As a growing presence in homes and schools, technology plays an important role in the way that children learn in their environment. The early integration of technology within education reflects the promise of computer-based educational tools to facilitate early learning in children (Grant, Wood, Gottardo, Evans, Phillips, & Savage, 2012). Young learners are reported to be challenged with high levels of distractibility that can hinder their ability to learn in particular conditions and contexts (Fisher, Godwin, & Seltman, 2014). This can be a problem when considering that educational materials are often designed to be elaborate to keep young learners interested. For this reason, the present study sought to determine the effect of visually "busy" versus visually "simpler" backgrounds during a video presentation meant to encourage the development of alphabetic knowledge. The participants recruited for this study included 20 preschoolers, 20 children in grade two, and 32 undergraduate students. Participants were presented with unfamiliar letter shapes (Arabic and Hebrew letters) in each of the two video contexts (busy and simpler). In order to test for differences in information retention and possible learning between the two displays, a forced-choice recognition task was used to compare between the two types of screens. To take into account individual differences, participants or their parents completed family literacy and technology use questionnaires, as well as were evaluated on literacy and vocabulary measures. Analyses included correlational analysis, descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses of variance. There was a main effect of age on performance overall. However, there were no significant differences between performance on the simpler and busy conditions for each age group. Lastly, literacy skill, vocabulary skill and technology use did not show significant relationships with performance on the letter learning task.


Previous studies have indicated that approximately half the corneal endothelial cells can be lost at the time of IOL insertion. Momentary contact between the methacrylate surface and the endothelial cell appears to cause an adhesion between these surfaces which damages the cells even without prolonged contact. Although other factors may also damage the endothelium, this endothelial damage which seems clinically important can be prevented by simply dipping IOL in simple solutions of PVP.


Istat, the Italian national statistical institute, in co-operation with professors of statistics, scientific societies and experts in web communication, produced The Worth of Data, hypertext materials for promoting and improving statistical literacy. We present the experience from two viewpoints: (i) the process for designing and implementing hypertext; (ii) and the ways selected for improving statistical literacy. The first aspect involved the decision to focus on the concept of awareness: not only as to when and how to use statistical data, but also on how to be discerning about sources, their quality and reliability ... The second aspect concerned the language and confirmed that to deliver content in plain language, without losing scientific precision, is indeed a difficult task. To achieve good results, it is necessary to make use of the various skills within a good team. Each expert should give up a little turf and contribute knowledge to attain a common outcome worth communicating.


The article is based on an observation that there are significant and non-arbitrary similarities between two, seemingly quite distant, theories that address the problem of linguistic categorization. One is the theory of open texture put forward by a prominent legal philosopher, Herbert L.A Hart. The other is the theory of prototypes, originated from psychological research by Eleanor Rosch and developed by cogni-tively-oriented linguists, most notably Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, and Ronald Langacker. Firstly, the origins of the open texture theory are presented, including the discussion of Friedrich Waismann's and Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas and their impact on Hart's theory. Secondly, Hart's theory of open texture is examined, based on several articles and his masterpiece: The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1961). Thirdly, a brief introduction to the prototype theory is provided, focusing on its reception in Cognitive Linguistics. Fourthly, a comparison of both theories is presented, including a sketch of a broader philosophical and historical background, as well as a detailed analysis of similarities and dissimilarities between them. The comparison results in a conclusion that, on linguistic grounds, the open texture theory can be viewed as an anticipation of prototype theory. Finally, several reservations are made in order to avoid possible confusions and some obvious objections.


Cross-validation is a mainstay for measuring performance and progress in machine learning. There are subtle differences in how exactly to compute accuracy, F-measure and Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) in cross-validation studies. However, these details are not discussed in the literature, and incompatible methods are used by various papers and software packages. This leads to inconsistency across the research literature. Anomalies in performance calculations for particular folds and situations go undiscovered when they are buried in aggregated results over many folds and datasets, without ever a person looking at the intermediate performance measurements. This research note clarifies and illustrates the differences, and it provides guidance for how best to measure classification performance under cross-validation. In particular, there are several divergent methods used for computing F-measure, which is often recommended as a performance measure under class imbalance, e.g., for text classification domains and in one-vs.-all reductions of datasets having many classes. We show by experiment that all but one of these computation methods leads to biased measurements, especially under high class imbalance. This paper is of particular interest to those designing machine learning software libraries and researchers focused on high class imbalance.


The semantic Web extends the current Web with a semantic layer, which semantic-aware agents can use for reasoning. The idea is to enable a greater degree of task automation and user support than is possible with the current Web. Yet the semantic Web has implications for knowledge publishing and access. An ontology-driven world might lead to the imposition of dominant conceptual viewpoints on formal knowledge production, which might threaten the democratic nature of knowledge publishing on the Web. However, the author argue that this won't necessarily happen, if we fully exploit the inherent flexibility and "smartness" associated with semantic technologies, and we succeed in connecting the semantic Web's construction process to the social dynamics shaping the current Web


The evolution of any software product over its lifetime is unavoidable, caused both by bugs to be fixed and by new requirements appearing in the later stages of the product's lifecycle. Traditional development and architecture paradigms have proven to be not suited for these continual changes, resulting in large maintenance costs. This has caused the rise of approaches such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), based on loosely coupled, interoperable services, aiming to address these issues. This paper describes a case study of the evolution of an existing legacy system towards a more maintainable SOA. The proposed process includes the recovery of the legacy system architecture, as a first step to define the specific evolution plan to be executed and validated. The case study has been applied to a medical imaging system, evolving it into a service model.


Due to the Fermi–Dirac statistics of electrons the temporal correlations of tunnelling events in a double barrier setup are typically negative. Here, we investigate the shot noise behaviour of a system of two capacitively coupled quantum dot states by means of a Master equation model. In an asymmetric setup positive correlations in the tunnelling current can arise due to the bunching of tunnelling events. The underlying mechanism will be discussed in detail in terms of the current–current correlation function and the frequency-dependent Fano factor.


Introduction Prominent trabecular left ventricular (LV) meshwork and deep intertrabecular LV recesses are featuring LV non-compaction (LVNC). The aim of this study was to evaluate tricuspid annular (TA) morphological and functional abnormalities by three-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography (3DSTE) in patients with LVNC without right ventricular (RV) involvement. Materials and Methods This study consisted of 21 patients with isolated LVNC, from which 6 cases were excluded due to inferior image quality. The remaining patient group consisted of 15 subjects with a mean age of 52.1 ± 11.4 years (9 males). LVNC was defined according to the Jenni's criteria. Their results were compared to 21 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (mean age: 52.4 ± 3.9 years, 14 males). Complete routine 2-dimensional Doppler echocardiographic examination was performed in all the patients with isolated LVNC and healthy controls. End-systolic and end-diastolic TA dimensions were assessed on selected planes derived from full-volume 3D echocardiographic datasets during 3DSTE. Results Patients with isolated LVNC showed significantly dilated end-systolic and end-diastolic TA diameter and area, which were accompanied with preserved TA functional properties and associated with right atrial (RA) volumes. TA plane systolic excursion (TAPSE) showed mild correlations with TA fractional area change (TAFAC) and TA fractional shortening (TAFS). No correlations could be demonstrated between TAPSE and TA morphological features. Extent of LVNC did not correlate with any echocardiographic parameters. Conclusion TA is dilated with preserved sphincter-like function in patients with isolated LVNC. Longitudinal (TAPSE) and sphincter-like (TAFAC and TAFS) TA movements correlate with each other. TA dilation is associated with an increased RA volumes respecting cardiac cycle.


SHP2 (Src homology-2 domain-containing protein tyrosine phosphatase-2) is a non-receptor protein tyrosine phosphatase that removes tyrosine phosphorylation. Functionally, SHP2 serves as an important hub to connect several intracellular oncogenic signaling pathways, such as Jak/STAT, PI3K/AKT, RAS/Raf/MAPK, and PD-1/PD-L1 pathways. Mutations and/or overexpression of SHP2 have been associated with genetic developmental diseases and cancers. Because of the role of SHP2 plays in many diseases, the development of inhibitors targeting the catalytic site in SHP2 has been pursued for more than a decade, but none has advanced to clinical development. Recent discovery of allosteric inhibitors has inspired a novel approach to selectively target SHP2 via the non-catalytic site. To date, four SHP2 allosteric inhibitors have entered clinical trials for the treatment of solid tumors. This review will provide a summary of the physiological and biological functions of SHP2 and discuss the development of non-allosteric/allosteric SHP2 inhibitors in recent years.


C1q nephropathy (C1qN) is a rare cause of nephrotic syndrome (NS). Management of steroid resistant (SR) C1qN is not clear. A 13year old girl with NS for the last 6 years was referred for themanagement of SR. At disease onset, she had proteinuria of 80mg/m per h with serum albumin and serum creatinine of 18 g/L and 70.72 μmol/L, respectively. The initial episode was steroid responsive, later progressing to frequent relapse and a steroid dependent state. At presentation, she had proteinuria of 173mg/m per h, which came down to 109mg/m per h after 4months of oral prednisolone (1mg/kg per day). A kidney biopsy at this stage revealed 25 glomeruli, 15 had segmental or global sclerosis, four had endothelial swelling and one showed podocyte crowning. Tubular atrophy and interstitial fibrosis was occupying 20% of the biopsy area. Immunofluorescence revealed 2+ C1q staining in the mesangium and along capillary loops. Other immunoglobulinswere absent. A diagnosis of C1qNwasmade, and shewas given a single dose of 375mg/m rituximab. TheCD19 count fell to<1%(absolute count< 5×10 cells/L). Counts rose to 12×10 cells/L at 3months and 25×10 cells/L at 6months, and at both times responded to 100mg of rituximab (<5×10 cells/L). The proteinuria had declined to 13.3 and 21.2mg/m per h with serum albumin of 40.9 and 37.8 g/L at 3 and 6months, respectively, suggesting clinical remission. There is a shortage of good quality evidence formanagement of C1qN. Steroids are tried as first line agents, followed by calcineurin inhibitors in the case of resistance. Sinha et al. reported a case of steroid dependent C1qN in an 11year old boy who was treated successfully with rituximab (375mg/m weekly for 4weeks). Themechanism of beneficial effect of this agent remains unclear but could be related to inhibition of production of pathological immunoglobulins that bind C1q or binding to B cells in tubulointerstial/ mesangial infiltrates. This case also suggests the promise in titrating rituximab to CD-19 levels rather than going by fixed dosage schedules.


