"Opportunities multiply as they are seized ." Sun Tzu On the eve of the one hundredth day of his Presidency, Barack Obama received a wonderful gift: Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, announced he was leaving the Republican Party to become a Democrat.  This puts the number of Senate Republicans at 40, the lowest level in over 30 years, and gives the Democrats, at least on paper, the special majority of 60 votes needed for them to override a filibuster of legislation by the opposition.  Besides the obvious advantages for Democrats, Specter's pivotal decision has other important implications, not only for Republicans but also for Democrats. First, it highlights the sad state of the Republican Party: Specter explained that he felt compelled to leave the party because he knew that, as a moderate, he could not win another Republican primary election. The Republican Party under G.W Bush employed the electoral tactic of consolidating the white, Southern, right -wing Christian base, rather than reaching out to the middle. This helped them win two presidential elections and gave credence to the claim that they were the "party of the permanent majority". That was only four years ago. But Bush's disastrous second term had the effect of alienating two major constituencies: the realist establishment in foreign policy who were dismayed by his stated goals of bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fiscal conservatives who saw the federal budget surplus rapidly turn into deficit. The party then entered a downward spiral of contraction. It lost ground with centrist voters, at a time when the center of the political spectrum was expanding.  It suffered from a leadership void that left it at times voiceless, while at other times it spoke in a cacophony of inchoate opinions. During these 100 days, no articulate Republican counter-case was made to Obama's proposals. The "big tent" party has become so narrow in its geographical and ideological base that it is as irrelevant today as the Whigs were in the 1850s. Second, Arlen Specter's switch is also significant in that it may have a moderating force on the Obama agenda, forcing him to accommodate it toward the center instead of pushing ahead at full steam.  This could be a timely correction, since some fiscally conservative Democrats (so-called Blue Dog Democrats) are increasingly voicing their concern, not only about the frenetic pace of reforms but also about the ambitious scale of the spending: the request for $ 800 billion in the form of a fiscal stimulus will be followed by another $ 600 billion for health care and $ 500 billion for infrastructure.  This will add two trillion dollars to the national debt, and would represent the biggest expansion in the role of the Federal Government since Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program. According to Niall Ferguson, economic historian at Harvard, the federal debt which is now  around a still-healthy 70% of GDP, will balloon to 180% of GDP, similar to Japan's.  These are serious concerns that may come back to haunt the administration further down the line, if the economy does not pull ahead in a year or two. The first one hundred days is by most measures an inconclusive, artificial period of time in which to evaluate a President's success. In all likelihood the next one hundred days will be more determinative, once the legislative agenda moves forward. But we can still use this early stage as a barometer of public support and as a measure of how much Obama has worked to fulfill his campaign promises.  In many ways, this period only writes the afterword of the 2008 presidential election. The President has been given an extended period of grace by the American people, in the understanding that he inherited the worst economic crisis since 1930. In the face of tumultuous times and unprecedented unease over the economy, he has maintained his calm and collected demeanor and continued to communicate, explain, and give hope. Thus he was able to avoid a flare- up of populist rage at the excesses of Wall Street, and focus with calm persistence on fixing the economic mess at home and the frayed international ties abroad. His ability to recognize US missteps and open up to the world reaching out to Iran and Cuba has already changed the entire tone of US foreign policy. This new moderation and sensitivity about how others perceive the United States was welcomed around the world and even has not borne fruit yet, it bodes well for future exchanges. The main criticism that has been raised is that the Obama team is embarking on too many different tasks and that this "frenzied flurry" of activity will not allow it to focus on solving the two main problems it faces: the economy and the fight against terrorism. Both are labor intensive and complicated and demand full-time attention and concentration. There is some value in these criticisms, but there are two main reasons why the White House has chosen this approach.  First, the President has a vision that ties all his initiatives together, and he so far deserves praise for pursuing it without neglecting any of the major problems he faces.  For Obama, fixing the economy alone is not feasible without changing the country's energy base, reforming its health care and education systems. His vision encompasses a technological, knowledge- based economy where the new jobs will be in the green energy sector and in bio-technology and robotics. To meet the job demands of these two revolutions in technology and energy, a third revolution will have to take place in the educational field, with a renewed stress on mathematics and science, as well as a restructuring of curriculums and developing inter-disciplinary skills for problem-solving. At the same time, these revolutions would also transform the international landscape in many ways, some predictable (the demise of oil-based economies would certainly solve a problem or two in the Middle East), others not so. But the United States is clearly at a crossroads in its history and must choose between continuity and demise, or change and a renewed claim to leadership in the XXI century. Second, blessed by a prolonged period of grace granted to them by the American people and the media, and with no opposition in the horizon, the administration has adopted this frenetic pace to make the most of this enlarged window of opportunity. Propelled forward by a vision but at the same time imbued of a healthy pragmatism, Obama has not kept every single promise to every constituency, and has preferred instead to pick his battles. For example, he did not re-open NAFTA in the realization that economic recovery will require free trade. Similarly, he has postponed a fight over making permanent a ban on the sale of assault weapons. He also gave up on pushing for a reduction of farm subsidies when it was clear that Congress Democrats would not yield on that issue. Instead, he has focused on a set of non-negotiable priorities, trying to do as much as he can and knowing that only a few will bear fruit in the long run. Obama is now at the peak of his power but has not lost sense of the ephemeral nature   of politics, and he knows that the seeds of the downfall are often sowed at the highest point of power. A student of history, he is well aware that presidents inevitably become reactive, as unforeseen events beyond their control begin to shape their tenures and their place in history.  If a year or two from now the economy has not recovered and promises made in the first hundred days remain unfulfilled, disillusionment will set in and his power will wane accordingly.  His outsized expansion of the federal government would then be harshly criticized and cost him the support of moderates. His strong repudiation of all of Bush's national security policies, including the publishing of the torture memos, could also become a huge liability in the case of another major terrorist attack. Ultimately, the strongest moment for a president is also the riskiest, since there is a temptation to overreach.  Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia


The collection of articles in this issue of Seminars in Speech and Language is much needed in speech-language pathology. The combined effect of increasing demographic shifts in the United States, a broadening scope of practice in the discipline, and professional mandates for culturally competent, evidencebased practice with a richly diverse adult population underscores the imperative need for this volume. Issues related to serving culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) pediatric populations have received significant attention in speech-language pathology and related literatures over the past decade. In contrast, there has been relatively little attention in the empirical and clinical literatures directed toward issues surrounding service delivery with communicatively impaired CLD adult populations. This lack of attention in the professional literatures puts speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working with CLD adults at a considerable disadvantage. A lack of information on the part of SLPs may lead to inadequate service delivery to this large and growing segment of the U.S. population. Limitations in the quality of the services rendered by SLPs to communicatively disordered minority adults may result in care disparities and, in turn, poor service outcomes. In fact, one of the greatest health-care challenges in the United States is the profound disparity in care between racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities as compared with white English-speaking Americans of Western European descent. The general purpose of the articles included in this issue of Seminars in Speech and Language is to highlight evidence and conceptual principles at the intersection of CLD and acquired communication impairments in adults. Each article is also translational in that practical strategies for improving clinical service delivery to CLD populations are presented. Consistent with recent calls to examine communication and its impairments using innovative, cross-disciplinary evidence and paradigms, the articles in this volume cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. Ultimately, the information presented here is expected to enhance the core knowledge and skills of SLPs to work with CLD adult populations. In this issue, seven articles focus on various aspects of CLD in adults. In the first article, Centeno sets the stage for the overarching theme of this issue by discussing current gaps and complexities in service delivery to communicatively impaired minority adults, using bilingual Spanish-English persons with aphasia for illustration. Next, Olivares and Altarriba discuss connections between emotions, culture, and language in immigrant and minority persons and the implications of these connections for clinical practice. Based on culturally shaped psychoemotional issues in Hispanics, this article describes the benefits of collaborative crossdiscipline communication between SLPs and mental health professionals. In the third article, Wong and colleagues discuss important information on tonal


