COVID-19 has caused the closure of schools around the world. According to the Global World Forum, more than 1.2 billion students have dropped out of classrooms worldwide. As a result, education has transformed dramatically with the extensive rise in e-learning where teaching is delivered remotely through technological solutions and platforms. Even though successful transitions among many universities have taken place, the users' expectations of e-learning systems are still poor due to this rapid movement. Therefore, e-learning systems need to be investigated from a perspective of quality in order to ensure its effectiveness. The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the role of quality factors in influencing the effectiveness of e-learning systems from the perspective of academic staff. A quantitative approach was adopted using a web-based questionnaire. A total of 129 valid questionnaires were obtained through simple random sampling techniques. The results of the study indicated that all examined factors, namely, System Quality (SQ), Information Quality (IQ), Service Quality (SEQ), Technical Support Quality (TSQ), Course Design Quality (CDQ), and Learner Quality (LQ), influenced E-learning System Effectiveness significantly. The proposed factors explained a significant percentage with 90.8 percent of the total variance of E-learning Effectiveness. Furthermore, the results of multiple regressions using stepwise analysis indicated that the top three contributing factors were Service Quality, Learner Quality, and System Quality respectively. Moreover, the results revealed that Attitude partially mediated the relationship between Service Quality and E-learning System Effectiveness. Several implications and recommendations were proposed for future research.


Enrollment reported by 62 public residential schools to the Annual Survey of Hearing Impaired Children and Youth between 1970-71 and 1978-79 is examined nationally and in four distinct regions of the country and is compared to enrollment patterns in the general school population during the same period. Also discussed here are ethnic background, handicapping conditions in addition to the hearing impairment, and age of the students in these schools for the same period.


This research attempted to investigate the effect of new pension reform on the lives of Nigeria retirees. The purpose of this is to explore the need for better retirement welfare and ensure prompt payment of retirement benefits. A structured questionnaire was used to obtain data. Data were analyzed using the information obtained from the questionnaires. Results from data analyses suggest that pension business should not be run like government business. Stocks at the floor of the stock exchange should be allowed to compete for pension funds but with some form of lsquoCircuit Breakerrsquo that stops the bidding process when the market begins to go chaotic. The new pension reform act should be fully implemented as stated in section 4(1)(c) of the Act which stipulate that after the withdrawal of a lump sum of money to be paid to a pensioner as gratuity, the amount standing to his RSA credit should be sufficient to pay him an annuity of 50% of the last salary he received before retirement. In the case of a shortfall, section 12 (1) (b) also that the #39shortfall shall immediately become a debt of the relevant employer#39 who shall #39issue a written acknowledgment of the debt to the relevant employee (retiree) and take steps to meet the shortfall#39 (Nigeria 2004). This provision should be fully implemented, so that all retirees under the CPS can, at least, receive 50% of the last salary they received before retirement.


As a long-standing problem in computer vision, face detection has attracted much attention in recent decades for its practical applications. With the availability of face detection benchmark WIDER FACE dataset, much of the progresses have been made by various algorithms in recent years. Among them, the Selective Refinement Network (SRN) face detector introduces the two-step classification and regression operations selectively into an anchor-based face detector to reduce false positives and improve location accuracy simultaneously. Moreover, it designs a receptive field enhancement block to provide more diverse receptive field. In this report, to further improve the performance of SRN, we exploit some existing techniques via extensive experiments, including new data augmentation strategy, improved backbone network, MS COCO pretraining, decoupled classification module, segmentation branch and Squeeze-and-Excitation block. Some of these techniques bring performance improvements, while few of them do not well adapt to our baseline. As a consequence, we present an improved SRN face detector by combining these useful techniques together and obtain the best performance on widely used face detection benchmark WIDER FACE dataset.


In his literary portrait of Abbot Adalhard, written soon after the abbot's death in 826, Paschasius Radbertus of Corbie compared his subject's moral and spiritual progress to the method of the ancient painter Zeuxis as this had been described in Cicero's De inventione. According to Cicero, the people of Cortona commissioned Zeuxis to decorate a temple with the image of Helen, who was reputed to be the most beautiful of mortal women. Because nature withheld overall perfection from any individual, Zeuxis studied several handsome models and combined the best features of each in an image that was more perfect than the form of any actual maiden. Adalhard too was an artist who sought to realize a work that somehow went beyond nature, but in his case the objective was a reformation of the image of God in himself. To achieve this, Adalhard too used models, in his case the lives and deeds of the saints, whose examples of virtue he discerned with the mind's eye and assimilated in an effort to resemble the transcendent archetype.


The majority of laymen and a great many of our professional brethren regard squint with a great deal of indifference. This arises largely from the prevalent idea that the child will outgrow it, is too young to be treated or, if treated, will have to always wear glasses. Yet when children grow up with this horrible deformity, they and their parents often seek for relief without success. What I wish to try to make clear is the fallacy of the above reasons, why the squinting eyes of children should be attended to as soon as the first appearance of even a tendency to squint is noticed. In rare instances in some cases the squint disappears as the patient grows older, but nearly always with vision much impaired in the deviating eye and binocular vision very imperfectly developed. The earlier one can get a case after he has commenced


As a contribution to International Physics Year (2005), we performed a historical study of Einstein's final years and the diseases that required surgical treatment. Because of the particular circumstances of the age, two of the most famous surgeons of the time, Rudolph Nissen and Frank Glenn, as well as the well-known radiologist, Gustav Bucky, came together with Albert Einstein over the abdominal aortic aneurysm that ended his life in April 1955. We discuss little known or hitherto unpublished data and anecdotes about the physicist's final surgical disease.


Anthropogenic nitrogen (N) inputs have been found to influence emissions of greenhouse gases from a variety of ecosystems; however, the effects of N loading on greenhouse gas dynamics in lakes are not well documented. We measured concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) in 26 lakes in the Colorado Rocky Mountains (USA) receiving elevated (5 – 8 kg N ha−1 yr−1) or low (<2 kg N ha−1 y−1) levels of atmospheric N deposition. The mean CO2 concentration in surface waters was 27 μmol L−1 and did not differ between deposition regions. The CH4 concentration was greater in low‐deposition lakes (167 nmol L−1) compared to high‐deposition lakes (48 nmol L−1), while the opposite was true for N2O. The concentration of N2O in surface water averaged 29 nmol L−1 in high‐deposition lakes compared to 22 nmol L−1 in low‐deposition lakes. Nitrous oxide is of particular interest because it is more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and because of its role in the destruction of stratospheric ozone. To understand the potential magnitude of lake N2O production related to atmospheric N deposition, we applied two published methodologies for determining emissions from aquatic ecosystems to available data sets. We estimated contemporary global N2O emissions from lakes to be 0.04 – 2 Tg N y−1, increasing to 0.1 – 3.4 Tg N y−1 in 2050. The contemporary estimates represent 13–95% of emissions from rivers and estuaries, suggesting that further research is required to better quantify emission rates from lentic ecosystems.


The false discovery rate is a criterion for controlling Type I error in simultaneous testing of multiple hypotheses. For scanning statistics, due to local dependence, clusters of neighbouring hypotheses are likely to be rejected together. In such situations, it is more intuitive and informative to group neighbouring rejections together and count them as a single discovery, with the false discovery rate defined as the proportion of clusters that are falsely declared among all declared clusters. Assuming that the number of false discoveries, under this broader definition of a discovery, is approximately Poisson and independent of the number of true discoveries, we examine approaches for estimating and controlling the false discovery rate, and provide examples from biological applications. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.


The synthesis of two new bridged polycyclic systems (I and II), possessing a rigid N-arylethylbenzomorphan structure, by mercuric acetate cyclization of the corresponding seco derivatives (IV and VI, respectively) is described. The relative configuration of these compounds and the preferred indolo[2, 3-a]- or benzo[a]quin-olizidine conformation is assigned.


Homogenates from guinea pig vas deferens were examined for possible existence of sigma receptor and phencyclidine (PCP) receptor using a radioligand binding assay. [3H](+)-SKF-10047 bound saturably in the homogenates to a single population of binding sites with a Kd of 311 and a Bmax of 1090 fmol/mg protein. IC50S of several representative sigma in displacing [3H](+)-SKF-10047 from this binding site were very much similar to the IC50S of those drugs in the brain sigma receptor binding assay. A correlation coefficient of 0.96 was obtained when IC50S from vas deferens were compared with those from the brain assay. Attempts to demonstrate PCP receptors in this tissue using [3H]TCP (N-[1-(2-thienyl)cyclohexyl]piperidine), however, yielded negative results. The results indicate that while guinea pig vas deferens contains sigma receptors, PCP receptors may be absent in this tissue.


This study aimed at predicting feed conversion ratio (FCR) of young rabbits from abundances of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) to improve this trait by selecting animals with the most favorable microbiota and identifying the most relevant microorganisms involved in feed efficiency. Data come from two rabbit populations coming from paternal INRA 1001 line (the G10, selected for 10 generations for decreased residual feed intake and the G0 control produced from frozen embryos of the common ancestor line). There were 296 and 292 FCR data from G10 and G0 individuals, respectively. Phenotypic data were pre-corrected for the systematic effects of group, batch, litter size and sex and the random litter effect. Sequence quality control and chimera removal were performed with the DADA2 pipeline. Samples with less than 5,000 final sequence counts and doubleton ASV were removed. The ASV counts of the final table (including 918 ASVs) were centered log-ratio transformed and corrected for batch effects with a surrogate variable analysis. Nested resampling for hyper-parameter tuning and prediction validation was implemented leading to 25 pairs of training/test sets. Bayesian regression models (Bayesian Lasso, Bayesian Ridge Regression and Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces) and machine learning algorithms (Support vector machine and Elastic net) were fitted to all ASVs leading to an almost null prediction accuracy in all cases. Then, ASVs were ranked for their prediction importance using the permutation accuracy importance score in a Random Forest algorithm based on conditional inference and, different subsets of increasing size (50, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, All) of the most important ASVs and surrogate variables were used as predictors in the machine learning algorithms. The best performance and the most stable results were obtained with machine learning using the 100 most important ASVs being most of them assigned to order Clostridiales . The medians of the Spearman correlation (interquartile range) were 0.33 (0.09) and 0.32 (0.06) for SVM and ENET, respectively.