Despite a high number of neoantigens and T cell infiltration, most locally advanced and metastatic bladder cancers (BC) (>70%) do not respond to anti-PD1 treatment. Thus, targeting additional checkpoints may play an important role in treatment of BC. We sought to identify negative regulators of T cell activity and evaluate their function using a previously validated pre-clinical carcinogen-induced mouse model of BC. To identify regulators of T cell activity, we first investigated the timing and infiltration of T cells during tumor development in the BBN mouse BC model. We found that numbers of CD4+ and CD8+ T cell increased dramatically within the first 1-2 weeks, but then decreased over the next six weeks decreasing to the lowest levels at 8 weeks before increasing again coordinating with increasing tumor volume. During the decrease in T cell numbers, macrophages increased and by transcriptome profiling we identified increased levels of the T cell inhibitory protein B7-H4. B7-H4+CD11b+ macrophages increased over 4 weeks with opposite expression of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells by FACS. By IHC we localized B7-H4 expression in macrophages adjacent to tumor. A bioinformatic analysis of the human TCGA identified highest B7-H4 expression in luminal infiltrated subtypes of MIBCs, but did not correlate with CD4, CD8 or overall tumor mutation burden. MIBCs with elevated B7-H4 expression had significantly worse survival. In vitro, addition of anti-B7-H4 significantly increased proliferation and IFN-γ production by human T cells co-cultured with B7-H4 expressing APCs. To determine the role of B7-H4 in BC, we treated mice with overt BC (beginning at 4 months of carcinogen administration) with vehicle, anti-PD1 or anti-B7-H4 antibody. Compared to vehicle treated animals, anti-B7-H4 treated mice had a reduction in the number of pT3 tumors (50% vs. 73%), but less than anti-PD1 treated tumors (27%). However, anti-B7-H4 treated mice had significantly increased tumor infiltrating CD8+ T cells per histological field (77.1+34.3 vs. 11.5+7.8; p=0.0121), as well as a significant increase splenic CD8+IFN-γ+ T cells and levels of secreted IFN-γ upon anti-CD3 stimulation. Transcriptome profiling of tumors that responded to anti-B7-H4 antibody by RNA-Seq identified a decrease in mitotic cell cycle, cell cycle checkpoints, RHO GTPases and mitotic spindle checkpoint pathways in responsive tumors. In summary, we confirm the expression of B7-H4 in macrophages found in a murine model of BC and correlate expression to poor survival in the TCGA of MIBC. Inhibition of B7-H4 results in lymphocyte proliferation in vitro and inhibition of B7-H4 in mice resulted in decreased tumor stage and increased CD8+ TILs. This data suggests that B7-H4 may be a candidate alternative checkpoint that can be targeted in humans with BC unresponsive to PD1 therapy. Citation Format: Joshua Meeks, Alexander P. Glaser, Damiano Fantini, Yanni Yu, Valerie Eaton, Joseph R. Podojil, Stephen D. Miller. B7H4 as a T cell inhibitory regulator in bladder cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 2405.


Medical images always come with various kinds of noises which can make the images fuzzy due to such elements as instrument and external interference in the imaging process. Fuzzy medical image will affect doctors' diagnosis of illness. De-noising processing of medical images is the foundation of image segmentation, contour extraction and visualization. This paper mainly studies wavelet analysis methods for medical image denoising. Wavelet transform is a global transformation and it has excellent properties in time domain and frequency domain. The basic idea of multi-wavelet is to extend the multi-resolution analysis space generated by single-scale function in the uni-wavelet to the space generated by multi-scale function so as to get more freedom. The core issue of de-noising is that the data of wavelet domain are different from the coefficients of noises and image edges. Therefore, this paper firstly improves the threshold and the threshold function. Then, it conducts secondary processing by taking the mean value of several translations. It effectively improves the distorting phenomenon caused by image de-noising, directly enhances the de-noising effect, greatly suppresses image noises and makes the texture clearer. Finally, the experiment simulation results show that the algorithm of this paper has a better effect on de-noising medical images than other methods.


Recent investigations devoted to the Eurasian loess formations have provided an integrated high-resolution climatic sequence well radiocarbon dated between 13.4 and 42.5 kyr BP on charcoal and wood remains. Here, we show that the reproducible climatic signature of this loess sequence can be compared by proxy-correlation with the Greenland ice climatic signals, taking into account the distribution of the aeolian components in both records. This correlation allows situating with precision the series of 14C dates obtained from loess with regard to the Greenland climatic sequence. In this way, comparing the atmospheric loess-derived 14C chronology with the chronologies of the marine sequences becomes possible.


Flooding is one of the key environmental factors affecting the carbon sequestration potential of estuarine tidal flat wetlands. In order to reveal the effect of flooding on soil carbon (C) sinks in estuarine tidal wetlands, we investigated and analyzed the soil organic carbon (SOC) storage, the contents of active SOC components, and SOC stability indicators across a tidal flat in the Jiulong River estuary in southeast China. The results showed that the SOC storage gradually decreased by 54% with the increase in flooding frequency. The change pattern of microbial biomass carbon (MBC), dissolved organic carbon (DOC), and liable organic carbon (LOC) followed the change pattern of the SOC storage. With the increase in flooding frequency, DOC/SOC and LOC/SOC increased by 80% and 26%, respectively, whereas MBC/SOC decreased by 29%. As flooding frequency increased, particulate organic carbon (POC) and mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC) contents decreased by 81% and 35%, respectively. The decreases in POC contents were correlated with the increases in soil pH, whereas the decreases in MAOC contents were associated with the decline in clay contents. Soil carbon stability index (CSI) increased by 246% with increasing flooding frequency. These combined results indicated that SOC storage decreased, but SOC stability increased, with the increased flooding frequency. Mineral-bound organic carbon was the main protection mechanism for the SOC stability, which was of great significance to the soil C sink of the estuarine tidal wetlands.


The use of institutional care in countries in transition to capitalist economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia continues to grow. This paper shows how common understandings of reasons for entry to care that blame parents lead to policies that are unable to address the situation of children and families. Effective social policy needs to find ways to see the predicaments of parents and overcome the blindness that can be induced by prejudice and ideology. The paper demonstrates how a small research project involving Roma women as researchers in Bulgaria was able to make parents visible and challenge commonly held views leading to the development of an effective local alternative to residential care.


The ultrastructural morphology of a ceruminous gland adenoma in the middle ear was examined electron microscopically. The epithelial tumor cells displayed apocrine caps, microvilli, cell junctions, secretory granules, vacuoles, lipid droplets and siderosomes, which are the characteristic ultrastructural features of apocrine glands. Concentric membranous bodies of the endoplasmic reticulum, phagocytic activity of the tumor cells, intracytoplasmic lumina, ciliated cells and also spiny collagen in the tumor stroma could be seen. The myoepithelial cells are an important tumor marker in the differential diagnosis between ceruminomas and adenomas of the middle ear. The ectopic origin in the modified apocrine ceruminous glands, the specific localization, the clinical features and the extremely rare occurrence of the ceruminoma makes this tumor a unique neoplastic entity.


Runt-related transcription factor 1 (RUNX1), a member of the RUNX family, is one of the key regulatory proteins in vertebrates. RUNX1 is involved in embryonic development, hematopoiesis, angio-genesis, tumorigenesis and immune response. In the past few decades, studies mainly focused on the effect of RUNX1 on acute leukemia and cancer. Only few studies about the function of RUNX1 in the patholog-ical process of pulmonary diseases have been reported. Recent studies have demonstrated that RUNX1 is highly expressed in both mesenchymal and epithelial compartments of the developing and postnatal lung and that it plays a critical role in the lipopolysaccharide induced lung inflammation by regulating the NF-κB pathway. RUNX1 participates in the regulation of the NF-κB signaling pathway through interaction with IkB kinase complex in the cytoplasm or interaction with the NF-κB subunit P50. NF-κB is well-known signaling pathway necessary for inflammatory response in the lung. This review is to highlight the RUNX1 structure, isoforms and to present the mechanism that RUNX1 regulates NF-κB. This will illus-trate the great potential role of RUNX1 in the inflammation signaling pathway in pulmonary diseases.


Strain prioritization for drug discovery aims at excluding redundant strains of a collection in order to limit the repetitive identification of the same molecules. In this work, we wanted to estimate what can be unexploited in terms of the amount, diversity, and novelty of compounds if the search is focused on only one single representative strain of a species, taking Streptomyces lunaelactis as a model. For this purpose, we selected 18 S. lunaelactis strains taxonomically clustered with the archetype strain S. lunaelactis MM109T. Genome mining of all S. lunaelactis isolated from the same cave revealed that 54% of the 42 biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) are strain specific, and five BGCs are not present in the reference strain MM109T. In addition, even when a BGC is conserved in all strains such as the bag/fev cluster involved in bagremycin and ferroverdin production, the compounds produced highly differ between the strains and previously unreported compounds are not produced by the archetype MM109T. Moreover, metabolomic pattern analysis uncovered important profile heterogeneity, confirming that identical BGC predisposition between two strains does not automatically imply chemical uniformity. In conclusion, trying to avoid strain redundancy based on phylogeny and genome mining information alone can compromise the discovery of new natural products and might prevent the exploitation of the best naturally engineered producers of specific molecules.


