, the case of the audiovisual series Voices of the forest, which is a digital series related to wildlife observation and whose objectives are to contribute to generate interest in traveling to Alto Mayo, in San Martin, Peru, and motivate the audience to carry out wildlife observation activities.


A politician's persona is negotiated on multiple platforms in various ways. Some maintain a strategic, carefully negotiated self, while others reveal more and blur lines between professional and private dimensions of their persona (Street 2004). Together with constituents – who discuss them widely on different platforms – politicians build personal brands which construct their lives as performances and products to be sold (van Dijck 2013; Enli 2015a). Persona representations provoke feelings and politicians are expected to effectively manage scrutiny of both private and professional elements of their public selves.


Institute for Energy Technology, Halden, Norway,email: {wenhuiz, firstname.lastname@example.com specification of a software system involves several aspects. Two es-sential aspects are convenience in specification and possibility for formalanalysis. These aspects are, to some extent, exclusive. This paper de-scribes an approach to the specification of systems that emphasizes bothaspects, by combining UML with a language for description of the ob-servable behavior of object viewpoints, OUN. Whereas both languagesare centered around object-oriented concepts, they are complementary inthe sense that one is graphical and semi-formal while the other is textualand formal. The approach is demonstrated by a case study, focusing onthe specification of an open communication infrastructure. In this pa-per, emphasis is placed on specification aspects. Verification aspects arediscussed briefly at the end of the paper.


Over the last few decades, correlative species distribution models (SDMs) have been adopted as the most widely used approach for describing and predicting spatial patterns of relationships between species occurrence and environmental conditions (Elith & Leathwick, 2009). Over this same period, the discipline of remote sensing (RS) has produced a breadth of novel geospatial datasets and analytical algorithms for mapping biogeographical heterogeneity. It is not surprising that RS data are now commonly used in SDMs: spaceand airborne RS data provide a low cost means to map environmental changes across multiple spatio-temporal scales and are attractive for their ability to measure spatial factors often impossible to quantify otherwise (e.g. landscape connectivity). Looking into this trend further, our literature search – with keywords 'remote sensing' and 'species distribution' or 'habitat suitability' – returned 210 articles where remote sensing was integrally used in SDMs, 60% of which were published just in the past 5 years (ISI Web of Science, 2 May 2013). This development should be a good thing, right? However, several scientists have critically pointed out that the content and spatial scale of RS predictors do not often match species' life-history strategies (e.g. Bradley et al., 2012; Lechner et al., 2012). Our objective here is not to disagree with their recently proposed methodological guidelines, but rather to reflect on the various facets of using RS in SDMs in an effort to bridge disciplinary perspectives. Despite the rapidly increasing number of interdisciplinary approaches, we believe that some remaining discrepancies between geographical and ecological perspectives still influence current SDM studies. To illustrate this diversity of disciplinary viewpoints, we build on the proposition of Carl Troll, who coined the term 'landscape ecology' in an attempt to integrate the 'spatial' approach of geographers and the 'functional' approach of ecologists. In SDM studies, at one extreme, RS researchers may tend to focus on mapping spatial patterns of species distributions, while ecologists may be as much concerned with the explanations of these distributions. By this generalized point of view, we do not wish to draw boxes around disciplines but believe that inherited disciplinary perspectives, differing research priorities and associated methodological advancements remain the core reasons why the integration of RS in SDMs has not yet reached its full potential. Below, we discuss how the application of RS data in SDMs can be improved by (1) a greater awareness of the differing sample size and characteristics of RS and ecological data, (2) the combination of different RS predictors in multi-scale modelling frameworks, (3) the use of RS data to infer information on species absence, and (4) a clearer definition of the modelling purpose. First, remotely sensed and field-based ecological data typically vary in their sample sizes and functional relationships to the focal species. Ecological perspectives may sometimes lead to using relatively small samples of data compared with RS; however, those field samples are often relatively accurate and typically capture information that is ecologically relevant to the distribution of the species (direct predictors, e.g. temperature or soil type). In contrast, RS data provide a wall-to-wall census of biophysical factors with relatively low accuracies (due to errors introduced during data acquisition, processing or analysis) which may serve only as indirect surrogates for functional variables (see Elith & Leathwick, 2009). Recognizing and accepting these differences between the two data sources is crucial. In particular, relationships between species occurrence and such indirect surrogates may be non-stationary in space and time. For example, the same values of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) or other indices can be observed for habitat patches with completely different plant community compositions. While the importance of this spatio-temporal non-stationarity of RS signals along elevational or climatic gradients has been recognized in vegetation mapping (see Guyon et al., 2011), we do not see careful contextualization for the use of RS data in SDMs so far. It is therefore essential to develop approaches that will allow us to extract ecological meaning from the censuses provided by RS data and design new RS indicators that capture direct environmental drivers. While this has been accomplished for modelling animal species by approximating habitat heterogeneity from RS data (Goetz et al., 2010), there is an apparent research gap for plant species. We specifically suggest continuing to explore the potential of functionally relevant biophysical parameters, such as leaf area index (LAI) or fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (fPAR), instead of using the more common vegetation indices (e.g. NDVI or enhanced vegetation index) that consist of combinations of spectral bands and are only indirectly linked to biophysical properties of vegetation. In addition, remotely sensed land surface temperature (LST), which is one of the most important parameters for quantifying surface energy and water balances (Quattrochi & Luvall, 2004), is a valuable, yet largely untapped source of data in SDMs. Second, although the importance of considering scale-dependency of patterns and processes is well established in both disciplines, we see differences in implementation. Both ecologists and RS specialists widely accept that the choice of spatial scale, defined by extent (the geographical area considered) and grain (smallest measurement unit within a dataset), has to be driven by the objective and the potential application of the research. Obviously, there may be exceptions, where published studies fail to establish that their observation scale does correspond to the phenomena scale (at which the organism interacts with the environment; Lechner et al., 2012). Pearson & Dawson (2003) proposed a hierarchical framework for conceptualizing the scales at which different environmental factors affect species distributions. However, most RSbased studies that embrace multi-scale approaches compare the utility of the same


From Brokeback Mountain to Life of Pi, the Taiwan-born film director, Ang Lee, has won two Oscars for the Best Director. Both films are set in cultural contexts where Lee did not grow up, and yet both have drawn global audiences and received unanimous praise from critics. This article examines Ang Lee's cinematic technique communicated with his Eastern sensibilities in Brokeback Mountain. In applying his cinematic language, he not only shows loyalty to the mood and content of the original short story, but also re-creates much visual detail. His visual additions serve to redeem what in writing is not replicable in film, such as psychological description, and to enrich the story to fill the range of a full-length feature film. So much has been written about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. The film has received unanimous acclamation from global audiences, film critics and LGBT communities. It was also one of the biggest winners at the 78 th Academy Awards, crowning Lee the Best Director. It has been regarded as an "issue film that invites nothing but pure escapism" (Herring, 2007, 94), as well as "a love story about two guys who happen to be gay" (McBride, 2007, 96). The financial success of the film is equally remarkable. Grundmann has noted, "Made and marketed for $14 million (not a single one of which, as Variety has noted, went to TV advertising), its initial badge was strictly art house. But when the opening weekend yielded a conspicuous eighth best per-screen average in history, even seasoned industry analysts were taken by surprise " (2006, 50-52). The success is obvious, and yet not so much scholarship has been done to examine the immense success of this film. Some critic ascribes the financial success of the film to the "sacrifice of countercultural subversiveness" to achieve the inoffensiveness of the subject matter (Osterweil, 2007, 42). In my view, the success lies in the Eastern sensibilities in Ang Lee's cinematic language entailed to highlight the universality of a cowboy love story. We will first look at what makes a good film and what is the definition of a good film. Arguably, despite individual differences of taste and inter-subjective reception of a particular film within an audience, the universality of world's most HUAI BAO SHAWA, the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Email: firstname.lastname@example.com.


