Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently achieved competitive performance in broad vision tasks. Unfortunately, on popular threat models, naturally trained ViTs are shown to provide no more adversarial robustness than convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Adversarial training is still required for ViTs to defend against such adversarial attacks. In this paper, we provide the first and comprehensive study on the adversarial training recipe of ViTs via extensive evaluation of various training techniques across benchmark datasets. We find that pre-training and SGD optimizer are necessary for ViTs' adversarial training. Further considering ViT as a new type of model architecture, we investigate its adversarial robustness from the perspective of its unique architectural components. We find, when randomly masking gradients from some attention blocks or masking perturbations on some patches during adversarial training, the adversarial robustness of ViTs can be remarkably improved, which may potentially open up a line of work to explore the architectural information inside the newly designed models like ViTs. Our code is available at https://github.com/mo666666/When-Adversarial-Training-Meets-Vision-Transformers.


Assembly of a single ribosome is a complex task, which requires in eukaryotes the
concerted action of over 200 non-ribosomal factors and a large number of snoRNAs.
The pre-rRNA undergoes co-transcriptional processing, modifications and cleavage
events, which separate the biogenesis pathways of the small and large ribosomal
subunits at an early stage in the nucleolus. Despite the biochemical characterization of
the majority of the involved factors it is not known how these components are
structurally arranged in the 90S pre-ribosome, the earliest pre-ribosomal particle in the
biogenesis pathway. My work showed the cryo-EM structure of the 90S pre-ribosome
from C. thermophilum at 7.3 A average resolution, revealing a perforated particle
comprised of 19 β-propellers located mainly at the periphery and intertwined with
dsRNA helices. Most of the electron density could be accounted for and assigned to the
90S sub-complexes UTP-A, UTP-B, Mpp10, Rcl1/Bms1, U3 snoRNP as well as the
partially folded pre-18S rRNA in a head-down orientation, thereby providing an overall
architecture of the 90S complex.
At the foot of the ct90S we identified the UTP-A sub-complex, which binds the first
dsRNA helices of the nascent rRNA transcript at the 5' end of the 5'ETS. The growing
transcript then interacts with UTP-B components and hybridizes with the 3' hinge region
of the U3 snoRNP in the body part of the complex. Following the 5'ETS sequence
further we encounter the pre-18S rRNA, which will ultimately form the RNA core of the
small (40S) ribosomal subunit. With respect to the 90S the pre-40S is oriented upside
down, pointing towards the core of the 90S. We find the 5' domain of the pre-40S to a
large extent developed and resembling the mature conformation, albeit requiring a final
compaction step. Part of the central domain platform is folded, but shifted with respect
to its mature position relative to the 5' domain. The head is least resembling its mature
state and could be partially identified on the basis of the corresponding bound r-proteins
at their mature positions and Emg1, known to modify the pre-18S rRNA in that region. The gradual development of the 18S from 5' domain first and 3' end last is similar to
how ribosomes assemble in bacteria.
Taken together the data provide the first structural
view into the architecture of 90S pre-ribosome, and will serve as solid foundation for
guiding further biochemical experiments as well as structural studies.


This paper sets out a general equilibrium pollution and trade model to provide a framework for examination of the trade and environment debate. The model contains as special cases a canonical pollution haven model as well as the standard Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson factor endowments model. We draw quite heavily from trade theory, but develop a simple pollution demand and supply system featuring marginal abatement cost and marginal damage schedules familiar to environmental economists. We have intentionally kept the model simple to facilitate extensions examining the environmental consequences of growth, the impact of trade liberalization, and strategic interaction between countries.


Purpose of review Pain management in the trauma patient can be challenging, especially outside the operating room setting. Traditional analgesics such as opioids and NSAIDs are also problematic in trauma care. In this review, the use of regional anesthetic techniques outside the operating theatre is discussed. Recent findings Regional anesthesia is an increasing but still underutilized clinical tool for the trauma patient outside the operating room. Regional anesthesia provides well tolerated and effective analgesia and anesthesia for many indications in the trauma setting including hip fracture, reduction of joint dislocation, wound debridement, laceration repair, and multiple rib fractures. Its use can increase safety and resource allocation in emergency departments. Performance of peripheral nerve blocks, especially with ultrasound, is amenable in various medical environments with minimal training. Summary Pain is often poorly managed in the trauma patient. In addition to quality analgesia, regional anesthesia provides a variety of benefits in the trauma setting outside the traditional operating room setting. While further utilization requires increased training and structural changes, existing tools such as ultrasound are removing barriers to the widespread use of peripheral nerve block techniques across multiple disciplines.


Pediatric supracondylar humerus fractures are the most commonly encountered type of elbow fractures in children that require surgical fixation. Many pediatric supracondylar humerus fractures can be treated with closed reduction and percutaneous skeletal fixation. In difficult fractures, adjunct pin techniques, such as joystick wires and leverage pins, can be used to help attain a satisfactory and stable reduction before an open approach is used. After the fracture is reduced, optimal pinning, with the use of either crossed or lateral-entry techniques, and fixation that achieves maximal spread at the fracture site as well as bicortical engagement in both fragments are essential to maintain reduction and avoid complications that are associated with malunion. A practical approach as well as several tips and techniques may help surgeons attain and maintain stable closed reduction of pediatric supracondylar humerus fractures.


"Targeting Listening and Speaking" provides short and focused activities to help lower-proficiency ESL/EFL students improve their listening and speaking skills. It includes practice in both mastering the larger message and key words/phrases and specific words and sounds to assist students in developing better speaking and comprehension skills.Each unit has a general theme -- such as food, animals and pets, free time and hobbies, and travel -- around which all exercises are designed.The final unit consists of four listening tests that can be used to monitor progress. Each unit includes: dictation practice using dialogues listening skill development speaking practice listening to simple conversations sound practice with minimal pairs listening to simple lectures more speaking and discussion practice.Quizzes are available on the companion website.The audio material is available either on CD or cassette (there are 4 components for each).


Lead and cadmium are both highly toxic pollutants and pose potential risks to the environment and human health. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) inoculation and organic amendments may make a potential contribution to phytoremediation of these toxic metals, but their effects remain unclear. We conducted a pot culture experiment to study the contribution of AM inoculation and/or cattle manure to phytoremediation of two soils artificially polluted with 0, 350, 500 and 1000 mg Pb per kg soil or 0, 1, 10, 100 mg Cd per kg soil using tobacco plants. Results showed that AM colonization was greatly reduced when exposed to more heavy metals especially Cd, whereas organic amendment alleviated metal stress and showed protective effects. In general, AM inoculation and cattle manure, singly or in combination, all significantly increased tobacco growth and Pb and Cd accumulation in shoots and roots, while decreased DTPA-extractable Pb and Cd concentrations in soil, and combination treatments (MN) produced the most pronounced positive effects. Improved plant P nutrition, higher soil pH and lower available metal concentrations contributed by AM inoculation and/or organic amendment may be the main strategies to alleviate metal toxicity and enhance phytoremediation efficiency. Our results indicate that AM fungi and organic manure play a synergistic positive role both in phytoextraction and phytostabilization of Cd and Pb.


The Vienna Doctoral Programme on Water Resource Systems (DK-WRS) is a programme that aims to educate students in interdisciplinary water science through cutting edge research at an international level. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund and designed to run over a period of 12 yr during which 80 doctoral students are anticipated to graduate. This paper reports on our experiences of setting up and implementing the Programme. We identify three challenges: integrating the disciplines, maintaining depth in an interdisciplinary programme, and teaching subjects remote to each student's core expertise. To address these challenges we adopt a number of approaches. We use three levels of instruments to foster integration across the disciplines: joint groups (e.g. a joint study programme), joint science questions (e.g. developed in annual symposia), and joint study sites. To maintain depth we apply a system of quality control including regular feedback sessions, theses by journal publications and international study exchange. For simultaneously teaching students from civil and environmental engineering, biology, geology, chemistry, mathematics we use visually explicit teaching, learning by doing, extra mentoring and by cross relating associated subjects. Our initial assessment of the Programme shows some very positive outcomes. Joint science questions formed between students from various disciplines indicate integration is being achieved. The number of successful publications in top journals suggests that depth is maintained. Positive feedback from the students on the variety and clarity of the courses indicates the teaching strategy is working well. Our experiences have shown that implementing and running an interdisciplinary doctoral programme has its challenges and is demanding in terms of time and human resources but seeing interactions progress and watching people grow and develop their way of thinking in an interdisciplinary environment is a valuable reward.


A combination of geography, public policy, and commercial investment in information infrastructure combines to create geo-policy barriers that in turn structure the ability of rural citizens to access the Internet. A statistical study of 208 rural telephone exchanges in Texas combined with case studies from rural counties explores the impact of distance and policies aimed at enabling rural telephone connection on the presence of Internet service providers. Market territories, including exchange areas and LATAs, and the distance requirements of expanded local calling policy in Texas can both help and hinder Internet access in remote areas.


Treatment with combinations of synthetic prostaglandins, one with an ovarian site of action and one with a uterine site of action, terminated pregnancy in all rhesus monkeys given the injection on day 28 of fertile menstrual cycles. Single prostaglandins, even at higher doses, interrupted pregnancy in only one-third of the monkeys. The most effective treatment, 5-oxa-17-phenyl-18,19,20-trinor prostaglandin F1 alpha methyl ester plus 9-deoxo-16,16-dimethyl-9-methylene prostaglandin E2, promptly intercepted early pregnancy after a single administration and without side effects.


