Using a numerical computational method, quasiprobability distributions of new kinds of even and odd nonlinear coherent states (EONLCS) are investigated. The results show that the distributions of the new even nonlinear coherent states (NLCS) are distinct from those of the new odd NLCS and imply that the new EONLCS always exhibit some different nonclassical effects. Finally, with the aid of newly introduced intermediate coordinate-momentum representation in quantum optics, the tomograms of the new EONLCS are calculated. This is a new way of obtaining the tomogram function.


Do discretionary spending cuts and tax increases hurt social well-being? To answer this question, we combine subjective well-being data covering over half a million of individuals across 13 European countries, with macroeconomic data on fiscal consolidations. We find that fiscal consolidations reduce individual well-being in the short run, especially when they are based on spending cuts. In addition, we show that accompanying monetary and exchange rate policies
(disinflation, depreciations and the liberalization of capital flows) mitigate the well-being cost of fiscal consolidations. Finally, we investigate the well-being consequences of the two well-knowns expansionary fiscal consolidations episodes taking place in the 80s (in Denmark and Ireland). We find that even expansionary fiscal consolidations can have well-being costs. Our results may therefore shed some light on why some governments may choose to consolidate through taxes even at the cost of economic growth. Indeed, if spending cuts are to generate a large well-being loss, they can trigger an opposition and protest against a fiscal consolidation plan and hence making it politically costly.


The known Movements of the Earthcrust. OBSERVED MOVEMENTS. Holland is sinking with respect to sealevel and the ocean is encroaching on its shores. Dikes are built to protect the land, and from generation to generation they have been raised higher and higher until now fields and meadows lie five or ten yards below the level of the ocean. The sinking has progressed variably, yet without complete interruption, since the beginning of local history, and the measurements of a thousand years indicate that it ranges from 0.09 to 0.75 of a meter per century, the more exact measurements since 1732 giving a mean of 0.26 of a meter for each hundred years. No horizontal movement of the terrestrial crust has been detected in connection with this vertical movement. In 1819 a severe earthquake devastated the delta of the Five Rivers in western India, and throughout an immense area the quaking land . . .


Objective: The Polycomb-group (PcG) protein, Ezh2 methylates histone protein and is required for epigenetic gene silencing in the adult heart, but the mechanism of interaction at specific genes has not been explored. This study investigates the role of Ezh2 and ncRNA-mediated (non-coding RNA) PcG mechanisms in ventricular remodeling of the pathological heart. Methods: We explored the expression as well as the interaction of ncRNAs in a mouse model to attenuate pressure overload caused by transverse aortic constriction (TAC) using the prototypical histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor, Trichostatin A (TSA). In addition, loss of function studies was used to validate our findings. We examined the interaction of Ezh2 and ncRNA bound at gene promoters using chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays. Results: ChIP experiments in TAC hearts show release of Ezh2 at promoters of hypertrophy marker genes, Anp and Bnp, whereas increased binding of Ezh2 at the bidirectional promoter (bdP) of myosin heavy chain (MHC) genes. Administration of TSA attenuated Ezh2 binding to bdP and restored antisense (AS) β-MHC and α-MHC gene expression. Long ncRNAs (lncRNAs) are specifically regulated and RNA-ChIP experiments in TAC hearts show increased chromatin binding for the primary microRNA-208b (Pri-miR-208b) transcript. RNAi-mediated loss-of-function screens for lncRNAs (AS β-MHC, Pri-miR-208b) and Ezh2 identified Pri-miR-208b as a functional lncRNA that interact with Ezh2 at gene promoters of TAC hearts. We additionally showed the AS β-MHC transcript is critical in regulating cardiac MHC shift to pathological stress. All experiments independently performed (n≥6). Conclusion: These results describe a previously uncharacterized interaction of a primary microRNA targeting specific chromatin modifications and regulation of genes implicated in pathological remodeling of ventricular hypertrophy. We propose lncRNAs function as transcriptional regulators of the hypertrophied heart and a better understanding of the complexity of epigenetic changes regulating gene expression in cardiac hypertrophy.


The main objective of this research is to define and develop a comparison method of regular expressions, and apply it to amyloid proteins. In general, the biological problem that we study is concerning the search for similarities between non-homologous protein families, using regular expressions, with the goal of discover and identify specific regions conserved in the protein sequence, and in this way determine that proteins have a common origin. From the computer point of view, the problem consists of comparison of protein motifs expressed using regular expressions. A motif is a small region in a previously characterized protein, with a functional or structural significance in the protein sequence. In this work we proposed a hybrid method of motifs comparison based on the Genetic Programming, to generate the populations derived from every regular expression under comparison, and the Backpropagation Artificial Neural Network, for the comparison between them. The method of motifs comparison is tested using the database AMYPdb, and it allows discover possible similarities between amyloid families.


A detailed crystallographic investigation of N-methylacetamide complexes of Li, Na, K, Mg and Ca has been made in view of its importance in the coordination chemistry and biochemistry of alkali and alkaline earth metals. The metal ions bind to the amide oxygen causing an increase in the carbonyl distance and a proportionate decrease in the central C—N bond distance. The decrease in the central C—N distance is accompanied by an increase in the distance of the adjacent C—C bond and a decrease in the adjacent C—N bond distance. The metal ion generally deviates from the direction of the lone pair of the carbonyl oxygen and also from the plane of the peptide, the out-of-plane deviation varying with the ionic potential of the cation. The metal-oxygen distance in alkali and alkaline earth metal complexes of a given coordination number also varies with the ionic potential of the cation, as does the strength of binding of the cations to the amide. The amide molecules are essentially planar in these complexes, as expected from the increased bond order of the central C—N bond. The NH bonds of the amide are generally hydrogen bonded to anions. The structures of the amide complexes are compared with those of other oxygen donor complexes of alkali and alkaline earth metals. The structural study described here also provides a basis for the interpretation of results from spectroscopic and theoretical investigations of the interaction of alkali and alkaline earth metal cations with amides.


Background Pregnancy is the only natural condition in which Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) remits spontaneously in approximately half of the pregnancies [1]. Many physicians try to taper or stop medication when a women conceives in order to prevent drug related side effects for mother and child. However, 50% of the patients still has active disease in the third trimester of pregnancy1. Factors that can identify patients in whom medication can be safely tapered during pregnancy are therefore needed. Objectives To determine clinical factors associated with lower disease activity in the third trimester during pregnancy in women with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and thereby to identify patients in whom medication can be safely tapered during pregnancy. Methods This study is embedded in the Pregnancy induced Amelioration of Rheumatoid Arthritis (PARA)-study, a nationwide prospective cohort study. There was data available on 190 pregnancies from first trimester unto delivery. Disease activity was measured using the Disease Activity Score in 28 joints (DAS28). A multivariate linear regression analysis was performed on the DAS28 in the third trimester. Independent covariates in these models: the DAS28 in the first trimester, prednisone and sulfasalazine use in the first trimester, parity, methotrexate use in past, autoantibody status (either rheumatoid factor or ACPA positive), presence of erosions and duration of RA. Results In the multivariate linear regression model, see table 1., a higher DAS28 in the first trimester, the use of prednisone and the presence of autoantibodies were statistically significantly associated with a higher DAS28 in the third trimester (p-values <0.001, 0.032 and 0.014 respectively). Conclusions The DAS28 in the first trimester, the autoantibody status and the use of prednisone were associated with RA disease activity in the third trimester. Female RA patients who have a lower DAS28 in the first trimester are likely to have lower disease activity in the third trimester, especially if they are autoantibody negative and if they do not use prednisone. In these patients, it may be considered to safely taper their medication. References de Man YA, Dolhain RJ, van de Geijn FE, Willemsen SP, Hazes JM. Disease activity of rheumatoid arthritis during pregnancy: results from a nationwide prospective study. Arthritis Rheum 2008;59:1241–8. Funding Dr. R.J.E.M. Dolhain received unrestricted research grants from the Dutch Arthritis Association (Reumafonds), a non-commercial fund raising organization, and from UCB Pharma BV. Conflicts of interest None. Disclosure of Interest None declared


Political science accounts of the debt crisis in Europe have highlighted the changes observable in national and European policymaking. These changes have vastly showed an emphasis on economic imperatives and more precisely on the crisis' impact on public expenditure. Defence policy offers a particularly interesting perspective on the politics of state adaptation to spending cuts. While being at the core of state sovereignty, this policy has not been immune to attempts at decreasing public expenditure. Yet, we argue that contrary to many accounts so far, the crisis' impact cannot be solely analysed through the mere budget numbers. Based on neo-institutionalism and public policy analysis, this paper demonstrates that actors have lessened the crisis' impact through their use of defence acquisition instruments. They have shown three strategies to decrease the impact of budgetary cuts: compensation, delaying and re-categorizing acquisition procedures.


Following up on previous analysis of characteristics of articles in the Journal of Human Factors, the current paper is intended to present a current analysis of articles published from 1997-2004. The paper examines all published articles across the following characteristics: year of publication, period of publication, general affiliation of authors, specific affiliation of 1st author, country of origin of authors, technical group, and collaboration comparisons. This information illustrates the important contributors to research in the field, how much research is done within each technical group, and the characteristics of collaborative work produced. By making comparisons within the eight year period and comparing total data to previous trend analysis (Zavod & Hitt, 2000) this paper will illustrate the direction of human factors research. The information reported can provide a reference for professionals, students, and prospective researchers in identifying where research is taking place and burgeoning topics of interest.