Methods in modeling and numerical simulation for the high density plasma processing are introduced,namely,continuous and kinetic methods.Based on the drift diffusion equations as an example of a continuum model and particle in cell/Monte Carlo collision kinetic model,a plasma processing model is proposed.Simulations of the plasma sheath and the process of plasma etching and deposition are discussed.A preliminary scheme of whole modeling for high density plasma processing is presented.


The heat shield of high speed reentry spacecraft is often made up of porous ablative thermal protection materials (TPMs) that can accommodate high heating rates and heat loads through phase change and mass loss. When the temperature increases, those materials absorb heat and start to pyrolyze, releasing gases that interact with the surrounding flow. Modeling the species production and the material decomposition rate is important for their use in numerical simulations for the robust determination of heat shield thickness. To this end, pyrolysis experiments have been performed on TPMs in order to determine the kinetic parameters of chemical laws that govern mass loss and species production rates [Wong et al., Polym. Degrad. Stabil., 112:122–131, 2015]. Samples are heated in a furnace and the mass loss is measured while the species produced are collected.


Absorption Acousto-Optics Devices Add/Drop Filter Arrayed Waveguide Grating Athermal Component Attenuator BPM (Beam Propagation Method) Directional Coupler Dispersion and Its Control Distributed Bragg Reflector (DBR) Laser Distributed Feedback (DFB) Laser EA (Electro-Absorption) Modulator Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) Fiber Bragg Grating Fibers Filter Four Wavelength Mixing Frequency Chirping Integrated Twin-Guide Laser Isolator/Circulator Lambda Plate Light Lithium Niobate (LN) Modulator Magneto-Optic Switch Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Microlens Mircro-Ring Resonator Circuit Mode Locking Mode Scrambler Modulation of Semiconductor Lasers Multi-Mode Interference Devices Nano-Photonics Nonlinear Optical Waveguide Optical Convolution Optical Coupling in Waveguides Optical Coupling of Lasers and Fibers Optical Fiber Optical Filter Synthesis Optical Interconnects Optical Loss Optical Parallel Processor Optical Parametric Amplifier (OPA) Optical Pickup Optical Scattering Optical Switch Optical Tap Opticlal Resonator Optoelectronic Integrated Circuit (OEIC) Periodic Structure Phase Shifter (Lambda Plate) Photodetector Photonic Crystal Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC) Planar Microlens Polarization Polarization Control Quantum Wells for Integrated Optics Raman Amplifier RF Spectrum Analyzer Scattering Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) Semiconductor Laser Semiconductor Optical Amplifier Single Photone source Stacked Planer Optical Circuit Surface Acoustic Wave Device (SAW Device) ThermoOptic Device 3R (Retiming Reshaping Regeneration) Traveling-Wave Electro Absorption Modulator Transmitter/Receiver Tunable Semiconductor Laser Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) Waveguide Bends Waveguide Modeling Waveguide Theory Wavelength Conversion Wavelength Multiplexer/Demultiplexer (MX/DMUX in WDM) Y-Branch


In order to confirm the binding site in the FAD-reduced keratin (RK) complex, polarographic and fluorometric studies were carried out and the FAD–RK complex was isolated. An adenine moiety of FAD was found to form a 1:1 complex with RK.


Advanced digital technology has given rise to modern visual tools known as Augmented Reality (AR). AR integrates virtual information into the real environment, and recent studies have demonstrated its potential to enhance teaching and learning practices in higher education. However, while university learners have become increasingly adept at utilizing technology to support their learning, many faculty members have been slower to embrace technology for enhancing their teaching practices. This study aims to investigate the attitudes of academic staff towards adopting Augmented Reality Technologies (ARTs) in higher education. Additionally, it seeks to determine whether there are any differences in attitudes based on age, utilizing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a theoretical framework. A survey was conducted, and a total of (851) usable responses were received from participants. The study results reveal that most faculty members have a positive attitude towards using AR as a pedagogical tool in teaching and learning, particularly to support students remotely during crisis periods. Additional results indicate that the response to crises factor strongly influences academic staff attitude towards AR.  Moreover, the attitude factor strongly influences academic staff members' intention to use AR in the future. Additionally, the results show that there are no differences between the teaching staff and their age regarding their attitude. The paper concludes with some recommendations.


With the fast development of information technology and increasing number of image database, how to retrieval a large amount of information from the image quickly and effectively becomes more and more important. Brain Storm Optimization (BSO) is simple, robust and has high searching precision. So it is applied into the image retrieval in this paper. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) extracts the color, texture, shape and other low-level visual features of images to realize image matching. Compared with image retrieval based on single feature, image retrieval based on multi-feature fusion can fully represent image information. In the multi-feature fusion, the ratio of each feature selection is critical to the search result. Traditional method is manually set or proportional integration, which ignores the priority between the various features. This paper uses BSO for image retrieval. Color histogram, color moment, color structure descriptor, Tamura texture feature, GLCM texture, wavelet transform texture, Gabor transform texture, edge histogram descriptors and Hu invariant moment are extracted in the paper and BSO is used for image retrieval. Experiment results show that the proposed method can retrieval the target image accurately and improve the precision of the system.


The quality of teachers and the effectiveness of education are closely related. The pre-service teacher education programs offered in universities differ greatly in terms of environment, quality of faculties, equipment, training, quality of students, and also the internship system. Therefore, pre-service teacher education programs should work towards in becoming a more exquisite training progress, optimizing the quality of teachers. Utilizing the Professional Standards for Qualified Vocational Education Teacher developed in a former study in 2013, this study analyzed the professional performance of pre-service teachers in areas of auto mechanics, re-figuration and air conditioning, interior design, and drafting. This study also further examines the performance of pre-service teachers by means of documentary analysis and focus group discussion. The results and conclusions of this study hope to aid the industrial departments of vocational high schools to establish a professional performance checking system for pre-service teachers, and also provide concrete suggestions for future development.


Offshore oil and gas platforms facilities include extensive piping components, pressure vessels, and other equipment. These are monitored regularly to minimize non-conformances for safety and integrity of platforms. This paper focuses on using field measurements of thickness in pipes to alert engineers to take appropriate actions when thickness falls below the minimum thickness. Data from the field at various thickness measurement locations (TMLs) are used to analyze for finding anomalies. Inspectors periodically measure at TMLs on pipes and record the thickness values. Based on these measurements they determine the remaining life time at a location before thickness falls below the minimum thickness. They do this by estimating corrosion rates and then calculate the next measurement date. When the measured thickness value at a TML is below the minimum they will issue action reports. With multiple measurements of thickness values at TMLs, we have developed a machine learning framework and algorithms to generate action alerts before corrosion lead to non-conformances. This approach is based on machine learning techniques to learn from examples when certain TMLs will have below the minimum thickness. Such alert prediction models are from a purely data driven approach and can help in prioritizing inspection schedule. The results show that our approach using machine learning is effective in capturing potential nonconformances in TMLs.


The aim of this study was to understand the effects of braid pattern and number of layers on 3D axial braided unit cell structures. Various unit cell based representative 3D axial braided preforms were developed. Data generated from these structures included unit cell dimensions, yarn angle and yarn length in the unit cell structures.It was shown that braid patterns affected the 3D axial braided unit cell structures. The 1 × 1 braid pattern made fully interconnected integral 3D axial braided unit cell structures, whereas the 2 × 1 braid pattern created disconnected braid layers which were connected to the structure edges. When the number of layers increased 3D axial braided unit cell thickness also increased. Braid pattern slightly affected the braided yarn angle. On the other hand, it was observed that the number of layers considerably affected the yarn length in the unit cell structure. Increasing the layer number from six to eight layers created a yarn path in the unit cell edge regions called the 'multilayer yarn length'. This yarn path was not observed below eight layer 3D axial braided unit cell structures. In jamming conditions, minimum jamming decreased the width of the unit cell structure but maximum jamming increased its width. In addition, minimum jamming decreased the surface angle of the unit cell structure, conversely, however, the maximum jamming increased the surface angle. Also, it was realized that jamming conditions influenced the density of the unit cell but did not affect the yarn length in the unit cell structures.


