Background Lyssaviruses are pathogens of bat origin of considerable zoonotic concern being the causative agent for rabies disease, however our understanding of their persistence in bat populations remains very scarce. Methods Leveraging existing data from an extensive ecological field survey characterizing Myotis myotis and Miniopterus schreibersii bat species in the Catalonia region, we develop a data-driven spatially explicit metapopulation model to identify the mechanisms of the empirically observed persistence of European Bat Lyssavirus subtype 1 (EBLV-1), the most common lyssavirus species found in Europe. We consider different disease progressions accounting for lethal infection, immunity waning, and potential cross-species transmission when the two populations share the same refuge along the migratory path of M. schreibersii. Results We find that EBLV-1 persistence relies on host spatial structure through the migratory nature of M. schreibersii bats, on cross-species mixing with M. myotis population, and on a disease progression leading to survival of infected animals followed by temporary immunity. The higher fragmentation along the northern portion of the migratory path is necessary to maintain EBLV-1 sustained circulation in both species, whereas persistence would not be ensured in the single colony of M. myotis. Our study provides first estimates for the EBLV-1 transmission potential in M. schreibersii bats and average duration of immunity in the host species, yielding values compatible with previous empirical observations in M. myotis bats. Conclusions Habitats sharing and the strong spatial component of EBLV-1 transmission dynamics identified as key drivers in this ecological context may help understanding the observed spatial diffusion of the virus at a larger scale and across a diverse range of host species, through long-range migration and seeding of local populations. Our approach can be readily adapted to other zoonotic pathogens of public health concern.


ABSTRACT The study intended to compare repellency of three insecticides on bumble bees and honey bees in Norwegian red clover (Trifolium pratense L.) seed crops, and to examine effects of thiacloprid on bumble bee colony development in the field. The repellency study was carried out in a large-scale field trial in SE Norway in 2013. On average for observations during the first week after spraying, 17 and 40% less honey bees (P = .03) and 26 and 20% less bumble bees (P = .36) were observed on plots sprayed with the pyrethroids lambda-cyhalothrin and alpha-cypermethrin, respectively, than on unsprayed control plots. No pollinator repellency was found on plots sprayed with the neonicotinoid thiacloprid. Compared with unsprayed control the seed yield increases were 22% on plots sprayed with thiacloprid vs. 12–13% on plots sprayed with pyrethroids (P = .10). Follow-up studies in 2014–2016 focused on the effect of thiacloprid on bumble bee colony development in commercially reared nests of Bombus terrestris placed into red clover seed crops at the start of flowering. Unsprayed control crops were compared with crops sprayed either at the bud stage or when 18–44% of flower heads were in full bloom. Chemical analyses of adult bumble bees showed that thiacloprid was taken up in bees when crops were sprayed during flowering, but not detected when crops were sprayed at the bud stage. The bumble bees in late-sprayed crops also developed weaker colonies than in unsprayed crops. Dead bees with a high internal concentration of thiacloprid were found in one crop sprayed during the night at 35% flowering. This shows that thiacloprid is not bee-safe if sprayed after anthesis and that spraying has to be conducted at the bud stage to reduce its contamination of nectar and pollen.


Many Asian countries experienced the rapid change in industrial structure, which has resulted in a notable increase in occupational diseases, particularly overwork-related cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). "Overwork" or "Karoshi" has since been a major health concern for workers in Asia. Taiwan is the third country in the world after Japan and Korea where national governments announced criteria to recognise overwork-related CVDs. However, the public's worries persisted, as the criteria seemed unable to solve the problem of long working hours in these countries. In the December 2016 and early 2017, a series of regulatory changes in Taiwan has received significant attentions, triggered by increasing social criticism indicating that Taiwanese regulations lagged behind international labour standards and many highly industrialised countries. As a result, increases in research addressing overwork-related CVDs issues and in the reported CVD cases could be a good reflection of the national policy change. We first compared the trends of research focus in Taiwan with those in Japan and Korea, respectively. We further collected 10 year data for Taiwan and Japan to investigate the impact of introducing a new policy. We found consistent and plausible correlations between the implementation of new policy and the number of recognised overwork-related CVDs. On the other hand, our results of Taiwan suggested a systematic problem of under-recognition of occupational diseases. Although the industrial development contributed to the country's economic growth substantially, the country will need to keep bearing the underlying burden of overwork-related CVDs.


Rhizobium trifolii most frequently infects its host white clover (Trifolium repens L.) by means of infection threads formed in markedly curled root hairs. Rhizobium infections are classified as either lateral or apical based on whether they originate in the branches or at the apex of the root hairs. A quantitative estimate of lateral and apical infection in the region of the host root (Trifolium repens L. cv. Regal Ladino) that possessed mature and immature root hairs at the time of inoculation with Rhizobium trifolii TAI (CSIRO, Canberra City, Australia) indicated that lateral infection occurred more frequently in the mature root hair region of the root. Apical infections were more common in the immature root hair region. Cell free filtrates collected from R. trifolii cultured in association with the host roots induced branching in white clover root hairs. A partially purified preparation of the branching factor was obtained from freeze-dried filtrates by ethanol extraction and ion exchange chromatography. Preliminary studies on the characteristics of these substances suggest that some are dialyzable and heat stable white others are non-dialyzable and heat labile. The dialyzable, heat-stable compounds contain neutral sugars and range between 1200 to 10000 daltons in size. In roots that were exposed to low concentrations (6–25 μg-ml−1) of these partially purified deformation factors before inoculation, the developmentally mature root hairs were deformed at the time of inoculation. Nodules appeared in the mature and immature root hair region of these plants at the same time. In plants exposed to water, nodules were observed in the immature root hair region and mature root hair regions 3 and 5 days after inoculation, respectively. Based on these results, we conclude that the nodule development was hastened in the plants exposed to the root hair-deforming substances because the mature root hairs of these plants were made infectible at the time of inoculation by this exposure.


PurposeElevated intraocular pressure is a crucial pathologic event for the development of glaucoma (GL). We have reported that nerve growth factor (NGF) reaches retinal cells and the optic nerve (ON) when applied to the eye. Whether ocular application of NGF prevents or reduces damage to retinal ganglion cell (RGC) is not known. MethodsGL was induced in adult rats by the injection of hypertonic saline into the episcleral vein of the right eye and the left eye used as control. Rats were then treated daily with ocular application of NGF or vehicle solution for 7 weeks. Retinal and ON tissues were then used for structural, immunohistochemical, and biochemical studies. ResultsThe injection of hypertonic saline into the episcleral vein led to progressive degeneration of RGCs, with the loss of nearly 40% of these cells after 7 weeks of treatment. This cellular loss is associated with the downregulation of NGF and NGF-receptor expression in the retina and ON of the glaucomatous eye and ocular treatment with NGF significantly reduced the deficit induced by GL. ConclusionsThese findings indicate that NGF can exert protective action on RGC degeneration occurring in glaucomatous retina. We suggest that ocular NGF treatment might be a suitable pharmacologic approach to investigate protective mechanisms of degenerating RGCs.


The increasing emergence of carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae (CPK) isolates is a global health alarm. Rapid methods that require minimum sample preparation and rapid data analysis are urgently required. ABSTRACT The increasing emergence of carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae (CPK) isolates is a global health alarm. Rapid methods that require minimum sample preparation and rapid data analysis are urgently required. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization–time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) has recently been used by clinical laboratories for identification of antibiotic-resistant bacteria; however, discrepancies have arisen regarding biological and technical issues. The aim of this study was to standardize an operating procedure and data analysis for identification of CPK by MALDI-TOF MS. To evaluate this approach, a series of 162 K. pneumoniae isolates (112 CPK and 50 non-CPK) were processed in the MALDI BioTyper system (Bruker Daltonik, Germany) following a standard operating procedure. The study was conducted in two stages; the first is denominated the "reproducibility stage" and the second "CPK identification." The first stage was designed to evaluate the biological and technical variation associated with the entire analysis of CPK and the second stage to assess the final accuracy of MALDI-TOF MS for the identification of CPK. Therefore, we present an improved MALDI-TOF MS data analysis pipeline using neural network analysis implemented in Clover MS Data Analysis Software (Clover Biosoft, Spain) that is designed to reduce variability, guarantee interlaboratory reproducibility, and maximize the information selected from the bacterial proteome. Using the random forest (RF) algorithm, 100% of CPK isolates were correctly identified when all the peaks in the spectra were selected as input features and total ion current (TIC) normalization was applied. Thus, we have demonstrated that real-time direct tracking of CPK is possible using MALDI-TOF MS.


This paper deals with two types of rotational average which arise in a number of physical processes in fluids. The first are termed "phased averages," and occur in the theory of bimolecular interactions with radiation; the second are "Boltzmann-weighted" averages, which occur in the theory of anisotropic media. A general method for obtaining these results is presented, and analytic results are given for tensorial interactions up to and including the fourth rank. Several applications are discussed including laser-induced forces, cooperative two-photon absorption, and electric-field-induced harmonic generation. The proof of a relation involving conventional rotational averages is also given.


Given a baseline speech coder and speech with an available phonetic class segmentation, a number of potential enhancements to that coder become possible. While the quality of speech segmentation by phoneme and phonetic class is constantly improving, we use TIMIT to generate phonetic class segmentation as a basis for initial testing of these techniques. Using coders drawn from the MELP family, we explore specialized phonetic codebooks, phonetically-driven superframing, and improved modeling of specific phonetic classes and the transitions between them. We compare the reconstructed speech from these enhancements against the base coder using the metrics of computational cost, transmission cost, and the quality of the reconstructed speech. In most cases, we find that segmentation-based coders can produce speech with quality comparable to that of MELP, using fewer transmitted bits and at no additional computational cost. With phonetic codebooks and transition modeling, CCR tests show these segmentation-based coders produce speech of better quality than is produced by MELP.