Diamond (100) substrates have been fluorinated with both atomic and molecular fluorine under ultrahigh vacuum conditions using molecular beams. X-ray photoelectron spectra of the resulting samples indicate that atomic fluorine, F, reacts with an initial accommodation coefficient of 0.25 (+ or - 0.1) at 298 K; a saturation coverage of about three quarters of a monolayer is obtained. The carbon fluoride adlayer is thermally stable to 700 K, but slowly desorbs at temperatures above this. In contrast, molecular fluorine, F2, reacts quite slowly; a saturation coverage of less than one fifth of a monolayer after several hundred monolayers exposure to F2 at temperatures from 300 K to 700 K is achieved. In addition, diamond substrates saturated with fluorine atoms showed no loss of fluorine after exposure to beams of H2 and O2 at temperatures between 300 K and 700 K.


Population patterns of infection are determined largely by susceptibility to infection. Infection and vaccination induce an immune response that, typically, reduces susceptibility to subsequent infections. With a general epidemic model, we detect a 'reinfection threshold', above which reinfection is the principal type of transmission and, consequently, infection levels are much higher and vaccination fails. The model is further developed to address human tuberculosis (TB) and the impact of vaccination. The bacille Calmette–Guérin (BCG) is the only vaccine in current use against TB, and there is no consensus about its usefulness. Estimates of protection range from 0 to 80%, and this variability is aggravated by an association between low vaccine efficacy and high prevalence of the disease. We propose an explanation based on three postulates: (i) the potential for transmission varies between populations, owing to differences in socio–economic and environmental factors; (ii) exposure to mycobacteria induces an immune response that is partially protective against reinfection; and (iii) this protection is not significantly improved by BCG vaccination. These postulates combine to reproduce the observed trends, and this is attributed to a reinfection threshold intrinsic to the transmission dynamics. Finally, we demonstrate how reinfection thresholds can be manipulated by vaccination programmes, suggesting that they have a potentially powerful role in global control.


The effect of temperature-dependent viscosity on the heat transfer over a continuous moving surface is studied. The boundary layer equations are transformed to ordinary differential equations containing a Prandtl number and a viscosity/temperature parameter. The velocity profiles, temperature profiles, the skin friction coefficient and the rate of heat transfer are computed and discussed in detail for various values of the viscosity/temperature parameter and Prandtl number.


An extensive ab initio study of the ground- and excited-state potential energy surfaces of pyracylene is presented in this work. CASSCF calculations show that there is an accessible sloped S0/S1 conical intersection, which leads to ultrafast internal conversion and explains the observed photostability. RASSCF calculations (using a well-defined subset of the CASSCF configurations) are shown to be able to reproduce CASSCF results satisfactorily and will therefore be useful for larger systems where CASSCF is currently too expensive. MRCI and MRPT2 energy corrections are computed to assess the ionic character of the excited states. Finally, MMVB calculations are also benchmarked against CASSCF, to assess the reliability of this parametrized method for excited states of large conjugated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.


We develop a model of assignment games with pairwise-identity-dependent externalities. A concept of conjectural equilibrium is proposed, and the universal conjecture is shown to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the general existence of equilibrium. We then apply the solution concept to a matching-based Cournot model in which the unit production cost of a firm depends on both the technology of the firm and the human capital of the manager hired, and show that if technology and human capital are complementary, the positive assortative matching (PAM) is a stable matching under rational expectations, or even if firm technology and human capital are substitutable yet the substitutive effect is dominated by the marginal effects of technology and human capital, the PAM is still a rational stable matching.However, if the substitutive effect on the unit production cost is sufficiently strong or the market demand is sufficiently high, the negative assortative matching is a rational stable matching.


Radiation therapy is commonly used for prostate cancer treatment; however, normal tissues can be damaged from the reactive oxygen species (ROS) produced by radiation. In separate reports, we and others have shown that manganese porphyrins (MnPs), ROS scavengers, protect normal cells from radiation-induced damage but inhibit prostate cancer cell growth. However, there have been no studies demonstrating that MnPs protect normal tissues, while inhibiting tumor growth in the same model. LNCaP or PC3 cells were orthotopically implanted into athymic mice and treated with radiation (2 Gy, for 5 consecutive days) in the presence or absence of MnPs. With radiation, MnPs enhanced overall life expectancy and significantly decreased the average tumor volume, as compared to the radiated alone group. MnPs enhanced lipid oxidation in tumor cells but reduced oxidative damage to normal prostate tissue adjacent to the prostate tumor in combination with radiation. Mechanistically, MnPs behave as pro-oxidants or antioxidants depending on the level of oxidative stress inside the treated cell. We found that MnPs act as pro-oxidants in prostate cancer cells, while in normal cells and tissues the MnPs act as antioxidants. For the first time, in the same in vivo model, this study reveals that MnPs enhance the tumoricidal effect of radiation and reduce oxidative damage to normal prostate tissue adjacent to the prostate tumor in the presence of radiation. This study suggests that MnPs are effective radio-protectors for radiation-mediated prostate cancer treatment.


In this brief, a shuffled schedule (SS) of the min-max decoding algorithm is proposed for nonbinary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. To increase the throughput and reduce the memory requirement, a modified SS (MSS) with much simpler check node processing is also proposed, based on a new shuffled merge algorithm. Numerical simulations for three LDPC codes with different lengths and rates over GF(32) show: 1) both SS and MSS converge faster and have slightly better error performance than the flooding schedule, and 2) the degradation of the MSS in error performance as well as convergence rate is negligible. Finally, an efficient decoder architecture based on the MSS is proposed for quasi-cyclic LDPC codes. The proposed decoder architecture further enhances the decoding throughput with improved check and variable node processing units. The implementation results of an (837, 726) LDPC decoder over GF(32) demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperforms those in previous works.


Authoring in the context of Interactive Storytelling (IS) is inherently difficult, and there is a need for authoring tools that both enable and assist authors in the creation of new content. In this paper, we discuss our approach for creating an AI-assisted authoring tool via the concept of mixed-initiative systems. We introduce our tool, Mimisbrunnur, which uses this concept to assist authors in the creation of story content. We explain how the tool functions and introduce its fundamental components, including Natural Language Processing, a Suggestion Generator, and three authoring modules.


These first three volumes of a promising series are strong evidence that the policy sciences of development are beginning to emerge as an identifiable problem-oriented frame of reference, intersecting every specialized field of knowledge. The goals of development are gaining clarity; the historical perspective deepens; the interdependence of conditioning factors is better understood; the probable lines of future growth are more fully projected; and the invention and evaluation of policies designed to maximize or at least to achieve minimum results are forging ahead. The editors of each volume have woven theory and data into coherent patterns, and many essays—such as the chapters by Marx, Riggs, Lerner, and Pool—are sharply centered on the hitherto underdeveloped topics with which they come to grips. The Almond-Coleman model of political development lurks meaningfully in the wings.


Abstract Maintenance of biodiversity in managed forested landscapes requires detailed knowledge of the ecological requirements of specialist organisms linked to key microhabitats. Here we examine the relationship of 37 lichenized and unlichenized epiphytic calicioid species to stand age and substratum type in seven pairs of mid-seral (70–165 y) and old (220–470 y) forest stands in humid east-central British Columbia. Based on our inventory of eight host tree species, total calicioid diversity and mean species richness are highest in old stands, with 12 species not detected and nine additional species much less frequent in mid-seral stands. Thuja plicata supports by far the highest level of total calicioid diversity, with 31 of 37 species; mostly associated with very old trees. Owing primarily to the late recruitment of lignicolous calicioids, stand-level calicioid richness continues to increase into the 5th century after stand initiation. Our study thus has two major findings pertinent to the maintenance of forest biodiversity in managed forests: first, stand-level calicioid richness increases slightly for at least three centuries past the acquisition of old-growth status; second, remnant trees and snags carried forward into mid-seral, regenerating stands enhance overall calicioid species richness. These results suggest that very old old-growth (= 'antique') forests might play an important role in the long-term maintenance of calicioid species richness, further suggesting that the standard practice of lumping all forests above a set age into a single old-growth category is not ecologically tenable for all taxonomic groups.


BACKGROUND
Hip osteoarthritis often coexists with adult spinal deformity, an abnormality in which sagittal spinopelvic malalignment is present. Debate exists whether to perform spinal realignment correction or total hip arthroplasty first. Hip extension and pelvic tilt are important compensatory mechanisms in the setting of sagittal spinopelvic malalignment and change after spinal realignment. We performed this study to evaluate the effect that the spinal realignment surgical procedure has on acetabular anteversion.

METHODS
This study is a retrospective review of a multicenter, prospective, consecutive database of patients with adult spinal deformity who underwent surgical spinal realignment. Only patients who already had undergone a total hip arthroplasty prior to the spinal realignment procedure were retained for analysis. Patients were excluded if they had insufficient imaging or large-head, metal-on-metal bearings or they had undergone revision total hip arthroplasty in the study period. Acetabular anteversion was calculated via the ellipse method on a standing, posterior-anterior, 90-cm radiograph with a well-centered pelvis. Anteversion was measured preoperatively and at six weeks or three months after the spinal realignment procedure. Spinopelvic parameters measured included pelvic incidence, pelvic tilt, sacral slope, lumbar lordosis, T1 pelvic angle, sagittal vertical axis, T1-spinopelvic inclination, and thoracic kyphosis.