Sinusoids are used for making harmonic and other sounds. In order to having life in the sounds and adding a wide variety of noises, irregularities are inserted in the frequency and amplitudes. A simple and intuitive noise model is presented, consisting of a low-pass filtered noise, and having control for strength and bandwidth. The noise is added on the frequency and amplitudes of the sinusoids, and the resulting irregularity's (jitter and shimmer) bandwidth is derived. This, together with an overview of investigation methods of the jitter and shimmer results in an analysis of the necessary sample rate of the shimmer and jitter. A harmonic model introduces individual and common irregularity, and adds a correlation control. The model has been implemented in max/msp and used in contemporary music compositions.


Aeromonads are ubiquitous in aquatic environments and several species have been recognized as pathogens to a variety of animals including humans. The genus Aeromonas includes a tight group of species and subspecies, some of which have required reclassification. The present study was aimed on aeromonads isolated from human clinical material and classified by biotyping and ribotyping techniques. A group of 75 human aeromonads was identified on the complex level by biotyping as Aeromonas hydrophila complex and/or Aeromonas sobria complex. Identification to the species level was not reliable by biotyping and without additional techniques biotyping cannot be used to delineate closely related species of Aeromonas. Ribotyping clearly distinguished both complexes on the base of fragment lengths and furthermore in several cases enabled correct species identification. Aeromonas hydrophila complex yielded only long fragments in range 2 kbp to 20 kbp, while Aeromonas sobria complex showed also smaller fragments below 2 kbp. Aeromonas hydrophila subsp. hydrophila was predominant species in A. hydrophila complex and we did not prove the recently mentioned position of Aeromonas aquariorum as widely distributed species in clinical specimens and previously misidentified as A. hydrophila. Among A. sobria complex isolates the Aeromonas veronii bv. sobria strains were very frequent. Both taxa, A. hydrophila subsp. hydrophila and A. veronii bv. sobria showed great heterogeneity of ribotyping patterns in several clusters. Ribotyping results also proved occurrence of rare pathogens Aeromonas hydrophila subsp. dhakensis, Aeromonas bestiarum, Aeromonas jandaei, Aeromonas veronii bv. veronii and Aeromonas allosaccharophila in diarrheic stool samples. Species variability of aeromonads from clinical samples was not high and ribotyping was appeared as useful tool for reliable strain typing and species identification of aeromonads in combination with biotyping.


Manufacturing-induced residual stresses in carbon/epoxy 3D woven composites arise during cooling after curing due to a large difference in the coefficients of thermal expansion between the carbon fibers and the epoxy matrix. The magnitudes of these stresses appear to be higher in composites with high throughthickness reinforcement and in some cases are sufficient to lead to matrix cracking. This paper presents a numerical approach to simulation of development of manufacturing-induced residual stresses in an orthogonal 3D woven composite unit cell using finite element analysis. The proposed mesoscale modeling combines viscoelastic stress relaxation of the epoxy matrix and realistic reinforcement geometry (based on microtomography and fabric mechanics simulations) and includes imaginginformed interfacial (tow/matrix) cracks. Sensitivity of the numerical predictions to reinforcement geometry and presence of defects is discussed. To validate the predictions, blind hole drilling is simulated, and the predicted resulting surface displacements are compared to the experimentally measured values. The validated model provides an insight into the volumetric distribution of residual stresses in 3D woven composites. The presented approach can be used for studies of residual stress effects on mechanical performance of composites and strategies directed at their mitigation.


Abstract A compilation of the applied experimental conditions when studying metal ion adsorption onto kraft fibres, and the resulting conclusion, revealed that the ionic strength conditions used during the experiments were an important dividing factor. At low ionic strengths, the conclusion has regularly been that the Donnan ion-exchange model could correctly predict the adsorption while, at higher ionic strengths, it has often been concluded that the formation of specific metal-ion fibre complexes must be assumed. To study this apparent influence from the presence of monovalent sodium ions, Cu K-edge EXAFS spectra of Cu2+ ions adsorbed to kraft fibres were collected in media of "0" to 100 mM NaCl. Combined with previous data, these measurements confirmed that at very low ionic strength, the importance of specific interactions between the chemically modified cellulose fibres and the Cu(II) ions significantly decreased. For a detailed description of the adsorption phenomenon, both types of interactions must be considered simultaneously. For most technical and engineering applications, however, the Donnan model can be used at low ionic strength conditions, i.e. I ≲ 10 mM. At higher ionic strengths, though, the inclusion of specific complexes in the model is necessary for correctly describing the adsorption of di- and trivalent cations with strong complex forming properties.


In the last few years, the interest in the use of robots in STEM education has risen. However, their main drawback is the high cost, which makes it almost impossible for schools to have one robot per student. Another drawback is the proprietary nature of commercial solutions, which limits the ability to expand or adapt the robot to educational needs. Different robot kit versions, which have different electronics and programming interfaces and target different age groups, make the decision of educators on which robot to use in STEM education even more complicated. In this work, we propose a new low-cost 3D-printable and unified software-based solution that can cover the needs of all age groups, from kindergarten children to university students. The solution is driven by open source and open hardware ideas, with which, we believe we will help educators in their work. We provide detail on the 3D-printable robot parts and its list of electronics that allow for a wide range of educational activities to be supported, and explain its flexible software stack that supports four different operating modes. The modes cover the needs of users that do not know or want to program the robot, users that prefer block-based programming and less or more experienced programmers who want to take full control of the robot. The robot implements the principles of continuous integration and deployment and allows for easy updates to the latest software version through its web-based administration panel. Though, in its first steps of development and testing, the proposed robot has a huge potential, due to its open nature and the community of students, researchers and educators, that potential has kept growing. A pilot at selected schools, a performance evaluation of various technical aspects and a comparison with state-of-the-art platforms will soon follow.


We report on a 4-stage OPCPA system for high-field applications delivering 10-mJ ~40-fs pulses at 1.5 mum. The system is based on a fusion of femtosecond DPSS Yb technology and a picosecond Nd:YAG pump laser. In a first preliminary filamentation experiment in xenon, we observe spectral broadening of the recompressed multi-mJ 1.5 mum pulses.


The World Health Organization states that adults worldwide have a prevalence of almost 100% for dental caries and 15-20% for severe periodontal diseases. Astonishingly, the prevalence of oral candidiasis is high in HIV patients which stand at 40-50%. The main therapeutics targets for these diseases are pathogen inhibition, limiting oral inflammation and restoring lost oral tissue. Current treatments have limitations, as suggested by the high disease prevalence rates. More importantly, the chronicity of oral diseases requires a natural and safe long-term therapy. Probiotic bacteria, with recent works investigating the oral microbiome, have gained great interest for the development of biotherapeutics. The goals of this thesis includes screening Lactobacillus strains for the inhibition of Streptococcus mutans, and Candida albicans, dental caries and oral candidiasis causing microorganism, respectively. Following the selection of probiotic strains, probiotic characteristics such as probiotic bacteriocin activity, salivary pH modulation, probiotic nutrient (sucrose) competition, probiotic co-aggregation with S. mutans, bacterial attachment to oral epithelial keratinocytes, bacterial nitric oxide production and bacterial antioxidant activity were investigated. Lactobacillus reuteri and Lactobacillus fermentum strains demonstrated oral health promoting characteristics when compared to S. mutans. This was followed by investigations into probiotic hydrogen peroxide production, as hydrogen peroxide has important implications in oral health, including its antimicrobial and whitening properties. Indeed, it was demonstrated that the L. reuteri mechanism of S. mutans inhibition was directly correlated to peroxide production, as investigated using catalase inactivation of hydrogen peroxide. L. reuteri NCIMB 701359, the probiotic with the highest level of hydrogen peroxide production, demonstrated significant reduction in S. mutans biofilm formation, as investigated in a developed model of biofilm under simulated oral conditions. Chronic inflammation and loss of oral tissue are characteristics of periodontal diseases. L. fermentum NCIMB 5221 treatment demonstrated significant reductions in pro-inflammatory cytokines secreted by inflamed osteoblast-like cells. Of potentially even greater interest for periodontitis, the probiotic L. fermentum NCIMB 5221 was also shown to promote the growth of osteaoblast-like cells. In vivo studies shows that L. fermentum NCIMB 5221 modulated serum calcium levels demonstrating their potential role for bone remodeling. Also, a novel oral thin film (OTF) was developed using carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC), to improve the delivery and residence of probiotic bacterial cells into the oral cavity. Following film characterisation and optimization, L. fermentum NCIMB 5221 was incorporated in the films. The probiotic-CMC-OTFs when stored long-term at room temperature, did not change bacterial cell viability and anti-oxidant activity for 150 days. This novel work demonstrates the potential of probiotic bacterial…


ObjectiveTo present the survival results for patients with colorectal carcinoma metastases who have undergone liver resection after being staged by [18F] fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose–positron emission tomography (FDG-PET). Summary Background DataHepatic resection is standard therapy for colorectal metastases confined to the liver, but recurrence is common because of the presence of undetected cancer at the time of surgery. FDG-PET is a sensitive diagnostic tool that identifies tumors based on the increased uptake of glucose by tumor cells. To date, no survival results have been reported for patients who have actually had liver resection after being staged by FDG-PET. MethodsForty-three patients with metastatic colorectal cancer were referred for hepatic resection after conventional tumor staging with computed tomography. FDG-PET was performed on all patients. Laparotomy was performed on patients not staged out by PET. Resection was performed at the time of laparotomy unless extrahepatic disease or unresectable hepatic tumors were found. Patients were examined at intervals in the preoperative period. ResultsFDG-PET identified additional cancer not seen on computed tomography in 10 patients. Surgery was contraindicated in six of these patients because of the findings on FDG-PET. Laparotomy was performed in 37 patients. In all but two, liver resection was performed. Median follow-up in the 35 patients undergoing resection was 24 months. The Kaplan-Meier estimate of overall survival at 3 years was 77% and the lower 95% confidence limit of this estimate of survival was 60%. This figure is higher than 3-year estimate of survival found in previously published series. The 3-year disease-free survival rate was 40%. ConclusionsPreoperative FDG-PET lessens the recurrence rate in patients undergoing hepatic resection for colorectal metastases to the liver by detection of disease not found on conventional imaging.


