We describe the canonical phase space of asymptotically flat gravity in Ashtekar–Barbero (AB) variables. We show that the Gauss constraint multiplier must fall off slower than previously considered in order to recover ADM phase space. The generators of the asymptotic Poincare group are derived within the AB phase space without reference to the ADM generators. The resulting expressions are shown to agree, modulo Gauss constraint terms, with those obtained from the ADM generators. A payoff of this procedure is a new expression for the generator of asymptotic rotations, which is polynomial in the triad and hence better suited for quantum theory. Our treatment complements an earlier description by Thiemann in the context of self-dual variables.


Natural fibres are widely used as reinforcement for thermoplastics to produce composites. In this work, high density polyethylene wastes had value added to them by reinforcing with plant natural fibres (wood flour, rice husks and bagasse) during recycling. The fibres were heated to reduce their moisture content and improve their compatibilitieswith heatedHDPE wastes while binders were used to improve interfacial strength. Composites were prepared by extrusion and tested using universal mechanical testing equipment. The data were analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique. The final results for mechanical properties for wood flour, rice husks and bagasse composites respectively were: Tensile strength 83.87 MPa, 74 MPa, and 62.73MPa; Flexural 26.73MPa, 39MPa and 15.22MPa;Compressive 225MPa, 190.5MPa and 140MPa and Impact strength 78 J/mm2, 81 J/ mm2 and 66 J/mm2. The use of binders significantly improved impact strengths and use of fibres added value by cloning desirable mechanical properties to thermoplastic wastes through molecular re-engineering at the interface. Thermoplastic wastes therefore got a second life in form of new value added fibre reinforced products having possible usage for construction works instead of heading for land filling or incineration.


The mouse p53 protein generated by alternative splicing (p53as) has amino acid substitutions at its C terminus that result in constitutively active sequence-specific DNA binding (active form), whereas p53 protein itself binds inefficiently (latent form) unless activated by C-terminal modification. Exogenous p53as expression activated transcription of reporter plasmids containing p53 binding sequences and inhibited growth of mouse and human cells lacking functional endogenous p53. Inducible p53as in stably transfected p53 null fibroblasts increased p21(WAF1/Cip-1/Sdi) and decreased bcl-2 protein steady-state levels. Endogenous p53as and p53 proteins differed in response to cellular DNA damage. p53 protein was induced transiently in normal keratinocytes and fibroblasts whereas p53as protein accumulation was sustained in parallel with induction of p21(WAF1/Cip-1/Sdi) protein and mRNA, in support of p53as transcriptional activity. Endogenous p53 and p53as proteins in epidermal tumor cells responded to DNA damage with different kinetics of nuclear accumulation and efficiencies of binding to a p53 consensus DNA sequence. A model is proposed in which C-terminally distinct p53 protein forms specialize in functions, with latent p53 forms primarily for rapid non-sequence-specific binding to sites of DNA damage and active p53 forms for sustained regulation of transcription and growth.


Knowledge of the microscopic structure, including three-dimensional (3-D) size and orientation of the precipitates, is essential to fully understand the mechanical properties of the magnesium alloys and designing the alloys with better performance. Analytical TEM with high spatial resolution offers the simultaneous measurements of 3-D size, structure, orientation, composition of the precipitates from one typical sample along an established crystallographic axis. Besides popular Burgers orientation relationship (OR), other ORs such as Pitsch?Schrader OR, Crawley OR, Potter OR and a new OR with the form of [0001]? 1.0? from [311]? and (110)? 2.0?? from (03)? between the magnesium matrix and the precipitate ?-Mg17Al12 are identified by TEM imaging and diffraction techniques. As a case study, the thicknesses of the individual precipitates with Burgers OR are further measured to be 100?200 nm through both electron energy-loss spectroscopy and x-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy combining differential x-ray absorption and extrapolation, which are in agreement with the overall 3-D size statistic distribution results obtained through analysing various samples along various directions. Furthermore, the fabricated wedge-shape structure provides a platform on which to study the dependence of the interfacial strain on the variation of the thickness.


In a 67-year-old woman a tumour-like swelling developed at the site of repeated bilateral injections of procaine solution with polyvinylpyrrolidone as an additive. The histological picture of the removed tumour showed striking similarities to a malignant histiocytic tumour. The diagnosis was histiocytic inflammation due to polyvinylpyrrolidone storage. Retention of polyvinylpyrrolidone increases with increasing molecular weight and is dependent of the form of application. Treatment consists of removal of the storage focus, because polyvinylpyrrolidone maintains foreign-body reaction and absorption and storage in internal organs may cause further complications. Injectable drugs should not be used with polyvinylpyrrolidone as depot-carrier.


This chapter documents the historical evolution of the US urban system. From a handful of port cities in the colonial period, there was a sustained urban growth from 1830 to the twentieth century. While the initial rise is associated with a transportation revolution and early industrialization, regional shocks associated with immigration, second industrial revolution, gold and oil discoveries, and land speculation give special character to US urban development. The rank-size analysis of city sizes shows that there were three periods of urban hierarchy, largely coinciding with functional evolutions of cities: first, as regional mercantile centers; second, as national, industrial-mercantile, densely built cities; and, third as post-industrial, service-oriented, metropolitan, suburban places. A more detailed analysis of post-industrial cities shows that innovations in services such as finance, insurance and real estate contribute significantly to the concentration of few large metropolitan areas whereas manufacturing and retail tend toward medium and smaller cities. The larger cities were considerably more economically diverse than smaller cities, and a spatial analysis indicates that cities tend to co-evolve as they compete to grow. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the impact of political institutions on urban development. In contrast to developments in Latin America and Canada, American federalism that grants significant political authority to state and localities has significantly impacted US urban and rural development.


Welcome to the first of two special issues of the Jazz Research Journal focusing on the music and legacy of John Coltrane. 2007 witnessed several publications and events that commemorated the 40th anniversary of Coltrane's death, each in their own way designed to examine the impact and influence of this iconic artist on jazz past and present.1 Today, the impact of Coltrane's life and music can still be seen across literature, visual arts and performance, and a sizeable body of published work offers insights into the artist's music, spirituality, politics and cultural influence. It is within this context that we felt that a themed issue would not only be timely, capturing some of the most recent insights into Coltrane's music, but also of significant interest to our multi disciplinaryreadership.

Featured articles in this issue were originally presented at the Colloque International John Coltrane, University of Tours, in November 2007. Following the event, the conference organizer and musicologist Vincent Cotro contacted the Jazz Research Journal to discuss the possibility of featuring papers which had been presented during the two-day event. Subsequently, several researchers were invited to expand their work and submit articles to the Jazz Research Journal for peer review. As Cotro states below, research sessions and panel discussions raised a number of critical issues that exceeded the initial boundaries of the colloquium. Contributors therefore had the opportunity to draw on the broader outcomes of the event in developing their work for publication.

As a point of departure for our readers, Cotro has written the following contextual outline of the Colloque International John Coltrane alongside an introduction to the contributions to this issue.


Le imprese dell'Ict in Toscana: profili competitivi e modelli innovativi (by Leonardo Bargigli e Martina Cioni) - ABSTRACT: The impact and consequences of ICT revolution on global economies are actually under reconsideration due to the present crisis of the so-called new economy. But global crises show their consequences also at a local level. In Tuscany, after some years of optimism in which ICT was thought to be one of the possible drivers of future growth, a careful analysis needs now to be undertaken in order to assess the real solidity of ICT-related activities, in particular with regard to innovative capability. The empirical evidence presented in this paper is based on the results of a survey realised in 2001. Thanks to a cluster analysis performed on a sample of 263 firms, the main typologies of ICT firms in Tuscany are identified. These are classified on the basis of a wide set of variables size, R&D intensity, main markets, sources of innovation, human capital-, in order to assess their potential for technological innovation. Through this analysis four main typologies are identified, among which innovative firms (i. e. those delivering products or services which are close to the (technological frontier) represent a small minority. Instead ICT firms in Tuscany are specialized in less advanced activities, like customer-relationship services on behalf of large national firms, standard hardware assembling, software development or customisation for local SMEs. It seems thus unlikely that these firms will be one of the main driver for future regional growth, unless effective policies are developed at a regional and local level.


The objectives of this study are to determine the application of the listening team learning model at MTs Swasta Tarbiyah Waladiyah Pulau Banyak, to improve learning outcomes of Islamic Cultural History subjects in class VIII MTs Private Tarbiyah Waladiyah Pulau Banyak, to find out if there are any improving student learning outcomes through the listening team learning model for the subjects of Islamic Cultural History Class VIII MTs Swasta Tarbiyah Waladiyah Pulau Banyak. The model in this study uses Kurt Lewin's research model which consists of 4 stages, namely; planning, implementing actions, observing and reflecting. The subject of this research is the eighth grade students of MTs Swasta Tarbiyah Waladiyah Pulau Banyak. Which consists of 35 students. Data collection techniques using interviews, observation, documentation, and written test assessment. Before using the listening team learning model, the teacher still uses the conventional model, namely by using the lecture method in learning. So that students are not interested in understanding the learning material and this is very influential on student learning outcomes, namely only 33% of students who completed when I did the pre-test and 77% of students did not complete. From the observations, it was shown that students' responses to the use of the jigsaw learning model in learning showed a positive and enthusiastic attitude, all aspects had been met. The use of the listening team learning model can improve student learning outcomes from pre-cycle students who complete 33% of cycle I students who complete 62% of student mastery increases by about 29%, cycle II students who complete about 100%, from cycle I to cycle II students completeness increases about 38%. With this, the Jisaw learning model has succeeded in improving the learning outcomes of SKI subjects in class VIII MTs Swasta Tarbiyah Waladiyah Pulau Banyak.


