Liquid to solid partitioning as a function of pH leaching Procedure LSP EPA method 1313 was carried out to test the effectiveness , performance and efficiency of the cement-based solidification / stabilization (S/S) of heavy metals contaminated sand samples using Ordinary Portland Cement OPC type A . Two cement based mix designs ( 7 and 25 % ) have been applied to (S/S) sand contaminated samples with different heavy metal ions ( Pb , Cu , Cr , and Cd ) having the following concentrations ( 500 , 1500 and 3000 mg / kg ). Fixed water to cement ratio of 0.45 was maintained for all the experiments. Effective retention levels for the heavy metal ions was achieved using a 25 % OPC mix ratio to (S/S) the contaminated samples even when the extraction solutions were of pH levels as low as 2. Leaching experiments showed that as the pH level of the extraction solution is reduces and as the OPC content in the (S/S) samples is reduced the more heavy metal ions that can leach out. Up to 80 % of chromium, cadmium, lead, and copper ions leachability can be prevented when higher cement content is introduced to the solidification / stabilization process under the same pH extraction. Acidic extraction effects and solubilized the Calcium – Silica – Hydrate (C-S-H) gel that is created by the OPC binder, which holds, and contain the heavy metal ions and thus results in more release of those ions into the extraction solutions. The alkaline environments provided by the cement binder are believed to have participated in the precipitation of several metal ions such as cadmium and lead io, leading to their less detection in the leaching extracts. Alkaline extraction experiments (pH 8-13) showed that the mobility of the metal ions under the same experimental conditions followed the order of pb> Cr > Cu > Cd in samples of various cement contents. KeywordsSolidification / Stabilization; Heavy Metals; LSP; Leaching. How to cite this article: B.A. Hussain, Sh.E. Ebrahim and A.H. Sulaymon, "Cement Based Solidification/ Stabilization Leaching Performances of Selected Heavy Metal Ions under Different pH Extractions," Engineering and Technology Journal, Vol. 37, Part C, No. 2, pp. 268-274, 2019.


The early twentieth-century oil boom radically transformed the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, and in the early 1920s the Osages became the world's richest community because of their collective sharing of profits from mineral resources. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews, an Osage American tribal historian, published Sundown, his only work of fiction, a peculiar Bildungsroman about the life of Chal Windzer in the aftermath of oil discovery on the Osage reservation. I argue that Mathews's use of the novel of formation is a particularly important literary and intellectual intervention. First, at a time when the significance of material resources to the American economy and American national imaginary was growing, Mathews uses the generic convention of progress to narrate oil's social "formation," alongside the tale of Chal's dissolution, his failure, that is, of the very development which the novel's genre implies. Second, Mathews's literary representation of the oil boom as the Great Frenzy – a period of widespread violence and cultural chaos – complicates traditional accounts of capitalist economic development, which define late-stage capitalism and its financial deregulation and IT boom as an era of radical cultural "fluidity" (Bauman, Sennett). By drawing attention to the material and social fluidity of oil culture and the force with which it affected the Osages, Sundown points to a specific Osage American colonial, and thus always already transnational, history of (petro)modernity. The character of modernity, Mathews shows us, is inextricably tied to the conditions under which human and natural resources are extracted and allowed to become "social." The destabilization of reservation culture derives equally from oil discovery itself, and the technological transformations within the energy industry, from the colonialist conditions that impose capitalism upon the Osages, and from the very collectivist modes of wealth distribution that the Osages adopted in order to resist colonial exploitation. Thus Mathews's novel reveals an alternative genealogy of the destabilization of cultural forms to the one that begins with post-Bretton Woods global financial deregulation, the collapse of state institutions in the global North, and the late twentieth-century emergence of new communication technologies. For the Osages in the 1920s and for the characters in Sundown, crude oil and colonial exploitation, as well as, paradoxically, anticapitalist legal provisions of the Allotment Act's collectivizing of it, make reservation culture "liquid" and "uncertain" precisely at the time of America's entering into the presumably "solid" econo-political phase of development.


DENSITY POPULATION ESTIMATION OF BEAR CUSCUS (Ailurops ursinus) In TANGKOKO BATUANGUS NATURE RESERVE BITUNG CITY. The purpose of this study to determine the number of Bear cuscus density estimation ( A.ursinus ) in Tangkoko Nature Reserve in wildlife conservation programe. This study conducted in Tangkoko Nature Reserve Batuangus for 3 months from 1 st August  through 31 st October 2015. The variable of this study are about: density population, estimation of density population, and vegetation, by using observation methods and Line Transect Animal Sampling Technique (NRC, 1981). This study use four transects, that consist of : A = 1736m, B = 1724m, C = 1620m, D = 1620m and the spread of observation area in each lines is about 100m. The results showed, there has been increase the density population of Bear cuscus in Tangkoko about 213.85% compared with the results of previous studies which totaled 53.13/km2 became 166.75/km2. Bear cuscus population estimation ( A. ursinus ) in Tangkoko Nature Reserve is increased to 213.85% or forecasts twice a few years earlier. Increasing population density Bear cuscus in Tangkoko Nature Reserve is because the carrying capacity of the habitat has improved and stabel and because of the socialization of management konservation (habitat, wild animal/fauna endemik) has been done in some likes research, training, dissemination to the public and the outreach community by WCS, field courses, WWF, Macacanigra Project, etc. and Local organizations in the field of conservation (nature lovers, your community, etc .). Keywords : Density, Population, Bear Cuscus (A. ursinus)


Treatment of municipal wastewater results worldwide in the production of large amounts of sewage sludge. The major part of the dry matter content of this sludge consists of nontoxic organic compounds, in general a combination of primary sludge and secondary (microbiological) sludge. The sludge also contains a substantial amount of inorganic material and a small amount of toxic components. There are many sludge-management options in which production of energy (heat, electricity, or biofuel) is one of the key treatment steps. The most important options are anaerobic digestion, co-digestion, incineration in combination with energy recovery, co-incineration in coal-fired power plants, co-incineration in combination with organic waste focused on energy recovery, use as an energy source in the production of cement or building materials, pyrolysis, gasification, supercritical (wet) oxidation, hydrolysis at high temperature, production of hydrogen, acetone, butanol, or ethanol, and direct generation of electrical energy by means of specific micro-organisms. Incineration and co-incineration with energy recovery and use of sewage sludge in the production of Portland cement are applied on a large scale. In these processes, the toxic organics are destructed and the heavy metals are immobilized in the ash or cement. The energy efficiency of these processes strongly depends upon the dewatering and drying step. It is expected that these applications will strongly increase in the future. Supercritical wet oxidation is a promising innovative technology but is still in the development stage. With the exception of biogas production, the other biological methods to produce energy are still in the initial research phase. Production of biogas from sewage sludge is already applied worldwide on small, medium, and large scales. With this process, a substantial experience exists and it is expected that this application is getting more and more attention. Besides the increasing focus on the recovery and reuse of energy, inorganics, and phosphorous, there is also an increasing focus to solve completely the problem of the toxic organics and inorganic compounds in sludge. In the assessment and selection of options for energy recovery by means of biological methods, this aspect has to be taken into account.


Bile duct injury is a severe complication related to cholecystectomy, impacting in the long-term quality of life and functional status. Bile duct repair is the first-line treatment for complex injuries. During short-term and long-term postoperative care, it is important to bear in mind the diagnostic tools, both laboratory and imaging, that will be useful to evaluate a possible surgical complication and to plan an adequate therapeutic strategy. In addition, post-surgical classification describes patients according to their complications and clinical course. In this review we describe the principal issues of postoperative care after bile duct repair, highlighting the diagnosis, severity classification and therapeutic approach of acute cholangitis.


We study the routing problem in all-wireless networks based on cooperative transmissions. We model the minimum-energy cooperative path (MECP) problem and prove that this problem is NP-complete. We hence design an approximation algorithm called cooperative shortest path (CSP) algorithm that uses Dijkstra's algorithm as the basic building block and utilizes cooperative transmissions in the relaxation procedure. Compared with traditional non-cooperative shortest path algorithms, the CSP algorithm can achieve a higher energy saving and better balanced energy consumption among network nodes, especially when the network is in large scale. The nice features lead to a unique, scalable routing scheme that changes the high network density from the curse of congestion to the blessing of cooperative transmissions.


Cellulose is a biopolymer that has broad potential applications including in building insulation, and it was studied for its potential as a filler material. A closed-cell polyurethane foam insulation formulation was developed, and cellulose filaments (CFs) were introduced at varying percentages. The viscosity and morphology of the formulations were studied, as were different foam properties, such as water vapor permeability, reaction kinetics, density, porosity, thermal conductivity, and compressive strength foams as a function of cellulose filaments content. A commercial foam was also tested as a reference. The cellulose filaments impacted the formulations' viscosity, and all the properties of the resulting insulating material. For example, samples containing 5% of cellulose filaments were found to perform differently than samples containing 0%, 1% and 2.5% mainly due to agglomerate formation, which impacted cell size (about 0.1 mm2 at 0%, 1% and 2.5% versus a mean of over 0.4 mm2 at 5%), and differential vapor sorption (with a mass change of 2%wt at 0 parts per hundred of polyol versus 2.5%wt at 5% from 0% to 95% relative humidity). However, the required performances by the standards of polyurethane foam insulation material were always fulfilled regardless of the amount of cellulose filaments present.


The results of CDM device level tests-opposite to SDM-are strongly influenced by the device packages. An investigation of different types of devices (technology and package) shows that the CDM withstand voltage depends on the peak current of the discharge current waveform and not on the charge which is stored on the device after charging. This information has important consequences for tester characterization and the test procedure. Furthermore, peak current investigation gives a chance to extrapolate CDM results from one specific package to other packages and even perhaps for SDM/CDM correlation.


