Gemma culture and protonema growth of Barbula indica (Hook.) Spreng in response to meliorative knop, authors study the whole process and take photoes. The results show that its gemma germinates after 3~4 days;10 days later, chloronemata, caulonemata and rhizoides begin to differentiate; 18 days, the branch top cells of caulonemata differentiate into unicellular or multicellular gemmas; Nearly 40 days, bud primordium appears on caulonemata and develops into callow gametophyte. In the end of this paper, the characteristics of gemma development, and phyoiological ecology and gametophyte formation are analysed and discussed.


Researches on the preparation of several polytetrafluroethylene(PTFE)functional fibers and N-isopropylacrylamide(NIPA)grafted chitosan via the radiation grafting have been described which were developed in the authors'laboratory in recent years.It is found that the radiation grafted functional materials have special properties.(1)The acrylic acid grafted PTFE fiber showed stronger acidity than the carboxylic acid grafted one,of which the carboxylic content was 3.07 mmol/g determined by the titration experiments.It showed excellent adsorption,desorption and separation properties for Cu 2+,Pb 2+ and La 3+.The highest adsorption capacity for Cu 2+,Pb 2+ and La 3+ was 107.48,246.41,150.20 mg/g respectively,when pH was 5.(2)Hammett superacid indicators were used to estimate the superacidity of PTFE-g-ST-SO_3H fibers with different degree of grafting.The results showed that the acidity of PTFE-g-St-SO_3H fiber was stronger than 100% H_2SO_4 when the grafting degree was 21.7%.The relative catalytic activity of PTFE-St-SO_3H fiber as a polymer superacid catalyst was higher than that of macroporous sulphonated resin in esterification,and it can be used repeatedly.(3)The NIPA grafted chitosan showed good thermo and pH activity,it had the potential use in drug releasing and other areas.


Introduction: Treatment of mild to moderate hypokalemia is a high potassium-containing diet and oral pharmaceutical potassium products. However, several medical centers in Iran use injectable dosage forms orally, which is not a confirmed method by reliable guidelines. Objectives: This study investigated the advantages and side effects of oral tablets versus injection vials of potassium chloride orally. Patients and Methods: This descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was performed from March 2022 to June 2022. Thirty patients received tablets ("potassium chloride tablet" group), and thirty patients received injection vials ("potassium chloride vials orally" group) of potassium chloride orally. The variables, including age, gender, clinical side effects, and serum level of potassium, were regularly recorded. Results: The mean duration of serum potassium normalization was 42.00 hours for the "potassium chloride tablet" group and 84.57 hours for the "potassium chloride vials orally" group. The mean total potassium intake was 127.20 mEq/L in the "potassium chloride tablet" group and 280.03 mEq/L for the "potassium chloride vials orally" group. No significant difference was observed in gastrointestinal complications, including esophagitis, bloating, stomach ache, and nausea. None of the patients have required endoscopy due to esophagitis. Conclusion: Our result suggested that prescribing oral potassium chloride tablets has superior benefits over injection vials. However, more detailed research is needed to reveal the other aspects of this problem. Study Registration: This study was retrospectively registered in Research Registry UIN (UIN: reviewregistry1668).


Purpose: Eye movement in intermittent exotropia (IXT) patients is characterized by viability and uncertainty, however, conventional strabismus inspection methods cannot reflect these important qualities. Here, we sought to study the ocular motor behavior of IXT under different viewing conditions by eye tracker.Methods: Sixty-one IXT patients (33 males and 28 females) and 15 age-matched control participants were recruited for this study. An eye tracker equipped with a high-speed camera and MATLAB software was employed to monitor and record eye movement as well as eye position in included subjects with 3D shutter glasses at a normal reading distance (57 cm).Results: By using an eye tracker, our data showed that 90% of the included IXT patients lost their control and showed exotropia in 1.5±2.1s. The average deviation degree measured by the eye tracker was 32.9±11.5△, ranging from 6 to 50△, and reached its maximum deviation degree at 36.9±12.4△, with a mean time of 2±1.5s. Although a significant difference exists in the strabismus quantification between the prism test and the eye tracker, the test results obtained from these two methods were positively correlated. Moreover, by using the eye tracker, the fixation instability of IXT patients could be easily recorded and analyzed. In addition, the included IXT patients were divided into three types according to their ocular motor behavior as monitored by an eye tracker.Conclusion: Eye trackers could not only provide continuous, precise and effective strabismus assessments but also analyze ocular motor behavior over a period of time in IXT patients.


ABSTRACT BACKGROUND: We evaluated the results of urgent intralesional bleomycin injection (IBI) treatment of intra-abdominal lymphangiomas (IAL) presenting with acute abdomen in children. METHODS: The records of patients who underwent urgent IBI due to acutely presenting IAL between January 2013 and January 2020 were reviewed retrospectively in terms of age, presenting symptoms, cyst type, number of injections, pre- and post-treatment cyst volume, clinical response, complications, and follow-up. RESULTS: Six patients with a mean age of 4.3 years (2–13 years) were treated. Presenting symptoms were acute abdominal pain (n=4), abdominal distention (n=1), hypoproteinemia and chylous ascites (n=1). Lesions were of macrocystic type in four and macro and micro cystic in two patients. The median number of injections performed was 2 (1–11). Mean cyst volume reduced dramatically from 567 cm3 (range 117–1656) to 3.4 cm3 (range 0–13.8) after treatment (p=0.028). Treatment response was excellent in four patients with complete resolution of the cysts, while good in the remaining two. No early or late complications or recurrence was observed in a mean follow-up period of 40 months (16–56 months). CONCLUSION: IBI is a safe, fast, and easily applicable method with satisfactory results in the treatment of acutely presenting IAL. It may be recommended in primary as well as recurrent lesions.


This essay's main goal is to promote reflections and analysis that may be established between education and labor, considering both of them in the neoliberal context. It aims to cover the school daily routine through bibliographical research that discusses these themes. The theoretical references studied indicate control, regulation, teacher proletarianization and teaching devaluation are the most common elements in teachers' lives, which frequently cause them various diseases. Nevertheless, the bibliographical research shows a resistance movement by teachers who do not accept these conditions and suffer silently because of these patterns. It is, then, a bibliographical and qualitative revision about education and labor, inserting itself on the education and educational politics research field.


Digital images are subject to various kinds of distortions that may result in a degradation of visual quality during acquisition, processing, compression, storage, transmission and reproduction. It is therefore necessary for many applications to be able to quantify the image quality degradation that occurs in a system, so that it is possible to control and enhance the quality of the images it produces. In this context the goal of objective image quality assessment is to design a quality measure based on the human vision model that can predict the perceived image quality automatically. The objective measure should give a numerical value quantifying the dissatisfaction of a typical human viewer when observing the reproduced image in place of the original. Despite the existence of several studies on human perception of image quality, only few works [1] can be found in the scientific literature dealing with the quality assessment of geometrically distorted images and the limitation of the metrics proposed so far is that they just rely on the displacement field defining the distortion without taking into account the characteristics of the images. This is a relevant problem since the same distortion applied to two different images can result in a different perceived image quality. After a description of the problem of the assessment of geometric distortions in images and a review of the solutions proposed so far in the literature, we introduce an objective quality metric for geometrically distorted images, which has a good correspondence to the human perception of the distortions. The basic idea of our approach is the following. It is well known that the main function of the HVS when looking at an image is to extract structural information from the viewing field [2], therefore a measurement of structural distortions should be a good approximation of perceived image distortion, since the more distortion affects the structure of the objects in the visual scene, the more the corresponding degradation is visible and annoying. Human vision is sensitive to bars and edges, for this reason structures of objects in images are typically outlined by edges and bars. Hence, we expect that a measure that links the displacement field describing the distortion with the presence of edges and bars in the image is likely to provide ad adequate measure. We decided to use Gabor filters to extract bar and edges information from the images and to use these features to evaluate …