Background: Lithium remains the gold standard treatment for bipolar disorder. However, it has a very narrow therapeutic index (0.6–0.8 mmol/L). It has been suggested that high environmental temperature can lead to dehydration, elevated plasma lithium concentration and then lithium toxicity. Objectives: We aimed to investigate the effect of seasonal and short-term changes in temperature on serum lithium concentrations in Sydney, Australia. Methods: We retrospectively analysed data from all patients who had serum lithium concentrations taken from the Prince of Wales and Sutherland Hospitals between 2008 and 2018. Temperature data came from the Bureau of Meteorology. We examined correlations between lithium concentrations and the preceding 5 days maximum temperatures, month and season. We also performed a longitudinal analysis of the effect of temperature and seasons within selected patients who had repeated levels. Results: A total of 11,912 serum lithium concentrations from 2493 patients were analysed. There was no significant association between higher lithium concentration and preceding higher temperatures (r = –0.008, p = 0.399). There was also no important seasonal or monthly variation, across all patients or in the smaller cohort with longitudinal data (n = 123, r = 0.008, 95% confidence interval: [–0.04, 0.06]). Conclusion: There were no clinically important differences in serum lithium concentration related to seasons, months or temperatures, which suggests that patients on lithium are able to adequately maintain hydration during hot weather in Sydney.


Mixtures of factor analyzers enable model-based density estimation and clustering to be undertaken for high-dimensional data, where the number of observations n is very large relative to their dimension p. In practice, there is often the need to reduce further the number of parameters in the specification of the componentcovariance matrices. To this end, we propose the use of common component-factor loadings, which considerably reduces further the number of parameters. Moreover, it allows the data to be displayed in low-dimensional plots.


Study Design. A comparative study of trunk muscle recruitment patterns in healthy control subjects and patients with chronic low back pain was conducted. Objective. To assess trunk muscle recruitment in patients with low back pain. Summary of Background Data. Conflicting evidence has been reported on the level and pattern of trunk muscle recruitment in patients with low back pain. The disparities can be explained partly by methodologic differences. It was hypothesized that trunk muscle recruitment patterns may be altered in patients with low back pain to compensate for reduced spinal stability. Methods. For this study, 16 patients with low back pain and 16 matched control subjects performed slow trunk motions about the neutral posture and isometric ramp contractions while seated upright. Ratios of electromyographic amplitudes and estimated moment contributions of antagonist over agonist muscles and of segmentally inserting muscles over muscles inserting on the thorax and pelvis only were calculated. In addition, model simulations were performed to assess the effect of changes in muscle recruitment on spinal stability. Results. The ratios of antagonist over agonist, and of lumbar over thoracic erector spinae electromyographic amplitude and estimated moment contributions were greater in the patients than in the control subjects. The simulation model predicted that these changes would effectively increase spinal stability. Conclusions. Trunk muscle recruitment patterns in patients with low back pain are different from those in healthy control subjects. The differences are likely to be functional with respect to enhancement of spinal stability in the patients.


Objective To explore the association between serum leucine (leu) and diabetic retinopathy (DR) in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and then to analyze the influence of gender on the association. Method The electronic medical records of 1,149 T2D patients who met inclusion and exclusion criteria were retrieved from the Second Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University and the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinzhou Medical University. Serum leu levels of all subjects were measured by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry. Logistic regression was used to obtain the odds ratio (OR) and CI of leu–DR risk in multiple models. When using these models, restricted cubic spline (RCS) was used to test the potential non-linear relationship between multiple continuous independent variables, such as leu and DR (classification), and dependent variables. We also used the additive interaction method to evaluate the interaction effect between leu and gender on DR. Results Leu was a protective factor of DR [0.78 (0.66, 0.92)]. When gender was divided into male and female, the above relationship was statistically significant only in men [0.73 (0.58, 0.94)]. Three indicators of additive interaction—RERI, AP, and S—suggested that there is no interaction between gender and leu on the risk of DR. Conclusions Male T2D patients with high leu levels may have a lower risk of DR.


Objective The purpose of this study was to investigate barriers to surge capacity of an overcrowded emergency department (ED) for a foodborne disease outbreak (FBDO) and to identify solutions to the problems. Design The emergency response of an overcrowded ED to a serious FBDO with histamine fish poisoning was reviewed. Setting The ED of a tertiary academic medical centre (study hospital) with 1600 acute beds in southern Taiwan. Results Among the 346 patients in the outbreak, 333 (96.2%) were transferred to the study hospital without prehospital management within about 2 h. The most common symptoms were dizziness (58.9%), nausea and vomiting (36.3%). 181 patients (54.4%) received intravenous fluid infusion and blood tests were ordered for 82 (24.6%). All patients were discharged except one who required admission. The prominent problems with surge capacity of the study hospital were shortage of spare space in the ED, lack of biological incident response plan, poor command system, inadequate knowledge and experience of medical personnel to manage the FBDO. Conclusions Patients with FBDO could arrive at the hospital shortly after exposure without field triage and management. The incident command system and emergency operation plan of the study hospital did not address the clinical characteristics of the FBDO and the problem of ED overcrowding. Further planning and training of foodborne disease and surge capacity would be beneficial for hospital preparedness for an FBDO.


Introduction: Considerable progress has been made, over the last years, in understanding the role of the endocannabinoid system (ES) in regard to its role in a variety of physiological processes including nociception (pain-sensation), appetite, lipid metabolism, gastrointestinal motility, cardiovascular modulation, motor activity, and memory. Furthermore, ES is strongly associated with human behavior and the skeletal ES is of major importance. ES is comprised of cannabinoid receptors (CB1 and CB2), their endogenous ligands (endocannabinoids) and proteins responsible for their metabolism. Areas covered: To summarize and present all the existing literature that associate CB receptors' polymorphisms with behavior and disease in different populations, as well as its possible therapeutic perspectives. A literature review presenting the most recent data in terms of ES and the latest knowledge regarding the involvement of genetic polymorphisms of cannabinoid receptors in a variety of human diseases and psychiatric and neurological disorders. Expert opinion: The ES is an emerging target for drug discovery, because it is involved in the regulation of many cellular and physiological functions. The modulation of the ES by selective agonists or antagonists may hold tremendous therapeutic potential in various conditions mentioned in this review. However, further information is still required before the ES is completely comprehended.


We report the case of a 27-year old woman who presented hypocalcemia and hyperphosphoremia during her first pregnancy. Her phenotype was in favor of Albright's hereditary osteodystrophy: short stature, obesity, round face, brachymetacarpy and mental retardation. However, the diagnosis of pseudohypopara thyroidism type Ia was ruled out due to low PTH level (10 pg/ml). The patient's 22q11 microdeletion was suspected and identified because of the association of severe neonatal hypocalcemia, abnormal face and renal malformation in her children. Deletion 22q11 leads to various syndromes, including Di George syndrome, also referred to as CATCH 22 syndrome (Cardiac defect (C), Abnormal face (A), Thymic hypoplasia (T), Cleft palate (C) and Hypocalcemia (H)). Retrospectively, the patient presented with symptoms suggestive of CATCH 22: abnormal face, hypernasal voice suggestive of velopharyngeal insufficiency, mental retardation, recurrent otitis in childhood. It is also noteworthy that there was an idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. In conclusion, while the phenotype was suggestive of Albright's hereditary osteodystrophy, the constatation of a low PTH level would cast doubt on this diagnosis. Furthermore, the 22q11 microdeletion should be searched by FISH (Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization) in all patients with hypopara thyroidism of unknown origin, even in the absence of cardiac malformations. Finally, it seems that patients with CATCH 22 would be predisposed to auto-immune disease as a result of thymic dysfunction.


The effects of dietary supplementation of zinc (Zn) sources and concentrations were investigated on growth performance, absorption into tissues, fecal excretion, nutrient retention, and intestinal morphology in broilers fed a corn-soybean meal basal diet. A total of 525 one-day-old chicks (Ross 308) were assigned based on body weight to seven dietary treatments. There were five replicate pens for each treatment and 15 broilers per replicate pen. The dietary treatments included a basal diet (control, without supplementing Zn), and basal diet supplemented with Zn, as inorganic zinc sulfate (ZnS; 110 mg/kg); organic Zn-methionine (ZnM; 110 mg/kg); hot-melt extruded (HME) 25 zinc sulfate (27.5 mg/kg); HME50 zinc sulfate (55 mg/kg); HME75 zinc sulfate (82.5 mg/kg); or HME100 zinc sulfate (110 mg/kg) for 35 days in two phases (d 1–21, phase I and d 22–35, phase II). Bodyweight and feed efficiency of broiler chicks fed diets supplemented with increasing dietary concentrations of HME-Zn improved linearly during the study period (P<0.05). Compared to the control treatment, the ZnS, ZnM, and HME diets increased Zn concentrations in the serum and liver. Inorganic ZnS supply resulted in the highest Zn concentration in excreta. Increasing supplemented Zn content in diets as HME linearly increased Zn concentration in the excreta, serum, liver, and tibia. Broiler chicks fed diets supplemented with increasing concentrations of HME increased villus height (VH; linear and quadratic) of the jejunum and VH of the ileum (linear). Increasing concentrations of dietary Zn supplied as HME resulted in linearly enhanced dry matter, gross energy, and nitrogen retention of broilers on day 21. These results suggest that dietary HME-Zn at a lower level (55 ppm) shows the same growth performance as common ZnSO4 at 110 ppm.


