The World Health Report 2000, prepared by the World Health Organization, presented performance rankings of 191 nations' health care systems. These rankings have been widely cited in public debates about health care, particularly by those interested in reforming the U.S. health care system to resemble more closely those of other countries. Michael Moore, for instance, famously stated in his film SiCKO that the United States placed only 37th in the WHO report. CNN.com, in verifying Moore's claim, noted that France and Canada both placed in the top 10. Those who cite the WHO rankings typically present them as an objective measure of the relative performance of national health care systems. They are not. TheWHOrankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions— some of them logically incoherent, some characterizedby substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares. The analysts behind the WHO rankings express the hope that their framework "will lay the basis for a shift from ideological discourse on health policy to a more empirical one." Yet the WHOrankings themselves have a strong ideological component. They include factors that are arguably unrelated to actual health performance, some of which could even improve in response to worse health performance. Even setting those concerns aside, the rankings are still highly sensitive to both measurement error and assumptions about the relative importanceof the components. And finally, the WHO rankings reflect implicit value judgments and lifestyle preferences that differ among individuals and across countries. February 28, 2008


Understanding the true, sometimes deceitful, nature of sticky costs is vital to take advantage of market opportunities and to compete; by aligning the needed substructure to the medium and long term business expectations. Doing so will allow management to be better positioned to achieve such goals. This long-term research (16 years), performed in México, offers a holistic understanding of the real sticky costs behavior in both bullish and bearish markets. The stickiness nature of costs is an unintended manifestation of the embedded conditions of the assets acquired, while pursuing longer term objectives. This is the case because it is through assets, in general, that businesses compete. We will document that costs behave differently in bearish and bullish markets; costs, under general market conditions, perform at different rates in each market. We introduced a dummy regression variable to determine if the increase in administrative spending is positively related to an income increase, considering years with income increases and decreases. We also found that costs will continue rising, at a lower rate, even in bearish markets, unless there is a global crisis. Those who not understand the actual sticky nature of costs will face their deceitful nature, especially during bearish markets.


Previous work has shown that African elephants Loxodonta africana will avoid African honeybees Apis mellifera scutellata. Here we present results from a pilot study conducted to evaluate the concept of using beehives to mitigate elephant crop depredation. In Laikipia, Kenya, we deployed a 90-m fence-line of nine inter-connected hives, all empty, on two exposed sides of a square two-acre farm that was experiencing high levels of elephant crop depredation. Compared with a nearby control farm of similar status and size, our experimental farm experienced fewer raids and consequently had higher productivity. Socioeconomic indicators suggest that not only was the concept of a beehive fence popular and desired by the community but also that it can pay for its construction costs through the sale of honey and bee products. We are calling for experiments testing this concept of a 'guardian beehive-fence' to be conducted rigorously and scientifically in as wide a range of agricultural settings as possible to evaluate jointly its effectiveness and efficiency.


Zooplankton accumulate several groups of photoprotective compounds to shield against damaging ultraviolet radiation (UV). One of these groups, the carotenoids, makes the animals more conspicuous to visually hunting predators, whereas others, such as the mycosporine‐like amino acids (MAAs) may not. The blend of photoprotective compounds is therefore important for the UV defense but also for the ability to escape predation through crypsis. Here we assess laboratory and field data from different latitudes to examine how UV, predation threat, and pigment availability (in food) affects the mixture of UV‐protective compounds in copepods. Overall, the blend of MAAs and carotenoids was partly explained by the availability of MAAs in the food, the UV‐threat, and the presence of predators. Copepods upregulated their MAA content when UV threat was increasing (i.e., if MAAs were abundant in food), and in field data this accumulation only occurred at high levels of predation threat. If MAAs were scarce, copepods instead compensated with higher carotenoid accumulation. However, when there was a high predation threat this carotenoid compensatory effect was disadvantageous, and low concentrations of both MAAs and carotenoids at high UV‐threat resulted in lower reproduction. In all, these results showed that carotenoids and MAAs are complementary substances, i.e., one is high when the other is low, and copepods are, hence, able to adjust their blend of different UV‐protective compounds to optimize their defenses to the threats of UV and predation. These defense systems may buffer against direct food‐web interactions and help the zooplankton to survive in environments with high UV threat.


So much of our lung health throughout life is determined by what happens before birth and when we are born. Managing respiratory problems in newborn infants requires experience and teamwork, an understanding of the background to the problems, and knowledge of the evidence behind the clinical options available. In this Monograph , science, evidence and expertise are brought together in a collection of comprehensive, state-of-the-art reviews that cover: the structure and function of the newborn respiratory system; neonatal lung disease in preterm infants; developmental, structural and functional diseases of the respiratory system; and more. This book will prove a valuable resource for neonatal clinicians, scientists researching the area and adult clinicians managing lung health.


Learn how to write, tune, and port SQL queries and other statements for a Big Data environment, using Impala - the massively parallel processing SQL query engine for Apache Hadoop. The best practices in this practical guide help you design database schemas that not only interoperate with other Hadoop components, and are convenient for administers to manage and monitor, but also accommodate future expansion in data size and evolution of software capabilities. Ideal for database developers and business analysts, Getting Started with Impala includes advice from Cloudera's development team, as well as insights from its consulting engagements with customers. Learn how Impala integrates with a wide range of Hadoop components Attain high performance and scalability for huge data sets on production clusters Explore common developer tasks, such as porting code to Impala and optimizing performance Use tutorials for working with billion-row tables, date- and time-based values, and other techniques Learn how to transition from rigid schemas to a flexible model that evolves as needs change


Novel is a long story that is written in prose. It has elements such as plot, point of view, character, characterization, conflict, setting, and theme. This analysis stressed on King Louis XIV's social conflicts and the effects of King Louis XIV's social conflicts on himself, in Alexandre Dumas's novel "The Man in the Iron Mask" which is very interesting and
challenging.
In this study, the writer used descriptive qualitative research design in which it was only purposed to describe and interpret what exists in the novel. Meanwhile, the technique used in this study was library research. Moreover, she employed objective approach because she just
analyzed what exists in the novel without correlating the author's life background. Later, the object of this study was the novel "The Man in the Iron Mask". The data of this study were collected from dialogues and paragraph quotations related to the problems.
After analyzing the problems, the writer can conclude that there are six social conflicts faced by King Louis XIV with several people: a) King Louis XIV's social conflict with Fouquet due to Fouquet's crime; b) the social conflict of the King Louis XIV with Aramis and Porthos because the King Louis XIV is sent into Bastile by them; c) the King Louis XIV's social conflicts with the jailer due to the fact that the jailer has no respond to the King Louis XIV's request; d) King Louis XIV has social conflict with Philippe because Philippe has the same appearance with the King Louis XIV; and e) the King Louis XIV's social conflict with D' Artagnan due to D' Artagnan's refusal to the King Louis XIV's command. Furthermore, King Louis XIV's social
conflicts with several people stated above bring out effects on himself. Those social conflicts with the people make King Louis XIV desperate, fearful, weak, angry.


BACKGROUND
A gap exists between patients' desire to be told about medical errors and present practice. Little is known about how physicians approach disclosure. The objective of the present study was to describe how physicians disclose errors to patients.

METHODS
Mailed survey of 2637 medical and surgical physicians in the United States (Missouri and Washington) and Canada (national sample). Participants received 1 of 4 scenarios depicting serious errors that varied by specialty (medical and surgical scenarios) and by how obvious the error would be to the patient if not disclosed (more apparent vs less apparent). Five questions measured what respondents would disclose using scripted statements.

RESULTS
Wide variation existed regarding what information respondents would disclose. Of the respondents, 56% chose statements that mentioned the adverse event but not the error, while 42% would explicitly state that an error occurred. Some physicians disclosed little information: 19% would not volunteer any information about the error's cause, and 63% would not provide specific information about preventing future errors. Disclosure was affected by the nature of the error and physician specialty. Of the respondents, 51% who received the more apparent errors explicitly mentioned the error, compared with 32% who received the less apparent errors (P<.001); 58% of medical specialists explicitly mentioned the error, compared with 19% of surgical specialists (P<.001). Respondents disclosed more information if they had positive disclosure attitudes, felt responsible for the error, had prior positive disclosure experiences, and were Canadian.

CONCLUSIONS
Physicians vary widely in how they would disclose errors to patients. Disclosure standards and training are necessary to meet public expectations and promote professional responsibility following errors.