Interstitial lung disease is one of the main treat to the health .Computer Tomography is used for assessment of interstitial lung disease .But sometimes it is difficult to visually interpret because of the crossing and overlapping of the vessels in the CT. There a vessel segmentation techniques is used for detecting lung disease Different techniques is available for lung segmentation for diagnosing lung disease. Vessel tree extraction is one of the challenging technique for several years and it is under open research. Automatic segmentation of vessel tree is one of the most important requirement for Computer Aided Diagnosis(CAD).In this paper we investigate lung vessel extraction and enhancement technique and present the capabilities of most important algorithms concerning lung vessel segmentation. Introduction .Lung disease is one of the leading cause of death. Some evidence suggest that early detection of lung disease may allow for timely therapeutic intervention which in turn result in a more favorable prognosis of the patients. Correct assessment especially accurate visualization and quantification of blood vessels, bronchi and all the tissues in lungs play an significant role in the detection of interstitial lung disease and other lung disease .But now adays the detection of lung disease is done by radiologist by using their naked eye to visualize the CT scan. But it is very difficult to distinguish the reticular pattern and ILD patterns in the lungs by using the naked eye. In clinical practice it is of great importance to be able to characterize the vascular tree for the detections of pulmonary emboli,pulmonary hypertension etc But it has found to be present to be an impossible task due to the following reason. (i) It is difficult to determine boundaries of a vessel consistently, especially thin segments due to the partial volume effects and image noise (ii)Volumetric lung scans of the adult human consist of more than 500 slices and the vascular tree in a bipodial fashion, rapidly branch as one tracks the vessels from their central to peripheral locations, with the full tree structure consisting of more than 23 generations So a computerized diagnosis is essential for detecting the lung disease. Computer aided diagnosis(CAD)scheme for Multi Detector Computer Tomography are widely used to characterize quantify and detect numerous lung abnormalities..The aim of CAD system is to increase radiologist confidence and identify the extent and characterization of the type of present disease pattern.It can be used to detect numerous lung abnormalities such as focal abnormalities,pulmonary embolism etc. So identifying vessel segments and diagnosing the lung disease is a major task .Another problem is the structure of the blood vessel. There will be thin segments and they are in low intensity. So enhancement of vessel is essential before segmentation .So the main steps in CAD system is vessel enhancement and segmentation of lung and vessels .Here an survey of different vessel segmentation techniques are done. JishaKrishnan et al./ International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Technology (IJCSET) ISSN : 2229-3345 Vol. 4 No. 05 May 2013 616 FIG (i) Similarity of reticular pattern (blue arrow)and vessel segments(white arrow) IU3.LUNG SEGMENTATION Before segmenting the vessels and nodule in the lungs the lung should be segmented. This is to extact lungs from fats ,muscles etc. The lung is surrounded by air walls and air sacs. So for segmenting the blood vessels it is essential to segment the lungs. Here describe different lung segmentation methods In the algorithm proposed by Wang et al [6]several preprocessing are done.The preprocessing step include identify and estimates airways in each CT slice. A CT thresholding techniques[16] is used for intial lung estimate that include normal and mildly abnormal lung parenchyma .By the elimination of airways the tranchea , bronchi as well as some unwanted region were identified as airways.Here the method used is the trachea is identified on the seed point and traced the entire airways from an upper slice to a lower slice through the CT scan .The segmented airways were then removed from the CT images to prevent interference in lung segmentation. After removing airways from the CT images the next step is to estimation of initial lungs. A CT thresholding techniques is used[ 16].A 3D binary lung mask[6 ] is generated when the threshold was applied to the CT image.To remove the unwanted pixels apply a 2D connected component labeling algorithm[ 6]. This algorithm help to identify whether the two lungs connected or not. The next step of lung segmentation is to identification of abnormal lung regions. The severe ILD pattern have rich texture compared to surrounding soft tissue. Such texture information can be used to identify the abnormal lung regions. A 3D cooccurance matrix is employed to analyze the texture features of all pixels. The next step is postprocessing for filling the holes in the lungs. The holes were automatically identified and filled by 2D connected component labeling technique in each CT slice. The method proposed by Kortifias et al mentions about lung field segmentation. It is done by two stage 3D LF segmentation technique[5]. Here a 3D histogram thresholding[12] lung field segmentation combined with edge highlighting wavelet preprocessing [12] step is done. By 3D histogram thresholding the lung can be divided into two segments ,normal lung parenchyma as one segment and fat ,muscle as other segment which is treated as backgroundsegment.Here edge highlightibg is done to reduce the noise in the CT scan. In the method proposed by Kaftran et al lung [2]segmentation is done by region growing from a seed point is selected inside trachea. To remove the trachea and major airways from the lung mask a region growing process with adaptive threshold is started from the trachea seed. In the algorithm proposed by Fieng Li et al 3D image processing and analysis techniques, trilinear interpolation technique [19] is employed.Here a thresholding technique is used to separate the lung region from other regions and background outside the body for each of the CT section .To include all jextapleural objects inside the lung region a starting point is considered ,scan counter clockwise all points on the entire contour one by one and find a point B with the condition [12] (1) The distance between point A and B is less than 3 30mm . (2) all the pixels is on astraight line AAB connecting p points 'A' and 'B'. In the method proposed by shikata et al lung segmentation based on intensity thresholding [3] and 3D labeling is employed. The lung segmentation requires three seed points. They should be located in the left lung,, right lung and trachea. Both left and right lung are extracted by simple thresholding with a fixed value and 3Dlabelling with two seed points in the lungs JishaKrishnan et al./ International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Technology (IJCSET) ISSN : 2229-3345 Vol. 4 No. 05 May 2013 617 Fig 2 Lung segmentation 3.VESSELENHANCEMENT Before segmenting the vessel it is necessary to enhance the vessel to distinguish different tube like structures,blob like structure and the blood vessels. In the algorithm proposed by zhou et al[1] Multiscale 3D filters[21] are used to enhance local structures such as tissue boundaries ,cortices,vessels and nodules.Here a new filter is designed to enhance all vascular structures by using the eigenvalues of the hessian matrix.In conventional multiscale 3D filter they are limited to specific structures of interest and their filter response functions are defined explicitly. Based on the characteristics of their eigenvalues of the hessian matrix a new multiscale response function R(r̅, бs ,λ1, λ2,λ3 R(r̅ ; бs ; λ ) [1 ] is used .So all vascular structure including vessel bifurcation and to suppress non vessel structure such as the lymphoid tissue surrounding the vessel can be found by[1] 1 ,λ2,λ3 ) = � (( λ1|+ λ2|) 2 exp(−| λ1 √λ1+λ2+ − c|), λ1, λ2, λ3 < 0 0 otherwise �Where λ1 ,λ2,λ3 are hessian eigen values at voxel r̅=(x,y,z) in a 3D image .бs is the standard deviation of the Gaussian kernel at scale s and c is the constant.The constant c plays an important role in enhancement of both the tubular and the blob-like structures. The response RC Rc= 2|λ1| 2 exp�− � |λ1| �2λ1 − c�� = α|λ1| of tubular structures can be approximated as Fig 3: An ideal tubular structure and itseigenvectors Schuldause et al [4]proposed an vessel enhancement technique by the selection of vessel branches that will be segmented This selection is done by the placement of manual seed points along the vessel branches A local adaptive contrast enhancement[4] is used to properly handle the inhomogenous distribution of the contrast agent within the vessel region .Here the idea is to place small overlying boxes along the vessel centerline and perform an intensity mapping of the pixel intensities with each box taking the lower pixel value of a overlying region .A hessian matrix is computed at each centerline point to get the two eigen vectors and eigenvalues which define the orientation of the box. According to kaftran et al [2]a threshold based approach is used to segment the core pulmonary vascular tree.A lower threshold T2 is applied and resulting components smaller than a minimum volume Vmin In kortifiates et al[5] in his work,a multiscale enhancement filter[21] is used for segmentation and visualization of curvilinear structure such as vessels in CT of the lung. The filter is based on eigen value analysis of the hessian matrix to capture characteristics of 3D tubular structure associated to the vessel tree .Original images are convolved with gaussian kernals of varying standard deviation enhancing local structure of specific sizes. in size are eliminated[2]. Each component is reduced to one or more seed point by identifying local minima in a distant transformed image


Aim  To assess spatial relationships between avian community similarity and level of urbanization. We tested the following hypotheses for taxonomic similarity: Hypothesis A – the decline in taxonomic similarity with distance is stronger for the least urbanized locations compared to the most urbanized locations; Hypothesis B – the converse of Hypothesis A; and Hypothesis C – the decline in taxonomic similarity with distance is stronger for the most and least urbanized locations compared to locations with intermediate levels of urbanization. We also determined if increasing urbanization led to increased functional similarity within bird communities.


BACKGROUND
This study tested the hypothesis that the high incidence of ventricular arrhythmias caused by hypothalamic stimulation during acute myocardial ischemia could be attenuated by afferent nerve stimulation and investigated the cardiac mechanisms for those effects.

METHODS AND RESULTS
In 18 anesthetized dogs, stimulating electrodes were implanted in the hypothalamus and in the isolated left peroneal nerve. The chest was opened and approximately 100 plunge needles were inserted into the ventricles for 3-D activation mapping. Each animal underwent 4 episodes of 2.5 minutes of acute myocardial ischemia. The first and fourth episodes served as controls. During the second and third episodes, animals received either hypothalamic stimulation, peroneal nerve stimulation, or both. Hypothalamic stimulation significantly increased the incidence of ventricular arrhythmias. This high incidence was reduced 34% by simultaneous stimulation of the hypothalamus and peroneal nerve. 3-D mapping showed a focal origin for all ventricular arrhythmias. Hypothalamic stimulation increased the number of arrhythmic beats and decreased the coupling interval between each arrhythmic beat and the preceding beat. These effects were reduced by peroneal nerve stimulation.

CONCLUSIONS
Alteration in autonomic tone by hypothalamic stimulation causes a high incidence of ventricular arrhythmias during acute myocardial ischemia that can be decreased by afferent nerve stimulation.


Small radio telescope in 21cm was used for studying the partial solar eclipse, with magnitude 0.89, in Hong Kong on 21st June, 2020. The radio telescope SPIDER 300A was designed and constructed by the Radio2Space Company, Italy. Radio flux density time curves (light curve) and a two-dimension mapping of the eclipse is presented in this paper. Standard radio data reduction methods were used to obtain the intensity time curve. We also adopted the semi-pipeline method for the reduction of data to obtain the same results as with the built-in software of the radio telescope SPIDER 300A. The total solar radio flux of the eclipse was found to reduce by maximum 55 +/- 5 percent, while the maximum eclipsed area of the same eclipse is 86.08%. Other radio observations of solar eclipses in Hong Kong are also discussed in this paper, including SPIDER 300A observation of partial solar eclipse on 26th December 2019 (APPENDIX A); and small radio telescope (SRT), developed by the Haystack Observatory, MIT, USA, observation of 2020 eclipse (APPENDIX B).