A subtraction hybridization technique was employed to make a library enriched for Pseudomonas solanacearum-specific sequences. One cloned fragment, PS2096, hybridized under stringent conditions to DNA of 82 P. solanacearum strains representing all subgroups of the species. Other plant-associated bacteria, including closely related species such as Pseudomonas capacia, Pseudomonas picketti, or Pseudomonas syzygii, did not hybridize to PS2096. A minimum number of between 4 x 10(5) and 4 x 10(6) P. solanacearum cells could routinely be detected with PS2096 labelled either with [32P]dCTP or with digoxigenin-11-dUTP. To improve the sensitivity of detection, PS2096 was sequenced to allow the construction of specific oligonucleotide primers to be used for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. After 50 cycles of amplification, 5 to 116 cells, depending on the strain, could reproducibly be detected by visualization of a 148-bp PCR product on an agarose gel. A preliminary field trial in Burundi with the probe and PCR primers has confirmed that they are sensitive tools for specifically detecting low-level infections of P. solanacearum in potato tubers.


We present results of multiple regressions of the leading mode of atmospheric variability at southern high latitudes: the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). It is regressed against indices with large interannual variability, and one of several trend indices in order to determine which trend term gives the optimum fit. We use SAM in sea‐level pressure from station data in order to provide a long time series, from 1957 to 2005. The regression indices are stratospheric volcanic aerosol, solar activity, the quasi‐biennial oscillation (QBO), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, together with either a linear trend, or the effective equivalent stratospheric chlorine (EESC) that depletes polar ozone, or ozone mass deficit (OMD) in the Antarctic vortex. We find a statistically significant signal for volcanic aerosol, and, when the solar and QBO indices are represented by their product, a highly significant response to the product. We find a significant linear trend in SAM, but there is a major increase in significance using EESC2 and a further increase using OMD. We make no direct attempt to identify cause and effect, but if the trend is due to human influence then ozone loss is at least 9 times more likely the principle cause of the trend in SAM than greenhouse gases, although we do not exclude greenhouse gases making a smaller contribution. Monthly and seasonal regressions show a maximum correlation with OMD between December and May (summer and autumn), consistent with previous work on stratospheric change as a cause of change in the troposphere. Copyright © 2007 Royal Meteorological Society


Measuring the importance of a node in a network is a major goal in the analysis of social networks, biological systems, transportation networks, and so forth. Different centrality measures have been proposed to capture the notion of node importance. For example, the center of a graph is a node that minimizes the maximum distance to any other node (the latter distance is the radius of the graph). The median of a graph is a node that minimizes the sum of the distances to all other nodes. Informally, the betweenness centrality of a node w measures the fraction of shortest paths that have w as an intermediate node. Finally, the reach centrality of a node w is the smallest distance r such that any s-t shortest path passing through w has either s or t in the ball of radius r around w. The fastest known algorithms to compute the center and the median of a graph and to compute the betweenness or reach centrality even of a single node take roughly cubic time in the number n of nodes in the input graph. It is open whether these problems admit truly subcubic algorithms, i.e., algorithms with running time Õ(n3-δ) for some constant δ > 0.1 We relate the complexity of the mentioned centrality problems to two classical problems for which no truly subcubic algorithm is known, namely All Pairs Shortest Paths (APSP) and Diameter. We show that Radius, Median, and Betweenness Centrality are equivalent under subcubic reductions to APSP, i.e., that a truly subcubic algorithm for any of these problems implies a truly subcubic algorithm for all of them. We then show that Reach Centrality is equivalent to Diameter under subcubic reductions. The same holds for the problem of approximating Betweenness Centrality within any finite factor. Thus, the latter two centrality problems could potentially be solved in truly subcubic time, even if APSP required essentially cubic time. On the positive side, our reductions for Reach Centrality imply an improved Õ(Mnω)-time algorithm for this problem in case of non-negative integer weights upper bounded by M, where ω is a fast matrix multiplication exponent.


This paper provides a model to identify the most appropriate packaging system (i.e. the industrial process by which the product is hygienically coupled with the container) for different liquid foods. The model developed is grounded on the Analytic Network Process (ANP) methodology, a powerful and flexible tool used in decision making. To select the appropriate packaging system, the model takes into account several factors, including packaging material, cost, safety, performance (e.g., speed and accuracy), plant reliability and flexibility, which may directly or indirectly affect the suitability of the process. Moreover, the chemical and physical properties of commercial liquid foods, and the packaging technology are included in the model as further variables to be considered for the final choice. We try to answer the following research questions: is a filling system appropriate for a given liquid food? Is it compatible with a defined packaging technology? When several filling systems are available for a given liquid food, how can the most appropriate one be selected? The ease of application of the model and the robustness of the results provided have been tested on a sample of 59 commercial liquid foods. for which the model allowed to identify the most suitable packaging system, providing useful practical guidelines. The model was developed in close collaboration with a panel of experts, operating in the beverage bottling industry, and validated by the same experts: thus, the resulting tool is suitable for use as a decision support system by food and bottling industries.


Historians generally agree that modern brands arose from the vertically integrated corporations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were used as competitive weapons between like firms. Looking at the alcoholic beverage trade and drawing on trade press, court reports, newspaper advertising, business records, and accounts of consumer behavior, I suggest that, on the contrary, supply chains made up of small firms played both an earlier and a significant part in the genesis of modern brands. In these chains, firms used branding not only to fight direct competitors but also to discipline and subordinate other links in the chain over whom they had no direct control and with whom they had to cooperate.


The angular variation of the gyromagnetic factor measured by electron spin resonance (ESR) in single crystals of several copper-amino acid complexes (CAC) does not follow the second-order tensorial dependence expected for spins 1/2. Fourth-order contributions with magnitudes of up to delta g=0.01 have been clearly distinguished from the ESR data. CAC have two copper positions per unit cell differing in the orientation of their anisotropic gyromagnetic tensors. The ESR spectra show a single, exchange collapsed line for both sites. Linewidth and magnetic susceptibility measurements indicate exchange interactions 0.2 K > mod J mod >0.6 K, and a low-dimensional magnetic behaviour which is supported by the structural information. The observed anomalous contribution to the gyromagnetic factor is examined in terms of the theory of Kubo and Tomita, and the authors analyse three types of contributions to the shifts. One arises from the difference between the Zeeman interactions for the two sites, and is produced when the non-secular part of this term is modulated by the exchange interaction. The dipole-dipole interaction between copper ions gives rise to two additional contributions. One is due to the non-secular terms, while the other arises because of the low symmetry of CAC, and becomes important in magnetic low-dimensional systems. Only the secular part of this last term is studied, giving a contribution that depends on the orientation of the microwave field. Although the theoretical results obtained within the standard scheme give contributions with the right order of magnitude, the overall agreement with their experimental results is poor, suggesting that a more detailed analysis is required.


A photoconductive semiconductor switch (PCSS) with a gap of 0.018 m was fabricated from semi-insulating (SI) GaAs and tested under different bias voltages by using a laser at a wavelength of 1064 nm for triggering. The peculiar photoconductivity in high-power SI GaAs PCSS is reported. The PCSS operates in linear mode at bias voltages of 4 and 6 kV, because the waveform of photocurrent is similar to that of laser pulse. As the bias voltage increases, the full-width at half-maximum of photocurrents also increases, and the PCSS undergoes transition from linear to nonlinear mode. The switch behaved nonlinearly at a bias voltage of 10 kV, with obvious lock-on in photocurrent waveform. However, with bias voltages above 10 kV, the photocurrents increase instead of staying on a constant value, and a two-stage rise of photocurrents is observed. In both linear and nonlinear modes, photocurrents have the same full pulse duration at different bias voltages.


PRISONERS WITH AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) were a focus of concern at the 11th National Conference on Correctional Health Care, held in Chicago. Lambert N. King, MD, PhD, medical director, St Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center, New York City, told participants, "AIDS and HIV [human immunodeficiency virus] infection in prisons present unprecedented problems." Among these problems are how (and whether) to determine who is infected, how and where to incarcerate persons who test positive for HIV antibody or develop overt disease, who will pay for therapy, how to stem the spread of infection (tattooing and anal intercourse are issues here), and how to deal with questions of confidentiality and with less-than-optimal response by correctional officers and administrative staff. The difficulty of finding solutions to all of the problems appears to be exacerbated by a tangle of statutes, recommendations, and pending legislation that vary from state to state. Also, it seems


Outer membrane vesicles (OMV) contain immunogenic proteins and contribute to in vivo survival and virulence of bacterial pathogens. The first OMV vaccines successfully stopped Neisseria meningitidis serogroup B outbreaks but required detergent-extraction for endotoxin removal. Current vaccines use attenuated endotoxin, to preserve immunological properties and allow a detergent-free process. The preferred process is based on spontaneously released OMV (sOMV), which are most similar to in vivo vesicles and easier to purify. The release mechanism however is poorly understood resulting in low yield. This study with N. meningitidis demonstrates that an external stimulus, cysteine depletion, can trigger growth arrest and sOMV release in sufficient quantities for vaccine production (±1500 human doses per liter cultivation). Transcriptome analysis suggests that cysteine depletion impairs iron-sulfur protein assembly and causes oxidative stress. Involvement of oxidative stress is confirmed by showing that addition of reactive oxygen species during cysteine-rich growth also triggers vesiculation. The sOMV in this study are similar to vesicles from natural infection, therefore cysteine-dependent vesiculation is likely to be relevant for the in vivo pathogenesis of N. meningitidis.