Tourism, Safety and Security: a multi dimensional analysis brings together with advanced Wi-Com Technology is discussed in this paper. India has an amazing spectrum of animals native to the country. The country's rich and diverse wildlife is preserved in 120-plus national parks, 18 bio-reserves and 500plus wildlife sanctuaries. In recent days, wild life tourism is a very popular place for adventurers and you-tubers. People are expecting more adventures and reality in their tourism, instead of seeing animals in zoo, people now wish to see them in forest areas lively. However, there are only rules and conditions regarding safety for people and forest guards, but no security factors. Therefore, there exists lot of animal attacks and it is increasing year by year as, per the survey. They were only concentrating in forest fire safety and animal tracking in the past years. In this research, we propose an idea to implement a strong safety precaution by using Wi-Com Technology, for the touristers d for t guards in particular.We use Near-field communication (NFC) reader to track the animal's prese ce, which is fixed with a tag. Once any of the animals is present near the limit, it will store and display the particular animal's details to the tourister's vehicle. The main object of this research work is to provide safety for the touristers. In the proposed system, the emergency switches are used to mention the priority of danger to the forest department server room, using Zig-bee protocol. International Journal of Engineering and Techniques Volume 5 Issue 2, Mar-Apr 2019 ISSN: 2395-1303 http://www.ijetjournal.org Page 98 II. LITERATURE SURVEY A. Survey on Security in Wireless Sensor networks (Waleed Al Shehri, 2017, IJACS) The emergence of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be considered one of the most important revolutions in the field of information and communications technology (ICT). Recently, there has been dramatic increase in the use of WSN applications such as surveillance systems, battleground applications, object tracking, habitat monitoring, forest fire detection and patient monitoring. Due to limitations of sensor nodes in terms of energy, storage and computational ability, many security issues have arises in such applications. As a result, many solutions and approaches have been proposed for different attacks and vulnerabilities to achieve security requirements. This paper surveys different security approaches for WSNs, examining various types of attacks and corresponding techniques for tackling these. B. Internet of Things technology for fire monitoring system (S.R.Vijayalakshmi , S.Muruganand, 2017, IJRET) IoT is one of the dominant position all over the world in technological development. It is another information industry following computer, Internet and mobile communication. In Internet of Things technology the fire-fighting, fire monitoring and safety management system are an important applications. It discusses IoT system framework for fire-fighting, planning, and monitoring. It gives development points for providing research and development of IoT in fire-fighting, monitoring and safety management field. Intelligent fire monitoring systems need a key of accurate and effective firefighting software design. This paper also discusses about the requirements of user and key main issues of wireless sensor network hardware and software for monitoring fire. It discusses in elaborate the function of each module and implementation of that module in a detailed way. It also discusses application features of IoT technology and Wireless Sensor Network technology for according to fire-fighting requirements. C.Wildfire Monitoring and Detection SystemUsing Wireless Sensor Network (Albert S. Lutakamale, Shubi Kaijage,2017) Wildfire monitoring and detection system based on wireless sensor network. This system detects fire by monitoring surrounding temperature, humidity and smoke. Once fire is detected, a warning message containing probable location of that fire is immediately sent to the responsible authority over cellular network. In order for the system to be more effective, communities living near forests or national parks can send warning messages through the same system to the responsible authority using their mobile handsets once they witness wildfire or illegal activities. For the system to be fully functional, the only requirement is the availability of cellular network coverage in forests or national parks to enable short message services to take place. The system prototype is developed using Arduino microcontroller, several sensors to detect temperature, relative humidity and smoke as well as wireless network connection modules. At the control center Telerivet messaging platform is used to design the messaging service. The experimental resultsjustify the capability of the proposed system in detecting wildfire in realtime. D. Wireless Networked Security System Based onZigBee Technology (Liting Cao, Yanxia Liu and Shuo Yang,2016) The existing security systems show many shortcomings such as difficult to extend and severe time-consuming because it is based on wiring network technology. In this paper, we present a wireless networked security system based on ZigBee technology. The system adopts hybrid topology structure based on cluster, which consists of many micro-sensor nodes, network coordinator nodes, network gateway (router), communication network and monitor centre (computer). For short distance transmission, the micro-sensor nodes International Journal of Engineering and Techniques Volume 5 Issue 2, Mar-Apr 2019 ISSN: 2395-1303 http://www.ijetjournal.org Page 99 collect data from the monitoring surroundings and transmit to the gateway using Zig-Bee communication. For long distance transmission, from the gateway to the monitor centre, system uses TCP/IP protocol. The gateway in this system is the protocol conversion used to transform a data package in ZigBee protocol to TCP/IP protocol before transmitting. A modified routing protocol based on LEACH is adopted in the system. The simulation result shows that the modified LEACH Protocol has superiority on survival time. The wireless micro-sensor can be scattered to the surroundings that human unable enter. Then the sensor nodes self-organizing networked security system and realize security monitor task. The system also can be used to forest fireproofing and environment pollution inspection after modification.


Electronic absorption and fluorescence spectra based on transmission measurements of thin layers obtained from new perylene–zeolite L composites and new dye1,dye2–zeolite L sandwich composites, the latter acting as antenna systems, have been investigated and analyzed. The influence of extra- and intraparticle self-absorption on the spectral shape and fluorescence quantum yield is discussed in detail. Due to its intraparticle origin, self-absorption and re-emission can often not be avoided in organized systems such as dye–zeolite L composites where a high density of chromophores is a prerequisite for obtaining the desired photophysical properties. We show, however, that it can be avoided or at least minimized by preparing dye1,dye2–zeolite L sandwich composites where donors are present in a much larger amount than the acceptors because they act as antenna systems.


Objective To summarize and analyze imaging performance and characteristics of benign and tumor-like lesions of the calcaneus, to improve the diagnosis of such diseases. Methods The imaging findings of 17 cases with benign tumors or tumor-like lesions in the calcaneus proved by surgery or histopathology were retrospectively analyzed. X-ray examination were performed in all cases, CT in 10 cases and MR in 4 cases. Results The imaging findings showed 6 cases of bone cyst, 3 cases of chondroblastoma, 3 cases of giantcell tunlor, 3 cases of aneurysmal bone cyst, 2 cases of lipomain and one case of hemangioma. Various lesions had both similarity and unique characteristic imaging performance. Conclusions Benign tumor and tumor-like lesions in the calcaneus have certain characteristic imaging features, which can be diagnosed accurately in combination with clinical and biochemical results.


Examines the viability of a proposal to have a general increase in wages in the interests of maintaining purchasing power after the end of World War II. Problems related to the proposal to pay increased wages out of increased postwar profits; Absence of an excessive spread between wages and selling prices; Interest of the public to see that there is a maximum production of goods and services. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)


A New Thermodynamic Method for Solid-Liquid–Vapor Equilibrium in Ternary Antisolvent Crystallization Systems Using Binary Data By Mamata Mukhopadhyay and Sameer V. Dalvi Chemical Engineering Department , Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, India. (email: firstname.lastname@example.com) Abstract: Prediction of the solid-liquid-vapor (S-L-V) equilibrium data for the ternary (CO2 -solventsolid) systems is needed in the design and analysis of Supercritical Antisolvent (SAS) or Gas Antisolvent (GAS) crystallization processes using CO2 as the antisolvent. A new model is presented in this paper for the prediction of the ternary (S-L-V) equilibrium compositions from the binary interaction constants of (CO2-solvent) system and the solid solubility in the solvent at a reference pressure. The model first predicts the ternary liquid phase compositions for the isothermal solid-liquid (S-L) equilibrium from the partial molar volume fraction (PMVF) of the solvent in the binary (CO2-solvent) system. The solid mole fraction in the ternary liquid mixture is considered proportional to the PMVF of the solvent or the contribution of the solvent to the molar volume of the binary (CO2-solvent) mixture. The bubble point pressure and the vapor phase compositions are calculated ensuring that all three (S-L-V) phases are in equilibrium. The model has been validated for two ternary systems: (CO2-toluene-naphthalene) and (CO2-toluenephenanthrene) with the experimental data from the literature. The predicted bubble point pressures are found to agree well with the corresponding experimental data within % AARD of 3.11 and 1.15 respectively for the two ternary systems at 298 K over the pressure range of 14.9 – 62.4 bar. The variation of pressure with temperature at the S-L-V equilibrium also agrees with the reported trends. The model has been illustrated for the generation of ternary phase diagrams for assessing the crystallization pathways.


Node embedding (NE) algorithms capture features of graph's nodes and represent them in a low dimensional vector space. Graphs are inherently noisy structures, which might reduce the learned representations quality. We propose a novel approach using denoising autoencoders to reduce noise in the learned representation of nodes. Experiments with three state-of-the-art NE algorithms show that our approach effectively reduces noise in a link prediction task.


Chrysanthemum white rust is a quarantine pest in many countries. In India, this invasive disease was first reported in Udagamandalam in Tamil Nadu in 2012 and has spread to chrysanthemum growing areas in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The disease turns epidemic when the night temperature is lower than 19-20°C. Since the disease is newly emerging in India, an attempt was made to evaluate fungicides for the management of this disease. Field evaluation for two years during 2015-16 and 2016-17 was carried out. Spraying chlorothalonil at 0.2% immediately after the first appearance of the rust pustules and continuing at fortnightly interval during Dec – Jan reduced the infection and prevented further spread. In 2015-16, the PDI in chlorothalonil treated plots did not rise above 10 PDI while in control it reached 78.8 PDI. In 2016-17 also, chlorothalonil was found effective with less than 10 PDI while in control it reached above 70 DPI. The next best chemical was propiconazole with 20 PDI. Myclobutanil which was found effective in Europe was not found effective in our study.


In this study, the authors evaluated the morphology pattern and motion characteristics of human spermatozoa before and after swim-up separation. Samples were divided into two, morphologically different groups according to the percentage of normal sperm forms assessed by the strict criteria of the Norfolk laboratory: "good"(G) and "poor" (P) prognosis patterns. The percentages of normal forms, slightly abnormal forms, and severe head defects were significantly different in the two groups. Motile characteristics were analyzed by a computerized semen analyzer with constant parameter settings. Before swim-up there were no significant differences in semen volume, percentage of neck and tail defects, concentration, or percentage of motility and linearity, but the mean velocity was higher in group G. After swim-up the percentage of motility, total number of motile cells, and recovery rate were higher for group G, and the incidence of severe head defects correlated negatively with the percentage of cells with a velocity of greater than 80 microns/sec. The results suggest that patients with a high incidence of sperm head defects have impaired original velocity, and swim-up selects for velocity as well as normal forms and motility. Although motility and velocity improved substantially after swim-up, the recovery rate and percentage of motility were significantly lower in the P group.


