The impact of phase noise induced by amplified spontaneous emission and nonlinear Kerr effect is analyzed in investigating the performance of BPSK homodyne systems based OPLL in long-haul optical fiber communications. Under the Gaussian probability density function assumption the equivalent power spectral density of linear and nonlinear phase noise are determined, respectively. Using the power spectral density function the expressions of phase error variance taking into account linear phase noise, nonlinear phase noise and shot noise of corresponding photodiodes are determined. The impact of the number of amplifiers, bit rate and signal power on the phase error variance is analyzed. Using the minimum phase error variance and corresponding BER expression the receiver sensitivity and BER curves are given, respectively. Under the required BER, it is shown that there is a limitation on the maximum transmission distance of the BPSK homodyne system based OPLL. The theory expressions and numerical results obtained in this paper are helpful for designing OPLL and evaluating the impact of phase noise on the receivers based OPLL in long-haul optical fiber communications.


Objective To analyze the impact of the lymph node ratio (LNR, ratio of metastatic to examined nodes) on the prognosis of hypopharyngeal cancer patients. Methods SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results)-registered hypopharyngeal cancer patients with lymph node metastasis were evaluated using multivariate Cox regression analysis to identify the prognostic role of the LNR. The categorical LNR was compared with the continuous LNR and pN classifications to predict cause-specific survival (CSS) and overall survival (OS) rates of hypopharyngeal cancer patients. Results Multivariate analysis of 916 pN+ hypopharyngeal cancer cases identified race, primary site, radiation sequence, T classification, N classification, M classification, the number of regional lymph nodes examined, the continuous LNR (Hazard ratio 2.415, 95% CI 1.707–3.416, P<0.001) and age as prognostic variables that were associated with CSS in hypopharyngeal cancer. The categorical LNR showed a higher C-index and lower Akaike information criterion (AIC) value than the continuous LNR. When patients (n = 1152) were classified into four risk groups according to LNR, R0 (LNR = 0), R1 (LNR ≤0.05), R2 (LNR 0.05–0.30) and R3 (LNR >0.30), the Cox regression model for CSS and OS using the R classification had a higher C-index value and lower AIC value than the model using the pN classification. Significant improvements in both CSS and OS were found for R2 and R3 patients with postoperative radiotherapy. Conclusions LNR is a significant prognostic factor for the survival of hypopharyngeal cancer patients. Using the cutoff points 0.05/0.30, the R classification was more accurate than the pN classification in predicting survival and can be used to select high risk patients for postoperative treatment.


A numerical model has been developed to describe various fundamental kinetics of an inner-shell excited Xe Auger laser emitted at 109 nm. We have found that the laser output characteristics strongly depend on the electron deexcitation of the upper laser level. This model also predicts the increase of the laser output energy by controlling a soft X-ray flux spectrum emitted from a laser-produced plasma. >


The English-language historiography of the Eastern Front of World War II is notably sparse until the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the first couple of post-war decades, memoirs written by former generals in the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of the Third Reich, dominated the historical conversation. These memoirs created the myth of the clean and apolitical Wehrmacht, where military operations and genocidal policy were separate. According to this narrative, it was the Nazi leadership and the SS that committed large-scale atrocities on the Eastern Front while the Wehrmacht focused only on winning the war. Anglo-American historians largely accepted these accounts, mainly because of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. The experiences of German generals were invaluable insights into Soviet doctrine, and therefore the generals' tendency to downplay their own complicity in Nazi war crimes was largely accepted. Increasing access to German and later Soviet archives in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that this was far from the truth. Recent historical works have demonstrated that genocidal policy and war strategy were inextricably linked. The question of why the Wehrmacht accepted Nazi ideology is more difficult to answer. Historians have applied this question to both the High Command and to the everyday soldiers, with differing conclusions.


Abstract Landscape dynamics is the result of interactions between social systems and the environment, these systems evolving significantly over time. climatic conditions and biophysical phenomena are the main factors of landscape dynamics. Also, currently man is responsible for most changes affecting natural ecosystems. The objective of this work is to study the dynamics of a typical landscape of western Algeria in time and space, and to map the distribution of vegetation groups constitute the vegetation cover of this ecosystem. as well as using a method of monitoring the state of a fragile ecosystem by remote sensing to understand the processes of changes in this area. The steppe constitutes a large arid area, with little relief, covered with low and sparse vegetation. it lies between the annual isohyets of 100 to 400 mm, subjected to a very old human exploitation with an activity of extensive breeding of sheep, goats, and camels. Landsat satellite data were used to mapping vegetation groups in the Mecheria Steppe at a scale of 1: 300,000. Then, a comparison was made between the two maps obtained by a classification of Landsat-8 sensor Operational Land Imager (OLI) acquired on March 18, 2014, and Landsat-5 sensor Thematic Mapper (TM) acquired on April 25, 1987. The results obtained show the main changes affecting the natural distribution of steppe species, a strong change in land occupied by the Stipa tenacissima steppe with 65% of change, this steppe is replaced by Thymelaea microphylla, Salsola vermiculata, lygeum spartum and Peganum harmala steppe. an absence from the steppe Artemisia herba-alba that has also been replaced by the same previous steppes species. The groups with Quercus ilex and Juniperus phoenicea are characterized by a strong regression that was lost 60% of its global surface and transformed by steppe to stipa tenacissima and bare soil.


We study entanglement generation in a pair of qubits interacting with an initially correlated system. Using time-independent perturbation theory and the adiabatic theorem, we show conditions under which the qubits become entangled as the joint system evolves into the ground state of the interacting theory. We then apply these results to the case of qubits interacting with a scalar quantum field. We study three different variations of this setup; a quantum field subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions, a quantum field interacting with a classical potential, and a quantum field that starts in a thermal state.


Identification of the pregnant woman prone to develop pre-eclampsia later during her course of the pregnancy is a clinical challenge in clinical obstetrics. A new and non-invasive approach to detect abnormalities in pre-eclamptic women that differentiate from women with uneventful pregnancies is presented here. We applied non-linear and fractal features for classifying the dynamical complexity of the heart rate (HR) patterns corresponding to seven normal subjects and eight pre-eclamptic patients. Significant differences in the estimated largest Lyapunov exponent and in the correlation dimension between normotensive women and those with pre-eclampsia were found, suggesting they may have potential as new markers for pre-eclampsia. HR patterns in healthy and pre-eclamptic pregnancies correspond to complex non-linear dynamics, which could arise from the contribution of stochastic and chaotic components. HR of pre-eclamptic patients also revealed a more regular dynamic behavior than those belonging to normal pregnancies, corroborating the general observation that diseased states may be associated with regular HR patterns.


The Raduha section represents a continuation of the research of the Anisian Strelovec Formation in the Kamnik-Savinja Alps. The Strelovec Formation was deposited during the Anisian on a drowned section of the Serla Dolomite carbonate platform in a restricted probably outer ramp environment associated with an intraplatform basin. The base of the section is represented by dolostone breccia containing angular carbonate lithoclasts of shallow-marine origin. This is followed by alternations of laminated and homogenous hemipelagic limestones deposited in a restricted and anoxic environment. Hemipelagic sedimentation was occasionally interrupted by clay input and deposition of sediments from gravity mass flows. Slow filling of the basin lead to a gradual cessation of anoxic conditions and sedimentation of bedded shallow-marine limestones. After shallow water conditions were established, bioclastic dolostone of the Contrin Formation was deposited.


One of the challenges in Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks is the assignment of channels to links such that connectivity is ensured and interference is minimized. Two links that are within interference range of each other could be assigned the same channel, which causes co-channel interference and decreases network throughput. In this paper, we identify the above problem in the Topology-controlled Interference-aware Channel-assignment Algorithm (TICA) [1] and propose an enhanced version called e-TICA. The new algorithm solves the un-foreseen interference problem through two-way interference-range edge coloring. We show through simulations that e-TICA outperforms TICA in terms of fairness among flows without sacrificing the average network throughput.


Objective To describe the effect of time after velopharyngoplasty on outcome and to search for preoperative prognostic factors for residual hypernasality in patients with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. Design Retrospective chart review. Setting Tertiary hospital. Patients Patients with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and velopharyngeal dysfunction who underwent a primary (modified) Honig velopharyngoplasty between 1989 and 2009. Main Outcome Measures Clinically obtained perceptual and instrumental measurements of resonance, nasalance, and understandability before and after velopharyngoplasty. Results Data were available for 44 of 54 patients (81% follow-up), with a mean follow-up time of 7.0 years (range, 1.0 to 19.4 years). During follow-up, 24 (55%) patients attained normal resonance and 20 (45%) had residual hypernasality or underwent revision surgery. Mean postoperative nasalance and understandability scores were closer to the norm than mean preoperative scores were (2.0 versus 5.5 standard deviations for the normal passage, 1.3 versus 8.1 standard deviations for the nonnasal passage, and score 2.3 versus 4.1 understandability). Serial measurements revealed that hypernasality only resolved an average of 5 years after surgery, and three patients whose resonance initially normalized later relapsed to hypernasality. Gender, age at surgery, lateral pharyngeal wall adduction, velar elevation, presence of a palatal defect, previous intravelar veloplasty, nasalance, understandability, adenoidectomy, hearing loss, and IQ were not able to predict poor outcome following primary velopharyngoplasty (all p > .05). Conclusions In this chart review of patients with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and velopharyngeal dysfunction, residual hypernasality persisted in many patients after velopharyngoplasty. None of the preoperative factors that were studied had prognostic value for the outcome.