Summary Chronic renal failure (CRF) syndrome significantly alters patients' quality of life. Anaemia, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases are common complications of CRF. The study aimed to determine the incidence of arterial hypertension (AH), anaemia, and left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) in patients with CRF and to analyze the relationship between them. The study included 212 patients with CRF, treated at the Clinic of Nephrology and Dialysis at the University Hospital "Dr. G. Stranski," Pleven, during 2008-2020. The AH accounted for 88.2% of the patients with CRF. The incidence of AH is comparable to that in patients in the predialysis period – 88.6% and among patients on dialysis – 87.9%. LVH was diagnosed in 94.3% of patients with CRF. The incidence of LVH in the predialysis period was 94.3%, and among dialysis patients -94.4%. The incidence of LVH among hypertensive and normotensive patients was comparable. The incidence of anaemia among patients with CRF was 86.3%. Anaemia was present in 94.4% of the patients on dialysis and in 78.1% of the patients in the predialysis period. The difference was significant (p <0.05). There was no correlation between anaemia and AH, nor between AH and LVH. A significant dependence of LVH on the duration of chronic renal failure and dialysis treatment was established.


This paper reports an experimental feasibility study of the potential for using Fibre Bragg Grating (FBG) thermal sensing technology for electrical fault detection in random wound coils. The study is performed on prototype test coils housed in a purpose built steel core section. The FBG thermal sensors are embedded between copper conductors in multiple positions within the coil structure and in close proximity of the known hot spots of interest. The examined coils are designed to enable emulation of hot spots representative of those that would be expected at the outset of winding fault events. A series of experiments were separately conducted in order to characterise the potential of coil internal thermal stress monitoring to provide recognition of a developing winding fault. To this end, winding fault scenarios with different severity levels of inter-turn fault are experimentally examined. The reported findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed in-situ thermal sensing scheme to enable monitoring and recognition of coil internal thermal stress induced at various stages of emulated electrical fault.


ESD discharges to antennas can damage the RF front end. In particular, antennas with highly inductive ground connections allow large ESD-induced voltages at their RF terminals. This work investigates the ESD properties of an RF switch used as an antenna tuner by measuring the voltages and currents at its terminals and building a SPICE model. The goal is to predict the damage threshold when the switch is used in an RF front end.


Light weight structures have stimulated a strong trend towards the development of aluminium sandwich material. The main objective of this paper, to develop the basic techniques in order to apply aluminium sandwich sheets for an automotive body panel. Weight reduction is targeted in different industrial sectors. This leads to increasing numbers of applications of fibre composites for primary structural components. In consequence the use of composites made of FRP and metals are highly attractive. The aluminium/glass fibre sandwich sheet is the material fabricated by adhering two aluminium skins to one glass fibre core. Therefore it is good substitutive material for improving the fuel efficiency. In this study, we developed aluminium glass fibre sandwich sheet for automotive hood. In this review paper recent developments in composite technology and also performance behavior of metal matrix composites (MMC) have been discussed. Metal matrix composites offer several advantages such as better damage tolerance to fatigue crack growth and impact damage especially for automotive and aircraft application. Keywords— Fibre Metal Laminates, Sandwitch Panel, Glass Fibre Reinforced Plastic.


Parental meta-emotion philosophy refers to parents' feelings and behaviors toward their own and their children's emotions. It reflects parental beliefs about emotion socialization. Research has indicated that maternal positive meta-emotion philosophy (e.g. emotion coaching) is associated with children's emotional competence, social competence and that maternal negative meta-emotion philosophy (etc. emotion dismissing) is related with children's behavior problem. However, little research has been conducted on paternal meta-emotion philosophy. Moreover, there is inadequate research on parental emotion noninvolvement and emotion dysfunction. It has been suggested that children's competence may be a mediator of the relations between parental emotion socialization belief or goal and children's social outcomes. It is also reasonable to argue that parents' beliefs or goals about emotion may also affect their own emotion-related behavior and emotion expressivity. As such, parental emotion expressivity may play a mediated role in relations between parental emotion-related beliefs and children's social competence. The current study explored relations among parental meta-emotion philosophy, emotion expressivity, and children's social competence. We hypothesized that parental emotion expressivity would mediate the relations between parental meta-emotion philosophy and children's social competence. Three hundred and forty one children aged 3-5 years and their parents participated in the study. Child social competence was assessed using the Early School Behavior Rating Scale reported by mothers. Fathers and mothers reported their own emotion expressivity using the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire and meta-emotion philosophy using the Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy Scale. Multiple regression analyses and path analyses revealed the following results. First, paternal emotion coaching philosophy was positively associated with children's social competence, and paternal emotion dysfunction philosophy was negatively associated with children's social competence. Paternal positive expressivity was positively associated with children's social competence whereas paternal negative emotional expressivity was negatively associated with children's social competence. Paternal positive and negative emotion expressivity mediated relations between paternal emotion coaching and children's social competence. In addition, paternal negative emotion expressivity mediated relations between paternal emotion dysfunction and children's social competence. Second, maternal emotion coaching philosophy was positively associated with children's social competence, and maternal emotion dysfunctional philosophy was negatively associated with children's social competence. Further, maternal positive emotional expressivity was positively associated with children's social competence, but negative emotional expressivity was not associated with children's social competence. The relation between maternal emotion coaching and children's social competence was mediated by maternal emotion expressivity. These results indicated that parental emotion-related beliefs or goals not only were directly associated with children's social competence, but also had indirect effects on children's social competence through emotion-related reflection and behavior.


Recently, prosthetic replacement has been commonly applied as a standard procedure for the elbow joint destruction by arthritis or trauma, and elbow arthrodesis has been used only for patients who are unsuitable for other conventional treatment methods. In most cases, ulnohumeral arthrodesis is performed, considering the geometry and the amount of surface area of the distal humerus and proximal ulna. In this report, we present a successful case of the radiohumeral arthrodesis using unilateral external fixation without bone grafting for a patient who sustained severe open communited fracture with transarticular massive bone loss. We decided to fuse the elbow at 70 degrees of flexion, and the forearm was fixed at 80 degrees of pronation. At 13-month after the operation, radiographic evidence of solid enlarged right elbow fusion was gained. At more than three years after operation, we evaluated patient-oriented quantitative functional disability using Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand (DASH) to confirm that radiohumeral arthrodesis fixed at this angle could be accepted. This technique can be recommended as a salvage procedure in the face of significant bone loss of the proximal ulna.


Several issues should be solved for small signal stability assessment of extra-large power system. First, various alternative energy generation models and modern intelligent control equipments are emerged continuously; a convenient and flexible way to simulate these models which can be updated timely should be found for the small signal stability assessment software. Second, the system state variables array dimension expands sharply with the increase of new models. Jacobi matrix, even stored in a sparse way, still will be a huge scale. The execution of the traditional serial algorithm will be high storage cost and low efficient. In this paper the user-defined model module of the power system analysis software package and a method which can linearize any block are introduced in detail. The development of the Parallel algorithms based on the 'Multi-port Inverse Matrix parallel algorithm' or some mature parallel numerical analysis solvers are discussed, which can be applied on the high performance PC clusters or multi-core PC.


Infants successfully discriminate speech sound contrasts that belong to their native language's phonemic inventory in auditory-only paradigms, but they encounter difficulties in distinguishing the same contrasts in the context of word learning. These difficulties are usually attributed to the fact that infants' attention to the phonetic detail in novel words is attenuated when they must allocate additional cognitive resources demanded by word-learning tasks. The present study investigated 15-month-olds' ability to distinguish novel words that differ by a single vowel in an auditory discrimination (Experiment 1) and a word-learning (Experiment 2) paradigm. These experiments aimed to tease apart whether infants' performance is dependent solely on the specific acoustic properties of the target vowels or on the context of the task. Experiment 1 showed that infants were only able to discriminate a contrast marked by a large difference along a static dimension (the vowels' second formant), while they were not able to discriminate a contrast with a small phonetic distance between its vowels, due to the dynamic nature of the vowels. In Experiment 2, infants did not succeed at learning words containing the same contrast they were able to discriminate in Experiment 1. The current findings demonstrate that both the specific acoustic properties of vowels in the infant's native language as well as the task presented continue to play a significant role in early speech perception well into the second year of life.


Earlier studies suggest that the altitudinal permafrost limit decreases from the west to the east in Southern Norway and that the lowermost altitudinal permafrost limit in Southern Scandinavia occurs in the eastern part of Southern Norway. Most investigations on mountain permafrost have been undertaken in Jotunheimen and Dovrefjell further west, and in order to validate this regional pattern, the distribution of permafrost has been mapped on the mountains Sølen and Elgåhogna in the Femunden region, Central-Eastern Norway. Empirical-statistical models based on BTS and logistic regression were developed for each mountain, and validated with DC resistivity measurements. Permafrost was found to be probable down to 1100–1300 m a.s.l., which validates the regional west–east gradient in the altitudinal permafrost limit. Elevation is the main controlling factor for permafrost distribution on both Sølen and Elgåhogna. In addition, potential solar radiation and the surface wetness pattern were significant in the Sølen and Elgåhogna models, respectively. Mean annual ground surface temperatures are high and generally above zero, which contradicts the results from the BTS and DC resistivity. This together with observed air ventilation funnels through the snow cover suggest thermal advection and strong thermal offsets in the openwork blockfields.