Abstract:  Determining the inter‐island migration abilities of pest species and delimiting eradication units enable more viable long‐term eradication campaigns because recurrent colonization from neighboring islands is avoided. We examined the genetic structure of the invasive Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) to identify gene flow between islands and delimit population units at different geographical scales. We investigated variation in eight microsatellite loci in rat populations from 18 islands, representing five archipelagos off the Brittany coast (France). Although most of the islands are isolated from each other, short genetic distances, weak FSTvalues between close islands, and a high level of cross‐assignment showed that individuals collected on different islands could represent a single population unit. A Bayesian clustering method also supported the existence of high levels of gene flow between some neighboring islands. Thus, the statement "one island equals one population" can be false when inter‐island distances are less than a few hundred meters. Genetic studies enable the definition of island clusters among which migration may occur that should be considered eradication units. To avoid reinvasion and to minimize ecological and economic costs, rats on all islands in an eradication unit should be eradicated simultaneously. We suggest that the genetic monitoring we performed here can be applied for management of any pest.


In recent years, there have been introduced, new standards, (or amendments), which specify the type of laser hazard class appropriate to a given circumstance or use environment. The Class of a laser processing machine, for example, as installed in the EU (European Union) or EFT A countries within the (European Free Trade Area) is dictated by the user environment, and the type of personnel expected in that environment. This presentation gives a brief of the varying requirements for general use, telecommunication and material processing lasers as delineated in the pertinent Standards. Standards discussed include IEC (EN) 60825-1 Safety of laser products – Part 1: Equipment classification, requirements and user's guide; IEC (EN) 60825-2 Safety of laser products – Part 2: Fiber optic communication systems; ISO/IEC (EN) 11553-1 (FDIS) Safety of machines — Laser processing machines — Part 1: General safety requirements; US Title 21 Code of Federal Regulations ¶ 1040 Federal Laser Product Performance Standard; ANSI B 11.21: Safety Requirements for Machine Tools Using Lasers for Processing Materials; and their associated or referenced standards. This presentation should be useful to those manufacturers intending to provide the described equipment, or to users desiring an understanding of the manufacturing requirements, as it relates to their responsibilities in the work place environment.In recent years, there have been introduced, new standards, (or amendments), which specify the type of laser hazard class appropriate to a given circumstance or use environment. The Class of a laser processing machine, for example, as installed in the EU (European Union) or EFT A countries within the (European Free Trade Area) is dictated by the user environment, and the type of personnel expected in that environment. This presentation gives a brief of the varying requirements for general use, telecommunication and material processing lasers as delineated in the pertinent Standards. Standards discussed include IEC (EN) 60825-1 Safety of laser products – Part 1: Equipment classification, requirements and user's guide; IEC (EN) 60825-2 Safety of laser products – Part 2: Fiber optic communication systems; ISO/IEC (EN) 11553-1 (FDIS) Safety of machines — Laser processing machines — Part 1: General safety requirements; US Title 21 Code of Federal Regulations ¶ 1040 Federal Laser Product Performance Standard; A...


In summary, the limited duration of government power is essential in a democratic state. It ensures balanced regulation of the political affairs along with the realization of public interests. The ruling party has to keep itself from pursuing immediate advantages (such as political capital). Therefore, it has to provide legible policies, which are possible to implement and which promote the development of the society.


In China, the demand for public infrastructure projects is high due to the acceleration of urbanization and the rapid growth of the economy in recent years. Infrastructures are mainly large scale, so local governments have difficulty in independently completing financing work. In this context, public sectors often seek cooperation from private sectors, in which public–private partnership (PPP) is increasingly common. Although numerous studies have concentrated on sustainable development, the unsustainability performances of infrastructures are often reported on various media. Furthermore, studies on the sustainability performances of PPP-type infrastructure (PTI) projects are few from the perspective of private sectors' behaviors. In this study, we adopted the modified theory of planned behavior and the structure equation model and conducted a questionnaire survey with 258 respondents for analyzing the sustainable behaviors of private sectors. Results indicated that behavioral attitude, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norm interact significantly. They have direct positive effects on behavioral intention and then indirectly influence actual behavior through this intention. Actual sustainable behaviors of private sectors have significantly positive effects on the sustainable development of cities. We offer theoretical and managerial implications for public and private sectors on the basis of the findings to ensure and promote the sustainability performances of PTI projects.


The papers collected in this issue address a variety of aspects of the concept of conatus ranging from the explorations of its roots in early ancient Greek thought to its application on modern theories of democratic education. The conatus is a special relation between the parts of a monad and their subparts and the subparts of the subparts to infinity, which ensures that each part and subpart is a part of this monad and not of any other. As a fundamental trait of monadic existence, the conatus is manifested in a multiplicity of facets that sustain the persistence of any real existence. It is thus obvious that there is still a vast field of such manifestations of conatus that awaits philosophical exploration, especially in the realms of Social Ontology and of the Philosophy of Nature.


Political psychology constitutes a problem-oriented and interdisciplinary field (Staerkle, 2015). In fact, being born in the decades between the First and Second World Wars, it is intrinsically characterized by the concern to study and cope with social and political crises and their implications (Nesbitt-Larking & Kinnvall, 2012). Its theoretical tools and concepts were developed in order to cast light on phenomena such as mass psychology and collective action, racism, the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. The role of psychology in the study of these phenomena was, as Moscovici (1988) argued, not only necessary but also functional.


The Australian Army continues to evolve and adapt as it implements Plan Beersheba. Implementing these changes falls to Major General Jeff Sengelman, Head of Modernisation and Strategic Planning, who recently spoke with APDR to discuss Army's future direction. This involves several key initiatives that will improve Army's force generation cycle; increase its capabilities in digitisation, protection, mobility and firepower; and enhance its intellectual capital by encoding lessons from the last 15 years of operations into doctrine, training and future capability. Underpinning the first major initiative - a sustainable force generation cycle - is the restructure of the Army's three Combat Brigades to ensure that at any given time, one is always available for operations.


The present invention discloses a pipe section TBM construction method, the step is provided with a shaft section has a length of pipe sections integrally; Release first shield machine working shaft hole, the hole at the distal end cover is mounted with a steel collar tube section, to complete the first installation; the second pipe section transverse to the inner working transported cartridge at shield tail shield; by mechanical handle tube section to rotate 90 degrees about the Z axis, and then rotated 90 degrees about the X axis; mat the pipe sections elevate to the desired height, then laying pipe sections mounted into the cylinder it first collar steel pipe sections; after transport section by section, as described above, rotate, elevate, and then laying a pipe section cylinder the rear section by section with a pipe section has been installed eleven good closed, complete pipe laying. Present invention compared with the conventional shield construction, with the overall pipe sections, overcome the shortcomings of segment joints leak, saving many accessories and auxiliary materials, enhanced structural stability, installation speed, shorten the construction period, reduce costs, the joint sealing performance, adapt to a wide range of soil.


By analyzing the destruction process of concrete,conclusion is drawn on the research of the destruction mechanism of concrete at macro and micro levels.Comparative study is made between various research models,and some suggestions are put forward to avoid failure of concrete in practical engineering.


Objectives: The primary objectives of our study were to determine if inpatient anticholinergic burden in Parkinson disease (PD) was associated with a diagnosis of fracture and delirium. Secondary objectives were to examine whether anticholinergic burden increased the risk of emergency department (ED) visit and inpatient readmission within 30-days of discharge.
 Background: Medications used in the treatment of cardiovascular, genitourinary, and psychiatric conditions have anticholinergic effects in the brain. PD patients are particularly vulnerable to adverse effects of anticholinergic medications due to disease-related disruption of central cholinergic pathways. Pharmacoepidemiology data in PD are limited.
 Methods: We examined dispensed medications, diagnoses, and readmission in a cohort of 16,302 PD inpatients admitted to hospitals subscribed to Cerner Health Facts, an electronic medical record platform, between 2000 and 2011. Anticholinergic burden was assessed using the Anticholinergic Risk Scale (ARS). Unconditional logistic regression was used to compute the odds of fracture and delirium compared to ARS score = 0 for categories of anticholinergic burden. Cox proportional hazard models were used to estimate the 30-day ED visit and inpatient readmission risk associated with increasing anticholinergic burden.
 Results: Use of non-PD medications with moderate to very strong anticholinergic potential was common (57.8[percnt]). Individuals with the highest ARS score (≥4) had an increased odds of fracture (adjusted odds ratio (AOR): 2.04, 95[percnt] CI: 1.60-2.59) and delirium (AOR: 1.61, 95[percnt] CI: 1.08-2.40) compared to those with no anticholinergic burden. Similarly, individuals with the highest ARS score were at increased risk of ED visit (adjusted hazard ratio (AHR): 1.32, 95[percnt] CI: 1.10-1.58) and inpatient readmission (AHR: 1.16, 95[percnt] CI: 1.01-1.33) within 30-days of discharge.
 Conclusions: We found a positive association between increased anticholinergic burden and adverse health outcomes among individuals with PD. Additional studies are needed to better understand the risks of anticholinergic medications in PD. Disclosure: Dr. Crispo has nothing to disclose. Dr. Willis has nothing to disclose. Dr. Thibault has nothing to disclose. Dr. Fortin has nothing to disclose. Mr. Hays has received personal compensation for activities with Cerner Corporation as an employee. Dr. McNair has received personal compensation for activities with Cerner Corporation as an employee. Dr. Bjerre has nothing to disclose. Dr. Kohen has nothing to disclose. Dr. Perez-Lloret received personal compensation for activities with Aguettant Laboratories as a consultant. Dr. Mattison has received personal compensation for activities with Risk Sciences International. Dr. Krewski has received personal compensation for activities with Risk Sciences International as an employee.