The effect of bioaerosol size was incorporated into predictive dose‐response models for the effects of inhaled aerosols of Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularemia) on rhesus monkeys and guinea pigs with bioaerosol diameters ranging between 1.0 and 24 μm. Aerosol‐size‐dependent models were formulated as modification of the exponential and β‐Poisson dose‐response models and model parameters were estimated using maximum likelihood methods and multiple data sets of quantal dose‐response data for which aerosol sizes of inhaled doses were known. Analysis of F. tularensis dose‐response data was best fit by an exponential dose‐response model with a power function including the particle diameter size substituting for the rate parameter k scaling the applied dose. There were differences in the pathogen's aerosol‐size‐dependence equation and models that better represent the observed dose‐response results than the estimate derived from applying the model developed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP, 1994) that relies on differential regional lung deposition for human particle exposure.


The decline in biodiversity is generating a global concern and Nigeria is not left out either. As a developing country it depends on biological resources for survival and every effort should be channeled towards its conservation. This paper therefore highlighted the need to conserve forest biodiversity in rorder to check its extinction. Community participation is viewed as the most viable option for conserving forest biodiversity in Nigeria. Some of the agroforestry systems, which are community and individual-oriented for achieving this are highlighted.
[JEXT Vol.2(1) 2001: 56-64]


A comprehensive one-dimensional fully coupled hydrodynamic treatment of the film profiles behind liquid slugs in horizontal and inclined gas - liquid slug flow is presented. Experiments were performed in horizontal air - water pipes 32 and 50 mm in diameter, the smaller also being inclined to an angle of 5 degrees. Time traces of film thickness were produced with the use of a wire-probe technique. The experimental results are compared against the theory presented here, as well as previously reported hydrodynamic models. It is concluded that the film profiles calculated by the use of one-dimensional models are highly sensitive to the choice of input variables, for example, the slug translational velocity; however good agreement is achievable provided that consistent hydrodynamic equations and correct input variables are used. It is hoped that the work presented here will influence future mechanistic models of slug flow.


Cold atoms in optical lattices allow for accurate studies of many body dynamics. Rapid time-dependent modifications of optical lattice potentials may result in significant excitations in atomic systems. The dynamics in such a case is frequently quite incompletely described by standard applications of tight-binding models (such as, e.g., Bose-Hubbard model or its extensions) that typically neglect the effect of the dynamics on the transformation between the real space and the tight-binding basis. We illustrate the importance of a proper quantum mechanical description using a multiband extended Bose-Hubbard model with time-dependent Wannier functions. We apply it to situations directly related to experiments.


Genetic mapping is a way to identify exactly which chromosome has which gene and exactly pinpointing where that gene lies on that particular chromosome. Mapping also acts as a method in determining which gene is most likely recombine based on the distance between two genes. Researchers begin a genetic map by collecting samples of blood., saliva, or tissue from family members that carry a prominent disease or trait and family members that don't. The most common sample used in gene mapping, especially in personal genomic tests is saliva. Scientists then isolate DNA from the samples and closely examine it, looking for unique patterns in the DNA of the family members who do carry the disease that the DNA of those who don't carry the disease don't have. These unique molecular patterns in the DNA are referred to as polymorphisms, or markers.


The trans-azobenzene molecule is thought to prefer a planar C2h geometry, in gas phase as well as in solution, according to the most recent computational studies. As a consequence, the weak n-->pi* absorption band is forbidden by symmetry at the equilibrium geometry, and its intensity depends on the effect of the vibrational motions on the electronic structure. In this computational study, we determine the contribution of the vibrational modes to the oscillator strength, taking into account the anharmonicity, the thermal distributions, and the solvent effects. The good agreement of our results with the measured absorption spectrum confirms the C2h equilibrium structure of trans-azobenzene, with a relatively easy torsion of the phenyl groups around the N--C bonds. We also address the question of the polarization of this transition, which is a preliminary step to interpret the time-resolved fluorescence anisotropy measurements [C.-W. Chang et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 126, 10109 (2004)], a very sensitive probe of solvent effects on the excited state dynamics.


EPH 513. International Health Systems. 3 Credit Hours. Students will study international health from a broad prospective of global health issues and international health systems. This course will include a critical analysis of health systems in both developing and developed countries through comparison with the Wolrd Health Organization's model and the health system in the United States. A variety of health factors will be examined including the role of public health and public health funding. Components: LEC. Grading: GRD. Typically Offered: Spring.


A total of 217 patients with superficial bladder cancer (SBC) category Ta-T1 were retrospectively analysed for tumour progression and prognostic factors; 46% of patients presented with recurrences, 13% with increasing grades of anaplasia and 12% with progression in tumour category. The mean annual index of recurrences was 0.7 +/- 0.1; 4% of patients died from tumour progression and the overall 5-year survival rate was 88% +/- 5.3. Factors that influenced progression significantly were peritumoural dysplasia, inflammatory infiltrate, residual tumour following transurethral resections, increasing grade of anaplasia and index of recurrences > 0.7. Multivariate statistical analysis revealed that only tumour category and increasing grade of anaplasia had significant prognostic value. Increasing grade of anaplasia predicts the likelihood of tumour progression with a 91% global predictive capacity. Thirty percent of patients with tumour progression did not have an increasing grade of anaplasia. Among these 87% were Ta, 50% were GI and the mean index of recurrences was 0.9. All were conservatively treated and 87% are alive. Among the patients with an increasing grade of anaplasia and tumour progression the mean index of recurrences was 1.7; 67% developed muscle infiltrating cancer and 7% metastatic spread without local progression; 64% of these patients died from cancer. An increasing grade of anaplasia affects prognosis. It defines patients with a high risk of tumour progression and tumour-related death, especially those with T1 bladder cancer.


Background: Dengue fever is caused by dengue virus (DENV), a member of the genus Flavivirus of the family Flaviviridae. The virus is transmitted by the infected female of the primary vector Aedes Aegyptus mosquitoes. Dengue fever is the world's most important re-emerging arboviral disease with over 50% of the world's population at risk of the disease. Since 2013, Ethiopia has reported more than 12,000 Dengue Fever cases. The purpose of this study is to determine risk factors of Dengue Fever outbreak and implement possible interventions in Dire Dawa City Administration Methods: we conducted 1:2 unmatched case control study from November 1 to 15, 2017. Cases were febrile patients with two or more of the following manifestations: headache, retro orbital pain, myalgia, arthralgia, rash, hemorrhagic manifestations and leucopenia. Cases were purposively collected from health facilities and controls were people without suspected Dengue Fever symptoms.  Multiple logistic regression was used to control confounders and to identify risk factors for Dengue Fever. Results: We included 180 participants (60 cases and 120 controls), among Dengue Fever cases 46 (76.6%) were males and 14(23.4%) were females. The entomological finding was (HI=21%, CI=20% and BI=20%) in the study area. Presences of tree holes (adjusted OR = 8.77: 95% CI: 2.07 – 37.07), Uncovered window (adjusted OR = 0.09: 95% CI: 0.01 – 0.58), not use replant (adjusted OR = 15.21: 95% CI: 3.59 – 54.9), Not wear long sleeved clothes (adjusted OR = 19.48: 95% CI: 5.70 -66.6), Not sprayed in the last6mths (adjusted OR = 6.86: 95% CI: 1.47 -32.02), presence of water container(adjusted OR = 15.2: 95% CI: 3.33 -68.8) were independent risk factors for dengue fever disease. From ten serum samples, six were IGM positive for DENVII. Conclusion: The outbreak is confirmed dengue fever outbreak and patients not using repellants, house without sprayed in the last six months, residents wear short sleeved cloths, open water containers and tree holes are significantly associated with enhancing the exposure to dengue fever disease infection. Keywords: [Dengue fever, Diredewa, outbreak, Aedes Eagypti] DOI : 10.7176/JMPB/63-04 Publication date: January 31 st 2020


In recent years evidence has accumulated to implicate a poor awareness of illness in schizophrenia. This study employed two clinical scales to assess both the psychopathology of 41 schizophrenic patients and the intensity of their awareness of illness. The results show the existence of a close relationship between these two clinical dimensions. Nevertheless, awareness of illness did not appear as a constant and isolated factor. In the authors' opinion, the findings derivated from the study support the idea that a poor awareness of illness could be a nuclear symptom of schizophrenia.


Abstract Species of Trichoderma are widely distributed around the world. In this study, two new species in Trichoderma, named as T.albidum and T.variegatum, were introduced and illustrated. These species were isolated from diseased tubers of Gastrodiaelata in China and identified based on morphological characteristics and multi-gene sequence analyses of three loci that is the internal transcribed spacer regions of the ribosomal DNA (ITS), the translation elongation factor 1-α encoding gene (tef1-α) and the gene encoding the second largest nuclear RNA polymerase subunit (rpb2). Distinctions between the new species and their close relatives were discussed. According to results of the phylogenetic analyses, T.albidum belonged to the Harzianum clade and T.variegatum are grouped with species of the Spirale clade. The expansion of two clades provided research foundations for the prevention and control of tuber diseases in G.elata.


It has been suggested that the newly discovered endogenous opiate peptides (called endorphins) might play a role in the symptoms of schizophrenia. The administration of narcotic antagonists provides both a test of the hypothesis and a potential treatment. In this article, we review the methods by which data have been gathered to test endorphin involvement in schizophrenia. Alternative strategies, which hold greater promise of producing conclusive positive or negative evidence, include exploitation of individual differences, use of psychophysiological measures, genetic strategies, and multivariate statistical techniques with larger sample sizes.