To investigate whether preferential responsiveness of residual B-cells is a feature of a diabetic state we compared insulin-releasing effects of glucose and arginine in perfused pancreases from moderately diabetic BB-Wistar rats. BB-rats were hyperglycaemic and insulin-dependent but possessed some insulin reserves (6 per cent of pancreatic content of control Wistar rats). Glucose (27.7 mM) failed to release insulin from diabetic pancreases while, conversely, arginine (8 mM) evoked a several-fold increase in insulin secretion. Ratios between responses from diabetic and normal pancreases were 0.01 and 0.29, respectively, when glucose or arginine were used as stimuli. This difference was significant (P less than 0.05, Wilcoxon test). Glucose furthermore failed to exert a time-dependent (= priming) effect on arginine-induced insulin secretion in the diabetic animals. Also A-cell responsiveness to glucose (acute and priming effects) were lost in BB-rats. It is concluded that selective loss of glucose effects on B- and A-cell secretion are associated with the diabetic state of the BB-Wistar rats.


We study optimal equity infusions into a financial network prone to the risk of contagious failures, which may be due to insolvency or to bank runs by short term creditors. Bank runs can be triggered by failures of connected banks. Under complete information on interbank linkages, we show that the problem reduces to a combinatorial optimization problem. Subject to budget constraints, the government chooses the set of minimal cost whose survival induces the maximum network stability. Our results demonstrate that the optimal equity infusion might significantly mitigate failure contagion risk and stabilize the system. In the case of partial information on the network, the controllers' focus swiftly changes from preventing insolvencies to preventing runs by short term creditors.


SUMMARY: Spores of Bacillus stearothermophilus NCTC 10003 germinated without delay in glucose/glutamate chemically defined medium at 60°C. The nature of the nutrient limitation inducing sporulation affected the ability of spores to germinate under the conditions studied. Spores produced after glucose depletion of the medium (carbon-depleted spores) germinated faster and to a greater extent than did spores produced after sulphate depletion of the medium (sulphur-depleted spores). Sub-lethal heat treatment (80°C, 10 min) prior to germination enhanced dormancy. l-Alanine (0.2 mg ml-1) did not reverse this effect, nor did it enhance the germination of sulphur-depleted spores. The rate and extent of germination for both kinds of spores was proportional to the intrasporal manganese concentration. In contrast, extrasporal manganese exerted an inhibitory effect and it was not required for germination. We conclude that the nature of the nutrient depletion and the level of intrasporal manganese distinctly affect the extent and rate of spore germination.


In this research, the physically-based WTS (Water Temperature Simulation) model was developed to predict water temperature changes in a river in eastern Connecticut during the summer. The model was applied and calibrated with a one-hour time step during the summer's low-flow season on the Fenton River, which is tributary of the Mansfield Hollow Lake. Temperatures were recorded at one-hour intervals during the summer in 2004 and 2005, at various locations along the river to provide data for the model's calibration. Model results were tested against observed stream temperatures and also compared to the SSTemp (Stream Segment Temperature model) created by Bartholow (2002). Results show that both models can be used to predict changes in stream temperature due to changes in groundwater inflow/outflow, and could be used to assess various water management scenarios.


We describe scaling arguments and simulations of the kinetics of the coil-to-globule transition. Scaling predicts and simulations confirm that irreversible collapse is dominated by diffusion of the polymer ends which accrete monomers and small aggregates. Exponents found by simulations agree closely with scaling relations. In three dimensions the collapse time is predicted to scale only linearly with polymer length. Our results are contrasted with de Gennes' mean-field theory of collapse in the reversible regime of small departure from θ-solvent conditions.


The concept of Heimat can be used in conjunction with many phenomena and sometimes seems to have a precise definition. The very vagueness of the concept bespeaks its emotional aspect, one that makes it rather appealing for a wide range of marketing and propaganda purposes. Heimat denotes a local identification that is not exclusive of other identifications, whether regional, national or transnational institutions, ideologies or religious communities. The Article will address the concept and its varied meanings and it will also examine the fundamental relationship between individuals with respect to their social and geographic spaces.


Noninvasive monitoring in obtaining important and reliable information relevant to pediatric practices, not only in respect of dangers and complications of most invasive techniques, but also because a number of them difficult or even impossible in infants. The aim of this study was to estimate the significance of hemodynamic parameters and capabilities of ECHO and dophlercardiography for analyzing violations hemodynamics in primary diagnosis and conduct drug therapy in infants. The study included the results of a survey of 65 infants aged from 29 to 39 weeks with various surgical pathology, who received the various options the hemodynamic support. In the initial assessment and selecting tactics of therapy for hemodynamic analysis carried out routine monitoring and for evaluation of cardiac contractility used echo- and Doppler exams. All children have pointed out a number of significant changes of haemodynamics, that has required inotropic therapy with dopamine (64% of children with diaphragmatic hernia received additional dobutamine). Validation of expressed pulmonary hypertension children appointed sildenafil, and in the absence ofthe effect used nitrous oxide. Hemodynamic monitoring allows to monitor the status of circulation on the background of the treatment and to make timely changes to the script therapy.


The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) and the AhR nuclear translocator protein (ARNT) are basic‐helix‐loop‐helix (bHLH) proteins involved in transcriptional regulation. The AhR is a ligand‐activated partner of the ARNT protein. Both proteins are required to transcriptionally regulate gene expression. ARNT must be complexed to AhR to permit binding to the regulatory DNA sequence. The AhR‐ligand complex is known to mediate a range of biological responses, such as developmental toxicity, induction of cleft palate, and hydronephrosis. AhR and ARNT are expressed in human embryonic palatal cells and AhR was recently shown to have a specific developmental pattern of expression in the mouse embryo. In the present study, expression of ARNT is characterized in C57BL/6N mouse embryos from gestation day (GD) 10–16 using immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization. An affinity purified antibody against human ARNT (1.1 μg/ml) was detected with an avidinbiotin‐peroxidase complex. ARNT mRNA was localized with a 35S‐RNA probe from pBM5/NEOM1–1. Specific spatial and temporal patterns of ANRT expression emerged and mRNA and protein expression correlated. The GD 10–11 embryos showed highest levels of ARNT in neuroepithelial cells of the neural tube, visceral arches, otic and optic placodes, and preganglionic complexes. The heart also had significant expression of ARNT with strong nuclear localization. After GD11, expression in heart and brain declined. In GD 12–13 embryos expression was highest in the liver where expression increased from GD 12–16. At GD 15–16 the highest levels of ARNT occurred in adrenal gland and liver, although ARNT was also detected in submandibular gland, ectoderm, tongue, bone, and muscle. In all of these tissues ARNT was cytoplasmic as well as nuclear, except in some of the cortical adrenal cells in which ARNT was strongly cytoplasmic with little or no nuclear localization. These specific patterns of ARNT expression, which differ in certain tissues from the expression of AhR, suggest that ARNT may have additional roles in normal embryonic development. © 1995 wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Broccoli (Brassica oleracea var. italica), cauliflower (B. oleracea var. botrytis), and cabbage (B. oleracea var. capitata) have been grown in central Mexico since 1970, with 21,000 ha cropped in 2001. In contrast, areas grown with oilseed rape (B. napus) are very limited in Mexico (<8,000 ha). Blackleg, a destructive disease of B. napus in most parts of the world, was first observed in Mexico in Zacatecas and Aguascalientes in 1988 on B. oleracea, causing as much as 70% yield loss. A species complex of two closely related Dothideomycete species, Leptosphaeria maculans and L. biglobosa, is associated with this disease of crucifers (1), but leaf symptoms on susceptible plants are different, with L. maculans typically causing >15-mm pale gray lesions with numerous pycnidia, whereas L. biglobosa causes dark and smaller lesions only containing a few pycnidia. Having a similar epidemiology, both species can be present on the same plants at the same time, and symptom confusion can occur as a function of the physiological condition of the plant or expression of plant resistance responses. A total of 209 isolates from symptomatic B. oleracea leaves were collected from three fields in central states of Mexico (58 to 71 isolates per location). All leaves showed similar symptoms, including a 10- to 15-mm tissue collapse with an occasional dark margin. Cotyledons of seven B. napus differentials were inoculated with conidia of all the isolates as described by Dilmaghani et al. (1). Two hundred isolates caused tissue collapse typical of L. maculans. However, nine obtained from white cabbage in a single location in Aguascalientes caused <5-mm dark lesions. When inoculated onto cotyledons of three B. oleracea genotypes commonly grown in Mexico (cvs. Domador, Monaco, and Iron Man), the nine isolates caused a range of symptoms characterized by tissue collapse (maximum 10 to 15 mm), showing the presence of patches of black necrotic spots within the collapse. The occasional presence of a few pycnidia allowed us to reisolate the fungus for molecular identification. ITS1-5.8S-ITS2, (internal transcribed spacers and 5.8S rDNA), actin, and β-tubulin sequences were obtained as described previously (4). Multiple gene genealogies based on these sequence data showed two subclades of L. biglobosa: L. biglobosa 'occiaustralensis' (one isolate; ITS [AM410082], actin [AM410084], and β-tubulin [AM410083]) and L. biglobosa 'canadensis' (eight isolates; ITS [AJ550868], actin [AY748956], and β-tubulin [AY749004]) (3,4), which were previously described on B. napus in the United States, Canada, and Chile. To our knowledge, this is the first report of L. biglobosa in Mexico. Previously, this species has only been reported once on B. oleracea without discrimination into subclades (2). In the Aguascalientes sampling, 24% of the isolates were L. biglobosa, similar to Canadian locations where this species is still common as compared with L. maculans (1). The large proportion of sampled L. biglobosa 'canadensis', highlights the prevalence of this subclade throughout the American continent (1). References: (1) A. Dilmaghani et al. Plant Pathol. 58:1044, 2009. (2) E. Koch et al. Mol. Plant-Microbe Interact. 4:341, 1991. (3) E. Mendes-Pereira et al. Mycol Res. 107:1287, 2003. (4) L. Vincenot et al. Phytopathology 98:321, 2008.