Rats with streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes were studied in order to identify abnormal microRNA (miRNA) expression profiles in diabetic retinopathy (DR) and to ascertain miRNAs associated with DR. Histopathologically, we observed characteristic features of DR in rats at 10 weeks after STZ injection. Investigation of miRNA expression profiles in the retinas of control and diabetic rats using miRNA microarrays revealed that many miRNAs were abnormally expressed in DR. On the basis of their fold changes and probability values, a total of 37 miRNAs were selected for further validation by real-time PCR analysis. The results showed that 11 miRNAs were significantly upregulated and 6 miRNAs were notably downregulated in DR. Furthermore, these changes in retinal miRNA expression levels paralleled the course of DR. Levels of miR-182, miR-96, miR-183, miR-211, miR-204, and miR-124 were significantly increased during the progress of DR, whereas miR-10b, miR-10a, miR-219-2-3p, miR-144, miR-338, and miR-199a-3p were significantly decreased. Our data indicate that the aberrant miRNA expression profiles in DR are associated with the development of DR. Modulation of retinal miRNA expression levels may provide a potential therapeutic strategy for DRs.


In this paper, I argue against the epistemology of some contemporary moral intuitionists who believe that the notion of self-evidence is more important than that of intuition. Quite the contrary, I think the notion of intuition is more basic if intuitions are construed as intellectual seemings. First, I will start with elaborating Robert Audi's account of self-evidence. Next, I criticise his account on the basis of the idea of "adequate understanding." I shall then present my alternative account of self-evidence which is based on the seeming account of intuition. Finally, I show how the seeming account of self-evidence can make the moral intuitionist epistemology more tenable.


This study examines children's social responses to gender cues in synthesized speech in a computer-based instruction setting. Eighty 5th-grade elementary school children were randomly assigned to one of the conditions in a full-factorial 2 (participant gender) × 2 (voice gender) × 2 (content gender) experiment. Results show that children apply gender-based social rules to synthesized speech. More specifically, children evaluate synthesized speech more positively, trust the speech more, and learn more effectively when voice gender matches either content gender (consistency attraction) and/or their own gender (similarity attraction). Children's computer self-efficacy was a significant covariate for their social responses to synthesized speech. Theoretical and practical implications of the current study for the design of educational media are discussed.


Abstract It has been suggested that the lysosomal proteinases cathepsin B, L and D participate in tumour invasion and metastasis. Whereas for cathepsins B and L the role of active enzyme in invasion processes has been confirmed, cathepsin D was suggested to support tumour progression via its propeptide, rather than by its proteolytic activity. In this study we have compared the presence of active cathepsins B, L and D in rastransformed human breast epithelial cells (MCF-10A neoT) with their ability to invade matrigel. In this cell line high expression of all three cathepsins was detected by immunofluorescence microscopy. The effect of proteolytic activity on cell invasion was studied by adding various natural and synthetic cysteine and aspartic proteinase inhibitors. The most effective compound was chicken cystatin, a general natural inhibitor of cysteine proteinases, (82.8 ± 1.6% inhibition of cell invasion), followed by the synthetic inhibitor transepoxysuccinylLleucylamido(4-guanidino) butane (E-64). CLIK-148, a specific inhibitor of cathepsin L, showed a lower effect than chicken cystatin and E-64. Pepstatin A weakly inhibited invasion, whereas the same molar concentrations of squash aspartic proteinase (SQAPI)like inhibitor, isolated from squash Cucurbita pepo, showed significant inhibition (65.7 ± 1.8%). We conclude that both cysteine and aspartic proteinase activities are needed for invasion by MCF-10A neoT cells in vitro.


Extensive research has been conducted for decades to elucidate the molecular and regulatory mechanisms for phytochrome-mediated light signaling in plants. As a result, tens of downstream signaling components that physically interact with phytochromes are identified, among which negative transcription factors for photomorphogenesis, PHYTOCHROME-INTERACTING FACTORs (PIFs), are well known to be regulated by phytochromes. In addition, phytochromes are also shown to inactivate an important E3 ligase complex consisting of CONSTITUTIVELY PHOTOMORPHOGENIC 1 (COP1) and SUPPRESSORs OF phyA-105 (SPAs). This inactivation induces the accumulation of positive transcription factors for plant photomorphogenesis, such as ELONGATED HYPOCOTYL 5 (HY5). Although many downstream components of phytochrome signaling have been studied thus far, it is not fully elucidated which intrinsic activity of phytochromes is necessary for the regulation of these components. It should be noted that phytochromes are autophosphorylating protein kinases. Recently, the protein kinase activity of phytochrome A (phyA) has shown to be important for its function in plant light signaling using Avena sativa phyA mutants with reduced or increased kinase activity. In this review, we highlight the function of phyA as a protein kinase to explain the regulation of plant photoresponses by phyA.


Prediction accuracy for mass appraisal purposes has evolved substantially over the last few decades, facilitated by the evolution in big data, data availability and open source software. Accompanying these advances, newer forms of geo-spatial approaches and machine learning (ML) algorithms have been shown to help improve house price prediction and mass appraisal assessment. Nonetheless, the adoption a of ML within mass appraisal has been protracted and subject to scrutiny by assessment jurisdictions due to their failure to account for spatial autocorrelation and limited practicality in terms of value significant estimates needed for tribunal defense and explainability. Existing research comparing traditional regression approaches has tended to examine unsupervised ML methods such as Random Forest (RF) models which remain more esoteric and less transparent in producing value significant estimates necessary for mass appraisal explainability and defense. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to apply the supervised Regularized regression technique which offers a more transparent alternative, and integrate this with a more nuanced geo-statistical technique, the Eigenvector Spatial Filter (ESF) approach, to more accurately account for spatial autocorrelation and enhance prediction accuracy whilst improving explainability needed for mass appraisal exercises. By undertaking such an approach, the research demonstrates the application of this method can be easily adopted for property tax jurisdictions in a framework which is more interpretable, transparent and useable within mass appraisal given its simple and appealing approach. The findings reveal that the integration of the ESFs improves model explainability, prediction accuracy and spatial residual error compared to baseline classical regression and Elastic-net regularized regression architectures, whilst offering the necessary 'front-facing' and flexible structure for in-sample and out-of-sample assessment needed by the assessment community for valuing the unsold housing stock. In terms of policy and practice, the study demonstrates some important considerations for mass appraisal tax assessment and for the improvement of taxation assessment and the alleviation of horizontal and vertical inequity.


Cardiovascular beriberi is caused by thiamine deficiency and usually arises for one of two reasons: alcoholism or diet. Shoshin beriberi is a fulminant form of cardiac beriberi. We investigated the histopathological features of biopsied myocardial tissue samples from two patients with Shoshin beriberi (one patient with nonalcoholic beriberi and another patient with alcoholic beriberi). Interstitial fibrosis and a variation in size of the myocardial fibers were the main findings in the sample from these patients after thiamine treatment. These findings are persistent histopathological features in the myocardium of patients with Shoshin beriberi after thiamine treatment.


The objective of this study was to investigate physicochemical and antioxidant characteristics of immature flat persimmon during 7 heat treatment aging steps. The pH decreased, and hence, acidity increased with aging. Hunter L value decreased with aging. The a value rapidly increased until step 3, whereas the b value decreased. Fructose content decreased while glucose contents slightly increased during aging. Hardness, chewiness and gumminess rapidly decreased, indicating softening in texture, but it was negligible after aging step 3. Phenolic compounds including gallic acid and homogentisic acid were detected at step 3 and then gradually increased with aging. However, contents of flavonoid and tannin were much higher in step 1 sample than others. The antioxidant activities observed by DPPH, ABTS, and FRAP assay were the highest at step 1 possibly due to the higher levels of flavonoids and tannin acid in the step 1 sample.


This paper examines the role of cooperative societies in economic development. The aim is to investigate the ways in which cooperatives can act as agents towards sustainable community development. The paper is a descriptive survey, which involves the collection of data for the purpose of describing the role of cooperative societies in economic development. The paper posits that for over 160 years now cooperatives have been an effective way for people to exert control over their economic livelihoods as they play an increasingly important role in facilitating job creation, economic growth and social development. The paper concludes that to be effective and successful, cooperatives must continuously achieve two inter-related goals: enhance viability and improve ability to service its members; and remain an economically viable, innovative and competitive enterprise.


Abstract : This program was devoted to the determination of the failure modes and to a study of the failure mechanisms in integrated circuits used in the Minuteman II control and guidance system. In-depth failure analyses were performed on 114 rejects from system equipment and 75 failures from vendor burn-in tests. Analytical and procedural techniques not ordinarily used in routine failure analysis were applied and evaluated on this program. The in-depth analysis identified the major device failure modes as (1) excessive surface leakage current, (2) cracked die, (3) oxide dielectric defects (pinholes), and (4) die-to-header bond failures. Localization of certain failure modes to particular part types and vendors along with device usage in system must be considered in assessing the relative importance of the failure modes. The results were compared with data from routine analysis and from the Component Quality Assurance Program. A thorough radiographic examination was performed on a group of 292 devices which had retested good upon submission to in-house analysis. The examination showed that 5 percent of the sample had movable metallic particles included in the package, and a total of 29 percent had some potential reliability hazard. A similar examination of 4,999 production parts revealed an incidence of 0.4 percent with included movable particles. It is felt that the results of this program demonstrate the value of conducting a more extensive routine failure analysis. (Author)


Among 135,000 patients admitted to a hospital and clinic in a large, rural area, 296 underwent roentgenographic examination of the skull because of injuries to the back of the head. A fracture of the occipital bone was found in 98 patients, 32 of whom had severe complications. The 21 cases here described involved lesions in the posterior fossa and included 2 fatal cases of intracerebellar hemorrhage. There were eight cases of extradural hemorrhage in this region; decompression or removal of clots was followed by complete recovery in seven of these. The eighth was not relieved by making a bur hole in the occipital region; he died following a lumbar puncture, and autopsy revealed both an extradural hemorrhage and a bilateral subdural hematoma. Subdural hematoma was found in four patients, three of whom died; it is believed that all might have been saved had bur holes been placed in both supratentorial and infratentorial regions. Subdural hygroma occurred in seven patients, and all survived; more rapid improvement resulted from the making of bur holes into the posterior fossa to permit the escape of trapped cerebrospinal fluid and to reduce the intracranial pressure. In the past, attention has been focused on lesions to the surface of the cerebral hemispheres; these cases show that similar attention should be given to the structures in the posterior fossa.