Carnivorous mammals use their forelimbs in different ways to capture their prey. Most terrestrial carnivores have some cursorial (running) adaptations, but ambush predators retain considerable flexibility in their forelimb movement, important for grappling with their prey. In contrast, predators that rely on pursuit to run down their prey have sacrificed some of this flexibility for locomotor efficiency, in the greater restriction of the forelimb motion to the parasagittal plane. In this article, we measured aspects of the forelimb anatomy (44 linear measurements) in 36 species of carnivorous mammals of known predatory behavior, and used multivariate analyses to investigate how well the forelimb anatomy reflects the predatory mode (ambush, pursuit, or pounce‐pursuit). A prime intention of this study was to establish morphological correlates of behavior that could then be applied to fossil mammals: for this purpose, five individuals of the recently extinct thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) were also included as unknowns. We show that the three different types of predators can be distinguished by their morphology, both in analyses where all the forelimb bones are included together, and in the separate analyses of each bone individually. Of particular interest is the ability to distinguish between the two types of more cursorial predators, pursuit and pounce‐pursuit, which have previously been considered as primarily size‐based categories. Despite a prior consideration of the thylacine as a "pounce‐pursuit" or an "ambush" type of predator, the thylacines did not consistently cluster with any type of predatory carnivores in our analyses. Rather, the thylacines appeared to be more generalized in their morphology than any of the extant carnivores. The absence of a large diversity of large carnivorous mammals in Australia, past and present, may explain the thylacine's generalized morphology. J. Morphol. 275:1321–1338, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


This book is an interesting publication with selected Asian crops grouped into seven chapters based on their usage: grains, vegetables, fruits, fats and oils, beans and nuts, spices, and herbal beverages and subsequents. Its purpose is to bring Asian crops and culture that have made a significant contribution to human dietetics to the attention of people in other parts of the world. In addition to nutrition, Asian cuisines were part of traditional systems of health and healing. In each chapter the treatise on each crop has an introduction, botanical description, nutritional composition, food and medicinal uses, anti-nutritional factors, if any, and research results related to nutraceutical compounds. The botanical descriptions lack references. The traditional use of various plant parts from different crops mentioned in this book are 'household remedies', which are undocumented by research. Nevertheless, such claims descending from previous generations help students in dietetics and nutrition to undertake research to document such claims. Among oil crops, soybean, and among millets, Pennisetum typhoides, an important crop, are missing. The treatment of many crops (e.g. eggplant, French bean, winged bean, taro) is too brief. Instead of embedding the chemical composition for most of the crops in the text, it would have been better to have such data in tables. This book will open the eyes of non-specialist readers in Asia and other parts of the world to choose foods for a healthy diet and lifestyle, and help scientists to conduct research and industry to develop health-related products from plants.


Abstract Recent experimental data suggest that the uptake of 99Tc by vegetation from soils may be two to three orders of magnitude higher than the 0.25 value currently being used in radiological assessments. Following a survey of the literature, a concentration factor of 50 was applied to evaluate the dose from a 1.0 Ci/yr-release to the atmosphere by a hypothetical uranium enrichment facility. Doses to the GI tract and thyroid of an adult living 1600 m from the facility were 18 mrem and 80 mrem, respectively. These doses are delivered entirely through transport of 99Tc through food chain pathways. This assessment indicates a potential for 99Tc exposures to exceed recently proposed standards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 40 CFR 190. The previously assumed concentration factor of 0.25 would have produced corresponding doses of 0.13 mrem to the GI tract and 0.57 mrem to the thyroid. The results of this analysis demonstrate the need for additional research on the environmental behavior and dosimetry of 99Tc. In particular, data are needed to elucidate the retention of 99Tc in soils and the uptake of 99Tc by edible vegetation in field studies simulating chronic exposure conditions. Data on the uptake and retention of 99Tc in humans are also necessary to improve the reliability of dose conversion factors for specific organs and various age groups.


Hospital-acquired conditions such as catheter-associated urinary tract infection, stage 3 or 4 hospital-acquired pressure injury, and falls with injury are common, costly, and largely preventable. This study used participatory design methods to design and evaluate low-fidelity prototypes of clinical dashboards to inform high-fidelity prototype designs to visualize integrated risks based on patient profiles. Five low-fidelity prototypes were developed through literature review and by engaging nurses, nurse managers, and providers as participants (N = 23) from two hospitals in different healthcare systems using focus groups and interviews. Five themes were identified from participatory design sessions: Need for Integrated Hospital-Acquired Condition Risk Tool, Information Needs, Sources of Information, Trustworthiness of Information, and Performance Tracking Perspectives. Participants preferred visual displays that represented patient comparative risks for hospital-acquired conditions using the familiar design metaphor of a gauge and green, yellow, and red "traffic light" colors scheme. Findings from this study were used to design a high-fidelity prototype to be tested in the next phase of the project. Visual displays of hospital-acquired conditions that are familiar in display and simplify complex information such as the green, yellow, and red dashboard are needed to assist clinicians in fast-paced clinical environments and be designed to prevent alert fatigue.


Query expansion (QE) aims at improving information retrieval (IR) effectiveness by enhancing the query formulation. Because users' queries are generally short and because of the language ambiguity, some information needs are difficult to answer. Query reformulation and QE methods have been developed to face this issue. Relevance feedback (RF) is one of the most popular QE techniques. In its manual version, the system uses the information on the relevance -manually judged- of retrieved documents in order to expand the initial query. Rather than using users' judgment on the document relevance, blind RF considers the first retrieved documents as relevant. Generally speaking, RF methods consider the terms that cooccur with query terms within positive feedback documents as candidates for the expansion. Rather than considering feedback documents in their all, it is possible to analyze local information. This paper presents a new method that uses local context from feedback documents for QE. The method uses POS information as well as the remoteness from query terms within feedback documents. We show that the method significantly improves precision on TREC collections.


OBJECTIVE
To identify the feasibility of home care and difficulties of mothers who deliver this care for children with special health needs (CRIANES) and to analyze the role of nurses as facilitators of this care.

METHODS
This descriptive study with a qualitative approach included ten mothers of CRIANES who completed a semi-structured interview at a teaching hospital in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Data were analyzed using a thematic analysis.

RESULTS
Participants pointed out as difficulties the accessibility of treatment facilities and the presence of complex disease. The administration of medicines was classified as both easy and difficult. Features that made home care feasible were help of the child and preparation of nurses in the hospital context for home care. Maternal love helped mothers to overcome difficulties.

CONCLUSION
Encouragement from the nursing team for centered family care is needed. In addition, mothers should be better prepared for the transition from hospital to home. The health network needs to be reorganized with inclusion of CRIANES in the primary care network in order to reduce the dependency of this population on hospitals and to help broaden the social network for CRIANES.


In this talk, I will explain how to extend classical mean field methods to study the control and the optimal control of large stochastic systems. I will first show that as the number of objects of the system grows, solving an optimal control problem for a stochastic system can be reduced to the solving of a deterministic optimization problem. Then, I will present how to study the limiting behavior of the controlled system using di fferential inclusions. In practice, this allows one to easily evaluate the performance of a policy and provide a way to asymptotically solve problems that used to be intractable. Some examples will be provided, illustrating these facts.


This paper focuses on feature combination approaches for dis- criminative language models (DLMs). DLM is a feature-based log-linear language modeling approach where the feature pa- rameters are estimated discriminatively. DLM allows for easy integration of various knowledge sources into language mod- eling. Choosing the proper strategy when combining features coming from different information sources is important. We in- vestigated three approaches for combining lexical, word class, and acoustic features in DLMs. The three approaches are joint parameter estimation, cascade training, and model score combination. The cascade approach is an interesting approach that finally gave the best test set performance, improving the word error rate by 0.49% absolute (3% relative) on transcription of English Broadcast News. The word class features and state duration features were found to be very complementary, and their combination provided most of the improvement.


The authors studied the composition of isoenzymes of malic dehydrogenase in peripheral blood leucocytes of patients with Duchenne-type progressive muscular dystrophy, their mothers and sisters, and also in other primary muscular diseases. The studied group included 25 patients with Duchenne dystrophy, 20 their mothers and sisters, and 11 patients with other primary muscular diseases. The control group comprised 10 healthy subjects aged 19-40 years. Sporadically a decrease was observed of total activity and of the amount of the mitochondrial isoenzyme of MDH in Duchenne dystrophy. In one case the m-MDH isoenzyme was completely absent, this patient had most advanced disease. In the mothers of patients decreased MDH activity occurred rarely (once in 13 mothers) and the pattern of MDH isoenzymes was normal, similarly as in sisters of these patients. In other primary muscular diseases no abnormalities were found.


The effect of a pulse dose of Vitamin D3 on uptake of [99mTc]MDP by fractured and osteoporotic bone, respectively, was compared with D3's effect on uptake by normal bone in rats. At 4, 7, and 14 days, respectively, after femoral fracture, basal uptake was significantly (p less than 0.005) increased at the fracture site by 336.8, 276.1, and 183.5%, respectively, over the contralateral control site. D3-treated rats had lower uptakes than untreated controls at all three fracture sites and at 12 of 15 normal bone sites but analysis of variance showed the uptake differences were not significant. Cortisone-induced osteoporosis caused a significant (p less than 0.05) decrease in basal uptake. The decrease occurred in all nine bone areas studied. D3 caused a significant (p less than 0.05) increase (mean 16.2%) in uptake by these osteoporotic bones, but a significant (0.1 greater than p greater than 0.05) decrease (mean 13.0%) in uptake by the same bones in normal controls. Thus, D3 had an effect on uptake by the bone lesion, osteoporosis, that differed from D3's effect on uptake by fracture or normal bone.