UNLABELLED
Riboswitches are non-coding RNA located in the 5' untranslated regions where they bind a target metabolite used to specify the riboswitch class and control the expression of associated genes. Accurate identification of riboswitches is the first step towards understanding their regulatory and functional roles in the cell. In this article, we describe a new web application named Riboswitch Scanner which provides an automated pipeline for pHMM-based detection of riboswitches in partial as well as complete genomic sequences rapidly, with high sensitivity and specificity.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION
Riboswitch Scanner can be freely accessed on the web at http://service.iiserkol.ac.in/∼riboscan/

CONTACT
firstname.lastname@example.com

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


There is not nearly as much trade as standard models suggest there should be. Formal trade barriers and transport costs are too low to account for the difference. The pattern of missing trade has interesting variation across country pairs. These clues suggest the need for theoretical and eventually structural empirical work on the missing transactions costs. This paper reviews recent empirical findings and some promising research directions in search, predation and contract theory.


Classic polyarteritis nodosa (PAN) is a rare necrotising vasculitis and can result in intrarenal or perirenal bleeding because of aneurysm formation. This report describes the case of a patient with severe manifestation of PAN who developed a subcapsular hematoma from a spontaneously ruptured aneurysm in the spleen and a retroperitoneal hematoma from a renal cortex aneurysm. For the first time angiographic controls have been documented over years in this disease. The value of angiographic procedures for diagnosis and for evaluation of the disease course of PAN is discussed.


Abstract Natural rock collapse that reaches the ground surface to form a collapse doline is relatively rare in limestone karst. The anthropogenic karst geohazard is posed by the possibility of rock collapse when additional loading is imposed by engineering works directly over a known or unknown cave. An intact rock-cover thickness that exceeds half the cave width appears to be safe in most karst terrains formed in strong limestone. Guidelines suggest that drilling or probing prior to construction should prove sound rock to depths ranging between 3 and 7 m in most of the various types of karst.


The high-pressure behaviour of LiGdF4 scheelite (I41/a, Z = 4) was studied by measuring its angle-dispersive x-ray powder diffraction patterns as a function of pressure and temperature in a diamond anvil cell and a large-volume Paris–Edinburgh cell using a synchrotron radiation source. Upon compression to about 11 GPa at room temperature, the stable structure is of the scheelite type. At higher pressures and T = 298 K, new reflections occur that cannot be explained with the fergusonite structural model previously observed for LiY F4. Associated with this is the growth of an amorphous component. All the transformations are largely irreversible upon decompression. Annealing of the sample at 13.1 GPa led to a nucleation of a solid solution series LiyGd1−yF3−2y (P63/mmc, Z = 2) and traces of LiF. The new material LiyGd1−yF3−2y (P63/mmc, Z = 2) was recovered to ambient conditions but back-transformed to a Y F3-type phase (Pnma, Z = 4) after regrinding at room temperature for several hours. These observations are discussed in relation to the high-pressure high-temperature systematics of the AMX4-type compounds.


Fifty patients with adenocarcinoma of the uterine cervix were evaluated retrospectively. Treatment was based on the stage and size of tumors and the overall medical condition of the patient. Radical surgery or surgery in combination with radiation therapy was employed whenever possible. The overall survival rate was 50%, with Stage IB survival 74%. Survival in Stage IB patients was adversely affected by increasing tumor grade and size. This closely correlated with a tendency of the tumors to dedifferentiate as they increased in size. Lymph node involvement increased with increasing grade of tumor as well. Survival in patients with advanced disease was dismal. Survival increased with aggressive management which should, if possible, include surgery in Stage I and II disease.


One side effect of chemotherapy used in the treatment of cancer is alopecia, or hair loss. Since hair contributes greatly to physical attractiveness and to body image, alopecia might be expected to be distressing to patients receiving chemotherapy, resulting in decreased social interactions. A Body Image/Social Activity questionnaire was administered to 77 cancer patients receiving chemotherapy. Subjects with alopecia were expected to have significantly lower scores than those without alopecia. Although the differences found were in the expected direction, they were not statistically significant. The negative effect of hair loss may have been minimized by the process of adaptation. For many subjects, physical characteristics became less important as measures of worth and living itself became more important. Positive health care experiences such as good preparation for hair loss, individual attention, and continuity of care may also have minimized the threat associated with alopecia and may account for the lack of significant differences between the two study groups.


Samples of beach gravels were obtained from foreshore cusp deposits at Portmore Beach, near Malin Head, Republic of Ireland. Axial dimensions (A, B and C) were measured, and the maximum projection sphericity was derived, for each of 4360 clasts. Each sample was also categorized according to depositional subenvironment. Principal components analysis and cluster analysis were used to identify potential facies zonation. Results indicate that reworking of the foreshore by incident and edge waves resulted in clast size and shape segregation both parallel and perpendicular to the beach. Patterns of zonation were distinctly different from those described in earlier facies descriptions, showing a complex set of foreshore facies. The distribution of these facies was controlled primarily by location within beach cusp systems. Primary and secondary facies demonstrate alongshore variability of a magnitude comparable to across shore differences. The results have important implications for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, morphosedimentary description and research sampling design, and provide the basis for a conceptual model of gravel beach cusp facies.


Introduction As precipitation patterns are predicted to become increasingly erratic, the functional maintenance of warm-temperate forests constitutes a key challenge for forest managers. In this study, 2-year-old Quercus acutissima seedlings were selected to elucidate the mechanisms whereby they respond to soil water fluctuations and the drought hardening effects on plant carbohydrate dynamics. Methods Seedlings were trained under different soil water conditions for 2 months: drought (D), well-watered (W), 1-month drought and then 1-month well-watered (D-W), and 1-month well-watered and then 1-month drought (W-D). The functional traits involved in water- and carbon-use strategies were explored at the end of the hardening period. Compared with seedlings in group W, seedlings in groups D, D-W, and W-D had increased potential for carbon uptake (i.e., light saturated point, maximum ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate (RuBP) saturated rate, and electron transport rate) and water uptake (i.e., fine root–to–coarse root ratio) and downregulated growth and mitochondrial respiration to decrease carbon consumption. After water fluctuation hardening, we performed a successional dry-down experiment for 1 month to detect carbohydrate dynamics and explore the acclimation caused by prior hardening. Results and discussion Our results revealed that there were more soluble sugars allocated in the leaves and more starch allocated in the stems and roots of seedlings hardened in the D, W-D, and D-W treatments than that of seedlings hardened in the W treatment. No significant changes in total non-structural carbohydrates were found. In addition, we found near-zero (seedlings trained by D and D-W treatments) or negative (seedlings trained by W-D treatment) growth of structural biomass at the end of the dry-down experiment, which was significantly lower than that of W-hardened seedlings. This suggests that there was a shift in allocation patterns between carbon storage and growth under recurrent soil drought, which can be strengthened by drought memory. We conclude that Q. acutissima seedlings adjusted water- and carbon-use strategies in response to water fluctuations, whereas stress memory can enhance their overall performance in reoccurring drought. Therefore, taking advantage of stress memory is a promising management strategy in forest nurseries, and drought-trained seedlings might be more suitable for afforestation practices in sites characterized by fluctuating soil water content, considering the ongoing global climatic changes.


The full-length zinc-binding protein (ZnBP) gene was cloned from a normalized cDNA library constructed from a cotton mutant (Xiangmian-18) during the gland-forming stage. The clone was sequenced and analysed. BLASTP analysis showed that the deduced amino acid sequence of ZnBP in Xiangmian-18 is similar to that in Arabidopsis thaliana (GenBank accession no. EFH46337.1) with an overall similarity of 77%. The cDNA insert comprises 654 base pairs (bp) and 217 amino acid residues. Its molecular weight is 24.6 kDa, and the theoretical pI is 9.33. The cotton ZnBP gene was cloned from the gDNA from Xiangmian-18 leaves. After sequencing the two fragments, a 1731 bp cotton ZnBP gene with three introns was identified. Using pET-28a(+) as a prokaryotic expression vector, the gene was expressed in Escherichia coli BL21(DE3). The conditions for achieving optimal ZnBP expression were 37°C, IPTG 1 mmol/L, 8 h and a shaker speed of 150 rpm. Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) and Western blot analysis confirmed the correct expression of the protein. pCAMBIA2300-35S-OCS was used as a eukaryotic expression vector. The recombinant plasmid pCAMBIA2300-ZnBP was used to transform competent Agrobacterium GV3101 by the freeze-thaw method. Then, A. thaliana plants were transformed by the floral dipping method. Transformed plants were grown to maturity in a growth chamber. After screening on kanamycin-resistant half-strength Murashige and Skoog plates and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis, two transgenic plant strains were obtained. Northern blot analysis showed that ZnBP expression was higher in homozygous plants than in wild-type plants. The differences between the phenotypes of homozygous and wild-type plants indicate that the ZnBP gene affects the growth and development of A. thaliana. The results of prokaryotic expression of ZnBP and overexpression of the ZnBP gene in A. thaliana improve our understanding of the function of this gene. Future studies should investigate the molecular mechanisms involved in gland morphogenesis in cotton. Key words : Gossypium hirsutum, pigment gland, zinc binding protein, prokaryotic expression, overexpression.