This surgical video demonstrates a technique for an open-door laminoplasty with its associated risks.1-3 The key to maintaining a strong hinge that can be opened without fracture lies in gradual, slow drilling of the hinge followed by sequential, progressively wider opening of the laminoplasty. This is in contradistinction to a single opening maneuver, which "cracks" the hinge and can result in fracture and disconnection of the lamina from the spine. We present our technique of C4-6 right-sided open-door laminoplasty. A C3 laminectomy is performed instead of a laminoplasty in order to prevent any muscular dissection of C2. This not only maintains the strong muscular attachment to C2, but it also helps alleviate postoperative pain since the muscles are maintained.4-6 The top of C7 is drilled to decompress the C6-7 level, and the C7 spinous process, along with its strong attachment to T1, is maintained to prevent kyphosis. The video highlights methods for maintaining key muscular and ligamentous attachments (C2 muscles and C7-T1 ligament) to decrease kyphosis risk, progressive hinge opening to help mitigate the risk of hinge fracture, and methods to help decrease postoperative pain (avoiding laminoplasty of C3, maintaining muscular and ligamentous attachments as stated above, and contouring the spinous processes in a manner that avoids protrusion into the paraspinal muscles). We have received informed consent of this patient to submit this video.


BACKGROUND
Before primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in patients with ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), it is not clear whether a routine early administration of glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors in the emergency ward is beneficial or their administration in selected cases in the catheterization laboratory.

OBJECTIVES
The present randomized clinical trial sought to investigate whether an earlier administration of Tirofiban could exert any impact on TIMI grade 3 flows and ST resolution in the electrocardiography of patients with STEMI before primary PCI.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Patients with STEMI within twelve hours of symptom commencement were included if primary PCI was planned to be performed within ninety minutes of admission and excluded if they had contraindications for Tirofiban. Seventy patients were randomized to receive 25 μg/kg of bolus Tirofiban early in the emergency ward (the early Tirofiban group) in three minutes and 70 did not receive Tirofiban (the control group). The primary endpoint of the study was a Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) grade 3 flows on the initial angiogram. The study is registered as IRCT201105126463N1 in: www.irct.ir.

RESULTS
The study population had a mean age of 57.17 ± 10.09 years and included 79.3 % males. TIMI grade 3 flow was seen in 15 (21.4 %) patients of the Tirofiban group and 7 (10 %) of the control group (P = 0.06, odds ratio = 0.407, and 95 % confidence interval = 0.155-1.072). Complete ST resolution was seen in 30 (42.9 %) patients of the Tirofiban group and 34 (48.6 %) of the control group (P = 0.5).

CONCLUSION
Although TIMI grade 3 flows trended to be higher in the patients who received early Tirofiban in the emergency ward, the difference did not constitute statistical significance and possible benefits, therefore, require further clarification.


: Low-toxicity pesticides--polycarbazin and prometrin--are suggested for use in decontamination of helminths' invaded soils. Soils in the invasion foci and microfoci should be treated with pesticides dosed at 50 g/5 l of water per 1 m2, in autumn, after the crop, and in early spring after the snow melt, with respect to the periods of maximal accumulation of helminths' ova in soil and preparations' degradation period (about 6 months).


Most current mutual information (MI) based feature selection techniques are greedy in nature thus are prone to sub-optimal decisions. Potential performance improvements could be gained by systematically posing MI-based feature selection as a global optimization problem. A rare attempt at providing a global solution for the MI-based feature selection is the recently proposed Quadratic Programming Feature Selection (QPFS) approach. We point out that the QPFS formulation faces several non-trivial issues, in particular, how to properly treat feature `self-redundancy' while ensuring the convexity of the objective function. In this paper, we take a systematic approach to the problem of global MI-based feature selection. We show how the resulting NP-hard global optimization problem could be efficiently approximately solved via spectral relaxation and semi-definite programming techniques. We experimentally demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of these novel feature selection frameworks.


Introduction
Cereal-legume intercropping is one of the best ways to increase the yield per unit area (to decrease the detrimental effect caused by weeds and to reduce application of fertilizers and herbicides. Stoltz et al. (2014) in a study on corn-pea intercropping reported that crops yield in intercropped plots was significantly greater than that of monoculture. It has been reported that barley-faba bean intercropping led to an increase in total grain yield and it could cause a decrease in weed biomass. Considering the importance of intercropping to reach stability and sustainability in production, the aim of this study was to assess the changes in yield and yield components of faba bean and pea in intercropping with wheat, barley and triticale under weedy conditions in southern Fars Province.

Materials & Methods
A field experiment was performed in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources of Darab, Shiraz University during 2014-2015. Treatments included 10 monoculture (wheat, barley, triticale, pea and faba bean with and without weeds) and 6 intercropping (wheat + pea, wheat + faba bean, barley + pea, barley + faba bean, triticale + pea and triticale + faba bean with weeds) which laid out based on a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications. Irrigation intervals were 8 and 12 days based on environmental conditions. Weeds were hand weeded twice, at tillering and booting stages of cereals. After crop maturity, plants were hand harvested to measure yield and yield components. Additionally, partial land equivalent ratio (LER) was calculated. The partial land equivalent ratio has been defined as a measure of efficiency of an intercrop or mixture. The LER compares land areas required under single or sole cropping to give the yields obtained from the component crops of the mixture. Values greater than 0.5 indicate intercropping to be more efficient than sole cropping in terms of land use, while values less than 0.5 indicate a loss in efficiency due to intercropping. Values equal to 0.5 indicate that the components fully share the same limiting resource. The data analyzed by using MSTATC ver2.10 software (1991). Since the number of the plants was not similar in all the plots, the data was subjected to analysis of covariance.

Results & Discussion
Results showed a significant effect of treatments on 1000-seed weight of pea, number of pod per m2, number of seed per pod, grain yield, biological yield, harvest index and LER. The greatest 1000-seed weight of pea, number of pod per m2, seed yield and harvest index obtained in intercropping of wheat + pea (366.7 g), weed-free pea monoculture (1317), weed-free faba bean monoculture (4149 kg/ha) and weed-free faba bean monoculture (46.46 %), respectively. The highest number of seed per pod was obtained in intercropping of barley + faba bean (3.7), weed-free faba bean monoculture (3.29) and intercropping of wheat + faba bean (2.93), respectively. Total and partial LER of legumes in all intercropping treatments compared to weedy monoculture was greater than 1 and 0.5, respectively. The results showed that weed-free monoculture treatments had the highest grain yield, biological yield and harvest index. However, crop yield and harvest index in intercropping treatments were similar or superior to weedy monocultures. For instance, grain yield and harvest index in intercropping of wheat + faba bean was higher than those of in weedy faba bean monoculture, 102 and 93 %, respectively. In general, grain yield, biological yield and harvest index of pea and faba bean in weed-free monocultures treatments was higher than weedy monocultures and intercropping treatments. Grain yield and harvest index of intercropping was similar or higher than those of weedy monocultures.

Conclusion
Total and partial LER of legumes in all intercropping treatments compared to weedy monoculture was greater than 1 and 0.5, respectively. Since cereals are more competitive than legumes, it seems for increasing the efficiency of intercropping; a higher density of legumes should be used. Additionally, for reducing weed interference and increasing yield in pea and faba bean, the use of cereal-legume intercropping is recommended.


The article deals with H. influenzae (different serotypes) carrier state and immune response before and after the administration of the vaccine "Act-HIB" to children of different age groups. Children aged up to 1 year and over 1 year have been found to differ in the dynamics of carrier state and in the concentration of antibodies of different classes to the antigens of this infective agent, which makes it necessary to carry out their early immunization with a view to ensure their protection from H. influenzae infection.


ABSTRACT We report here the 3,637,012-bp draft genome sequence of Microbacterium sp. strain LEMMJ01, isolated from ornithogenic soil from King George Island, Antarctica. The total number of genes presented in the draft genome sequence was 3,553, and the total number of coding sequences was 3,497. In addition, genes related to the production of terpene and carotenoids were revealed.


Overtopping dam-break flow has great harm to the earthen embankments due to the hydraulic erosion. Some researchers have carried out relevant model experiments, but it is difficult to achieve the experimental conditions for the actual situation. The common numerical simulation is to express the scouring process through the empirical relationship, which obviously could not reflect the real scouring process. In this paper, a new overtopping erosion model using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is proposed. When the shear stress on the sediment SPH particle exceeds the critical stress, the erosion process begins. Then, when a sediment SPH particle is completely eroded, it will begin to move and is described as a non-Newtonian fluid. The unincipient sediment particles are treated as boundary. This model is well validated with plane dikebreach experiment, and has also achieved a good agreement with erodible bed dam-break experiment.