This paper proposes a blackboard architecture based on Tuple Spaces to support flexible integration of existing algorithms with modern learning environments and interfaces. The platform allows for extending existing single user systems to networked environments and for combining heterogeneous implementation languages. The specific implementation supports a generic inter-language communication by adding a Prolog interface to the Java based TSpaces platform. This approach is exemplified by a Java application for symbolic derivation coupled with an intelligent analyser written in Prolog, which uses deductive error recognition and classification to generate feedback to the user.


BACKGROUND
The calcium channel blockers are commonly associated with male infertility. Long-term administration of such drugs has been shown to suppress spermatogenesis. The present study was designed to determine the effects of cessation of calcium channel blocker (amlodipine) medication on spermatogenesis.

METHODS
The study was carried out in the Department of Physiology, in collaboration with Department of Pathology, Army Medical College, and National Institute of Health, Islamabad from April 2007 to March 2008. Thirty male rats were divided into two groups A and B each containing 15 rats. Group A rats were given distilled water (vehicle) whereas group B rats were given amlodipine by oral gavage for 50 days. After 50 days, amlodipine/distilled water was withdrawn. The rats were left for recovery to take place for another 50 days of drug withdrawal period. Testes were removed in all the rats and sectioned. The sections were stained with haematoxylin and eosin and examined microscopically. Results were analyzed using SPSS version 13.

RESULTS
Fifty days after drug withdrawal, there were statistically insignificant differences in mean tubular diameter and height of germinal epithelium between amlodipine treated and vehicle treated groups.

CONCLUSION
Spermatogenesis in amlodipine treated rats does not differ significantly from spermatogenesis in vehicle treated rats after 50 days of drug withdrawal period.


: This article is the revised version of my inaugural lecture given on June 27, 2017 at the Department of European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Following the professorship's research areas of gender, education and the future, I would like to elaborate the anticipatory, imaginative and transformative ("educational") po-tential of European Ethnology. In a broad outline, which sketches out future research topics and questions, I inquire into the following three aspects: Firstly, doing and making futures are presented as topics of cultural analysis from the perspective of gender and education. Secondly, I show the relations between pedagogical and anthropological concepts and how a wide conception of education may enrich European Ethnology. And thirdly, I discuss how European-Ethnological research practices can be understood as an Anticipatory Anthropology, which analyzes the making of futures, but is also part of laying out and creating futures. This article focuses on the entanglements of future/education on different social fi elds, such as that of economics (technological advertisement by the company Intel), the literary fi eld (the feminist science fi ction of Ursula Le Guin) and the fi eld of early Cultural Anthropology as Future Research (the collaborations of Boasian anthropologists and the pedagogue John Dewey). Here, I am interested in how time and temporality are made, practiced and imagined and how tem-poral orders are created. Throughout my analysis, it becomes evident that the nexus of future/education and future-making takes effect through the dialectic relation of the normative and the exploratory.


The structural and optoelectronic characteristics of Zn1−xCdxS (x = 0, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, 1) semiconductors are reported using density functional theory within GGA, EV-GGA, and mBJ functionals. These semiconductors are observed in cubic symmetry at all Cd-concentrations and the lattice constant increases linearly with Cd-concentration while the bulk modulus shows a reverse behavior. These materials are direct bandgap semiconductors at all Cd-concentrations and their bandgap energy decreases from 3.67 eV to 2.59 eV. The isotropic optical properties of these direct bandgap semiconductors vary with Cd concentration as well, with absorption coefficients decreasing and absorbed near-UV light converting to visible blue light. Optical properties like refractive index, dielectric constant, conductivity, extinction coefficient, and reflectance are also displayed and discussed. These results provide useful theoretical understanding for the application of CdZnS semiconductors in photonic, photovoltaic, and optoelectronic devices.


Internet of things (IoT) is a concept that motivates researchers to develop their ideas into an innovative application. RPL stands for Routing protocols for low power and lossy networks. RPL is the routing protocol, designed for constrained devices. IPv6 and Low power and Lossy network (LLN) techniques make this protocol more flexible with IoT. It is used to route the packets from the one node to another node. Various issues are observed during the routing. In RPL, Node failure, Mobility, energy consumption and congestion are few problems that are observed during the routing. The above problems lead to some issues like Packet loss, path loss, low packet delivery ratio, High energy consumption, and so on. Existing objective functions OF0 and OF1 are used in the RPL protocols to support static nodes in Destination-Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG). In this paper, a solution is introduced to overcome node failure in RPL. The node failure in RPL is addressed by using the energy-aware routing approach in the network. The proposed technique has two mechanisms: finding the node with minimum lifetime and parent selection process. This proposed work is evaluated using COOJA simulator.


At this time in the process of sweeping the road still using traditional tools by janitors, for example broom sticks. One of the technologies that began to develop was the Street Sweeper machine. This Street Sweeper is a tool to help alleviate the work of janitors in terms of road sweeping. Sweeping the highway using the Street Sweeper is one of the main steps to accelerate the process of sweeping the highway with rapid traffic flow. The working principle of this machine is by utilizing thrust from humans, by means of a machine being pushed and directed to the garbage scattered on the road. Therefore it is very appropriate to use Street Sweeper to sweep the road compared to using manual tools because it can save work time


Several protein sources can be used to produce bioactive peptides with angiotensin I-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibittory activity. Protein concentrates from ungerminated and germinated lima bean Phaseolus lunatus seed flours were hydrolyzed with Alcalase 2.4 L or pepsin-pancreatin sequential hydrolysis, and ACE inhibitory activity measured in the different hydrolysis treatments. Protein hydrolysate production was analyzed with a 23 factorial design with four replicates of the central treatment. Evaluated factors were protein concentrate source (ungerminated seeds, PC1; germinated seeds, PC2), enzyme/substrate ratio E/S (1/50 or 1/10) and hydrolysis time (0.5 or 2.0 h for Alcalase; 1 or 3 h for pepsin-pancreatin). Degree of hydrolysis (DH) was high for the Alcalase hydrolysates (24.12% 58.94%), but the pepsin-pancreatin hydrolysates exhibited the highest ACE inhibitory activity (IC50 = 0.250 0.692 mg/mL). Under the tested conditions, the hydrolysates with the highest ACE inhibitory activity were produced with sequential pepsin-pancreatin using either PC1 at 1 h hydrolysis time and a 1/10 E/S ratio or PC2 at 1 h hydrolysis time and a 1/50 E/S ratio. Lima bean protein hydrolysates prepared with Alcalase or pepsin-pancreatin are a potential ingredient in the production of physiologically functional foods with antihypertensive activity.


Satellite remote sensing is playing an increasing role in the rapid mapping of damage after natural disasters. In particular, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can image the Earth's surface and map damage in all weather conditions, day and night. However, current SAR damage mapping methods struggle to separate damage from other changes in the Earth's surface. In this study, we propose a novel approach to damage mapping, combining deep learning with the full time history of SAR observations of an impacted region in order to detect anomalous variations in the Earth's surface properties due to a natural disaster. We quantify Earth surface change using time series of interferometric SAR coherence, then use a recurrent neural network (RNN) as a probabilistic anomaly detector on these coherence time series. The RNN is first trained on pre-event coherence time series, and then forecasts a probability distribution of the coherence between pre- and post-event SAR images. The difference between the forecast and observed co-event coherence provides a measure of confidence in the identification of damage. The method allows the user to choose a damage detection threshold that is customized for each location, based on the local behavior of coherence through time before the event. We apply this method to calculate estimates of damage for three earthquakes using multiyear time series of Sentinel-1 SAR acquisitions. Our approach shows good agreement with observed damage and quantitative improvement compared to using pre-to co-event coherence loss as a damage proxy.


This research employed the experimental method with descriptive data analysis. It aimed to isolate and identify sponge symbiont bacteria with antibacterial potential against Multi-Drug Resistance Organisms (MDRO) with the 16S rRNA gene marker. Based on the study results, two sponges were obtained, namely Clathrina sp and Agelas sp, each having 11 and 7 isolates of symbiont bacteria, respectively. Based on the antibacterial activity test results, out of 18 isolates of symbiont bacteria, only 4 had antibacterial potential against MDRO ( Klebsiella pneumoniae ESBL, Pseudomonas aeruginosa ESBL, or Staphylococcus lugdunensis MRSA) with inhibition zones of 9.3 mm, 8.3 mm, and 8.1 mm, respectively. The results of bacterial identification using the 16S rRNA gene sequence isolate S1I3, S1I9, and A1I3 belong to the Bacillus cereus and Bacillus paramycoides types. This research is expected to provide important information about sponge symbiont bacteria with antibacterial potential against MDRO.


Purpose: To produce multi-modality compatible, realistic datasets for the joint evaluation of segmentation and registration with a reliable ground truth using a 4D biomechanical lung phantom. The further development of a computer controlled air flow system for recreation of real patient breathing patterns is incorporated for additional evaluation of motion prediction algorithms. Methods: A pair of preserved porcine lungs was pneumatically manipulated using an in-house computer controlled respirator. The respirator consisted of a set of bellows actuated by a 186 W computer controlled industrial motor. Patient breathing traces were recorded using a respiratory bellows belt during CT simulation and input into a control program incorporating a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) feedback controller in LabVIEW. Mock tumors were created using dual compartment vacuum sealed sea sponges. 65% iohexol,a gadolinium-based contrast agent and 18F-FDG were used to produce contrast and thus determine a segmentation ground truth. The intensity distributions of the compartments were then digitally matched for the final dataset. A bifurcation tracking pipeline provided a registration ground truth using the bronchi of the lung. The lungs were scanned using a GE Discovery-ST PET/CT scanner and a Phillips Panorama 0.23T MRI using a T1 weighted 3D fast field echo (FFE) protocol. Results: The standard deviation of the error between the patient breathing trace and the encoder feedback from the respirator was found to be ±4.2%. Bifurcation tracking error using CT (0.97×0.97×3.27 mm3 resolution) was found to be sub-voxel up to 7.8 cm displacement for human lungs and less than 1.32 voxel widths in any axis up to 2.3 cm for the porcine lungs. Conclusion: An MRI/PET/CT compatible anatomically and temporally realistic swine lung phantom was developed for the evaluation of simultaneous registration and segmentation algorithms. With the addition of custom software and mock tumors, the entire package offers ground truths for benchmarking performance with high fidelity.