This thesis examines the properties, applications and usefulness of the different conservation laws in everyday life from our homes to the industry. We investigate some mathematical derivations of linear and non-linear partial differential equations which are used as models to solve problems for instance in the applications of oil recovery process were we produce a model to find the amount of water that passes through the production well. Also investigations are made on derivations of the shallow water wave equations in one-dimension in which case emphasis is placed on important assumptions which are used to produce a simplified model which can be solved analytically. An overview of the different conservation laws are used in order to get the right models or equations. Emphasis was also placed on the different techniques used to solve the characteristic equations depending on the nature and direction of its characteristic speed. There are different ways of finding the solutions of the conservation differential equations but this thesis specifically is concentrated on the two types of solutions, that is, the shock and rarefaction solutions which are obtain at different characteristic speeds. Entropy conditions were also studied in order to get a phyically admissible weak solutions which allows a shock profile. A numerical scheme was employed to find an approximate solution to the shallow water wave equations. The numerical approach used in the thesis is based on the Lax–Friedrichs scheme which is built on differential equations by difference methods. Also further work will be needed for instance to look at two or three dimesional shallow water equation as well as it can be extended to look at applications of conservation in a two dimensional or network systems of cars.


This guide has been developed for use by students in the First Year Seminar: Spellbound: the Quest for Magic in Speculative Fiction and the Arts.


Fisher information is a measure of the best precision with which a parameter can be estimated from statistical data. It can also be defined for a continuous random variable without reference to any parameters, in which case it has a physically compelling interpretation of representing the highest precision with which the first cumulant of the random variable, i.e., its mean, can be estimated from its statistical realizations. We construct a complete hierarchy of information measures that determine the best precision with which all of the cumulants of a random variable-and thus its complete probability distribution-can be estimated from its statistical realizations. Several properties of these information measures and their generating functions are discussed.


In the UK, restraining medical patients in order to provide care is widely considered to be outmoded and difficult to justify. The prevailing clinical intuition that restraining patients is generally wrong (even when restraint is essential in order to provide artificial nutrition and hydration) has prompted us to develop a policy that is compatible with common law, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and the Human Rights Act 1998. The nature and scope of the problem are illustrated with clinical cases. These, in turn, serve to demonstrate the tension that arises between article 2, article 3 and article 8 rights, when incompetent patients are restrained in order to feed.


The effect of stretch-shortening cycles (SSCs) is often studied in laboratory settings, yet it remains unclear whether highly active muscle SSCs actually occur during in vivo movement. Nine highly trained jumping athletes performed single-leg pre-hop forward jumps at maximal effort. We hypothesized that these jumps would induce a SSC at the level of the muscle in the medial gastrocnemius. Kinematic and kinetic data were collected together with electromyography signals (EMG) and muscle fascicle length and pennation angle changes of the medial gastrocnemius of both legs and combined with a musculoskeletal model to calculate the stretch-shortening behavior of the muscle (fascicles) and tendon (series-elastic element). The length changes of the fascicles, longitudinal muscle displacement, series-elastic element, and whole muscle-tendon unit further allowed for a detailed analysis of the architectural gearing ratio between different phases of the SSC within a single movement. We found a SSC at the level of the joint, muscle-tendon unit and tendon but not at the muscle. We further found that the average architectural gearing ratio was higher during the stretching of the series-elastic element as compared to when the series-elastic element was shortening, yet this was not statistically tested because of low sample size for this parameter. However, we found no correlation when plotting the architectural gearing ratio as a function of the fascicle velocities at each instance in time. Despite the athletes having a clear preferred leg for jumping, we found no differences in any kinematic or kinetic parameter between the preferred and non-preferred leg or any parameter from the muscle-tendon interaction analysis other than a reduced longitudinal muscle shortening in the non-preferred leg (p = 0.008). We conclude that, although common at the level of the joints, MTUs, and tendon (series-elastic element), highly active SSCs very rarely occur in the medial gastrocnemius, even in movements that induce high loading. This has important implications for the translation of ex vivo findings on SSC effects, such as residual force enhancement, in this muscle. We further conclude that there is no precise tuning of the architectural gearing ratio in the medial gastrocnemius throughout the whole movement.


Abstract: This paper introduces an adaptive anti-sway tracking control algorithm for container cranes with unknown payloads and friction between the trolley and the rail. If the friction effects in the system can be modeled, there is an improved potential to design controllers that can cancel these effects. The proposed control improves the sway suppressing and the positioning capabilities of the trolley and hoisting against uncertain payload and friction. The variable structure controls are first designed based on a class of feedback linearization methods for the stabilization of the under-actuated sway dynamics. The adaptation mechanism are then designed with parameter estimation of unknown payload and friction compensation for the trolley and hoisting, based on Lyapunov stability methods for the accurate positioning and fast attenuation of trolley oscillation due to frictions in the vicinity of the target position. The asymptotic stability of the overall closed-loop system is assured irrespective of variations of rope length. Simulations are shown under various frictions and external winds in the case of no priori information of payload mass. Keywords: container cranes, sway suppression, variable structure control, friction compensation, unknown payload


The three-dimensional structures of Leu-198-->Glu, Leu-198-->His, Leu-198-->Arg, and Leu-198-->Ala variants of human carbonic anhydrase II (CAII) have each been determined by X-ray crystallographic methods to a resolution of 2.0 A. The side chain of Leu-198 is located at the mouth of the active site hydrophobic pocket, and this pocket is required for substrate association. Hydrophobic-->hydrophilic amino acid substitutions at the mouth of the pocket decrease kcat/KM for CO2 hydration: the CO2 hydrase activities of Leu-198-->Glu, Leu-198-->His, and Leu-198-->Arg CAIIs are diminished 19-fold, 10-fold, and 17-fold, respectively, relative to the wild-type enzyme; however, the substitution of a compact aliphatic side chain for Leu-198 has a smaller effect on catalysis, in that Leu-198-->Ala CAII exhibits only a 3-fold decrease in CO2 hydrase activity [Krebs, J. F., Rana, F., Dluhy, R. A., & Fierke, C. A. (1993) Biochemistry (preceding paper in this issue)]. It is intriguing that CO2 hydrase activity is not severely diminished in Leu-198-->Arg CAII, even though the side chain of Arg-198 blocks the hydrophobic pocket. Therefore, the bulky side chain of Arg-198 must be reasonably mobile in order to accommodate substrate association. Significantly, a residue larger than the wild-type Leu-198 side chain does not necessarily block the substrate association pocket; e.g., the side chain of Glu-198 packs against a hydrophobic patch, the net result of which is a wider mouth for the pocket.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


Summary: The practice of plastic surgery has become more complex. As plastic surgeons face the postgraduate realities of contracts, negotiations, and health system employment, they are frequently unprepared to effectively manage these challenges. Furthermore, many plastic surgery training programs do not emphasize real-world business and policy concerns in residency training. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery endeavors to provide robust conceptual education and guidance in business and policy to help both private practice and academic plastic surgeons participate in, lead, and shape the future of health care.


Covalent sidewall addition to single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) of a series of organolithium and organomagnesium compounds (nBuLi, tBuLi, EtLi, nHexLi, nBuMgCl, tBuMgCl) followed by reoxidation is reported. The functionalized R(n)-SWNTs were characterized by Raman and NIR emission spectroscopy. The reaction of SWNTs with organolithium and magnesium compounds exhibits pronounced selectivity: in general, metallic tubes are more reactive than semiconducting ones. The reactivity of SWNTs toward the addition of organometallic compounds is inversely proportional to the diameter of the tubes. This was determined simultaneously and independently for both metallic and semiconducting SWNTs. The reactivity also depends on the steric demands of the addend. Binding of the bulky t-butyl addend is less favorable than addition of primary alkyl groups. Significantly, although tBuLi is less reactive than, for example, nBuLi, it is less selective toward the preferred reaction with metallic tubes. This unexpected behavior is explained by fast electron transfer to the metallic SWNTs having low-lying electronic states close to the Fermi level, a competitive initial process. The NIR emission of weakly functionalized semiconducting SWNTs, also reported for the first time, implies interesting applications of functionalized tubes as novel fluorescent reporter molecules.


OBJECTIVE
To study the possibility on in vitro identifying the source or kinds of cells from Schistosoma japonicum (S.j).

METHODS
The cells from digested tissues of 18 days old schistosomula were smeared on slides. The adult worms of S.j were used for making paraffin sections. The cell smears and tissue sections were stained with 6 different methods of histochemical staining including Periodic Acid-Schiff (PAS), Argyrophil reaction (by Grimeliu's), Picric acid-acid Fuchsin (by Van Gieson, VG), Thionin, Toluidine blue (TB) and Hematoxylin-Eosin (HE) staining parallelly. The results were judged through inspecting the specific color of the cells on smears referring to location of corresponding staining of paraffin sections of adult worm tissues under light microscopy.

RESULTS
Vitelline gland cells, mother germ cells, nerve cells, digestive epithelial cells, muscular cells and mast cells were shown clearly. The stainings of VG, PAS and Thionin demonstrated cell types coinciding to histological location. The TB staining did not find red-purple mast cell in tissue sections but one in cell smears. The Grimeliu's argyrophil reaction displayed that intestine wall of tissure sections and stained cells of cell smears were in black clearly.

CONCLUSION
HE staining together with histochemical staining can reliably and rapidly distinguish the cell types of Schistosoma japonicum.


The purpose of the study was to compare the ability of a mutual information algorithm with that of a standard algorithm to align images of histological serial sections. The two align algorithms were implemented in C running on a Linux based PC. Both algorithms used the same gradient-based optimizer, but different cost functions standard (ST), and mutual information (MI) respectively. The object of the test was to align 4557 serial sections originating from a rat kidney. The alignment of kidney sections is difficult as these sections contain many nearly identical tubules, representing a high degree of translation symmetry. As a consequence there is a non-negligible chance of misalignment into a local minimum, making serial kidney sections good real life test objects for image alignment. We showed that images, which were difficult to align by the ST were easy to align with MI. We found that the most efficient strategy was first to align all 4557 images using the ST function and then to align the misaligned 54 images using the MI function.