Marc Maegele* and Qiaobing Huang‡§jj *Department for Trauma and Orthopedic Surgery, Cologne-Merheim Medical Center (CMMC), University Witten/Herdecke (UW/H), Köln, Germany; Institute for Research in Operative Medicine (IFOM), University Witten/Herdecke (UW/H), Campus Cologne-Merheim, Köln, Germany; Flexible Recruitment Program of Foreign Talents, 3rd Affiliated Hospital/Southern Medical University (SMU), Treatment Center for Traumatic Injuries, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, P.R. China; Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Shock and Microcirculation, Department of Pathophysiology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, P.R. China; and jjTrauma Care Center, 3rd Affiliated Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, P.R. China


Introduction: This study evaluates the perceptions of preparedness and willingness to work during disasters and public health emergencies among 213 healthcare workers from 10 ministries of health hospitals in the southern region of Saudi Arabia, which is exposed to the risk of disasters such as flash floods in wadis, fires, sandstorms, armed conflicts at the border and ongoing waves of COVID-19 pandemic. Method: This study employed a quantitative research design by using a survey (Fight or Flight). Results: The results showed that participants' willingness to work unconditionally during disasters and emergencies varied based on the type of condition: natural disasters (61.97%), seasonal influenza pandemic (52.58%), smallpox pandemic (47.89%), SARS/COVID-19 pandemic (43.56%), special flu pandemic (36.15%), mass shooting (37.56%), chemical incident and bombing threats (31.92%), biological events (28.17%), Ebola outbreaks (27.7%), and nuclear incident (24.88%). Conclusion: Among several factors that determine healthcare workers' willingness to work during disasters and public health emergencies, appropriate knowledge and skills to confidently manage an incident and the assurance of their families' safety are two decisive factors. Although we could only find a significant correlation between education and willingness to work during emergencies, previous reports have confirmed a significant correlation between education, age, and years of experience and the perception of hazards and fear and consequently willingness to work under threatening circumstances. While unsuccessful management of disasters and emergencies may be the result of organizational shortcomings and resource scarcity, healthcare workers' lack of knowledge, skills, and confidence and emotional distractions due to uncertainty about their own safety and that of their families may also play a significant role. Besides educational initiatives, which increase staff members' confidence through knowledge acquisition and skill improvement, other measures, which guarantee their families' safety and well-being during an emergency, should be established and implemented.


The EU F-gas regulation of 2006 and the recast of 2014 are forcing the market to reduce the use of refrigerants with high global warming potential (GWP). As a result, the production of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants with higher GWP decreased, making the prices of all HFC gases to increase. Any maintenance problem in a refrigeration system asks to evaluate the retrofitting of the gas making necessary to know the expected behaviour of the system. This paper aims to discuss the gases that can substitute the now-a-days HFCs, and the impact the retrofit will cause in a real air-conditioning systems. Many studies on retrofit address the behaviour of the refrigeration cycle, but usually, do not take into account the behaviour of the system as a whole. This paper models a water-to-water air-conditioning system taking into consideration the evaporator and condenser heat exchangers, the refrigeration cycle, the air-conditioning loop and the heat exchanger to the acclimatized area. Moreover, the paper studies the performance of the system when subjected to high condensing temperatures. The paper concludes that all possible retrofit solutions need to use flammable gases that make the refrigeration power of the equipment to reduce.


This essay analyses the propaganda and campaign literature of one of the most prominent preservation groups in Britain – the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) – in the context of Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of unprecedented suburban expansion. It argues that rather than a reactionary group intent on rejecting the forces of modernization, the CPRE engaged with the unprecedented forces of suburban expansion in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, advocating a proactive approach based fundamentally on the need to plan housing expansion.


Background:  We set out to review the validity of tests for B type natriuretic peptide (BNP) and N‐terminal pro BNP (NTproBNP) in the diagnosis of clinical heart failure (HF) in primary care and hospital settings and to examine the effect of age. We also examined the accuracy of the test in population screening for left ventricular systolic dysfunction.


The presented work aims at developing a distributed verification tool for a generalized automata system. The verification is done by an exhaustive state-space exploration – a stream of linearly-organized system states is updated on each node of a computational cluster and handed over to the next node over a network. The automata system is proposed to be general enough to describe common automata-based formalisms used for describing interaction of software components. We also present results obtained with the proof-of-concept implementation. 1 Motivation and Problem Statement Model checking of software components is an approach to automatically verify selected aspects of component correctness. As software itself is very difficult to verify, abstracted models and constraint languages have been introduced. We focus on those models and languages, that are based on automata and interactions among them, such as the specification of the transition rules and component composition. In behavior protocols[1] these models and languages allow us to check rules and bounds on interface utilization, and even to check complex interactions in the entire component system based on a complete description of possible actions and reactions. The existing approaches to model-checking of complex software architectures are trying to overcome two major problems. One is the problem inherent to the complexity of the model – the number of states of a model tends to grow exponentially with the size of the model, leading to a situation where the model either does not fit into the available memory, or the time to visit the states of the model is too long. This is referred to as a state explosion. The other is the problem inherent to the complexity of the model-checking methods – the methods consist of complex algorithms that are often implemented as a proof of concept only, thus lacking the potential an optimized implementation would bring. One of the approaches to solve the state space explosion problem is distribution of the model checking algorithm. The typical method is dividing the state space into distinct parts[2], where each node checks only the assigned states and, if necessary, asks the other nodes to visit other reachable states as the model ⋆ This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) 201/05/H014. checking algorithm traverses the state space. The network latency and load becomes a bottleneck, giving rise to a hard problem of optimal state distribution. Moreover, due to random access to states, the state space cannot be effectively saved on mass storage devices. Our goal is to solve these problems, namely: – To develop an effective distributed verification tool based on exhaustive exploration of linearly-organized state space and error state reporting. We restrict the problem to systems that describe interactions among components, are based on Label Transition Systems (LTS), and have a finite number of states. Because of limitations on the model, we can use more powerful optimizations than similar systems based on complex formalisms (LTL, CTL, models with unlimited state space). – To design a formal model of component interaction should the existing models prove unsuitable. The model should be general enough to allow describing a majority of common constructs available on LTS and be suitable for effective automated verification. – To present the approaches to conversion from other formal models to the verified one and to show how to interpret the results. 2 Related Work and Model Analysis The related work discusses ADL-based approaches to modeling, the abstract modeling approaches based on automata, and the problem of model verification. The Wright Architectural Description Language[3] uses a process algebra (a subset of CSP) for defining component behavior. The tested property is called compatibility[4] and in short says that the connector interaction cannot detect that the role process has been replaced by the port process. Behavior protocols[1] (BP), embedded in SOFA[5], allow the simplification of the verification process by hierarchical decomposition of the architecture, starting with the smallest parts of the system and continuing in the bottom-up manner, thus reducing the internal complexity of composite components. BP allows identifying several composition errors, including no activity (deadlock) and bad activity. Furthermore, it defines compliance[6] as the relation of expected and real behavior. Interface automata[7] allow compatibility checks between interface models in optimistic view, i.e. components can be used together if there is at least one correct design. The composition is defined on two automata only, synchronizing on one input and one output action. Team automata[8] is a composition of component automata. The specified action is executed in the team by simultaneously executing the action in all component automata. There is no limitation for the number of states. Component-interaction automata[9] has been developed with respect to ADL and software components. The concept is similar to team automata; however there are differences the authors give reasons to be more suitable for software design. Although a large spectrum of formalisms has been mentioned and analyzed, none of them is both general enough and easy to verify. Thus, we have decided to propose a new model denoted later in the text as interference automata. It is close to team automata. Notably, interference automata are not limited to one type of synchronization (synchronous, asynchronous or blocking, non-blocking) nor a number of action participants (one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many). Having this in mind, the model can be outlined as a set of local automata, augmented by a set of transition rules and a set of alarms. A system state is a vector of states of all the local automata. A transition is a pair of starting and final state. For practical reasons, a range of starting and final states is allowed as well. Alarms describes states which are somehow "interesting" and its reachability should be reported (often it is related to erroneous states). The proposed model does not cover all the needs of the mentioned formal methods (for example, the unlimited number of states), but fits perfectly to our requirements. There are many verification tools (including SPIN[10] and DiVinE[11]) that aim mainly at checking LTL or CTL formula. SPIN uses the Depth First Search (DFS) to explore the state space and uses the operational memory as a state cache to prevent a re-exploration of previously visited states. Because a random access to data structures is required, external slow devices such as hard-disks cannot be used effectively. We believe that targeting simpler interaction protocols and relations among components allows for a more efficient verifier implementation. 3 Distributed Verification We face the need of storing a large amount of states via a special state space encoding. All properties (such as state-explored and state-to-be-explored) of reached states are stored sequentially in the order of the DFS traversal algorithm, creating a stream. Because a numeric value of the state can be computed from its position in the stream, it is omitted. This approach saves a significant amount of storage space. The stream can be passed across computational nodes organized in a logical circle, allowing all the nodes to work simultaneously on different parts of the stream and systematically updating the state space. Because of the linear access pattern, buffering on mass storage devices is possible with nearly zero-overhead. A drawback of this approach is the need to avoid random access to the stream. During the verification process, nodes access the states only sequentially and use their operational memory as a state cache and a state buffer. In the case of memory overflow, the node has to suspend the exploration, store the explored states from the state buffer, and thus free the sufficient amount of memory. Because forced flushing of the state buffer reduces verification effectivity, three basic techniques to reduce memory consumption are used. The first technique is a static optimization which affects each component of the system individually (automata minimalization). A dynamic optimization takes into account the interactions among automata, trying to identify unreachable system states and remove them from the model. This improves the state space compression. The third optimization is applied on-the-fly during the verification process. A coherent part of the explored state space with the same properties is replaced by a single cut-off superstate. We plan to prove the concept on a real-life project[12]. At present, a basic, single-node prototype without dynamic optimizations shows promising results. For instance, the average amount of explored states is about 5 millions states per second (sps) on a low-end desktop, compared to 180000 sps of the SPIN model checker. This will change as more optimizations will be included. On a testing example with 10 states, the overall memory requirements were 6 bits per state. Future work will focus on implementation of a parallel reduction technique (with less overhead than classical LTL and CTL verifiers have) and further static model optimizations.