The National Science Foundation and National Research Council have identified a sharp decline in positive attitudes toward science. These predispositions are becoming more commonplace in middle and high school classrooms for various reasons. The NSF has identified a decline in students pursuing post-secondary careers in science and engineering, predominantly due to the negative perceptions seen in high school science classes. This study focused on the implementation of project based learning as a method for changing students' perspectives toward science and possibly altering their postsecondary choices towards a science career. Projects involved the shadowing of college researchers and professors in field-based environmental activities. High school students worked alongside college researchers and professors, while collecting data and preparing documentation in an inquiry based setting.


The Global Governance of HIV/AIDS explores the implications of high international intellectual property standards for access to essential medicines in developing countries. With a focus on HIV/AIDS governance, the volume provides a timely analysis of the international legal and political landscape, the relationship between human rights and intellectual property, and emerging issues in global health policy. It concludes with concrete strategies on how to improve access to HIV/AIDS medicines.


We use direct current (DC) electric fields in conjunction with ultraviolet light to self-assemble highly dense structures of colloidal ellipsoids with three-dimensional order and volume fraction as large as 67%. Ellipsoidal phases of colloids are of fundamental interest because novel packing structures are predicted to occur at high volume fractions; the symmetries of these crystal unit cells can also contribute to a variety of applications, including structural color materials. Previously, the very high volume fraction range of ellipsoidal phases has been inaccessible because of limitations such as vitrification and kinetic trapping. Here we report that the coupling of light to DC electric fields causes electrophoretic deposition that yields ellipsoid phases that are significantly denser than previous reports. The applied voltage across the capacitor-like device used for self-assembly was varied from 1.75-2.3 V and the power density of incident UV light was varied between 75-400 W m-2. As the coupled field strengths were increased, the assembled colloids underwent a phase transition from an isotropic fluid to a nematic liquid crystal phase consistent with previous reports. When the voltage and light intensity were between 1.9-2.1 V and 100-200 W m-2 respectively, the assembly had a high degree of orientational ordering and a degree of positional order along axes both parallel and perpendicular to the plane of the electrode surface. For the densest assembly achieved, the interlaying spacing is 0.9D, where D is the ellipsoid minor axis.


Since the 1980s, school violence has been prominent in society and is gradually increasing in occurrence. In 1999, the Columbine High School shooting shocked the country demonstrating how deadly school violence can be, with a death count of 13 total people, including 12 students and 1 teacher. The next prominent occurrence was in 2005 on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, where 10 people were killed at the hands of a 16-year-old student. Another more recent act of school violence was in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. There, the shooter killed 28 people including children and teachers inside the school and his mother. And the latest horrific incidence of this kind took place at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February of 2018. The shooter took the lives of 14 students and 3 school employees. As a response to these shootings, law enforcement has collaborated with schools to implement the use of school resource officers, emergency evaluation/reaction drills, and new policies regarding school violence.


The role of myeloid growth factors, such as granulocyte colony-stimulating factor and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, in the management of acute myeloid and acute lymphoblastic leukemias has been evaluated extensively in multiple clinical trials. Growth factors have been given before, concurrently, or sequentially with chemotherapy with the goal of reducing the duration of neutropenia and consequently the incidence and severity of infections, and improving the rate of remissions and overall survival. They also have been studied as chemotherapy-sensitizing agents in an effort to recruit dormant myeloid stem cells into the sensitive phase of the cycle. Additionally, growth factors, shown to stimulate proliferation and differentiation of leukemia cells in vitro, were evaluated as monotherapy in patients with acute leukemia. Most studies show modest improvement in the duration of the neutropenia, which does not consistently correlate with the severity of infection, rate or duration of remissions, or disease-free and overall survival. Attempts to enhance the chemosensitivity of the leukemic cells and decrease drug resistance failed to improve the rate of remission and survival in several large series. However, more recent reports suggested an improved outcome in younger patients with acute myeloid leukemia with normal karyotype. Several anecdotal case reports have shown that growth factor monotherapy can induce a complete remission in patients with acute leukemia. Data from the published clinical trials do not seem to support emergence of drug-resistant leukemia, worsening toxicity, and bone marrow failure with growth factor administration. (JNCCN 2007;5:203–215) JN052_Jrnl_50205Frank.qxd 2/16/07 12:58 AM Page 203


Pattern theory has engendered much controversy in the field of architecture; yet it has brought new insights to the field of software engineering. Patterns continue to play an important role in software engineering in general, and in software development in particular. In this study, two preliminary surveys, focusing on the two fields of architecture and software engineering, were carried out to investigate the role and effect of patterns. The surveys indicate that while, patterns are unpopular within the architecture community and are criticised for stifling creativity, software patterns are popular within the software community and a high proportion of software development companies use them in their development practice. The results however show that in the vast majority of cases, pattern usage is limited to design-based problems, involving a single type of pattern (i.e. design patterns). The results further show that process-based patterns are seldom used in the software development industry, which prompted the topic of the main investigation of this research to evaluate the effect and utility of process patterns.
A controlled experimental research method was designed and used to evaluate the utility and value of process patterns in the management of software development projects. In this '2x2 factorial design' experiment, the subjects were divided in two groups of experimental and control, where the experimental groups were given a set of process patterns to use in their software development projects. Overall, there were over 750 subjects involved in this experiment and a total of 260 software development projects (individual and group projects) were investigated. Measurements of a number of appropriate software attributes were taken during the life of the projects though a devised goal-based measurement process. A further number of attributes were measured after the projects were completed. Using metrics, a number of software attributes across the four major phases of the development lifecycle (i.e. Requirement Analysis, Design, Implementation, and Delivery) were measured and statistically analysed. In addition to these specific measurement data, official marks awarded to the projects by the tutors were also used in the analysis. The objective was to determine if the experimental groups produced software projects that were of higher quality, in terms of the measured software attributes, than the control groups.
The experiment results show that, in the case of thirteen measured attributes, the treated groups scored significantly higher than the control groups. The improvements are across all the four major development phases, with at least two attribute in each phase, showing significant improvement. The experiment, therefore, confirms that the application of process patterns in software development projects, improves the quality of the projects in terms of a number of specific attributes such as productivity and defect density. The results further show that the treated subjects in the group projects performed significantly better than those in the individual projects. This, therefore, confirms that while the application of process patterns significantly improves the quality of both group and individual projects, the improvement is more prominent in the case of team projects. Process patterns are thus shown to be more effective on team projects in improving the quality of software development projects.


Neural machine translation models usually adopt the teacher forcing strategy for training which requires the predicted sequence matches ground truth word by word and forces the probability of each prediction to approach a 0-1 distribution. However, the strategy casts all the portion of the distribution to the ground truth word and ignores other words in the target vocabulary even when the ground truth word cannot dominate the distribution. To address the problem of teacher forcing, we propose a method to introduce an evaluation module to guide the distribution of the prediction. The evaluation module accesses each prediction from the perspectives of fluency and faithfulness to encourage the model to generate the word which has a fluent connection with its past and future translation and meanwhile tends to form a translation equivalent in meaning to the source. The experiments on multiple translation tasks show that our method can achieve significant improvements over strong baselines.


Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text. Background and Purpose: Mechanical thrombectomy (MT) has been recommended for the treatment of nonminor ischemic stroke by national and international guidelines, but cost-effectiveness evidence has been generated for only a few countries using heterogeneous evaluation methods. We estimate the cost-effectiveness of MT across 32 European countries. Methods: A Markov model was developed to estimate the cost-effectiveness of MT compared with standard care over a 5-year time horizon. Patients with ischemic stroke eligible for MT were identified from 2017 country-specific incidence data. A societal perspective was adopted, including health, social, and informal care costs, and productivity losses. Model outcomes were expressed as quality-adjusted life years. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to test the robustness of findings. Results: We identified 267 514 ischemic stroke cases that were eligible for MT treatment across 32 European countries. MT was found to be more effective and cheaper than standard care in two-thirds of the countries (21/32) and cost-effective in all but one country (Bulgaria). Across Europe, the intervention was estimated to produce over 101 327 additional quality-adjusted life years (95% uncertainty interval, 65 180–149 085) and cost savings of $981 million (€868 million, 95% uncertainty interval, −1544 to 2564) and of $1.7 billion (€1.5 billion, 95% uncertainty interval, −1.2 to 3.6) in health and social care and societal costs, respectively. Conclusions: MT is highly likely to be cost-effective compared with standard care across Europe as a whole and in the vast majority of European countries.


Higher education institutions are increasingly looking to online education as a means to broaden their market reach, increase student enrollments and ultimately realize increased tuition revenue. Many institutions, however, find that they have insufficient infrastructure resources to launch one or more fully online learning programs. A small number of corporations now specialize in assisting higher education institutions with both launching and maintaining online education programs. These online education vendor partners typically provide higher education institutions with support in the areas of student marketing, faculty development and technology infrastructure. Such relationships are typically paid for by a share of online tuition dollars and often last for up to ten years. Due to the relatively long timeframes and costs associated with these vendor partnerships it is critical that higher education institutions choose a vendor that is the best fit for the institution. Prior to selecting an online education vendor partner, an institution will likely compare a number of vendors across a variety of dimensions such as cost, level of services, and experience. An online vendor partner decision matrix is one method for objectively acquiring and reviewing decision criteria to assist institutions in selecting the appropriate online education vendor partner.