Conflicts among developers' inconsistent copies of a shared project arise in collaborative development and can slow progress and decrease quality. Identifying and resolving such conflicts early can help. Identifying situations which may lead to conflicts can prevent some conflicts altogether. By studying nine open-source systems totaling 3.4 million lines of code, we establish that conflicts are frequent, persistent, and appear not only as overlapping textual edits but also as subsequent build and test failures. Motivated by this finding, we develop a speculative analysis technique that uses previously unexploited information from version control operations to precisely diagnose important classes of conflicts. Then, we design and implement Crystal, a publicly available tool that helps developers identify, manage, and prevent conflicts. Crystal uses speculative analysis to make concrete advice unobtrusively available to developers.


With the growing adoption of deep learning models in different real-world domains, including computational biology, it is often necessary to understand which data features are essential for the model's decision. Despite extensive recent efforts to define different feature importance metrics for deep learning models, we identified that inherent stochasticity in the design and training of deep learning models makes commonly used feature importance scores unstable. This results in varied explanations or selections of different features across different runs of the model. We demonstrate how the signal strength of features and correlation among features directly contribute to this instability. To address this instability, we explore the ensembling of feature importance scores of models across different epochs and find that this simple approach can substantially address this issue. For example, we consider knockoff inference as they allow feature selection with statistical guarantees. We discover considerable variability in selected features in different epochs of deep learning training, and the best selection of features doesn't necessarily occur at the lowest validation loss, the conventional approach to determine the best model. As such, we present a framework to combine the feature importance of trained models across different hyperparameter settings and epochs, and instead of selecting features from one best model, we perform an ensemble of feature importance scores from numerous good models. Across the range of experiments in simulated and various real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves the power of feature selection.


If surveillance data is to be correctly interpreted, the degree of exhaustiveness and representativeness of the surveillance system must be known. The capture-recapture method, which can be used for this evaluation - provided that at least two data sources are available - was applied to the surveillance of meningococcal infections in France. To identify those cases common to both surveillance systems, cases of the disease occurring in 1989 and 1990 and appearing on detailed Mandatory Notification (MN) records (702 cases) or reported to the National Reference Centre (NRC) (727 cases) were compared. The total number of cases of meningococcal infection was estimated at 1,367, using the capture-recapture method. Exhaustiveness rates, which did not differ for the various bacterial strains, were 51% for MN and 53% for NRC, although large regional differences were found for both systems. More cases were notified to MN in the age group 5-24 (60%), than in other age groups (49%). Quarterly exhaustiveness rates were unrelated to incidence of the disease. A district by district analysis of the correlation between exhaustiveness rates for each system suggests that the two data sources were probably independent. Scrupulous identification of common cases and study of the independence of the two systems are indispensable prerequisites for using this method, which provides a good alternative to exhaustive studies.


Cyclooxygenase (COX) enzyme is responsible for the formation of important biological mediators including prostaglandins, prostacyclin and thromboxane to trigger many physiological and patho-physiological responses. COXs exist in two distinct isoforms, a constitutively expressed form (COX-1) and an inducible form (COX-2). COX-2 is involved in the body's response to inflammation and pain. Moreover, it has also been shown that COX-2 is overexpressed in many human cancers, and that COX-2 is involved in various neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. COX-2 inhibitors are among the most widely used therapeutics for the treatment of chronic and acute pain and inflammation. Non-invasive monitoring of COX-2 functional expression by means of nuclear molecular imaging techniques like positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) might provide unique opportunities to obtain data on COX-2 expression levels during disease manifestation and progression to study potential roles of COX-2 under various pathological conditions. The present review summarizes recent research efforts directed to the design and synthesis of radiotracers as molecular probes with special emphasis on COX-2 imaging.


The evolution of human speech was probably involved into development of brain structures responsible for cultural behaviour, specially tool-making. Moreover, it has been sugested that only Homo erectus species had the speech apparatus formed the way which allowed to articulate some sounds.


Event forecasting is a challenging, yet important task, as humans seek to constantly plan for the future. Existing automated forecasting studies rely mostly on structured data, such as time-series or event-based knowledge graphs, to help predict future events. In this work, we aim to formulate a task, construct a dataset, and provide benchmarks for developing methods for event forecasting with large volumes of unstructured text data. To simulate the forecasting scenario on temporal news documents, we formulate the problem as a restricted-domain, multiple-choice, question-answering (QA) task. Unlike existing QA tasks, our task limits accessible information, and thus a model has to make a forecasting judgement. To showcase the usefulness of this task formulation, we introduce ForecastQA, a question-answering dataset consisting of 10,392 event forecasting questions, which have been collected and verified via crowdsourcing efforts. We present our experiments on ForecastQA using BERTbased models and find that our best model achieves 61.0% accuracy on the dataset, which still lags behind human performance by about 19%. We hope ForecastQA will support future research efforts in bridging this gap.


The article deals with the organization's strategic marketing (SM) influence on the system of creating customer value (CCV) at the time of transition to the knowledge economy. At first the author recognizes limitations of the traditional approach to the SM and proposes the typology of market behavior strategies of the organization. Then the comparative analysis of the system of CCV differences between long-linked and network market models is used for the explanation of the new role of the SM. In conclusion the article suggests discussion questions and future investigations in this field.


The 2010 EPBD asks for an economic and social analysis in order to preserve social equity and to promote innovation and building productivity. This is possible with a life cycle energy cost (LCEC) analysis, such as with the SEC (Sustainable Energy Cost) model whose bottom up approach begins with a building typology including inhabitants. Then the analysis of some representative buildings includes the identification of a technico-economical optimum and energy retrofitting scenarios for each retrofitting programme and the extrapolation for the whole building stock. An extrapolation for the whole building stock allows to set up the strategy and to identify the needed means for reaching the objectives.
SEC is a decision aid tool for optimising sustainable energy retrofitting strategies for buildings at territorial and patrimonial scales inside a sustainable development approach towards the factor 4. Various versions of the SEC model are now available for housing and for tertiary buildings.


The kinetics of microperoxidase-11 (MP-11) in the oxidation reaction of guaiacol (AH) by hydrogen peroxide was studied, taking into account the inactivation of enzyme during reaction by its suicide substrate, H2O2. Concentrations of substrates were so selected that: 1) the reaction was first-order in relation to benign substrate, AH and 2) high ratio of suicide substrate to the benign substrate, [H2O2]>>[AH]. Validation and reliability of the obtained kinetic equations were evaluated in various nonlinear and linear forms. Fitting of experimental data into the obtained integrated equation showed a close match between the kinetic model and the experimental results. Indeed, a similar mechanism to horseradish peroxidase was found for the suicide-peroxide inactivation of MP-11. Kinetic parameters of inactivation including the intact activity of MP-11, αi, and the apparent inactivation rate constant, ki, were obtained as 0.282 ± 0.006 min− 1 and 0.497 ± 0.013 min− 1 at [H2O2] = 1.0 mM, 27°C, phosphate buffer 5.0 mM, pH = 7.0. Results showed that inactivation of microperoxidase as a peroxidase model enzyme can occur even at low concentrations of hydrogen peroxide (0.4 mM).


This study explores the effect of a teacher development programme, emphasising the development of critical thinking, in producing changes in teaching practice. The theoretical point of view adopted in this thesis considers the active role played by learners in the construction of knowledge and Freire's critical pedagogy. Freire's proposition is that education is a political act and his epistemology and consequent pedagogy is based on challenges: those challenges in which learners, as members of a society, are presently immersed and from which they must emerge to promote changes for a more democratic world. The research I have carried out is a case-study approach to an exploration of an in-service course, in Brazil, during which eleven secondary science and mathematics teachers discussed their views and had contact with the constructivist approach and the methodology of action research. During this period the teachers designed critical action-research projects, developing approaches to the construction of knowledge by pupils in their own classroom. Their projects were developed over a four to six week period. The teachers were observed and video taped in their classrooms in the course of three lessons. Finally, each teacher reported their results and their perceptions of the impact of these on their pupils and whether this kind of intervention is a viable way of introducing changes. Sixteen months later, they were encouraged towards self-critical reflection on the whole process in an extended interview. In this study, the answers are intended to contribute to an understanding of the changes needed in teacher development programmes, as well as to reveal some obstacles to the introduction of innovations in classroom practice. This research vindicates a Freirean perspective on teachers critical constructivist reflection as a mechanism for promoting democratic classroom change. The implications of these teachers' collaborative critical action research extends well beyond the immediate context into a broad educational arena.


The rapid development of the Internet and various applications such as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has raised substantial concerns about personal information security. Conventional methods (e.g., passwords) and classic biological features (e.g., fingerprints) are security deficient because of potential information leakage and hacking. Biometrics that express behavioral features suggest a robust approach to achieving information security because of the corresponding uniqueness and complexity. In this paper, we consider identifying human subjects based on their transient neurophysiological signature captured using multichannel upper-limb surface electromyography (sEMG). An explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approach is proposed to process the internal dynamics of temporal sEMG signals. We propose and prove the suitability of "transient sEMG" as a biomarker that can identify individuals. For this, we utilize the Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) analysis to explain the network's attention. The outcome not only decodes and makes the unique neurophysiological pattern (i.e., motor unit recruitment during the transient phase of contraction) associated with each individual visualizable but also generates an optimizing two-dimensional (2D) spectrotemporal mask used to significantly reduce the size of the model and the trainable parameters. The resulting mask selectively and systematically samples the spectrotemporal characteristics of the users' neurophysiological responses, discarding 40% of the input space while securing the accuracy of about 74% with much shallower neural network architecture. In the systematic comparative study, we find that our proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms. For broader impacts, we anticipate our design of a compact, practical, interpretable, and robust identification system that requires only a minimal number of gestures and sensors (only 7% of the entire data set) to be a starting point for small and portable identification hardware.