A variety of new products, such as photovoltaic (PV) systems and electric vehicles (EVs), have been introduced to electricity systems targeting an energy-saving and low-carbon society. However, it is still unclear that, when these energy-saving products will be disseminated in our society, the dissemination will influence future electricity systems. To explore how future electricity systems might unfold, this paper describes scenarios by analyzing the influence of the diffusion of energy-saving products; e.g., PV systems and EVs. We compose the scenarios of regional electricity networks by combining scenario texts and simulations. The simulations estimate products diffusion and electricity demand based on the assumptions described in the scenario texts. We analyze the influences of introducing especially PV systems and EVs into electricity networks using the simulation models that we developed. As a case study, we described the scenario of a suburb city in Osaka, Japan.


The remarkable increase in the number of divorces, the family unit atomization, the emergence of new needs, tastes and consumer preferences, and the opportunity of personal attention towards a potential market niche and novel from a commercial point of view, are some current events that are taking place in Spain. Is the market prepared to face this new challenge? , Could the divorced segment become a new market? It is fair to say that the divorced population is increasing, and most of this group has a number of needs and personal characteristics that make them different from other consumers. To analyze if the divorced population can be segmented in commercial terms, obtaining a valid and consistent market for companies according to the designing and managing products and exclusive services for them, it is interesting to the economic-business world. Designing a correct segmentation, through a serie of precise explanatory variables and settled to this new type of consumer, in addition the effective communication of this new commercial change to this group, are two of the main bases at the time of carrying out this study.


This article discusses the results of a European project funded under SPRINT, the European Commission's central programme for technology transfer. The authors describe and analyse 'good practice' technology transfer mechanisms which are being implemented in the Netherlands, Ireland, Northern Ireland, France and Sweden. It is the authors' view that there is no one best model of a technology transfer mechanism/route to small and medium-sized entreprises. Each route is unique, and plays a different role in the technology transfer process. Based on technology transfer experiences from five different European countries, the authors examine and highlight the critical elements required for an effective university–SME partnership. In conclusion, strategic recommendations are set out for creating more successful technology transfer routes to the SME sector.


Abstract 235 Background: The RESORT trial (E4402) found comparable time to treatment failure (TTTF) and disease-related outcomes in previously untreated, indolent, follicular lymphoma randomized to maintenance rituximab (MR) versus rituximab retreatment (RR), and possible benefit of MR for patients with non-follicular lymphoma. The effects of MR versus RR on patient anxiety and health-related quality of life has not previously been examined. Methods: Pt received R 375 mg/m2 weekly × 4 and responders were randomized to MR (single dose R q 3 mo) or RR (R weekly × 4 at disease progression). Each strategy was continued until treatment failure. Participants enrolled after 5/2005 completed a patient-reported outcomes (PRO) assessment. Patient preferences regarding treatment were measured at randomization using 4 patient self-report items developed for this trial. These 4 items asked patients to rate the extent to which medical visits and cancer treatment reduces their anxiety and increases perceived control, and the extent to which they prefer to avoid medical care due to an increase in anxiety in response to reminders of illness. Participants were categorized based on their responses as using "active coping" (medical care decreases anxiety) or "avoidant coping" (prefer to avoid medical care). Participants completed PRO assessment following R induction at randomization, 3, 6, 12, 24, 36, and 48 months post-randomization, and at R failure. PRO assessment included standardized, validated questionnaires to measure general anxiety and depression (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, HADS), post-traumatic stress-type anxiety (Impact of Events Scale-Revised, IES-R), and health-related quality of life (Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy–General, FACT-G). Individual items were selected from existing measures or were developed for this trial to assess illness-specific anxiety about the future (Illness Impact). Primary PRO analysis compared change scores from randomization-12 months between MR and RR treatment arms. Differences between participants categorized as using active or avoidant coping were also examined. Results: 253 patients (92% of E4402 randomized sample) completed PROs at randomization. 125 patients were randomized to MR and 128 were randomized to RR. Demographic and disease characteristics were comparable between arms. Median age 60 years, 54% female, 95% White. All patients PS 0–1; 83% follicular lymphoma, 17% non-follicular. The study had 80% power to detect an effect size of 0.4 for the primary endpoint (change scores randomization to 12 months). There were no statistically significant differences between MR and RR on (1) any PRO measure and (2) PRO change scores from randomization to 12 month follow-up (p=NS). Figure 1 illustrates HADS Anxiety scores and Figure 2 shows FACT-G scores from randomization-48 months. The proportion of participants exceeding established clinical cut-off scores on the HADS Anxiety and IES-R did not differ between MR and RR. At randomization, 70% of participants were categorized as using an avoidant coping style and 30% as using active coping. Among participants using avoidant coping, 6–10% exceeded HADS Anxiety clinical cut-off at randomization, 3, 6, and 12 month assessments, and 16% at R failure. A lower proportion of those using active coping (0–3%) reported clinically significant anxiety at all time points (p Conclusion: In previously untreated, indolent, non-Hodgkin9s lymphoma, MR and RR are comparable with regard to patient-reported anxiety, post-traumatic anxiety, illness-specific anxiety about the future, and overall HRQL. MR did not result in reduced anxiety or better HRQL compared to RR, even among patients who report that medical visits and ongoing treatment reduce anxiety ("active coping"). RR did not result in lower anxiety or better HRQL among patients who reported a preference to avoid medical visits due to increased anxiety ("avoidant coping"). Administration of R q 3 months was not associated with functional improvements or detriments to HRQL, indicating R is well-tolerated. For MR and RR, avoidant coping was associated with a higher likelihood of clinically significant general anxiety and post-traumatic anxiety. Disclosures: Williams:Genentech: Membership on an entity9s Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding. Horning:Genentech: Employment. Kahl:Genentech: Consultancy, Research Funding; Roche: Consultancy.


One of the biggest challenges of Adaptive e-learning systems is learner modelling. The learner model should represent the learner's characteristics as faithfully as possible in order to provide adaptive learning. Among these characteristics, the learner's knowledge is considered to be the core characteristic of the learner model, as adaptive e-learning systems are centered on the learner's knowledge, since acquiring « knowledge » about a specific domain or concept is considered the main goal of learning and instruction. In this paper, we propose a novel adult learner's knowledge model using ontologies and rule reasoning, by trying to define the different components that construct the learner's knowledge in an exhaustive yet a simple way. The proposed model takes into account different elements of the learner's knowledge, such as the different knowledge types and categories, the learner's prior knowledge accumulated through his/her experiences, his/her misconceptions, errors and the previously learned but forgotten knowledge.


satirical guide to 'types of managers' did not really answer the question of how you manage any organisation, including a caring organisation, without management structures. He seemed to be implying that management itself is intrinsically corrupting, so what is the way out of this dilemma? To be fair, perhaps he did answer the question: the answer, he seemed to say, is revolution, but surely he is posing a false dichotomy. A choice in the long term between cynical manipulative and vacuous management and a socialist paradise (he didn't


Economic theory and empirical evidence clearly show that social exclusion dimensions are inter-related. Notwithstanding that, dimensions are usually assumed independent from one another in the economics literature. In this paper we explore the inter-dependency of social exclusion dimensions and study the transmission of deprivation among them. In particular, we propose the use of stochastic epidemic models, which are typically used to study the transmission of infectious diseases, to the analysis of deprivation diffusion among social exclusion dimensions with the aim of acquiring a deeper understanding of the mechanism governing deprivation transmission. We also provide an empirical implementation that investigates the consequences, in terms of future deprivation, for Italian and Spanish women of being jobless, as opposed to doing paid work. We also investigate the consequences of being unemployed versus being inactive. We conclude that working seems to act as a protective mechanism to shocks. In addition, conditional on losing one's job, women who subsequently search for a job (unemployed) are more likely to experience contagion than women who do not search (inactive).


The estimation accuracy of the trajectory in boost phase from several observations is analysed. Based on the theory of trajectory estimation, the error sources are presented, and the Cramer-Rao of the trajectory estimation in the boost phase is analysed. Finally, the results of theoretic analysis are validated by simulation.


Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of effective leaders across all spheres but especially in healthcare. Many Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) offer leadership programming, but these programs have been criticized for lacking impact. In developing a Master's-level leadership course at an AMC, we sought to inform the curriculum with the values, both personal and shared, as well as the competencies defined as essential by a group of leaders who successfully steered their organizations through the pandemic. Methods Study participants included selected leaders from a medical school, its hospital partner and parent university. We used a combination of semi-structured interviews, conducted virtually, and a rank-order survey to identify values and competencies to be used to inform course content. Results Our surveyed leaders relied on personal values that prioritized the organization's mission, aligning their teams around that mission and vision as well as leading with empathy and respect. As a group, these leaders valued a highly collegial and collaborative process as well as diversity and equity. Competencies essential to leadership, according to our participants, were the ability to create the environment that supports collaboration, including team development, and to uphold the organization's mission. Conclusion The surveyed leaders' organizations treated some of the highest numbers of COVID-19 patients of any hospital system and needed to make difficult decisions in order to provide patient care safely. Study participants were therefore uniquely experienced health care system leaders currently meeting unprecedented challenges. Our study suggests that applying a values-based approach to the development of future leaders will positively influence the impact of leadership education in a Master's-level healthcare leadership program.