In this work, we show new and improved error-correcting properties of folded Reed-Solomon codes and multiplicity codes. Both of these families of codes are based on polynomials over finite fields, and both have been the sources of recent advances in coding theory. Folded Reed-Solomon codes were the first explicit constructions of codes known to achieve list-decoding capacity; multivariate multiplicity codes were the first constructions of high-rate locally correctable codes; and univariate multiplicity codes are also known to achieve list-decoding capacity. However, previous analyses of the error-correction properties of these codes did not yield optimal results. In particular, in the list-decoding setting, the guarantees on the list-sizes were polynomial in the block length, rather than constant; and for multivariate multiplicity codes, local list-decoding algorithms could not go beyond the Johnson bound. In this paper, we show that Folded Reed-Solomon codes and multiplicity codes are in fact better than previously known in the context of list decoding and local list-decoding. More precisely, we first show that Folded RS codes achieve list-decoding capacity with constant list sizes, independent of the block length; and that high-rate univariate multiplicity codes can also be list-recovered with constant list sizes. Using our result on univariate multiplicity codes, we show that multivariate multiplicity codes are high-rate, locally list-recoverable codes. Finally, we show how to combine the above results with standard tools to obtain capacity achieving locally list decodable codes with query complexity significantly lower than was known before.


In November 2004 the Nordic Council of Ministers together with the Nordic countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland decided to initiate a collaboration by approving an action plan for improved co-operation between the countries concerned in the area of construction and building. The co-operation will take place through the following activities: to make market information and information on national regulations accessible to potential actors on the market to expand the basis of experience and new found knowledge in housing construction to undertake a comparative analysis of regulations within the building sector intended to serve as a basis for deliberations on possible harmonization to make it possible to compare competency requirements imposed on certain actors in the building process, and - to establish a network for joint research and development on issues relevant to the plan of action This report describes results of the second stage of a project devoted to promoting increased transparency of procedures for recognition of regulates professions in the Building Sector, particularly making national systems easier to manage and more clear, quick and friendly to use, improving transparency of qualifications to ensure that customers can rely on a more comprehensive service.


Rural community in peatland is less concerned actor during the recurrent fire disaster. This disaster has already diminished the source of livelihoods. There is limited information about the dynamics of the livelihoods related to the use of fire in peatland. This paper examines the dynamics of rural livelihoods and the adaptation livelihoods strategies in degraded peatland. Data are collected by field survey, in-depth interview, focus group discussion in three villages at Riau Province and they are analyzed descriptively. Peatland is the only remaining important resource for the rural people after fire disaster. They will select prospective commodities based on their capabilities and access to market. Rural community are more intensive in using the resource of peatland for their livelihoods with the growing interest to several commodities. Recent community livelihoods depend on some certain commodities (palm oil, areca nut, rubber) and tend to conduct expansive and monoculture land use strategy rather than polyculture strategy. Diversification livelihood with adaptive and valuable commodities through trainings, continuous coaching and building business.


In recent work George Graham (2010) develops and defends a realist account of mental disorders, along the way offering a challenge to the "standard view" of delusions. He begins with a symptom-focused challenge to categorical discussions of disorder, introduces a novel way to consider the nature of delusions, and proposes a significant revision to the dominant paradigm for delusions. Judgments about delusions should be based on its "downstream" effects on a person's life rather than solely the "upstream" causes of the state. This account is worth considering for its own merits but also serves as an illustration of how judgments about disorders are tied to normative judgments, a state that has provoked much skepticism. However, my objections to Graham's account also illustrate how we can improve the normative judgments that disorders judgments rely on so that their contested nature need not substantiate the objection to disorder judgments that they are too contested to be objective.
 In particular, I argue that Graham gives insufficient attention to the context of evaluation, confuses two kinds of understanding delusions, and fails to take seriously the basic harm of delusion. First, attending to the context of a person's life and how certain events, like delusional experiences, shape it requires that we balance concerns about prima facie harms with the all things considered value of such events in a person's life. Second, the study of delusions requires a certain kind of reflective understanding that Graham successfully exploits to argue for the significance of downstream effects in determining when a person suffers from a delusion. However, this kind of understanding is unconstrained by the pressing needs of the individuals who come into the care of mental health professionals. In such cases, it seems the imperative to help may give pragmatic reasons to favor understanding delusions in terms of their upstream causes, contra Graham. Finally, Graham tacitly accepts the idea that disruptions of reliable contact with the world need not be serious harms. This is a substantive normative claim and needs to be defended. In each objection, then, we can see how the larger issue of understanding mental disorders is inextricable from questions of good lives, the responsibilities of medical personnel, and the significance of intact psychological processes for a good life and thus what counts as a harm. One of the significant challenges to understanding mental disorders is how to understand the role of values in understanding and treating disorders, and looking at a novel account of delusions illustrates how implausible it is to imagine we can avoid normative judgments when defining or diagnosing mental disorders.


Breast cancer is the most common cancer and the incidence and mortality rate
had remained high. In Malaysia alone, breast cancers accounted for 31% of all
new cancer cases and are among the most fatal cancers. Since breast cancers
are complex diseases, there is no single marker that is both sensitive and
specific for early detection of the disease. The present study was undertaken to
characterize rat mammary gland tumors as a model for breast cancers and to
determine parameters that could be used as early tumor markers. The study
also undertook to determine the effect of recombinant human erythropoietin
(rHuEPO) and Tamoxifen on the rat mammary gland tumor.
In the first part of the study serum biochemical parameters, angiogenic factors
and tumor markers, tumor histopathology and ultrastructure and expression of
estrogen (ER) and erythropoietin receptors (EPOR) were determined. Twenty
female Sprague-Dawley rats, aged six to seven weeks were divided into two groups of 10 rats per group. The rats were treated intragastrically, the first
group with 20 mg 7,12-dimethylbenz(a)anthracene (DMBA) per rat to induce
mammary tumor development and the second group with 1 mL 0.9% normal
saline and served as the control. The animals were palpated weekly for tumor
mass and sacrificed two weeks after tumor occurrence. Blood was withdrawn
through cardiac puncture before tumor induction and weekly thereafter. Serum
biochemical parameters analysed were alkaline phosphatase (ALP), aspartate
aminotransferase (AST), alanine transferase (ALT), lactate dehydrogenase
(LDH), creatinine kinase (CK), glucose, blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and
creatinine by a chemistry analyser using standard diagnostic kits. Serum tumor
markers,namely α-fetoprotein (AFP) and CA15-3 were analysed using
automated immunoassay analyser, while the angiogenic factors, matrix
metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)
were determined by the ELISA technique. Tumor tissues excised from
sacrificed animals were subjected to histopathological analysis and ER-α and
EPOR determination through immunohistochemistry (IHC). Tumor ultrastructure
was examined by transmission electron microscopy (TEM).
The results showed higher ALT, ALP and AST concentrations in the DMBAtreated
than the control group reflecting abnormal liver function. Pronounced
increases in serum LDH were also observed in the DMBA-treated group.
Angiogenic factor estimations showed that serum MMP-2 levels remained high
throughout the study and seemed to have played a greater role than VEGF in early stage tumorigenesis. Serum tumor markers, AFP and CA 15.3 were not
detected in either the treated or control rats. Histopathological analysis showed
features typical of neoplastic cells which were enlarged nuclei, conspicuous
nucleoli nuclear pleomorphism, high nuclear to cytoplasma ratio,
hyperchromasia, and epithelial cell and stroma hyperplasia. These features are
similar to that found in breast cancers. Immunohistochemical analysis showed
that ER-α and EPOR were present in the DMBA-induced rat mammary tumor,
which also resemble human breast cancers. Transmission electron microscopy
analysis of the tumor demonstrated the co-existence of apoptosis, necrosis and
aponecrosis which may be used in the determination of mammary gland tumor
and breast cancer development in the early stages.
In conclusion, the combination of serum liver-related enzymes, serum MMP-2
and histological changes, ER-α and EPOR expression, evidences of apoptosis,
necrosis and aponecrosis may form the panel for screening and determination
of early mammary gland tumors in high risk cancer patients.
The second phase of the study involved the development of a xenograftinduced
mammary gland tumor model in rats as a substitute for the
conventional drug-induced method. The xenograft-induced mammary gland
tumor seems to be reliable and can produce tumors within a short period. The
xenograft model was then used to evaluate the effects of rHuEPO, Tamoxifen
and Tamoxifen-rHuEPO combination on mammary gland tumor growth and angiogenesis. In this study, 24 rats were divided into four groups of six rats
each. Each rat was treated orally: Group 1 with 60 IU rHuEPO; Group 2 with 20
mg Tamoxifen; Group 3 with a combination of 20 mg Tamoxifen and 60 IU
rHuEPO; Group 4 with 1 mL 0.9% normal saline and served as the control. The
results showed that rHuEPO did not promote mammary tumor growth and in
fact may enhance the cytotoxicity of Tamoxifen through the stimulation of
proapoptotic and antiproliferative effects. This study suggests that rHuEPO
treatment in cancer patients may not only be beneficial for the alleviation of
anemia due to the disease, but also augments the effect of certain
chemotherapeutic drugs used in the treatment of cancer