The Invariant Approach of Mara Selvini-Palazzoli is a new development in the Milan approach to family therapy. In order to distinguish and explain it, an overview of the Invariant Approach is given. Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development is used to provide a framework for explaining how Selvini-Palazzoli's therapy alters the family's epistemology and facilitates change in the "family game." It is suggested that family members in therapy tend to think about their problems in a style that resembles Piaget's preoperational period. The process of therapy can be seen as geared to facilitate a shift from a preoperational to an operational style of cognitive functioning. This shift gives family members access to more adaptive ways of thinking about their problem-solving strategies.


The study investigates the level of corporate sustainability disclosure on employee and the extent to which such disclosure influences financial performance of companies. The study examines relationship between five dimensions of corporate sustainability initiatives on employees and financial performance. The study covers a six year period of 2010 to 2015 of 253 public listed companies in Malaysia. This study employs two-step system generalized method of moment (GMM) for analysis.
 The findings reveal a low level of employee disclosure by companies in Malaysia which is consistent with previous studies. The study establishes the need for government involvement to enhance disclosure as voluntary disclosure appears to be inadequate to achieve the desired result as evidence shows that countries where disclosure is compulsory have high disclosure compare to countries with voluntary disclosure.
 The result of the study indicates strong association between some measures of financial performance and some dimensions of corporate sustainability disclosure on employees. It also establishes the importance of employee welfare in corporate sustainability disclosure on employee. Employee welfare has strong relationship with NPM, ROE and EPS. In addition, the dimensions of employee welfare, employee workplace and employee human rights show consistent results with NPM, ROE and EPS.It also demonstrates the importance of corporate sustainability initiatives on employee in maintaining competitive advantage, industrial harmony, employee loyalty and commitment which can improve financial performance.


Our shared experience is that too often, once a course is produced, insufficient resource is available to support its continued development from one presentation (or semester) to another. At the best this can lead to stale courses and jaded academics; at worst the course deteriorates from one presentation to the next with worsening student retention and performance.

This paper outlines the challenges posed by these issues as they have emerged within a suite of eLearning courses created according to the new business model, and describes one of the tools we have developed to support student driven course evolution.


Abstract Cotton plants are highly susceptible to infestation and bollworm moth is a major pest. Consequently, there is a great deal of current interest in the preparation of acetoxy (E) 9,11-dodecadiene (1), the sex pheromone relating to the species1. We report in this communication a practical, convenient and highly stereospecific route to 1.


Objectives : Clinical reasoning can be difficult to teach to pre-professional physiotherapy students due to their lack of clinical experience. It may be that tools such as clinical prediction rules (CPRs) could aid the process, but there has been little investigation into their use in physiotherapy clinical education. This study aimed to determine the perceptions and experiences of physiotherapy students regarding CPRs, and whether they are learning about CPRs on clinical placement. Design : Cross-sectional survey using a paper-based questionnaire. Participants : Final year pre-professional physiotherapy students ( n =371, response rate 77%) from five universities across five states of Australia. Results : Sixty percent of respondents had not heard of CPRs, and a further 19% had not clinically used CPRs. Only 21% reported using CPRs, and of these nearly three-quarters were rarely, if ever, learning about CPRs in the clinical setting. However most of those who used CPRs (78%) believed CPRs assisted in the development of clinical reasoning skills and none (0%) was opposed to the teaching of CPRs to students. The CPRs most commonly recognised and used by students were those for determining the need for an X-ray following injuries to the ankle and foot (67%), and for identifying deep venous thrombosis (63%). Conclusions : The large majority of students in this sample knew little, if anything, about CPRs and few had learned about, experienced or practiced them on clinical placement. However, students who were aware of CPRs found them helpful for their clinical reasoning and were in favour of learning more about them.


Veins, principally of prehnite, occur in diabase near Coopersburg, Pennsylvania. Early formed vein minerals are pyroxene and albite (An < 5) in which most of the crystals are choked with fluid inclusions. Commonly, the albite has inclusion-free rims of the same composition as the cores. Later minerals in the sequence are an amphibole followed by chlorite and prehnite. Minor quartz and calcite occur with the prehnite.

Diabase near the veins shows three zones of alteration. Adjacent to the vein is a 2 to 3 cm zone of amphibole with minor quartz and prehnite. The second zone is principally chlorite. In the third zone the texture of the diabase is preserved, but hypersthene is altered to chlorite and the plagioclase is choked with inclusions. In fresh rock, plagioclase lacks inclusions. It is suggested that the inclusion-choked albite crystallized from a hydrothermal liquid, whereas the inclusion-free rims formed after a change in state of the liquid to a vapor.


Introduction: Cyperus articulatus rhizome has been used in folk medicine by different inhabitants belonging to tropical and subtropical regions. But its metabolite profile and potential pharmacological and food applications were hardly explored. Evaluation of biological activities of Cyperus articulatus metabolites was the objective of the present study. Materials and Methods: In vitro biological studies concerning radical scavenging, reducing activity, food (meat and β-carotene) protection, biomolecule (DNA and Protein) protection and Acetylcholinesterase inhibitory activity were carried out for the rhizome extracts. Chemical constituents of the bioactive rhizome extract were analyzed through HRLC-MS/MS. Results: The rhizome acetone extract showed the highest antioxidant activity and protected DNA and protein from degradation at the lowest concentrations compared to all the six different solvent extracts tested. It significantly inhibited β-carotene bleaching, controlled the TBARS values during meat oxidation and significantly inhibited the Acetylcholinesterase enzyme. The major compounds detected in HRLC-MS/MS were dihydroquercetin, mycophenolic acid, embelin, quercetrin, meptazinol, koparin-2-methyl ether, venpocentine along with other phenolics and polyhydroxy compounds. Conclusion: The study explored Cyperus articulatus rhizome as a pharmacologically important source for nutraceuticals and drug ingredients and suggested further safety and efficacy studies of the detected metabolites.


Background Remission or low disease activity (LDA) are the main treatment targets in Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). Different remission criteria have been developed and differ between studies. The advent of biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) allowed a proportion of patients to reach these goals. Objectives We aimed at evaluating remission, sustained remission and LDA in "real life" RA patients treated with first line anti-TNF agents by different remission criteria. We evaluated the concomitant prednisone (PDN) and conventional synthetic (cs) DMARDs treatment. Methods We analysed retrospectively remission and LDA in 298 RA patients [age 54.5±13.3 years, 242/56 female/male, 92 early RA, 206 longstanding RA, baseline disease activity by 28 joint Disease Activity Score (DAS28) 5.2±1.3, 79.6% on concomitant csDMARDs, 49.3% on PDN] treated from 2008 to 2014 in the University of Rome Tor Vergata with first line anti-TNF drugs (120 Adalimumab 40mg/other week and 178 Etanercept 50mg/weekly). Remission and LDA were evaluated according to DAS28, Simplified Disease Activity Index (SDAI) and Clinical Disease Activity Index (CDAI) at three time points: 6 months, 1 and 2 years after the start of anti-TNF. Statistical analyses were performed using McNemar and Fisher tests. Results At 6 months remission was achieved in 18-24% of patients, at 1 year in 21-26% and at 2 years in 15-17% of cases. (Figure 1A). No significant difference was demonstrated comparing CDAI, SDAI and DAS28 remission. Remission at two consecutive time points was detected in 17.8% (DAS28), 17.1% (SDAI) and 14.8% (CDAI) of patients, while sustained long-term remission (at the three time points) was observed in 5% (CDAI and SDAI) and 4.3% (DAS28) of patients. LDA was detected in 33-45% of patients at 6 months, in 31-42% at 1 year and in 24-31% of patients at 2 years of treatment. DAS28 allowed identifying less patients in LDA compared with CDAI at 6 months and 1 year of treatment (p=0.01 and p=0.03) (Figure 1B). A higher number of early RA patients achieved remission than longstanding RA patients at 6 months (p<0.05 by CDAI and SDAI), 1 year (p<0.05 by DAS28 and SDAI, p=0.0001 by CDAI) and 2 years of treatment (p<0.05 by DAS28, p<0.01 by CDAI and SDAI) (Figure 1C-E). Likewise, a higher number of early RA patients achieved LDA than longstanding RA at 1 year (p<0.01 by DAS28 and CDAI, p<0.05 by SDAI) and at 2 years (p<0.05 by DAS28 and SDAI) (Figure 1F-H). During anti-TNF treatment a significant reduction of the number of patients on PDN was observed at 6 months, 1 and 2 years compared with baseline (p<0.0001 for all comparisons). Concomitant csDMARDs were reduced at 1 and 2 years compared with baseline (p<0.01 for both comparisons). Conclusions RA patients treated with first line anti-TNF drugs in routine clinical care achieved remission in 15-26% and LDA in 24-45% of cases according to the various indices allowing the reduction of PDN and csDMARDs treatment. DAS28 appeared more stringent than CDAI in identifying patients in LDA. Only a small proportion of patients (5%) achieved sustained long-term remission by the various indices. Anti-TNF treatment in early RA patients allowed better results compared with those in longstanding ones. Disclosure of Interest None declared


The PAX project at GSI Darmstadt plans to polarize an antipro ton beam by repeated interaction with a hydrogen target in a storage ring. Many of the beam particles are required to remain within the ring after interaction with the target, so small scattering angles are important. Hence we concentrate on low momentum transfer (small t), a region where electromagnetic effects dominate the hadronic effects. A colliding beam of polarize d electrons with energy sufficient to provide scattering of antiprotons beyond ring acceptance m ay polarize an antiproton beam by spin filtering. Expressions for spin observables are provided an d are used to estimate the rate of buildup of polarization of an antiproton beam.


Handling the growing complexity of software is one of the biggest challenges for the software industry. Two common answers to this challenge are: raising the level of abstraction (i. e., reducing complexity) and improving human understanding by improving the organization of software (managing complexity). It is our contention that if one gives developers tools with which they can better structure their software, one can reach both goals. Our programming language and integrated programming environment TUBE is such a tool and is based on hypergraphs, in their incarnation Topic Maps. Topic Maps give us powerful ways of annotating, documenting, querying and presenting TUBE programs. It also allows us to integrate all artifacts that are part of the system. Moreover, TUBE is a prototype-based object-oriented language which leads to a more direct, concrete and interactive style of programming in it, further increasing productivity.