In Europe, the deployment characteristics of frontal crash restraints are generally optimised to best protect an average young male, since a 50th percentile male dummy is used in a stylised frontal impact scenario. These single point restraint systems may not provide similar levels of effectiveness when the crash scenarios vary with respect to the regulatory and consumer crash test procedures. Previous research has demonstrated that varying restraint deployment characteristics according to occupant and crash variation can provide further injury reduction in frontal impacts. This thesis reports the investigation conducted to assess the potential real world injury reduction benefit of smart restraint systems in frontal impacts. The intelligent capability of the restraint was achieved by varying the seat belt load limiter (SBL) threshold, according to the frontal crash scenario.
Real world accident data (CCIS) were analysed to identify the target population of vehicle occupants and frontal impact scenarios where employing smart load limiters could be most beneficial, particularly in reducing chest injury risk. From the accident sample, the chest was the most frequently injured body region at an AIS 2+ level in frontal impacts (7% of front seat occupants). The proportion of older vehicle front seat occupants (>64 years old) with AIS 2+ injury was also greater than the proportion of younger occupants. Additionally, older occupants were more likely to sustain seat belt induced serious chest injury in low and moderate speed frontal crashes.
Numerical simulations using MADYMO software were conducted to examine the effect of varying the load limiter thresholds on occupant kinematics and injury outcome in frontal impacts. Generic baseline driver and front passenger numerical models were developed using a 50th percentile dummy and were adapted to accommodate a 5th and 95th percentile dummy. Simulations were performed where the load limiter threshold was varied in five frontal impact scenarios which were selected to cover as wide a range of real frontal crash conditions as possible. From the simulation results, it was found that for both the 50th and 95th percentile dummy in front seating positions (driver and passenger), the low SBL provided the best chest injury protection, without increasing the risk to other body regions. In severe impacts, the low SBL allowed the dummy to move further towards the front facia, thus increasing the chance of occupant hard contact with the vehicle interiors. The Smart load limiters predicted no injury risk reduction for the 5th percentile drivers, who are shorter and tend to sit closer to the steering wheel.
The potential injury reduction of the smart load limiters was quantified by applying the estimated injury risk reduction from the simulation to the real world accident data sample. Thoracic injury predictions from the simulations were converted into injury probability values using AIS 2+ age dependent thoracic risk curves which were developed and validated based on a methodology proposed by Laituri et al. (2005). Real world benefit was quantified using the predicted relative AIS 2+ risk reduction and assuming an appropriate adaptive system was fitted to all the cars in the real world sample. When applying the AIS 2+ risk reduction findings to the weighted accident data sample, the risk of sustaining an AIS 2+ seat belt injury reduced from 1.3% to 0.9% for younger front seat occupants, 7.6% to 5.0% for middle aged front seat occupants and 13.1% to 8.6% for the older front seat occupants.
The research findings clearly demonstrate a chest injury reduction benefit across all age groups when the load limiter characteristics are varied. It suggests that employing a smart load limiter in a vehicle would not only benefit older occupants but also middle aged and young occupants. The benefit does appear to be most pronounced for older occupants, since the older population is more vulnerable to chest injury. As the older population of car users is rapidly rising, the benefits of smarter systems can only increase in the future.


Recent trends and future demographic projections suggest that the need to produce more food and fibre will necessitate effective utilization of salt‐affected land and saline water resources. Currently at least 20 per cent of the world's irrigated land is salt affected and/or irrigated with waters containing elevated levels of salts. Several major irrigation schemes have suffered from the problems of salinity and sodicity, reducing their agricultural productivity and sustainability. Productivity enhancement of salt‐affected land and saline water resources through crop‐based management has the potential to transform them from environmental burdens into economic opportunities. Research efforts have led to the identification of a number of field crops, forage grasses and shrubs, aromatic and medicinal species, bio‐fuel crops, and fruit tree and agroforestry systems, which are profitable and suit a variety of salt‐affected environments. Several of these species have agricultural significance in terms of their local utilization on the farm. Therefore, crop diversification systems based on salt‐tolerant plant species are likely to be the key to future agricultural and economic growth in regions where salt‐affected soils exist, saline drainage waters are generated, and/or saline aquifers are pumped for irrigation. However, such systems will need to consider three issues: improving the productivity per unit of salt‐affected land and saline water resources, protecting the environment and involving farmers in the most suitable and sustainable crop diversifying systems to mitigate any perceived risks. This review covers different aspects of salt‐affected land and saline water resources, synthesizes research knowledge on salinity/sodicity tolerances in different plant species, and highlights promising examples of crop diversification and management to improve and maximize benefits from these resources. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Published Monthly at Austin, Texas. Subscription price $1.00 a year in advance. Eastern Representative: John Guy Monihan, St. Paul Building, 220 Broadway, New York City. Official organ of the the West Texas Medical Association, the Houston District Medical Association, the Austin District Medical Society, the Brazos Valley Medieal Association, the Galveston County Medical Society, and several others.


The objective of the study was to asses the susceptibility, pathological effect and serological response of wild pigeons (Columba livia) to Newcastle virus. A total of 28 adult wild pigeons were captured, 14 were inoculated with a velogenic viscerotropic strain of Newcastle virus by oral and nasal route, and the remaining birds were used as a control group. Clinical signs and mortality were recorded. Blood samples were collected for the hemaglutination inhibition technique. Tissue samples from lung and trachea were collected, and cloacal swabs were harvested for virus recovery and histological studies. Birds of the inoculated group showed clinical signs (64%) and mortality (42.8%). The clinical signs (sneezes, ruffled plumage, isolation and lethargy) started at day 4 after inoculation. The 43% of birds showed nervous signs (opisthotonos and tremors of head and neck) and 21% had diarrhea. In the necropsy was observed a widespread congestion and splenomegaly. The microscopic injuries were edema, gliosis, mononuclear perivascular cuffing in brain and cerebellum, loss of cillia, lymphoid infiltration in trachea, lung congestion, proventricular congestion, lymphocitic infiltration in intestines, and lymphoid depletion in spleen. The inoculated group showed the highest antibody titer (4.9) in the second week. The viral recovery was made upon lung and trachea tissues. It was showed that the specie Columba livia was susceptible to the experimental inoculation with a velogenic strain of Newcastle diasease virus.


We report on the experiment of in-situ bottom sediment oxygenation by forced aeration, in the industrial harbour of Marghera, with the aim of reducing heavy metal and organic pollutant content. Many of these are particularly resistant to biodegradation due to the presence of one or more aromatic rings in their molecular structure. In the presence of appropriate oxygenation conditions however, several species of bacteria rich in enzymes, known as "cyclo-oxygenase" can break the aromatic rings and use for their energetic metabolism. With the aim of determining possible variations of heavy metal and organic pollutants concentration, five sets of three sediment cores, where collected before, during and after two oxygenation campaigns, in three different sites, with a 7 month interval of no aeration. Fast freezing of the cores, after extraction, was applied, in order to avoid adding any artificial sediment mixing, in particular for the top part of the sediment core that is very fluid and sediment mixing can easily occur. The comparison of the heavy metal concentration averages of the top 6 cm of each core collected before, during and after the aeration activities gave a good indication of the oxygenation effects, of their persistence in time and of the general reduction of the heavy metal concentration in the surficial sediments. The study has also indicated that bottom sediment mixing plays a very important role: where sediment reworking and mixing are strong the effect of oxygenation is very limited and irregular. them


This paper develops methods for evaluating marginal policy changes. We characterize how the effects of marginal policy changes depend on the direction of the policy change, and show that marginal policy effects are fundamentally easier to identify and to estimate than conventional treatment parameters. We develop the connection between marginal policy effects and the average effect of treatment for persons on the margin of indifference between participation in treatment and nonparticipation, and use this connection to analyze both parameters. We apply our analysis to estimate the effect of marginal changes in tuition on the return to going to college.


In Donald Trump's America, protesting has roared back into fashion. The Women's March, held the day after Trump's inauguration, may have been the largest in American history, and resonated around the world. Between Trump's tweets and the march's popularity, it is clear that displays of anger dominate American politics once again. There is an extensive body of research on protest, but the focus has mostly been on the calculating brain—a byproduct of structuralism and cognitive studies—and less on the feeling brain. James M. Jasper's work changes that, as he pushes the boundaries of our present understanding of the social world. In The Emotions of Protest , Jasper lays out his argument, showing that it is impossible to separate cognition and emotion. At a minimum, he says, we cannot understand the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or pro- and anti-Trump rallies without first studying the fears and anger, moral outrage, and patterns of hate and love that their members feel. This is a book centered on protest, but Jasper also points toward broader paths of inquiry that have the power to transform the way social scientists picture social life and action. Through emotions, he says, we are embedded in a variety of environmental, bodily, social, moral, and temporal contexts, as we feel our way both consciously and unconsciously toward some things and away from others. Politics and collective action have always been a kind of laboratory for working out models of human action more generally, and emotions are no exception. Both hearts and minds rely on the same feelings racing through our central nervous systems. Protestors have emotions, like everyone else, but theirs are thinking hearts, not bleeding hearts. Brains can feel, and hearts can think.


The reliability of single measurements of waist and hip circumference and the ratio of waist circumference to hip circumference (a widely used measure of body fat distribution) has not been fully examined. The authors analyzed measurements of waist and hip circumference, as well as self-reported weight and height, repeated 3-6 times between 1986 and 1991 among 1,851 participants in the New York University Women's Health Study. Quetelet index (weight (kg)/height (m)2) was positively correlated with waist circumference (r = 0.88), hip circumference (r = 0.89), and waist/hip ratio (r = 0.52). Mean weight was positively correlated with the within-subject variance of waist circumference (r = 0.27) and, to a lesser degree, with the within-subject variance of hip circumference (r = 0.08) and waist/hip ratio (r = 0.10). The within-subject variance of weight was positively correlated with the within-subject variance of waist (r = 0.30) and hip (r = 0.23) measurements, and less so with waist/hip ratio (r = 0.05). Intraclass correlations for waist, hip, and waist/hip ratio were 0.89, 0.81, and 0.74, respectively; adjustment for Quetelet index reduced the intraclass correlations for waist and hip measures by 33% and 48%, respectively. Such adjustment can provide a more realistic determination of the reliability associated with an exposure variable in the design and analysis of studies investigating the relation between body fat distribution and disease.