There are many events that occur during adventitious rooting of cuttings from a physiological and morphological point of view. In the current study we evaluated cuttings of Eucalyptus nitens and Eucalyptus globulus to determine the physiological and morphological conditions differing rooting capacity. For thiswe induced rooting by exogenous applications of 4000ppm of indol butyric acid (IBA). After 0, 2, 5, 15 and 30 days of induction we obtained samples at the base of the cuttings for the morphoanatomic and phytochemical analysis (total phenols, flavonoids) and indol acetic acid (IAA). Morphoanatomical analysis shows that in both species root meristemoids formed from cells of the vascular cambium. During the rooting process there were differences between the two species on the measurements of phenolics compounds, E. nitens (800ug/gPF) had significantly higher values than E. globulus (200ug/gPF).Moreover, flavonoid compounds also differ between species, where rutin and quercetin were present only in E. nitens. This indicate that the phenolics compounds could make of difference. During the induction phase (first two days), IAA was in high concentrations, which decreased drastically during the following phases of adventitious rooting, this suggests a fundamental role in the induction phase of adventitious rhizogenesis.


In this chapter, we conduct an empirical study of fluctuation patters of regulatory capital buffers with respect to the business cycle for the 2001 to 2003 period with data of 18 countries and 456 Latin American and Caribbean banks. We also present results for Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela. Our results show that, although the general intuition sustaining the countercyclical approach of Basel III capital buffers agrees with the data, patterns vary across countries, being determining variables bank size, their forms of organization and levels of competition in the region's banking systems.


The traditional way of designing materials, including experimental measurement and computational simulation, are not efficient. Machine learning is considered a promising solution for material design in the recent years. By observing from previous data, machine learning finds patterns, learns from the patterns and predict the material properties. In this study, machine learning methods are used for discovering new cathode with better properties, includes crystal system learning and the property prediction. K-Folder cross-validation is used for finding the best training data with a limited dataset, nevertheless increasing the percentage of training data would ultimately result in better performance on prediction. It is found that, random forest gives the highest average accuracy in crystal system classification, meanwhile, extra randomized tree algorithm provides a higher averaged coefficient of determination and lower mean squared error in the regression model predicting electrical properties of cathodes. The random forest algorithm is chosen from a wide range of machine learning algorithms with the implementation of Monte Carlo validation. Based on the feature importance evaluation, oxygen contents are found to have the highest effects in determining capacity gravity and volume change in properties prediction.


Micro-electromechanical-systems (MEMS) based sensors are used for monitoring the state of machines in condition-based maintenance tasks. This approach is applied at tram depots for the purpose of identifying faulty wheels on trams in order to eliminate defective trams at the entry or dispatch gates. The application of MEMS-based sensors for the detection of wheel faults is the focus of this study. A method for processing of the collected sensor data is developed. It is based on assessing the energy of vibrations at different frequency bands. Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Packet Transform (MODWPT) is used for obtaining a description of the sensor data. The task of finding the energy threshold for detecting faulty wheels, frequency band and parameters of MODWPT which most distinctly distinguish the wheels is the goal of the method. The weighted difference (DW) between the extreme values of energy in a frequency band for normal and faulty wheels is proposed as the measure of the ability to distinguish the wheels. The search for the solution is formulated as a discrete optimisation problem of maximising this measure. Both the simulation and experimental results indicate that faulty wheels have greater vibration energy than normal wheels. The properties of this approach are discussed and evaluated.


In this study, two methods were used to prepare Ce–W oxide catalysts. The CeWOx catalyst prepared by the homogeneous precipitation method showed excellent NH3-SCR performance, with over 80% NOx conversion obtained from 225 to 450 °C under a high GHSV of 300 000 h−1. Characterization revealed that the homogeneous precipitation method can achieve highly dispersed active species and intense interaction between the Ce and W species on the CeWOx catalyst, and thus result in enhanced charge imbalance, superior redox functions, and outstanding adsorption and activation properties for the reactants, which are the main reasons for the highly efficient NOx abatement of the CeWOx catalyst.


This thesis is about the recent emergence of 'love your body' messages and discourse in mainstream women's magazines available to New Zealand audiences. It is situated culturally and historically, in a time when media discourses about women and their bodies are dominated by post-feminist and neo-liberal conceptualisations of bodies as commodity objects of production, representative of successful femininity and an inflexible natural order. This thesis contributes to the existing feminist research literature about magazines by investigating an apparently 'new' textual feature of young women's magazines, and through adding to an emerging literature about the production of magazine content. Methodologically, the thesis draws upon critical, feminist, and post-structuralist approaches as the basis of its own understanding of bodies and the undertaking of research. The research upon which this thesis is based has two parts. First, an in-depth investigation of the text and image content of magazine 'body love messages' in two different titles – Cleo (New Zealand) and Cosmopolitan (Australia) – employed thematic and discourse analysis to explore the kinds of discursive ideas made available through the magazine's communication of positive body messages to their readers. The analyses presented illustrate how 'body love' magazine content i) is framed within heavily dualistic discourses of the woman and her body, using obsessively repetitive images to illustrate its point, ii) constructs women's bodies as essentially difficult to love, and then in turn constructs love itself as a visually evidential practice, and finally iii) introduces a heterosexual (male) partner as an accomplice / audience for this visual practice. The second study involved a discursive analysis of interviews undertaken with magazine editorial staff based in New Zealand and Australia, asking participants about the production of positive body messages in the title(s) they work for. Drawing upon this work, the latter analytical chapters of my thesis address i) how various discourses are used by magazine employees to simultaneously legitimate the limits around positive body content in their magazines, and at the same time construct their practices as those of a 'good magazine', and ii) the centrality of 'images' as a carefully managed topic in these interviews, and what this implies about how 'love your body' content is conceptualised within the industry which produces it. In undertaking this work, my intention was to provide a basis upon which feminist questions about the use and purpose of magazines as cultural-discursive spaces might be revisited in light of the new 'body love' content. The concluding chapter to the thesis comprises a dialogue in response to these questions about contemporary magazine body messages; weighing arguments of hope and promise against more conservative concerns about misrepresentation and appropriation. It also reconsiders the implications of the analyses with a view towards evaluating what, if anything, has changed about the way young women's magazines address their readers' bodies through the production of body love discourse.


Solid state storage is increasingly deployed in all sizes of datacenters, from the small and medium business to the large enterprise. It comes in many forms including hybrid arrays, direct attached drives, PCIe flash and accelerators that fit somewhere in between servers and storage. With the price of flash continuing to drop, hybrid storage is becoming more compelling to the small and medium business for critical computing applications such as databases and day-to-day operational computing.


A pyroscrubber is a furnace used in the petroleum coke calcining industry to recover energy from the carbonaceous contents, including char dust and hydrocarbon volatiles of the exhaust gas from the calcination kiln. The combusted hot gases are used to generate steam and produce electricity, so it is important to optimize the pyroscrubber performance to produce high-grade combusted gases to generate steam but with minimal emissions. A previous study employed the locally-homogeneous flow (LHF) model to study rhe means to improve combustion efficiency and reduce emissions. In the LHF model, the inter-phase exchange rates of mass, momentum and energy are assumed to be infinitely fast, so the dispersed phase (char dust) can be simplified as the gas phase, and the complex two-phase flow is then treated as a single-phase flow. In this study, LHF model is replaced with a solid particle combustion model by incorporating both finite-rate heterogeneous and homogeneous combustion processes. Results reveal that the particle combustion model generates much higher local flame temperature (2200K) than in LHF model (1800K). All char particles are burned before or in the high-bay area. Total energy output of the case with particle combustion model is 92% of the LHF model. Furthermore, motivated by the potential energy saving from removing the air blower power supply, this study further investigates the possible benefit of running the pyroscrubber with the ventilation doors open. Three cases with different combinations of air injections and door opening have been studied. Results show that the gas flow is stably stratified with a large amount of the entrained cold air moving at the bottom of the chamber and the hot combusted gas moving through the top. With bottom doors completely open, sufficient air can be drawn into the pyroscrubber without the need of blowing air in, but the combustion gases will be overcooled making this practice unfavorable from the energy saving point of view.Copyright © 2010 by ASME


The importance of sampling from globally representative populations has been well established in human genomics. In human microbiome research, however, we lack a full understanding of the global distribution of sampling in research studies. This information is crucial to better understand global patterns of microbiome-associated diseases and to extend the health benefits of this research to all populations. Here, we analyze the country of origin of all 444,829 human microbiome samples that are available from the world's 3 largest genomic data repositories, including the Sequence Read Archive (SRA). The samples are from 2,592 studies of 19 body sites, including 220,017 samples of the gut microbiome. We show that more than 71% of samples with a known origin come from Europe, the United States, and Canada, including 46.8% from the US alone, despite the country representing only 4.3% of the global population. We also find that central and southern Asia is the most underrepresented region: Countries such as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh account for more than a quarter of the world population but make up only 1.8% of human microbiome samples. These results demonstrate a critical need to ensure more global representation of participants in microbiome studies.


Background IL10 is a pleiotrophic cytokine that inhibits the antigen specific activation of Th1 clones by reducing both the antigen presenting capacity and the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines by monocytes. It is also a potent activation and differentiation factor for B lymphocytes. SLE patients show increased IL10 serum levels associated with the pathogenesis of the disease. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells from SLE patients, and their relatives, constitutively produce high levels of the cytokine, suggesting an hereditary component in IL10 production. Anti-IL10 antibodies administration to SLE patients may be beneficial in the management of refractory cases. The IL10 gene promoter contains two dinucleotide repeats (microsatellites): IL10G and IL10R, close to transcription factor binding sites, probably playing an important role in the transcription regulation. Objectives To evaluate the association of the IL10G microsatellite with SLE in Spanish patients. Methods 80 unrelated SLE patients from Canary Islands (Spain) fulfilling at least four of the ACR criteria and 79 sex-matched healthy donors were included. A segment of the IL10 gene containing the microsatellite was amplified by PCR and the resulting products were electrophoresed in denaturing polyacrilamide gels. Chi-square test was used for statistical analysis. Results No particular IL10G allele was found to be significantly associated with SLE. Neverthaless, we found an elevated risk of serositis in carriers of the allele 19 (p = 0.007), a significant association of the 19/23 genotype with seizures (p = 0.018), and a reduced risk of renal disorder (p = 0.047) and thrombocytopenia (p = 0.049) in carriers of the allele 23. Conclusion Although IL10G alleles seem not to influence susceptibility to SLE in Spaniards, some of them may be related to the presence of several clinical manifestations of the disease.