Quantification over public announcements shifts the perspective from reasoning strictly about the results of a particular announcement to reasoning about the existence of an announcement that achieves some certain epistemic goal. Depending on the type of the quantification, we get different formalisms, the most known of which are arbitrary public announcement logic (APAL), group announcement logic (GAL), and coalition announcement logic (CAL). It has been an open question whether the logics have the finite model property, and in the paper we answer the question negatively. We also discuss how this result is connected to other open questions in the field.


We develop a stylized model that allows us to estimate a value-added measure for nursing homes ("SNFs") which accounts for patient selection both into and out of a SNF. We use the model, together with detailed data on the physical and mental health of about 6 million Medicare SNF patients between 2011 and 2016, to estimate the value added for about 14,000 distinct SNFs. We document substantial heterogeneity in value added. Nationwide, compared to a 10th percentile SNF, a 90th percentile SNF is able to discharge a patient at the same health level about a week sooner, which is about one third of the median length of stay. Heterogeneity in value added within a market is almost as large as it is nationwide. Our results point to the potential for substantial gains through policies that encourage reallocation of patients to higher-quality SNFs within their market. ∗We thank Alden Cheng, Eric Zwick, and seminar participants at Chicago Booth, Duke/UNC, Tinos IO conference, UBC, UPenn, USC, Rice, and Washington University for comments and suggestions. We are grateful to Sean Gao, Sam Wang, Alicia Weng, Xuyang Xia, Connie Xu, Yuci Zhou, and especially James Okun for superb research assistance, and to the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the National Institute on Aging (Finkelstein R01-AG032449) for financial support. †Stanford University and NBER, email@example.com ‡MIT and NBER, firstname.lastname@example.com §Stanford University and NBER, firstname.lastname@example.com. Mahoney is currently at the White House, on leave from Stanford; all his work on this paper was done while he was still at Stanford.


This paper studies differences in the perception of innovation barriers between innovative and non-innovative firms for 18 EU countries. The countries are grouped by their distance to the technological frontier using Community Innovation Surveys for the years 2002-2004 and 2004-2006. The results show that non-innovators interested in innovation are much more likely to perceive barriers than non-innovators that are not interested in innovation activities. With regard to differences between country groups there is a clear indication that innovation barriers related to the availability of skilled labour, innovation partners and knowledge are more important for firms located in countries close to the frontier, while the opposite is true regarding the availability of external finance. Although the share of innovators decreases with the distance to the technological frontier, the share of barrier-related innovators increases. The results demonstrate the usefulness of the innovation barrier approach to understand the determinants of innovative activity at the firm level and to priority-setting within innovation policies.


Because intra prediction modes in H.264 are determined by the brightness continuity between neighboring blocks, they can be used as a method for extracting edge information in the compression domain. However, if we just consider 9 intra prediction modes in H.264 as 9 different edge directions, we have the following two problems. First, intra prediction modes tend to yield too many edge blocks, generating unnecessary edge information. Second, we may not need all 9 directional edges (including the DC type) in H.264 intra prediction modes. For example, the EHD (edge histogram descriptor) in MPEG-7 defines only 4 directional edge types, namely horizontal, vertical, diagonal (HVD) edges with 0?, 90?, 45?, and 135?. Here, semi-diagonal (SD) edge types with 112.5?, 157.5?, 22.5?, and 67.5? in the intra prediction modes in H.264 are not used. In this paper. we prepose a method that removes unnecessary edges from the intra prediction modes by utilizing the total average coefficient of 4x4 blocks in each slice and assign SD edges to HVD (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, 0?, 90?, 45?, 135?) edges by the contextual information of the neighboring blocks. Experimental results show that the edges determined by the proposed method in the compression domain are comparable to those of the previous edge detection methods in the spatial domain.


How do teachers' attitudes and beliefs impact how HIV/AIDS education is implemented in Kenyan schools for the deaf? How do these attitudes and beliefs reflect how teachers think about Deafness? While there is extensive literature exploring in-school HIV/AIDS-related education in East Africa, there are few studies focusing on segregated schools for the deaf. There are also few studies exploring how educators think about Deafness as culture in this region. Western Kenya offers a useful site for the exploration of these topics with mandated, in-school HIV/AIDS curriculum and a high density of schools for the deaf. Related research also argues that teachers' attitudes and beliefs and the politics of schooling are useful in exploring socio-cultural constructions of Deafness. While previous studies have argued that "Deaf-friendly" HIV/AIDS education is not occurring in this region, this study found examples in these schools. Data from this study also revealed that this education was shaped by the beliefs and attitudes teachers held about sexuality, and Deafness and sign language. Furthermore, this study found that these attitudes and beliefs revealed underlying beliefs about Deafness that illustrate a range of constructions within this group of teachers. This study spanned 15 weeks of fieldwork gathering data through interviews, questionnaires and observations with 81 participants. Data focused primarily on interviews and questionnaires with 43 teachers in three segregated schools for the deaf in the Nyanza and Western provinces. There were 8 Deaf teachers who participated from these school sites supplemented by an additional 24 Deaf participants working in schools across Kenya to balance data. This study found that while the nationally-mandated HIV/AIDS course curriculum was not implemented in these schools, there was a significant presence of "embedded" and informal HIV/AIDS education. Teachers had a range of feelings about this education, some of which were unique to teaching Deaf children and children using sign language. They also reported how "Deaf stereotypes" shaped how they approached and implemented this education. In some cases these beliefs and attitudes simply heightened preexisting concerns about HIV/AIDS education in similar ways to parallel studies of "regular" schools in this region. However the most striking conclusion from this research was that the presence of "Deaf culture" and the use of sign language among the student population changed the way teachers approached, implemented and reflected upon this education in unique ways not seen in "regular" schools. Interviews also showed that some teachers rationalized their approach to this education because they felt that the Deaf were "different" in certain ways, especially in terms of sexuality. These conclusions are helpful for those in HIV/AIDS education, Comparative and International Education, Disability Studies, Deaf Studies and Medical Anthropology.


The meteorological imbalances in Brazil have a strong impact on the lives of the population across the country, especially in the Amazon region. These impacts extend to meteorological phenomena, such as extreme rainfall, droughts, and an increase in temperature in several regions, as well as impacts on health, the economy, and, as the object of this study, the quality of life. This study presents the impact of meteorological changes on the quality of life in the Amazon region, based on (i) the thermal discomfort index (TDI), (ii) the temperature and humidity index (THI), and (iii) the effective temperature index as a function of the wind (TEFW). For this, meteorological data from the years 2003–2021 were used, in which the variables include total precipitation, global radiation, air-dry bulb temperature, the maximum temperature in the previous hour, the minimum temperature in the previous hour, relative humidity, and wind speed. This analysis indicates that for this tropical region, the sensation of mild discomfort was predominant in about 70% of the measurements, indicating a certain level of impact on the population's quality of life, in addition to the fluctuation of levels of discomfort during periods of winter in that there are high rates of precipitation. The data control was performed with the removal of null data and calculation of monthly and annual averages, by using the compression (average) empty data frames in order to receive the values without losing the indexing of dates. At first, it was considered to use the kriging process to fill in the missing data; however, due to the existence of microclimates in the regions, the data could characterize remote regions in a generalized way, which would make it difficult to understand these data in comparison with the data from the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET, in Portuguese).


Previously, it has been shown that integrin alpha6beta1 expressed on human granulosa cells regulates luteinization in co-operation with its ligand, laminin. In this study, integrin alpha2 was immunohistochemically demonstrated to be expressed on granulosa and large luteal cells. It was also detected on luteinizing theca interna cells after ovulation. Immunoreactive collagen type IV, which is one of the ligands for integrin alpha2beta1, was detected around granulosa cells in the pre-ovulatory follicles and its expression was rapidly increased during ovulation. By flow cytometry, collagen type IV was detected on the cell surface of luteinizing granulosa cells isolated from pre-ovulatory follicles, confirming the physiological interaction between granulosa cells and collagen type IV. Collagen type IV in follicular fluid was positively related with progesterone concentration. In 4-day cultures of granulosa cells, collagen type IV in the media was significantly increased by human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG). The progesterone production was significantly attenuated when granulosa cells were cultured on collagen type IV-coated dishes, suggesting that collagen type IV suppresses granulosa cell luteinization. These findings show that collagen type IV, a ligand for integrin alpha2beta1, is rapidly produced around luteinizing granulosa cells during ovulation, probably under the control of luteinizing hormone (LH) and suggest that collagen type IV is a new parameter and/or regulator of granulosa cell luteinization in the periovulatory phases.


We evaluated 2 3-component multiple-schedule sequences-a response interruption and redirection (RIRD) treatment sequence and a no-interaction control sequence-using a multielement design. With this design, we were able to evaluate the immediate and subsequent effects of RIRD on 2 participants' vocal stereotypy. For both participants, RIRD produced an immediate decrease in vocal stereotypy and did not result in a subsequent increase.


The development of synfuel technology has focused attention on the determination and control of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in the work and general environments. As a group, PAH are perhaps the most important family of compounds of concern to the industrial hygienist in the synfuel industry. The resolution and detection of PAH present in an environmental sample remain challenging analytical tasks. This paper describes refinements in the analytical scheme and detection of multiple PAH by a combined HPLC and GC/MS approach in samples collected over several months in various areas of a coal conversion facility. The method has been proven to be a rapid, more sensitive, and less expensive approach than GC/MS alone, and has been applied successfully to a large number of samples collected in the real coal conversion environment.