Purpose: Management of the ICBN during axillary dissection is controversial and the division of ICBN is often trivialised.The effect of dividing the ICBN, and its association with sensory disturbance, is unclear. A systemic review and meta-analysis was performed to evaluate the effect of preserving the ICBN during axillary dissection. Methods: A systemic literature review and meta-analysis was performed according to the PRISMA and Cochrane Collaboration guidelines. Two authors (SW and SH) independently searched Medline, Pubmed, Embase, Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews and the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register from 1950 to December 2012 for studies comparing preservation or division of the ICBN in axillary dissection for breast cancer. The primary outcome of this meta-analysis was sensory disturbance, defined as objectively assessed change in sensation in the distribution of the ICBN after axillary dissection. The nature of sensory disturbance was assessed as a secondary outcome, categorised into two types: "hypersensitivity" and "hyposensitivity". Results: Three RCTs and four non-RCTs were reviewed. A meta-analysis demonstrated that the incidence of sensory disturbance was significantly lower with preservation of ICBN compared to division of the ICBN with Mantel-Haenzel combined odds ratio 0.31 (0.17-0.57, 95% CI). There was relatively low level of heterogeneity (I2 = 19%, c2 = 2.48, df = 2). The sensory disturbance was more likely to be hyposensitivity when compared to hypersensitivity (p Conclusion: This meta-analysis demonstrates that division of the ICBN is associated with higher risk of sensory disturbance, and that the nature of this sensory disturbance is more likely to be hyposensitivity, attributable to reduced nerve function. Citation Information: Cancer Res 2013;73(24 Suppl): Abstract nr P2-18-06.


The ninth international Gender and Education Association Conference Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections hosted by the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University engages with key debates surrounding the interplay between dynamics of education, work, employment and society in the context of crisis, upheaval and cutbacks, which reconfigure axes of intersectional inequalities. In considering diversity in education, this conference looks at the relationship between new equality regimes and continued educational inequalities, exploring organisational ambivalence, change and resistance. Participants will be asking important questions about the role of feminist research at a time when education, and its variously placed subjects (academics, pupils, students, and policy-makers), wrestle with the commitments and contentions in doing diversity and being diverse. This brief commentary piece probes at what – and who – is being compelled into, through and for diversity and explores the promises, pay-offs and pains of diversity when siphoned off from equality, justice and parity as policy and practice goals.


Study abroad and research experiences are proven high-impact pedagogical tools, but are rarely combined at scale. We integrated highly structured research experiences into short-term study abroad programs across multiple countries, then tested for longer term student perceived impacts. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of postgraduation data provided by 118 former participants, we identified positive self-reported impacts across a range of domains relevant to longer term academic and career success (e.g., professional connections, specific skills, worldview, and personal growth). Themes and subthemes were consistently similar by minority status, gender, and program locations. Inclusion of highly structured research experiences in short-term study abroad can provide additional value to students. The benefits would accrue most especially to women and minority students who have less on-campus access to traditional science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-field research mentoring and are accordingly underrepresented in the research-career pipeline.


We investigate the coarse homology of leaves in foliations of compact manifolds. This is motivated by the observation that the non-leaves constructed by Schweitzer and by Zeghib all have non-finitely generated coarse homology. This led us to ask whether the coarse homology of leaves in a compact manifold always has to be finitely generated. We show that this is not the case by proving that there exist many leaves with non-finitely generated coarse homology. Moreover, we improve Schweitzer's non-leaf construction and produce non-leaves with trivial coarse homology.


Proceedings: AACR 103rd Annual Meeting 2012‐‐ Mar 31‐Apr 4, 2012; Chicago, IL

Several indole-3-carbinol analogs are under preclinical evaluation at the National Cancer Institute. One analog, NSC743380 (1-[(3-chlorophenyl)-methyl]-1H-indole-3-carbinol), is selectively toxic to a subset of NCI 60 cell lines in vitro and has undergone extensive in vivo testing. In vivo, NSC743380 produced complete regressions in A498 renal xenograft models at doses as low as 45 mg/kg when administered intraperitoneally. Additional studies demonstrated that NSC743380 is orally bioavailable. To extend knowledge regarding the mechanism of action, two pairs of resistant and sensitive cell lines [A498/ACHN (renal) and NCI-H226/A549 (NSCLC), sensitive/resistant, respectively] were used. Results showed that 5-10 min following NSC743380 treatment, phosphorylation of p38 and JNK were enhanced in sensitive but not resistant lines. Two hrs of treatment resulted in an inhibition of transcription and translation (45% and 75% inhibition, respectively) and by 4 hrs NSC743380 induced caspase-dependent apoptosis with loss of c-FLIP. Pathway-specific inhibitors were then used to gain mechanistic insight. Diverse antioxidants and NSAIDs, inhibitors of JNK, RAS/RAF, PPAR, lipid 2nd messenger signaling, transcription and actin polymerization were shown to completely inhibit NSC743380 activity. Microarray analysis of three sensitive cell lines using Affymetrix U133 Plus 2 chipset identified several trends in the transcriptome notably the upregulation of diverse immediate-early genes (IEGs) including; transcriptional regulators [EGR1, FOS/FOSB, HES1, MAFF and SOX9], secreted factors [HBEGF, IL-8 and GDF-15] and several general IEGs [ARC, ERRFI1, GADD45A/B, GEM and IER2]. A second noteworthy trend involved increased expression of the IL-6 family members, IL-6, IL-11 and LIF. These data led to an exploration as to whether enhanced JAK/STAT signaling was responsible for the above effects. Short time course lysates from 3 sensitive (A498, CAKI-1 and NCI-H226) cell lines and 1 resistant (A549) cell line showed that in sensitive lines only, NSC743380 rapidly (5 minutes) enhanced phosphorylation of the JAK family member Tyk2 at Y1054/55 and STAT3 at Y705. Additionally several phosphostate changes were observed in a subset of sensitive cell lines such as JAK1 phosphorylation in A498 cells and transient increase in pSTAT1 in A498 and CAKI-1 cell lines. Furthermore, two inhibitors of JAK/STAT signaling, AG490 and resveratrol, completely inhibited NSC743380 activity and p38/JNK phosphorylation. Subsequent siRNA knockdown experiments showed that Tyk2 siRNA inhibited NSC743380 activity whereas STAT3 and JAK1 siRNA along with scrambled siRNA had no effect. These data suggest that signaling through the JAK family member Tyk2 contributes towards NSC743380 activity and the data are being evaluated to determine how best to move forward. Funded by NCI Contract No. HHSN261200800001E.

Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2012 Mar 31-Apr 4; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2012;72(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 2810. doi:1538-7445.AM2012-2810


In the framework of the EU programme for systematic sequencing of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome we determined the sequence of a 9359 bp fragment of the right arm of chromosome VII. Five open reading frames (ORFs) of at least 300 nucleotides were found in this region. YGR267c encodes a protein with significant similarity to the enzyme GTP‐cyclohydrolase I, that controls the first step in the biosynthetic pathway leading to various pterins and shows a high degree of sequence conservation from bacteria to mammals. We have recently demonstrated (Nardese et al., 1996) that YGR267c corresponds to the FOL2 gene, previously localized in the same chromosomal region by genetic mapping. The protein deduced from YGR270w belongs to the superfamily of putative ATPases associated with diverse cellular activities. It corresponds to the YTA7 gene, a member of a set of yeast genes coding for putative ATPases with high similarity to constituents of the 26S protease. The three ORFs YGR266w, YGR268c and YGR269w encode putative products of unknown function, with neither significant similarity to proteins in databases nor recognizable domains. YGR268c and YGR269w are partially overlapping ORFs: YGR268c seems to correspond to a real gene, whereas YGR269w is probably a fortuitous ORF. The sequence has been entered in the EMBL data library under Accession Number Y07893. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The pharmacy profession has long used technology to more effectively bring health care to the patient. Navy pharmacy has embraced technology advances in its daily operations, from computers to dispensing robots. Evolving from the traditional role of compounding and dispensing specialists, pharmacists are establishing themselves as vital team members in direct patient care: on the ward, in ambulatory clinics, in specialty clinics, and in other specialty patient care programs (e.g., smoking cessation). An important part of the evolution is the timely access to the most up-to-date information available. Micromedex, Inc. (Denver, Colorado), has developed a number of computer CD-ROM-based full-text pharmacy, toxicology, emergency medicine, and patient education products. Micromedex is a recognized leader with regard to total pharmaceutical information availability. This article discusses the implementation of Micromedex products within the established Composite Healthcare Computer System and the subsequent use by and effect on the international Navy pharmacy community.


We address the task of estimating the 3D shapes of novel shape classes from a single RGB image. Prior works are either limited to reconstructing known training classes or are unable to reconstruct high-quality shapes. To solve those issues, we propose Generalizing Implicit Networks (GIN) which decomposes 3D reconstruction into 1.) front-back depth estimation followed by differentiable depth voxelization, and 2.) implicit shape completion with 3D features. The key insight is that the depth estimation network learns local class-agnostic shape priors, allowing us to generalize to novel classes, while our implicit shape completion network is able to predict accurate shapes with rich details by learning implicit surfaces in 3D voxel space. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale benchmark using 55 classes of ShapeNet and real images of Pix3D. We qualitatively and quantitatively show that the proposed GIN significantly outperforms the state of the art on both seen and novel shape classes for single-image 3D reconstruction. We also illustrate that our GIN can be further improved by using only few-shot depth supervision from novel classes.