Abstract. In recent days, an unrivaled proliferation of autonomous driving becomes an active area of research in the field of smart city applications. Millions of autonomous cars emerge as ubiquitous in smart cities in the foreseeable future. Vehicle detection and tracking is one of the important cases in smart city applications. It clarifies that the efficient scene parsing methods will be a huge potential. There were several traditional methods employed for the detection of object for the purpose of vehicle detection and road segmentation. However, there were some drawbacks such as reduced rate of detection accuracy, improper road segmentations, and missing detections of occluded objects exist. To overcome the existing issues, we propose an effective multi focus object detector (MFOD) that retrieves spatiotemporal data and considers multiple cues of an object for detection and tracking. The proposed MFOD performs lane detection, vehicle detection, and tracking. To accomplish this task, modified Hough transform is proposed for lane detection and road segmentation. Residual attention unit (RAU) with shared convolutional neural network layers is deployed for vehicle detection and tracking. It makes use of motion model to update the network and creates visualization map to explore the visibility of occluded objects and spatial attention map for accurate prediction of object location. The proposed MFOD is also extended for scene parsing task. We performed extensive analysis of the proposed MFOD with standard evaluation metrics on two different datasets, such as KITTI for object detection and tracking task and cityscapes for scene parsing task. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MFOD achieves 3% to 4% improvement compared with the existing methods.


The purpose of this cross-sectional study and research was to evaluate the health risks to children in relation to the concentration of lead and cadmium in drinking water. Samples were collected between 1 May 2020 and 15 October 2020. Thirty-three child development centres, Phatthalung province, Thailand. Two hundred and ten drinking water samples were taken, consisting of 66 bottled water samples, 66 tap water samples, 66 filtered tap water samples and 12 raw water samples for using in the child development centres. Concentrations of lead and cadmium were identified by graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry. The concentration of cadmium in bottled water samples, tap water samples, filtered tap water samples, and raw water samples ranged from nd - 0.0020mg/L, nd - 0.0049 mg/L, nd - 0.0018 mg/L and nd - 0.0049 mg/L. The summation of the total hazard index of bottled water samples, tap water samples, filtered tap water, and raw water samples was less than 1, was considered health-protective. The results will provide the direct evidence needed by child development centres managers to warn learners about the health risk of drinking water among children.


The paper deals with a two-mode antenna and analytic algorithm for diagnostics of plasma parameters designed for experimental study and prediction of flight characteristics of plasma on the basis of the results obtained during bench tests and flight experiments and available in the data base.


The requirements projected to the year 2000 for space-based global service systems, including both personal communications and innovative services, are developed based on historic trends and anticipated worldwide demographic and economic growth patterns. The growing demands appear to be best satisfied by developing larger, more sophisticated space systems in order to reduce the size, complexity, and expense of ground terminals. The availability of low-cost ground terminals will, in turn, further stimulate the generation of new services and new customers.


Background: Accurate diagnosis of heart failure (HF) is essential for its proper management and logical drug therapy to reduce morbidity and mortality. In this perspective, researchers are in search of a good biomarker as complementary to the clinical parameters to improve the performance of HF diagnosis. B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) secreted by cardiac ventricles in HF has emerged as a new promising biomarker in this regard. Objective: Evaluation of plasma BNP concentration in HF cases. Methods: In a hospital based case-control study, 100 HF cases and 80 age and sex matched control subjects without HF were enrolled by non random sampling. Plasma BNP was measured in all study subjects and then compared between cases and controls. Results: Median plasma BNP concentration in HF (446.5pg/ml, range 16.8-4000pg/ml) found to be significantly high compared to that in control subjects (69.5pg/ml, range 0.6-627.5pg/ml). Conclusion: In HF patients, plasma BNP is raised significantly. So it can be a promising biomarker for diagnosis of HF. Keywords: B-type natriuretic peptide, heart failure DOI:10.3329/jom.v11i1.4268 J Medicine 2010: 11: 46-50


Purpose. The aim of this study was to determine the maturity-related variations in anthropometry, physical fitness, and sport-specific skills among young male and female futsal players. Methods. Overall, 77 athletes (44 boys and 33 girls) aged 10.5–13.7 (12.3 ± 0.9) years were measured for stature, body mass, 2 skinfolds, as well as 3 fitness and 2 sport-specific test items. Results. Compared with boys, girls were significantly more advanced in maturation and had greater body mass index and body fat percentage. Except for the countermovement jump result, boys outperformed girls in all fitness and sport-skill assessments. Regardless of gender, early maturing players were significantly taller and heavier and had higher body fat percentage and grip strength than their late maturing counterparts. In boys, none of the other physical fitness and sport-specific skill measures significantly differed between contrasting maturity groups. In turn, early maturing girls had significantly better scores in all physical fitness measurements than late maturing girls. Partial correlations, with chronological age controlled as a covariate, indicated moderate to high correlations between the maturation indicator and stature and body mass in both boys and girls. Except for grip strength and dribbling tests for boys and girls, respectively, other physical fitness and sport-specific skill measures did not show a significant correlation with maturity status. Conclusions. These results highlight that rather than with functional and sport-specific characteristics, physical maturity status may be associated with greater body size in young futsal players.


Western Corn Rootworm is a pest of maize that mostly damages roots. Many alternative strategies have been explored to control this species, with little or non-lasting success, and it remains a threat to maize production worldwide. Gaeolaelaps aculeifer, a soil-dwelling predatory mite that inhabits the first few centimeters of the soil, showed high predatory potential against WCR larvae in the laboratory. In this study, we explored the efficiency of G. aculeifer against WCR in more realistic contexts. First, we infested maize plants isolated in pots in a greenhouse with WCR, and tested the impact of different densities of mites on plant protection. Using standard indicators of WCR population presence and impact, we confirmed that G. aculeifer has the potential to control WCR at densities starting from 100 mites/plant. Then, considering that the release of a large amount of biocontrol agents at WCR emergence might be too costly and constraining for large-scale implementation, we tested the efficiency of a predator-in-first strategy in a maize field infested by WCR. The goal was to introduce fewer G. aculeifer combined with Aleuroglyphus ovatus eggs as an alternative food source in order to let the mite population grow in the field and reach sufficient density at the critical stage for protection. This strategy gave comparable results to pesticide on all indicators examined in our field trial, highlighting the potential to sustainably manage this pest.


In the winter of 2009 a collection of feminist scholars, PhD candidates, and constitutional lawyers from around the world held a conference at Queens College in Ontario, Canada to share ideas about feminist constitutionalism and to determine the ways in which their work could advance equality. This volume of 24 chapters, which includes a foreword by Catherine MacKinnon and an introduction by the editors, provides their findings. In her foreword, MacKinnon contends that feminism is both a new perspective and a "tool for intervening in the legal sphere" (ix). Given the importance of the law and that women have only rarely (and recently) taken seats at the constitution-writing table, existing legal codes typically reflect the voices of the powerful. It is not surprising, writes MacKinnon, that those people are members of the dominant race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and gender, and they have tended to empower and be sensitive to the issues of the privileged (ix). What feminist constitutionalism can do, then, is (1) uncover the ways in which commitments to equality and dignity that are enshrined in law actually mask the privilege and power of the dominant group and (2) develop new approaches to enhancing the rights of the marginalized. With its sensitivity to the complexity of identity and habit of discovering hidden power realities, feminist constitutionalism seeks to bring opportunity, freedom, and dignity to all members of the society, even those who are sometimes invisible. Interestingly, MacKinnon wonders aloud whether feminist constitutionalism really exists and warns that this effort risks ghettoization. Ultimately, she encourages the contributors to look for avenues for mainstream interaction and recognition. Opening the volume, editors Beverley Baines, Daphne Barak-Erez, and Tsvi Kahana explain that feminist constitutionalism "is the project of rethinking constitutional law in a manner that addresses and reflects feminist thought and experience" (1). They use this term to emphasize that they seek a holistic rethinking of constitutionalism (which focuses on the institutions of power and the relationships between individuals, groups, and the government) that also incorporates insights from feminism about the social nature of power, the ways that private distinctions maintain public


Abstract : Although it has been shown that new employees who receive realistic information about an organization prior to their entry into it tend to have lower turnover than those who receive positively-biased information, little is known about the process through which this realistic information affects turnover. The present study investigated three possible psychological processes underlying the use of realistic job previews in a field experiment with 320 new employees of a retail food chain. Three psychological processes through which RJPs were hypothesized to lower turnover were suggested. These were: 1) lowered expectations and increased job satisfaction, 2) improved ability to cope with unpleasant job circumstances when they were expected, and 3) the creation of a perceptual set of greater openness and honesty within the company. None of the hypotheses received strong support. The results were discussed primarily in terms of general lack of support for the effects of met expectations on job satisfaction.