Research on embedded file system becomes more important when the mobile devices have a lot of different options: Cramfs, JFFS and the Yet Another Flash File System (YAFFS), etc. Some of them are specially designed for NAND device such as YAFFS. This paper tries to improve the performance when the file system is adapted to the small-sized NAND device.


Background: Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum that affects in later stages the central nervous system. Case Presentation: 37-year-old male with history of stimulant use disorder and depression with misdiagnosed blurred vision for one year duration. Syphilis serologies positive, cerebrospinal fluid positive for IgG and IgM Syphilis. Treated with Penicillin G for 14 days. Discussion: Neurosyphilis cases are currently on the rise and need to be considered as differential when presenting with atypical psychiatric or neurological symptoms. The diagnosis is based on serological markers in the blood and cerebrospinal fluids. Cerebral imaging studies are encouraged for early detection as well.


This paper reports on exploratory, descriptive and comparative analyses of client-centered major issues, from the perspectives of individuals who have been directly and substantively involved with SAP Financials in five closely related government agencies. A three-round, non-anonymous, Delphi-type, open-survey was adopted using personalized email with attached survey instruments. To support the interpretation of study findings, a series of interviews and domain experts' workshops were conducted during and after the Delphi survey rounds. Implications for practice and research are discussed. The study also makes interesting methodological observations, suggesting pitfalls and possible improvements when employing a Delphi-type survey approach in similar or more traditional IS key issues studies.


As a signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United States has reported an economy-wide inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals since the mid-1990s (U.S. EPA 2021). Forest land, harvested wood products (HWP), woodlands, and urban trees within the land sector collectively represent the largest net carbon (C) sink in the United States, offsetting more than 11 percent of total GHG emissions in 2019 (U.S. EPA 2021). Estimates of GHG emissions and removals are compiled by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service researchers and are based primarily on National Forest Inventory (NFI) data collected and maintained by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program within the Forest Service. This report provides an overview of the status and trends of GHG emissions and removals from forest land, woodlands in the grassland category, HWP, and urban trees in settlements in the United States from 1990 to 2019. The estimates for the United States summarized here are based on the compilation reported in the "Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry" chapter of the U.S. EPA (2021) submission to the UNFCCC. Most of the National scale estimates are also reported by individual State (Fig. 1) and are available online for the entire 1990-2019 time series (see appendix 1). New in this report are uncertainty estimates (see appendix 2) compiled for individual States (Fig. 1) and a published research dataset (Walters et al. 2021).


Tautomycin (TT) and calyculin A (CyA) are inhibitors of protein phosphatases type 1 and 2 (PP1, PP2). Inhibitors 1 and 2 are specific for PP1, which is the major phosphatase functionally relevant in heart and able to dephosphorylate phospholamban (PLB). TT and CyA maintain PLB in its phosphorylated state, thereby increasing calcium uptake. Rabbit saponin skinned fibers (SF) are used to assess calcium load of the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR). The present investigation aimed to examine the effects of PP1 inhibitors on SR calcium load assessed by caffeine-induced tension transient (CITT), and to correlate this activity with the PLB phosphorylation state. TT and CyA (100 nm) applied during the uptake phase increased the amplitude of CITT by 10 and 20%, respectively,P<0.05 without effect on the release phase. Both CyA and TT were devoid of calcium sensitizing effect when studied on Triton X-100 SF. After skinning procedure, SF were grinded for biochemical studies. SDS-PAGE electrophoresis and immunoblots using a monoclonal PLB antibody showed that cAMP or Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinases phosphorylated PLB in an additive fashion. Inhibition of PP1 by inhibitor 1, CyA and TT maintained PLB in its phosphorylated state in a dose-dependent manner. The results of this study in which functional and biochemical experiments in cardiac SF were combined demonstrate that strong correlation exists between the phosphorylation-dephosphorylation cycle of PLB and calcium uptake.


The purpose of the study is to find out there is a difference in financial performance of PT Aneka Gas Industri Tbk before and after Go Public during the period of 2014-2018. The data used in this research is quantitative data. This research is a comparative study with a quantitative approach. The data analysis method used was ratio analysis and paired-t test using the SPSS 24 application. The results of the study is the financial performance of PT Aneka Gas Industri Tbk through the ratios: CR, QR, ROI, ROE, DAR, DER and TATO before and after going public is not significant different.


OBJECTIVE
To observe the effect of electroacupuncture (EA) on expression of histone deacetylase 2 (HDAC2), histone H3, bone formation related genes and proteins in osteoporosis rats, so as to reveal its mechanisms underlying improvement of osteoporosis.

METHODS
Female SD rats were randomly divided into 4 groups: sham operation, model, EA and medication (n= 10 rats in each group). The osteoporosis model was established by castration. EA (2 Hz, 1 mA) was applied to bilateral "Shenshu" (BL23) and "Pishu" (BL20) for 10 min, once every other day for 8 weeks. Rats of the medication group received subcutaneous injection of 17 β-estradiol (100 µg/kg, 20 µg/mL). The bone quality and quantity including the cortical bone mineral density (CBMD), trabecular bone mineral density (TBMD), ratio of bone volume /total volume (BV /TV), trabecular thickness (Tb.Th), trabecular number (Tb.N), trabecular separation (Tb. Sp), trabecular bone pattern factor (Tb.Pf), and structure model index (SMI) of the right thigh-bone were detected by using a micro-computed tomography. Serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and estrogen 2 (E2) contents were assayed by using colorimetry and ELISA, expression levels of HDAC2, histone H3 and Runx2 in the thigh-bone were detected using Western blot, and that of Runx2 mRNA was detected using quantitative real-time PCR, separately. The co-expression of Ac-histone H3/Runx2 and Runx2/ALP was observed by using immunofluorescence histochemical staining.

RESULTS
After modeling, the levels of TBMD, BV/TV, Tb.Th, and Tb.N, serum E2 and ALP, and expression of Runx2 protein and mRNA, Ac-histone and ALP proteins were significantly lower (P<0.01), and those of Tb.Sp, Tb.Pf and SMI, HDAC2 and histone H3 proteins were significantly higher (P<0.01) in the model group than those in the sham operation group. After the interventions, the decrease of TBMD, BV/TV, Tb.N,Runx2 protein and mRNA,ALP in both EA and medication groups, serum E2 in the medication group, and Ac-histone H3 in the EA group, and the increase of Tb.Sp in the medication group, Tb.Pf, SMI, and HDAC2 in both EA and medication groups, and histone H3 in the EA group were reversed (P<0.01, P<0.05). No significant changes were found in the levels of CBMD after modeling relevant to the sham operation group, and after EA and medication interventions (P>0.05). The effects of EA were significantly superior to 17 β-estradiol in down-regulating the expression of HDAC2 and histone H3 proteins and in up-regulating expression of Ac-histone H3 protein (P<0.01,P<0.05)..

CONCLUSION
EA treatment can increase bone density, increase bone mass and trabecular bone, and promote trabecular bone rod-like changes in plate shape in osteoporosis rats, which is related to its effect in up-regulating the expression of Ac-histone H3 protein, and down-regulating the expression of bone formation-related proteins.


horizontal conflict at Losari beginning from young men fight at two border area that going bigger and become social riot and plundering Chinese shops. Religion as prophetic teaching—that trying to develop equality between men—is actually fails to internalize to their community. Communication and conflict resolution primarily played by actor namely religious and community figure that still have authority or power and honored by their community. Good cooperation between Losari Regency government with religious and community figure is one of key success to perform conflict resolution that begin with communication between two community involved that horizontal conflict.


Human nonverbal emotional communication in dyadic dialogs is a process of mutual influence and adaptation. Identifying the direction of influence, or cause-effect relation between participants is a challenging task, due to two main obstacles. First, distinct emotions might not be clearly visible. Second, participants cause-effect relation is transient and variant over time. In this paper, we address these difficulties by using facial expressions that can be present even when strong distinct facial emotions are not visible. We also propose to apply a relevant interval selection approach prior to causal inference to identify those transient intervals where adaptation process occurs. To identify the direction of influence, we apply the concept of Granger causality to the time series of facial expressions on the set of relevant intervals. We tested our approach on synthetic data and then applied it to newly, experimentally obtained data. Here, we were able to show that a more sensitive facial expression detection algorithm and a relevant interval detection approach is most promising to reveal the cause-effect pattern for dyadic communication in various instructed interaction conditions.


Video events grounding aims at retrieving the most relevant moments from an untrimmed video in terms of a given natural language query. Most previous works focus on Video Sentence Grounding (VSG), which localizes the moment with a sentence query. Recently, researchers extended this task to Video Paragraph Grounding (VPG) by retrieving multiple events with a paragraph. However, we find the existing VPG methods may not perform well on context modeling and highly rely on video-paragraph annotations. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel VPG method termed Semi-supervised Video-Paragraph TRansformer (SVPTR), which can more effectively exploit contextual information in paragraphs and significantly reduce the dependency on annotated data. Our SVPTR method consists of two key components: (1) a base model VPTR that learns the video-paragraph alignment with contrastive encoders and tackles the lack of sentence-level contextual interactions and (2) a semi-supervised learning framework with multimodal feature perturbations that reduces the requirements of annotated training data. We evaluate our model on three widely-used video grounding datasets, i.e., ActivityNet-Caption, Charades-CD-OOD, and TACoS. The experimental results show that our SVPTR method establishes the new state-of-the-art performance on all datasets. Even under the conditions of fewer annotations, it can also achieve competitive results compared with recent VPG methods.


