We recently described a signaling pathway, CD24-Siglecg G/10, that suppresses the inflammatory response to danger-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs). Here we report on the role of DAMPs in secondary bacterial pneumonia following influenza A virus (IAV) infection. During IAV infection, two prototypical DAMPs, HSP70 and HMGB1, accumulated in the lungs of infected mice. IAV PB1-F2, a protein encoded by highly-pathogenic strains, such as 1918 "Spanish flu," contributed to this accumulation, as infection with PB1-F2-deficient IAV led to a decrease in DAMPs. To model bacterial superinfection, we administered sublethal LPS intranasally 7 days after IAV infection. While all mice were more sensitive to the LPS challenge after IAV infection, CD24-/- and siglecg-/- mice did not recover from LPS challenge as quickly as WT mice. Indeed, this regimen was lethal for a subset of knockout mice, while all WT mice survived. Furthermore, CD24- and Siglec G-deficient mice were more susceptible to superinfection with the gram-negative bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. Together these results demonstrate that the ability of inflammatory PB1-F2 protein of IAV to prime for lethal, secondary bacterial pneumonia is due to the accumulation of DAMPs in the lungs of infected animals, and provide new targets for the treatment of this often fatal disease.


In event-driven wireless sensor networks nodes transmit information only if the monitored physical magnitude levels have triggered an alarm. In these networks, traffic exhibits a high spatial correlation, since it is likely that neighbor nodes detect and try to notify the same events. Thus, the probability of packet collision raises up, as well as notification delay, just as opposite as required. In this work we propose to use a p- persistent mechanism in the access control layer. The aim is reducing collisions and saving energy. We compute the optimal p for a coherent network deployment and describe the experimental implementation of our proposal. Theoretical computations predict a notable improvement, specially in terms of energy, and experiments reveal that our proposal achieves up to 67% of energy saving compared against a perfect (collision-free) mechanisms.


Analysis of dynamic lung OE-MRI is challenging due to the presence of substantial artefacts and poor SNR, particularly at 3 T. We propose a cyclical oxygen delivery scheme and ICA to separate the oxygen-enhancement signal from these confounding factors at 3 T. The proposed method extracts a well-defined oxygen-enhancement signal that removes confounds due to proton density changes, blood flow and motion. We also demonstrate the ability to resolve the opposite enhancement effects of the parenchymal and vascular OE-MRI signals to provide information on pulmonary vasculature and gas distribution. The method is shown to be sensitive to smoking status.


An atomic scale study was made of the Ag/CdO(222) heterophase interface produced by internal oxidation of a Ag(Cd) alloy, using HREM and atom-probe field-ion microscopy (APFIM). A study was commenced of interfacial segregation at metal/metal oxide interfaces; the system being studied is the Cu(Ag)/MgO(222) heterophase interface, where Ag is the segregating species. A study was made of the necessary conditions to measure the oxygen content in MgO precipitates produced by internal oxidation of Cu(Mg) alloys, using APFIM. We are also studying solute-atom segregation at grain boundaries in Ni-Pd alloys via computer simulations and combined APFIM/TEM.


From the outset of Napoleon's career, the charismatic Corsican was compared to mythic heroes of antiquity like Achilles, and even today he remains the apotheosis of French glory, a value deeply embedded in the country's history. From this angle, the Napoleonic era can be viewed as the final chapter in the battle of the Ancients and Moderns. In this book, Robert Morrissey presents a literary and cultural history of glory and its development in France and explores the "economy of glory" Napoleon sought to implement in an attempt to heal the divide between the Old Regime and the Revolution. Examining how Napoleon saw glory as a means of escaping the impasse of Revolutionary ideas of radical egalitarianism, Morrissey illustrates the challenge the leader faced in reconciling the antagonistic values of virtue and self-interest, heroism and equality. He reveals that the economy of glory was both egalitarian, creating the possibility of an aristocracy based on merit rather than wealth, and traditional, being deeply embedded in the history of aristocratic chivalry and the monarchy - making it the heart of Napoleon's politics of fusion. Going beyond Napoleon, Morrissey considers how figures of French romanticism such as Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Hugo constantly reevaluated this legacy of glory and its consequences for modernity. Available for the first time in English, The Economy of Glory is a sophisticated and beautifully written addition to French history.


The development objective of the Social Security Modernization Project for Vietnam is to support the modernization of the social security administration in Vietnam by improving the business processes, modernizing information systems, improving service delivery, and strengthening management and accountability. Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: (1) it is essential to increase the participation of women, especially in the ethnic minorities (EM) groups in the project sites, in various project activities and interventions, such as information dissemination and training; (2) district grievance redressal centers have to give training and guidance on grievance redress mechanism (GRM) to commune officials, village heads, or other related people and run Vietnam social security (VSS's) annual meetings with local people regularly; and (3) adequate timing of training sessions to maximize attendance is essential. In addition, assistance should be provided during the registration, issuance, and guidance for use.


The main product of Indonesia natural rubber is SIR 20. The quality improvement can be done by converting the production of natural rubber SIR 20 to SIR 20 constant viscosity ( SIR 20 CV). The production of natural rubber SIR 20CV need the stabilizing agents among other a mixture of hydrazine hydrate and ammonium sulfate. The research purpose was to find out and to study the formulation and dosage of the mixture hydrazine hydrate and ammonium sulfate on the production of constant viscosity rubber. This research used factorial completely randomized design with the treatment factor consist of percentage of mixture hydrazine hydrate-ammonium sulfate (treatment A), additive dosage (treatment B) and control (HNS and blank/without additive). The treatment A consists of 50%:50% (A1), 70%:30% (A2), and 30%:70% (A3). The treatment B consists of 0.05% (B1), 0.10% (B2), 0.15% (B3) and 0.20% (B4). Parameters were latex coagulation condition, dry rubber content, and technical quality (initial plasticity/Po, plasticity retention index/PRI, Mooney viscosity/MV, stability viscosity index/SVI, volatile content and ash content). The analysis of technical quality was compared with requirements of SNI 06-1903-2000 about SIR. The results showed that the use of mixed additives of hydrazine hydrate and ammonium sulfate had a significant effect on the parameter pH of latex coagulation, dry rubber content, plasticity, Mooney viscosity, and viscosity stability index of the rubber SIR 20CV. The best treatment was obtained by the treatment of A3B1, which is 30% hydrazine hydrate and 70% ammonium sulfate with a dosage o f 0.05%, because c ould produce natural rubber SIR 20CV with grade CV-70 in accordance with SNI 06-1903-2000.


The aim was to investigate the effects of a 48 h period of fluid, energy or combined fluid and energy restriction on salivary IgA (s-IgA) responses at rest and after exercise. Thirteen healthy males (age 21 (sem 1) years) participated in four randomised 48 h trials. In the control trial participants received their estimated energy (12 154 (sem 230) kJ/d) and water (3912 (sem 140) ml/d) requirements. On fluid restriction (FR) participants received their energy requirements and 193 (sem 19) ml water/d to drink and on energy restriction (ER) participants received their water requirements and 1214 (sem 25) kJ/d. Fluid and energy restriction (F+ER) was a combination of FR and ER. After 48 h, participants performed a 30 min treadmill time trial (TT) followed by rehydration (0–2 h) and refeeding (2–6 h). Unstimulated saliva was collected at 0, 24 and 48 h, post-TT, and 2 and 6 h post-TT. Saliva flow rate (sflw) and s-IgA (ELISA) remained unchanged in control conditions and on ER. However, 48 h on FR decreased sflw (64 %) which most probably accounted for the increase in s-IgA concentration (P < 0·01). Despite a decrease in sflw (54 %), s-IgA concentration did not increase on F+ER, resulting in a decreased s-IgA secretion rate by 24 h (0 h: 20 (sem 2); 24 h: 12 (sem 2) μg/min; P < 0·01). Post-TT s-IgA secretion rate was not lower compared with 48 h on any trial. s-IgA secretion rate returned to within 0 h values by 6 h post-TT on F+ER. In conclusion, a 24–48 h period of combined F+ER decreased s-IgA secretion rate but normalisation occurred upon refeeding.


The purpose of the survivor's pension is to create rights for young and old age dependants. In the case of developed countries, the system deals essentially with the spouse survival. In the case of MENA countries, the survivor's pensions scheme provides a wider perspective of coverage and is extended to protect children, brothers, sisters, dependant parents and grand-parents according to specific criteria. Two objectives of survivor's pensions can be distinguished. On the one hand, the survivor's pensions aim at providing a minimum of resources when the widow(er) could not acquire any other sources of income. In this case, the widow survivor's pension is provided to the most modest households in order to help them from plunging in extreme poverty. This context prevails widely in MENA countries, where poverty is high and the level of dependancy is also prominent. On the other hand, a second perspective considers the survivor's pensions as a pension right to the widow (er) with the aim of maintaining her/his former standard of living. Developed countries are particularly concerned by this environment. This paper propose an analysis of the impact of pension reforms, particurlarly, of the survirvorship pensions reforms on the individual situations of retirees. The analysis focuses on Moroccan pension system and will consider a representative sample of members of the main schemes in Morocco.


The effect of ammonium sulphate supply on plant Cd uptake, growth and photosynthesis of bean plants (cv. Limburgse vroege) grown in Cd-contaminated artifi cial soil was studied. The experiments were performed at controlled conditions in absence or presence of Cd (0 or 50 mg Cd kg-1 soil) and with or without supply of ammonium sulphate [0 or 0.687 g (NH4)2SO4 kg-1]. Cadmium inhibited both growth and photosynthetic activity of bean plants. The supply of ammonium sulphate had no signifi cant effect on plant Cd uptake and growth inhibition, but to some extend, reduced Cd-induced stress and its negative impact on the photosynthetic performance.