A new micro-endemic goby, Elacatinus rubrigenis, is described from Utila in the Bay Islands of the Gulf of Honduras (Western Atlantic). The new species is similar to the Greenbanded Goby, E. multifasciatus, but differs in having a prominent red stripe across the cheek, more-numerous green bars on the body, and 11 second-dorsal-fin elements (vs. equal numbers of 11 and 12). The new species, the Redcheek Goby, replaces the Greenbanded Goby on the island of Utila and has not been sighted at any other location, potentially one of the smallest ranges reported for a Caribbean reef fish. The COI barcode mtDNA sequence for the Redcheek Goby is 11.2% divergent from the original type population of the Greenbanded Goby from the U. S. Virgin Islands. However, Panamanian Greenbanded Gobies, with no red cheek stripe, show a similarly large 11.3% genetic distance from the type population (within-population sequence variation is less than 1%). Despite the prominent marking difference, there is only a 3.3% sequence difference between Redcheek Gobies and Panamanian Greenbanded Gobies. These results highlight the lack of concordance between genetic and phenotypic divergence among cryptic lineages of reef fishes. The Panamanian population has some small meristic differences from the type population and is (reluctantly) described here as the new species Elacatinus panamensis. An unexpected 4.3% sequence difference between the adjacent Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands populations indicates that the Greenbanded Goby is likely to break up into inconveniently numerous discrete genetic lineages, presumably in allopatry. These sequence differences are generally greater than those separating the Elacatinus cleaning-goby species in the Caribbean and greater than the differences found among most genera of reef fishes. The remarkably deep DNA-sequence divergence among these allopatric cryptic species and lineages raises important and difficult questions about genetic structure, speciation processes, and species definitions among some coral reef fishes.


In the safety analysis of nuclear power plants, large break loss-of-coolant accidents (LB LOCAs) continue to be one of the major issues. In this study, the latest version of the French best-estimate computer code CATHARE2 V2.5_1 Mod6.1 was used in order to predict the thermal-hydraulic phenomena in the VVER-1000 reactor during LB LOCA. This type of reactor is in operation and under construction in several countries including Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, China, and India. The paper first presents the CATHARE modeling of a VVER-1000 reactor, including the core, the vessel, the primary and secondary circuits with the pressurizer, the main circulation pumps, the horizontal steam generators, and the steam lines. The emergency core cooling system (ECCS) is presented also with hydroaccumulators and high- and low-pressure safety injection pumps. The break, located in the cold leg and close to the reactor, is represented by the RUPTURE module of CATHARE, which modelizes a double-ended guillotine type of break. In the current calculations, the bottom-up and top-down reflooding play a very important role, compared to some western pressurized water reactors, because of the ECCS injection into the downcomer and upper plenum of the VVER-1000. That is why special attention is paid to the validation of the CATHARE reflooding model, based on the REWET-II experiment devoted to VVER. In CATHARE, a special two-dimensional reflooding module has been developed, which takes into account the radial and axial conduction in the vicinity of the quench front. The assessment based on the REWET-II facility shows the ability of the code to predict the progression of two simultaneous quench fronts. Then, the paper presents the results of the LB LOCA analysis for VVER-1000 (reference case and sensitivity study), describing the blowdown, refill, and reflood phases of the accident. Problems related to the countercurrent flow limitation (CCFL) phenomena at the core outlet are also considered. The results of the calculations show reasonable prediction of the basic parameters important to the safety of the plant, such as quench front progression, fuel-cladding temperatures, break flows, pressure behavior, etc. As expected, the temperatures—despite the conservative character of the modeling—remain below the safety criteria. It should be noted that the calculated fuel wall temperatures are very sensitive to the proper selection of the reflooding parameters and CCFL and need skillful choice of the reflooding conditions.


We introduce a neural network with a recurrent attention model over a possibly large external memory. The architecture is a form of Memory Network [23] but unlike the model in that work, it is trained end-to-end, and hence requires significantly less supervision during training, making it more generally applicable in realistic settings. It can also be seen as an extension of RNNsearch [2] to the case where multiple computational steps (hops) are performed per output symbol. The flexibility of the model allows us to apply it to tasks as diverse as (synthetic) question answering [22] and to language modeling. For the former our approach is competitive with Memory Networks, but with less supervision. For the latter, on the Penn TreeBank and Text8 datasets our approach demonstrates comparable performance to RNNs and LSTMs. In both cases we show that the key concept of multiple computational hops yields improved results.


This dissertation addresses the interpretation of it-clefts in German, as well as that
of the related focus structure of Hungarian pre-verbal focus, and presents novel
answers to several research gaps. It-clefts are sentences of the form It was Sue who
climbed a mountain. One of the most debated questions is whether or not this
sentence structure comes with an exhaustivity inference of the form Nobody other
than Sue climbed a mountain, and, if it does, whether the exhaustivity is part of the
semantic structure of the it-cleft, or a pragmatic inference. This thesis presents the
results of a corpus study for German which, in addition to experiments designed
based on the naturally occurring corpus data, show that German it-clefts can be
exhaustive, but they are not exhaustive in every case. Whether or not it-clefts
receive an exhaustive reading depends largely on the context. This assumption
is confirmed by a production study, which suggests that, when producing it-clefts
in semi-spontaneous written dialog-situations, speakers prefer it-clefts in contexts
that are exhaustive and/or contrastive. In acceptability ratings, speakers do not
reject it-clefts in non-exhaustive environments. It seems that it-clefts are likely
to be used and interpreted to express some kind of exhaustivity. However, the
data do not support a semantic analysis of this exhaustivity inference. It-clefts
are not a unified class of sentences. There are (at least) two different kinds of itclefts, namely Focus-Background and Topic-Comment Clefts, which serve different
information structural purposes and differ in terms of their exhaustivity. This
thesis presents experimental results for German which show that the two cleft types
actually vary slightly regarding their exhaustivity judgments: TC-clefts seem to be
a little less frequently exhaustive than FB-clefts. This thesis further shows that,
contrary to previous theoretical assumptions, it-clefts are combinable with a large
variety of focus particles, both exclusive (only) and non-exclusive (e.g. also), which
can have an influence on the exhaustivity of the cleft structure. As for the case
of Hungarian pre-verbal focus, this dissertation shows that this sentence structure
did not show the strong exhaustivity that is frequently attributed to it. Therefore,
the data support the more recent presuppositional analysis of the exhaustivity
inference of Hungarian pre-verbal focus.


ABSTRACT The concept of risk aversion has been well-researched, and the prevailing wisdom for some time has been that most investors prefer to reduce the amount of risk required to obtain a given rate of return. This paper measures the difference between this aversion to investment risk (defined as risk tolerance) and an individual's capacity for investment risk A questionnaire measuring both tolerance and capacity is given to 167 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a variety of Finance courses. It is hypothesized that for most participants, the risk tolerance score will be lower than the risk capacity score. It is further hypothesized that male students will have higher capacity and higher tolerance than female students, and that higher risk tolerance will be found among students enrolled in advanced finance and investing classes. INTRODUCTION All investors must deal with several types of risk in making their choices. One key element of financial theory is the concept of risk aversion; in other words, most people will try to minimize the amount of risk required for a given return, or conversely, maximize the return expected for a given level of risk (Gitman & Joehnk, 2005). People differ significantly, however, in how much risk they can absorb, for reasons that are economic as well as emotional (Gollier & Pratt, 1996). These differences have broadly been categorized into risk tolerance and risk capacity. The two terms are often used interchangeably. More recently, however, Kitkes (2006) and others have stated a need to define and measure each term separately in order to obtain a more useful investor profile. Cordell (2001) proposed a tool he called RiskPACK as an instrument to separate and measure different components of an individual's attitude toward risk. Cordell defined four such components: Propensity, Attitude, Capacity, and Knowledge, thus creating the PACK acronym. Based on his further research, Cordell later suggested that risk could be usefully viewed in just two dimensions: capacity and tolerance (Cordell, 2002). Capacity for risk can be determined somewhat obj ectively, based on the individual ' s income, age, financial stability, family situation and similar quantifiable factors. Tolerance for risk is more of an attitudinal measure, and is thus more subj ective than risk capacity. Two individuals might have identical incomes, ages, etc, and therefore have identical capacity for risk. But it would not be surprising to find that one of them can tolerate more risk, despite the similarity of their situations. Risk capacity, then, is more quantitatively measurable; risk tolerance less so. This becomes more of an issue when trying to measure both these factors simultaneously (Roszkowski, Davey & Grable, 2005). MEASURING RISK TOLERANCE VS. MEASURING RISK CAPACITY Risk tolerance questionnaires have been widely used since their introduction in the mid 1980's (Droms & Strauss, 2003). However, many researchers question whether such instruments provide a good measure of what they are supposed to measure. Yook and Everett (2003) found differing and sometimes contradictory results from the same pool of investors. Furthermore, Bouchey (2004) contended that many of the questions found on risk tolerance questionnaires were actually better measures of asset allocation or investment goals as opposed to true measures of risk tolerance. Roszkowski and others pointed out as long ago as 1989 (Roszkowski & Snelbecker, 1989) and as recently as 2005 the difficulties in many of the questionnaires in current use and suggested a method for improving their effectiveness. The keys to any questionnaire's success include its validity and its reliability (Cooper & Schindler, 2006). The concept of reliability is that the better-designed the questions, the more likely results from separate administrations of the instrument will be consistent. Validity, on the other hand, refers to the questionnaire's ability to measure what it is supposed to measure. …