RESULTS
Forty-one hips (thirty-three patients) were identified. Acetabular anteversion significantly reduced (p < 0.001) after spinal correction by mean change of -4.96° (range, -22.32° to +2.36°). The change in anteversion correlated with the changes in sagittal pelvic orientation (0.828 for the pelvic tilt, -0.757 for the sacral slope, and -0.691 for the lumbar lordosis) and global spinopelvic alignment (0.579 for the sagittal vertical axis and 0.585 for the T1 pelvic angle). Regression analysis revealed that anteversion decreased by 1° for each of the following spinopelvic parameter changes (p < 0.001): 1.105° for spinopelvic tilt, 1.032° for sacral slope, and 3.163° for lumbar lordosis.

CONCLUSIONS
Patients with spinopelvic malalignment had a high prevalence of excessively anteverted acetabular components. Sagittal spinal correction following total hip arthroplasty resulted in reduced acetabular anteversion, which may have implications for stability. Changes in anteversion are most closely related to changes in pelvic tilt in an almost one-to-one ratio.


In this paper I list a number of 33 sequences of primes obtained by the method of concatenation; some of these sequences are presented and analyzed in more detail in my previous papers, gathered together in five books of collected papers: "Two hundred conjectures and one hundred and fifty open problems on Fermat pseudoprimes", "Two hundred and thirteen conjectures on primes", "Conjectures on primes and Fermat pseudoprimes, many based on Smarandache function", "Sequences of integers, conjectures and new arithmetical tools", "Formulas and polynomials which generate primes and Fermat pseudoprimes".


The Erlangen communication hub allows medical subsystems to exchange data by two completely different methods. Since 1995 a communication data base, which is implemented using the relational data base system ADABAS D, contains data from the most important hospital systems. This data can be accessed by other medical systems. Thus, the communication data base allows subsystems which do not have a standardised interface to implement proprietary system interconnections via access based on SQL. The capabilities of this interconnection are dependent on both the implementation and the data which is made available by the communication data base. This contains mainly basic patient data and the results of tests performed by various laboratory systems. In addition to this proprietary communication system we have since the end of 1996 a communication server which can also handle standardised message formats such as HL7, EDIFACT, DICOM3. Future subsystems which possess standard interfaces will be connected via this server. The connection of the patient management system IS-H and the central laboratory system to the database has been proceeding since the beginning of 1997.


AACR Annual Meeting-- Apr 12-16, 2008; San Diego, CA

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The development of cancer is considered a complex genetic disease controlled by multiple genetic and environmental factors. Genes modifying cancer risk are interesting targets for cancer prevention, early diagnosis and therapy. The inbred BD-rat strains constitute a model system for analysis of the genetic basis of cancer susceptibility or resistance, as they exhibit differential sensitivity to the development of peripheral nerve sheath tumors (MPNST) induced by the carcinogen ethylnitrosourea (EtNU) on postnatal day one. Rats of the BDIX- and BDIV strains, respectively, are either highly susceptible or entirely resistant to the development of EtNU-induced MPNST arising predominantly in the trigeminal nerves. Seven chromosomal loci associated with susceptibility/resistance to MPNST induction were found to control tumor incidence and/or survival time in an allele and sex-specific manner. Among them the Mss4 locus on chromosome 6 mediates almost complete tumor resistance in female animals through homozygous BDIV alleles. Due to the fact that they exert nearly monogenic effects on tumor resistance the genomic fragment of interest could be narrowed down to 20 Mb by analyzing haplotypes of affected females. To verify the allele and sex-specific effects of this locus on MPNST development rats of the congenic strain BDIX (Mss4a). BDIV were treated with EtNU. This strain carries a 36 Mb BDIV fragment (RNO-6:98-134 Mb) encompassing the telomeric two thirds of Mss4 and additional adjacent sequence. While tumor incidence and latency time largely remain the same in BDIX (Mss4a). BDIV males compared to BDIX male controls we see a strongly reduced incidence and increased latency time in females. However the BDIV fragment introgressed does not mediate complete resistance in females as previously suggested by the association studies. In parallel, comparative expression profiling of female trigeminal nerves from BDIV, BDIX and the congenic BDIX (Mss4a ).BDIV rats resulted in 235 differentially expressed genes between the parental strains while the expression of 66 genes varies strongly due to the introduction of the Mss4a fragment to the BDIX genetic background (threshold 2-fold change). Seven of the 66 differentially expressed transcripts were located in the fragment inserted representing interesting candidate genes while 59 seemed to be regulated by trans-acting genome wide mechanisms. No differential expression of genes located in the Mss4a fragment was displayed between BDIX( Mss4a ).BDIV females 100 days after EtNU-treatment and age matched controls.


This meta-review is an examination of the therapeutic properties of colostrum. The scientific development and subsequent implementation of new therapeutics continues to influence researchers all over the globe today. Therefore, this review examines previously published research on colostrum and its effects on physiological functioning to determine its role as a potential therapeutic. Additionally, this review explores options for the potential therapeutic use of colostrum in immunology, IBS, diabetes and thyroid. There is abundant research supporting the immunomodulatory properties of colostrum, while also implicating its roles in alleviating IBS which is presented in this review. There is also evidence for the presence of IGF-1, T4, T3 and iodine in colostrum. Therefore, this review will also examine the current research examining the detection and respective physiological relevance for diabetes and thyroid functioning.


[1] Scientists have speculated that lightning on Saturn's moon Titan could produce changes in atmospheric chemistry and could even spark production of organic compounds that could be precursors to the evolution of life, but so far there has been no conclusive detection of lightning on Titan. Extending previous searches for lightning on Titan, Fischer and Gurnett analyzed radio data up to the 72nd close flyby of Titan by the Cassini spacecraft. They found no evidence of lightning and concluded that if lightning occurs at all on Titan, it is probably a very rare event. (Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2011GL047316, 2011)


Primary ovarian insufficiency (POI) implies the cessation of menstruation for several months in women before the age of 40 years and is a major cause of infertility. The study of the contribution of genetic factors to POI has been fueled by the use of whole exome sequencing (WES). Here, to uncover novel causative pathogenic variants and risk alleles, WES has been performed in 12 patients with familial POI (eight unrelated index cases and two pairs of sisters) and six women with early menopause and family history of POI (four index cases and one pair of sisters). Likely causative variants in NR5A1 and MCM9 genes were identified as well as a variant in INHA that requires further investigation. Moreover, we have identified more than one candidate variant in 3 out of 15 familial cases. Taken together, our results highlight the genetic heterogeneity of POI and early menopause and support the hypothesis of an oligogenic inheritance of such conditions, in addition to monogenic inheritance.


Background: Several studies have shown the association of polymorphisms in the MTNR1B gene with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). However, there is no evidence about the impacts of its genetic polymorphism on the therapeutic efficacy of nateglinide. Therefore, this prospective case-control study was designed to investigate the effect of MTNR1B rs10830963 gene polymorphism on the therapeutic efficacy of nateglinide in treating T2DM.
Methods: We genotyped 200 healthy subjects using the method of the high resolution of melting curve (HRM). A total of 60 newly diagnosed T2DM patients were enrolled and given nateglinide (360 mg/d) for 8 weeks orally who had the same genotypes CYP2C9*1 and SLCO1B1 521TT respectively. The outcome was measured by collecting the venous blood samples before and at the 8th week of the treatment. Also, anthropometric measurements, glucose, and lipid metabolism were determined before and after the nateglinide treatment.
Result: It was found that the risk G allelic frequency of MTNR1B rs10830963 was higher in T2DM patients when compared with the healthy subjects (P<0.05). A total of 60 newly diagnosed patients with type 2 diabetes after completing the eight weeks treatment came for the follow-up visit and showed a less reduction in fasting plasma glucose (FPG) levels with a less increase in homeostasis model assessment for β cell HOMA-β in the carriers of G allele at rs10830963, when compared with the wild-type CC (P <0.05).
Conclusion: Thus, it was found that the MTNR1B rs10830963 polymorphism was associated with the therapeutic efficacy of nateglinide in T2DM patients. Also, the CC homozygotes had a better effect than G allele carriers.


Professors Bhagwati and Panagariya in their recent book have sought to debunk what they perceive to be common mistaken perceptions about the Indian economic performance. They argue reforms centering on a more open economy of early 1990s is the primary spurt behind economic growth. India's economic growth has been equitable in reducing income poverty at a dramatic rate; Indians enjoy human development indicators that far surpass what would be expected given the average income level. However, much of the arguments made in the book fail to properly engage with the debates that centre on evaluating Indian economic progress since the 1990s and the decade before. The arguments often use selective data and ignore the nuanced debate that would place India's performance in much less favorable terms requiring solutions that would affect many Indians who have not seen significant improvements in their lives over the past two or three decades.


ABSTRACT The essay elucidates the intellectual and historiographical phenomenon of migration to the forefront by engaging with the perceptions of the Teutonic/Germanic migrations of the fifth century among a few major Victorian ethnologists and historians. It focuses particularly on the unique view of the ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham (1812–88). While many Victorian historians of the mid-nineteenth century became obsessed with the Teutonic narrative, arguing that these ancient tribes had conquered vast territories of Europe, Latham, in contrast, downplayed the impact of Teutonism, discounted the vastness of the Teutonic expansion in Europe and expressed his doubts regarding the alleged Teutonic purity of the English nation. Instead, Latham advocated for an ethnological investigation, drawing conclusions which were critical of the very influential Teutonic narrative that he considered misleading, since it was founded solely on superfluous ancient historical sources. Latham's challenge of the prevailing thesis, hence, reflected a heightened mid-nineteenth century debate between ethnology and history. Rather than delving into the historical migrations themselves, the study of the perception of Teutonic migrations contributes to the understanding of how these historians and ethnologists differentiated between 'ideal' and 'destructive' historical migrations while inserting different meanings to the concepts of 'race' and 'language'.