The Hough Transform (HT) is a method for extracting straight lines from an edge image. The main limitations of the HT for usage in actual applications are computation time and storage requirements. This paper reports a hardware architecture for HT implementation on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with parallelized voting procedure. The 2-dimensional accumulator array, namely the Hough space in parametric form (ρ, θ), for computing the strength of each line by a voting mechanism is mapped on a 1-dimensional array with regular increments of θ. Then, this Hough space is divided into a number of parallel parts. The computation of (ρ, θ) for the edge pixels and the voting procedure for straight-line determination are therefore executable in parallel. In addition, a synchronized initialization for the Hough space further increases the speed of straight-line detection, so that XGA video processing becomes possible. The designed prototype system has been synthesized on a DE4 platform with a Stratix-IV FPGA device. In the application of road-lane detection, the average processing speed of this HT implementation is 5.4 ms per XGA-frame at 200 MHz working frequency.


ARTHRITIS AND STILL SERVING The review by Wg Cdr Bennett and colleagues at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre (DMRC) at Headley Court is one of three offerings from that institution in this edition which reminds us that their work involves more than post-injury rehabilitation. Bennett reports the results of biological drug therapy in a small but important cohort of serving soldiers and examines the issues regarding their safety and efficacy. Most importantly he records DMRC's success in maintaining what are often valuable senior soldiers in useful military employment.


Abstract Soil salinity is a major soil degradation threat especially for arid coastal environments where it hinders agricultural production, thus imposing a desertification risk. In the prospect of a changing climate, soil salinity caused by brackish water irrigation introduces additional uncertainties regarding the viability of deficit irrigation and intensive cultivation practices such as greenhouse cropping. Here, we propose a modification of the SALTMED leaching requirement model to account for greenhouse cultivation conditions. The model is applied in the RECARE Project Case Study of Timpaki, a semiarid region in south-central Crete, Greece, where greenhouse horticulture is an important land use. Excessive groundwater abstractions toward irrigation have resulted in a drop of the groundwater level in the coastal part of the aquifer, thus leading to seawater intrusion and in turn to soil salinization. Crop yield and soil profile electrical conductivity (EC) sensitivity to initial soil EC (up to 2 dS m−1) and irrigation water EC (up to 3 dS m−1) are modeled for the locally popular horticultural crops of Solanum lycopersicum, Solanum melongena, and Capsicum annuum. Climate model data obtained from nine general circulation models for the "worst case" representative concentration pathway of 8.5 W m−2 of the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project are corrected for bias against historical observations with the Multisegment Statistical Bias Correction method and used to estimate crop yield and soil profile EC sensitivity in a warmer future. Results show that the effects of climate change on S. lycopersicum greenhouse cultivations of Timpaki will be detrimental, whereas S. melongena and C. annuum cultivations may show greater resilience.


Spent catalysts for sulfuric acid production have large amount of vanadium and due to environmental authority it is required to reduce the vanadium contain of the spent catalyst. Experimental investigation was conducted to study the vanadium recovery from spent catalyst via leaching process using sodium hydroxide to study the effect of process variables (temperatures, sodium hydroxide molarities, leaching time and particle size) on vanadium recovery. The effect of process variables (temperature, particle size,molarities of sodium hydroxide and leaching time) on the percentages of vanadium recovery were investigated and discussed .It was found that the percentage of vanadium recovery increased with increasing temperature up to 100 , increasing sodium hydroxide molarity from 2 to 4M, increasing leaching time, decreasing particle size from mesh 150, 100 and 65. A complete vanadium recovery was achieved at the following conditions: temperature (100˚c), particle size (150 mesh ) molarity of Na OH(4 molar) and leaching time(5 h).


The E/Z stereoselection in the acyclic oxy-Cope rearrangement of stereochemically-defined 3-methyl-1,5-heptadien-4-ols, prepared via diastereoselective [2,3]Wittig variants, has been evaluated, thereby permitting to propose a reasonable transition-state model for this type of anionic oxy-Cope variant.


Ensemble smoothing can be used as a cost-efficient addition to ensemble square root Kalman filters to improve a reanalysis in data assimilation. To correct a past state estimate, the smoother utilizes the cross-covariances between the filtered state ensemble at the present time and a past ensemble at the time where the smoothing is performed. Using the cross-covariances relies on the assumption that the dynamics of the system under consideration are linear. For nonlinear models, it can be expected that the smoothing is suboptimal.We discuss the influence of nonlinearity on the performance of ensemble smoothing based on numerical experiments with the Lorenz-96 model and a realistic ocean circulation model. The experiments show that there exists an optimal smoothing time interval (lag), which depends on the strength of the nonlinearity. For very long lags, the smoothing can result in a deterioration of the state estimate compared to the filtered result. In the case of multivariate assimilation, different fields show distinct optimal smoother lags. In practice, one will have to choose either a compromise for all fields, or one needs to smooth over different lags specific for each field.


Thach Khoan, Phu Tho area is the area with great potential for weathered kaolinite source from pegmatites of the Tan Phuong complex. This kaolin has quite good quality and is used in many traditional applications such as high quality ceramic glaze, high-grade bricks. However, the use of this material in the treatment of water pollution is still limited. In this study, the natural kaolin material from Thach Khoan area, Phu Tho province with about 87% amount of tubular halloysites was used to remove Cd2+ ion from water. The factors of pH, contact time, the adsorbent weight, and initial concentration of Cd2+ were studied to access their effects on the Cd2+ ion adsorption process using this raw material. The results indicated that under the conditions of pH0 of 6.5 and at room temperature (25 oC), with 0.8 g of halloysite powder and Cd2+ initial concentration of 30 mg/L, the adsorption of Cd2+ could reach equilibrium after 50 minutes with an efficiency of 86.31%. The adsorption process follows the Langmuir adsorption isotherm model with the maximum monolayer adsorption capacity of 2.75 mg/g and follows the second-order pseudo-adsorption kinetic equation. The results show that the natural halloysite material without treatment has the potential in using to remove heavy metal ions in polluted water and needs to be studied further.


Freshly isolated effector cells expressing natural cell-mediated cytotoxicity (NCMC) against cultured target cells possessed antibodies attached to Fc receptors on their cell surfaces. A wide variety of natural antibodies in the circulation combined with the receptors on effector cells to allow recognition of the many specificities on cultured target cells and resulted in reactions with an overall appearance of nonselectiveness. The role of antibodies in the specificity of NCMC was demonstrated by recovery of NCMC by trypsinized effector cells when incubated in serum. With absorbed serum, activity was selectively weaker against the absorbing target cell. When effector cells were reconstituted with antibodies eluted from the absorbing cells, selective cytotoxicity for that cell was detected. The specificity of effector cells reconstituted with eluted antibodies confirmed the results from previous studies on specificity by direct cytotoxicity and by competitive inhibition of cytotoxicity and supported the role of antibodies in NCMC.


PURPOSE
Germline SDHB, SDHC, and/or SDHD mutations have been reported in familial and apparently sporadic paragangliomas (PGLs). There is, however, some variation in the prevalence, penetrance, and phenotypic expression of the succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) mutated gene among different populations. We sought to determine whether germline mutations in SDHB, SDHC, and/or SDHD play a role in cervical PGLs from northern Spain, where this disorder is particularly frequent, and whether there is any difference with respect to the data published in other populations.

DESIGN
Thirty-six sporadic cervical PGLs and four familial PGLs were investigated by PCR-single-strand conformation polymorphism analysis and sequencing. Computational biology was applied to address the structural-conformational changes behind missense mutations and, simultaneously, infer the possible consequences in protein function.

RESULTS
Eight sporadic cases (22.2%) carried pathogenic germline mutations, six of which were in SDHB and two in SDHD. Three families had mutations in SDHD and one in SDHB. Seven of 11 different pathogenic mutations (64%) affected SDHB. Ten mutations were novel. Missense mutations were primarily found in SDHB and frameshift mutations in SDHD. Missense SDHB mutations seemed to alter the enzymatic activity by hampering the electron transfer. SDH-linked tumors occurred mainly in males (P = 0.0033), occurred at a younger age (P < 0.0001), were usually multifocal (P = 0.0011), and exhibited a larger size (P = 0.0341).

CONCLUSIONS
A significant proportion of sporadic cervical PGLs arise as a consequence of intrinsic genetic factors. At variance with previous reports, SDHB is frequently mutated in sporadic cervical PGLs and the mutations do not entail a deleterious behavior. Therefore, SDHB genetic testing may be considered in all subjects presenting with solitary cervical PGL and no family history.


Abstract:This essay analyzes the photographs taken by two emerging female Kashmiri photojournalists who have come of age in the latest round of mass resistance by Kashmiri youth against the Indian state. Taken in Indian-occupied Kashmir from 2013 until the present, the photographs highlight two forms of protest: one is the protest of the Kashmiri female photographer, seeking to document everyday life under the occupation, and the other is the actual form of protest, be it one of resistance or resilience, depicted in the photograph. The essay showcases how these photographs serve as a counter-memory to the nationalist narratives provided by the Indian state and civil society.


The main aim of the article is to present a picture of contemporary celebrations of the Victory Day in Israel from the perspective of reports from Russian-language Israeli web portals. Although the tradition of celebrations dates back to 1950, the Victory Day did not become an official public holiday until 2017. Established on 9 May as the day of remembrance for the veterans of World War II, it resulted from the actions of the Russian-speaking population in Israel on two levels. The first was the political sphere and the activity of immigrant parties, especially Yisrael Beiteinu, in the work of the Knesset. The other was the social activity of local activists. However, both of these factors would not have been so effective if it were not for the reports of Russian-language Israeli media, in particular web portals. Although the arguments of the journalists associated with the portals were not always fully justified, their work contributed to the increased interest in the issue of veterans in Israel and Victory Day celebrations.