The goals and objectives of the project summarized in this viewgraph presentation are the following: (1) Develop and demonstrate verified airframe and cryotank structural design and analysis technologies, including damage tolerance, safety, reliability, and residual strength technologies, robust nonlinear shell and cryotank analysis technologies, high-fidelity analysis and design technologies for local structural detail features and joints, and high-fidelity analysis technologies for sandwich structures; (2) Demonstrate low cost, robust materials and processing, including polymeric matrix composite (PMC) and metallic materials and processing, and refractory composite and metallic hot structures materials and processing; (3) Develop and demonstrate robust airframe structures and validated integrated airframe structural concepts, including low cost fabrication and joining, operations efficient designs and inspection techniques (non-destructive evaluation), scale-up and integrated thermal structure tests, and airframe structures IVHM; (4) Demonstrate low cost, robust repair techniques; and (5) Develop verified integrated airframe structural concepts, including integrated structural concepts.


Intracranial aneurysm is a cerebrovascular defect of localized bulge in the wall of a blood vessel. Without treatment, it may result in subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) due to rupture, and severely disrupt the quality of patient's life. Flow diverter (FD) implantation, as an emerging endovascular treatment, intends to block intra-aneurysmal inflow and induce thrombotic occlusion by implanting a stent into the parent artery, eventually leading to the local hemodynamic rehabilitation. In our previous study, by using the combination of Lattice Boltzmann Simulation (LBS) and Simulated Annealing Procedure (SAP), a two dimensional plane with discretized stent struts was implemented to explore the factors that lead to an efficient FD structure design.


Irrigation sustainability is particularly important in the vicinity of Doñana National Park (Huelva, Spain), where Europe's most important wetland area coexists with a profitable strawberry irrigation activity. In this paper, an innovation and technology transfer project was laid out. The project was promoted by the Institute of Agricultural and Fisheries Research and Training (IFAPA), belonging to the Regional Government of Andalusia. The main objective of the project was to contribute to the sustainability of the complex ecological, productive, and social system of this region. The project was focused on the rational use of water resources. Experimentation, demonstration, technology transfer, and training activities were carried out, involving public administrations, companies, and private farms. The project was carried out in collaboration with strawberry companies covering a total surface area of 1900 hectares. Irrigation application efficiency and irrigation water productivity increased by 66% and there was also a significant increase in water saving (44%), without resulting production losses. The success of the activity was based on the implication of farmers in experimentation assignments. During a five-year time span, irrigation trials took place on several farms. This fact allowed a progressive improvement of irrigation management by farmers based on confidence in the experimental work results.


(3 S,8 R,9 R,10 R)-Heptadeca-1-ene-4,6-diyne tetrol and its 3-epimer were synthesized, and it was found that the relative configuration which was proposed for 1 was incorrect.


This first issue of The Catholic Social Science Review inaugurates not just the only scholarly Catholic social science journal in America which is fully committed to the orthodox teaching of the Church, but also the most ambitious project of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists to date. Just like the Society itself, it is an attempt to respond to the challenge Pope Pius XI issued to scholars sixty-five years ago to "build a genuine Catholic social science." What does it mean to build a Catholic social science? It means, first and foremost, to follow the Church in all she teaches in matters of faith and morals. This provides the outer limits for all Catholic scholarly inquiry; if the world were committed to the truth in its fullest, it would recognize that it provides the limits of all human inquiry. We recognize that this is no restraint on legitimate human freedom, for man has no right to embrace that which is untrue and Jesus Christ— for whom the Father made all things—appointed the Church's Magisterium to be the arbiter of the truths which must guide men. The second criterion of a Catholic social science, or any scholarly endeavor, is that it must be objective. In other words, it must genuinely be committed to seeking the truth. It must go where its dispassionate investigation leads it. This is not incompatible with loyalty to the Magisterium because objectivity is not the same thing as value neutrality. Scholarly inquiry cannot sensibly proceed if it does not operate by the nature of man and things; one cannot choose to discard reality. Nor is it possible to have a position which does not work from certain premises or principles. Value neutrality, then, is a falsehood. Pope John Paul II has said the Church is not afraid of the truth; she will not hesitate to subject herself to serious, searching inquiry. Indeed, it is because she so subjects herself that we can have such confidence and faith in her. There are none of her moral teachings, for example, that are not fully established by sound philosophical reasoning and have not proven to be the right course for man from the experience of human affairs and history. Particularly central for the building of a Catholic social science is the social teaching of the Church, as set out primarily in the modern world in the social encyclicals. No approach to the study of social life and problems, or any social theory which seeks to address those problems, could call itself truly Catholic if it did not follow fully all the social teachings of the Church. Indeed, one of the unfortunate spectacles of the contemporary world, especially in the West, is of Catholic thinkers, writers, commentators, activists, public officials, and even Church operatives claiming to be taking "Catholic" positions on questions when upon close examination it is apparent that they are glossing over or paying no attention to certain parts of that teaching or really allowing secular ideologies to shape their thinking.


There are three non-integrable phases in literatures: Berry phase, Aharonov–Anandan phase, and Yang phase. This article discusses the evolutions of Yang phase under the cyclic condition and the adiabatic condition for the general time-dependent harmonic oscillator, thus reveals the intimate relations between these three non-integrable phases.


The motion of a filamentary particle and also the discharge from a particle have been extensively investigated for the development of prevention and protection method in a gas-insulated switchgear (GIS). The particle showed several different patterns of motion; such as simple standing, precession motion, jumping up-and-down, and so forth. In either case of such motion, it depends on corona discharge from the particle itself. Since this motion cannot be explained with only monopolar discharge from one end of a particle, bipolar discharge from both ends of a particle occurring simultaneously have been investigated by applying the floating particle method. The particle length and the gap between particle and electrode were chosen as parameters. From experimental results, several interesting features were obtained. the curve of bipolar corona current lays between negative and positive ones of monopolar curves. There is current jump at the threshold voltage that seems to be a new feature of corona current from a filamentary particle. So far, the experimental results indicate that this threshold voltage is not a function of a particle length, but it could depend slightly on length. Flashover voltage is a function of particle length and gap. It decreases with length and increases with gap.


Abstract In this article we consider the estimation of the log-normalization constant associated to a class of continuous-time filtering models. In particular, we consider ensemble Kalman–Bucy filter estimates based upon several nonlinear Kalman–Bucy diffusions. Using new conditional bias results for the mean of the aforementioned methods, we analyze the empirical log-scale normalization constants in terms of their
$\mathbb{L}_n$
 -errors and
$\mathbb{L}_n$
 -conditional bias. Depending on the type of nonlinear Kalman–Bucy diffusion, we show that these are bounded above by terms such as
$\mathsf{C}(n)\left[t^{1/2}/N^{1/2} + t/N\right]$
 or
$\mathsf{C}(n)/N^{1/2}$
 (
$\mathbb{L}_n$
 -errors) and
$\mathsf{C}(n)\left[t+t^{1/2}\right]/N$
 or
$\mathsf{C}(n)/N$
 (
$\mathbb{L}_n$
 -conditional bias), where t is the time horizon, N is the ensemble size, and
$\mathsf{C}(n)$
 is a constant that depends only on n, not on N or t. Finally, we use these results for online static parameter estimation for the above filtering models and implement the methodology for both linear and nonlinear models.


The stochastic two-dimensional Cahn–Hilliard–Navier–Stokes equations under non-Lipschitz conditions are considered. This model consists of the Navier–Stokes equations controlling the velocity and the Cahn–Hilliard model controlling the phase parameters. By iterative techniques, a priori estimates and weak convergence method, the existence and uniqueness of an energy weak solution to the equations under non-Lipschitz conditions have been obtained.


The use of multimedia tools over the World Wide Web is an extremely desirable instructional method. Unintentionally this has created a maze of online tutorials and demonstrations with huge amounts of information in disarray. In addition, Cognitive theories, like Active Learning and Experiential Learning, applicable to the engineering domain, sermonize modeling, problem resolution and problem visualization as the key elements in instruction. In this paper, we present some of our work on building user configurable Java Applets for education in photonics (lasers and optics). These include design Applets for laser principles that illustrate optical ray tracing systems, population inversion, and 3-D visualization of optical polarization. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of user-controlled context based educational resources. A design-based learning experience using Java Applets and the multiple facets of the design and development of such a software system is described. Specifically, an initial object-oriented framework that emphasizes key elements of design like reusability, flexibility, modularity and extensibility is provided. This framework is developed for the design of educational Java Applets that provide user configurable simulation environments. The six key elements of the framework are: Components, Strategy objects, Singleton objects, Visitor objects, Toolkits and Containers. Moreover, methods to initialize Applets using design windows and HTML tags are presented. This framework provides basic guidelines for developing userconfigurable Java simulation environments for use in any science or engineering field.


BACKGROUND: Pancreatic cancer is associated with mutations in the tumor suppressor gene cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 2A (p16 INK4A ), a regulator of the cell cycle and apoptosis. This study investigates whether immunohistochemical expression of p16 INK4A as well as hypoxia markers and poly adenosine diphosphate-ribose polymerase (PARP) correlates with survival in patients with resected pancreatic adenocarcinoma. METHODS: Seventy-three patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma who underwent curative resection at Stanford University were included. From the surgical specimens, a tissue microarray was constructed using triplicate tissue cores from the primary tumor and used for immunohistochemical staining for the following markers: carbonic anhydrase IX, dihydrofolate reductase, p16 INK4A , and PARP1/2. Staining was scored as either positive or negative and percentage positive staining. Staining score was correlated with overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS). RESULTS: Of the markers tested, only immunohistochemical expression of p16 INK4A correlated with clinical outcome. On univariate analysis, p16 INK4A expression in the tumor was associated with improved OS (P ¼ .038) but not PFS (P ¼ .28). The median survival for patients with positive versus negative p16 INK4A staining was 28.8 months versus 18 months. On multivariate analysis, p16 INK4A expression was associated with improved OS (P ¼ .026) but not PFS (P ¼ .25). Age (P ¼ .0019) and number of nodes involved (P ¼ .025) were also significant for OS. Adjuvant chemotherapy and margin status did not correlate with OS or PFS. CONCLUSIONS: Expression of p16 INK4A is associated with improved OS in patients with resected pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Further investigation is needed for validation, given conflicting data in the published literature. Cancer 2010;116:5179–87. V C 2010 American Cancer Society.