To establish a reference point in time, Dean Maurer of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (DOT) conducted a survey of the state DOTs to determine their current specification requirements with respect to the use of polyphosphoric acid (PPA). This survey was conducted in the winter of 2008–2009. The survey had 37 responses from the state DOTs. The Ontario Ministry of Transport (MTO) had also conducted a survey in 2007 on the use of PPA to modify asphalt binder. Pennsylvania combined the data from the two surveys to achieve a combination of 48 responses. The survey overall provided a snapshot in time on the use of PPA and the general policies of the highway agencies on its use. The general conclusions from the survey were the following: There is a wide spectrum in the use of PPA from outright bans to unrestricted use; No specific documentation of poor performance was brought forward; A potential exists to significantly expand the currently limited performance database and available documentation on PPA as a binder modifier; Due to fluctuating binder–modifier supply, agencies will need to be more flexible and knowledgeable concerning modifiers; and The workshop agenda should go a long way toward filling critical gaps in knowledge on PPA modification.


Summary Objective: Self-report data is increasingly gathered by electronic devices. The present study aimed at testing usability and patient acceptance of two administration modes (tablet vs. paper-pencil) in primary care patients _ 60 years. Material and methods: Two depression instruments were administered using a randomized crossover design (n = 193). Results: Patients positively evaluated the usability of the tablet (clear presentation, well manageable). Additionally, the majority of patients preferred the tablet over the paper-pencil mode (more suitable, less stressful and difficult). Tablet mode and increasing age were associated with increased response time. Age, somatic morbidity and formal education showed only weak associations with usability and acceptance. Conclusion: Socio-demographic variables such as increasing age and formal education and somatic morbidity do not lead to limitations of use. Clinical relevance: The study demonstrates high usability and acceptance of depression assessment by tablets in elderly patients.


This paper proposed a novel fractional-order Chua's memristive circuit. Firstly, a fractional-order mathematical model of a diode bridge generalized memristor with RLC filter cascade is established, and simulations verify that the fractional-order generalized memristor satisfies the basic characteristics of a memristor. Secondly, the capacitor and inductor in Chua's chaotic circuit are extended to the fractional order, and the fractional-order generalized memristor is used instead of Chua's diode to establish the fractional-order mathematical model of chaotic circuit based on RLC generalized memristor. By studying the stability analysis of the equilibrium point and the influence of the circuit parameters on the system dynamics, the dynamic characteristics of the proposed chaotic circuit are theoretically analyzed and numerically simulated. The results show that the proposed fractional-order memristive chaotic circuit has gone through three states: period, bifurcation, and chaos, and a narrow period window appears in the chaotic region. Finally, the equivalent circuit method is adopted in PSpice to realize the construction of the fractional-order capacitance and inductance, and the simulation of the fractional-order memristive chaotic circuit is completed. The results further verify the correctness of the theoretical analysis.


ABSTRACT Smart assisted living technologies are often touted as the solution to the challenges associated with an ageing population. Viewing elderly consumers, their relatives, and technologies as comprising an assemblage, this article aims to understand how smart objects actively reshape the everyday practices in families with elderly consumers. Interviews with and observations of users of smart alarm systems indicate a stratification of the paired experiences of users and systems and identify a tension between enabling experiences of the elderly and constraining experiences of the relatives. This article contributes to views of families with elderly as assemblages by providing insights into joint and disjoint consumer experiences in multiple consumer-object assemblages, identity negotiations of the elderly and their relatives, and the hidden costs of smart assisted living technologies.


Nine migrainers with (MWA; aged 18-36 yrs) and 10 without (MWOA; aged 21-36 yrs) aura as well as 10 controls (aged 19-28 yrs) from a female university were measured twice with an interval of 7 days. The first session of recordings and tests for migraineurs was held about 7 hours after a migraine attack. The authors hypothesized that electrophysiological changes in the posterior cerebral cortex related to visual spatial attention are influenced by the level of arousal in migraineurs with aura, and that this varies over the course of time. Event related potentials related to the active visual attention task manifested significant differences between controls and both types of migraine sufferers for the N200, suggesting a common pathophysiological mechanism for migraineurs. Furthermore, MWOAs showed a significant enhancement for the N200 at the second session, indicating the relevance of time of measurement within migraine studies. Finally, MWAs showed significantly enhanced P240 and P300 components at central and parietal cortical sites compared to MWOAs and controls, which seemed to be maintained over both sessions and could be indicative of increased noradrenergic activity in MWAs.


This study addresses the issues of developing community involvement, action and trust in a diverse community from a social constructionist paradigm using narrative action research and grounded theory strategies. Additionally, the study identifies and focuses on archetypal symbols and myths as they relate to these diverse groups and how they resonate with group members. A community organization, The Metropolitan Organization (TMO) in Houston, Texas, comprised of churches and schools, is used as the vehicle for conducting meetings and developing relationships. The study also addressed the question of why persons become involved in such a group as TMO and what motivated them to stay involved. The central theoretical focus of the project is the proposition that meaning is constructed through intersubjective referential realities (Rijsman, 1997) and also through interobjective projected meanings onto archetypal symbols. The intersubjective meanings to observers of archetypal symbols often lacks consensus of meaning between individuals and groups. This


A paper in the International Journal of Cancer analyzed Palestinian cancer registry data in the West Bank from 1998 to 2007, showing a cluster of elevated cancer incidence in rural villages in south‐west Hebron, with a 4.10 risk ratio for childhood lymphoma (p = 0.0023). The paper called for investigation of the environmental or genetic etiologies of this cluster in an otherwise unremarkable rural area.1 Our research in these same villages shows them to be the center of an extensive informal electronic and electrical waste (e‐waste) dismantling industry in Palestine, operating for almost two decades. This entails extensive open‐burning of e‐waste components to extract valuable metals or dispose of nonvaluable waste, releasing high concentrations of hazardous contaminants, which may be an important factor in the elevated cancer incidence. We offer a first step in assessing this link. We applied a novel multitemporal object‐based method to map the prevalence and intensity of e‐waste burn sites in the entire Hebron Governorate (1,060 km2) between 1999 and 2007. A weighted standard deviation ellipse of cumulative burn activity covers a smaller area (247 km2) very closely matching the childhood lymphoma cluster: it contains 85% of the core cluster area (RR of 4.1), and falls almost entirely (95%) within the broader area of elevated risk (RR of 2.8). Extensive international evidence linking informal e‐waste processing to elevated cancer incidence and this strong spatial association of e‐waste burning activity with a distinct unexplained cancer cluster in the Palestinian context signals the urgent need for investigation and intervention.


Comparison of clinical-roentgenologic and electroneuromyographic data was performed for 29 patients, aged 3 - 16 years, at different stages of conservative and surgical treatment for hip joints dysplasia. First group included 18 patients with complicated clinical course; second - 11 patients with favorable process of joint formation. Functional activity of motor neurons, spinal cord and peripheral nerves conductivity was assessed. It was shown that in patients from the 1 st group the ENMG indices were statistically significantly lower than in healthy children ( р <0,05). F-waves parameters were typical for the change in spinal cord motor neurons activity of both functional and organic pattern. Decrease in the latent period of F-waves was indicative of axonal demyelinating lesion of spinal cord roots and peripheral nerves. Dynamic control at different stages of treatment showed negative changes in electrophysiological indices in complicated clinical course that confirmed the necessity of neurophysiologic monitoring.


More than 40 Ulmus minor clones were characterised on the basis of 10 foliar morphological traits and budburst phenology in two successive years. Ramets, 4- and 5-years-old, were obtained by means of self-rooted cuttings from elms located in northern, central and southern Italy and in France. Measurements were taken in an open field in the vicinity of Florence (Italy). The morphological traits were found not to be appropriate for describing the variability between clones of different origins, even if some of these traits indicated a xeric adaptation in clones originating from southern Italy. On the contrary, the phenological traits were valid describers of the origin of the clones. Indeed, the southern-Italian clones flushed earlier than the others, while the French clones were more delated. A comparison of the results of the two years showed that the chilling requirements on the trial site were not satisfied. The actual state of knowledge regarding dormancy in the Ulmus genus does not enable to speculate further on the results of this research. Morphological characters seem to show a greater phenotypic plasticity with respect to phenological traits.


