Importance
Clinicians may be confronted with patients refusing recommended adjuvant therapy (AT) after the primary resection of an advanced oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). However, for this tumor entity, data are lacking regarding the oncological outcomes and associated factors after refusal of AT.

Objective
To evaluate the difference in survival and disease recurrence for patients with and without recommended AT after resection of advanced OSCC.

Design, Setting, and Participants
In this single-center retrospective matched cohort study, patients with advanced OSCC who refused recommended AT between January 2010 and December 2021 were matched 1:1 according to Union for International Cancer Control tumor staging with patients who completed AT.

Exposures
Patients with advanced OSCC who refused or completed recommended AT between 2010 and 2021.

Main Outcomes and Measures
The primary outcome of this study was the comparison of overall survival (OS) and recurrence-free survival (RFS) between the 2 study groups.

Results
A total of 82 patients (mean [SD] age at time of surgery, 68.0 [11.3] years; 38 [46.3%] female, 44 [53.7%] male) with and without AT (41 per study group) were included in the analysis. Patients refusing AT developed more frequent disease recurrence than patients who completed AT (61.0% vs 26.8%; difference, 34.2%; odds ratio, 4.26; 95% CI, 1.68-10.84). In addition, patients who refused AT presented with lower 2-year OS (72.7% vs 88.6%; difference, 15.9%; 95% CI, 8.6%-40.6%) and much lower 2-year RFS (39.1% vs 74.2%; difference, 35.1%; 95% CI, 0.2%-70.5%). In the patient cohort who rejected AT, a worse OS was associated with female sex (48.6% vs 90.5%; difference, 41.9%; 95% CI, 0.6%-84.4%), pT1-2 category (57.1% vs 92.3%; difference, 35.2%; 95% CI, 3.3%-73.6%), and pN1 or higher category (61.2% vs 82.6%; difference, 21.4%; 95% CI, 14.1%-56.8%). Lower RFS was associated with female sex (37.9% vs 90.9%; difference, 53.0%; 95% CI, 8.0%-97.9%), advanced T category (pT3-4, 35.3% vs 80.0%; difference, 44.7%; 95% CI, 6.4%-95.3%), lymph node yield of 20 or greater (31.4% vs 80.6%; difference, 49.2%; 95% CI, 4.9%-93.4%), and lymph node ratio of less than 4.6% (36.6% vs 84.4%; difference, 47.8%; 95% CI, 1.8%-93.1%).

Conclusions and Relevance
In this cohort study of patients with advanced OSCC, refusal of AT was associated with worse oncological outcomes. The prevalence of disease recurrence during follow-up was 34% higher in patients who refused AT than in patients who completed AT. The results from this study may assist clinicians in guiding patients who are considering refusal of or withdrawal from AT.


Cuminum cyminum (in arabic: Kemoun) is an important source of therapeutic, cosmetic, bio-food and technological agents. Ancient civilizations used this plant for therapeutic purposes. Extracts from this plant are nowadays strongly used in the industrial and research fields, particularly for the medicinal, pharmacological and cosmetological purposes. Bioactive molecules extracted from Cuminum cyminum may express biocidal activities and prove to be good candidates for new antioxidants. The objective of the present work is to evaluate the biological properties of this plant, including antibacterial and antioxidant effects. The seeds of cumin are harvested at the wilaya of Biskra, and stored in a dry place until their use. They were identified at Hassiba Benbouali University of Chlef. Essential oil is obtained by hydro-distillation using a Clivenger type device (AFNOR, 2000). The obtained sample is stored in sealed bottles at low temperature (4°C) and away from light. The antibacterial effect is assessed by the disc method. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) is determined by standard methods. The antioxidant activity is evaluated by the DPPH free radical trapping method of the methanolic extracts. The essential oil of C. cyminum shows a better activity against Gram+ strains compared to Gram- strains. The determination of MICs leads to the conclusion that its activity can be triggered at a very low concentration. The reaction with DPPH gives an interesting IC50. This testifies to the ability of this essential oil to reduce free radicals. Thanks to the antibacterial activities that we have highlighted, cumin can be considered as a palliative that could replace certain antibiotics. Moreover, its antioxidant activity allows us to use it as a natural food additive.


The New Zealand strawberry industry experiences losses due to fungal diseases that can cost up to $4.4 million per annum or 20% of the crop value. Disease control relies almost exclusively on applications of the fungicide captan. During the 2003/2004 production season, grower monitoring trials investigated the relative importance of grey mould (Botrytis cinerea), anthracnose (Colletotrichum acutatum) and leak (Rhizopus spp.) in causing postharvest fruit rot. The average fruit rot incidence (expressed per day) was 3.6, 2.2 and 1.6% for grey mould, leak and anthracnose, respectively, when ripe fruit was incubated at room temperature under high humidity. In two grower trials and one replicated spray trial, frequent captan applications did not reduce grey mould, anthracnose or leak incidence compared to an unsprayed treatment. Integrated management strategies for control of strawberry fruit rot diseases are urgently required for New Zealand strawberry growers.


BACKGROUND
Renal ischemic preconditioning (IPC) is a phenomenon whereby a brief period of ischemia and reperfusion (I/R) provides tolerance to subsequent periods of ischemia. IPC has been demonstrated to protect rodent kidneys during I/R. The applicability to large mammals, including human beings, is unclear. The objective of this study was to determine if renal IPC has a beneficial effect in a large animal model of warm I/R and hypothermic preservation injury, which occurs with renal allografting.

METHODS
Renal ischemia (45 minutes) and reperfusion was studied in untreated dogs and in dogs receiving IPC (10-minute/10-minute I/R). IPC was administered immediately before I/R (early IPC) or 24 hours before I/R (delayed IPC). In another group of dogs, pharmacologically induced IPC was attempted with local intra-arterial administration of dipyridamole (2.4 mg/kg/min) to increase local adenosine concentrations. Finally, IPC was induced in kidneys before harvest, cold stored for 24 hours in University of Wisconsin flush solution, and subsequently reperfused for 4 hours in allogeneic recipients. Renal functional parameters, including vascular resistance, glomerular filtration rate, urine production, oxygen consumption, and proximal tubular fluid reabsorption, were monitored during the reperfusion period and were compared with the control ischemic group.

RESULTS
Renal function significantly declined during I/R, relative to the nonischemic contralateral kidney but was not different with any form of IPC, relative to the ischemic control group not treated with IPC. IPC pretreatment also did not affect the preservation injury observed in cold-stored kidneys reperfused after transplantation.

CONCLUSIONS
It is concluded that IPC has no significantly measurable effects in warm or hypothermic renal I/R injury in large animals. The clinical usefulness of IPC in human renal ischemic conditions remains uncertain.


Oregonin isolated from Alnus formosana is a diarylheptanoid derivative, which appears to have antioxidative and anti-inflammatory activities. Previous reports have demonstrated that oregonin is able to inhibit iNOS and COX-2 expression. Up to date the precise mechanism responsible for inhibition of iNOS and COX-2 by oregonin remains unclear. In this study, we further elucidated actions of oregonin on the iNOS, COX-2, and HO-1 induction in order to clarify the molecular mechanism underlying its anti-inflammatory actions. Our results showed that oregonin reduced NO production induced by LPS or IFN-


Performance of space diversity techniques is considered for transmissions in mobile radio environments. Optimal performances are derived for any multipath Rayleigh fading channel for Nth-order diversity whenever the signals delivered by the antennas are correlated or not. The proposed theoretical study, illustrated for 2PSK, is suitable for any other modulation schemes (constellation, symbol rate, filter shaping...) to evaluate optimal performance of existing or future digital systems including imperfect channel estimation on fast varying channels. Matched filter bound performance is compared to practical receivers behavior. Simulations have been carried out in the case of the GSM system for second order diversity considering two practical receiver structures based on MLSE (maximum-likelihood sequence-estimator). The theoretical results and simulations show that second order diversity can be used in practical to considerably improve the BER performance or to improve the link budget of the transmission.


Submonolayer films of AE on Pt(111) exhibit parallel partial dislocations separated by narrow hcp domains and much wider fcc domains, the large difference in width being atypical of strained metal overlayers on close-packed substrates. Using a two-dimensional Frenkel-Kontorova model, we calculate the relative domain widths. We examine possible effects of dislocations on equilibrium island shape and calculate the energies of stable and metastable dislocation structures versus island size. Experimental results are explained by proximity to the incommensurate-commensurate phase transition. [S0031-9007(99)09291-1].


Optimal distortionary taxation is known to display dynamic inconsistency in the sence that an optimal announced tax rate policy gives incentives to renege and, therefore, is not credible in the view of rational consumers, whereas the consistent policy leads to lower social welfare. This paper extends the analysis to contingent tax rate policies, where the government uses information not only on the initial capital endowments but also on the current capital stocks. There are contingent tax rate policies with commitments which yield the first-best result and are, therefore, time-consistent. The credible contingent tax rate policy withcut ccW,~,it~re~iLs may generate more social welfare than the standard optimal tax rate policy and is always better than the consistent tax rate policy with restricted information. In the case of more than one consumer the first-best result can not be achieved anymore. For a growing number of consumers the credible tax rate policy with full information tends to be the same as the consistent tax rate policy with restricted information.


AIM
To quantify the expression of Fc receptor (FcRn) and polymeric immunoglobulin receptor (pIgR) mRNA under a long-term influence of mycotoxin mycophenolic acid (MPA), which is used in human transplantation medicine due to its immunosuppressive properties and is a common contaminant in silage.