Parallelism is an effective method in improving the efficiency of model checking. C program model checking based on LTS is studied and a methodology for parallel software model checking is presented. It utilizes modularity of MAGIC, a software model checker, to decompose C program into components, distributes them over computational nodes and parallel call MAGIC to complete the verification. Close to linear speedup and good scalability can be achieved due to little synchronization and inter-nodes communication. The reduction of time expense is beneficial to formal verification of large-scale software.


In order that the clientside of web page can execute programs of VFP,a DLL mode module file can be programmed by VFP to be called by a web page script.By the function of ExecScript() of VFP,a dynamic VFP program can be called without rebuilding the DLL file.By passing the web page object to the DLL method,the web page object can be operated inside VFP directly.Combining the serveside VFP script of a web site,the web page functions can be better and easier to develop.To use the VFP inner Base64 encode and decode function,it is easy to transfer binary files between serveside and clientside.


In this paper, two novel bearingless switched reluctance motors (BLSRMs), 8/10 hybrid type and 12/14 hybrid type, are presented. The two BLSRMs have separate torque and suspending force poles. Due to the independent characteristics between the torque and suspending force, the torque control can be decoupled from the suspending force control. In this paper, suspending force control characteristics of the two hybrid BLSRMs are compared. Although the two hybrid BLSRMs have excellent decoupling characteristics, the suspending force control performance is dependent on the torque characteristics. In the suspending force control comparison, a simple PID and hysteresis current control methods are employed. To verify the validity of the control strategy, tests are executed to the two types, and the control characteristics of the two types are presented and compared.


The concept of the enemy, as Carl Schmitt tirelessly emphasized, is an essential political concept. For Schmitt, it even defines the essence of the political. Just as there can be no friends without the possibility of enemies, so too is there no politics without the possibility of hostility and antagonism. A world at peace, tolerant and free from conflict, may be a desideratum, but it can never be secured.Perhaps the most interesting response to Schmitt's politics of enmity is found in the work of the Frankfurt School, who always maintained an ambivalent relation to Schmitt's work. In Adorno and Horkheimer's great book, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the concept of the enemy is subjected to a dialectic critique intent on disclosing the concept's ambiguous potential. They show, through an interpretation of German anti-Semitism, that under certain conditions the enemy is not only the enemy but is also, against all expectations, the friend. Under such conditions, the one who is feared - the Jew - is not only feared, but also desired. And this desire, Adorno and Horkheimer insist, is Utopian through and through.My paper "The Utopian Function of the Enemy in the Thought of the Frankfurt School" investigates the Utopian dimension of the enemy in the work of the critical theorists. Implicit in Adorno and Horkheimer's work on anti-Semitism is the claim not only that the enemy is often enough the desired friend, but that once this logic of reversal is uncovered, the enemy could emerge anew as the disavowed friend. Uncovering the Utopian current in the concept of the enemy is an important feature of the Utopian politics of the Frankfurt School, and it is their contribution to the politics of peace and reconciliation [also friendship, love, harmony] that Carl Schmitt never envisioned.


DBSCAN (density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise) is one of the most widely used density-based clustering algorithms, which can find arbitrary shapes of clusters, determine the number of clusters, and identify noise samples automatically. However, the performance of DBSCAN is significantly limited as it is quite sensitive to the parameters of eps and MinPts. Eps represents the eps-neighborhood and MinPts stands for a minimum number of points. Additionally, a dataset with large variations in densities will probably trap the DBSCAN because its parameters are fixed. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose a new density-clustering algorithm called GNN-DBSCAN which uses an adaptive Grid to divide the dataset and defines local core samples by using the Nearest Neighbor. With the help of grid, the dataset space will be divided into a finite number of cells. After that, the nearest neighbor lying in every filled cell and adjacent filled cells are defined as the local core samples. Then, GNN-DBSCAN obtains global core samples by enhancing and screening local core samples. In this way, our algorithm can identify higher-quality core samples than DBSCAN. Lastly, give these global core samples and use dynamic radius based on k-nearest neighbors to cluster the datasets. Dynamic radius can overcome the problems of DBSCAN caused by its fixed parameter eps. Therefore, our method can perform better on dataset with large variations in densities. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets were conducted. The results indicate that the average Adjusted Rand Index (ARI), Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), Adjusted Mutual Information (AMI) and V-measure of our proposed algorithm outperform the existing algorithm DBSCAN, DPC, ADBSCAN, and HDBSCAN.


The United Kingdom (UK) currently has one of the most attractive regulatory and tax systems in the world for Islamic finance, as well as being far ahead of other western nations for provision of Islamic finance, with five sharia-compliant banks. Yet despite this, the patronage of these banks is extremely low, often times below that of smaller building societies. While the largest Islamic bank in the UK, Al Rayan (formerly Islamic Bank of Britain), have one third of its customer base have religious affiliations other than Islam, and a further 80% of all fixed-term deposits also patroned by non-Muslims. This study explores why general consumers do not pursue patronage with Islamic banking.This is an inductive research enquiry that uses descriptive statistics within a social constructivist paradigm to construct a line of reasoning, based on the primary data is collected through detailed questionnaire (n=29).The findings from this research highlight the need for Islamic banks to better fund information programmes, advertisements and promotions to further spread awareness of their offerings as consumers are positive in their reception to Islamic finance concepts but unaware of its offerings.


Abstract : Since the end of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military has participated in 50 small-scale contingencies; the humanitarian relief effort for the 750,000 Kosovar Albanians displaced by Slobodan Milosevic is just one example. Because many of these contingency operations were without deliberate plans and without an infrastructure in place, aerospace forces have had to respond to this trend with changes in organization and technology. Previously, Air Force units have been committed through stovepipes: engineers, communicators, medics, air field managers, security forces, airlift control elements, and so forth, often in advance of an established Joint Task Force (JTF) or even a Commander of Air Force Forces (COMAFFOR). While other services are tasked to deploy in recognizable units (e.g., a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit or Marine Expeditionary Force), Air Force units tend to be tasked by Unit Type Codes (UTC) or, in some cases, individual specialties. While we have demonstrated the ability to react quickly, we often outpace our own ability to set up appropriate command structures. In other cases, we hinder our ability to react quickly by requiring large and cumbersome survey teams, which can be as intimidating as the threat we are attempting to counter, especially to a small nation. We can do better than that. To help aerospace forces take maximum advantage of that thing we do best in today's expeditionary world -- get there rapidly -- and to do it without having to smother host nations with survey teams, U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) formed the 86th Contingency Response Group (CRG) as a test for the Air Force. Our chief of staff, Gen Mike Ryan, gave permission to create the unit just as events in Serbia were coming to a boil. This is the story of the 86th and of a handful of dedicated airmen who made a big difference for thousands of refugees and demonstrated the value of an organized "first in" capability to our Expeditionary Air Force.


In recent years, the total quantity of abalone produced on farms worldwide has increased significantly, although abalone fisheries have declined. Production from fisheries has decreased from almost 20,000 metric tonnes (mt) in the 1970s to only about 6,500 mt in 2016/17. Over the same period, farm production has increased from negligible quantities in the 1970s to about 160,662 mt in 2016/17, the vast majority being produced in China (139,697 mt) and South Korea (16,042 mt). Illegal exploitation, particularly in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and California, is still a major problem reaching an estimated 7,000 mt in the 2016/17 period. A positive development that partially counteracts the illegal exploitation has been the establishment of restoration and ranching operations in various countries around the world. Taking all sources of abalone into account (fished, farmed, and illegal), it is estimated that in 2017, the total availability of abalone to the world market was 174,162 mt.


New Urbanism is being promoted as a set of ideas to mitigate sprawl, to encourage sustainable growth, and to facilitate infill development. In this article, the author focuses on the supply side story of New Urbanism to examine its implications for public policy. Specifically, the author evaluates where designers, developers, and planners involved with New Urbanist projects differ (or concur) in their endorsement of New Urbanist principles and in their satisfaction with the implementation of these ideas. Research reveals that in general, these designers, developers, and planners are endorsing New Urbanist ideas as a tool for achieving sustainable growth. The study shows that New Urbanist principles that focus on neighborhood design are most likely to be promoted and are expected to influence public policy, while principles that focus on regional planning may not generate enough support and are least likely to be implemented. The article concludes with policy recommendations.


Growing environmental awareness and responsibility in the tourist industry contributes to the search for innovative solutions aimed at reducing the impact of tourism on the environment. Successful promotion of yachts charter offer, which are auxiliary powered by renewable raw materials, not only draws attention to the fact of emissions reduction, also allows to build a competitive advantage by offering service not encountered on the market. For this purpose, an attempt to characterize the development of biofuel requirements for use in yacht's auxiliary drives has been made. Multiple criteria analysis, based on the physiochemical properties, economic and ethical issues, construction of auxiliary drives and the selection criteria allowed emerge biofuels characterized by optimal properties. Considerations were based on the presentation of three conceptions of yacht's auxiliary engines with proposed biofuels and the scope of the necessary engine modifications.