The impressive growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the last decade constitutes a challenge both for social studies on sociability and on ICT usage. It demands to put methodologies and sociological analysis that have mainly been developed for the study of face-to-face interactions into question. The work presented here traces the history of research on communication practices undertaken by the author for more than a decade. The text presents the hypotheses developed about the links between social contacts and telephone usage and then examines the effects of the popularisation of mobile and individual devices such as cell phones on the practices of interpersonal communications. It concludes with a discussion of methodological issues and looks at more recent research that tries to study sociability across all the various contexts and communication technologies that became widely disseminated in recent years. The relationship between communication technologies and sociability has been changed by the current transformation of the technological landscape. Even if the technologies mentioned neither determine nor totally control social action the new communication technologies lay the framework wherein social bonds are created and maintained. Ways to build, manage and nurture those relationships are closely intertwined with the technologies that mediate contacts. At the same time face-to-face contacts and phone calls are often highly correlated. This is also true for the new communication tools. Research undertaken by the author shows that each new communication service has been adopted in a more global relational economy thus increasing the number of opportunities to forge social links. Hence the new communication technologies are not substituting the older ones but a continuous, mutual and stepwise re-adaptation can be observed as new communication technologies arrive and get integrated into the social partition that guides the music of link. Today's integration of ICTs into social practices seems to be particularly intense so that it becomes doubtful to analyse social interactions, links or networks without taking into account the technologies that provide support, guide and give them their rhythm. In particular, the transition towards mobile and ubiquitous communication technologies can transform our accessibility if we compare with their use at the usual places of technology-supported presence, like the home or the office. The new technology-heavy relational practices are based on the increasing use of text messaging (email, SMS, IM). Even though these technologies reduce the availability constraints inherent to ICTs by allowing a asynchronous response to contact solicitations the proliferation of mediated contacts increases the pressure exercised by a new relational pace. This interweaving of the "real" and the "virtual" in everyday sociability may bring about new forms of individual control and ways to manage individual reachability. In the long run it might reconfigure the relational rhythms and social norms


This paper documents for the first time a volume-sensitive Ca2+ influx pathway in osteocytes, which transmits loading-induced signals into bone formation. Stretch loading by swelling rat and chicken osteocytes in hypo-osmotic solution induced a rapid and progressive increase of cytosolic calcium concentration, [Ca2+] i . The influx of extracellular Ca2+ explains the increased [Ca2+] i that paralleled the increase in the mean cell volume. Gadolinium chloride (Gd3+), an inhibitor of stretch- activated cation channels, blocked the [Ca2+] i increase caused by hypotonic solutions. Also, the expression of α1C subunit of voltage-operatedl-type Ca2+ channels (α1C) is required for the hypotonicity-induced [Ca2+] i increase judging from the effect of α1C antisense oligodeoxynucleotides. Parathyroid hormone (PTH) specifically potentiated the hypotonicity-induced [Ca2+] i increase in a dose-dependent manner through the activation of adenyl cyclase. The increases induced by both PTH and hypotonicity were observed primarily in the processes of the osteocytes. In cyclically stretched osteocytes on flexible-bottomed plates, PTH also synergistically elevated the insulin-like growth factor-1 mRNA level. Furthermore, Gd3+ and α1C antisense significantly inhibited the stretch-induced insulin-like growth factor-1 mRNA elevation. The volume-sensitive calcium influx pathways of osteocytes represent a mechanism by which PTH potentiates mechanical responsiveness, an important aspect of bone formation.


The goal of this work is to study the feasibility of the characterization of the fracture strength of porous alumina/zirconia thin layers by three-point bending and Weibull analysis. Films have been obtained by electrophoretic deposition on graphite and thermo-gelation of the deposit with carrageenan. On sintering, graphite is burned out and self-supported films are obtained. Strength values are well fitted to a simple two-parameter Weibull distribution. The fracture origins are subcritical growth cracks that originated at the surface irregularities associated with the processing method. A Weibull modulus around 3 is obtained.


ABSTRACT To what extent is regulation associated with supply in the platform economy (PE)? We address this research question by analyzing the relationship between the strictness of rules/laws in 59 U.S. cities and the number of short-stay accommodation offerings. We find that the stricter regulation is, the higher the supply in these platforms. We also investigate how the presence (or lack thereof) of money transactions in the platform affects this relationship. We discover that the presence of money transactions in these platforms negatively moderates the positive relationship between regulation strictness and the supply of short-stay accommodations. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating how aggregate supply in the PE is affected by legal uncertainties, thereby joining the debate on how digital platforms are reforming labor practices in major parts of the economy and industrial value chains.


The initiation of bud and hyphal growth in the opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans both involve polarized morphogenesis. However, there are many differences including the function of the septin proteins, a family of proteins involved in membrane organization in a wide range of organisms. Septins form a characteristic ring on the inner surface of the plasma membrane at the bud neck, whereas the septins are diffusely localized across emerging hyphal tips. In addition, septin rings are maintained at sites of septum formation in hyphae rather than being disassembled immediately after cytokinesis. The possibility that C. albicans septins are regulated by the small ubiquitin-like protein SUMO was examined in this study because the Saccharomyces cerevisiae septins were shown previously to be modified by SUMO (Smt3p). However, SUMO conjugation to septins was not detected during budding or hyphal morphogenesis in C. albicans. These results are supported by the lack of conserved SUMO consensus motifs between septins from the two organisms even after adjusting the predicted Cdc3p and Cdc12p septin sequences to account for mRNA splicing in C. albicans. Interestingly, a homolog of the Smt3p SUMO was identified in the C. albicans genome, and an epitope tagged version of Smt3p was conjugated to a variety of proteins. Immunofluorescence analysis showed prominent Smt3p SUMO localization at bud necks and sites of septum formation in hyphae similar to the septins. However, Smt3p was primarily detected on the mother cell side of the septin ring. A subset of these Smt3p-modified proteins co-immunoprecipitated with the septin Cdc11p. These results indicate that septin-associated proteins and not the septins themselves are the key target of SUMO modification at the bud neck in C. albicans.


We report on the synthesis, solution structure and photophysical properties of poly[3-[6-(N-methylimidazolium)hexyl]-2,5-thiophene] bromide (P3ImiHT) when complexed with sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS). Synthesis of P3ImiHT used a Grignard metathesis (GRIM)-type route developed by McCullough, followed by quaternisation of the bromohexyl side groups of poly[3-(6-bromohexyl)thiophene] with N-methylimidazole. P3ImiHT was mixed with either SDS or deuterated SDS to form the P3ImiHT(SDS)x complex, where x is the molar ratio of surfactant to polyelectrolyte repeat unit, in D2O and studied using small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) and optical spectroscopy. Marked differences in behaviour are observed upon interaction of P3ImiHT with SDS compared with the related poly[3-(6-trimethylammoniumhexyl)thiophene] bromide (P3TMAHT). At room temperature, P3ImiHT forms charged aggregates with electrostatic repulsion which are eliminated by the SDS addition. For x ≤ 1 P3ImiHT and SDS are molecularly mixed and form ellipsoidal (x = 1/5) or sheet-like (x = 1/2–1) P3ImiHT(SDS)x aggregates. No visible precipitation is observed around the nominal charge compensation point (x = 1). For x > 1, P3ImiHT(SDS)x aggregates coexist with SDS rich micelles which turn from thick rod-like (x = 3/2) to non-charged (x = 2) and charged ellipsoidal micelles (x = 5). This transition is driven by decreasing free ion fraction. For x = 5, P3ImiHT(SDS)x forms a lamellar phase with a periodicity of ∼270 A. The structural transitions are accompanied by an initial red-shift from 422 nm (x = 0) to 459 nm (x = 1), followed by a reverse blue-shift to 400 nm (x = 5) of the UV/vis absorption maxima. The photoexcitation spectra follow this trend but are ∼50 nm red-shifted, thus indicating energy transfer within the density of states after photoexcitation. The photoluminescence maximum is gradually blue-shifted from 643 nm to 597 nm on increasing x from 0 to 5, indicating a decrease in polymer–polymer interactions.


Abstract Deposition and release mechanisms for corrosion products at nuclear fuel element surfaces in boiling water have been considered in detail. Particles deposit from turbulent eddies, as in non-boiling water. Also, water which evaporates at nucleation sites causes a convective flow normal to the heating surface. Particles in the convective flow are filtered as the water percolates through deposits to reach nucleation sites. If the water pH is low (<9.3 at 25 C), magnetite crystals will grow from solution on the fuel sheaths in both ammoniated and lithiated water. As well, the higher the dissolved hydrogen concentration, the larger the quantity of magnetite precipitated. The release mechanisms depend strongly on water chemistry. If there is no dissolution mechanism for release, then deposits grow until spalling limits their thickness. Results from an in-reactor experiment are used to postulate a spalling mechanism which depends on surface heat flux. If deposits can dissolve, then deposits are thin (<2...


In this paper, a frequency-domain harmonic balance method is developed for solving the Maxwell-Bloch equations or simplified versions thereof for semiconductor lasers. The numerical algorithms are formulated to track stationary, periodic, and quasi-periodic steady-state behavior, including passive-mode-locking operation. The nonlinear set of equations with the Fourier coefficients and the fundamental angular frequency as unknowns is solved by a Newton method. Special focus is put on the derivation of a comprehensive bifurcation analysis tool including homotopy, continuation, stability analysis, bifurcation detection, and methods to handle branch switching. As an illustrative example of the method, nonlinear multimode characteristics of an edge-emitting laser are presented.


Unsteady pressure distributions around a simplified sedan automobile model were investigated by conducting dynamic wind-tunnel testing using the newly developed forced oscillating apparatus, HEXA-X3, which can produce 6-degrees-of-freedom motion. The effects of heaving and pitching oscillation were investigated as the model simulated a vehicle running on a flat road at approximately 40 m/s and 1 Hz oscillation. The effects of the ground plate on unsteady pressure distributions over the model surfaces were measured while simulating heaving and pitching motion at Strouhal-number conditions similar to those for actual vehicles. The influence of the tubing on the frequency response of the pressure sensor was evaluated to be negligible by conducting a calibration experiment first. In the static case, the overall pressure distribution was consistent with that for a typical sedan, and the influence of the local relative flow velocity changes due to the contraction effect was observed in the underside of the model. In the forced oscillation tests, the effect of heaving and pitching motions on the flow around the underside was investigated. Effects of oscillation parameters, specifically amplitude and frequency, were investigated using the gain and phase-lag normalized by data from the steady model. Results of the test indicate that there is a characteristic distribution in pressure fluctuation, and the phenomena that become dominant in the flow around the underside vary according to location. The dynamic heaving motion was shown to change the pressure distribution, possibly due to changes in the effective angle of attack in addition to the static effect. The pitching test showed that a dynamic camber effect works in addition to those effects.