Drug discovery proceeds as a multi-stage process, from the identification of a potential therapeutic target through lead generation, lead optimization, preclinical evaluation to clinical testing, before a new medicine is marketed. Uniting synthetically accessible chemical space with disease relevant biological space represents a significant challenge. Industrial chemical biology approaches have been recognized by pharmaceutical companies as a novel strategy in drug discovery. It encompasses an organizational structure composed of dedicated, specialized teams, thereby enabling a detailed analysis and an optimal use of the chemical and biological space of target classes. The benefits of an industrial chemical biology approaches in combination with automated parallel synthesis and purification will be discussed. A case study for the discovery of novel GPCRs ligands with a focus on the therapeutic areas of Inflammation and Neurobiology will also be presented.


In brief Knee dislocation is a rare but brief potentially catastrophic water-skiing injury. Our patient sustained a fracture-dislocation of the knee and, because of vascular damage, required amputation of his lower leg. A subsequent survey of approximately 150 orthopedic surgeons revealed that, among their patients, the majority of serious knee injuries related to waterskiing resulted from noncontact falls into the water. Dislocation was the most serious consequence recorded, while damage to the tibial collateral ligament occurred most frequently.


The first force map has been generated for a 2 DOF wing designed for the MFI project. For the wing beating at a resonance frequency of 139 Hz, the average 3-D forces were found as a function of sinusoidal voltage amplitude and actuator phase difference. An image sequence of the wing trajectory allowed comparison to simulated forces using a quasi-steady state aerodynamic approximation. Finally, the results were compared to the case of ideally matched leading/lagging wing dynamics driven by sinusoids.


We propose a similarity measure for sparsely sampled time course data in the form of a loglikelihood ratio of Gaussian processes (GP). The proposed GP similarity is similar to a Bayes factor and provides enhanced robustness to noise in sparse time series, such as those found in various biological settings, e.g., gene transcriptomics. We show that the GP measure is equivalent to the Euclidean distance when the noise variance in the GP is negligible compared to the noise variance of the signal. Our numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data show improved performance of the GP similarity when used in conjunction with two distance-based clustering methods.


BACKGROUND
The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers, and Allied Workers (UURWAW) is one of the 15 building and construction trades departments in the AFL-CIO. The U.S. roofing industry, including both roofing and waterproofing applications, both unionized and nonunionized, comprises about 25,000 firms, employing approximately 300,000 people, about 200,000 of whom are involved in the application of roofs. The specific toxins to which roofers may be exposed at the job site include, among others, bitumens (asphalt and/or coal tar pitch) as well as asbestos and fiberglass from roof removal operations. Excess deaths from occupational injuries are also of concern.

METHODS
This study evaluated causes of mortality among 11,144 members of the UURWAW. Age-adjusted proportionate mortality ratios (PMRs) were computed with 95% confidence intervals (CI) using U.S. age-, gender-, and race-specific proportional mortality rates for the years of the study, 1950-1996.

RESULTS
Statistically significant increased PMRs were found for all injuries (PMR = 142, CI = 134-150), especially falls (PMR = 464, CI = 419-513) and other injuries (PMR = 121, CI = 107-137), cancers of the lung (PMR = 139, CI = 131-148), bladder (PMR = 138, CI = 111-170), esophagus (PMR = 134, CI = 107-166), larynx (PMR = 145, CI = 106-193), and cancers of other and unspecified sites (PMR = 130, CI = 112-149), pneumoconioses and other nonmalignant respiratory diseases (PMR = 115, CI = 103-128), and homicides (PMR = 153, CI = 135-172). The occupational exposures which may have contributed to the excess risks of malignant and nonmalignant respiratory diseases include, among others, asphalt fumes, coal tar pitch volatiles and asbestos; however, cigarette smoking must also be considered a contributing factor.

CONCLUSIONS
The present study underscores the need to control airborne exposures to hazardous substances and especially to examine fall prevention efforts within the roofing industry. Am. J. Ind. Med. 37:478-492, 2000. Published 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.


Mode locking and frequency tuning of a CW light-focusing Nd : glass laser called the SELFOC Nd : glass laser were achieved. Using an acoustooptic modulator having a modest degree of modulation (about 3 percent), almost perfectly mode-locked pulses as short as 49 ps were obtained. Pulsewidth was measured with an intensity-correlation method using the second-harmonic generation in KDP. Most of the observed shapes of the intensity-correlation curves were in agreement with theories previously presented by several authors. When the laser was mode locked, the long-term averaged optical spectrum was observed to narrow considerably. Some experimental evidence that the CW SELFOC Nd:glass laser could be considered to have a homogeneously broadened line was also found. Frequency tuning was achieved by using a tilted etalon in a cavity. When a 50-μm-thick etalon was used, the tuning range was more than 40 A. Pulses obtained from a frequency-tuned mode-locked laser were as short as about 100 ps.


Portable computing devices with wireless links are new means for computing and communication. PDAs, cell phones, and portable computers are expected to drive mobile commerce. Among them personal digital assistants (PDAs) are considered to have the most potential. While there is strong indication that PDA adoption is increasing, little systematic research has been done to understand the determinants of PDA adoption and use by individuals. In this study we empirically examine PDA adoption using widely employed Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The findings of the study show that TAM predicts PDA adoption well.


The rejection of foreign individuals is considered a central parameter in the evolution of social life. Within family units, parents are typically thought to reject foreign offspring to ensure that their investment into care is directed towards their own descendants. Whereas selection for such kin bias is expected to be high when parental care is extended and involves numerous and energetically costly behaviors, it can be reduced when the acceptance of foreigners provide subsequent benefits to offspring and when alternative parental strategies limit the risk of clutch parasitism. In this study, we investigated the outcome of these conflicting selection pressures in the European earwig. Our results overall demonstrate that mothers do not eliminate foreign eggs, provide the same level of care to both foreign and own eggs (egg grooming, egg defense, and maternal return) and pay the same costs of care in terms of weight loss and immunity when tending each type of eggs. We also show that foreign and own eggs exhibit similar development time, hatching success and lead to comparable juvenile quality. Interestingly, our results reveal that tending eggs (of any origin) reduces mothers' weight loss during this long period, possibly due to egg cannibalism. Hence, these findings emphasize the difficulty to predict the occurrence of kin bias, and stress the need to broaden our knowledge on the net benefits of egg rejection for parents to better under-stand the general importance of kin bias in the evolution of pre-hatching parental care.


The present work was carried out to determine the LD50 and LD90 of Malathion, Fenitrothion and Propoxur for the house fly, MUSCA DOMESTICA L., under laboratory conditions. The house fly populations were collected from the municipality garbage area of Ankara in September 1981, April and September, 1982. The resistance tests were applied on both sexes by means of Topical Application method. The highest resistance level for Malathion was observed in Ankara strains. The values of LD50 were 261.1, 302.1, 312,6 micrograms/female, respectively. The populations were not showed high resistance ratio to Fenitrothion (R/S 93.3, 126.6, 56.6 at LD50) and Propoxur (R/S 34.2, 31.4, 21.4 at LD50). It is clear that, Propoxur was more toxic to female and male flies than Fenitrothion. However the males were more susceptible to the applied insecticides than the females. It was concluded that susceptibility of houseflies to the insecticides varied widely by seasons in the same habitat. The results of the tests indicated that the resistance level of Malathion was very high. Therefore it should not be recommended for the control of houseflies in Ankara.


In cultured hippocampal neurons and in adult brain, the splicing regulatory protein Sam68 is partially relocated to the somatodendritic domain, and associates with dendritic polysomes. Transfer to the dendrites is activity-dependent. We have investigated the repertoire of neuronal mRNAs to which Sam68 binds . Using co-immunoprecipitation and micro-array in vivo screening techniques, Sam68 was found to associate with a number of plasticity-related mRNA species, including Eef1a1, an activity-responsive mRNA coding for translation elongation factor eEF1A. In cortical neuronal cultures, translation of the Eef1a1 mRNA was strongly induced by neuronal depolarisation, and correlated with enhanced association of Sam68 with polysomal mRNAs. The possible function of Sam68 in Eef1a1 mRNA utilization was studied by expressing a dominant-negative, cytoplasmic Sam68 mutant (GFP-Sam68 C) in cultured hippocampal neurons. The level of eEF1A was lower in neurons expressing GFP-Sam68 C than Δ Δ in control neurons, supporting the proposal that endogenous Sam68 may contribute to the translational efficiency of the Eef1a1 mRNA. These findings are discussed in the light of the complex, potentially crucial regulation of eEF1A biosynthesis during longterm synaptic change. MESH


AIM
To predict survival time of Korean hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients by analyzing big data using Cox proportional hazards model.

METHODS
Big data of the patients who underwent treatment for HCC from 2008 to 2015, provided by Korea Central Cancer Registry, National Cancer Center, and Ministry of Health and Welfare, were analyzed. A total of 10 742 patients with HCC were divided into two groups, with Group I (3021 patients) confirmed on biopsy and Group II (5563 patients) diagnosed as HCC according to HCC diagnostic criteria as outlined in Korean Liver Cancer Association guidelines. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were performed to identify independent risk factors of recurrence after treatment and survival status.

RESULTS
A total of 3021 patients in Group I and 5563 patients in Group II were included in the study and the difference in survival time between the two groups was statistically significant (P < 0.05). Recurrence was only included in intrahepatic cases, and the rates were 21.2 and 19.8% while the periods from the first treatment to recurrence were 15.57 and 14.19 months, respectively. Age, diabetes, BMI, platelet, alpha-fetoprotein, histologic tumor maximum size, imaging T stage, presence of recurrence, and duration of recurrence were included in multivariate analysis.

CONCLUSION
By using nationwide, multicenter big data, it is possible to predict recurrence rate and survival time which can provide the basis for treatment response to develop a predictive program.