Spectroscopy of excited states is still a quite challenging problem for lattice QCD. The reason is that euclidean two-point functions have a sum of infinitely many exponentials in their spectral representation and it is a non-trivial task to extract the subleading terms corresponding to the excited states. For quenched or partially quenched calculations the situation is complicated further by additional unphysical contributions: When ignoring the fermion determinant, the η also becomes a Goldstone boson, and this massless flavor singlet state can couple in various processes through hairpin diagrams. The corresponding effects were studied in [1] for the quenched scalar propagator. It was demonstrated that the η leads to additional contributions to the scalar propagator which have a negative sign and a non-standard t-dependence. Such terms, often referred to as "ghosts", compete with the exponential decay coming from the scalar, and make the extraction of the scalar mass cumbersome. For the nucleon system the effects of ghost states and the problems they cause in the extraction of the Roper resonance were discussed in [2]. In principle, in a quenched calculation, correlators for all quantum numbers may be infested by ghosts, possibly coming from bound or scattering states with η, or states involving even several η. Thus, one has to find tools for reliably removing these contributions, in particular, if one is interested in excited states, where the influence of the ghost states is even more devastating. A powerful tool, developed for the analysis of excited states, is the variational method [3, 4]. The main idea is to work with several linearly independent interpolators Oi, i = 1, 2, . . . r, all with the quantum numbers of the desired state, and to compute the cross-correlations


A compact, unpretentious, almost conversational volume by the medical director of the London Child Guidance Clinic and Training Center, an institution supported in large part by The Commonwealth Fund of New York. There are no formal case studies; there is, instead, an abundance of concrete illustrations of symptoms and of methods. Behaviour is spelled with an extra vowel, but the problems-stealing, lies, feeding difficulties, nervousness, enuresis, sex difficulties, speech defects, fits, anxiety, mental deficiencyare not peculiar to Britain. There is no reference to the effects of present war conditions on British children. Aggressiveness is regarded as a source of anxiety in young children. Work, security, and affection are stressed as essential guidance goals. The author's approach is conservative. No novel points of view are advanced, but child guidance is advocated as a branch of clinical medicine which is rapidly becoming more exact, assured, and successful. The author frowns on elaborate intensive psycho-therapeutic processes, which he regards as tedious and difficult, and, moreover, so hazardous that they sh6uld be employed only where the prognosis is sufficiently serious to justify drastic procedures. He wisely recommends restraint, because active treatment may interfere with the healing process of nature. In the publication of this useful, orientational volume The Commonweafth Fund again affirms its interest in promoting the practical objectives of mental hygiene.


A recent patient's experience highlights how autologous serum tears can help heal the ocular surface and provide relief of dry eye symptoms.


Rufino's employers are the focus of this chapter. The Ermelinda's owner was José Francisco de Azevedo Lisboa, a slave trader also known by the nickname Azevedinho (little Azevedo). He was well-known to the British authorities for his extensive slave trading activities in Angola, West Africa, Bahia, and Pernambuco in the 1830s and 1840s. He was the equivalent of the CEO of a large slave trading firm based in Recife that brought together some of the wealthiest local merchants, such as Angelo Francisco Carneiro, later Viscount of Loures, and had formed a vast network of connections with slave dealers all over Brazil. According to an investigation by the British, this organization smuggled massive numbers of slaves to Brazilian shores.


This paper briefly outlines a method to measure the conflict between pedestrians and cyclists (unprotected road users) and motorised traffic in a town centre. Junctions are selected at random and the traffic situation recorded by video. The recordings are examined to determine the degree of separation. Examples are given of the information obtained. The information provides a basis for determining where action is necessary. For the covering abstract see IRRD 880187.


Decision-making methods based on a deterministic criterion, such as optimal power flow (OPF) and security-constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF), have been widely applied to practical power system operation. With these methods, the operating conditions of the power system are classified as secure or insecure based on predefined deterministic criteria. However, such a binary secure/insecure index based on a deterministic analysis does not take into account the relative risks associated with random outages of generation and transmission facilities. Therefore using deterministic decision-making methods such as OPF and SCOPF to balance the security and economy can be unnecessarily expensive. This study proposes an optimal probabilistic security (OPS) approach, which balances security and economy on a probabilistic basis. The objective of the OPS is to minimise the expected social cost, which is the sum of the expected operating cost and the expected interruption cost. An improved particle swarm optimisation technique is used to solve this probabilistic optimisation problem. Unlike other risk-based decision-making algorithms, the OPS is a self-contained decision-making tool, which does not require the definition of an arbitrary risk threshold. The OPS determines operator actions that optimally balance security and economy for given weather and operating conditions. The OPS is compared with the OPF and SCOPF using a six-bus system and the IEEE-RTS.


In this paper we investigate Vedic divider, double precision floating point divider, Vedic divider used in RSA cryptography, Goldschmidt algorithm based floating point divider, which have been proposed by different researchers. At the point when the investigation of the different dividers have been performed, Vedic divider has less power sparing, faster and less space possessed compared to customary divider. The Goldschmidt computational calculation is actualized utilizing subtractor and floating-point multiplier. By joining Boolean rationale with ancient Vedic arithmetic, generous measure of iteration are reduced, diminishment in delay and decrease in power for most part utilized designs. The division calculation for double precision floating point has lessening in power utilization and configuration space contrast with various double precision division techniques.


This paper is concerned with the software management processes that examine the area of software development through the development models, which are known as software development life cycle. It represents six of the software development models namely, waterfall, Prototyping, Incremental, RAD, Spiral and Extreme programming. This paper provides a framework which serve as a basis for analyzing the similarities and differences among different life cycle models. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to represent different models of software development and make a comparison between them to show the features and defects of each model.


Pakistan covers 79.1 million ha in which the area of water is estimated at 7.8 million ha and provides food and shelter to the local inhabitants as well as visiting and resident wildfowl. From early July to late September, monsoons reach into Pakistan and are of immense significance to the country's wildlife and agro-based communities. However, a vast part of the country, mainly Baluchistan province, remains deprived of this rain but in winter seasonal rains and snow occur, particularly in Quetta, Zhoba and Pishin valleys. This rain and snow melt water provides a source of sustenance to the people of not only Baluchistan, but also Afghanistan. This water settles in a chain of lagoons in the Chagai desert, and provides much bird habitat. For centuries, Lake Zangi Nawar has been used by hundreds of thousand of birds and many local tribes. The people and governments have collectively made small dams so that this large source of water may be of help through seasonal agriculture and pasture management for their livestock, on which the people mainly depend. The lake is the sole source for raising the water-table for the nearby villages who use this for drinking purposes. These Baluch tribes are barely literate, but with experience they have recognized that the lake and its valuable by-products are of immense advantage. Thus, they carefully watch and guard the whole area. The study considers the available resources, the community response, and the development made by the visitors at Zangi Nawar. It also provides options and suggestions for long-term sustainable management of the wetland and its resources.


Parametrized time-frequency analysis (PTFA) can effectively improve time-frequency energy aggregation of non-stationary signal and immunity of cross term interference, but it exists the energy diffusion near the real instantaneous frequency. The improved multi-synchrosqueezing transform (IMSST) can improve the time-frequency energy aggregation, but it still has defects in processing strong FM and AM signals under noise interference. Therefore, in order to make use of their advantages and overcome their disadvantages, a novel parametrized multi-synchrosqueezing transform method based on weighted least square, IMSST and PTFA, namely PMSST is proposed in this paper. In the PMSST, the IMSST is designed to obtain the signal time-frequency representation with high energy aggregation. Then the ridge extraction algorithm is employed to extract the instantaneous frequency ridges of each mono-component signal. The weighted least square method is used to estimate the parameters of parameterized transform kernel. Finally, time-frequency spectrum is superimposed to obtain the time-frequency energy representation of the enhanced signal. The experiment results show that the PMSST can effectively process non-stationary signals with varying instantaneous frequency by the simulated signal and actual fault signals.


It is proved that a connected graph is planar if and only if all its cocycles with at least four edges are "grounded" in the graph. The notion of grounding of this planarity criterion, which is purely combinatorial, stems from the intuitive idea that with planarity, there should be a linear ordering of the edges of a cocycle such that in the two subgraphs remaining after the removal of these edges, there can be no crossing of disjoint paths that join the vertices of these edges. The proof given in the paper of the right-to-left direction of the equivalence is based on Kuratowski's theorem for planarity involving $K_{3,3}$ and $K_5$, but the criterion itself does not mention $K_{3,3}$ and $K_5$. Some other variants of the criterion are also shown necessary and sufficient for planarity.


This chapter briefly reviews the main theories of government accountability and accountable governments, and lays out an analytical framework with which to investigate the changing nature of accountability for the Chinese government. Next, it discusses the Chinese government's development and major achievements in the area of accountability. The problems for government accountability that have grown out of the "total economic approach" are discussed from the perspective of regional and local governments. The responsibility to promote economic growth has displaced government's social management and public services responsibilities and, at the same time, local governments have lacked the financial wherewithal to fulfill their public services responsibilities. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the challenges to the implementation of government accountability measures arising from increased problems in governance. Keywords: China's government accountability; public services; socio-economic development


After years of development from a concept to early experimental stage, X-ray Deformable Mirrors (XDMs) are used in many synchrotron/free-electron laser facilities as a standard x-ray optics tool. XDM is becoming an integral part of the present and future large x-ray and EUV projects and will be essential in exploiting the full potential of the new sources currently under construction. The main objective of using XDMs is to correct wavefront errors or to enable variable focus beam sizes at the sample. Due to the coupling among the N actuators of a DM, it is usually necessary to perform a calibration or training process to drive the DM into the target shape. Commonly, in order to optimize the actuators settings to minimize slope/height errors, an initial measurement need to be collected, with all actuators set to 0, and then either N or 2N measurements are necessary learn each actuator behavior sequentially. In total, it means that N+1 or 2N+1 scans are required to perform this learning process. When the actuators number N is important and the actuator response or the necessary metrology is slow then this learning process can be time consuming. In this work, we present a fast and accurate method to drive an x-ray active bimorph mirror to a target shape with only 3 or 4 measurements. Instead of sequentially measuring and calculating the influence functions of all actuators and then predicting the voltages needed for any desired shape, the metrology data are directly used to "guide" the mirror from its current status towards the particular target slope/height via iterative compensations. The feedback for the iteration process is the discrepancy in curvature calculated by using B-spline fitting of the measured height/slope data. In this paper, the feasibility of this simple and effective approach is demonstrated with experiments.