This paper introduces a new approach for generation of phonetic transcriptions for voice dialing applications. where on-line construction of user vocabularies is mandatory. The proposed method allows adaptive selection of new transcriptions requiring much less speech utterances for system training than other approaches. The new approach is compared to other classical approaches showing a clear improvement on performance and efficiency.


Multiple actors across different institutional levels play a role in water governance. The coordination of these actors is important for effective water governance. However, the joining together of multiple actors can have several implications, such as a redistribution of power across actors, a change in democratic control and citizen influence as well as shifting accountability structures. These implications can involve different barriers and bridges that might impede or foster coordination. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, we assess the following barriers and bridges for coordination: (1) reputational power in terms of who is perceived as important for coordination in the water sector; (2) democratic legitimacy in terms of actors' value of local control of water services; and (3) accountability in terms of the regional actors' capacity to steer in the water sector. This article focuses on three cases in a Swiss region that has experienced water provision challenges due to its highly fragmented water supply structures. We find that reputational power serves as a bridge in our three cases: when the actors responsible for water supply regard potential coordination partners as important, then we observe coordination. In contrast, we do not find conclusive evidence to support the assumption that a fear of losing local control is a barrier for coordination. Instead, our results indicate that accountability, in the form of vertical steering by the regional actors, serves as a bridge for coordination, and that this could help mitigate some of the potentially negative effects of democratic legitimacy perceptions: through convening local actors or providing positive incentives to municipalities to work together, regional actors can foster coordination.


The tetrapod ZnO nanostructures are synthesized on the Si (100) substrates using the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method at 1000℃. Each nanostructure has four arms which are about 3-10 μ m in length and 0.2-1.5 μ m in diameter. Further analyses on structure demonstrate that the tetrapod ZnO nanostructures have single crystalline wurtzite hexagonal structure preferentially oriented in c -axis. The photoluminescence (PL) measurements of the tetrapod ZnO nanostructures revealed a UV peak at 382 nm corresponding to the free exciton emission, and a green peak at 523 nm arising from deep level emission. For comparative analysis, cathodoluminescence (CL) spectra obtained from different regions of an individual tetrapod are investigated. Moreover, a possible growth mechanism of the tetrapod ZnO nanostructures is also discussed based on the experimental results.


PURPOSE
To assess whether hyaloid adhesion is more prevalent in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) than in control patients and to evaluate whether it is more prevalent in exudative AMD than in non-exudative AMD.

METHODS
This was a cross-sectional, controlled analytical study. Patients from the Ophthalmology Department of the Public Service Hospital of the State of São Paulo were included if they were diagnosed with AMD that was confirmed by fundus biomicroscopy and fluorescein angiography. Patients were divided into three groups: patients without a vitreoretinal disease (controls), patients with exudative AMD, and patients with non-exudative AMD. For the optimal study of the vitreoretinal interface, all patients were subjected to spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT; Cirrus HD-OCT, version 4000; Carl Zeiss Meditec) and ultrasonography (UltraScan®, Alcon). Results with p values of ≤0.05 were considered statistically significant.

RESULTS
We assessed 75 eyes of 23 patients with AMD (14 women and nine men) and 15 the control patients (11 women and four men). In total, 33 eyes had AMD that was consistent with the inclusion criteria, of which 11 had the non-exudative form (non-atrophic) and 22 had the exudative form (11 active and 11 disciform scars). Adherence was observed in eight eyes in the control group (26.67%), in seven eyes with exudative AMD (31.82%), and in five eyes with non-exudative AMD (45.45%).

CONCLUSION
Patients with exudative and non-exudative forms of AMD did not present with higher vitreoretinal adhesion than control patients as assessed by SD-OCT and ultrasound. Moreover, patients with exudative AMD (neovascular membrane and disciform scar) did not reveal a higher adherence than those with non-exudative AMD when evaluated by the same methods.


"Multiple sclerosis: what therapeutic perspectives? Three phenomena, which may be interrelated, are at the origin of the accumulation of disability in multiple sclerosis: remyelination defect, persistence of chronic microglial inflammation and neuro¬degeneration. Identifying the molecular and cellular mechanisms and being able to follow them in vivo by advanced imaging repre¬sent a major research challenge for the coming years. Several translational pharmacological avenues have already led to clinical trials targeting remyelination, neuroprotection and control of mi¬croglial activation; however, an optimized methodology with rele¬vant endpoints remains to be defined."


Metaverse is the next generation of Internet-based applications and social forms using various cutting-edge technologies, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D holographic avatars, video, cloud computing, etc. It is also defined as a virtual parallel life, i.e., a digital twin of real life, utilizing physical, augmented, and virtual reality to provide a metaphor of real life for its avatars in a shared virtual environment through the Internet. The metaverse is a virtual world that allows users to interact with each other or objects in real-time using their avatars by breaking down all real-world physical obstacles. It has been applied to various domains, such as video games, art, retail, education, healthcare, manufacturing, social, and many more. This paper investigates the Metaverse for Industry 4.0 and beyond applications in terms of opportunities and challenges. It analyses opportunities of the Metaverse for different aspects, from technical, economic, and educational to social. This study also discussed main challenges in Metaverse, such as data security and privacy, decentralization, interoperability, and resource management.


 Abstract — Banking bot is an artificial intelligent development for banking operations, which can understand people queries and responds accordingly. The main aim of this project is to develop a banking bot using artificial intelligent algorithms which should be able to analyze and understand user's queries and react accordingly. For any banking related queries we have to go to the bank or call to customer care. It takes lot of time and effort and bank people are also very busy to atte nd our queries. On the other hand we don't get complete information from the customer care executives. It will be more suitable if we can directly post our queries online or chat with the bank people and get the response within less time. To overcome this problem we proposed banking bot where people can directly chat with a bot and they can integrate all of their bank accounts into same bot account and access them easily. In this Banking bot, we have included the four basic bank operations namely adding and viewing the beneficiary, fund transfer, viewing the balance and mini statement. In addition, users can post any query regarding the banking operations .


Aim    The aim of this study was to determine the average minimum number of slow pathway ablation procedures required to reach a steady success rate among inexperienced operators.Material and Methods    We analyzed the consecutive AVNRT ablation procedures of three inexperienced operators for the rate of operational success and complications.Results    Operators performed a total of 156 AVNRT ablation procedures. There was no statistical significance between the three operators regarding the rate of success (p=0.69) and complications. There were significant differences between the operators in terms of procedure time, fluoroscopy time, and cumulative air kerma. The variability of procedure time and cumulative air kerma, both among three operators and within each operator, decreased significantly after the 25th case. Each operator was analyzed individually for the probability of success as related to the cumulative number of ablations. All trainee operators reached a success rate of 90 % at the 27th procedure.Conclusion    An average of 27 slow pathway ablation procedures should be performed by a beginner operator to achieve proficiency.


In 1972, 1069 high schools participated in a nationwide survey. Of those schools reporting information about their grading systems, 67.6% indicated that only letter grades were used, 16.3% indicated that only percentage grades were used, 5.4% used a system which combined letter and percentage grades, 2.6% used only numerical grades, 1.7% used only other types of grades (such as pass-fail), 3.6% used a combination of grade types other than letter and percentage grades, and 2.7% of the schools did not indicate the exact system used. However, on a regional basis, the popularity of particular grade types varied. Also, within regions, there was quite a bit of variance in grade type used from state to state. This survey points out the difficulty in comparing grades from different parts of the country.


This study was developed in a sugarcane area under contrasting management regimes defined by mechanical green harvesting (GH) and burning harvesting (BH) to test the hypotheses that the ratio of carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxygen (O2), known as the apparent respiratory quotient (ARQ), can be used to categorise soil biological activity. The study aimed to (i) examine the profile and relationship between the CO2 flux (FCO2) and the O2 flux (FO2) in a sugarcane area under mechanical harvesting with straw burning (BH) and mechanical harvesting with maintenance of straw (GH), considering soil moisture; (ii) and suggest the use of ARQ as an index for categorising the biological activity of soils. Our results showed consistently lower FCO2 for soil moisture in the range of 6.0–8.6% for both management regimes. The soil moisture increments triggered a decrease in FO2 and an increase in FCO2 and ARQ. The FCO2 and FO2 were positively correlated under BH. The BH yielded a cumulative CO2 emission of 53.68% higher than for GH. Overall, our findings revealed that soil moisture affected the O2 uptake and CO2 emission profile of soil, limiting O2 uptake and increasing CO2 releases for water-filled porosity below 70%. The GH management system, which incorporates sugarcane residues into the superficial layer of the soil, can help protect against soil erosion. The ARQ can be used as an index to categorise biological activity in soil, where ARQ values close to 1 can be considered a reflection of aerobic activity with balance between CO2 production and O2 consumption.