A mathematical model for the behavior of programs or workloads is presented and from it is extracted the miss ratio of a finite, fully associative cache (or other first-level memory) using least-recently-used replacement under those workloads. To obtain miss ratios, the function u(t, L), defined to be the number of unique lines of size L referenced before time t, is modeled. Empirical observations show that this function appears to have the form u(t, L)=(W L/sup a/t/sup b/) (d/sup log/ /sup L log t/) where W, a, b, d are constants that are related, respectively, to the working set size, locality of references to nearby addresses (spatial locality), temporal locality (locality in time not attributable to spatial locality), and interactions between spatial locality and temporal locality. The miss ratio of a finite fully associative cache can be approximated as the time derivative of u(t, L) evaluated where the function has a value equal to the size of the cache. When the miss ratios from this model are compared to measured miss ratios for a representative trace, the accuracy is high for large caches. For smaller caches, the model is close but not highly precise. >


The choice over the Portuguese case studies was based on the sample constructed for the application of the firm questionnaires, during the second year of the SOWING project, 1999. This sample was fulfilled of firms among several activity sectors: textile, manufacturing, electronics, transports and software industry, based on NACE – codes (2 – digit level). Thus, we agreed to include in a new database the remaining questionnaires and construct a sample with 113 observations. Concerning the organisational change we make a distinction of three categories of change. First we analyse changes taking place at the inter-firm level (outsourcing, subcontracting, geographic relocation), followed by changes at the organisational level (deconcentration/decentralisation, reduction of hierarchical levels, introduction of cost and profit centres). The third kind of changes analysed will be those taking place at the workplace level (job enlargement/enrichment, changing character of work, work load). The Portuguese studied companies presents a relative uniform pattern considering the variables social competencies, practical knowledge, responsibility and specialized professional qualifications.


The monitoring of metabolic compounds such as glucose is largely reported in literature. The applications of this type of analysis are mainly related to clinical purposes, e.g. in diabetes pathology, where a lot of studies are presented in literature. Recently, some authors presented studies about glucose and lactate detection in cell culture monitoring [1], [2]. A clear identification of medium compounds could be interesting for biologists and biotechnologists, since they may be identified as markers of different cell states. It can also pave the way to automated systems, as a feedback of the medium state. In the field of amperometric biosensors, a lot of techniques related to the structuration of the electrodes have been presented in the last twenty years. Especially for glucose biosensors, a lot of mediators have been employed to carry the electrons released from the redox reaction to the surface of the electrode [3], [4]. Recently, some authors presented great results in terms of sensitivity and limit detection by using nanostructured electrodes. The employment of carbon nanotubes has shown promising results, due to their ability to promote the electron transfer from the active site of the enzyme onto the surface of the electrode, because of their electrocatalytic properties. Since we observed an improvement in terms of sensitivity and detection limit by using Multi-walled Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNT) for hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) detection, we decided to modify the nanostructured electrodes with glucose oxidase (GOD), since glucose is the most interesting compound in cell culture. We dropped 40 µl (1 mg ml-1) MWCNT onto Screen Printed Electrodes (SPE) purchased from Dropsens (Spain), and after, we deposited a certain quantity of GOD (3.5 U mm-2) and we stored the electrode overnight at +4°C. The result of the detection from chronoamperometry in stirring conditions with PBS as support electrolyte is shown in Figure 1.


Chlortetracycline (CTC) contamination of aquatic systems has seriously threatened the environmental and human health throughout the world. Conventional biological treatments could not effectively treat the CTC industrial wastewater and few studies have been focused on the wastewater systematic treatment. Firstly, 40.0 wt% of clay, 30.0 wt% of dewatered sewage sludge (DSS), and 30.0 wt% of scrap iron (SI) were added to sinter the new media (cathode-anode integrated ceramic filler, CAICF). Subsequently, the nontoxic CAICF with rough surface and porous interior packed into ME reactor, severing as a pretreatment step, was effective in removing CTC residue and improving the wastewater biodegradability. Secondly, expanded granular sludge bed (EGSB) and sequencing batch reactor (SBR), serving as the secondary biological treatment, were mainly focusing on chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N) removal. The coupled ME-EGSB-SBR system removed about 98.0% of CODcr and 95.0% of NH3-N and the final effluent met the national discharged standard (C standard of CJ 343-2010, China). Therefore, the CTC industrial wastewater could be effectively treated by the coupled ME-EGSB-SBR system, which has significant implications for a cost-efficient system in CTC industrial systematic treatment and solid wastes (DSS and SI) treatment.


We analyze skip-gram with negative-sampling (SGNS), a word embedding method introduced by Mikolov et al., and show that it is implicitly factorizing a word-context matrix, whose cells are the pointwise mutual information (PMI) of the respective word and context pairs, shifted by a global constant. We find that another embedding method, NCE, is implicitly factorizing a similar matrix, where each cell is the (shifted) log conditional probability of a word given its context. We show that using a sparse Shifted Positive PMI word-context matrix to represent words improves results on two word similarity tasks and one of two analogy tasks. When dense low-dimensional vectors are preferred, exact factorization with SVD can achieve solutions that are at least as good as SGNS's solutions for word similarity tasks. On analogy questions SGNS remains superior to SVD. We conjecture that this stems from the weighted nature of SGNS's factorization.


B cells are famous for rearranging their antibody genes. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this tinkering continues even after the cells leave their birthplace in the bone marrow, Wang et al. reveal on page 3079.

Figure 1

B cells (brown) undergo peripheral receptor editing.

Antibody genes typically undergo several rounds of revision. The gene segments first reshuffle to produce uniquely shaped antibodies. Some B cell genes undergo a further tweak, known as receptor editing, to revamp antibody genes that might lead to attacks on self antigens. The timing of receptor editing is controversial. Most researchers assume it occurs while B cells are maturing in the bone marrow. However, some findings suggest that B cells continue the process even after they relocate to the lymph nodes and spleen.

Wang et al. chanced across fresh evidence while studying the origin of a lymphatic cancer. Whenever it happens, receptor editing involves breaking the DNA and then healing it through a process called non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ). Failure of NHEJ in other situations can lead to cancer-causing chromosome instability, so the researchers wanted to test whether disrupting this type of repair promotes lymphatic tumors.

They created a mouse line in which a key NHEJ gene malfunctions in B cells that have exited the bone marrow. Sure enough, B cell–derived tumors sprouted in the mice. To the researchers' surprise, the cells that gave rise to the tumors had performed not only the initial reshuffling, but also receptor editing, thus supporting the hypothesis that at least some receptor editing occurs outside the bone marrow. The caveat, the scientists say, is that the tumor cells might not duplicate what happens in normal B cells. The benefits of late revisions aren't clear, but they might allow the immune system to further expand its repertoire of antibodies.


Valproic acid (VPA) induces haemorrhagic liposis of the cervical muscles in the chicken embryo model (CEM). Vitamin E and resveratrol (RV) exhibit prominent anti‐oxidative and glutathione (GSH)‐protecting effects. In the present study we hypothesized that vitamin E and RV would ameliorate VPA induced haemorrhagic liposis in chick embryos. To this end, 120 Day 0 fertilized eggs were divided into 10 groups (n = 12 in each). The effects of different combinations of VPA (60 mmol/L), RV (0.2 and 2.0 mmol/L) and vitamin E (0.2 and 2.0 mmol/L) applied to Hamburger and Hamilton (HH) Stage 10 (Day 1.5) embryos were tested in the CEM using established methods. Both RV and vitamin E (both at 2.0 mmol/L) effectively rescued neural tube defects in the early stage CEM and inhibited the malformation rate compared with that in the control group (8.4% and 5.0% vs 36.5 ± 3.0%, respectively; P < 0.05) and suppressed serum homocysteine and S‐adenosylhomocysteine concentrations, downregulated cervical muscular carnitine, triglycerides, H2O2, malondialdehyde, interleukin‐6 and ACC expression (P < 0.05 for all) and upregulated CPT1 expression and GSH (P < 0.05 for both). The haemorrhagic liposis of cervical muscles can be alleviated by RV and vitamin E. It appears that the main mechanism of action of RV and vitamin E in rescuing VPA‐induced teratogenicity is through the suppression of reactive oxygen species and upregulation of GSH.


The similarity search in theoretical mass spectra generated from protein sequence databases is a widely accepted approach for identification of peptides from query mass spectra produced by shotgun proteomics. Growing protein sequence databases and noisy query spectra demand database indexing techniques and better similarity measures for the comparison of theoretical spectra against query spectra. We employ a modification of previously proposed parameterized Hausdorff distance for comparisons of mass spectra. The new distance outperforms the original distance, the angle distance and state-of-the-art peptide identification tools OMSSA and X!Tandem in the number of identified peptides even though the q-value is only 0.001. When a precursor mass filter is used as a database indexing technique, our method outperforms OMSSA in the speed of search. When variable modifications are not searched, the search time is similar to X!Tandem. We show that the precursor mass filter is an efficient database indexing technique for high-accuracy data even though many variable modifications are being searched. We demonstrate that the number of identified peptides is bigger when variable modifications are searched separately by more search runs of a peptide identification engine. Otherwise, the false discovery rates are affected by mixing unmodified and modified spectra together resulting in a lower number of identified peptides. Our method is implemented in the freely available application SimTandem which can be used in the framework TOPP based on OpenMS.