This work presents the application of a distributed control approach to maximize the power extraction from photovoltaic (PV) modules based on a dc-dc four-switch synchronous buck-boost converter (FSBBC). The outputs of several converters are connected to series and parallel arrays, thus allowing obtaining maximum power point tracking (MPPT) in an individual manner, regardless of the temperature and/or irradiance conditions.


Many problems in the experimental estimation of parameters for models can be solved through use of the likelihood ratio test. Applications of the likelihood ratio, with particular attention to photon counting experiments, are discussed. The procedures presented solve a greater range of problems than those currently in use, yet are no more difficult to apply. The procedures are proved analytically, and examples from current problems in astronomy are discussed.


This paper is an attempt to identify (i.e. to build an adequate mathematical model for control object) and to optimize the work of the sulphur mining field. The method of regression analysis is applied. Stochastic expressions obtained are used in constructing the performance index as well as in calculations. The results obtained are analised in respect of their usability for the bore-hole method of sulphur mining. Finally, requirements are formulated that should make it possible to achieve an effective mathematical model.


Recent advances in semiconductor, networking and material science technologies are driving the ubiquitous deployment of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Together, these technologies have combined to enable a new generation of WSNs that differ greatly from wireless networks developed and deployed as recently as 5 to 10 years ago. Today's state-of-the-art WSNs have lower deployment and maintenance costs, last longer and are more rugged. They are finding their way into numerous applications in our homes, work places and beyond, bringing new sources of information, control and convenience to our personal and professional lives. Table 1 summarizes several examples of how WSNs can enhance productivity, reduce cost and even save lives.


We consider the problem of optimally designing an excitation input for parameter identification of an electrochemical Li-ion battery model. The conventional approach to performing parameter identification uses standard test cycles. In contrast, we optimally design the input trajectory to maximize parameter identifiability in the sense of Fisher information. Specifically, we derive sensitivity equations for the electrochemical model. This approach enables parameter sensitivity analysis and optimal parameter fitting via gradient-based algorithms. This paper presents a general systematic approach to identify the electrochemical parameters in a non-invasive way. First, we group parameters into two sets: (i) equilibrium parameters, and (ii) dynamical parameters. We also divide the dynamical parameters into subsets by calculating orthogonalized sensitivity, which mitigates linear dependence between parameters. A large number of input profiles have been devised to constitute an input library. Then, the optimal inputs are selected from the input library to maximize the Fisher information, via convex programming. Using this framework a number of relevant experiments are obtained to parameterize. To validate our approach experimentally, we consider a 18650 Lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxide battery. Compared to the conventional approach, our proposal achieves lower voltage RMSE across all experimental testing cycles. zE-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com


This briefing investigates the status of the educational system and, more specifically, of continuing training in companies in the Principality of Andorra. Part of this analysis is based on a field study designed to explore and understand both the current situation and the training needs of the main sectors within the Andorran economy. A proposal for continuing training is posed, with reference to best practice from different countries, in particular Spain and France, which share geographic borders with the principality.


In this paper, we consider the use of UAVs to provide wireless connectivity services, for example after failures of wireless network components or to simply provide additional bandwidth on demand, and introduce the concept of UAVs as a service (UaaS). To facilitate UaaS, we introduce a novel framework, dubbed D3S, which consists of four phases: demand, decision, deployment, and service. The main objective of this framework is to develop efficient and realistic solutions to implement these four phases. The technical problems include determining the type and number of UAVs to be deployed, and also their final locations (e.g., hovering or on-ground), which is important for serving certain applications. These questions will be part of the decision phase. They also include trajectory planning of UAVs when they have to travel between charging stations and deployment locations and may have to do this several times. These questions will be part of the deployment phase. The service phase includes the implementation of the backbone communication and data routing between UAVs and between UAVs and ground control stations.


Remote control of electric fans by the application of IoT technology addresses the restrictions of "push button" controls that are usual in conventional fans. This paper explains a new control method for air flow control of a Smart Electric Fan (SEF), in this case fans mainly used in the household. In this new method the supply voltage that is applied to the motor terminals of the SEF is precisely changed with the mobile application developed by using IoT solutions. As this proposed method integrates with the conventional control methods referred to as the Firing Angle Control method or Phase Angle Control method with a new IoT-based solution, the controlling of any device becomes simpler. We developed a mobile application that enables the fan to be remotely controlled using a smartphone or tablet computer. The phase or delay angle of the voltage waveform is changed by giving as an input from the smart phone mobile application, and this results in minimizing the power loss caused due to switching in case of push button system. We demonstrated that by using this app, implementing the IoT-based solution, the air flow rate of the SEF was increased and the performance of the SEF exceeded the air flow rate of the original, conventionally controlled fan with the speed of the fan being significantly increased. Applying this control method has thus been verified to be advantageous and appropriate for the remote control of the air flow and fan speed, resulting in the efficient Smart Electric Fan. The main focus of this research was to implement the integrated control method in the residential fans.


Australia's Refugee convention implicitly states that human beings with the capacity to help are obliged to assist the desperate who make a claim on them and to share the burden of those in distant places who do not arrive on Australian shores. In spite of that the Minister for Immigration, Kevin Andrews, announced the decision to send a group of Sri Lankan asylum seekers to Nauru without hope of resettlement in Australia. If this is the only justification for the Pacific Solution, it is morally unacceptable because it inflicts suffering on an innocent group of people in order to communicate a harsh message to others.


Objective: To evaluate the effect of topical anesthesia for extracapsular cataract extraction and posterior chamber lens implantation. Methods: 92 eyes of 87 cases were selected randomly to carry out the extracapsular cataract extraction and intraocular lens implantation in topical anesthesia. Results: 83 eyes (90.2%) were satisfied, 89 eyes (96.7%) were effective. Whereas posterior capsular was damaged and vitreous body was loss in 3 eyes (3.3%) and the operations were finished in retrobulbar anesthesia. The rate about the damage of posterior capsular and loss of vitreous body were lower than those of peri-bulbar anesthesia simultaneously. The reason was probably that the cases were cautiously selected to finfish the first extracapsular cataract extraction in topical anesthesia. Conclusion: The topical anesthesia for extracapsular cataract extraction and intraocular lens implantation might be a safe, effective and convenient method.


Board of directors independence has been a focus for a large series of studies in finance. The overall evidence suggests that independence has no or negative effect on firm performance. Director accountability constitutes a second topic of research, in law and economics. Two distinctive models might be identified. The first one gives primacy to the interests of shareholders, whereas the other advocates enlarged fiduciary duties for directors. We argue that these two issues (independence and accountability) are related. In particular, we show that independence is a strong implication only for the shareholder model of accountability. In turn, the way the poor results of independency are accounted for crucially depends on the way director accountability is analyzed.


This study tries to investigate the contributory factors in the success and failure in teaching of the four language skills through teaching of literature because literature is critically and crucially relevant to the evolution of a literary sensibility. The basic end of literature is to read which develops reading skills and to reinterpret the dynamics of a given society. In this process the language skills are actually manifested. Literature, if we deconstruct the term involves two stages of reading; one that is the text, and second; the subsequent evaluation which entails the ability to break the text and trace the possibilities of meanings. This cannot be done without a proper perspective of the literary and linguistic mind, and the very act of interpretation amply appropriates reading skills. Literature fundamentally helps to develop the spirit of inquiry and the variety of thoughts involved in the representation of the text and; therefore, the study of literature enhances the ability to think beyond what you have been provided with and also to be equipped with a quizzical bent of mind that seeks to establish the competence to question what is read as a matter of literary text. This makes the learner naturally acquire the language from the literary context and consequently develop the language skills. Teaching of language through literature has been a tested method as literary texts are so complete with vocabulary, the terrain of thoughts, the diversity of human encounters and the complexity of experiences. In the process of deconstructing a text, one comes across umpteen shades of thoughts conceived and delivered in a compressed form. Also the decoding of the language given its symbolic structure greatly enhances the prospects of independent thinking and writing. In this way the written skills are widely developed. A text is a bundle of thoughts clad in a complicated web of linguistic sophistication, and the sophistry alone suffices to constitute a challenge to break through the cordon of words that are generally ambiguous that provides an appropriate exposure to the complex patterns of language. Literature entails both the ambiguity of thoughts and the diversity of linguistic representations and therefore it is pertinent to stick to the teaching of literature as a means of decoding the language. It raises the range of vocabulary and the canvass of thoughts. If a novel is picked up for evaluation, the first task is the evaluation of the time background to suggest the socio-political tendencies, the words which are not commonly used, and the thoughts that are dressed in a highly complex form call for a more detailed engagement with the text. This is the best and perhaps the most effective way to develop the vocabulary, phrases, the stock of words, complex structures and the pieces of information compressed in a symbolic form. A novel is a document of thought expressed at a particular period and the language used can be extremely useful for the communication purposes even though they are words by the highly trained and proficient minds. However no literature can ever be seen in isolation from the language as 'language is culture'. Without a judicious selection of text the learner will be at a loss to understand the conflicting usage of language for the meaning of the word is not determined by the word alone, rather it is the context which determines its meaning. What can aid a learner, further, is the quality of mind in finding a method to respond to the situation as the teacher has their own limitations, and it will be difficult for a teacher to explain without a moderate exposure to the language or literature.