This paper presents one-dimensional numerical simulations of implosion of a reactor-size, indirect drive inertial confinement fusion target that consists of a capsule surrounded by a solid gold casing. The radius of the casing is twice the outer radius of the capsule so that the casing to capsule surface area ratio is 4. The capsule absorbs about 3 MJ input radiation energy while 2.4 MJ energy is lost into the casing wall. The implosion yields an output thermonuclear energy of 770 MJ so that the capsule gain, Gc, is about 257 while the target gain Gt, is of the order of 140. It has been found that the hydrodynamic stability of the target during the compression phase is substantially improved due to ablative effects. Moreover, a parameter study of the target gain versus input pulse parameters shows that the target gain may be insensitive to changes in the input parameters over a wide range.


The Shoo Fly Complex between Quartz Hill and Fall Creek Mountain contains Paleozoic folds and probable thrust faults that predate the intrusion of the Bowman Lake batholith. U-Pb analyses from six zircon fractions show that the youngest phase of the batholith is 409 ± 16 m.y. old. Previous suggestions that Paleozoic deformation in the Shoo Fly Complex is an early expression of the Late Devonian–Early Mississippian Antler orogeny are now viewed as less likely because the Antler orogeny postdated deformation of the Shoo Fly by at least 20 m.y.


Introduction Left ventricular (LV) function is an important indicator of morbidity and mortality after cardiac surgery. Therefore, interventions to optimise peri-operative LV function may improve surgical outcomes. Biventricular (BiV) pacing has been shown to improve haemodynamic function in heart failure patients and temporary BiV pacing is feasible after cardiac surgery. Therefore, temporary BiV pacing may be beneficial to heart failure patients after cardiac surgery. Aim The aim of this trial was to investigate the clinical utility of temporary BiV pacing delivered via epicardial wires attached to the right atrium (RA), right ventricle (RV) and left ventricle (LV) after cardiac surgery. Methods 55 subjects undergoing elective cardiac surgery (coronary artery bypass grafting and/or valve surgery) were recruited from two cardiac centres, over an 18-month period commencing January 2010. 38 subjects completed the protocol. Nine subjects were removed at the operators request including: "off pump" bypass surgery, patient referred for alternative mode of revascularisation or surgical "turn down". 19 subjects were randomly assigned to receive temporary (BiV) pacing using a dedicated triple chamber temporary pacing box with the capacity to programme the atrio-ventricular (AV) and inter-ventricular (VV) intervals. 19 received "standard pacing" after cardiac surgery. The duration of level 3 care was measured for each subject. In brief, this is the requirement for either invasive ventilation, multi-organ support or haemodynamic support with more than one inotrope/vasocontrictor or intra-aortic balloon pump. The trial was powered to compare the primary endpoint of transition from level 3 to level 2 care in the two groups. Secondary endpoints included acute haemodynamic performance in different pacing modes: immediately after the operation, 6 h, 18 h and 24 h after admission to cardiac intensive care. The pacing modes assessed included: atrial inhibited (AAI); ventricular inhibited (VVI-RV); dual chamber (DDD-RV); biventricular (DDD-BiV) and left ventricular pacing (DDD-LV). Base rate for pacing was set at 86/min and continued for the duration of level 3 care. The haemodynamic data were measured using a pulmonary arterial catheter using either thermodilution or continuous cardiac output measurements. Results The baseline demographics are illustrated in Abstract 002 table 1. The acute haemodynamic measurements at 18 h, Abstract 002 table 2.Abstract 002 Table 1 Demographic Biventricular pacing Standard pacing p Value Age/years (SD) 69.2 (9.3) 65.5 (12.7) 0.32 Male gender/% 79 79 1.0 NYHA score pre-operation (SD) 2.5 (0.7) 2.4 (0.9) 0.69 Euroscore/additive (SD) 8.3 (3.1) 7 (2.8) 0.18 QRS duration/ms (SD) 113.3 (29.3) 115.2 (24.4) 0.84 CABG only/% 63 58 0.63 Ejection fraction (pre-op)/% (SD) 26.1 (5.4) 28.0 (7.3) 0.34 Cardiopulmonary bypass time/min (SD) 127.1 (41.1) 144 (45.9) 0.25 Duration of Level 3 Care/hours (SD) 44.5 (36.8) 57.1 (73.0) 0.56Abstract 002 Table 2 Pacing mode Cardiac output l/min/(SD) p Value (paired student t test vs AAI) AAI 5.4 (1.1) VVI 4.3 (1.7) <0.001 DDD-RV 5.3 (1.1) 0.77 DDD-BIV 5.8 (1.2) 0.02 DDD-LV 5.4 (0.7) 0.73 Conclusions BiV pacing significantly improved haemodynamics in the early part of the post-operative period compared to standard AAI pacing at 18 h. There is a suggestion that the improvement in haemodynamic function may translate into clinical benefit. The duration of level 3 care was 57.1 h in the standard pacing group compared to 44.5 h in the BiV group. However, the 22% reduction in level 3 care in the BiV group compared to the standard pacing group did not reach statistical significance.


An exercise based cardiac rehabilitation program has proven to be effective for improving exercise tolerance, quality of life, coronary risk factors and many other aspects of life for ischemic heart disease patients. Cardiac rehabilitation will proceed to the second stage after recent dramatic progress in both diagnostic modalities and therapeutic strategies for patients with ischemic heart diseases. The purpose of cardiac rehabilitation may shift from an improvement in mortality to either the primary or secondary prevention of atherosclerotic diseases throughout life. This paper will review the present situation and discuss the future of cardiac rehabilitation in this country, while also elucidating some of the current problems.


Demand for biological drugs is putting pressure on health budgets. Christopher Kelly and Fraz Mir examine why they are so expensive and what can be done to increase access.


OBJECTIVES
The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) commissioned a survey in 1998 to describe sabbatical programs, academic rank, and tenure, and to shed light on factors affecting the continuum of faculty development, as a context for evaluating the potential importance of emergency medicine (EM) sabbatical programs.

METHODS
The chairs of 120 EM residency programs were surveyed.

RESULTS
The response rate was 90%. Of 108 responses, 44 were academic EM departments (AEMDs); ten were their affiliates. The setting was urban for 82%; 37% were publicly funded and 58% privately. AEMDs were more likely to have a tenure track and eligibility for a sabbatical program, but not more likely to use a sabbatical program. Among 2,042 ranked EM faculty, there were 121 professors and 346 associate professors. Mean sabbatical length was six months, provided at full pay requiring a mean of 5.7 years of employment. Among 39 programs reporting eligibility for an EM sabbatical, requirements included: tenure (43%), academic rank of associate professor (78%), an application with multiple approval levels (92%), and a formal report (75%). Thirteen EM programs used sabbaticals; only 40 faculty members altogether (9% of senior faculty) have taken sabbaticals. The mean value of sabbaticals (rated by users on a scale of 1 to 10) was 6.8. Reduced funding, lack of departmental status, difficulty retaining faculty, Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) regulations, graduate medical education (GME) cutbacks, and no release time were identified as challenges for emergency physicians (EPs) wishing to participate in sabbaticals. Strategies proposed to overcome these obstacles include quality customer service, streamlined operations, outside contracts, computerization, hiring individuals with PhDs, collaboration, political activity, and faculty development.

CONCLUSIONS
A sabbatical can be beneficial for individuals and their institutions, but presently EPs have not been able to maximize use of available opportunities. Some obstacles to successful participation of EM in sabbatical programs might be overcome with creative strategies and the active support of professional academic organizations.


From the point of view of evolution equations with soliton solutions, we present a general way for the study of the shockwave of one-dimensional Burgers equation under the action of perturbations. Apart from the damping case which needs a somewhat special treatment, we formulate the effects induced by other general perturbations unifyingly.


Author(s): Le, Rebekah Charney | Advisor(s): Cho, Ken | Abstract: Germ layer specification is one of the earliest developmental events in metazoan organisms, and relies upon the combinatorial interactions of signaling pathways and transcription factors (TFs), and the epigenetic landscape. A complete understanding of the gene regulatory program that contribute to the specification of the mesoderm and endoderm ('mesendoderm') in vivo is a crucial unanswered question. The Nodal signaling pathway, which is zygotically activated in the vegetal hemisphere of the early Xenopus embryo, is transcriptionally mediated by the TF Foxh1 and plays a key role in mesendoderm development. It has been suggested that Foxh1 plays dual regulatory roles in transcriptional mediation, and also functions independently of Nodal signaling. However, little is known about the contribution of Foxh1 to the activation of the mesendoderm program via TF binding to cis-regulatory modules (CRMs).Here, I have investigated the early functions of Xenopus Foxh1. I have utilized chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) coupled with deep sequencing to investigate the genome-wide in vivo binding patterns of Foxh1 over the time course of early mesendoderm development, and compared Foxh1 occupancy to the recruitment of RNA polymerase II, epigenetic marks, and zygotic factors. I have found that Foxh1 binding is dynamic and bookmarks the early embryonic genome before zygotic genome activation. Furthermore, this early binding recruits the co-repressor Groucho/Tle. I identified a population of Foxh1 persistent peaks that are occupied throughout early mesendoderm development. These persistent peaks are marked as active enhancers, and recruit Smad2/3 and the zygotic pioneer factor Foxa. Therefore, they are likely critical mesendoderm CRMs, likely pioneered by Foxh1.Further, through mRNA-seq coupled with loss-of-function, I've expanded the list of bona-fide direct Foxh1 and Nodal signaling targets throughout mesendoderm development. Foxh1 direct targets appear dynamically regulated across the time course, and I confirm that Foxh1 functions dually as an activator and repressor. Temporal analysis of the expression of Foxh1 repressed targets suggests that Foxh1 plays a role in the regulation of maternal genes.My findings indicate a complex role for maternal Foxh1 at the top of a temporal hierarchy in the regulation of the early mesendoderm gene regulatory program. I propose a model whereby Foxh1 interacts with transcriptional co-repressors and activators in a context-specific fashion to regulate enhancer activation through both time and space. As the roles of Nodal signaling and Foxh1 in mesoderm and endoderm development are conserved among vertebrates, the findings presented here will have broad impacts in the fields of developmental, evolutionary, and stem cell biology.