The purpose of this study was to see if practicing reading during year five gave results primarily for theweakest readers. During five weeks seven teachers and remedial teachers read with 53 students in yearfive. They were divided into groups dependent on the results from a screening, which was performedearlier in the autumn. The weakest students were placed in small groups and the stronger in larger groups.The students in the small groups took turns reading aloud while the readers in the larger groups readsilently for thirty minutes every day for five weeks. Those with the lowest results from the screening werethe ones who improved the most during this period. The results indicate that the weakest readersbenefitted from practicing reading in small groups.


Here we present data indicating the complexity and highly variable response of barrier islands and beaches to the impacts of tropical cyclones and winter storms along the northern Gulf of Mexico. Data indicate that (1) barrier islands can conserve mass during catastrophic hurricanes; (2) less severe hurricanes and tropical storms can promote rapid dune aggradation and contribute sediment to the entire barrier system; (3) cold fronts play a critical role in the post-storm adjustment of the barrier by deflating the subaerial portion of the overwash terrace and eroding its marginal lobe along the bayside beach through locally generated, high frequency, steep waves; and (4) barrier systems along the northern Gulf do not necessarily enter an immediate post-storm recovery phase, although nested in sediment-rich nearshore environments. The fluid mud environment off west Louisiana coast plays a significant role in damping wave energy associated with tropical cyclones. However, no significant surge attenuation appears apparent. It is anticipated that these findings will have important implications for the longer-term evolution of coastal systems in the northern Gulf of Mexico.


A novel sulfonate flame retardant, 1,3,5,7-tetrakis(phenyl-4-sodium sulfonate)adamantane (FR-A), was suc-cessfully synthesized from l-bromoadamantane in sequential four-step reactions involving Fiedel-Crafts phenylation, sul-phonation, hydrolysis, and neutralization. The success of synthesis was confirmed by FTIR spectra, 'H NMR spectra, elemental analyses and mass spectra. The effect of FR-A on the flame retardacy of polycarbonate (PC) has been studied. Limiting oxygen index (LOI) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) showed that this novel sulfonate flame retardant had effective flame retardancy on polycarbonate (PC). With a small amount (0.08 Wt%) of FR-A. the flame retardancy of PC was improved obviously, which got to UL 94 V-0 rating. TGA and DTA curves demonstrated that the additive raised the degradation rate of PC by promoting the quick formation of an insulating carbon layer on the surface, and confirmed that the flame retardant mechanism of PC/FR-A system was similar to potassium diphenylsulfone sulfonate (KSS).


To enhance the stability of sulfur cathode for a high energy lithium–sulfur battery, sulfur–activated carbon (S–AC) composite was prepared by encapsulating sulfur into micropores of activated carbon using a solution-based processing technique. In the analysis using the prepared specimen of S–AC composite by the focused ion beam (FIB) technique, the elemental sulfur exists in a highly dispersed state inside the micropores of activated carbon, which has a large surface area and a narrow pore distribution. The S–AC composite was characterized through X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method, selected area electron diffraction (SAED), energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDX), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), thermogravimetry analysis (TGA), and field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM). A lithium–sulfur cell using the S–AC composite has a high first discharge capacity over 800 mA h g−1 S even at a high current density such as 2C (3200 mA g−1 S) and has good cycleability around 500 mA h g−1 S discharge capacity at the 50th cycle at the same current density.


In humans, the liver is an organ involved in various processes critical for life. The liver secrets bile produces plasma proteins such as albumin tightly regulates the composition of blood plasma controls the flow of energy and nutrients in tissues, involved in detoxification processes, and the excretion of waste products. Because of these vital functions in the human body, it is essential to assess hepatic injury and malfunction accurately. Evaluating elevations in the serum hepatic enzymes and correlating the results with the medical history and physical examination can assist in delineating the differential diagnosis. Among these hepatic enzymes, transaminases, mainly alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST).This review focuses on the significance of the hepatic enzyme ALT in assessing hepatic injury and malfunction. ALT is aggregated primarily in the cytosol of hepatocytes and consists of 496 amino acids and has a half-life of approximately 47 hours. ALT is normally detectable in serum at low concentrations (typically <30 IU/L). However, any process that leads to loss of hepatocyte membrane integrity or necrosis results in the release of ALT in high concentrations in the plasma.Therefore, the elevation of serum ALT concentration is a sensitive but not specific measure of hepatocellular injury, as the degree of elevation can not determine the exact cause. The most common causes are alcohol-induced liver injury, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), chronic hepatitis B or C, autoimmune hepatitis, and drug or herbal supplement-induced liver injury. Other causes include hemochromatosis, vascular disease, acute viral hepatitis, and genetic disorders affecting the liver.


Macrosocial changes may generate influences on marital quality. This study used data from the 2002–2012 Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice surveys conducted by the Family Planning Association of Hong Kong to track the trends of marital satisfaction of both husbands and wives over a 10-year period in Hong Kong, with associated factors. Results indicated that 85% of the husbands and around 80% of the wives reported that they were satisfied with their marital relationships, and no significant changes in general were observed for them between 2002 and 2012 except for some subgroups. Husbands aged 45–49 years, in employment and whose monthly household income between 25,000 HKD and 39,999 HKD, reported marital satisfaction decreased over the past 10 years and wives with primary education or below also reported a decreasing trend during this period. Education and family income had positive influences on the husbands' and wives' marital satisfaction, and husbands were more likely to be sensitive to the unemployment. Less than one-third of couples needed professional counseling on family-related issues, and couple conflicts and work–family conflicts were the urgent needs that should be given priority in delivering services. The implications of this study are discussed in the Chinese context of Hong Kong.


Metalliferous (Fe-Cu-Pb-Zn) quartz-carbonate-sulphide veins cut greenschist to epidote-amphibolite facies metamorphic rocks of the Dalradian, SW Scottish Highlands, with NE-SW to NW-SE trends, approximately parallel or perpendicular to regional structures. Early quartz was followed by pyrite, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, galena, barite, late dolomite-ankerite and clays. Both quartz-sulphide and carbonate vein mineralisation is associated with brecciation, indicating rapid release of fluid overpressure and hydraulic fracturing.

Two distinct mineralising fluids were identified from fluid inclusion and stable isotope studies. High temperature (>350°C) quartz-precipitating fluids were moderately saline (4.0-12.7 wt.% NaCl equivalent) with low
(approximately 0.05). Quartz 18O (+11.7 to +16.5) and sulphide 34S (13.6 to 1.1) indicate isotopic equilibrium with host metasediments (rock buffering) and a local metasedimentary source of sulphur. Later, low-temperature (TH = 120-200°C) fluids, probably associated with secondary carbonate, barite and clay formation, were also moderately saline (3.8-9.1 wt.% NaCl equivalent), but were strongly enriched in 18O relative to host Dalradian lithologies, as indicated by secondary dolomite-ankerite (18O = +17.0 to +29.0, 13C = 1.0 to 3.0). Compositions of carbonate-forming fluids were externally buffered.

The veins record the fluid-rock interaction history of metamorphic host rocks during cooling, uplift and later extension. Early vein quartz precipitated under retrograde greenschist facies conditions from fluids probably derived by syn-metamorphic dehydration of deeper, higher-grade rocks during uplift and cooling of the Caledonian metamorphic complex. Veins are similar to those of mesothermal veins in younger Phanerozoic metamorphic belts, but are rare in the Scottish Dalradian. Early quartz veins were reactivated by deep penetration of low-temperature basin fluids that precipitated carbonate and clays in veins and adjacent Dalradian metasediments throughout the SW Highlands, probably in the Permo-Carboniferous. This event is consistent with paragenetically ambiguous barite with 34S characteristic of late Palaeozoic basinal brines.


This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 188575, "A New Shortcut Work Flow in Flexible Reservoir Modeling: Introducing Structural Features Without Regridding," by Alejandro Rodríguez Martínez and Stefano Frambati, Total, prepared for the 2017 Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, Abu Dhabi, 13–16 November. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
 Current reservoir-modeling work flows are rigid, because modification to the understanding of the underlying structural model often requires a complete regeneration of the reservoir grid, which brings additional costs, delays, and incompatibilities with past calculations. This paper proposes a novel work flow for structural-features modeling that allows the introduction of faults and other structural and nonstructural features to any simulation grid without modification.
 Introduction
 The modeling of hydrocarbon reservoirs is a multiscale and multidisciplinary process that usually involves several months for advancement from seismic interpretation to reservoir simulation. One crucial moment in the life of a reservoir model is the creation of its reservoir-simulation grid. This involves the encoding of the so-called structural model (Fig. 1), a set of surfaces representing interfaces between different geological features. A given grid cell can belong only to one side of each of these surfaces, generating geometrical tension on the grid. Once the reservoir simulation grid is created, every aspect of the simulation depends on it.
 Several weeks or even months are spent building and quality checking the reservoir-simulation model, which is completely based on the cell division of the space determined by the reservoir grid. Simulations are then run and compared with actual data, when it is available, or used for conceptual design of production methods and structures. Other times, the model already exists and new production data are acquired. These simulations and comparisons sometimes re-veal fundamental flaws in the simulation model, such as the existence of an unseen or underestimated fault that was not included or the need to model differently the flow across a fault because a fault relay was ignored. In such cases, the engineer can decide either to ignore the issue, leaving an inaccurate model in place for the rest of the field's life but retaining compatibility with previous simulations, or to modify the reservoir properties manually to mimic the missing feature. These manual modifications, however, are extremely costly, and the result is often nongeological and possibly inconsistent with future evolutions of the model.
 A final option is for the seismic-interpretation team to add the missing fault to the structural model. This may require many steps, ultimately changing the geometry and number of cells. Expected timelines will be delayed, the budget will grow, and some development decisions will have to wait for the new simulations. Because of this, in future projects, the engineer will take great care to ensure that every trace of a fault is included in the first version of the structural model. That way, transmissibility multipliers can always be set to unity and the faults can be removed de facto from the actual simulation if need be. This strategy, however, creates large, unwieldy models, often with more than 200 faults.