At the meeting of the International Committee on Systematic Bacteriology (ICSB) in Prague, Czech Republic, in July 1994, the problems created by the publication of many new names and new combinations of names of both genera and species were discussed, provoked by a presentation by Dr J. T. Magee (Cardiff, UK). It was decided to establish an ad hoc committee within the ICSB with the task of formulating an approach to communication of new names to users in medical and veterinary bacteriology. The following bacterial names have been published in 1994 in articles in the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology (IJSB) (validly published) or published elsewhere and listed in 1994 on the validation lists in IJSB (validated). For some taxa there is


In recent years,the legislation of the protection of famous trademark are becoming more and more perfect,but the abuse of famous trademark is not paid enough atten-tion.After analyzing different cases of abusing famous trademark,the paper gives some suggestions about its legal regulation and judicial practice?


Based on the CHNS survey data, this paper measures the poverty index and the Gini coefficient in urban and rural areas in China, and tests the impact of trade openness on income inequality and poverty through panel data regression. The results show that:(l) trade openness expands income gap in both urban and rural areas in China, but has no significant effect on poverty;(2) relative to regions with low labor factor mobility, trade openness narrows income gap and reduces poverty in regions with high labor factor mobility.


Background. Knowledge and attitudes concerning eye disorders are important socio-demographic parameters critical for eye care uptake and outcomes, especially in underserved populations. Objectives. To assess knowledge and attitudes concerning common eye disorders in a rural south-eastern Nigerian population. Methods. The study was a population-based survey of knowledge and attitudes concerning common eye diseases conducted in Abagana community in September 2011. Results. The participants comprised 263 males and 238 females. Their profile of good knowledge was eye infections: 38.9%; refractive error: 28.9%; cataracts: 18.0%; diabetic retinopathy: 8.0%; glaucoma: 5.8%; and overall good knowledge: 4.0%. Prevention and treatment of eye disorders were rated as first priorities over other major disabilities by 91.4% participants. Older age and formal education were the significant predictors of good knowledge. Conclusion. In Abagana, there is poor overall and disorder-specific knowledge of eye disorders. Socio-demographic factors are important determinants of knowledge. Community-based preventive eye health education is underscored.


In Recent years, Interleave Division Multiple Access (IDMA) scheme has gained a remarkable attention in wireless communication due to high spectral efficiency, high speed of communication services and low cost of receiver. This paper presents the S-Random interleaver based IDMA scheme. User specific S-Random interleaver provides good spreading and also separates the different users. The results of simulation present that BER performance of S-Random interleaver is better than random interleaver for IDMA system in environment of Rayleigh fading. Further, the BER performance analysis of S-Random interleaver in IDMA system with the application of Maximal Ratio Receiver Combining (MRRC) diversity has been observed. MRRC scheme mitigate the fading effect with the use of multiple antenna at the receiver side. The simulation results demonstrates that S-Random interleaver in IDMA using MRRC diversity has shown the significant improvement in BER performance compared to random interleaver without diversity scheme.


The geographic market definition is crucial for the compatibility assessment and may affect the outcome of a case in a determinant manner as illustrated in the SCA/MetsaTissue - case and the Volvo/Scania - case. The factors assessed by the Commission and their indication of a wide respectively a narrow market definition has been identified and laid out in a table. In addition, the considerations of the Commission when assessing a concentrations compatibility with the Common Market has been identified and an overview of the factors detriment for a finding of dominance has been outlined. Furthermore, the changes in the Commissions appraisal of concentrations, due to the new Merger Regulation have been examined. The analysed changes are specifically the altered compatibility test and the introduction of the appraisal of efficiency gains. Moreover, the econometric tool of merger simulation has been discussed as well as the possibility of utlising the American model under the Merger Regulation. Finally, the SCA/MetsaTissue - case and the Volvo/Scania - case was analysed in the light of the new Merger Regulation raising questions as to whether they would be found compatible with the Common Market.


Objective To investigate the expressions of P56, IFN-β, IFN-α mRNAs and the effects of KPV, a COOH-terminal tripeptide sequence of alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone [alpha-MSH(11-13)], and anaesthesia on the expressions in severe burn injured mice.Methods Eighty mice were randomly and equally divided into 4 groups: control, burn (TBS15%Ⅱ), burn+KPV (injection of 40 μg per animal immediately after burn), and burn+anaesthesia (injection of 0.4 mg/kg diazepam and 10 mg/kg ketamine immediately after burn). All animals were sacrificed in 3 h after burn respectively. The expressions of P56, IFN-β, and IFN-α mRNAs in liver, spleen, lung and kidney tissues were detected with RT-PCR. Results P56 was expressed highly in liver, spleen, lung, and kidney in normal control group, and was obviously increased in kidney in burn group and burn+KPV group, but that in burn+anaesthesia group had no significant difference with that in normal control. IFN-β was not expressed in live and lightly expressed in spleen, lung and kidney, and its expression in lung was significantly increased in burn group and burn+anaesthesia group, but mildly decreased in burn+KPV group. IFN-α mRNA was expressed in all detected organs in normal control, and highly expressed in kidney of burn group and burn+KPV group, but not in burn+anaesthesia group. Conclusion These results indicate that the increased IFN expressing induce the up-regulation of P56, suggesting which may be involved in the disorder of early post trauma stress.


We use a coalescence model to generate $f_{0}$(980) particles for four configurations: ${s\bar{s}}$ meson, ${u\bar{u}s\bar{s}}$ tetraquark, ${K^{+}K^{-}}$ molecule and $u\bar{u}$ p-wave state. The phase-space information of the coalescing constituents is taken from a multi-phase transport (AMPT) simulation of proton-proton and proton-lead collisions at the LHC. It is shown that the transverse momentum spectra and production yields of $f_0(980)$ differ significantly among the configurations. It is suggested that the $p_T$ spectra of the $f_0(980)$ compared to those of other hadrons (such as pion) and the ratio of the $f_0(980)$ $p_T$ spectra in pPb over pp can be exploited to tell the configuration of the $f_0(980)$.


Context based adaptive entropy coders are used in newer compression standards to achieve rates that are asymptotically close to the source entropy: separate arithmetic coders are used for a large number of possible conditioning classes. This greatly reduces the amount of sample data available for learning. To combat this problem, which is referred as the context dilution problem in the literature, one needs to balance the benefit of using high-order context modeling and the learning cost associated with context dilution. In the first part of this dissertation, we propose a context quantization method to attack the context dilution problem for non-binary source. It begins with a large number of conditioning classes and then uses a clustering procedure to reduce the number of contexts into a desired size. The main operational difficulty in practice is how to describe the complex partition of the context space. To deal with this problem, we present two novel methods, coarse context quantization (CCQ) and entropy coded state sequence (ECSS), for efficiently describing the context book, which completely specifies the context quantizer mappings information. The second part of this dissertation considers binarization of non-binary sources. Same as nonbinary source, the cost of sending the complex context description as side information is very high. Up to now, all the context quantizers are designed off-line and being optimized with respect to the statistics of the training set. The problem of handling the mismatch between the training set and an input image has remained largely untreated. We propose three novel schemes, minimum description length, image dependent and minimum adaptive code length, to deal with this problem. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the JBlG and JBIG2 standard with peak compression improvement of 24% and 1 1 Oh separately on the chosen set of halftone images. In the third part of this dissertation, we extend our study to the joint design of both quantizers and entropy coders. We propose a context-based classification and adaptive quantization scheme, which essentially produce a finite state quantizer and entropy coder with the same procedure.