There is increasing evidence that metabolic imaging with positron-emission tomography (PET) using fluor-18 labeled fluorodeoxyglucose (18F FDG) is highly accurate for in vivo detection of a variety of malignancies. This quality gives FDG-PET an important role in the detection of malignant tumors and their metastases as well as for differentiation of tumors of unknown etiology. In the male and female reproductive tract, whole body imaging with FDG-PET is in particular capable of visualizing lymph-node and distant metastases before these changes become apparent on conventional cross-sectional imaging modalities. According to the incidence of tumors in the reproductive tract, FDG-PET-imaging has been evaluated in prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, cervical and testicular cancer. The role of PET is discussed with respect to the current management of patients. The presented data indicate that FDG-PET is more accurate for lymph-node staging in cervical cancer and testicular cancer. In ovarian cancer, FDG-PET may be helpful for detection of tumor recurrence. The role of FDG-PET is questionable in prostate cancer, due to the low metabolic activity of this type of cancer. Carbon-11 labeled acetate and carbon-11 or fluor-18 labeled choline are more promising than FDG for detection of recurrence in prostate cancer. In all other tumors of the reproductive tract there is limited experience with PET for a final conclusion.


This paper aims to investigate disruptive technology in the supermarket industry and its' sustainability in Singapore. The extended Technology Acceptance Model 3 (TAM3) was used to test and analyse factors affecting consumer willingness to adopt the use of high-tech enabled (HTE) services in supermarkets. A sample of 50 survey respondents completed an online questionnaire. Pivot tables and multiple regression statistics were used to analyse survey responses. Perceived usefulness and Perceived ease of use are two determining factors that contributed to adoption attitudes. Other moderating factors like unique demographics, psychographics, relative convenience, and location accessibility also play big roles in adoption rates. While actual use of HTE services was found to be low, the intention to use was high.


Mediastinal fibromatosis is a rare entity affecting individuals of all age groups, and is extremely rare in children. Fibromatosis can occur anywhere in the body; most commonly in the superficial soft tissues, extremities, or abdomen. Bilateral pleural and mediastinal fibromatosis extending to neck along the tissue planes has not previously been reported in the literature. Most fibromatoses are benign but 10-20% can undergo malignant transformation. These tumours are initially asymptomatic, but can present with compressive symptoms as they grow in size. We present a rare case of fibromatosis of neck and mediastinum which developed in a 4 year old boy who had undergone cardiac surgery 2 years previously. Diagnostic dilemma and challenges in surgical removal are outlined. This report documents an extremely rare case of anterior mediastinal fibromatosis, desmoid type that occurred immediately after cardiac surgery in a young child.


INTRODUCTION
Plastic surgery history denotes two forefathers: Sushruta Samhita, who dates back to the 6th century BC with the Sanskrit surgical handbook, composed mainly by him, and Sir Harold Delf Gillies who is considered the father of modern plastic surgery due to his pioneer work during World War I.


We present the Shannon entropy as an indicator of spatial resolution for morphology of resonance mode pattern in dielectric micro cavity. We obtain two types of optimized mesh point for the minimum and maximum sizes, respectively. The critical mesh point for the minimum size is determined by the barely identifiable quantum number through chi square test whereas the saturation of difference of the Shannon entropy corresponds to the maximum size. We can also show that the critical mesh point increases as the (real) wave number of eigenvalue trajectory increases and estimate the proportional constant between them. .


Database systems for real-time applications must satisfy timing constraints associated with transactions, in addition to maintaining data consistency. In addition to real-time requirements, security is usually required in many applications, because sensitive information must be safeguarded. Multilevel security requirements introduce a new dimension to transaction processing in real-time database systems. The paper addresses issues that must be investigated in order to design and develop a multilevel secure database management system for real-time applications.<<ETX>>


OBJECTIVE
miR-613 may suppress ovarian cancer development and progression. We wished to assess the potential prognostic value of miR-613 expression analysis in ovarian cancer.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
A total of 236 pairs of human ovarian cancer and matched normal tissue specimens were collected. Resected tissue specimens were obtained during the operation and were snap-frozen in liquid nitrogen for subsequent RNA extraction. Total RNA was extracted from tissue specimens, and miR-613 expression was quantified using TaqMan qPCR. The miR-613 expression was normalized to expression of U6 as an internal standard.

RESULTS
miR-613 expression in ovarian cancer tissue specimens was significantly (p < 0.001) lower than that in matched normal adjacent tissue specimens. Furthermore, within ovarian cancer tissue specimens, 114 specimens exhibited lower levels of miR-613 ("low expression" group), whereas 122 specimens showed higher levels of this miR ("high expression" group). Low expression of miR-613 showed significant associations with the FIGO stage (p < 0.001), tumour grade (p < 0.001), and lymph node metastases (p < 0.001). Furthermore, low miR-613 expression was associated with lower progression-free and overall survival (respectively, p < 0.01 and < 0.0001). Finally, the multivariate analysis using the Cox proportional hazards model showed that miR-613 expression levels, FIGO stage, and lymph node metastases were independently associated with progression-free and overall survival in patients with ovarian cancer.

CONCLUSIONS
miR-613 expression levels are low in ovarian cancer tissue and correlate with progression-free and overall survival. Thus, miR-613 may be useful as a prognostic marker in ovarian cancer.


Background: To compare the clinical and radiographic outcomes between the conventional delayed and staged approaches for intra-articular calcaneus fractures in which early definite fixation could not be performed because of severe soft tissue injury. Methods: From January 2015 to May 2019, a total of 32 cases with acute intra-articular calcaneal fractures met criteria and were enrolled in the study. We compared the outcomes of intra-articular calcaneal fractures that underwent delayed internal fixation between groups treated with a conventional delayed approach (non-EF group) vs a temporary medial external fixation (EF group). Clinical outcome measures included a 10-point visual analog scale score, the AOFAS score, and the Foot Function Index. Radiographic outcome measures included Böhler angle, talar declination angle, and calcaneal width. Reduction of the posterior facet was assessed on CT scans. Results: The first 15 (46.9%) were treated with a conventional delayed approach, and the latter 17 (53.1%) were treated with a staged approach with temporary medial external fixation. Clinical outcomes were not different between the groups at the last follow-up. The time from injury to definite internal fixation was shorter by an average of 3.8 days in the EF group (P = .001). The Böhler angle, talar declination angle, and calcaneal width were not different between the groups before surgery and at the last follow-up. Reduction of the posterior facet on CT scans was significantly better in the EF group than in the non-EF group (good/excellent = 94% vs 60%, respectively, P = .033). Conclusion: The staged approach using medial external fixation for displaced intra-articular calcaneus fractures could be an effective method to decrease the time to definitive internal fixation and obtain optimal reduction of the posterior facet. Level of Evidence: Level III, retrospective case-control study.


The ability to electrodeposit titanium at low temperatures would be an important breakthrough for making corrosion resistant layers on a variety of technically important materials. Ionic liquids have often been considered as suitable solvents for the electrodeposition of titanium. In the present paper we have extensively investigated whether titanium can be electrodeposited from its halides (TiCl(4), TiF(4), TiI(4)) in different ionic liquids, namely1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)amide ([EMIm]Tf(2)N), 1-butyl-1-methylpyrrolidinium bis(trifluoromethyl-sulfonyl)amide ([BMP]Tf(2)N), and trihexyltetradecyl-phosphonium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)amide ([P(14,6,6,6)]Tf(2)N). Cyclic voltammetry and EQCM measurements show that, instead of elemental Ti, only non-stoichiometric halides are formed, for example with average stoichiometries of TiCl(0.2), TiCl(0.5) and TiCl(1.1). In situ STM measurements show that-in the best case-an ultrathin layer of Ti or TiCl(x) with thickness below 1 nm can be obtained. In addition, results from both electrochemical and chemical reduction experiments of TiCl(4) in a number of these ionic liquids support the formation of insoluble titanium cation-chloride complex species often involving the solvent. Solubility studies suggest that TiCl(3) and, particularly, TiCl(2) have very limited solubility in these Tf(2)N based ionic liquids. Therefore it does not appear possible to reduce Ti(4+) completely to the metal in the presence of chloride. Successful deposition processing for titanium in ionic liquids will require different maybe tailor-made titanium precursors that avoid these problems.


Introduction: Cancer is the second leading cause of death, preceded only by cardiovascular diseases, and epidemiological evidence demonstrates that this tendency is emerging worldwide. The number of cancer-related deaths is expected to increase 45% between 2007 and 2030. Excluding skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women, accounting for nearly 1 in 3 cancers diagnosed in the United States. Brazilian data confirm that breast cancer is the leading type of cancer in women and that, over the past 30 years, mortality has increased. Brazil has an extensive vegetal biodiversity with more than 55,000 species listed. Such biodiversity collaborates with the finding of compounds which could be the basis for the design of new anti-tumor drugs, with fewer side effects than the conventional chemotherapy used currently. Cedrelone is a limonoid isolated from Trichilia catigua (Meliaceae), a native Brazilian plant popularly known as "catuaba" or "catigua".

Material and Methods: Cedrelone was isolated from the fruits of Trichilia catigua collected at Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz (ESALQ), Piracicaba, Brazil. The aryls were reduced to powder and extracted with dichloromethane and methanol at room temperature. Dichloromethane fraction was chromatographed on a silica gel, similar fractions were grouped and fraction eight was recristalized and produced 323.4 mg of pure cedrelone. MDA-MB-231 human breast tumor and HF cell lines, obtained from ATCC, were maintained at 37°C in 5% CO2 in DMEM medium (Vitrocell) containing FBS 10%, penicillin (100 UI/ml), streptomycin (100 mg/ml) and L-glutamine (2 mM). For proliferation assays, the MTT method was used (Mosmann et al., 1983). Wound-healing migration assay was based on the repopulation of wounded cultures. Adhesion assays were performed in 96 well plates. Different concentrations of cedrelone were incubated with MDA-MB-231 cells before being plated on the wells, which were previously coated with a solution of collagen type I. Unbound cells were washed and adhered cells were stained with crystal violet solution. Absorbance reading was performed at 595nm. The effect of cedrelone on MDA-MB-231 tumor cell invasiveness was determined by the ability to transmigrate through a layer of matrigel in a transwell chamber (BD Biosciences). Zymography experiments were performed with supernatants of the wound healing assay which were collected and tested for MMP activity as previously described (Leber and Negus, 2001). Finally, the apoptotic activity of cedrelone on MDA-MB-231 cells was analyzed by flow cytometry with the FITC Annexin V Apoptosis Detection Kit (BD Biosciences).