Introduction Viral warts are common skin condition caused by the human papilloma virus. Aim To determine the clinical features of warts and therapeutic approaches to warts and compare them with the literature. Material and methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted on 362 consecutive patients presenting to a dermatology clinic in Ankara, Middle Anatolia, Turkey. Age, gender, anatomic localization, clinical types, number of warts, and medical therapy histories were recorded. Results In our study 139 (38.4%) children and 223 (61.6%) adults had warts. Warts were seen in 191 men, and 171 women. The mean age was 24.7 ±13.5. In all groups the incidence and the number of warts were higher in men. Clinical types of warts were vulgar, anogenital, plantar, verruca plana, filiform, and mosaic. Thirty-six (9.9%) of 362 cases had more than one type. The locations of warts were as follows extremities (n = 233, 64.4%), anogenital (n = 86, 23.7%) and head and neck (n = 73, 20.2%). The incidence of anogenital warts was statistically higher in men than women (p < 0.05). Topical medical treatment was the first choice (n = 60, 57.1%). Conclusions In our study, the incidence and the number of warts were higher in men, which is different than in previous reports. The anogenital wart (AW) was ranked second in all types of warts. According to this finding, we can say that the frequency of AW has been increased in Turkey. To our knowledge recently there have been no studies investigating the clinical features of viral warts in all ages in the literature.


We present T&D-Bench, Teaching and Design Workbench, a framework for design space exploration of embedded processors. Design space exploration has become a fundamental phase of the SOC (system on a chip) design process in industry and in research, and so it is important also in computer architecture education. T&D-Bench is an innovative framework to be employed in computer architecture education, providing the students a contact with a contemporary hardware design activity, and offering an easy and rapid design process, together with graphical user interface resources for tracking and steering the experiments with the processor models. T&D-Bench has been used at Universidade de Caxias do Sul since 2003 with positive results reported by the students, both beginners and seniors. T&D-Bench is available as an open source and platform-independent framework on the Internet


Background and objectives: Many studies have verified that endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) has prominent advantages in en bloc resection and low recurrence rate. However, ESD also has technical difficulty for some large-area gastric lesions. Endoscopic submucosal tunneling dissection (ESTD) combined the tunnel technique with the traditional ESD technique for treating gastrointestinal mucosal lesions under tunnel endoscopy. This technique has been gradually applied to the treatment of large-scale early cancer and precancerous lesions, and has achieved good results. Yet no meta-analysis has been published, so we performed this study to determine the efficacy and safety of ESTD vs ESD in gastric lesions through clinical outcomes.Methods: We performed the literature search in PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Embase, Wanfang, and CNKI dating up to February 9, 2021. Studies comparing the clinical outcomes of ESTD and ESD in gastric lesions were enrolled. The Newcastle-Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale was used to evaluate the quality of these studies. Results: Four articles were included that involved a total of 920 patients (187 from the ESTD group and 733 from ESD group). ESTD has higher en bloc resection and R0 resection rate, faster dissection speed, and lower complication rate. The curative resection rate and recurrence rate of ESTD group is comparable with ESD group.Conclusions: ESTD technique is an effective and safe treatment procedure in gastric lesions, and may be prior to ESD for large gastric lesions.


Abstract. The reaction of serpentinized peridotites with CO2-bearing fluids to listvenite (quartz-carbonate rocks) requires massive fluid flux and significant permeability despite increase in solid volume. Listvenite and serpentinite samples from Hole BT1B of the Oman Drilling Project help to understand mechanisms and feedbacks during vein formation in this process. Samples analyzed in this study contain abundant magnesite veins in closely spaced, parallel sets and younger quartz-rich veins. Cross-cutting relationships suggest that antitaxial, zoned carbonate veins with elongated grains growing from a median zone towards the wall rock are among the earliest structures to form during carbonation of serpentinite. Their bisymmetric chemical zoning of variable Ca and Fe contents, a systematic distribution of SiO2 and Fe-oxide inclusions in these zones, and cross-cutting relations with Fe-oxides and Cr-spinel indicate that they record progress of reaction fronts during replacement of serpentine by carbonate in addition to dilatant vein growth. Euhedral terminations and growth textures of carbonate vein fill together with local dolomite precipitation and voids along the vein – wall rock interface suggest that these antitaxial veins acted as preferred fluid pathways allowing infiltration of CO2-rich fluids necessary for carbonation to progress. Fluid flow was probably further enabled by external tectonic stress, as indicated by closely spaced sets of subparallel carbonate veins. Despite widespread subsequent quartz mineralization in the rock matrix and veins, which most likely caused a reduction in the permeability network, carbonation proceeded to completion in listvenite horizons.


Terrorist attacks such a suicide bombings and detonation of improved explosive devices are a worldwide problem that caused many casualties and economic damage. To prevent these attacks, human intelligence gathering, social network analysis and data mining of databases containing financial transactions and telephone communication records are employed. This pre-emptive approach is, however, not fail-save and cannot predict and preclude all terrorist attacks. Therefore, procedures and techniques must be used that can identify imminent terrorist attacks by detecting anomalous behaviour of people, vehicles or other objects before the attacks occur. The time-critical detection of anomalous behaviour that is described in this paper is based on the fusion of data from multiple sensors and a consistency check of the sensor reports that are associated with a subject or an object.


In this study, a novel IR projector driver that can minimize nonuniformity in electric circuits, using a dual-current-programming structure, is proposed to generate high-quality infrared (IR) scenes for accurate sensor evaluation. Unlike the conventional current-mode structure, the proposed system reduces pixel-to-pixel nonuniformity by assigning two roles (data sampling and current driving) to a single transistor. A prototype of the proposed circuit was designed and fabricated using the SK-Hynix 0.18 µm CMOS process, and its performance was analyzed using post-layout simulation data. It was verified that nonuniformity, which is defined as the standard deviation divided by the mean radiance, could be reduced from 21% to less than 0.1%.


Coccidiosis is a complex parasitic disease ubiquitous in all types of poultry production. It can have both a direct effect on bird health and welfare with significant negative impacts on the production parameters and indirect effect as it predisposes to other pathogens. Ionophore coccidiostats have been used safely for over 45 years by poultry producers. Concerns have been raised that their use in livestock production could promote the development of antibiotic resistance, but their unique mode of action makes it unlikely. Conversely their removal can result in increased use of therapeutic antibiotics to treat disease posing a greater risk of antibiotic resistance development. Economic and environmental models examining the impact of the removal of ionophore coccidiostats from UK production suggest the annual cost to the broiler sector would be between £68.02-£109.95 million and result in an additional 84,000 tonnes CO2 e being produced per annum. Any cost increase would make this wholesome and affordable animal protein less affordable to poorer sectors of society. Increased greenhouse gas production, demand for water and land as a result of less efficient production will impact on climate change targets.


We carried out a one-night optical V and near-infraredJHK monitoring observation of the least luminous Seyfert 1 galaxy, NGC4395, on 2004 May 1, and detected for the first time the intraday flux variations in the J andH bands, while such variation was not clearly seen for the K band. The detected J andH variations are synchronized with the flux variation in the V band, which indicates that the intraday-variable componen t of near-infrared continuum emission of the NGC4395 nucleus is an extension of power-law continuum emission to the near-infrared and originates in an outer region of the central accretion disk. On the other hand, from our regular program of long-term optical BVI and near-infraredJHK monitoring observation of NGC4395 from 2004 February 12 until 2005 January 22, we found large flux var iations in all the bands on time scales of days to months. The optical BVI variations are almost synchronized with each other, but not completely with the near-infraredJHK variations. The color temperature of the near-infrared var iable component is estimated to be T = 1320∼ 1710 K, in agreement with thermal emission from hot dust tori in active galactic nuclei (AGNs). We therefore conclude that the near-infrared variation con sists of two components having different time scales, so that a small K-flux variation on a time scale of a few hours would possibly be veiled by large variation of thermal dust emission on a time scale of days. Subject headings: galaxies: Seyfert — galaxies: active — infrared: galaxies — dust, extinction — galaxies: individual(NGC 4395)


We present the application of a Timepix detector on the VZLUSAT-1 nanosatellite. Timepix is a compact pixel detector (256×256 square pixels, 55×55 μm each) sensitive to hard X-ray radiation. It is suitable for detecting extraterrestrial X-rays due to its low noise characteristics, which enables measuring without special cooling. This project aims to verify the practicality of the detector in conjunction with 1-D Lobster-Eye optics to observe celestial sources between 5 and 20 keV. A modified USB interface (developed by IEAP at CTU in Prague) is used for low-level control of the Timepix. An additional 8-bit Atmel microcontroller is dedicated for commanding the detector and to process the data onboard the satellite. We present software methods for onboard post-processing of captured images, which are suitable for implementation under the constraints of the low-powered embedded hardware. Several measuring modes are prepared for different scenarios including single picture exposure, solar UV-light triggered exposure, and long-term all-sky monitoring. The work has been done within Medipix2 collaboration. The satellite is planned for launch in April 2017 as a part of the QB50 project with an end of life expectancy in 2019.