The general regularities of exfoliation of layered crystals
are considered. A physical model based on the analogy of the spatial packing
of polydisperse spherical solid particles is proposed to simulate the distribution
of nanoplates in a liquid. Mathematical dependences have been obtained for calculating the critical concentration of aggregation of nanoplates, using graphene as an example. The verification of the adequacy of the mathematical model to the real process was carried out.


Despite the success of the Sistrunk procedure, persistence of a thyroglossal duct cyst (TGDC), sinus, or remnant following excision remains a clinical problem. This is most likely due to the presence of microscopic disease that was not excised at the time of surgery. The purpose of this study is to determine the incidence of microscopic disease superior to the hyoid bone in children who have had either a primary or revision procedure for a TGDC.


Streptococcus suis is a major porcine pathogen, which can be transmitted to  human beings by close contact with ether infected or carrier pigs. There were many outbreaks in many provinces in the North of Thailand also Chiang kham district Phayao province continuously. The authors were interested and reseach the problem between  2009, January to 2011, December and discriptive and developed screening tool which can  be applied for the disease finally. This research data was collected by using disease surveillance during the 3 year study period. The 618 patients with diagnosis of sepsis, acute meningitis, infective endocarditis, severe pneumonia or septic arthritis were screened and  examined. The finding of surveillance revealed that there were 31 patients infected with the bacteria, 8, 15, and 8 patients in 2009, 2010 and 2011 respectively. The signs and symptoms of the patients were fever (93.50%), headache (77.40%), myalgia (64.50%) stiff neck (51.60%), hearing loss (48.80%) and nausea vomiting (48.40%). Hemo-culture and CSF-culture demonstrated S.suis infection to 9.70 percent. There were 25 males (80.60%) and 6 females (19.40%), male patients were about 4 time of female patients. All infection patients aged over 25 years. The 71.00 percent of S.suis infected patients had an experience of consuming raw pork or under-cooked pork products or contact with raw pork meat or coming in to raw internal organs or blood (71.00 percent). Reportedly 90.30 percent of  S.suis infected patients did not know about infection status of the origin. In all, 83.90 percent of the S.suis infected patients found to be under the infl uence of alcohol. The following risk factors associated with S.suis infection were history of consuming raw pork, no recollection, contact or exposure to raw pork, internal organs or pork blood as well as alcohol consumption and age ranging above 25, can be used to develop screening tool for S. suis infection. The result of testing the tool showed accuracy 90.20 percent, reliability 92.30 percent, sensitivity 92.30 percent, specificity 50.00 percent, positive predictive value 92.30 percent, and negative predictive value 25.00 percent. The specificity will increase if the patients have sign and symptom such as fever, headache, myalgia, nausea/vomiting, stiff neck or hearing loss as well as laboratory findings showed evidence of bacterial infection even bacterial infection in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). It is highly recommended that the public should be informed educated about the safety and danger of eating raw pork. However, changing attitude and behavior of the risk groups by supporting social measures and law enforcement are required in order to provide protection for population from S.suis infection. Keywords : Streptococcus Suis, Chiang kham Hospital, Screening test.


A description is given of an experiment in which we tried to show that visual feedback is more effective in intonation learning than auditory feedback. The factors in the experiment were feedback mode and practice time.The results showed a significant effect of visual feedback over auditory feedback, whereas amount of practice time doesn't seem to be a major factor. An analysis of learning behaviour of the subjects in the experiment revealed that feedback mode influences learning behaviour: subjects with visual feedback tend to practise more intensively than subjects with auditory feedback.Future research will concentrate on various factors related to intonation learning and the effectiveness of visual feedback, such as the role of age, mothertongue and degree of fluency in the second language.


In [4], we proved that the RSA congruence could be extended to a situation where the modulus of the congruence is a simple product of primes. In this work, we discuss the cryptosystem of this extended RSA congruence as an analogue of the RSA cryptosystem, which is hereafter referred to as the Extended RSA Cryptosystem. Journal of the Nigerian Association of Mathematical Physics Vol. 8 2004: pp. 341-343


This paper provides a simple and systematic design method of reduced-order observers without internal delays for systems having a time delay in the state variables. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of these observers are given.


A 'democratic' load sharing principle is used to generate information on the state of each of the rectifiers paralleled in a DC telecommunications power plant. Failures of individual rectifiers can be recognized and certain appropriate measures can be taken without intervention of the supervision unit. This improves the overall reliability, simplifies the rectifier interface, and reduces the number of the tasks to be executed by the supervision unit. The proposed distribution of the system features between the rectifiers and the supervision unit enhances the efficiency of the system monitoring and control. Some system features which are being specified by certain users are discussed and shown to be obsolete. Their elimination contributes to an improved cost/performance ratio.<<ETX>>


This essay describes language practices in a 16th Century colonial Yucatecan Mayan text to cure smallpox, included in the Ritual de los Bacabes (Bacabes Ritual) by Joan Canul. The textual characterization involves the dialogical nature of the spell, performed in the different roles assumed by the healer or magician priest when interacting with his interlocutors, mainly, the deities and spirits related to the creation and healing of smallpox, and the bacabes, who hold the sky. The analysis includes multiple meanings in symbolic and contextual perspectives. The Mayan ritual exhibits evidence of oral tradition and reading practices from ancient codex texts. Language ritual resources include lexical, semantic, discursive, and stylistic manifestations to achieve certain communicative intentionality. In these ritual documents, it is possible to appreciate the transmission of spoken tradition to the alphabetic written texts in practices involved to cure a variety of physical and emotional illnesses in the colonial Mayan culture.


The aim of the study on the development conditions for extraction of a series of three-part herbs, Bidens tripartita L., Solidago canadensis L. and Agrimonia eupatoria L. herbs in the technology of dry extracts. The influence of factors on the process of extraction of activety substances of a series of three-part herbs, Bidens tripartita L., Solidago canadensis L. and Agrimonia eupatoria L. have been studied. Features are studied and regularities of extraction of Bidenst ripartita L., Solidago canadensis L. and Agrimonia eupatoria L. herbs.


According to the traditional account, only a few migratory Lapps were living in the forests of Eastern Finland during the Middle Ages, with peasants from the southern and western agricultural areas visiting the area during summers. They maintained small-scale cultivation, hunting and fishing. Each autumn they transported the harvest to their permanent living places in the south. This so-called "eramark" theory or wilderness economy model has been firmly established in the scholarly literature (Register pa Eramarker 61–85; Gissel et al. 1981: 132–135; Taavitsainen 1994: 196, 200–203; Taavitsainen 1999: 310–313; Taavitsainen 2004: 47–48; Taavitsainen et al. 2007: 95–102; Bjorn 1999: 39–40; Maki 2004: 138). Over the last thirty years palaeoecologists have discovered in lake sediments the remains of small-scale medieval cultivation throughout the eastern Finnish and Karelian forest areas, but the quantity of the cultivation increases considerably only in the 16th century. The most recent and sensational finds are from Repovesi and Kuittijarvi (Vuonninen). The first offers proof of a largescale and permanent human impact after the Viking age in a wilderness traditionally considered to have been unpopulated. The second indicates that the entire East Fennoscandian area was well-populated, because it is so far to the north (Vuorela-Hicks 1996: 245–257; Gronlund 1995: 6–36; Alenius et al. 2006: 164–165; Alenius 2007: 11–12; Alenius et al. 2005: 19–21; Saarnisto-Alenius [in print], cf. Korpela 2008: 118–119). The results have been explained within the framework of the colonization and wilderness economy model: small-scale cultivation was part of the seasonal hunting and fishing culture, and the strong expansion of agriculture in the 16th century matches the new colonization and the large size of the new population, which was recorded in the contemporary tax rolls. Marek Zvelebil and Paul Dolukhanov call the transition from nomadism to farming "a revolutionary development that provides the basis of civilization throughout the world" (Zvelebil–Dolukhanov 1991: 233–278).


ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Xiangchuan Wang is first author on 'Cortical recruitment of centralspindlin and RhoA effectors during meiosis I of Caenorhabditis elegans primary spermatocytes', published in JCS. Xiangchuan is a Senior Research Scholar in the lab of Yu Chung Tse at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, P.R. China, investigating the generation of diversified gametes.


Communication for development is a comparatively new field that offers new tools and techniques to support inclusive and informed decisions in the planning and management of large water and energy infrastructure projects, including dams. Rethinking the approach to communication on dam projects is also timely in today's policy context. A window of opportunity has opened to tie in governance reform (including fighting corruption), poverty reduction, and communication with today's challenges in sustainable infrastructure development. Progress on any one of these aspects requires effective communication with stakeholders and interests. This handbook aims to help foster a 'communication culture' that will accommodate the wide range of stakeholder interests in dam planning and management in ways appropriate to the development context of today and the need to promote solutions to sustainability challenges. It seeks to create awareness among practitioners of the benefits and costs of improving the role of communication in infrastructure development. It also demonstrates how communication helps to improve governments' capacities to address corruption issues in infrastructure. Finally, this handbook is aimed at building the capacity of project teams and government officials to effectively adopt and adapt modern communication principles and tools to cover all stages of the dam project cycle.


[Abstract] The research presents a routing protocol for exchange of routing information among vastly spread routers in space which may also be in continuous motion. We call it Space OSPF. The proposed protocol uses trajectories of spacecrafts and supports calculation of approximated optimum path routing tables ahead of time or on-demand withstanding topological changes due to continuous motion. Since the trajectories of spacecrafts are either predictable (e.g., satellite constellation orbiting a planet), preset (e.g., Space Station), or set on demand (e.g., a space shuttle), the suggested routing protocol enables routers on board those spacecrafts to calculates the time intervals where spacecrafts are in direct view with each other and expected delay. Additionally, this protocol divides the routing domain (e.g., our solar system) into hierarchical routing areas. The hierarchical area provides necessary localization to efficiently and orderly distribute routing information throughout the vast space routing domain. The proposed protocol is suitable for building a space communication infrastructure and provides support for intermittent pathways. The paper presents the principal elements of this protocol along with its stability analysis.


To discuss the supervisory mode of hyperbaric oxygen medical quality controlled by,the supervisory practices were discussed in the last 16 years were analyses of hyperbaric oxygen medical quality control council of Nanjing Public Health Bureau,and then the problems were analyzed in the practices as there was of no administrative power or lower supervisory quality and poor supervisory efficiency in the supervisory mode of single constituent hyperbaric oxygen medical specialists and the joint administrative constituents of several government departments is a appropriate supervisory mode for hyperbaric oxygen medical quality control council to carry out its responsibility.


A seasonal circulation patterns in the Chinju Bay (CB) were suggested from the observed data at two channels of the Noryang Channel (NC) and the Daebang Channel (DC) during the period from 2005 to 2008. The water circulation in the CB is mainly controlled through the NC and the DC. In winter, tidal current at the surface layer of the NC flows from the Kwangyang Bay (KB) eastward into the CB, whereas the current at the bottom layer flows from the CB westward into the KB. In summer, tidal current at the surface layer of the NC goes from the CB westward into the KB. The flow system at the NC shows the typical pattern of thermohaline circulation. In spring, tidal current at the surface layer of the eastern part of the DC flows out into southeastern open ocean. However, in summer, the current in the western part of the DC flows into the CB through the DC. Also, the velocity in the western part of DC is 50~70 cm/sec stronger than that in the eastern part. To obtain better understanding on the seasonal circulation pattern in the NC and the DC, additionally the detailed studies on the field measurements and three dimensional numerical modeling are needed.


topic and popular method in the area of security. Face recognition is a system to identify the image from the database. In this paper we present face recognition using hybrid radial basis function for low dimensional feature extract ion system that takes an image as the input query and retrieves images based on image content. Face recognition system is recognizing based on dimensionality reduction derived image features. In this paper we proposed hybrid radial basis function which contains PCA, KPCA and neural network method based on radial basis function. This proposed method gives high retrieval efficiency and low recognition time as compared to existing techniques using ORL and YALE database.


This paper provides the route of hierarchical connotation and numerical extension in credit-file regulation and forming rule,sets up new method of construction market credit regulation appraisal,expounds its theory foundation, introduces grey handling technology line and process, gives an example of Xiamen to verify the feasibility and effectiveness, and produces relevant tactics of regulation design.


Discusses the legal and methodological bases of the organization and conduct of training senior pedagogical staff workers of educational institutions of the Voronezh region. Examines the concept of efficiency in the context of training senior teaching staff and the role of the content of training in this issue. Reveal the essential special feature of the content of training senior and pedagogical chemical workers educational institutions and developed new education-educational programs of additional professional education as a tool of modernization of educational process and development of the set of the model of cooperation of educational institutions.


A compact laser Doppler flowmeter (35x80x210mm3) for the measurement of subfoveal choroidal blood flow parameters (ChBF) was mounted on a helmet. This device allows the measurement of ChBF during dynamic exercises or in supine position, without the need for pupil dilatation. Its optical system is based on a Schlieren arrangement by which the surface of light collection and that of the illumination are spatially separated by an obscuration. The laser probing beam ((lambda) equals 790 nm, 100 (mu) W at the cornea) is focused at the fovea by having the tested subject look directly at the beam. Computer analysis of the photocurrent produced by the scattered light provides a relative measure of the mean blood velocity, number and flux of the red blood cells in the choriocapillaris. Measurements were performed to assess the reliability of the flow parameters measurements in normal volunteers: reproducibility and sensibility when subjects are sitting or standing; measurement of changes in ChBF in the case of isometric and dynamic exercises. Results demonstrate that this new helmet-mounted device provides data comparable to the conventional device. It allows for the first time, however, the continuous measurement of choroidal hemodynamics in humans during various types of exercises.


During the operational phase of the expressway, a significant challenge arises concerning substantial differential settlement in the transition zone connecting the culvert and the general subgrade, affecting its smoothness. In order to address the issue of abrupt stiffness variations within the transition section and to mitigate the occurrence of differential settlement, a gradient pile–reinforced-concrete slab composite foundation was implemented for the first time within an expressway culvert–subgrade transition section. At the same time, an in situ vibration test was conducted through the SBZ30 vibration exciter to comprehensively understand the vertical dynamic responses in the culvert–subgrade transition section under various axle loads and speed conditions. Furthermore, continuous monitoring was conducted to track the long-term settlement of the roadbed. The findings indicate that the utilization of gradient pile–reinforced-concrete slab composite foundations can significantly mitigate the amplitude of the dynamic response parameters. Moreover, dynamic parameters and attenuation coefficients exhibit a gradual reduction as the depth increases. Dynamic stresses, acceleration, and displacements on the roadbed surface exhibited positive correlations with both the axle weight and vehicle speed. However, at deeper depths, the load weight exerted a more pronounced influence. As the speed rose, acceleration decayed faster, affecting a shallower depth. Conversely, the increased load slowed the acceleration decay. The cumulative deformation of the roadbed and the number of excitations followed exponential function characteristics. Settlement values progressively increased while the settlement rate gradually diminished, eventually reaching a stable state, ultimately stabilizing within 4.7 mm. These research outcomes offer valuable guidance and serve as a reference for the implementation of gradient pile–reinforced-concrete slab composite foundations within the culvert–subgrade transition section.