ABSTRACT In Escherichia coli, rRNAs are transcribed as precursors and require processing at the 3′ and 5′ ends to generate mature RNA molecules. The largest of these RNAs, 23S rRNA, is matured at the 3′ end by a set of exonucleases and at the 5′ end by an unknown RNase. Whether the 3′ and 5′ maturation steps occur independently or are coupled has previously been unclear. By assessing the levels of precursors accumulating at the 3′ and 5′ ends, we provide evidence that these processes may be linked. Thus, each of several conditions that led to precursor accumulation at one end also did so at the other end. We also observed that each end undergoes maturation at similar rates, suggesting that the two processes could be coupled. Finally, we provide evidence that processing at the 3′ end facilitates 5′-end maturation. A model to explain the basis for the observed directionality of the reactions is proposed. This information will aid in the search for the enzyme responsible for final maturation of the 5′ end of 23S rRNA.


This study was performed to investigate the effect of regular aerobic exercise on the representative markers of cardiovascular inflammatory diseases. Biomarkers of cardiovascular disease were measured in 89 healthy elderly males (age range; 47–88) living in Seoul, Korea. Questionnaires were used to assess the status of the regular exercise participants. Various factors associated with chronic cardiovascular diseases, including total cholesterol, triglyceride, phospholipid, platelet, and C-reactive protein were lowered in regular exercise participants (p<0.05). In contrast, serum albumin concentration was higher in the exercised group compared with a non-exercised group (p<0.05). Therefore it was concluded that participation in regular exercise reduces cardiovascular inflammation and offers protection against chronic cardiovascular disease in elderly Korean men.


Reported in this paper are foliar chemistry, tree growth (above- and below- ground), soil chemistry, nitrogen cycling (net mineralization and nitrification) and soil N20 flux responses to the first 6 yr of chronic nitrogen amendments at the Harvard Forest (Massachusetts, USA). A 70-yr-old red pine (Pinus resinosa Ait.) stand and a 50-yr-old mixed hardwood stand received control, low nitrogen (50 kg.ha-'-yr-'), high nitrogen (150 kg.ha-'-yr-'), and low nitrogen plus sulfur treatments, with additions occurring in six equal doses over the growing season as NH4NO3 and Na2SO4. Foliar N concentrations increased up to 25% in the hardwood stand and 67% in the pines, and there was no apparent decrease of N retranslocation due to fertilization. Wood production increased in the hardwood stand in response to fertilization but decreased in the pine stand. Fine-root nitrogen concentrations increased with N additions, and fine roots were a significant sink for added nitrogen. Nitrate leaching losses increased continuously over the 6-yr period in the treated pine stands but remained insignificant in the hardwoods. Annual net N mineralization increased substan- tially in response to treatments in both stands but declined in the pine high-N plot by the end of year six. Net nitrification increased from 17% of net mineralization in 1988 to 51% in 1993 for the pine high-N plot. Only a slight increase in net nitrification was measured in the hardwood stand, and only in 1993. Extractable NH4 was consistently higher in treated plots than in controls in both stands, where extractable NO3 was higher than controls only in the treated pine plots. Soil extracts yielded <1.5 kg/ha of NO3-N for all plots in the hardwood stand throughout the experiment. Effluxes of N2O were consistently greater in the pine high-N plot than in the pine control plot, but there were no observed large-scale increases in N20 emissions immediately following fertilizer application. Calculated nitrogen budgets for the first 6 yr showed extremely high N retention (85-99%). Of the retained N, 50-83% appears to be in the long-term, recalcitrant soil pool. The relative importance of biotic and abiotic mechanisms of N incorporation into soils remains uncertain. Size, kinetics, and uptake capacity of this soil pool are critical and largely unknown factors determining ecosystem response to increased N loading and may be related to land-use history.


BACKGROUND
The present study examined dietary messages conveyed in articles and advertising in two popular British women's magazines, Woman and Home and Woman's Own, between 1940 and 1954.

METHODS
A qualitative analysis of written content was performed, focusing on regularities evident in content, and addressing the construction of the role of women in relation to food provision, as well as assertions for nutritional health. The setting comprised a desk-based study. The study sample encompassed 37 magazines, and yielded a corpus of 569 articles concerned with food or dietary supplements, of which 80.1% were advertisements.

RESULTS
Ministry of Food dietary advice featured prominently up to 1945 and advocated food consumption according to a simple nutrient classification. Advertising and article content also used this classification; advocating consumption of food and supplements on the grounds of energy, growth and protection of health was customary. Providing food to meet nutritional needs was depicted as fundamental to women's war effort and their role as dutiful housewives. Advertising in 1950s magazines also focused on nutritional claims, with a particular emphasis on energy provision.

CONCLUSIONS
These claims reflected the prevailing food policy and scientific understanding of nutritional health. This analysis of food messages in women's magazines provides lessons for contemporary nutrition policy.


Type IV secretion systems (T4SSs) are large macromolecular machines that translocate protein and DNA and are involved in the pathogenesis of multiple human diseases. Here, using electron cryotomography (ECT), we report the in situ structure of the Dot/Icm type IVB secretion system (T4BSS) utilized by the human pathogen Legionella pneumophila. This is the first structure of a type IVB secretion system, and also the first structure of any T4SS in situ. While the Dot/Icm system shares almost no sequence similarity with type IVA secretion systems (T4ASSs), its overall structure is seen here to be remarkably similar to previously reported T4ASS structures (those encoded by the R388 plasmid in Escherichia coli and the cag pathogenicity island in Helicobacter pylori). This structural similarity suggests shared aspects of mechanism. However, compared to the negative‐stain reconstruction of the purified T4ASS from the R388 plasmid, the L. pneumophila Dot/Icm system is approximately twice as long and wide and exhibits several additional large densities, reflecting type‐specific elaborations and potentially better structural preservation in situ.


ABSTRACT Wolf hybrids present a case study for deconstructing and critiquing how the nature/culture dualism permeates discourses about and constitutes human relationships with "wild" and "domestic" animals. In this essay, I conduct a critical textual analysis of three competing discourses about wolf hybrids: (1) wolf hybrid buyers and sellers determined to defend the animals as suitable pets for the "right owner"; (2) conservationists worried about preserving a pure stock of wild and/or endangered wolves; and (3) domestic animal advocates worried about individual wolf hybrids' welfare in the hands of irresponsible owners. Despite legitimate ethical concerns about the "ownership" of canines, hybridized or otherwise, I posit that these discourses largely eschew complex ethical quandaries in favor of a simultaneous fetishization and fear of the "wild" wolf. The wild/domestic dualism discursively invoked for and against wolf hybrids constitutes an ahistorical eco-normativity that constructs wolf hybrids as both liminal and killable creatures. Wolf hybrids ultimately function as "companion cyborgs": neither wild nor domestic canines, but rather liminal denizens of both sides of a nature/culture dualism ill-suited for wolfish dogs and doggish wolves.


In order to enhance the performance of AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) biosensor, millimeter grade AlGaN/GaN HEMT structure have been designed and successfully fabricated. Factors influencing the capability of the AlGaN/GaN HEMT biosensor are analyzed. UV/ozone is used to oxidize GaN surface and then 3-aminopropyl trimethoxysilane (APTES) self-assembled monolayer can be bound to the sensing region. This serves as a binding layer in the attachment of prostate specific antibody (anti-PSA) for prostate specific antigen detection. The millimeter grade biomolecule-gated GaN/AlGaN HEMT sensor shows a quick response when the target prostate specific antigen in a buffer solution is added to the antibody-immobilized sensing area. The detection capability of this biomolecule-gate sensor estimated to be below 0.1pg/ml level using a 2 x 1 : 5 mm 2 sensing area, which is the best result of GaN/AlGaN HEMT biosensor for PSA detection till now. The electrical result of the biomolecule-gated GaN/AlGaN HEMT biosensor suggests that this biosensor might be a useful tool for the prostate cancer screening.


Twenty-eight active international athletes agreed to be available for random spot urine collections at their homes, places of work and training. Suitable briefed collectors were arranged to conduct the spot collections and forward the specimens for analysis. An average number of 3.4 collections per athlete was made in the 9 month period of the trial. Overall there was a "failure to collect" percentage of 14 during the winter months and 54 during the summer months. The average time interval between initial contact with the athlete and collection was 11 hours 50 minutes. It is concluded that random spot collections of urine from active athletes in training is possible and practical. Improved collection rates could be achieved by additional spot collection at athletic events during the summer and by using regionally based mobile collectors responsible for several athletes.


Location service provides location information of robots to sensors, to enable event reporting. Existing protocols apply partial flooding to trace robots, leading to poor scalability. We propose a novel scalable location service, which applies hierarchical rings to update robot location and guide routing toward it. Each mobile robot creates a set of hierarchical update rings of doubling radii. Whenever the robot leaves its k-th ring, it updates its new location to sensors along its newly defined k-th ring, and re-defines all smaller rings for future decisions. When a sensor needs to route to the mobile robot, it starts searching from its smallest ring and sends location query to the sensors along the ring. If the query fails, the search then extends to the next larger ring, until it intersects an existing update ring, from which the search can be directed towards reported center. The location of destination is updated whenever another more recent ring is intersected. Our scheme guarantees message delivery if robot remains connected to sensors during its move. The theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate better scalability than previous protocols for the similar goal.


SUMMARY Retrospective analysis of the archival clinical data collected outside the controlled trials is the main source of false conclusions due to data manipulation. This flawed method produces common errors especially in case if life duration is used as an endpoint in survival analysis. It is pointed out that the mixing of searching and / or descriptive-promoting goals with the evidence aimed conclusions is incorrect and should be avoided. The main feature of evidence based study is the fact that the design of the study, inclusion / - exclusion criteria, recruitment time and analysis plan are developed and exist before the experimental data will appear. Special modeling program was written to generate the data and to simulate wrong procedures of data manipulation and analysis. In the paper the examples of late post factum selection of patients are demonstrated and the resulting bias of estimates is discussed. The main conclusion is that retrospective time to event analysis of the passively collected data is not free of mistakes. Such type of the study and analysis should be used with limitation in discovering and descriptive studies.