Two specific factors have contributed to the drastic transformation of South Africa's role in the field of international criminal justice since 1994. The first factor is South Africa's re-emergence as a respected member of the international community of states, and the second the increase in the mobility of humans together with the increase of crime with a transnational element, and more particularly, international terrorism. Gone are the days when crime was regarded as a local phenomenon.


This paper shows the results of a teachinginnovation Project called #Relaciónate of the University of Cantabria. This Project was designed to stablished a communication and specialist information channel between Labour Relations Degree students and teachers. The regular publication through Twitter was focused on legal reports, sentences, doctrinal analysis selected by teachers and specialised profiling network –like official bodies, professionals, teachers connected by social network, ecc.-. This particular system creates an online learning community which allows us to contextualize and share theoretical contents being taught in classroom and to improve the students involvement in learning processes and their relevant skills and values, such as self-directed learning, critical thinking or information management.


Background/Aims: Since its introduction in 1983, laparoscopic appendectomy (LA) has not replaced the conventional open procedure. The patient benefit seems limited to a decreased wound infection rate, and the overall morbidity and mortality rates remain equal to those of open appendectomy. Methods: The data (collected by the Swiss Association of Laparoscopic and Thoracoscopic Surgery) from 2,179 patients undergoing LA at 84 surgical institutions in Switzerland between January 1995 and December 1997 were retrospectively analyzed. Results: More than 90% of all patients had no intra- or postoperative complications. However, perforated appendicitis was associated with more complications, in particular a threefold increased wound infection rate (9.2 vs 3.5%). Furthermore, the conversion and reoperation rates of perforated appendicitis were significantly increased compared to 'simple' acute appendicitis (25.5 and 10.4% vs 4.8 and 2.1%, respectively). LA performed with a stapling device is superior to LA performed with loops, although the difference is not significant. Conclusion: Therefore, LA is a safe and effective procedure. The postoperative morbidity and mortality rates are comparable to those of open appendectomy, which is still the most commonly used procedure in Switzerland. The question of whether perforated appendicitis is better treated laparoscopically or by the open procedure cannot be answered with our data.


The image on the right (click to enlarge) is the paystub for the female child worker we interviewed for this investigation--Wu Xiaofang (This is an alias as well as the name she used on her fake ID in order to get into the factory to work). She told our investigator that she was 14 years old. This paystub and its wealth of information is strong evidence in support of our report's conclusions. According to the listed hours, salary, and overtime pay shown above, we calculated that her approximate overtime was between 70 and 84 hours in this month. The daily subsidy for night shifts is 7 RMB ($1.09), and she received a total of 77 RMB in subsidies for her night shifts in this month. So it can be easily concluded that she worked 11 night shifts during this month, each shift lasting from 8pm to 8am. This paystub clearly shows how the factory was treating this 14-year-old girl. In its statement, the factory alleged that Xiaofang made up a story about her terrible working conditions out of revenge for her dismissal by the factory.


ABSTRACT Clinical supervision for residential care staff is essential and yet has rarely been studied. Drawing from the reflective practice tradition, we interviewed residential care supervisors about their clinical decision-making processes and analyzed the data qualitatively to identify common themes and distill their beliefs and reported practices. We found that supervisors prioritized a compassion-based model of supervision characterized by fostering staff self-care, developing staff's empathy and responsiveness to clients, helping staff with disappointments in their relationships with clients, accurately evaluating client progress, preserving safety, and nurturing teamwork. A supervisor's subjective experience of his caregiving of staff could be explained using a second-level analytic concept we termed a caregiving heuristic—one's beliefs, values, and guidelines for action as a caregiver—of which compassion was, for these supervisors, a foundational element. The supervisors envisioned compassion as a central means by which they could prevent compassion fatigue, develop their staff's caregiving heuristics, and improve job satisfaction and quality of client care.


Literature published recently in the Soviet Union discusses diffusion coating treatment of alloys containing TiC in detail, but contains no information on the treatment of alloys consist of WC.A preliminary experiment involving titanizing of a WC-Co cemented carbide system was carried out to examine the applicability of the paste process to cemented carbides used for wood cutting tools.Research results obtained are summarized as follows:(1) The WC-Co cemented carbide system decreased in mass after titanizing. Mass loss increased with reduction of paste thickness, but increased with increase in the time of treatment due to oxidation or detitanization.(2) Hardness after titanizing increased with increases in paste thickness, temperature of treatment and time. Under optimum condition, surface hardness was improved remarkably.(3) The intermetallic compound formed were identified by X-ray diffraction pattern.(4) Transverse rupture strength, after titanizing increased with increases in the temperature of treatment but decreased with increases in treatment time.(5) Alloys low in Co content could be hardened to the some extent as well as iron and steel, but toughness was decreased by titanizing. It is recommended that Co content be increased to obtain alloys with greater toughness.


As many finance services are made through supply chain system, it needs the stability and accuracy in information transmit process. Supply chain finance service online should be built on the system, including open API, basic database, and progress standardization. The paper focuses on related processes on the SCM platform. Then it discusses how to strengthen the determination of legal rights and responsibilities and provides business scenario of planning electronic warehouse receipt. It shows that the information transmit mechanism can get the economic profit with the help of system.


The Prison Service is one of the key organisations needed for the effective and efficient functioning of the state. It has always been associated with the broadly defined prison system. Meanwhile, the powers of the Prison Service go far beyond the prison system and extend to certain aspects of the criminal procedure or public order and safety. Given the above, it is reasonable to ask the question about the status of the Prison Service within the system of public authorities in the state, which includes, among other things, a comprehensive system of legal protection authorities. It may be thus interesting to look at the Prison Service from the point of view of legal protection authorities.


A reproducible experimental skin infection was a requirement before further studies on the pathogenesis of cutaneous infections could be undertaken. A variety of experimental procedures added further evidence that the skin is difficult to infect. However, a significant regional difference in susceptibility to experimental infection was demonstrated. The technique consisted of: a) applying Staphylococci and Streptococci in the form of an overnight broth culture; b) stabbing through the drop of inoculum with a blood lancet; and c) covering the site with nonporous plastic tape. Four areas on each subject were inoculated in an identical manner. The back was successfully infected in 15% and the arm in 13% of the attempts. The thigh was successfully infected in 21% of the attempts and the leg in 38%. Circulatory factors may account for these differences.


Avoiding ureteric injuries Although the position of the ureter at the pelvi-ureteric junction (approximately the level of the 2nd lumbar vertebra) is quite consistent, the path of the ureter along the psoas muscle is quite variable. The point where the ureter crosses the bifurcation of the iliac vessels to enter the pelvis is also quite consistent. Within the pelvis it runs in the bed of the ovary along the pelvic side wall then medially in the base of the broad ligament below the uterine artery and lateral to the cervix, before entering the bladder. Numerous pathological processes may alter the expected path of the ureter in the pelvis.


Abstract : Pressures working on defense structures of European NATO countries, particularly those of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), tend to favor a change to latent conscript forces oriented toward territorial defense on one hand, standing volunteer armies on the other. Political, financial, and military potentialities of a combination of such forces are discussed, and a detailed comparison is made of territorial defense concepts and forces, as well as civil defense proparations, for four countries--Switzerland and Yugoslavia (which do not participate in NATO's Military integration) and Norway and France (which do so to a much lesser extent than the FRG). (Author)


This study investigates the influence of teacher presence in a postgraduate course. Results show that a teacher's immediate feedback to students' contributions indeed encourages students' involvement in online discussion. A key issue in online course administration is how to improve the quality of student participation. Regarding the questionnaire, students reported on both the strengths and weaknesses of online activities. The students gained encouragement from peers, were more motivated to investigate the topics, and many of them found it easier to contribute their ideas online than in class. On the other hand, students who did not pay enough attention in class had trouble getting involved in online activities; in addition, if students did not get responses from the teacher and peers, they tended to feel disappointed and discouraged. We can infer that teacher presence plays a very important role as it affects how students participate in discussions. Especially when students have contradictory comments on controversial issues, they look to the teacher to step up and take a stronger leadership role. The students think that it is quite essential to have a teacher's involvement toward these critical points.


This article contains analysis of the main problems and prospects of Canadian automotive industry development. Due to the disruption of global supply chains caused by the 2020 coronavirus crisis, as well as other macroeconomic and geo-economic shocks of the recent years, the Canadian automotive industry, competing with automakers from other countries in the global market, is experiencing serious difficulties, which led to significant decline in its economic results in recent years. This, in turn, negatively affects specific indicators, including the demand for labor resources in the sector, the volume of tax revenues of the government, the share of national products in the domestic automobile market of the country and so on. Nevertheless, the country has a significant potential for the development of the industry by using both of its own and macro-regional economic resources. In the following years Canada has all options needed to transform its own automotive industry to meet the modern and future needs of the international market.