Trust is difficult to define. Instead of doing so, I propose that the best way to understand the concept is through a genealogical account. I show how a root notion of trust arises out of some basic features of what it is for humans to live socially, in which we rely on others to act cooperatively. I explore how this concept acquires resonances of hope and threat, and how we analogically apply this in related but different contexts. The genealogical account explains both why the notion has such value for us and why it is difficult to define.


Abstract We propose a version of the classical Artin approximation that allows us to perturb the variables of the approximated solution. Namely, it is possible to approximate a formal solution of a Nash equation by a Nash solution in a compatible way with a given Nash change of variables. This result is closely related to the so-called nested Artin approximation and becomes false in the analytic setting. We provide local and global versions of this approximation in real and complex geometry together with an application to the Right-Left equivalence of Nash maps.


We present a statistical study of the filamentary structures of the cosmic web in the large hydro-dynamical simulations Illustris-TNG, Illustris, and Magneticum at redshiftz = 0. We focus on the radial distribution of the galaxy density around filaments detected using the Discrete Persistent Structure Extractor (DisPerSE). We show that the average profile of filaments presents an excess of galaxy density (> 5σ) up to radial distances of 27 Mpc from the core. The relation between galaxy density and the length of filaments is further investigated showing that short (Lf <  9 Mpc) and long (Lf ≥ 20 Mpc) filaments are two statistically different populations. Short filaments are puffier, denser, and more connected to massive objects, whereas long filaments are thinner, less dense, and more connected to less massive structures. These two populations trace different environments and may correspond to bridges of matter between over-dense structures (short filaments), and to cosmic filaments shaping the skeleton of the cosmic web (long filaments). Through Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) explorations, we find that the density profiles of both short and long filaments can be described by the same empirical models (generalised Navarro, Frenk and White,β-model, a single and a double power law) with different and distinct sets of parameters.


Recently, there has been growing concern about ethical and integrity issues in the accounting and auditing profession in public and private sectors of the economy, based on questionable acts committed by professionals whose certification decision makers rely upon. This study adopted the stewardship theory as a theoretical background to develop an empirical framework for examining the influence of ethical professional standards on financial reporting practices in less developed countries. The result of this study however, shows that there is a low degree of adoption. The most prevalent of these factors are greediness and self-interest of the accountant while the least factor is lack of will to sanction violations of clearly defined ethical codes of conduct. The paper recommends that strong enforcement mechanism including the establishment of peer review procedures and institutional monitoring to regulate the activities of professional accountants and ensure strict enforcement of codes of professional practice.


Gliomas are brain tumors that are treated with surgical resection. Prognosis is influenced by the extent of resection and postoperative neurological status. As consequence, given the extreme interindividual and interhemispheric variability of subcortical white matter (WM) surgical planning requires to be patient's tailored. According to the "connectionist model," there is a huge variability among both cortical areas and subcortical WM in all human beings, and it is known that brain is able to reorganize itself and to adapt to WM lesions. Brain magnetic resonance imaging diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography allows visualization of WM bundles. Nowadays DTI tractography is widely available in the clinical setting for presurgical planning. Arcuate fasciculus (AF) is a long WM bundle that connects the Broca's and Wernicke's regions with a complex anatomical architecture and important role in language functions. Thus, its preservation is important for the postoperative outcome, and DTI tractography is usually performed for planning surgery within the language-dominant hemisphere. High variability among individuals and an asymmetrical pattern has been reported for this WM bundle. However, the functional relevance of AF in the contralateral non-dominant hemisphere in case of tumoral or surgical lesion of the language-dominant AF is unclear. This review focuses on AF anatomy with special attention to its asymmetry in both normal and pathological conditions and how it may be explored with preoperative tools for planning surgery on gliomas in language areas. Based on the findings available in literature, we finally speculate about the potential role of preoperative evaluation of the WM contralateral to the surgical site.


Tom Johnson, Corey Flintoff, Tony Kahn, and Ted Koppel are some of the better known contributors of the 16 essays, some of which were presented at a spring 1998 lecture series at the University of Rhode Island. The anthology is designed as a bridge between working journalists and academics in the fi


A directional borehole radar system using an array antenna connected to passive optical electric field sensors was developed and evaluated by laboratory and field experiments. This system uses a single dipole antenna for a transmitter and a four-dipole element circular array for a receiver. The received signals are transmitted through optical fibers from optical electric field sensors. The receiver array measures the phase differences between four dipole antennas and estimates the azimuth direction of the incoming reflection wave. The accuracy of the phase measurement was first evaluated in a laboratory test and then tested in a field experiment. To compensate for the sensitivity differences among the sensors, we propose an in situ calibration technique. The dominant operating frequency of the system is 70 MHz. Subsequently, we used borehole radar for subsurface measurements in a vertical borehole in granite. Estimation of the azimuth orientations of subsurface fractures was successfully demonstrated.


inspiration; squeezing the bag empties the contents through the expiratory valve. Previous Laerdal equipment (as used in the 'Triservice Anaesthetic Apparatus')' has been virtually impossible to misconnect because of the use of cagemount connexions up to the valve assembly and 22-mm connexions after the valve assembly, although the latter had a I in 20 taper as distinct from the 1 in 40 taper specified in BS 3849.' It would appear that it is the addition of the '0 ring which allows what should be incompatible components to engage firmly. We have taken the precaution of suitably labelling the valve.


In this paper we present Markov random field (MRF) models for face occlusion detection and recovery. For occlusion detection, we use a pixel-based pair-wise MRF model (which is similar to the Ising model) where the binary mask on each pixel is inferred to decide the presence of occlusion. Then we construct a patch-based non-parametric pair-wise MRF model for occlusion recovery, which is learned using occlusion-free face images in the training set. Proba-bilistic inference using í µí»¼-expansion leads to fast occlusion recovery, compared to the existing method. Numerical experiments confirm that our method speeds up the existing method by several orders of magnitude, while the quality of recovery is as good as the existing one.


The goal of this work is to design a minimum cost resilient overlay network, where a data network is on top of a transport network. Two major challenges are addressed. On one hand, a single failure in the transport network causes multiple simultaneous failures; on the other, the multicommodity flow must respect integrality. An integer programming formulation is presented to design an overlay, meeting the previous constraints. We prove that the problem belongs to the class NP-Hard. Then, a decomposition approach is introduced, where the problem is solved in two steps by means of relaxations of the original formulation. Experiments carried out with real-life instances, coming from the Uruguayan telecommunication operator, show that the approach is competitive with respect to previous metaheuristics, to know, Tabu-Search (TS) and Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS). A modest percentage of cost-reduction is achieved in some instances, which means millionaire savings in practice.


STUDY OBJECTIVES
Recent evidence suggests that certain anesthetic agents decrease electrical coupling, whereas the stimulant modafinil appears to increase electrical coupling. We investigated the potential role of electrical coupling in 2 reticular activating system sites, the subcoeruleus nucleus and in the pedunculopontine nucleus, which has been implicated in the modulation of arousal via ascending cholinergic activation of intralaminar thalamus and descending activation of the subcoeruleus nucleus to generate some of the signs of rapid eye movement sleep.

DESIGN
We used 6- to 30-day-old rat pups to obtain brainstem slices to perform whole-cell patch-clamp recordings.

MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS
Recordings from single cells revealed the presence of spikelets, manifestations of action potentials in coupled cells, and of dye coupling of neurons in the pedunculopontine nucleus. Recordings in pairs of pedunculopontine nucleus and subcoeruleus nucleus neurons revealed that some of these were electrically coupled with coupling coefficients of approximately 2%. After blockade of fast synaptic transmission, the cholinergic agonist carbachol was found to induce rhythmic activity in pedunculopontine nucleus and subcoeruleus nucleus neurons, an effect eliminated by the gap junction blockers carbenoxolone or mefloquine. The stimulant modafinil was found to decrease resistance in neurons in the pedunculopontine nucleus and subcoeruleus nucleus after fast synaptic blockade, indicating that the effect may be due to increased coupling.

CONCLUSIONS
The finding of electrical coupling in specific reticular activating system cell groups supports the concept that this underlying process behind specific neurotransmitter interactions modulates ensemble activity across cell populations to promote changes in sleep-wake state.


The aim of this work was to study the effect of milking fraction and mammary gland health status on the electrical conductivity (EC) of milk from Manchega ewes, considering also the lactation number. To this end, we also studied the relationship of EC with milk macrocomposition, and the relation existing between EC and somatic cell count (SCC). Finally, the use of EC thresholds as a mastitis detection method (sensitivity, specificity, positive (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV)) was assessed in each of the three fractions: first streams (F1), machine milk (F2) and stripping milk (F3). Milking fraction, mammary gland health status and lactation number had a significant effect on EC and SCC. In the case of EC, the milking fraction caused a more pronounced effect than health status of the glands or number of lactation (F = 19.95, 15.88 and 6.55, respectively; P < 0.5). In SCC, the gland health status caused the most pronounced effect followed by milking fraction and lactation number (F = 112.02, 6.89, and 5.28, respectively; P < 0.05). Changes in the milk composition, especially fat and lactose contents, explained the EC variation to a great extent. For the same EC threshold, specificity and sensitivity varied slightly depending on the milking fraction. NPV above 80% was obtained in the three milking fractions and at all EC thresholds tested, but PPV was only higher than 20% as of the threshold of 4.5, 4.4, and 4.2 mS/cm in F1, F2 and F3, respectively. From the results obtained, we concluded that the algorithm design for mastitis detection in sheep should include those factors affecting the composition and which therefore cause variations in EC, such as milking fraction, individual differences, lactation stage or lactation number.