This paper investigates how changes in both institutional incentives and economic interests are important for securing durable changes in economic policy. We study how bipartisan support developed to sustain the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934, which fundamentally transformed U.S. trade policy. The durability of this change was achieved only when the Republicans, long-time supporters of high tariffs who originally vowed to repeal the RTAA, began to support this Democratic initiative in the 1940s. We find little evidence of an ideological shift among Republicans, but rather an increased sensitivity to export interests for which the institutional structure of the RTAA itself may have been responsible. We conclude that the combination of greater export opportunities and the institutional change that strengthened exporters' lobbying position was required to bring about Republican support for trade liberalization. Copyright 1999 by the University of Chicago.


In the present paper, I explore how the Internet has affected the flow of information between in and outside Myanmar (Burma). I show that there is a strong difference between the way information was presented before and after the introduction of the World Wide Web.
 Within the last century, the country has been marked by political instability (Eliot, 1997; Freedom House, 2000). Particularly since its separation from British colonial rule in 1948, Burma has witnessed significant political change, violence and unrest. Since the early 1960s, Burma has essentially been an isolated state, with closed borders and a military government. However, the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War seem to suggest that isolationism is growing less common worldwide. Importantly, meteoric advances in communications have also paralleled the fall of isolationism.
 In my study, I examine two political events in Myanmar connected to student uprisings, in the hope of documenting how the Internet - as an easily researched symbol of modern communications - may be affecting the political strategies of one of the last isolated states.


The early Ming Dynasty emperors who favored the patronage of the arts are the biggest contributors to the development of flower-and-bird paintings in the court (宮廷花鳥畵) from various styles of previous school branches. The characteristic features of flower-and-bird paintings in Ming Dynasty court can be categorized by "the colored flower-and-bird painting", "flower-bird and landscape paintings" and "nature and imaged flower-and-bird painting." These diverse aspects of the flower-and-bird painting in the early Ming Dynasty were closely associated with two phenomena: One is the formation of the Imperial Painting Academy (宮廷畵壇), and the other is the interaction with scholar-gentry (文人士大夫). Most of the court painters in the early Ming Dynasty were from the southern part of the Yangtze River (揚子江), including Zhejiang (浙江), Fujian (福建), and Jiangsu (江蘇). A considerable number of the Southern Song court painters disassembled in these areas when the dynasty perished. When these painters reunified, they carried forward the style of the flower-and-bird paintings from the Ming Dynasty court as an influx of the previous dynasty's academic painting style in response to the imperial taste. Bian Wen-jin (邊文進), a leading early Ming Dynasty court painter, led the fashion of the splendid shade of color in the colored flower-and-bird painting while still having command of the concise literati style based on his interaction with the scholargentry. His works, thus, can be evidence that the flower-and-bird painting in the court was painted in diverse styles from the beginning. Lin Liang (林良) and Lu Ji (呂紀) both founded a new composition in painting, called flower-bird and landscape paintings, but Liang painted it as imaged flower-and-bird paintings using monochrome ink (水墨寫意花鳥畵), and Ji's works are painted as the colored flower-and-bird paintings (彩色花鳥畵). This style, indeed, began in the Yuan Dynasty (元代) and became more complex in Liang and Ji's era. This complex aspect has a close relationship with the landscape painting style of the Zhe School (浙派), which was rampant in the contemporary era. Sun Long (孫隆)'s paintings reveal a different style from that of the Imperial Painting Academy. The subject matter of his paintings originated from the grass-and-insect paintings of his hometown, Piling (毘陵). His paintings deliver extempore images of objects using a new style of brushwork that can accentuate colors without outlines as watercolor sketches. Long's simple brushwork is on the same line of paintings from nature in the Song and the Yuan Dynasty. His attempt also was a precursor to a style of a painting from nature and imaged flower-and-bird painting, which was mainly developed during the Jiangnan area, after Long's era. Judging from the representative works of official painters from the Ming court, the flower-and-bird painting in the court inherited the themes, techniques and compositions from the paintings in the earlier dynasties. Consequently, the flower-andbird paintings, which contain various painting styles, met the demands of the new Ming Dynasty era. Furthermore, considering the point that the flower-and-bird paintings in the Ming Dynasty allowed painters not only to work both academic and literati styles of paintings but also to bridge painters from the front and rear eras, it is worthwhile to examine the paintings in the art historical context.


Abstract The climatology of September thunderstorms at Denver, Colo., is discussed. Data as near as possible to the time of occurrence of thunderstorms are studied to determine variables related to the occurrence of thunderstorms. The same variables from earlier data are investigated to determine their forecasting value. Three variables taken from the 2000 MST raobs and 700-mb. charts are ultimately used to obtain an objective aid for forecasting thunderstorms between midnight and midnight following the 2000 MST upper air chart. It is pointed out that for practical purposes this constitutes a forecast of afternoon and evening thunderstorms, or a forecast for 12–20 hours in advance. The conclusion is drawn that the objective aid developed should prove of value in forecasting September thunderstorms at Denver.


Human resources in an institution such as a hospital are an important strategy to create an accelerated improvement in overall health status, integrated, equitable, affordable and acceptable to the entire community. In maintaining the continuity and life of its organization, organizations are required to be able to maintain good relations between the leaders of the organization and human resources as the driving force of an organization. This research was conducted by taking the object of research in the installation of radiology at the Army Hospital Dr. Soepraoen, Malang City. This study aims to determine the perceptions of human resources (HR) from Radiology Installation in Army Hospital Dr. Soepraoen Malang towards leadership style and remuneration system. The method used in this study is qualitative research with a descriptive approach. The sampling technique that will be used in this study is a total sampling of 15 radiology installation employees at the Army Hospital Dr. Soepraoen. The results of the study show that a good perception of Human Resources (HR) related to Leadership Style in the Installation of Army Hospital Radiology dr. Soepraoen Malang and the application of remuneration carried out by Army Hospital Dr. Soepraoen Malang city runs well. Advice from researchers is expected to be able to develop knowledge in the field of administration and quality of hospital services. In addition, this research might be able to help further similar research, especially with regard to the remuneration system and leadership style in hospitals.


The paper proposes a novel training approach for a neural network to perform switching among an array of computationally generated stochastic optimal feedback controllers. The training is based on the outputs of off-line computed lookup-table metric (LTM) values that store information about individual controller performances. Our study is based on a problem of bicycle kinematic model navigation through a sequence of gates and a more traditional approach to the training is based on kinematic variables (KVs) describing the bicycle-gate relative position. We compare the LTM and KV based training approaches to the navigation problem and find that the LTM training has a faster convergence with less variations than the KV based training. Our results include numerical simulations illustrating the work of the LTM trained neural network switching policy.


Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a chronic disorder that is thought to affect from 3% to 7% of school-age children (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Children with ADHD typically exhibit problems maintaining attention, sustaining effort, modulating motor activity, and organizing and finishing tasks (American Psychiatric Association). In addition, they often exhibit comorbid behaviors such as depression, anxiety, oppositional defiant disorders, and compulsive behaviors (National Institute of Mental Health, 1996; Whalen & Henker, 1991). As a result, many children with ADHD encounter difficulties in the school environment, often in the form of disciplinary problems or academic difficulties (e.g., underachievement, poor grades, or failure to complete assignments; DuPaul & Stoner, 2003). At present, the recommended treatment for children with ADHD involves a multimodal approach that combines medication (e.g., psychostimulants), behavior modification, accommodations, and ancillary services (e.g., counseling; Barkley, 1998; Reid, 1999). Of these approaches, probably the most well known and widely used is medication (Goldman, Genel, Bezman, & Slanetz, 1998). Although the use of medication for the treatment of symptoms for ADHD has a documented record of effectiveness (MTA Cooperative Group, 1999), it is not recommended in isolation. There is evidence that other approaches (e.g., behavior management, educational accommodations) are useful both in isolation and in conjunction with medication (Conners et al., 2001; Pfiffner & Barkley, 1998). One type of intervention that holds promise for children with ADHD is one that can help children self-regulate their behavior. Self-regulation describes a number of methods used by students to manage, monitor, record, and/or assess their behavior or academic achievement. Self-regulation can be used to decrease maladaptive or increase positive target behaviors (Kern, Ringdahl, Hilt, & Sterling-Turner, 2001) and has shown considerable success with children with learning disabilities (e.g., Graham & Harris, 2003; Reid, 1996), behavior disorders (e.g., Nelson, Smith, Young, & Dodd, 1991; Smith & Sugai, 2000), and mental retardation (e.g., Cole & Gardner, 1984). Recently, Strayhorn (2002) argued that there is a need to develop systematic programs to enable self-regulated behavior among children with ADHD. This is consistent with recent theoretical work in ADHD that has begun to conceptualize ADHD as a deficit in self-regulated behavior (Barkley, 1997). From this perspective, ADHD results from a performance deficit rather than a skill deficit. In other words, ADHD is "not a disorder of knowing what to do, but of doing what one knows" (Barkley, 1998, p. 249). One important component of self-regulation is a conscious appraisal of immediate past behavior (Barkley, 1997). This information allows individuals to assess past behavior and, if necessary, change their pattern of responding (i.e., inhibit an automatic response). The feedback enables a comparison between what the child is doing and what the child should be doing, which in turn serves as a cue to maintain appropriate behavior or change inappropriate behavior. Ensuring a steady stream of feedback is important. As Barkley (1998) noted, one critical factor in self-regulation for children with ADHD is "more feedback more often" (p. 250). Self-regulation theory has long recognized the importance of a feedback cycle in which individuals systematically self-assess and self-evaluate their behavior (Pintrich, 2000; Zimmerman, 2000). These processes are seen as fundamental to the development of self-regulation. A discussion of the four common forms of self-regulation that incorporate these processes follow. SELF-MONITORING Self-monitoring (SM) is a multistage process of observing and recording one's behavior (Mace, Belfiore, & Hutchinson, 2001). …


The occurrence of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) was examined in tall alpine herbfields (Celmisia-Poa alliance) in Kosciuszko National Park, Australia. Relatively undisturbed areas and areas which had been successfully, and unsuccessfully, rehabilitated in the 1960s and 1970s following severe loss of vegetation and soil erosion were sampled. Most common plant species in undisturbed areas were colonized by AMF, often with greater than 50% of root length colonized. Colonization by AMF of the dominant species, Poa fawcettiae, was substantially lower in areas that had failed to re-establish vegetation or a soil profile following rehabilitation, and in areas that had been successfully rehabilitated, but had again started to degrade in the 1990s. This lower colonization may be attributed to a number of factors. These include toxic effects from Zn released from galvanized wire used in the rehabilitation work and the loss of the organic horizon resulting in reduced AMF inoculum levels, extreme soil temperatures and low soil water. The study indicated that AMF might need to be considered when planning the rehabilitation of degraded areas of herbfields in Kosciuszko National Park.