METHOD
We applied 300 mg MPA/day in nine sheep for nine weeks and compared them with untreated animals (n=9). The expression level of Ig receptor mRNA was determined in eight different adult ovine tissues (liver, kidney, jejunum, ileum, spleen, thymus, mesenteric and pharyngeal lymph nodes). For a reliable and sensitive mRNA quantification of Ig receptor subtypes, a real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was used with a relative- and tissue-specific efficiency corrected quantification model (REST).

RESULTS
Each tissue exhibited an individual expression pattern of FcRn and pIgR mRNA. Both types of Ig receptors were highly expressed in the liver, kidney, and gastrointestinal tract. Medium-to-low expressions were found in the spleen, thymus, mesenteric and pharyngeal lymph nodes. FcRn mRNA was significantly down-regulated by MPA in the liver (p=0.02). After MPA treatment, a significant up-regulation of pIgR mRNA expression was observed in the ileum and liver (p=0.04 for both). Expression level of FcRn mRNA in the tissues in decreasing order was as follows: liver > kidney > jejunum > ileum > spleen > thymus > mesenterial lymph node > pharyngeal lymph node; whereas expression level for pIgR mRNA was the following: liver > kidney > jejunum > ileum > pharyngeal lymph node > spleen > thymus > mesenterial lymph node.

CONCLUSION
The MPA exhibited immunomodulatory effects in the liver and ileum of treated sheep. Its possible immunosuppressive effects may be explained by lowering the level of FcRn expression in the liver, which resulted in a lower IgG serum-to-bile transport. However, MPA showed stimulatory effects on pIgR expression in the liver and ileum, suggesting good IgA and IgM transport in these tissues.


The purpose of this paper is to present a structured method to assess and manage feeding problems in children under three years of age and a newly developed instrument to assist in the assessment and monitoring of these feeding problems. Simple management strategies and practical suggestions are described, derived from clinical experience and a pertinent review of the literature. Because feeding problems are so prevalent (affecting up to 35% of infants), the use of structured parent questionnaires, interviews and observation scales is important when assessing and managing these problems.


ABSTRACT Stephen Darwall notes that for Cudworth the fundamental ethical motive is love, but that the Cambridge Platonist tells us little about love's character, aim and object (The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought', 1640–1740). In this article I examine Cudworth's doctrine of 'superintellectual instinct' as a natural love for or inclination to the good as it takes shape in two of his unpublished freewill manuscripts (BL MS Additional 4980 and 4982). I show that in these manuscripts he assumes a threefold model of how this higher love as a natural or 'created' grace fits into the overall moral life of a person, together with human free will and special grace. I argue that although Cudworth adopts an Origenist synergistic position on the question of the relationship between grace and free will, stating that special grace is a necessary condition of salvation conjointly with free will and creation grace, in reality he struggles to show the strict necessity of special grace.


The summarizes the salient characteristics of 560 cell lines: precursor B (85), mature B (155), plasma cell leukemia/myeloma (66), immature T (55), mature T (21), natural killer (10), Hodgkin lymphoma (10), anaplastic large cell lymphoma (16), myelocytic (62), monocytic (33) and erythrocytic-megakaryocytic cell lines (45). Along with other improvements, the advent of continuous human leukemia-lymphoma (LL including myeloma) cell lines as a rich resource of abundant, accessible and manipulable living cells has contributed significantly to a better understanding of the pathophysiology of hematopoietic tumors. The first LL cell lines, Burkitt lymphoma-derived lines, were established in 1963. Since then more than 1500 cell lines have been described, some 500 of them in detail. The major advantages of continuous cell lines is the unlimited supply and worldwide availability of identical cell material and the infinite viable storability in liquid nitrogen. LL cell lines are characterized generally by monoclonal origin and differentiation arrest, sustained proliferation in vitro with preservation of most cellular features, and specific genetic alterations characteristic of their tumor of origin. Recent transcriptional profiling studies have confirmed that LL cell lines stably retain the aberrant profiles typical of their tumors of origin. The most practical classification of LL cell lines assigns them to one of the physiologically occurring cell lineages, based on their immunophenotype, genotype and functional features. Truly malignant cell lines should be discerned from Epstein-Barr virus-immortalized normal cells. The efficiency of cell line establishment is rather low and the deliberate establishment of new LL cell lines remains by and large an unpredictable process. Difficulties in establishing continuous cell lines may be caused by the inappropriate selection of nutrients and growth factors. Clearly, a generally suitable microenvironment for hematopoietic cells, either malignant or normal, cannot yet be defined. The characterization and publication of new LL cell lines should provide important and informative core data, attesting to their scientific significance. Large percentages of LL cell lines are contaminated with mycoplasma (about 20%) or are cross-contaminated with other cell lines (14% in our DNA fingerprinting analysis on 622 samples covering 560 LL cell lines). Solutions to these problems are sensitive detection, effective elimination and rigorous prevention of mycoplasma infection and proper, regular authentication of cell lines. The underlying cause appears to be negligent cell culture practice. The willingness of investigators to make their LL cell lines available to others is all too often limited. There is a need in the scientific community for clean and authenticated high quality LL cell lines to which every scientist has access. These are offered by public cell line banks like the DSMZ which holds 169 LL cell lines which all have undergone a strict quality, identity and characterization program (immunoprofile, karyotype, DNA fingerprint, virus/mycoplasma check). An example of the practical utility of LL cell lines are the recent advances in studies of classical and molecular cytogenetics which in large part were made possible by cell lines. We propose a list of the most useful, robust and publicly available reference cell lines which may be used for a variety of experimental purposes. The is available on CD; inquire at .


The study of segregation is essential for understanding how place influences life outcomes. However, traditional segregation indices rely heavily on the use of areal units for calculation, which risks introducing both measurement and interpretation error. Researchers suggest that individual-level data avoids many of the problems facing traditional area-level indices. In this Dissertation, I use the recent release of the complete 1940 Census to investigate the potential problems with measuring segregation with areal units and develop a new method for measuring segregation at the individual level. In Chapter 1, I investigate the potential impact the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) may have on accurately measuring segregation when using areal unit indices. In Chapter 2, I develop a new measure of segregation, the Shortest Path Isolation (SPI) index, which captures the degree of racial isolation from the perspective of what an individual would experience. Using the SPI index developed in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 investigates how individual-level racial isolation in 1940 West Philadelphia is associated with access to neighborhood resources by race. Given that our understanding is only as good as our measurement, it is imperative that our measures accurately reflect our perceptions of segregation. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Demography First Advisor Jason Schnittker


The skeletal sex and ancestry of unidentified human crania can be inferred both from physical and from molecular features. This paper depicts and discusses the experiences of physical and molecular anthropologists on a set of commingled crania from the largest Mediterranean shipwreck disaster on 18 April 2015, in order to facilitate identification of human crania. Twenty-one disarticulated crania that were recovered from the above-mentioned shipwreck were analyzed to estimate skeletal sex and ancestry, following a physical and a molecular pipeline. The physical analyses applied morphological and metric methods that provided posterior probabilities for the crania to be classified into a sex or ancestral group. The molecular analyses were performed on petrous bones via a shotgun sequencing approach that allowed us to determine the sex of each individual and to retrieve the complete mitochondrial genome, Y chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms, up to 597573 SNPs across the human genome from each individual. The morphometric sex analyses showed that most crania belonged to male individuals, although some estimations remained uncertain or undetermined. Inconsistent results were obtained for ancestry estimation as well, since morphological methods classified the crania mostly as European/White, in contrast to the most numerous African forms determined by craniometric analyses. This quite agreed with molecular analyses that identified only African males. Overall, undetermined and contrasting results were obtained between disciplines, preventing the creation of reliable and sound biological profiles that could provide guidance on the sex and ancestral group of the victims. Therefore, the times may not be mature for a merger of physical and molecular anthropology. However, future investigations of this research avenue would pave the way to the possible development of novel tools, methods, and wider reference databases that could address the limitations of both disciplines.


Results: Out of a sample of 1,211 Tehran residents, 31.4% demonstrated "poor" knowledge of disaster preparedness. For 31.4% of the sample, the knowledge assessed "moderate", and the remaining 37.2% had an "acceptable" level of knowledge. The relative frequencies of people with poor, moderate, and acceptable attitude were 25.6%, 32.5%, and 41.9%, respectively. Regarding practice, the percentage of the subjects that were determined to be at a "poor" level was 25.7%, while 29% fell into the "moderate" category, and 45.3% were classified as having "acceptable" practice in terms of disaster preparedness. Statistical analysis of the KAP scores was used to identify the following groups as being at "high risk" for adverse consequences in the event of an earthquake: women, housewives, residents of eastern districts, senior citizens, pensioners, those living alone, poorly educated people, and people living in a rented accommodation or in crowded families.


Abstract: This article draws on newspaper commentary, Nyaturu hunger lore, and ethnographic research to describe how central Tanzanian villagers accessed food aid from the state during the East African food crisis of 2006. Through leveraging their political support and their participation in national development agendas, rural inhabitants claimed their rights. Yet it was through these exchanges that the state converted food aid into political power. The article argues that the highly ritualized gift of food aid naturalizes a contemporary political and economic order in which, counterintuitively, it is rural farmers who go hungry.


A macro notation incorporating path notation is introduced. The notation was designed to permit the specification of the behaviour of a distributed system in terms of resources characterized by associated synchronization statements. The proper co-ordination of processes using the resources can thus be stated as the permissible order of execution of operations on shared resources as part of the resource definition. This contrasts with the usual "process oriented" approach which associates synchronization statements with the processes using the resource. This makes proper co-ordination of processes part of the individual task of each process. We argue that the process oriented approach is not suited for specifying highly parallel systems with distributed decision capabilities. The notions of adequacy, starvation, priority and interrupts are discussed in the context of our "resource oriented" approach and compared with thei counterparts in a "process oriented" approach. Semi formal demonstrations of the adequacy of simple but realistic example systems are sketched.