This delightful little book is beautifully written and well organized. Produced primarily for the layman, it deals with eight ancient thinkers —Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Yang Chu, Mo Tzu, Hsiin Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu—as representatives of Chinese philosophy. In each case a very short discussion on three or four central points of thought is preceded by a brief biography and followed by an appraisal. There are interesting comparisons between China and the West (p. xvi), Confucius and Mencius (p. 66), Confucius and Lao Tzu (p. 70), Confucianism and Taoism (p. 89), and Mencius and Hsiin Tzu (pp. 190-1), even if in only a few sentences. The author's approach is largely traditional. For example, he still believes that Buddhism entered China in the first century A.D. (p. xxx), that Confucius edited the Classics (pp. 28-33), ^ t hi political doctrines are found in the "Evolution of the Rites" chapter in the Boo\ of Rites (p. 10), that the Duke of Chou (d. 1094) wrote the Boo\ of Rites (p. 31), that the spurious Lieh Tzu of the third century is the work of Lieh Tzu who lived centuries before (p. 115). All of these ideas have been proved wrong by modern scholarship. Certain historical inaccuracies need to be corrected. It is wrong to say that Lao Tzu's real name was Lai Tan and that the honorific Lao was added only later (p. 70). From the very first he was called Lao Tzu or Lao Tan, but he was later confused by some with Lao Lai Tzu. Emperor Hsiian-tsung did not divide the Lao Tzu into two parts as is asserted (p. 73); it had been divided into parts for centuries before him. What he did was to have the eightyone chapters divided into groups. He is also 391


In order to balance the performance index and computational efficiency of the active suspension control system, this paper offers a fast distributed model predictive control (DMPC) method based on multi-agents for the active suspension system. Firstly, a seven-degrees-of-freedom model of the vehicle is created. This study establishes a reduced-dimension vehicle model based on graph theory in accordance with its network topology and mutual coupling constraints. Then, for engineering applications, a multi-agent-based distributed model predictive control method of an active suspension system is presented. The partial differential equation of rolling optimization is solved by a radical basis function (RBF) neural network. It improves the computational efficiency of the algorithm on the premise of satisfying multi-objective optimization. Finally, the joint simulation of CarSim and Matlab/Simulink shows that the control system can greatly minimize the vertical acceleration, pitch acceleration, and roll acceleration of the vehicle body. In particular, under the steering condition, it can take into account the safety, comfort, and handling stability of the vehicle at the same time.


In a review of supercooled and glassy water Debenedetti (2003 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 15 R1669) proposes that the boiling line for supercooled water (a binodal) can meet a conjectured low temperature limit of stability for supercooled water (a spinodal) only at a critical point. This comment offers a counter-example to show that the meeting of a binodal and a spinodal need not be a critical point.


Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) has been widely studied in preparing clay-modified electrodes (CMEs) and in assembly of nano-laminated composite that mimics nacre. In this paper, the hydrothermal intercalation and EPD were combined to prepare CMEs with a uniform and continuous polymer/clay composite film of brick-and-mortar nano-laminated structure. X-ray diffraction, scanning electronic microscopy and thermal gravimetric analysis were employed to characterize the structure and composition of the films. Stability of aqueous suspension, temperature for hydrothermal intercalation and deposition time, etc. were systematically studied and discussed.


As ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC) projects are constructed in China, the electromagnetic environment problem is widely concerned. One of the most important problems is the ion-flow field including the human body under the UHVDC lines. But it has not been analyzed sufficiently. In this paper, the 3-D upstream finite-element method, a new method to analyze the 3-D ion-flow field under HVDC lines is proposed and verified by experiments. Then, the method is used to calculate the ionized electric field and the ion current of the human body model under the UHVDC lines. The ionized electric field is significantly distorted by the human body. According to the results, the ionized electric field and the ion current of the human body remarkably increase with the height of the human body model. The results could provide a reference for evaluating the electromagnetic environment and the personal feeling test under the UHVDC lines.


At-speed scan testing is susceptible to yield loss risk due to power supply noise caused by excessive launch switching activity. This paper proposes a novel two-stage scheme, namely CTX (Clock-Gating-Based Test Relaxation and X-Filling), for reducing switching activity when test stimulus is launched. Test relaxation and X-filling are conducted (1) to make as many FFs inactive as possible by disabling corresponding clock-control signals of clock-gating circuitry in Stage-1 (Clock-Disabling), and (2) to make as many remaining active FFs as possible to have equal input and output values in Stage-2 (FF-Silencing). CTX effectively reduces launch switching activity, thus yield loss risk, even with a small number of donpsilat care (X) bits as in test compression, without any impact on test data volume, fault coverage, performance, and circuit design.


Nitrogen deficiency is the most limiting abiotic stress factor affecting the grain yield of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L.) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries. Breeding for high-yielding potential in association with high nitrogen fixation performance is the principal objective of cowpea breeding programs to improve both the productivity and production of this orphan crop in the region. Therefore, the present study was undertaken to determine the diversity of genotypes for nodulation capacity in two environments and to understand the root architecture and morphology of genotypes as well as grain yield and yield-related traits in 324 cowpea genotypes. The experiment was conducted in two different environments during the 2017 cropping season. The experiments were laid out in 18 × 18 simple lattice design. Grain yield exhibited highly significant and positive genotypic correlations with stem diameter, basal root length of 1st whorls, basal root branching density, taproot length and adventitious root length, demonstrating that selection of cowpea genotypes based on these traits could be effective to capitalize on grain yield under low nitrogen conditions. Days to flowering, days to maturity, stem diameter, 1st whorl angle, basal root length of 1st whorls, basal root branching density, taproot length, adventitious root diameter and adventitious root length had significant and positive genotypic correlations with days to maturity. The first ten principal components (PC) explained 65.13% of the total variation. Stem diameter, taproot width, and taproot length traits were important contributors to the variability in the first PC. The highest inter-cluster distance (D2) was recorded between clusters III and IV. However, clusters II and V recorded the minimum inter-cluster distance (78.96 units). The range of intra-cluster distance was 24.22–5,112.92 units, indicating that the high genetic distance displayed within and between clusters has to be exploited via crossing and selecting the most divergent parents for future cowpea improvement. Five clusters of cowpea genotypes were evident, and within the clusters, the genotypes had good nodulation potential with high grain yield traits, which could significantly contribute to SSA food and nutritional security. Moreover, it can contribute to resilience and improve crop production and sustainability under marginal environmental conditions.


The materiality of ritual performance is a growing focus for archaeologists. In Europe, collective ritual performance is expected to be highly structured and to leave behind a loud archaeological signature. In Australia and Papua New Guinea, ritual is highly structured; however, material signatures for performance are not always apparent, with ritual frequently bound up in the surrounding natural and cultural landscape. One way of assessing long-term ritual in this context is by using archaeology to historicize ethno-historical and ethnographic accounts. Examples of this in the Torres Strait region, islands between Papua New Guinea and mainland Australia, suggest that ritual activities were materially inscribed at kod sites (ceremonial men's meeting places) through distribution of clan fireplaces, mounds of stone/bone and shell. This paper examines the structure of Torres Strait ritual for a site ethnographically reputed to be the ancestral kod of the Mabuyag Islanders. Intra-site partitioning of ritual performance is interpreted using ethnography, rock art and the divergent distribution of surface and sub-surface materials (including microscopic analysis of dugong bone and lithic material) across the site. Finally, it discusses the materiality of ritual at a boundary zone between mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea and the extent to which archaeology provides evidence for Islander negotiation through ceremony of external incursions.


Temperate deciduous fruit trees survive winter temperatures by entering a dormant phase in their aerial meristematic organs. Release from bud dormancy occurs after chill requirements (CR) have been satisfied, whereas bud burst/flowering follows heat requirement (HR) fulfillment. The physiological basis behind these metrics remains elusive. In this study, we are presenting the first multidisciplinary dormancy progression analysis in northern Patagonia, linking (1) forcing/field phenology, (2) bud anatomical development, and (3) soluble sugar (sucrose, glucose, and fructose) dynamics in Juglans regia L. CR and HR were determined for 'Chandler' and 'Franquette,' two walnut cultivars with markedly different CR, in artificial chill/forced heat trials (three seasons) and in-field chill/forced heat tests (five seasons) using excised twigs either with or without apical buds (non-decapitated and decapitated). The soluble sugar dynamics of 'Chandler' (high-performance liquid chromatography) and the anatomical changes of the buds (light microscopy) of the two cultivars were analyzed during endo-ecodormancy progression in one and two seasons, respectively. The CR defined by artificial chill tests proved to be an overestimation compared to the field determinations. Moreover, HR was the main driver in the phenology dynamics, as expected for a high-chill region. 'Chandler' showed an average of 10.3 field chill portions (CP) and 2,163 Growing Degree Hours (GDH°C) less than 'Franquette' for dormancy release and bud burst, respectively. These results were consistent with the transition of the shoot apex from the vegetative to the reproductive phase and the soluble sugar profile. The decrease in sucrose between 15 and 30 days after CR fulfillment could be a reliable biological marker for endodormancy release in walnut, while the increase in fructose and glucose is likely an osmolyte and cellulosic carbon source in pre-sprouting. In addition, we discuss the effect of paradormancy thanks to our apical bud experiment (with or without). Our results improve the current understanding of endo-ecodormancy progression in walnut and provide insightful results for walnut production (i.e., cultivation practices such as pruning) as well as for further application in dormancy modeling, to infer the ideotypes that should be bred for future climate conditions.


Plants need sufficient water resources to be healthy and fertile. Excess amount of water and less amount of water supplied to plant may cause the plant to wither and die. Past research has focused on the method on how to watering the plant water on the right time with the right amount of water. This research focussed on how to develop an auto watering system using Arduino that watering plant at the right time with the right amount. This home based system is to facilitate human in watering plant without involving any manpower. To develop a fully automated system that intelligently measures the soil moisture, different approaches of methods used in varying fields were reviewed. The most suitable system had been selected to be a source of ideas and guidance. An own idea proposed to improve the approaches of existing systems. The final components and materials needed to support an efficient auto watering system was obtained by analyzing and testing the prototypes. A plant auto watering system using Arduino is a system that facilitates human in watering the plant.


Measuring radioactivity is almost exclusively a professional task in the realms of science, industry and defense, but recent events spur the interest in low-cost consumer detection devices. We show that by using image processing techniques, a current, only slightly modified, off-the-shelf HD webcam can be used to measure α, β as well as γ radiation. In contrast to dedicated measurement devices such as Geiger counters, our framework can classify the type of radiation and can differentiate between various kinds of radioactive materials. By optically insulating the camera's imaging sensor, recordings at extreme exposure and gain values are possible, and the partly very faint signals caused by the particle impacts are separated from the thermal and device background noise and analyzed in real-time.