Dytiscid beetles comprise a large element within the Canadian fauna yet their identification is difficult for the nonspecialist and the distribution and habitats of the species are only sketchily known. The initial and continued aims are to make the predaceous water beetle fauna of Canada accessible to as wide an audience as possible by summarizing available knowledge of the fauna, documenting the species present and their distribution and habitats, providing means for the identification of the taxa, and indicating where knowledge is especially lacking and where interesting and possibly productive research avenues lie. To achieve these aims it has been necessary to revise several genera, review the systematic position of many taxa and to seek out immature stages of various taxa. Much new information, including descriptions of new taxa, is included in this book. The aim of the work being to aid and encourage others to look at water beetles with increased interest and appreciation and to stimulate research on these poorly understood insects. The Canadian fauna cannot be understood without reference to the overall Nearctic fauna and therefore the scope gradually enlarged over time to include most of the North American fauna. This work treats all Nearctic genera and most species. Detailed treatment is provided for all species known from Canada. Non-Canadian species are treated as fully in some genera, in others these species are included only in keys. Only within genera where some species are too poorly known to allow their definition, are all species not included. The areas with the most incomplete coverage are both the Gulf States and southwestern United States, namely western Texas to southern California. For the rest of the continent, it is hoped that this work will provide a useful identification guide.


GPCR Close-Up Structures of G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs) determined in the past few years, have provided insight into the function of this important family of membrane proteins. Liu et al. (p. 232) used a protein-engineering strategy to produce a stabilized version of the human A2Aadenosine receptor (A2AAR). The high-resolution structure reveals the position of about 60 internal waters, which suggests an almost continuous channel in the GPCR and can explain the allosteric effects of Na+ on ligand binding and how cholesterol may contribute to GPCR stabilization. A protein-engineering strategy yields a closer look at the receptor-bound water, sodium, and lipid molecules. Pharmacological responses of G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs) can be fine-tuned by allosteric modulators. Structural studies of such effects have been limited due to the medium resolution of GPCR structures. We reengineered the human A2A adenosine receptor by replacing its third intracellular loop with apocytochrome b562RIL and solved the structure at 1.8 angstrom resolution. The high-resolution structure allowed us to identify 57 ordered water molecules inside the receptor comprising three major clusters. The central cluster harbors a putative sodium ion bound to the highly conserved aspartate residue Asp2.50. Additionally, two cholesterols stabilize the conformation of helix VI, and one of 23 ordered lipids intercalates inside the ligand-binding pocket. These high-resolution details shed light on the potential role of structured water molecules, sodium ions, and lipids/cholesterol in GPCR stabilization and function.


Genes in an organism's DNA (genome) have embedded in them information about proteins, which are the molecules that do most of a cell's work. A typical bacterial genome contains on the order of 5,000 genes. Mammalian genomes can contain tens of thousands of genes. For each genome sequenced, the challenge is to identify protein components (proteome) being actively used for a given set of conditions. Fundamentally, sequence alignment is a sequence matching problem focused on unlocking protein information embedded in the genetic code, making it possible to assemble a "tree of life" by comparing new sequences against all sequences from known organisms. But, the memory footprint of sequence data is growing more rapidly than per-node core memory. Despite years of research and development, high-performance sequence alignment applications either do not scale well, cannot accommodate very large databases in core, or require special hardware. We have developed a high-performance sequence alignment application, ScalaBLAST, which accommodates very large databases and which scales linearly to as many as thousands of processors on both distributed memory and shared memory architectures, representing a substantial improvement over the current state-of-the-art in high-performance sequence alignment with scaling and portability. ScalaBLAST relies on a collection of techniques - distributing the target database over available memory, multilevel parallelism to exploit concurrency, parallel I/O, and latency hiding through data prefetching - to achieve high-performance and scalability. This demonstrated approach of database sharing combined with effective task scheduling should have broad ranging applications to other informatics-driven sciences


Abstract In outdoor activities, it seems reasonable that the longer children spend in spontaneous physical activity (PA), the higher the probability of being active. Indeed, the time spent outdoor has been identified as a variable consistently associated with the children's PA. Outdoor playing, such as the organized sports practice, appears associated with healthier lifestyle standards. All the recommendations mention the importance of increasing daily PA practice in children and teenagers, but few studies highlight the relationship between outdoor play and the recommended PA levels. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between the frequency of outdoor play, the frequency of the organized sports practice, and the compliance of the recommendations for PA practice in children in the inner city area of Porto. The sample of this study is composed of 422 individuals (mean age of 11.6 years). Two hundred and twenty-five of them were girls and 197 were boys from the sixth grade (elementary schools located in the inner city area of Porto). PA was objectively evaluated using accelerometers. Participants reported frequency of participation in different PA contexts, such as sports practice and outdoor play. The results show a predictor effect of participating in sports three or more times per week on compliance of PA guidelines. In conclusion, organized sports practice seems more effective than outdoor play to reach the recommended levels of PA in children.


The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (2000) emphasizes that all actions which pertains to children should be in their best interest and this includes the welfare of learners in schools. This study sought to explore the perception of measures to reduce the push factors of juvenile crime in two South African schools. A Social Learning Theory was employed as the theoretical lens for this study and a qualitative case study approach, which is explorative and descriptive in nature, was also used. An interview schedule was used to collect data focusing on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with participants as well as key informants. Convenience sampling, which is a nonprobability type of sampling that entails the selection of samples based on their convenience and accessibility was used given the sensitive aspect of this particular study, especially on the identification of research participants. A sample of seven focus groups consisting of seven participants was drawn from the entire population of two selected schools in order to have a minimum of 49 representatives from each school. Audio recordings and transcribed verbatim were analyzed by the researcher as data collection technique. A thematic analysis, which looks across all data to identify common issues and recurring themes, was used. This research sought to be ethically considerate, adhering to codes such as confidentiality, informed consent, voluntary participation and others. Findings indicate that five crimes (substance use, stealing, bullying, physical fights and gangster activity) identified as recurring themes during the general preliminary investigation of juvenile crimes were also identified as common crimes at the two selected schools. Another observation in this study was that school juvenile offenders are generally cognisant of push factors of juvenile crime in schools, but are less informed when it comes to assimilating push factors with measures to reduce juvenile crimes. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/


The role of several factors that have been suggested as being of etiologic importance in renovascular fibromuscular dysplasia was examined in a case-control study of 33 patients with angiographically demonstrated fibromuscular dysplasia and 61 renal transplant donor control subjects with normal renal arteries. The factors studied included use of oral contraceptive agents or markers of sex hormone dysfunction, mechanical stress to the renal artery wall, human lymphocytic antigen (HLA) type, cigarette smoking, history of hypertension for more than 5 years, and family history of cardiovascular disease. The risk of fibromuscular dysplasia was significantly (p = 0.003) increased (odds ratio = 4.1, 95% confidence interval = 1.5-10.9) among cigarette smokers. A significant (p less than 0.001) dose-response relation was noted between cigarette use and the risk of fibromuscular dysplasia developing (odds ratio = 8.6 for those who had smoked more than 10 pack-years). Personal history of hypertension more than 5 years was also associated (odds ratio = 5.0, 95% confidence interval = 1.1-22.8) with a significantly (p = 0.036) increased risk for the development of fibromuscular dysplasia. HLA-DRw6 antigen was more common in the 33 fibromuscular dysplasia patients than in the 61 renal transplant donor control subjects (odds ratio = 3.00, p = 0.067) or a second group of 934 ambulatory control subjects (odds ratio = 2.51, p = 0.031). Adjustment for cigarette smoking increased the odds ratio to 5.0 (95% confidence interval = 1.3-19.6). There was a positive though not statistically significant (odds ratio = 1.7, p = 0.175) association noted between family history of cardiovascular disease and fibromuscular dysplasia.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


Improving abiotic stress resistance in cauliflower (Brassica oleracea var. botrytis L.) by mutagenesis and Agrobacterium mediated transformation. by Ehab Mohamed Rabei Metwali Gahrieb Abiotic environmental stress such as drought, salinity and low temperature are common conditions that adversely affect plant growth and crop production. Breeding for crop resistance to abiotic stress is difficult due to its multigenic nature. An alternative approach is through DNA mutation and DNA transfer. These approaches were employed and tested in this research and comparison between them was carried out. NEU and NMU induced mutant lines and control plants were sub-cultured many times on maintenance medium and stored at 5 °c for 2 years and then tested for salt and hydroxyproline resistance as in-vitro and in-vivo plants and proline content was measured. Non-acclimated and acclimated in-vivo plants were also assessed for resistance to freezing. Control plants had little or no N aCI or hydroxyproline resistance whilst selected plants showed varying degrees of resistance. In-vitro and in-vivo responses of selected lines were correlated. Leaf proline content was increased markedly in the mutant lines and the greatest proline contents occurred following NaCI stress with the most respondent line having 100 fold levels compared to the controls. Both non-acclimated and acclimated selected lines showed improved frost resistance over controls. The results clearly demonstrated that NaCI, frost and hydroxyproline resistance were stable traits over repeated in-vitro subcultures and prolonged low temperature storage. A complete range of mutants with single, double or triple resistance traits were produced. The level of resistance however was not necessarily correlated with the level of proline and some lines showed resistance without elevated proline. It is concluded that elevated proline is not essential for improved resistance to abiotic stress in cauliflower, but where it does occur it does improve resistance. Integration of APX and SOD stress genes into cauliflower (Brassica oleracea var. botrytis L.) plants was achieved by using Agrobacterium tumefaciens mediated transformation method. The procedure utilized polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of insert DNA directly after isolation of individual colonies without the necessity of separate procedures for DNA isolation and purification. Preliminary selection of transgenic plants was performed on different combinations of kanamycin, gentamycin and tetracycline containing medium. Integration of the introduced stress gene (APX and SOD) in the plants was confirmed by using ~-glucuronidase gene (GUS) and leaf disc assays as a gene fusion and diagnostic marker, respectively. The stable integration of the APX and SOD gene at 478 bp was detected by using polymerase chain reaction (peR) of the putative transgenic plants. Analysis of APX and SOD gene expression under salt treatment showed that putative transgenic cauliflower survived the salinity stress comparing with the control plants. List of


Montgomery modular multiplication is one of the fundamental operations used in cryptographic algorithms, such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems. At CHES 1999, Tenca and Koç proposed the Multiple-Word Radix-2 Montgomery Multiplication (MWR2MM) algorithm and introduced a now-classic architecture for implementing Montgomery multiplication in hardware. With parameters optimized for minimum latency, this architecture performs a single Montgomery multiplication in approximately 2n clock cycles, where n is the size of operands in bits. In this paper, we propose two new hardware architectures that are able to perform the same operation in approximately n clock cycles with almost the same clock period. These two architectures are based on precomputing partial results using two possible assumptions regarding the most significant bit of the previous word. These two architectures outperform the original architecture of Tenca and Koç in terms of the product latency times area by 23 and 50 percent, respectively, for several most common operand sizes used in cryptography. The architecture in radix-2 can be extended to the case of radix-4, while preserving a factor of two speedup over the corresponding radix-4 design by Tenca, Todorov, and Koç from CHES 2001. Our optimization has been verified by modeling it using Verilog-HDL, implementing it on Xilinx Virtex-II 6000 FPGA, and experimentally testing it using SRC-6 reconfigurable computer.