THIs PAPER is a report of our preliminary observations on 37 carefully selected patients at Queen Mary and Ste. Anne's Veterans' Hospitals with reserpine (Serpasilt). The study was done from August 15, 1954 to March 15, 1955, and is con-tinuing. The history, pharmacology, experimental physi'ology and first North American clinical study have been reported elsewhere.,


In 2016 the South East European International Institute for Sustainable Technologies (SEEIIST) was proposed by Herwig Schopper and brought to the political level by Sanja Damjanović, Minister of Science of Montenegro. In this framework two design studies have been completed by two groups of European experts: a "4th Generation Synchrotron Light Source for Science and Technology" (SRL) and a "Facility for Tumour Hadron Therapy and Biomedical Research" (HTR). A preliminary report was presented and discussed at the Workshop on "New International Research Facilities for South East Europe" held in January 2017 at ICTP (Trieste). In March 2018 the Steering Committee came unanimously to the conclusion that the first facility to be built should be the HTR. This report contains the HTR study, which was completed in July 2018; the Executive Summary has been written for the readers who are not interested in the details.


A novel device, called the frequency-independent strong-signal suppressor (FISSS), is described. It is placed after the antenna and uses an amplitude-dependent voltage standing wave ratio that exhibits a very sharp transition from matched load to open load. Signals having amplitudes greater than a predetermined threshold (e.g. the interfering signals) are absorbed, while weaker signals (e.g. the spread-spectrum signal) are reflected and extracted by means of a directional coupler. Some laboratory results are described such as the suppression of one or a few CW tones by tens of decibels and the improvement of bit error rate performance of a direct-sequence spread system by tens of decibels. The extension of the FISSS to frequency hopping is described.<<ETX>>


In this paper we consider the optimization problem of an agent who wants to maximize the total expected discounted utility from consumption over an infinite horizon. The agent is under obligation to pay a debt at a fixed rate until he/she declares bankruptcy. At that point, after paying a fixed cost, the agent will be able to keep a certain fraction of the present wealth, and the debt will be forgiven. The selection of the bankruptcy time is taken to be at the discretion of the agent. The novelty of this paper is that at the time of bankruptcy the wealth process has a discontinuity, and that the agent continues to invest and consume after bankruptcy. We show that the solution of a free boundary problem satisfying some additional conditions is the value function of the above optimization problem. Particular examples such as the logarithmic and the power utility functions will be provided, and in these cases explicit forms will be given for the optimal bankruptcy time, investment and consumption processes.


We make an analytical estimate of the maximum 21 cm absorption signal from the cosmic dawn, taking into account the inhomogeneity of gas distribution in the intergalactic medium (IGM) due to non-linear structure formation. The gas located near halos is over-dense but adiabatically heated, while the gas far from halos is under-dense and hence cooler. The cumulative effect of adiabatic heating and cooling from this gas inhomogeneity results in a reduction in the maximum global 21 cm absorption depth by about 40% as compared with homogeneous IGM model, assuming saturated coupling between the spin temperature of neutral hydrogen (HI) and the adiabatic gas kinetic temperature.


old ruling classes, or overthrowing them in revolution." It is the story of this conflict in century after century that Miss Beard relates. Most of the facts which she has used are well known and no important questions can be raised concerning them, but her interpretative generalizations are at times too sweeping and inclined to be sensational. It is easy to agree with her, however, that the actions of too many business men have been reproachable, but, of course, no more so than the actions of any other class of society. FRED M. JONES University of Illinois


Bulb rot disease has become one of the main diseases that seriously affects the yield and quality of Fritillaria taipaiensis P.Y.Li (F. taipaiensis). In this study, F. taipaiensis was used as the research object to explore the effect and mechanism of Bacillus subtilis C3 in preventing and curing bulb rot. Through isolation and verification of the pathogenic fungi, we determined for the first time that the pathogenic fungus that causes bulb rot in F. taipaiensis is Fusarium oxysporum. The results of the study showed that B. subtilis C3 inhibits the growth of pathogenic fungi, and the inhibition rate is as high as 60%. In the inhibition mechanism, strain C3 inhibits the conidiogenesis of pathogenic fungi and destroys the cell structure of its hyphae, causing protoplast exudation, chromatin concentration, DNA fragmentation, and ultimately cell death. Among the secondary metabolites of C3, antimicrobial proteins and main active components (paeonol, ethyl palmitate, and oxalic acid) inhibited the growth of F. oxysporum. The molecular weight of the antibacterial protein with the highest inhibition rate was approximately 50 kD. The results of a field experiment on the Taibai Mountain F. taipaiensis planting base showed that after the application of strain C3, the incidence of bulb rot in Fritillaria was reduced by 18.44%, and the ratio of bacteria to fungi in the soil increased to 8.21, which verified the control effect of C3 on Fritillaria bulb rot disease. This study provides a theoretical basis for the use of B. subtilis C3 to prevent and control bulb rot in Fritillaria.


Different from the traditional way of subdividing the moire fringe that needs complex subsequent circuits, we adopt a linear CCD array to subdivide the grating line directly. Because of the CCD's high sensitivity, consistency and the amount of pixels, the interval between two neighboring lines of the grating can be measured and the subdivision factor is up to thousands of times. Therefore, our device can attain high resolution with limited cost. The circuit is also much simpler than before since CCD driver itself completes the subdividing and digitizing functions. The practical device's precision is better than 0.1 μm and the linearity is better than 0.99.


Background: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether diabetes mellitus (DM) affects outcomes in patients receiving robotic-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RARP) for prostate cancer.

Patients and Methods: We compared the early clinical results of diabetic and nondiabetic patients in terms of preoperative (pre-OP) variables and surgical outcomes. Patient records were obtained from a review of the database for prostate cancer patients receiving RARP at Chang-Gung Memorial Hospital, Taiwan, between July 2012 and December 2014. The patients underwent a comprehensive physical examination and medical history review and were classified into two groups: diabetic (DM cohort) and nondiabetic (non-DM cohort). The pre-OP variables and intraoperative and postoperative (post-OP) data of the two cohorts were compared. In addition, biochemical recurrence (BCR)-free survival and urinary continence recovery in the cohorts were compared.

Results: In total, 363 patients (84 DM 279 non-DM) were enrolled. Compared with the non-DM cohort, patients in the DM cohort were older (68 vs. 65 years, p = 0.002) and had a higher BMI (26.2 vs. 24.8 kg, p = 0.009) the DM cohort also had a higher proportion of clinical T3a (35.7% vs. 26.5%, p lt 0.001) and Gleason score 8ndash10 (26.2% vs. 14.3%, p = 0.019). Intraoperatively, the two cohorts were similar in terms of operative time, blood loss, hospital stay, transfusion rates, and surgical complication rates. However, the final pathology stage of the DM cohort seemed to be more advanced than that of the non-DM cohort. The BCR-free survival was similar in both cohorts, but the speed of recovery from urinary incontinence differed. The continence rates in the DM cohort at post-OP 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months were 30.9%, 45.0%, and 62.8%, respectively, whereas those in the non-DM cohort were 43.0%, 66.5%, and 94.9%, respectively (p lt 0.001). Through univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis, we discovered that DM was an independent factor that affected urinary incontinence at post-OP 6 months.

Conclusion: DM patients could achieve a favorable radical prostatectomy outcome with the utility of da Vinci robotic arms. However, diabetes is an unfavorable factor affecting recovery from post-OP urinary incontinence.


IHF (integration host factor) mutants exhibit asynchronous initiation of chromosome replication from oriC as determined from flow cytometric analysis of cultures where RNA synthesis was inhibited with rifampicin. However, the run‐out kinetics of chromosome replication in ihf mutants shows that they continue to produce oriCs for some time in the absence of RNA synthesis resulting in a twofold increase in the oriC per mass ratio. An ihf dnaA double mutant did not exhibit this continued increase of the oriC per mass ratio. This indicates that ihf mutants can initiate replication from oriC in a rifampicin‐resistant initiation mode but requires fully functional DnaA protein. The origin per mass ratio, determined by a quantitative Southern blotting technique, showed that the ihf mutants had an origin per mass ratio that was 60% of the wild type although it had a normal DnaA protein concentration. This shows that the initiation mass was substantially higher in the ihf mutants. The oriC per terminus ratio, which was also determined by Southern blotting, was very low in the ihf mutant, although it grew with the same doubling times as the wild‐type strain. This indicates that cells lacking IHF replicate their chromosome(s) very fast.


As social media platforms have increased their role as content moderators, alternative social media platforms have emerged with fewer rules and policies on moderating content. One such platform is Gab, a social media platform similar to Twitter that champions free speech with minimal standards on content. Early research has linked this platform with alt-right, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and other alternative content that is sometimes marginalized in mainstream social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. In an effort to provide a means for researchers to study this platform, we introduce a database of 37,012,061 posts (with additional edit histories), 24,551,804 comments, and 819,957 user profiles webscraped from Gab between August 2016 and December 2018. In this paper, we outline our data collection process, describe the data, consider the ethics of our data collection process, and provide suggested avenues of inquiry for researchers interested in analyzing our database.