We have now demonstrated the ability to non-invasively image RPE cell death in a targeted fashion with a custom engineered NIRF dye conjugated to an irreversibly binding pan-caspase substrate. The bio-probe detection was sensitive and specific for degenerating RPE and overlying outer retinal layers in a mouse model with geographic atrophy (GA)-like features. No significant ocular toxicity was noted, and eyes maintained a clear visual axis with undetectable anterior or posterior segment inflammation. While the potential role of caspase inhibition in the treatment of GA remains uncertain and will be addressed in future studies, an ideal translation of this knowledge would be to utilize caspase imaging as a means for the early detection, prognosis, and indication for therapeutic intervention in GA.


The objective of this article is to describe an investment decision using net present value and real options. A case study describes the data and the corn-ethanol industry so students can study a cooperative's decision of whether or not to invest in a new corn-ethanol plant in 2015 Nebraska. An extensive set of information accompanies this case, including spreadsheets with data, computer software code, lesson plans for teaching real options and net present value, and an extensive teaching note.


Along temperate to polar rocky shorelines, large brown algae known as kelps form marine forests which provide a three-dimensional habitat for many associated species. Ocean warming is posing an increasing threat to kelps at their warm distributional edges and first range shifts have been recorded. For these sessile species unable to migrate, trait variability due to phenotypic plasticity and genetic variation is an important mechanism of response to environmental change. The aim of this thesis was to produce a comprehensive assessment of the variation and plasticity of thermal traits across populations and life cycle stages of a keystone marine forest species, the cold-temperate to Arctic kelp Laminaria digitata. Using physiological response parameters, population genetics and transcriptomics, I present evidence for four levels of thermal trait variability in a marine forest key species. I describe (1) genetic and physiological differentiation along the species' distribution range, (2) genetic variation for phenotypic plasticity among genotypes, (3) carry-over effects over reproduction and individual ontogeny, and (4) the production of new phenotypes by outbreeding among distant lineages. Integrating these responses into a framework of seasonal temperature variation and predictions of ocean warming showed that L. digitata, as a species with a cold-temperate thermal profile, is adapted well to the current conditions along its distributional range, but may not be equipped to respond to rapid climate change at its warm range edges. The concepts investigated in this thesis provide further insight into trait variability as a mechanism of marine forest resilience and offer intriguing features for mariculture and conservation efforts.


The objective of this study realized in Mexico was to identify the constructed meanings of kidnapping and the repercussions of this crime on survivors of economic kidnapping. Sampling was by opportunity, having as a criteria of inclusion to have been a victim of economic kidnapping. We worked with nine Mexican citizens; two women and seven men; one participant was under-age. The period of time that they were kidnapped was between 3 and 5 days, two exceeded this time: the under-age was kidnapped 21 days, and another male about two months.
As a method, the multiple case study was used (Stake, 2013) and as data collection technique the production of narratives. For the generation of narratives, Chase (2015) was followed who suggests framing this type of interview with an open and general question so the subjects elaborate a story; In our case, the initial question was: can you tell me what happened (about the kidnapping)? and later, also with open questions, it was deepened about what the person narrated. These stories were audio-recorded and transcribed, making some modifications for better understanding but retaining the original meaning of the story. With the support of the Atlas.Ti software, a holistic and phenomenological analysis of the narratives was carried out. At all time the welfare of the participants and compliance with the ethical principles of research with people was observed.
With the holistic analysis, stable, regressive and progressive narratives were identified. Stable narratives are those in which the trajectory of the story or the person remains without significant changes; in the regressive, the valuation that the person makes decreases, the story goes in continuous decrease or deterioration; In progressive narratives the movement of the evaluative dimension increases with the passage of time, growth and improvement are observed (Gergen and Gergen 1983). All people interviewed meant the kidnapping as "terrible act" and "the worst that can happen to you", however differences were identified between other meanings contained in the regressive and progressive narratives. In the regressive narratives, meanings with negative connotations predominated, such as "punishment of God" and "event that destroys your life"; and in the progressive narratives, meanings with positive connotations predominated, such as "proof that I surpassed", "a new opportunity", "event where I showed spiritual strength". The effects identified were associated with the constructed meanings, in such a way that effects such as search for new personal goals, self-affirmation and empowerment were related to positive meanings and effects such as isolation and loss of interest in living, were associated with meanings with negative connotation.
The narratives we build are full of meanings about ourselves, our experiences, the world and our context. These meanings may or may not favor our development, in such a way that we must favor the construction of meanings that favor our full development, particularly in people who have experienced high impact situations such as kidnapping. Allowing people to freely construct a narrative of their experiences allows us to identify the meanings they have constructed, providing elements for interventions. In the end, meanings can be deconstructed and reconstructed.


We have typed ABO, Rh and Kell blood group systems in 1,267 voluntary blood donors native to the three districts into which Terni province is subdivided. By using the method of principal components, the Terni population was compared with those of other provinces of central Italy to disclose that (1) the Terni sample clustered with the Tyrrhenian rather than the Adriatic populations, and (2) there seems to be a positive relation with both the distribution of the languages spoken during the prehistoric period and the location of pre-Roman civilizations.


: Direct "inferior" lymphography of the medial superficial collector was used for the examination of 54 patients. It was established that acute and chronic edemas of lower extremities were followed by different changes of small lymphatic vessels of the skin and subcutaneous fat.


As major web and cloud service providers continue to accelerate the demand for new data center capacity worldwide, the importance of power oversubscription as a lever to reduce provisioning costs has never been greater. Building on insights from Google-scale deployments, we design and deploy a new architecture across hardware and software to improve power oversubscription significantly. Our design includes (1) a new \em medium voltage power plane to enable larger power sharing domains (across tens of MW of equipment) and (2) a \em scalable, fast, and robust power capping service coordinating multiple priorities of workload on every node. Over several years of production deployment, our co-design has enabled \em power oversubscription of 25% or higher, saving hundreds of millions of dollars of data center costs, while preserving the desired availability and performance of all workloads.


Permafrost peatlands store globally significant amounts of soil organic carbon (SOC) that may be vulnerable to climate change. Permafrost thaw exposes deeper, older SOC to microbial activity, but SOC vulnerability to mineralization and release as carbon dioxide is likely influenced by the soil environmental conditions that follow thaw. Permafrost thaw in peat plateaus, the dominant type of permafrost peatlands in North America, occurs both through deepening of the active layer and through thermokarst. Active layer deepening exposes aged SOC to predominately oxic conditions, while thermokarst is associated with complete permafrost thaw which leads to ground subsidence, inundation and soil anoxic conditions. Thermokarst often follows active layer deepening, and wildfire is an important trigger of this sequence. We compared the mineralization rate of aged SOC at an intact peat plateau (∼70 cm oxic active layer), a burned peat plateau (∼120 cm oxic active layer), and a thermokarst bog (∼550 cm anoxic peat profile) by measuring respired 14C–CO2. Measurements were done in fall when surface temperatures were near-freezing while deeper soil temperatures were still close to their seasonal maxima. Aged SOC (1600 yrs BP) contributed 22.1 ± 11.3% and 3.5 ± 3.1% to soil respiration in the burned and intact peat plateau, respectively, indicating a fivefold higher rate of aged SOC mineralization in the burned than intact peat plateau (0.15 ± 0.07 versus 0.03 ± 0.03 g CO2–C m−2 d−1). None or minimal contribution of aged SOC to soil respiration was detected within the thermokarst bog, regardless of whether thaw had occurred decades or centuries ago. While more data from other sites and seasons are required, our study provides strong evidence of substantially increased respiration of aged SOC from burned peat plateaus with deepened active layer, while also suggesting inhibition of aged SOC respiration under anoxic conditions in thermokarst bogs.


The efficacy of cefonicid and of ceftriaxone, administered once daily for the treatment of lower respiratory tract bacterial infections (pneumonia or bronchitis), was evaluated and compared in 118 patients with chronic lung disease. The patients were randomly assigned to receive 1 gm of either drug, intravenously or intramuscularly, daily for three to 11 days (mean, seven days). Pathogenic bacteria were isolated from sputum in 59% of patients; Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae predominated. Clinical cure or improvement was noted in 95% and 93% of patients treated with cefonicid and ceftriaxone, respectively, and bacteriologic cure or improvement in 69% and 81% (the differences were not significant). Side effects were infrequent and similar in the two treatment groups, except that diarrhea was more common in the ceftriaxone group (11%, versus 4.4% in the cefonicid group). It is concluded that patients with chronic lung disease who experience acute exacerbations associated with infection caused by H influenzae or S pneumoniae, or other susceptible organisms, can be effectively treated with once-daily administration of either cefonicid or ceftriaxone.


During the last several years, assessing the probability of default (PD) and loss give default (LGD) on credit assets have become a high priority task in the internal credit risk systems of the financial institutions. Such an intense surge of interest is caused by the following factors:

A historic high in the frequency and severity of bankruptcy at the turn of the century have attracted much media attention.
Basel Accord on credit risk capital adequacy—the so-called Basel II Accord; see Basel Commission on Banking Supervision—for banks and financial institutions to qualify for the advanced internal rating based (IRB) approach, they need to develop better assessment of PD and LGD.

To address the enormous need of PD and LGD evaluations, various quantitative techniques have been employed not only by financial institutions, but also regulatory bodies and the rating agencies. In this chapter, a brief review of the techniques of credit scoring in estimating PD is presented. For LGD computations, one can refer to Chapter 15 of Altman and Hotchkiss.

Keywords:

probability of default;
multiple discriminant analysis;
financial ratios;
logistic regression;
probit regression


A number of systems in recent times suffer from attacks like DDoS and Ping of Death. Such attacks result in loss of critical system resources and CPU cycles, as these compromised systems behave in an abnormal manner. The effect of such abnormalities is worse in case of compromised systems handling financial transaction, since it leads to severe monetary losses. In this paper we propose a system that uses the Replicated State Machine approach to detect abnormality in system usage. The suggested system is based on PAXOS algorithm, an algorithm for solving the consensus problem in a network of unreliable processors.


Adoptive T cell transfer of engineered T cells with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) can harness the patients9 immune system to recognize a specific antigen and redirect T cells to target disease. Conventional CAR T cells, however, are specific to a single antigen. While remarkably effective, antigen escape, due in part to the heterogeneous nature of a tumor, renders these CAR T cells ineffective. In order to address the disadvantage of conventional CAR T cells, we developed a switchable CAR T cell system. Specifically, we replaced the antigen-binding domain of a conventional CAR with a meditope and used meditope-enabled monoclonal antibodies (memAbs) to alter antigen specificity. As the T cell decoration is similar to how a bike rack is used to transport bicycles on cars, we have coined the technology a Fabrack. To fully examine our switchable CAR T cell system, Fabrack CAR Jurkat-NFAT-Luc cells were established to quantitate T cell activation through NFAT-regulated luciferase expression. Multiple memAbs with unique antigen specificity were combined with the Fabrack CAR Jurkat cells and target tumor cells and demonstrated the feasibility, specificity and robustness of the in vitro system. Next, native human T cells transduced with Fabrack showed dramatic tumor-killing effect when coupled with an antigen specific memAb. The engaged Fabrack T cells proliferated with remarkably increased CD107a and IFNγ, indicating functional activation of T cells. Live cell imaging demonstrated selective killing of target cells in the presence of corresponding memAbs. Furthermore, tumor burden in immunocompromised mice with OVCAR3 xenografts was largely reduced when mice were treated with Fabrack T cells and memAbs. Collectively, these studies suggest the feasibility of switchable CAR T cell and support further development for future clinical use in cancer immunotherapy. Citation Format: Yi-Chiu Kuo, Jeremy D. King, Cheng-Fu Kuo, Victor Kenyon, Miso Park, Wen-Chung Chang, Lawrence Stern, Christine E. Brown, John C. Williams. Antibody-based redirection of meditope-CAR T cells selectively kill antigen bearing tumor cells [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr 6591.


Purpose: Beginning with the graduating class of 2018, the American Board of Surgery (ABS) requires that residents complete the ABS Flexible Endoscopy Curriculum, Fundamentals of Endoscopic Surgery (FES). This curriculum includes both didactic and simulator training. In the ideal setting residents gain proficiency using simulation prior to performing endoscopies in the clinical setting. This new requirement creates an increased demand for endoscopic simulators in all General Surgery residency programs. Due to the cost prohibitive nature of virtual reality simulators an economic alternative is needed. Methods: A mechanical simulator was created from inexpensive items easily acquired at a hardware store and in the hospital. Total cost of the simulator was approximately $120 USD. To validate the simulator, experienced endoscopists completed a training session with the device. A seven-question Likert scale survey (1 - strongly disagree to 5 - strongly agree) was completed after the session evaluated the simulated experience versus live upper endoscopies and the device's ability to meet the goals of the FES curriculum. Results: Eight proficient endoscopists completed the training session and survey and agreed that the device closely replicated live colonoscopies and would meet all training requirements in the FES curriculum. Mean responses to all seven survey questions ranged from 3.8–4.4. Conclusion: This device is a cost-effective method for simulating live upper endoscopies and is appropriate for use in FES training.


Matric suction has an important effect on the behavior of unsaturated soils, and polypropylene fibers are often used to improve soil. In order to probe into the mechanism of matric suction and fiber reinforcement, triaxial shear tests are carried out with changing matric suction and net confining pressure. Unsaturated clay in the Shaoxing section of East Zhejiang Grand Canal is selected with polypropylene fiber as a reinforcement material in the tests. The results show that the total cohesion intercept and effective internal friction angle of soil increase with the increase in matric suction, while the adsorption internal friction angle decreases gradually. Similarly, the contribution of matric suction to shear strength decreases. The total cohesion intercept is more sensitive to matric suction. As the length of fiber is 12 mm, the shear strength parameters of soil will be improved accordingly, which makes the fiber reinforcement achieve the best. The stress–strain relationship is approximately hyperbolic and strain hardening. The characteristics of strain hardening are more obvious with the increase in matric suction, and the soil specimens present plastic failure. The volumetric strain of specimen is more sensitive to the changing net confining pressure. It increases with the increase in net confining pressure, and increases linearly as the matric suction is zero. The failure modes of triaxial tests are divided into tensile failure and friction failure.


BCG is an attenuated live strain of Mycobacterium bovis that is used as an intravesical immunotherapy for superficial bladder cancer. Although generally well tolerated, BCG instillation can lead to systemic diseases. We present a case of a 75-year-old man who was treated for recurrent localised transitional cell carcinoma (TCC) of the bladder with intravesical instillation of BCG in 2006. His medical history included Parkinson's disease. The patient reported worsening of Parkinson symptoms in the preceding month. In addition, he had progressive pancytopaenia and a bone marrow biopsy showed a granulomatous inflammatory infiltrate. Cultures from bone marrow aspiration grew M. bovis. He was successfully treated with tuberculostatic drugs and made a full recovery. In addition, there was partial amelioration of the Parkinson symptoms. This case shows that physicians should be aware that BCG instillation for TCC can cause systemic disease even years after treatment.


Aging leads to psychological losses and various physical changes that, associated with body-stereotyped patterns imposed by society, can cause disturbances in the body image perception (BIP) in the elderly. The aim of this study was to evaluate BIP in older adults living in the city of Campina Grande / PB and its relationship with different anthropometric and body composition indicators. This cross-sectional study was carried out with older adults of both sexes enrolled in the Family Health Strategy of Campina Grande, PB. BIP was considered as a dependent variable and body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), triceps skinfold (TSF), and arm fat area (AFA) as independent variables. The association between BIP and anthropometric indicators was verified using the Pearson chi-square test (X²), simple and multiple logistic regression, with significance level of p <0.05. Overall, 420 older adults were interviewed (68.1% women), of whom 409 reported their actual body image perception. Regarding the perception of idealized body image, 11 individuals did not respond and 230 were satisfied, since 179 desired another silhouette. Individuals with BMI indicative of overweight / obesity were more likely of showing body image dissatisfaction compared to those with normal weight. Subjects with excessive TSF showed greater body image dissatisfaction in relation to those with normal weight. Women were more likely of showing body image dissatisfaction. Thus, it was observed that variables BMI, TSF and sex were independently associated with body image satisfaction.


In this paper, a simple optical method that uses an infrared(IR) cut filter is proposed to minimize variation of eye image by external infrared(IR) sources in a video based head mounted eye tracking system that is used in the field of sports. For this, the IR cut filter is attached to a head mount of the eye tracking system, and the camera with an IR LED is located between the IR cut filter and eye. In this structure, external IR is blocked by the IR cut filter, and the IR intensity on the eye can be controlled by the IR LED. Therefore, the illumination condition of the camera to capture the eye can be stable without being affected by external IR illuminations. To verify the proposed idea, variation of the eye image and intensity of the IR with/without the IR cut filter is measured under various illumination conditions. The measured data show that the IR cut filter method can block external IR effectively, and complex pupil detection algorithms can be replaced by a simple binarized method.


Simple Summary Brain metastases are one of the most frequent complications for cancer patients. Stereotactic radiosurgery is considered a cornerstone treatment for patients with limited brain metastases and the ideal dose and fractionation schedule still remain unknown. The aim of this literature review is to discuss the dose-effect relation in brain metastases treated by stereotactic radiosurgery, accounting for fractionation and technical considerations. Abstract For more than two decades, stereotactic radiosurgery has been considered a cornerstone treatment for patients with limited brain metastases. Historically, radiosurgery in a single fraction has been the standard of care but recent technical advances have also enabled the delivery of hypofractionated stereotactic radiotherapy for dedicated situations. Only few studies have investigated the efficacy and toxicity profile of different hypofractionated schedules but, to date, the ideal dose and fractionation schedule still remains unknown. Moreover, the linear-quadratic model is being debated regarding high dose per fraction. Recent studies shown the radiation schedule is a critical factor in the immunomodulatory responses. The aim of this literature review was to discuss the dose–effect relation in brain metastases treated by stereotactic radiosurgery accounting for fractionation and technical considerations. Efficacy and toxicity data were analyzed in the light of recent published data. Only retrospective and heterogeneous data were available. We attempted to present the relevant data with caution. A BED10 of 40 to 50 Gy seems associated with a 12-month local control rate >70%. A BED10 of 50 to 60 Gy seems to achieve a 12-month local control rate at least of 80% at 12 months. In the brain metastases radiosurgery series, for single-fraction schedule, a V12 Gy < 5 to 10 cc was associated to 7.1–22.5% radionecrosis rate. For three-fractions schedule, V18 Gy < 26–30 cc, V21 Gy < 21 cc and V23 Gy < 5–7 cc were associated with about 0–14% radionecrosis rate. For five-fractions schedule, V30 Gy < 10–30 cc, V 28.8 Gy < 3–7 cc and V25 Gy < 16 cc were associated with about 2–14% symptomatic radionecrosis rate. There are still no prospective trials comparing radiosurgery to fractionated stereotactic irradiation.


Ankle arthritis is a debilitating condition. It can disrupt physical function and quality of life. Non surgical treatment includes pharmacological agents and orthoses. Surgical options range from arthrodesis to joint preservation techniques. Ankle arthrodesis is a reliable and effective treatment of choice for advanced ankle arthritis but has its limitations. Total ankle arthroplasty is fast gaining renewed interest as longer term outcome studies show good results coupled with improved implant and instrumentation designs. Osteotomies and arthroscopic debridement are increasingly popular techniques that are useful for joint preservation. Joint distraction arthroplasty and osteochondral allografting are also showing some promise. This article reviews the impact of ankle arthritis and treatment strategies available from joint sacrificing surgery to joint and mobility preservation.


We report on rare side effects of paroxetine. A 67‐year‐old female patient who had been suffering from prolonged depression for over a year but had not received appropriate treatment was administered 20‐mg paroxetine daily. However, the patient required hospital admission after 16 days because of behavioural disturbances and delusions that she was being chased by evil persons from a religious group. The delusions were ultimately confirmed to be serial nightmares and an oneiroid state. The nightmares gradually disappeared following discontinuation of paroxetine. The Adverse Drug Reaction Probability Scale showed a score of 6 (probable). Reports on paroxetine‐induced nightmares are rare, and there is a possibility that, in this case, parexetine caused the nightmares in association with depression and assumed underlying brain dysfunction due to ageing.


In this paper we present the gross-count material basis set (GC-MBS) method for estimating transmission losses in measurements of radionuclides using low-resolution gamma-ray detectors such as NaI or CdZnTe. The application to continuum-subtracted peaks measured with high-purity Ge detectors is also discussed. To illustrate the method, we apply it to the correction of spectra from enriched uranium that have been distorted by various intervening absorbers. We also examine the application to simultaneous determination of the uranium enrichment through an unknown absorber using an NaI detector.


Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a heterogeneous disease with a diverse clinical picture. Correspondingly, its severity varies from mild disease with flexural eczema, which may be successfully treated with a short-term topical treatment, to very severe universal disease requiring systemic immunomodulatory treatment. In the current literature the terms phenotype and endophenotype are often used. The first describes the clinical picture met by the clinician in the clinic, and the second is mostly used to encompass different biomarkers found in biological samples such as blood and skin. A significant part of the research published in recent years has centred on correlating endophenotype to the prognostic risk of comorbidities and response to treatment, especially as AD has entered the age of biologics. However, in the clinical situation with the patient and patient's family, it would be optimal to be able to make risk assessments and predictions from the severity and clinical history of the patient's disease. In this issue of the BJD, Mulick et al. report on their study of 11 866 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children birth cohort. The study aimed to classify AD into robustly identifiable subtypes, using data generated from questionnaires on the presence of flexural dermatitis and severity within the previous year, collected at 11 time points over the child's first 14 years of age. The study is performed elegantly, and should in many ways serve as guidance for future epidemiological studies. The authors divide the population into an explorative (development) cohort, on which they perform latent class analysis, and a validation cohort to confirm the results obtained in the first group. From the latent class analysis models, they found the optimal number of phenotype groupings is five, comprising four disease phenotypes – Unaffected/Rare, Severe–Frequent AD, Moderate–Frequent AD, Moderate–Declining AD and Mild– Intermittent AD – and that there are clinically relevant associations between the different subgroups and asthma. They also show that family history of AD increases the risk of having one of the severe phenotypes. Altogether, the study demonstrates that there are phenotypic subtypes of AD, and that they are clinically meaningful. The approach is based on clinical subtypes, and together with studies performed on endophenotypes, we are moving towards a better taxonomy within the large and heterogeneous group of patients with AD, the ultimate goal being a precise and personalized risk assessment, intervention and treatment.


The research deals with experiencing infertility and its consequences in the adoption of a child and focuses on infertile couples that have wished to adopt a child and joined a program preparing them to be foster parents. The results show that most of the infertile couples experience infertility very much as being different from couples with children as well as having to cope with the feelings of deep emotional loss resulting from the inability to reproduce biologically. There is therefore the question whether these facts should be taken into account by the profession (i.e. social workers) when dealing with child adoption as, according to most of the respondents of our survey, the process of coming to terms with infertility and its consequences is an important factor in establishing healthy family relationships and the child's identity within the adoptive family. We concluded from the results of the research that the infertile couples preparation program for adopting a child carried out by the Society of Adoptive Families "Deteljica", is a comprehensive autopoietic social workers' answer to the needs of participants for a successful adoption of a child, as it makes it possible to supply these future adoptive parents with the requisite information and experience and provides support to the entire family upon accepting a child in its midst, while its fundamental attribute is offering help to couples in overcoming the traumas resulting from their infertility.


Five rabbit kidneys were perfused with heparinized human blood, five with platelet-rich, leucocyte-poor blood, five with platelet-poor, leucocyte-rich blood, and five with platelet-poor, leucocyte-poor, heparinized human blood. The kidneys were perfused at a constant pressure of 80 mm Hg and the time until the flow decreased to 2 ml/min was determined. Removal of platelets from the blood significantly delayed rejection. The effect of removing leucocytes was insignificant. Morphologically all groups revealed platelet aggregates, endothelial damage and ischemic changes of distal tubular epithelium.


Unilocular calcareous Foraminifera of the middle-upper Eocene and lower Oligocene from Tierra del Fuego Island and adjacent continental platform, Argentina. The calcareous unilocular Foraminifera of the Leticia Formation (upper middle Eocene), Cerro Colorado Formation (upper middle Eocene-upper Eocene) and the Cabo Pena Formation (lower Oligocene) from Tierra del Fuego Island are described. The Leticia Formation yields scarce unilocular foraminifers that are characterized by species described from the Maastrichtian and the lower Eocene, including Conolagena argentina , C . acuticosta and Sipholagena sp. The Cerro Colorado Formation bears 29 species, almost the half of which (both individuals and species) belong to the Genus Fissurina , with Fissurina bisulcata occurring as the most abundant taxon. The formation also contains species characteristic of either Antarctic waters or the Malvinas current, reflecting the temperature decrease in the oceanic waters during the middle-late Eocene. The Cabo Pena Formation, which contains the Spirosigmoilinella-Martinottiella Assemblage typical of the Antarctic region, yielded 19 species; the dominant unilocular species belong to the genera Fissurina and Parafissurina , and the most conspicuous are fimbriate forms, such as F. fimbriata and F. fueguina, which are associated with Antarctic waters.


We have been collecting and recording routing paths from a test host to each of over 90,000 registered networks on the Internet since August 1998. The resulting database contains intersting routing and reachability information, and is available to the public for research purpose. The daily scans cover approximately a tenth of the networks on the Internet, with a full scan run roughly once a month. We have also been collecting Lucent's intranet data, and applied these tools to understanding its size and connectivity. We have also detected the sloss of power to routers in Yugoslavia as the result of NATO bombing.

A simulated spring-force algorithm lays out the graphs thgat results from these database. This algorithm is well known, but has never been applied to such a large problem. The Internet graph, with around 88,000 nodes and 100,000 edges, is larger than those previsouly considered tractable by the data visualization community. The resulting Internet layouts are pleasent, though rather cluttered. On smaller networks, like Lucent's intranet, the layouts present the data in a useful way. For the Internet data, we have also tried plotting a minimum distance spanning tree; by throwing away edges, the remaining graph can be made more accessible.

Once a layout is chosen, it can be colored in various ways to show network-relevant data, such as IP address, domain information, location, ISPs, and result of scan (completed, filtered, loop, etc).

This paper expands and updates the description of the project given in an IEEE Computer article [1].


When large sets of constraints and objectives are combined in a practical optimization problem, managing all these potentially conflicting goals can become very difficult and might require to solve an instance multiple times. First, an instance might be infeasible with the current constraints, in which case our system introduces a novel violation score to help identify the constraints that need to be relaxed for the next run. Second, multiple objectives are often combined using a linear combination with hand-crafted weights, which are very difficult to set such that the result matches the expectations regarding the balance between individual objectives. Instead, the user can tell our system particular thresholds for the expected changes in objectives, e.g., to reduce objective 1 by 10 % while not increasing objective 2 by more than 5 %. Dynamic weight setting automatically adapts the weights to reach these thresholds or uses the violation scores to explain reasons for not reaching thresholds. It can not only be used for soft constraints, but also to determine weights when hard constraints are internally represented as soft constraints in meta-heuristics. While the methodology is general, we have implemented it in the context of a personnel scheduling framework of our industry partner and present a detailed evaluation on the domain of Bus Driver Scheduling, where its benefits can be seen in multiple scenarios.


To supplement the current understanding of the reservoir and also to increase the confidence level in decision making, an understanding in the variation of Oil Water Contact is very much important. In this paper, a study of an integrated and efficient methodology for establishment of complex Oil Water Contacts in Barail Main Sand (water drive reservoir) for a part of one oilfield of Upper Assam Basin has been discussed. The Barail Formation which is the main producing reservoir exhibits unique behaviour in terms of fluid distribution. The aim of the study is to map the movement of Oil Water Contact with respect to time and production in the study area. The study is mainly based on the structural contour map drawn based on the open hole log data of drilled wells in different time frame throughout the development of the study area. Using Oil Field Management software a cross section had been prepared taking Oil Water Contact as base among the selected wells to track its trend in these wells of the study area. The present study shows that Oil Water Contact is disturbed upon the start of production and sensitive to the rate and volume of withdrawal from localized area. Aquifer is very active and vertical sweep efficiency in the reservoir is very good due to its reservoir properties which resulted a small transition zones as it is evident from the open hole logs of the wells drilled in different time span. The study also shows that as a result of the thinning of oil column and sand incursion owing to the high drawdown in the study area, the tracking of movement of Oil Water Contact is found to be very important.


This paper presents a novel adaptive synthetic (ADASYN) sampling approach for learning from imbalanced data sets. The essential idea of ADASYN is to use a weighted distribution for different minority class examples according to their level of difficulty in learning, where more synthetic data is generated for minority class examples that are harder to learn compared to those minority examples that are easier to learn. As a result, the ADASYN approach improves learning with respect to the data distributions in two ways: (1) reducing the bias introduced by the class imbalance, and (2) adaptively shifting the classification decision boundary toward the difficult examples. Simulation analyses on several machine learning data sets show the effectiveness of this method across five evaluation metrics.


The article presents an example of finishing treatment for aluminum alloys with the use of vibration machining, with loose abrasive media in a closed tumble r. For the analysis of selected properties of the surface layer prepared flat samples of aluminum alloy PA 6/2017 in the state after recrystallization. The samples in the first stage we re subjected to a treatment of deburring using ceramic media. In a second step polishing process perfor med with a strengthening metal media . In addition, for comparative purposes was considered. only the case of metal polishing. The prepared samples were s ubjected to hardness tests and a tangential tensile test. As a result of finishing with v ibratory machining , it was possible to remove burrs, flash, rounding sharp edges, smoothing and lightening the surface of objects made. The basic parameters of the sur face geometry were obtained using the Talysurf CCI Lite - Taylor Hobson optical profiler. As a result of the tests it can be stated that the greatest reduction of surface roughness and mass loss occurs in the first minutes of the process. Mechanical tests have shown that the most advantageous high values of tensile strength and hardness are obtained with two -stage vibration treatment, combination of deburring and polishing. Moreover the use of metal media resulted in the strengthening of the surface by pressure deburring with metal media.


Almost immediately after the discovery of the Roentgen ray, in 1895, radiation injuries of various kinds began to be encountered in early X-ray workers, radium handlers, radiologists, and exposed patients. The injuries, which were predominantly acute reactions resulting from the killing of cells in affected tissues, were found to be preventable merely by keeping exposures below relevant threshold levels. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, it was realized that thresholds might not exist for certain effects of ionizing radiation, such as mutagenic, carcinogenic, and teratogenic effects. The risks of such effects in workers and other populations exposed to low-level radiation have thus been of increasing concern in recent years. The scientific basis for assessing such risks and the principles that have evolved for their control have important implications for occupational and environmental health in general.


The accurate estimation of flow speeds with single loop data is critical to freeway traffic management. Many existing methods cannot accurately estimate speed because of difficulty in determining vehicle lengths and because some assumptions can be applied only to certain limited conditions. Moreover, excessive experimentally determined parameters some proposed approaches difficult to implement. A new unscented Kalman filter method of speed estimation is presented. The algorithm of the proposed method is implemented and evaluated with the use of field data from Texas Transportation Institute's vehicle detector test beds on State Route 6 in College Station, Texas, and on Interstate 35 in Austin, Texas. Estimated speeds are compared with observed speed data and with results from other estimation methods. The results indicate that the proposed method has excellent estimation accuracy and outperforms other methods. In addition to its superior accuracy, the proposed method is fairly easy to implement and practical for real-system implementation.


UNLABELLED
Anemia is a common symptom in multiple myeloma (MM) patients but the pathogenesis of it is still unknown. The aim of the study was to explain the causes of anemia in MM patients. Peripheral blood count, bone marrow aspirate, iron and ferritin level, serum erythropoietin (EPO) level, T cell subsets and in vitro CFU-E count were analyzed in the group od 31 MM patients. Erythropoietin and iron deficiency in the study group were not observed. EPO serum level was not significantly different in patients with multiple myeloma and in comparison to patients with sideroblastic anemia with solid tumors. Absolute CD8 T lymphocyte count was not significantly increased in the study group. CFU-E colonies count in vitro was not decreased in these patients.

CONCLUSIONS
In the study group of the MM patients anemia probably does not depend on EPO production. Diminished proliferative response of erythropoietic cells on normal serum level of EPO and abnormal iron utilisation probably occur in these patients. Replacement of normal erythropoiesis by tumor plasma cells is probably not decisive.


The ceramic trade throughout Medieval Southeast Asia was prolific. Terrestrial sites have yielded massive amounts of ceramic material and the archaeological reports of shipwreck cargoes corroborate the versatile and extensive qualities of trade ceramics in the region. The sheer quantity of ceramic artefacts found in shipwreck assemblages, paired with a well-researched framework of the aesthetic, demonstrates that we rely heavily on ceramic data to date wrecks and establish regional trading patterns. While ceramics typically represent the bulk of the recovered material in these instances, many other types of material are present in the various assemblages. Yet these "lesser" materials suffer from a lack of investigation and, therefore, play virtually no role in the archaeological and historical assessment of the ship, its cargo, and its relationship to the maritime economy of the period. While ceramic studies may provide a general overview, a consideration of the other material provides subtlety and nuance to the analysis. This case study focuses on the non-ceramic assemblages for six shipwrecks from the 14th and 15th Centuries of Southeast Asia (three Chinese-built and three Southeast Asian-styled junks). The typological study of the metallurgical, organic and geological material from these wrecks can complement much of the work surrounding existing trade models as well as reveal new concepts of crew life, belief systems and culture. These facets come together to offer a more holistic narrative as well as stimulating the need within the region for more study regarding the locations where past peoples mined and manufactured raw metals. The thesis will also consider the motivations behind the excavators of these projects and what role this plays in the interpretation of the non-ceramic material. One wreck was excavated by treasure hunters, one was done by an amateur archaeologist and a curator, and a third was excavated by a governmental organization. Two excavations were conducted by a non-profit foundation in conjunction with a National Museum and a final one was a purely academic excavation. Each party brings their own experiences and motivations to the excavation and therefore the systems of collection, curation, and conservation weigh heavily and are varied. These factors can determine what priorities each excavator brings to the analysis of excavated objects and the extent to which this effects the subsequent interpretation of the shipwreck.


The authors analyze different methods of treatment of perineal wounds after abdominoperineal extirpation of the rectum. They do not recommend for wider use the method of filling the cavity with an omental flap or loops of the small intestine. They consider haemostatic tamponades of the perineal cavity as obsolete in view of the large number of postoperative infectious complications. In their trials they used as a filling absorbable polymer. They elaborated a method of lavage drainage of the perineal wound which, in view of the favourable results achieved, is considered the method of choice.


The current theoretical knowledge concerning the influence of epistasis on heterosis is based on simplified multiplicative model. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of epistasis in the heterosis and combining ability analyses, assuming additive model, hundreds of genes, linkage disequilibrium (LD), dominance, and seven types of digenic epistasis. We developed the quantitative genetics theory for supporting the simulation of the individual genotypic values in nine populations, the selfed populations, the 36 interpopulation crosses, 180 doubled haploids (DHs) and their 16,110 crosses, assuming 400 genes in 10 chromosomes of 200 cM. Epistasis only affects population heterosis if there is LD. Only additive x additive and dominance x dominance epistasis can affect the components of the heterosis and combining ability analyses of populations. Both analyses can lead to completely wrong inferences regarding the identification of the superior populations, the populations with greater differences of gene frequencies, and the populations with maximum variability, when the number of interacting genes and the magnitude of the epistatic effects are high. There was a decrease in the average heterosis by increasing the number of epistatic genes and the magnitude of their epistatic effects. The same results are generally true for the combining ability analysis of DHs. Surprisingly, the combining ability analyses of subsets of 20 DHs showed no significant average impact of epistasis on the identification of the most divergent ones, even assuming a high number of epistatic genes and great magnitude of their effects. However, a significant negative effect can occur. Statements and Declarations The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. The author certifies that he has no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. The author has no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.


Based on a minimum time algorithm the planning of dense storage with complicated storage objects and numerous storage positions was studied. For the operating space constraints of storage equipment, a pre-solution of minimum storage was given, which was obtained by artificial arrangement. Then, the optimum solution was solved by the Minimum Time Algorithm. The model was built, and it was proved that this planning has been considered to be accurate enough and helpful in practical applications. Especially, the planning has been already used in practical medicine storage.


Bloodstream infections play an important role in neonatal morbidity and mortality. In this study, we retrospectively analyzed etiology and antibiotic resistance profiles of bacteria isolated from blood or Cerebro Spinal Fluid (CSF) cultures to evaluate the appropriateness of initial empirical therapy of neonatal sepsis. Methods: microbiological data from patients admitted to Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), from January 2005 to October 2018, were anonymously extracted from the Laboratory of Microbiology database. According to the neonatal sepsis definition for patients admitted to NICU, positive cultures obtained within the first 72 h of life were labeled as Early Onset Sepsis (EOS); and Late Onset Sepsis (LOS) for those obtained later. Results: 859 bacterial strains, 846 from blood and 13 from CSF, were detected in 611 neonates. In EOS, 75 blood cultures were found: 61 yielded Gram-positives and 14 Gram-negatives. Coagulase Negative Staphylococci (CoNS) represented the majority (52% n = 39). Streptococcus agalactiae and Escherichia coli were both isolated in 8% (n = 6) of cases. 784 strains were isolated in LOS: 686 (87%) Gram-positives and 98 (13%) Gram-negatives. CoNS represented most pathogens (n = 560, 71.4%) followed by Staphylococcus aureus (n = 57, 7.3%) and Enterococcus faecalis (n = 33, 4.2%). Ampicillin/gentamicin therapy resulted effective in 15/20 (75%) of EOS isolates. Internal protocol for LOS initial empirical therapy, calling for piperacillin/tazobactam and vancomycin resulted effective in 98.5% (734/745) of LOS strains. Conclusions: knowledge of local epidemiology of resistant pathogens, both in EOS and LOS, is fundamental to set up an effective empirical therapy in NICU. Aminoglycosides were fundamental in EOS. On the other side, LOS empirical therapy with vancomycin is sustained by the observation of 38% of methicillin resistance among S. aureus and about 95% in CoNS.


Current - voltage characteristics of step-edge junctions made of thin films were studied as a function of magnetic field and temperature within the framework of the Bardeen - Stephen flux flow model. The influence of a locally applied magnetic field was also studied by utilizing two kinds of junction, i.e. a single-layer junction made on a step on an MgO substrate and a multi-layer junction having a control line just below the junctions.


Abstract While quantification of the effects of NO x and water vapor is still at an early stage there is evidence that contrail formation could make a significant contribution to global warming. This paper builds on previous research that analyzed a policy of restricting air transport cruise altitudes to eliminate contrail formation. Our previous work [Transport. Res. D 7(6) (2002) 451], examined altitude restrictions in European airspace and concluded that this could be a beneficial policy for reducing climate change impacts from aviation. Since most of the flights in European airspace are short-haul flights, this paper evaluates the trade-offs between altitude restrictions, fuel burn and journey times for longer haul flights of up to 6000 nm. Our focus is on the North Atlantic and US airspace and we examine potential contrail fraction to determine optimal cruise altitudes for reducing contrail formation. Changes in fuel burn and travel times associated with flight levels of 18,000 and 31,000 ft for different aircraft types are analyzed. We find that, in most cases, CO2 emission increases would be unlikely to entirely counteract the benefit of possible reductions in contrail formation. For some aircraft types, the percentage increase in emitted CO2 was found to be strongly dependent on journey length. In general, journey times appear not to be a major issue except for some aircraft types. Our results suggest that reducing aircraft cruise altitudes could be a beneficial policy for mitigating climate change impacts from the aviation sector. This is clearly dependent on aircraft type and the distances traveled, but more importantly on ambient atmospheric conditions which can vary significantly between regions and due to daily variation. This suggests that real time flight planning to minimize contrail formation should be investigated as a possible climate mitigation policy.


Family farming is organized in different forms in the countries of Central Europe where collectivisation had been implemented. Many of these forms are different than seen in other parts of Europe. The reprivatisation and revival of family farming systems has been seen to be a complex process dependent on many determining factors. This article addresses why the various types of farms have arisen, why they survive or fail as a result of a process of de-collectivisation. The inheritance of the organisational of farms from parent to child has had to be replaced and questions arise about historical ownership and how this explains present forms. Small and large farms are generally dominate the agrarian structure. In a number of countries the family farms of a medium and a large size is less significant. To explain this situation a re-evaluation of institutional changes must be conducted, especially in light of both historical and current bifurcation where smaller smooth changes to the system caused sudden 'qualitative' or topological changes. Institutional change has to be considered and analysed as a moment of gradual elimination of the collectivized system through a number sequences of causally related events, each at a different pace. The absence or the weakness of modern family farms is the result of an unfavourable mix of both informal and formal institutions that put pressure on the revival of family farming. The political and economic environment created during transitional periods gave an obvious comparative advantage to large-scale farms. These same institutional changes had no particular limiting effect on the survival of small subsistence farms. Path dependent mechanisms, as they can effect to outcomes at a single moment in time or to long run equilibria of a process, are not absolute and policies implemented by reformers tend to lead to path diversion creating a plurality of structural arrangements often inefficient. New structural dichotomy has appeared between agricultural systems based on a high concentration of land and the use of paid labour (the Czech case), and agricultural systems with more dual configurations that combine family and non-family labour (Hungarian and Lithuanian cases). Path shifting mechanisms have been in favour of the continuity of large farms being transformed into corporate holdings or partnerships. They consequently have inhibited the setting up of a sustainable family farming model. Dismantling collective farming might open 79


A Hybrid cloud is a concrescence of public plus private clouds bound together by either standardized or proprietorship technology that changes information plus diligence immovableness. Proposed system aiming to expeditiously resolving yequandary from deduplication on differential favors in remote location computing. A hybrid remote location structure lying of a populace remote location plus a person removed location plus ye information owners simply source their information storage by using world cloud while ye information operation is managed in private cloud. To build information management measurability in cloud computing, de-duplication has been an identical well-kenned technique recently is use. Deduplication dilutes your bandwidth requirements, hastens the data transfers, and it keeps your cloud storage needs to a minimum. Proposed system demonstrates several nascent deduplication formulas fortifying approved duplicate assure inside hybrid remote location structure. To hold ye privacy of information ye convergent encoding proficiency holds made up used to encrypt ye information afore source. Approved deduplication system support differential sanction duplicate check. As a proof of conception, a prototype is implemented in approved duplicate check scheme and conduct test bed experiments utilizing prototype, approved duplicate check scheme incurs minimal overhead compared to mundane operations.


Unsupervised spectral clustering methods can yield good performance when identifying crisp clusters with low complexity since the learning algorithm does not rely on finding the local minima of an objective function and rather use spectral properties of the graph. Nonetheless, the performance of such approaches are usually affected by their uncertain parameters. Using the underlying structure of a general spectral clustering method, in this paper a new soft-link spectral clustering algorithm is introduced to identify clusters based on fuzzy k-nearest neighbor approach. We construct a soft weight matrix of a graph by identifying the upper and lower boundaries of learning parameters of the similarity function, specifically the fuzzifier parameter (fuzziness) of the Fuzzy k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm. The algorithm allows perturbations on the graph Laplace during the learning stage by the changes on these learning parameters. With the empirical analysis using an artificial and a real textual entailment dataset, we demonstrate that our initial hypothesis of implementing soft links can improve the classification performance of final outcome.


When phages were originally identified, the possibility of using them as antibacterial agents against pathogens was immediately recognized and put into practise based on the knowledge available at the time. However, with the advent of antibiotics a decline in the use of phage as therapeutics followed. Phages did, however, become more useful in the study of fundamental aspects of molecular biology and in the diagnostic laboratory for the identification of pathogenic bacteria. More recently, the original application of phage as therapeutics to treat human and animal infections has been rekindled, particularly in an era where antibiotic resistance has become so problematic/commonplace. Phage lysins have also been studied and utilized in their own right as potential therapeutics for the treatment of bacterial infections. Indeed the past decade has seen a considerable amount of research worldwide focused on the engineering of phages as antibacterial agents in a wide range of applications. Furthermore, the US Food and Drug Administration and/or the US Department of Agriculture have recently approved commercial phage preparations to prevent bacterial contamination of livestock, food crops, meat and other foods. Such developments have prompted this review into the status of phage research as it pertains to the control of infectious bacteria.


Although Robert Nozick has argued that libertarianism is compatible with the justice of a minimal state—even if does not arise from mutual consent—few have been persuaded. I will outline a different way of establishing that a non-consensual libertarian state can be just. I will show that a state can—with a few important qualifications—justly enforce the rights of citizens, extract payments to cover the costs of such enforcement, redistribute resources to the poor, and invest in infrastructure to overcome market failures.


Intelligent systems require sizable sets of known data for training. Developing datasets from real-world data is a time-consuming and cumbersome process. Simulation provides an alternative with key advantages: rapid data collection, automated semantic tagging, lower cost, etc. at the cost of realism. The major automotive autonomy efforts rely on simulation to supplement real-world driving with millions of miles of simulated driving. Simulators are also being used to develop and test autonomous algorithms for do-it-yourself autonomous remote-control cars, small-to-medium sized unmanned ground vehicles, and intelligent agents that exist only in virtual environments. Building and using simulated environments for training and testing intelligent systems provides many significant advantages, users must be aware of the limitations and constraints of simulated environments and carefully evaluate transfer of learning from simulated datasets to real-world performance.


In the new conditions of work with the staff, a creative individualized approach to human resource management. The speed of scientific and technological progress and the strengthening of competition determine the special role of personnel management in the overall management system of the organization. The system of personnel management should provide the necessary organizations with the skills and abilities, and support the desire to use these skills of its employees. To this end, special programs are being developed.


We propose a framework to perform streaming covariance selection. Our approach employs regularization constraints where a time-varying sparsity parameter is iteratively estimated via stochastic gradient descent. This allows for the regularization parameter to be efficiently learnt in an online manner. The proposed framework is developed for linear regression models and extended to graphical models via neighbourhood selection. Under mild assumptions, we are able to obtain convergence results in a non-stochastic setting. The capabilities of such an approach are demonstrated using both synthetic data as well as neuroimaging data.


Consumers are increasingly considering information on how foods are produced in making their buying decisions. For example, in the United States sales of products labeled as organic were estimated at over $3 billion in 1996. Federal and state governments are facing tough choices in deciding how to regulate what product labels tell us about how foods are produced. Our research highlights the important market-based considerations in making these choices. Many consumers are willing to pay more for products produced in specific ways, but it is often difficult or impossible for them to verify whether a product labeled as such was really produced in that way. Process attributes (e.g., pesticide or hormone use levels, environmental protection practices) usually cannot be judged by inspecting the product or even by consuming it. In this situation, =ethical producers could label their products as being produced in a specific way when they are not, deceiving consumers and causing them to pay for product characteristics they do not get. Ethical producers who have produced the product in the labeled way may find their market undermined by the cheaters. Avoiding these problems may require government or independent third-parties to provide verification for consumers. Someone outside the market may also be needed to set the process standards on which certification and labeling are based. This is often a complex process.


This report describes and analyzes the MD6 hash function and is part of our submission package for MD6 as an entry in the NIST SHA-3 hash function competition. Significant features of MD6 include: • Accepts input messages of any length up to 2 − 1 bits, and produces message digests of any desired size from 1 to 512 bits, inclusive, including the SHA-3 required sizes of 224, 256, 384, and 512 bits. • Security—MD6 is by design very conservative. We aim for provable security whenever possible; we provide reduction proofs for the security of the MD6 mode of operation, and prove that standard differential attacks against the compression function are less efficient than birthday attacks for finding collisions. We also show that when used as a MAC within NIST recommendedations, the keyed version of MD6 is not vulnerable to linear cryptanalysis. The compression function and the mode of operation are each shown to be indifferentiable from a random oracle under reasonable assumptions. • MD6 has good efficiency: 22.4–44.1M bytes/second on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo laptop with 32-bit code compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for digest sizes in the range 160–512 bits. When compiled for 64-bit operation, it runs at 61.8–120.8M bytes/second, compiled with MS VS, running on a 3.0GHz E6850 Core Duo processor. • MD6 works extremely well for multicore and parallel processors; we have demonstrated hash rates of over 1GB/second on one 16-core system, and over 427MB/sec on an 8-core system, both for 256-bit digests. We have also demonstrated MD6 hashing rates of 375 MB/second on a typical desktop GPU (graphics processing unit) card. We also show that MD6 runs very well on special-purpose hardware. • MD6 uses a single compression function, no matter what the desired digest size, to map input data blocks of 4096 bits to output blocks of 1024 bits— a fourfold reduction. (The number of rounds does, however, increase for larger digest sizes.) The compression function has auxiliary inputs: a "key" (K), a "number of rounds" (r), a "control word" (V ), and a "unique ID" word (U). • The standard mode of operation is tree-based: the data enters at the leaves of a 4-ary tree, and the hash value is computed at the root. See Figure 2.1. This standard mode of operation is highly parallelizable. 1http://www.csrc.nist.gov/pki/HashWorkshop/index.html


Rail transit is the most effective way to solve the urban traffic problem. However, due to the large initial investment and plenty of engineering materials it needs, it is valuable to study the problem on the return of the investment benefit. The paper first proves that the benefit of the construction of the rail transit will be the increased value of the land along the rail, and the benefit can be considered as the difference between the land prices before and after the opening of the rail. Secondly, based on this theory, by taking Dalian LRT NO.3 as the case study, a practical Hedonic Approach model is developed. And then, the influence of the being planned Dalian LRT NO.4 on the land price is calculated.


This analysis of the pricing (ADR), demand (occupancy), and revenue (RevPAR) dynamics in the U.S. hotel industry for the period 2001 through 2007 demonstrates the potentially negative consequences of attempting to maintain market share by offering prices below those of direct competitors. This seven-year study examined the outcomes of pricing behavior on total rooms revenue and occupancy for hotels and their competitors in both bad times (2001-2003) and good (2004-2007). The results are the same in both periods. Hotels that offer average daily rates above those of their direct competitors experienced lower occupancies compared to those other hotels, but recorded higher relative RevPARs. For 67,008 hotel observations, this pattern of demand and revenue behavior was consistent for hotels in all market segments, from luxury to economy. Overall the results suggest that the best way to have better revenue performance than your competitors is to have higher average rates. The findings suggest that lodging demand may be inelastic in local markets, and hotel operators may wish to resist the pressure to undercut competitors when possible.


Achieving high performance within stringent power budgets is emerging to be one of the most difficult challenges in the design of current generation digital systems. In synchronous systems, switching signals are typically allowed a fixed amount of time to settle within each clock cycle, with the clock period appropriately selected to accommodate the worst-case switching delay. Some additional timing margin, typically 10-20% of the clock period, is allowed beyond the nominal critical path delays to accommodate timing uncertainties introduced by process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations; these appear to be increasing significantly in highly scaled CMOS technologies. Unfortunately, despite the lack of switching activity, the circuit continues to consume significant static power during these timing margins, which consequently result in unwanted loss of both power and performance. Furthermore, since worst case signal paths in CMOS are highly input dependent and generally not activated in every clock cycle, this wasteful window of circuit inactivity in a typical cycle is often longer than just the timing margin. This is particularly true for circuits with a wide distribution of path delays, where the few long paths are infrequently activated; the computation completes with signals stabilizing quite early in most clock cycles. Clearly, significantly higher computational throughput and power efficiency could be achieved if the resulting window of circuit inactivity during the remainder of the clock cycles could be eliminated or even minimized. Asynchronous and data flow designs and architectures have long tried to exploit this statistical variability in delays in circuit functional blocks by building in a capability for signaling the completion of each operation. This can potentially allow execution to proceed as soon as a functional result is available, instead of waiting out the worst case delay for each functional block. An early and classic example is carry completion signaling in ripple carry adders which provides an indication as soon as the carry signals have stabilized and the result is valid, following application of each new set of inputs. Unfortunately, the efficient design of fully asynchronous and data flow systems has proved extremely challenging. Consequently, elements of asynchronous operation have sometimes been incorporated into traditional clock based designs using some form of a handshaking control protocol. Typically such designs dynamically allow functional units a varying number of system clock periods to complete their operation, thereby avoiding worst case delays in every instance. The mechanisms employed to ensure that a functional block gets sufficient time to correctly complete its operation broadly take three forms. (1) Completion signaling, where the function is designed with redundant outputs (or output coding) which directly indicates when the result is valid. (2) Input based timing prediction, where (a subset of) the inputs are decoded to quickly determine if for those inputs the circuit will need one, two or more cycles. And (3) error detection based recovery, where error detection circuits check the results at the end of every clock cycle and initiate a recovery, requiring additional cycles, in case of an error caused by the aggressive clock timing. In this presentation we discuss a number of better-than-worst-case design approaches that have been proposed in the literature. We not only focus on the various low cost error detection and recovery techniques that have been proposed, but also address other major challenges in implementing such designs. Key among them is addressing potential flip-flop meta-stability which can occur if the flip-flop inputs are allowed to arrive at arbitrary times relative to the clock signal, as is the case in such overclocked designs. Another challenge associated with the commonly used flip-flop duplication based timing error detection approach are false error indications from the activation of short paths. Mitigation of this problem using path buffering and hold latches is discussed. Recent results from experimental circuits prototyped by ARM and Intel are also presented. Finally, we discuss promising new research, including efficient application of the better-than-worst-case design concept to arithmetic circuits.


Oceanic and coastal bioluminescence in surface waters, in many instances, is produced by microscopic dinoflagellates. Their light emission is usually observed at a maximum during the night hours and markedly inhibited during the day. This diel periodicity has never been observed in situ for identified species and never before in heterotrophic Protoperidinium dinoflagellates. Pronounced differences in stimulable bioluminescence measured with bathyphotometers in Vestfjord, Norway in September 1990 correlated with simultaneous ship-board laboratory experiments. Cells of both the photosynthetic Ceratium fusus and heterotrophic Protoperidinium curtipes showed a pronounced inhibition of bioluminescence during the day and maximum bioluminescence at night.


Bistatic radar is a subject of considerable present interest. Despite this, current understanding of the properties of bistatic clutter, and in particular, bistatic sea clutter, is limited at best. The purpose of this study is to present an analysis of the limited existing published radar data and to derive an empirical model, which expresses the variation of mean σ0 with the measurement geometry and sea conditions. This empirical model is then compared with electromagnetic (EM) scattering calculations using the composite model (sometimes called the two-scale model) to show the extent to which the EM model is able to reproduce the trends observed in the data. The results indicate where improvements to bistatic EM modelling are required (very low grazing angles and out-of-plane scattering), and a general need for more radar data to extend the empirical σ0 model and expand it to the bistatic clutter statistics.


The overexpression of thioredoxin (Trx) 1 is one of the mechanisms for drug resistance in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) treatment. The co-delivery of drugs and a short hairpin RNA (shRNA) against Trx1 to silence its expression might provide a promising approach to improve drug sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents. In this paper, cationic liposomes containing gemini surfactants, soybean lecithin and DOPE were firstly constructed as gene transfection carriers. The length and symmetrical degree of aliphatic chains of gemini surfactants were found to affect gene transfection efficiency of cationic liposomes. Cationic liposome containing gemini surfactants with symmetrical C16 aliphatic chains (L16-2-16) showed the highest transfection efficiency in HCC Bel7402 cells and also displayed the strongest DNA condensation capacity and the highest cellular uptake. Folic acid (FA) targeting further enhanced the transfection efficiency of L16-2-16 by binding to the folate receptor (FR) in FR-overexpressing Bel7402 cells and lipid raft/caveolae-dependent endocytosis might be involved in FA-L16-2-16-mediated gene delivery. Then the multifunctional co-delivery system for doxorubicin (DOX) and Trx1 shRNA was developed via electrostatic interactions between the FA-L16-2-16 and Trx1 shRNA/DOX complex. Co-delivery of Trx1 shRNA and DOX by FA-L16-2-16 inhibited the cell viability and induced apoptosis of Bel7402 cells more efficiently than co-delivery of control shRNA and DOX. The system for co-delivering DOX and Trx1 shRNA could simultaneously achieve gene transfection and drug release in the same cell and increase the intracellular as well as intranuclear DOX concentrations. These results demonstrated that gemini surfactant-based cationic liposomes were promising carriers for the co-delivery of nucleic acids and chemotherapeutic agents to sensitize HCC chemotherapy.