Abstract The Triassic Sherwood Sandstone Group sediments of the East Irish Sea Basin are over 4000 ft thick and comprise medium- to coarse-grained sandstones and rare thin mudstones. Facies models developed during production drilling on the South Morecambe Field show that deposition occurred in a braided fluvial setting with minor aeolian episodes. The major facies associations present are: (A) major channel fill; (B) ephemeral channel fill; (C) non-channelized sheetflood deposits; (D) and (E) non-reservoir fines (abandonment and playa respectively); (F) aeolian dune and sand-sheet. Volumetrically, the major channel (A) and sheetflood (C) facies dominate, and the alternation of these facies associations is correlatable across the field. The aeolian sandstones form units varying in thickness from a few grain diameters up to 3 m thick. The sand-sheet and dune deposits can be correlated over considerable distances and show pressure communication on RFT logs. Although the aeolian sandstones comprise only 5–10% of the reservoir they have very high porosities and permeabilities (up to 30% and 10 darcies) and make disproportionate contributions to flow into the wellbore. The depositional criteria used to differentiate between aeolian and fluvial deposition in the South Morecambe Field are pinstripe lamination, good sorting and lack of rounded clay clasts, but these criteria are not definitive. As a result of the dissolution of an early diagenetic cement, aeolian sandstones have very high porosities compared to fluvial sandstones. This high porosity is reflected in high sonic transit times and allows aeolian sandstones to be identified tentatively in uncored wells by use of sonic logs.


Efficient room-temperature operation of a diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser is demonstrated for the quasi-three-level transition at 946 nm. Continuous-wave output powers of more than 800 mW cw in single-frequency operation are generated by application of a composite-cavity nonplanar ring laser. High amplitude and frequency stability of the emitted radiation is observed.


Objectives: Various definitions for distal intestinal obstruction syndrome (DIOS), meconium ileus equivalent, and constipation in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) are used. However, an unequivocal definition for DIOS, meconium ileus equivalent, and constipation is preferred. The aims of this study were, therefore, to seek consensus on the definitions for DIOS and constipation in patients with CF and to determine the incidence, characteristics, and treatment of DIOS in a cohort of paediatric patients with CF. Methods: During the 2005 European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition meeting in Porto a group of paediatric gastroenterologists discussed the definition of DIOS and constipation in CF. Subsequently, all patients younger than or equal to 18 years with complete DIOS according to the definition agreed upon and diagnosed during the years 2001 to 2005 in 8 CF centres were studied. Results: Distal intestinal obstruction syndrome was defined as an acute complete or incomplete faecal obstruction in the ileocaecum, whereas constipation was defined as gradual faecal impaction of the total colon. Fifty-one episodes of DIOS in 39 patients were recorded, giving an overall incidence of 6.2 (95% confidence interval, 4.4–7.9) episodes per 1000 patient-years. Of the 39 patients with DIOS, 20% experienced a relapse, 92% were pancreatic insufficient, 44% had a history of meconium ileus at birth, and 82% had a severe genotype. Conservative treatment was effective in 49 of 51 DIOS episodes (96%). Conclusions: The European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition CF Working Group definitions of DIOS and constipation in CF are specific and make a clear distinction between these 2 entities. The incidence of DIOS in the present study was considerably higher than reported previously.


Implied volatility is a useful bit of information for futures and options hedgers and speculators. However, extraction of implied volatility from Black-Scholes (BS) option pricing model requires a numeric search. Since 1988, there have been numerous simplifying modifications to the BS formula proposed and presented in the applied economics and finance literature to allow approximation of implied volatility directly. This study identifies and tests these simplification methods for accuracy for call only and put-call average elicitation of an implied volatility estimate. Results show that accuracy varies by method and whether call only or put-call average approaches are applied.


In February and March of 1978, filter samplers mounted on an aircraft were used to collect the aerosol fraction of the eruption clouds from three active Guatemalan volcanoes (Fuego, Pacaya, and Santiaguito). The samples were collected on Teflon (Fluoropore) filters with a nominal pore diameter of 0.5μm. The mass of air sampled by the filters ranged from 0.15 to 6.6 kg. The particulate material collected consisted of fragments of angular silicate ash and droplets of what is interpreted as dilute H2SO4 and HCl. After collection of the samples, each filter was rinsed with 60 ml of distilled-deionized water. Splits of each extract were centrifuged to remove particles greater than or equal to 0.1 μm in diameter, acidified, and analyzed for B, Ba, Be, Ca, Cd, Co, Cu, Fe, Li, Mg, Mn, Mo, Na, Pb, Si, Sr, V, and Zn by inductively coupled plasma—optical emission spectroscopy. Separate splits were analyzed for F and Cl by specific-ion-electrode methods and for U by a fission track technique. The elements dissolved in the aqueous extracts represent components of water-soluble material either formed directly in the eruption cloud or derived from interaction of ash particles and aerosol components of the plume. Calculations of enrichment factors, based upon concentration ratios, showed the elements most enriched in the extracts relative to bulk ash composition were Cd, Cu, V, F, Cl, Zn, and Pb. These elements represent a subset (with the addition of Cl and F) of elements previously reported enriched in atmospheric aerosols in remote regions as well as in volcanic areas. This suggests that some of the enriched elements were widely dispersed as volatile halides emitted from a volcanic source.


We introduce the effect of cohabitation between generations to a previous model on the slowdown of the Neolithic transition in Europe. This effect consists on the fact that human beings do not leave their children alone when they migrate, but on the contrary they cohabit until their children reach adulthood. We also use archaeological data to estimate the variation of the Mesolithic population density with distance, and use this information to predict the slowdown of the Neolithic front speed. The new equation leads to a substantial correction, up to 37%, relative to previous results. The new model is able to provide a satisfactory explanation not only to the relative speed but also to the absolute speed of the Neolithic front obtained from archaeological data.


Learning structured matrices in high dimensions: Low rank estimation and structured graphical models Karthik Mohan Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Maryam Fazel Electrical Engineering The topic of learning matrix structures in the high-dimensional statistical setting has received a lot of attention in machine learning, statistics and signal processing literature. High dimensional setting refers to problems that have more parameters to estimate than samples or measurements. Examples of problems that fall in this area include matrix factorization, matrix rank minimization, and graphical model estimation. These problems arise in many applications including collaborative filtering, system identification, and learning gene-regulatory networks. The focus of this thesis is on the algorithmic and theoretical aspects of learning matrix structures in the high dimensional setting with emphasis on the two problems of matrix rank minimization and graphical model estimation. We first consider the problem of reconstructing a low-rank matrix given a few linear measurements. This problem is known to be NP-hard. We propose a family of iterative reweighted algorithms that reconstruct the low-rank matrix efficiently and accurately. We also give recovery guarantees for these algorithms under suitable assumptions on the measurement maps. Finally, we also apply our algorithms to the problems of system identification and matrix completion. Our extensive numerical experiments illustrate that our algorithms perform better than state of the art algorithms on both synthetic and real data when the rank of the true underlying matrix is unknown. We next consider the problem of learning structured Gaussian graphical models in the high dimensional setting. This problem has a lot of applications ranging from biological modeling to social networks. While existing literature focuses on learning Gaussian graphical models using a simple sparsity regularizer (e.g. the graphical lasso formulation), applications often present prior knowledge that require more structured regularizers. Examples of networks that occur in applications include scale-free networks (where a few nodes have a high degree), community networks (where the connections occur in small dense communities), etc. We propose the structured graphical lasso formulation, a framework that generalizes graphical lasso to learning graphical models with arbitrary user-specified structures. We continue by considering a special case of the structured graphical lasso that pertains to learning graphical model with a few hub nodes. We propose an ADMM algorithm to solve this formulation. Empirical studies indicate the superiority of hub graphical lasso over graphical lasso and other traditional methods in learning graphs with few hubs. When the number of hubs to be learned is O(1), hub graphical lasso requires far fewer samples than graphical lasso to learn the right graphical model. We move on to study the problem of estimating multiple Gaussian graphical models where information is shared between the graphical models. We propose different formulations that capture different ways in which information is shared between the networks. Our empirical results indicate that our approach does better than existing approaches in estimating gene-regulatory networks with shared information. We switch gears by focusing on methods to reduce computational time for our models. We note that the proposed ADMM algorithm for hub graphical lasso and other formulations, though effective, involves a singular value decomposition in each iteration whose computational cost can be prohibitive for large problem sizes. To alleviate the computational bottle neck, we first provide algorithm independent approaches (based on screening rules) to speed up our proposed convex formulations. These screening rules are used to break down the problem into independent sub-problems (where possible), yielding significant speed-ups in computation. Typical algorithms for learning sparse graphical models require a Cholesky computation to check for positive definiteness of the iterates. We propose a block-coordinate descent algorithm with step-size selection rules that avoid expensive Cholesky checks and only rely on matrix vector multiplies in each iteration. Our empirical results show significant speed ups over the SVD based ADMM algorithm.