Pedestrian deaths account for 23% of all road traffic fatalities worldwide. After declining for three decades, pedestrian fatalities in the United States have been increasing with 6,941 fatalities in 2020, the highest number for more than two decades, impeding progress toward a zero-deaths transportation system. The Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool (PBCAT) was developed to describe the pre-crash actions of the parties involved to better define the sequence of events and precipitating actions that lead to crashes involving motor vehicles and pedestrians or cyclists. Undoubtedly, police crash data influence decision-making processes in the transportation agencies. Using crash data from three major cities in Texas (during the period from 2018 to 2020), this study assessed the data quality of police-reported crash narratives on pedestrian-involved traffic crashes. As the pedestrian crash typing involves many categories, conventional machine-learning algorithms will not be sufficient in solving the classification problem from narrative texts. This study used few-shot learning (FSL), an advanced machine learning, to solve this issue. Using the pre-knowledge obtained from five different crash types and a few labeled data points of three unseen new crash types, the proposed model achieved roughly 40% overall accuracy. Also, four different configurations of crash types were formed and tested which indicates that the model is robust.


To the Editor. — In the November 1977 issue of theArchives(113:1533-1538), C. Anders Hedin, DDS, found that women constituted a high proportion of subjects with gingival melanosis due to tobacco smoking, even though these women had a lower cigarette consumption than the affected men. This female preponderance has been observed in other instances of hyperpigmentation, such as that induced by hydantoin anticonvulsants. 1 In a survey of 70 patients with chlorpromazine melanosis, all were female. 2 A reflectance spectrophotometry study of subjects under prolonged therapy with phenothiazines and/or hydantoins showed that women (both white and black) had a strikingly greater pigmentary response to these drugs than did their male counterparts. 3 A comparison of blue-eyed and brown-eyed whites revealed that only the women tended toward a skin melanin difference in the expected direction. 4 As levodopa is a precursor of melanin, I recently conducted a small pilot study


The authors describe a neural network model capable of generating a spatial representation of the pitch of an acoustic source that can be naturally imbedded in an architecture for signal separation. The model is a type of pattern matching model. The input to the pitch detecting module is a spectral representation, which is discussed. Pitch is one of several auditory percepts used by humans to separate multiple sound sources in the environment from each other. The model provides a neural instantiation of a type of harmonic sieve. It is capable of quantitatively simulating a large body of psychoacoustical data, including new data on octave shift perception.<<ETX>>


With average turnover costs equaling four times an employee's salary, administrators cannot afford to lose nurse aides. This study explored why aides leave and ways to improve your facility's work environment.


For the characterization of genomic copy number changes that occur in the development and progression of cancer, oligonucleotide array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) offers high-resolution and precise determination of chromosomal copy number and genome-wide aberrations. We recently reported a new method for making simultaneous measurements of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and copy number alterations in the same microarray assay. The combined assay can detect copy-number neutral events, such as acquired loss of heterozygosity (LOH), as well as allelic imbalance in and around amplified regions. Previously reported algorithms for analyzing Agilent CGH+SNP data were able to genotype primarily diploid samples and to detect regions of constitutional LOH. However, tumor heterogeneity, aneuploidy and variable sample quality create significant challenges for both solid and liquid tumors. Our earlier methods were often unable to cope with the high levels of aneuploidy sometimes found in solid tumors, or with admixtures of normal cells and aberrant cells. We now describe new computational methods which can determine total copy number, aneuploid fraction, and allele-specific copy number in many aneuploid tumor samples, even when mixed with up to 80% normal tissue. We report results from genomic DNA isolated from a cancer cell line, a blood sample, and a solid tumor. Each of these sample types presents novel challenges. The cell line we studied, though largely monoclonal, is highly aneuploid. The blood DNA is of high quality, but the fraction of tumor cells in the sample is low. The solid tumor DNA is of relatively low quality, and composed of multiple aberrant clones. We were able to determine the aneuploid fraction of the tumors, and to measure copy number variation in samples with as little as 20% tumor cell content. In addition to detecting copy-neutral LOH regions, we also measured allele-specific copy number, both of the aberrant clone and of admixed normal cells. The new analysis methods allow the extension of the extra allelic information available from the CGH+SNP assay to cancer samples. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2011 Apr 2-6; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2011;71(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 45. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2011-45


Brazil is the fourth largest producer and exporter of pork in the world. Pig farming is raising environmental and economic concerns, mainly associated with the production and use of feed. It causes major environmental impacts due to its strong dependence on scarce resources (e.g. arable land, fossil fuel), and release of pollutants to the air, water and soil (e.g. greenhouse gases, nitrogen). Pig farming relies heavily on high quality food crops (i.e. cereals and oilseeds). In recent years, the growing competition for these high quality food crops with other sectors such as the energy and food sectors has resulted in rising feed costs. The problem of rising feed cost is worsened by price volatility of cereals and oilseeds. The use of alternative feed sources and the genetic improvement of pigs through selective breeding are expected to improve the environmental and economic sustainability of pig farming. The aim of this thesis was to assess the impacts of using co-products in the diets of pigs and of genetic improvement of pigs through selective breeding on both the environmental and economic sustainability of pig farming in Brazil. The results show that the use of co-products in the diets of pigs in Brazil raises feed costs, global warming potential, energy use, and excretions of nitrogen and phosphorus. However, it reduces land use. The use of co-products that can be produced on marginal land (e.g. macauba cake) improves the efficiency of pork production when marginal land is not used to grow food crops. Breeders can use economic values that are derived by accounting for risk and risk preferences of farmers in order to produce breeding materials that increase the utility of risk averse farmers. Similarly, the mitigation of environmental impacts can be incorporated in breeding goals via using economic values that are derived by accounting for environmental costs. Genetic improvement of traits that raise farm productivity has the potential to reduce environmental impacts of farming while also raising the utility of risk averse farmers. The study also measured the effect of genetic expenses on dynamic productivity growth and its components using data from Dutch specialized dairy farms over 2007-2013. The results show that spending greater than the median expenses on genetics has the potential to increase productivity growth associated with inputs and investments in the first two years after the expenses.


In this article I shall be supporting two main claims. The first is that the essence of the difference between particularism and generalism lies in where they locate ethical correctness. The second is that generalism, although to be preferred to particularism, is not the final resting place for ethical correctness. Ultimately, ethical correctness resides in ethical theories that provide the rationale for generalism. Particularism is presented as a theory that allows attention to be paid to specific cases and shows a sensitivity to the particular case. Generalism, with its appeal to moral principles, is supposed to lack this sensitivity to specific cases. I argue that although this might be true of subsumptive generalism, it is not true of what I call judgmental generalism. This latter type of generalism retains an appeal to moral principles whilerequiringsensitivity to the particular case. I consider Kantian ethics as an example of this sort of generalism. Furthermore, I support the claim that this judgmental generalism is to be preferred to particularism. I argue against a prominent form of particularism, put forward by Jonathan Dancy, based on an appeal to the holism of reasons. This doctrine involves the claim that the value of a complex whole is not necessarily identical with the value of its parts. I show that Dancy's discussion of this involves inconsistencies and also appears to incorporate subsumptive generalism. This statement of particularism is ultimately incoherent.


Although education is an important determinant of scientific knowledge and trust in science, research shows that better educated individuals are not 'immune' to anti-scientific views. In some studies, for example, education was neither a significant determinant of vaccination knowledge nor consistently linked with the intention to get vaccinated against vaccine-preventable diseases. Trust in the healthcare system is also known to be a determinant of health-related attitudes and behaviours. However, it remains unclear whether trust in the healthcare system moderates the effect of education on vaccination knowledge and vaccine uptake intention. In our study, we examined whether in Slovenia education is linked to higher levels of knowledge about vaccination, whether education is linked with a greater intention to get vaccinated against Covid-19, and whether trust in the healthcare system moderates the effect of education. We analysed two non-representative samples obtained through online surveys in November 2019 (Study 1;N = 661;76% women) and in March/April 2020 (Study 2;N = 851;84% women). We compared three educational groups (1 = secondary school or lower;2 = up to the first-cycle Bologna degree;3 = second-cycle Bologna degree or higher). Multivariate analyses showed that, when controlling for other determinants (gender, age, employment/activity status, self-rated health and political orientation), the mid-level education group showed the lowest level of vaccination knowledge (Study 1) and the lowest Covid-19 vaccine uptake intention (Study 2). Additionally, we found that trust in the healthcare system moderated the effects of education. Among high-trust groups, higher education had a significant positive impact only on Covid-19 vaccine uptake intention (Study 2) but had no significant impact on vaccine knowledge (Study 1). Among low-trust groups, the educational impact was similar for both outcomes;the mid-level educational groups had significantly lower Covid-19 vaccine uptake intention and vaccine knowledge, while the highest and the lowest educational group had the most vaccine knowledge and uptake intention. The implications of the results are discussed.


© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use. Tackling the mental health burden of frontline healthcare staff in the COVID-19 pandemic: China's experiences


We present the first sample compression algorithm for nearest neighbors with non-trivial performance guarantees. We complement these guarantees by demonstrating almost matching hardness lower bounds, which show that our performance bound is nearly optimal. Our result yields new insight into margin-based nearest neighbor classification in metric spaces and allows us to significantly sharpen and simplify existing bounds. Some encouraging empirical results are also presented.


The strong light-matter interaction in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers (MLs) is governed by robust excitons. Important progress has been made to control the dielectric environment surrounding the MLs, especially through hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) encapsulation which drastically reduces the inhomogeneous contribution to the exciton linewidth. Most studies use exfoliated hBN from high quality flakes grown under high pressure. In this work, we show that hBN grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) over a large surface area substrate has a similarly positive impact on the optical emission from TMD MLs. We deposit MoS2 and MoSe2 MLs on ultrathin hBN films (few MLs thick) grown on Ni/MgO(111) by MBE. Then, we cover them with exfoliated hBN to finally obtain an encapsulated sample: exfoliated hBN/TMD ML/MBE hBN. We observe improved optical quality of our samples compared to TMD MLs exfoliated directly on SiO2 substrates. Our results suggest that hBN grown by MBE could be used as a flat and charge-free substrate for fabricating TMD-based heterostructures on a larger scale.


From the first allergen immunotherapy proposed in the early 1900s to the present day, numerous studies have proven the efficacy of allergen immunotherapy for the treatment of allergic rhinitis, allergic conjunctivitis, allergic asthma and stinging insect hypersensitivity. The major risk, however small, with allergen immunotherapy is anaphylaxis. There has been considerable interest and debate regarding risk factors for immunotherapy reactions (local and systemic) and interventions to reduce the occurrence of these reactions. One of these interventions that is especially debated regards dose adjustment for various reasons, but in particular for local reactions. In this review, we discuss the safety of immunotherapy and provide a comprehensive review of the literature regarding immunotherapy schedules and doses.


In the construction of a large software system, it is inevitable that some aspects of program behavior will cut across the structure of the code. The changes that are needed to support a new feature, for example, may be spread across several different points in the original program, making them harder to maintain and harder to reuse. The designers of "aspect-oriented" programming languages aim to tackle these problems by introducing new language mechanisms to capture cross-cutting concerns. Their hope is that this will allow different aspects of a program to be captured as independent entities that can be woven together automatically to produce a complete program. In this paper, we focus on AspectJ, an aspect-oriented extension of Java that has been designed and implemented by a team at Xerox PARC to support an empirical assessment of aspect-oriented programming. The development of AspectJ has been driven largely by pragmatic concerns. Here, we provide a complimentary perspective by using interpreters, written in Haskell, to present a formal semantics for a simple aspect-oriented programming language, and so to distill the essence of AspectJ. This paper provides a firm semantic foundation for the design of aspect-oriented programming languages. It illustrates the flexibility that can be obtained by writing interpreters in a monadic style, but also challenges us to contemplate how the ideas of aspect-oriented programming might be applied to the design of future functional languages.


. Manufacturing companies typically use sophisticated production planning systems optimizing production steps, often delivering near-optimal solutions. As a downside for delivering a near-optimal schedule, planning systems have high computational demands resulting in hours of computation. Under normal circumstances this is not issue if there is enough buffer time before implementation of the schedule (e.g. at night for the next day). However, in case of unexpected disruptions such as delayed part deliveries or defectively manufactured goods, the planned schedule may become invalid and swift replanning becomes necessary. Such immediate replanning is unsuited for existing optimal planners due to the computational requirements. This paper proposes a novel solution that can effectively and efficiently perform replanning in case of different types of disruptions using an existing plan. The approach is based on the idea to adhere to the existing schedule as much as possible, adapting it based on limited local changes. For that purpose an agent-based scheduling mechanism has been devised, in which agents represent materials and production sites and use local optimization techniques and negotiations to generate an adapted (sufficient, but non-optimal) schedule. The approach has been evaluated using real production data from Huawei, showing that efficient schedules are produced in short time. The system has been implemented as proof of concept and is currently reimplemented and transferred to a production system based on the Jadex agent platform.


While hosting mega sporting events brings various benefits to the host regions from the increased number of tourists, one of the main factors that deters tourists is the various types of risks associated with international travels. The sport tourism literature has highlighted terrorism risk and political instability as major concerns that impact travel intentions. This study examined and compared the influence of tourists' risk perceptions on travel intentions across mega sporting event host destinations with different levels (i.e. apparent risks, less imminent risks, and unidentified risks) of such risks. Data were collected from 571 potential tourists via an online survey software and analyzed using a structural equation modeling technique. The results indicated that perceived terrorism risk significantly influenced the tourists' travel intentions. Tourists' terrorism risk perceptions toward South Korea (apparent risks) most significantly impacted their travel intentions, followed by general destinations outside of the United States (unidentified risks), while political instability was not significantly related to travel intentions. These findings offer practical implications for mega sporting event organizers.


Abstract Aim Pentraxin-3, high sensitive CRP (HsCRP) and adropin were investigated in cord blood of infants of mothers with gestational diabetes mellitus (IDM) to evaluate the exposure of fetus to inflammation and whether there is any correlation with clinical findings. Methods Forty IDM and forty three infants whose mother did not have diabetes were included in this prospective study. Adropin, pentraxin-3 and HsCRP levels were measured in the cord blood samples. Echocardiographic measurements were performed in the first three days of life. Results Adropin and pentraxine-3 levels were significantly lower and HsCRP levels were significantly higher in IDM group. Echocardiographic measurements of myocardial hypertrophy were negatively correlated with adropin. Conclusion Alterations in these markers in IDM supports the hypothesis of in utero fetal exposure to inflammation caused by gestational diabetes mellitus. Potentially, cord blood adropin might be used as a predictor for complications of diabetes.


Purpose: Sarcoidosis with cardiac involvement has a relatively high morbidity and mortality, and early diagnose of cardiac sarcoidosis is a critical issue. Systolic dyssynchrony index (SDI) measured by three-dimensinonal echocardiography was used in our study for detection of subclinical left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction in patients with sarcoidosis and normal LV function on two-dimensional echocardiography.Methods: Forty-four patients diagnosed with sarcoidosis (without clinically apparent cardiac involvement) and 44 healthy control subjects were included in this study. Conventional 2D echocardiographic parameters and SDI measured by 3D echocardiography were analyzed in all participants.Results: While two-dimensional echocardiographic results of study groups were similar; SDI_16 (SDI for 16 segments of LV) results were significantly higher in sarcoidosis group compared to healthy controls (6.99 + 5.02 vs 2.89 + 1.32, p<0.0001), and 47.7% of patients with sarcoidosis had SDI_16 value of >6%.Conclusion: SDI_16 was higher in patients with sarcoidosis and this parameter could be used as a marker to identify patients with cardiac involvement of sarcoidosis in the early phase.


Abstract Metaplastic breast cancer (MBC) comprises less than 1% of all breast cancers, and it is defined by a mixture of adenocarcinoma plus mesenchymal and epithelial components. It is more common in older and black female patients. It has a larger size and faster growth, and it is frequently node-negative and triple-negative when compared with invasive ductal carcinoma. The authors report the case of a 72-year-old female patient, presenting with a breast lump, whose biopsy revealed a probable MBC with chondroid differentiation. She underwent a breast conservative surgery (BCS) and axillary sentinel lymph node dissection (SLND). The pathological report was concordant with the biopsy, and the patient was proposed to chemoradiotherapy. Despite its rarity and more severe features at diagnosis, BCS plus SLND plus radiotherapy should be offered to these patients, associated with chemotherapy. Chondroid differentiation is the rarest of all histological subtypes.


In this paper, we present improved inapproximability results for the k-level uncapacitated facility location problem. In particular, we show that there is no polynomial time approximation algorithm with performance guarantee better than 1.539 unless NP is contained in DTIME(nO(log log n)) for the case when k = 2. For the case of general k (tendining to infinity) we obtain a better hardness factor of 1.61.

Interestingly, our results show that the two-level problem is computationally harder than the well known uncapacitated facility location problem (k = 1) since the best known approximation guarantee for the latter problem is 1.488 due to Li [22], and our inapproximability is a factor of 1.539 for the two-level problem. The only inapproximability result known before for this class of metric facility location problems is the bound of 1.463 due to Guha and Khuller [17], which holds even for the case of k = 1.


We compare the velocity dispersion of the intracluster medium (ICM) of the Perseus cluster of galaxies as observed by the Hitomi X-ray telescope to our three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of jet-inflated bubbles in cluster cooling flows, and conclude that the observations support the mixing-heating mechanism of the ICM. In the mixing-heating mechanism the ICM is heated by mixing of hot bubble gas with the ICM. This mixing is caused by vortices that are formed during the inflation process of the bubble. Sound waves and turbulence are also excited by the vortices, but they contribute less than 20 per cents to the heating of the ICM. Shocks that are excited by the jets contribute even less.