This paper focuses on the research of stability capacity of shells with openings, the judgment of joint rigidity and the influence of joint rigidity on stability capacity of shell structure. The research result showed that it should give priority to use ribbed-Schwedler shells for the shells with large openings. Currently, there is no clear standard for judging joint rigidity, this paper presents a way to identify the steel joints stiffness. In the structural design of Chang'an stadium, according to the joint structure, it is proved to be hinged node by analyzing the joint stiffness. Buckling analysis results show that: single-layer shell with hinged nodes also has good stability. The result of the research has a certain value to practical engineering design.


Abstract This essay draws attention to Novatian's view of divine impassibility and God's emotions. Many modern theologians have abnegated this attribute because of the alleged paradox with scriptural depictions of God's affections. After a brief genetic study of the term impassibility, followed by a compendious survey of select modern theologians, I offer Novatian as a way forward beyond this theological impasse. The church can profit from the early polemics against Marcion who posited that the one God was unable to bear all the emotional ascriptions scripture predicates to God. To Novatian, God was impassible yet possessed a manifold of emotions.


SIR: With reference to your issue of February 28, 1970, you have an editorial on the immunization disaster at Geelong. Am I to conclude from your generally admirable conclusions that sterilizing by bolling does not destroy the virus of serum hepatitis? If that is so, I presume it follows that glass syringes and needles sterllized by bolling in the surgery are obsolete. I should be grateful for your comments, as I imagine that sterllizing syringes and needles by boiling is still a fairly common procedure throughout Australia. SIR: Thank you for letting me see Dr Reading's letter, I have searched the minutes of Council meetings and the correspondence files and can find no record of a written application by Dr Reading for assistance. If he refers to a telephone conversation with myself, I am quite sure that any courteous request would have evoked an equally courteous response.


Transplantation of a Lewis rat small bowel allograft (SBTx) into Lewis x Brown Norway F1 (LBNF1) hybrid recipients provokes lethal graft-versus-host disease. GVHD in F1 hybrid rats inoculated with large number of parental lymphocytes may be abrogated by prior treatment of F1 hybrids with a sublethal dose (SLD) of the same parental lymphocytes. Therefore, we sought to determine whether this type of immunomodulation would prevent GVHD after SBTx. We examined whether pretreatment of LBNF1 recipients with a SLD of parental lymphocytes, or with a revascularized segment of parental small bowel, might ameliorate GVHD following transplantation of the entire parental small bowel. Nonpretreated LBNF1 recipients died of GVHD after entire Lew SBTx; 95% of LBNF1 recipients pretreated with SLD of Lew lymphocytes and 84% of LBNF1 recipients first transplanted with a segment of Lew small bowel survived GVHD induced by entire Lew SBTx 10 days later. Of LBNF1 recipients pretreated with SLD of Brown Norway lymphocytes or first transplanted with a segment of BN small bowel, none were protected from GVHD induced by entire Lew SBTx 10 days later. We concluded that pretreatment of LBNF1 recipients either with an SLD of parental lymphocytes or with a segment of parental small bowel provides profound protection from the effects of GVHD following transplantation of an entire small bowel of the same parental strain specificity.


BACKGROUND
There have not been previous reports of patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) using a gadolinium chelate.

METHODS AND RESULTS
A 74-year-old woman, who had a history of anaphylactic shock 4 times in response to iodinated contrast media despite preprocedural intravenous administration of hydrocortisone, was hospitalized because of unstable angina refractory to intensive medical treatment. Fully considering the risks of iodinated agents, digital subtraction coronary angiography and PCI were performed using gadopentetate dimeglumine without any side effects or complications.

CONCLUSIONS
Gadolinium chelates can be an alternative contrast media during PCI in particular patients with contraindications to iodinated media.


Past empirical failures of the basic Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) model related to the inability of data to meet its restrictive assumptions, particularly identical international technologies and factor price equalization. Trefler (1993) tried to resuscitate HOV by introducing a simple Hicks-neutral (HN) factor-productivity adjustment, an approach that was heavily criticized. In this paper, we re-examine the productivity question by estimating factor-specific productivities from the individual technology data of multiple countries. Using a dataset of 29 countries, both developed and developing, we find evidence of factor-augmenting technological differences. In particular, the factor-productivity adjustment works well for developed members of the OECD. Further, we find that the ratios of factor productivities are strongly correlated with corresponding factor endowments. This systematic bias implies that the ability of HOV to explain North-South factor trade depends both on relative factor abundance and factor-augmenting productivity gaps.


This paper illustrates how nonlinear programming and simulation tools, which are available in packages such as MATLAB and SIMULINK, can easily be used to solve optimal control problems with state- and/or input-dependent inequality constraints. The method presented is illustrated with a model of a single-link manipulator. The method is suitable to be taught to advanced undergraduate and Master's level students in control engineering.


Ni-containing heteropolyvanadate, Na6[NiV14O40], was synthesized for the first time to be applied in high-energy lithium storage applications as a negative electrode material. Na6[NiV14O40] can be prepared via a facile solution process that is suitable for low-cost mass production. The as-prepared electrode provided a high capacity of approximately 700 mAh g-1 without degradation for 400 cycles, indicating excellent cycling stability. The mechanism of charge storage was investigated using operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), X-ray diffraction (XRD), transition X-ray microscopy (TXM), and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The results showed that V5+ was reduced to V2+ during lithiation, indicating that Na6[NiV14O40] is an insertion-type material. In addition, Na6[NiV14O40] maintained its amorphous structure with negligible volume expansion/contraction during cycling. Employed as the negative electrode in a lithium-ion battery (LIB), the Na6[NiV14O40]//LiFePO4 full cell had a high energy density of 300 W h kg-1. When applied in a lithium-ion capacitor, the Na6[NiV14O40]//expanded mesocarbon microbead full cell displayed energy densities of 218.5 and 47.9 W h kg-1 at power densities of 175.7 and 7774.2 W kg-1, respectively. These findings reveal that the negative electrode material Na6[NiV14O40] is a promising candidate for Li-ion storage applications.


Gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) are most often associated with oncogenic mutations of the KIT gene resulting in activation of the tyrosine kinase receptor KIT. Familial GIST syndrome based on a hereditary predisposition to develop GIST owing to a germline mutation is exceedingly rare. We describe a kindred with familial GIST displaying a novel germline mutation in exon 17. Three siblings (2 females, 1 male; 42 to 49 y) underwent surgery for multiple intra-abdominal tumors within a 3-year period. Their father had been operated on for gastric and jejunal tumors 20 years previously. The GIST was confirmed by immunohistochemistry in each sibling. Tumor and blood samples of the family members were analyzed for mutations in KIT and platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PDGFRα) genes. All examined lesions were of spindle cell type with expression of CD117. The tumor material exhibited a novel point mutation in codon 822 in exon 17 resulting in the replacement of asparagine by tyrosine (N822Y). The same mutation was detected in the father's blood sample. One healthy brother of the 3 siblings showed a wild-type sequence of the KIT gene. The germline mutation in exon 17 of the KIT gene identified in this kindred is very different from previously reported mutations of the KIT gene in familial GIST. Although the penetrance of KIT mutations is as yet unknown, assessment of the unaffected kindred of GIST patients for the presence of this mutation could help to distinguish individuals at high risk from those at virtually no risk.


One of the major challenges in today's agriculture is to achieve enhanced plant growth and biomass even under adverse environmental conditions. Recent advancements in genetics and molecular biology have enabled the identification of a complex signaling network contributing toward plant growth and development on the one hand and abiotic stress response on the other hand. As an outcome of these studies, three major approaches have been identified as having the potential to improve biomass production in plants under abiotic stress conditions. These approaches deal with having changes in the following: (i) plant–microbe interactions; (ii) cell wall biosynthesis; and (iii) phytohormone levels. At the same time, employing functional genomics and genetics-based approaches, a very large number of genes have been identified that play a key role in abiotic stress tolerance. Our Minireview is an attempt to unveil the cross-talk that has just started to emerge between the transcriptional circuitries for biomass production and abiotic stress response. This knowledge may serve as a valuable resource to eventually custom design the crop plants for higher biomass production, in a more sustainable manner, in marginal lands under variable climatic conditions.


This article reports findings from a study which interviewed 36 undergraduate students about aspects of the teaching and learning environment which motivated or demotivated their study. It was found that students were motivated by a teaching environment characterized by eight main elements. This article reports in detail on the element of establishing relevance, as this seemed very important to the interviewees. The interviewees found that teaching abstract theory alone was demotivating. Relevance could be established through: showing how theory can be applied in practice, establishing relevance to local cases, relating material to everyday applications, or finding applications in current newsworthy issues. The traditional building block curriculum, which devotes substantial parts of initial courses to basic theory, could demotivate students if they could not see how the theory was applicable to the discipline or profession. The problem could be alleviated by a course which revealed a curriculum map showing the application of basic material in more advanced courses, or by early periods of exposure to professional practice in professional programmes. Professional programmes faced a double-edged sword with respect to relevance in that it could be established by demonstrating that material was relevant to a future career. However, students could easily become demotivated if they could not see the relevance of theoretical material, since they had chosen a professional programme in the expectation that it would prepare them well for their future career.


The allocation of opportunities affects income distribution and income inequality. This paper analyzes the economic impacts of the initial allocation of resources and redistribution of opportunities. In this study, we apply a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model focusing on the distribution of opportunities and allocation of available resources. The differences between households' income are caused by differences in labor income (skilled and unskilled) and the household's income from capital stock. The model is calibrated based on the micro consistent matrix (MCM) of the Iranian economy. We found that the redistribution of opportunities and re-allocation of resources can reduce inequality. In other words, improvement inequality of opportunities leads to more equal society. The important finding of the study is that an increase in inequality of opportunity may cause the income gap grows faster. So, big reduction in inequality of income after a small reduction in inequality of opportunities can be witnessed.