Background: Metastatic esophageal carcinoma (EC) has a poor prognosis and only limited treatment options. While immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have improved the treatment of a broad spectrum of cancers, patients with EC mostly fail to respond to this treatment. For that reason, it is crucial to understand the immune phenotype of each cancer patient and moreover, to understand how different therapies modulate the cancer microenvironment and sensitize the tumors to the treatment with ICIs. Summary: We have conducted a systematic review of the literature to evaluate the potential of ICI therapy in combination with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and/or biologic therapy in EC patients. In our review, we have discussed the effects of diverse treatment approaches on the tumor microenvironment of EC. In addition, we have reviewed the current phase II and III clinical trials in EC patients to provide a rationale for immunotherapy application in combination settings with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and/or biologic therapy. Key Messages: A great effort is already underway in clinical trials evaluating the combinatorial administration of ICIs and other treatment modalities in metastatic EC patients. PD-L1 expression status was shown to be higher in the squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) as compared to adenocarcinoma. Thus, ICIs plus chemotherapy are being discussed as a particularly feasible option for patients with SCC. Radiation was shown to induce the expression of immune checkpoint molecules and to promote the priming and activation of cytotoxic T cells which provides a rationale for ICI administration in a combination with radiotherapy. The combination of ICIs with biologic therapy was shown to be safe; however, the impact on the clinical outcomes of EC patients varied among studies.


BACKGROUND
Plasma adiponectin is decreased in patients with coronary artery diseases, especially in patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). However, the correlation between plasma adiponectin and variant angina pectoris (VAP) has not been verified. Plasma adiponectin concentrations between VAP and other coronary artery diseases was compared in the present study. The association between plasma adiponectin concentration and VAP was also investigated.

METHODS AND RESULTS
Plasma adiponectin concentrations in the VAP group (n=101) were compared with those of the ACS group (n=117), the stable angina pectoris group (n=108), and the normal coronary group (n=81). Plasma adiponectin concentrations in VAP and ACS were significantly lower than that of the normal coronary group (6.6+/-5.4 vs 5.2+/-4.0 vs 9.0 +/-6.2 microg/ml, p<0.001, respectively). Multivariate analysis indicated that plasma adiponectin (odds ratio (OR) 0.735, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.621-0.855, p=0.011), smoking (OR 2.012, 95% CI 1.210-3.880, p=0.020), and age (OR 0.976, 95% CI 0.957-0.997, p=0.022) correlated independently with the development of VAP.

CONCLUSIONS
Our results suggest that a decrease in plasma adiponectin concentration might be associated with the development of VAP.


Introduction: Higher-level-of-care (HLOC) transfers to tertiary care hospitals are common. While this has been shown profitable for hospitals, the impact on physicians has not been described. Community medical center call panels continue to erode, in part due to the perception that patients needing transfer are underinsured. Surveys show that the problematic specialties to maintain call panels in community hospitals are neurosurgery, otolaryngology, plastic surgery, orthopedics and ophthalmology. This places greater stress on tertiary care hospitals' physicians. The objective of this study is to describe the financial consequences to physicians who care for HLOC transfers across specialties and compare these with all patients from each specialty and specialty-specific national reimbursement benchmarks. Methods: Financial data were obtained for all HLOC transfers to a single tertiary care center from January 2007 through March 2008. Work relative value unit (RVU) and reimbursement were taken from a centralized professional fee billing office. National benchmarks for reimbursement per RVU were calculated from the 2006 Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Compensation and Production Survey. Results: In this period 570 patients were transferred, 319 (55.9%) through the emergency department (ED). Reimbursement per RVU varied from a high of $74.93 for neurosurgery to $25.91 for family medicine. Reimbursement to emergency medicine (EM) for HLOC patients was 16% above the average reimbursement per RVU for all ED patients ($50.5 vs. $43.7). Similarly, neurosurgery reimbursement per RVU was 22% above the reimbursement per RVU for all patients ($74.93 vs. $61.27). The remainder of specialties was reimbursed less ($25.91 vs $69.60) per RVU for HLOC patients than for all of their patients at this center. All specialties at this site were reimbursed less for each HLOC patient than national average reimbursement for all patients in each specialty. Conclusion: Average professional fee reimbursement for HLOC patients was higher for EM and neurosurgery than for all other patients in these specialties at this site, but lower for the rest of the specialties. Compared to the national benchmarks, this site had an overall lower reimbursement per RVU for all specialties, reflecting a poorer patient mix. At this site HLOC transfers patients are financially advantageous for EM and neurosurgery.


In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, growing concern over increasing rates of brucellosis seroprevalence in wildlife has challenged wildlife managers to develop strategies for minimizing the potential for pathogen exchange within and between wildlife populations. Recent evidence suggests that increases in elk seroprevalence may be associated with increasing elk densities and/or increasing size of elk aggregations. However, the interactions between elk population density, landscape factors, and elk aggregation patterns are not well-understood, making appropriate management responses challenging. Using a unique, long-term elk aggregation dataset collected across a wide range of elk population sizes, we investigated relationships between elk population size, landscape factors, and elk aggregation responses (group size and group density) with goals of clarifying how changes in elk population size may affect elk aggregation patterns. Overall, landscape attributes and weather had a stronger influence on elk aggregation patterns than factors such as elk population size that are within management control. We found little evidence that elk population size affected mean elk group sizes, but we did find evidence that the size and density of the largest elk aggregations increased as elk population size increased. We also found some evidence that group densities increased following the establishment of wolves. However, across the relatively wide range of elk population sizes observed in this study, only modest changes in elk group density were observed, suggesting that dramatic reductions in population sizes would be necessary to produce measureable reductions in elk group density to affect frequency-dependent transmission. Management actions designed to lower disease transmission are likely to negatively affect other objectives related to elk management and conservation. We therefore suggest that a first step in managing disease transmission risk is agreement among stakeholders interested in elk management of all objectives related to elk management, including acknowledgment that disease transmission is undesirable. © 2011 The Wildlife Society.


The quantum theory of Stokes-anti-Stokes processes in a degenerate system in a cavity is developed. The Raman transition is pumped by a coherent field. Effects of many atoms, cavity losses, and thermal photons are included in the theory. An exact solution for the model is obtained. An explicit expression for the reduced density matrix of the cavity field is given. The spectrum of the cavity field is obtained and is interpreted in terms of the eigenstates of the effective Hamiltonian describing Stokes-anti-Stokes processes. The spectrum develops sidebands due to strong Raman coupling.


SUMMARY: Four pseudomonad isolates which could use uric acid aerobically as a sole C, N and energy source were isolated from poultry house deep-litter, droppings, and nearby soil. Organisms harvested from media containing uric acid can degrade uric acid completely, with the formation of CO3 and NH3. Allantoin, allantoic, glyoxylic and formic acids were completely oxidized.


Lake Singkarak is one of natural resources and environmental which is important for human life. It is located in West Sumatera Province, with area of 11220 km 2 and 136 m depth. Until 2000, there were no studies about the total economic value of lake Singkarak resource. That is the reason why the researcher wants to conduct a research to estimate the use value and non-use value of it. In order to quantify the value above, he used some approaches that based on the concept of individual willingness to pay, by using the framework of the total economic value. The study shows that total economic value of natural resources and environmental of Singkarak lake is Rp. 174.950 billion per year. It consists of (a) the economic value of fishery Rp. 7,328 billion, (b) the economic value of irrigation Rp. 0, 775 billion, (c) the economic value of recreation Rp. 4,176 billion, (d) the economic value of domestic use Rp. 7,718 billion, and (e) the the economic value of electricity power Rp. 154,992 billion. These findings are usefull for the government as the policy maker to manage the development of lake Singkarak's natural resources and its environmental efectively and sustainability .


Abstract The vine breeding of varieties resistant to two major pathogens (mildew and powdery mildew) underpins the promise of a pesticide-free viticulture. Numerous questions appear while professionals try to plant these varietal innovations in their vineyard: what is a good grape variety? Can we produce good wines with these 'new' varieties that fit our expectations for taste, quality, their capacity to adapt to our terroirs, etc.? Going faster is a challenge for growers who want to test new production methods associated with new markets. In that context, testing these varieties is a necessity. This paper focuses on one of these specific tests conducted in the Languedoc Wine Region (France). Technicians, scientists and economic players in this sector all together organise the testing in order to distribute the first experimental plants through regional winegrowers. To analyse what qualifies a good experimentation, I follow how actors formulate their concerns and what they take into account in such situations. Using a theoretical framework derived from the Science and Technology Studies (STS), I describe how relations between professionals and objects are transformed as they face uncertainties in their efforts to achieve the promise of a more sustainable viticulture.


ABSTRACT Education is considered a path for escaping poverty. However, poverty and lack of success in school are closely linked. Understanding structural factors within society that cause poverty and their influence on learning and educational outcomes requires reshaping teacher education programmes. There is a need for programmes that adopt the social justice perspective and challenge prevalent deficit perceptions of people in poverty, through critical reflection. This article presents a qualitative study that analysed the responses of teachers in Israel who were exposed to life stories of people in poverty as a means of arousing poverty-awareness. Our experience shows that reflexive reading of life stories can challenge stereotypes, deepen teachers' understanding of socio-economic disadvantage, and help sensitise them to school pedagogies and practices that exacerbate inequality. This change of teachers' understandings and attitudes has the potential to develop a partnership-based relationship with families living in poverty and improve student's educational achievement.