In this review, we focus on the field of organic photovoltaic cells based on small molecular weight materials. In particular, we discuss the physical processes that lead to photocurrent generation in organic solar cells, as well as the various architectures employed to optimize device performance. These include the donor–acceptor heterojunction for efficient exciton dissociation, the exciton blocking layer, the mixed or bulk heterojunction, and the stacked or tandem cell. We show how the choice of materials with known energy levels and absorption spectra affect device performance, particularly the open‐circuit voltage and short‐circuit current density. We also discuss the typical materials and growth techniques used to fabricate devices, as well as the issue of device stability, all of which are critical for the commercialization of low‐cost and high‐performance organic solar cells. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Climate change is already affecting the distributions of marine fish, and future change is expected to have a particularly large impact on small islands that are reliant on the sea for much of their income. This study aims to develop an understanding of how climate change may affect the distribution of commercially important tuna in the waters around the United Kingdom's Overseas Territories in the South Atlantic. The future suitable habitat of southern bluefin, albacore, bigeye, yellowfin and skipjack tunas were modelled under two future climate change scenarios. Of all the tunas, the waters of Tristan da Cunha are the most suitable for southern bluefin, and overall, the environmental conditions will remain so in the future. Tristan da Cunha is not projected to become more suitable for any of the other tuna species in the future. For the other tuna species, Ascension Island and Saint Helena will become more suitable in the future, particularly so for skipjack tuna around Ascension Island, as the temperature and salinity conditions change in these areas. Large marine protected areas have been designated around the territories, with those in Ascension and Tristan da Cunha closed to tuna fishing. Although these areas are small relative to the whole Atlantic, these model projections could be useful in understanding whether this protection will benefit tuna populations into the future, particularly where there is high site fidelity.


The increasing complexity of configurable software systems creates a need for more intelligent sampling mechanisms to detect and locate failure-inducing dependencies between configurations. Prior work shows that test schedules basedon a mathematical object, called a covering array, can beused to detect and locate failures in combination with a classification tree analysis. This paper addresses limitations ofthe earlier approach. First, the previous work requires developers to choose the covering array's strength, even thought here is no scientific or historical basis for doing so. Second, if a single covering array is insufficient to classify specificfailures, the entire process must be rerun from scratch. To address these issues, our new approach incrementally and adaptively builds covering array schedules. It begins witha low strength, and continually increases this as resources allow, or poor classification results require. At each stage, previous tests are reused. This allows failures due to only one or two configurations settings to be found and classified as early as possible, and also limits duplication of work when multiple covering arrays must be used.


ONE of President Roosevelt's most appealing intellectual claims for the New Deal was that it would experiment with policy, and would discard the experiments which failed to work. It is time to admit that the enterprise represented in the Bituminous Coal Act of 1937 is an experiment which has failed, and, in the nature of the coal industry, had to fail. On April 26, 1941, the Act ceases to be in effect.' It should not be renewed.


Two notions of fractional stochastic dominance are recently proposed by Muller et al. (2017) and Huang et al. (2020), respectively. Our main objective is to understand the comparative advantages of the two notions, as well as their suitability in different contexts, by establishing several new technical results. For a more comprehensive comparison, we further include a third natural notion of fractional stochastic dominance based on the coefficient of relative risk aversion. Among the three notions, it turns out that one can be seen as a logarithmic version of second-order stochastic dominance (SSD), another one can be seen as a power version of SSD, whereas there does not exist a transformation to associate the last one with SSD. We find that these notions of fractional stochastic dominance are naturally connected to five classes of risk measures, including Value-at-Risk, Expected Shortfall, expectiles, entropic risk measures, and loss certainty equivalents. The three notions are further characterized in the contexts of the rank-dependent utility model and the cumulative prospect theory. We make some recommendations on which notion to use in specific situations, as they all have their own merits.


In Reply.— I applaud the letter by Dr Ferrari as an illustration of the kind of interspecialty collaboration that can broaden the clinical training, experience, and competence of future primary care physicians. Both this letter and that by Dr Rivera raise the question of what breadth of practice is reasonable and educationally attainable for the residency-trained primary care physician. Although space constraints preclude response to all of the issues raised, several points must be made. First, the educational and practice goals for the primary care physician are not to become a "jack of all trades" or to "be all things to all people." Rather, the goal is to prepare the primary care physician to skillfully provide a broad spectrum of personal, continuing care for patients and their families regardless of age, sex, or presenting complaint. This assumes that the primary care physician's training will encompass an appropriate body of knowledge,


Antibodies against the Gc2 serotype determinant of gonococcal lipopolysaccharides (LPS) and antisera against strains of meningococci were tested by ELISA against the Gc2 LPS, and the antibodies examined for inhibition by bacteria of prototype strains of gonococci and meningococci. From one of the anti-meningococcal sera and anti-lactose (anti-lac) type of antibody was isolated. The results showed that antigenic sites belonging to the serotype, variable, and common sets of determinants as defined for gonococcal LPSs, may cross-react with meningococci. The anti-lac antibody combined with all of 34 strains of gonococci, with 41 out of 44 strains of meningococci tested, and with a Neisseria cinerea strain. The anti-lac showed no reactivity with any of a number of other Gram-negative cocci or bacilli examined. The results indicate that LPS from most strains of the pathogenic Neisseria species share a lactosyl moiety, presumably an inner core structure, of similar or identical configuration.


Abstract An experiment is described in which the Andean topography in a general circulation model is replaced by an envelope topography and a new model climatology is produced. The resulting simulation is compared to the model climatology of an experiment in which the topography of the Andean region is completely removed. Apart from dramatic local effects, the Andean mountain range appears to exert little influence on the general circulation of the Southern Hemisphere. The experiments are assessed in the context of the geologically recent uplift of the Andes.


The optical sensing subsystem of a LIGO interferometer is described. The system includes two complex interferometric sensing schemes to control test masses in length and alignment. The length sensing system is currently employed on all LIGO interferometers to lock coupled cavities on resonance. Auto-alignment is to be accomplished by a wavefront-sensing scheme which automatically corrects for angular fluctuations of the test masses. Improvements in lock stability and duration are noted when the wavefront auto-alignment system is employed. Preliminary results from the commissioning of the 2 km detector in Washington are shown.


Conjugate optical-conductive analysis is of main importance in thin film processing applications. Several studies have been carried out by making use of the one-dimensional model. In this paper the transient conjugate conductive-radiative field has been solved in the hypothesis of one-dimensionality of the optical field and of two-dimensionality of the thermal field. Results have been obtained with the matrix method for the optical field and the finite volume method for the thermal field. The results show that when the investigation is localized to the center of the spot, the one-dimensional model describes the thermal field quite well. Instead, if knowledge of the temperature is required elsewhere the two-dimensional model is needed. The investigation herein presented shows that for low-conductivity materials (a – Si) the temperature peaks are placed inside the thin film for the absorption function distribution, determined by interference phenomena. For higher-diffusivity materials (c – Si), both the thermal gradient components are of the same order of magnitude. The laser irradiation wavelength is 1.064 μm for a – Si and 0.532 μm for c – Si.


Distraction is regarded as one of the most important sources for traffic accidents, being a contributing factor in about 10–12% of accidents according to traditional crash studies. The use of electronic devices inside the car is a source of driver distraction that has generated a big concern in recent times. One major negative consequence of the in-vehicle use of these devices is a decrease of attention to stimuli in traffic. In order to study the consequences on driving performance, 43 subjects drove the driving simulator SIMUVEG while introducing directions in a navigator. Drivers' capability of keeping longitudinal and lateral control of the vehicle as well as awareness of the road scene was evaluated in this sample of drivers. Analysis of the measures revealed significant reduction of lateral and longitudinal control and of awareness of the visual environment, providing evidence of the negative consequences of interacting with electronic devices while driving.


Abstract The plasma concentration of lidocaine and its metabolite, mono-ethyl-glycine-xylidine, was measured furing fiberoptic bronchoscopy (FB) using an ultrasonic nebulizer to achieve topical anaesthesia. Most patients received additional anaesthesia of the laryngeal region and the tracheobronchial tree during the procedure. The achieved plasma concentrations showed that a substantial amount of lidocaine was absorbed, but toxic plasma levels were not reached. Lidocaine plasma concentration above the therapeutic range for treating cardiac diseases was observed in one patient. The use of an ultrasonic nebulizer with lidocaine before FB seems to give sufficient local anaesthesia and to be a safe method.


Early detection of retinal diseases is one of the most important means of preventing partial or permanent blindness in patients. In this research, a novel multi-label classification system is proposed for the detection of multiple retinal diseases, using fundus images collected from a variety of sources. First, a new multi-label retinal disease dataset, the MuReD dataset, is constructed, using a number of publicly available datasets for fundus disease classification. Next, a sequence of post-processing steps is applied to ensure the quality of the image data and the range of diseases, present in the dataset. For the first time in fundus multi-label disease classification, a transformer-based model optimized through extensive experimentation is used for image analysis and decision making. Numerous experiments are performed to optimize the configuration of the proposed system. It is shown that the approach performs better than state-of-the-art works on the same task by 7.9% and 8.1% in terms of AUC score for disease detection and disease classification, respectively. The obtained results further support the potential applications of transformer-based architectures in the medical imaging field.