Working with a group of investigators from the European Respiratory Society (ERS)/European Cystic Fibrosis Society (ECFS) task force for the "Provision of care in adults with cystic fibrosis (CF)" [1], we have previously modelled future trends in CF demography in European countries by calculating flows of patients entering and exiting CF cohorts in each country [2]. In that report, we used individual country data contained in the ECFS Patient Registry and were able to calculate demographic forecasts for several European Countries, including France [2]. These forecasts, which were based on the assumption that major demographic trends remained stable over time, suggested that a major increase in the number of CF adults was expected in western European countries by 2025 [1, 2]. In France, our forecast predicted an increase by 45.5% in the CF population between 2010 and 2025, corresponding to an increase by 18.4% in the paediatric population and an increase by 75.7% in the adult population [2]. Data confirm that a major increase in the adult cystic fibrosis population is expected within 10 years in France http://ow.ly/8LhD30cKvO7


Abstract. Wild foods found in and around farms, fallows and forests supplement foods and incomes of rural households and have co-evolved with other wild biodiversity. The present study was carried out using a structured questionnaire during February and March 2013 in two villages of Valappur Nadu in the Kolli Hills, Tamil Nadu, southern India, lying between 900 and 1100 m above mean sea level, covering a total sample of 40 tribal households. The diversity of wild food species across different food groups – greens, fruits, mushrooms, roots, tubers, birds, bats, rats and their seasonal availability and household consumption pattern were recorded. Greens are available predominantly during the rainy season and fruits mostly during the dry season. Women are mostly involved in foraging greens, mushrooms, vegetables, fruits, while men contribute to the food basket through trapping, fishing and hunting, and children are involved in both. Some of the surveyed households reported that they strongly believe that wild foods are nutritious and contribute to overall health and well-being apart from supplementing food security. The article concludes by viewing wild foods through the lens of food security in its four dimensions – access, availability, absorption and stability – and briefly touches upon some sociological aspects related to wild foods.


In this work, a test room was built in Baghdad city, with selective dimensions, while the solar chimneys (SC) where designed with aspect ratio (ar) bigger than 12 and setup to the oriented wall to the south. Collector of SC consist of paraffin wax as a phase change material (PCM) and supported by copper foam matrix (CFM), to enhance the combined of thermal energy storage material box (TESMB). Double transparent acrylic sheets covered the collector from outside. TESB supported by array of evacuated tubular collector with thermosyphon to sincere heat storage in the TESB. Results of experimental work that achieved in 25 January and 26 February refer to effectiveness using TESM in closed loop SC in day time and its effect cover the night time also. The heating system of test room is arrived to the biggest room temperature after sun set, at that moment the difference between indoor and outdoor approximately 15 o C, and room temperature value still bigger after five hours from sun- set with a different in temperature by approximately 8 o C. Numerical solution done by employing CFD with solution the PDE's that present continuity, momentum, energy equations, by using the FVM with algebraic forms of turbulent viscosity and diffusion coefficient and employing turbulent standard model. The comparison between numerical and experimental results indicated that the heat transfer inside test room is dominate by condition, also results shows acceptable convergence in velocity and temperature profile, while the experimental results for air flow inside SC gap appears the turbulent behavior in most duration time.


Abstract Objective: We have previously described placental oxygenation capacity as an index of placental function. The aim of this study was to utilize this test to evaluate placental gas exchange capacity in pre-eclampsia and fetal growth restriction (FGR). Study design: Two nested case-control studies were conducted between: (i) pre-eclamptic appropriate-for-gestational-age fetus (AGA) and non-pre-eclamptic AGA; and (ii) pre-eclamptic FGR and non-pre-eclamptic FGR based on gestational age match. Umbilical A-V gas differences were compared between groups. Results: Pre-eclamptic AGA was associated with smaller A-V pO2 and A-V pCO2 differences compared to non-pre-eclampsia (A-V pO2, 7.1±3.8 mm Hg vs. 11.3±5.9 mm Hg, P=0.001; A-V pCO2, 7.8±5.7 mm Hg vs. 10.7± 5.9 mm Hg, P=0.01). Pre-eclamptic FGR was associated with smaller A-V pO2 and A-V pCO2 differences compared to non-pre-eclampsia (A-V pO2, 6.6±3.1 mm Hg vs. 10.8±8.1 mm Hg, P<0.001; 6.7±4.5 mm Hg vs. 10.9±10.3 mm Hg, P=0.044). Pre-eclamptic FGR also had significantly lower venous pO2 but not arterial pO2 (Venous pO2, 20.3±6.3 mm Hg vs. 25.4±11.9 mm Hg, P=0.003). Conclusion: Pre-eclampsia decreases the placental oxygenation capacity as measured by the umbilical arterial-venous oxygen difference.


s and indexing: Indexed in ABI/INFORM Database (ProQuest), ABI/INFORM Global (ProQuest), Academic OneFile (GALE Cengage), ArticleFirst (OCLC), Business Source Complete (EBSCO Publishing), Business Source Corporate (EBSCO Publishing), Current


In the final days before the German federal elections, some observers are asking whether a change in government would portend a shift in the country's consistently strong support of the euro. Even if a more eurosceptic government is elected to office, this commentary finds it highly unlikely that the German public would radically change its stance.


This is a companion textbook for an introductory course in physics. It aims to link the theories and models that students learn in class with practical problem-solving techniques. In other words, it should address the common complaint that 'I understand the concepts but I can't do the homework or tests'. The fundamentals of introductory physics courses are addressed in simple and concise terms, with emphasis on how the fundamental concepts and equations should be used to solve physics problems.


PurposeThis paper aims to examine the significance and challenges of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives organized by multi-stakeholders and to clarify the function of CSR initiatives: What is the significance of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs)? What conditions are required for CSR initiatives to work satisfactorily? How do CSR standards function effectively in companies?Design/methodology/approachThe significance and challenges of multi-stakeholder CSR initiatives are clarified theoretically, based on previous literature from relevant research fields.FindingsMSIs are beyond the "dichotomy" of two traditional approaches to CSR, namely, voluntary vs mandatory. However MSIs do not automatically ensure good performance. We should discuss not only the legitimacy of MSIs but external monitoring and evaluation systems for responsible companies in the market, as well as organizational efforts to incorporate CSR standards into managerial processes.Social implicationsThis paper shows that an MSI is an important platform for establishing and promoting a CSR standard, and further that market maturity and stakeholder engagement are required to make CSR work.Originality/valueThe study explains that ceremonial compliance with CSR standards may be inevitable even where the legitimacy of an MSI is secured, and that we should recognize that monitoring and sanction systems in the market and an organizational approach to the incorporation of CSR in management practices are required.


Adrenal myelolipoma is a rare, endocrinologically inactive neoplasm. It was initially described by Giercke in 1905, and 24 years later, Oberling coined the term 'myelolipoma'[1]. Duckman and Freedman in 1957 presented the first symptomatic case treated surgically, and De Boils & De May reported the first case of radiologically diagnosed incidentaloma[2]. In the past, these lesions used to be primarily detected at autopsy. Recently, with widespread use of noninvasive imaging modalities such as ultrasonography, computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, incidental detection is more common, affecting men and women equally[3]. Accounting for 3–5% of all primary tumors of the adrenals, the true incidence of these tumors is not known, although it is thought to be 0.08%–0.4%, with increased incidence noted in the later decades of life[4].


This paper presents a structured power and energy-flow-based qualitative modelling approach that is applicable to a variety of system types including electrical and fluid flow. The modelling is split into two parts. Power flow is a global phenomenon and is therefore naturally represented and analysed by a network comprised of the relevant structural elements from the components of a system. The power flow analysis is a platform for higher-level behaviour prediction of energy related aspects using local component behaviour models to capture a state-based representation with a global time. The primary application is Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and a form of exaggeration reasoning is used, combined with an order of magnitude representation to derive the worst case failure modes. The novel aspects of the work are an order of magnitude(OM) qualitative network analyser to represent any power domain and topology, including multiple power sources, a feature that was not required for earlier specialised electrical versions of the approach. Secondly, the representation of generalised energy related behaviour as state-based local models is presented as a modelling strategy that can be more vivid and intuitive for a range of topologically complex applications than qualitative equation-based representations. The two-level modelling strategy allows the broad system behaviour coverage of qualitative simulation to be exploited for the FMEA task, while limiting the difficulties of qualitative ambiguity explanation that can arise from abstracted numerical models. We have used the method to support an automated FMEA system with examples of an aircraft fuel system and domestic a heating system discussed in this paper.


Inspired by the hierarchical structure of nacre and the robust adhesive ability of mussel threads, graphene oxide–polydopamine (GO–PDA) nanocomposites are designed and synthesized to achieve enhanced mechanical properties and to provide additional functionalities. Here we report a joint experimental/computational investigation of GO–PDA nanocomposites, proposing a probable chemical reduction mechanism of PDA to convert GO to reduced GO (rGO), which helps increase the electrical conductivity. The most stable chemical connection between PDA and GO is also proposed. Our artificial nacre-like GO–PDA nanocomposites are shown to have higher tensile strength and toughness compared to natural nacre. The pulling tests conducted by molecular dynamics simulations, which are supported by our experiments, reveal that the enhanced mechanical strength of GO–PDA nanocomposites mainly originates from the additional non-covalent interactions provided by PDA. The humidity-driven shrinking mechanism of GO–PDA nanocomposites due to non-uniform stresses on the GO–PDA sheets is also discovered in our simulations and supported by our experiments. The findings in this work can help improve and tune the properties of GO–PDA nanocomposites and might also apply to other 2D materials.