Aim The past decade has seen increasing civilian tourniquet use driven largely by a military evidence base1. This work intended to correlate available data on the frequency of UK prehospital tourniquet use. Methods Freedom of information requests were made to 13 UK ambulance trusts for numbers of the incidence of tourniquet use from 2015–16 and patient haemodynamic status (blood pressure and pulse) at time of application. Results Most (9/13) trusts were unable to provide data regarding prehospital haemorrhage control techniques as this something that was not routinely recorded. Two trusts had only recently begun recording tourniquet use and so were unable to provide 12 months of data and another was able to deliver number of recorded uses but not patient haemodynamic status. A single trust was able to provide full details of annual tourniquet use in 31 patients. 14/31 (45%) of patients had a systolic BP of 100/min at application. 2 patients had a haemostatic pressure dressing applied before tourniquet use. Conclusion There is a significant lack of data regarding UK ambulance service tourniquet use and this should be urgently increased to improve both research and clinical governance. Many (45%) patients are already in significant levels of shock prior to application of tourniquet use which is associated with very high levels of mortality2 and only further data collection will help to understand and ultimately address the reasons underlying this. References Bulger EM, Snyder D, & Schoelles K, et al. An evidence-based prehospital guideline for external haemorrhage control: American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma. Prehosp Emerg Care. 2014;18(2):163–173. Kragh JF, Littrel ML, & Jones JA, et al. Battle casualty survival with emergency tourniquet use to stop limb bleeding. J Emerg Med. 2011;41(6):590–597. Conflict of interest None declared. Funding None declared.


Abstract Radiation quality factor, Q, of an electrically small lossless structure that fits an oblate spheroidal volume for transverse-to-axis polarisation is investigated. Q is evaluated for different size and shape of a spheroid by integrating numerically the stored energy associated with radiation. It is found that Q depends on the distribution of power amongst the various spheroidal modes, and a minimum of Q is achieved by suitable optimisation of the relative amplitudes of these modes. A graphical comparison between the minimum Q of a transversally polarised oblate and an axially polarised prolate spheroid is provided for ellipticities in the range 0.2,…,1. The inverse of the obtained minimum Q serves as an estimate for the bandwidth potential of an arbitrary, linearly polarised lossless radiator inside that volume.


This article deals with the process of canon formation for Flemish and Dutch painters from the 17th century onwards. We examine how the essential art-historical treatises and art encyclopedias since Houbraken's Grote Schouburgh der Nederlandsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen ranked and evaluated the leading painters, based on the attention given to them in these volumes. Using standardized z-scores, we map the relative importance the selected artists received in these publications over the 3 centuries. In doing so, we emphasize the path-dependency and the dimension of time in explaining the endurance of certain artists in the long run. From our research it emanates that the canon of Netherlandish painters is much more volatile than previously assumed.


abstract: The medieval existence of a sexual meaning for the word cunning, rendering the word itself available for sexual puns, remains unrecognized today, in part because the Middle English Dictionary (MED) fails to include any instance demonstrating such use. But a line from the popular Proverbs of Hending, written before 1325, witnesses to the fourteenth-century availability of the sense. This article discusses the value of literary puns, shows numerous instances in which Chaucer appears to pun sexually on the word cunning, and explains the incarnational implications of the linking of body and spirit in such a pun. It also explores the MED's omission of the relevant quotation from the entry for cunning, examining the MED's archived slips and considering the editorial conventions that should have required inclusion of the evidence from the Proverbs of Hending.


This Response to "Partial Valuation and Cost-Benefit Analysis" argues that the author's conclusion that regulators should not regulate when the costs of regulation are greater than the monetized benefits implicitly depends on a false assumption that there is an identity of interests between regulatory winners and losers (without this identity of interests, it is simply utilitarianism, recast), and that the author also incorrectly assumes that economic valuations based on beneficiaries' estimated "willingness to pay" fully reflect larger, societal preferences. Without these assumptions, which are necessary to support her logical argument, the author's claim resolves to a highly controversial normative assertion, one that requires a normative defense she does not provide.The author is correct in asserting that there are many regulatory goods that regulators deem "incommensurable" with money but that — in theory — are at least partially monetizable, in the sense that there does exist some willingness to pay for these goods. But the benefit of acquiring ad hoc valuation estimates for all such regulatory goods for which there exists some willingness to pay, goods that often cannot be even partially monetized without significant new research, would not justify the delay and expense the proposed, very expanded monetization process would require. And, in many cases, unavoidable uncertainty regarding risk and exposure will make it impossible for agencies to generate useful monetary values for many valuable public health, safety, and environmental protections.Finally, this Response disputes the author's claim that OIRA should block a proposed auto safety regulation unless and until the auto safety agency has produced a new cost-benefit analysis that presents monetized benefits in excess of the rule's monetized costs.


In most circumstances, a nasal route for the delivery of pulmonary aerosol medications is rarely considered; however, in specific instances, this route may be quite useful. Consider, for example, the delivery of aerosol treatments during humidified high-flow nasal cannula use in pediatric critical care, or continuous aerosol delivery via cannula for medications with short durations of action. The goal of this study was to evaluate the potential for delivering aerosols via nasal cannula through in vitro studies of aerosol output and size. The system utilized for testing included an Aerogen Solo nebulizer downstream of a heater/humidifier system, followed by a nasal cannula and an aerosol collection apparatus. Adult, pediatric, and infant cannulas were tested with and without an inhalation-only breathing simulator. The cannulas were driven by 3 lpm (50 psig) oxygen flows. Dose quantification was performed using radioisotope techniques. Total cannula output and system losses were measured. Aerosol size measurements were made from the nebulizer, from the heating tube, and from the prongs of the adult and pediatric cannulas, using laser-diffraction techniques. Total cannula output ranged from 8.4-25.1% and 18.6-26.9% of loaded dose, without and with the addition of inhalation flows. Volume median diameters were 2.2 +/- 0.2 microm from the adult cannula and 1.9 +/- 0.3 microm from the pediatric cannula. Ninety percent of the aerosol volume was in sizes smaller than 4.2 +/- 0.4 microm (adult) and 3.8 +/- 0.5 microm (pediatric). System losses were highest in the nebulizer-humidifier connectors, heated tube, and humidifier. Losses in the nebulizer were very low (2.2-3.5%). This study demonstrates that aerosols can be efficiently delivered through a humidified high-flow nasal cannula system. Further study is required to determine if this route is viable for pulmonary delivery.


In this paper, we introduce a new model called Fractionally Integrated Separable Spatial Autoregressive processes with Seasonality and denoted Seasonal FISSAR for two-dimensional spatial data. We focus on the class of separable spatial models whose correlation structure can be expressed as a product of correlations. This new modelling allows taking into account the seasonality patterns observed in spatial data. We investigate the properties of this new model providing stationary conditions, some explicit expressions form of the autocovariance function and the spectral density function. We establish the asymptotic behaviour of the spectral density function near the seasonal frequencies and perform some simulations to illustrate the behaviour of the model.


Introduction Strong and shared growth increasingly depend on the capacity of nations to develop, deploy and upgrade the skills of their citizens. Within this context, the following places an emphasis on three focal points for education systems in the 21 century. The first focus is on essential skills. The second focus is on the effectiveness of impact of education on economic and social outcomes. The third focus is on the dynamic elements of skill formation and skill use.


Diabetes mellitus is a lingering disease associated with pancreatic malfunctioning unable to synthesize sufficient insulin, or the insulin produced by the body cannot be effectively utilized, resulting in the accumulation of glucose in the body. This study evaluates the anti-diabetic activity of the aqueous and methanol extracts of Abelmoschus caillei in Streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. Thirty male rats were administered with 45 mg/kg Streptozotocin (STZ) to induce-diabetes for 3 days and thereafter treated with graded oral doses of 200 and 400 mg/kg of aqueous and methanol pod extracts of A. caillei for 28 days. Hematological analysis, biochemical analysis and histopathology of the heart, were carried out using standard procedures. The results from this study showed a significant reduction in the elevated blood glucose levels at day 28 of the aqueous and methanol extracts (67.37; 130 mg/dL and 173.0; 140.0 mg/dL) with percentage reduction of (68.29; 56.3% and 30.7; 45.8%) respectively when compared with glibenclamide group and diabetes control (220.7 mg/dl; 43.98 % and 418.7 mg/dl; 0%). The hematological, lipid profile and liver function test had a slight significant difference specifically at 400 mg/kg of the extracts when compared with the control p> 0.05. The architectural frame work of the organ's histopathology elicited no deformities in liver, kidney, pancreases, lungs, and heart the treated groups when compared with the diabetic control. This study showed that A. caillei extracts possess anti-diabetic potentials, thereby supporting the claims in the management of diabetes from the traditional folk's report.


How do middle aged women experience the process of growing older? Does their sense of self change during midlife? In recent years it has been argued that it is not possible to offer an adequate theory of women's experience and self-understanding without addressing the bodily aspects of the constitution of identity in their social context. According to the 'double standard of ageing' hypothesis, women are not permitted to age in ways that men are; they are marginalized and ignored not only by popular culture but also by some sociologists and gerontologists. Thus, there is a need for rethinking current theory so as to ensure that midlife women become more visible. The themes explored include: body image in midlife, participants' notions of middle age, methods women use in order to control the signs of ageing, female sexuality in midlife, life milestones, ageism. The book contributes to the current debates within social sciences by offering new data that corroborate the hypothesis of the embodied nature of female identity, and the view that ageing is experienced as a defining factor in the development of personal female identity


We show that the Farhi-Gutmann analog quantum search is a singular algorithm in the following sense:when the original driving Hamiltonian is perturbed slightly such that it is made of projections to the starting state and to the target state with different energies, the maximum fidelity (transition probability) between the searching state and thetarget state is strictly less than 1 over the entire evolution period, and the first time to achieve this maximum fidelity is of order √n/√1+cN, whose behavior depends crucially on whether c = 0 or not (here N is the total number of items, and the original Farhi-Gutmann case corresponds to c = 0). Moreover, when c ≠ 0 and N tends to infinity, the maximum fidelity tends to zero, and the first time to achieve the maximum fidelity tends to a positive constant! The condition for guaranteeing the algorithm's efficiency is determined explicitly.