Thin Film Composite (TFC) NF membranes are prepared by interfacial polymerization (IP) between amine and acyl chemical groups. The biofouling is significant drawback for the NF membranes that could be decreased with variety of acidification process. After a while, active PA layer will not be stable in high acidic media, which lead to lower performance of membranes [Tang (2012) Nyströma (2004)]. This efficiency reduction can appear in experimental results. For making the acidic resistance membrane, the nano-particle embedding in PA-layer is economical and effective [Hoek (2011)]. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) have been employed due to their well water transport and functionality properties. In this study new nanocomposite membranes that were prepared of polysulfone/TFN-PA by incorporating of aromatic amine functionalized-MWCNT (AAF-MWCNTs). The effect of AAF-MWCNTs on the salinity removal efficiency and the acid resistance of NF membranes is presented.


To understand the mental health status of College Students,provide a theoretical basis for the mental health education in Higher Vocational Colleges。Method: In this study,508 students from Lanzhou Petrochemical College of Vocational Technology were chosen as the subject,Boy student 296 people,girl student 212 people.Results and Conclusion: The first class with obvious mental problems accounted for about 1.2% of the students,the second types of common psychological problems of the students accounted for 4.33%,,the third class is not psychological problems of students accounted for 94.47%.Girl student psychological problem severity was higher than that of male students,but the number of boys more than girls。College Students'psychological problems are bad interpersonal relationship,emotions and will,lack of confidence,physiological and psychological problems,and unhappy family and past,insomnia and about the level of interest is the measure index.of psychological problems of students.


The author uses his developed GH-Method: Math-physical medicine approach to investigate a more detailed contribution analysis of metabolism index (MI) on the sub categories for three medical conditions and three lifestyle details based on his risk probability percentages of having cardiovascular disease (CVD) or stroke for over a period of 10+ years. Listed below is a table of his annualized risk probability percentage based on MI of having CVD or stroke: Y2010: 100% Y2011: 90% Y2012: 83% Y2013: 85% Y2014: 72% Y2015: 60% Y2016: 55% Y2017: 54% Y2018: 54% Y2019: 55% Y2020: 51%. This article describes the individual contributions from MI which includes three medical conditions subcategories (glucose, blood pressure, and lipids) and three lifestyle subcategories (food, exercise, and others) of different modeling associated with artery blockage and artery rupture scenarios based on the risk probability percentage of having CVD or stroke. His research results from the past 10+ years have demonstrated the importance of maintaining an excellent healthy state for the entire body through a stringent lifestyle program to reduce the risk of having CVD or stroke. Emphasis has been placed on the significance and contributions for a patient's overall metabolism state. Therefore, three subcategories of specific medical conditions (diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia) along with three subcategories of lifestyle (food, exercise, and others) including weight and waistline are quantified. As a result, the findings corroborated with the advice from health-care professionals to their patients.


A regional coupled approach to water cycle prediction is demonstrated for the 4‐month period from November 2013 to February 2014. This provides the first multi‐component analysis of precipitation, soil moisture, river flow and coastal ocean simulations produced by an atmosphere‐land‐ocean coupled system focussed on the United Kingdom (UK), running with horizontal grid spacing of around 1.5 km across all components. The Unified Model atmosphere component, in which convection is explicitly simulated, reproduces the observed UK rainfall accumulation (r2 of 0.95 for water day accumulation), but there is a notable bias in its spatial distribution—too dry over western upland areas and too wet further east. The JULES land surface model soil moisture state is shown to be in broad agreement with a limited number of cosmic‐ray neutron probe observations. A comparison of observed and simulated river flow shows the coupled system is useful for predicting broad scale features, such as distinguishing high and low flow regions and times during the period of interest but are less accurate than optimized hydrological models. The impact of simulated river discharge on NEMO model simulations of coastal ocean state is explored in the coupled modelling framework, with comparisons provided relative to experiments using climatological river input and no river input around the UK coasts. Results show that the freshwater flux around the UK contributes of order 0.2 psu to the mean surface salinity, and comparisons to profile observations give evidence of an improved vertical structure when applying simulated flows. This study represents the first assessment of the coupled system performance from a hydrological perspective, with priorities for future model developments and challenges for evaluation of such systems discussed.


. In the field of interior design,VR technology mainly takes the form of visual images and videos. From traditional 3D Max modeling to rendering two-dimensional images, to online platforms such as Kujiarle and Panorama IE generating panoramic roaming videos,VR technology is combined with interior design to transform interior design from form to interior.Allow innovation and development. The improvement and optimization of 5G network speed and VR technologyimprovetheefficiency,costandprocessofinteriordesign,helpinterior designfromdesigntointelligentexperienceofmaterialselection,andexpandthe experienceofVRtechnologyininteriordesign.Takingtheinteriordesignof OFFICEHOMEApartmentforyoungpeopleinSuzhouasanexample,thispaper explainstheembodimentofVRtechnologyintheinteriordesignprocessfrom threestages:conceptofschemedesign,schemeoutputandschemereport,and expoundstheprospectdirectionofVRtechnologyinthefieldofinteriordesign [1].


A machine learning model was used to detect target signals for an underwater lidar system operating in turbid water. For this system, scatter returns from the underwater environment and shot noise can create false alarms with signatures resembling true target peaks. A binary peak classifier model was implemented that classifies each peak in the lidar signal as a target or a non-target. For a gray target positioned at 7 m downrange, ≥97% target detection accuracy was achieved at turbidities of $\mathrm{c}\leq 0.8\ \mathrm{m}^{-1}$, ranging from clear waters up to simulated open ocean conditions, and ≥85% target accuracy was achieved at simulated harbor-like turbidities of $1.0\ \mathrm{m}^{-1}\leq \mathrm{c}\leq 1.2\ \mathrm{m}^{-1}$, where c is the attenuation coefficient of the turbid water. This approach can enhance the detection capabilities of a system already using frequency-domain discrimination techniques.


Excitation conditions of inductively coupled plasma hyphenated with chemical vapor generation with the use of borane reducing agents (NaBH4, C(CH3)3NH2–BH3 and (CH3)2NH–BH3) and acids (HCl and CH3COOH) were investigated. The electron number density, the Mg II/Mg I intensity ratio as well as the Ar, B, Bi, Sb and H excitation temperatures were measured at various concentrations of the reductants and acids. Some analytical figures of merit were also determined. The plasma parameters were affected if NaBH4 was applied. Influence of other borane reductants was not so significant. Hydrogen produced due to chemical vapor generation was responsible for changes in the ICP characteristics, while a role of other products transported simultaneously to plasma was negligible. The Ar, B, Bi and Sb excitation temperatures were independent or slightly dependent on chemical vapor generation conditions. The electron number density increased with NaBH4 concentration, from 0.7 × 1015 cm−3 for "dry" argon plasma to 1.5 × 1015 cm−3 while the Mg II/Mg I intensity ratio varied from 5 to 11. At low concentrations of the reductants and acids, the plasma was not in robust conditions. If the NaBH4 was the reductant, the H temperature varied more significantly, from 3100 to 2100 K.


Polyacrylamide gel system is widely been used in oilfield for water shutoff treatment. Gelation behavior such as proper gelation time provides a basic guideline on gel placement depth in reservoir layers. In this study, the gelation behavior of partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide crosslinked with chromium(III) acetate (PHPA/Cr3+) reinforced with nano-silica was studied in term of gelation time and gel stability. The gelation time of PHPA/Cr3+ gel could be controlled with the addition of nano-silica where the gel has shown a delay in gelation time at low concentration of nano-silica. At 0.3 wt.% of nano-silica concentration, the gelation time has shown two times delay compared to the original gel system. The gel at the formulations of 0.7 wt.% and 1.0 wt.% nano-silica content remained stable with H code after 24 hours observation.


In this paper, we propose and demonstrate effective laser phase noise compensation for coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems that have long OFDM symbols. The phase noise compensation is achieved via hybrid modulated multiband optical OFDM, aided by the digital filter bank technique. For this, one of the multiple subbands is modulated as discrete Fourier transform spread OFDM. Our experimental results show that laser phase noise up to 1 MHz can be compensated for 114.8-Gb/s 16-QAM signals with 480-km standard single mode fiber transmission.


This paper develops an effective multi-objective feature selection algorithm based on differential evolution (DE). In the algorithm, a randomized localization mutation based on Pareto domination is used to improve the convergence of DE. A self-adaptive crossover is proposed to dynamically assign the crossover probability of each individual. Based on it, the promising regions around good individuals will most likely be exploited. The proposed multi-objective algorithm is compared with three existing multi-objective feature selection algorithms. Experimental results show that it is a highly competitive method for solving feature selection problem.


Side-scan sonar (SSS) is placed great expectations to support Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) in self-localization. Current research focuses on feature-based navigation solutions of which the foundation is data association. However, underwater acoustic image processing technique is still unmatured to produce high-quality SSS image and realize accurate registration. This paper presents an SSS image processing framework implemented in an autonomous workflow to provide real-time navigation information. Canny edge detector-based bottom tracking and improved Retinex-based gray level correction are two key algorithms in it. Canny edge detector takes waterfall image as objective, utilizing the information of not only the single ping but also its surrounding pings, which increases the accuracy and stability of sea bottom line extraction. Improved Retinex with Time Variant Gain (TVG) compensation remedies the shortage of attenuation trend correction. Combined with geometric correction module and registration module, an internally coherent framework is proposed to support AUV navigation.