Uncertainty assessment is a key step in nuclear applications to ensure that a system cannot move towards unsafe conditions. This topic has already been addressed by several OECD/NEA projects such as UMS or BEMUSE. However, if uncertainty propagation methods have now become mature for industrial applications, the input uncertainties quantification on the physical models still requires further investigations. It is precisely in this context that the SAPIUM project has been proposed in order to reduce as much as possible (or at least better understand) the user-effect observed in the previous PREMIUM activity that was a first attempt to analyze available methods to handle this issue. The underlying idea of the proposed work is not to focus on method benchmarking but on the construction of a clear and shared systematic approach for input uncertainty quantification as it is already addressed in industries and RandD for related topics. The main outcome of the project is a first good practices document that can be exploited for safety study in order to increase the agreement among experts on recommended practices as well as on remaining open issues for further developments. End users are therefore the developers and the users of BEPU methodologies, as well as the organizations in charge of evaluating them. Since it is an on-going activity, this paper describes the general content of the SAPIUM activity. All the details of the contributions will be available in the final document that will be issued in 2019.


Abstract Surface tension of kraft lignin (KL) and KL/poly(N,N-dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate) mixtures, with different composition at the air-water interface depending on pH and temperature, was measured. It was found that the surface activity of both KL and the reaction mixtures grows with decreasing pH and increasing temperature. At the same time, the surface activity of the KL/poly(N,N-dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate) reaction mixture, irrespective of its composition under the same environment conditions, considerably exceeds the surface activity of KL, indicating the synergetic effect governed by the peculiarities of the polymeric structure of the formed soluble particles of the polyelectrolyte complex.


Customers challenge sealant formulators to develop high weatherability construction sealants with ever-higher performance. This paper will discuss some of the factors that influence weatherability and durability of sealants, such as binder, pigments, stabilizers, and catalysts. One-component polyurethane and modified silicone sealants will be evaluated. Raw material influences need to be carefully tested and optimized in order to develop high weatherability sealants. Taking these factors into consideration, it is possible to formulate high weatherability sealants that meet customers' demands. These demands are expected to increase in the future.


Volume 3, Issue 6, November-December 2014 Page 107 Abstract Decision trees are considered to be one of the most popular approaches for representing classifiers. Researchers from various disciplines such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognisition and Data Mining have dealt with the issue of growing a decision tree from available data. Traditional decision tree classifiers used to work on the data whose values are known and precise. Therefore in this research such classifiers are used to handle data with uncertain information. Two approaches has been implemented one is the averaging in which the data uncertainty is represented by abstract probability distribution by summary statistics such as mean and variances. The other approach is the distribution based which considers all the sample points that constitute each pdf.


The explanation dimension of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based system has been a hot topic for the past years. Different communities have raised concerns about the increasing presence of AI in people's everyday tasks and how it can affect people's lives. There is a lot of research addressing the interpretability and transparency concepts of explainable AI (XAI), which are usually related to algorithms and Machine Learning (ML) models. But in decision-making scenarios, people need more awareness of how AI works and its outcomes to build a relationship with that system. Decision-makers usually need to justify their decision to others in different domains. If that decision is somehow based on or influenced by an AI-system outcome, the explanation about how the AI reached that result is key to building trust between AI and humans in decision-making scenarios. In this position paper, we discuss the role of XAI in decision-making scenarios, our vision of Decision-Making with AI-system in the loop, and explore one case from the literature about how XAI can impact people justifying their decisions, considering the importance of building the human-AI relationship for those scenarios.


This review outlines how eyes of terrestrial vertebrates and insects meet the competing requirements of coding both spatial and spectral information. There is no unique solution to this problem. Thus, mammals and honeybees use their long-wavelength receptors for both achromatic (luminance) and colour vision, whereas flies and birds probably use separate sets of photoreceptors for the two purposes. In particular, we look at spectral tuning and diversification among 'long-wavelength' receptors (sensitivity maxima at greater than 500 nm), which play a primary role in luminance vision. Data on spectral sensitivities and phylogeny of visual photopigments can be incorporated into theoretical models to suggest how eyes are adapted to coding natural stimuli. Models indicate, for example, that animal colour vision—involving five or fewer broadly tuned receptors—is well matched to most natural spectra. We can also predict that the particular objects of interest and signal-to-noise ratios will affect the optimal eye design. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to account for the adaptive significance of features such as co-expression of photopigments in single receptors, variation in spectral sensitivities of mammalian L-cone pigments and the diversification of long-wavelength receptors that has occurred in several terrestrial lineages.


Nanoparticles of Titanium dioxide (TiO2) was successfully synthesized from simple aqueous peroxo route using TiOSO4 and H2O2 as the precursors. Amorphous titaniumperoxo complex powder was obtained at room temperature, which was then converted into anatase by heat-treating at 300°C. This new method is simple, inexpensive, environmentally benign and promising to be used for the preparation of large quantity of TiO2 nanoparticles.


Catena(dimethylammonium-bis(mu2-chloro)-chlorocuprate), (CH3)2NH2CuCl3, forms chains of Cu2Cl6(2-) bifold dimers linked along the structural chain axis by terminal chlorides forming long semicoordinate bonds to adjacent dimers. The structural chains are separated by dimethylammonium ions that hydrogen bond to chloride ions of the dimers. A structural phase transition below room temperature removes disorder in the hydrogen bonding, leaving adjacent dimers along the chain structurally and magnetically inequivalent, with alternating ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic pairs. The coupled dimers are magnetically isolated from each other along the structural chain axis by the long semicoordinate Cu-Cl bond. However, the dimers couple to like counterparts on adjacent chains via nonbonding Cl...Cl contacts. The result is two independent magnetic chains, one an alternating antiferromagnetic chain and the other an antiferromagnetic chain of ferromagnetically coupled copper dimers, which run perpendicular to the structural chains. This magnetostructural analysis is used to fit unusual low-temperature (1.6 K) magnetization vs field data that display a two-step saturation. The structural phase transition is identified with neutron scattering and capacitance measurements, and the X-ray crystal structures are determined at room temperature and 84 K. The results appear to resolve long-standing confusion about the origins of the magnetic behavior of this compound and provide a compelling example of the importance of two-halide magnetic exchange.


Changes in glycosylation are common in malignancy, and as almost all surface proteins are glycosylated, this can dramatically affect the behavior of tumor cells. In breast carcinomas, the O-linked glycans are frequently truncated, often as a result of premature sialylation. The sialyltransferase ST3Gal-I adds sialic acid to the galactose residue of core 1 (Galβ1,3GalNAc) O-glycans and this enzyme is over-expressed in breast cancer resulting in the expression of sialylated core 1 glycans. In order to study the role of ST3Gal-I in mammary tumor development, we developed transgenic mice that over-express the sialyltransferase under the control of the human membrane-bound mucin 1 promoter. These mice were then crossed with PyMT mice that spontaneously develop mammary tumors. As expected, ST3Gal-I transgenic mice showed increased activity and expression of the enzyme in the pregnant and lactating mammary glands, the stomach, lungs and intestine. Although no obvious defects were observed in the fully developed mammary gland, when these mice were crossed with PyMT mice, a highly significant decrease in tumor latency was observed compared to the PyMT mice on an identical background. These results indicate that ST3Gal-I is acting as a tumor promoter in this model of breast cancer. This, we believe, is the first demonstration that over-expression of a glycosyltransferase involved in mucin-type O-linked glycosylation can promote tumorigenesis.


Owing to the imposed but undesired accelerations such as quadrature error and cross-axis perturbation, the micro-machined gyroscope would not be unconditionally retained at resonant mode. Once the preset resonance is not sustained, the performance of the micro-gyroscope is accordingly degraded. In this article, a direct model reference adaptive control loop which is integrated with a modified disturbance estimating observer (MDEO) is proposed to guarantee the resonant oscillations at drive mode and counterbalance the undesired disturbance mainly caused by quadrature error and cross-axis perturbation. The parameters of controller are on-line innovated by the dynamic error between the MDEO output and expected response. In addition, Lyapunov stability theory is employed to examine the stability of the closed-loop control system. Finally, the efficacy of numerical evaluation on the exerted time-varying angular rate, which is to be detected and measured by the gyroscope, is verified by intensive simulations.


Background— Enthusiasm for laparoscopic surgical approaches to prostate cancer treatment has grown, despite limited evidence of improved outcomes compared with open radical prostatectomy. We compared laparoscopic (with or without robotic assistance) versus open radical prostatectomy in terms of postoperative outcomes and subsequent cancer-directed therapy. Materials and Methods— Using a population-based cancer registry linked with Medicare claims, we identified men age 66 or older with localized prostate cancer who received a radical prostatectomy from 2003-2005. Outcome measures were general medical/surgical complications and mortality within 90 days following surgery; genitourinary/bowel complications within 365 days; receipt of radiation therapy, androgen deprivation therapy or both within 365 days; length of hospital stay. Results— Of the 5,923 men,18% received a laparoscopic radical prostatectomy. Adjusting for patient and tumor characteristics, there were no differences in rates of general medical/surgical complications (OR 0.93; 95% CI: 0.77-1.14) or genitourinary/bowel complications (OR 0.96; 95% CI: 0.76-1.22) or in the use of postoperative radiation, androgen deprivation or both (OR 0.80; 95% CI: 0.60-1.08). Laparoscopic prostatectomy was associated with a 35% shorter hospital stay (p<0.0001) and a lower rate of bladder neck/urethral obstruction (OR 0.74; 95% CI 0.58-0.94). In laparoscopic patients, surgeon volume was inversely associated with length of hospital stay and the odds of any genitourinary/bowel complication. Conclusions— Laparoscopic and open radical prostatectomy have similar rates of postoperative morbidity and use of additional treatment. Men considering prostate cancer surgery should understand the expected benefits and risks of each technique to facilitate decision-making and to set realistic expectations.