This study examined the effect of rinses on the microbial safety of whole egg and its components, commonly consumed in the Ilorin west area, to unrinsed eggs. The microorganisms isolated during this study include: Serratia spp., Providencia spp., Citrobacter spp., E. coli, Enterobacter spp., Klebsiella spp., while the fungus includes Cladosporium spp., Aspergillus fumigatus, A. niger, A. flavus, Penicillium spp. and Mucor spp. From this study the rinsed eggs have the lowest amount of microbial load at 0.6 × 102 cfu/ml, which was less than the accepted 6.0 log10 CFU/ml recommended by the International Commission on the Microbiological Specification for Food. Therefore, it is recommended that table eggs should not be consumed raw.


The 2019 Antitrust Writing Awards Dinner took place on March 26, 2019 at the historic National Press Club in Washington, DC.


No studies have investigated whether the writing of certain transformations can predict comprehension of prose written in them. In studying this possibility, 90 subjects, 30 from each grade level, were asked to read three major prose forms, each written in three transformed versions, and to respond to each immediately on Cloze tests. Every subject also rewrote a simple sentence paragraph using his own sentence combining techniques. The Cloze test scores were then compared to sentence-lengthening criteria in a multiple regression analysis. Cloze tests did not satisfactorily predict sentence length. Yet there was strong evidence to suggest that Cloze tests are less valid measures of advanced reading comprehension and that the higher Cloze scores predicted lower sentence-lengthening criteria.


The work is devoted to the preparation and study of new functional materials with a chiral structurefor sorption and chromatographic technologies used for the separation and concentration of organic compounds, including isomers of various types and optically active compounds. To obtain a composite adsorbent, silicon dioxide nanoparticles (butasil) were modified with unsubstituted β-cyclodextrin, and then they were applied on a silica support Chromaton N-AW. Also an adsorbent with silicon dioxide nanoparticles without cyclodextrin was also obtained. Using low-temperature nitrogen adsorption, the geometric characteristics of both adsorbents were determined. The study of the adsorption properties of adsorbents with respect to pairs of organic compounds of various nature was carried out by gas chromatography. From the obtained temperature dependences of the Henry adsorption constants, the thermodynamic characteristics of adsorption for the studied compounds were calculated. It was found that for both studied adsorbents, the values of specific surface areas are close and significantly differ from the corresponding values for butasil (176.4 m2/g) and solid support (2-4 m2/g). The modification of butasil nanoparticles with β-cyclodextrin seems to lead to a slight increase in the specific surface area and pore volume of the Bsil/CD adsorbent compared to the Bsil adsorbent due to intramolecular cavities. Based on the values of the thermodynamic characteristics of adsorption, it was concluded that, in the case of the Bsil/CD adsorbent, for the molecules of the studied adsorbates, a guest – host complexation is detected. In this case, for cyclic and bicyclic structures, difficulty is observed with inclusion in the cavity. Further, for alkanols, both outer-sphere and intra-sphere complexation is possible.A possible structure of silicon dioxide nanoparticles modified with unsubstituted β-cyclodextrin wasproposed based on the obtained data. In the proposed structure, butyl fragments on the particle surface play the role of «guests» and are included in the macrocyclic cavities of cyclodextrin molecules. Thus, butylfragments on the particle surface act as anchor groups orienting macrocyclic molecules. The resulting orientationof cyclodextrin molecules is favorable for the formation of complexes of different stability with enantiomericmolecules, which is showed in high enantioselectivity for terpenes (limonene, camphene, pinene).


Self- and semi-supervised machine learning techniques leverage unlabeled data for improving downstream task performance. These methods are especially valuable for remote sensing tasks where producing labeled ground truth datasets can be prohibitively expensive but there is easy access to a wealth of unlabeled imagery. We perform a rigorous evaluation of SimCLR, a self-supervised method, and FixMatch, a semi-supervised method, on three remote sensing tasks: riverbed segmentation, land cover mapping, and flood mapping. We quantify performance improvements on these remote sensing segmentation tasks when additional imagery outside of the original supervised dataset is made available for training. We also design experiments to test the effectiveness of these techniques when the test set is domain shifted to sample different geographic areas compared to the training and validation sets. We find that such techniques significantly improve generalization performance when labeled data is limited and there are geographic domain shifts between the training data and the validation/test data.


What is the model for integration in the UK? There is much rhetoric about joining up health and social care to address more than the physical needs of patients. To cite Maslow's (1943) theory of the Hierarchy of Needs, there are many factors that play into an individual being 'well'. These include safe and secure housing, education and employment, friendship, and a feeling of belonging. The integration of health and social care provides the opportunity for a holistic view of individuals, to ensure that they are best equipped to maintain their psychological and physical health, wellbeing, and safety. The Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership (GMHSCP) aims to achieve an integrated system as a result of the Devolution Agenda (HM Treasury and Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), 2014). The role of the community practitioner is pivotal to the devolution vision being achieved, as community practitioners treat, observe, and truly understand the community around them. This article will explore the process and journey Greater Manchester has undertaken, the programmes' aims and challenges, and the opportunities it affords community nurses.


Josephson edge junctions have been fabricated using thin sputtered films of MgO (8-32 AA) to produce a weak connection between high-T/sub c/ electrodes. The current-voltage characteristics of these junctions can be well modeled by the resistively shunted junction (RSJ) equation, and they possess excellent Josephson properties, exhibiting strong magnetic field modulation and microwave response at 10 and 100 GHz up to 85 K. The best high temperature (T>70 K) operation has been obtained with devices which have critical current densities in excess of 10/sup 5/ A/cm/sup 2/ at 4.2 K, and junction critical current resistance products I/sub c/R/sub n/ equivalent to 0.10 mV at 83 K. Experiments indicate that improvements in device quality are expected as the base electrode junction surface is improved. Preliminary results indicate that the cyclability of these junctions is good.<<ETX>>


Information Communication and Technology (ICT) in the globalisation era enhance rapidly with the emergence of various internet applications. The variety of such applications can be accessed easily and possesses interactive features that attract users from different age groups. Youths are active users who are driven to surf internet applications. This research aims to study individuals on YouTube with high social influence who affect the building of thinking schemes among netizen youths in Malaysia. The objective of this study is to observe the use of YouTube in fulfilling the satisfaction and wants of youths and to identify the effectiveness of YouTube in fulfilling the satisfaction in the formation of stigma among netizen youths. The quantitative method is employed in this study with samples aimed at focusing on youths in urban areas such as in Damansara, Kuala Lumpur. A set of questionnaires was distributed directly to 132 respondents aged between 15 to 18 years old. The data collected were analysed descriptively and with correlation inference by using the SPSS software. The findings show a significant relationship between YouTube usage and netizen youth behaviour. This reveals that youths have satisfaction in using YouTube and are influenced by the YouTube Influencer itself.


Molecules and methods of the present invention, in the selected subset of cells, trans - provide a means for the production in vivo of spliced molecule. Prior to the present invention - trans - splicing molecules before - trans - in splicing molecules with specific target cells are only expressed trans between pre-mRNA - a substrate for the splicing reaction. Transformer in vivo - splicing reaction, functional or as mRNA, encoding the protein to be expressed in the target cells. Expression product of the mRNA is either a protein having a therapeutic value to the cell or host organism, or toxin induces the death of specific cells, or not normally present protein in such cells. The present invention further provides for identifying the boundaries of the exon / intron before -mRNA using Ekisontagu method provides PTMs genetically engineered. PTMs of the present invention can be used in the purification and identification of the protein expressed in a particular cell type, resulting in production of a chimeric RNA that encodes a peptide affinity purification tag.


Mouse natural killer (NK) cells can lyse a variety of syngeneic, allogeneic and xenogeneic target cells in short‐term 51Cr release assays. The target specificity of NK cells is not known, but endogenous C‐type viral antigens have been suggested as possible target structures. To test this hypothesis, human lymphoid lines were superinfected with xenotropic mouse C‐type virus either by repeated passage through nude mice or by in vitro superinfection with the supernatants of nude‐mouse‐passaged lines. The appearance of surface‐associated MuLV antigens after superinfection was confirmed in a complement‐dependent cytotoxtcity test. Subsequently, the NK sensitivity of each infected line was compared with its non‐infected counterpart in direct cytolytic and competition assays, None of these two assay systems showed a consistent difference in NK sensitivity of infected and non‐infected cell lines. These findings do not lend support to the concept that murine C‐type viral antigens are responsible for NK sensitivity.


The results of experimental study on concrete beams reinforced with glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) bars are presented and compared with steel reinforced concrete beams and beams reinforced with steel and GFRP bars together. Three series of reinforced beams were tested in the flexure. The experimental data are showed that possible area in which GFRP bar possesses potential to employ is secondary reinforcement in concrete structures.


The repackaged malware has become one of the most serious problems on Android platform nowadays. To detect repackaged Android malware, recent research has produced extensive approaches and tools, and most of them are done by comparing repackaged apps with the original ones. However, how to choose original apps is a non-trivial challenge. One possible way is to treat all apps in the official Android market as original apps, while in this way the pairwise comparison is inefficient and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect repackaged Android malware based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Our main observation is that MEC servers can collect network traffic traces generated by both original and repackaged apps in large degrees, thus we can directly analyze these traffic traces to detect repackaged malware. To be specific, plaintext contents and flow statistical features are extracted from network traffic to calculate similarities between apps. After that, the similarity values are clustered to separate original apps and repackaged malware automatically. We ran a thorough set of experiments to assess the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can detect repackaged Android malware at high speed and with high precision.