A is a major genetic risk factor due to its increased incidence of developing Alzheimer's disease. The study was designed to predict such compounds that may help in designing drugs to suppress the over activity of ApoE4 protein. 22 natural compounds (marine, microorganism and plant derivative) were used as inhibitors and docked with ApoE4 (PDB id 1B68). Six synthetic compounds (in clinical trials) were docked with target proteins to compare and analyze the docking results with natural compounds. Compounds S-allyl-L-cysteine, epicatechin gallate and fulvic acid show high binding affinity i.e., -7.1, -7 and -7, respectively. Epicatechin gallate shows hydrogen bond with Gln156 and Asp35 and fulvic acid shows hydrogen bonding with Glu27. In case of synthetic compounds, tideglusib did not show hydrogen bonding with any amino acid residue of ApoE4 but showed high binding affinity of -7.2, same as that of natural compound S-allyl-L-cysteine which showed high binding affinity of -7.1 but did not show hydrogen bonding with any amino acid residue. Protein-protein interactions of ApoE4 showed physical and functional interaction with related proteins. Our study predicted a compound epicatechin gallate on the basis of binding affinity and hydrogen bonding with amino acid residue as a potential lead compound which may be used as an inhibitor.


Education is an important mechanism of sustainable development implementation. Education for sustainable development (ESD) is one of the priorities of international organizations (UN, UNESCO, and other), and national governments from the beginning of the 1990s. Experience generated over three decades of implementation of ESD, as well as theoretical studies show that a whole-institution approach is required for effective furthering of ESD. Withing this approach the priorities shift from including ESD issues into a few selected subjects or events to applying ESD as a foundation for the entire functioning of an educational institution (including management and budget, education, professional development, campus design, resource use, community relations etc). The research presented in the article has been completed using systemic, problematic, and comparative approaches. Ecological systems theory and educational design are suggested as theoretical and methodological foundations for the whole institution approach. They point at the need to take into consideration child's natural and socio-cultural environment in designing education systems. The article considers practical cases (for example, international "Eco-schools" network, Anglo-American school and other) which can be replicated in and by other organizations.


With regard to the existing test case priority algorithm rarely focusing on the static covering condition of test case and other design information, as well as the testing person need to online collect relevant information about each statement in the procedure, and a higher dependence on code information, and so on, this paper proposes a online adjustment strategy for the priority ranking of test case basing on multiple-objective optimization. Firstly, it is possible to define the requirement coverage matrix of test case basing on the definition of design information of test case. Then, on the basis of the content above mentioned, it introduces three impact factors of test case priority, which are respectively coverage matrix of attention requirement, the importance degree of test case based on requirement and failure rate. In addition, it online estimates the attention requirement coverage rate and failure rate of test case according to the coverage requirement condition and the results from the execution of the test cases in the testing procedure. Finally, online adjustment of test case priority is realized. The advantage of this method lies in that it keeps the advantage of online adjustment for priority without depending on code information, and avoids the extra costs.


Recent records of lichenicolous fungi from the Kharkiv region are provided. Twenty species were reported as new to the region. Pronectria gromakovae is described as a new species on Lecanora populicola. Didymocyrtis cladoniicola, D. epiphyscia, Epicladonia sandstedei, Katherinomyces cetrariae and Lichenoconium lichenicola are new to the forest-steppe zone of Ukraine. Physcia stellaris is reported as a new host species for Cladosporium licheniphilum. Notes on the currently known distribution of selected species in other Ukrainian regions are provided.


Corporate citizenship represents various organizational activities and status related to the organization's societal and stakeholder obligations. This study develops five different dimensions of corporate citizenship and examines the relationship between the five dimensions and purchase intention by including two key mediators. In the proposed model of this study, purchase intention is indirectly affected by economic, legal, ethical, general philanthropic, and strategic philanthropic citizenship via the mediation of corporate identification and brand trust. Empirical testing using a survey of 353 consumers from various industries confirms most of our hypothesized effects. Last, managerial implications for corporate leaders and limitations of our findings are discussed in depth.


McKinnon's complementarity hypothesis articulates that money and physical
capital complements each other instead of substituting under a repressed financial
sector. In spite of various economic and financial reforms in Myanmar, the
financial sector of Myanmar is lagging behind international standards. Thus, this
study is designed to test McKinnon's complementarity hypothesis in case of
Myanmar. Time series studies has been analyzed for said purpose. This study not
only determines unit root problem but also tests unit root problem in presence of
structural break. Long run relationship is testified through bounds test in presence
of structural break. Long run and short run estimates are determined in order to
check McKinnon's complementarity hypothesis in static and dynamic setting as
bounds testing approach distinguish feature is to provide static long run estimates
along with dynamic short run estimates. Moreover, this study applies innovative
accounting approach to determine strength of casual relationship between
variables of the study. Results of the study confirms McKinnon's
complementarity hypothesis in long run and no evidence is found in case of short
run. Thus, it can be deduced that investment is restricted due to availability of
finance rather than cost of capital in Myanmar.


ABSTRACT One of the major ecosystem services delivered to agriculture worldwide is the reduction of pests by natural enemies. However, the landscape composition affects multiple dimensions of pest control, and non-crop habitat surrounding farm fields shows variable responses across geographies. Here, crop damage and pest abundance were compared between local farms with two antagonistic land cover and land use aspects (1- High conservation, landscape with high structural complexity; 2- High degradation, landscapes with low complexity). The field data were collected at experimental guava orchards in the Cariri Paraibano, one of the driest regions in the Brazilian Caatinga. The results show that damage caused by orthopterans and their abundance was significantly smaller in the landscape with high structural complexity. Therefore, the results support the hypothesis that crop damage and pest abundance are smaller in landscapes with high structural complexity. Additionally, the results are very important for the dryland regions as they provide information about the relationship between landscape structure and crop damage plus pest abundance in a regional gap. As drylands are critically endangered in all American continents, sustainable agricultural landscapes with the application of natural cover restoration can help drylands to achieve sustainable development.


Objectives: To investigate the effect of GH administration on coagulation/fibrinolysis in GHD children before and after GH replacement. Methods: Fifteen prepubertal children, (mean age±SE: 9.8±0.4 years) with growth hormone deficiency (GHD) were included in this hospital based prospective study. Serum levels of PT, APTT, fibrinogen, VII, VIII, antithrombin (AT), protein C (PC), D-dimers, plasminogen (Plg), PAI-1 and a2antiplasmin (a2P) were measured before and after rhGH treatment. Control values were obtained from thirteen healthy subjects matched by age, sex and BMI. Results: At baseline all studied parameters were within normal ranges. However, PT and AT levels were significantly lower [(12.1±0.1 vs 12.5±0.04sec, p=0.04) and (117.3±3.1 vs 128.7±3.2%, p=0.024) respectively], and VIII, PAI-1 and a2P levels significantly higher compared to healthy controls [(122.6±6.1 vs 82.6±6.1%, p=0.001), (2.9±0.1 vs 1.3±0.3U/ml, p=0.001) and (119.1±1.0 vs 105.2±2.0%, p=0.001) respectively]. After a mean (SE) interval of 9.3 (0.4) months of treatment, a significant increase in PT and AT values was noted [(12.5±0.23 vs12.1±0.15sec, p=0.034) and (123.2±2.6 vs 117.3±3.1%, p=0.052) respectively]. PAI-1 levels were significantly decreased (2.3±0.3 vs 2.9±0.1U/ml, p=0.001) Conclusions: GH replacement therapy led to a significant increase in PT and AT levels and significant decrease in PAI-1 levels in GHD children, suggesting a beneficial effect of GH treatment against the possible risk of future atherothrombosis. Received: Apr 10, 2018 Accepted: May 28, 2018 Published: June 22, 2018 Copyright: © 2018 Karachaliou, Fotini-Helen, et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Corresponding author: Fotini-Helen Karachaliou, Pediatric Endocrinology Unit, University General Hospital, Attikon, Rimini 1 Chaidari, Greece E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Citation: Karachaliou, Fotini-Helen, et al. Effect of GH Treatment on Coagulation Parameters in Children with Growth Hormone Deficiency. Endocrinology, Diabetes and Obesity. 2018; 1(1):4. Open Access


It is well known that any congestion game admits a pure Nash Equilibrium. This paper investigates a particular congestion game such that strategies are exactly the facilities. We prove that for such a congestion game endowed with the nondeterministic best-reply update rule, every strategy profile can reach a Nash equilibrium after at most n iterations; and particularly when the best-reply update rule is deterministic, every strategy profile will enter a limit cycle of length ≤ 2 after at most 3p + 1 iterations, where p and n denote the number of strategies and the number of players, respectively. Besides, based on these results, for a traffic network, we consider a stochastic evolutionary congestion game, and prove that every profile will converge to a Nash equilibrium almost surely.


In the medium of HAc-NaAc(pH=5.0),Cu(Ⅱ) reacts with HPMαFP to form a complex and there is a sharp and sensitive polarographic wave at-0.55V(vs SCE).The peak height is linear with the concentration of Cu(Ⅱ) in the range of 1.5~9.0mg·mL-1.Many electrochemical methods are used to study the properties of the polarographic wave and the mechanism of electrode reaction and it is proved that the polarographic wave at-0.55V is an adsorptive wave of the complex.The peak current is produced by reduction of Cu(Ⅱ).The molar ration of the complex is as follow: Cu(Ⅱ)∶HPMαFP=1∶2,and the conditional formation constant is 3.89×105.


In this work, we report an efficient synthesis approach of disodium terephthalate and its application as a potential battery anode material. Disodium terephthalate is upcycled from waste polyethyle...


Ataxic hemiparesis is a well-recognized manifestation of lacunar infarction. We report a patient in whom this syndrome was caused by a 4-cm3 parasagittal haematoma. The finding that ataxic