Results: This study demonstrates that cedrelone inhibits proliferation, adhesion, migration and invasion of breast tumor cells from the line MDA-MB-231. The effects of cell migration and invasion on MDA-MB-231 cell may be explained, at least in part, by the ability of cedrelone to inhibit MMP activity. We also demonstrate that cedrelone is able to induce apoptosis in MDA-MB-231 cells. There are only a few works investigating the effect of limonoids in cellular processes closely related to tumor progression such as adhesion, migration and invasion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work describing the effects of a limonoid on tumor and non-tumor cell adhesion process. Furthermore, after nimbolide, this is the second work to demonstrate the effects of a limonoid on cell migration and invasion, in addition to the effect on MMP activity, and the first work performed with MDA-MB-231 breast tumor cell line.

Conclusion: Our results show that cedrelone could be the basis for the design of a new anti-tumor drug to be used in chemotherapy.

Citation Format: Amanda Blanque Becceneri, Angelina Maria Fuzer, Julio Cesar Conceicao Filho, Paulo Cezar Vieira, Joao Batista Fernandes, Cristiane Cazal, Marcia Regina Cominetti. Effects of limonoid cedrelone on MDA-MB-231 breast tumor cells in vitro. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Third AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Basic Cancer Research; Sep 18-22, 2013; National Harbor, MD. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2013;73(19 Suppl):Abstract nr B10.


Metronidazol was employed in the endodontic treatment of 200 gangrenous teeth, with symptoms of acute and chronic periodontitis. In 50 cases aerobic and anaerobic microbiological cultivations have been performed. The number of the necessary treatments was less, symptoms of irritation in the periapical region could not be observed. The favourable clinical and microbiological results in the course of the Metronidazol treatment point to the role of the anaerobic microorganisms in connection with the inflammatory symptoms of the gangrenous pulp.


There are many reports regarding various medical institutions' attempts at the prevention of dispensing errors. However, the relationship between occurrence timing of dispensing errors and subsequent danger to patients has not been studied under the situation according to the classification of drugs by efficacy. Therefore, we analyzed the relationship between position and time regarding the occurrence of dispensing errors. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between occurrence timing of them and danger to patients. In this study, dispensing errors and incidents in three categories (drug name errors, drug strength errors, drug count errors) were classified into two groups in terms of its drug efficacy (efficacy similarity (-) group, efficacy similarity (+) group), into three classes in terms of the occurrence timing of dispensing errors (initial phase errors, middle phase errors, final phase errors). Then, the rates of damage shifting from "dispensing errors" to "damage to patients" were compared as an index of danger between two groups and among three classes. Consequently, the rate of damage in "efficacy similarity (-) group" was significantly higher than that in "efficacy similarity (+) group". Furthermore, the rate of damage is the highest in "initial phase errors", the lowest in "final phase errors" among three classes. From the results of this study, it became clear that the earlier the timing of dispensing errors occurs, the more severe the damage to patients becomes.


Abstract The present study provides scientific information on the growth pattern and relative condition of shortfin scad, Decapterus macrosoma Bleeker landed in Banjarmasin fishing port, Indonesia. A total of 313 individual scad comprising 178 males and 135 females ranging from 152 to 225 mm total length and from 37 to 110 g weight were investigated. The body shape of both males and females showed isometric growth patterns indicating that all body dimensions grew at the same rate. The regression coefficient was significantly different between the sexes. The total length (TL), body weight (W), body depth (BD), W/TL, and BD/TL ratios and condition factors of the females were comparatively higher than those of males. The highest percentage of the catch was between 180 and 189 mm TL (32.59–40.45%) and 50 and 59 g W (20.65-21.79%). The relative condition factor values ranged from 0.799 to 1.433, which reflected the good condition of the fish samples. The estimated length at first capture (Lc50) and selection factor values were 180 mm and 3.54 for males and 185 mm and 3.64 for females. In the present work, the purse seine was considered to be a male-biased gear, with a sex ratio of 1.3 : 1. The outcomes of this research could be useful for sustainable pelagic fisheries management and for developing precautionary measures to prevent the overexploitation of this species.


Analytic expressions for the degradation of the mean system performance due to polarisation dependent loss (PDL) and polarisation dependent gain (PDG) are derived. For PDL values lower than 0.5 dB only a negligible change in the mean system performance is expected. PDG, on the other hand, is shown to cause a significant degradation of the system performance.


Intimate partner violence (IPV) has been linked to a broad range of negative consequences. Thus, early detection and prevention of behaviors associated with IPV is necessary to combat this global public health problem. Controlling behaviors (CBs) within the intimate context, including acts to constrain free mobility or access to friends and relatives, have been characterized as a moderate form of violence and may be an indicator of more severe IPV. Previous research in this field, however, has been primarily conducted in the United States. Accordingly, we lack knowledge of similar findings in other countries to draw more general conclusions about observed associations between these variables, and to identify underlying mechanisms. The current study analyzes the role of control within the Spanish context by examining its correlates, as well as the role and impact of CBs on psychological and physical violence. To achieve these objectives, we use data from the Spanish sample of the Violence Against Women Survey carried out by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (N = 1,520 adult women). The results indicated that young women, women with a previous history of physical/sexual abuse during childhood, and women who have resided in Spain for fewer years are at greater risk of experiencing control within the context of an ongoing relationship. Partner risk factors included frequent episodes of drunkenness and general violence (i.e., violence outside of the home). In addition, control was more frequently reported among couples where the man was older than the woman. As hypothesized, women who reported CB by their partners were more likely to experience psychological and physical violence. These findings emphasize the importance of preventing CBs to avert the most severe forms of violence, and provides relevant information about the groups that could most benefit from these efforts.


The Rhenodanubian Flysch zone (RDF) is a Lower Cretaceous-lower Palaeocene turbidite succession extending for similar to 500 km from the Danube at Vienna to the Rhine Valley (Eastern Alps). It consists of calcareous and siliciclastic turbidite systems deposited in a trench abyssal plain. The age of deposition has been estimated through micropalaeontologic dating. However, palaeomagnetic studies constraining the age and the palaeolatitude of deposition of the RDF are still missing. Here, we present palaeomagnetic data from the Early Cretaceous Tristel and Rehbreingraben Formations of the RDF from two localities in the Bavarian Alps (Rehbrein Creek and Lainbach Valley, southern Germany), and from the stratigraphic equivalent of the Falknis Nappe (Liechtenstein). The quality of the palaeomagnetic signal has been assessed by either fold test (FT) or reversal test (RT). Sediments from the Falknis Nappe are characterized by a pervasive syntectonic magnetic overprint as tested by negative FT, and are thus excluded from the study. The sediments of the Rehbreingraben Formation at Rehbrein Creek, with positive RT, straddle magnetic polarity Chron M0r and the younger M'-1r' reverse event, with an age of similar to 127-123 Ma (late Barremian-early Aptian). At Lainbach Valley, no polarity reversals have been observed, but a positive FT gives confidence on the reliability of the data. The primary palaeomagnetic directions, after correction for inclination shallowing, allow to precisely constrain the depositional palaeolatitude of the Tristel and Rehbreingraben Formations around similar to 28 degrees N. In a palaeogeographic reconstruction of the Alpine Tethys at the Barremian/Aptian boundary, the RDF is located on the western margin of the Brianconnais terrain, which was separated from the European continent by the narrow Valais Ocean.


In this paper, we describe a robust method for the extraction of the apparent 3-D camera velocity and 3-D scene structure information. Our method performs the extraction of the apparent 3-D camera velocity in a fully automated way without any knowledge about 3-D scene content information as used in current methods. This has the advantage that it can be used to fully automate the generation of natural-looking virtual/augmented environments, as well as in video-database browsing. First, we describe our method for the robust extraction of 3-D parameters. This method is a combination of the eight-point method in structure-from-motion with a statistical technique to automatically select feature points in the image, irrespective of 3-D content information. Second, we discuss two applications which use the results of the 3-D parameter extraction. The first application is the generation of sprite layers using 3-D camera velocity information to represent an eight-parameter perspective image-to-sprite mapping plus 3-D scene depth information for the sprite layering. The second application is the use of 3-D camera velocity for the indexing of large video databases according to a set of seven independent types of camera motion. In this application, we discuss a formal video description structure-the camera-motion descriptor-which was successfully included in the working draft of the MPEG-7 video standard.