The clustering validation and clustering interpretation are the two last steps of clustering process. The validation step permits to evaluate the goodness of clustering results using some measures. Valid results are then generally interpreted and used in cluster analysis. The validity measures are classified into three categories: unsupervised measures, supervised measures and relative measures. Several supervised measures have been proposed to perform supervised evaluation such as entropy, purity, F-measure, Jaccard coefficient and Rand statistic. Generally, these measures evaluate results according to class labels. However, they are not always able to distinguish interpretable clusters because most of them depends on the number of labels. This paper proposes a new supervised evaluation measure - called "homogeneity degree"- that permits to merge the steps of validation and interpretation. Our measure is applied to a real traffic data set and is used to interpret some traffic situations. Comparison with other evaluation measures shows the performance of our proposal.


The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted all walks of life. Although, the impact of COVID-19 in terms of estimated number of cases & deaths based on anecdotal data is available, the effect and impact, in terms of losses in different sectors await confident comprehension. It is understood that COVID-19 is the consequential manifestation of systemic risk but there are only few studies that goes back in time to investigate the chronic nature of underlying vulnerabilities in a community that is responsible for shaping the disaster at hand. This body of work investigates the process of how the risk, the translation of which contributed to faster transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and relatively higher deaths due to COVID-19 during the first wave, in the World Heritage (old) city of Ahmedabad, had been building over a period of more than 600 years by considering the old city as a 'system' and its functional and operational dimensions as 'sibling systems'. The methodology adopted by the study would help policy-makers to understand how decisions of the present, which disregards the past, can lead to tumultuous consequences, emphasising on the need of local level understanding and assessment of risk through the lens of systems analysis. This study also tries to understand how the overall system (the old city of Ahmedabad) managed to cope with the effect and impact of COVID-19 by leveraging its ways of life and collective consciousness - cultural heritage – to build a case of the urgent need of mainstreaming cultural heritage into risk-informed sustainable development.


In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the complexity-specific hypothesis explains that atypical visual processing is attributable to selective functional changes in visual pathways. We investigated dendritic microstructures and their associations with functional connectivity (FC). Participants included 28 individuals with ASD and 29 typically developed persons. We explored changes in neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging (NODDI) and brain areas whose FC was significantly correlated with NODDI parameters in the explored regions of interests. Individuals with ASD showed significantly higher orientation dispersion index (ODI) values in the left occipital gyrus (OG) corresponding to the secondary visual cortex (V2). FC values between the left OG and the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) were significantly negatively correlated with mean ODI values. The mean ODI values in the left OG were significantly positively associated with low registration of the visual quadrants of the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile (AASP), resulting in a significant positive correlation with passive behavioral responses of the AASP visual quadrants; additionally, the FC values between the left OG and the left MTG were significantly negatively associated with reciprocal social interaction. Our results suggest that abnormal V2 dendritic arborization is associated with atypical visual processing by altered intermediation in the ventral visual pathway.


The prion protein (PrP) takes up 4-6 equiv of copper in its extended N-terminal domain, composed of the octarepeat (OR) segment (human sequence residues 60-91) and two mononuclear binding sites (at His96 and His111; also referred to as the non-OR region). The OR segment responds to specific copper concentrations by transitioning from a multi-His mode at low copper levels to a single-His, amide nitrogen mode at high levels (Chattopadhyay et al. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2005, 127, 12647-12656). The specific function of PrP in healthy tissue is unclear, but numerous reports link copper uptake to a neuroprotective role that regulates cellular stress (Stevens, et al. PLoS Pathog.2009, 5 (4), e1000390). A current working hypothesis is that the high occupancy binding mode quenches copper's inherent redox cycling, thus, protecting against the production of reactive oxygen species from unregulated Fenton type reactions. Here, we directly test this hypothesis by performing detailed pH-dependent electrochemical measurements on both low and high occupancy copper binding modes. In contrast to the current belief, we find that the low occupancy mode completely quenches redox cycling, but high occupancy leads to the gentle production of hydrogen peroxide through a catalytic reduction of oxygen facilitated by the complex. These electrochemical findings are supported by independent kinetic measurements that probe for ascorbate usage and also peroxide production. Hydrogen peroxide production is also observed from a segment corresponding to the non-OR region. Collectively, these results overturn the current working hypothesis and suggest, instead, that the redox cycling of copper bound to PrP in the high occupancy mode is not quenched, but is regulated. The observed production of hydrogen peroxide suggests a mechanism that could explain PrP's putative role in cellular signaling.


Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification was used for detecting circulating tumor cells. However, PCR was so sensitive that it detected a very low level of mRNA with no relevance to tumor cells. We analyzed the degree of micro-tumor spread in esophageal cancer patients using quantitative PCR. Samples were collected from 28 patients and 35 controls. Real-time quantitative PCR (LightCycler) was employed for the detection of carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and cytokeratin 20 (CK-20). In the CEA and CK-20 mRNA assays, 7 and 3 out of 28 patients, respectively, showed higher mRNA levels in peripheral blood than the normal range based on values of controls (mean+/-2SD). Eleven out of 19, 4 out of 14, and 2 out of 5 patients showed higher CEA mRNA levels in the samples from tumor drainage vein, costal bone marrow, and thoracic duct lymph, respectively. One of the 7 patients who showed higher CEA mRNA levels in pretreatment peripheral blood is currently free from disease. These findings reveal that quantitative PCR can discriminate high levels of cancer-specific expression from low levels of illegitimate expression in blood. They also suggest that the identification of circulating tumor cells by the CEA mRNA assay is a reliable means of predicting early recurrence.


Modern satellites deployed in low Earth orbit (LEO) accommodate processing payloads that can be exploited for edge computing. Furthermore, by implementing inter-satellite links, the LEO satellites in a constellation can route the data end-to-end (E2E). These capabilities can be exploited to greatly improve the current store-and-forward approaches in Earth surveillance systems. However, they give rise to an NP-hard problem of joint communication and edge computing resource management (RM). In this paper, we propose an algorithm that allows the satellites to select between computing the tasks at the edge or at a cloud server and to allocate an adequate power for communication. The overall objective is to minimize the energy consumption at the satellites while fulfilling specific service E2E latency constraints for the computing tasks. Experimental results show that our algorithm achieves energy savings of up to 18% when compared to the selected benchmarks with either 1) fixed edge computing decisions or 2) maximum power allocation.


Objective. To probe into the characteristics of authors, institutes and region distribution of papers published in "Space Medicine & Medical Engineering" (SMME), as well as its papers indexed and cited by CBMDisc, CB-ISITC and CSCD-CD98; to look into its core authors, core regions and core institutes. Method. Bibliometric method was used to analyse its published papers, cited papers and indexed papers. Result. 716 papers have been published in SMME, among which 622 were coauthor papers (86.9%); 94 were single author papers (13.1%); organization collaboration papers 109 (15.2%); institutes 548 (76.5%); colleges and Universities 132 (18.4%); hospitals 36 (5.1%). CBMDisc and CB-ISTIC index rate were 81% and 75% of its papers respectively, SMME's 39 papers were cited in 25 journals via CSCD-CD98, 10 of 42 core authors are cited. Conclusion. Papers published in SMME per issue have been increasing in 10 years, core region is Beijing. Core authors have been formed in SMME. Papers indexed by CBMDisc and CB-ISTIC are also increasing. But its citation status is not ideal, and high cited papers and high cited authors are few. Numbers and types of Natural Scientific Foundation supported papers are increasing.


The rolling resistance of passenger tires and the fundamental factors influencing results from laboratory and road testing are discussed. Test methodologies for laboratory testing, rolling resistance trailer, vehicle coast-down, and vehicle fuel consumption tests are discussed. The major emphasis is on the direct comparison of the bias belted tire with the steel belted radial tire to demonstrate the effect of tire construction, test method, and test parameters on tire performance. Observations are made regarding test methods and the significance of certain data.


The concentration of myelin basic protein (MBP) mRNA in primary cultures of cells dissociated from embryonic mouse cerebra and grown in the presence of varying amounts of thyroid hormone was measured using a 32P‐labeled cDNA probe and a dot‐blot procedure. The cDNA probe contained 1.85 kilobases of the gene for MBP. The concentration of mRNA specific for MBP in control cells grown on a medium containing normal (euthyroid) calf serum increased with increasing age of culture. The greatest increase occurred between 15 and 35 days in culture (5.25‐fold increase); whereas between 35 and 50 days in culture, the rate of accumulation slowed to yield a net increase of MBP mRNA of only 10%. The quantity of MBP mRNA was drastically diminished at all ages studied when the cells were grown from the sixth day onward on a medium containing hypothyroid calf serum. Although the amount of MBP mRNA in hypothyroidtreated cells did increase, the change in concentration was less (3.43‐fold), and it peaked earlier (at 30 days). Unlike the euthyroid cells, after 30 days the MBP mRNA actually fell in the hypothyroid‐treated cells. If hypothyroid media were supplemented with triiodothyronine (T3) on the eighth day in culture, the quantity of MBP mRNA in the cells was restored almost completely to the levels found in the control euthyroid cells at all ages. Therefore, the regulation of the synthesis of MBP by thyroid hormone is at least in part a pretranslational event; that is, thyroid hormone adjusts the concentration of the mRNA specific for MBP.


BACKGROUND
Polymerization shrinkage is one of dental clinicians' main concerns when placing direct, posterior, resin-based composite restorations. Evolving improvements associated with resin-based composite materials, dental adhesives, filling techniques and light curing have improved their predictability, but shrinkage problems remain.