Iron oxide and gold-based magneto-plasmonic nanostructures exhibit remarkable optical and superparamagnetic properties originating from their two different components. As a consequence, they have improved and broadened the application potential of nanomaterials in medicine. They can be used as multifunctional nanoprobes for magneto-plasmonic heating as well as for magnetic and optical imaging. They can also be used for magnetically assisted optical biosensing, to detect extreme traces of targeted bioanalytes. This review introduces the previous work on magneto-plasmonic hetero-nanostructures including: (i) their synthesis from simple "one-step" to complex "multi-step" routes, including seed-mediated and non-seed-mediated methods; and (ii) the characterization of their multifunctional features, with a special emphasis on the relationships between their synthesis conditions, their structures and their properties. It also focuses on the most important progress made with regard to their use in nanomedicine, keeping in mind the same aim, the correlation between their morphology—namely spherical and non-spherical, core-satellite and core-shell, and the desired applications.


A power quality evaluation method combining extenics and AHP(Analytic Hierarchy Process) is presented.Three matter-element models are set based on power quality analysis using matter-element theory of extenics,and quantified to form relationship matrix using relation-function theory of extenics.The target weights are figured out using AHP.The final quantitative grade of the power quality is calculated based on relation-matrix and target weights.The power quality level of synthetic evaluation is obtained by combining the relationship matrix and the target weights.As an example,the power quality of PCC(the Point of Common Coupling) is evaluated,which shows that,the proposed method can evaluate power quality quantitatively and qualitatively and distinguishes different power quality levels effectively.


Conclusions 1. Hepatic uptake, clearance of radioactivity from blood, and excretion of radioactivity into urine and feces of patients with liver disease differ signficantly from similar determinations in controls.


Abstract Mapping of carbonatites and related mineral deposits has occupied prominent place in mineral resource exploration programs given their potential to host valuable concentrations of critical metals such as rare earth elements and niobium. Based on spectral characteristics of most indicative minerals for these rocks, a mapping approach was developed using Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data. The combination of band rationing outcomes with components from the principal component analysis and minimum noise fraction techniques highlighted the targeted rocks, with the excellent prospective zone representing ∼ 0.2% of the total investigated area. This approach was successfully applied to the Gleibat Lafhouda complex to rapidly delineate carbonatites and iron oxide-apatite ore outcrops. Results were validated through field observations and in-situ geochemical analysis using a portable X-ray fluorescence analyzer. Field data have also served as training data to perform a supervised classification, allowing further improvement of the mapping results.


Urban technical innovation is very important to the growth of its economy.This article analyzes the necessity to finance and the financial policy tool for city technology innovation characteristics which appear in city technology innovation and then analyses the problems of our country cities at present and the selection from these tools,trying to put forward several proposals for government.


With the exploration and the practice for several years,the national characteristic specialty of geography in Anhui Normal University has formed a dual tutors system under the cooperation of university teachers and school teachers on the way to cultivate normal students.According to the idea of optimizing resources,improving understanding,both tutors have a common aim of cultivating a type of teachers of H with a unity of knowledge and practice.Through cooperative cultivation,cooperative teaching,cooperative practice,cooperative evaluation,now we have formed a cooperation mechanism which takes seven "one"s the project as the foundation,and promotes the professional development of normal students,school teachers and university teachers.By ways of learning,literature and art,policies and so on,the dual tutors system is on its way to deepen cultures interaction between universities and schools.


Field experiment entitled "bioefficacy of pyrazosulfuron and bensulfuron methyl in combination with pretilachlor against weeds in transplanted rice under Kashmir conditions" was conducted at Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops, Sher-eKashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir during kharif 2014 and 2015. The experiment comprised of six treatments (W1:Pretilachlor+Bensulfuron methyl, W2:Pretilachlor+ pyrazosulfuron, W3:Butachlor, W4:Hand weeding twice (15 and 30 DAT), W5 :Weed free and W6:Weedy check) replicated four times in a randomized block design. The results revealed that application of Pretilachlor+Bensulfuron methyl, on an average caused a reduction of 7.44 and 79 per cent in weed population as compared to butachlor and weedy check, respectively. Pretilachlor+pyrazosulfuron application also proved effective in controlling the weeds and reduced their density by 10.25 per cent compared to commonly used butachlor. Among the tested herbicides, lowest weed dry matter of 9.45 (3.22) g m-2 was recorded with Pretilachlor+pyrazosulfuron application. Application of Pretilachlor+Bensulfuron methyl exhibited a superiority of 11.09 per cent in reducing the dry weight of weeds as compared to Butachlor and the corresponding figure for Pretilachlor+pyrazosulfuron was 17.06 per cent. Combination application of Pretilachlor+pyrazosulfuron recorded considerably higher grain yield (7.27 t ha-1) than butachlor (6.74 t ha-1) and weedy check (4.17 t ha-1). The superiority exhibited by Pretilachlor+pyrazosulfuron over butachlor was 7.35 and 7.76 per cent during 2014 and 2015, respectively.


Parenthood of people with intellectual disability is still a controversial issue but cannot be avoided because many of them want to have families and be parents. Altogether with introducing the idea of normalization, integration and empowerment they strive more and more intensively for their right to "normal" life. The main doubt is if they can be good parents. Previously the opinion was that intellectual disability makes it impossible and that their children are always in danger of poorer environment, neglect of their needs or abuse. Now factors influencing parenthood abilities are better identified. They are: socio-economic status, family functioning, parents' physical and mental health, child characteristics, social factors and others. Nowadays the main question is not if people with intellectual disability can be parents but how to support them to be good parents.


As a professional field,the Student Affairs Administration in US experienced several modes,such as in loco parentis,student personnel work,student service,student development and so on.It takes the 'student-based' philosophy and purpose of management,adopts the one-strip mechanism of management,executes a service-based method,and builds a professional working team in Student Affairs.All those characteristics are very important for us to refer to improve our student affairs in China.


The authors wish to thank the AgMardt Trust for financial support of the modelling and risk
analysis through the Agribusiness Innovation Grant Scheme, grant number 20614, and the MAF
Sustainable Farming Fund, project number SF 06/120, Ravensdown Coop Ltd and Agriseeds Ltd
for financial support of the field trials.


Medicine and education are reciprocal systems in which education influences health care and overall health affects schooling and academic performance. There is a large extant literature describing collaboration between these systems and professionals within these systems for the benefit of children. However, both medical and educational systems are undergoing revolutionary systemic reform. The result is that the nature of collaboration between medical and educational collaboration is changing. Therefore, the models and descriptions of interprofessional collaboration require change. This special issue represents a transitional discussion of models, illustrations, and training approaches to effective medical and educational collaboration. Nearly 18% of school-age children have one or more chronic health conditions and 7% of those have significant functional limitations as a result (Farmer, Clark, & Marien, 2003). Medical issues have a profound effect on children's academic achievement and social development (Bradley-Klug, Grier, & Ax, 2006; Thies, 1999). One of the most effective strategies for prevention and intervention with a host of pediatric medical issues is working with the child's school (Bowman, 2001; Brown & Bolen, 2003). It has long been noted, however, that it takes the coordinated efforts of both educational personnel and health care practitioners to successfully tackle the medical, academic, and mental health needs of children and their families (Zins & Wagner, 1997). The reciprocal relationship between health care service


Urinary neurotransmitter testing is the preferred method of assessing nervous system function due to its stability and sensitivity. Neurotransmitters in the urine can be applied to clinical practice to evaluate nervous system function and monitor treatment efficacy. Historically, urinary neurotransmitters have been utilized to diagnose pheochromocytoma, but more recent research shows this testing may be valuable in assessing psychiatric and inflammatory disorders.


We show that uracil DNA glycosylase from E. coli excises uracil residues from the ends of double stranded oligos. This information has allowed us to develop an efficient method of cloning PCR amplified DNA. In this report, we describe use of this method in cloning of E. coli genes for lysyl- and methionyl-tRNA synthetases. Efficiency of cloning by this method was found to be the same as that of subcloning of DNA restriction fragments from one vector to the other vector. Possibilities of using other DNA glycosylases for such applications are discussed.