Growth of population in Pekanbaru is about 4% per year. It could be predicted that population will be more than 1 million in 2012. This condition causes growth of settlement and then gives a big effect to environment. Pekanbaru Kota District is an area which has the highest densely populated settlement in Pekanbaru. It is the smallest area in this town. The width is 2,26 km2 or 0,36% from the width of city. In 2004, this place was occupied by 30.129 people. It means that the average of population densely in this area is13.311 people per km2. This area has unique characteristic in its development. The place is downtown and center of all activities, especially in economic Physically, many settlements in this place have exceeded capacity of environment. This condition can cause bad and unhealthy area. Aim of this research to identify condition of densely populated settlement and to know people perception about their environment.The identified condition in this settlement showed slum area and became unique because the people who live there do not care about their environment. Data taken from respondent showed that 61,19% people who lived in the house which have width less than 50 m2 felt comfortable with their environment. 62,79% people who have their own well felt satisfied about the clean water in their houses. People perception and this unique condition could be used as hint to make priority in settlement improvement. Keywords: Slums, Density, Settlement, Environment


Background: Adolescence is the period of transition from childhood to adulthood and the second most critical period of physical growth after the first year of life. Nutritional problems may arise from poor eating habits, snacking and consumption of nutrition deficient processed foods. Some social factors have been shown to influence their nutritional status, the result of which may have detrimental health implications as they advance into adulthood. Aim: To determine the effect of some social factors on the nutritional status of adolescents in Port Harcourt. Methods: A multi-staged sampling technique was used to select 960 adolescents from eight secondary schools in Port Harcourt. Using an investigator-administered questionnaire, information on their socio-economic status, eating habits, food content and level of activity was obtained. Anthropometric measurements were taken and BMI calculated using the formula weight/height 2 (kg/m 2 ). This was then used to categorize their nutritional status. The results were analyzed using SPSS 14 and EPI Info 6.04. Results: Eight hundred and nineteen adolescents (85.3%) had normal weight, 61(6.4%) were underweight while 17 (1.8%) were obese. Significantly more males (8.9%) were underweight compared to females (3.8%); while females were significantly more overweight and obese than males. Consumption of snacks (17.4%), soft drinks (10%), higher social economic class (11.5%) and watching television for >3hrs a day (18.6%) were associated with overweight and obesity. Conclusion: Social economic status, snacking and hours spent watching television have a detrimental effect on the nutritional status of adolescents in Port Harcourt.


A WS provides the communication between heterogeneous systems. While performing this operation, we need to focus on QoS of consumer, provider and registry directory. There will be some parameters like WS selection, prediction and rank these are parameters need to consider while QoS implementation in web services. While performing integration in web services we need to focus on QoS requirements regarding server and network performance. Performance of WS is related to locations i.e the network distance and the Internet connections between consumer and provider. There will be more QoS approach which works on consumers collected QoS data, based on this data system can predict the QoS of WS. Throughput and response time are the QoS of WS. In this paper, we have proposed parallel XML parser, by which we can parse UDDI, WSDL and SOAP XML files parallel by which it will improve the response time and throughput of WS.


We consider the maximum of the periodogram based on an infinite variance heavy-tailed sequence. For alpha <1 we show that the maxima constitute a weakly convergent sequence and find its limiting distribution. For 1 alpha <2 we show that the sequence of the maxima is not tight and find a normalization that makes it tight.


The lifetime of H2O2 is an important factor in the feasibility of Fenton's reaction for soil and groundwater remediation. The lifetime of H2O2 was evaluated in Fenton's reaction and Fenton‐like reactions with haematite and magnetite. H2O2 was more stable in the Fenton‐like reaction than in the Fenton's reaction. The lifetime of H2O2 was also highly affected by the solution pH, and a pH buffered acidic condition was preferred. Fenton's reaction and Fenton‐like reaction were tested for phenanthrene adsorbed on sand. Fenton‐like reaction and acidic condition showed better degradation rates in comparing with those of Fenton's reaction and unbuffered systems. The dissolved iron species were measured in the Fenton's reaction, and Fenton‐like reaction with haematite as a function of pH. In the presence of H2O2, ferric iron was the major dissolved iron species and the pH buffered to acidic condition maintained relatively high levels of dissolved iron in the aqueous solution. The higher iron concentration in the solution contributed to effective production of hydroxyl radical and degradation of organic contaminants.


The Incremental Prototyping Technology for Embedded Real-Time Systems (Iptes) project, which is part of ESPRIT II, is described. The goal of the project is to develop methodologies and tools for the distributed prototyping of real-time systems. The work concentrates on two areas of support for concurrent engineering: adapting graphical-animation techniques to real-time-system development and creating a mechanism for propagating changes within and between tasks.<<ETX>>


All porcine oocytes cultured 20 hr in medium with 10 micrograms/ml cycloheximide rested in the germinal vesicle (GV) stage but with the highly condensed bivalents in nucleoplasm. When these oocytes were washed and cultured in the control medium for 2, 4, and 6 hr, germinal vesicle breakdown (GVBD) was completed in 0, 86, and 100% of them, respectively. When similarly inhibited oocytes cultured successively only 2.5 hr in the control medium were given again in cycloheximide enriched medium (3.5 hr), nearly all of them reached late diakinesis stage again. It means that oocytes cultured for 20 hr and washed free of this inhibitor of protein synthesis completed GVBD rapidly (4 hr) and protein synthesis crucial for nuclear membrane disintegration occurred already during the first 2 hr after washing of inhibitor. All oocytes cultured for 20 hr in medium with 1 mM p-aminobenzamidine rested in GV with chromatin around the compact nucleolus. The successive culture in cycloheximide (20 hr) and p-aminobenzamidine (10 hr) prevented GVBD in all oocytes, too. In contrast, when the oocytes washed after cycloheximide block (20 hr) were cultured in p-aminobenzamidine enriched medium 2 and 3 hr and again for 6 hr in cycloheximide medium, the nuclear membrane dissolved in 62 and 68% of oocytes, respectively. These data suggest that inhibition of protein synthesis in pig oocytes does not prevent the high condensation of bivalents in GV. However, nuclear membrane breakdown requires the successive protein synthesis and proteolysis.


The lanthanide octacarbonyl anion complexes Ln(CO)8 - (Ln=Tm, Yb, Lu) were produced in the gas phase and detected by mass-selected infrared photodissociation spectroscopy in the carbonyl stretching-frequency region. By comparison of the experimental CO-stretching frequencies with calculated data, which are strongly red-shifted with respect to free CO, the Yb(CO)8 - and Lu(CO)8 - complexes were determined to possess octahedral (Oh ) symmetry and a doublet X2 A2u (Yb) and singlet X1 A1g (Lu) electronic ground state, whereas Tm(CO)8 - exhibits a D4h equilibrium geometry and a triplet X3 B1g ground state. The analysis of the electronic structures revealed that the metal-CO attractive forces come mainly from covalent orbital interactions, which are dominated by [Ln(d)]→(CO)8 π backdonation and [Ln(d)]←(CO)8 σ donation (contributes ≈77 and 16 % to covalent bonding, respectively). The metal f orbitals play a very minor role in the bonding. The electronic structure of all three lanthanide complexes obeys the 32-electron rule if only those electrons that occupy the valence orbitals of the metal are considered.


In this work we describe for the first time the integration of "smart" polymer brushes into single conical nanopores to obtain a new highly functional signal-responsive chemical nanodevice. The responsive brushes were constituted of zwitterionic monomers whose charge is regulated via pH changes in the environmental conditions. The pH-dependent chemical equilibrium of the monomer units provides a fine-tuning of the ionic transport though the nanopore by simply presetting the pH of the electrolyte solution. Our results demonstrate that this strategy enables a higher degree of control over the rectification properties when compared to the nanochannels modified with charged monolayer assemblies. We envision that these results will create completely new avenues to build-up "smart" nanodevices using responsive polymer brushes integrated into single conical nanopores.


This study aims to evaluate the effects of adapted games over preschool child performance in arithmetic and monetary abilities. The subjects were eight children of Childhood Education, distributed in two Experimental Groups. For both groups, using adapted dominos, the following relations were taught and tested: printed numerals (A), dot sets (B), addition operations (C), printed values (D), pictures of banknotes/coins (E). First, relations AB/BA and AC/CA were taught, testing BC/CB relation. Later, relation DC/CD was taught and relations AD/DA and DB/BD were tested. Finally, relation DE/ED was taught and relations EB/BE, EC/CE and AE/EA were tested. Evaluations of stimulus naming were conducted in Pretest, Probe and Posttest stages. For Group one, the evaluations of stimuli naming were conducted via card display, and for Group two were used adapted games. Evaluation results suggest that the use of adapted games may contribute to lower tests variability in stimuli naming.


Recent work in source separation of two-channel mixtures has used spatial cues (cross-channel amplitude and phase difference coefficients) to estimate time-frequency masks for separating sources. As sources increasingly overlap in the time-frequency domain or the spatial angle between sources decreases, these spatial cues become unreliable. We introduce a method to re-estimate the spatial cues for mixtures of harmonic sources. The newly estimated spatial cues are fed to the system to update each source estimate and the pitch estimate of each source. This iterative procedure is repeated until the difference between the current estimate of the spatial cues and the previous one is under a pre-set threshold. Results on a set of three-source mixtures of musical instruments show this approach significantly improves separation performance of two existing time-frequency masking systems.