Comparative studies of corruption focus on the selection and incentives of policymakers. With few exceptions, actors who are in charge of implementing policies have been neglected. This article analyzes an original data set on the bureaucratic features and its effects on corruption in fifty-two countries. Two empirical findings challenge the conventional wisdom in literature. First, certain bureaucratic factors, particularly meritocratic recruitment, reduce corruption, even when controlling for a large set of alternative explanations. Second, the analysis shows that other allegedly relevant bureaucratic factors, such as public employees' competitive salaries, career stability, or internal promotion, do not have a significant impact.


ABSTRACT Despite progress with diagnostic criteria, the type and timing of laboratory tests used to diagnose infective endocarditis (IE) have not been standardized. This is especially true with serological testing. Patients with suspected IE were evaluated by a standard diagnostic protocol. This protocol mandated an evaluation of the patients according to the modified Duke criteria and used a battery of laboratory investigations, including three sets of blood cultures and systematic serological testing for Coxiella burnetii, Bartonella spp., Aspergillus spp., Legionella pneumophila, and rheumatoid factor. In addition, cardiac valvular materials obtained at surgery were subjected to a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation, including PCR aimed at documenting the presence of fastidious organisms. The study included 1,998 suspected cases of IE seen over a 9-year period from April 1994 to December 2004 in Marseilles, France. They were evaluated prospectively. A total of 427 (21.4%) patients were diagnosed as having definite endocarditis. Possible endocarditis was diagnosed in 261 (13%) cases. The etiologic diagnosis was established in 397 (93%) cases by blood cultures, serological tests, and examination of the materials obtained from cardiac valves, respectively, in 348 (81.5%), 34 (8%), and 15 (3.5%) definite cases of IE. Concomitant infection with streptococci and C. burnetii was seen in two cases. The results of serological and rheumatoid factor evaluation reclassified 38 (8.9%) possible cases of IE as definite cases. Systematic serological testing improved the performance of the modified Duke criteria and was instrumental in establishing the etiologic diagnosis in 8% (34/427) cases of IE.


This paper introduces a speed-sensorless method for detecting rotor asymmetries in wound rotor induction machines working under non-stationary conditions. The method is based on the time-frequency analysis of rotor currents and on a subsequent transformation which leads to the following goals: unlike conventional spectrograms, it enables to show the diagnostic results as a simple graph, similar to a Fourier spectrum, but where the fault components are placed always at the same positions, regardless the working conditions of the machine; moreover, it enables to assess the machine condition through a very small set of parameters. These characteristics facilitates the understanding and processing of the diagnostic results and thus, help to design improved monitoring and predictive maintenance systems. Also these features make the proposed method very suitable for condition monitoring of wind power generators, because it fits well with the usual non-stationary working conditions of wind turbines, and makes feasible the transmission of significant diagnostic information to the remote monitoring center, using standard data transmission systems. Simulation results and experimental tests, carried out on a 5kW laboratory rig, show the validity of the proposed method and illustrate its advantages regarding previously developed diagnostic methods under non-stationary conditions.


Abstract: Perineal swelling during pregnancy in captive common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) was studied to examine if the swelling pattern is consistent with known fluctuations in estrogens and progesterone and to test associations between reduced swelling and pathological outcome. Analyses of swelling during 107 pregnancies with a variety of outcomes revealed that a majority of swelling patterns fit an endocrinological model closely, but that a small minority (6.6%) from low parity mothers had exaggerated and extended swelling, suggesting an altered sensitivity of the swelling to steroids. Disregarding this extreme minority, swelling was found to be significantly reduced from that of normal outcome pregnancies for sub‐groups with varying degrees of maternal incompetence, neonatal fatality, and stillbirth. This reduction was most marked for pregnancies in nursery‐reared mothers. Given the validity of the correspondence between swelling patterns and steroid concentrations, lower estrogen concentrations are implicated in the etiology of the puerperal pathologies seen. That steroid hormone concentrations during pregnancy may influence maternal behavior in apes provides a clue to the etiology of post‐partum depression in women.


Previous experiments have identified the E2F transcription factor as a potential downstream target for the action of cellular regulatory activities, such as the Rb tumor suppressor protein, that control cell growth and that, when altered, contribute to the development of human tumors. In light of these findings, we have assayed the ability of the E2F1 and DP1 genes, which encode heterodimeric partners that together create E2F activity, to act in an oncogenic fashion. We find that E2F1, particularly in combination with the DP1 product, cooperates with an activated ras oncogene to induce the formation of morphologically transformed foci in primary rat embryo fibroblast cultures. In addition, an E2F1 chimeric protein, in which sequences involved in Rb binding have been replaced with the herpesvirus VP16 activation domain, exhibits increased transformation activity. Cells transfected with E2F1 and DP1 or the E2F1-VP16 chimera form colonies in soft agar and induce tumor formation in nude mice. We conclude that deregulated E2F1 expression and function can have oncogenic consequences.


ABSTRACT This section is placed at the beginning of a manuscript and must convey everything presented: what the research was about, where, why and how it was conducted and what it means relative to the current state of knowledge. It should consist of one paragraph of 250 or fewer words (i.e., no more than 3% of length of manuscript). Abstracts always are written in the past tense, thus, the best quality abstracts are written after the remainder of the manuscript is finished. Bibliographic services publish only the title and abstract of manuscripts. When conducting a literature search, researchers may read abstracts of perhaps 100s of papers in which the titles possibly have bearing on an aspect of their work. Only if the content of the abstract seems relevant will researchers progress to reading the article from which the abstract was derived. Therefore, great care must be used to write an abstract so it correctly reflects the contents of the manuscript in a precise and concise manner that can stand alone. Furthermore, it must contain no figures, tables or references to them, or material not presented in the body of the manuscript; except for critique papers, no literature citations should be included. Also, it should not contain acronyms or jargon, even with definitions, not readily known to the general reading audience of the publication in which the manuscript will be published.


A MWCNT/TiO2 composite was modified onto glassy carbon electrode and fabricated by mechanical attachment, then applied to detection of ascorbic acid using cyclic voltammetry. Electrode responses were obtained for the oxidation of 0.5 mM ascorbic acid at the glassy carbon electrode modified with MWCNT, TiO2, MWCNT/TiO2 composite and an unmodified glassy carbon electrode. A well-defined and highly resolved oxidation peak of ascorbic acid at the MWCNT/TiO2/GCE with current enhancement and peak potential shift toward the origin being observed, this indicates evidence of electrocatalytic process. In comparison with other electrodes, the observed current enhancements at the MWCNT/TiO2/GCE were 1.3 folds higher than those obtained by MWCNT/GCE and 1.5 folds by a bare glassy carbon electrode. The response peak current revealed a good linear relationship of up to 2.5 mM ascorbic acid with correlation coefficient of 0.998. A good detection limit of 4.0 μM was found using MWCNT/TiO2/GCE. Other usual parameters such as effect of pH, scan rate, temperature, supporting electrolyte and concentration of ascorbic acid were studied.


Using the example of a reintroduced bighorn sheep population in Badlands National Park, South Dakota we demonstrate the usefulness of neutrality tests and demographic data for detecting a severe genetic bottleneck (Ne < 10). From demographic data the effective population size of the founding population at Badlands was estimated to be six, and a heterozygosity excess test revealed evidence of a severe population bottleneck. We discuss the criteria for intervention when there is evidence of a severe bottleneck, and propose methods of mitigating the potentially deleterious long‐term consequences of such bottlenecks. These issues are presented in the context of bighorn sheep reintroductions, but the issues are also of general importance to restoration efforts involving other large vertebrates.


OBJECTIVE
Mesiodens is the most common form of supernumerary tooth mainly located between the maxillary central incisors. Its etiology is not completely understood but both genetic and environmental factors are assumed. The degree of mineralization and inorganic element content in hard tooth tissues is poorly understood as well as is the durability and suitability for allo- and auto-transplantation. Therefore aim of this study was to examine the content of inorganic elements.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
This study included 26 mesiodens teeth and 26 normal central incisor teeth as controls. All specimens were prepared for SEM/EDS analysis which was aimed at specific sites on the enamel, dentine and cementum in order to evaluate the weight percentage and ratio of important inorganic elements.

RESULTS
and Conclusion. The results showed that there was a difference in the weight percentage of selected inorganic elements (calcium, phosphorus, oxygen, carbon, magnesium and sodium) in all three types of dental hard tissues but the differences were mostly expressed in the cementum tissue. The statistical analysis showed that the differences were marginally significant especially for calcium and phosphorus values and ratio in the enamel and dentine. The carbon and magnesium content in all three hard tissues showed the most differences, but overall, the hard tissues mineral content of the mesiodens did not differs significantly from healthy teeth.