The emergence of resistance to antimicrobial drugs in a range of bacterial pathogens of the respiratory tract creates a challenge for the clinical diagnostic laboratory. Resistance to macrolides among strains of Streptococcus pneumoniae has reached high levels in many countries. There are two main types of resistance mechanisms, one (MLSB phenotype) leading to high-level resistance and the other (M phenotype) resulting in a lower level of resistance. As there are indications that high-level resistance may have clinical relevance, it is important to be able to detect such strains. This is now possible with the erythromycin/clindamycin double disc diffusion test. Although resistance to beta-lactams has also increased, there is now evidence that some beta-lactams are still effective against isolates that have low-level resistance. In response to these observations, new breakpoints have now been introduced by the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) for amoxicillin, cefotaxime and ceftriaxone, which increase the percentage of pneumococcal isolates that can still be treated effectively with these agents. As a consequence of the increasing use of fluoroquinolones, resistance has now emerged to this group of compounds and this has been associated with clinical failures. Although standard minimum inhibitory concentration tests can detect strains with high levels of resistance (double step mutants) they are not reliable in detecting strains with a single mutation. This is important as there is increasing evidence that strains with a single mutation in the target topoisomerase are even more likely to develop a second mutation, leading to higher levels of resistance and thus probably, therapeutic failure. Because resistance to fluoroquinolones is currently low in the US, the NCCLS does not recommend that susceptibility testing with the newer respiratory fluoroquinolones be carried out routinely. However, since the respiratory fluoroquinolones have in fact become the first line of therapy for the treatment of community-acquired pneumonia, it may now be time to institute routine testing of clinical isolates of pneumococci to these agents. Simple techniques for the clinical diagnostic laboratory to enable these first-step mutants to be detected are urgently required.


Despite recent achievements by the South African government in enhancing the provision of access to education, the quality of educational information access with regards to the provision of learning resources to high school learners by the government in one of the country's most impoverished provinces, was the focus of this study. The study was an attempt to establish the reality of the availability and accessibility of educational information available to students, especially those in Grade 12 preparing for their Matric examination. Ribot and Peluso's theory of access was utilised for this study, while a survey design was adopted to answer the following research questions on data collected from Grade 12 learners, teachers and librarians: What are the types of educational information available to high school learners in the Fort Beaufort Education District in the Eastern Cape Province? To what extent is the available educational information accessible by high school learners in the Fort Beaufort Education District in the Eastern Cape Province? The results revealed accessibility constraints regarding some categories of educational information resources, including information resources on soft skills as well as information and communication technologies education (mean item scores 3.45 and 3.07 respectively). The engagement of teacher librarians to facilitate robust collection development and support access to educational information is imperative and recommended.


We present a general derivation of the electron spin noise power spectrum in alkali gases as measured by optical Faraday rotation, which applies to both classical gases at high temperatures as well as ultracold quantum gases. We show that the spin-noise power spectrum is determined by an electron spin-spin correlation function, and we find that measurements of the spin-noise power spectra for a classical gas of {sup 41}K atoms are in good agreement with the predicted values. Experimental and theoretical spin noise spectra are directly and quantitatively compared in both longitudinal and transverse magnetic fields up to the high magnetic-field regime (where Zeeman energies exceed the intrinsic hyperfine energy splitting of the {sup 41}K ground state)


We show how a special class of Schrodinger macroscopic quantum-superposition states can be produced by a coherent field propagating through a Kerr medium. We show that these states are eigenstates of the mth power of the photon-annihilation operator leading also to the possibility of producing these using multiphoton Jaynes-Cummings systems. We further show how superpositions of squeezed coherent states can be produced.


Purpose: To investigate the thus far poorly defined impact of perioperative complications (POCs) on clinical outcomes after endovascular therapy (EVT) of diabetic patients with critical limb ischemia (CLI) due to isolated infrapopliteal lesions. Methods: A multicenter registry of CLI patients was interrogated to identify 780 consecutive diabetic patients (mean age 71±10 years; 553 men) who successfully underwent balloon angioplasty for isolated infrapopliteal lesions. More than half of the population (487 patients) was on dialysis. Independent predictors (logistic regression) and prognostic impact on outcomes (Cox proportional hazards model) of POC (ie, death, myocardial infarction, stroke, pseudoaneurysm, puncture site hemorrhage/hematoma, distal emboli, vascular rupture, transfusion, dialysis, and gastrointestinal hemorrhage) were investigated. Outcomes are presented as the odds ratio (OR) and hazard ratio (HR), respectively, with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results: POCs occurred in 12.3% (96/780) of the population. Multivariate modeling identified body mass index (BMI) <18.5 kg/m2 (adjusted OR 1.71, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.89, p=0.047) and tissue loss (adjusted OR 2.43, 95% CI 1.14 to 5.15, p=0.021) as independent predictors of POCs. In a Cox regression model adjusted for baseline clinical characteristics, the occurrence of POCs was independently associated with major adverse limb events (HR 1.87, 95% CI 1.12 to 3.13, p=0.016) but not with mortality or wound healing. In follow-up, freedom from major adverse limb events was higher in the group without POC (85.2%) than with POC (69.7%, p=0.006) at up to 3 years. Conclusion: POCs within 30 days after balloon angioplasty for infrapopliteal disease in diabetics with CLI were more likely to occur in patients with low BMI and tissue loss. POC occurrence was associated with major adverse limb events in follow-up but not with mortality or wound healing.


According to special relativity, a (longitudinally) moving stick is Lorentz contracted. When it is brought to rest, it must expand to its proper length. But, exactly how this expansion unfolds depends on how the stick is stopped. If the front end hits a brick wall, the rear end must (briefly) continue moving, and the stick contracts even further before expanding; if instead the rear end is suddenly stopped, the front end (briefly) continues, and (surprisingly) the stick overexpands before settling into its proper length. These effects of overexpanding and overcontracting are independent of any classical or molecular elasticity, but are derived entirely from the limits of information travel time imposed by special relativity. I explore these phenomena, inspired by the little known "lock and key" paradox.


Abstract Although the nursing literature contains many references to the nurses' teaching, support, and advocacy functions, the consumer and other health care professional literature suggests that the potential importance of nurses in these roles is not widely accepted. In a secondary analysis, we examined nurses' interventions for teaching and support in survey of a random sample of oncology nurses in a national organization. Clinical oncology nurses (n =454) reported their attitudes to and knowledge about suicidal patients. They reported their goals, interventions, and emotional support for a suicidal patient. When nurses described their care, they rarely mentioned patient teaching, emotional support, and advocacy. A gap also existed between the recommended assessments, related goals, and interventions. The nurses' difficulties in responding therapeutically to suicidal patients also emerged from their religious/other values, uncomfortable feelings, inadequate knowledge, personal experiences, and weight of professional responsibility. A small percentage of oncology nurses with good psychiatric skills reported they had no difficulty in their caregiving role including teaching, support, and advocacy.


: A complex vestibulologic and audiologic examination was made in 25 patients with OMPC free of mesotympanitis before and after experimental myringoplasty with hen's egg amnion. The patients were divided into two groups depending on the presence of vestibular complaints. Partial or complete disappearance of subjective vestibular symptoms, reduced stimulation of the vestibular receptors (by 19%, on the average) were detected by experimental vestibular tests on the side of the affected ear. The asymmetry coefficient by labyrinth lowered by 31.1%, on the average.


Informal social security, particularly Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), popularly known as stokvels in South Africa, are widely used within the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa due to the weak and/or non-existence of formal social security. These stokvels remain a major form of social protection for the poor, and their continued existence is a reflection of the absence of a comprehensive formal social security. The study explored the views of stokvel members on how stokvels, as a form of informal social security, can be strengthened to provide meaningful social protection. The study adopted a case study research design, located within a qualitative paradigm. The study population consisted of women members of stokvels with a minimum of five years in the stokvel. All participants were South African citizens residing in Johannesburg's Soweto Township, and were drawn from two different categories of stokvels, namely burial and accumulating savings and grocery stokvels. A key informant holding a strategic position in the National Stokvels Association of South Africa (NASASA) was recruited to be part of the study. Regulation and integration of stokvels with formal institutions, provision of financial support to stokvels through subsidies, and training of stokvel members on financial management skills emerged as part of strategies to be considered in order to strengthen the social protection provisioning of stokvels. It was clear that formalizing stokvels might be one of the possible  avenues that could be explored in order to strengthen their social protection  provision. Key words : informal social security, social protection, strengthening, stokvels, Soweto, Johannesburg – South Africa


AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ROLE OF COPPER DEFICIENCY AND ZINC IN A MOUSE MODEL OF EARLY ONSET ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE Stefanie N. Howell, MA George Mason University, 2014 Thesis Director: Dr. Jane M. Flinn While significant advances have been made in understanding the neural mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease (AD), many aspects remain unknown. More recent theories revolve around the effects of metals in the diseased brain. Building on research previously conducted in our lab, this study examined the roles of two metals, zinc (Zn) and copper (Cu), in a mouse model of early onset AD. The previously mentioned studies found that excess Zn caused behavioral impairments in rats and mice; however, the addition of Cu to the Zn-enhanced water remediated the negative effects seen in the purely Zn group. This supports the theory that the effects of "excess Zn" were due to an induced Cu deficiency. To test this theory it was necessary to look at a Cu deficiency directly. For this purpose, we, together with Harlan laboratory nutritionists, developed a specialized Cu deficient and Cu control diet (differing only in levels of Cu). Wildtype (Wt) (C57Bl/6J) and transgenic (Tg) mice with one copy of a doubly mutated human amyloid precursor protein (hAPP) gene (J20; breeders obtained from the Jackson Laboratory) were raised in one of three groups: a strictly control group (lab water + control diet), or one of two experimental conditions involving excess Zn (Znwater + control diet) and a diet deficient in Cu (Cu deficient diet + lab water). Mice were run in two behavioral tasks, novel object recognition (NOR) and Morris water maze (MWM), aimed at identifying the effects of the metals on memory deficits seen early in AD patients. Mice were tested beginning at 6 months of age. All Wt and Tg groups distinguished the novel object at 15-minutes, groups varied widely at 1 hour, and no differences were seen at 24-hours. In MWM, there was a significant difference between Wt and Tg mice on all measures. Cu-deficient Tg mice were trending toward a significant difference in latency on day 3 from the Zn-enhanced group, who were slower to learn the task. Within the Tg group (MWM), Cu deficient mice unexpectedly performed the best overall, the controls performed intermediately and the Zn-enhanced group showed the worst performance. The differing patterns seen in MWM and NOR indicate that the effects of Cu and Zn are dependent upon different brain structures, and that the Zn effect is not entirely due to an induced Cu deficiency.