In this paper we propose an application of data mining methods in the prediction of the availability and performance of Internet paths. We deploy a general decision-making method for advising the users in further usage of Internet path at particular time and date. The method is based on the clustering and tree classification data mining techniques. The usefulness of our method for prediction the Internet path behavior has been confirmed in real-life experiment. The active Internet measurements were performed to gather the end-to-end latency and packet routing information. The knowledge gathered has been analyzed using a professional data mining package via neural clustering and decision tree algorithms. The results show that the data mining can be efficiently used for the purpose of the forecasting the network behavior. We propose to build a network performance monitoring and prediction service based on proposed data mining procedure. We address our approach especially to the non-networkers of such networking frameworks as Grid and overlay networks who want to schedule their network activity but who want to be left free from networking issues to concentrate on their work.


In order to study the effect of basketball athletes on the action of fast stop jump after fatigue, the dynamic characteristics of lower limbs during the rapid stop jump shot under fatigue were discussed by means of experimental analysis in this paper. 12 basketball professional athletes in a sports institute were selected. Fatigue test was conducted with continuous running and jump. A special motion capture and mechanical three-dimensional tester was used to collect the kinetic data of the subjects. The results show that the indexes of the athletes in the take-off stage, the flying stage and the landing stage have significant differences before and after fatigue. After the fatigue of the athletes, the ankle augmentation rate decreases, so the dynamics characteristics weaken. Because of the great internal and external shock of the ankle joint before landing, the risk of injury is relatively large. After fatigue, it is suggested that the basketball players reduce the knee joint torque and the lower limb gravity, which may reduce the risk of injury.


Herbivory in temperate marine ecosystems has been the focus of widespread research attention. In comparison, little is known about tropical herbivores and the role they play in controlling the abundance of marine macrophytes. This study investigates the role of one group of invertebrate herbivores, the sea hares. Their role as herbivores in tropical intertidal habitats was examined at four study sites situated near Townsville, Queensland, Australia. The roles these animals play as herbivores were investigated by examining the variation in density and feeding specificity.
The variation in density was documented by surveying the distribution and abundance of sea hares and their food macrophytes for one year. In addition, the population dynamics of population irruptions of sea hares at a single site were examined in greater detail. There was extreme variation in the densities reached by each of the five local species recorded. Aplysia dactylomela, Aplysia extraordinaria, and Petalifera petalifera remained at low abundance throughout the sampling period. In contrast, Bursatella leachii and Stylocheilus striatus were found in extremely high density within the seagrass beds of Shelly Beach in association with a bloom of the cyanobacteria Calothrix crustacea. The population dynamics of Bursatella leachii showed that at this location, the population underwent continuous recruitment in contrast to the results of previous studies.
The relationships between each sea hare species and their preferred host macrophytes were species specific. The density of Aplysia dactylomela was positively correlated with a limited number of red algae species, but the clearest relationship was with the red macrophytic group (Rhodophyta), a finding consistent with previous feeding preferences experiments for this species. Aplysia extraordinaria density was correlated with several of the available red algae species however because of the low density, its feeding ecology remains unclear. Petalifera petalifera was found to maintain a very strict association with the brown calcified alga, Padina tenuis. The temporal distribution of all sea hares was restricted to the winter months, a relationship that may be related to environmental limitations, such as ultraviolet radiation. The abundances of B. leachii and S. striatus could not be quantitatively related to any of the algal species recorded because cyanobacteria bloom abundance was not estimated. The feeding specificity of Bursatella leachii was more closely examined using two-way choice preference testing. This species preferred to consume the green alga, Enteromorpha sp. to the cyanobacterium Calothrix crustacea, the brown alga Sargassum sp., and the red alga Pterocladia pinnata. There was no difference in the feeding hierarchy obtained by examining edibility or attractiveness. Feeding specificity of the six local sea hares was also investigated by examining the morphology of the radula feeding organ. Scanning electron microscopy was used to examine the fine details of the radula teeth. Three radula teeth types were created based on the sea hare radulae examined: simple, bilobed and denticulate. These radula types correspond to the feeding preferences exhibited by each sea hare. Sea hares with complex radulae were more likely to be highly specialised feeders while those with simple radulae were more likely to be generalists. A theoretical framework was developed, based on these radula types, which can now be used to make testable predictions about feeding preferences of sea hare species with unknown feeding specificity.
The results of this study demonstrate that the density and feeding specificity of sea hares are species specific. Therefore care should be taken in extrapolating information from studies based on a small number of sea hare species to the entire sea hare group. Three of the sea hare species examined within (A. dactylomela, A. extraordinaria and P. petalifera) are not likely to play major roles as herbivores in their habitats as a result of their low densities. However, Bursatella leachii and Stylocheilus striatus would exert a strong influence on their seagrass habitats as a because of their high density and feeding specialisation on cyanobacteria. Sea hares may play an increased role in habitats, such as shallow intertidal ecosystems, unavailable to the primary herbivores.


Neonatal chronic lung disease is characterized by failed formation of alveoli and capillaries, and excessive deposition of matrix elastin, which are linked to lengthy mechanical ventilation (MV) with O(2)-rich gas. Vitamin A supplementation has improved respiratory outcome of premature infants, but there is little information about the structural and molecular manifestations in the lung that occur with vitamin A treatment. We hypothesized that vitamin A supplementation during prolonged MV, without confounding by antenatal steroid treatment, would improve alveolar secondary septation, decrease thickness of the mesenchymal tissue cores between distal air space walls, and increase alveolar capillary growth. We further hypothesized that these structural advancements would be associated with modulated expression of tropoelastin and deposition of matrix elastin, phosphorylated Smad2 (pSmad2), cleaved caspase 3, proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), VEGF, VEGF-R2, and midkine in the parenchyma of the immature lung. Eight preterm lambs (125 days' gestation, term approximately 150 days) were managed by MV for 3 wk: four were treated with daily intramuscular Aquasol A (vitamin A), 5,000 IU/kg, starting at birth; four received vehicle alone. Postmortem lung assays included quantitative RT-PCR and in situ hybridization, immunoblot and immunohistochemistry, and morphometry and stereology. Daily vitamin A supplementation increased alveolar secondary septation, decreased thickness of the mesenchymal tissue cores between the distal air space walls, and increased alveolar capillary growth. Associated molecular changes were less tropoelastin mRNA expression, matrix elastin deposition, pSmad2, and PCNA protein localization in the mesenchymal tissue core of the distal air space walls. On the other hand, mRNA expression and protein abundance of VEGF, VEGF-R2, midkine, and cleaved caspase 3 were increased. We conclude that vitamin A treatment partially improves lung development in chronically ventilated preterm neonates by modulating expression of tropoelastin, deposition of elastin, and expression of vascular growth factors.


We present the results of calculation and experimental testing of an achromatic polarization converter and a composite terahertz waveplate (WP), which are represented by sets of plane-parallel birefringent plates with in-plane birefringence axis. The calculations took into account the effect of interference, which was especially prominent when plates were separated by an air gap. The possibility of development of a spectrum analyzer design based on a set of WPs is also discussed.


Advanced location-based services (A-LBS) for humancentric tracking and monitoring are now emerging as operators and service providers begin to leverage their existing infrastructure and invest in new technologies, toward increasingly innovative location application solutions. We can now point to humancentric tracking and monitoring services where the person (i.e. subject) has become an active node in the network. For example, in health applications through the use of embedded technologies such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) or in campus applications through the use of electronic monitoring techniques in the form of global positioning systems (GPS). These technologies, for the greater part, have been introduced into society at large, without the commensurate assessment of what they will mean in terms of socio-ethical implications. Of particular concern is the potential for these innovative solutions to be applied in government-to-citizen mandated services, increasing the ability of the state to collect targeted data and conduct covert surveillance on any given individual, described herein as überveillance. This paper aims to define, describe, and interpret the current socio-ethical landscape of advanced location-based services for humans in order to promote discourse among researchers and practitioners to better direct telecommunications policy.