ABSTRACT Sterol regulatory element-binding proteins (SREBPs) are transcription factors that regulate a wide variety of genes involved in fatty acid and cholesterol synthesis. In the present study, we identified that isoxanthohumol (IXN) suppressed SREBP activity. Low concentrations of IXN (10 and 30 μM) reduced the amount of mature forms of SREBPs, while high concentration of IXN (100 μM) reduced both precursor and mature forms of SREBPs in Huh-7 cells. The IXN-mediated decrease in the precursor forms of SREBPs in Huh-7 cells was completely abolished by culturing cells under sterol-supplemented conditions and was partly abolished by treatment with a proteasome inhibitor, MG132, but not a lysosome inhibitor, NH4Cl. Moreover, IXN accelerated the ubiquitination of the precursor forms of SREBP-1a. These results suggest that IXN suppresses SREBP activity, at least in part, via ubiquitin-proteasome-dependent degradation of the precursor forms of SREBPs. Abbreviations: ACC1: acetyl-CoA carboxylase 1; DMEM: Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium; ER: endoplasmic reticulum; GAPDH: glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase; 25-HC: 25-hydroxycholesterol; HMGCR: HMG-CoA reductase; HMGCS: HMG-CoA synthase; Insig: insulin-induced gene; IXN: isoxanthohumol; LPDS: lipoprotein-deficient serum; SCAP: SREBP cleavage-activating protein; SCD1: stearoyl-CoA desaturase; SREBPs: sterol regulatory element-binding proteins; XN: xanthohumol Graphical Abstract IXN decreases protein levels of precursor and mature forms of SREBPs


Since the 60's, the "Defense In Depth" concept has provided a key approach to formalize and improve nuclear safety in power plants. It consists of deploying technical and organizational barriers and lines of defense structured on five protection levels. Protection levels represent the safety goals related to prevention and control of abnormal operations, mitigation of severe accidents and radiological consequences of significant external releases of radioactive materials. After the AZF disaster occurred in Toulouse the 21st September 2001, the Parliamentary Inquiry of the French government enounced numerous recommendations to improve the security of industrial and technological activities and, among them, the use of "Defense In Depth" concept and Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA). This paper presents a study financed by the French government on the capability to transpose this concept into the French policy to improve industrial and technological security and control. The authors present the underlying theoretical basis of the "Defense In Depth" concept in nuclear safety, its legislation framework and control. They discuss the legal and technical means to engage and to solve the problems that could occur for its implementation into industry.


A prototype software tool facilitating the use of a design method supporting structured reflection on design processes is presented. The prototype, called Echo, has been developed to explore the benefits of using a software system to facilitate the use of the design method. Both the prototype software tool and the design method are developed as part of the Ph.D. project of Isabelle Reymen. The goal of the design method is supporting designers with reflection on design processes in a systematic way and regularly during the design process. The design method only supports the preparation step of a reflection process, a process that consists of the steps preparation, image forming, and conclusion drawing. The main concepts of the design method are the description and analysis of design situations and design activities and the idea of design sessions. The prototype software tool only supports the description and analysis of design situations. The goal of this report is to offer design researchers insight into the concepts of the developed prototype, to offer designers some help when using the prototype, and to offer programmers information about the current implementation of the prototype for improving and/or extending the prototype. A description of the main concepts of the prototype, user documentation, and implementation documentation can be found in this report. The design method is explained in detail in (Chapter 5 of) the Ph.D. thesis of Isabelle Reymen, which is also published as SAI Report 2001/1.


Current advancements in military and wireless applications create the need for increased functionality with reduced cost and size. In this paper a highly integrated tunable electronics are necessary to meet these new requirements. Barium strontium titanium oxide (BST) is a viable technology for these applications. BST technology offers significant benefits with its high tuning range, high power capabilities and low control voltages. While there is great interest in the development of BST technology, little research has been published regarding integrated matching networks using BST thin film parallel plate capacitors for an X-band low noise amplifier (LNA).


We describe a step-frequency radar (SFR) imaging system that is suitable for microwave nondestructive evaluation (NDE) applications. The system includes a computer-automated microwave measurement apparatus, calibration software, and nonlinear inverse scattering imaging algorithms. Through the use of an inverse Fourier transform, the raw SFR data is transformed into a synthetic time-domain pulse. A calibration procedure involving the use of calibration targets may then be used to remove pulse distortions due to the eeective aperture and dispersive nature of the antennas and measurement system. Nonlinear inverse scattering algorithms described here are then applied to the corrected data to produce quantitative spatial images of various electromagnetic parameters. Reconstructions of metallic and dielectric scattering objects including metallic rods, glass rods and plastic PVC pipes from real measurement data collected in our laboratory are shown.


During a year long residency, photographer Jhon Kippin documented the changing landscape of Greenham common, notorious during the Cold War and the scene of a unique peace protest throughout the 1980s and 90s. This project marks the change of use of the site from a military base common land, with essays examining the history of the Common, the development of the Womens' Peace Movement and the protest at Greenham. The essays place both the events at Greenham Common and Kippin's critical practice in a wider social and political context. Included is an account by one of the longest serving peace protesters, Sarah Hipperson.


In this paper, we analyze how humans can solve problems quickly by the process of solving the problem of convex hull. Then we present the M2M (Macro to Micro) data structure which maintains a finite set of n points in the plane under insertion and deletion of points in amortized O(1) time per operation and O(n) space usage. In addition, as the insert operation of each point is independent, the algorithm has high parallelism. And because the insert operations will not cause the imbalance of the tree structure, the M2M data structure is dynamic. Moreover, it can be shared by all the algorithms based on M2M model which greatly improves the efficiency when a variety of algorithms work simultaneity, such as in image processing and pattern recognition. In all, the M2M model points out a general pattern for designing high parallel algorithms, an efficient strategy for solving multi-operational problems and a new approach for computer to stimulate the thinking pattern of human beings.


Pain, a major symptom of stomatological disease, usually leads to a specialist consultation. Most commonly it is caused by dental caries and differs in nature and in intensity according to the stage of disease: dentinitis, pulpitis, desmodontitis and dental abscess. Added to this is peridental pain and the pre- and post-operative pains related to these diseases. Almost all oral-maxillary pathology is painful, be it boney such as in osteomyelitis and fractures, mucosal in gingivo-stomatitis and aphthous ulcers, or tumourous. However, besides the "multidisciplinary" facial pains such as facial neuralgia and vascular pain, two pain syndromes are specific to stomatology: pain of the tempero-mandibular joint associated with problems of the bite and glossodynia, a very common somatic expression of psychological problems.


I t may be chic in the current milieu of diet-health mania to say one has cut back on meat and refined sugars, and people report as much in numerous consumer surveys. However, U.S. per capita food supply data indicate that Americans consumed record-high levels of caloric sweeteners and total meat (red meat, poultry, and fish) in 1994. And, forecasters predict still higher consumption in 1995 and 1996. The American diet has changed considerably over the past decade. Beef consumption, for example, fell 14 percent between 1980-84 and 1990-94, while chicken consumption rose 37 percent and turkey 67 percent (table 1). Egg use also declined, while cheese consumption increased steadily. Consumption of fresh produce reached a record-high level in 1994 (with kiwifruit one of the biggest gainers, increasing 267 percent between 1980-84 and 1990-94). Diet and health concerns, as well as changing relative prices and increases in real (adjusted for inflation) disposable income, compelled these changes in U.S. food consumption. New products-particularly more convenient ones-also have contributed to shifts in consumption, along with an aging population, expanded advertising campaigns, smaller households, more two-earner households, more singleperson households, and an increasing proportion of ethnic minorities in the U.S. population. USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) estimates per capita food consumption, based on food disappearance data (see box). These data represent the amount of food available for human use. They are used as a proxy to estimate human consumption, even though the data may overstate what is actually eaten because they represent food supplies available in the market and do not account for waste.


In 2003, anthropologist Professor Peter Sutton wrote, "To demand of a kin-based society that it produce simple, stable and definitive lists of rights and rights-holders in land and waters is ethnocentric," and "codification, at least for many such groups, is itself contrary to their own laws and customs." However, despite warnings by Sutton and others, the structuring of native title and related claims and determinations have continued just as warned against. It is argued here that this phenomenon is the result of attempts to accommodate the demands of non-Indigenous political, legal, and economic structures to have simply defined groups and consequent corporate identities that are recognizable to, and controllable by, dominant non-Indigenous structures. The consequent corporate identities, the Prescribed Bodies Corporate (PBC), are a modern version of the system of king plates of old and more needs to be done to ensure recognition of complex traditional law systems.


Abstract. Layek U, Das A, Das U. 2022. Floral biology, floral volatile organic compounds and floral visitors of Chromolaena odorata, an invasive alien species in West Bengal, India. Biodiversitas 23: 2118-2129. Chromolaena odorata (L.) R.M. King & H. Rob. is a fast-growing weed native to the Neotropics and introduced in several regions of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Southeast Asia, including West Bengal in India. It is one of the world's most widespread and troublesome invasive alien plant species (IAPS) that severely infest natural habitats and crop fields. However, extensive data documents about the reproductive ecology are unknown, especially within West Bengal. This study assesses the floral biology, floral volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and floral visitors of the weed. The weed species flowers from October to January. Florets are white to purple, with short, narrow corolla tubes and deep-seated nectar. Abundant VOCs are benzyl stearate, 2,4-decadienal, n-hexadecanoic acid, 1-hexyl-2-nitrocyclohexane, and o-decyl hydroxylamine. Flower heads were visited by numerous insect groups, though the diversity of Lepidoptera (mainly butterflies) was higher than the other insect orders. The weed is pollinated by diverse insect groups (e.g., butterflies, flies, honeybees, leafcutter bees, solitary bees, and wasps). However, vital pollination services to the weed were provided by butterflies (based on the 'approximate pollination value'). Our findings may conclude that the clustered capitula, longer stigmatic receptivity, and broad array of pollinators resulted in too much fruit set. It is one of the critical factors that support the high growth rate and invasive nature of the weed in dry habitats.


The associated production of a single top quark with a Z boson (tZj) represents an important probe of the electroweak (EW) sector of the Standard Model. Since differential measurements of tZj are expected to enhance the sensitivity to new-physics effects, and the experimental interest in this direction is growing in the light of upcoming LHC runs, it is crucial to improve the off-shell modelling of this process for realistic fiducial regions. We present the first Standard-Model calculation of the off-shell tZj production in the multi-lepton decay channel including NLO EW and QCD corrections to the LO EW signal. All off-shell effects and spin correlations are accounted for, both at LO and at NLO. Relying on a realistic fiducial volume, we highlight the most relevant effects coming from radiative corrections and from irreducible-background contamination on total and differential cross sections.


We provide an axiomatization-based justification for applying the Owen value to decompose R in OLS models if prior knowledge can be used to form groups of regressor variables. The assumptions made by the axioms are not only plausible with respect to the variables but also clarify the meaning of the exogenous grouping of variables.