Purpose
Big data analytics has emerged as one of the most used keywords in the digital world. The hype surrounding the buzz has led everyone to believe that big data analytics is the panacea for all evils. As the insights into this new field are growing and the world is discovering novel ways to apply big data, the need for caution has become increasingly important. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a literature review in the field of big data application for humanitarian relief and highlight the challenges of using big data for humanitarian relief missions.

Design/methodology/approach
This paper conducts a review of the literature of the application of big data in disaster relief operations. The methodology of literature review adopted in the paper was proposed by Mayring (2004) and is conducted in four steps, namely, material collection, descriptive analysis, category selection and material evaluation.

Findings
This paper summarizes the challenges that can affect the humanitarian logistical missions in case of over dependence on the big data tools. The paper emphasizes the need to exercise caution in applying digital humanitarianism for relief operations.

Originality/value
Most published research is focused on the benefits of big data describing the ways it will change the humanitarian relief horizon. This is an original paper that puts together the wisdom of the numerous published works about the negative effects of big data in humanitarian missions.


Multi-instance learning (MIL) is widely adop- ted for automatic whole slide image (WSI) analysis and it usually consists of two stages, i.e., instance feature extraction and feature aggregation. However, due to the "weak supervision" of slide-level labels, the feature aggregation stage would suffer from severe over-fitting in training an effective MIL model. In this case, mining more information from limited slide-level data is pivotal to WSI analysis. Different from previous works on improving instance feature extraction, this paper investigates how to exploit the latent relationship of different instances (patches) to combat overfitting in MIL for more generalizable WSI classification. In particular, we propose a novel Multi-instance Rein- forcement Contrastive Learning framework (MuRCL) to deeply mine the inherent semantic relationships of different patches to advance WSI classification. Specifically, the proposed framework is first trained in a self-supervised manner and then finetuned with WSI slide-level labels. We formulate the first stage as a contrastive learning (CL) process, where positive/negative discriminative feature sets are constructed from the same patch-level feature bags of WSIs. To facilitate the CL training, we design a novel reinforcement learning-based agent to progressively update the selection of discriminative feature sets according to an online reward for slide-level feature aggregation. Then, we further update the model with labeled WSI data to regularize the learned features for the final WSI classification. Experimental results on three public WSI classification datasets (Camelyon16, TCGA-Lung and TCGA-Kidney) demonstrate that the proposed MuRCL outperforms state-of-the-art MIL models. In addition, MuRCL can achieve comparable performance to other state-of-the-art MIL models on TCGA-Esca dataset.


From the standpoint of applied ontology, the problem of understanding and modeling causation has been recently challenged on the premise that causation is real. As a consequence, the following three results were obtained: (1) causation can be understood via the notion of systemic function; (2) any cause can be decomposed using only four subfunctions, namely Achieves, Prevents, Allows, and Disallows; and (3) the last three subfunctions can be defined in terms of Achieves alone. It follows that the essence of causation lies in a single function, namely Achieves. It remains to elucidate the nature of the Achieves function, which has been elaborated only partially in the previous work. In this paper, we first discuss a couple of underlying policies in the above-mentioned causal theory since these are useful in the discussion, then summarize the results obtained in the former paper, and finally reveal the nature of Achieves giving a complete solution to the problem of what causation is.


BACKGROUND
Medullary thyroid carcinomas (MTCs) complicated by ectopic Cushing's syndrome (CS) have a poor prognosis, partially due to the difficulty in controlling hypercortisolism by adrenal blocking drugs. Recent reports (including the initial follow-up of this patient) have suggested that tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) may be a therapeutic option due to an anti-secretory action on ACTH. However, there is a lack of long-term follow-up studies.

PATIENT FINDINGS
The case is reported of a 58-year-old man with MTC-related CS resistant to a combination of several anti-cortisolic drugs. Vandetanib, an oral multi-TKI that targets RET in particular, was initiated, and a rapid reversal of the hypercortisolism was observed without any change in tumor size. Vandetanib was briefly interrupted twice, once for 45 days because of side effects and a second time for 10 days to schedule surgical debulking. Each time, plasma cortisol and calcitonin levels increased after TKI withdrawal and were rapidly lowered by vandetanib reintroduction. As described in other cases of CS caused by MTC, a marked ACTH increase after desmopressin stimulation was observed before vandetanib therapy. In contrast, a blunted ACTH response to desmopressin was documented throughout the course of vandetanib treatment. This modulation of the tumoral ACTH production is a strong argument in favor of a TKI anti-secretory action. A left thyroid lobectomy and a modified neck dissection were performed one year after the initiation of vandetanib in order to reduce the tumor mass. An activating M918T RET (c.2753T>C) somatic mutation was identified in a lymph node metastasis.

CONCLUSION
Three years and eight months after vandetanib initiation, there was no sign of recurrence of hypercortisolism. This case illustrates the long-term effectiveness of vandetanib in maintaining the control of hypercortisolism in MTC-related CS.


G.G.C. has received com M.C. has served on th served on the board o and Enteral Nutrition; her institution has rec collaborative and Prov pensation from Child L.A.G. has received c received compensatio employment, expert t stocks/stock options; LLC, consulted to No received or has grants Institutes of Health, th holds equity interest in has received compens Fibrosis Foundation; M Abbott Laboratories, Foundation, the Natio Diseases/National Ins ticals; E.A.R. has rece sionalism & Ethical institution has receive as the medical editor has received compen Pharmaceuticals, and Nutrition; J.T. has rec Pediatrics, Prometheu conflicts of interest. Copyright # 2012 by E Hepatology, and Nut Gastroenterology, He DOI: 10.1097/MPG.0b01


Nitophyllum erosum Harvey (Delesseriaceae, Rhodophyta) is a branched, monostromatic red alga that is readily recognised by its distinctive fringe of branched, multicellular processes. It has been considered to be a member of the genus Myriograrnrne Kylin, since it was thought to have carposporangia borne in short chains, a feature partially diagnostic for that genus. Recent collections of female and cystocarpic material have allowed us to ascertain the structure of the procarp, a feature important in generic placement. The procarp includes two periaxial cells, of which one acts as a cover cell while the other functions as the supporting cell, ultimately bearing two sterile cell groups and a four-celled carpogonial branch. In addition, the carposporophyte includes a distinctive fusion cell that incorporates gametophytic cells from the floor of the cystocarpic cavity, and the carposporangia are single and terminal on gonimoblast filaments. This combination of characters is diagnostic of the genus Haraldiophyllurn, a genus to which we transfer this species as Haraldiophyllum erosurn (Harvey) Millar & Huisman. comb. nov.


An adaptive integration algorithm for the computation of the Sommerfeld-type integral has been developed. The algorithm allows the user to specify the precise location of the desired range sample points and change the integration contour. In addition, the algorithm can be used to recompute the Sommerfeld-type integral with different range resolutions without recomputing the integrand. It is also shown how the algorithm can be used to adaptively increase the number of integration points required to evaluate the Sommerfeld-type integral. Numerical results show that the algorithm is useful in many interesting areas. >


For 31 of the 33 extant species of pinnipeds it is either known or suspected that they include cephalopods in their diet. The two exceptions are the Baikal Seal and the Caspian Seal, which inhabit freshwater where cephalopods do not occur. The available evidence indicates that no species of seal specializes entirely on cephalopods and only few regularly eat appreciable quantities of this prey, although for several they appear to be seasonally important prey. For most pinnipeds only rudimentary prey identifications have been published. The most common taxa of cephalopods reported to be consumed by seals are members of the neritic Loliginidae, the oceanic Ommastrephidae, Onychoteuthidae and Gonatidae, as well as benthic octopods. Too few quantitative diet analyses on enough pinnipeds have been done to quantify the consumption of cephalopods by seals globally with any precision.


of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-09) will focus on successful applications of AI technology. The conference will use technical papers, invited talks, and panel discussions to explore issues , methods, and lessons learned in the development and deployment of AI applications ; and to promote an interchange of ideas between basic and applied AI. IAAI-09 will consider papers in two tracks: (1) emerging applications or methodologies and (2) deployed application case studies. Submissions should clearly identify which track they are intended for, as the two tracks are judged on different criteria. Applications are defined as deployed once they are in production use by their final end users (not the people who created the application) for sufficiently long that experience can be reported (usually greater than three months of use by the end-users). All submissions must be original. The goal of the emerging application track is to "bridge the gap" between basic AI research and deployed AI applications, by discussing efforts to apply AI tools, techniques, or methods to real world problems. Emerging applications are on aspects of AI applications that are not appropriate for deployed application case studies, or are not sufficiently deployed to be submitted as case studies. This track is distinguished from reports of scientific AI research appropriate for the IJCAI-09 Conference in that the objective of the efforts reported here should be the engineering of AI applications. Emerging application papers may include any aspects of the technology, engineering , or deployment of AI applications , including discussions of prototype applications; performance evaluation of AI applications; ongoing efforts to develop large-scale or domain-specific knowledge bases or ontologies; development of domain or task focused tools, techniques, or methods; evaluations of AI tools, techniques or methods for domain suitability; unsuccessful attempts to apply particular tools, techniques or methods to specific domains (which shed insight on the applicability and limitations of the tool, technique or method); system architectures that work; scalability of techniques; integration of AI with other technologies; development methodologies; validation and verification; lessons learned; social and other technology transition issues. The following questions will appear on the review form for emerging technology papers. Authors are advised to bear these questions in mind while writing their papers. Reviewers will look for papers that meet at least some (although not necessarily all) of the criteria in each category. Significance: How important is the problem being addressed? Is it a difficult or simple problem? …