We introduce the notion of -spaces which is much weaker than cone metric spaces defined by Huang and X. Zhang (2007). We establish some critical point theorems in the setting of -spaces and, in particular, in the setting of complete cone metric spaces. Our results generalize the critical point theorem proposed by Dancs et al. (1983) and the results given by Khanh and Quy (2010) to -spaces and cone metric spaces. As applications of our results, we characterize the completeness of -space (cone metric spaces and quasimetric spaces are special cases of -space) and studying the Ekeland type variational principle for single variable vector-valued functions as well as for multivalued bifunctions in the setting of cone metric spaces.


This brief proposes a process of implementing a teletweezing system using multiple slaves for deformable object manipulation such as bio tweezing tasks. The multiple slave feature is desirable to improve both the manipulation dexterity and stable grasping force control capability. A flexible multiple robot connection environment is assured in a very quick and easy manner using an RT-Middleware platform. In this brief, we propose the control strategy for a single-master multislave telemicrotweezer. Also, several simulations and experiments are performed to prove the validity of the proposed control scheme and the design methodology. These involve biomanipulation tasks such as Ikura (salmon roe) tweezing, which is a magnified version of a wide variety of bio-cell tweezing. To realize the Ikura remote tweezing using a single-master multislave system and a human's dexterous operation skill, we first decompose the dynamics of multiple slaves into two decoupled systems, which are the shape system describing cooperative tweezing aspect and the locked system that preserves energetic passivity. Scattering-based communication is used to passify the master-slave communication delay. Last, a preliminary pick-and-place experiment and some simulation results are provided to verify the validity of the proposed control method.


This session presented a case study of one library's move to a discovery layer in the catalog in order to help users discover and access electronic resources. The presenters described the entire process of evaluating the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) and deciding which provider to choose for the discovery layer. Both presenters shared strategies and decision-making methods with the audience.


Creating a climate that fosters organisational creativity is a critical challenge for many managers today. We know for example that strategic uniformity across organisations leads to reduced returns, whereas difference leads to higher performance (Nattermann 2000). Creative thinking is an important component of developing such uniqueness in an organisation, both in terms of its strategic positioning as well broader internal understandings (Jacobs and Heracleous 2005, 2006). Incentive structures that favour short- term results, combined with limited budgets and the notorious difficulties associated with quantifying creativity payoffs (Amabile and Khaire 2008), pose significant challenges to managing for creativity. At the same time, the long- term survival of most organisations in dynamic business environments will ultimately depend on their ability to nurture and mobilise creativity, that is, to generate outputs and outcomes that are both novel and valuable (Ford 1996). While standardised strategy tools and techniques can provide useful inputs for strategic analysis, the ability to move beyond 'dry' analytics and make a creative leap is often essential to developing strategies with sufficient distinctiveness and uniqueness to confer competitive advantage. The creative process itself can energise managers and motivate them to exert discretionary effort. Managers often face a variety of challenges when attempting to stimulate creative thinking and implement innovative strategies in their organisations. Today's increasingly diverse and complex organisations can hinder the intersubjective sensemaking among individuals and groups necessary to develop a negotiated order (Drazin et al. 1999) favourable to creativity. It has been well documented that diversity is a necessary condition for real creativity; that is, only by bringing together individuals from diverse backgrounds and with diverse views can true novelty emerge. Further, simply hiring more creative people is not enough; research suggests that in unstructured settings, people tend to interact mostly with people similar to themselves (Ingram and Morris 2007). It is also easy


Contralateral C7 nerve root transfer for brachial plexus injury is described, passing the nerve through a subcutaneous tunnel on the anterior surface of the neck and chest. We recommend passing the nerve graft through the retropharyngeal space. This route has the benefits of a simpler dissection, a shorter distance and protected placement of the graft. It has been used in one clinical case.


The philosophy of Aristotle and its impact on the process of empirical scientific inquiry has been substantial. The influence of the clarity and orderliness of his thinking, when applied to the acquisition of knowledge in nursing, can not be overstated. Traditional empirical approaches have and will continue to have an important influence on the development of nursing knowledge through nursing research. However, as nursing is primarily a practice discipline, the transition from empirical and syllogistic reasoning is problematic. Other types of inquiry are essential in the application of nursing knowledge obtained by empirical scientific approaches and to understand how that knowledge can best be used in the care of patients. This paper reviews the strengths and limitations of syllogistic reasoning by applying it to a recently published study on temperature measurement in nursing. It then discusses possible ways that the empirical knowledge gained from that study and confirmed in its reasoning by logical analysis could be used in the daily care of critically ill patients. It concludes by highlighting the utility of broader approaches to knowledge development, including interpretative approaches and contemporary empiricism, as a way to bridge the gap between factual empirical knowledge and the practical application of that knowledge in everyday clinical nursing practice.


This paper starts by presenting an empirical finding in the U.S. stock market: Between 2001 and 2021, high productivity was achieved when the Shannon evenness—measuring the inverse of concentration—dropped. Conversely, when the Shannon evenness soared, productivity plunged. The same inverse relationship between evenness and productivity has been observed in several ecosystems. This suggests explaining this result by adopting the business ecosystem perspective, i.e., regarding the tangle of interactions between companies as an ecological network, in which companies play the role of species. A useful strategy to model such ecological communities is through ensembles of synthetic communities of pairwise interacting species, whose dynamics is described by the Lotka–Volterra generalized equations. Each community is specified by a random interaction matrix whose elements are drawn from a uniform distribution centered around 0. It is shown that the inverse relationship between productivity and evenness can be generated by varying the strength of the interaction between companies. When the strength increases, productivity increases and simultaneously the market evenness decreases. Conversely, when the strength decreases, productivity decreases and evenness increases. This strength can be interpreted as reflecting the looseness of monetary policy, thus providing a link between interest rates and market structure.


Most of the mangrove marshes along the Indian River Lagoon were impounded to control mosquito production. The impoundments were initially kept permanently flooded and isolated from the lagoon. Earlier studies showed that installation of culverts to allow the exchange of water with the lagoon resulted in re-establishment of marsh vegetation and increase in the abundance and diversity of fish and decapods. Today, 52% of the mosquito control impoundments are closed to maintain high water levels during the peak mosquito breeding season in the summer, and left open to allow exchange of water (through culverts) for rest of the year (the Rotational Impoundment Management-RIM). Twenty one percent of the mosquito control impoundments are left open the entire year (unmanaged). A I-year study was conducted to compare the effects of these two major management regimes (RIM and unmanaged) on the abundance and community structure of fish and decapods utilizing the perimeter canal. Monthly samples were taken at duplicate sites at each of the two RIM and two unmanaged impoundments at St. Lucie County, Florida using a seine net (mesh size 3 mm). A total of 38 taxa were collected, most of which were transient species that spend their larval and/or juvenile stage(s) in the marshes. However, two resident species [mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis) and sailfin molly (Poecilia latipinna)] accounted for almost 90% of the total number captured. Proportions of mosquito fish are much higher in the RIM than in the unmanaged impoundments throughout the year. In general, fewer species and numbers were caught in the summer, followed by a large increase in the fall and a decrease between fall and spring. The summer closure of the RIM impoundments resulted in even lower abundance and fewer species captured compared with unmanaged impoundments. Fortunately, transient species, which are most greatly affected by marsh management practices, use the mangrove marsh primarily during the spring and fall.


Excretion of haptocorrin (R binder), cobalamin, and other corrinoids was studied in meconium from cystic fibrosis (n = 4), premature (n = 3), and control neonates (n = 13). Corrinoids content was 1.67 +/- 0.92 pmol/mg protein in meconium of cystic fibrosis (CF) neonates but only 0.33 +/- 0.37 and 0.48 +/- 0.47 pmol/mg protein, respectively, in that of prematures and controls. Considering its molecular mass (110,100 +/- 10,100) and its mean isoelectric point (3.67 +/- 0.20), haptocorrin remained undergraded in the meconium of CF neonates whereas it was partially degraded in the meconium of prematures and in most of the meconium from controls. Sequestration of cobalamin by undergraded haptocorrin can explain its increased excretion in CF meconium. Cobalamin-binding capacity of haptocorrin was 22.13 +/- 15.50 pmol/mg protein in CF meconium and about 400-fold lower in meconium of prematures and controls. This may correspond to a fetal intestinal hypersecretion in cases of CF.


The Braun-Blanquet method of phytosociological analysis has been used to identify the plant communities of the seasonally flooded areas of the Pongolo River Floodplain. Six communities and two sub-communities, whose distribution is closely related to relative periods of exposure and inundation, were recognized. The struc ture and interrelationships o f the communities are considered and the role of human activities in determining their extent is commented upon. Comparison is made with similar situations elsewhere in Africa.


The danger of pressure damage due to bandages is considerable. Plaster casts are incorrect immediately after accidents, repositioning of and operations on limbs. Complaints of circulatory disturbances and pains are to be taken very seriously. Pressure damage may occur not only after plaster casts, but also with elastic bandages. The urgent need to pay attention to undisturbed blood flow to the extremities after accidents and operations is emphasized with reference to 11 cases of various kinds.


In this paper we investigate speech recordings before and after speaker's drug-abuse treatment, and show that there is no statistically significant dependency between distortions of speaker's fundamental frequency and formants on the one hand, and different groups of drugs and on the degree of drug intoxication on the other. Changes of the fundamental frequency are not regular and do not have a general nature. The main reasons for these changes are changes in the emotional state of speakers, rather than a drug addiction treatment. Exploring the effect of the duration of narcotic drugs usage on the speaker's fundamental frequency showed that voices of speakers with prolonged use of drugs of the heroin group tend to decrease the fundamental frequency by about 3% per year.