As a world-known historic and cultural city,Beij in g is not only the capital of China but also an important carrier and development meristem of oriental civilization.So the landscape architecture in Beijing shou ld pay great attention to build up its own style.Taking the main constructions o f landscape architecture newly built in2002in Beijing as examples,the author mak es a preliminary study on the three characteristics which the mature"modern Bei jing-style landscape"should have.


The objectives of the study are to understand the variability and changes in hydro- climatic variables in space and time dimensions, and to evaluate the performance of managed aquifer recharge (MAR) for sustainable water resources management in northwest Bangladesh. The study reveals that groundwater resource in the northwest Bangladesh is under stress. The stress has developed and it increases over the years, as a result, shallow groundwater resource has already become scarce. The people of the area are not getting even drinking water using their hand tube wells (HTWs) during the dry season and facing trouble with irrigation water. These problems are becoming acute as a result of uncontrolled and unplanned groundwater abstraction for irrigation. Moreover, rainfall in the study area decreases and dryness increases. Higher values of the seasonality index ( ¯ SI = 0.87 ) and precipitation concentration index (PCI = 19.8) are indicators of frequent dry spells. The area suffered from 12 moderate-extreme droughts during 1971–2011, and moderate to high drought risk (B) prevails in the area. The frequent drought, decreasing trend in rainfall, transboundary river flow, and thick clay surface lithology along with the uncontrolled irrigation are also responsible for rapid depletion of groundwater. As the annual surplus of water (average = 594 mm) is higher than groundwater recharge (330 mm), an experimental study on managed aquifer recharge (MAR) has been con- ducted to enhance the groundwater recharge. It shows good performance for restoring the groundwater without creating any sorts of hazards. Moreover, almost 5% of irri- gated land can be irrigated from surface water sources by re-excavating the rivers, Kharis (small channels). It is necessary to prepare an integrated water resource management plan (IWRMP) considering the impacts of climate change, drought risk, driving factors of the groundwater resource depletion, and rainwater as a resource for achieving the sustainability. Our not to cover all the aspects related to the sustainability of water resources management. However, the findings of the study will contribute to under standing the phenomena related to sustainable groundwater management in drought prone areas. Our study demonstrates that unplanned irrigation for the dry season rice production is the significant responsible factor for groundwater depletion. Moreover, cli -mate-related factors, like decreasing trend in rainfall, distribution of rainfall (SI and PCI), frequent drought, are also related to the groundwater depletion. In the study area, the thick clay surface lithology, which is the barrier of groundwater recharge, is also an impor-tant factor for groundwater depletion. The study also demonstrates that water resources management also related to the transboundary river relationship. To achieve sustainability in groundwater resource management particularly in the study area, water resource man-agers need to consider several factors along with the factors mentioned. First, it is time to take decision about the land use patterns as rice, which cultivates in about 81% cultivable area during the dry season, is the highest water consuming crop in the area. Though it is the staple food in the country, it is necessary to reduce this crop cultivation to protect rapid depletion of groundwater resource. Moreover, water-saving irrigation techniques such alternate drying and wetting, raised bed techniques need to promote for farming. Surface water irrigation where and when it is available need to facilitate to minimize the stress on groundwater. The present study also indicates that groundwater recharge in some Upazilas increases due to create favorable recharge structures like re-excavation of rivers and Kharis (small channel). However, the effort is not quite enough for protecting ground water depletion. As annual surplus water is higher than the net groundwater recharge, groundwater recharge favorable structures for rainwater harvesting need to develop. An experimental study on MAR shows the potentiality of the technique for ensuring drinking water supply especially in the rural areas. An IWRMP considering the driving forces of groundwater depletion, potentiality of surface water, and MAR and land use pattern of the area need to prepare and execute the plan accordingly for achieving the sustainability in water resources management.


The relaxation dynamics of the crystal–superfluid interface of He after deformation induced by acoustic radiation pressure was investigated for various crystal orientations. Themelting relaxation after growthwas approximately 10 times slower than the growth relaxation aftermelting for vicinal surfaces and facets, while both relaxation timeswere consistent with each other for rough surfaces. The asymmetry in the time constant between themelting and growth of vicinal surfaces and facets can be qualitatively explained as the effect of superflow induced by local rapid interfacemotion, such as a quick rounding of facet edges of the He crystal. Rough surfacesmovemore isotropically and no significant local rapid interfacemotion is induced; therefore, their relaxation is likely to be symmetric with aminimal effect of superflow.While the growth relaxationwas simply back to the initial shape in a single stage, themelting relaxationwasmuchmore complexwithmultiple stages and the exhibition of various anomalous shapes depending on temperature. Anomalous shapes such as needle-like shapes duringmelting have a larger curvature and higher energy and thus should have disappeared more quickly than the growth shapewith a smaller curvature, but theywere considerably stable and disappeared slowly. This counter-intuitive asymmetry suggests the significant role of superflow in the relaxation process.


The effects of different CO_2 concentrations on the growth and development of invasive plants have been studied intensively,but less scientific interest has been focused on the invasive plant Spartina alterniflora,which has spread rapidly in recent years in the coastal ecosystems of China.In this study,the photosynthetic characteristics under different CO_2 concentrations for Spartina alterniflora and for an indigenous plant Phragmites australis at the saltmarsh of Chongming Dongtan,Shanghai were measured and compared during the 2004 growing season.The photosynthetic indices were determined using a LI-6400 portable photosynthesis and accessories CO_2 control system(Li-cor,Inc.USA).The main experimental results are summarized below:(1) With the increase of control CO_2 concentration,the photosynthetic index of net photosynthetic rate and dark respiration rate in Phragmites australis and Spartina alterniflora were raising and falling respectively;(2) Spartina alterniflora had a different photosynthetic/respiration-CO_2 concentration response mechanism,compared with the indigenous plant Phragmites australis,where Spartina alterniflora had a significantly higher apparent carboxylation efficiency(CE) and respiration rate(R),which in turn were more sensitive to CO_2 influences;(3) The photosynthetic indexes net photosynthetic rate(P_n),leaf stomatal conductance(G_s) and transpiration rate(T_r) of Spartina alterniflora had more photosynthetic physiological acclimations than Phragmites australis under the 400μmol/mol CO_2 concentration;however,Spartina alterniflora showed a stress response under the 1000μmol/mol CO_2 concentration.These results could be helpful in explaining the physiological and ecological mechanisms of Spartina alterniflora with respect to its growth rate,productivity and strong competitive ability.


In this paper neutron diffraction experiments were performed for Fe-substituted Mn12 in order to determine the sites of Fe atoms. The results of structure refinements for the sample with our accessed highest Fe content showed that all Fe atoms occupied Mn(3) sites in the Mn12 skeleton. The x-ray absorption fine structure experiments as well as multiple scattering simulations gave the same result. Thus we concluded that Fe atoms only occupied Mn(3) sites. This conclusion also means that Fe-substituted Mn12 series only includes the four single-molecule magnets of [Mn12−xFexO12(CH3COO)16(H2O)4].2CH3COOH.4H2O (x = 1,2,3, and 4), denoted by Mn11Fe1, Mn10Fe2, Mn9Fe3, and Mn8Fe4, respectively.


Background: Although people tend to be exposed to food addiction today, there are no formal diagnostics for Food Addiction. Thus, clinical application for therapy is difficult. The present study reviews the clinical characteristics, mechanisms, and measurement tools, and presents opinions on psychiatric classification to suggest directions for further research.Methods: The authors conducted a literature search using the terms food addiction or FA. The review included 54 Korea and international studies from 1956 to 2021.Results: Food addiction has reported similarities with substance use disorder and binge eating disorder. Consequently, it seems to be more reasonable to categorize it as substance or behavioral addiction rather than an eating disorder. Further research is needed on whether food addiction can be classified as a behavioral addiction in that food does not have intoxication properties by itself. Further, it is worth considering the dimensional classification of binge-eating-related spectrum disorder, given the behavioral similarities.Conclusions: Several studies have attempted to reveal the characteristics of food addiction, but researchers' views on the psychiatric classification are inconsistent. The addition of food addiction in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) seems to require a phased approach. Further work should also verify the effective treatment methods, focusing on underlying mechanism.


Asynchronous fusion is the general mode of global track fusion.Current algorithms have defects in not fully using all measurement data and not precisely describing the track.The alternative updating asynchronous fusion algorithm can provide refined track with guarantee of fusion precision.Some application problems of this algorithm were also discussed.Through simulation,the validity of alternative asynchronous track fusion algorithm was proved.


Pneumonia ranks third in the structure of hospital mortality in infants after perinatal pathology and congenital malformations in Ukraine. Over the past 20 years in Ukraine, there has been a 33,7% increase in the incidence of pneumonia in children (p˂0.01), with the predominant detection of this pathology in children from regions of the country who have problematic issues in the proper provision of pediatric services. The highest incidence of pneumonia in all age groups was observed in children of Ivano-Frankivsk, Rivne, Kyiv and Vinnitsa regions. Thanks to the progressive development of domestic pediatrics and the introduction of modern medical and diagnostic technologies, in particular, vaccine prophylaxis, over the past 20 years, the death rate of children from acute infections of the upper respiratory tract, pneumonia and influenza has decreased by almost 5 times. Changes in recent years in the incidence of pneumonia in children correspond to the dynamics of the spread of influenza and acute respiratory viral infection, especially during the epidemics 2009-2010 and 2015-2016. Assessing the dynamics of this indicator in subsequent periods is extremely important in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues.