Previous studies on the United States and Latin America have demonstrated unequal media coverage of men and women during electoral campaigns. However, in Mexico, a country where women increasingly participate in politics, this has seldom been studied. This is worrisome when considering that, with gender stereotyping, the media can create new barriers for female candidates, affecting voters' perceptions of women's expertise and policy proposals. Through a comparative analysis, this research explores the role of the media when covering women running for office. It specifically studies coverage of executive-branch campaigns at the three levels of government. This is an important contribution to the literature as there are few studies of the Mexican context; specifically, this research examines the visibility, focus, traits, and issues covered in written media in order to explore, as well expand knowledge of, media biases and Mexican politics. Findings suggest that women running for positions with more power received different appraisal in printed media. Furthermore, male candidates received more coverage with the number of stories and headlines explicitly covering them higher than female candidates. This was most evident in municipal elections. At the same time, coverage of both female and male candidates shied away from personal traits or family matters. The media's attention was on 'male' issues, where women were less competitive than men. Albeit with marginal differences, coverage of municipal elections was positive for women (where they won), compared with that of the across-the-board losses for female candidates running for governor.


This paper proposes a novel thin-film resonator structure, which combines the microstrip resonator and the coplanar resonator to form an integrated resonator. This resonator structure has an extremely compact size, as compared to the thin-film resonator structures from the literature, and its resonant frequency was shown theoretically to be less sensitive to, or even insensitive to, the thickness of the substrate. An eight-pole quasi-elliptic filter based on this novel resonator was designed. The exact filter layout was simulated and optimized by full-wave electromagnetic simulation using IE3D software. The full-wave simulated filter response was in good agreement with the theoretical filter response. A filter was fabricated on a double-sided YBa/sub 2/Cu/sub 3/O/sub 7/ thin film epitaxially grown on a 2-in-diameter MgO wafer. The measured filter response showed a bandwidth of 1.5 MHz and a center frequency of 850.3 MHz at 78 K. The insertion loss at the passband center was 1 dB, corresponding to a filter Q of 28 000. Steep rejection slopes were obtained at the band edges and rejections reached over 70 dB in approximately 300 kHz from the passband edges. No pronounced changes were observed for input power levels between -20-0 dBm, indicating a relatively high power-handling capability of the filter.


Aims The aim of our research was to gain data about the efficacy of intravitreal injections of a recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rTPA) in dissolving vitreoretinal tractions (VRTs). Materials and methods The study group consisted of patients of our Ophthalmology Clinic who had received an injection of rTPA (TPA Group) for an existent vitreomacular traction confirmed by optical coherence tomography and stereoscopic examinations. The control group consisted of patients who had declined treatment despite the existence of a vitreomacular traction confirmed by the same diagnostic methods. Each group consisted of 30 people (30 eyes). The observation period was 6 months. Conclusion In both groups some of the VRTs had dissolved. In the TPA group the traction dissolved in 10 patients (33.33%) and in the control group only in 5 (16.67%). It is also important to point out that the mean baseline membrane thickness was higher in the TPA group than in the control group. Observing patients in both groups we noticed that the dissolution of vitreoretinal membrane occurred most frequently in those cases where the membrane was thin. In the TPA group, the mean membrane thickness after 6 months decreased considerably. At the same time, no significant change in the membrane thickness could be observed in the control group. Observation of the retinal thickness allows us to draw the following conclusion: in the TPA group, the retinal thickness in the macular area (edema) had decreased over the study period, whereas in the control group it had increased. In those cases where the traction had dissolved, the edema of the retina decreased by the end of the 6-month period in both groups. In the TPA group, the dissolution of the membrane occurred most often within 3 months from the primary injection. Based on statistics, we can confirm that in the control group there was a decrease in visual acuity during the 6 months of the study period. At the same time, visual acuity in the TPA group underwent a small improvement. A 6-month observation had shown that in patients with strong VRTs, and in particular with VRTs accompanied by epiretinal membranes, a single intraocular injection is not enough to achieve posterior vitreous detachment. We have also shown that rTPA is a safe drug, with no adverse effects observed during the study period.


This paper develops a new approach to the study of network effects in organizations and markets by proposing that structural influences on social and economic action result from contingent blends of well-understood social mechanisms. We emphasize the interplay of three different network processes: resource and information transfer, status signaling and certification, and social influence. Different mixes of these mechanisms characterize disparate networks because the obligations imposed by ties and the capacities of partners result in situations where mechanisms amplify or diminish one another. We test hypotheses about mechanism interactions using four years (1997–2000) of data on high-technology IPOs that situate organizational decisions about whether to withdraw an offering in two distinct networks. We find that network mechanisms exert multiple moderating effects on one another and that those effects vary systematically across venture capital syndicate and director interlock networks. These findings help to explain why different networks exert disparate effects, why the effects of some structures change as their larger contexts shift, and why even very successful organizations can sometimes find themselves hamstrung by their connections.


Presented is a study of fault equivalence in steady-state DC linear analog circuits. Equivalent fault relationships attributable to node isolation or equivalence in the driving-point and/or transfer characteristics of one-port network are shown to prevent effective fault diagnosis in a number of basic analog circuits. The analysis of these conditions using graph and transformation theorems is demonstrated to provide the basis for a more systematic approach to improving fault diagnosis.


Background Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness that burdens both patients and caregivers. Objective The aim of this study is to examine the feasibility of a web-based psychoeducation course targeted at caregivers of persons with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) and to describe their experiences of living with a person with SSD based on the material caregivers produced during the web-based course. Methods A convergent, parallel, mixed methods study design was used. First, caregivers' engagement in the course was evaluated quantitatively. Second, the overview of the course feedback was evaluated using quantitative and qualitative methods. Third, the experiences of being a caregiver to a person with SSD were analyzed qualitatively with the thematic analysis of the writings caregivers produced during the web-based course. Results A total of 30 caregivers participated in the study and a web-based psychoeducation course. Less than two-thirds (18/30, 60%) completed the course. Content was most often logged for the first module, Orientation (3465 log-ins), and the lowest number of log-ins was recorded for the Daily life module (1061 log-ins). Feedback on the course varied; over half (10/17, 59%) of the caregivers considered the content to be very good or good, about half (9/17, 53%) considered the website layout to be good, only 6% (1/17) felt that the usability of the website was poor, and no one felt that it was very poor. From the reported experiences of being a caregiver to a person with SSD, 3 themes were formed: the caregiver's own well-being, relationship with the person with SSD, and experience of health care services. Conclusions The web-based psychoeducation course for caregivers living with a person with SSD seems to be especially suitable for those who have little experience as a caregiver. In the future, more planning and the consideration of aspects related to the needs of specific target groups, course content, practical arrangements, and scheduling should be taken into account. In addition, although caregivers can improve their own well-being in different ways, they need regular support and cooperation from health care professionals.


Smart Living or intelligent environment for living provides great comfort to the people. Smart Home is the concept of living in a home that is self-manageable, automated and user centric. Smart Living concept integrates assistance and comfort for disabled and elder person. Assistive/Adaptive Technology enhances the quality of life for disabled persons as it aims to reduce the effects of impairments. Disabled and elder person can perform daily life activities and participate in social life by adopting appropriate Assistive Technology device. Researchers as well as many industries view disability with different aspects and proposed smart devices to support disabled and elder person. Many appliances and comprehensive assisted living system are commercially available in market. These devices and systems are aimed to provide support in different walks of life but their integration on a single platform is major issue. Smartphone based Remote Control application with single interface could significantly assist living. In this paper, research group explore the high-tech assistive technology devices, which are either commercially available or proposed in research papers and categorize them according to their role in daily living. Further, research group propose a remote control model provided on mobile, which integrate assistive living functions and exploit mobile technology for smart living.


Objective: Analysis of time-to-failure data, especially in a highly reliable product becomes very difficult due to small duration between production and release in the market. So, accelerated life testing (ALT) is the most widely used in the past few years in a product life testing. In this paper, we considered the lifetime generalized exponential distribution (GED) under constant stress partially ALT with Type-II censoring scheme. Material and Method: The maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) of the parameters of GED and accelerate factor is present. The approximate confidence intervals (ACIs) based on the normal approximation to the asymptotic distribution of MLEs are constructed. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for Bayesian point and interval estimation is tackled. Results: The measurement of developing methods is assessed and compared through numerical example and Monte Carlo simulation. Conclusion : Estimation results are more acceptable and Bayesian point and interval estimation are better than the approximate MLSs estimation.


Abstract Libellago corbeti sp. nov. (holotype ♂: Sri Lanka, Ratnapura District, near Kudawe, 6.26°N, 80.25°E, 03 vii 2007, to be deposited in the Sri Lanka National Museum, Colombo) is described and figured. Its phenotype does not resemble that of any other Libellago species. Habitat characteristics and species behaviour are briefly outlined. Keys to males and females of Libellago species in Sri Lanka are provided.


Adenoma Sebaceum.-JOHN FRANKLIN, M.B. This patient, Mrs. A. M., aged 33, married, has had the condition on the face as long as she can remember. She suffered from epileptic fits from the age of eight until two or three years ago. Last October she had a miscarriage and during the pregnancy had three further epileptic fits. Otherwise she is perfectly normal, enjoys good health and is intellectually bright. The Wassermann reaction is negative. She states quite definitely that if she becomes ill the condition of the face improves and she is certain that some years ago during an attack of pneumonia the whole thing disappeared for a short while. She has two sisters quite normal, but she thinks that her mother had a patch similar to her own on one cheek. On examination numerous small soft white tumours, varying in size from that of a pin's head to that of a lentil, are seen on the nose and both cheeks, being most marked in the furrows on either side of the nose. There is no abnormal pigmentation, and, except for an occasional dilated capillary, there are no marked telangiectases. There are no moles or other tumours to be seen. Dr. Pulvertaft, of Westminster Hospital, has kindly prepared the microscopic sections and reports that: " The tissue consists of proliferated sebaceous glands which project more deeply than normally into the corium. The ducts are in places blocked forming cysts. There is chronic inflammation and blood-vessels are prominent. No sign of nmvoid cells."


Abstract The prototype of the Infant in the Virgin and Child before a Firescreen was probably an anapesōn representation. This time, Campin was presumably directly influenced by Byzantine art. Early Netherlandish painters were similarly motivated to draw on Byzantine models as their Italian contemporaries were driven to the sculpture of classical antiquity.


A high fidelity recording system has been used to observe the elastic wave motion at vertical separations from an exploding charge ranging from 15 to 300 feet. The motion near the charge has a predominant frequency of about 1000 cps for rigid material and a duration of a few milliseconds. The motion becomes increasingly complex and low frequency components become dominant as the point of observation recedes from the source. A secondary wave which may be a bound wave associated with the fluid in the drill hole was observed.


When sexually-naive male mice are placed together with newborn young, some males will commit infanticide (kill the young) while others will behave parentally (retrieve the young to a nest and keep them warm). The intrauterine position of male mouse fetuses, which is recorded at Cesarean delivery, has previously been found to influence the titers of estradiol that male fetuses are exposed to in utero. In adulthood, most male mice that developed in utero between male fetuses (2 M males) behaved parentally toward young, while most males that developed in utero between female fetuses (0 M males) committed infanticide. When 0 M and 2 M males were castrated at birth and tested with young in adulthood, few males committed infanticide. But, when these same males were tested with young after 25 days of treatment with testosterone, more 0 M than 2 M males committed infanticide and more 2 M than 0 M males behaved parentally. In contrast to the above findings, more 2 M than 0 M males that were castrated when 28 days old behaved parentally without treatment with testosterone; few of the non-parental males committed infanticide, but, instead, ignored the young. Finally, stressing pregnant mice by placing them under bright lights during the last third of pregnancy eliminated the effect of developing next to female fetuses in the male offspring, and all prenatally-stressed males resembled 2 M males in their behavior toward young: most prenatally-stressed males were parental rather than infanticidal when tested with young. The significance of these findings to models of hormonal effects on sexual differentiation is discussed.


The receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor lapatinib, indicated to treat patients with HER2-positive breast cancer in combination with capecitabine, can cause severe hepatotoxicity. Lapatinib is further associated with mitochondrial toxicity and accumulation of reactive oxygen species. The effect of lapatinib on the Kelch-like ECH-associated protein 1 (Keap1)-nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) pathway, the major cellular defense pathway against oxidative stress, has so far not been studied in detail. In the present study, we show that lapatinib (2–20 µM) activates the Keap1-Nrf2 pathway in HepG2 cells, a hepatocellular carcinoma-derived cell line, in a concentration-dependent manner upon 24 h of treatment. Lapatinib stabilized the transcription factor Nrf2 at concentrations ≥5 µM and caused its nuclear translocation. Well-established Nrf2 regulated genes (Nqo1, Gsta1, Gclc, and Gclm) were upregulated at lapatinib concentrations ≥10 µM. Furthermore, cellular and mitochondrial glutathione (GSH) levels increased starting at 10 µM lapatinib. As a marker of oxidative stress, cellular GSSG significantly increased at 10 and 20 µM lapatinib. Furthermore, the gene expression of mitochondrial Glrx2 and SOD2 were increased upon lapatinib treatment, which was also observed for the mitochondrial SOD2 protein content. In conclusion, lapatinib treatment for 24 h activated the Keap1-Nrf2 pathway in HepG2 cells starting at 10 μM, which is a clinically relevant concentration. As a consequence, treatment with lapatinib increased the mRNA and protein expression of antioxidative and other cytoprotective genes and induced GSH synthesis, but these measures could not completely block the oxidative stress associated with lapatinib.


C © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Nutrition. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Published online September 6, 2021. Lukoye Atwoli, editor in chief, East African Medical Journal; Abdullah H. Baqui, editor in chief, Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition; Thomas Benfield, editor in chief, Danish Medical Journal; Raffaella Bosurgi, editor in chief, PLOS Medicine; Fiona Godlee, editor in chief, The BMJ; Stephen Hancocks, editor in chief, British Dental Journal; Richard Horton, editor in chief, The Lancet; Laurie Laybourn-Langton, senior adviser, UK Health Alliance on Climate Change; Carlos Augusto Monteiro, editor in chief, Revista de Saúde Pública; Ian Norman, editor in chief, International Journal of Nursing Studies; Kirsten Patrick, interim editor in chief, CMAJ; Nigel Praities, executive editor, Pharmaceutical Journal; Marcel G.M. Olde Rikkert, editor in chief, Dutch Journal of Medicine; Eric J. Rubin, editor in chief, NEJM; Peush Sahni, editor in chief, National Medical Journal of India; Richard Smith, chair, UK Health Alliance on Climate Change; Nick Talley, editor in chief, Medical Journal of Australia; Sue Turale, editor in chief, International Nursing Review; Damián Vázquez, editor in chief, Pan American Journal of Public Health.


Based on the embedded-atom method, molecular dynamics simulations have been performed to study the structural features of Al and Cu in the liquid and solid states during rapid solidification. The calculated pair correlation functions above the melting points of Al and Cu are found to be in good agreement with experiment, especially for Cu. The results show that the EAM can correctly and efficiently predict the glass transition and crystallization during rapid solidification from liquid metals, and can also describe microstructures of liquids, supercooled liquids, glasses and crystalline phases. In addition, structural analysis using bond orientational order and pair analysis techniques have been made in detail, and the effect of cooling rate on microstructures during rapid solidification has been analysed.


Many important topics in multiobjective optimization and decision making have been studied in this book so far. In this chapter, we wish to discuss some new trends and challenges which the field is facing. For brevity, we here concentrate on three main issues: new problem areas in which multiobjective optimization can be of use, new procedures and algorithms to make efficient and useful applications of multiobjective optimization tools and, finally, new interesting and practically usable optimality concepts. Some research has already been started and some such topics are also mentioned here to encourage further research. Some other topics are just ideas and deserve further attention in the near future.


We perform a rigorous study of private matrix analysis when only the last W updates to matrices are considered useful for analysis. We show the existing framework in the non-private setting is not robust to noise required for privacy. We then propose a framework robust to noise and use it to give first efficient o(W ) space differentially private algorithms for spectral approximation, principal component analysis (PCA), multi-response linear regression, sparse PCA, and non-negative PCA. Prior to our work, no such result was known for sparse and non-negative differentially private PCA even in the static data setting. We also give a lower bound to demonstrate the cost of privacy.


Arcanobacterium haemolyticum formerly known as Corynebacteria haemolyticum is a Gram positive bacilli. It is a fastidious, facultative anerobic, catalase negative, beta haemolytic and non motile bacterium. Gram positive bacilli are usually considered to be non-pathogenic as the majority are part of normal flora of human skin and mucous membranes. Hence, diagnosis of such infection and its treatment may be delayed by a failure of recognition. However, this bacterium has been implicated in wound, superficial and deep-seated soft tissue infections, endocarditis, osteomyelitis, meningitis, pneumonia, and also septicemia. The early diagnostic evaluation of this organism is emphasized. We report a case series which illustrates the significance of Arcanobacterium haemolyticum in skin and soft tissue infections.


Marine fouling has been a major problem for man since he first placed materials in the ocean environment. Until four or five years ago, the methods used for the control of biofouling had not changed much from those used by the Phoenicians in the 13th century B.C. This paper reviews the historical and biological context for the new methods of fouling control. An overview of present day antifouling technology is presented and the future of fouling control technology is discussed.


Abstract Between the late 1970s and early 1990s, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) altered its First Amendment advocacy, shifting from being an ardent supporter of the strict separation of church and state to being a champion of the government accommodation of religion. At the same time, the denomination also became unswervingly pro-life. In this article, I use the SBC case to identify a previously under-analyzed link between abortion politics and church-state politics. I suggest that pro-life politics played an important role in the SBC's shift away from the separation of church and state. I focus on three areas where abortion politics aided this shift: (1) opposing separationists' assertions that anti-abortion policies violated the Establishment Clause; (2) becoming allies rather than foes with Catholics; and (3) promoting a greater emphasis on the free exercise of religion. I conclude by discussing the implications for the relationship between religion, law, and politics.


Ischemic stroke is an acute neurological syndrome either due to permanent or temporary obstruction of blood. Such obstruction immediately triggers abrupt pathological cascading processes, which collectively lead to neuronal cell death. Oxidative stress and neuroinflammation in ischemic stroke are critical regulating events that ultimately lead to neuronal death. Complicated interplay exists between the two processes which occur through several stages. Most often, oxidative stress precedes the inflammatory mechanisms and includes several interconnected cascades that underlie the ischemic stroke pathology. In continuation of the previously published data, here, we further ruled out the protective role of melatonin in focal cerebral ischemic injury model. Administration of 5 mg/kg dose of melatonin 30 min prior to ischemia reduced brain infarction associated with sequentially rescued neuronal apoptosis. Furthermore, melatonin attenuated neuroinflammatory markers and reactive oxygen species (ROS), induced by ischemic stroke, via halting the key players of mitogen stress family (p38/JNK). Besides, melatonin modulated the endogenously produced antioxidant enzyme, thioredoxin (Trx) pathway. These broader therapeutic efficacies of melatonin suggest that melatonin could be further investigated for its diverse therapeutic actions with multiple targets in recovering, preventing and halting the detrimental outcomes of MCAO, such as elevated oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, and neurodegeneration.


Exact pattern matching is a method of localizing arbitrarily sized patterns in time series data. To date, the problem of exact pattern matching has only been fully addressed for one query pattern on one time series with a single best match location. This paper addresses the broader problem of finding the top-K pattern matches for a multidimensional time series pattern in a large multidimensional time series. The problem is addressed in two stages using an algorithm that combines ideas from the fields of data mining and bi-clustering. The first stage of the algorithm addresses selecting the dimension subset that matches the query pattern and locating the matching pattern. The second stage of the algorithm addresses the problem of finding the top-K matches of the pattern in the selected time series dimensions. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated against the best single dimensional exact pattern matching algorithm on real and simulated data.


Classically, semantic theories have assumed that words are endowed with universal, immutable meanings. This assumption is not tenable when modeling natural language dialogue; far from treating word meanings as fixed entities, linguistic agents are constantly coordinating useful semantic conventions. They disambiguate polysemous words, construct ad hoc interpretations particular to their communicatory goals, and ultimately learn new ways to use old words based on these collaborations. This thesis proposes a lexical model for dialogue semantics that supports semantic coordination. The model that is proposed employs a hierarchical lexicon to distinguish between the different kinds of shared semantic information. It is used to build a theory of semantic coordination that drives lexicosemantic learning and tends to introduce polysemy in the lexicon. The lexical model and theory of semantic coordination are formalized using Type Theory with Records, which uses feature structure-like objects to store semantic information. Finally, the thesis presents some empirical work: A corpus study on contrastive focus reduplication—one strategy for semantic coordination—confirms predictions made by the pragmatic and semantic theory presented earlier, and a signaling games simulation supports the connection between semantic coordination and polysemy that is predicted by the hierarchical lexical model.


Ab initio modulation models require a number of turbulence quantities as input for any reasonable diffusion tensor. While turbulence transport models describe the radial evolution of such quantities, they in turn require observations in the inner heliosphere as input values. To study long-term modulation requires turbulence data over at a least a solar magnetic cycle. As a start we analyze 1-minute resolution data for the N-component of the magnetic field, from 1974 to 2012 (initially using IMP and then ACE data), covering about two solar magnetic cycles. We assume a very simple three-stage power-law frequency spectrum to construct a second-order structure function that is fitted to the data. Apart from an inertialand an energy range (with the transition between the two denoted by the bendover scale), we assume a cutoff range at small frequencies in order to ensure a finite energy density. The spectrum is forced to be either flat or to decrease with decreasing frequency in the latter range. Given that cosmic rays sample magnetic fluctuations over long periods in their transport through the heliosphere, we average the spectra over at least 27 days. We find that the variance of the N-component has a clear solar-cycle dependence, with smaller values (~6 nT2) during solar minimum and larger during solar maximum periods (~17 nT2), well correlated with the magnetic field magnitude, in agreement with previous studies. The inertial range index almost identical to the Kolomogorov value 5/3. Our results suggest that the dominant change in the spectrum of fluctuations of the N-component of the magnetic field, over a solar magnetic cycle, is its level. To a good approximation the spectrum retains its shape for scales up to ~100 times the bendover scale, while its level is well correlated with the magnitude of the magnetic field.


A theoretical model for the capacitance-voltage characteristics of strained modulation-doped field-effect transistors (MODFETs) is developed, based on a self-consistent solution of the Schrodinger and Poisson equations. We report on the first MODFET C-V simulator in which the proposed Hamiltonian takes into account the strain caused by lattice mismatch, as well as the position-dependent lattice constant and electron effective mass. It is demonstrated that the inclusion of strain-related energy terms is essential to achieve good agreement between theory and experimental data for the C-V characteristics of pseudomorphic-channel devices at high gate voltages. The model is also shown to be a useful tool to predict important device characteristics such as the transconductance.


Background: Pain is a common complaint of patients after surgery. Different techniques or medications including local anesthetics infiltration, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or opioids have been used for postoperative analgesia. Lidocaine is an amide local anesthetic agent that works by influencing the complex phenomenon of pain. Aim: To compare the mean pain score with intraoperative lidocaine versus control in patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy under general anesthesia. Methods: 350 patients aged 20-60 years of either sex scheduled for laparoscopic cholecystectomy were included in the study. Patients with allergy to lidocaine; patients with neuromuscular disease, endocrine or metabolic disorder and pregnant patients were excluded from study. Patients were randomly divided in two groups by using lottery method after taking informed consent. On arrival to the operating room, monitor was attached to display continuous ECG, mean arterial blood pressure, and arterial oxygen saturation. Results: In lidocaine group, the mean age of patients was 39.93±11.56years. In control group, the mean age of patients was 37.93±11.83years. In lidocaine group, there were 91 (52%) males and 84 (48%) females. In control group, there were 77 (44%) males and 98 (56%) females. In lidocaine group, the mean BMI of patients was 26.66±4.81kg/m2. In control group, the mean BMI of patients was 26.77±4.76kg/m2. In lidocaine group, the mean pain score of patients was 1.00±0.84. In control group, the mean pain score of patients was 2.39±1.10. The difference was significant (p<0.05). Conclusion: Thus lidocaine is found to be more effective in reducing postoperative pain than control. Keywords: General anesthesia, laparoscopic cholecystectomy, lidocaine, postoperative pain.


Childhood cystic partially differentiated nephroblastoma (CPDN) is an uncommon renal neoplasm. Bilateral CPDN or CPDN co-existing with a cystic nephroma/Wilms tumour is extremely rare. Treatment of CPDN is by complete surgical excision. Although local recurrences are uncommon, distant metastases have not been described. We present a case of bilateral CPDN that, after complete excision, recurred as bilateral cystic Wilms tumour. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported case in the literature where a bilateral CPDN has recurred as bilateral Wilms tumour.


Since the advent of word embedding methods, the representation of longer pieces of texts such as sentences and paragraphs is gaining more and more interest, especially for textual similarity tasks. Mikolov et al. (2013) have demonstrated that words and phrases exhibit linear structures that allow to meaningfully combine words by an element-wise addition of their vector representations. Recently, Arora et al. (2017) have shown that removing the projections of the weighted average sum of word embedding vectors on their first principal components, outperforms sophisticated supervised methods including RNN's and LSTM's. Inspired by Mikolov et al. (2013) and Arora et al. (2017) findings and by a bilingual word mapping technique presented in Artetxe et al. (2016), we introduce MappSent, a novel approach for textual similarity. Based on a linear sentence embedding representation, its principle is to build a matrix that maps sentences in a joint-subspace where similar sets of sentences are pushed closer. We evaluate our approach on the SemEval 2016/2017 question-to-question similarity task and show that overall MappSent achieves competitive results and outperforms in most cases state-of-art methods.


Common solids (e.g., flour, sugar, etc.,) can be suspended and transported in air via pneumatic conveying systems. Finely divided solid substances dispersed into a dust cloud (e.g., into a silo) can form a potential explosive atmosphere, if in the right concentration with the oxidizing agent (e.g., air). In addition, it is known that the pneumatic handling of substance, which allows its transport at a certain velocity, can generate static charges; thus, a possible competent ignition source may be also created. In this paper, the causation of an actual dust explosion involving a flour silo being loaded from a tank truck through pneumatic conveying systems in an industrial plant is analyzed. The mechanisms of static discharge applicable to the case in question are discussed, in light of both actual empirical data collected at the incident site, and theory. To fully explain the events that led to the explosion, plausible hypotheses and alternative to static discharge were also evaluated.


There are various types of Multilevel Converters (MCs) in addition to various types of modulation techniques for these types of MCs; the challenges in selecting the best one of them with regard to the amount of the required of components, and its harmonics content. So, a comparison study among these types has been done in this paper. For comparison study, the simulation of seven level of two popular topologies of MCs: Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) converter, and Cascaded-MCs were carried out with Matlab/Simulink software program. These converters are used to drive a single phase capacitor start motor drive. Multicarrier modulation control techniques are used for controlling the MCs; these techniques involve two main type: Level Shifted Carrier (LSC), and Phase Shifted Carrier (PSC). The comparison is made with respect to the performance factors as, the amplitude of  the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), and the DC-bus utilization performance which measured by Root Mean Square of the output voltage Vrms at variable modulation indices and variable carrier frequency. Based on simulation results it's found, that the cascaded-MC with PSC modulation method gives best results, in addition to the Alternative Phase Opposition Disposition APOD-LSC modulation technique (with even number of modulation frequency) generate the output voltage with a lower harmonic content compared with the other techniques.


Pharmacogenomic experiments allow for the systematic testing of drugs, at varying dosage concentrations, to study how genomic markers correlate with cell sensitivity to treatment. The first step in the analysis is to quantify the response of cell lines to variable dosage concentrations of the drugs being tested. The signal to noise in these measurements can be low due to biological and experimental variability. However, the increasing availability of pharmacogenomic studies provides replicated data sets that can be leveraged to gain power. To do this, we formulate a hierarchical mixture model to estimate the drug-specific mixture distributions for estimating cell sensitivity and for assessing drug effect type as either broad or targeted effect. We use this formulation to propose a unified approach that can yield posterior probability of a cell being susceptible to a drug conditional on being a targeted effect or relative effect sizes conditioned on the cell being broad. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach via case studies. First, we assess pairwise agreements for cell lines/drugs within the intersection of two data sets and confirm the moderate pairwise agreement between many publicly available pharmacogenomic data sets. We then present an analysis that identifies sensitivity to the drug crizotinib for cells harboring EML4-ALK or NPM1-ALK gene fusions, as well as significantly down-regulated cell-matrix pathways associated with crizotinib sensitivity.


The mechanism of gunshot residue (GSR) deposition and its probing characteristics have been studied by the Glue-Lift collection of GSR and its identification by scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray analysis (SEM-EDX). By blocking alternately muzzle-blast residues and trigger-blast residues of shotguns, it has been shown that, if the firearm is thoroughly cleaned before the firing, the muzzle-blast residues seldom settle from the air onto the shooter's hands. Whereas the trigger-blast residues are literally blasted onto the immediate surfaces of the firearm and on both of the shooter's hands that are on the weapon. Therefore, the hand deposits are mainly the breech deposits. If the firearm is not pre-cleaned the residues of previous firings lodged as fouling in the interior of the gun are blown off rather irregularly through the breeches and the muzzle in the subsequent firings. These residues occasionally overlap with the fresh breech deposits of the shooter's hands. Color tests for residue developed with sodium rhodizonate have confirmed the basic mechanism of GSR escape through the breeches and the ejection mechanism of the close-breech weapons. The forced deposition of the trigger-blast residues is an advantageous as well as limiting process. The contrast of residue deposits on the back of a hand versus the palm, is due to shadowing of the residue particles by the hand grasp on the firearm. But these particles may also be transferred to the nonfiring hand by contact with a fired gun. Whether it is a handgun or a longarm, if the gun is pre-cleaned and the ammunition and the hand grasps remain unchanged, a fixed amount of residues is deposited per firing on the back of the trigger hand. This deposition, which takes into account all deposited particles containing one, two, and three characteristic elements of GSR (e.g., Pb, Sb, Ba), is a fundamental piece of information helpful for the reconstruction of a shooting.


: In recent years, oregano essential oil has been used as an animal food additive due to its antifungal and antibacterial properties as well as s synthetic antibiotic substitute. It is desirable to develop fast and effective thymol and carvacrol quantification method in a swine feed organic matrix. In this work, a performance comparison between the Soxhlet solvent extraction technique using petroleum ether and ethyl acetate and the head space-solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) technique is made. A 2 4 design of experiments is performed for defining HS-SPME parameters: equilibrium temperature of 40 ºC, extraction temperature of 40 ºC, ionic strength of 0.57 M, and extraction time of 40 min. The HS-SPME method is more efficient for extracting thymol and carvacrol extraction from an organic matrix. Limits of detection and quantification values using Soxhlet extraction with ethyl acetate were 3.7 and 12.5 μL -1 for thymol and 1.4 and 4.7 μg L -1 for carvacrol, respectively; while LOD and LOQ for HS-SPME were 0.9 and 3.1 μg L -1 for thymol and 0.6 and 1.9 μg L -1 for carvacrol,


Vegetative cells and spores of types A and B Clostridium botulinum and C. sporogenes were coinoculated into culture media and into mechanically deboned chicken meat. Botulinal toxin formation was inhibited; the degree of inhibition depended on the relative concentrations of the two microorganisms. Inhibition of toxin formation by C. sporogenes also occurred in the meat system, but not all strains of C. botulinum were affected.


Over the last two decades research has indicated an unpleasant experience for the elderly with exemptions. An important question for this paper is whether the unpleasant exempted experience for the elderly in accessing health services is linked to illiteracy. Since illiteracy can affect how services are used and its results, the answer to this paper's question could affect how health services are accessed and their associated outcomes. Policy implementors are operating without a solid knowledge of this relationship. The study used a mixed methods approach. Purposive random sampling was applied to select  879 elderly and was guided by research assistants in filling in the questionnaires. Also, purposive sampling was used to recruit 23 key informants. Results indicates a significant relationship between illiteracy and selected indicators of health service access: awareness, acceptability and adequacy. This paper argues for more training opportunities through non-formal programs among adults and communication capacity building among health providers based on the results of implementing the elderly exemption policy in Ubungo and Mbarali districts in Tanzania.


The problem of the calibration of detectors used in extensive air shower experiments is discussed. A method using light-emitting diodes to provide the necessary calibration for large-area scintillation counters is described. The results of applying this method of calibration to the Sydney air shower array are presented, showing two possible sources of error in the scintillation detectors.


Summary: The Afghan war was fought by Soviet troops uncer very difficult conditions. Evacuation from the mountains by conventional ambulances and helicopters was problematic. In the early phases of the war many of the lessons of World War II wound treatment had been forgotten. Eventually. the principles of extremity immobilization, minimal surgical care of simple wounds, and surgical debridement of major wounds with delayed closure were relearncd. Such procedures as reconstructive amputations and intramedullary fixation of fractures were contraindicated. Early extremity immobilization was best performed by plastic casts. External fixation with the Ilizarov apparatus, even though extremely valuable in selected cases, was done only by well-trained specialists in larger hospitals.


Recent findings evidence that cavitational and mechanical effects of ultrasound waves trigger molecular assembly and pattern formation, exemplified by organogels and ordered structures. Although sonication-assisted aggregation has become a well-established protocol, the science behind it is often overlooked. In this tutorial review various aspects of ultrasound-driven reactions are introduced, highlighting organic and metal coordination compounds, as well as recent applications focused on polymer structures. Given the importance of supramolecular assemblies, especially hydrogels, as biomaterials and vehicles for drug transport and delivery, sound waves thus provide a facile entry to new forms of soft matter and functionalized materials.


As the Cu2+ in EDTA-Cu wastewater has too high concentration to remove with general method and is in a complex state, and its handling is the difficult part in environmental engineering, we try to use synchronous Oxidation Treatment in EDTA-Cu wastewater with high ferrite salt and have achieved good results. Preparation of Na2FeO4 as an oxidant on the spot can not only solve the problem of high cost, but simplify the process of disposal. Measured by the removal rates of Cu2+ as criteria, the effect of three important factors are studied, including ph, dosage and reaction time, then corresponding optimal parameters can be acquired by the orthogonal test. The results show that the removal rate of Cu2+ can be up to 99.1% in such experimental conditions that pH=14, reaction time = 30min and dosage = 300mg/L, and the concentration of Cu2+ is less than 0.49mg/L in the treated wastewater, which also meets the national discharge standards of class I.


This article describes the experimental stage of an e-learning course of Russian as foreign language (level A2) on the course management system Moodle for the students of the Faculty of Political Sciences «Roberto Ruffilli» - University of Bologna (Italy) and the required competences of teachers.


Numerical simulation is used to show that conversion of radiation from a femtosecond XeCl excimer system by stimulated Raman scattering can be used to generate pulses with unique characteristics: a duration shorter than the reciprocal of the gain bandwidth, a steep leading edge, and a high contrast. A basic four-channel system with consecutive addition of pulses involving stimulated Raman scattering is proposed. It is shown that the total output power can reach 120 TW.


ABSTRACT Conventionally, turbidity currents are considered as fluidal flows in which sediment is supported by fluid turbulence, whereas debris flows are plastic flows in which sediment is supported by matrix strength, dispersive pressure, and buoyant lift. The concept of high-density turbidity current refers to high-concentration, commonly nonturbulent, flows of fluids in which sediment is supported mainly by matrix strength, dispersive pressure, and buoyant lift. The conventional wisdom that traction carpets with entrained turbulent clouds on top represent high-density turbidity currents is a misnomer because traction carpets are neither fluidal nor turbulent. Debris flows may also have entrained turbulent clouds on top. The traction carpet/debris flow and the overriding turbulent clouds are wo separate entities in terms of flow rheology and sediment-support mechanism. In experimental and theoretical studies, which has linked massive sands and floating clasts to high-density turbidity currents, the term "high-density turbidity current" has actually been used for laminar flows. In alleviating this conceptual problem, sandy debris flow is suggested as a substitute for high-density turbidity current. Sandy debris flows represent a continuous spectrum of processes between cohesive and cohesionless debris flows. Commonly they are rheologically plastic. They may occur with or without entrained turbulent clouds on top. Their sediment-support mechanisms include matrix strength, dispersive pressure, and buoyant lift. They are characterized by laminar flow conditions, a moderate to hi h grain concentration, and a low to moderate mud content. Although flows evolve and transform during the course of transport in density-stratified flows, the preserved features in a deposit are useful to decipher only the final stages of deposition. At present, there are no established criteria to decipher transport mechanisms from the depositional record.


Changes in cytokinin, auxin, and abscisic acid levels were determined by high performance liquid chromatography following CO(2) enrichment of the root zone. Both trans zeatin and zeatin riboside significantly decreased in the roots 6 days after treatment with CO(2). In the leaves zeatin riboside increased whereas trans zeatin showed no significant difference from the control. Indoleacetic acid in the leaves increased dramatically for 6 days following CO(2) treatment; however, indoleacetic acid levels in the roots increased slightly after 2 days and remained higher than the control. Abscisic acid increased shortly after CO(2) treatments; after 6 days this difference was no longer evident.


Super-resolution, which aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution images, has drawn considerable attention and has been intensively studied in computer vision and remote sensing communities. The super-resolution technology is especially beneficial for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), as the amount and resolution of images captured by UAV are highly limited by physical constraints such as flight altitude and load capacity. In the wake of the successful application of deep learning methods in the super-resolution task, in recent years, a series of super-resolution algorithms have been developed. In this paper, for the super-resolution of UAV images, a novel network based on the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer is proposed with better efficiency and competitive accuracy. Meanwhile, as one of the essential applications of the UAV is land cover and land use monitoring, simple image quality assessments such as the Peak-Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) are not enough to comprehensively measure the performance of an algorithm. Therefore, we further investigate the effectiveness of super-resolution methods using the accuracy of semantic segmentation. The code will be available at https://github.com/lironui/LSwinSR.


Most well-known discriminative clustering models, such as spectral clustering (SC) and maximum margin clustering (MMC), are non-Bayesian. Moreover, they merely considered to embed domain-dependent prior knowledge into data-specific kernels, while other forms of prior knowledge were seldom considered in these models. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian maximum margin clustering model (BMMC) based on the low-density separation assumption, which unifies the merits of both Bayesian and discriminative approaches. In addition to stating prior distribution on functions explicitly as traditional Gaussian processes, special prior knowledge can be embedded into BMMC implicitly via the Universum set easily. Furthermore, it is much easier to solve a BMMC than an MMC since the integer variables in the optimization are eliminated. Experimental results show that the BMMC achieves comparable or even better performance than state-of-the-art clustering methods and solving BMMC is more efficiently.


This paper considers the non-centralized version of privacy preserving data publishing (PPDP), which refers to generating published tables from multiple non-centralized private tables owned by different data holders. Traditional solutions to PPDP on a single centralized dataset cannot be directly applied to this problem. Even if every published table satisfies a traditional privacy preserving requirement individually, an adversary who can collect multiple published tables may be able to deduce some private information that violates the satisfied requirement. Due to privacy reasons, the data holders cannot share information with each other to cooperate on the data publishing issues. In this paper, we propose non-centralized distinct l-diversity and an algorithm to generate published tables. Our algorithm does not rely on any communications between the data holders but only collects published tables released by other data holders. Experiments on real datasets are conducted to show that the algorithm is feasible to real applications.


One of the main characteristics of complex systems is that the interrelations between the entities composing the system are not permanently established but evolve along time. As opposed to complicated systems, the structure of complex systems also evolve in a dynamic organizational process. When studying complex systems, self-organization and emergent phenomena must therefore be taken into account and studied carefully. In this paper, we propose to provide tools in order to automatically detect and characterize the emergent phenomena occurring in agent-based simulations. To this end, we consider the interactions between the entities at the lower level as the main organizational forces that shape the structure of the system at a higher level. These interactions are detected during the simulation and represented as dynamic graphs. Measures can then be made on various properties of the graph so as to detect the occurrence of structuring processes. Groups detection and tracking techniques are then introduced so as to characterize more precisely the exact nature of these processes.


The purpose was to explore whether quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) can assess the dynamic process of renal ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) in rabbits. We found that the magnetic susceptibility values of the outer medulla were statistically significant among the IRI group. Additionally, the magnetic susceptibility values of the outer medulla was highly correlated with the pathological score of renal injury. With these findings, QSM could serve as a quantitative biomarker to assess the dynamic changes of the outer medulla in the early stage of renal IRI.


production in the kidney has remained unsettled.5 T On the other hand, from their morphologic characteristics, some endocrine function has been ascribed to the juxtaglomerular cells (JG cells ). Secretory-like granules of JG cells were especially stained by the method introduced by Wilson.9 Using this staining method, attempts have been made to correlate the granularity of the JG cells, which has been reported to be especially striking in renal ischemia, whether in man or experimental animals.10'11 In our previous studies,12 the erythropoiesis assessed by changes in reticulocyte counts and red cell incorporation of radioiron, and plasma erythropoietin levels as determined with the bioassay method using starved rats as described by Fried et al.,'3 were markedly increased in animals with constricted renal arteries. From these results, suggesting the production of erythropoietin from the ischemic kidney, the following experiments were undertaken in order to study the relationship between erythropoiesis and the granularity of the JG cells in detail.


We have studied electron correlation effects in quantum dots and rings which include a repulsive scattering centre and are subjected to a perpendicular magnetic field. The results for the dipole-allowed absorption spectrum show good qualitative agreement with the observed magnetoplasmon dispersion in similar systems. This work provides a unified description of the electron correlations in quantum dots and quantum rings in a magnetic field. We also demonstrate that optical absorption is a direct route to explore the effects of impurity and interactions in a quantum ring.


The Santa Barbara earthquake of 13 August 1978, provides an opportunity to perform a broadband investigation of body waves for a well-recorded, moderate size (M_L = 5.1) event. The long- and short-period teleseismic body waves are modeled in the time domain to construct a source time function which is consistent in the period range of 1 to 20 sec. The long-period records indicate an overall duration of 6 sec while the short-period records reveal the fine-scale character of the slip history consisting of two sharp pulses separated by about 1 sec. The source mechanism determined from this analysis is a moderately dipping (30°NE) thrust with significant left-lateral slip. The moment was determined to be 1.1 × 10^(25) dyne-cm.

The earthquake was also reasonably well recorded on accelerographs in the near-field. The modeling of the strong motion displacements was a two step procedure: (1) the displacements were modeled alone, and (2) in an attempt to achieve consistency between the local and far-field time functions, the qualitative features of the teleseismic short-period time function were used to predict the displacements. If the two sources in the short-period time function are allowed to have different mechanisms, the displacements can be modeled quite well. This suggests that the overall faulting process was rough, and the multiple source character suggested at high frequencies is due to high-stress drop asperities. The two sources are modeled as asperities separated by 1.5 km; the first source has a mechanism consistent with the teleseismic solution while the second source is more steeply dipping. The total moment determined from the strong motion data is 3.5 × 10^(24) dyne-cm or one-third the long-period moment. This is consistent with other recent studies which suggest that the high-frequency strong ground motion is controlled by the distribution of asperities even though the sum of their moments may be small compared to the overall moment. This study also shows the importance of teleseismic short periods in predicting the local displacements.


Rats received during 3 weeks a Mg-deficient or a Mg-rich diet; Mg-deficient animals revealed hypomagnesemia, cellular K-depletion and Ca-loading. Phrenic nerve-diaphragm preparations were studied; the physiological Tyrode solution contained low or high-Mg concentrations and 0 or 12 mmol lactate/L. Electric stimulation (indirect via the nerve or direct) produced tetanic contractions and increased force at increasing stimulation frequencies. Significantly lower frequencies were needed to elicit these effects when intra- and extracellular Mg levels were low, in comparison to plentiful Mg supply. Comparing unstimulated and stimulated diaphragmatic tissue electrolyte concentrations revealed tissue losses of Mg, K Ca from stimulated tissues which were less pronounced when Mg supply was optimal. These data support the empiric finding that relief from muscle cramps is promptly offered by Mg supplements.


Abstract Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy is a slowly progressive skeletal muscle and joint disorder associated with cardiac complications. Dilated cardiomyopathy was the initial manifestation of Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy in an 8-year-old girl. Despite normal muscle and myocardial biopsies, genetic testing revealed LMNA mutations. As Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy is associated with minimal skeletal muscle weakness, cardiac complications can facilitate its diagnosis.


Context
Age-related declines in immune system function, including vaccine responsiveness, are well established. Dietary and lifestyle factors have been investigated in human clinical trials and observational studies for their effects on vaccine response.

Objective
The review intended to assess dietary and lifestyle factors that can modulate vaccine response in a population aged 55 years or older or in a population with an average age of 55 years or older.

Design
The research team performed a narrative review of studies occurring up until May 2021 by searching electronic PubMed databases.

Results
The review findings suggest that two factors may have clinically relevant effects on vaccine response: regular aerobic exercise and psychological environmental stressors, in particular caregiving stress, which studies have consistently found can have a positive and negative effect or association, respectively. In addition, micronutrients used in combination as well as microbiome-targeted interventions show mostly promising results. Other factors may yet be relevant but very few studies have been done.

Conclusions
Heterogeneity of study design, small sample sizes, and other challenges mean that strong conclusions remain elusive. Further study is needed as well as improvements in study design. However, there are indications that certain dietary and lifestyle factors influence vaccine effectiveness.


We report on current profile evolution in EAST NBI driven plasmas where two neutral beams are injected, one during the current ramp phase and the second during flattop. At the end of the current ramp phase, it is found that a flat q profile with q0 ∼ 1 is achieved with low magnetic shear in the core. It is observed that plasma current and density both relax much faster than resistive time, even in the absence of sawtooth activity when H–L transition occurs. Density fluctuations associated with magnetic perturbations (3/2) as a precursor to the H–L transition are observed. It is likely that these modes play a role in fast current transport.


Models the positive column in strongly electronegative gases, where recombination is the dominant mechanism of charge loss in the volume. The pressure range is taken to be such that mobility governs particle motion. It is related to earlier work in gases like oxygen, where detachment is the dominant loss mechanism and there are many similarities with the case where the attachment/ionization rate ratio P was <1, treated by Daniels, Franklin and Snell (1990). It is shown that P is necessarily less than unity and that it is not physically possible to have a discharge where electron-ion recombination is the only loss mechanism. The structure found is that of a central positive ion-negative ion core surrounded by a conventional electron-positive ion plasma with a sharp transition region of fractional thickness given by the parameter l1/2 where l is a normalized ratio of ion recombination rate beta i and ionization rate nu i given by beta ine0/ nu i where ne0 is the central electron density. Expressions are found for the ion plasma dimensions and the eigenvalue lambda , which relates the ionization rate, discharge radius, ion mobility and electron temperature, and comparison is made with the work of Volynets et al. (1993). The physical characteristics of such discharges are explained by the treatment given for the first time since the problem was formulated in 1949.


No cholera epidemics have occurred in Taiwan since a severe outbreak caused by V. Cholerae serogroup O1 occurred in 1962 [1]. Although, during the period 1962-2009, several cholera infections have occurred, only a few are cluster infections and most of the reported cases are sporadic. The infection sources for most of the indigenous cholera infections occurred during the late twentieth century had been epidemiologically associated with the consumption of soft shelled turtle raised from contaminated farm ponds. However, the infection sources of indigenous cholera cases occurred during the recent five years were all unable to be identified. In order to understand the possible infection sources and relevant risk factors associated with cholera infections, we have reviewed epidemiologic investigation reports on indigenous cholera infection occurred during 1997~2009 and analyzed data from environmental surveillance in domestic areas, field investigation in foreign countries, and from relevant researches. The study found that all cholera infections occurred during the recent 12 years are sporadic except two cluster infections; elderly people and those with underlying disease, such as gastrectomy and chronic diseases, are population susceptible to cholera infection; and poor personal hygiene practices and food sanitation are important risk factors to cholera infections. The reasons why infection sources for most of the cholera cases could not be identified are partly because the recognition of infection sources for sporadic case has always been difficult and the insufficient information on food consumption during the incubation period of disease provided by patients. If physicians could keep vigilance and sensitivity over diagnosis of suspected cholera cases and promote notification efficiency, it would be useful for investigation of infection sources. Experiences from developed countries showed that the strains of toxigenic V. cholerae exist in natural environments, usually spread through the contamination of food, and cause infection in immuno-compromised hosts [2]. The study recommends that: 1. Local governments with cases occurred should strengthen health education directed at the susceptible population and the education of physicians on diagnosis and notification of suspected cases. 2. Investigators should do their best to collect detail information on food origin, food preparation, eating utensil, food storage, and eating habits of the reported cases, and health status of close contacts and neighborhood people. 3. National laboratory should establish data bank for native strains to facilitate the comparative analysis with strains from other countries. 4. Agriculture authority periodically conduct survey on environment and fishery of farm ponds; food sanitation authority routinely monitor on safety of marketed marine product; and authorities in charge of agriculture, food sanitation, and disease control should establish a channel for mutual communication and work together to assure citizen's health and safety. 5. Department of disease control will have to collect and obtain information on environmental surveillance and risk assessment for coastal areas along Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matzu.


ABSTRACT Maintenance in HIV care is important to achieve optimal personal health and HIV viral load suppression for young people living with HIV (PLWH). We assessed the relationship between incarceration and missed visits in a longitudinal data cohort of PLWH (n = 910), ages 12–24, from 14 adolescent trial network sites across the US. The time from study entry to missed visits was modeled using Cox proportional hazards models. The cohort was mostly male (78%) and African American (75%) with a median age of 22. Prior incarceration had been experienced by 39% of the cohort, with a median number of times incarcerated of 2 (IQR: 1–3). The crude and adjusted hazard ratios for missed HIV care visits comparing those with incarceration histories to those without were 1.27 (95% CI: 1.06, 1.54) and 1.53 (95% CI: 1.26, 1.86). Among those returning to care, HIV viral loads were more likely to be unsuppressed among those with incarceration history compared to those without (RR: 1.28, 95% CI: 0.95, 1.74). This association was attenuated to the null after adjustment for suppression of viral load prior to the missed visit. Young PLWH with incarceration histories are at higher risk of missing HIV care visits.


Purpose: Isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) 1 and IDH2 mutations (IDH1/2mt) are frequent in glioma. Preclinical studies suggest IDH1/2mts confer "BRCAness" phenotype, a vulnerability that can be targeted through PARP inhibition. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a multicenter study of olaparib monotherapy in patients with IDH1/2mt gliomas. Methods: Patients with recurrent, contrast-enhancing IDH1/2mt gliomas were enrolled in a two-step phase II trial; the primary endpoint was overall response rate per Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (RANO) criteria. Olaparib 300 mg orally twice daily was given. Results: A total of 15 evaluable patients were enrolled. Histology was astrocytoma (N = 12) and oligodendroglioma (N = 3). Most toxicities were grade 1 or 2. Best response was stable disease (SD) in 9 (60%) patients. Median progression-free survival (PFS) was 3.63 months and median overall survival was 20.7 months. For patients with SD, median PFS was 5.53 months; 4 patients had SD for >6 months. Among patients with best response progressive disease (N = 6), 5 had grade 4 tumor and 4 had known CDKN2A alteration. PFS was 5.23 months for grades 2 or 3 tumors (N = 10) versus 1.8 months for grade 4 (N = 5; P = 0.0013). Conclusion: The study did not meet the prespecified response-based activity threshold for moving to step 2. However, prolonged SD was observed in patients with grades 2 and 3 histologies, suggesting olaparib monotherapy could be of clinical benefit in select populations. Grade 4 tumors per 2021 World Health Organization classification defined by histology or CDKN2A alteration derived no benefit from this drug, highlighting the usefulness of this classification for future patient stratification and trial design. Significance: A single-arm phase II trial of olaparib in IDH-mutant glioma demonstrated clinically significant prolonged SD for select patients with grade 2/3 disease, suggesting potential benefit of olaparib in IDH-mutant gliomas.


A simple method for the recording of animal activity patterns is described, based upon a transduction made with piezoelectric sensors attached to a modified cage. The signal is then filtered and digitalized, and can be stored for later analysis.


Bladder or urethral calculi in 50 patients were effectively fragmented and removed per-urethrally using an ultrasonic lithotriptor with the probe vibrating at 30,000 implulses/s. In adults, local anaesthesia was employed and the operation performed as an out-patient procedure. The method has the advantages over others discussed in that a small (23 F) sheath is used and that damage to the bladder or urethra by the probe is avoided. Using a newer, modified sheath resembling that for punch prostatectomy, larger stones can be fragmented by engaging the stone in the fenestrum of the sheath.


With computer analysis occurrence of small homologous and complementary fragments (21 nucleotides in length) has been studied in genomes of 14 human viruses causing most dangerous infections. The sample includes viruses with (+) and (–) single stranded RNA and DNA-containing hepatitis A virus. Analysis of occurrence of homologous sequences has shown the existence two extreme situations. On the one hand, the same virus contains homologous sequences to almost all other viruses (for example, Ebola virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus, and mumps virus), and numerous homologous sequences to the same other virus (especially in severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus to Dengue virus and in Ebola virus to poliovirus). On the other hand, there are rare occurrence and not numerous homologous sequences in genomes of other viruses (rubella virus, hepatitis A virus, and hepatitis B virus). Similar situation exists for occurrence of complementary sequences. Rubella virus, the genome of which has the high content of guanine and cytosine, has no complementary sequences to almost all other viruses. Most viruses have moderate level of occurrence for homologous and complementary sequences. Autocomplementary sequences are numerous in most viruses and one may suggest that the genome of single stranded RNA viruses has branched secondary structure. In addition to possible role in recombination among strains autocomplementary sequences could be regulators of translation rate of virus proteins and determine its optimal proportion in virion assembly with genome and mRNA folding. Occurrence of small homologous and complementary sequences in RNAand DNA-containing viruses may be the result of multiple recombinations in the past and the present and determine their adaptation and variability. Recombination may take place in coinfection of human and/or common hosts. Inclusion of homologous and complementary sequences into genome could not only renew viruses but also serve as memory of existence of a competitor for host and means of counteraction against a competitor in coinfection being an analogy of the bacterial CRISPR/Cas system.


Multiple anthropometric equations have been developed aiming to provide accurate and affordable assessment of body fat composition in male athletes. This study examined correlations of values obtained from seventeen different anthropometric equations to DXA as well as BIA and DXA values. Male athletes (n = 101) from three different combat sports, wrestling (n = 33), judo (n = 35), and kickboxing (n = 33), with an average age of 20.9 ± 4.2 were included. Body fat percentage was estimated using anthropometry, BIA, and DXA. Correlations between anthropometric methods and DXA, as well as BIA and DXA, were determined using Spearman's rank correlation. Sixteen out of seventeen estimates of body fat percentages using existing anthropometric equations showed strong positive correlation with the values derived from DXA measurements (r = 0.569 − 0.909). The highest correlation was observed using the equation derived by Yuhasz, r = 0.909, followed by the equations from Oliver et al., Evans et al., Faulkner, and Thorland et al. (r ≈ 0.9). Statistical analysis of body fat percentages from DXA and BIA measurements also showed high positive correlation (r = 0.710). Correlation of seventeen anthropometric equations with BIA and DXA methods revealed that equations by Yuhasz, Oliver et al., Evans et al., Faulkner, and Thorland et al. are suitable alternative for assessing body fat percentage among male athletes from combat sports, showing even stronger correlation than BIA method.


Length of stay in the ICU is one of the factors limiting operating room utilization in cardiac surgery and consequently one of the primary cost-effectiveness parameters. At present it seems that factors guiding LOS in ICU after cardiac surgery has reached a stage, where the need for patient turnover, practical convenience and especially local policies are superior to what is actually possible and even many different recovery scores have been used and refined following new monitoring techniques length of stay is not a valid parameter when comparing institutions or procedures. ICU research and quality programmes are needed to make goal-oriented programmes. The purpose of this prospective study was to create an objective and reproducible ICU discharge model to be used in research and as an administrative logistic tool in cardiac surgery. Patients and methods: All cardiac patients in a 50 day period (N=113) were followed. Our discharge model consists of 5 semi-objective variables (sedation, respiration, nausea, pain and motor function and 7 objective variables (peripheral saturation, diureses, arterial blood pressure, heart rate, cardiac index, temperature and postoperative drainage). Patients were score every hour until the next morning, termination of haemodynamic monitoring or at discharge, whichever came first. Patients were considered eligible for discharge from the cardiac recovery unit at a steady discharge score of 4 (IDS4) or below and with no single variable score higher than 2. Results: The actual discharge time was statistically significant longer than the eligible discharge time (p<0.0001), with a difference of 8.68 hours. The data showed no correlation between ventilation time and eligible time to discharge, while in actual discharge time patients ventilated shorter time also presented the shortest time to actual discharge. Conclusion: Although very early extubation has impact on actual discharge time from ICU, it does not favour a shorter time to reach an eligible state. The perplexity of definitions in relation to LOS in ICU calls for an evaluation protocol and the described objective discharge model might be valuable, especially with respect to research, but also for logistic and administrative purposes. The relative objectivity makes comparison between units and centres more reliable than present reporting.


Batik is one of the Indonesian cultural heritages, which has already been acknowledged by UNESCO as world cultural heritage. There is a change of batik consumption nowadays. It is seen from the wearing of batik that seems to shift from the "formal" image to "formal" and "informal" image. Due to the change of the batik wearing today, this study wants to discover what modes and purposes of batik products consumption to Airlangga University Students are. This study applies qualitative research method. Circuit of culture theory by Stuart Hall et al. is used in analyzing it and the research of Graeme Turner, in the consumption part, is adopted as well. This study is held in Airlangga University and conducted by using in-depth interview, as data collection technique to 8 respondents, 4 males and 4 females of students aged 18-25 years old. Finally, this study discovers that from batik 'from below' there are two modes of batik consumption namely the contexts of space and the context of time of batik consumption. The contexts of space and context of time are about the reasons of consuming batik products. Ways of batik consumption are the ways they actualize their reasons. It can be seen from the number of batik collection, price awareness, place of shopping, brand awareness, time awareness, and regulation the batik wearing. The purpose of batik consumption can be seen from their identification to batik that indicates the nationalism. These modes and purposes of batik consumption to Airlangga University students indicate its consumption as an active process.


Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an innovative method of monitoring structural safety, integrity, and performance without affecting the structure itself. Wireless sensor Networks (WSN) have demonstrated their potential for structural Health Monitoring: flexible, easy to deploy, lightweight and cost-effective. However, in many monitoring system, the conventional usages of WSNs are cases with low data rate, small data size, low duty cycle, and low power consumption. Structural health monitoring requires high data rate, time-synchronization, large data size, measurement stability and a relatively high Sampling rate. There are few studies about clock distribution in WSN for data fusion and modal analysis. In this study, we outline the synchronization requirements of wireless sensor networks and present how clock-drift, network aggregation capacity and measurement stability issues are solved.


Using three unique micro datasets, we find that an unexpected and unprecedented loosening of China's LTV policy for non-primary houses fueled the entire mortgage boom during 2014Q4-2016Q3. The mortgage expansion disproportionately increased the share of mortgages to middle-aged homeowners with high education, while their consumption growth declined persistently. To interpret these empirical findings, we develop a quantitative model and identify that homeowners' trade-up of their primary homes as speculative housing investment is a key channel for a change in LTV policy to exert aggregate and distributional impacts on mortgage markets. Our cross-city evidence provides empirical support for this channel.


Background: Radiotherapy combined with breast-conserving surgery is widely performed in patients with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). This research was conducted to evaluate the use of radiotherapy to reduce the risk of multiple primary cancer (MPC) and mortality in DCIS patients. Methods: 108,416 patients first diagnosed with DCIS between 1998 and 2015 who received lumpectomy in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) 18 database were included. Age, race, year of diagnosis, laterality, pathologic grade, surgery, radiation, estrogen receptor status, progesterone receptor status, tumor size and vital status were extracted. A comparison of lumpectomy vs. lumpectomy plus radiotherapy was performed using 1:1 propensity score-based matching. Results: Of the 108,416 patients, 39,039 patients were treated with lumpectomy alone, and 69,377 were treated with lumpectomy and radiotherapy. The adjusted hazard ratio (HR) for death was 0.801 and 0.7444 for occurrence of MPC in the lumpectomy and radiotherapy vs. lumpectomy alone groups, respectively. Conclusion: Lumpectomy plus radiotherapy is associated with a significant reduction in mortality and risk of MPC, mainly second primary BC. Younger patients, Black women with high-grade tumors were likely to benefit most. Radiotherapy reduced the risk of occurrence rather than the mortality of MPC patients to reduce the overall mortality.


The problem addressed in this paper is to disambiguate grammatically ambiguous input sentences by asking the user, who need not be a computer specialist or a linguist, without showing any parse trees or phrase structure rules. Explanation List Comparison (ELC) is the technique that implements this process. It is applicable to all parsers which are based on phrase structure grammar, regardless of the parser implementation. An experimental system has been implemented at Carnegie-Mellon University, and it has been applied to English-Japanese machine translation at Kyoto University.


Introduction:
Rare diseases have gained recognition over the past decade as an important area for health service improvement. They affect 1 in 17 people over a lifetime, consume 14% of the NHS budget, and are an important cause of illness and death[1]. In 2013, the Department of Health published for the first time a "UK Strategy for Rare Diseases" which identified 5 key recommendations for improving the lives of people with rare diseases, and included the need for epidemiological studies. 75% of rare diseases are genetic in origin, and have onset in childhood. However, rheumatologists provide care for people with a number of rare diseases, amounting to an important component of the 25% of rare diseases which are believed to be non-genetic and present in adulthood.
One of the main challenges in studying rare disease, is the difficulty in finding enough people with the disease to study. Recent linkage of databases of primary and secondary care health records in the UK provide an opportunity to study representative samples, large numbers of people, and the breadth of healthcare provision.
In this thesis, I report 4 epidemiological studies in routinely collected healthcare data, conducted in an exemplar rheumatic disease, ANCA-associated vasculitis.
Methods:
I used routinely collected healthcare data from local hospitals, a large database of UK general practice records, and linked hospital episode statistics to identify cases of ANCA-associated vasculitis.
The specific questions addressed in the studies were:
1. What are the current incidence, prevalence and mortality of ANCA-associated vasculitis in the UK, stratified by age, sex and ethnic group? I addressed this question in a local hospital cohort, and then in linked primary and secondary care records in England. I used projections of the population structure in 20 years' time to predict the expected number of incident and prevalent cases.
2. What is the natural history of the most common type of ANCA-associated vasculitis (granulomatosis with polyangiitis) prior to diagnosis, and are there opportunities to diagnose it sooner in primary or secondary care? I conducted a case-control study in a large database of primary care records, and attempted to develop a model for GPs that predicted the risk of a person having granulomatosis with polyangiitis, such as is advocated by the UK Strategy for Rare Diseases.
3. What are the strongest aetiological factors in granulomatosis with polyangiitis in the UK? I compared the frequency of possible aetiological exposures between cases and population-based controls in a large database of prospectively collected primary care data.
Results:
1. There were about 1300 new cases of ANCA-associated vasculitis in the UK in 2015, more than previously thought. The incidence has been stable since 2000, however the disease is more common in older people, therefore due to predicted aging of the UK population there will be 34% more cases in 2035. We are not able to detect any differences in incidence rates between people from different ethnic groups, but our studies lacked power for this question.
2. People with granulomatosis with polyangiitis consulted their GP more than healthy people prior to their diagnosis. However, they consulted with a wide variety of symptoms, and none were highly predictive of the diagnosis. In addition, the lower the prevalence of the disease, the lower the positive predictive value of a diagnostic model. Granulomatosis with polyangiitis is rare, so even with an exceptionally well-performing model (with a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 90%) only 2 of every 10,000 people flagged as 'at risk' would have granulomatosis with polyangiitis, and the rest would have false positive results.
3. People with granulomatosis with polyangiitis were 5 times more likely than population-based controls to have a previous diagnosis of bronchiectasis, and 2-3 times more likely to have a previous diagnosis of an autoimmune disease or chronic renal impairment.
Conclusions:
1. Although incidence appears stable, commissioners need to expand services to diagnose and treat people with GPA, and other adult-onset rare diseases, over the next 20 years due to the predicted increase in the proportion of the population in the age-groups at highest risk.
2. In particular, over the next 20 years, the age structure of the Black and Minority ethnic population in the UK is predicted to change to have many more people in older age-groups, and the UK medical community need to be alert to an expected emergence of significant numbers of Black and Minority ethnic people with ANCA-associated vasculitis.
3. Computerised prompts to alert GPs to consider a diagnosis of rare disease are unlikely to work. Resources to improve early diagnosis and treatment of ANCA-associated vasculitis would be better targeted at secondary care where the majority of cases have contact in the year before diagnosis.
4. The novel association of bronchiectasis with developing granulomatosis with polyangiitis raises a new hypothesis for bronchiectasis as a possible aetiological factor in granulomatosis with polyangiitis.


This series of three articles is structured to provide anatomically accurate functional schematics of the motor and sensory innervation of the shoulder and upper limb. This first paper provides radiographically oriented sagittal sections through the brachial plexus to assist in directly identifying a plexal lesion. A coronal schematic of the brachial plexus and summary table allows prediction of unique patterns of denervation from 19 lesion sites. Correlation between the lesion and the denervation pattern ensures the lesion is, in fact, clinically significant. The next two articles will present a color-coded atlas that allows the radiologist to quickly assess patterns of denervated muscles and thereby indirectly localize the lesion site. Thus, the three articles can be used together to predict the clinical picture for a given nerve lesion or extrapolate lesion location when a constellation of denervated muscles are seen on an upper limb magnetic resonance imaging or electromyographic study.


Autocrine production of growth factors can have significant effects on cell activity. We report for the first time that autocrine production of insulin-like growth factor–I (IGF-I) alters paracellular transport across bovine mammary epithelial cells in vitro. Paracellular transport was assessed by measuring phenol red transport across mammary alveolar cells–large T antigen (MAC-T cells) derived from parental mammary epithelial cells, cultured on porous membranes and compared with two different transfected MAC-T cell lines that constitutively secrete IGF-I. Phenol red transport was essentially blocked in parental cell culture after six days, while IGF-I secreting cells provided essentially no barrier. Surprisingly, neither co-culture studies between parental and IGF-I–secreting cells nor addition of exogenous IGF-I or IGF-binding protein–3 reversed the phenol red transport properties. IGF-I–secreting cells did however express lower levels of the junction components occludin and E-cadherin than parental cells, suggesting that localized autocrine IGF-I activity might lead to increased permeability via changes in both the tight and adherens junction protein levels.


We present a developmental framework based on a long-term memory and reasoning mechanisms (Vision Similarity and Bayesian Optimisation). This architecture allows a robot to optimize autonomously hyper-parameters that need to be tuned from any action and/or vision module, treated as a black-box. The learning can take advantage of past experiences (stored in the episodic and procedural memories) in order to warm-start the exploration using a set of hyper-parameters previously optimized from objects similar to the new unknown one (stored in a semantic memory). As example, the system has been used to optimized 9 continuous hyper-parameters of a professional software (Kamido) both in simulation and with a real robot (industrial robotic arm Fanuc) with a total of 13 different objects. The robot is able to find a good object-specific optimization in 68 (simulation) or 40 (real) trials. In simulation, we demonstrate the benefit of the transfer learning based on visual similarity, as opposed to an amnesic learning (i.e. learning from scratch all the time). Moreover, with the real robot, we show that the method consistently outperforms the manual optimization from an expert with less than 2 hours of training time to achieve more than 88% of success.


The National Treatment Clause, Article 1102 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, protects foreign investors from discrimination, including expropriation of their investments. This national treatment approach - equal treatment of foreign investors and local investors by states - was developed to encourage investment in Europe after the Second World War. Over the course of fifty years, the approach has evolved to provide foreign investors with protections over and above those provided to domestic investors. This article discusses the evolution of national treatment approaches, from affording foreign investors equal treatment to ensuring new investment conditions in international trade.


PedExpert is a Windows-based Bayesian network software, especially constructed to solve problems in parentage testing that are complex because of missing genetic information on the alleged father and/or because they involve genetic mutations. PedExpert automates the creation and manipulation of Bayesian networks, implementing algorithms that convert pedigrees and sets of indispensable information (genotypes, allele frequencies, mutation rates) into Bayesian networks. This program has a novel feature that can incorporate information about gene mutations into tables of conditional probabilities of transmission of alleles from the alleged father to the child, without adding new nodes to the network. This permits using the same Bayesian network in different modes, for analysis of cases that include mutations or not. PedExpert is user-friendly and greatly reduces the time of analysis for complex cases of paternity testing, eliminating most sources of logical and operational error.


In database systems, users access shared data under the assumption that the data satisfies certain consistency constraints. This paper defines the concepts of transaction, consistency and schedule and shows that consistency requires that a transaction cannot request new locks after releasing a lock. Then it is argued that a transaction needs to lock a logical rather than a physical subset of the database. These subsets may be specified by predicates. An implementation of predicate locks which satisfies the consistency condition is suggested.


Eight pollen diagrams from cores lying approximately on an east to west transect across the North Basin of Windermere and macroscopic plant remains identified from these cores are described and figured. The marginal cores show a well-developed late-glacial succession of two layers of barren laminated glacial clay, separated by a detritus silt containing plant remains which indicate a cold-temperate birch wood flora; it is suggested that this succession may be correlated with the Upper and Lower Dryas clays separated by the cold-temperate Allerod layer of Continental authors. The post-glacial deposits, which are most completely represented in the deep-water cores, show similar phases of forest history to those already recognized in England and Wales, but the apparent over-representation of Pinus in deep-water deposits and the absence of Fagus and Carpinus introduce complications into any attempt to apply to these deposits the zonation scheme worked out for the East Anglian fenland.


The plasma pharmacokinetics of the anthracycline drug daunorubicin in doses of 1 and 10 mg/kg body weight were compared in normal and leukemic inbred Sutton-August rats (50-70 x 10(9) leukemic cells/1 blood). The area under the plasma concentration versus time curve was about 25 times larger in the leukemic rats at both dose levels. The data indicate that daunorubicin has a lower volume of distribution in leukemic rats as compared with normals. The large reduction in plasma clearance of daunorubicin in the leukemic rats can to some extent be explained by impairment of hepatic and renal functions but the results indicate that the leukemic state per se was of importance for the observed pharmacokinetic differences. This finding may be of importance for the treatment of patients with a high leukemic cell load, since higher retention of the drug in the central compartment leads to lower concentrations in poorly vascularized tissues, which favours the development of resistant leukemic cell clones.


This article describes results from a simulation model of rural land use, focusing on how the relative advantages of imitative and nonimitative approaches to land use selection change under different circumstances. It is shown that the success of "imitation" depends in quite complex ways on the type of imitation used, the strategies of other agents with which the imitator is interacting, and aspects of the heterogeneity of the environment.


Cardiac angiosarcomas are extremely rare in childhood, they are rapidly progressive tumours that often present themselves as diagnostic dilemmas, resulting in delayed diagnosis. Also, extracardiac manifestations, including abdominal pain, are extremely rare in patients with intracardiac tumors. We herein present the case of a 15-year-old girl who presented with abdominal pain. Echocardiography and thoracic computed tomography showed right atrial mass. The patient underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Eight months after treatment, abdominal recurrence was detected. The abdominal mass was resected, and radiotherapy and new chemotherapy protocol were given. The present case illustrates a rare case of primary cardiac angiosarcoma posing a diagnostic dilemma in an adolescent girl.


In two separate experiments, lactating goats were milked unilaterally thrice daily instead of twice daily for periods of 13 and 37 wk, starting at 2 to 5 wk after parturition. The other gland was milked twice daily throughout. In both experiments thrice-daily milking increased milk yield significantly. In the first experiment, after 37 wk the amounts of RNA and DNA, rate of cell proliferation and activities of several enzymes per cell were greater in the thrice-milked gland (P less than .05). In the second experiment, after 9 or 10 d of thrice-daily milking the activities of several key mammary enzymes per cell measured in biopsy samples had increased in the thrice-milked but not the twice-milked gland. After 13 wk of thrice-daily milking, the DNA content of the glands and the activity per cell of the key enzymes was the same in both glands, showing that the synthetic capacity of the gland was being used more effectively in the treated gland. These results indicate that several mechanisms contributed to the increased milk yield induced by thrice-daily milking.


I elucidate Heidegger's understanding of the "place-being" of the "question of being." My premises are: 1) Heidegger's "question of being" can be appropriately made sense of as the "question of language." 2) The "question of language" requires a topological approach that looks into the link between the place-nature of language and the open-bounded essence of human existence. First, I explain the topological underpinnings of Heidegger's later thought of being as the clearing and language; second, I examine Sheehan's phenomenological reading of Heidegger by focusing on the relationship between alētheia and appropriation (Ereignis). In the first section, I explain the correlation between place and language within the context of the "question of being" and display how understanding the former is crucial in having a more complete perspective for the latter. In the second section, I examine Sheehan's acknowledgment of Heidegger's idea of place (topos) in his understanding of the nature of human existence in relation to Ereignis, while criticizing the "metaphorical" reading of the "placebeing" of the clearing.


Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection is generally asymptomatic as latent tuberculosis, but it is still known as the world's leading bacterial cause of death. The diagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection relies on the evidence of cellular immunity to mycobacterial antigens. Since the association between HLA class II and tuberculosis infection has been reported in several population groups, a detailed study on the CD4+ T cell response to major tuberculosis antigens is needed. To elucidate which HLA class II allotypes in an individual are preferentially used in tuberculosis, CD4+ T cells specific to TB10.4, Ag85b, ESAT-6, and CFP-10 of Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigens were analyzed comprehensively. A total of 33 healthy donors were analyzed by ex vivo and cultured ELISPOT using panels of artificial antigen-presenting cells expressing a single HLA class II allotype. The CD4+ T cell responses were increased by an average of 39-fold in cultured ELISPOT compared with ex vivo ELISPOT. In ex vivo and cultured ELISPOT, CD4+ T cell responses showed significantly higher by HLA-DR than those of HLA-DQ and HLA-DP locus. In cultured ELISPOT, 9 HLA-DR allotypes, 4 HLA-DQ allotypes, and 3 HLA-DP allotypes showed positive CD4+ T cell responses. Among ten donors with positive CD4+ T cell responses when tested for mixed Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigens, seven donors were positive for only a single allotype, and three were positive for two allotypes in an individual. However, only one allotype was used for a single antigen-specific response when a single tuberculosis antigen was used individually. These results on the distribution of HLA class II allotypes showing high CD4+ T-cell responses to Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigens and the intra-individual allotype dominance will provide valuable information for understanding the immunobiology and immunogenetics of tuberculosis, which can contribute to the development of more effective vaccines.