Federated learning (FL) has recently become one of the hottest focuses in wireless edge networks with the ever-increasing computing capability of user equipment (UE). In FL, UEs train local machine learning models and transmit them to an aggregator, where a global model is formed and then sent back to UEs. In wireless networks, local training and model transmission can be unsuccessful due to constrained computing resources, wireless channel impairments, bandwidth limitations, etc., which degrades FL performance in model accuracy and/or training time. Moreover, we need to quantify the benefits and cost of deploying edge intelligence, as model training and transmission consume certain amount of resources. Therefore, it is imperative to deeply understand the relationship between FL performance and multiple-dimensional resources. In this paper, we construct an analytical model to investigate the relationship between the FL model accuracy and consumed resources in FL empowered wireless edge networks. Based on the analytical model, we explicitly quantify the model accuracy, available computing resources and communication resources. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our theoretical modeling and analysis, and demonstrate the trade-off between the communication and computing resources for achieving a certain model accuracy.


The study investigated the effect of exogenous melatonin and (or) curcumin treatment on the cerebral cortex of adult rats. In this context, malondialdehyde (MDA), nitric oxide (NO), glutathione (GSH), superoxide dismutase (SOD), nuclear factor E2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) and SIRT2 protein expression were examined. A total of 30 Wistar albino rats involved in the study were randomly divided into five groups. Over 30 days, the control groups received phosphate-buffered saline or dimethyl sulfoxide injections, and the treatment groups received melatonin, curcumin, or a combination of melatonin and curcumin injections. In the cerebral cortex homogenates, the MDA, GSH, and sum of NO were respectively determined by the thiobarbituric acid, modified Ellman and Griess test methods. The SOD and Nrf2 levels were examined using the ELISA method and SIRT2 protein expression using the Western blot technique. The study found that both melatonin and curcumin treatments significantly reduced lipid peroxidation and SIRT2 protein expression levels (p < 0.05) and increased the Nrf2 level in the cytoplasm (p < 0.05). The study revealed that curcumin and melatonin treatments reduced MDA and SIRT2 protein expression level and increased intracellular Nrf2, GSH, and SOD in the cortex tissue. We also found that the combined melatonin and curcumin treatment produced no synergistic effect.


Computer tomography (CT) is an important aid to the diagnosis of sella tumours because it images the tumour directly and delineates it from the healthy tissues. The tumour type can be identified to a certain extent, but angiography is necessary to distinguish tumours from aneurysms. The study is based on 140 surgical and histological examinations, the results of which were compared wit those obtained by CT. Suprasellar inflammations could always be identified by CT. Although intrasellar tumours may be identifiable by CT if full use is made of the potential of the equipment, negative CT results do not necessarily mean that there is no tumour. The diagnostic validity of the method is restricted by the absence of "standards", against which the variable images of intrasellar structures can be judged, and the restricted resolution of CT.


With the present study, we introduce a fast and robust method to calculate the source displacement spectra of small earthquakes on a local to regional scale. The work is based on the publicly available Qopen method of full envelope inversion, which is further tuned for the given purpose. Important source parameters—seismic moment, moment magnitude, corner frequency, and high-frequency fall off—are determined from the source spectra by fitting a simple earthquake source model. The method is demonstrated by means of a data set comprising the 2018 West Bohemia earthquake swarm. We report moment magnitudes, corner frequencies, and centroid moment tensors inverted from short-period body waves with the Grond package for all earthquakes with a local magnitude larger than 1.8. Moment magnitudes calculated by envelope inversion show a very good agreement to moment magnitudes resulting from the probabilisitc moment tensor inversion. Furthermore, source displacement spectra from envelope inversion show a good agreement with spectra obtained by multiple taper analysis of the direct onsets of body waves but are not affected by the large scatter of the second. The seismic moments obtained with the envelope inversion scale with corner frequencies according to M0∝fc−4.7. Earthquakes of the present data set result in a smaller stress drop for smaller magnitudes. Self-similarity of earthquake rupture is not observed. In addition, we report frequency-dependent site amplification at the used stations.


Question: We present a study of positive and negative interactions between the invasive grass Schismus barbatus (Poaceae) and Ambrosia dumosa (Asteraceae). Ambrosia facilitates seedling establishment, and such facilitation may accelerate invasion of exotic species, which, in turn, may reduce establishment of native plants.

Location: Joshua Tree National Park, California, USA.

Methods: During 2003-2004, we used field surveys to characterize the natural spatial distribution of Schismus in relation to native shrubs, and experimentally manipulated seed rain of Ambrosia and Schismus at three distances from adult Ambrosia canopies. We measured percentage germination and individual performance of both species. Field data were complemented by a greenhouse experiment that measured competition between Ambrosia seedlings and Schismus planted at three densities and five relative abundances under controlled conditions.

Results: Field surveys showed that the density of Schismus is independent of Ambrosia shrubs, but growth is enhanced near shrub canopies. In our field experiment Schismus is facilitated by adult Ambrosia. Under controlled conditions, Schismus does not respond to the density of Ambrosia seedlings, but changes in density of Schismus decreased performance of Ambrosia seedlings.

Conclusion: Schismus invasion may be detrimental to native perennial plant populations. Although a reduction of seedling establishment is not usually expected to slow population growth of long-lived perennials, recent unprecedented adult mortality in this community, and the well-documented facilitative role of Ambrosia, suggest that Schismus invasion may be of high ecological significance.


Multidimensional techniques for IT valuation is the bridge between financial IT value management and the strategically aligned application of IT investments. Portfolio management is one such technique, in which managers categorize various project classes. Even with these methods, however, managers must still rely on financial methods that define IT value in economic terms for individual projects in each category


Education Planning is one of the important parts in order to realize the national education development program, namely improving access, quality, governance and strengthening accountability and governance of national education. To carry out the planning of education and to implement educational programs are targeted and sustainable, there needs education data fast, complete, valid, accountable, and renewable. Based on the instructions of national Prosiding Seminar Nasional Informatika dan Sistem Informasi ISSN 2549-4805 74 education minister in 2011 and the number two ministerial circulars concerning data collection applications in environments Kemendikbud, stated that the application DAPODIKDAS an official application that is used to collect basic data basic education. This study uses a model of associative purpose of this study was to see whether there is a relation between Organizational Culture and Success Motivation Against User Information System Implementation Dapodikdas. While the method of analysis using multiple linear regersi. The results of this study, Simultaneously all independent variables were tested using the F-Test concluded that Cultural Organization and Motivation Users affect positively and significantly to the successful implementation of Information Systems Dapodikdas Elementary School in the district of partial Purbalingga.Secara all independent variables were tested using TTest. It was concluded that organizational culture has no influence on the success of the implementation of information systems DAPODIKDAS elementary level Purbalingga. While Motivation Users have an influence on the success of the implementation of information systems DAPODIKDAS elementary level Purbalingga.


The LHC accelerator in Geneva is expected to start colliding proton-proton beams at an energy of 14 TeV by Spring 2008. The CMS Collaboration is finalizing the construction not only of the apparatus, but also of the offline and computing infrastructure, in order to efficiently analyze the first collected data. Offline operations during the pilot run will include reconstruction at the T0, re-reconstruction with updated calibrations and alignment, sample skimming and analysis tasks. On the Computing side, this implies an efficient infrastructure able to deal with 300 Hz of DAQ output, and to move in an organized way the multi TB samples from T0 to the T2s, where analyzes will take place using GRID-like facilities. The Offline and Computing infrastructure has already been tested to a 25% scale during the challenge CSA06; a 50% challenge, CSA07, is going to happen during the summer.


The recent progress made in Galactic γ-ray astronomy using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) instrument provides for the first time a population of Galactic TeV γ-rays, and hence potential neutrino sources, for which the neutrino flux can be estimated. Using the energy spectra and source morphologies measured by H.E.S.S., together with new parameterizations of pion production and decay in hadronic interactions, we estimate the signal and background rates expected for these sources in a first-generation water Cerenkov detector (ANTARES) and a next-generation neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea, KM3NeT, with an instrumented volume of 1 km3. We find that the brightest γ-ray sources produce neutrino rates above 1 TeV, comparable to the background from atmospheric neutrinos. The expected event rates of the brightest sources in the ANTARES detector make a detection unlikely. However, for a 1 km3 KM3NeT detector, event rates of a few neutrinos per year from these sources are expected, and the detection of individual sources seems possible. Although generally these estimates should be taken as flux upper limits, we discuss the conditions and type of γ-ray sources for which the neutrino flux predictions can be considered robust.


Growth of the fish Plagioscion squamosissimus (Perciformes: Sciaenidae) according to multiple models inference in the middle Orinoco basin, Venezuela. Introduction: The prior use of von Bertalanffy's model has been generally used in the study of fish growth, without considering the existence of other growth models that can produce a better adjustment of the data used; considering the use of multiple growth models as a better alternative, to select the one that produces a better adjustment. Objective: Due to uncertainty of the results obtained in a previous work on the growth of Plagioscion squamosissimus (Heckel 1840) in the middle Orinoco region in Venezuela, applying a priori the model of von Bertalanffy, the same data were adjusted to other models of growth to select the best adjustment. Methods: The models evaluated were the U-von Bertalanffy, the U-Logistics and the U-Gompertz, derived from the global U-Richards model, then the best adjustment was selected using the Akaike Information Criteria (AIC). Results: Contradicting the prior use of von Bertalanffy's model in the previous study, the model that actually produces a better adjustment of the data used was the U-Gompertz. Conclusions: It is necessary to evaluate the stock of P. squamosissimus in the middle Orinoco region using growth parameters estimated from an inference of multiple models, in order to validate the existing information of a moderately exploited resource.


The purpose of this study was to determine if hair nicotine and cotinine levels reflect relative exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in subjects who worked in the hospitality industry, where public smoking was permitted. Hair samples from 26 subjects were analyzed by gas chromatograph/mass spectrometry techniques for nicotine and cotinine. An exposure gradient was shown for nicotine but not cotinine. Among nonsmokers, those working in bars where there are no public smoking restrictions had the highest hair nicotine levels, which were close to levels found in smokers. Nicotine measured in hair is useful as a biological marker for exposure to ETS from multiple sources. Bar workers in particular are exposed to high levels of ETS, which may adversely affect the health of nonsmokers.