Accepted 6 May 1997 Summary The British Geriatrics Society has described 16 training objectives for senior house officers (SHOs) in geriatric medicine. We have developed these into an audit standard, and in a controlled trial we consider the effectiveness of audit as a means of monitoring and improving SHO training. SHOs from three hospitals were sent a questionnaire asking about the adequacy of formal and informal training for each objective; there was a response rate of 87%. Results were presented at an audit meeting in one hospital, inadequacies of training identified and the hospital's programme of teaching modified appropriately. Two control hospitals remained unaware of the audit findings and were therefore unable to modify their ining programmes. Re-audit at six months completed the audit cycle; the control hospitals showing no change between the two audits. In the intervention hospital the adequacy oftaining over the 16 objectives improved from 59% at first audit to 73% at re-audit. The initial audit had highlighted three target objectives as needing special attention; here the improvement from 38% to 69% was even more impressive, and statistically significant at p<O.05 on X2 test. Thus, although a questionnaire approach is inevitably subjective and affected by SHO satisfaction, the discipline of audit appeared effective in identifying and correcting deficiencies in an SHO training programme.


The major outer membrane protein (OmpH) of Pasteurella multocida X-73 was purified by selective extraction with detergents, followed by size exclusion chromatography. The planar lipid bilayer assay showed that OmpH has pore-forming function. The average single channel conductance in 1.0 M KCl was 0.62 nS. The gene (ompH) encoding OmpH has been isolated and sequenced by construction of a genomic library and PCR techniques. The coding region of this gene is 1,059 bp long. The predicted primary protein is composed of 353 amino acids, with a 20-amino-acid signal peptide. The mature protein is composed of 333 amino acids with a molecular mass of 36.665 kDa. The ompH gene encoding mature protein has been expressed in Escherichia coli by using a regulatable expression system. The ompH gene was distributed among 15 P. multocida serotypes and strain CU. Protection studies showed that OmpH was able to induce homologous protection in chickens. These findings demonstrate that OmpH is a protective outer membrane porin of strain X-73 and is conserved among P. multocida somatic serotypes.


Books, 2002, 0142300381, 9780142300381, 32 pages. Have you ever wondered where fish go when the ponds and lakes freeze in the wintertime? Or what makes the sound you hear when you put your ear to a seashell? Or why snakes shed their skins? Now you can find out the answers to these questions and many others in this beautiful book of fanciful and fact-filled poems that explain some of nature's greatest mysteries..


ABSTRACT The emergence of drug-resistant parasites is a serious threat faced by malaria control programs. Understanding the genetic basis of resistance is critical to the success of treatment and intervention strategies. A novel locus associated with antimalarial resistance, ap2-mu (encoding the mu chain of the adaptor protein 2 [AP2] complex), was recently identified in studies on the rodent malaria parasite Plasmodium chabaudi (pcap2-mu). Furthermore, analysis in Kenyan malaria patients of polymorphisms in the Plasmodium falciparum ap2-mu homologue, pfap2-mu, found evidence that differences in the amino acid encoded by codon 160 are associated with enhanced parasite survival in vivo following combination treatments which included artemisinin derivatives. Here, we characterize the role of pfap2-mu in mediating the in vitro antimalarial drug response of P. falciparum by generating transgenic parasites constitutively expressing codon 160 encoding either the wild-type Ser (Ser160) or the Asn mutant (160Asn) form of pfap2-mu. Transgenic parasites carrying the pfap2-mu 160Asn allele were significantly less sensitive to dihydroartemisinin using a standard 48-h in vitro test, providing direct evidence of an altered parasite response to artemisinin. Our data also provide evidence that pfap2-mu variants can modulate parasite sensitivity to quinine. No evidence was found that pfap2-mu variants contribute to the slow-clearance phenotype exhibited by P. falciparum in Cambodian patients treated with artesunate monotherapy. These findings provide compelling evidence that pfap2-mu can modulate P. falciparum responses to multiple drugs. We propose that this gene should be evaluated further as a potential molecular marker of antimalarial resistance.


Despite the ongoing interest in reciprocal situations, which form a central part of our social, intellectual and moral lives, and the linguistic encoding of such situations in different languages, studies of reciprocals in Papuan languages remain under-represented in the reciprocal literature. The Trans New Guinea languages Mian, Amele and Hua have a reciprocal construction in which the reciprocal subevents are expressed by individual transitive verbs plus an existential verb expressing that the reciprocal action is done together. Mian goes one step further and fuses this construction into a single verb with a reciprocal suffix -sese. The present paper is an in-depth analysis of the morphology, syntax and semantics of reciprocal constructions in Mian, including a comparison with Amele, and an analysis of the diachronic development of the Mian reciprocal, whose origin presumably lies in a biclausal description in which the reciprocal subevents are spelled out separately and sequentially.


In this paper, we describe how to efficiently implement an acoustic room simulator to generate large-scale simulated data for training deep neural networks. Even though Google Room Simulator in [1] was shown to be quite effective in reducing the Word Error Rates (WERs) for far-field applications by generating simulated far-field training sets, it requires a very large number of Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) of large size. Room Simulator in [1] used approximately 80 percent of Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage in our CPU + Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) training architecture [2]. In this work, we implement an efficient OverLap Addition (OLA) based filtering using the open-source FFTW3 library. Further, we investigate the effects of the Room Impulse Response (RIR) lengths. Experimentally, we conclude that we can cut the tail portions of RIRs whose power is less than 20 dB below the maximum power without sacrificing the speech recognition accuracy. However, we observe that cutting RIR tail more than this threshold harms the speech recognition accuracy for rerecorded test sets. Using these approaches, we were able to reduce CPU usage for the room simulator portion down to 9.69 percent in CPU/GPU training architecture. Profiling result shows that we obtain 22.4 times speed-up on a single machine and 37.3 times speed up on Google's distributed training infrastructure.


This action research project is an experimental study. It aims at investigating the effect of using web-cam chat on the development of university learners' paralinguistic competence. The population of the study included 460 students majoring in English language and literature at the University of Jordan in Amman. The sample of the study consisted of 32 students registered for a Debate course, in the first semester of the academic year 2013-2014. After reviewing the theoretical literature and the previous studies, the researchers identified the paralinguistic aspects of language to be studied, i.e. gestures, postures, facial expressions, gaze and eye contact, bodily movement, intonation, pauses, stress and rhythm, emotional tone of speech, and proximity. A pre-test was administrated to know the actual level of both groups: The control group and the experimental group before being exposed to the new experience of teaching. The control group was taught traditionally while the experimental group was taught via web-cam chat formally inside the lab and informally outside the classroom. Two months later, a post-test was administrated so as to find if any change occurred, if it occurred, to what extent, in what dimension, and in favor of which group. To be certain of the validity of the test, it was refereed by a group of specialists, and its reliability was calculated by Cronbach Alpha Coefficient to be (0.92). To treat the raw scores statistically, means and standard deviations were found. The results of study indicated significant differences in favor of the experimental group, which was taught via web-cam chat. This could be an indirect suggestion for methodologists and curricula designers to emphasize the role of web-cam chat on developing the learners' paralinguistic competence. Furthermore, it could be an invitation for textbooks writers, the time they sit to decide the content of foreign language activities and exercises to take the paralinguistic aspects of language into account because they vary from one language community to another. Finally, it could be wiser if researchers conduct studies at scholastic level to judge the effect of CMC on the paralinguistic competence of the EFL learners.


A new technique, referred to as Stokes holography, is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for controlled synthesis of generalized Stokes parameters in 3D space using Stokes fringes. Stokes fringes are polarization fringes which permit to record and reconstruct complete wavefront. Full use of Stokes fringes in a single step is realized by scattering complex field and subsequently reconstructing using spatial averaging of the randomly scattered field. Mathematical formulations are derived and supported by experimental results of 3D object reconstruction in generalized Stokes parameters.


Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), a plasticizer used in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) products, has been reported to have toxic effects on animal reproduction. However, these reports come from studies mostly using rodents as test species and using doses higher than the doses humans are, presumably, exposed to. In the present thesis work young boars were used as model animals to assess the effects of pre-pubertal DEHP exposure on the quality of fresh and cryopreserved spermatozoa post-puberty. Pairs (n=8) of cross-bred male boar siblings were used, with one brother per pair becoming, at random, the test animal while the other was the control. Test males were orally exposed to DEHP (300 mg/kg body weight (bw)) three times per week from 3 to 7 weeks of age, while controls were given placebo. Semen collections and analyses started when the boars were 6 months old and continued until they were 9 months old. Ejaculates collected between 8 and 9 months of age were also cryopreserved for analyses post-thaw. Ejaculates were evaluated for sperm numbers, motility, morphology and plasma membrane integrity (PMI). Post-thaw spermatozoa were assessed for sperm motility, PMI, the ability to capacitate in vitro when exposed to the effector bicarbonate, and to acrosome-react when exposed to calcium ionophore (Ca-ionophore), the ability of the nuclear deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) to sustain denaturation in vitro using a sperm chromatin structure assay (SCSA), and the ability of post-thaw spermatozoa to in vitro penetrate homologous, in vitro-matured (IVM) oocytes. The spermiogram did not significantly differ between exposed and control boars, except for sperm morphology. Boars exposed to DEHP had fewer (p<0.05) spermatozoa with tailless, defective heads (at 7–8 months of age) and double-folded tails (at 6–7, 7–8 and 6–9 months) than did controls. Regarding post-thaw spermatozoa, there were no differences in PMI between groups, but the DEHP-exposed boars had significantly fewer linearly motile spermatozoa at 30 (p<0.05) and 120 (p<0.001) minutes post-thaw, depicting also a larger amplitude of lateral head displacement (LHD) 120 minutes post-thaw (p<0.05). Proportions of capacitated post-thaw spermatozoa were similar between groups (control: 3.7%; DEHP-exposed: 4.4%), and exposure to bicarbonate had similar effects on capacitation of stable spermatozoa (control: 24.0%; DEHP-exposed: 22.1%). Live post-thaw spermatozoa from either group were acrosome-reacted in vitro to similar rates after exposure to Ca-ionophore (control: 9.3%; DEHP-exposed: 8.9%). Chromatin structure stability was similar between groups, with low proportions of spermatozoa showing induced DNA-denaturation (DNA fragmentation index, DFI; control: 0.15; DEHP-exposed: 0.17). In vitro sperm penetration rate did not significantly differ between groups (control: 59%; DEHP-exposed: 50%), nor did the number of spermatozoa in the ooplasm (control: 1.7; DEHP-exposed: 1.5). In summary, the DEHP exposure in the present studies did not cause obvious adverse effects on sperm production or sperm quality in boars. Cryopreservation was only able to disclose minor post-thaw sperm kinematic deviations in DEHP-exposed boars. However, DEHP did not seem to affect the ability of spermatozoa to capacitate or acrosome-react or to damage the nuclear genome, nor did it seem to affect their in vitro fertilizing ability.


Blum, Kevin M. M.S.B.M.E., Purdue University, May 2015. High Density Collagen Fibril Constructs With Tunable Mechano-Biology in Acellular and Cellular Configurations. Major Professor: Sherry Voytik-Harbin. Collagen has long been used as a material for tissue engineering due to its prevalence in the extracellular matrix of connective tissues. However, traditional collagen materials utilizing atelocollagen and acid solubilized telocollagen have lacked the mechanical integrity and collagen fibril density found in the in vivo state. Here, we utilize collagen oligomers and confined compression to forcibly remove a portion of the fluid phase component. Materials were created with controlled, substantially increased material properties, including order of magnitude increases in collagen fibril density, elastic modulus, compressive modulus,and resistance to proteolytic degradation. The technique was found to be amenable to cell encapslation, allowing the creation of viable cellularized high density constructs. The translational aspects of these high density collagen materials was examined through the ultrastructure and bulk property changes that may be present through lyophilization and rehydration, as well as comparison against a gold standard market crosslinked microfibrillar collagen sponge.


Analysis of mine fire growth and spread is important for improving safe emergency egress for mine workers in fires. In fire engineering, a 'design fire' is the term that describes the characterisation of a fire in relation to its growth and decay. Defining the design fire is the starting point for managing the fire risk of a mine and is the basis for further analysis of emergency response. A current Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre (MISHC) PhD project is researching methods of improving fire life safety and asset loss control in mining using Video Based Fire Detection (VBFD) in the context of fixed plant fires. Experiments were carried out at Safety in Mines Testing and Research Station (SIMTARS) facilities. This research was part of the MISHC project to better understand the detection capabilities of VBFD in relation to weak plumes from the early combustion of coal associated with fixed plant. This part of the research specifically deals with assessing the physical dimensions and shape of the low energy, non-flaming weak plumes formed from smouldering coal fires. It demonstrates how experimental methods were used to successfully validate the corresponding numerical simulation of the design fire so it can be used for further research.


The aim of this study is to explore the ways in which students, aged 11–14 years, account for certain changes in physical systems and the extent to which they draw on an energy model as a common framework for explaining changes observed in diverse systems. Data were combined from two sources: interviews with 20 individuals and an open-ended questionnaire that was administered to 240 students (121 upper elementary school students and 119 middle school students). We observed a wealth of approaches ranging from accounts of energy transfer and transformation to responses identifying specific objects or processes as the cause of changes. The findings also provide evidence that students do not seem to appreciate the transphenomenological and unifying nature of energy. Students' thinking was influenced by various conceptual difficulties that are compounded by traditional science teaching; for instance, students tended to confuse energy with force or electric current. In addition, the comparison between the responses from middle school students and those of elementary school students demonstrates that science teaching and maturation appeared to have a negligible influence on whether students had constructed a coherent energy model, which they could use consistently to account for changes in certain physical systems. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 444–469, 2008


The growth of online technologies in higher education has presented new challenges for the field of social work education. Some have questioned whether this human interaction-dependent profession can be ethically delivered online. Technology also poses special challenges for social work education and practice in the areas of confidentiality and professional boundaries. These ethical questions have resulted in a lag for research in the area of online social work education when compared to other fields. This review of the relevant literature attempts to discover the current state of knowledge for social work education technologies. Findings indicate that barriers to human interaction and technical glitches are common concerns for educators. However, there is evidence that online social work students have statistically similar outcomes in comparison to traditional students and that technology presents new opportunities to the field if properly utilized.


Conformational and electronic properties of a series of 1,4-benzodiazepine analogues and their specific interaction with a model cationic receptor site have been calculated using both empirical energy and semiempirical molecular orbital methods. The aim of these studies was to identify molecular properties and modes of receptor interaction which are determinants of relative receptor affinities and pharmacological activities for these anxiolytics. Analogues with variations in key positions of the 7-membered (B) ring, at positions C7, C8, and C9 of the fused phenyl (A) ring, and at positions 2' and 4' of the phenyl (C) ring were examined. The results indicate that both active and inactive analogues have similar low-energy conformations, arguing against this property as a modulator of recognition at the receptor. However, calculated molecular electrostatic potentials together with explicit model receptor interactions allowed the deduction that interactions with three cationic receptor sites are required for high-affinity analogues. The specific cationic site interactions are postulated with electron-withdrawing groups at C7, the C2 = O1 group, and the imine nitrogen, N4. Moreover, interactions of N4 with a model cationic receptor site are enhanced by halogen substituents at C2', but only when the phenyl ring is rotated by 30 degrees toward a more planar conformer, corresponding to an induced conformational change. If this enhancement is important, a 2'-Cl substituent on more rigid analogues of the 1,4-benzodiazepines with increased co-planarity of the phenyl C-ring and the C1'--C5 = N4 plane should have an even greater differential effect on receptor affinity.


We employ and extensively characterise an ex vivo culture system to study terminal erythroid maturation of CD34+ progenitors from the peripheral blood of normal individuals and patients with Congenital Dyserythropoietic Anaemia type 1 (CDA-I). Using morphological analysis, FACS analysis and the proteomic approach CyTOF, we analysed patient-derived erythroblasts stage-matched with those from healthy donors during the expansion phase and into early differentiation. In patient cells, aspects of disordered erythropoiesis manifest midway through differentiation, including increased proliferation and changes in the DNA accessibility profile. We also show that cultured erythroblasts from CDA-I patients recapitulate the pathognomic feature of this erythroid disorder with up to 40% of the cells having abnormal 'spongy' chromatin morphology by electron microscopy, as well as upregulation of GDF15, a marker of ineffective erythropoiesis. In the tertiary phase of culture, patient cells show significantly less enucleation and there is persistence of earlier erythroid precursors. Furthermore, the enucleation defect appears to be more severe in patients with mutations in C15orf41, as compared to the other known causative gene CDAN1, indicating a genotype/phenotype correlation in CDA-I. Such erythroblasts are a valuable resource for investigating the pathogenesis of this disease and provide the opportunity for streamlining diagnosis for CDA-I patients and ultimately other forms of unexplained anaemia.