We present Synkhronos, an extension to Theano for multi-GPU computations leveraging data parallelism. Our framework provides automated execution and synchronization across devices, allowing users to continue to write serial programs without risk of race conditions. The NVIDIA Collective Communication Library is used for high-bandwidth inter-GPU communication. Further enhancements to the Theano function interface include input slicing (with aggregation) and input indexing, which perform common data-parallel computation patterns efficiently. One example use case is synchronous SGD, which has recently been shown to scale well for a growing set of deep learning problems. When training ResNet-50, we achieve a near-linear speedup of 7.5x on an NVIDIA DGX-1 using 8 GPUs, relative to Theano-only code running a single GPU in isolation. Yet Synkhronos remains general to any data-parallel computation programmable in Theano. By implementing parallelism at the level of individual Theano functions, our framework uniquely addresses a niche between manual multi-device programming and prescribed multi-GPU training routines.


Aqueous nickel-zinc (Ni-Zn) batteries with excellent safety and environmental benignity are promising candidates for sustainable energy storage. However, the inferior conductivity and inevitable phase transition of trditional Ni-based cathodes limit the redox kinetics and lead to restricted electrode specific capacity and device energy density. Here, a Nix Co1-x (OH)2 electrode doped with Pd, Ag, and Au atoms is constructed for catalyzing the redox kinetics on the conductive nanoporous phosphide. Density functional theory calculations and experimental results reveal that the introduction of the Ag atomic dopants can effectively modulate the electron structure and optimize the OH- adsorption energy, thereby accelerating the catalyzed redox kinetics of Nix Co1-x (OH)2 by the facilitated charge transfer at the active sites around metal dopants. Consequently, the assembled Ni-Zn battery delivers an ultrahigh power density of 7.85 W cm-3 and energy density of 49.53 mW h cm-3 , with a long-term cycling stability. The cooperation of atomic catalysis and redox kinetics will inspire more exploration of efficient energy materials and devices.


In recent years, several biclustering methods have been suggested to identify local patterns in gene expression data. Most of these algorithms represent greedy strategies that are heuristic in nature: an approximate solutions is found within reasonable time bounds. The quality of biclustering, though, is often considered more important than the computation time required to generate it. Therefore, this paper addresses the question whether additional run-time resources can be exploited in order to improve the outcome of the aforementioned greedy algorithms. To this end, we propose a general framework that embed such biclustering methods as local search procedures in an evolutionary algorithm. We demonstrate on one prominent example that this approach achieves significant improvements in the quality of the biclusters when compared to the application of the greedy strategy alone.


Intelligent systems designed using machine learning algorithms require a large number of labeled data. Background knowledge provides complementary, real-world factual information that can augment the limited labeled data to train a machine learning algorithm. The term Knowledge Graph (KG) is in vogue as for many practical applications, it is convenient and useful to organize this background knowledge in the form of a graph. Recent academic research and implemented industrial intelligent systems have shown promising performance for machine learning algorithms that combine training data with a knowledge graph. In this article, we discuss the use of relevant KGs to enhance the input data for two applications that use machine learning—recommendation and community detection. The KG improves both accuracy and explainability.


Until now thefindingsof rhyncholites from the Jurassic marine sediments of Crimea were very scarce. In both the Oxfordian and Kimmeridgian of Crimea, rhyncholites were never found despite the fact that in Western and Central Europe they are very numerous in Middle and Upper Jurassic marine sediments. We have described five new findings of rhyncholites from Crimea whose age ranges from the Upper Callovian to the Kimmeridgian. They belong to the five different species (including three new ones) of the genus Gonatocheilus Till, 1907, which was never previously described in Crimea. We also discuss the taxonomy of rhyncholites and argue that the genus Palaeotheutis Till, 1906 is unavailable according to article 33 of International code of zoological nomenclature and the genus Gonatocheilus Till, 1907 should be used instead of it.


The development of cell-type-specific delivery systems is highly desirable for gene-therapeutic applications. Current virus-based vector systems show broad cell specificity, which results in the need to restrict the natural tropism of these viral systems. Here we demonstrate that tumour-cell-specific virus-like particles can be functionally assembled in vitro from recombinant viral coat protein expressed in Escherichia coli. The insertion of a negatively charged peptide in the HI loop of polyoma VP1 interferes with the binding of VP1 to the natural recognition site on mammalian cells and also serves as an adapter for the coupling of antibody fragments that contain complementary charged fusion peptides. A recombinant antibody fragment of the tumour-specific anti-(Lewis Y) antibody B3 could be coupled to the mutant VP1 by engineered polyionic peptides and an additional disulphide bond. With this system an entirely recombinant cell-specific delivery system assembled in vitro could be generated that transfers genes preferentially to cells presenting the tumour-specific antigen on the cell surface.


Medical colleges in India have been urged to increase the quality and quantity of teaching on population dynamics and family welfare planning since 1957. The recommendations of the Deans and Principals Conference of August 1967 and the directive of the Medical Council of India issued in August of 1968 outline a syllabus and present many suggestions about the ways in which a number of departments should contribute to the teaching of these subjects during the years of the undergraduate medical curriculum. The Preventive and Social Medicine (P and SM) department is involved in teaching these subjects. In order to determine to what extent the recommendations and directives were being implemented a questionnaire was sent to the head of the department of P and SM in each of the 93 medical schools in India to ask what that department had done in the 1968-1969 academic year. It was determined that the departments of P and SM were devoting an average of 10.8 holrs of lecture or class discussion to teaching family welfare planning and population dynamics. Many departments said they needed more books in the field. About 40% were conducting research on 1 or more related topics. Questions on the subjects were included in examinations by 90% of the departments in their college exams and 75% said that questions on these topics appeared on the written University examinations. 73% of the departments used A-V aids in their teaching of family welfare planning and the same proportion utilized seminars. 1 department required students to insert an IUCD. However in the internship 17 departments required women to do so and 7 required men to do 1 or more insertions. 2 departments made it a requirement during the final year to assist tubectomy operations and 9 departments did so during the internship. 1 department required final year students to do a vasectomy. During internship 16 required men to do 1 or more vasectomies and 7 required women to. Shortage of staff was the most frequent difficulty mentioned for implementing the suggested syllabus. The most frequent suggestion for improving teaching was the development of more adequate teaching family welfare planning clinics. It was concluded that compared with departments of P and SM in other countries the ones in India were devoting a significant and perhaps an adequate amount of time to the teaching of family welfare planning and population dynamics.


Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV; genus Tospovirus, family Bunyaviridae) genetic diversity was evaluated by sequencing parts of the three RNA genome segments of 224 isolates, mostly from pepper and tomato crops in southern Europe. Eighty-three per cent of the isolates showed consistent clustering into three clades, corresponding to their geographical origin, Spain, France or the USA, for the three RNA segments. In contrast, the remaining 17% of isolates did not belong to the same clade for the three RNA segments and were shown to be reassortants. Among them, eight different reassortment patterns were observed. Further phylogenetic analyses provided insights into the dynamic processes of the worldwide resurgence of TSWV that, since the 1980s, has followed the worldwide dispersal of the western flower thrips (Frankliniella occidentalis) tospovirus vector. For two clades composed essentially of Old World (OW) isolates, tree topology suggested a local re-emergence of indigenous TSWV populations following F. occidentalis introductions, while it could not be excluded that the ancestors of two other OW clades were introduced from North America contemporarily with F. occidentalis. Finally, estimation of the selection intensity that has affected the evolution of the NSs and nucleocapsid proteins encoded by RNA S of TSWV suggests that the former could be involved in the breakdown of resistance conferred by the Tsw gene in pepper.


Clavibacter michiganensis subsp. michiganensis, the causal agent of bacterial canker and wilt of tomato, is considered to be one of the most important bacterial pathogens worldwide. In the year 2000 there was an increase in the number of infected greenhouses and in the severity of the disease in Israel. As part of the effort to cope with the disease, a comprehensive survey was conducted. Scouts recorded disease severity monthly in 681 production units. At the end of the season the scouts met with the growers and together recorded relevant details about the crop and cultural practices employed. The results suggested an absence of anisotropy pattern in the study region. Global Moran's I analysis showed that disease severity had significant spatial autocorrelation. The strongest spatial autocorrelation occurred within a 1,500 m neighborhood, which is comparable to the distance between production units maintained by one grower (Farm). Next, we tested three groups of variables including or excluding the Farm as a variable. When the Farm was included the explained variation increased in all the studied models. Overall, results of this study demonstrate that the most influential factor on bacterial canker severity was the Farm. This variable probably encompasses variation in experience, differences in agricultural practices between growers, and the quality of implementation of management practices.