India has relatively poor health outcomes, despite having a well-developed administrative system, good technical skills in many fields, and an extensive network of public health institutions for research, training, and diagnostics. This suggests that the health system may be misdirecting its efforts, or may be poorly designed. To explore this, the authors use instruments developed to assess the performance of public health systems in the United States and Latin America based on the framework of the Essential Public Health Functions, identified as the basic functions that an effective public health system must fulfill. The authors focus on the federal level in India, using data obtained from senior health officials in the central government. The data indicate that the reported strengths of the system lie in having the capacity to carry out most of the public health functions. Its reported weaknesses lie in three broad areas. First, it has overlooked some fundamental public health functions such as public health regulations and their enforcement. Second, deep management flaws hinder effective use of resources-including inadequate focus on evaluation, on assessing quality of services, on dissemination and use of information, and on openness to learning and innovation. Resources could also be much better used with small changes, such as the use of incentives and challenge funds, and greater flexibility to reassign resources as priorities and needs change. Third, the central government functions too much in isolation and needs to work more closely with other key actors, especially with sub-national governments, as well as with the private sector and with communities. The authors conclude that with some reassessment of priorities and better management practices, health outcomes could be substantially improved.


Compact radio cores are not only common in radio galaxies and quasars but also in many nearby galaxies with low-active, supermassive black holes. One famous example is the Galactic Center source Sgr A*. Recent studies of proper motions and radial velocities of stars in the inner parsec of the Galaxy convincingly demonstrate the presence of a compact dark mass of 2.5 10^6 Mo in the nucleus of the Milky Way. Millimeter VLBI and submm observations of Sgr A* thus probe a region of only a few Schwarzschild radii in diameter. In this paper I will review our current theoretical and observational knowledge of this source and compare it to some famous LINER galaxies like NGC 4258, NGC 3079, and NGC 6500. In all cases these radio cores can be well explained by a standard AGN jet model, and, with the exception of Sgr A*, large scale outflows are observed that have powers comparable to those inferred from the radio cores. Recent VLBI observations of radio-weak quasars and HST observations of Seyfert galaxies indicate that these AGN also produce powerful jets which, however, have relatively less luminous radio cores than radio-loud quasars and the LINERs discussed here. Therefore, jets and compact radio cores appear to be natural constituents of an AGN, but the reason why apparently some jets are radio-loud and others not remains a mystery.


In IoT environments, voluminous amounts of data are produced every single second. Due to multiple factors, these data are prone to various imperfections, they could be uncertain, conflicting, or even incorrect leading to wrong decisions. Multisensor data fusion has proved to be powerful for managing data coming from heterogeneous sources and moving towards effective decision-making. Dempster–Shafer (D–S) theory is a robust and flexible mathematical tool for modeling and merging uncertain, imprecise, and incomplete data, and is widely used in multisensor data fusion applications such as decision-making, fault diagnosis, pattern recognition, etc. However, the combination of contradictory data has always been challenging in D–S theory, unreasonable results may arise when dealing with highly conflicting sources. In this paper, an improved evidence combination approach is proposed to represent and manage both conflict and uncertainty in IoT environments in order to improve decision-making accuracy. It mainly relies on an improved evidence distance based on Hellinger distance and Deng entropy. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a benchmark example for target recognition and two real application cases in fault diagnosis and IoT decision-making have been provided. Fusion results were compared with several similar methods, and simulation analyses have shown the superiority of the proposed method in terms of conflict management, convergence speed, fusion results reliability, and decision accuracy. In fact, our approach achieved remarkable accuracy rates of 99.32% in target recognition example, 96.14% in fault diagnosis problem, and 99.54% in IoT decision-making application.


One of the problems that face the use of XLPE insulators is the appearance of defects. These defects appear during the manufacturing processes of the insulator, and one of these defects is air cavities or voids. The defects presence within the insulators of high voltage cables affects the distribution of the electric field within the cable layers. The distortion of the electric field due to the presence of air cavities is the main reason for the treeing appearance inside the insulator, which eventually leads to the emergence of partial discharges that reduce the life of the cable. In this study, the effect of the presence of an air cavity inside an XLPE insulator was studied by changing the dimensions of the cavity, that is, changing the ratio of the dimensions of the cavity parallel to the electric field and vertical to it and the effect of this on the value of the electric field in the center of the cavity. It was noted that the electric field in the cavity is higher than in the external electric field. The increase in the field in the cavity center does not depend on the cavity size, but rather on the ratio of the cavity dimensions parallel to the electric field to the vertical to it. The electric field enhancement factor was calculated based on the simulation results, which showed a reasonable agreement with the theoretical values.


Induction heating has been applied to the preheating process in various industrial fields. It has been used as a simple device structure, limiting the heating zone through controlled variables, and free-welding positions. It would be helpful to weld thick plates with arc welding such as GMAW. The induction heating process is well suited to this process. In this study, in order to find suitable induction heating parameters, a simulation was conducted with multi physics S/W. Three kinds of material were heated by induction coils designed specially for thick plate. Consequently, steel and nimonic alloy were the most efficient materials for preheating by induction. It can be concluded that the induction heating process is a good method for preheating the thick plate.


The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) offers panoply of 3G services that require a high protection of the transmitted information. In the present paper, we are interested by network access security, especially the protection of the data integrity and the provisioning of data encryption. A special interest will be given to the second set of 3GPP cryptographic algorithms UEA2/UIA2 based on the SNOW 3G algorithm. This set was, in fact, a subject only of few research works in comparison with the first one based on KASUMI algorithm. A closer look is taken at both the encryption algorithm UEA2 and the integrity algorithm UIA2 operations. The different operation modes of the algorithm SNOW 3G will be presented as well. A study of the time and space complexity of three algorithms has been carried out.


Decades of research have indicated the foundational importance of parenting to offspring outcomes during childhood and beyond. Unearthing the specific origins of parenting is therefore a critically important research objective. Extant research on this topic has suggested that parenting behaviors are multidetermined (Belsky, 1984) and are associated with a wide range of contextual and familial characteristics (e.g., ethnicity, community, family financial stress), as well as characteristics of the parents (e.g., personality) and their children (e.g., temperament). Behavioral genetic studies have further indicated that parenting behaviors are in fact heritable-that is, individual differences in parenting are at least partially a function of genetic differences between persons. Critically, however, the estimates of these genetic influences have varied dramatically across studies. It is also unclear how factors such as parent gender, child age, and methodological considerations may impact genetic influences on parenting behavior. In the current set of meta-analyses, we sought to quantitatively synthesize twin and adoption studies (n = 56) examining the etiology of parenting behavior, with the goal of more definitively cataloguing genetic and environmental effects on parenting. Results reveal significant effects of parental genetic makeup on parental behavior, but also highlight the genetic makeup of the child as a particularly prominent source of genetic transmission (via evocative gene-environment correlation). Environmental contributions to parenting also emerged as important, including both shared and nonshared environmental effects. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.


Phosphorous is an essential macronutrient for plant growth and development. Most of the soil is deficient in plant available phosphorous and due to economic limitations majority of Ethiopian farmers applied inadequate fertilizers. It is essential to stabilize a mechanism to access P for plants with an efficient, cheap, and eco-friendly approach for enhanced crop growth and production. The main objective of this study was to screen efficient phosphate solubilizing bacteria from tomato rhizosphere soil. Using halo zone formation on PVK agar medium, more than 400 PSB isolates were isolated from 13 rhizosphere soil samples. By evaluating SI, texture in the culture-re-culturing process, liquid medium pH change efficiency and growth rate, upmost three promising PSB isolates (K-1-29, K-10-27, and K-10-41) were selected. Incubation of the isolates in PVK broth for five days showed significant pH reduction. For instance, isolate K-10-41 showed significant pH change (4.02) which indicates the organic acid production. Isolation and evaluation of efficient phosphate solubilizing bacteria maintain soil fertility, promote plant growth, induce plant response to pathogens, reduce agrochemical consumption and promote sustainable agriculture. Therefore, these selected PSB isolates need further detailed study for taxonomic identification, plant growth promotion, host range, and phytopathogen response. Local isolation improves environmental adaptation and indigenous competition.


Theoretical consequences of the use of progeny testing, sib testing, and mass selection are examined in a flock of 1,000 ewes producing 700 progeny of breeding age each year. Selection based on a combination of individual merit and merit of half-sibs should result in approximately the same annual improvement as that achieved by optimum use of progeny-tested sires. In large flocks extensive use of outstanding sires by artificial insemination may increase progress for traits with heritability of about 0.3 by a factor of about 1.2 as compared with mass selection. The advantages to be gained by progeny testing and artificial insemination may be outweighed by the dangers of inbreeding, and the cost involved would have to be considered. As most of these advantages should be achieved by combination or even by mass selection, which avoid inbreeding and much of the cost, progeny testing with wide use of progeny-tested sires is unlikely to be the most economical road to flock improvement.


Pruning of neural networks is one of the well-known and promising model simplification techniques. Most neural network models are large and require expensive computations to predict new instances. It is imperative to compress the network to deploy models on low resource devices. Most compression techniques, especially pruning have been focusing on computer vision and convolution neural networks. Existing techniques are complex and require multi-stage optimization and fine-tuning to recover the state-of-the-art accuracy. We introduce a Differentiable Mask Pruning (DMP), that simplifies the network while training, and can be used to induce sparsity on weight, filter, node or sub-network. Our method achieves competitive results on standard vision and NLP benchmarks, and is easy to integrate within the deep learning toolbox. DMP bridges the gap between neural model compression and differentiable neural architecture search.


The leading causes of infant death vary by age at death but were consistent from 2005 to 2015 (1-6). Previous research shows higher infant mortality rates in rural counties compared with urban counties and differences in cause of death for individuals aged 1 year and over by urbanization level (4,5,7,8). No research, however, has examined if mortality rates from the leading causes of infant death differ by urbanization level. This report describes the mortality rates for the five leading causes of infant, neonatal, and postneonatal death in the United States across rural, small and medium urban, and large urban counties defined by maternal residence, as reported on the birth certificate for combined years 2013-2015.