The aim of this paper is to build on a previous paper which explored the politics and perspectives of various social actors regarding anti-discrimination legislation and equality within a higher education setting. This paper will discuss the impact of the politics and perceptions on compliance with legislative requirements as reflected through the equality processes within a case study institution. In considering this, the question which will be borne in mind is: does the tendency towards adopting the formal equality stance also impact on the case study's equality processes and, in turn, their response to the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED)? Such an analysis could have wider implications on how equality and compliance with the law is dealt with in other Higher Education Institutions (HEI).


Health care costs continue their inexorable rise, threatening America's long-term fiscal stability, competitiveness, and standard of living. Over the past half-century, efforts to rein in spending have uniformly failed. In this Article, we explain why, breaking with standard accounts of regulatory and market dysfunction. We point instead to the nexus of economics, mutual empathy, and social expectations that drives medical innovation and locks in low-value technologies. We show how law reflects and rein-forces this nexus — and how and why health-policy-makers avert their gaze.

Next, we propose to circumvent these barriers instead of surmounting them. Rather than targeting today's excessive spending, we seek to leverage available legal tools to bend the arc of innovation, away from marginally-beneficial technology and toward high-value advances. To this end, we set forth a novel, value-based approach to pricing and patent protection — one that departs sharply from current practice by rewarding innovators in proportion to the therapeutic benefits new tests and treatments yield.

Using cancer therapy as an example, we explain how emerging information technology and large troves of electronic clinical data are opening the way to near-real-time assessment of efficacy. We then show how such assessment can power ongoing adjustment of pricing and patent terms. Finally, we offer a blueprint for how laws governing health care payment and intellectual property can be tailored to realize this value-focused vision. For the reasons we lay out, the transformation of incentives we urge will both slow clinical spending growth and greatly enhance the social value that this spending yields.


ABSTRACT In response to the increasing numbers of mentally ill persons placed under the care of correctional institutions, community-based diversion programs have been established to address the unique needs and challenges of this vulnerable population. Given that legal personnel may serve as gatekeepers in placement decisions, and the lack of existing research examining their attitudes toward offenders with mental illness, the present study aimed to evaluate perceptions of dangerousness and treatment need among a sample of judges, prosecutors, and public defenders across the state of Mississippi. While controlling for age, results of a factorial MANCOVA revealed that public defenders, relative to both judges and prosecutors, endorsed more compassionate attitudes about defendants with mental illnesses. Furthermore, political ideology did not significantly influence attitudes toward mentally ill offenders. While judges and prosecutors endorsed more negative stereotypes about mental illness and perceived mentally ill defendants as a greater risk to the community, mean scores across groups suggested moderately positive attitudes overall. Study limitations, implications for correctional mental health providers, and directions for future research are discussed.


Abstract Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) has ushered in a new era of scientific discovery by allowing new insights into DNA-protein interactions. ChIP is used to quantify enriched genomic regions using qPCR, and more recently is combined with next generation sequencing (ChIP-seq) to obtain a genome wide profile of protein binding sites. Nevertheless, ChIP-qPCR remains an integral component of this technology for quality control purposes, before the library preparation and sequencing steps. In addition, ChIP-qPCR remains more time- and cost-effective for many focused projects in which the DNA regions of interest are already known. However, the DNA oligonucleotide primers needed for ChIP-qPCR are more challenging to design than for other qPCR projects. Here, we present the first public repository for ChIP oligonucleotides that have been verified to perform well in ChIP-qPCR experiments. ChIPprimersDB was developed by manual screening of publications to ensure primer quality and provide additional specific information on the ChIP experiments where the primers have been used. In addition to the primer sequences, the database includes information about the antibody, cells and tissues used in the experiment, information on the experimental design, and a direct link to the original publication. The database is linked at https://umiamihealth.org/bascom-palmer-eye-institute/research/laboratory-research/ocular-oncology-laboratory/chip-primers and hosted at https://www.chipprimers.com/.


The paper by Presbitero, Udell and Zazzaro (henceforth, PUZ) aims to investigate whether the financial crisis that in Italy really "hit" after Lehman Brothers in September 2008 actually led to a credit crunch there and which types of firms suffered most. PUZ start from the quarterly editions of a monthly survey of about 3,800 Italian manufacturing firms (by ISAE, now ISTAT) to analyze credit access by 3,623 firms between 2008:Q1 to 2009:Q3, i.e., 23,140 firm-quarter observations of which 12,734 came after Lehman. PUZ find suggestive evidence that there was a credit crunch in Italy post-Lehman, that firms in provinces with bank branches located further from their bank's headquarter (i.e., with banks that are more functionally distant) suffered relatively more, and that in those provinces especially high-quality firms were affected. These findings are consistent with a home bias but not with a flight-to-quality interpretation. This nice paper by PUZ is truly thought-provoking as the home bias in banking that is documented is occurring within one country. But before pointing out a possible broader avenue for further investigation, I want to discuss a few limitations of this study (most of which the authors are also aware of and candidly highlight) and in this way also indicate more immediate directions for follow-up research.


THE MODERATING ROLE OF PERCEIVED ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BULLYING AND WORK BEHAVIORS by Zakwan Salahieh Workplace bullying has been linked to many unfavorable outcomes that can be very costly to organizations. One way to minimize the impact of this negative behavior is through perceived organizational support (POS). Thus, researchers have called for more studies examining the joint effects of workplace bullying and POS on various outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine whether POS would moderate the relationship between workplace bullying and outcomes that are related to work behaviors and motivations, namely, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and work engagement. A total of 224 individuals working in a variety of industries participated in an online survey. The study examined the direct effects of workplace bullying on OCB-I (behaviors directed towards individuals), OCB-O (behaviors directed towards the organization), and work engagement as well as the moderating effects of POS on such relationships. In support of the hypotheses, results showed that workplace bullying was negatively related to all three outcomes. However, POS moderated only the relationship between workplace bullying and OCB-I. The effects of workplace bullying on OCB-I were more negative when POS was low, but there was no relationship between the two when POS was high. In other words, high POS nullified the negative impact of workplace bullying on OCB-I. These findings suggest that in order to foster positive work behaviors, organizations should create a supportive work environment through the implementation of anti-bullying policies and training programs.


The road network of main and secondary roads for Nicopolis ad Nestum has not been studied comprehensively so far. Our research was carried out in the period 2010-2015. We have gathered the preserved parts of roads with bridges, together with the results of archaeological studies and data about the settlements alongside these roads. The Roman city of Nicopolis ad Nestum inherited road connections from pre-Roman times, which were further developed. Road construction in the area has been traced chronologically from the pre-Roman roads to the Roman primary and secondary ones for the ancient city. There were several newly built roadbeds that were important for the area and connected Nicopolis with Via Diagonalis and Via Egnatia. The elements of infrastructure have been established: primary and secondary roads, crossings, facilities and roadside stations. Also the locations of custom-houses have been found at the border between Parthicopolis and Nicopolis ad Nestum. We have identified a dense network of road infrastructure with relatively straight sections and a lot of local roads and bridges, connecting the settlements in the territory of Nicopolis ad Nestum.


OBJECTIVES
The prevalence of septic acute kidney injury and impact on functional status of PICU survivors are unknown. We used data from an international prospective severe sepsis study to elucidate functional outcomes of children suffering septic acute kidney injury.

DESIGN
Secondary analysis of patients in the Sepsis PRevalence, OUtcomes, and Therapies point prevalence study: acute kidney injury was defined on the study day using Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes definitions. Patients with no acute kidney injury or stage 1 acute kidney injury ("no/mild acute kidney injury") were compared with those with stage 2 or 3 acute kidney injury ("severe acute kidney injury"). The primary outcome was a composite of death or new moderate disability at discharge defined as a Pediatric Overall Performance Category score of 3 or higher and increased by 1 from baseline.

SETTING
One hundred twenty-eight PICUs in 26 countries.

PATIENTS
Children with severe sepsis in the Sepsis PRevalence, OUtcomes, and Therapies study.

INTERVENTIONS
None.

MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS
One hundred two (21%) of 493 patients had severe acute kidney injury. More than twice as many patients with severe acute kidney injury died or developed new moderate disability compared with those with no/mild acute kidney injury (64% vs 30%; p < 0.001). Severe acute kidney injury was independently associated with death or new moderate disability (adjusted odds ratio, 2.5; 95% CI, 1.5-4.2; p = 0.001) after adjustment for age, region, baseline disability, malignancy, invasive mechanical ventilation, albumin administration, and the pediatric logistic organ dysfunction score.

CONCLUSIONS
In a multinational cohort of critically ill children with severe sepsis and high mortality rates, septic acute kidney injury is independently associated with further increased death or new disability.