Context: Glucocorticoids have pleiotropic metabolic functions, and acute glucocorticoid excess affects fatty acid metabolism, increasing systemic lipolysis. Whether glucocorticoids exert adipose tissue depot-specific effects remains unclear. Objective: To provide an in vivo assessment of femoral and abdominal adipose tissue responses to acute glucocorticoid administration. Design and Outcome Measures: Nine healthy male volunteers were studied on two occasions, after a hydrocortisone infusion (0.2 mg/kg/min for 14 hours) and a saline infusion, respectively, given in randomized double-blind order. The subjects were studied in the fasting state and after a 75-g glucose drink with an in vivo assessment of femoral adipose tissue blood flow (ATBF) using radioactive xenon washout and of lipolysis and glucose uptake using the arteriovenous difference technique. In a separate study (same infusion design), eight additional healthy male subjects underwent assessment of fasting abdominal ATBF and lipolysis only. Lipolysis was assessed as the net release of nonesterified fatty acids (NEFAs) from femoral and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue. Results: Acute hypercortisolemia significantly increased basal and postprandial ATBF in femoral adipose tissue, but the femoral net NEFA release did not change. In abdominal adipose tissue, hypercortisolemia induced substantial increases in basal ATBF and NEFA release. Conclusions: Acute hypercortisolemia induces differential lipolysis and ATBF responses in abdominal and femoral adipose tissue, suggesting depot-specific glucocorticoid effects. Abdominal, but not femoral, adipose tissue contributes to the hypercortisolemia-induced systemic NEFA increase, with likely contributions from other adipose tissue sources and intravascular triglyceride hydrolysis.


DairyNZ funded a two-year study on dairy farm ownership and management structures (June 2005 to May 2007), followed by a study on dairy farm succession in 2007/08. Farm business structures affect wealth creation and distribution, and determine who the dairy industry participants are and will be, and the roles they will have. Succession determines the next generation of farm owners. The research included literature reviews, farmer focus groups, a survey, case studies and industry interviews. This paper will present an overview of the key issues identified and discuss what these might mean for the future.


David Cheal (ed.), Aging and Demographic Change in Canadian Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 288pp. Paper. £15. ISBN 0- 8020-8505-9. Jamie Swift, Jacqueline M. Davies, Robert G. Clarke and Michael Czerny SJ, Getting Started on Social Analysis in Canada, 4th edn (Toronto: Between The Lines, 2003, 230pp. Paper. $24.95. ISBN 1-8963-5777-6. The 'greying' of the population of the developed world is one of the key trends that will affect society during the next half-century. The implications of a steadily aging society are profound and wide-ranging, with likely impacts on most aspects of life - from the rising costs of medical services to reduced labour force participation and the effects upon social cohesion of worsening intergenerational inequalities. Canada will not escape this 'demographic aging' process. By 2040 nearly 23 per cent (10 million) of Canadians will be over 65 years of age, compared with around 13 per cent (4 million) today. Given the litany of concerns associated with this process, it is not surprising that it was selected as a topic for the Project on Trends sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Policy Research Initiative. One outcome of this Trends Project is an excellent collection of essays edited by David Cheal, Professor of Sociology at the University of Winnipeg. Aging and Demographic Change in Canadian Context consists of seven essays, including a scene-setting introduction by the editor. Each essay addresses a different aspect of demographic aging and its impacts upon society, and each raises some powerful questions regarding the policies required to manage the impacts and the accompanying research questions that need to be addressed. Susan A. McDaniel considers issues relating to linkages between generations. These include the changing nature of the family, income/debt differentials across generations, and the growing dependence of the elderly on a diminishing proportion of the population in work. Douglas Thorpe introduces the factors of language and culture to the equation, noting that the current demographic trends may lead to the decline of French as a vital working language in Quebec. Fundamental questions about societal attitudes to the elderly are raised. These are addressed more specifically by Ingrid Arnet Connidis in terms of the informal support systems for older persons. She notes how the changing composition of families, and of lifestyles in general, have eroded traditional support networks. Joel Prager considers the impact of an aging population upon economic productivity; Marty Thomas and Rosemary A. Venne consider issues relating to the balance between work and leisure; and Joseph A. …


Early osteoarthritis (OA), characterised by cartilage defects, is a degenerative disease that greatly affects the adult population. Cell-based tissue engineering methods are being explored as a solution for the treatment of these chondral defects. Chondrocytes are already in clinical use but other cell types with chondrogenic properties, such as mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), are being researched. However, present methods for differentiating these cells into stable articular-cartilage chondrocytes that contribute to joint regeneration are not effective, despite extensive investigation. Environmental stimuli, such as mechanical forces, influence chondrogenic response and are beneficial with respect to matrix formation. In vivo, the cartilage is subjected to multiaxial loading involving compressive, tensile, shear and fluid flow and cellular response. Tissue formation mechanobiology is being intensively studied in the cartilage tissue-engineering research field. The study of the effects of hydrostatic pressure on cartilage formation belongs to the large area of mechanobiology. During cartilage loading, interstitial fluid is pressurised and the surrounding matrix delays pressure loss by reducing fluid flow rate from pressurised regions. This fluid pressurisation is known as hydrostatic pressure, where a uniform stress around the cell occurs without cellular deformation. In vitro studies, examining chondrocytes under hydrostatic pressure, have described its anabolic effect and similar studies have evaluated the effect of hydrostatic pressure on MSC chondrogenesis. The present review summarises the results of these studies and discusses the mechanisms through which hydrostatic pressure exerts its effects.


UNLABELLED
There is a continued need for orally bioavailable anticancer compounds that exhibit good efficacy against breast cancer. STX140, a derivative of 2-methoxyestradiol (2-MeOE2), has been shown to have excellent oral bioavailability and significantly reduces tumor growth. A new micronized formulation of STX140 has now been developed and its pharmacokinetics (PK) in rats and effect on MDA-MB-231 breast cancer growth in nude mice was investigated.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
For the PK studies, female Wistar rats were treated orally with STX140 in two separate vehicles (10% tetrahydrofuran (THF) in propylene glycol (PG) or 0.5% methyl cellulose (MC) in saline) and plasma samples taken for high performance liquid chromatography analysis over 48 h. For the tumor efficacy studies, female nude mice were inoculated with MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells and then treated orally with a range of doses of STX140.

RESULTS
The PK studies demonstrated that the THF/PG vehicle resulted in a greater oral bioavailability of STX140 compared to the 0.5% MC vehicle. However, this was not translated to the tumor efficacy studies where STX140 at 20 mg/kg in either vehicle caused a significant reduction in tumor volume.

CONCLUSION
The new micronized formulation of STX140 is orally bioavailable and efficacious at inhibiting MDA-MB-231 breast tumor growth.


BACKGROUND
Maternal complications related to anesthesia are low in comparison with the results from obstetric factors in developing countries. The purposes of the present study were to determine the incidence of maternal mortality related to anesthesia, to analyze the causes and to suggest measures to improve anesthetic safety for the parturients.

MATERIAL AND METHOD
The present study was part of a multi-center study conducted by the Royal College of Anesthesiologists of Thailand aimed at surveillance of anesthesia-related complications in Thailand. The authors conducted a prospective survey of hospital records from all of the cases in and outside the operating room receiving general anesthesia in 18 centers between March 1, 2003 and February 28, 2004. All the forms were checked and verified by three-peer review then included in the analysis, using descriptive statistics.

RESULTS
Sixteen thousand six hundred ninety seven cases were included. The incidence of anesthetic complication in parturients was 35.9: 10,000 (95% CI 27.4, 46.1). Incidence ofthe four most common anesthetic related adverse events in caesarean section were desaturation 13.8 (95% CI 8.7, 20.7), cardiac arrest 10.2 (95% CI 5.9, 16.3), awareness 6.6 (95% CI 3.3, 11.8), and death related anesthesia 4.8 (95% CI 2.17, 9.4). Of these, seven (17.5%) had preeclampsia/eclampsia and 46 (76.7%) presented for emergency caesarean delivery. General anesthesia was used in 41 patients (68.4%) and spinal in eighteen (30%). There were eight maternal deaths including five with general anesthesia, giving a case fatality rate of 0.1% of general anesthetics or 0.3% of caesarean deliveries.

CONCLUSION
The authors found that inexperience, inadequate knowledge, inadequate care, and patient conditions were the major contributory factors. Most of them were preventable and correctable. Additional training and quality assurance can improve and prevent these serious adverse events.


Objective: The objective of this study was to identify the urgency patterns and the effect of time management.Study Design: A survey based descriptive study.Place and Duration of Study: Army Medical College, Rawalpindi Pakistan, from June to August 2015.Material and Methods: Through random sampling, sample size was limited to 50 respondents. Questionnaire was introduced after the informed consent to the management and faculty of the Army Medical College. It was divided into section of demographic data & and data regarding the awareness about time management and practices of effective time management in the organization. Second section composed of the urgency index questions and calculations of the total score. Third section was the Steve Covey Time Management Grid to categorize activities into four quadrants. The time management matrix technique (TMMT) was constructed by Steve Covey to focus on the control of personal actions rather than purely scheduling time.Results: Twenty eight (56%) males and 22 (44%) females participated in the study with mean age of 43.54 ± 7.58. Four (8%) were single and 46 (92%) were married. Mean working experience of the participants was 17.55 ± 7.36. Categories of the participants into low urgency and high urgency index after calculation of the scores reflected that most of the participants irrespective of the gender or length of the work experience were suffering from high urgency patterns of life style.Conclusion: Most of the participants were suffering from high urgency patterns of life style. Urgent tasks have short-term penalties while important tasks are those with objective-oriented consequences.
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