METHODS
The authors propose restoring enamel and dentin as two different substrates and describe new techniques for placing direct, posterior, resin-based composite restorations. These techniques use flowable and microhybrid resin-based composites that are polymerized with a progressive curing technique to restore dentin, as well as a microhybrid composite polymerized with a pulse-curing technique to restore enamel. Combined with an oblique, successive cusp buildup method, these techniques can minimize polymerization shrinkage greatly.

CONCLUSIONS
Selection and appropriate use of materials, better placement techniques and control polymerization shrinkage may result in more predictable and esthetic Class II resin-based composite restorations.

CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS
By using the techniques discussed by the authors, clinicians can reduce enamel microcracks and substantially improve the adaptation of resin-based composite to deep dentin. As a consequence, marginal discoloration, recurrent caries and postoperative sensitivity can be reduced, and longevity of these restorations potentially can be improved.


This paper proposes a low-cost architecture to improve the management SPM (Scratch Pad Memory) in dynamic and multitasking modes. In this context, our management strategy SPM based on Programmable Automaton implemented in Xilinx Vertex-5 FPGA is entirely different from prior research works. SPM is generally managed by software (by a strong programming logic or by compilation). But our Programmable Automaton facilitates access to SPM in order to move code or data and liberates space in SPM. After this step, software takes over content management of SPM (what part of code or data should be placed in SPM, locates spaces of Heap and Stack). So the performance of the programs is actually improved thanks to minimization of the access latency at the DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory or Main Memory).


The overall conclusion that can be drawn from the existing body of research is that the FISP has helped increase smallholder fertilizer use. It has also had a positive but modest direct impact on maize yields and overall smallholder maize production in Malawi. There is conflicting evidence as to whether rural poverty rates have risen or declined in recent years, and it is unclear how FISP has directly impacted household poverty.


The thermogravimetric analysis of binary Cu-80Ni alloys prepared respectively by conventional casting(CA) and mechanical alloying(MA) techniques and presenting widely different grain sizes was performed at 800 ℃ in air in order to study the effect of grain size change on the oxidation behavior of a solid solution alloy. The results show that the kinetic curves for the oxidation of the two alloys are complex and deviate from the parabolic rate law and usually are not composed of a single stage. Mixed scales were produced on the CACu-80Ni alloy surface, which consists of a mixture of copper and nickel oxides. However, oxide scale for MACu-80Ni alloy is mainly composed of a thick compact and continuous inner layer of nickel oxide. The reduction in the alloy grain size speeds up the diffusion of the more reactive component nickel from the alloy to alloy/oxide scale interface and completes the transition from a mixed scale to continuous scale of nickel oxide.


This thesis targets the part of Gareth Evans's and John McDowell's view of singular thought which involves the claim that there can be illusions of thought. Singular thought is, according to Evans and McDowell, an object-dependent thought-content; such thought-content could not be entertained unless the object it is about exists. Nevertheless, in a case of perceptual hallucination, where a subject mistakenly takes it that there is an object in front of him or her, Evans and McDowell think that it can seem to a subject exactly as though he or she is having an object-dependent thought, although the subject is in fact not thinking at all due to the absence of any object to think about. The thesis argues for a rejection of this idea of illusions of object-dependent thought. It is further argued that the idea of illusions of thought can be eliminated from Evans's and McDowell's view without abandoning their fundamental insight about how singular thought-content is object-dependent. Following specifically McDowell's development of the view, it is suggested that singular thought is about the world in virtue of how things cognitively appear to the subject. It is suggested that in an alleged case of illusion of thought, the subject has an object-dependent thought about an object whose existence in part is due to the mind's directedness in that very episode of singular thinking. Furthermore, Evans's and McDowell's respective views of acquaintance are criticised, and an idea about acquaintance as awareness of a wider range of objects than just perceivable objects is put forward. In general, the thesis outlines a revised version of Evans's and McDowell's view, a version according to which singular thought, although externalistically individuated, is transparent to the thinker.


Concatenated sequence alignments are often used to infer species-level relationships. Previous studies have shown that analysis of concatenated data using maximum likelihood (ML) can produce misleading results when loci have differing gene tree topologies due to incomplete lineage sorting. Here, we develop a polynomial time method that utilizes the modified mincut supertree algorithm to construct an estimated species tree from inferred rooted triples of concatenated alignments. We term this method SuperMatrix Rooted Triple (SMRT) and use the notation SMRT-ML when rooted triples are inferred by ML. We use simulations to investigate the performance of SMRT-ML under Jukes-Cantor and general time-reversible substitution models for four- and five-taxon species trees and also apply the method to an empirical data set of yeast genes. We find that SMRT-ML converges to the correct species tree in many cases in which ML on the full concatenated data set fails to do so. SMRT-ML can be conservative in that its output tree is often partially unresolved for problematic clades. We show analytically that when the species tree is clocklike and mutations occur under the Cavender-Farris-Neyman substitution model, as the number of genes increases, SMRT-ML is increasingly likely to infer the correct species tree even when the most likely gene tree does not match the species tree. SMRT-ML is therefore a computationally efficient and statistically consistent estimator of the species tree when gene trees are distributed according to the multispecies coalescent model.


PURPOSE
To evaluate a unique method of extended mentorship in robot-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy (RALP) at VA San Diego Healthcare System (VASDHS). As novel robotic technologies diffuse into surgical practice, developing safe apprenticeships remains a challenge.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
Between October 2008 and November 2010, 90 RALPs were prospectively divided into three phases: Proctored, Independent, and Instructor. During the first 30 Proctored cases, an experienced robotic surgeon from the affiliated university-based hospital mentored a robotic novice attending surgeon with previous open retropubic and laparoscopic experience. The novice surgeon gained proficiency during the next 30 Independent cases, then introduced increasing resident participation during the last Instructor 30 cases. Patient demographics, tumor characteristics, operative measures, and length of hospital stay were compared. Functional outcomes were assessed using the Sexual Health Inventory for Men and an incontinence questionnaire. We used independent t test, analysis of variance, Mann-Whitney U test, Fisher exact test, Kruskal-Wallis, and Pearson chi-square tests for comparison in these patient populations.

RESULTS
All groups were similar in age, clinical T-stage, and D'Amico Risk Group. Preoperative prostate-specific antigen levels were significantly higher (P<0.001) and prostates were larger (P=0.044) in the middle Instructor Phase. The early Proctored Phase had the lowest Gleason scores and the lowest body mass indexes. Despite these differences favoring the Proctored Phase, immediate operative outcomes were similar with respect to safety, oncologic, and functional parameters.

CONCLUSIONS
In the VASDHS cohort, RALPs were performed safely under the supervision of a newly proctored attending surgeon. Although longer follow-up could reveal subtle differences between groups, overall follow-up was similar to most existing studies. Extended mentorship by an experienced surgeon is a viable model for achieving proficiency in RALP in a setting such as a VA hospital affiliated with an academic hospital and increasing access to care for the veteran patient population.


According to the prior studies individual investors do not act according to the traditional finance assumption. Rather they take investment decision under the influence of several psychological and other factors. In this paper individual investors of Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) were taken under survey on sample basis who are on the market since 2008 till now. The study was made to identify the most influential factors which affect investment decision of individual investors. For this purpose demographic and social economic variables were asked under different questions. The paper discussed and used relevant theories to select those questions. Investors' response was used apply under PCA. After factors analysis it was found that Psychological factor is the most dominating influence upon investor's decision making process. Micro economic factor and social factor also have influence on selecting investment securities. Though not very much but, little influence also has been observed by macroeconomic factor and. Index and knowledge of financial analysis of stock market is not very significant to the investors in fact most of the investors do not understand the process and exact meaning of index. It is suggest that, the amateur investors should gather more knowledge about the market and take every declaration under consideration. In order to avoid herd behavior, investors can gather past data and control their representative bias if they want to seek target profit.


Dear sir, I have read with interest the manuscript entitled 'Simple excision and primary closure of pilonidal sinus: a simple modification of conventional technique with excellent results' [1]. The authors stated that 'complex sinuses extending into the gluteal region were also included in this study', but they did not mention how many such cases were successfully treated with their modified primary closure technique. They also wrote in the article that 'care is taken to make sure the sinus with its branches are excised completely with the incision always lying in the normal tissues'. In my opinion, the procedure (simple excision of all sinus and primary closure) may not be suitable for such complex cases with extensive gluteal involvement. I believe that it is not possible to close wound without any tension as authors mentioned. I would like to emphasize the importance of cleft lift technique with excision of pits in which the most lateral sinus is excised separately [2]. In such complex cases, the fistula tracts and sinus orifices within the outer lines of contact when the buttocks are pushed together are excised with an asymmetric incision which yields a totally laterally placed closure line without any tension and lifts the gluteal cleft. I think the key point in the surgical treatment of pilonidal disease is elimination of the cleft which exposes the epidermis to moisture, hypoxia and bacteria.


The black-box nature of neural networks limits model decision interpretability, in particular for high-dimensional inputs in computer vision and for dense pixel prediction tasks like segmentation. To address this, prior work combines neural networks with decision trees. However, such models (1) perform poorly when compared to state-of-the-art segmentation models or (2) fail to produce decision rules with spatially-grounded semantic meaning. In this work, we build a hybrid neural-network and decision-tree model for segmentation that (1) attains neural network segmentation accuracy and (2) provides semi-automatically constructed visual decision rules such as "Is there a window?". We obtain semantic visual meaning by extending saliency methods to segmentation and attain accuracy by leveraging insights from neural-backed decision trees, a deep learning analog of decision trees for image classification. Our model SegNBDT attains accuracy within ~2-4% of the state-of-the-art HRNetV2 segmentation model while also retaining explainability; we achieve state-of-the-art performance for explainable models on three benchmark datasets -- Pascal-Context (49.12%), Cityscapes (79.01%), and Look Into Person (51.64%). Furthermore, user studies suggest visual decision rules are more interpretable, particularly for incorrect predictions. Code and pretrained models can be found at this https URL.