In this paper, we propose two modifications to reduce the complexity of the subcarrier-multiplexing (SCM) based digital backpropagation (DBP) for high symbol rate SCM systems. The first one is to reduce the number of interfering subcarriers (RS-SCM-DBP) when evaluating the cross-subcarrier nonlinearity (CSN). The second one is to replace the original frequency domain CSN filters with the infinite impulse response (IIR) filters (IIR-RS-SCM-DBP) in the CSN compensation. The performance of the proposed schemes are numerically evaluated in three-channel dual-polarization (DP) 16QAM wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmissions. The aggregate symbol rate for each channel is 120 GBaud and the transmission distance is 1600 km. For the SCM system with 16 subcarriers, the IIR-RS-SCM-DBP with only 4 interfering subcarriers and 2 steps can achieve a 0.3 dB Q-factor improvement in the WDM transmission. Compared to the original SCM-DBP, the proposed IIR-RS-SCM-DBP reduces the complexity by 48% at a performance loss of only 0.07 dB.


Antonio Maceo Grajales (1845–1896) is one of the most celebrated heroes of Cuban independence. Though he died before he could see the dawn of a sovereign, if U.S.-occupied, Cuba, Maceo would become an important node of nationalist commemoration. Throughout this process, Maceo's blackness represented both a source of his prestige—the struggle against African slavery had been intimately tied to independence—and a barometer of lingering racial inequalities. Posthumous depictions thus tended to downplay racial tensions in a unifying vision of nation. Yet Maceo's martyrdom in the Spanish-Cuban-American War also reverberated in more uncanny registers. Before and after his death, apocryphal sons emerged periodically from the shadows, opening battles over Maceo's legacy. In their movement across borders, these real and apocryphal children gave voice to silences around race and sovereignty as they converged on the body of their lionized "father," while also opening up narrative spaces wherein the status quo could be reimagined.


Wellbore stability problems make up huge over-costs worldwide. In recent years declining resource volumes and favorable oil prices are encouraging operators to drill deeper, and more complex well trajectories drilling for hydrocarbons have turned into a much more challenging task. Furthermore, the complexity and variations of those wells have added the weight to planning and problem anticipation at both drilling and production stages. This study describes the geomechanical wellbore stability analysis of different formations drilled in Adıyaman region, Turkey. The analysis assumes validity of linear elastic theory for porous media and requires drilling reports, well logs, laboratory tests and core analysis. It was observed that with the assessment of geomechanical wellbore stability analysis mud weight window, which includes minimum mud weight and maximum mud weight, can be determined for the studied formations.


A two-layer multiple-time-scale turbulence model is presented. The near-wall model is based on the classical Kolmogorov-Prandtl turbulence hypothesis and the semi-empirical logarithmic law of the wall. In the two-layer model presented, the computational domain of the conservation of mass equation and the mean momentum equation penetrated up to the wall, where no slip boundary condition has been prescribed; and the near wall boundary of the turbulence equations has been located at the fully turbulent region, yet very close to the wall, where the standard wall function method has been applied. Thus, the conservation of mass constraint can be satisfied more rigorously in the two-layer model than in the standard wall function method. In most of the two-layer turbulence models, the number of grid points to be used inside the near-wall layer posed the issue of computational efficiency. The present finite element computational results showed that the grid independent solutions were obtained with as small as two grid points, i.e., one quadratic element, inside the near wall layer. Comparison of the computational results obtained by using the two-layer model and those obtained by using the wall function method is also presented.


Deferred payment contracts involving use of al-bai' bithaman ajil, al-murabahah and bai' al-inah have been extensively used in design of Malaysian in Islamic financial products. It is widely argued that Islamic banking is the replication of conventional system by imitating the conventional banking products excepting that they are presented in syariah compliance mechanism. The deferred payment sales are one of the example. The issues of form and substance in Islamic banking products and instruments has been frequently debated. Therefore, this paper endeavour to analyse the nature and content of Islamic financial products with particular reference to the debt-based transactions of Al-Bai' Bithaman Ajil, Al-Murabahah and bai' al-inah as practiced in the Malaysian Islamic banking. By analysing legal documents, reports, fiqh and Islamic jurisprudence's views, this paper suggests that the debt-based transactions have been proven to be a reliable and efficient way of conducting commercial transactions which are in conformity with the syariah. Nevertheless, the practice of these modes of transactions ought to be enhanced and perfected to avoid intentional or unintentional deception in its implementation.


The kinetic theory of granular flow is a successful model for gas-solid flows. However, inelastic collisions between particles, among other mechanisms, cause agglomeration of particles, which may be the reason why undue sensitivity of the model to any slight inelasticity in inter-particle collisions has been seen previously. In contrast to a dry (i.e. no interstitial gas) granular system, this tendency to agglomerate in a gas driven two-phase system may be countered by the carrier gas turbulence. In this paper, a heuristic model for particle gas turbulence interaction is introduced within the scope of a generalized kinetic theory model which incorporates the carrier fluid effect on particulate stresses. The numerical results for the flow of granular particles in vertical pipes, which considers slightly inelastic inter-particle collisions, are in reasonably good agreement with published experimental data. Even in this relatively simple model, the results indicate that the interactions between the particle phase and gas turbulence need to be appropriately addressed in any kinetic theory based model for gas solid flows.


This study examined the mechanism for the anti-cancer effects of histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor trichostatin A (TsA) in H-ras-transformed human breast epithelial (MCF10A-ras) cells. The effects of TsA on anti-cancer effects of MCF10A-ras cells were determined by measuring the level of cell cycle regulator expression and apoptotic cell death using Western blotting and flow cytometry analysis, respectively. TsA induced morphological changes, apoptotic cell death and modulation of the cell cycle regulatory proteins in the MCF10A-ras cells. TsA increased the levels of acetylated histone H3 and H4 in MCF10A-ras cells. In addition, TsA markedly down-regulated the expression of cyclin D1 and CDK4, up-regulated the expression of p21WAF1 and p53 and induced cell cycle arrest at the G1 phase in MCF10A-ras cells. The levels of hyperphosphorylation of the Rb protein were lower in MCF10A-ras cells after the TsA treatment. Furthermore, the up-regulation of p53 promoted Bax expression, which led to the activation of pro-caspase-3 and eventually to apoptosis in MCF10A-ras cells. TsA significantly increased the levels of ERK1/2 phosphorylation in MCF10A-ras cells. Overall, the TsA-activated ERK pathway plays an important role in cell cycle arrest and apoptosis through the ERK-dependent induction of p21 in Ras-related human cancer cells.


The human teratocarcinoma cell line NTera 2 (NT2) can be induced to differentiate into post‐mitotic neurons possessing well‐defined axonal and dendritic morphology. Highly enriched neurons (NT2‐N cells) can be prepared in large numbers, thus combining many of the advantages of both primary and continuous cell culture systems. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to express foreign genes in NT2‐N cells. We examined whether vaccinia virus (VV) can express heterologous proteins in NT2‐N cells and characterized the response of NT2‐N cells to VV infection. NT2‐N cells were infected with VV vectors expressing the envelope glycoprotein (gp160) from the human immunodeficiency type 1 virus (HIV‐1). These vectors were chosen because VV‐directed synthesis and post‐translational processing of gp160 have been well characterized in many cell types. Approximately 85% of the neurons expressed gp160 which underwent native post‐translational cleavage. The rate of gp160 synthesis was maximal at 5–48 hours postinfection, but was detectable for as long as 4 days. Surprisingly, NT2‐N cells showed no VV‐induced alterations in morphology, downregulation of host protein synthesis, or cytotoxicity, as measured by lactate dehydrogenase release. These results indicate that VV can serve as an efficient vector for introducing foreign genes in NT2‐N cells without the cytotoxic effects often associated with VV infection. These properties, in conjunction with the advantages provided by NT2‐N cells, provide new options for analyzing the cellular and molecular functions of human neurons. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


In anticipation of the breeding season male songbirds of the temperate zones undergo gonadal recrudescence in early spring that lead to elevated circulating testosterone (T) levels, positively correlated with an increase in aggressive and song behaviour. However, besides seasonal changes there are also marked fluctuations of T levels and song production within the breeding season. In many species, T levels and singing activity drop after pairing or after the first clutch is laid. Domesticated canaries (Serinus canaria) are multiple-brooded with an extended breeding season, and males continue to sing after egg-laying. So far, studies have mainly focused on the seasonality of T levels and song behaviour whereas the pattern of change throughout the breeding period is unknown. Here, we focused on the first and on the last brood of the breeding season. We measured plasma T levels in males at the different breeding stages and assessed song characteristics of males at both times. T levels fluctuated significantly throughout brood 1, being highest during the nest building stage compared with egg-laying and feeding of young. No such changes occurred during the last brood. Temporal song characteristics changed between brood 1 and brood 3 with song length being the main contributor to explain these changes. Our data suggest that T mainly plays a role in mate attraction and initial nesting site selection but that elevated levels are not necessary for subsequent breeding attempts. Furthermore, temporal song characteristics are maintained independently of T levels, suggesting a threshold effect. Our results demonstrate behavioural and physiological plasticity of domesticated canaries during the breeding season and are consistent with previous findings in wild songbirds.


Modern computer systems are increasing in complexity, spread, and scale in order to meet the diverse and sophisticated needs of the users. In the development of these systems, we inevitably use legacy codes and off-the shelf software as black box software in order to shorten the development time and lower the development cost. These systems are often connected via a network to utilize services provided by other systems, whereas services and network performance may change while in operation. We often need to change the specification and implementation of a system due to the changes of environments and users' requirements. In addition, threats caused by viruses and unauthorized accesses have to be properly removed. Therefore, modern computer systems inherently involve incompleteness of specifications and implementations and uncertainty of environments and requirements.