OBJECTIVES
Sixty-three patients suffering from benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) entered a double-blind, comparative, parallel-groups study lasting 3 weeks, carried out to compare the efficacy and safety of alfuzosin 2.5 mg tid (n = 32) vs serenoa repens 160 mg bid (n = 31) in BPH.

METHODS
Efficacy was assessed both on clinical symptoms (Boyarsky's scale, visual analogue scale, clinical global impression), urinary flow rates (uroflowmetry) and residual urinary volume (transabdominal ultrasound). Events and reported signs were recorded throughout the entire study.

RESULTS
Statistically significant and clinically relevant differences were found between the two treatments in favour of alfuzosin for Boyarsky's total score (decrease from 9.6 +/- 3.0 to 5.9 +/- 3.0, 38.8% for alfuzosin and from 9.3 +/- 2.5 to 6.8 +/- 2.8, 26.9% for serenoa repens) and obstructive score (decrease from 4.9 +/- 2.1 to 3.0 +/- 1.9, 37.8% for alfuzosin; from 4.4 +/- 1.7 to 3.4 +/- 1.8, 23.1% for Serenoa repens; p = 0.01 for both). Clinically relevant differences were found between the two treatments for visual analogue scale and overall clinical impression at the end of the study. Furthermore, the increase in quality of micturition was better with alfuzosin. The proportion of responders (increase on day 21 in peak flow rate of at least 25% relative to the baseline values) was in favour of alfuzosin (71.8% and 48.4% for alfuzosin and Serenoa repens, respectively; p = 0.057). Both treatments were well tolerated. No patient treated with alfuzosin complained of any adverse event at any time during the study. One patient in the Serenoa group complained of mild pruritus which cleared spontaneously. Systolic, diastolic blood pressure and heart rate did not show any clinically relevant change during treatment with alfuzosin.

CONCLUSIONS
The findings confirm the efficacy and safety of alfuzosin in symptomatic BPH and indicate the superiority of alfuzosin over Serenoa repens in the treatment of urinary signs and symptoms of BPH.


In wideband cognitive radio networks having multiple channels, it improves the efficiency of spectrum access to predict the states of unsensed channels at different locations. On considering the channel states as a matrix, whose rows are the indices of locations and columns are the indices of channels, the prediction of channel states is essentially a matrix completion, i.e. reconstructing the whole matrix by using a few known entries. Due to the challenges of high dimensionality and decentralization, as well as the {\em a priori} information about the similarity between adjacent channels or locations, the traditional matrix completion approaches, like singular value decomposition (SVD) and nuclear norm optimization, are inefficient. In this paper, we propose to apply the framework of Belief Propagation (BP) for the matrix completion. Both centralized and decentralized versions are introduced. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed BP framework can effectively predict the channel states and thus efficiently orient the spectrum sensing of secondary users. Numerical simulations have shown that, for a scenario with 20000 frequency-space pairs, we can achieve a reconstruction error rate less than 20% (5%) with sampling rate 1% (15%). It is also demonstrated that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the general-purpose SVD based matrix completion algorithm.


Nucleic acid hybridization between cellular DNA and complementary RNA to Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) was used to detect the presence of EBV DNA. Nineteen of 20 established human lymphoid cell lines studied have contained EBV genomes in various amounts. The lines containing EBV DNA included 5 originating from tissues of patients with various diseases as well as from healthy donors. The antibody titers to herpes group viruses in the donors and the presence of detectable EBV virion or associated antigens in the cell lines showed little if any correlation with the number of EBV genome equivalents in the established lymphoblastoid cell lines. However, large numbers of EBV genome equivalents were associated with the finding of virions by electron microscopy and of viral antigens by immunofluorescence. A unique cell line, RPMI 8226, identified as a myeloma cell line, did not contain detectable EBV genome. All 20 cell lines were identified as being of thymus-independent lymphocyte (B-cell) origin on the basis of either immunoglobulin synthesis, presence of membrane receptor sites for immunoglobulin G and complement, or the presence of both properties.

The study showed the consistent presence of the EBV genome in all established lymphoblastoid cell lines with B-cell surface markers.


Concept «los» («destiny») as a key in the Polish culture has many lexical representation. «Destiny» in Polish is the life, the existence of someone or something; future, sequence of events; the supreme regulatory beginning. Destiny is thought of as contradictory, ambivalent beginning. It is able to help or hinder. Carriers of the Polish language are ambivalent in their relation to the destiny. Presence of the destiny may either be approved or denied. Poles have different views on the nature of destiny. On the one hand, destiny is presented as unchangeable and predefined from above. On the other, there is a view that it is created during the life (existence), and, for example, a person can have a significant influence on it. Metaphorically in Polish destiny is represented by the signs of person, connecting or disconnecting, gracious or formidable beginning.


South Africa is a member of the Southern African Development Community and it is termed the economic master minder of the region due to its economic development in the region unlike the other member states. Therefore by virtue of signing the 1992 SADC treaty it meant that everything that happens in South Africa or that South Africa does has to be in line with the SADC principles or objectives. The research study therefore assessed the impact of the South African xenophobic attacks on SADC regional integration principles or objectives. It is also quite important to highlight that words principles and objectives were used interchangeably throughout the study. Therefore before assessing the impact the study highlighted the SADC principles or objectives which are, to enhance economic development in the region through poverty alleviation, promote free movement of people and goods, consolidate peace, stability and security in the region as well as to promote cultural exchange in the region through interaction to mention but a few. The study highlighted the nature of xenophobia at a global perspective then moved on to reveal the nature of xenophobia in South Africa which is then traced from pre apartheid then post apartheid up until 2017.The driving force towards the whole study was based on the fact that the SA xenophobic attacks have been occurring periodically ever since apartheid which in turn has moved from being a national problem to being a regional problem as it threatens the success of regional integration in Southern Africa. In the research the impact of SA xenophobic attacks was assessed under three main dimensions which were political, economic and social impact that the attacks have on the various objectives or principles .It is imperative for one to note that literature written by other scholars on the subject at hand was critically reviewed giving detail and gaps that haven't been fully addressed by various scholars which are the main reason why this study had to be carried out. The research used a qualitative approach mostly though the quantitative approach is also applied to explain data that is in numeric form. For a reliable data collection procedure research instruments like interviews, questioners, visual presentations and desk top analysis were used. It is also important to note that data was analyzed using excel in the computer for presentation of pie charts and tables and then descriptive method is given in words to explain information presented by graphs. Last but not least after all has been said and done conclusions and recommendations of the study were given as a way of cementing the whole research.


OBJECTIVES
To assess the effectiveness and compliance to a short center-based intensive rehabilitation program followed by a home-based program for chronic low back pain.

METHODS
Open prospective study in patients with chronic low back pain. The program included five weekly meetings of 12 day. Followed by a home-based program consigned on a booklet. Evaluation of deficiencies (lumbar and radicular pains on an analog visual scale, Schöber Mac Rae test, distance finger-ground, Shirado test, Sorensen test), disabilities (Quebec functional index), and handicap (analog visual scale) were assessed at J0, five weeks, three months and one year. Compliance was assessed quantitatively (a number of exercises, duration of the meetings, numbers meetings per week) and qualitatively (semi-quantitative ordinal scale). Patient's global opinion on the effectiveness of the program was collected on a semi-quantitative ordinal scale.

RESULTS
60 patients (20 women), aged of 45 +/- 10,4 years, were included. Duration of the symptoms was 110 +/- 123 months. At five weeks, a significant improvement of all parameters was observed. This improvement was maintained at three months. At 12 months, there was no more significant improvement. Compliance to the program was 64,4%. 40.7% of the patient did not realize their exercises correctly. The majority gave up back muscle isometric reinforcement exercises. Score of Shirado test, Quebec index and EVA handicap were significantly different in the group realizing the home-base program. At one year, 79% of the patients regarded this program as useful.

CONCLUSION
Although quantitative compliance with the home-based program can be considered as satisfactory, the effectiveness of this intensive rehabilitation program of lumbar decrease after three months. This can be explained by a fast deterioration of qualitative compliance. The effectiveness of a short supervised program between 3 and 6 months associated a more powerful message of motivation must be evaluated.


Ethylene oxide(EO) and propylene oxide(PO) random copolyethers were synthesized by the sequential addition of the mixture of ethylene oxide and propylene oxide to propylene glycol (initiator) in the presence of potassium hydroxide(KOH), and characterized with infrared spectrum(FTIR) and nuclear magnetism resonance(NMR). The effects of catalyst concentration, reaction temperature, charging rate and EO/PO mixture ratio on the polymerization reaction were investigated. It was revealed that the optimal reaction condition is the ratio of 2.5:1000(KOH mass vs. product mass), at 114.6℃ and pressure below 0.4MPa. The residual KOH was neutralized by phosphoric acid(H3PO4). Then the crude copolyether was refined with adsorbents, and the refined copolyether, which contains less than 0.7μg/ml K+, was obtained as colorless, viscous liquid.