In database security, the issue of providing a level of security for multimedia information is getting more and more known. For the moment the security of multimedia information is done through the security of the database itself, in the same way, for all classic and multimedia records. So what is the reason for the creation of a security management system and a set of security rules for this type of information? The reason is the fast progress of multimedia information usage in enterprise activities. More and more distributed activities are based on processing multimedia information in real time, which is why the implementation of such a security system is important.


The federal government's trust relationship with federallyrecognized Indian tribes is a product of the last two centuries of Federal Indian Law and federal-tribal relations. For approximately the last 50 years, the federal government has sought to promote tribal self-determination as a means to carry out its trust responsibilities to Indian tribes; but the shadows of prior federal policies, based largely on notions of tribal incompetence and federal paternalism, remain. Perhaps no other policy arena better demonstrates the history, evolution, and promise for reform of the federal trust relationship than Federal Indian energy policy, or the range of federal statutes and regulations devoted to the management of the development of tribal energy resources. This article provides a detailed review of Federal Indian energy policy and proposes a new path for reform that would allow for broader tribal authority and, potentially, a new conception of the federal trust responsibility.


The location of polynomial roots is sensitive to perturbations of the coefficients. Continuous changes of the coefficients of a polynomial move the roots continuously. We consider the problem of finding the minimal perturbations to the coefficients to move one or several roots to given loci. We measure minimality in the Euclidean distance to the coefficient vector, as well as the maximal coefficient-wise change in absolute value (infinity norm), and in the Manhattan norm ($l\sp1$-norm). In the Euclidean norm the computational task reduces to a least squares problem, in the infinity norm and the $l\sp1$-norm it can be formulated as a linear program.
We can derive symbolic solutions in closed form for the Euclidean norm in the case of complex coefficients and a single complex root. Our new result is a formula for the minimum change in the infinity norm for the case of real coefficients and a single real root. Based on the principle of parametric minimization we develop hybrid symbolic-numeric algorithms to constrain one root of a complex or real polynomial to a curve in the complex plane.
As an application to robust control, we give a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the radius of stability in the Euclidean norm for a variety of stability domains.


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Why do so many executives and other employees receive fixed stock options as part of their compensation packages? There is an impressive literature on compensatory options, and yet it raises more puzzles than it solves. Tax law, option theory, and agency theory all suggest that we might have expected to find quite different practices than we do observe. In particular, there is a puzzle in the popularity of conventional fixed options when indexed options would seem to be relatively attractive. The solution or story offered here develops arguments about signaling, in the form of employees' disinclination to be seen as preferring cash over options in their own employer's future. It relies on the idea that indexed options encourage more risk alteration, or inefficient differentiation, than other forms of compensation. And it introduces the notion that there is something of a norm in favor of nonconflicting fortunes within a community. The norm part of the argument says something about the more general norm of privacy with respect to money matters and it illuminates the occasional practice of confidentiality regarding one's own compensation. This practice might be stable because of the negative signals emitted by defectors. The same analysis might help explain why stock option practices are somewhat sticky.


How much inequality in policy instruments can a universalist welfare state tolerate in its pursuit of equity? This article reviews the nuances of universalism as a concept through examination of its meaning and application in Norwegian health policy, with a contextual focus on migrant maternal health in Norway. The Nordic welfare model is generous and dedicated to achieving equality through the universal provision of social services; however, there are increasing gray areas that challenge the system, invoking the conundrum of equality versus equity. Universalism is a central principle in Norwegian health policy, however changes in the socio-political environment have meant the concept as originally conceived requires a more nuanced articulation. Population changes in particular, such as a growing and diverse migrant settlement, present challenges for how to achieve the equality desired by universalist measures, while maintaining the equity demanded by diversity. This article uses an example of a Norwegian program that delivers maternal health services to migrant women to question the concept of universalism as a theoretical and practical construct, as historically and currently applied in Norwegian health policy. This example illustrates how healthcare as an organization functions in the country, and the role of its key players in adapting policy instruments to meet the Norwegian welfare state's universal policy aims. The scholarly contribution of this article lies in promoting a critical reflection on the evolving definition of universalism, and in contributing to a discussion on the need to retheorize the concept in Norwegian health policy to attain equity.


Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are currently a major research area globally. Most of the RFID tags available in the market use application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) which are expensive compared to other tagging techniques. RFID can only compete with, even and replace barcodes if they are made chipless and printed like the barcodes. Chipless RFID tags reduce the manufacturing costs and enable the use of the technology in high volume applications. Much research has been carried out on the development of chipless RFID tags. However, only a limited amount of work has been carried out on the development of chipless RFID readers.

This thesis presents the design of three novel, very low-cost chipless RFID readers for reading spectral signature-based chipless RFID tags. Two of the readers use frequency domain-based techniques to decode data from the chipless tags. The Gen-1 reader is capable of detecting the features of amplitude and phase signature of a chipless RFID tag. The reader requires a calibration measurement. The detection process is more hardware-based and fewer signal processing techniques are used.

The Gen-2 reader reconstructs the amplitude and phase responses using the signals received from the chipless RFID tags. The reader does not need a calibration measurement, which offers a major improvement over the predecessors. The voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) of the reader generates a linear chirp (swept) frequency interrogation signal. The Gen-2 reader is even lower-cost compared to the Gen-1 and has a simpler RF section. The detection process uses a Hilbert transform-based signal processing technique to re-construct the amplitude and phase responses of the chipless tag. The operation of both Gen-1 and Gen-2 readers are validated experimentally.

The tag reading speed is hindered by the performance of the VCO and the number of data points required in frequency domain-based readers. A novel high-speed tag reading technique based on ultra-wideband RF pulses is proposed in this research. The proposed method is validated with simulations. The integrated reader is a complete system with an RF section, a digital section and a graphical user interface (GUI) and software interface.

Most of the existing UWB antenna designs are not suitable for chipless RFID applications due to their low gain or physical size. Hence, in addition to the readers, a design of novel UWB antenna is also proposed in this research work to use with the readers. The antenna is compact and high gain and provides UWB operation with over 9 dB gain and 3.9-10 GHz operating frequency band.

The unique features of the developed chipless RFID reader systems are (i) low cost, (ii) secure and (iii) remote and non-line of sight operability. The importance of these developments lies in the fact that they enable the development of low-cost chipless RFID systems comparable to other cheap tagging systems such as optical barcodes.


More than 90 percent of the Earth's mass is composed of iron, oxygen, silicon and magnesium, distributed among a metal-rich core, a silicate-rich mantle and more highly fractionated crustal rocks (less than 1% of the total). Mantle and core compositions can be approximated quite easily provided the bulk-Earth composition is assumed to be the same as that of appropriate meteorites. Critical mineral-physics data, some of which are reviewed in this article, are then needed to develop viable compositional and thermal Earth models, thus leading to a better knowledge of the deepest rocks in the Earth.


We describe what we call the dioptric elasticity method of making Schmidt plates. An oversize disk is supported on a narrow metal ring. Within this ring, the air underneath is partially evacuated; a primary vacuum is formed under the outer annulus. The elastically deformed disk is worked flat. When the loads are removed, the disk takes on an excellent, smooth Kerber profile over the region interior to the supporting ring. This produces more highly aspherical surfaces (F/1) and is more convenient than the method attempted by Schmidt. We give the elasticity theory, discuss our shop methods, and show the very satisfactory results.


In this paper we analyse an M 1.0 confined flare observed mainly during its gradual phase. We use the data taken during a coordinated observational campaign between ground based instruments (THEMIS and VTT) and space observatories (SoHO/CDS and MDI, TRACE and RHESSI). We use these multi-wavelength observations to study the morphology and evolution of the flare, to analyse its gradual phase and to understand the role of various heating mechanisms. During the flare, RHESSI observed emission only within the 3-25 keV spectral range. The RHESSI spectra indicate that the emission of the flare was mainly of thermal origin with a small non-thermal component observed between 10 and 20 keV. Nevertheless, the energy contained in the non-thermal electrons is negligible compared to the thermal energy of the flaring plasma. The temperature of plasma obtained from the fitting of the RHESSI X-ray spectra was between 8.5 and 14 MK. The lower temperature limit is typical for a plasma contained in post flare loops observed in X-rays. Higher temperatures were observed during a secondary peak of emission corresponding to a small impulsive event. The SoHO/CDS observations performed in EUV Fe XIX line also confirm the presence of a hot plasma at temperatures similar to those obtained from RHESSI spectra. The EUV structures were located at the same place as RHESSI X-ray emission. The magnetic topology analysis of the AR coming from a linear force-free field extrapolation explains the observed features of the gradual phase of the flare i.e. the asymmetry of the ribbons and their fast propagation. The combination of the multi-wavelength observations with the magnetic model further suggests that the onset of the flare would be due to the reconnection of an emerging flux in a sheared magnetic configuration.