The aim of this study is to determine the levels of plasma fibronectin in leprosy patients of Nigerian origin. Seventy leprosy patients, 42 men and 28 women, aged 20 to 70 years, of Mile 4 Hospital Abakalilki in Ebonyi State of Nigeria and seventy age and sex-matched apparently normal subjects were used.  Some (44) of the patients were on multiple drug therapy with dapsone, rifampicin, and clofazimine as the mainline drugs. The remaining 26 patients had stable treated leprosy but were living in the colony, (on-colony). Study protocol was approved by the Ethic Committee of the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Enugu and informed consent was obtained from all subjects before collection of data and samples was made. Plasma fibronectin was assayed by an ELISA method. The leprosy patients had mean plasma fibronectin levels of 70.51 ± 17.83 µg/ml, men 85.39 ± 18.0 µg/ml, women 63.19 ± 3.63 µg/ml compared with the mean control value of 286.2 ± 130 µg/ml, men 395.5 ± 114.5 µg/ml, women 208.9 ± 71.69 µg/ml (p < 0.001). Peak control values were observed in the fifth decade of life, 40 to 49 years, and declined steadily thereafter. The peak values for the patients were observed in third decade of life, 20 to 29 years, and declined steadily with advancing age. Patients on drugs had lower fibronectin values, 71.32 ± 13.83 µg/ml, than those living on colony, 85.30 ± 20.50 µg/ml (p < 0.05). There is marked hypofibronectinaemia in leprosy patients that may be due to several possible causes. More work is needed to elucidate the exact cause(s) of hypofibronectinaemia in leprosy.

 Key words: Leprosy, hypofibronectinaemia, plasma fibronectin, adhesion protein, Nigerian lepers.


This is a conceptional article which the writer proposes a concept of teaching English trhough Poem. The integrated of literature in language teaching is very important. The most widely used language in the world is English, there are many people need to learn English for communication. There are several ways of teaching English, one of them is through literature that is a part of a language, the use of literature in English language teaching can be as authentic material. There are many literary works that can be used for teaching English, one of them is the poem. Hypothetically, the use of poem in English language teaching can help the teacher improve the students' English language skills and knowledge about the culture of the nation of English. In a class, a teacher should be creative and give the opportunity for students to use English actively and understanding the poem content.


Casts and molds of soft-bodied organisms in Ediacaran sandstones ("Ediacara-style" fossilization) have played an important role in reconstruction of the emergence and radiation of early complex macroscopic life. However, the preservational processes responsible for the Ediacara fossil record are still vigorously debated. Whereas classic studies proposed fossilization via rapid sulfide mineralization of carcass and matground surfaces, a more recent view posits silica as the key mineral involved in their preservation. We performed experiments in which a variety of soft-bodied organisms were exposed to silica-rich solutions at concentrations considered characteristic of Ediacaran seawater (2 mM). Our results document continuous precipitation of amorphous silica onto the surfaces of these organic tissues under constant and normal marine pH values (7.8). Mineral formation was accompanied by a progressive decrease in the dissolved silica (DSi) concentration of the experimental solution to levels well below amorphous silica saturation. Additionally, we find that the magnitude of silica precipitation is correlated to each organism's functional-group chemistry, as measured by potentiometric acid-base titrations. We suggest that a wide range of soft-bodied organisms were prone to silicification in Ediacaran marine environments characterized by anactualistically high DSi concentrations. This provides further support for the model that the extraordinary moldic preservation of the Ediacara Biota was promoted by early silica cementation and that this mode of preservation can offer an accurate glimpse into the composition of those early animal ecosystems.


Developing and carrying out analyzes that allow nutritional profiling of foods has become increasingly necessary in the food industry, especially when essential nutrients, such as minerals, are involved. In addition, having this type of information makes it possible to characterize the food, corroborate labeling, monitor regulations, improve food quality, and take public health measures when there are deficiencies or excesses in the population level of any nutrient. During this survey, total ash, Cl, Ca, P, Mg, Fe, Zn, Cu, Na, and K, were analyzed in different foods (including meat, dairy, cocoa, baked products, fruits, vegetables, legumes, beverages, cocoa products), for a total of n = 2046, 190, 385, 101, 113, 718, 190, 79, 945, and 190 samples, respectively. These samples were compiled from January 2019 to December 2021 as part of routine surveillance of the food industry. Food mineral fraction was assessed by gravimetry, chloride by potentiometry, and the rest of the analytes by spectrometry. Descriptive statistics were produced to analyze the database, and the information was divided by type of food and minerals.


The freeze out of the expanding systems, created in relativistic heavy ion collisions, is discussed. We combine Bjorken scenario with earlier developed freeze out equations into a unified model. The important feature of the proposed model is that physical freeze out is completely finished in a finite time, which can be varied from 0 (freeze out hypersurface) to infinity. The dependence of the post freeze out distribution function on this freeze out time will be studied. As an example model is completely solved and analyzed for the gas of pions.


Due to reduction in tillering period and increased risk of hot weather during grain filling, late planting results in linear reduction in wheat grain yield. A study was undertaken to determine the effects of planting dates on growth and yield of different wheat genotypes in Sindh. The trial was laid out in RCBD with split plot arrangement having four replications during 2000-01 and 2001-02 at Sakrand, Sindh. Four sowing dates i.e. November 1 and 15, December 1 and 15 were in main plots, whereas six wheat genotypes (V-7001, V-7002, V-7004, MPT-6, Abadgar-93, and Anmol-91) were in sub plots. Because of better tillering, plant growth, growth period, number of grain per unit area and grain weight, No- vember 15 planted wheat had maximum grain yield of 5904 kg ha -1 , followed by November 1 and December 1 which gave 5302 and 4948 kg ha -1 respectively. Wheat planted on December 15 resulted in minimum grain yield of 4756 kg ha -1 . Wheat genotype, V-7002 had significantly (P<0.05) higher grain yield of 5578 kg ha -1 in comparison with other genotypes. Whereas genotype MPT-6 had grain yield of 5366 kg ha -1 that was also significantly higher than other genotypes. However, V- 7004 had minimum grain yield of 4716 kg ha -1 in comparison with other geno- types. While evaluating performance of different genotypes on different sowing dates, V-7002 resulted in maximum yield on November 15 and late planting. On the other hand, V-7004 had lower yield on all planting dates. Results from the study revealed that maximum grain yield could be achieved with wheat planted in first fortnight of November and any delay in wheat planting might reduce wheat yield.


The Islamic conquest of the seventh century marked the beginning of a process that pulled the Far and Central Maghreb into the emerging Islamic world. This process was, howev-er, not straightforward. Step by step, commercial, political and intellectual bonds linked the Maghreb with the Middle Eastern centers, while religious missionaries and political dissidents arrived there and sought for adepts amongst the newly converted population. Umayyads and Fatimids used this territory to fight their battles. The conflicts between these rival regional macro-powers forced the Berber imamates to increase their dependence on the Western Umayyads in Al-Andalus. Economically the Maghreb had become part of a transregional commercial network (slave- trade) and eventually became part of the Islamicate world sharing legal practices, religious doctrines and globally connected scholarly elites. The growing influence of Maliki scholars and practices prepared the terrain for the adoption of the Maliki legal school and the marginalization of local forms of Islam. Finally, the Maghreb became part of a "Sunni" mainstream Islam throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries.


In this paper we investigate the application of a rotational-shear interferometer, toward the problem of simultaneously estimating the directions of well-localized sources, and their spectral profiles. Rotational shear makes possible the acquisition of a spectrum estimate, without the mechanical scan required in using a Michelson interferometer in Fourier-transform spectroscopy. The spectrum and angle estimates are obtained computationally. The interferometric data enables the application of super-resolution direction-finding techniques commonly used in radar and sonar array processing.


Abstract Since the early 2000s, the exploitation of shale gas has radically modified the US energy scenario. In a number of European countries, the US boom has elicited questions about its repeatability in Europe. Among the staunchest supporters of the development of national shale-gas resources were Polish administrations, which grounded their activism in this domain in the language of energy security, autonomy vis-à-vis Russian gas, and in Poland's old oil history. The history of hydrocarbon exploration in the country dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, and is connected to the oil boom that occurred in the region of Galicia. While the boom was over by World War I, promising estimations made in recent years by several agencies about Poland's shale gas reserves have stirred hopes of a 'second Galicia'. From 2007, the Polish government started assigning permits to both national and foreign gas companies. However, factors linked to legislation, geology and macroeconomics caused a premature end to hopes of Polish autonomy. After a reconstruction of the history of oil in Galicia and the constitution of the Polish oil and gas sector, this paper narrates the rise and fall of Poland's 'affair' with shale gas.


Both age-dependent and age-independent alteration of DNA methylation in human tissues are functionally associated with the development of many malignant and non-malignant human diseases. TCGA-KIRC data were biometrically analyzed to identify new loci with age-dependent DNA methylation that may contribute to tumor risk in normal kidney tissue. ANKRD34B and ZIC1 were evaluated as candidate genes by pyrosequencing of 539 tissues, including 239 normal autopsy, 157 histopathologically tumor-adjacent normal, and 143 paired tumor kidney samples. All candidate CpG loci demonstrated a strong correlation between relative methylation levels and age (R = 0.70–0.88, p < 2 × 10−16) and seven out of 10 loci were capable of predicting chronological age in normal kidney tissues, explaining 84% of the variance (R = 0.92). Moreover, significantly increased age-independent methylation was found for 9 out of 10 CpG loci in tumor-adjacent tissues, compared to normal autopsy tissues (p = 0.001–0.028). Comparing tumor and paired tumor-adjacent tissues revealed two patient clusters showing hypermethylation, one cluster without significant changes in methylation, and a smaller cluster demonstrating hypomethylation in the tumors (p < 1 × 10−10). Taken together, our results show the presence of additional methylation risk factors besides age for renal cancer in normal kidney tissue. Concurrent tumor-specific hypermethylation suggests a subset of these loci are candidates for epigenetic renal cancer susceptibility.